“I shall warehouse your furniture at the Pantechnicon, so that wherever you fix your future abode it may be conveyed there,” he said. “We took some pains in choosing those things, and you may prefer them to newer, and even better furniture. Write to me when you have made your choice of a new home.”
“Home,” she echoed, and that was all.
“When you have found that home and settled down there, you will have Mercy to share your life, will you not?” he pleaded. “The child will be a comfort to you.”
“A comfort, yes. She was born under such happy conditions—she has such reason to be proud of her parentage! Mercy—Mercy what? She must have some kind of surname, I suppose, before she is much older. What is she to be called?”
“You are very cruel, Evelyn. What does a name matter?”
“Everything. A name means a history. Should I be here—and you bidding me good-bye—if my name were Dalbrook? It is just because my name is not Dalbrook that you can cast me adrift—like a rotten boat which a man sends down the stream to be stranded on a mudbank, and moulder there piecemeal, inch by inch.”
CHAPTER XXXIII.
“One little flash of summer light,
One brief and passionate dream.”
Lord Cheriton sent his valet and his portmanteau to Victoria Street in a cab, and walked to Hercules Buildings. It was a short distance from the terminus, and the movement was a relief to his troubled brain. He was strangely agitated in approaching the girl whom he had known only as Mercy Porter, who had lived to twenty-seven years of age, almost as a stranger to him, whom he had looked upon in her girlhood with a keen and painful interest, but an interest which he had never betrayed by one outward sign. It was her mother’s perversity and wrongheadedness, he told himself, which had necessitated this complete estrangement. Had she consented to bring up her daughter anywhere else he might have acted in somewise as a father to her. But she had chosen to plant the girl there, at his gates, in the sight of his wife and her child; and he was thus constrained to ignore the tie, to repress every token of interest, every sign of emotion, to act his lifelong lie, and play his part of benefactor and patron to the end.