Melrose received these various items of information half scornfully, half greedily; it might have been guessed that his interest in the teller was a good deal keener than his interest in the things told. The conversation revealed to Netta phases in her husband's existence wholly unknown to her. So Edmund had been in Rome—for two or three years—in the Embassy! That she had never known. He seemed also to have been an English member of Parliament for a time. In any case he had lived, apparently for years, like other men of his kind—shooting, racing, visiting, travelling, fighting, elections. She could not fit the facts to which both alluded with her own recollections of the misanthrope who had first made acquaintance with her and her family in Florence three years before this date; and her bewilderment grew.
As for the others, they had soon, it seemed, completely forgotten the thin sallow-faced wife, who sat with her back to the window, restlessly twisting her rings.
Presently Melrose stopped abruptly—in front of Lady Tatham.
"Where is Edith?" He bent forward peremptorily, his hand on the table, his eyes on the lady's face.
"At the Cape with her husband."
"Has she found him out yet?"
"There's nothing to find out. He's an excellent fellow."
"A stupid prig," said Melrose passionately. "Well, you did it!—You did it!"
"Yes, I did it." Lady Tatham rose quietly. She had paled, and after a minute's hesitation she held out her hand to Melrose. "Suppose, Edmund, we bury the hatchet. I should like to be friends with you and your wife, if you would allow it?"
The change of manner was striking. Up to this moment Lady Tatham had been, so to speak, the aggressor, venturing audaciously on ground which she knew to be hostile—from bravado?—or for some hidden reason? But she spoke now with seriousness—even with a touch of womanly kindness.
Melrose looked at her furiously.
"Lady Tatham, I advise you to leave us alone!"
She sighed, met his eyes a moment, gravely, then turned to Netta.
"Mrs. Melrose, your husband and I have an old quarrel. He wanted to marry my sister. I prevented it. She is married now—and he is married. Why shouldn't we make friends?"
"Quarrels are very foolish!" said Netta, sententiously, straightening her small shoulders. But she dared not look at Melrose.
"Well, tell him so," laughed Lady Tatham. "And come and see me at Duddon
Castle."
"Thank you! I should like to!" cried Netta.
"My wife has no carriage, Lady Tatham."
"Oh, Edmund—we might hire something," said his wife imploringly.
"I do not permit it," he said resolutely. "Good-bye, Lady Tatham. You are like all women—you think the cracked vase will hold water. It won't."
"What are you going to do here, Edmund?"
"I am a collector—and works of art amuse me."
"And I can do nothing—for you—or your wife?"
"Nothing. I am sorry if you feel us on your mind. Don't. I would have gone farther from you, if I could. But seven miles—are seven miles."
Lady Tatham coloured. She shook hands with Netta.
Melrose held the door open for her. She swept through the hall, and hurried into her carriage. She and Melrose touched hands ceremoniously, and the brougham with its fine roan horses was soon out of sight.
A miserable quarrel followed between the husband and wife. Netta, dissolved in hysterical weeping, protested that she was a prisoner and an exile, that Edmund had brought her from Italy to this dreary place to kill her, that she couldn't and wouldn't endure it, and that return to Italy she must and would, if she had to beg her way. It was cruel to shut her up in that awful house, to deny her the means of getting about, to treat people who wished to be kind to her as Edmund had treated Lady Tatham. She was not a mere caterpillar to be trodden on. She would appeal to the neighbours—she would go home to her parents, etcetera—etcetera.
Melrose at first tried to check her by sarcasm—a banter that stung where it lit. But when she would not be checked, when she followed him into his study, wailing and accusing, a whirlwind of rage developed in the man, and he denounced her with a violence and a brutality which presently cowed her. She ran shivering upstairs to Anastasia and the baby, bolted her door, and never reappeared till, twenty-four hours later, she crept down white and silent, to find a certain comfort in Thyrza's rough ministrations. Melrose seemed to be, perhaps, a trifle ashamed of his behaviour; and they patched up a peace over the arrangements for the heating of the house on which for once he had the grace to consult her.
The winter deepened, and Christmas came. On the mountain-tops the snow lay deep, and when Netta—who on many days never left the house—after walking a while up and down the long corridor for the sake of exercise, would sink languidly on the seat below its large western window, she looked out upon a confusion of hills near and far, drawn in hard white upon an inky sky. To the south the Helvellyn range stretched in bold-flung curves and bosses; in the far distance rose the sharper peaks of Derwentwater; while close at hand Blencathra with its ravines, and all the harsh splendour of its white slopes and black precipices, alternately fascinated and repelled the little Southerner, starved morally and physically for lack of sun.
Even for Cumbria it was a chill and sunless winter. No bracing frosts, and persistent northwesterly winds. Day after day the rain, which was snow on the heights, poured down. Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite rose till they mingled in one vast lake. The streams thundered from the fells; every road was a water-course.
Netta lost flesh and appetite. She was a discontented and ailing woman, and the Dixons could not but notice her fragile state. Mrs. Dixon thought her "nobbut a silly sort of body," but would sometimes try to cook what pleased her, or let Anastasia use the kitchen fire for "gnocchi" or "risotto" or other queer messes; which, however, when they appeared, were generally more relished by the master than the mistress.
Dixon, perceiving no signs of any desire on Netta's part to attend the "papish" chapel ten miles away, began to plot for her soul. His own life was in the little Methodist chapel to which he walked four miles every Sunday, wet or fine. In the summer he had accompanied the minister and one or two class leaders in a drive through the hayfields, shouting to the haymakers—"We're going to heaven!—won't you come with us!"—and he had been known to spend five hours at a stretch on his knees wrestling for the salvation of a drunken friend, in the village of Threlkeld. But Netta baffled him. Sometimes he would come home from chapel, radiant, and would take her a bunch of holly for the table by way of getting into conversation with her. "It was fine to-day, Missis! There was three found peace. And the congregation was grand! There was four attorneys—two of 'em from as far as Pengarth." And he would lend her tracts—and even offer, good man, to borrow a "shandrey" from a neighbour, and drive her himself to the chapel service. But Netta only smiled or yawned at him; and as for the tracts, she hid them under the few sofa cushions the house possessed.
Mr. Tyson, the agent, came to the house as seldom as he could, that he might not quarrel with his employer before it was to his own interest to do so. Netta discovered that he pitied her; and once or twice, drawing on the arts of flirtation, with which the Florentine woman is always well acquainted, she complained to him of her loneliness and her husband's unkindness. But his north-country caution protected him from any sentimentalizing, however innocent. And before the end of the winter Netta detested him. Meanwhile she and Anastasia lived for one hope only. From many indications it was plain that Melrose was going south in March. The women were determined not to stay behind him. But, instinctively, they never raised the subject, so as not to risk a struggle prematurely.
