CHAPTER VII.
“I saw a Fury whetting a death-dart.”
“I saw a Fury whetting a death-dart.”
“I saw a Fury whetting a death-dart.”
“I saw a Fury whetting a death-dart.”
Lord Cheriton liked to take his summer holiday on a sunny sea-shore where there were not many English visitors. Paramé St. Malo fulfilled both these conditions. It afforded him a vast expanse of golden sands, firm beneath his foot, steeped in sunshine for the most part, on which to pace to and fro, lifting his eyes dreamily now and then to the sea-girt city, with its stony rampart, and its quaint Louis Quatorze mansions, facing the sea in the sober dignity of massive stone façade and tall windows; grey old houses, which seem too good for the age in which they find themselves, solid enough to last through long centuries, and to outlive all that yet lingers of that grandiose France in which they were built. Roof above roof rises the Breton city, steep old streets leading up to Cathedral and Municipal Palace, with the crocketed steeple for its pinnacle, shining with a pale brilliance in the summer sunlight, verdureless, and with but little colour save the reflected glory of the skies, and the jasper green of the sea in its ring of golden sand.
Lord Cheriton affected Paramé because, though it was within a summer night’s journey from his own Isle of Purbeck, it was thoroughly out of the beaten track, and he was tolerably secure from those hourly encounters with his most particular friends, to which he must have submitted at Baden or Spa, at Trouville or Dieppe. Paramé was Parisian or nothing. The smart people all came from Paris. English smartness had its centre at Dinard, and the English who patronize Dinard will tell you there is no other paradise on earth, and that its winter climate is better than that of the Riviera, if people would only have faith. So long as the Cheritons could keep out of the way of exploring friends from Dinard, his Lordshipwas exempt from the amusements which to some minds make life intolerable.
Lady Cheriton was distinctly social in her instincts, and looked Dinard-wards sometimes from her lotus-land with a longing eye. She would have liked to ask some nice people to luncheon; and she knew so many nice people at Dinard. She would have liked to organize excursions to Mont St. Michel, or up the Rance to Dinan. She would have liked to plunge into all manner of innocent gaieties; but her husband stamped out these genial yearnings.
“It seems such a pity not to have people over to dinner when there are such nice operettas and vaudevilles every night at the Casino,” she sighed.
“And if you had them over to dinner, how do you suppose they would get back?” asked her husband, sternly. “Would you wish to keep them all till next morning, and be bored with them at breakfast?”
That intervening strip of sea, narrow as it was, afforded unspeakable comfort to Lord Cheriton. It was an excuse for refusing to go over and take afternoon tea with people he was supposed to hold in his heart of hearts in the way of friendship.
“You can go, Maria, if you like,” he told his wife; “but I am not a good sailor, and I came here on purpose to be quiet.”
This was his Lordship’s answer to every hospitable suggestion. He had come to Paramé for rest; and not for gadding about, or entertainments of any kind.
So the long summer days succeeded each other in a lazy monotony, and whatever gaiety there might be in the great white hotel, the English law-lord and his wife had no share in it. They occupied a suite of light, airy rooms in the west pavilion, and were served apart from the vulgar herd, after the fashion which befitted a person of Lord Cheriton’s distinction. They had only their body servants, man and maid, so they were waited upon by the servants of the hotel, and they drove about the dusty, level roads between St. Servans and Dol in a hired landau, driven by a Breton coachman. Lady Cheriton was dull, but contented. She had always submitted to her husband’s pleasure. He had been a very indulgent husband in essentials, and he had made her a peeress. Her married life had been eminently satisfactory; and she could afford to endure one summer month of monotony amidst pleasant surroundings. She dropped in at the Casino every evening, while Lord Cheriton read the papers in the seclusion of his salon—with the large French window wide open to the blue sea, and the blue moonlight—hearing the tramp of feet on the terrace, or the sea wall beyond, or now and again strains of lively music from the theatre, where the little opera company from Paris were singing Lecocq’s joyous music.
People used to turn round to look at Lady Cheriton as she walked gravely between the rows of seats to her place near theorchestra, his Lordship’s valet following with an extra shawl, an opera-glass, and a footstool. He established her in her chair, and then retired discreetly to the back of the theatre to await her departure, and to escort her safely back to the hotel. He was a large, serious-looking man, a French Swiss, who had lived ten years in Italy, and over fifteen years in Lord Cheriton’s service, and who spoke French, Italian, German, and English indifferently.
