The London morning papers did not reach Anerly until ten o'clock. Breakfast had softened Graham's mind towards the village. He no longer called down fire and brimstone from heaven on the unlucky place. After all, the wind, which had only been, like himself, a visitor, was more to blame than the place. It was a horrid thing to get to London in the early afternoon--the odious, practical, dinner-eating, business-rushing afternoon. No. He would wait until the shades of eve were falling fast, and then he'd through a Devon village pass, bearing a banner, with the sensible device, "Nearest railway-station where I can book for London?" In the meantime he would sit under the porch, have some cider and a pipe, and look at the London paper, which had just come.
Having been a severe sufferer from the storm, Graham naturally turned to the account of it. The first thing that caught his eye was: "Gallant Rescue of a Yacht's Crew." The Report did not consist of more than two dozen lines, but it contained all the important elements of the story, and wound up by saying that Mr. Charles Augustus Cheyne was now the guest of his Grace the new Duke of Shropshire. In the early part of the paragraph it spoke of Mr. Cheyne as being the author of the late and very successful novel, "The Duke of Fenwick," so that no doubt could exist in Graham's mind as to the individuality of the hero.
"In the fact that Cheyne's name is the same as that of the man mysteriously married here thirty-five years ago, and that the name is the same as that of the Duke of Shropshire, and that Cheyne is at Silverview now, there is more than mere coincidence, and I cannot do better than send off my manuscript to Cheyne to-night."
So he put the sheets into an envelope, with a note, and posted them at the railway-station on his way up to town.
CHAPTER XXII.
[THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER.]
Mrs. Mansfield still lived at Wyechester, and in the same house as she had spent the early days of her widowhood. With the disappearance and disgrace of her daughter, she had closed her heart against the world. She had provided, in a mechanical way, for her grandson, and she kept herself informed of his whereabouts and his doings. Otherwise she lived a blind narrow life of rigid devotion and unscrupulous severity.
From the day the baby-boy and the packet arrived from Brussels, she had never broken the seal of that packet. For thirty-five years it had lain where she had that day placed it in her desk. The brown paper in which it had been wrapped was now rotten, and might be shaken asunder.
Why should she open it? Her daughter had run away with a man, and had not, in her first letter, said she was married. What was the good of looking through those papers? If it contained any statements in favour of that wretched girl, these statements were, beyond all doubt, lies. Nothing in the world would clear her daughter's name or mitigate the disgrace of her conduct.
Mrs. Mansfield took in The Wyechester Independent. She did not read the general news as a rule. But the Independent as became the only daily paper in a town whose sole claim upon distinction was that it had a cathedral and a bishop, devoted much of its space to local and general religious topics. The religious news and comments she always read.