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THE LIGHT OF SCARTHEY
A Romance
by
EGERTON CASTLE
Author of
"The Pride of Jennico," "Young
April," etc.
"Take whichsoever way thou wilt--the ways are all alike;
But do thou only come--I bade my threshold wait thy coming.
From out my window one can see the graves, and on my life
The graves keep watch." _Luteplayer's Song._
New York
Frederick A. Stokes Company
MCM
Copyright, 1899,
by Frederick A. Stokes Company.
All rights reserved.
Fourth Edition.
I Dedicate
THIS BOOK TO THE
MEMORY OF
FREDERICK ANDREWS LARKING
OF THE ROCKS, EAST MALLING, KENT
THAT, SO LONG AS ANYTHING OF MINE SHALL ENDURE,
THERE MAY ENDURE ALSO
A RECORD OF OUR FRIENDSHIP AND OF
MY SORROW
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
_Among the works of every writer of Fiction there are generally one or
two that owe their being to some_ haunting _thought, long communed
with--a thought which has at last found a living shape in some story
of deed and passion._
_I say one or two advisedly: for the span of man's active life is
short and such haunting fancies are, of their essence, solitary. As a
matter of fact, indeed, the majority of a novelist's creations belong
to another class, must of necessity (if he be a prolific creator) find
their conception in more sudden impulses. The great family of the
"children of his brain" must be born of inspirations ever new, and in
alluring freshness go forth into the world surrounded by the
atmosphere of their author's present mood, decked in the colours of
his latest imaginings, strengthened by his latest passional
impressions and philosophical conclusions._
_In the latter category the lack of long intimate acquaintance between
the author and the friends or foes he depicts, is amply compensated
for by the enthusiasm appertaining to new discoveries, as each
character reveals itself, often in quite unforeseen manner, and the
consequences of each event shape themselves inevitably and sometimes
indeed almost against his will._
_Although dissimilar in their genesis, both kinds of stories can, in
the telling, be equally life-like and equally alluring to the reader.
But what of the writer? Among his literary family is there not one
nearer his heart than all the rest--his_ dream-child? _It may be the
stoutest of the breed or it may be the weakling; it may be the
first-born, it often is the Benjamin. Fathers in the flesh know this
secret tenderness. Many a child and many a book is brooded over with a
special love even before its birth.--Loved thus, for no grace or merit
of its own, this book is my dream-child._
* * * * *
_Here, by the way, I should like to say my word in honour of
_Fiction_--"fiction" contradistinguished from what is popularly termed
"serious" writing._
_If, in a story, the characters and the events are truly convincing;
if the former are appealingly human and the latter are so carefully
devised and described as never to evoke the idea of improbability,
then it can make no difference in the_ intellectual pleasure _of the
reader whether what he is made to realise so vividly is a record of
fact or of mere fancy. Facts we read of are of necessity past: what is
past, what is beyond the immediate ken of our senses, can only be
realised in imagination; and the picture we are able to make of it for
ourselves depends altogether on the sympathetic skill of the recorder.
Is not Diana Vernon, born and bred in Scott's imagination, to the full
as living now before us as Rob Roy Macgregor whose existence was so
undeniably tangible to the men of his days? Do we not see, in our
mind's eye, and know as clearly the lovable "girt John Ridd" of_ Lorna
Doone _the romance as his contemporaries, Mr. Samuel Pepys of the hard
and uncompromising_ Diary _or King James of_ English Annals?
_Pictures, alike of the plainest facts or of the veriest imaginings,
are but pictures: it matters very little therefore whether the man or
the woman we read of but never can see in the flesh has really lived
or not, if what we do read raises an emotion in our hearts. To the
novelist, every character, each in his own degree, is almost as
living as a personal acquaintance; every event is as clear as a
personal experience. And if this be true of the story written_ a la
grace de la plume, _where both events and characters unfold themselves
like the buds of some unknown plant, how much more strongly is it the
case of the story that has so long been mused over that one day it had
to be told! Then the marking events of the actors' lives, their
adventures, whether of sorrow or of joy, their sayings and doings,
noble or bright or mistaken, recorded in the book, are but a tithe of
the adventures, sayings and doings with which the writer seems to be
familiar. He might write or talk about them, in praise or
vindictiveness as he loves or dreads them, for many a longer day--but
he has one main theme to make clear to his hearers and must respect
the modern canons of the Story-telling Art. Among the many things
therefore he could tell, an he would, he selects that only which will
unravel a particular thread of fate in the tangle of endless
consequences; which will render plausible the growth of passions on
which, in a continuous life-drama, is based one particular episode._
_Of such a kind is the story of Adrian Landale._
_The haunting thought round which the tale of the sorely
tempest-tossed dreamer is gathered is one which, I think, must at one
time or other have occurred to many a man as he neared the maturity of
middle-life:--What form of turmoil would come into his heart if, when
still in the strength of his age but after long years of hopeless
separation, he were again brought face to face with the woman who had
been the one passion of his life, the first and only love of his
youth? And what if she were still then exactly as he had last seen
her--she, untouched by years even as she had so long lived in his
thoughts: he, with his soul scarred and seamed by many encounters
bravely sustained in the Battle of Life?_
_The problem thus propounded is not solvable, even in fiction, unless
it be by "fantastic" treatment. But perhaps the more so on this
account did it haunt me. And out of the travail of my mind around it,
out of the changing shadows of restless speculation, gradually
emerged, clear and alive, the being of Adrian Landale and his two
loves._
_Here then was a man, whose mind, moulded by nature for grace and
contemplation, was cast by fate amid all the turmoils of_ Romance _and
action. Here was one of those whose warm heart and idealising
enthusiasm must wreathe the beauty of love into all the beauties of
the world; whose ideals are spent on one adored object; who, having
lost it, seems to have lost the very sense of love; to whom love never
could return, save by some miracle. But fortune, that had been so
cruelly hard on him, one day in her blind way brings back to his door
the miraculous restitution--and there leaves him to struggle along the
new path of his fate! It is there also that I take up the thread of
the speculation, and watch through its vicissitudes the working of the
problem raised by such a strange circumstance._
_The surroundings in a story of this kind are, of the nature of
things, all those of_ Romance. _And by_ Romance, _I would point out,
is not necessarily meant in tale-telling, a chain of events fraught
with greater improbability than those of so-called real life. (Indeed
where is now the writer who will for a moment admit, even tacitly,
that his records are not of reality?) It simply betokens, a
specialisation of the wider genus_ Novel; _a narrative of strong
action and moving incident, in addition to the necessary analysis of
character; a story in which the uncertain violence of the outside
world turns the course of the actors' lives from the more obvious
channels. It connotes also, as a rule, more poignant emotions--emotions
born of strife or peril, even of horror; it tells of the shock of arms
in life, rather than of the mere diplomacy of life._
_Above all_ Romance _depends upon picturesque and varied setting; upon
the scenery of the drama, so to speak. On the other hand it is not
essentially (though this has sometimes been advanced) a narrative of
mere adventures as contrasted to the observation and dissection of
character and manners we find in the true "novel." Rather be it said
that it is one in which the hidden soul is made patent under the
touchstone of blood-stirring incidents, of hairbreadth risks, of
recklessness or fierceness. There are soaring passions, secrets of the
innermost heart, that can only be set free in desperate
situations--and those situations are not found in the tenor in
every-day, well-ordered life: they belong to Romance._
_Spirit-fathers have this advantage that they can bring forth their
dream-children in what age and place they list: it is no times of
now-a-days, no ordinary scenery, that would have suited such
adventures as befell Adrian Landale, or Captain Jack, or "Murthering
Moll the Second."_
_Romantic enough is the scene, which, in a manner, framed the display
of a most human drama; and fraught it is, even to this day, in the
eyes of any but the least imaginative, with potentialities for strange
happenings.[A] It is that great bight of Morecambe; that vast of brown
and white shallows, deserted, silent, mysterious, and treacherous with
its dreaded shifting sands; fringed in the inland distance by the
Cumbrian hills, blue and misty; bordered outwards by the Irish sea,
cold and grey. And in a corner of that waste, the islet, small and
green and secure, with its ancient Peel, ruinous even as the noble
abbey of which it was once the dependant stronghold; with its still
sturdy keep, and the beacon, whose light-keeper was once a Dreamer of
Beautiful Things._
[Footnote A: _Those who like to associate fiction with definite places
may be interested to know that the prototype of Scarthey is the_ Piel
of Foudrey, _on the North Lancashire coast, near the edge of Morecambe
Bay, and that Pulwick was suggested by Furness Abbey. Barrow-in-Furness
was then but a straggling village. A floating light, facing the mouth
of the Wyre, now fulfils the duties devolving on the beacon of Scarthey
at the time of this story._]
_And romantic the times, if by that word is implied a freer scope than
can be found in modern years for elemental passions, for fighting and
loving in despite of every-day conventions; for enterprise, risks,
temptations unknown in the atmosphere of humdrum peace and order. They
are the early days of the century, days when easy and rapid means of
communication had not yet destroyed all the glamour of distance, when
a county like Lancashire was as a far-off country, with a spirit, a
language, customs and ideas unknown to the Metropolis; days when, if
there were no lifeboat crews, there could still be found rather
experienced "wreckers," and when the keeping of a beacon, to light a
dangerous piece of sea, was still within the province of a
public-spirited landlord. They are the days when the spread of
education had not even yet begun (for weal or for woe) its levelling
work; days of cruel monopolies and inane prohibitions, and ferocious
penal laws, inept in the working, baleful in the result; days of
keel-hauling and flogging; when the "free-trader" still swung, tarred
and in chains, on conspicuous points of the coast--even as the
highwayman rattled at the cross-road--for the encouragement of the
brotherhood; when it was naturally considered more logical (since hang
you must for almost any misdeed) to hang for a sheep than a lamb, and
human life on the whole was held rather cheap in consequence. They are
the days when in Liverpool the privateers were daily fitting out or
bringing in the "prizes," and when, in Lord Street Offices, distant
cargoes of "living ebony" were put to auction by steady, intensely
respectable, Church-going merchants. But especially they are the days
of war and the fortunes of war; days of pressgangs, to kidnap
unwilling rulers of the waves; of hulks and prisons filled to
overflowing, even in a mere commercial port like Liverpool, with
French prisoners of war._
_A long course of relentless hostilities, lasting the span of a
full-grown generation, had cultivated the predatory instinct of all
men with the temperament of action, and seemed to justify it.
Venturesome, hot-spirited youths, with their way to make in the world
(who in a former age might have been reduced to "the road") took up
privateering on a systematic scale. In such an atmosphere there could
not fail to return a belief in the good old_ border rule, _"the simple
plan: that they should take who have the power, and they should keep
who can." And it must be remembered that an island country's border is
the enemy's coast! On that ethical understanding many privateer owners
built up large fortunes, still enjoyed by descendants who in these
days would look upon high-sea looting of non-combatants with definite
horror._
_The years of the great French war, however, fostered a species of
nautical enterprise more venturesome even than privateering, raiding,
blockade-running and all the ordinary forms of smuggling that are
usual when two coast lines are at enmity. I mean that smuggling of
gold specie and bullion which incidentally was destined to affect the
course of Sir Adrian's life so powerfully._
* * * * *
_As Captain Jack's last venture may, at this distance of time, appear
a little improbable, it is well to state here some little-known facts
concerning the now rather incomprehensible pursuit of gold
smuggling--a romantic subject if ever there was one._
_The existence at one time of this form of "free-trade" is all but
forgotten. Indeed very little was ever heard of it in the world,
except among parties directly interested, even at the time when it
played an important part in the machinery of governments. Its rise
during the years of Napoleonic tyranny on the continent of Europe, and
its continuance during the factitious calm of the First Restoration in
France, were due to circumstances that never existed before and are
little likely to occur again._
_The accumulation of a fund of_ gold _coin, reserved against sudden
contingency, was one of Bonaparte's imperial ideas. In a modified and
more modern form, this notion of a "war-chest," untouched and
unproductive in peace-time, is still adhered to by the Germans: they
have kept to heart many of their former conqueror's lessons, lessons
forgotten by the French themselves--and the enormous treasure of gold
bags guarded at Spandau is a matter of common knowledge. Napoleon,
however, in his triumphant days never, and for obvious reasons, lacked
money. It was less an actual treasure that he required and valued so
highly for political and military purposes, than an ever ready reserve
of wealth easily portable, of paramount value at all times;
"concentrated," so to speak. And nothing could come nearer to that
description than rolls of English guineas. Indeed the vast numbers of
these coins which fitfully appeared in circulation throughout Europe
justified the many weird legends concerning the power of "British
Gold"_--l'or Anglais!
_There is every reason to believe that, in days when the national
currency consisted chiefly of lumbering silver_ ecus, _the Bourbon
government also appreciated to the full the value of a_ private _gold
reserve. At any rate it was at the time of the first Restoration that
the golden guinea of England found in France its highest premium._
_Without going into the vexed and dreary question of single or double
standard, it will suffice to say that during the early years of the
century now about to close, gold coin was leaving England at a rate
which not only appeared phenomenal but was held to be injurious to the
community._
_As a matter of fact most of it was finding its way to France, whilst
Great Britain was flooded with silver. It was then made illegal to
export gold coin or bullion. The prohibition was stringently, indeed
at one time, ruthlessly, enforced. In this manner the new and highly
profitable traffic in English guineas entered the province of the
"free-trader"; the difference introduced in his practice being merely
one of degree. Whereas, in the case of prohibited imports, the chief
task lay in running the illicit goods and distributing them, in the
case of guinea-smuggling its arduousness was further increased by the
danger of collecting the gold inland and clearing from home harbours._
_Very little, as I said, has ever been heard of this singular trade,
and for obvious reasons. In the first place it obtained only for a
comparatively small number of years, the latter part of the Great War:
the last of it belonging to the period of the_ Hundred Days. _And in
the second it was, at all times, of necessity confined to a very small
number of free-trading skippers. Of adventurous men, in stirring days,
there were of course a multitude. But few, naturally, were the men to
whose honour the custody of so much ready wealth could safely be
intrusted. "That is where," as Captain Jack says sometimes in this
book, "the 'likes of me' come in."_
_The exchange was enormously profitable. As much as thirty-two
shillings in silver value could, at one time, be obtained on the other
side of the water for an English guinea. But the shipper and broker,
in an illegal venture where contract could not be enforced, had to be
a man whose simple word was warranty--and indeed, in the case of large
consignments, this blind trust had to be extended to almost every man
of his crew. What a romance could be written upon this theme alone!_
_In the story of Adrian Landale, however, it plays but a subsidiary
part. Brave, joyous-hearted Captain Jack and his bold venture for a
fortune appear only in the drama to turn its previous course to
unforeseen channels; just as in most of our lives, the sudden
intrusion of a new strong personality--transient though it may be, a
tempest or a meteor--changes their seemingly inevitable trend to
altogether new issues._
* * * * *
_It was urged by my English publishers that, in_ "The Light of
Scarthey," _I relate two distinct love-stories and two distinct phases
of one man's life; and that it were wiser (by which word I presume was
meant more profitable) to distribute the tale between two books, one
to be a sequel to the other. Happily I would not be persuaded to cut a
fully composed canvas in two for the sake of the frames. "It is the
fate of sequels," as Stevenson said in his dedication of _Catriona_,
"to disappoint those who have waited for them." Besides, life is
essentially continuous.--It may not be inept to state a truism of this
kind in a world of novels where the climax of life, if not indeed its
very conclusion, is held to be reached on the day of marriage! There
is often, of course, more than one true passion of love in a man's
life; and even if the second does not really kill the memory of the
first, their course (should they be worth the telling) may well be
told separately. But if, in the story of a man's love for two women,
the past and the present are so closely interwoven as were the reality
and the "might-have-been" in the mind of Adrian Landale, any
separation of the two phases, youth and maturity, would surely have
stultified the whole scheme of the story._
_I have also been taken to task by some critics for having, the tale
once opened at a given time and place, harked back to other days and
other scenes: an inartistic and confusing method, I was told. I am
still of contrary opinion. There are certain stories which_ belong,
_by their very essence, to certain places. All ancient buildings have,
if we only knew them, their human dramas: this is the very soul of the
hidden but irresistible attraction they retain for us even when
deserted and dismantled as now the Peel of Scarthey. For the sake of
harmonious proportions, and in order to give it its proper atmosphere,
it was imperative that in this drama--wherever the intermediate scenes
might be placed, whether on the banks of the Vilaine, on the open sea,
or in Lancaster Castle--the Prologue should be witnessed on the green
islet in the wilderness of sands, even as the Crisis and the Closing
Scene of rest and tenderness._
_E. C.,
49, Sloane Gardens,
London, S. W.
October 1899._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I
SIR ADRIAN LANDALE, LIGHT-KEEPER OF SCARTHEY
CHAP. PAGE
I. The Peel of Scarthey 1
II. The Light-Keeper 6
III. Day Dreams: A Philosopher's Fate 16
IV. Day Dreams: A Fair Emissary 32
V. The Awakening 43
VI. The Wheel of Time 53
VII. Forebodings of Gladness 63
VIII. The Path of Wasted Years 70
IX. A Genealogical Epistle 85
PART II
"MURTHERING MOLL THE SECOND"
X. The Threshold of Womanhood 97
XI. A Masterful Old Maid 113
XII. A Record and a Presentment 122
XIII. The Distant Light 136
XIV. The Tower of Liverpool: Master and Man 144
XV. Under the Light 156
XVI. The Recluse and the Squire 174
PART III
"CAPTAIN JACK," THE GOLD SMUGGLER
XVII. Gold Smuggler and the Philosopher 191
XVIII. "Love Gilds the Scene and Woman Guides the Plot" 211
XIX. A Junior's Opinion 224
XX. The Quick and the Dead 244
XXI. The Dawn of an Eventful Day 252
XXII. The Day: Morning 262
XXIII. The Day: Noon 276
XXIV. The Night 294
XXV. The Fight for the Open 309
XXVI. The Three Colours 323
XXVII. Under the Light Again: The Lady and the Cargo 335
XXVIII. The End of the Thread 349
XXIX. The Light Goes Out 364
XXX. Husband and Wife 375
XXXI. In Lancaster Castle 382
XXXII. The One He Loved and the One Who Loved Him 393
XXXIII. Launched on the Great Wave 406
XXXIV. The Gibbet on the Sands 413
XXXV. The Light Rekindled 430
PART I
SIR ADRIAN LANDALE, LIGHT-KEEPER OF SCARTHEY
_We all were sea-swallowed, though some cast again;
And by that destiny to perform an act,
Whereof what's past is Prologue._
THE TEMPEST
THE LIGHT OF SCARTHEY
CHAPTER I
THE PEEL OF SCARTHEY
He makes a solitude and calls it peace.
BYRON.
Alone in the south and seaward corner of the great bight on the
Lancastrian coast--mournfully alone some say, gloriously alone to my
thinking--rises in singular unexpected fashion the islet of Scarthey;
a green oasis secure on its white rocky seat amidst the breezy
wilderness of sands and waters.
There is, in truth, more sand than water at most times round Scarthey.
For miles northward the wet strand stretches its silent expanse, tawny
at first, then merging into silver grey as in the dim distance it
meets the shallow advance of briny ripple. Wet sand, brown and dull,
with here and there a brighter trail as of some undecided river
seeking an aimless way, spreads westward, deep inland, until stopped
in a jagged line by bluffs that spring up abruptly in successions of
white rocky steps and green terraces.
Turn you seaward, at low tide there lies sand again and shingle
(albeit but a narrow beach, for here a depth of water sinks rapidly)
laved with relentless obstinacy by long, furling, growling rollers
that are grey at their sluggish base and emerald-lighted at their
curvetting crest. Sand yet again to the south, towards the nearer
coast line, for a mile or perhaps less, dotted, along an irregular
path, with grey rocks that look as though the advance guard of a giant
army had attempted to ford its insecure footing, had sunk into its
treacherous shifting pits, and left their blanching skull-tops half
emerging to record the disaster.
On the land side of the bight, far away beyond the grandly desolate,
silent, yellow tract, a misty blue fringe on the horizon heralds the
presence of the North Country; whilst beyond the nearer beach a
sprinkling of greenly ensconced homesteads cluster round some peaceful
and paternal looking church tower. Near the salty shore a fishing
village scatters its greystone cabins along the first terrace of the
bluffs.
Outwards, ever changing in colour and temper roll and fret the grey
waters of the Irish Sea, turbulent at times, but generally lenient
enough to the brown-sailed ketches that break the regular sweep of the
western horizon as they toil at the perpetual harvest of the deep.
Thus stands Scarthey. Although appearing as an island on the charts,
at low tides it becomes accessible dry-foot from the land by a narrow
causeway along the line of the white shallow reefs, which connect the
main pile to the rocky steps and terraces of the coast. But woe betide
man or beast that diverges many feet from the one secure path! The
sands of the great bay have already but too well earned their sinister
reputation.
During the greater part of the day, however, Scarthey justifies its
name--Skard- or Scarth-ey, the Knoll Island in the language of the old
Scandinavian masters of the land.
In fair weather, or in foul, whether rising out of sunny sands when
the ebbing waters have retired, or assailed on all sides by ramping
breakers, Scarthey in its isolation, with its well-preserved ruins and
its turret, from which for the last hundred years a light has been
burning to warn the seafarer, has a comfortable look of security and
privacy.
The low thick wall which in warlike times encompassed the bailey (now
surrounding and sheltering a wide paddock and neat kitchen gardens)
almost disappears under a growth of stunted, but sturdy trees; dwarf
alders and squat firs that shake their white-backed leaves, and swing
their needle clusters, merrily if the breeze is mild, obstinately if
the gale is rousing and seem to proclaim: "Here are we, well and
secure. Ruffle and toss, and lash, O winds, the faithless waters, _we_
shall ever cling to this hospitable footing, the only kindly soil
amid this dreariness; here you once wafted our seed; here shall we
live and perpetuate our life."
On the sea front of the bailey walls rise, sheer from the steep rock,
the main body and the keep of the Peel. They are ruinous and shorn of
their whilom great height, humbled more by the wilful destruction of
man than by the decay of time.
But although from a distance the castle on the green island seems
utterly dismantled, it is not, even now, all ruin. And, at the time
when Sir Adrian Landale, of Pulwick, eighth baronet, adopted it as his
residence, it was far from being such.
True, the greater portion of that mediaeval building, half monastic,
half military, exposed even then to the searching winds many bare and
roofless chambers; broken vaults filled with driven sands; more than
one spiral stair with hanging steps leading into space. But the
massive square keep had been substantially restored. Although roofless
its upper platform was as firm as when it was first built; and in a
corner, solidly ensconced, rose the more modern turret that sheltered
the honest warning light.
The wide chambers of the two remaining floors, which in old warlike
days were maintained bare and free, and lighted only by narrow
watching loopholes on all sides, had been, for purposes of peaceful
tenanncy, divided into sundry small apartments. New windows had been
pierced into the enormous thickness of stone and cement; the bare
coldness of walls was also hidden under more home-like panellings.
Close-fitting casements and solid doors insured peace within; the wind
in stormy hours might moan or rage outside this rocky pile, might hiss
and shriek and tear its wings among the jagged ruins, bellow and
thunder in and out of opened vaults, but it might not rattle a window
of the modern castellan's quarters or shake a latch of his chamber
door.
There, for reasons understood then only by himself, had Sir Adrian
elected, about the "year seven" of this century and in the prime of
his age, to transplant his lares and penates.
The while, this Adrian Landale's ancestral home stood, in its placid
and double pride of ancient and settled wealth, only some few miles
away as the bee flies, in the midst of its noble park, slightly
retired from the coast-line; and from its upper casements could be
descried by day the little green patch of Scarthey and the jagged
outline of its ruins on the yellow or glimmering face of the great
bay, and by night the light of its turret. And there he was still
living, in some kind of happiness, in the "year fourteen," when, out
of the eternal store of events, began to shape themselves the latter
episodes of a life in which storm and peace followed each other as
abruptly as in the very atmosphere that he then breathed.
For some eight years he had nested on that rock with no other
companions but a dog, a very ancient housekeeper who cooked and washed
for "t' young mester" as she obstinately persisted in calling the man
whom she had once nursed upon her knee, and a singular sturdy foreign
man (Rene L'Apotre in the language of his own land, but known as Renny
Potter to the land of his adoption); which latter was more than
suspected of having escaped from the Liverpool Tower, at that time the
lawful place of custody of French war prisoners.
His own voluntary captivity, however, had nothing really dismal for
Adrian Landale. And the inhabited portions of Scarthey ruins had
certainly nothing prison-like about them, nothing even that recalled
the wilful contrition of a hermitage.
On the second floor of the tower (the first being allotted to the use,
official and private, of the small household), clear of the
surrounding walls and dismantled battlements, the rooms were laid out
much as they might have been up at Pulwick Priory itself, yonder
within the verdant grounds on the distant rise. His sleeping quarters
plainly, though by no means ascetically furnished, opened into a large
chamber, where the philosophic light-keeper spent the best part of his
days. Here were broad and deep windows, one to the south with a wide
view of the bay and the nearer coast, the other to the west where the
open sea displayed her changeable moods. On three sides of this room,
the high walls, from the white stone floor to the time-blackened beams
that bore the ceiling, almost disappeared under the irregular rows of
many thousand of volumes. Two wooden arm-chairs, bespeaking little
aversion to an occasional guest, flanked the hearth.
The hearth is the chief refuge of the lone thinker; this was a cosy
recess, deep cut in the mediaeval stone and mortar; within which, on
chilly days, a generous heap of sea-cast timber and dried turf shot
forth dancing blue flames over a mound of white ash and glowing
cinders; but which, in warmer times, when the casements were unlatched
to let in with spring or summer breeze the cries of circling sea-fowls
and the distant plash of billows, offered shelter to such green plants
as the briny air would favour.
At the far end of the room rose in systematical clusters the pipes of
a small organ, built against the walls where it bevelled off a corner.
And in the middle of the otherwise bare apartment stood a broad and
heavy table, giving support to a miscellaneous array of books, open or
closed, sundry philosophical instruments, and papers in orderly
disorder; some still in their virginal freshness, most, however,
bearing marks of notemaking in various stages.
Here, in short, was the study and general keeping-room of the master
of Scarthey, and here, for the greater part, daily sat Sir Adrian
Landale, placidly reading, writing, or thinking at his table; or at
his organ, lost in soaring melody; or yet, by the fireside, in his
wooden arm-chair musing over the events of that strange world of
thought he had made his own; whilst the aging black retriever with
muzzle stretched between his paws slept his light, lazy sleep, ever
and anon opening an eye of inquiry upon his master when the latter
spoke aloud his thoughts (as solitary men are wont to do), and then
with a deep, comfortable sigh, resuming dog-life dreams.
CHAPTER II
THE LIGHT-KEEPER
He who sits by the fire doth dream,
Doth dream that his heart is warm.
But when he awakes his heart is afraid for the bitter cold.
_Luteplayer's Song._
The year 1814 was eventful in the annals of the political world.
Little, however, of the world's din reached the little northern
island; and what there came of it was not willingly hearkened to.
There was too much of wars past and present, too many rumours of wars
future about it, for the ear of the recluse.
Late in the autumn of that red-letter year which brought a short
respite of peace to war-ridden Europe--a fine, but rather tumultuous
day round Scarthey--the light-keeper, having completed the morning's
menial task in the light-turret (during a temporary absence of his
factotum) sat, according to custom, at his long table, reading.
With head resting on his right hand whilst the left held a page ready
to turn, he solaced himself, pending the appearance of the mid-day
meal, with a few hundred lines of a favourite work--the didactic
poems, I believe, of a certain Doctor Erasmus Darwin, on the analogies
of the outer world.
There was quite as little of the ascetic in Adrian Landale's physical
man as of the hermitage in his chosen abode.
With the exception of the hair, which he wore long and free, and of
which the fair brown had begun to fade to silver-grey, the master of
Scarthey was still the living presentment of the portrait which, even
at that moment, presided among the assembly of canvas Landales in the
gallery of Pulwick Priory. Eight years had passed over the model since
the likeness had been fixed. But in their present repose, the features
clear cut and pronounced, the kindly thoughtful eyes looked, if
anything, younger than their counterfeit; indeed, almost
incongruously young under the flow of fading hair.
Clean shaven, with hands of refinement, still fastidious, his long
years of solitude notwithstanding, as to general neatness of attire,
he might at any moment of the day have walked up the great stair of
honour at Pulwick without by his appearance eliciting other remarks
than that his clothes, in cut and colour, belonged to fashions now
some years lapsed.
The high clock on the mantelshelf hummed and gurgled, and with much
deliberation struck one. Only an instant later, lagging footsteps
ascended the wooden, echoing stairs without, and the door was pushed
open by the attendant, an old dame. She was very dingy as to garb,
very wrinkled and feeble as to face, yet with a conscious achievement
of respectability, both in appearance and manner, befitting her post
as housekeeper to the "young master." The young master, be it stated
at once, was at that time fast approaching the end of his second score
years.
"Margery," said Adrian, rising to take the heavy tray from the
knotted, trembling hands; "you know that I will not allow you to carry
those heavy things upstairs yourself." He raised his voice to
sing-song pitch near the withered old ear. "I have already told you
that when Renny is not at home, I can take my food in your kitchen."
Margery paused, after her wont, to wait till the sounds had filtered
as far as her intellect, then proceeded to give a few angry
headshakes.
"Eh! Eh! It would become Sir Adrian Landale o' Pulwick--Barrownite--to
have 's meat i' the kitchen--it would that. Nay, nay, Mester Adrian,
I'm none so old but I can do my day's work yet. Ah! an' it 'ud be well
if that gomerl, Renny Potter, 'ud do his'n. See here, now, Mester
Adrian, nowt but a pint of wine left; and it the last," pointing her
withered finger, erratically as the palsy shook it, at a cut-glass
decanter where a modicum of port wine sparkled richly under the
facets. "And he not back yet, whatever mischief's agate wi' him,
though he kens yo like your meat at one." And then circumstances
obliged her to add: "He is landing now, but it's ower late i' the
day."
"So--there, Margery," sang the "Squire," giving his old nurse
affectionate little taps on the back. "Never fash yourself; tides
cannot always fit in with dinner-hours, you know. And as for poor
Renny, I believe after all you are as fond of him, at the bottom of
your heart, as I am. Now what good fare have you got for me to-day?"
bending from his great height to inspect the refection, "Ah--hum,
excellent."
The old woman, after another pause for comprehension, retired battling
with dignity against the obvious pleasure caused by her master's
affectionate familiarity, and the latter sat down at a small table in
front of the south window.
Through this deep, port-hole-like aperture he could, whilst disposing
of his simple meal, watch the arrival of the yawl which did ferrying
duty between Scarthey and the mainland. The sturdy little craft,
heavily laden with packages, was being hauled up to its usual place of
safety high on the shingle bank, under cover of a remnant of walling
which in the days of the castle's strength had been a secure
landing-place for the garrison's boats, but which now was almost
filled by the cast-up sands and stone of the beach.
This was done under the superintendence of Rene, man of all work, and
with the mechanical intermediary of rollers and capstan, by a small
white horse shackled to a lever, and patiently grinding his steady
rounds on the sand.
His preliminary task achieved, the man, after a few friendly smacks,
set the beast free to trot back to his loose pasture: proceeding
himself to unship his cargo.
Through the narrow frame of his window, the master, with eyes of
approval, could see the servant dexterously load himself with a
well-balanced pile of parcels, disappearing to return after intervals
empty-handed, within the field of view, and select another burden, now
heavier now more bulky.
In due course Rene came up and reported himself in person, and as he
stopped on the threshold the dark doorway framed a not unstriking
presentment; a young-looking man for his years (he was a trifle junior
to his master), short and sturdy in build, on whose very broad
shoulders sat a phenomenally fair head--the hair short, crisp, and
curly, in colour like faded tow--and who, in smilingly respectful
silence, gazed into the room out of small, light-blue eyes, brimful of
alertness and intelligence, waiting to be addressed.
"Renny," said Adrian Landale, returning the glance with one of
comfortable friendliness, "you will have to make your peace with
Margery; she considers that you neglect me shamefully. Why, you are
actually twenty minutes late after three days' journeying, and perils
by land and sea!"
The Frenchman answered the pleasantry by a broader smile and a scrape.
"And, your honour," he said, "if what is now arriving on us had come
half an hour sooner, I should have rested planted there" (with a jerk
of the flaxen head towards the mainland), "turning my thumbs, till
to-morrow, at the least. We shall have a grain, number one, soon."
He spoke English fluently, though with the guttural accent of
Brittany, and an unconquerable tendency to translate his own jargon
almost word for word.
In their daily intercourse master and man had come for many years past
to eschew French almost entirely; Rene had let it be understood that
he considered his proficiency in the vernacular quite undeniable, and
with characteristic readiness Sir Adrian had fallen in with the little
vanity. In former days the dependant's form of address had been
_Monseigneur_ (considering, and shrewdly so, an English landowner to
stand in that relation to a simple individual like himself); in later
days "Monseigneur" having demurred at the appellation, "My lord," in
his own tongue, the devoted servant had discovered "Your honour" as a
happy substitute, and adhered to this discovery with satisfaction.
"Oh, we are going to have a squall, say you," interpreted the master,
rising to inspect the weather-glass, which in truth had fallen deep
with much suddenness. "More than a squall, I think; this looks like a
hurricane coming. But since you are safe home, all's well; we are
secure and sound here, and the fishing fleet are drawing in, I see,"
peering through the seaward window. "And now," continued Adrian,
laying down his napkin, and brushing away a few crumbs from the folds
of a faultless silk stock, "what have you for me there--and what
news?"
"News, your honour! Oh, for that I have news this time," said Mr.
Renny Potter, with an emphatic nod, "but if your honour will permit, I
shall say them last. I have brought the clothes and the linen, the
wine, the brandy, and the books. Brandy and wine, your honour, I
heard, out of the last prize brought into Liverpool, and a Nantes ship
it was, too"--this in a pathetically philosophical tone. Then after a
pause: "Also provisions and bulbs for the devil's pot, as Margery will
call it. But there is no saying, your honour eats more when I have
brought him back onions, eschalot, and _ail_; now do I lie, your
honour? May I?" added the speaker, and forthwith took his answer from
his master's smile; "may I respectfully see what the old one has
kitchened for you when I was not there?"
And Adrian Landale with some amusement watched the Frenchman rise from
the package he was then uncording to examine the platters on the table
and loudly sniff his disdain.
"Ah, ah, boiled escallops again. Perfectly--boiled cabbage seasoned
with salt. Not a taste in the whole affair. Prison food--oh, yes, old
woman! Why, we nourished ourselves better in the Tower, when we could
have meat at all. Ah, your honour," sighed the man returning to his
talk; "you others, English, are big and strong, but you waste great
things in small enjoyment!"
"Oho, Renny," said the light-keeper squire, as he leant against the
fireplace leisurely filling a long clay pipe, "this is one of your
epigrams; I must make a note of it anon; but let me see now what you
really have in those parcels of books--for books they are, are they
not? so carefully and neatly packed."
"Books," assented the man, undoing the final fold of paper. "Mr. Young
in the High Street of Liverpool had the packets ready. He says you
must have them all; and all printed this year. What so many people can
want to say, I for my count cannot comprehend. Three more parcels on
the stairs, your honour. Mr. Young says you must have them. But it
took two porters to carry them to the Preston diligence."
Not without eagerness did the recluse of Scarthey bend over and finger
the unequal rows of volumes arrayed on the table, and with a smile of
expectation examine the labels.
"The Corsair" and "Lara" he read aloud, lifting a small tome more
daintily printed than the rest. "Lord Byron. What's this? Jane Austen,
a novel. 'Roderick, last of the Goths.' Dear, dear," his smile fading
into blankness; "tiresome man, I never gave him orders for any such
things."
Rene, battling with his second parcel, shrugged his shoulders.
"The librarian," he explained, "said that all the world read these
books, and your honour must have them."
"Well, well," continued the hermit, "what else? 'Jeremy Bentham,' a
new work; Ricardo, another book on economy; Southey the Laureate,
'Life of Nelson.' Really, Mr. Young might have known that naval deeds
have no joy for me, hardly more than for you, Renny," smiling grimly
on his servant. "'Edinburgh Review,' a London magazine for the last
six months; 'Rees's Cyclopaedia,' vols. 24-27; Wordsworth, 'The
Recluse.' Ah, old Willie Wordsworth! Now I am anxious to see what he
has to say on such a topic."
"Dear Willie Wordsworth," mused Sir Adrian, sitting down to turn over
the pages of the 'Excursion,' "how widely have our lives drifted apart
since those college days of ours, when we both believed in the coming
millennium and the noble future of mankind--noble mankind!"
He read a few lines and became absorbed, whilst Rene noiselessly
busied himself in and out of the chamber. Presently he got up, book in
hand, slowly walked to the north window, and passively gazed at the
misty distance where rose the blue outline of the lake hills.
"So my old friend, almost forgotten," he murmured, "that is where you
indite such worthy lines. It were enough to tempt me out into men's
world again to think that there would be many readers and lovers
abroad of these words of yours. So, that is what five and twenty years
have done for you--what would you say to what they have done for
me...?"
It was a long retrospect.
Sir Adrian was deeply immersed in thought when he became aware that
his servant had come to a standstill, as if waiting for a return of
attention. And in answer to the mute appeal he turned his head once
more in Rene's direction.
"Your honour, everything is in its place," began the latter, with a
fitting sense of his own method. "I have now to report that I saw your
man of business in Lancaster, and he has attended to the matter of the
brothers Shearman's boat that was lost. I saw the young men themselves
this morning. They are as grateful to Sir Adrian as people in this
country can express." This last with a certain superiority.
Sir Adrian received the announcement of the working of one of his
usual bounties with a quiet smile of gratification.
"They also told me to say that they would bring the firewood and the
turf to-morrow. But they won't be able to do that because we shall
have dirty weather. Then they told me that when your honour wants fish
they begged your honour to run up a white flag over the lantern--they
thought that a beautiful idea--and they would bring some as soon as
possible. I took on myself to assure them that I could catch what fish
your honour requires; and the prawns, too ... but that is what they
asked me to say."
"Well, well, and so you can," said the master, amused by the show of
sub-acute jealousy. "What else?"
"The books of the man of business and the banker are on the table. I
have also brought gazettes from Liverpool." Here the fellow's
countenance brimmed with the sense of his news' importance. "I know
your honour cares little for them. But this time I think you will read
them. Peace, your honour, it is the peace! It is all explained in
these journals--the 'Liverpool Mercury.'"
Renny lifted the folded sheets from the table and handed them with
contained glee. "There has been peace these six months, and we never
knew it. I read about it the whole way back from the town. The Emperor
is shut up on an island--but not so willingly as your Honour, ah,
no!--and there is an end of citizen Bonaparte. Peace, France and
England no longer fighting, it is hard to believe--and our old kings
are coming back, and everything to be again as in the old days."
Sir Adrian took the papers, not without eagerness, and glanced over
the narrative of events, already months old, with all the surprise of
one who, having wilfully shut himself out from the affairs of the
world, ignored the series of disasters that had brought about the
tyrant's downfall.
"As you say, my friend, it is almost incredible," he said, at length.
Then thoughtfully: "And now you will be wanting to return home?" said
he.
Rene, who had been scanning his master's face with high expectation,
felt his heart leap as he thought he perceived a hidden tone of regret
in the question.
He drew himself up to his short height, and with a very decided voice
made answer straightway:
"I shall go away from your honour the day when your honour dismisses
me. If your honour decides to live on this rock till my hour, or his,
strikes--on this rock with him I remain. I am not conceited, I hope,
but what, pray, will become of your honour here without me?"
There was force in this last remark, simply as it was pronounced.
Through the mist of interlacing thoughts suggested by the word Peace!
(the end of the Revolution, that distant event which, nevertheless,
had had such sweeping influence over the course of his whole life), it
brought a faint smile to Sir Adrian's lips.
He took two steps forward and laid his hand familiarly on the man's
broad shoulder, and, in a musing way, he said at intervals:
"Yes, yes, indeed, good Renny, what would become of me?--what would
have become of me?--how long ago it seems!--without you? And yet it
might have been as well if two skeletons, closely locked in embrace,
blanched by the grinding of the waters and the greed of the crabs, now
reposed somewhere deep in the sands of that Vilaine estuary.... This
score of years, she has had rest from the nightmare that men have made
of life on God's beautiful earth. I have been through more of it, my
good Renny."
Rene's brain was never equal to coping with his master's periodic fits
of pessimism, though he well knew their first and ever-present cause.
In a troubled way he looked about the room, so peaceful, so retired
and studious; and Sir Adrian understood.
"Yes, yes, you are right; I have cut off the old life," he made answer
to the unspoken expostulation, "and that I can live in my own small
world without foregoing all my duties, I owe to you, my good friend;
but startling news like this brings back the past very livingly, dead
though it be--dead."
Rene hesitated; he was pondering over the advisability of disburdening
himself of yet another strange item of information he had in reserve;
but, as his master, rousing himself with an effort as if to dismiss
some haunting thought, turned round again to the table, he decided
that the moment was not propitious.
"So you have seen to all these things," said Sir Adrian wearily.
"Good; I will look over them."
He touched the neat pile of books and papers, listlessly, as he spoke,
yet, instead of sitting down, remained as he was, with eyes that had
grown wondering, staring out across the sea.
