CHAPTER XXXIV.
“Poor wretches that dependOn greatness’ favour dream as I have done,Wake and find nothing.”
“Poor wretches that dependOn greatness’ favour dream as I have done,Wake and find nothing.”
“Poor wretches that dependOn greatness’ favour dream as I have done,Wake and find nothing.”
“Poor wretches that depend
On greatness’ favour dream as I have done,
Wake and find nothing.”
Lord Cheriton heard the story of his daughter’s fate in silence. It was an old and a common story, and any words of reprobation uttered now would have seemed a mockery from the lips of the father who had allowed his daughter’s seducer to go unpunished.
“What did you do in your loneliness?” he asked, after a pause.
“I wandered from village to village for some months, living as the peasants live. I did not take Colonel Tremayne’s advice, and offer myself as a teacher of youth. I did not try to enter a respectable home under a false character. I lived among peasants and as they lived, and my money lasted a long time. I had always been fond of needlework, so I bought some materials before I left Naples, and I used to sit in the olive woods, or by the sea shore, making baby linen, which I was able to dispose of when my wanderings brought me to Genoa, where I lived in a garret all through the winter after my illness. I remained in Italy for more than a year, and then my heart sickened of the beauty of the sea and sky, the streets of palaces, the orange groves and olive woods, the bright monotony of loveliness. Some of my own misery seemed to have mixed itself with all that was loveliest in that Southern world, and I felt as if grey skies and dull streets would be a relief to me. So I came to London, and found this lodging, and have managed to live—as you see—ever since. I have no wish to live any better. I have only one friend in the world. I have no desire to change. If my mother cared for me and wanted me I would go to her—but she never wanted me in the past, and I doubt if she will ever want me in the future.”
“Your mother is a most unhappy woman, Mercy, and she has made her unhappiness a part of my life, and a part of other lives. She left her home this morning, alone, without giving any one notice where she was going, or why she was going. I am full of fear about her. My only hope was to find her here.”
“And not having found her here, what are you going to do? Where will you look for her?”
“I don’t know. I am altogether at fault. She had no friends in London, or anywhere else. She had isolated herself most completely. At Cheriton she was respected, but she made no friends. How could she make friends in a place where her whole existence was a secret? Ah, Mercy, have compassion upon me in my trouble—give me something of a child’s love, for the burden of my sin is too heavy for me to bear.”
He sank into a chair, covering his face with his hands, and she knew that the strong man was crying like a child.
Her heart was touched by his distress, as a woman if not as a daughter.
“I am sorry for you in your trouble,” she said, in a low voice, “and I would gladly help you if I could. But I cannot forget my mother’s broken heart—the slow torture of long years. I had to look on and see her suffer, not even knowing the cause of her sorrow, utterly unable to comfort her. Sorrow had hardened her. She was hard to me, a hard task-mistress rather than a mother. And now you tell me she has gone away, no one knows where. What can I do to help you and her?”
“God knows if you can do anything, Mercy,” he answered, looking up at her gently, relieved somewhat by those unaccustomed tears.
He took her hand, which she did not withhold from him.
“Sit down, Mercy,” he said, “sit here by my side, and let us consider calmly what we can do. Your mother has no friends to whom she could go, no one, unless it were Miss Newton.”
“Miss Newton,” cried Mercy. “What does my mother know of Miss Newton?”
“They were acquainted many years ago, but your mother would hardly go to her now.”
“My mother knew Miss Newton, my one friend?”
“Yes, long ago. How did you come to know her?”
“She sought me out. It is the business of her life to seek out those who have most need of her, to whom her friendship can do most good. She heard of me from a girl who lives in this house, and she came to me and invited me to her lodgings, and brightened my life by her kindness. And did she really know my mother, years ago?”
“Yes, more than thirty years ago, when they were both young.”
“How strange that is.”
