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THE DAY WILL COME.




  THE DAY WILL COME.

  A Novel.


  BY THE AUTHOR OF

  “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,”
  “MOHAWKS,” &c., &c., &c.


  Stereotyped Edition.


  LONDON:
  SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LIMITED,
  STATIONERS’ HALL COURT.
  1890.

  [_All rights reserved_]




  LONDON:
  PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.




THE DAY WILL COME.

[Illustration: Decoration]


CHAPTER I.

    “Farewell, too—now at last—
     Farewell, fair lily.”


The joy-bells clashed out upon the clear, bright air, startling the
rooks in the elm-trees that showed their leafy tops above the grey
gables of the old church. The bells broke out with sudden jubilation;
sudden, albeit the village had been on the alert for that very sound
all the summer afternoon, uncertain as to when the signal for that
joy peal might be given.

The signal had come now, given by the telegraph wires to the old
postmistress, and sent on to the expectant ringers in the church
tower. The young couple had arrived at Wareham station, five miles
off; and four horses were bringing them to their honeymoon home
yonder amidst the old woods of Cheriton Chase.

Cheriton village had been on tiptoe with expectancy ever since four
o’clock, although common sense ought to have informed the villagers
that a bride and bridegroom who were to be married at two o’clock
in Westminster Abbey were not very likely to appear at Cheriton
early in the afternoon. But the village having made up its mind to
a half-holiday was glad to begin early. A little knot of gipsies
from the last race-meeting in the neighbourhood had improved the
occasion and set up the friendly and familiar image of Aunt Sally
on the green in front of the Eagle Inn; while a rival establishment
had started a pictorial shooting-gallery, with a rubicund giant’s
face and wide-open mouth, grinning at the populace across a barrel
of Barcelona nuts. There are some people who might think Cheriton
village and Cheriton Chase too remote from the busy world and its
traffic to be subject to strong emotions of any kind. Yet even in
this region of Purbeck, cut off from the rest of England by a winding
river, and ostentatiously calling itself an island, there were eager
interests and warm feelings, and many a link with the great world of
men and women on the other side of the stream.

Cheriton Chase was one of the finest places in the county of Dorset.
It lay south of Wareham, between Corfe Castle and Branksea Island,
and in the midst of scenery which has a peculiar charm of its own, a
curious blending of level pasture and steep hillside, barren heath
and fertile water-meadow; here a Dutch landscape, grazing cattle,
and winding stream; there a suggestion of some lonely Scottish
deer-walk; an endless variety of outline; and yonder on the steep
hilltop the grim stone walls and mouldering bastions of Corfe Castle,
standing dark and stern against the blue fair-weather sky or boldly
confronting the force of the tempest.

Cheriton House was almost as old as Corfe in the estimation of some
of the country people. Its history went back into the night of ages.
But while the Castle had suffered siege and battery by Cromwell’s
ruthless cannon, and had been left to stand as that arch-destroyer
left it, until only the outer walls of the mighty fabric remained,
with a tower or two, and the mullions of one great window standing
up above the rest, the mere skeleton of the gigantic pile, Cheriton
House had been cared for and added to century after century, so that
it presented now a picturesque blending of old and new, in which
almost every corridor and every room was a surprise to the stranger.

Never had Cheriton been better cared for than by its present owner,
nor had Cheriton village owned a more beneficent lord of the manor.
And yet Lord Cheriton was an alien and a stranger to the soil, and
that kind of person whom rustics mostly are inclined to look down
upon—a self-made man.

The present master of Cheriton was a man who owed wealth and
distinction to his own talents. He had been raised to the peerage
about fifteen years before this day of clashing joy-bells and village
rejoicings. He had been owner of the Cheriton estate for more than
twenty years, having bought the property on the death of the last
squire, and at a time of unusual depression. He was popularly
supposed to have got the estate for an old song; but the old song
meant something between seventy and eighty thousand pounds, and
represented the bulk of his wife’s fortune. He had not been afraid so
to swamp his wife’s dowry, for he was at this time one of the most
popular silk gowns at the equity Bar. He was making four or five
thousand a year, and he was strong in the belief in his power to rise
higher.

The purchase, prompted by ambition, and a desire to take his place
among the landed gentry, had turned out a very lucky one from a
financial point of view, for a stone quarry that had been unworked
for more than a century was speedily developed by the new owner of
the soil, and became a source of income which enabled him to improve
mansion-house and farms without embarrassment.

Under Mr. Dalbrook’s improving hand, the Cheriton estate, which had
been gradually sinking to decay in the occupation of an exhausted
race, became as perfect as human ingenuity, combined with judicious
outlay, can make any estate. The falcon eye of the master was on
all things. The famous advocate’s only idea of a holiday was to
work his hardest in the supervision of his Dorsetshire property. He
thought of Cheriton many a time in the law courts, as Fox used to
think of St. Anne’s and his turnips amidst the debauchery of a long
night’s card-playing, or in the whirl of a stormy debate. Purbeck
might have been the motto and password of his life. He was born at
Dorchester, the son of humble shopkeeping parents, and was educated
at the quaint old stone grammar school in that good old town. All
his happiest hours of boyhood had been spent in the Isle of Purbeck.
Those watery meadows and breezy commons and break-neck hills had
been his playground; and when he went back to them as a hard-headed,
overworked man of the world, made arrogant from the magnitude of a
success which had never known check or retrogression, the fountains
of his heart were unlocked by the very atmosphere of that fertile
land where the salt breath of the sea came tempered by the balmy
perfume of the heather, the odour of hedgerow flowers, rosemary, and
thyme.

At Cheriton James Dalbrook unbent, forgot that he was a great man,
and remembered only that his lot was cast in a pleasant place, and
that he had the most lovable of wives and the loveliest of daughters.

His daughter had been born at Cheriton, had known no other country
home, and had never considered the first-floor flat in Victoria
Street where her father and mother spent the London season, and where
her father had his _pied-à-terre_ all the year round, in the light
of a home. His daughter, Juanita, was the eldest of three children
born in the old manor house. The two younger, both sons, died in
infancy; and it seemed to James Dalbrook that there was a blight
upon his offspring, such a blight as that which withered the male
children of Henry of England and Catherine of Arragon. Much had been
given to him. He had been allowed to make name and fortune, he whose
sole heritage was a little crockery shop in a second-rate street of
Dorchester. He had enjoyed the lordship of broad acres, the honours
and position of a rural squire; but he was not to be allowed that
crowning glory for which strong men yearn. He was not to be the first
of a long line of Barons Cheriton of Cheriton.

After the grief and disappointment of those two deaths—first of an
infant of a few weeks old, and afterwards of a lovely child of two
years—James Dalbrook hardened his heart for a little while against
the fair young sister who survived them. She could not perpetuate
that barony which was the crown of his greatness; or if by special
grace her father’s title might be in after-days bestowed upon the
husband of her choice—which in the event of her marrying judiciously
and marrying wealth, might not be impracticable—it would be an alien
to his race who would bear the title which he, James Dalbrook, had
created. He had so longed for a son, and behold two had been given
to him, and upon both the blight had fallen. When people praised
his daughter’s childish loveliness he shook his head despondently,
thinking that she too would be taken, like her brothers, before ever
the bud became a flower.

His heart sickened at thought of this contingency, and of his
heir-at-law in the event of his dying childless, a first cousin,
clerk in an auctioneer’s office at Weymouth, a sandy-haired freckled
youth, without an aspirate, with a fixed idea that he was an
authority upon dress, style, and billiards, an insupportable young
man under any conditions, but hateful to murderousness as one’s next
heir. To think of that freckled snob strutting about the estate in
years to come, blinking with his white eyelashes at those things
which had been so dear to the dead!

His wife, to whom he owed the estate, had no relations nearer or
clearer to her than the freckled auctioneer was to her husband. There
remained for them both to work out their plans for the disposal
of that estate and fortune which was their own to deal with as
they pleased. Already James Dalbrook had dim notions of a Dalbrook
Scholarship Fund, in which future barristers should have their long
years of waiting upon fortune made easier to them, and for which they
should bless the memory of the famous advocate.

Happily those brooding fears were not realized; this time the bud
was not blighted, the flower carried no canker in its heart, but
opened its petals to the morning of life, a strong bright blossom,
revelling in sun and shower, wind and spray. Juanita grew from
babyhood to girlhood with hardly an illness, save the regulation
childish complaints, which touched her as lightly as a butterfly’s
wing touches the flowers.

Her mother was of Spanish extraction, the granddaughter of a Cadiz
merchant, who had failed in the wine trade and had left his sons and
daughters to carve their own way to fortune. Her father had gone
to San Francisco at the beginning of the gold fever, had been one
of the first to understand the safest way to take advantage of the
situation, and had started a wine-shop and hotel, out of which he
made a splendid fortune within fifteen years. He acquired wealth in
good time to send his two daughters to Paris for their education,
and by the time they were grown up he was rich enough to retire from
business, and was able to dispose of his hotel and wine-store for a
sum which made a considerable addition to his capital. He established
himself in a brand-new first-floor in one of the avenues of the Bois
de Boulogne, a rich widower, more of an American than a Spaniard
after his long exile, and he launched his two handsome daughters in
Franco-American society. From Paris they went to London, and were
well received in that upper middle-class circle in which wealth
can generally command a welcome, and in which a famous barrister,
like Mr. Dalbrook, ranks as a star of the first magnitude. James
Dalbrook was then at the apogee of his success, a large handsome
man on the right side of his fortieth birthday. He was not by any
means the kind of man who would seem a likely suitor for a beautiful
girl of three and twenty; but it happened that his heavily handsome
face and commanding manner, his deep, strong voice and brilliant
conversation possessed just the charm that could subjugate Maria
Morales’ fancy. His conquest came upon him as a bewildering surprise,
and nothing could be further from his thoughts than a marriage
with the Spaniard’s daughter; and yet within six weeks of their
first meeting at a Royal Academy soirée in the shabby old rooms in
Trafalgar Square, Mr. Dalbrook and Miss Morales were engaged, with
the full consent of her father, who declared himself willing to give
his daughter forty thousand pounds, strictly settled upon herself,
for her dowry, but who readily doubled that sum when his future
son-in-law revealed his desire to become owner of Cheriton, and to
found a family. For such a laudable purpose Mr. Morales was willing
to make sacrifices; more especially as Maria’s elder sister had
offended him by marrying without his consent, an offence which was
only cancelled by her untimely death soon after her marriage.

Juanita was only three years old when her father was raised to the
bench, and she was not more than six when he was offered a peerage,
which he accepted promptly, very glad to exchange the name of
Dalbrook—still extant over the old shop-window in Dorchester, though
the old shopkeepers were at rest in the cemetery outside the town—for
the title of Baron Cheriton.

As Lord Cheriton James Dalbrook linked himself indissolubly with
the lands which his wife’s money had bought—money made in a ’Frisco
wine-shop for the most part. Happily, however, few of Lord Cheriton’s
friends were aware of that fact. Morales had traded under an assumed
name in the miners’ city, and had only resumed his patronymic on
retiring from the bar and the wine-vaults.

It will be seen, therefore, that Juanita could not boast of
aristocratic lineage upon either side. Her beauty and grace, her
lofty carriage and high-bred air, were spontaneous as the beauty of
a wild flower upon one of those furzy knolls over which her young
feet had bounded in many a girlish race with her dogs or her chosen
companion of the hour. She looked like the daughter of a duke,
although one of her grandfathers had sold pots and pans, and the
other had kept order, with a bowie-knife and a revolver in his belt,
over the humours of a ’Frisco tavern, in the days when the city was
still in its rough and tumble infancy, fierce as a bull-pup. Her
father, who, as the years went on, worshipped this only child of
his, never forgot that she lacked that one sovereign advantage of
good birth and highly placed kindred; and thus it was that from her
childhood he had been on the watch for some alliance which should
give her these advantages.

The opportunity had soon offered itself. Among his Dorsetshire
neighbours one of the most distinguished was Sir Godfrey Carmichael,
a man of old family and good estate, highly connected on the maternal
side, and well connected all round, and married to the daughter of
an Irish peer. Sir Godfrey showed himself friendly from the hour
of Mr. Dalbrook’s advent in the neighbourhood. He declared himself
delighted to welcome new blood when it came in the person of a man
of talent and power. Lady Jane Carmichael was equally pleased with
James Dalbrook’s gentle wife. The friendship thus begun never knew
any interruption till it ended suddenly in a ploughed field between
Wareham and Wimbourne, where Sir Godfrey’s horse blundered at a
fence, fell, and rolled over his rider, ten years after Juanita’s
birth.

There were two daughters and a son, considerably their junior,
who succeeded his father at the age of fifteen, and who had been
Juanita’s playfellow ever since she could run alone.

The two fathers had talked together of the possibilities of the
future while their children were playing tennis on the lawn at
Cheriton, or gathering blackberries on the common. Sir Godfrey
was enough a man of the world to rejoice in the idea of his son’s
marriage with the heiress of Cheriton, albeit he knew that the little
dark-eyed girl, with the tall slim figure and graceful movements, had
no place among the salt of the earth. His own estate was a poor thing
compared with Cheriton and the Cheriton stone-quarries; and he knew
that Dalbrook’s professional earnings had accumulated into a very
respectable fortune invested in stocks and shares of the soundest
quality. Altogether his son could hardly do better than continue to
attach himself to that dark-eyed child as he was attaching himself
now in his first year at Eton, riding his pony over to Cheriton every
non-hunting day, and ministering to her childish caprices in all
things.

The two mothers had talked of the future with more detail and more
assurance than the fathers, as men of the world, had ventured upon.
Lady Cheriton was in love with her little girl’s boyish admirer.
His frank, handsome face, open-hearted manner, and undeniable pluck
realized her ideal of high-bred youth. His mother was the daughter
of an earl, his grandmother was the niece of a duke. He had the
right to call an existing duke his cousin. These things counted for
much in the mind of the storekeeper’s daughter. Her experience at
a fashionable Parisian convent had taught her to worship rank; her
experience of English middle-class society had not eradicated that
weakness. And then she saw that this fine, frank lad was devoted to
her daughter with all a boy’s ardent feeling for his first sweetheart.

The years went on, and young Godfrey Carmichael and Juanita Dalbrook
were sweethearts still—sweethearts always—sweethearts when he was
at Eton, sweethearts when he was at Oxford, sweethearts in union,
and sweethearts in absence, neither of them ever imagining any other
love; and now, in the westering sunlight of this July evening, the
bells of Cheriton Church were ringing a joy-peal to celebrate their
wedded loves, and the little street was gay with floral archways and
bright-coloured bunting, and mottoes of welcome and greeting, and
Lady Cheriton’s barouche was bringing the bride and bridegroom to
their first honeymoon dinner, as fast as four horses could trot along
the level road from quiet little Wareham.

By a curious fancy Juanita had elected to spend her honeymoon in
that one house of which she ought to have been most weary, the good
old house in which she had been born, and where all her days of
courtship, a ten years’ courtship, had been spent. In vain had the
fairest scenes of Europe been suggested to her. She had travelled
enough to be indifferent to mountains and lakes, glaciers and fjords.

“I have seen just enough to know that there is no place like home,”
she said, with her pretty air of authority. “I won’t have a honeymoon
at all if I can’t have it at Cheriton. I want to feel what it is like
to have you all to myself in my own place, Godfrey, among all the
things I love. I shall feel like a queen with a slave; I shall feel
like Delilah with Samson. When you are quite tired of Cheriton—and
subjection, you shall take me to the Priory; and once there you shall
be master and I will be slave.”

“Sweet mastership, tyrannous slavery,” he answered, laughing. “My
darling, Cheriton will suit me better than any other place in the
world for my honeymoon, for I shall be near my future electors, and
shall be able to study the political situation in all its bearings
upon—the Isle of Purbeck.”

Sir Godfrey was to stand for his division of the county in the
election that was looming in the distance of the late autumn. He
was very confident of success, as a young man might be who came of
a time-honoured race, and knew himself popular in the district,
armed with all the newest ideas, too, full to the brim of the most
modern intelligence, a brilliant debater at Oxford, a favourite
everywhere. His marriage would increase his popularity and strengthen
his position, with the latent power of that larger wealth which must
needs be his in the future.

The sun was shining in golden glory upon grey stone roofs and grey
stone walls, clothed with rose and honeysuckle, clematis and trumpet
ash,—upon the village forge, where there had been no work done since
the morning, where the fire was out, and the men were lounging at
door and window in their Sunday clothes,—upon the three or four
village shops, and the two village inns, the humble little house of
call opposite the forge, with its queer old sign, “Live and Let
Live,” and the good old “George Hotel,” with sprawling, dilapidated
stables and spacious yard, where the mail-coach used to stop in the
days that were gone.

There was a floral arch between the little tavern and the forge—a
floral display along the low rustic front of the butcher’s shop—and
the cottage post-office was converted into a bower. There were
calico mottoes flapping across the road—“Welcome to the Bride and
Bridegroom,” “God Bless Them Both,” “Long Life and Happiness,” and
other fond and hearty phrases of time-honoured familiarity. But those
clashing bells, with their sound of tumultuous gladness, a joy that
clamoured to the blue skies above and the woods below, and out to the
very sea yonder, in its loud exuberance, those and the smiling faces
of the villagers were the best of all welcomes.

There were gentlefolks among the crowd—a string of pony carts and
carriages drawn up on the long slip of waste grass beyond the forge,
just where the road turned off to Cheriton Chase; and there were two
or three horsemen, one a young man upon a fine bay cob, who had been
walking his horse about restlessly for the last hour or so, sometimes
riding half a mile towards the station in his impatience.

The carriage came towards the turning-point, the bride bowing and
smiling as she returned the greetings of gentle and simple. Emotion
had paled the delicate olive of her complexion, but her large dark
eyes were bright with gladness. Her straw-coloured tussore gown and
leghorn hat were the perfection of simplicity, and seemed to surround
her with an atmosphere of coolness amidst the dust and glare of the
road.

At sight of the young man on the bay cob, she put her hand on Sir
Godfrey’s arm and said something to him, on which he told the
coachman to stop. They had driven slowly through the village, and the
horses pulled up readily at the turn of the road.

“Only to think of your coming so far to greet us, Theodore!” said
Juanita, leaning out of the carriage to shake hands with the owner of
the cob.

“I wanted to be among the first to welcome you, that was all,” he
answered quietly. “I had half a mind to ride to the station and be
ready to hand you into your carriage, but I thought Sir Godfrey might
think me a nuisance.”

“No fear of that, my dear Dalbrook,” said the bridegroom. “I should
have been very glad to see you. Did you ride all the way from
Dorchester?”

“Yes; I came over early in the morning, breakfasted with a friend,
rested the cob all day, and now he is ready to carry me home again.”

“What devotion!” said Juanita, laughingly, yet with a shade of
embarrassment.

“What good exercise for Peter, you mean. Keeps him in condition
against the cubbing begins. God bless you, Juanita. I can’t do
better than echo the invocation above our heads, ‘God bless the bride
and bridegroom.’”

He shook hands with them both for the second time. A faint glow of
crimson swept over his frank fair face as he clasped those hands.
His honest grey eyes looked at his cousin for a moment with grave
tenderness, in which there was the shadow of a life-long regret. He
had loved and wooed her, and resigned her to her more favoured lover,
and he was honest in his desire for her happiness. His own gladness,
his own life, seemed to him of small account when weighed against her
well-being.

“You must come and dine with us before we leave Cheriton, Dalbrook,”
said Sir Godfrey.

“You are very good. I am off to Heidelberg for a holiday as soon as I
can wind up my office work. I will offer myself to you later on, if I
may, when you are settled at the Priory.”

“Come when you like. Good-bye.”

The carriage turned the corner. The crowd burst into a cheer: one,
two, three, and then another one: and then three more cheers louder
than the first three, and the horses were on the verge of bolting for
the rest of the way to Cheriton.

Theodore Dalbrook rode slowly away from the village festivities, rode
away from the clang of the joy-bells, and the sound of rustic triple
bob majors. It would be night before he reached Dorchester; but there
was a moon, and he knew every yard of high road, every grassy ride
across the wide barren heath between Cheriton and the old Roman city.
He knew the road and he knew his horse, which was as good of its
kind as there was to be found in the county of Dorset. He was not a
rich man, and he had to work hard for his living, but he was the son
of a well-to-do father, and he never stinted the price of the horse
that carried him, and which was something more to Theodore Dalbrook
than most men’s horses are to them. It was his own familiar friend,
companion, and solace. A man might have understood as much only to
see him lean over the cob’s neck, and pat him, as he did to-night,
riding slowly up the hill that leads from Cheriton to the wild ridge
of heath above Branksea Island.

Theodore Dalbrook, junior partner in the firm of Dalbrook & Son,
Cornhill, Dorchester, was a more distant relative of Juanita’s than
the sandy first-cousin in the auctioneer’s office whom Lord Cheriton
had once hated as the only alternative to a charitable endowment.
The sandy youth was the only son of Lord Cheriton’s elder brother,
long since dead. Theodore was the grandson of a certain Matthew
Dalbrook, a second cousin of Lord Cheriton’s, and once upon a time
the wealthiest and most important member of the Dalbrook family. The
humble-minded couple in the crockery shop had looked up to Matthew
Dalbrook, solicitor, with a handsome old house in Cornhill, a smart
gig, a stud of three fine horses, and half the county people for
his clients. To the plain folks behind the counter, who dined at
one and supped on cold meat and pickles and Dutch cheese at nine
of the clock, Mr. Dalbrook, the lawyer, was a great man. They were
moved by his condescension when he dropped in to the five-o’clock
tea, and talked over old family reminiscences, the farmhouse on the
Weymouth Road, which was the cradle of their race, and where they had
all known good days while the old people were alive, and while the
homestead was a family rendezvous. That he should deign to take tea
and water-cresses in the little parlour behind the shop, he who had
a drawing-room almost as big as a church, and a man-servant in plain
clothes to wait upon him at his six-o’clock dinner, was a touching
act of humility in their eyes. When their younger boy brought home
prizes and certificates of all kinds from the grammar school, it was
from Matthew they sought advice, modestly, and with the apprehension
of being deemed over-ambitious.

“I’m afraid he’s too much of a scholar for the business,” said the
mother, shyly, looking fondly at her tall, overgrown son, pallid with
rapid growth and overmuch Greek and Latin.

“Of course he is; that boy is too good to sell pots and pans. You
must send him to the University, Jim.”

Jim, the father, looked despondently at James, the son. The
University meant something awful in the crockery merchant’s mind: a
vast expenditure of money; dreadful hazards to religion and morals;
friendships with dukes and marquises, whose influence would alienate
the boy from his parents, and render him scornful of the snug
back-parlour, with his grandfather’s portrait over the mantelpiece,
painted in oils by a gifted townsman, who had once had a picture very
nearly hung in the Royal Academy.

“I couldn’t afford to send him to college,” he said.

“Oh, but you must afford it. I must help you, if you and Sarah
haven’t got enough in an old stocking anywhere—as I dare say you
have. My boys are at the University, and they didn’t do half as well
at the grammar school as your boy has done. He must go to Cambridge,
he must be entered at Trinity Hall, and if he works hard and keeps
steady he needn’t cost you a fortune. You would work, eh, James?”

“Wouldn’t I just, that’s all,” James replied with emphasis.

His heart had sickened at the prospect of the crockery business:
the consignments of pots and pans; the returned empties, invoices,
quarterly accounts, matchings, rivetings, dust, straw, dirt, and
degradation. He could not see the nobility of labour in that dusty
shop, below the level of the pavement, amid ewers and basins, teacups
and beer jugs, sherries and ports. But to work in the University—hard
by that great college where Bacon had worked, and Newton, and a host
of the mighty dead, and where Whewell, a self-made man, was still
head—to work among the sons of gentlemen, and with a view to the
profession of a gentleman,—_that_ would be labour for which to live;
for which to die, if need be.

“If—if mother and me were to strain a p’int,” mused the crockery man,
who was better able to afford the University for his son than many a
gentleman of Dorset whose boys had to be sent there, willy nilly, “if
mother and me that have worked so hard for our money was willing to
spend a goodish bit of it upon sending him to college, what are we to
do with him after we’ve made a fine gentleman of him? _That’s_ where
it is, you see, Mat.”

“You are not going to make a fine gentleman of him. God forbid. If he
does well at Cambridge, you can make a lawyer of him. Trinity Hall is
the nursery of lawyers. You can article him to me; and look you here,
Jim, if I don’t have to help you pay for his education, I’ll give him
his articles. There, now, what do you say to that?”

The offer was pronounced a generous one, and worthy of a blood
relation; but James Dalbrook never took advantage of his kinsman’s
kindness. His University career was as successful as his progress
at the quaint stone grammar school, and his college friends, who
were neither dukes nor marquises, but fairly sensible young men, all
advised him to apply himself to the higher branch of the law. So
James Dalbrook, of Trinity Hall, ate his dinners at the Temple during
his last year of undergraduate life, came out seventh wrangler,
was called to the Bar, and in due course wore crimson, velvet, and
ermine, and became Lord Cheriton, a man whose greatness in somewise
overshadowed the small provincial dignity of the house of Matthew
Dalbrook, erstwhile head of the family.

The Dalbrooks, of Dorchester, had gone upon their way quietly,
thriving, respected, but in no wise distinguished. Matthew, junior,
had succeeded his father, Matthew, senior, and the firm in Cornhill
had been Dalbrook & Son for more than thirty years; and now Theodore,
the eldest of a family of five, was Son, and his grandfather, the
founder of the firm, was sleeping the sleep of the just in the
cemetery outside Dorchester.

Lord Cheriton was too wise a man to forget old obligations or
to avoid his kindred. There was nothing to be ashamed of in his
connection with a thoroughly reputable firm like Dalbrook & Son.
They might be provincial, but their name was a synonym for honour
and honesty. They had taken as firm root in the land as the county
families whose title-deeds and leases, wills and codicils they kept.
They were well-bred, well-educated, God-fearing people, with no
struggling ambitions, no morbid craving to get upon a higher social
level than the status to which their professional position and their
means entitled them. They rode and drove good horses, kept good
servants, lived in a good house, visited among the county people
with moderation, but they made no pretensions to being “smart.”
They offered no sacrifices of fortune or self-respect to the modern
Moloch—Fashion.

There was a younger son called Harrington, destined for the Church,
and with advanced views upon church architecture and music; and there
were two unmarried daughters, Janet and Sophia, also with advanced
views upon the woman’s rights question, and with a sovereign contempt
for the standard young lady.

Theodore’s lines were marked out for him with inevitable precision.
He had been taken into partnership the day he was out of his
articles, and at seven-and-twenty he was his father’s right hand,
and represented all that was modern and popular in the firm. He
was steady as a rock, had an intellect of singular acuteness, a
ready wit, and very pleasing manners. He had, above all things,
the inestimable gift of an equable and happy temper. He had been
everybody’s favourite from the nursery upwards, popular at school,
popular at the University, popular in the local club, popular in the
hunting field; and it was the prevailing opinion of Dorchester that
he ought to marry an heiress and make a great position for the house
of Dalbrook. Some people had gone so far as to say that he ought to
marry Lord Cheriton’s daughter.

He had been made free of the great house at Cheriton from the time
he was old enough to visit anywhere. His family had been bidden to
all notable festivities; had been duly called upon, at not too long
intervals, by Lady Cheriton. He had ridden by Juanita’s side in many
a run with the South Dorset foxhounds, and had waited about with
her outside many a covert. They had pic-nicked and made gipsy tea
at Corfe Castle; they had rambled in the woods near Studland; they
had sailed to Branksea, and, further away, to Lulworth Cove, and the
romantic caves of Stare: but this had been all in frank cousinly
friendship. Theodore had seen only too soon that there was no room
for him in his kinswoman’s heart. He began by admiring her as the
loveliest girl he had ever seen; he had ended by adoring her, and he
adored her still—but with a loyal regard which accepted her position
as another man’s wife; and he would have died sooner than dishonour
her by one unholy thought.

It was nearly ten o’clock when he rode slowly along the avenue that
led into Dorchester. The moon was shining between the overarching
boughs of the sycamores. The road with that high overarching roof
had a solemn look in the moonlit stillness. The Roman amphitheatre
yonder, with its grassy banks rising tier above tier, shone white
in the moonbeams; the old town seemed half asleep. The house in
Cornhill had a very Philistine look as compared with that fine old
mansion of Cheriton which was present in his mind in very vivid
colours to-night, those two wandering about the old Italian garden,
hand-in-hand, wedded lovers, with the lamp-lit rooms open to the
soft summer night, and the long terrace and stone balustrade and
moss-grown statues of nymph and goddess silvered by the moonbeams.
The Cornhill house was a good old house notwithstanding, a panelled
house of the Georgian era, with a wide entrance-hall, and a
well-staircase with carved oak balusters and a baluster rail a foot
broad. The furniture had been very little changed since the days
of Theodore’s great-grandfather, for the late Mrs. Dalbrook had
cherished no yearnings for modern art in the furniture line. Her
gentle spirit had looked up to her husband as a leader of men, and
had reverenced chairs and tables, bureaus and wardrobes that had
belonged to his grandfather, as if they were made sacred by that
association. And thus the good old house in the good old town had a
savour of bygone generations, an old family air which the parvenu
would buy for much gold if he could. True that the dining-room chairs
were over-ponderous, and the dining-room pictures belonged to the
obscure school of religious art in which you can only catch your
saint or your martyr at one particular angle; yet the chairs were of
a fine antique form, and bore the crest of the Dalbrooks on their
shabby leather backs, and the pictures had a respectable brownness
which might mean Holbein or Rembrandt.

The drawing-room was large and bright, with four narrow, deeply
recessed windows commanding the broad street and the Antelope Hotel
over the way, and deep window seats crammed with flowers. Here the
oak panelling had been painted pale pink, and the mouldings picked
out in a deeper tint by successive generations of Vandals, but the
effect was cheerful, and the pink walls made a good background for
the Chippendale secretaires and cabinets filled with willow-pattern
Worcester or Crown Derby. The window-curtains were dark brown cloth,
with a border of Berlin wool lilies and roses, a border which would
have set the teeth of an æsthete on edge, but which blended with
the general brightness of the room. Old Mrs. Matthew Dalbrook, the
grandmother, and her three spinster daughters had toiled over these
cross-stitch borders, and Theodore’s mother would have deemed it
sacrilege to have put aside this labour of a vanished life.

Harrington Dalbrook and his two sisters were in the drawing-room,
each apparently absorbed in an instructive book, and yet all three
had been talking for the greater part of the evening. It was a
characteristic of their highly intellectual lives to nurse a volume
of Herbert Spencer or a treatise upon the deeper mysteries of Buddha,
while they discussed the conduct or morals of their neighbours—or
their gowns and bonnets.

“I thought you were never coming home, Theo,” said Janet. “You don’t
mean to say you waited to see the bride and bridegroom?”

“That is exactly what I do mean to say. I had to get old Sandown’s
lease executed, and when I had finished my business I waited about to
see them arrive. Do you think you could get me anything in the way of
supper, Janie?”

“Father went to bed ever so long ago,” replied Janet; “it’s
dreadfully late.”

“But I don’t suppose the cook has gone to bed, and perhaps she would
condescend to cut me a sandwich or two,” answered Theodore, ringing
the bell.

His sisters were orderly young women, who objected to eating and
drinking out of regulation hours. Janet looked round the room
discontentedly, thinking that her brother would make crumbs. Young
men, she had observed, are almost miracle workers in the way of
crumbs. They can get more superfluous crumbs out of any given piece
of bread than the entire piece would appear to contain, looked at by
the casual eye.

“I have found a passage in Spencer which most fully bears out _my_
view, Theodore,” said Sophia, severely, referring to an argument she
had had with her brother the day before yesterday.

“How did she look?” asked Janet, openly frivolous for the nonce.

“Lovelier than I ever saw her look in her life,” answered Theodore.
“At least I thought so.”

He wondered, as he said those words, whether it had been his own
despair at the thought of having irrevocably lost her which invested
her familiar beauty with a new and mystic power. “Yes, she looked
exquisitely lovely, and completely happy—an ideal bride.”

“If her nose were a thought longer her face would be almost perfect,”
said Janet. “How was she dressed?”

“I can no more tell you than I could say how many petals there are
in that Dijon rose yonder. She gave me an impression of cool soft
colour. I think there was yellow in her hat—pale yellow, like a
primrose.”

“Men are such dolts about women’s dress,” retorted Janet,
impatiently; “and yet they pretend to have taste and judgment, and to
criticize everything we wear.”

“I think you may rely upon us for knowing what we _don’t_ like,” said
Theodore.

He seated himself in his father’s easy-chair, a roomy old chair
with projecting sides, that almost hid him from the other occupants
of the room. He was weary and sad, and their chatter irritated his
overstrung nerves. He would have gone straight to his own room on
arriving, but that would have set them wondering, and he did not want
to be wondered about. He wanted to keep his secret, or as much of it
as he could. No doubt those three knew that he had been fond of her,
very fond; that he would have sacrificed half his lifetime to win her
for the other half; but they did not know how fond. They did not know
that he would fain have melted down all the sands of time into one
grain of gold—one golden day in which to hold her to his heart and
know she loved him.




CHAPTER II.

    “And warm and light I felt her clasping hand
     When twined in mine; she followed where I went.”


There is a touch of childishness in all honeymoon couples, a
something which suggests the Babes in the Wood, left to play together
by the Arch-Deceiver, Fate; wandering hand in hand in the morning
sunshine, gathering flowers, pleased with the mossy banks and leafy
glades, like those children of the old familiar story, before ever
hunger or cold or fear came upon them, before the shadow of night
and death stole darkly on their path. Even Godfrey Carmichael, a
sensible, highly educated young man, whose pride it was to march in
the van of progress and enlightenment, even he had that touch of
childishness which is adorable in a lover, and which lasts, oh, so
short a time; transient as the bloom on the peach, the down on the
butterfly’s wing, the morning dew on a rose.

He had loved her all his life, as it seemed to him. They had been
companions, friends, lovers, for longer than either could remember,
so gradual had been the growth of love. Yet the privilege of
belonging to each other was not the less sweet because of this old
familiarity.

“Are we really married—really husband and wife—Godfrey?” asked
Juanita, nestling to his side as they stood together in the wide
verandah where they breakfasted on these July mornings among climbing
roses and clematis. “Husband and wife—such prosaic words. I heard you
speak of me to the Vicar yesterday as ‘my wife.’ It gave me quite a
shock.”

“Were you sorry to think it was true?”

“Sorry—no! But ‘wife.’ The word has such a matter-of-fact sound. It
means a person who writes cheques for the house accounts, revises the
bill of fare, and takes all the blame when the servants do wrong.”

“Shall I call you my idol, then, my goddess—the enchantress whose
magic wand wafts gladness and sunshine over my existence?”

“No, call me wife. It is a good word, after all, Godfrey—a good
serviceable word, a word that will stand wear and tear. It means for
ever.”

They breakfasted _tête-à-tête_ in their bower of roses; they wandered
about the Chase or sat in the garden all day long. They led an idle
desultory life like little children, and wondered that evening
came so soon, and stayed up late into the summer night, steeping
themselves in the starshine and silence which seemed new to them in
their mutual delight.

There was a lovely view from that broad terrace, with its Italian
balustrade and statues, its triple flight of marble steps descending
to an Italian garden, which had been laid out in the Augustan age
of Pope and Addison, when the distinctive feature of a great man’s
garden was stateliness. Here was the lovers’ favourite loitering
place when the night grew late, Juanita looking like Juliet in her
loose white silk tea-gown, with its Venetian amplitude of sleeve and
its mediæval gold embroidery. The fashionable dressmaker who made
that gown had known how to adapt her art to Miss Dalbrook’s beauty.
The long straight folds accentuated every line of the finely moulded
figure, fuller than the average girlish figure, suggestive of Juno
rather than Psyche. She was two inches taller than the average girl,
and looked almost as tall as her lover as she stood beside him in the
moonlight, gazing dreamily at the landscape.

This hushed and solemn hour on the verge of midnight was their
favourite time. Then only were they really alone, secure in the
knowledge that all the household was sleeping, and that they had
their world verily to themselves, and might be as foolish as they
liked. Once, at sight of a shooting star, Juanita flung herself upon
her lover’s breast and sobbed aloud. It was some minutes before he
could soothe her.

“My love, my love, what does it mean?” he asked, perplexed by her
agitation.

“I saw the star, and I prayed that we might never be parted; and
then it flashed upon me that we _might_, and I could not bear the
thought,” she sobbed, clinging to him like a frightened child.

“My dear one, what should part us, except death?”

“Ah, Godfrey, death is everywhere. How could a good God make His
creatures so fond of each other and yet part them so cruelly as He
does sometimes?”

“Only to unite them again in another world, Nita. I feel as if our
two lives must go on in an endless chain, circling among those stars
yonder, which could not have been made to be for ever unpeopled.
There are happy lovers there at this instant, I am convinced—lovers
who have lived before us here, and have been translated to a higher
life yonder; lovers who have felt the pangs of parting, the ecstasy
of reunion.”

He glanced vaguely towards that starry heaven, while he fondly
smoothed the dark hair upon Juanita’s brow. It was not easy to win
her back to cheerfulness. That vision of possible grief had too
completely possessed her. Godfrey was fain to be serious, finding her
spirits so shaken; so they talked together gravely of that unknown
hereafter which philosophy or religion may map out with mathematical
distinctness, but which remains to the individual soul for ever
mysterious and awful.

Her husband found it wiser to talk of solemn things, finding her so
sad, and she took comfort from that serious conversation.

“Let us lead good lives, dear, and hope for the best in other
worlds,” he said. “There is sound sense in the Buddhist theory, that
we are the makers of our own spiritual destiny, and that a man may be
in advance of his fellow men, even in getting to Heaven.”

Those grave thoughts had little place in Juanita’s mind next day,
which was the first day the lovers devoted to practical things.
They started directly after breakfast for a _tête-à-tête_ drive to
Milbrook Priory, where certain alterations and improvements were
contemplated in the rooms which were to be Juanita’s. Godfrey’s
widowed mother, Lady Jane Carmichael, had transferred herself and
her belongings to a villa at Swanage, where she was devoting herself
to the creation of a garden, which was, on a small scale, to repeat
the beauties of her flat old-fashioned flower garden at the Priory.
It irked her somewhat to think how long the hedges of yew and holly
would take to grow; but there was a certain pleasure in creation. She
was a mild, loving creature, with an aristocratic profile, silvery
grey hair, and a small fragile figure; a woman who looked a patrician
to her finger tips, and whom everybody imposed upon. Her blue blood
had not endowed her with the power to rule. She adored her son, was
very fond of Juanita, and resigned her place in her old home without
a sigh.

“The Priory was a great deal too big for me,” she told her particular
friends. “I used to feel very dreary there when Godfrey was at
Oxford, and afterwards, for of course he was often away. It was only
in the shooting season that the house looked cheerful. I hope they
will soon have a family, and then that will enliven the place a
little.”

Milbrook Village and Milbrook Priory lay twelve miles nearer
Dorchester than Cheriton Chase. Juanita enjoyed the long drive in the
fresh morning air through a region of marsh and watery meadow, where
the cattle gave charm and variety to a landscape which would have
been barren and monotonous without them, a place of winding streams
on which the summer sunlight was shining.

The Priory was by no means so fine a place as Cheriton, but it was
old, and not without interest, and Lady Jane was justified in the
assertion that it was too large for her. It would be too small
perhaps for Sir Godfrey and his wife in the days to come, when in the
natural course of events James Dalbrook would be at rest after his
life labour, and Cheriton would belong to Juanita.

“No doubt they will like Cheriton better than the Priory when we are
all dead and gone,” said Lady Jane, with her plaintive air. “I only
hope they will have a family. Big houses are so dismal without little
people.”

This idea of a family was almost a craze with Lady Jane Carmichael.
She had idolized her only son, had been miserable at every parting,
and it had seemed a hard thing to her that there was not more of him,
as she had herself expressed it.

“Godfrey has been the dearest boy. I only wish I had six of him,”
she would say piteously; and now her mind projected itself into the
future, and she pictured a bevy of grandchildren—numerous as a covey
of partridges in the upland fields of the home farm at Cheriton—and
fancied herself lavishing her hoarded treasures of love upon them.
She had grandchildren already, and to spare, the offspring of her two
daughters, but these did not bear the honoured name of Carmichael,
and, though they were very dear to her maternal heart, they were not
what Godfrey’s children would be to her.

She would be gone, she told herself, before they would be old enough
to forsake her. She would be gone before those young birds grew too
strong upon the wing. A blessed spell of golden years lay before her;
a nursery, and then a schoolroom; and then, perhaps, before the last
dim closing scene, a bridal, a granddaughter clinging to her in the
sweet sadness of leave-taking, a fair young face crowned with orange
flowers pressed against her own in the bride’s happy kiss—and then
she would say _Nunc dimittis_, and feel that her cup of gladness had
been filled to the brim.

The lovers’ talk was all of that shadowy future, as the pair of
greys bowled gaily along the level road. The horses were Godfrey’s
favourite pair, and belonged to a team of chestnuts and greys which
had won him some distinction last season in Hyde Park, when the
coaches met at the corner by the Magazine, and when the handsome Miss
Dalbrook, Lord Cheriton’s heiress, was the cynosure of many eyes.
The thoughts of Sir Godfrey and his wife were far from Hyde Park and
the Four-in-Hand Club this morning. Their minds were filled with
simple rural anticipations, and had almost a patriarchal turn, as of
an Arcadian pair whose wealth was all in flocks and herds, and green
pastures like these by which they were driving.

The Priory stood on low ground between Wareham and Wimbourne,
sheltered from the north by a bold ridge of heath, screened on the
east by a little wood of oaks and chestnuts, Spanish chestnuts, with
graceful drooping branches, whose glossy leaves contrasted with the
closer foliage of the rugged old oaks. The house was built of Purbeck
stone, and its bluish grey was touched with shades of gold and
silvery green where the lichens and mosses crept over it, while one
long southern wall was clothed with trumpet-ash and magnolia, myrtle
and rose, as with a closely interwoven curtain of greenery, from
which the small latticed windows flashed back the sunshine.

Nothing at the Priory was so stately as its counterpart at Cheriton.
There were marble balustrades and rural gods there on the terrace;
here there was only a broad gravel walk along the southern front,
with a little old shabby stone temple at each end. At Cheriton three
flights of marble steps led from the terrace to the Italian garden,
and then again three more flights led to a garden on a lower level,
and so by studied gradations to the bottom of the slope on which the
mansion was built. Here house and garden were on the same level, and
those gardens which Lady Jane had so cherished were distinguished
only by an elegant simplicity. Between the garden and a park of less
than fifty acres there was only a sunk fence, and the sole glory of
that modest domain lay in a herd of choice Channel Island cows, which
had been Lady Jane’s pride. She had resigned them to Juanita without
a sigh, although each particular beast had been to her as a friend.

“My dear, what could I do with cows in a villa?” she said, when
Juanita suggested that she should at least keep her favourites,
Beauty, and Maydew, and Coquette. “Of course, as you say, I could
rent a couple of paddocks; but I should not like to see the herd
divided. Besides, you will want them all by-and-by, when you have a
family.”

Nita stepped lightly across the threshold of her future home. The
old grey porch was embedded in roses and trailing passion-flowers.
Everything had a shabby, old-world look compared with Cheriton. Here
there had been no improvement for over a century; all things had been
quiescent as in the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty.

“What a dear old house it is, Godfrey, and how everything in it
speaks to me of your ancestors—your own ancestors—not other people’s!
That makes all the difference. At Cheriton I feel always as if I were
surrounded by malevolent ghosts. I can’t see them, but I know they
are there. Those poor Strangways, how they must hate me.”

“If there are any living Strangways knocking about the world
houseless, or at any rate landless, I don’t suppose they feel over
kindly disposed to you,” said Godfrey; “but the ghosts have done with
human habitations. It can matter very little to them who lives in the
rooms where they were once happy or miserable, as the case may be.
Has your father ever heard anything of the old family?”

“Never. He says there are no Strangways left on this hemisphere.
There may be a remnant of the race in Australia,” he says, “for he
heard of a cousin of Reginald Strangway’s who went out to Brisbane
years ago to work with a sheep farmer on the Darling Downs. There
is no one else of the old race and the old name that he can tell
me about. I take a morbid interest in the subject, you know. If I
were to meet a very evil-looking tramp in the woods and he were to
threaten me, I should suspect him of being a Strangway. They all
_must_ hate us.”

“With a very unreasonable hatred, then, Nita, for it was no fault
of your father’s that the family went to the bad. I have heard my
father talk of the Strangways many a time over his wine. They had
been a reckless, improvident race for ever so many generations, men
who lived only for the pleasure of the hour, whose motto was ‘_Carpe
diem_’ in the worst sense of the words. There was a Strangway who
was the fashion for a short time during the Regency, wore a hat of
his own invention, and got himself entangled with a popular actress,
who sued him for breach of promise. _He_ dipped the property.
There was a racing Strangway who kept a stable at Newmarket and
married—well—never mind how. _He_ dipped the property. There was
Georgiana Strangway, an heiress and a famous beauty, in the Sailor
King’s reign. Two of the Royal Dukes wanted to marry her; but she
ran away with a bandmaster in the Blues. She used to ride in Hyde
Park at nine o’clock every morning in a green cloth spencer trimmed
with sable, at a time when very few women rode in London. She saw the
bandmaster, fell over head and ears in love with him, and bolted.
They were married at Gretna. He spent as much of her fortune as he
could get at, and was reported to have thrashed her before they
parted. She set up a boarding-house at Ostend, gambled, drank cheap
brandy, and died at five-and-forty.”

“What a dreadful ghost _she_ would be to meet,” said Nita, with a
shudder.

“From first to last they have been a bad lot,” concluded Sir Godfrey,
“and the Isle of Purbeck was a prodigious gainer when your father
became master of Cheriton Chase and Baron Cheriton of Cheriton.”

“_That_ is what they must feel worst of all,” said Nita, speaking of
the dead and the living as if they were one group of banished shades.
“It must be hard for them to think that a stranger takes his title
from the land that was once theirs, from the house in which they were
born. Poor ill-behaved things, I can’t help being sorry for them.”

“My fanciful Nita, they do not deserve your pity. They make their own
lives, love. They have only suffered the result of their own Karma.”

“I only hope they will be better off in their next incarnations,
and that they won’t get to that dreadful eighth world which leads
nowhere,” said Juanita.

She made this light allusion to a creed which she and her lover had
discussed seriously many a time in their graver moods. They had read
Mr. Sinnett’s books together, and had given themselves up in somewise
to the fascinating theories of Esoteric Buddhism, and had been
impressed by the curious parallel between that semi-fabulous Reformer
of the East and the Teacher and Redeemer in whom they both believed.

They went about the house together, Nita admiring everything, as if
she were seeing those old rooms for the first time. The alterations
to be made were of the smallest. Nita would allow scarcely any
change.

“Whatever was nice enough for Lady Jane must be good enough for
me,” she said, decisively, when Godfrey proposed improvements which
would have changed the character of his mother’s morning room, a
conservatory, and a large bay window opposite the fireplace, for
instance.

“But it is such a shabby old hole, compared with your room at
Cheriton.”

“It is a dear old hole, sir, and I won’t have it altered in
the smallest detail. I adore those deep-set windows and wide
window-seats; and this apple-blossom chintz is simply delicious.
Faded, sir? What of that? One can’t buy such patterns nowadays, for
love or money. And that old Chinese screen must have belonged to a
mandarin of the highest rank. My only feeling will be that I am a
wretch in appropriating dear Lady Jane’s surroundings. This room
fitted her like a glove.”

“She is charmed to surrender it to you, love; and your forbearance in
the matter of improvement will delight her.”

“Your improvements would have been destruction. A conservatory
opening out of that window would suggest a city man’s drawing-room
at Tulse Hill. I have seen such in my childhood, when mother used to
visit odd people on the Surrey side of the river.”

“Loveliest insolence!”

“Oh, I am obliged to cultivate insolence. It is a parvenu’s only
defensive weapon. We new-made people always give ourselves more airs
than you who were born in the purple.”

She roamed from room to room, expatiating upon everything with a
childlike pleasure, delighted at the idea of this her new kingdom,
over which she was to reign with undivided sovereignty. Cheriton was
ever so much grander; but at Cheriton she had only been the daughter
of the house; indulged in every fancy, yet in somewise in a state of
subjection. Here she was to be sole mistress, with Godfrey for her
obedient slave.

“And now show me your rooms, sir,” she exclaimed, with pretty
authority. “I may wish to make some improvements _there_.”

“You shall work your will with them, dearest, as you have done with
their master.”

He led her to his study and general den, a fine old room looking into
the stable-yard, capacious, but gloomy.

“This is dreadful,” she cried, “no view, and ever so far from _me_!
You must have the room next the morning-room, so that we can run in
to each other, and talk at any moment.”

“That is one of the best bedrooms.”

“What of that! We can do without superfluous bedrooms; but I cannot
do without you. This room of yours will make a visitor’s bedroom.
If he or she doesn’t like it, he or she can go away, and leave us
to ourselves, which _we_ shall like ever so much better, shan’t
we?” she asked, caressingly, as if life were going to be one long
honeymoon.

Of course he assented, kissed the red frank lips, and assured her
that for him bliss meant a perpetual _tête-à-tête_. Yes, his study
should be next her boudoir; so that even in his busiest hours he
should be able to turn to her for gladness—refreshing himself with
her smiles after a troublesome interview with his bailiff—taking
counsel with her about every change in his stable, sharing her
interest in every new book.

“I will give orders about the change at once,” he said, “so that
everything may be ready for us when you are tired of Cheriton.”

They lunched gaily in the garden. Nita hated eating indoors when the
weather was good enough for an _al fresco_ meal. They lunched under a
Spanish chestnut that made a tent of foliage on the lawn in front of
the house. They lingered over the meal, full of talk, finding a new
world of conversation suggested by their surroundings; and then the
greys were brought round to the hall door, and they started on the
return journey.

It began to rain before they reached Cheriton, and the afternoon
clouded over with a look of premature winter. No saunterings on the
terrace this evening; no midnight meanderings among the cypresses and
yews, the gleaming statues and dense green walls; as if they had been
Romeo and Juliet, wedded and happy, in the garden at Verona. For the
first time since the beginning of their honeymoon they were obliged
to stay indoors.

“It is positively chilly,” exclaimed Juanita, as her maid carried off
her damp mantle.

“My dearest love, I’m afraid you’ve caught cold,” said Godfrey, with
apprehension.

“Do I ever catch cold, Godfrey?” Nita cried, scornfully; and indeed
her splendid physique seemed to negative the idea as she stood before
him, tall and buoyant, with the carnation of health upon cheek and
lips, her eyes sparkling, her head erect.

“Well, no, my Juno, I believe you are as free from all such weakness
as human nature can be; but I shall order fires all the same, and I
implore you to put on a warm gown.”

“I will,” she answered, gaily. “You shall see me in my copper plush.”

“Thanks, love. That is a vision to live for.”

“Shall we have tea in my dressing-room—or in yours?”

“In mine. I think we have taken tea in almost every other room in the
house, as well as in every corner of the garden.”

It had been one of her girlish caprices to devise new places for
their afternoon tea. Whether it had been as keen a delight to the
footmen to carry Japanese tables and bamboo chairs from pillar to
post was open to question; but Juanita loved to colonize, as she
called it.

“I feel that wherever we establish our teapot we invest the spot with
the sanctity of home,” she said.

Fires were ordered, and tea in Sir Godfrey’s dressing-room.

It was Lord Dalbrook’s dressing-room actually, and altogether a
sacred chamber. It had been one of the best bedrooms in the days of
the Strangways; but his Lordship liked space, and had chosen this
room for his den—a fine old room, with full length portraits of the
Sir Joshua period let into the panelling. The furniture was of the
plainest, and very different from the luxurious appointments of the
other rooms, for these very chairs and tables, and yonder substantial
mahogany desk, had done duty in James Dalbrook’s chambers in the
Temple thirty years before. So had the heavy-looking clock on the
chimney-piece, surmounted by a bronze Saturn leaning upon his scythe.
So had the brass candlesticks, and the ink-stained red morocco
blotter on the desk. He had fallen asleep in that capacious arm-chair
many a time in the small hours, after struggling with the intricacies
of a railway bill or poring over a volume of precedents.

The thick Persian carpet, the velvet window-curtains, panelled walls,
and fine old fireplace gave a look of subdued splendour to the room,
in spite of the dark and heavy furniture. There was a large vase of
roses on the desk, where Lord Cheriton never tolerated a flower; and
there were more roses on the chimney-piece; and some smart bamboo
chairs, many coloured, like Joseph’s coat, had been brought from
Nita’s morning room—and so, with logs blazing on the floriated iron
dogs, and a scarlet tea-table set out with blue and gold china, and
a Moorish copper kettle swinging over a lamp, the room had as gay an
aspect as any one could desire.

Juanita had made her toilet by the time the tea-table was ready,
and came in from her room next door, a radiant figure in a gleaming
copper-coloured gown, flowing loose from throat to foot, and with
no adornment except a broad collar and cuffs of old Venice point.
Her brilliant complexion and southern eyes and ebon hair triumphed
over the vivid hue of the gown, and it was at her Sir Godfrey
looked as she came beaming towards him, and not at the dressmaker’s
master-piece.

“How do you like it?” she asked, with childlike pleasure in her fine
raiment. “I ought to have kept it till October, but I couldn’t resist
putting it on, just to see what you think of it. I hope you won’t say
it’s gaudy.”

“My dearest, you might be clad in a russet cloud for anything I
should know to the contrary. A quarter of a century hence, when you
are beginning to fancy yourself _passée_, we will talk about gowns.
It will be of some consequence then how you dress. It can be none
now.”

“That is just a man’s ignorance, Godfrey,” she said, shaking her
finger at him, as she seated herself in one of the bamboo chairs, a
dazzling figure in the light of the blazing logs, which danced about
her eyes and hair and copper-coloured gown in a bewildering manner.
“You think me handsome, I suppose?”

“Eminently so.”

“And you think I should be just as handsome if I dressed anyhow—in a
badly-fitting Tussore, for instance, made last year and cleaned this
year, and with a hat of my own trimming, eh, Godfrey?”

“Every bit as handsome.”

“That shows what an ignoramus a University education can leave a man.
My dearest boy, half my good looks depend upon my dressmaker. Not
for worlds would I have you see me a dowdy, if only for a quarter of
an hour. The disillusion might last a lifetime. I dress to please
you, remember, sir. It was of you I thought when I was choosing my
trousseau. I want to be lovely in your eyes always, always, always.”

“You need make no effort to attain your wish. You have put so strong
a spell upon my eyes that with me at least you are independent of the
dressmaker’s art.”

“Again I say you don’t know what you are talking about. But frankly
now, do you think this gown too gaudy?”

“That coppery background to my Murillo Madonna. No, love; the colour
suits you to perfection.”

She poured out the tea, and then sank back in her comfortable chair,
in a reverie, languid after her explorations at the Priory, full of a
dreamlike happiness as she basked in the glow of the fire, welcome as
a novel indulgence at this time of the year.

“There is nothing more delightful than a fire in July,” she said.

Her eyes wandered about the room idly.

“Do you call them handsome?” she asked presently.

Godfrey looked puzzled. Was she still harping on the dress question,
or was she challenging his admiration for those glorious eyes which
he had been watching in their rovings for a lazy five minutes.

“I mean the Strangways. That is their famous beauty—the girl in the
scanty white satin petticoat, with the goat. Imagine any one walking
about a wood, with a goat, in white satin. What queer ideas portrait
painters must have had in those days. She is very lovely though,
isn’t she?”

“She is not my ideal. I don’t admire that narrow Cupid’s-bow mouth,
the lips pinched up as if they were pronouncing ‘prunes and prism.’
The eyes are large and handsome, but too round; the complexion is
wax-dollish. No, she is not _my_ ideal.”

“I should have been miserable if you had admired her.”

“There is a face in the hall which I like ever so much better, and
yet I doubt if it is a good face.”

“Which is that?”

“The face of the girl in that group of John Strangway’s three
children.”

“That girl with the towsled hair and bright blue eyes. Yes, she must
have been handsome—but she looks—I hope you won’t be shocked, but I
really can’t help saying it—that girl looks a devil.”

“Poor soul! Her temper did not do much good for her. I believe she
came to a melancholy end.”

“How was that?”

“She eloped from a school in Switzerland with an officer in a line
regiment—a love match; but she went wrong a few years afterwards,
left her husband, and died in poverty at Boulogne, I believe.”

“Another ghost!” exclaimed Juanita, dolefully. “Poor, lost soul, she
_must_ walk. I can’t help feeling sorry for her—married to a man
who was unkind to her, perhaps, and whom she discovered unworthy of
her love. And then years afterwards meeting some one worthier and
better, whom she loved passionately. That is dreadful! Oh, Godfrey!
if I had been married before I saw you—and we had met—and you had
cared for me—God knows what kind of woman I should have been. Perhaps
I should have been one of those poor souls who have a history, the
women mother and her friends stare at and whisper about in the Park.
Why are people so keenly interested in them, I wonder? Why can’t they
leave them alone?”

“It would be charity to do so.”

“No one is charitable—in London.”

“Do you think people are more indulgent in the country?”

“I suppose not. I’m afraid English people keep all their charity for
the Continent. I shall never look at the girl in that group without
thinking of her sad story. She looks hardly fifteen in the picture.
Poor thing! She did not know what was coming.”

They loitered over their tea-table, making the most of their
happiness. The sweetness of their dual life had not begun to pall. It
was still new and wonderful to be together thus, unrestrained by any
other presence.

In the midst of their gay talk Juanita’s eyes wandered to the bronze
Time upon the chimney-piece, and the familiar figure suggested gloomy
ideas.

“Oh, Godfrey! look at that grim old man with his scythe, mowing down
our happy moments so fast that we can hardly taste their sweetness
before they speed away. To think that our lives are hurrying past
us like a rapid river, and that we shall be like him” (pointing
distastefully to the type of old age—the wrinkled brow and flowing
beard) “before we know that we have lived.”

“It is a pity, sweet, that life should be so short.”

Her glance wandered to the dark oak panel above the clock, and she
started up from her low chair with a faint scream, stood on tiptoe
before the fireplace, snatched half a dozen scraggy peacock’s
feathers from the panel, and threw them at her husband’s feet.

“Look at those,” she exclaimed, pointing to them as they lay there.

“Peacock’s feathers! What have they done that you should use them so?”

“Oh, Godfrey, don’t you know?” she asked, earnestly.

“Don’t I know what?”

“That peacock’s feathers bring ill luck. It is fatal to take them
into a house. They are an evil omen. And father _will_ pick them up
when he is strolling about the lawn, and _will_ bring them indoors;
though I am always scolding him for his obstinate folly, and always
throwing the horrid things away.”

“And this kind of thing has been going on for some years, I suppose?”
asked Godfrey, smiling at her intensity.

“Ever since I can remember.”

“And have the peacock’s feathers brought you misfortune?”

She looked at him gravely for a few moments, and then burst into a
joyous laugh.

“No, no, no, no,” she said, “Fate has been over kind to me. I have
never known sorrow. Fate has given me _you_. I am the happiest woman
in the world—for there can’t be another _you_, and you are mine. It
is like owning the Kohinoor diamond; one knows that one stands alone.
Still, all the same, peacock’s feathers are unlucky, and I will not
suffer them in your room.”

She picked up the offending feathers, twisted them into a ball,
and flung them at the back of the deep old chimney, behind the
smouldering logs; and then she produced a chess board, and she and
Godfrey began a game with the board on their knees, and played for an
hour by firelight.




CHAPTER III.

    “A deadly silence step by step increased,
     Until it seemed a horrid presence there.”


That idea of the Strangways had taken hold of the bride’s fancy.
She went into the hall with Godfrey after dinner, and they looked
together at the family group. The picture was a bishop’s half-length,
turned lengthwise, and the figures showed only the head and
shoulders. The girl stood between the two boys, her left arm round
her younger brother’s neck. He was a lad of eleven or twelve, in an
Eton jacket and broad white collar. The other boy was older than
the girl, and was dressed in dark green corduroy. The heads were
masterly, but the picture was uninteresting.

“Did you ever see three faces with so little fascination among the
three?” asked Godfrey. “The boys look arrant cubs; the girl has the
makings of a handsome woman, but the lines of her mouth and chin
have firmness enough for forty, and yet she could hardly have been
over fifteen when that picture was painted.”

“She has a lovely throat and lovely shoulders.”

“Yes, the painter has made the most of those.”

“And she has fine eyes.”

“Fine as to colour and shape, but as cold as a Toledo blade—and as
dangerous. I pity her husband.”

“That must be a waste of pity. If he had been good to her she would
not have run away from him.”

“I am not sure of that. A woman with that mouth and chin would go her
own gate if she trampled upon bleeding hearts. I wonder your father
keeps these shadows of a vanished race.”

“He would not part with them for worlds. They are like the peacock’s
feathers that he _will_ bring indoors. I sometimes think he has a
fancy for unlucky things. He says that as we have no ancestors of our
own—to speak of—I suppose we must _have_ ancestors, for everybody
must have come down from Adam somehow——”

“Naturally, or from Adam’s ancestor, the common progenitor of the
Darwinian thesis.”

“Don’t be horrid. Father’s idea is that as we have no ancestors of
our own, we may as well keep the Strangway portraits. The faces are
the history of the house, father said, when mother wanted those
dismal old pictures taken down to make way for a collection of
modern art. So there they are, and I can’t help thinking that they
_overlook_ us.”

They were still standing before the trio of young faces
contemplatively.

“Are they _all_ dead?” asked Juanita, after a pause.

“God knows. I believe it is a long time since any of them were heard
of. Jasper Blake talks to me about them sometimes. He was in service
here, you know, before he became my father’s bailiff. In fact, he
only left Cheriton after the old squire’s death. He is fond of
talking of the forgotten race, and it is from him that most of my
information is derived. He told me about that unlucky lad,”—pointing
to the younger boy. “He was in the navy, distinguished himself out in
China, and was on the high road to getting a ship when he got broke
for drunkenness—a flagrant case, which all but ended in a tremendous
disaster and the burning of a man-of-war. He went into the merchant
service—did well for a year or two, and then the old enemy took
hold of him again, and he got broke _there_. After that he dropped
through—disappeared in the great dismal swamp where the men who fail
in this world sink out of knowledge.”

“And the elder boy; what became of him?”

“He was in the army—a tremendous swell, I believe,—married Lord
Dangerfield’s youngest daughter, and cut a dash for two or three
years, and then disappeared from society, and took his wife to
Corsica, on the ground of delicate health. For anything I know to
the contrary they may still be living in that free-and-easy little
island. He was fond of sport, and liked a rough life. I fancy that
Ajaccio would suit him better than Purbeck or Pall Mall.”

“Poor things; I wonder if they ever long for Cheriton?”

“If old Jasper is to be believed, they were passionately fond of the
place, especially that girl. Jasper was groom in those days, and he
taught her to ride. She was a regular dare-devil, according to his
account, with a temper that no one had ever been able to control. But
she seems to have behaved pretty well to Jasper, and he was attached
to her. Her father couldn’t manage her anyhow. They were too much
alike. He sent her to a school at Lausanne soon after that picture
was painted, and she never came back to Cheriton. She ran away with
an English officer who was home from India on furlough, and was
staying at Ouchy for his health. She represented herself as of full
age, and contrived to get married at Geneva. The squire refused ever
to see her or her husband. She ran away from the husband afterwards,
as I told you. In fact, to quote Jasper, she was an incorrigible
bolter.”

“Poor, poor thing. It is all too sad,” sighed Juanita. “Let us go
into the library and forget them. There are no Strangways there,
thank Heaven.”

She put her arm through Godfrey’s and led him off, unresisting. He
was in that stage of devotion in which he followed her like a dog.

The library was one of the best rooms in the house, but the least
interesting from an archæologist’s point of view. It had been built
early in the eighteenth century for a ball-room, a long narrow room,
with five tall windows, and it had been afterwards known as the
music-room; but James Dalbrook had improved it out of its original
character by throwing out a large bay, with three windows opening
on to a semi-circular terrace, with marble balustrade and steps
leading down to the prettiest portion of that Italian garden which
was the crowning glory of Cheriton Manor, and which it had been
Lord Cheriton’s delight to improve. The spacious bay gave width
and dignity to the room, and it was in the space between the bay
and the fireplace that people naturally grouped themselves. It was
too large a room to be warmed by one fire of ordinary dimensions,
but the fireplace added by James Dalbrook was of abnormal width
and grandeur, while the chimney-piece was rich in coloured marbles
and massive sculpture. The room was lined with books from floor to
ceiling. Clusters of wax candles were burning on the mantelpiece,
and two large moderator lamps stood on a massive carved oak table
in the centre of the room—a table spacious enough to hold all the
magazines, reviews, and periodicals in three languages that were
worth reading—Quarterlies, _Revue des Deux Mondes_, _Rundschau_,
_Figaro_, _World_, _Saturday_, _Truth_, and the rest of them—as
well as guide-books, peerages, clergy and army lists—which made a
formidable range in the middle.

Godfrey flung himself into a long, low, arm-chair, and Juanita
perched herself lightly beside him on the cushioned arm, looking down
at him from that point of vantage. There was a wood fire here as well
as in the hall; but the rain was over now, the evening had grown
warmer, and the French windows in the bay stood open to the dull grey
night.

“What are you reading now, Godfrey?” asked Juanita, glancing at the
cosy double table in a corner by the chimney-piece, loaded with books
above and below.

“For duty reading Jones’ book on ‘Grattan and the Irish Parliament;’
for old books ‘Plato;’ for new ‘Wider Horizons.’”

He was an insatiable reader, and even in those long summer days of
honeymoon bliss he had felt the need of books, which were a habit of
his life.

“Is ‘Wider Horizons’ a good book?”

“It is full of imagination, and it carries one away; but one has
the same feeling as in ‘Esoteric Buddhism.’ It is a very comforting
theory, and it ought to be true; but by what authority is this gospel
preached to us, and on what evidence are we to believe?”

“‘Wider Horizons’ is about the life to come?”

“Yes; it gives us a very vivid picture of our existence in other
planets. The author writes as if he had been there.”

“And according to this theory you and I are to meet and be happy
again in some distant star?”

“In many stars—climbing from star to star, and achieving a higher
spirituality, a finer essence, with every new existence, until we
attain the everlasting perfection.”

“And we who are to die old and worn out here are to be young and
bright again there—in our next world?”

“Naturally.”

“And then we shall grow old again—go through the same slow decay—grey
hairs, fading sight, duller hearing?”

“Yes; as we blossom so must we fade. The withered husk of the old
life holds the seed from which the new flower must spring; and with
every incarnation the flower is to gain in vigour and beauty, and the
life period is to lengthen till it touches infinity.”

“I must read the book, Godfrey. It may be all a dream; but I love
even dreams that promise a future in which you and I shall always be
together—as we are now, as we are now.”

She repeated those last four words with infinite tenderness. The
beautiful head sank down to nestle upon his shoulder, and they were
silent for some minutes in a dreamy reverie, gazing into the fire,
where the logs had given out their last flame, and were slowly fading
from red to grey.

It was a quarter to eleven by the dial let into the marble of the
chimney-piece. The butler had brought a tray with wine and water
at ten o’clock, and had taken the final orders before retiring.
Juanita and her husband were alone amid the stillness of the sleeping
household. The night was close and dull, not a leaf stirring, and
only a few dim stars in the heavy sky.

As the clock told the third quarter with a small silvery chime, as if
it were a town clock in fairyland, Juanita started suddenly from her
half-reclining position, and listened intently, with her face towards
the open window.

“A footstep!” she exclaimed. “I heard a footstep on the terrace.”

“My dearest, I know your hearing is quicker than mine; but this time
it is your fancy that heard and not your ears. I heard nothing. And
who should be walking on the terrace at such an hour, do you suppose?”

“I don’t suppose anything about it, but I know there was some one.
I heard the steps, Godfrey. I heard them as distinctly as I heard
you speak just now; light footsteps—slow, very slow, and with that
cautious, treacherous sound which light, slow footsteps always have,
if one hears them in the silence of night.”

“You are very positive.”

“I know it, I heard it!” she cried, running to the window, and out
into the grey night.

She ran along the whole length of the terrace and back again, her
husband following her with slower steps, and they found no one, heard
nothing from one end to the other.

“You see, love, there was no one there,” said Godfrey.

“I see nothing of the kind—only that the some one who was there has
vanished very cleverly. An eavesdropper might hide easily enough
behind any one of those cypresses,” she said, pointing to the
obelisk-shaped trees which showed black against the dim grey of the
night.

“Why should there be any eavesdropper, love? What secrets have you
and I that any prowler should care to watch or listen. The only
person of the prowling kind to be apprehended would be a burglar; and
as Cheriton has been burglar-free all these years, I see no reason
for fear; so, unless your mysterious footfall belonged to one of the
servants or a servant’s follower, which is highly improbable on this
side of the house, I take it that you must have heard a ghost.”

He had his arm around her, and was leading her out of the misty night
into the warm, bright room, and his voice had the light sound of
laughter; but at that word ghost she started and trembled, and her
voice was very serious as she answered—

“A ghost, yes! It was just _like_ the footfall of a ghost—so slow, so
soft, so mysterious. I believe it was a ghost, Godfrey—a Strangway
ghost. Some of them _must_ revisit this house.”




CHAPTER IV

    “Who will dare
     To pluck thee from me? And of thine own will,
     Full well I feel that thou wouldst not leave me.”


The sunshine of a summer morning, streaming in through mullioned
windows that looked due south, raised Juanita’s spirits, and
dispersed her fears. It was impossible to feel depressed under such
a sky. She had been wakeful for a considerable part of the night,
brooding upon that ghostly footstep which had sent such a sudden
chill to her warm young heart, but that broad clear light of morning
brought common sense.

“I dare say it was only some lovesick housemaid, roaming about after
all the others had gone to bed, in order to have a quiet think about
her sweetheart, and what he said to her last Sunday as they went home
from church. I know how _I_ used to walk about with no company but
my thoughts of you, Godfrey, and how sweet it used to be to go over
all your dearest words—over and over again,—and no doubt the heart
of a housemaid is worked by just the same machinery that sets mine
going—and her thoughts would follow the same track.”

“That is what we are taught to believe, dearest, in this enlightened
age.”

“Why should it be a ghost?” pursued Juanita, leaning back in her
bamboo chair, and lazily enjoying the summer morning, somewhat
languid after a sleepless night.

They were breakfasting at the western end of the terrace, with an
awning over their heads, and a couple of footmen travelling to and
from the house in attendance upon them, and keeping respectfully out
of earshot between whiles. The table was heaped with roses, and the
waxen chalices of a great magnolia on the lower level showed above
the marble balustrade, and shed an almost overpowering perfume on the
warm air.

“Why should a ghost come now?” she asked, harping upon her morbid
fancies. “There has never been a hint of a ghost in all the years
that father and mother have lived here. Why should one come now,
unless——”

“Unless what, love?”

“Unless one of the Strangways died last night—at the very moment when
we heard the footfall—died in some distant land, perhaps, and with
his last dying thought revisited the place of his birth. One has
heard of such things.”

“One has heard of a great many strange things. The human imagination
is very inventive.”

“Ah, you are a sceptic, I know. I don’t think I actually believe
in ghosts—but I am afraid of being forced to believe in them. Oh,
Godfrey, if it were meant for a warning,” she cried, with sudden
terror in the large dark eyes.

“What kind of warning?”

“A presage of misfortune—sickness—death. I have read so many stories
of such warnings.”

“My dearest love, you have read too much rubbish in that line. Your
mind is full of morbid fancies. If the morning were not too warm,
I should say put on your habit and let us go for a long ride. I am
afraid this sauntering life of ours is too depressing for you.”

“Depressing—to be with you all day! Oh, Godfrey, _you_ must be tired
of _me_ if you can suggest such a thing.”

“But, my Nita, when I see you giving yourself up to gloomy
speculations about ghosts and omens.”

“Oh, that means nothing. When one has a very precious treasure one
must needs be full of fears. Look at misers; how nervous they are
about their hidden gold. And my treasure is more to me than all the
gold of Ophir—infinitely precious.”

She sprang up from her low chair, and leaned over the back of his to
kiss the broad brow which was lifted up to meet those clinging lips.

“Oh, my love, my love, I never knew what fear meant till I knew the
fear of parting from you,” she murmured.

“Put on your habit, Nita. We will go for a ride in spite of the
sun. Or what do you say to driving to Dorchester, and storming your
cousins for a lunch? I want to talk to Mr. Dalbrook about Skinner’s
bill of dilapidations.”

Her mood changed in an instant.

“That would be capital fun,” she cried. “I wonder if it is a breach
of etiquette to lunch with one’s cousins during one’s honeymoon?”

“A fig for etiquette. Thomas,” to an approaching footman, “order the
phaeton for half-past eleven.”

“What a happy idea,” said Juanita, “a long, long drive with you, and
then the fun of seeing how you get on with my strong-minded cousins.
They pretend to despise everything that other girls care for, don’t
you know; and go in for literature, science, politics, every thing
intellectual, in short; and I have seen them sit and nurse Darwin
or Buckle for a whole evening, while they have talked of gowns and
bonnets and other girls’ flirtations.”

“Then they are not such Roman maidens as they affect to be.”

“Far from it. They will take the pattern of my frock with their eyes
before I have been in the room ten minutes. Just watch them.”

“I will; if I can take my eyes off you.”

Juanita ran away to change her white peignoir for a walking-dress,
and reappeared in half an hour radiant and ready for the drive.

“How do you like my frock?” she asked, posing herself in front of her
husband, and challenging admiration.

The frock was old gold Indian silk, soft and dull, made with an
exquisite simplicity of long flowing draperies, over a kilted
petticoat which just showed the neat little tan shoes, and a glimpse
of tan silk stocking. The bodice fitted the tall supple figure like a
glove; the sleeves were loose and short, tied carelessly at the elbow
with a broad satin ribbon, and the long suéde gloves matched the
gown to the nicest shade. Her hat was leghorn, broad enough to shade
her eyes from the sun, high enough to add to her importance, and
caught up on one side with a bunch of dull yellow barley and a few
cornflowers, whose vivid hue was repeated in a cluster of the same
flowers embroidered on one side of the bodice. Her large sunshade
was of the same silk as her gown, and that was also embroidered with
cornflowers, a stray blossom flung here and there with an accidental
air.

“My love, you look as if you had stepped out of a fashion book.”

“I suppose I am too smart,” said Juanita with an impatient sigh; “and
yet my colouring is very subdued. There is only that touch of blue
in the cornflowers—just the one high light in the picture. That is
the only drawback to country life. Everything really pretty seems too
smart for dusty roads and green lanes. One must be content to grope
one’s obscure way in a tailor gown or a cotton frock all the year
round. Now this would be perfection for a Wednesday in Hyde Park,
wouldn’t it?”

“My darling, it is charming. Why should you not be prettily dressed
under this blue summer sky? You can sport your tailor gowns in
winter. You are not too smart for me, Nita. You are only too lovely.
Bring your dust cloak, and you may defy the perils of the road.”

Celestine, Lady Carmichael’s French-Swiss maid, was in attendance
with the dust cloak, an ample wrap of creamy silk and lace,
cloudlike, indescribable. This muffled the pretty gown from top to
toe, and Nita took her seat in the phaeton, and prepared for a longer
drive and a longer talk than they had had yesterday.

She was pleased at the idea of showing off her handsome young husband
and her new frock to those advanced young ladies, who had affected a
kind of superiority on the ground of what she called “heavy reading,”
and what they called advanced views. Janet and Sophia had accepted
Lady Cheriton’s invitations with inward protest, and in their
apprehension of being patronized had been somewhat inclined to give
themselves airs, taking pains to impress upon their cousin that she
was as empty-headed as she was beautiful, and that they stood upon an
intellectual plane for which she had no scaling ladder. She had put
up with such small snubbings in the sweetest way, knowing all the
time that as the Honourable Juanita Dalbrook, of Cheriton Chase, and
one of the débutantes whose praises had been sung in all the society
papers, she inhabited a social plane as far beyond their reach as
their intellectual plane might be above hers.

“I don’t suppose we shall see Theodore,” said Juanita, as the bays
bowled merrily along the level road.

The greys were getting a rest after yesterday’s work, and these were
Lady Cheriton’s famous barouche horses, to whom the phaeton seemed a
toy.

“He must have gone to Heidelberg before now,” added Juanita.

“He must be fond of Heidelberg to be running off there when it is so
jolly at home.”

“He was there for a year, you know, before he went to Cambridge, and
he is always going back there or to the Hartz for his holidays. I
sometimes tell him he is half a German.”

She rather hoped that Theodore was in Germany by this time; and yet
she had assured herself in her own mind that there could be no pain
to him in their meeting. She knew that he had loved her—that in
one rash hour, after a year’s absence in America, when he had not
known, or had chosen to forget, the state of affairs between her and
Godfrey, he had told her of his love, and had asked her to give him
hope. It was before her engagement; but she was not the less frank in
confessing her attachment to Godfrey. “I can never care for any one
else,” she said; “I have loved him all my life.”

All her life! Yes, that was Theodore’s irreparable loss. While he,
the working man, had been grinding out his days in the treadmill
round of a country solicitor’s office, the young patrician had
been as free as the butterflies in Juanita’s rose garden; free to
woo her all day long, free to share her most trifling pleasures
and sympathize with her lightest pains. What chance had the junior
partner in Dalbrook & Son against Sir Godfrey Carmichael of Milbrook
Priory?

Theodore had managed his life so well after that one bitter rebuff
that Juanita had a right to suppose that his wound had healed, and
that the pain of that hour had been forgotten. She was sincerely
attached to him, as a kinsman, and respected him more than any other
young man of her acquaintance. Had not Lord Cheriton, that admirable
judge of character, declared that Theodore was one of the cleverest
men he knew, and regretted that he had not attached himself to the
higher branch of the law, as the more likely in his case to result in
wealth and fame?

The phaeton drove up to the old Hanoverian doorway as St. Peter’s
clock chimed the quarter after one. The old man-servant looked
surprised at this brilliant vision of a beautiful girl, a fine
pair of horses, a smart groom, and Sir Godfrey Carmichael. The
_tout-ensemble_ was almost bewildering even to a man accustomed
to see the various conveyances of neighbouring landowners at his
master’s door.

“Yes, my lady, both the young ladies are at home,” said Brown, and
led the way upstairs with unshaken dignity.

He had lived in that house five-and-thirty years, beginning as
shoe-black and errand boy, and he was proud to hear his master tell
his friends how he had risen from the ranks. He had indulged in some
mild philanderings with pretty parlour-maids in the days of his
youth, but had never seriously entangled himself, and was a confirmed
bachelor, and something of a misogynist. He was a pattern of honesty
and conscientiousness, having no wife and family to be maintained
upon broken victuals and illuminated with filched candle-ends or
stolen oil. He had not a single interest outside his master’s house,
hardly so much as a thought; and the glory and honour of “family”
were his honour and glory. So, as he ushered Lady Carmichael and her
husband to the drawing-room, he was meditating upon what additions to
the luncheon he could suggest to cook which might render that meal
worthy of such distinguished guests.

Sophia was seated by one of the windows, painting an orchid in a tall
Venetian vase. It was a weakness with these clever girls to think
they could do everything. They were not content with Darwin and the
new learning, but they painted indifferently in oils and in water
colours, played on various instruments, sang in three languages, and
fancied themselves invincible at lawn tennis.

The orchid was top-heavy, and had been tumbling out of the vase every
five minutes in a manner that had been very trying to the artist’s
temper, and irritating to Janet, who was grappling with a volume of
Johann Müller, in the original, and losing herself in a labyrinth of
words beginning with _ver_ and ending with _heit_.

They both started up from occupations of which both were tired, and
welcomed their visitors with a show of genuine pleasure; for although
they had been very determined in their resistance to anything like
patronage on Juanita’s part when she was Miss Dalbrook, they were
glad that she should be prompt to recognize the claims of kindred now
that she was Lady Carmichael.

“How good of you to come!” exclaimed Janet. “I didn’t think you would
remember us, at such a time.”

“Did you think I must forget old friends because I am happy?” said
Juanita. “But I mustn’t take credit for other people’s virtues. It
was Godfrey who proposed driving over to see you.”

“I wanted to show you what a nice couple we make,” said Sir Godfrey,
gaily, drawing his bride closer to him, as they stood side by side,
tall and straight, and glowing with youth and gladness, in the middle
of the grave old drawing-room. “You young ladies were not so cousinly
as your brother Theodore. _You_ didn’t drive to Cheriton to welcome
us home.”

“If Theo had told us what he was going to do we should have been
very glad to be there too,” replied Sophy, “but he rode off in the
morning without saying a word to anybody.”

“He is in Germany by this time, I suppose?” said Juanita.

“He is downstairs in the office. His portmanteau has been packed for
a week, I believe,” explained Janet, “but there is always some fresh
business to prevent his starting. My father relies upon him more
every day.”

“Dear, good Theodore, he is quite the cleverest man I know,” said
Juanita, without the slightest idea of disparaging her husband, whom
she considered perfection. “I think he must be very much like what my
father was at his age.”

“People who are in a position to know tell us that he is exactly what
his _own_ father was at that age,” said Janet, resenting this attempt
to trace her brother’s gifts to a more distant source. “I don’t see
why one need go further. My father would not have been trusted as he
has been for the last thirty years if he were a simpleton; and Galton
observes——”

The door opened at this moment, and Theodore came in.

He greeted his cousin and his cousin’s husband with unaffected
friendliness.

“It it against my principles to take luncheon,” he said, laughingly,
as he gave Juanita his hand, “but this is a red-letter day. My father
is waiting for us in the dining-room.”

They all went down stairs together, Theodore leading the way with
his cousin, talking gaily as they went down the wide oak staircase,
between sober panelled walls of darkest brown. The front part of the
ground floor was given up to offices, and the dining-room was built
out at the back, a large bright-looking room with a bay window,
opening on to a square town garden, a garden of about half an acre,
surrounded with high walls, above which showed the treetops in
one of the leafy walks that skirt the town. It was very different
to that Italian garden at Cheriton, where the peacocks strutted
slowly between long rows of cypresses, where the Italian statues
showed white in every angle of the dense green wall, and where the
fountain rose and fell with a silvery cadence in the still summer
atmosphere. Here there was only a square lawn, just big enough for a
tennis court, and a broad border of hardy flowers, with one especial
portion at the end of the garden, where Sophia experimented in cross
fertilization after the manner of Darwin, seeming for ever upon the
threshold of valuable discoveries.

Mr. Dalbrook was a fine-looking man of some unascertained age between
fifty and sixty. He boasted that he was Lord Cheriton’s junior by a
year or two, although they had both come to a time of life when a
year or two more or less could matter very little.

He was very fond of Juanita, and he welcomed her with especial
tenderness in her new character as a bride. He kissed her, and then
held her away from him for a minute, with a kindly scrutiny.

“Lady Godfrey surpasses Miss Dalbrook,” he said, smiling at the
girl’s radiant face. “I suppose now you are going to be the leading
personage in our part of the county. We quiet townspeople will be
continually hearing of you, and there will not be a local paper
without a notice of your doings. Anyhow, I am glad you don’t forget
old friends.”

He placed her beside him at the large oval table, on which the
handsomest plate and the eldest china had been set forth with a
celerity which testified to Brown’s devotion. Mr. Dalbrook was one of
those sensible people who never waste keep or wages upon a bad horse
or a bad servant, whereby his cook was one of the best in Dorchester;
so the luncheon, albeit plain and unpretentious, was a meal of which
no man need feel ashamed.

Juanita was fond of her uncle, as she called this distant cousin of
hers, to distinguish him from the younger generation, and she was
pleased to be sitting by him, and hearing all the news of the county
town and the county people who were his clients, and in many cases
his friends. It may be that his cousinship with Lord Cheriton had
gone as far as his professional acumen to elevate him in the esteem
of town and county, and that some people who would hardly have
invited the provincial solicitor for own sake, sent their cards as a
matter of course to the law lord’s cousin. But there were others who
esteemed Matthew Dalbrook for his own sterling qualities, and who
even liked him better than the somewhat severe and self-assertive
Lord Cheriton.

While Juanita talked confidentially to her kinsman, and while Sir
Godfrey discussed the latest theory about the sun, and the probable
endurance of our own little planet, with Janet and Sophia, Theodore
sat at the bottom of the table, silent and thoughtful, watching the
lovely animated face with its look of radiant happiness, and telling
himself that the woman he loved was as far away from him sitting
there, within reach of his touch, within the sound of his lowest
whisper, as if she had been in another world. He had borne himself
bravely on her wedding-day, and smiled back her happy smile, and
clasped her hand with a steady grin of friendship; but after that
ordeal there had been a sad relapse in his fortitude, and he had
thought of her ever since as a man thinks of that supreme possession
without which life is worthless—as the miser thinks of his stolen
gold—or the ambitious man of his blighted name.

Yes, he had loved her with all the strength of his heart and mind,
and he knew that he could never again love with the same full
measure. He was too wise a man, and too experienced in life, to tell
himself that for him time could have no healing power—that no other
woman could ever be dear to him; but he told himself that another
love like unto this was impossible, and that all the future could
bring him would be some pale faint copy of this radiant picture.

“I suppose it’s only one man in fifty who marries his first love,” he
thought; and then he looked at Godfrey Carmichael and thought that
to him overmuch had been given. He was a fine young fellow, clever,
unassuming, with a frank good face; a man who was liked by men as
well as by women; but what had he done to be worthy of such a wife
as Juanita? Theodore could only answer the question in the words of
Figaro, “He had taken the trouble to be born.”

That one thoughtful guest made no difference in the gaiety of the
luncheon table. Matthew Dalbrook had plenty to say to his beautiful
cousin, and Juanita had all the experiences of the last season to
talk about, while once having started upon Sir William Thomson and
the ultimate exhaustion of the sun’s heat, the sisters were not
likely to stop.




CHAPTER V.

    “Poor little life that toddles half an hour,
     Crowned with a flower or two, and there an end—”


Sir Godfrey’s device for diverting his wife’s mind from the morbid
fancies of the previous night answered admirably. She left Dorchester
in high spirits, after having invited her cousins to Cheriton for
tennis and lunch on the following day, and after having bade an
affectionate good-bye to Theodore, who was to start on his holiday
directly he could make an end of some important business now in hand.
His father told him laughingly that he might have gone a week earlier
had he really wanted to go.

“I believe there must be some attraction for you in Dorchester,
though I am not clever enough to find out what it is,” said Mr.
Dalbrook, innocently, “for you have been talking about going away for
the last fortnight, and yet you don’t go.”

Lady Carmichael had lingered in the homely old house till afternoon
tea, had lingered over her tea, telling her cousins all they wanted
to know about smart society in London, that one central spot of
bright white light in the dull, grey mass of a busy, commonplace
world, of which she knew so much, and of which they knew so little.
Janet and Sophia professed to be above caring for these things,
except from a purely philosophical point of view, as they cared
for ants, bees, and wasps; but they listened eagerly all the same,
with occasional expressions of wonder that human beings could be so
trivial.

“Five hundred pounds spent in flowers at Lady Drumlock’s ball!” cried
Sophy, “and to think that in a few more million years the sun may be
as cold as the north pole, and what trace will there be then of all
this butterfly world?”

“Did the Mountains cut a tremendous dash this season?” asked Janet,
frivolously curious about their immediate neighbours, county people
who went to London for the season. “Of course you know she had
thirty thousand pounds left her by an uncle quite lately. And she is
so utterly without brains that I dare say she will spend it all in
entertainments.”

“Oh, they did entertain a good deal, and they did their best,
poor things, and people went to them,” Juanita answered, with a
deprecating air; “but still I should hardly like to say that they are
_in_ society. In the first place, she has never succeeded in getting
the Prince at any of her dances; and in the next place, her parties
have a cloud of provincial dulness upon them, against which it is in
vain to struggle. He can never forget his constituents and his duty
to his borough, and that kind of thing does not answer if one wants
to give really nice parties. I’m afraid her legacy won’t do her much
good, poor soul, unless she gets some clever person to show her how
to spend it. There is a kind of society instinct, don’t you know, and
she is without it. I believe the people who give good parties are
born, not made—like poets and orators.”

Sir Godfrey looked down at her, smiling at her juvenile arrogance,
which, to his mind, was more bewitching than another woman’s humility.

“We mean to show them the way next year, if we take a house in town,”
he said.

“But we are not going to have a house in town,” answered Juanita,
quickly. “Why, Godfrey, you know I have done with all that kind of
frivolity. We can go to Victoria Street in May, and stay with our
people there long enough to see all the pictures and hear some good
music, and just rub shoulders with the friends we like at half a
dozen parties, and then we will go back to our nest at the Priory.
Do you think that I am like Lady Mountain, and want to waste my life
upon the society struggle, when I have _you_?”

It was after five o’clock when they left Dorchester. It was more than
half-past seven when they drew near Cheriton, and the sun was setting
behind the irregular line of hills towards Studland. They approached
the Manor by one of the most picturesque lanes in the district, a
lane sunk between high banks, rugged and rocky, and with here and
there a massive trunk of beech or oak jutting out above the roadway,
while the gnarled and twisted roots spread over the rough, shelving
ground, and seemed to hold up the meadow-land upon the higher level;
a dark, secret-looking lane it must have seemed on a moonless night,
sunk so deeply between those earth walls, and overshadowed by
those gigantic trunks and interlacing branches; but in this mellow
evening light it was a place in which to linger. There was a right
of way through Cheriton Chase, and this sunk lane was the favourite
approach. A broad carriage drive crossed the Chase and park, skirted
the great elm avenue that led to the house, and swept round by a wide
semi-circle to the great iron gates which opened on the high-road
from Wareham.

The steep gable ends of an old English cottage rose amidst the trees,
on the upper ground just outside the gate at the end of the lane. It
was a veritable old English cottage, and had been standing at that
corner of the park-like meadow for more than two hundred years, and
had known but little change during those two centuries. It was a good
deal larger than the generality of lodges, and it differed from other
lodges insomuch as it stood outside the gate instead of inside, and
on a higher level than the road; but it was a lodge all the same,
and the duty of the person who lived in it was to open the gate of
Cheriton Chase to all comers, provided they came in such vehicles as
were privileged to enjoy the right of way. There was a line drawn
somewhere; perhaps at coal waggons or tradesmen’s carts; but for the
generality of vehicles the carriage road across Cheriton Chase was
free.

A rosy-faced girl of about fourteen came tripping down the stone
steps built into the bank as the carriage approached, and was
curtseying at the open gate in time for Sir Godfrey to drive through
without slackening the pace. He gave her a friendly nod as he passed.

“Does Mrs. Porter never condescend to open the gate herself?” he
asked Juanita.

“Seldom for any one except my father. I think she makes a point of
doing it for him, though I believe he would much rather she didn’t.
You mustn’t sneer at her, Godfrey. She is a very unassuming person,
and very grateful for her comfortable position here, though she has
known better days, poor soul.”

“That is always such a vague expression. What were the better days
like?”

“She is the widow of a captain—in the mercantile marine, I think it
is called—a man who was almost a gentleman. She was left very poor,
and my father, who knew her husband, gave her the lodge to take
care of, and a tiny pension—not so much as I spend upon gloves and
shoes, I’m afraid; and she has lived here contentedly and gratefully
for the last ten years. It must be a sadly dull life, for she is an
intellectual woman, too refined to associate with upper servants
and village tradespeople; so she has no one to talk to—literally no
one—except when the Vicar, or any of us call upon her. But that is
not the worst, poor thing,” pursued Juanita, dropping her voice to a
subdued and sorrowful tone; “she had a great trouble some years ago.
You remember, don’t you, Godfrey?”

“I blush to say that Mrs. Porter’s trouble has escaped my memory.”

“Oh, you have been so much away; you would hardly hear anything
about it, perhaps. She had an only daughter—her only child—a very
handsome girl, whom she educated most carefully; and the girl went
wrong, and disappeared. I never heard the circumstances. I was not
supposed to know, but I know she vanished suddenly, and that there
was a good deal of fuss with mother, and the servants, and the Vicar;
and Mrs. Porter’s hair began to whiten from that time, and people who
had not cared much for her before were so sorry that they grew quite
fond of her.”

“It is a common story enough,” said Godfrey, “what could a handsome
girl do—except go wrong—in such a life as that. Did she open the gate
while she was here?”

“Only for my father, I believe. Mrs. Porter has always contrived
to keep a girl in a pinafore, like that girl you saw just now. All
the girls come from the same family, or have done for the last six
or seven years. As soon as the girl grows out of her pinafores she
goes off to some better service, and a younger sister drops into her
place.”

“And her pinafores, I suppose.”

“Mrs. Porter’s girls always do well. She has a reputation for making
a good servant out of the raw material.”

“A clever woman, no doubt; very clever, to have secured a
lodge-keeper’s berth without being obliged to open the gate; a woman
who knows how to take care of herself.”

“You ought not to disparage her, Godfrey. The poor thing has known so
much trouble—think of what it was to lose the daughter she loved—and
in such a way—worse than death.”

“I don’t know about that. Death means the end. A loving mother might
rather keep the sinner than lose the saint, and the sinner may wash
herself clean and become a saint—after the order of Mary Magdalene.
If this Mrs. Porter had been really devoted to her daughter she would
have followed her and brought her back to the fold. She would not
be here, leading a life of genteel idleness in that picturesque old
cottage while the lost sheep is still astray in the wilderness.”

“You are very hard upon her, Godfrey.”

“I am hard upon all shams and pretences. I have not spoken to Mrs.
Porter above half a dozen times in my life—she never opens the
gate for me, you know—but I have a fixed impression that she is a
hypocrite—a harmless hypocrite, perhaps—one of those women whose
chief object in life is to stand well with the Vicar of her parish.”

They were at the hall door by this time, and it was a quarter to
eight.

“Let us sit in the drawing-room this evening, Godfrey,” said Juanita,
as she ran off to dress for dinner. “The library would give me the
horrors after last night.”

“My capricious one. You will be tired of the drawing-room to-morrow.
I should not be surprised if you ordered me to sit on the housetop.
We might rig up a tent for afternoon tea between two chimney stacks.”

Juanita made a rapid toilet, and appeared in one of her graceful
cream-white tea-gowns, veiled in a cloud of softest lace, just as the
clocks were striking eight. She was all gaiety to-night, just as she
had been all morbid apprehension last night; and when they went to
the drawing-room after dinner—together, for it was not to be supposed
that Sir Godfrey would linger over a solitary glass of claret—she
flew to the grand piano and began to play Tito Mattei’s famous waltz,
which seemed the most consummate expression of joyousness possible to
her. The brilliant music filled the atmosphere with gaiety, while the
face of the player, turned to her husband as she played, harmonized
with the light-hearted melody.

The drawing-room was as frivolously pretty as the library was soberly
grand. It was Lady Cheriton’s taste which had ruled here, and the
room was a kind of record of her ladyship’s travels. She had bought
pretty things or curious things wherever they took her fancy, and had
brought them home to her Cheriton drawing-room. Thus the walls were
hung with Algerian embroideries on damask or satin, and decorated
with Rhodian pottery. The furniture was a mixture of old French and
old Italian. The Dresden tea services and ivory statuettes, and _capo
di monte_ vases, and Copenhagen figures, had been picked up all over
the Continent, without any regard to their combined effect; but there
were so many things that the ultimate result was delightful, the
room being spacious enough to hold everything without the slightest
appearance of over-crowding.

The piano stood in a central position, and was draped with a Japanese
robe of state—a mass of rainbow-hued embroidery on a ground of violet
satin almost covered with gold thread. It was the most gorgeous
fabric Godfrey Carmichael had ever seen, and it made the piano a spot
of vivid parti-coloured light, amidst the more subdued colouring of
the room—the silvery silken curtains, the delicate Indian muslin
draperies, and the dull tawny plush coverings of sofas and chairs.

The room was lighted only by clusters of wax candles, and a
reading-lamp on a small table near one of the windows. It was a rule
that wherever Sir Godfrey spent his evening there must always be a
reading-table and lamp ready for him.

He showed no eagerness for his books yet awhile, but seemed
completely happy lolling at full length on a sofa near the piano,
listening and watching as Juanita played. She played more of Mattei’s
brilliant music—another waltz—an arrangement of _Non è ver_—and then
dashed into one of Chopin’s wildest mazurkas, with an audacious
self-abandonment that was almost genius.

Godfrey listened rapturously, delighted with the music for its own
sake, but even more delighted for the gladness which it expressed.

She stopped at last, breathless, after Mendelssohn’s Capriccio.
Godfrey had risen from the sofa and was standing by her side.

“I’m afraid I must have tired you to death,” she said, “but I had a
strange sort of feeling that I must go on playing. That music was a
safety-valve for my high spirits.”

“My darling, I am so glad to see that you have done with imaginary
woes. We may have real troubles of some kind to face by-and-by,
perhaps, as we go down the hill, so it would be very foolish to
abandon ourselves to fancied sorrows while we are on the top.”

“Real troubles—yes—sickness, anxiety, the fear of parting,” said
Juanita, in a troubled voice. “Oh, Godfrey, if we were to give half
our fortune to the poor—if we were to make some great sacrifice—do
you think God would spare us such pangs as these—the fear—the
horrible fear of being parted from each other?”

“My dearest, we cannot make a bargain with Providence. We can only do
our duty, and hope for the best.”

“At any rate, let us be very—very good to the poor,” urged Juanita,
with intense earnestness; “let us have their prayers to plead for us.”

The night was warm and still, and the windows were all open to the
terrace. Godfrey and Juanita took their coffee in their favourite
corner by the magnolia tree, and sat there for a long time in the
soft light of the stars, talking the old sweet talk of their future
life.

“We must drive to Swanage and see Lady Jane to-morrow,” said Juanita
by-and-by. “Don’t you think it was very wrong to go to see my
people—only cousins after all—before we went to your mother?”

“She will come to us, dear, directly we give her permission. I know
she is dying to see you in your new character.”

“How lovely she looked at the wedding, in her pale grey gown and
bonnet. I love her almost as well as I love my own dear, good,
indulgent mother, and I think she is the most perfect lady I ever
met.”

“I don’t think you’ll find her very much like the typical
mother-in-law, at any rate,” replied Godfrey, gaily.

They decided on driving to Swanage next morning. They would go in the
landau, and bring “the mother” back with them for a day or two, if
she could be persuaded to come.

Juanita stifled a yawn presently, and seemed somewhat languid after
her sleepless night and long day of talk and vivacity.

“I am getting very stupid company,” she said. “I’ll go to bed
early to-night, Godfrey, and leave you an hour’s quiet with ‘Wider
Horizons.’ I know you are longing to go on with that book, but your
chatterbox wife won’t let you.”

Of course he protested that her society was worth more than all the
books in the British Museum. He offered to take his book up to her
room and read her to sleep, if she liked; but she would not have it
so.

“You shall have your own quiet corner and your books, just as if you
were still a bachelor,” she said, caressingly, as she hung upon his
shoulder for a good-night kiss. “As for me, I am utterly tired out.
Janet and Sophy talked me to death; and then there was the long drive
home. I shall be as fresh as ever to-morrow morning, and ready to be
off to dear Lady Jane.”

He went into the hall with her, and to the top of the stairs for the
privilege of carrying her candlestick, and he only left her at the
end of the corridor out of which her room opened.

She did not ring for her maid, preferring solitude to that young
person’s attendance. She did not want to be worried with elaborate
hair-brushing or ceremonies of any kind. She was thoroughly exhausted
with the alternations of emotion of which her life had been made up
of late, and she fell asleep almost as soon as her head touched her
pillow.

The bedroom was over the drawing-room. Her last look from the open
casement had shown her the reflection of the lights below on the
terrace. She was near enough to have spoken out of the window to her
husband, had she been so minded. She could picture him sitting at the
table at the corner window, in his thoughtful attitude, his head bent
over his book, one knee drawn up nearly to his chin, one arm hanging
loosely across the arm of his low easy-chair. She had watched him
thus many a time, completely absorbed in his book.

She slept as tranquilly as an infant, and her dream-wanderings were
all in pleasant places—with him, always with him; confused after the
manner of all dreams, but with no sign of trouble.

What was this dream about being with him at Woolwich where they were
firing a big gun? A curious dream! She had been there once with her
father to see a gun drawn—but she had never seen one fired there,—and
now in her dream she stood in a crowd of strange faces, fronting
the river, and there was a long grey ironclad on the water—a turret
ship—and there came a flash, and then a puff of white smoke, and the
report of a gun, short and sharp, not like the roar of a cannon by
any means, and yet her dream showed her the dark sullen gun on the
grey deck, the biggest gun she had ever seen.

She started up from her pillow, cold and trembling. That report of
the gun had seemed so real and so near, that it had awakened her. She
was wide awake now, and pushed back her loose hair from her eyes,
and felt under her pillow for her watch, and looked at it in the dim
light of the night-lamp on the table by her bed.

“A quarter to one.”

She had left the drawing-room a few minutes after ten. It was long
for Godfrey to have sat reading alone; but he was insatiable when he
had a new book that interested him.

She got up and put on her slippers and dressing-gown, prepared to
take him to task for his late hours. She was not alarmed by her
dream, but the sound of that sharp report was still in her ears as
she lighted her candle and went down into the silent house.

She opened the drawing-room door, and looked across to the spot where
she expected to see her husband sitting. His chair was empty. The
lamp was burning just as she had left it hours ago, burning with a
steady light under the green porcelain shade, but he was not there.

Puzzled, and with a touch of fear, she went slowly across the room
towards his chair. He had strayed out on to the terrace perhaps—he
had gone out for a final smoke. She would steal after him in her long
white gown, and frighten him if she could.

“He ought at least to take me for a ghost,” she thought.

She stopped transfixed with a sudden horror. He was lying on the
carpet at her feet in a huddled heap, just as he had rolled out of
his chair. His head was bent forward between his shoulders, his face
was hidden. She tried to lift his head, hanging over him, calling
to him in passionate entreaty; and, behold, her hands and arms were
drowned in blood. His blood splashed her white peignoir. It was all
over her. She seemed to be steeped in it, as she sat on the floor
trying to get a look at his face—to see if his wound was mortal.

For some moments she had no other thought than to sit there in her
horror, repeating his name in every accent of terror and of love,
beseeching him to answer her. Then gradually came the conviction
of his unconsciousness, and of the need of help. He was badly
hurt—dangerously hurt—but it might not be mortal. Help must be got.
He must be cured somehow. She could not believe that he was to die.

She rushed to the bell and rang again, and again, and again, hardly
taking her finger from the little ivory knob, listening as the shrill
electric peal vibrated through the silent house. It seemed an age
before there was any response, and then three servants came hurrying
in—the butler, and one of the footmen, and a scared housemaid. They
saw her standing there, tall and white, dabbled with blood.

“Some one has been trying to murder him,” she cried. “Didn’t you hear
a gun?”

No, no one had heard anything till they heard the bell. The two men
lifted Sir Godfrey from the floor to the sofa, and did all they could
do to staunch that deadly wound in his neck, from which the blood was
still pouring—a bullet wound. Lambert, the butler, was afraid that
the bullet had pierced the jugular vein.

If there was life still, it was only ebbing life. Juanita flung
herself on the ground beside that prostrate form and kissed the
unconscious lips, and the cold brow, and those pallid cheeks; kissed
and cried over him, and repeated again and again that the wound was
not mortal.

