The day will come

by M. E. Braddon

“I asked him if he knew what had become of the lady’s husband, but here his mind is a blank. He had heard that the man was a scamp, and that was all he knew about him.

“Since making these inquiries I have spent a long evening at the Literary Institute, where, as you know, there is a set of the Times, in volumes, extending over a period of forty years. I have looked through the deaths for three years, taking the year in which Gaster thinks he heard of Mrs. Darcy’s death, as the middle year out of three, but without result. It is, of course, unlikely that the death would be advertised if the poor lady died friendless and in poverty in a foreign town; but I thought it my duty to make this investigation.

“Awaiting your further commands, &c., &c.”

There was nothing conclusive in this; and Theodore felt that the history of Mrs. Darcy’s later years remained to be unravelled. It was not to be supposed that the runaway wife, who, if she were yet living must be an elderly woman, could have had act or part in the murder of Sir Godfrey Carmichael; but it was not the less a part of his task to trace her story to its final chapter. Then only could he convince Juanita of the wildness of that idea which connected the catastrophe of the 29th of July with the exiled Strangways. When he could say to her, “You see that long before that fatal night the Squire’s three children had vanished from this earth,” she would be constrained to confess that the solution of the mystery was not to be sought here.

He went over to Boulogne, saw the English chaplain, and several of the hotel-keepers. He explored the cemetery, and examined the record of the dead. He visited the police, and he made friends with the elderly editor of an old-established newspaper; but from all his questioning of various people the result was blank. Nobody remembered a Mrs. Darcy, an Englishwoman of distinguished appearance but fallen fortunes, a woman long past youth and yet not old. If she had lived for any time in Boulogne she had left no trace of her existence; if she had died and been buried there she had left no record among the graves.

Boulogne could tell him nothing. He came back to the great wilderness of London, the rallying point for all wanderers. It was there perhaps that the end of Evelyn Strangway was to be sought.

He had, as it seemed to him, only one clue, the name of her governess. The governess was only seven or eight years older than the pupil, and she might have survived her pupil, and might have been in communication with her till the end. Jasper Blake had told him that there was a strong attachment between Sarah Newton and the wayward girl she taught.

To hunt for a governess among the thousands of portionless gentlewomen who try to live by teaching might seem more hopeless than the proverbial search for the lost needle, but Theodore did not despair. If Miss Newton had remained a spinster and had continued to exercise her vocation as a teacher she might be traced through one of those agencies which transact business between governess and employer; but, on the other hand, if, as was more likely, she had long ago abandoned the profession of teacher, and had made some obscure marriage, she would have sunk into the vast ocean of middle-class life, in whose depths it would be almost impossible to discover her. The first thing to be done was to make a visitation of the agencies, and this task Theodore began two days after his return from Boulogne.

He had methodized his life by this time, devoting a certain portion of his days to his cousin’s interests, but in no wise neglecting the work he had to do for his own advancement. He had known too many instances of men who had made reading law an excuse for an idle and desultory life, and he was resolved that his own course should be steady and persistent even to doggedness. He had been told that success at the Bar was nowadays almost unattainable; that the men of the day who had conquered fame and were making great fortunes, were in a manner miraculous men, and that it was futile for any young man to hope to follow in their steps. The road they had trodden was barred against the new comer. Theodore listened to these pessimists, yet was not discouraged. He had told himself that he would emerge somehow from the obscurity of a country solicitor’s practice—would bring himself in some wise nearer the social level of the woman he loved, so that if in the days to come one gleam of hope should ever shine upon that love he might be able to say to her, “My place in life is the place your father held when he offered himself to your mother; my determination to conquer fortune is not less than his.”

He seldom passed the dingy door of the ground-floor chambers—on which the several names of three briefless ones were painted in dirty letters that had once been white—without thinking of his fortunate kinsman, without wondering what his life had been like in those darksome rooms, and in what shape fortune had first appeared to him. He had not married until he was forty. Long and lonely years had gone before that golden summertide of his life, when a young and lovely woman had given him happiness and fortune. How had he lived in those lonely years? Tradition accused him of miserly habits, of shabby raiment, of patient grinding and scraping to accumulate wealth. Theodore knew that if he had hoarded his earnings it had been for a worthy end. He had set himself to win a place among the lords of the soil. The land he loved had been to him as a mistress, and for that he had been content to live poorly and spend his nights in toil. For such miserliness Theodore had nothing but admiration; for he had seen how liberally the man who had scraped and hoarded was able to administer a large income—how generous as a master, friend, and patron the sometime miser had shown himself.