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One moment I thought his fever had returned, but following his gaze I looked round: there stood lady Cairnedge! John was face to face with his mother, and my uncle was not there to defend him! "Are you ready?" she said, nor pretended greeting. She seemed slightly discomposed, and in haste.
"And all the women in paradise would but bring you closer!" I ventured to add. The day after our marriage, which took place within a month of our return from Paris, John went to Rising, on a visit to lady Cairnedge of anything but ceremony, and took his uncles and myself with him. "Will you tell her ladyship," he said to the footman, "that Mr. Day desires to see her."
In a few minutes, however, a slight sound in another part of the room, caused me to turn them thitherward. There stood lady Cairnedge, in a riding-habit, with a whip in her hand, staring, pale as death, at my uncles. Then, with a scornful laugh, she turned and went through a door immediately behind her, which closed instantly, and became part of the wainscot, hardly distinguishable.
"Lady Cairnedge smothered a splendid black horse not far from there. Through the darkness I heard him going down. It makes me shudder every time I think of it." "I cannot tell you, child. I suppose my gray was such a skeleton that the bog couldn't hold him. I left it all to him, and he got himself and me too out of it somehow. It was too dark, as you know, to see anything between the flashes.
We returned to England the next day. All the journey through, my uncles were continually reverting to the matter of John's parentage: the more they saw of him, the less could they believe lady Cairnedge his mother.
"Let lady Cairnedge know at once that Mr. Day desires to see her." The man went. We walked into the white drawing-room, the same where I sat alone among the mirrors the morning after I was lost on the moor. How well I remembered it! There we waited. The gentlemen stood, but, John insisting, I sat my eyes fixed on the door by which we had entered.
"My father was a rich man, and left my mother more than enough; there was no occasion for her to marry again, except she loved, and I am sure she did not love lord Cairnedge. I wish, for my sake, not for his, he were alive now. But the moment, I am one and twenty, I shall be my own master, and hope, sir, you will not count me unworthy to be the more Belorba's servant.
"Mind what you are doing, lady Cairnedge!" I cried. "The ground here will not carry the weight of a horse like yours." But as I spoke he gave in, and sprang across the ditch at the way-side. There, however, he stood. "You think to escape me," she answered, in a low, yet clear voice, with a cat-like growl in it. "You make a mistake!"
"You are quite right, mother," answered John calmly; "I am fit to go home with you. But Rising does not quite agree with me. I dread such another attack, and do not mean to go." The drawing-room had a rectangular bay-window, one of whose three sides commanded the door. The opposite side looked into a little grove of larches. Lady Cairnedge had already realized the position of the room.
If he declined to return with her, he and his house continued at his service. We looked for lady Cairnedge all the next day. John was up by noon, and ready to receive her in the drawing-room; he would not see her in his bedroom. But the hours passed, and she did not come.
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