THE DAY WILL COME.

THE DAY WILL COME.
A Novel.
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,”
“MOHAWKS,” &c., &c., &c.
Stereotyped Edition.
LONDON:
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LIMITED,
STATIONERS’ HALL COURT.
1890.
[All rights reserved]

LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

THE DAY WILL COME.

CHAPTER I.

“Farewell, too—now at last—

Farewell, fair lily.”

The joy-bells clashed out upon the clear, bright air, startling the rooks in the elm-trees that showed their leafy tops above the grey gables of the old church. The bells broke out with sudden jubilation; sudden, albeit the village had been on the alert for that very sound all the summer afternoon, uncertain as to when the signal for that joy peal might be given.

The signal had come now, given by the telegraph wires to the old postmistress, and sent on to the expectant ringers in the church tower. The young couple had arrived at Wareham station, five miles off; and four horses were bringing them to their honeymoon home yonder amidst the old woods of Cheriton Chase.

Cheriton village had been on tiptoe with expectancy ever since four o’clock, although common sense ought to have informed the villagers that a bride and bridegroom who were to be married at two o’clock in Westminster Abbey were not very likely to appear at Cheriton early in the afternoon. But the village having made up its mind to a half-holiday was glad to begin early. A little knot of gipsies from the last race-meeting in the neighbourhood had improved the occasion and set up the friendly and familiar image of Aunt Sally on the green in front of the Eagle Inn; while a rival establishment had started a pictorial shooting-gallery, with a rubicund giant’s face and wide-open mouth, grinning at the populace across a barrel of Barcelona nuts. There are some people who might think Cheriton village and Cheriton Chase too remote from the busy world and its traffic to be subject to strong emotions of any kind. Yet even in this region of Purbeck, cut off from the rest of England by a winding river, and ostentatiously calling itself an island, there were eager interests and warm feelings, and many a link with the great world of men and women on the other side of the stream.

Cheriton Chase was one of the finest places in the county of Dorset. It lay south of Wareham, between Corfe Castle and Branksea Island, and in the midst of scenery which has a peculiar charm of its own, a curious blending of level pasture and steep hillside, barren heath and fertile water-meadow; here a Dutch landscape, grazing cattle, and winding stream; there a suggestion of some lonely Scottish deer-walk; an endless variety of outline; and yonder on the steep hilltop the grim stone walls and mouldering bastions of Corfe Castle, standing dark and stern against the blue fair-weather sky or boldly confronting the force of the tempest.

Cheriton House was almost as old as Corfe in the estimation of some of the country people. Its history went back into the night of ages. But while the Castle had suffered siege and battery by Cromwell’s ruthless cannon, and had been left to stand as that arch-destroyer left it, until only the outer walls of the mighty fabric remained, with a tower or two, and the mullions of one great window standing up above the rest, the mere skeleton of the gigantic pile, Cheriton House had been cared for and added to century after century, so that it presented now a picturesque blending of old and new, in which almost every corridor and every room was a surprise to the stranger.

Never had Cheriton been better cared for than by its present owner, nor had Cheriton village owned a more beneficent lord of the manor. And yet Lord Cheriton was an alien and a stranger to the soil, and that kind of person whom rustics mostly are inclined to look down upon—a self-made man.

The present master of Cheriton was a man who owed wealth and distinction to his own talents. He had been raised to the peerage about fifteen years before this day of clashing joy-bells and village rejoicings. He had been owner of the Cheriton estate for more than twenty years, having bought the property on the death of the last squire, and at a time of unusual depression. He was popularly supposed to have got the estate for an old song; but the old song meant something between seventy and eighty thousand pounds, and represented the bulk of his wife’s fortune. He had not been afraid so to swamp his wife’s dowry, for he was at this time one of the most popular silk gowns at the equity Bar. He was making four or five thousand a year, and he was strong in the belief in his power to rise higher.

The purchase, prompted by ambition, and a desire to take his place among the landed gentry, had turned out a very lucky one from a financial point of view, for a stone quarry that had been unworked for more than a century was speedily developed by the new owner of the soil, and became a source of income which enabled him to improve mansion-house and farms without embarrassment.

Under Mr. Dalbrook’s improving hand, the Cheriton estate, which had been gradually sinking to decay in the occupation of an exhausted race, became as perfect as human ingenuity, combined with judicious outlay, can make any estate. The falcon eye of the master was on all things. The famous advocate’s only idea of a holiday was to work his hardest in the supervision of his Dorsetshire property. He thought of Cheriton many a time in the law courts, as Fox used to think of St. Anne’s and his turnips amidst the debauchery of a long night’s card-playing, or in the whirl of a stormy debate. Purbeck might have been the motto and password of his life. He was born at Dorchester, the son of humble shopkeeping parents, and was educated at the quaint old stone grammar school in that good old town. All his happiest hours of boyhood had been spent in the Isle of Purbeck. Those watery meadows and breezy commons and break-neck hills had been his playground; and when he went back to them as a hard-headed, overworked man of the world, made arrogant from the magnitude of a success which had never known check or retrogression, the fountains of his heart were unlocked by the very atmosphere of that fertile land where the salt breath of the sea came tempered by the balmy perfume of the heather, the odour of hedgerow flowers, rosemary, and thyme.

At Cheriton James Dalbrook unbent, forgot that he was a great man, and remembered only that his lot was cast in a pleasant place, and that he had the most lovable of wives and the loveliest of daughters.

His daughter had been born at Cheriton, had known no other country home, and had never considered the first-floor flat in Victoria Street where her father and mother spent the London season, and where her father had his pied-à-terre all the year round, in the light of a home. His daughter, Juanita, was the eldest of three children born in the old manor house. The two younger, both sons, died in infancy; and it seemed to James Dalbrook that there was a blight upon his offspring, such a blight as that which withered the male children of Henry of England and Catherine of Arragon. Much had been given to him. He had been allowed to make name and fortune, he whose sole heritage was a little crockery shop in a second-rate street of Dorchester. He had enjoyed the lordship of broad acres, the honours and position of a rural squire; but he was not to be allowed that crowning glory for which strong men yearn. He was not to be the first of a long line of Barons Cheriton of Cheriton.

After the grief and disappointment of those two deaths—first of an infant of a few weeks old, and afterwards of a lovely child of two years—James Dalbrook hardened his heart for a little while against the fair young sister who survived them. She could not perpetuate that barony which was the crown of his greatness; or if by special grace her father’s title might be in after-days bestowed upon the husband of her choice—which in the event of her marrying judiciously and marrying wealth, might not be impracticable—it would be an alien to his race who would bear the title which he, James Dalbrook, had created. He had so longed for a son, and behold two had been given to him, and upon both the blight had fallen. When people praised his daughter’s childish loveliness he shook his head despondently, thinking that she too would be taken, like her brothers, before ever the bud became a flower.

His heart sickened at thought of this contingency, and of his heir-at-law in the event of his dying childless, a first cousin, clerk in an auctioneer’s office at Weymouth, a sandy-haired freckled youth, without an aspirate, with a fixed idea that he was an authority upon dress, style, and billiards, an insupportable young man under any conditions, but hateful to murderousness as one’s next heir. To think of that freckled snob strutting about the estate in years to come, blinking with his white eyelashes at those things which had been so dear to the dead!

His wife, to whom he owed the estate, had no relations nearer or clearer to her than the freckled auctioneer was to her husband. There remained for them both to work out their plans for the disposal of that estate and fortune which was their own to deal with as they pleased. Already James Dalbrook had dim notions of a Dalbrook Scholarship Fund, in which future barristers should have their long years of waiting upon fortune made easier to them, and for which they should bless the memory of the famous advocate.

Happily those brooding fears were not realized; this time the bud was not blighted, the flower carried no canker in its heart, but opened its petals to the morning of life, a strong bright blossom, revelling in sun and shower, wind and spray. Juanita grew from babyhood to girlhood with hardly an illness, save the regulation childish complaints, which touched her as lightly as a butterfly’s wing touches the flowers.

Her mother was of Spanish extraction, the granddaughter of a Cadiz merchant, who had failed in the wine trade and had left his sons and daughters to carve their own way to fortune. Her father had gone to San Francisco at the beginning of the gold fever, had been one of the first to understand the safest way to take advantage of the situation, and had started a wine-shop and hotel, out of which he made a splendid fortune within fifteen years. He acquired wealth in good time to send his two daughters to Paris for their education, and by the time they were grown up he was rich enough to retire from business, and was able to dispose of his hotel and wine-store for a sum which made a considerable addition to his capital. He established himself in a brand-new first-floor in one of the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne, a rich widower, more of an American than a Spaniard after his long exile, and he launched his two handsome daughters in Franco-American society. From Paris they went to London, and were well received in that upper middle-class circle in which wealth can generally command a welcome, and in which a famous barrister, like Mr. Dalbrook, ranks as a star of the first magnitude. James Dalbrook was then at the apogee of his success, a large handsome man on the right side of his fortieth birthday. He was not by any means the kind of man who would seem a likely suitor for a beautiful girl of three and twenty; but it happened that his heavily handsome face and commanding manner, his deep, strong voice and brilliant conversation possessed just the charm that could subjugate Maria Morales’ fancy. His conquest came upon him as a bewildering surprise, and nothing could be further from his thoughts than a marriage with the Spaniard’s daughter; and yet within six weeks of their first meeting at a Royal Academy soirée in the shabby old rooms in Trafalgar Square, Mr. Dalbrook and Miss Morales were engaged, with the full consent of her father, who declared himself willing to give his daughter forty thousand pounds, strictly settled upon herself, for her dowry, but who readily doubled that sum when his future son-in-law revealed his desire to become owner of Cheriton, and to found a family. For such a laudable purpose Mr. Morales was willing to make sacrifices; more especially as Maria’s elder sister had offended him by marrying without his consent, an offence which was only cancelled by her untimely death soon after her marriage.

