At first, after the death of Mr. Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock had hoped that her dread and fear were now ended, but she soon found that this was not to be. The telltale bundle of letters was in the possession of a detective whom the cruel lawyer had long ago called to his aid, and the detective, thinking Lady Dedlock herself might have had something to do with the murder, thought it his duty to tell all that his dead employer had discovered to Sir Leicester.
It was a fearful shock to the haughty baronet to find so many tongues had been busy with the name his wife had borne so proudly. When the detective finished, Sir Leicester fell unconscious, and when he came to his senses had lost the power to speak.
They laid him on his bed, sent for doctors and went to tell Lady Dedlock, but she had disappeared.
Almost at one and the same moment the unhappy woman had learned not only that the detective had told his story to Sir Leicester, but that she herself was suspected of the murder. These two blows were more than she could bear. She put on a cloak and veil and, leaving all her money and jewels behind her, with a note for her husband, went out into the shrill, frosty wind. The note read:
"If I am sought for or accused of his murder, believe I am wholly innocent. I have no home left, I will trouble you no more. May you forget me and forgive me."
They gave Sir Leicester this note, and great agony came to the stricken man's heart. He had always loved and honored her, and he loved her no less now for what had been told him. Nor did he believe for a moment that she could be guilty of the murder. He wrote on a slate the words, "Forgive—find," and the detective started at once to overtake the fleeing woman.
He went first to Esther, to whom he told the sad outcome, and together they began the search. For two days they labored, tracing Lady Dedlock's movements step by step, through the pelting snow and wind, across the frozen wastes outside of London, where brick-kilns burned and where she had exchanged clothes with a poor laboring woman, the better to elude pursuit—then back to London again, where at last they found her.
But it was too late. She was lying frozen in the snow, at the gate of the cemetery where Captain Hawdon, the copyist whom she had once loved, lay buried.
So Lady Dedlock's secret was hidden at last by death. Only the detective, whose business was silence, Sir Leicester her husband, and Esther her daughter, knew what her misery had been or the strange circumstances of her flight, for the police soon succeeded in tracing the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn to Hortense, the revengeful French maid whom he had threatened to put in prison.
One other shadow fell on Esther's life before the clouds cleared away for ever.