Meanwhile Melrose passed a winter wholly satisfactory to himself. The partial unpacking of his collections was an endless source of amusement and pleasure. But his curious egotism showed itself very plainly in the business. He made no attempt at artistic arrangement, though there was some classification. As fast as one room was filled—the vacant packing-cases turned on their sides, serving to exhibit what they had once contained—he would begin upon another. And woe to Mrs. Dixon or Thyrza if they attempted any cleaning in one of his rooms! The collections were for himself only, and for the few dealers or experts to whom he chose to show them. And the more hugger-mugger they were, the less he should be pestered to let people in to see them. Occasionally he would rush up to London to attend what he called a "high puff sale"—or to an auction in one of the northern towns, and as he always bought largely, purchases kept arriving, and the house at the end of the winter was in a scarcely less encumbered and disorderly condition than it had been at the beginning. The few experts from the Continent or America, whom he did admit, were never allowed a word of criticism of the collections. If they ventured to differ from Melrose as to the genuineness or the age of a bronze or a marble, an explosion of temper and a speedy dismissal awaited them.
One great stroke of luck befel him in February which for a time put him in high good-humour. He bought at York—very cheaply—a small bronze Hermes, which some fifteenth-century documents in his own possession, purchased from a Florentine family the year before, enabled him to identify with great probability as the work of one of the rarest and most famous of the Renaissance sculptors. He told no one outside the house, lest he should be plagued to exhibit it, but he could not help boasting of it to Netta and Anastasia.
"That's what comes of having an eye! It's worth a thousand guineas of it's worth a penny. And those stupid idiots let me have it for twenty-two pounds!"
"A thousand guineas!" Gradually the little bronze became to Netta the symbol of all that money could have bought for her—and all she was denied; Italy, freedom, the small pleasures she understood, and the salvation of her family, now in the direst poverty. There were moments when she could have flung it passionately out of the window into the stream a hundred feet below. But she was to find another use for it.
March arrived. And one day Anastasia came to tell her mistress that she had received orders to pack Mr. Melrose's portmanteaus for departure.
Netta brooded all day, sitting silent and pale in the window-seat, with some embroidery which she never touched on her knee. Outside, not a sign of spring! A bitter north wind was blowing which had blanched all colour from the hills, and there was ice on the edges of the streams. Thyrza was away in Carlisle, helping an aunt. There was no one in the house but Mrs. Dixon, and a deaf old woman from one of the labourer's cottages; attached to the farm, who had come in to help her. The poor babe had a cold, and could be heard fretfully crying and coughing in her nursery.
And before Netta's inward eye there stretched the interminable days and weeks ahead, no less than the interminable weeks and months she had already lived through, in this discomfort of body, and this loneliness of spirit.
After supper she walked resolutely into her husband's littered study and demanded that she and Anastasia and the baby should go with him to the Continent. He, she understood, would stop in Paris. She and the child would push on to Florence, where she could stay the summer with her people, at no greater cost than at the Tower. The change was necessary both for her and Felicia, and go she would.
Melrose flatly and violently refused. What did she want better than the Tower? She had as much service, and as much luxury as her antecedents entitled her to; and he neither could nor would provide her with anything more. He was heavily in debt, and had no money to spend on railway tickets. And he entirely disapproved of her relations, especially of her father, who might any day find himself "run in" by the Italian authorities for illicit smuggling of pictures out of the country. He declined to allow his child to become familiar with such a circle.
Netta listened to him with tight lips, her pale face strangely flushed. When she saw that her appeal was quite fruitless she went away, and she and Anastasia sat up whispering together far into the night.
Early next morning Melrose departed, leaving a letter for his wife, in which he informed her that he had left money with Mr. Tyson for the household expenses, and for the few shillings he supposed she would want as pocket money. He advised her to be out a great deal, and assured her that the Cumbria summer, when it came, was delightful. And he signed himself "your affectionate husband, Edmund Melrose."
Mrs. Dixon went into Pengarth for shopping on the fly which conveyed Melrose to the station, and was to come out by carrier. After their departure there was no one left in the house but the deaf old woman. Netta and her maid preceeded to carry out a plan they had been long maturing. Anastasia had a few pounds left of her Christmas wages; enough to carry them to London; and for the rest, they had imagined an excellent device.
The bronze Hermes had been left by Melrose in a cupboard in a locked room on the first floor. When Mrs. Dixon came back that night, she discovered that Mrs. Melrose, with her child and maid had quitted the house. They had apparently harnessed the cart and horse themselves, and had driven into Pengarth, taking a labourer with them to bring the cart home. They had carried all their personal belongings away with them; and, after a while, Mrs. Dixon, poking about, discovered that the door of one of the locked rooms had been forced.
She also noticed, in one of the open drawers of Mrs. Melrose's bedroom, a photograph, evidently forgotten, lying face downward. Examining it, she saw that it was a picture of Netta, with the baby, taken apparently in Italy during the preceding summer. The Cumbrian woman, shrewdly observant like all her race, was struck by the tragic differences between the woman of the picture and the little blighted creature who had just made a flitting from the Tower.
She showed the photograph to her husband, returned it to the drawer, and thought no more about it.
News was of course sent to Mr. Melrose in Paris, and within three days he had come rushing back to the Tower, beside himself with rage and grief, not at all, as George Tyson soon assured himself, for the loss of his wife and child, but entirely for the theft of the priceless Florentine bronze, a loss which he had suspected on the first receipt of the news of the forced door, and verified at once on his arrival.
He stood positively aghast at Netta's perfidy and wickedness, and he wrote at once to the apartment in the Via Giugno, to denounce her in the most emphatic terms. As she had chosen to steal one of his most precious possessions, which she had of course converted into money, she had no further claim on him whatever, and he broke off all relations with her. Eighty pounds a year would be paid by his lawyers to a Florentine lawyer, whom he named, for his daughter's maintenance, so long as Netta left him unmolested. But he desired to hear and see no more of persons who reminded him of the most tragical event of his history as a collector, as well as of the utter failure of his married life. Henceforth they were strangers to each other, and she might arrange her future as she pleased.
The letter was answered by Mrs. Robert Smeath in the third person, and all communications ceased. As a matter of fact the Smeath family were infinitely relieved by Melrose's letter, which showed that he did not intend to take any police steps to recover the bronze or its value. Profiting by the paternal traditions, Netta had managed the sale of the Hermes in London, where, owing to Melrose's miserly hiding of it, it was quite unknown, with considerable skill. It had realized a small fortune, and she had returned, weary, ill, but triumphant, to the apartment in the Via Giugno.
Twelve months later, Melrose had practically forgotten that he had ever known her. He returned for the winter, to Threlfall, and entered upon a course of life which gradually made him the talk and wonder of the countryside. The rooms occupied by Netta and her child were left just as he had found them when he returned after her flight. He had turned the key on them then, and nobody had since entered them. Tyson wondered whether it was sentiment, or temper; and gave it for the latter.
The years passed away. Melrose's hair turned from black to gray; Thyrza married a tradesman in Carlisle and presented him with a large family; the Dixons, as cook and manservant, gradually fitted themselves more and more closely to the queer conditions of life in the Tower, and grew old in the service of a master whose eccentricities became to them, in process of time, things to be endured without comment, like disagreeable facts of climate. In Dixon, his Methodist books, his Bible, and his weekly chapel maintained those forces of his character which were—and always continued to be—independent of Melrose; and Melrose knew his own interests well enough not to interfere with an obstinate man's religion. While Tyson, after five years, passed on triumphantly to a lucrative agency in the Dukeries, having won a reputation for tact and patience in the impossible service of a mad master, which would carry him through life. Melrose, being Melrose, found it hopeless to replace him satisfactorily; and, as he continued to buy land greedily year after year, the neglected condition of his immense estate became an ever-increasing scandal to the county.
Meanwhile, for some years after the departure of Netta, Lady Tatham was obliged for reason of health to spend the winters on the Riviera, and she and her boy were only at Duddon for the summer months. Intercourse between her and her cousin Edmund Melrose was never renewed, and her son grew up in practical ignorance of the relationship. When, however, the lad was nearing the end of his Eton school days Duddon became once more the permanent home, summer and winter, of mother and son, and young Lord Tatham, curly-haired, good-humoured, and good-hearted, became thenceforward the favourite and princeling of the countryside. On the east and north, the Duddon estates marched with Melrose's property. Occasions of friction constantly arose, but the determination on each side to have no more communication with the other than was absolutely necessary generally composed any nascent dispute; so long at least as Lady Tatham and a very diplomatic agent were in charge.
But at the age of twenty-four, Harry Tatham succeeded to the sole management of his estates, and his mother soon realized that her son was not likely to treat their miserly neighbour with the same patience as herself.
And with the changes in human life, went changes even more subtle and enduring in the Cumbria county itself. Those were times of crisis for English agriculture. Wheat-lands went back to pasture; and a surplus population, that has found its way for generations to the factory towns, began now to turn toward the great Canadian spaces beyond the western sea. Only the mountains still rose changeless and eternal, at least to human sense; "ambitious for the hallowing" of moon and sun; keeping their old secrets, and their perpetual youth.
And after twenty years Threlfall Tower became the scene of another drama, whereof what has been told so far is but the prologue.
III
It was a May evening, and Lydia Penfold, spinster, aged twenty-four, was sketching in St. John's Vale, that winding valley which, diverging from the Ambleside-Keswick road in an easterly direction, divides the northern slopes of the Helvellyn range from the splendid mass of Blencathra.
So beautiful was the evening, so ravishing under its sway were heaven and earth, that Lydia's work went but slowly. She was a professional artist, to whom guineas were just as welcome as to other people; and she had very industrious and methodical views of her business. But she was, before everything, one of those persons who thrill under the appeal of beauty to a degree that often threatens or suspends practical energy. Save for the conscience in her, she could have lived from day to day just for the moments of delight, the changes in light and shade, in colour and form, that this beautiful world continually presents to senses as keen as hers. Lydia's conscience, however, was strong; though on this particular evening it did little or nothing to check the sheer sensuous dreaming that had crept over her.
The hand that held her palette had dropped upon her knee, her eyes were lifted to the spectacle before her, and her lips, slightly parted, breathed in pleasure.
She looked on a pair of mountains of which one, torn and seamed from top to toe as though some vast Fafnir of the prime had wreaked his dragon rage upon it, fronted her sheer, rimmed with gold where some of its thrusting edges still caught the sunset, but otherwise steeped in purple shades already prophesying night; while the other, separated from the first by a gap, yet grouping with it, ran slanting away to the northwest, offering to the eyes only a series of lovely foreshortened planes, rising from the valley, one behind the other, sweeping upward and backward to the central peak of Skiddaw, and ablaze with light from base to summit.
The evenings in the north are long. It was past seven on this May day; yet Lydia knew that the best of the show was still to come; she waited for the last act, and refused to think of supper. That golden fusion of all the upper air; that "intermingling of Heaven's pomp," spread on the great slopes of Skiddaw—red and bronze and purple, shot through each other, and glorified by excess of light; that sharpness of the larch green on the lower slopes; that richness of the river fields; that shining pageantry of cloud, rising or sinking with the mountain line: pondering these things, absorbing them, she looked at her drawing from time to time in a smiling despair; the happy despair of the artist, who amid the failure of to-day looks forward with passion to the effort of to-morrow.
Youth and natural joy possessed her.
What scents from the river-bank, under the softly breathing wind which had sprung up with the sunset! The girl brought her eyes down, and saw a bank of primroses, and beyond, in the little copse on the farther side of the stream, a gleam of blue, where the wild hyacinth spread among the birches. While close to her, at her very feet, ran the stream, with its slipping, murmuring water, its stones splashed with white, purple, and orange, its still reaches paved with evening gold.
"What a mercy I wrote that letter!" she said to herself, with a sigh of content. She was thinking of a proposal that had come to her a few days before this date, to take a post as drawing mistress in a Brighton school. The salary was tempting; and, at the moment, money was more than usually scarce in the family purse. Her mother's eyes had looked at her wistfully.
Yet she had refused; with a laughing bravado that had concealed some inward qualms.
Whereupon the gods had immediately and scandalously rewarded her. She had sold four of her drawings at a Liverpool exhibition for twenty pounds; and there were lying beside her on the grass some agreeable press notices just arrived, most of which she already knew by heart.
Twenty pounds! That would pay the half year's rent. And there were three other drawings in a London show that might very well sell too. Why not—now the others had sold? Meanwhile she—thank the Lord!—had saved herself, as a fish from the hook. She was still free; free to draw, free to dream. She had not bartered her mountains for a salary. Instead of crocodile walks, two and two, with a score of stupid schoolgirls, here she was, still roaming the fells, the same happy vagabond as before. She hugged her liberty. And at the same time she promised herself that her mother should have a new shawl and a new cap for Whitsuntide.
Those at present in use came near in Lydia's opinion to being a family disgrace.
The last act of the great spectacle rushed on; and again the artist held her breath enthralled. The gold on Skiddaw was passing into rose; and over the greenish blue of the lower sky, webs of crimson cirrhus spun themselves. The stream ran fire; and far away the windows of a white farm blazed. Lydia seized a spare sketching-block lying on the grass, and began to note down a few "passages" in the sky before her.
Suddenly a gust came straying down the valley. It blew the press-cuttings which had dropped from her lap toward the stream. One of them fell in, the others, long flapping things, hung caught in a tuft of grass. Lydia sprang up, with an exclamation of annoyance, and went to the rescue. Dear, dear!—the longest and best notice, which spoke of her work as "agreeable and scholarly, showing, at tunes, more than a touch of high talent"—was quietly floating away. She must get it back. Her mother had not yet read it—not yet purred over it. And it was most desirable she should read it, so as to get rid thereby of any lingering doubt about the horrid school and its horrid proposal.
But alack! the slip of newspaper was already out of reach, speeded by a tiny eddy toward a miniature rapid in the middle of the beck. Lydia, clinging with one hand to a stump of willow, caught up a stick lying on the bank with the other, and, hanging over the stream, tried to head back the truant. All that happened was that her foot slipping on a pebble went flop into the shallow water, and part of her dress followed it.
It was not open to Lydia to swear, and she had no time for the usual feminine exclamations before she heard a voice behind her.
"Allow me—can I be of any use?"
She turned in astonishment, extricating her wet foot, and clambered back on to the bank. A young man stood there, civilly deferential. His bicycle lay on the grass at the edge of the road, which was only a few steps away.
"I saw you slip in, and thought perhaps I might help. You were trying to reach something, weren't you?"
"It doesn't matter, thank you," said Lydia, whose cheeks had gone pink.
The young man looked at her, and became still more civil.
"What was it? That piece of paper? Oh, I'll get it in a moment."
And splashing from stone to stone in the river-bed, he had soon reached a point where, with the aid of Lydia's stick, the bedraggled cutting was soon fished out and returned to its owner. Lydia thanked him.
"But you've wet both your feet!" She looked at them, with concern. "Won't it be very uncomfortable, bicycling?"
"I haven't far to go. Oh, by the way, I was just looking out for somebody to ask—about this road—and I couldn't see a soul, till just as I came out of the little wood there"—he pointed—"I saw you—slipping in."
They both laughed. Lydia returned to her camp stool, and began to put up her sketching things.
"What is it you want to know?"
"Is this the road for Whitebeck?"
"Yes, certainly. You come to a bridge and the village is on the other side."
"Thank you. I don't know these parts. But what an awfully jolly valley!" He waved a hand toward it. "And what do you think I saw about a mile higher up?" He had picked up his bicycle from the grass, and stood leaning easily upon it. She could not but observe that he was tall and slim and handsome. A tourist, no doubt; she could not place him as an inhabitant.
"I know!" she said smiling. "You saw the otter hounds. They passed me an hour ago. Have they caught him?"
"Who? the otter? Lord, no! He got right away from them—up a tributary stream."
"Good!" said Lydia, as she shut her painting-box.
The young man hesitated. He had clearly no right to linger any longer, but, as the girl before him seemed to him one of the most delicious creatures he had ever seen, he did linger.
"I wonder if I might ask you another question? Can you tell me whether that fine old house over there is Duddon Castle?"
"Duddon Castle!" Lydia lifted her eyebrows. "Duddon Castle is seven miles away. That place is called Threlfall Tower. Were you going to Duddon?"
"No. But"—he hesitated—"I know young Tatham a little. I should like to have seen his house. But, that's a fine old place, isn't it?" He looked with curiosity at the pile of building rising beyond a silver streak of river, amid the fresh of the May woods.
"Well—yes—in some ways," said Lydia, dubiously. "Don't you know who lives there?"
"Not the least. I am a complete stranger here. I say, do let me do that up for you?" And, letting his bicycle fall, the young man seized the easel which had still to be taken to pieces and put into its case.
Lydia shot a wavering look at him. He ought certainly to have departed by now, and she ought to be snubbing him. But the expression on his sunburnt face as he knelt on the grass, unscrewing her easel, seemed so little to call for snubbing that instead she gave him further information; interspersed with directions to him as to what to do and what not to do with her gear.
"It belongs to a Mr. Melrose. Did you never hear of him?"
"Never. Why should I?"
"Not from the Tathams?"
"No. You see I only knew Tatham at college—in my last year. He was a good deal junior to me. And I have never stayed with them at Duddon—though they kindly asked me—years ago."
The girl beside him took not the smallest notice of his information. She was busy packing up brushes and paints, and her next remark showed him subtly that she did not mean to treat him as an acquaintance of the Tathams, whom she probably knew, but was determined to keep him to his rôle of stranger and tourist.
"You had better look at Threlfall as you pass. It has a splendid situation."
"I will. But why ought I to have heard of the gentleman? I forget his name."
"Mr. Melrose? Oh, well—he's a legend about here. We all talk about him."
"What's wrong with him? Is he a nuisance?—or a lunatic?"
"It depends what you have to do with him. About here he goes by the name of the 'Ogre.'"
"How, does he eat people up?" asked the stranger, smiling.
The girl hesitated.
"Ask one of his tenants!" she said at last.
"Oh, he's a landlord, and a bad one?"
She nodded, a sudden sharpness in her gray eyes.
"But that's not the common reason for the name. It's because he shuts himself up—in a house full of treasures. He's a great collector."
"Of works of art? You—don't need to be mad to do that! It seems to be one of the things that pays best nowadays—with all these Americans about. It's a way of investing your money. Doesn't he show them to anybody?"
"Nobody is allowed to go near him, or his house. He has built a high wall round his park, and dogs are let loose at night that tear you to pieces."
"Nice man! If it weren't for the dogs, I should brave him. In a small way, I'm a collector myself."
He smiled, and Lydia understood that the personal reference was thrown out as a feeler, in case she might be willing to push the conversation further. But she did not respond, although as he spoke she happened to notice that he wore a remarkable ring on his left hand, which seemed to illustrate his remark. An engraved gem?—Greek? Her eyes were quick for such things.
However, she was seized with shyness, and as she had now finished the packing of her brushes and paints, and the young man had elaborately fastened all the straps of the portable easel and its case, there was nothing for him to do but to stoop unwillingly for his soft hat which was lying on the grass. Then an idea struck him.
"I say, what are you going to do with all these things?"
"Carry them home." She smiled. "I am not a cripple."
"Mightn't I—mightn't I carry them for you?"
"Thank you. My way lies in quite another direction. Good-night."
She held out a shapely hand. He took it, lifted his hat, and departed.
As soon as he was safely past a jutting corner of the road Lydia, instead of going home, lazily sat down again on a rock to think about what had happened. She was perfectly aware that—considering the whole interview had only taken ten minutes—she had made an impression upon the young man. And as young men of such distinguished appearance were not common in the Whitebeck neighbourhood, the recollection of all those little signs in look and manner which had borne witness to the stranger's discreet admiration of her was not at all disagreeable.
He was not a native—that she was sure of. She guessed him a Londoner. "Awfully good clothes!—London clothes. About thirty, I should think? I wonder what he does. He can't be rich, or he wouldn't be bicycling. He did up those straps as though he were used to them; but he can't be an artist, or he'd have said something. It was a face with lots of power in it. Not very good-tempered, I should say? But there's something about him—yes, distinctly, something! I liked his thin cheeks, and his dark curls. His head, too, was uncommonly well set on. I'm sure that there's a good deal to him, as the Americans say; he's not stuffed with sawdust. I can imagine—just imagine—being in love with him."
She laughed to herself.
Then a sudden thought occurred to her, which reddened her cheeks. Suppose when the young man came to think over it, he believed that she had let the papers fall into the river—deliberately—on purpose—just to attract his attention? At the very precise moment that he comes upon the scene, she slips into the water. Of course!—an arranged affair!
She sat on, meditating in some discomfort.
"It is no use deceiving ourselves," she thought. "We're not in the good old Tennysonian days. There's precious little chivalry now! Men don't idealize women as they used. They're grown far more suspicious—and harder. Perhaps because women have grown so critical of them! Anyway something's gone—what is it? Poetry? Illusion? And yet!—why is it that men still put us off our balance?—even now—that they matter so much less, now that we live our own lives, and can do without them? I shouldn't be sitting here, bothering my head, if it had been another girl who had come to help."
Slowly she gathered up her things and took her way home, while the evening of blue and pearl fell around her, while the glow died on the fells, and Venus came out in a sky that was still too full of light to let any lesser stars appear.
She crossed the stepping stones, and in a river field on the farther side she came across an old shepherd, carrying a wounded ewe across his shoulders, and with his dog beside him. At sight of him she paused in astonishment. He was an old friend of hers, but he belonged to a village—the village of Mainstairs—some three miles away in the lowland toward Pengarth. She had first come across him when sketching among some distant fells where he had been a shepherd for more than forty years.
The old man's russet face, sharp-lined and strong, lit up as he saw her approaching.
"Why I thowt I med coom across yer!" he said smiling. And he explained that he had been paying a visit to a married daughter under Naddle Fell, and had volunteered to carry an injured sheep down to a valley farm, whence it had strayed on his way home.
They stopped to talk while he rested a few minutes, under his burden, propped against a rock. Lydia asked him after a sick grand-daughter. Her question showed knowledge—no perfunctory kindness.
He shook his head sadly, and her grave, soft look, as she fell silent a little, beside him, said more than words.
"Anything been done to your cottage?" she asked him presently.
"Noa—nowt."
"Nor to the other houses?"
"Naethin'."
Her brows frowned.
"Horrible!" she said under her breath. But they did not pursue the subject. Instead the old man broke out in praise of the "won'erful 'cute" sheep dog beside him, and in the story of the accident which had slightly lamed the ewe he was carrying. Lydia's vivacious listening, her laugh, her comments, expressed—unconsciously—with just a touch of Cumbria dialect, showed them natural comrades. Some deeply human gift, some spontaneity in the girl, answered to the racy simplicity of the old man.
"Tell me once more"—she said, as she rose from her seat upon a fallen tree, and prepared to go on her way—"those counting words you told me last week. I tried to tell them to my mother—but I couldn't remember them all. They made us laugh so."
"Aye, they're the owd words," said the shepherd complacently. "We doan't use 'em now. But my feyther minds how his feyther used allus to count by 'em."
And he began the catalogue of those ancient numerals by which the northern dalesman of a hundred years ago were still accustomed to reckon their sheep, words that go back to the very infancy of man.
"Yan—tyan—tethera—methera—pimp; sethera—lethera—hovera—dovera—dick."
Lydia's face dissolved in laughter—and when the old man delighting in her amusement went on to the compounds of ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and the rest:
"Yan-a-dick—tyan-a-dick—tethera-a-dick—methera-a-dick—bumfit."
At "bumfit" (fifteen) they both rocked with merriment, the old man carried away by the infection of hers.
"Go on," said Lydia—the tears of laughter in her eyes—"up to twenty, and then hear me say them."
"Yan-a-bumfit—tyan-a-bumfit—tethera-a-bumfit—methera-a-bumfit—giggot" (twenty).
"Giggot" set them both off again—and then Lydia—stumbling, laughing, and often corrected, said her lesson.
By the time she was fairly perfect, and the old man had straightened himself again under his load—a veritable "good shepherd," glorified by the evening light—they parted with a friendly nod, glad to have met and sure to meet again.
"I'll come and see Bessie soon," she said gently, as she moved on.
"Aye. Yo'll be varra welcome."
She stepped forward briskly, gained the high road, and presently saw in front of her a small white house, recently built, and already embowered in a blossoming garden. Lilacs sent their fragrance to greet her; rhododendrons glowed through the twilight, and a wild-cherry laden with bloom reared its white miracle against the walls of the house.
Lydia stood at the gate devouring the tree with her eyes. The blossom had already begun to drop. "Two days more"—she said to herself, sighing—"and it'll be gone—till next year. And it's been out such a little, little while! I seem hardly to have looked at it. It's horrible how short-lived all the beautiful things are."
"Lydia!" A voice called from an open window.
"Yes, mother."
"You're dreadfully late, Lydia! Susan and I have finished supper long ago."
Lydia walked into the house, and put her head into the drawing-room.
"Sorry, mother! It was so lovely, I couldn't come in. And I met a dear old shepherd I know. Don't bother about me. I'll get some milk and cake."
She closed the door again, before her mother could protest.
"Girls will never think of their meals!" said Mrs. Penfold to herself in irritation. "And then all of a sudden they get nerves—or consumption—or something."
As she spoke, she withdrew from the window, and curled herself up on a sofa, where a knitted coverlet lay, ready to draw over her feet. Mrs. Penfold was a slight, pretty woman of fifty with invalidish Sybaritic ways, and a character which was an odd mixture of humility and conceit—diffidence and audacity. She was quite aware that she was not as clever as her daughters. She could not write poetry like Susan, or paint like Lydia. But then, in her own opinion, she had so many merits they were without; merits which more than maintained her self-respect, and enabled her to hold her ground with them. For instance: by the time she was four and twenty, Lydia's age, she had received at least a dozen proposals. Lydia's scalps, so far as her mother knew, were only two—fellow-students at South Kensington, absurd people, not to be counted. Then, pretty as Lydia was, her nose could not be compared for delicacy with her mother's. "My nose was always famous"—Mrs. Penfold would say complacently to her daughters—"it was that which first attracted your dear father. 'It was,' he said—you know he always expressed himself so remarkably—'such a sure sign of "race."' His own people—oh! they were quite nice people—but quite middle-class." Again, her hands and feet were smaller and more aristocratic than either Lydia's or Susan's. She liked to remind herself constantly how everybody had admired them and talked about them when she was a girl.
Drawing her work-box toward her, while she waited for Lydia's return, Mrs. Penfold fell to knitting, while the inner chatter of the mind went as fast as her needles—concerned chiefly with two matters of absorbing interest: Lydia's twenty pounds, and a piece of news about Lydia, recently learnt from the rector's wife.
As to the twenty pounds, it was the greatest blessing! Of course the school salary would have been a certainty—and Lydia had hardly considered it with proper seriousness. But there—all was well! The extra twenty pounds would carry them on, and now that Lydia had begun to earn, thought the maternal optimist, she would of course go on earning—at higher and higher prices—and the family income of some three hundred a year would obtain the increment it so desperately needed. And as Mrs. Penfold looked upon a girls' school as something not far removed from a nunnery, a place at any rate painfully devoid of the masculine element; and as her whole mind was set—sometimes romantically, sometimes financially—on the marriage of her daughters, she felt that both she and Lydia had escaped what might have been an unfortunate necessity.
Yes, indeed!—what a providential escape, if—
Mrs. Penfold let fall her knitting; her face sparkled. Why had Lydia never communicated the fact, the thrilling fact that she had been meeting at the rectory—more than once apparently—not merely a young man, but the young man of the neighbourhood. And with results—favourable results—quite evident to the Rector and the Rector's wife, if Lydia herself chose to ignore and secrete them. It was really unkind….
The door opened. A white figure slipped into the room through its mingled lights, and found a stool beside Mrs. Penfold.
"Dear—are you all right?"
Mrs. Penfold stroked the speaker's head.
"Well, I thought I was going to have a headache this morning, darling—but I didn't—it went away. Lydia! the Rector and Mrs. Deacon have been here. Why didn't you tell me you have been meeting Lord Tatham at the rectory?"
Lydia laughed.
"Didn't I? Well, he's quite decent."
"Mrs. Deacon says he admired you. She's sure he did!" Mrs. Penfold stooped eagerly toward her daughter, trying to see her face in the twilight.
"Mrs. Deacon's a goose! You know she is, mother,—you often say so. I met him first, of course, at the Hunt Ball. And you saw him there too. You saw me dancing with him."
"But that was only once," said Mrs. Penfold, candidly. "I didn't think anything of that. When I was a girl, if a young man liked me at a dance, we went on till we made everybody talk. Or else, there was nothing in it."
"Well, there was nothing in it, dear—in this case. And I wouldn't advise you to give me to Lord Tatham—just yet!"
Mrs. Penfold sighed.
"Of course one knows that that kind of young man has his marriage made for him—just like royalty. But sometimes—they break out. There are dukes that have married plain Misses—no better than you, Lydia—and not American either. But—Lydia—you did like him?"
"Who? Lord Tatham? Certainly."
"I expect most girls do! He's the great parti about here."
"Mother, really!" cried Lydia. "He's just a pleasant youth—not at all clever. And oh, how badly he plays bridge!"
"That doesn't matter. Mrs. Deacon says you got on with him, splendidly."
"I chaffed him a good deal. He really plays worse than I do—if you can believe it."
"They like being chaffed"—said Mrs. Penfold pensively—"if a girl does it well."
"I don't care, darling, whether they like it or not. It amuses me, and so
I do it."
"But you mustn't let them think they're being laughed at. If you do that, Lydia, you'll be an old maid. Oh, Lydia!"—the speaker sighed like a furnace—"I do wish you saw more young men!"
"Well, I saw another one—much handsomer than Lord Tatham—this afternoon," laughed Lydia.
Mrs. Penfold eagerly inquired. The story was told, and Mrs. Penfold, as easily lured by a new subject as a child by a new doll, fell into many speculations as to who the youth could have been, and where he was going. Lydia soon ceased to listen. But when the coverlet slipped away she did not fail to replace it tenderly over her mother's feet, and every now and then her fingers gave a caressing touch to the delicate hand of which Mrs. Penfold was so proud. It was not difficult to see that of the two the girl was really the mother, in spirit; the maturer, protecting soul.
Presently she roused herself to ask:
"Where is Susan?"
"She went up to write directly after supper, and we mustn't disturb her. She hopes to finish her tragedy to-night. She said she had an inspiration."
"Inspiration or no, I shall hunt her to bed, if I don't hear her door shut by twelve," said Lydia with sisterly determination.
"Do you think, darling, that Susy—will ever make a great deal of money by her writings?" The tone was wistful.
"Well, no, mother, candidly, I don't. There's no money in tragedies—so
I'm told."
Mrs. Penfold sighed. But Lydia, changed the subject, entered upon a discussion, so inventively artistic, of the new bonnet, and the new dress in which her mother was to appear on Whitsunday, that when bedtime came Mrs. Penfold had seldom passed a pleasanter evening.
After her mother had gone to bed, Lydia wandered into the moonlit garden, and strolled about its paths, lost in the beauty of its dim flowers and the sweetness of its scents. The spring was in her veins, and she felt strangely shaken and restless. She tried to think of her painting, and the prospect she had of getting into an artistic club, a club of young landscapists, which exhibited every May, and was beginning to make a mark. But her thoughts strayed perpetually.
So her mother imagined that Lord Tatham had only danced once with her at the Hunt Ball? As a matter of fact, he had danced with her once, and then, as dancing was by no means the youth's strong point, they had sat out in a corner of the hotel garden, by the river, through four supper dances. And if the fact had escaped the notice both of Mrs. Penfold and Susy, greatly to Lydia's satisfaction, she was well aware that it had not altogether escaped the notice of the neighbourhood, which kept an eager watch on the doings of its local princeling in matters matrimonial.
And as to the various meetings at the rectory, Lydia could easily have made much of them, if she had wished. She had come to see that they were deliberately sought by Lord Tatham, and encouraged by Mrs. Deacon. And because she had come to see it, she meant to refuse another invitation from Mrs. Deacon, which was in her pocket—without consulting her mother. Besides—said youthful pride—if Lord Tatham really wished to know them, Lady Tatham must call. And Lady Tatham had not called.
Her mother was quite right. The marriage of young earls are, generally speaking, "arranged," and there are hovering relations, and unwritten laws in the background, which only the foolish forget. "And as I am not a candidate for the place," thought Lydia, "I won't be misunderstood!"
She did not intend indeed to be troubled—for the present—with such matters at all.
"Marrying is not in the bill!" She declaimed it to a lilac-bush, standing with her hands behind her, and face uplifted. "I have no money, and no position—therefore the vast majority of men won't want to marry me. And as to scheming to make them want it—why!—good heavens!—when there are such amusing things to do in the world!"
She paced the garden paths, thinking passionately, defiantly of her art, yet indignant with herself for these vague yearnings and languors that had to be so often met and put down.
"Men!—men!—what do they matter to me, except for talk—and fun! Yet there one goes thinking about them—like any fool. It's sex of course—and youth. I can no more escape them than anybody else. But I Can be mistress of them. I will. That's where this generation differs. We needn't drift—we see clear. Oh! those clouds—that blue!—those stars! Dear world! Isn't beauty enough?"
She lifted her arms above her head in a wild aspiration. And all in a moment it surprised her to feel her eyes wet with tears.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the young man who had rescued her press cuttings had fallen, barely an hour after his parting from her, upon evil fortunes.
His bicycle had carried him swiftly down the valley toward the Whitebeck bridge. Just above the bridge, a steep pitch of hill, one of those specimens of primitive road-making that abound in Cumbria, descended rapidly into a dark hollow, with a high wall on one side, overhung by trees, and on the other a bank, broken three parts of tie way down by the entrance of a side road. At the top of the hill, Faversham, to give the youth his name, stopped to look at the wall, which was remarkable for height and strength. The thick wood on his right hid any building there might be on the farther side of the stream. But clearly this was the Ogre's wall—ogreish indeed! A man might well keep a cupboard full of Fatimas, alive or dead, on the other side of it, or a coiner's press, or a banknote factory, or any other romantic and literary villainy. Faversham found himself speculating with amusement on the old curmudgeon behind the wall; always with the vision, drawn by recollection on the leafy background, of a girl's charming face—clear pale skin, beautiful eyes, more blue surely than gray—the whitest neck, with coils of brown hair upon it—the mouth with its laughing freedom—yet reticent—no mere silly sweetness!
Then putting on his brake, he began to coast down the hill, which opened gently only to turn without notice into something scandalously precipitous. The bicycle had been hired in Keswick, and had had a hard season's use. The brake gave way at the worst moment of the hill, and Faversham, unable to save himself, rushed to perdition. And by way of doubling his misfortune, as in the course of his mad descent he reached the side road on the left, there came the loud clatter of a cart, and a young horse emerged almost at a gallop, with a man tugging vainly at its rein.
Ten minutes later a group of men stood consulting by the side of the road over Faversham's prostrate form. He was unconscious; his head and face were covered with blood, and his left ankle was apparently broken. A small open motor stood at the bottom of the hill, and an angry dispute was going on between an old man in mire-stained working-clothes, and the young doctor from Pengarth to whom the motor belonged.
"I say, Mr. Dixon, that you've got to take this man into Mr. Melrose's house and look after him, till he is fit to be moved farther, or you'll be guilty of his death, and I shall give evidence accordingly!" said the doctor, with energy, as he raised himself from the injured man.
"Theer's noa place for him i' t' Tower, Mr. Undershaw, an' I'll take noa sich liberty!"
"Then I will. Where's Mr. Melrose?"
"I' London—till to-morrow. Yo'll do nowt o' t' soart, doctor."
"We shall see. To carry him half a mile to the farm, when you might carry him just across that bridge to the house, would be sheer murder. I won't see it done. And if you do it, you'll be indicted for manslaughter. Now then—why doesn't that hurdle come along?" The speaker looked impatiently up the road; and, as he spoke, a couple of labourers appeared at the top of the hill, carrying a hurdle between them.
Dixon threw looks of mingled wrath and perplexity at the doctor, and the men.
"I tell yo', doctor, it conno' be done! Muster Melrose's orders mun be obeyed. I have noa power to admit onybody to his house withoot his leave. Yo' knaw yoursel'," he added in the doctor's ear, "what Muster Melrose is."
Undershaw muttered something—expressing either wrath or scorn—behind his moustache; then said aloud:
"Never you mind, Dixon; I shall take the responsibility. You let me alone. Now, my boys, lend a hand with the hurdle, and give me some coats."
Faversham's leg had been already placed in a rough splint and his head bandaged. They lifted him, quite unconscious, upon the hurdle, and made him as comfortable as they could. The doctor anxiously felt his pulse, and directed the men to carry him, as carefully as possible, through a narrow gate in the high wall opposite which was standing open, across the private foot-bridge over the stream, and so to the Terrace whereon stood Threlfall Tower. Impenetrably hidden as it was behind the wall and the trees, the old house was yet, in truth, barely sixty yards away. Dixon followed, lamenting and protesting, but in vain.
"Hold your tongue, man!" said Undershaw at last, losing his temper. "You disgrace your master. It would be a public scandal to refuse to help a man in this plight! If we get him alive through to-night, it will be a mercy. I believe the cart's been over him somewhere!" he added, with a frowning brow.
Dixon silenced, but by no means persuaded, followed the little procession, till it reached a side door of the Tower, opening on the terrace just beyond the bridge. The door was shut, and it was not till the doctor had made several thunderous attacks upon it, beside sending men round to the other doors of the house, that Mrs. Dixon at last cautiously opened it.
Fresh remonstrance and refusal followed on the part both of husband and wife. Fresh determination also on the part of the doctor, seconded by the threatening looks and words of Faversham's bearers, stout Cumbria labourers, to whom the storming of the Tower was clearly a business they enjoyed. At last the old couple, bitterly protesting, gave way, and the procession entered.
They found themselves in a long corridor, littered with a strange multitude of objects, scarcely distinguishable in the dim light shed by one unshuttered window through which some of the evening glow still penetrated. Dixon and his wife whispered excitedly together; after which Dixon led the way through the corridor into the entrance hall—which was equally encumbered—and so to a door on the right.
"Yo' can bring him in there," he said sulkily to Undershaw. "There's mebbe a bed upstairs we can bring doon."
He threw open the drawing-room—a dreary, disused room, with its carpets rolled up in one corner, and its scanty furniture piled in another. The candle held by Mrs. Dixon lit up the richly decorated ceiling.
"Can't you do anything better?" asked Undershaw, turning upon her vehemently. "Don't you keep a spare bedroom in this place?"
"Noa, we doan't!" said Mrs. Dixon, with answering temper. "There isn't a room upstairs but what's full o' Muster Melrose's things. Yo' mun do wi' this, or naethin'."
Undershaw submitted, and Faversham's bearers gently laid him down, spreading their coats on the bare floor to receive him, till a bed could be found. Dixon and his wife, in a state of pitiable disturbance, went off to look for one, while Undershaw called after them:
"And I warn you that to-morrow you'll have to find quarters for two nurses!"
Thus, without any conscious action on his own part, and in the absence of its formidable master, was Claude Faversham brought under the roof of Threlfall Tower.
IV
On the evening of the following day, Mr. Edmund Melrose arrived in Pengarth by train from London, hired a one-horse wagonette, and drove out to the Tower.
His manners were at no time amiable, but the man who had the honour of driving him on this occasion, and had driven him occasionally before, had never yet seen him in quite so odious a temper. This was already evident at the time of the start from Pengarth, and thenceforward the cautious Cumbrian preserved an absolute and watchful silence, to the great annoyance of Melrose, who would have welcomed any excuse for ill-humour. But as nothing beyond the curtest monosyllables were to be got out of his companion, and as the rich beauty of the May landscape was entirely lost upon himself, Melrose was reduced at last in the course of his ten miles' drive to scanning once more the copy of the Times which he had brought with him from the south. The news of various strikes and industrial arbitrations which it contained had already enraged him; and enraged him again as he looked through it. The proletariat, in his opinion, must be put down and kept down; that his own class began to show a lamentable want of power to do either was the only public matter that ever really troubled him. So far as his life was affected by the outside world at all, except as a place where auctions took place, and dealers' shops abounded, it was through this consciousness of impending social disaster, this terror as of a rapidly approaching darkness bearing the doom of the modern world in its bosom, which intermittently oppressed him, as it has oppressed and still overshadows innumerable better men of our day.
At this moment, in the month of May, 190—, Edmund Melrose had just passed his seventieth birthday. But the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his good looks had scarcely abated since the time when, twenty-three years before this date, Netta Smeath had first seen him in Florence; although his hair had whitened, and the bronzed skin of the face had developed a multitude of fine wrinkles that did but add to its character. His aspect, even on the threshold of old age, had still something of the magnificence of an Italian captain of the Renaissance, something also of the pouncing, peering air that belongs to the type. He seemed indeed to be always on the point of seizing or appropriating some booty or other. His wandering eyes, his long acquisitive fingers, his rapid movements showed him still the hunter on the trail, to whom everything else was in truth indifferent but the satisfaction of an instinct which had grown and flourished on the ruins of a man.
As they drove along, through various portions of the Tower estates, the eyes of the taciturn driver beside him took note of the dilapidated farm buildings and the broken gates which a miserly landlord could not be induced to repair, until an exasperated tenant actually gave notice. Melrose meanwhile was absorbed in trying to recover a paragraph in the Times he had caught sight of on a first reading, and had then lost in the excitement of studying the prices of a sale at Christie's, held the day before, wherein his own ill luck had led to the bad temper from which he was suffering. He tracked the passage at last. It ran as follows:
"The late Professor William Mackworth has left the majority of his costly collections to the nation. To the British Museum will go the marbles and bronzes, to the South Kensington, the china and the tapestries. Professor Mackworth made no stipulations, and the authorities of both museums are free to deal with his bequests as they think best."
Melrose folded the newspaper and put it back into his pocket with a short sudden laugh, which startled the man beside him. "Stipulations! I should rather think not! What museum in its senses would accept such piffling stuff with any stipulations attached? As it is, the greater part will go into the lumber-rooms; they'll never show them! There's only one collection that Mackworth ever had that was worth having. Not a word about that. People don't give their best things to the country—not they. Hypocrites! What on earth has he done with them? There are several things I want."
And he fell into a long and greedy meditation, in which, as usual, his fancy pursued a quarry and brought it down. He took no notice meanwhile of the objects passed as they approached the Tower, although among them were many that might well have roused the attention of a landlord; as, for instance, the condition of the long drive leading up to the house, with its deep ruts and grass-grown sides; a tree blown down, not apparently by any very recent storm, and now lying half across the roadway, so that the horse and carriage picked their way with difficulty round its withered branches; one of the pillars of the fine gateway, which gave access to the walled enclosure round the house, broken away; and the enclosure within, which had been designed originally as a formal garden in the Italian style, and was now a mere tangled wilderness of weeds and coarse grass, backed by dense thickets of laurel and yew which had grown up in a close jungle round the house, so that many of the lower windows were impenetrably overgrown.
As they drew up at the gate, the Pengarth driver looked with furtive curiosity at the house-front. Melrose, in the words of Lydia to young Faversham, had "become a legend" to his neighbourhood, and many strange things were believed about him. It was said that the house contained a number of locked and shuttered rooms which were never entered; that Melrose slept by day, and worked or prowled by night; that his only servants were the two Dixons, no one else being able to endure his company; that he and the house were protected by savage dogs, and that his sole visitors were occasional strangers from the south, who arrived with black bags, and often departed pursued with objurgations by Melrose, and in terror of the dogs. It was said also that the Tower was full of precious and marvellous things, including hordes of gold and silver; that Melrose, who was detested in the countryside, lived in the constant dread of burglary or murder; and finally—as a clue to the whole situation which the popular mind insisted on supplying—that he had committed some fearful crime, during his years in foreign parts, for which he could not be brought to justice; but remorse and dread of discovery had affected his brain, and turned him into a skulking outcast.
Possessed by these simple but interesting ideas, the Pengarth man sharply noticed, first that the gate of the enclosure was padlocked, Melrose himself supplying a key from his pocket; next that most of the windows of the front were shuttered; and lastly—strange and unique fact, according to his own recollections of the Tower—that two windows on the ground floor were standing wide open, giving some view of the large room within, so far as two partially drawn curtains allowed. As Melrose unlocked the gate, the house door opened, and three huge dogs came bounding out, in front of a gray-haired man, whom the driver of the wagonette knew to be "owd Dixon," Melrose's butler and factotum. The driver was watching the whole scene with an absorbed curiosity, when Melrose turned, threw him a sudden look, paid him, and peremptorily bade him be off. He had therefore no time to observe the perturbation of Dixon who was coming with slow steps to meet his master; nor that a woman in white cap and apron had appeared behind him on the steps.
* * * * *
Melrose on opening the gate found himself surrounded by his dogs, a fine mastiff and two young collies. He was trying to drive them off, after a gruff word to Dixon, when he was suddenly brought to a standstill by the sight of the woman on the steps.
"D——n it!—whom have you got here?" he said, fiercely perceiving at the same moment the open windows on the ground floor.
"Muster Melrose—it's noan o' my doin'," was Dixon's trembling reply, as he pointed a shaky finger at the windows. "It was t' yoong doctor from Pengarth—yo' ken him—"
A woman's voice interrupted.
"Please, sir, would you stop those dogs barking? They disturb the patient."
Melrose looked at the speaker in stupefaction.
"What the deuce have you been doing with my house?"—he turned furiously to Dixon—"who are these people?"
"Theer's a yoong man lyin' sick i' the drawin'-room," said Dixon desperately. "They do say 'at he's in a varra parlish condition; an' they tell me there's to be no barkin' nor noise whativer."
"Well, upon my word!" Melrose was by this time pale with rage. "A young man—sick—in my drawing-room!—and a young woman giving orders in my house!—you're a precious lot—you are!" He strode on toward the young woman, who, as he now saw, was in the dress of a nurse. She had descended the steps, and was vainly trying to quiet the dogs.
"I'll uphold yer!" muttered Dixon, following slowly after; "it's the queerest do-ment that iver I knew!"
"Madam! I should like to know what your business is here. I never invited you that I know of, and I am entirely at a loss to understand your appearance in my house!"
The girl whom Melrose addressed with this fierce mock courtesy turned on him a perplexed face.
"I know nothing about it, sir, except that I was summoned from Manchester last night to an urgent case, and arrived early this morning. Can't you, sir, quiet your dogs? Mr. Faversham is very ill."
"In my house!" cried Melrose, furiously. "I won't have it. He shan't remain here. I will have him removed."
The girl looked at him with amazement.
"That, sir, would be quite impossible. It would kill him to move him. Please, Mr. Dixon, help me with the dogs."
She turned imploringly to Dixon, who obediently administered various kicks and cuffs to the noisy trio which at last procured silence.
Her expression lightened, and with the professional alertness of one who has no time to spend in gossiping, she turned and went quickly back into the house.
Dixon approached his master.
"That's yan o' them," he said, gloomily. "T'other's inside."
"T'other who?—what? Tell me, you old fool, at once what the whole cursed business is! Are you mad or am I?"
Dixon eyed him calmly. He had by this time summoned to his aid the semi-mystical courage given him occasionally by his evangelical faith. If it was the Lord's will that such a thing should happen, why it was the Lord's will; and it was no use whatever for Mr. Melrose or any one else to kick against the pricks. So with much teasing deliberation, and constantly interrupted by his angry master, he told the story of the accident on the evening before, of Doctor Undershaw's appearance on the scene, and of the storming of the Tower.