Juanita was only three years old when her father was raised to the bench, and she was not more than six when he was offered a peerage, which he accepted promptly, very glad to exchange the name of Dalbrook—still extant over the old shop-window in Dorchester, though the old shopkeepers were at rest in the cemetery outside the town—for the title of Baron Cheriton.

As Lord Cheriton James Dalbrook linked himself indissolubly with the lands which his wife’s money had bought—money made in a ’Frisco wine-shop for the most part. Happily, however, few of Lord Cheriton’s friends were aware of that fact. Morales had traded under an assumed name in the miners’ city, and had only resumed his patronymic on retiring from the bar and the wine-vaults.

It will be seen, therefore, that Juanita could not boast of aristocratic lineage upon either side. Her beauty and grace, her lofty carriage and high-bred air, were spontaneous as the beauty of a wild flower upon one of those furzy knolls over which her young feet had bounded in many a girlish race with her dogs or her chosen companion of the hour. She looked like the daughter of a duke, although one of her grandfathers had sold pots and pans, and the other had kept order, with a bowie-knife and a revolver in his belt, over the humours of a ’Frisco tavern, in the days when the city was still in its rough and tumble infancy, fierce as a bull-pup. Her father, who, as the years went on, worshipped this only child of his, never forgot that she lacked that one sovereign advantage of good birth and highly placed kindred; and thus it was that from her childhood he had been on the watch for some alliance which should give her these advantages.

The opportunity had soon offered itself. Among his Dorsetshire neighbours one of the most distinguished was Sir Godfrey Carmichael, a man of old family and good estate, highly connected on the maternal side, and well connected all round, and married to the daughter of an Irish peer. Sir Godfrey showed himself friendly from the hour of Mr. Dalbrook’s advent in the neighbourhood. He declared himself delighted to welcome new blood when it came in the person of a man of talent and power. Lady Jane Carmichael was equally pleased with James Dalbrook’s gentle wife. The friendship thus begun never knew any interruption till it ended suddenly in a ploughed field between Wareham and Wimbourne, where Sir Godfrey’s horse blundered at a fence, fell, and rolled over his rider, ten years after Juanita’s birth.

There were two daughters and a son, considerably their junior, who succeeded his father at the age of fifteen, and who had been Juanita’s playfellow ever since she could run alone.

The two fathers had talked together of the possibilities of the future while their children were playing tennis on the lawn at Cheriton, or gathering blackberries on the common. Sir Godfrey was enough a man of the world to rejoice in the idea of his son’s marriage with the heiress of Cheriton, albeit he knew that the little dark-eyed girl, with the tall slim figure and graceful movements, had no place among the salt of the earth. His own estate was a poor thing compared with Cheriton and the Cheriton stone-quarries; and he knew that Dalbrook’s professional earnings had accumulated into a very respectable fortune invested in stocks and shares of the soundest quality. Altogether his son could hardly do better than continue to attach himself to that dark-eyed child as he was attaching himself now in his first year at Eton, riding his pony over to Cheriton every non-hunting day, and ministering to her childish caprices in all things.

The two mothers had talked of the future with more detail and more assurance than the fathers, as men of the world, had ventured upon. Lady Cheriton was in love with her little girl’s boyish admirer. His frank, handsome face, open-hearted manner, and undeniable pluck realized her ideal of high-bred youth. His mother was the daughter of an earl, his grandmother was the niece of a duke. He had the right to call an existing duke his cousin. These things counted for much in the mind of the storekeeper’s daughter. Her experience at a fashionable Parisian convent had taught her to worship rank; her experience of English middle-class society had not eradicated that weakness. And then she saw that this fine, frank lad was devoted to her daughter with all a boy’s ardent feeling for his first sweetheart.

The years went on, and young Godfrey Carmichael and Juanita Dalbrook were sweethearts still—sweethearts always—sweethearts when he was at Eton, sweethearts when he was at Oxford, sweethearts in union, and sweethearts in absence, neither of them ever imagining any other love; and now, in the westering sunlight of this July evening, the bells of Cheriton Church were ringing a joy-peal to celebrate their wedded loves, and the little street was gay with floral archways and bright-coloured bunting, and mottoes of welcome and greeting, and Lady Cheriton’s barouche was bringing the bride and bridegroom to their first honeymoon dinner, as fast as four horses could trot along the level road from quiet little Wareham.

By a curious fancy Juanita had elected to spend her honeymoon in that one house of which she ought to have been most weary, the good old house in which she had been born, and where all her days of courtship, a ten years’ courtship, had been spent. In vain had the fairest scenes of Europe been suggested to her. She had travelled enough to be indifferent to mountains and lakes, glaciers and fjords.

“I have seen just enough to know that there is no place like home,” she said, with her pretty air of authority. “I won’t have a honeymoon at all if I can’t have it at Cheriton. I want to feel what it is like to have you all to myself in my own place, Godfrey, among all the things I love. I shall feel like a queen with a slave; I shall feel like Delilah with Samson. When you are quite tired of Cheriton—and subjection, you shall take me to the Priory; and once there you shall be master and I will be slave.”

“Sweet mastership, tyrannous slavery,” he answered, laughing. “My darling, Cheriton will suit me better than any other place in the world for my honeymoon, for I shall be near my future electors, and shall be able to study the political situation in all its bearings upon—the Isle of Purbeck.”

Sir Godfrey was to stand for his division of the county in the election that was looming in the distance of the late autumn. He was very confident of success, as a young man might be who came of a time-honoured race, and knew himself popular in the district, armed with all the newest ideas, too, full to the brim of the most modern intelligence, a brilliant debater at Oxford, a favourite everywhere. His marriage would increase his popularity and strengthen his position, with the latent power of that larger wealth which must needs be his in the future.

The sun was shining in golden glory upon grey stone roofs and grey stone walls, clothed with rose and honeysuckle, clematis and trumpet ash,—upon the village forge, where there had been no work done since the morning, where the fire was out, and the men were lounging at door and window in their Sunday clothes,—upon the three or four village shops, and the two village inns, the humble little house of call opposite the forge, with its queer old sign, “Live and Let Live,” and the good old “George Hotel,” with sprawling, dilapidated stables and spacious yard, where the mail-coach used to stop in the days that were gone.

There was a floral arch between the little tavern and the forge—a floral display along the low rustic front of the butcher’s shop—and the cottage post-office was converted into a bower. There were calico mottoes flapping across the road—“Welcome to the Bride and Bridegroom,” “God Bless Them Both,” “Long Life and Happiness,” and other fond and hearty phrases of time-honoured familiarity. But those clashing bells, with their sound of tumultuous gladness, a joy that clamoured to the blue skies above and the woods below, and out to the very sea yonder, in its loud exuberance, those and the smiling faces of the villagers were the best of all welcomes.

There were gentlefolks among the crowd—a string of pony carts and carriages drawn up on the long slip of waste grass beyond the forge, just where the road turned off to Cheriton Chase; and there were two or three horsemen, one a young man upon a fine bay cob, who had been walking his horse about restlessly for the last hour or so, sometimes riding half a mile towards the station in his impatience.

The carriage came towards the turning-point, the bride bowing and smiling as she returned the greetings of gentle and simple. Emotion had paled the delicate olive of her complexion, but her large dark eyes were bright with gladness. Her straw-coloured tussore gown and leghorn hat were the perfection of simplicity, and seemed to surround her with an atmosphere of coolness amidst the dust and glare of the road.

At sight of the young man on the bay cob, she put her hand on Sir Godfrey’s arm and said something to him, on which he told the coachman to stop. They had driven slowly through the village, and the horses pulled up readily at the turn of the road.

“Only to think of your coming so far to greet us, Theodore!” said Juanita, leaning out of the carriage to shake hands with the owner of the cob.

“I wanted to be among the first to welcome you, that was all,” he answered quietly. “I had half a mind to ride to the station and be ready to hand you into your carriage, but I thought Sir Godfrey might think me a nuisance.”

“No fear of that, my dear Dalbrook,” said the bridegroom. “I should have been very glad to see you. Did you ride all the way from Dorchester?”

“Yes; I came over early in the morning, breakfasted with a friend, rested the cob all day, and now he is ready to carry me home again.”

“What devotion!” said Juanita, laughingly, yet with a shade of embarrassment.

“What good exercise for Peter, you mean. Keeps him in condition against the cubbing begins. God bless you, Juanita. I can’t do better than echo the invocation above our heads, ‘God bless the bride and bridegroom.’”

He shook hands with them both for the second time. A faint glow of crimson swept over his frank fair face as he clasped those hands. His honest grey eyes looked at his cousin for a moment with grave tenderness, in which there was the shadow of a life-long regret. He had loved and wooed her, and resigned her to her more favoured lover, and he was honest in his desire for her happiness. His own gladness, his own life, seemed to him of small account when weighed against her well-being.

