M. E. Braddon

“ What of the history of James Dalbrook in those long years of bachelor life in London, when he was slowly working his way to the front? Might not there have been some hidden sin in that life, some sin dark enough to awaken a sleepless vengeance, a malignity which should descend upon him in the day of peace and prosperity like a thunderbolt from a clear and quiet sky?
A man who marries at forty years of age has generally some kind of history before his marriage; and it was in that history Theodore told himself he must look for the secret of Godfrey Carmichael’s death. ”

“ And then Theodore Dalbrook asked himself the essential question: What bearing, if any, had this episode of his kinsman’s life upon the murder of Juanita’s husband? What dark and vengeful figure lurked in the background of that common story of dishonourable love? An outraged husband, a brother, a father? That obscure life apart from friends and acquaintances would show that some great wrong had been done, some sacred tie had been broken. Only a sinful union so hides its furtive happiness—only a deep sense of degradation will reconcile a woman to banishment from the society of her own sex. ”

“ Lady Cheriton would have had the room closed; for a year at least, she pleaded; but her husband told her that to make it a sealed chamber now would be to throw it out of use for his lifetime.
“If we once let servants and people think and talk of it as a haunted room nobody will ever like to occupy it again so long as this house stands,” he said. “Stories will be invented—those things shape themselves unawares in the human mind—sounds will be heard, and the whole house will become uninhabitable. We both love our house, Maria. Our own hands have fashioned it after our own hearts. ”

“ She must be a curious young woman,” said Lord Cheriton, with a vexed air. “I should have liked very much to have made her life bright and easy, if she would have let me—for her father’s sake. On what ground did she refuse my offer?”
“On the ground of preferring to work for her living, and to live a hard life. She has taken that upon herself, I believe, as an expiation for her past errors, although she did not say that in so many words. She is wonderfully firm. I never saw such a resolute temper in so young—and so gentle-mannered—a woman.” ”

“ Lord Cheriton hailed the first hansom he found upon his way, and told the man to drive him to Camberwell Grove.
The neighbourhood through which he went was curiously unfamiliar after the changes and forgetfulness of twenty years; and yet it was curiously familiar to him, and brought back the memory of that dead time, when a man who was himself, and yet not himself, had gone to and fro that road until its every shop-front and every street corner seemed engraven upon his brain.
It is a busy, teeming world—a world of seething humanity, jostling, striving, anxious, hollow-cheeked and eager-eyed. ”

“ My dear Juanita, if you would only withdraw your thoughts from this ghastly subject! I will not ask you to forget. That may be impossible. I entreat you only to be patient, to leave the chastisement of crime to Providence, which works in the dark, works silently, inevitably, to the end for which we can only grope in a lame and helpless fashion. Be sure the murderer will stand revealed sooner or later. That cruel murder will not be his last crime, and in his next act of violence he may be less fortunate in escaping every human eye. ”

“ God keep you, Theodore, from such a loss as mine!”
“I must gain something before I can lose it,” he answered, with a shade of bitterness. “I see myself, as the years go on, hardening into a lonely old bachelor, outliving the capacity for human affection.”
“That is nonsense-talk. You think so just now, perhaps. There is no one beyond your own family you care for, and you fancy yourself shut out from the romance of life—but your day will come, very suddenly, perhaps. You will see some one whom you can care for. ”

“ If it were to be Theodore’s blessed fate to see the one love of his life victorious, soon or late, after long patience and devoted sacrifice, Cuthbert must taste the bitterness of having loved in vain. But he would hardly be worthy of pity, perhaps, seeing that he had known from the first how the land lay, seeing that honour forbade his falling in love with Juanita.
But will honour make a man blind to beauty, deaf to the music of a voice, impervious to the subtle charms of all that is purest, best, and loveliest in womanhood? ”

“ Theodore had managed his life so well after that one bitter rebuff that Juanita had a right to suppose that his wound had healed, and that the pain of that hour had been forgotten. She was sincerely attached to him, as a kinsman, and respected him more than any other young man of her acquaintance. Had not Lord Cheriton, that admirable judge of character, declared that Theodore was one of the cleverest men he knew, and regretted that he had not attached himself to the higher branch of the law, as the more likely in his case to result in wealth and fame? ”