“Is any one going for the doctor?” she cried, frantically. “Are you
all going to stand still and see him die?”

Lambert assured her that Thomas was gone to the stable to wake the
men, and despatch a mounted messenger for Mr. Dolby, the family
doctor.

“He might have helped us more if he had run there himself,” cried
Juanita. “There will be time lost in waking the men, and saddling a
horse. I could go there faster.”

She looked at the door as if she had half resolved to rush off to the
village in her dressing-gown and slippers. And then she looked again
at that marble face, and again fell upon her knees by the sofa, and
laid her cheek against that bloodless cheek, and moaned and cried
over him; while the butler went to get brandy, with but little hope
in his own mind of any useful result.

“What an end to a honeymoon!” he said to himself despondently.




CHAPTER VI.

    “Is not short payne well borne that bringes long ease,
      And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?
     Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
      Ease after warre, death after life....”


The morning dawned upon a weeping household. There was nothing to be
done when Mr. Dolby, the village surgeon, arrived at Cheriton House.
He could only examine the death-wound and express his opinion as to
its character.

“It was certainly not self-inflicted,” he told the servants, as they
stood about him in a stony group.

“Self-inflicted, indeed!” echoed Lambert, “I should think not. If
ever there was a young man who had cause to set store by his life it
was Sir Godfrey Carmichael. It’s murder, Mr. Dolby, rank murder.”

“Yes, I’m afraid it’s murder,” said Dolby, with an air which implied
that suicide would have been a bagatelle in comparison.

“But who can have done it, and why?” he asked after a pause.

The servants inclined to the opinion that it was the act of a
poacher. Lord Cheriton had always been what they called a mark
upon poachers. There was doubtless a vendetta to which the
pheasant-snaring fraternity had pledged themselves, and Sir Godfrey
was the victim of that vendetta; however strange it might appear that
hatred of Lord Cheriton should find its expression in the murder of
Lord Cheriton’s son-in-law.

“We must wait for the inquest before we can know anything,” said
Dolby, when he had done all that surgery could do for that cold clay,
which was to compose the lifeless form in its final rest in a spare
bedroom at the end of the corridor, remote from that bridal chamber
where Juanita was lying motionless in her dumb despair.

The local policeman was on the scene at seven o’clock, prowling
about the house with a countenance of solemn stolidity, and asking
questions which seemed to have very little direct bearing on the
case, and taking measurements between the spot where the murdered man
had been found, too plainly marked by the pool of blood which had
soaked into the velvet pile, and imaginary points upon the terrace
outside, with the doctor at his elbow to make suggestions, and as
far as in him lay behaving as a skilled London detective might have
behaved under the same circumstances, which conduct on his part did
not prevent Mr. Dolby telegraphing to Scotland Yard as soon as the
wires were at his disposal.

He was in the village post-office when the clock struck eight, and
the postmistress, who had hung out a flag and decorated her shop
front with garlands on the wedding day, was watching him with an
awe-stricken countenance as he wrote his telegrams.

The first was to Scotland Yard:—

“Sir Godfrey Carmichael murdered late last night. Send one of your
most trustworthy men to investigate.”

The second was to Lord Cheriton, Grand Hotel, Paramé St. Malo,
France:—

“Sir Godfrey Carmichael was murdered last night, between twelve
and one o’clock. Murderer unknown. Death instantaneous. Pray come
immediately.”

The third was to Matthew Dalbrook, more briefly announcing the murder.

He was going to send a fourth message to Lady Jane Carmichael, began
to write her address, then thought better of it, and tore up the form.

“I’ll drive over and tell her,” he said to himself. “Poor soul, it
will break her heart, let her learn it how she may. But it would be
cruel to telegraph, all the same.”

Every one at Cheriton knew that Lady Jane’s affections were centred
upon her only son. She had daughters, and she was very fond of them.
They were both married, and had married well; but their homes lay
far off, one in the Midlands, the other in the North of England, and
although in each case there was a nursery full of grandchildren,
neither the young married women nor the babies had ever filled Lady
Jane’s heart as her son had filled it.

And now Mr. Dolby had taken upon himself to go and tell this gentle
widow that the light of her life was extinguished; that the son she
adored had been brutally and inexplicably murdered. It was a hard
thing for any man to do; and Mr. Dolby was a warm-hearted man, with
home ties of his own.

Before Mr. Dolby’s gig was half-way to Swanage, his telegram had
been delivered at Dorchester, and Matthew Dalbrook and his son were
starting for Cheriton with a pair of horses in the solicitor’s neat T
cart, which was usually driven with one. Theodore drove, and father
and son sat side by side in a dreary silence.

What could be said? The telegram told so little. They had speculated
and wondered about it in brief broken sentences as they stood in the
office fronting the sunny street, waiting for the carriage. They
had asked each other if this ghastly thing could be; if it were not
some mad metamorphose of words, some blunder of a telegraph clerk’s,
rather than a horrible reality.

Murdered—a man who had been sitting at their table, full of life and
spirits, in the glow of youth, and health, and happiness, less than
twenty-four hours ago! Murdered—a man who had never known what it was
to have an enemy, who had been popular with all classes! Had been!
How awful to think of him as belonging to the past, he who yesterday
looked forward to so radiant a future! And Theodore Dalbrook had
envied him, as even the most generous of men must needs envy the
winner in the race for love.

Could it be? Or if it were really true, how could it be? What manner
of murderer? What motive for the murder? Where had it happened?
On the highway—in the woody labyrinths of the Chase? And upon the
mind of Theodore flashed the same idea which had suggested itself
to the servants. It might be the work of a poacher whom Sir Godfrey
had surprised during a late ramble. Yet a poacher must be hard
bested before he resorts to murder, and Sir Godfrey—easy tempered
and generous—was hardly the kind of man to take upon himself the
functions of a gamekeeper, and give chase to any casual depredator.
It was useless to wonder or to argue while the facts of the case
were all unrevealed. It would be time to do that when they were at
Cheriton. So the father and son sat in a dismal silence, save that
now and again the elder man sighed, “Poor Juanita, my poor Juanita;
and she was so happy yesterday.”

Theodore winced at the words. Yes, she had been so happy, and he
had despaired because of her happiness. The cup of gladness which
had brimmed over for her had been to him a fountain of bitterness.
It seemed to him as if he had never realized how fondly he loved
her till he saw her by her husband’s side, an embodiment of life’s
sunshine, innocently revealing her felicity in every look and word.
It was so long since he had ceased to hope. He had even taught
himself to think he was resigned to his fate, that he could live his
life without her. But that delusion ceased yesterday, and he knew
that she was dearer than she had ever been to him now that she was
irrevocably lost. It was human nature, perhaps, to love her best when
love was most hopeless.

They drove along the level road towards Cheriton, in the dewy
freshness of the summer morning, by meadow and copse, by heath and
cornfield, the skylarks carolling in the hot blue sky, the corncrake
creaking inside the hedge, the chaffinch reiterating his monotonous
note, the jay screaming in the wood, all living creatures revelling
in the cloudless summer. It was hard, awful, unsupportable, that he
who was with them yesterday, who had driven along this road under
the westering sun, was now cold clay, a subject for the coroner, a
something to be hidden away in the family vault, and forgotten as
soon as possible; for what does consolation mean except persuasion to
forget?

Never had the way between Dorchester and Cheriton Chase looked
lovelier than in this morning atmosphere; never had the cattle
grouped themselves into more delightful pictures amidst those shallow
waters which reflected the sky; never had the lights and shadows been
fairer upon those level meadows and yonder broken hills. Theodore
Dalbrook loved every bit of that familiar landscape; and even to-day,
amidst the horror and wonder of his distracted thoughts, he had a
dim sense of surrounding beauty, as of something seen in a dream.
He could have hardly told where he was, or what the season was, or
whether it was the morning or the evening light that was gilding the
fields yonder.

The lowered blinds at Cheriton told only too surely that the ghastly
announcement in the telegram was no clerical error. The face of the
footman who opened the door was pale with distress. He conducted Mr.
Dalbrook and his son to the library, where the butler appeared almost
immediately to answer the elder man’s eager questions.

Not on the highway, not in the woods or the Park, but in the
drawing-room where the butler had seen him sitting in a low arm-chair
by the open window, in the tranquil summer night, absorbed in his
book.

“He was that wrapped up that I don’t believe he knew I was in the
room, sir,” said Lambert, “till I asked him if there was anything
further wanted for the night, and then he starts, looks up at me with
his pleasant smile, and answers in his quiet friendly way, ‘Nothing
more, thank you, Lambert. Is it very late?’ I told him it was past
eleven, and I asked if I should shut the drawing-room shutters
before I went to bed, but he says, ‘No, I’ll see to that—I like the
windows open,’ and then he went on reading, and less than two hours
afterwards he was lying on the ground, in front of the window—dead.”

“Have you any suspicion, Lambert, as to the murderer?”

“Well, no, sir; not unless it was a poacher or an escaped lunatic.”

“The lunatic seems rather the more probable conjecture,” said Matthew
Dalbrook. “The police are at work already, I hope.”

“Well, sir, yes; our local police are doing all that lies in their
power, and I have done what I could to assist them. Mr. Dolby wired
to Scotland Yard at the same time as he wired to you.”

“That was wisely done. Have there been no traces of the murderer
discovered? No indication of any kind?”

“Nothing, sir; but one of the under housemaids remembers to have
heard footsteps about on the terrace, after dark, on several
occasions within the last fortnight; once while Sir Godfrey and our
young lady were at dinner, and two or three times at a later hour
when they were in the drawing-room or the library.”

“Did she see any one?”

“No, sir; she is rather a dull kind of girl, and never so much as
troubled to find out what the footsteps meant. Her bedroom is one of
the old attics on the south side of the house, and she was sitting
at work near her open window when she heard the footsteps—going and
coming—slow and stealthy-like—upon the terrace at intervals. She is
sure they were not her ladyship’s nor Sir Godfrey’s steps on either
occasion. She says she knows their walk, and she would swear to these
footsteps as altogether different. Slower, more creeping-like, as she
put it.”

“Has no one been seen lurking about after dark?”

“No one, sir, as we have heard of; and the constable questioned all
the servants, pretty close, I can tell you. He hasn’t left much for
the London detective to do.”

Matthew Dalbrook had been the only questioner in this interrogatory.
Theodore had sunk into a chair on entering the room, and sat silent,
with a face of marble. He was thinking of the stricken girl whose
life had been desolated by this mysterious crime. His father had not
forgotten her; but he had wanted, first of all, to learn all he could
about her husband’s death.

“How does Lady Carmichael bear it?” he asked presently.

“Very sadly, sir; very sadly. Mrs. Morley and Celestine are both with
her. Mr. Dolby ordered that she should be kept as quiet as possible,
not allowed to leave her room if they could help it, but it has been
very difficult to keep her quiet. Poor dear young lady! She wanted to
go to _him_.”

“Poor girl! poor girl! So happy yesterday!” said Matthew Dalbrook.

His son sat silent, as if he were made of stone.

Far, very far off, as it were at the end of a long dark vista, cut
sharply across an impenetrable wood of choking thorns and blinding
briars, he saw Juanita again radiant, again happy, again loving and
beloved, and on the threshold of another life. The vision dazzled
him, almost to blindness. But could it ever be? Could that loving
heart ever forget this agony of to-day—ever beat again to a joyful
measure? He wrenched himself from that selfish reverie; he felt a
wretch for having yielded up his imagination, even for a moment,
to that alluring vision. He was here to mourn with her, here to
pity her—to sympathize with this unspeakable grief. Murdered! Her
lover-husband shot to death by an unknown hand, her honeymoon ended
with one murderous flash—that honeymoon which had seemed the prelude
to a lifetime of love.

“I should like to see her,” said Mr. Dalbrook. “I think it would be a
comfort to her to see me, however agitated she may be. Will you take
my name to the housekeeper, and ask her opinion?”

Lambert looked doubtful as to the wisdom of the course, but was ready
to obey all the same.

“Mr. Dolby said she was to be kept very quiet, sir—that she wasn’t to
see anybody.”

“That would hardly apply to her own people. Mr. Dolby telegraphed for
me.”

“Did he, sir? Then I conclude he would not object to her ladyship
seeing you. I’ll send up your name. Perhaps, while the message is
being taken, you would like to have a look at the spot where it
happened?”

“Yes. I want to know all that can be known.”

Lambert had been so busy with the constable all the morning that he
felt himself almost on a level with Scotland Yard talent, and he took
a morbid interest in that dark stain on the delicate half tints of
the velvet pile, and in such few details as he was able to expound.
He despatched a footman upstairs, and he led the Dalbrooks to the
drawing-room, where he opened the shutters of that window through which
the assassin must have aimed, and let a flood of sunshine into the
darkened room.

The chair, the table, and lamp stood exactly as they had stood last
night. Lambert took credit to himself for not having allowed them to
be moved by so much as an inch.

“Any assistance in my power I shall be only too happy to give to the
London detective,” he said. “Of course, coming on the scene as a
total stranger, he can’t be expected to do much without help.”

There was no need to point out that ghastly stain upon the carpet.
The shaft of noonday sunshine seemed to concentrate its brightness
on that grisly patch. Dark, dark, dark with the witness of a cruel
murder—the murder of a man who had never done an unkindly act, or
harboured an unworthy thought.

Theodore Dalbrook stood looking at that stain. It seemed to bring
the fatal reality nearer to him. He looked at the low chair with its
covering of peacock plush, and its Turkish embroidery draped daintily
across the broad back and capacious arms—a chair to live in—a
sybarite’s estate,—and then at the satinwood book-table filled with
such books as the lounger loves—Southey’s “Doctor,” “Burton,” “Table
Talk,” by Coleridge, Whateley, Rogers, “The Sentimental Journey,”
“Rochefoucauld,” “Caxtoniana,” “Elia,” and thrown carelessly upon
one of the shelves a handkerchief of cobweb cambric, with a monogram
that occupied a third of the fabric, “J.C.” Her handkerchief, dropped
there last night, as she arranged the books for her husband’s
use—putting her own favourites in his way.

Lambert took up a book and opened it with a dismal smile, handing it
to Mr. Dalbrook as he did so.

It was “Wider Horizons,” the volume he had been reading when the
bullet struck him, and those open pages were spattered with his blood.

“Put it away for God’s sake, man,” cried Dalbrook, horrified.
“Whatever you do, don’t let Lady Carmichael see it.”

“No, sir, better not, perhaps, sir—but it’s evidence, and it ought to
be produced at the inquest.”

“Produce it if you like; but there is evidence enough to show that he
was murdered on this spot.”

“As he sat reading, sir; the book is a great point.”

And then Lambert expounded the position of that lifeless form, making
much of every detail, as he had done to the constable.

While he was talking, the door was opened suddenly, and Juanita
rushed into the room.

“Lord have mercy on us, she mustn’t see that,” cried Lambert,
pointing to the carpet.

Matthew Dalbrook hurried forward to meet her, and caught her in his
arms before she could reach that fatal spot. He held her there,
looking at her with pitying eyes, while Theodore approached slowly,
silently, agonized by the sight of her agony. The change from the
joyous self-abandonment of yesterday to the rigid horror of to-day
was the most appalling transformation that he had ever looked upon.
Her face was of a livid pallor, her large dark eyes were distended
and fixed, and all their brilliancy was quenched like a light blown
out. Her blanched lips trembled as she tried to speak, and it was
after several futile efforts to express her meaning that she finally
succeeded in shaping a sentence distinctly.

“Have they found his murderer?”

“Not yet, dearest. It is far too soon to hope for that. But it is not
for you to think about that, Juanita. All will be done—be sure—rest
secure in the devotion of those who love you; and——” with a break in
his voice, “who loved him.”

She lifted her head quickly, with an angry light in the eyes which
had been so dull till that moment.

“Do you think I will leave that work to others?” she said. “It is
my business, it is all that God has left me to do in this world.
It is my business to see that his murderer suffers,—not as I
suffer—that can never be,—but all that the law can do—the law which
is so merciful to murderers nowadays. You don’t think he can get
off lightly, do you, uncle? They will hang him, won’t they? Hang
him—hang him—hang him,” she repeated, in hoarse dull syllables. “A
few moments’ agony after a night of terror. So little—so little! And
I have to live my desolate life. My punishment is for a lifetime.”

“My love, God will be good to you. He can lighten all burdens,”
murmured Mr. Dalbrook, gently.

“He cannot lighten mine, not by the weight of a single hair. He has
stretched forth His hand against me in hatred and anger, perhaps
because I loved His creature better than I loved Him.”

“My dearest, this is madness——”

“I did, I did,” she reiterated. “I loved my husband better than I
loved my God. I would have worshipped Satan if I could have saved
him by Satan’s help. I loved him with all my heart, and mind, and
strength, as we are taught to love God. There was not room in my
heart for any other religion. He was the beginning and the end of my
creed. And God saw my happy love and hated me for it. He is a jealous
God. We are taught that when we are little children. He is a jealous
God, and He put it into the head of some distracted creature to come
to that window and shoot my husband.”

A violent fit of hysteria followed these wild words. Matthew Dalbrook
felt that all attempts at consolation must needs be vain for some
time to come. Until this tempest of grief was calmed nothing could be
done.

“She will have her mother here in a day or two,” said Theodore. “That
may bring some comfort.”

Juanita heard him even in the midst of her hysterical sobbing. Her
hearing was abnormally keen.

“No one, no one can comfort me, unless they can give me back my dead.”

She started up suddenly from the sofa where Matthew had placed her,
and grasped his arm with convulsive force.

“Take me to him,” she entreated, “take me to him, uncle. You were
always kind to me. They won’t let me go to him. It is brutal, it is
infamous of them. I have a right to be there.”

“By-and-by, my dear girl, when you are calmer.”

“I will be calm this instant if you will take me to him,” she said,
commanding herself at once, with a tremendous effort, choking down
those rising sobs, clasping her convulsed throat with constraining
hands, tightening her tremulous lips.

“See,” she said, “I am quite calm now. I will not give way again.
Take me to him. Let me see him—that I may be sure my happy life was
not all a dream—a mad-woman’s dream—as it seems to have been now,
when I cannot look upon his face.”

Mr. Dalbrook looked at his son interrogatively.

“Let her see him,” said Theodore, gently. “We cannot lessen her
sorrow. It must have its way. Better perhaps that she should see him,
and accustom herself to her grief; better for her brain, however it
may torture her heart.”

He saw the risk of a further calamity in his cousin’s state—the fear
that her mind would succumb under the burden of her sorrow. It seemed
to him that there was more danger in thwarting her natural desire to
look upon her beloved dead than in letting her have her way.

The housekeeper had followed her young mistress to the drawing-room
door, and was waiting there. She shook her head, and murmured
something about Mr. Dolby’s orders, but submitted to the authority of
a kinsman and family solicitor, as even superior to the faculty.

She led the way silently to that upper chamber where the murdered man
was lying. Matthew Dalbrook put his cousin’s icy hand through his arm
and supported her steps as they slowly followed. Theodore remained in
the drawing-room, walking up and down, in deepest thought, stopping
now and then in his slow pacing to and fro to contemplate that stain
upon the velvet pile, and the empty chair beside it.

In the room above Juanita knelt beside the bed where he who kissed
her last night on the threshold of her chamber lay in his last
slumber, a marble figure with calm dead face shrouded by the snowy
sheet, with flowers—white waxen exotics—scattered about the bed. She
lifted the sheet, and looked upon him, and kissed him with love’s
last despairing kiss, and then she knelt beside the bed, with her
face bent in her clasped hands, calmer than she had been at any
moment since she found her murdered husband lying at her feet.

“It’s wonderful,” whispered the housekeeper to Mr. Dalbrook; “it
seems to have soothed her, poor dear, to see him—and I was afraid she
would have broke down worse than ever.”

“You must give way to her a little, Mrs. Morley. She has a powerful
mind, and she must not be treated like a child. She will live through
her trouble, and rise superior to it, be sure of that; terrible as it
is.”

The door opened softly, and a woman came into the room, a woman of
about five-and-forty, of middle height, slim and delicately made,
with aquiline nose and fair complexion, and flaxen hair just touched
with grey. She was deadly pale, but her eyes were tearless, and she
came quietly to the bed, and fell on her knees by Juanita’s side
and hid her face as Juanita’s was hidden, and the first sound that
came from her lips was a long low moan—a sound of greater agony than
Matthew Dalbrook had ever heard in his life until that moment.

“Good God,” he muttered to himself, as he moved to a distant window,
“I had forgotten Lady Jane.”

It was Lady Jane, the gentle soul who had loved that poor clay with
a love that had grown and strengthened with every year of his life,
with a love that had won liberal response from the recipient. There
had never been a cloud between them, never one moment of disagreement
or doubt. Each had been secure in the certainty of the other’s
affection. It had been a union such as is not often seen between
mother and son; and it was ended—ended by the red hand of murder.

Matthew Dalbrook left the room in silence, beckoning to the
housekeeper to follow him.

“Leave them together,” he said. “They will be more comfort to each
other than anyone else in the world can be to either of them.
Keep in the way—here, in the corridor, in case of anything going
wrong—fainting, or hysterics, for instance,—but so long as they are
tolerably calm let them be together, and undisturbed.”

He went back to his son, and they both left the house soon afterwards
and drove off to find the Coroner and to confer with him. Later in
the afternoon they saw the local policeman, whose discoveries, though
he evidently thought them important, Mr. Dalbrook considered _nil_.

He had found out that a certain village freebooter—ostensibly an
agricultural labourer, nocturnally a poacher—bore a grudge against
Lord Cheriton, and had sworn to be even with him sooner or later. The
constable opined that, being an ignorant man, this person might have
mistaken Lord Cheriton’s son-in-law for Lord Cheriton himself.

He had discovered, in the second place, that two vans of gipsies had
encamped just outside the Chase on the night after the arrival of the
bridal pair. They were, in fact, the very gipsies who had provided
Aunt Sally and the French shooting-gallery for the amusement of the
populace, and he opined that some of these gipsies were “in it.”

Why they should be in it he did not take upon himself to explain,
but he declared that his experience of the tribe justified his
suspicions. He was also of opinion that the murderer had come with
the intent to plunder the drawing-room, which was, in his own
expression, “chock-full of valuables,” and that, being disappointed,
and furthermore detected, in that intent, he had tried to make all
things safe by a casual murder.

“But, man alive, Sir Godfrey was sitting in his arm-chair, absorbed
in his book. There was nothing to prevent any intending burglar
sneaking away unseen. You must find some better scent than that if
you mean to track the murderer.”

“I hope, sir, with my experience of the district, I shall have a
better chance of finding him than a stranger imported from the
Metropolis,” said Constable Barber, severely. “I conclude there will
be a reward offered, Mr. Dalbrook?”

“There will, and a large one. I must not take upon myself to name
the figure. Lord Cheriton will be here to-morrow or next day, and
he will, no doubt, take immediate steps. You may consider yourself a
very lucky man, Barber, if you can solve this mystery.”

Matthew Dalbrook turned from the eager face of the police-officer
with a short, angry sigh. It was of the reward the man was thinking,
no doubt—congratulating himself perhaps upon the good luck which had
thrown such a murder in his way. And presently the man from Scotland
Yard would be on the scene, keen and business-like, yet full of a
sportsman’s ardour, intent on discovery, as on a game in which the
stakes were worth winning. Little cared either of these for the one
fair life cut short, for the other young life blighted.




CHAPTER VII.

    “I saw a Fury whetting a death-dart.”


Lord Cheriton liked to take his summer holiday on a sunny sea-shore
where there were not many English visitors. Paramé St. Malo fulfilled
both these conditions. It afforded him a vast expanse of golden
sands, firm beneath his foot, steeped in sunshine for the most part,
on which to pace to and fro, lifting his eyes dreamily now and then
to the sea-girt city, with its stony rampart, and its quaint Louis
Quatorze mansions, facing the sea in the sober dignity of massive
stone façade and tall windows; grey old houses, which seem too good
for the age in which they find themselves, solid enough to last
through long centuries, and to outlive all that yet lingers of that
grandiose France in which they were built. Roof above roof rises the
Breton city, steep old streets leading up to Cathedral and Municipal
Palace, with the crocketed steeple for its pinnacle, shining with a
pale brilliance in the summer sunlight, verdureless, and with but
little colour save the reflected glory of the skies, and the jasper
green of the sea in its ring of golden sand.

Lord Cheriton affected Paramé because, though it was within a summer
night’s journey from his own Isle of Purbeck, it was thoroughly
out of the beaten track, and he was tolerably secure from those
hourly encounters with his most particular friends, to which he must
have submitted at Baden or Spa, at Trouville or Dieppe. Paramé was
Parisian or nothing. The smart people all came from Paris. English
smartness had its centre at Dinard, and the English who patronize
Dinard will tell you there is no other paradise on earth, and that
its winter climate is better than that of the Riviera, if people
would only have faith. So long as the Cheritons could keep out of the
way of exploring friends from Dinard, his Lordship was exempt from
the amusements which to some minds make life intolerable.

Lady Cheriton was distinctly social in her instincts, and looked
Dinard-wards sometimes from her lotus-land with a longing eye. She
would have liked to ask some nice people to luncheon; and she knew
so many nice people at Dinard. She would have liked to organize
excursions to Mont St. Michel, or up the Rance to Dinan. She would
have liked to plunge into all manner of innocent gaieties; but her
husband stamped out these genial yearnings.

“It seems such a pity not to have people over to dinner when there
are such nice operettas and vaudevilles every night at the Casino,”
she sighed.

“And if you had them over to dinner, how do you suppose they would
get back?” asked her husband, sternly. “Would you wish to keep them
all till next morning, and be bored with them at breakfast?”

That intervening strip of sea, narrow as it was, afforded unspeakable
comfort to Lord Cheriton. It was an excuse for refusing to go over
and take afternoon tea with people he was supposed to hold in his
heart of hearts in the way of friendship.

“You can go, Maria, if you like,” he told his wife; “but I am not a
good sailor, and I came here on purpose to be quiet.”

This was his Lordship’s answer to every hospitable suggestion. He had
come to Paramé for rest; and not for gadding about, or entertainments
of any kind.

So the long summer days succeeded each other in a lazy monotony, and
whatever gaiety there might be in the great white hotel, the English
law-lord and his wife had no share in it. They occupied a suite of
light, airy rooms in the west pavilion, and were served apart from
the vulgar herd, after the fashion which befitted a person of Lord
Cheriton’s distinction. They had only their body servants, man and
maid, so they were waited upon by the servants of the hotel, and they
drove about the dusty, level roads between St. Servans and Dol in a
hired landau, driven by a Breton coachman. Lady Cheriton was dull,
but contented. She had always submitted to her husband’s pleasure. He
had been a very indulgent husband in essentials, and he had made her
a peeress. Her married life had been eminently satisfactory; and she
could afford to endure one summer month of monotony amidst pleasant
surroundings. She dropped in at the Casino every evening, while
Lord Cheriton read the papers in the seclusion of his salon—with
the large French window wide open to the blue sea, and the blue
moonlight—hearing the tramp of feet on the terrace, or the sea wall
beyond, or now and again strains of lively music from the theatre,
where the little opera company from Paris were singing Lecocq’s
joyous music.

People used to turn round to look at Lady Cheriton as she walked
gravely between the rows of seats to her place near the orchestra,
his Lordship’s valet following with an extra shawl, an opera-glass,
and a footstool. He established her in her chair, and then retired
discreetly to the back of the theatre to await her departure, and to
escort her safely back to the hotel. He was a large, serious-looking
man, a French Swiss, who had lived ten years in Italy, and over
fifteen years in Lord Cheriton’s service, and who spoke French,
Italian, German, and English indifferently.

Lady Cheriton was handsome still, with a grand Spanish beauty which
time had touched lightly. She was tall and dignified in carriage,
though a shade stouter than she could have wished, and she dressed to
perfection with sobriety of colouring and richness of material. Her
life had been full of pleasantness, her only sorrow being the loss
of her infant sons, which she had not taken to heart so deeply as
the proud father who had pined for an heir to his newly won honours.
She had her daughter, her first-born, the child for whom her heart
had first throbbed with the strange new love of maternity. She shed
some natural tears for the boy-babies, and then she let Juanita fill
their place in her heart, and her life again seemed complete in its
sum of happiness. And now in this sleepy summer holiday—cut off
from most things that she cared for—Juanita’s letters had been her
chief joy—those happy, innocent, girlish letters, overflowing with
fond, foolish praise of the husband she loved, letters made up of
nothings—of what he had said to her, and what she had said to him—and
where they had taken afternoon tea—and of their morning ride, or
their evening walk, and of those plans for the long future which they
were always making, projecting their thoughts into the time to come,
and laying out those after years as if they were a certainty.

There had been no fairer morning than that which followed the night
of the murder. Lord Cheriton was an early riser at all seasons,
most of all in the summer, when he was generally awake from five
o’clock, and had to beguile an hour or so with one of the books on
the table by his bed—a well-thumbed “Horace” or a duodecimo “Don
Quixote,” in ten volumes, which went everywhere with him. By seven
o’clock he was dressed, and ready to begin the day; and between that
hour and breakfast it was his habit to attend to the correspondence
which had accumulated during the previous day. This severe rule was
suspended, however, at Paramé, and he gave himself up to restful
vacuity, strolling up and down the sands, or walking round the walls
of St. Malo, or sauntering into the cathedral in a casual way for an
early mass, enjoying the atmosphere of the place, with its old-world
flavour.

On this particular morning he went no further than the sands, where
he paced slowly to and fro in front of the long white terrace, hotel,
and casino, heedless alike of Parisian idlesse coquetting with the
crisp wavelets on the edge of the sea, and of the mounted officer
yonder drilling his men upon the sandy flat towards St. Malo. He was
in a mood for idleness, but with him, idleness was only a synonym for
deep thought. He was meditating upon his only child’s future, and
telling himself that he had done well for her.

Sir Godfrey Carmichael would be made Baron Cheriton in the days to
come, when he, the first Baron, should be laid in the newly built
vault in the cemetery outside Dorchester. He was not going to sever
himself from his kindred in that last sleep, albeit they were
common folk. He would lie under the Egyptian sarcophagus which he
had set up in honour of his father, the crockery dealer, and his
mother, the busy, anxious house-wife. The sarcophagus was plain
and unpretentious, hardly too good for the shopkeeper; yet with a
certain solid dignity which was not unbefitting the law-lord, almost
as massive as that mammoth cross which marks the resting-place of
Henry Brougham in the fair southern land. He had chosen the monument
with uttermost care, so that it might serve the double purpose. He
had looked at the broad blank panel many a time, wondering how his
own name would look upon it, and whether his daughter would have a
laurel wreath sculptured above it. It might be that admiring friends
would suggest his being laid in the Abbey, hard by those shabby
disused courts where he had pleaded and sat in judgment through so
many laborious years; and it might be that the suggestion would be
accepted by Dean and Chapter, and that the panel on the Dorchester
sarcophagus would remain blank. James Dalbrook knew that he had
deserved well of posterity, and, above all, of the ruling powers.
He had been staunch and unwavering in his adherence to his own
party, and he knew that he had a strong claim upon any Conservative
Ministry. He had sounded those in authority, and he had been assured
that there would be very little difficulty in getting Sir Godfrey
Carmichael a peerage by-and-by, when he, Lord Cheriton, should be no
more. Sir Godfrey’s family was one of the oldest in the country, and
he had but to deserve well of his party, when he had got his seat,
to insure future favours. As the owner of the Cheriton and Milbrook
estates, he would be a worthy candidate for one of those coronets
which seem to be dealt round so freely by expiring Ministries, as
it were a dying father dividing his treasures among his weeping
children. So far as any man can think with satisfaction of the days
when he shall be no more—and when this world will go on, badly, of
course, but somehow, without him—Lord Cheriton thought of those
far-off years when Godfrey Carmichael should be owner of Cheriton
Chase. The young man had shown such fine qualities of heart and mind,
and, above all, had given such unobtrusive evidence of his affection
for Juanita’s father, that the elder man must needs give measure for
measure; therefore Godfrey had been to Lord Cheriton almost as a son.
The union of his humbly born daughter with one of the oldest families
in the south of England gratified the pride of the self-made man. His
own pedigree might be of the lowliest; but his grandson would be
able to look back upon a long line of ancestors, glorified by many
a patrician alliance. Strong and stern as was the fabric of James
Dalbrook’s mind, he was not superior to the Englishman’s foible, and
he loved rank and ancient lineage. He was a Tory to the core of his
heart; and it was the earnestness and thoroughness of his convictions
which had given him weight with his party. Wherever he spoke or
whatever he wrote—and he had written much upon current politics in
the _Saturday Review_, and the higher-class monthlies—bore the stamp
of a Cromwellian vigour and a Cromwellian sincerity.

He had never felt more at ease than upon that balmy summer morning,
pacing those golden sands in quiet meditation—brooding over Juanita’s
last letter received overnight—with its girlish raptures, its girlish
dreams; picturing her in the near future as happy a mother as she was
a bride, with his grandson, the third Baron Cheriton of the future,
in her lap. He smiled at his own foolishness in thinking of that
first boy-baby by the title which was but one of the possibilities of
a foreshadowed sequence of events; yet he found himself repeating the
words idly, to the rhythm of the wavelets that curled and sparkled
near his feet—third Baron Cheriton, Godfrey Dalbrook Carmichael,
third Baron Cheriton.

The cathedral clock was striking nine as he went into the hotel. The
light breakfast of coffee and rolls was laid on a small round table
near the window. Lady Cheriton was sitting in a recess between the
massive stone columns which supported the balcony above, reading
yesterday’s _Morning Post_ in her soft grey cashmere peignoir, whose
flowing lines gave dignity to her figure. Her dark hair, as yet
untouched by time, was arranged with an elegant simplicity. The fine
old lace about her throat harmonized admirably with the pale olive of
her complexion. She looked up at her husband with her placid smile,
and gave him her hand in affectionate greeting.

“What a morning, James! One feels it a privilege to live. What a
superb day it would be for Mont St. Michel!”

“A thirty-mile drive in the dust! Do you really think that it is the
best use to which to put a summer day? You may be sure there will be
plenty of worthy people of the same opinion, and that the rock will
swarm with cheap tourists, and pretty little Madame Poulard will be
put to the pin of her collar to feed them all.”

She had seated herself at the table by this time, and was pouring out
coffee with a leisurely air, smiling at her husband all the time,
thinking him the greatest and wisest of men, even when he restrained
her social instincts. She was never tired of looking at that massive
face, with its clearly defined features, sharply cut jaw, and large
grey eyes—dark and deep as the eyes of the earnest thinker rather
than the shrewd observer. The strong projection of the lower brow
indicated keen perceptions, and the power of rapid judgment; but
above the perceptive organs the upper brow towered majestically,
giving the promise of a mind predominant in the regions of thought
and imagination—such a brow as we look upon with reverence in the
portraits of Walter Scott.

Intellectually the brow was equal to Scott’s; morally there was
something wanting. Neither benevolence nor veneration was on a par
with the reasoning faculties. Tory principles with Lord Cheriton were
not so much the result of an upward-looking nature as they were with
Scott. This, at least, is the opinion at which a phrenologist might
have arrived after a careful contemplation of that powerful brow.

Lord Cheriton sipped his coffee, and leaned back in his arm-chair,
with his face to the morning sea. He sat in a lazy attitude, still
thoughtful, with those pleasant thoughts which are the repose of the
working man’s brain.

The tide was going out; the rocky islets stood high out of the water;
the sands were widening, till it seemed almost as if the sea were
vanishing altogether from this beautiful bay.

“I suppose they will finish their honeymoon in a week or two, and
move on to the Priory,” said Lord Cheriton, by-and-by, revealing the
subject of his reverie.

“Yes, Juanita says we may go home as early as the second week in
August if we like. She is to be at the Priory in time to settle down
before the shooting begins. They will have visitors in September—his
sisters, don’t you know—the Morningsides and the Grenvilles, and
children and nurses—a house full. Lady Jane ought to be there to help
her to entertain.”

“I don’t think Nita will want any help. She will be mistress of the
situation, depend upon it, and would be if there were forty married
sisters with their husbands and belongings. She seemed to be mistress
of us all at Cheriton?”

“She is so clever,” sighed the mother, remembering that Cheriton
House would no longer be under that girlish sovereignty.

The grave looking French-Swiss valet appeared with a telegram on a
salver.

“Who can have sent me a _petit bleu_?” exclaimed Lord Cheriton, who
was accustomed to receive a good many of those little blue envelopes
when he was in Paris, but expected no such communications at St Malo.

Before leaving for his holiday he had impressed upon land steward and
house steward that he was not to be bothered about anything.

“If there is anything wanted you will communicate with Messrs.
Dalbrook,” he said. “They have full powers.”

And yet here was some worrying message—some question about a lease
or an agreement, or somebody’s rick had been burnt, or somebody’s
chimney had fallen through the roof. He opened the little envelope
with a vexed air, resentful of an unexpected annoyance. He read the
message, and then sat blankly staring; read again, and rose from his
seat suddenly with a cry of horror.

Never in his life had he experienced such a shock; never had those
iron nerves, that heart, burned hard in the furnace of this world’s
strife, been so tried. He stood aghast, and could only give the
little paper—with its type-printed syllables—to his scared wife,
while he stood gazing at summer sky and summer sea in a blank
helplessness, realizing dimly that something had happened which must
change the whole course of the future, and overthrow every plan he
had ever made.

“The third Baron Cheriton.” Strange, but in that awful moment the
words he had repeated idly on the sands half an hour ago echoed again
in his ear.

Alas, he felt as if that title for which he had toiled was already
extinct. He saw, as in a vision, the velvet cap and golden coronet
upon the coffin lid, as the first and last Lord Cheriton was carried
to his grave. That prophetic vision must needs be realized within a
few years. There would be no one to succeed him.

Murdered! Why? By whom? What devil had been conjured out of hell to
cut short that honest, stainless life? What had Godfrey Carmichael
done that a murderer’s hand should be raised against him?

       *       *       *       *       *

Lady Cheriton’s softer nature found relief in tears before the day
was done; tears and agonized pacings up and down those rooms where
life had been so placid in the sunlight—agonized supplications that
God would take pity upon her widowed girl.

“So young, and so happy, and a widow—a widow before her nineteenth
birthday,” wailed the mother.

Lord Cheriton’s grief was of a sterner kind, and found no outlet
in words. He held a brief consultation with his valet, a soldierly
looking man, who had fought under Garibaldi in Burgundy, when the
guerilla captain made his brilliant endeavour to save sinking France.
They looked at time-tables and calculated hours. The express to Paris
would not arrive in time for the evening mail _viâ_ Calais and Dover.
It was Saturday. The cargo boat would cross to Southampton that
night, and influence would obtain accommodation for his Lordship and
party on board her. The valet took a fly and drove off to the quay
to find the South-Western superintendent, and secure a private cabin
for his master and mistress. They would have the boat to themselves,
and would be at Southampton at seven o’clock next morning, and at
Cheriton before noon, even if it were necessary to engage a special
engine to take them there.

Lord Cheriton telegraphed to his daughter.

“Your mother and I will be with you to-morrow morning. Be brave for
our sakes. Remember that you are all we have to live for.”

Another telegram to the house-steward ordered a close carriage to be
in attendance at Wareham Station at ten o’clock on Sunday morning.

“How quietly you bear it, James,” his wife told Lord Cheriton,
wonderingly, when the mode of their return had been arranged, and her
maid was packing her trunks, with those soberly handsome gowns which
had been the wonder of many a butterfly Parisienne.

She called him by his Christian name now as in their earliest years
of wedded life. It was only on ceremonious occasions, and when the
eye of society was upon her, that she addressed him by his title.

That stern quietude of his, the fine features set and rigid,
frightened her more than a loquacious grief would have done. And yet
she hardly knew whether he felt the calamity too much for words; or
whether he did not feel it enough.

“Poor Godfrey,” she sighed, “he was so good to me—all that a son
could have been—murdered! My God! my God! how horrible. If it had
been any other kind of death one might bear it—and yet that _he_
should die at all would be too dreadful. So young, so handsome—cut
off in the flower of his days! And she loved him so. She has loved
him all her life. What will become of her without him?”

“What will become of her?” that was the mother’s moaning cry all
through that dreary day.

Lord Cheriton paced the sands as far as he could go from that giddy
multitude in front of the sea wall—beyond the little rocky ridge by
the pleasant Hôtel des Bains, where the young mothers, and nurses,
and children, and homely, easy-going visitors congregate—away towards
Cancale, where all was loneliness. He walked up and down, meditating
upon his blighted hopes. He knew now that he had loved this young man
almost as well as he loved his own daughter, and that his death had
shattered as fair a fabric as ever ambition built on the further side
of the grave.

“She will go in mourning for him all the days of my life, perhaps,”
he thought, “and then some day after I am in my grave she will fall
in love with an adventurer, and the estate I love and the fortune I
have saved will be squandered on the Turf or thrown away at Monte
Carlo.”

A grim smile curled his lip at a grim thought, as he paced that
lonely shore beyond the jutting cliff and the villa on the point.

“I am sorry I left the Bench when I did,” he thought; “it would have
been something to have put on the black cap and passed sentence upon
that poor lad’s murderer.”

Who was his murderer, and what the motive of the crime? Those were
questions which Lord Cheriton had been asking himself with maddening
iteration through that intolerable summer day. He welcomed the fading
sunlight of late afternoon. He could eat nothing; would not even sit
down to make a pretence of dining; but waited chafing in the great
stone hall of the hotel for the carriage that was to take him and his
wife to the steamer.




CHAPTER VIII.

    “The stars move still, Time runs, the clock will strike.”


Trains were favourable, and there was no necessity for a special
engine to carry Lord Cheriton and his wife to the house of mourning.
It was not yet noon when the closed landau drove in at the chief gate
of the park, not that side gate in the deep, rocky lane, of which
Mrs. Porter was custodian. One of the gardeners lived at the lodge,
and it was he who opened the gate this Sunday morning. Lord Cheriton
stopped the carriage to question him. He had heard a full account of
the murder already from the station-master at Wareham.

“Have they found the murderer?” he asked.

“No, my Lord; I’m afraid they’re not likely to—begging your
Lordship’s pardon for venturing an opinion.”

The man was an old servant, and altogether a superior person.

“Were the gates locked at the usual time on Friday night?”

“Yes, my Lord—the gates were locked, but that wouldn’t keep out a
foot-passenger. There’s the turnstile in the lane.”

“Of course. Yes, yes. A London detective has been at work, I hear.”

“Yes, my Lord; came yesterday before two o’clock, and has been about
with Barber ever since.”

“And have they discovered nothing?”

“Nothing, my Lord—or if they have it has been kept dark.”

Lord Cheriton asked no further questions. The man was right. A
detective from Scotland Yard was not likely to talk about any minor
discoveries that he might have made. Only the one grand discovery of
the guilty man would have been made known.

Five minutes later the carriage drew up in front of the hall door.
What a blank and melancholy look the fine old house had with all
the windows darkened. It did not look so dismal as a London house
with its level rows of windows and its flat façade would have looked
under similar conditions; for here there was variety of mullion and
moulding, bay-windows and oriel, dormer and lattice, and over all the
growth of lovely creeping plants, starry clematis and passion-flower,
clustering Banksia roses and waxen magnolia, an infinite beauty of
form and colour. Yet the blind windows were there, with their dull,
dead look and chilling suggestion of death. Lady Cheriton looked at
the house for a moment or so as she got out of the carriage, and then
burst into tears. It seemed to her as if she had scarcely realized
the stern reality till that moment.

She went straight to her daughter’s boudoir, a room with an oriel
window looking across the wide expanse of the park, where the
turf lay openest to the sunshine, and where the deer were wont to
congregate. The garden was at its narrowest point just below this
window, and consisted only of a broad gravel path, and a strip of
flowers at the top of a steep grass bank that sloped down to the
ha-ha which divided garden and park. The room was full of Juanita’s
girlish treasures—evidences of fancies that had passed like summer
clouds—accomplishments begun and abandoned—a zither in one corner—a
guitar and a mandolin against the wall—an easel in front of one
window—a gigantic rush work-basket lined with amber satin and crammed
with all manner of silks, wools, scraps, and unfinished undertakings
in another. The room remained just as she had left it when she went
to London at the beginning of May. She had not occupied it during her
honeymoon; and perhaps that was the reason she was here now in her
desolation, sitting silent, statue-like, with Lady Jane by her side,
on a sofa opposite the oriel. She lifted her eyelids when her mother
came into the room, and looked up at her in speechless despair. She
uttered no word of greeting, but sat dumbly. Lady Cheriton went over
to her, and knelt by her side, and then, feebly, automatically, the
widowed girl put her limp, cold hand into her mother’s and hid her
bloodless face upon her mother’s breast.

Lady Cheriton held her there with one hand while she stretched out
her other hand to Lady Jane.

“Dear Lady Jane, how good of you to be with her—to comfort her.”

“Where else should I be?—I want to be near him!”

The gentle blue eyes filled with tears, the gracious head trembled a
little. Then came a long shivering sigh and silence.

The mother knelt beside the sofa with her child’s head leaning
forward upon her matronly bosom. There may have been some comfort
perhaps in that contact, some recurrence of the thoughts and feelings
of earlier years, when the mother could console every grief and
soothe every pain. No words came to either of those mourners. What
could be said in mitigation of a sorrow that seemed to offer no point
of relief, no counter-balancing good. There was nothing to be done
but to sit still and suffer.

The silence lasted long, and then Juanita lifted her head suddenly
from its heavy repose and looked fixedly in her mother’s face.

“My father has come back with you?” she asked.

“Yes, dearest. We did not lose an hour. Had there been any quicker
way of travelling we would have been here sooner.”

“My father will be able to find the murderer,” said Juanita,
scarcely hearing her mother’s words, intent upon her own thought. “A
great lawyer as he was; a judge, too; he must be able to trace the
murderer—to bring him to justice—to take a life for a life. Oh, God!”
with a shrill agonizing cry, “could a thousand lives give me back one
hour of that one life? Yet it will be something—something—to know
that his murderer has been killed—killed shamefully, in cold blood,
in the broad light of day. Oh, God, thou Avenger of wrong, make his
last hours bitter to him, make his last moments hopeless; let him see
the gates of hell opening before him when he stands trembling with
the rope round his neck.”

There was an intensity of hatred in this vindictive appeal, which
thrilled the two listeners with an icy horror. It was like a blast
from a frozen region blowing suddenly in their faces, and they
shivered as they heard. Could it be the girl they knew, the loving,
lovable girl, who, in those deep, harsh tones, called upon her God
for vengeance and not for mercy?

“Oh, my love, my poor heart-broken love, pray to Him to have pity
upon us; ask Him to teach us how to bow to the rod, how to bear His
chastisement. That is the lesson we have to learn,” pleaded Lady
Jane, tearful and submissive, even in the depth of sorrow.

“Is it? _My_ lesson is to see justice done upon the wretch who killed
my husband—the malignant, the merciless devil. There was not one of
those slayers of women and children in the Indian mutiny worse than
the man who killed my love. What had _he_ done—he, the kindest and
best—generous, frank, pitiful to all who ever came in his way—what
had _he_ done to provoke any man’s enmity? Oh, God, when I remember
how good he was, and how much brighter and better the world was for
having him——”

She began to pace the room, as she had paced it again and again in
her slow hours of agony, her hands clasped above her dishevelled
head, her great dark eyes—so dovelike in their hours of love
and happiness—burning with an angry light, lurid almost, in the
excitement of her fevered brain. There had been times when Lady
Jane had feared that reason must give way altogether amidst this
wild delirium of grief. She had stayed to watch, and to console,
forgetting her own broken heart, putting aside all considerations of
her own sorrow as something that might have its way afterwards, in
order to comfort this passionate mourner.

Comfort, even from affection such as this, was unavailing. Now and
again the girl turned her burning eyes upon the mother’s pale,
resigned face, and for a moment a thought of that chastened, gentle
grief softened her.

“Dear, dear Lady Jane, God made you better than any other woman on
this earth, I believe,” she cried amidst her anguish. “The saints and
martyrs must have been like you, but I am not. I am not made like
that. I _cannot_ kiss the rod.”

The meeting between Juanita and her father was more painful to him
than to her. She hung upon his neck in feverish excitement, imploring
him to avenge her husband.

“You can do it,” she urged; “you who are so clever must know how to
bring the murderer’s guilt home to him. You will find him, will you
not, father? He cannot have gone very far. He cannot have got out
of the country yet. Think, it was only Friday. I was a happy woman
upon Friday; only think of that—happy—sitting by Godfrey’s side in
the phaeton, driving through the sunset, and thinking how beautiful
the world was and what a privilege it was to live. I had no more
foreboding than the skylark had singing above our heads. And in less
than an hour after midnight my darling was dead. Oh, God, how sudden!
I cannot even remember his last words. He kissed me as he left me at
my bedroom door—kissed me and said something. I cannot remember what
it was; but I can hear the sound of his voice still—I shall hear it
all my life.”

Lord Cheriton let her ramble on. He had, alas, so little to say
to her, such sorry comfort to offer. Only words, mere words—which
must needs sound idle and hollow in the ear of grief, frame his
consolatory speeches with what eloquence he might. He could do
nothing for her, since he could not give her back her dead. This
wild cry for vengeance shocked him from those young lips; yet it was
natural perhaps. He too would give much to see the assassin suffer;
he too felt that the deck and the gallows would be too trivial a
punishment for that accursed deed.

He had looked upon the marble face of him who was to have been the
second Baron Cheriton—looked upon it in its placid repose, and had
sworn within himself to do all that ingenuity could do to avenge that
cruel murder.

“He could not have had an enemy,” he told himself, “unless it was
some wretch who hated him for being happy and beloved.”

He had a long talk with Mr. Luke Churton, the London detective, who
had exhausted all his means without arriving at any satisfactory
result.

“I confess, my Lord, that I am altogether at a standstill,” said Mr.
Churton, when he had related all that he had done since his arrival
on the scene early on Saturday afternoon. “The utmost information I
have been able to obtain leaves me without one definite idea. There
is no one in the neighbourhood open to suspicion, so far as I can
make out; for I am sure your Lordship will agree with me that your
butler’s notion of a poacher resenting your treatment by the murder
of your son-in-law is much too thin. One cannot accept such a notion
as that for a moment,” said Mr. Churton, shaking his head.

“No, that is an untenable idea, no doubt.”

“The next suggestion is that some person was prowling about with
the intention of abstracting trinkets and other valuables from the
drawing-room—in an unguarded moment when the room might happen to be
empty—and I admit that the present fashion of covering drawing-room
tables and cabinets with valuables of every description is calculated
to suggest plunder; but that kind of thing would be probable enough
in London rather than in the country, and nothing is more unlikely
than that a prowler of that order would resort to murder. Again, the
manner in which the body was found, with the open book lying close
to the hand that had held it, goes far to prove that Sir Godfrey was
shot as he sat reading—and at a time when a burglar could have no
motive for shooting him.”

“Do you think it was the act of a lunatic?”

“No, my Lord, for in that event the murderer would have been heard
of or found before now. The gardens, park, and chase have been most
thoroughly searched under my superintendence. It is not possible
for a lap-dog to be hidden anywhere within this demesne. The
neighbouring villages—solitary cottages—commons and copses—have been
also submitted to a searching investigation—the police all over the
country are on the alert. Of course the crime is still of very recent
date. Time to us seems longer than it really is.”

“No doubt, no doubt! I can find no other hypothesis than that the
act was done by a madman—such a motiveless murder—a man sitting by a
window reading—shot by an unknown hand from a garden terrace—remote
from the outer world. Were we in Ireland the crime might seem
commonplace enough. Sir Godfrey was a landowner—and that alone is an
offence against the idle and the lawless in that unhappy country,—but
here, in the midst of an orderly, God-fearing population——”

“Had Sir Godfrey no enemy, do you think, my Lord?” asked the
detective, gravely. “The crime has the look of a vendetta.”

“There never was a young man, owner of a considerable estate, more
universally beloved. His tenants adore him—for as a landlord he has
been exceptionally indulgent.”

“He may have granted too much in some quarters, and too little in
others.”

“No, no. He has been judicious in his liberality, and he has a
capital bailiff, an old man who was a servant on this estate many
years ago.”

“But there are other influences,” said the detective, musingly.
“Whenever I meet with a crime of this kind—motiveless apparently—I
remember the Eastern Prince—I think he was one of those long-headed
Orientals, wasn’t he, my Lord, who used to ask, ‘Who is she?’ In a
thoroughly dark case I always suspect a woman behind the curtain. Sir
Godfrey had been independent of all control for a good many years—and
a young man of fortune, handsome, open-hearted, with only a mother
to look after him—well, my Lord, _you_ know the kind of thing that
generally happens in such cases.”

“You mean that my son-in-law may have been involved in some
disreputable intrigue?”

“I don’t say disreputable, my Lord; but I venture to suggest that
there may have been some—ahem—some awkward entanglement—with a
married woman, for instance,—and the husband—or another lover—may
have belonged to the criminal classes. There are men who think very
little of murder when they fancy themselves ill-used by a woman.
Half the midnight brawls, and nearly half the murders, in the
metropolis are caused by jealousy. I know what a large factor that
is in the sum-total of crime, and unless you are sure there was no
entanglement——”

“I am as sure as I can be of anything outside my own existence. I
don’t believe that Sir Godfrey ever cared for any woman in his life
except my daughter.”

“He might not have cared, my Lord, but he might have been drawn in,”
suggested Mr. Churton. “Young men are apt to be weak where women are
concerned; and women know that, unfortunately, and they don’t scruple
to use their power; not the best of ’em even.”

Young men are apt to be weak. Yes, Lord Cheriton had seen enough of
the world to know that this was true. It was just possible that in
that young life, which had seemed white as snow to the eye of kindred
and friends, there had been one dark secret, one corroding stain,
temptation yielded to, promises given—never to be fulfilled. Such
things have been in many lives, in most lives, perhaps, could we know
all, Lord Cheriton thought, as he sat silently meditating upon the
detective’s suggestions.

Lady Jane might know something about her son’s past, perhaps,
something that she might have kept locked in the beneficent maternal
heart. He determined to sound her delicately at the earliest
opportunity.

But on being sounded Lady Jane repudiated any such possibility.
No, again and again no. His youth had been spotless; no hint of an
intrigue had ever reached her from any quarter. He had chosen his
friends among the most honourable young men at the University—his
amusements had been such as became a young Englishman of exalted
position—he had never stooped to low associations or even doubtful
company; and from his boyhood upwards he had adored Juanita.

“That love alone would have kept him right,” said Lady Jane; “but I
do not believe that it was in his nature to go wrong.”

It would seem, therefore, that the detective’s suspicion was
groundless. Jealousy could not have been the motive of the crime.

“If any of us could be sure that we know each other I ought to accept
Lady Jane’s estimate of her son,” thought Lord Cheriton; “but there
is always the possibility of an unrevealed nature—one phase in a
character that has escaped discovery. I am almost inclined to think
the detective may have hit upon the truth. There _must_ have been a
motive for this devilish act—unless it were done by a maniac.”

The latter supposition seemed hardly probable. Lunacy wandering loose
about the country would have betrayed itself before now.

It was past five upon that summer afternoon, and Lord Cheriton,
having seen his daughter and interviewed the detective, was
sauntering idly about the gardens in the blank hours before dinner.
That meal would be served as usual, no doubt, at eight o’clock,
with all due state and ceremony. The cook and her maids were busied
about its preparation even now in this tranquil hour when afternoon
melts into evening, sliding so softly from day to night that only
those evening hymns of the birds—and on Sundays those melancholy
church bells thrilling across the woods—mark the transition. They
were scraping vegetables and whipping eggs while the birds were at
vespers, and they were talking of the murder as they went about their
work. When would they ever cease to gloat with ghoulish gusto on that
deadly theme, with endless iteration of “says he” and “says she”?

Lord Cheriton left the stately garden with its quadruple lines of
cypress and juniper, its marble balustrades, and clipped yew hedges
five feet thick, its statues and alcoves. He passed through a little
gate, and across a classic single-arched bridge to the park, where he
sauntered slowly beneath his immemorial elms, in a strange dreamlike
frame of mind, in which he allowed his senses to be beguiled by
the balmy afternoon atmosphere and the golden light, until the
all-pervading consciousness of a great grief, which had been with him
all day, slipped off him for the moment, leaving only a feeling of
luxurious repose, rest after labour.

Cheriton Chase was exercising its wonted influence upon him. He loved
the place with that deep love which is often felt by the hereditary
owner, the man born on the soil, but perhaps still oftener, and
to a greater degree by him who has conquered and won the land by
his own hard labour of head or hand, by that despicable personage,
the self-made man. In all his wanderings—those luxurious reposeful
journeyings of the man who has conquered fortune—James Dalbrook’s
heart yearned towards these ancient avenues and yonder grey walls.
House and domain had all the charm of antiquity, and yet they were
in a measure his own creation. Everywhere had his hand improved and
beautified; and he might say with Augustus that where he found brick
he would leave marble. The dense green walls—those open-air courts
and quadrangles—those obelisks of cypress and juniper had been there
in the dominion of the Strangways, with here and there a mouldering
stone Syrinx or a moss-grown Pan; but it was he who brought choicest
marbles from Rome and Florence to adorn that stately pleasaunce; it
was he who erected yonder fountain, whose waters made a monotonous
music by day and night. The marble balustrades, the mosaic floors,
the artistic enrichment of terrace and mansion had been his work.
If the farms were perfect it was he who had made them so. If his
tenants were contented it was because he had shown himself a model
landlord—considerate and liberal, but severely exacting, satisfied
with nothing less than perfection.

Having thus in a manner created his estate James Dalbrook loved it,
as a proud, self-contained man is apt to love the work of his own
hands, and now in this quiet Sunday afternoon the very atmosphere
of the place soothed him, as if by a spell. A kind of sensuous
contentment stole into his heart, with temporary forgetfulness of
his daughter’s ruined life. But this did not last long. As he drew
near the drive by which strangers were allowed to cross the park by
immemorial right, he remembered that he had questioned one of the
lodge-keepers, but not the other. He struck across an open glade
where only old hawthorn trees cast their rugged shadows on the
close-cropped turf, and made for the gate opening into the lane.

Mrs. Porter’s cottage had its usual aspect, a cottage such as any
gentleman or lady of refined taste might have been pleased to
inhabit, quaint, mediæval, with heavy timbers across rough cast
walls, deep-set casements, picturesque dormers, and thatched roof,
with gable ends which were a source of rapture to every artist who
visited Cheriton—a cottage embowered in loveliest creeping plants,
odorous of jasmine and woodbine, and set in a garden where the
standard roses and carnations were rumoured to excel those in her
ladyship’s own particular flower-garden. Well might a lady who had
known better days rejoice in such a haven; more especially when those
better days appeared to have raised her no higher than the status of
a merchant-captain’s wife.

Very few people about Cheriton envied her ladyship. It was considered
that, if not born in the purple, she had at least brought her husband
a large fortune, and had a right to taste the sweets of wealth. But
there were many hard-driven wives and shabby genteel spinsters who
envied Mrs. Porter her sinecure at the gate of Cheriton Park, and who
looked grudgingly at the garden brimming over with flowers and the
lattices shining in the evening sun, and through the open casements
at prettily furnished rooms, rich in books and photographs, and other
trivial indications of a refined taste.

“It is well to be she,” said the curate’s wife, as she went home
from the village with two mutton chops in her little fancy basket,
a basket which suggested ferns, and in which she always carried a
trowel, to give the look of casual botany to her housewifely errands.
“I wonder whether Lord Cheriton allows her an income for doing
nothing, or is it only house, and coals, and candles that she gets?”
speculated the curate’s wife, who lived in a brand new villa on the
outskirts of Cheriton village—a villa that was shabby and dilapidated
after three years’ occupation, through whose thin walls all the
winds of winter blew, and whose slate roof made the upper floor like
a bakehouse under the summer sun.

Lord Cheriton, still sauntering in gloomy meditation, came to the
cottage garden outside his gates, and found Mrs. Porter standing
among her roses,—a tall, black figure, the very pink and pattern
of respectability, with her prayer-book in one hand and a grey
silk sunshade in the other. She turned at the sound of those
august footsteps, and came to the little garden gate to greet her
benefactor, with a grave countenance, as befitted the circumstances.

“Good afternoon,” he said briefly. “Have you just come from church?”

“Yes, I have been to the children’s service.”

“Not very interesting, I should imagine, for anybody past childhood?”

“It is something to do on a Sunday afternoon, and I like to hear Mr.
Kempster talk to the children.”

“Do you? Well, there is no accounting for tastes. Can you tell me
anything about my son-in-law’s murderer? Have you seen any suspicious
characters hanging about? Did you notice any one going into the park
on Friday night?”

“No, I have not seen a mortal out of the common way. The gate
was locked at the usual hour. Of course the gate would make no
difference—it would be easy for any one to get into the park.”

“And no one was seen about? It is extraordinary. Have you any idea,
Mrs. Porter, any theory about this horrible calamity that has come
upon us?”

“How should I have any theory? I am not skilled in finding out such
mysteries, like the man who came from London yesterday. Has he made
no discoveries?”

“Not one.”

“Then you can’t expect me to throw a light upon the subject.”

“You have an advantage over the London detective. You know the
neighbourhood—and you know what kind of man Sir Godfrey was.”

“Yes, I know that. How handsome he was, how frank and pleasant
looking, and how your daughter adored him. They were a beautiful
couple.”

Her wan cheeks flushed, and her eyes kindled as she spoke, as if with
a genuine enthusiasm.

“They were, and they adored each other. It will break my daughter’s
heart. You have known trouble—about a daughter. I think you can
understand what I feel for my girl.”

“I do—I do! Yes, I know what you must feel—what she must feel in her
desolation, with all she valued gone from her for ever. But she has
not to drink the cup that _my_ girl must drink, Lord Cheriton. _She_
has not fallen. _She_ is not a thing for men to trample under foot,
and women to shrink away from.”

“Forgive me,” said Lord Cheriton, in a softened voice. “I ought not
to have spoken of—Mercy.”

“You ought never to speak of her—to me. I suppose you thought the
wound was so old that it might be touched with impunity, but you were
wrong. That wound will never heal.”

“I am sure you know that I have always been deeply sorry for you—for
that great affliction,” said Lord Cheriton gently.

“Sorry, yes, I suppose you were sorry. You would have been sorry if a
footman had knocked down one of your Sèvres vases and smashed it. One
is sorry for anything that can’t be replaced.”

“That is a harsh and unjust way of speaking, Mrs. Porter,” said Lord
Cheriton, drawing himself up suddenly with an air of wounded dignity.
“You can tell me nothing about our trouble, I see; and I am not in
the mood to talk of any older grief. Good night.”

He lifted his hat with grave respect and walked back to the park
gate, vanishing slowly from those grey eyes which followed him in
eager watchfulness.

“Is he really sorry?” she asked herself. “Can such a man as that be
sorry for any one, even his own flesh and blood? He has prospered;
all things have gone well with him. Can he be sorry? It is a check,
perhaps; a check to his ambitious hopes. It baulks him in his longing
to found a family. He looks pale and worn, as if he had suffered: and
at his age, after a prosperous life, it must be hard to suffer.”

So mused the woman who had seen better days—embittered doubtless by
her own decadence—embittered still more by her daughter’s fall.

It was nearly ten years since the daughter had eloped with a
middle-aged Colonel in a cavalry regiment, a visitor at the Chase—a
man of fortune and high family, with about as diabolical a reputation
as a man could enjoy and yet hold Her Majesty’s commission.

Mercy Porter’s fall had been a surprise to everybody. She was a girl
of shy and reserved manners, graver and sadder than youth should
be. She had been kept very close by her mother, allowed to make no
friendships among the girls in the village, to have no companions of
her own age. She had early shown a considerable talent for music, and
her piano had been her chief pleasure and occupation. Lady Cheriton
had taken a good deal of notice of her when she grew up, and she
might have done well, the gossips said, when they recalled the story
of her disgrace; but she chose to fall in love with a married man of
infamous character, a notorious profligate, and he had but to beckon
with his finger for her to go off with him. The circumstances of her
going off were discussed confidentially at feminine tea-drinkings,
and it was wondered that Mrs. Porter could hold her head so high, and
show herself at church three times on a Sunday, and entertain the
curate and his wife to afternoon tea, considering what had happened.

The curate and his wife were new arrivals comparatively, and only
knew that dismal common story from hearsay. They were both impressed
by Mrs. Porter’s regular attendance at the church services, and by
the excellence of that cup of tea with which she was always ready to
entertain them whenever they cared to drop in at her cottage between
four and five o’clock.

       *       *       *       *       *

The inquest was opened early on the afternoon of Monday at the
humble little inn near the forge, with its rustic sign, “Live and
let live.” Juanita gave her evidence with a stony calmness which
impressed those who heard her more than the stormiest outburst of
grief would have done. Her mother and her husband’s mother had both
implored her not to break down, to bear herself heroically through
this terrible ordeal, and they were both in the room to support her
by their presence. Both were surprised at the firmness of her manner,
the clear tones of her voice as she made her statement, telling how
she had heard the shot in her dream, and how she had gone down to the
drawing-room to find Sir Godfrey lying face downward on the carpet,
in front of the chair where he had been sitting, his hand still upon
the open book, which had fallen as he fell.

“Did you think of going outside to see if any one was lurking about?”

“No, I thought of nothing but trying to save him. I did not believe
that he was dead.”

There was a look of agony in her large wide open eyes as she said
this—a piteous remembrance of the moment while she still hoped—which
thrilled the spectators.

“What course did you take?”

“I rang for the servants. They came after a time that seemed long—but
I believe they came quickly.”

“And after they had come——?”

“I remembered nothing more. They wanted me to believe that he was
dead—and I would not—I could not believe—and—I remember no more till
next day.”

“That will do, Lady Carmichael. I will not trouble you further.”

Lady Jane and Lady Cheriton wanted to take her away after this, but
she insisted upon remaining.

“I wish to hear every word,” she said.

They submitted, and the three women, robed in densest black, sat in a
little group behind the Coroner till the end of that day’s inquiry.

No new facts were elicited from any of the witnesses, and nothing
had resulted from the elaborate search made, not only throughout
Lord Cheriton’s domain, but in the neighbourhood. No suspicious
prowlers had been heard of. The gipsies who had contributed to the
gaiety of the wedding day had been ascertained to have left the
Isle of Purbeck a fortnight before the murder, and to be delighting
the larger world between Portsmouth and Havant. Nothing had been
discovered; no sale of revolver or gun to any questionable purchaser
at Dorchester; no indication, however slight, which might put a
keen-witted detective upon the trail. Mr. Churton confessed himself
completely at fault.

The jury drove to Cheriton House to view the body, and the inquest
was adjourned for a fortnight, in the expectation that some discovery
might be made in the interim. The funeral would take place at the
usual time; there was nothing now to hinder the victim being laid in
his last resting-place in the old Saxon church at Milbrook.

Bills offering a reward of £500 for any information leading to the
discovery of the murderer were all over the village, and in every
village and town within a radius of forty miles. The stimulus of
cupidity was not wanting to sharpen the rural wit. Mr. Churton shook
his head despondently when he talked over the inquest with Lord
Cheriton later in the day, and owned himself “out of it.”

“I have been in many dark cases, my Lord,” he said, “and I’ve had
many hard nuts to crack, but this beats ’em all. I can’t see my
way to making anything of it; and unless you can furnish me with
any particulars of the poor young gentleman’s past life, of an
enlightening character, I don’t see much hope of getting ahead.”

“You stick to your idea of the murder being an act of revenge?”

“What other reason could there be for such a murder?”

That question seemed unanswerable, and Lord Cheriton let it pass.
Matthew Dalbrook and his elder son were to dine with him that
evening, in order to talk quietly and calmly over the terrible event
of last week, and the bearing which it must have upon his daughter’s
future life. Lady Cheriton and Lady Jane Carmichael had lived
entirely on the upper floor, taking such poor apologies for meals as
they could be induced to take in her ladyship’s morning-room. That
closed door at the eastern end of the corridor exercised its solemn
influence upon the whole house. Those mourning women never went in
or out without looking that way—and again and again through the long
still days they visited that chamber of death, carrying fairest
blooms of stephanotis or camellia, whitest rose-buds, waxen lilies;
kneeling in silent prayer beside that white bed.

During all those dismal days before the funeral Juanita lived
secluded in her own room, only leaving it to go to that silent room
where the white bed and the white flowers made an atmosphere of cold
purity, which chilled her heart as if she too were dead. She counted
the hours which remained before even this melancholy link between
life and death would be broken, and when she must stretch out her
hands blindly to find one whom the earth would hide from her for
evermore. In the brief snatches of troubled sleep that had visited
her since Friday night she had awakened with her husband’s name upon
her lips, with outstretched hands that yearned for the touch of his,
awakening slowly to consciousness of the horrible reality. In every
dream that she had dreamed he had been with her, and in some of those
dreams had appeared with a distinctness which involved the memory
of her sorrow. Yes, she had thought him dead—yes, she had seen him
stretched bleeding at her feet; but that had been dream and delusion.
Reality was here, here in his strong voice, here in the warm grasp of
his hand, here in the lying vision that was kinder than truth.

Mr. Dalbrook and his son arrived at a quarter to eight, and were
received by Lord Cheriton in the library. The drawing-room was now a
locked chamber, and it would be long doubtless before any one would
have the courage to occupy that room. The Dalbrooks were to stay
at Cheriton till after the funeral. Matthew Dalbrook had been Sir
Godfrey’s solicitor, and it would be his duty to read the will.

He was also one of the trustees to Juanita’s marriage settlement,
and the time had come—all too soon—when the terms of that settlement
would have to be discussed.

“How is my cousin?” asked Theodore, when he had shaken hands with
Lord Cheriton.

“Have you seen her since—Friday?”

“Yes, I saw her on Saturday morning. She was terribly changed.”

“A ghastly change, is it not?” said Lord Cheriton, with a sigh.
“I doubt if there is any improvement since then: but she behaved
splendidly at the inquest this afternoon. We were all prepared for
her breaking down. God knows whether she will ever get the better of
her grief, or whether she will go down to the grave a broken-hearted
woman. Oh! Matt,” turning to his kinsman and contemporary, “such a
trial as this teaches us how Providence can laugh at our best laid
plans. I thought I had made my daughter’s happiness as secure as the
foundations of this old house.”

“You did your best, James. No man can do more.”

Theodore was silent for the most part after his inquiry about his
cousin. He listened while the elder men talked, and gave his opinion
when it was asked for, and showed himself a clear-headed man of
business; but his depression was not the less evident. The thought of
Juanita’s grief—the contrast between her agony now and her joyousness
the day she was at Dorchester—was never absent from his mind; and the
talk of the two elder men, the discussion as to the extent of her
possessions, her power to do this and that, the house she was to live
in, the establishment she was to keep, jarred upon him horribly.

“By the conditions of the settlement, the Priory is to be hers for
her life, with everything it contains. By the conditions of Sir
Godfrey’s will, in the event of his leaving no issue, the Priory
estate is to go after his widow’s death to Mrs. Grenville’s eldest
son, or failing a son in that direction, then to Mrs. Morningside’s
eldest son. Should neither sister leave a son surviving at the time
of Lady Carmichael’s death the estate is to be sold, and the product
divided in equal portions among the surviving nieces; but at the
present rate at which the two ladies are filling their nurseries
there is very little doubt there will be a surviving son. Mrs.
Grenville was Sir Godfrey’s favourite, I know, and I can understand
his giving her boy the estate, and thus founding a family, rather
than dividing the property between the issue of the two sisters.”

“I do not think anybody can find fault with his will,” said Lord
Cheriton. “God knows that when I saw him sign it in my room in
Victoria Street, an hour after his marriage, nothing was further from
my thoughts than the idea that the will would come into force within
the next fifty years. It seemed almost an idle precaution for so
young a man to be in such a hurry to set his house in order.”

“Do you think Juanita will decide to live at the Priory?” asked Mr.
Dalbrook.

“It would seem more natural for her to live here with her mother and
me, but I fear that this house will seem for ever accursed to her.
She will remember that it was her own whim to spend her honeymoon
here. It will seem to her as if she had brought her husband to his
death. Oh, God, when I remember how her mother and I suggested
other places—how we talked to her of the Tyrol and the Dolomites,
of Hungary, Norway—and with what a kind of childish infatuation she
clung to her fancy for this house, it seems as if a hideous fatality
guided her to her doom. It is her doom, as well as his. I do not
believe she will ever be a happy woman again.”

“It may seem so now to us all, to herself most of all, poor girl,”
answered Matthew Dalbrook. “But I never saw a sorrow yet that Time
could not heal, and the sorrow of a girl of nineteen leaves such a
margin for Time’s healing powers. God grant that you and I may both
live to see her bright and happy again—with a second husband. There
is something prosaic, I feel, in the very sound; but there may be
some touch of romance even in a second love.”

He did not see the painful change in his son’s face while he was
talking: the sudden crimson which faded slowly to a ghastly pallor.
It had never occurred to Matthew Dalbrook that his son Theodore
had felt anything more than a cousinly regard for Lord Cheriton’s
daughter.

       *       *       *       *       *

The funeral took place on the following Wednesday—one of those
funerals about which people talk for a month, and in which grief
is almost lost sight of by the majority of the mourners in a
feverish excitement. The procession of carriages, very few of them
unoccupied, was nearly half a mile long—the little churchyard at
Milbrook could scarcely contain the mourners. The sisters’ husbands
were there, with hats hidden in crape, and solemn countenances;
honestly sorry for their brother-in-law’s death, but not uninterested
in his will. All the district, within a radius of thirty miles, had
been on the alert to pay this last mark of respect to a young man who
had been universally liked, and whose melancholy fate had moved every
heart.

The will was read in the library, and Juanita appeared for the first
time since her cousins had been at Cheriton. She came into the room
with her mother, and went to Matthew and his son quietly, and gave
a hand to each, and answered their grave inquiries about her health
without one tear or one faltering accent; and then she took her
seat beside her father’s chair, and waited for the reading of the
will. It seemed to her as if it contained her husband’s last words,
addressed to her from his grave. He knew when he wrote or dictated
those words that she would not hear them in his lifetime. The will
left her a life-interest in everything, except twenty thousand pounds
in consols to Lady Jane, a few legacies to old servants and local
charities, and a few souvenirs to college friends. Sir Godfrey had
held the estate in fee simple, and could deal with it as he pleased.
He expressed a hope that if his wife survived him she should continue
to live at the Priory, and that the household should remain, as far
as possible, unchanged, that no old horse should ever be sold, and no
dogs disposed of in any way off the premises. This last request was
to secure a continuance of old customs. His father had never allowed
a horse that he had kept over a twelvemonth to be sold; and had never
parted with a dog. His own hand shot the horse that was no longer fit
for service; his own hand poisoned the dog whose life had ceased to
be a blessing.

When the will was finished, and it was by no means a lengthy
document, Lady Jane kissed her daughter-in-law.

“You will do as he wished, won’t you, dearest?” she said, softly.

“Live at the Priory—yes, Lady Jane, unless you will live there
instead. It would be more natural for you to be mistress there.
When—when—my darling made that will he must have thought of me as
an old woman, likely to survive him by a few years at most, and it
would seem natural to him for me to go on living in his house—to
continue to live—those were his words, you know—to continue to live
in the home of my married life. But all is different now, and it
would be better for you to have the Priory. It has been your home so
long. It is full of associations and interests for you. I can live
anywhere—anywhere except in this detested house.”

She had spoken in a low voice all the time, so low as to be quite
inaudible to her father and Matthew Dalbrook, who were talking
confidentially upon the other side of the wide oak table.

“My love, it is your house. It will be full of associations for
you too—the memories of his youth. It may comfort you by-and-by to
live among the things he cared for. And I can be with you there now
and then. You will bear with a melancholy old woman now and then,”
pleaded Lady Jane, with tearful tenderness.

The only answer was a sob, and a clinging pressure of the hand; and
then the three women quietly left the room. Their interest in the
business was over. Blinds had been drawn up and Venetian shutters
opened. There was a flood of sunshine on the staircase and in the
corridors as Juanita went back to her room. The perfume of roses and
the breath of summer came in at the open windows.

“Oh, God, how the sun shines!” she cried, in a sudden agony of
remembrance.

Those odours from the garden, the blue sky, summer greenery and
dazzling summer light brought back the image of her vanished
happiness. Last week, less than a week ago, she had been one of the
joyous creatures in that glad, gay world—joyous as the thrush whose
song was thrilling upon the soft sweet air.

Lady Jane’s two sons-in-law had drawn near the oak table at which the
lawyer was seated with his papers before him.

Jessica’s husband, Mr. Grenville, was sporting. His thoughts were
centred in his stable, where he found an all-sufficient occupation
for his intellectual powers in an endless buying, exchanging,
selling, summering and wintering his stud; in the invention of
improved bits, and the development of new ideas in saddlery; in the
performance of operations that belong rather to the professional
veterinary than to the gentleman at large, and in the conversation
of his stud groom. These resources filled up all the margin that
was left for a man who hunted four days a week in his own district,
and who often got a fifth and even a sixth day in other counties
accessible by rail. It may have been a natural result of Mr.
Grenville’s devotion to the stable that Mrs. Grenville was absorbed
by her nursery; or it may have been a natural bent on the lady’s
part. However this might be, the lady and the gentleman followed
parallel lines, in which their interests never clashed. He talked
of hardly anything but his horses; she rarely mentioned any other
subject than her children, or something bearing upon her children’s
well-being. He believed his horses to be the best in the county; she
considered her babies unsurpassed in creation. Both in their line
were supremely happy.

Mr. Morningside, married to Sir Godfrey’s youngest sister, Ruth, was
distinctly Parliamentary; and had no sympathies in common with such
men as Hugo Grenville. To him horses were animals with four legs who
dragged burdens; who were expensive to keep, and whose legs were
liable to “fill” or to develop superfluous bone on the slightest
provocation. His only idea of a saddle horse was a slow and stolid
cob, for whose virtuous disposition and powerful bone he had paid
nearly three hundred pounds, and on which he pounded round the park
three or four times every morning during the Parliamentary season, an
exercise of which he was about as fond as he was of Pullna water, but
which had been recommended him for the good of his liver.

Mr. Morningside had a castle in the north, too near Newcastle to
be altogether beautiful, and he had a small suite upon a fifth
floor in Queen Anne’s Mansion. He had taken this apartment as a
bachelor _pied à terre_ for the Parliamentary season; and he had
laid considerable emphasis upon the landowner’s necessity for stern
economy which had constrained him to take rooms so small as to be
altogether “impossible” for his wife. Mrs. Morningside was, however,
of a different opinion. No place was impossible for her which her
dear Stuart deigned to occupy. She did not mind small rooms, or a
fifth story. Was there not a lift, and were there not charming people
living ever so much nearer the skies? She did not mind even what she
gracefully described as “pigging it,” for her dear Stuart’s sake. She
was utterly unlike her elder sister, and she had no compunction at
placing over two hundred miles between her and her nursery.

“They’d wire for me if anything went wrong,” she said, “and the
express would take me home in a few hours.”

“That would depend upon what time you got the wire. The express
doesn’t go every quarter of an hour like a Royal Blue,” replied Mr.
Morningside, gloomily.

He was a dry-as-dust man; one of those self-satisfied persons who are
never less alone than when alone. He had married at five and thirty,
and the comfortable habits of a priggish bachelor still clove to him
after six years of married bliss. He was fond of his wife in her
place, and he thought her a very charming woman at the head of his
table, and receiving his guests at Morningside Castle. But it was
essential to his peace that he should have many solitary hours in
which to pore over Blue books and meditate upon an intended speech.
He fancied himself greatly as a speaker, and he was one of those
Parliamentary bores whose ornate periods are made mincemeat of by
the reporters. He looked to a day when he would take his place with
Burke and Walpole, and other giants, whose oratory had been received
coldly in the dawn of their senatorial career. He gave himself up
to much study of politics past and present, and was one of those
well-informed bores who are only useful as a store-house of hard
facts for the use of livelier speakers. When a man had to speak upon
a subject of which he knew nothing, he went to Mr. Morningside as to
a Parliamentary Encyclopædia.

To sustain these stores of knowledge Mr. Morningside required
much leisure for what is called heavy reading; and heavy reading
is not easy in that genial family life which means incessant talk
and incessant interruption. Mr. Morningside would have preferred,
therefore, to keep his den on the fifth floor to himself; but his
wife loved London, and he could not refuse her the privilege of
occasionally sharing his nest on a level with the spires and towers
of the great city. She made her presence agreeably felt by tables
covered with photograph easels, Vallauris vases, stray flowers in
specimen glasses, which were continually being knocked over, Japanese
screens, and every known variety of chair-back; and albeit he was
an essentially dutiful husband, Mr. Morningside never felt happier
than when he had seen his Ruth comfortably seated in the Bournemouth
express on her way to the home of her forefathers for one of those
protracted visits that no one but a near relation would venture to
make. He left her cheerily on such occasions, with a promise to run
down to the Priory on Saturday evenings whenever it was possible to
leave the helm.

Mr. Morningside had liked his brother-in-law as well as it was in him
to like any man, and had been horrified at that sudden inexplicable
doom; but Sir Godfrey being snatched off this earth in the flower
of his age, Mr. Morningside thought it only natural that the young
Morningsides should derive some benefit, immediate or contingent,
from their uncle’s estate. It was, therefore, with some disgust
that he heard that clause in the will which gave Jessica’s sons the
preference over all the sons of Ruth. True that, failing any son of
Jessica’s, the estate was to lapse to the eldest surviving son of
Ruth; but what earthly value was such a reversionary interest as this
in the case of a lady whose nursery was like a rabbit warren?

“I congratulate you on your eldest boy’s prospects, Grenville,” said
Mr. Morningside, sourly. “Your Tom,” a boy whom he hated, “will come
into a very fine thing one of these days.”

“Humph,” muttered Grenville, “Lady Carmichael’s is a good life, and
I should be very sorry to see it shortened. Besides, who can tell?
Before this time next year there may be a nearer claimant.”

“Lord have mercy upon us,” exclaimed Morningside, “I never thought of
_that_ contingency.”




CHAPTER IX.

    “Poor girl! put on thy stifling widow’s weed,
     And ’scape at once from Hope’s accursèd bands;
     To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow,
     And the next day will be a day of sorrow.”


Life falls back into old grooves after calamities the most
stupendous. After fires—after plagues—after earthquakes—people
breakfast and dine, marry and are given in marriage. A few more
graves testify to the fever that has decimated a city; a ruined
village here and there along the smiling southern shore, shells
that were once houses, churches beneath whose shivered domes no
worshipper dare ever kneel again, bear witness to the earthquake; but
the monotonous commonplace of life goes on all the same in city and
village, on hill and sea-shore. And so when Godfrey Carmichael was
laid in his grave, when the police had exhausted their ingenuity in
the vain endeavour to fathom the secret of his death—when the coroner
had adjourned and again adjourned his inquiry, and an open verdict
had been pronounced, life in Cheriton House resumed its old order,
and the room in which the bridegroom had lain murdered at the feet of
the bride was again thrown open to the sun and air, and to the sound
of voices, and to the going and coming of daily life.

Lady Cheriton would have had the room closed; for a year at least,
she pleaded; but her husband told her that to make it a sealed
chamber now would be to throw it out of use for his lifetime.

“If we once let servants and people think and talk of it as a haunted
room nobody will ever like to occupy it again so long as this house
stands,” he said. “Stories will be invented—those things shape
themselves unawares in the human mind—sounds will be heard, and the
whole house will become uninhabitable. We both love our house, Maria.
Our own hands have fashioned it after our own hearts. It would be
folly to put a brand upon it, and to say henceforward it shall be
accursed to us. God knows I am sorry for Juanita’s sorrow, sorry for
my own loss; but I look to you to help me in keeping our home bright
and pleasant for our declining days.”

It was the habit of her life to obey him and try to please him in all
things; so she answered gently—

“Of course, dear James, it shall be as you wish. I feel sure you are
right. It would be wicked to shut up that lovely room”—with a faint
shudder; “but I shall never go near the west window without thinking
of—our dear boy. And I’m afraid Juanita will never be able to endure
the room.”

“Perhaps not. We can use the other rooms when she is here. She has
her own house now; and I dare say it will be some time before she
will care to cross this threshold. The house must seem fatal to
her. It was her own caprice that brought him here. I’m afraid that
recollection will torture her, poor child.”

It was finally decided therefore that the drawing-room should be used
nightly, as it had been in all the peaceful years that were gone. The
lamps with their gay shades of rose or amber made spots of coloured
light amidst tables heaped with flowers. All the choicest blooms that
the hothouses or the gardens could produce were brought as of old,
like offerings to a pagan shrine. The numberless toys upon the tables
were set out in the old orderly disorder—porcelain and enamel bon-bon
boxes on one table—antique watches and gold and silver snuff-boxes
on another—bronzes, intaglios, coins, medals, filigree scent bottles
upon a third, and a background of flowers everywhere. The piano was
opened, and the candles lighted ready for her ladyship, who sang
Spanish ballads delightfully even yet, and who was in the habit of
singing to her husband of an evening whenever they were alone.

They were generally alone now, not being able to receive visitors
from the outside world at such a time. The vicar of the parish dined
at Cheriton now and then, and Matthew Dalbrook spent a night there
occasionally, and talked over business matters, and the future
development of a tract of land at Swanage, which formed a portion of
the original Strangway estate.

The widow had taken possession of her new home, the home which they
two were to have lived in for half a century of loving union. They
had joked about their golden wedding as they sat at lunch on the
lawn that day; had laughed at the thought of how they would look in
white hair and wrinkles, and then had sighed at the thought of how
those they loved now would be gone before that day came, and how the
friends who gathered round them would be new friends, the casual
acquaintances of the passing years promoted to friendship in the
place of those earlier, nearer, dearer friends whom death had taken.

They had talked of their silver wedding, which seemed a happier idea;
for dear Lady Jane and Juanita’s mother and father might all live to
see that day. They would be old, of course, older by five and twenty
years; but not too old to be happy and beloved. The young wife and
husband pictured the lawn on which they were sitting crowded with
friends and tenants and villagers and children; and planned the
feasting and the sports, which were to have a touch of originality,
something out of the beaten track, which something was not easy to
devise.

And now she and Lady Jane were sitting in the same spot, in the
sultry August evening, two desolate women; the tawny giant at their
feet, _his_ dog, the mastiff Styx, looking up at them now and then
with great serious eyes, as if asking what had become of his master.

Juanita was strangely altered since the days of her honeymoon. Her
cheeks had hollowed, and the large dark eyes looked larger, and gave
a haggard expression to the pallid face; but she was bearing her
sorrow bravely for Lady Jane’s sake, as Lady Jane had done for her
sake, in the beginning of things. That gentle lady had broken down
after the funeral, and Juanita had been constrained to forget her own
agony for a brief space in trying to comfort the bereaved mother; and
so the two acted and re-acted upon each other, and it was well for
them to be together.

They had settled down in the old house before they had been there a
week. Lady Jane put off her return to Swanage indefinitely. She could
drive over now and then to supervise the gardening, and she would
stay at the Priory as long as Juanita wanted her.

“That would be always,” said Juanita.

“Ah, my love, that would not do. I don’t forget all that has been
written about mothers-in-law. There must be some truth in it.”

“Oh, but you forget. That is when there is a son and husband to
quarrel about,” said Juanita, with a sudden sob. “We have no cause
for jealousy. We have only our dead.”

Lady Jane wanted to establish her daughter-in-law in that cheerful
sitting-room which had been her own, but here Juanita opposed her.

“I am not going to have it—now,” she said, resolutely. “It shall be
your room always. No one else shall use it. I am going to have his
room for my den.”

“My dearest, it is the dullest room in the house.”

“It was his room, and I like it better than any other in the world.”

She arranged all her own books and possessions in the large room
looking into the stable yard, which had been Sir Godfrey’s study
from the time he went to Eton. She found all his Eton books on a
lower shelf of one of the book-cases, and she sat on the floor for
an hour dusting grammars and dictionary, First Greek Reader, Latin
Gradus, and all the rest of them. She found his college books,
with the college arms upon them, on another shelf. She would have
nothing disturbed or altered, and she was supremely indifferent to
the question of incongruity. Her own book-cases from Cheriton, the
dainty toy book-cases of inlaid satin wood, were squeezed into the
recesses on each side of the fireplace. Her photographs of mother,
father, friends, horses, and dogs, were arranged upon the carved oak
mantelpiece, above the quaint little cupboards with carved doors,
spoil of old Belgian churches, still full of choice cigars, the young
man’s store. His spurs and hunting-crops, canes, and boxing-gloves,
decorated the panel between the two tall windows. His despatch box
still stood upon the library table, and the dog Styx pushed the door
open whenever it was left ajar and strolled into the room as by old
established right.

She felt herself nearer her dead husband here than anywhere else;
nearer even than in the churchyard, where she and Lady Jane went
every afternoon with fresh flowers for his grave. They had not laid
him in the family vault, but among the graves of gentle and simple,
under the sunny turf. The marble was not yet carven which was to mark
out his grave amidst those humbler resting-places.

       *       *       *       *       *

Theodore Dalbrook had not seen his cousin since the day of the
funeral. His father and his two sisters had called upon her at the
Priory, and had brought back an account of the quiet dignity with
which she bore herself in her melancholy position.

“I did not think she had so much solid sense,” said Janet; and then
she and Sophia talked about the Priory as a dwelling-house, and of
its inferiority to Cheriton, and speculated upon the amount of their
cousin’s income.

“She has a splendid position. She will be a fine catch for some one
by-and-by,” said Harrington. “I hope she won’t go and throw herself
away upon an adventurer.”

“I hope not,” said his father, “but I suppose she will marry again?
That seems inevitable.”

“I don’t see that it is inevitable,” argued Theodore, almost angrily.
“She was devotedly attached to her husband. I suppose there is now
and then a woman who can remain faithful to a first love——”

“When the first love is alive, and not always then,” put in Sophia,
flippantly. “Of course she will marry again. If she wanted to remain
single people would not let her, with her income.”

Theodore got up and walked to the window. His sister’s talk often set
his teeth on edge, but rarely so much as it did to-day.

“You talk of her as if she were the most shallow-brained of women,”
he exclaimed, with his back to the family group, looking out with
gloomy eyes into the old-fashioned street, the narrow circumscribed
view which he had hated of late with a deadly hatred.

“I don’t think she is very deep,” answered Sophia. “She never could
appreciate Darwin. She told me once that she wondered what I could
find to interest me in earthworms.”

“A woman must, indeed, be shallow who feels no interest in that
thrilling subject,” sneered Theodore.

“Upon my word, now,” said his father, “Darwin’s book interested me,
though I’m not a scientific man. And I never see a worm wriggling
off the gardener’s spade without feeling that I ought to be grateful
to him as a factor in the landed interest. Perhaps,” continued Mr.
Dalbrook, musingly, “my own practice in the conveyancing line owes
something of its substantial character to earthworms. If it were not
for _them_ there might be no land to convey.”

The conversation drifted lightly away from Juanita and her sorrow,
but her image still filled Theodore’s mind, and he left the
drawing-room and the frivolous talk and the clinking of teacups and
teaspoons, and went out in the declining light to walk in the avenue
of sycamores on the edge of the old city.

He had not called upon his cousin in her new home; he shrank from the
very idea of meeting her while her sorrow was still new, while her
thoughts and feelings were concentrated upon that one subject, while
he could only be to her as an unwelcome intruder from that outside
world she loathed, as grief loathes all but its own sad memories.

Had the calamity which had desolated her life brought her any nearer
to him who had loved her so long and so unselfishly? Alas, no; he
told himself that if she ever loved again, it would be to a stranger
that her reawakening heart would open rather than to the rejected
lover of the past, the man whom her memory would couple with the
husband she had lost, and whom she would compare disadvantageously
with that chosen one.

No, he told himself, there was little more chance for him in the
future than there had been in the past. She liked him and trusted
him, with a sisterly affection which nothing short of a miracle could
warm into love. Passion does not grow out of such placid beginnings.

In her very dawn of girlhood she had been in love with Godfrey: had
blushed at his coming: had quarrelled with him, and wept stormy
tears: had suffered all those alternations of joy and grief, pride
and self-abasement, which accompany love in an impassioned nature.
Theodore remembered her treatment of the fifth-form Etonian, of the
undergraduate, remembered the passionate drama perpetually being
acted in those two young lives, a drama which he had watched with
aching heart; and he felt that he could never be as that first lover
had been. He was associated with the commonplace of her life. She
had laughed often at his dry-as-dust talk with her father—the dull
discussions about leases and bills of dilapidation. A solicitor
living from year’s end to year’s end in a country town—what a dreary
person he must needs appear beside the brilliant young Patrician,
full of the gladness of the life that knows neither labour nor care.
He sickened at the thought of that contrast.

He had served his father faithfully hitherto, and the bond between
father and son had been one of strong affection as well as duty; but
for the last year there had been growing upon him an inexpressible
weariness of the house in which he was born, and the city in which
he had lived the chief part of his uneventful life. He had struggled
against the disgust of familiar things, telling himself that it was
an unworthy feeling, and that he would be a snob if he indulged it.
Yet the disgust grew into absolute loathing; the monotonous days,
the repetitive work, oppressed him like a nightmare. Since Juanita’s
marriage the burden had become more and more intolerable. To be so
near her, yet so far. To be letting life creep away in dull drudgery
which could never bring him nearer her social level; to feel that all
his pursuits and associations were beneath the woman he loved, and
could never arouse the faintest interest in her mind. This was almost
too bitter to be borne, and he had for some time past been meditating
some way of escape, some manner of release from these old fetters
into the wider arena of the outer world.

Such escape was not easy. He had to think of his father, that
indulgent, large-minded father who had given his son a very
remunerative share in his practice at an age when most young men
are dependent for every suit of clothes or five-pound note upon
parental bounty and parental caprice. He knew that his father looked
to him for an entire release from work before they were many years
older; and that he would then find himself sole master of a business
worth at least fifteen hundred a year. All this had come to him
and would come to him easily, as the reward of conscientious and
intelligent work. It was a prospect which few young men would forego
without considerable hesitation; but Theodore hardly thought of the
substantial advantages which he was so eager to sacrifice. His sole
hesitation was on account of the disappointment which the step he
contemplated would inflict upon his father.

He was not without a foreshadowing of a plan by which that
disappointment might be in somewise lessened. He had kept an eye
upon his brother for some time past, and he had discovered that the
young man’s fervour for the Anglican Church had begun to cool. There
were all the signs of wavering in that gifted youth. At one time he
devoted all his study to the writings of Cardinal Newman, Hurrel
Froude, and the Tractarian Party—he lived in the atmosphere of Oxford
in the forties; he talked of Cardinal Manning as the head and front
of religious thought. He was on the verge of deciding for the Old
Faith. Then a sudden change came over the spirit of his dream. He
began to have doubts, not of the reformed faith, but of every Western
creed.

“Light comes from the East,” he told his sisters with an oracular
air. “I doubt if there is any nearer resting-place for the sole of
my foot than the Temple of Buddha. I find there the larger creed for
which my mind yearns—boundless vistas behind and before me. I begin
to entertain painful doubts of my fitness for the Anglican Church.
I might be a power, perhaps, but it would be outside those narrow
bounds—like Voysey, or Stopford Brooke. The Church, with its present
limitations, would not hold me.”

The sisters sympathized, argued, quoted Essays and Reviews, and
talked of Darwin and Spencer, Huxley and Comte. Theodore listened and
said nothing. He saw which way the tide was turning, and rejoiced in
the change of the current.

And now this sultry August afternoon, pacing up and down the green
walk, he was expectant of an opportunity of discussing his brother’s
future with that gentleman himself, as Harrington was in the habit
of taking his afternoon constitutional, book in hand, upon this very
path.

He appeared by-and-by, carrying an open volume of Max Müller, and
looking at the nursemaids and perambulators.

“What, Theo, taking your meditative cigar? You don’t often give
yourself a holiday before dinner.”

“No, but I wanted to talk to you alone, and I knew this was your
beat.”

“Nothing gone wrong, I hope.”

“No; it is your future I want to discuss, if you don’t mind.”

“My future is wrapped in a cloud of doubt,” replied the young man,
dreamily. “Were the Church differently constituted—were the minds
that rule in it of a larger cast, a wider grasp, a——”

“Harrington, how would you like the law as a profession?” Theodore
asked abruptly, when the other began to hesitate.

“My dear fellow, it is all very well to ask me that question, when
you know there is no room for me in my father’s office,” retorted
Harrington, with a contemptuous wave of that long, lean white hand,
which always reminded him of St. Francis de Sales or Savonarola; not
that he had any positive knowledge of what those saintly hands were
like.

“Room might be made for you,” said Theodore.

“I should not care to accept a subordinate position—Aut Cæsar——”

“So far as the Cæsar-ship of a provincial solicitor’s office can go
the whole empire may be yours by-and-by, if you like—provided you put
your shoulder to the wheel and pass your examinations.”

“Do you mean to say that you would throw up your position—and an
income which would allow of your marrying to-morrow, if you chose—to
make room for me?”

“If I can get my father’s consent, yes, decidedly.”

“And how do you propose to exist without a profession?”

“I don’t propose anything of the kind. I mean to go to the Bar.”

“Oh, I begin to understand. A solicitor’s office is not good enough
for you?”

“I don’t say that; but I have taken a disgust—an unreasonable
disgust, no doubt—to that branch of the law, and I am very sick of
Dorchester.”

“So am I,” retorted Harrington, gazing vaguely at a pretty nursemaid.
“We are agreed there at any rate. And you want to follow in Lord
Cheriton’s track, and make a great name?”

“It is only one in a thousand who succeeds as James Dalbrook has
succeeded; but if I go to the Bar you may be sure I shall do my best
to get on; and I shall start with a pretty good knowledge of common
law.”

“You want to be in London—you are pining for an æsthetic centre,”
sighed Harrington.

“I don’t quite know what that is, but I should prefer London to
Dorchester.”

“So should I—and you want me to take your place at the mill; to grind
out my soul in the dull round that has sickened you.”

“The life has begun to pall upon me, but I think it ought to suit
you,” answered Theodore, thoughtfully. “You are fonder of home—and of
the sisters—than I am. You get on better with them.”

“You have been rather grumpy lately, I admit,” said Harrington.

“And you have let yourself cool upon your Divinity exam. You
evidently don’t mean the Church?”

“I have outgrown the Church. You can’t put a quart of wine into a
pint bottle.”

“And you must do something. I don’t think you can do anything so
good as to take my place, and become my father’s right hand until he
chooses to retire, and leave you the practice. You will have married
by that time, perhaps, and will have sobered down—intellectually.
Morally you are one of the steadiest fellows I know.”

“I suppose I ought to consider this what the house-agents call an
unusual opportunity?” said Harrington; “but you must give me time to
think it over.”

“Take time,” answered Theodore, briefly. “I’ll talk to my father in
the meanwhile.”

Mr. Dalbrook received his elder son’s communication as if it had been
a blow from an enemy’s hand.

“Do you suppose that ass Harrington can ever take your place?” he
exclaimed. Whereupon Theodore took pains to explain that his brother
was by no means an ass, and that he was only labouring under that
burden of small affectations which weighs down a young man who has
been allowed to live too much in the society of young women, sisters
and sisters’ friends, and to consider all his own utterances oracular.

“He is not so fit for the Church as Brown is,” said Theodore, “and he
will only addle his brains if he reads any more theology. He won’t
be content with Paley and Butler, and the good old books which have
been the turnpike road to ordination for a century. He is all for new
ideas, and the new ideas are too big for him. But if you will give
him his articles, and teach him, as you taught me——”

“I don’t think I taught you much. You seemed to get at everything by
instinct.”

“Ah, you taught me my profession without knowing it; and you will
teach Harrington with just as little trouble. He will shake off that
husk of affectation in your office—no solicitor can be affected—and
he will come out a good lawyer; while I am trying my luck in
Temple chambers, reading, and waiting for briefs. With your help,
by-and-by, I am bound to do something. I shall get a case or two upon
this circuit, anyhow.”

“I can’t think what has put this folly in your head, Theo,” said his
father, with a vexed air.

“It is not folly, father; it is not a caprice,” the young man
protested, with sudden earnestness. “For God’s sake don’t think me
ungrateful, or that I would willingly turn my back upon my duty
to you. Only—young people have troubles of their own, don’t you
know?—and of late I have not been altogether happy. I have not
prospered in my love-dream; and so I have set up a new idol, that
idol so many men worship with more or less reward—Success. I want to
spread my wings, and see if they will carry me on a longer flight
than I have taken yet.”

“Well, it would be selfish of me to baulk you, even if your loss were
to cripple me altogether. And it won’t do that. I am strong enough to
work on for a few years longer than I intended.”

“Oh, my dear father, I hope it won’t come to that. I hope my change
of plan won’t shorten your years of leisure.”

“I am afraid that’s inevitable, Theo. I can’t transfer a fine
practice to my son till I’ve made him a good lawyer—and God knows
how long that will take in Harrington’s case. Judging by my present
estimation of him, I should say half a century. But don’t be
downhearted, Theo. You shall eat your dinners. You shall qualify for
the Woolsack. After all, I don’t know how a life of leisure might
suit me. It would be a change from the known to the unknown, almost
as stupendous as the change from life to death.”

Perhaps Matthew Dalbrook had fathomed that secret woe at which
Theodore had hinted darkly; in any case he took his elder son’s
defection more easily than might have been hoped, and bore patiently
with some preliminary fatuity from the younger son, who accepted the
gift of his articles, an allowance of two hundred pounds per annum,
and the promise of a junior partnership in the near future, with the
languid politeness of one who felt that he was renouncing a mitre.

Everything was settled off-hand, and Theodore was to go to London at
the end of September to select and furnish his modest chambers in one
of those grave old courts of the Temple, and be ready to begin his
new life with the beginning of term.

He had not seen Juanita since the funeral, and she had been told
nothing of this sudden reconstruction of his life; but he determined
to see her before he left Dorchester, and he considered that he
had a right, as her kinsman, to bid her good-bye. Perhaps in his
heart-weariness he was inclined to exaggerate the solemnity of that
leave-taking, somewhat as if he had been starting for Australia.

He drove over to the Priory on a dull, grey afternoon, his last day
in Dorchester. His portmanteaus were packed, and all things were
ready for an early departure next morning. Sorely as he had sickened
of the good old town which was his birth-place, he felt a shade of
melancholy at the idea of cutting himself adrift altogether from that
quiet haven; and the love of those open stretches of barren heath and
those swampy meadows and grazing cattle on the way to Milbrook, was
engrained in him deeper than he knew. It was a landscape which took a
peculiar charm from the grey dimness of an autumnal atmosphere, and
it seemed to Theodore Dalbrook that those level pastures and winding
waters had never looked fairer than they looked to-day.

He had written to his cousin a day before to tell her of his intended
visit. It was too solemn a matter in his own mind for him to leave
the finding her at home to chance. His groom took the dog-cart round
to the stables, while he was ushered at once to the drawing-room
where Lady Carmichael was sitting at her work-table in the bow
window, with Styx stretched on a lion-skin at her feet.

The silence of the house struck Theodore Dalbrook painfully as he
followed the footman across the hall and along a corridor which
led to the drawing-room—that death-like silence of a roomy old
mansion in which there are neither children nor guests, only one
lonely inhabitant waited upon by solemn-visaged servants, drilled
to a phenomenal quietness, and keeping all their good spirits for
the remoteness of the servants’ hall, shut off by double doors and
long passages. Saddened by that atmosphere of gloom, he entered his
cousin’s presence, and stood with her small cold hand in his, looking
at the face which had changed so sorely from that vivid beauty which
had shone upon him in the low light of the sinking sun on that summer
evening not three months ago.

