CHAPTER VIII.
“The stars move still, Time runs, the clock will strike.”
“The stars move still, Time runs, the clock will strike.”
“The stars move still, Time runs, the clock will strike.”
“The stars move still, Time runs, the clock will strike.”
Trains were favourable, and there was no necessity for a special engine to carry Lord Cheriton and his wife to the house of mourning. It was not yet noon when the closed landau drove in at the chief gate of the park, not that side gate in the deep, rocky lane, of which Mrs. Porter was custodian. One of the gardeners lived at the lodge, and it was he who opened the gate this Sunday morning. Lord Cheriton stopped the carriage to question him. He had heard a full account of the murder already from the station-master at Wareham.
“Have they found the murderer?” he asked.
“No, my Lord; I’m afraid they’re not likely to—begging your Lordship’s pardon for venturing an opinion.”
The man was an old servant, and altogether a superior person.
“Were the gates locked at the usual time on Friday night?”
“Yes, my Lord—the gates were locked, but that wouldn’t keep out a foot-passenger. There’s the turnstile in the lane.”
“Of course. Yes, yes. A London detective has been at work, I hear.”
“Yes, my Lord; came yesterday before two o’clock, and has been about with Barber ever since.”
“And have they discovered nothing?”
“Nothing, my Lord—or if they have it has been kept dark.”
Lord Cheriton asked no further questions. The man was right. A detective from Scotland Yard was not likely to talk about any minor discoveries that he might have made. Only the one grand discovery of the guilty man would have been made known.
Five minutes later the carriage drew up in front of the hall door. What a blank and melancholy look the fine old house had with all the windows darkened. It did not look so dismal as a London house with its level rows of windows and its flat façade would have looked under similar conditions; for here there was variety of mullion and moulding, bay-windows and oriel, dormer and lattice, and over all the growth of lovely creeping plants, starry clematis and passion-flower, clustering Banksia roses and waxen magnolia, an infinite beauty of form and colour. Yet the blind windows werethere, with their dull, dead look and chilling suggestion of death. Lady Cheriton looked at the house for a moment or so as she got out of the carriage, and then burst into tears. It seemed to her as if she had scarcely realized the stern reality till that moment.
She went straight to her daughter’s boudoir, a room with an oriel window looking across the wide expanse of the park, where the turf lay openest to the sunshine, and where the deer were wont to congregate. The garden was at its narrowest point just below this window, and consisted only of a broad gravel path, and a strip of flowers at the top of a steep grass bank that sloped down to the ha-ha which divided garden and park. The room was full of Juanita’s girlish treasures—evidences of fancies that had passed like summer clouds—accomplishments begun and abandoned—a zither in one corner—a guitar and a mandolin against the wall—an easel in front of one window—a gigantic rush work-basket lined with amber satin and crammed with all manner of silks, wools, scraps, and unfinished undertakings in another. The room remained just as she had left it when she went to London at the beginning of May. She had not occupied it during her honeymoon; and perhaps that was the reason she was here now in her desolation, sitting silent, statue-like, with Lady Jane by her side, on a sofa opposite the oriel. She lifted her eyelids when her mother came into the room, and looked up at her in speechless despair. She uttered no word of greeting, but sat dumbly. Lady Cheriton went over to her, and knelt by her side, and then, feebly, automatically, the widowed girl put her limp, cold hand into her mother’s and hid her bloodless face upon her mother’s breast.
Lady Cheriton held her there with one hand while she stretched out her other hand to Lady Jane.
“Dear Lady Jane, how good of you to be with her—to comfort her.”
“Where else should I be?—I want to be near him!”
The gentle blue eyes filled with tears, the gracious head trembled a little. Then came a long shivering sigh and silence.
The mother knelt beside the sofa with her child’s head leaning forward upon her matronly bosom. There may have been some comfort perhaps in that contact, some recurrence of the thoughts and feelings of earlier years, when the mother could console every grief and soothe every pain. No words came to either of those mourners. What could be said in mitigation of a sorrow that seemed to offer no point of relief, no counter-balancing good. There was nothing to be done but to sit still and suffer.
The silence lasted long, and then Juanita lifted her head suddenly from its heavy repose and looked fixedly in her mother’s face.
“My father has come back with you?” she asked.
“Yes, dearest. We did not lose an hour. Had there been any quicker way of travelling we would have been here sooner.”
“My father will be able to find the murderer,” said Juanita,scarcely hearing her mother’s words, intent upon her own thought. “A great lawyer as he was; a judge, too; he must be able to trace the murderer—to bring him to justice—to take a life for a life. Oh, God!” with a shrill agonizing cry, “could a thousand lives give me back one hour of that one life? Yet it will be something—something—to know that his murderer has been killed—killed shamefully, in cold blood, in the broad light of day. Oh, God, thou Avenger of wrong, make his last hours bitter to him, make his last moments hopeless; let him see the gates of hell opening before him when he stands trembling with the rope round his neck.”
There was an intensity of hatred in this vindictive appeal, which thrilled the two listeners with an icy horror. It was like a blast from a frozen region blowing suddenly in their faces, and they shivered as they heard. Could it be the girl they knew, the loving, lovable girl, who, in those deep, harsh tones, called upon her God for vengeance and not for mercy?