“I am thinking, Mercy; I am trying to think what refuge your mother could have found in London? Remember I have to think of her as of one who is scarcely accountable for her actions. I have to think of her as under the influence of one fixed idea—not governed by the same laws that govern other people.”
“I am powerless to help you,” answered Mercy, hopelessly. “I will do anything you tell me to do—but of all people in this world I am least able to advise you. I know nothing of my mother’s life except as I saw it at Cheriton—one long weariness.”
“You shall know all by-and-by; all. I will stand before you as a criminal before his judge. I will lay bare my heart to you as a penitent before his father-confessor—and then perhaps, when you have heard the whole story, you will take compassion upon me—you will understand how hard a part I had to play—and that I was not altogether vile. I will say no more about your life here, and your future life, as I would have it, until that confession has been made. Then it will remain for you to decide whether I am worthy to be treated in somewise as a father.”
She sat in silence, with her head bent over her folded hands. He looked at the dejected droop of the head, the grey threads in the auburn hair, the hollow cheek, the attenuated features and wan complexion, and remembered how brilliant a creature she had been in the first bloom of her beauty, and with what furtive apprehensive glances he, her father, had admired that girlish face. She was handsomer in those days than ever her mother had been, with a softer, more refined loveliness than the Strangway type. And he had let this flower grow beside his gate like a weed, and be trampled under foot like a weed; and now the face bore upon it all the traces of suffering, the lines about the mouth had taken the same embittered look that he remembered only too well in Evelyn Darcy, that look of silent protest against Fate.
He watched her for some minutes in an agony of remorse. She was his daughter, and it had been his duty to shelter her from the storms of life—and he had let the storms beat upon that undefended head, he had let her suffer as the nameless waifs of this world have to suffer, uncared for, unavenged.
If she should ever be brought to forgive him, could he ever forgive himself?
But he had nearer anxieties than these sad thoughts of that which might have been and that which was. He had the missing woman to think of, and the evil that might come to herself or others from her being at large. He had to speculate upon her motive in leaving Cheriton.
Perhaps it was only a natural result of his interview with her yesterday afternoon, when he had shown her the pistol, and told her where it had been found, that pistol which he and she knew so well—one of a pair that had been in her husband’s possession at the time of her marriage—which had been pledged while they were living in Essex Street, and when their funds were at the lowest. She had kept the duplicate, with other duplicates which Darcy’s carelessness abandoned to her—and afterwards some womanishapprehension of danger in the somewhat isolated cottage in Camberwell Grove—some talk of burglarious attacks in the neighbourhood—had induced her to redeem the pistols, and they had been kept in their case on the table beside her bed for years. No burglar had ever troubled the quiet cottage, where there was neither plate-chest nor jewel-case to tempt an attack. The pistols had never been used. They had been packed up with other things and stored in the Pantechnicon, and James Dalbrook had forgotten the existence of Captain Darcy’s revolvers till the builder’s foreman showed him the pistol that had been found in the well. Then there came back upon him, in a flash, the memory of the case that had stood beside his bed, and the fact that the pistols had been sent down to Cheriton with Mrs. Darcy’s other goods. That pistol could not have passed out of her possession without her knowledge and consent. If hers was not the hand that pulled the trigger, she must, at least, have furnished the weapon, and she must have known the murderer.
He told her as much as this, yesterday afternoon, when he showed her the pistol. She heard him in dogged silence, looking at him with wide-open eyes, in which the dilatation of the pupil never altered. She neither admitted nor denied anything. He could extort no answer from her, except some scornful and evasive retort. And so he left her in despair, having warned her that discovery was now a question of time. The finding of the pistol would put the police on the right track, and link by link the chain of circumstantial evidence would be fitted together.
“You had better tell me the truth, and let me help you, if I can,” he told her.
She had acted upon his warning perhaps, but without his help. It was like her perverse nature to go out into the world alone, to make a mysterious disappearance just at the time when suspicion might at any moment be directed towards her, just when it was most essential that there should be not the slightest deviation from the sluggish course of her every-day life.
