The day will come

by M. E. Braddon

“How strange that is.”

“I am thinking, Mercy; I am trying to think what refuge your mother could have found in London? Remember I have to think of her as of one who is scarcely accountable for her actions. I have to think of her as under the influence of one fixed idea—not governed by the same laws that govern other people.”

“I am powerless to help you,” answered Mercy, hopelessly. “I will do anything you tell me to do—but of all people in this world I am least able to advise you. I know nothing of my mother’s life except as I saw it at Cheriton—one long weariness.”

“You shall know all by-and-by; all. I will stand before you as a criminal before his judge. I will lay bare my heart to you as a penitent before his father-confessor—and then perhaps, when you have heard the whole story, you will take compassion upon me—you will understand how hard a part I had to play—and that I was not altogether vile. I will say no more about your life here, and your future life, as I would have it, until that confession has been made. Then it will remain for you to decide whether I am worthy to be treated in somewise as a father.”

She sat in silence, with her head bent over her folded hands. He looked at the dejected droop of the head, the grey threads in the auburn hair, the hollow cheek, the attenuated features and wan complexion, and remembered how brilliant a creature she had been in the first bloom of her beauty, and with what furtive apprehensive glances he, her father, had admired that girlish face. She was handsomer in those days than ever her mother had been, with a softer, more refined loveliness than the Strangway type. And he had let this flower grow beside his gate like a weed, and be trampled under foot like a weed; and now the face bore upon it all the traces of suffering, the lines about the mouth had taken the same embittered look that he remembered only too well in Evelyn Darcy, that look of silent protest against Fate.

He watched her for some minutes in an agony of remorse. She was his daughter, and it had been his duty to shelter her from the storms of life—and he had let the storms beat upon that undefended head, he had let her suffer as the nameless waifs of this world have to suffer, uncared for, unavenged.

If she should ever be brought to forgive him, could he ever forgive himself?

But he had nearer anxieties than these sad thoughts of that which might have been and that which was. He had the missing woman to think of, and the evil that might come to herself or others from her being at large. He had to speculate upon her motive in leaving Cheriton.

Perhaps it was only a natural result of his interview with her yesterday afternoon, when he had shown her the pistol, and told her where it had been found, that pistol which he and she knew so well—one of a pair that had been in her husband’s possession at the time of her marriage—which had been pledged while they were living in Essex Street, and when their funds were at the lowest. She had kept the duplicate, with other duplicates which Darcy’s carelessness abandoned to her—and afterwards some womanish apprehension of danger in the somewhat isolated cottage in Camberwell Grove—some talk of burglarious attacks in the neighbourhood—had induced her to redeem the pistols, and they had been kept in their case on the table beside her bed for years. No burglar had ever troubled the quiet cottage, where there was neither plate-chest nor jewel-case to tempt an attack. The pistols had never been used. They had been packed up with other things and stored in the Pantechnicon, and James Dalbrook had forgotten the existence of Captain Darcy’s revolvers till the builder’s foreman showed him the pistol that had been found in the well. Then there came back upon him, in a flash, the memory of the case that had stood beside his bed, and the fact that the pistols had been sent down to Cheriton with Mrs. Darcy’s other goods. That pistol could not have passed out of her possession without her knowledge and consent. If hers was not the hand that pulled the trigger, she must, at least, have furnished the weapon, and she must have known the murderer.

He told her as much as this, yesterday afternoon, when he showed her the pistol. She heard him in dogged silence, looking at him with wide-open eyes, in which the dilatation of the pupil never altered. She neither admitted nor denied anything. He could extort no answer from her, except some scornful and evasive retort. And so he left her in despair, having warned her that discovery was now a question of time. The finding of the pistol would put the police on the right track, and link by link the chain of circumstantial evidence would be fitted together.