“Oh, my love, my poor heart-broken love, pray to Him to have pity upon us; ask Him to teach us how to bow to the rod, how to bear His chastisement. That is the lesson we have to learn,” pleaded Lady Jane, tearful and submissive, even in the depth of sorrow.
“Is it?Mylesson is to see justice done upon the wretch who killed my husband—the malignant, the merciless devil. There was not one of those slayers of women and children in the Indian mutiny worse than the man who killed my love. What hadhedone—he, the kindest and best—generous, frank, pitiful to all who ever came in his way—what hadhedone to provoke any man’s enmity? Oh, God, when I remember how good he was, and how much brighter and better the world was for having him——”
She began to pace the room, as she had paced it again and again in her slow hours of agony, her hands clasped above her dishevelled head, her great dark eyes—so dovelike in their hours of love and happiness—burning with an angry light, lurid almost, in the excitement of her fevered brain. There had been times when Lady Jane had feared that reason must give way altogether amidst this wild delirium of grief. She had stayed to watch, and to console, forgetting her own broken heart, putting aside all considerations of her own sorrow as something that might have its way afterwards, in order to comfort this passionate mourner.
Comfort, even from affection such as this, was unavailing. Now and again the girl turned her burning eyes upon the mother’s pale, resigned face, and for a moment a thought of that chastened, gentle grief softened her.
“Dear, dear Lady Jane, God made you better than any other woman on this earth, I believe,” she cried amidst her anguish. “The saints and martyrs must have been like you, but I am not. I am not made like that. Icannotkiss the rod.”
The meeting between Juanita and her father was more painful tohim than to her. She hung upon his neck in feverish excitement, imploring him to avenge her husband.
“You can do it,” she urged; “you who are so clever must know how to bring the murderer’s guilt home to him. You will find him, will you not, father? He cannot have gone very far. He cannot have got out of the country yet. Think, it was only Friday. I was a happy woman upon Friday; only think of that—happy—sitting by Godfrey’s side in the phaeton, driving through the sunset, and thinking how beautiful the world was and what a privilege it was to live. I had no more foreboding than the skylark had singing above our heads. And in less than an hour after midnight my darling was dead. Oh, God, how sudden! I cannot even remember his last words. He kissed me as he left me at my bedroom door—kissed me and said something. I cannot remember what it was; but I can hear the sound of his voice still—I shall hear it all my life.”
Lord Cheriton let her ramble on. He had, alas, so little to say to her, such sorry comfort to offer. Only words, mere words—which must needs sound idle and hollow in the ear of grief, frame his consolatory speeches with what eloquence he might. He could do nothing for her, since he could not give her back her dead. This wild cry for vengeance shocked him from those young lips; yet it was natural perhaps. He too would give much to see the assassin suffer; he too felt that the deck and the gallows would be too trivial a punishment for that accursed deed.
He had looked upon the marble face of him who was to have been the second Baron Cheriton—looked upon it in its placid repose, and had sworn within himself to do all that ingenuity could do to avenge that cruel murder.
“He could not have had an enemy,” he told himself, “unless it was some wretch who hated him for being happy and beloved.”
He had a long talk with Mr. Luke Churton, the London detective, who had exhausted all his means without arriving at any satisfactory result.
“I confess, my Lord, that I am altogether at a standstill,” said Mr. Churton, when he had related all that he had done since his arrival on the scene early on Saturday afternoon. “The utmost information I have been able to obtain leaves me without one definite idea. There is no one in the neighbourhood open to suspicion, so far as I can make out; for I am sure your Lordship will agree with me that your butler’s notion of a poacher resenting your treatment by the murder of your son-in-law is much too thin. One cannot accept such a notion as that for a moment,” said Mr. Churton, shaking his head.
“No, that is an untenable idea, no doubt.”
“The next suggestion is that some person was prowling about with the intention of abstracting trinkets and other valuables fromthe drawing-room—in an unguarded moment when the room might happen to be empty—and I admit that the present fashion of covering drawing-room tables and cabinets with valuables of every description is calculated to suggest plunder; but that kind of thing would be probable enough in London rather than in the country, and nothing is more unlikely than that a prowler of that order would resort to murder. Again, the manner in which the body was found, with the open book lying close to the hand that had held it, goes far to prove that Sir Godfrey was shot as he sat reading—and at a time when a burglar could have no motive for shooting him.”
“Do you think it was the act of a lunatic?”
“No, my Lord, for in that event the murderer would have been heard of or found before now. The gardens, park, and chase have been most thoroughly searched under my superintendence. It is not possible for a lap-dog to be hidden anywhere within this demesne. The neighbouring villages—solitary cottages—commons and copses—have been also submitted to a searching investigation—the police all over the country are on the alert. Of course the crime is still of very recent date. Time to us seems longer than it really is.”
