He made his inquiries of the station-master. Yes, Mrs. Porter had left by the early train. She had taken a second-class ticket for Waterloo.
Lord Cheriton telegraphed to Miss Marian Gray, at 69, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth—
“If your mother is with you when you receive this, I beg you to detain her till I come.
“Cheriton.”
His wife’s suggestion seemed to him like inspiration. Where else could that desolate woman seek for a shelter but under the roof which sheltered her only child? She was utterly friendless in London and elsewhere—unless, indeed, her old governess Sarah Newton could be counted as a friend.
The Weymouth up-train steamed in, and he took his seat in the corner of a first-class compartment, where he was tolerably secure of being left to himself for the whole of the journey, guards and porters conspiring to protect his seclusion, albeit he had not taken the trouble to engage a compartment. His greatness was known all along the line.
He had ample leisure for thought during that three hours’ journey, leisure to live over again that life of long ago which had been brought so vividly back to his memory by the events of to-day. He had made it his business to forget that past life, so far as forgetfulness was possible, with that living reminder for ever at his gate. Habit had even reconciled him to the presence of Mrs. Porter at the West Lodge. Her supreme quietude had argued her contentment. Never by so much as one imprudent word, or one equivocal look, had she aroused his wife’s doubts as to her past relations with her employer. She had been accepted by all the little world of Cheriton, she had behaved in the most exemplary manner; and although he had never driven in at the West Gate, and seen her standing there in her attitude of stern humility, without a pang of remorse and a stinging sense of shame, yet that sharp moment of pain being past, he was able to submit to her existence as the one last forfeit he had to pay for his sin. And now he knew that the statue-like calm of her face, as she had looked up at him in the clear light, under the branching beeches, had been only the mask of hidden fires—that through all those years in which she had seemed the image of quiet resignation, of submission to a mournful fate, she had been garnering up her vengeance to wreak it upon the offender in his most unguarded hour, piercing the breast of the father through the innocent heart of the child. He knew now that hatred had been for ever at his doors, that angry pride had watched his going in and coming out, under the guise of humility—that by day and by night hideous thoughts had been busy in that hyper-active brain, such thoughts as point the way to madness and to crime.
When he had made up his mind to break his promise to Evelyn Darcy, and to marry another woman, fifteen years her junior, he had told himself that the wrench once made, the link once sundered, all would be over. She would submit as other women have submitted to the common end of such ties. She could not deem herself more unfortunate than those other women had been, since his attachment had endured far longer than the average span of illicit loves. He had been patient and faithful and unselfish in his devotion for more than a decade. He would have gone on waiting perhaps had there been a ray of hope; but Tom Darcy had shown a malignant persistency in keeping alive; and even were Tom Darcy dead how bitter a thing it would be for the fashionable Queen’s Counsel to enter society with a wife of damaged character. In the old days of hopefulness and fond love they had told each other that the stain upon the past need never be known in that brilliant future to which they both looked forward; but now he told himself that despite their secluded life the facts of that past would ooze out. People would insist upon finding out who Mr. Dalbrook’s wife was. It would not be enough to say, “She is there—handsome, clever, and a lady.” Society would peer and pry into the background of her life. Whose daughter was she? Had she been married before? And in that case who was her husband? Where had she lived before her recent marriage? Had she spent her earlier years in the Colonies or on the Continent, or how was it that society had seen nothing of her?
Those inevitable questions would have made his life a burden and her life an agony, James Dalbrook told himself; even had Darcy been so complaisant as to die and leave them free to rehabilitate their position by marriage; but Darcy had shown no disposition towards dying, and now here was a lovely girl with a fortune willing to marry him—a girl to whom his heart had gone out, despite his conscientious endeavour to be faithful to that old attachment. To-day, in his agony of remorse and apprehension, he could recall the scene of their severance as well as if it had happened yesterday.
He had gone home in the chill March twilight, in that depressing season when the pale spring flowers, daffodils, primroses, and narcissus are fighting their ineffectual battle with the cutting east wind, when the sparrows have eaten the hearts of all the crocuses, and the scanty grass in suburban gardens is white with dust, when the too-early lighted lamps have a sickly look in the windy streets, and the neglected fires in suburban drawing-rooms are more dismal than fireless hearths.