Lady Cheriton was handsome still, with a grand Spanish beauty which time had touched lightly. She was tall and dignified in carriage, though a shade stouter than she could have wished, and she dressed to perfection with sobriety of colouring and richness of material. Her life had been full of pleasantness, her only sorrow being the loss of her infant sons, which she had not taken to heart so deeply as the proud father who had pined for an heir to his newly won honours. She had her daughter, her first-born, the child for whom her heart had first throbbed with the strange new love of maternity. She shed some natural tears for the boy-babies, and then she let Juanita fill their place in her heart, and her life again seemed complete in its sum of happiness. And now in this sleepy summer holiday—cut off from most things that she cared for—Juanita’s letters had been her chief joy—those happy, innocent, girlish letters, overflowing with fond, foolish praise of the husband she loved, letters made up of nothings—of what he had said to her, and what she had said to him—and where they had taken afternoon tea—and of their morning ride, or their evening walk, and of those plans for the long future which they were always making, projecting their thoughts into the time to come, and laying out those after years as if they were a certainty.
There had been no fairer morning than that which followed the night of the murder. Lord Cheriton was an early riser at all seasons, most of all in the summer, when he was generally awake from five o’clock, and had to beguile an hour or so with one of the books on the table by his bed—a well-thumbed “Horace” or a duodecimo “Don Quixote,” in ten volumes, which went everywhere with him. By seven o’clock he was dressed, and ready to begin the day; and between that hour and breakfast it was his habit to attend to the correspondence which had accumulated during the previous day. This severe rule was suspended, however, at Paramé, and he gave himself up to restful vacuity, strolling up and down the sands, or walking round the walls of St. Malo, or sauntering into the cathedral in a casual way for an early mass, enjoying the atmosphere of the place, with its old-world flavour.
On this particular morning he went no further than the sands, where he paced slowly to and fro in front of the long white terrace, hotel, and casino, heedless alike of Parisian idlesse coquetting with the crisp wavelets on the edge of the sea, and of the mounted officer yonder drilling his men upon the sandy flat towards St. Malo. Hewas in a mood for idleness, but with him, idleness was only a synonym for deep thought. He was meditating upon his only child’s future, and telling himself that he had done well for her.
Sir Godfrey Carmichael would be made Baron Cheriton in the days to come, when he, the first Baron, should be laid in the newly built vault in the cemetery outside Dorchester. He was not going to sever himself from his kindred in that last sleep, albeit they were common folk. He would lie under the Egyptian sarcophagus which he had set up in honour of his father, the crockery dealer, and his mother, the busy, anxious house-wife. The sarcophagus was plain and unpretentious, hardly too good for the shopkeeper; yet with a certain solid dignity which was not unbefitting the law-lord, almost as massive as that mammoth cross which marks the resting-place of Henry Brougham in the fair southern land. He had chosen the monument with uttermost care, so that it might serve the double purpose. He had looked at the broad blank panel many a time, wondering how his own name would look upon it, and whether his daughter would have a laurel wreath sculptured above it. It might be that admiring friends would suggest his being laid in the Abbey, hard by those shabby disused courts where he had pleaded and sat in judgment through so many laborious years; and it might be that the suggestion would be accepted by Dean and Chapter, and that the panel on the Dorchester sarcophagus would remain blank. James Dalbrook knew that he had deserved well of posterity, and, above all, of the ruling powers. He had been staunch and unwavering in his adherence to his own party, and he knew that he had a strong claim upon any Conservative Ministry. He had sounded those in authority, and he had been assured that there would be very little difficulty in getting Sir Godfrey Carmichael a peerage by-and-by, when he, Lord Cheriton, should be no more. Sir Godfrey’s family was one of the oldest in the country, and he had but to deserve well of his party, when he had got his seat, to insure future favours. As the owner of the Cheriton and Milbrook estates, he would be a worthy candidate for one of those coronets which seem to be dealt round so freely by expiring Ministries, as it were a dying father dividing his treasures among his weeping children. So far as any man can think with satisfaction of the days when he shall be no more—and when this world will go on, badly, of course, but somehow, without him—Lord Cheriton thought of those far-off years when Godfrey Carmichael should be owner of Cheriton Chase. The young man had shown such fine qualities of heart and mind, and, above all, had given such unobtrusive evidence of his affection for Juanita’s father, that the elder man must needs give measure for measure; therefore Godfrey had been to Lord Cheriton almost as a son. The union of his humbly born daughter with one of the oldest families in the south of England gratified the pride of the self-made man. His own pedigree might be of the lowliest; but his grandsonwould be able to look back upon a long line of ancestors, glorified by many a patrician alliance. Strong and stern as was the fabric of James Dalbrook’s mind, he was not superior to the Englishman’s foible, and he loved rank and ancient lineage. He was a Tory to the core of his heart; and it was the earnestness and thoroughness of his convictions which had given him weight with his party. Wherever he spoke or whatever he wrote—and he had written much upon current politics in theSaturday Review, and the higher-class monthlies—bore the stamp of a Cromwellian vigour and a Cromwellian sincerity.
He had never felt more at ease than upon that balmy summer morning, pacing those golden sands in quiet meditation—brooding over Juanita’s last letter received overnight—with its girlish raptures, its girlish dreams; picturing her in the near future as happy a mother as she was a bride, with his grandson, the third Baron Cheriton of the future, in her lap. He smiled at his own foolishness in thinking of that first boy-baby by the title which was but one of the possibilities of a foreshadowed sequence of events; yet he found himself repeating the words idly, to the rhythm of the wavelets that curled and sparkled near his feet—third Baron Cheriton, Godfrey Dalbrook Carmichael, third Baron Cheriton.
The cathedral clock was striking nine as he went into the hotel. The light breakfast of coffee and rolls was laid on a small round table near the window. Lady Cheriton was sitting in a recess between the massive stone columns which supported the balcony above, reading yesterday’sMorning Postin her soft grey cashmere peignoir, whose flowing lines gave dignity to her figure. Her dark hair, as yet untouched by time, was arranged with an elegant simplicity. The fine old lace about her throat harmonized admirably with the pale olive of her complexion. She looked up at her husband with her placid smile, and gave him her hand in affectionate greeting.
“What a morning, James! One feels it a privilege to live. What a superb day it would be for Mont St. Michel!”
“A thirty-mile drive in the dust! Do you really think that it is the best use to which to put a summer day? You may be sure there will be plenty of worthy people of the same opinion, and that the rock will swarm with cheap tourists, and pretty little Madame Poulard will be put to the pin of her collar to feed them all.”
She had seated herself at the table by this time, and was pouring out coffee with a leisurely air, smiling at her husband all the time, thinking him the greatest and wisest of men, even when he restrained her social instincts. She was never tired of looking at that massive face, with its clearly defined features, sharply cut jaw, and large grey eyes—dark and deep as the eyes of the earnest thinker rather than the shrewd observer. The strong projection of the lower browindicated keen perceptions, and the power of rapid judgment; but above the perceptive organs the upper brow towered majestically, giving the promise of a mind predominant in the regions of thought and imagination—such a brow as we look upon with reverence in the portraits of Walter Scott.
Intellectually the brow was equal to Scott’s; morally there was something wanting. Neither benevolence nor veneration was on a par with the reasoning faculties. Tory principles with Lord Cheriton were not so much the result of an upward-looking nature as they were with Scott. This, at least, is the opinion at which a phrenologist might have arrived after a careful contemplation of that powerful brow.
Lord Cheriton sipped his coffee, and leaned back in his arm-chair, with his face to the morning sea. He sat in a lazy attitude, still thoughtful, with those pleasant thoughts which are the repose of the working man’s brain.
The tide was going out; the rocky islets stood high out of the water; the sands were widening, till it seemed almost as if the sea were vanishing altogether from this beautiful bay.
“I suppose they will finish their honeymoon in a week or two, and move on to the Priory,” said Lord Cheriton, by-and-by, revealing the subject of his reverie.
“Yes, Juanita says we may go home as early as the second week in August if we like. She is to be at the Priory in time to settle down before the shooting begins. They will have visitors in September—his sisters, don’t you know—the Morningsides and the Grenvilles, and children and nurses—a house full. Lady Jane ought to be there to help her to entertain.”
“I don’t think Nita will want any help. She will be mistress of the situation, depend upon it, and would be if there were forty married sisters with their husbands and belongings. She seemed to be mistress of us all at Cheriton?”
“She is so clever,” sighed the mother, remembering that Cheriton House would no longer be under that girlish sovereignty.
The grave looking French-Swiss valet appeared with a telegram on a salver.
“Who can have sent me apetit bleu?” exclaimed Lord Cheriton, who was accustomed to receive a good many of those little blue envelopes when he was in Paris, but expected no such communications at St Malo.
Before leaving for his holiday he had impressed upon land steward and house steward that he was not to be bothered about anything.
“If there is anything wanted you will communicate with Messrs. Dalbrook,” he said. “They have full powers.”
And yet here was some worrying message—some question about a lease or an agreement, or somebody’s rick had been burnt, or somebody’s chimney had fallen through the roof. He opened thelittle envelope with a vexed air, resentful of an unexpected annoyance. He read the message, and then sat blankly staring; read again, and rose from his seat suddenly with a cry of horror.