“No doubt, no doubt! I can find no other hypothesis than that the act was done by a madman—such a motiveless murder—a man sitting by a window reading—shot by an unknown hand from a garden terrace—remote from the outer world. Were we in Ireland the crime might seem commonplace enough. Sir Godfrey was a landowner—and that alone is an offence against the idle and the lawless in that unhappy country,—but here, in the midst of an orderly, God-fearing population——”
“Had Sir Godfrey no enemy, do you think, my Lord?” asked the detective, gravely. “The crime has the look of a vendetta.”
“There never was a young man, owner of a considerable estate, more universally beloved. His tenants adore him—for as a landlord he has been exceptionally indulgent.”
“He may have granted too much in some quarters, and too little in others.”
“No, no. He has been judicious in his liberality, and he has a capital bailiff, an old man who was a servant on this estate many years ago.”
“But there are other influences,” said the detective, musingly. “Whenever I meet with a crime of this kind—motiveless apparently—I remember the Eastern Prince—I think he was one of those long-headed Orientals, wasn’t he, my Lord, who used to ask, ‘Who is she?’ In a thoroughly dark case I always suspect a woman behind the curtain. Sir Godfrey had been independent of all control for a good many years—and a young man of fortune, handsome, open-hearted, with only a mother to look after him—well, my Lord,youknow the kind of thing that generally happens in such cases.”
“You mean that my son-in-law may have been involved in some disreputable intrigue?”
“I don’t say disreputable, my Lord; but I venture to suggest that there may have been some—ahem—some awkward entanglement—with a married woman, for instance,—and the husband—or another lover—may have belonged to the criminal classes. There are men who think very little of murder when they fancy themselves ill-used by a woman. Half the midnight brawls, and nearly half the murders, in the metropolis are caused by jealousy. I know what a large factor that is in the sum-total of crime, and unless you are sure there was no entanglement——”
“I am as sure as I can be of anything outside my own existence. I don’t believe that Sir Godfrey ever cared for any woman in his life except my daughter.”
“He might not have cared, my Lord, but he might have been drawn in,” suggested Mr. Churton. “Young men are apt to be weak where women are concerned; and women know that, unfortunately, and they don’t scruple to use their power; not the best of ’em even.”
Young men are apt to be weak. Yes, Lord Cheriton had seen enough of the world to know that this was true. It was just possible that in that young life, which had seemed white as snow to the eye of kindred and friends, there had been one dark secret, one corroding stain, temptation yielded to, promises given—never to be fulfilled. Such things have been in many lives, in most lives, perhaps, could we know all, Lord Cheriton thought, as he sat silently meditating upon the detective’s suggestions.
Lady Jane might know something about her son’s past, perhaps, something that she might have kept locked in the beneficent maternal heart. He determined to sound her delicately at the earliest opportunity.
But on being sounded Lady Jane repudiated any such possibility. No, again and again no. His youth had been spotless; no hint of an intrigue had ever reached her from any quarter. He had chosen his friends among the most honourable young men at the University—his amusements had been such as became a young Englishman of exalted position—he had never stooped to low associations or even doubtful company; and from his boyhood upwards he had adored Juanita.
“That love alone would have kept him right,” said Lady Jane; “but I do not believe that it was in his nature to go wrong.”
It would seem, therefore, that the detective’s suspicion was groundless. Jealousy could not have been the motive of the crime.
“If any of us could be sure that we know each other I ought to accept Lady Jane’s estimate of her son,” thought Lord Cheriton; “but there is always the possibility of an unrevealed nature—one phase in a character that has escaped discovery. I am almost inclinedto think the detective may have hit upon the truth. Theremusthave been a motive for this devilish act—unless it were done by a maniac.”
The latter supposition seemed hardly probable. Lunacy wandering loose about the country would have betrayed itself before now.
It was past five upon that summer afternoon, and Lord Cheriton, having seen his daughter and interviewed the detective, was sauntering idly about the gardens in the blank hours before dinner. That meal would be served as usual, no doubt, at eight o’clock, with all due state and ceremony. The cook and her maids were busied about its preparation even now in this tranquil hour when afternoon melts into evening, sliding so softly from day to night that only those evening hymns of the birds—and on Sundays those melancholy church bells thrilling across the woods—mark the transition. They were scraping vegetables and whipping eggs while the birds were at vespers, and they were talking of the murder as they went about their work. When would they ever cease to gloat with ghoulish gusto on that deadly theme, with endless iteration of “says he” and “says she”?
Lord Cheriton left the stately garden with its quadruple lines of cypress and juniper, its marble balustrades, and clipped yew hedges five feet thick, its statues and alcoves. He passed through a little gate, and across a classic single-arched bridge to the park, where he sauntered slowly beneath his immemorial elms, in a strange dreamlike frame of mind, in which he allowed his senses to be beguiled by the balmy afternoon atmosphere and the golden light, until the all-pervading consciousness of a great grief, which had been with him all day, slipped off him for the moment, leaving only a feeling of luxurious repose, rest after labour.