“ It was very different to that Italian garden at Cheriton, where the peacocks strutted slowly between long rows of cypresses, where the Italian statues showed white in every angle of the dense green wall, and where the fountain rose and fell with a silvery cadence in the still summer atmosphere. Here there was only a square lawn, just big enough for a tennis court, and a broad border of hardy flowers, with one especial portion at the end of the garden, where Sophia experimented in cross fertilization after the manner of Darwin, seeming for ever upon the threshold of valuable discoveries. ”

“ You will see her beauty under a cloud, for she is not one of those women who begin to get over the loss of a husband as soon as their crape gets rusty; but her beauty is all the more touching on account of the grief that separates her from all other women—even from her past self. I sometimes look at her and wonder if this sad and silent woman can be the Juanita I once knew; the light-hearted, spontaneous girl, a buoyant creature, all impulse and caprice, fancy and imagination. ”

“ And is it a small thing to see strangers in a home that has been in one’s family for three centuries? Again, remember that although nothing throve on the Cheriton Estate while the Strangways held it—or at any rate not for the last hundred years of their holding—no sooner was my father in possession than the luck changed. Quarries were developed; land that had been almost worthless became valuable for building. Everything has prospered with him. And think of them outside—banished for ever, like Adam and Eve out of Paradise. Think of them with hate and envy gnawing their hearts. ”

“ She had settled down there in her new position, as widow and mother, a woman for whom all life’s passionate story was over, who must live henceforward for that new life growing day by day towards that distant age of passion and of sorrow through which she had passed suddenly and briefly, crowding into a month the emotions of a lifetime. There are women who have lived to celebrate their golden wedding who in fifty years of wedlock have not felt half her sum of love, and who in losing the companion of half a century have not felt half her sum of grief. ”

“ What manner of murderer? What motive for the murder? Where had it happened? On the highway—in the woody labyrinths of the Chase? And upon the mind of Theodore flashed the same idea which had suggested itself to the servants. It might be the work of a poacher whom Sir Godfrey had surprised during a late ramble. Yet a poacher must be hard bested before he resorts to murder, and Sir Godfrey—easy tempered and generous—was hardly the kind of man to take upon himself the functions of a gamekeeper, and give chase to any casual depredator. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She will remember that it was her own whim to spend her honeymoon here. It will seem to her as if she had brought her husband to his death. Oh, God, when I remember how her mother and I suggested other places—how we talked to her of the Tyrol and the Dolomites, of Hungary, Norway—and with what a kind of childish infatuation she clung to her fancy for this house, it seems as if a hideous fatality guided her to her doom. It is her doom, as well as his. I do not believe she will ever be a happy woman again. ”

“ He had seen in that great seething cauldron of London life men whose countenances bore the stamp of a degradation so profound that the most ferocious crime might seem the normal outcome of their perverted natures. He could imagine how the broken-down gentleman, steeped in drink, and embittered by the idea of wrongs which had been the natural consequence of his own misconduct, had sunk step by step upon the ladder of vice, till he had arrived at that lowest deep where the dreams of men are stained with blood and darkened by the shadow of the hangman. ”

“ To see such a man as this so completely unhinged by a woman’s perversity was a new thing to Theodore Dalbrook; and his heart went out to his kinsman as it had never done before.
“My dear Cheriton, you have done all that was in your power to do for that mistaken young woman,” he said, holding out his hand, which the elder man grasped warmly. “Whatever wrong you may have unwittingly brought about by the presence of a blackguard under your roof, you have done your best to atone for that wrong. The most sensitive, the most punctilious of men could do no more.” ”

“ Dorchester, and especially the old house in Cornhill, received Mr. Ramsay with open arms. Harrington was in the dejected state of a young man who has been rudely awakened from youth’s sweetest delusion. Fooled and forsaken by Juliet Baldwin, he had told himself that all women are liars, and was doing all in his power to establish his reputation as a woman-hater. In this temper of mind he was not averse from his own sex, and he welcomed his brother’s friend with unaffected cordiality, and was evidently cheered by the new life which Ramsay’s vivacity brought into the quiet atmosphere of home. ”

