“The snow
Of her sweet coldness hath extinguished quite
The fire that but even now began to flame.”
Theodore Dalbrook, a sensible, hard-headed man of business, was like a puppet in his cousin’s hands. She told him to toil for her, and he deemed himself privileged to be allowed so to labour. She put him upon that which, according to his own conviction, was an absolutely false track, and he was compelled to follow it. She bade him think with her thoughts, and he bent his mind to hers.
Yes, she was right perhaps. It was a vendetta. Lord Cheriton had lived all these years hemmed round with unseen, unsuspected foes. They had not burned his ricks, or tried to burn his dwelling-house; they had not slandered him to the neighbourhood in anonymous letters; they had not poisoned his dogs or his pheasants. Such petty malevolence had been too insignificant for them. But they had waited till his fortunes had reached their apogee, till his only child had grown from bud to flower and he had wedded her to an estimable young man of patrician lineage and irreproachable character. And, just when fate was fairest the cowardly blow had been struck—a blow that blighted one young life, and darkened those two other lives sloping towards the grave, the lives of father and mother, rendered desolate because of their daughter’s desolation.
Mastered by that will which was his law, the will of the woman he loved, Theodore began to believe as she believed, or at least to think it just possible that there might be amongst the remnant of the Strangway race a man so lost and perverted, so soured by poverty, so envenomed by disgraces and mortifications, eating slowly into the angry heart, like rust into iron, that he had become at last the very incarnation of malignity—hating the man who had prospered while he had failed, hating the owner of his people’s forfeited estate as if that owner had robbed them of it—hating with so passionate a malevolence that nothing less than murder could appease his wrath. Yes, there might be such a man. In the history of mankind there have been such crimes. They are not common in England, happily; but among the Celtic nations they are not uncommon.
“My first brief,” mused Theodore, with a grim smile, as he walked up and down the drawing-room while his cousin was writing a memorandum requesting the bailiff’s presence. “It is more like a case entrusted to a detective than submitted to counsel’s opinion; but it will serve to occupy my mind while I am eating my dinners. My poor Juanita! Will her loss seem less, I wonder, when she has discovered the hand that widowed her?”
He dined with his cousin at a small round table in the spacious dining-room which had held so many cheerful gatherings in the years that were gone: the sisters and their husbands, and the sisters’ friends; and Godfrey’s college friends; and those old friends of the neighbourhood who seemed only a little less than kindred, by reason of his having known them all his life. And now these two were sitting here alone, and the corners of the room were full of shadows. One large circular lamp suspended over the table was the only light, the carving being done in a serving-room adjoining.
Juanita was too hospitable to allow the meal to be silent or gloomy. She put aside the burden of her grief and talked to her cousin of his family and of his own prospects; and she seemed warmly interested in his future success. It was but a sisterly interest, he knew, frankly expressed as a sister’s might have been; yet it was sweet to him nevertheless, and he talked freely of his plans and hopes.
“I felt stifled in that old street,” he told her. “A man must be very happy to endure life in a country town.”