Cheriton Chase was exercising its wonted influence upon him. He loved the place with that deep love which is often felt by the hereditary owner, the man born on the soil, but perhaps still oftener, and to a greater degree by him who has conquered and won the land by his own hard labour of head or hand, by that despicable personage, the self-made man. In all his wanderings—those luxurious reposeful journeyings of the man who has conquered fortune—James Dalbrook’s heart yearned towards these ancient avenues and yonder grey walls. House and domain had all the charm of antiquity, and yet they were in a measure his own creation. Everywhere had his hand improved and beautified; and he might say with Augustus that where he found brick he would leave marble. The dense green walls—those open-air courts and quadrangles—those obelisks of cypress and juniper had been there in the dominion of the Strangways, with here and there a mouldering stone Syrinx or a moss-grown Pan; but it was he who brought choicest marbles from Rome and Florence to adorn that stately pleasaunce; it was he who erected yonder fountain, whose waters made a monotonous music by day and night. Themarble balustrades, the mosaic floors, the artistic enrichment of terrace and mansion had been his work. If the farms were perfect it was he who had made them so. If his tenants were contented it was because he had shown himself a model landlord—considerate and liberal, but severely exacting, satisfied with nothing less than perfection.
Having thus in a manner created his estate James Dalbrook loved it, as a proud, self-contained man is apt to love the work of his own hands, and now in this quiet Sunday afternoon the very atmosphere of the place soothed him, as if by a spell. A kind of sensuous contentment stole into his heart, with temporary forgetfulness of his daughter’s ruined life. But this did not last long. As he drew near the drive by which strangers were allowed to cross the park by immemorial right, he remembered that he had questioned one of the lodge-keepers, but not the other. He struck across an open glade where only old hawthorn trees cast their rugged shadows on the close-cropped turf, and made for the gate opening into the lane.
Mrs. Porter’s cottage had its usual aspect, a cottage such as any gentleman or lady of refined taste might have been pleased to inhabit, quaint, mediæval, with heavy timbers across rough cast walls, deep-set casements, picturesque dormers, and thatched roof, with gable ends which were a source of rapture to every artist who visited Cheriton—a cottage embowered in loveliest creeping plants, odorous of jasmine and woodbine, and set in a garden where the standard roses and carnations were rumoured to excel those in her ladyship’s own particular flower-garden. Well might a lady who had known better days rejoice in such a haven; more especially when those better days appeared to have raised her no higher than the status of a merchant-captain’s wife.
Very few people about Cheriton envied her ladyship. It was considered that, if not born in the purple, she had at least brought her husband a large fortune, and had a right to taste the sweets of wealth. But there were many hard-driven wives and shabby genteel spinsters who envied Mrs. Porter her sinecure at the gate of Cheriton Park, and who looked grudgingly at the garden brimming over with flowers and the lattices shining in the evening sun, and through the open casements at prettily furnished rooms, rich in books and photographs, and other trivial indications of a refined taste.
“It is well to be she,” said the curate’s wife, as she went home from the village with two mutton chops in her little fancy basket, a basket which suggested ferns, and in which she always carried a trowel, to give the look of casual botany to her housewifely errands. “I wonder whether Lord Cheriton allows her an income for doing nothing, or is it only house, and coals, and candles that she gets?” speculated the curate’s wife, who lived in a brand new villa on the outskirts of Cheriton village—a villa that was shabby and dilapidated after three years’ occupation, through whose thin walls all the windsof winter blew, and whose slate roof made the upper floor like a bakehouse under the summer sun.
Lord Cheriton, still sauntering in gloomy meditation, came to the cottage garden outside his gates, and found Mrs. Porter standing among her roses,—a tall, black figure, the very pink and pattern of respectability, with her prayer-book in one hand and a grey silk sunshade in the other. She turned at the sound of those august footsteps, and came to the little garden gate to greet her benefactor, with a grave countenance, as befitted the circumstances.
“Good afternoon,” he said briefly. “Have you just come from church?”
“Yes, I have been to the children’s service.”
“Not very interesting, I should imagine, for anybody past childhood?”
“It is something to do on a Sunday afternoon, and I like to hear Mr. Kempster talk to the children.”
“Do you? Well, there is no accounting for tastes. Can you tell me anything about my son-in-law’s murderer? Have you seen any suspicious characters hanging about? Did you notice any one going into the park on Friday night?”
“No, I have not seen a mortal out of the common way. The gate was locked at the usual hour. Of course the gate would make no difference—it would be easy for any one to get into the park.”
“And no one was seen about? It is extraordinary. Have you any idea, Mrs. Porter, any theory about this horrible calamity that has come upon us?”
“How should I have any theory? I am not skilled in finding out such mysteries, like the man who came from London yesterday. Has he made no discoveries?”
“Not one.”
“Then you can’t expect me to throw a light upon the subject.”
“You have an advantage over the London detective. You know the neighbourhood—and you know what kind of man Sir Godfrey was.”
“Yes, I know that. How handsome he was, how frank and pleasant looking, and how your daughter adored him. They were a beautiful couple.”
Her wan cheeks flushed, and her eyes kindled as she spoke, as if with a genuine enthusiasm.
“They were, and they adored each other. It will break my daughter’s heart. You have known trouble—about a daughter. I think you can understand what I feel for my girl.”
