“Well, sir, that was Jane’s first and last visit. She got married all of a sudden before Lady-day, and she went to live in the country, where her husband was postman in her native village, and I never see no more of her. I went to Camberwell Grove again in the Long Vacation, when I knew Mr. Dalbrook was away, but I found only an old woman in the house as caretaker, stone deaf, and disagreeable into the bargain. Mr. Dalbrook moved into King’s Bench Walk the following year, and less than six months after that I saw his marriage in the papers; and his clerk told me he had married a very rich young lady, and was going to buy an estate in the country. I went to have another look at the cottage soon after Mr. Dalbrook’s marriage, and I found the garden-gate locked, and a board up to say that the house was to be let unfurnished; and that, sir, is all I could ever find out about the lady called Mrs. Danvers.”
“And this history of the home in Camberwell Grove is all you ever knew about Mr. James Dalbrook’s life outside the chambers in Ferret Court.”
“Yes, sir, that is all I ever heard, promiscuously or otherwise.”
“Well, Mrs. Dugget, you have been frank with me, and you have earned my little present,” said Theodore, handing her the two notes, which her old fingers touched tremulously in a rapture that was too much for words. It was with an effort that she faltered out her thanks for his generosity, which, she protested, she had never “looked for.”
Theodore walked back towards the Temple deep in thought; indeed so troubled and perplexed were his thoughts that upon approaching Ferret Court he stopped short, and instead of going straight to his chambers, turned aside and went to the Gardens, where he walked up and down the same gravel path for an hour, pondering upon that picture of the hidden home in Camberwell Grove, conjured up before him by the loquacious laundress. Yes, he could imagine that obscure existence almost as if he had seen it with his bodily eyes. He could fancy the solitary home where never kinsman or familiar friend crossed the threshold; a home destitute of all home ties and homely associations; a home never smiled upon by the parson of the parish; cut off from all local interests, identified with nothing, a mystery among the commonplace dwellings around and about it; a subject for furtive observation from the neighbours. He could fancy those two lonely lives preying upon each other, too closely united for peaceful union; the woman too utterly dependent upon the man; she feeling her dependence a degradation; he feeling her helplessness a burden. He could picture them, loving each other, perhaps, passionately, jealously to the last, and yet weary of each other, worn out and weighed down by the narrowness of a life walled off from the rest of the world and all its changeful interests and widening sympathies. And then he saw the picture in still darker colours, as it might have been ere that unknown figure faded from the canvas. He thought of the ambitious, successful barrister, heart-sick at the fetters which he had fastened upon his life, tired of his faded mistress, seeing all gates open to him were he but free to pass them; still living apart from the world, at a time of life when all the social instincts are at their highest development, when a man loves the society of his fellow-men, the friction of crowds, the sound of his own voice, and every social tribute that the world can offer to his talents and his success. He saw his kinsman galled by the chain which love and honour had hung about him, loathing his bondage, longing for liberty—saw him with the possibility of a brilliant marriage suddenly offering itself to him, a lovely girl ready to throw herself into his arms, a fortune at his feet, and the keen ambition of a self-made man goading him like a spur. How did it end? Did death set him free—death, the loosener of all bonds? Or did his mistress sacrifice herself and her broken heart to his welfare, and of her own accord release him? There are women capable of such sacrifices. It would seem that his disentanglement, however it came about, had been perfect of its kind; for no rumour of a youthful intrigue, no scandal about a cast-off mistress had ever clouded the married life of James Dalbrook. Even in Cheriton village, where the very smallest nucleus in the way of fact was apt to swell into a gigantic scandal, even at Cheriton nobody had ever hinted at indiscretions in the earlier years of the local magnate.
And then Theodore Dalbrook asked himself the essential question: What bearing, if any, had this episode of his kinsman’s life upon the murder of Juanita’s husband? What dark and vengeful figure lurked in the background of that common story of dishonourable love? An outraged husband, a brother, a father? That obscure life apart from friends and acquaintances would show that some great wrong had been done, some sacred tie had been broken. Only a sinful union so hides its furtive happiness—only a deep sense of degradation will reconcile a woman to banishment from the society of her own sex.
Whether that forsaken mistress were dead or living there might lurk in her sad history the elements of tragedy, the motive for a ghastly revenge; and on this account the story possessed a grim fascination for Theodore Dalbrook. He lay awake the greater part of the night thinking in a fitful way of that illicit ménage in the unfashionable suburb—the suburb whose very existence is unknown to society. He fell asleep long after the sun was up, only to dream confusedly of a strange woman who was now James Dalbrook’s lawful wife—and now his victim—and whose face had vague resemblances to other faces, and who was and was not half a dozen other women in succession.
He walked to Camberwell on the following afternoon, surprised at the strange world through which he passed on his way there, the teeming, busy, noisy world—the world which makes such a hard fight for life. The Grove itself, after that bustling, seething road, seemed a place in which nightingales might have warbled, and laughing girls hidden from their lovers in the summer dusk. The very atmosphere of decay from a better state was soothing. There were trees still, and gardens, and here and there pretty, old-fashioned houses; and in a long narrow garden between two larger houses he found Myrtle Cottage. There was a board up, and the neglected garden indicated that the cottage had been a long time without a tenant.
There was a policeman’s wife living in it, with a colony of small children, in the cotton-pinafore stage of existence, and with noses dependent upon maternal supervision, so much so that scarcely had the matron attended to one small snub than her attention was called off to another, which gave a distracted air to all her conversation.
She took Mr. Dalbrook over the house, and expatiated upon the damp walls, and the utter incompetence of the cistern and pipes to meet the exigencies of a family, which was the more to be regretted on the ground that the landlord declined to do anything in the way of repairs, as he intended to pull the house down in a few years with a view to making better use of the ground.