"Look," he said presently, in a low voice, and Rene noticed a rare
flush of colour rise to the thin cheeks. "Look--is not this day just
like--one we both remember well...? Listen, the wind is coming up as
it did then. And look at yonder sky!"
And taking the man by the arm, he advanced slowly with him towards the
window.
In the west the heavens on the horizon had grown threateningly dark;
but under the awe-inspiring slate-coloured canopy of clouds there
opened a broad archway filled with primrose light--the luminous arch,
well known to seafarers, through which charge the furious southwestern
squalls. The rushing of the storm was already visible in the distance
over the grey waters, which having been swayed for days by a steady
Aquilon were now lashed in flank by the sudden change of wind.
The two men looked out for a while in silence at the spectacle of the
coming storm. In the servant's mind ran various trivial thoughts
bearing on the present--what a lucky matter it was that he should have
returned in time; only just in time it was; from the angry look of the
outer world the island would now, for many a day be besieged by seas
impassable to such small craft as alone could reach the reef. Had he
tarried but to the next tide (and how sorely he had been tempted to
remain an hour more in the gatekeeper's lodge within sight and hearing
of buxom Moggie, Margery's grand-daughter), had he missed the tide,
for days, maybe for weeks, would the master have had to watch and
tend, alone, the beacon fire. But here he was, and all was well; and
he had still the marvellous news to tell. Should he tell them now? No,
the master was in one of his trances--lost far away in the past no
doubt, that past that terminated on such a day as this. And Sir
Adrian, with eyes fixed on the widening arch of yellow light, was
looking inwards on the far-away distance of time.
Men, who have been snatched back to life from death in the deep,
recall how, before seeming to yield the ghost, the picture of their
whole existence passed in vivid light before the eye of their mind.
Swift beyond the power of understanding are such revelations; in one
flash the events of a good or an evil life leap before the seeing
soul--moment of anguish intolerable or of sublime peace!
On such a boisterous day as this, some nineteen years before, by the
sandy mouth of the river Vilaine, on the confines of Brittany and
Vendee had Adrian Landale been drowned; under such a sky, and under
the buffets of such an angry wind had he been recalled to life, and in
the interval, he had seen the same pictures which now, coursing back
many years in a few seconds, passed before his inward vision.
CHAPTER III
DAY DREAMS: A PHILOSOPHER'S FATE
Le beau temps de ma jeunesse ... quand j'etais si malheureux.
The borderland between adolescence and manhood, in the life of men of
refined aspirations and enthusiastic mettle, is oftener than not an
unconsciously miserable period--one which more mature years recall as
hollow, deceiving, bitterly unprofitable.
Yet there is always that about the memories of those far-off young
days, their lofty dreams long since scattered, their virgin delights
long since lost in the drudgery of earthly experience, which ever and
anon seizes the heart unawares and fills it with that infinite
weakness: that mourning for the dead and gone past, which yet is not
regret.
In the high days of the Revolutionary movement across the water,
Adrian Landale was a dreamy student living in one of those venerable
Colleges on the Cam, the very atmosphere of which would seem
sufficient to glorify the merits of past ages and past institutions.
Amidst such peaceful surroundings this eldest scion of an ancient,
north-country race--which had produced many a hardy fighter, though
never yet a thinker nor even a scholar--amid a society as prejudiced
and narrow-minded as all privileged communities are bound to become,
had nevertheless drifted resistlessly towards that unfathomable sea
whither a love for the abstract beautiful, a yearning for
super-earthly harmony and justice, must inevitably waft a young
intelligence.
As the academical years glided over him, he accumulated much classical
lore, withal read much latter-day philosophy and developed a fine
youthful, theoretical love for the new humanitarianism. He dipped
aesthetically into science, wherein he found a dim kind of help
towards a more recondite appreciation of the beauties of nature. His
was not a mind to delight in profound knowledge, but rather in
"intellectual cream."
He solaced himself with essays that would have been voted brilliant
had they dealt with things less extravagant than Universal Harmony and
Fraternal Happiness; with verses that all admitted to be highly
polished and melodious, but something too mystical in meaning for the
understanding of an every-day world; with music, whereof he was
conceded an interpreter of no mean order.
In fact the worship of his soul might have been said to be the
Beautiful in the abstract--the Beautiful in all its manifestations
which include Justice, Harmony, Truth, and Kindliness--the one
indispensable element of his physical happiness, the Beautiful in the
concrete.
This is saying that Adrian Landale, for all his array of definite
accomplishments, which might have been a never-failing source of
interest in an easy existence, was fitted in a singularly unfortunate
manner for the life into which one sudden turn of fortune's wheel
unexpectedly launched him.
During the short halcyon days of his opening independence, however, he
was able to make himself the centre of such a world as he would have
loved to live in. He was not, of course, generally popular, either at
college or at home; nor yet in town, except among that small set in
whose midst he inevitably found his way wherever he went; his
inferiors in social status perhaps, these chosen friends of his; but
their lofty enthusiasms were both appreciative of and congenial to his
own. Most of them, indeed, came in after-life to add their names to
England's roll of intellectual fame, partly because they had that in
them which Adrian loathed as unlovely--the instinct and will of
strife, partly; it must be added, because they remained free in their
circumstances to follow the lead of their nature. Which freedom was
not allotted to him.
* * * * *
On one magnificent frosty afternoon, early in the year 1794, the
London coach deposited Adrian Landale in front of the best hostelry in
Lancaster, after more than a year's separation from his family.
This separation was not due to estrangement, but rather to the
instigation of his own sire, Sir Thomas--a gentleman of the "fine old
school"--who, exasperated by the, to him, incomprehensible and
insupportable turn of mind developed by his heir (whom he loved well
enough, notwithstanding, in his own way), had hoped, in good
utilitarian fashion, that a prolonged period of contact with the
world, lubricated by a plentiful supply of money, might shake his "big
sawney of a son" out of his sickly-sentimental views; that it would
show him that _gentlemen's_ society--and, "by gad, ladies' too"--was
not a thing to be shunned for the sake of "wild-haired poets, dirty
firebrands, and such cattle."
The downright old baronet was even prepared, in an unformed sort of
way, to see his successor that was to be return to the paternal hearth
the richer for a few gentlemanly vices, provided he left his nonsense
behind him.
As the great lumbering vehicle, upon the box seat of which sat the
young traveller, lost in dreamy speculation according to his wont,
drew clattering to a halt, he failed at first to notice the central
figure in the midst of the usual expectant crowd of inn guests and inn
retainers, called forward by the triumphant trumpeting which heralds
the approach of the mail. There, however, stood the Squire of Pulwick,
"Sir Tummus" himself, in portly and jovial importance.
The father's eyes, bright and piercing under his bushy white brows,
had already detected his boy from a distance; and they twinkled as he
took note, with all the pride of an author in his work, of the
symmetry of limb and shoulders set forth by the youth's faultless
attire--and the dress of men in the old years of the century was
indeed calculated to display a figure to advantage--of the lightness
and grace of his frame as he dismounted from his perch; in short of
the increased manliness of his looks and bearing.
But a transient frown soon came to overshade Sir Thomas's ruddy
content as he descried the deep flush (an old weakness) which mantled
the young cheeks under the spur of unexpected recognition.
And when, later, the pair emerged from the inn after an hour's
conversation over a bottle of burnt sherry--conversation which, upon
the father's side, had borne, in truth, much the character of
cross-examination--to mount the phaeton with which a pair of
high-mettled bays were impatiently waiting the return homewards, there
was a very definite look of mutual dissatisfaction to be read upon
their countenances.
Whiling away the time in fitful constrained talk, parcelled out by
long silences, they drove again through the gorgeous, frost-speckled
scenery of rocky lands until the sheen of the great bay suddenly
peered between two distant scars, proclaiming the approach to the
Pulwick estate. The father then broke a long spell of muteness, and
thus to his son, in his ringing country tones, as if pursuing aloud
the tenor of his thoughts:
"Hark'ee, Master Adrian," said he, "that you are now a man of parts,
as they say, I can quite see. You seem to have read a powerful lot of
things that do not come our way up here. But let us understand each
other. I cannot make head or tail of these far-fetched new-fangle
notions you, somehow or other, have fallen in love with--your James
Fox, your Wilberforce, your Adam Smith, they may be very fine fellows,
but to my humble thinking they're but a pack of traitors to king and
country, when all is said and done. All this does not suit an English
gentleman. You think differently; or perhaps you do not care whether
it does or not. I admit I can't hold forth as you do; nor string a lot
of fine words together. I am only an old nincompoop compared to a
clever young spark like you. But I request you to keep off these
topics in the company I like to see round my table. They don't like
Jacobins, you know, no more do I!"
"Nor do I," said Adrian fervently.
"Nor do you? Don't you, sir, don't you? Why, then what the devil have
you been driving at?"
"I am afraid, sir, you do not understand my views."
"Well, never mind; I don't like 'em, that's short, and if you bring
them out before your cousin, little Madame Savenaye, you will come off
second best, my lad, great man as you are, and so I warn you!"
In tones as unconcerned as he could render them the young man sought
to turn the intercourse to less personal topics, by inquiring further
anent this unknown cousin whose very name was strange to him.
Sir Thomas, easily placable if easily roused, started willingly enough
on a congenial topic. And thus Adrian conceived his first impression
of that romantic being whose deeds have remained legendary in the
French west country, and who was destined to exercise so strong an
influence upon his own life.
"Who is she?" quoth the old gentleman, with evident zest. "Ay. All
this is news to you, of course. Well: she _was_ Cecile de Kermelegan.
You know your mother's sister Mary Donoghue (murthering Moll, they
called her on account of her killing eyes) married a M. de Kermelegan,
a gentleman of Brittany. Madame de Savenaye is her daughter (first
cousin of yours), that means that she has good old English blood in
her veins and Irish to boot. She speaks English as well as you or I,
her mother's teaching of course, but she is French all the same; and,
by gad, of the sort which would reconcile even an Englishman with the
breed!"
Sir Thomas's eyes sparkled with enthusiasm; his son examined him with
grave wonder.
"The very sight of her, my boy, is enough to make a man's heart warm.
Wait till you see her and she begins to talk of what the red-caps are
doing over there--those friends of yours, who are putting in practice
all your fine theories! And, bookworm as you are, I'll warrant she'll
warm your sluggish blood for you. Ha! she's a rare little lady. She
married last year the Count of Savenaye."
Adrian assumed a look of polite interest.
"Emigre, I presume?" he said, quietly.
"Emigre? No, sir. He is even now fighting the republican rapscallions,
d--n them, and thrashing them, too, yonder in his country. She stuck
by his side; ay, like a good plucked one she did, until it became
palpable that, if there was to be a son and heir to the name, she had
better go and attend to its coming somewhere else, in peace. Ho, ho,
ho! Well, England was the safest place, of course, and, for her, the
natural one. She came and offered herself to us on the plea of
relationship. I was rather taken aback at first, I own; but, gad, boy,
when I saw the woman, after hearing what she had had to go through to
reach us at all, I sang another song. Well, she is a fine
creature--finer than ever now that the progeny has been satisfactorily
hatched; a brace of girls instead of the son and heir, after all! Two
of them; no less. Ho, ho, ho! And she was furious, the pretty dear!
However, you'll soon see for yourself. You will see a woman, sir, who
has loaded and fired cannon with her own hands, when the last man to
serve it had been shot. Ay, and more than that, my lad--she's brained
a hulking sans-culotte that was about to pin her servant to the floor.
The lad has told me so himself, and I daresay he can tell you more if
you care to practise your French with master Rene L'Apotre, that's the
fellow! A woman who sticks to her lord and master in mud and
powder-smoke until there is precious little time to spare, when she
makes straight for a strange land, in a fishing-smack, with no other
protector than a peasant; and now, with an imp of a black-eyed infant
to her breast (Sally Mearson's got the other; you remember Sally, your
own nurse's daughter?), looks like a chit of seventeen. That's what
you'll see, sir. And when she sails downstairs for dinner, dressed up,
powdered and high-heeled, she might be a princess, a queen who has
never felt a crumpled roseleaf in her life. Gad! I'm getting poetical,
I declare."
In this strain did the Squire, guiding his horses with strong,
dexterous hand, expatiate to his son; the crisp air rushing past them,
making their faces glow with the tingling blood until, burning the
ground, they dashed up the avenue that leads to the white mansion of
Pulwick, and halted amidst a cloud of steam before its Palladian
portico.
What happened to Adrian the moment after happens, as a rule, only once
in a man's lifetime.
Through the opening portals the guest, whose condensed biography the
Squire had been imparting to his son (all unconsciously eliciting
thereby more repulsion than admiration in the breast of that
fastidious young misogynist), appeared herself to welcome the return
of her host.
Adrian, as he retired a pace to let his father ascend the steps, first
caught a glimpse of a miraculously small and arched foot, clad in pink
silk, and, looking suddenly up, met fully the flash of great dark
eyes, set in a small white face, more brilliant in their immense
blackness than even the glinting icicles pendant over the lintel that
now shot back the sun's sinking glory.
The spell was of the kind that the reason of man can never sanction,
and yet that have been ever and will be while man is. This youth,
virgin of heart, dreamy of head who had drifted to his twentieth
year, all unscathed by passion or desire, because he had never met
aught in flesh and blood answering to his unconscious ideal, was
struck to the depth of his soul by the presence of one, as unlike this
same ideal as any living creature could be; struck with fantastic
suddenness, and in that all-encompassing manner which seizes the
innermost fibres of the being.
It was a pang of pain, but a revelation of glory.
He stood for some moments, with paling cheeks and hotly-beating heart,
gazing back into the wondrous eyes. She, yielding her cheek carelessly
to the Squire's hearty kiss, examined the new-comer curiously the
while:
"Why--how now, tut, tut, what's this?" thundered the father, who,
following the direction of her eyes, wheeled round suddenly to
discover his son's strange bearing, "Have you lost all the manners as
well as the notions of a gentleman, these last two years? Speak to
Madame de Savenaye, sir!--Cecile, this is my son; pray forgive him, my
dear; the fellow's shyness before ladies is inconceivable. It makes a
perfect fool of him, as you see."
But Madame de Savenaye's finer wits had already perceived something
different from the ordinary display of English shyness in the young
man, whose eyes remained fixed on her face with an intentness that
savoured in no way, of awkwardness. She now broke the spell with a
broader smile and a word of greeting.
"You are surprised," said she in tripping words, tinged with a
distinct foreign intonation, "to see a strange face here, Mr.
Adrian--or, shall I say cousin? for that is the style I should adopt
in my Brittany. Yes, you see in me a poor foreign cousin, fleeing for
protection to your noble country. How do you do, my cousin?"
She extended a slender, white hand, one rosy nail of which, bending
low, Adrian gravely kissed.
"_Mais, comment donc!_" exclaimed the lady, "my dear uncle did you
chide your son just now? Why, but these are Versailles manners--so
gallant, so courtly!"
And she gave the boy's fingers, as they lingered under hers, first a
discreet little pressure, and then a swift flip aside.
"Ah! how cold you are!" she exclaimed; and then, laughing, added
sweetly: "Cold hands, warm heart, of course."
And with rapping heels she turned into the great hall and into the
drawing-room whither the two men--the father all chuckles, and the son
still struck with wonder--followed her.
She was standing by the hearth holding each foot alternately to the
great logs flaming on the tiles, ever and anon looking over her shoulder
at Adrian, who had advanced closer, without self-consciousness, but
still in silence.
"Now, cousin," she remarked gaily, "there is room for you here, big as
you are, to warm yourself. You must be cold. I know already all about
your family, and I must know all about you, too! I am very curious, I
find them all such good, kind, handsome people here, and I am told to
expect in you something quite different from any of them. Now, where
does the difference come in? You are as tall as your father, but in
face--no, I believe it is your pretty sisters you are like in face."
Here the Squire interrupted with his loud laugh, and, clapping his
hand on his stalwart son's head:
"You have just hit it, Cecile, it's here the difference lies. Adrian,
I really believe, is a little mistake of Dame Nature; his brain was
meant for a girl and was tacked on to that big body by accident, ho,
ho, ho! He is quite lady-like in his accomplishments--loves music, and
plays, by gad, better than our organist. Writes poetry, too. I found
some devilish queer things on his writing-table once, which were not
_all_ Latin verses, though he would fain I thought so. And as for
deportment, Madame Cecile, why there is more propriety, in that
hobbedehoy, at least, more blushing in him, than in all the
bread-and-butter misses in the county!"
Adrian said nothing; but, when not turned towards the ground, his gaze
still sought the Countess, who now returned the look with a ripening
smile open to any interpretation.
"Surely," she remarked, glancing then at the elder for an instant with
some archness, "surely you English gentlemen, who have so much
propriety, would not rather ... there was young Mr. Bradbury, we heard
talked of yesterday, whom every farmer with a red-cheeked lass of his
own--"
"No, no!" hastily interrupted the baronet, with a blush himself, while
Adrian's cheek in spite of the recent indictment preserved its smooth
pallor--in truth, the boy, lost in his first love-dream, had not
understood the allusion. "No, I don't want a Landale to be a
blackguard, you know, but--" And the father, unable to split this
ethical hair, to logical satisfaction, stopped and entered another
channel of grumbling vituperation, whilst the Countess, very much
amused by her private thoughts, gave a little rippling laugh, and
resumed her indulgent contemplation of the accused.
"What a pity, now, school-boy Rupert is not the eldest; there would be
a country gentleman for you! Whereas, this successor that is to be of
mine is a man of books and a philosopher. Forsooth, a first-class
bookworm; by gad, I believe the first of our race! And he might make a
name for himself, I've been told, among that lot, though the pack o'
nonsense he treats us to at times cannot, I'm thinking, really go down
even among those college fuzzle-heads. But I am confounded if that
chap will ever be of any use as a landlord whenever he steps into my
shoes. He hates a gun, and takes more pleasure--what was it he said
last time he was here?--oh, yes, more pleasure in watching a bird dart
in the blue than bringing it down, be it never so neat a shot. Ho, ho!
did ye ever hear such a thing? And though he can sit a horse--I will
say that for him (I should like to see a Landale that could not!)--I
have seen this big boy of mine positively sicken, ay! and scandalise
the hunt by riding away from the death. Moreover, I believe that, when
I am gone, he will always let off any poaching scoundrel on the plea
that the vermin only take for their necessity what we preserve for
sport."
The little foreign lady, smiling no longer, eyed her big cousin with
wondering looks.
"Strange, indeed," she remarked, "that a man should fail to appreciate
the boon of man's existence, the strength and freedom to dominate, to
be up and doing, to _live_ in fact. How I should long to be a man
myself, if I ever allowed myself to long for anything; but I am a
woman, as you see," she added, rising to the full height of her
exquisite figure, "and must submit to woman's lot--and that is just
now to the point, for I must leave you to go and see to the wants of
that _mioche_ of mine which I hear whining upstairs. But I do not
believe my uncle's account of you is a complete picture after all,
cousin Adrian. I shall get it out of you anon, catechise you in my own
way, and, if needs be, convert you to a proper sense of the glorious
privileges of your sex."
And she ran out of the room.
"Well, my lad," said Sir Thomas, that evening, when the ladies had
left the two men to their decanter, "I thought my Frenchwoman would
wake you up, but, by George, I hardly expected she would knock you all
of a heap so quick. Hey! you're winged, Adrian, winged, or this is not
port."
"I cannot say, sir," answered Adrian, musing.
The old man caught up the unsatisfactory reply in an exasperated
burlesque of mimicry: "I cannot say, sir--you cannot say? Pooh, pooh,
there is no shame in being in love with her. We all are more or less;
pass the bottle. As for you, since you clapped eyes on her you have
been like a man in the moon, not a word to throw to a dog, no eyes, no
ears but for your own thoughts, so long as madam is not there. Enter
madam, you're alive again, by George, and pretty lively, too! Gad, I
never thought I'd ever see _you_ do the lady's man, all in your own
queer way, of course; but, hang it all, she seems to like it, the
little minx! Ay, and if she has plenty of smiles for the old man she's
ready to give her earnest to you--I saw her, I saw her. But don't you
forget she's married, sir, very much married, too. She don't forget it
either, I can tell you, though you may think she does. Now, what sort
of game is she making of you? What were you talking about in the
picture gallery for an hour before dinner, eh?"
"To say the truth," answered the son, simply, "it was about myself
almost the whole time."
"And she flattered you finely, I'll be bound, of course," said his
elder, with a knowing look. "Oh, these women, these women!"
"On the contrary, sir, she thinks even less of me than you do. That
woman has the soul of a savage; we have not one thought in common."
The father burst into a loud laugh. "A pretty savage to look at,
anyhow; a well-polished one in the bargain, ho, ho, ho! Well, well, I
must make up my mind, I suppose, that my eldest son is a lunatic in
love with a savage."
Adrian remained silent for a while, toying with his glass, his young
brow contracted under a painful frown. At length, checking a sigh, he
answered with deliberation:
"Since it is so palpable to others, I suppose it must be love, as you
say. I had thought hitherto that love of which people talk so much was
a feeling of sweetness. What I feel in this lady's presence is much
more kin to anguish; for all that, as you have noticed, I appear to
live only when she is nigh."
The father looked at his son and gaped. The latter went on, after
another pause:
"I suppose it is so, and may as well own it to myself and to you,
though nothing can come of it, good or bad. She is married, and she is
your guest; and even if any thought concerning me could enter her
heart, the merest show of love on my part would be an insult to her
and treason to you. But trust me, I shall now be on my guard, since my
behaviour has already appeared strange."
"Tut, tut," said the Baronet, turning to his wine in some dudgeon, his
rubicund face clouding as he looked with disfavour at this strange
heir of his, who could not even fall in love like the rest of his
race. "What are you talking about? Come, get out of that and see what
the little lady's about, and let me hear no more of this. She'll not
compromise herself with a zany like you, anyhow, that I'll warrant."
But Adrian with all the earnestness of his nature and his very young
fears was strenuously resolved to watch himself narrowly in his
intercourse with his too fascinating relative; little recking how
infinitesimal is the power of a man's free-will upon the conduct of
his life.
The next morning found the little Countess in the highest spirits.
Particularly good news had arrived from her land with the early
courier. True, the news were more than ten days old, but she had that
insuperable buoyancy of hopefulness which attends active and healthy
natures.
The Breton peasants (she explained to the company round the breakfast
table), headed by their lords (among whom was her own _Seigneur et
Maitre_) had again crushed the swarms of ragged brigands that called
themselves soldiers. From all accounts there was no hope for the
latter, their atrocities had been such that the whole land, from
Normandy to Guyenne, was now in arms against them.
And in Paris, the hot pit whence had issued the storm of foulness that
blasted the fair kingdom of France after laying low the hallowed heads
of a good king and a beautiful queen, in Paris, leaders and led were
now chopping each other's heads off, _a qui mieux mieux_. "Those
thinkers, those lofty patriots, _hein, beau cousin_, for whom, it
seems, you have an admiration," commented the lady, interrupting her
account to sip her cup of cream and chocolate, with a little finger
daintily cocked, and shoot a mocking shaft at the young philosopher
from the depth of her black eyes.
"Like demented wolves they are destroying each other--Pray the God of
Justice," quoted she from her husband's letter, "that it may only
last; in a few months, then, there will be none of them left, and the
people, relieved from this rule of blood, will all clamour for the
true order of things, and the poor country may again know peace and
happiness. Meanwhile, all has yet to be won, by much devotion and
self-sacrifice in the cause of God and King; and afterwards will come
the reward!...
"And the revenge," added Madame de Savenaye, with a little, fierce
laugh, folding the sanguine budget of news. "Oh! they must leave us a
few for revenge! How we shall make the hounds smart when the King
returns to his own! And then for pleasures and for life again. And we
may yet meet at the mansion of Savenaye, in Paris," she went on gaily,
"my good uncle and fair cousins, for the King cannot fail to recall
his faithful supporter. And there will be feasts and balls. And there,
maybe, we shall be able to repay in part some of your kindness and
hospitality. And you, cousin Adrian, you will have to take me through
pavanne and gavotte and minuet; and I shall be proud of my northern
cavalier. What! not know how one dances the gavotte? _Fi donc!_ what
ignorance! I shall have to teach you. Your hand, monsieur," slipping
the missive from the seat of war into her fair bosom. "La! not that
way; with a _grace_, if you please," making a profound curtsey. "Ah,
still that cold hand; your great English heart must be a very
furnace. Come, point your right foot--so. And look round at your
partner with--what shall I say--_admiration serieuse_!"
That she saw admiration, serious enough in all conscience in Adrian's
eyes, there was little doubt. With sombre heart he failed not to mark
every point of this all-human grace, but to him goddess-like beauty,
the triumph and glory of youth. The coy, dainty poise of the adorable
foot--pointed _so_--and treading the ground with the softness of a
kitten at play; the maddening curve of her waist, which a sacque,
depending from an exquisite nape, partly concealed, only to enhance
its lithe suppleness; the divinely young throat and bust; and above
all the dazzling black rays from eyes alternately mocking, fierce or
caressing.
Well might his hand be cold with all his young untried blood, biting
at his heart, singing in his head. Why did God place such creatures on
His earth to take all savour from aught else under the sun?
"Fair cousin, fair cousin, though I said serious admiration, I did not
mean you to look as if you were taking me to a funeral. You are
supposed to be enjoying yourself, you know!"
The youth struggled with a ghastly smile; and the father laughed
outright. But Madame de Savenaye checked herself into gravity once
more.
"Alas! _Nous n'en sommes pas encore la_," she said, and relinquished
her adorer's hand. "We have still to fight for it.... Oh! that I were
free to be up and doing!"
The impatient exclamation was wrung out of her, apparently, by the
appearance of two nurses, each bearing an infant in long, white robes
for the mother's inspection; a preliminary to the daily outing.
The elder of these matrons was Adrian's own old nurse who, much
occupied with her new duties of attendant to Madame de Savenaye and
one of her babies, now beheld her foster-son again for the first time
since his return.
"Eh--but you've grown a gradely mon, Mester Adrian!" she cried, in her
long-drawn Lancastrian, dandling her bundle energetically from side to
side in the excess of her admiration, and added with a laugh of
tender delight: "Eh, but you're my own lad still, as how 'tis!" when,
blushing, the young man crossed the room and stooped to kiss her,
glancing shyly the while at the white bundle in her arms.
"Well, and how are the little ones?" quoth Madame de Savenaye,
swinging her dainty person up to the group and halting by beaming
Sally--the second nurse, who proudly held forth her charge--merely to
lay a finger lightly on the infant's little cheek.
"Ah, my good Sally, your child does you credit!--Now Margery, when you
have done embracing that fine young man, perhaps you will give me my
child, _hein_?"
Both the nurses blushed; Margery at the soft impeachment as she
delivered over the minute burden; her daughter in honest indignation
at the insulting want of interest shown for her foster-babe.
"No, I was not made to play with puppets like you, mademoiselle," said
the comtesse, addressing herself to the unconscious little being as
she took it in her arms, but belying her words by the grace and
instinctive maternal expertness with which she handled and soothed the
infant. "Yes, you can go, Sarah--_au revoir_, Mademoiselle Madeleine.
Fie the little wretch, what faces she pulls! And you, Margery, you
need not wait either; I shall keep this creature for a while. Poor
little one!" sang the mother, walking up and down, and patting the
small back with her jewelled hand as she held the wee thing against
her shoulder, "indeed I shall have soon to leave you----"
"What's this--what's this?" exclaimed the master of the house with
sudden sharpness. He had been surveying the scene from the hearthrug,
chuckling in benevolent amusement at little Madam's ways.
Yes, it was her intention to return to her place by the side of her
lord, she explained, halting in her walk to face him gravely; she had
come to that resolution. No doubt her uncle would take the children
under his care until better times--those good times that were so fast
approaching. Buxom Sally could manage them both--and to spare, too!
Adrian felt his heart contract at the unexpected announcement; a look
of dismay overspread Sir Thomas's face.
"Why--what? what nonsense, child!" cried he again in rueful tones.
"_You_, return to that place now ... what good do you think you could
do--eh?" But here recollecting himself, he hesitated and started upon
a more plausible line of expostulation. "Pooh, pooh! You can't leave
the little ones, your husband does not ask you to come back and leave
them, does he? In any case," with assumed authority, "I shall not let
you go."
She looked up with a smile.
"Would _you_ allow your friends to continue fighting alone for all you
love, because you happened to be in safe and pleasant circumstances
yourself?" she asked. Then she added ingenuously: "I have heard you
say of one that was strong of will and staunch to his purpose, that he
was a regular Briton. I thought that flattering: I am a Briton, of
Brittany, you know, myself, uncle: would you have _me_ be a worthless
Briton? As to what a woman can do there--ah, you have no idea what it
means for all these poor peasants of ours to see their lords remain
among them, sharing their hardship in defence of their cause.
Concerning the children," kissing the one she held and gazing into its
face with wistful look, "they can better afford to do without me than
my husband and our men. A strong woman to tend them till we come back,
is all that is wanted, since a good relative is willing to give them
shelter. Rene cannot be long in returning now, with the last news.
Indeed, M. de Savenaye says that he will only keep him a few days
longer, and, according to the tidings he brings must I fix the date
for my departure."
Sir Thomas, with an inarticulate growl, relapsed into silence; and she
resumed her walk with bent head, lost in thought, up and down the
great room, out of the pale winter sunshine into the shadow, and back
again, to the tune of "Malbrook s'en va t'en guerre," which she hummed
beneath her breath, while the baby's foolish little head, in its white
cap from which protruded one tiny straight wisp of brown hair, with
its beady, unseeing black eyes and its round mouth dribbling
peacefully, bobbed over her shoulder as she went.
Adrian stood in silence too, following her with his eyes, while the
picture, so sweet to see, so strange to one who knew all that was
brewing in the young mother's head and heart, stamped itself upon his
brain.
At the door, at length, she halted a moment, and looked at them both.
"Yes, my friends," she said, and her eyes shot flame; "I must go
soon." The baby bobbed its head against her cheek as if in
affirmative; then the great door closed upon the pair.
CHAPTER IV
DAY DREAMS: A FAIR EMISSARY
Many guests had been convened to the hospitable board of Pulwick upon
the evening which followed Adrian's return home; and as, besides the
fact that the fame of the French lady had spread enthusiasm in most of
the male breasts of the district and anxious curiosity in gentler
bosoms, there was a natural neighbourly desire to criticise the young
heir of the house after his year's absence, the county had responded
in a body to the invitation.
It was a goodly company therefore that was assembled in the great
withdrawing rooms, when the Countess herself came tripping down the
shallow oaken stairs, and found Adrian waiting for her in the hall.
He glanced up as she descended towards him to cover her with an ardent
look and feast his eyes despairingly on her beauty; and she halted a
moment to return his gaze with a light but meaning air of chiding.
"Cousin!" she said, "you have very singular manners for one supposed
to be so shy with ladies. Do you know that if my husband were here to
notice them you might be taken to task?"
Adrian ran up the steps to meet her. The man in him was growing apace
with the growth of a man's passion, and by the boldness of his answer
belying all his recent wise resolutions, he now astonished himself
even more than her.
"You are going back to him," he said, with halting voice. "All is
well--for him; perhaps for you. For us, who remain behind there is
nothing left but the bitterness of regret--and envy."
Then in silence they descended together.
As they were crossing the hall there entered suddenly to them,
stumbling as he went, Rene, the young Breton retainer, whom the lord
of Savenaye had appointed as squire to his lady upon her travels, and
who, since her establishment at Pulwick, had been sent to carry news
and money back to Brittany.
No sooner had the boy--for such he was, though in intelligence and
blind devotion beyond his years--passed into the light, than on his
haggard countenance was read news of disastrous import. Recent tears
had blurred his sunburnt cheek, and the hand that tore the hat from
his head at the unexpected sight of his mistress, partly in
instinctive humility, partly, it seemed, to conceal some papers he
held against his breast, twitched with nervous anguish.
"Rene!" cried the Countess, eagerly, in French. "What hast thou
brought? Sweet Jesu! Bad news--bad news? Give!"
For an instant the courier looked around like a hunted animal seeking
a retreat, and then up at her in dumb pleading; but she stamped her
foot and held him to the spot by the imperiousness of her eye.
"Give, I tell thee," she repeated; and, striking the hat away,
snatched the papers from his hand. "Dost thou think I cannot bear ill
news--My husband?"
She drew nearer to a candelabra, and the little white hands
impatiently broke the seals and shook the sheets asunder.
Sir Thomas, attracted by his favourite's raised tones and uneasy at
her non-appearance, opened the drawing-room door and came forward
anxiously, whilst his assembled guests, among whom a sense that
something of importance was passing had rapidly spread, now gathered
curiously about the open doorway.
The Countess read on, unnoticing, with compressed lips and knitted
brows--those brows that looked so black on the fair skin, under the
powdered hair.
"My husband! ah, I knew it, my Andre ... the common fate of the
loyal!" A sigh lifted the fair young bosom, but she showed no other
sign of weakness.
Indeed those who watched this unexpected scene were struck by the
contrast between the bearing of this young, almost girlish creature,
who, holding the written sheets with firm hands to the light, read
their terrible contents with dry eyes, and that of the man who had
sunk, kneeling, at her feet, all undone, to have had the bringing of
the news.
The silence was profound, save for the crackling of the pages as she
turned them over, and an occasional long-drawn sob from the messenger.
When she came to the end the young widow--for such she was
now--remained some moments absorbed in thought, absently refolding the
letter into its original neatness. Then her eyes fell on Rene's
prostrate figure and she stooped to lay a kind hand for an instant on
his shoulder.
"Bear up, my good Rene," she said. At her voice and touch he dragged
his limbs together and stood humbly before her.
"We must be brave," she went on; "your master's task is done--ours,
yours and mine, is not."
He lifted his bloodshot eyes to her with the gaze of a faithful dog in
distress, scraped an uncouth bow and abruptly turned away, brushing
the tears from his cheek with his sleeve, and hurrying, to relieve his
choking grief in solitude. She stood a while, again absorbed in her
own reflection, and of those who would have rushed to speak gentle
words to her, and uphold her with tender hands, had she wept or
swooned, there was none who dared approach this grief that gave no
sign.
In a short time, however, she seemed to recollect herself and awaken
to the consciousness of the many watching eyes.
"Good uncle," she said, going up to the old man and kissing his cheek,
after sweeping the assembled company with dark, thoughtful gaze. "Here
are news that I should have expected sooner--but that I would not
entertain the thought. It has come upon us at last, the fate of the
others ... Andre has paid his debt to the king, like many hundreds of
true people before--though none better. He has now his reward. I glory
in his noble death," she said with a gleam of exaltation in her eyes,
then added after a pause, between clenched teeth, almost in a whisper:
"And my sister too--she too is with him--but I will tell you of it
later; they are at rest now."
Jovial Sir Thomas, greatly discomposed and fairly at a loss how to
deal with the stricken woman, who was so unlike any womankind he had
ever yet come across, patted her hand in silence, placed it within his
arm and quietly led her into the drawing-room, rolling, as he did so,
uneasy eyes upon his guests. But she followed the current of her
thoughts as her little feet kept pace beside him.
"That is bad--but worse--the worst of all, the cause of God and king
is again crushed; everything to begin afresh. But, for the present,
we"--here she looked round the room, and her eyes rested an instant
upon a group of young men, who were surveying her from a corner with
mingled admiration and awe--"we, that is Rene and I, have work to do
in this country before we return. For you will keep us a little
longer?" she added with an attempt at a smile.
"Will I keep you a little longer?" exclaimed the squire hotly, "will I
ever let you go, now!"
She shook her head at him, with something of her natural archness.
Then, turning to make a grave curtsey to the circle of ladies around
her:
"I and my misfortune," she said, "have kept your company and your
dinner waiting, I hardly know how long. No doubt, in their kindness
they will forgive me."
And accepting again her uncle's arm which, delighted at the solution
of the present difficulty, and nodding to Adrian to start the other
guests, he hastened to offer her, she preceded the rest into the
dining-hall with her usual alert bearing.
The behaviour of the Countess of Savenaye, had affected the various
spectators in various ways. The male sex, to a man, extolled her
fortitude; the ladies, however, condemned such unfeminine strength of
mind, while the more charitable prophesied that she would pay dearly
for this unnatural repression. And the whispered remark of one of the
prettier and younger damsels, that the loss of a husband did not seem
to crush her, at any rate, met, on the whole, with covert approval.
As for Adrian, who shall describe the tumult of his soul--the regret,
the hungering over her in her sorrow, the wild unbidden hopes and his
shame of them? Careful of what his burning eyes might reveal, he
hardly dared raise them from the ground; and yet to keep them long
from her face was an utter impossibility. The whispered comments of
the young men behind him, their admiration, and astonishment drove him
to desperation. And the high-nosed dowager, whom it was his privilege
to escort to his father's table, arose from it convinced that Sir
Thomas's heir had lost in his travels the few poor wits he ever
possessed.
The dinner that evening was without doubt the most dismal meal the
neighbourhood had ever sat down to at the hospitable board of Pulwick,
past funeral refections not excepted. The host, quite taken up with
his little foreign relative, had words only for her; and these,
indeed, consisted merely in fruitless attempts to induce her to
partake largely of every course--removes, relieves, side-dishes,
joints, as their separate turn came round. Long spells of silence fell
upon him meantime, which he emphasised by lugubriously clearing his
throat. Except for the pretty courtesy with which she would answer
him, she remained lost in her own thoughts--ever and anon consulting
the letter which lay beside her to fall again, it seemed, into a
deeper muse; but never a tear glinted between her black lashes.
More than once Adrian from his distant end of the table, met her eyes,
fixed on him for a moment, and the look, so full of mysterious
meanings made his heart beat in anguish, expecting he knew not what.
Among the rest of the assembly, part deference to a calamity so
stoutly borne, part amazement at such strange ways, part discomfort at
their positions as feasters in the midst of mourning, had reduced
conversation to the merest pretence. The ladies were glad enough when
the time came for them to withdraw; nor did most of the men view with
reluctance a moment which would send the decanters gliding freely over
the mahogany, and relieve them from this unwonted restraint.
Madame de Savenaye had, however, other interests in store for these
latter.
She rose with the rest of the ladies, but halted at the door, and
laying her hand upon her uncle's arm, said an earnest word in his ear,
in obedience to which he bundled out his daughters, as they hung back
politely, closed the door upon the last skirt, and reconducted the
Countess to the head of the table, scratching his chin in some
perplexity, but ready to humour her slightest whim.
She stood at her former place and looked for a moment in silence from
one to another of the faces turned with different expressions of
astonishment and anticipation towards her--ruddy faces most of them,
young, or old, handsome or homely, the honest English stamp upon each;
and distinct from them all, Adrian's pallid, thoughtful features and
his ardent eyes.
Upon him her gaze rested the longest. Then with a little wave of her
hand she prayed them to be seated, and waited to begin her say until
the wine had passed round.
"Gentlemen," then quoth she, "with my good uncle's permission I shall
read you the letter which I have this night received, so that English
gentlemen may learn how those who are faithful to their God and their
King are being dealt with in my country. This letter is from Monsieur
de Puisaye, one of the most active partisans of the Royal cause, a
connection of the ancient house of Savenaye. And he begins by telling
me of the unexpected reverses sustained by our men so close upon their
successes at Chateau-Gonthier, successes that had raised our loyal
hopes so high. 'The most crushing defeat,' he writes, 'has taken place
near the town of Savenaye itself, on your own estate, and your
historic house is now, alas! in ruins.... During the last obstinate
fight your husband had been wounded, but after performing prodigies of
valour--such as, it was hoped or trusted, the king should in time hear
of--he escaped from the hands of his enemies. For many weeks with a
few hundred followers he held the fields in the Marais, but he was at
last hemmed in and captured by one of the monster Thureau's _Colonnes
Infernales_, those hellish legions with an account of whose deeds,' so
says this gallant gentleman our friend, 'I will not defile my pen, but
whose boasts are like those of Attila the Hun, and who in their malice
have invented obscene tortures worthy of Iroquois savages for all who
fall into their clutches, be they men, women, or children.... But, by
Heaven's mercy, dear Madame,' says M. de Puisaye to me, 'your noble
husband was too weak to afford sport to those demons, and so he has
escaped torment. He was hanged with all speed indeed, for fear he
might die first of his toils and his wounds, and so defeat them at the
last.'"
A rustling murmur of horror and indignation went round the table; but
the little woman faced the audience proudly.
"He died," she said, "as beseems a brave man. But this is not all. I
had a sister, she was very fair--like me some people said, in
looks--she used to be the merry one at home in the days of peace," she
gave a little smile, far more piteous than tears would be--"She chose
to remain among her people when they were fighting, to help the
wounded, the sick." Here Madame de Savenaye paused a moment and put
down the letter from which she had been reading; for the first time
since she had begun to speak she grew pale; knitting her black brows
and with downcast eyes she went on: "Monsieur de Puisaye says he asks
my pardon humbly on his knees for writing such tidings to me, bereaved
as I am of all I hold dear, but 'it is meet,' he says, 'that the
civilised world should know the deeds these followers of _liberty_ and
_enlightenment_ have wrought upon gallant men and highborn ladies,'
and I hold that he says well."
She flashed once more her black gaze round upon the men, who with
heads all turned towards her and forgetting their wine, hung upon her
words. "It is right that I should know, and you too! It is meet that
such deeds should be made known to the world: my sister was taken by
these men, but less fortunate than my husband she had life enough left
for torture--she too is dead now; M. de Puisaye adds: Thank God! And
that is all that I can say too--Thank God!"
