CHAPTER XXVII.
“I saw her too.Yes, but you must not love her.I will not, as you do; to worship her,As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess;I love her as a woman.”
“I saw her too.Yes, but you must not love her.I will not, as you do; to worship her,As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess;I love her as a woman.”
“I saw her too.Yes, but you must not love her.I will not, as you do; to worship her,As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess;I love her as a woman.”
“I saw her too.
Yes, but you must not love her.
I will not, as you do; to worship her,
As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess;
I love her as a woman.”
A decent-looking woman opened the door of the house in Hercules Buildings, and ushered Mr. Dalbrook up two flights of stairs to the small back-room in which Mercy Porter had lived her lonely life from year’s end to year’s end. The tasteful arrangement of that humble chamber struck Theodore at the first glance. He had seen such rooms at Cambridge, where an undergraduate of small means had striven to work wonders with a few shabby old sticks that had done duty for half-a-dozen other undergraduates, and which had been but of poorest quality when they issued, new and sticky with cheap varnish, from the emporium of a local upholsterer.
Mercy was very pale, and although she received her visitor with outward calmness, he could see that she had not yet recovered from yesterday’s agitation.
“What induced you to take so much trouble to betray me, Mr. Dalbrook?” she asked.
“Betray is a very hard word, Miss Porter.”
“You don’t suppose that I believed yesterday’s meeting was accidental? You took the trouble to bring Lady Cheriton across my path in order to satisfy your curiosity about my identity. Was that generous?”
“God knows that it was meant in your best interests. I knew that Lady Cheriton was your true and loyal friend—that she had more of the mother’s instinct than your real mother, and that no pain could possibly come to you from any meeting with her. And then I had a very serious reason for bringing you together. It was absolutely necessary for me to make sure of your identity.”
“Why necessary? What can it matter to you who I am?”
“Everything. I am the bearer of a very generous offer from Lord Cheriton—and it was essential that I should make that offer to the right person.”
Mercy’s face underwent a startling change at the sound of Lord Cheriton’s name. She had been standing by the window in a listless attitude, just where she had risen to receive her visitor.She drew herself suddenly to her fullest height, and looked at him with flushed cheeks and kindling eyes.
“I will accept no generosity from Lord Cheriton,” she said. “I want nothing from him except to be let alone. I want nothing from Lady Cheriton except her sympathy, and I would rather have even that at a distance. You have done the greatest harm you could do me in bringing me face to face with my old life.”
“Believe me I had but one feeling, anxiety for your happiness.”
“What is my happiness to you?” she retorted, almost fiercely. “You are playing at philanthropy. You can do me no good—you may do me much evil. You see me contented with my life—accustomed to its hardships—happy in the possession of one true friend. Why come to me with officious offers of favours which I have never sought?”
“You are ungenerous, and unjust. From the first hour of our acquaintance I saw that you were of a different clay to that of the women among whom I found you—different by education, instinct, associations, family history. How could I help being interested in one who stood thus apart? How could I help wanting to know more of so exceptional a life?”
“Yes, you were interested, as you might have been in any other wreck—in any derelict vessel stranded on a lonely shore, battered, broken, empty, rudderless, picturesque in ruin. It was a morbid interest, an interest in human misery.”
He stated his commission plainly and briefly. He told her that it was Lord Cheriton’s earnest wish to provide for her future life—that he was ready, and even anxious, to settle a sum of money which would ensure her a comfortable income for the rest of her days. He urged upon her the consideration of the new happiness, and larger opportunities of helping others, which this competence would afford her; but she cut him short with an impatient movement of her head.
“Upon what ground does he base his generous offer?” she asked coldly.
“Upon the ground of his interest in your mother and yourself—an interest which it is only natural for him to feel in one who was brought up on his estate, and whose father was his friend. It may be also that he feels himself in some wise to blame for the great sorrow of your life.”
“Tell him that I appreciate his noble contempt for money, his readiness to shed the sunshine of his prosperity upon so remote an outcast as myself; but tell him also that I would rather starve to death, slowly in this room, than I would accept the price of a loaf of bread from his hands. Do not hesitate to tell him this, in the plainest form of speech. It is only right that he should know the exact measure of my feelings towards him.”
After this Theodore could only bow to her decision and leave her.
“Lord Cheriton is my cousin, and a man whom I have every reason to regard with affection and respect,” he began.
She interrupted him sharply.
“He has never denied the cousinship, never treated you as the dirt under his feet—never looked down upon you from the altitude of his grandeur, with insufferable patronage——”
“Never. He has been most unaffectedly my friend, ever since I can remember.”
“Then you are right to think well of him—but you must let me have my opinion in peace, even although you are of his blood and I am——nothing to him. Good-bye. Forgive me if I have been ungracious and ungrateful. I have no doubt you meant well by me—only I would so much rather be let alone. It did me no good to see Lady Cheriton yesterday. My heart was tortured by the memories her face recalled.”
