“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.”