“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.”