Lucius Davoren, Volume II by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

The sky was starless above the Shadrack-road, and the air hardly less oppressive than it had been in the sultry noontide. That low sky seemed to shut in the Shadrack district like an iron roof, and the Shadrackites lounging against their doorposts, or conversing at street corners, or congregating in small clusters outside public-houses, bemoaned themselves that the storm had not yet come.

Lucius left Cedar House heavy-hearted, in spite of the knowledge that he, who yesterday knew not of a creature in this universe likely to leave him a five-pound note, was to-night heir to a handsome fortune. The thought of Mr. Sivewright's generosity in no manner elated him. Had his mind been free to contemplate this fact he would, no doubt, have rejoiced in the new sense of security which such a prospect must have inspired; he would have rejoiced not alone for himself, but for the sake of the woman who was to be his wife. Through the thick tangle of his troubled thoughts no gleam of light could penetrate. He saw himself the centre of perplexities. It seemed almost as if the avenging shade of the man he had slain were hunting him down-tempting him to entangle himself by some foolish confession, urging him to some folly that must bring about his own destruction. He thought of Orestes pursued by the Eumenides-tortured by the burden of a crime which, at the hour of its commission, he had deemed an act of justice.

Instead of turning homewards as usual, he paused for a minute or so outside the iron gate, and then took the opposite direction, setting his face towards the distant country. It was only a fancy, perhaps, but it seemed to him that the atmosphere was a shade less oppressive when he turned his back upon Shadrack Basin and the steam factories which encompassed it. No rain came to cool the fever-parched city, nor had the first low note of the impending storm sounded in distant thunder. Yet that coming storm was no less a certainty.

There was a strange bewilderment in the surgeon's mind. That promise of wealth, ease, security, a more speedily-won renown, all the benefits which go hand-in-hand with the possession of ample means, had excited his brain, although it had not elated his spirits. He saw all the scheme of his future altered. No longer need he toil in this wretched district. He might at once establish himself amongst the most famous of his fellow workers; make known his new theories, his discoveries in the vast world of medical science; do good on a scale infinitely larger than that afforded by his present surroundings. It was not that he wanted to turn his back upon the suffering poor. His brightest hopes, his fondest dreams, were of the good he was to do for these. He only desired that his light might not be for ever hidden under a bushel. Strong in the belief that he could serve the whole race of man, he languished to shake off those fetters, forged by necessity, which kept him chained to this obscure corner of the earth.

With the thought of his improved prospects, and all the hopes that went along with that thought, there mingled that ever-brooding care about the past. He had perceived a curious change in Lucille's manner to-night. Could she have discovered anything? How anxious she had been to get rid of him! She had not seemed exactly cold or unkind, but her manner had been hurried, excited; as if her mind were occupied with some all-absorbing thought in which he had no part.

‘If, by some fatal chance, she had discovered the true story of her father's fate,' he told himself, ‘she would hardly have concealed her knowledge; she would have surely told me the truth at once, and dismissed me for ever. I cannot imagine her acting in any double or underhanded manner. Yet to-night it seemed as if she had something to hide from me.'

This fancy troubled him; and in spite of his endeavours to dismiss the suspicion as groundless, the thought recurred to him every now and then. He walked far along the Shadrack-road, farther than he had penetrated for many a day; walked on, meditative, and hardly conscious where he went, until he came to a region of deserted building-ground, upon which a few skeleton houses lifted their roofless walls to the blank sky, as if demanding of the gods wherefore the speculative builder-long since stranded on the reefy shore of the bankruptcy court-came not to finish them.

This arid plain, which had erst been pleasant meadow-land, and where the shorn remnant of a once-beauteous hawthorn hedge still languished here and there under a cloud of lime dust, was the nearest approach to a rustic landscape within reach of the Shadrackites. Its beauty did not tempt the pedestrian.

Lucius halted at sight of the skeleton houses, and having in some measure walked down his excitement, turned back. He did not, however, take exactly the same way by which he had come. The prospect of the Shadrack-road, in all its dreary length, may have appalled him, or it may have been mere vagrant fancy which led him to return by a long narrow street, straggling and poverty-stricken, yet boasting here and there some good old red-brick mansion, which had once been the country seat of a prosperous City merchant, but which now, shorn of its garden, and defaced by neglect and decay, was let off in divers tenements to the struggling poor.

This street, with all its byways, was familiar to Lucius, who had plenty of patients in those squalid houses, down those narrow side streets, courts, and alleys. He knew every turn of the place, and wandered on to-night, not troubling himself which way he went, so long as he kept in a general manner the homeward direction. It had struck twelve when he emerged from a darksome alley on to the wharf which formed one side of the narrow creek whereon Mr. Sivewright's garden abutted.