“Unless you will let me say that you wish him to stay.”
She blushed deepest crimson, and again had resource to the baby’s pink little head as a hiding-place for her confusion.
“Tell him anything you like. Ask him to come and romp with the children next Easter. He is fond of children, and I am sure he would like my nephews and nieces. Ah, Theodore,” she cried, holding out her hand, “now you are indeed my brother. Forget that you ever wished to be more, and let me hear of your having found a new love by-and-by.”
“By-and-by is easily said, Juanita.”
What would that by-and-by have revealed could the curtain of the Future have been lifted that Christmas Eve, as the children danced in the shadowy room while their elders sat beside the fire in the winter dusk? A coffin brought by land and sea, and laid with stately ceremonial in the cemetery at Dorchester. A respectful obituary notice of Lord Cheriton, with a laudatory biography, setting forth his remarkable gifts and his honourable career: much wonderment among his Lordship’s friends at the premature termination of that prosperous life—a man of sixty who had looked ten years younger, and whose vigorous constitution and grand bearing had denoted one of the semi-immortals—a Brougham, a Lyndhurst, or a St. Leonards.
What else? A lovely matron, proud of her handsome Scotch husband and his scientific successes, reigning over one of the most delightful houses in London, a house in which the brightest lights of the intellectual world are to be found shining in a congenial atmosphere. Sir Godfrey Carmichael’s widow, now Cuthbert Ramsay’s wife, and one of the leaders in all movements that tend towards the welfare and enlightenment of mankind.
What else? A rising barrister, living quietly in a secluded old house at Chiswick, with a sweet serious-looking wife, and two lovely babies, supremely contented with his lot and with his home, which is managed for him with that perfection of art which conceals art. His wife and he are of exactly the same age, have the same deep love of good books, good pictures, and good music, and the same indifference to frivolous pleasures and fashionable amusements. They have a few friends, carefully chosen, and of choicest quality, and amongst the most honoured of these is Sarah Newton, still brisk and active, though her abundant hair is snow white, and there are the deep lines of age about her shrewd and kindly eyes. They have their garden with its old cedars, and old walls shutting off the world of gig-and-villa respectability. They have their boathouse and boats, in which they live for the most part on summer evenings, and they have hardly anything left to wish for—except a lock and weir.
The barrister is Theodore Dalbrook, and his wife’s name is Mercy.
He found her four years ago established as nurse at Cheshunt Grange, administering to her mother till the day of her death, which happened by a strange fatality within a few hours of that other death in Algiers, a sudden death by cerebral apoplexy, swift as a thunder-clap. He found her there, and saw her frequently in his duty visits to the Asylum—visits paid in performance of a promise to his unhappy kinsman—and little by little that sympathy which he had felt for her in the first hour of their acquaintance warmed and ripened into love, and in Mercy, the woman who had sinned and paid the bitter penalty of sin, he found the consoling angel of his disappointed youth.