Never in his life had he experienced such a shock; never had those iron nerves, that heart, burned hard in the furnace of this world’s strife, been so tried. He stood aghast, and could only give the little paper—with its type-printed syllables—to his scared wife, while he stood gazing at summer sky and summer sea in a blank helplessness, realizing dimly that something had happened which must change the whole course of the future, and overthrow every plan he had ever made.
“The third Baron Cheriton.” Strange, but in that awful moment the words he had repeated idly on the sands half an hour ago echoed again in his ear.
Alas, he felt as if that title for which he had toiled was already extinct. He saw, as in a vision, the velvet cap and golden coronet upon the coffin lid, as the first and last Lord Cheriton was carried to his grave. That prophetic vision must needs be realized within a few years. There would be no one to succeed him.
Murdered! Why? By whom? What devil had been conjured out of hell to cut short that honest, stainless life? What had Godfrey Carmichael done that a murderer’s hand should be raised against him?
Lady Cheriton’s softer nature found relief in tears before the day was done; tears and agonized pacings up and down those rooms where life had been so placid in the sunlight—agonized supplications that God would take pity upon her widowed girl.
“So young, and so happy, and a widow—a widow before her nineteenth birthday,” wailed the mother.
Lord Cheriton’s grief was of a sterner kind, and found no outlet in words. He held a brief consultation with his valet, a soldierly looking man, who had fought under Garibaldi in Burgundy, when the guerilla captain made his brilliant endeavour to save sinking France. They looked at time-tables and calculated hours. The express to Paris would not arrive in time for the evening mailviâCalais and Dover. It was Saturday. The cargo boat would cross to Southampton that night, and influence would obtain accommodation for his Lordship and party on board her. The valet took a fly and drove off to the quay to find the South-Western superintendent, and secure a private cabin for his master and mistress. They would have the boat to themselves, and would be at Southampton at seven o’clock next morning, and at Cheriton before noon, even if it were necessary to engage a special engine to take them there.
Lord Cheriton telegraphed to his daughter.
“Your mother and I will be with you to-morrow morning. Be brave for our sakes. Remember that you are all we have to live for.”
Another telegram to the house-steward ordered a close carriage to be in attendance at Wareham Station at ten o’clock on Sunday morning.
“How quietly you bear it, James,” his wife told Lord Cheriton, wonderingly, when the mode of their return had been arranged, and her maid was packing her trunks, with those soberly handsome gowns which had been the wonder of many a butterfly Parisienne.
She called him by his Christian name now as in their earliest years of wedded life. It was only on ceremonious occasions, and when the eye of society was upon her, that she addressed him by his title.
That stern quietude of his, the fine features set and rigid, frightened her more than a loquacious grief would have done. And yet she hardly knew whether he felt the calamity too much for words; or whether he did not feel it enough.
“Poor Godfrey,” she sighed, “he was so good to me—all that a son could have been—murdered! My God! my God! how horrible. If it had been any other kind of death one might bear it—and yet thatheshould die at all would be too dreadful. So young, so handsome—cut off in the flower of his days! And she loved him so. She has loved him all her life. What will become of her without him?”
“What will become of her?” that was the mother’s moaning cry all through that dreary day.
Lord Cheriton paced the sands as far as he could go from that giddy multitude in front of the sea wall—beyond the little rocky ridge by the pleasant Hôtel des Bains, where the young mothers, and nurses, and children, and homely, easy-going visitors congregate—away towards Cancale, where all was loneliness. He walked up and down, meditating upon his blighted hopes. He knew now that he had loved this young man almost as well as he loved his own daughter, and that his death had shattered as fair a fabric as ever ambition built on the further side of the grave.
“She will go in mourning for him all the days of my life, perhaps,” he thought, “and then some day after I am in my grave she will fall in love with an adventurer, and the estate I love and the fortune I have saved will be squandered on the Turf or thrown away at Monte Carlo.”
A grim smile curled his lip at a grim thought, as he paced that lonely shore beyond the jutting cliff and the villa on the point.
“I am sorry I left the Bench when I did,” he thought; “it would have been something to have put on the black cap and passed sentence upon that poor lad’s murderer.”
Who was his murderer, and what the motive of the crime? Those were questions which Lord Cheriton had been asking himself with maddening iteration through that intolerable summer day. He welcomed the fading sunlight of late afternoon. He could eatnothing; would not even sit down to make a pretence of dining; but waited chafing in the great stone hall of the hotel for the carriage that was to take him and his wife to the steamer.