“You must come and dine with us before we leave Cheriton, Dalbrook,” said Sir Godfrey.

“You are very good. I am off to Heidelberg for a holiday as soon as I can wind up my office work. I will offer myself to you later on, if I may, when you are settled at the Priory.”

“Come when you like. Good-bye.”

The carriage turned the corner. The crowd burst into a cheer: one, two, three, and then another one: and then three more cheers louder than the first three, and the horses were on the verge of bolting for the rest of the way to Cheriton.

Theodore Dalbrook rode slowly away from the village festivities, rode away from the clang of the joy-bells, and the sound of rustic triple bob majors. It would be night before he reached Dorchester; but there was a moon, and he knew every yard of high road, every grassy ride across the wide barren heath between Cheriton and the old Roman city. He knew the road and he knew his horse, which was as good of its kind as there was to be found in the county of Dorset. He was not a rich man, and he had to work hard for his living, but he was the son of a well-to-do father, and he never stinted the price of the horse that carried him, and which was something more to Theodore Dalbrook than most men’s horses are to them. It was his own familiar friend, companion, and solace. A man might have understood as much only to see him lean over the cob’s neck, and pat him, as he did to-night, riding slowly up the hill that leads from Cheriton to the wild ridge of heath above Branksea Island.

Theodore Dalbrook, junior partner in the firm of Dalbrook & Son, Cornhill, Dorchester, was a more distant relative of Juanita’s than the sandy first-cousin in the auctioneer’s office whom Lord Cheriton had once hated as the only alternative to a charitable endowment. The sandy youth was the only son of Lord Cheriton’s elder brother, long since dead. Theodore was the grandson of a certain Matthew Dalbrook, a second cousin of Lord Cheriton’s, and once upon a time the wealthiest and most important member of the Dalbrook family. The humble-minded couple in the crockery shop had looked up to Matthew Dalbrook, solicitor, with a handsome old house in Cornhill, a smart gig, a stud of three fine horses, and half the county people for his clients. To the plain folks behind the counter, who dined at one and supped on cold meat and pickles and Dutch cheese at nine of the clock, Mr. Dalbrook, the lawyer, was a great man. They were moved by his condescension when he dropped in to the five-o’clock tea, and talked over old family reminiscences, the farmhouse on the Weymouth Road, which was the cradle of their race, and where they had all known good days while the old people were alive, and while the homestead was a family rendezvous. That he should deign to take tea and water-cresses in the little parlour behind the shop, he who had a drawing-room almost as big as a church, and a man-servant in plain clothes to wait upon him at his six-o’clock dinner, was a touching act of humility in their eyes. When their younger boy brought home prizes and certificates of all kinds from the grammar school, it was from Matthew they sought advice, modestly, and with the apprehension of being deemed over-ambitious.

“I’m afraid he’s too much of a scholar for the business,” said the mother, shyly, looking fondly at her tall, overgrown son, pallid with rapid growth and overmuch Greek and Latin.

“Of course he is; that boy is too good to sell pots and pans. You must send him to the University, Jim.”

Jim, the father, looked despondently at James, the son. The University meant something awful in the crockery merchant’s mind: a vast expenditure of money; dreadful hazards to religion and morals; friendships with dukes and marquises, whose influence would alienate the boy from his parents, and render him scornful of the snug back-parlour, with his grandfather’s portrait over the mantelpiece, painted in oils by a gifted townsman, who had once had a picture very nearly hung in the Royal Academy.

“I couldn’t afford to send him to college,” he said.

“Oh, but you must afford it. I must help you, if you and Sarah haven’t got enough in an old stocking anywhere—as I dare say you have. My boys are at the University, and they didn’t do half as well at the grammar school as your boy has done. He must go to Cambridge, he must be entered at Trinity Hall, and if he works hard and keeps steady he needn’t cost you a fortune. You would work, eh, James?”

“Wouldn’t I just, that’s all,” James replied with emphasis.

His heart had sickened at the prospect of the crockery business: the consignments of pots and pans; the returned empties, invoices, quarterly accounts, matchings, rivetings, dust, straw, dirt, and degradation. He could not see the nobility of labour in that dusty shop, below the level of the pavement, amid ewers and basins, teacups and beer jugs, sherries and ports. But to work in the University—hard by that great college where Bacon had worked, and Newton, and a host of the mighty dead, and where Whewell, a self-made man, was still head—to work among the sons of gentlemen, and with a view to the profession of a gentleman,—that would be labour for which to live; for which to die, if need be.

“If—if mother and me were to strain a p’int,” mused the crockery man, who was better able to afford the University for his son than many a gentleman of Dorset whose boys had to be sent there, willy nilly, “if mother and me that have worked so hard for our money was willing to spend a goodish bit of it upon sending him to college, what are we to do with him after we’ve made a fine gentleman of him? That’s where it is, you see, Mat.”

“You are not going to make a fine gentleman of him. God forbid. If he does well at Cambridge, you can make a lawyer of him. Trinity Hall is the nursery of lawyers. You can article him to me; and look you here, Jim, if I don’t have to help you pay for his education, I’ll give him his articles. There, now, what do you say to that?”

The offer was pronounced a generous one, and worthy of a blood relation; but James Dalbrook never took advantage of his kinsman’s kindness. His University career was as successful as his progress at the quaint stone grammar school, and his college friends, who were neither dukes nor marquises, but fairly sensible young men, all advised him to apply himself to the higher branch of the law. So James Dalbrook, of Trinity Hall, ate his dinners at the Temple during his last year of undergraduate life, came out seventh wrangler, was called to the Bar, and in due course wore crimson, velvet, and ermine, and became Lord Cheriton, a man whose greatness in somewise overshadowed the small provincial dignity of the house of Matthew Dalbrook, erstwhile head of the family.

The Dalbrooks, of Dorchester, had gone upon their way quietly, thriving, respected, but in no wise distinguished. Matthew, junior, had succeeded his father, Matthew, senior, and the firm in Cornhill had been Dalbrook & Son for more than thirty years; and now Theodore, the eldest of a family of five, was Son, and his grandfather, the founder of the firm, was sleeping the sleep of the just in the cemetery outside Dorchester.

Lord Cheriton was too wise a man to forget old obligations or to avoid his kindred. There was nothing to be ashamed of in his connection with a thoroughly reputable firm like Dalbrook & Son. They might be provincial, but their name was a synonym for honour and honesty. They had taken as firm root in the land as the county families whose title-deeds and leases, wills and codicils they kept. They were well-bred, well-educated, God-fearing people, with no struggling ambitions, no morbid craving to get upon a higher social level than the status to which their professional position and their means entitled them. They rode and drove good horses, kept good servants, lived in a good house, visited among the county people with moderation, but they made no pretensions to being “smart.” They offered no sacrifices of fortune or self-respect to the modern Moloch—Fashion.

There was a younger son called Harrington, destined for the Church, and with advanced views upon church architecture and music; and there were two unmarried daughters, Janet and Sophia, also with advanced views upon the woman’s rights question, and with a sovereign contempt for the standard young lady.

Theodore’s lines were marked out for him with inevitable precision. He had been taken into partnership the day he was out of his articles, and at seven-and-twenty he was his father’s right hand, and represented all that was modern and popular in the firm. He was steady as a rock, had an intellect of singular acuteness, a ready wit, and very pleasing manners. He had, above all things, the inestimable gift of an equable and happy temper. He had been everybody’s favourite from the nursery upwards, popular at school, popular at the University, popular in the local club, popular in the hunting field; and it was the prevailing opinion of Dorchester that he ought to marry an heiress and make a great position for the house of Dalbrook. Some people had gone so far as to say that he ought to marry Lord Cheriton’s daughter.

He had been made free of the great house at Cheriton from the time he was old enough to visit anywhere. His family had been bidden to all notable festivities; had been duly called upon, at not too long intervals, by Lady Cheriton. He had ridden by Juanita’s side in many a run with the South Dorset foxhounds, and had waited about with her outside many a covert. They had pic-nicked and made gipsy tea at Corfe Castle; they had rambled in the woods near Studland; they had sailed to Branksea, and, further away, to Lulworth Cove, and the romantic caves of Stare: but this had been all in frank cousinly friendship. Theodore had seen only too soon that there was no room for him in his kinswoman’s heart. He began by admiring her as the loveliest girl he had ever seen; he had ended by adoring her, and he adored her still—but with a loyal regard which accepted her position as another man’s wife; and he would have died sooner than dishonour her by one unholy thought.

It was nearly ten o’clock when he rode slowly along the avenue that led into Dorchester. The moon was shining between the overarching boughs of the sycamores. The road with that high overarching roof had a solemn look in the moonlit stillness. The Roman amphitheatre yonder, with its grassy banks rising tier above tier, shone white in the moonbeams; the old town seemed half asleep. The house in Cornhill had a very Philistine look as compared with that fine old mansion of Cheriton which was present in his mind in very vivid colours to-night, those two wandering about the old Italian garden, hand-in-hand, wedded lovers, with the lamp-lit rooms open to the soft summer night, and the long terrace and stone balustrade and moss-grown statues of nymph and goddess silvered by the moonbeams. The Cornhill house was a good old house notwithstanding, a panelled house of the Georgian era, with a wide entrance-hall, and a well-staircase with carved oak balusters and a baluster rail a foot broad. The furniture had been very little changed since the days of Theodore’s great-grandfather, for the late Mrs. Dalbrook had cherished no yearnings for modern art in the furniture line. Her gentle spirit had looked up to her husband as a leader of men, and had reverenced chairs and tables, bureaus and wardrobes that had belonged to his grandfather, as if they were made sacred by that association. And thus the good old house in the good old town had a savour of bygone generations, an old family air which the parvenu would buy for much gold if he could. True that the dining-room chairs were over-ponderous, and the dining-room pictures belonged to the obscure school of religious art in which you can only catch your saint or your martyr at one particular angle; yet the chairs were of a fine antique form, and bore the crest of the Dalbrooks on their shabby leather backs, and the pictures had a respectable brownness which might mean Holbein or Rembrandt.