“ Cheriton Chase was exercising its wonted influence upon him. He loved the place with that deep love which is often felt by the hereditary owner, the man born on the soil, but perhaps still oftener, and to a greater degree by him who has conquered and won the land by his own hard labour of head or hand, by that despicable personage, the self-made man. In all his wanderings—those luxurious reposeful journeyings of the man who has conquered fortune—James Dalbrook’s heart yearned towards these ancient avenues and yonder grey walls. ”

“ When I heard that you were going to live in London, it flashed into my mind that you would be just the right person to help me, and I knew how good you had been to me always, and that you would help. London is the place in which to make your inquiries. I have heard my father say that all broken lives—all doubtful characters—gravitate towards London. It is the one place where people fancy they can hide.”
“I will do everything in my power to realize your wish, Juanita. I shall be a solitary man with a good deal of leisure, so I ought to succeed, if success be possible.” ”

“ Murdered—a man who had been sitting at their table, full of life and spirits, in the glow of youth, and health, and happiness, less than twenty-four hours ago! Murdered—a man who had never known what it was to have an enemy, who had been popular with all classes! Had been! How awful to think of him as belonging to the past, he who yesterday looked forward to so radiant a future! And Theodore Dalbrook had envied him, as even the most generous of men must needs envy the winner in the race for love. ”

“ The plain little white crape cap seemed in perfect harmony with that raven hair and pure white forehead. She was unlike any other woman Cuthbert Ramsay had ever known. There was not one touch of society slang, nor of the society manner of looking at life. She had passed through the fiery ordeal of two London seasons unscorched in the furnace. Love had been the purifying influence. She had never lived upon the excitement of every-day pleasures and volatile loves, the intermittent fever of flirtations and engagements that are on and off half a dozen times in a season. ”

“ Harrington concluded that there was a mystery in these things outside the limits of masculine understanding. To his eye the white satin and tulle his betrothed had worn had seemed faultless; but it may be that the glamour of first love acts like limelight upon a soiled white garment: and no doubt Miss Baldwin’s gown had seen service.
He walked back to the house with her, and left her at the door just as it was growing dusk, and the servants were coming home from church. He left her with a fictitious appearance of cheerfulness, promising to go to tea on the following afternoon. ”

“ I was glad to work with him, and to feel that I was useful to him; but that feeling was not enough to reconcile me to the monotony of my days. A man who has home ties—a wife and children—may be satisfied in that narrow circle; but for a young man with his life before him it is no better than a prison.”
“I understand,” said Juanita, eagerly. “I can fully sympathize with you. I am very glad you are ambitious, Theodore. A man is worthless who is without ambition. And now tell me what you will do when you go to London. ”

“ There must have been some indication.”
“Put madness out of the question, Juanita, what then?”
“Hatred, Theodore. That is the strongest passion in the human mind—a savage hatred which could not be satisfied except with the brightest life that it had the power to destroy—a relentless hatred—not against him, not against my beloved. What had he done in all his good life that any one upon this earth should hate him? But against us—against my father and mother and me—the usurpers, the owners of Cheriton Manor; against us who have thrust ourselves upon the soil which that wicked race held so long. ”

“ That fact has so preyed upon the widow’s mind that she has imagined a motive. She has a strange fancy that one of the Strangways must have been the author of the crime. She has brooded over their images till her whole mind has become possessed with the idea of one of that banished race, garnering his wrath for long years, until at last the hour came for a bloody revenge, and then striking a death-blow out of the dark—striking his fatal blow and vanishing from the sight of men, as if a phantom arm had been stretched out of the night to deal that blow. ”

“ She began to grow reckless; eat her dinner and took her dry champagne with a masculine gusto; smoked as many cigarettes as a secretary of legation; read all the new French novels, and talked about them unreservedly with her partners; was keen upon racing, and loved euchre and nap. She had half made up her mind to throw herself away upon the first wealthy cotton-spinner she might meet up in the North when she allowed herself to be touched by Harrington Dalbrook’s somewhat boyish devotion, and began to wonder whether it might not be well for her to end her chequered career by a love match. ”