There was a dead silence in the room as she ceased speaking, broken at
last, here and there, along the table by exclamations and groans and a
deep execration from Sir Thomas, which was echoed deep-mouthed by his
guests.
Adrian himself, the pacific, the philosopher, with both arms,
stretched out on the table, clenched his hands, and set his teeth and
gazed into space with murderous looks.
Then the clear young voice went on again:
"You, who have honoured mothers and wives of your own, and have young
sweethearts, or sisters or daughters--you English gentlemen who love
to see justice, how long will you allow such things to be done while
you have arms to strike? We are not beaten yet; there are French
hearts still left that will be up and doing so long as they have a
drop of blood to shed. Our gallant Bretons and Vendeens are uniting
once more, our emigres are collecting, but we want aid, brave English
friends, we want arms, money, soldiers. My task lies to my hand; the
sacred legacy of my dead I have accepted; is there any of you here who
will help the widow to maintain the fight?"
She had risen to her feet; the blood glowed on her cheek as she
concluded her appeal; a thousand stars danced in her eyes.
Old men and young they leapt up, with a roar; pressing round her,
pouring forth acclamations, asseverations and oaths--Would they help
her? By God--they would die for her--Never had the old rafters of
Pulwick rung to such enthusiasm.
And when with proud smiles and crimsoned face she withdraws at last
from so much ardour, the door has scarcely fallen behind her before
Sir Thomas proposes her health in a bellow, that trembles upon tears:
"Gentlemen, this lady's courage is such as might put most men's
strength to shame. Here is, gentlemen, to Madame de Savenaye!"
And she, halting on the stairs for a moment, to still her high-beating
heart, before she lay her babe against it, hears the toast honoured
with three times three.
* * * * *
When the Lancastrian ladies had succeeded at length in collecting and
carrying off such among the hiccupping husbands, and maudlin sons, who
were able to move, Sir Thomas re-entering the hall, after speeding the
last departing chariot, and prudently leaning upon his tall son--for
though he had a seasoned head the night's potations had been deep and
fiery--was startled well-nigh into soberness, at the sight of his
niece waiting for him at the foot of the stairs.
"Why, Cis, my love, we thought you had been in bed this long while!
why--where have you been then since you ran away from the dining-room?
By George!" chuckling, "the fellows were mad to get another glimpse of
you!"
His bloodshot eye hung over her fondly. There was not a trace of
fatigue upon that delicate, pretty face.
"I wanted to think--I have much to think on now. I have had to read
and ponder upon my instructions here,"--tapping her teeth with the
letter, she still carried, "Good uncle, I would speak with you--yes,
even now," quick to notice Adrian's slight frown of disapproval (poor
fellow, he was sober enough at any rate!), "there is no time like the
present. I have my work to do, and I shall not rest to-night, till I
have planned it in my head."
Surely the brilliancy of those eyes was feverish; the little hands she
laid upon them to draw them into the dim-lit library were hot as fire.
"Why, yes, my pretty," quoth the good uncle, stifling a portentous
yawn, and striving to look wondrous wise, "Adrian, she wants to
consult me, sir, hic!"
He fell into an arm-chair as he spoke, and she sank on her knees
beside him, the firelight playing upon her eager face, while Adrian,
in the shadow, watched.
"Do you think," she asked of the old man, eagerly, "that these
gentlemen, who spoke so kindly to me a few hours ago, will be as much
in earnest in the morning?"
"Why d--n them! if they go back on their word, I'll call them out!"
thundered Sir Thomas, in a great rage all of a sudden. She surveyed
him inquiringly, and shot a swift keen glance from the placid, bulky
figure in the chair, to Adrian pale and erect, behind it, then rose to
her feet and stood a few paces off, as it were pondering.
"What is now required of me--I have been thinking it well over," she
said at last, "can hardly be achieved by a woman alone. And yet, with
proper help and support, I think I could do more than any man by
himself. There is that in a woman's entreaties which will win, when a
man may fail. But I must have a knight at my side; a protector, at the
same time as a faithful servant. These are not the times to stand on
conventional scruples. Do you think, among these gentlemen, any could
be found with sufficient enthusiasm, for the Royal cause, here
represented by me, to attend, and support me through all the fatigues,
the endless errands, the interviews--ay, also the rebuffs, the
ridicule at times, perhaps the danger of the conjuration, which must
be set on foot in this country--to do all that, without hope of other
reward than the consciousness of helping a good cause, and--and the
gratitude of one, who may have nothing else to give?"
She stopped with a little nervous laugh: "No, it is absurd! no man,
on reflection would enter into such a service unless it were for his
own country."
As the last words fell from her lips, she suddenly turned to Adrian
and met his earnest gaze.
"Or for his kindred," said the young man, coming up to her with grave
simplicity, "if his kindred required it."
A gleam of satisfaction passed across her face. The father, who had
caught her meaning--sharp enough, as some men can be in their
cups--nodded his head with great vigour.
"Yes, why should you think first of strangers," he grumbled, "when you
have your own blood, to stand by you--blood is thicker than water,
ain't it? Am I too old, or is he too young, to wait on you--hey,
madam?"
She extended her hand, allowing it to linger in Adrian's grasp, whilst
she laid the other tenderly on the old man's shoulder.
"My good uncle! my kind cousin! Have I the choice already between two
such cavaliers? I am fortunate indeed in my misfortune. In other
circumstances to decide would be difficult between two men, each so
good; but," she added, after a moment's hesitation, and looking at
Adrian in a manner that made the young man's heart beat thickly, "in
this case it is obvious I must have some one whom I need not fear to
direct."
"Ay, ay," muttered the baronet, "I'd go with you, my darling, to the
world's end; but there's that young philosopher of mine breaking his
heart for you. And when all's said and done, it's the young fellow
that'll be the most use to you, I reckon. Ay, you've chosen already,
I'll be bound. The gouty old man had best stop at home. Ho, ho, ho!
You've the luck, Adrian; more luck than you deserve."
"It is I who have more luck than I deserve," answered Madame de
Savenaye, smiling upon her young knight as, taking heart of grace, he
stooped to seal the treaty upon her hand. "To say the truth, I had
hoped for this, yet hardly dared to allow myself to count upon it. And
really, uncle, you give your own son to my cause?--and you, cousin,
you are willing to work for me? I am indeed strengthened at the outset
of my undertaking. I shall pray that you may never have cause to
regret your chivalrous goodness."
She dropped Adrian's hand with a faint pressure, and moved sighing
towards the door.
"Do you wonder that I have no tears, cousin?" she said, a little
wistfully; "they must gather in my heart till I have time to sit down
and shed them."
Thus it was that a letter penned by this unknown M. de Puisaye from
some hidden fastness in the Bocage of Brittany came to divert the
course of Adrian Landale's existence into a channel where neither he,
nor any of those who knew him, would ever have dreamed to see it
drift.
CHAPTER V
THE AWAKENING
Oh, what hadst thou to do with cruel Death,
Who wast so full of life, or Death with thee?
LONGFELLOW.
Sir Adrian Landale, in his sea-girt fastness, still absorbed in dreams
of bygone days, loosed his grasp of faithful Rene's shoulder and fell
to pacing the chamber with sombre mien; while Rene, to whom these fits
of abstraction in his master were not unfamiliar, but yet to his
superstitious peasant soul, eerie and awe-inspiring visitations,
slipped unnoticed from his presence.
The light-keeper sate down by his lonely hearth and buried his gaze in
the glowing wood-embers, over which, with each fitful thundering rush
of wind round the chimney, fluttered little eddies of silvery ash.
So, that long strife was over, which had wrought such havoc to the
world, had shaped so dismally the course of his own life! The monster
of selfish ambition, the tyrannic, insatiable conqueror whose very
existence had so long made peaceable pursuits unprofitable to mankind,
the final outcome of that Revolution that, at the starting point, had
boded so nobly for human welfare--he was at last laid low, and all the
misery of the protracted struggle now belonged to the annals of the
past.
It was all over--but the waste! The waste of life and happiness, far
and wide away among innocent and uninterested beings, the waste
remained.
And, looking back on it, the most bitter portion of his own wrecked
life was the short time he had yet thought happy; three months, spent
as knight-errant.
How far they seemed, far as irrevocable youth, those days when, in the
wake of that love-compelling emissary, he moved from intrigue to
intrigue among the emigres in London, and their English sympathisers,
to bustling yet secret activity in seafaring parts!
The mechanical instrument directed by the ingenious mind of Cecile de
Savenaye; the discreet minister who, for all his young years, secured
the help of some important political sympathiser one day, scoured the
country for arms and clothing, powder and _assignats_ another; who
treated with smuggling captains and chartered vessels that were to run
the gauntlet on the Norman and Breton coast, and supply the means of
war to struggling and undaunted loyalists. All this relentless work,
little suited, on the whole, to an Englishman, and in a cause the
rights of which he himself had, up to then, refused to admit, was then
repaid a hundredfold by a look of gratitude, of pleasure even, a few
sweet moments of his lady's company, before being sent hence again
upon some fresh enterprise.
Ah, how he loved her! He, the youth on the threshold of manhood, who
had never known passion before, how he loved this young widowed mother
who used him as a man to deal for her with men, yet so loftily treated
him as a boy when she dealt with him herself. And if he loved her in
the earlier period of his thraldom, when scarce would he see her one
hour in the twenty-four, to what all-encompassing fervour did the
bootless passion rise when, the day of departure having dawned and
sunk, he found himself on board the privateer, sailing away with her
towards unknown warlike ventures, her knight to protect her, her
servant to obey!
On all these things mused the recluse of Scarthey, sinking deeper and
deeper into the past: the spell of haunting recollection closing on
him as he sat by his hearthside, whilst the increasing fury of the
gale toiled and troubled outside fighting the impassable walls of his
tower.
Could it have been possible that she--the only woman that had ever
existed for him, the love for whom had so distorted his mind from its
natural sympathies, had killed in him the spring of youth and the
savour of life--never really learnt to love him in return till the
last?
And yet there was a woman's soul in that delicious woman's body--it
showed itself at least once, though until that supreme moment of union
and parting, it seemed as if a man's mind alone governed it, becoming
sterner, more unbendable, as hardships and difficulties multiplied.
In the melancholy phantasm passing before his mind's eye, of a period
of unprecedented bloodshed and savagery, when on the one side Chouans,
Vendeens, and such guerillas of which Madame de Savenaye was the
moving spirit, and on the other the _colonnes infernales_ of the
revolutionary leaders, vied with each other in ferocity and cunning,
she stood ever foremost, ever the central point of thought, with a
vividness that almost a score of years had failed to dim.
When the mood was upon him, he could unfold the roll of that story
buried now in the lonely graves of the many, or in the fickle memories
of the few, but upon his soul printed in letters of fire and blood--to
endure for ever.
Round this goddess of his young and only love clustered the sole
impressions of the outer world that had ever stirred his heart: the
grandeur of the ocean, of the storm, the glory of sunrise over a
dishevelled sea, the ineffable melancholy of twilight rising from an
unknown strand; then the solemn coldness of moonlight watches, the
scent of the burnt land under the fierce sun, when all nature was
hushed save the dreamy buzz of insect-life: the green coolness of
underwood or forest, the unutterable harmony of the sighing breeze,
and the song of wild birds during the long patient ambushes of
partisan war; the taste of bread in hunger, of the stream in the fever
of thirst, of approaching sleep in exhaustion--and, mixed with these,
the acrid emotions of fight and carnage, anguish of suspense, savage
exultation of victory--all the doings of a life which he, bred to
intellectual pleasures and high moral ideas, would have deemed a
nightmare, but which, lived as it was in the atmosphere of his longing
and devotion, yet held for him a strange and pungent joy: a cup of
cruel memories, yet one to be lingered over luxuriously till the
savour of each cherished drop of bitterness be gathered to the
uttermost.
Now, in the brightness of the embers, between the fitful flames of
crumbling wood, spreads before his eyes the dreary strand near
Quiberon, immense in the gathering darkness of a boisterous evening.
Well hidden under the stone table of a Druidical men-hir glows a small
camp-fire sedulously kept alive by Rene for the service of The Lady.
She, wrapped up in a coarse peasant-cloak, pensively gazes into the
cheerless smoke and holds her worn and muddy boots to the smouldering
wood in the vain hope of warmth.
And Adrian stands silently behind her, brooding on many things--on the
vicissitudes of that desultory war which has left them not a roof
whereunder they can lay their heads, during which the little English
contingent has melted from them one by one; on the critical action of
the morrow when the republican columns, now hastening to oppose the
landing of the great royalist expedition to Quiberon (that supreme
effort upon which all their hopes centre) must be surprised and cut
off at whatever cost; on the mighty doings to follow, which are to
complete the result of the recent sea fight off Ushant and crown their
devoted toil with victory at last....
And through his thoughts he watches the pretty foot, in its hideous
disguise of patched, worn, ill-fitting leather, and he sees it as on
the first day of their meeting, in its gleaming slipper and dainty
silken stocking.
Now and then an owl-cry, repeated from point to point, tells of
unremitting guard, but for which, in the vast silence, none could
suspect that a thousand men and more are lying stretched upon the
plain all around them, fireless, well-nigh without food, yet patiently
waiting for the morrow when their chiefs shall lead them to death; nor
that, in a closer circle, within call, are some fifty _gars_, remnant
of the indomitable "Savenaye band," and tacitly sworn bodyguard to The
Lady who came back from ease and safety over seas to share their
peril.
No sound besides, but the wind as it whistles and moans over the
heath--and the two are together in the mist which comes closing in
upon them as if to shroud them from all the rest, for even Rene has
crept away, to sleep perhaps.
She turns at last towards him, her small face in the dying light of
this sullen evening, how wan and weather-beaten!
"Pensive, as usual, cousin?" she says in English, and extends her
hand, browned and scratched, that was once so exquisite, and she
smiles, the smile of a dauntless soul from a weary body.
Poor little hands, poor little feet, so cold, so battered, so
ill-used! He, who would have warmed them in his bosom, given his heart
for them to tread upon, breaks down now, for the first time; and
falling on his knees covers the cold fingers with kisses, and then
lays his lips against those pitiful torn boots.
But she spurns him from her--even from her feet:
"Shame on you!" she says angrily; and adds, more gently, yet with some
contempt: "_Enfant, va!_--is this the time for such follies?"
And, suddenly recalled to honour and grim actuality, he realises with
dismay his breach of trust--he, who in their earlier days in London
had called out that sprightly little emigre merely for the vulgar
flippancy (aimed in compliment, too, at the grave aide-de-camp), "that
the fate of the late Count weighed somewhat lightly upon Madame de
Savenaye;" he, who had struck that too literary countryman of his own
across the face--ay, and shot him in the shoulder, all in the secret
early dawn of the day they left England--for daring to remark within
his hearing: "By George, the handsome Frenchwoman and her cousin may
be a little less than kin, but they are a little more than kind."
But yet, as the rage of love contending in his heart with
self-reproach, he rises to his feet in shame, she gives him her hand
once more, and in a different voice:
"Courage, cousin," says she, "perhaps some day we may both have our
reward. But will not my knight continue to fight for my bidding, even
without hope of such?"
Pondering on this enigmatic sentence he leaves her to her rest.
* * * * *
When next he finds himself by her side the anticipated action has
begun; and it is to be the last day that those beautiful burning eyes
shall see the glory of the rising sun.
The Chouans are fighting like demons, extended in long skirmishing
lines, picking out the cluster of gunners, making right deadly use of
their English powder; imperceptibly but unflinchingly closing their
scattered groups until the signal comes and with ringing cries:
"_Notre Dame d'Auray!_" and "_Vive le roi!_" they charge, undismayed
by odds, the serried ranks of the Republicans.
She, from the top of the druidical stone, watches the progress of the
day. Her red, parted mouth twitches as she follows the efforts of the
men. Behind her, the _gars_ of Savenaye, grasping with angry clutch,
some a new musket, others an ancient straightened scythe, gaze
fiercely on the scene from under their broad felts. Now and then a
flight of republican bullets hum about their ears, and they look
anxiously to Their Lady, but that fearless head never bends.
Then the moment arrives, and with a fervent, "God be with you, brave
people," she hurls, by a stirring gesture, the last reserve on to the
fight.
And now he finds himself in the midst of the furious medley, striking
mechanically, his soul away behind on that stone, with her. Presently,
as the frenzy waxes wilder, he is conscious that victory is not with
them, but that they are pressed back and encompassed, and that for
each blue coat cast down amidst the yells and oaths, two more seem to
come out of the rain and smoke; whilst the bare feet and wooden shoes
and the long hair of his peasants are seen in ever-lessening ranks.
And, in time, they find themselves thrown back to the men-hir; she is
there, still calm but ghastly white, a pistol in each hand. Around
her, through the wet smoke, rise and fall with sickening thuds the
clubbed muskets of three or four men, and then one by one these sink
to the ground too. With a wailing groan like a man in a nightmare, he
sees the inevitable end and rushes to place his body before hers. A
bullet shatters his sword-blade; now none are left around them but the
begrimed and sinister faces of their enemies.
As they stand prisoners, and unheeding the hideous clamour, he, with
despair thinking of her inevitable fate at the hands of such victors,
and scarcely daring to look at her, suddenly sees _that_ in her eyes
which fills his soul to overflowing.
"All is lost," she whispers, "and I shall never repay you for all you
have done, cousin!"
The words are uttered falteringly, almost plaintively.
"We are not long now for this world, friend," she adds more firmly.
"Give me your forgiveness."
How often has Adrian heard this dead voice during the strange
vicissitudes of these long, long years! And, hearing it whisper in the
vivid world of his brain, how often has he not passionately longed
that he also had been able to yield his poor spark of life on the last
day of her existence.
For the usual fate of Chouan prisoners swiftly overtakes the surviving
leaders of the Savenaye "band of brigands," as that doughty knot of
loyalists was termed by their arch-enemy, Thureau.
A long journey towards the nearest town, in an open cart, under the
pitiless rain, amidst a crowd of evil-smelling, blaspheming, wounded
republicans, who, when a more cruel jolt than usual awakens their
wounds, curse the woman in words that should have drawn avenging bolts
from heaven. She sits silent, lofty, tearless; but her eyes, when they
are not lost in the grey distance, ever wistfully seek his face.
The day is drawing to a close; they reach their goal, a miserable,
grey, draggled town at the mouth of the Vilaine, and are roughly
brought before the arbiter of their lives--Thureau himself, the
monstrous excrescence of the times, who, like Marat and Carrier, sees
nothing in the new freedom but a free opening for the lowest instincts
of ferocity.
And before this monstrous beast, bedizened in his general's frippery,
in a reeking tavern-room, stand the noble lady of Savenaye and the
young heir of Pulwick.
The ruffian's voice rings with laughter as he gazes on the silent
youthful pair.
"Aha, what have we here; a couple of drowned rats? or have we trapped
you at last, the ci-devant Savenaye and her _godam_ from England? I
ought really to send you as a present to the Convention, but I am too
soft-hearted, you see, my pigeons; and so, to save time and make sure,
we will marry you to-day."
One of the officers whispers some words in his ear, which Thureau,
suddenly growing purple with rage, denies with a foul oath and an
emphatic thump of his huge fist on the table.
"Hoche has forbidden it, has he? Hoche does not command here. Hoche
has not had to hunt down the brigands these last two years. Dead the
beast, dead the venom, I say. And here is the order," scribbling
hurriedly on a page torn from a pocket-book. "It shall not be said
that I have had the bitch of Savenaye in my hands and trusted her on
the road again. Hoche has forbidden it! Call the cantineer and hop:
the marriage and quick--the soup waits."
Unable to understand the hidden meaning of the order, Adrian looks at
his lady askance, to find that, with eyes closed upon the sight of the
grinning faces, she is whispering prayers and fervently crossing
herself. When she turns to him again her face is almost serene.
"They are going to drown us together; that is their republican
marriage of aristocrats," she says in soft English. "I had feared
worse. Thank heaven there is no time now for worse. We shall be firm
to the last, shall we not, cousin?"
There is a pathetic smile on her worn weather-stained face, as the
cantineer and a corporal enter with ropes and proceed to pinion the
prisoners.
But, as they are marched away once more under the slanting rain, are
forced into a worn-out boat and lashed face to face, her fortitude
melts apace.
"There, my turtle-doves," sneers the truculent corporal, "another
kindness of the general. The Nantes way is back to back, but he
thought it would amuse you to see each other's grimaces."
On the strand resounds the muffled roll of wet drums, announcing the
execution of national justice; with one blow of an axe the craft is
scuttled; a push from a gaff sends it spinning on the swift swollen
waters into the estuary. Adrian's lips are on her forehead, but she
lifts her face; her eyes now are haggard.
"Adrian," she sobs, "you have forgiven me? I have your death on my
soul! Oh, Adrian, ... I could have loved you!"
Helpless and palsied by the merciless ropes, she tries passionately to
reach her little mouth to his. A stream of fire rushes through his
brain--maddening frenzy of regret, furious clinging to escaping
life!--Their lips have met, but the sinking craft is full, and, with a
sudden lurch, falls beneath the eddies.... A last roll of the drums,
and the pinioned bodies of these lovers of a few seconds are silently
swirling under the waters of the Vilaine.
And now the end of this poor life has come--with heart-breaking sorrow
of mind and struggle of body, overpowering horror at the writhings of
torture in the limbs lashed against his--and vainly he strives to
force his last breath into her hard-clenched mouth.
Such was the end of Adrian Landale, aged twenty--the end that should
have been--The pity that it was not permitted!
After the pangs of unwelcome death, the misery of unwelcome return to
life. Oh, Rene, Rene, too faithful follower; thou and the other true
men who, heedless of danger, hanging on the flanks of the victorious
enemy, never ceased to watch your lady from afar. You would have saved
her, could courage and faithfulness and cunning have availed! But,
since she was dead, Rene, would thou hadst left us to drift on to the
endless sea! How often have I cursed thee, good friend, who staked thy
life in the angry bore to snatch two spent bodies from its merciless
tossing. It was not to be endured, said you, that the remains of the
Lady of Savenaye should drift away unheeded, to be devoured by the
beasts of the sea! They now repose in sacred ground, and I live on!
Oh, hadst thou but reached us a minute later!--ah, God, or a minute
earlier!
Rarely had Sir Adrian's haunting visions of the past assumed such
lurid reality. Rising in torment from the hearth to pace unceasingly
the length and breadth of the restful, studious room, so closely
secure from the outer turmoil of heaven and earth, he is once more
back in the unknown sea-cave, in front of the angry breakers. Slowly,
agonisingly, he is recalled to life through wheeling spaces of pain
and confusion, only that his bruised and smarting eyes may see the
actual proof of his own desolateness--a small, stark figure wrapped in
coarse sailcloth, which now two or three ragged, long-haired men are
silently lifting between them.
He wonders, at first, vaguely, why the tears course down those wild,
dark faces; and then, as vainly he struggles to speak, and is gently
held down by some unknown hand, the little white bundle is gone, and
he knows that _there_ was the pitiful relict of his love--that he will
never see her again!
* * * * *
Sir Adrian halted in front of his seaward window, staring at the
driven rain, which bounded and plashed and spread in minute torrents
down the glass, obscuring the already darkening vision of furious sea
and sky.
The dog, that for some moments had shown an anxious restlessness in
singular concert with his master's, now rose at last to sniff beneath
the door. No sound penetrated the roar of the blast; but the old
retriever's uneasiness, his sharp, warning bark at length recalled Sir
Adrian's wandering thoughts to the present. And, walking up to the
door, he opened it.
Oh, God! Had the sea given up its dead?
Sir Adrian staggered back, fell on his knees and clapped his hands
together with an agonised cry:
"Cecile...!"
CHAPTER VI
THE WHEEL OF TIME
And to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him.
BYRON.
Upon the threshold she stood, looking in upon him with dark, luminous
eyes; round the small wet face tangles of raven hair fell limp and
streaming; dark raiments clung to her form, diapered with sand and
sea-foam, sodden with the moisture that dripped from them to the
floor; under the hem of her skirt one foot peered forth, shoeless in
its mud-stained stocking.
Sir Adrian stared up at her, his brain whirling with a frenzy of joy,
gripped in its soaring ecstasy by terror of the incomprehensible.
On the wings of the storm and the wind had she come to him, his
love--across the awful barriers that divide life and death? Had his
longings and the clamour of his desolate soul reached her, after all
these years, in the far-beyond, and was her sweet ghost here to bid
him cease from them and let her lie at rest? Or, yet, had she come to
call him from the weary world that their souls might meet and be one
at last?... Then let her but lay her lips against his, as once in the
bitterness of death, that his sorely-tried heart may break with the
exquisite pang and he, too, may die upon their kiss.
Swift such thoughts were tossing in the turmoil of his mind when the
vision smiled ... a young, rosy, living smile; and then reason,
memory, the wonder of her coming, the haunting of her grave went from
him; possessed by one single rapturous certainty he started up and
gathered the wet form into his strong arms--yet gently as if he feared
to crush the vision into void--and showered kisses on the wet face.
Not death--but life! A beating heart beneath his; a lithe young form
under his hand, warm lips to his kisses, ... Merciful Heaven! Were,
then, these twenty years all an evil, fevered dream, and was he awake
at length?
She turned her face from him after a moment and put her hand against
his breast to push him from her; and as she did so the wonder in the
lovely, familiar eyes turned to merriment, and the lips parted into
laughter.
The sound of the girlish laughter broke the spell. Sir Adrian stepped
back, and passed his hand across his forehead with a dazed look.
And still she laughed on.
"Why, cousin Landale," she said, at length between the peals; "I came
to throw myself upon your kindness for shelter from the storm, but--I
had not anticipated such a reception."
The voice, clear and sweet, with just a tinge of outlandish
intonation, struck Adrian to the heart.
"I have not heard," he faltered, "that voice for twenty years...!"
Then, coming up to her, he took her hands; and, drawing her towards
the firelight, scanned her features with eager, hungering eyes.
"Do not think me mad, child," he said at last; "tell me who you
are--what has brought you here? Ah, God, at such a moment! Who is it,"
he pursued, as if to himself, whilst still she smiled mockingly and
answered not; "who is it, then, since Cecile de Savenaye is dead--and
I am not dreaming--nor in fever? No vision either--this is flesh and
blood."
"Yes, indeed," mocked the girl with another burst of merriment; "flesh
and blood, please, and very living! Why, cousin Landale, you that knew
Cecile de Savenaye so well have you forgotten two babes that were born
at your own house of Pulwick? I believe, 'tis true, I have somewhat
altered since you saw me last."
And again the old room echoed to the unwonted sound of a girl's
laughter.
Now was the hallucination clearing; but the reality evoked a new and
almost as poignant tenderness. Cecile--phantom of a life-time's love,
reborn in the flesh, young as on the last day of her earthly
existence, coming back into his life again, even the same as she had
left it! A second wonder, almost as sweet as the first! He clung to
it as one clings to the presence of a dream, and, joy unspeakable, the
dream did not melt away, but remained, smiling, beautiful, unchanged.
"Cecile's daughter ..." he murmured: "Cecile's self again; but she was
not so tall, I think," and drew trembling, reverent hands from her
head to her straight young shoulders. And then he started, crying in a
changed voice:
"How wet and cold you are! Come closer to the fire--sit you into this
chair, here, in the warmth."
He piled up the hearth with faggots till the flames roared again. She
dropped into the proffered chair with a little shiver; now that he
recalled her to it, she was wet and cold too.
He surveyed her with gathering concern.
"My child," he began, and hesitated, continuing, after a short pause
of musing--for the thought struck him as strange--"I may call you so,
I suppose; I that am nearly old enough to be your father; my mind was
so unhinged by your sudden appearance, by the wonderful resemblance,
that I have neglected all my duties as host. You will suffer from
this--what shall we do to comfort you? Here, Jem, good dog! Call
Rene!"
The old retriever who, concluding that the visitor was welcome, had
returned to his doze, here gathered his stiff limbs together, hobbled
out through the doorway to give two or three yelping barks at some
point on the stairs, and then crawl back to his cosy corner by the
hearth.
The girl laughed again. It was all odd, new, exciting. Adrian looked
down at her. Cecile, too, had had a merry heart, even through peril
and misfortune.
And now there were hasty steps upon the stairs, creaking above the
outer tumult of sea and wind; and, in accordance with the
long-established custom of summoning him, Rene appeared upon the
threshold, holding a pair of candles.
At the sight of the figure sitting by the fire he halted, as if rooted
to the ground, and threw up his hands, each still clutching its
candle.
"Mademoiselle...!" he ejaculated. "Mademoiselle here!" Then, rapidly
recovering his quick wits, he deposited his burden of light upon the
table, advanced towards the lady, made an uncouth but profound bow,
and turned to his master.
"And this, your honour," he remarked, oracularly, and in his usual
manner of literal adaptation, "was also part of the news I had for
your honour from my last journey; but, my faith, I did not know how to
take myself to it, as your honour was so much occupied with old times
this evening. But I had seen Mademoiselle at the castle, as
Mademoiselle can tell you herself. And if your honour," he added, with
a look of astonishment, "will have the goodness to say how it is
possible that Mademoiselle managed to arrive here on our isle, in this
weather of all the devils--reverence speaking, and I humbly beg the
pardon of Mademoiselle for using such words--when it was with pain I
could land myself, and that before the storm--I should be grateful to
your honour. For I avow I cannot comprehend it at all. Ah, your
honour!" continued Rene, with an altered tone, "'tis a strange thing,
this!"
The looks of master and man crossed suddenly, and in the frank blue
eyes of the Breton peasant, Sir Adrian read a reflex of his own
thoughts.
"Yes," he said, more in answer to the look than to the exclamation,
"yes, it is a strange thing, friend."
"And his Honour cannot read the riddle any more than you yourself,
Rene," quoth Mademoiselle de Savenaye, composedly from her corner;
"and, as for me, I can give no explanations until I am a little
warmer."
"Why, truly," exclaimed Sir Adrian, striking his forehead, "we are a
very pair of dolts! Hurry, Renny, hurry, call up Margery, and bid her
bring some hot drink--tea, broth, or what she has--and blankets. Stay!
first fetch my furred cloak; quick, Rene, every moment is precious!"
With all the agitation of a rarely excited man Sir Adrian threw more
wood on the fire, hunted for a cushion to place beneath her feet, and
then, seizing the cloak from Rene's hands, he helped her to rise, and
wrapped its ample folds round her as carefully as if she were too
precious almost to be touched.
Thus enveloped she sank back in the great arm-chair with a cosy,
deliberate, kitten-like movement, and stretched out her feet to the
blaze, laying the little shoeless one upon Jem's grey muzzle.
Adrian knelt beside her, and began gently to chafe it with both hands.
And, as he knelt, silence fell between them, and the storm howled out
yonder; he heard her give a little sigh--that sigh which would escape
from Cecile's weariness in moments of rest, which had once been so
familiar and so pathetic a sound in his ear. And once more the power
of the past came over him; again he was upon the heath near Quiberon,
and Cecile was sitting by him and seeking warmth by the secret fire.
"Oh, my darling," he murmured, "your poor little feet were so cold;
and yet you would not let me gather them to my breast." And, stooping
slowly, he kissed the pretty foot in its torn, stained stocking with a
passion he had not yet shown.
The girl looked on with an odd little smile. It was a novel
experience, to inspire--even vicariously--such feelings as these; and
there was something not unpleasant in the sense of the power which had
brought this strange handsome man prostrate before her--a maidenly
tremor, too, in the sensation of those burning lips upon her feet.
He raised his eyes suddenly, with the old expectation of a rebuff; and
then, at the sight of the youthful, curious face above him, betook
himself to sighing too; and, laying the little foot back tenderly upon
the cushion, he rose.
From between the huge fur collar which all but covered her head, the
black eyes followed him as alertly as a bird's; intercepting the soft
melancholy of his gaze, she smiled at him, mischievous, confident, and
uncommunicative, and snuggled deeper into the fur.
Leaning against the high mantel-board, he remained silent, brooding
over her; the clock ticked off solemnly the fleeting moments of the
wonderful hour; and ever and anon the dog drew a long breath of
comfort and stretched out his gaunt limbs more luxuriously to the
heat. After a while Sir Adrian spoke.
"He who has hospitality to dispense," said he, smiling down at her
mutinous grace, "should never ask whence or how the guest came to his
hearth ... and yet--"
She made a slight movement of laziness, but volunteered nothing; and
he continued, his look becoming more wistful as he spoke:
"Your having reached this rock, during such weather, is startling
enough; it is God's providence that there should live those in these
ruins who are able to give you succour. But that you should come in to
me at the moment you did--" He halted before the bold inquisitive
brightness of her eyes. "Some day perhaps you will let me explain," he
went on, embarrassed. "Indeed I must have seemed the most absolute
madman, to you. But he who thinks he sees one returned from death in
angry waters, may be pardoned some display of emotion."
The girl sat up briskly and shook herself as if in protest against the
sadness of his smile and look.
"I rise indeed from a watery grave," she said lightly, "or at least
from what should have been my grave, had I had my deserts for my
foolishness; as it has turned out I do not regret it now; though I
did, about midway."
The red lips parted and the little teeth gleamed. "I have found such
kindness and welcome." She caressed the dog who, lazily, tried to lick
her hand. "It is all such an adventure; so much more amusing than
Pulwick; so much more interesting than ever I fancied it might be!"
"Pulwick; you come from Pulwick?" said Sir Adrian musing; "true, Rene
has said it but just now. Yet, it is of a piece with the strangeness
of it all."
"Yes," said Mademoiselle de Savenaye, once more collecting her cloak,
which her hurried movement had thrown off her shoulder. "Madelon and I
are now at Pulwick--I am Molly, cousin, please to remember--or rather
I am here, very warm now, and comfortable, and she is somewhere along
the shore--perhaps--she and John, as wet as drowned rats. Well, well,
I had best tell you the tale from the beginning, or else we never
shall be out of the labyrinth.--We started from Pulwick, for a ride by
the shore, Madelon and I. When we were on the strand it came on to
rain. There was smoke out of your chimney. I proposed a canter as far
as the ruins, for shelter. I knew very well Madelon would not follow;
but I threw poor Lucifer--you know Lucifer, Mr. Landale has reserved
him for me; of course you know Lucifer, I believe he belongs to you!
Well, I threw him along the causeway. John, he's the groom you know,
and Madelon, shrieked after me. But it was beautiful--this magnificent
tearing gallop in the rain--I was not going to stop.--But when we
were half way, Lucifer and I, I saw suddenly that the foam seemed to
cover the sand in front of me. Then I pulled up quick and turned round
to look behind me. There was already a frightful wind, and the sand
and the rain blinded me almost, but there was no mistake--the sea was
running between the shore and me. Oh! my God! but I was frightened
then; I beat poor Lucifer until my whip broke, and he started away
with a will. But when his feet began to splash the water he too became
frightened and stopped. I did not know what to do; I pulled out my
broach to spur him with the pin, but, at the first prick I gave him,
he reared, and swerved and I fell right on my face in the froth. I got
up and began to run through the water; then I came to some stones and
I knew I was saved, though the water was up to my knees and rushing by
like a torrent. When I had clambered up the beach I thought again of
poor Lucifer. I looked about and saw him a little way off. He was
shaking and tossing his dear black head, and neighing, though I really
did not hear him, for the wind was in my ears; his body was stock
still, I could not see his legs.... And gradually he sank lower, and
lower, and lower, and at last the water passed over his head. Oh! it
was horrible, horrible!"
The girl shuddered and her bright face clouded. After a moment she
resumed:
"It was only then I thought of the moving sands they spoke of the
other day at Pulwick--and that was why Madelon and that poltroon groom
would not follow me! Yet perhaps they were wise, after all, for the
thought of being buried alive made me turn weak all of a sudden. My
knees shook and I had to sit down, although I knew I had passed
through the danger. But I was so sorry for poor Lucifer! I thought if
I had come down and led him, poor fellow, he might have come with me.
Death is so awful, so hideous; he was so full of life and carried me
so bravely, only a few minutes before! Is it not a shame that there
should be such a thing as death?" she cried, rebelliously, and looked
up at the man above her, whose face had grown white at the thought of
the danger she had barely escaped.
"I waited," she resumed at length, "till I thought he must be quite
dead, there below, and came up to the ruins, and looked for an
entrance. I knocked at some doors and called, but the wind was so
loud, no one heard. And then, at last, there was one door I could
open, so I entered and came up the stairs and startled you, as you
know. And that is how I came here and how Lucifer is drowned."
As she finished her tale at last, she looked up at her companion. But
Sir Adrian, who had followed her with ever-deepening earnestness of
mien, remained silent; noticing which she added quickly and with a
certain tinge of defiance:
"And now, no doubt, you are not quite so pleased as you seemed at
first with the apparition which has caused you the loss of one of your
best horses!"
"Why child," cried Sir Adrian, "so that you be safe you might have
left all Pulwick at the bottom of the sands for me!" And Rene who
entered the room at that moment, heading the advance of Dame Margery
with the posset, here caught the extraordinary sound of a laugh on his
master's lips, and stepped back to chuckle to himself and rub his
hands.
"Who would have believed that!" he muttered, "and I who was afraid to
tell his honour! Oh, yes, there are better times coming. Now in with
you, Mother Margery, see for yourself who is there."
Holding in both hands a fragrant, steaming bowl, the old crone made
her slow entrance upon the scene, peering with dim eyes, and dropping
tremulous curtseys every two or three steps.
"Renny towd me as you wanted summat hot for a lady," she began
cautiously; and then having approached near for recognition at last,
burst forth into a long-drawn cry!
"Eh, you never says! Eh, dear o' me," and was fain to relinquish the
bowl to her fellow-servant who narrowly watching, dived forward just
in time to catch it from her, that she might clasp her aged hands
together once and again with ever-renewed gestures of astonishment.
"An' it were truth then, an' I that towd Renny to give over his
nonsense--I didn't believe it, I welly couldn't. Eh, Mester Adrian,
but she's like the poor lady that's dead and gone, the spit an' image
she is--e-eh, she is!"
Molly de Savenaye laughed aloud, stretched out her hand for the bowl,
and began with dainty caution to sip its scalding contents.
"Ah, my dear Margery," said the master, "we little thought what a
guest the sea would cast up at our doors to-night! and now we must do
our best for her; when she's finished your comforting mixture I shall
give her into your charge. You ought to put her to bed--it will not be
the first time."
"Ah! it will not, and a troublesome child she was," replied Margery,
after the usual pause for the assimilation of his remark, turning to
the speaker from her palsied yet critical survey of her whilom
nursling.
"And I'll see to her, never fear, I'll fettle up a room for her at
once--blankets is airing already, an' sheets, an' Renny he's seen to
the fire, so that as soon as Miss, here, is ready, I am."
Upon which, dropping a last curtsey with an assumed dignity which
would have befitted a mistress of the robes, she took her departure,
leaving Adrian smiling with amusement at her specious manner of
announcing that his own bedroom--the only one available for the
purpose in the ruins--was being duly converted into a lady's bower.
"It grieves me to think," mused he after a pause, while Rene still
bursting with ungratified curiosity, hung about the further end of the
room, "of the terrible anxiety they must be in about you at Pulwick,
and of our absolute inability to convey to them the good news of your
safety."
The girl gave a little laugh, with her lips over the cup, and shrugged
her shoulders but said nothing.
"My God, yes," quoth Rene cheerfully from his corner. "Notre Dame
d'Auray has watched over Mademoiselle to-day. She would not permit the
daughter to die like the mother. And now we have got her ladyship we
shall keep her too. This, if your honour remembers his sailor's
knowledge, looks like a three-days' gale."
"You are right, I fancy," said Sir Adrian, going over to him and
looking out of the window. "Mademoiselle de Savenaye will have to take
up her abode in our lighthouse for a longer time than she bargained. I
do not remember hearing the breakers thunder in our cave so loud for
many years. I trust," continued the light-keeper, coming down to his
fair guest again, "that you may be able to endure such rough
hospitality as ours must needs be!"
"It has been much more pleasant and I feel far more welcome already
than at Pulwick," remarked Mademoiselle, between two deliberate sips,
and in no way discomposed, it seemed, at the prospect held out to her.
"How?" cried Sir Adrian with a start, while the unwonted flush mounted
to his forehead, "you, not welcome at Pulwick! Have they not welcomed
a child of Cecile de Savenaye at Pulwick?... Thank God, then, for the
accident that has sent you to me!"
The girl looked at him with an inquisitive smile in her eyes; there
was something on her lips which she restrained. Surrendering her cup,
she remarked demurely:
"Yes, it was a lucky accident, was it not, that there was some one
to offer shelter to the outcast from the sea? It is like a tale of
old. It is delightful. Delightful, too, not to be drowned, safe and
sound ... and welcome in this curious old place."
She had risen and, as the cloak fell from her steaming garments, again
she shivered.
"But you are right," she said, "I must go to bed, and get these damp
garments off. And so, my Lord of Scarthey, I will retire to my
apartments; my Lady in Waiting I see yonder is ready for me."
With a quaint mixture of playfulness and gravity, she extended her
hand, and Adrian stooped and kissed it--as he had kissed fair Cecile
de Savenaye's rosy finger-tip upon the porch of Pulwick, twenty years
before.
CHAPTER VII
FOREBODINGS OF GLADNESS
Molly de Savenaye in her improvised bedroom, wet as she was, could
hardly betake herself to disrobing, so amused was she in surveying the
fresh and romantic oddity of her surroundings, with their mixture of
barbarous rudeness and almost womanish refinement.
