He paled at the address in those clear, incisive tones, dreading what she might say next.
“I think it may be better we should not meet,” he said gloomily. “I have placed you in the care of those who will do the best that can be done for you.”
“You are sending me to a madhouse, in the care of a mad doctor. That is your substitute for Cheriton Chase; the home I used to dream about ages ago, in this house; the home you and I were to have shared as man and wife. It was my birth-place, James, and I would to God it had been my grave before I ever looked upon your face!”
The nurse hustled her charge into the carriage, muttering something about “delusions;” but Dr. Mainwaring was too shrewd a student of humanity not to perceive some meaning in these consecutive utterances. He had no doubt that Mrs. Porter was deranged, and a person who would be the better for the moderate restraint of a well-ordered asylum: but he had also no doubt that she had her lucid intervals, and that in this farewell speech she had let in the light upon her past relations with James Dalbrook, first Baron Cheriton.
That revelation accounted for some points in the law-lord’s conduct which had hitherto been incomprehensible to his friend the doctor.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
“Mine after-life! what is mine after-life?
My day is closed! the gloom of night is come!
A hopeless darkness settles o’er my fate!”
It seemed to Lord Cheriton as he drove to Victoria Street in Dr. Mainwaring’s brougham, that the day which had just come to an end had been the longest day of his life. He looked back at the sunny morning hour in which he had lingered over the business of the toilet, brooding upon that discovery of the pistol, his spirits weighed down by a vague foreboding, a dim horror of approaching evil, scarcely able to measure the extent of his own fears. He recalled the moment at which his valet brought him Theodore’s brief summons to the West Lodge—a moment that had given new reality to all he dreaded—a summons which told him that the shadowy horror which had been beside his pillow all through the night was going to take a tangible shape. Oh, God, how long it seemed since that pencilled line was put into his hand—since he stood in the blinding sunshine staring at the curt summons—before he recovered himself so far as to turn to his servant with his habitual grave authority, and give some trivial order about his overcoat.