The drawing-room was large and bright, with four narrow, deeply recessed windows commanding the broad street and the Antelope Hotel over the way, and deep window seats crammed with flowers. Here the oak panelling had been painted pale pink, and the mouldings picked out in a deeper tint by successive generations of Vandals, but the effect was cheerful, and the pink walls made a good background for the Chippendale secretaires and cabinets filled with willow-pattern Worcester or Crown Derby. The window-curtains were dark brown cloth, with a border of Berlin wool lilies and roses, a border which would have set the teeth of an æsthete on edge, but which blended with the general brightness of the room. Old Mrs. Matthew Dalbrook, the grandmother, and her three spinster daughters had toiled over these cross-stitch borders, and Theodore’s mother would have deemed it sacrilege to have put aside this labour of a vanished life.

Harrington Dalbrook and his two sisters were in the drawing-room, each apparently absorbed in an instructive book, and yet all three had been talking for the greater part of the evening. It was a characteristic of their highly intellectual lives to nurse a volume of Herbert Spencer or a treatise upon the deeper mysteries of Buddha, while they discussed the conduct or morals of their neighbours—or their gowns and bonnets.

“I thought you were never coming home, Theo,” said Janet. “You don’t mean to say you waited to see the bride and bridegroom?”

“That is exactly what I do mean to say. I had to get old Sandown’s lease executed, and when I had finished my business I waited about to see them arrive. Do you think you could get me anything in the way of supper, Janie?”

“Father went to bed ever so long ago,” replied Janet; “it’s dreadfully late.”

“But I don’t suppose the cook has gone to bed, and perhaps she would condescend to cut me a sandwich or two,” answered Theodore, ringing the bell.

His sisters were orderly young women, who objected to eating and drinking out of regulation hours. Janet looked round the room discontentedly, thinking that her brother would make crumbs. Young men, she had observed, are almost miracle workers in the way of crumbs. They can get more superfluous crumbs out of any given piece of bread than the entire piece would appear to contain, looked at by the casual eye.

“I have found a passage in Spencer which most fully bears out my view, Theodore,” said Sophia, severely, referring to an argument she had had with her brother the day before yesterday.

“How did she look?” asked Janet, openly frivolous for the nonce.

“Lovelier than I ever saw her look in her life,” answered Theodore. “At least I thought so.”

He wondered, as he said those words, whether it had been his own despair at the thought of having irrevocably lost her which invested her familiar beauty with a new and mystic power. “Yes, she looked exquisitely lovely, and completely happy—an ideal bride.”

“If her nose were a thought longer her face would be almost perfect,” said Janet. “How was she dressed?”

“I can no more tell you than I could say how many petals there are in that Dijon rose yonder. She gave me an impression of cool soft colour. I think there was yellow in her hat—pale yellow, like a primrose.”

“Men are such dolts about women’s dress,” retorted Janet, impatiently; “and yet they pretend to have taste and judgment, and to criticize everything we wear.”

“I think you may rely upon us for knowing what we don’t like,” said Theodore.

He seated himself in his father’s easy-chair, a roomy old chair with projecting sides, that almost hid him from the other occupants of the room. He was weary and sad, and their chatter irritated his overstrung nerves. He would have gone straight to his own room on arriving, but that would have set them wondering, and he did not want to be wondered about. He wanted to keep his secret, or as much of it as he could. No doubt those three knew that he had been fond of her, very fond; that he would have sacrificed half his lifetime to win her for the other half; but they did not know how fond. They did not know that he would fain have melted down all the sands of time into one grain of gold—one golden day in which to hold her to his heart and know she loved him.

CHAPTER II.

“And warm and light I felt her clasping hand

When twined in mine; she followed where I went.”

There is a touch of childishness in all honeymoon couples, a something which suggests the Babes in the Wood, left to play together by the Arch-Deceiver, Fate; wandering hand in hand in the morning sunshine, gathering flowers, pleased with the mossy banks and leafy glades, like those children of the old familiar story, before ever hunger or cold or fear came upon them, before the shadow of night and death stole darkly on their path. Even Godfrey Carmichael, a sensible, highly educated young man, whose pride it was to march in the van of progress and enlightenment, even he had that touch of childishness which is adorable in a lover, and which lasts, oh, so short a time; transient as the bloom on the peach, the down on the butterfly’s wing, the morning dew on a rose.

He had loved her all his life, as it seemed to him. They had been companions, friends, lovers, for longer than either could remember, so gradual had been the growth of love. Yet the privilege of belonging to each other was not the less sweet because of this old familiarity.

“Are we really married—really husband and wife—Godfrey?” asked Juanita, nestling to his side as they stood together in the wide verandah where they breakfasted on these July mornings among climbing roses and clematis. “Husband and wife—such prosaic words. I heard you speak of me to the Vicar yesterday as ‘my wife.’ It gave me quite a shock.”

“Were you sorry to think it was true?”

“Sorry—no! But ‘wife.’ The word has such a matter-of-fact sound. It means a person who writes cheques for the house accounts, revises the bill of fare, and takes all the blame when the servants do wrong.”

“Shall I call you my idol, then, my goddess—the enchantress whose magic wand wafts gladness and sunshine over my existence?”

“No, call me wife. It is a good word, after all, Godfrey—a good serviceable word, a word that will stand wear and tear. It means for ever.”

They breakfasted tête-à-tête in their bower of roses; they wandered about the Chase or sat in the garden all day long. They led an idle desultory life like little children, and wondered that evening came so soon, and stayed up late into the summer night, steeping themselves in the starshine and silence which seemed new to them in their mutual delight.

There was a lovely view from that broad terrace, with its Italian balustrade and statues, its triple flight of marble steps descending to an Italian garden, which had been laid out in the Augustan age of Pope and Addison, when the distinctive feature of a great man’s garden was stateliness. Here was the lovers’ favourite loitering place when the night grew late, Juanita looking like Juliet in her loose white silk tea-gown, with its Venetian amplitude of sleeve and its mediæval gold embroidery. The fashionable dressmaker who made that gown had known how to adapt her art to Miss Dalbrook’s beauty. The long straight folds accentuated every line of the finely moulded figure, fuller than the average girlish figure, suggestive of Juno rather than Psyche. She was two inches taller than the average girl, and looked almost as tall as her lover as she stood beside him in the moonlight, gazing dreamily at the landscape.

This hushed and solemn hour on the verge of midnight was their favourite time. Then only were they really alone, secure in the knowledge that all the household was sleeping, and that they had their world verily to themselves, and might be as foolish as they liked. Once, at sight of a shooting star, Juanita flung herself upon her lover’s breast and sobbed aloud. It was some minutes before he could soothe her.

“My love, my love, what does it mean?” he asked, perplexed by her agitation.

“I saw the star, and I prayed that we might never be parted; and then it flashed upon me that we might, and I could not bear the thought,” she sobbed, clinging to him like a frightened child.

“My dear one, what should part us, except death?”

“Ah, Godfrey, death is everywhere. How could a good God make His creatures so fond of each other and yet part them so cruelly as He does sometimes?”

“Only to unite them again in another world, Nita. I feel as if our two lives must go on in an endless chain, circling among those stars yonder, which could not have been made to be for ever unpeopled. There are happy lovers there at this instant, I am convinced—lovers who have lived before us here, and have been translated to a higher life yonder; lovers who have felt the pangs of parting, the ecstasy of reunion.”

He glanced vaguely towards that starry heaven, while he fondly smoothed the dark hair upon Juanita’s brow. It was not easy to win her back to cheerfulness. That vision of possible grief had too completely possessed her. Godfrey was fain to be serious, finding her spirits so shaken; so they talked together gravely of that unknown hereafter which philosophy or religion may map out with mathematical distinctness, but which remains to the individual soul for ever mysterious and awful.

Her husband found it wiser to talk of solemn things, finding her so sad, and she took comfort from that serious conversation.

“Let us lead good lives, dear, and hope for the best in other worlds,” he said. “There is sound sense in the Buddhist theory, that we are the makers of our own spiritual destiny, and that a man may be in advance of his fellow men, even in getting to Heaven.”

Those grave thoughts had little place in Juanita’s mind next day, which was the first day the lovers devoted to practical things. They started directly after breakfast for a tête-à-tête drive to Milbrook Priory, where certain alterations and improvements were contemplated in the rooms which were to be Juanita’s. Godfrey’s widowed mother, Lady Jane Carmichael, had transferred herself and her belongings to a villa at Swanage, where she was devoting herself to the creation of a garden, which was, on a small scale, to repeat the beauties of her flat old-fashioned flower garden at the Priory. It irked her somewhat to think how long the hedges of yew and holly would take to grow; but there was a certain pleasure in creation. She was a mild, loving creature, with an aristocratic profile, silvery grey hair, and a small fragile figure; a woman who looked a patrician to her finger tips, and whom everybody imposed upon. Her blue blood had not endowed her with the power to rule. She adored her son, was very fond of Juanita, and resigned her place in her old home without a sigh.