As he looked the memory of the bride’s face came between him and
the face of the widow, and for a moment or two he stood speechless.
The clearly-cut features were pinched and sharpened, wasted by long
nights of weeping and long days of silent regret. The dark eyes
were circled by purple shadows, and the oval cheeks were sunken and
pallid. All the colour and richness of that southern beauty had
vanished, as if some withering blight had passed over the face.

“It was very good of you to think of me before you left Dorchester,”
she said, gently.

She pushed forward a chair for her cousin, before she sat down; and
Theodore seated himself opposite to her with the wicker work-table
between them. He wondered a little to see that satin-lined receptacle
gorged with bright coloured silks, and pieces of unfinished
embroidery; for it seemed to him that there was a touch of frivolity
in this light ornamental needlework which hardly harmonized with her
grief-stricken countenance.

“You could not suppose that I should leave without seeing you,” he
said; “I should have come here weeks ago, only——”

“Only you wanted to give me time to grow calm, to teach myself to
look my trouble straight in the face,” she said, interpreting his
thought. “That was very thoughtful of you. Well, the storm is over
now. I am quite calm, as you see. I dare say some people think I am
_getting over it_. That is the usual phrase, is it not? And so you
are going to the Bar, Theodore. I am glad of that. You are clever
enough to make a name as my father did. It will be slow work, I
suppose; but it will be a field worthy of your ambition, which a
solicitor’s office in a market-town never would be.”

“I have felt the want of a wider field for a long time; and I shall
feel more interest in a barrister’s work. But I hope you don’t think
I am conceited enough to expect to get on as well as your father.”

“I don’t know about that. I think you must know you are a clever man.
I have been wishing to see you for a long time, Theodore, only I was
like you—I wanted to give myself time to be calm. I want to talk to
you about—the murderer.”

“Yes. Have you heard anything? Has there been any discovery?”

“Nothing. The offer of a reward has resulted in nothing—not one
little scrap of information. The London detective gave up the
business and went back to town a week after the funeral, having
obtained only negative results. The police hereabouts are creatures
without an idea; and so unless something is done, unless some clever
brain can solve the riddle, the wretch who killed my husband may go
down to the grave unpunished.”

“It is hard that it should be so,” said Theodore, quietly, “yet it is
an almost impossible case. There is not a single indication so far to
put one on the track—not one little clue.”

“Not for these dull-brained, mechanical discoverers, perhaps; but
for you or me, Theo,—for us who loved him there ought to be light.
Think, what a strange murder it was. Not for gain, remember. Had
it been the hand of a burglar that shot him, I could understand
the difficulty of tracing that particular criminal among all the
criminal classes. But _this_ murder, which seems utterly motiveless,
must have been prompted by some extraordinary motive. It was not the
act of a maniac; a maniac must have left some trace of his presence
in the neighbourhood. A maniac could not have so completely eluded
the police on the alert to hunt him down. There must have been some
indication.”

“Put madness out of the question, Juanita, what then?”

“Hatred, Theodore. That is the strongest passion in the human mind—a
savage hatred which could not be satisfied except with the brightest
life that it had the power to destroy—a relentless hatred—not against
him, not against my beloved. What had he done in all his good
life that any one upon this earth should hate _him_? But against
us—against my father and mother and me—the usurpers, the owners of
Cheriton Manor; against us who have thrust ourselves upon the soil
which that wicked race held so long. Oh, Theodore, I have thought
and thought of this, till the conviction has grown into my mind—till
it has seemed like a revelation from God. It was one of that wicked
family who struck this blow.”

“One of your predecessors—the Strangways? Is that what you mean,
Nita?”

“Yes, that is what I mean.”

“My dear Juanita, it is too wild an idea. What, after your father has
owned the estate nearly a quarter of a century? Why should the enemy
wait all those years—and choose such a time?”

“Because there never before was such an opportunity of striking a
blow that should bring ruin upon us. My father’s hope of making his
son-in-law his successor in the peerage was known to a good many
people. It may easily have reached the ears of the Strangways.”

“My dear girl, the family has died off like rotten sheep. I doubt if
there are any survivors of the old race.”

“Oh, but families are not obliterated so easily. There is always some
one left. There were two sons and a daughter of the old squire’s.
Surely one of those must have left children.”

“But, Juanita, to suppose that any man could hate the purchaser of
his squandered estate with a hatred malignant enough for murder is to
imagine humanity akin to devils.”

“We are akin to devils,” cried Juanita, excitedly. “I felt that I
could rejoice as the devils rejoice at human suffering if I could see
my husband’s murderer tortured. Yes, if he were tied against a tree,
as Indian savages tie their sacrificial victims—tied against a tree
and killed by inches, with every variety of torture which a hellish
ingenuity can suggest, I would say my litany, like those savages, my
litany of triumph and content. Yes, Theodore, we have more in common
with the devils than you may think.”

“I cannot see the possibility of murder, prompted by such an
inadequate motive,” said Theodore, slowly, remembering, as he spoke,
how Churton had suggested that the crime looked like a vendetta.

“Inadequate! Ah, that depends, don’t you see. Remember, we have not
to deal with good people. The Strangways were always an evil race.
Almost every tradition that remains about their lives is a story of
wrong-doing. And think how small a wound may be deadly when the blood
has poison in it beforehand. And is it a small thing to see strangers
in a home that has been in one’s family for three centuries? Again,
remember that although nothing throve on the Cheriton Estate while
the Strangways held it—or at any rate not for the last hundred years
of their holding—no sooner was my father in possession than the luck
changed. Quarries were developed; land that had been almost worthless
became valuable for building. Everything has prospered with him. And
think of them outside—banished for ever, like Adam and Eve out of
Paradise. Think of them with hate and envy gnawing their hearts.”

“There would be time for them to get over that feeling in four and
twenty years. And when you talk about _them_, I should like to know
exactly whom you mean. I assure you the general idea is that they
have all died off. That is to say, all of the direct line.”

“It is upon that very subject I want to talk to you, Theodore. Would
you like to do me a service, a very great service?”

“Nothing would make me happier.”

“Then will you try to find out all about the Strangways—if they are
really all gone, or if there are not some survivors, or a survivor,
of the last squire’s family? If you can do that much it will be
something gained. We shall know better what to think. When I heard
that you were going to live in London, it flashed into my mind that
you would be just the right person to help me, and I knew how good
you had been to me always, and that you _would_ help. London is the
place in which to make your inquiries. I have heard my father say
that all broken lives—all doubtful characters—gravitate towards
London. It is the one place where people fancy they can hide.”

“I will do everything in my power to realize your wish, Juanita. I
shall be a solitary man with a good deal of leisure, so I ought to
succeed, if success be possible.”

They were silent for some few minutes, Juanita being exhausted with
the passionate vehemence of her speech. She took up a piece of
embroidery from the basket, and began, with slow, careful stitches,
upon the petal of a dog rose.

“I am glad to see you engaged upon that artistic embroidery,” said
Theodore, presently, for the sake of saying something.

“That means perhaps that you wonder I can care for such frivolous
work as this,” she said, interpreting his recent thought, when his
eyes first lighted on her satin-lined basket with its rainbow-hued
silks. “It seems inconsistent, I dare say; but this work has helped
me to quiet my brain many a time when I have felt myself on the brink
of madness. These slow regular stitches, the mechanical movement of
my hand as the flowers grow gradually, stitch by stitch, through the
long melancholy day, have quieted my nerves. I cannot read. Books
give me no comfort, for my eyes follow the page while my mind is
brooding on my own troubles. It is better to sit and think quietly,
while I work. It is better to face my sorrow.”

“Have you been long alone?”

“No. It is only three weeks since Lady Jane went back to Swanage; and
she comes to see me two or three times a week. My father and mother
come as often. You must not think I am deserted. Every one is very
good to me.”

“They have need to be.”

Again there was a brief interval of silence, and then Juanita closed
her basket, and lifted her earnest eyes to her cousin’s face.

“You know all about the Strangways?” she inquired.

“I have heard a good deal about them from one and another. People who
live in the country have long memories, and are fond of talking of
the lords of the soil, even when the race has vanished from the land.
I have heard elderly men tell their after-dinner stories about the
Strangways at my father’s table.”

“You know the family portraits at Cheriton?”

“The pictures in the hall? Yes. I have wondered sometimes that your
father should have kept them there—effigies of an alien race.”

“I hate them,” exclaimed Juanita, shuddering. “I always had an
uncomfortable feeling about them, a feeling of strange cold eyes
looking at us in secret enmity; but now I abhor them. There is a
girl’s face—a cruel face—that I used rather to admire when I was a
child, and sometimes dream about; and on the last night but one—of—my
happy life—I looked at that picture with Godfrey, and told him my
feeling about that face, and he told me the pitiful story of the girl
whose portrait we were looking at. The creature had a sad life, and
died in France, poor and broken-hearted. Two hours later I heard a
strange step upon the terrace—while Godfrey and I were sitting in
the library—a stealthy, creeping step, coming near one of the open
windows, and then creeping away again. When we looked out there was
no one to be seen.”

“And this was the night before—Sir Godfrey’s death?”

“Yes. I told my father about it—after—after my trouble; and when he
questioned the gardeners he discovered that footprints had been seen
by one of them on the damp gravel the morning after I heard that
ghost-like step. They were strange footprints the man was sure, or he
would not have noticed them—the prints of a shoe with a flat heel—not
of a large foot,—but they were not very distinct, and he went over
them with his roller, and rolled them out, and thought no more about
the fact till my father questioned him. The next day was dry and
warm, as you know, and the gravel was hard next night. There were no
footprints seen—afterwards.”

“Did the gardener trace those marks beyond the terrace—to the avenue,
for instance?”

“Not he. All he did was to roll them out with his iron-roller.”

“They suggest one point—that the murderer may have been lurking about
on the night before the crime.”

“I am sure of it. That footstep would not have frightened me if there
had been no meaning in it. I felt as a Scotchman does when he has
seen the shadow of the shroud round his friend’s figure. It is a
point for you to remember, Theodore; if you mean to help me.”

“I do mean to help you.”

“God bless you for that promise,” she cried, giving him her hand,
“and if you want any further information about the Strangways there
is some one here who may be useful. Godfrey’s old bailiff, Jasper
Blake, lived over ten years at Cheriton. He only left there when
the Squire died, and he almost immediately entered the service of
Godfrey’s father. If you can stay till the evening I will send for
him, and you can ask him as many questions as you like.”

“I will stay. There is a moon rather late in the evening, and I shall
be able to get back any time before midnight. But, Juanita, as an
honest man, I am bound to tell you that I believe you are following
an _ignis fatuus_—you are influenced by prejudices and fancies,
rather than by reason.”




CHAPTER X.

                  “The snow
    Of her sweet coldness hath extinguished quite
    The fire that but even now began to flame.”


Theodore Dalbrook, a sensible, hard-headed man of business, was like
a puppet in his cousin’s hands. She told him to toil for her, and he
deemed himself privileged to be allowed so to labour. She put him
upon that which, according to his own conviction, was an absolutely
false track, and he was compelled to follow it. She bade him think
with her thoughts, and he bent his mind to hers.

Yes, she was right perhaps. It was a vendetta. Lord Cheriton had
lived all these years hemmed round with unseen, unsuspected foes.
They had not burned his ricks, or tried to burn his dwelling-house;
they had not slandered him to the neighbourhood in anonymous
letters; they had not poisoned his dogs or his pheasants. Such petty
malevolence had been too insignificant for them. But they had waited
till his fortunes had reached their apogee, till his only child had
grown from bud to flower and he had wedded her to an estimable young
man of patrician lineage and irreproachable character. And, just
when fate was fairest the cowardly blow had been struck—a blow that
blighted one young life, and darkened those two other lives sloping
towards the grave, the lives of father and mother, rendered desolate
because of their daughter’s desolation.

Mastered by that will which was his law, the will of the woman he
loved, Theodore began to believe as she believed, or at least to
think it just possible that there might be amongst the remnant of the
Strangway race a man so lost and perverted, so soured by poverty, so
envenomed by disgraces and mortifications, eating slowly into the
angry heart, like rust into iron, that he had become at last the
very incarnation of malignity—hating the man who had prospered while
he had failed, hating the owner of his people’s forfeited estate as
if that owner had robbed them of it—hating with so passionate a
malevolence that nothing less than murder could appease his wrath.
Yes, there might be such a man. In the history of mankind there have
been such crimes. They are not common in England, happily; but among
the Celtic nations they are not uncommon.

“My first brief,” mused Theodore, with a grim smile, as he walked up
and down the drawing-room while his cousin was writing a memorandum
requesting the bailiff’s presence. “It is more like a case entrusted
to a detective than submitted to counsel’s opinion; but it will serve
to occupy my mind while I am eating my dinners. My poor Juanita! Will
her loss seem less, I wonder, when she has discovered the hand that
widowed her?”

He dined with his cousin at a small round table in the spacious
dining-room which had held so many cheerful gatherings in the years
that were gone: the sisters and their husbands, and the sisters’
friends; and Godfrey’s college friends; and those old friends of the
neighbourhood who seemed only a little less than kindred, by reason
of his having known them all his life. And now these two were sitting
here alone, and the corners of the room were full of shadows. One
large circular lamp suspended over the table was the only light, the
carving being done in a serving-room adjoining.

Juanita was too hospitable to allow the meal to be silent or gloomy.
She put aside the burden of her grief and talked to her cousin of his
family and of his own prospects; and she seemed warmly interested in
his future success. It was but a sisterly interest, he knew, frankly
expressed as a sister’s might have been; yet it was sweet to him
nevertheless, and he talked freely of his plans and hopes.

“I felt stifled in that old street,” he told her. “A man must be very
happy to endure life in a country town.”

“But you are not unhappy, Theodore?” she interrupted, wonderingly.

“Unhappy—no, that would be too much to say, perhaps. You know how
fond I am of my father. I was glad to work with him, and to feel that
I was useful to him; but that feeling was not enough to reconcile
me to the monotony of my days. A man who has home ties—a wife and
children—may be satisfied in that narrow circle; but for a young man
with his life before him it is no better than a prison.”

“I understand,” said Juanita, eagerly. “I can fully sympathize with
you. I am very glad you are ambitious, Theodore. A man is worthless
who is without ambition. And now tell me what you will do when you go
to London. How will you begin?”

“I shall put up at the Inns of Court Hotel for a few days while I
look about for a suitable set of chambers, and when I have found
them and furnished them, and brought my books and belongings from
Dorchester, I shall sit down and read law. I can read while I am
qualifying for the Bar. I shall go on reading after I have qualified.
My life will be to sit in chambers and read law books until some one
brings me business. It hardly sounds like a brilliant career, does
it?”

“All beginnings are hard,” she answered, gently. “I suppose my father
went through just the same kind of drudgery when he began?”

“Well, yes, he must have gone upon the same lines, I fancy. There is
no royal road.”

“And while you are studying law and waiting for briefs, will you have
time to look after my interests?”

“Yes, Juanita. Your interest shall be my first thought always. If it
can make you happier to discover your husband’s murderer——”

“Happier! It is the only thing that can reconcile me to the burden of
living.”

“If it is for your happiness, you need not fear that I shall ever
relax in my endeavours. I may fail,—indeed, I fear I must fail,—but
it shall not be for the lack of earnestness or perseverance.”

“I knew that you would help me,” she said, fervently, holding out her
hand to him across the table.

Dinner was over, and they were alone, with the grapes and peaches
of the Priory hothouses, which were not even second to those of
Cheriton, unheeded upon the table before them.

“Blake is in the house by this time, I dare say,” said Juanita
presently. “Would you like to see him here, and shall I stay, or
would you rather talk to him alone?”

“I had better take him in hand alone. It is always hard work to get
straight answers out of that sort of man, and any cross current
distracts him. His thoughts are always ready to go off at a tangent.”

“He knows all about the Squire’s children. He can give you any
particulars you want about them.”

The butler came into the room five minutes afterwards with the
coffee, and announced the bailiff’s arrival.

Juanita rose at once, and left her cousin to receive Jasper Blake
alone.

He came into the room with rather a sheepish air. He was about sixty,
young looking for his age, with a bald forehead, and stubbly iron
grey hair, and a little bit of whisker on each sunburnt cheek. He had
the horsey look still, though he had long ceased to have anything to
do with horses beyond buying and selling cart-horses for the home
farm, and occasionally exhibiting a prize animal in that line. He was
a useful servant, and a thoroughly honest man, of the old-fashioned
order.

“Mr. Blake, I want you to give me some information about old friends
of yours. I have a little business in hand, which indirectly concerns
the Strangway family, and I want to be quite clear in my own mind as
to how many are left of them, and where they are to be found.”

The bailiff rubbed one of his stunted whiskers meditatively, and
shook his head.

“There was never many of ’em to leave, sir,” he said, grumpily, “and
I don’t believe there’s any of ’em left anywheres. There seems to
have been a curse upon ’em, for the last hundred years. Nothing ever
throve with them. Look at what Cheriton is now, and what it was in
their time.”

“I didn’t know it in their time, Mr. Blake.”

“Ah, you’re not old enough; but your father knew the place. He did
business for the old Squire—till things got too bad—mortgages, and
accommodation bills, and overdrawn accounts at the bank, and such
like, and your father washed his hands of the business—a long-headed
gentleman, your father. He can tell you what Cheriton was like in the
Squire’s time.”

“Why do you suppose the Strangways are all dead and gone?”

“Well, sir, first and foremost it’s fifteen years and more since I’ve
heard of any of ’em, and the last I heard was about as bad as bad
could be.”

“What was that last report?”

“It was about Master Reginald—that was the eldest son, him that was
colonel of a Lancer regiment, and married Lord Dangerfield’s youngest
daughter. I remember the bonfires on the hills out by Studlands just
as if it happened yesterday, but it’s more than forty years ago, and
I was a boy in the stables at fourteen shillings a week.”

“Reginald, the elder son, colonel of Lancers, married Lord
Dangerfield’s daughter—about 1840,” wrote Theodore in a pocket-book
which he held ready for taking notes.

“What was it you heard about him?” he asked.

“Well, sir, it was Mr. de Lacy’s servant that told me. He’d been
somewhere in the south with his master where there was gambling—a
place where the folks make a regular trade of it. It’s a wonderful
climate, says Mr. de Lacy’s man, and the gentry go there for their
health, and very often finish by shooting themselves, and it seems
Colonel Strangway was there. He’d come over from Corsica, which it
seems was in the neighbourhood—where he’d left his poor wife all
among brigands and savages—and he was at the tables day and night,
and he had a wonderful run of luck, so that they called him the
king of the place, and it was who but he? Howsoever the tide turned
suddenly, and he began losing, and he lost his last sixpence, in a
manner of speaking regular cleaned out, Mr. de Lacy’s man said; and
by-and-by there comes another gentleman, a Jewish gentleman from
Paris, rolling in money, and playing for the sake of the science, and
able to hold out where another man must have given in; and in a week
or two _he_ was the king of the place, and the Colonel was nowhere,
just living on tick at the hotel, and borrowing a fiver from Mr.
de Lacy or any other old acquaintance whenever he had the chance,
and making as much play as he could with two or three cart wheels,
where he used to play with hundred-franc pieces. And so it went on,
and he cut up uncommon rough when anybody happened to offend him,
and there was more than one row at the hotel or in the gardens—they
don’t allow no rows in the gambling rooms,—and just as the season was
coming to an end the Colonel went off one afternoon to catch the boat
for Corsica. The boat was to start after dark from Nice, and there
was a lot of traffic in the port, but not as much light as there
ought to have been, and the Colonel missed his footing in going from
the quay to the boat, and went to the bottom like a plummet. Some
people thought he made away with himself on purpose, and that the
one sensible thing he did was to make it look like accident, so as
not to vitiate the insurance on his life, which Lord Dangerfield had
taken care of, and had paid the premiums ever since the Colonel began
to go to the bad. Anyhow, he never came up again alive out of that
water. His death was published in the papers: ‘Accidentally drowned
at Nice.’ I should never have known the rights or the wrongs of it if
Mr. de Lacy hadn’t happened to be visiting here soon afterwards.”

“Did Colonel Strangway leave no children?”

“Neither chick nor child.”

“Do you know if his widow is still living?”

“No, sir. That is the last I ever heard of him or his.”

“What about the younger brother?”

“I believe he must be dead too, though I can’t give you chapter and
verse. He never married, didn’t Mr. Frederick—not to my knowledge.
He went on board a man-of-war before he was fifteen, and at five and
twenty he was a splendid officer and as fine a young man as you need
wish to see; but he was too fond of the bottle. China was the ruin
of him, some folks said, and he got court-marshalled out there, not
long after they sacked that there Summer Palace there was so much
talk about; and then he contrived to pass into the mercantile marine,
which was a come-down for a Strangway, and for a few years he was one
of their finest officers, a regular dare-devil; could sail a ship
faster and safer than any man in the service; used to race home with
the spring pickings of tea, when tea wasn’t the cheap muck it is now,
and when there weren’t no Suez Canal to spoil sport. But he took to
his old games again, and he got broke again, broke for drunkenness
and insubordination; and then he went and loafed and drank in
Jersey—where, it’s my belief, he died some years ago.”

“You have no positive information about his death?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

“There was one daughter, I think?”

“Yes, there was a daughter, Miss Eva. I taught her to ride. There
wasn’t a finer horsewoman in Dorsetshire, but a devil of a temper—the
real Strangway temper. I wasn’t surprised when I heard she’d married
badly; I wasn’t surprised when I heard she’d run away from her
husband.”

“Did she leave any children?”

“No, not by him.”

“But afterwards—do you know if there were children?”

“I can’t say that I do. She was living in Boulogne when I last heard
of her, and somebody told me afterwards that she died there.”

“That’s vague. She may be living still.”

“I don’t think that’s likely. It’s more than ten years—ay, it’s
nearer fifteen—since I heard of her death. She was not the kind of
woman to hide her light under a bushel for a quarter of a century. If
she were alive I feel sure we should have heard of her at Cheriton.
Lord! how fond she was of the place, and how proud she was of her
good looks and her old name, and how haughty and overbearing she was
with every other young woman that ever came in her way.”

“She must have been a remarkably disagreeable young person, I take
it.”

“Well, not altogether, sir. She had a taking way when she wasn’t
in her tantrums, and she was very good to the poor people about
Cheriton. _They_ doated upon her. She never quarrelled with them. It
was with her father she got on worst. Those two never could hit it
off. They were too much alike. And at last, when she was close upon
seventeen, and a regular clipper, things got so bad that the Squire
packed off the governess at an hour’s warning. She was too young and
silly to manage such a pupil as Miss Strangway, and it’s my belief
she sided with her in all her mischief, and made things worse. He
turned her out of doors neck and crop, and a week afterwards he took
his daughter up to London and handed her over to an English lady, who
kept a finishing school somewhere abroad, at a place called Losun.”

“At Lausanne, I think.”

“Yes, that was the name. She was to stay there for a year, and then
she was to have another year’s schooling in Paris to finish her; but
she never got to Paris, didn’t Miss Eva. She ran off from Lausanne
with a lieutenant in a marching regiment, and her father never saw
her face again. He had no money to give her if she had married ever
so well, but he took a pride in striking her name out of his will all
the same.”

“What was her husband’s name?”

“Darcy—Tom Darcy. He was an Irishman, and I’ve heard he treated her
very badly.”

“Do you know how long it was after her marriage that she left him?”

“I only know when I heard they were parted, and that was six or seven
years after she ran away from Lausanne.”

“How long was that before the Squire’s death and the sale of the
estate?”

“Nearly ten years, I should say.”

“That makes it about thirty-four years ago?”

“Yes, that’s about it.”

Theodore noted down the date in his book. He had heard all these
things before now—loosely, and in a disjointed fashion—never having
been keenly interested in the vicissitudes of the Strangways.

“Who was the man who took her away from her husband?”

“God knows,” said Jasper. “None of us at Cheriton ever heard.
We fancied he must have been a Frenchman, for she was heard of
afterwards—a good many years afterwards—at Boulogne. Our old Vicar
saw her there the year before he died—it must have been as late as
sixty-four or sixty-five, I fancy,—a wreck, he said. He wouldn’t have
recognized her if she hadn’t spoken to him, and she had to tell him
who she was. I heard him tell my old master all about it, one summer
afternoon at the Vicarage gate, when Sir Godfrey had driven over to
see him. Yes, it must have been as late as sixty-five, I believe.”

“Five years after Lord Cheriton bought the estate?”

“About that.”

“Do you remember the name of Miss Strangway’s governess? Of course,
you do, though.”

The bailiff rubbed his iron-grey whisker with a puzzled air.

“My memory’s got to be like a corn-sieve of late years,” he said,
“but I ought to remember her name. She was at Cheriton over four
years, and I only wish I had a guinea for every time I’ve sat behind
her and Miss Strangway in the pony chaise. She was a light-hearted,
good-tempered young woman, but she hadn’t bone enough for her work.
She wasn’t up to Miss Strangway’s weight. Let me see now—what was
that young woman’s name?—she was a good-looking girl, sandy, with a
high colour and a freckled skin. I ought to remember.”

“Take a glass of claret, Mr. Blake, and take your time. The name will
come back to you. Have you ever heard of the lady since she left
Cheriton?”

“Never—she wasn’t likely to come back to this part of the world after
having been turned out neck and crop, as she was. What was the name
of the man who saw the apple fall?—Newton—that was it, Sarah Newton.
Miss Strangway used to call her Sally. I remember that.”

“Do you know where she came from, or what her people were?”

“She came from somewhere near London, and it’s my opinion her father
kept a shop; but she was very close about her home and her relatives.”

“And she was young, you say?”

“Much too young for the place. She couldn’t have been five and twenty
when she left; and a girl like Miss Strangway, a motherless girl,
wanted some one older and wiser to keep her in order.”

“Had the Squire’s wife been long dead at that time?”

“She died before I went to service at Cheriton. Miss Eva couldn’t
have been much above seven years old when she lost her mother.”

Theodore asked no more questions, not seeing his way to extracting
any further information from the bailiff. He had been acquainted
with most of these facts before, or had heard them talked about. The
handsome daughter who ran away from a foreign school with a penniless
subaltern—the Strangway temper, and the pitched battles between
the spendthrift father and the motherless unmanageable girl—the
life-long breach, and then a life of poverty and an untimely death
in a strange city, only vaguely known, yet put forward as a positive
and established fact. He had heard all this: but the old servant’s
recollections helped him to tabulate his facts—helped him, too, with
the name of the governess, which might be of some use in enabling him
to trace the story of the last of the Strangways.

“If there is any ground for Juanita’s theory, I think the man most
likely to have done the deed would be the Colonel of Lancers,
supposed to be drowned at Nice. If I were by any means to discover
that the story of the drowning was a mistake, and that the Colonel is
in the land of the living, I should be inclined to adopt Juanita’s
view of the murder.”

He encouraged the bailiff to take a second glass of claret, and
talked over local interests with him for ten minutes or so, while
his dog-cart was being brought round; and then, Mr. Blake having
withdrawn, he went to the drawing-room where Juanita was sitting at
work by a lamp-lit table, and wished her good night.

“Did you find Jasper intelligent?” she asked, eagerly.

“Very intelligent.”

“And did you find out all you wanted from him?”

“Not quite all. He told me very little that I did not know before;
but there were one or two facts that may be useful. Good night, Nita,
good night, and good-bye.”

“Not for long,” she answered. “You will spend Christmas at home, of
course.”

“Yes, I shall go home for the Christmas week, I suppose.”

“You will have something to tell me by that time, perhaps. You will
be on the track.”

“Don’t be too sanguine, Nita. I will do my uttermost.”

“I am sure you will. Ah, you don’t know how I trust you, how I lean
upon you. God bless you, Theodore. You are my strong rock. I, who
never had a brother, turn to you as a sister might. If you can do
this thing for me—if you can avenge his cruel death——”

“If—what then, Juanita?” he asked, paling suddenly, and his eyes
flaming.

“I shall honour—esteem you—as I have never done yet; and you know I
have always looked up to you, Theodore. God bless and prosper you.
Good night.”

Her speech, kind as it was, fell upon his enthusiasm like ice. He
was holding both her hands, almost crushing them unawares in his
vehemence. Then his grip loosened all at once, he bent his head,
gently kissed those slender hands, muttered a husky good night, and
hurried from the room.




CHAPTER XI.

    “The God of love—_ah, benedicite_!
     How mighty and how great a Lord is he!”


A week later Theodore Dalbrook was established in chambers on the
second floor of No. 2, Ferret Court, Temple.

Ferret Court is one of the few places in the Temple which have not
been improved and beautified out of knowledge within the last thirty
years. The architect and the sanitary engineer have passed by on the
other side, and have left Ferret Court to its original shabbiness.
Its ceilings have not been elevated, or its windows widened, nor has
the Early-English stone front replaced the shabby old brickwork. Its
time has not come. The rooms are small and low, the queer old closets
where generations of lawyers have kept their goods and chattels are
dark and redolent of mice. The staircases are rotten, the heavy old
balusters are black with age, and the deep old window-seats are set
in windows of the early Georgian era.

The chambers suited Theodore, first because they were cheap, and next
because the sitting-room, which was at the back, commanded a good
view of the river. The bedroom was a tolerable size, and there was a
dressing-room just big enough to hold bath and boots. He furnished
the rooms comfortably, with solid old-fashioned furniture, partly
consisting of surplus articles sent from the old house in Dorchester,
and partly of his own purchases in London. The rooms were arranged
with a sober taste which was by no means inartistic, and there was
just enough bright colouring in the Algerian portières and a few
handsome pieces of Oriental crockery to relieve the dark tones of old
oak and Spanish mahogany. Altogether the chambers had the established
look of a nest which was meant to last through wind and weather, a
shelter in which a man expected to spend a good many years of his
life.

He had another reason for choosing those old rooms in Ferret Court
in preference to chambers in any of those new and commodious houses
in the courts that had been rebuilt of late years. It was in this
house that James Dalbrook had begun his legal career; it was here,
on the ground floor, that the future Lord Cheriton had waited for
briefs nearly forty years ago; and it was here that fame and fortune
had first visited him, a shining apparition, bringing brightness into
the shabby old rooms, irradiating the gloomy old court with the glory
of triumphant ambition, hopes suddenly realized, the consciousness
of victory. James Dalbrook had occupied those dingy chambers fifteen
years, and long after he became a great man, and he had gone from
them almost reluctantly to a spacious first-floor in King’s Bench
Walk. He had enjoyed the reputation of a miser at that period of his
life. He was never known to give a dinner to a friend; he lived in a
close retirement which his enemies stigmatized as a hole-and-corner
life; he was never seen at places of amusement; he never played
cards, or bet upon a race. Socially he was unpopular.

Theodore had taken all the preliminary steps, and had arranged to
read with a well-known special pleader. He was thoroughly in earnest
in his determination to succeed in this new line. He wanted to prove
to his father that his abandonment of the Dorchester office was
neither a caprice nor a folly. He was even more in earnest in his
desire to keep his promise to his cousin Juanita.

Almost his first act upon arriving in London had been to go to
Scotland Yard in the hope of finding the detective who had been sent
to Cheriton, and his inquiries there were so far successful that he
was able to make an appointment with Mr. Churton for the next day but
one.

He had talked with Churton after the adjourned inquest, and had
heard all that the professional intellect had to offer in the way
of opinion at that time; but he thought it worth his while to find
out if the detective’s ideas had taken any new development upon
subsequent reflection, and also to submit Juanita’s theory to
professional consideration. He was not one of those amateurs who
think that they are cleverer at a trade than the man who has served a
long apprenticeship to it.

“Have you thought anything more about the Cheriton murder since last
July, Mr. Churton?” he asked; “or has your current work been too
engrossing to give you time for thought?”

“No, sir. I’ve had plenty of other cases to think about, but I’m not
likely to forget such a case as that at Cheriton, a case in which I
was worsted more completely than I have been in anything for the last
ten years. I’ve thought about it a good bit, I can assure you, Mr.
Dalbrook.”

“And do you see any new light?”

“No, sir. I stick pretty close to my original opinion. Sir Godfrey
Carmichael was murdered by somebody that bore a grudge against him;
and there’s a woman at the bottom of it.”

“Why a woman? Might not a man’s hatred be deadly enough to lead to
murder?”

“Not unless he was egged on by a woman; or had been jilted by a
woman; or was jealous of a woman; or thought he had a woman’s wrongs
to avenge.”

“Is that what your experience teaches you, Mr. Churton?”

“Yes, Mr. Dalbrook, that is what my experience teaches me.”

“And you think it was an enemy of Sir Godfrey’s who fired that shot?”

“I do.”

“Do you think the enemy was a woman—the hand that pulled the trigger
a woman’s hand?”

“No, I don’t. A woman couldn’t have been about the place without
being remarked—or got clear off, as a man might.”

“There are the servants. Could the murderer be one of them?”

“I do not think so, sir. I’ve taken stock of them
all—stables—lodges—everywhere. I never met with such a superior set
of servants. The person at the west lodge is a lady bred and born,
I should say. She gave me a good deal of information about the
household. I consider her a remarkably intelligent woman, and I know
she is of my opinion as to the motive of the murder.”

“And yet if I tell you that Sir Godfrey had not an enemy in
the world?” said Theodore, dwelling on the main point, and not
particularly interested in what the highly-intelligent Mrs. Porter
might have said upon the subject.

“I should tell you, sir, that no man can answer for another man.
There is something in the lives of most of us that we would rather
keep dark.”

“I don’t believe there was any dark spot in Sir Godfrey’s life. But
what if there were an enemy of Lord Cheriton’s—a man who has been a
judge is in a fair way to have made enemies—a foe vindictive enough
to strike at him through his son-in-law, to smite him by destroying
his daughter’s happiness? She is his only child, remember, and all
his hopes and ambitions centre in her.”

“Well, Mr. Dalbrook, if there was such a man he would be an
out-and-out blackguard.”

“Yes, it would be a refinement of cruelty—a Satanic hate; but such a
man might exist. Remember the murder of Lord Mayo—one of the wisest
and most beloved of India’s rulers. The wretch who killed him had
never seen his face till the day of the murder. He thought himself
unjustly condemned, and he killed the man who represented the Power
which condemned him. Might not some wrong-headed Englishman have the
same vindictive feeling against an English judge?”

“Yes, it is possible, no doubt.”

“My cousin, Lady Carmichael, has another theory.”

Theodore explained the positions of Lord Cheriton and the race that
preceded him as owners of the soil, and Juanita’s suspicion of some
unknown member of the Strangway family; but the detective rejected
this notion as unworthy of professional consideration.

“It is like a young lady to get such an idea into her head,” he
said. “If the estate had changed hands yesterday—well, even then
I shouldn’t suspect the former owners of wanting to murder the
purchaser’s son-in-law; but when you reflect that Lord Cheriton has
been in peaceful possession of the property for more than twenty
years the idea isn’t worth a moment’s thought. What put such a fancy
into the lady’s head, do you think, Mr. Dalbrook?”

“Grief! She has brooded upon her loss until her sorrow has taken
strange shapes. She thinks that it is her duty to help in bringing
her husband’s murderer to justice. She has racked her brains to
discover the motive of that cruel crime. She has conjured up the
image of incarnate hatred, and she calls that image by the name of
Strangway. I have pledged myself to act upon this idea of hers as if
it were inspiration, and the first part of my task will be to find
out any surviving member of Squire Strangway’s family. He only left
three children, so the task ought not to be impossible.”

“You don’t mean, sir, that you are going to act upon the young lady’s
theory?”

“I do mean it, Mr. Churton, and I want you to help me; or at any rate
to give me a lesson. How am I to begin?”

He laid his facts before the detective, reading over the notes which
he had elaborated from Jasper Blake’s reminiscences and from his own
recollection of various conversations in which the Strangways had
figured.

Churton listened attentively, nodded, or shook his head occasionally,
and was master of every detail after that one hearing.

“Jersey is not a large place. If I were following up this inquiry I
should go first for the son who is supposed to have died in Jersey,”
he said, when he had heard all. “I should follow that line as far as
it goes, and then I should hunt up the particulars of the Colonel’s
death, the gentleman who was drowned at Nice. If any Strangway had a
hand in the business, it must have been one of those two, or the son
of one of them. But I tell you plainly, Mr. Dalbrook, that I don’t
put any faith in that poor lady’s notion—no, not that much,” said the
detective, snapping his fingers contemptuously.

“Yet it was you yourself who first mooted the idea of a vendetta.”

“So it was; but I didn’t mean a vendetta on such grounds as that. An
estate changes hands, and—after twenty years and more—the original
holders try to murder the son-in-law of the purchaser! That won’t
hold water, sir. There’s not enough human passion in it. I’ve had to
study humanity, Mr. Dalbrook. It’s been a part of my profession, and
perhaps I’ve studied human nature closer than many a philosopher who
sits in his library and writes a book about it. Now, there’s no human
nature in that notion of Lady Carmichael’s. A man may be very savage
because his spendthrift father has squandered his estate, and he may
feel savage with the lucky man who bought and developed that estate,
and may envy him in his enjoyment of it—but he won’t nurse his wrath
for nearly a quarter of a century, and then give expression to his
feelings all at once with a revolver. _That_ isn’t human nature.”

“How about the exception to every rule? Might not this be an
exceptional case?”

“It might, of course. There’s no truer saying than that fact is
stranger than fiction; but, for all that, this notion of Lady
Carmichael’s is a young lady’s notion, and it belongs to fiction and
not to fact. I wouldn’t waste my time upon it, if I were you, Mr.
Dalbrook.”

“I must keep my promise, Mr. Churton. I am obliged to you for your
plain speaking, and I am inclined to agree with you; but I have made
a promise, and I must keep it.”

“Naturally, sir; and if in the course of your inquiries I can be of
any use to you, I shall be very glad to co-operate.”

“I rely on your help. Remember there is a handsome reward to be
earned by you if you can bring about the discovery of the murderer.
My part in the search will count for nothing.”

“I understand, sir. That’s a stimulus, no doubt; but I hardly wanted
it. When a case baffles me as this case has done, I would work day
and night, and live on bread and water for a month, to get at the
rights of it. Good day. You’ve got my private address, and you can
wire me anywhen.”

“You’re a Sussex man, Mr. Churton, I fancy?”

“Born in the village of Bramber.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Theodore left Waterloo the following evening, and landed at St.
Heliers on the following morning an hour or so before noon. He landed
on the island as an absolute stranger, and with the vaguest idea of
the work that lay before him, but with the determination to lose no
time in beginning that work. He sent his valise to Brett’s Hotel,
and he walked along the pier to the town, and inquired his way to
the Police Office. He was not going in quest of information about a
member of the criminal classes; but the man he was hunting had been a
notorious drunkard, and it seemed to him that in a small settlement
like St. Heliers such a man would have been likely to attract the
attention of the police at some stage of his downward career.

The first official whom Theodore interrogated had never heard of
the name of Strangway in the island; but an elderly inspector
appearing presently upon the scene, and listening attentively to the
conversation, made a suggestion.

“You say the gentleman was fond of drink, sir, and in that case
he’d be likely to have his favourite public, where they’d know all
about him. Now, there are not so many taverns in St. Heliers where
a sea-captain, and a broken-down gentleman, would care to enjoy
himself. He wouldn’t go to a low place, you see; and he wouldn’t
fancy a swell place. It would be some house betwixt and between,
where he’d be looked up to a bit—and it would be something of a
seafaring place, you may be sure. There ain’t so many but what
you could look in at ’em all, and ask a few questions, and get on
the right track. I can give you the names of two or three of the
likeliest.”

“I shall be much obliged,” said Theodore. “I think it’s a capital
idea.”

The inspector wrote down the names of three taverns, tore the leaf
out of his pocket-book, and handed it to Mr. Dalbrook.

“If you don’t hear of him at one of those, I doubt if you’ll hear
of him anywhere on the island,” he said. “Those houses are all near
the pier and the quays. It won’t take you long to go from one to the
other. ‘The Rose and Crown,’ that’s where the English pilots go; ‘La
Belle Alliance,’ that’s a French house with a _table d’hôte_. They’ve
got a very good name for their brandy, and it’s a great place for
broken-down gentlemen. You can get a good dinner for half-a-crown
with _vin ordinaire_ included.”

“I’ll try the ‘Belle Alliance’ first,” said Theodore. “It sounds
likely.”

“Yes, I believe it’s about the likeliest,” replied the inspector.

The “Belle Alliance” fronted the quay, and stood at the corner of
a shabby old street. There was a church close by, and a dingy old
churchyard. Everything surrounding the “Belle Alliance” was shabby
and faded, and its outlook on the dirty quay and the traffic of ugly
waggons and uglier tracks, hogsheads and lumber of all kinds, was
depressing in the extreme.

But the tavern itself had an air of smartness which an English tavern
would hardly have had in the same circumstances. The interior was
gay with much looking-glass, and a good deal of tarnished gilding.
There were artificial flowers in sham silver vases on the tables,
and there was a semi-circular counter at one end of the restaurant,
behind which a ponderous divinity, still youthful, but expansive, sat
enthroned, her sleek, black hair elaborately dressed, her forehead
ornamented with accroche-cœurs, and a cross of Jersey diamonds
sparkling upon her swan-like throat, which was revealed by one of
those open collars which are dear to the lower order of French women.
There was a row of tables in front of the windows which looked
towards the quay, and there was a long, narrow table in the middle of
the room, laid for the _table d’hôte dejeuner_; but as yet the room
was empty, save for one young man and woman, of the tourist order,
who were whispering and tittering over a _café complet_ at one of the
small tables furthest from the buffet.

Theodore went straight to the front of the buffet, and saluted the
lady enthroned there.

“Madame speaks English, no doubt?”

“Oh, yes, but a leetle. I am live long time in Jairsey, where is more
English as French peoples.”

After this sample speech it seemed to him that he might get on better
with the lady in her native tongue, so he asked her for a cup of
coffee in her own language, and stood at the counter while he drank
it, and talked to her of indifferent matters, she nothing loth.

“You have lived a long time in Jersey,” he said. “Does that mean a
long time in this house?”

“Except one year I have lived in this house all the time, nine
years. I was only nineteen when I undertook the position of _dame du
comptoir_. I could not have undertaken such a responsibility with
a stranger, but the proprietor is my uncle, and he knew how to be
indulgent to my youth and inexperience.”

“And then, a handsome face is always an attraction. You must have
brought him good fortune, madame.”

“He is kind enough to say so. He found it difficult to dispense with
my services while I was absent, though he had a person from London
who had been much admired at the Crystal Palace.”

“And you, madame,—was it a feminine caprice, the desire for change,
which made you abandon your uncle during that time?”

“I left him when I married,” replied the lady, with a profound sigh.
“I returned to him a heart-broken widow.”

“Pray forgive me for having recalled the memory of your grief. I am a
stranger in this place, and I am here on a somewhat delicate mission.
My first visit is to this house, because I knew I should find
intelligence and sympathy here rather than among my own countrymen.
I am fortunate in meeting with a lady who has occupied an important
position at St. Heliers for so long a period. I have strong reasons
for wishing to discover the history of a gentleman who came to the
Island some years ago—I do not know how many—after having been
unfortunate in the world. He was a naval man.”

“My poor husband was a naval man,” sighed the _dame du comptoir_.

“A pilot, no doubt,” thought Theodore.

Theodore’s manner, which was even more flattering than his words,
had made a favourable impression, and the lady was disposed to be
confidential. She glanced at the clock, and was glad to see that it
was only twenty minutes past twelve. There was time for a little
further conversation with this handsome, well-bred Englishman,
before the habitués of the “Belle Alliance” came trooping in for the
half-past twelve o’clock _table d’hôte_. Already the atmosphere was
odorous with fried sole and _ragout de mouton_.

“The gentleman of whom I am in quest is reported to have died on the
Island,” he continued; “but this is very likely to have been a false
report, and it is quite possible that Captain Strangway may still——”

“Captain Strangway,” echoed the woman, with an agitated air.

“Yes, I see you know all about him. You can help me to find him.”

“Know him!” cried the woman. “I should think I did know him, to my
bitter cost. Captain Strangway was my husband.”

“Good Heavens!”

“He was my husband. The people will be here in a few minutes. If
monsieur will do me the honour to step into my sitting-room, we can
talk without interruption.”




CHAPTER XII.

 “The comfort is, you shall be called to no more payments, fear no more
  tavern bills.”


The _dame du comptoir_ beckoned a waiter, and delegated some portion
of her supreme authority to him for the next quarter of an hour. She
constituted as it were a Regency, and gave her subordinate command
over her wine and liqueur bottles, her _fine champagne_, Bass and
Guinness; and then she ushered Theodore Dalbrook into a very small
sitting-room at the back of the counter, so small indeed that a large
looking-glass, a porcelain stove, two arm-chairs, and one little
table left hardly standing room.

Theodore followed with a sense of bewilderment. He had told himself
that the Island of Jersey was a world so small that he could not
have much difficulty in tracing any man who had lived and died there
within the last ten years; but accident had been kinder to him than
he had hoped.

The lady seated herself in one of the ruby velvet arm-chairs, and
motioned him to the other.

“You have given me a shock, monsieur,” she said. “My friends in the
island know that my marriage was unfortunate, and they never mention
my husband. He is forgotten as if he had never been. I sometimes
fancy that year of my life was only a troubled dream. Even my name is
unchanged. I was called Mdlle. Coralie before I married. I am called
Madame Coralie now.”

“I am sorry to have caused you painful emotion, madame, but it is
most important to me to trace the history of your husband’s later
years, and I deem myself very fortunate in having found you.”

“Is it about a property, a fortune left him, perhaps?” exclaimed
Coralie, with sudden animation, her fine eyes lighting up with hope.

“Alas, no. Fortune had nothing in reserve for your unlucky husband.”

“Unlucky, indeed, but not so unlucky as I was in giving my heart to
him. I knew that he was a drunkard. I knew that he had been turned
out of the navy, and out of the mercantile marine on account of
that dreadful vice,—but he—he was very fond of me, poor fellow, and
he swore that he would never touch a glass of brandy again as long
as he lived, if I would consent to marry him. He did turn over a
new leaf for a time, and kept himself sober and steady, and would
hang over that counter for a whole evening talking to me, and take
nothing but black coffee. I thought I could reform him. I thought it
would be a grand thing to reform a man like that, a gentleman bred
and born, a man whose father had been a great landowner, and whose
family name was one of the oldest in England. He was a gentleman in
all his ways. He never forgot himself even when he had been drinking.
He was a gentleman to the last. Such a fine-looking man too. While
he was courting me and kept himself steady he got back his good
looks. He looked ten years younger, and I was very proud of him the
day we were married. He had taken a house for me, a nice little
house on the hill near the Jesuits’ College, with a pretty little
garden, and I had furnished the house out of my savings. I had saved
a goodish bit since I came to Jersey, for my uncle is a generous
man, and my situation here is a good one. I had over two hundred
pounds in hand after I paid for the furniture—these chairs were in
my drawing-room,—and he hadn’t much more than the clothes he stood
upright in, poor fellow. But I wouldn’t have minded that if he had
only kept himself steady. I was prepared to work for him. I knew I
should have to keep him. He was too much of a gentleman to be able to
work except in his profession, and that was gone from him for ever;
so I knew it was incumbent on me to work for both, and I thought
that by letting our drawing-room floor in the season, and by doing a
little millinery all the year round—I’m a good milliner, monsieur—I
thought I could manage to keep a comfortable home, without touching
my two hundred pounds in the Savings Bank.”

“You were a brave, unselfish girl to think so.”

“Ah, sir, we are not selfish when we love. I was very fond of
him, poor fellow. I had begun with pitying him, and then he was a
thoroughbred gentleman—he was _vielle roche_, monsieur, and I have
always admired the noblesse. I am no Republican, moi. And he had such
winning ways when he was sober—and he was not stupid as other men are
when he was drunk—only more brilliant—_la tête montée—hélas, comme il
pétillait d’esprit_—but it was his brain that he was burning—that was
the fuel that made the light. But how is it you interest yourself in
him, monsieur?” she asked, suddenly, fixing him with her sharp black
eyes. “You say it is not about property. You must have a motive, all
the same.”

“I have a motive, but my interest is not personal. I am acting for
some one who now owns the Strangway estate, and who wishes to know
what has become of the old family.”

“What can it matter to any one?” asked Madame Coralie, suspiciously.
“They had lost all their money—of the land that had been theirs not
an acre was left. What business is it of any one’s what became of
them when they were driven from their birth-place. Oh, how my poor
Frederick hated the race that had possessed itself of his estate!
There was nothing too bad for them. When he was excited he would rave
about them awfully—a beggarly lawyer, a black-hearted scoundrel,
that is what he would call Lord—Lord Sherrington, when he had been
drinking.”

Theodore’s brow grew thoughtful. How strange this seemed, almost
like a confirmation of Juanita’s superstitious horror of the
banished race. Perhaps it was not unnatural that an unlucky
spendthrift—ruined, disgraced—should hate the favourite of fortune
who had ousted him; but not with a hate capable of murder, murder
in cold blood, the murder of a man who had never injured him even
indirectly.

“Your husband has been dead some years, I conclude?” he said,
presently.

“Three years and a half on the tenth of last month.”

“And you had a troublesome time with him, I fear?”

“Trouble seems a light word for what I went through. It was like
living in hell—there is no other word—the hell which a madman can
make of all around him. For a few weeks we went on quietly—he
seemed contented, and I was very happy, thinking I had cured him. I
watched him as a cat watches a mouse, for fear he should go wrong
again. He never went out without me; and at home I did all that a
woman can do to make much of the man she loves, studying him in
everything, surrounding him with every little luxury I could afford,
cooking dainty little meals for him, petting him as if he had been
an idolized child. He seemed grateful, for the first few weeks, and
almost happy. Then I saw he was beginning to mope a little. He got
low-spirited, and would sit over the fire and brood—it was cutting
March weather—and would moan over his blighted life, and his own
folly. ‘If I had to begin over again,’ he would say, ‘ah, it would be
different, Cora, it would be all different.’”

“He was not unkind to you?”

“No, he was never unkind, never. To the last, when he died raving
mad with delirium tremens, he was always kind. It was seeing his
madness and his ruin that made my trouble. He was violent sometimes,
and threatened to kill me, but that was only when he didn’t know me.
I watched him moping for a week or so, and then one day, I was so
unhappy at seeing him fret, that I thought I would do anything to
cheer him. I fancied he missed the company in this house, and the
cards and dominoes, and billiards—for before we were married he used
to dine at the _table d’hôte_ two or three times a week, and used to
be in the _café_ or in the billiard-room every night.”

“How did he manage to live without a profession, and without
ostensible means?”

Madame shrugged her shoulders.

“God knows. I think he used to write to his old friends—his brother
officers in the navy or the merchant service—and he got a little
from one and a little from another. He would borrow of any one. And
there was a small legacy from his mother’s sister which fell in to
him soon after he came to Jersey. That was all gone before I married
him. He hadn’t a penny after he’d paid the marriage fees. Well,
monsieur, seeing him so downhearted I proposed that he should go down
to the ‘Belle Alliance’ and have a game at billiards and see his old
friends. ‘You needn’t take any money,’ I said, ‘my uncle will treat
you hospitably.’ He seemed pleased at the idea, and he promised to
be home early; but just as he was leaving the house he turned back
and said there was a little bill of thirty shillings he owed to a
bootmaker in the street round the corner, and he didn’t like to pass
the man’s shop without paying. Would I let him have the money? It
was the first money he’d asked me for since we were married, and I
hadn’t the heart to say no, so I went to my little cash-box and took
out three half sovereigns. I told him that the money meant a week’s
housekeeping. ‘I give you nice little dinners, don’t I, Fred?’ I
said, ‘but you’ve no idea how economical I am.’ He laughed and kissed
me, and said he hated economy, and wished he had a fortune for my
sake, and he went down the street whistling. Well, sir, perhaps you
can guess what happened. He came home at three o’clock next morning
mad with drink, and then I knew he was not to be cured. I went on
trying all the same, though, till the last; and I lived the life of a
soul in torment. I was fond of him to the last, and saw him killing
himself inch by inch, and saw him die a dreadful death, one year and
three days after our wedding day. He spent every penny I had in the
world, and my uncle helped us when that was gone, and I came back to
this house after his funeral a broken-hearted woman. All my furniture
which I’d worked for was sold to pay the rent, and the doctors, and
the undertaker. I just saved the furniture in this room, and that is
all that is left of four hundred and seventy pounds and of my married
life.”

“You were indeed the victim of a generous and confiding heart.”

“I was fond of him to the last, monsieur, and I forgave him all my
sufferings; but let no woman ever marry a drunkard with the hope of
reforming him.”

“Were you quite alone in your martyrdom; had your husband no
relatives left to help him on his dying bed?”

“Not one. He told me he was the last of his race. He must have had
distant relations, I suppose; but his elder brother was dead, and his
sister.”

“You are sure his brother was dead?”

“Yes; he fell into the water at Nice on a dark evening, when he was
going on board the steamer for Corsica. I have got the paper with the
account of his death.”

“Will you show me that paper, and any other documents relating to
your husband’s family? I know I have no right to ask such a favour;
but all I can say is that I shall be very grateful if you will so far
oblige me.”

The _table d’hôte_ was in full swing in the adjoining room, as
testified by the clattering of plates and the jingle of knives
and forks, and a subdued murmur as of a good many confidential
conversations carried on simultaneously.

“You want to see my poor Fred’s private papers,” said the widow,
meditatively. “That’s a good deal to ask; not that there are any
secrets in them that can hurt anybody above ground. The Colonel is
dead, and his sister. My husband was the last. But I can’t understand
why anybody should want to pry into a dead man’s papers, unless
there’s property hanging to them.”

She looked at Theodore suspiciously, as if she could not divest
herself of the idea of a fortune having turned up somehow,
unexpectedly; a fortune to which her dead husband was entitled.

“There is no property, I assure you. It is a question of sentiment,
not of money.”

“You’re a lawyer, I suppose?” said Coralie, still suspiciously.

She supposed that it was only lawyers who went about prying into the
affairs of the dead.

“I am a lawyer; but the business which brings me to Jersey is not law
business.”

“Well, I don’t see how any harm can come to me through your seeing
my husband’s papers. There’s not many to see—a few letters from the
Colonel, and two or three from a lawyer about the legacy, and a dozen
or so from old friends, refusing or sending him money. You’ve spoken
kindly to me, and I’ve felt that you could sympathize with me, though
you’re a stranger—so—well—you may see his letters, though it hurts me
to touch anything that belonged to him, _le pauvre homme_.”

She took a bunch of keys from her pocket, unlocked the little
secretaire, and from one of the drawers produced a bundle of old
letters and cuttings from newspapers, which she handed to Theodore
Dalbrook, and then seated herself opposite to him, planted her
elbows on the table, and watched him while he read, keenly on the
alert for any revelation of his purpose which might escape him in
the course of his reading. She had not altogether relinquished that
idea of an inheritance, or legacy—property of some kind—involved in
this endeavour to trace a dead man’s history. The explanation which
Theodore had given had not convinced her. He had confessed himself a
lawyer, and that was in itself enough to make her doubt him.

The cuttings from old newspapers belonged to the days when Frederick
Strangway had commanded a war-ship, to the days when he fought in
the Chinese war. Some of them recorded the honour he had won for
himself at different stages of his career, and it was only natural
that these should have been carefully preserved by him in all his
wanderings. But there were other cuttings—the report of the court
martial that broke him—the trial in which he stood accused of having
risked the loss of his ship with all hands aboard by his dissolute
habits—a shameful and a painful story. This record of his folly had
been kept by that strange perversity of the human mind which makes
a man secrete and treasure documents which must wring his heart and
bow his head with shame every time he looks at them. There were other
extracts of a like shameful kind—reports of street rows, two cases of
drunken assault in San Francisco, one of a fight in Sydney harbour.
He had kept them all as if they had been words of praise and honour.

The letters were most of them trivial—letters from brother officers
of the past—“very sorry to hear of your embarrassments,” “regret
inability to do more than the enclosed small cheque,” “the numerous
claims upon my purse render it impossible for me to grant the
loan requested,” the usual variations upon the old tune in which
a heavily-taxed _pater familias_ fences with the appeal of an
unlucky acquaintance. They were such letters as are left by the
portmanteauful among the effects of the man for whom the world has
been too hard.

Theodore put aside all this correspondence after a brief glance,
and there remained only four letters in the same strong, resolute
hand—the hand of Reginald Strangway.

The first in date was written on Army and Navy Club paper, and was
addressed to Captain Strangway, R.N., H.M.S. _Cobra_, Hong Kong.

  “MY DEAR FRED,

  “I have been sorry to leave your letter so long unanswered, but
  I am bothered about a great many things. My wife has been out of
  health for nearly a year. The doctors fear her chest is affected,
  and tell me I ought to get her away from England before the winter.
  As things have been going very badly with me for a long time I
  shall not be sorry to cut this beastly town, where the men who have
  made their money, God knows how, are now upon the crest of the
  wave, and by their reckless expenditure have made it impossible
  for a man of small means to live in London—if he wants to live
  like a gentleman. Everything is twice as dear as it used to be
  when I was a subaltern. My wife and I are pigging in two rooms on
  a second floor in Jermyn Street. I live at my club, and she lives
  on her relatives, so that we don’t often have to sit down to a
  lodging-house dinner of burnt soles and greasy chops, but the whole
  business is wretched. She has to go to parties in a four-wheel
  cab, and I can hardly afford the risk of a rubber. So I shall be
  uncommonly glad to cut it all, and settle in some out-of-the-way
  place where we can live cheap, and where the climate will suit
  Millicent.

  “My first idea was Algiers, but things are still rather unsettled
  there, as you know. Lambton, of the Guards, has been shooting
  in Corsica lately, and came home with a glowing account of the
  climate and the cheapness of the inns, which are roughish, but
  clean and fairly comfortable; so I have determined on Corsica.
  We shall be within a day’s sail of Nice, so not utterly out of
  reach of civilization, and we can live there how we like, without
  entertaining a mortal, or having to buy new clothes. Millicent, who
  is fond of novelty, is in love with the notion, and Dangerfield has
  behaved very well to her, promising her an extra hundred a year if
  we will live quietly and keep out of debt, which, considering he is
  as poor as Job, is not so bad. As for my creditors, they are pretty
  quiet since I got Aunt Belle’s legacy, part of which I divided
  among ’em as a sop to Cerberus. They’ll have to be still quieter
  when I’m settled in Corsica.

  “Of course, you heard of that wretched woman’s kicking over the
  traces altogether at last. God knows what will become of her. I
  believe she had been carrying on rather badly for some time before
  Tom found out anything. You know what an ass he is. However, he
  got hold of a letter one evening—met the postman at the door and
  took her letters along with his own, and didn’t like the look of
  one and opened it; and then there was an infernal row, and she
  just put on her bonnet and shawl, walked out of the house and
  called a cab and drove off. He followed in another cab, but it
  was a foggy night, and he lost her before she’d gone far. They
  were in lodgings in Essex Street, and it isn’t easy for one cab to
  chase another on a foggy evening. She never went back to him, and
  he went all over London denouncing her, naming first one man and
  then another, but without any definite idea as to who the real man
  was. The letter was only a couple of sentences in Italian, which
  Tom only knew by sight—but he could see it was an appointment at
  a theatre, for the theatre and hour were named. She snatched the
  letter out of his hand while they were quarrelling, he told me, and
  chucked it into the fire, so he hasn’t even the man’s handwriting
  as evidence against him. It was a hand he had never seen before,
  he says. However, if he wants to find her no doubt he can do
  so, if he takes the trouble. I am sorry she should disgrace her
  family, and of course my wife feels the scandal uncommonly hard
  upon _her_. I can’t say that I feel any pity for Tom Darcy. She had
  led a wretched life with him ever since he sold out, and I don’t
  much wonder at her being deuced glad to leave him. As it’s Tom’s
  business to shoot her lover, and not mine, I shan’t mix myself up
  in the affair—and as for her, well, she has made her bed——!”

There was more in the letter, but the rest was of no interest to
Theodore.

The letter was dated January 3rd, 1851.

Three of the remaining letters were from Corsica, and contained
nothing of any significance. A fourth was written at Monte Carlo, in
answer to an appeal for money, and the date was twelve years later
than the first. It was a gloomy letter, the letter of a ruined man,
who had drunk the cup of disappointment to the dregs.

“To ask me for help seems like a ghastly joke on your part. Whatever
your troubles may be, I fancy my lookout is darker than yours. My
wife and I have vegetated on that accursed island for just a dozen
years—it seems like a lifetime to look back upon. We just had enough
to live upon while my father was alive, for, bad as things were at
Cheriton, he contrived to send me something. Now that he is gone, and
the estate has been sold by the mortgagees, there is nothing left for
me—and we have been living for the last two years upon the pittance
my poor Milly gets from her father. Whatever your cares may be, you
don’t know what it is to have a sick wife whose condition requires
every luxury and indulgence, and to have barely enough for bread and
cheese. If you were to see the house we live in—the tiled floors
and the dilapidated furniture—and the windows that won’t shut—and
the shutters that won’t keep to, and our two Corsican servants who
look like a brace of savages, though they are good creatures in the
main—you would be the last man to howl about your own troubles to me.

“I have been here a month, and with my usual diabolical luck. I am
going home to-morrow—though perhaps I should be wiser if I went up
into the hills behind Monaco and put a bullet through my brains.
Millicent would be no worse off, God help her; for she is entirely
dependent on her father, and I am only an incubus,—but she might
think herself worse off, poor soul, so I suppose I had better go home.

“What am I thinking about? I can’t afford to take refuge in the
suicide’s haven. My life is insured in the Imperial for £3,000, and
poor old Dangerfield has been paying the premium ever since I began
to go to the bad financially. It would be too hard upon him if I shot
myself.”

This was the last letter, and it was endorsed by the brother’s hand.

“Reginald’s last letter. I read in the _Times_ newspaper of his being
drowned at Nice ten days afterwards.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Theodore made a note of the dates of these letters, and the name of
the insurance office. Provided with these data it would be easy for
him to verify the fact of Colonel Strangway’s death, and thus bring
the history of the two sons of old Squire Strangway to its dismal
close in dust and darkness.

And thus would be answered Juanita’s strange suspicion of the house
of Strangway, answered with an unanswerable answer. Who can argue
with Death? Is not that at least the end of all things—the road that
leads no whither?

There remained for him only the task of tracing the erring daughter
to her last resting-place. This would doubtless be more difficult,
as a runaway wife living under a false name, and in all probability
going from place to place, was likely to have left but faint and
uncertain indications of her existence. But the first part of his
task had been almost too easy. He felt that he could take no credit
for what he had done, could expect no gratitude from Juanita.

He thanked Mrs. Strangway—_alias_ Madame Coralie—for her politeness,
and asked to be allowed to offer her a ten-pound note as a trifling
acknowledgment of the favour she had done him. She promptly accepted
this offering, and was only the more convinced that there was
“property” involved in the lawyer’s researches.

“If there is anything to come to _me_ from any of his relations, I
hope nobody will try to keep me out of it,” she said. “I hope his
friends will remember that I gave him my last shilling, and nursed
him when there wasn’t many would have stayed in the room with him?”

Theodore reiterated his assurance that no question of money or
inheritance was involved in his mission to the Island, and then bade
the Captain’s widow a respectful adieu, and threaded his way through
the avenue of tables to the door, and out of the garlic-charged
atmosphere into the fresh autumnal air.

He stayed one night in Jersey, and left at eleven o’clock the next
morning on board the _Fanny_, and slept in his chambers in Ferret
Court, after having written a long letter to Juanita with a full
account of all that he had learnt from the lips of the widow, and
from the letters of the dead.

“I do not surrender my hope of finding the murderer,” he wrote
finally, “but you must now agree with me that I must look elsewhere
than among the remnants of the Strangway race. They can prove an
unanswerable _alibi_—the grave.”

He went to the office of the Imperial next morning, saw the
secretary, and ascertained that the amount of the policy upon Colonel
Strangway’s life had been paid to Lady Millicent Strangway, his
widow, in April, 1863, after the directors had received indisputable
evidence of his death.

“I remember the case perfectly,” said the secretary. “The
circumstances were peculiar, and there was a suspicion of suicide,
as the man had just left Monte Carlo, and was known to have lost
his last napoleon, after a most extraordinary run of luck. There
was some idea of disputing the claim; but if he did make away with
himself he had contrived to do it so cleverly that it would have been
uncommonly difficult to prove that his death was not an accident—more
particularly as Lord Dangerfield brought an action against the
steamboat company for wilful negligence in regard to their gangway
and deficient lighting. The policy was an old one, too, and so it was
decided not to litigate.”

“There could be no doubt as to the identity of the man who was
drowned at Nice, I conclude?”

“No, the question of identity was carefully gone into. Lord
Dangerfield happened to be wintering at Cannes that year, and he
heard of his son-in-law’s death in time to go over and identify
the body before it was coffined. You know how quickly burial
follows death in that part of the world, and there would have been
no possibility of the widow getting over from Ajaccio before the
funeral. We had Lord Dangerfield’s declaration that the body he saw
at Nice was the body of Colonel Strangway, and we paid the £3,000 on
that evidence. We have never had any reason to suspect error or foul
play.”




CHAPTER XIII.

    “Thou takest not away, O Death?
     Thou strikest—absence perisheth,
     Indifference is no more;
     The future brightens on our sight;
     For on the past hath fallen a light
     That tempts us to adore.”


While Juanita clung with feverish intensity to the hope of
discovering her husband’s murderer Lord Cheriton seemed to be
gradually resigning himself to the idea that the crime would go to
swell the long list of undiscovered murders which he could recall
within his own experience of life—crimes which had kept society
expectant and on the alert for a month, and which had stimulated the
police to unwonted exertions, finally to fade into oblivion, or to
be occasionally cited as an example of the mysteriousness of human
history.

He had offered a large reward, he had brought all his own trained
intelligence to bear upon the subject; he had thought and brooded
upon it by day and by night; and the result had been nil. A hand had
been stretched out of the darkness to slay an unoffending young man,
in whose life his daughter’s happiness had been bound up. That was
the whole history of the murder. A shot heard in the night, a bullet
fired out of the darkness with fatal aim.

Not one indication, not one suggestive fact had been discovered since
the night of the murder.

“It is hopeless,” said Lord Cheriton, talking over the calamity
with Mr. Scarsdale, the Vicar of Cheriton and Testwick, adjoining
parishes; “the crime and the motive of the crime are alike
inscrutable. If one could imagine a reason for the act it might be
easier to get upon the track of the murderer; but there is no reason
that I can conceive for such a deed. It has been suggested to me that
Sir Godfrey might have had a secret enemy—that his life might not
have been as spotless as we think——”

“I will answer for it that he was never guilty of a dishonourable
action, that he provoked no man’s hatred by any unworthy act,”
interrupted the Vicar warmly.

He had been curate at Milbrook before he got the Cheriton living,
and had lived for two years at the Priory while he prepared Godfrey
Carmichael for Eton, so he claimed the right to vouch for the honour
of the dead.

“There never was a whiter soul in mortal clay,” said the Vicar.

“I am inclined to estimate his character almost as highly as you,”
replied Lord Cheriton, deliberately, “yet the straightest walker
may make one false step—and there may have been some unfortunate
entanglement at the University or in London——”

“I will never believe it. He may have been tempted—he may have
yielded to temptation,—but if he erred, be sure he atoned for his
error to the uttermost of his power.”

“There are errors—seeming light to the steps that stumble—which
cannot be atoned for.”

“There was no such error in his youth. I looked in his face on
his wedding day, Lord Cheriton, and it was the face of a man of
unblemished life—a man who need fear no ghost out of the dead past.”

“Well, you are right, I believe,—and in that case the murder is
motiveless—the murder of a madman—a madman so profoundly artful in
his lunacy as to escape every eye. By heaven, I wish we had the old
way of hunting such a quarry—and that a leash of bloodhounds could
have been set loose upon his track within an hour of the murder.
_They_ would have hunted him down—_their_ instinct would have found
him skulking and shivering in his lair; and we should have needed no
astute detective primed with all the traditions of Scotland Yard. It
would have been swift, sudden justice—blood for blood.”

His dark grey eyes shone with an angry light as he walked up and down
the spacious floor of the library, while the Vicar stood in front
of the fire, looking gravely into his clerical hat, and without any
suggestion to offer.

“I hope Lady Carmichael is recovering her spirits,” he said feebly,
after a pause.

“She is not any happier than she was when her loss was a week old;
but she keeps up in a wonderful way. I believe she is sustained by
some wild notion that the murderer will be found—that she will live
to see her husband’s death avenged. I doubt if at present she has any
other interest in life.”

“But let us hope she will be cheered by the society of her husband’s
people. I hear that the Morningsides and the Grenvilles are to be at
the Priory in November.”

“Indeed! I have heard nothing about it.”

“I was at Swanage yesterday afternoon, and took tea with Lady Jane.
She was full of praises of Lady Carmichael’s goodness, and her desire
that all things at the Priory might be just as they had been in Sir
Godfrey’s lifetime. His brothers-in-law used to be invited for the
shooting in November, and they were to be invited this year, on
condition that Lady Jane would help to entertain them, and Lady Jane
has consented gladly. So there will be a large family party at the
Priory on this side of Christmas,” concluded the Vicar.

“I am glad to hear it,” said Lord Cheriton. “Anything is better for
her than solitude; any occupation, if it be only revising a bill
of fare, or listening to feminine twaddle, is better for her than
idleness.”

“Yes, there will be a houseful,” pursued the Vicar; “Mrs. Grenville
takes her nursery with her wherever she goes.”

“And Mrs. Morningside is delighted to leave hers behind her.”

“Yes, she is one of those mothers who are always telling people what
paragons of nurses Providence has provided for their darlings, or how
admirably their children are being brought up by a model governess,”
said the Vicar, who was severe upon other people’s neglect of duty.
“By-the-by, talking of mothers, I believe I saw Mrs. Porter’s
daughter the other day while I was in town.”

“You _believe_ you saw her?”

“Yes, I am not certain. A face flashed past me in the street one
night, and when the face was gone it came upon me that it was Mercy
Porter’s eyes that looked at me for an instant in the gaslight. I was
in a busy thoroughfare on the Surrey side of Westminster Bridge. I
had been to hear Vansittart preach a mission sermon at a church near
Walworth, and I was walking back to the West End. It was late on a
Saturday night, and the road was full of costermongers’ barrows, and
the pavement was crowded with working people doing their marketing. I
tried to overtake the girl whose face had startled me, but it was no
use. She had melted into the crowd. I went back the whole length of
the street, hoping I might find her in front of one of the costers’
stalls; but she must have turned into one of the numerous side
streets, and it was hopeless to hunt for her there. Yet I should have
been very glad to get hold of her.”

“Is she much changed?”

“Changed! Yes. It was only the ghost of Mercy Porter that I saw. I
should not have known her but for her eyes. She had fine eyes, do
you remember, and with a great deal of expression in them. I think I
should be safe in swearing to Mercy Porter’s eyes.”

“Did she look poor or ill?”

“She looked both—but the illness might be only hunger. She had that
wan pinched look one sees in the faces of the London poor, especially
in the women’s faces.”

“Have you told her mother?”

“No, I came to the conclusion that it would be giving the poor soul
useless pain to tell her anything, having so little to tell. She knew
years ago that Colonel Tremaine had deserted his victim, and that
the girl had dropped through. God knows where: into the abyss that
swallows up handsome young women who begin their career in West End
lodgings and a hired brougham. If the mother were to go in quest of
her, and bring her home here, it might be only to bring shame and
misery upon her declining years. The creature may have fallen too low
for the possibility of reformation, and the mother’s last hours might
be darkened by her sin. I would do much to rescue her—but I would
rather try to save her through a stranger’s help than by the mother’s
intervention.”

Lord Cheriton continued his pacing to and fro, and did not appear
particularly interested in the case of Mercy Porter. He had been much
troubled by her flight from Cheriton, for the seducer was his own
familiar friend, and he had felt himself in somewise to blame for
having brought such a man to Cheriton. He told himself that he would
not have had Tremaine inside his house had his own daughter been out
of the schoolroom; and yet he had allowed the man to cross the path
of the widow’s only child, and to bring desolation and sorrow upon
the woman whose life he had in somewise taken under his protection.

“There are people whose mission it is to hunt out that kind of
misery,” he said, after an interval of silence. “I hope one of those
good women will rescue Mercy Porter. I think you have been wise in
saying nothing to the mother. She has got over her trouble, and
anything she might hear about the girl would only be a reopening of
old wounds.”

“She is a wonderful woman,” replied the vicar; “I never saw such
grief as hers when the girl ran away; and yet within a few months she
had calmed down into the placid personage she has been ever since.
She is a woman of very powerful mind. I sometimes wonder that even
at her age she can content herself with the monotonous life she leads
in that cottage.”

“Oh, she likes the place, I believe, and the life suits her,” said
Lord Cheriton, carelessly. “She had seen a good deal of trouble
before she came here, and this was a quiet haven for her after the
storms of life. I am very sorry the daughter went wrong,” he added,
with a sudden cloud upon his face. “_That_ was a bitter blow; and I
shall never forgive myself for having brought that scoundrel Tremaine
here.”

“He is dead, is he not?”

“Yes, he was killed in Afghanistan six years ago. He was a good
soldier though he was a bad man. I dare say he made his being ordered
off to India an excuse for leaving Mercy—left her with a trifle of
money perhaps, and a promise of further remittances, and then let her
drift. I told my lawyer to keep his eye upon her, if possible, and to
establish her in some respectable calling if ever he saw the chance
of doing so; but she eluded him somehow, as you know.”

“Yes, you told me what you had done. It was like you to think even of
so remote a claim upon your generosity.”

“Oh, she belonged to Cheriton. I have cultivated the patriarchal
feeling as much as I can. All who live upon my land are under my
protection.”

“Lady Cheriton has been a good friend to Mrs. Porter too.”

“My wife is always kind.”

Juanita accepted her cousin’s account of what he had heard and read
at St. Heliers, as the closing of his researches in the history of
the Strangways. The sister’s death in a shabby exile remained to be
traced; but there was no light to be expected there; and Juanita
felt that she must now submit to surrender her superstition about
that evil race. It was not from them the blow had come. The murderer
had to be hunted for in a wider range, and the quest would be more
difficult than she had thought. She was not the less intent upon
discovery because of this difficulty.

“I have all my life before me,” she told herself, “and I have nothing
to live for but to see his murderer punished.”

It had been Juanita’s especial desire that the Morningsides and the
Grenvilles should be invited to the Priory just as they had been in
Sir Godfrey’s lifetime—that all the habits of the household should be
as he had willed them when his bodily presence was there among them,
as he was now in the spirit, to Juanita’s imagination. She thought of
him every hour of the day, and in all things deferred to his opinions
and ideas, shaping the whole course of her life to please him who
was lying in that dark resting-place where there is neither pain nor
pleasure.

When November came, however, and with it the group of Grenvilles,
nurses and nursery governess, and the Morningsides with valet and
maid, it seemed to Juanita as if the wild companions of Comus or a
contingent from Bedlam had invaded the sober old Priory. Those loud
voices in the hall, that perpetual running up and down and talking
and laughing upon the staircase; the everlasting opening and shutting
of doors; the roll of carriage-wheels driving up to the door a dozen
times in a day; the bustle and fuss and commotion which two cheerful
families in rude health can contrive to make in a house where they
feel themselves perfectly at home—all these things were agonizing to
the mourner who had lived in silence and shadow from the hour of her
loss until now. Happily, however, Lady Jane was there to take all the
burden off those weary shoulders; and Lady Jane in the character of
a grandmother was in her very fittest sphere. Between her ladyship
and the housekeeper all arrangements were made, and every detail was
attended to without inflicting the slightest trouble upon Juanita.

“You shall see just as little of them all as you like, dear,” said
Lady Jane. “You can breakfast and lunch in your morning-room, and
just come down to dinner when you feel equal to being with us, and
then you will see the darlings at dessert. I know _they_ will cheer
you, with their pretty little ways. Such loving pets as they are
too, and so full of intelligence. Did I tell you what Johnnie said
yesterday, at lunch?”

“Yes, dear Lady Jane, you did tell me. It was very funny,” replied
Juanita, with a faint smile.

She could not tell that adoring grandmother that the children were
a burden to her, and that those intelligent speeches and delightful
mispronunciations of polysyllabic words which convulsed parents and
grandparent seemed to add perceptibly to her own gloom. She pretended
to be interested in Tom’s letter from Eton with a modest request for
a large hamper, and she made a martyr of herself by showing Susie
picture-books, and explaining the pictures, or by telling Lucy her
favourite Hans Andersen story, which never palled upon that young
listener.

“Don’t you think you would like a new one?” Juanita would ask.

“No, no, not a new one—the same, please. I want ‘The Proud Darning
Needle.’”

So the adventures of “The Proud Darning Needle” had to be read or
related as the case might be.

Juanita took Lady Jane’s advice and spent the greater part of every
day in her morning-room, that room which had been Godfrey’s den. It
was further from the staircase than any other sitting-room, and the
clatter and the shrill voices were somewhat modified by distance.
The house-party amused themselves after their hearts’ desire, and
worked the horses with the true metropolitan feeling that a horse is
an animal designed for locomotion, and that he can’t have too much of
it. Lady Jane was the most indulgent of deputy hostesses, and spent
all breakfast time in cutting sandwiches of a particularly dainty
kind for her sons-in-law, so that they might be sustained between the
luxurious home breakfast at nine, and the copious luncheon with which
the cart met the shooters by appointment at half-past one. When the
shooters had started there were the little Grenvilles to slave for;
and Lady Jane spent another half-hour in seeing them off upon their
morning constitutional, Lucy on her Shetland, and Johnnie, Susie,
and Godolphin on their short little legs, with groom and nurses
in attendance. There were so many wraps to be adjusted, so many
injunctions to be given to nurses and groom, so many little pockets
to be filled with gingerbreads and queen-cakes, while Mrs. Grenville
looked on, and protested against grandmamma’s infraction of hygienic
rules. Dr. Dobson Drooce had said they must _never_ eat between meals.

Juanita rarely appeared before afternoon tea, when she was generally
installed in her own particular easy-chair by the fire, fenced round
by a seven-leaved Indian screen, which was big enough to include a
couple of small tables and a creepie stool, before the sisters-in-law
came in from their afternoon drive, or the shooters dropped in after
their day in the woods. There were no other guests than the sisters
and their husbands; and it was an understood thing that no one else
should be asked, unless it were Lord and Lady Cheriton, the Dalbrooks
from Dorchester, or Mr. Scarsdale.

No one could have been sweeter than the young widow was to her
visitors during the hours she spent with them, listening with
inexhaustible patience to Jessica Grenville’s graphic account of the
measles as lately “taken” by her whole brood, with all the after
consequences of the malady, and the amount of cod-liver oil and
quinine consumed by each patient; pretending to be interested in Ruth
Morningside’s perpetual disquisitions upon smart people and smart
people’s frocks; and in every way performing her duty as a hostess.

And yet George Grenville was not altogether satisfied.

“I’ll tell you what it is, Jess,” he said to his wife one night,
in the luxurious privacy of the good old-fashioned bedroom, seated
on the capacious sofa in front of the monumental four-poster, with
elaborately-turned columns, richly-moulded cornice, and heavy damask
curtains; the kind of bedstead for which our ancestors gave fifty
guineas, and for which no modern auctioneer can obtain a bid of fifty
shillings; “I’ll tell you what it is, Jess,” repeated Mr. Grenville,
frowning at the fire, “either your brother’s widow gives herself
confounded airs, or there is something in the wind.”

“I’m afraid so, George,” replied his wife, meekly.

“You’re afraid of what? Why the deuce can’t you be coherent? Afraid
of her airs——”

“I’m afraid there is—something in the wind,” faltered the submissive
lady. “I suppose it’s the best thing that could happen to her, poor
girl, for a nursery will be an occupation for her mind, and prevent
her brooding on her loss; but this place would have been very nice
for Tom all the same.”

“I should think it would indeed, and he ought not to be swindled out
of it,” said Mr. Grenville, with a disgusted air. “I—I am surprised
at your sister-in-law! I have always considered that there is a kind
of indelicacy in a posthumous child. It may be a prejudice on my
part, but I have always felt a sort of revulsion when I have heard of
such creatures,” and Mr. Grenville curled his lordly aquiline nose,
and made a wry face at the jovial fire, blazing hospitably, heaped
high with coals and wood, and roaring up towards the frosty sky.




CHAPTER XIV.

    “Then through my brain the thought did pass,
     Even as a flash of lightning there,
     That there was something in her air,
     Which would not doom me to despair;
     And on the thought my words broke forth.”


Harrington Dalbrook was as keenly impressed with a sense of
stupendous self-sacrifice in giving up his prospects in the Church as
if the Primacy had only been a question of time; yet as his Divinity
examination had twice ended in disappointment and a shamefaced return
to the paternal roof-tree, it might be thought that, in his friend
Sir Henry Baldwin’s phraseology, he was very well out of it. Sir
Henry was the average young man of the epoch, sharp, shallow, and
with a strong belief in his own superiority to the human race in
general, and naturally to a friend whose father plodded over leases
and agreements in an old-fashioned office in a country town; but the
two young men happened to have been thrown together at Oxford, where
Sir Henry was at Christ Church while Harrington Dalbrook was at New;
and as Sir Henry’s ancestral home was within six miles of Dorchester,
the friendship begun at the University was continued in the county
town.

Sir Henry lived at a good old Georgian house called the Mount,
between Dorchester and Weymouth. It was a red brick house, with a
centre and two wings, a Corinthian portico of Portland stone, and
a wide level lawn in front of the portico, that was brilliant with
scarlet geraniums all the summer. There were no novelties in the way
of gardening at the Mount, and there were never likely to be any
new departures while Lady Baldwin held the reins of power. She was
known in the locality as a lady of remarkable “closeness,” a lady
who pared down every department of expenditure to the very bone. The
gardens and shrubberies were always in perfect order, neat, trim,
weedless; but everything was reduced to the minimum of outlay; there
were no new plants or shrubs, no specimen trees, no innovations or
improvements; there was very little “glass,” and there were only two
gardeners to do the work in grounds for which most people would have
kept four or five.

The dowager was never ashamed to allude to the smallness of her
jointure or to bemoan her son’s college debts. She had two daughters,
the younger pale, sickly, and insignificant; the elder tall and
large, with a beauty of the showy and highly-coloured order, brown
eyes, a complexion of milk and roses, freely sprinkled with freckles,
and light wavy hair, which in a young woman of meaner station might
have been called red.

The neighbourhood was of opinion that it was time for the elder
Miss Baldwin to marry, and that she ought to marry well; but that
important factor in marriage, the bridegroom, was not forthcoming. It
was a ground of complaint against Sir Henry that he never brought any
eligible young men to the Mount.

“My mother’s housekeeping would frighten them away if I did,”
answered Henry, when hard driven upon this point. “The young men of
the present day like a good dinner. There isn’t a third-rate club in
London where the half-crown house dinner isn’t better than the food
we have here—better cooked and more plentiful.”

“Perhaps, if you helped mother a little things would be more
comfortable than they are,” remonstrated Laura, the younger sister,
who generally took upon herself the part of Mentor. “You must know
that her income isn’t enough to keep up this place as it ought to be
kept.”

“I don’t know anything of the kind. I believe she is hoarding and
scraping for you two girls; but she’ll find by-and-by that she has
been penny wise and pound foolish, for nobody worth having will ever
propose to Juliet in such a dismal hole as this,” continued the
baronet, scornfully surveying the old-fashioned furniture, which had
never been vivified by modern frivolities, or made more luxurious by
modern inventions.

“Juliet is not the beginning and end of our lives,” replied Laura,
sourly. “She has plenty of opportunities, if she were only capable of
using them. I know her visiting costs a small fortune.”

“A very small one,” said Juliet; “I have fewer gowns than any girl I
meet, and have to give smaller tips when I am leaving. The servants
are hardly civil to me when I go back to a house.”

“I dare say not,” retorted Laura, “considering that you expect other
people’s maids to do more for you than your own maid would do, if you
had one.”

Juliet sighed, and shrugged her graceful shoulders.

“It is all very horrid and very sordid,” she said, “and I wish I were
dead.”

“I don’t go so far as that,” replied Laura, “but I wish with all my
heart you were married, and that mother and I could live in peace.”

All this meant that the handsome Miss Baldwin was seven and twenty,
and that although she had drunk the cup of praise from men and women,
not one eligible man with place and fortune to offer had offered
himself. Eligible men had admired and had praised and had flattered,
and had ridden away, like the knight of old, and had married some
other girl; a girl with money generally, an American girl sometimes.
Juliet Baldwin hated the very name of Columbus.

For want of some one better to flirt with, Juliet had flirted with
Harrington Dalbrook. He was her junior by two years, and on his first
visit to the Mount had succumbed to her beauty, and to the charm of
manners which somewhat exaggerated the progressive spirit of the
smart world. Miss Baldwin was amused by her conquest, though she
had no idea of allowing her acquaintance with her brother’s friend
to travel beyond the strictest limits of that state of things which
our neighbours call “flirtage.” But “flirtage” nowadays is somewhat
comprehensive; and with Juliet it went so far as to allow her
admirer to gratify her with offerings of gloves and flowers for her
ball-dresses, when she was staying with friends in Belgravia, and the
young man was taking a holiday in London.

It may be that the fascinations of this young lady had something
to do with Harrington’s failure to pass his Divinity examination,
and with his subsequent renunciation of the Church of England for
the wider faith of the naturalist and the metaphysician. He told
his family that he had got beyond Christianity as it was understood
by Churchmen, and set forth in the Thirty-nine Articles. He had
gone from the river to the sea, as he explained it, from the narrow
banked-in river of orthodoxy to the wide ocean of the new faith—faith
in humanity—faith in a universal brotherhood—faith in one’s self as
superior to anything else in the universe, past or present. In this
enlightened attitude he had grasped at Theodore’s offer,—all the
more eagerly, perhaps, because he had lately heard Juliet Baldwin’s
emphatic declaration apropos to nothing particular—that she would
never marry a parson, and that the existence of a parson’s wife in
town or country seemed to her of all lives the most odious.

Would she take more kindly to a lawyer, he asked himself with a
sinking heart. Would a country practice, life in an old-fashioned
house in an old-fashioned market-town, satisfy her ambition? He
feared not. If he wanted that radiant creature for his wife, he must
exchange country for town, Dorchester for Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and a
house in Chester Street, or at least Gloucester Place. She had been
used to Belgravia; but she might perhaps tolerate the neighbourhood
of Portman Square, the unaristocratic sound of Baker Street, the
convenience of Atlas omnibuses, until he should be able to start his
brougham.

Led on by this guiding star he told himself that what he had to
do was to become learned in the law, particularly in the science,
art, and mystery of conveyancing, which branch of a family practice
he believed to be at once dignified and lucrative. He had to make
himself master of his profession, to make his experiments upon the
inferior clay of Dorsetshire—upon farmers and small gentry,—and then
to persuade his father to buy him a London practice, an aristocratic
London practice, such as should not call a blush to the cheek of a
fashionable wife. He had met solicitors’ wives who gave themselves
all the airs of great ladies, and who talked as if the Bench and the
Bar were set in motion and kept going by their husbands. Such a wife
would Juliet be could he be so blessed as to win her.

The mild “flirtage,” involving much tribute from the glover and the
florist, the bookseller and the photographer, had been going on for
nearly three years, and Harrington was tremendously in earnest. His
sisters had encouraged him in his infatuation, thinking that it would
be rather a nice thing to have a baronet as a family connection,
and with a sneaking admiration for Sir Henry Baldwin’s club-house
manners, and slangy vocabulary, which had to be translated to them
in the first instance by Harrington. They liked to be intimate with
Miss Baldwin of the Mount, liked to see her smart little pony-cart
waiting for an hour in front of the door in Cornhill, while the young
lady prattled about her conquests, her frocks, and her parties, over
the afternoon tea-table. True that she never talked about anybody
but herself, except when she depreciated a rival belle; but the
background of her talk was the smart world, and that was a world of
which Janet and her sister loved to hear, albeit “plain-living and
high-thinking” was their motto.

Sir Henry had a small hunting stud, and somewhat ungraciously allowed
his elder sister an occasional mount, although, as he took care to
impress upon her, he hated hunting women. For the pleasure of being
in the young lady’s society Harrington, who had no passion for
horsemanship, became all of a sudden an ardent sportsman, borrowed
his brother’s cob, Peter, and was ultimately cajoled into the
purchase of an elderly hunter, which was not quite quick enough for
his friend Sir Henry.

“You don’t mean hunting in the shires, so pace is not of so much
consequence to you as it is to me,” said the baronet. “Mahmud will
carry you beautifully in our country, and he’s as quiet as a sheep.”

It is possible that this qualification of sheepishness was Mahmud’s
chief merit in Harrington’s estimation. He was a black horse, and
looked a good deal for the money. Sir Henry asked a hundred guineas
for him, and finally took his friend’s acceptance for eighty, and
this transaction was the first burden of debt which Harrington
Dalbrook laid upon his shoulders after leaving the University. There
had been college debts, and he had considerably exceeded a very
liberal allowance, but his father had paid those debts to the last
shilling; and one grave and stern remonstrance, with a few fatherly
words of advice for the future, had been all that Harrington had been
called upon to endure. But he did not forget that his father had
warned him against the consequences of any future folly.

He felt rather uncomfortable when the black horse was brought to the
door one hunting morning, and when his father happened to be in the
front office, whence he could see the unknown animal.

“Where did you get that black horse, Harrington? Is it a hire?” he
asked.

“No. The fact is I’ve bought him.”

“Have you really? You must be richer than I gave you credit for being
if you can afford to buy yourself a hunter. He looks a well-bred one,
but shows work. I hope you didn’t give much for him.”

“No; I got him on easy terms.”

“Not on credit, I hope.”

“No; of course not. Sir Henry Baldwin sold him to me. I had saved a
little out of my allowance, don’t you know?”

“I’m very glad to hear it. And now be off and get a good day’s sport,
if you can. I shall want you to stick to your desk to-morrow.”

Harrington took up his crop and hurried out, with a heart as heavy
as lead. Never until to-day had he told his father a deliberate
falsehood; but Matthew Dalbrook’s searching look had frightened him
out of his veracity. Only six months ago he had solemnly pledged
himself to avoid debt, and he had broken his promise already, and
owed eighty guineas for a beast which he could hardly hope to ride to
hounds half a dozen times that season. He had involved himself for
the beast’s maintenance also, for his father’s stables were full, and
he had been obliged to put this new animal out at livery. He began to
feel now that he had made a fool of himself; that he had been talked
into buying a horse for which he had very little use.

He was jogging along in a low-spirited way when Sir Henry and his
sister came up behind him at a sharp trot, whereat Mahmud gave a
buck-jump that almost unseated him.

“The black looks a trifle fresh this morning,” said Sir Henry.
“You’ll take it out of him presently. He suits you capitally, and
he’s well up to your weight. I was a little bit too heavy for him.
You’ll find him go like old boots.”

Miss Baldwin, flushed with fresh air and exercise, looked more
than usually brilliant. She was particularly amiable too; and when
Harrington complained that he might not be able to give Mahmud enough
work she offered to meet the difficulty.

“Send him over to me whenever you don’t want him,” she said,
cheerily. “I’ll make him handy for you.”

The black gave another buck-jump, and Harrington felt inclined to lay
him at her feet there and then. It was only the remembrance of that
horrid slip of stamped paper, which had doubtless already been turned
into cash by Sir Henry, which restrained him. He made up his mind
to send Mahmud to Tattersall’s at the end of the hunting season, to
be sold without reserve. Juliet was riding a thoroughbred of which
she was particularly fond, and was in very high spirits during the
earlier part of the day; and in her lively society Harrington forgot
the stamped paper, and gradually got on good terms with his horse.
Mahmud had, indeed, no fault but age. He knew a great deal better how
to keep near the hounds than his new master, and promised to be a
valuable acquisition.

Harrington felt that he was distinguishing himself.

“The black suits you down to the ground,” shouted Sir Henry, in
the middle of a run, as he bucketed past his friend upon a pulling
chestnut that had no respect for anybody, but clove his way through
the ruck of riders like a battering-ram.

Sir Henry boasted of this animal that he never kicked a hound.

“Small thanks to him,” said the Master, “for he kicks everything
else. Hounds are not good enough for him. He nearly smashed my leg
last Monday.”

Harrington and Juliet did a good deal of quiet flirtation while
the hounds were drawing a spinney rather late in the day, after a
very good run and a kill. He told her all about the change in his
position, and that he was to be his father’s partner after a very
short apprenticeship to the law.

“And you will live in Dorchester all your life,” said Juliet, with an
involuntary disgust.

“Not if I can help it. I don’t mean to vegetate in a dead-alive
provincial town. My father has a London connection already, and all
his business wants is a little new blood. I hope to start chambers in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields before I am many years older. And if I should
marry,” he continued, faltering a little, “I could afford to have a
house in the West End—May Fair or Belgravia, for instance.”

“Let it be May Fair, I beg—for your wife’s sake, whoever she may
be,” exclaimed Juliet lightly. “A small house in Belgravia is
an abomination. There is an atmosphere of invincible dreariness
throughout that district which can only be redeemed by wealth and
splendour. Perhaps it is because the place is on a level with
Millbank. There is a flavour of the prison in the very air. Now,
in Curzon or Hertford Street one breathes the air of the Park and
Piccadilly, and one could exist in a bandbox. But really now,
Harrington, joking apart, is it not rather wild in a young man like
you—not out of paternal leading-strings—to talk about marriage and
housekeeping?”

“One can’t help thinking of the future. Besides, I am not so very
young. I am four and twenty.”

Juliet laughed a short cynical laugh, which ended in a sigh. She
wondered whether he knew that she was three years older. Brothers are
such traitors.

“I am four and twenty, and I feel that it is in me to succeed,”
concluded Harrington, with a comfortable vanity which he mistook for
the self-confidence of genius.

The hounds drew blank, and the riders jogged homewards presently,
by lane and common, Sir Henry keeping in front with one of his
particular friends, and talking horse-flesh all the way, while Juliet
and Harrington followed slowly side by side in earnest conversation.

He told her the history of his doubts, about which she did
not care twopence—his “phases of faith and feeling,” as he
expressed it alliteratively. All she wanted to know was about
his prospects—whether his father was as well off as he was said
to be—she had heard people talk of him as a very rich man—those
officious people who are always calculating other people’s incomes,
and descanting upon the little their neighbours spend, and the
much that they must contrive to save. Juliet had heard a good deal
of this kind of talk about Matthew Dalbrook, whose unpretentious
and somewhat old-fashioned style of living gave an impression of
reserved force—wealth invested and accumulating for a smarter
generation. After all, perhaps, this young man, whose adoration was
obvious, might not be a despicable _parti_. He might be pretty well
off by-and-by, with a fourth, or better than a fourth, share of
Matthew Dalbrook’s scrapings,—and he was Lord Cheriton’s cousin, and
therefore could hardly be called a nobody.

Moved by these considerations, gravely weighed in the grave and grey
November dusk, as they rode slowly between tall hedges, leafy still,
but sear and red with the frost, Juliet felt inclined to let herself
be engaged to her legal lover. She had been engaged to several people
since she danced at her first ball. The bond did not count for very
much in her mind. One could always slip out of that kind of thing,
if it became inconvenient—one could manage with such tact that the
man himself cried off, if one were afraid of being denounced as a
jilt. Juliet and her lovers had always parted friends; and she wore
more than one half-hoop of sapphires or of brilliants which had once
played a solemn part as her engagement ring, but which had lapsed
into a souvenir of friendship.

She was not so foolish as to hasten matters. She wanted to see her
way before her; and she opposed Harrington’s youthful ardour with the
calm _savoirfaire_ of seven and twenty. She called him a foolish boy,
and declared that they must cease to be friends if he insisted upon
talking nonsense. She would have to accept a very urgent invitation
to Lady Balgowny Brigg’s Castle in Scotland, which she had been
fencing with for years, if he made it difficult for them to meet. She
threw him into a state of abject alarm by this stupendous threat.

“I won’t say a word you can take objection to,” he protested, “though
I can’t think why you should object.”

“You forget that I have to study other people’s ideas as well as my
own,” she answered gently. “I hope you won’t be offended if I tell
you that my mother would never speak to me again if I were engaged to
you.”

“No doubt Lady Baldwin has higher views,” the young man said meekly.

“Much higher views. My poor mother belongs to the old school. She
cannot forget that her grandfather was a marquis. It is foolish, but
I suppose it is human nature. Don’t let us talk any more about this
nonsense. I like you very much as my brother’s friend, and I shall go
on liking you if you don’t make me unhappy by talking nonsense.”

Harrington took comfort from that one word “unhappy.” It implied
depths of feeling beneath that fashionable manner which held him at
arm’s length.

His spirits were somewhat dashed presently when Miss Baldwin looked
with friendly contemptuousness at his neat heather-mixture coat and
mud-stained white cords, and said carelessly,—

“It’s a pity you don’t belong to the Hunt. I fancy you would look
rather nice in pink!”

“I—I—have so lately given up the idea of the Church,” he faltered.

“Yes, but now you have given it up, you ought to be a member of the
Hunt. Let my brother put you up at the next meeting. You are pretty
sure of being elected, and then you can order your pink swallow-tail
coat in time for the Hunt Ball in December.”

Harrington shivered. That would mean two red coats—a hunting coat and
a dancing coat. But this idea of twenty pounds laid out upon coats
was not the worst. Twenty years ago, when he had ridden as hard and
kept as good horses as any member of the Hunt, Matthew Dalbrook had
resolutely declined the honour of membership. He had considered that
a provincial solicitor had other work than to ride to hounds twice
or three times a week. He might allow himself that pleasure now and
again as an occasional relaxation in a hard-working professional
life; but it was not for him to spend long days tearing about the
country with the men of whose lands and interests he was in some wise
custodian.

Theodore, who was at heart much more of a sportsman than his younger
brother, had respected his father’s old-fashioned prejudices,
whatever line they took, and he had never allowed his name to be
put up for the Hunt. He had subscribed liberally to the fund for
contingent expenses, as his father and grandfather had done before
him; but he had been content to forego the glory of a scarlet coat,
and the privilege of the Hunt buttons.

Harrington was not strong in that chief virtue of man, moral
courage—the modern and loftier equivalent for that brute-courage
which was the Roman’s only idea of virtue. He felt that to
acknowledge himself afraid to put up for election into the sacred
circle of the Hunt lest he should offend his father, was to own by
implication that a solicitor was not quite upon the social level of
landed gentry and retired military men, the colonels and majors who
form the chief ornament of the average Hunt club.

He murmured something to the effect that his father was not sporting,
and wouldn’t like him to waste too much time riding to hounds.

“What does that matter?” exclaimed Juliet. “You needn’t go out any
oftener because you are a member of the Hunt. There are men who
appear scarcely half a dozen times in a season—men who have left the
neighbourhood, and only come down for a run now and then for old
sake’s sake.”

“I’ll think it over,” faltered Harrington. “Don’t say anything to Sir
Henry about it just yet.”

“As you please; but I shan’t dance with you at the ball if you wear a
black coat,” said Juliet, giving her bridle a sharp little shake and
trotting forward to join her brother.

Mahmud, discomposed by that sudden start, gave a shambling elderly
shy; Harrington pulled him up into a walk, and rode sulkily on, and
allowed the other three riders to melt from him in the shades of
evening.

Yes, she was beautiful exceedingly, and it would be promotion for
a country solicitor to be engaged to a girl of such high standing;
but he felt that his relations with her were hedged round with
difficulty. She was expensive herself, and a cause of expense in
others. She had spent the brightest years of her girlhood in visiting
in country houses, where everything was on a grander scale than
at the Mount. She had escaped from the barrenness of home to the
mansions of noblemen and millionaires. She had strained all her
energies towards one aim—to be popular, and to be asked to good
houses. She had run the gauntlet of most of the best smoke-rooms
in the three kingdoms, and had been talked about everywhere as the
handsome Miss Baldwin. Yet her twenty-seventh birthday had sounded,
and she was Miss Baldwin still. Half a dozen times she had fancied
herself upon the eve of a great success—such a marriage as would
at once exalt her to the pinnacle of social distinction—and at
the last moment, as it seemed, the man had changed his mind. Some
malicious mother of ugly daughters, or disappointed spinster, had
told the eligible suitor “things” about Miss Baldwin—harmless little
deviations from the rigid lines of maidenly etiquette, and the
suitor had cried off, fearing in his own succinct speech that he was
going to be “had.”

At seven and twenty, damaged by the reputation of failure—spoken of
by the initiated as “that handsome girl Maltravers so nearly married,
don’t you know?”—Miss Baldwin felt that all hope of a great match
was over. The funeral bell of ambition had tolled. She began to grow
reckless; eat her dinner and took her dry champagne with a masculine
gusto; smoked as many cigarettes as a secretary of legation; read all
the new French novels, and talked about them unreservedly with her
partners; was keen upon racing, and loved euchre and nap. She had
half made up her mind to throw herself away upon the first wealthy
cotton-spinner she might meet up in the North when she allowed
herself to be touched by Harrington Dalbrook’s somewhat boyish
devotion, and began to wonder whether it might not be well for her to
end her chequered career by a love match.

He was good-looking, much better educated than her brother and her
brother’s set, and he adored her. But, on the other hand, he was
utterly without any claims to be considered “smart,” and marriage
with him would mean at best bread and cheese—or would at least
mean nothing better than bread and cheese until they should both
be middle-aged, and she should have lost all semblance of a waist.
She had met solicitors’ wives in society who wore diamonds, and who
hurried away from evening parties because they were afraid of their
horses catching cold—a carefulness which to her mind implied that
horses were a novelty. She had even heard of solicitors making big
fortunes; but she concluded that those were exceptional men, and she
did not see in Harrington’s character the potentiality of wealth
beyond the dreams of avarice.

Moved by these mixed feelings she allowed her lover to dangle in a
state of uncertainty, and to spend all his spare cash upon those
airy nothings which a young lady of Miss Baldwin’s easy temper will
accept from even a casual admirer. He knew the glover whose gloves
she approved, and she occasionally told him the colour of a gown
in advance, so that he might give her a suitable fan; and she had,
furthermore, an off-hand way of mentioning any songs or new French
novels she fancied.

“How very sweet of you,” she would say, when the songs or the books
appeared, “but it is really too bad—I must never mention anything I
want in your hearing.”

In spite of which wise remark the volatile damsel went on mentioning
things, and being surprised when her wishes were gratified.

       *       *       *       *       *

Miss Baldwin had met Lady Cheriton and her daughter both in town and
country, and she and her people had been invited to garden parties at
Cheriton Chase, but there had been no intimacy between the families.
Lady Cheriton shrank with an inward terror from a young lady of such
advanced opinions as those which dropped like pearls and diamonds—or
like toads and adders—according to the idea of her hearers—from Miss
Baldwin’s lips. Rumours of the young man’s infatuation had been
conveyed to the Priory by Lady Jane, and Harrington having gone to a
family dinner at Milbrook was severely interrogated by his cousin.

“I hope there is no truth in what I have heard about you, Harry,”
she said confidentially, when he was sitting by her in her favourite
corner within the shadow of the tall screen.

“I cannot answer that question until you tell me what you have
heard,” he replied with offended dignity.

