“You had better tell me the truth, and let me help you, if I can,” he told her.
She had acted upon his warning perhaps, but without his help. It was like her perverse nature to go out into the world alone, to make a mysterious disappearance just at the time when suspicion might at any moment be directed towards her, just when it was most essential that there should be not the slightest deviation from the sluggish course of her every-day life.
Lord Cheriton started up suddenly.
“Yes, that is at least an idea,” he muttered. “Good-bye, Mercy. I have thought of a place where your mother might possibly go—a place associated with her past life. It is a forlorn hope, but I may as well look for her there. Wherever and whenever I find her you will come to her, will you not, if she should need your love?”
“Of course I will go to her—and if she has no other shelter I can bring her here. I should not be afraid to work for her.”
“It is cruel of you to talk of working for her. You know that the want of money has never been an element in her troubles. She might have lived an easy and refined life among pleasant people if she would have been persuaded by me. As it was, I did what I could to make her life comfortable.”
“Yes, I know she had plenty of money. She gave me expensive masters, as if she had been a woman of fortune. I used to wonder how she could afford it. We lived very simply, almost like hermits, but there seemed always money for everything she wanted. Our clothes, our furniture, and books seemed far too good for our station. I used to wonder who and what we were; and I have been asked questions sometimes about my former home. What did I remember of my childhood? Where had I lived before my father died? I could tell people nothing. I only remembered a cottage among fields, and the faces of the woman who nursed me and her children who played with me. I remembered nothing but the cottage, and the great cornfields, and the lanes and hedgerows, till one summer day my mother came in a carriage, and took me on a journey by the railroad—a journey that lasted a long time, for we had to wait and change trains more than once—and in the evening I found myself at Cheriton. That was all of my life that I could recall, and I did not even know the name of the woman with whom I lived till I was seven years old, or of the village near her cottage.”
“You were hardly used, Mercy; but it was not all my fault.”
He would not tell her that it was his wish to have her reared at Myrtle Cottage, where he would have watched her infancy and childhood; he would not tell her that it was the mother’s sensitiveness, her resentful consciousness of her false position, which had banished the child.
“You will come to me whenever I summon you, Mercy?” he said.