“The Priory was a great deal too big for me,” she told her particular friends. “I used to feel very dreary there when Godfrey was at Oxford, and afterwards, for of course he was often away. It was only in the shooting season that the house looked cheerful. I hope they will soon have a family, and then that will enliven the place a little.”

Milbrook Village and Milbrook Priory lay twelve miles nearer Dorchester than Cheriton Chase. Juanita enjoyed the long drive in the fresh morning air through a region of marsh and watery meadow, where the cattle gave charm and variety to a landscape which would have been barren and monotonous without them, a place of winding streams on which the summer sunlight was shining.

The Priory was by no means so fine a place as Cheriton, but it was old, and not without interest, and Lady Jane was justified in the assertion that it was too large for her. It would be too small perhaps for Sir Godfrey and his wife in the days to come, when in the natural course of events James Dalbrook would be at rest after his life labour, and Cheriton would belong to Juanita.

“No doubt they will like Cheriton better than the Priory when we are all dead and gone,” said Lady Jane, with her plaintive air. “I only hope they will have a family. Big houses are so dismal without little people.”

This idea of a family was almost a craze with Lady Jane Carmichael. She had idolized her only son, had been miserable at every parting, and it had seemed a hard thing to her that there was not more of him, as she had herself expressed it.

“Godfrey has been the dearest boy. I only wish I had six of him,” she would say piteously; and now her mind projected itself into the future, and she pictured a bevy of grandchildren—numerous as a covey of partridges in the upland fields of the home farm at Cheriton—and fancied herself lavishing her hoarded treasures of love upon them. She had grandchildren already, and to spare, the offspring of her two daughters, but these did not bear the honoured name of Carmichael, and, though they were very dear to her maternal heart, they were not what Godfrey’s children would be to her.

She would be gone, she told herself, before they would be old enough to forsake her. She would be gone before those young birds grew too strong upon the wing. A blessed spell of golden years lay before her; a nursery, and then a schoolroom; and then, perhaps, before the last dim closing scene, a bridal, a granddaughter clinging to her in the sweet sadness of leave-taking, a fair young face crowned with orange flowers pressed against her own in the bride’s happy kiss—and then she would say Nunc dimittis, and feel that her cup of gladness had been filled to the brim.

The lovers’ talk was all of that shadowy future, as the pair of greys bowled gaily along the level road. The horses were Godfrey’s favourite pair, and belonged to a team of chestnuts and greys which had won him some distinction last season in Hyde Park, when the coaches met at the corner by the Magazine, and when the handsome Miss Dalbrook, Lord Cheriton’s heiress, was the cynosure of many eyes. The thoughts of Sir Godfrey and his wife were far from Hyde Park and the Four-in-Hand Club this morning. Their minds were filled with simple rural anticipations, and had almost a patriarchal turn, as of an Arcadian pair whose wealth was all in flocks and herds, and green pastures like these by which they were driving.

The Priory stood on low ground between Wareham and Wimbourne, sheltered from the north by a bold ridge of heath, screened on the east by a little wood of oaks and chestnuts, Spanish chestnuts, with graceful drooping branches, whose glossy leaves contrasted with the closer foliage of the rugged old oaks. The house was built of Purbeck stone, and its bluish grey was touched with shades of gold and silvery green where the lichens and mosses crept over it, while one long southern wall was clothed with trumpet-ash and magnolia, myrtle and rose, as with a closely interwoven curtain of greenery, from which the small latticed windows flashed back the sunshine.

Nothing at the Priory was so stately as its counterpart at Cheriton. There were marble balustrades and rural gods there on the terrace; here there was only a broad gravel walk along the southern front, with a little old shabby stone temple at each end. At Cheriton three flights of marble steps led from the terrace to the Italian garden, and then again three more flights led to a garden on a lower level, and so by studied gradations to the bottom of the slope on which the mansion was built. Here house and garden were on the same level, and those gardens which Lady Jane had so cherished were distinguished only by an elegant simplicity. Between the garden and a park of less than fifty acres there was only a sunk fence, and the sole glory of that modest domain lay in a herd of choice Channel Island cows, which had been Lady Jane’s pride. She had resigned them to Juanita without a sigh, although each particular beast had been to her as a friend.

“My dear, what could I do with cows in a villa?” she said, when Juanita suggested that she should at least keep her favourites, Beauty, and Maydew, and Coquette. “Of course, as you say, I could rent a couple of paddocks; but I should not like to see the herd divided. Besides, you will want them all by-and-by, when you have a family.”

Nita stepped lightly across the threshold of her future home. The old grey porch was embedded in roses and trailing passion-flowers. Everything had a shabby, old-world look compared with Cheriton. Here there had been no improvement for over a century; all things had been quiescent as in the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty.

“What a dear old house it is, Godfrey, and how everything in it speaks to me of your ancestors—your own ancestors—not other people’s! That makes all the difference. At Cheriton I feel always as if I were surrounded by malevolent ghosts. I can’t see them, but I know they are there. Those poor Strangways, how they must hate me.”

“If there are any living Strangways knocking about the world houseless, or at any rate landless, I don’t suppose they feel over kindly disposed to you,” said Godfrey; “but the ghosts have done with human habitations. It can matter very little to them who lives in the rooms where they were once happy or miserable, as the case may be. Has your father ever heard anything of the old family?”

“Never. He says there are no Strangways left on this hemisphere. There may be a remnant of the race in Australia,” he says, “for he heard of a cousin of Reginald Strangway’s who went out to Brisbane years ago to work with a sheep farmer on the Darling Downs. There is no one else of the old race and the old name that he can tell me about. I take a morbid interest in the subject, you know. If I were to meet a very evil-looking tramp in the woods and he were to threaten me, I should suspect him of being a Strangway. They all must hate us.”

“With a very unreasonable hatred, then, Nita, for it was no fault of your father’s that the family went to the bad. I have heard my father talk of the Strangways many a time over his wine. They had been a reckless, improvident race for ever so many generations, men who lived only for the pleasure of the hour, whose motto was ‘Carpe diem’ in the worst sense of the words. There was a Strangway who was the fashion for a short time during the Regency, wore a hat of his own invention, and got himself entangled with a popular actress, who sued him for breach of promise. He dipped the property. There was a racing Strangway who kept a stable at Newmarket and married—well—never mind how. He dipped the property. There was Georgiana Strangway, an heiress and a famous beauty, in the Sailor King’s reign. Two of the Royal Dukes wanted to marry her; but she ran away with a bandmaster in the Blues. She used to ride in Hyde Park at nine o’clock every morning in a green cloth spencer trimmed with sable, at a time when very few women rode in London. She saw the bandmaster, fell over head and ears in love with him, and bolted. They were married at Gretna. He spent as much of her fortune as he could get at, and was reported to have thrashed her before they parted. She set up a boarding-house at Ostend, gambled, drank cheap brandy, and died at five-and-forty.”

“What a dreadful ghost she would be to meet,” said Nita, with a shudder.

“From first to last they have been a bad lot,” concluded Sir Godfrey, “and the Isle of Purbeck was a prodigious gainer when your father became master of Cheriton Chase and Baron Cheriton of Cheriton.”

“That is what they must feel worst of all,” said Nita, speaking of the dead and the living as if they were one group of banished shades. “It must be hard for them to think that a stranger takes his title from the land that was once theirs, from the house in which they were born. Poor ill-behaved things, I can’t help being sorry for them.”

“My fanciful Nita, they do not deserve your pity. They make their own lives, love. They have only suffered the result of their own Karma.”

“I only hope they will be better off in their next incarnations, and that they won’t get to that dreadful eighth world which leads nowhere,” said Juanita.

She made this light allusion to a creed which she and her lover had discussed seriously many a time in their graver moods. They had read Mr. Sinnett’s books together, and had given themselves up in somewise to the fascinating theories of Esoteric Buddhism, and had been impressed by the curious parallel between that semi-fabulous Reformer of the East and the Teacher and Redeemer in whom they both believed.

They went about the house together, Nita admiring everything, as if she were seeing those old rooms for the first time. The alterations to be made were of the smallest. Nita would allow scarcely any change.

“Whatever was nice enough for Lady Jane must be good enough for me,” she said, decisively, when Godfrey proposed improvements which would have changed the character of his mother’s morning room, a conservatory, and a large bay window opposite the fireplace, for instance.

“But it is such a shabby old hole, compared with your room at Cheriton.”

“It is a dear old hole, sir, and I won’t have it altered in the smallest detail. I adore those deep-set windows and wide window-seats; and this apple-blossom chintz is simply delicious. Faded, sir? What of that? One can’t buy such patterns nowadays, for love or money. And that old Chinese screen must have belonged to a mandarin of the highest rank. My only feeling will be that I am a wretch in appropriating dear Lady Jane’s surroundings. This room fitted her like a glove.”

“She is charmed to surrender it to you, love; and your forbearance in the matter of improvement will delight her.”