“Something that would make me very unhappy if it were true. I was
told you were getting entangled with that Miss Baldwin.”

“I don’t know why you should lay such an offensive emphasis
upon the demonstrative pronoun. Miss Baldwin is beautiful and
accomplished—and—I am very proud of being attached to her.”

“Has it gone so far as that, Harry? Are you actually engaged to her?”

“I am not actually engaged—she has a right to look a good deal
higher—but I hope to make her my wife as soon as I am in a position
to marry. She has given me so much encouragement that I don’t think
she will refuse me when the right time comes.”

“But, my dear boy, she is always giving encouragement,” exclaimed
Juanita, anxiously.

Dear little Lucy Grenville was at the piano at the other end of the
room playing an infantile arrangement of “Batti, batti,” with fingers
of iron, while mother and grandmother hung over her enraptured, and
while the rest of the family party talked their loudest, so the
cousins in the nook by the fire were not afraid of being overheard.
“She is the most encouraging young lady I ever heard of. She has
jilted and been jilted a dozen times, I believe——”

“You _believe_,” echoed Harrington, with intense indignation; “I
wonder that a girl of your good sense—in most things—can give heed to
such idle gossip.”

“Do you mean to say that she has not been jilted?”

“Certainly not. I admit that her name has been associated with the
names of men in society. Silly people who write for the papers have
given out things about her. She was to marry Lord Welbeck, Sir
Humphrey Random—Heaven knows whom. A girl can’t stay at big houses,
and be admired as she has been, without all manner of reports getting
about. But she is heartily sick of that kind of life, an endless
web of unmeaning gaieties—that is what she herself called it. She
will be very glad to settle down to a refined, quiet life—say, at
the West End of London, with a victoria and brougham, and a small
house, prettily furnished. One can furnish so prettily and so
cheaply nowadays,” concluded Harrington, with his mind’s eye upon
certain illustrated advertisements he had seen of late—Jacobean
dining-rooms—Sheraton drawing-rooms—for a mere song.

“I have heard people say that a reformed rake makes a good husband,”
said Juanita gravely, “but I have never heard that a reformed flirt
makes a good wife.”

“It is a shame to talk like that, Juanita. Every handsome girl is
more or less a flirt. She can’t help flirting. Men insist upon
flirting with her.”

“Does your father know you mean to marry Miss Baldwin?”

“No, I have never mentioned marriage to him. That will come in good
time.”

“And do you think he will approve?”

“I don’t know. He is full of old-fashioned prejudices; but I don’t
see how he can object to my marrying into one of the county families.”

“Don’t you think it will be more like Miss Baldwin marrying out
of one of the county families? I’m afraid from what I know of her
brother and of old Lady Baldwin they would both want her to marry
money.”

“I suppose they have wanted that for the last four or five years,”
answered Harrington; “but it has not come off, and they must be
satisfied if she chooses to marry for love.”

“Well, I mustn’t plague you any more, Harry. I see your heart is too
deeply involved. I hope Miss Baldwin is a nicer girl than I have ever
thought her. Girls are sometimes prejudiced against each other.”

“Occasionally,” said Harrington, with satirical emphasis.

Lucy finished “Batti, batti,” with a final chord in the bass and a
final twirl in the treble, and was pronounced by her grandmother to
have achieved wonders.

“Her time is a little uncertain,” her mother remarked modestly; “but
she has a magnificent ear. You should see her run to the window when
there is an organ in the street.”

“Yes, mother,” cried Johnny, “but she never stays to listen unless
there is a monkey on the top.”

       *       *       *       *       *

December came, and the Hunt Ball, at which more than one of Miss
Baldwin’s discarded or discarding admirers were present. The young
lady looked very handsome in white satin and gauze, without a vestige
of colour about her costume, and with her bodice cut with an audacity
which is the peculiar privilege of dressmakers who live south of
Oxford Street. The white gown set off Miss Baldwin’s brilliant
colouring, and looked well against the pink coats of her partners.

Harrington’s dress suit had been a thing of beauty and a joy to him
when it came home from his London tailor’s, folded as no human hands
could ever fold it again, enshrined in layers of tissue paper.
His sisters had helped to unpack the tailor’s parcel, and had
exclaimed at the extravagance of the corded-silk lapels and the satin
sleeve-lining, and he had himself deemed that the archetypal coat
could scarcely be more beautiful. Yet in this lurid ball-room he felt
ashamed of his modest black twilled kersimere, and the insignificance
of his white tie. The fox-hunters seemed to him to have it all their
own way.

Miss Baldwin, however, was not unkind. She danced with him oftener
than with any one else, especially after supper, when she became
unconscientious and forgetful as to her engagements, and when her
card was found to hold twice as many names as there were dances,
together with a pencil sketch of a lobster waltzing with a champagne
bottle, supplied by an unknown hand.

It was a cold, clear night, and youth and imprudence were going in
couples to the garden behind the ball-room for coolness between the
dances, and to look at the frosty stars, which in the enthusiasm of
girlhood were accepted as a novelty. Harrington and Juliet were among
those who ventured into the garden, the lady wrapped in a great white
fur cloak, which made her look like a haystack in a snow-piece.

“Poor Doriscourt brought me this polar bear-skin,” she said. “He shot
the bear himself, at the risk of his life. I had asked him to bring
me a skin when he came home.”

“You asked him to give you something for which he must risk his life,
and yet you make a great fuss at accepting Daudet’s last novel from
me,” said Harrington, with tender reproachfulness.

“Ah, but you and Doriscourt are so different,” exclaimed Juliet,
rather contemptuously. “He was a great dare-devil, who would have
come down hand-over-hand on a rope from the moon if there had been
any way of getting up there.”

“What has become of him?”

“Dead! He died a year ago—of drink, I’m afraid—lung-complaint
complicated with del. trem. Poor fellow!”

She breathed a deep sigh, with that little pensive air which in a
young lady of experience is as much as to say, “He was the only man I
ever loved,” and then she turned the conversation and talked of the
supper and the champagne, which she sweepingly condemned.

Harrington hated that talk about the supper. He would have preferred
talking of the stars like a schoolgirl, or Claude Melnotte,
“wondering what star should be our home when love becomes immortal.”
To be told that the wine which now glowed in his veins and
intensified his passion was not worth three-and-sixpence a bottle
jarred upon his finer feelings. “You are such a cynic,” he said. “I
think I shall never get any nearer to your real self—for I know there
is a heart under that mocking vein.”

And then he repeated his simple story of a humble, devoted
love—humble because the woman he loved was the loveliest among all
womankind, and because she occupied a higher plane than that on which
his youth had been spent.

“But you have taught me what ambition means,” he said. “Only promise
to be my wife and you shall see that I am in earnest—that it is in me
to succeed.”

She had long been wavering—touched by his truthfulness, his boyish
devotion—very weary of life at the Mount, where the mother scolded
and the sister sneered, where the underfed and underpaid servants
were frankly disobliging, where her brother rarely saw his womankind
except at meals, which periods of family life he enlivened by a
good deal of strong language, grumbling at the cookery, and at
the deterioration of landed property in general, and his own in
particular. The rest of his home-life he spent in the billiard-room
or the stables, since he found the society of the saddle-room more
congenial than the dreariness of the drawing-room, where his mother
and sisters were not always on speaking terms.

From such a house as the Mount—goodly and fair to look upon without
as many other whited sepulchres—any escape would be welcome. Juliet
felt that she was a great deal too good for a young man of uncertain
prospects and humdrum surroundings; but he was very much in love,
and he was good-looking, and in her own particular phraseology she
was beginning to be rather weak about him. She was so weak that she
let him hold her unresisting hand as they stood side by side in the
garden, and devour it with kisses.

“You certainly ought to do well in the world,” she said, sweetly;
“for you are the most persistent person I ever knew.”

He looked round, saw that they were alone in the garden, and clasped
her in his arms, polar bear and all, and kissed the unresisting lips,
as he had kissed the unresisting hand.

“My dearest,” he exclaimed, “that means for life, does it not?”

“You are taking everything for granted,” she said; “but I suppose it
must be so. Only remember I don’t want our engagement talked about
till you are in a more assured position. My mother would make home a
hell upon earth, if she knew.”

“I will do nothing rash, nothing that you do not approve,” replied
Harrington, considerably relieved by this injunction; for although it
was not Matthew Dalbrook’s habit to make a pandemonium of the family
circle, Harrington feared that he would strongly disapprove of such
an alliance as that which his younger son had chosen for himself. He
welcomed the idea of delay, hoping to be more firmly seated at the
office desk before he must needs make the unpleasing avowal. “When
my father finds I am valuable to him he will be more inclined to
indulgence,” he thought.




CHAPTER XV.

    “For men have marble, women waxen minds,
     And therefore are they formed as marble will;
     The weak oppress’d, the impression of change kinds,
     Is formed in them by force, by fraud, or skill;
     Then call them not the authors of their ill.”


Inclination would have taken Theodore Dalbrook to Dorsetshire before
the Christmas holidays gave him an excuse for going home; but he
wrestled with that haunting desire to revisit the Priory, and to be
again _tête-à-tête_ with his cousin in the dimly lighted room where
she had talked to him of her own sorrows and of his ambitions. The
memory of that last evening was the most vivid element in his life.
It stood out like a spot of light against the dull grey of monotonous
days, and the burden of dry-as-dust reading. But he had told her
that he should not see her until Christmas time, and he was not weak
enough to indulge that insane longing for the society of a woman
whose heart was in the grave of her husband.

November and the greater part of December stretched before him like
a long dark road which had to be trodden somehow before he came to
the inn at which there would be light and comfort, cheerful voices,
and friendly greetings. He set his face resolutely towards that dark
prospect, and tramped along, doing the work he had to do, living the
life of a hermit in those chambers in Ferret Court, which had already
taken the stamp of his own character, and looked as if he had lived
in them for years.

He had no need to sit alone at night with his books and his lamp, for
there were plenty of houses in which he would have been welcome. His
name was a passport in legal circles. Old friends of James Dalbrook’s
were ready to welcome his kinsman to their tables, eager to be of
service to him. He had his college friends, too, in the great city,
and need not have gone companionless. But he was not in the mood for
society of any kind, old or young, except the society of Blackstone,
Coke, and Justinian, and divers other sages who out of the dim past
shed their light upon the legal wilderness of the present. He sat
by his fire and read law, and laid down his book only to smoke his
meditative pipe and indulge in foolish waking dreams about that grave
old house in Dorsetshire and the young widow who lived there.

He had followed two of those three children of the old Squire, two
out of the three faces in the picture in the hall at Cheriton, to
the end of their story. No man could discover any postscript to that
story, which in each case was closed by a grave.

There remained only one last unfinished record—the history of the
runaway wife, the end whereof was open to doubt. That unlucky lady’s
fate had been accepted upon hearsay. It had been said that she had
died at Boulogne, within a year or so after the Vicar met her there.

Upon his return from Jersey, Theodore wrote to his father’s oldest
and most experienced clerk, begging him to hunt up the evidence of
Mrs. Darcy’s death, so far as it was obtainable at Cheriton or in the
neighbourhood.

The clerk replied as follows, after an interval of ten days:—

  “DEAR SIR,

  “I have been twice to Cheriton, and have made inquiries, cautiously
  as you wished, with respect to the report of Mrs. Darcy’s death,
  some fifteen years ago, and saw Mr. Dolby, the doctor, and Gaster
  at the general shop, who, as you are no doubt aware, is a gentleman
  who busies himself a good deal about other people’s affairs, and
  sets himself up for being an authority upon most things.

  “Mr. Dolby I found very vague in his ideas. He remembered the late
  Vicar telling him about having met Mrs. Darcy in the market-place
  at Boulogne, and being shocked at the change in her. He told Mr.
  Dolby that he did not think she was long for this world; but it was
  some time after when Dolby heard some one—he could not remember who
  it was—assert that Mrs. Darcy was dead.

  “Gaster had much more to say upon the subject. He pretends to be
  interested in all reminiscences of the Strangways, and boasts of
  having served Cheriton House for nearly forty years. He remembers
  Evelyn Strangway when she was a little girl, handsome and
  high-spirited. He remembered the report of her death at Boulogne
  getting about the village, and he remembered mentioning the fact
  to Lord Cheriton at the time. There was an election going on just
  then, and his lordship had looked in to consult him, Joseph Gaster,
  about certain business details: and his lordship seemed shocked to
  hear of the poor lady’s death. ‘I suppose that is the end of the
  family, my Lord?’ Gaster said, and his lordship replied, ‘Yes, that
  is the end of the Strangways.’

  “Gaster believes that he must have read of the death in the
  newspapers; perhaps copied from the _Times_ into a local paper; at
  any rate, the fact had implanted itself in his mind, and it had
  never occurred to him to doubt it.

  “I asked him if he knew what had become of the lady’s husband, but
  here his mind is a blank. He had heard that the man was a scamp,
  and that was all he knew about him.

  “Since making these inquiries I have spent a long evening at the
  Literary Institute, where, as you know, there is a set of the
  _Times_, in volumes, extending over a period of forty years. I have
  looked through the deaths for three years, taking the year in which
  Gaster _thinks_ he heard of Mrs. Darcy’s death, as the middle year
  out of three, but without result. It is, of course, unlikely that
  the death would be advertised if the poor lady died friendless and
  in poverty in a foreign town; but I thought it my duty to make this
  investigation.

  “Awaiting your further commands, &c., &c.”

There was nothing conclusive in this; and Theodore felt that the
history of Mrs. Darcy’s later years remained to be unravelled. It was
not to be supposed that the runaway wife, who, if she were yet living
must be an elderly woman, could have had act or part in the murder of
Sir Godfrey Carmichael; but it was not the less a part of his task
to trace her story to its final chapter. Then only could he convince
Juanita of the wildness of that idea which connected the catastrophe
of the 29th of July with the exiled Strangways. When he could say to
her, “You see that long before that fatal night the Squire’s three
children had vanished from this earth,” she would be constrained to
confess that the solution of the mystery was not to be sought here.

He went over to Boulogne, saw the English chaplain, and several of
the hotel-keepers. He explored the cemetery, and examined the record
of the dead. He visited the police, and he made friends with the
elderly editor of an old-established newspaper; but from all his
questioning of various people the result was blank. Nobody remembered
a Mrs. Darcy, an Englishwoman of distinguished appearance but fallen
fortunes, a woman long past youth and yet not old. If she had lived
for any time in Boulogne she had left no trace of her existence; if
she had died and been buried there she had left no record among the
graves.

Boulogne could tell him nothing. He came back to the great wilderness
of London, the rallying point for all wanderers. It was there perhaps
that the end of Evelyn Strangway was to be sought.

He had, as it seemed to him, only one clue, the name of her
governess. The governess was only seven or eight years older than the
pupil, and she might have survived her pupil, and might have been in
communication with her till the end. Jasper Blake had told him that
there was a strong attachment between Sarah Newton and the wayward
girl she taught.

To hunt for a governess among the thousands of portionless
gentlewomen who try to live by teaching might seem more hopeless
than the proverbial search for the lost needle, but Theodore did not
despair. If Miss Newton had remained a spinster and had continued
to exercise her vocation as a teacher she might be traced through
one of those agencies which transact business between governess
and employer; but, on the other hand, if, as was more likely, she
had long ago abandoned the profession of teacher, and had made
some obscure marriage, she would have sunk into the vast ocean of
middle-class life, in whose depths it would be almost impossible to
discover her. The first thing to be done was to make a visitation of
the agencies, and this task Theodore began two days after his return
from Boulogne.

He had methodized his life by this time, devoting a certain portion
of his days to his cousin’s interests, but in no wise neglecting the
work he had to do for his own advancement. He had known too many
instances of men who had made reading law an excuse for an idle
and desultory life, and he was resolved that his own course should
be steady and persistent even to doggedness. He had been told that
success at the Bar was nowadays almost unattainable; that the men of
the day who had conquered fame and were making great fortunes, were
in a manner miraculous men, and that it was futile for any young man
to hope to follow in their steps. The road _they_ had trodden was
barred against the new comer. Theodore listened to these pessimists,
yet was not discouraged. He had told himself that he would emerge
somehow from the obscurity of a country solicitor’s practice—would
bring himself in some wise nearer the social level of the woman he
loved, so that if in the days to come one gleam of hope should ever
shine upon that love he might be able to say to her, “My place in
life is the place your father held when he offered himself to your
mother; my determination to conquer fortune is not less than his.”

He seldom passed the dingy door of the ground-floor chambers—on which
the several names of three briefless ones were painted in dirty
letters that had once been white—without thinking of his fortunate
kinsman, without wondering what his life had been like in those
darksome rooms, and in what shape fortune had first appeared to him.
He had not married until he was forty. Long and lonely years had gone
before that golden summertide of his life, when a young and lovely
woman had given him happiness and fortune. How had he lived in those
lonely years? Tradition accused him of miserly habits, of shabby
raiment, of patient grinding and scraping to accumulate wealth.
Theodore knew that if he had hoarded his earnings it had been for a
worthy end. He had set himself to win a place among the lords of the
soil. The land he loved had been to him as a mistress, and for that
he had been content to live poorly and spend his nights in toil.
For such miserliness Theodore had nothing but admiration; for he
had seen how liberally the man who had scraped and hoarded was able
to administer a large income—how generous as a master, friend, and
patron the sometime miser had shown himself.

He spent more than a week in visiting the numerous agencies which
are employed by the great governess-class, and the result of that
painstaking exploration was not altogether barren. He succeeded
in finding an elderly personage at the head of an old-established
Agency, who kept her book with praiseworthy regularity, and who
remembered Sarah Newton. She had had no less than four Miss Newtons
on her register at different times, but there was only one Sarah
Newton among them, and for this lady she had obtained a situation in
the Lake Country so lately as July 20, 1873—that is to say, about
eleven years before the period of Theodore’s investigation.

On that date Miss Newton had entered the family of a Mr. Craven—the
vicar of a small parish between Ambleside and Bowness. She was living
in that family four years afterwards, when Miss Palmer, the Principal
in the Agency, last heard of her.

“And in all probability she is living there still,” said Miss Palmer.
“At her time of life people are not fond of change. I remember her
when she was a young woman, full of energy, and very impatient of
control. I used to see her much oftener then. She seldom kept a
situation over a twelvemonth.”

“Except at Cheriton Chase. She was more than a year in that
situation, I think.”

“Cheriton Chase! I don’t remember the name. Some one else may have
got her the situation. How long ago was she there, do you suppose?”
asked Miss Palmer, turning over one of her neat basil-bound registers.

“It was in the year ’47 she left Cheriton.”

“Ah, then, it was not we who got her the situation. My first entry
about her is on the 11th December, ’48. She paid her entrance fee of
one guinea on that date. It is higher than that of inferior agencies;
but we take real trouble for our clients, and we make it our business
to be safe upon the point of CHARACTER. We are as careful about the
families into which we send governesses as about the governesses we
introduce into families.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The next day was Sunday, and Theodore employed that day of rest in
travelling by a very slow train to Bowness; where he arrived at five
o’clock in the evening, to find mountain and lake hidden in densest
grey, and an innkeeper who seemed neither to desire nor deserve
visitors. Happily the traveller was of the age at which dinner is
not a vital question, and he was hardly aware of the toughness of
the steak, or the inferior quality of the codfish set before him in
the desolate coffee-room. He had a diamond Virgil in his pocket, and
he sat by the fire reading the sixth book by the paraffin lamp till
ten o’clock, and then went contentedly to a bedroom which suggested
ghosts, or at least nightmare.

No deadly visions troubled him, however, for the slow train had
brought about a condition of abject weariness which resulted in
dreamless slumber. The sun shone into his bleak bed-chamber when
he awoke next morning, and the lake stretched beneath his windows,
silver-shining, melting dimly into the grey of the opposite shore.
The mountains were sulking still, and only showed their ragged crests
above dark rolling clouds; but the scene was an improvement upon the
avenue of chimney-pots and distant glimpse of a murky Thames as seen
from Ferret Court.

His landlord greeted him in a more cheerful spirit upon Monday
morning than he had evinced on Sunday evening when his after-dinner
lethargy was rudely disturbed by a guest whose business-like air
and small Gladstone bag did not promise much profit; a visitor who
would want a dinner off the joint, most likely, and a half-crown
breakfast; a visitor whose libations would be limited to bitter beer
and an occasional whisky and soda. Such a guest in a house that was
beginning to hibernate was a burden rather than a boon.

This morning, however, the landlord was reconciled to his solitary
customer, having told his wife that after all, “little fish are
sweet,” and he went blithely to order the dog-cart—his own cart and
own man—ostler in the season, coachman or anything you please out of
the season—to drive Mr. Dalbrook to Kettisford Vicarage, a nine-mile
journey.

It was a pretty, out-of-the-way nook—half hidden in a cleft of the
hills—at which Theodore arrived a few minutes after noon; a little,
old-fashioned, world-forgotten village, and a sprawling old greystone
house, covered with Virginia creeper, passion-flower, and the
feathery leafage of the trumpet ash; a long, low house, with heavily
thatched roof, projecting over its upper casements; a sleepy-looking
old house in a still sleepier garden, so remote and so sheltered
that winter had forgotten to come there; and the great yellow roses
were still blooming on the wall, fattened by the misty atmosphere of
the adjacent lake, glorified by the untainted air. November was half
over, yet here the only signs of autumn were the grey sky, and the
crimson of the Virginia creeper.

The Vicar of Kettisford was one of those privileged persons who
can speak with their enemies at the gate, assured of being backed
up in their speech by a family contingent. The Vicarage seemed
overflowing with young life, from the very threshold of the hall,
where cricket-bats, a tricycle, a row of well-used tennis rackets,
a stupendous array of hats, overcoats, and comforters, testified to
that quiverful so esteemed in the patriarchal age.

A conscientious performer was pounding at the “Harmonious Blacksmith”
upon a wiry piano near at hand, having left the door wide open,
with the indecent disregard of other people peculiar to juvenile
performers upon all kinds of instruments. From the other side of the
hall came the twanging of an equally wiry guitar, upon which girlish
fingers began, and for ever recommenced a Spanish melody, which the
performer was striving to attain by that agonizing process known
among young ladies as “picking up” an air. Mark, gentle reader, what
the learned and reverend Haweis has to say upon this art of playing
by ear!

From a remoter room came young voices and young laughter; and amidst
all these sounds it was hardly surprising that Mr. Dalbrook had to
ring three times, and to wait in front of the open hall door for
at least ten minutes, before an elderly housemaid responded to his
summons and ushered him into the Vicar’s study, the one room in the
Vicarage which was ever fit to receive a visitor.

The Vicar was reading a newspaper in front of a comfortable fire. He
was an elderly man, of genial and even jovial aspect, and he received
Mr. Dalbrook’s apologetic account of himself and his business with
perfect good humour.

“You want to see Miss Newton, my dear sir. I am sorry to tell you she
left us nearly two years ago—heartily sorry, for Sarah Newton is a
very worthy woman, and a jewel of price in a motherless family like
mine,” said the Vicar. “I regret that you should have come such a
long way to find her when, had you written to me, I could have told
you where to look for her in London.”

“Yes, it was a mistake to come so far without making preliminary
inquiries—only, as she had not applied to her usual agent for a new
situation, I concluded that she was still under your roof.”

“She has not gone into a new situation, Mr. Dalbrook. She was too
much valued in this house to wish to change to another employment,
although she might have lived more luxuriously and done less work
elsewhere. She was a mother to my girls—ay, and to my boys as
well—while she was with us; and she only left us when she made up her
mind to live an independent life.”

“She has left off teaching, then, I conclude?”

“Yes. She had a little bit of money left her by a bachelor uncle,
safely invested in railway stock, and yielding about two hundred a
year. This, with her own savings, made her an independent woman, and
she made up her mind to realize her own ideal of a useful life—an
ideal which had been developing in her mind for a good many years—a
life which was to be serviceable to others, and yet pleasant to
herself.”

“Do you mean that she joined some sisterhood?”

“No, no, Mr. Dalbrook; Sarah Newton is much too fond of her own
way, much too independent and fiery a spirit, to place herself in a
position where other people would think for her, and where she would
be obliged to obey. She told me her plan of life very frankly. ‘I
have about two hundred and sixty pounds a year,’ she said; ‘I can
live comfortably upon half that money, if I live after a plan of my
own; and I can do a great deal of good with the other half if I do
it in my own way. I am elderly and plain. If I were to live amongst
small gentilities I should be a nobody, and in all probability
I should be considered a bore. I shall take a lodging in a poor
neighbourhood, furnish my rooms with the utmost comfort, treat myself
to a good piano, and collect my little library book by book from
the second-hand booksellers. I shall spend half my days in going
quietly about among the poor young women of the district—I ought to
know what girls are after nearly forty years’ teaching and managing
the species—and I shall spend half my income in doing as much good to
them as I can, in my own unorthodox way.’ I knew the good that brave
little soul had done in this parish, in her quiet, unpretentious
fashion, and I felt no doubt she would carry out her plan.”

“Have you seen her since she left you?”

“Yes, I went to see her last June when I had a fortnight’s holiday in
London. I found her in a shabby old house in Lambeth, not very far
from St. Thomas’s Hospital; but dingy as the house looked outside,
our good Sally’s apartments were the picture of comfort. I found
her as happy as a bird. Her plan of life had answered her highest
expectations. ‘My friends are legion,’ she said, ‘but I haven’t a
single gentility among them.’ Sally is a desperate Radical, you must
know.”

“Will you give me her address, that I may write and ask her
permission to call upon her?”

“You shall have the address, but I doubt if she will feel disposed to
receive you. She will count you among the gentilities.”

“I must try my chance at any rate. I want her to throw some light
upon the history of one of her earliest pupils. Did you ever hear her
talk of Cheriton Chase and the Strangway family?”

“My dear sir, I have heard her talk of any number of places, and
any number of people. I used to tell her she must be a female
Methuselah to have passed through so many experiences. She was very
fond of telling stories of the families in which she had lived, but
though I used to listen I remember very little about them. My girls
would remember better, I have no doubt. They can give you chapter
and verse, I dare say; so the best thing you can do is to eat your
luncheon with us, and then you can ask them as many questions as you
like.”

Theodore accepted the offer with gratitude, and ten minutes
afterwards followed the Vicar into the dining-room, where three
tall, good-looking girls and two straggling youths were assembled,
and where a fourth girl and another boy dropped in after the rest
were seated. The board was spread with a plenteous but homely meal.
A large dish of Irish stew smoked at one end of the table, and the
remains of yesterday’s roast ribs of beef appeared at the other.

The girls were evidently accustomed to droppers in, and received
Theodore with perfect equanimity.

Alicia, the eldest, carved the beef with a commanding wrist, and the
third daughter, Laura, administered to his appetite with pickled
walnuts and mashed potatoes. The girls were all keenly interested
directly he spoke of Miss Newton. They pronounced her a dear old
thing, not a bit like a governess.

“We all loved her,” said Alicia: “and we are not the easiest girls
to get on with, I can assure you. We have had two poor things since
Sally deserted us, and we have driven them both away. And now we are
enjoying an interregnum, and we hope the dear father will make it a
long one.”

“Did you ever hear your governess talk of the Strangways, Miss
Craven?”

“What, Evelyn Strangway, of Cheriton Chase? I should think we did,
indeed,” cried Laura. “She had a good many prosy stories—chestnuts,
we used to call them—but the Cheriton Chase stories were the most
chestnutty. It was her first situation, and she was never tired of
talking about it.”

“Do you know if she kept up her acquaintance with Miss Strangway in
after life?” asked Theodore.

“I think not; at any rate, she never talked about that. She knew
something about the poor girl’s later life—something very bad, I
think—for she would never tell us. She used to sigh and look very
unhappy if the subject was touched upon; and she used to warn us
against runaway matches. As if any of us would be likely to run
away from this dear old father?” protested Laura, leaning over the
table to pat the Vicar’s coat-sleeve. “Why, he would let us marry
chimney-sweeps rather than see us unhappy.”

There was a good deal more talk about Sarah Newton, her virtues
and her little peculiarities, but nothing bearing upon Theodore’s
business, so he only stayed till luncheon was finished, and then
wished the amiable Vicar and his family a friendly good-bye, offering
to be of use to them in London at any time they might want some small
business transacted there, and begging the Vicar to look him up at
his chambers when he took his next holiday.

“You may rely upon it I shall take you at your word,” said the parson
cheerily. “You’ve no idea what a gay old dog I am when I am in
town—the theatre every night, and a little bit of supper afterwards.
I generally take one of my lads with me, though, to keep me out
of mischief. Good-bye, and mind you don’t fall in love with Sally
Newton. She’s old and ugly, but she’s one of the most fascinating
women I know.”

Theodore drove off in the dog-cart with all the Vicarage family at
the gate waving their hands to him, as if he had been an old friend,
and with four Vicarage dogs barking at him.

He went back to London that night, and wrote to Miss Newton, asking
leave to call upon her upon a matter relating to one of her old
pupils on the following day. He should take silence to mean consent,
and would be with her at four in the afternoon, if he did not receive
a telegram to forbid him.

He worked in his chambers all the morning, and at a little after
three set out to walk to Lambeth. The address was 51, Wedgewood
Street, near the Lambeth Road. It was not a long walk, and it was not
a pleasant one, for a seasonable fog was gathering when Theodore
left the Temple, and it thickened as he crossed Westminster Bridge,
where the newly-lighted lamps made faint yellow patches in the dense
brown atmosphere. Under these conditions it took him some time to
find Wedgewood Street, and that particular house which had the honour
of sheltering Sarah Newton.

It was a very shabby old street. The shops were of the meanest order,
and the houses which were not shops looked as if they were mostly
let off to the struggling class of lodgers; but it was a street
that had evidently seen better days, for the houses were large and
substantially built, and the doorways had once been handsome and
architectural—houses which had been the homes of prosperous citizens
when Lambeth was out of town, and when the perfume of bean blossom
and new-mown hay found its way into Wedgewood Street.

The ground-floor of Number 51 was occupied by a shoemaker, a
shoemaker who had turned his parlour into a shop, who made to
measure, but was not above executing repairs neatly. The front door
being open, Theodore walked straight upstairs to the first-floor
landing, where there was a neat little Doulton ware oil-lamp burning
on a carved oak bracket, and where he saw Miss Newton’s name painted
in bold black letters upon a terra-cotta coloured door. The stairs
were cleaner than they generally are in such a house, and the landing
was spotless.

He rang a bell, and the door was promptly opened by a lady, whom he
took to be Miss Newton. She was rather below middle height, strongly
built, but of a neat, compact figure. She was decidedly plain, and
her iron grey hair was coarse and wiry; but she had large bright eyes
which beamed with good nature and intelligence. Her black stuff gown
and narrow linen collar, the knot of scarlet ribbon at her throat,
and the linen cuffs turned back over perfectly-fitting sleeves, were
all the pink of neatness, and suited her as no other kind of dress
would have done. The trim figure, the bright eyes, and the small
white hands made a favourable impression upon Theodore, in spite of
the lady’s homeliness of feature and complexion.

“Walk in, Mr. Dalbrook,” she said cheerily. “Pray come and sit by
the fire; you must be chilled to the bone after coming through that
horrid fog. Ah, how I hate fog! It is the scourge of the London poor,
and it sometimes kills even the rich. And now we are only at the
beginning of the evil, and there is the long winter before us.”

“Yes, it is very bad, no doubt; but you do not look as if the fog
could do you much harm, Miss Newton.”

“No, it won’t hurt _me_. I’m a hardy old plant, and I contrive to
make myself comfortable at all seasons.”

“You do, indeed,” he answered, glancing round the room. “I had no
idea——”

“That anybody could be so comfortable in Lambeth,” she said,
interpreting his thoughts. “No, people think they must pay for
what they call ‘a good situation.’ Poor pinched widows and shabby
spinsters spend more than half their income on rent and taxes, and
starve on the other half, in order to live in a genteel locality—some
dingy little street in Pimlico perhaps, or a stucco terrace in
Kensington. Here am I with two fine large rooms in a forgotten old
street, which was built before the age of shoddy. I live among poor
people, and am not obliged to sacrifice a sixpence for the sake
of appearances. I buy everything in the cheapest market, and my
neighbours look up to me, instead of looking down upon me, as they
might if I lived among gentilities. You will say, perhaps, that I
live in the midst of dirt and squalor. If I do I take care that none
of it ever comes near me, and I do all that one woman’s voice and one
woman’s pen can do to lessen the evils that I see about me.”

“It would be a good thing for poor neighbourhoods if there were many
ladies of your mind, Miss Newton,” said Theodore, basking in the
glow of the fire, and looking lazily round the room, with its two
well-filled book-cases, occupying the recesses on each side of the
fireplace, its brackets and shelves, and hanging pockets, its large
old-fashioned sofa, and substantial claw-footed table, its wicker
chairs, cushioned with bright colour—its lamps and candlesticks on
shelf and bracket, ready to the hand when extra light should be
wanted, its contrivances and handinesses of all kinds, which denoted
the womanly inventiveness of the tenant.

“Well, I believe it would. If only a small percentage of the lonely
spinsters of England would make their abode among the poor, things
would have to be mended somehow. There could not be such crying evils
as there are if there were more eyes to see them, and more voices
to protest against them. You like this old room of mine, I see, Mr.
Dalbrook,” added Sarah Newton, following his eyes as they surveyed
the dark red wall against which the brackets and shelves, and books
and photographs, and bits of old china stood out in bright relief.

“I am full of admiration and surprise!”

“It is all my own work. I had lived in other people’s houses so
long that I was charmed to have a home of my own, even in Lambeth.
I was determined to spend very little money, and yet to make myself
comfortable; so I just squatted in the next room for the first three
months, with only a bedstead, a table, and a chair or two, while I
prowled all over London to find the exact furniture I wanted. There’s
not an article in the room that did not take me weeks to find and to
buy, and there’s not an article that wasn’t a tremendous bargain.
But what an egotistical old prattler I am! Women who live much alone
get to be dreadful prosers. I won’t say another word about myself—at
any rate, not till after I’ve made you a cup of tea after your cold
walk.”

She had seen the mud upon his boots, and guessed that he had walked
from the Temple.

“Pray do not take any trouble——”

“Nonsense; it is never trouble to a woman to make tea. I give a
tea-party twice a week. I hope you like tea?”

“I adore it. But pray go on with your account of how you settled down
here. I am warmly interested.”

“That’s very good of you—but there’s not much to tell about myself,”
said Miss Newton, producing some pretty old china out of an antique
cupboard with glass doors, and setting out a little brass tea-tray
while she talked.

There was a small copper kettle singing on the old-fashioned hob,
and there was a covered dish of toast in the capacious fender. Miss
Newton’s dinners were ever of the slightest, but she was a sybarite
as to her tea and toast. No cheap and powdery mixture; no “inferior
Dosset” for her. She made her brew with a dainty precision which
Theodore admired, while she went on talking.

“Do you like the colour of the walls? Yes, I painted them. And you
like that paper on the ceiling? I papered it. I am rather a dab at
carpentering, too, and I put up all those shelves and brackets, and
I covered the chairs, and stained the boards round that old Turkey
carpet; and then, after a day’s hard work, it was very pleasant to
go and stroll about among the bookshops of an evening and pick up a
volume here and there till I got all my old friends about me. I felt
like Elia; only I had no Bridget to share my pleasure.”

She seated herself opposite to him with a wicker table in front of
her, and began to pour out the tea. He wondered to find himself as
much at home with her as if he had known her all his life.

“It is very good of you to receive me so cordially,” he said,
presently. “I feel that I come to you as an unauthorized intruder.”

“Can you guess why I was willing to receive you?” she asked, looking
at him intently and with a sudden gravity. “Can you guess why I
didn’t telegraph to forbid your coming?”

“Indeed, no, except because you are naturally kind.”

“My kindness had nothing to do with it. I was willing to see you
because of your name. It is a very familiar name to me—Dalbrook, the
name of the man who bought the house in which she was born. Poor
soul, how she must have hated him, in her desolate after years. How
she must have hated the race that ousted her from the home she loved.”

“You are talking of Evelyn Strangway?”

“Yes, she was my first pupil, and I was very fond of her—all the
fonder of her, perhaps, because she was wayward and difficult to
manage: and because I was much too young and inexperienced to
exercise any authority over her.”

“It is of her I want to talk to you, if you will allow me.”

“Certainly. I like talking of those old days when I was a girl. I
don’t suppose I was particularly happy at Cheriton Chase; but I was
young, and we most of us hug the delusion that we were happy in our
youth. Poor Evelyn—so often in disgrace—so often unhappy, from the
very dawn of girlhood! What reason can _you_ have for being curious
about her?”

“I have a very strong reason, though I cannot explain it yet awhile.
I have set myself to discover the history of that banished race.”

“After the angel with the flaming sword stood at the gate—that is to
say, after Mr. Dalbrook bought the property. By-the-by, what are you
to Lord Cheriton? His son perhaps?”

“No, I am only a distant cousin.”

“Is it on his account you are making these inquiries?”

“He is not even aware that I am making them.”

“Indeed; and pray how did you find me out? My tea-parties are
not recorded in the Society papers; I have never figured among
‘Celebrities at Home.’”

“I took some pains to find you,” said Theodore, and then he told her
of his visits to the agencies, and his journey to the Vicarage in
Lakeland.

“You have taken infinite trouble, and for a small result. I can give
you very little information about Evelyn Strangway—afterwards Mrs.
Darcy.”

“Did you lose sight of her after you left Cheriton?”

“Yes, for a long time. It was years before we met again; but she
wrote to me several times from Lausanne, during the first year of her
banishment; doleful letters, complaining bitterly of her father’s
cruelty in keeping her away from her beloved Cheriton, the horses
and dogs, the life she loved. School she detested. She was clever,
but she had no taste for intellectual pursuits. She soon wearied of
the lake and the mountains, and the humdrum society of a small town.
She wrote of herself as a galley-slave. Then came a sudden change,
and she began to write about _him_. You don’t know the way a girl
writes about _him_; the first him she has ever thought worthy to be
written about. Her tone was light enough at the beginning. She had
met a young Irishman at a little evening party, and they had laughed
together at Lausanne society. He was an officer, on furlough, full of
wit and fun. I need not go into details. I saw her danger, and warned
her; I reminded her that her father would never allow her to marry a
subaltern in a marching regiment, and that such a marriage would mean
starvation. Her father could give her nothing; it was incumbent on
her to marry well, and with her attractions she had only to wait for
a good offer. It would inevitably come in due time.”

“She was handsome, I suppose? I know her face in the picture at
Cheriton. My cousin bought all the old portraits.”

“She was much handsomer than the picture. That was painted when she
was only fifteen, but at seventeen her beauty had developed, and she
was one of the most brilliant blondes I ever saw. Well, I suppose you
know how useless my advice was. She ran away with her Irish admirer,
and I heard no more of her for nearly four years, when I met her one
afternoon in the Strand, and she took me home to her lodging in Cecil
Street, and gave me some tea. It was in October, and I stayed with
her till dark, and then she insisted on seeing me off in the omnibus
to Haverstock Hill, where I was then living in an artist’s family.
The lodgings were shabby, and she was shabbily dressed. She was as
handsome as ever, but she looked worried and unhappy. Her husband had
sold out of the army, and had a position as secretary to a West End
club.

“She told me that they would have been pretty well off but for
his extravagance. He was getting four hundred a year, and they
had no children. She complained that it was her fate to be allied
with spendthrifts. Her father had squandered his fortune; and
her husband’s improvident habits kept her in continual debt
and difficulty. It grieved me to see the shabbiness of her
surroundings—the squalid lodging-house parlour, without so much as
a bunch of flowers or a stand of books to show that it was in the
occupation of a lady. There was a cigarbox on the mantelpiece, and
there was a heap of newspapers on the sofa, and a pair of shabby
slippers inside the fender. It was a room to make one shudder. I
asked her if she was reconciled to her father, and she said no; she
had heard nothing of him since her marriage. I felt very unhappy
about her after we parted at Hungerford Market. I saw her standing
on the pavement as the omnibus drove away, a tall, slim figure,
distinguished-looking in spite of her shabby mantle and rusty black
silk gown. I had promised to go and see her again, though I was very
seldom at liberty at that time, and I went to Cecil Street two or
three times in the course of the winter, but she was always out, and
there was something in the tone of her letters that made me think
she did not wish to see me again, though I believe she was fond of
me always, poor soul. I saw nothing more of her, and heard nothing
until nearly four years afterwards, when I was spending an afternoon
at Richmond with my pupils—two girls of fourteen and sixteen—and I
came face to face with her in front of Thomson’s Seat. She was with
a tall, handsome man, whom at first I took to be her husband: but
there was something in the manner of both of them that impressed me
uncomfortably, and I began to fear that this was not her husband. She
looked much brighter than when I saw her in Cecil Street, and she
was better dressed—very plainly, but in excellent taste. She took me
aside a little way while her companion stood and talked to the two
girls. She put her arm through mine in her old caressing way, and
then she said, abruptly, ‘I almost wonder that you will speak to me.
I thought you would cut me dead.’ I looked puzzled, no doubt; so she
said, ‘Perhaps you don’t know what a lost creature I am. Perhaps
you have not heard.’ I told her I had heard nothing about her since
we parted at Hungerford Market, and then she gave a deep sigh, and
said, ‘Well, I am not going to deceive you. That,’ with a jerk of
her head towards the man who was standing with his back to us, ‘is
not my husband, but he and I are bound together for the rest of our
lives, and we are perfectly happy together. Society would scorn us
and trample upon us no doubt if we gave it a chance; but we don’t.
We live out of the world, and we live for one another. Now, aren’t
you shocked with me? Don’t you want to run away?’ she asked, with a
little laugh, which sounded as if she was very nearly crying. I told
her that I was very sorry for her. I could say no more than that.
‘You would be sorrier still if you could picture to yourself the
miserable life I led before I left my husband,’ she said. ‘I bore
it for five years, years that seemed an eternity. He cared for me
no more than for the flower-girls in the street. He left me to pine
in my dingy lodging, left me to be dunned and worried all day long,
left me out-at-elbows, ashamed of my own shabbiness, while he amused
himself at his club; and then he considered himself cruelly used when
he found out there was another man in the world who thought me worth
caring for, and when I told him I loved that man with all my heart.
My leaving him was the impulse of a moment. The moment came when his
brutality turned the scale, and I ran out of the house in my despair,
and jumped into the first cab I could hail, and drove away to _him_,’
pointing to the man in the distance, strolling beside my two gawky
girls, ‘and to happiness. I am a wicked wretch, no doubt, to be happy
under such circumstances, but I am, or, at any rate, as happy as
anybody can hope to be in this world. There is always a thorn among
the flowers,’ she sighed, as if the thorn was a big one, I thought.
‘I suppose I shall never see you again,’ she said. ‘When we say
good-bye presently, it will be farewell for ever.’ I told her that
was not inevitable. I was my own mistress, free to choose my friends.
I told her that if ever she had need of a friend I would go to her.
I felt that I was in some wise answerable for the bad turn her life
had taken, for had I been a more judicious counsellor, I might have
guided her better, might have prevented her coming into collision
with her father. I asked her for her address, but she told me she had
promised to tell nobody where she lived. ‘We are living out of the
world,’ she said, ‘we have no visitors, no friends or acquaintance.’
She clasped my hands, kissed me, and hurried away to rejoin the man
whose name I never learned. He lifted his hat to me and the girls,
and they walked away together towards the Star and Garter, leaving
us standing by Thomson’s Seat, staring idly at the landscape in the
summer sunlight. I felt dazed as I stood there, looking down into
that lovely valley. It had been a terrible shock to me to meet her
again under such circumstances.”




CHAPTER XVI.

    “Be useful where thou livest, that they may
     Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still.
     ... All worldly joys go less
     To the one joy of doing kindnesses.”


“What impression did the man make upon you in that brief meeting?”
asked Theodore. “Did he strike you as a _roué_?”

“No, that was the odd part of the business. He had the steady,
respectable air of a bread-winner, a professional, or perhaps a
commercial man. I could not tell which. There was nothing flashy
or dissipated in his appearance. He looked me steadily in the face
when he bowed to me at parting, and he had a frank, straightforward
expression, and a grave decision of manner that was not without
dignity. He was soberly dressed in a style that attracted no
attention. I had no doubt that he was a gentleman.”

“He was handsome, you say?”

“Yes, he was decidedly handsome—but I can remember only the general
character of his face, not features or details, for I saw him only
twice in my life.”

“Ah, you saw him again?”

“Once again—some years later, after her death.”

“She is dead, then?” cried Theodore; “that is the fact I am most
anxious to learn from a reliable source of information. There was a
rumour of her death years ago, but no one could give me any evidence
of the fact. I went to Boulogne last week to try and trace her to her
last resting-place; but I could discover neither tombstone nor record
of any kind.”

“And yet it was at Boulogne she died. I will tell you all I know
about her, if you like. It doesn’t amount to much.”

“Pray, tell me everything you can. I am deeply grateful to you for
having treated me with so much frankness.”

“It was on her account I received you. I am glad to talk to any one
who is interested in her pitiful fate. There were so few to care for
her. I think there is no lot more sad than that of a broken-down
gentleman’s daughter, born to an inheritance she is never to enjoy,
brought up to think of herself as a personage, with a right to the
world’s respect, and finding herself friendless and penniless in the
bloom of her womanhood, exposed to the world’s contumely.”

Theodore’s face flushed a little at this mention of his interest in
the unhappy lady, for he could but feel that the interest was of a
sinister kind; but he held his peace, and Miss Newton went on with
her story.

“It was ever so many years after that meeting in Richmond Park—I
think it must have been nearly ten years—when I ran against that very
man upon a windy March day in Folkestone. I had thought much and
often of my poor girl in all those years, wondering how the world had
used her, and whether the lover whom she trusted so implicitly had
been true to her. I shuddered at the thought of what her fate might
have been if he were false. I had never heard a word about her in all
that time. I had seen no report of a Divorce suit in the papers. I
knew absolutely nothing of her history from the hour I parted with
her by Thomson’s Seat till I ran against that man in Folkestone. I am
rather shy about speaking to strangers in a general way; but I was
so anxious to know her fate that I stopped this man, whose very name
was unknown to me, and asked him to tell me about my poor friend. He
looked bewildered, as well he might, at being pounced upon in that
manner. I explained that I was Evelyn Strangway’s old governess, and
that I was uneasy at having lost sight of her for so many years, and
was very anxious to see her again. He looked troubled at my question,
and he answered me gravely—‘I am sorry to say you will never do that.
Your friend is dead.’ I asked when she died, and where? He told me
within the last month, and at Boulogne. I asked if he was with her
at the last, and he said no; and then he lifted his hat and muttered
something about having very little time to get to the station. He was
going to London by the next train, it seemed, and he was evidently
anxious to shake me off; but I was determined he should answer at
least one more question. ‘Was her husband with her when she died?’
I asked. His face darkened at the question, which I suppose was a
foolish one. ‘Do you think it likely?’ he said, trying to move past
me; but I had laid my hand upon his sleeve in my eagerness. ‘Pray
tell me that her end was not unhappy—and that she was penitent for
her sins.’ He looked very angry at this. ‘If I stand here talking
to you another minute I shall lose my train, madam,’ he said, ‘and
I have important business in London this afternoon.’ A fly came
strolling by at this moment. He hailed it and jumped in, and he drove
off into what Thomas Carlyle would call the Immensities. I never saw
him again; I never knew his name, or calling, or place of abode, or
anything about him. I can no more localize him than I can Goethe’s
Mephistopheles. God knows how he treated my poor girl—whether he
was kind or cruel; whether he was faithful to a dishonourable tie,
or whether he held it as lightly as such ties have been held by the
majority of men from Abraham downwards.”

The little woman’s face flushed and her eyes filled as she gave vent
to her feelings.

“And this is all you know of Evelyn Strangway?” said Theodore, when
she had finished.

“This is all I know of her. And now tell me why you are so anxious to
learn her history—you who can never have seen her face, except in
the picture at Cheriton. I dressed her for that picture and sat by
while it was painted.”

“I will tell you the motive of my curiosity,” answered Theodore.
“You have treated me so frankly that I feel I must not withhold my
confidence from you. I know that I can rely upon your discretion.”

“I can talk, as you have just heard,” said Miss Newton; “but I can be
silent as the grave, when I like.”

“You must have read something about the murder at Cheriton last July.”

“I read a great deal about it. I took a morbid interest in the case,
knowing the house so well in every cranny and corner. I could picture
the scene as vividly as if I had seen the murdered man lying there. A
most inexplicable murder, apparently motiveless.”

“Apparently motiveless. That fact has so preyed upon the widow’s mind
that she has imagined a motive. She has a strange fancy that one
of the Strangways must have been the author of the crime. She has
brooded over their images till her whole mind has become possessed
with the idea of one of that banished race, garnering his wrath for
long years, until at last the hour came for a bloody revenge, and
then striking a death-blow out of the dark—striking his fatal blow
and vanishing from the sight of men, as if a phantom arm had been
stretched out of the night to deal that blow. She has asked me to
help her in discovering the murderer, and I am pledged to do my
utmost towards that end. I am the more anxious to do so as I tremble
for the consequences if she should be allowed to brood long upon this
morbid fancy about the Strangways. I think, however, that with your
help I have now laid that ghost. I have traced the two brothers to
their graves; and I suppose we may accept the statement of the man
you met at Folkestone as sufficient evidence of Mrs. Darcy’s death;
especially as it seems to fit in with the account of the then Vicar
of Cheriton, who met her in Boulogne in the summer of ’64 looking
very ill and much aged.”

“It was in the spring of ’65 I met that man at Folkestone. I could
find the exact date in my diary if you wished to be very precise
about it, for it is one of my old-maidish ways to be very regular in
keeping my diary. Poor Evelyn! To think that any one should be mad
enough to suspect her of being capable of murder—or Fred or Reginald.
They had the Strangway temper, all three of them; and a fiery temper
it was when it was roused, a temper that led to family quarrels and
all sorts of unhappiness; but murder is a different kind of thing.”

“That is the question,” said Theodore, gravely. “Is there such a
wide gulf between the temper that makes family quarrels, sets father
against son, and brother against brother, and the temper that pulls
a trigger or uses a bowie-knife? I thought they were one and the
same thing in actual quality, and that the result was dependent upon
circumstances.”

“Oh, don’t talk like that, please. Murder is something exceptional—a
hideous solecism in nature—and in this case why murder? What had
Sir Godfrey Carmichael done that any member of the Strangway family
should want to kill him?”

“I tell you that the idea is a wild one, the morbid growth of my
cousin’s sorrow.”

“Of course it is. I am very sorry for her, poor soul. I don’t suppose
any woman could suffer more than she must have suffered. It is a
dreadful story. And she was very fond of her husband, I dare say.”

“She adored him. They had been lovers almost from her childhood.
There never were a more devoted bride and bridegroom. Their honeymoon
was not even beginning to wane. They were still lovers, still in a
state of sweet surprise at finding themselves husband and wife. Poor
girl, I saw her the day before the murder, a brilliant creature,
the very spirit of joy. I saw her the morning after, a spectre,
with awful eyes and marble face—more dreadful to look upon than her
murdered husband.”

“It is all too sad,” sighed Miss Newton. “I begin to think that
Cheriton is a fatal house, and that no one can be happy there.
However, you can tell this poor lady that the Strangways are
exonerated from any part in her misery.”

“I shall write to her to-night to that effect. And now, Miss Newton,
let me thank you once more for your friendly frankness, and wish you
a good night.”

“Don’t be in such a hurry, Mr. Dalbrook. I like your face, and I
should like to see you again some day, if you can find time to waste
an hour upon an old maid in such a God-forsaken place as Wedgewood
Street.”

“I shall think an hour so spent most delightfully employed,” answered
Theodore, who was quite subjugated by the charm of this little person
and her surroundings.

He did not remember having ever sat in a room he liked better than
this first-floor front in Wedgewood Street, with its terra-cotta
walls, prettily-bound books, curious oddments of old china, and
comfortable curtains of creamy workhouse-sheeting, with a bold
vermilion border worked by Sarah Newton’s indefatigable fingers.

“I should very much like to hear all about your life in this—strange
neighbourhood,” he said.

“There is not much to tell. When my little fortune—left by my uncle,
the drysalter—fell in to me I was a lonely old woman, without one
surviving relative for whom I cared twopence. I was pretty tired of
teaching French and German—God knows how many hundred times I must
have gone through Ollendorff in both languages—and I’ve done him a
good many times in Italian, _par dessus le marché_. Perhaps I might
have held on for a year or two longer, as I was very fond of those
nice girls and boys at Kettisford Vicarage, if it hadn’t been for
Ollendorff. _He_ decided me. Leila, the youngest girl, had only just
begun that accursed book. She was blundering over ‘the baker’s golden
candlestick’ the very morning I got the lawyer’s letter to tell me of
my uncle’s death, and the will, and the legacy. I snatched the book
out of her hand, and shut it with a bang. ‘Ain’t I to do any more
Ollendorff, Sally?’ she asked. ‘You may do as much as you like, my
love,’ I said, ‘but you’ll do no more with me. I’m a millionaire, or
at least I feel as rich and independent as if I were a Rothschild.’
Well, I lay awake all that night making plans for my life, and trying
to think out how I could get the most comfort out of my little
fortune, enjoy my declining years, have everything I wanted, and yet
be of some use to my fellow-creatures; and the end of it was that
I made up my mind to take a roomy lodging in a poor neighbourhood,
where I should not be tempted to spend a penny upon appearances,
furnish it after my own heart, and make myself happy in just my own
way, without caring a straw what anybody thought about me. I knew
that I was plain as well as elderly, that I could never be admired,
or cut a figure in the genteel world, so I determined to renounce the
gentilities altogether and to be looked up to in a little world of my
own.”

“And you have found your plan answer——”

“It has answered beyond my hopes. Ever since I was thirty years of
age and had finished with all young ideas and day-dreams, I had one
particular ideal of earthly bliss, and that was the position of a
country squire’s wife—an energetic, active, well-meaning woman, the
central figure in a rural village, having her model cottages and her
allotment gardens, her infirmary, her mission-house—the good genius
of her little community, a queen in miniature, and without political
entanglements, or menace of foreign war. Now it could never be my lot
to reign on a landed estate, to build cottages, or cut up fertile
meadows for cottagers’ gardens; but I thought by taking up my abode
in a poor neighbourhood, and visiting in a friendly, familiar way—no
tracts or preachings—among the most respectable of the inhabitants,
and slowly feeling my way among the difficult subjects, I might
gradually acquire an influence just as strong as that of the Lady
Bountiful in a country parish, and might come to be as useful in my
small way as the squire’s wife with her larger means. And I have
done it,” added Miss Newton, triumphantly. “There are rooms in this
street and in other streets that are to me my model cottages. There
are overworked, underfed women who look up to me as their Providence.
There are children who come and hang to my skirts as I pass along the
streets. There are great hulking men who ask my advice and get me to
write their letters for them. What could a squire’s wife have more
than that? And yet I have only a hundred and fifty pounds a year to
spend upon my people.”

“You give them something more than money. You give them sympathy—the
magnetism of your strong and generous nature.”

“Ah, there is something in that. Magnetism is a good word. There
must be some reason why people attach themselves so ardently to Mr.
Gladstone, don’t you know,—some charm in him that holds them almost
in spite of themselves, and makes them think as he thinks, and veer
as he veers. Yes, they swing round with him like the boats going
round with the tide, and they can’t help it any more than the boats
can. And I think, to compare small things with great, there must be
some touch of that magnetic power in _me_,” concluded Miss Newton.

“I am sure of it,” said Theodore, “and I am sure, too, that you must
be like a spot of light in this dark little world of yours.”

“I live among my friends. That is the point,” explained Miss
Newton. “I don’t come from Belgravia, or from a fashionable terrace
in Kensington, and tell them they ought to keep their wretched
rooms cleaner, and open their windows and put flower-pots on their
window-sills. I live here, and they can come and see how I keep _my_
rooms, and judge for themselves. Their landlord is my landlord; and
a nice life I lead him about water, and whitewash, and drains. He is
thoroughly afraid of me, I am happy to say, and generally bolts round
a corner when he sees me in the street; but I am too quick for his
over-fed legs. I tackle him about all his shortcomings, and he finds
it easier to spend a few pounds upon his property now and then than
to have _me_ upon his heels at every turn; so now Crook’s tenements
have quite a reputation in Lambeth. If you were to see the old dragon
you would wonder at my pluck in attacking him, I can assure you.”

“Your whole life is wonderful to me, Miss Newton; and I only wish
there were hundreds of women in this big city living just as you
live. Tell me, please, what kind of people your neighbours are.”

“Oh, there are people of all kinds, some of course who are quite
impracticable, for whom I can do nothing; but there are many more
who are glad of my friendship, and who receive me with open arms.
The single women and widows are my chief friends, and some of those
I know as well as if we had been brought up and educated upon the
same social level. They are workwomen of all kinds, tailoresses,
shirt-makers, girls who work for military outfitters, extra hands
for Court dressmakers, shop-girls at the humbler class of shops,
shoe-binders, artificial-flower-makers. I wonder whether you would
like to see some of them.”

“I should like it very much indeed.”

“Then perhaps you will come to one of my tea-parties. I give two
tea-parties a week all through the winter, to just as many of my
women friends as this room will hold. It holds about twenty very
comfortably, so I make twenty-five the outside limit. We rather
enjoy a little bit of a crush—and I give my invitations so that they
all have such pleasure as I can give them, fairly, turn and turn
about. We do not begin our evening too early, for the working hours
are precious to my poor things. We take tea at eight o’clock, and
we seldom separate before half-past eleven—just as if we were at a
theatre. We have a little music, a little reading and recitation, and
sometimes a round game at cards. When we are in a wild humour we play
dumb-crambo, or even puss-in-the-corner; and we have always a great
deal of talk. We sit round this fireplace in a double semi-circle,
the younger ones sitting on the rug in front of us elders, and we
talk, and talk, and talk—about ourselves mostly, and you can’t think
what good it does us. Surely God gave man speech as the universal
safety-valve. It lets off half our troubles, and half our sense of
the world’s injustice.”

“Please let me come to your very next party,” said Theodore, smiling
at the little woman’s ardour.

“That will be to-morrow evening,” replied Miss Newton. “I shall have
to make an excuse for your appearance, as we very seldom invite a
man. You will have to read or recite something, as a reason for your
being asked, don’t you know.”

“I will not recoil even from that test. I have distinguished myself
occasionally at a Penny Reading. Am I to be tragic—or comic?”

“Be both if you can. We like to laugh; but we revel in something that
makes us cry desperately. If you could give us something creepy into
the bargain, freeze our blood with a ghost or two, it would be all
the more enjoyable.”

“I will satiate you with my talents; I shall feel like Pentheus
when he intruded upon his mother and her crew, and shall be humbly
grateful for not being torn to pieces. I dare say I shall be torn to
pieces morally, in the way of criticism. Good night, and a thousand
thanks.”

“Wait,” said Miss Newton. “I’m afraid it is much foggier than when
you came. I have smelt the fog coming on while we have been talking.
Wouldn’t you like a cab?”

“I should very much, but I doubt if I shall succeed in finding one.”

“_You_ wouldn’t, but I dare say I can get you one,” replied Miss
Newton, decisively.

She had an unobtrusive little chatelaine at her side, and from the
bunch of implements, scissors, penknife, thimble, she selected a
small whistle. Then she pulled back one of the cream-white curtains,
opened the window, and whistled loud and shrill into the fog. Two
minutes afterwards there came a small treble voice out of the
darkness.

“What is it, Miss Newton?”

“Who’s that?”

“Tommy Meadows.”

“All right, Tommy. Do you think you could find a hansom without
getting yourself run over?”

“Rather! Do you want it bringed to your door, miss?”

“If you please, Tommy.”

“I’m off,” cried the shrill voice, and in less than ten minutes a
two-wheeler rattled along the street, and drew up sharply at Tommy’s
treble command, with Tommy himself seated inside, enjoying the drive
and the uncertainty of the driver.

His spirits were still further exalted by the gift of sixpence from
Theodore as he stepped into the cab, to be taken back to the Temple
at a foot pace.

Even that sitting-room of his, which he had taken pains to make
comfortable and home-like, had a gloomy look after that bright room
in Lambeth, with its terra-cotta walls and cream-coloured curtains,
its gaily-bound books and vivid Vallauris vases perched in every
available corner. He was more interested in that quaint interior, and
in the woman who had created it, than he had been in any one except
that one woman who filled the chief place in all his thoughts. The
Vicar of Kettisford had not over-estimated Sarah Newton’s power of
fascination.

He was in Wedgewood Street at a few minutes before eight on the
following evening. The sky above Lambeth was no longer obscured;
there were wintry stars shining over that forest of chimney pots and
everlasting monotony of slated roofs; and even Lambeth looked lively
with its costers’ barrows and bustle of eventide marketing. Theodore
found the door open, as it had been yesterday, and he found an extra
lamp upon the first floor landing, and the door of Miss Newton’s room
ajar, while from within came the sound of many voices, moderated to a
subdued tone, but still lively.

His modest knock was answered by Miss Newton herself, who was
standing close to the door, ready to greet every fresh arrival.

“How do you do? We are nearly all here,” she said, cheerily.

“I hope you have not just been dining, for with us tea means a hearty
meal, and if you can’t eat anything we shall feel as if you were
Banquo’s ghost. How do you do, Mrs. Kirby?” to another arrival. “Baby
better, I hope? Yes, that’s right. How are you, Clara? and you, Rose?
You’ve had that wretched tooth out—I can see it in your face. Such a
relief, isn’t it? So glad to see you, Susan Dale, and you, Maria,
and you, Jenny. Why, we are all here, I do believe.”

“Yes, Miss Newton,” said a bright-looking girl by the fireplace, who
had been making toast indefatigably for twenty minutes, and whose
complexion had suffered accordingly. “There are two and twenty of us,
four and twenty, counting the gentleman and you. I think that’s as
many as you expected.”

“Yes, everybody’s here. So we may as well begin tea.”

In most such assemblies, where the intention was to benefit a humble
class of guests, the proceedings would have begun with a hymn; but
at Miss Newton’s parties there were neither hymns nor prayers—and
yet Miss Newton loved her hymn-book, and delighted in the pathos
and the sweetness of the music with which those familiar words are
interwoven; nor would she yield to anybody in her belief in the
efficacy of prayer; but she had made up her mind from the beginning
that her tea-parties were to be pure and simple recreation, and that
any good which should come out of them was to come incidentally. The
women and girls who came at her bidding were to feel they came to be
entertained, came as her guests, just as, had they been duchesses,
they might have gone to visit other duchesses in Park Lane or Carlton
Gardens. They were not asked in order that they should be taught, or
preached to, or wheedled into the praying of prayers or the singing
of hymns. They went as equals to visit a friend who relished their
society.

And did not everybody relish the tea! which might be described as
a Yorkshire tea of a humble order; not the Yorkshire tea which may
mean mayonnaise and perigord pie, chicken and champagne—but tea
as understood in the Potteries of Hull, or the humbler alleys and
streets of Leeds or Bradford. Three moderate-sized tables had been
put together to make one capacious board, spread with snowy damask,
upon which appeared two large plum loaves, two tall towers of bread
and butter, a glass bowl of marmalade, a bowl of jam, two dishes of
thinly-sliced German sausage set off with sprigs of parsley—German
sausage bought at the most respectable ham and beef shop in the
Borough, and as trustworthy as German sausage can be; and for
crowning glory of the feast a plentiful supply of shrimps, freshly
boiled, savouring of the unseen sea. The hot buttered toast was
frizzling on a brass footman in front of the fire, ready to be handed
round piping hot, as required. There were two tea-trays, one at each
end of the table, and there were two bright copper kettles, which had
never been defiled by the smoke of the fire, filled with admirable
tea.

Miss Newton took her place at the head of the table, with Theodore
on her right hand, and a pale and fragile looking young woman on her
left. These two assisted the hostess in the administration of the
tea-tray, handing cups and saucers, sugar-basin and cream-jug; and in
so doing they had frequent occasion to look at each other.

Having gone there prepared to be interested, Theodore soon began to
interest himself in this young woman, whom Miss Newton addressed
as Marian. She was by no means beautiful now, but Theodore fancied
that she had once been very handsome, and he occupied himself in
reconstructing the beauty of the past from the wreck of the present.

The lines of the face were classic in their regularity, but the
hollow cheeks and pallid complexion told of care and toil, and the
face was aged untimely by a hard and joyless life. The eyes were
darkest grey, large and pathetic-looking, the eyes of a woman who
had suffered much and thought much. The beauty of those eyes gave a
mournful charm to the pale pinched face, and the light auburn hair
was still luxuriant. Theodore noted the delicate hands and taper
fingers, which differed curiously from the other hands which were
busy around the hospitable board.

He could see that this young woman was a favourite with Sarah Newton,
and he told himself that she was of a race apart from the rest; but
he was agreeably surprised in finding that, except for the prevailing
Cockney accent, and a few slight lapses in grammar and pronunciation,
Miss Newton’s guests were quite as refined as those ladies of
Dorchester with whom it had been his privilege to associate; indeed,
he was not sure that he did not prefer the Cockney twang and the
faulty grammar to the second-hand smartness and slang of the young
ladies whose “Awfully jolly,” “Ain’t it,” and “Don’t you know,” had
so often irritated his ear on tennis lawn or at afternoon tea. Here
at least there was the unstudied speech of people who knew not the
caprices of fashion or the latest catch word that had descended from
Belgravia to Brompton, and from Brompton to the provinces.

There was a great deal of talk, as Miss Newton had told him there
would be; and as she encouraged all her guests to talk about
themselves, he gathered a good deal of interesting information
about the state of the different trades and the ways and manners
of various employers, most of whom seemed to be of a despotic and
grasping temper. The widows talked of their children’s ailments or
their progress at the Board School; the girls talked a little, and
with all modesty, of their sweethearts. Sarah Newton was interested
in every detail of those humble lives, and seemed to remember every
fact bearing upon the joys or the sorrows of her guests. It was a
wonder to Theodore, to see how the careworn faces lighted up round
the cheerful table in the lamplight. Yes, it was surely a good thing
to live among these daughters of toil, and to lighten their burdens
by this quick sympathy, this cheerful hospitality. Vast Pleasure
Halls and People’s Palaces may do much for the million; but here was
one little spinster with her small income making an atmosphere of
friendliness and comfort for the few, and able to get a great deal
nearer to them than Philanthropy on a gigantic scale can ever get to
the many.

Theodore noticed that while most other tongues babbled freely, the
girl called Marian sat silent, after her task of distributing the
tea was over, with hands folded in her lap, listening to the voices
round her, and with a soft slow smile lighting her face now and
then. In repose her countenance was deeply sad, and he found himself
speculating upon the history that had left those melancholy lines
upon a face that was still young.

“I am much interested in your next neighbour,” he said to Miss
Newton, presently, while Marian was helping another girl to clear
the table. “I feel sure there must be something very sad in her
experience of life, and that she has sunk from a higher level.”

“So do I,” answered Miss Newton, “but I know very little more about
her than you do, except that she is a most exquisite worker with
those taper fingers of hers, and that she has worked for the same
baby-linen house for the last three years, and has lived in the same
second-floor back in Hercules’ Buildings. I think she is as fond of
me as she can be, yet she has never told me where she was born, or
who her people were, or what her life has been like. Once she went so
far as to tell me that it had been a very commonplace life, and that
her troubles had been in nowise extraordinary—except the fact of her
having had a very severe attack of typhus fever, which left her a
wreck. Once, from some chance allusion, I learnt that it was in Italy
she caught the fever, and that it was badly treated by a foreign
doctor; but that one fact is all she ever let slip in her talk, so
carefully does she avoid every mention of the past. I need hardly
tell you that I have never questioned her. I have reason to know that
her life for the last three years has been spotless—an industrious,
temperate, Christian life—and that she is charitable and kind to
those who are poorer than herself. That is quite enough for me, and I
have encouraged her to make a friend of me in every way in my power.”

“She is happy in having found such a friend, an invaluable friend to
a woman who has sunk from happier surroundings.”

“Yes, I think I have been a comfort to her. She comes to me for
books, and we meet nearly every day at the Free Library, and compare
notes about our reading. My only regret is that I cannot induce her
to take enough air and exercise. She spends all the time that she can
spare from her needlework in reading. But I take her for a walk now
and then, and I think she enjoys that. A penn’orth of the tramcar
carries us to Battersea Park, and we can stroll about amongst grass
and trees, and in sight of the river. She is better off than most of
the girls in the way of getting a little rest after toil, for that
fine, delicate needlework of hers pays better than the common run of
work, and she is the quickest worker I know.”

The tables were cleared by this time, and space had been made for
that half-circle round the fire of which Miss Newton had spoken on
the previous night. The younger girls brought hassocks and cushions,
and seated themselves in the front rank, while their elders sat in
the outer row of chairs.

Theodore was now called upon to contribute his share to the
entertainment, and thereupon took a book from his pocket.

“You told me you and your friends were fond of creepy stories, Miss
Newton,” he said. “Is that really so?”

“Really and truly.”

“And you are none of you afflicted with weak nerves—you are not
afraid of being made uncomfortable by the memory of a ghastly story?”

“No. I think that with most of us the cares of life are too real and
too absorbing to leave any room in our minds for imaginary horrors.
Isn’t it so, now, friends?”

“Lor, yes, Miss Newton,” answered one of the girls briskly: “we’re
all of us too busy to worry about ghosts; but I love a ghost tale for
all that.”

A chorus of voices echoed this assertion.

“Then, ladies, I shall have the honour of reading the ‘Haunters and
the Haunted,’ by Bulwer Lytton.”

The very title of the story thrilled them, and the whole party, just
now so noisy with eager talk and frequent laughter, sat breathless,
looking at the reader with awe-stricken eyes as that wonderful story
slowly unwound itself.

Theodore read well, in that subdued and semi-dramatic style which is
best adapted to chamber-reading. He felt what he read, and the horror
of the imaginary scene was vividly before his eyes as he got deeper
into the story.

The reading lasted nearly two hours, but it was not one moment too
long for Theodore’s audience, and there was a sigh of regret when the
last words of the story had been spoken.

“Well,” exclaimed one young lady, “I do call that a first-class tale,
don’t you, Miss Newton?”

“You may go a long way without getting such a ghost tale as that,”
said another; “and don’t the gentleman read beautifully, and don’t he
make one feel as if it was all going on in this very room? And the
dog too! There, I never see such a thing! A poor dog to drop down
dead, like that.”

“I did hope that there dog would come to life again at the end,” said
one damsel.

By way of diversion after the story, Miss Newton opened her piano,
beckoned three of the girls over to her, and played the symphony
of “Blow, Gentle Gales,” which old-fashioned glee the three girls
sang with taste and discretion, the bass part being altered to suit
a female voice. Then came some songs, all of which Miss Newton
accompanied; and then at her request Theodore read again, this time
selecting Holmes’ “Wonderful One-Horse Shay,” which caused much
laughter; after which, the little clock on the chimney-piece having
struck eleven, he wished his hostess good night, selected his coat
and hat from among the heap of jackets and hats on a table on the
landing, and went downstairs.

He was still in Wedgewood Street when he heard light footsteps
coming quickly behind him. It seemed to him that they were trying to
overtake him, so he turned and met the owner of the feet.

“I beg your pardon, sir; forgive me for following you,” said a very
gentle voice, which he recognized as belonging to the girl called
Marian—“I wanted so much to speak to you—alone.”

“And I am glad of the opportunity of speaking to you,” he answered.
“I felt particularly interested in you this evening—there are some
faces, you know, which interest us in spite of ourselves almost, and
I felt that I should like to know more of you.”

This was so gravely said that there was no possibility of an
offensive construction being given to the words.

“You are very good, sir. It was your name that struck me,” she
answered, falteringly; “it is a Dorsetshire name, I think.”

“Yes, it is a Dorsetshire name, and I am a Dorchester man.”

“Dorchester,” she repeated slowly. “I wonder whether you know a place
called Cheriton?”

“I know it very well indeed. A kinsman of mine lives there. Lord
Cheriton is my cousin.”

“I thought as much, directly I heard your name. You must know all
about that dreadful murder, then—last summer?”

“Yes, I know about as much of it as any one knows, and that is very
little.”

“They have not found the murderer?” she asked, with a faint shudder.

“No, nor are they ever likely to find him, I believe. But tell me why
you are interested in Cheriton. Do you come from that part of the
country?”

“Yes.”

“Were you born in Cheriton village?”

“I was brought up not far from there,” she answered, hesitatingly.

He remembered what Miss Newton had told him of her own forbearance in
asking questions, and he pursued the inquiry no further.

“May I see you as far as your lodgings?” he said, kindly. “It will be
very little out of my way.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Dalbrook. I am too much accustomed to going
about alone ever to want any escort. Good night, and thank you for
having answered my questions.”

Her manner showed a disinclination to prolong the interview, and she
walked away with hurried steps which carried her swiftly into the
darkness.

“Poor lonely soul!” he said to himself. “Now, whose lost sheep
is she, I wonder? She is certainly of a rank above a cottager’s
daughter, and with those hands of hers it is clear she has never
been in domestic service. Not far from Cheriton! What may that mean?
Not far is a vague description of locality. I must ask Lady Cheriton
about her the next time I am at the Chase.”




CHAPTER XVII.

    “A mind not to be changed by place or time.”


Christmas at Dorchester was not a period of festivity to which
Theodore Dalbrook had hitherto looked forward with ardent
expectations, but in this particular December he found himself
longing for that holiday season even as a schoolboy might long for
release from Latin Grammar and suet pudding, and for the plenteous
fare and idle days of home. He longed for the grave old town with its
Roman relics and leafless avenues; longed for it, alas! not so much
because his father, brother, and sisters dwelt there, as because it
was within a possible drive of Milbrook Priory, and once being at
Dorchester he had a fair excuse for going to see his cousin. Many and
many a time in his chambers at the Temple he had felt the fever-fit
so strongly upon him that he was tempted to put on his hat, rush out
of those quiet courts and stony quadrangles to the bustle of the
Embankment, spring into the first hansom that came within hail, and
so to Waterloo, and by any train that would carry him to Wareham
Station, and thence to the Priory, only to look upon Juanita’s face
for a little while, only to hold her hand in his, once at greeting
and once at parting, and then back into the night and the loneliness
of his life, and law books and precedents, and Justinian and Chitty,
and all that is commonplace and dry-as-dust in man’s existence.

He had refrained from such foolishness, and now Christmas was at
hand, his sisters were making the house odious with holly and laurel,
the old cook was chopping suet for the traditional pudding which
he had loathed for the last ten years, and he had a fair excuse for
driving along the frosty roads to visit his widowed cousin. He had a
pressing invitation from Lord Cheriton to spend two or three days of
his holiday time at the Chase, an invitation which he had promptly
accepted; but his first visit was to Lady Carmichael.

He found the house in all things unlike what it had been when last
he saw it. The dear Grenvilles had been persuaded to spend their
Christmas in Dorsetshire, and the Priory was full of children’s
voices, and the traces of children’s occupation. Theodore had known
Jessica Grenville before her marriage, yet it was not the less a
shock to find himself confronted by a portly matron and a brood of
children in that room where he had seen Juanita’s sad face bent
over her embroidery. There was no trace of Juanita in the spacious
drawing-room to-day, and the fact of her absence almost unhinged
him, and put him at a disadvantage in his conversation with Mrs.
Grenville, who received him with gracious loquacity, and insisted
upon his giving an immediate opinion upon the different degrees of
family likeness to be seen in her four children there present.

“Those two are decided Carmichaels,” she said, putting forward a
rather flabby boy and a pudding-faced girl, “and the other two are
thorough Grenvilles,” indicating the latter and younger pair, who
were seated on the floor building a Tower of Babel with a lately
received present of bricks, and carrying out the idea by their own
confusion of tongues.

Theodore felt glad he was not a Grenville if that was the type. He
murmured some vague civility about the children, while he shook hands
with Lady Jane, who had come forward shyly to welcome him, almost
obliterated by her more loquacious daughter.

“Don’t you think Johnnie the very image of his poor dear uncle?”
asked Mrs. Grenville urgently, a question which always agonized Lady
Jane, who could not see the faintest likeness between her snub-nosed
and bilious-looking grandchild and her handsome son.

Theodore was too nervous to be conscious of his own untruthfulness
in replying in the affirmative. He was anxious to have done with the
children, and to hear about his cousin.

“I hope Juanita is not ill?” he said.

“Oh, no, she is pretty well,” replied Lady Jane, “but we keep her as
quiet as we can, and of course the children are rather trying for
her——”

“Nobody can say that they are noisy children,” interjected the happy
mother.

“So she seldom leaves her own rooms till the evening,” continued Lady
Jane. “You would like to see her at once, I dare say, Mr. Dalbrook?
And I know she will be pleased to see you.”

She rang, and told the footman to inquire if Lady Carmichael was
ready to see Mr. Dalbrook, and Theodore had to occupy the interval
until the footman’s return with polite attentions to the four
children. He asked Lucy whence she had obtained those delightful
bricks, thereby eliciting the information that the bricks were not
Lucy’s, but Godolphin’s, only he “let her play with them,” as he
observed magnanimously. He was gratified with the further information
that the tower now in process of elevation was not a church, but
the Tower of Babel; and he was then treated to the history of that
remarkable building as related in Holy Writ.

“_You_ didn’t know that, did you?” remarked Godolphin, boastfully,
when he had finished his narration in a harsh bawl, being one of
those coarse brats whom their parents boast of as after the pattern
of the infant Hercules.

The footman returned before Godolphin had wrung a confession of
ignorance from the nervous visitor, and Theodore darted up to follow
him out of the room.

He found Juanita reclining on a low couch near the fire in a
dimly-lighted room, that room which he remembered having entered
only once before, on the occasion of an afternoon party at the
Priory, when Sir Godfrey had taken him to his den to show him a
newly acquired folio copy of Thomson’s “Seasons,” with the famous
Bartolozzi mezzotints. It was a good old room, especially at this
wintry season, when the dulness of the outlook was of little
consequence. The firelight gleamed cheerily on the rich bindings of
the books, and on the dark woodwork, and fondly touched Juanita’s
reclining figure and the rich folds of her dark plush tea-gown.

“How good of you to come to see me so soon, Theodore!” she said,
giving him her hand. “I know you only came to Dorchester yesterday.
The girls were here the day before, and told me they expected you.”

“You did not think I should be in the county very long without
finding my way here, did you, Juanita?”

“Well, no, perhaps not. I know what a true friend you are. And now
tell me, have you made any further discoveries?”

“One more discovery, Juanita, as I told you briefly in my last
letter. I have traced the Squire’s daughter to the sad close of a
most unhappy life—and so ends the Strangway family as you know of
their existence—that is to say, those three Strangways who had some
right to feel themselves aggrieved by the loss of the land upon which
they were born.”

“Tell me all you heard from Miss Newton. Your letter was brief and
vague, but as I knew I was to see you at Christmas I waited for
fuller details. Tell me everything, Theodore.”

He obeyed her, and related the bitter, commonplace story of Evelyn
Strangway’s life, as told him by her old governess. There were no
elements of romance in the story. It was as common as the Divorce
Court or the daily papers.

“Poor creature! Well, there ends my theory, at least about her,” said
Juanita, gloomily. “Her brothers were dead, and she was dead, long
before that fatal night. Did they bequeath their vengeance to any
one else, I wonder? Who else is there in this world who had reason
to hate my father or me? And I know that no creature upon this earth
could have cause to hate my husband.”

“In your father’s calling there is always a possibility of a deadly
hate, inexplicable, unknown to the subject. Remember the fate of Lord
Mayo. A judge who holds the keys of life and death must make many
enemies.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “there is that to be thought of. Oh, my dearest
and best, why did you ever link your life with that of a Judge’s
daughter? I feel as if I had lured him to his doom. I might have
foreseen the danger. I ought never to have married. What right
had I? Some discharged felon lay in wait for him—some relentless,
Godless, hopeless wretch—whom my father had condemned to long
imprisonment—whose angry heart my father had scorched with his
scathing speech. I have read some of his summings up, and they have
seemed cruel, cruel, cruel—so cold, so deliberate, so like a god
making light of the sins of men. Some wretch, coming maddened out of
his silent cell, and seeing my husband—that white, pure life, that
brave, strong youth—prosperous, honoured, happy—seeing what a good
man’s life can be—lay in wait like a tiger, to destroy that happy
life. If it was not one of the Strangways who killed him, it must
have been such a man.”

Her eyes shone, and her cheeks flushed with a feverish red. Theodore
took her hand, held it in both his own, and bent to kiss the cold
fingers—not with a lover’s ardour, fondly as he loved; but with a
calm and brotherly affection which soothed her agitated heart. He
loved her well enough to be able to subjugate himself for her sake.

“My dear Juanita, if you would only withdraw your thoughts from
this ghastly subject! I will not ask you to forget. That may
be impossible. I entreat you only to be patient, to leave the
chastisement of crime to Providence, which works in the dark, works
silently, inevitably, to the end for which we can only grope in a
lame and helpless fashion. Be sure the murderer will stand revealed
sooner or later. That cruel murder will not be his last crime, and in
his next act of violence he may be less fortunate in escaping every
human eye. Or if that act is to be the one solitary crime of his life
something will happen to betray him—some oversight of his own, or
some irrepressible movement of a guilty conscience will give his life
to the net, as a bird flies into a trap. I beseech you, dear, let
your thoughts dwell upon less painful subjects—for your own sake—for
the sake——”

He faltered, and left his sentence unfinished, and Juanita knew that
his sisters had told him something. She knew that the one hope of
her blighted life, hope which she had hardly recognized as hope yet
awhile, was known to him.

“I can never cease to think of that night, or to pray that God
will avenge that crime,” she said, firmly. “You think that is an
unchristian prayer perhaps, but what does the Scripture say? ‘Whoso
sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’ Christ came to
confirm that righteous law. Oh! it is well to be a humanitarian—to
sign petitions against capital punishment,—but let your nearest and
dearest be murdered, and you will be quick to recognize the justice
of that old inexorable law—a life for a life. That is what _I_ want,
Theodore—the life of the man who killed my husband.”

“If I can help to bring about that end, Juanita, believe me that I
will not shrink from the task; but at present I must own that I am
off the track, and see no likelihood of succeeding where a trained
detective has failed. Could I but find a shred of evidence to put me
on the trail, I would pursue that clue to the bitter end; but so far
all is dark.”

“Yes, all is dark!” she answered, dejectedly; and then, after a
pause, she said, “You are going to stay at Cheriton, I hear?”

“I am to spend three days there at the turn of the year, just before
I go back to London. I have chambers in Ferret-court, over the rooms
in which your father spent the golden years of his youth, the years
that made him a great man. It will be very interesting to me to hear
him talk over those years, if I can beguile him into talking of
himself, a subject which he so seldom dwells upon.”

“Ask him if he ever made a bitter enemy. Ask him for his experience
as a Judge at Assizes—find out, if you can, whether he ever provoked
the hatred of a bad vindictive man.”

“I will question your father, Juanita.”

“Do! He will not let me talk to him about the one subject that
occupies my mind. He always stops me on the threshold of any
inquiries. He might surely help me to find the murderer, with his
highly trained intellect, with his experience of the darkest side of
human nature. But he will not help me. He would talk more freely to
you, no doubt.”

“I will sound him,” answered Theodore, and then he tried to beguile
her into talking of other things—her home, her surroundings.

“It must be a comfort to you to have Lady Jane.”

“A comfort! She is all that I have of happiness—all that reminds
me of Godfrey. My mother and father are very dear to me—I hope you
believe that, Theodore?—but our lives are parted now. My mother is
wrapped up in her husband. Neither of them can sympathize with me as
_his_ mother can. Their loss is not the same as ours. We two are one
in our grief.”

“And she is a buffer between you and the outer world, I see. She
bears the burdens that would weigh you down. Those children, for
instance—no doubt they are charming, as children go; but I fancy they
would worry you if you had too much of them.”

“They would kill me,” said Juanita, smiling at him for the first
time in their interview. “I am not very fond of children. It sounds
unwomanly to say so, but I often find myself wishing they could be
born grown up. Fortunately, Lady Jane adores them. And I am glad to
have the Grenvilles at Christmas time. I want all things to be as
they would have been were my dearest here. I lie here and look round
this room, which was his, and think and think, and think of him till
I almost fancy he is here. Idle fancy! Mocking dream! Oh! if you knew
how often I dream that he is living still, and that I am still his
happy wife. I dream that he has been dead—or at least that we have
all believed that he was dead—but that it was a mistake. He is alive;
our own for long years to come. The wild rapture of that dream wakes
me, and I know that I am alone. God keep you, Theodore, from such a
loss as mine!”

“I must gain something before I can lose it,” he answered, with a
shade of bitterness. “I see myself, as the years go on, hardening
into a lonely old bachelor, outliving the capacity for human
affection.”

“That is nonsense-talk. You think so just now, perhaps. There is no
one beyond your own family you care for, and you fancy yourself shut
out from the romance of life—but your day will come, very suddenly,
perhaps. You will see some one whom you can care for. Love will
enter your life unawares, and will fill your heart and mind, and the
ambition that absorbs you now will seem a small thing.”

“Never, Juanita. I don’t mean to plague you with any trouble of mine.
You have given me your friendship, and I hope to be worthy of it;
but pray do not talk to me of the chances of the future. My future
is bounded by the hope of getting on at the Bar. If I fail in that I
fail in everything.”

“You will not fail. There is no reason you should not prosper in your
profession as my father prospered. I often think that you are like
him—more like him than you are like your own father.”

Their talk touched on various subjects after this—on the great events
of the world, the events that make history—on books and theatres, and
then upon Sarah Newton, whose plan of life interested Juanita.

He told her of the girl called Marian, and her inquiries about
Cheriton.

“I wonder if you ever knew her among your villagers,” he said. “I
should much like to know who she is. She interests me more than I
can say. There is a refinement in her manners and appearance that
convinces me she must have belonged to superior people. She was never
born in a labourer’s cottage, or amidst a small shopkeeper’s shabby
surroundings. She was never taught at a National School, or broken
into domestic service.”

“And she was once very handsome, you say?”

“Yes, she must have been beautiful, before illness and trouble set
their marks upon her face. She is only a wreck now, but there is
beauty in the wreck.”

“How old do you suppose her to be?”

“Eight or nine and twenty. It is difficult to guess a woman’s age
within two or three years, and this woman’s face is evidently aged by
trouble; but I don’t think she can be thirty.”

“There is only one person I can think of who would in any manner
answer your description,” said Juanita, thoughtfully.

“Who is that?”

“Mercy Porter. You must have heard about Mercy Porter, the daughter
of the woman at the West Lodge.”

“Yes, yes, I remember. She ran away with a middle-aged man—an army
man—one of your father’s visitors.”

“I was a child at the time, and of course I heard very little about
it. I only knew that Mercy Porter who used to come to tea with
mother, and who played the piano better than my governess, suddenly
vanished out of our lives, and that I never saw her again. My mother
was quite fond of her, and I remember hearing of her beauty, though
I was too young myself to know what beauty meant. I could not think
any one pretty who wore such plain frocks, and such stout useful
boots as Mercy wore. Her mother certainly did nothing to set off her
good looks, or to instil vanity. Years after, my mother told me how
the girl disappeared one summer evening, and how Mrs. Porter came
distracted to the house, and saw my father, and stormed and raved at
him in her agony, saying it was _his_ friend who had blighted her
daughter’s youth—_his_ work that she had gone to her ruin. He was
very patient and forbearing with her, my mother said, for he pitied
her despair, and he felt that he was in some wise to blame for having
brought such an unprincipled man as Colonel Tremaine to Cheriton,
a man who had carried ruin into many homes. Mercy had been seen to
leave Wareham Station with him by the night mail. He had a yacht at
Weymouth. She wrote to her mother from London a fortnight afterwards,
and Mrs. Porter brought the letter to my mother and father one
morning, as they sat at breakfast. It was a heart-broken letter—the
letter of a poor foolish girl who flings away her good name and
her hope of Heaven, with her eyes open, and knows the cost of her
sacrifice, and yet can’t help making it. I was engaged to Godfrey
when I first heard Mercy’s story, and I felt so sorry for her, so
sorry, in the midst of my happy love. What had I done to deserve
happiness more than she, that life should be so bright for me and so
dark for her. I did not know that my day of agony was to come.”

“Did you ever hear how Colonel Tremaine treated her?”

“No; I believe my father wrote him a very severe letter, and called
upon him to repair the wrong he had done; but I don’t think he even
took so much trouble as to answer that letter. His regiment was
ordered off to India two or three years afterwards, and he was killed
in Afghanistan about six years ago.”

“And has nothing been heard of Mercy since her flight?”

“Nothing.”

“I wonder her mother has sat at home quietly all these years instead
of making strenuous efforts to find her lost lamb,” said Theodore.

“Ah, that is almost exactly what Godfrey said of her. He seemed to
think her heartless for taking things so quietly. She is a curious
woman—self-contained, and silent. I sometimes fancy she was more
angry than grieved at Mercy’s fate. Mother says she turns to ice at
the slightest mention of the girl’s name. Don’t you think love would
show itself differently?”

“One can never be sure about other people’s sentiments. Love has many
languages.”

Their talk drifted to more commonplace subjects. And then Theodore
rose to take leave.

“You must dine at the Priory before your holiday is over, Theo,”
said his cousin, as they shook hands. “Let me see—to-morrow will be
Christmas Day—will you come the day after, and bring the sisters? It
is too long a drive for a winter night, so you must stay; there is
plenty of room.”

“Are you sure we shall not bore you?”

“I am sure you will cheer me. My sister-in-law is very good—but
Lady Jane is the only person in this house of whom I do not get
desperately tired, including myself,” she added, with a sigh. “Please
say you will come, and I will order your rooms.”

“We will come then. Good night, Juanita.”

The shadows were falling as he drove away, after refusing tea in the
drawing-room and a further acquaintance with the wonderful children.

He looked forward to that evening at the Priory with an eager
expectancy that he knew to be supreme foolishness, and when the
evening came, it brought some measure of disappointment with it.
Juanita was not so well as she had been upon Christmas Eve. She was
not able to dine downstairs, and the family dinner, at which the
Etonian Tom, Johnnie, and Lucy were allowed to take their places in
virtue of Christmas time, was a dull business for Theodore. His only
pleasure was in the fact that he sat on Lady Jane’s right hand, and
was able to talk with her of Juanita. Even that pleasure was alloyed
with keenest pain; for Lady Jane’s talk was of that dead love which
cast its shadow over Juanita’s youth, or of that dim and dawning hope
which might brighten the coming days—and neither in the love of the
past nor in the love of the future had Theodore any part. Juanita was
on her sofa by the drawing-room fire when he and Mr. Grenville left
the dining-room, after a single glass of claret, and a brief review
of the political situation. Theodore’s sisters were established
on each side of her. There was no chance for him while they were
absorbing her attention, and he retired disconsolately to the group
in the middle of the room, where Mrs. Grenville and Lady Jane were
seated on a capacious ottoman with the children about them.

Johnnie and Lucy, who had over-eaten themselves, were disposed to be
quiet, the little girl leaning her fair curls and fat shining cheek
against her grandmother’s shoulder with an air that looked touching,
but which really indicated repletion; Johnnie sprawling on the carpet
at his mother’s feet, and wishing he had not eaten _that_ mince-pie,
telling himself that, on the whole, he hated mince-pie, and envying
his brother Tom, who had stolen off to the saddle-room to talk to
the grooms. Godolphin and Mabel having dined early, were full of
exuberance, waiting to be “jumped,” which entertainment Theodore had
to provide without intermission for nearly half an hour, upheaving
first one and then another towards the ceiling, first a rosy bundle
in ruby velvet, and then a rosy bundle in white muslin, laughing,
screaming, enraptured, to be caught in his arms, and set carefully
on the ground, there to await the next turn. Theodore slaved at this
recreation until his arms ached, casting a furtive glance every
now and then at the corner by the fireplace where his sisters were
treating Juanita to the result of their latest heavy reading.

At last, to his delight, Lucy recovered from her comatose condition,
and began to thirst for amusement.

“Let’s have magic music,” she said; “we can all play at that, Granny
and all. You know you love magic music, Granny. Who’ll play the
piano? Not mother, she plays so badly,” added the darling, with
childlike candour.

“Sophy shall play for you,” cried Theodore; “she’s a capital hand at
it.”

He went over to his sister.

“Go and play for the children, Sophy,” he said. “I’ve been doing my
duty. Go and do yours.”

Sophy looked agonized, but complied; and he slipped into her vacant
seat.

He sat by his cousin’s side for nearly an hour, while the children,
mother, and grandmother played their nursery game to the sound of
dance-music, now low, now loud, neatly executed by Sophy’s accurate
fingers. Their talk was of indifferent subjects, and the lion’s
share of the conversation was enjoyed by Janet; but to Theodore it
was bliss to be there, by his cousin’s side, within sound of her
low melodious voice, within touch of her tapering hand. Just to sit
there, and watch her face, and drink in the tones of her voice, was
enough. He asked no more from Fate, yet awhile.

He had a long talk with her in her own room next morning, before he
went back to Dorchester, and the talk was of that old subject which
absorbed her thoughts.

“Be sure you find out all you can from my father,” she said at
parting.

       *       *       *       *       *

Life at Cheriton Chase bore no impress of the tragedy that had
blighted Juanita’s honeymoon. There were no festivities this winter;
there was no large house-party. There had been a few quiet elderly or
middle-aged visitors during the shooting season, and there had been
some slaughter of those pheasants which were wont to sit, ponderous
and sleepy as barn-door fowls, upon the five-barred gates, and
post-and-rail fences of the Chase. But even those sober guests—old
friends of husband and wife—had all departed, and the house was empty
of strangers when Theodore arrived there, in time for dinner on New
Year’s Eve. Nothing could have suited him better than this. He wanted
to be _tête-à-tête_ with Lord Cheriton; to glean all in the way of
counsel or reminiscence that might fall from those wise lips.

“If there is a man living who can teach me how to get on in my
profession it is James Dalbrook,” he said to himself, thinking of his
cousin by that name which he had so often heard his father use when
talking of old days.

Lady Cheriton greeted him affectionately, made him sit by her in
the library, where a richly embroidered Japanese screen made a cosy
corner by the fireplace, during the twenty minutes before dinner. She
was a handsome woman still, with that grand-looking Spanish beauty
which does not fade with youth, and she was dressed to perfection in
lustreless black silk, relieved by the glitter of jet here and there,
and by the soft white crape kerchief, worn _à la_ Marie-Antoinette.
There was not one thread of grey in the rich black hair, piled in
massive plaits upon the prettily shaped head. Theodore contemplated
her with an almost worshipping admiration. It was Juanita’s face he
saw in those classic lines.

“I want to have a good talk with you, Theo,” she said; “there is no
one else to whom I can talk so freely now my poor Godfrey is gone. We
sit here of an evening, now, you see. The drawing-room is only used
when there are people in the house, and even then I feel miserable
there. I cannot get his image out of my mind. Cheriton insists that
the room shall be used, that it shall not be made a haunted room—and
no doubt it is best so,—but one cannot forget such a tragedy as that.”

“I hope Juanita will forget some day.”

“Ah, that is what I try to hope. She is so young, at the very
beginning of life, and it does seem hard that all those hopes for
which other women live should be over and done with for her. I wish
I could believe in the power of Time to cure her. I wish I could
believe that she will be able to love somebody else as she loved
Godfrey. If she does, I dare say it will be some new person who has
had nothing to do with her past life. I had been in and out of love
before I met James Dalbrook, but the sight of him seemed like the
beginning of a new life. I felt as if it had been preordained that I
was to love him, and only him—that nothing else had been real. Yes,
Theodore,”—with a sigh,—“you may depend, if ever she should care for
anybody, it will be a new person.”

“Very lucky for the new person, and rather hard upon any one who
happens to have loved her all his life.”

“Is there any one—like that?”

“I think you know there is, Lady Cheriton.”

“Yes, yes, my dear boy, I know,” she answered kindly, laying her
soft hand upon his. “I won’t pretend not to know. I wish, with all
my heart, you could make her care for you, Theodore, a year or two
hence. You would be a good and true husband to her, a kind father to
Godfrey’s child—that fatherless child. Oh, Theodore, is it not sad
to think of the child who will never—not for one brief hour—feel the
touch of a father’s hand, or know the blessing of a father’s love?
Such a dead blank where there should be warmth and life and joy! We
must wait, Theo. Who can dispose of the future? I shall be a happy
woman if ever you can tell me you have won the reward of a life’s
devotion.”

“God bless you for your goodness to me,” he faltered, kissing the
soft white hand, so like in form and outline to Juanita’s hand, only
plumper and more matronly.

They dined snugly, a cosy trio, in a small room hung with genuine old
Cordovan leather, and adorned with Moorish crockery, a room which
was called her Ladyship’s parlour, and which had been one of Lord
Cheriton’s birthday gifts to his wife, furnished and decorated during
her absence at a German spa. When Lady Cheriton left them, the two
men turned their chairs towards the fire, lighted their cigars, and
settled themselves for an evening’s talk.

The great lawyer was in one of his pleasantest moods. He gave
Theodore the benefit of his experience as a stuff-gown, and did all
that the advice of a wise senior can do towards putting a tyre on the
right track.

“You will have to bide your time,” he said in conclusion; “it is
a tedious business. You must just sit in your chambers and read
till your chance comes. Always be there, that’s the grand point.
Don’t be out when Fortune knocks at your door. She will come in a
very insignificant shape on her earlier visits—with a shabby little
two-guinea brief in her hand; but don’t you let that shabby little
brief be carried to somebody else just because you are out of the
way. I suppose you are really fond of the law.”

“Yes, I am very fond of my profession. It is meat and drink to me.”

“Then you will get on. Any man of moderate abilities is bound to
succeed in any profession which he loves with a heart-whole love; and
your abilities are much better than moderate.”

There was a little pause in the talk while Lord Cheriton threw on a
fresh log and lighted a second cigar.

“I have been meditating a good deal upon Sir Godfrey’s murder,” said
Theodore, “and I am perplexed by the utter darkness which surrounds
the murderer and his motive. No doubt you have some theory upon the
subject.”

“No, I have no theory. There is really nothing upon which to build
a theory. Churton, the detective, talked about a vendetta—suggested
poacher, tenant, tramp, gipsy, any member of the dangerous classes
who might happen to consider himself aggrieved by poor Godfrey. He
even went so far as to make a very unpleasant suggestion, and urged
that there might be a woman at the bottom of the business, speculated
upon some youthful intrigue of Godfrey’s. Now, from all I know of
that young man, I believe his life had been blameless. He was the
soul of honour. He would never have dealt cruelly with any woman.”

“And you, Lord Cheriton,” said Theodore, hardly following the latter
part of his cousin’s speech in his self-absorption.

His kinsman started and looked at him indignantly.

“And you—in your capacity of judge, for instance—have you never made
a deadly foe?”

“Well, I suppose the men and women I have sentenced have hardly loved
me; but I doubt if the worst of them ever had any strong personal
feeling about me. They have taken me as a part of the machinery of
the law—of no more account than the iron door of a cell or a beam of
the scaffold.”

“Yet there have been instances of active malignity—the assassination
of Lord Mayo, for instance.”

“Oh, the assassin in that case was an Indian, and a maniac. We live
in a different latitude. Besides, it is rather too far-fetched an
idea to suppose that a man would shoot my son-in-law in order to
avenge himself upon me.”

“The shot may have been fired under a misapprehension. The figure
seated reading in the lamplight may have been mistaken for you.”

“The assassin must have been uncommonly short-sighted to make such a
mistake. I won’t say such a thing would be impossible, for experience
has taught me that there is nothing in this life too strange to be
true; but it is too unlikely a notion to dwell upon. Indeed, I think,
Theodore, we must dismiss this painful business from our minds. If
the mystery is ever to be cleared up, it will be by a fluke; but even
that seems to me a very remote contingency. Have you not observed
that if a murderer is not caught within three months of his crime he
is hardly ever caught at all? I might almost say if he is not caught
within one month. Once let the scent cool and the chances are a
hundred to one in his favour.”

“Yet Juanita has set her heart upon seeing her husband avenged.”

“Ah, that is where her Spanish blood shows itself. An Englishwoman,
pure and simple, would think only of her sorrow. My poor girl hungers
for revenge. Providence may favour her, perhaps, but I doubt it.
The best thing that can happen to her will be to forget her first
husband, fine young fellow as he was, and choose a second. It is
horrible to think that the rest of her life is to be a blank. With
her beauty and position she may look high. I am obliged to be
ambitious for my daughter, you see, Theodore, since Heaven has not
spared me a son.”

Theodore saw only too plainly that, whatever favour his hopes
might have from soft-hearted Lady Cheriton, his own kinsman, James
Dalbrook, would be against him. This mattered very little to him at
present, in the face of the lady’s indifference. One gleam of hope
from Juanita herself would have seemed more to him than all the
favour of parents or kindred. It was her hand that held his fate: it
was she alone who could make his life blessed.

New Year’s Day was fine but frosty, a sharp, clear day on which
Cheriton Park looked loveliest, the trees made fairy-like by the
light rime, the long stretches of turf touched with a silvery
whiteness, the distant copses and boundary of pine-trees half hidden
in a pale grey mist.

Theodore walked across the park with Lady Cheriton to the eleven
o’clock service in the church at the end of Cheriton village. It was
nearly a mile from the great house to the fine old fifteenth-century
church, but Lady Cheriton always walked to church in decent weather,
albeit her servants were conveyed there luxuriously in a capacious
omnibus specially retained for their use. On the way along the
silent avenue Theodore told her of his meeting with Miss Newton’s
_protégée_, and of Juanita’s idea that the woman called Marian might
be no other than Mercy Porter.

“I certainly remember no other case of a girl about here leaving her
home under disgraceful circumstances—that is to say, any girl of
refinement and education,” said Lady Cheriton. “There have been cases
among the villagers, no doubt; but if this girl of yours is really a
superior person, and really comes from Cheriton, I think Juanita is
right, and that you must have stumbled upon Mercy Porter. Her mother
ought to be told about it, without delay.”

“Will you tell her, or will you put me in the way of doing so?”

“Would you like to see Mrs. Porter?”

“Yes. I feel interested in her, chiefly because she may be Marian’s
mother. I shall have to go to work very carefully, so as not to cause
her too keen a disappointment in the event of Juanita’s guess being
wrong.”

“I do not know that you will find her very soft-hearted where her
daughter is concerned,” replied Lady Cheriton, thoughtfully. “I
sometimes fear that she has hardened herself against that unhappy
girl. The troubles of her own early life may have hardened her,
perhaps. It is not easy to bear a long series of troubles with
patience and gentleness.”

“Do you know much of her history?”

“Only that she lost her husband when she was still a young woman,
and that she was left to face the world penniless with her
young daughter. If my husband had not happened to hear of her
circumstances, Heaven knows what would have become of her. He had
been intimate with her husband when he was a young man in London, and
it seemed to him a duty to do what he could for her; so he pensioned
off an old gardener who used to live in that pretty cottage, and
he had the cottage thoroughly renovated for Mrs. Porter. She had a
little furniture of a rather superior kind warehoused in London, and
with this she was able to make a snug and pretty home for herself, as
you will see, if you call upon her after the service. You are sure to
see her at church.”

“Was she very fond of her little girl in those days?”

