“So young, and so happy, and a widow—a widow before her nineteenth birthday,” wailed the mother.
Lord Cheriton’s grief was of a sterner kind, and found no outlet in words. He held a brief consultation with his valet, a soldierly looking man, who had fought under Garibaldi in Burgundy, when the guerilla captain made his brilliant endeavour to save sinking France. They looked at time-tables and calculated hours. The express to Paris would not arrive in time for the evening mail viâ Calais and Dover. It was Saturday. The cargo boat would cross to Southampton that night, and influence would obtain accommodation for his Lordship and party on board her. The valet took a fly and drove off to the quay to find the South-Western superintendent, and secure a private cabin for his master and mistress. They would have the boat to themselves, and would be at Southampton at seven o’clock next morning, and at Cheriton before noon, even if it were necessary to engage a special engine to take them there.
Lord Cheriton telegraphed to his daughter.
“Your mother and I will be with you to-morrow morning. Be brave for our sakes. Remember that you are all we have to live for.”
Another telegram to the house-steward ordered a close carriage to be in attendance at Wareham Station at ten o’clock on Sunday morning.
“How quietly you bear it, James,” his wife told Lord Cheriton, wonderingly, when the mode of their return had been arranged, and her maid was packing her trunks, with those soberly handsome gowns which had been the wonder of many a butterfly Parisienne.
She called him by his Christian name now as in their earliest years of wedded life. It was only on ceremonious occasions, and when the eye of society was upon her, that she addressed him by his title.
That stern quietude of his, the fine features set and rigid, frightened her more than a loquacious grief would have done. And yet she hardly knew whether he felt the calamity too much for words; or whether he did not feel it enough.
“Poor Godfrey,” she sighed, “he was so good to me—all that a son could have been—murdered! My God! my God! how horrible. If it had been any other kind of death one might bear it—and yet that he should die at all would be too dreadful. So young, so handsome—cut off in the flower of his days! And she loved him so. She has loved him all her life. What will become of her without him?”
“What will become of her?” that was the mother’s moaning cry all through that dreary day.