“Your improvements would have been destruction. A conservatory opening out of that window would suggest a city man’s drawing-room at Tulse Hill. I have seen such in my childhood, when mother used to visit odd people on the Surrey side of the river.”

“Loveliest insolence!”

“Oh, I am obliged to cultivate insolence. It is a parvenu’s only defensive weapon. We new-made people always give ourselves more airs than you who were born in the purple.”

She roamed from room to room, expatiating upon everything with a childlike pleasure, delighted at the idea of this her new kingdom, over which she was to reign with undivided sovereignty. Cheriton was ever so much grander; but at Cheriton she had only been the daughter of the house; indulged in every fancy, yet in somewise in a state of subjection. Here she was to be sole mistress, with Godfrey for her obedient slave.

“And now show me your rooms, sir,” she exclaimed, with pretty authority. “I may wish to make some improvements there.”

“You shall work your will with them, dearest, as you have done with their master.”

He led her to his study and general den, a fine old room looking into the stable-yard, capacious, but gloomy.

“This is dreadful,” she cried, “no view, and ever so far from me! You must have the room next the morning-room, so that we can run in to each other, and talk at any moment.”

“That is one of the best bedrooms.”

“What of that! We can do without superfluous bedrooms; but I cannot do without you. This room of yours will make a visitor’s bedroom. If he or she doesn’t like it, he or she can go away, and leave us to ourselves, which we shall like ever so much better, shan’t we?” she asked, caressingly, as if life were going to be one long honeymoon.

Of course he assented, kissed the red frank lips, and assured her that for him bliss meant a perpetual tête-à-tête. Yes, his study should be next her boudoir; so that even in his busiest hours he should be able to turn to her for gladness—refreshing himself with her smiles after a troublesome interview with his bailiff—taking counsel with her about every change in his stable, sharing her interest in every new book.

“I will give orders about the change at once,” he said, “so that everything may be ready for us when you are tired of Cheriton.”

They lunched gaily in the garden. Nita hated eating indoors when the weather was good enough for an al fresco meal. They lunched under a Spanish chestnut that made a tent of foliage on the lawn in front of the house. They lingered over the meal, full of talk, finding a new world of conversation suggested by their surroundings; and then the greys were brought round to the hall door, and they started on the return journey.

It began to rain before they reached Cheriton, and the afternoon clouded over with a look of premature winter. No saunterings on the terrace this evening; no midnight meanderings among the cypresses and yews, the gleaming statues and dense green walls; as if they had been Romeo and Juliet, wedded and happy, in the garden at Verona. For the first time since the beginning of their honeymoon they were obliged to stay indoors.

“It is positively chilly,” exclaimed Juanita, as her maid carried off her damp mantle.

“My dearest love, I’m afraid you’ve caught cold,” said Godfrey, with apprehension.

“Do I ever catch cold, Godfrey?” Nita cried, scornfully; and indeed her splendid physique seemed to negative the idea as she stood before him, tall and buoyant, with the carnation of health upon cheek and lips, her eyes sparkling, her head erect.

“Well, no, my Juno, I believe you are as free from all such weakness as human nature can be; but I shall order fires all the same, and I implore you to put on a warm gown.”

“I will,” she answered, gaily. “You shall see me in my copper plush.”

“Thanks, love. That is a vision to live for.”

“Shall we have tea in my dressing-room—or in yours?”

“In mine. I think we have taken tea in almost every other room in the house, as well as in every corner of the garden.”

It had been one of her girlish caprices to devise new places for their afternoon tea. Whether it had been as keen a delight to the footmen to carry Japanese tables and bamboo chairs from pillar to post was open to question; but Juanita loved to colonize, as she called it.

“I feel that wherever we establish our teapot we invest the spot with the sanctity of home,” she said.

Fires were ordered, and tea in Sir Godfrey’s dressing-room.

It was Lord Dalbrook’s dressing-room actually, and altogether a sacred chamber. It had been one of the best bedrooms in the days of the Strangways; but his Lordship liked space, and had chosen this room for his den—a fine old room, with full length portraits of the Sir Joshua period let into the panelling. The furniture was of the plainest, and very different from the luxurious appointments of the other rooms, for these very chairs and tables, and yonder substantial mahogany desk, had done duty in James Dalbrook’s chambers in the Temple thirty years before. So had the heavy-looking clock on the chimney-piece, surmounted by a bronze Saturn leaning upon his scythe. So had the brass candlesticks, and the ink-stained red morocco blotter on the desk. He had fallen asleep in that capacious arm-chair many a time in the small hours, after struggling with the intricacies of a railway bill or poring over a volume of precedents.

The thick Persian carpet, the velvet window-curtains, panelled walls, and fine old fireplace gave a look of subdued splendour to the room, in spite of the dark and heavy furniture. There was a large vase of roses on the desk, where Lord Cheriton never tolerated a flower; and there were more roses on the chimney-piece; and some smart bamboo chairs, many coloured, like Joseph’s coat, had been brought from Nita’s morning room—and so, with logs blazing on the floriated iron dogs, and a scarlet tea-table set out with blue and gold china, and a Moorish copper kettle swinging over a lamp, the room had as gay an aspect as any one could desire.

Juanita had made her toilet by the time the tea-table was ready, and came in from her room next door, a radiant figure in a gleaming copper-coloured gown, flowing loose from throat to foot, and with no adornment except a broad collar and cuffs of old Venice point. Her brilliant complexion and southern eyes and ebon hair triumphed over the vivid hue of the gown, and it was at her Sir Godfrey looked as she came beaming towards him, and not at the dressmaker’s master-piece.

“How do you like it?” she asked, with childlike pleasure in her fine raiment. “I ought to have kept it till October, but I couldn’t resist putting it on, just to see what you think of it. I hope you won’t say it’s gaudy.”

“My dearest, you might be clad in a russet cloud for anything I should know to the contrary. A quarter of a century hence, when you are beginning to fancy yourself passée, we will talk about gowns. It will be of some consequence then how you dress. It can be none now.”

“That is just a man’s ignorance, Godfrey,” she said, shaking her finger at him, as she seated herself in one of the bamboo chairs, a dazzling figure in the light of the blazing logs, which danced about her eyes and hair and copper-coloured gown in a bewildering manner. “You think me handsome, I suppose?”

“Eminently so.”

“And you think I should be just as handsome if I dressed anyhow—in a badly-fitting Tussore, for instance, made last year and cleaned this year, and with a hat of my own trimming, eh, Godfrey?”

“Every bit as handsome.”

“That shows what an ignoramus a University education can leave a man. My dearest boy, half my good looks depend upon my dressmaker. Not for worlds would I have you see me a dowdy, if only for a quarter of an hour. The disillusion might last a lifetime. I dress to please you, remember, sir. It was of you I thought when I was choosing my trousseau. I want to be lovely in your eyes always, always, always.”

“You need make no effort to attain your wish. You have put so strong a spell upon my eyes that with me at least you are independent of the dressmaker’s art.”

“Again I say you don’t know what you are talking about. But frankly now, do you think this gown too gaudy?”

“That coppery background to my Murillo Madonna. No, love; the colour suits you to perfection.”

She poured out the tea, and then sank back in her comfortable chair, in a reverie, languid after her explorations at the Priory, full of a dreamlike happiness as she basked in the glow of the fire, welcome as a novel indulgence at this time of the year.

“There is nothing more delightful than a fire in July,” she said.

Her eyes wandered about the room idly.

“Do you call them handsome?” she asked presently.

Godfrey looked puzzled. Was she still harping on the dress question, or was she challenging his admiration for those glorious eyes which he had been watching in their rovings for a lazy five minutes.

“I mean the Strangways. That is their famous beauty—the girl in the scanty white satin petticoat, with the goat. Imagine any one walking about a wood, with a goat, in white satin. What queer ideas portrait painters must have had in those days. She is very lovely though, isn’t she?”

“She is not my ideal. I don’t admire that narrow Cupid’s-bow mouth, the lips pinched up as if they were pronouncing ‘prunes and prism.’ The eyes are large and handsome, but too round; the complexion is wax-dollish. No, she is not my ideal.”

“I should have been miserable if you had admired her.”

“There is a face in the hall which I like ever so much better, and yet I doubt if it is a good face.”

“Which is that?”

“The face of the girl in that group of John Strangway’s three children.”

“That girl with the towsled hair and bright blue eyes. Yes, she must have been handsome—but she looks—I hope you won’t be shocked, but I really can’t help saying it—that girl looks a devil.”

“Poor soul! Her temper did not do much good for her. I believe she came to a melancholy end.”

“How was that?”

“She eloped from a school in Switzerland with an officer in a line regiment—a love match; but she went wrong a few years afterwards, left her husband, and died in poverty at Boulogne, I believe.”

“Another ghost!” exclaimed Juanita, dolefully. “Poor, lost soul, she must walk. I can’t help feeling sorry for her—married to a man who was unkind to her, perhaps, and whom she discovered unworthy of her love. And then years afterwards meeting some one worthier and better, whom she loved passionately. That is dreadful! Oh, Godfrey! if I had been married before I saw you—and we had met—and you had cared for me—God knows what kind of woman I should have been. Perhaps I should have been one of those poor souls who have a history, the women mother and her friends stare at and whisper about in the Park. Why are people so keenly interested in them, I wonder? Why can’t they leave them alone?”

“It would be charity to do so.”

“No one is charitable—in London.”

“Do you think people are more indulgent in the country?”