“I hardly know. People have different ways of showing affection.
She was very strict with poor Mercy. She educated her at home, and
never allowed her to associate with any of the village children.
She kept the child entirely under her own wing, so that the poor
little thing had actually no companion but her mother, a middle-aged
woman, saddened by trouble. I felt very sorry for the child, and
I used to have her up at the house for an afternoon now and then,
just to introduce some variety into her life. When she grew up into
a beautiful young woman, her mother seemed to dislike these visits,
and stipulated that Mercy should only come to see me when there were
no visitors in the house. She did not want her head turned by any
of those foolish compliments which frivolous people are so fond of
paying to a girl of that age, never thinking of the mischief they
may do. I told her that I thought she was over-careful, and that as
Mercy must discover that she was handsome sooner or later, it was
just as well she should gain some experience of life at once. Her
instinctive self-respect would teach her how to take care of herself;
and if she could be safe anywhere, she would be safe with me. Mrs.
Porter is a rather obstinate person, and she took her own way. She
kept Mercy as close as if she had been an Oriental slave; and yet,
somehow, Colonel Tremaine contrived to make love to her, and tempted
her away from her home. Perhaps, if that home had been a little less
dismal, the girl might not have been so easily tempted.”

They had left the park by this time and were nearing the church.
A scanty congregation came slowly in after Lady Cheriton and her
companion had taken their seats in the chancel pew. The congregation
was chiefly feminine. Middle-aged women in every-day bonnets and
fur-trimmed cloaks, with their shoulders up to their ears. Girls in
felt hats and smart, tight-fitting jackets. A few pious villagers of
advanced years, spectacled, feeble, with wrinkled faces half hidden
under poke bonnets: two representative old men with long white hair
and quavering voices, whose shrill treble was distinguishable above
the rustic choir.

Amidst this sparse congregation Theodore had no difficulty in
discovering Mrs. Porter.

She sat in one of the front benches on the left side of the aisle,
which side was reserved for the tradespeople and humbler inhabitants
of Cheriton; while the benches on the right were occupied by the
county people, and some small fry who ranked with those elect of
the earth—with them, but not of them—a retired banker and his wife,
the village doctor, the village lawyer, and two or three female
annuitants of good family.

A noticeable woman, this Mrs. Porter, anywhere. She was tall and
thin, straight as a dart, with strongly marked features and white
hair. Her complexion was pale and sallow, the kind of skin which is
generally described as sickly. If she had ever been handsome, all
traces of that former beauty had disappeared. It was a hard face,
without womanly charm, yet with an unmistakable air of refinement.
She wore her neat little black straw bonnet and black cloth mantle
like a lady, and she walked like a lady, as Theodore saw presently,
when that portion of the little band of worshippers which did not
remain for the celebration dribbled slowly out of church.

He left Lady Cheriton kneeling in her pew, and followed Mrs. Porter
out of the porch and along the village street, and thence into that
rustic lane which led to the West Lodge. He had spoken to her only
once in his life, on a summer morning, when he had happened to find
her standing at her garden gate, and when it had been impossible for
her to avoid him. He knew that she must have seen him going in and
out of the park gates often enough for his appearance to be familiar
to her, so he had no scruple in introducing himself.

“Good morning, Mrs. Porter,” he said, overtaking her in the deeply
sunk lane, between those rocky banks where hart’s-tongue and
polypodium grew so luxuriantly in summer, and where even in this
wintry season the lichens and mosses spread their rich colouring over
grey stone and brown earth, and above which the snow-laden boughs
showed white against the blue brightness of the sky.

She turned and bowed stiffly.

“Good morning, sir.”

“You haven’t forgotten me, I hope. I am Theodore Dalbrook, of
Dorchester. I think you must have seen me pass your window too often
to forget me easily?”

“I am not much given to watching the people who pass in and out, sir.
When his Lordship gave me the cottage, he was good enough to allow
me a servant to open the park gate, as he knew that I was not strong
enough to bear exposure to all kinds of weather. I am free to live my
own life therefore, without thinking of his Lordship’s visitors.”

“I am sorry to intrude myself upon your notice, Mrs. Porter, but I
want to speak to you upon a very delicate subject, and I must ask
your forgiveness in advance if I should touch upon an old wound.”

She looked at him curiously, shrinkingly even, with a latent anger
in her pale eyes, eyes that had been lovely once, perhaps, but which
time or tears had faded to a glassy dulness.

“I have no desire to discuss old wounds with any one,” she said
coldly. “My troubles at least are my own.”

“Not altogether your own, Mrs. Porter. The sorrow of which I am
thinking involves another life—the life of one who has been dear to
you.”

“I have nothing to do with any other life.”

“Not even with the life of your only child?”

“Not even with the life of my only child,” she answered doggedly.
“She left me of her own accord, and I have done with her for ever. I
stand utterly alone in this world—utterly alone,” she repeated.

“And if I tell you that I think and believe I have found your
daughter in London—very poor—working for her living, very sad and
lonely, her beauty faded, her life joyless—would you not wish to know
more—would not your heart yearn towards her?”

“No! I tell you I have done with her. She has passed out of my life.
I stand alone.”

There was a tone of finality in these words which left no room for
argument.

Theodore lifted his hat, and walked on.




CHAPTER XVIII.

    “O sovereign power of love! O grief! O balm!
     All records, saving thine, come cool, and calm,
     And shadowy, through the mist of passed years.”


Harrington Dalbrook, having in a manner given hostages to Fortune,
entered upon his new career with a strength of purpose and a resolute
industry which took his father by surprise.

“Upon my word, Harry, I did not think there was so much grit in you,”
said Mr. Dalbrook. “I thought you and your sisters were too much
stuffed with modern culture to be capable of old-fashioned work.”

“I hope, my dear father, you don’t think education and intellect out
of place in a lawyer?”

“Far from it. We have had too many examples to the contrary, from
Bacon to Brougham, from Hale to Cockburn; but I was afraid of the
dilettante spirit, the talk about books which you had only half
read, the smattering of subjects that need the work of a lifetime
to be properly understood. I was afraid of our modern electro-plate
culture—the process which throws a brilliant film of education over a
foundation of ignorance. However, you have surprised me, Harry. I own
that I was disappointed by your want of purpose at the University;
but I begin to respect you now I find you attack your work in the
right spirit.”

“I want to get on,” answered Harrington, gravely, hanging his head a
little in shame at his own reticence.

From so good a father he felt it was a kind of dishonour to keep
a secret; but Juliet Baldwin had insisted upon secrecy, and the
name of every _fiancée_ in the early stages of an engagement is
She-who-must-be-obeyed.

Harrington said not a word, therefore, as to that mighty prime-mover
which was urging him to dogged perseverance in a profession for which
he had as yet no real inclination. He put aside Darwin and Spencer,
Max Müller and Seeley, Schopenhauer and Hartmann, all those true or
false lights which he had followed through the mazes of free thought;
and he set himself to master the stern actualities of the law. He
had not done well at the University; not because he was wanting in
brains, but because he was wanting in concentration and doggedness.
The prime-mover being supplied, and of a prodigious power, Harrington
brought his intellectual forces to bear upon a given point, and
made a rapid advance in legal knowledge and acumen. The old
cook-housekeeper complained of the coals and candles which “Master
Harry” consumed during his after-midnight studies, and wondered that
the household were not all burnt in their beds by reason of the
young gentleman dropping off to sleep over Coke upon Littleton. The
sisters complained that they had now practically no brother, since
Harrington, who had a pretty tenor voice, and had hitherto been a
star at afternoon teas and evening parties, refused to go anywhere,
except to those few houses—county—where Miss Baldwin might be met.

Scarcely had the New Year begun when Miss Baldwin went off upon a
visit to one of the largest houses in Wiltshire, and one of the
smartest, a house under the dominion of a childless widow, gifted
with a large income and a sympathetic temperament, a lady who allowed
her life to be influenced and directed by a family of nephews and
nieces, and whose house was declared by the advanced section of
society to be “quite the most perfect house to stay in, don’t you
know.”

Miss Baldwin did not leave the neighbourhood of Dorchester and her
lover without protestations of regret. The thing was a bore, a
sacrifice on her part, but it must be done. She had promised dear old
Lady Burdenshaw ages ago, and to Lady Burdenshaw’s she must go.

“You needn’t worry about it,” she said, with her off-hand air,
lolling on the billiard-room settee in the grey winter afternoon, on
the second Sunday of the year; “if you are at all keen upon being at
Medlow Court while I am there, I’ll make dear old Lady Burdenshaw
send you an invitation.”

“You are very good,” replied Harrington, “and I should like staying
in the same house with you; but I couldn’t think of visiting a lady I
don’t know, or of cadging for an invitation.”

Sir Henry had asked his friend to luncheon, and now, after a somewhat
Spartan meal of roast mutton and rice pudding, the lovers were alone
in the billiard-room, Sir Henry having crept off to the stables. The
table was kept rigorously covered on Sundays, in deference to the
Dowager’s Sabbatarian leanings; and there was nothing for her son to
do in the billiard-room, except to walk listlessly up and down and
stare at some very dingy examples of the early Italian school, or to
take the cues out of the rack one by one to see which of them wanted
topping.

“Oh, but you needn’t mind. You would be capital friends with Lady B.
We all call her Lady B., because a three-syllable name is too much
for anybody’s patience. I tell her she ought to drop a syllable. Lady
Bur’shaw would do just as well. I suppose, though, if I were to get
an invitation you could hardly be spared from—the shop,” concluded
Juliet, with a laugh.

“Hardly. I have to stick very close to—the shop,” replied Harrington,
blushing a little at the word. “Remember what I am working for—a
family practice in London and a house that you need not be ashamed to
inhabit. To me that means as much as the red ribbon of the Bath means
to a soldier or sailor. My ambition goes no further, unless it were
to a seat in Parliament later on.”

“You are a good earnest soul. Yes, of course, you must go into
Parliament. In spite of all the riff-raff that has got into the House
of late years, boys, Home Rulers, city-men, there is a faint flavour
of distinction in the letters M.P. after a man’s name. It helps him
just a little in society to be able to talk about ‘my constituents,’
and to contemplate European politics from the standpoint of the town
that has elected him. Yes, you must be in the House, by-and-by,
Harry.”

“You told me you were tired of country house visiting,” said
Harrington, who for the first time since his betrothal felt somewhat
inclined to quarrel with his divinity.

“So I am, heartily sick of it; and I shall rejoice when I have a snug
little nest of my own in Clarges or Hertford Street. But you must
admit that Medlow Court is better than this house. Behold our average
Sunday! Roast mutton—rice pudding—and invincible dulness; all the
servants except an under-footman gone to afternoon church, and no
possibility of a cup of tea till nearly six o’clock. A cold dinner at
eight, and family prayers at ten.”

“What kind of a Sunday do you have at Medlow?”

“_Il y’en a pour tous les goûts._ Medlow is liberty hall. If we
were even to take it into our heads to have family prayers Lady
Burdenshaw would send for her chaplain—pluck him out of the bosom of
his family—and order him to read them. She doesn’t _like_ cards on
a Sunday, because of the servants; but after the clock has struck
eleven we may do what we please—play poker, nap, euchre, baccarat,
till daylight, if we are in the humour. The billiard and smoke rooms,
and the ball-room are at one end of the house, ever so far from the
servants’ quarters. We can have as much fun as we like while those
rustic souls are snoring.”

Harrington sighed ever so faintly. This picture of a fashionable
interior was perfectly innocent, and his betrothed’s way of looking
at things meant nothing worse than girlish exuberance, fine animal
spirits: but the _sans gêne_ of Medlow Court was hardly the kind of
training he would have chosen for his future wife. And then he looked
at the handsome profile, the piled-up mass of ruddy-brown hair on
the top of the haughtily poised head, the perfectly fitting tailor
gown, with its aristocratic simplicity, costing so much more than
plebeian silks and satins; and he told himself that he was privileged
in having won such exalted beauty to ally itself with his humble
fortunes. Such a girl would shine as a duchess; and if marriageable
dukes had eyes to see with, and judgment to guide their choice, that
lovely auburn head would ere now have been crowned with a tiara of
family diamonds instead of waiting for the poor sprigs of orange
blossom which alone may adorn the brow of the solicitor’s bride.

“Shall we go for a stroll in the grounds?” asked Juliet, with a
restless air and an impatient shiver. “Perhaps it will be warmer out
of doors than it is here. We keep such miserable fires in this house.
I believe the grates were chosen with a view to burning the minimum
of coal.”

“I shall be delighted.”

Laura was absent on a visit to Yorkshire cousins, strong-minded like
herself, and with no pretensions to fashion. Lady Baldwin had retired
for her afternoon siesta. On Sundays she always read herself to
sleep with Taylor or South; on week-days she nodded over the morning
paper. She had gone to the morning-room with the idea that Henry
would take his friend to the stables, and that Juliet would require
no looking after. It had never entered into her ladyship’s head that
her handsome daughter would look so low as the son of her solicitor.
Juliet was therefore free to do what she pleased with her afternoon,
and her pleasure was to walk in the chilly shrubberies, and the bare
grey park, sparsely timbered, and with about as little forestal
beauty as a gentleman’s park can possess.

She put on an old seal-skin jacket and a toque to match, which she
kept in the room where her brother kept his overcoats, and which
smelt of tobacco, after the manner of everything that came within Sir
Henry’s influence. And then she led the way to a half-glass door,
which opened on a grass-plot at the side of the house, and she and
her lover went out.

“You can smoke if you like,” she said. “You know I don’t mind. I’ll
have a cigarette with you in the shrubbery.”

“Dearest Juliet, I can’t tell you how glad I should be if you would
smoke—less,” he said nervously, blushing at his own earnestness.

“You think I smoke too many cigarettes—that they are really bad for
me?” she asked carelessly.

“It isn’t that. I wasn’t thinking about their effect on your health;
but—I know you will call it old-fashioned nonsense—I can’t bear to
see the woman who is to be my wife with a cigarette between her lips.”

“And when I am your wife, I suppose you will cut me off from tobacco
altogether.”

“I should never be a domestic tyrant, Juliet; but it would wound me
to see my wife smoke, just as much as it wounds me now when I see you
smoke half a dozen cigarettes in succession.”

“What a Philistine you are, Harry! Well, you shall not be tortured.
I’ll ease off the smoking if I can—but a whiff or two of an
Egyptian soothes me when my nerves are overstrained. You are as
bad as my mother, who thinks cigarette smoking one stage on the
road to perdition, and rather an advanced stage, too. You are very
easily shocked, Harry, if an innocent little cigarette can shock
you. I wonder if you are really fond of me, now the novelty of our
engagement has worn off?”

“I am fonder of you every day I live.”

“Enthusiastic boy! If that is true, you may be able to stand a worse
shocker than my poor little cigarette.”

Harrington turned pale, but he took the hand which she held out to
him, and grasped it firmly. What was she going to tell him?

“Harry, I want to make a financial statement. I want you to help me,
if you can. I am up to my eyes in debt.”

“In debt?”

“Yes. It sounds bad, don’t it? Debt and tobacco should be exclusively
masculine vices. I owe money all round—-not large sums—but the
sum-total is large. I have had to hold my own in smart houses upon
an allowance which some women would spend with their shoemaker.
My mother gives me a hundred and twenty-five pounds a year for
everything, tips, travelling expenses, clothes, music—and I am not
going to say anything unkind about her on that score, for I don’t see
how she could give me more. Her own means come to something under
eighteen hundred a year, and she has this place to keep up. Henry
takes all the rents, and often keeps her waiting for her income,
which is a first charge upon the estate. If it were not for your
father, who looks after her interests as sharply as he can, she might
fare much worse. Henry brings as many men as he likes here, and
contributes nothing to the housekeeping.”

“And you owe money to milliners and people?” said Harrington, deeply
distressed by his sweetheart’s humiliation, which he felt more keenly
than the lady herself.

Juliet had lived among girls who talked freely of their debts and
difficulties, of sops to Cerberus, and getting round an unwilling
dressmaker. Harrington’s lines had been set among old-fashioned
countrified people, to whom debt—and especially feminine
indebtedness—meant disgrace. He had come back from the University
feeling like a murderer, because he had exceeded his allowance.

“Milliners, dressmakers, shoemakers, hatters—and ever so many more. I
am afraid I have been rather reckless—only—I thought——”

“I thought I should make a great match,” she would have said, had
she followed her idea to its close, but she checked herself abruptly,
and cut off a sprig of yew with a swing of the stick she carried.

“If I can help you in any way——” began Harrington.

“My dear boy, there is only one way in which you can help me. Lend
me any money you can spare, say fifty pounds, and I will give it you
back by instalments of ten or fifteen pounds a quarter. It would be
mockery for me to pretend I could pay you in a lump sum, now I have
told you the extent of my income.”

Harrington’s worldly wealth at that moment was something under fifty
pounds. His father had given him a cheque for fifty on Christmas Eve,
and he had no right to expect anything more till Lady Day; while he
had to think of the black horse who was steadily eating his head off
at livery, and for whom nothing had been paid as yet.

He could not find it in his heart to tell his affianced that he
was, comparatively speaking, a pauper. He knew that his father had
the reputation of wealth, a man always ready to invest in any odd
parcel of land that was in the market, and who was known to possess
a good many small holdings and houses in his native town and its
neighbourhood. Could he tell her that her future husband was still
in leading-strings, and that the run of his teeth and fifty pounds a
quarter were all he could count upon till he was out of his articles?
No; he would rather perish than reveal these despicable facts; so,
although he had only forty-three pounds odd in his little cash-box,
he told her that he would let her have fifty pounds in a day or two.

“If you could manage to bring it me to-morrow I should be very glad,”
said Juliet, who, once having broken the ice, talked about the loan
with easy frankness. “I must have a new frock for the ball at Medlow.
They are to have a ball on the first of February, the ball of the
year. There will be no end of smart people. I want to send Estelle
Dawson thirty-five or forty pounds, about half the amount of her last
bill. It’s a paltry business altogether. I know girls who owe their
dressmakers hundreds where I owe tens. Let me have the cash to-morrow
if you can, there’s a dear. Miss Dawson is sure to be full of work
for the country at this season, and she won’t make my frock unless I
give her a week’s notice.”

“Of course, dear, yes, you shall have the money,” Harrington answered
nervously; “but your white gown at our ball looked lovely. Why
shouldn’t you wear that at Medlow?”

“My white gown would be better described as black,” retorted the
young lady with marked acidity. “If I didn’t hate the Dorchester
people like poison I wouldn’t have insulted them by wearing such
a rag. I would no more appear in it at Medlow than I would cut my
throat.”

Language so strong as this forbade argument. Harrington concluded
that there was a mystery in these things outside the limits of
masculine understanding. To his eye the white satin and tulle his
betrothed had worn had seemed faultless; but it may be that the
glamour of first love acts like limelight upon a soiled white
garment: and no doubt Miss Baldwin’s gown had seen service.

He walked back to the house with her, and left her at the door just
as it was growing dusk, and the servants were coming home from
church. He left her with a fictitious appearance of cheerfulness,
promising to go to tea on the following afternoon.

He was glad of the six-mile walk to Dorchester, as it gave him
solitude for deliberation. At home the keen eyes of his sisters would
be upon him, and he would be pestered by inquiries as to what there
had been for lunch and what Miss Baldwin wore; while the still more
penetrating gaze of his father would be quick to perceive anything
amiss.

“Oh, Juliet, if you knew how hard you are making our engagement to
me!” he ejaculated mentally, as he walked, with the unconscious hurry
of an agitated mind, along the frost-bound road.

There had been a hard frost since Christmas, and hunting had been out
of the question, whereby the existence of Mahmud, and the bill at the
livery stable seemed so much the heavier a burden.

Somehow or other he must get the difference between forty-three
pounds and fifty, only seven pounds, a paltry sum, no doubt; but it
would hardly do for him to leave himself penniless until Lady Day. He
might be called on at any moment for small sums. Short of shamming
illness and stopping in bed till the end of the quarter, he could not
possibly escape the daily calls which every young man has upon his
purse. He told himself, therefore, that he must contrive to borrow
fifteen or twenty pounds. But of whom? That was the question.

His first thought was naturally of his brother—but in the next moment
he remembered how Theodore in his financial arrangements with his
father had insisted upon cutting himself down to the very lowest
possible allowance.

“You will pay all my fees, Dad, and give me enough money to furnish
my chambers decently, with the help of the things I am to have out of
this house, and you will allow me so much,” he said, naming a very
modest sum, “for maintenance till I begin to get briefs. I want to
feel the spur of poverty. I want to work for my bread. Of course I
know I have a court of appeal here if my exchequer should run dry.”

Remembering this, Harrington felt that he could not, at the very
beginning of things, pester his brother for a loan. The same court
of appeal, the father’s well-filled purse, was open to him; but
he had no excuse to offer, no reason to give, for exceeding his
allowance.

He might sell Mahmud, if there were not two obstacles to that
transaction. The first that nobody in the neighbourhood wanted to buy
him, the second that he was not yet paid for, except by that bill
which rose like a pale blue spectre before the young man’s eyes as
he was dropping off to sleep of a night, and sometimes spoiled his
rest. He would have to sell Mahmud in order not to dishonour that
bill; and if the horse should fetch considerably less than the price
given for him, as all equine experience led his owner to fear, whence
was to come the difference? That was the problem which would have to
be solved somehow before the tenth of March. He would have to send
the beast to Tattersall’s most likely, the common experience of the
hunting field having taught him that nobody ever sells a horse among
his own circle. He saw himself realizing something under fifty pounds
as the price of the black, and having to bridge over the distance
between that amount and eighty as best he might. But March was not
to-morrow, and he had first of all to provide for to-morrow; a mere
trifle, but it would have to be borrowed, and the sensation of
borrowing was new to Matthew Dalbrook’s son. He had frittered away
his ready money at the University, and he had got into debt; but he
had never borrowed money of Jew or Gentile. And now the time had come
when he must borrow of whomsoever he could.

He took tea with his sisters in the good, homely, old-fashioned
drawing-room, which was at its best in winter; the four tall, narrow
windows closely curtained, a roaring fire in the wide iron grate,
and a modern Japanese tea-table wheeled in front of it. Five o’clock
tea was of a more substantial order on Sundays than on week-days, on
account of the nine o’clock supper which took the place of the seven
o’clock dinner, and accommodated those who cared to attend evening
church. Lady Baldwin’s Spartan luncheon had not indisposed her guest
for cake and muffins, and basking in the glow of the fire Harrington
forgot his troubles, enjoyed his tea, and maintained a very fair
appearance of cheerfulness while his sisters questioned and his
father put in an occasional word.

“I’m afraid you are getting rather too friendly at the Mount,” said
Matthew Dalbrook. “I don’t like Sir Henry Baldwin, and I don’t think
he’s an advantageous friend for you.”

“Oh, but we’re old chums,” said Harrington, blushing a little; “we
were at Oxford together, you know.”

“I’m afraid we both know it, Harry, and to our cost,” replied his
father. “You might have succeeded in your divinity exam, if it hadn’t
been for this fine gentleman friend of yours.”

“I’m not sorry I failed, father. The law suits me ever so much better
than the Church.”

“So long as you stick to that opinion I’m satisfied. Only don’t go to
the Mount too often, and don’t let the handsome Miss Baldwin make a
fool of you.”

If it had not been for the coloured shades over the lamps, which were
so artistic as to be useless for seeing purposes, Harrington might
have been seen to turn pale.

“No fear of that,” Sophia exclaimed contemptuously. “Juliet Baldwin
is not likely to give a provincial solicitor any encouragement. She’s
a girl who expects to marry for position, and though she is just a
shade _passée_, she may make a good match even yet. She comes here
because she likes _us_; but she’s a thorough woman of the world, and
you needn’t be afraid of her running after Harry.”

Harrington grew as red as a peony with suppressed indignation.

“Perhaps as the Baldwins are my friends you might be able to get on
without talking any more about them,” he said, scowling at his elder
sister. “I’ve told you what we had for lunch, and how many servants
were in the room, and what kind of gown Juliet—Miss Baldwin—was
wearing. Don’t you think we’ve had enough of them for to-night?”

“Quite enough, Harry, quite enough,” said the father. “By-the-by, did
you read the _Times_ leader on Gladstone’s last manifesto? And where
are the _Field_ and the _Observer_? Bring me over a lamp that I can
see by, Sophy, my dear. Those crimson lamp-shades of yours suggest
one of Orchardson’s pictures, but they don’t help me to read my
paper.”

“They’re the beastliest things I ever saw,” said Harrington,
vindictively.

“I’m sorry you don’t like them,” said Janet. “It was Juliet Baldwin
who persuaded us to buy them. She had seen some at Medlow Court, and
she raved about them.”

Harrington went out of the room without another word. How odious
his sisters had become of late; yet while he was at Oxford they
had regarded him as an oracle, and he had found even sisterly
appreciation pleasant.

It was some time since he had attended evening service, but on
this particular evening he went alone, not troubling to invite his
sisters, who were subject to an intermittent form of neuralgia which
often prevented their going to church in the evening. To-night he
avoided St. Peter’s, in which his father had seats, and went to the
more remote church of Fordington, where he had a pew all to himself
on this frosty winter night, except for one well-behaved worshipper
in the person of his father’s old and confidential clerk, James
Hayfield, a constant church-goer, who was punctual at every evening
service, whatever the weather. Harrington had expected to see him
there.

Hayfield sat modestly aloof at the further end of the pew, but when
the service was over the young man took some pains to follow close
upon the heels of the grey-haired clerk, with shoulders bent by long
years of desk-work, and respectable dark-blue Chesterfield overcoat
with velvet collar.

“How do you do, Hayfield? Isn’t this rather a sharp night for you to
venture out in?” said Harrington, as they left the church porch.

“I’m a toughish customer, I thank you, Mr. Harrington. It would take
severer weather than this to keep me away from the evening service.
I’m very fond of the evening service. A fine sermon, sir, a fine,
awakening sermon.”

“Magnificent, capital,” exclaimed Harrington, who hadn’t heard
two consecutive sentences, and whose mind had been engaged upon
arithmetical problems of the most unpleasant kind. “It is uncommonly
cold though,” he added, shivering. “I’ll walk round your way. It will
be a little longer for me.”

“You’re very good, Mr. Harrington, very good indeed,” said the old
clerk, evidently touched by this unusual condescension. Never till
to-night had his master’s son offered to walk home from church with
him.

The old man’s gratitude was more than Harrington could stand. He
could not take credit for kindly condescension, when he knew himself
intent upon his own selfish ends.

“I’m afraid I’m not altogether disinterested in seeking your company
to-night, Hayfield,” he blurted out. “The fact is, I want to ask a
favour of you.”

“You may take it as granted, Mr. Harrington,” answered the clerk,
cheerily, “provided the granting of it lies within my power.”

“Oh, it’s not a tremendous affair—in point of fact, it’s only a small
money matter. I’m exceeding my allowance a little this quarter, but I
intend to pull up next quarter; and it will be a great convenience to
me in the meantime if you’ll lend me ten or fifteen pounds.”

It was out at last. He had no idea until he uttered the words how
mean a creature the utterance of them would make him seem to himself.
There are people who go through life borrowing, and who do it with
the easiest grace, seeming to confer rather than to ask a favour. But
perhaps even with these gifted ones the first plunge was painful.

“Fifteen or twenty, if you like, sir,” replied Hayfield. “I’ve got a
few pounds in an old stocking, and any little sum like that is freely
at your service. I know your father’s son won’t break his word or
forget that an old servant’s savings are his only bulwark against age
and decay.”

“My dear Hayfield, of course I shall repay you next quarter, without
fail.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harrington, I feel sure you will. And if at the
same time I may venture a word, as an old man to a young one, in
all friendliness and respect, I would ask you to beware of horses.
I heard some one let drop the other evening in the billiard-room at
the ‘Antelope,’ where I occasionally play a fifty, I heard it said,
promiscuously, that Sir Henry Baldwin is a better hand at selling a
horse than you are at buying one.”

“That’s bosh, Hayfield, and people in a God-forsaken town
like Dorchester will always talk bosh—especially in a public
billiard-room. The horse is a good horse, and I shall come home upon
him when I send him up to Tattersall’s after the hunting.”

“I only hope he won’t come home upon you, sir. You’d better not put a
high reserve upon him if you don’t want to see him again. I used to
be considered a pretty good judge of a horse in my time. I never was
an equestrian, but one sees more of a horse from the pavement than
when one is on his back.”

Harrington felt that he must bear with this twaddle for the sake
of the twenty pounds which would enable him to lend Juliet a round
fifty, and would thereby enable Juliet to go to Medlow Court and
flirt with unknown men, and forget him upon whom her impecuniosity
was inflicting such humiliation. After all, love is only another name
for suffering.

Mr. Hayfield lived in West-Walk terrace, where he had a neat first
floor in a stucco villa, semi-detached, and built at a period when
villas strove to be architectural without attaining beauty. The first
floor consisted of a front sitting-room, looking out upon the alley
of sycamores and the green beyond, and a back bedroom, looking over
gardens and houses, towards the church-tower in the heart of the town.

Provided with a latch-key, Mr. Hayfield admitted his master’s son
to the inner mysteries of the villa, where a lady with a very reedy
voice was singing “Far away,” in the front parlour, while a family
conversation which almost drowned her melody was going on in the back
parlour. Mr. Hayfield’s bedroom candlestick and matches were ready
for him on a Swiss bracket near his door, and his lamp was ready on
a table in his sitting-room, where every object was disposed with a
studied precision which marked at once the confirmed bachelor and
the model lodger. “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “The Christian Year,”
“Whitaker’s Almanack,” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” were placed with
mathematical regularity upon the walnut loo table, surrounding a
centrepiece of wax flowers in an alabaster vase under a glass shade.
A smaller table of the nature described as Pembroke was placed
nearer the fire, and on this appeared Mr. Hayfield’s supper-tray, set
forth with a plate of cold roast beef, a glass saucer of Oriental
pickle, cheese, and accompaniments, flanked by an Imperial pint
of Guinness’. A small fire burned brightly in the grate, whose
dimensions had been reduced by a careful adjustment of fire-bricks.

“Sit down, my dear Mr. Harrington, you’ll find that chair very
comfortable. I’ll go and get you the money. My cash-box is in the
next room. Can I tempt you to join me in a plate of cold ribs?
There’s plenty more where that came from. Mrs. Potter has a fine wing
rib every Sunday, from year’s end to year’s end. I generally take my
dinner with her and her family, but I sup alone. A little society
goes a long way with a man of my age. I like my _Lloyd_ and my _News
of the World_ after supper.”

He went into his bedroom, which was approached by folding doors,
and came back again in two minutes with a couple of crisp notes,
the savings of half a year, savings which meant a good deal of
self-denial in a man who, in his own words, wished to live like a
gentleman. The old clerk prided himself upon his good broadcloth,
clean linen, and respectable lodgings; and it was felt in the town
that so respectable a servant enhanced even the respectability of
Dalbrook and Son.

Harrington took the bank-notes with many thanks, and insisted upon
writing a note of hand—albeit the old clerk reminded him that Sunday
was a _dies non_—at the desk where Hayfield wrote his letters and
did any copying work he cared to do after office hours. He stayed
while the old man ate his temperate meal, but would not be persuaded
to share it. Indeed, his lips felt hot and dry, and it seemed to him
as if he should never want to eat again; but he gladly accepted a
tumbler of the refreshing Guinness’ upon the repeated assurance that
there was plenty more where that came from.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a rapid thaw on the following morning, so Harrington rode
the black over to the Mount in the twilight after office hours, a
liberty which that high-bred animal resented by taking fright at
every doubtful object in the long leafless avenue beyond the Roman
Amphitheatre.

Trifles which would have been light as air to him, jogging homeward
in company after a long day’s hunting, assumed awful and ghostly
aspects under the combined influences of solitude and want of work.
The twilight ride to the Mount was in fact a series of hairbreadth
escapes, and it would have needed a stronger stimulant than the
Dowager’s wishy-washy tea to restore Mr. Dalbrook’s physical balance,
if his mental balance had not been so thoroughly unhinged as to make
him half unconscious of physical discomfort.

“You look awfully seedy,” said Juliet, as she poured out tea from a
pot that had been standing nearly half an hour.

The Dowager had retired to her own den, where she occupied a great
portion of her life in writing prosy letters to her relatives and
connections of all degrees; but as she never sent them anything else,
this was her only way of maintaining the glow of family feeling.

“The black nearly pulled my fingers off,” replied Harrington. “I
never knew him so fresh.”

“You should have taken it out of him on the downs,” answered Juliet,
rather contemptuously. “The grass is all right after the thaw. Have
you brought me what you so kindly promised?”

He took a sealed envelope out of his breast-pocket and handed it to
her.

“Is this the fifty? How quite too good of you!” she cried, pocketing
it hastily. “You don’t know what a difficulty you have got me out of;
but I’m afraid I may have inconvenienced you.”

This was evidently an afterthought.

“‘Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and
times of your desire?’” quoted Harrington, with a sentimental air.

“How sweet!” exclaimed Juliet, really touched by his affection; yet
she would rather he had told her that fifty pounds was a sum of no
consequence, and that so small a loan involved no inconvenience for
him.

“I’m afraid his father can hardly be as rich as people think,” she
said to herself, while Harrington relaxed his strained muscles before
the fire.

“How I wish you were not going to Medlow!” he said presently.

“So do I; but I can’t possibly get out of it, and then it’s a blessed
escape to get away from here.”

“Do you really dislike your home?” asked her lover, wondering at this
hitherto unknown characteristic in a young woman.

“I loathe it, and so does my sister, though she pretends to be
domestic and religious and all that kind of thing. Lady Baldwin is
an impossible person, and our housekeeping would disgrace the Union.
If I had not had the _entrée_ of plenty of good houses, and been in
request, I should have been found hanging in one of the attics years
ago.”

This candour gave Harrington an uncomfortably chilly feeling, as if
a damp cold wind had blown over him, and then he told himself that
it would be his privilege to initiate this dear girl in the tranquil
delights of a happy home, which, while modest in its pretensions,
should yet be smart enough to satisfy her superior tastes and
aspirations.

“When do you go?” he asked, preparing to take leave.

“To-morrow. Your kindness has made everything easy to me.”

“Come back as soon as you can, love;” and then there was some
lingering foolishness permissible between engaged lovers, and the
beautiful Miss Baldwin’s head reposed for two or three minutes upon
the articled clerk’s shoulder, while he looked into her eyes and told
her that they were stars to light him on to fame and fortune.

“I hope they’ll show you a short cut,” she said.

He left her cheered by the thought that she was very fond of him; and
so she was, but he was not the first, second, third, or fourth young
man of whom she had been fond, nor was it a new thing to her to be
told that her eyes were guiding stars.




CHAPTER XIX.

                            “All the creatures
    Made for Heaven’s honours, have their ends, and good ones,
    All but the cozening crocodiles, false women.”


February had begun, the frost and snow had disappeared. There were
soft breathings of spring in the breezes that blew over the broad
grassy downs beyond the Roman encampment, and the sportsmen of
the neighbourhood were rejoicing in open weather and lengthening
daylight; but Juliet Baldwin was still at Medlow Court, and the
heart of Harrington Dalbrook was heavy as he set out in the pleasant
morning for some distant meet; and it was heavier as he rode home
in the evening, after a day’s sport which had shown him only too
distinctly that the black horse was not so young as he had been. He
hugged himself with the delusion that those indications of advancing
years which were but too obvious towards the close of a trying day
across a heavy country, would vanish after a week’s rest, and that
the horse would show no signs of staleness at Tattersall’s, where he
must inevitably be sold before the end of the month, his owner seeing
no other way of meeting the bill that had been given in exchange for
a beast whose name should have been, not Mahmud, but White Elephant.

Harrington’s sole motive for buying a hunter—or, rather, his sole
excuse for being trapped into the purchase—was the expectation of
being able to ride to hounds in Miss Baldwin’s company. She had
said to him “You ought to hunt,” and he had straightway hunted, just
as, if she had told him to balloon, he would have ballooned. And now
Juliet Baldwin was following the hounds in another county while he
was in Dorsetshire plodding along dreary roads to inaccessible meets
at places which would seem to have been chosen with a special study
of everybody’s inconvenience. The whole business was fraught with
bitterness. He had never loved hunting for its own sake—had never
possessed the single-mindedness of the genuine sportsman, who cares
not for weather or country, or companionship, or hunger or thirst, so
long as there is a fox at the beginning of the day and blood at the
end.

Juliet was out with the hounds three days a week. She wrote rapturous
accounts of forty minutes here, and an hour there; and every run
which she described was apparently the quickest thing that had ever
been known in that country. She let her lover know _en passant_ that
she had been greatly admired, and that her horsemanship had been
talked about. Her letters were very affectionate, but they testified
also to a self-love that amounted to adoration. Her frocks, her
horses—provided, as the young ravens are fed, by a kindly Providence
in the shape of casual acquaintance—her breaks at billiards, her
waltzing, were all dilated upon with a charming frankness.

“It seems rather foolish to write all this egotistical twaddle,” she
apologized, “but you complain if I send you a short letter, and there
is literally nothing to tell here—at least nothing about any one
you know, or that would have the faintest interest for you—so I am
obliged to scribble about my frocks and my little social triumphs.”

This was kindly meant, no doubt, but it stung him to be reminded that
his friends were not her friends, that Belgravia is not further from
Islington than her people were from his people.

In one of her letters she wrote casually:—

“Why don’t you put Mahmud into a horse-box and come over for a day
with these hounds. It would be capital fun. There is a dear little
rustic inn where you and your horse can put up—and Lady B. would
ask you to dinner as a matter of course. I dare say your highly
respectable hair will stand on end at some of our ways—but that won’t
matter. I am sure you would enjoy an evening or two at Medlow. Think
about it, like a dear boy.”

Harrington did think about it—indeed, from the first reading of his
lady-love’s unceremonious invitation he thought of nothing else.
After much puzzling over time-tables, he found that trains—those
particular trains which condescend, with an asterisk, to carry
horses—could be matched so as to convey the black horse to the
immediate vicinity of Medlow Court in something under a day, and this
being so, he telegraphed his intention of putting up at the “Medlow
Arms” on the following night, taking pains to add “Shall arrive at
five p.m.,” so as to secure the promised invitation to dinner. He had
been so chary of spending money since his loan to Juliet that he had
still a few pounds in hand, enough as he thought to pay travelling
expenses and hotel bills. His heart was almost light as he packed his
hunting-gear and dress suit, albeit March 10 was written in fiery
characters across a spectral bill which haunted him wherever he went.

It was still early in February, he told himself. Some stroke of luck
might happen to him. Some rich young fool at Medlow Court might take
a fancy to Mahmud and want to buy him. He had heard of men who wanted
to buy horses, although it had been his fate to meet only the men who
were eager to sell.

After no less than three changes of trains he arrived at the
Toppleton Road Station—for Medlow and Toppleton—about half-past four,
weary, but full of hope. He was to see her again—after three weeks’
severance. He was going at her own express desire. It was her tact
and cleverness that had made the visit easy for him. Had he not Lady
Burdenshaw’s invitation in his pocket, in a fine open-hearted hand,
sprawling over three sides of large note-paper:—

  “DEAR MR. DALBROOK,

  “I hear you are coming over for a day or two with our hounds, and
  I hope you will contrive to dine with us every evening while you
  are in the neighbourhood. Your father and Sir Phillimore were old
  friends. Dinner at eight.

  “Sincerely yours,
  “SARAH BURDENSHAW.”

Sir Phillimore had been in the family vault nearly fifteen years.
The malicious averred that he had sought that dismal shelter as a
refuge and a relief from the life which Lady Burdenshaw imposed upon
him—open house, big shoots, hunting breakfasts, fancy balls, and
private theatricals in the country; and in London perpetual parties
or perpetual gadding about.

Sir Phillimore’s grandfather had come up from Aberdeen, a raw boy
without a penny, and had found out something about the manufacture of
iron which had eventually made him a millionaire. Sir Phillimore’s
fortune had reconciled the beautiful Sally Tempest to a marriage with
a man who was her senior by a quarter of a century, and the only
license she had allowed herself had been her indulgence in boundless
extravagance, and a laxity of manner which had somewhat shocked
society in the sober fifties and sixties, though it left her moral
character unimpeached.

In the eighties nobody wondered or exclaimed at Lady Burdenshaw’s
freedom of speech and manner, or at the manners she encouraged in her
guests. In the eighties Sarah Burdenshaw was generally described as
“good fun.”

Harrington found the dear little rustic inn very picturesque
externally, but small and stuffy within, and the bedroom into which
he was ushered was chiefly occupied by a large old-fashioned,
four-post bedstead, with chintz hangings that smelt of mildewed
lavender—indeed, the pervading odour of the “Medlow Arms” was mildew.
He dressed as well as he could under considerable disadvantages; and
a rumbling old landau, which had the local odour, conveyed him to
Medlow Court much quicker than he could have supposed possible from
his casual survey of the horse. It was ten minutes to eight when he
entered Lady Burdenshaw’s drawing-room.

It was a very large room, prettily furnished in a careless style,
as if by a person whose heart was not set upon furniture. There
were plenty of low luxurious chairs, covered with a rather gaudy
chintz, and befrilled with lace and muslin, and there were flowers in
abundance; but of human life the room was empty.

Harrington hardly knew whether he was relieved or discomposed at
finding himself alone. He had leisure in which to pace the room
two or three times, to arrange his tie and inspect his dress suit
before one of the long glasses, and then to feel offended at Juliet’s
coldness. She knew that he was to be there. She might surely have
contrived to be in the drawing-room ten minutes before the dinner
hour.

Half a dozen people straggled in, a not too tidy-looking matron in
ruby velvet, a sharp-featured girl in black lace, and some men who
looked sporting or military. One of these talked to him.

“I think you must be Mr. Dalbrook,” he said, after they had discussed
the weather and the state of the roads.

“You are quite right—but how did you guess?”

“Miss Baldwin told me you were coming, and I don’t think there’s any
one else expected to-night. Do you know your hostess?”

“I am waiting for that privilege.”

“Ah! that explains your punctuality. Nobody is ever punctual at
Medlow. Eight o’clock means half-past, and sometimes a quarter to
nine. Lady Burdenshaw has reached her sixtieth year without having
arrived at a comprehension of the nature of time, as an inelastic
thing which will not stretch to suit feminine convenience. She
still believes in the elasticity of an hour, and rushes off to her
room to dress when she ought to be sitting down to dinner. Her girl
friends follow her example, and seldom leave the billiard-room or the
tea-room till dear Lady B. leads the way.”

A whole bevy of ladies entered the room rather noisily at this
moment, and among them appeared Juliet, magnificent in a red gown,
which set off the milky whiteness of her shoulders.

“Rather a daring combination with red hair,” remarked the young lady
in black, who was sitting on a narrow _causeuse_ with a large man,
whose white moustache and padded chest suggested a cavalry regiment.

“You may call the lady a harmony in red,” said the gentleman.

Harrington scowled upon these prattlers, and then crossed the room
to greet his love. Yes, it was a daring combination, the scarlet
gown with the ruddy tints in her auburn hair; but the audacity was
justified by success. She looked a magnificent creature, dazzling as
Vashti in her Eastern splendour, invincible as Delilah. Who could
resist her?

She gave her hand to Harrington, and seemed pleased to see him, but
in the next moment he saw her looking beyond him towards the end
of the room. He turned, involuntarily following the direction of
her eyes, and saw the man who had talked to him, and who was now
evidently watching them. He was a middle-aged man, handsome, tall,
and upstanding, and with an air which Harrington considered decidedly
patrician.

“Who is that man by the piano?” he asked.

“Major Swanwick, Lord Beaulieu’s younger brother.”

“Ah, I thought he was a swell,” said Harrington, innocently. “He was
very civil to me just now. You might have been in the drawing-room a
little earlier, Juliet. You must have known that I was longing to see
you.”

“My dear boy, we were playing skittle-pool till five minutes to
eight. I had no idea you were in the house. Ah, here comes Lady B.”

A fat, fair, flaxen-haired lady in a sky-blue tea-gown embroidered
with silver palm-leaves came rolling into the room, murmuring
apologies for having kept people waiting for their dinner.

“I know you must all be delightfully ravenous,” she said; “and that’s
ever so much better than feeling that dinner has come too soon after
lunch.”

Juliet introduced her friend, who was most graciously received.

“How is your father?” asked Lady Burdenshaw. “It is ages since I saw
him—more than twenty years, I believe. Sir Phillimore bought some
land in your county, and Mr. Dalbrook acted for him in the matter,
and he still receives the rents. And so you are going out with the
hounds to-morrow? They meet quite near—not more than seven or eight
miles from your inn. Juliet will show you the way across country.
She’s always in the first flight; but if you want to know her
particular talent, you should see her play pool. I can assure you she
makes all the men sit up.”

Harrington scarcely followed the lady’s meaning. There was no time
for explanations, as the butler, who had been waiting for her
Ladyship’s appearance, now announced dinner, and Harrington had the
bliss of going to the dining-room with Juliet Baldwin on his arm. He
felt as if he were in the Moslem’s enchanted fields as he sat by her
side at the brilliant table, with its almost overpowering perfume of
hot-house flowers, which were grouped in great masses of bloom among
the old silver and the many-coloured Venetian glass. Yes, it was a
Mohammedan paradise, and this was the houri, this lovely creature
with the milky shoulders rising out of soft folds of scarlet crape.

“How long are you going to stay here, Juliet?” he asked, as the houri
unfolded her napkin.

She gave a little laugh before she answered the question.

“Compare this room and table with our dining-room at the Mount—you
can compare the dinner with my mother’s dinners after you have eaten
it—and ask yourself if any reasonable creature would be in a hurry
to leave this Canaan for that wilderness. I’m afraid I shall stop as
long as ever dear old Lady B. asks me; and she is always pressing me
to extend my visit.”

“I don’t think dinner can be much of attraction in your mind,
Juliet,” said Harrington.

“Of course not—girls don’t care what they eat,” replied Juliet,
sipping her clear soup, and most fully appreciating the flavour. “But
there are so many advantages at Medlow. There is the hunting, for
instance, which is much better than any I can get at home, where I
have positively no horse that I can call my own. Here I can always
rely upon a good mount.”

“Has Lady Burdenshaw a large stable?”

“Oh, she keeps a good many horses; but most of hers are only fit for
leather. There are men who come here with strings of hunters, and
have always a young one that they like me to handle for them.”

“Juliet, you will get your neck broken,” cried Harrington, pale with
horror, and staring vacantly at the fish that was being offered to
him.

“There is no fear of that while I ride young horses, the danger is an
old one. My father taught me to ride, and as he was one of the best
cross-country riders in Dorset I am not likely to make a mistake.
You had better try that _sole Normande_; it is one of the Medlow
specialities.”

“Juliet, I hate the idea of your staying in this house—or in any
house where there is a crowd of fast men. I hate the idea of your
riding men’s horses—of your being under an obligation to a stranger——”

“Don’t I tell you that the obligation is all the other way. A young
hunter is a more saleable article when he has carried a lady. ‘Will
suit a bold horsewoman in a stiff country.’ That sort of thing is
worth a great deal in a catalogue, and the men whose horses I ride
are not strangers.”

“At the most they are casual acquaintances.”

“Call them that if you like. Why should not one profit by one’s
acquaintances?”

“There is one of your benefactors looking at you at this moment, and
looking as if he objected to my talking to you.”

“How dare you talk about my benefactors? Do you suppose I had you
invited to Medlow in order that you might insult me?”

This little dialogue was conducted in subdued tones, but with a good
deal of acrimony upon either side. Harrington was bursting with
jealousy.

The house, the men, the very atmosphere awakened distrust. He
detested those men for their square shoulders and soldierly bearing,
for the suggestion of cavalry or household brigade which seemed to
him to pervade the masculine portion of the assembly. He had always
hated military men. Their chief mission in life seemed to be to make
civilians look insignificant.

Miss Baldwin ate the next _entrée_ in stony silence, and it was not
till he had abjectly apologized for his offensive speech that her
lover was again taken into favour. She relented at last, however, and
favoured him with a good deal of information about the house party
which made such a brilliant show at Lady Burdenshaw’s luxurious board.

The men were for the most part military—the greater number bachelors,
or at any rate unencumbered with wives. Two had been divorced,
one was a widower, another was separated in the friendliest way
from a wife who found she could live in better style unfettered by
matrimonial supervision.

Major Swanwick was one of the two who had profited by Sir James
Hannen’s jurisdiction.

“His wife was Lady Flora Thurles, one of the Tantallans. All the
Tantallan girls went wrong, don’t you know. It was in the blood.”

“You and he seem to be great friends,” said Harrington, still
suspicious.

“Oh, we have met very often; he is quite an old chum of mine. He is a
good old thing.”

Seeing that the good old thing looked as if he were well under forty,
Harrington was not altogether reassured, even by this comfortable
tone. He watched his betrothed and the Major all through the long
evening in the billiard-room, where pool was again the chief
amusement of a very noisy party, of which Juliet and Major Swanwick
seemed to him the ringleaders and master-spirits. It was with
difficulty that he, the affianced, got speech with his betrothed.

There were just a few minutes, while the old family tankards were
being carried round with mulled claret and other cunning drinks, in
which Juliet vouchsafed to give her attention to her lover, he having
in a manner cornered her into a draped recess at the end of the room,
where he held her prisoner while he bade her good night.

“I shall see you at the meet to-morrow,” he said.

“I won’t promise to be at the meet, but I shall find you and the
hounds in plenty of time. I know every inch of this country.”

“Whose horse are you going to ride to-morrow?”

“A fine upstanding chestnut; I’m sure you’ll admire him?”

“Yes, yes, but whose?”

“Whose?” echoed Juliet, as if she scarcely understood the word.
“Oh,”—with a sudden flash of intelligence,—“you mean whose property
is he? As if that mattered! He belongs to Major Swanwick.”

“Good night!” said Harrington; and he went off to take leave of Lady
Burdenshaw, who was sitting in the capacious ingle nook, with a
circle of men about her telling her anecdotes in Parisian French, and
from whom every now and then there burst peals of jovial laughter.

“At my age one understands everything, and one may hear everything,”
said her Ladyship.

Harrington went back to the “Medlow Arms” more depressed than he had
felt during any period of his courtship. Instinct had warned him of
the dangers that must lurk in such a house as Medlow Court for such
a girl as Juliet Baldwin; but neither instinct nor imagination had
prepared him for the horrible reality. To see the woman who was to
be his wife smoking cigarettes, playing shilling pool, and bandying
doubtful jokes with men who had obviously the very poorest opinion
of the opposite sex, was an agony which he had never thought to
suffer; and for the first time since his engagement he asked himself
whether it would not have been better to have trusted his future
happiness to the most insipid and colourless of the girls with whom
he played tennis than to this magnificent specimen of emancipated
smartness. The image of Juliet sprawling over the billiard-table,
with her eyes on fire and her shoulders half out of her gown as she
took a difficult “life,” pursued him like a bacchanalian nightmare
all through his troubled snatches of sleep. The stony straw mattress
and lumpy feather bed would not have been conducive to slumber under
the happiest circumstances, but for a mind disturbed by care they
were a bed of torture. He rose at seven, unrefreshed, heavy-hearted,
detesting chanticleer, cloudy skies, and all the old-fashioned fuss
about a hunting morning, and wishing himself in his comfortable room
in the good old house in Cornhill, where he had ample space and
all things needful to a luxurious toilet. He got himself dressed
somehow. He was in the saddle at nine o’clock, after a breakfast for
which he had no appetite.

It was a long, dreary ride to the little roadside inn at which the
hounds met, and Harrington being particularly punctual, had to jog
along companionless till the last mile, when Major Swanwick and
another man from Medlow overtook him and regaled him with their talk
for the rest of the way.

“I think I know that black horse,” said the Major, who looked
provokingly well in his red coat, chimney pot, and cream-coloured
tops, thereby making Harrington ashamed of his neat dark grey coat,
Bedford cords, and bowler hat. “Wasn’t he in Baldwin’s stud nine
years ago?”

“I bought him off Sir Henry Baldwin.”

“Thought so. Good hand at selling a horse, Baldwin! However, I
suppose there’s some work in the black horse yet.”

“I hope so, for I mean to hunt him to the end of the season,”
answered Harrington, ignoring that awful necessity of selling before
the end of the month.

Hope glowed faintly in his breast as he saw the Major’s keen eye
going over his mount, as if studying the condition of every limb and
every muscle.

“Wears well,” he said, after this deliberate survey, “but I’m afraid
you’ll find him like the wonderful one-horse shay. He’ll go to pieces
all at once. Did Baldwin tell you his age?”

“He said something about rising eight—but I didn’t inquire very
particularly, as I know the horse is a good one.”

“And it was a good one of Baldwin to talk about rising eight. He
would have been within the mark if he had said rising eighteen. I’ve
bought a horse of Sir Henry myself, and,”—after a brief pause—“I’ve
sold him one.”

“And I dare say that made you even,” said Harrington, with acidity.
He would have liked to call the Major out for his insolence, and
almost regretted that he was a Briton, and not a Frenchman and a
professed duellist.

“Faith, I don’t think he had altogether the best of me—for when
he rode that hunter of mine he was like the little old woman in
the nursery rhyme, of whom it was said that she should have music
wherever she went. He had music, and to spare.”

And so with jovial laughter they rode up to the open space in front
of the “Red Cow,” where the hounds were grouped about a duck-pond,
while the master chatted with his friends.

It was an hour later before Juliet appeared, cropping up suddenly on
a windy common, with three other girls and two men, while the hounds
were drawing the furze.

“You see I could make a pretty good guess where to find you,” she
said to Harrington. “How well the black looks! You have been saving
him up, I suppose?”

“No, I’ve hunted as often as I could. I had no other distraction
during your absence.”

“How sweet of you to say that—with all the gaieties of Dorchester to
allure you! Hark! they’ve found, and we shall be off in a minute.
Yes, there he goes!”—pointing with her whip to the spot where the fox
had flashed across the short level sward, vanishing next moment in
the withered heather. “Now you’ll see what this horse can do, and you
can tell me what you think of him when we meet at dinner.”

There was the usual minute or so of flutter and expectation, and then
the business-like calm—an almost awful calm—every man settling down
to his work, intent upon himself, steering carefully for a good place.

Harrington was a nervous rider, and if fortune helped him to get
a good place he rarely kept it. To-day he was more than usually
nervous, fancying that Juliet’s eye was upon him, which it wasn’t,
and, indeed, could not have been, unless it had been situated in the
back of her head, since she was already ever so far in front.

In time, however, he, too, contrived to settle down, and the black
horse took the business into his own hands, and kept his rider fairly
close to the hounds. For the first twenty minutes there was a good
deal of jumping, but of a mildish order, and Harrington felt that he
was distinguishing himself, inasmuch as he was able to stick to his
horse, though not always to his saddle.

They lost their first fox, after a very fair run, and they waited
about for nearly two hours before they started a second, which they
did eventually in a scrubby copse on the skirts of a great stretch of
ploughed land.

The plough took a great deal out of Mahmud, and after the plough came
a series of small fields, with some stiffish fences, which had to be
taken by any man who wanted to keep with the hounds. Here Juliet was
in her glory, for the chestnut on which she was mounted was a fine
fencer, and she knew how to handle him, or, perhaps it may be said,
how to let him alone.

Mahmud had been almost as fine a fencer as the fiery young chestnut,
and he was a horse of a great heart, always ready to attempt more
than he could do. The livery stable people had told Harrington that
if his legs were only as good as his heart he would be one of the
best hunters in the county. And now, with some quavering of spirit
on his own part, Harrington trusted that heart would stand instead
of legs, and get him and the black over the fences somehow. Just
at this crucial point in the run, Juliet was in front of him, and
Major Swanwick was pressing him behind. He was near the hounds, and
altogether in a place of honour, could he but keep it, and to keep it
he felt was worth a struggle.

He got over or through the first fence somehow; not gloriously, but
without too much loss of time; and galloped gaily towards the second,
which looked a stiffer and more complicated affair. Juliet’s horse
went over like a bird, and Juliet sat him like a butterfly, no more
discomposed by the shock than if she had been some winged insect
that had lighted on his haunches. Mahmud followed close, excited by
the horse in front of him, and rose to his work gallantly; but this
time it was timber and not quick-set that had to be cleared, and that
stiff rail was just too much for the old hunter’s legs. He blundered,
hit himself with the sharp edge of the rail, and fell heavily
forward, sending his rider flying into the next field, and sinking
in a struggling mass into the ditch. Major Swanwick dismounted in an
instant, scrambled over the hedge, and ran to help Harrington up.

“Are you hurt?”

“Not much,” answered the fallen man, staggering to his feet, hatless,
and with a dazed look. “I’m afraid my horse is done for, though, poor
old chap.”

In that moment his only thought was of the beast he had been fond of,
which had been to him as a friend, albeit often an unmanageable one.
He had no thought just then of the money value of that doubled-up
mass lying in the ditch.

Mahmud had finished his course. His forearm was broken, and the most
merciful thing was to make a swift end of him with a bullet from a
gun which one of the whips fetched from the nearest farmhouse. His
owner stood by him and waited for the end, while Juliet and the
rest of the hunt galloped away out of sight. When the shot had been
fired the black horse was left to be carted off to the kennels, and
Harrington turned to walk slowly and sorrowfully to the farmhouse,
where he was promised a trap to convey him to the “Medlow Arms.”

Then and then only did he discover that he had dislocated his
shoulder, and was suffering acute agony, and then and then only did
he remember the acceptance which he had given for the black horse.

Where now were the fifty pounds which he had reckoned upon getting
for the animal at Tattersall’s, trusting to Providence, or old
Hayfield, to make up the balance of thirty. He saw himself now with
that horrible acceptance falling due and no assets.

He got back to the rustic inn, with great suffering, and laid himself
down upon the stony-hearted four-poster instead of dressing to go
and dine at Medlow. The village surgeon came and attended to his
shoulder, a painful business, though not unskilfully done; and then
he was told he must keep himself as quiet as possible for a few days,
and must not think of travelling till the inflammation was reduced.
It was his right shoulder on which he had fallen, and he was utterly
helpless. The handy young man of the “Medlow Arms” had to valet him
and assist him to eat the tough mutton chop which was served to him
in lieu of all the delicacies of Medlow Court.

A messenger came from that hospitable mansion at ten o’clock with a
little note from Juliet.

“Why did you not turn up at dinner-time? Major Swanwick said you were
all right. I waited till I saw you get up, safe and sound. So sorry
for poor old Mahmud. Come to breakfast to-morrow and tell us all
about it. We killed in a quarter of an hour.—Yours, JULIET.”

Harrington sent his best regards to Miss Baldwin and his apologies to
Lady Burdenshaw, and begged to inform them that he had dislocated his
shoulder, and was unable to write.

He had a miserable night—sleepless and in pain—haunted by the ghost
of Mahmud, whose miserable end afflicted him sorely, and troubled
by the perplexities of his financial position. Should he tell his
father the whole truth? Alas, it seemed only yesterday that he had
told his father the whole truth about his college debts; and though
truthfulness is a great virtue, a second burst of candour coming on
the heels of the first might be too much for Mr. Dalbrook’s patience.

Should he borrow the money from Juanita? No, too humiliating. He had
always felt a restraining pride in all his intercourse with his grand
relations at Cheriton Chase. They were of his own blood; but they
were above him in social status, and he was sensitively alive to the
difference in position.

Could he apply to his brother? Again the answer was in the negative.
He doubted whether Theodore possessed eighty guineas in the world.

And so he went on revolving the same considerations through his
fevered brain all through the long winter night. There were moments
of exasperation and semi-delirium, when he thought he would go over
to Medlow Court as soon as he was able to move, and appeal to the
beneficence of Lady Burdenshaw for the temporary accommodation of a
cheque for eighty guineas.

And thus the night wore on till the morning sounds of the inn brought
the sense of stern reality across his feverish dreams; and then,
amidst the crowing of cocks, and the bumping of pails, and tramping
of horses in the stable yard, he contrived to fall asleep, after
having failed in that endeavour all through the quiet of the night.

It was about half-past eleven, and the handy-man had helped him
to make a decent toilet and to establish himself upon a sofa that
was a little harder than the bed, when a pony-carriage drove up to
the door, and the chamber-maid came in with an awe-stricken face to
announce Lady Burdenshaw and another lady, and would he please to see
them, as they wanted to come upstairs.

The room was tidy, and he was dressed as well as a helpless man could
be, so he said yes, they might come up, which was almost unnecessary,
as they were already on the stairs, and were in the room a minute
afterwards.

Juliet expressed herself deeply concerned at her lover’s misfortune,
though she did not attempt to conceal from him that she considered
his riding in fault. Lady Burdenshaw was more sympathetic, and was
horrified at the discomfort of his surroundings.

“You cannot possibly endure that cruel-looking sofa till your
shoulder is well,” she said, “and such a small room, too, poor
fellow; and a horrid low ceiling; and the house smells damp. I wonder
if we could venture to move him to the Court, Ju?”

Ju was of opinion that such a proceeding would be to the last degree
dangerous.

“The only chance for his shoulder is to keep quiet,” she said.

Unfortunately, the surgeon had said the same thing, and there could
be no doubt about it.

“Perhaps you could send him a sofa?” suggested Juliet.

“Of course I could; and I can send him soups and jellies and
things—but that isn’t like having him at Medlow, where he could have
a large airy room, and where you and I could take it in turns to
amuse him.”

“Dear Lady Burdenshaw, you are too good to an almost stranger,”
murmured Harrington, moved to the verge of tears by her geniality.

“Stranger! fiddlesticks. Don’t I know your cousin, Lord Cheriton; and
has not your father done business for me? Besides, I like young men,
when they’re modest and pleasant, as you are. Indeed I sometimes like
them when they’re impertinent. I like young faces and young voices
about me. I like to be amused, and to see people happy. I can’t
endure the idea of your lying for ever so many days and nights in
this dog-kennel, when you came to Medlow to enjoy yourself.”

“It mustn’t be many days and nights. I must get home somehow by the
end of the week, if I post all the way.”

“Oh, you needn’t post. When you are able to be moved, my carriage
shall take you to the station; and I’ll get the railroad people to
take an invalid carriage through to Dorchester for you.”

“Indeed, you must not be impatient, Harry,” said Juliet. “I shall
come to see you every day, except on the hunting days, and even then
I can walk over in the evening, if Lady B. will let me.”

“Of course I shall let you. All my sympathies are with lovers, and
when you are married I shall give Mr. Dalbrook as much of my business
as I possibly can venture to take away from those dear old fossils at
Salisbury, who have been the family lawyers for the best part of a
century.”

Juliet had confided her engagement to Lady B. at the beginning of her
visit, and she and Lady B. had talked over the young man’s chances of
doing well in the world, and the wisdom or the foolishness of such
an alliance. Lady B. had seen a good deal of smart young men and
women, and she had discovered that the smart young men were very keen
in the furtherance of their own interests, and that the smart young
women had considerable difficulty in getting themselves permanently
established in the smart world by smart marriages. Some were
beautiful, and many were admired; but they had to wait for eligible
suitors, and one false step in the early stages of their career would
sometimes blight their chances of success. Juliet had taken many
false steps, and had got herself a good deal talked about, and Lady
Burdenshaw felt that her chance of making an advantageous match had
been lessening year by year until it had come to be almost nil.

“If this young fellow is sensible and good-looking, and has a little
money, I really think, Ju, you ought to marry him,” concluded Lady
B., talking the matter over with her _protégée_ before she had seen
Harrington.

She fancied that Juliet had cooled somewhat in her feelings towards
her youthful lover within the last week or ten days. It might be,
Lady B. thought, that she began to perceive that he was too young,
that the difference in their ages, which was not much, and the
difference in their worldly experience, which was enormous, unfitted
them to be happy together.

“No doubt the young man is a _pis aller_,” reflected Lady Burdenshaw,
after Harrington’s appearance at Medlow, “but he is a very
good-looking fellow, and by no means bad—as a _pis aller_. Of course,
he is too young for Juliet, and much too fresh and innocent to
understand her; but if he knew more he wouldn’t be so eager to marry
her—so she ought to be satisfied.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lady Burdenshaw sent a delightful sofa, and a lot of books, flowers,
pillows, foot-rests, and other luxuries in one of her own waggons,
within an hour of her return to Medlow, and Harrington’s comfort was
considerably increased by her kindness. Still the thought of that
wretched acceptance was like a thorn in every cushion, a scorpion
under every pillow, a wasp in every flower. Nor was he altogether
at ease about Juliet. He thought that he had detected a constraint
in her manner, a shiftiness in her eyes. It had wounded him that
she had so promptly opposed his being conveyed to Medlow. It might
be that she was influenced only by concern for his safety; yet it
would have been natural for his betrothed to wish to have him under
the same roof with her, where she might tend and comfort him in his
helplessness. Pain and anguish were wringing his brow, and she who
should have been his ministering angel was content to limit her
ministrations to half an hour of somewhat disjointed conversation,
and to the polite attention of bringing him the morning papers, when
everybody at Medlow had looked at them.

Lady Burdenshaw had very kindly taken upon herself to write to
Matthew Dalbrook, explaining his son’s prolonged absence, and making
light of his accident as a matter only involving a few days’ rest.

The few days had gone on till the fourth day after his fall, and
in spite of all that Lady Burdenshaw had done to ameliorate his
captivity the hours of the day and the night seemed to grow longer
and longer, till he began to think of Silvio Pellico and the Man in
the Iron Mask. Juliet’s visits were very short, and she was obviously
absent-minded and bored even during that scanty half-hour which she
gave to her betrothed.

“I’m afraid you are like Colonel Enderby’s wife,” he said, “and that
the sight of sickness or suffering is more than you can bear.”

“Who was Colonel Enderby’s wife?”

“Don’t you know? She is the heroine of a very clever novel—an
original, strange, and, I fear, not unnatural character.”

“Don’t remember her,” answered Juliet, carelessly. “I don’t read many
English novels. They are too slow for me.”

On the hunting day he missed even that brief visit, and was expectant
of her coming all the evening, as she had promised to make up for the
day’s absence. But the night was wet, and she told him next day that
she did not like to take out Lady Burdenshaw’s horse and man in such
weather.

“The stable people would have resented it, and I am obliged to stand
well with the stable,” she said.

He thought she had a troubled look that day. It seemed to him that it
cost her an effort to keep her attention upon any subject, and she
lapsed into silence every now and then, looking dreamily out of the
window to the thatched roofs and ploughed fields in the distance.

“I’m afraid you have something on your mind,” he said.

“What nonsense! What put such an idea into your head?”

“You are so thoughtful, and so much more silent than usual.”

“There is so little to talk about in a sick room. If I were to tell
you about our doings at Medlow I should only bore you.”

“Not at all. I should be very pleased to hear how you amuse yourself.
Is Major Swanwick still there?”

“Yes; he is still there.”

He saw that her cheeks crimsoned as she answered his question, and
he wondered whether she really had any _penchant_ for the Major, or
whether she suspected his jealous apprehensions upon that subject.
She got up to go before he could question her further.

“I shall be late for luncheon,” she said, “and Lady B. hates any of
us to be absent!”

“I thought there was no such thing as punctuality at Medlow.”

“Oh, we are pretty punctual at luncheon. It’s the hungry hour, and we
are all ravenous. Good-bye.”

“_Au revoir._ You will come to-morrow, love; and come earlier, I
hope.”

“_Pas possible._ I shall be out with the hounds.”

“Another blank day for me. But don’t disappoint me in the evening,
whatever the weather may be.”

She was gone, leaving him doubtful of her fidelity, though far from
suspecting the extent of her falsehood.

He endured the long, dull day as best he might, and improved his
mind by skimming all the books which Lady Burdenshaw had sent him,
which were really the cream of Mudie’s last supply—travels, memoirs,
gossip, magazines—books chosen with a view to the masculine mind,
which was supposed to be indifferent to fiction. Evening came at
last. His lamp was lighted, his fire swept and garnished. The hunting
party would be jogging homeward in the wintry darkness, he thought.
There were three hours to wait before half-past nine, which was the
earliest time at which he could expect his beloved.

It was a little after the half-hour, when his heart began to beat
faster at the sound of carriage wheels. This time she was not going
to disappoint him. He listened for her step upon the stair—the firm,
quick tread he knew so well; but it was another step which he heard,
a slower and heavier tread, with much rustling of silken draperies.
It must be Lady Burdenshaw come to chaperon her.

It was Lady Burdenshaw, but alone. She came in and drew near his sofa
with a serious countenance.

“Great God!” he cried, starting up from his reclining position; “is
anything the matter? An accident in the hunting field! Is she hurt?”

“No, my poor fellow. _She’s_ not hurt. It would take a great deal to
hurt her. She’s too hard. But she has done her best to hurt you.”

“What do you mean?”

“She has gone off with that audacious scamp.”

“Major Swanwick?”

“Yes. Did you suspect anything?”

“I thought there was an understanding between them.”

“They went off together early this morning; walked five miles to the
station, leaving their luggage to be looked after by the Major’s
servant, who had received his instructions and who got everything
packed and off by the one o’clock train for London. I got this
telegram late in the afternoon from Salisbury.”

She handed him a telegram, which he read slowly, word by word,
and then he slowly folded it and restored it to his visitor, in
heart-stricken silence.

The telegram was in these words:—

  “To LADY BURDENSHAW, MEDLOW COURT,—

  “Major Swanwick and I were married at two o’clock, before the
  Registrar. We start for Monte Carlo to-night. Please break it to
  Harrington, and forgive me for going away without telling you. We
  thought it better to avoid fuss.

  “Yours lovingly,
  “JULIET SWANWICK.”

“God help this infatuated girl,” said Lady Burdenshaw. “She has
married a scoundrel who is up to his eyebrows in debt. He behaved
brutally to his first wife, and he is not very likely to treat this
one any better. I’m very sorry I ever had them in my house together.
He was an old flame, and he had lost her more than one good match
by his equivocal attentions. As for you, my dear young fellow, I
congratulate you upon a very lucky escape.”

Harrington put his hand before his eyes to hide the tears of
mortification and wounded love. Yet, even while the sense of
disappointment was keenest, he had a feeling that Lady Burdenshaw was
right, and that he had escaped a lifelong martyrdom. How could he,
with his limited means, have ever satisfied a woman who lived only
for pleasure and excitement, dress and dissipation? Juliet had been
very frank with him during their brief courtship, and he had seen
enough of her character to know that this splendid creature was not
of the stuff that makes a good wife for a professional man with his
struggles all before him. He was sorry, he was angry, he was wounded
to the quick; but in the midst of it all he felt that there was a
burden lifted off his mind and off his life—that he could breathe
more freely, that he was no longer overweighted in the race.

Lady Burdenshaw stopped with him for an hour, and told him a good
many small facts to his charmer’s discredit, although he begged her
more than once to desist. It was her only idea of comforting him, and
it may be that her efforts were not misdirected.

He was surprised on the following afternoon by a visit from his
father, who was not satisfied with Lady Burdenshaw’s report of his
condition. Touched by this evidence of paternal affection, the young
man took heart of grace and made a full confession—first of his
engagement, and next of his pecuniary obligations—the acceptance so
soon to fall due, the twenty pounds borrowed from Hayfield.

“I can pay that very easily out of my allowance,” he said; “I only
tell you about it to show what a mean hound I was becoming.”

“You were very hard driven, my poor boy. You had been unlucky enough
to fall in love with an unprincipled woman. You may thank Providence
for having escaped a life of misery. Such an alliance as that would
have wrecked your future. I would rather you married a housemaid with
a good character than such a woman as Juliet Baldwin. However, there
are plenty of nice girls in your own sphere, thank God, and plenty of
pretty girls with unblemished character and antecedents.”

Harrington went back to Dorchester with his father next day, and the
acceptance was promptly honoured when it was presented at the house
in Cornhill.

Sir Henry had discounted it at the local bank almost immediately
after it passed into his possession, and the bank had regarded the
document as good value for their money, Matthew Dalbrook being very
unlikely to allow his son’s signature to be dishonoured.




CHAPTER XX.

    “All the spring-time of his love
     Is already gone and past.”


Theodore went back to wintry London before the year was a week old.
He settled himself by his lonely fireside, in the silence of his
old-fashioned rooms. All he had of the beauty of this world was
a glimpse of the river athwart the heavy grey mists of a London
morning, or the lamps on the Embankment shining like a string of
jewels in the evening dusk. There were days of sullen, hopeless fog,
when even these things were hidden from him, and when it was hard
work to keep that stealthy, penetrating greyness and damp cold out of
his rooms.

He had brought a fox-terrier from Dorchester on his return from
his holiday, an old favourite that had seen the best days of her
youth, and was better able to put up with a sedentary life, varied
only by an occasional run, than a younger animal would have been.
This faithful friend, an animated little beast even at this mature
stage of her existence, lightened the burden of his loneliness, were
it only by leaping on to his knees twenty times in five minutes,
and only desisting therefrom upon most serious remonstrance. It
was pleasant to him to have something that loved him, even this
irrepressible Miss Nipper, with her sidelong grin of affectionate
greeting, and her unconquerable suspicion of rats behind the
wainscot. He felt less like Dr. Faustus on that famous Easter
morning, when the emptiness of life and learning came home to the
lonely student with such desolating intensity, when even a devil was
welcome who could offer escape from that dull burden of existence.

He had come back from his brief holiday dejected and disheartened.
It seemed to him that she who was his lode-star was more remote from
him than she had ever been—more and more remote—vanishing into a
distant world where it was vain for him to follow. He had failed in
the task that she had imposed upon him. He was no nearer the solution
of that dark mystery which troubled her life than he had been when
he first promised to help her. How poor and impotent a creature he
must appear in her eyes. His only discoveries had been negative.
All that his keen, trained intellect, sharpened by seven years of
legal experience, had been able to do was to prove the unsoundness
of her own theory. He had started no theory upon his part. No flash
of genius had illumined the obscurity which surrounded Godfrey
Carmichael’s death.

He went on with his plodding work, resolutely bent upon doing the
utmost that patient labour can do to insure success. Even if it were
all vain and futile—that hope of winning favour in her eyes—the mere
possibility of standing better with her, of showing her that he was
of the stuff which goes to the making of distinguished men—even this
was worth working for.

“She may have great offers by-and-by,” he told himself, recalling
what Lord Cheriton had said about his daughter’s chances. “With her
beauty and her expectations, to say nothing of her present means,
she is sure of distinguished admirers; but at the worst she cannot
look down upon a man who is on the road to success in her father’s
profession.”

This ever-present consideration, joined to his love of his calling,
sweetened all that was dry and dull in the initial stages of a
barrister’s career. While other men of his age were spending their
evenings at the Gaiety Theatre, seeing the same burlesque and
laughing at the same jokes night after night, as appetite grew with
what it fed on, Theodore was content to sit in chambers and read law.
It was not that he was wanting in appreciation of the drama. There
was no man in London better able to enjoy the dignity of Hamlet at
the Lyceum, or the rollicking fun of the Gaiety Bluebeard. He was
no pedantic piece of clay, proud of the dulness that calls itself
virtue. He was only an earnest worker, bent upon a given result,
and able to put aside every hindrance upon the road that he was
travelling.

“They that run in a race run all, but one obtaineth the prize,” he
said to himself, recalling a sentence in an epistle that he had
learned years ago at his mother’s knee, words that always brought
back the cold brightness of early spring, and a period of extra
church services, long sermons in the lamp-lit church, and the voices
of strange preachers, a time of daffodils and fish dinners, and much
talk of High and Low Church. He had never faltered in his religious
convictions; yet in the days of his youth that Lenten season in a
country town, that recurrent sound of church bells in the chilly
March twilight, had weighed heavy upon his soul.

Almost the only recreation which he allowed himself in this winter
season was an occasional attendance at Miss Newton’s tea-parties.
He had secured acceptance for himself at these entertainments
on the strength of his reading, and he was now established as a
Shakespearian reader; Miss Newton having taken it into her head that
Shakespeare is of all great poets the easiest understood by the
people, and having ordered him to read Shakespeare until she should
tell him to desist.

“I know what they like and what they dislike,” she said. “They’ll
not conceal their feelings from me when we talk you over after you’ve
gone. As soon as ever I find them getting tired I’ll let you know.”

He began with Macbeth, a story which caught them at the very first
page. The witches took their breath away; and when he came to
the murder scene they were all sitting round him with their hair
seemingly on end. He closed his first reading with that awful
knocking at the gate; that one supreme stage effect which has never
yet been paralleled by mortal dramatist. There were some of the girls
who tumbled off their chairs and grovelled on the floor in their
excitement. There were others who wanted to know the fate of Macbeth
and his wife on the instant.

“I do hope they were both hung, like the Mannings,” said a meek widow.

“Oh, but _he_ wasn’t so much to blame, Mrs. Kirby. That wicked woman
drove him to it.”

“So did Mrs. Manning,” argued a Bermondsey lady, “but they hung
Manning all the same when they caught him. I was a child when it
happened, but I remember hearing about them. He was took in Jersey,
and she wore a black satin gown.”

“Oh, don’t talk about your Mannings, Mrs. Hodge,” cried one of the
girls, indignantly. “They were low, vulgar people. These were a King
and Queen in a palace. It’s all different. It lifts one up out of
one’s own life only to hear about them. You may read about murders in
the newspapers till your eyes begin to swim, but you won’t feel like
_that_. I don’t know when I’ve felt so sorry for anybody as I feel
for King Macbeth.”

Marian sat silent, and refrained from all part in the chorus of
criticism, but she moved to the piano presently and began to play a
Scotch air—a grand old march—slow, solemn music that was almost too
much for the nerves of the more excitable among Miss Newton’s party.
She glided from one melody to another, and she played those wild
Scottish airs with such thrilling power that they seemed to sustain
and intensify the uncanny effect of the tragic reading.

Theodore went over to the piano and stood beside her as she played.

“I knew you were a musician,” he said, “though I never heard you
touch the keys till to-night.”

“How did you know?”

“My cousin Juanita told me. She remembered your playing in her
mother’s room when she was a child.”

The woman called Marian lifted her eyes to him with a look of patient
reproach, as if she said, “You are cruel to hit any one so helpless
as I am,” and then, playing all the time, she answered coldly,—

“I do not know what you are talking about.”

“Don’t you! Oh, but indeed I think you do, and I should be very glad
to be of use to you if you would let me, for the sake of those old
days. I don’t think it is possible I can be mistaken, though you may
have your own reason for refusing to confide in me.”

He was certain now in his own mind that this was Mercy Porter and no
other. That fine touch upon the piano implied sustained and careful
cultivation. She did not play like a girl who had learnt music as an
afterthought.

He left the house when she did, and walked part of the way to
Hercules Buildings with her, but did not offer to go out of his way
to see her home, being very sure she would refuse.

“I wish you would trust me,” he said gently, as they walked side
by side, without looking at each other. “Believe me that every
one at Cheriton is sorry for you. If you were to go back to the
neighbourhood you would have everybody’s sympathy. There would be no
one to cast a stone.”

“I am very sorry I ever mentioned Cheriton to you, Mr. Dalbrook,” she
said impatiently. “It was a foolish impulse that made me talk. You
insist upon making guesses. You try to force a confession from me. It
is hardly generous.”

“My interest in you must be my excuse.”

“You can do me no good by that kind of interest. I shall never see
Dorsetshire again—so what can it matter who I was when I lived in
that part of the world. There are hundreds of women in London as
lonely as I am—hundreds—perhaps thousands—who have broken every link
with their past. My life suits me well enough, and I am contented. I
shall never try to change it.”

“That is a pity. You are young enough to make a good wife to an
honest man, to help in creating a happy home.”

“Am I? I feel a century old; and I have done with every thought of
love or marriage. When I woke to consciousness after that dreadful
fever, awoke from darkness and oblivion like that of the grave, I
entered upon a new life. I came out of that sickness like one who had
passed through hell. Passion and hope, and youth and good looks, had
been burnt out of me in a fiery furnace. It was a wonder to myself
that my body was alive. It was no wonder to me that my heart was
dead. From that time I have lived very much as I am living now—after
a brief time of struggle and starvation—and the life suits me fairly
well. I shall never seek to better it.”

“That is hard, Marian.”

He called her by her Christian name, frankly, in almost paternal
friendliness, not knowing any other name by which to call her.

He was with Miss Newton earlier than usual on the occasion of her
next tea-drinking, so early as to be before anybody else, and he
talked to his hostess about Marian—Marian Gray, Miss Newton called
her,—confiding to her his conviction that this young woman was
no other than Mrs. Porter’s missing daughter. He told her of his
interview with Mrs. Porter, and of the mother’s angry repudiation of
her child.

“I can but think that her hardness was assumed,” he said, “and that
the ice would melt at a touch if the mother and daughter could be
brought together. I should like to try the experiment.”

“It is hardly wise to try experiments with human hearts,” said Miss
Newton. “Marian is contented and at peace, if not happy. To force her
back upon a mother who might be hard and bitter to her—do you think
that would be true kindness?”

“What if the mother’s heart has been yearning for her lost lamb in
all these years, and by bringing her back I might make two lives
happy?”

“Let the mother come to the child. Let her who has something to
forgive be the one to make the advance. It is so hard for the sinner
to go back. She must be helped back. If the mother were a woman with
a motherly heart, she would have been searching for her lost child
in all those years, instead of wrapping herself up in her sorrow at
home.”

“I own I have thought that.”

“Of course you have. You can’t think otherwise as a sensible man. I
have no patience with such a mother. As for Marian, I think she may
get on very well as she is. I am fond of her, and I believe she is
fond of me. She earns from twelve to fourteen shillings a week. She
pays five shillings for her room, and she lives upon eightpence a
day. I needn’t tell you that the teapot is her _pièce de résistance_.
Her most substantial meal on some days consists of a couple of scones
from the Scotch baker’s, or a penny loaf and a hard-boiled egg;
but when I go to see her she gives me an admirable cup of tea, and
positively delicious bread and butter. Her room is the very pink and
pattern of neatness. All the instincts of a lady show themselves in
that poor little two-pair back. She has curtained the iron bedstead
and the window with white dimity, which is always clean and fresh,
for she washes and irons it with her own hands. She generally
contrives to have a bunch of flowers upon her work-table, and, hard
as she works, her room is always free from litter. She has about half
a dozen books of her own upon the mantelshelf, her Bible, Milton,
Shakespeare, Charles Lamb’s Essays, Goldsmith’s Poems, and the ‘Idyls
of the King’—well-worn volumes, which have been her companions for
years. She borrows other books from the Free Library, and her mind is
always being cultivated. I really believe she is happy. She is one of
those rare individuals who can afford to live alone. Do not disturb
her lightly.”

“You are right perhaps. The mother struck me as by no means a
pleasant character, always supposing that Mrs. Porter is her mother,
of which I myself have very little doubt.”

Theodore made no further effort to bring mother and daughter
together, but he met Marian from time to time at Miss Newton’s
tea-parties, and acquaintance ripened into friendship. Her refinement
and her musical talent sustained his interest in her. He talked to
her of books sometimes when they happened to be sitting side by side
at the tea-table, and he was surprised at the extent of her reading.
She confessed, when he questioned her, that she was in the habit of
stealing two or three hours from the night for her books.

“I find that I can do with a few hours’ sleep,” she said, “if I lie
down happy in my mind after being absorbed in a delightful book. My
books are my life. They give me the whole universe for my world,
though I have to live in one room, and to follow a very monotonous
calling.”

He admired the refinement of that purely intellectual nature, but
he admired still more that admirable tact which regulated her
intercourse with Miss Newton’s homelier friends. Never by word or
tone or half-involuntary glance did Marian betray any consciousness
of superiority to the uncultivated herd. She shared their interests,
she sympathized with their vexations, she neither smiled nor
shuddered at Cockney twang or missing aspirate.

Winter brightened into spring, with all its varieties of good and
evil; east winds rushing round street-corners, and cutting into
the pedestrian like a knife; west winds enfolding him like a balmy
caress, and bringing the perfume of violets, the vivid yellow of
daffodils into the wilderness of brick and stone; rainy days, grey,
monotonous, dismal, hanging on the soul like a curtain of gloom
and hopelessness. These made up the sum of Theodore’s outer life.
Within he had his books, his ambition, and his faithful love. He told
himself that it was a hopeless love; but there are many things which
a man tells himself, and tries to believe, and yet does not believe.
The very human longing for blessedness is too strong for human
wisdom. Where there is love, there is always hope.

He had grown accustomed to his life in chambers; and albeit he was
much attached to his father, and was amiably tolerant of his brother
and sisters, he could but feel that this solitary existence better
suited his temper than residence in a family circle. At Dorchester it
had been very difficult for him to be alone. Out of business hours
his sisters considered that they had a claim upon him, a right to
waste his life in the most trivial amusements and engagements. If
he withdrew himself from their society, and that of their numerous
dearest friends, they accused him of grumpiness, and thought
themselves ill-treated. He had chafed against the waste of life, the
utter futility of those engagements which prevented his keeping level
with the intellectual growth of the age. He felt that his youth was
slipping from under him, leaving him stationary, when every pulse
of his being beat impatiently for progress. And now it was pleasant
to him to be his own master, free to make the best possible use of
his days. He found a few friends in London whose society suited
him, and only a few. Among these the man of whom he saw most was
Cuthbert Ramsay, a young Scotchman, who had been his chief companion
at Cambridge, who had studied medicine for three years in Leipsic
and Paris with Ludwig and Pasteur, and who was now at St. Thomas’s.
The two young men ran up against each other in that main artery of
London life, the Strand, in the January twilight, and renewed the
friendly intimacy of that bygone time when Ramsay had been at Trinity
and Dalbrook at Trinity Hall. They dined together at a restaurant on
the evening of that first meeting, and after dinner Theodore took his
friend to his chambers, where the two sat late into the night talking
over college reminiscences of hall and river.

Cuthbert Ramsay had been one of the most remarkable undergraduates
of those days, notable alike for mental and physical gifts which
lifted him out of the ruck. He was six feet two—with the form of an
athlete and as handsome a face as was ever seen within the gates
of Trinity,—and these advantages of person, which would have been
noteworthy in any man, were the more remarkable in him, because of
his utter indifference to them, or, perhaps, it may be said, complete
unconsciousness of them. He knew that he was a big man, because his
tailor told him as much; but he had never taken into consideration
the question as to whether he was or was not a handsome man; indeed,
except when he had his hair cut, an operation which he always
submitted to unwillingly and of dire necessity, it is doubtful if he
ever looked into a glass long enough to know what manner of man he
was—certainly not at his morning toilet, when he moved restlessly
about the room, hairbrushes in hand, belabouring his handsome head,
and exercising his extraordinary memory by the repetition of some
scientific formula acquired during the previous night’s reading.

His own estimate of his appearance was comprised in the idea that he
was “very Scotch.” That milky whiteness of complexion, touched with
just enough ruddy colour to give life to the face, those brilliant
blue eyes, the straight nose, clear-cut nostrils, firm lips and
firmer chin, the high broad brow, and crisp auburn hair, constituted
to his mind nothing more than his brevet of nationality.

“No one would ever take me for anything but a Scotchman,” he would
say lightly, if any acquaintance ventured to hint at his good looks.
“There’s no mistake about me. Albion is written on my brow.”

From his childhood upwards he had cared only for large things—intent
upon investigation and discovery from the time he could crawl—asking
the most searching questions of mother and of nurse—prying into
those abstract mysteries which perplex philosophers before he could
speak plain. The thirst for knowledge had grown with his growth and
strengthened with his strength. His hardy boyhood had been spent
for the most part in the windy streets of Aberdeen, marching with
swinging stride along that granite pavement, his shabby red gown
flapping in the north-easter; faring anyhow, as indifferent to what
he ate as he was to what he wore; ahead of his fellows in all things
intellectual, and abreast with the best athletes of his year in the
sports they valued,—a king among men; and of such a happy disposition
that nothing in life came amiss to him, and what would have been
hardship to another seemed sport to him.

Some one, a wealthy member of his extensive family, found out
that this Cuthbert was no common youth, and that with a little
encouragement he might do honour to the clan. This distant kinsman,
one of the heads of the great house of Ramsay, sent him to Cambridge;
where he entered as a scholar of his college, and at the end of a
year gained a University scholarship, which made him independent.
This hardy youth from the city of Bon Accord was able to live upon so
little—could not for the life of him have been extravagant, having
none of that _mollesse_, or soft self-indulgence, which is at the
root of most men’s squanderings. He was nine and twenty years of
age, and he had never worn a gardenia, and had only had one suit of
dress clothes since he grew to man’s estate. Needless to say that
albeit he went out very seldom that suit was now somewhat shabby;
but Cuthbert’s superb appearance neutralized the shabbiness, and he
looked the finest man in any assembly. His parents were in their
graves before he left the University. He had no ties. He was free as
Adam would have been if Eve had never been created. There was no one
near or dear to him to feel proud of his honours, though his name
was high in the list of Wranglers, and he had taken a first-class in
science. And now, after that interval of serious scientific work in
Leipsic and Paris, he was plodding at St. Thomas’s with a view to a
London degree, and thus the two hard-working young men—very intimate
in the old days when Cuthbert’s rooms in the Bishop’s Hostel were
conveniently adjacent to Theodore’s ground floor in Trinity Hall—were
thrown together again upon their life-journey, and were honestly glad
to renew the old friendship.

Ramsay was delighted with his friend’s chambers.

“I was afraid there was nothing so good as this left in the Temple,”
he said, rapturously contemplating the blackened old wainscot, and
the low ceiling with its heavy cross-beam. “I thought smartness
and brand-new stone had superseded all that was historical and
interesting within the precincts of the Lamb. But these rooms of
yours have the true smack. Why, I really believe now, Dalbrook, you
must have rats behind that wainscot?”

“Perhaps I had, till Miss Nipper came to keep me company,” answered
Theodore, patting the terrier, whose neat little head and intelligent
ears were lifted at the sound of her name.

“And Nipper has made them emigrate to the next house, no doubt?”

“I’m glad you like my rooms, Cuthbert.”

“Like them! I envy you the ownership more than I can say. If anything
can make me sorry that I am not a lawyer it would be the fact that
I can’t live in the Temple. We doctors have no distinctive abode,
nothing associated with the past.”

“Perhaps that is because medicine is essentially a progressive
science.”

“Is it? Sometimes I begin to doubt if it has made any progress since
Galen—or Albertus Magnus. I will admit that there was progress of
some kind up to _his_ time.”

“This house has an interest for me that it would have for no one
else,” said Theodore, presently, while his friend filled his
briar-wood. “My kinsman, Lord Cheriton, occupied the rooms underneath
these for about a dozen years; and it is a fancy of mine to keep his
image before me as I sit here alone with my books. It reminds me
of what a man can do in the profession which so many of my friends
declare to be hopeless.”

“No one knows anything about it, Theodore. If you went into
statistics you would find that the chances of success in the learned
professions are pretty nearly equal. So many men will get on, and
so many will fail, at every trade, in every calling. The faculty of
success lies in the man himself. I always thought you were the kind
of man to do well in whatever line you hit upon. A calm, clear brain
and a resolute will are the first factors in the sum of life. And so
Lord Cheriton lived in this house, did he? I have heard people talk
of him as a very distinguished man, as well as a very lucky one.
By-the-by, it was in his house that strange murder occurred last
year.”

“Yes, it was in his house, and it was his daughter’s husband who was
murdered.”

“Tell me the story, Theodore,” said Ramsay, leaning back his handsome
head, and half closing his eyes, with the air of a man who liked
hearing about murders. “I read the account in the papers at the time,
but I’ve very nearly forgotten all about it.”

Theodore complied, and gave his friend the history of the case, and
the failure of every attempt to find the murderer.

“And there has been nothing discovered since last summer?”

“Nothing!”

“That is rather hard upon Lord Cheriton—bearing in mind your
detective’s suggestion of a vendetta. The vendetta would not be
likely to close with the death of Sir Godfrey Carmichael. Hatred
would demand further victims—Lord Cheriton himself perhaps—or this
lovely young widow,—but there could hardly be such a vindictive
feeling without a strong cause. Enmity so deadly must have had a
beginning in a profound sense of wrong.”

“I have studied the case from that point of view, but can discover
no cause for such malignity. I have almost given up all hope of
unravelling the mystery.”

“And your kinsman is to live under the sword of Damocles for the
rest of his life? Upon my soul I pity him. I can imagine nothing in
Ireland worse than the murder of Sir Godfrey Carmichael—a man seated
peacefully in his own drawing-room; and a high-principled, amiable
young man, you tell me, who never was known to wrong his fellow-man.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Theodore Dalbrook did not spend his Easter holidays in Dorsetshire.
He had heard from his sisters that Juanita was staying at Swanage
with Lady Jane Carmichael. He was unwilling to intrude upon her
there, and he had nothing to communicate upon the subject which
was at present his only claim upon her interest. Under these
circumstances he was easily persuaded to spend his vacation in a ten
days’ trip to Holland with Cuthbert Ramsay, who was keenly interested
in the result of some experiments which had lately been made at
Leyden; and thus it happened that Theodore let some time go by
without seeing any member of his family except his father, who came
to London occasionally upon business, and whom his son was delighted
to entertain and make much of in his chambers or at his club, the
serviceable Constitutional.

Towards the end of April he read an announcement in the papers which
had touched him almost to tears.

“On the 23rd inst., at Milbrook Priory, the widow of Sir Godfrey
Carmichael, of a posthumous son.”

He was thankful for her sake that this new interest had been given
to her days—that a new and fair horizon was open to her in this
young life, with all its possibilities of love and gladness. It
might be that the coming of this child would change the current of
her thoughts, that the stern desire for retribution would grow less
keen, that the agonizing sense of loss would be softened almost
to forgetfulness. He remembered those lovely lines of the poet
philosopher’s—

    “A child, more than all other gifts,
     Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.”

This child came, he hoped, freighted with healing and comfort, came
like the glad spring-time itself, like Adonis or Persephone, with his
arms full of flowers.

He wrote to his cousin, in tenderest congratulation, a letter
breathing a generous affection, without one selfish thought lurking
between the lines.

Her answer came after nearly a month’s delay, but, although tardy, it
was most delightful to him. Juanita asked him to be godfather to her
boy; and he could easily imagine that this was the highest honour she
could offer him.

“In London half the young men I used to meet took a pride in avowing
their unbelief,” she wrote, “but I know that you are not ashamed
to acknowledge your faith in Christ and His Church. I shall feel
secure that what you promise for my child will be fulfilled, so far
as it is in your power to bring about its fulfilment. I know that if
you stand beside the font and take those vows in His name you will
not remember that ceremony as an empty form, a mere concession to
usage and respectability. Those promises will appeal to you for my
fatherless child in the days to come. They will make you his friend
and protector.”

He accepted the trust with greater gladness than he had felt about
anything that had happened to him for a long time; and on a balmy
morning in the last week of May he found himself standing by the font
of the old Saxon church at Milbrook where he had heard the solemn
words of the Burial Service read above Sir Godfrey Carmichael’s
coffin less than a year before. He took upon himself the custody of
the infant’s conscience in all good faith, and he felt that this
trust which his cousin had given to him made a new link between them.

The Grenvilles had come down from town to be present at the ceremony,
though neither husband nor wife was officially concerned in it. Mrs.
Grenville had seized the opportunity to bring Johnnie and Godolphin
to Dorsetshire for change of air. She had an idea that the Purbeck
air had a particularly revivifying effect upon them—like unto no
other air.

“I suppose that is because it is my native air,” she explained.

Mr. Grenville submitted to his nephew’s existence as a mysterious
dispensation of Providence, which it became him to endure with
gentleman-like fortitude, but he did not cease to regard a posthumous
infant as a solecism in nature and society.

“Your sister-in-law actually seems pleased with her baby,” he told
his wife, grumblingly, as he put on a frock coat in honour of the
approaching ceremony; “but it appears to me that a woman of refined
feeling would be impressed with a sense of incongruity—of indelicacy
even—in the idea of a child born such ages after the father’s death—a
sort of no-man’s-baby. And upon my word it is uncommonly hard upon
Thomas. With such a family as ours—five and the possibilities of the
future—it would have been a grand thing to have one well provided
for. As things stand now they must _all_ be paupers.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lord Cheriton was Theodore’s fellow-sponsor, and Lady Jane was
godmother, an office which filled the dear soul with rapture. She
held her grandchild throughout the service, except when she delivered
him gingerly to the priest, who, at one stage of the ceremony,
carried the new-made Christian half-way up the aisle, and, as it
were, flaunted him in the face of the scanty congregation.

Juanita stood like a statue while these rites were being celebrated,
and in her pale set face there was none of the tender interest which
a mother might be expected to show upon such an occasion. There was
a deep pathos in that marble face and those black garments in an
hour which has generally something of a festal aspect. Strangers
thought her cold, a proud, hard young woman, thinking more of her
own importance, perhaps, than of her baby; yet could they have read
beneath the surface they would have pitied the girl-widow in her
desolation on this day which should have been blessed to her. She
could but think of him who was not there; of the father who had been
fated never to look upon his son’s face; of the son who was to grow
from infancy to manhood without the knowledge of a father’s love.

Theodore watched that pale and lovely face, full of sympathy, but not
without wonder. How would this new tie affect her? Would it soften
all that was hard and vindictive in her mind—would it be strong
enough to bring about resignation to the will of Heaven—a patient
waiting upon Providence, instead of that feverish eagerness to exact
a life for a life?

They two were alone together for only a few minutes after luncheon,
strolling along the broad gravel walk in front of the dining-room
windows, in the afternoon sunshine, while Lord Cheriton and Mr.
Grenville lingered over coffee and cigars, and Lady Jane and her
daughter made a domestic group with children and nurses under a
gigantic Japanese umbrella. Short as that _tête-à-tête_ was it
convinced Theodore that the child had not brought oblivion of the
father’s fate.

“You have heard nothing more—made no new discovery, I suppose?”
Juanita said, nervously.

“Nothing. Indeed, Juanita, I fear I have no talent as an amateur
detective. I am not likely to succeed where Mr. Churton failed. It
was easy enough for me to complete the record of the Strangways—to
set your suspicions at rest with regard to them. _That_ was plain
sailing. But it seems to me I shall never go any further.”

“I’m afraid you will not,” she said, wearily; “and yet I had such
hope in your cleverness—your determination to help me. As a lawyer
you would know how to set about it. The London detective has many
cases—his mind travels from one to another. He has no leisure to
think deeply about anything—but you who have had so much leisure of
late—you would, I know, be glad to help me.”

“Glad! Good God, Juanita, you must know that I would cut off my hand
to give you ease or comfort—respite even from a passing trouble.
And if you are really set upon this thing—if your peace is really
dependent upon the discovery of your husband’s murderer——”

“It is, it is, Theodore. I cannot know rest or comfort while his
death remains unpunished. I cannot lie down in peace at night while
I know that the wretch who killed him is walking about, rejoicing in
his wickedness, glad to have destroyed that blameless life, laughing
at our feeble love which can let our dead go unavenged.”

“If cudgelling these poor brains of mine could bring me any nearer to
the truth, Juanita,” Theodore said, with a troubled sigh, “I should
have helped you better; but so far I can see no ray of light in the
thick darkness. I do not think any efforts of ours will solve the
mystery. Only some accident, some inconceivable imprudence on the
part of the murderer can put us on his track.”

And then he thought with horror of Ramsay’s idea that a hatred so
malignant as that which had killed Godfrey Carmichael might reveal
itself in some new crime. He thought of the young mother bending
over her infant’s cradle in some unguarded room—calm in the fancied
safety of her English home. He thought of her wandering alone in park
or wood, while that rabid hatred lurked in the shadow, waiting and
watching for the moment of attack. The horror of the idea chilled
him to the heart, but he was careful not to hint at that horror
to Juanita. He seized the first opportunity of being alone with
Lady Jane, and imparted his fears, founded upon that suggestion of
Cuthbert Ramsay’s to her. The kind creature was quick to take alarm,
and promised to see that Juanita was guarded at all hours by all
precautions that could be taken without alarming her.

“She is surrounded with old and faithful servants,” said Lady Jane;
“a hint to them will put them on their guard; but if you thought
it wiser I would take her away from this place—take her away from
England, if necessary. It is horrible to think of living at the mercy
of an unknown foe.”

“My friend’s notion may be groundless. The crime of last year may
have been an isolated act—the inspiration of madness. In our efforts
to account for the unaccountable we may invent theories which
torture us, and which may yet have no ground in fact. Only it is as
well to think of possibilities, however hideous.”

He spent one night at the Priory, and before departure next morning
presented his offering of a fine George the Second mug to his godson,
Godfrey James Dalbrook—who in his present stage of existence seemed
to his godfather a scarcely distinguishable morsel of humanity
smothered in overmuch cambric and Valenciennes.

“I’m afraid if I were to meet my godson in the arms of a strange
nurse I should not know him,” he said, deprecatingly, after he had
kissed the rosebud mouth, “but, please God, the time will come when
he and I will be firm friends. As soon as he is old enough to decline
_mensa_ I shall feel that we can converse upon a common footing, and
when he goes to Eton I shall renew my youth every time I run down to
waste an hour in the playing fields watching him at cricket, or to
drive him to the ‘White Hart.’”

Although he put on an air of cheerfulness in his leave-taking, he
left the Priory with a sense of deepest anxiety; and it was almost
a relief to him when he received a letter from Lady Jane a week
afterwards.

“I could not get over the uneasy feeling which your suggestion
awakened,” she wrote, “so I am going to carry off mother and child
to Switzerland the day after to-morrow. Interlaken and Grindelwald
are delightful at this season. We shall return to Dorsetshire as soon
as the tourists begin to invade our retreat, and I trust in God that
some discovery may be made in the meantime, so that all our minds may
be more at ease.”




CHAPTER XXI.

    “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
     That time will come and take my love away.
     This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
     But weep to have that which it fears to lose.”


That ghastly idea mooted by Cuthbert Ramsay—the idea of an
unsatisfied hatred still hovering like a bird of prey over the heads
of Juanita and her child, ready to make its deadly swoop in the hour
that should see her most helpless and unprotected—gave a new impetus
to Theodore’s mind, and he applied himself again to the apparently
hopeless endeavour to find the motive of the murder and the person of
the murderer.

As an initial step he invited Mr. Churton to dine with him at his
chambers, entertained that gentleman with a well-chosen little
dinner sent in from a famous tavern in the Strand, and a bottle of
unexceptionable port after dinner; and by this innocent means got the
detective into an expansive frame of mind, and induced him to discuss
the Cheriton murder in all its bearings.

The result of the long evening’s talk differed in hardly any point
from the opinion which Mr. Churton had formulated at Cheriton. The
motive of the murder must be looked for in some past wrong, or
fancied wrong, inflicted upon the murderer. And again Mr. Churton
returned to his point that there was a woman at the bottom of it.

“Do you mean that a woman fired the shot?”

“Decidedly not. I mean that a woman was the motive power. Women are
not given to avenging their wrongs with their own hands. They will
instigate the men who love them to desperate crimes—unconsciously
perhaps—for they are the first to howl when the crime has been
committed, and the lover’s neck is in danger. But jealousy is the
most powerful factor of all, and I take it jealousy was at the bottom
of the Cheriton crime. I take it that some intrigue of Sir Godfrey’s
youth was at the root of the matter.”

“Strange as you may consider such a belief, Mr. Churton, I am
inclined to think that Sir Godfrey’s youth was innocent of
intrigues—that he never loved any woman except my cousin, whom he
adored from the time he was eighteen, when she was a lovely child of
eleven. It was a very romantic attachment, and the kind of attachment
which keeps a man clear of low associations.”

“You and Lord Cheriton tell me the same story, sir,” said the
detective, with a touch of impatience; “but if this immaculate young
man never injured anybody, how do you account for that bullet?”