Old Margery's fumbling hands were not nimble either, and it was long
since she had acted as attendant upon one of her own sex. And so the
matter progressed but slowly; but the speed of Margery's tongue was
apparently not affected by its length of service. It wagged
ceaselessly; the girl between her own moods of curious speculation
vouchsafing an amused, half-contemptuous ear.
Presently, however, as the nurse's reminiscences wandered from the
less interesting topic of her own vicissitudes, the children she had
reared or buried, and the marvellous ailments she had endured, to an
account of those days when she had served the French Madam and her
babes, Molly, slowly peeling a clinging sleeve from her arm, turned a
more eager and attentive face to her.
"Ah," quoth Margery, appraising her with blear eyes, "it's a queer
thing how ye favour your mother, miss. She had just they beautiful
shoulders and arms, as firm an' as white; but you're taller, I think,
and may be so, to speak, a stouter make altogether. Eh, dear, you were
always a fine child and the poor lady set a deal of store on you, she
did. She took you with her and left your sister with my Sally, when
she was trapesing up to London and back with Mester Adrian, ay, and me
with ye. And many the day that I wished myself safe at Pulwick! And I
mind the day she took leave of you, I do that, well."
Here Dame Margery paused and shook her head solemnly, then pursued in
another key:
"See now, miss, dear, just step out of they wet things, will ye now,
and let me put this hot sheet round ye?"
"But I want to hear about myself," said Molly, gratefully wrapping the
hot linen round her young beauty, and beginning to rub her black locks
energetically. "Where was it my mother parted from me?"
"Why, I'll tell you, miss. When Madam--we allus used to call her
Madam, ye know--was goin' her ways to the ship as was to take her to
France, I took you after her mysel' down to the shore that she might
have the very last of ye. Eh, I mind it as if it were yesterday.
Mester Adrian was to go with her--Sir Adrian, I should say, but he was
but Mester Adrian then--an' a two three more o' th' gentry as was all
fur havin' a share o' th' fightin'. Sir Thomas himsel' was theer--I
like as if I could see him now, poor owd gentleman, talkin' an'
laughin' very hard an' jov'al, an' wipin' 's e'en when he thought
nobody noticed. Eh, dear, yes! I could ha' cried mysel' to see th'
bonny young lady goin' off fro' her bairns. An' to think she niver
came back to them no more. Well, well! An' Mester Adrian too--such a
fine well-set-up young gentleman as he were--and _he_ niver comed back
for ten year an' when he did, he was that warsened--" she stopped,
shook her head and groaned.
"Well, but how about me, nurse," observed Molly, "what about _me_?"
"Miss, please it was this way. Madam was wantin' a last look at her
bairn--eh, she did, poor thing! You was allus her favoryite, ye know,
miss--our Sally was wet-nurse to Miss Maddyline, but Madam had you
hersel'. Well, miss, I'd brought you well lapped up i' my shawl an'
William Shearman--that was Thomas Shearman's son, feyther to William
an' Tom as lives over yonder at Pulwick village--well, William was
standin' in 's great sea-boots ready to carry her through th' surf
into the boat; an' Mester Adrian--Sir Adrian, I mean--stood it might
be here, miss, an' there was Renny, an' yon were th' t'other gentry.
Well, Madam stopped an' took you out o' my arms, an' hugged you to her
breast--an' then she geet agate o' kissin' you--your head an' your
little 'ands. An' you was jumpin' an' crowin' in her arms--the wind
had blown your cap off, an' your little downy black hair was standing
back. (Just let me get at your hair now, miss, please--Eh! it's cruel
full of sand, my word, it is.)"
"It's 'ard, when all's said an' done, to part wi' th' babe ye've
suckled, an' Madam, though there was niver nought nesh about 'er same
as there is about most women, an' specially ladies--she 'ad th'
mother's 'eart, she 'ad, miss, an when th' time coom for her to leave
th' little un, I could see, as it were, welly burstin'. There we stood
wi' th' wind blowin' our clothes an' our 'air, an' the waves roarin',
an' one bigger nor th' t'others ran up till th' foam reached Madam's
little feet, but she niver took no notice. Then all of a sudden she
gets th' notion that she'd like to take you with 'er, an' she turns
an' tells Mester Adrian so. 'She shall come with me,' she says, quite
sharp an' determined, an' makes a sign to William Shearman to carry
'em both over. 'No, no,' says Mester Adrian, 'quite impossible,' says
he, as wise as if he'd been an owd man i' stead o' nobbut a lad, ye
might say. 'It would be madness both for you an' th' child. Now,' he
says, very quiet an' gentle, 'if I might advise, I should say stay
here with the child.' Eh, I couldn't tell ye all he said, an' then Sir
Tummas coom bustlin' up, 'Do, now, my dear; think of it,' he says,
pattin' her o' th' hand. 'Stay with us,' he says, 'ye'll be welcome as
th' flowers in May!' An' there was Renny wi' 's 'at off, an' th' tears
pourin' down his face, beggin' an' prayin' Madam to stop--at least, I
reckoned that was what he were sayin' for it was all in 's own
outlandish gibberish. The poor lady! she'd look from one to th'
t'other an' a body a' must think she'd give in--an' then she'd
unbethink hersel' again. An' Sir Thomas, he'd say, 'Do now, my dear,'
an' then when she'd look at him that pitiful, he'd out wi' 's red
'andkercher an' frown over at Mester Adrian, an', says he, 'I wonder
ye can ax her!' Well, all of a sudden off went th' big gun in th'
ship--that was to let 'em know, miss, do ye see--an' up went Madam's
head, an' then th' wind fetched th' salt spray to her face, an' a kind
o' change came over her. She looked at the child, then across at the
ship--an' then she fair tossed ye back to me. Big William catched her
up in his arms just same as another bairn, an' carried her to the
boat."
"Yes," said Molly, gazing into the burning logs with brilliant eyes,
but speaking low, as if to herself, so that her attendant's deaf ears
failed to catch the meaning of the words. "Ah, that was life indeed!
Happy mother to have seen such life--though she did die young."
"As ye say, miss," answered Margery, making a guess at the most likely
comment from a daughter's lips, "it was cruel hard--it was that.
'Come, make haste!' cries the other young gentlemen: my word, they
were in a hurry lest Madam happen to change her mind. I could welly
have laughed to see their faces when Mester Adrian were trying to
persuade her to stop at Pulwick, and let the men go alone. 'T wern't
for that they reckoned to go all that road to France, ye may think,
miss. Well, miss, in a few minutes they was all out i' the boat wi'
th' waves tossin' 'em--an' I stood watchin' with you i' my arms,
cryin' and kickin' out wi' your little legs, an' hittin' of me wi'
your little 'ands, same as if ye knowed summat o' what was agate, poor
lamb, an' was angry wi' me for keepin' ye. Then in a little while the
big, white sails o' th' ship went swellin' out an' soon it was gone.
An' that was th' last we saw o' Madam. A two-three year arter you an'
Miss Maddyline was fetched away, to France, as I've been towd. I doubt
you didn't so much as think there was such a place as Pulwick, though
many a one there minds how they dandled and played wi' you when you
was a wee bairn, miss."
"Well, I am very glad to be back in England, anyhow," said Molly,
nimbly slipping into bed. "Oh, Margery, what delicious warm sheets,
and how good it is to be in bed alive, dry, and warm, after all!"
A new atmosphere pervaded Scarthey that night. The peaceful monotony
of years, since the master of Pulwick had migrated to his "ruins," was
broken at last, and happily. A warm colour seemed to have crept upon
the hitherto dun and dull surroundings and brightened all the
prospects.
At any rate Rene, over his busy work in the lantern, whistled and
hummed snatches of song with unwonted blithesomeness, and, after
lighting the steady watch-light and securing all his paraphernalia
with extra care, dallied some time longer than usual on the outer
platform, striving to snatch through the driven wraith a glance of the
distant lights of Pulwick. For there, in the long distance, ensconced
among the woods, stood a certain gate-lodge of greystone, much covered
with ivy, which sheltered, among other inmates, the gatekeeper's
blue-eyed, ripe and ruddy daughter--Dame Margery's pet grandchild.
The idea of ever leaving the master--even for the sake of the
happiness to be found over yonder--was not one to be entertained by
Rene. But what if dreams of a return to the life of the world should
arise after to-day in the recluse's mind? Ah, the master's eyes had
been filled with light!... and had he not actually laughed?
Rene peered again through the wind, but nothing could be seen of the
world abroad, save grey, tumbling waters foaming at the foot of the
islet; fretful waters coalescing all around with the driven, misty
air. A desolate view enough, had there been room for melancholy
thoughts in his heart.
Blithely did he descend the steep wooden stairs from the roaring,
weather-beaten platform, to the more secure inhabited keep; and,
humming a satisfied tune, he entered upon Margery in her flaming
kitchen, to find the old lady intent on sorting out a heap of feminine
garments and spreading them before the fire.
Rene took up a little shoe, sand-soiled and limp, and reverentially
rubbed it on his sleeve.
"Well, mother," he said, cheerfully, "it is a long while since you had
to do with such pretty things. My faith, these are droll doings,
ah--and good, too! You will see, Mother Margery, there will be good
out of all this."
But Margery invariably saw fit, on principle, to doubt all the
opinions of her rival.
Eh, she didn't hold so much wi' wenches hersel', an' Mester Adrian,
she reckoned, hadn't come to live here all by himsel' to have visitors
breaking in on him that gate!
"There be visitors _and_ visitors, mother--I tell you, I who speak to
you, that his honour is happy."
Margery, with a mysterious air, smoothed out a long silk stocking and
gave an additional impetus to the tremor Nature had already bestowed
upon her aged head.
Well, it wasn't for her to say. She hoped and prayed there was nowt
bad a coomin' on the family again; but sich likenesses as that of Miss
to her mother was not lucky, to her minding; it was not. Nowt good had
come to Mester Adrian from the French Madam. Ah, Mester Adrian had
been happy like with her too, and she had taken him away from his
home, an' his people, an' sent him back wi'out 's soul in the end.
"And now her daughter has come to give it him back," retorted Rene,
as he fell to, with a zest, on the savoury mess he had concocted for
his own supper.
"Eh, well, I hope nowt bad's i' the road," said Margery with senile
iteration. "They do say no good ever comes o' saving bodies from
drowning; not that one 'ud wish the poor Miss to have gone into the
sands--an' she the babby I weaned too!"
Rene interrupted her with a hearty laugh. "Yes, every one knows it
carries misfortune to save people from the drowning, but there, you
see, her ladyship, she saved herself--so that ought to bring good
fortune. Good-night, Mother Margery, take good care of the lady....
Ah, how I wish I had the care of her!" he added simply, and, seizing
his lantern, proceeded to ascend once more to his post aloft.
He paused once on his way, in the loud sighing stairs, struck with a
fresh aspect of the day's singular events--a quaint thought, born of
his native religious faith: The Lady, the dear Mistress had just
reached Heaven, no doubt, and had straightway sent them the young one
to console and comfort them. Eh bien! they had had their time of
Purgatory too, and now they might be happy.
Pleasant therefore were Rene's musings, up in the light watcher's
bunk, underneath the lantern, as, smoking a pipe of rest, he listened
complacently to the hissing storm around him.
And in the master's sleeping chamber beneath him, now so curiously
turned into a feminine sanctum, pleasant thoughts too, if less formed,
and less concerned with the future, lulled its dainty occupant to
rest.
Luxuriously stretched between the warm lavender-scented sheets,
watching from her pillow the leaping fire on the hearth, Miss Molly
wondered lazily at her own luck; at the many possible results of the
day's escapade; wondered amusedly whether any poignant sorrow--except,
indeed poor Madeleine's tears--for her supposed demise, really
darkened the supper party at Pulwick this evening; wondered agreeably
how the Lord of the Ruined Castle would meet her on the morrow, after
his singular reception of her this day; how long she would remain in
these romantic surroundings and whether she would like them as well at
the end of the visitation.
And as the blast howled with increasing rage, and the cold night drew
closer on, and the great guns in the sea-cave boomed more angrily with
the risen tide, she dimly began to dwell upon the thought of poor
Lucifer being sucked deeper into his cold rapacious grave, whilst she
was held in the warm embrace of a man whose eyes were masterful and
yet gentle, whose arm was strong, whose kisses were tender.
And in the delight of the contrast, Mademoiselle de Savenaye fell into
the profound slumber of the young and vigorous.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PATH OF WASTED YEARS
And I only think of the woman that weeps;
But I forget, always forget, the smiling child.
_Luteplayer's Song._
That night, even when sheer fatigue had subdued the currents of blood
and thought that surged in his head, Sir Adrian was too restless to
avail himself of the emergency couch providently prepared by Rene in a
corner. But, ceasing his fretful pacing to and fro, he sat down in the
arm-chair by the hearth where she had sat--the waif of the
sea--wrapped round him the cloak that had enfolded the young body,
hugging himself in the salt moisture the fur still retained, to spend
the long hours in half-waking, firelight dreams.
And every burst of tempest rage, every lash of rain at the window,
every thud of hurricane breaking itself on impassable ramparts, and
shriek of baffled winds searching the roofless halls around, found a
strangely glad echo in his brain--made a sort of burden to his
thoughts:
Heap up the waters round this happy island, most welcome winds--heap
them up high and boiling, and retain her long captive in these lonely
ruins!
And ever the image in his mind's eye was, as before, Cecile--Cecile
who had come back to him, for all sober reason knew it was but the
child.
The child----! Why had he never thought of the children these weary
years? They, all that remained of Cecile, were living and might have
been sought. Strange that he had not remembered him of the children!
Twenty years since he had last set eyes upon the little living
creature in her mother's arms. And the picture that the memory evoked
was, after all, Cecile again, only Cecile--not the queer little
black-eyed puppet, even then associated with sea-foam and salty
breeze. Twenty years during which she was growing and waxing in
beauty, and unawares, maturing towards this wonderful meeting--and he
had never given a thought to her existence.
In what sheltered ways had this fair duplicate of his love been
growing from a child to womanhood during that space of life, so long
to look back upon--or so short and transient, according to the mood of
the thinker?
And, lazily, in his happier and tender present mood he tried to
measure once again the cycles of past discontent, this time in terms
of the girl's own lifetime.
It is bitter in misery to recall past misery--almost as bitter, for
all Dante's cry, as to dwell on past happiness. But, be the past
really dead, and a new and better life begun, the scanning back of a
sombre existence done with for ever, may bring with it a kind of
secret complacency.
Truly, mused Sir Adrian, for one who ever cherished ideal aspirations,
for the student, the "man of books" (as his father had been
banteringly wont to term him), worshipper of the muses, intellectual
Epicurean, and would-be optimist philosopher, it must be admitted he
had strangely dealt, and been dealt with, since he first beheld that
face, now returned to light his solitude! Ah, God bless the child!
Pulwick at least nursed it warmly, whilst unhappy Adrian, ragged and
degraded into a mere fighting beast, roamed through the Marais with
Chouan bands, hunted down by the merciless revolutionists, like
vermin; falling, as months of that existence passed over him, from his
high estate to the level of vermin indeed; outlawed, predatory,
cunning, slinking, filthy--trapped at last, the fit end of vermin!
Scarcely better the long months of confinement in the hulks of
Rochelle. How often he had regretted it, then, not to have been one of
the chosen few who, the day after capture, stood in front of six
levelled muskets, and were sped to rest in some unknown charnel!
Then!--not now. No, it was worth having lived to this hour, to know of
that fair face, in living sleep upon his pillow, under the safeguard
of his roof.
Good it was, that he had escaped at last, though with the blood of one
of his jailors red upon his hands; the blood of a perhaps innocent
man, upon his soul. It was the only time he had taken a life other
than in fair fight, and the thought of it had been wont to fill him
with a sort of nausea; but to-night, he found he could face it, not
only without remorse, but without regret. He was glad he had listened
to Rene's insidious whispers--Rene, who could not endure the captivity
to which his master might, in time, have fallen a passive, hopeless
slave, and yet who would have faced a thousand years of it rather than
escape alone--the faithful heart!
Yes, it was good, and he was glad of it, or time would not have come
when she (stay, how old was the child then?--almost three years, and
still sheltered and cherished by the house of Landale)--when she would
return, and gladden his eyes with a living sight of Cecile, while Rene
watched in his tower above; ay, and old Margery herself lay once more
near the child she had nursed.
Marvellous turn of the wheel of fate!
But, who had come for the children, and where had they been taken? To
their motherland, perhaps; even it might have been before he himself
had left it; or yet to Ireland, where still dwelt kinsfolk of their
blood? Probably it was at the breaking up of the family, caused by the
death of Sir Thomas, that these poor little birds had been removed
from the nest, that had held them so safe and close.
That was in '97, in the yellow autumn of which year Adrian Landale,
then French fisherman, parted from his brother Rene L'Apotre upon the
sea off Belle Isle; parted one grizzly dawn after embracing, as
brothers should. Oh, the stealthy cold of that blank, cheerless
daybreak, how it crept into the marrow of his bones, and chilled the
little energy and spirits he had left! For a whole year they had
fruitlessly sought some English vessel, to convey this English
gentleman back to his native land. He could remember how, at the
moment of separation, from the one friend who had loved both him and
her, his heart sank within him--remember how he clambered from aboard
the poor little smack, up the forbidding sides of the English brig;
how Rene's broken words had bidden God bless him, and restore him
safely home (home!); remember how swiftly the crafts had moved apart,
the mist, the greyness and desolateness; the lapping of the waters,
the hoarse cries of the seamen, all so full of heart-piercing
associations to him, and the last vision of Rene's simple face, with
tears pouring down it, and his open mouth spasmodically trying to give
out a hearty cheer, despite the sobs that came heaving up to it. How
little the simple fellow dreamed of what bitterness the future was yet
holding for his brother and master, to end in these reunions at last!
The vessel which had taken Adrian Landale on board, in answer to the
frantic signals of the fishing-smack, that had sailed from Belle Isle
obviously to meet her, proved to be a privateer, bound for the West
Indies, but cruising somewhat out of her way, in the hope of outgoing
prizes from Nantes.
The captain, who had been led to expect something of importance from
the smack's behaviour, in high dudgeon at finding that so much bustle
and waste of time was only to burden him with a mere castaway seeking
a passage home--one who, albeit a countryman, was too ragged and
disreputable in looks to be trusted in his assurances of
reward--granted him indeed the hospitality of his ship, but on the
condition of his becoming a hand in the company during the forthcoming
expedition.
There was a rough measure of equity in the arrangement, and Adrian
accepted it. The only alternative, moreover, would have been a jump
overboard. And so began a hard spell of life, but a few shades removed
from his existence among the Chouan guerillas; a predatory cruise
lasting over a year, during which the only changes rung in the gamut
of its purpose were the swooping down, as a vulture might, upon
unprotected ships; flying with superior speed from obviously stronger
crafts; engaging, with hawk-like bravery, everything afloat that
displayed inimical colours, if it offered an equal chance of fight.
And this for more than a year, until the privateer, much battered, but
safe, despite her vicissitudes made Halifax for refitting. Here, at
the first suitable port she had touched, Adrian claimed and obtained
his release from obligations which made his life almost unendurable.
Then ensued a period of the most absolute penury; unpopular with most
of his messmates for his melancholy taciturnity, despised by the more
brutal as one who had as little stomach for a carouse as for a bloody
fight, he left the ship without receiving, or even thinking of his
share of prize-money. And he had to support existence with such mean
mechanical employment as came in his way, till an opportunity was
offered of engaging himself as seaman, again from sheer necessity, on
a homeward-bound merchantman--an opportunity which he seized, if not
eagerly, for there was no eagerness left in him, yet under the
pressure of purpose.
Next the long, slowly plodding, toilsome, seemingly eternal course
across the ocean.
But even a convoy, restricted to the speed of its slowest member, if
it escape capture or natural destruction, must meet the opposite shore
at length, and the last year of the century had lapsed in the even
race of time when, after many dreary weeks, on the first of January
1801, the long low lines of sandhills on the Lancastrian coast loomed
in sight. The escort drew away, swiftly southwards, as if in joyful
relief from the tedious task, leaving the convoy to enter the Mersey,
safe and sound.
That evening Adrian, the rough-looking and taciturn sailor, set foot,
for a short while, on his native land, after six years of an exile
which had made of him at five and twenty a prematurely aged and
hopelessly disillusioned man.
And Sir Adrian, as he mused, wrapped in the honoured fur cloak, with
eyes half closed, by his sympathetic fire, recalled how little of joy
this return had had for him. It was the goal he had striven to reach,
and he had reached it, that was all; nay, he recalled how, when at
hand, he had almost dreaded the actual arrival home, dreaded, with the
infinite heart-sickness of sorrow, the emotions of the family welcome
to one restored from such perils by flood and field--if not indeed
already mourned for and forgotten--little wotting how far that return
to Pulwick, that seemed near and certain, was still away in the dim
future of life.
Yet, but for the fit of hypochondriacal humour which had fallen black
upon him that day of deliverance and made him yearn, with an intensity
increasing every moment, to separate himself from his repugnant
associates and haste the moment of solitude and silence, he might have
been rescued, then and for ever, from the quagmire in which perverse
circumstances had enslaved him.
"Look'ee here, matey," said one of his fellow-workers to him, in a
transient fit of good-fellowship which the prospect of approaching
sprees had engendered in him even towards one whom all on board had
felt vaguely to be of a different order, and disliked accordingly,
"you don't seem to like a jolly merchantman--but, maybe, you wouldn't
take more kindly to a man-o'-war. Do you see that there ship?--a
frigate she is; and, whenever there's a King's ship in the Mersey that
means that it's more wholesome for the likes of us to lie low. You
take a hint, matey, and don't be about Liverpool to-night, or until
she's gone. Now, I know a crib that's pretty safe, Birkenhead way;
Mother Redcap's, we call it--no one's ever been nabbed at Mother
Redcap's, and if you'll come along o' me--why then if you won't, go
your way and be damned to you for a----"
This was the parting of Adrian Landale from his fellow-workers. The
idea of spending even one night more in that atmosphere of rum and
filth, in the intimate hearing of blasphemous and obscene language,
was too repulsive to be entertained, and he had turned away from the
offer with a gesture of horror.
With half a dozen others, in whose souls the attractions of the town
at night proved stronger than the fear of the press party, he
disembarked on the Lancashire side, and separating from his
companions, for ever, as he thought, ascended the miserable lanes
leading from the river to the upper town.
His purpose was to sleep in one of the more decent hotels, to call the
next day for help at the banking-house with which the Landales had
dealt for ages past, and thence to take coach for Pulwick. But he had
planned without taking reck of his circumstances. No hotel of repute
would entertain this weather-beaten common sailor in the meanest of
work-stained clothes. After failing at various places even to obtain a
hearing, being threatened with forcible ejectment, derisively referred
to suitable cribs in Love Lane or Tower Street, he gave up the
attempt; and, in his usual dejection of spirit, intensified by
unavowed and unreasonable anger, wandered through the dark streets,
brooding. Thus aimlessly wandering, the remembrance of his young
Utopian imaginings came back to him to mock him. Dreams of universal
brotherhood, of equality, of harmony. He had already seen the apostles
of equality and brotherhood at work--on the banks of the Vilaine. And
realising how he himself, now reduced to the lowest level in the
social scale, hunted with insult from every haunt above that level,
yet loathed and abhorred the very thought of associating again with
his recent brothers in degradation, he laughed a laugh of bitter
self-contempt.
But the night was piercing cold; and, in time, the question arose
whether the stench and closeness of a riverside eating-house would not
be more endurable than the cutting wind, the sleet, and the sharper
pangs of hunger.
His roaming had brought him once more to that quarter of the town
"best suited to the likes of him," according to the innkeeper's
opinion, and he found himself actually seeking a house of
entertainment in the slimy, ill-lighted narrow street, when, from out
the dimness, running towards him, with bare feet paddling in the
sludge, came a slatternly girl, with unkempt wisps of red hair hanging
over her face under the tartan shawl.
"Run, run, Jack," she cried, hoarsely, as she passed by breathless,
"t' gang's comin' up...."
A sudden loathly fear seized Adrian by the heart. He too, took to his
heels by the side of the slut with all the swiftness his tired frame
could muster.
"I'm going to warn my Jo," she gasped, as, jostling each other, they
darted through a maze of nameless alleys.
And then as, spent with running, they emerged at last into a broader
street, it was to find themselves in the very midst of another party
of man-of-war's men, whose brass belt-buckles glinted under the
flickering light of the oil-lamp swinging across the way.
Adrian stopped dead short and looked at the girl in mute reproach.
"May God strike me dead," she screamed, clapping her hands together,
"if I knew the bloody thieves were there! Oh, my bonny lad, I meant to
save ye!" And as her words rang in the air two sailors had Adrian by
the collar and a facetious bluejacket seized her round the waist with
hideous bantering.
A very young officer, wrapped up in a cloak, stood a few paces apart
calmly looking on. To him Adrian called out in fierce, yet anguished,
expostulation:
"I am a free and independent subject, sir, an English gentleman. I
demand that you order your men to release me. For heaven's sake," he
added, pleadingly, "give me but a moment's private hearing!"
A loud guffaw rang through the group. In truth, if appearances make
the gentleman, Adrian was then but a sorry specimen.
The officer smiled--the insufferable smile of a conceited boy raised
to authority.
"I can have no possible doubt of your gentility, sir," he said, with
mocking politeness, and measuring, under the glimmering light, first
the prisoner, from head to foot, and then the girl who, scratching and
blaspheming, vainly tried to make her escape; "but, sir, as a
free-born English gentleman, it will be your duty to help his Majesty
to fight his French enemies. Take the English gentleman along, my
lads!"
A roar of approbation at the officer's facetiousness ran through the
party.
"An' his mother's milk not dry upon his lips," cried the girl, with a
crow of derisive fury, planting as she spoke a sounding smack on a
broad tanned face bent towards her. The little officer grew pink.
"Come, my men, do your duty," he thundered, in his deepest bass.
A rage such as he never had felt in his life suddenly filled Adrian's
whole being. He was a bigger man than any of the party, and the rough
life that fate had imposed on him, had fostered a strength of limb
beyond the common. A thrust of his knee prostrated one of his captors,
a blow in the eye from his elbow staggered the other; the next instant
he had snatched away the cutlass which a third was drawing, and with
it he cleared, for a moment, a space around him.
But as he would have bounded into freedom, a felling blow descended on
his head from behind, a sheet of flame spread before his eyes, and
behind this blaze disappeared the last that Adrian Landale was to see
of England for another spell of years.
When he came back to his senses he was once more on board ship--a
slave, legally kidnapped; degraded by full and proper warrant from his
legitimate status for no crime that could even be invented against
him; a slave to be retained for work or war at his master's pleasure,
liable like a slave to be flogged to death for daring to assert his
light of independence.
* * * * *
The memory of that night's doing and of the odious bondage to which
it was a prelude, rarely failed to stir the gall of resentment in Sir
Adrian; men of peaceable instincts are perhaps the most prone to the
feeling of indignation.
But, to-night, a change had come over the spirit of his dreams; he
could think of that past simply as the past--the period of time which
would have had to be spent until the advent of the wonder-working
present: these decrees of Fate had had a purpose. Had the past, by one
jot, been different, the events of this admirable day might never have
been.
The glowing edifice on the hearth collapsed with a darting of sudden
flame and a rolling of red cinders. Sir Adrian rose to rebuild his
fire for the night; and, being once roused, was tempted by the
ruddiness of the wine, glinting under the quiet rays of the lamp, to
advance to the table and partake of his forgotten supper.
The calm atmosphere, the warmth and quiet of the room, in which he
broke his bread and sipped his wine, whilst old Jem stretched by the
hearth gazed at him with yellow up-turned eyes full of lazy inquiry
concerning this departure from the usual nightly regularity; the
serene placidity of the scene indoors as contrasting with the angry
voices of elements without, answered to the peace--the strange
peace--that filled the man's soul, even in the midst of such
uncongenial memories as now rose up before him in vivid concatenation.
She was then five years old. Where was she, when he began that
seemingly endless cruise with the frigate _Porcupine_? He tried to
fancy a Cecile five years old--a chubby, curly-headed mite, nursing
dolls and teasing kittens, whilst he was bullied and browbeaten by
coarse petty officers, shunned and hated by his messmates, and flogged
at length by a tyrannizing captain for obduracy--but he could only see
a Cecile in the spring of womanhood, nestling in the arm-chair yonder
by the fire and looking up at him from the folds of a fur cloak.
She was seven years old when he was flogged. Ah, God! those had been
days! And yet, in the lofty soul of him he had counted it no disgrace;
and he had been flogged again, ay, and a third time for that obstinate
head that would not bend, that obstinate tongue that would persist in
demanding restitution of liberty. The life on board the privateer had
been a matter of bargain; he had bartered also labour and obedience
with the merchantman for the passage home, but the king had no right
to compel the service of a free man!
She was but twelve years old when he was finally released from
thraldom--it had only lasted four years after all; yet what a cycle
for one of his temper! Four years with scarce a moment of
solitude--for no shore-leave was ever allowed to one who openly
repudiated any service contract: four years of a life, where the sole
prospect of change was in these engagements, orgies of carnage, so
eagerly anticipated by officers and men alike, including himself,
though for a reason little suspected by his companions. But even the
historic sea-fights of the _Porcupine_, so far as they affected Adrian
Landale, formed in themselves a chain of monotony. It was ever the
same hurling of shot from ship to ship, the same fierce exchange of
cutlass-throws and pike-pushes between men who had never seen each
other before; the same yelling and execrations, sights, sounds, and
smells ever the same in horror; the same cheers when the enemy's
colours were lowered, followed by the same transient depression; the
cleansing of decks from stains of powder and mire of human blood, the
casting overboard of human bodies that had done their life's work,
broken waste and other rubbish. For weeks Adrian after would taste
blood, smell blood, dream blood, till it seemed in his nausea that all
the waters of the wide clean seas could never wash the taint from him
again. And before the first horrid impressions had time to fade, the
next occasion would have come round again: it was not the fate of
Adrian Landale that either steel or shot, or splintered timber or
falling tackles should put an end to his dreary life, welcome as such
an end would have been to him then.
Then ... but not now. Remembering now his unaccountable escape from
the destruction which had swept from his side many another whose
eagerness for the fray had certes not sprung, like his own, from a
desire to court destruction, he shuddered. And there arose in his mind
the trite old adage:
"Man proposeth..."
God had disposed otherwise.
It was not destined that Adrian Landale should be shot on the high
seas any more than he should be drowned in the rolling mud of the
Vilaine--he was reserved for this day as a set-off to all the
bitterness that had been meted out to him; he was to see the image of
his dead love rise from the sea once more. And, meanwhile, his very
despair and sullenness had been turned to his good. It would not be
said, if history should take count of the fact, that while the Lord of
Pulwick had served four years before the mast, he had ever disgraced
his name by cowardice....
Whether such reasonings were in accordance even with the most
optimistic philosophy, Sir Adrian himself at other times might have
doubted. But he was tender in thought this stormy night, with the
grateful relaxation that a happy break brings in the midst of
long-drawn melancholy.
Everything had been working towards this end--that he should be the
light-keeper of Scarthey on the day when out of the raging waters
Cecile would rise and knock and ask for succour at his chamber.
Cecile! pshaw!--raving again.
Well, the child! Where was she on the day of the last engagement of
that pugnacious _Porcupine_, in the year 1805, when England was freed
from her long incubus of invasion? She was then twelve.
It had seemed if nothing short of a wholesale disaster could terminate
that incongruous existence of his.
The last action of the frigate was a fruitless struggle against
fearful odds. After a prolonged fight with an enemy as dauntless as
herself, with two-thirds of her ship's company laid low, and commanded
at length by the youngest lieutenant, she was tackled as the sun went
low over the scene of a drawn battle, by a fresh sail errant; and, had
it not been for a timely dismasting on board the new-comer, would have
been captured or finally sunk then and there. But that fate was only
held in reserve for her. Bleeding and disabled, she had drawn away
under cover of night from her two hard-hit adversaries, to encounter a
squall that further dismantled her, and, in such forlorn conditions,
was met and finally conquered by the French privateer _Espoir de
Brest_, that pounced upon her in her agony as the vulture upon his
prey.
Among the remainder of the once formidable crew, now seized and
battened down under French hatches, was of course Adrian Landale--he
bore a charmed life. And for a short while the only change probable in
his prospects was a return to French prisons, until such time as it
pleased Heaven to restore peace between the two nations.
But the fortune of war, especially at sea, is fickle and fitful.
The daring brig, lettre de marque, _L'Espoir de Brest_, soon after her
unwonted haul of English prisoners, was overtaken herself by one of
her own species, the _St. Nicholas_ of Liverpool, from whose swiftness
nothing over the sea, that had not wings, could hope to escape if she
chose to give the chase.
Again did Adrian, from the darkness among his fellow-captives, hear
the familiar roar and crash of cannon fight, the hustling and the thud
of leaping feet, the screams and oaths of battle, and, finally, the
triumphant shouts of English throats, and he knew that the Frenchman
was boarded. A last ringing British cheer told of the Frenchman's
surrender, and when he and his comrades were once more free to breathe
a draught of living air, after the deathly atmosphere under hatches,
Adrian learned that the victor was not a man-of-war, but a free-lance,
and conceived again a faint hope that deliverance might be at hand.
It was soon after this action, last of the fights that Adrian the
peace-lover had to pass through, and as the two swift vessels, now
sailing in consort, and under the same colours cleaved the waters,
bound for the Mersey, that a singular little drama took place on board
the _Espoir de Brest_.
Among the younger officers of the English privateer, who were left in
charge of the prize, was a lad upon whom Adrian's jaded eyes rested
with a feeling of mournful sympathy, so handsome was he, and so young;
so full of hope and spirits and joy of life, of all, in fact, of which
he himself had been left coldly bare. Moreover, the ring of the merry
voice, the glint of the clear eye awakened in his memory some fitful
chord, the key of which he vainly sought to trace.
One day, as the trim young lieutenant stood looking across the waters,
with his brave eager gaze that seemed to have absorbed some of the
blue-green shimmer of the element he loved, all unnoting the haggard
sailor at his elbow, a sudden flourish of the spy-glass which he, with
an eager movement, swung up to bear on some distant speck, sent his
watch and seals flying out of his fob upon the deck at Adrian's feet.
Adrian picked them up, and as he waited to restore them to their
owner, who tarried some time intent on his distant peering, he had
time to notice the coat and crest engraved upon one of the massive
trinkets hanging from their black ribbons.
When at last the officer lowered his telescope, Adrian came forward
and saluted him with a slight bow, all unconsciously as unlike the
average Jack Tar's scrape to his superior as can be well imagined:
"Am I not," he asked, "addressing in you, sir, one of the Cochranes of
the Shaws?"
The question and the tone from a common sailor were, of course, enough
to astonish the young man. But there must be more than this, as Adrian
surmised, to cause him to blush, wax angry, and stammer like a very
school-boy found at fault. Speaking with much sharpness:
"My name is Smith, my man," cried he, seizing his belongings, "and
you--just carry on with that coiling!"
"And my name, sir, is Adrian Landale, of Pulwick Priory. I would like
a moment's talk with you, if you will spare me the time. The Cochranes
of the Shaws have been friends of our family for generations."
A guffaw burst from a group of Adrian's mates working hard by, at this
recurrence of what had become with them a standing joke; but the
officer, who had turned on his heels, veered round immediately, and
stood eyeing the speaker in profound astonishment.
"Great God, is it possible! Did you say you were a Landale of Pulwick?
How the devil came you here then, and thus?"
"Press-gang," was Adrian's laconic answer.
The lad gave a prolonged whistle, and was lost for a moment in
cogitation.
"If you are really Mr. Landale," he began, adding hastily, as if to
cover an implied admission--"of course I have heard the name: it is
well known in Lancashire--you had better see the skipper. It must have
been some damnable mistake that has caused a man of your standing to
be pressed."
The speaker ended with almost a deferential air and the smile that had
already warmed Adrian's heart. At the door of the Captain's quarters
he said, with the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye:
"A curious error it was you made, I assure you my name is Smith--Jack
Smith, of Liverpool."
"An excusable error," quoth Adrian, smiling back, "for one of your
seals bear unmistakably the arms of Cochrane of the Shaws, doubtless
some heirloom, some inter-marriage."
"No, sir, hang it!" retorted Mr. Jack Smith of Liverpool, his boyish
face flushing again, and as he spoke he disengaged the trinket from
its neighbours, and jerked it pettishly overboard, "I know nothing of
your Shaws or your Cochranes."
And then he rapped loudly at the cabin-door, as if anxious to avoid
further discussion or comment on the subject.
The result of the interview which followed--interview during which
Adrian in a few words overcame the skipper's scepticism, and was
bidden with all the curiosity men feel at sea for any novelty, to
relate, over a bottle of wine, the chain of his adventures--was his
passing from the forecastle to the officers' quarters, as an honoured
guest on board the _St. Nicholas_, during the rest of her cruise.
Thinking back now upon the last few weeks of his sea-going life, Sir
Adrian realised with something of wonder that he had always dwelt on
them without dislike. They were gilded in his memory by the rays of
his new friendship.
And yet that this young Jack Smith (to keep for him the nondescript
name he had for unknown reasons chosen to assume) should be the first
man to awaken in the misanthropic Adrian the charm of human
intercourse, was singular indeed; one who followed from choice the
odious trade of legally chartered corsair, who was ever ready to
barter the chance of life and limb against what fortune might bring in
his path, to sacrifice human life to secure his own end of enrichment.
Well, the springs of friendship are to be no more discerned than
those of love; there was none of high or low degree, with the
exception of Rene, whose appearance at any time was so welcome to the
recluse upon his rock, as that of the privateersman.
And so, turning to his friend in to-night's softened mood, Sir Adrian
thought gratefully that to him it was that he owed deliverance from
the slavery of the King's service, that it was Jack Smith who had made
it possible for Adrian Landale to live to this great day and await its
coming in peace.
The old clock struck two; and Jem shivered on the rug as the
light-keeper rose at length from the table and sank in his arm-chair
once more.
Visions of the past had been ever his companions; now for the first
time came visions of the future to commingle with them. As if caught
up in the tide of his visitor's bright young life, it seemed as though
he were passing at length out of the valley of the shadow of death.
* * * * *
Rene, coming with noiseless bare feet, in the angry yellow dawn of the
second day of the storm, to keep an eye on his master's comfort, found
him sleeping in his chair with a new look of rest upon his face and a
smile upon his lips.
CHAPTER IX
A GENEALOGICAL EPISTLE
... and braided thereupon
All the devices blazoned on the shield,
In their own tinct, and added, of her wit,
A border fantasy of branch and flower.
_Idylls of the King._
Pulwick Priory, the ancestral home of the Cumbrian Landales, a
dignified if not overpoweringly lordly mansion, rises almost on the
ridge of the green slope which connects the high land with the sandy
strand of Morecambe; overlooking to the west the great brown breezy
bight, whilst on all other sides it is sheltered by its wooded park.
When the air is clear, from the east window of Scarthey keep, the tall
garden front of greystone is visible, in the extreme distance, against
the darker screen of foliage; whitely glinting if the sun is high;
golden or rosy at the end of day.
As its name implies, Pulwick Priory stands on the site of an extinct
religious house; its oldest walls, in fact, were built from the spoils
of once sacred masonry. It is a house of solid if not regular
proportions, full of unexpected quaintness; showing a medley of
distinct styles, in and out; it has a wide portico in the best
approved neo-classic taste, leading to romantic oaken stairs; here
wide cheerful rooms and airy corridors, there sombre vaulted basements
and mysterious unforeseen nooks.
On the whole, however, it is a harmonious pile of buildings, though
gathering its character from many different centuries, for it has been
mellowed by time, under a hard climate. And it was, in the days of the
pride of the Landales, a most meet dwelling-place for that ancient
race, insomuch as the history of so many of their ancestors was
written successively upon stone and mortar, brick and tile, as well
as upon carved oak, canvas-decked walls, and emblazoned windows.
* * * * *
Exactly one week before the disaster, which was supposed to have
befallen Mademoiselle Molly de Savenaye on Scarthey sands, the acting
Lord of Pulwick, if one may so term Mr. Rupert Landale, had received a
letter, the first reading of which caused him a vivid annoyance,
followed by profound reflection.
A slightly-built, dark-visaged man, this younger brother of Sir
Adrian, and vicarious master of his house and lands; like to the
recluse in his exquisite neatness of attire, somewhat like also in the
mould of his features, which were, however, more notably handsome than
Sir Adrian's; but most unlike him, in an emphasised artificiality of
manner, in a restless and wary eye, and in the curious twist of a thin
lip which seemed to give hidden sarcastic meaning even to the most
ordinary remark.
As now he sat by his desk, his straight brows drawn over his
amber-coloured eyes, perusing the closely written sheets of this
troublesome missive, there entered to him the long plaintive figure of
his maiden sister, who had held house for him, under his own minute
directions, ever since the death in premature child-birth of his young
year-wed wife.
Miss Landale, the eldest of the family, had had a disappointment in
her youth, as a result of which she now played the ungrateful _role_
of old maid of the family. She suffered from chronic toothache, as
well as from repressed romantic aspirations, and was the _ame damnee_
of Rupert. One of the most melancholy of human beings, she was tersely
characterised by the village folk as a "_wummicky_ poor thing."
