The earl cared very little for otters and rats, and almost nothing at all for salmon, so that when April came he usually went to his yacht, and practically lived aboard it until November. Sometimes he made long cruises in this substantial and comfortable vessel, which he delighted in navigating himself. He was lying in at Bremerhaven, for example, in May, when one of a sheaf of telegrams scattered along the line of North Sea ports in search of him, brought the news that his youngest son Joseph, who had drifted into Mashonaland after the collapse of the Jameson adventure, had been killed in the native rebellion. Upon consideration, the earl could not see that a post-haste return to England would serve any useful end. He sailed westward, however, after some telegraphic communication with England, and made his leisurely way down the Channel and round Cornwall to Milford Haven, where his wont was to winter his yacht, and where most of his crew were at home. The fact that he and the vessel were well known in this port rendered it possible to follow in detail subsequent events.
It was on the 10th of June that Lord Porlock came to anchor in Milford, and went ashore, taking the afternoon train for Shrewsbury. He returned on the 14th, accompanied by his eldest son and heir, Lord Cressage. This latter personage was known only from hearsay at Milford, and local observation of him was therefore stimulated by a virgin curiosity. It was noted that Viscount Cressage—a stalwart and rubicund young man of more than his father’s height, but somewhat less swarthy of aspect—was laboring under very marked depression. He hung about the hotel, during the delay incident upon cleaning up the yacht, taking on new stores and altering some of the sailing gear, in a plainly moping mood, saying little to his father and never a word to any one else. A number of witnesses were able to make it clear that at first he did not intend to sail forth, but was merely bearing his father company while the latter remained in harbor.
The fact of their recent bereavement accounted in a general way for their reticence with each other, but it was impossible not to see that the younger man had something besides the death of a brother on his mind. When, on the second day of their waiting, the tide began to fill in which on its turn was to bear out the yacht, his nervous preoccupation grew painfully manifest. He walked across many times to the headland; he fidgeted in and out of the bar, taking drinks for which he obviously had no relish, and looking over and over again in the railway time-tables for information which he seemed incapable of fixing in his memory. At last, when everything was ready, and the earl stood with his hand out to say good-bye to his son, the latter had suddenly, and upon the evident impulse of the moment, declared with some excitement that he also would go. People remembered that he had said, as if in defensive explanation of his hasty resolve: “Perhaps that will teach her a lesson!” His father had only remarked “Rot!”—and with that the yacht sailed off, a heaving white patch against the blackening west.
But what followed was too grossly unreasoning to afford a lesson to anybody. The morning newspapers of the 18th contained in one column confirmation of the earlier report that the Hon. Anselm Torr, second son of the earl of Porlock, had been a passenger on the ill-fated “Drummond Castle,” and had gone down with the rest in the night off Ushant; and in another column a telegram from Porthstinian, announcing the total loss of a large yacht, on the rocks known as the Bishop and Clerks, with all on board. The evening papers followed with the rumor that the lost yacht was the “Minstrel,” with both Lord Porlock and his son, Lord Cressage, on board; but it was not until the next afternoon that the public possessed all the facts in this extraordinary affair. Then it happened that the edge was rather taken off the horror of the tragic coincidence, by the announcement that these sudden deaths brought forward as next heir to the dukedom Captain Edward Torr, late of the —th Hussars, who was better known, perhaps, as the husband of Miss Cora Bayard. The thought of Cora as a prospective duchess made such a direct appeal to the gayer side of the popular mind, that the gruesome terrors surrounding her advancement were lost to sight. When, a few days later, it was stated that the venerable Duke of Glastonbury had suffered a stroke of paralysis, and lay at Caermere in a critical state, the news only made more vivid the picture of the music-hall dancer turned into Her Grace which the public had in its mind’s eye. Her radiant portrait in the photographic weeklies and budgets was what remained uppermost in the general memory.
For a time, however, in that little fraction of the public which is called Society, the figure of another woman concentrated interest upon itself, in connection with the Torr tragedy. The fact that a music-hall person was to wear a great title had no permanent hold upon the imagination of this class. They would probably see rather less of her then than now—and the thing had no longer the charm of the unusual. But they had known Lady Cressage. They had admired her, followed after her, done all sorts of nice things for her, in that season of her wonderful triumph as the most beautiful girl, and the most envied bride, in London. After her marriage she had been very little in evidence, it was true; one hardly knew of any other reigning beauty who had let the sceptre slip through her fingers so promptly and completely. What was the secret of it all? It could not be said that she had lost her good looks, or that she was lacking in cleverness. There was no tangible scandal against her; to the contrary, she seemed rather surprisingly indifferent to men’s company. Of course, it was understood that her marriage was unhappy, but that was scarcely a reason for allowing herself to be so wholly snuffed out of social importance. Everybody knew what the Torrs were like as husbands, and everybody would have been glad to be good to her. But in some unaccountable way, without quite producing the effect of rebuffing kindness, she had contrived to lapse from the place prepared for her. And now those last words from the lips of poor young Cressage—“Perhaps that will teach her a lesson!”—sifted their way from the coroner’s inquest in a Welsh village up to London, and set people thinking once more. Who could tell? It might be that the fault was not all on one side. According to the accounts of Milford, he was in a state of visible excitement and mental distress. The very fact of his going off alone in a yacht with his father, of whom he notoriously saw as little as possible on dry land, showed that he must have been greatly upset. And his words could mean nothing save that it was a quarrel with his wife which had sent him off to what proved to be his death. What was this quarrel about? And was it the woman, after all, who was to blame? Echoes of these questions, and of their speculative and varied answers, kept themselves alive here and there in London till Parliament rose in August. They were lost then in the general flutter toward the moors.
Lady Cressage, meantime, had not quitted Caermere or disclosed any design of doing so, and it is there we return to her, where she sat at her ease under the palms in the glass-house, with a book open before her.
The spattering reports of a number of guns, not very far away, caused her presently to lift her head, but after an instant, with a fleeting frown, she went back to her book. The racket continued, and finally she closed the volume, listened with a vexed face for a minute or two and then sprang to her feet.
“Positively this is too bad!” she declared aloud, to herself.
Unexpectedly, as she turned, she found confronting her another young woman, also clad in black, even to the point of long gloves, and a broad hat heavy with funereal plumes. In her hand she held some unopened letters, and on her round, smooth, pretty countenance there was a doubtful look.
“Good-mornin’, dear,” said this newcomer. Her voice, not unmusical in tone, carried the suggestion of being produced with sedulous regard to a system. “There were no letters for you.”
There was a momentary pause, and then Lady Cressage, as if upon deliberation, answered, “Good-morning—Cora.” She turned away listlessly as she spoke.
“Ah, so it is one of my ‘Cora’ days, after all,” said the other, with a long breath of ostentatious reassurance. “I never know in the least where to have you, my dear, you know—and particularly this mornin’; I made sure you’d blame me for the guns.”
“Blame”—commented Lady Cressage, musingly—“I no longer blame anybody for anything. I’ve long since done with my fancy for playing at being God, and distributing judgments about among people.”
“Oh, you’re quite right about this shootin’