“It is unaccountable, except upon a far-fetched hypothesis.”

“What may that be?”

“That the act of vengeance—though striking Godfrey Carmichael—was
aimed at Lord Cheriton; that the blow was meant to ruin his
daughter’s life, and by ricochet strike him to the heart. I think we
have spoken of this possibility before to-night.”

After that evening with Churton, Theodore made up his mind that there
was no assistance to be looked for from this quarter. The detective
had exhausted his means of investigation, and had nothing further to
suggest. He was too practical a man to waste time or thought upon
speculative theories. Theodore saw, therefore, that if he were to
pursue the subject further he must think and work for himself.

After considering the question from every possible point of view, he
became the more established in the idea that Godfrey Carmichael had
been the scapegoat of another man’s sin, the vicarious victim whose
death was to strike at a guilty life. Of his youth it was easy to
know all that there was to be known. He had lived in the sight of
his fellow-men, a young man of too much social importance to be able
to hide any youthful indiscretions or wrong-doing. But what of that
other and so much longer life? What of the early struggles of the
self-made man? What of the history of James Dalbrook in those long
years of bachelor life in London, when he was slowly working his way
to the front? Might not there have been some hidden sin in that life,
some sin dark enough to awaken a sleepless vengeance, a malignity
which should descend upon him in the day of peace and prosperity like
a thunderbolt from a clear and quiet sky?

A man who marries at forty years of age has generally some kind of
history before his marriage; and it was in that history Theodore told
himself he must look for the secret of Godfrey Carmichael’s death.
He was loyal to his kinsman and his friend; he was inspired by no
prurient curiosity, no envious inclination to belittle the great man;
he was prompted solely by his desire to unearth the hidden foe, and
to provide for the safety of Juanita’s future life.

Meditating upon his past intercourse with Lord Cheriton, and upon
every familiar conversation which he was able to recall, he was
surprised to find how very little his kinsman had ever related of
his London life, before the time when he took silk and married a
rich wife. His allusions to that earlier period had been of the
briefest. He had shown none of that egotistical pleasure which most
successful men feel in talking of their struggles, and the rosy dawn
of fame, those first triumphs, small perhaps in themselves, but
the after-taste of which is sweeter in the mouth than the larger
victories of the flood-tide. He had never talked of any affairs of
the heart, any of those lighter flirtations and unfinished romances
which elderly men love to recall. His history, so far as it could be
judged by his conversation, had been a blank.

Either the man must have been a legal machine, a passionless piece
of human clay, caring for nothing but professional achievement, in
those eighteen years of manhood between his call to the Bar and his
marriage, or he had lived a life which he could not afford to talk
about. He was either of a duller clay than his fellow-men, or he had
a hidden history.

Now, as it was hardly possible that James Dalbrook, judged from
either a psychological or a physiological standpoint, could have been
dull and cold, and plodding, and passionless, at any period of his
career, there remained the inference that he had a secret history.

Living under the very roof that had sheltered his cousin in the
greater part of his professional career, Theodore Dalbrook arrived at
this conclusion.

What kind of a life had he lived, that young barrister, briefless
and friendless at the outset, whose name was eventually to become
a power, a weight bringing down the judicial scale on the side of
victory, just as Archer’s riding was supposed to secure the winning
of a race. How had he lived in those early years, when the fight
was all before him? What friends had he made for himself, and what
enemies? What love, or what hate, had agitated his existence?

The investigator could only approach the question in the most
commonplace manner. It was nearly a quarter of a century since James
Dalbrook had been a tenant of that ground-floor set, above which
Theodore was pacing up and down in the summer dusk. He had to find
some one who remembered him at that time.

It would not be his present laundress, a buxom matron of about five
and thirty, who had never been known to any present inhabitant of
Ferret Court without the encumbrance of a baby in arms, or a baby at
the breast. As fast as one baby was disposed of, there was another
coming forward to take its place. She always brought her baby with
her, and left it about in obscure corners, like an umbrella. It was
always of the order of infant designated good; that is to say, it was
not a squalling baby. There were some of Mrs. Armstrong’s clients who
suspected her of keeping it in a semi-narcotized condition in the
interests of her profession; but when this practice was hinted at the
matron referred to the necessities of teething, and hoped she did not
require to be reminded of her duty as a mother.

This good person brought in the lighted lamp while Theodore was
pacing up and down the narrow limits of his sitting-room. She placed
the lamp on the table, looked inquiringly at her employer, and
then retired, only to return with the tea-tray, which she arranged
lingeringly. She was a talkative person, with an active intellect,
and it irked her to leave the room without any scrap of conversation,
were it only an inquiry about the postman, or a casual remark upon
the weather.

Nothing being forthcoming from Mr. Dalbrook, she withdrew to the
door, but paused upon the threshold and dropped a curtsey.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have a storm to-night, sir,” she said.

The fear was a thing of the moment, inspired by her desire to talk.

“Do you think so, Mrs. Armstrong?”

“I do, indeed, sir. It couldn’t be that ’eavy if there wasn’t thunder
in the air.”

“Perhaps not,” replied Theodore, indifferently. “Ah! by the way, how
long have you looked after these chambers?”

“From three years before I was married, sir.”

“Is that long?”

“Lor’, yes, sir; I should think it was! Why, my Joseph was thirteen
on his last birthday!”

“Let me see; that would mean about seventeen years, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I suppose you knew nothing about the chambers before that time.”

“I won’t say that, sir. I’ve known them more or less ever since I
could run alone. Mother looked after them before me. It was only
when the rheumatics took such firm hold of her”—this was said as if
Theodore were thoroughly posted in the case—“that mother gave up.
She had done for the gentlemen in this house for over twenty years;
though when she married father she never thought to have to do such
work as this, he being a master carpenter and cabinet-maker with
a nice business—and she’d been brought up different, and had more
education than any of _us_ ever had.”

“Then your mother must have known this house when Mr. Dalbrook had
the ground floor—the Mr. Dalbrook who is now Lord Cheriton,” said
Theodore, cutting short this biographical matter.

“I should think she did, sir. Many’s the time I’ve heard her talk
of him. He was just like you, sir, in his ways, as far as I can
gather—very quiet and very studious. She waited upon him for nearly
twelve years, so she ought to be a judge of his character.”

“I should like to have a chat with your mother some of these days,
Mrs. Armstrong.”

“Would you, sir? I’m sure she’d be delighted. She loves talking over
old times. She’s none of your Radicals, that are all for changing
things, like my husband. She looks up to her superiors, and she feels
quite proud of having done for Lord Cheriton when he was just like
any other young gentleman in Ferret Court. Any time you’d like to
step round to our place, sir, mother would be happy to see you. She’d
be glad to wait upon you, but she’s crippled with the rheumatics, and
it’s as much as she can do to get upstairs of a night and downstairs
of a morning.”

“I’ll call upon her to-morrow afternoon, if that will be convenient.”

“No fear of that, sir. Shall I look round at four o’clock and show
you where she lives, sir? It’s not above five minutes’ walk.”

“If you please. I shall be very much obliged.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Gadbolt’s Lane was one of the obscurest alleys between the Temple and
St. Bride’s Church, but it was as well known in the locality as if it
had been Regent Street. Thither Mrs. Armstrong conducted her employer
on a sultry June afternoon, and admitted him with her own private key
into one of the narrowest houses he had ever seen—a house of three
stories, with one window in each story, and with a tiny street door
squeezed in between the parlour window and the next house—a house
which, if it had stood alone, would have been a tower. Upon the
narrow street door appeared a wide brass plate inscribed with the
name of “J. W. Armstrong, plumber,” and in the parlour window were
exhibited various indications of the plumbing trade. On a smaller
brass plate just below the knocker appeared the modest legend, “Miss
Mobley, ladies’ own materials made up.”

The little parlour behind the plumber’s emblems was very close and
stuffy upon this midsummer afternoon, for Mrs. Dugget’s complaint
necessitated a fire in season and out of season; but it was also
spotlessly clean, and preparations had evidently been made for an
afternoon tea of an especially delicate character. There was a rack
of such thin, dry toast as Mrs. Armstrong’s employer affected, and
there was a choice pat of Aylesbury butter, set forth upon the
whitest of table-cloths, and flanked by a glass jar of jam, the glass
receptacle being of that ornate character which dazzles the purchaser
into comparative indifference as to the quality of the jam; just as
admiring man, caught by outward beauty, is apt to shut his eyes to
the lack of more lasting charms in the way of temper and character.

“Mother thought perhaps you’d honour her by taking a cup of tea this
warm afternoon, sir,” said Mrs. Armstrong, when Theodore had seated
himself opposite the invalid, “and then you can have your little talk
over old times while I look after Armstrong’s supper. He’ll eat any
bit I choose to give him for his dinner, and there’s days he don’t
get no dinner at all, but he always looks for something tasty for
supper, don’t he, mother?”

Mrs. Dugget acknowledged this trait in her son-in-law’s character,
and Theodore having graciously accepted her hospitality, Mrs.
Armstrong poured out the tea, and waited upon the distinguished
guest, and, having done this, withdrew to her domestic duties. She
was visible in front of the window five minutes afterwards, setting
out with a basket over her arm, evidently in quest of the “something
tasty” that was needful to her husband’s well-being.

“Your daughter tells me that you remember my cousin, Lord Cheriton,
when he was Mr. Dalbrook,” said Theodore, when he and the old woman
were alone together, except for the presence of a very familiar
black cat, which pushed its chilly nose into Theodore’s hand, and
rubbed its sleek fur against Theodore’s legs, with an air of slavish
adulation.

“It isn’t everybody that Tom takes to,” said Mrs. Dugget, touched by
her favourite’s conduct. “He’s a rare judge of character, is Tom.
I’ve had him from a kitten, and his mother before him. Yes, sir, I
ought to remember his lordship, seeing that I waited upon him for
over eleven years; and a quiet gentleman he was to attend upon,
giving next to no trouble, and never using bad language, or coming
home the worse for drink, as I’ve known a gentleman behave in that
very set.”

“Did he live in his chambers all that time?”

“Well, sir, nominally he did, but actually he didn’t. He had his
bedroom and his bath-room, just as you have; and the rooms was
furnished pretty comfortable, and everything about them was very
neat, for he was uncommonly particular, was Mr. Dalbrook; and he was
always there of a day, and all day long, except when he was at the
law courts, for there never was a more persevering gentleman. But
after the first three years I can’t say that he _lived_ in Ferret
Court. He came there by nine or ten o’clock every morning; and
sometimes he stayed till ten o’clock at night, and sometimes he left
as early as five in the afternoon; but he didn’t live there no more
after the third year, when he was beginning to get on a bit. There
was his rooms, and there was nothing altered, except that he took
away his dressing-case and a good many of his clothes; but there was
everything left that he wanted for his toilet, and all in apple-pie
order for him to fall back upon his old ways at any time. Only, as I
said before, he didn’t live there no longer; and instead of having
his dinner in his own room at seven o’clock, he never took anything
more than a biscuit and a glass of sherry, or a brandy and soda.”

“Did this change in his habits come about suddenly?”

“Yes, sir, it did; without an hour’s warning. I comes to his rooms
one morning and finds that his bed hasn’t been slept in, and I finds
a little bit of a pencil note from him to say that he would be
stopping out of town for a few days. He was away over a fortnight,
and from that time to the end of my service in Ferret Court, he never
spent another night there.”

“He had taken lodgings out of town, I conclude? I suppose you knew
his other address?”

“No, sir, he never told me where his home was, for of course he must
have had a home somewhere. No man would be a waif and stray for all
those years—above all, such a steady-going gentleman as Mr. Dalbrook.
I’ve heard other gentlemen accuse him of being a hermit. ‘One never
sees you nowhere,’ they says. ‘You’re as steady as Old Time,’ they
says. And so he was; but he was very secret with his steadiness.”

“Had you any idea where that second home of his was—in what part of
the suburbs? It could not have been very far from London, since you
say he came to his chambers before ten o’clock every morning.”

“It was oftener nine than ten, sir,” said Mrs. Dugget.

She paused a little before replying to his question, watching him
with a sly smile as he caressed the obtrusive cat. She had her own
notions as to the motive of his curiosity. He had expectations from
Lord Cheriton, perhaps, and he wanted to discover if there were
anything in the background of his kinsman’s history which was likely
to interfere with the fruition of his mercenary hopes.

“It was a good many years after Mr. Dalbrook left off sleeping at his
chambers that I made a sort of discovery,” she said; “and I knew my
place too well to take any advantage of that discovery. But still I
had my suspicions, and I believe they were not far off the truth.”

“What was the nature of your discovery?”

“Oh, well, you see, sir, it wasn’t much to talk about, only it set
me thinking. It was two or three years before Mr. Dalbrook left
Ferret Court and went to that first floor set in King’s Bench Walk,
but he was beginning to be a great man, and he had more work than he
could do, slave as hard as he might; and he did slave, I can tell
you, sir. His rooms in Ferret Court were very shabby—they hadn’t had
a bit of paint or a pail of whitewash for I don’t know how long;
so, just before the Long Vacation, he says to me, ‘I’m going to get
these rooms done up, Mrs. Dugget, while I’m out of town. I’ve got a
estimate from a party in Holborn, and he’s to paint the wainscot and
clear coal the ceiling, and do the whole thing for nine pounds seven
and eightpence, in a workmanlike manner. You’ll please to clean up
after him, and do away with all the waste paper and rubbish, and get
everything tidy before November.”

Mrs. Dugget paused, and refreshed herself with half a cup of tea, and
apologized for the obtrusiveness of the cat.

“I hope you don’t object to cats, sir.”

Theodore smiled, reflecting that any man who objected to cats would
have fled from that stuffy parlour before now.

“No, I am rather fond of them, as an inferior order of dog. Well,
now, as to this discovery of yours, Mrs. Dugget?”

“I’m coming to it as fast as I can, sir. You must know that there was
a lot of waste paper in one of the closets beside the fireplace, and
you are aware how roomy those closets in Ferret Court are. I never
held with burning waste paper, first because it’s dangerous with
regard to fire, and next because they’ll give you three shillings
a sack for it at some of the paper mills; so I had always emptied
the waste-paper baskets into this closet, which was made no other
use of, and the bottom of the closet was chock-full of old letters,
envelopes, pamphlets, and such like. So I took my sack, and I sat
down on the floor and filled it. Now, as I was putting in the papers
by handfuls—taking my time over it, for the painters wasn’t coming
till the following Monday, and all my gentlemen was away on their
holidays—I was struck by seeing such a number of envelopes addressed
to the same name—

  ‘J. Danvers, Esq.,
  ‘Myrtle Cottage,
  ‘Camberwell Grove.’

How did Mr. Dalbrook come to have all those envelopes belonging to
Mr. Danvers? There must have been letters inside the envelopes, and
what business had he with Mr. Danvers’s letters?”

“They may have been letters bearing upon some case on which he was
engaged,” said Theodore.

“So they might, sir; but would _he_ have the letters?” asked the
laundress shrewdly. “Wouldn’t that be the solicitor’s business?”

“You are right, Mrs. Dugget. I see you have profited by your
experience in the Temple.”

“I had the curiosity to look at the post-marks on those envelopes,
sir. There was over a hundred of ’em, I should think, some whole, and
some torn across, and the post-marks told me that they spread over
years. They most of ’em looked like tradesmen’s envelopes, and the
Camberwell post-mark was on a good many of ’em. That closet hadn’t
been cleared out for eight or nine years, to my knowledge, and those
envelopes went back for the best part of that time, and the longer I
looked at them the more I wondered who Mr. Danvers was.”

“And did you come to any conclusion at last?”

“Well, sir, I had my own idea about it, but it isn’t my place to say
what that idea was.”

“Come, come, Mrs. Dugget, you have no employer now, and you are
beholden to no one. You are a free agent, and have a perfect right to
give expression to your opinion.”

“If I thought it would go no further, sir.”

“It shall go no further.”

“Very well then, sir, to be candid, I thought that James Dalbrook and
J. Danvers, Esq., were the same person, and that Mr. Dalbrook had
been living in Camberwell Grove under an assumed name.”

“Would not that seem a very curious thing for a professional man in
Mr. Dalbrook’s position to do?” inquired Theodore, gravely.

“It might seem curious to you, sir, but I’ve seen a good deal of
professional gentlemen in my time, and it didn’t strike me as very
uncommon. Gentlemen have their own reasons for what they do, and the
more particular they are from a professional point of view the more
convenient they may find it to make a little alteration in their
names now and again.”

Mrs. Dugget looked at him with a significant shrewdness, which gave
her the air of a female Mephistopheles, a creature deeply versed in
all things evil.

“Did your curiosity prompt you to try and verify your suspicions?” he
asked.

The old woman looked at him searchingly before she answered, as
if trying to discover what value there might be for him in any
information she had it in her power to give or to withhold. So far
she had been carried along by her inherent love of gossip, stimulated
by the wish to stand well with her daughter’s employer, and perhaps
with a view to such small amenities as a pound of tea or a bottle
of whisky. But at this point something in Theodore’s earnest manner
suggested to her that her knowledge of his kinsman’s life might have
a marketable value, and she therefore became newly reticent.

“It doesn’t become me to talk about a gentleman like Mr. Dalbrook,
your namesake and blood relation, too, sir,” she said, folding her
rheumatic hands meekly. “I’m afraid I’ve made too free with my tongue
already.”

Theodore did not answer her immediately. He took a letter-case
from his breast-pocket, and slowly and deliberately extracted two
crisp bank-notes from one of the divisions. These he opened and
spread calmly and carefully on the table, smoothing out their crisp
freshness, which crackled under his hand.

There is something very pleasant in the aspect of a new bank-note;
money created expressly, as it were, for the first owner; virgin
wealth, pure and uncontaminated by the dealings of the multitude.
These were only five-pound notes, it is true, the lowest in the scale
of English paper-money—in the eye of a millionaire infinitesimal as
the grains of sand on the sea-shore—yet to Mrs. Dugget those two
notes lying on the table in front of her suggested vast wealth. It is
doubtful if she had ever seen two notes together in the whole of her
previous experience. Her largest payment was a quarter’s rent, her
largest receipt had been a quarter’s wages. She had managed to save a
little money in the course of her laborious days, but her savings had
been accumulated in sovereigns and half-sovereigns, which had been
promptly transferred to the savings bank. Bank-notes to her mind were
the symbols of surplus wealth.

“Now, I am not going to beat about the bush, Mrs. Dugget,” said
Theodore, with a matter-of-fact air. “I have a great respect for my
kinsman, Lord Cheriton, who has been a kind friend to me. You may be
assured, therefore, that if I am curious about his past life, I mean
him no harm. I have reasons of my own, which it is not convenient for
me to explain, for wanting to know all about his early struggles, his
friends, and his enemies. I feel perfectly sure that you followed up
your discovery of those envelopes—that you took the trouble to find
Myrtle Cottage, and to ascertain the kind of people who lived there.”
Her face told him that he was right. “If you choose to be frank with
me, and tell me all you can, those two five-pound notes are very much
at your service. If you prefer to hold your tongue, I can only wish
you good afternoon, and try to make my discoveries unaided, which
will not be very easy after a lapse of over twenty years.”

“I don’t want to keep any useful information from you, sir, provided
you’ll promise not to let anything I may tell you get to Lady
Cheriton’s ears. I shouldn’t like to make unhappiness between man and
wife.”

“I promise that Lady Cheriton shall not be made unhappy by any
indiscretion of mine.”

“That’s all I care about, sir,” said Mrs. Dugget, piously, with her
keen old eye upon the notes, “and being sure of that, I don’t mind
owning that I did take the trouble to follow up the address upon the
envelope. Now, when a gentleman like Mr. Dalbrook—a gentleman as
always pays his way regular, and stands high in his profession—when
such a gentleman as that changes his name, you may be sure there’s a
lady in the case. If you take up a paper, sir, and happen to glance
at a divorce case, promiscuous, as I do sometimes when my son-in-law
leaves his _Telegraph_ or his _Echo_ lying about—you’ll find that the
gentleman who runs away with the lady always changes his name first
thing—whether he and the lady go to an hotel, or takes lodgings, or
go on the Continent—he always takes another name. I don’t think the
change does him much good, for wherever he goes people seem to know
all about him, and come out with their knowledge in court directly
it’s wanted—but it seems as if he must always act so, and act so he
does.”

Theodore submitted to this disquisition in silence, but he touched
the notes lightly with his fingers and made them crackle, by way of
stimulus to Mrs. Dugget’s intellect.

“I felt sure if Mr. Dalbrook had been living at Myrtle Cottage under
the name of Danvers there was a lady mixed up in it, and, being in
the Long Vacation, when I knew he generally went abroad, I thought
I would try and satisfy myself about him. I thought I should feel
more comfortable in waiting upon him when I knew the worst. And then
Camberwell Grove was such a little way off. It would be just a nice
outing for me of a summer evening; so what did I do one lovely warm
afternoon but take my tea a little earlier than usual, and trot off
to the corner of Lancaster Place, where I wait for a Waterloo ’bus
coming sauntering along the Strand as if time was made for slaves,
and there was no such things as loop-lines or trains to be caught.
I hadn’t no train to catch, so I didn’t mind the sauntering and the
dawdling and the taking up and setting down. I had all the summer
evening before me when I got out at the Green and made my way to
the Grove. It’s a beautiful romantic place, Camberwell Grove, sir.
I don’t know whether you know it, but if you do I’m sure you’ll own
that there ain’t a prettier neighbourhood near London. Twenty years
ago they used still to show you the garden where George Barnwell
murdered his uncle, but I dare say that’s been done away with by now.
It took me a good time to find Myrtle Cottage, for it was one of the
smallest houses in the Grove, and it stood back in a pretty little
garden, and there was nothing on the gate to tell if it was Myrtle
or otherwise. But I did find it at last, thanks to a young housemaid
who was standing at the gate, talking to a grocer’s lad. The grocer’s
lad made off when he saw me, and for the first few minutes the girl
was inclined to be disagreeable; but she came round very quickly, and
I dare say she was glad to have some one to talk to on that solitary
summer evening. ‘Cook’s out for her holiday,’ she says, ‘and I can’t
stop in the house alone.’ And then we got talking, and after we’d
talked a bit standing at the gate, she asked me into the garden,
where there was a long narrow grass plot, screened off from the high
road by two horse-chestnut trees and some laburnums, and there was
some garden chairs and a table on the grass, and the young woman
asked me to sit down. She’d got her work-basket out there, and she’d
been making herself an apron. ‘I can’t bear the house of a summer
evening,’ she says, ‘it gives me the horrors.’ Well, we talked of
her master and mistress, as was natural. She’d lived with them over
a twelvemonth, and it was a pretty good place, but very dull, and
the missus had a temper, and was dreadfully particular, and expected
things as nice as if she had ten servants instead of two, and was
very mean into the bargain, and seemed afraid of spending money. ‘I
shouldn’t be so particular, if I was her,’ the girl said, and then
she told me that she knew things wasn’t all right, though they seemed
a very respectable couple, and the lady went to church regularly.”

“What made her suspect that things were wrong?” asked Theodore, Mrs.
Dugget having paused at this point of her narrative.

“Oh, sir, servants always know! They can’t live six months in a house
without finding out how the land lies. They’ve got so little to think
of, you see, except their masters and mistresses. You can’t wonder
if they’re always on the watch and the listen, meaning no harm, poor
things. If you was shut up in a stuffy little kitchen all day, never
seeing no one but the lads from the tradespeople for two or three
minutes at a time, you’d watch and you’d listen. It’s human nature.
People don’t like reading servants, and they don’t like gadding
servants; so they must put up with servants that think a good deal
of what’s going on round them. The housemaid told me she was sure
from the solitary way Mr. and Mrs. Danvers lived that there was a
screw loose somewhere. ‘No one never comes near them,’ she said,
‘and she never goes nowhere except for a walk with him. No visitors,
no friends. I can’t think how she bears her life. She hasn’t a
party-gown, even. If anybody asked her to a party she couldn’t go.
When he took her abroad last month she was all in a fluster and
excitement, just like a child, or like a prisoner that’s going to be
let out of prison. She shook hands with cook and me when she said
good-bye, and that isn’t like her. “I feel so happy, Jane,” she says,
“I don’t know what I’m doing.” No more I think she did. She looked
quite wild with pleasure, and quite young too in her new bonnet,
although in a general way she looks older than him.’ And then the
girl told me how fond she was of him, although she showed her temper
now and then, even to him. Not often, the girl said, and any quarrel
with him threw her into a dreadful way afterwards, and she would lie
awake and sob all night long. The girl had heard her, for it was a
trumpery little house, though it was pretty to look at, and the walls
were very thin. I could see with my own eyes that it wasn’t much of
a house, a sort of dressed-up cottage, smothered with creepers up to
the roof. It looked pretty and countrified after the Temple, and
I could understand that Mr. Dalbrook liked living in such a lovely
place as Camberwell Grove.”

“Did you find out what the lady was like?” asked Theodore.

“You may be sure I tried to do that, sir. How could I help being
interested in a lady that had such an influence over one of my
gentlemen? The girl told me that Mrs. Danvers was one of the ‘has
beens.’ She had been handsome, perhaps, once upon a time; and she
might have had a fine figure once upon a time; but she had neither
face nor figure now. She was pale and careworn, and she was very
thin. She didn’t do anything to set herself off either, like other
ladies of five and thirty. She wore the same merino gown month after
month, and she had only one silk gown in her wardrobe. She was always
neat and nice, like a lady; but she didn’t seem to care much how she
looked. She told the girl once that she and Mr. Danvers would be
better off by and by, and then all things would be different with
them. ‘I am only waiting for those happier days,’ she says; but the
girl fancied she would be an old woman before those days came.”

“Were there any children?”

“I could not find out for certain. The girl fancied from chance
words she had overheard that there had been a baby, but that it had
been sent away, and that this was a grievance between them, and came
up when they quarrelled, which was not often, as I said before.
Altogether I left Camberwell Grove feeling very sorry for the lady
who was called Mrs. Danvers, and I thought it was a great pity if Mr.
Dalbrook wanted to make a home for himself he couldn’t have managed
it better. I made great friends with Jane, the housemaid, before I
left that garden, and I asked her when she had an evening out to come
and take a cup of tea with me; and if she could get leave to go to
the theatre, my youngest son, who was living at home then, could take
her, along with my daughter, who was then unmarried and in service in
New Bridge Street. The young woman came once, about Christmas time,
and she told me things were just the same as they had been at Myrtle
Cottage. She talked very freely about Mr. and Mrs. Danvers over her
tea, but she had no idea that he was beknown to me, or that he was a
barrister with chambers in the Temple. She thought he was something
in the City. I asked her if it was Mr. Danvers who was mean and kept
his lady short of money; but she thought not. She thought it was
Mrs. Danvers that had a kind of mania for saving, for she was quite
put out if Mr. Danvers brought her home a present that cost a few
pounds. It seemed as if they were saving up for some purpose—for they
used to talk to each other of the money he was putting by, and it
was plain they were looking forward to a better house and a happier
kind of life. Jane thought that either she had a husband hidden away
somewhere—in a lunatic asylum, perhaps—or he had another wife.”

Mrs. Dugget stopped to replenish the thrifty little fire with a very
small scoopful of coals, during which operation the sleek black cat
leaped upon her back and balanced himself upon her shoulders while
she bent over the grate.

“Well, sir, that was Jane’s first and last visit. She got married all
of a sudden before Lady-day, and she went to live in the country,
where her husband was postman in her native village, and I never
see no more of her. I went to Camberwell Grove again in the Long
Vacation, when I knew Mr. Dalbrook was away, but I found only an old
woman in the house as caretaker, stone deaf, and disagreeable into
the bargain. Mr. Dalbrook moved into King’s Bench Walk the following
year, and less than six months after that I saw his marriage in the
papers; and his clerk told me he had married a very rich young lady,
and was going to buy an estate in the country. I went to have another
look at the cottage soon after Mr. Dalbrook’s marriage, and I found
the garden-gate locked, and a board up to say that the house was to
be let unfurnished; and that, sir, is all I could ever find out about
the lady called Mrs. Danvers.”

“And this history of the home in Camberwell Grove is all you ever
knew about Mr. James Dalbrook’s life outside the chambers in Ferret
Court.”

“Yes, sir, that is all I ever heard, promiscuously or otherwise.”

“Well, Mrs. Dugget, you have been frank with me, and you have earned
my little present,” said Theodore, handing her the two notes, which
her old fingers touched tremulously in a rapture that was too much
for words. It was with an effort that she faltered out her thanks for
his generosity, which, she protested, she had never “looked for.”

Theodore walked back towards the Temple deep in thought; indeed
so troubled and perplexed were his thoughts that upon approaching
Ferret Court he stopped short, and instead of going straight to his
chambers, turned aside and went to the Gardens, where he walked
up and down the same gravel path for an hour, pondering upon that
picture of the hidden home in Camberwell Grove, conjured up before
him by the loquacious laundress. Yes, he could imagine that obscure
existence almost as if he had seen it with his bodily eyes. He could
fancy the solitary home where never kinsman or familiar friend
crossed the threshold; a home destitute of all home ties and homely
associations; a home never smiled upon by the parson of the parish;
cut off from all local interests, identified with nothing, a mystery
among the commonplace dwellings around and about it; a subject for
furtive observation from the neighbours. He could fancy those two
lonely lives preying upon each other, too closely united for peaceful
union; the woman too utterly dependent upon the man; she feeling
her dependence a degradation; he feeling her helplessness a burden.
He could picture them, loving each other, perhaps, passionately,
jealously to the last, and yet weary of each other, worn out and
weighed down by the narrowness of a life walled off from the rest of
the world and all its changeful interests and widening sympathies.
And then he saw the picture in still darker colours, as it might have
been ere that unknown figure faded from the canvas. He thought of the
ambitious, successful barrister, heart-sick at the fetters which he
had fastened upon his life, tired of his faded mistress, seeing all
gates open to him were he but free to pass them; still living apart
from the world, at a time of life when all the social instincts are
at their highest development, when a man loves the society of his
fellow-men, the friction of crowds, the sound of his own voice, and
every social tribute that the world can offer to his talents and his
success. He saw his kinsman galled by the chain which love and honour
had hung about him, loathing his bondage, longing for liberty—saw
him with the possibility of a brilliant marriage suddenly offering
itself to him, a lovely girl ready to throw herself into his arms, a
fortune at his feet, and the keen ambition of a self-made man goading
him like a spur. How did it end? Did death set him free—death, the
loosener of all bonds? Or did his mistress sacrifice herself and
her broken heart to his welfare, and of her own accord release him?
There are women capable of such sacrifices. It would seem that his
disentanglement, however it came about, had been perfect of its kind;
for no rumour of a youthful intrigue, no scandal about a cast-off
mistress had ever clouded the married life of James Dalbrook. Even in
Cheriton village, where the very smallest nucleus in the way of fact
was apt to swell into a gigantic scandal, even at Cheriton nobody
had ever hinted at indiscretions in the earlier years of the local
magnate.

And then Theodore Dalbrook asked himself the essential question: What
bearing, if any, had this episode of his kinsman’s life upon the
murder of Juanita’s husband? What dark and vengeful figure lurked
in the background of that common story of dishonourable love? An
outraged husband, a brother, a father? That obscure life apart from
friends and acquaintances would show that some great wrong had been
done, some sacred tie had been broken. Only a sinful union so hides
its furtive happiness—only a deep sense of degradation will reconcile
a woman to banishment from the society of her own sex.

Whether that forsaken mistress were dead or living there might lurk
in her sad history the elements of tragedy, the motive for a ghastly
revenge; and on this account the story possessed a grim fascination
for Theodore Dalbrook. He lay awake the greater part of the night
thinking in a fitful way of that illicit ménage in the unfashionable
suburb—the suburb whose very existence is unknown to society. He
fell asleep long after the sun was up, only to dream confusedly of a
strange woman who was now James Dalbrook’s lawful wife—and now his
victim—and whose face had vague resemblances to other faces, and who
was and was not half a dozen other women in succession.

He walked to Camberwell on the following afternoon, surprised at the
strange world through which he passed on his way there, the teeming,
busy, noisy world—the world which makes such a hard fight for life.
The Grove itself, after that bustling, seething road, seemed a
place in which nightingales might have warbled, and laughing girls
hidden from their lovers in the summer dusk. The very atmosphere of
decay from a better state was soothing. There were trees still, and
gardens, and here and there pretty, old-fashioned houses; and in a
long narrow garden between two larger houses he found Myrtle Cottage.
There was a board up, and the neglected garden indicated that the
cottage had been a long time without a tenant.

There was a policeman’s wife living in it, with a colony of small
children, in the cotton-pinafore stage of existence, and with noses
dependent upon maternal supervision, so much so that scarcely had the
matron attended to one small snub than her attention was called off
to another, which gave a distracted air to all her conversation.

She took Mr. Dalbrook over the house, and expatiated upon the damp
walls, and the utter incompetence of the cistern and pipes to meet
the exigencies of a family, which was the more to be regretted on
the ground that the landlord declined to do anything in the way of
repairs, as he intended to pull the house down in a few years with a
view to making better use of the ground.

“And indeed that’s about all it’s fit for,” said the policeman’s
wife. “It ain’t fit for anybody to _live_ in.”

The rooms had even a more desolate look than rooms in empty houses
usually have, in consequence of this long neglect. The cottage had
been empty for two years and a half, long enough for the damp to
make hideous blotches upon all the walls, and trace discoloured maps
of imaginary continents upon all the ceilings; long enough for the
spiders to weave their webs in all the corners, for rust to eat deep
into the iron grates, and for dust and dirt to obscure every window.

Theodore stood in the room which had once been a drawing-room, and
which boasted of a wide French window looking out upon a lawn, with a
large weeping-ash directly in front of the window, and much too near
for airiness or health, a melancholy-looking tree in which Theodore
thought Mrs. Danvers might have found a symbol of her own life, as
she stood at the window and looked at those dull drooping branches
against a background of ivy-covered wall.




CHAPTER XXII.

    “And if we do but watch the hour,
     There never yet was human power
       Which could evade, if unforgiven,
     The patient search and vigil long
     Of him who treasures up a wrong.”


Theodore made a tour of the little garden in the summer sundown. It
was very small, but its age gave it a superiority over most suburban
gardens. There were trees, and hardy perennials that had been growing
year after year, blooming and fading, with very little care on the
part of successive tenants. The chief charm of the garden to some
people might have been its seclusion. There was no possibility of
being “overlooked” in this narrow pleasaunce, and overlooking is the
curse of the average garden attached to the average villa. Mr. and
Mrs. Jones, taking their ease, or working in their garden in the cool
of the evening, are uncomfortably conscious of Mr. and Mrs. Smith
eyeing them from the drawing-room windows of next door.

Here the high wall on one side, and the tall horse-chestnuts on the
other, made a perfect solitude; but seclusion on a very small scale
is apt to merge into dulness, and it must be owned that the garden
of Myrtle Cottage at sundown was about as melancholy a place as
the mind of man could imagine. Theodore, contemplating it from the
standpoint of Mrs. Danvers’ history, her friendlessness, her sense
of degradation, wondered that she could have endured that dismal
atmosphere for a single summer. And she had lived there for many
years; lived there till weariness must have become loathing.

“God help her, poor soul!” he said to himself. “How she must have
abhorred that weeping ash! How it must have tortured her to see the
leaves go and come again year after year, and to know that neither
spring nor autumn would better her fate!”

He took down the address of the agent who had the letting of the
house, and left with the intention of seeing him that evening if
possible. The landlord was a personage resembling the Mikado, or
the Grand Llama, and was not supposed to be accessible to the
human vision, certainly not in relation to his house property. The
policeman’s wife averred that “him and the De Crespignys owned half
Camberwell.”

The agent was represented to live over his office, which was in
no less famous a locality than Camberwell Grove, and was likely,
therefore, to oblige Mr. Dalbrook by seeing him upon a business
matter after business hours. It was not much past seven when Theodore
entered the office, where he found the agent extending his business
hours so far as to be still seated at his desk, deep in the revision
of a catalogue. He was a very genial agent, and he put aside the
catalogue immediately, asked Theodore to be seated, and wheeled round
his office chair to talk to him.

“Myrtle Cottage. Yes, a charming little box, convenient and compact,
a bijou residence for a bachelor with a small establishment. Such a
nice garden, too, retired and rustic. If you were thinking of taking
the property on a repairing lease, the rent would be very moderate,
really a wonderfully advantageous occasion for any one wanting a
pretty secluded place.”

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Adkins, I am not thinking of taking that
house or any house. I have come to ask you a few questions about a
former tenant, and I shall take it as a favour if you will be so good
as to answer them.”

The agent looked disappointed, but he put his pen behind his ear,
crossed his legs, and prepared himself for conversation.

“Do you mean a recent tenant?” he asked.

“No; the gentleman I am interested in left Myrtle Cottage twenty
years ago—nearer five and twenty years, perhaps. His name was
Danvers.”

The agent gave a suppressed whistle, and looked at his interlocutor
with increasing interest.

“Oh, you wanted to know something about Mr. Danvers. Was he an
acquaintance of yours?”

“He was.”

“Humph! He is more than old enough to be your father. He might almost
be your grandfather. Do you know him intimately?”

“As intimately as a man of my age can know a man of his age.”

“And position,” added the agent, looking at his visitor shrewdly.

Theodore returned the look.

“I don’t quite follow your meaning,” he said.

“Come, now, sir, if you know anything at all about the gentleman in
question you must know that his name is not Danvers, and never was
Danvers; that he took Myrtle Cottage under an assumed name, and lived
there for nearly ten years under that assumed name; that he never let
any of his friends or acquaintances cross his threshold; and that he
thought he had hoodwinked me, me a man of the world, moving about in
the world, among other men of the world. Why, sir, Mr. Danvers had
not paid me three half-years’ rent in notes or gold, as he always
paid, and in this office here—before I had found out that he was the
rising barrister, Mr. Dalbrook—and before I had guessed the reason
of his hole-and-corner style of life.”

“What became of the lady who was called Mrs. Danvers?”

“And who in all probability was Mrs. Danvers,” said Mr. Adkins. “I
have reason to believe that was her name. What became of her? God
knows. A servant came to me one August morning with the keys and a
half-year’s rent—the tenant had given notice to surrender at the
Michaelmas quarter, that being the quarter at which he entered upon
possession. Mr. and Mrs. Danvers had gone abroad—to Belgium, the
woman thought; and as it was their present intention to live abroad,
their furniture had all been removed to the Pantechnicon upon the
previous day, and the house was empty, and at my disposal.”

“Did you hear nothing more of them after that?”

“I heard of him, sir, as all the world heard of him—heard of his
marriage with a wealthy young Spanish lady, heard of his elevation to
the peerage,—but of Mrs. Danvers I never heard a syllable. I take it
she was pensioned off, and that she lived—and may have died—on the
Continent. Why, there are a lot of sleepy old Flemish towns—I’m a bit
of a traveller in my quiet way—which seem to have been created for
that purpose!”

“Is that all you can tell me about your tenants, Mr. Adkins? I am
not prompted by idle curiosity in my inquiries. I have a very strong
motive——”

“Don’t trouble yourself to explain, sir. I know nothing about Mr. and
Mrs. Danvers which I have any desire to hold back—or which I am under
any obligation to keep back. My business relations with the gentleman
never went beyond letting him Myrtle Cottage, which I let to him
without a reference, on the strength of a twelvemonth’s rent in
advance, and a deuce of a hurry he was in to get into the place. As
for Mrs. Danvers, you may be surprised to hear that I never saw her
face. I’m not a prying person, and, as the rent was never overdue,
I had no occasion to call at the house. But I did see some one who
had a strong bearing upon the lady’s life, and a very troublesome
customer that person was.”

“Who was he?”

“No less an individual than her husband. A man dashed into this
office one winter afternoon, a little after dusk, and asked me if I
had let a house to a person called Danvers? I could see that he had
been drinking, and that he was in a state of strong excitement; so I
answered him shortly enough, and I kept him well between myself and
the door, so as to be able to pitch him out if he got troublesome.
He told me that he’d just come from Myrtle Cottage, that he had been
refused admittance there, although the woman who lived there was
his wife. He wanted to know if the house had been taken by her, or
by the scoundrel who passed himself off as her husband? If it had
been taken in her name it was his house, and he would very soon let
them know that he had the right to be there. I told him that I knew
nothing about him or his rights; that my client’s tenant was Mr.
Danvers, and that there the business ended. He was very violent upon
this, abused the tenant, talked about his own wrongs and his wife’s
desertion of him, asked me if I knew that this man who called himself
Danvers was an impostor, who had taken the house in a false name, and
who was really a beggarly barrister called Dalbrook; and then from
blasphemy and threatening he fell to crying, and sat in my office
shivering and whimpering like a half-demented creature, till I took
compassion upon him so far as to give him a glass of brandy, and send
my office lad out with him to put him into a cab.”

“Did he tell you his name or profession?”

“No, he was uncommonly close about himself. I asked him if the lady’s
name was really Danvers, and if he was Mr. Danvers; but he only
stared at me in a vacant way with his drunken eyes. It was hopeless
trying to get a straight answer from him about anything. Heaven knows
how he got home that night, for he wouldn’t tell the office boy his
address, and only told the cabman to drive to Holborn. ‘I’ll pull him
up when I get there,’ he said. He may have been driven about half the
night, for all I can tell.”

“Was that all you ever saw or heard of him?”

“All I ever saw, but not all I ever heard. Servants and neighbours
will talk, you see, sir, and I happened to be told of three or four
occasions—at considerable intervals—at which my gentleman made
unpleasantness at Myrtle Cottage. He would go there wild with drink—I
believe he never went when he was sober—and would kick up a row.
If he wanted to get his wife away from the life she was leading he
would have gone to work in a different manner; but it’s my opinion he
wanted nothing of the kind. He was savage and vindictive in his cups,
and he wanted to frighten her and to annoy the man who had tempted
her away from him. But he was a poor creature, and after blustering
and threatening he would allow himself to be thrust out of doors like
a stray cur.”

“What kind of a man did he look? A broken-down gentleman?”

“Yes, I should say he had been a gentleman once, but he had come down
a longish way. He had come down as low as drink and dissipation can
bring a man. Altogether I should consider him a dangerous customer.”

“A man capable of violence—of crime even?”

“Perhaps! A man who wouldn’t have stopped at crime if he hadn’t been
a white-livered hound. I tell you, sir, the fellow was afraid of Mr.
Dalbrook, although Mr. Dalbrook ought to have been afraid of him. He
was a craven to the core of his heart.”

“What age did you give him?”

“At the time he came to me I should put him down at about six and
thirty.”

“And that is how many years ago?”

“Say four and twenty—I can’t be certain to a year or so. It wasn’t a
business transaction, and I haven’t any record of the fact.”

“Was he a powerful-looking man?”

“He was the remains of a powerful man: he must have been a fine
man when he was ten years younger—a handsome man, too—one of those
fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, aquiline-nosed men who set off good
clothes—the kind of man to do justice to a rig out from a fashionable
tailor. He was a wreck when I saw him, but he was the wreck of a
handsome man.”

“And you take it that he was particularly vindictive?”

“He was as vindictive as a cur can be.”

“And was his anger strongest against the lady, do you suppose, or
against the gentleman?”

“Decidedly against the gentleman. He was full of envy and hatred
and all uncharitableness towards Mr. Dalbrook. He affected to think
contemptuously of his talents and to belittle him in every way, while
he was bursting with envy at his growing success. He was jealous
and angry as a husband, no doubt; but he was still more jealous and
still angrier as a disappointed man against a successful man. He was
as venomous as conscious failure can be. And now, sir, that I have
spoken so freely about this little domestic drama, which was all past
and done with twenty years ago, and in which I only felt interested
as a man of the world, now may I ask your name, and how you come to
be so keenly interested in so remote an event?”

“My name is Dalbrook,” replied Theodore, taking out his card and
lying it upon the agent’s desk.

“You don’t mean to say so! A relation of Lord Cheriton’s?”

“His cousin, a distant cousin, but warmly attached to him and—his.
The motive of my inquiry need be no secret. A dastardly murder was
committed last summer in Lord Cheriton’s house——”

“Yes, I remember the circumstances.”

“A seemingly motiveless murder; unless it was the act of some secret
foe—foe either of the man who was killed—or of his wife’s father,
Lord Cheriton. I have reason to know that the young man who was
killed had never made an enemy. His life was short and blameless.
Now, a malignant cur, such as the man you describe—a man possessed by
the devil of drink—would be just the kind of creature to assail the
strong man through his defenceless daughter. To murder her husband
was to break her heart, and to crush her father’s hopes. This man may
have discovered long beforehand how my cousin had built upon that
marriage—how devoted he was to his daughter, and how ambitious for
her. Upon my soul, I believe that you have given me the clue. If we
are to look for a blind unreasoning hatred—malignity strong enough
and irrational enough to strike the innocent in order to get at the
guilty—I do not think we can look for it in a more likely person than
in the husband of Mrs. Danvers.”

“Perhaps not,” said Mr. Adkins, keenly interested, yet dubious. “But,
granted that he is the man, how are you to find him? It is about four
and twenty years since he stood where you are standing now, and I
have never set eyes on him from that day to this—close upon a quarter
of a century. I can’t tell you his calling, or his kindred, the place
where he lived, or even the name he bore, with any certainty. Danvers
may have been only an assumed name—or it may have been his name.
There’s no knowing—or rather there’s only one person likely to be
able to help you in the matter, and that is Lord Cheriton.”

“It would be difficult to question him upon such a subject.”

“Of course it would; and I don’t suppose that even he has taken the
trouble to keep himself posted in the movements of that very ugly
customer. Having shunted the lady he wouldn’t be likely to concern
himself about the gentleman.”

“A quarter of a century,” said Theodore, too thoughtful to give a
direct answer. “Yes, it must be very difficult to trace any man after
such an interval; but if that man went to Cheriton Chase he must have
left some kind of trail behind him, and it will go hard with me if
I don’t get upon that trail. I thank you, Mr. Adkins, for the most
valuable information I have obtained yet, and if any good comes of it
you shall know. Good night.”

“Good night, sir. I shall be very glad to aid in the cause of
justice. Yes, I remember the Cheriton Chase murder, and I should like
to see the mystery cleared up.”




CHAPTER XXIII.

                        “Upon a tone,
    A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
    And his cheek change tempestuously ...
    But she in these fond feelings had no share;
    Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
    Even as a brother—but no more.”


After that conversation with the house-agent, the idea that he had
found the clue to the Cheriton Chase mystery took root in Theodore
Dalbrook’s mind. Taking as his starting-point the notion of a deadly
hatred wreaking itself in an indirect revenge, there seemed no more
likely figure for the _rôle_ of avenger than that of the wronged and
deserted husband. The one startling improbability in this view of the
case was the long interval between the husband’s appearance at Myrtle
Cottage and the date of the murder; but even this difficulty Theodore
was able to account for upon the hypothesis of a gradual perversion,
a descent from vice to crime, as the man’s nature hardened under the
corrupting influence of a profligate life, while the old festering
sore grew into a malignant canker, under the lash of misery. He
had seen in that great seething cauldron of London life men whose
countenances bore the stamp of a degradation so profound that the
most ferocious crime might seem the normal outcome of their perverted
natures. He could imagine how the broken-down gentleman, steeped
in drink, and embittered by the idea of wrongs which had been the
natural consequence of his own misconduct, had sunk step by step upon
the ladder of vice, till he had arrived at that lowest deep where the
dreams of men are stained with blood and darkened by the shadow of
the hangman. He could imagine such a man brooding over his wrongs for
long years, nursing his jealous wrath as the one touch of manliness
that survived in him—until some newspaper description of the Dalbrook
and Carmichael wedding reminded him of the bitter contrast between
his own lot and that of his rival, and, lashed into sudden fury, he
set out upon his murderous errand, hardly caring whom he murdered so
long as he could hurt the man he hated.

The very fact that Mrs. Danvers’ husband had been described as a
craven, made the idea of his guilt more likely. Only a coward would
have chosen such a revenge; only a coward could have stretched out
his hand from the darkness to kill a man who had never injured
him. The crime was the crime of a coward or a madman; and this man,
brutalized by drink, may have been both madman and coward.

Here at least was a man closely associated with James Dalbrook’s
life, and having good cause to hate him. In the darkness surrounding
the murder of Godfrey Carmichael this was the first flash of light.

And having arrived at this point Theodore Dalbrook saw himself face
to face with a new and seemingly insurmountable difficulty. To follow
this clue to the end, to bring the crime home to the husband of Lord
Cheriton’s cast-off mistress, was to expose the history of the great
man’s earlier years to the world at large, to offer up a reputation
which had hitherto been stainless as a rich and savoury repast to
that carrion brood—consisting of almost everybody—which loves to
feast upon garbage. How the evening newspapers would revel in the
details of such a story—what denunciations—what gloating over the
weakness of a strong man’s life! How the contents bills would bristle
with appetizing headings, how the shrill-voiced newsboys would
yell their startling particulars, their latest developments of the
Cheriton Chase Scandal!

This must all inevitably follow upon the discovery of the murderer,
if the murderer were indeed the injured husband. There could be no
possible escape from that glare of publicity, that swelling symphony
of slander. From the moment the law laid its hand upon the criminal
the case would pass beyond individual control, and individual
interests and reputations would become as nought. Justice would have
to do its work, and in the doing of it must needs afford the usual
fine opportunity to the newspapers. Theodore thought with horror of
such humiliation coming upon Lord Cheriton, and through him upon
Juanita, who loved her father with a reverential affection, and who
was intensely proud of his character and position. He thought of
gentle Lady Cheriton, who adored her husband, and who doubtless would
be made miserable by the knowledge that his first love had been given
to another woman, whom he had loved well enough to sacrifice honour
for the sake of that illicit love. What agony to that single-minded,
trusting creature to find that dark spot upon her husband’s past, and
to know that the daughter’s happiness had been blighted because of
the father’s sin!

With these considerations in his mind it seemed to Theodore that it
would be better to halt on the very threshold of discovery; and yet
there was the appalling thought of further possibilities in the way
of crime—of a madman’s revenge carried a stage further, a madman’s
pistol aimed at the defenceless mother or the unconscious child. What
was he to do? Was there no alternative between inaction and such
action as must speedily set in motion the machinery of the law, and
thus deprive him of all free will in the future conduct of the case?

Yes, there was an alternative course. If he were once assured of
the identity of the assassin, it might be in his power to lay hands
upon him, and to place him under such circumstances of control in
the future as would insure Juanita’s safety, and render any further
crime impossible. If the man were mad, as Theodore thought more
than likely, he might be quietly got into an asylum. If he were
still master of his actions he might be got abroad, to the remotest
colony in the Antipodes. The knowledge of his crime would be a hold
over him, a lever which would remove him to the uttermost ends
of the earth, if need were. This would be an illegal compromise,
no doubt—unjustifiable in the eye of the law,—but if it insured
Juanita’s safety, and saved her father’s character, the compromise
was worth making. It was, indeed, the only way by which her security
and her father’s good name could be provided for.

To arrive at this result he had to find the man who appeared in
Mr. Adkins’s office about four and twenty years ago, and of whose
subsequent existence he, Theodore, had no knowledge.

“I must begin at the other end,” he told himself. “If that man was
the murderer, he must have been seen in the neighbourhood. It is not
possible that he could have come to the place, and watched for his
opportunity, and got clear off after the deed was done without being
seen by human eyes.”

And yet there remained the fact that the local policeman and a
London detective had both failed in obtaining the faintest trace of
a suspicious-looking stranger, or indeed of any stranger, male or
female, who had been observed in the neighbourhood of Cheriton before
or after the murder; there remained the fact that a large reward had
been offered without resulting in one scrap of information bearing
upon the subject. How could he hope, in the face of these facts, to
trace the movements of a man whose personal appearance was unknown to
him, and who had come and gone like a shadow?

“I can but try, and I can but fail,” he told himself. “Knowing what I
know now, I cannot remain inactive.”

It may be that he had caught something of the fiery eagerness which
consumed Juanita, that in his ardent desire to be worthy of her
regard, to waste his life in her service, he had become, as it were,
inoculated with the spirit of his mistress, and hoped as she hoped,
and thought as she thought.

With the beginning of the Long Vacation he went to Dorchester, but
this time not alone. He took his friend Cuthbert Ramsay with him, as
a visitor to the grave old house, in the grave old town.

His sisters often made a complaint against him that he never
introduced any of his college friends to them—that whereas the
sisters of other University men were rich in the acquaintance of
Charlies and Algernons, and Freds and Toms, who were produceable at
tennis parties and available for picnics at the shortest notice, they
were restricted to the youths of Dorchester and a horizon bounded by
the country houses of the immediate neighbourhood. Remembering these
reproaches, and seeing that his friend Ramsay was obviously pining
for rest and country air, Theodore suggested that he should occupy
the bachelor’s room in Cornhill as long as he could venture to stop
away from hospitals and lectures and scientific investigations.

“You want a long fallow, Cuthbert,” he said, “and you couldn’t have a
better lotus island than Dorchester. There’s not an excitement or a
feverish sensation to be had within twenty miles, and then I really
want to make you known to my cousin, Lord Cheriton. He is a very
clever man—an all-round man—and he would be interested in you and all
that you are doing.”

“I shall be proud of knowing him. And then there is your cousin, Lady
Carmichael. I am deeply interested in her, without having ever seen
her face, and when I do see her——”

“You will say she is one of the loveliest women you ever saw in your
life, Cuthbert. I have no doubt of that. You will see her beauty
under a cloud, for she is not one of those women who begin to get
over the loss of a husband as soon as their crape gets rusty; but
her beauty is all the more touching on account of the grief that
separates her from all other women—even from her past self. I
sometimes look at her and wonder if this sad and silent woman can
be the Juanita I once knew; the light-hearted, spontaneous girl, a
buoyant creature, all impulse and caprice, fancy and imagination.”

“You may be sure that I shall admire her, and you may be sure I shall
not forget that there is some one whose admiration has a deeper root
than the lust of the eye and the fancy of the moment.”

Theodore would not affect to misunderstand him. It was not possible
that he could have talked of his cousin in the freedom of friendship
without having revealed his secret to his friend.

“My dear fellow,” he said with a sigh, “mine is a hopeless case. You
will know that it is so when you see Juanita and me together. Her
mother said to me on the first day of this year, ‘If ever she comes
to care for anybody it will be some new person;’ and I have not
the least doubt that her mother was right. Her first love was her
playfellow, the companion of her girlhood. A woman cannot have two
such loves. Her second attachment, if she ever make one, will be of a
totally different character.”

“Who knows, Theodore? A woman’s heart is to be measured by no
callipers that I know of; it is subject to no scientific test; we
cannot say it shall give this or that result. It may remain cold as
marble to a man through years of faithful devotion, and then, in an
instant, the marble may change to a volcano, and hidden fires may
leap out of that seeming coldness. ‘Nil desperandum’ should be the
motto of all inventors—and of all lovers.”

Dorchester, and especially the old house in Cornhill, received
Mr. Ramsay with open arms. Harrington was in the dejected state
of a young man who has been rudely awakened from youth’s sweetest
delusion. Fooled and forsaken by Juliet Baldwin, he had told himself
that all women are liars, and was doing all in his power to establish
his reputation as a woman-hater. In this temper of mind he was not
averse from his own sex, and he welcomed his brother’s friend with
unaffected cordiality, and was evidently cheered by the new life
which Ramsay’s vivacity brought into the quiet atmosphere of home.

The sisters were delighted to do honour to a scientific man, and
were surprised, on attacking Mr. Ramsay at dinner with the ease and
aplomb of _confrères_ in modern science, to discover one of two
things—either that he knew nothing, or that they knew very little.
They were at first inclined to the former opinion, but it gradually
dawned upon them that their own much-valued learning was of a very
elementary character, and that their facts were for the most part
wrong. Chastened by this discovery, they allowed the conversation
to drift into lighter channels, and never again tackled Mr. Ramsay
either upon the broad and open subject of evolution, or the burning
question of the cholera bacillus. They were even content to leave
him to the enjoyment of his own views upon spontaneous generation
and the movement of glaciers, instead of setting him right upon both
subjects, as they had intended in the beginning of their acquaintance.

“He is remarkably handsome, but horribly dogmatic,” Sophia told her
brother, “and I’m afraid he belongs to the showy, shallow school
which has arisen since the death of Darwin. He would hardly have
dared to talk as he did at dinner during Darwin’s lifetime.”

“Perhaps not, if Darwin had been omnipresent.”

“Oh, there is a restraining influence in the very existence of such a
man. He is a perpetual court of appeal against arrogant smatterers.”

“I don’t think you can call a man who took a first class in science a
smatterer, Sophy. However, I’m sorry you don’t like my friend.”

“I like him well enough, but I am not imposed upon by his dogmatism.”

The two young men drove to Milbrook Priory on the following day,
Theodore feeling painfully eager to discover what change the last
few months had made in Juanita. She had been in Switzerland, with
Lady Jane and the baby, living first at Grindelwald, and later in
one of those little villages on the shores of the lake of the forest
cantons, which combine the picturesque and the dull in a remarkable
degree—a mere cluster of chalets and cottages at the foot of the
Rigi, facing the monotonous beauty of the lake, and the calm grandeur
of snow-capped mountains, which shut in that tranquil corner of the
earth and shut out all the busy world beyond it. Nowhere else had
Juanita felt that deep sense of seclusion, that feeling of being
remote from the din and press of life.

And now she was again at the Priory. She had settled down there in
her new position, as widow and mother, a woman for whom all life’s
passionate story was over, who must live henceforward for that new
life growing day by day towards that distant age of passion and of
sorrow through which she had passed suddenly and briefly, crowding
into a month the emotions of a lifetime. There are women who have
lived to celebrate their golden wedding who in fifty years of wedlock
have not felt half her sum of love, and who in losing the companion
of half a century have not felt half her sum of grief. It is the
capacity for loving and suffering which differs in different people,
and, weighed against that, Time counts but little.

She received her cousin with all her old friendliness. She was a
little more cheerful than when last they met, and he saw that the new
interest of her life had done good. Lady Jane was at Swanage, and
Juanita was alone at the Priory, though not without the expectation
of company a little later in the year, as the sisters and their
husbands were to be with her before the first of October, so that the
expense of pheasant-breeding might not be altogether wasted.

“You must be here as much as you can in October, Theodore,” she said,
“and help me to endure Mr. Grenville and Mr. Morningside. One talks
nothing but sport, and the other insists upon teaching me the science
of politics.”

She received Cuthbert Ramsay with a serious sweetness which charmed
him. Yes, she was verily beautiful among women, exceptionally
beautiful. Those southern eyes shone star-like in the settled pallor
of her face, and her whole countenance was etherealized by thought
and grief. It touched the stranger to see how she struggled to
put away the memory of her sorrow and to receive him with all due
hospitality—how she restrained herself as she showed him the things
that had been a part of her dead husband’s existence, and told him
the story of the old house which had sheltered so many generations of
Carmichaels.

Lady Cheriton had been lunching at the Priory, where she came at
least twice a week to watch her grandson’s development in all those
graces of mind and person which marked his superiority to the average
baby. She came all the oftener because of the difficulty in getting
Juanita to Cheriton.

“My poor child will hardly ever visit us,” she told Theodore, as
they sauntered on the lawn while Juanita was showing Mr. Ramsay the
pictures in the dining-room. “She has an insurmountable horror of
the house she was once so fond of; and I can’t wonder at it, and
I can’t be angry with her. I have seen how painfully her old home
affects her, so I don’t worry her to come to us often. I make a
point of getting her there once in a way in the hope of overcoming
her horror of the place as time goes by; and I have even gone out
of my way to make changes in the furniture and decorations, so that
the rooms should not look exactly the same as they looked in her
fatal honeymoon; but I can see in her face that every corner of the
house is haunted for her. Once when she had been calm and cheerful
with me for a whole afternoon, walking about the garden and going
from room to room, she flung herself into my arms suddenly, sobbing
passionately. ‘We were so happy, mother,’ she said, ‘so happy in this
fatal house!’ We must bear with her, poor girl. God has given her a
dark lot.”

Theodore had seen an anxious, questioning look in Juanita’s eyes
from the beginning of his visit, and he took the first opportunity
of being alone with her, while Lady Cheriton entertained Mr. Ramsay
with an exposition of the merits of her grandson, who was calmly
slumbering in a hammock on the lawn, unconscious of her praises, and
half smothered in embroidered coverlets.

“Have you found out anything?” she asked, eagerly, as soon as they
were out of earshot.

“Yes, I believe I have really come upon a clue, and that I may
ultimately discover the murderer; but I can give you no details as
yet—the whole thing is too vague.”

“How clever of you to succeed where the police have utterly failed!
Oh, Theodore, you cannot imagine how I shall value you—how deeply
grateful——”

“Stop, Juanita, for Heaven’s sake don’t praise me. I may be chasing
a Will-o’-the-Wisp. I don’t suppose that any experienced detective
would take up such a clue as I am going to follow—only you have set
me to do this thing, and it has become the business of my life to
obey you.”

“You are all that is good. Pray tell me everything you have
discovered—however vague your ideas may be.”

“No, Juanita, I can tell you nothing yet. You must trust me, dear.
I am at best only on the threshold of a discovery. It may be long
before I advance another step. Be content to know that I am not
idle.”

She gave an impatient sigh.

“It is so hard to be kept in the dark,” she said. “I dream night
after night that I myself am on the track of his murderer—sometimes
that I meet him face to face—oh, the hideous pallid face—the face of
a man who has been hanged and brought to life again. It is always the
same kind of face—the same dull livid hue—though it differs as to
features, though the man is never the same. You cannot imagine the
agony of those dreams, Theodore. Lay that ghost for me, if you can.
Make my life peaceful, though it can never be happy.”

“Never is a long word, Nita. As the years go by, your child’s love
will give life a new colour.”

“Yes, he is very dear. He has crept into my heart, little nestling
unconscious thing—knowing nothing of my love or my sorrow, and yet
seeming to comfort me. I sometimes think my darling’s spirit looks
out of those clear eyes. They seem so full of thought—of thought far
beyond human wisdom.”

Theodore could see that the work of healing was being done, slowly
but surely. The gracious influence of a new love was being exercised,
and the frozen heart was reviving to life and warmth under the soft
touch of those baby fingers. He saw his cousin smile with something
of the old brightness as she stood by while Cuthbert Ramsay dandled
the little lord of Carmichael Priory in his great strong arms,
smiling down at the tiny pink face peeping out of a cloud of lace and
muslin.

“Any one can see that Mr. Ramsay is fond of children,” said Lady
Cheriton, approvingly, as if a liking for infants just short-coated
were the noblest virtue of manhood.

“Oh, I am fond enough of the little beggars,” answered Cuthbert,
lightly. “All the gutter brats about St. Thomas’s know me, and
hang on to my coat-tails as I go by. I like to look at a child’s
face—those old shrewd London faces especially—and speculate upon the
life that lies before those younglings, the things those eyes are to
see, the words those lips are to speak. Life is such a tremendous
mystery, don’t you know—one can never be tired of wondering about it.
But this fellow is going to be very happy, and a great man in the
land. He is going to belong to the new order, the order of rich who
go through life shoulder to shoulder with the poor; the redressers of
wrongs, the adjusters of social levels.”

“I hope you are not a Socialist, Mr. Ramsay?” said Lady Cheriton,
with an alarmed air.

“Not much; but I acknowledge that there are points where my ideas
touch the boundary line of Socialism. I don’t want impossibilities. I
have no dream of a day when there shall be no more millionaires, no
great patrons of art or great employers of labour, but only a dead
level of small means and shabby dwellings, and sordid colourless
lives. No, there must be butterflies as well as ants—if it were only
that the ants may have something pretty to look at. What I should
like to see is a stronger bond of friendship and sympathy between the
two classes—a real knowledge and understanding of each other between
rich and poor, and the twin demons Patronage and Sycophancy exorcised
for ever and ever.”

The tea-tables were brought out upon the lawn by this time; Sir
Godfrey Carmichael was carried off by his nurse; and the two young
men sat down with Lady Cheriton and her daughter under the tree
beneath which Juanita and her husband had sat on that one blissful
day which they had spent together at the Priory as man and wife.
They seemed a very cheery and pleasant quartette as they sat in the
sultry afternoon atmosphere, with the level lawn and flower-beds
stretching before them, and the wide belt of old timber shutting out
all the world beyond. Cuthbert Ramsay was the chief talker, full of
animal spirits, launching the wildest paradoxes, the most unorthodox
opinions. The very sound of his strong full voice, the very ring of
his buoyant laugh, were enough to banish gloomy thoughts and sad
memories.

Lady Cheriton was delighted with this new acquaintance; first,
because he was dexterous in handling a baby; next on the score of
general merits. She was not a deeply read person, but she had a
profound respect for culture in other people; and she had an idea
that a scientific man was a creature apart, belonging to a loftier
world than that which she and her intellectual equals inhabited.
Theodore had told her of his friend’s claims to distinction, his hard
work in several cities, and seeing this earnest worker boyish and
light-hearted, interested in the most frivolous subjects, she was
lost in wonder at his condescension.

She begged him to go to Cheriton with Theodore at the earliest
opportunity—an invitation which he accepted gladly.

“I have long wished to know Lord Cheriton,” he said.

The two young men left soon after tea. Cuthbert’s high spirits
deserted him at the Priory gates, and both men were thoughtful during
the homeward drive.

“Well, Cuthbert, what do you think of my cousin, now that you have
seen her?” Theodore asked, when he had driven the first mile.

“I can only agree with you, my dear fellow. She is a very lovely
woman. I think there could hardly be two opinions upon that point.”

“And do you think—as I do—that it is hopeless for any man to spend
his life in worshipping her? Do you think her heart is buried with
her dead husband?”

“Only as Proserpine was buried with Pluto. It is not in human
nature for so young a woman to wear her weeds for a lifetime. The
hour of revival must come sooner or later. She has too bright and
quick an intellect to submit to the monotony of an inconsolable
sorrow. Her energy expends itself now in the desire to avenge her
husband’s death. Failing in that, her restless spirit will seek some
new outlet. She is beginning to be interested in her child. As that
interest grows with the child’s growth, her horizon will widen.
And then, and then, when she has discovered that life can still be
beautiful, her heart will become accessible to a new love. The cure
and the change, the awakening from death to life, may be slower
than it is in most such cases, because this woman is the essence of
sincerity, and all her feelings lie deep. But the awakening will
come—you may be sure of that. Wait for it, Theodore; possess your
soul in patience.”

“You can afford to be philosophical,” said the other, with a sigh.
“You are not in love!”

“True, my friend. No doubt that makes a difference.”




CHAPTER XXIV.

    “And one, an English home—gray twilight poured
       On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
     Softer than sleep—all things in order stored,
       A haunt of ancient Peace.”


Theodore and his friend betook themselves to Cheriton Chase on the
following Friday, for that kind of visit which north country people
describe as “a week end.” They carried their portmanteau in that
portion of the dog-cart which is more legitimately occupied by a
leash of spaniels or Irish setters, and they arrived in the golden
light of the afternoon, just when that sunk lane approaching the west
gate was looking its loveliest. Hart’s-tongue and rocky boulder, the
great brown trunks of the oaks and the polypodium growing amidst
their cloven branches were all touched with sun-gleams, while evening
shadows lay soft and cool upon the tall flowering grasses in the
meadows on either side of the deep gully.

“That is Mrs. Porter’s cottage,” said Theodore, indicating the
gatekeeper’s house with a turn of his whip towards the end of the
lane where the clustered chimneys showed through a gap in the trees.

Ramsay had been introduced to Miss Newton, and had constituted
himself honorary surgeon and medical adviser to that lady and all
her humble friends. He had been invited to the tea-parties in
Wedgewood Street, and had interested himself in the young woman
called Marian, and in her probable identity with the lodge-keeper’s
missing daughter, for which reason he had a keen desire to make the
lodge-keeper’s acquaintance.

“From your account of the lady she must be a piece of human adamant,”
he said. “I like to tackle that kind of individual. I’ve met a few
of them, and I’m happy to say that if I haven’t been able to melt
them I’ve generally succeeded in making them smart. I should enjoy
exhibiting my moral aquafortis in the case of this lady. I shall
get you to accompany me in a morning call upon her while we are at
Cheriton.”

“My dear Cuthbert, I would sooner call, uninvited and without
credentials, upon the Archbishop of Canterbury. I don’t forget how
she froze me when I tried to be friendly with her last New Year’s
Day. She was more biting than the north-east wind that was curdling
the ponds in the Park.”

“A fig for her bitingness. Do you suppose I mind? If you won’t take
me to her, I shall go by myself. A character of that kind has an
irresistible fascination for me. I would go a hundred miles any day
to see a bitter, bad woman.”

“She is bitter enough, but she may not be bad. She may be only a
creature who mistakes fanaticism for religion, who has so misread her
Bible that she thinks it her bounden duty to shut her heart against a
beloved child rather than to forgive a sinner. I believe she is to be
pitied rather than blamed, odious as she may seem.”

“Very likely. A hard heart, or an obstinate temper, is a disease like
other diseases. One ought to be sorry for the sufferer. But this
woman has a strong character, anyhow, for good or evil, and I delight
in studying character. The average man and woman is so colourless
that there is infinite relief in the study of any temperament which
touches the extreme. Think how delightful it would be to meet
such a man as Iago or Othello—picture to yourself the pleasure of
watching the gradual unfolding of such a mind as Iachimo’s, and
consider how keen would be one’s interest in getting to the bottom
of a woman like that poisoning stepmother of Imogen’s whose name
Shakespeare does not take the trouble to record. So this is the
lodge—charming Early English cottage—real rustic English, not Bedford
Parkish—half-timbered, thatched gables, dormers like eyes under bushy
eyebrows, walls four feet thick, lattices two hundred years old. It
might be the very cottage in which Grandmamma Wolf waited for the
dear, plump little girl, with chubby cheeks shining like the butter
in her basket, and with lips as sweet as her honey. Poor little
girl!”

The servant-maid ran down the steps to open the gate, and as the
wheels stopped an upper casement swung suddenly open, and a woman’s
face appeared in the golden light—a pale, wan face, whose most
noticeable expression was a look of infinite weariness—

“Anæmic,” said Cuthbert, as they drove in at the gate. “Decidedly
anæmic. I should suspect that woman——”

“Of what?”

“Of being a vegetarian,” answered Cuthbert, gravely. “But I’ll call
to-morrow, and find out all about her.”

Lord Cheriton received his kinsman’s friend with marked cordiality,
and seemed to enjoy his freshness and spontaneity. They talked of
Cambridge—the Cambridge of forty years ago and the Cambridge of
to-day,—and they talked of the continental schools of medicine, a
subject in which the lawyer was warmly interested. There were no
other visitors expected before September, when three old friends of
Lord Cheriton’s were to shoot the partridges. In October there was
to be a large party for the pheasant shooting, which was the chief
glory of Cheriton Chase. There had been no shooters at the Chase last
year, and Lord Cheriton felt himself so much the more constrained to
hospitality.

“You fellows must come in October, when we have our big shoot,” he
said; but Cuthbert Ramsay told him that he must be at work again in
London before the end of September.

Cuthbert was much impressed by the master of Cheriton Chase, and
the grave and quiet dignity with which he wore success that might
have made a weaker man arrogant and self-assertive. It would seem
as if scarcely anything were wanting to that prosperous career. Yet
Cuthbert saw that his host was not free from a cloud of care. It was
natural, perhaps, that he should feel the tragedy of his son-in-law’s
death as a lasting trouble, not to be shuffled off and forgotten when
the conventional period of mourning was past.

Theodore had some private talk with his cousin on the first evening
of his visit, walking up and down the terrace, while Cuthbert was
looking at the books in the library, under Lady Cheriton’s guidance.
He had it fully in his mind that the time must come when he would be
obliged to take Lord Cheriton into his confidence, but he felt that
time was still far off. Whenever the revelation came it must needs be
infinitely painful to both, and deeply humiliating to the man whose
hidden sin had brought desolation upon his innocent daughter, and
untimely death upon the man whose fate had been linked with hers. It
was for his dishonour, for the wrongs inflicted by him, that those
two had made expiation.

No, the time to be outspoken—the time to say in the words of the
prophet, “Thou art the man,” had not yet come. When it should come
he would be prepared to act resolutely and fearlessly; but in the
mean time he must needs go on working in the dark.

He remembered his last conversation with Lord Cheriton on that
subject—remembered how Cheriton had said that he believed Godfrey
Carmichael incapable of a dishonourable action—incapable of
having behaved cruelly to any woman. Had he who pronounced that
judgment been guilty of dishonour—had he been cruel to the woman
who sacrificed herself for him? There are so many degrees in such
wrong-doing! There is the sin of impulse: there is the deliberate
betrayal, the coldly planned iniquity, the sin of the practised
seducer who has reduced seduction to a science, and who has no more
heart or conscience than a machine. There is the sin of the generous
man, who finds his feet caught in the web of circumstance, who
begins, innocently enough, by pitying a neglected wife, and ends by
betraying the neglectful husband. Theodore gave his kinsman credit
for belonging to the category of generous sinners. Indeed, the fact
that he had lived aloof from the world for many years, sharing the
isolation of the woman who loved him, was in itself evidence that he
had not acted as a villain; yet it was possible that when the final
hour came, the hour for breaking those illicit bonds, the rupture
may have been in somewise cruel; and the remembrance of that cruelty
might be a burden upon the sinner’s conscience at this day. Such
partings can never be without cruelty. The fact that one sinner is
to marry and begin a new life, while the other sinner is to finish
her days in a dishonoured widowhood, is in itself a cruelty. She may
submit, as to a fate which she foresaw dimly, even in the hour of her
fall—but she would be more than human if she did not think herself
hardly used by the man who forsakes her. Nothing he can do to secure
her worldly comfort or to screen her from the world’s disdain will
take the sting out of that parting. The one fact remains that her day
is done. He has ceased to care for her, and he has begun to care for
another.

“Nothing has occurred since I was here to throw any new light upon
the murder, I suppose?” Theodore said quietly, as they smoked their
cigars, walking slowly up and down in the summer night.

“Nothing.”

“Did her ladyship tell you that I have met a girl in London, whom I
believe to be no other than Mercy Porter?”

“Yes, she told me something about that fancy of yours, for I take it
to be nothing more than a fancy. The world is too wide for you and
Mercy Porter to meet so easily. What was your ground for identifying
her with the lodge-keeper’s girl?”

“The lodge-keeper’s girl!” There was something needlessly
contemptuous in the phrase, it seemed to Theodore: a studied disdain.

“It was she herself who suggested the idea, by her inquiries about
Cheriton. She confessed to having come from this part of the world,
and she has an air of refinement which shows that she does not
belong to the peasant class. She is a very good pianiste—plays with
remarkable taste and feeling; and Lady Cheriton tells me that Mercy
had a talent for music. I have no doubt in my own mind that this
young woman is Mercy Porter, and I think her mother ought to go to
London and see her, even if she should not think fit to bring her
back to the home she left.”

“Mrs. Porter is a woman of peculiar temper. The girl may be happier
away from her.”

“Yes, that is very likely—but the mother ought to forgive her.
The penitent sinner, whose life for the last few years has been
blameless, ought to feel that she is pardoned and at peace with her
mother. I tried to approach the subject, but Mrs. Porter repelled
me with an almost vindictive air; and I do not think it would be
any good for me to plead for my poor friend again. If you or Lady
Cheriton would talk to her——”

“I will get my wife to manage her. It is a matter in which a woman
would have more influence than you or I. In the mean time, if there
is anything I can do to make Mercy Porter’s life easier, I shall be
very glad to do it, for her father’s sake.”

“You are very good; but she is not in want, and she seems content
with her lot.”

“What is she doing for a living?”

“Her employment is fine needlework. She lives in one small back room
in Lambeth, and has only one friend in the world, and that friend
happens to be a lady who once lived in this house.”

“A lady who lived in this house!” exclaimed Lord Cheriton. “Who, in
Heaven’s name, do you mean?”

“Miss Newton, who was governess to Miss Strangway nearly forty years
ago.”

“What brought Miss Newton and you together?”

“That is rather a long story. I took some trouble to find the lady in
order to settle one question which had disturbed my cousin Juanita
since her husband’s death.”

“What question?”

“She was haunted by an idea that Sir Godfrey’s murderer was one of
the Strangways, and his murder an act of vengeance by some member
of that banished race. It was in order to set this question at rest
for ever that I took some trouble to hunt out the history of Squire
Strangway’s two sons and only daughter. I traced them all three to
their graves, and have been able to convince Juanita that they and
their troubles were at rest long before the time of her husband’s
murder.”

“What could have put such a notion into her head?”

“Oh, it came naturally enough. It was only a development of Churton’s
idea of a vendetta.”

“She was always full of fancies. Yes, I remember she used to say the
house was haunted by the ghosts of the Strangways. I really think she
had a dim idea that I had injured that spendthrift race in buying
the estate which they had wasted. And so to satisfy Juanita you took
the trouble to ferret out Miss Newton? Upon my word, Theodore, your
conduct is more Quixotic than I could have believed of any young man
in the nineteenth century. And pray by what means did you discover
the _ci-devant_ governess?”

Theodore told the story of his visit to the scholastic agencies, his
journey to Westmorland, and his friendly reception by Miss Newton in
her Lambeth lodgings.

“She was much attached to Miss Strangway, who was her first charge,
and near enough to her own age to be more of a companion than a
pupil,” he said, “and she spoke of her melancholy fate with great
tenderness.”

“It was a melancholy fate, was it? I know she made a
runaway-marriage; but in what way was her fate sadder than the common
destiny of a spendthrift’s daughter—a girl who has been reared in
extravagance and self-indulgence, and who finds herself face to face
with penury in the bloom of her womanhood?”

“That in itself would be sad, but Miss Strangway’s destiny was sadder
than that—commonplace enough, no doubt—only the old story of an
unhappy marriage and a runaway wife.”

He could not help looking at Lord Cheriton at this point, thinking
how this common story of an unfaithful wife must needs remind his
kinsman of that other story of another wife which had influenced his
early manhood. He must surely have a sensitive shrinking from the
discussion of any similar story.

“She ran away from her husband! Yes, I remember having heard as much.
What did Miss Newton know about her—beyond that one fact?”

“Very little—only that she died at Boulogne nearly twenty years ago.
This fact Miss Newton heard from the lips of the man for whom Mrs.
Darcy left her husband. I had been at Boulogne a week or so before
I saw Miss Newton, and I had hunted there for any record of Mrs.
Darcy’s death, without result. But this is not very strange, as it
is quite likely that she lived at Boulogne under an assumed name,
and was buried in that name, and so lies there, in a foreign land,
dissevered for ever from any association with her name and kindred.”

“There are not many of her kindred left, I take it,” said Lord
Cheriton. “There seems to have been a blight upon that race for the
last half-century. But, now, tell me about some one in whom I am more
interested—the girl you believe to be Mercy Porter. I should be
very glad to make her life happier, and so I told her ladyship. You,
Theodore, might be the intermediary. I would allow her a hundred a
year, which would enable her to live in some pretty country place—in
Devonshire or Cornwall, for instance, in some quiet sea-coast village
where no one would know anything about her or her story.”

“A hundred a year! My dear Cheriton, that is a most generous offer.”

“No, no, there is no question of generosity. Her father was my
friend, and I was under some obligation to him. And then the girl
was my wife’s _protégée_; and, finally, I can very well afford it. I
am almost a childless man, Theodore. My grandson will be rich enough
when I am gone, rich enough to be sure of a peerage, I hope, so that
there may be a Baron Cheriton when I am in the dust.”

“You are very good. I believe this girl has a great deal of pride—the
pride of a woman who has drunk the cup of shame, and she may set
herself against being your pensioner; but if the matter can be
arranged as you wish she may yet see happier days. I think the first
thing to be done is to reconcile mother and daughter. Mrs. Porter
ought to go up to London——”

“To see Miss Newton’s _protégée_? On no account. I tell you Mrs.
Porter is a woman of strange temper—God knows how bitterly she might
upbraid her daughter. And if the girl is proud, as you say she is,
the mother’s reproaches would goad her to refuse any help from me or
my wife. No, Theodore, the longer we keep mother and daughter apart,
the better for Mercy’s chances of happiness.”

“But if this young woman should refuse to confess her identity with
Mercy Porter it will be impossible to benefit her.”

“That difficulty may be easily overcome. You can take my wife to see
her. She was always fond of my wife.”

“And you will leave the mother out of the question. That seems rather
hard upon her.”

“I tell you, Theodore, it is better to leave the mother out of the
question. She never acted a mother’s part to Mercy—there was never
any real motherly love—at least that was Lady Cheriton’s opinion
of the woman, and she had ample opportunity for judging, which, of
course, I had not. If you want to help the daughter, keep the mother
aloof from her.”

“I dare say you are right, and I shall of course obey you
implicitly,” said Theodore, inwardly reluctant.

He had an exalted idea of maternal love, its obligations and
privileges, and it seemed to him a hard thing to come between a
penitent daughter and a mother whose heart ought to be full of pity
and pardon. Yet he remembered his brief interview with Mrs. Porter,
and he could but own to himself that this might be an exceptional
case.




CHAPTER XXV.

    “And from that time to this I am alone,
        And I shall be alone until I die.”


Theodore and his friend strolled across the Park on Saturday
afternoon in the direction of the west gate, Cuthbert Ramsay intent
upon carrying out his intention of introducing himself to Mrs.
Porter, and Theodore submitting meekly to be led as it were into the
lion’s den.

“You have no idea what hard stuff this woman is made of,” he said;
and then he told Ramsay what Lord Cheriton had said to him about Mrs.
Porter on the previous evening, and how the daughter’s life was to be
made happy, if possible, without reference to the mother.

“The harder she is the more I am interested in making her
acquaintance,” replied Cuthbert. “I don’t care a jot about
commonplace women, were they as lovely as Aphrodite. I go to see
this soured widow as eagerly as Romeo scaled Juliet’s balcony. Did
his lordship ever tell you what it was that soured the creature, by
the way? That kind of hardness is generally in somewise the result
of circumstance, even where there is the adamantine quality in the
original character.”

“I never heard any details about the lady’s past life; only that her
husband was in the merchant navy, upon the India and China line—that
he died suddenly and left her penniless—that she was a lady by birth
and education, and had married somewhat beneath her. I have often
wondered how my cousin, as a barrister, came to be intimate with a
captain in the merchant service.”

They were at the gates of the Park by this time, and close to the
rustic steps which led up to Mrs. Porter’s garden. It was one of
those tropical days which often occur towards the end of August,
and the clusters of cactus dahlias in the old-fashioned border, and
the tall hollyhocks in the background, made patches of dazzling
colour in the bright white light, against which the cool grays of
the stone cottage offered repose to the eye. One side of the cottage
was starred with passion-flowers, and on the other the great waxen
chalices of the magnolia showed creamy white against the scarlet of
the trumpet ash. It was the season at which Mrs. Porter’s hermitage
put on its gayest aspect, the crowning feast of bloom and colour
before the chilling breath of autumn brought rusty reds and pallid
grays into the picture.

The two young men heard voices as they approached the steps, and on
looking upward, Theodore saw the curate and his wife standing on the
little grass-plot with Mrs. Porter. There could hardly be a better
opportunity for approaching her, as she was caught in the act of
receiving visitors, and could not deny herself.

Mr. and Mrs. Kempster were young people, and of that social
temperament which will make friends under the hardest conditions. Mr.
Kempster belonged to the advanced Anglican school, and ministered the
offices of the Church as it were with his life in his hand, always
prepared for the moment when he should come into collision with his
Bishop upon some question of posture or vestments. He had introduced
startling innovations into the village church, and hoped to be
able to paraphrase the boast of Augustus, and to say that he found
Cheriton Evangelical and left it Ritualistic. Needless to say, that
while he gratified one half of his congregation he offended the other
half, and that old-fashioned parishioners complained bitterly of his
“gewgaws fetched from Aaron’s old wardrobe or the flamen’s vestry.”
Mrs. Kempster had work enough to do in smoothing down the roughened
furs of these antediluvians, which smoothing process she effected
chiefly by a rigorous system of polite afternoon calls, in which
no inhabitant of the parish was forgotten, and an occasional small
expenditure in the shape of afternoon tea and halfpenny buns toasted
and buttered by her own fair hands. She was a bright, good-tempered
little woman, whom her husband generally spoke of as a “body.”

The Kempsters had just accepted Mrs. Porter’s invitation to tea, and
were making an admiring inspection of her garden before going into
the cottage.

“I don’t believe any one in Cheriton parish has such roses as you,
Mrs. Porter,” said the curate’s wife, gazing admiringly at the
standard Gloire de Dijon, which had grown into gigantic dimensions in
the middle of the grass-plot. “I never saw such a tree; but then, you
see, you give your mind to your garden as none of us can.”

“I have very little else to think about, certainly,” said Mrs. Porter.

“Except Algernon’s sermons. I know you appreciate them,” cried
Mrs. Kempster, in her chirruping little voice. “Algernon says no
one listens as attentively as you do. ‘She quite carries me away
sometimes with that rapt look of hers,’ he said the other day. I am
half inclined to feel jealous of you, Mrs. Porter. Oh, here is Mr.
Dalbrook. How d’ye do, Mr. Dalbrook?”

Mrs. Kempster shook hands with Theodore before he could approach
Mrs. Porter, but having got past this vivacious lady, he introduced
Cuthbert Ramsay to the mistress of the house.

“My friend is a stranger in the neighbourhood, Mrs. Porter,” he
said, “and he was so struck by the beauty of your cottage yesterday,
that he set his heart upon being introduced to you, and I was really
obliged to bring him.”

“My cottage is not generally considered a show place, Mr. Dalbrook,”
she answered coldly, turning her dull gray eyes full upon Theodore
with a look which made him uncomfortable, “but I shall be very happy
to show it to your friend—and his lordship’s friend, I conclude.”

“I don’t know if I dare claim that distinction, Mrs. Porter,”
answered Cuthbert, in his cheerful resonant voice. “This is my first
visit to the Chase; and if Lord Cheriton has received me with open
arms it is only because I am his kinsman’s friend.”

Theodore introduced the stranger to the Kempsters, who welcomed him
eagerly, as one who came fraught with the interests and excitements
of the outer world.

“May I ask if our man has got in for Southwark?” demanded Mr.
Kempster. “His lordship would be sure to get a telegram after the
polling.”

“I blush to say that I forgot all about the election, and didn’t ask
after the telegram,” replied Cuthbert. “When you say ‘our man,’ you
mean——”

“The Conservative candidate. I conclude you belong to us.”

“Again I blush to say I don’t belong to you the least little bit. I
am an advanced Liberal.”

Mr. Kempster sighed, with a sigh that was almost a groan.

“A destroyer and disestablisher of everything that has made the glory
of England since the days of the Heptarchy,” he said, plaintively.

“Well, yes, there have been a good many false gods toppled over, and
a good many groves of Baal cut down, since the Saxon Kings ruled over
the Seven Kingdoms. You don’t want Baal and the rest of them stuck up
again, do you, Mr. Kempster?”

“Mr. Ramsay, there are times and seasons when I would to God I could
wake up in the morning and find myself a subject of King Egbert.
Yes, when I see the rising tide of anarchy—the advancing legions of
unbelief—the Upas Tree of sensual science,” said Kempster, slipping
airily from metaphor to metaphor, “I would gladly lay hold upon all
that was most rigid and uncompromising among the bulwarks of the
past. I would belong to the Church of Wolsey and A’Becket. I would
lie prostrate before the altar at which St. Augustine was celebrant.
I would grovel at the feet of Dunstan.”

“Ah, Mr. Kempster, we can’t go back. That’s the plague of it, for
romantic minds like yours. I am afraid we have done with the
picturesque in religion and in everything else. We are children of
light—or the fierce white light of science and common sense. We may
regret the scenic darkness of mediævalism, but we cannot go back to
it. The clouds of ignorance and superstition have rolled away, and we
stand out in the open, in the searching light of truth. We know what
we are, and whom we serve.”

At Mrs. Porter’s invitation they all followed her into the cottage
parlour, where the tea-table stood ready, and much more elegantly
appointed than that modest board which the curate’s wife was wont to
spread for her friends. Here there appeared both old china and old
silver, and the tea which Mrs. Porter’s slender white hands dispensed
was of as delicate an aroma as that choice Indian pekoe which
Theodore occasionally enjoyed in Lady Cheriton’s boudoir.

Mrs. Porter placed herself with her back to the window, but
Cuthbert’s keen eyes were able to note every change in her
countenance as she listened to the conversation going on round her,
or on rare occasions took part in it. He observed that she was
curiously silent, and he was of opinion that Theodore’s presence was
in some manner painful to her. She addressed him now and then, but
with an effort which was evident to those studious eyes of Cuthbert
Ramsay’s, though it might escape any less keen observer.

The conversation was of politics and of the outer world for the first
ten minutes, and was obviously uninteresting to Mrs. Kempster, who
fidgeted with her teaspoon, made several attempts to speak, and had
to wait her opportunity, but finally succeeded in engaging Theodore’s
attention.

“Have you seen Lady Carmichael lately, Mr. Dalbrook?” she inquired.

“I saw her three days ago.”

“And how did you find her? In better spirits I hope? She hardly ever
comes to Cheriton now, and her old friends know very little about
her. I am told she has a horror of the place, though she was once so
fond of it. Poor thing, it is only natural! You found an improvement
in her, I hope?”

“Yes, I saw at least the beginning of improvement,” answered
Theodore. “Her child gives a new interest to her life.”

“What a blessing that is! And by-and-by she will meet some one else,
who will interest her even more than her baby, and she will marry
again. She is too young to go on grieving for ever. Don’t you think
so, Mrs. Porter?”

“Yes, I suppose she will forget sooner or later. Most women have a
faculty for forgetting.”

“Most women, but not all women,” said Cuthbert, with his earnest air,
which made the commonest words mean more from him than from other
men. “I do not think you would be the kind of woman to forget very
quickly, Mrs. Porter.”

She was in no hurry to notice this remark, but went on pouring out
tea quietly for a minute or two before she replied.

“There is not much room in my life for forgetfulness,” she said,
after that protracted pause. “So without being in any way an
exceptional person, I may lay claim to a good memory.”

“She remembers her daughter, and yet memory does not soften her
heart,” thought Theodore. “With her, memory means implacability.”

He looked round the room, in the flickering light of the sunshine
that crept in between the bars of the Venetian shutters. He had not
expected ever to be sitting at his ease in Mrs. Porter’s parlour
after that unpromising conversation upon the first day of the year.
He looked round the room, thoughtfully contemplative of every detail
in its arrangement which served to tell him what manner of woman Mrs.
Porter was. He was not a close student of character like Ramsay; he
had made for himself no scientific code of human expression in eye
and lip and head and hand; but it seemed to him always that the room
in which a man or a woman lived gave a useful indication of that
man’s or that woman’s mental qualities.

This room testified that its mistress was a lady. The furniture
was heterogeneous—shabby for the most part, from an upholsterer’s
point of view, old-fashioned without being antique; but there was
nevertheless a _cachet_ upon every object which told that it had
been chosen by a person of taste, from the tall Chippendale bureau
which filled one corner of the room, to the solid carved oak table
which held the tea-tray. The ornaments were few, but they were old
china, and china of some mark from the collector’s point of view;
the draperies were of Madras muslin, spotless, and fresh as a spring
morning. Theodore noticed, however, that there were no flowers in the
vases, and none of those scattered trifles which usually mark the
presence of refined womanhood. The room would have had a bare and
chilly aspect, lacking these things, if it had not been for a few
pictures, and for the bookshelves, which were filled with handsomely
bound books.

“You have a nice library, Mrs. Porter,” he said, somewhat aimlessly,
as he took a cup of tea from her hands. “I suppose you are a great
reader?”

“Yes, I read a great deal. I have my books and my garden. Those make
up my sum of life.”

“May I look at your books?”

“If you like,” she answered coldly.

He went about the small, low room—so low, with its heavily-timbered
ceiling, that Cuthbert Ramsay’s head almost touched the
crossbeams—and surveyed the collections of books in their different
blocks. Whoever had so arranged them had exercised both taste and
dexterity. Everything in the room fitted like a Chinese puzzle, and
everything seemed to have been adapted to those few pieces of old
furniture—the walnut-wood bureau, the oak table, and the old Italian
chairs. The books were theological or metaphysical for the most
part, but among them he found Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus,” “Past and
Present,” and “French Revolution;” Bulwer’s mystical stories, and a
few books upon magic, ancient and modern.

“I see you have a fancy for the black art, Mrs. Porter,” he said
lightly. “One would hardly expect to find such books as these in the
Isle of Purbeck.”

“I like to know what men and women have built their hopes upon in the
ages that are gone,” she answered. “Those dreams may seem foolishness
to us now, but they were very real to the dreamers, and there were
some who dreamed on till the final slumber—the one dreamless sleep.”

This was the longest speech she had made since the young men entered
her garden, and both were struck by this sudden gleam of animation.
Even the large grey eyes brightened for a few moments, but only
to fade again to that same dull, unflinching gaze which made them
more difficult to meet than any other eyes Theodore Dalbrook had
ever looked upon. That unflinching stare froze his blood; he felt a
restraint and an embarrassment which no other woman had ever caused
him.

It was different with Cuthbert Ramsay. He was as much at his ease in
Mrs. Porter’s parlour as if he had known that lady all her life. He
looked at her books without asking permission. He moved about with a
wonderful airiness of movement which never brought him into anybody’s
way. He fascinated Mrs. Kempster, and subjugated her husband, and
impressed everybody by that strong individuality which raises some
men a head and shoulders above the common herd. It would have been
the same had there been a hundred people in the room instead of five.

Mrs. Porter relapsed into silence, and the conversation was carried
on chiefly by Cuthbert Ramsay and the Curate, until Mrs. Kempster
declared that she must be going, lest the children should be unhappy
at her absence from their evening meal.

“I make a point of seeing them at their tea,” she said; “and then
they say their prayers to me before nurse puts them to bed—so
prettily, and Laura sings a hymn with such a sweet little voice. I
am sure she will be musical by-and-by, if it is only by the way she
stands beside the piano and listens while I sing. And such an ear as
that child has, as fine as a bird’s! You must come and hear her sing
‘Abide with me,’ some day, Mrs. Porter, when you drop in to take a
cup of tea.”

Mrs. Porter murmured something to the effect that she would be
pleased to enjoy that privilege.

“Ah, but you never come to tea with me, though I am always asking
you. I’m afraid you are not very fond of children.”

“I am not used to them, and I don’t think that children like people
who are out of the habit of associating with them,” answered Mrs.
Porter deliberately. “I never know what to say to a child. My life
has been too grave and too solitary for me to be fit company for
children.”

The Curate and his wife took leave and went briskly down the steps to
the lane, and Theodore made a little movement towards departure, but
Cuthbert Ramsay lingered, as if he were really loth to go.

“I am absolutely in love with your cottage, Mrs. Porter,” he said;
“it is an ideal abode, and I can fancy a lady of your studious habits
being perfectly happy in this tranquil spot.”

“The life suits me well enough,” she answered icily, “perhaps better
than any other.”

“You have a piano yonder, I see,” he said, glancing through the
half-open door to an inner room with a latticed window, beyond which
a sunlit garden on a bit of shelving ground sloped upwards to the
edge of the low hillside, the garden vanishing into an upland meadow,
where cows were seen grazing against the evening light. This second
sitting-room was more humbly furnished than the parlour in which they
had been taking tea, and its chief feature was a cottage piano, which
stood diagonally between the lattice and the small fireplace.

“You too are musical, I conclude,” pursued Cuthbert, “like little
Miss Kempster.”

“I am very fond of music.”

“Might we be favoured by hearing you play something?”

“I never play before people. I played tolerably once, perhaps—at
least my master was good enough to say so. But I play now only
snatches of music, by fits and starts, as the humour seizes me.”

She seated herself by the casement with a resigned air, as much as to
say, “Are these young men never going?” Her long, thin fingers busied
themselves in plucking the faded leaves from the pelargoniums which
made a bank of colour on the broad window ledge.

“You were at home at the time of the murder, I suppose, Mrs. Porter?”
said Cuthbert, after a pause, during which he had occupied himself
in looking at the water-colour sketches on the walls, insignificant
enough, but good of their kind, and arguing a cultivated taste in the
person who collected them.

“I am never away from home.”

“And you heard and saw nothing out of the common course—you have no
suspicion of any one?”

“Do you suppose if I had it would not have been made known to the
police immediately after the murder? Do you think I should hoard and
treasure up a suspicion, or a scrap of circumstantial evidence till
you came to ask me for it?” she said, with suppressed irritation.

“Pray forgive me. I had no idea of offending you by my question. It
is natural that any one coming to Cheriton Chase for the first time
should feel a morbid interest in that mysterious murder.”

“If you had heard it talked about as much as I have you would
be as weary of the subject as I am,” said Mrs. Porter, rather
more courteously. “I have discussed it with the local police and
the London police, with his Lordship, with the doctor, with Mr.
Dalbrook’s father, with Lady Carmichael, with Lady Jane Carmichael,
these having all a right to question me—and with a good many other
people in the neighbourhood who had no right to question me. I answer
you as I answered them. No, I saw nothing, I heard nothing on that
fatal night—nor in the week before that fatal night, nor at any
period of Lady Carmichael’s honeymoon. Whoever the murderer was he
did not come in a carriage and summon my servant to unlock the gate
for him. The footpath through the Park is open all night. There was
nothing to hinder a stranger coming in and going out—and the chances
were a thousand to one, I fancy, against his being observed—once
clear of the house. That is all I know about it.”

“And as an old resident upon the property you have no knowledge of
any one who had a grudge against Lord Cheriton or his daughter—such a
feeling as might prompt the murder of the lady’s husband as a mode of
retaliation upon the lady or her father?”

“I know no such person, and I have never considered the crime from
such a point of view. It is too far-fetched a notion.”

“Perhaps. Yet where a crime is apparently motiveless the mainspring
must be looked for below the surface. Only a far-fetched theory can
serve in such a case.”

“Shall I tell you what I think about the murder, Mr. Ramsay?” asked
Mrs. Porter, looking up at him suddenly, and fixing him with those
steady grey eyes.

“Pray do.”

“I think that no one upon God’s earth will ever know who fired that
shot. Only at the Day of Judgment will the murderer stand revealed,
and then the secret of the crime and the motive will stand forth
written in fire upon the scroll that records men’s wrongs and sorrows
and sins. You and I, and all of us, may read the story there,
perhaps, in that day when we shall stand as shadows before the great
white throne.”

“I believe you are right, Mrs. Porter” answered Cuthbert, quietly,
holding out his hand to take leave. “A secret that has been kept for
more than a year is likely to be kept till we are all in our graves.
The murderer himself will be the one to tell it, perhaps. There are
men who are proud of a bloody revenge, as if it were a noble deed.
Good day to you, Mrs. Porter, and many thanks for your friendly
reception.”

He held the thin, cold hand in his own as he said this, looking
earnestly at the imperturbable face, and then he and Theodore left
the cottage.

“Well, Cuthbert, what do you think of that woman?” asked Theodore,
after they had passed through the gate, and into the quiet of the
long glade where the fallow deer were browsing in the fading day.

“I think a good deal about her, but I haven’t thought out my opinion
yet. Has she ever been off her head?”

“Not to my knowledge. She has lived in that house for twenty years. I
never heard that there was anything wrong with her mentally.”

“I believe there is something, or has been something very wrong.
There is madness in that women’s eye. It may be the indication of
past trouble, or it may be a warning of an approaching disturbance.
She is a woman who has suffered intensely, and who has acquired an
abnormal power of self-restraint. I should like to know her history.”

“My God, Cuthbert,” cried Theodore, grasping him by the arm, and
coming suddenly to a standstill, “do you know what your words
suggest—to what your conclusion points? The murder of my cousin’s
husband was an act of vengeance, or of lunacy. We have made up our
minds about that, have we not? The detective, Juanita, you and I,
everybody. We are looking for some wretch capable of a blindly
malignant revenge, or for homicidal madness, with its unreasoning
thirst for blood; and here, here at these gates is a woman whom you
suspect of madness, a woman who could have had access to the gardens
at any hour, who knew the habits and hours of the servants, who would
know how to elude observation.”

“My dear fellow, you are going a great deal too far. Who said I
suspected that unhappy woman of homicidal madness? The brain disease
I suspect in Mrs. Porter is melancholia, the result of long years
of self-restraint and solitude, the not unfrequent consequence of
continuous brooding upon a secret grief.”




CHAPTER XXVI.

    “My eyes are dim with childish tears,
       My heart is idly stirred,
     For the same sound is in my ears
       Which in those days I heard.”


That suggestion of Cuthbert Ramsay’s of latent madness in the
lodge-keeper came upon Theodore like a flash of lurid light, and
gave a new colour to all his thoughts. It was in vain that his
friend reminded him of the wide distinction between the fury of the
homicidal lunatic and the settled melancholy of a mind warped by
misfortune. After that conversation in the Park he was haunted by
Mrs. Porter’s image, and he found his mind distracted between two
opposite ideas; one pointing to the man who had claimed Mrs. Danvers
as his wife, the deserted and betrayed husband of James Dalbrook’s
mistress; the other dwelling upon the image of this woman living at
his kinsman’s gate, with an existence which was unsatisfactorily
explained by the scanty facts which he had been able to gather about
her former history.

He recalled her conduct about her daughter, her cold and almost
vindictive rejection of the penitent sinner; her stern resolve to
stand alone in the world.

Was that madness, or the consciousness of guilt, or what? It was
conduct too unnatural to be accounted for easily, consider it how he
might. He had heard often enough of fathers refusing to be reconciled
with erring or disobedient children. The flinty hardness of the
father’s heart has become proverbial. But an unforgiving mother seems
an anomaly in nature.

He determined upon confiding Ramsay’s opinion and his own doubts to
Lord Cheriton without delay.

Whatever abnormal circumstances there had been in Mrs. Porter’s
history, her benefactor was likely to be acquainted with them; and if
those circumstances had affected her intellect it was vital that he
should be made aware of the fact before evil of any kind could arise.

He contrived an after-dinner stroll upon the terrace with his kinsman
as upon the previous evening, and entered upon the subject without
loss of time.

“Ramsay and I took our afternoon-tea with Mrs. Porter,” he said.

“Indeed! How did that come about? She is not a sociable person in a
general way, or accessible to strangers.”

“It was to gratify a fancy of Ramsay’s that I went there. He admired
her cottage and was interested in her history, and took it into his
head that she was a woman of exceptional character.”

“He was not far wrong there, I believe. Mrs. Porter is a very hard
nut to crack. I have never been able to fathom her.”

“And yet with your knowledge of her previous history you must have
the safest clue to her character.”

“I don’t know about that. There is nothing exceptional in her
history—and there is much that is exceptional in her character, as
your friend says. Pray what was the result of his observation of the
lady in the leisure of afternoon tea-drinking?”

“He believed that he saw the traces of madness in her countenance
and manner; madness either past, present, or impending. He could not
decide which.”

There was not light enough upon the terrace to show Theodore any
change in his cousin’s countenance, but the movement of Lord
Cheriton’s hand as he took the cigar from his mouth, and the sudden
slackening of his pace were sufficient indications of troubled
thought. It could hardly be pleasant for him to hear so melancholy a
suggestion about the pensioner whom he had established in comfort at
his gate, intending that she should enjoy his bounty for all the days
of her life.

“Upon what does your friend base this fantastical notion?” he asked
angrily.

“Upon physiological and psychological evidence. You can question him,
if you like. It appears to me that you ought to know the truth.”