She gave him her hand, the thin white hand, with taper fingers worn by constant work. It was a very pretty hand, and it lay in his strong grasp to-day for the first time, so reserved had been her former greetings and farewells. He looked at the delicate hand for a moment or two before he let it go, and from the hand upwards to the fair, finely-cut face, and the large, dark grey eyes. That look of his startled her, the hollow cheeks flushed, and the eyelids fell beneath his steady gaze.
“Good-bye, Mercy,” he said, gently, “let me call you Mercy, for the sake of the link between us—the link of common recollections, and the sad secrets of the past.”
“Call me what you like. It is not very probable we shall meet often.”
“You are very stubborn, cruel to yourself, and more cruel to those who want to help you. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” she echoed, almost in a whisper.
He went out into the shabby street haunted by those sad uplifted eyes, and the hollow cheeks faintly flushed with delicate bloom. How lovely she must have been in her dawning womanhood, and how closely she must have kept at home in the cottage by the west gate, seeing that he who had been so frequent a guest at Cheriton had never once met her there!
He was not satisfied to submit to this total failure of his mission without one further effort. He went from Hercules Buildings to Wedgewood Street, and saw his admirable Sarah Newton, into whose attentive ear he poured the story of Mercy’s obstinacy.
“She is a strange girl—a girl who could live in closest friendship with me all this time, and never tell me the secret of her past life,” said Miss Newton thoughtfully. “Why she should be so perversein her refusal of Lord Cheriton’s offer I can’t imagine—but you may depend she has a reason.”
Theodore escorted Lady Cheriton back to Dorsetshire by the afternoon train, but they parted company at Wareham Station, he going on to Dorchester, where his sisters received him with some wonderment at his restlessness.
“It is rather a farce for you and Mr. Ramsay to make engagements which you never intend to keep,” said Sophia peevishly; and it was thereupon expounded to him that he and his friend had pledged themselves to be present at a certain tennis party upon the previous afternoon.
“I’m very sorry we both forgot all about it,” he apologized, “but I don’t suppose we were missed.”
“I don’t suppose you would have been,” answered his sister sulkily, “if there had been half a dozen decent young men at the party; but as Harrington preferred the office to our society or our friends, and as there were only three curates and one banker’s clerk at Mrs. Hazledean’s, you and Mr. Ramsay would at least have beensomething.”
“It is hardly worth any man’s while to endure an afternoon’s boredom—to fetch and carry teacups in a sweltering sun, and play tennis upon an unlevel lawn, if he is only to count forsomething, a mere make-weight.”
“Oh, you young men give yourselves such abominable airs nowadays,” retorted Sophy, with a manner which implied that the young men of former generations had been modesty incarnate. “As for your friend, he has made a mere convenience of this house.”
“As how, Sophy?”
“I don’t think the fact requires explanation. First he goes to the Priory, and then to Cheriton, and then he is off to London, and then he is to be back on Saturday in order to lunch at the Priory on Sunday. If that is not making an hotel of your father’s house I don’t know what is.”
“Perhaps I have been too unceremonious, forgetting that I no longer live here, that it behoves me now, perhaps, to act in all things as a visitor. It was I who made the engagements, Sophy. You must not be angry with Ramsay.”
“I am not angry. It cannot matter to me how Mr. Ramsay treats this house. No doubt he thinks himself a great deal too clever for our society, although we are notquiteso feather-headed as most girls. He finds metal more attractive at the Priory.”
“What do you mean, Sophy?”
“That he is over head and ears in love with Juanita. It does not need a very penetrating person to discover that.”
“What nonsense! Why, he has not seen her above three times.”
“Quite enough for a young man of his vehement character.”
“What can have put such an idea into your head?”
“His way of talking about her—the expression of his face when he pronounces her name—the questions he asked me about her, showing the keenest interest in even the silliest details. What kind of a girl was she before she married, and how long had she known Sir Godfrey before they were engaged, and had their love been a grand passion full of romance and poetry, or only a humdrum kind of affection encouraged by their mutual relations? Idiotic questions of that kind could only be asked by a man who was in love. And then how eagerly he snapped at your suggestion that he should go with you to the Priory next Sunday.”
“It may be as you think,” Theodore answered gravely. “I know his fervid temperament about most things; but I did not think he was the kind of man to fall in love—upon such very slight provocation.”
“She may have given more encouragement than you suppose,” said Sophy. “He is the kind of man that a frivolous, half-educated girl would think attractive.Shewould never find out the want of depth under that arrogant, self-assured manner. However, she has asked Janet and me for next Sunday, and I shall soon see how the land lies. You were always unobservant.”
Theodore did not try to vindicate his character as an observer, albeit he knew no look or tone of his cousin’s was likely to escape him; that even sharp-eyed malevolence could never watch her more closely than love would watch out of his eyes.
Yes; it was not unlikely that Cuthbert admired her too much for his own peace. He recalled words which had passed unnoticed when they were together. Poor Cuthbert! He felt he had done wrong in exposing his friend to such an ordeal. Who could know her and not love her?