“I suppose not. I’m afraid English people keep all their charity for the Continent. I shall never look at the girl in that group without thinking of her sad story. She looks hardly fifteen in the picture. Poor thing! She did not know what was coming.”

They loitered over their tea-table, making the most of their happiness. The sweetness of their dual life had not begun to pall. It was still new and wonderful to be together thus, unrestrained by any other presence.

In the midst of their gay talk Juanita’s eyes wandered to the bronze Time upon the chimney-piece, and the familiar figure suggested gloomy ideas.

“Oh, Godfrey! look at that grim old man with his scythe, mowing down our happy moments so fast that we can hardly taste their sweetness before they speed away. To think that our lives are hurrying past us like a rapid river, and that we shall be like him” (pointing distastefully to the type of old age—the wrinkled brow and flowing beard) “before we know that we have lived.”

“It is a pity, sweet, that life should be so short.”

Her glance wandered to the dark oak panel above the clock, and she started up from her low chair with a faint scream, stood on tiptoe before the fireplace, snatched half a dozen scraggy peacock’s feathers from the panel, and threw them at her husband’s feet.

“Look at those,” she exclaimed, pointing to them as they lay there.

“Peacock’s feathers! What have they done that you should use them so?”

“Oh, Godfrey, don’t you know?” she asked, earnestly.

“Don’t I know what?”

“That peacock’s feathers bring ill luck. It is fatal to take them into a house. They are an evil omen. And father will pick them up when he is strolling about the lawn, and will bring them indoors; though I am always scolding him for his obstinate folly, and always throwing the horrid things away.”

“And this kind of thing has been going on for some years, I suppose?” asked Godfrey, smiling at her intensity.

“Ever since I can remember.”

“And have the peacock’s feathers brought you misfortune?”

She looked at him gravely for a few moments, and then burst into a joyous laugh.

“No, no, no, no,” she said, “Fate has been over kind to me. I have never known sorrow. Fate has given me you. I am the happiest woman in the world—for there can’t be another you, and you are mine. It is like owning the Kohinoor diamond; one knows that one stands alone. Still, all the same, peacock’s feathers are unlucky, and I will not suffer them in your room.”

She picked up the offending feathers, twisted them into a ball, and flung them at the back of the deep old chimney, behind the smouldering logs; and then she produced a chess board, and she and Godfrey began a game with the board on their knees, and played for an hour by firelight.

CHAPTER III.

“A deadly silence step by step increased,

Until it seemed a horrid presence there.”

That idea of the Strangways had taken hold of the bride’s fancy. She went into the hall with Godfrey after dinner, and they looked together at the family group. The picture was a bishop’s half-length, turned lengthwise, and the figures showed only the head and shoulders. The girl stood between the two boys, her left arm round her younger brother’s neck. He was a lad of eleven or twelve, in an Eton jacket and broad white collar. The other boy was older than the girl, and was dressed in dark green corduroy. The heads were masterly, but the picture was uninteresting.

“Did you ever see three faces with so little fascination among the three?” asked Godfrey. “The boys look arrant cubs; the girl has the makings of a handsome woman, but the lines of her mouth and chin have firmness enough for forty, and yet she could hardly have been over fifteen when that picture was painted.”

“She has a lovely throat and lovely shoulders.”

“Yes, the painter has made the most of those.”

“And she has fine eyes.”

“Fine as to colour and shape, but as cold as a Toledo blade—and as dangerous. I pity her husband.”

“That must be a waste of pity. If he had been good to her she would not have run away from him.”

“I am not sure of that. A woman with that mouth and chin would go her own gate if she trampled upon bleeding hearts. I wonder your father keeps these shadows of a vanished race.”

“He would not part with them for worlds. They are like the peacock’s feathers that he will bring indoors. I sometimes think he has a fancy for unlucky things. He says that as we have no ancestors of our own—to speak of—I suppose we must have ancestors, for everybody must have come down from Adam somehow——”

“Naturally, or from Adam’s ancestor, the common progenitor of the Darwinian thesis.”

“Don’t be horrid. Father’s idea is that as we have no ancestors of our own, we may as well keep the Strangway portraits. The faces are the history of the house, father said, when mother wanted those dismal old pictures taken down to make way for a collection of modern art. So there they are, and I can’t help thinking that they overlook us.”

They were still standing before the trio of young faces contemplatively.

“Are they all dead?” asked Juanita, after a pause.

“God knows. I believe it is a long time since any of them were heard of. Jasper Blake talks to me about them sometimes. He was in service here, you know, before he became my father’s bailiff. In fact, he only left Cheriton after the old squire’s death. He is fond of talking of the forgotten race, and it is from him that most of my information is derived. He told me about that unlucky lad,”—pointing to the younger boy. “He was in the navy, distinguished himself out in China, and was on the high road to getting a ship when he got broke for drunkenness—a flagrant case, which all but ended in a tremendous disaster and the burning of a man-of-war. He went into the merchant service—did well for a year or two, and then the old enemy took hold of him again, and he got broke there. After that he dropped through—disappeared in the great dismal swamp where the men who fail in this world sink out of knowledge.”

“And the elder boy; what became of him?”

“He was in the army—a tremendous swell, I believe,—married Lord Dangerfield’s youngest daughter, and cut a dash for two or three years, and then disappeared from society, and took his wife to Corsica, on the ground of delicate health. For anything I know to the contrary they may still be living in that free-and-easy little island. He was fond of sport, and liked a rough life. I fancy that Ajaccio would suit him better than Purbeck or Pall Mall.”

“Poor things; I wonder if they ever long for Cheriton?”

“If old Jasper is to be believed, they were passionately fond of the place, especially that girl. Jasper was groom in those days, and he taught her to ride. She was a regular dare-devil, according to his account, with a temper that no one had ever been able to control. But she seems to have behaved pretty well to Jasper, and he was attached to her. Her father couldn’t manage her anyhow. They were too much alike. He sent her to a school at Lausanne soon after that picture was painted, and she never came back to Cheriton. She ran away with an English officer who was home from India on furlough, and was staying at Ouchy for his health. She represented herself as of full age, and contrived to get married at Geneva. The squire refused ever to see her or her husband. She ran away from the husband afterwards, as I told you. In fact, to quote Jasper, she was an incorrigible bolter.”

“Poor, poor thing. It is all too sad,” sighed Juanita. “Let us go into the library and forget them. There are no Strangways there, thank Heaven.”

She put her arm through Godfrey’s and led him off, unresisting. He was in that stage of devotion in which he followed her like a dog.

The library was one of the best rooms in the house, but the least interesting from an archæologist’s point of view. It had been built early in the eighteenth century for a ball-room, a long narrow room, with five tall windows, and it had been afterwards known as the music-room; but James Dalbrook had improved it out of its original character by throwing out a large bay, with three windows opening on to a semi-circular terrace, with marble balustrade and steps leading down to the prettiest portion of that Italian garden which was the crowning glory of Cheriton Manor, and which it had been Lord Cheriton’s delight to improve. The spacious bay gave width and dignity to the room, and it was in the space between the bay and the fireplace that people naturally grouped themselves. It was too large a room to be warmed by one fire of ordinary dimensions, but the fireplace added by James Dalbrook was of abnormal width and grandeur, while the chimney-piece was rich in coloured marbles and massive sculpture. The room was lined with books from floor to ceiling. Clusters of wax candles were burning on the mantelpiece, and two large moderator lamps stood on a massive carved oak table in the centre of the room—a table spacious enough to hold all the magazines, reviews, and periodicals in three languages that were worth reading—Quarterlies, Revue des Deux Mondes, Rundschau, Figaro, World, Saturday, Truth, and the rest of them—as well as guide-books, peerages, clergy and army lists—which made a formidable range in the middle.

Godfrey flung himself into a long, low, arm-chair, and Juanita perched herself lightly beside him on the cushioned arm, looking down at him from that point of vantage. There was a wood fire here as well as in the hall; but the rain was over now, the evening had grown warmer, and the French windows in the bay stood open to the dull grey night.

“What are you reading now, Godfrey?” asked Juanita, glancing at the cosy double table in a corner by the chimney-piece, loaded with books above and below.

“For duty reading Jones’ book on ‘Grattan and the Irish Parliament;’ for old books ‘Plato;’ for new ‘Wider Horizons.’”

He was an insatiable reader, and even in those long summer days of honeymoon bliss he had felt the need of books, which were a habit of his life.

“Is ‘Wider Horizons’ a good book?”

“It is full of imagination, and it carries one away; but one has the same feeling as in ‘Esoteric Buddhism.’ It is a very comforting theory, and it ought to be true; but by what authority is this gospel preached to us, and on what evidence are we to believe?”

“‘Wider Horizons’ is about the life to come?”

“Yes; it gives us a very vivid picture of our existence in other planets. The author writes as if he had been there.”

“And according to this theory you and I are to meet and be happy again in some distant star?”

“In many stars—climbing from star to star, and achieving a higher spirituality, a finer essence, with every new existence, until we attain the everlasting perfection.”

“And we who are to die old and worn out here are to be young and bright again there—in our next world?”

“Naturally.”

“And then we shall grow old again—go through the same slow decay—grey hairs, fading sight, duller hearing?”

“Yes; as we blossom so must we fade. The withered husk of the old life holds the seed from which the new flower must spring; and with every incarnation the flower is to gain in vigour and beauty, and the life period is to lengthen till it touches infinity.”