“I have no objection to hear anything he may have to say, but it is
very unlikely I shall be influenced by him. These young men, who are
by way of being savants, are full of crochets and theories. They look
at every one as Darwin looked at a Virginia creeper or a cowslip,
with a preconceived notion that they must find out something about
him. I believe Mrs. Porter, with her calm, impassible nature, is much
better able to reckon up your friend Ramsay than he is able to come
to a correct opinion about her.”

“I should like you to discuss the question with him, at any rate,”
said Theodore. “The horror of last year’s calamity is a reason you
should have nobody about the estate whom you cannot trust.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that while you have madness at your gate you may have murder
in your house.”

“Theodore! You cannot be so cruel as to associate that unhappy woman
with Godfrey Carmichael’s death?”

“God knows! That murder has to be accounted for somehow. Can you, as
Juanita’s father, know rest or peace till it has been accounted for?
I could not, in your place.”

“I hope you do not think it necessary to teach me my duty to my
daughter,” said Lord Cheriton coldly; and Theodore felt that he had
said too much.

His cousin addressed him upon some indifferent subject a minute or so
afterwards, when he had lighted a fresh cigar, and his manner resumed
its usual friendliness. There was no further mention of Mrs. Porter
that night, but on Sunday Lord Cheriton walked home from church with
Cuthbert Ramsay, and questioned him as to his impressions about the
lodge-keeper.

“Theodore has exaggerated the significance of my remark,” explained
Cuthbert. “I take it Mrs. Porter’s case is one of slight aberration
brought on by much brooding upon troubles, real or imaginary. If my
power to diagnose is worth anything, her mind has lost its balance,
her thoughts have lost their adjusting power. She is like a piece of
mechanism that has got out of square, and will only work one way.
You may hardly consider that this amounts to madness, and I may have
done wrong in speaking of it: only were Mrs. Porter concerned in
my existence, I should feel it incumbent on me to watch her; and I
recommend you to have her watched, so far as it can be done without
alarming or annoying her.”

“I will do what I can. I will get another opinion from a man of long
experience in mental cases. I have an old friend in the medical
profession, a specialist, who has made mental disease the study of
his life. He will give me any advice I want.”

“You cannot do better than get his opinion of Mrs. Porter, if you are
interested in her welfare.”

“I am interested in all who are dependent upon me, and in her
especially, on account of old associations.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lady Carmichael drove over to Cheriton after luncheon, upon one of
those Sunday visits which she paid from time to time in deference
to her father, albeit she could never approach the house without
pain. She came in the useful family landau, which had carried the
Misses Carmichael to tennis parties, dinners, and dances, before they
married, and which now conveyed the nurse and baby on their visits to
Cheriton. She came for what Lady Cheriton called a long afternoon,
and she was received in the library, which was now the most used room
in the house. No one cared to occupy that fatal drawing-room; and
although it was always accessible, and there was a feint of daily
occupation, its cold elegance was for the most part untenanted.

“And over all there hung a cloud of fear.”

To-day, for the first time, Theodore discovered numerous alterations
in the arrangement of pictures and furniture in the hall. He had
promised Cuthbert to show him the portraits of the Strangways, and
most particularly that picture of the Squire’s three children,
painted nearly forty years before; but he found that this picture,
among others, had been removed, and that a fine Rhodian plate
occupied its place on the dark oak panelling.

He noticed the fact to his cousin.

“I am sorry to miss the family group,” he said. “It was a really
interesting picture.”

“Interesting to you perhaps, who knew the history of the race,”
answered Lord Cheriton, “but very uninteresting to a stranger.
I think I’ve made an improvement over there. That plate is a
splendid bit of colour, and lights up a dark corner. But that was
not my motive. I wanted to make such trifling alterations as would
change the aspect of the hall for Juanita, without any ostensible
refurnishing. I have done the same thing in the library. The changes
there are slight, but the room is not as it was when she and her
husband occupied it.”

“I should like to show Ramsay the Strangway portraits, if they are
get-at-able.”

“They are not just at present. The canvases were rotting, and I have
sent them to London to be lined. You can show them to your friend
by-and-by, when I get them back.”

Mr. Ramsay’s thoughts seemed a long way from the Strangway portraits
this afternoon, although he had expressed a curiosity as to the
lineaments of that luckless race. He was out in the garden—in Lady
Cheriton’s rose garden—with Juanita and her son, and was giving
further proofs of his adaptability to infantile society. The
grandmother was of the party, looking on with profound admiration
at that phase of awakening intellect which is described as “taking
notice.” It was held now as an established fact that the infant
Godfrey James Dalbrook took notice, and that his notice dwelt with
especial favour upon Cuthbert Ramsay.

“I think it must be because you are so tall and big,” said Juanita
lightly. “He feels your power, and he wants to conciliate you.”

“Artful little beggar! No, that is much too low a view. There is a
magnetic affinity between us—love at first sight. When babies do
take a fancy they are thoroughly in earnest about it. Loafing about
in the New Cut sometimes, studying human nature from the Saturday
night point of view, I have had a poor woman’s baby take a fancy to
me—a poor little elfin creature, a year old perhaps, and not half
so big as this bloated aristocrat, a sour-smelling baby which would
give you _mal au cœur_, Lady Carmichael; and the wretched little waif
would hook on to my elephantine finger and cleave to me as if I were
its mother. Oh, how sorry I have felt for such a baby—with the pure
starry eyes of infancy shining in the flabby withered face that has
grown old for want of cold water and fresh air! For such infancy and
for stray dogs I have suffered acutest agonies of pity—and yet I have
done nothing—only pitied and passed on. That is the worst of us. We
can all pity, but we don’t act upon the divine impulse. You may be
sure the Levite felt very sorry for the wounded traveller, though he
did not see his way to helping him.”

This was one of Cuthbert’s tirades, which he was wont to indulge in
when he found himself in congenial society; and Juanita’s society was
particularly congenial to him. He felt as if no other woman had ever
sympathized with him or understood him—and he gave her credit for
doing both. Never had he felt so happy in the society of any woman,
as he felt in this sunlit garden to-day, among the roses which were
just now blooming in a riotous luxuriance, the branching heads of
standards top-heavy with great balls of blossom, swaying gently in
the summer wind.

He had expected to see her a gloomy creature, self-conscious in her
grief—but the child’s little fingers had loosened her heartstrings.
If she was not gay, she was at least able to endure gaiety in others.
She listened to the young man’s rhapsodies and paradoxes with a
gentle smile; she admired her mother’s roses. She cast no shadow
upon the quiet happiness of the summer afternoon, that tranquil
contentedness which belongs to the loveliness of Nature, and which
makes a blessed pause in the story of human passion and human
discontent. It was one of those summer afternoons which make one say
to oneself, “Could life be always thus what a blessed thing it were
to live!” and then the sound of evening bells breaks the spell, and
the shadows creep across the woods, and it is dinner time, and all
that halcyon peace is over.

How lovely she looked in her simply-made black gown, with its
closely-fitting bodice and straight flowing skirt, of that thick
lustreless silk which falls in such statuesque folds! The plain
little white crape cap seemed in perfect harmony with that raven
hair and pure white forehead. She was unlike any other woman
Cuthbert Ramsay had ever known. There was not one touch of society
slang, nor of the society manner of looking at life. She had passed
through the fiery ordeal of two London seasons unscorched in the
furnace. Love had been the purifying influence. She had never lived
upon the excitement of every-day pleasures and volatile loves, the
intermittent fever of flirtations and engagements that are on and off
half a dozen times in a season. The influence that guided all her
thoughts and all her actions had been one steadfast and single-minded
love. She had cared for no praises but from her lover’s lips; she had
dressed and danced, and played and sung, for none other than he. And
now in her devotion to her child there was the same concentration and
simplicity. She did not know that she was looking her loveliest in
that severe black gown and white cap; she did not know that Cuthbert
Ramsay admired her far too much for his peace. She only felt that
he was very sincere in his devotion to the baby, and that he was a
clever young man whose society suggested new ideas, and made her for
the moment forgetful of her grief.

It was evening before she left Cheriton. She had stayed later than
usual, and the shadows were creeping over the park as she walked to
the west gate with Theodore and his friend, the carriage following
slowly with nurse and baby ensconced among light fleecy wraps, lest
vesper breezes should visit that human blossom too roughly. Theodore
had proposed the walk across the park, and Juanita had assented
immediately.

“I am always glad of a walk,” she said. “I have so few excuses for a
ramble nowadays. I have to stay at home to take care of baby.”

“Do you doubt the capabilities of that highly-experienced nurse?”
asked Ramsay laughingly.

“I doubt every one but myself, and I sometimes doubt even my own
discretion where my precious one is concerned.”

“You will have more reason to doubt by-and-by when your precious one
is old enough to be spoilt,” said Theodore. “He has begun to take
notice, and before very long he will notice that he is monarch of all
he surveys, and that everybody about him is more or less his slave.
He will live in that atmosphere till you send him to Eton, and then
he will find himself suddenly confronted with the hard, cruel world
of strictly Republican boyhood, which will jostle and hustle him with
ruthless equality.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lady Cheriton had business in London early in the following week.
She was going to London to see her dentist, and her dressmaker, the
latter being one of the arbiters of fashion who never go out of
their way to wait upon their clients, but who do the rather exact
reverence and attention from those clients. She had shopping to do
at the West-end of London, that shopping which is so delightful to a
lady who spends two-thirds of the year in the country. Above all, she
had things to get at the “Stores,” an institution which was dear to
Lady Cheriton’s heart, in spite of all her husband’s lectures upon
political economy and the necessity of sustaining private enterprise
and the shopkeeping interest.

Hearing of these engagements, and that Lady Cheriton intended to
spend two nights in Victoria Street, Theodore suggested that he
should be allowed to accompany her ladyship to London and to arrange
a meeting between her and the young woman who called herself Marian
Gray.

“If you really wish to help her,” he concluded.

“I do really wish it,” answered Lord Cheriton earnestly, “and the
sooner the matter is put in hand the better pleased I shall be. Shall
my wife call on this person?”

“She is very proud and very reserved. It might be better to bring
about a meeting which would appear accidental. Marian goes for a walk
with Miss Newton once or twice a week. I could arrange with her good
friend that they should be walking in a particular place—Battersea
Park, for instance—at a certain hour, and Lady Cheriton could drive
that way with me, and we could meet them. It would be the easiest
way of arriving at the truth as to Marian Gray’s identity with Mercy
Porter.”

“Very good. You might suggest that to my wife.”

Lady Cheriton, who was the soul of good-nature, fell in at once with
Theodore’s idea.

“I would do anything in my power to help that poor girl,” she said;
“for I think her sadly to be pitied. Her girlhood was so dull and
joyless—such a ceaseless round of lessons and practice, without any
of those pleasures to which most school-girls look forward. Her
mother seemed to take a pride in keeping the girl apart from every
one, in dressing her plainly, and in making her whole life as dreary
as she could. I hardly wonder that the poor, hopeless creature
surrendered to the first tempter—a man whose manner to women had
always been called irresistible, even by women of the world, and a
man who would not shrink from any amount of falsehood in pursuing his
wicked aim. And now she is paying forfeit for her sin with a lonely
life of toil in a London garret. Poor Mercy! She was so pretty and so
refined—a lady in all her instincts.”

Cuthbert Ramsay left on Monday, promising to return at the end of
the week; and Theodore went up to town with Lady Cheriton on the
following Wednesday. He went straight from the terminus to Wedgewood
Street, where he saw Miss Newton, told her of Lord Cheriton’s
benevolent intentions to Marian, alias Mercy, and arranged the walk
in Battersea Park for the following afternoon. Miss Newton and her
_protégée_ were to be walking upon the pathway beside the river at
half-past three o’clock, when Lady Cheriton would drive that way.

Miss Newton had no difficulty in carrying out her part of the little
plot. Marian was always ready to put aside her work for the pleasure
of an afternoon with that one friend to whom her heart was ever open.
She met Miss Newton at the starting-place of the tramcar, and they
rode through the dusty crowded highways to the People’s Park, where
the flower-beds were gaudy with the rank luxuriance that is the
beginning of the end of summer’s good things, and where the geranium
leaves were riddled by voracious slugs. There was a dustiness and
worn-out air upon all the foliage and all the flowers, despite the
coolness that came from the swiftly-flowing river—an air of fading
and decay which pervades even the outermost regions of London when
the season is over and the world of fashion has fled—the air of a
theatre when the play is done and the lights are extinguished.

Sarah Newton and her young friend walked slowly along the gravel
pathway, looking dreamily at the bright river, with its gay movement
of passing boats and flowing waters. The elder of the two friends,
who was wont to be full of cheery talk of newspapers and books, the
history of the present, and the history of the past, was to-day
unusually grave and silent.

“I’m afraid you are not well, dear Miss Newton,” said Marian, looking
at her anxiously.

“Oh, yes, my dear, I am well enough. You know I am made of cast-iron,
and except for the toothache, or a cold in my head, I hardly know
what illness means. I am only a little thoughtful.”

They walked a few paces in silence, and then Miss Newton stopped
suddenly to admire an approaching carriage. “What a stylish Victoria!
Why, I declare there is Mr. Dalbrook, with a lady!”

The carriage drew up as she spoke, and Theodore alighted. Marian had
reddened a little at the mention of his name, but the flush upon her
cheek deepened to crimson when she saw the lady in the carriage,
and as the lady got out and came towards her the crimson faded to a
deadly white.

“Mercy, child, I am glad with all my heart to find you,” said Lady
Cheriton, holding out both her hands.

She was determined that there should be no doubt in the young girl’s
mind as to her friendship and indulgence—that there should be nothing
in the mode of her approach, in the tone of her voice, or the
expression of her countenance that could bruise that broken reed.
Love and pity looked out of those lovely southern eyes, which even in
mature age retained much of their youthful beauty.

Mercy Porter went towards her, trembling, and with eyes brimming with
tears. The calm, self-restrained nature had melted all at once at
those gentle words in the familiar voice which had given her words of
kindness and of praise in her desolate childhood. The transformation
filled Theodore with wonder.

“Dear Lady Cheriton, I thought you would long ago have forgotten the
wretched girl to whom you were once so kind,” she faltered.

“No, Mercy, I have never forgotten you. I have always been
sorry—deeply sorry for you. And when Mr. Dalbrook told me about
having met a person who interested him—a person associated with
Cheriton—I knew that person must be you. My dear girl, I thank God
that we have found you. My cousin will call upon you to-morrow and
talk to you about your future—and of our plans for making your life
happier than it is.”

“There is no need,” said Mercy, quickly. “I get on very well as I
am. My life is quite good enough for me. I hope for nothing better,
wish for nothing better.”

“Nonsense, Mercy. His Lordship and I are your friends, and we mean to
help you.”

“I will accept help from no one, Lady Cheriton. I made up my mind
about that long ago. I can earn my own living very well now. If ever
my fingers or my eyes fail me—I can go to the workhouse. I am deeply
thankful for your pity—but I ask for no more, I will accept no more.”

“We will see about that, Mercy,” said Lady Cheriton, with her gentle
smile, quite unable to estimate the mental force in opposition to her.

She could understand a certain resistance, the pride of a sensitive
nature painfully conscious of disgrace, unable to forget the past.
She was prepared for a certain amount of difficulty in reconciling
this proud nature to the acceptance of benefits; but she never for
one moment contemplated an implacable resistance.

“Let me see your friend, Mercy,” she said, “the lady who has been
kind to you.”

“Kind is a poor word. She has been my angel of deliverance. She has
saved me from the great dismal swamp of self-abasement and despair.”

Miss Newton had walked briskly ahead with Theodore, so as to leave
Lady Cheriton and Mercy together. Mercy ran after her friend, and
brought her back a little way, as Lady Cheriton advanced to meet her.

“Miss Newton, my one true and good friend in all this great world
of London, and the only friend of my miserable childhood, Lady
Cheriton,” said Mercy, looking from one to the other with that intent
look of thoughtful minds that work in narrow grooves.

“I thank you for being good to one in whose fate I am warmly
interested, Miss Newton,” said Lady Cheriton. “You have done the work
of the good Samaritan, and at least one wounded heart blesses you.”

They walked on a little way together, and Lady Cheriton spoke of the
old house and the old family, the vanished race with which Sarah
Newton had been associated in her girlhood.

“They are all dead, I understand?” she said, in conclusion.

“Yes, there is none left of the old family. They are not a fortunate
race, and I fear there are few who regret them; but I cannot help
feeling sorry that they are all gone. They have passed away like a
dream when one awakens.”

Lady Cheriton lingered on the river-side pathway for nearly
half-an-hour, talking to Mercy and Miss Newton. Theodore left them
together, after having obtained Mercy’s permission to call at her
lodgings on the following afternoon.




CHAPTER XXVII.

                  “I saw her too.
      Yes, but you must not love her.
      I will not, as you do; to worship her,
    As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess;
    I love her as a woman.”


A decent-looking woman opened the door of the house in Hercules
Buildings, and ushered Mr. Dalbrook up two flights of stairs to the
small back-room in which Mercy Porter had lived her lonely life from
year’s end to year’s end. The tasteful arrangement of that humble
chamber struck Theodore at the first glance. He had seen such rooms
at Cambridge, where an undergraduate of small means had striven to
work wonders with a few shabby old sticks that had done duty for
half-a-dozen other undergraduates, and which had been but of poorest
quality when they issued, new and sticky with cheap varnish, from the
emporium of a local upholsterer.

Mercy was very pale, and although she received her visitor with
outward calmness, he could see that she had not yet recovered from
yesterday’s agitation.

“What induced you to take so much trouble to betray me, Mr.
Dalbrook?” she asked.

“Betray is a very hard word, Miss Porter.”

“You don’t suppose that I believed yesterday’s meeting was
accidental? You took the trouble to bring Lady Cheriton across my
path in order to satisfy your curiosity about my identity. Was that
generous?”

“God knows that it was meant in your best interests. I knew that
Lady Cheriton was your true and loyal friend—that she had more of
the mother’s instinct than your real mother, and that no pain could
possibly come to you from any meeting with her. And then I had a very
serious reason for bringing you together. It was absolutely necessary
for me to make sure of your identity.”

“Why necessary? What can it matter to you who I am?”

“Everything. I am the bearer of a very generous offer from Lord
Cheriton—and it was essential that I should make that offer to the
right person.”

Mercy’s face underwent a startling change at the sound of Lord
Cheriton’s name. She had been standing by the window in a listless
attitude, just where she had risen to receive her visitor. She
drew herself suddenly to her fullest height, and looked at him with
flushed cheeks and kindling eyes.

“I will accept no generosity from Lord Cheriton,” she said. “I want
nothing from him except to be let alone. I want nothing from Lady
Cheriton except her sympathy, and I would rather have even that at a
distance. You have done the greatest harm you could do me in bringing
me face to face with my old life.”

“Believe me I had but one feeling, anxiety for your happiness.”

“What is my happiness to you?” she retorted, almost fiercely. “You
are playing at philanthropy. You can do me no good—you may do me
much evil. You see me contented with my life—accustomed to its
hardships—happy in the possession of one true friend. Why come to me
with officious offers of favours which I have never sought?”

“You are ungenerous, and unjust. From the first hour of our
acquaintance I saw that you were of a different clay to that of
the women among whom I found you—different by education, instinct,
associations, family history. How could I help being interested in
one who stood thus apart? How could I help wanting to know more of so
exceptional a life?”

“Yes, you were interested, as you might have been in any other
wreck—in any derelict vessel stranded on a lonely shore, battered,
broken, empty, rudderless, picturesque in ruin. It was a morbid
interest, an interest in human misery.”

He stated his commission plainly and briefly. He told her that it
was Lord Cheriton’s earnest wish to provide for her future life—that
he was ready, and even anxious, to settle a sum of money which
would ensure her a comfortable income for the rest of her days. He
urged upon her the consideration of the new happiness, and larger
opportunities of helping others, which this competence would afford
her; but she cut him short with an impatient movement of her head.

“Upon what ground does he base his generous offer?” she asked coldly.

“Upon the ground of his interest in your mother and yourself—an
interest which it is only natural for him to feel in one who was
brought up on his estate, and whose father was his friend. It may be
also that he feels himself in some wise to blame for the great sorrow
of your life.”

“Tell him that I appreciate his noble contempt for money, his
readiness to shed the sunshine of his prosperity upon so remote an
outcast as myself; but tell him also that I would rather starve to
death, slowly in this room, than I would accept the price of a loaf
of bread from his hands. Do not hesitate to tell him this, in the
plainest form of speech. It is only right that he should know the
exact measure of my feelings towards him.”

After this Theodore could only bow to her decision and leave her.

“Lord Cheriton is my cousin, and a man whom I have every reason to
regard with affection and respect,” he began.

She interrupted him sharply.

“He has never denied the cousinship, never treated you as the dirt
under his feet—never looked down upon you from the altitude of his
grandeur, with insufferable patronage——”

“Never. He has been most unaffectedly my friend, ever since I can
remember.”

“Then you are right to think well of him—but you must let me have
my opinion in peace, even although you are of his blood and I
am——nothing to him. Good-bye. Forgive me if I have been ungracious
and ungrateful. I have no doubt you meant well by me—only I would
so much rather be let alone. It did me no good to see Lady Cheriton
yesterday. My heart was tortured by the memories her face recalled.”

She gave him her hand, the thin white hand, with taper fingers worn
by constant work. It was a very pretty hand, and it lay in his strong
grasp to-day for the first time, so reserved had been her former
greetings and farewells. He looked at the delicate hand for a moment
or two before he let it go, and from the hand upwards to the fair,
finely-cut face, and the large, dark grey eyes. That look of his
startled her, the hollow cheeks flushed, and the eyelids fell beneath
his steady gaze.

“Good-bye, Mercy,” he said, gently, “let me call you Mercy, for the
sake of the link between us—the link of common recollections, and the
sad secrets of the past.”

“Call me what you like. It is not very probable we shall meet often.”

“You are very stubborn, cruel to yourself, and more cruel to those
who want to help you. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” she echoed, almost in a whisper.

He went out into the shabby street haunted by those sad uplifted
eyes, and the hollow cheeks faintly flushed with delicate bloom. How
lovely she must have been in her dawning womanhood, and how closely
she must have kept at home in the cottage by the west gate, seeing
that he who had been so frequent a guest at Cheriton had never once
met her there!

He was not satisfied to submit to this total failure of his mission
without one further effort. He went from Hercules Buildings to
Wedgewood Street, and saw his admirable Sarah Newton, into whose
attentive ear he poured the story of Mercy’s obstinacy.

“She is a strange girl—a girl who could live in closest friendship
with me all this time, and never tell me the secret of her past
life,” said Miss Newton thoughtfully. “Why she should be so perverse
in her refusal of Lord Cheriton’s offer I can’t imagine—but you may
depend she has a reason.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Theodore escorted Lady Cheriton back to Dorsetshire by the afternoon
train, but they parted company at Wareham Station, he going on to
Dorchester, where his sisters received him with some wonderment at
his restlessness.

“It is rather a farce for you and Mr. Ramsay to make engagements
which you never intend to keep,” said Sophia peevishly; and it
was thereupon expounded to him that he and his friend had pledged
themselves to be present at a certain tennis party upon the previous
afternoon.

“I’m very sorry we both forgot all about it,” he apologized, “but I
don’t suppose we were missed.”

“I don’t suppose you would have been,” answered his sister sulkily,
“if there had been half a dozen decent young men at the party; but
as Harrington preferred the office to our society or our friends,
and as there were only three curates and one banker’s clerk at Mrs.
Hazledean’s, you and Mr. Ramsay would at least have been _something_.”

“It is hardly worth any man’s while to endure an afternoon’s
boredom—to fetch and carry teacups in a sweltering sun, and play
tennis upon an unlevel lawn, if he is only to count for _something_,
a mere make-weight.”

“Oh, you young men give yourselves such abominable airs nowadays,”
retorted Sophy, with a manner which implied that the young men of
former generations had been modesty incarnate. “As for your friend,
he has made a mere convenience of this house.”

“As how, Sophy?”

“I don’t think the fact requires explanation. First he goes to the
Priory, and then to Cheriton, and then he is off to London, and then
he is to be back on Saturday in order to lunch at the Priory on
Sunday. If that is not making an hotel of your father’s house I don’t
know what is.”

“Perhaps I have been too unceremonious, forgetting that I no longer
live here, that it behoves me now, perhaps, to act in all things as
a visitor. It was I who made the engagements, Sophy. You must not be
angry with Ramsay.”

“I am not angry. It cannot matter to me how Mr. Ramsay treats this
house. No doubt he thinks himself a great deal too clever for our
society, although we are not _quite_ so feather-headed as most girls.
He finds metal more attractive at the Priory.”

“What do you mean, Sophy?”

“That he is over head and ears in love with Juanita. It does not need
a very penetrating person to discover that.”

“What nonsense! Why, he has not seen her above three times.”

“Quite enough for a young man of his vehement character.”

“What can have put such an idea into your head?”

“His way of talking about her—the expression of his face when he
pronounces her name—the questions he asked me about her, showing the
keenest interest in even the silliest details. What kind of a girl
was she before she married, and how long had she known Sir Godfrey
before they were engaged, and had their love been a grand passion
full of romance and poetry, or only a humdrum kind of affection
encouraged by their mutual relations? Idiotic questions of that kind
could only be asked by a man who was in love. And then how eagerly he
snapped at your suggestion that he should go with you to the Priory
next Sunday.”

“It may be as you think,” Theodore answered gravely. “I know his
fervid temperament about most things; but I did not think he was the
kind of man to fall in love—upon such very slight provocation.”

“She may have given more encouragement than you suppose,” said Sophy.
“He is the kind of man that a frivolous, half-educated girl would
think attractive. _She_ would never find out the want of depth under
that arrogant, self-assured manner. However, she has asked Janet and
me for next Sunday, and I shall soon see how the land lies. You were
always unobservant.”

Theodore did not try to vindicate his character as an observer,
albeit he knew no look or tone of his cousin’s was likely to escape
him; that even sharp-eyed malevolence could never watch her more
closely than love would watch out of his eyes.

Yes; it was not unlikely that Cuthbert admired her too much for his
own peace. He recalled words which had passed unnoticed when they
were together. Poor Cuthbert! He felt he had done wrong in exposing
his friend to such an ordeal. Who could know her and not love her?




CHAPTER XXVIII.

    “For life must life, and blood must blood repay.”


Cuthbert Ramsay arrived at Dorchester on Saturday just in time to
dress for dinner, and he contrived to make himself so agreeable to
all the family in the course of that friendly meal, that Janet and
Sophia forgave him for his base desertion, and Harrington forgave
him for being a great deal cleverer and happier than himself. He
was in very high spirits—had been working hard in London—attending
lectures—witnessing operations—and looking after those gratis
patients in the slums who were his chief delight.

“I love to find out what life means below the surface,” he said. “One
only gets at realities when one comes face to face with the struggle
for existence. The children—the poor pinched atomies whom one looks
at with a shudder, remembering that _they_ are the men and women of
the future! That is the terrible point—to think that in those little
half-starved faces one sees the men who are to meet in Trafalgar
Square and unmake our smooth, easy world—to think that in those
wizened morsels of humanity we have all the elements of discord and
destruction in the days to come. _That_ is the appalling thought.”

“It is a thought that should teach us our duty to them,” said Janet.

“What do you take that duty to be?”

“To educate them!”

“Educate—yes—educate them in the ways of health and cleanliness—after
we have fed them. _That_ I take to be our primary duty to the
children as much as to the lower animals. You know the old adage,
Miss Dalbrook, _mens sana in corpore sano_. Did you ever hear of a
sound and healthy mind in an unsound scrofulous body? So long as we
leave the little children to semi-starvation, we are sacrificing to
the Demon Scrofula, which is to our enlightened age what the Demon
Leprosy was to those darker ages whose ignorance we prate about.”

“I am not in favour of pauperizing the working classes,” said
Harrington.

“That idea of pauperism is a bugbear and a stumbling-block in the
path of benevolence. Do you pauperize an agricultural labourer whose
utmost wages are fifteen shillings a week if you provide his children
with two good meals of fresh meat in the seven days, and so grow
better bone and sinew than can be produced upon bread and dripping,
or bread and treacle? Do you pauperize a man by giving him a free
supply of pure water, and larger, airier rooms than his scanty wages
will buy for him? To subsidize is not to pauperize, Mr. Dalbrook; and
if England is to hold together upon the old lines during the coming
centuries, the well-to-do will have to help the poor upon a stronger
and wider basis than that on which they have helped them in the past,
and a good deal of the spare cash that is now being spent on fine
clothes and dinner-parties will have to be spent upon feeding and
housing the million.”

The two young men drove over to Milbrook early on Sunday morning,
in order to attend morning service at the picturesque old church.
Matthew Dalbrook and his daughters were to join them at the Priory in
time for luncheon, which was to be a regular family party.

Cuthbert was silent for the greater part of the drive, and Theodore
was thoughtfully observant of him. Yes, there might be something in
Sophy’s idea. More than once during that long drive the young man’s
face brightened with a sudden smile, a smile of ineffable happiness,
as of a dreaming lover who sees the gates of his earthly paradise
opening, sees his mistress coming to meet him on the threshold.
Theodore’s heart sank at the thought that Sophia had hit upon the
truth. Anyway there was hopelessness in the idea. If it were to be
Theodore’s blessed fate to see the one love of his life victorious,
soon or late, after long patience and devoted sacrifice, Cuthbert
must taste the bitterness of having loved in vain. But he would
hardly be worthy of pity, perhaps, seeing that he had known from the
first how the land lay, seeing that honour forbade his falling in
love with Juanita.

But will honour make a man blind to beauty, deaf to the music of a
voice, impervious to the subtle charms of all that is purest, best,
and loveliest in womanhood? Theodore began to think that he had done
wrong in bringing his friend within the influence of irresistible
charms.

“I was a fool to think that he could help himself; I was a worse fool
to suppose that she will ever care for me—the humdrum cousin whom
she has known all her life—the country solicitor whose image she has
always associated with leases and bills of dilapidation—a little more
than a bailiff, and a little less than a gentleman.”

They consigned the dog-cart to the village ostler, who was expiating
the jovial self-indulgence of Saturday night in the penitential
drowsiness of Sunday morning, and they were in their places in
the grey old church when Lady Carmichael came to the chancel pew.
Theodore’s watchful eyes followed her from her entrance in a halo of
sunshine, which was suddenly obscured as the curtain dropped behind
her, to the moment when she bowed her head in prayer. He saw her face
brighten as she passed the pew where he and his friend were sitting,
and he told himself that it was Cuthbert’s presence which conjured
up that happier light in her soft, dark eyes. On the walk from
the church to the Priory it was with Cuthbert she talked—Cuthbert
the irrepressible, who had so much to say that he must needs find
listeners. It was Cuthbert who sat next her at luncheon, and who
engrossed her attention throughout the meal. It was Cuthbert who went
through the hot-houses, fern-houses, and greenhouses with her after
luncheon, and gave her practical lessons in botany and entomology
as they went along, and who promised her some Austrian frogs. The
day was one long triumph for Cuthbert Ramsay, and he gave himself up
to the intoxication of the hour as a drunkard surrenders to strong
drink, unconditionally, without thought of the morrow.

“What do you think of your friend’s infatuation _now_?” asked Janet,
with her most biting accent, as she and Theodore followed in the
horticultural procession, she carefully picking up her gown at
every one of those treacherous puddles which are to be found in the
best-regulated hot-houses. “Have you any doubt in your mind now?”

“No. I have no doubt.”

The carriages were at the door half an hour afterwards, and all
through the homeward drive Cuthbert was silent as the grave. Only as
they came into Dorchester did he find speech to say,—

“I shall have to go back to town early to-morrow morning, Theodore!”

“So soon. What an unquiet spirit you are! You’ll come back to us next
Friday or Saturday, I hope.”

“I don’t know. I’ll try; but I’m rather afraid I can’t.”

Theodore did not press the point, and his friend kept his word,
and left by the first train on Monday morning, after having been
intolerably stupid on Sunday evening, according to the sisters, who
were disposed to think themselves especially ill-used by Mr. Ramsay’s
obvious infatuation for Lady Carmichael.

“I was beginning to respect Juanita for her conduct in the difficult
position of a young widow,” said Sophia; “but I begin to fear that
she is no better than the rest of them, and that her leaving off
crape upon her last gowns is a sign that she means to marry again
before the second year of her widowhood is over.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lady Cheriton’s roses were in danger from a failure of the water
in that old-fashioned well which had hitherto supplied the
flower-gardens. There had been an unusually long spell of dry weather
since the beginning of July, and the gardeners were in despair. When
Theodore went over to the Chase with his portmanteau, in accordance
with an engagement made the previous week, he found that Lord
Cheriton had that morning given an order for the sinking of the old
well from twenty to thirty feet deeper.

“There is plenty of water, my lord,” said the head gardener, “if we
only go deep enough for it.”

“Very well, Mackenzie, go as deep as you like, so long as you don’t
go below the water-bearing strata. You had better put on plenty of
hands. Her ladyship is uneasy about her roses, seeing how you have
been stinting them lately.”

“It has been hard work, my lord, to do our duty by the roses, and
keep the lawns in decent order. The ground would be as hard as iron
if we didn’t use a good deal of water for the grass.”

“Get to work, Mackenzie, and don’t waste time in talking about it.
Drive over to Gadby’s, and tell him to send some good men.”

This conversation took place upon the terrace directly after
Theodore’s arrival; and when the gardener had gone off to the stables
to get the dog-cart-of-all-work, Lord Cheriton and his cousin walked
in the direction of the well.

The well was in one of the kitchen-gardens, quite the oldest bit of
garden ground at Cheriton, a square garden of about two acres, shut
in with high crumbling old red-brick walls, upon which grew blue
gages and William pears, egg-plums and apricots, attaining more or
less to perfection as the aspect favoured them. It was a pleasant
garden to dream in upon a summer afternoon, for there was an air of
superabundant growth that was almost tropical in the century-old
espaliers, albeit they had long ceased to produce meritorious fruit,
and in the sprawling leaves and yellow blossoms of the vegetable
marrows which seemed to be grown for no purpose except to produce
champion gourds or pumpkins, to be ultimately hung up as ornaments
in the gardener’s cottage, or to rot in a corner of the greenhouse.
There is always one old greenhouse in such a garden given over to
preserving spiders and accumulating rubbish.

In the middle of a vegetable marrow warren stood the well—a well
of eight feet in diameter, surrounded by a low brick wall, of that
same bright red brick which crumbled behind the blue gages and the
egg-plums, and which the birds pecked and perforated, for very
wantonness. It was a well of the old pattern, with a ponderous wooden
roller, and an iron spindle, which had wound up water from those
same cool depths for over a hundred years. It had run dry often, in
the time of the Strangways, that good old well; but no Strangway had
ever thought of improving anything upon the estate; so in seasons of
drought the flowers had drooped and the turf had withered unheeded by
the proprietorial eye.

Mr. Gadby’s men appeared after their dinner, and got seriously to
work by about three o’clock, at which hour Theodore and Lady Cheriton
were strolling in the rose garden, while the master of the house sat
in the library reading. Theodore had observed a marked change in his
cousin since his last visit to the Chase. There was a worried look in
Lord Cheriton’s face which had not been there even after the shock
of the murder, a look of nervous apprehension which showed itself
from time to time in a countenance where firmness of character and an
absolute fearlessness had been hitherto the strongest characteristics.

He had not yet told his lordship the result of his interview
with Mercy Porter. He had waited till an opportunity for quiet,
confidential talk should come about naturally, and that opportunity
now occurred. Lady Cheriton left him after half an hour’s review of
the roses, and he went through the open window into the library where
Lord Cheriton sat in his large arm-chair at his own particular table,
reading the political summing-up in the last _Quarterly_.

“Shall I be disturbing you if I sit here?” asked Theodore, taking a
volume from the table where the newest books were always to be found.

“On the contrary, I shall be very glad of a little conversation.
I have been struggling through an analysis of last session, which
is all weariness and vexation of spirit. The session was dull, the
commentary is duller. I am anxious to know how you got on with Mrs.
Porter’s daughter.”

“Very badly, I regret to say, from our point of view. She rejects
your generous offer. She prefers her present hard life, with its
independence. She will accept no obligation from any one.”

“Humph! She must be a curious young woman,” said Lord Cheriton, with
a vexed air. “I should have liked very much to have made her life
bright and easy, if she would have let me—for her father’s sake. On
what ground did she refuse my offer?”

“On the ground of preferring to work for her living, and to live
a hard life. She has taken that upon herself, I believe, as an
expiation for her past errors, although she did not say that in so
many words. She is wonderfully firm. I never saw such a resolute
temper in so young—and so gentle-mannered—a woman.”

“You tried to overcome her objections, you represented to her how
easy and pleasant her life might be in some picturesque village—among
the hills and lakes, or by the sea—and how she might live among
people who would know nothing of her past history, who would grow to
be fond of her for her own sake?”

“I urged all this upon her. I am as anxious as you are that she
should leave that dreary attic—that monotonous labour—but nothing I
could say was of the least use. She was resolute—she would accept
nothing from you.”

“From me—ah, that is it!” cried Lord Cheriton, suddenly. “Had the
offer come from any one else she might have been less stubborn. But
from _me_ she will take nothing—not a loaf of bread if she were
starving. That is the explanation of her hardness—it is to me she is
adamant. Tell me the truth, Theodore. Don’t spare my feelings. This
girl hates me, I suppose!”

“I fear she has a deeply-rooted prejudice against you. She may—most
unjustly—blame you for her misery, because Colonel Tremayne was your
friend.”

“Yes, that is her feeling, no doubt; it is on that account she hates
me. Perhaps she is justified in her anger. I ought to have shot that
scoundrel. Had we both lived fifty years sooner I suppose I should
have shot him.”

“I don’t think you could have been called upon to do that even by the
old code of honour. Mercy was not allied to you——”

“No; but she dwelt at my gates. She was under my protection—she had
no other man living to defend her. I ought to have punished her
seducer—it was incumbent on me to do it. Because there was no one
else,” he added slowly, after a long pause.

“It may be on that account she rejects your generous offer. I cannot
pretend to interpret her feelings; but there was certainly some
strong personal prejudice on her part. She was deeply moved. She
burst into a passion of sobs. ‘Not from him,’ she cried, ‘I will
accept nothing from him. Of all the men upon this earth he shall be
the last to help me!’”

Lord Cheriton flung the _Quarterly_ from him with a passionate
gesture, as he started to his feet and began to walk up and down the
long clear space in front of the windows.

“Theodore,” he said suddenly, “you have not yet come face to face
with all the problems of life. Perhaps you have not yet found out
how hard it is to help people. I would have given much to be able
to help that girl—to assure her an easy and reputable existence—the
refinements of life amidst pleasant surroundings. What would it
matter to me whether I allowed her one hundred or two hundred a year?
All I desire is that her life should be happy. And of deliberate
malice—of sheer perversity—she rejects my help, she dooms herself
to the seamstress’ slavery, and to a garret in Lambeth. My God, to
think that with all the will and all the power to help her, I cannot
come between her and that sordid misery. It is hard, Theodore, it is
very hard upon a man like me. There is nothing I hold of this world’s
goods that I have not worked for honestly; and when I want to do good
for others with what I have won, I am barred by their folly. It is
enough to make me mad.”

Never before had Theodore seen this self-abandonment in his stately
cousin, the man who bore in every tone and every gesture the impress
of his acknowledged ascendency over his fellow-men. To see such a
man as this so completely unhinged by a woman’s perversity was a new
thing to Theodore Dalbrook; and his heart went out to his kinsman as
it had never done before.

“My dear Cheriton, you have done all that was in your power to do for
that mistaken young woman,” he said, holding out his hand, which the
elder man grasped warmly. “Whatever wrong you may have unwittingly
brought about by the presence of a blackguard under your roof, you
have done your best to atone for that wrong. The most sensitive, the
most punctilious of men could do no more.”

“I thank you, Theodore, for your sympathy. Yes, I have done my best
for her—you will bear witness to that.”

“A father could scarcely do more for an erring daughter. I only wish
her mother felt half as kindly towards her as you, upon whom her
claim is so slight.”

“No, no; it is a substantial claim. She is fatherless, and her mother
is dependent upon me. I stand, as it were, _in loco parentis_. Well,
we will say no more about her; she must go her own way. Only, if ever
you find an opportunity of helping her—for me, you will do me a great
favour by taking prompt advantage of it.”

“I shall gladly do so. I am interested in her for her own sake, as
well as for yours.”

“You are a good fellow, Theodore, and I know you wish us well. I will
go a step further than that and say I know that I can trust you.”

This was said with an earnestness which impressed Theodore. It seemed
to him almost as if his kinsman foresaw that inevitable hour in which
there must be perfect unreserve between them—in which the younger
man would have to say to his senior and superior in rank, “I know
the secret of your earlier years. I know the dark cloud that has
overshadowed your life.”

They talked for a little while of indifferent subjects, and then Lord
Cheriton proposed a stroll in the direction of the well.

“I should like to see whether those fellows have begun work,” he said.

The old garden looked its sleepiest in the westering sunlight, but
there was business going on there nevertheless, and a great heap of
damp clay had been flung out by the side of the low brick parapet.
Two men were at work below, and there were two men above, while a
fifth, a foreman and leading light, looked on and gave directions.

“Glad to see you’ve tackled the job, Carter,” said Lord Cheriton.

“Yes, my lord, we’ve got on to it pretty well. Could I have a word
with your lordship?”

“Certainly, as many words as you like. How mysterious you look,
Carter! There is nothing in your communication that Mr. Dalbrook is
not to hear, I suppose?”

“No, my lord, Mr. Dalbrook don’t matter; but I thought you wouldn’t
care for everybody to know, lest it should get round to her ladyship,
and give her a scare.”

“What are you driving at, Carter, with your ladyships and your
scares? Have you seen a ghost at the bottom of the well?”

“No, my lord, but the men found this in the surface clay, and I
thought it might have some bearing upon—last year—the murder.”

He dropped out his words hesitatingly, as if he hardly dared approach
that ghastly theme, and then took something out of his jacket pocket,
and handed it to Lord Cheriton.

It was a Colt’s revolver, by no means of the newest make, rusted by
lying long under water. The foreman had amused his leisure since
the discovery in trying to rub off the rust with a large cotton
handkerchief, assisted by his corduroy coat-sleeve, and had succeeded
in polishing a small silver plate upon the butt of the pistol so as
to make the initials “T. D.” engraved upon it easily decipherable.

There was not much in the discovery perhaps; but by the ghastly
change in Lord Cheriton’s face Theodore saw that to him at least
it appeared of fatal significance. His hand shook as it held the
pistol, his eyes had a look of absolute horror as they scrutinized
it; and nothing could be more obvious than the effort with which he
controlled his agitation, and looked from the builder’s foreman to
Theodore with an assumption of tranquillity.

“It may mean much, or nothing, Carter,” he said, putting the pistol
in his coat pocket. “It was quite right of you to bring the matter
before me.”

“I thought the initials on the pistol might lead to something being
found out, my lord,” said the foreman. “I don’t think there can be
much doubt the murderer chucked it in there.”

“Don’t you? I have gone into the subject of circumstantial evidence
a little deeper than you have, Carter; it was my trade, don’t you
know, just as laying bricks was yours, and I can tell you that the
odds are ten to one against this pistol having belonged to the
murderer. Do you think it likely that the man who shot Sir Godfrey
Carmichael would have gone out of his way to throw his pistol down
that particular well?”

“I don’t know about that, my lord; it would have been a safe
hiding-place, if the water hadn’t given out—and it would be in his
way if he were making for the West Gate. He could hardly have taken a
shorter cut than across this garden.”

“Perhaps not—if both the garden doors were open that night.”

“I don’t think anybody ever saw them shut, my lord, night or day,”
answered Carter, with respectful persistency.

Theodore knew by the very look of the clumsy wooden doors, pushed
back against the old wall, with rusty hinges, and with the tendrils
of vine or plum tree growing over their edges, that the man was
right. The path across this garden and the next garden led in a
direct line to the West Lodge, and it was this way by which the
servants went on most of their errands to the village.

The one idea suggested by the choice of that hiding-place was that
the person who threw away that pistol was familiar with the premises.
The well was about thirty feet away from the path, and screened by
the old espaliers. There was a gap in the espaliers where an ancient
and cankered apple tree had been taken out, and it was by this
opening that the gardeners generally went to draw water. They had
trodden a hard foot-track in their going and coming.

It was always possible that a stranger exploring the grounds
furtively and in haste might have been sharp enough to hit upon the
well as a safe and handy hiding-place. It would, of course, have been
vital to the murderer to get rid of his weapon as soon as possible
after the deed was done, lest he should be taken red-handed and with
that piece of evidence upon him.

Theodore saw in that pistol with the initials “T. D.,” confirmatory
evidence against the husband of Mrs. Danvers, the one person in the
world who had ground for an undying hatred of Lord Cheriton and his
race. He made no remark upon the discovery of the weapon, fearing to
say too much; and he waited quietly to see how his kinsman would act
in the matter. That ghastly change in Lord Cheriton’s countenance
as he examined the pistol, suggested that he had come to the same
conclusion as Theodore. Remorse and horror could hardly have been
more plainly expressed by the human countenance; and what remorse
could be more terrible than that of the man who saw the sin of his
youth visited upon his innocent daughter?

“Shall you take any steps with reference to this discovery?” asked
Theodore, when they had gone half-way back to the house in absolute
silence.

“What steps can I take, do you think? Send for another London
detective—or for the same man again—and give him this pistol? To
what end? He would be no nearer finding the murderer because of the
finding of the pistol.”

“The initials might lead to identification.”

“Did you never hear of such a thing as a second-hand pistol? And
do you think an assassin would make use of a pistol with his own
initials upon it to commit murder? I do not.”

“Not the professional assassin. But we are all agreed that this
murder was an act of vengeance—for some reason at present unknown—and
the semi-lunatic who would commit murder for such a motive would not
be likely to do his work very neatly. His brain would be fevered
by passion or alcohol, in all probability, and he would go to work
blindly.”

“That is no more than a theory, and my experience has shown me that
such theories are generally falsified by fact. The murder was so
far neatly done that the murderer got clear off, in spite of a most
rigorous search. I doubt if the pistol, with initials which may
belong to anybody in the world, will help us to track him after more
than a year.”

“Then you mean to do nothing in the matter?”

“I think not. I cannot see my way to doing anything at present;
but if you like to take the pistol to Scotland Yard and see what
impression it makes upon the experts there——”

“I should much like to do so. I cannot ignore the fact that so
long as Sir Godfrey’s murderer remains undiscovered, there is a
possibility of peril for you and for Juanita, and for Juanita’s
child. Who can tell whether that deadly hatred is appeased—whether
the man who killed your daughter’s husband is not on the watch to
kill you or your daughter—when he sees his opportunity?”

“As for myself, I must take my chance. I would to God that the ball
had struck me instead of my son-in-law. It would have been better—a
lighter chastisement. I have lived my life. I have done all I ever
hoped to do in this world. A few years, more or less, could matter
very little to me. And yet, life is sweet, Theodore, life is sweet!
However heavily we are handicapped, we most of us would choose to
finish our race.”

There was infinite melancholy in his tone, the melancholy of a man
who sees the shadows of a great despair darkening round him, the
melancholy of a man who gives up the contest of life, and feels that
he is beaten.

“Do not say anything to my wife about this business,” he said; “let
her be happy as long as she can. She has not forgotten last summer,
but she is beginning to be something like what she was before that
blow fell upon us. The advent of Juanita’s baby has worked wonders.
There is something to look forward to in that child’s existence. Life
is no longer a cul-de-sac.”

“There is one thing to be done,” said Theodore, after an interval of
silence. “The bullet was kept, of course.”

“Yes, it is in the possession of the police, I believe.”

“Would it not be well to ascertain if it fits the pistol you have in
your pocket?”

“Yes. I will go to the station to-morrow and look into that.”

There was no more said about the pistol that evening. Theodore felt
that it would be cruelty to dwell upon the subject, seeing that his
kinsman had been deeply affected by the discovery, and that he was
oppressed by a gloom which he strove in vain to shake off.

It was evident to Theodore that those initials on the pistol had
a terrible meaning for Lord Cheriton, that he recognized in those
initials the evidence of an injured husband’s vengeance, a hatred
which had been undiminished by the lapse of years.

He told himself that the tardiness of that revenge might be accounted
for by various contingencies, any one of which would lessen the
improbability of that long interval between the wrong done and the
retribution exacted. It might be that the murderer had been an exile
in a distant world. It might be that he had been a criminal fretting
himself against the bars of a felon’s prison, nursing his anger in
the dull, dead days of penal servitude. Such things have been.

It was clear to Theodore Dalbrook that in those initials upon the
Colt’s revolver lay the clue to the murderer, and that Lord Cheriton
shrank with horror from the revelation which those two letters
might bring about. Yet, whatever evil might come upon the master
of Cheriton out of the secret past, it was vital that the murderer
should be found, lest his second crime should be more hideous than
his first; and Theodore was resolved that he would spare no effort in
the endeavour to find him, living or dead.

“God grant that I may find a grave rather than the living man,” he
thought, “for Cheriton’s sake. God grant that he may be spared the
humiliation of having his story told to all the world.”

He went into Cheriton village early upon the following afternoon,
and dropped in upon the doctor, an old inhabitant, whose father
and grandfather before him had prescribed for all the parish, rich
and poor. Mr. Dolby, _par excellence_ Dr. Dolby, was a bachelor, a
spare, sharp-visaged man of about forty, social and expansive, a keen
sportsman, and a good billiard player, a man whose lines had been
set in pleasant places, for he had inherited a roomy old cottage,
with capacious stabling, and twenty acres of the fattest meadow-land
in Cheriton parish, and he led exactly that kind of life which his
soul loved. It would have been no gain to such a man to have changed
places with Baron Rothschild or Lord Salisbury. He would have been
in all that constitutes human happiness a loser by such an exchange.
So cheery a person was naturally popular in a narrow world like
Cheriton, and Mr. Dolby was a general favourite, a favourite in
polite society, and in the billiard-room at the Cheriton Arms, which,
in default of a club, served as the afternoon and evening rendezvous
for lawyer, doctor, and the tenant-farmers of a gentlemanly class—the
smock-frock farmers and tradespeople having their own particular
meeting place at the Old House at Home, a public-house at the other
end of the village. Theodore had known Mr. Dolby from his childhood,
and the medical adviser of Cheriton was an occasional dropper-in at
the luncheon table in Cornhill, when business transactions with his
tailor or his banker took him to the county town. There was nothing
unusual, therefore, in Theodore’s afternoon call at Dovecotes, a
somewhat picturesque name which had been given to the doctor’s
domicile by his predecessor, who had devoted his later years to an
ardent cultivation of Barbs and Jacobins and other aristocratic
birds, and who had covered a quarter of an acre of garden ground with
pigeon-houses of various construction.

Theodore found Mr. Dolby smoking his afternoon pipe in the seclusion
of his surgery. He had made a long morning round, had driven
something between twenty and thirty miles, and considered himself
entitled to what he called his otium cum whisky and water, which
refreshment stood on a small table at his elbow while he lolled in
his capacious easy chair.

He welcomed his visitor with effusion, and insisted on calling for
another syphon, and having another little table arranged at the elbow
of the other easy chair.

“Make yourself comfortable, old chap, and let us have a jaw,” he
said. “I haven’t seen you for ages. Are you at the Chase?”

They talked of the usual village topics, glanced at the great world
of politics, speculated upon the prospects of the shooting season,
and then Theodore approached the real business of his visit.

“There is a fellow I am interested in from a business point of view,”
he began, “who has been hanging about this place, off and on, for the
last five and twenty years, I believe, though I have never happened
to meet him. He is a drinking man, and altogether a bad lot; but it
is my business to hunt him down.”

“On account of some property, I suppose?”

“Yes, on account of some property. Now, I know what an observer you
are, Dolby, and what a wonderful memory you have——”

“I haven’t wasted it up in London,” interjected Dolby. “A week in
Oxford Street and the Strand would take ten years off my memory.
It’s pretty clear at present, thank God. Well, now, what about this
fellow, what kind of a fellow is he—a gentleman or a cad?”

“He was once a gentleman, but he may have tumbled pretty low by this
time. He was going down hill at a good pace five and twenty years
ago.”

“Egad, then he must be at the bottom of the hill, I take it. What is
he like—fat or lean, dark or fair, short or tall?”

“A tall man, fair complexion, a man who has once been handsome, a
showy-looking man,” answered Theodore, quoting the house-agent.

“That will do. Yes, just such a man as that was at the Arms one
night—six—eight—upon my word I believe it must have been ten years
ago. A man who put on a good deal of side, though his clothes were no
end seedy—ragged edges to his trousers, don’t you know—and though his
hand shook like an aspen leaf. I played a fifty game with him, and
I should say, though I beat him easy, that he had once been a fine
player. He was in wretched form, poor creature, but——”

“Ten years ago, do you really think it was as long ago you saw him?”

“I know it was. It would be in seventy-four, that was the year
Potter was returned for Screwmouth. I remember we were all talking
of the election the night that fellow was there. Yes, I remember him
perfectly; a tall, fair man, a wreck, but with the traces of former
good looks. I fancy he must have been a soldier. He slept at the Arms
that night, and I met him rather early next morning, before nine
o’clock, coming away from the Chase—met him within ten yards of the
West Lodge.”

“Did he talk about Lord Cheriton?”

“A good deal—talked rather wild, too—and would have blackguarded
your cousin if we hadn’t shut him up pretty sharply. He pretended to
have been intimate with him before he made his way at the Bar, and he
talked in the venomous way a man who has been a failure very often
does talk about a man who has been a success. It’s only human nature,
I suppose. There’s a spice of venom in human nature.”

“Have you never seen this man at Cheriton since that occasion—never
within the last ten years?”

“Never, and I should be inclined, looking at the gentleman from a
professional point of view, to believe that he must have been under
the turf for a considerable portion of that period. I don’t think
there could have been three years’ life in the man I played billiards
with that evening. Hard lines for him, poor beggar, if there was
property coming to him. He looked as if he wanted it bad enough.”

“What had he been doing at the Chase, do you suppose?”

“I haven’t the least idea. I was driving in my cart when I passed
him. I looked back and watched him for two or three minutes. He
was walking very slowly, and with a languid air, like a man who
was not used to walking. Ten years—no, Theodore—I don’t think it’s
possible such a shaky subject as that could have lasted ten years.
One certainly does see very miserable creatures crawling on for years
after they have been ticketed for the undertaker—but this man—no—I
don’t think he could hold out long after that October morning. I
fancy he was booked for a quick passage.”

“He may have pulled himself together, and turned over a new leaf.”

“Too old, and too far gone for that.”

“Or what if he had done something bad and got himself shut up for a
few years?”

“Penal servitude do you mean? Well, that might do something! It’s a
very severe regimen for the habitual drunkard—and it means kill or
cure. In this case I should say decidedly kill.”

“But it might cure.”

“I should think the chances of cure were as two in two hundred. I
won’t say it would be impossible, not having examined the patient—but
so far as observation can teach a man anything, observation taught me
that the case was hopeless.”

“And yet it is my belief that this man was at Cheriton some time last
year. You know everybody, and talk to everybody, my dear Dolby. I
wish you’d find out for me whether I am right?”

“I’ll do my best,” answered Mr. Dolby cheerfully. “If the man has
been seen by anybody in the village I ought to be able to hear about
him. Everybody was tremendously on the lookout last year, after the
murder, and no stranger could have escaped observation.”

“Perhaps not—but before the murder——”

“Anybody who had been seen shortly before the murder would have been
remembered and talked about. You can have no idea of the intense
excitement that event caused among us. We seemed to talk of nothing
else, and to think of nothing else for months.”

“And you suppose that if the man I want had been about—for a few
hours only, just long enough to come and go away again on that fatal
night, he would have been remembered?”

“I am sure of it. He would have inevitably been taken for the
murderer. Remember, we were all on the alert, ready to fix upon the
first suspicious-looking person our memory could suggest to us.”

“Do you think Johnson would remember the man?”

Johnson was the proprietor of the Cheriton Arms.

“My dear fellow, did you ever find Johnson’s memory available about
any transaction six months old? Johnson’s memory is steeped in beer,
buried in flesh. Johnson is a perambulating barrel of forgetfulness—a
circumambulatory hogshead of stupidity. Ask Johnson to tell you the
Christian name of his grandmother, and I would venture a new hat he
would be unable to answer you. There is nothing to be got out of mine
host of the Cheriton Arms. Be sure of that.”

“I’m afraid you are right,” said Theodore.

He felt as if he had come to a point at which there was no
thoroughfare. There was the pistol, with the initials “T. D.,”
and he had made up his mind that the man for whom those initials
had been engraved was the man who gave his name as Danvers when he
called upon the house-agent, the man whose wife had been known for
years as Mrs. Danvers. He had made up his mind that this man and
no other had murdered Godfrey Carmichael—that many years after the
wife’s death the husband had returned from exile or imprisonment,
embittered so much the more, so much the more vindictive, so much
the more malignant for all that he had suffered in that interval,
and had taken the first opportunity to attack a hated household.
That he would strike again if he should be allowed to live and be at
large Theodore had no doubt. A second murder, and a third murder,
seemed the natural sequence of the first. He remembered the murders
of the Jermys at Stanfield Hall—the savage hatred which tried to slay
four people, two of whom were utterly unconnected with the wrong
that called for vengeance. In the face of such a story as that of
the murderer Rush, who could say that Theodore’s apprehension of
an insatiable malignity, wreaking itself in further bloodshed, was
groundless?

He left Dovecotes disheartened, hardly knowing what his next step was
to be, and very hopeless of tracking a man who had so contrived as to
be unseen upon his deadly errand. He must have come and gone verily
like a thief in the night, sheltered by darkness, meeting no one;
and yet there was the evidence of the servants at the inquest, who
swore to having heard mysterious footsteps outside the house late at
night upon more than one occasion shortly before the murder. If the
murderer had been about upon several nights, creeping round by the
open windows of the reception rooms, watching his opportunity, what
had he done with himself in the day? Where had he hidden himself; how
had he evaded the prying eyes of a village, which is all eyes, all
ears for the unexplained stranger?




CHAPTER XXIX.

    “When haughty expectations prostrate lie
     And grandeur crouches like a guilty thing.”


Theodore walked moodily along the lane leading to the West Gate,
brooding over discrepancies and difficulties in the case which he
had set himself to unravel. As he drew near Mrs. Porter’s cottage he
saw Lord Cheriton come out of the porch, unattended. He came slowly
down the steps to the gate, with his head bent, and his shoulders
stooping wearily, an attitude which was totally unlike his usual
erect carriage, an attitude which told distinctly of mental trouble.

Theodore overtook him, and walked by his side, at the risk of being
considered intrusive. He was very curious as to his kinsman’s motive
for visiting Mrs. Porter, after yesterday’s conversation about Mercy.

“Have you been trying to bring about a reconciliation between mother
and daughter?” he asked.

“No. I have told you that little good could result from bringing
those two obstinate spirits together. You have seen for yourself
what the daughter can be—how perverse, how cruel, what a creature of
prejudice and whim. The mother’s nature is still harder. What good
could come of bringing such a daughter back to such a mother? No, it
was with no hope of reconciliation that I called upon Mrs. Porter. I
have been thinking very seriously of your friend Ramsay’s suggestion
of mental trouble. I regret that I did not act upon the hint sooner,
and get my friend Mainwaring to see her, and advise upon the case. I
shall certainly consult him about her—but as he has a very important
practice, and a large establishment under his care, it may be very
difficult for him to come to Cheriton. I think, therefore, it might
be well to send her up to the neighbourhood of London—to some quiet
northern suburb, for instance, within half an hour’s drive of
Mainwaring’s asylum, which is near Cheshunt; then, if it should be
deemed advisable to place her under restraint for a time—though I
cannot suppose that likely—the business could be easily accomplished.

“Your idea then would be——”

“To take her up to London, with her servant, as soon as I have
found comfortable lodgings for her in a quiet neighbourhood. I
have proposed the journey to her this afternoon, on the ground of
her being out of health and in need of special advice. I told her
that people had remarked upon her altered appearance, and that I
was anxious she should have the best medical care. She did not deny
that she was ailing. I think, therefore, there will be very little
difficulty in getting her away when I am ready to remove her.”

“What is your own impression as to her mental condition?”

“I regret to say that my impression very much resembles that of your
friend. I see a great change in her since I last had any conversation
with her. Yes, I fear that there is something amiss, and that it is
no longer well for her to live in that cottage, with a young girl
for her only companion. It would be far better for her to be in a
private asylum—where, hers being a very mild case, life might be made
easy and agreeable for her. I know my friend Mainwaring to be a man
of infinite benevolence, and that there would be nothing wanting to
lighten her burden.”

He sighed heavily. There was a look in his face of unutterable care,
of a despondency which saw no issue, no ray of light far off in the
thickening gloom. Theodore thought he looked aged by several years
since yesterday, as if the evidence of the pistol had struck him to
the heart.

“He knows now that it was his own sin that brought about this evil,”
thought Theodore.

He could conceive the agony of the father’s heart, knowing that
for his own wrong-doing his innocent daughter had been called upon
to make so terrible an expiation. He could penetrate into the dark
recesses of the sinner’s mind, where remorse for that early error,
and for all the false steps which it had necessitated, dominated
every other thought. Till yesterday James Dalbrook might have
supposed his sin a thing of the past, atoned for and forgiven—its
evil consequences suffered in the past, the account ruled off in the
book of fate, and the acquittance given. To-day he knew that his
sin had cost him his daughter’s happiness; and over and above that
horror of the past there lay before him the hazard of some still
greater horror in the future. Could anybody wonder that his eyes were
sunken and dull, as they never had been before within Theodore’s
memory? Could anybody wonder at the strained look in the broad,
open forehead, beneath which the eyes looked out wide apart under
strongly-marked brows; or at the hard lines about the mouth, which
told of sharpest mental pain?

       *       *       *       *       *

Late that evening, when Lady Cheriton had gone to bed, Theodore
approached the subject of the pistol.

“Did you compare the ball with the revolver that was found
yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes. The ball fits the bore. I don’t know that the fact goes to
prove much—but so far as it goes it is now in the knowledge of
our local police. Unfortunately they are not the most brilliant
intellects I know of.”

“If you will let me have the pistol to-night before we go to bed
I will go up to town by an early train to-morrow and take it to
Scotland Yard, as you suggested.”

“I suggested nothing of the kind, my dear Theodore. I attach very
little importance to the discovery of the pistol as a means towards
discovering the murderer. I said you might take it to Scotland Yard
if you liked—that was all.”

“I should like to do so. I should feel better satisfied——”

“Oh, satisfy yourself, by all means,” interrupted Lord Cheriton
irritably. “You are great upon the science of circumstantial
evidence. There is the pistol,” taking it out of a drawer in the
large writing-table. “Do what you like with it.”

“You are not offended with me I hope?”

“No, I am only tired—tired of the whole business, and of the
everlasting talk there has been about it. If it is a vendetta, if the
hand that killed Godfrey Carmichael is to kill me, and my daughter,
and her son—if my race is to be eradicated from the face of this
earth by an unappeasable hatred I cannot help my fate. I cannot parry
the impending blow. Nor can you or Scotland Yard protect me from my
foe, Theodore.”

“Scotland Yard may find your foe and lock him up.”

“I doubt it. But do as you please.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Theodore’s train left Wareham at nine o’clock. There was a still
earlier train at seven, by which farmers and other enterprising
spirits who wanted to take time by the forelock were accustomed to
travel; but to be in time for the nine o’clock train Theodore had to
leave Cheriton at a quarter to eight, and to drive to the distant
town in the dog-cart made and provided for station work, and drawn by
one of two smart cobs kept for the purpose.

He left the park by the West Gate. He had to wait longer than usual
for the opening of the gate; and when the chubby-cheeked maid-servant
came down the steps with a key in her hand and unlocked the gate
there was that in her manner which indicated a fluttered mind.

“Oh, if you please, sir, I’m sorry to keep you waiting so long, but
I couldn’t find the key just at first, though I thought I’d hung it
up on the nail last night after I locked the gate—but I was so upset
at my mistress leaving so suddenly—never saying a word about it
beforehand—that I hardly knew what I was doing.”

Theodore stopped the groom as he drove through the gate. He had a few
minutes to spare, and could afford himself time to question the girl,
who had a look of desiring to be interrogated.

“What is this about your mistress leaving suddenly?” he asked. “Do
you mean that Mrs. Porter has gone away—on a journey.”

“Yes, indeed, sir. She that never left home before since I was a
child—for I’ve known her ever since I can remember, and never knew
her to be away for so much as a single night. And the first thing
this morning when I was lighting the kitchen fire she opens the door
and just looks in and says—‘Martha, I’m going to London. Don’t expect
me back till you see me. There’s a letter on the parlour table,’ she
says. ‘Let it lie there till it’s called for—don’t you touch it, nor
yet the box,’ and she shuts the kitchen door and walks off just as
quietly as if she was going to early church, as she has done many a
time before it was daylight. I was that upset that I knelt before the
stove a good few minutes before I could realize that she was gone—and
then I run out and looked after her. She was almost out of sight,
walking up the lane towards Cheriton.”

“Had she no luggage—did she take nothing with her?”

“Nothing. Not so much as a hand-bag.”

“What time was this?”

“It struck six a few minutes after I went back to the kitchen.”

“What about the letter—and the box your mistress spoke of?”

“There they are, sir, on the parlour table, where she left them.
_I’m_ not going to touch them,” said the girl, with emphasis. “She
told me not, and I’m not going to disobey her.”

“To whom is the letter addressed?”

“Do you mean who it’s for, sir?”

“Yes.”

“It’s for his lordship—and it’s to lie there till his lordship sends
for it.”

“In that case I may as well give it to his lordship’s servant, who
can take it up to the house presently.”

“I don’t know if that will be right, sir. She said it was to be
called for.”

“Then we call for it. I, his lordship’s cousin, and James, his
lordship’s groom. Won’t that do for you?”

“I suppose that will be right, sir,” the girl answered doubtfully.
“The letter and the box are both on the table, and I wasn’t to
interfere with either of ’em, and I’m not going to it. That’s all I
can say.”

The girl was swollen with the importance of her mission as being
associated with a mystery, and she was also in lively dread of her
very severe mistress, who might come down the lane at any moment and
surprise her in some act of dereliction.

Theodore passed her by and went into the sitting-room where he had
taken tea with the Kempsters and Cuthbert Ramsay.

A letter lay on the carved oak table in front of the window, and
beside the letter there stood a walnut-wood box, eighteen inches by
nine. The letter was addressed, in a bold, characteristic hand, to
Lord Cheriton. To be called for. The box had a small brass plate upon
the lid, and a name engraved upon the plate—

  THOMAS C. DARCY,
  9th Foot.

No one who had ever seen such a box before could doubt that this was
a pistol-case. It was unlocked, and Theodore lifted the lid.

One pistol lay in its place, neatly fitted into the velvet-lined
receptacle. The place for the second pistol was vacant.

Theodore took the Colt’s revolver from his pocket and fitted it into
the place beside the other pistol. It fitted exactly, and the two
pistols were alike in all respects—alike as to size and fashion,
alike as to the little silver plate upon the butt, and the initials,
“T. D.”

Thomas Darcy! Darcy was the name of Evelyn Strangway’s husband, and
one of those pistols which had belonged at some period to Evelyn
Strangway’s husband had been found in the well in the fruit garden,
and the other in possession of Lord Cheriton’s _protégée_ and
pensioner, the humble dependant at his gates, Mrs. Porter.

Theodore changed his mind as to his plan of procedure. He did not
send Mrs. Porter’s letter to Lord Cheriton by the groom as he had
intended, after he himself had been driven to Wareham. His journey
to London might be deferred now; indeed, in his present condition
of mind, he was not the man to interview the authorities of
Scotland Yard. He left Mrs. Porter’s letter in its place beside the
pistol-case, and wrote a hasty line to his kinsman at Mrs. Porter’s
writing-table, where all the materials for correspondence were
arranged ready to his hand.

“The West Lodge, 8.15. Pray come to me here at once, if you can.
I have made a terrible discovery. There is a letter for you. Mrs.
Porter has gone to London.”

He put these lines into an envelope, sealed it, and then took it out
to the groom, who was waiting stolidly, neatly tickling the cob’s
ears now and again, with an artistic circular movement of the lash,
which brought into play all the power and ease of his wrist.

“Drive back to the house with that note as fast as you can,” said
Theodore, “and let his lordship know that I am waiting for him here.”




CHAPTER XXX.

    “Thy love and hate are both unwise ones, lady.”


“Well, Theodore, what is your discovery?” asked Lord Cheriton half
an hour later, the two men standing face to face in Mrs. Porter’s
sitting-room, amidst the silence of the summer morning, a gigantic
bee buzzing in the brown velvet heart of a tall sunflower, painfully
audible to the younger man’s strained ears.

“There is a letter, sir. You had better read that before I say
anything,” answered Theodore.

It was years since he had called his cousin sir, not since he had
been a schoolboy, and had been encouraged to open his mind upon
politics or cricket, over his single glass of claret, after dinner.
On those occasions a boyish respect for greatness had prompted the
ceremonious address; to-day it came to his lips involuntarily—as if a
barrier of ice were suddenly interposed between himself and the man
he had esteemed and admired for so many years of his life.

Lord Cheriton held the letter in his hand unopened, while he stood
looking at the pistol-case, where both pistols occupied their
places—one bright and undamaged, the other rusted and spoilt, as to
outward appearance at least. He was ghastly pale, but not much more
so than he had looked yesterday after he left Mrs. Porter’s cottage.

“That is my discovery,” said Theodore, pointing to the pistols. “I
stopped short in my journey to Scotland Yard when I found that case
upon the table here. I want to secure Juanita and her son from the
possibilities of an insatiable hatred—but I don’t want to bring
trouble—or disgrace—upon you, if I can help it. You have always been
good to me, Lord Cheriton. You have regarded the claims of kindred.
It would be base in me if I were to forget that you are of my own
blood—that you have a right to my allegiance. Tell me, for God’s
sake, what I am to do. Trust me, if you can. I know so much already
that it will be wisest and best for you to let me know all—so that I
may help you to find the murderer, and to avoid any reopening of old
wounds.”

“I doubt if you or any one else can help me, Theodore,” said Lord
Cheriton wearily, looking straight before him through the open
lattice and across the little flower-garden where the roses were
still in their plenitude of colour and perfume. “I doubt if all my
worldly experience will enable me to help myself even. There is
a pass to which a man may come in his life—not wholly by his own
fault—at which his case seems hopeless. He sees himself suddenly
brought to a dead stop, deep in the mire of an impassable road, and
with the words ‘No thoroughfare’ staring him in the face. I have come
to just that point.”

“Oh, but there is always an issue from every difficulty for a man of
courage and resolution,” said Theodore. “I know you are not a man to
be easily broken down by Fate. I am half in the light and half in the
dark. It must have been the owner of that pistol who killed Godfrey
Carmichael—but how came the case and the fellow-pistol into Mrs.
Porter’s possession? Was she that man’s accomplice? And who was he,
and what was he, that she should be associated with him?”

“You believe that it was a man who fired that pistol?”

“Most assuredly. I believe it was the man whose wife lived for many
years at Myrtle Cottage, Camberwell Grove; the man who called upon a
house-agent at Camberwell to make inquiries about his wife, and who
called himself by the name she bore in the neighbourhood—the name of
Danvers. Danvers may have been only an alias for Darcy, and in that
case the man who called upon the agent was the husband of Evelyn
Strangway, and the woman who lived for so many years in the seclusion
of Myrtle Cottage was old Squire Strangway’s only daughter, and
Captain Darcy’s runaway wife.”

“And you think Tom Darcy murdered my son-in-law?” asked Lord
Cheriton, with a ghastly smile.

“I do.”

“And what do you suppose to have been the motive of that murder?”

“Revenge—revenge upon the man who tempted his wife away from him.”

“The cur who ill-used and neglected his wife—whose conduct drove her
from her wretched home, and justified her abandonment of him—was
never man enough to conceive such a revenge, or to hate with such a
hatred. However, in this case we need not enter upon the question of
motive. There is one reason why Tom Darcy cannot be suspected of any
part in Sir Godfrey’s murder. He died nine years ago, and was buried
at my expense in Norwood Cemetery.”

“Great God! then who could have fired that pistol?”

“The answer to that question is most likely here,” replied Lord
Cheriton quietly, as he tore open the envelope of Mrs. Porter’s
letter.

The letter was brief but comprehensive, and all-sufficing.

  “You know now who killed your cherished daughter’s husband. If she
  is like me she will carry her sorrow to the grave. If she is like
  me all her days will be darkened by cruel memories. Your broken
  promise blighted my life. I have blighted her life—an eye for an
  eye. I told you three and twenty years ago that a day would come
  when you would be sorry for having abandoned me. I think that day
  _has_ come.

  “EVELYN DARCY.”

Lord Cheriton handed the letter to his kinsman without a word.

“Since you know so much of my history you may as well know all,” he
said; “so know the thorny pillow which a man makes for himself when
he sacrifices the best years of his life to an illicit love.”

Theodore read those ghastly lines in silence. The signature told all.

“What in Heaven’s name brought Evelyn Strangway to be a lodge-keeper
at the entrance of the house where she was born?” he asked, at last.
“How could you permit such a life-long humiliation?”

“It was her own desire—it was at her insistence I allowed her to come
here. I opposed her fancy with all my power of argument, with all
the strength of opposition. I offered to provide her with a home in
town or country—at home or abroad—near at hand or at the Antipodes.
I offered to settle four hundred a year upon her—to sink capital to
that amount—to make her future and that of—our child—secure against
the chances of fate.”

“Your child—Mercy!” exclaimed Theodore.

“Yes, Mercy. My daughter and hers. You understand now why she refused
my help. She would take nothing from her father. There was a like
perversity in mother and daughter, a determination to make me drink
the cup of remorse to the dregs. Oh, Theodore, it is a long and
shameful story. To you—for the first time in my life—to you only
among mankind these lips have spoken of it. I have kept my secret.
I have brooded upon it in the slow hours of many and many a wakeful
night. I have never forgotten—I have not been allowed to forget. If
time could have erased or softened that bitter memory under other
conditions I know not; but for me the case was hopeless. My victim
was there, at my gates, a perpetual memento of my folly and my
wrong-doing.”

“Strange that a woman of refinement and education should elect to
fill so degrading a position!”

“Perhaps only a refined and highly educated woman could have devised
so refined a punishment. ‘Let me live near you,’ she pleaded; ‘let me
live at the gate of the park I loved so well when I was a child—let
me see you pass sometimes—open the gate for you and just see you go
by—without a word, without a look even upon your part. It will be
some consolation for me in my lonely, loveless life. I shall know
that at least I am not forgotten.’ Forgotten? as if it had been
possible for me to forget, in the happiest circumstances, even if she
had made for herself a home at the farthest extremity of Europe, or
in the remotest of our colonies. As it was, her presence embittered
the place I loved—the great reward and aim of my life. Her shadow
fell across my young wife’s pathway—her influence darkened all my
days.”

He began to pace up and down the little room with a feverish air.
He seemed to find a sort of relief in talking of this burden which
he had borne so long in secret—borne with a smile upon his lips,
suffering that silent agony which strong men have borne again and
again in the history of mankind, carrying their silent punishment
upon them till the grave revealed the hidden canker, and laid bare
the festering wound which had rankled unsuspected by the world.

“She was cruelly treated by her husband, Theodore. A young and
beautiful woman, married to a profligate and a sot. It had been a
love-match, as the world calls it—that is to say, a marriage brought
about by a schoolgirl’s impatience to break her bonds, and a woman’s
first delight in hearing herself called beautiful. She had flung
herself away upon a handsome reprobate; and three or four years after
marriage she found herself alone and neglected in a shabby lodging in
one of the squalidest streets off the Strand. I can see the wretched
rooms she lived in, to-day, as I stand here—the lodging-house
furniture, the dingy curtains darkening the dirty windows looking
into the dirty street. What a home for youth and beauty!”

He paused, with an impatient sigh, took another turn across the
narrow space, and then resumed:

“Our acquaintance began by accident—under an umbrella. I met them
together one night, husband and wife, leaving the little Strand
Theatre in the rain. I heard him tell her that it was not worth while
to take a cab, they were so near home; and something in her proud,
handsome face and her contemptuous way of replying to him caught my
attention and interested me in her. I offered my umbrella, and we all
three walked to Essex Street together. Just in that fortuitous way
began the alliance which was to give its colour to all my life. The
husband cultivated my acquaintance—was glad to meet me at my club—and
dined with me as often as I cared to asked him. We used to go to
Essex Street after dining together, and finish the evening with her,
and so by degrees I came to know all about her—that she was the only
daughter of the owner of Cheriton Chase; that she was very handsome,
and very clever, though only half-educated; that she had offended
her father by her marriage, and that she had not brought her husband
a penny; that he neglected her, and that he drank; and that she was
miserable. I came to know this very soon; I came very soon to love
her. She was the first woman I had ever cared for, and I loved her
passionately.”

He took another turn, and sighed again, regretfully, despairingly, as
one who looks back upon the pallid ghost of a love that has long been
dead.

“It began with pity. I was so sorry for her, poor soul, her wasted
life, her slighted beauty. God knows that for a long time I had no
thought of sin. Gradually the yearning to see more of her, to bring
some brightness and pleasure into her life, became too strong for
prudence, and I persuaded her to meet me unknown to her husband. We
planned little excursions, innocent enough in themselves, a morning
drive and a modest luncheon at Richmond, or Greenwich, or Jack
Straw’s Castle, a trip to Hampton Court or Windsor by boat or rail.
She had hardly any acquaintances in London, and there was little fear
of her being recognized. We went to a theatre together now and then,
and sat in a dark stage box, happy, talking of an impossible future
in the intervals of the performance. We never said as much, but I
think we had both a vague idea that Providence would help us—that her
husband would die young, and leave us free to be happy together. Yes,
we were very fond of each other, very single-hearted in those days.
She was only two and twenty, remember, and I was still a young man.”

Another pause, another sigh, and a look across the roses, as if
across the long lapse of years to an unforgotten past.

“Heaven knows how long we might have gone on in this way, without
sin, if not without treachery to the husband, who cared so little for
his wife that it seemed scarcely dishonourable to deceive him. Our
fate was precipitated by circumstances. Darcy surprised a little note
of mine, asking Evelyn to meet me at a theatre. He attacked his wife
brutally, refused to believe anything except the worst. He called
her by names that were new and hideous to her ear, and her soul rose
up in arms against him. She defied him, ran out of the house, took
a cab, and came to my chambers in the foggy November evening. She
came to me helpless, friendless, with no one in this wide world to
love her or to protect her, except me. This was the turning-point.
Of course she could not stay there to be seen by my clerk and my
laundress. I took her to Salisbury that night, and we spent a
fortnight moving from village to village along the south coast of
Devonshire. My hope was that Darcy would apply for a divorce, and
that in less than a year I might make the woman I loved my wife. I
rejoiced in the thought of his obscurity and hers. The record of
the case would pass unnoticed in the papers, and years hence, when
I should have made a position at the Bar, nobody need know that the
wife I loved and honoured was once the runaway wife of another man. I
had argued without allowing for the malignity of a cur. Darcy wrote
his wife one of the most diabolical letters that ever was penned by
man; he wreaked his venom upon her—upon her, the weaker sinner; he
called her by all the vile epithets in his copious vocabulary, and
he told her that she should never have the right to the name of an
honest woman, for that he would sooner hang himself than divorce her.
And so she was to drag her chain for the rest of his days; and so she
was to pay the bitter price of having trusted her young life to a
low-bred scoundrel.”

“Hard luck for both of you,” said Theodore.

“Yes, it was indeed hard luck. If you could know how truly and
entirely I loved her in those days—how completely happy we should
have been in each other’s society, but for the embittering
consciousness of our false position. Cut off by his malevolence from
escape by divorce, we naturally hoped for a day when we should be
released by his death. His habits were not those which conduce to
length of years.

“We talked of the future—we had our plans and dreams about that life
which was to be ours in after-days, when I should be making a large
income, and when she would be really my wife. With that hope before
her she was content to live in the strictest seclusion, to economize
in every detail of our existence, to know no pleasure except that of
my society. Never did a handsome woman resign herself to a duller or
more unselfish existence—and yet I believe for the first few years
she was happy. We were both happy—and we were full of hope.

“I remember the day she first suggested to me that I should buy
Cheriton Chase when it came into the market. I was beginning to be
employed in important cases, and to get big fees marked upon my
briefs, and I had taken silk. I had made my name, and I was saving
money. Yet the suggestion that I should buy a large estate was too
wild for any one but a woman to have made. From that hour, however,
it was Evelyn’s _idée fixe_. She had a passionate love for her
birth-place, an overweening pride in her race and name. She urged me
to accumulate money—the estate would be sacrificed at half its value,
perhaps,—would go for an old song. She became rigidly economical,
would hardly allow herself a new gown, and her keenest delight was
in the deposit notes I brought her, as my money accumulated at the
Union Bank. She had no idea of investments, or interest for my
accumulations. Her notions about money were a child’s notions—the
idea of saving a large sum to buy the desire of her heart; and the
desire of her heart was Cheriton Chase.

“God knows I was honest and earnest enough in those days. I meant to
buy that estate, for her sake, if it was possible to be done. I meant
to marry her directly she was free to become my wife. My fidelity had
not wavered after a union of ten years and more—but Darcy was very
far from dying. He had hunted out his wife in her quiet retreat, had
threatened and annoyed her, and I had been obliged to buy him off by
paying his passage to Canada—where he had been quartered with his
regiment years before, and which he pretended would open a new field
for him. Our case, so far as he was concerned, seemed hopeless, and I
was beginning to feel the darkness of the outlook, when I made Maria
Morales’ acquaintance.

“It was the old, old story, Theodore. God forbid you should ever
go through that hackneyed experience. Just as the old chain was
beginning to drag heavily, a new face appeared upon my pathway—a
girlish face, bright with promise and hope. I saw the opportunity
of a union which would smooth my way to a great position—crown the
edifice of my fortune, give me a wife of whom I might be proud. Could
I ever have been proud of the woman who had sacrificed her good name
for my sake? I was bound to her by every consideration of honour and
duty. But there was the fatal stain across both our lives. I could
not take her into society without the fear of hearing malignant
whispers as we passed. However well these social secrets may be kept,
there is always some enemy to hunt them out, and the antecedents of
James Dalbrook’s wife would have been public property.

“And here was a beautiful and innocent girl who loved me well
enough to accept me as her husband although I was twenty years her
senior, loved me with that youthful upward-looking love which is of
all sentiments the most attractive to a man who has lived a hard
work-a-day life in a hard work-a-day world. To spend an hour with
Maria was to feel a Sabbath peacefulness which solaced and refreshed
my soul. I felt ten years younger when I was with her than I felt in
my own—home.”

He stopped, with a heart-broken sigh.

“Oh, Theodore, beware of such burdens as that which I laid upon my
shoulders; beware of such a chain as I wound about my steps. What
a dastard a man feels himself when his love begins to cool for
the woman who cast her life upon one chance—who leans upon him as
the beginning and end of her existence. I have walked up and down
the quiet pathway before Myrtle Cottage for an hour at a stretch,
dreading to go in, lest she should read my treason in my face. The
break came at last—suddenly. I paltered with my fate for a long
time. I carried on a kind of Platonic flirtation with Maria Morales,
taking monstrous pains to let her know that I never meant to go
beyond Platonics—reminding her of the difference of our ages, and
of my almost paternal regard—the vain subterfuge of a self-deluded
man. One moment of impulse swept away all barriers, and I left Onslow
Square Maria’s engaged husband. Her father’s generosity precipitated
matters. Squire Strangway had been dead nearly a year, and the
estate was in the hands of the mortgagee, who had been trying to sell
it for some time. My future father-in-law was eager for the purchase
directly I suggested it to him, and my wife’s dowry afforded me the
means of realizing Evelyn’s long-cherished dream.”

“Cruel for her, poor creature.”

“Cruel—brutal—diabolical! I felt the blackness of my treason, and
yet it had been brought about by circumstances rather than by any
deliberate act of mine. I had to go to the woman who still loved me,
and still trusted me, and tell her what I was going to do. I had to
do this, and I did it—by word of mouth—face to face—not resorting to
the coward’s expedient of pen and ink. God help me, the memory of
that scene is with me now. It was too terrible for words; but after
the storm came a calm, and a week later I went across to Boulogne
with her, and saw her comfortably established there at a private
hotel, where she was to remain as long as she liked, while she made
up her mind as to her future residence. The furniture was sent to the
Pantechnicon. The _home_ was broken up for ever.”

“And the daughter, where was she?”

Lord Cheriton answered with a smile of infinite bitterness.

“The daughter had troubled us very little. Evelyn was not an exacting
mother. The child’s existence was a burden to her—rendered hateful by
the stigma upon her birth, which the mother could not forget. Mercy’s
infancy was spent in a Buckinghamshire village, in the cottage of her
foster-mother. Mother and daughter never lived under the same roof
till they came here together, when Mercy was seven years old.”

“Yet, according to village tradition, Mrs. Porter was passionately
fond of her daughter, and broken-hearted at her loss.”

“Village tradition often lies. I do not believe that Evelyn ever
loved her child. She bitterly felt the circumstances of her birth—she
bitterly resented her unhappy fate; but I believe it was her pride,
her deep sense of wrong done to herself, which tortured her rather
than her love for her only child. She is a strange woman, Theodore—a
woman who could do that deed—a woman who could write that letter.
Your friend has fathomed her unhappy secret. She was a mad woman
when she fired that shot. She was mad when she penned that letter.
And now, Theodore, I have trusted you as I have never before trusted
mortal man. I have ripped open an old wound. You know all, and you
see what lies before me. I have to find that woman and to save her
from the consequences of her crime, and to save my daughter and my
grandson from the hazards of a mad woman’s malignity. You can help
me, Theodore, if you can keep a cool, clear brain, and do just what I
ask you to do, and no more.”

He put aside his emotion with one stupendous effort, and became a man
of iron, cool, resolute, unflinching.

“I will obey you implicitly,” said Theodore.

He had been completely won by his kinsman’s candour. Had James
Dalbrook told him anything less than the truth he would have despised
him. As it was, he felt that he could still respect him, in spite of
that fatal error, which had brought such deadly retribution.

“It is early yet,” said Lord Cheriton, looking at his watch, and
from that to the neat little clock on the mantelpiece, where the
hands pointed to twenty minutes past nine. “The dog-cart is waiting
outside. Do you drive to the Priory and put yourself on guard there
till—till that unhappy woman has been traced. You can tell Juanita
that I have sent you there—that I have heard of dangerous characters
being about, and that I am afraid of her being in the house with only
servants. My wife shall follow you later, and can stay at the Priory
while I am away from home, which I must be, perhaps, for some time. I
have to find her, Theodore.”

“Have you any idea where she may be gone?”

“For the moment, none. She may have made her way to the nearest river
and thrown herself in. Living or dead, I have to find her. That is my
business. And when I have found her I have to get her put away out of
the reach of the law. _That_ is my business.”

“God help you to carry it through,” said Theodore. “I shall stay at
the Priory till I hear from you. Be so kind as to ask Lady Cheriton
to bring my portmanteau and dressing-bag in her carriage this
afternoon. I may tell Juanita that her mother is coming to-day, may I
not?”

“Decidedly! Good-bye. God bless you, Theodore. I know that I may rely
upon your holding your tongue. I know I can rely upon your active
help if I should need you.”

And so with a cordial grasp of hands they parted, Theodore to take
his seat in the dog-cart, and drive towards the Priory to offer
himself to his cousin as her guest for an indefinite period. It was
a curious position in which he found himself; but the delight of
being in Juanita’s society, of being in somewise her protector, was a
counterbalance to the embarrassing conditions under which he was to
approach her.




CHAPTER XXXI.

    “Love’s reason’s without reason.”


The cob was all the fresher for the impatience which he had suffered
in standing for nearly an hour in the lane, and he bowled the
dog-cart along the level roads at a tremendous pace. Theodore arrived
at the Priory before eleven, and found Juanita sitting on the lawn
with her baby in her lap, and the dog Styx at her side. His heart
leapt with gladness at the sight of her sitting there, safe and
happy, in the morning sunshine, for his morbid imagination had been
at work as he drove along, and he had been haunted by hideous visions
of some swift and bloody act which might be done by the fugitive
mad woman before he could reach the Priory. What deed might not be
done by a woman in the state of mind which that woman must have been
in when she left the evidence and the confession of her crime upon
the table and fled out of her house in the early morning? A silent
thanksgiving went up from his heart to his God as he saw Juanita
sitting in the sunshine, smiling at him, holding out her hand to him
in surprised welcome. She was safe, and it was his business to guard
her against that deadly enemy. He knew now whence the danger was
to come—whose the hand he had to fear. It was no longer a nameless
enemy, an inscrutable peril from which he had to defend her.

“How early you are, Theodore. Everybody is well, I hope—there is
nothing wrong at home?”

“No. Every one is well. Your father is going to London for a few
days, and your mother is coming to stay with you during his absence,
and I come to throw myself on your hospitality while she is here.
His lordship has heard of some suspicious characters in your
neighbourhood, and has taken it into his head that it will be well
for you to have me as your guest until your brothers-in-law come to
you for the shooting. I hope you won’t mind having me, Juanita?”

“Mind, no; I am delighted to have you, and my mother, too. I was
beginning to feel rather lonely, and had half decided on carrying
baby off to Swanage. Isn’t he a fortunate boy to have two doating
grandmothers?” She checked herself with a sudden sigh, remembering in
what respect the richly-dowered infant was so much poorer than other
babies. “Yes, darling,” she murmured, bending over the sleeping
face, rosy amidst its lace and ribbons as it nestled against her arm.
“Yes, there is plenty of love for you upon earth, my fatherless one;
and, who knows, perhaps _his_ love is watching over you in heaven.”

After this maternal interlude she remembered the obligations of
hospitality.

“Have you breakfasted, Theodore? You must have left Cheriton very
early.”

Theodore did not tell her how early, but he confessed to having taken
only a cup of tea.

“Then I will order some breakfast out here for you. It is such a
perfect morning. Baby and I will stay with you while you take your
breakfast.”

She called the nurse, who was close by, and gave her orders, and
presently the gipsy table was brought out, and a cosy breakfast was
arranged upon the shining damask, and Theodore was having his coffee
poured out for him by the loveliest hands he had ever seen, while the
nurse paraded up and down the lawn with the newly-awakened baby.

“I cannot understand my father taking an alarm of that kind,” Juanita
said, presently, after a thoughtful silence. “It is so unlike him.
As if any harm could come to me from tramps or gipsies, or even
professional burglars, with half a dozen men-servants in the house,
and all my jewels safe at the Bank. Theodore, does it mean anything?”
she asked, suddenly. “Does it mean that my father has found out
something about the murder?”

He was silent, painfully embarrassed by this home question. To answer
it would be to break faith with Lord Cheriton; to refuse to answer
was in some manner to break his promise to Juanita.

“I must ask you to let me leave that question unanswered for a few
days,” he said. “Whatever discovery has been made it is your father’s
discovery, and not mine. His lips alone can tell it to you.”

“You know who murdered my husband?”

“No. Juanita, I know nothing. The light we are following may be a
false one.”

He remembered how many lying confessions of crime had been made by
lunacy since the history of crime began—how poor distraught creatures
who would not have killed a worm had taken upon themselves the burden
of notorious assassinations, and had put the police to the trouble of
proving them self-accusing perjurers. Might not Mrs. Porter be such
a one as these?

“Ah! but you are following some new light—you are on the track of his
murderer?”

“I think we are. But you must be patient, Juanita. You must wait till
your father may choose to speak. The business is out of my hands now,
and has passed into his.”

“And he is going to London to-day, you say—he is going upon that
business?”

“I have said too much already, Juanita. I entreat you to ask me no
more.”

She gave an impatient sigh, and turned from her cousin to the dog, as
if he were the more interesting companion of the two.

“Well, I suppose I must be content to wait,” she said; “but if you
knew what I have suffered—what I shall suffer till that mystery is
solved—you would not wonder if I feel angry at being kept in the
dark. Has your friend gone back to London?”

“Yes; but he is coming again before my holiday is over. You like him,
I know, Juanita,” he added, looking at her somewhat earnestly.

“Yes, I like him,” she answered, carelessly, but with a faint blush.
“I suppose most people like him, do they not? He is so bright and
clever.”

“I am very glad you like him. He is the most valued friend I
have—indeed, I might almost say he is the only friend I made for
myself at the University. I made plenty of acquaintances, but very
few I cared to meet in after-life. Ramsay was like a brother. It
would have been a real grief to me if our friendship had not lasted.”

“He is ambitious, is he not?”

“Very ambitious.”

“And proud?”

“Very proud; but it is a noble pride—the pride that keeps a man
straight in all his doings—the pride that prefers bread and cheese in
a garret to turtle and venison at a parvenu’s table. He is a splendid
fellow, Nita, and I am proud of his friendship.”

“Is he very busy, that he should be so determined to leave
Dorchester?”

“Yes; he is full of work always. I thought he might have been content
to take two or three weeks’ quiet reading in our sleepy old town, but
he wanted to get back to the hospital. He will come back for a day
or two when the whim seizes him. He has always been erratic in his
pleasures, but steady as a rock in his work.”




CHAPTER XXXII.

    “The heaviness and guilt within my bosom
     Takes off my manhood.”


Lord Cheriton put the pistol-case under his arm and left the
cottage. The case was covered by his loose summer overcoat, and
anybody meeting him in the Park might have supposed that he was
carrying a book, or might have failed to observe that he was carrying
anything whatever. As it happened he met nobody between the West
Gate and the house. He went in at the open window of the library,
locked the pistol-case in one of the capacious drawers of the large
writing-table—drawers which contained many of his most important
documents, and which were provided with the safest lever locks.

When this was done he went to his wife’s morning-room, where she was
generally to be found at this hour, her light breakfast finished, and
her newspaper-reading or letter-writing begun.

“Where have you been so early, James?” she asked, looking up at him
with an affectionate smile. “I was surprised to hear you had gone out
before breakfast.”

He looked at her in silence for a few moments—lost in thought. The
beautiful and gracious face turned towards him in gentle inquiry
had never frowned upon him in all their years of wedded life. Never
had that tranquil affection failed him. There had been no dramatic
passion in their love, no fierce alternations of despair and bliss—no
doubts, no jealousies. His girlish wife had given herself to him
in implicit trustfulness, fond of him, and proud of him, believing
in him with a faith second only to her faith in God. For three and
twenty years of cloudless wedded life she had made his days happy.
Never in all those years had she given him reason for one hour of
doubt or trouble. She had been his loving and loyal helpmate, sharing
his hopes and his ambitions, caring for the people he cared for,
respecting even his prejudices, shaping her life in all things to
please him.

Great heaven! what a contrast with that other woman, whose fiery and
exacting love had made his life subordinate to hers—whose jealousy
had claimed the total surrender of all other ties, of all other
pleasures, had cut him off from all the advantages of society, had
deprived him of the power to make friends among his fellow-men, had
kept him as her bond-slave, accepting nothing less than a complete
isolation from all that men hold best in life.

He looked at his wife’s calm beauty—where scarce a line upon
the ivory-white forehead marked the progress of years—the soft,
gazelle-like eyes lifted so meekly to meet his own. He compared
this placid face with that other face, handsome, too, after its
fashion—long after the bloom of youth had gone—but marked in every
feature with the traces of a nervous temperament, a fiery temper, the
face of a woman in whose character there were none of the elements
of domestic happiness—or, in a word, the face of a Strangway, the
daughter of a perverse and unhappy race, from whose line no life of
happiness and well-doing had arisen within the memory of man.

“My dear Maria, I was wrong in not leaving a message. I was sent for
to Mrs. Porter’s cottage. She has gone away in rather a mysterious
manner.”

“Gone away!”

“Yes. That in itself is rather astonishing, you know; but there was
something so strange in her manner of leaving that I feel it my duty
to look after her. I shall go up to town by the midday train. I have
other business which may keep me in London for a few days, till the
shooting begins, perhaps. I have sent Theodore to the Priory to tell
Juanita that you are going to her this afternoon, and that you will
stay with her till I come back.”

“That is disposing of me rather as if I were a chattel,” said his
wife, smiling.

“I knew you would be glad of a few days’ quiet baby-worship at the
Priory, and I knew this house would be dull for you without any
visitors.”

“Yes, there is always a gloom upon the house when you are away—a much
deeper gloom since last summer. No sooner am I alone than I begin
to think of that dreadful night when my poor girl saw her murdered
husband lying at her feet. Yes, James, you are right in sending me
away. I shall be happy at the Priory with my darling—and she can
never again be happy with me in this house.”

Lord Cheriton breakfasted in his wife’s room—it was only an apology
for breakfast, for he was too agitated to eat; but he refreshed
himself with a cup of strong tea, and he enjoyed the restfulness of
his wife’s companionship while he sat there waiting for the carriage
which was to take him to Wareham.

“What makes you so uneasy about Mrs. Porter?” Lady Cheriton asked
presently.

“The suddenness and strangeness of her departure, in the first place.
It would have been only natural she should have communicated with
you or me before she left. And, in the second place, I have been
made uneasy by an observation of Mr. Ramsay’s. He has conceived the
opinion that Mrs. Porter is not altogether right in her mind—that
there is a strain of madness.”

“Oh, James, that would be dreadful!”

“Yes, it would be dreadful to think of her wandering about alone. The
very fact that she has hardly left that cottage for the last twenty
years, except to go to church, would make her nervous and helpless
among strangers and in a strange town. She would hardly be able to
take care of herself, perhaps—and if, in addition to this, her mind
is not quite right——”

“Oh, poor thing! It is terrible to think of it. And you do not even
know where she has gone?”

“She told the servant she was going to London. God knows whether that
is true or false. She took no luggage, not even a hand-bag.”

“She may have gone to her daughter.”

“To Mercy? Yes, that is an idea. It never occurred to me. She has
been so cold and hard about her daughter in all these years—and yet
it may be so. She may have relented at last.”

A servant announced the carriage. His Lordship’s portmanteau had been
got in, and all was ready.

“Good-bye, Maria. I have no time to lose, as I have inquiries to make
and telegrams to despatch at the station.”

“You will stay in Victoria Street, of course?”

“Yes. I shall telegraph to Mrs. Begby. I am taking Wilson; I shall be
very well taken care of, be sure, dearest.”

He kissed her and hurried away. He sighed as he left that atmosphere
of perfect peace—sighed again as he thought of the business that lay
before him. He had to find her—this murderess—he had to prove that
she was mad—if it were possible—and to put her away for the rest of
her days in some safe retreat, secure from the hazard of discovery—a
hard and bitter task for the man who had once loved her, and whose
love had been her destruction.

He made his inquiries of the station-master. Yes, Mrs. Porter had
left by the early train. She had taken a second-class ticket for
Waterloo.

Lord Cheriton telegraphed to Miss Marian Gray, at 69, Hercules
Buildings, Lambeth—

  “If your mother is with you when you receive this, I beg you to
  detain her till I come.

  “CHERITON.”

His wife’s suggestion seemed to him like inspiration. Where else
could that desolate woman seek for a shelter but under the roof
which sheltered her only child? She was utterly friendless in London
and elsewhere—unless, indeed, her old governess Sarah Newton could be
counted as a friend.

The Weymouth up-train steamed in, and he took his seat in the corner
of a first-class compartment, where he was tolerably secure of being
left to himself for the whole of the journey, guards and porters
conspiring to protect his seclusion, albeit he had not taken the
trouble to engage a compartment. His greatness was known all along
the line.

He had ample leisure for thought during that three hours’ journey,
leisure to live over again that life of long ago which had been
brought so vividly back to his memory by the events of to-day.
He had made it his business to forget that past life, so far as
forgetfulness was possible, with that living reminder for ever at his
gate. Habit had even reconciled him to the presence of Mrs. Porter
at the West Lodge. Her supreme quietude had argued her contentment.
Never by so much as one imprudent word, or one equivocal look, had
she aroused his wife’s doubts as to her past relations with her
employer. She had been accepted by all the little world of Cheriton,
she had behaved in the most exemplary manner; and although he had
never driven in at the West Gate, and seen her standing there in her
attitude of stern humility, without a pang of remorse and a stinging
sense of shame, yet that sharp moment of pain being past, he was able
to submit to her existence as the one last forfeit he had to pay
for his sin. And now he knew that the statue-like calm of her face,
as she had looked up at him in the clear light, under the branching
beeches, had been only the mask of hidden fires—that through all
those years in which she had seemed the image of quiet resignation,
of submission to a mournful fate, she had been garnering up her
vengeance to wreak it upon the offender in his most unguarded hour,
piercing the breast of the father through the innocent heart of the
child. He knew now that hatred had been for ever at his doors, that
angry pride had watched his going in and coming out, under the guise
of humility—that by day and by night hideous thoughts had been busy
in that hyper-active brain, such thoughts as point the way to madness
and to crime.

When he had made up his mind to break his promise to Evelyn Darcy,
and to marry another woman, fifteen years her junior, he had told
himself that the wrench once made, the link once sundered, all would
be over. She would submit as other women have submitted to the common
end of such ties. She could not deem herself more unfortunate than
those other women had been, since his attachment had endured far
longer than the average span of illicit loves. He had been patient
and faithful and unselfish in his devotion for more than a decade.
He would have gone on waiting perhaps had there been a ray of hope;
but Tom Darcy had shown a malignant persistency in keeping alive;
and even were Tom Darcy dead how bitter a thing it would be for the
fashionable Queen’s Counsel to enter society with a wife of damaged
character. In the old days of hopefulness and fond love they had told
each other that the stain upon the past need never be known in that
brilliant future to which they both looked forward; but now he told
himself that despite their secluded life the facts of that past would
ooze out. People would insist upon finding out who Mr. Dalbrook’s
wife was. It would not be enough to say, “She is there—handsome,
clever, and a lady.” Society would peer and pry into the background
of her life. Whose daughter was she? Had she been married before?
And in that case who was her husband? Where had she lived before her
recent marriage? Had she spent her earlier years in the Colonies or
on the Continent, or how was it that society had seen nothing of her?

Those inevitable questions would have made his life a burden and
her life an agony, James Dalbrook told himself; even had Darcy been
so complaisant as to die and leave them free to rehabilitate their
position by marriage; but Darcy had shown no disposition towards
dying, and now here was a lovely girl with a fortune willing to marry
him—a girl to whom his heart had gone out, despite his conscientious
endeavour to be faithful to that old attachment. To-day, in his agony
of remorse and apprehension, he could recall the scene of their
severance as well as if it had happened yesterday.

He had gone home in the chill March twilight, in that depressing
season when the pale spring flowers, daffodils, primroses, and
narcissus are fighting their ineffectual battle with the cutting east
wind, when the sparrows have eaten the hearts of all the crocuses,
and the scanty grass in suburban gardens is white with dust, when the
too-early lighted lamps have a sickly look in the windy streets, and
the neglected fires in suburban drawing-rooms are more dismal than
fireless hearths.

Camberwell Grove was not at its best in this bleak March season.
The time had been when the long narrow garden at Myrtle Cottage
was carefully kept, and when Evelyn had taken a pride in the
old-fashioned flower-borders and the blossoming creepers upon
the verandah, but for the last two or three years she had been
careless and indifferent, and one jobbing-gardener having left the
neighbourhood she had taken no pains to get another in his place; nor
had she done any of that weeding and watering and pruning, which had
at one time helped to shorten the long light evenings. A weariness
of all things had come upon her, tired out with waiting for brighter
days.

