Lord Cheriton paced the sands as far as he could go from that giddy multitude in front of the sea wall—beyond the little rocky ridge by the pleasant Hôtel des Bains, where the young mothers, and nurses, and children, and homely, easy-going visitors congregate—away towards Cancale, where all was loneliness. He walked up and down, meditating upon his blighted hopes. He knew now that he had loved this young man almost as well as he loved his own daughter, and that his death had shattered as fair a fabric as ever ambition built on the further side of the grave.
“She will go in mourning for him all the days of my life, perhaps,” he thought, “and then some day after I am in my grave she will fall in love with an adventurer, and the estate I love and the fortune I have saved will be squandered on the Turf or thrown away at Monte Carlo.”
A grim smile curled his lip at a grim thought, as he paced that lonely shore beyond the jutting cliff and the villa on the point.
“I am sorry I left the Bench when I did,” he thought; “it would have been something to have put on the black cap and passed sentence upon that poor lad’s murderer.”
Who was his murderer, and what the motive of the crime? Those were questions which Lord Cheriton had been asking himself with maddening iteration through that intolerable summer day. He welcomed the fading sunlight of late afternoon. He could eat nothing; would not even sit down to make a pretence of dining; but waited chafing in the great stone hall of the hotel for the carriage that was to take him and his wife to the steamer.
CHAPTER VIII.
“The stars move still, Time runs, the clock will strike.”
Trains were favourable, and there was no necessity for a special engine to carry Lord Cheriton and his wife to the house of mourning. It was not yet noon when the closed landau drove in at the chief gate of the park, not that side gate in the deep, rocky lane, of which Mrs. Porter was custodian. One of the gardeners lived at the lodge, and it was he who opened the gate this Sunday morning. Lord Cheriton stopped the carriage to question him. He had heard a full account of the murder already from the station-master at Wareham.
“Have they found the murderer?” he asked.
“No, my Lord; I’m afraid they’re not likely to—begging your Lordship’s pardon for venturing an opinion.”