The day will come

by M. E. Braddon

“What may that be?”

“That the act of vengeance—though striking Godfrey Carmichael—was aimed at Lord Cheriton; that the blow was meant to ruin his daughter’s life, and by ricochet strike him to the heart. I think we have spoken of this possibility before to-night.”

After that evening with Churton, Theodore made up his mind that there was no assistance to be looked for from this quarter. The detective had exhausted his means of investigation, and had nothing further to suggest. He was too practical a man to waste time or thought upon speculative theories. Theodore saw, therefore, that if he were to pursue the subject further he must think and work for himself.

After considering the question from every possible point of view, he became the more established in the idea that Godfrey Carmichael had been the scapegoat of another man’s sin, the vicarious victim whose death was to strike at a guilty life. Of his youth it was easy to know all that there was to be known. He had lived in the sight of his fellow-men, a young man of too much social importance to be able to hide any youthful indiscretions or wrong-doing. But what of that other and so much longer life? What of the early struggles of the self-made man? What of the history of James Dalbrook in those long years of bachelor life in London, when he was slowly working his way to the front? Might not there have been some hidden sin in that life, some sin dark enough to awaken a sleepless vengeance, a malignity which should descend upon him in the day of peace and prosperity like a thunderbolt from a clear and quiet sky?

A man who marries at forty years of age has generally some kind of history before his marriage; and it was in that history Theodore told himself he must look for the secret of Godfrey Carmichael’s death. He was loyal to his kinsman and his friend; he was inspired by no prurient curiosity, no envious inclination to belittle the great man; he was prompted solely by his desire to unearth the hidden foe, and to provide for the safety of Juanita’s future life.

Meditating upon his past intercourse with Lord Cheriton, and upon every familiar conversation which he was able to recall, he was surprised to find how very little his kinsman had ever related of his London life, before the time when he took silk and married a rich wife. His allusions to that earlier period had been of the briefest. He had shown none of that egotistical pleasure which most successful men feel in talking of their struggles, and the rosy dawn of fame, those first triumphs, small perhaps in themselves, but the after-taste of which is sweeter in the mouth than the larger victories of the flood-tide. He had never talked of any affairs of the heart, any of those lighter flirtations and unfinished romances which elderly men love to recall. His history, so far as it could be judged by his conversation, had been a blank.

Either the man must have been a legal machine, a passionless piece of human clay, caring for nothing but professional achievement, in those eighteen years of manhood between his call to the Bar and his marriage, or he had lived a life which he could not afford to talk about. He was either of a duller clay than his fellow-men, or he had a hidden history.

Now, as it was hardly possible that James Dalbrook, judged from either a psychological or a physiological standpoint, could have been dull and cold, and plodding, and passionless, at any period of his career, there remained the inference that he had a secret history.

Living under the very roof that had sheltered his cousin in the greater part of his professional career, Theodore Dalbrook arrived at this conclusion.

What kind of a life had he lived, that young barrister, briefless and friendless at the outset, whose name was eventually to become a power, a weight bringing down the judicial scale on the side of victory, just as Archer’s riding was supposed to secure the winning of a race. How had he lived in those early years, when the fight was all before him? What friends had he made for himself, and what enemies? What love, or what hate, had agitated his existence?