“Yes, I will come.”
He held out his hand, and she gave him hers, which was cold as death. He drew her to his breast, and kissed the pallid, careworn forehead, and so they parted, father and daughter, the daughter acknowledged for the first time at seven-and-twenty years of age.
Lord Cheriton hailed the first hansom he found upon his way, and told the man to drive him to Camberwell Grove.
The neighbourhood through which he went was curiously unfamiliar after the changes and forgetfulness of twenty years; and yet it was curiously familiar to him, and brought back the memory of that dead time, when a man who was himself, and yet not himself, had gone to and fro that road until its every shop-front and every street corner seemed engraven upon his brain.
It is a busy, teeming world—a world of seething humanity, jostling, striving, anxious, hollow-cheeked and eager-eyed. He had chosen to plant his hidden Eden upon “the Surrey side,” and had gone to and fro by that squalid highway with a contented spirit, because it was a world in which he was least likely to meet any of his professional brotherhood. What other barrister in decent practice, what other Queen’s Counsel, above all, was likely to pitch his tent at Camberwell? There might be old-fashioned men who would be content to grow their early cucumbers, and gloat over their pines and peaches in some citizen’s paradise on Clapham Common. There might be men who would resign themselves to life at Wandsworth; but where was the spirit so lowly within the precincts of the Lamb who would stoop to live in a place which was accessible only by the Elephant and Castle and the Walworth Road? Do not the very names of those places stink in the nostrils of gentility? The Elephant has never held up his trunk since the glories of the Queen’s Bench departed, since Ichabod was written on those walls against which Lord Huntingtower played rackets, and in whose shadow so many of Earth’s great ones have paced up and down in the days when the noble debtor was still a person apart and distinguished, not amenable to the laws which govern the bankrupt trader.
He had borne with the Walworth Road because it lay so far out of gentility’s track. The very odour of the neighbourhood was familiar—the reek of cooked meats and stale vegetables, blended with all-pervading fumes of beer. But there were numerous changes. He missed familiar shops and well-remembered features. All that had been shabby of old looked still shabbier to-day. How often he had tramped those pavements, economizing the cost of a cab, and not caring to rub shoulders with the habitués of the knife-board on Atlas or Waterloo. The walk had suited him. He could think out the brief read overnight as he tramped to Westminster in the morning. How well he remembered the cool breath of the river blowing up the Westminster Road on bright spring mornings, when the flower-girls were offering violets and primroses at the street corners. How well he remembered the change to a cleaner and a statelier world when he had crossed the bridge—the solemn grandeur of Westminster Hall, the close, sickly atmosphere of the crowded courts. Looking back he wondered how he bore the monotony of that laborious life, forgetting that he had been borne up and carried along by his ambition, always looking onward to the day when his name and fortune should be made, and he should taste the strong wine of success. He remembered what an idle dream Evelyn’s idea of buying the Cheriton estate had seemed to him when first she mooted it; how he had talked of it only to indulge her fancy, as one discusses impossible things with a child; and how by slow degrees the notion of its feasibility had crept into his mind; how he had begun to calculate the possibilities of his future savings; how he had covered stray half-sheets of paper with elaborate calculations, taking pleasure in the mere figures as if they were actual money. He remembered how, when he had saved five thousand pounds, a rabid eagerness to accumulate took hold of him, and with what keen eyes he used to look at the figures on a brief. He had caught the infection of Evelyn’s sanguine temper, and of Evelyn’s parsimonious habits. They used to hang over his bankbook sometimes of an evening, as Paolo and Francesca hung over the story of Launcelot, calculating how much could be spared to be placed on deposit, how little they could contrive to live on for the next quarter. As the hoard increased Evelyn grew to grudge herself the smallest luxury, a few flowering plants for the drawing-room, a day’s hire of the jobbing gardener, a drive in a hansom to Richmond or Greenwich, little pleasures that had relieved the monotony of their isolation.
“My father cannot live many years,” she told James Dalbrook, “and when he dies the estate will have to be sold. I have often heard him say so.”
Mr. Dalbrook went on a stolen journey to Cheriton, and saw every bit of the estate which he could get to see. He was careful to say nothing of this expedition to Evelyn lest she should want to go with him, as he felt that her presence would have been a difficulty. Some one might have recognized the Squire’s young daughter in the mature woman.
He went back to London passionately in love with the property, which he remembered as one of the paradises of his boyhood, in the days when he had been fond of long excursions on foot to Corfe, or Swanage, or the great sunburnt hills by the sea. He saw Cheriton Chase now with the entranced eyes of an ambitious man to whom territorial possession seemed the crowning glory of life.
He had saved ten thousand pounds, very little compared with the sum which would be required; but he told himself that when he had amassed another ten he might feel secure of being able to buy the estate, since it would be easy to raise seventy per cent. of the purchase money on mortgage. He began to see his way to the realization of that dream. He would have to go on living laborious days—to go on with those habits of self-denial which had already become a second nature—even after the prize was won; but he saw himself the owner of that noble old house, amidst a park and woodland that were the growth of centuries; and he thought of the delight of restoring and improving and repairing, after fifty years of slipshod poverty and gradual decay.