“I do—I do! Yes, I know what you must feel—what she must feel in her desolation, with all she valued gone from her for ever. But she has not to drink the cup thatmygirl must drink, Lord Cheriton.Shehas not fallen.Sheis not a thing for men to trample under foot, and women to shrink away from.”
“Forgive me,” said Lord Cheriton, in a softened voice. “I ought not to have spoken of—Mercy.”
“You ought never to speak of her—to me. I suppose you thought the wound was so old that it might be touched with impunity, but you were wrong. That wound will never heal.”
“I am sure you know that I have always been deeply sorry for you—for that great affliction,” said Lord Cheriton gently.
“Sorry, yes, I suppose you were sorry. You would have been sorry if a footman had knocked down one of your Sèvres vases and smashed it. One is sorry for anything that can’t be replaced.”
“That is a harsh and unjust way of speaking, Mrs. Porter,” said Lord Cheriton, drawing himself up suddenly with an air of wounded dignity. “You can tell me nothing about our trouble, I see; and I am not in the mood to talk of any older grief. Good night.”
He lifted his hat with grave respect and walked back to the park gate, vanishing slowly from those grey eyes which followed him in eager watchfulness.
“Is he really sorry?” she asked herself. “Can such a man as that be sorry for any one, even his own flesh and blood? He has prospered; all things have gone well with him. Can he be sorry? It is a check, perhaps; a check to his ambitious hopes. It baulks him in his longing to found a family. He looks pale and worn, as if he had suffered: and at his age, after a prosperous life, it must be hard to suffer.”
So mused the woman who had seen better days—embittered doubtless by her own decadence—embittered still more by her daughter’s fall.
It was nearly ten years since the daughter had eloped with a middle-aged Colonel in a cavalry regiment, a visitor at the Chase—a man of fortune and high family, with about as diabolical a reputation as a man could enjoy and yet hold Her Majesty’s commission.
Mercy Porter’s fall had been a surprise to everybody. She was a girl of shy and reserved manners, graver and sadder than youth should be. She had been kept very close by her mother, allowed to make no friendships among the girls in the village, to have no companions of her own age. She had early shown a considerable talent for music, and her piano had been her chief pleasure and occupation. Lady Cheriton had taken a good deal of notice of her when she grew up, and she might have done well, the gossips said, when they recalled the story of her disgrace; but she chose to fall in love with a married man of infamous character, a notorious profligate, and he had but to beckon with his finger for her to go off with him. The circumstances of her going off were discussed confidentially at feminine tea-drinkings, and it was wondered that Mrs. Porter could hold her head so high, and show herself at church three times on a Sunday, and entertain the curate and his wife to afternoon tea, considering what had happened.
The curate and his wife were new arrivals comparatively, and only knew that dismal common story from hearsay. They were both impressed by Mrs. Porter’s regular attendance at the church services, and by the excellence of that cup of tea with which she was always ready to entertain them whenever they cared to drop in at her cottage between four and five o’clock.
The inquest was opened early on the afternoon of Monday at the humble little inn near the forge, with its rustic sign, “Live and let live.” Juanita gave her evidence with a stony calmness which impressed those who heard her more than the stormiest outburst of grief would have done. Her mother and her husband’s mother had both implored her not to break down, to bear herself heroically through this terrible ordeal, and they were both in the room to support her by their presence. Both were surprised at the firmness of her manner, the clear tones of her voice as she made her statement, telling how she had heard the shot in her dream, and how she had gone down to the drawing-room to find Sir Godfrey lying face downward on the carpet, in front of the chair where he had been sitting, his hand still upon the open book, which had fallen as he fell.
“Did you think of going outside to see if any one was lurking about?”
“No, I thought of nothing but trying to save him. I did not believe that he was dead.”
There was a look of agony in her large wide open eyes as she said this—a piteous remembrance of the moment while she still hoped—which thrilled the spectators.
“What course did you take?”
“I rang for the servants. They came after a time that seemed long—but I believe they came quickly.”
“And after they had come——?”
“I remembered nothing more. They wanted me to believe that he was dead—and I would not—I could not believe—and—I remember no more till next day.”
“That will do, Lady Carmichael. I will not trouble you further.”
Lady Jane and Lady Cheriton wanted to take her away after this, but she insisted upon remaining.
“I wish to hear every word,” she said.
They submitted, and the three women, robed in densest black, sat in a little group behind the Coroner till the end of that day’s inquiry.
No new facts were elicited from any of the witnesses, and nothing had resulted from the elaborate search made, not only throughout Lord Cheriton’s domain, but in the neighbourhood. No suspicious prowlers had been heard of. The gipsies who had contributed to the gaiety of the wedding day had been ascertained to have left theIsle of Purbeck a fortnight before the murder, and to be delighting the larger world between Portsmouth and Havant. Nothing had been discovered; no sale of revolver or gun to any questionable purchaser at Dorchester; no indication, however slight, which might put a keen-witted detective upon the trail. Mr. Churton confessed himself completely at fault.
The jury drove to Cheriton House to view the body, and the inquest was adjourned for a fortnight, in the expectation that some discovery might be made in the interim. The funeral would take place at the usual time; there was nothing now to hinder the victim being laid in his last resting-place in the old Saxon church at Milbrook.
