“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.”