His heart sickened at thought of this contingency, and of his heir-at-law in the event of his dying childless, a first cousin, clerk in an auctioneer’s office at Weymouth, a sandy-haired freckled youth, without an aspirate, with a fixed idea that he was an authority upon dress, style, and billiards, an insupportable young man under any conditions, but hateful to murderousness as one’s next heir. To think of that freckled snob strutting about the estate in years to come, blinking with his white eyelashes at those things which had been so dear to the dead!
His wife, to whom he owed the estate, had no relations nearer or clearer to her than the freckled auctioneer was to her husband. There remained for them both to work out their plans for the disposal of that estate and fortune which was their own to deal with as they pleased. Already James Dalbrook had dim notions of a Dalbrook Scholarship Fund, in which future barristers should have their long years of waiting upon fortune made easier to them, and for which they should bless the memory of the famous advocate.
Happily those brooding fears were not realized; this time the bud was not blighted, the flower carried no canker in its heart, but opened its petals to the morning of life, a strong bright blossom, revelling in sun and shower, wind and spray. Juanita grew from babyhood to girlhood with hardly an illness, save the regulation childish complaints, which touched her as lightly as a butterfly’s wing touches the flowers.
Her mother was of Spanish extraction, the granddaughter of a Cadiz merchant, who had failed in the wine trade and had left his sons and daughters to carve their own way to fortune. Her father had gone to San Francisco at the beginning of the gold fever, had been one of the first to understand the safest way to take advantage of the situation, and had started a wine-shop and hotel, out of which he made a splendid fortune within fifteen years. He acquired wealth in good time to send his two daughters to Paris for their education, and by the time they were grown up he was rich enough to retire from business, and was able to dispose of his hotel and wine-store for a sum which made a considerable addition to his capital. He established himself in a brand-new first-floor in one of the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne, a rich widower, more of an American than a Spaniard after his long exile, and he launched his two handsome daughters in Franco-American society. From Paris they went to London, and were well received in that upper middle-class circle in which wealth can generally command a welcome, and in which a famous barrister, like Mr. Dalbrook, ranks as a star of the first magnitude. James Dalbrook was then at the apogee of his success, a large handsome man on the right side of his fortieth birthday. He was not by any means the kind of man who would seem a likely suitor for a beautiful girl of three and twenty; but it happened that his heavily handsome face and commanding manner, his deep, strong voice and brilliant conversation possessed just the charm that could subjugate Maria Morales’ fancy. His conquest came upon him as a bewildering surprise, and nothing could be further from his thoughts than a marriage with the Spaniard’s daughter; and yet within six weeks of their first meeting at a Royal Academy soirée in the shabby old rooms in Trafalgar Square, Mr. Dalbrook and Miss Morales were engaged, with the full consent of her father, who declared himself willing to give his daughter forty thousand pounds, strictly settled upon herself, for her dowry, but who readily doubled that sum when his future son-in-law revealed his desire to become owner of Cheriton, and to found a family. For such a laudable purpose Mr. Morales was willing to make sacrifices; more especially as Maria’s elder sister had offended him by marrying without his consent, an offence which was only cancelled by her untimely death soon after her marriage.
Juanita was only three years old when her father was raised to the bench, and she was not more than six when he was offered a peerage, which he accepted promptly, very glad to exchange the name of Dalbrook—still extant over the old shop-window in Dorchester, though the old shopkeepers were at rest in the cemetery outside the town—for the title of Baron Cheriton.
As Lord Cheriton James Dalbrook linked himself indissolubly with the lands which his wife’s money had bought—money made in a ’Frisco wine-shop for the most part. Happily, however, few of Lord Cheriton’s friends were aware of that fact. Morales had traded under an assumed name in the miners’ city, and had only resumed his patronymic on retiring from the bar and the wine-vaults.
It will be seen, therefore, that Juanita could not boast of aristocratic lineage upon either side. Her beauty and grace, her lofty carriage and high-bred air, were spontaneous as the beauty of a wild flower upon one of those furzy knolls over which her young feet had bounded in many a girlish race with her dogs or her chosen companion of the hour. She looked like the daughter of a duke, although one of her grandfathers had sold pots and pans, and the other had kept order, with a bowie-knife and a revolver in his belt, over the humours of a ’Frisco tavern, in the days when the city was still in its rough and tumble infancy, fierce as a bull-pup. Her father, who, as the years went on, worshipped this only child of his, never forgot that she lacked that one sovereign advantage of good birth and highly placed kindred; and thus it was that from her childhood he had been on the watch for some alliance which should give her these advantages.
The opportunity had soon offered itself. Among his Dorsetshire neighbours one of the most distinguished was Sir Godfrey Carmichael, a man of old family and good estate, highly connected on the maternal side, and well connected all round, and married to the daughter of an Irish peer. Sir Godfrey showed himself friendly from the hour of Mr. Dalbrook’s advent in the neighbourhood. He declared himself delighted to welcome new blood when it came in the person of a man of talent and power. Lady Jane Carmichael was equally pleased with James Dalbrook’s gentle wife. The friendship thus begun never knew any interruption till it ended suddenly in a ploughed field between Wareham and Wimbourne, where Sir Godfrey’s horse blundered at a fence, fell, and rolled over his rider, ten years after Juanita’s birth.
There were two daughters and a son, considerably their junior, who succeeded his father at the age of fifteen, and who had been Juanita’s playfellow ever since she could run alone.
The two fathers had talked together of the possibilities of the future while their children were playing tennis on the lawn at Cheriton, or gathering blackberries on the common. Sir Godfrey was enough a man of the world to rejoice in the idea of his son’s marriage with the heiress of Cheriton, albeit he knew that the little dark-eyed girl, with the tall slim figure and graceful movements, had no place among the salt of the earth. His own estate was a poor thing compared with Cheriton and the Cheriton stone-quarries; and he knew that Dalbrook’s professional earnings had accumulated into a very respectable fortune invested in stocks and shares of the soundest quality. Altogether his son could hardly do better than continue to attach himself to that dark-eyed child as he was attaching himself now in his first year at Eton, riding his pony over to Cheriton every non-hunting day, and ministering to her childish caprices in all things.