Bills offering a reward of £500 for any information leading to the discovery of the murderer were all over the village, and in every village and town within a radius of forty miles. The stimulus of cupidity was not wanting to sharpen the rural wit. Mr. Churton shook his head despondently when he talked over the inquest with Lord Cheriton later in the day, and owned himself “out of it.”
“I have been in many dark cases, my Lord,” he said, “and I’ve had many hard nuts to crack, but this beats ’em all. I can’t see my way to making anything of it; and unless you can furnish me with any particulars of the poor young gentleman’s past life, of an enlightening character, I don’t see much hope of getting ahead.”
“You stick to your idea of the murder being an act of revenge?”
“What other reason could there be for such a murder?”
That question seemed unanswerable, and Lord Cheriton let it pass. Matthew Dalbrook and his elder son were to dine with him that evening, in order to talk quietly and calmly over the terrible event of last week, and the bearing which it must have upon his daughter’s future life. Lady Cheriton and Lady Jane Carmichael had lived entirely on the upper floor, taking such poor apologies for meals as they could be induced to take in her ladyship’s morning-room. That closed door at the eastern end of the corridor exercised its solemn influence upon the whole house. Those mourning women never went in or out without looking that way—and again and again through the long still days they visited that chamber of death, carrying fairest blooms of stephanotis or camellia, whitest rose-buds, waxen lilies; kneeling in silent prayer beside that white bed.
During all those dismal days before the funeral Juanita lived secluded in her own room, only leaving it to go to that silent room where the white bed and the white flowers made an atmosphere of cold purity, which chilled her heart as if she too were dead. She counted the hours which remained before even this melancholy link between life and death would be broken, and when she must stretch out her hands blindly to find one whom the earth would hide from her for evermore. In the brief snatches of troubled sleep that had visited her since Friday night she had awakened with her husband’sname upon her lips, with outstretched hands that yearned for the touch of his, awakening slowly to consciousness of the horrible reality. In every dream that she had dreamed he had been with her, and in some of those dreams had appeared with a distinctness which involved the memory of her sorrow. Yes, she had thought him dead—yes, she had seen him stretched bleeding at her feet; but that had been dream and delusion. Reality was here, here in his strong voice, here in the warm grasp of his hand, here in the lying vision that was kinder than truth.
Mr. Dalbrook and his son arrived at a quarter to eight, and were received by Lord Cheriton in the library. The drawing-room was now a locked chamber, and it would be long doubtless before any one would have the courage to occupy that room. The Dalbrooks were to stay at Cheriton till after the funeral. Matthew Dalbrook had been Sir Godfrey’s solicitor, and it would be his duty to read the will.
He was also one of the trustees to Juanita’s marriage settlement, and the time had come—all too soon—when the terms of that settlement would have to be discussed.
“How is my cousin?” asked Theodore, when he had shaken hands with Lord Cheriton.
“Have you seen her since—Friday?”
“Yes, I saw her on Saturday morning. She was terribly changed.”
“A ghastly change, is it not?” said Lord Cheriton, with a sigh. “I doubt if there is any improvement since then: but she behaved splendidly at the inquest this afternoon. We were all prepared for her breaking down. God knows whether she will ever get the better of her grief, or whether she will go down to the grave a broken-hearted woman. Oh! Matt,” turning to his kinsman and contemporary, “such a trial as this teaches us how Providence can laugh at our best laid plans. I thought I had made my daughter’s happiness as secure as the foundations of this old house.”
“You did your best, James. No man can do more.”
Theodore was silent for the most part after his inquiry about his cousin. He listened while the elder men talked, and gave his opinion when it was asked for, and showed himself a clear-headed man of business; but his depression was not the less evident. The thought of Juanita’s grief—the contrast between her agony now and her joyousness the day she was at Dorchester—was never absent from his mind; and the talk of the two elder men, the discussion as to the extent of her possessions, her power to do this and that, the house she was to live in, the establishment she was to keep, jarred upon him horribly.
“By the conditions of the settlement, the Priory is to be hers for her life, with everything it contains. By the conditions of Sir Godfrey’s will, in the event of his leaving no issue, the Priory estate is togo after his widow’s death to Mrs. Grenville’s eldest son, or failing a son in that direction, then to Mrs. Morningside’s eldest son. Should neither sister leave a son surviving at the time of Lady Carmichael’s death the estate is to be sold, and the product divided in equal portions among the surviving nieces; but at the present rate at which the two ladies are filling their nurseries there is very little doubt there will be a surviving son. Mrs. Grenville was Sir Godfrey’s favourite, I know, and I can understand his giving her boy the estate, and thus founding a family, rather than dividing the property between the issue of the two sisters.”
“I do not think anybody can find fault with his will,” said Lord Cheriton. “God knows that when I saw him sign it in my room in Victoria Street, an hour after his marriage, nothing was further from my thoughts than the idea that the will would come into force within the next fifty years. It seemed almost an idle precaution for so young a man to be in such a hurry to set his house in order.”
