“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.