The day will come

by M. E. Braddon

The only answer was a sob, and a clinging pressure of the hand; and then the three women quietly left the room. Their interest in the business was over. Blinds had been drawn up and Venetian shutters opened. There was a flood of sunshine on the staircase and in the corridors as Juanita went back to her room. The perfume of roses and the breath of summer came in at the open windows.

“Oh, God, how the sun shines!” she cried, in a sudden agony of remembrance.

Those odours from the garden, the blue sky, summer greenery and dazzling summer light brought back the image of her vanished happiness. Last week, less than a week ago, she had been one of the joyous creatures in that glad, gay world—joyous as the thrush whose song was thrilling upon the soft sweet air.

Lady Jane’s two sons-in-law had drawn near the oak table at which the lawyer was seated with his papers before him.

Jessica’s husband, Mr. Grenville, was sporting. His thoughts were centred in his stable, where he found an all-sufficient occupation for his intellectual powers in an endless buying, exchanging, selling, summering and wintering his stud; in the invention of improved bits, and the development of new ideas in saddlery; in the performance of operations that belong rather to the professional veterinary than to the gentleman at large, and in the conversation of his stud groom. These resources filled up all the margin that was left for a man who hunted four days a week in his own district, and who often got a fifth and even a sixth day in other counties accessible by rail. It may have been a natural result of Mr. Grenville’s devotion to the stable that Mrs. Grenville was absorbed by her nursery; or it may have been a natural bent on the lady’s part. However this might be, the lady and the gentleman followed parallel lines, in which their interests never clashed. He talked of hardly anything but his horses; she rarely mentioned any other subject than her children, or something bearing upon her children’s well-being. He believed his horses to be the best in the county; she considered her babies unsurpassed in creation. Both in their line were supremely happy.

Mr. Morningside, married to Sir Godfrey’s youngest sister, Ruth, was distinctly Parliamentary; and had no sympathies in common with such men as Hugo Grenville. To him horses were animals with four legs who dragged burdens; who were expensive to keep, and whose legs were liable to “fill” or to develop superfluous bone on the slightest provocation. His only idea of a saddle horse was a slow and stolid cob, for whose virtuous disposition and powerful bone he had paid nearly three hundred pounds, and on which he pounded round the park three or four times every morning during the Parliamentary season, an exercise of which he was about as fond as he was of Pullna water, but which had been recommended him for the good of his liver.

Mr. Morningside had a castle in the north, too near Newcastle to be altogether beautiful, and he had a small suite upon a fifth floor in Queen Anne’s Mansion. He had taken this apartment as a bachelor pied à terre for the Parliamentary season; and he had laid considerable emphasis upon the landowner’s necessity for stern economy which had constrained him to take rooms so small as to be altogether “impossible” for his wife. Mrs. Morningside was, however, of a different opinion. No place was impossible for her which her dear Stuart deigned to occupy. She did not mind small rooms, or a fifth story. Was there not a lift, and were there not charming people living ever so much nearer the skies? She did not mind even what she gracefully described as “pigging it,” for her dear Stuart’s sake. She was utterly unlike her elder sister, and she had no compunction at placing over two hundred miles between her and her nursery.

“They’d wire for me if anything went wrong,” she said, “and the express would take me home in a few hours.”

“That would depend upon what time you got the wire. The express doesn’t go every quarter of an hour like a Royal Blue,” replied Mr. Morningside, gloomily.

He was a dry-as-dust man; one of those self-satisfied persons who are never less alone than when alone. He had married at five and thirty, and the comfortable habits of a priggish bachelor still clove to him after six years of married bliss. He was fond of his wife in her place, and he thought her a very charming woman at the head of his table, and receiving his guests at Morningside Castle. But it was essential to his peace that he should have many solitary hours in which to pore over Blue books and meditate upon an intended speech. He fancied himself greatly as a speaker, and he was one of those Parliamentary bores whose ornate periods are made mincemeat of by the reporters. He looked to a day when he would take his place with Burke and Walpole, and other giants, whose oratory had been received coldly in the dawn of their senatorial career. He gave himself up to much study of politics past and present, and was one of those well-informed bores who are only useful as a store-house of hard facts for the use of livelier speakers. When a man had to speak upon a subject of which he knew nothing, he went to Mr. Morningside as to a Parliamentary Encyclopædia.