“Why is your mind set upon living at Cheriton?”
“Why? Because I have dreamt and thought of that place till my love for it has become almost a disease; because I have not the faintest interest in any other spot upon earth. I don’t care how I live there. I have no pride left in me. Pride, self-respect, care for myself died a sudden death one day you know of, when I found that you had ceased to care for me, when I awoke from a long dream and knew that my place in life was lost. I shall be content to vegetate in that cottage—and—and if you think I ought to have Mercy with me, why Mercy can be there too. I shall be Mrs. Jones, or Mrs. Brown, and there can be no particular reason why Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Brown should not have a daughter.”
She was so earnest, so intent, so resolute upon this and nothing else than this, that he was constrained to yield to her wishes, and once having yielded, he did all in his power to make her life comfortable and free from humiliation. He had the cottage as tastefully restored as if he had been going to occupy it himself; he opened an account for Mrs. Porter at a Dorchester Bank, and paid in four hundred pounds to her credit, and he told her that the same amount would be paid in yearly on the 1st of January. There should be nothing uncertain or pinched in her circumstances.
This being done, he resigned himself as best he might to bear the burden of that unwelcome presence at his gates. He and the woman who was to have been his wife rarely spoke to each other during those long slow years in which the master of Cheriton grew in honour and dignity and in the respect of his fellow-men. He whose career Evelyn Darcy had watched from the very dawn of success was now a personage, a man of mark in his native county, a man who could afford to hold out the hand of friendship to his less distinguished relatives, and who could afford to confess himself the son of a small shopkeeper in the county town.
Lady Cheriton had been inclined to interest herself in the lonely woman at the West Lodge. She was impressed by the unmistakable refinement of Mrs. Porter’s appearance, and wanted to befriend her; but Lord Cheriton had forbidden any friendly relations between his wife and the lodge-keeper, on the ground that she was a woman of very peculiar temper, that she would resent anything like patronage, and that she would infinitely prefer being left alone to being taken up or petted. The tender-hearted Maria, always submissive to the husband she adored, had obeyed without question; but some years after, when Mercy was growing up and being educated by the best masters available in the neighbourhood, Lady Cheriton had taken a fancy to the hard-worked girl, and had interested herself warmly in her progress; and thus it had happened that although Mrs. Porter never was known to cross the threshold of the great house, her daughter went there often, and was made much of by Lady Cheriton, and admired by Juanita, whose accomplishments were still in embryo, while Mercy was far advanced in music and modern languages.
“I suppose her mother means her to go out as a governess by-and-by,” Lady Cheriton told her husband. “She is over-educated for any other walk in life, and in any case she is overworked. I feel very sorry for her when I see how tired she looks sometimes, and how anxious she is about her studies. Juanita must never be allowed to toil like that.”
Lord Cheriton remembered all that had happened with reference to the woman who called herself Mrs. Porter, in all these long years—his daughter Juanita’s lifetime. She had seen the funeral trains of his infant sons pass through the gate beside her cottage—she had seen the little coffins covered with snow-white flowers, and she must have known the bitterness of his disappointment. She had lived at the West Lodge for all these years, and had made no sign of a rebellious heart, of anger, jealousy, or revengeful feeling. He had believed that she was really content so to live; that in granting what she had asked of him he had satisfied her, and that her sense of wrong was appeased. At first he had lived in feverish apprehension of some outbreak or scene—some revelation made to the wife he loved, or to the friends whose esteem he valued; but as the years went by without bringing him any trouble of this kind, he had ceased to think with uneasiness of that sinister figure at his gates.
And now by the light of the hideous confession which he carried in his breast pocket he knew that in all those years she had been cherishing her sense of wrong, heaping up anger and revenge and malice and every deadly feeling engendered of disappointed love, against the day of wrath. Could he wonder if her mind had given way under that slow torture, until the concealed madness of years culminated in an act of wild revenge—a seemingly motiveless crime? Heaven knows by what distorted reasoning she had arrived at the resolve to strike her deadly blow there rather than elsewhere. Heaven knows what sudden access of malignity might have been caused by the spectacle of the honeymoon lovers and their innocent bliss.
The cab had turned into Camberwell Grove, and now he asked himself if it were not the wildest fancy to suppose that she might have gone back to Myrtle Cottage, or that she might be hanging about the neighbourhood of her old home. The cottage was in all probability occupied, and even if she had wandered that way she would most likely have come and gone before now. The idea had flashed into his mind as he sat in Mercy’s room, the idea that in her distracted state all her thoughts might revert to the past, and that her first impulse might lead her to revisit the house in which she had lived so long.