And now he had reason to believe that Mercy had discovered the secret of her birth. Her contemptuous refusal of his bounty could proceed, he thought, from no other cause. She knew that he was her father, and she would accept no boon from a father who had denied her his name and his love.
She resented her mother’s wrongs, as well as her own. His heart sank at the thought of standing before her—his daughter and his judge!
The house in Hercules Buildings was decent and clean-looking. The woman who opened the door told him that Miss Gray was at home, and directed him to the second-floor back.
“Is she alone?” he asked. “Has there been no one with her this morning?”
“No, sir. She don’t have anybody come to see her once in six months, except Miss Newton.”
Lady Cheriton’s conjecture was not the inspiration he had thought. Mrs. Porter had not made her way here. What if she had doubled back after starting in the train for London—got out at the first station and gone to the Priory—to realize that ghastly apprehension of Theodore Dalbrook’s, and to follow up her scheme or vengeance by some new crime. Once admit that she was mad, and there was no limit to the evil she might attempt and do. His only comfort was in the idea that Juanita’s cousin was there, on the alert to guard her from every possible attack.
He knocked at the door of the back room on the second-floor landing, and it was opened by the faded woman he had seen last in her fresh young beauty, a fair, bright face at a rustic casement, framed in verdure. The face was sadly aged since he had looked upon it, and if it was beautiful still it was with the beauty of outline and expression, rather than of youthful freshness and colouring.
The grave sad eyes were lifted to his face as Mercy made way for him to enter. She placed a chair for him, and stood a little way off, waiting for him to speak. He looked at the small room with infinite sadness. Her neatness and ingenuity had made the best of the poorest means, and the shabby little room had as fresh and gay an air as if it had been a room in an Alpine chalet, or a farmhouse in Normandy. The poor little pallet-bed was hidden by white dimity curtains, the washstand was screened by a drapery of the same white dimity, daintily arranged with bright ribbon bows. There was a shelf of neatly bound books above the mantelpiece, and there were bits of Japanese china here and there, giving a touch of brilliant colour to the cheap white paper on the walls and the white draperies. The room had been furnished by Mercy herself. The chairs were of wicker work, cushioned and decorated by Mercy’s clever hands. There was a pine chest of drawers, with a Japanese looking-glass hanging above it, and there was a quaint little japanned table of bright vermilion at the side of Mercy’s arm-chair. That poor little second-floor bedroom, with its one window, and most unlovely outlook, was Mercy’s only source of pride. She had pinched herself to buy those inexpensive chairs, and the luxury of the Japanese glass, the lacquered tea-tray with its Satsuma cups and saucers, and the turquoise and absinthe tinted vases, all those trifling details which made her room so different from the rooms of most work-girls. She had stained and waxed the old deal boards with her own hands, and it was her own labour that kept the floor polished and dustless, and the window-panes bright and clear. The natural instinct of a lady showed itself in that love of fair surroundings.
“I hoped to find your mother with you,” said Lord Cheriton.
“Why? I received your telegram, and could not understand what it meant. Is there anything wrong with my mother?”