At the sight of Mr. Landale's weighted brow she propped up her own
long sallow face, upon its aching side, with a trembling hand, and,
full of agonised prescience, ventured to ask if anything had happened.
"Sit down," said her brother, with a sort of snarl--He possessed an
extremely irritable temper under his cool sarcastic exterior, a temper
which his peculiar anomalous circumstances, whilst they combined to
excite it, forced him to conceal rigidly from most, and it was a
relief to him to let it out occasionally upon Sophia's meek, ringleted
head.
Sophia collapsed with hasty obedience into a chair, and then Mr.
Landale handed to her the thin fluttering sheets, voluminously crossed
and re-crossed with fine Italian handwriting:
"From Tanty," ejaculated Miss Sophia, "Oh my dear Rupert!"
"Read it," said Rupert peremptorily. "Read it aloud."
And throwing himself back upon his chair, he shaded his mouth with one
flexible thin hand, and prepared himself to listen.
"CAMDEN PLACE, BATH, October 29th," read the maiden lady in those
plaintive tones, which seemed to send out all speech upon the breath
of a sigh. "MY DEAR RUPERT,--You will doubtless be astonished, but
your invariably affectionate Behaviour towards myself inclines me to
believe that you will also be _pleased_ to hear, from these few lines,
that very shortly after their receipt--if indeed not before--you may
expect to see me arrive at Pulwick Priory."
Miss Landale put down the letter, and gazed at her brother through
vacant mists of astonishment.
"Why, I thought Tanty said she would not put foot in Pulwick again
till Adrian returned home."
Rupert measured the innocent elderly countenance with a dark look. He
had sundry excellent reasons, other than mere family affection, for
remaining on good terms with his rich Irish aunt, but he had likewise
reasons, these less obvious, for wishing to pay his devoirs to her
anywhere but under the roof of which he was nominal master.
"She has found it convenient to change her mind," he said, with his
twisting lip. "Constancy in your sex, my dear, is merely a matter of
convenience--or opportunity."
"Oh Rupert!" moaned Sophia, clasping the locket which contained her
dead lover's hair with a gesture with which all who knew her were very
familiar. Mr. Landale never could resist a thrust at the faithful
foolish bosom always ready to bleed under his stabs, yet never
resenting them. Inexplicable vagary of the feminine heart! Miss
Sophia worshipped before the shrine of her younger brother, to the
absolute exclusion of any sentiment for the elder, whose generosity
and kindness to her were yet as great as was Rupert's tyranny.
"Go on," said the latter, alternately smiling at his nails and biting
them, "Tanty O'Donoghue observes that I shall be surprised to hear
that she will arrive very shortly after this letter, if not before it.
Poor old Tanty, there can be no mistake about her nationality. Have
the kindness to read straight on, Sophia. I don't want to hear any
more of your interesting comments. And don't stop till you have
finished, no matter how amazed you are."
Again he composed himself to listen, while his sister plunged at the
letter, and, after several false starts, found her place and
proceeded:
"Since, owing to his most _unfortunate_ peculiarity of Temperament and
consequent strange choice of abode, I cannot apply to my nephew
Adrian, _a qui de droit_ (as Head of the House) I must needs address
myself to you, my dear Rupert, to request hospitality for myself and
the two young Ladies now under my Charge."
The letter wavered in Miss Sophia's hand and an exclamation hung upon
her lip, but a sudden movement of Rupert's exquisite crossed legs
recalled her to her task.
"These young ladies are _Mesdemoiselles de Savenaye_, and the
daughters of Madame la Comtesse de Savenaye, who was my sister Mary's
child. She and I, and Alice your mother, were sister co-heiresses as
you know, and therefore these young ladies are _my_ grand-nieces and
your _own_ cousins once removed. Of Cecile de Savenaye, her _strange_
adventures and ultimate _sad_ Fate in which your own brother was
implicated, you cannot but have heard, but you may probably have
forgotten even to the _very existence_ of these charming young women,
who were nevertheless born at Pulwick, and whom you must at some time
or other have beheld as infants during your _excellent_ and _lamented_
father's lifetime. They are, as you are doubtless also unaware--for I
have remarked a _growing_ Tendency in the younger generations to
neglect the study of Genealogy, even as it affects their own
Families--as well born on the father's side as upon the maternal. M.
de Savenaye bore _argent a la fasce-canton d'hermine_, with an
_augmentation of the fleurs de lis d'or_, _cleft in twain_ for his
ancestor's _memorable_ deed at the siege of Dinan."
"There is Tante O'Donoghue fully displayed, _haut volante_ as she
might say herself," here interrupted Mr. Landale with a laugh. "Always
the same, evidently. The first thing I remember about her is her
lecturing me on genealogy and heraldry, when I wanted to go fishing,
till, school-boy rampant as I was, I heartily wished her impaled and
debruised on her own Donoghue herse proper. For God's sake, Sophia, do
not expect me to explain! Go on."
"He was entitled to eighteen quarters, and related to such as Coucy
and Armagnac and Tavannes," proceeded Miss Sophia, controlling her
bewilderment as best she might, "also to Gwynne of Llanadoc in this
kingdom--Honours to which Mesdemoiselles de Savenaye, being sole
heiresses both of Kermelegan and Savenaye, not to speak of their own
mother's share of O'Donoghue, which now-a-days is of greater
substance--are personally entitled.
"If I am the _sole_ Relative they have left in these Realms, Adrian
and you are the next. I have had the charge of my two young Kinswomen
during the last six months, that is since they left the Couvent des
Dames Anglaises in Jersey.
"Now, I think it is time that your Branch of the Family should incur
the share of the _responsibility_ your relationship to them entails.
"If Adrian were _as_ and _where_ he should be, I feel sure he would
embrace this opportunity of doing his duty as the Head of the House
without the smallest hesitation, and I have no doubt that he would
offer the _hospitality_ of Pulwick Priory and his _Protection_ to
these amiable young persons for as long as they _remain unmarried_.
"From you, my dear Nephew, who have undertaken under these melancholy
family circumstances to fill your Brother's place, I do not, however,
_expect_ so much; all I ask is that you and my niece Sophia be kind
enough to _shelter_ and _entertain_ your cousins for the space of two
months, while I remain at Bath for the benefit of my Health.
"At my age (for it is of no use, nephew, for us to deny our years when
any Peerage guide must reveal them pretty closely to the curious),
and I am this month passing sixty-nine, at my _age_ the charge of two
high-spirited young Females, in whom conventional education has failed
to subdue Aspirations for worldly happiness whilst it has left them
somewhat inexperienced in the Conventions of Society, I find a _little
trying_. It does not harmonise with the retired, peaceful existence to
which I am accustomed (and at my time of life, I think, entitled), in
which it is my humble endeavour to wean myself from this earth which
is so full of Emptiness and to prepare myself for that other and
_better_ Home into which we must all resign ourselves to enter. And
happy, indeed, my dear Rupert, such of us as will be found worthy; for
come to it we all must, and the longer we live, the sooner we may
expect to do so.
"The necessity of producing them in Society, is, however, rendered a
matter of greater responsibility by the fact of the _handsome_
Fortunes which these young creatures possess already, not to speak of
their expectations."
Rupert, who had been listening to his aunt's letter, through the
intermediary of Miss Sophia's depressing sing-song, with an abstracted
air, here lifted up his head, and commanded the reader to repeat this
last passage. She did so, and paused, awaiting his further pleasure,
while he threw his handsome head back upon his chair, and closed his
eyes as if lost in calculations.
At length he waved his hand, and Miss Sophia proceeded after the usual
floundering:
"A neighbour of mine at Bunratty, Mrs. Hambledon of Brianstown, a
_lively_ widow (herself one of the Macnamaras of the Reeks, and thus a
distant connection of the Ballinasloe branch of O'Donoghues), and whom
I had reason to believe I could trust--but I will not anticipate--took
a prodigious fancy to Miss Molly and proposed, towards the beginning
of the Autumn, carrying her away to Dublin. At the same time the wet
summer, producing in me an acute recurrence of that Affection from
which, as you know, I suffer, and about which you _never fail_ to make
such kind Enquiries at Christmas and Easter, compelled me to call in
Mr. O'Mally, the apothecary, who has been my very _obliging_ medical
adviser for so many years, and who strenuously advocated an immediate
course of waters at Bath. In short, my dear Nephew, thus the matter
was settled, your cousin Molly departed _radiant_ with _good_ spirits,
and _good_ looks for a spell of gayety in Dublin, while your cousin
Madeleine, prepared (with _equal_ content) to accompany her old aunt
to Bath. It being arranged with Mrs. Hambledon that she should herself
conduct Molly to us later on.
"We have been here about three weeks. Though persuaded by good Mr.
O'Mally that the waters would benefit my old bones, I was actuated, I
must confess, by another motive in seeking this Fashionable Resort. In
such a place as this, thronged as it is by all the Rank and Family of
England, one can at least know _who is who_, and I was not without
hopes that my nieces, with their faces, their name, and their
fortunes, would have the opportunity of contracting suitable
Alliances, and thus relieve me of a charge for which I am, I fear,
little fitted.
"But, alas! my dear Rupert, I was most woefully mistaken. Bath is
_distinctly not_ the place for two beautiful and unsophisticated
Heiresses, and I am certainly neither possessed of the Spirits, nor of
the Health to guard them from fortune-hunters and _needy nameless_
Adventurers. While it is my desire to impress upon you, and my niece
Sophia, that the conduct of these young ladies has been _quite_ beyond
reproach, I will not conceal from you that the attentions of a certain
person, of the name of _Smith_, known here, and a favorite in the
circles of frivolity and fashion as _Captain Jack_, have already made
Madeleine _conspicuous_, and although the dear girl conducts herself
with the utmost propriety, there is an air of _Romance_ and _mystery_
about the Young Man, not to speak of his unmistakable good looks,
which have determined me to remove her from his vicinity before her
Affections be _irreparably_ engaged. As for Molly, who is a thorough
O'Donoghue and the image of her grandmother, that celebrated
Murthering Moll (herself the toast of Bath in our young days), whose
elopement with the Marquis de Kermelegan, after he had killed an
English rival in a duel, was once a nine-days' wonder in this very
town, and of whom you must have heard, Mrs. Hambledon restored her to
my care only three days ago, and she has already twenty Beaux to her
String, though favouring _nobody_, I am bound to say, but her own
amusement. Yesterday she departed under Mrs. Hambledon's chaperonage,
in the Company of a dozen of the highest in rank here, on an
expedition to Clifton; the while my demure Madeleine spends the day at
the house of her dear friend Lady Maria Harewood, whither, I only
learnt upon her return at ten o'clock under his escort, _Captain
Jack_--in my days that sort of _captain_ would have been strongly
suspected, of having a shade too much of the _Heath_ or the _London
Road_ about him--had likewise been convened. It was long after
midnight when, with a great _tow-row_, a coach full of very merry
company (amongst whom the widow Hambledon struck me as over-merry,
perhaps) landed my other Miss _sur le perron_.
"This has decided me. We shall decamp _sans tambou ni trompette_.
To-morrow, without allowing discussion from the girls (in which I
should probably be worsted), we pack ourselves into my travelling
coach, and find our Way to you. But, until we are fairly on the Road,
I shall not even let these ladies know _whither_ we are bound.
"With your kind permission, then, I shall remain a few days at
Pulwick, to recruit from the _fatigues_ of such a long Journey, before
leaving your fair cousins in your charge, and in that of the gentle
Sophia (whom I trust to entertain them with something besides her
usual melancholy), till the time comes for me to bring them back with
me to Bunratty.
"Unless, therefore, you should hear to the contrary, you will know
that on Tuesday your three _unprotected_ female relatives will be
hoping to see your travelling carriage arrive to fetch them at the
Crown in Lancaster.
"Your Affectionate Aunt,
"ROSE O'DONOGHUE."
As Miss Landale sighed forth the concluding words, she dropped the
little folio on her lap, and looked at her brother with a world of
apprehension in her faded eyes.
"Oh, Rupert, what shall we do?"
"Do," said Mr. Landale, quickly turning on her, out of his absorption,
"you will kindly see that suitable rooms are prepared for your aunt
and cousins, and you will endeavour, if you please, to show these
ladies a cheerful countenance, as your aunt requests."
"The oak and the chintz rooms, I suppose," Sophia timidly suggested.
"Tanty used to say she liked the aspect, and I daresay the young
ladies will find it pleasant to look out on the garden."
"Ay," returned Rupert, absently. He had risen from his seat, and
fallen to pacing the room. Presently a short laugh broke from him.
"Tolerably cool, I must say," he remarked, "tolerably cool. It seems
to be a tradition with that Savenaye family, when in difficulties, to
go to Pulwick."
Miss Landale looked up with relief. Perhaps Rupert would think better
of it, and make up his mind to elude receiving the unwelcome visitors
after all. But his next speech dashed her budding hopes.
"Ay, as in the days of their mother before them, when she came here to
lay her eggs, like a cuckoo in another bird's nest--I wish they had
been addled, I do indeed--we may expect to have the whole place turned
topsy-turvy, I suppose. It is a pretty assortment, _faith_ (as Tanty
says herself); an old papist, and two young ones, fresh from a convent
school--and of these, one a hoyden, and the other lovesick! Faugh!
Sophia you will have to keep your eyes open when the old lady is gone.
I'll have no unseemly pranks in this house."
"Oh, Rupert," with a moan of maidenly horror, and conscious
incompetence.
"Stop that," cried the brother, with a contained intensity of
exasperation, at which the poor lady jumped and trembled as if she had
been struck. "All your whining won't improve matters. Now listen to
me," sitting down beside her, and speaking slowly and impressively,
"you are to make our relatives feel welcome, do you understand?
Everything is to be of the best. Get out the embroidered sheets, and
see that there are flowers in the rooms. Tell the cook to keep back
that haunch of venison, the girls won't like it, but the old lady
knows a good thing when she gets it--let there be lots of sweet things
for the young ones too. I shall be giving some silver out this
afternoon. I leave it to you to see that it is properly cleaned. What
are you mumbling about to yourself? Write it down if you can't
remember, and now go, go--I am busy."
PART II
"MURTHERING MOLL THE SECOND"
_Then did the blood awaken in the veins
Of the young maiden wandering in the fields._
LUTEPLAYER'S SONG.
CHAPTER X
THE THRESHOLD OF WOMANHOOD
Onward floweth the water, onward through meadows broad,
"How happy," the meadows say, "art thou to be rippling onward."
"And my heart is beating, beating beneath my girdle here;"
"O Heart," the girdle saith, "how happy art thou that thou beatest."
_Luteplayer's Song._
DUBLIN, _October 15th, 1814_.--This day do I, Molly de Savenaye, begin
my diary.
Madeleine writes to me from Bath that she has purchased a very fine
book, in which she intends to set forth each evening all that has
happened her since the morning; she advises me to do so too. She says
that since _real life_ has begun for us; life, of which every
succeeding day is not, as in the convent, the repetition of the
previous day, but brings some new discovery, pleasure, or pain, we
ought to write down and preserve their remembrance.
It will be so interesting for us to read when a new life once more
begins for us, and we are _married_. Besides it is the _fashion_, and
all the young ladies she knows do it. And she has, she says, already
plenty to write down. Now I _should_ like to know what about.
When ought one to start such a record? Surely not on a day like this.
"Why _demme_" (as Mrs. Hambledon's nephew says), "_what the deyvil_
have I got to say?"
_Item:_ I went out shopping this morning with Mrs. Hambledon, and,
bearing Madeleine's advice in mind, purchased at Kelly's, in Sackville
Street, an album book, bound in green morocco, with clasp and lock,
which Mr. Kelly protests is quite secure.
_Item:_ We met Captain Segrave of the Royal Dragoons (who was so
attentive to me at Lady Rigtoun's rout, two days ago). He looked very
well on his charger, but how conceited! When he saw me, he rolled his
eyes and grew quite red; and then he stuck his spurs into his horse,
that we might admire how he could sit it; which he did, indeed, to
perfection.
Mrs. Hambledon looked vastly knowing, and I laughed. If ever I try to
fancy myself married to such a man I cannot help laughing.
This, however, is not diary.--_Item:_ We returned home because it
began to rain, and to pass the time, here am I at my book.
But is _this_ the sort of thing that will be of interest to read
hereafter? I have begun too late; I should have written in those days
when I saw the dull walls of our convent prison for the last time. It
seems so far back now (though, by the calendar it is hardly six
months), that I cannot quite recall how it felt to live in prison. And
yet it was not unhappy, and there was no horror in the thought we both
had sometimes then, that we should pass and end our lives in the cage.
It did not strike us as hard. It seemed, indeed, in the nature of
things. But the bare thought of returning to that existence now, to
resume the placid daily task, to fold up again like a plant that has
once expanded to sun and breeze, to have never a change of scene, of
impression, to look forward to nothing but _submission_, sleep, and
_death_; oh, it makes me turn cold all over!
And yet there are women who, of their own will, give up the _freedom
of the world_ to enter a convent _after_ they have tasted life! Oh, I
would rather be the poorest, the ugliest peasant hag, toiling for
daily bread, than one of these cold cloistered souls, so that the free
air of heaven, be it with the winds or the rain, might beat upon me,
so that I might live and love _as I like_, do right _as I like_; ay,
and do wrong _if_ I liked, with the free will which is my _own_.
We were told that the outer world, with all its sorrows and trials,
and dangers--how I remember the Reverend Mother's words and face, and
how they impressed me then, and how I should laugh at them,
_now!_--that the world was but a valley of tears. We were warned that
all that awaited us, if we left the fold, was _misery_; that the joys
of this world were _bitter_ to the taste, its pleasures _hollow_, and
its griefs _lasting_.
We believed it. And yet, when the choice was actually ours to make,
we chose all we had been taught to dread and despise. Why? I wonder.
For the same reason as Eve ate the apple, I suppose. I would, if I had
been Eve. I almost wish I could go back now, for a day, to the cool
white rooms, to see the nuns flitting about like black and white
ghosts, with only a jingle of beads to warn one of their coming, see
the blue sky through the great bare windows, and the shadows of the
trees lengthening on the cold flagged floors, hear the bells going
ding-dong, ding-dong, and the murmur of the sea in the distance, and
the drone of the school, and the drone of the chapel, to go back, and
feel once more the dull sort of content, the calmness, the rest!
But no, no! I should be trembling all the while lest the blessed doors
leading back to that _horrible_ world should never open to me again.
The sorrows and trials of the world! I suppose the Reverend Mother
really meant it; and if I had gone on living there till my face was
wrinkled like hers, poor woman, I might have thought so too, in the
end, and talked the same nonsense.
Was it really I that endured such a life for seventeen years? O God! I
wonder that the sight of the swallows coming and going, the sound of
the free waves, did not drive me mad. Twist as I will my memory, I
cannot recall _that_ Molly of six months ago, whose hours and days
passed and dropped all alike, all lifeless, just like the slow tac,
tac, tac of our great horloge in the Refectory, and were to go on as
slow and as alike, for ever and ever, till she was old, dried,
wrinkled, and then died. The real Molly de Savenaye's life began on
the April morning when that dear old turbaned fairy godmother of ours
carried us, poor little Cinderellas, away in her coach. Well do I
remember my birthday.
I have read since in one of those musty books of Bunratty, that
_moths_ and _butterflies_ come to life by shaking themselves out, one
fine day, from a dull-looking, shapeless, ugly thing they call a
_grub_, in which they have been buried for a long time. They unfold
their wings and fly out in the sunshine, and flit from flower to
flower, and they look beautiful and happy--the world, the wicked
world, is open to them.
There were pictures in the book; the ugly grub below, dreary and
brown, and the lovely _butterfly_ in all its colours above. I showed
them to Madeleine, and said: "Look, Madeleine, as we were, and as we
are."
And she said: "Yes, those brown gowns they made us wear were ugly; but
I should not like to put on anything so bright as red and yellow.
Would you?"
That is the worst of Madeleine; she never realises in the least what I
mean. And she _does_ love her clothes; that is the difference between
her and me, she loves fine things because they are fine and dainty and
all that--I like them because they make _me_ fine.
And yet, how she did weep when she left the convent. Madeleine would
have made a good nun after all; she does so hate anything ugly or
coarse. She grows quite white if she hears people fighting; if there
is a "row" or a "shindy," as they say here. Whereas Tanty and I think
it all the fun in the world, and would enjoy joining in the fray
ourselves, I believe, if we dared. I know _I_ should; it sets my blood
tingling. But Madeleine is a real princess, a sort of Ermine; and yet
she enjoys her new life, too, the beauty of it, the refinement, being
waited upon and delicately fed and clothed. But although she has
ceased to weep for the convent, if it had not been for me she would be
there still. The only thing, I believe, that could make me weep now
would be to find one fine morning that this had only been a dream, and
that I was once more _the grub_! To find that I could not open my
window and look into the wide, wide world over to the long, green
hills in the distance, and know that I could wander or gallop up to
them, as I did at Bunratty, and see for myself _what lies
beyond_--surely that was a taste of heaven that day when Tanty Rose
first allowed me to mount her old pony, and I flew over the turf with
the wind whistling in my ears--to find that I could not go out when I
pleased and hear new voices and see new faces, and men and women who
_live each their own life_, and not the _same_ life as mine.
When I think of what I am now, and what I might have remained, I
breathe deep and feel like singing; I stretch my arms out and feel
like flying.
Our aunt told us she thought Bunratty would be dull for us, and so it
was in comparison with this place. Perhaps _this_ is dull in
comparison with what _may_ come. For good Tanty, as she likes us to
call her, is intent on doing great things for us.
"Je vous marierai," she tells us in her funny old French, "Je vous
marierai bien, mes filles, si vous etes sages," and she winks both
eyes.
_Marriage!_ _That_, it is quite evident, is the goal of every properly
constituted young female; and every respectable person who has the
care of said young female is consequently bent upon her reaching that
goal.
So marriage is _another_ good thing to look forward to. And _love_,
that love all the verses, all the books one reads are so full of;
_that_ will come to us.
They say that _love is life_. Well, all I want is to live. But with a
grey past such as we have had, the present is good enough to ponder
upon. We now can lie abed if we have sweet dreams and pursue them
waking, and be lazy, yet not be troubled with the self-indulgence as
with an enormity; or we can rise and breathe the sunshine at our own
time. We can be frivolous, and yet meet with smiles in response, dress
our hair and persons, and be pleased with ourselves, and with being
admired or envied, yet not be told horrid things about death and
corruption and skeletons. And, above all--oh, above _all_, we can
think of the future as different from the past, as _changing_, be it
even for the worse; as unknown and fascinating, not as a repetition,
until death, of the same dreary round.
In Mrs. Hambledon's parlour here are huge glasses at either end;
whenever you look into them you see a never-ending chain of rooms with
yourself standing in the middle, vanishing in the distance, every one
the same, with the same person in the middle, only a little smaller, a
little more insignificant, a little darker, till it all becomes
_nothing_. It always reminds me of life's prospects in the convent.
I dislike that room. When I told Mrs. Hambledon the reason why, she
laughed, and promised me that, with my looks and disposition, my life
would be eventful enough. I have every mind that it shall.
* * * * *
_October 18th._--Yesterday, I woke up in an amazing state of
happiness, though for no particular reason that I can think of. It
could not be simply because we were to go out for a visit to the
country and see new people and places, for I have already learned to
find that most new people are cut out on the same pattern as those one
already knows. It must have been rather because I awoke under the
impression of one of my lovely dreams--such dreams as I have only had
since I left my _grub_ state; dreams of space, air, long, long views
of beautiful scenery, always changing, always wider, such as swallows
flying between sky and earth might see, under an exquisite and
brilliant light, till for very joy I wake up, my cheeks covered with
tears.
This time, I was sitting on the prow of some vessel with lofty white
sails, and it was cutting through the water, blue as the sky, with
wreaths of snow-like foam, towards some unknown shores, ever faster
and faster, and I was singing to some one next to me on the prow--some
one I did not know, but who felt with me--singing a song so perfect,
so sweet (though it had no human words) that I thought _it explained
all_: the blue of the heaven, the freshness of the breeze, the
fragrance of the earth, and why we were so eagerly pressing onwards. I
thought the melody was such that when once heard it could never be
forgotten. When I woke it still rang in my ears, but now I can no more
recall it. How is it we never know such delight in waking hours? Is
that some of the joy we are to feel in Heaven, the music we are to
hear? And yet it can be heard in this life if one only knew where to
go and listen. And this life is beautiful which lies in front of us,
though they would speak of it as a sorrowful span not to be reckoned.
It is good to be young and think of the life still to come. Every
moment is precious for its enjoyment, and yet sometimes I find that
one only knows of a pleasure when it is just gone. One ought to try
and be more awake at each hour to the happiness it may bring. I shall
try, and you, my diary, shall help me.
This is really _no_ diary-keeping. It is not a bit like those one
reads in books. It ought to tell of other people and the events of
each day. But other people are really very uninteresting; as for
events, well, so far, they are uninteresting too; it is only what they
cause to spring up in our hearts that is worth thinking upon; and that
is so difficult to put in words that mostly I spend my time merely
pondering and not writing.
Last night Mrs. Hambledon took me to the _play_. It was for the first
time in my life, and I was full of curiosity. It was a long drama,
pretty enough and sometimes very exciting. But I could see that though
the actress was very handsome and mostly so unhappy as to draw tears
from the spectators, there were people, especially some gentlemen, who
were more interested in looking at the box where I sat with Mrs.
Hambledon. Indeed, I could not pretend, when I found myself before my
glass that night, that I was not amazingly prettier than that Mrs.
Colebrook, about whose beauty the whole town goes mad.
When I recalled the hero's ravings about his Matilda's eyes and
cheeks, and her foot and her sylph-like waist, and her raven hair, I
wondered what _that_ young man would say of me if he were my lover and
I his persecuted mistress. The Matilda was a pleasing person enough;
but if I take her point by point, it would be absurd to speak of her
charms in the same breath with mine. Oh, my dear Molly, how beautiful
I thought you last night! How happy I should be, were I a dashing
young lover and eyes like _yours_ smiled on me. I never before thought
myself prettier than Madeleine, but now I do.
Lovers, love, mistress, bride; they talked of nothing else in the
play. And it was all ecstasy in their words, and nothing but _misery_
in fact (just as the Reverend Mother would have had it).
The young man who played the hero was a very fine fellow; and yet when
I conceive _him_ making love to me as he did last night to Mrs.
Colebrook, the notion seems really _too_ ludicrous!
What sort of man then is it I would allow to love me? I do not mind
the thought of lovers sighing and burning for me (as some do now
indeed, or pretend to) I like to feel that I can crush them with a
frown and revive them with a smile; I like to see them fighting for my
favour. But to give a man the right to love me, the right to my
smiles, the _right to me_! Indeed, I have yet seen _none_ who could
make me bear the thought.
And yet I think that I could love, and I know that the man that I am
to love must be living somewhere till fate brings him to me. He does
not think of me. He does not know of me. And neither of us, I suppose,
will taste life as life is till the day when we meet.
CAMDEN PLACE, BATH, _November 1st_.--Bath at last, which, must please
poor Mrs. Hambledon exceedingly, for she certainly did _not_ enjoy the
transit. I cannot conceive how people can allow themselves to be so
utterly distraught by illness. I feel I can never have any respect for
her again; she moaned and lamented in such cowardly fashion, was so
peevish all the time on board the vessel, and looked so very begrimed
and untidy and _plain_ when she was carried out on Bristol quay. The
captain called it _dirty_ weather, but I thought it _lovely_, and I
don't think I ever enjoyed myself more--except when Captain Segrave's
Black Douglas ran away with me in Phoenix Park.
It was beautiful to see our brave boat plough the sea and quiver with
anger, as if it were a living thing, when it was checked by some great
green wave, then gather itself again under the wind and dash on to the
fight, until it conquered. And when we came into the river and the sun
shone once more it glided on swiftly, though looking just a little
tired for a while until its decks and sails were dry and clean again,
and I thought it was just like a bird that has shaken and plumed
itself. I was sorry to leave it. The captain and the mate and the
sailors, who had wrapped me up in their great, stiff tarpaulin coats
and placed me in a safe corner where I could sit out and look, were
also sorry that I should go.
But it was good to be with Madeleine again and Tanty Donoghue, who
always has such a kind smile on her old wrinkled face when she looks
at me.
Madeleine was astonished when I told her I had loved the storm at sea
and when I mimicked poor Mrs. Hambledon. She says she also thought she
was dying, so ill was she on her crossing, and that she was quite a
week before she got over the impression.
It seems odd to think that we are sisters, and twin sisters too; in so
many things she is different from me. She has changed in manner since
I left her. She seems so absorbed in some great thought that all her
words and smiles have little meaning in them. I told her I had tried
to keep my diary, but had not done much work, and when I asked to see
hers (for a model) Madeleine blushed, and said I should see it this
day year.
_Madeleine is in love_; that is the only way I can account for that
blush. I fear she is a sly puss, but there is such a bustle around us,
and so much to do and see, I have no time to make her confess. So I
said I would keep mine from her for that period also.
It seems a long span to look ahead. What a number of things will
happen before this day year!
BATH, _November 3rd_.--Bath is delightful! I have only been here two
days, and already I am what Tanty, in her old-fashioned way, calls
_the belle_. Already there are a dozen sparks who declare that my eyes
have _shot death_ to them. This afternoon comes my Lord of Manningham,
nicknamed _King of Bath_, to "drink a dish of tea," as he has it, with
his "dear old friend Miss O'Donoghue."
Tanty has been here three weeks, and he has only just discovered her
existence, and remembered their tender friendship. Of course, I know
very well what has really brought him. He is Lord Dereham's
grandfather on the mother's side, and Lord Dereham, who is the son of
the Duke of Wells, is "the catch," as Mrs. Hambledon vows, of the
fashionable world this year. And Lord Dereham has seen me twice, and
_is in love with me_.
But as Lord Dereham is more like a little white rat than a man, and
swears more than he converses--which would be very shocking if it were
not for his lisp, which makes it very funny--needless to say, my diary
dear, your Molly is not in love with him--He has no chance.
And so Lord Manningham comes to tea, and Tanty orders me to remain and
see her "old friend" instead of going to ride with the widow
Hambledon. The widow Hambledon and I are everywhere together, and she
knows all the most entertaining people in Bath, whereas Madeleine,
whom I have hardly seen at all except at night, when I am so dead
tired that I go to sleep as soon as my head touches the pillow (I vow
Tanty's manner of speech is catching), Miss Madeleine keeps to her own
select circle, and turns up her haughty little nose at _my_ friends.
So now Madeleine is punished, for Tanty and I have had the honour of
receiving the _King of Bath_, and I have been vouchsafed the stamp of
his august approval.
"My dear Miss O'Donoghue," he cried, as I curtsied, "do my senses
deceive me, or do I not once more behold _Murthering Moll_?"
"I thought you could not fail to notice the likeness; my niece is,
indeed, a complete O'Donoghue," says Tanty, amazingly pleased.
"Likeness, ma'am," cried the old wretch, bowing again, and scattering
his snuff all over the place, while I sweep him another splendid
curtsey, "likeness, ma'am, why this is no feeble copy, no humble
imitation, 'tis _Murdering Moll herself_, and glad I am to see her
again." And then he catches me under the chin, and peers into my face
with his dim, wicked old eyes. "And so you are Murdering Moll's
daughter," says he, chuckling to himself. "Ay, she and I were very
good friends, my pretty child, very good friends, and that not so long
ago, either. Ay, _Mater pulchra, filia pulchrior_."
"But I happen to be her grand-daughter, please my lord," said I, and
then I ran to fetch him a chair (for I was dreadfully afraid he was
going to kiss me). But though no one has ever accused me of speaking
too modestly to be heard, my lord had a sudden fit of deafness, and I
saw Tanty give me a little frown, while the old thing--he must be much
older than Tanty even--tottered into a chair, and went on mumbling.
"I was only a boy in those days, my dear, only a boy, as your good
aunt will tell you. I can remember how the bells rang the three
beautiful Irish sisters into Bath, and I and the other dandies stood
to watch them drive by. The bells rang in the _belles_ in those days,
my dear, he, he, he! only we used to call them 'toasts' then, and your
mother was the most beautiful of 'the three Graces'--we christened
them 'the three Graces'--and by gad she led us all a pretty dance!"
"Ah, my lord," says Tanty, and I could see her old eyes gleam though
her tone was so pious, "I fear we were three wild Irish girls indeed!"
Lord Manningham was too busy ogling me to attend to her.
"Your mother was just such another as you, and she had just such a
pair of dimples," said he.
"You mean my grandmother," shouted I in his ear, just for fun, though
Tanty looked as if she were on pins and needles. But he only pinched
my cheek again and went on:
"Before she had been here a fortnight all the bucks in the town were
at her feet. And so was I, so was I. Only, by gad, I was too young,
you know, as Miss O'Donoghue here will tell you. But she liked me; she
used to call me her 'little manny.' I declare I might have married
her, only there were family reasons, and I was such a lad, you know.
And then Jack Waterpark, some of us thought she would have had _him_
in the end--being an Irishman, and a rich man, and a marquis to
boot--he gave her the name of _Murthering Moll_, because of her
killing eyes, young lady--he! he! he!--and there was Ned Cuffe ready
to hang himself for her, and Jim Denham, and old Beau Vernon, ay, and
a score of others. And then one night at the Assembly Rooms, after the
dancing was over and we gay fellows were all together, up gets
Waterpark, he was a little tipsy, my dear, and by gad I can hear him
speak now, with that brogue of his. 'Boys,' he says, 'it's no use your
trying for her any more, for by God _I've won her_.' And out of his
breast-pocket he pulls a little knot of blue ribbon. Your mother, my
dear, had worn a very fine gown that evening, with little knots of
blue ribbon all over the bodice of it. The words were not out of his
mouth when Ned Cuffe starts to his feet as white as a sheet: 'It's a
damned lie,' he cries, and out of his pocket _he_ pulls another little
knot. 'She gave it to me with her own hands,' he cried and glares
round at us all. And then Vernon bursts out laughing and flourishes a
third little bow in our eyes, and I had one too, I need not tell you,
and so had all the rest, all save a French fellow--I forget his
name--and it was he she had danced with the most of all. Ah, Miss
O'Donoghue, how the little jade's eyes sparkle! I warrant you have
never told her the story for fear she would want to copy her mother in
other ways besides looks--Hey? Well, my pretty, give me your little
hand, and then I shall go on--pretty little hand, um--um--um!" and
then he kissed my hand, the horrid, snuffy thing! but I allowed it,
for I did so want to hear how it all ended.
"And then, and then," I said.
"And then, my dear, this French fellow, your papa he must have
been--so I suppose I must not abuse him, and he was a very fine young
man after all, and a man of honour as well--he stood and cursed us
all."
"'You English fools,' he said, 'you braggards--cowards.' And he
seized a glass of wine from the table and with a sweep he dashed it at
us and ended by flinging the empty glass in Lord Waterpark's face. It
was the neatest thing you ever saw, for we all got a drop except
Waterpark, and he got the glass. 'I challenge you all,' said the
Frenchman, 'I'll fight you one by one, and I shall have her into the
bargain.' And so he did, my dear, he fought us all, one after the
other; there were five of us; he was a devil with the sword, but Ned
Cuffe ran him through for all that--and he was a month getting over
it, but as soon as he could crawl again he vowed himself ready for
Waterpark, and weak as he was he ran poor Waterpark through the lungs.
Some said Jack spitted himself on his sword--but dead he was anyhow,
and monsieur your father--what was his name? Kerme-something--was off
with your mother before the rest of us were well out of bed."
"Fie, fie, my lord," said Tanty, "you should not recall old stories in
this manner!"
"Gad, ma'am, I warrant this young lady is quite ready to provide you
with a few new ones," chuckled my lord; and as there was no more to be
extracted from him but foolish old jokes and dreadful smiles, I
contrived to free my "pretty little hand," and sit down demurely by
Tanty's side like the modest retiring young female I should be.
But my blood was dancing in my veins--the blood of Murthering
Moll--doddering old idiot as he is, Lord Manningham is right for once,
I mean to take quite as much out of life as she did. That indeed is
worth being young and beautiful for! We know nothing of our family,
save that both father and mother were killed in Vendee. Tanty never
will tell us anything about them (except their coats of arms), and I
am afraid even to start the subject, for she always branches off upon
heraldry and then we are in for hours of it. But after Lord Manningham
was gone I asked her when and how my grandmother died.
"She died when your mother was born, my dear," said Tanty, "she was
not as old as you are now, and your grandfather never smiled again, or
so they said."
That sobered me a little. Yet she lived her life so well, while she
did live, that I who have wasted twenty precious years can find in my
heart rather to envy than to pity my beautiful grandmother.
* * * * *
_November 5th._--It is _three o'clock in the morning_, but I do not
feel at all inclined to go to bed. Madeleine is sleeping, poor pretty
pale Madeleine! with the tears hardly dry upon her cheeks and I can
hear her sighing in her sleep.
I was right, she is in love, and the gentleman she loves is not
approved of by Tanty and the upshot of it all is we are to leave dear
Bath, delightful Bath, to-morrow--to-day rather--for some unknown
penitential region which our stern relative as yet declines to name. I
am longing to hear more about it; but Tanty, who, though she talks so
much, can keep her own counsel better than any woman I know, will not
give me any further information beyond the facts that the delinquent
who has dared to aspire to my sister is a person of _the name of
Smith_, and that it would not do at all.
I have not the heart to wake Madeleine to make her tell me more, though
I really ought to pinch her well for being so secretive--besides, my
head is so full of my own day that I want to get it all written down,
and I shall never have done so unless I begin at the beginning.
Yesterday, then, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon Lord Dereham's coach
and four came clattering up to our door to call for me. Mrs. Hambledon
was already installed and Lady Soames and a dozen other of the
_fashionables_ of Bath. My little Lord Marquis had kept the box seat
for me, at which the other ladies, even my dear friend and chaperon,
looked rather green. The weather was glorious, and off we went with a
flourish of trumpets and whips, and I knew I should enjoy myself
monstrously.
And so I did. But it was the drive back that was the _best_ of all. We
never started till near nine o'clock, and Lord Dereham insisted on my
sitting beside him again--at which all the ladies looked daggers _at
me_ and all the gentlemen daggers _at him_. And then we sang songs and
tore along uphill and down dale, under the beautiful moonlight,
through the still air, till all at once we found we had lost our way.
We had to drive on till we came to an inn and we could make inquiries.
There the gentlemen opened another hamper of wine, and when we set
off again I promise you they were all pretty _lively_ (and most of
the ladies too, for the matter of that). As for me, who never drank
anything but milk or water till six months ago, I have not learnt to
like wine yet, so, though I sipped out of the glass to keep the fun
going, I contrived to dispose of the contents, quietly over the side
of the coach, when no one was looking.
It was a drive to remember. We came to a big hill, and as we were
going down it at a smart pace the coach began to sway, then the ladies
began to screech, and even the men looked so scared that I laughed
outright. Lord Dereham was perfectly tipsy and he did not know the
road a bit, but he drove in beautiful style and was extraordinarily
amusing; as soon as the coach took to swaying, instead of slackening
speed as they all begged him, he _lashed_ the horses into a tearing
gallop, looking over his shoulder at the rest and cursing them with
the greatest energy, grinning with rage, and looking more like a
little white rat than _ever_.
"Give me the whip," said I, "and I shall whip the team while you
drive."
"_Cuth me_," cried he, "if you are not worth the whole coach-load a
dozen times over."
On we went; the coach rocked, the horses galloped, and I knew at any
moment the whole thing might upset, and I flourished my whip and
lashed at the steaming flanks and I never felt what it was to really
enjoy myself before.
Presently, although we were tearing along so fast, the coach steadied
itself and went as straight as an arrow; and this, it seems, it would
never have done had not Lord Dereham kept up the pace.
And all the rest of the drive his lordship wanted to kiss me. I was
not a bit frightened, though he was drunk, but every time he grew too
forward I just flicked at the horses with the whip, and I think he saw
that I would have cracked him across the face quite as readily if he
dared to presume.
No doubt a dozen times during the day I could have secured a coronet
for myself, not to speak of future 'strawberry leaves,' as my aunt
says, if I had cared to; but who could think of loving a man like
_that_? He can manage four horses, and he has shot two men in a duel,
and he can drink three bottles of wine at a sitting, and when one
tries to find something more to say for him, lo! that is all!
When we at length arrived at Camden Place, for I vowed they must leave
me home the first, there was the rarest sport. My lord's grooms must
set to blow the horns, for they were as drunk as their master, while
one of the gentlemen played upon the knocker till the whole crescent
was aroused.
Then the doors opened suddenly, _and Tanty appears_ on the threshold,
holding a candle. Her turban was quite crooked, with the birds of
Paradise over one eye, and I never saw her old nose look so hooked.
All the gentlemen set up a shout, and Sir Thomas Wrexham began to crow
like a cock for no reason on earth that I can think of. The servants
were holding up lanterns, but the moon was nigh as bright as day.
Tanty just looked round upon them one after another, and in spite of
her crooked turban I think they all grew frightened. Then she caught
hold of me, and just whisked me behind her. Next she spied out Mrs.
Hambledon, who had been asleep inside the coach, and now tumbled
forth, yawning and gaping.
"And so, madam," cries Tanty to her, not very loud, but in a voice
that made even me tremble; "so, madam, this is how you fulfil the
confidence I placed in you. A pretty chaperon you are to have the
charge of a young lady; though, indeed, considering your years, madam,
I might have been justified in trusting you."