Lord Cheriton started up suddenly.
“Yes, that is at least an idea,” he muttered. “Good-bye, Mercy. I have thought of a place where your mother might possibly go—a place associated with her past life. It is a forlorn hope, but I may as well look for her there. Wherever and whenever I find her you will come to her, will you not, if she should need your love?”
“Of course I will go to her—and if she has no other shelter I can bring her here. I should not be afraid to work for her.”
“It is cruel of you to talk of working for her. You know that the want of money has never been an element in her troubles. She might have lived an easy and refined life among pleasant people if she would have been persuaded by me. As it was, I did what I could to make her life comfortable.”
“Yes, I know she had plenty of money. She gave me expensive masters, as if she had been a woman of fortune. I used to wonder how she could afford it. We lived very simply, almost like hermits, but there seemed always money for everything she wanted. Our clothes, our furniture, and books seemed far too good for our station. I used to wonder who and what we were; and I have been asked questions sometimes about my former home. What did I remember of my childhood? Where had I lived before my father died? I could tell people nothing. I only remembered a cottage among fields, and the faces of the woman who nursed me and her children who played with me. I remembered nothing but the cottage, and the great cornfields, and the lanes and hedgerows, till one summer day my mother came in a carriage, and took me on a journey by the railroad—a journey that lasted a long time, for we had to wait and change trains more than once—and in the evening I found myself at Cheriton. That was all of my life that I could recall, and I did not even know the name of the woman with whom I lived till I was seven years old, or of the village near her cottage.”
“You were hardly used, Mercy; but it was not all my fault.”
He would not tell her that it was his wish to have her reared at Myrtle Cottage, where he would have watched her infancy and childhood; he would not tell her that it was the mother’s sensitiveness, her resentful consciousness of her false position, which had banished the child.
“You will come to me whenever I summon you, Mercy?” he said.
“Yes, I will come.”
He held out his hand, and she gave him hers, which was cold as death. He drew her to his breast, and kissed the pallid, careworn forehead, and so they parted, father and daughter, the daughter acknowledged for the first time at seven-and-twenty years of age.
Lord Cheriton hailed the first hansom he found upon his way, and told the man to drive him to Camberwell Grove.
The neighbourhood through which he went was curiously unfamiliar after the changes and forgetfulness of twenty years; and yet it was curiously familiar to him, and brought back the memory of that dead time, when a man who was himself, and yet not himself, had gone to and fro that road until its every shop-front and every street corner seemed engraven upon his brain.
It is a busy, teeming world—a world of seething humanity, jostling, striving, anxious, hollow-cheeked and eager-eyed. He had chosen to plant his hidden Eden upon “the Surrey side,” and had gone to and fro by that squalid highway with a contented spirit, because it was a world in which he was least likely to meet any of his professional brotherhood. What other barrister in decentpractice, what other Queen’s Counsel, above all, was likely to pitch his tent at Camberwell? There might be old-fashioned men who would be content to grow their early cucumbers, and gloat over their pines and peaches in some citizen’s paradise on Clapham Common. There might be men who would resign themselves to life at Wandsworth; but where was the spirit so lowly within the precincts of the Lamb who would stoop to live in a place which was accessible only by the Elephant and Castle and the Walworth Road? Do not the very names of those places stink in the nostrils of gentility? The Elephant has never held up his trunk since the glories of the Queen’s Bench departed, since Ichabod was written on those walls against which Lord Huntingtower played rackets, and in whose shadow so many of Earth’s great ones have paced up and down in the days when the noble debtor was still a person apart and distinguished, not amenable to the laws which govern the bankrupt trader.
