CHAPTER IX.
“Poor girl! put on thy stifling widow’s weed,And ’scape at once from Hope’s accursèd bands;To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow,And the next day will be a day of sorrow.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 seemfatal 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,hisdog, 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 forthemthere might be no land to convey.”
The conversation drifted lightly away from Juanita and hersorrow, 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 andmore 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 thegreen 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 hadsickened 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 myselfto 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 amgetting 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. Butthismurder, 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 hatehim? 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 aboutthem, 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 youwouldhelp. 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 therewhen 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 anignis fatuus—you are influenced by prejudices and fancies, rather than by reason.”