"I shall come and see you and him at irregular intervals; and whenever I come and find him looking well and comfortable, I will give you a guinea in addition to what I have arranged with you for."
By this she intended to secure the continual good treatment of the child; for though she had failed in her heroic resolve of living down talk of the idle tongues of Wyechester, she had made up her mind to be as good to the orphan as she could.
When she got home she found news awaiting her of the death of her daughter. She put away the thought of her daughter as much as she could from her mind; and, in a few years, when the boy was old enough to go to school, she went to that town again, and having requested an attorney to preserve secrecy in the matter, without giving him any reason for it, she asked the lawyer to find a school for the boy. Accordingly he was sent to the school kept by the old maid, and later to a college. Subsequently he was put to business in London; but from the time he left the place where he had been brought up, he had never seen his grandmother, and the early days at his nurse's had completely faded out of his memory.
The grandmother was now a very old woman. She still lived in her house at Wyechester. She had altered greatly in face and figure, but her nature had softened in no way with years. She was still as stiff and intellectually assured as ever she had been. She had the willing power of one hundred and fifty pounds a year; the other seventy died with her; and she had made this will in favour of Charles Augustus Cheyne, of Long Acre, in London. Although he had never within his memory heard her name, she had always taken care to know what he was doing, and how he was getting on.
She had even so far given way to worldliness as to read the publications to which he contributed; and as she read them she thought of how strange it should be that his grandfather was younger than his grandson when he died, and here was she now reading what the grandson had written!
But in all that Charles Augustus Cheyne had ever written, there was nothing so surprising as would have been the result of bringing together the sealed packet held by his grandmother, the registry of Anerly Church, and Charles Augustus Cheyne.
CHAPTER VIII.
[ON BOARD THE YACHT "SEABIRD."]
The bodily and mental conditions of the Marquis of Southwold, which forbade him living ashore any length of time, were many and almost insurmountable. The greatest doctors had of course been consulted, but without being able to afford any relief. They had called his lordship's symptoms by a number of very learned names, seldom heard in the medical profession. They could go no further than that. They had tried every resource of their art, and had failed. Men at the top of the profession can afford to confess failure much better than their brethren of a less degree. When the greatest doctors declare a patient must die soon, the sooner that patient dies the better for conventional decency.
The doctors had not said that Lord Southwold must die soon; but they had declared him incurable, and advised him to try the sea. He tried the sea, and the remedy was most successful. On shore his eyes were tender and dim, his limbs dumb and nerveless, his appetite failed, and his spirits sank almost to melancholia. But no sooner did he go on board a ship than all these symptoms began to abate. His eyes grew stronger, his sight improved, the lassitude lessened, he could eat with relish, and his spirits gradually returned.