He had borne with the Walworth Road because it lay so far out of gentility’s track. The very odour of the neighbourhood was familiar—the reek of cooked meats and stale vegetables, blended with all-pervading fumes of beer. But there were numerous changes. He missed familiar shops and well-remembered features. All that had been shabby of old looked still shabbier to-day. How often he had tramped those pavements, economizing the cost of a cab, and not caring to rub shoulders with the habitués of the knife-board on Atlas or Waterloo. The walk had suited him. He could think out the brief read overnight as he tramped to Westminster in the morning. How well he remembered the cool breath of the river blowing up the Westminster Road on bright spring mornings, when the flower-girls were offering violets and primroses at the street corners. How well he remembered the change to a cleaner and a statelier world when he had crossed the bridge—the solemn grandeur of Westminster Hall, the close, sickly atmosphere of the crowded courts. Looking back he wondered how he bore the monotony of that laborious life, forgetting that he had been borne up and carried along by his ambition, always looking onward to the day when his name and fortune should be made, and he should taste the strong wine of success. He remembered what an idle dream Evelyn’s idea of buying the Cheriton estate had seemed to him when first she mooted it; how he had talked of it only to indulge her fancy, as one discusses impossible things with a child; and how by slow degrees the notion of its feasibility had crept into his mind; how he had begun to calculate the possibilities of his future savings; how he had covered stray half-sheets of paper with elaborate calculations, taking pleasure in the mere figures as if they were actual money. He remembered how, when he had saved five thousand pounds, a rabid eagerness to accumulate took hold of him,and with what keen eyes he used to look at the figures on a brief. He had caught the infection of Evelyn’s sanguine temper, and of Evelyn’s parsimonious habits. They used to hang over his bankbook sometimes of an evening, as Paolo and Francesca hung over the story of Launcelot, calculating how much could be spared to be placed on deposit, how little they could contrive to live on for the next quarter. As the hoard increased Evelyn grew to grudge herself the smallest luxury, a few flowering plants for the drawing-room, a day’s hire of the jobbing gardener, a drive in a hansom to Richmond or Greenwich, little pleasures that had relieved the monotony of their isolation.
“My father cannot live many years,” she told James Dalbrook, “and when he dies the estate will have to be sold. I have often heard him say so.”
Mr. Dalbrook went on a stolen journey to Cheriton, and saw every bit of the estate which he could get to see. He was careful to say nothing of this expedition to Evelyn lest she should want to go with him, as he felt that her presence would have been a difficulty. Some one might have recognized the Squire’s young daughter in the mature woman.
He went back to London passionately in love with the property, which he remembered as one of the paradises of his boyhood, in the days when he had been fond of long excursions on foot to Corfe, or Swanage, or the great sunburnt hills by the sea. He saw Cheriton Chase now with the entranced eyes of an ambitious man to whom territorial possession seemed the crowning glory of life.
He had saved ten thousand pounds, very little compared with the sum which would be required; but he told himself that when he had amassed another ten he might feel secure of being able to buy the estate, since it would be easy to raise seventy per cent. of the purchase money on mortgage. He began to see his way to the realization of that dream. He would have to go on living laborious days—to go on with those habits of self-denial which had already become a second nature—even after the prize was won; but he saw himself the owner of that noble old house, amidst a park and woodland that were the growth of centuries; and he thought of the delight of restoring and improving and repairing, after fifty years of slipshod poverty and gradual decay.
And now, as the hoard increased to twelve, fifteen, eighteen thousand, James Dalbrook began to talk to his companion of their future ownership of Cheriton as a certainty. They planned the rooms they were to occupy; they allotted their small stock of furniture about the old mansion house—things they had bought by slow degrees in the happy hunting-grounds of Wardour Street and the Portland Road, and which were all good of their kind. They discussed the number of servants that they could manage to carry onwith for the first few years, while economy would still be needful. It was understood between them, though rarely spoken about, that Tom Darcy would be dead before that fruition of their dreams. He had been sent off to Canada, a broken man. Who could doubt that a few years more would see the end of that worthless existence? And then the bond between those two who had held to each other so faithfully would be realized, and Evelyn could go back to the house in which she was born, its proud and happy mistress.