Mrs. Hambledon, cut short in the middle of a loud yawn by this attack,
was a sight to see.
"Hoighty-toighty, ma'am!" she cried, indignantly, as soon as she could
get her voice; "here's a fine to-do. It is my fault, of course, that
Lord Dereham should mistake the road. And my fault too, no doubt, that
your miss should make an exhibition of herself riding on the box with
the gentlemen at this hour of night, when I implored her to come
inside with me, were it only for the sake of common female propriety."
"Common female indeed!" echoed Tanty, with a snort; "the poor child
knew better."
"Cuth the old cats! they'll have each other'th eyeth out," here cried
my lord marquis, interposing his little tipsy person between them. He
had scrambled down the box after me, and was listening with an air of
profound wisdom that made me feel fit to die laughing. "Don't you mind
her, old lady," he went on, addressing Tanty; "Mith Molly ith quite
able to take care of herself--damme if she'th not."
Aunt Donoghue turned upon him majestically.
"And then that is more than can be said for you, my poor young man,"
she exclaimed; and I vow he looked as sobered as if she had flung a
bucket of cold water over him. Upon this she retired and shut the
door, and marched me upstairs before her without a word.
Before my room door she stopped.
"Mrs. Dempsey has already packed your sister's trunks," she said, in a
very dry way; "and she will begin to pack yours early--I was going to
say to-morrow--but you keep such hours, my dear--it will be _to-day_."
I stared at her as if she had gone mad.
"You and your sister," she went on, "have got beyond me. I have taken
my resolution and given my orders, and there is not the least use
making a scene."
And then it came out about Madeleine. At first I thought I would go
into a great passion and refuse to obey, but after a minute or two I
saw it was, as she said, no use. Tanty was as cool as a cucumber. Then
I thought perhaps I might mollify her if I could cry, but I couldn't
pump up a tear; I never can; and at last when I went into my room and
saw poor Madeleine, who has cried herself to sleep, evidently, I
understood that there was nothing for us but to do as we were told.
And now I can hear Tanty fussing about her room still--she has been
writing, too--cra, cra, cra--this last hour. I wonder who to? After
all there is some fun in being taken off mysteriously we don't know
where. I should like to go and kiss her, but she thinks I am abed.
CHAPTER XI
A MASTERFUL OLD MAID
No contrary advice having reached Pulwick since Miss O'Donoghue's
_letter of invoice_, as Mr. Landale facetiously described it, he drove
over to Lancaster on the day appointed to meet the party.
And thus it came to pass that through the irresistible management of
Miss O'Donoghue, who put into the promotion of her scheme all the
energy belonging to her branch of the family, together with the long
habit of authority of the _Tante a heritage_, the daughters of Cecile
de Savenaye returned to that first home of theirs, of which they had
forgotten even the name.
Mr. Landale had not set eyes on his valuable relative for many years,
but her greeting, at the first renewal of intercourse which took place
in the principal parlour of the Lancaster Inn, was as easily detached
in manner as though they had just met again after a trifling absence
and she was bringing her charges to his house in accordance with a
mutual agreement.
"My dear Rupert," cried she, "I am glad to see you again. I need not
ask you how you are, you look so extremely sleek and prosperous.
Adrian's wide acres are succulent, hey? I should have known you
anywhere; though to be sure, you are hardly large enough for the
breed, you have the true Landale stamp on you, the unmistakable
Landale style of feature. _Semper eadem._ In that sense, at least, one
can apply your ancient and once worthy motto to you; and you know,
nephew, since you have conveniently changed your faith, both to God
and king, this sentiment strikes one as a sarcasm amidst the
achievements of Landale, you backsliders! Ah, we O'Donoghues have
better maintained our device, _sans changier_."
Rupert, to whom the well-known volubility of his aunt was most
particularly disagreeable, but who had nevertheless saluted the
stalwart old lady's cheek with much affection, here bent his supple
back with a sort of mocking gallantry.
"You maintain your _device_, permit me to say, my dear aunt, as
ostentatiously in your person as we renegade Landales ourselves."
"Pooh, pooh! I am too old a bird to be caught by such chaff, nephew;
it is pearls before.... I mean it is too late in the day, my dear.
Keep it for the young things. And indeed I see the sheep's eyes you
have been casting in their direction. Come nearer, young ladies, and
make your cousin's acquaintance," beckoning to her nieces, who,
arrayed in warm travelling pelisses and beaver bonnets of fashionable
appearance, stood in the background near the fireplace.
"They are very like, are they not?" she continued. "Twins always are;
as like as two peas. And yet these are as different as day and night
when you come to know them. Madeleine is the eldest; that is she in
the beaver fur; Molly prefers bear. Without their bonnets you will
distinguish them by their complexion. Molly has raven hair (she is the
truest O'Donoghue), whilst Madeleine is fair, _blonde_, like her
Breton father."
The sisters greeted their new-found guardian, each in her own way.
And, in spite of the disguising bonnets and their surprising
similarity of voice, height, and build, the difference was more marked
than that of beaver and bear.
Madeleine acknowledged her kinsman's greeting with a dainty curtsey
and little half-shy smile, marked by that air of distinction and
breeding which was her peculiar characteristic. Molly, however, who
thought she had reasonable cause for feeling generally exasperated,
and who did not see in Mr. Rupert Landale, despite his good looks and
his good manner, a very promising substitute for her Bath admirers
(nor in the prospect of Pulwick a profitable exchange for Bath), came
forward with her bolder grace to flounce him a saucy "reverence,"
measuring him the while with a certain air of mockery which his
thin-skinned susceptibility was quick to seize.
He looked back at her down the long tunnel of her bonnet, appraising
the bloom and beauty within with cold and curious gaze, and then he
turned to Madeleine and made to her his courteous speech of welcome.
This was sufficient for Miss Molly, who, for six months already
accustomed to compel admiration at first sight from all specimens of
the male sex that came across her path, instantly vowed a deadly
hatred to her cousin, and followed the party into the Landale family
coach--Rupert preceding, with a lady on each arm--in a temper as black
as her own locks.
It fell to her lot to sit beside the objectionable relative on the
back seat, while, by the right of her minute's seniority, Madeleine
sat beside Tanty in the front. The projecting wings of her headgear
effectively prevented her from watching his demeanour, unless, indeed,
she had turned to him, which was, of course, out of the question; but
certain fugitive conscious blushes upon the young face in front of
her, certain castings down of long lashes and timid upward glances,
made Molly shrewdly conjecture that Mr. Landale, through all the
apparent devotion with which he listened to Tanty's continuous flow of
observations, was able to bestow a certain amount of attention upon
her pretty neighbour.
Tanty herself conducted the conversation with her usual high hand,
feigning utter oblivion of the thundercloud on Molly's countenance;
and, if somewhat rambling in her discourse, nevertheless contriving to
plant her points where she chose.
Thus the long drive wore to its end. The sun was golden upon Pulwick
when the carriage at length drew up before the portico. Miss Sophia
received them in the hall, in a state of painful flutter and timidity.
She had a constitutional terror of her aunt's sharp eyes, and, though
she examined her young cousins wistfully, Madeleine's unconscious air
of dignity repelled her as much as Molly's deliberate pertness.
Rupert conducted his aunt upstairs, and down the long echoing corridor
towards her apartment.
"Ha, my old quarters," quoth Tanty, disengaging herself briskly from
her escort to enter the room and look round approvingly, "and very
comfortable they are. And my two nieces are next door, I see, as gay
as chintz can make them. Thank you, nephew, I shall keep you no
longer. We shall dine shortly, I feel sure. Well, well, I do not
pretend I am not quite ready to do justice to your excellent
fare--beyond doubt, it will be excellent! Go to your room, girls, your
baggage is coming up, you see; I shall send Dempsey to assist you
presently. No, not you, Sophia, I was speaking to the young ones. I
should like to have a little chat with you, my dear, if you have no
objection."
One door closed upon Rupert as he smiled and bowed himself out, the
other upon Molly hustling her sister before her.
Tanty in the highest good humour, having accomplished her desire, and
successfully "established a lodgment" (to use a military term not
inappropriate to such a martial spirit) for her troublesome nieces in
the stronghold of Pulwick, once more surveyed her surroundings: the
dim old walls, the great four-post bed, consecrated, of course, by
tradition to the memory of some royal slumberer, the damask hangings,
and the uncomfortable chairs, with the utmost favour, ending up with a
humorous examination of the elongated figure hesitating on the
hearthrug.
"Be seated, Sophia. I am glad to stretch my old limbs after that
terrible drive. So here we are together again. What are you sighing
for? Upon my soul, you are the same as ever, I see, the same tombstone
on your chest, and blowing yourself out with sighs, just as you used.
That will never give you a figure, my poor girl; it is no wonder you
are but skin and bones. Ah, can't you let the poor fellow rest in his
grave Sophia? it is flying in the face of Providence, I call it, to go
on perpetually stirring up his ashes like that. I hope you mean to try
and be a little more cheerful with those poor girls. But, there, I
believe you are never so happy as when you are miserable. And it's a
poor creature you would be at any time," added the old lady to
herself, after a second thoughtful investigation of Miss Landale's
countenance, which had assumed an expression of mulishness in addition
to an increase of dolefulness during this homily.
Here, to Miss Landale's great relief, the dying sunset, wavering into
crimson and purple, from its first glory of liquid gold, attracted her
aunt's attention, and Miss O'Donoghue went over to the window.
Beneath her spread the quaint garden, with its clipped box edges, and
beyond the now leafless belt of trees, upon the glimmer of the bay,
the outline of Scarthey, a dark silhouette rose fantastically against
the vivid sky. Even as she gazed, there leapt upon its fairy turret a
minute point of white.
The jovial old countenance changed and darkened.
"And Adrian is still at his fool's game over there, I suppose," she
said irately turning upon Sophia. "When have you seen him last? How
often does he come here? I gather Master Rupert is nothing if not the
master. Why don't you answer me, Sophia?"
* * * * *
The dinner was as well cooked and served a meal as any under Rupert's
rule, which is saying a good deal, and if the young ladies failed to
appreciate the "floating island," the "golden nests," and "silver
web," so thoughtfully provided for them, Tanty did ample justice to
the venison.
Indeed the cloud which had been visible upon her countenance at the
beginning of dinner, and which according to that downright habit of
mind, which rendered her so terrible or so delightful a companion, she
made no attempt to conceal, began to lift towards the first remove,
and altogether vanished over her final glass of port.
After dinner she peremptorily ordered her grand-nieces into the
retirement of their bedchambers, unblushingly alleging their exhausted
condition in front of the perfect bloom of their beautiful young
vigour.
She then, over a cup of tea, luxuriously stretching her thin frame in
the best arm-chair the drawing-room could afford, gave Rupert a brief
code of directions as to the special attentions and care she desired
to be bestowed upon her wards, during their residence at Pulwick,
descanting generously upon their various perfections, gliding
dexterously over her reasons for wishing to be rid of them herself,
and concluding with the hint--either pregnant or barren of meaning as
he chose to take it--that if he made their stay pleasant to them, she
would not forget the service.
Then, as Mr. Landale began, with apparent guilelessness, to put a few
little telling questions to her anent the episodes which had made Bath
undesirable as a residence for these young paragons, the old lady
suddenly became overwhelmed with fatigue and sleepiness, and professed
herself ready to be conducted to her bower immediately.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, despite the _moue de circonstance_ which Molly thought it
incumbent on her to assume, neither she nor Madeleine regretted their
compulsory withdrawal from the social circle downstairs.
Madeleine had her own thoughts to follow up, and that these were both
engrossing and pleasant was easily evident; and Molly, bursting with a
sense of injury arising from many causes, desired a special
explanation with her sister, which the presence in and out upon them
of Tanty's woman had prevented her from indulging in before dinner.
"So here we are at last," cried she, indignantly, after she had walked
round and severely inspected her quarters, pausing to "pull a lip" of
extreme disfavour at the handsome portrait of Mr. Landale that hung
between the windows, "we are, Madeleine, at last, kidnapped,
imprisoned, successfully disposed of, in fact."
"Yes, here we are at last," echoed Madeleine, abstractedly, warming
her slender ankles by the fire.
"Have you made out yet what particular kind of new frenzy it was that
seized chere Tante?" asked Miss Molly, with great emphasis, as she sat
down at her toilet-table. "You are the cause of it all, my dear, and
so you ought to know. It is all very well for Tanty to pretend that I
have brought it on myself by not coming home till three o'clock (as if
that was _my_ fault). She cannot blink the fact that her Dempsey
creature had orders to pack my boxes before bedtime. Your Smith must
be a desperately dangerous individual. Well," she continued, looking
round over her shoulder, "why don't you say something, you
lackadaisical thing?"
But Madeleine answered nought and continued gazing, while only the
little smile, tilting the corners of her lips, betrayed that she had
heard the petulant speech.
The smile put the finishing touch to Molly's righteous anger.
Brandishing a hairbrush threateningly, she marched over to her sister
and looked down upon the slender figure, in its clinging white dress,
with blazing eyes.
"Look here," she cried, "there must be an end of this. I can put up
with your slyness no longer. How _dare_ you have secrets from me,
miss?--your own twin sister! You and I, who used never to have a
thought we did not share. How dare you have a lover, and not tell me
all about him? What was the meaning of your weeping like a fountain
all the way from Bath to Shrewsbury, and then, without rhyme or reason
apparently, smiling to yourself all the way from there to Lancaster.
You have had a letter, don't attempt to deny it, it is of no use....
Oh, it is base of you, it is indeed! And to think that it is all
through you that I am forced into this exile, through your _airs
penches_, and your sighing and dreaming, and your mysterous
_Smith_.... To think that to-night, this very night, is the ball of
the season, and we are going to bed! Oh, and to-morrow and to-morrow,
and to-morrow, with nothing but a knave and a fool to keep us
company--for I don't think much of your female cousin, Madeleine, and,
as for your male cousin, I perfectly detest him--and all the tabbies
of the country-side for diversion, with perhaps a country buck on high
days and holidays for a relish! Pah!"
Molly had almost talked her ill-humour away. Her energetic nature
could throw off most unpleasant emotions easily enough so long as it
might have an outlet for them; she now laid down the threatening
brush, and, kneeling beside her, flung both her arms round Madeleine's
shoulders.
"Ma petite Madeleine," she coaxed, in the mother tongue, "tell thy
little sister thy secrets."
A faint flush crept to Madeleine's usually creamy cheeks, a light into
her eyes. She turned impulsively to the face near hers, then, as if
bethinking herself, pursed her lips together and shook her head
slightly.
"Do you remember, ma cherie," she said, at last, "that French tale
Mrs. Hambledon lent us in which it is said _'Qui fuit l'amour, l'amour
suit.'_"
"Well?" asked Molly, eagerly, her lips parted as if to drink in the
expected confidence.
"Well," replied the other, "well, perhaps things may not be so bad
after all. Perhaps," rising from her seat, and looking at her sister
with a little gentle malice, while she, too, began to disrobe her
fairer beauty for the night, "some of your many lovers may come after
you from Bath! Oh, Molly!" with a little scream, for Molly, with eyes
flashing once more, had sprung up from her knees to inflict a vicious
pinch upon the equivocator's arm.
"Yes, miss, you shall be pinched till you confess." Then flouting her
with a sudden change of mood, "I am sure I don't want to know your
wonderful secret,"--seizing her comb and passing it crackling through
her hair with quite unnecessary energy--"Mademoiselle la Cachotiere.
Anyhow, it cannot be very interesting.... _Mrs. Smith!_ Fancy caring
for a man called Smith! If you smile again like that, Madeleine, I
shall beat you."
The two sisters looked at each other for a second as if hesitating on
the brink of anger, and then both laughed.
"Never mind, I shall pay you out yet," quoth Molly, tugging at her
black mane. "So our lovers are to come after us, is _that_ it? Do you
know, Madeleine," she went on, calming down, "I almost regret now that
I would not listen to young Lord Dereham, simpleton though he be. He
looked such a dreadful little fright that I only laughed at him.... I
should have laughed at him all my life. But it would perhaps have been
better than this dependence on Tanty, with her sudden whims and
scampers and whisking of us away into the wilderness. Then I should
have had my own way always. Now it's too late. Tanty told me yesterday
that she sees he is a dissolute young man, and that his dukedom is
only a Charles II. creation, and 'We know what that means,' she added,
and shook her head. I am sure I had not a notion, but I shook my head
too, and said, 'Of course, that made it impossible.' I was really
afraid she would want me to marry him. She was dreadfully pleased and
said I was a true O'Donoghue. Oh, dear! I don't know _anything_ about
love. I can't imagine being in love; but one thing is certain, I could
never, never, never allow a horrid little rat like Lord Dereham to
make love to me, to kiss me, nor, indeed, any man--oh, horror! How you
are blushing, my dear! Come here into the light. It would be good for
your soul, indeed it would, to confess!"
But Madeleine, burying her hot cheeks in her sister's neck and
clasping her with gentle caresses, was not to be drawn from her
reticence. Molly pushed her off at last, and gave a hard little
good-night kiss like a bird-peck.
"Very well; but you might as well have confessed, for I shall find out
in the long run. And who knows, perhaps you may be sorry one day that
you did not tell me of your own accord."
CHAPTER XII
A RECORD AND A PRESENTMENT.
The gallery of family portraits at Pulwick is one of the most
remarkable features of that ancient house.
It was a custom firmly established at the Priory--ever since the first
heralds' visitation in Lancashire, when some mooted point of claims to
certain quarterings had been cleared in an unexpected way by the
testimony of a well-authenticated ancestral portrait--for each
successive representative to add to the collection. One of the first
cares of every Landale, therefore, on succeeding to the title was to
be painted, with his proper armorial and otherwise distinguishing
honours jealously delineated, and thus hung in the place of honour
over the high mantelshelf of the gallery--displacing on the occasion
his own immediate and revered predecessor.
The chain was consequently unbroken from the Elizabethan descendants
of the first acquirers of ecclesiastical property at Pulwick, down to
the present Light-keeper of Scarthey.
But whilst the late Sir Thomas appeared in all the majesty of
deputy-lieutenant, colonel of Militia, magistrate, and sundry other
honourable offices, in his due place on the right of the present
baronet, the latter figured in a character so strange and so
incongruous that it seemed as if one day the dignified array of
Landales--old, young, middle-aged, but fine gentlemen, all of
them--must turn their backs upon their degenerate kinsman.
Over the chimney-piece, in the huge carved-oak frame (now already two
centuries old), a common sailor, in the striped loose trousers, the
blue jacket with red piping of a man-of-war's man, with pigtail and
coarse open shirt--stood boldly forth as the representative of the
present owner of Pulwick.
Proud of their long line of progenitors, it was a not unusual thing
for the Landales to entertain their guests at breakfast in a certain
sunny bow-window in the portrait gallery rather than in the breakfast
parlour proper, which in winter, unmistakably harboured more damp than
was pleasant.
It was, therefore, with no surprise that Miss Landale received an
early order from her brother to have a fire lighted in the apartment
sacred to the family honours, and the matutinal repast served there in
due course.
Whether Mr. Landale was actuated by a regard for the rheumatism of his
worthy relative, or merely a natural family pride, or by some other
and less simple motive, he saw no necessity for informing his docile
housewife on the matter.
As Sophia was accustomed to no such condescension on his part even in
circumstances more extraordinary, she merely bundled out of bed
unquestioningly in the darkness and cold of the morning to see his
orders executed in the proper manner; which, indeed, to her credit was
so successfully accomplished that Tanty and her charges, when they
made their entry upon the scene, could not fail to be impressed with
the comfortable aspect of the majestic old room.
Mr. Landale examined his two young uninvited guests with new keenness
in the morning light. Molly was demure enough, though there was a
lurking gleam in her dark eye which suggested rather armed truce than
accepted peace. As for Madeleine, though to be serene was an actual
necessity of her delicate nature, there was more than resignation in
the blushing radiance of her look and smile.
"Portraits of their mother," said Rupert, bringing his critical survey
to a close, and stepping forward with a nice action of the legs to
present his arm to his aunt. "Portraits of their mother both of
them--I trust to that miniature which used to grace our collection in
the drawing-room rather than to the treacherous memory of a school-boy
for the impression--but portraits by different masters and in
different moods."
There was something patronising in the tone from so young a man, which
Molly resented on the spot.
"Oh, we should be as like as two peas, only that we are as different
as day and night, as Tanty says," she retorted, tossing her white chin
at her host, while Miss O'Donoghue laughed aloud at her favourite's
sauciness.
"And after all," said Rupert, as he bestowed his venerable relative on
her chair, with an ineffable air of politeness, contradicted, though
only for an instant, by the look which he shot at Molly from the light
hazel eyes, "Tanty is not so far wrong--the only difference between
night and day is the difference between the _brunette_ and the
_blonde_," with a little bow to each of the sisters, "an Irish bull,
if one comes to analyse it, is but the expression of the too rapid
working of quick wits."
"Faith, nephew," said Tanty, sitting down in high good humour to the
innumerable good things in which her Epicurean old soul delighted,
"that is about as true a thing as ever you said. Our Irish tongues are
apt to get behind a thing before it is there, and they call that
making a bull."
Rupert's sense of humour was as keen as most of his other faculties,
and at the unconscious humour of this sally his laugh rang out
frankly, while Molly and Madeleine giggled in their plates, and Miss
O'Donoghue chuckled quietly to herself in the intervals of eating and
drinking, content to have been witty, without troubling to discover
how.
Sophia alone remained unmoved by mirth; indeed, as she raised her
drooping head, amazed at the clamour, an unwary tear trickled down her
long nose into her tea. She was given to revelling in anniversaries of
dead and gone joys or sorrows; the one as melancholy to her to look
back upon as the other; and upon this November day, now very many
years ago, had the ardent, consumptive rector first hinted at his
love.
"And now," said Miss O'Donoghue, who, having disposed of the most
serious part of the breakfast, pushed away her plate with one hand
while she stirred her second cup of well-creamed tea lazily with the
other, "Now, Rupert, will you tell me the arrangements you propose to
make to enable me to see your good brother?"
Rupert had anticipated being attacked upon this subject, and had fully
prepared himself to defend the peculiar position it was his interest
to maintain. To encourage a meeting between his brother and the old
lady (to whom the present position of affairs was a grievous offence)
did not, certainly, enter into his plan of action; but Tanty had put
the question in an unexpected and slightly awkward shape, and for a
second or two he hesitated before replying.
"I fear," said he then, gliding into the subject with his usual easy
fluency, "that you will be disappointed if you have been reckoning
upon an interview with Adrian, my dear aunt. The hermit will not be
drawn from his shell on any pretext."
"What," cried Tanty, while her withered cheek flushed, "do you mean to
tell me that my nephew, Sir Adrian Landale, will decline to come a few
hundred yards to see his old aunt--his mother's own sister--who has
come three hundred miles, at seventy years of age, to see him in his
own house--_in his own house_?" repeated the irate old lady, rattling
the spoon with much emphasis against her cup. "If you _mean_ this,
Rupert, it is an insult to me which I shall never forget--_never_."
She rose from her seat as she concluded, shaking with the tremulous
anger of age.
"For God's sake, Tanty," cried Rupert, throwing into his voice all the
generous warmth he was capable of simulating, "do not hold me
responsible for Adrian in this matter. His strange vagaries are not of
my suggesting, heaven knows."
"Well, nephew," said Miss O'Donoghue, loftily, "if you will kindly
send the letter I am about to write to your brother, by a safe
messenger, immediately, I shall believe that it is _your_ wish to
treat me with proper respect, whatever may be Adrian's subsequent
behaviour."
Mr. Landale's countenance assumed an expression of very genuine
distress; this was just the one proof of dutiful attachment that he
was loth to bestow upon his cherished aunt.
"I see how it is," he exclaimed earnestly, coming up to the old lady,
and laying his hand gently upon her arm, "you entirely misunderstand
the situation. I am not a free agent in this matter. I cannot do what
you ask; I am bound by pledge. Adrian is, undoubtedly, more
than--peculiar on certain points, and, really, I dare not, if I would,
thwart him."
"Oh!" cried Tanty, shooting off the ejaculation as from a pop-gun.
Then, shaking herself free of Rupert's touch, she sat down abruptly in
her chair again, and began fanning herself with her handkerchief. Not
even in her interchange of amenities with Mrs. Hambledon, had Molly
seen her display so much indignation.
"You want me to believe he is mad, I suppose?" she snapped, at last.
"Dear me! No, no, no!" responded the other, in his airy way. "I did
not mean to go so far as that; but--well, there are very painful
matters, and hitherto I have avoided all discussion upon them, even
with Sophia. My affection for Adrian----"
"Fiddlesticks!" interrupted Tanty. "You meant something, I suppose;
either the man's mad, or he is not. And I, for one, don't believe a
word of it. The worst sign about him, that I can see, is the blind
confidence the poor fellow seems to put in you."
Here Molly, who had been listening to the discussion "with all her
ears"--anything connected with the mysterious personality of the
absent head of the house was beginning to have a special fascination
for her--gave an irrepressible little note of laughter.
Rupert looked up at her quickly, and their eyes met.
"Hold your tongue, Miss," cried Miss O'Donoghue, sharply; aware that
she had gone too far in her last remark, and glad to relieve her
oppression in another direction, "how dare you laugh? Sophia, this is
a terrible thing your brother wants me to believe--may I ask what
_your_ opinion is? Though I'll not deny I don't think that will be
worth much."
Sophia glanced helplessly at Rupert, but he was far too carefully
possessed of himself to affect to perceive her embarrassment.
"Come, come," cried Miss O'Donoghue, whose eyes nothing escaped, "you
need not look at Rupert, you can answer for yourself, I suppose--you
are not absolutely a drivelling idiot--_all_ the Landales are not
ripening for lunatic asylums--collect your wits, Sophia, I know you
have not got any, but you have _enough_ to be able to give a plain
answer to a plain question, I suppose. Do you think your brother mad,
child?"
"God forbid," murmured Sophia, at the very extremity of those wits of
which Miss O'Donoghue had so poor an opinion. "Oh, no, dear aunt, not
_mad_, of course, not in the least _mad_."
Then, gathering from a restless movement of Rupert's that she was not
upon the right tack she faltered, floundered wildly, and finally drew
forth the inevitable pocket-handkerchief, to add feelingly if
irrelevantly from its folds, "And indeed if I thought such a calamity
had really fallen upon us--and of course there _are_ symptoms, no
doubt there are symptoms...."
"What are his symptoms--has he tried to murder any of you, hey?"
"Oh, my dear aunt! No, indeed, dear Adrian is gentleness itself."
"Does he bite? Does he gibber? Oh, away with you, Sophia! I am sure I
cannot wonder at the poor fellow wanting to live on a rock, between
you and Rupert. I am sure the periwinkles and the gulls must be
pleasant company compared to you. That alone would show, I should
think, that he knows right well what he is about. Mad indeed! There
never was any madness among the O'Donoghues except your poor uncle
Michael, who got a box on the ear from a windmill--and _he_ wasn't an
O'Donoghue at all! You will be kind enough, nephew, to have delivered
to Sir Adrian, no later than to-day, the letter which I shall this
moment indite to him."
"Perhaps," said Rupert, "if you will only favour me with your
attention for a few minutes first, aunt, and allow me to narrate to
you the circumstances of my brother's return here, and of his
subsequent self-exile, you will see fit to change your opinion, both
as regards him and myself."
A self-controlled nature will in the long run, rightly or wrongly,
always assume the ascendency over an excitable one. The moderateness
of Rupert's words, the coolness of his manner, here brought Tanty
rapidly down from her pinnacle of passion.
Certainly, she said, she was not only ready, but anxious to hear all
that Rupert could have to say for himself; and, smoothing down her
black satin apron with a shaking hand, the old lady prepared to listen
with as much judicial dignity as her flustered state allowed her to
assume. Rupert drew his chair opposite to hers and leant his elbow on
the table, and fixed his bright, hard eyes upon her.
"You remember, of course," he began after a moment's pause, "how at
the time of my poor father's death, Adrian was reported to have lost
his life in the Vendee war--though without authoritative
confirmation--at the same time as the fair and unhappy Countesse de
Savenaye, to whose fortune he had so chivalrously devoted himself."
Tanty bowed her head in solemn assent; but Molly, watching with the
most acute attention, felt her face blaze at the indefinable shade of
mockery she thought to catch upon the speaker's curling lip.
"It was," continued he, "the constant strain, the long months of
watching in vain for tidings, that told upon my father, rather than
the actual grief of loss. When he died, the responsibilities of the
headship of the house devolved naturally upon me, the only male
representative left, seemingly, to undertake them. The months went by;
to the most sanguine the belief in Adrian's death became inevitable.
Our hopes died slowly, but they died at last; we mourned for him,"
here Rupert cast down his eyes till the thick black lashes which were
one of his beauties swept his cheek; his tone was perfect in its
simple gravity. "At length, urged thereto by all the family, if I
remember rightly by yourself as well, dear aunt, I assumed the title
as well as the position which seemed mine by right. I was very young
at the time, but I do not think that either then, or during the ten
years that followed, I unworthily filled my brother's place."
There was a proud ring of sincerity in the last words, and the old
lady knew that they were true; that during the years of his absolute
power as well as of his present more restricted mastership, Rupert's
management of the estate was unimpeachable.
"Certainly not, my dear Rupert," she said in softer tones than she had
hitherto used to him, "no one would dream of suggesting such a
thing--pray go on."
"And so," pursued the nephew, with a short laugh, relapsing into that
light tone of banter which was his most natural mode of expression;
"when, one fine day, a hired coach clattered up Sir Rupert Landale's
avenue and deposited upon his porch a tattered mariner who announced
himself, in melancholy tones that would have befitted the ghost no
doubt many took him for, as the rightful Sir Adrian, erroneously
supposed defunct, I confess that it required a little persuasion to
make me recognise my long-lost brother--and yet there could be no
doubt of it. The missing heir had come to his own again; the dead had
come back to life. Well, we killed the fatted calf, and all the rest
of it--but I need not inflict upon you the narrative of our
rejoicing."
"Faith, no," said Tanty, drily, "I can see it with half an eye."
"You know, too, I believe, the series of extraordinary adventures, or
misadventures, which had kept him roaming on the high seas while we at
home set up tablets to his memory and 'wore our blacks' as people here
call it, and cultivated a chastened resignation. There was a good deal
of correspondence going on at the time between Pulwick and Bunratty,
if I remember aright, and you heard all about Adrian's divers attempts
to land in England, about his fight with the King's men, his crack on
the head and final impressment. At least you heard as much as we could
gather ourselves. Adrian is not what one would call a garrulous person
at the best of times. It was really with the greatest difficulty that
we managed to extract enough out of him to piece together a coherent
tale."
"Well, well," quoth Tanty, with impatience, "you are glib enough for
two anyhow, my dear! All this does not tell me how Adrian came to live
on a lighthouse, and why you put him down as a lunatic."
"Not as a lunatic," corrected Rupert, gently, "merely as slightly
eccentric on certain points. Though, indeed, if you had seen him
during those first months after his return, I think even you with your
optimistic spirit would have feared, as we did, that he was falling
into melancholia. Thank heaven he is better now. But, dear me, what we
went through! I declare I expected every morning to be informed that
Sir Adrian's corpse had been found hanging from his bedpost or
discovered in a jelly at the bottom of the bluffs. And, indeed, when
at length he disappeared for three days, after he had been last
observed mooning along the coast, there was a terrible panic lest he
should have sought a congenial and soothing end in the embraces of
the quicksands.... It turned out, however, that he had merely strolled
over to Scarthey--where, as you know, my father established a beacon
and installed a keeper to warn boats off our shoals--and, finding the
place to his liking, had remained there, regardless of our feelings."
"Tut, tut!" said Tanty; but whether in reproof of Rupert's flippant
language or of her elder nephew's erratic behaviour, it would have
been difficult to determine.
"Of course," went on Rupert, smoothly, "I had resolved, after a decent
period, to remove my lares and penates from a house where I was no
longer master and to establish myself, with my small patrimony (I
believe I ought to call it _matrimony_, as we younger children benefit
by our O'Donoghue mother) in an independent establishment. But when I
first broached the subject, Adrian was so vastly distressed, expressed
himself so well satisfied with my management of the estate and begged
me so earnestly to consider Pulwick as my home, vowing that he himself
would never marry, and that all he looked forward to in life was to
see me wedded and with future heirs to the name springing around me,
that it would have been actual unkindness to resist. Moreover, as you
can imagine, Adrian is not exactly a man of business, and his
spasmodic interferences in the control of the property being already
then of a very injudicious nature, I confess that, having nursed it
myself for eleven years with some success, I dreaded to think what it
would become under his auspices. And so I agreed to remain. But the
position increased in difficulty. Adrian's moroseness seemed to grow
upon him; he showed an exaggerated horror of company; either flying
from visitors as from the pest, and shutting himself up in his own
apartments, or (on the few disastrous occasions when my persuasions
induced him to show himself to some old family friends) entertaining
them with such unusual sentiments concerning social laws, the
magistracy, the government, his Majesty the King himself, that the
most extraordinary reports about him soon spread over the whole
county. This was about the time--as you may remember--of my own
marriage."
Here an alteration crept into Mr. Landale's voice, and Molly looked
at him curiously, while Miss Sophia gave vent to an audible sniff.
"To be sure," said Tanty, hastily. Comfortably egotistic old ladies
have an instinctive dislike to painful topics. And that Rupert's
sorrow for his young wife had been, if self-centred and reserved, of
an intense and prolonged nature was known to all the family.
The widower himself had no intention of dilating upon it. His wife's
name he never mentioned, and no one could guess, heavily as the blow
was known to have fallen upon him, the seething bitterness that her
loss had left in his soul, nor imagine how different a man he might
have been if that one strong affection of his life had been spared to
soften it.
"Adrian fled from the wedding festivities, as you may remember, for
you were our honoured guest at the time, and greatly displeased at his
absence," he resumed, after a few seconds of darkling reflection.
"None of us knew where he had flown to, for he did not evidently
consider his owl's nest sufficiently remote; but we had his fraternal
blessing to sustain us. And after that he continued to make periodical
disappearances to his retreat, stopping away each time longer and
longer. One fine day he sent workmen to the island with directions to
repair certain rooms in the keep, and he began to transfer thereto
furniture, his books and his organ. A dilapidated little French
prisoner next appeared on the scene (whom my brother had extracted
from the Tower of Liverpool, which was then crammed with such gentry),
and finally we were informed that, with this worthy companion, Sir
Adrian Landale was determined to take up his abode altogether at
Scarthey, undertaking the duties of the recently defunct light-keeper.
So off he went, and there he is still. He has extracted from us a
solemn promise that his privacy is to be absolutely respected, and
that no communications, or, above all, visits are to be made to him.
Occasionally, when we least expect it, he descends upon us from his
tower, upsets all my accounts, makes the most absurd concessions to
the tenants, rides round the estate with his eyes on the ground and
disappears again. _Et voila_, my dear aunt, how we stand."
"Well, nephew," said Miss O'Donoghue, "I am much obliged to you, I am
sure, for putting me _au courant_ of the family affairs. It is all
very sad--very sad and very deplorable; but----"
But Mr. Landale was quite aware that Tanty was not yet convinced to
the desired extent. He therefore here interrupted her to play his last
card--that ace he had up his sleeve, in careful preparation for this
trial of skill with his keen-witted relative, and to the suitable
production of which he had been all along leading.
Rising from his chair with slow, deliberate movement, he proceeded, as
if following his own train of thought, without noticing that Miss
O'Donoghue was intent on speech herself:
"You have not seen him, I believe, since he was quite a lad. You would
have some difficulty in recognising him, though he bears, like the
rest of us, what you call the unmistakable Landale stamp. His portrait
is here, by the way--duly installed in its correct position. That,"
with a laugh, "was one of his freaks. It was his duty to keep up the
family traditions, he said--and there you will approve of him, no
doubt; but hardly, perhaps, of the manner in which he has had that
laudable intention carried out. My own portrait was, of course,
deposed (like the original)," added Mr. Landale, with something of a
sneer; "and now hangs meekly in some bedroom or other--in that, if I
mistake not, at present hallowed by my fair cousins' presence. Well,
it is good for the soul of man to be humbled, as we are taught to
believe from our earliest years!"
Tanty was fumbling for her eye-glasses. She was glad to hear that
Adrian had remembered some of his obligations (she observed,
sententiously, as she hauled herself stiffly out of her chair to
approach the chimney-piece); it was certainly a sign that he was more
mindful of his duties as head of the house than one would expect from
a person hardly responsible, such as Rupert had represented him to be,
and ...
Here, the glasses being adjusted and focussed upon the portrait, Miss
O'Donoghue halted abruptly with a dropping jaw.
"There is a curious inscription underneath the escutcheon," said Mr.
Landale composedly, "which latter, by the way, you may notice is the
only one in the line which has no room for an impaled coat (Adrian's
way of indicating not only that he is single, but means to remain
such); Adrian composed it himself and indeed attached a marked
importance to it. Let me read it for you, dear Tanty, the picture
hangs a little high and those curveting letters are hard to decipher.
It runs thus:
_Sir Adrian William Hugh Landale, Lord of Pulwick and Scarthey in the
County Palatine of Lancaster, eighth Baronet, born March 12th, 1775.
Succeeded to the title and estate on the 10th February 1799, whilst
abroad. Iniquitously pressed into the King's service on the day of his
return home, January 2nd, 1801. Twice flogged for alleged
insubordination, and only released at last by the help of a friend
after five years of slavery. Died_ [Here a space for the date.] It is
a record with a vengeance, is it not? Notice my brother's
determination to die unmarried and to retire, once for all, from all
or any of the possible honours connected with his position!"
They had all clustered in front of the picture; even Madeleine roused
from her sweet day-dreams to some show of curiosity; Miss Landale's
bosom, heaving with such sighs as to make the tombstone rise and fall
like a ship upon a stormy sea; Molly with an eagerness she did not
attempt to hide; and Miss O'Donoghue still speechless with horror and
indignation.
Mr. Landale had gauged his aunt's temperament correctly enough. To one
whose ruling passion was pride of family, this mockery of a
consecrated family custom, this heirloom destined to carry down a
record of degradation into future generations, was an insult to the
name only to be explained to her first indignation by deliberate
malice--or insanity.
And from the breezy background of blue sky and sea, contrasting as
strangely with the dark solemnity of the other portraits as did the
figure itself in its incongruous sailor dress, the face of the eighth
baronet looked down in melancholy gravity upon the group gathered in
judgment upon him.
"Disgraceful! Positively disgraceful!" at length cried the last
representative of the O'Donoghues of Bunratty, in scandalised tones.
"My dear Rupert, you should have a curtain put up, that this
exhibition of folly--of madness, I hardly know what to call it--be not
exposed to every casual visitor. Dear me, dear me, that I should live
to see any of my kin deliberately throw discredit on his family, if
indeed the poor fellow is responsible! Rupert, my good soul, can you
ascribe any reason for this terrible state of affairs ... that blow on
the head?"
"In part perhaps," said Mr. Landale. "And yet there have been other
causes at work. If I could have a private word in your ear," glancing
meaningly over his shoulder at the two young girls who were both
listening, though with very different expressions of interest and
favour, "I could give you my opinion more fully."
"Go away now, my dear creatures," hereupon said Miss O'Donoghue,
promptly addressing her nieces. "It is a fine morning, and you will
lose your roses if you don't get the air. I don't care if it has begun
to rain, miss! Go and have a game of battledore and shuttlecock then.
Young people _must_ have exercise. Well, my dear Rupert, well!"--when
Molly, with a pettish "battledore and shuttlecock indeed!" had taken
her sister by the arm and left the room.
"Well, my dear aunt, the fact is, I believe my unhappy brother has
never recovered from--from his passion for Cecile de Savenaye, that
early love affair, so suddenly and tragically terminated--well, it
seems to have turned his brain!"
"Pooh, pooh! why that was twenty years ago. Don't tell me it is in a
man to be so constant."
"In no _sane_ man perhaps; but then, you know, Tanty, that is just the
point.... Remember the circumstances. He loved her madly; he followed
her, lived near her for months and she was drowned before his eyes, I
believe. I never heard, of course, any details of that strange period
of his life, but we can imagine." This was a difficult, vague, subject
to deal with, and Mr. Landale wisely passed on. "Moreover, his
behaviour when in this house on his return at first has left me no
doubt. I watched him closely. He was for ever haunting those rooms
which she had inhabited. When he found her miniature in the
drawing-room he went first as white as death, then he took it in his
hand and stood gazing at it (I am not exaggerating) for a whole hour
without moving; and, finally, he carried it off, and I know he used to
talk to it in his room. And now, even if I had not given my poor
brother my word of honour never to disturb his chosen solitude, I
should have felt it a heavy responsibility to promote a meeting which
would inevitably bring back past memories in a troublous manner upon
him. In fact, were he to come across the children of his dead
love--above all Molly, who must be startlingly like her mother--what
might the result be? I hardly like to contemplate it. The human brain
is a very delicately balanced organ, my dear aunt, and once it gets
ever so slightly out of order one cannot be too careful to avoid
risk."
He finished his say with an expressive gesture of the hand. Miss
O'Donoghue remained for a moment plunged in reflection, during which
the cloud upon her countenance gradually lifted.
"It is a strange thing," she said at last, "but constancy seems to run
in the family. There is no denying that. Here is Sophia, a ridiculous
spectacle--and you yourself, my dear Rupert.... And now poor Adrian,
too, and his case of mere calf-love, as one would have thought."
"A calf may grow into a fine bull, you know," returned Mr. Landale,
who had winced at his aunt's allusion to himself and now spoke in the
most unemotional tone he could assume, "especially if it is well
fostered in its youth."
"And I suppose," said Miss O'Donoghue, with a faint smile, "you think
I ought to know all about bulls." She again put up her glasses to
survey the portrait with critical deliberation; after which,
recommending him once more strenuously to have a curtain erected, she
observed, that it would break her heart to look at it one moment
longer and requested to be conducted from the room.
Mr. Landale could not draw any positive conclusion from his aunt's
manner of receiving his confidence, nor determine whether she had
altogether grasped the whole meaning of what he had intended
delicately to convey to her concerning his brother's past as well as
present position; but he had said as much as prudence counselled.
CHAPTER XIII
THE DISTANT LIGHT
In spite of their first petulant or dolorous anticipation, and of the
contrast between the even tenor of country life and the constant
stream of amusement which young people of fashion can find in a place
like Bath, the two girls discovered that time glided pleasantly enough
over them at Pulwick.
Instead of the gloomy northern stronghold their novel-fed imagination
had pictured (the more dismally as their sudden removal from town
gaieties savoured distantly of punishment at the hand of their irate
aunt), they found themselves delivered over into a bright,
admirably-ordered house, replete with things of beauty, comfortable to
the extremity of luxury; and allowed in this place of safety to enjoy
almost unrestricted liberty.
The latter privilege was especially precious, as the sisters at that
time had engrossing thoughts of their own they wished to pursue, and
found more interest in solitary roamings through the wide estate than
in the company of the hosts.
On the fifth day Miss O'Donoghue took her departure. Her own
travelling coach had rumbled down the avenue, bearing her and her
woman away, in its polished yellow embrace, her flat trunk strapped
behind, and the good-natured old face nodding out of the window, till
Molly and Madeleine, standing (a little disconsolate) upon the porch
to watch her departure, could distinguish even the hooked nose no
longer. Mr. Landale, upon his mettled grey, a gallant figure, as Molly
herself was forced to admit, in his boots and buckskins, had cantered
in the dust alongside, intent upon escorting his aged relative to the
second stage of her journey.
That night, almost for the first time since their arrival, there was
no company at dinner, and the young guests understood that the
household would now fall back into its ordinary routine.
But without the small flutter of seeing strangers, or Tanty's lively
conversation, the social intercourse soon waned into exceeding
dulness, and at an early hour Miss Molly rose and withdrew to her
room, pretexting a headache, for which Mr. Landale, with his usual
high courtesy, affected deep concern.
As she was slowly ascending the great oaken staircase, she crossed
Moggie, the gatekeeper's daughter, who in her character of
foster-sister to one of the guests had been specially allotted to them
as attendant, during the remainder of their visit to Pulwick.
Molly thought that the girl eyed her hesitatingly, as if she wished to
speak:
"Well, Moggie?" she asked, stopping on her way.
"Oh, please, miss," said the buxom lass, blushing and dropping a
curtsey, "Renny Potter, please, miss, is up at our lodge to-night, he
don't care to come to the 'ouse so much, miss. But when he heard about
you, miss, you could have knocked him down with a feather he was so
surprised and that excited, miss, we have never seen him so. And he's
so set on being allowed to see ye both!"
Molly as yet failed to connect any memories of interest with the
possessor of the patronymic mentioned, but the next phrase mentioned
aroused her attention.
"He is Sir Adrian's servant, now, miss, and goes back yonder to the
island, that is where the master lives, to-morrow morning. But he
would be so happy to see the young ladies before he goes, if the
liberty were forgiven, he says. He was servant to the Madam your
mother, miss.
"Well, Moggie," answered Miss Molly, smiling, "if that is all that is
required to make Renny Potter happy, it is very easily done. Tell
Renny Potter: to-morrow morning." And she proceeded on her way
pondering, while the successful emissary pattered down to the lodge in
high glee to gather her reward in her sweetheart's company.
* * * * *
When later on Madeleine joined her sister, she found her standing by
the deep recessed window, the curtains of which were drawn back,
resting her head on her hand against the wainscot, and gazing abroad
into the night.
She approached, and passing her hand round Molly's waist looked out
also.
"Again at your window?"
"It is a beautiful night, and the view very lovely," said Molly. And
indeed the moon was riding high in a deep blue starry heaven, and
shimmered on the strip of distant sea visible from the windows.
"Yes, but yesterday the night was not fine, and nothing was to be seen
but blackness; and it was the same the day before, and yet you stared
out of this window, as you have every night since our coming. It is
strange to see _you_ so. What is it, why don't you tell me?"
"Madeleine," said Molly, suddenly, after a lengthy pause, "I am simply
_haunted_ by that light over yonder, the Light of Scarthey. There is a
mystery about those ruins, on which I keep meditating all day long. I
want to know more. It draws me. I would give anything to be able, now,
to set sail and land there all unknown to any one, and see what manner
of life is led where that light is burning."
But Madeleine merely gave a pout of little interest. "What do you
think you would find? A half-witted middle-aged man, mooning among a
litter of books, with an old woman, and a little Frenchman to look
after him. Why, Mr. Landale himself takes no trouble to conceal that
his poor brother is an almost hopeless lunatic."
"Mr. Landale--" Molly began, with much contempt; but she interrupted
herself, and went on simply, "Mr. Landale is a very fine gentleman,
with very superior manners. He speaks like a printed book--but for all
that I _would_ like to know."
Madeleine laughed. "The demon of curiosity has a hold of you, Molly;
remember the fable they made us repeat: _De loin c'est quelque chose,
et de pres ce n'est rien._ Now you shall go straight into your bed,
and not take cold."
And Miss Madeleine, after authoritatively closing the curtains, kissed
her sister, and was about to commence immediate disrobing, when she
caught sight of the shagreen-covered book, lying open on the table.
"So your headache was your diary--how I should like to have a peep."
"I daresay!" said Molly, sarcastically, and then sat down and, pen in
hand, began to re-read her night's entry, now and then casting a
tantalising glance over her shoulder at her sister. The lines, in the
flowing convent hand, ran thus:
"Aunt O'Donoghue left us this morning, and so here we are, planted in
Pulwick; and she has achieved her plan, fully. But what is odd is that
neither Madeleine nor I seem to mind it, now. What has come over
Madeleine is her secret, and she keeps it close; but that _I_ should
like being here is strange indeed.
"And yet, every day something happens to make me feel connected with
Pulwick--something more, I mean, than the mere fact that we were born
here. So many of the older people greet me, at first, as if they knew
me--they all say I am so like 'the Madam;' they don't see the same
likeness in Madeleine for all her _grand air_. There was Mrs. Mearson,
the gatekeeper, was struck in amazement. And the old housekeeper,
whenever she has an opportunity tries to entertain me about the
beautiful foreign lady and the grand times they had at Pulwick when
she was here, and 'Sir Tummas' was still alive.
"But, though we are made to feel that we are more than ordinary
guests, it is not on account of Mr. Landale, but _on account of Sir
Adrian_--the Master, as they call him, whom we never see, and whom his
brother would make out to be mad. Why is he so anxious that Sir Adrian
should not know that Aunt Rose has brought us here? He seemed willing
enough to please her, and yet nothing that she could say of her wish
could induce him even to send a messenger over to the rock. And now we
may be here all these two months and never even have caught a sight of
the _Master_. I wonder if he is still like that portrait--whether he
bears that face still as he now sits, all alone, brooding as his
brother says, up in those ruined chambers, while the light burns calm
and bright in the tower! What can this man of his have to say to me?"
Molly dotted her last forgotten "i," blotted it, closed and carefully
locked the book. Then, rising, she danced over to her sister, and
forced her into a pirouette.
"And now," she cried gaily, "our dear old Tanty is pulling on her
nightcap and weeping over her posset in the stuffy room at Lancaster
regretting _me_; and I should be detesting her with all my energies
for leaving me behind her, were it not that, just at present, I
actually find Pulwick more interesting than Bath."
Madeleine lifted her heavy-lidded eyes a little wonderingly to her
sister's face, as she paused in her gyration.
"What fly stings thee now?" she inquired in French.
"You do not tell me about _your_ wounds, my dear, those wounds which
little Dan Cupid has made upon your tender heart, with his naughty
little arrow, and which give you such sweet pain, apparently, that you
revel in the throes all day long. And yet, I am a good child; you
shall guess. If you guess aright, I shall tell you. So now begin."
They stood before the fire, and the leaping tongues of light played
upon their white garments, Madeleine's nightgear scarcely more
treacherously tell-tale of her slender woman's loveliness than the
evening robe that clung so closely to the vigorous grace of Molly's
lithe young figure.
The elder, whose face bore a blush distinct from the reflected glow of
the embers, fell to guessing, as commanded, a little wildly:
"You begin to find the _beau cousin_ Rupert a little more interesting
than you anticipated."
"Bah," cried Molly, with a stamp of her sandalled foot, "it is not
possible to guess worse! He is more insufferable to me, hour by hour."
"I think him kind and pleasant," returned Madeleine simply.
"Ah, because he makes sweet eyes at you, I suppose--yet no--I express
myself badly--he could not make anything sweet out of those hard, hard
eyes of his, but he is very--what they call here in England--attentive
to you. And he looks at you and ponders you over when you little think
it--you poor innocent--lost in your dream of ... _Smith_! There, I
will not tease you. Guess again."
"You are pleased to remain here because you are a true
weather-cock--because you like one thing one day another the
next--because the country peace and quiet is soothing to you after the
folly and noise of the great world of Bath and Dublin, and reminds you
refreshingly, as it does me, of our happy convent days." The glimmer
of a dainty malice lurked in the apparent candour of Madeleine's
grave blue eyes, and from thence spread into her pretty smile at the
sight of Molly's disdainful lip, "Well then, I give it up. You have
some mischief on foot, of that at least I am sure."
"No mischief--a work of righteousness rather. Sister Madeleine, you
heard all that that gallant gentleman you think so highly of--your
cousin Rupert, my dear" (it was a little way of Molly's to throw the
responsibility of anything she did not like, even to an obnoxious
relationship, upon another person's shoulders), "narrated of his
brother Sir Adrian, and how he persuaded Tanty that he was, as you
said just now, a hopeless madman--"
"But yes--he does mad things," said the elder twin, a little
wonderingly.
"Well, Madeleine, it is a vile lie. I am convinced of it."
"But, my darling----"
"Look here, Madeleine, there is something behind it all. I attacked
that creature, that rag, you cannot call her a woman, that female
cousin of yours, Sophia, and I pressed her hard too, but she could not
give me a single instance about Sir Adrian that is really the least
like insanity; and last night, when the young fool who escorted me to
dinner, Coventry his name was, told me that every one says Sir Adrian
is shut up on the island and that his French servant is really his
keeper, and that it was a shame Rupert was not the eldest brother, I
quite saw the sort of story Master Rupert likes to spread--don't
interrupt, please! When you were wool-gathering over the fire last
night (in the lively and companionable way, permit me to remark in
parenthesis, that you have adopted of late), and you thought I was
with Tanty, I had marched off with my flat candlestick to the picture
gallery to have a good look at the so-called lunatic. I dragged over a
chair and lit the candles in the candelabra each side of the
chimney-piece, and then standing on my perch still, I held up my own
torch and I saw the sailor really well. I think he has a beautiful
face and that he is no more mad than I am. But he looks so sad, so
sad! I longed to make those closed lips part and tell me their secret.
And, as I was looking and dreaming, my dear, just as you might, I
heard a little noise, and there was Rupert, only a few yards off,
surveying me with such an angry gaze--Ugh!" (with a shiver) "I hate
such ways. He came in upon me with soft steps like some animal. Look
at his portrait there, Madeleine!--Stay! I shall hold up the light as
I did last night to Sir Adrian--see, it flickers and glimmers and
makes him seem as if he were alive--oh, I wish he were not hanging in
front of our beds, staring out at us with those eyes! You think them
very fine, I daresay, that is because his lashes are as thick and dark
as a woman's--but the look in them, my dear--do you know what it
reminds me of? Of the beautiful, cruel greyhound we saw at the
coursing at that place near Bunratty (you remember, just before they
started the hare), when he stood for a moment motionless, looking out
across the plain. I can never forget the expression of those
yellow-circled eyes. And, when I see Rupert look at you as if he were
fixing something in the far distance, it gives me just the feeling of
horror and sickness I had then. (You remember how dreadful it was?)
Rupert makes me think of a greyhound, altogether he is so lithe and so
clean-cut, and so full of eagerness, a sort of trembling eagerness
underneath his seeming quiet, and I think he could be cruel."
Molly paused with an unusually grave and reflective look; Madeleine
yawned a little, not at all impressed.
"How you exaggerate!" she said. "Well what happened when he came in
and caught you? The poor man! I suppose, he thought you were setting
the house on fire."
"My dear, I turned as red as a poppy and began blowing out all my
illumination, feeling dreadfully guilty, and then he helped me off my
chair with such an air of politeness that I could have struck him with
pleasure, but I soon gathered my wits again. And, vexed with myself
for being a ninny, I just dropped him a little curtsey and said, 'I've
been examining my mad cousin.' 'Well, and what do you think of him?'
he asked me, smiling (his abominable smile!). But I can keep my
thoughts to myself as well as other people. 'I think he is very
handsome,' I answered, and then I wagged my head and added, 'Poor
fellow,' just as if I thought he was really mad. 'Poor fellow!' said
cousin Rupert, still with his smile. Whereupon we interchanged
good-nights, and he ceremoniously reconducted me to my door. What was
he spying after me for, like that? My dear, your cousin has a bad
conscience.--But I can spy too--I have been questioning the servants
to-day, and some of the people on the estate."
"Oh, Molly!"
"Come, don't be so shocked. It was diplomatically, of course, but I am
determined to find out the truth. Well, so far from looking upon Sir
Adrian as a lunatic, they all adore him, it seems to me. He comes here
periodically--once every three months or so--and it is like the King's
Justices, you know--St. Louis of France--he redresses all wrongs, and
listens to grievances and gives alms and counsel, and every one can
come with his story, down to the poorest wretch on the estate, and
they certainly gave me to understand that they would fare pretty
hardly under Mr. Landale if it were not for that mild beneficent
restraining influence in his tower yonder. It is very romantic, do you
know (you like romance, Madeleine). I wonder if Sir Adrian will come
over while we are here. Oh, I hope, I hope he will. I shall never rest
till I have seen him."
"Silly child," said Madeleine, "and so that is the reason you are glad
to remain here?"
"Even so, my dear," answered the other, skipped into the big four-post
bed, carefully ascertained and selected the softest pillow, and then,
smiling sweetly at her sister from under a frame of dark curls, let
her white lids drop over the lustre of her eyes and so intimated she
desired to sleep.
CHAPTER XIV
THE TOWER OF LIVERPOOL: MASTER AND MAN
A prison is a house of care,
A place where none can thrive,
A Touchstone True to try a friend,
A Grave for man alive.
Sometimes a place of right,
Sometimes a place of wrong,
Sometimes a place of rogues and thieves,
And honest men among.
_Old Inscription._
It was soon after sunrise--at that time of year an hour not
exorbitantly early--when Molly awoke from a tangle of fantastic dreams
in which the haunting figure of her waking thoughts, the hermit of
Scarthey, appeared to her in varied shapes; as an awe-inspiring,
saintly ascetic with long, white hair; as a young, beautiful,
imprisoned prince; even as a ragged imbecile staring vacantly at a
lantern, somewhere in a dismal sea-cave.
The last vision was uppermost in her mind when she opened her eyes;
and the girl, under the impression of so disgusting a disillusion,
remained for a while pondering and yawning, before making up her mind
to exchange warmth and featherbed for her appointment without.
But the shafts of light growing through the chinks in the shutters
ever brighter and more full of dancing motes, decided her.
"A beautiful morning, Madeleine," she said, leaning over and pulling
one of the long fair strands upon her neighbour's pillow with sisterly
authority. "Get up, lazy-bones, and come and have a walk with me
before breakfast."
The sleeping sister awoke, smiled with her usual exquisite serenity of
temper, and politely refused. Molly insisted, threatened, coaxed, but
to no avail. Madeleine was luxuriously comfortable, and was not to be
disturbed either mentally or bodily; and Molly, aware of the resisting
power of will hidden under that soft exterior, at length petulantly
desisted; and wrapped up in furs, with hands plunged deep into the
recesses of a gigantic muff, soon sallied forth herself alone into the
park.
Half-way down the avenue she met blue-eyed Moggie with round face
shining out of the sharp, exhilarating atmosphere like a small sun.
The damsel was overcome with blushes and rapture at her young
mistress's unexpected promptitude in carrying out her promise, and ran
back to warn her sweetheart of that lady's approach.
* * * * *
As Molly drew near the keeper's lodge--a sort of Doric temple,
quaintly standing in the middle of a hedge-enclosed garden, and
half-buried under thickly-clustering, interlacing creepers--from the
side of the enormous nest of evergreen foliage there emerged, in a
state of high excitement strenuously subdued, a short, square-built
man (none other than Rene L'Apotre), whilst between the boughs of the
garden-hedge peeped forth the bashful, ruddy face of the lady of his
fancy, eager to watch the interview.
Rene ran forward, then stopped a few paces away, hat in hand, scraping
and bowing in the throes of an overwhelming emotion that strove hard
with humility.
"Ah, Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle!" he ejaculated between spells of
amazed staring, and seemed unable to bring forth another word.
"And so you have known my mother, Rene," said Miss Molly (in her
native tongue) with a smile.
At the sound of the voice and of the French words, Rene's face grew
pale under its bronze, and the tears he had so strongly combated,
glistened in his eyes.
"If I had not heard last night," he said at length, "that these ladies
had come back--it was Moggie Mearson who told me, who was foster
sister to you, or was it Mademoiselle your sister? and proud she is of
it--if I had not known that the young ladies were here again, when I
saw Mademoiselle I would have thought that my lady herself had
returned to us (may the good God have her soul!). Ah, to think that I
should ever see her again in the light of the sun!"
He stopped, suffocated with the sob that his respect would not allow
him to utter.
But Molly, who had had other objects in view when she rose from her
couch this cold, windy morning, than to present an objective to a
serving-man's emotion, now thought the situation had lasted long
enough for her enjoyment and determined to put an end to it.
"Eh bien, Rene," she said gaily, "or should I call you Monsieur
Potter? which, by the way, is a droll name for a Frenchman, I am very
glad to see that you are pleased to see me. If you would care to have
some talk with me you may attend me if you like. But I freeze standing
here," stamping her feet one after the other on the hard ground. "I
must absolutely walk; and you may put on your hat again, please; for
it is very cold for you too," she added, snuggling into her muff and
under her fur tippet.
The man obeyed after another of his quaint salutes, and as Molly
started forward, followed her respectfully, a pace in rear.
"I daresay you will not be sorry to have a little talk with a
compatriot in your own tongue, all English as you may have grown,"
said the young lady presently; "and as Moggie has told me that you
were in my mother's service, there is a whole volume of things which,
I believe, you alone can relate to me. You shall tell me all that, one
day. But what seems to me the most curious, first of all, is your
presence here. We ourselves are only at Pulwick by chance."
"Mademoiselle," said Rene in an earnest voice, "if you knew the whole
story, you would soon understand that, since it was not to be, that I
should remain the humble servitor of Monseigneur le Comte de Savenaye,
Mademoiselle's father, or of Madame, who followed him to heaven,
notwithstanding all our efforts to preserve her, it is but natural
that I should attach myself (since he would allow it) to my present
master."
"Mr. Landale?" asked Molly, affecting ignorance.
"No, Mademoiselle," cried the Frenchman, hotly. "My master is Sir
Adrian. Had Mr. Landale remained the lord of this place, I should have
been left to die in my prison--or at least have remained there until
this spring, for it seems there is peace again, and the Tower of
Liverpool is empty now."
"_Voyons, voyons, conte moi cela_, Rene," said Molly, turning her
face, beautifully glowing from the caress of the keen air, eagerly to
her companion. And he, nothing loth to let loose a naturally garrulous
tongue in such company, and on such a theme, started off upon a long
story illustrated by rapid gesticulation.
"I will tell you," cried he, and plunged into explanation with more
energy than coherence, "it was like this:
"I had been already two years in that prison; we were some hundreds of
prisoners, and it was a cruel place. A cruel place, Mademoiselle,
almost as bad as that where we were shut up, my master and I together,
years before, at La Rochelle--and that I will tell you, if you wish,
afterwards.
"I had been taken by the marine conscription, when their Republic
became the French Empire. And a sailor I was then (just, as I heard
later, as Sir Adrian also was at the time; but that I did not know,
you understand), for they took all those that lived on the coast. Now
I had only served with the ship six months, when she was taken by the
English, and, as I say, we were sent to the prison in Liverpool, where
we found so many others, who had been already there for years. When I
heard it was Liverpool, I knew it was a place near Pulwick, and I at
once thought of Mr. Landale, not him, of course, they _now_ call Mr.
Landale, but him who had followed my mistress, Madame your mother, to
help to fight the Republicans in the old time. And I thought I was
saved: I knew he would get me out if it was possible to get any one
out. For, you see, I thought his honour was home again, after we had
been beaten, and there was no more to be done for my lady. We had
contrived to find an English ship to take him home, and he had gone
back, as I thought, Mademoiselle. Well, a prisoner becomes cunning,
and besides, I had been in prison before; I managed to make up a
letter, and as I knew already some English, I ended by persuading a
man to carry it to Pulwick for me. It was a long way, and I had no
money, but I made bold to assure him that Mr. Landale--oh, no! not
_this_ one," Rene interrupted himself again with a gesture eloquent of
resentful scorn, "but my master; I assured the man that he would
receive recompence from him. You see, Mademoiselle, I knew his heart
was so good, that he would not allow your mother's servant to rot in
the tower.... But days afterwards the man came back. Oh, he was angry!
terribly angry with me, and said he should pay me out--And so he did,
but it is useless to tell you how. He had been to Pulwick, he said,
and had seen Mr. Landale. Mr. Landale never knew anything of any
French prisoner, and refused to give any money to the messenger. Ah,
Mademoiselle, it was very sad! I had not signed my letter for fear of
its getting into wrong hands, but I spoke of many things which I knew
he could not have forgotten, and now I thought that he would not
trouble his mind about such a wretch as Rene--triple brute that I was
to conceive such thoughts, I should have deserved to remain there for
ever!... I did remain, Mademoiselle, more than three years; many and
many died. As for me, I am hard, but I thought I should never never
walk free again; nor would I, Mademoiselle, these seven years, but for
him."
"He came, then?" said the girl with sympathetic enthusiasm. She was
listening with attention, carried away by the speaker's earnestness,
and knew instinctively to whom the "him," and the "he" referred.
"He came," said Rene with much emphasis. "Of course he came--the
moment he knew." And after a moment of half-smiling meditation he
pursued:
"It was one May-day, and there was some sun; and there was a smell of
spring in the air which we felt even in that dirty place. Ah, how I
remember me of it all! I was sitting against the wall in the courtyard
with two others who were Bretons, like you and me, Mademoiselle,
shifting with the sun now and then, for you must know a prisoner loves
the sun above all; and there, we only had it a few hours in the day,
even when it did shine. I was carving some stick-heads, and
bread-plates in wood--the only thing I could do to put a little more
than bread, into our own platters," with a grin, "and whistling,
whistling, for if you can't be gay, it is best to play at it.... Well,
that day into our courtyard there was shown a tall man--and I knew him
at once, though he was different enough in his fine coat, and hat and
boots, from the time when I had last seen him, when he was like me, in
rags and with a woollen cap on his head, and no stockings under his
shoes--I knew him at once! And when I saw him I stood still, with my
mouth round, but not whistling more. My blood went phizz, phizz, all
over my body, and suddenly something said in my head: 'Rene, he has
come to look for you.' He was searching for some one, for he went
round with the guardian looking into each man's face, and giving money
to all who begged--and seeing that, they all got up, and surrounded
him, and he gave them each a piece. But I could not get up; it was as
if some one had cut out my knees and my elbows. And that was how he
saw me the sooner. He noticed I remained there, looking at him like a
dog, saying nothing. When he saw me, he stood a moment quite quiet;
and without pretending anything he came to me and looked down
smiling.--'But if I am not mistaken I know this man,' he said to the
guardian, pretending to be astonished. 'Why, this is Rene L'Apotre?
Who would have thought of seeing you here, Rene L'Apotre?' says he.
And then he smiled again, as much as to say, 'You see I have come at
last, Rene.' And once more, as if to explain: 'I have only lately come
back to England,' in a gentle way, all full of meaning.... I don't
know what took me, but I cried like an infant, in my cap. And the
guardian and some of the others laughed, but when I looked up again,
his eyes shone also. He looked so good, so kind, Mademoiselle, that it
was as if I understood in words all he meant, but thought better not
to say at the time. Then he spoke to the guardian, who shook his head
doubtfully. And after saying, 'Have good courage, Rene L'Apotre,' and
giving me the rest of his money, he went away--but I knew I was not
forgotten, and I was so happy that the black, black walls were no more
black. And I sang, not for pretence this time, ah no! and I spent all
my money in buying a dinner for those at our end of the prison, and we
even had wine! You may be sure we drank to his happiness."
Here the man, carried away by his feelings, seized his hat and waved
it in the air. Then, ashamed of his ebullition, halted and glanced
diffidently at the young lady. But Molly only smiled in encouragement.
"Well, and then?" she asked.
"Well, Mademoiselle," he resumed, "it was long before I saw him again;
but I kept good courage, as I was told. One day, at last, the guardian
came to fetch me and took me to the governor's cabinet; and my master
was there--I was told that my release had been obtained, though not
without trouble, and that Sir Adrian Landale, of Pulwick Priory, had
gone warranty for me that I should not use my liberty to the prejudice
of His Majesty, the King of England, and that I was to be grateful to
Sir Adrian. I almost laughed at him, Mademoiselle. Oh! he took care to
advise me to be grateful!" And here Rene paused ironically, but there
was a quiver on his lips. "Ah, he little knew, Monsieur the Governor,
that when my master had taken me to an inn, and the door was closed
over the private room, he who had looked so grand and careless before
the governor, took me by both hands and then, in his fine clothes,
embraced me--me the dirty prisoner--just as he did when he left me in
the old days, and was as poor and ragged as I was! And let me weep
there on his breast, for I had to weep or my heart would have broken.
But I wander, Mademoiselle, you only wanted to know how I came to be
in his service still. That is how it was; as I tell you."
Molly was moved by this artless account of fidelity and gratitude, and
as she walked on in attentive silence, Rene went on:
"It was then his honour made me know how, only by accident, and months
after his own return, he chanced to hear of the letter that some one
had sent to Mr. Landale from the Tower of Liverpool, and that Mr.
Landale had said he knew nothing of any French prisoner and had
thought it great impudence indeed. And how he--my master--had suddenly
thought (though my letter had been destroyed) that it might be from
me, the servant of my lady your mother, and his old companion in arms
(for his honour will always call me so). He could not sleep, he told
me, till he had found out. He started for Liverpool that very night.
And, having discovered that it was me, Mademoiselle, he never rested
till he had obtained my liberty."
* * * * *
Walking slowly in the winter sunshine, the one talking volubly, the
other intently listening, the odd pair had reached a rising knoll in
the park where, under the shelter of a cluster of firs, stood a row of
carved stone seats that had once been sedillas in the dismantled
Priory Church.
From this secluded spot could be obtained the most superb view of the
whole country-side. At the end of the green, gently-sloping stretch of
pasture-land, which extended, broken only by irregular clusters of
trees, down to the low cliffs forming the boundary of the strand, lay
the wide expanse of brown sand, with its streamlets and salt pools
scintillating under the morning sun.
Further in the western horizon, a crescent of deep blue sea, sharply
defined under a lighter blue sky and fringed landwards with a
straggling border of foam, advanced slowly to the daily conquest of
the golden bay. In the midst of that frame the eye was irresistibly
drawn, as to the chief object in the picture, to the distant rock of
Scarthey--a green patch, with the jagged red outline of the ruins
clear cut against the sky.
Since this point of view in the park had been made known to her, on
the first day when she was piloted through the grounds, Molly had more
than once found her way to the sedillas, yielding to the fascination
of the mysterious island, and in order to indulge in the fancies
suggested by its ever-changing aspect.
At the fall of day the red glow of the sinking sun would glint through
the dismantled windows; and against the flaming sky the ruins would
stand out black and grim, suggesting nought but abandonment and
desolation until suddenly, as the gloom gathered upon the bay, the
light of the lamp springing to the beacon tower, would reverse the
impression and bring to mind a picture of faithful and patient
watching.
When the sun was still in the ascendant, the island would be green and
fresh to the gaze, evoking no dismal impression; and as the rays
glanced back from the two or three glazed windows, and from the roofed
beacon-tower, the little estate wore a look of solid security and
privacy in spite of its crumbling walls, which was almost as
tantalising to her romantic curiosity.
It was with ulterior motives, therefore, that she had again wended her
way to the knoll this sunny, breezy morning. She now sat down and let
her eyes wander over the wide panorama, whilst Rene stood at a humble
distance, looking with eyes of delight from her to the distant abode
of his master.
"And now you live with Sir Adrian, in that little isle yonder," said
she, at length. "How came it that you never sought to go back to your
country?"
"There was the war then, Mademoiselle, and it was difficult to
return."
"But there has been peace these six months," insisted Molly.
"Yes, Mademoiselle, though I only learned it yesterday. But then, bah!
What is that? His honour needs me. I have stopped with him seven
years, and my faith, I shall stop with him for ever."
There was a long silence.
"Does any one know," asked Molly, at length, with a vague air of
addressing the trees, mindful, as she spoke, of the manner in which
Mr. Landale had practically dismissed her and her sister at a certain
point of his version of his brother's history, "_why_ Sir Adrian has
shut himself up in that place instead of living at the Hall all this
time?"
A certain dignity seemed to come over the servant's squat figure. He
hesitated for a moment, and then said very simply, his honest eyes
fixed upon the girl's face: "I am only his humble servant,
Mademoiselle, and it is enough for me that it is his pleasure to live
alone."
"You are indeed faithful," said Molly, with a little generous flush of
shame at this peasant's delicacy compared to her own curiosity. And,
after another pause, she added, pensively: "But tell me, does Sir
Adrian never leave his solitude? I confess I should like to meet one
who had known my mother, who could talk of her to me."
Rene looked at the young girl with a wistful countenance, as though
the question had embarked him on a new train of thought. But he
answered evasively: "His honour comes rarely to Pulwick--rarely."
Molly, with a little movement of pique, rose abruptly from her seat.
But quickly changing her mood again she turned round as she was about
to depart, and smiling: "Thank you, Rene," she said, and held out her
dainty hand, which he, blushing, engulfed in his great paw, "I am
going in, I am dreadfully hungry. We shall be here two months or more,
and I shall want to see you again ... if you come back to Pulwick."
She walked quickly away towards the house. Rene followed the
retreating figure with a meditative look, so long as he could keep her
in sight, then turned his gaze to the island and there stood lost in a
deep muse, regardless of the fact that his sweetheart, Moggie, was
awaiting a parting interview at the lodge, and that the tide that
would wait for no man was swelling under his boat upon the beach.
* * * * *
A sudden resolution was formed in Molly's mind as the immediate result
of this conversation, and she framed her behaviour that morning solely
with a view to its furtherance.
Breakfast was over when, glowing from her morning walk, she entered
the dining-room; but, regardless of Mr. Landale's pointedly elaborate
courtesy in insisting upon a fresh repast being brought to her, his
sarcastically overacted solicitude, intended to point out what a deal
of avoidable trouble she gave to the household, Molly remained
perfectly gracious, and ate the good things, plaintively set before
her by Miss Landale, with the most perfect appetite and good humour.
She expatiated in terms of enthusiasm on the beauty of the estate and
the delight of her morning exploration, and concluded this
condescending account of her doings (in which the meeting with Rene
did not figure) with a request that Mr. Landale should put horses at
the disposal of herself and her sister for a riding excursion that
very afternoon. And with determined energy she carried the point,
declaring, despite his prognostications of coming bad weather, that
the sunshine would last the day.
In this wise was brought about the eventful ride which cost the life
of Lucifer, and introduced such heart-stirring phantasmagories into
the even tenor of Sir Adrian Landale's seclusion.
* * * * *
That evening the news rapidly spread throughout Pulwick that the cruel
sands of the bay had secured yet another victim.
In an almost fainting condition, speechless with horror, and hardly
able yet to realise to the full her own anguish, Madeleine was
conducted by the terrified groom, through the howling wind and
drenching rain, back to the Priory.
And there, between the fearful outcries of Miss Landale, and the deep
frowning gravity of her brother, the man stammered out his tale.--How
the young lady when the rain first began, had insisted,
notwithstanding his remonstrances, upon taking the causeway to the
island, and how it was actually by force that he prevented the other
lady from following so soon as she understood the danger into which
her sister was running.
There was no use, he had thought (explained the man, half
apologetically), for two more to throw away their lives, just for no
good, that way. And so they had sat on their horses and watched in
terror, as well as they could through the torrents of rain. They had
seen in the distance Lucifer break from the young lady's control, and
swerve from the advancing sea. And then had come the great gust that
blew the rain and the sand in their faces and set their horses
dancing; and, when they could see again, all traces of horse and rider
had disappeared, and there lay nothing before them but the advancing
tide, though the island and its tower were still just visible through
the storm.
No amount of cross-examination could elicit any further information.
The girl's impulse seemed to have been quite sudden, and she had only
laughed back at the groom over her shoulder upon his earnest shout of
warning, though she had probably expected them to follow her. And as
there could be no doubt about the calamity which had ensued, and no
possible rescue even of the body, he had returned home at once to
bring the disastrous news.
Madeleine had been carried completely unconscious to her bed, but
presently Miss Sophia was summoned to her side as the girl showed
signs of returning animation, and Rupert was left alone.
He fell to pacing the room, lost in a labyrinth of complicated and
far-reaching reflections.
Beyond doubt he was shocked and distressed by the sudden and horrible
disaster; and yet as an undercurrent to these first natural thoughts,
there ran presently a distinct notion that he would have felt the
grievousness of it more keenly had Madeleine perished in that cruel
manner and her sister survived to bring the tale home.
The antagonism which his cousin, in all the insolence of her young
beauty and vigorous self-esteem, had shown for him had been mutual. He
had instinctively felt that she was an enemy, and more than that--a
danger to him. This danger was now removed from his path, and by no
intervention or even desire of his own.
The calamity which had struck the remaining sister into such
prostration would make her rich indeed; by anticipation one of the
great heiresses in England.
"Sorrow," thought Mr. Landale, and his lip curled disdainfully, "a
girl's sorrow, at least, is a passing thing. Wealth is an everlasting
benefit."
Madeleine was a desirable woman upon all counts, even pecuniary
considerations apart, or would be to one who had a heart to give--and
even if the heart was dead...?
Altogether the sum of his meditations was assuming a not unpleasing
aspect; and the undercurrent in time assumed almost the nature of
self-congratulation. Even the ordeal which was yet to come when he
would have to face Miss O'Donoghue and render an account of his short
trust, could not weigh the balance down on the wrong side.
And yet a terrible ordeal it would be; women are so unreasonable, and
Aunt Rose so much more so even than the average woman. Still it had to
be done; the sooner the better; if possible while the storm lasted and
while roaring waters kept all ill news upon land and the interloping
heir on his island.
And thus that very evening, whilst Madeleine sobbed on her pillow and
Molly was snugly enjoying the warm hospitality of Scarthey, a mounted
messenger departed from the Priory to overtake Miss O'Donoghue on the
road to Bath and acquaint her with the terrible fatality that had
befallen her darling and favourite.
CHAPTER XV
UNDER THE LIGHT
DECEMBER 16TH.--Again I separate your green boards, my diary. No one
has opened you; for your key, now a little rusty, still hangs upon my
watch--my poor watch whose heart has ceased to beat, who, unlike its
mistress, has _not_ survived the ordeal by sand and water! What is
better, no one has attempted to force your secrets from you; which,
since it appears that it had been agreed that Molly de Savenaye was
dead and buried in Scarthey sands, speaks well for all concerned. But
she is not dead. She is very much alive; and very happy to be so.
This will indeed be an adventure worth reading, in the days to come;
and it must be recounted--though were I to live to a hundred years I
do not think I could ever forget it. Tanty Rose (she has not yet
stopped scolding everybody for the fright she has had) is in the next
room with Madeleine, who, poor dear, has been made quite ill by this
prank of mine; but since after the distress caused by her Molly's
death she has had the joy of finding her Molly alive again, things are
balanced, I take it; and all being well that ends well, the whole
affair is pleasant to remember. It has been actually as interesting as
I expected--now that I think it over--even more.
Of all the many pictures that I fancied, not one was at all like the
reality--and this reality I could not have rested till I had found. It
was Rene's account decided me. I laid my plans very neatly to pay the
recluse a little visit, and plead necessity for the intrusion. My
machinations would have been perfect if they had not caused Madeleine
and poor old Tanty unnecessary grief.
But now that I know the truth, I cannot distinctly remember what it
was that I _did_ expect to find on that island.
If it had not been that I had already gone through more excitement
than I bargained for to reach that mysterious rock, how exciting I
should have found it to wander up to unknown ruins, to knock at the
closed doors of an enchanted castle, ascend unknown stairs and engage
in devious unknown passages--all the while on the tiptoe of
expectation!
But when I dragged myself giddy and faint from the boiling breakers
and scrambled upon the desolate island under the rain that beat me
like the lashes of a whip, pushing against a wind that bellowed and
rushed as though determined to thrust me back to the waters I had
cheated of their prey, my only thoughts were for succour and shelter.
Such warm shelter, such loving welcome, it was of course impossible
that I could for a moment have anticipated!
Conceive, my dear diary, the feelings of a poor, semi-drowned
wanderer, shivering with cold, with feet torn by cruel stones, who
suddenly emerges from howl and turmoil into a warm, quiet room to be
received as a long and eagerly expected guest, whose advent brings
happiness, whose presence is a highly prized favour; in fact not as
one who has to explain her intrusion, but as one who in the situation
holds the upper hand herself.
And _this_ was my welcome from him whose absence from Pulwick was more
haunting than any presence I can think of!
Of course I knew him at once. Even had I not expected to see him--had
I not come to seek him in fact--I should have known him at once from
the portrait whose melancholy, wide-open eyes had followed me about
the gallery. But I had not dreamed to see him so little altered. Now,
apart from the dress, if he is in any way changed from the picture, it
is in a look of greater youth and less sombreness. The portrait is
handsome, but the original is better.
Had it not been so, I imagine I might have felt vastly different when
I was seized and enfolded and--kissed! As it was I cannot remember
that, even at the moment of this extraordinary proceeding, I was
otherwise than pleased, nor that the dark hints of Mr. Landale
concerning Sir Adrian's madness returned to disturb my mind in the
least.
And yet I found myself enveloped in great strong arms out of which I
could not have extricated myself by the most frantic efforts--although
the folding was soft and tender--and I loved that impression. Why? I
cannot say.
His words of love were not addressed to me; from his exclamation I
knew that the real and present Molly was not the true object of his
sudden ecstasy.
And yet I am glad that this is the first man who has been able to kiss
Molly de Savenaye. It is quite incomprehensible; I ought to be
indignant.
Now the whole secret of my reception is plain to see, and it is
pathetic; Sir Adrian Landale was in love with my mother; when she was
an unprotected widow he followed her to our own country; if she had
not died soon after, he would have married her.
What a true knight must this Sir Adrian be, to keep so fresh for
twenty years the remembrance of his boyish love that when I came in
upon him to look at him with _her_ eyes, it was to find him pondering
upon her, and to fill his soul with the rapturous thought that his
love had come back to him. Though I was aware that all this fervour
was not addressed to me, there was something very gratifying in being
so like one who could inspire such long-lived passion.--Yes, it was
unexpectedly pleasant and comforting to be so received. And the tender
care, the thoughtful solicitude next bestowed on the limp and
dishevelled waif of the sea by my _beau tenebreux_ were unmistakably
meant for Molly and no one else, whatever his first imaginings may
have been, and they were quite as interesting to receive.
The half-hour I spent, cosily ensconced by his hands, and waited upon
by his queer household, was perhaps the best I have ever known. He
stood by the fireplace, looking down from his great height, with a
wondering smile upon me. I declare that the loving kindness of his
eyes, which he has wide, grey, and beautiful, warmed me as much as the
pyramid of logs he had set burning on the hearth!
I took a good reckoning of the man, from under the gigantic collar, in
which, I felt, my head rested like a little egg at the bottom of a
warm nest. "And so," I thought, "here is the Light-keeper of Scarthey
Island!" And I was obliged to confess that he was a more
romantic-looking person than even in my wildest dreams I had pictured
to myself--that in fact I had found out for the first time _the man_
really approved of.
And I congratulated myself on my own cleverness--for it was evident
that, just as I had suspected from Rene's reticent manner, even by him
our existence at Pulwick had not been mentioned to "the master."
And as Mr. Landale was quite determined to avail himself of his
brother's _sauvagerie_ not to let him know anything about us, on his
side, but for me we might have remained at and departed from Pulwick
unknown to the head of the house! And what a pity that would have
been!
