CHAPTER XXXVII.
“A malady
Preys on my heart that medicine cannot reach,
Invisible and cureless.”
Mrs. Porter’s evanishment created considerable talk in the little village of Cheriton, and would doubtless have been the occasion of still greater wonder but for the impenetrable stupidity of the young maid-servant, from whom no detailed account of her mistress’s departure could be extorted. Had the girl Phœbe been observant and loquacious she might have stimulated public curiosity by a lively narrative of events; setting forth Theodore Dalbrook’s emotion at finding the lodge deserted; and how he had sent up to the house for his Lordship; and how his Lordship and Mr. Dalbrook had remained in earnest conversation for nearly an hour in the lodge parlour; and how Mrs. Porter had left a mahogany box upon the table, a flat mahogany box with brass corners, which Phœbe had never seen before; and how this very box had disappeared mysteriously when the two gentlemen left. All this would have afforded mental pabulum for the acuter wits of the village, and would have formed the nucleus of an interesting scandal, to be uttered with bated breath over the humble tea-tray, and to give zest to the unassuming muffin in the back parlours of small rustic shopkeepers. As it was, thanks to Phœbe’s admirable stolidity, all that was known of Mrs. Porter’s departure was that she had gone to London by the early train on a certain morning, and that her luggage had been sent after her, address unknown.
It was the general opinion that Mrs. Porter had had money left her, and that she had reassumed her position in life as a genteel personage. This afforded some scope for speculative gossip, but not for a wide range of conjecture, and in less than a month after Mrs. Porter’s departure the only talk in relation to the West Lodge was the talk of who would succeed the vanished lady as its occupant. This thrilling question was promptly settled by the removal of the head gardener and his wife from their very commonplace abode in the village to the old English cottage.
Cheriton was furnished with a more interesting topic of discourse before the end of October, when it was “given out” that Lord and Lady Cheriton were going to winter abroad, an announcement which struck consternation to a village in which the great house was the centre of light and leading, and the chief consumer of butcher’s meat, farm produce—over and above the supply from the home-farm—and expensive groceries; not to mention hardware, kitchen crockery, coals, saddlery, forage, and odds and ends of all kinds. To shut up Cheriton Chase for six months was to paralyse trade in Cheriton.
To draw down the blinds and close the shutters of the great house was to spread a gloom over the best society in the neighbourhood, and to curtail the weekly offertory by about one-third.
Everybody admitted, however, that his Lordship had been looking ill of late. He had aged suddenly, “as those fine, well set-up men are apt to do,” said Mr. Dolby, the doctor. He looked careworn and haggard. The village solicitor hoped that he had not been dabbling with foreign loans—or had invested blindly in the fortune of an impossible canal—yet opined that nothing but the Stock Exchange could make such a sudden change for the worse in any man. Mr. Dolby declared that Lord Cheriton’s lungs were as sound as a bell, and that if he were ordered abroad it was not on account of his chest.
Everybody pitied her Ladyship, and talked of her as despondingly as if it had been proposed to take her to Botany Bay in the days of transportation for felony. It was so cruel to separate her from her flower-gardens, her hothouses, her poultry-yard, and her daughter; for all which things a correct British matron was supposed to exist. To take her from these placid domestic pleasures, from these strictly lady-like interests, and to plunge her in a hotbed of vice such as Monte Carlo—as pictured by the rustic mind—would be a kind of moral murder. Cheriton recovered its equanimity somewhat upon hearing that his Lordship was going to winter at Mustapha Supérieure—but it was opined that even there baccarat and Parisian morals would be in the ascendant, and a photograph of a square in Algiers, which looked like a bit broken off the Rue de Rivoli, was by no means reassuring.