The day will come

by M. E. Braddon

The Priory was by no means so fine a place as Cheriton, but it was old, and not without interest, and Lady Jane was justified in the assertion that it was too large for her. It would be too small perhaps for Sir Godfrey and his wife in the days to come, when in the natural course of events James Dalbrook would be at rest after his life labour, and Cheriton would belong to Juanita.

“No doubt they will like Cheriton better than the Priory when we are all dead and gone,” said Lady Jane, with her plaintive air. “I only hope they will have a family. Big houses are so dismal without little people.”

This idea of a family was almost a craze with Lady Jane Carmichael. She had idolized her only son, had been miserable at every parting, and it had seemed a hard thing to her that there was not more of him, as she had herself expressed it.

“Godfrey has been the dearest boy. I only wish I had six of him,” she would say piteously; and now her mind projected itself into the future, and she pictured a bevy of grandchildren—numerous as a covey of partridges in the upland fields of the home farm at Cheriton—and fancied herself lavishing her hoarded treasures of love upon them. She had grandchildren already, and to spare, the offspring of her two daughters, but these did not bear the honoured name of Carmichael, and, though they were very dear to her maternal heart, they were not what Godfrey’s children would be to her.

She would be gone, she told herself, before they would be old enough to forsake her. She would be gone before those young birds grew too strong upon the wing. A blessed spell of golden years lay before her; a nursery, and then a schoolroom; and then, perhaps, before the last dim closing scene, a bridal, a granddaughter clinging to her in the sweet sadness of leave-taking, a fair young face crowned with orange flowers pressed against her own in the bride’s happy kiss—and then she would say Nunc dimittis, and feel that her cup of gladness had been filled to the brim.

The lovers’ talk was all of that shadowy future, as the pair of greys bowled gaily along the level road. The horses were Godfrey’s favourite pair, and belonged to a team of chestnuts and greys which had won him some distinction last season in Hyde Park, when the coaches met at the corner by the Magazine, and when the handsome Miss Dalbrook, Lord Cheriton’s heiress, was the cynosure of many eyes. The thoughts of Sir Godfrey and his wife were far from Hyde Park and the Four-in-Hand Club this morning. Their minds were filled with simple rural anticipations, and had almost a patriarchal turn, as of an Arcadian pair whose wealth was all in flocks and herds, and green pastures like these by which they were driving.

The Priory stood on low ground between Wareham and Wimbourne, sheltered from the north by a bold ridge of heath, screened on the east by a little wood of oaks and chestnuts, Spanish chestnuts, with graceful drooping branches, whose glossy leaves contrasted with the closer foliage of the rugged old oaks. The house was built of Purbeck stone, and its bluish grey was touched with shades of gold and silvery green where the lichens and mosses crept over it, while one long southern wall was clothed with trumpet-ash and magnolia, myrtle and rose, as with a closely interwoven curtain of greenery, from which the small latticed windows flashed back the sunshine.

Nothing at the Priory was so stately as its counterpart at Cheriton. There were marble balustrades and rural gods there on the terrace; here there was only a broad gravel walk along the southern front, with a little old shabby stone temple at each end. At Cheriton three flights of marble steps led from the terrace to the Italian garden, and then again three more flights led to a garden on a lower level, and so by studied gradations to the bottom of the slope on which the mansion was built. Here house and garden were on the same level, and those gardens which Lady Jane had so cherished were distinguished only by an elegant simplicity. Between the garden and a park of less than fifty acres there was only a sunk fence, and the sole glory of that modest domain lay in a herd of choice Channel Island cows, which had been Lady Jane’s pride. She had resigned them to Juanita without a sigh, although each particular beast had been to her as a friend.

“My dear, what could I do with cows in a villa?” she said, when Juanita suggested that she should at least keep her favourites, Beauty, and Maydew, and Coquette. “Of course, as you say, I could rent a couple of paddocks; but I should not like to see the herd divided. Besides, you will want them all by-and-by, when you have a family.”

Nita stepped lightly across the threshold of her future home. The old grey porch was embedded in roses and trailing passion-flowers. Everything had a shabby, old-world look compared with Cheriton. Here there had been no improvement for over a century; all things had been quiescent as in the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty.