Francis Tredethlyn had to wait a very long time before there could be any possibility of a letter from the Gray’s Inn solicitors, but he endured the delay with perfect tranquillity of mind; and if either of the two men seemed anxious for the arrival of the letter, that man was Harcourt Lowther, and not Francis Tredethlyn. The ensign had a trick of alluding to his servant’s good fortune whenever things went especially ill with himself.
“Here am I without a friend in the world to lend me a five-pound note,” he would remark, impatiently, “and there are you with a chance of a nice little legacy from that old uncle of yours. I shouldn’t wonder if you stand in for four or five hundred at the least.”
“I don’t think it, sir,” the valet always answered, coolly. “I’ve heard our neighbours say, that what with farming, what with mining, and dabbling a good bit with funds and railway shares, and such-like, my uncle must be as rich as a Jew; but for all that, I don’t look to be much better off for any thing that he’ll have left me. I suppose he’s left every thing to my cousin Susan, seeing that he had neither kith nor kin except her and me. But somehow or other I can’t imagine his parting with his money to any one, even after his death. I almost fancy that he’d rather have tied it up, if he could, so that the interest upon it would go on accumulating for ever and ever, thinking as he might perhaps, being old and eccentric, that he’d have a kind of satisfaction, even in his grave, from knowing that the money was going on getting more and more, instead of being spent or squandered.”
Francis Tredethlyn did not make this remark in any spirit of ill-nature; he spoke like a man who states a plain fact.
“I dare say he was a regular old curmudgeon,” Mr. Lowther answered, “but he must leave his money to some one, and the fact of these lawyers advertising for you is ample proof that he must have left some of it to you.”
Such a conversation as this occurred pretty frequently during the long interval in which Francis Tredethlyn waited for the answer to his letter. Sometimes, when Harcourt Lowther was in a very bad temper, he would accuse his attendant of having grown proud and insolent and lazy, since the advent of that Times newspaper, which the ensign had borrowed from Mr. Corbett; but every one of the accusations was as groundless as many other of the officer’s complaints against people and things in general. There was no change in Francis Tredethlyn: he did his work cheerfully and well, obeyed orders in a frank, manly spirit, and behaved himself altogether in a most exemplary manner.
The time when a letter from England might be expected came round at last; but Francis Tredethlyn evinced no anxiety for the arrival of the solicitors’ epistle. A long season of drought had given way before a sudden downfall of rain, and Harcourt Lowther, who had planned a couple of days’ kangaroo hunting, and had made all necessary arrangements for the performance of his duties by a good-natured and efficient colour-sergeant, found himself a prisoner in his cottage at Port Arthur, with nothing to do but wait for a change in the weather.
It was very tiresome. The accomplished, light-hearted Harcourt Lowther, who could take life so pleasantly in the drawing-rooms of Tyburnia or Belgravia, to whom a summer afternoon amongst a group of fashionable gossips in the smoking-room of his favourite club was only too short, found this terrible Tasmanian day intolerably long. He had tried every available way of getting rid of his time. He had sketched a little, and read a little, and played the flute a little, and smoked a great deal, and had relieved the oppression of his spirits by an incalculable number of yawns, and a little occasional bad language. And now, having exhausted all these resources, he stood with his head leaning listlessly against the roughly finished sash of the window, watching the convict labourers at work under the heavy rain. He derived some faint ray of comfort from the signs of those two men. At any rate, there were some people in the world worse off than himself,—unlucky wretches who were obliged to work in wet weather, and wear a hideous dress, and eat coarse unpalatable food, or food that appeared abominably coarse and unpalatable in the eyes of Mr. Harcourt Lowther, who had been known upon occasion to turn up his nose at the culinary masterpieces of Soyer and Francatelli.
“Why don’t they kill themselves?” muttered the ensign; “they could drive rusty nails into their veins, and make an end of themselves somehow. There are plenty of poisonous things in my garden that they might eat, and make a finish of their lives that way; but they don’t. They go on day after day drudging and toiling, and enduring their lives, somehow or other. I suppose they hope to get away some day. How ever should I bear my life if I didn’t hope to get away—if I didn’t hope it would come to an end pretty soon?”
Mr. Lowther, having exhausted the pleasure to be derived from a contemplation of the convicts, took to pacing up and down the two rooms; in the inner of which Francis Tredethlyn was busy cleaning his master’s guns.
Walking backwards and forwards, and backwards and forwards, and passing the valet every time, Harcourt Lowther was fain to talk to him; rather for the pleasure and relief of hearing his own voice, than from any desire to be friendly towards his vassal.
“No letter yet, Tredethlyn?” he said.
“No, sir; but it may come any day.”
“And you wait for it as quietly as if a legacy, more or less, was nothing to you. I suppose if they send you a remittance, you’ll be wanting to buy your discharge, and leave this place; and I shall have to get another servant,—some awkward, ignorant boor, perhaps?”
“I don’t know about that, sir. There’s plenty as good as me, I dare say, among our fellows. Other folks may have been brought up respectably, and taken to soldiering, like me. And as for buying my discharge, I don’t say but I should be glad to do that, if those lawyer people gave me the chance. I should be glad to get back to England and see my little cousin Susy. I always call her little Susy, because I can’t help thinking of her as she was when I remember her first, when she and I were boy and girl sweethearts together. I’ve thought of her a deal since I got the news of her father’s death, and I feel anxious about her, somehow or other, when I fancy her left alone among strangers.”
Harcourt Lowther, always walking backwards and forwards between the two rooms, was in the sitting-room when his servant said this. He stopped to look out of the window again, and there seemed to be a kind of dismal fascination for him in the convicts, towards whom his eyes wandered in a moody, absent-minded stare.
“And where do you expect to find her—your cousin, I mean—when you do go back to England?” he asked presently.
“At the old farm, sir, to be sure. Where should I find her but there? Poor little soul! she’s never known any other home but that, and isn’t likely to leave it in a hurry of her own free will.”
“Humph!” muttered the officer, “there’s no calculating upon the changes that take place in this world. I never expect to find any thing as I left it when I return to a place or people that I’ve been absent from for any length of time. I expect to find plenty of changes when I get back to the civilised world again. Do you suppose the people there can afford to waste their time thinking of wretched exiles here? Life with them is utterly different from what it is with us. When I left England, I was engaged to a beautiful girl with fifty thousand pounds or so for her fortune,—a girl who would have married me, and given me a grand start in life, if it hadn’t been for her father; but do you think I expect to find her in the same mind when I go back? Do you think two years’ absence won’t act as a sponge, and wipe my image out of her thoughts? What has a beautiful, frivolous creature like that to do with constancy? Every man who looks at her falls over head and ears in love with her. She is fed upon flattery and adulation. Is it probable, or natural, or even possible that she will remember me?”
It was not likely that Mr. Lowther would ask this question of his valet. He asked it of himself, rather, in a peevish and complaining spirit, and seemed to find a dismal comfort in harping on his wrongs and his miseries.
“I was a fool to think that Maude Hillary could be constant to me!” he muttered, angrily. In his anger against a world that had treated him so badly, he was angry with himself for having been so much a fool as to expect better treatment. He walked to a little looking-glass hanging over the mantelpiece, and looked at his handsome face. Was it the face of a man who was to have no place in the world? Were his many graces of person, his charm of manner, his versatility of mind, to serve for nothing after all?
“When I think of the fellows who get on in the world, I feel inclined to make an end of all this by cutting my throat,” he said, as he frowned at the image in the glass.
He felt the region of the jugular vein softly with the ends of his fingers as he spoke, and wondered whether death by the severance of that important artery was a very painful finish for a man to make. He thought of how he might look if Francis Tredethlyn, finding him late to rise one morning, broke into his room and saw him lying in the sunny little chamber deluged with blood and stone dead. He had been very religiously brought up, amongst gentle, true-hearted women; but there was no more pious compunction in his mind as he thought of suicide than there might have been in the mind of an aboriginal inhabitant of the Solomon Islands. He had a mother at home—a mother who believed in him and idolized him, to the disparagement of all other creatures; but no image of her grief and despair arose between him and the scheme of a desperate death. His thoughts travelled in a narrow circle, of which self was the unchanging centre.
“I have heard of men making away with themselves on the very eve of some event which would have made a complete change in their fortunes,” he thought presently. “I never read the story of a suicide that did not seem more or less the story of a fool. No, my death shall never make a paragraph for a newspaper. I must be very hard pushed when I come to that. This place gives me the blue-devils, and everything looks black to me out here. I wish Abel Janz Tasman and Captain Cook had perished before ever they sighted this dismal land. I wish all the lot of petty Dutch traders and navigators had come to an untimely end before ever they discovered any one of these miserable islands, which have been a paradise for convicts and scoundrels, and a hell for gentlemen, during the last half-century. How was I to know, when I bought a commission in her Majesty’s service, that the first stage on the road to martial glory was to be the post of head-gaoler at a settlement in the Antipodes? The papers talk of a change in the transportation system, a change that will rid Van Diemen’s Land of its present delightful inhabitants; but no change is likely to come about in my time. I shall have to drag my chain out to the last link, I dare say. It’s better to be born lucky than rich, says the proverb; but how about the poor devils who are neither rich nor lucky?”
A rap on the little door, that opened out of the sitting-room on to a patch of garden which lay between the house and the high road, startled Mr. Lowther out of his long reverie.
“It’s the fellow with the letters,” he cried; and before Francis Tredethlyn could emerge from the inner room, his master had opened the door, and had taken a little packet of letters, newspapers, and magazines from the man who brought them. “One from my mother; one from—yes—from Maude, at last; the Times, Punch, Blackwood’s, United Service, and the lawyer’s letter!—‘Francis Tredethlyn, Esq.!’ eh? The legacy must be something more than five hundred, my man, or they’d hardly dub you Esquire.”
He tossed the letter over to his servant as he spoke, and looked at the Cornishman furtively, with something like envy expressed in his look. Francis Tredethlyn received the lawyers’ epistle very coolly, and retired into the adjoining room to read it, while his master sat at the table in the parlour, tearing off the flimsy envelope of a letter with a hasty nervous hand.
“From Maude!” he muttered. “At last, my lady: at last, at last!”
The letter was a very long one, written in a clear and bold yet sufficiently feminine hand, on slippery pink paper scented with a perfume that had survived an Australian voyage. The contents of the letter must have been tolerably pleasing to Harcourt Lowther, for he smiled as he read, and seemed to forget all about Francis Tredethlyn’s legacy.
“I miss you very much, though papa surrounds us with gaiety; indeed, I think we have been gayer than ever lately; and he never seems so happy as when our dear old lawn is crowded with visitors. But I miss you, Harcourt, in spite of all the cruel insinuations in your last letter. The summer evenings seem long and dreary when I think of you, so far away, so unhappy, as your letters tell me you are, Harcourt, though you are too unselfish to admit the truth in plain words. I scarcely open the piano once in a month, now that I have no one to play concertante duets. I scarcely care for a new opera; for the men who come into our box bore me to death with their vapid talk, and I know that not one of them understands what he talks about. I am not happy, Harcourt, though you taunt me with my wealth and my position, and the difference between our lives. I am not happy, for our future seems to grow darker and darker every day. I have mentioned you to my father several times, and every time he seems more angry than the last; so now I feel that your name is tacitly tabooed; and any chance allusion to you from the lips of strangers makes me tremble and turn cold. I have tried in vain to comprehend the reason of my father’s aversion to any thought of a marriage between you and me. I have been so much a spoiled child, that to be thwarted or opposed on any subject seems strange to me, most of all when that subject is so near my heart. I can scarcely think that my dear father would allow any consideration of fortune to stand in the way of happiness, and yet that is the only consideration that can influence him, for I know that he always liked and admired you. You must awhile be patient: what I can do I will. And you must trust me, dear Harcourt, and not pain me again as you have pained me by those unkind doubts of my constancy. You know that money has never been any consideration with me; and you ought to know that I would willingly lose every penny of my fortune rather than sacrifice my promise to you.”
“O yes; that’s all very well!” muttered Mr. Lowther peevishly, after having read this part of Miss Hillary’s epistle twice over; “but Lionel Hillary’s daughter with fifty thousand pounds or so, and without a penny, are two very different people. Not but what she’s always a beautiful girl and a charming girl; but a man can have his pick of charming and beautiful girls, if that’s all he wants to set him up in life. I love her, Heaven knows; and the sight of her writing sends a thrill through my veins like the touch of her hand, or the fluttering of her breath upon my cheek. But poverty makes a man practical, and I think I never read a letter that had less of the practical in it than this letter. It’s a woman’s epistle all over. We must be patient, and wait till we’re worn out by waiting, and the engagement between us becomes a chain that binds us both from better things, and the sound of each other’s name becomes a nuisance to us from its associations of trouble and responsibility. That’s what a long engagement generally comes to. If I’d distinguished myself in India, led a desperate charge against orders, or taken the gate of an Affghan fortress, or done something reckless and mad-headed and lucky, and could have gone back with a captaincy, and a dash of newspaper celebrity about my name, I might have hoped that old Hillary, in a moment of maudlin after-dinner generosity, would have given his consent to my marriage with Maude. But how am I to present myself at Twickenham, and say, ‘I have been taking care of convicts for the last two years,—not particularly well, for more convicts have escaped into the bush in my time than in any other man’s time, according to the reports,—and I have come back to England with the same rank that I had when I left, and with less money than I took away with me’? Can I go to Lionel Hillary and say that? Is that the sort of argument which will induce a man to give me his daughter and her fortune?”
He went back to Miss Hillary’s letter. It was only a frivolous letter, after all; and it contained more intelligence about a morning concert in Hanover Square, a regatta at Ryde, and a preternaturally sagacious Skye-terrier, than was likely to be gratifying to a discontented exile at Port Arthur. But Mr. Lowther was fain to content himself as he might with the pretty girlish gossip. It was something, after all his grumbling, to receive the assurance that he was not entirely forgotten by the only daughter and sole heiress of one of the richest merchants in the city of London.
He looked up presently from his letter, to see Francis Tredethlyn standing in the doorway between the two rooms, pale to the lips, and clutching at his throat as if he had some difficulty in breathing.
“What’s the matter, man?” asked the ensign; “hasn’t the old chap left you any money, after all?”
“It isn’t that, sir,” gasped the soldier; “there’s money enough and to spare. It’s my cousin Susy; that poor little innocent creature, that was as pure as the apple-blossoms on the gnarled old trees in the orchard when I left home. She’s done something, sir—something that turned her father against her. She’s gone away, sir, and no one knows where she’s gone, or what’s come of her, or whether she’s dead or alive. And her father disinherited her, poor lost lamb; and—that’ll tell you all about the fortune, sir, if you want to know about it.” Francis Tredethlyn threw the lawyer’s letter upon the table before his master, and walked away to the window—the same window at which the ensign had stood looking out at the convicts half an hour before.
Harcourt Lowther read the lawyer’s letter, at first with a listless, indifferent air, and then as eagerly as if he had been reading his own death-warrant. It was a long letter, worded in a very formal manner, but it set forth the fact that the fortune left by Oliver Tredethlyn to his nephew Francis amounted to something over thirty thousand a year.
For some minutes after this fact had been made clear to him Harcourt Lowther sat with the open letter before him, staring at the lines. Then suddenly the blank stupor upon his face gave way to a look of despair. The ensign flung his head and arms upon the table, and burst into tears.
“I have been eating my own heart in this place for nearly two years,” he sobbed, “and not one ray of light—no, by the heaven above me! not one—has dawned upon my life; and a valet, a private soldier, the fellow who scours my rooms and blacks my boots, has thirty thousand a year left him!”
There was something so terrible in this hysterical outburst of rage and envy, something so utterly piteous in this unmanly revolt against another man’s good fortune, that Francis Tredethlyn forgot his own trouble before the aspect of his master’s degradation.
“Don’t, sir,” he cried, “for God’s sake, don’t do that! All the riches in the world wouldn’t pay a man for taking on like that. If you want money, you’re welcome to borrow some of mine as soon as ever I get the power to lend it. There’s more than I care to have, or could ever spend. You’ll be welcome to what you want, Mr. Lowther. I don’t set much account upon money, and I don’t think I ever shall; and the thoughts of this fortune don’t give me half the pleasure I’ve felt in the gift of a crown-piece long ago, when I was a little lad. I suppose it was because I thought then there was nothing in all the world that five shillings wouldn’t buy, and because I’m wiser now, and know there are some things a million of money can’t purchase. The news of this money has brought the thoughts of my father and my mother back to me, Mr. Lowther. I’d give every sixpence of it, if it could bring back the past, and pay out the bailiff’s man that was sitting by our kitchen-fire at home when my mother lay ill up-stairs. But it can’t do that. My father and mother both died poor, and all this money can’t buy back one of the sorrowful days they spent in the old farm, when things went from bad to worse, and debt and ruin came down upon us. I don’t seem to care for the money, Mr. Lowther; I am dazed and bewildered, somehow, by the greatness of the sum, but I don’t seem to care.”
The ensign had calmed himself by this time. He got up and brushed the tears from his eyes, real tears of rage, envy, mortification, and despair. There was a faint blush upon his face, the one evidence of his shame which he could not suppress in a moment, but all other evidences of feeling had passed away.
“You’re a good fellow, Tredethlyn,” he said, “an excellent simple-hearted fellow; as simple-hearted as a baby,—for who but a baby ever talked as you talk about this money? and I congratulate you upon your good luck. I see these lawyer fellows send you a bill for a couple of hundred; that’ll buy you off here pleasantly, and get you back to England. My advice to you is to get back as fast as ever you can, and enter into possession of your property. It seems a complicated kind of estate from what I can make out—mining property, and agricultural property, and shares in half the speculations of modern times,—but it’s a great estate, and that’s all you want to know. Go back; and as soon as ever I can get away from this accursed hole, I’ll look you up in London; and I—I will borrow a little of that money you generously offer, and I’ll turn bear leader, and show you what life is in the upper circle, to which thirty thousand a year is the universal ‘open sesame.’”
The ensign slapped his hand upon his servant’s shoulder with a jovial air, and spoke almost as gaily as if Oliver Tredethlyn’s fortune was to be in some way or other a stroke of good luck for himself.
“Thank you, sir,” Francis answered, thoughtfully, “you’re very good; but I don’t care to force myself in among grand folks because I’m rich enough to do as they do. I’ve got a task before me, and it may be a long one.”
“A task!”
“Yes; I’ve got to look for my cousin.”
“Your cousin, Susan Tredethlyn!—the girl whose portrait you showed me?”
“Yes, sir. All this money would have been hers, most likely, if she hadn’t done something to turn my uncle against her. I can’t forget that, you see, sir; and the first use I make of the money will be to spend some of it in looking after her.”
“Susan Tredethlyn,” muttered Harcourt Lowther,—“Susan Tredethlyn. That portrait you showed me was a very bad one, for I haven’t the least notion of what your cousin is like.”
When the jaded horses of the “Electric” coach from Falmouth stopped before the Crown Inn at Landresdale, in the county of Cornwall, on the 13th of July, 1852, the landlord of the little hostelry was somewhat startled by an event which was of very rare occurrence in those parts. A passenger alighted from the back of the coach, and demanded his portmanteau from the guard,—a passenger who, carrying his portmanteau as easily as if it had been a parcel of flimsy milliner’s ware, walked straight to the little private parlour opposite the bar, and ensconced himself therein.
“I shall want my dinner, and a bed, Joseph Penruffin,” he said to the proprietor of the Crown. “You’d better see the coach off, and then you can come and talk to me.”
Mr. Penruffin retired aghast and staring.
“I don’t know who he is, Sarah,” he remarked to a comely-looking woman, who was sitting amongst a noble array of shelves and bottles in a shady little bar that seemed a good deal too small for such a portly presence. “His name’s as clean gone out of my mind as if I’d never set eyes upon him; but I know him, and he knows me, Sarah, for he called me by my name as glib as you please, and his face—Lord bless us and save us!—his face is as familiar to me as yourn.”
The passenger who had surprised the Crown Inn from its lazy tranquillity stood at the little window looking out at the coach. The passenger was Francis Tredethlyn, lately a foot-soldier in her Majesty’s service, now a gentleman of landed estate and funded property; but very little changed by the change in his fortune. As he had been independent and fearless in the days when he ruled his life by the orders of other men, so was he simple and unpretending now in the hour of his sudden prosperity. What he had said to his master in the cottage at Port Arthur in the first flush of his new fortunes appeared to be equally true of him now. He did not seem to care about his wealth. He was in no way elated by a change of fortune which would have sent some men into a madhouse.
“It seems to me, somehow, as if there was a kind of balance kept up in this world between good and evil, like the debtor and creditor sides of a ledger. I put down my uncle Oliver’s fortune on one side, and it looks as if I was the luckiest fellow in Christendom. But there’s the loss of poor little Susy must go down on the other side, and then the book looks altogether different. The loss of her—yes, the loss—that’s the word! If the earth had opened and swallowed her up, she couldn’t seem more lost to me than she is.”
The passengers of the “Electric” had recruited themselves by this time, and a fresh pair of horses had replaced the tired animals who now stood steaming in the great stable-yard. The coach rolled slowly off, along a road that lay straight before the windows of the Crown—a road that crept under the steep slope of a thickly wooded hill, defended by an old crumbling wall, which, even in its decay, was grander and stronger than any modern wall that ever girdled a modern gentleman’s estate. The dark-red brick wall, and all the sombre woods above it, belonged to the Marquis of Landresdale, upon whose mansion and estate the little town or village of Landresdale was a kind of dependant, the inhabitants being almost all of them supported indirectly or directly by the patronage of the great man and his household. By these simple people the Cornish nobleman was spoken of with awe and reverence as the “Marquis;” and that the world held any other creature with a claim to that title was a fact utterly ignored—it may be, even discredited—by the ratepayers of Landresdale. Under the shadow of Landresdale House they were born and lived; and in a church which was only a kind of mausoleum for the departed nobles and dames of the house of Landresdale they worshipped every sabbath-day, until in the minds of some hero-worshippers, the figure of the Marquis grew into a giant shape that blotted out all the world beyond Landresdale.
“How familiar the old place seems to me, and yet how strange!” thought Francis Tredethlyn, as he stood at the window. “There’s Jim Teascott the cobbler over the way, sitting in the very same attitude he was in when I stopped at the corner below to take my last look at Landresdale. But the street seems as if it had dwindled and shrunk away into half the size it used to be; and I feel as strange—as strange as if I’d been dead and buried, and had come to life again after folks had forgotten all about me; even the very seasons are all wrong, somehow, to my mind, as they might seem to a man that had been lying dead ever so long.”
Francis Tredethlyn rubbed his broad palm across his forehead, as if to clear some kind of cloud away from his intellect. It was scarcely strange that he should be confused and mystified by the seasons. He had left autumnal clouds and winds in the Antipodes; and after a hundred days or so at sea, he found a blazing July sky above his native land, and he felt as if he had, somehow or other, been cheated out of a winter. He looked at a little pocket-book, in which he had written some names and addresses and other memoranda, and in which the initials “S. T.” occurred very often. Those initials meant Susan Tredethlyn, and the memoranda in the pocket-book chiefly related to inquiries which Francis had made about his lost cousin.
Those inquiries had resulted in very little information. The lawyers had only been able to tell Francis the bare facts relating to his uncle’s death; how one day, when they least expected to see the old man, he had suddenly presented himself at their offices, very pale, very feeble, and with an awful something, which even they recognized as the sign-manual of the King of Terrors himself, imprinted on his haggard features: how he had seated himself quietly in his accustomed place, and had dictated to them, deliberately and unflinchingly, the terms of a will, by which he bequeathed every shilling he possessed to his nephew, Francis Tredethlyn; how, when they, as in duty bound, remonstrated with him about the injustice that such a will would inflict upon his only daughter, a hideous frown had distorted his face, and he had struck his clenched fist upon the office-table, crying, with the most horrible imprecation ever uttered in that place, that no penny of his getting should ever go to save his daughter from rotting in a workhouse or starving to death on the king’s highway;—he had said this, and in such a manner as most effectually to put an end to all remonstrance on the part of his solicitors. This was all that the lawyers could tell Francis Tredethlyn about his cousin Susan; but they had gone on to tell him how his uncle had insisted on leaving the office alone and on foot; how he had walked the best part of the way from Gray’s Inn to an old-fashioned commercial inn in the Borough, and how he had broken down at last, only a hundred yards from his destination, and had fainted away on the threshold of a chemist’s shop, whence he had been carried to his death-bed. This had happened on the 30th of June in the preceding year; and this was all that the lawyers had to tell Francis Tredethlyn, over and above such intelligence as related only to the extent and nature of the property bequeathed to him by his late uncle.
But in Landresdale the name of Oliver Tredethlyn was almost as well known as that of the Marquis himself; and in Landresdale Francis hoped to learn the true story of his cousin’s fate. He stood now looking out of the window into the rustic highway, as quiet in the summer evening calm as if it had been a street in one of the buried cities of Italy, as peaceful in its drowsy aspect as if no palpitating human heart had ever carried its daily burden of care and sorrow along the narrow footways, beneath the shadow of the peaked roofs and quaint abutting upper stories. He stood looking out, and remembering himself a boy in that old hill-side street; he stood there now, wondering alike at the past and the present, which by contrast seemed both equally strange and unnatural; he stood there in all the flush and vigour of his youth, a tall, broad-shouldered, simple-hearted soldier, with a fortune far exceeding the narrow limits of his arithmetical powers, as ignorant of all the real world that lay before him as a little country lad who rides to town upon the top of a load of hay and expects to find the streets paved with gold, and the Queen dressed in her crown and robes, and sitting on her throne with the ball and sceptre in her hands for ever and ever.
The landlord of the Crown came bustling in presently with a wooden tray of knives and forks, and glasses and cruets, that would have amply served for a dinner-party of half-a-dozen. He laid the cloth with great ceremony, although with a certain air of briskness inseparable from innkeeping, even in the laziest and dullest village in all England; and he kept a furtive watch upon his guest throughout all his operations, from the preparatory polishing down of the mahogany table, to the final flourish with which he removed a very large cover from a very small rumpsteak.
“I think I ought to know you, sir,” he said, courteously, as Francis Tredethlyn seated himself at the table.
“I think you ought, Joseph Penruffin; I think you ought to remember Francis Tredethlyn, son of your old friend John Tredethlyn, of Pen Gorbold, who was a little bit too friendly in this house, perhaps, for his own prosperity.”
“Francis Tredethlyn!” cried the landlord, clapping his hand upon his knee, “Francis Tredethlyn! To be sure it is! To think that I should forget a face that was once as familiar to me as my own son’s! Francis Tredethlyn! Why, I remember you a lad playing cricket on the green yonder with my own boys. And you’ve come into a very fine fortune, sir, I understand; and I hope you will excuse the liberty, if I make so bold as to wish you every happiness with it, Francis Tredethlyn. Lord bless us and save us! why, I can remember you a little bit of a toddling child coming into Landresdale Church with your mother on a summer Sunday morning, as if it was yesterday! I ask pardon for being so bold and free-like, but the sight of your face takes me back to old times, and I’m apt to forget myself.”
Mr. Penruffin’s mind was curiously divided between the memories of the past and his desire to be duly reverential to Francis Tredethlyn’s new fortunes. The young man smiled as he recognized the influence of his newly acquired wealth at war with the associations of his boyhood. He had seen pretty much the same thing in the office of Messrs. Krusdale and Scardon. He was beginning already to perceive that an income of thirty thousand a year made a kind of barrier between himself and poorer men, and that they regarded him with the same feeling of mingled reverence and familiarity with which they would have looked at a very ordinary statue seen across a wonderful screen of virgin gold.
“And the sight of your face takes me back to old times, Mr. Penruffin,” he said, with rather a mournful accent, “and I’d freely give half this great fortune of mine if I could bring back one of those summer Sunday mornings in the old church, and see myself a little fellow again, trudging by my mother’s side, with a green-baize bag of prayer-books on my arm. I’d give five thousand pounds for a silk-dress I saw in a Plymouth draper’s fifteen years ago, when I was too poor to do any thing but wish for it, if my mother were alive to wear it. I used to think, when I was a lad, of what I’d buy for my mother out of the first five-pound note I ever earned; and now I’ve got thirty thousand a year, and there’s nothing upon all this earth that I can buy for her, except a gravestone to mark the spot where she lies.”
“Thirty thousand a year!” muttered the landlord, in an undertone, which had just a tinge of disappointment in it. The Landresdale people had given their imaginations free play since the death of Oliver Tredethlyn, and the old man’s fortune had swelled into almost fabulous proportions with the lapse of time; so thirty thousand didn’t seem so very much, after all. There had been an idea in Landresdale that Francis Tredethlyn would most likely buy up the Marquis’s estate off-hand, and if practicable make a handsome offer for the purchase of the title.
“I am sure, sir, your feelings do you credit,” said Mr. Penruffin, after that brief sense of disappointment; “I may say very great credit,” he added, with emphasis,—as if any display of feeling from the possessor of thirty thousand a year were specially meritorious. “I suppose you have come down this way to survey your property, sir; to look about you a little, eh?” inquired the landlord of the Crown, when Francis had finished his frugal dinner.
“Not I,” the young man answered; “I scarcely know what my property is yet, though the lawyers told me a long rigmarole about it. No, I’ve come on a very different errand,” he added gravely. “You remember my cousin, Susan Tredethlyn, I dare say? I have come to look for her.”
Joseph Penruffin shook his head solemnly, and breathed a long sigh that was almost a groan.
“If that’s your errand here, sir, I’m afraid it isn’t likely to be a very fortunate one. Folks in Landresdale never expect to see Susan Tredethlyn again; she went away from the farm four years ago; no one knows exactly where she went; no one knows why she went. There’s your uncle’s old servants, Mr. Tredethlyn, of course they might have said something, if they’d liked to it. But you may as well go and question the tombstones in Landresdale churchyard as question them. All I know, or all anybody knows in this place is, that your cousin Susan went away and never came back again; and it stands to reason that she must have done something very bad indeed, and made her father very desperate against her, before the old man would have gone and left all his money away from her—meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but only looking at it in the light of human nature in general,” added the landlord, apologetically.
“I’ll never believe that Susan Tredethlyn did any thing wicked or unwomanly till her own lips tell me so,” cried Francis, bringing his hand heavily down on the table. “She may have made my uncle desperate against her, that’s likely enough, for he was always hard with her; and when I think of his having hoarded all this money, and remember the life my cousin Susan used to lead, I can scarcely bring myself to believe that she was his own flesh and blood. I’ll never believe that she did any thing wrong. I’ll never believe that she could grow to be any thing different from what she was when I left home,—an innocent, modest little creature, who was almost frightened of her own pretty looks when she caught a sight of herself in a glass. But I’m going up to the old house; and if Martha Dryscoll or her husband know any thing of my lost cousin, I’ll get the knowledge from them, though I have to wring it out of their wizened old throats.”
The young man rose as he said this, and took his hat and stick from a chair near the window. Joseph Penruffin watched him with something like alarm upon his countenance.
“You’ll sleep here to-night, sir?” he asked.
“Yes; I’m going straight up to the Grange, and I don’t know how long I may be gone; but I’ll come back here to sleep. I should scarcely fancy lying down in one of those dreary old rooms; I should expect to see the wandering spirit of my lost cousin come and look in at me from the darkness outside my window. No; however late I may be, I’ll come back here to sleep.”
“And perhaps you’d like some little trifle for supper, sir, having made such an uncommon poor dinner,” suggested the landlord,—“a chicken and a little bit of grass, or a tender young duck and a dish of peas?”
But Francis Tredethlyn was walking up the little village street out of earshot of these savoury suggestions before the landlord had finished his sentence.
“I don’t call that manners,” muttered Mr. Penruffin; “but I shall cook the chicken for ten o’clock, and chance it; he can afford to pay for it, whether he eats it or not. And I think, taking into consideration old acquaintance and thirty thousand a year, it would only have been friendly in Francis Tredethlyn if he’d ordered a bottle of wine with his dinner.”
The sun was low when Francis Tredethlyn left the Crown Inn, and walked slowly up the village street. The sun was low, and already a crimson glory flickered here and there upon the quaint old casements. The young man walked slowly, looking about him with a half-doubtful, half-bewildered gaze, like a man who sees his native village in a dream. And indeed no village in the vision of a sleeper could be more tranquil in its rustic repose than this Cornish street, steep and stony, mounting to the summit of a hill, upon whose top the great gates of Landresdale loomed grim and stately, like the entrance to an ogre’s castle in fairyland. You climbed the steep little street; and you came to the big gates of Landresdale; and that was all. The village ended here; and there was nothing for you to do but to go back again. It was like coming to the end of the world, and finding a great Elizabethan door of ponderous oak and iron barred against any chaotic realm that might lie beyond our every-day earth. There may have been occasions—indeed, the inhabitants of Landresdale would have testified to many such—on which those ponderous doors swung open on their mighty hinges: but the ignorant traveller, looking at them shut, found it difficult to realize the possibility of their ever being opened. They looked like the doors of a mausoleum: which may open once in half a century to admit the coffined dead, but can never be unclosed for any meaner purpose. Grim towers flanked the stony arch on either side, and two old rusty cannon displayed their iron noses within the shadow of the towers, ready to fire a volley down the hilly street whenever the simple folks of Landresdale should evince any revolutionary tendencies.
To the right of the great gates there was a handsome wing of solid masonry, whose Tudor windows opened upon a square courtyard, where there were more cannon, and upon a prim, old-fashioned garden, shut in by a high wall, and only visible to the wanderer through the iron rails and arabesques of a lofty gate, amidst whose scrollwork the arms of the Landresdales and Treverbyns, the Courtenays and Polwheles, were interlaced and entangled.
The garden wall bounded the estate of Rashleigh Vyvyan Trevannence, Marquis of Landresdale; and beneath the shelter of that old ivy-covered red brick wall lay the churchyard, quiet and shadowy, dark with the dense foliage of great yew-trees, thick with long tangled grass, that grew high amongst the slanting headstones. Francis Tredethlyn stopped by the low wooden gate, and leaning against the moss-grown pillar that supported it, looked up at the square towers which seemed like stony sentinels for ever keeping guard over the entrance to Landresdale. The light was red upon the corner window that faced the western sky, but all the other casements stared blankly and darkly out upon the graves in the churchyard, and the empty village street, in which one woman, toiling slowly upwards with a pitcher of water that slopped and trickled at intervals upon the pavement, was the only living presence.
“The great gates look just the same as they used to look,” thought Francis Tredethlyn. “When I was a boy, and read fairy-tales, I always fancied that the enchanted castle the wandering prince came to in the middle of a wood, or on the summit of a great mountain, was like Landresdale, a castle standing all alone in the middle of the way, with no road to the right nor to the left, so that the prince must go in and ask shelter, though he knew that harm would come of it, or else go back and lose all the trouble of his journey. How I used to long to pull that bell when I was a lad!” thought Francis, looking at the iron ring which swung from a massive chain on one side of the archway.
“But I’ve no need to dawdle here,” he thought, as he pushed the gate open and went into the churchyard. “It seems as if the nearer I get to the place where I am certain to hear the truth about Susan, the more I dread hearing it.”
The ignorant traveller who might turn away from the great gates of Landresdale to descend the hill under the impression that the county of Cornwall came to an abrupt termination upon the threshold of the Marquis’s domain, would have been mistaken. There were other and higher lands, broad stretches of hill and moorland, lying beyond the churchyard, to the right of the quaint old garden and the Gothic towers and casements: and it was thitherward that Francis Tredethlyn directed his steps. He crossed the churchyard, only pausing briefly before one tombstone, upon which the names of Sarah and John Tredethlyn were cut, low down on the stone, at the bottom of a long list of Tredethlyns, who lay buried in that churchyard. The young man let himself out of the solemn precinct by a little rusty iron gate that opened on a broad expanse of common land sloping upward towards the western sky, and only broken here and there by a quarry or a patch of water.
“It looks bleak and barren enough,” thought Francis, with a shudder; “but it’s hereabouts that my uncle Oliver picked up a good bit of his money. The tin mines lie out yonder; and the stone quarry in the hollow there brought him in plenty, if folks tell the truth.”
Francis Tredethlyn might have echoed the boast of Helen Macgregor had he chosen, and with stronger justification than that lady, for the earth upon which he trod was not only his native land but his own peculiar property, by virtue of certain yellow-looking parchments under the sign-manual of an Earl and Baron of Landresdale who flourished in the reign of James I. and by payment of an eccentric annual tribute in the shape of a young doe and a hundredweight of virgin tin. It was all his own, this bleak waste land which Francis Tredethlyn, late private soldier in her Majesty’s service, late valet to a capricious master, now trod under his feet. Nor was it the less to be considered for its barrenness of aspect, for rich metals lay deep below the heathery surface, in mines that were amongst the oldest and most valuable in Cornwall.
But Francis Tredethlyn was in no wise elated or disturbed by the importance of his possession. He had never felt any ardent desire for wealth, and as yet he had not begun to realize its manifold advantages. He saw the effect of his fortune upon other men, and smiled at their weakness; but what had been true of him in the first hour of his altered position was true of him now,—he had no power either to realize or rejoice in the extent of his riches.
He walked slowly across the barren moorland, always upward, always mounting towards a long ridge of western hill, behind which two streaks of yellow light stretched low against the darkening sky,—a bleak, bare-looking hill, that seemed the very end of the world. It was upon this hillside that Tredethlyn Grange had been built four centuries ago, in the days when men built their houses with a view to endurance; and it stood there still, a long gray tenement of moss-grown stone, with narrow casement windows, looking darkly out upon the twilight moor. The larger portion of the old house had been uninhabited during the tenantship of the Tredethlyns, who, in a spirit of economy, had located themselves in the interior rooms lying at one end of the rambling mansion. It was in one of these rooms that a light now twinkled faintly; and it was towards this end of the house that Francis Tredethlyn directed his steps. There had been a moat once on two sides of the house, but cabbages now grew upon the sloping earth. There had been a garden once before the Grange, and an old stone sun-dial still marked the spot; but of all the trim flower-beds and angular paths there remained no vestige now. A field of trefoil, bounded by a low stone wall, lay beyond two broken pillars that had once supported a pair of handsome gates; and the sheep browsed close beneath the dim latticed windows.
“It seems like the end of the world to me to-night,” thought Mr. Tredethlyn; “and yet once it was comfortable and home-like enough, when I sat with Susy of a night by the fire in the kitchen, while she darned the old man’s gray worsted stockings. And to think that he had such oceans of money all that time, and yet seemed almost to grudge his only child every gown she wore, and every bit of bread she put into her mouth.” The young man was close to the familiar threshold by this time. He knocked at a low, narrow door in the neighbourhood of the one dimly lighted window, and then drew back a few paces, looking up at the old-fashioned casements.
“This is the window of Susy’s room,” he thought. “How black and dark it looks to-night! I remember coming up here the night before I ran away to Falmouth to enlist. I remember standing by the low wall yonder, in the cold autumn night, looking up at that very window. There was a light burning then, and I thought of how I should see it burning just the same when I came back, and how I’d throw a handful of earth up at the old window, and Susy would look out, startled and wondering, to find her faithful sweetheart come back to her from the end of the world. And now it’s this place that seems like the end of the world somehow, and I’m every bit as far from Susy now as ever I was out yonder.”
The door was opened only a very little way, and a woman’s face, so hard and angular that it seemed almost to cut into the dusky atmosphere, peered out at the traveller.
“What do you please to want, sir?” she asked, suspiciously.
“I want to ask you a few questions, Martha Dryscoll. I’ve come from the Antipodes to ask them.”
“Mr. Tredethlyn!” cried the woman, opening the door to its widest extent; “Mr. Francis Tredethlyn come home to his own like a ghost in the night! I make so bold as to bid you welcome, sir. Your uncle’s empty chair stands ready for you. The house seems strange and lonesome without him.”
It was not everybody who would have ascribed to Mr. Oliver Tredethlyn the power to enliven any house with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, or brighten any fireside with so much as the faintest glimmer of light. But Martha Dryscoll spoke in all good faith. She had believed in her master, and had worked for him, and pinched for him, and half-starved herself and other people for his sake, throughout five-and-thirty years of the dreariest and hardest life that woman ever endured. He had picked her up, starved and almost dying, upon a high road near one of his outlying farms, and had taken her from field-labour and all its attendant pains, to be his housekeeper and—slave; and she had repaid this favour a thousandfold by a devotion that knew no weariness, and a rigid economy that extended itself to the saving of a grain of salt in the old spindle-legged leaden saltcellars.
Oliver Tredethlyn had not been actuated by any Quixotic motive in this eccentric choice of a servant. He took his housekeeper from the wayside because he saw in her a stuff he had vainly sought in the pampered menials who had hitherto presented themselves to his notice. He had been attracted to Martha in the first instance by her gaunt face and gaunter figure, which would have been sufficiently alarming in one of King Frederick William’s chosen grenadiers. He had been attracted still more by her curt answers to his curt questions, in which she told him that she had walked thirty miles that day before lying down, as she believed, to die; that she had walked twenty miles the day before, and five-and-twenty the day before that; that she had not tasted food for the last eight-and-forty hours; and that she had worked in the fields and lived upon an average of two-pence a day ever since she could remember.
It was upon this that a bargain was struck between Oliver Tredethlyn, of Tredethlyn Grange, of the one part, and Martha Blank, Martha Anybody, of the other part, for the poor creature had no knowledge of any special surname to which she might lay claim. She had been called Carroty Jane in one place because her hair was red and her name was not Jane. She had been called Gawky Bet, and Lanky Poll, at other places, on account of her abnormal height; but the name she had received in the Union, where her earlier years had been passed, was Martha, and it was this name which she herself recognised as her legitimate appellation. She went home with Oliver Tredethlyn in one of his empty waggons, and ate her first spare meal in the Grange kitchen before nightfall; and from that hour until the old man’s death she served him well and faithfully. She lived with him all the days of his bachelorhood, and resignedly united herself to his bailiff when he commanded her so to do. This faithful creature welcomed Mr. Tredethlyn’s wife when he took it into his head to bring home a small tenant-farmer’s pretty daughter, who had been forced into a marriage with a man whom she detested; and, faithful and untiring to the last, this rough-handed, brawny-armed servant watched by the young wife’s sick bed during those dull years in which she slowly withered and faded, from a fresh, blooming girl, into a prematurely old woman, and so sank by lingering stages into an early grave, leaving behind her one only child, whose infancy and girlhood were brightened by no softer light than such as might be shed from the grim, grenadier-like affection of Martha Dryscoll.
Jonathan Dryscoll, the farm-bailiff whom Oliver Tredethlyn had desired his housekeeper to marry, was ten years younger than his wife, and was so poor and weak a creature morally and physically in her hands, that he seemed at least half a century her junior. If she told him to do anything, he did it. If she told him to think anything, he thought it; or would have done so, if the mental exercise had not been generally beyond the scope of his faculties. He was as honest and faithful as Martha herself; but if Martha had told him to go and fire all the ricks on Oliver Tredethlyn’s property, he would have done it with the blind trustfulness of a princess in a child’s story-book, who obeys the eccentric behests of a fairy godmother. That Martha Dryscoll could do anything wrong, or think anything wrong, was an hypothesis which Jonathan her husband had never contemplated. Perhaps the pleasantest thing about this couple was that there was no disagreeable evidence of Martha’s authority. Indeed, that worthy woman was most punctilious in respect to her liege lord and husband, whom she always spoke of as “the master.” Jonathan obeyed and trembled, but the sceptre which his wife wielded was an invisible one, and the chains that bound her slave were as impalpable as if they had been fashioned of cobwebs.
Martha Dryscoll was not renowned for her capacity of expressing any species of emotion; but some faint ray of pleasure kindled in her grim face as she conducted Francis Tredethlyn through the kitchen to an apartment that had served as a kind of state chamber for three generations of his race. She set the candle on the polished mahogany table, and, folding her arms, contemplated the new master of the Grange at her leisure. In that dim light, in her quaint, scanty dress, with a brown background of oaken wainscot behind her, she looked like a quaint figure in one of Jan Steen’s pictures, a hard-faced, angular housewife, honest, laborious, and economical, with her ear perpetually open to the leaking of beer-barrels, or the boiling-over of soup-kettles; her eye ever on the alert to perceive waste or destruction.
“I wish you welcome, Mr. Tredethlyn,” she said; and then, with something like sadness in her tone, “If the money was to go away from her, better that it should go to you than to strangers. I don’t think that you’d turn your back upon her, if she was to need your help; would you now, Mr. Francis?”
“Turn my back upon her!” cried the young man,—“turn my back upon my cousin Susy! Do you think I want the money that ought to have been hers? With God’s blessing, I will go to the end of the world to find my poor little girl. But tell me—tell me all about it, Martha. I know you are a good creature. I know you were fond of Susan, though you seemed hard and stern, like the old man. Tell me all you know about my lost cousin, and don’t fear but I’ll make good use of my knowledge.”
“It isn’t much I have to tell, sir,” answered the housekeeper, very gravely. “You remember old Mr. Restwick, of Pen Gorbold. Folks say that he’s almost as rich as our master was. However it is, he and master were always fast friends; and when Mrs. Restwick had been dead a little over a twelvemonth, he and master seemed to get friendlier than ever, and was always laying their heads together about something, old Restwick hanging about this place, and sitting in our kitchen, and in this very room—for master made quite a fuss with the old man, and would sit in the parlour on his account—all the summer time. Miss Susan usen’t to like the old man, but she daredn’t say as much, seeing as he was her father’s friend. Heaven, as looks down upon me, knows, Mr. Francis, than the real reason of old Restwick pottering about our place night after night never came into my head, no more than if it had been so much Greek or Latin. But one night—one quiet summer evening, after such a day as to-day—the truth came out all at once; and it came upon Susan Tredethlyn as it came upon me—like a thunderbolt. Can you guess what it was, Mr. Francis?”
“No!” exclaimed the young man, staring at Martha Dryscoll with a bewildered expression on his face.
“Nor any one else, Mr. Francis, that wasn’t so wrapped up in the love of his money that the very heart inside of him had turned to stuff as hard as big golden guineas, or harder; for there’s some kind of furnace as will melt them, isn’t there, Mr. Francis? On the night I am telling you of, my master told Susan the meaning of old Restwick’s visits. She was to marry him—poor, pretty young thing. He’d promise to make such and such—settlements—I think master called ’em, and she’d be mistress of Pen Gorbold farm, and one of the richest women in this part of the country. The poor dear only gave one shriek, Mr. Francis, and fell down upon the floor at her father’s feet as white and as quiet as a corpse.”
“The hard-hearted villain!” cried Francis, pacing up and down the room; “the infernal villain!”
“She didn’t lie there long; she wasn’t let to do that. Mr. Tredethlyn lifted her up by the arm, and set her on her feet, fierce and savage-like; and when she opened her eyes, and looked about her, all stupefied and bewildered, he began to talk to her. It was cruel talk to hear from a father to his child; it was a cruel sight to see her trembling and shivering, and only held from falling by his hard hand clenched upon her arm. I tried to interfere between them, Mr. Francis; but my master let his daughter drop into a chair, and pushed me out of the room. Me and Jonathan was sleeping in the room over the stables then, and Mr. Tredethlyn took me by the shoulders, and put me out of the door that opens from the kitchen into the stone-yard at back. I heard the door bolted against me, and I knew I could be no help or comfort to that poor child all night. The door’s thick, but I could just hear Susan Tredethlyn’s sobs now and then, like as if they’d been blown towards me on the winds, and her father’s voice speaking loud and stern; I listened till all seemed quiet, and I was in hopes his heart was softened towards her. But when I got up at four o’clock next morning—for it was harvest-time, and we were very busy—Susan Tredethlyn’s room was empty, and the front door was unlocked and unbolted. She’d run away, Mr. Francis; she’d let herself out some time in the night, and run away. There was a little scrap of a shawl she used to wear hanging to the latch of the door. That was bad news for me to tell my master, Mr. Francis; but I had to tell it. He turned white, and glared at me for a minute just like a wild beast, and there was a choking, gurgling kind of noise in his throat. But he was as quiet after that one minute as if he had been made of iron. ‘So much the better, Mrs. Dryscoll,’ he said, ‘an undutiful daughter isn’t worth the meat she eats.’”
“But he went after her,” said Francis; “surely he made some attempt to bring her back? He didn’t let a poor ignorant girl go out into the world without a friend—without a sixpence?”
“She had a little money, Mr. Francis. Her father had given her a sovereign on her birthday every year for the last ten years, making her promise to save the money. She had saved the money, for she had no chance to spend it, poor child; and she took that money with her, for when I looked about her room I missed the little box she used to keep it in. As to looking for her, Mr. Tredethlyn never stirred hand or foot to do it, though I went on my bended knees to him, begging and praying of him to bring her back. As to me, Mr. Francis, I’m but a poor ignorant countrywoman, that never learned to read and write till I was getting on for thirty; but I got my husband to go to Falmouth with an advertisement for the county paper, saying as ‘S. T. was to remember she had a true friend in M. D., and was to be sure and write to her whenever she wanted help.’ I daredn’t say more, sir; and I think when master saw that advertisement he knew what it meant, for he glared at me across the paper, just as he glared at me when I told him his daughter was gone.”
“And he never relented—he never softened towards that poor unhappy girl?”
“For three years, sir, he never mentioned her name. Night after night he’d sit and write, and make out his accounts, and calculate his profits, and such-like, and he’d talk to me fast enough about the business of the farm; but he never spoke his daughter’s name. One day he got a letter directed in her hand. I took it from the postman at Landresdale myself one afternoon when I was down there marketing, and I wrote down the post-mark that was on it, and that was all I ever knew of that letter. When my master saw the hand, he came over all of a tremble like, and there was something awful in the sight of that stern old man trembling and shivering like as if he had been stricken by the palsy; but he got over it in a minute, and read the letter, me watching him all the time. If his face had been stone, it couldn’t have told less. He crumpled up the letter and put it in his pocket, and for three months he never spoke of that nor of his daughter. Yet I knew somehow that he thought of her; for a kind of change came over him, and he seemed always brooding, brooding, brooding; and he’d start up all of a sudden when we was all sitting of a night quiet in this kitchen—he’d start up as if he was going right away, and then heave a long sigh, and sit down again. But he never said anything about what was in his thoughts, till one morning he came to me, and said very quietly, ‘Pack me some clothes in a carpet-bag, Mrs. Dryscoll. I’m going to London to look for my daughter.’ My husband and him went on foot down to Landresdale to catch the Falmouth coach; but our master never came back. The next news as we heard of him, Mr. Francis, came to us a month after he’d left. It was a letter from the lawyers, to say that Mr. Oliver Tredethlyn was dead.”
“And is that all?”
“Yes, Mr. Francis; I can tell you no more. My master was a good master to me, and I served him faithfully, and worked hard to save his money. But things have all seemed to come before me in a new light since that night when I saw Susan Tredethlyn fall white and cold at her father’s feet, and him without pity for her. It seems as if I’d been stone-blind up to that time, Mr. Francis; and my eyes was opened all of a sudden; and I saw that we’d been all wicked heathens, making an idol out of money that had never brought happiness or comfort to any living creature; least of all to ourselves. I saw it all at once that night, Mr. Francis, and I knew that our lives had been wrong somehow.”
Martha Dryscoll spoke very earnestly. She was a good woman, after her own manner; eager to do her duty to the uttermost, grateful for small favours, faithful and affectionate. A noble heart beat in that grenadier-like form, a gentle spirit looked out of those hard gray eyes. She told the story of her young mistress’s flight with a sorrowful solemnity, undisturbed by tears. Perhaps her hard childhood, her bitter youth, her joyless middle life had dried up the source of that tender womanly emotion; for Martha Dryscoll had never been seen by living witnesses to shed a tear. She unlocked a grim-looking workbox, and took from it a little pocket-book, out of which she tore a leaf.
“That’s the name that was on the post-mark, Mr. Francis,” she said, handing the paper to Mr. Tredethlyn.
The young man read the word Coltonslough.
“Coltonslough,” he repeated, “I never heard of a place of that name. But I’ll find it, if it’s the most obscure spot upon the earth. God bless you, Martha Dryscoll, for I believe you’re a good woman.”
He held out his hand, and grasped the housekeeper’s bony fingers as he spoke.
“We’ve been awaiting—me and the master—for orders from you as to what we was to do, sir. We’re ready to serve you faithful, if you want our service; but we’re ready to leave the old place, if we’re any burden upon you. You’ll be coming to settle here, maybe?”
“No,” answered Francis Tredethlyn, with something of a shudder. “If I’d found Susan here, as I once thought to find her, I should have been glad enough to settle somewhere in these parts. As it is, there’s something in the place that gives me the heartache, and I doubt if I shall ever come near it again. Whatever wages you and your husband had in my uncle’s time shall be doubled from to-night, Mrs. Dryscoll; and if my cousin Susan is still alive, and should ever find her way back to this place, I should like her to see a light burning in the old window, and to find a faithful friend ready to bid her welcome home.”
Francis Tredethlyn did not linger very long in the house where a great part of his boyhood had been spent. Martha’s husband came in presently, smelling very strongly of cowhouse and stable, and the two would fain have given Mr. Tredethlyn a detailed account of their stewardship: but the young man had no heart to listen to them. What did it matter to him that he was the poorer by the death of an Alderney cow on the pasture-farm down in the valley, or the richer by a great sheep-shearing season on the hill? He came home to find no creature of his kith or kin. He stood as much alone in the world as Adam before Eve was created to bear him company; and he felt very desolate in spite of his thirty thousand a year.
He walked back to Landresdale across the bleak moorland under the still summer night. Away in the distance he saw the dark expanse of purple ocean melting imperceptibly into purple sky: and vague and dim as that shadowy distance seemed the unknown future that lay before him. He slept at the Crown, and left Landresdale early the next morning by the Falmouth coach, journeying Londonward: but he had by no means abandoned his search for Susan Tredethlyn.