“I must read the book, Godfrey. It may be all a dream; but I love even dreams that promise a future in which you and I shall always be together—as we are now, as we are now.”

She repeated those last four words with infinite tenderness. The beautiful head sank down to nestle upon his shoulder, and they were silent for some minutes in a dreamy reverie, gazing into the fire, where the logs had given out their last flame, and were slowly fading from red to grey.

It was a quarter to eleven by the dial let into the marble of the chimney-piece. The butler had brought a tray with wine and water at ten o’clock, and had taken the final orders before retiring. Juanita and her husband were alone amid the stillness of the sleeping household. The night was close and dull, not a leaf stirring, and only a few dim stars in the heavy sky.

As the clock told the third quarter with a small silvery chime, as if it were a town clock in fairyland, Juanita started suddenly from her half-reclining position, and listened intently, with her face towards the open window.

“A footstep!” she exclaimed. “I heard a footstep on the terrace.”

“My dearest, I know your hearing is quicker than mine; but this time it is your fancy that heard and not your ears. I heard nothing. And who should be walking on the terrace at such an hour, do you suppose?”

“I don’t suppose anything about it, but I know there was some one. I heard the steps, Godfrey. I heard them as distinctly as I heard you speak just now; light footsteps—slow, very slow, and with that cautious, treacherous sound which light, slow footsteps always have, if one hears them in the silence of night.”

“You are very positive.”

“I know it, I heard it!” she cried, running to the window, and out into the grey night.

She ran along the whole length of the terrace and back again, her husband following her with slower steps, and they found no one, heard nothing from one end to the other.

“You see, love, there was no one there,” said Godfrey.

“I see nothing of the kind—only that the some one who was there has vanished very cleverly. An eavesdropper might hide easily enough behind any one of those cypresses,” she said, pointing to the obelisk-shaped trees which showed black against the dim grey of the night.

“Why should there be any eavesdropper, love? What secrets have you and I that any prowler should care to watch or listen. The only person of the prowling kind to be apprehended would be a burglar; and as Cheriton has been burglar-free all these years, I see no reason for fear; so, unless your mysterious footfall belonged to one of the servants or a servant’s follower, which is highly improbable on this side of the house, I take it that you must have heard a ghost.”

He had his arm around her, and was leading her out of the misty night into the warm, bright room, and his voice had the light sound of laughter; but at that word ghost she started and trembled, and her voice was very serious as she answered—

“A ghost, yes! It was just like the footfall of a ghost—so slow, so soft, so mysterious. I believe it was a ghost, Godfrey—a Strangway ghost. Some of them must revisit this house.”

CHAPTER IV

“Who will dare

To pluck thee from me? And of thine own will,

Full well I feel that thou wouldst not leave me.”

The sunshine of a summer morning, streaming in through mullioned windows that looked due south, raised Juanita’s spirits, and dispersed her fears. It was impossible to feel depressed under such a sky. She had been wakeful for a considerable part of the night, brooding upon that ghostly footstep which had sent such a sudden chill to her warm young heart, but that broad clear light of morning brought common sense.

“I dare say it was only some lovesick housemaid, roaming about after all the others had gone to bed, in order to have a quiet think about her sweetheart, and what he said to her last Sunday as they went home from church. I know how I used to walk about with no company but my thoughts of you, Godfrey, and how sweet it used to be to go over all your dearest words—over and over again,—and no doubt the heart of a housemaid is worked by just the same machinery that sets mine going—and her thoughts would follow the same track.”

“That is what we are taught to believe, dearest, in this enlightened age.”

“Why should it be a ghost?” pursued Juanita, leaning back in her bamboo chair, and lazily enjoying the summer morning, somewhat languid after a sleepless night.

They were breakfasting at the western end of the terrace, with an awning over their heads, and a couple of footmen travelling to and from the house in attendance upon them, and keeping respectfully out of earshot between whiles. The table was heaped with roses, and the waxen chalices of a great magnolia on the lower level showed above the marble balustrade, and shed an almost overpowering perfume on the warm air.

“Why should a ghost come now?” she asked, harping upon her morbid fancies. “There has never been a hint of a ghost in all the years that father and mother have lived here. Why should one come now, unless——”

“Unless what, love?”

“Unless one of the Strangways died last night—at the very moment when we heard the footfall—died in some distant land, perhaps, and with his last dying thought revisited the place of his birth. One has heard of such things.”

“One has heard of a great many strange things. The human imagination is very inventive.”

“Ah, you are a sceptic, I know. I don’t think I actually believe in ghosts—but I am afraid of being forced to believe in them. Oh, Godfrey, if it were meant for a warning,” she cried, with sudden terror in the large dark eyes.

“What kind of warning?”

“A presage of misfortune—sickness—death. I have read so many stories of such warnings.”

“My dearest love, you have read too much rubbish in that line. Your mind is full of morbid fancies. If the morning were not too warm, I should say put on your habit and let us go for a long ride. I am afraid this sauntering life of ours is too depressing for you.”

“Depressing—to be with you all day! Oh, Godfrey, you must be tired of me if you can suggest such a thing.”

“But, my Nita, when I see you giving yourself up to gloomy speculations about ghosts and omens.”

“Oh, that means nothing. When one has a very precious treasure one must needs be full of fears. Look at misers; how nervous they are about their hidden gold. And my treasure is more to me than all the gold of Ophir—infinitely precious.”

She sprang up from her low chair, and leaned over the back of his to kiss the broad brow which was lifted up to meet those clinging lips.

“Oh, my love, my love, I never knew what fear meant till I knew the fear of parting from you,” she murmured.

“Put on your habit, Nita. We will go for a ride in spite of the sun. Or what do you say to driving to Dorchester, and storming your cousins for a lunch? I want to talk to Mr. Dalbrook about Skinner’s bill of dilapidations.”

Her mood changed in an instant.

“That would be capital fun,” she cried. “I wonder if it is a breach of etiquette to lunch with one’s cousins during one’s honeymoon?”

“A fig for etiquette. Thomas,” to an approaching footman, “order the phaeton for half-past eleven.”

“What a happy idea,” said Juanita, “a long, long drive with you, and then the fun of seeing how you get on with my strong-minded cousins. They pretend to despise everything that other girls care for, don’t you know; and go in for literature, science, politics, every thing intellectual, in short; and I have seen them sit and nurse Darwin or Buckle for a whole evening, while they have talked of gowns and bonnets and other girls’ flirtations.”

“Then they are not such Roman maidens as they affect to be.”

“Far from it. They will take the pattern of my frock with their eyes before I have been in the room ten minutes. Just watch them.”

“I will; if I can take my eyes off you.”

Juanita ran away to change her white peignoir for a walking-dress, and reappeared in half an hour radiant and ready for the drive.

“How do you like my frock?” she asked, posing herself in front of her husband, and challenging admiration.

The frock was old gold Indian silk, soft and dull, made with an exquisite simplicity of long flowing draperies, over a kilted petticoat which just showed the neat little tan shoes, and a glimpse of tan silk stocking. The bodice fitted the tall supple figure like a glove; the sleeves were loose and short, tied carelessly at the elbow with a broad satin ribbon, and the long suéde gloves matched the gown to the nicest shade. Her hat was leghorn, broad enough to shade her eyes from the sun, high enough to add to her importance, and caught up on one side with a bunch of dull yellow barley and a few cornflowers, whose vivid hue was repeated in a cluster of the same flowers embroidered on one side of the bodice. Her large sunshade was of the same silk as her gown, and that was also embroidered with cornflowers, a stray blossom flung here and there with an accidental air.

“My love, you look as if you had stepped out of a fashion book.”

“I suppose I am too smart,” said Juanita with an impatient sigh; “and yet my colouring is very subdued. There is only that touch of blue in the cornflowers—just the one high light in the picture. That is the only drawback to country life. Everything really pretty seems too smart for dusty roads and green lanes. One must be content to grope one’s obscure way in a tailor gown or a cotton frock all the year round. Now this would be perfection for a Wednesday in Hyde Park, wouldn’t it?”

“My darling, it is charming. Why should you not be prettily dressed under this blue summer sky? You can sport your tailor gowns in winter. You are not too smart for me, Nita. You are only too lovely. Bring your dust cloak, and you may defy the perils of the road.”

Celestine, Lady Carmichael’s French-Swiss maid, was in attendance with the dust cloak, an ample wrap of creamy silk and lace, cloudlike, indescribable. This muffled the pretty gown from top to toe, and Nita took her seat in the phaeton, and prepared for a longer drive and a longer talk than they had had yesterday.

She was pleased at the idea of showing off her handsome young husband and her new frock to those advanced young ladies, who had affected a kind of superiority on the ground of what she called “heavy reading,” and what they called advanced views. Janet and Sophia had accepted Lady Cheriton’s invitations with inward protest, and in their apprehension of being patronized had been somewhat inclined to give themselves airs, taking pains to impress upon their cousin that she was as empty-headed as she was beautiful, and that they stood upon an intellectual plane for which she had no scaling ladder. She had put up with such small snubbings in the sweetest way, knowing all the time that as the Honourable Juanita Dalbrook, of Cheriton Chase, and one of the débutantes whose praises had been sung in all the society papers, she inhabited a social plane as far beyond their reach as their intellectual plane might be above hers.