“Do you think Juanita will decide to live at the Priory?” asked Mr. Dalbrook.
“It would seem more natural for her to live here with her mother and me, but I fear that this house will seem for ever accursed to her. She will remember that it was her own whim to spend her honeymoon here. It will seem to her as if she had brought her husband to his death. Oh, God, when I remember how her mother and I suggested other places—how we talked to her of the Tyrol and the Dolomites, of Hungary, Norway—and with what a kind of childish infatuation she clung to her fancy for this house, it seems as if a hideous fatality guided her to her doom. It is her doom, as well as his. I do not believe she will ever be a happy woman again.”
“It may seem so now to us all, to herself most of all, poor girl,” answered Matthew Dalbrook. “But I never saw a sorrow yet that Time could not heal, and the sorrow of a girl of nineteen leaves such a margin for Time’s healing powers. God grant that you and I may both live to see her bright and happy again—with a second husband. There is something prosaic, I feel, in the very sound; but there may be some touch of romance even in a second love.”
He did not see the painful change in his son’s face while he was talking: the sudden crimson which faded slowly to a ghastly pallor. It had never occurred to Matthew Dalbrook that his son Theodore had felt anything more than a cousinly regard for Lord Cheriton’s daughter.
The funeral took place on the following Wednesday—one of those funerals about which people talk for a month, and in which grief is almost lost sight of by the majority of the mourners in a feverish excitement. The procession of carriages, very few of them unoccupied,was nearly half a mile long—the little churchyard at Milbrook could scarcely contain the mourners. The sisters’ husbands were there, with hats hidden in crape, and solemn countenances; honestly sorry for their brother-in-law’s death, but not uninterested in his will. All the district, within a radius of thirty miles, had been on the alert to pay this last mark of respect to a young man who had been universally liked, and whose melancholy fate had moved every heart.
The will was read in the library, and Juanita appeared for the first time since her cousins had been at Cheriton. She came into the room with her mother, and went to Matthew and his son quietly, and gave a hand to each, and answered their grave inquiries about her health without one tear or one faltering accent; and then she took her seat beside her father’s chair, and waited for the reading of the will. It seemed to her as if it contained her husband’s last words, addressed to her from his grave. He knew when he wrote or dictated those words that she would not hear them in his lifetime. The will left her a life-interest in everything, except twenty thousand pounds in consols to Lady Jane, a few legacies to old servants and local charities, and a few souvenirs to college friends. Sir Godfrey had held the estate in fee simple, and could deal with it as he pleased. He expressed a hope that if his wife survived him she should continue to live at the Priory, and that the household should remain, as far as possible, unchanged, that no old horse should ever be sold, and no dogs disposed of in any way off the premises. This last request was to secure a continuance of old customs. His father had never allowed a horse that he had kept over a twelvemonth to be sold; and had never parted with a dog. His own hand shot the horse that was no longer fit for service; his own hand poisoned the dog whose life had ceased to be a blessing.
When the will was finished, and it was by no means a lengthy document, Lady Jane kissed her daughter-in-law.
“You will do as he wished, won’t you, dearest?” she said, softly.
“Live at the Priory—yes, Lady Jane, unless you will live there instead. It would be more natural for you to be mistress there. When—when—my darling made that will he must have thought of me as an old woman, likely to survive him by a few years at most, and it would seem natural to him for me to go on living in his house—to continue to live—those were his words, you know—to continue to live in the home of my married life. But all is different now, and it would be better for you to have the Priory. It has been your home so long. It is full of associations and interests for you. I can live anywhere—anywhere except in this detested house.”
She had spoken in a low voice all the time, so low as to be quite inaudible to her father and Matthew Dalbrook, who were talking confidentially upon the other side of the wide oak table.
“My love, it is your house. It will be full of associations for you too—the memories of his youth. It may comfort you by-and-by to live among the things he cared for. And I can be with you there now and then. You will bear with a melancholy old woman now and then,” pleaded Lady Jane, with tearful tenderness.
The only answer was a sob, and a clinging pressure of the hand; and then the three women quietly left the room. Their interest in the business was over. Blinds had been drawn up and Venetian shutters opened. There was a flood of sunshine on the staircase and in the corridors as Juanita went back to her room. The perfume of roses and the breath of summer came in at the open windows.
“Oh, God, how the sun shines!” she cried, in a sudden agony of remembrance.
Those odours from the garden, the blue sky, summer greenery and dazzling summer light brought back the image of her vanished happiness. Last week, less than a week ago, she had been one of the joyous creatures in that glad, gay world—joyous as the thrush whose song was thrilling upon the soft sweet air.
Lady Jane’s two sons-in-law had drawn near the oak table at which the lawyer was seated with his papers before him.
