The day will come

by M. E. Braddon

“Yes, it is in the possession of the police, I believe.”

“Would it not be well to ascertain if it fits the pistol you have in your pocket?”

“Yes. I will go to the station to-morrow and look into that.”

There was no more said about the pistol that evening. Theodore felt that it would be cruelty to dwell upon the subject, seeing that his kinsman had been deeply affected by the discovery, and that he was oppressed by a gloom which he strove in vain to shake off.

It was evident to Theodore that those initials on the pistol had a terrible meaning for Lord Cheriton, that he recognized in those initials the evidence of an injured husband’s vengeance, a hatred which had been undiminished by the lapse of years.

He told himself that the tardiness of that revenge might be accounted for by various contingencies, any one of which would lessen the improbability of that long interval between the wrong done and the retribution exacted. It might be that the murderer had been an exile in a distant world. It might be that he had been a criminal fretting himself against the bars of a felon’s prison, nursing his anger in the dull, dead days of penal servitude. Such things have been.

It was clear to Theodore Dalbrook that in those initials upon the Colt’s revolver lay the clue to the murderer, and that Lord Cheriton shrank with horror from the revelation which those two letters might bring about. Yet, whatever evil might come upon the master of Cheriton out of the secret past, it was vital that the murderer should be found, lest his second crime should be more hideous than his first; and Theodore was resolved that he would spare no effort in the endeavour to find him, living or dead.

“God grant that I may find a grave rather than the living man,” he thought, “for Cheriton’s sake. God grant that he may be spared the humiliation of having his story told to all the world.”

He went into Cheriton village early upon the following afternoon, and dropped in upon the doctor, an old inhabitant, whose father and grandfather before him had prescribed for all the parish, rich and poor. Mr. Dolby, par excellence Dr. Dolby, was a bachelor, a spare, sharp-visaged man of about forty, social and expansive, a keen sportsman, and a good billiard player, a man whose lines had been set in pleasant places, for he had inherited a roomy old cottage, with capacious stabling, and twenty acres of the fattest meadow-land in Cheriton parish, and he led exactly that kind of life which his soul loved. It would have been no gain to such a man to have changed places with Baron Rothschild or Lord Salisbury. He would have been in all that constitutes human happiness a loser by such an exchange. So cheery a person was naturally popular in a narrow world like Cheriton, and Mr. Dolby was a general favourite, a favourite in polite society, and in the billiard-room at the Cheriton Arms, which, in default of a club, served as the afternoon and evening rendezvous for lawyer, doctor, and the tenant-farmers of a gentlemanly class—the smock-frock farmers and tradespeople having their own particular meeting place at the Old House at Home, a public-house at the other end of the village. Theodore had known Mr. Dolby from his childhood, and the medical adviser of Cheriton was an occasional dropper-in at the luncheon table in Cornhill, when business transactions with his tailor or his banker took him to the county town. There was nothing unusual, therefore, in Theodore’s afternoon call at Dovecotes, a somewhat picturesque name which had been given to the doctor’s domicile by his predecessor, who had devoted his later years to an ardent cultivation of Barbs and Jacobins and other aristocratic birds, and who had covered a quarter of an acre of garden ground with pigeon-houses of various construction.

Theodore found Mr. Dolby smoking his afternoon pipe in the seclusion of his surgery. He had made a long morning round, had driven something between twenty and thirty miles, and considered himself entitled to what he called his otium cum whisky and water, which refreshment stood on a small table at his elbow while he lolled in his capacious easy chair.