She had fed upon those dreams, lived upon them, had thought of little else in her solitary days, in the isolation of her home. She had put away her child with stern resolve that no difficulty should arise out ofthatexistence when she came to take her place in society as James Dalbrook’s wife. She never meant to acknowledge the daughter born at Myrtle Cottage. She would do her duty to the child somehow; but not in that way.
Lord Cheriton remembered all these things as the cab rattled along the Walworth Road. Our waking thoughts have sometimes almost the rapidity of our dreams. He surveyed the panorama of the past; recalled the final bitterness of that meeting at Boulogne, when he went over to see Mrs. Darcy, and when he had to tell her that he was master of Cheriton Chase, by the help of his wife’s dowry, and that he had begun life there on a far more dignified footing than they two had contemplated.
She received the announcement with sullen silence, but he could see that it hurt her like the thrust of a sword. She stood before him with a lowering brow, white to the lips, her thin fingers twisting themselves in and out of each other with a convulsive moment, and one corner of the bloodless under lip caught under the sharp white teeth fiercely.
“Well,” she said at last, “I congratulate you. Cheriton has a new master; and if the lady of the house is not the woman whose shadow I used to see there in my dreams—it matters very little to you. You are the gainer in all ways. You have got the place you wanted; and a fair young wife instead of a faded—mistress.”
She lifted up her eyes, pale with anguish, and looked at him with an expression he had never been able to forget.
He was silent under this thrust, and then, after a troubled pause, he asked her if she had made up her mind where her future days were to be spent. He was only desirous to see her settled in some pretty neighbourhood, in the nicest house that she could find for herself, or that he could choose for her.
“Do not let money be any consideration,” he said. “My fees are rolling in very fast this year, and they are big fees. I want to see you happily circumstanced, with Mercy.”
“There is only one place I care to live in,” she answered, “and that is Cheriton Chase.”
He told her, with a sad smile, that Cheriton was the only place that was impossible for her.
“It is not impossible. Do you think I want to be a fine lady, or to tell people that I was once Evelyn Strangway? I only want to live upon the soil I love—and to see you, sometimes, as you go past my door. There is the West Lodge, now—one of the most picturesque old cottages in England. I loved it when I was a girl. Sally Newton and I used to picnic there, when my father and I were not on speaking terms. Who is living in that cottage now?”
“One of the gardeners.”
“Turn out the gardener and let me live there.”
He rejected the idea as preposterous, degrading, that she should live at the lodge gates, she who had once been the Squire’s daughter.
“Do not talk to me of degradation,” she answered, bitterly. “There will be no degradation for me in living at your gates, now that you and I are strangers. My degradation belongs to the past. Nothing in the future can touch me. I am nameless henceforward, a nullity.”
“But if you should be recognized there?”
“Who is there to recognize me? Do you think there is one line or one look of Evelyn Strangway’s sixteen-year-old face left in my face to-day?”
Knowing the portrait in the hall at Cheriton he was fain to confess that the change was complete. It would have been difficult for any one to find the lines of that proud young beauty in the careworn features and sunken cheeks of the woman who stood before him now. The months that had gone by since their parting had aged her as much as if they had been years.
“If your husband should find you there?”
“Not likely! It is the very last place in which he would look for me; and the chances are against his ever returning to England.”
“Why is your mind set upon living at Cheriton?”
“Why? Because I have dreamt and thought of that place till my love for it has become almost a disease; because I have not the faintest interest in any other spot upon earth. I don’t care how I live there. I have no pride left in me. Pride, self-respect, care for myself died a sudden death one day you know of, when I found that you had ceased to care for me, when I awoke from a long dream and knew that my place in life was lost. I shall be content to vegetate in that cottage—and—and if you think I ought to have Mercy with me, why Mercy can be there too. I shall be Mrs. Jones, or Mrs. Brown, and there can be no particular reason why Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Brown should not have a daughter.”