Jessica’s husband, Mr. Grenville, was sporting. His thoughts were centred in his stable, where he found an all-sufficient occupation for his intellectual powers in an endless buying, exchanging, selling, summering and wintering his stud; in the invention of improved bits, and the development of new ideas in saddlery; in the performance of operations that belong rather to the professional veterinary than to the gentleman at large, and in the conversation of his stud groom. These resources filled up all the margin that was left for a man who hunted four days a week in his own district, and who often got a fifth and even a sixth day in other counties accessible by rail. It may have been a natural result of Mr. Grenville’s devotion to the stable that Mrs. Grenville was absorbed by her nursery; or it may have been a natural bent on the lady’s part. However this might be, the lady and the gentleman followed parallel lines, in which their interests never clashed. He talked of hardly anything but his horses; she rarely mentioned any other subject than her children, or something bearing upon her children’s well-being. He believed his horses to be the best in the county; she considered her babies unsurpassed in creation. Both in their line were supremely happy.
Mr. Morningside, married to Sir Godfrey’s youngest sister, Ruth, was distinctly Parliamentary; and had no sympathies in common with such men as Hugo Grenville. To him horses were animals with four legs who dragged burdens; who were expensive to keep, and whose legs were liable to “fill” or to develop superfluous bone on the slightest provocation. His only idea of a saddle horse was a slow and stolid cob, for whose virtuous disposition and powerfulbone he had paid nearly three hundred pounds, and on which he pounded round the park three or four times every morning during the Parliamentary season, an exercise of which he was about as fond as he was of Pullna water, but which had been recommended him for the good of his liver.
Mr. Morningside had a castle in the north, too near Newcastle to be altogether beautiful, and he had a small suite upon a fifth floor in Queen Anne’s Mansion. He had taken this apartment as a bachelorpied à terrefor the Parliamentary season; and he had laid considerable emphasis upon the landowner’s necessity for stern economy which had constrained him to take rooms so small as to be altogether “impossible” for his wife. Mrs. Morningside was, however, of a different opinion. No place was impossible for her which her dear Stuart deigned to occupy. She did not mind small rooms, or a fifth story. Was there not a lift, and were there not charming people living ever so much nearer the skies? She did not mind even what she gracefully described as “pigging it,” for her dear Stuart’s sake. She was utterly unlike her elder sister, and she had no compunction at placing over two hundred miles between her and her nursery.
“They’d wire for me if anything went wrong,” she said, “and the express would take me home in a few hours.”
“That would depend upon what time you got the wire. The express doesn’t go every quarter of an hour like a Royal Blue,” replied Mr. Morningside, gloomily.
He was a dry-as-dust man; one of those self-satisfied persons who are never less alone than when alone. He had married at five and thirty, and the comfortable habits of a priggish bachelor still clove to him after six years of married bliss. He was fond of his wife in her place, and he thought her a very charming woman at the head of his table, and receiving his guests at Morningside Castle. But it was essential to his peace that he should have many solitary hours in which to pore over Blue books and meditate upon an intended speech. He fancied himself greatly as a speaker, and he was one of those Parliamentary bores whose ornate periods are made mincemeat of by the reporters. He looked to a day when he would take his place with Burke and Walpole, and other giants, whose oratory had been received coldly in the dawn of their senatorial career. He gave himself up to much study of politics past and present, and was one of those well-informed bores who are only useful as a store-house of hard facts for the use of livelier speakers. When a man had to speak upon a subject of which he knew nothing, he went to Mr. Morningside as to a Parliamentary Encyclopædia.
To sustain these stores of knowledge Mr. Morningside required much leisure for what is called heavy reading; and heavy reading is not easy in that genial family life which means incessant talk andincessant interruption. Mr. Morningside would have preferred, therefore, to keep his den on the fifth floor to himself; but his wife loved London, and he could not refuse her the privilege of occasionally sharing his nest on a level with the spires and towers of the great city. She made her presence agreeably felt by tables covered with photograph easels, Vallauris vases, stray flowers in specimen glasses, which were continually being knocked over, Japanese screens, and every known variety of chair-back; and albeit he was an essentially dutiful husband, Mr. Morningside never felt happier than when he had seen his Ruth comfortably seated in the Bournemouth express on her way to the home of her forefathers for one of those protracted visits that no one but a near relation would venture to make. He left her cheerily on such occasions, with a promise to run down to the Priory on Saturday evenings whenever it was possible to leave the helm.
Mr. Morningside had liked his brother-in-law as well as it was in him to like any man, and had been horrified at that sudden inexplicable doom; but Sir Godfrey being snatched off this earth in the flower of his age, Mr. Morningside thought it only natural that the young Morningsides should derive some benefit, immediate or contingent, from their uncle’s estate. It was, therefore, with some disgust that he heard that clause in the will which gave Jessica’s sons the preference over all the sons of Ruth. True that, failing any son of Jessica’s, the estate was to lapse to the eldest surviving son of Ruth; but what earthly value was such a reversionary interest as this in the case of a lady whose nursery was like a rabbit warren?
“I congratulate you on your eldest boy’s prospects, Grenville,” said Mr. Morningside, sourly. “Your Tom,” a boy whom he hated, “will come into a very fine thing one of these days.”
“Humph,” muttered Grenville, “Lady Carmichael’s is a good life, and I should be very sorry to see it shortened. Besides, who can tell? Before this time next year there may be a nearer claimant.”
“Lord have mercy upon us,” exclaimed Morningside, “I never thought ofthatcontingency.”