It would seem, therefore, that the detective’s suspicion was groundless. Jealousy could not have been the motive of the crime.
“If any of us could be sure that we know each other I ought to accept Lady Jane’s estimate of her son,” thought Lord Cheriton; “but there is always the possibility of an unrevealed nature—one phase in a character that has escaped discovery. I am almost inclined to think the detective may have hit upon the truth. There must have been a motive for this devilish act—unless it were done by a maniac.”
The latter supposition seemed hardly probable. Lunacy wandering loose about the country would have betrayed itself before now.
It was past five upon that summer afternoon, and Lord Cheriton, having seen his daughter and interviewed the detective, was sauntering idly about the gardens in the blank hours before dinner. That meal would be served as usual, no doubt, at eight o’clock, with all due state and ceremony. The cook and her maids were busied about its preparation even now in this tranquil hour when afternoon melts into evening, sliding so softly from day to night that only those evening hymns of the birds—and on Sundays those melancholy church bells thrilling across the woods—mark the transition. They were scraping vegetables and whipping eggs while the birds were at vespers, and they were talking of the murder as they went about their work. When would they ever cease to gloat with ghoulish gusto on that deadly theme, with endless iteration of “says he” and “says she”?
Lord Cheriton left the stately garden with its quadruple lines of cypress and juniper, its marble balustrades, and clipped yew hedges five feet thick, its statues and alcoves. He passed through a little gate, and across a classic single-arched bridge to the park, where he sauntered slowly beneath his immemorial elms, in a strange dreamlike frame of mind, in which he allowed his senses to be beguiled by the balmy afternoon atmosphere and the golden light, until the all-pervading consciousness of a great grief, which had been with him all day, slipped off him for the moment, leaving only a feeling of luxurious repose, rest after labour.
Cheriton Chase was exercising its wonted influence upon him. He loved the place with that deep love which is often felt by the hereditary owner, the man born on the soil, but perhaps still oftener, and to a greater degree by him who has conquered and won the land by his own hard labour of head or hand, by that despicable personage, the self-made man. In all his wanderings—those luxurious reposeful journeyings of the man who has conquered fortune—James Dalbrook’s heart yearned towards these ancient avenues and yonder grey walls. House and domain had all the charm of antiquity, and yet they were in a measure his own creation. Everywhere had his hand improved and beautified; and he might say with Augustus that where he found brick he would leave marble. The dense green walls—those open-air courts and quadrangles—those obelisks of cypress and juniper had been there in the dominion of the Strangways, with here and there a mouldering stone Syrinx or a moss-grown Pan; but it was he who brought choicest marbles from Rome and Florence to adorn that stately pleasaunce; it was he who erected yonder fountain, whose waters made a monotonous music by day and night. The marble balustrades, the mosaic floors, the artistic enrichment of terrace and mansion had been his work. If the farms were perfect it was he who had made them so. If his tenants were contented it was because he had shown himself a model landlord—considerate and liberal, but severely exacting, satisfied with nothing less than perfection.
Having thus in a manner created his estate James Dalbrook loved it, as a proud, self-contained man is apt to love the work of his own hands, and now in this quiet Sunday afternoon the very atmosphere of the place soothed him, as if by a spell. A kind of sensuous contentment stole into his heart, with temporary forgetfulness of his daughter’s ruined life. But this did not last long. As he drew near the drive by which strangers were allowed to cross the park by immemorial right, he remembered that he had questioned one of the lodge-keepers, but not the other. He struck across an open glade where only old hawthorn trees cast their rugged shadows on the close-cropped turf, and made for the gate opening into the lane.
Mrs. Porter’s cottage had its usual aspect, a cottage such as any gentleman or lady of refined taste might have been pleased to inhabit, quaint, mediæval, with heavy timbers across rough cast walls, deep-set casements, picturesque dormers, and thatched roof, with gable ends which were a source of rapture to every artist who visited Cheriton—a cottage embowered in loveliest creeping plants, odorous of jasmine and woodbine, and set in a garden where the standard roses and carnations were rumoured to excel those in her ladyship’s own particular flower-garden. Well might a lady who had known better days rejoice in such a haven; more especially when those better days appeared to have raised her no higher than the status of a merchant-captain’s wife.
Very few people about Cheriton envied her ladyship. It was considered that, if not born in the purple, she had at least brought her husband a large fortune, and had a right to taste the sweets of wealth. But there were many hard-driven wives and shabby genteel spinsters who envied Mrs. Porter her sinecure at the gate of Cheriton Park, and who looked grudgingly at the garden brimming over with flowers and the lattices shining in the evening sun, and through the open casements at prettily furnished rooms, rich in books and photographs, and other trivial indications of a refined taste.
“It is well to be she,” said the curate’s wife, as she went home from the village with two mutton chops in her little fancy basket, a basket which suggested ferns, and in which she always carried a trowel, to give the look of casual botany to her housewifely errands. “I wonder whether Lord Cheriton allows her an income for doing nothing, or is it only house, and coals, and candles that she gets?” speculated the curate’s wife, who lived in a brand new villa on the outskirts of Cheriton village—a villa that was shabby and dilapidated after three years’ occupation, through whose thin walls all the winds of winter blew, and whose slate roof made the upper floor like a bakehouse under the summer sun.