She was so earnest, so intent, so resolute upon this and nothingelse than this, that he was constrained to yield to her wishes, and once having yielded, he did all in his power to make her life comfortable and free from humiliation. He had the cottage as tastefully restored as if he had been going to occupy it himself; he opened an account for Mrs. Porter at a Dorchester Bank, and paid in four hundred pounds to her credit, and he told her that the same amount would be paid in yearly on the 1st of January. There should be nothing uncertain or pinched in her circumstances.
This being done, he resigned himself as best he might to bear the burden of that unwelcome presence at his gates. He and the woman who was to have been his wife rarely spoke to each other during those long slow years in which the master of Cheriton grew in honour and dignity and in the respect of his fellow-men. He whose career Evelyn Darcy had watched from the very dawn of success was now a personage, a man of mark in his native county, a man who could afford to hold out the hand of friendship to his less distinguished relatives, and who could afford to confess himself the son of a small shopkeeper in the county town.
Lady Cheriton had been inclined to interest herself in the lonely woman at the West Lodge. She was impressed by the unmistakable refinement of Mrs. Porter’s appearance, and wanted to befriend her; but Lord Cheriton had forbidden any friendly relations between his wife and the lodge-keeper, on the ground that she was a woman of very peculiar temper, that she would resent anything like patronage, and that she would infinitely prefer being left alone to being taken up or petted. The tender-hearted Maria, always submissive to the husband she adored, had obeyed without question; but some years after, when Mercy was growing up and being educated by the best masters available in the neighbourhood, Lady Cheriton had taken a fancy to the hard-worked girl, and had interested herself warmly in her progress; and thus it had happened that although Mrs. Porter never was known to cross the threshold of the great house, her daughter went there often, and was made much of by Lady Cheriton, and admired by Juanita, whose accomplishments were still in embryo, while Mercy was far advanced in music and modern languages.
“I suppose her mother means her to go out as a governess by-and-by,” Lady Cheriton told her husband. “She is over-educated for any other walk in life, and in any case she is overworked. I feel very sorry for her when I see how tired she looks sometimes, and how anxious she is about her studies. Juanita must never be allowed to toil like that.”
Lord Cheriton remembered all that had happened with reference to the woman who called herself Mrs. Porter, in all these long years—his daughter Juanita’s lifetime. She had seen the funeral trainsof his infant sons pass through the gate beside her cottage—she had seen the little coffins covered with snow-white flowers, and she must have known the bitterness of his disappointment. She had lived at the West Lodge for all these years, and had made no sign of a rebellious heart, of anger, jealousy, or revengeful feeling. He had believed that she was really content so to live; that in granting what she had asked of him he had satisfied her, and that her sense of wrong was appeased. At first he had lived in feverish apprehension of some outbreak or scene—some revelation made to the wife he loved, or to the friends whose esteem he valued; but as the years went by without bringing him any trouble of this kind, he had ceased to think with uneasiness of that sinister figure at his gates.
And now by the light of the hideous confession which he carried in his breast pocket he knew that in all those years she had been cherishing her sense of wrong, heaping up anger and revenge and malice and every deadly feeling engendered of disappointed love, against the day of wrath. Could he wonder if her mind had given way under that slow torture, until the concealed madness of years culminated in an act of wild revenge—a seemingly motiveless crime? Heaven knows by what distorted reasoning she had arrived at the resolve to strike her deadly blow there rather than elsewhere. Heaven knows what sudden access of malignity might have been caused by the spectacle of the honeymoon lovers and their innocent bliss.
The cab had turned into Camberwell Grove, and now he asked himself if it were not the wildest fancy to suppose that she might have gone back to Myrtle Cottage, or that she might be hanging about the neighbourhood of her old home. The cottage was in all probability occupied, and even if she had wandered that way she would most likely have come and gone before now. The idea had flashed into his mind as he sat in Mercy’s room, the idea that in her distracted state all her thoughts might revert to the past, and that her first impulse might lead her to revisit the house in which she had lived so long.