Lord Cheriton received his kinsman’s friend with marked cordiality, and seemed to enjoy his freshness and spontaneity. They talked of Cambridge—the Cambridge of forty years ago and the Cambridge of to-day,—and they talked of the continental schools of medicine, a subject in which the lawyer was warmly interested. There were no other visitors expected before September, when three old friends of Lord Cheriton’s were to shoot the partridges. In October there was to be a large party for the pheasant shooting, which was the chief glory of Cheriton Chase. There had been no shooters at the Chase last year, and Lord Cheriton felt himself so much the more constrained to hospitality.
“You fellows must come in October, when we have our big shoot,” he said; but Cuthbert Ramsay told him that he must be at work again in London before the end of September.
Cuthbert was much impressed by the master of Cheriton Chase, and the grave and quiet dignity with which he wore success that might have made a weaker man arrogant and self-assertive. It would seem as if scarcely anything were wanting to that prosperous career. Yet Cuthbert saw that his host was not free from a cloud of care. It was natural, perhaps, that he should feel the tragedy of his son-in-law’s death as a lasting trouble, not to be shuffled off and forgotten when the conventional period of mourning was past.
Theodore had some private talk with his cousin on the first evening of his visit, walking up and down the terrace, while Cuthbert was looking at the books in the library, under Lady Cheriton’s guidance. He had it fully in his mind that the time must come when he would be obliged to take Lord Cheriton into his confidence, but he felt that time was still far off. Whenever the revelation came it must needs be infinitely painful to both, and deeply humiliating to the man whose hidden sin had brought desolation upon his innocent daughter, and untimely death upon the man whose fate had been linked with hers. It was for his dishonour, for the wrongs inflicted by him, that those two had made expiation.
No, the time to be outspoken—the time to say in the words of the prophet, “Thou art the man,” had not yet come. When it should come he would be prepared to act resolutely and fearlessly; but in the mean time he must needs go on working in the dark.
He remembered his last conversation with Lord Cheriton on that subject—remembered how Cheriton had said that he believed Godfrey Carmichael incapable of a dishonourable action—incapable of having behaved cruelly to any woman. Had he who pronounced that judgment been guilty of dishonour—had he been cruel to the woman who sacrificed herself for him? There are so many degrees in such wrong-doing! There is the sin of impulse: there is the deliberate betrayal, the coldly planned iniquity, the sin of the practised seducer who has reduced seduction to a science, and who has no more heart or conscience than a machine. There is the sin of the generous man, who finds his feet caught in the web of circumstance, who begins, innocently enough, by pitying a neglected wife, and ends by betraying the neglectful husband. Theodore gave his kinsman credit for belonging to the category of generous sinners. Indeed, the fact that he had lived aloof from the world for many years, sharing the isolation of the woman who loved him, was in itself evidence that he had not acted as a villain; yet it was possible that when the final hour came, the hour for breaking those illicit bonds, the rupture may have been in somewise cruel; and the remembrance of that cruelty might be a burden upon the sinner’s conscience at this day. Such partings can never be without cruelty. The fact that one sinner is to marry and begin a new life, while the other sinner is to finish her days in a dishonoured widowhood, is in itself a cruelty. She may submit, as to a fate which she foresaw dimly, even in the hour of her fall—but she would be more than human if she did not think herself hardly used by the man who forsakes her. Nothing he can do to secure her worldly comfort or to screen her from the world’s disdain will take the sting out of that parting. The one fact remains that her day is done. He has ceased to care for her, and he has begun to care for another.
“Nothing has occurred since I was here to throw any new light upon the murder, I suppose?” Theodore said quietly, as they smoked their cigars, walking slowly up and down in the summer night.
“Nothing.”
“Did her ladyship tell you that I have met a girl in London, whom I believe to be no other than Mercy Porter?”
“Yes, she told me something about that fancy of yours, for I take it to be nothing more than a fancy. The world is too wide for you and Mercy Porter to meet so easily. What was your ground for identifying her with the lodge-keeper’s girl?”