And now, as the hoard increased to twelve, fifteen, eighteen thousand, James Dalbrook began to talk to his companion of their future ownership of Cheriton as a certainty. They planned the rooms they were to occupy; they allotted their small stock of furniture about the old mansion house—things they had bought by slow degrees in the happy hunting-grounds of Wardour Street and the Portland Road, and which were all good of their kind. They discussed the number of servants that they could manage to carry on with for the first few years, while economy would still be needful. It was understood between them, though rarely spoken about, that Tom Darcy would be dead before that fruition of their dreams. He had been sent off to Canada, a broken man. Who could doubt that a few years more would see the end of that worthless existence? And then the bond between those two who had held to each other so faithfully would be realized, and Evelyn could go back to the house in which she was born, its proud and happy mistress.
She had fed upon those dreams, lived upon them, had thought of little else in her solitary days, in the isolation of her home. She had put away her child with stern resolve that no difficulty should arise out of that existence when she came to take her place in society as James Dalbrook’s wife. She never meant to acknowledge the daughter born at Myrtle Cottage. She would do her duty to the child somehow; but not in that way.
Lord Cheriton remembered all these things as the cab rattled along the Walworth Road. Our waking thoughts have sometimes almost the rapidity of our dreams. He surveyed the panorama of the past; recalled the final bitterness of that meeting at Boulogne, when he went over to see Mrs. Darcy, and when he had to tell her that he was master of Cheriton Chase, by the help of his wife’s dowry, and that he had begun life there on a far more dignified footing than they two had contemplated.
She received the announcement with sullen silence, but he could see that it hurt her like the thrust of a sword. She stood before him with a lowering brow, white to the lips, her thin fingers twisting themselves in and out of each other with a convulsive moment, and one corner of the bloodless under lip caught under the sharp white teeth fiercely.
“Well,” she said at last, “I congratulate you. Cheriton has a new master; and if the lady of the house is not the woman whose shadow I used to see there in my dreams—it matters very little to you. You are the gainer in all ways. You have got the place you wanted; and a fair young wife instead of a faded—mistress.”
She lifted up her eyes, pale with anguish, and looked at him with an expression he had never been able to forget.
He was silent under this thrust, and then, after a troubled pause, he asked her if she had made up her mind where her future days were to be spent. He was only desirous to see her settled in some pretty neighbourhood, in the nicest house that she could find for herself, or that he could choose for her.
“Do not let money be any consideration,” he said. “My fees are rolling in very fast this year, and they are big fees. I want to see you happily circumstanced, with Mercy.”
“There is only one place I care to live in,” she answered, “and that is Cheriton Chase.”
He told her, with a sad smile, that Cheriton was the only place that was impossible for her.