And now she was again at the Priory. She had settled down there in her new position, as widow and mother, a woman for whom all life’s passionate story was over, who must live henceforward for that new life growing day by day towards that distant age of passion and of sorrow through which she had passed suddenly and briefly, crowding into a month the emotions of a lifetime. There are women who have lived to celebrate their golden wedding who in fifty years of wedlock have not felt half her sum of love, and who in losing the companion of half a century have not felt half her sum of grief. It is the capacity for loving and suffering which differs in different people, and, weighed against that, Time counts but little.
She received her cousin with all her old friendliness. She was a little more cheerful than when last they met, and he saw that the new interest of her life had done good. Lady Jane was at Swanage, and Juanita was alone at the Priory, though not without the expectation of company a little later in the year, as the sisters and their husbands were to be with her before the first of October, so that the expense of pheasant-breeding might not be altogether wasted.
“You must be here as much as you can in October, Theodore,” she said, “and help me to endure Mr. Grenville and Mr. Morningside. One talks nothing but sport, and the other insists upon teaching me the science of politics.”
She received Cuthbert Ramsay with a serious sweetness which charmed him. Yes, she was verily beautiful among women, exceptionally beautiful. Those southern eyes shone star-like in the settled pallor of her face, and her whole countenance was etherealized by thought and grief. It touched the stranger to see how she struggled to put away the memory of her sorrow and to receive him with all due hospitality—how she restrained herself as she showed him the things that had been a part of her dead husband’s existence, and told him the story of the old house which had sheltered so many generations of Carmichaels.
Lady Cheriton had been lunching at the Priory, where she came at least twice a week to watch her grandson’s development in all those graces of mind and person which marked his superiority to the average baby. She came all the oftener because of the difficulty in getting Juanita to Cheriton.
“My poor child will hardly ever visit us,” she told Theodore, as they sauntered on the lawn while Juanita was showing Mr. Ramsay the pictures in the dining-room. “She has an insurmountable horror of the house she was once so fond of; and I can’t wonder at it, and I can’t be angry with her. I have seen how painfully her old home affects her, so I don’t worry her to come to us often. I make a point of getting her there once in a way in the hope of overcoming her horror of the place as time goes by; and I have even gone out of my way to make changes in the furniture and decorations, so that the rooms should not look exactly the same as they looked in her fatal honeymoon; but I can see in her face that every corner of the house is haunted for her. Once when she had been calm and cheerful with me for a whole afternoon, walking about the garden and going from room to room, she flung herself into my arms suddenly, sobbing passionately. ‘We were so happy, mother,’ she said, ‘so happy in this fatal house!’ We must bear with her, poor girl. God has given her a dark lot.”
Theodore had seen an anxious, questioning look in Juanita’s eyes from the beginning of his visit, and he took the first opportunity of being alone with her, while Lady Cheriton entertained Mr. Ramsay with an exposition of the merits of her grandson, who was calmly slumbering in a hammock on the lawn, unconscious of her praises, and half smothered in embroidered coverlets.
“Have you found out anything?” she asked, eagerly, as soon as they were out of earshot.
“Yes, I believe I have really come upon a clue, and that I may ultimately discover the murderer; but I can give you no details as yet—the whole thing is too vague.”
“How clever of you to succeed where the police have utterly failed! Oh, Theodore, you cannot imagine how I shall value you—how deeply grateful——”