He had refused Don Jose’s pressing invitation to dine in Onslow
Square. He had turned his back upon the warm brightness of
newly-furnished drawing-rooms, an atmosphere of hot-house flowers,
great rush baskets of tulips, hyacinths, and narcissus, low vases
of lilies of the valley and Parma violets; and amidst all this
brightness and colour the beautiful Spanish girl, with her pale,
clear complexion and soft black eyes. He had left his newly-betrothed
wife reluctant to let him go, in order to face the most painful
crisis that can occur in any man’s life; in order to tell the woman
who had loved and trusted him that love was at an end between them;
that the bond was broken, and his promise of no account.

“I expected you earlier, James,” she said, opening the door to him.

It was rarely that the door was opened by a servant when he went
home. She was always waiting for his knock.

“Yes, it is late, I know. I have been detained. I have lingered a
little on the way—I walked from the West End.”

“What, all the way? By the Walworth Road, that low neighbourhood you
dislike so much?”

“I did not care where I walked, Evelyn. I was too miserable to think
about my surroundings.”

“Miserable?” she asked, looking at him searchingly, and growing pale
as she looked, as if the pallor of his face reflected itself in hers,
“what should make you miserable?”

They were standing in the drawing-room, where the moderator lamp upon
the table shone bright and clear upon his troubled face.

“You have lost your money, James—you have speculated—you won’t be
able to buy Cheriton Chase,” she said breathlessly.

“Nonsense, Evelyn. Don’t you know that you have the deposit notes for
every pound I ever saved locked up in your desk.”

“Ah, but you might speculate—you may have ruined yourself, all the
same.”

“I have not ruined myself that way, Evelyn. Oh! for God’s sake,
forgive me, pity me, if you can. I have engaged myself to a girl who
loves me, though I am twenty years her senior; a girl who is proud
of me and believes in me. This engagement means a new and happy life
for me, and may mean release for you—who knows? We have neither of us
been happy lately. I think we have both felt that the end must come.”

She laid her hand upon his breast, holding the lapel of his coat
tightly with her thin white fingers, as if she would pin him there
for ever, looking straight into his eyes, with her own eyes dilated
and flaming.

“You are a coward and a traitor!” she said, between her clenched
teeth. “You are lying, and you know you are lying. The tie has
grown weaker for you, perhaps—not for me. For me every year has
strengthened it—for me every hope I have has pointed to one
future—the future in which I am to be your wife. You know what my
husband’s habits are—you know what his life is worth as compared
with yours. You know that we must be near the end of our probation,
that suddenly, without an hour’s warning, we may hear of his death,
and you will be free to give me the name and place I have earned by
ten years’ fidelity, and patience, and self-denial. You know this,
and that my life is bound up in yours; that I cannot exist without
you except as the most miserable of women; that I have not a friend
in the world, not a hope in the world, not an ambition in the world
but you; and you look me in the face with those cold, cruel eyes, and
tell me you have engaged yourself to a girl twenty years your junior,
that you are going to cast me off—me, your wife of ten years—more
than wife in devotion, more than wife in self-sacrifice——”

“God knows the sacrifice was mutual, Evelyn. If there has been
surrender on your side there has been surrender on mine. I have
turned my back upon society just at the time when it would have been
most enjoyable and most valuable. But I won’t even try to excuse
myself. I have acted very badly—I deserve the worst you can say of
me. I thought I was sure of myself, I thought I was rock; but the
hour of temptation came, and I was not strong enough to withstand
it. Be generous, Evelyn. Clasp hands and forgive me. Wherever I am
and whatever I do your welfare shall be my first, most sacred care.
The money I have saved shall be invested for your benefit—shall be
secured to your use and our daughter’s after you.”

“Money, benefit,” she cried, wildly. “How dare you talk to me of
money? How dare you put my wrongs in the balance against your sordid
money? Do you think money can help me to forget you—or to hate myself
less than I do for having loved and trusted you?”

And then followed a paroxysm of passionate despair at the memory
of which, after all the intervening years of peace and prosperity,
wedded love and deadened conscience, his blood ran cold. He found
himself face to face with a woman’s frenzy, impotent to comfort or to
tranquillize her. There was a moment when he had to exert brute force
to prevent her from dashing her brains out against the wall.

All through that long, hideous night he watched by her, and pleaded
with her, and guarded her from her own violence. At one time he was
on his knees before her, offering to give up the desire of his heart,
to break his solemn engagement of a few hours old, and to remain true
to her till the end of time; but she spurned his offered sacrifice.

“What, now that I know you love another woman? What, keep you by
my side, while I know your heart is elsewhere? What, have you mine
by the strength of a chain, like a galley-slave linked to his
gaol-companion, knowing that you hate me? Not for worlds—not to be a
duchess. No, no, no! The wrong is done—the wrong was in withdrawing
your love. There is no such thing as faithfulness from you to me. All
is over.”

He argued against himself—implored her to accept his sacrifice.

“I would do anything in this world, pay any price, rather than see
such despair as I have seen to-night,” he said, standing in the cold,
grey dawn, haggard and aged by the long night of agony, beside the
bed where that convulsed form lay writhing, with tear-disfigured
face, lips wounded and blood-stained, strained eye-balls, and
dishevelled hair.

She was adamant against his pleading.

“You cannot give me back my trust in you. I am not the coarse, common
creature you think me. I do not want to keep your dull clay when your
heart has gone to another. I will show you that I can live without
you.”

This was the beginning of a calmer mood, which he was fain to
welcome, though he knew that it was the icy calmness of despair.
Before the world was astir in Camberwell Grove she had grown
curiously quiet and rational. She had bathed her distorted features
and bound up her hair. She was clothed and in her right mind again;
and she sat quietly listening while he told her the story of his
temptation, and how this new love had crept into his heart unawares,
and how an innocent girl’s naïve preference had flattered him into
infidelity to the love of ten years. She listened quietly while he
spoke of the future, trying to make a sunny picture of the new home,
in England or abroad, which she was to create for herself.

“You have been far too self-denying,” he said; “you have sacrificed
even your own comfort to help me to grow rich. You must at least
share my prosperity. Money need be no object in your future
existence. Chose your new home where you will, and let it be as
bright and enjoyable as ample means can make it.”

“I will take nothing from you but the bare necessities of existence,”
she said. “I will go to the obscurest spot that I can find, and rot
there alone, or with my daughter, as you think fit. I may ask one
favour of you. Get me out of this house as soon as you can. I was
once happy here,” she added hoarsely, looking round the room with an
expression that tortured him.

“I will take you across the Channel to-day, if you like. Change of
air and scene may do you good. You have lived too long in this place.”

“Ten years too long,” she answered, with a faint laugh.

He went across to Boulogne with her by the night mail, established
her in a private hotel in the Grande Rue, and left her there within
an hour of their landing, with a pocket-book containing a hundred
pounds in her lap. Nothing could exceed his tenderness in this
parting; nor could any man’s compassion for a woman he had ceased
to love be deeper than his. He was full of thoughtfulness for her
future. He implored her to think of him as her devoted friend, to
whom her welfare was of the uttermost importance, to call upon him
unhesitatingly for any help in any scheme of life which she might
make for herself.

“I shall warehouse your furniture at the Pantechnicon, so that
wherever you fix your future abode it may be conveyed there,” he
said. “We took some pains in choosing those things, and you may
prefer them to newer, and even better furniture. Write to me when you
have made your choice of a new home.”

“Home,” she echoed, and that was all.

“When you have found that home and settled down there, you will have
Mercy to share your life, will you not?” he pleaded. “The child will
be a comfort to you.”

“A comfort, yes. She was born under such happy conditions—she has
such reason to be proud of her parentage! Mercy—Mercy what? She must
have some kind of surname, I suppose, before she is much older. What
is she to be called?”

“You are very cruel, Evelyn. What does a name matter?”

“Everything. A name means a history. Should I be here—and you bidding
me good-bye—if my name were Dalbrook? It is just because my name is
_not_ Dalbrook that you can cast me adrift—like a rotten boat which
a man sends down the stream to be stranded on a mudbank, and moulder
there piecemeal, inch by inch.”




CHAPTER XXXIII.

    “One little flash of summer light,
     One brief and passionate dream.”


Lord Cheriton sent his valet and his portmanteau to Victoria Street
in a cab, and walked to Hercules Buildings. It was a short distance
from the terminus, and the movement was a relief to his troubled
brain. He was strangely agitated in approaching the girl whom he
had known only as Mercy Porter, who had lived to twenty-seven
years of age, almost as a stranger to him, whom he had looked
upon in her girlhood with a keen and painful interest, but an
interest which he had never betrayed by one outward sign. It was
her mother’s perversity and wrongheadedness, he told himself, which
had necessitated this complete estrangement. Had she consented to
bring up her daughter anywhere else he might have acted in somewise
as a father to her. But she had chosen to plant the girl there, at
his gates, in the sight of his wife and her child; and he was thus
constrained to ignore the tie, to repress every token of interest,
every sign of emotion, to act his lifelong lie, and play his part of
benefactor and patron to the end.

And now he had reason to believe that Mercy had discovered the secret
of her birth. Her contemptuous refusal of his bounty could proceed,
he thought, from no other cause. She knew that he was her father, and
she would accept no boon from a father who had denied her his name
and his love.

She resented her mother’s wrongs, as well as her own. His heart sank
at the thought of standing before her—his daughter and his judge!

The house in Hercules Buildings was decent and clean-looking. The
woman who opened the door told him that Miss Gray was at home, and
directed him to the second-floor back.

“Is she alone?” he asked. “Has there been no one with her this
morning?”

“No, sir. She don’t have anybody come to see her once in six months,
except Miss Newton.”

Lady Cheriton’s conjecture was not the inspiration he had thought.
Mrs. Porter had not made her way here. What if she had doubled back
after starting in the train for London—got out at the first station
and gone to the Priory—to realize that ghastly apprehension of
Theodore Dalbrook’s, and to follow up her scheme or vengeance by some
new crime. Once admit that she was mad, and there was no limit to
the evil she might attempt and do. His only comfort was in the idea
that Juanita’s cousin was there, on the alert to guard her from every
possible attack.

He knocked at the door of the back room on the second-floor landing,
and it was opened by the faded woman he had seen last in her fresh
young beauty, a fair, bright face at a rustic casement, framed in
verdure. The face was sadly aged since he had looked upon it, and
if it was beautiful still it was with the beauty of outline and
expression, rather than of youthful freshness and colouring.

The grave sad eyes were lifted to his face as Mercy made way for
him to enter. She placed a chair for him, and stood a little way
off, waiting for him to speak. He looked at the small room with
infinite sadness. Her neatness and ingenuity had made the best of
the poorest means, and the shabby little room had as fresh and gay
an air as if it had been a room in an Alpine chalet, or a farmhouse
in Normandy. The poor little pallet-bed was hidden by white dimity
curtains, the washstand was screened by a drapery of the same white
dimity, daintily arranged with bright ribbon bows. There was a shelf
of neatly bound books above the mantelpiece, and there were bits of
Japanese china here and there, giving a touch of brilliant colour
to the cheap white paper on the walls and the white draperies.
The room had been furnished by Mercy herself. The chairs were of
wicker work, cushioned and decorated by Mercy’s clever hands.
There was a pine chest of drawers, with a Japanese looking-glass
hanging above it, and there was a quaint little japanned table of
bright vermilion at the side of Mercy’s arm-chair. That poor little
second-floor bedroom, with its one window, and most unlovely outlook,
was Mercy’s only source of pride. She had pinched herself to buy
those inexpensive chairs, and the luxury of the Japanese glass,
the lacquered tea-tray with its Satsuma cups and saucers, and the
turquoise and absinthe tinted vases, all those trifling details which
made her room so different from the rooms of most work-girls. She had
stained and waxed the old deal boards with her own hands, and it was
her own labour that kept the floor polished and dustless, and the
window-panes bright and clear. The natural instinct of a lady showed
itself in that love of fair surroundings.

“I hoped to find your mother with you,” said Lord Cheriton.

“Why? I received your telegram, and could not understand what it
meant. Is there anything wrong with my mother?”

“She left her home early this morning—suddenly—no one knows why or
wherefore. I am intensely anxious to find her.”

“But why? She has been able to take care of herself very well for the
last twenty years. You have not been particularly interested in her
all that time. Why should you be anxious to-day?”

“Because I have reason to think that all is not well with her—that
her mind is not quite right—and I am full of fear lest she should do
something rash.”

“God help her,” sighed Mercy, the pale face growing just a shade
whiter. “If you had seen much of her in the years that are gone your
fears would not have come so late in the day.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that her mind has been unsettled ever since I was old enough
to observe and to understand her. I was little more than a child when
I found out that she had brooded upon one great sorrow until all her
thoughts were warped—all charity and kindly feeling were dead in
her—dead or frozen into a dreadful numbness, a torpor of the soul.
She never really loved me—me, her only child, who tried very hard to
win her love. God knows how I loved her, having no one else to love.
There was always a barrier between us—the barrier of some bitter
memory. I could never get near her heart.”

He did not answer for some minutes, but stood up looking out of the
window at the dreary prospect of slated roof and smoke-blackened
chimney-pot, prospect in which a few red tiles or an old gable-end
were as a glimpse of beauty, amidst the all-pervading greyness and
cruel monotony of form and hue. He felt a constraint upon him such as
he had never felt in all his life before—felt tongue-tied, helpless,
paralyzed by a deep sense of shame and self-humiliation before this
unacknowledged daughter, who under happier circumstances might have
looked up to him and honoured him as the first among men. In this
bitter hour the name that he had won for himself in the world,
the fortune which his talent had earned for him were as dust and
ashes—the bitter ashes beneath the dazzling brightness of the dead
sea fruit.

“Why do you stop in this back room, Mercy?” he asked abruptly. “Why
do you condemn yourself to look out upon chimney-pots and blackened
roofs, when you have all the world to choose from if you like? Why in
pity’s name did you refuse my offer of an income?”

“Because I will take nothing from you—nothing—nothing—nothing!”

Her lips closed in a rigid line after that reiterated word. Her eyes
looked straight before her, cold, calm, resolute.

“Why are you so hard upon me?”

“Why? You ask me why—you, who let me live at your gates in meek
dependence on your bounty, nameless, fatherless, living a life of
miserable monotony with a heart-broken woman in whose frozen breast
even maternal love was dead. You who patted me on the head once in
half-a-year, and patronized me, and condescended to me, as if I were
of another race and of a different clay. You, my father—you who could
be content to let me grow from a child to a woman and never once let
your heart go out to me, and never once be moved to clasp me in your
arms and confess the tie between us. You who saw me come to your fine
house and go away, and often pretended not to see me, or passed me
with a side-glance and a little motion of your hand as if I were a
dog that ran by you in the street. You, my father—you, whose friend
saw me so friendless and alone that he could lie to me with impunity,
knowing there was no one in this world to take my part or to call him
to account for his lies. Had you been different, my fate might have
been different.”

“He was a villain, Mercy. God knows, I have suffered enough on that
score. I would have called him to account, I would have punished
him; but I had to think of my wife. I dared not act—there was a
monster in my path before which the boldest man sometimes turns
coward—publicity. Who was it told you, Mercy—when was it that you
discovered my secret?”

“He told me—taunted me with my mother’s story. He had guessed it, I
think; but though he had no proofs to give me, instinct told me that
it was true. My mother’s life and character had always been a mystery
to me. I understood both by the light of that revelation.”

“He told you the truth, Mercy. Yes, all my life as regards you was a
solemn sham. It was your mother’s determination to live at Cheriton,
and nowhere else, which made me a stranger to my own child. Had your
home been elsewhere—far from my wife and her surroundings—I might
have acted in some wise a father’s part. I might have acknowledged
our relationship—I might have seen you from time to time in the
freedom of paternal intercourse—I could have interested myself in
your education, watched over your welfare. As it was, I had to play
my difficult part as best I might.”

“You would have had to reckon with my mother’s broken heart wherever
she had lived,” answered Mercy. “Do you think I could have ever
valued your fatherly interest, knowing the measure of her wrong? In
my ignorance I looked up to you as our benefactor. You cheated me of
my gratitude and respect—you, who were the cause of all our sorrows.
I saw my mother’s mind growing more and more embittered as the years
went by. My youth was spent with a woman whose lips had forgotten how
to smile—with a mother who never spoke a motherly word, or kissed
her child with a motherly kiss. And then when love came—or that which
seemed love—can you wonder that I was weak and helpless in the hour
of temptation—I, who had never known what tenderness meant before I
heard his voice, before his lips touched mine? The only happiness I
ever knew upon this earth was my happiness with him. It was short
enough, God knows, but it was something. It was my only sunshine—the
only year in all my life in which the world seemed beautiful and life
worth living. Yes, it was at least a dream of loving and being loved;
but it was followed by a bitter waking.”

“He was a scoundrel, Mercy. You were not his first victim; but his
youth was past, and I believed in his reform. I should not have asked
him to my wife’s house had I not so believed. When I heard that he
had tempted you away from your mother I was in despair. I would have
made any sacrifice to save you, except the one sacrifice of facing a
hideous scandal, except the sacrifice of my social position and my
wife’s happiness. Had you alone been in question I might have taken
a bolder and more generous course, but you are right when you say I
had to reckon with your mother. I might have confessed the existence
of my daughter—might have secured my wife’s kindness and sympathy for
that daughter—but how could I say to her, The woman who lives beside
your gate is the woman who ought to have been my wife, and who for
ten years was to me as a wife, and relied upon my promise that no
other woman upon earth should ever occupy that place? I was fettered,
Mercy, caught in the toils, powerless to act a manly part. I did what
I could. I tried to trace you and Tremayne—failed, and never knew
what had become of him till I read of his death in Afghanistan. He
was a married man when he crossed your path, separated from his wife,
who had not used him over well. It was the knowledge of his domestic
troubles that inclined me to hold out the hand of friendship to him
at that time. He behaved infamously to you, I fear, my poor girl.”

“He only did what most men do, I suppose, under the same
circumstances. He only acted as you acted to my mother. He grew tired
of me. Only his weariness came in less than ten years—in less than
two. He took me roaming all over the world in his yacht. Those days
and nights at sea—or lying off some white city, gleaming against a
background of olive-clad hills—were like one long dream of beauty.
Sometimes we lived on shore for a little while—in some obscure
fishing village, where there was no one from England to ask who we
were. We spent one long winter coasting about between Algiers and
Tunis. I could hardly believe that it was winter in that world of
purple sea and sky and almost perpetual sunshine. We spent half a
year among the Greek islands—we stayed at Constantinople—and sailed
from there to Naples. It was at Naples I caught a fever, and lay
ill on board the yacht. It was a tedious illness, a long night of
darkness and delirium. When I recovered Colonel Tremayne was gone. He
had left the yacht on the first day of my unconsciousness, leaving
me in charge of a sister of mercy and three sailors. He had sold the
yacht, which was to pass into the new owner’s possession as soon as
I was strong enough to go on shore. He left me a letter, telling me
that he had deposited fifty pounds for me at the English bankers
where he had been in the habit of cashing cheques. I had been at the
bank with him on more than one occasion. He advised me to stay in the
South, and get a situation as governess in an Italian family. He was
obliged to go back to England on account of monetary difficulties,
but he hoped to be able to meet me later. He did not even take the
trouble to tell me where a letter would find him. He had abandoned
me at the beginning of a dangerous illness—left me to live or
die—friendless in a foreign land.”




CHAPTER XXXIV.

              “Poor wretches that depend
    On greatness’ favour dream as I have done,
      Wake and find nothing.”


Lord Cheriton heard the story of his daughter’s fate in silence. It
was an old and a common story, and any words of reprobation uttered
now would have seemed a mockery from the lips of the father who had
allowed his daughter’s seducer to go unpunished.

“What did you do in your loneliness?” he asked, after a pause.

“I wandered from village to village for some months, living as the
peasants live. I did not take Colonel Tremayne’s advice, and offer
myself as a teacher of youth. I did not try to enter a respectable
home under a false character. I lived among peasants and as they
lived, and my money lasted a long time. I had always been fond of
needlework, so I bought some materials before I left Naples, and I
used to sit in the olive woods, or by the sea shore, making baby
linen, which I was able to dispose of when my wanderings brought me
to Genoa, where I lived in a garret all through the winter after my
illness. I remained in Italy for more than a year, and then my heart
sickened of the beauty of the sea and sky, the streets of palaces,
the orange groves and olive woods, the bright monotony of loveliness.
Some of my own misery seemed to have mixed itself with all that was
loveliest in that Southern world, and I felt as if grey skies and
dull streets would be a relief to me. So I came to London, and found
this lodging, and have managed to live—as you see—ever since. I have
no wish to live any better. I have only one friend in the world. I
have no desire to change. If my mother cared for me and wanted me I
would go to her—but she never wanted me in the past, and I doubt if
she will ever want me in the future.”

“Your mother is a most unhappy woman, Mercy, and she has made her
unhappiness a part of my life, and a part of other lives. She left
her home this morning, alone, without giving any one notice where she
was going, or why she was going. I am full of fear about her. My only
hope was to find her here.”

“And not having found her here, what are you going to do? Where will
you look for her?”

“I don’t know. I am altogether at fault. She had no friends in
London, or anywhere else. She had isolated herself most completely.
At Cheriton she was respected, but she made no friends. How could she
make friends in a place where her whole existence was a secret? Ah,
Mercy, have compassion upon me in my trouble—give me something of a
child’s love, for the burden of my sin is too heavy for me to bear.”

He sank into a chair, covering his face with his hands, and she knew
that the strong man was crying like a child.

Her heart was touched by his distress, as a woman if not as a
daughter.

“I am sorry for you in your trouble,” she said, in a low voice, “and
I would gladly help you if I could. But I cannot forget my mother’s
broken heart—the slow torture of long years. I had to look on and see
her suffer, not even knowing the cause of her sorrow, utterly unable
to comfort her. Sorrow had hardened her. She was hard to me, a hard
task-mistress rather than a mother. And now you tell me she has gone
away, no one knows where. What can I do to help you and her?”

“God knows if you can do anything, Mercy,” he answered, looking up at
her gently, relieved somewhat by those unaccustomed tears.

He took her hand, which she did not withhold from him.

“Sit down, Mercy,” he said, “sit here by my side, and let us consider
calmly what we can do. Your mother has no friends to whom she could
go, no one, unless it were Miss Newton.”

“Miss Newton,” cried Mercy. “What does my mother know of Miss Newton?”

“They were acquainted many years ago, but your mother would hardly go
to her now.”

“My mother knew Miss Newton, my one friend?”

“Yes, long ago. How did you come to know her?”

“She sought me out. It is the business of her life to seek out those
who have most need of her, to whom her friendship can do most good.
She heard of me from a girl who lives in this house, and she came
to me and invited me to her lodgings, and brightened my life by her
kindness. And did she really know my mother, years ago?”

“Yes, more than thirty years ago, when they were both young.”

“How strange that is.”

“I am thinking, Mercy; I am trying to think what refuge your mother
could have found in London? Remember I have to think of her as of one
who is scarcely accountable for her actions. I have to think of her
as under the influence of one fixed idea—not governed by the same
laws that govern other people.”

“I am powerless to help you,” answered Mercy, hopelessly. “I will do
anything you tell me to do—but of all people in this world I am least
able to advise you. I know nothing of my mother’s life except as I
saw it at Cheriton—one long weariness.”

“You shall know all by-and-by; all. I will stand before you as a
criminal before his judge. I will lay bare my heart to you as a
penitent before his father-confessor—and then perhaps, when you
have heard the whole story, you will take compassion upon me—you
will understand how hard a part I had to play—and that I was not
altogether vile. I will say no more about your life here, and your
future life, as I would have it, until that confession has been made.
Then it will remain for you to decide whether I am worthy to be
treated in somewise as a father.”

She sat in silence, with her head bent over her folded hands. He
looked at the dejected droop of the head, the grey threads in the
auburn hair, the hollow cheek, the attenuated features and wan
complexion, and remembered how brilliant a creature she had been in
the first bloom of her beauty, and with what furtive apprehensive
glances he, her father, had admired that girlish face. She was
handsomer in those days than ever her mother had been, with a softer,
more refined loveliness than the Strangway type. And he had let
this flower grow beside his gate like a weed, and be trampled under
foot like a weed; and now the face bore upon it all the traces of
suffering, the lines about the mouth had taken the same embittered
look that he remembered only too well in Evelyn Darcy, that look of
silent protest against Fate.

He watched her for some minutes in an agony of remorse. She was his
daughter, and it had been his duty to shelter her from the storms of
life—and he had let the storms beat upon that undefended head, he had
let her suffer as the nameless waifs of this world have to suffer,
uncared for, unavenged.

If she should ever be brought to forgive him, could he ever forgive
himself?

But he had nearer anxieties than these sad thoughts of that which
might have been and that which was. He had the missing woman to think
of, and the evil that might come to herself or others from her being
at large. He had to speculate upon her motive in leaving Cheriton.

Perhaps it was only a natural result of his interview with her
yesterday afternoon, when he had shown her the pistol, and told
her where it had been found, that pistol which he and she knew so
well—one of a pair that had been in her husband’s possession at the
time of her marriage—which had been pledged while they were living
in Essex Street, and when their funds were at the lowest. She had
kept the duplicate, with other duplicates which Darcy’s carelessness
abandoned to her—and afterwards some womanish apprehension of danger
in the somewhat isolated cottage in Camberwell Grove—some talk of
burglarious attacks in the neighbourhood—had induced her to redeem
the pistols, and they had been kept in their case on the table
beside her bed for years. No burglar had ever troubled the quiet
cottage, where there was neither plate-chest nor jewel-case to tempt
an attack. The pistols had never been used. They had been packed up
with other things and stored in the Pantechnicon, and James Dalbrook
had forgotten the existence of Captain Darcy’s revolvers till the
builder’s foreman showed him the pistol that had been found in the
well. Then there came back upon him, in a flash, the memory of the
case that had stood beside his bed, and the fact that the pistols had
been sent down to Cheriton with Mrs. Darcy’s other goods. That pistol
could not have passed out of her possession without her knowledge and
consent. If hers was not the hand that pulled the trigger, she must,
at least, have furnished the weapon, and she must have known the
murderer.

He told her as much as this, yesterday afternoon, when he showed her
the pistol. She heard him in dogged silence, looking at him with
wide-open eyes, in which the dilatation of the pupil never altered.
She neither admitted nor denied anything. He could extort no answer
from her, except some scornful and evasive retort. And so he left
her in despair, having warned her that discovery was now a question
of time. The finding of the pistol would put the police on the right
track, and link by link the chain of circumstantial evidence would be
fitted together.

“You had better tell me the truth, and let me help you, if I can,” he
told her.

She had acted upon his warning perhaps, but without his help. It was
like her perverse nature to go out into the world alone, to make a
mysterious disappearance just at the time when suspicion might at any
moment be directed towards her, just when it was most essential that
there should be not the slightest deviation from the sluggish course
of her every-day life.

Lord Cheriton started up suddenly.

“Yes, that is at least an idea,” he muttered. “Good-bye, Mercy. I
have thought of a place where your mother might possibly go—a place
associated with her past life. It is a forlorn hope, but I may as
well look for her there. Wherever and whenever I find her you will
come to her, will you not, if she should need your love?”

“Of course I will go to her—and if she has no other shelter I can
bring her here. I should not be afraid to work for her.”

“It is cruel of you to talk of working for her. You know that the
want of money has never been an element in her troubles. She might
have lived an easy and refined life among pleasant people if she
would have been persuaded by me. As it was, I did what I could to
make her life comfortable.”

“Yes, I know she had plenty of money. She gave me expensive masters,
as if she had been a woman of fortune. I used to wonder how she
could afford it. We lived very simply, almost like hermits, but
there seemed always money for everything she wanted. Our clothes,
our furniture, and books seemed far too good for our station. I used
to wonder who and what we were; and I have been asked questions
sometimes about my former home. What did I remember of my childhood?
Where had I lived before my father died? I could tell people nothing.
I only remembered a cottage among fields, and the faces of the woman
who nursed me and her children who played with me. I remembered
nothing but the cottage, and the great cornfields, and the lanes and
hedgerows, till one summer day my mother came in a carriage, and
took me on a journey by the railroad—a journey that lasted a long
time, for we had to wait and change trains more than once—and in the
evening I found myself at Cheriton. That was all of my life that I
could recall, and I did not even know the name of the woman with
whom I lived till I was seven years old, or of the village near her
cottage.”

“You were hardly used, Mercy; but it was not all my fault.”

He would not tell her that it was his wish to have her reared
at Myrtle Cottage, where he would have watched her infancy
and childhood; he would not tell her that it was the mother’s
sensitiveness, her resentful consciousness of her false position,
which had banished the child.

“You will come to me whenever I summon you, Mercy?” he said.

“Yes, I will come.”

He held out his hand, and she gave him hers, which was cold as death.
He drew her to his breast, and kissed the pallid, careworn forehead,
and so they parted, father and daughter, the daughter acknowledged
for the first time at seven-and-twenty years of age.

Lord Cheriton hailed the first hansom he found upon his way, and told
the man to drive him to Camberwell Grove.

The neighbourhood through which he went was curiously unfamiliar
after the changes and forgetfulness of twenty years; and yet it was
curiously familiar to him, and brought back the memory of that dead
time, when a man who was himself, and yet not himself, had gone to
and fro that road until its every shop-front and every street corner
seemed engraven upon his brain.

It is a busy, teeming world—a world of seething humanity, jostling,
striving, anxious, hollow-cheeked and eager-eyed. He had chosen
to plant his hidden Eden upon “the Surrey side,” and had gone to
and fro by that squalid highway with a contented spirit, because
it was a world in which he was least likely to meet any of his
professional brotherhood. What other barrister in decent practice,
what other Queen’s Counsel, above all, was likely to pitch his tent
at Camberwell? There might be old-fashioned men who would be content
to grow their early cucumbers, and gloat over their pines and peaches
in some citizen’s paradise on Clapham Common. There might be men who
would resign themselves to life at Wandsworth; but where was the
spirit so lowly within the precincts of the Lamb who would stoop to
live in a place which was accessible only by the Elephant and Castle
and the Walworth Road? Do not the very names of those places stink
in the nostrils of gentility? The Elephant has never held up his
trunk since the glories of the Queen’s Bench departed, since Ichabod
was written on those walls against which Lord Huntingtower played
rackets, and in whose shadow so many of Earth’s great ones have paced
up and down in the days when the noble debtor was still a person
apart and distinguished, not amenable to the laws which govern the
bankrupt trader.

He had borne with the Walworth Road because it lay so far out
of gentility’s track. The very odour of the neighbourhood was
familiar—the reek of cooked meats and stale vegetables, blended with
all-pervading fumes of beer. But there were numerous changes. He
missed familiar shops and well-remembered features. All that had been
shabby of old looked still shabbier to-day. How often he had tramped
those pavements, economizing the cost of a cab, and not caring to
rub shoulders with the habitués of the knife-board on Atlas or
Waterloo. The walk had suited him. He could think out the brief read
overnight as he tramped to Westminster in the morning. How well he
remembered the cool breath of the river blowing up the Westminster
Road on bright spring mornings, when the flower-girls were offering
violets and primroses at the street corners. How well he remembered
the change to a cleaner and a statelier world when he had crossed the
bridge—the solemn grandeur of Westminster Hall, the close, sickly
atmosphere of the crowded courts. Looking back he wondered how he
bore the monotony of that laborious life, forgetting that he had been
borne up and carried along by his ambition, always looking onward to
the day when his name and fortune should be made, and he should taste
the strong wine of success. He remembered what an idle dream Evelyn’s
idea of buying the Cheriton estate had seemed to him when first she
mooted it; how he had talked of it only to indulge her fancy, as one
discusses impossible things with a child; and how by slow degrees
the notion of its feasibility had crept into his mind; how he had
begun to calculate the possibilities of his future savings; how he
had covered stray half-sheets of paper with elaborate calculations,
taking pleasure in the mere figures as if they were actual money.
He remembered how, when he had saved five thousand pounds, a rabid
eagerness to accumulate took hold of him, and with what keen eyes he
used to look at the figures on a brief. He had caught the infection
of Evelyn’s sanguine temper, and of Evelyn’s parsimonious habits.
They used to hang over his bankbook sometimes of an evening, as Paolo
and Francesca hung over the story of Launcelot, calculating how
much could be spared to be placed on deposit, how little they could
contrive to live on for the next quarter. As the hoard increased
Evelyn grew to grudge herself the smallest luxury, a few flowering
plants for the drawing-room, a day’s hire of the jobbing gardener, a
drive in a hansom to Richmond or Greenwich, little pleasures that had
relieved the monotony of their isolation.

“My father cannot live many years,” she told James Dalbrook, “and
when he dies the estate will have to be sold. I have often heard him
say so.”

Mr. Dalbrook went on a stolen journey to Cheriton, and saw every
bit of the estate which he could get to see. He was careful to say
nothing of this expedition to Evelyn lest she should want to go with
him, as he felt that her presence would have been a difficulty. Some
one might have recognized the Squire’s young daughter in the mature
woman.

He went back to London passionately in love with the property,
which he remembered as one of the paradises of his boyhood, in the
days when he had been fond of long excursions on foot to Corfe, or
Swanage, or the great sunburnt hills by the sea. He saw Cheriton
Chase now with the entranced eyes of an ambitious man to whom
territorial possession seemed the crowning glory of life.

He had saved ten thousand pounds, very little compared with the sum
which would be required; but he told himself that when he had amassed
another ten he might feel secure of being able to buy the estate,
since it would be easy to raise seventy per cent. of the purchase
money on mortgage. He began to see his way to the realization of
that dream. He would have to go on living laborious days—to go on
with those habits of self-denial which had already become a second
nature—even after the prize was won; but he saw himself the owner
of that noble old house, amidst a park and woodland that were the
growth of centuries; and he thought of the delight of restoring and
improving and repairing, after fifty years of slipshod poverty and
gradual decay.

And now, as the hoard increased to twelve, fifteen, eighteen
thousand, James Dalbrook began to talk to his companion of their
future ownership of Cheriton as a certainty. They planned the rooms
they were to occupy; they allotted their small stock of furniture
about the old mansion house—things they had bought by slow degrees in
the happy hunting-grounds of Wardour Street and the Portland Road,
and which were all good of their kind. They discussed the number
of servants that they could manage to carry on with for the first
few years, while economy would still be needful. It was understood
between them, though rarely spoken about, that Tom Darcy would be
dead before that fruition of their dreams. He had been sent off to
Canada, a broken man. Who could doubt that a few years more would see
the end of that worthless existence? And then the bond between those
two who had held to each other so faithfully would be realized, and
Evelyn could go back to the house in which she was born, its proud
and happy mistress.

She had fed upon those dreams, lived upon them, had thought of little
else in her solitary days, in the isolation of her home. She had put
away her child with stern resolve that no difficulty should arise out
of _that_ existence when she came to take her place in society as
James Dalbrook’s wife. She never meant to acknowledge the daughter
born at Myrtle Cottage. She would do her duty to the child somehow;
but not in that way.

Lord Cheriton remembered all these things as the cab rattled along
the Walworth Road. Our waking thoughts have sometimes almost the
rapidity of our dreams. He surveyed the panorama of the past;
recalled the final bitterness of that meeting at Boulogne, when he
went over to see Mrs. Darcy, and when he had to tell her that he was
master of Cheriton Chase, by the help of his wife’s dowry, and that
he had begun life there on a far more dignified footing than they two
had contemplated.

She received the announcement with sullen silence, but he could see
that it hurt her like the thrust of a sword. She stood before him
with a lowering brow, white to the lips, her thin fingers twisting
themselves in and out of each other with a convulsive moment, and one
corner of the bloodless under lip caught under the sharp white teeth
fiercely.

“Well,” she said at last, “I congratulate you. Cheriton has a new
master; and if the lady of the house is not the woman whose shadow I
used to see there in my dreams—it matters very little to you. You are
the gainer in all ways. You have got the place you wanted; and a fair
young wife instead of a faded—mistress.”

She lifted up her eyes, pale with anguish, and looked at him with an
expression he had never been able to forget.

He was silent under this thrust, and then, after a troubled pause,
he asked her if she had made up her mind where her future days were
to be spent. He was only desirous to see her settled in some pretty
neighbourhood, in the nicest house that she could find for herself,
or that he could choose for her.

“Do not let money be any consideration,” he said. “My fees are
rolling in very fast this year, and they are big fees. I want to see
you happily circumstanced, with Mercy.”

“There is only one place I care to live in,” she answered, “and that
is Cheriton Chase.”

He told her, with a sad smile, that Cheriton was the only place that
was impossible for her.

“It is not impossible. Do you think I want to be a fine lady, or to
tell people that I was once Evelyn Strangway? I only want to live
upon the soil I love—and to see you, sometimes, as you go past my
door. There is the West Lodge, now—one of the most picturesque old
cottages in England. I loved it when I was a girl. Sally Newton and
I used to picnic there, when my father and I were not on speaking
terms. Who is living in that cottage now?”

“One of the gardeners.”

“Turn out the gardener and let me live there.”

He rejected the idea as preposterous, degrading, that she should live
at the lodge gates, she who had once been the Squire’s daughter.

“Do not talk to me of degradation,” she answered, bitterly. “There
will be no degradation for me in living at your gates, now that you
and I are strangers. My degradation belongs to the past. Nothing in
the future can touch me. I am nameless henceforward, a nullity.”

“But if you should be recognized there?”

“Who is there to recognize me? Do you think there is one line or one
look of Evelyn Strangway’s sixteen-year-old face left in my face
to-day?”

Knowing the portrait in the hall at Cheriton he was fain to confess
that the change was complete. It would have been difficult for any
one to find the lines of that proud young beauty in the careworn
features and sunken cheeks of the woman who stood before him now. The
months that had gone by since their parting had aged her as much as
if they had been years.

“If your husband should find you there?”

“Not likely! It is the very last place in which he would look for me;
and the chances are against his ever returning to England.”

“Why is your mind set upon living at Cheriton?”

“Why? Because I have dreamt and thought of that place till my love
for it has become almost a disease; because I have not the faintest
interest in any other spot upon earth. I don’t care how I live there.
I have no pride left in me. Pride, self-respect, care for myself
died a sudden death one day you know of, when I found that you had
ceased to care for me, when I awoke from a long dream and knew that
my place in life was lost. I shall be content to vegetate in that
cottage—and—and if you think I ought to have Mercy with me, why Mercy
can be there too. I shall be Mrs. Jones, or Mrs. Brown, and there can
be no particular reason why Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Brown should not have
a daughter.”

She was so earnest, so intent, so resolute upon this and nothing
else than this, that he was constrained to yield to her wishes,
and once having yielded, he did all in his power to make her life
comfortable and free from humiliation. He had the cottage as
tastefully restored as if he had been going to occupy it himself;
he opened an account for Mrs. Porter at a Dorchester Bank, and paid
in four hundred pounds to her credit, and he told her that the same
amount would be paid in yearly on the 1st of January. There should be
nothing uncertain or pinched in her circumstances.

This being done, he resigned himself as best he might to bear the
burden of that unwelcome presence at his gates. He and the woman who
was to have been his wife rarely spoke to each other during those
long slow years in which the master of Cheriton grew in honour and
dignity and in the respect of his fellow-men. He whose career Evelyn
Darcy had watched from the very dawn of success was now a personage,
a man of mark in his native county, a man who could afford to hold
out the hand of friendship to his less distinguished relatives, and
who could afford to confess himself the son of a small shopkeeper in
the county town.

Lady Cheriton had been inclined to interest herself in the lonely
woman at the West Lodge. She was impressed by the unmistakable
refinement of Mrs. Porter’s appearance, and wanted to befriend her;
but Lord Cheriton had forbidden any friendly relations between his
wife and the lodge-keeper, on the ground that she was a woman of very
peculiar temper, that she would resent anything like patronage, and
that she would infinitely prefer being left alone to being taken up
or petted. The tender-hearted Maria, always submissive to the husband
she adored, had obeyed without question; but some years after, when
Mercy was growing up and being educated by the best masters available
in the neighbourhood, Lady Cheriton had taken a fancy to the
hard-worked girl, and had interested herself warmly in her progress;
and thus it had happened that although Mrs. Porter never was known
to cross the threshold of the great house, her daughter went there
often, and was made much of by Lady Cheriton, and admired by Juanita,
whose accomplishments were still in embryo, while Mercy was far
advanced in music and modern languages.

“I suppose her mother means her to go out as a governess by-and-by,”
Lady Cheriton told her husband. “She is over-educated for any other
walk in life, and in any case she is overworked. I feel very sorry
for her when I see how tired she looks sometimes, and how anxious
she is about her studies. Juanita must never be allowed to toil like
that.”

Lord Cheriton remembered all that had happened with reference to the
woman who called herself Mrs. Porter, in all these long years—his
daughter Juanita’s lifetime. She had seen the funeral trains of his
infant sons pass through the gate beside her cottage—she had seen the
little coffins covered with snow-white flowers, and she must have
known the bitterness of his disappointment. She had lived at the
West Lodge for all these years, and had made no sign of a rebellious
heart, of anger, jealousy, or revengeful feeling. He had believed
that she was really content so to live; that in granting what she
had asked of him he had satisfied her, and that her sense of wrong
was appeased. At first he had lived in feverish apprehension of some
outbreak or scene—some revelation made to the wife he loved, or to
the friends whose esteem he valued; but as the years went by without
bringing him any trouble of this kind, he had ceased to think with
uneasiness of that sinister figure at his gates.

And now by the light of the hideous confession which he carried
in his breast pocket he knew that in all those years she had been
cherishing her sense of wrong, heaping up anger and revenge and
malice and every deadly feeling engendered of disappointed love,
against the day of wrath. Could he wonder if her mind had given
way under that slow torture, until the concealed madness of years
culminated in an act of wild revenge—a seemingly motiveless crime?
Heaven knows by what distorted reasoning she had arrived at the
resolve to strike her deadly blow there rather than elsewhere. Heaven
knows what sudden access of malignity might have been caused by the
spectacle of the honeymoon lovers and their innocent bliss.

The cab had turned into Camberwell Grove, and now he asked himself
if it were not the wildest fancy to suppose that she might have
gone back to Myrtle Cottage, or that she might be hanging about the
neighbourhood of her old home. The cottage was in all probability
occupied, and even if she had wandered that way she would most likely
have come and gone before now. The idea had flashed into his mind as
he sat in Mercy’s room, the idea that in her distracted state all her
thoughts might revert to the past, and that her first impulse might
lead her to revisit the house in which she had lived so long.




CHAPTER XXXV.

    “The love of these is like the lightning spear,
     And shrivels whom it touches. They consume
     All things within their reach, and, last of all,
     Their lonely selves.”


The cottage was to be let. A board offering it upon a repairing lease
announced the fact.

Lord Cheriton opened the familiar gate. The very sound with which it
swung back as he passed recalled a life that was gone, that had left
nothing but an exceeding bitter sorrow. How weedy and dejected the
narrow garden looked in the sunshine—how moss-grown the gravel path
which he and Evelyn had once taken such pains to weed and roll, in
those early days when that modest suburban retreat seemed a happy
home, and the demon of ennui had not yet darkened their threshold.

He entered the well-remembered porch over which the Virginia creeper
hung in rank luxuriance. The house was not unoccupied, for slipshod
feet came along the passage at the sound of the bell, and he heard
children’s voices in the back premises.

A slatternly woman, with a year-old baby on her left arm, opened the
door.

“Has a lady called here this morning?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, there is a lady here now—in the drawing-room,” the woman
answered eagerly. “I hope you belong to her, for I’ve been feeling a
bit nervous about her, with me and the children alone in the house,
and my husband not coming back till night time. I’m afraid she’s not
quite right in her head.”

“Yes, I belong to her. I have come to fetch her.”

He went into the drawing-room—the room that had looked pretty and
picturesque enough in those unforgotten days—a small room furnished
with quaint old secretaire and bookcase, Chippendale chairs, and a
carved oak table, a pair of old blue-and-white jars on the top of
a dark mahogany bureau, a high, brass fender that used to glitter
in the firelight, sober brown damask curtains, and half-a-dozen
Bartolozzi engravings of rustic subjects, in neat oval frames—a room
that always looked like a Dutch picture.

Now that room was a scene of squalor and desolation. For furniture
there was nothing but a shabby Pembroke table, wanting two castors,
and two old cane-seated chairs, in each of which the cane was broken
and bulging. A dilapidated doll, in a ragged red gauze frock,
sprawled amidst the dirt on the bare floor, and a greasy rug lay in
front of the fireless hearth.

Mrs. Porter was sitting with her elbows on the table, and her head
resting on her clasped hands. She did not notice Lord Cheriton’s
approach till he was standing close beside her, when she looked up at
him.

At first her gaze expressed trouble and bewilderment; then her face
brightened into a quiet smile, a look of long ago.

“You are earlier than usual, James,” she said, holding out her hand.

He took the hand in his; it was hot and dry, as if with a raging
fever. It was the hand of a murderess; but it was also the hand of
his victim, and he could not refuse to take it.

“Was your work over so soon to-day?” she asked. “I’m afraid it will
be ever so long before dinner will be ready, and the house is all
in a muddle—everything wretched”—looking about her with a puzzled
air. “I can’t think what has happened to the rooms,” she muttered.
“Servants are so troublesome.”

She passed her hand across her forehead, as if her head were paining
her, and then looked at him helplessly.

“You are ill, Evelyn,” he said, gently.

It was twenty years since he had called her by the name that had been
so often on his lips in this house. It was almost as if the very
atmosphere of the house, even in its desolation, recalled the old
link between them, and made him forgetful of what had happened in
Dorsetshire.

“No. I have a headache, that is all. I shall set to work presently
and make everything comfortable for you. Only I can’t find Mary—I
can’t get on without Mary. I don’t like the look of that charwoman—a
wretched, untidy creature—and I don’t know what she has done with the
furniture. I suppose she moved it in order to clean the rooms. It is
just like their tricks, clearing out the furniture and then dawdling
ever so long before they begin to scrub the floors.”

He looked at her earnestly, wondering whether she was pretending,
whether she had repented that written acknowledgment of her crime,
and was simulating madness. No, it was real enough. The eyes, with
their dull fixed look and dilated pupils, the troubled movements
of the hands, the tremulous lips, all told of the unsettled brain.
There was but one course before him, to get her madness established
as an accepted fact before there was any chance of her crime being
discovered.

“Do not trouble about anything,” he said, gently. “I will get
some of the furniture brought back presently, and I will get you a
servant. Will you wait quietly here, while I see about two or three
small matters?”

“Yes, I will wait; but don’t be long. It seems such a long while
since yesterday,” she said, looking round the room in a forlorn way,
“and everything is so strangely altered. Don’t be long, if you _must_
go out.”

He promised to return in half an hour, and then he went out and spoke
to the woman.

“How did she come here, and when?”

“She walked up to the door. It was just dinner-time—half-past twelve
o’clock. I thought it was some one to see the house, so I let her in
without asking any questions, and I showed her all the rooms, and
it was some time before I saw she was wrong in her head. She looked
about her just as people mostly do look, and she was very thoughtful,
as if she was considering whether the place would suit. And then
after she’d been a long time looking at the rooms and the garden, she
went back into the drawing-room, and sat down at the table. I told
her I should be glad if she could make it convenient to leave, as I
had my washing to do. But she said she lived here, this was her home,
and she told me to go away and get on with my work. She gave me such
a scare that I didn’t know how to answer her. She spoke very mild,
and I could see that she was a lady; but I could see that she was
out of her mind, and that frightened me, for fear she should take a
violent turn, and I all alone in the house with those young children.
I was afraid to contradict her, so I just let her please herself and
sit in the drawing-room alone, while I got on with my bit of washing,
and kept the children well out of the way. I never felt more thankful
in my life than when you rang the bell.”

“I am going as far as the post-office to send off some telegrams, and
I want you to take care she doesn’t leave this house while I’m away,”
said Lord Cheriton, emphasizing his request with a sovereign.

“Thank you kindly, sir. I’ll do my best. I’m sure I’m sorry for her
with all my heart, poor dear lady.”

“And I want you to give me the use of this house for to-day—and
possibly for to-night, if by any chance I should not be able to get
her away to-night.”

“Yes, sir, you are free and welcome to the house as far as it’s mine
to give leave—and it’s been empty too long for there to be much
chance of a tenant turning up between now and to-morrow.”

“Very good. Then I shall send in a little furniture—just enough to
make her comfortable for a few hours—and when I come back you can get
her something to eat, and make her some tea.”

“Yes, sir. You won’t be gone long, I hope, for fear she should turn
violent?”

“She will not do that. She has never been violent.”

“I am very glad to hear that. Appearances are so deceitful sometimes
when folks are wrong in their heads.”

Lord Cheriton had told the cabman to wait. He got into the cab
and drove to the nearest upholsterer’s, where he hired a table, a
comfortable sofa, a couple of chairs, a small square carpet, and some
pillows and blankets, in the event of Mrs. Porter having to bivouac
in Myrtle Cottage. He meant her only to leave that shelter for a
place of restraint, under medical care.

This done, he went to the post-office and telegraphed first to Marian
Gray, Hercules Buildings:—

  “Your mother is at Myrtle Cottage, Camberwell Grove, and very ill.
  Go to her without delay.—CHERITON.”

His second telegram was to Dr. Mainwaring, Welbeck Street:—

  “Meet me as soon as possible at Myrtle Cottage, Camberwell Grove,
  and send a trained nurse, experienced in mental cases, to the same
  address. I want your advice upon a case in which time is of vital
  importance.”

He sent another telegram to another medical man, Dr. Wilmot, also an
old acquaintance, and a fourth to Theodore Dalbrook, at the Priory:—

  “Mrs. Porter is in London, and in my care. You need have no further
  apprehension.”

He was back at Myrtle Cottage within the half-hour, and was able
to direct the men who had just brought a small van containing the
furniture. He saw the things carried into the room that had been the
dining-room, which was empty—the policeman’s family preferring to
camp in the kitchen—and had them arranged there with some appearance
of comfort. Then he went back to the drawing-room, where Mrs. Porter
was standing at the window, staring at the weeping-ash.

“I didn’t know the tree was so big,” she muttered.

“The dining-room is in better order,” he said, gently, “will you come
and sit there, while they get you some tea?”

“Yes, James,” she answered, meekly, and then she added, with almost
the voice and manner of twenty years ago, “tell me about your day.”

She followed him into the other room, and seated herself opposite
him, looking at him expectantly. “Tell me about your day in the law
courts. Was it dull or interesting? Had you any great case on? I
forget. I forget.”

She had always questioned him on his return from the law courts: she
had read the reports of all his cases, and all his rivals’ cases,
interesting herself in everything that concerned his career. And now
there was so much of the past in her manner that his heart ached as
he listened to her. He could not humour her delusion.

“I have sent for your daughter,” he said gravely, thinking that name
might bring her back to a sense of the present time. “She will be
here before long, I believe. I hope you will receive her kindly.”

“Why have you sent for her?” she cried, vexed and startled. “She
is very well where she is—happy and well. The nurse told me so in
her last letter. I can’t have her here. You know that, James,—you
know how people would talk by-and-by—how they would ferret out the
truth—by-and-by, when we want to stand clear of the past——”

“Evelyn, the past is long past, and our child is a woman—a sorrowful
woman. I want you to take her to your heart again, if you have any
heart left in you.”

“I have not,” she cried, with a sudden change, appalling in its
instantaneousness. “My heart died within me twenty years ago, when
you broke it; in this house, yes, in this house, James Dalbrook, God
help me! I have been dreaming! I thought I was living here again in
the old time, and that you had come home to me, as you used to come,
before you broke your promise and abandoned me to marry a rich young
wife. Heart! No, I have a fiery scorpion here, where my heart used to
be. Do you think if I had had a heart I could have killed _him_—that
young man who never injured me by so much as one scornful word? It
was the thought of your daughter that maddened me—the thought of
her happiness, the sound of the church bells and the cheering, and
the sight of the flags and garlands and laurel arches—while _my_
daughter, your nameless, unacknowledged child, was an outcast, and
I who should have been your wife, and the happy mother of just as
happy a bride, I was living in that silent solitary cottage alone
and unloved—upon the land where my father and his forefathers had
been owners of the soil. I had dreamed the dream and you had realized
it. All through those moonlight nights I was awake and roaming about
in the park, from midnight till dawn, thinking, thinking, thinking,
till I felt as if my brain must burst with the agony of thought.
And then I remembered Tom Darcy’s pistols, and I took one of them
with me of a night. I hardly knew why I carried that pistol about
with me, but I felt a necessity to kill something. Once I was near
shooting one of the red deer, but the creature looked at me with its
plaintive eyes, so bold and so tame in his sense of security, and I
fondled him instead of killing him. And then I took to prowling about
by the house, and I saw those two in the lamp-lit room, in their
wedded happiness—their _wedded_ happiness, James, not such a union
as ours, secret, darkened by a cloud of shame. I saw your daughter
in her bright young beauty, the proud, triumphant wife: and then a
devilish thought took hold of me—the thought of seeing her widowed,
broken-hearted; the thought that I might be her evil Destiny—that
just by stretching out my arm and pulling a trigger I could bring
down all that pride into the dust—could bring youth and beauty down
to my level of dull despair.”

“It was a devilish thought.”

“It was; but it was my thought all the same; for three days and three
nights it was never absent from my mind, God knows how I got through
the common business of the day—how the few people with whom I came
in contact did not see murder in my face! I watched and waited for
my opportunity; and when the moment came I did not waver. There are
old people at Cheriton who could tell you that Evelyn Strangway at
fifteen years old was as good a shot as either of her brothers. My
hand had not forgotten its cunning; and your daughter was a widow
three weeks after she was made a wife. By so much as she was happier
than I, by so much was her joy briefer than mine.”

She sank into a corner of the large arm-chair and covered her face
with her hands, muttering to herself. He heard the words—“I made
myself her Evil Destiny; I was her fate—Nemesis, Nemesis! The sins of
the fathers! It is the Scripture.”

He could not stay in the room with her after that confession. She
had been perfectly coherent in telling the story of her crime; and
it seemed to him that even now she gloated over the evil she had
wrought—that had it been in her power to undo her work by the lifting
of her hand she would hardly have used that power. She seemed a
malignant spirit, rejoicing in evil.

He went out into the passage and told the policeman’s wife to look
after her, and then he went to the desolate drawing-room and walked
up and down the bare boards waiting for the arrival of one or both of
the doctors.

What would _they_ think of her mental condition. She had been
curiously coherent just now. The temporary delusion had passed away
like a cloud. She had spoken as a person fully conscious of her acts,
and accountable for them. Judged by her speech just now she was a
criminal who deserved the sternest measure of the law.

But he who knew of those long years of brooding, he who knew the
story of her wrongs, and how those wrongs must have acted upon that
proud and stubborn spirit, to him there seemed little doubt that
her mind had long lost its balance, and that her crime had been the
culminating crisis of a long period of melancholia. He waited the
verdict of the doctors with acutest anxiety, for only in an asylum
did he see safety for this unhappy sinner. The finding of the pistol
would inevitably be talked about at Cheriton, and it was possible
that at any moment suspicion might take the right direction. To
get her away, to get her hidden from the world was his most ardent
desire; but this was not inconsistent with his desire to spare her,
to do the best that could be done for her. The thought that he had
ruined her life—that his wrong-doing was at the root of all her
miseries—was never absent from his mind.

Dr. Mainwaring was the first to arrive. He was a man of supreme
refinement, gentle, compassionate, an artist by talent and
temperament, intellectual to the tips of his fingers. He had made
insanity and the care of the insane the work of his life, as his
father and grandfather had done before him, and he enjoyed the
privilege of having been born in an age of enlightenment, which they
had not even foreseen in their happiest anticipations. He had met
Lord Cheriton often in London society, and had visited him in the
country, and they were as close friends as two busy men of the world
can be.

He was mystified by so sudden a summons and to such a locality; but
he had too much tact to betray any surprise. He listened quietly to
Lord Cheriton’s explanation that he was wanted to form an opinion of
a dependent whose state of mind had given cause for uneasiness.

“I will say very little about her till you have seen her,” said
Cheriton. “If it should appear to you and to my friend Wilmot, whom
I have asked to meet you,—if you should decide that she ought to be
placed under restraint, I should wish her to be removed immediately
to your house at Cheshunt. I know that she will be made as happy
there as her state of mind will admit, and I shall rely upon your
kind consideration for making this a special case.”

“You may be assured I shall do my uttermost for any one in whom
you are interested, my dear Cheriton, but indeed I think you must
know that I do my uttermost in every case. It is only in some small
details that I can ever show special attention. Is this poor lady
very violent?”

“No, she is very quiet.”

“And there is no suicidal mania, I hope?”

“I have seen no evidence of it; but she left her home in a strange
and motiveless manner this morning, and that, coupled with other
indications in the past, gave me the alarm.”

“Has she any delusions?”

“Yes, it was under a delusion that she came to this empty house. She
lived here many years ago, and on talking to her just now I found her
unconscious of the lapse of time, and fancying that all things were
still as they were when she was a young woman.”

“Has she had any illness lately?”

“None that I know of.”

“I fear there can be little doubt as to her malady. Will you take me
to her? She will be less alarmed if you are with me. Oh, by the bye,
the nurse you asked for will be here almost immediately.”

“I am glad of that. There is only a wretched slattern in the house,
whom I don’t like to see in attendance upon my poor friend.”

Lord Cheriton and the doctor went into the room, where Mrs. Porter
was sitting facing the window, staring moodily at the trailing
tendrils of Virginia creeper and passion-flower hanging from the
roof of the verandah and shutting out the light. There was something
unspeakably desolate in that glimpse of neglected garden seen athwart
the neglected verdure, with the smoky London sky as a background.

She looked round quickly at the sound of footsteps, and started up
from her chair.

“Who is this man?” she asked, turning to Lord Cheriton. “Are you
going to send me to prison? You have lost no time.”

“This gentleman is my old friend, and he is interested in helping you
if he can.”

“You had better leave us together,” said Dr. Mainwaring, gently.

Lord Cheriton left the room silently, and paced the narrow entrance
hall, listening with intense anxiety to the low murmuring sound of
voices on the other side of the door.

There were no loud tones from either speaker. There could be neither
anger nor profound agitation upon Mrs. Porter’s side, the listener
thought, as he awaited the result of the interview. A knock at the
hall-door startled him from his expectancy, and he hastened to admit
the new arrival.

It was his other medical friend, Dr. Wilmot, stout and jovial,
more adapted to assist at a wedding than a funeral, more fitted to
prescribe for wine-bibbing aldermen or dowagers who needed to be
“kept up” on Rœderer or Mumm, than to stand beside the bed of agony,
or listening to the ravings of a mind distraught. Mainwaring came out
of the dining-room at the sound of voices in the hall.

“Ah, how do you do, Wilmot? You will have very little trouble in
making up your mind about this poor soul. Go in and talk to her while
I take a turn in the garden with his Lordship.”

He opened the dining-room door, and Dr. Wilmot passed in, smiling,
agreeable, and beginning at once in an oily voice, “My dear lady,
my friend Mainwaring suggests that I should have a little chat with
you while—while Lord Cheriton and he are admiring the garden. A very
nice garden, upon my word, for the immediate vicinity of London. One
hardly expects such a nice bit of ground nowadays. May I feel your
pulse? Thanks, a little too rapid for perfect health.”

“What do you and that other man mean by all this pretence?” she
exclaimed, indignantly. “I am not ill. Are you a doctor, or a
policeman in disguise? If you want to take me to prison I am ready to
go with you. I came to London on purpose to give myself up. You need
not beat about the bush. I am ready.”

“Mad, very mad,” thought Dr. Wilmot, detaining the unwilling wrist,
and noting its tumultuous pulsations by the second hand of his
professional watch.

Lord Cheriton and Dr. Mainwaring were pacing slowly up and down the
moss-grown gravel while this was happening.

“How did you find her?”

“Curiously calm and collected for the first part of the interview.
Had it not been for her troubled eye, and the nervous movements of
her hands, I should have supposed her as sane as you or I. I talked
to her of indifferent subjects, and her answers were consecutive and
reasonable, although it was evident she resented my presence. It was
only when I asked her why she had come to London that she became
agitated and incoherent, and began to talk about having committed a
murder, and wishing to give herself up and make a full confession
of her guilt. Instead of waiting for the law to find her out she
was going to find the law. She had no fear of the result. She had
long been tired of her life, and she was not afraid of the disgrace
of a felon’s death. Her whole manner, as she said this, showed a
deep-rooted delusion, and I am of opinion that her mind has been
unhinged for a long time. That notion of an imaginary crime is often
a fixed idea in lunacy. A madman will conceive a murder that never
took place, or he will connect himself with some actual murder, and
insist upon his guilt, often with an extraordinary appearance of
truth and reality, until he is shaken by severe cross-examination.”

“You will receive her in your house at once?”

“I have no objection, if Wilmot’s opinion coincides with mine; but
another medical man must sign the certificate if she is to enter my
house. I have no doubt as to her being in a condition to require
restraint. She is not violent at present, but if she is not taken
care of she will go wandering about in search of a police-magistrate,
and with increasing excitement there will be every likelihood of
acute mania. Ah, here comes Wilmot. Well, what do you think of the
case, Wilmot?”

“Mad, undeniably mad. She took me for a policeman, and raved about a
murder for which she wanted to give herself up to justice.”

“A fixed delusion, you see,” said Mainwaring, with a gentle sigh. “Do
you know how long she has had this idea, Cheriton?”

“Indeed, I do not. Her position on my estate was a peculiar one.
She lived at one of the lodges, but her status was not that of an
ordinary dependent. She was her own mistress, and lived a very
solitary life—after her daughter left her. I have sent for the
daughter, who will be here presently, I hope. My first notice of
anything amiss was a hint dropped by a young medical man who was
visiting at Cheriton. He saw Mrs. Porter, and formed the opinion that
she either had been off her head in the past, or was likely to go off
her head in the future. That startled me, and I had it in my mind
to ask you to come down to see her, Mainwaring, when there came the
sudden departure of this morning—a departure which was so at variance
with her former habits that it made me anxious for her safety. I
followed her to London—first to her daughter’s lodging—and then
here—where by mere guesswork, I found her.”

“Do you think that it may be the sad event of last year—the murder of
your son-in-law—which has put this notion into her head?”

“It is not unlikely. That dreadful event made a profound impression
upon everybody at Cheriton. She, being a reserved and thoughtful
woman, may have brooded over it.”

“Until she grew to associate herself with the crime,” said Wilmot.
“Nothing more likely. Was the murderer never found, by the way?”

“Never.”

“But there can be no suspicion against this lady, I conclude. She can
have been in no way concerned in the crime?”

“I think you have only to look at her in order to be satisfied upon
that point,” said Lord Cheriton; and the two physicians agreed that
the poor lady in question was not of the criminal type, and that
nothing was more common in the history of mental aberration than the
hallucination to which she was a victim.

“Those monotonous lives of annuitants and genteel dependents—exempt
from labour, and to the outward eye full of placid contentment, do
not infrequently tend towards madness,” said Dr. Wilmot. “I have
seen more than one such case as this. There are some minds that
have no need of action or variety, some natures which can vegetate
in a harmless nullity. There are other tempers which prey upon
themselves in solitude, and brood upon fancies till they lose touch
of realities. This lady is of the latter type, highly organized,
sensitive to a marked degree, of the _genus-irritabile_.”

“You will take all necessary steps at once?” said Lord Cheriton,
looking from one doctor to the other.

Both were consentient. Dr. Wilmot drove off at once to find the
nearest medical man, and brought him back in his carriage. A very
brief interview with the patient convinced this gentleman of the
necessity for gentle restraint, and the certificate was signed by him
and Dr. Wilmot.

It was six o’clock, and the shadows were deepening in the room where
Mrs. Porter was sitting, quiescent, silent, in a kind of apathy
from which she was scarcely roused by the entrance of the nurse
from Cheshunt, a tall comely-looking woman of about thirty, neatly
dressed, and with pleasant manners.

Mrs. Porter sat there in her dull lethargy, the food that had been
prepared for her untasted at her side. The nurse looked at the
patient with a keen professional eye, and from the patient to the
tray where an ill-cooked chop stagnated in a pool of grease; and
where the unused teacup showed that even the feminine refreshment of
tea had failed to tempt her.

“She hasn’t eaten anything,” said the nurse, “and she looks weak and
wasted, as if she had been for a long time without food. You’d better
send for some beef essence and a little brandy. She ought to be kept
up somehow, if she is to be taken to Cheshunt to-night. It will be a
long drive.”

Lord Cheriton despatched the policeman’s wife to the nearest
chemist’s and the nearest wine merchant’s, while he went himself
to a livery stable and ordered a brougham and pair to be at Myrtle
Cottage at seven o’clock. The certificate had been signed, and there
was nothing to hinder the removal of the patient. He found Mercy
with her mother upon his return, but the mother had given no sign of
recognition, and the daughter sorrowfully acknowledged the necessity
of the case after Dr. Mainwaring had gently explained her mother’s
condition to her.

“I am not surprised,” she said, with sad submission, “I saw it coming
years ago. I have lain awake many a night when I was a girl listening
to her footsteps as she walked up and down her bedroom, and to the
heart-broken sigh that she gave every now and then, in the dead of
the night, when she thought there was no one to hear her.”

An hour later the woman who for twenty years had been known as Mrs.
Porter, and who was to carry that name to her dying day, was on her
way to The Grange, Cheshunt, with her daughter and the nurse in the
carriage with her. She had made no resistance, had gone where she was
asked to go, with an apathetic indifference, had given no trouble;
but although her daughter had been with her for an hour, doing all
that tender attention could do to awaken her memory, there had been
not a word or a look from the mother to betoken consciousness of her
existence.

Yet it was clear that the mental powers were only clouded, not
extinguished; for, as Lord Cheriton stood a little way outside the
porch watching her as she passed out to the carriage, she stopped
suddenly and looked at him.

“Will you and I ever meet again, James Dalbrook?” she asked solemnly.

He paled at the address in those clear, incisive tones, dreading what
she might say next.

“I think it may be better we should not meet,” he said gloomily. “I
have placed you in the care of those who will do the best that can be
done for you.”

“You are sending me to a madhouse, in the care of a mad doctor. That
is your substitute for Cheriton Chase; the home I used to dream about
ages ago, in this house; the home you and I were to have shared as
man and wife. It was my birth-place, James, and I would to God it had
been my grave before I ever looked upon your face!”

The nurse hustled her charge into the carriage, muttering something
about “delusions;” but Dr. Mainwaring was too shrewd a student
of humanity not to perceive some meaning in these consecutive
utterances. He had no doubt that Mrs. Porter was deranged, and a
person who would be the better for the moderate restraint of a
well-ordered asylum: but he had also no doubt that she had her lucid
intervals, and that in this farewell speech she had let in the light
upon her past relations with James Dalbrook, first Baron Cheriton.

That revelation accounted for some points in the law-lord’s conduct
which had hitherto been incomprehensible to his friend the doctor.




CHAPTER XXXVI.

    “Mine after-life! what is mine after-life?
     My day is closed! the gloom of night is come!
     A hopeless darkness settles o’er my fate!”


It seemed to Lord Cheriton as he drove to Victoria Street in Dr.
Mainwaring’s brougham, that the day which had just come to an end had
been the longest day of his life. He looked back at the sunny morning
hour in which he had lingered over the business of the toilet,
brooding upon that discovery of the pistol, his spirits weighed down
by a vague foreboding, a dim horror of approaching evil, scarcely
able to measure the extent of his own fears. He recalled the moment
at which his valet brought him Theodore’s brief summons to the West
Lodge—a moment that had given new reality to all he dreaded—a summons
which told him that the shadowy horror which had been beside his
pillow all through the night was going to take a tangible shape. Oh,
God, how long it seemed since that pencilled line was put into his
hand—since he stood in the blinding sunshine staring at the curt
summons—before he recovered himself so far as to turn to his servant
with his habitual grave authority, and give some trivial order about
his overcoat.

Since then what slow agonies of apprehension—what self-abasement
before the daughter whom he met for the first time as his daughter,
face to face! What terror lest the woman whom his perfidy had driven
to madness and to crime should be called upon to answer to the law
for that crime—while England should ring with the story of _his_
treachery, and _his_ hidden sin! He felt as if he had lived through
half a lifetime of shame and agony between the vivid light of the
August morning and the cool grey shadows of the August night. He
leant back in his corner of the cosy little brougham, pale and dumb,
a worn-out man, and his friend the physician respected his silence.

“Will you come home and dine with me, Cheriton?” said Dr. Mainwaring,
as they crossed the bridge. “It may be pleasanter for you than the
solitude of your own rooms.”

“You are very good. No, I am not fit for society, not even for yours.
I am deeply indebted to you—I feel that you are indeed my friend—and
that you will do all that can be done to make that broken life yonder
endurable.”

“You may be sure of that. I would do as much were Mrs. Porter a
nameless waif whom I had found by the road side; but as your friend
she will have an unceasing interest for me. Shall you stay long
enough in town to be able to spare time to go and see her at the
Grange?”

“No, I must go back to Dorsetshire to-morrow. I doubt if I shall
ever see her again. Accept that fact as the strongest proof of my
confidence in you. Had I any doubt as to her treatment I would see
her from time to time, at whatever cost of pain to myself.”

“There is nothing but pain, then, in your present feeling about that
poor lady?”

“Nothing but pain.”

“And yet—forgive me if I touch an old wound—I think you must once
have loved her?”

The shadows were deepening, the lamps shone with faint yellow light
upon the grey stone parapet, and the interior of the carriage
was very dark. Perhaps it was the darkness which emboldened Dr.
Mainwaring to push his inquiry to this point.

“You are right,” his friend answered slowly. “I loved her once.”

The brougham stopped at his lordship’s door in Victoria Street, and
then drove northwards with the physician. There was time for much
serious reflection between Westminster and Welbeck Street.

“My new patient must be carefully looked after,” mused the doctor,
“for I’m afraid there’s more meaning in her self-accusation than
there generally is in such cases, and that Sir Godfrey Carmichael’s
murderer is now in my keeping.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The long August day passed very quietly at Milbrook Priory. Lady
Cheriton arrived in the afternoon, and the three generations spent
the summer hours on the lawn, mother and daughter sitting at work
under the tulip trees, grandson and nurse in that state of perpetual
motion which is infancy’s only alternative with perpetual slumber.

Theodore spent his afternoon in a somewhat restless fashion, and
appeared as if possessed by a rage for locomotion. He rambled
about the grounds, explored the shrubberies, and every yard of the
plantation that girdled the little park. He went to both lodges, and
talked to the caretaker at each. He made two different excursions to
the village, on pretence of making inquiries at the Post Office, but
in reality with the idea of meeting with, or hearing of, Mrs. Porter,
should she have wandered that way. He behaved like a member of the
secret police who had been charged with the guardianship of the most
precious life in the land; and if his movements betrayed the nervous
anxiety of the amateur, rather than the business-like tranquillity
of the professional, he made up in earnestness for what he lacked in
training and experience.

It was on his return from his second sauntering perambulation of the
village that he found Lord Cheriton’s telegram waiting for him at
the Priory. The relief that message brought was unspeakable, and his
countenance showed the change in his feelings when he rejoined the
two ladies on the lawn.

“Something very pleasant must have happened to you, Theodore,” said
Juanita. “You have been looking the picture of gloom all day, and now
you are suddenly radiant. Have you been talking to one of the Vicar’s
pretty daughters?”

“No, Juanita; neither of those wax-doll beauties glorified my path. I
heard their treble voices on the other side of the holly-hedge as I
passed the Vicarage, and I’m afraid they were quarrelling. I have had
good news from London.”

“From my father?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Theodore, why do you torture me by hiding things from me?
Something has happened, I know.”

“You will know all in a few days, Juanita. Thank God, a great fear
that has haunted me for some time past is now at an end. I can look
at you and your child without seeing the shadow of an enemy across
your path.”

She looked at him searchingly.

“All this amounts to nothing,” she said. “I have never feared for
myself or thought of myself. Will my husband’s death be avenged, and
soon, soon, soon? That is the question.”

“That is a question which you yourself may be called upon to
answer—and very soon,” he said.

He would say no more, in spite of her feverish eagerness, her
impatient questionings.

“I have changed my mind, Juanita,” he said presently. “I will not
bore you with my company till I am free to answer your questions. The
motive for my presence in this house is at an end.”

“Is it? What has become of the suspicious characters my father talked
about?”

“The danger has not come this way—as he feared it might.”

“Stay,” she said. “Whether there is danger or not you are going to
stay. I will not be played fast and loose with by any visitor. Mother
likes to have you here, and baby likes you.”

“Not so well as he likes Cuthbert Ramsay,” retorted Theodore, with
almost involuntary bitterness.

This time Juanita’s blush was an obvious fact.

She walked away from her cousin indignantly.

“You may go or stay, as you please,” she said; and he stayed, stayed
to be a footstool under her feet if she liked—stayed with a heart
gnawed by jealousy, consumed by despair.

“It is useless—hopeless beyond the common measure of hopelessness,”
he told himself. “She never cared for me in the past, and she will
never care for me in the future. I am doomed to stand for ever
upon the same dull plane of affectionate indifference. If I were
dangerously ill she would nurse me; if I were in difficulties she
would load me with benefits; if I were dead she would be sorry for
me; but she is fonder of Ramsay, whom she has seen half a dozen times
in her life, than she will ever be of me.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lord Cheriton returned to Dorsetshire on the following afternoon. He
drove from Wareham to the Priory, and had a long _tête-à-tête_ with
Theodore in the garden before dinner.

“You have acted for my daughter throughout this miserable business,”
he said, when he had told all that was to be told about Mrs. Porter’s
seclusion at Cheshunt. “She has confided in you more completely even
than in me—her father, and I leave my cause in your hands. You must
plead to the daughter for the erring father, whose sin has exercised
a fatal influence upon her life. Win her forgiveness for me—win her
pity for that most unhappy woman, if you can. It is a difficult task
which I entrust to you, Theodore, but I believe in your power to move
that generous heart to mercy.”

“You may believe in my devotion to you both,” said Theodore, and Lord
Cheriton left the Priory without seeing his wife and daughter, who
had gone to dress for dinner just before his arrival, and who came to
the drawing-room presently, both expecting to find him there.

Theodore explained his hasty departure as best he might.

“Your father drove over to speak to me upon a matter of business,” he
said to Juanita. “He was tired after his journey, and preferred going
home to dine.”

“He was not ill, I hope?” cried Lady Cheriton, with a look of alarm.

“No, there is nothing amiss with him, except fatigue.”

Juanita looked at him intently, eager to question him, but the
butler’s entrance to announce dinner stopped her, and she told
Theodore to give his arm to her mother, and followed them both to the
dining-room.

The meal was a mockery as far as two out of the three were concerned.
Juanita was nervous and ill at ease, impatient of the lengthy
ceremonial. Theodore ate hardly anything, but kept up a slipshod
conversation with Lady Cheriton, talked about the grandchild’s
abnormal intelligence, and assured her in reply to her reiterated
inquiries that her husband was not ill, was not even looking ill, and
that there was no reason for her to go back to the Chase that night,
as she was disposed to do.

Juanita rose abruptly before the grapes and peaches had been taken
round.

“Would you mind coming to my room at once, Theodore?” she said. “I
want half an hour’s talk with you about—business. You will excuse my
leaving you, won’t you, mother?”

“My dear child, I shall be glad to get half an hour in the nursery.
Boyle tells me that little rascal is never so lively as just before
he settles down for the night.”

Lady Cheriton went off in one direction, Juanita and Theodore in the
other.

The lamp was lighted in the study, on the table where two rows of
books told of the widow’s studious solitude.

Theodore glanced at the titles of those neatly arranged volumes and
saw that they were mostly upon scientific subjects.

“I did not know that you were fond of science, Juanita?” he said.

“I am not. I used to hate it. I am as ignorant as a baby. I don’t
believe I know any more about the moon than Juliet did when she
accused it of inconstancy. Only when one comes to my age one ought to
improve one’s self. Godfrey will be asking me questions before I am
much older—and when he wants to know whether the earth goes round the
sun or the sun round the earth, I must be prepared to answer him.”

She spoke with a nervous air, facing him in the soft clear lamplight,
her hand upon the row of books, her eyes eager and questioning.

“You have seen my father, Theodore. Is the embargo removed?”

“It is.”

“And you know who murdered my husband?”

“So far as the assassin’s own confession is to be believed, yes.”

“He has confessed—he is in prison—he will be hanged,” she cried
breathlessly.

“The murderer has confessed—but is not in prison—and will not be
hanged—at least I trust not, in God’s mercy.”

“You are full of pity for a murderer, Theodore,” she cried bitterly.
“Have you no pity for my husband? Is his death to go unpunished? Is
his life—the life that might have been as long as it was happy—is
that to count for nothing?”

“It is to count for much, Juanita. Believe me, your husband is
avenged. His death was a sacrifice to a broken heart and a disordered
brain. The hand that killed him is the hand of one who cannot be
called to account—the hand of a madwoman.”

“A woman?”

“Yes, a woman. The woman you have seen many a time as you passed in
and out of Cheriton Chase in your father’s carriage by the West Gate.”

“Mrs. Porter?”

“Yes.”

“Great God! why did she kill my husband?”

“Because she was unhappy—because she had suffered until sorrow had
obscured her intellect, till her life had become one long thirst to
do evil—one hatred of youth and beauty, and innocent gladness like
yours. She saw you in your wedded happiness, and she thought of a
happiness which was once her own day dream—the hope and dream of
patient, self-denying years. She struck at you through your husband.
She struck at your father through you.”

“My father! What was he to her—ever, except a friend and benefactor?”

“He was once more than that to Evelyn Strangway.”

“Strangway!” shrieked Juanita, clasping her hands. “Did I not tell
you so from the first? It was the footstep of a Strangway that crept
past our window, while we sat together in our happiness, without
thought of peril. It was a Strangway who killed my husband. You told
me that they were all dead and gone—that the race was extinct—that
the people I feared were phantoms. I told you it was a Strangway
who fired that shot, and you see my instinct was truer than your
reason—and there was a Strangway at our gates—disguised—under a false
name—looking at us with smooth, hypocritical smiles—nursing her wrath
to keep it warm.”

“Unhappily your instinct hit upon the fatal truth. The hatred of the
Strangways was not dead. One member of that family survived, and
cherished a more than common malignity against the race that had
blotted out the old name.”

“But my father, how had he provoked her hatred?”

“He once loved her, Juanita—many years ago—before he saw your
mother’s face. Evelyn Strangway and he had been lovers—pledged
to each other by a solemn promise. As a man of honour he should
have kept that promise; there were stringent reasons that bound
him. But he saw your mother and loved her, and broke with Evelyn
Strangway—openly, with no unmanly deceit; but still there was the
broken promise, and that involved a deep wrong. He believed that
wrong forgiven. He believed the more in her pardon because it was her
earnest desire to live unrecognized and unnoticed upon the estate
where she was born. He could not fathom the depth of hatred in that
warped nature. He did all that there was left to him to do—having
taken his own course and entered upon a new and fairer life with the
woman he loved—to make amends to the woman he had deserted. He never
suspected the depth of her feelings—he never suspected the seeds of
madness, with its ever present dangers. He did what in him lay to
atone for the sin of his youth; but that sin found him out, and it
was his bitter lot to see his beloved daughter the innocent victim
of his wrong-doing. He trusted me to tell you this miserable story,
Juanita. He humbles himself in the dust before you, stricken at the
thought of your suffering. He appeals through me to your love and to
your pity. How am I to answer him when I answer for you?”

She was silent for some moments after he had asked this final
question, her eyes fixed, her chest heaving with the stormy beating
of her heart.

“What has become of this woman—this pitiless devil?” she gasped.

“She is in a madhouse.”

“Is no punishment to overtake her? Is she not to be tried for her
life? Let them prove her mad, or let them find her guilty, and hang
her—hang her—hang her. Her life for his, her worn-out remnant of
wretched, disappointed days for his bright young life, with all its
promise and all its hope.”

“It would be a poor revenge, Juanita, to take so poor a life. This
unhappy woman is under restraint that will, in all probability, last
till the day of her death. Her crime is known only to your father and
to me. Were it to become known to others she would have to stand in
the dock, and then the whole story would have to be told—the story of
your father’s broken promise—of this woman’s youth, bound so closely
with his that to many it would seem almost as if they stood side by
side at the bar. Do you think that the fierce rapture of revenge
could ever atone to you for having brought dishonour upon your
father’s declining years, Juanita?”

“And my husband’s death is to go unavenged?”

“Do you think there is no retribution in the slow agony of a
shattered mind—the long blank days of old age in a lunatic asylum,
the apathy of a half-extinguished intellect varied by flashes of
bitter memory? God help and pity such a criminal, for her punishment
must be heavier than hemp and quick-lime.”

She seemed scarcely to hear him. She was walking up and down the
room, her hands clenched, her brows contracted over the fixed eyes.

“I caught just one glimpse of her as we drove past; but that glimpse
ought to have been enough,” she said. “I can see her face as we
passed the lodge, looking out at us from the parlour window, within
a few hours of my darling’s death—a pale vindictive face—yes,
vindictive. I ought to have understood; I ought to have taken
warning, and guarded my beloved one from her murderous hate.”

“What am I to say to your father, Juanita? I ought not to leave him
long in doubt. Think what it is for a father to humiliate himself
before his daughter—to sue for pardon.”

“Oh, but he must not do that. I have nothing to forgive. How could
he understand that there could be such diabolical malignity in any
human breast? How could he think that the wrong done by him would
be revenged upon that innocent head? Oh, if she had gone a nearer
way to revenge herself—if she had killed me, rather than him. It is
such bitterness to know that my love brought him untimely death—that
he might have been here now, happy, with long years of honour and
content before him if he had chosen any other wife.”

“It is hopeless to think of what might have been, Nita. Your husband
was happy in your love—and not unhappy in his death. Such a fate is
far better than the dull and slow decay which closes many a fortunate
life—the inch by inch dissolution of a protracted old age—the gradual
extinction of mind and feeling—the apathetic end. You must not talk
as if your husband’s death was the extremity of misfortune.”

“It was—for me. Can I forget what it was to lose him? Oh, there is no
use in talking of my loss. I wanted to avenge his death. I have lived
for that—and I am cheated of even that poor comfort.”

“What shall I say to your father?”

“Say that I will do nothing to injure him—or to distress my mother. I
will remember that I am their daughter, as well as Godfrey’s widow.
Good night, Theodore. You have done your uttermost to help me. We
cannot help it, either of us, if Fate was against us.”

She gave him her hand, very cold, but with the firm grasp of
friendship. The very touch of that hand told him he would never be
more to her than a friend. Not so is a woman’s hand given when the
impassioned heart goes with it.




CHAPTER XXXVII.

                “A malady
    Preys on my heart that medicine cannot reach,
    Invisible and cureless.”


Mrs. Porter’s evanishment created considerable talk in the little
village of Cheriton, and would doubtless have been the occasion
of still greater wonder but for the impenetrable stupidity of the
young maid-servant, from whom no detailed account of her mistress’s
departure could be extorted. Had the girl Phœbe been observant and
loquacious she might have stimulated public curiosity by a lively
narrative of events; setting forth Theodore Dalbrook’s emotion at
finding the lodge deserted; and how he had sent up to the house for
his Lordship; and how his Lordship and Mr. Dalbrook had remained in
earnest conversation for nearly an hour in the lodge parlour; and how
Mrs. Porter had left a mahogany box upon the table, a flat mahogany
box with brass corners, which Phœbe had never seen before; and how
this very box had disappeared mysteriously when the two gentlemen
left. All this would have afforded mental pabulum for the acuter wits
of the village, and would have formed the nucleus of an interesting
scandal, to be uttered with bated breath over the humble tea-tray,
and to give zest to the unassuming muffin in the back parlours of
small rustic shopkeepers. As it was, thanks to Phœbe’s admirable
stolidity, all that was known of Mrs. Porter’s departure was that she
had gone to London by the early train on a certain morning, and that
her luggage had been sent after her, address unknown.

It was the general opinion that Mrs. Porter had had money left
her, and that she had reassumed her position in life as a genteel
personage. This afforded some scope for speculative gossip, but not
for a wide range of conjecture, and in less than a month after Mrs.
Porter’s departure the only talk in relation to the West Lodge was
the talk of who would succeed the vanished lady as its occupant.
This thrilling question was promptly settled by the removal of the
head gardener and his wife from their very commonplace abode in the
village to the old English cottage.

Cheriton was furnished with a more interesting topic of discourse
before the end of October, when it was “given out” that Lord and
Lady Cheriton were going to winter abroad, an announcement which
struck consternation to a village in which the great house was the
centre of light and leading, and the chief consumer of butcher’s
meat, farm produce—over and above the supply from the home-farm—and
expensive groceries; not to mention hardware, kitchen crockery,
coals, saddlery, forage, and odds and ends of all kinds. To shut up
Cheriton Chase for six months was to paralyse trade in Cheriton.

To draw down the blinds and close the shutters of the great house was
to spread a gloom over the best society in the neighbourhood, and to
curtail the weekly offertory by about one-third.

Everybody admitted, however, that his Lordship had been looking
ill of late. He had aged suddenly, “as those fine, well set-up men
are apt to do,” said Mr. Dolby, the doctor. He looked careworn and
haggard. The village solicitor hoped that he had not been dabbling
with foreign loans—or had invested blindly in the fortune of an
impossible canal—yet opined that nothing but the Stock Exchange
could make such a sudden change for the worse in any man. Mr. Dolby
declared that Lord Cheriton’s lungs were as sound as a bell, and that
if he were ordered abroad it was not on account of his chest.

Everybody pitied her Ladyship, and talked of her as despondingly as
if it had been proposed to take her to Botany Bay in the days of
transportation for felony. It was so cruel to separate her from her
flower-gardens, her hothouses, her poultry-yard, and her daughter;
for all which things a correct British matron was supposed to exist.
To take her from these placid domestic pleasures, from these strictly
lady-like interests, and to plunge her in a hotbed of vice such as
Monte Carlo—as pictured by the rustic mind—would be a kind of moral
murder. Cheriton recovered its equanimity somewhat upon hearing that
his Lordship was going to winter at Mustapha Supérieure—but it was
opined that even there baccarat and Parisian morals would be in the
ascendant, and a photograph of a square in Algiers, which looked like
a bit broken off the Rue de Rivoli, was by no means reassuring.

Yet, whatever Dr. Dolby might say as to the soundness of his lungs,
there remained the fact that his Lordship had altered for the worse
since the shooting season began. He who used to go out daily with
the guns, had this year not gone with them half a dozen times in the
whole season. He whose active habits and personal superintendence of
his estate had been the admiration of his neighbours had taken to
staying at home, dreaming over Horace or Juvenal in the library.

Yes, Lord Cheriton was a broken man. From the hour in which his
daughter had laid her head upon his breast, and sobbed out fond
words of compassion and forgiveness for the weakness and the sin
that had brought about her one great sorrow—from that hour James
Dalbrook’s zest of life dwindled, and the things that he had cared
for pleased him no more. His heart sickened as he rode his cob by the
familiar lanes, and surveyed wide-spreading cornfield and undulating
pasture—sickened at the thought of that wretched creature whose
dream he had darkened, whose long-cherished hope he had ruthlessly
disappointed. The image of Evelyn Darcy, eating out her heart in
the dull monotony of a private madhouse, came between him and that
sunlit prospect, haunted and tortured him wherever he turned his eye.
He had to give up the quiet morning rides which had once been the
most restful portion of the day, his thinking hours, his time for
leisurely discursive meditations, for indulgence in happy thoughts
and humorous reverie.

His wife saw the change in him—knowing nothing of the cause—and urged
him to take advice. He gratified her by seeing Sir William Jenner,
confessed to being fagged and out of spirits, and obtained just
the advice he wanted—complete change of scene—a winter in Egypt or
Algiers.

“We’ll try Algiers first, and if we don’t like it we can try the
Nile,” he said, and his wife, who would have gone to Vancouver Island
or Patagonia just as cheerfully, forthwith ordered her trunks to be
packed, and began to take leave of her grandson, an operation which
would require weeks.

They left England in the middle of November, just when the last
leaves were being stripped from the oaks and beeches by the
blustering south-west wind, which is a speciality in that part of the
country, where it comes salt with the bitter breath of the sea, and
sometimes thick and gray with sea fog.

Mrs. Porter had been nearly three months at Cheshunt Grange, and
Theodore had been three times to see her in that carefully-chosen
retreat, and on two of those visits had met her daughter Mercy, who
went to her twice a week.

He had found Dr. Mainwaring’s patient strangely calm and tractable,
professing herself contented with her life, and having established
her reputation among the other patients as a lady of blameless
character and reserved manners.

“I sometimes wonder how they would feel if they knew what I did that
night,” she said to Theodore once, with a sinister smile. “They think
me a commonplace person. They call my complaint nervous debility.
Nobody here would believe me if I were to tell them that I murdered a
man who never offended me by so much as an uncivil word. They don’t
believe that such a deed as that would be possible in our day, and
in our country. They think it was only a couple of centuries ago in
Southern Europe that women knew the meaning of revenge.”

This was the solitary occasion on which she spoke of her crime.
On the other visits he found her apathetic. Although she was
elaborately polite, it was evident that she did not recognize him.
She had, however, recognized her daughter, and now received her with
some faint show of tenderness, but not without a touch of fretful
impatience. It was evident that Mercy’s presence gave her no pleasure.

“I go to see her as often as Dr. Mainwaring allows me,” Mercy told
Theodore, as they walked to the station together. “It is all I can
do—and it is very little.”

“Have you thought any more of Lord Cheriton’s earnest desire to
improve your position? Have you learnt to take pity upon him, to
think more kindly of him, on account of all he has suffered?”

“I am very sorry for him—but I can never accept any favour at his
hands. I can never forget what my mother’s life has been like, and
who made her what she is.”

“And is your own life to be always the same—a monotony of toil?”

“I am used to such a life—but I have some thought of a change in
my employment. I had a long talk with your friend Mr. Ramsay last
night at Miss Newton’s, and through his help I hope to learn to be a
sick-nurse. I should be of more use to my fellow-creatures in that
capacity than in stitching at fine needlework for rich people’s
children.”

“It would be a hard life, Mercy.”

“I am content to live a hard life. I had my span of a soft life—a
life of idleness on a summer sea, amidst the loveliest spots upon
earth—a life that would have been like a glimpse of Heaven itself,
if it had not been for the consciousness of sin and disgrace. Do you
think I forget those days on the Mediterranean, or forget that I have
to atone for them? The man I loved is dead—all that belonged to that
life has vanished like a dream.”

They parted at the railway station, she to go to her place in a
dusty third-class carriage, he to a smoking carriage to smoke the
meditative pipe, and think sadly of those two blighted lives which
had been ground beneath the wheels of Lord Cheriton’s triumphal car.

       *       *       *       *       *

Cheriton Chase was deserted, the blinds down, the servants on board
wages, the flower-beds empty and raked over for the winter; but at
Milbrook Priory all was life and movement. The sisters and their
husbands were again established in their favourite rooms. Lady Jane
was again at hand to assist her daughter-in-law to bear the burden
of a family party, and all was much as it had been in the previous
winter, except that Juanita had a new interest in life, and was able
to take pleasure in many things that had been an oppression to her
spirits last year.

Most of all were her feelings altered towards Mrs. Grenville and her
nursery. She was now warmly interested in the history of Johnnie’s
measles, and deeply sympathetic about that constitutional tendency
towards swollen tonsils which was dear little Lucy’s “weak point.”
For must not her Godfrey inevitably face the ordeal of measles, and
might not his tonsils show a like weakness at the growing age? All
those discussions about nursery dinners—the children who fed well and
the children who fed badly—those who liked milk puddings and those
who could not be induced to touch them—the advisability of a basin
of cornflour or bread-and-milk at bedtime, the murderous influence
of buns and pastry, and the lurking dangers of innocent-seeming
jam—all these things, to hear of which last year bored her almost to
exasperation, were now vital and spirit-moving questions.

The little visitors’ nurseries were near the infant Sir Godfrey’s
rooms, and it was a delight to find the baby taking pleasure in
his youthful cousins’ society, and revelling in their noise. His
own young lungs revealed their power and scope as they had never
done before, and led the infant orchestra. Juanita spent hours in
this noisy society, sitting on the floor to be crawled over by her
son—who was just beginning to discover the possibility of independent
locomotion—and to have her hair pulled affectionately by the younger
Grenvilles, who found her the most accommodating playfellow. She
insisted that the children should dine at the family luncheon table,
much to the gratification of their mother and grandmother, and to the
exasperation of Mrs. Morningside, who, having left her own children
with their conscientious governess and nurses, in the North of
England, did not see why her midday meal should be made intolerable
by the boisterous egotism of her nephews and nieces.

This was the condition of things at Christmas when Theodore
reappeared at the Priory, having come to Dorchester for his holidays,
after three months’ earnest work. He had been reading with a man of
some distinction at the Chancery Bar, and he had been writing for one
of the Law Journals. He was struck by the change in his cousin. She
looked younger, brighter, and happier than she had ever looked since
her husband’s death. No one could accuse her of having forgotten him,
of having grown indifferent to his memory, for at the least allusion
which recalled his image her expression clouded, and her eyes grew
sad. But there could be no doubt that the dawn of a happier existence
was beginning to disperse the darkness of her night of grief. The
influence of her child had done much; the solution of the mystery of
her husband’s death had done more to relieve her mind of its burden.
She was no longer tortured by wonder; her thoughts were no longer
forced to travel perpetually along the same groove. She knew the
worst, and pity for her father prompted her to try to forget the
wretch who had blighted her young life.

She received Theodore with all her old kindness, with that easy
cordiality which was of all indications the most hopeless for the man
who loved her. She took him to the nurseries, where Christmas fires
blazed merrily, and Christmas gifts strewed the carpet, a plethora
of toys, a litter of foil paper and gold and silver fringe, and
tissue-paper cocked hats and Pierrot caps, from the wreck of cracker
bonbons. The children were masters of the situation in this Christmas
week.

“It is _their_ season,” said Juanita tenderly. “I don’t think we can
ever do too much to make our children happy at this time, remembering
that He who made the season sacred was once a little child.” She took
her baby up in her arms as she spoke, and pressed the little face
lovingly against her own.

“Why does Mr. Ramsay never come to see me?” she asked with a sudden
lightness of tone. “He used to be so fond of baby.”

“He is working hard at the hospital.”

“And is he not to have any holiday with you?”

“I fear not.”

Her manner in making the inquiry, light as it was, told him so much;
and he noticed how she bent her face over the child’s flaxen head as
she talked of Ramsay.

“Why does he work so hard?” she asked, after a silence.

“He has never given me any reason, yet I have my own idea about his
motive.”

“And what is your idea?”

“Have you ever heard of a man trying to live down a hopeless
attachment—trying to medicine a mind diseased with the strong physic
of intellectual labour. That is _my_ case, Juanita; and I am inclined
to think that it may be Ramsay’s case too. He has altered curiously
within the last few months. I cannot get so near his inner-self as I
used to get; but I know him well enough to form a shrewd opinion.”

“I am sorry for you both,” she said, with a little nervous laugh,
still hiding her face against the baby’s incipient curls and wrinkled
pink skin. “I am sorry you should be so sentimental.”

“Sentimental, Nita! Is it sentimental to cherish one love for the
best part of a lifetime, knowing that love to be hopeless all the
time? If that is your idea of sentimentality, I confess myself
sentimental. I have loved you ever since I knew the meaning of
the word love—and I have gone on loving you in spite of every
discouragement. I loved you when your love was given to another. Yes,
I stood aside and harboured not one malevolent thought against the
man you had so blest and honoured. I have loved you in your sorrow,
as I loved you years ago in your light-hearted girlhood. I shall
love you till I am dust; but I know that my love is hopeless. Your
very kindness—in its level uniformity of sweetness—has told me that.”

“Dear Theodore, if you knew how I value you—how I admire and respect
you—I think you would be content to accept my sisterly regard”, she
said, looking up at him with tearful eyes. “Perhaps, had we met
differently, as strangers, I might have felt differently—but from my
earliest remembrance you have been to me as a friend and brother. I
cannot teach myself any other love.”

“Ah, Nita, that other love comes untaught. You want no teaching to
love Cuthbert Ramsay. Don’t be angry! I can’t help speaking of that
which has been in my mind so long. I saw my doom in your face when
Cuthbert was here. I saw that he could interest you as I had never
interested you. I saw that he brought fresh thoughts and fancies into
your life. I saw that he could conquer where I was beaten.”

“You have no right to say that.”

“I have the right that goes with conviction, Juanita, and with
disinterested love. I have the right of my loyal friendship for the
man who has shown himself loyal to me. Unless you or I make some sign
to prevent him, Cuthbert Ramsay will have made himself an exile from
this country before the new year is a month old.”

“What do you mean, Theodore?”

“I mean that he is in treaty with the leader of a scientific
expedition to the Antarctic Ocean. The ships will be away three
years, and if he join that expedition as doctor he will be absent for
that time, with the usual hazard of being absent for ever.”

“Why is he going?”

“He has never given me any reason, but I suspect that the reason
is——you.”

“Theodore!”

“If I read his secret right, he left this place deeply in love with
you. He knew I loved you, and that was one reason for a man of his
generous temper to withdraw. You are rich and he is poor, that makes
another reason. He is too honourable to come between his friend and
his friend’s love. He is too proud to offer himself with only his
talents and his unfulfilled ambition to a woman of fortune. So he
takes his old mistress Science for his comforter, and is going to the
other side of the world to watch the planets in the Polar skies, and
to keep the crew free of fever and scurvy, if he can.”

“Three years,” faltered Juanita. “It would not be so very long
anywhere else—but those Polar expeditions so often end in death.”

“Shall I tell him not to go?”

“Pray do.”

“I’m afraid I shall hardly prevail with him, unless——”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you will let me say that you wish him to stay.”

She blushed deepest crimson, and again had resource to the baby’s
pink little head as a hiding-place for her confusion.

“Tell him anything you like. Ask him to come and romp with the
children next Easter. He is fond of children, and I am sure he would
like my nephews and nieces. Ah, Theodore,” she cried, holding out her
hand, “now you are indeed my brother. Forget that you ever wished to
be more, and let me hear of your having found a new love by-and-by.”

“By-and-by is easily said, Juanita.”

       *       *       *       *       *

What would that by-and-by have revealed could the curtain of the
Future have been lifted that Christmas Eve, as the children danced
in the shadowy room while their elders sat beside the fire in the
winter dusk? A coffin brought by land and sea, and laid with stately
ceremonial in the cemetery at Dorchester. A respectful obituary
notice of Lord Cheriton, with a laudatory biography, setting forth
his remarkable gifts and his honourable career: much wonderment
among his Lordship’s friends at the premature termination of that
prosperous life—a man of sixty who had looked ten years younger, and
whose vigorous constitution and grand bearing had denoted one of the
semi-immortals—a Brougham, a Lyndhurst, or a St. Leonards.

What else? A lovely matron, proud of her handsome Scotch husband and
his scientific successes, reigning over one of the most delightful
houses in London, a house in which the brightest lights of the
intellectual world are to be found shining in a congenial atmosphere.
Sir Godfrey Carmichael’s widow, now Cuthbert Ramsay’s wife, and one
of the leaders in all movements that tend towards the welfare and
enlightenment of mankind.

What else? A rising barrister, living quietly in a secluded old
house at Chiswick, with a sweet serious-looking wife, and two lovely
babies, supremely contented with his lot and with his home, which is
managed for him with that perfection of art which conceals art. His
wife and he are of exactly the same age, have the same deep love of
good books, good pictures, and good music, and the same indifference
to frivolous pleasures and fashionable amusements. They have a few
friends, carefully chosen, and of choicest quality, and amongst the
most honoured of these is Sarah Newton, still brisk and active,
though her abundant hair is snow white, and there are the deep lines
of age about her shrewd and kindly eyes. They have their garden with
its old cedars, and old walls shutting off the world of gig-and-villa
respectability. They have their boathouse and boats, in which they
live for the most part on summer evenings, and they have hardly
anything left to wish for—except a lock and weir.

The barrister is Theodore Dalbrook, and his wife’s name is Mercy.

He found her four years ago established as nurse at Cheshunt Grange,
administering to her mother till the day of her death, which
happened by a strange fatality within a few hours of that other
death in Algiers, a sudden death by cerebral apoplexy, swift as a
thunder-clap. He found her there, and saw her frequently in his duty
visits to the Asylum—visits paid in performance of a promise to his
unhappy kinsman—and little by little that sympathy which he had felt
for her in the first hour of their acquaintance warmed and ripened
into love, and in Mercy, the woman who had sinned and paid the bitter
penalty of sin, he found the consoling angel of his disappointed
youth.

The world knows nothing of her story. That dead past is buried deeper
than ever ship went down into the treacherous waters of the tideless
sea. To Mercy herself, in her plenitude of domestic bliss, it seems
as if it was another woman who shed those bitter tears and drank
that cup of shame. The world knows only that Theodore Dalbrook has a
lovely and devoted wife, who thoroughly understands and realizes the
duties of her position.

Lord Cheriton’s will, executed three months before his death at
Mustapha Supérieure, bequeathed a life interest in the sum of £20,000
Consols to Sarah Newton, spinster, the principal to go to Mercy
Darcy—otherwise Mercy Porter—upon that lady’s death.


THE END.


  LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 22 Changed: Do I ever catch cold, Godfrey?” said cried,
             to: Do I ever catch cold, Godfrey?” Nita cried,

  pg 35 Changed: you would remember us, at such at time.
             to: you would remember us, at such a time.

  pg 57 Changed: or entertaiments of any kind.
             to: or entertainments of any kind.

  pg 61 Changed: Who can have sent me a petit bleue?
             to: Who can have sent me a petit bleu?

  pg 65 Changed: evidencies of fancies that had passed
             to: evidences of fancies that had passed

  pg 80 Changed: had paid nearly three hundred pounda
             to: had paid nearly three hundred pounds

  pg 84 Changed: Ah, my love, what would not do.
             to: Ah, my love, that would not do.

  pg 86 Changed: oppressed him life a nightmare.
             to: oppressed him like a nightmare.

  pg 139 Changed: preferred taking of the stars
              to: preferred talking of the stars

  pg 172 Changed: Her loved her well enough to be able
              to: He loved her well enough to be able

  pg 195 Changed: one sees more of a horse from tho pavement
              to: one sees more of a horse from the pavement

  pg 218 Changed: she wore a black satin gownd
              to: she wore a black satin gown

  pg 237 Changed: so I had alway emptied the waste-paper baskets
              to: so I had always emptied the waste-paper baskets

  pg 247 Changed: no less famous a locality than Camberwell Green
              to: no less famous a locality than Camberwell Grove

  pg 271 Changed: You found an improvment in her
              to: You found an improvement in her

  pg 276 Changed: not unfrequeut consequence of continuous brooding
              to: not unfrequent consequence of continuous brooding

  pg 316 Changed: he wreaked his vemon upon her
              to: he wreaked his venom upon her

  pg 352 Changed: soon as possible at Myrtle Cottage, Camberwell Green
              to: soon as possible at Myrtle Cottage, Camberwell Grove

  pg 355 Changed: To got her away
              to: To get her away