Henderson parted from Mrs. Temple with every nerve in his body throbbing with excitement. In spite of May Churchill’s rejection of his love, his unreasonable passion for her remained unchanged. There were times when he felt he hated her; when he cursed her memory, and blamed her for the undying remorse that overshadowed his soul. But for her, he often told himself, the miserable girl who had loved him too well might have been living still, and he himself free from the galling chains held by his groom, Jack Reid.
But if he hated May, it was a sort of loving hatred, while his feelings to John Temple were of the bitterest description. He believed but that for Temple, May would ultimately have become his wife; and as he strode down the lane, after parting with Mrs. Temple, he seemed to see again, in his mental vision, John lying at May’s feet in Fern Dene in the early days of their first acquaintance.
And that he should have induced her to leave her home; that she was writing to him in the terms described by Mrs. Temple, positively seemed to madden him.
“But it may be some other woman,” he told himself, as he had told Mrs. Temple. But at all events he would find out, and on his return to the Grange, to his mother’s great surprise, and not a little alarm, he told her he was about to start for London in a few hours.
Hidden anxiety and grief had wrought their baneful work now on Mrs. Henderson’s face. The terrible knowledge of her son’s crime, the awful dread of its punishment, were ever present in her mind. She had grown old before her time, and watched Henderson with unceasing eyes of fear.
Thus when she heard of his sudden journey she could scarcely suppress her nervousness. Henderson, too, was moody and reserved, and hurried on his preparations for departure.
“Will you be long away?” inquired Mrs. Henderson.
“But a few days at most,” he answered, and he told the same story to his groom, Jack Reid.
“This is something sudden,” said Reid, looking at him suspiciously. It crossed the man’s mind, indeed, that his master was about to leave Stourton for a much longer time than he stated.
“I’ll be back probably the day after to-morrow,” said Henderson, with affected carelessness; and Reid felt he could say nothing more, for he had grown certainly more respectful in his manner to his master after the episode of the shooting of Brown Bess.