Now, _why_ did not Mr. Landale wish his brother to know? Did he think
(as indeed has happened) that the Light-keeper would take too kindly
to the Savenaye children? Or to one of them? If so, he will be _bien
attrappe_, for there is no doubt that my sudden and dramatic arrival
upon his especial domain has made an impression on him that no meeting
prepared and discussed beforehand could have produced.
Adrian Landale may have been in love with our beautiful mamma in his
boyish days, but now, Sir Adrian, the _man_ is in love with the
beautiful Molly!
That is positive.
I was a long time before I could go to sleep in the tower; it was too
perfect to be in bed in such a place, safe and happy in the midst of
the rage I could hear outside; to have seen the unknown, to have found
him such as he is--to be under _the Light_!
What would have happened if my cousin had really been mad (and Rene
his keeper, as that stupid country-side wit suggested in my ear the
other night at dinner)? It would have been still more of an adventure
of course, but not one which even "Murthering Moll the Second" can
regret. Or if he had been a dirty, untidy hermit, as Madeleine
thought? That would have spoilt all.
Thus in the owl's nest, as Mr. Landale (spiteful creature!) called it
to Tanty, there lives not owl any more than lunatic. A polished
gentleman, with white, exquisite hands, who, when he is discovered by
the most unexpected of visitors, is shaven as smooth as Rupert
himself; has the most unexceptionable of snowy linen and
old-fashioned, it is true, but most well-fitting clothes.
As for the entertainment for the said casual visitor, not even Pulwick
with all its resources (where housekeeping, between the fussy brother
and the docile sister is a complicated science) could have produced
more real comfort.
In the morning, when I woke late (it was broad daylight), feeling as
if I had been beaten and passed through a mangle, for there was not an
inch of my poor body that was not sore, I had not turned round and so
given sign of life, before I heard a whisper outside my door; then
comes a sturdy knock and in walks old Margery, still dignified as a
queen's housekeeper, bearing a bowl of warm frothy milk.
And this being gratefully drunk by me, she gravely inquires, in her
queer provincial accent, how I am this morn; and then goes to report
to some anxious inquirer (whom?--I can easily guess) that with the
exception of my cut foot I am very well.
Presently she returns and lights a blazing fire. Then in come my dress
and linen and my one shoe, all cleaned, dried and mended, only my poor
habit is so torn and so stiff that I have to put up with Margery's
best striped skirt in lieu of it, till she has time to mend and wash
it. As it is she must have been at work all night upon these repairs
for me.
Again she goes out--for another consultation, I suppose--and comes
back to find me half clad, hopping about the room; this time she has
got nice white linen bandages and with them ties up my little foot,
partly for the cuts, partly for want of a sandal, till it is twice the
size of its companion. But I can walk on it.
Then my strange handmaid--who by the way is a droll, grumbling old
soul, and orders me about as if she were still my nurse--dresses me
and combs my hair, which will not yet awhile be rid of all its sand.
And so, in due course, Molly emerges from her bower, as well tended
almost as she might have been at Bath, except that Margery's striped
skirt is a deal too short for her and she displays a little more of
one very nice ankle and one gouty foot than fashion warrants.
And in this manner the guest goes to meet her host in the great room.
He was walking up and down as if impatiently expecting me, and when I
hobbled in, he came forward with a smile on his face which, once more,
I thought beautiful.
"God be praised!" he said, taking both my hands and kissing one of
them, with his fine air of gallantry which was all the more delightful
on account of his evident earnestness, "you seem none the worse for
this terrible adventure. I dreaded this morning to hear that you were
in a fever. You know," he added so seriously that I had to smile, "you
might easily have had a fever from this yesterday's work; and what
should we have done without doctor and medicines!"
"You have a good surgeon, at least," said I laughing and pointing at
my swaddled extremity. He laughed too at the _enmitouflage_. "I tried
to explain how it was to be done," he said, "but I think I could have
managed it more neatly myself."
Then he helped me to the arm-chair, and Rene came in, and, after a
profound bow (which did not preclude much staring and smiling at me
afterwards), laid, on a dazzling tablecloth, a most tempting
breakfast, explaining the while, in his odd English, "The bread is
stale, for we bake only twice a month. But there are some cakes hot
from the fire, some eggs, new laid last evening, some fresh milk, some
tea. It was a happy thing I arrived yesterday for there was no more
tea. The butter wants, but Mistress Margery will have some made
to-morrow, so that the demoiselle will not leave without having tasted
our Scarthey butter."
All the while Sir Adrian looked on with a sort of dreamy smile--a
happy smile!
"Poor Rene!" he said, when the man had left the room, "one would think
that you have brought to him almost as much joy as to me."
I wondered what Mr. Landale would have said had he through some magic
glass been able to see this little feast. I never enjoyed a meal more.
As for my host, he hardly touched anything, but, I could see, was all
absorbed in the delight of looking at me; and this he showed quite
openly in the most child-like manner.
Not one of the many fine gentlemen it has been my fate to meet in my
six months' apprenticeship to the "great world," not cousin Rupert
himself with all his elaborate politeness (and Rupert has de _grandes
manieres_, as Tanty says), could have played the host with a more
exquisite courtesy, and more true hospitality. So I thought, at least.
Now and again, it is true, while his eyes were fixed on me, I would
see how the soul behind them was away, far in the past, and then at a
word, even at a movement, back it would come to me, with the tenderest
softening I have ever seen upon a human face.
* * * * *
It was only at the end of breakfast that he suddenly adverted to the
previous day.
"Of course," he said, hesitatingly, but keeping a frank gaze on mine,
"you must have thought me demented when--when you first entered,
yesterday."
Now, I had anticipated this apology as inevitable, and I was prepared
to put him at his ease.
"I----? Not at all," I said quite gravely; and, seeing the puzzled
expression that came upon his face, I hastened to add in lower tones:
"I know I am very like my mother, and it was her name you called out
upon seeing me." And then I stopped, as if that had explained
everything.
He looked at me with a wondering air, and fell again into a muse.
After a while he said, with his great simplicity which seems somehow
in him the last touch of the most perfect breeding: "Yes, such an
apparition was enough to unhinge any one's mind for the moment. You
never knew her, child, and therefore never mourned her death. But
we--that is, Rene and I, who tried so hard to save her--though it is
so long ago, we have not forgotten."
It was then I asked him to tell me about the mother I had never known.
At first it was as if he could not; he fell into a great silence,
through which I could feel the working of his old sorrow. So then I
said to him quickly, for I feared he thought me an indiscreet
trespasser upon sacred ground, that he must remember my right to know
more than the vague accounts I had been given of my mother's history.
"No one will tell me of her," I said. "It is hard, for I am her own
daughter."
"It is wrong," he said very gently; "you ought to know, for you are
indeed, most verily, her own daughter."
And then by fragments he tried to tell me a little of her beauty, her
loving heart, her faithfulness and bravery. At first it was with
great tripping sighs as if the words hurt him, but by and by it came
easier, and with his eyes fixed wistfully on me he took me, as it
were, by his side through all their marvellous adventures.
And thus I heard the stirring story of the "Savenaye band," and I felt
prouder of my race than I had ever been before. Hitherto, being a
Savenaye only meant the pride our aunt tried to instil into us of
being undeniably _biennees_ and connected with numbers of great
families. But the tale of the deeds mine had done for the King's
cause, and especially the achievements of my own mother in starting
such an expedition after my father's death, and following its fortunes
to the bitter end, made my blood tingle with a new emotion.
Little wonder that Sir Adrian should have devoted his life to her
service. How madly enthralled I should have been, being a man, and
free and strong, by the presence of a woman such as my mother. I, too,
would have prostrated myself to worship her image returning to
life--and I am that living, living portrait!
When he came to the story of her death, he hesitated and finally
stopped. It must have been horrible. I could see it in his eyes, and I
dared not press him.
Now, I suppose I am the only one in the world, besides Rene, who knows
this man as he is. And I am proud of it.
And it is for this constancy, which no vulgar soul of them can
understand, that Rupert and his class have dubbed the gallant
gentleman a madman. It fills me with scorn of them. I do not yet know
what love is, therefore of course I cannot fathom its grief; but this
much I know--that if I loved and yet could not reach as high as ever
love may reach both in joy and sorrow, I should despise myself. I,
too, would draw the utmost from life that life can give.
He never even hinted at his love for my mother; speaking of himself
throughout as Rene might, as of her humble devoted servant merely. And
then the question began to gnaw at me. "Did she love him?" and
somehow, I felt as if I could not rest till I knew; and I had it on my
lips twenty times to cry out to him: "I know you loved her: oh! tell
me, did she love you?" And yet I dared no more have done so, and
overstepped the barrier of his gentle, reticent dignity, than I could
have thrust the lighthouse tower down; and I could not think, either,
whether I should be glad to hear that she had loved him, or that she
had not. Not even here, alone with myself, can I answer that question.
But though I respect him because he is as I have found him, and
understand how rare a personality it takes to achieve such refinement
of faithfulness, it seems to me, that to teach this constant lover to
forget the past in the present, would be something worth living
for--something worthy of _me_!
Molly!--What is the meaning of this? You have never before put that
thought in words, even to yourself! But let me be frank, or else what
is the use of this diary?
Looking back to those delightful three days, did not the _thought_
come to me, if not the words? Well, well, it is better, sometimes, I
believe, to let oneself drift, than to try and guide the boat; and I
must hurry back to Scarthey or I shall never have told my story....
How swiftly time had flown by us! I sitting in the arm-chair, with the
old dog's muzzle on my lap, and Sir Adrian standing by his great
chimney; the clock struck twelve, in the midst of the long silence,
and I had thought that barely an hour had passed.
I got up, and, seeing me limp in my attempt to walk, Sir Adrian gave
me his arm; and so we went round the great room _bras dessus_, _bras
dessous_, and it already seemed quite natural to feel like an intimate
friend in that queer dwelling.
We paused a long time in silence by the window, the tempest wind was
still raging, but the sky was clear, and all round us was a wonderful
sight; the sea, as far as eyes could reach, white with foam, lashed
and tossing in frenzy round the rock on which we stood so safely, and
rising in long jets of spray, which now and then dashed as far as our
window; and when I looked down nearer, I could see the little stunted
trees, bending backwards and forwards under the blast, and an odd idea
came to my mind:--they looked to me when they caught my sight, as
though they were bowing deep, hurriedly and frantically greeting me
among them.
I glanced up at my silent companion, the true knight, and found his
wide grey eyes fixed upon me with the same expression that was
already familiar to me, which I had especially noted as he told me his
long tale of olden times.
This time I felt the look go to my heart. _And then the thought first
came to my mind, all unformed, but still sweet._
I don't know exactly why, but in answer to his sad look, I smiled at
him, without a word, upon which he suddenly grew pale. After a while
he gave a sigh, and, as he drew my arm again through his, I fancy his
hand trembled a little.
When he had taken me back to my chair, he walked to and fro in
silence, looking at me ever and anon.
A long time we passed thus, without speaking; but it seemed as if our
thoughts were intermixing in harmony in the midst of our silence. And
then the spell was broken by Rene, who never came in without making me
his great scrape, trying hard not to beam too obtrusively in the
delight that evidently overtakes him whenever he sets eyes on me.
It was after a prolonged talk between him and the master, I fancy,
concerning the means of attending fitly upon my noble and delicate
person, that Sir Adrian, brought back, evidently, to the consideration
of present affairs, began to be exercised about the best means of
whiling away my time. When he hinted at the difficulty, I very soon
disposed of it.
I told him I had never been so happy in my life before--that the hours
went all too quickly--I told him there was so much he and Rene had yet
to tell me of their wonderful adventures, that I thought I should have
to carry them back to Pulwick with me. At the mention of Pulwick his
brow darkened, and Rene turned away to cough into his hand, and I saw
that I had gone too fast. (N.B.--Pulwick is evidently a sore subject;
I am sure I am not surprised. I can conceive how Rupert and Sophia
would drive a man of Sir Adrian's sensitiveness nearly to desperation.
Yet I _have_ brought Sir Adrian back to Pulwick, in spite of all. Is
not that a feather in my cap?)
But to return; I next made Rene laugh aloud and Sir Adrian give his
indulgent smile--such as a father might give to his child--by adding
that when I was bored I would soon let them know. "I always do," I
said, "for I consider that a duty to myself."
"God knows," said this strange man then, half smiling, "I would we
could keep you here for ever."
It was almost a declaration, but his eyes were far off--it was not
addressed to me.
I soon found that the recollection of all the extraordinary incidents
Sir Adrian had lived through, is one neither of pride nor pleasure to
him, but, all the same, never has anything in books seemed to me so
stirring, as the tale of relentless fate, of ever-recurring battles
and struggles and misfortunes told by the man who, still in the
strength of life, has now chosen to forego everything that might for
the remainder of his days have compensated him.
Willing as he was to humour me, however, and disproportionately
anxious to amuse me, it was little more than the dry bones of his
history, I was able to obtain from him.
With Rene's help, however, and my own lively imagination I have been
able to piece together a very wonderful skeleton, from these same dry
bones, and, moreover, endow it with flesh and blood and life.
Rene was very willing to descant upon his master's exploits, as far as
he knew them: "Whew, Mademoiselle should have seen him fight!" he
would say, "a lion, Mademoiselle, a real lion!"
And then I would contrast the reposeful, somewhat immobile
countenance, the dreaming eye, the almost womanly softness of his
smile, with the picture, and find the contrast piquant in the extreme.
Concerning his present home Sir Adrian was more willing to speak--I
had told him how the light on the little island had fascinated me from
the distance, and all the surmises I had made about it.
"And so, it was in order to see what sort of dungeon they kept the
madman in," he said, laughing quietly, "that you pushed the
reconnaissance, which nearly sent you into the jaws of death!"
I was so struck, at first, by his speaking of himself as the reputed
"madman" that I could not answer. To think of him as serenely
contemptuous of the world's imputation--and an imputation so galling
as this one of being irresponsible for his actions--and deliberately
continuing his even way without taking the trouble to refute it, has
given me an insight into his nature, that fills me with admiration,
and yet, at the same time, with a sort of longing to see him
reinstated in his proper place, and casting out those slandering
interlopers.
But, as he was waiting to be answered, I had to collect my thoughts
and admit, not without a little bashfulness, that my first account of
my exploit had contained a slight prevarication.
In all he has to say about his little Scarthey domain, about the
existence he has made for himself there, I cannot help noticing with
what affection he speaks of Rene. Rene, according to Sir Adrian, is
everything and everywhere; a perfect familiar genius; he is counsellor
as well as valet, plays his master's game of chess as well as shaves
him, can tune his organ, and manage his boat, and cast his nets, for
he is fisherman as well as gardener; he is the steward of this
wonderful little estate, and its stock of one pony, one cow, and
twelve hens; he tends the light, and can cook a dinner a great deal
better than his great rival, old Margery.
Of this last accomplishment we had good proof in the shape of various
dainties that appeared at our dinner. For when I exclaimed in
astonishment, the master said, well pleased, and pointing to the
attentive major-domo: "This is Rene's way of spoiling me. But now he
has surpassed himself to celebrate so unique an occasion."
And Rene's face was all one grin of rapture. I observe that on
occasions his eyes wander quite tenderly from me to his master.
Shall I ever enjoy dinners again like those in that old ruined tower!
Or hours like those during which I listened to tales of peril and
adventure, or to the music that pealed forth from the distant corner,
when Sir Adrian sat down to his organ and made it speak the wordless
language of the soul: that language that made me at times shiver with
a mad yearning for life, more life; at times soothed my heart with a
caress of infinite softness.
How is it that our organ-songs at the convent _never_ moved me in this
fashion?
Ah! those will be days to remember; all the more for being certain
that they will not be forgotten by him. Yes, those days have brought
some light into his melancholy life.
Even Rene knows that. "Oh, my lady," said he to me as he was leaving
the island yesterday. "You have come like the good fairy, you have
brought back the joy of life to his honour: I have not heard him
really laugh--before this year passed I did not believe he knew any
more how to laugh--what you can call laugh!"
It is quite true. I had made some droll remark about Tanty and Cousin
Sophia, and when he laughed he looked like a young man.
He was quick enough in grasping at a pretext for keeping me yet
another day. Yesterday the wind having suddenly abated in the night,
there was quite a bevy of little fishing-boats sailing merrily away.
And the causeway at low water was quite visible. As we looked out I
know the same idea came to both our minds, though there was no word
between us. At last it was I who spoke. "The crossing is quite safe,"
said I. And I added, as he answered nothing, "I almost wish now it was
not. How quick the time has gone by, here!"
His countenance when I looked up was darker. He kept his eyes fixed in
the distance. At last he said in a low voice:
"Yes, I suppose it is high time you should go back."
"I am sure I don't wish it," I said quite frankly--he is not the sort
of man with whom one would ever think of _minauderie_, "but Madeleine
will be miserable about me."
"And so you would really care to stop here," said he, with a smile of
wonder on his face, "if it were not for that reason?"
"Naturally I would," said I. "I feel already as cosy as a tame cat
here. And if it were not for Madeleine, poor little Madeleine, who
must be breaking her heart!--But then how can I go back?--I have no
wraps and only one shoe?"
His face had cleared again. He was walking up and down in his usual
way, whilst I hopped back, with more limping than was at all
necessary, to my favourite arm-chair.
"True, true," he said, as if speaking to himself, "you cannot walk,
with one shoe and a bandaged foot. And your clothes are too thin for
the roundabout sea journey in this cold wind. This is what we shall
do, child," he went on, coming up to me with a sage expression that
struggled with his evident eager desire. "Rene shall go off, as soon
as the tide permits, carrying the good news of your safety to your
sister, and bring back some warm things for you to wear to-morrow
morning, and I shall write to Rupert to send a carriage, to wait for
you on the strand."
And so, pleased like two children who have found a means of securing a
further holiday, we wrote both our letters. I wonder whether it
occurred to Sir Adrian, as it did to me, that, if we had been so very
anxious that I should be restored to the care of Pulwick with the
briefest delay, I might have gone with Rene that same day, wrapped up
in a certain cloak which had done good warming service already; and
that, as Rene had constructed with his cunning hands a sufficient if
not very pretty sandal for my damaged foot out of some old piece of
felt, I might have walked from the beach to the fishing village; and
that there, no doubt, a cart or a donkey might have conveyed me home
in triumph.
Perhaps it did _not_ occur to him; and certainly I had no desire to
suggest it on my side.
Thus, soon after mid-day, Master Rene departed alone. And Sir Adrian
and I, both very glad of our reprieve, watched, leaning side by side
upon the window-sill, the brave little craft glide away on the still
ruffled waters, until, when it had grown very small in the distance,
we saw the sail lowered and knew Rene had reached mainland.
And that was perhaps the best day of the three. Rene having been
unexpectedly despatched, we had to help to do everything ourselves
with old Margery, who is rather feeble. The sky was clear and
beautiful; and, followed gravely by Jem the dog, we went round the
little outer domain. I fed the hens, and Sir Adrian carried the pail
when Margery had milked the cow; we paid a visit in his wide paddock
to the pony, who trotted up to his master whinnying with pleasure. We
looked at the waters rushing past like a mill race on the further side
of the island, as the tide was rising, and he explained to me that it
was this rush which makes the neighbourhood of Scarthey so dangerous
to unwary crafts; we went down into the sea-caves which penetrate deep
under the ruins.--They say that in olden days there was a passage
under the rocky causeway that led as far as the old Priory, but all
traces of it have been effaced.
Then, later on, Sir Adrian showed me in detail his library.
"I was made to be a man of books," he said, when I wondered at the
number he had accumulated around him--there must be thousands, "a man
of study, not of action. And you know how fate has treated me. These
have been my one consolation of late years."
And it marvelled me to think that one who had achieved so many manly
deeds, should love musty old tiresome things so much. He really turned
them over quite reverentially. I myself do not think much of books as
companions.
When I made that little confession he smiled rather sadly, and said
that one like me never would lack the suitable companions of youth and
happiness; but that a creature of his unfortunate disposition could
find, in these long rows of folded leaves, the society of the best and
the loftiest minds, not of our age, but of all ages, and, what was
more, could find them ready for intercourse and at their best humour,
just in those hours when he himself was fit and disposed for such
intercourse--and this without dread of inflicting his own misery and
dulness upon them.
But I could not agree with his appreciation. I felt my nose curl with
disdain at the breath of dust and must and age these old tomes gave
forth, and I said again it was, to my mind, but a poor and tame sort
of fellowship.
He was perched on his ladder and had some odd volume in his hand, from
which he was about to give an example in point; on hearing, however,
this uncongenial sentiment he pushed back the book and came down
quickly enough to talk to me. And this was the last of our excursions
among the bookshelves.
Of this I was glad, for I confess it was there I liked Sir Adrian the
least.
When the end of the short day drew near it was time to go and attend
to the beacon. We ascended the ladder-like wooden stairs leading to
the platform. Then I had the _reverse_ of that view that for so many
days had engrossed my interest.
_Pulwick from Scarthey!..._ What a long time it seemed then since I
had left those rooms the windows of which now sent us back the rays of
the setting sun! and I had no desire to return, though return I must
on the morrow.
Rene, of course, had left everything in his usual trim order, so all
we had to do was to see to the lamp. It pleased my fantasy to light
the beacon of Scarthey myself, and I struck the steel and kindled the
brimstone and set fire to the huge, ill-smelling wicks until they gave
a flame as big as my hand; and "there is the light of Scarthey at
close quarters," I thought. And the Light-keeper was bending over me
with his kindly look, humouring me like a child.
As we sat there silently for a while in the twilight, there came from
the little room adjoining the turret an odd sound of flapping and
uncanny, melancholy cries. Sir Adrian rose, and we remembered the
seagull by which he had played the part of good Samaritan.
It had happened on the second day, as the storm was at its height.
There had come a great crash at the window, and we saw something white
that struggled on the sill outside; Sir Adrian opened the casement
(when we had a little tornado of our own inside, and all his papers
began dancing a sarabande in the room), and we gathered in the poor
creature that was hurt and battered and more than half stunned,
opening alternately its yellow bill and its red eyes in the most
absurd manner.
With a solicitude that it amused me to watch, Sir Adrian had tended
the helpless, goose-like thing and then handed it to Rene's further
care.
Rene, it seemed, had thought of trying to tame the wild bird, and had
constructed a huge sort of cage with laths and barrel-hoops, and
installed it there with various nasty, sea-fishy, weedy things, such
as seagulls consider dainty. But the prisoner, now its vigour had
returned, yearned for nothing but the free air, and ever and anon
almost broke its wings in sudden frenzy to escape.
"I wonder at Rene," said Sir Adrian, contemplating the animal with his
grave look of commiseration; "Rene, who, like myself, has been a
prisoner! He will be disappointed, but we shall make one of God's
creatures happy this day. There is not overmuch happiness in this
world."
And, regardless of the vicious pecks aimed at his hands, he with
firmness folded the great strong wings and legs and carried the gull
outside on the parapet.
There the bird sat a moment, astonished, turning its head round at its
benefactor before taking wing; and then it rose flying away in great
swoops--flap, flap--across the waves till we could see it no longer.
Ugly and awkward as the creature looked in its cage, it was beautiful
in its joyful, steady flight, and I was glad to see it go. I must have
been a bird myself in another existence, for I have often that longing
to fly upon me, and it makes my heart swell with a great impatience
that I cannot.
But I could not help remarking to Sir Adrian that the bird's last look
round had been full of anger rather than gratitude, and his answer, as
he watched it sweep heavily away, was too gloomy to please me:
"Gratitude," said he, "is as rare as unselfishness. If it were not so
this world would be different indeed. As it is, we have no more right
to expect the one than the other. And, when all is said and done, if
doing a so-called kind action gives us pleasure, it is only a special
form of self-indulgence."
There is something wrong about a reasoning of this kind, but I could
not exactly point out where.
We both stood gazing out from our platform upon the darkening waters.
Then across our vision there crept, round the promontory, a beautiful
ship with all sails set, looking like some gigantic white bird;
sailing, sailing, so swiftly yet so surely by, through the dim light;
and I cried out in admiration: for there is something in the sight of
a ship silently gliding that always sets my heart beating. But Sir
Adrian's face grew stern, and he said: "A ship is a whitened
sepulchre."
But for all that he looked at it long and pensively.
Now it had struck me before this that Sir Adrian, with all his
kindness of heart, takes but a dismal view of human nature and human
destiny; that to him what spoils the face of this world is that strife
of life--which to me is as the breath of my nostrils, the absence of
which made my convent days so grey and hateful to look back upon.
I did not like to feel out of harmony with him, and so almost angrily
I reproached him.
"Would you have every one live like a limpet on a rock?" cried I.
"Great heavens! I would rather be dead than not be up and doing."
He looked at me gravely, pityingly.
"May _you_ never see what I have seen," said he. "May you never learn
what men have made of the world. God keep your fair life from such
ways as mine has been made to follow."
The words filled me, I don't know why, with sudden misgiving. Is this
life, I am so eager for, but horror and misery after all? Would it be
better to leave the book unopened? They said so at the convent. But
what can they know of life at a convent?
He bent his kind face towards mine in the thickening gloom, as though
to read my thoughts, and his lips moved, but he did not speak aloud.
Then, above the song of the waves as they gathered, rolled in, and
fell upon the shingle all around, there came the beat of oars.
"Hark," said Sir Adrian, "our good Rene!"
His tone was cheerful again, and, as he hurried me away down the
stairs, I knew he was glad to divert me from the melancholy into which
he had allowed himself to drift.
And then "good Rene" came, bringing breezy life and cheerfulness with
him, and a bundle and a letter for me.
Poor Madeleine! It seems she has been quite ill with weeping for
Molly; and, indeed, her dear scrawl was so illegible that I could
hardly read it. Rene says she was nearly as much upset by the joy as
by the grief. Mr. Landale was not at home; he had ridden to meet Tanty
at Liverpool, for the dear old lady has been summoned back in hot
haste with the news of my decease!
He for one, I thought to myself, will survive the shock of relief at
learning that Molly has risen from the dead!
* * * * *
Ting, ting, ting.... There goes my little clock, fussily counting the
hour to tell me that I have written so long a time that I ought to be
tired. And so I am, though I have not told you half of all I meant to
tell!
CHAPTER XVI
THE RECLUSE AND THE SQUIRE
I thought I should never get away from supper and be alone! Rupert's
air of cool triumph--it was triumph, however he may have wished to
hide it--and Tanty's flow of indignation, recrimination, speculation,
and amazement were enough to drive me mad. But I held out. I pretended
I did not mind. My cheeks were blazing, and I talked _a tort et a
travers_. I should have _died_ rather than that Rupert should have
guessed at the tempest in my heart. Now I am alone at last, thank God!
and it will be a relief to confide to my faithful diary the feelings
that have been choking me these last two hours.
"Pride must have a fall." Thus Rupert at supper, with reference, it is
true, to some trivial incident, but looking at me hard and full, and
pointing the words with his meaning smile. The fairies who attended at
my birth endowed me with one power, which, however doubtful a blessing
it may prove in the long run, has nevertheless been an unspeakable
comfort to me hitherto. This is the reverse of what I heard a French
gentleman term _l'esprit de l'escalier_. Thanks to this fairy
godmother of mine, the instant some one annoys or angers me there
rises on the tip of my tongue the most galling rejoinder that can
possibly be made in the circumstances. And I need not add: _I make
it_.
To-night, when Rupert flung his scoff at me, I was ready for him.
"I trust the old adage has not been brought home to you, _Sir_
Rupert," said I, and then pretending confusion. "I beg your pardon," I
added, "I have been so accustomed to address the head of the house
these last days that the word escaped me unawares." The shot told
_well_, and I was glad--glad of the murderous rage in Rupert's eyes,
for I knew I had hit him on the raw. Even Tanty looked perturbed, but
Rupert let me alone for the rest of supper.
He is right nevertheless, that is what stung me. I am humbled, _and I
cannot bear it_!
Sir Adrian has left.
I was so triumphant to bring him back to Pulwick this morning, to have
circumvented Rupert's plans, and (let me speak the truth,) so happy to
have him with me that I did not attempt to conceal my exultation. And
now he has gone, gone without a word to me; only this miserable letter
of determined farewell. I will copy it--for in my first anger I have
so crumpled the paper that it is scarcely readable.
"My child, I must go back to my island. The world is not for me, nor
am I for the world, nor would I cast the shadow of my gloomy life
further upon your bright one. Let me tell you, however, that you have
left me the better for your coming; that it will be a good thought to
me in my loneliness to know of your mother's daughters so close to me.
When you look across at the beacon of Scarthey, child, through the
darkness, think that though I may not see you again I shall ever
follow and keep guard upon your life and upon your sister's, and that,
even when you are far from Pulwick, the light will burn and the heart
of Adrian Landale watch so long as it may beat."
I have shed more tears--hot tears of anger--since I received this than
I have wept in all my life before. Madeleine came in to me just now,
too full of the happiness of having me back, poor darling, to be able
to bear me out of sight again; but I have driven her from me with such
cross words that she too is in tears. I must be alone and I must
collect myself and my thoughts, for I want to state exactly all that
has happened and then perhaps I shall be able to see my way more
clearly.
* * * * *
This morning then, early after breakfast, I started across the waters
between Rene and Sir Adrian, regretting to leave the dear hospitable
island, yet with my heart dancing within me, as gaily as did our
little boat upon the chopping waves, to be carrying the hermit back
with me. I had been deadly afraid lest he should at the last moment
have sent me alone with the servant; but when he put on his big cloak,
when I saw Rene place a bag at the bottom of the boat, I knew he
meant to come--perhaps remain some days at Pulwick, and my spirits
went up, up!
It was a lovely day, too; the air had a crisp, cold sparkle, and the
waters looked so blue under the clear, frosty sky. I could have sung
as we rowed along, and every time I met Sir Adrian's eye I smiled at
him out of the happiness of my heart. His look hung on me--we French
have a word for that which is not translatable, _Il me couvait des
yeux_--and, as every day of the three we had spent together I had
thought him younger and handsomer, so this morning out in the bright
sunlight I said to myself, I could never wish to see a more noble man.
When we landed--and it was but a little way, for the tide was
low--there was the carriage waiting, and Rene, all grins, handed over
our parcels to the footman. Then we got in, the wheels began slowly
dragging across the sand to the road, the poor horses pulling and
straining, for it was heavy work. And Rene stood watching us by his
boat, his hand over his eyes, a black figure against the dazzling
sunshine on the bay; but I could see his white teeth gleam in that
broad smile of his from out of his shadowy face. As, at length, we
reached the high road and bowled swiftly along, I would not let Sir
Adrian have peace to think, for something at my heart told me he hated
the going back to Pulwick, and I so chattered and fixed his attention
that as the carriage drew up he was actually laughing.
When we stopped another carriage in front moved off, and there on the
porch stood--Rupert and Tanty!
Poor Tanty, her old face all disfigured with tears and a great black
bonnet and veil towering on her head. I popped _my_ head out of the
window and called to them.
When they caught sight of me, both seemed to grow rigid with
amazement. And then across Rupert's face came such a look of fury, and
such a deathly pallor! I had thought, certainly, he would not weep the
eyes out of his head for me; but that he should be stricken with
_anger_ to see me alive I had hardly expected, and for the instant it
frightened me.
But then I had no time to observe anything else, for Tanty collapsed
upon the steps and went off into as fine a fit of hysterics as I have
ever seen. But fortunately it did not last long. Suddenly in the
middle of her screams and rockings to and fro she perceived Sir Adrian
as he leant anxiously over her. With the utmost energy she clutched
his arm and scrambled to her feet.
"Is it you, me poor child?" she cried, "Is it you?"
And then she turned from him, as he stood with his gentle, earnest
face looking down upon her, and gave Rupert a glare that might have
slain him. I knew at once what she was thinking: I had experienced
myself that it was impossible to see Sir Adrian and connect his
dignified presence for one second with the scandalous impression
Rupert would have conveyed.
As for Rupert, he looked for the first time since I knew him
thoroughly unnerved.
Then Tanty caught me by the arm and shook me:
"How _dare_ you, miss, how dare you?" she cried, her face was flaming.
"How dare I what?" asked I, as I hugged her.
"How dare you be walking about when it is dead you are, and give us
all such a fright--there--there, you know what I mean.--Adrian," she
whimpered, "give me your arm, my nephew, and conduct me into your
house. All this has upset me very much. But, oh, am I not glad to see
you both, my children!"
In they went together. And my courage having risen again to its usual
height, I waited purposely on the porch to tease Rupert a little. I
had a real pleasure in noticing how he trembled with agitation beneath
his mask.
"Well, are you glad to see me, Cousin Rupert?" said I.
He took my hand; his fingers were damp and cold.
"Can you ask, my fair cousin?" he sneered. "Do you not see me overcome
with joy? Am I not indeed especially favoured by Providence, for is
not this the second time that a beloved being has been restored into
my arms like Lazarus from the grave?"
I was indignant at the heartlessness of his cynicism, and so the
answer that leaped to my lips was out before I had time to reflect
upon its unladylikeness.
"Ay," said I, "and each time you have cried in your soul, like Martha,
'Behold, he stinketh.'"
My cousin laughed aloud.
"You have a sharp tongue," he said, "take care you are not cut with it
yourself some day."
Just then the footmen who had been unpacking Tanty's trunks from the
first carriage laid a great wooden box upon the porch, and one of them
asked Rupert which room they should bring it to.
Rupert looked at it strangely, and then at me.
"Take it where you will," he exclaimed at last. "There lies good
money-value wasted--though, after all, one never knows."
"What is it?" said I, struck by a sinister meaning in his accents.
"Mourning, beautiful Molly--mourning for
you--crape--gowns--weepers--wherewith to have dried your sister's
tears--but not needed yet, you see."
He bared his teeth at me over his shoulder--I could not call it a
smile--and then paused, as he was about to brush past into the hall,
to give me the _pas_, with a mocking bow.
He does not even attempt now to hide his dislike of me, nor to draw
for me that cloak of suave composure over the fierce temper that is
always gnawing at his vitals as surely as fox ever gnawed little
Spartan. He sees that it is useless, I suppose. As I went upstairs to
greet Madeleine, I laughed to myself to think how Fate had
circumvented the plotter.
Alas, how foolish I was to laugh! Rupert is a dangerous enemy, and I
have made him mine; and in a few hours he has shuffled the cards, and
now he holds the trumps again. For that there is _du Rupert_ in this
sudden departure of my knight, I am convinced. Of course, _his_
reasons are plain to see. It is the vulgarest ambition that prompts
him to oust his brother for as long as possible--for ever, if he can.
And now, _I_ am outwitted. _Je rage._
I have never been so unhappy. My heart feels all crushed. I see no
help anywhere. I cannot in common decency go and seek Sir Adrian upon
his island again, and so I sit and cry.
* * * * *
Immediately upon his arrival Tanty was closeted with Sir Adrian in the
chamber allotted to her for so long a space of time that Rupert,
watching below in an inward fever, now flung back in his chair biting
his nails, now restlessly pacing the room from end to end, his mind
working on the new problem, his ears strained to catch the least sound
the while, was fain at last to ring and give orders for the immediate
sounding of the dinner bell (a good hour before that meal might be
expected) as the only chance of interrupting a conference which boded
so ill to his plans. Meanwhile Madeleine sobbed out the story of her
grief and joy on Molly's heart; and Miss Sophia, who thus
inconsiderately arrested in the full congenial flow of a new grief,
was thrown back upon her old sorrows for consolation, had felt
impelled to pay a visit to the rector's grave with the watering-can,
and an extra pocket-handkerchief.
Never perhaps since that worthy clergyman had gasped out his last
struggling breath upon her bosom had she known more unmixed
satisfaction than during those days when she hovered round poor
prostrate Madeleine's bed and poured into her deaf ear the tale of her
own woes and the assurances of her thoroughly understanding sympathy.
She had been looking forward, with a chastened eagerness, to the
arrival of the mourning, and had already derived a good deal of
pleasure from the donning of certain aged weeds treasured in her
wardrobe; it was therefore a distinct though quite unconscious
disappointment when the news came which put an untimely end to all
these funereal revels.
At the shrill clamour of the bell, as Rupert anticipated, Adrian
emerged instantly from his aunt's room, and a simultaneous jingle of
minor bells announced that the ladies' attention was in all haste
being turned to toilet matters.
Whatever had passed between his good old relative and his sensitive
brother, Rupert's quick appraising glance at the latter's face, as he
went slowly down the corridor to his own specially reserved apartment,
was sufficient to confirm the watcher in his misgiving that matters
were not progressing as he might wish.
Sir Adrian seemed absorbed, it is true, in grave thought, but his
countenance was neither distressed nor gloomy. With a spasm of fierce
annoyance, and a bitter curse on the meddling of old females and
young, Rupert had to admit that never had he seen his brother look
more handsome, more master of the house and of himself, more _sane_.
A few minutes later the guests of Pulwick assembled in the library one
by one, with the exception of Sophia, still watering the last
resting-place of the Rev. Herbert Lee.
Adrian came first, closely followed by Tanty, who turned a marked
shoulder upon her younger nephew and devoted all her attention to the
elder--in which strained condition of affairs the conversation between
the three was not likely to be lively. Next the sisters, attired alike
in white, entered together, bringing a bright vision of youth and
loveliness into the old room.
At sight of them Adrian sprang to his feet with a sudden sharp
ejaculation, upon which the two girls halted on the threshold, half
shy, half smiling. For the moment, in the shadow of the doorway, they
were surprisingly like each other, the difference of colouring being
lost in their curious similarity of contour.
My God, were there then two Ceciles?
Beautiful, miraculous, consoling had been to the mourner in his
loneliness the apparition of his dead love restored to life, every
time his eyes had fallen upon Molly during these last few blessed
days; but this new development was only like a troublous mocking
dream.
Tanty turned in startled amazement. She could feel the shudder that
shook his frame, through the hand with which he still unconsciously
grasped at the back of her chair. An irrepressible smile crept to
Rupert's lips.
The little interlude could not have lasted more than a few seconds
when Molly, recovering her usual self-possession, came boldly forward,
leading her sister by the tips of her fingers.
"Cousin Adrian," she said, "my sister Madeleine has many things to say
to you in thanks for your care of my valuable person, but just now she
is too bashful to be able to utter one quarter of them."
As the girls emerged into the room, and the light from the great
windows struck upon Madeleine's fair curls and the delicate pallor of
her cheek; as she extended her hand, and raised to Adrian's face,
while she dropped her pretty curtsey, the gaze of two unconsciously
plaintive blue eyes, the man dashed the sweat from his brow with a
gesture of relief.
Nothing could be more unlike the dark beauty of the ghost of his
dreams or its dashing presentment now smiling confidently upon him
from Tanty's side.
He took the little hand with tender pressure: Cecile's daughter must
be precious to him in any case. Madeleine, moreover, had a certain
appealing grace that was apt to steal the favour that Molly won by
storm.
"But, indeed, I could never tell Sir Adrian how grateful I am," said
she, with a timidity that became her as thoroughly as Molly's
fearlessness suited her own stronger personality.
At the sound of her voice, again the distressful nightmare-like
feeling seized Sir Adrian's soul.
Of all characteristics that, as the phrase is, "go in families,"
voices are generally the most peculiarly generic.
When Molly first addressed Sir Adrian, it had been to him as a voice
from the grave; now Madeleine's gentle speech tripped forth upon that
self-same note--Cecile's own voice!
And next Molly caught up the sound, and then Madeleine answered again.
What they said, he could not tell; these ghosts--these speaking
ghosts--brought back the old memories too painfully. It was thus
Cecile had spoken in the first arrogance of her dainty youth and
loveliness; and in those softer tones when sorrow and work and failure
had subdued her proud spirit. And now she laughs; and hark, the laugh
is echoed! Sir Adrian turns as if to seek some escape from this
strange form of torture, meets Rupert's eye and instinctively braces
himself into self-control.
"Come, come," cried Miss O'Donoghue, in her comfortable, commonplace,
cheerful tone: "This dinner bell of yours, Adrian, has raised false
hopes, which seem to tarry in their fulfilment. What are we waiting
for, may I ask?"
Adrian looked at his brother.
"Rupert, you know, my dear aunt," he said, "has the ordering of these
matters."
"Sophia is yet absent," quoth Rupert drily, "but we can proceed
without her, if my aunt wishes."
"Pooh, yes. Sophia!" snorted Miss O'Donoghue, grasping Sir Adrian's
arm to show herself quite ready for the march, "Sophia! We all know
what she is. Why, my dear Adrian, she'll never hear the bell till it
has stopped this half hour."
"Dinner," cried Rupert sharply to the butler, whom his pull of the
bell-rope had summoned. And dinner being served, the guests trooped
into that dining-room which was full of such associations to Sir
Adrian. It was a little thing, but, nevertheless, intensely galling to
Rupert to have to play second gentleman, and give up his privileges as
host to his brother. Usually indeed Adrian cared too little to stand
upon his rights, and insisted upon Rupert's continuing to act in his
presence as he did in his absence; but this afternoon Tanty had left
him no choice.
Nevertheless, as Mr. Landale sat down between the sisters, and turned
smiling to address first one and then the other, it would have taken a
very practised eye to discern under the extra urbanity of his
demeanour the intensity of his inward mortification. He talked a great
deal and exerted himself to make the sisters talk likewise, bantering
Molly into scornful and eager retorts, and preventing Madeleine from
relapsing into that state of dreaminess out of which the rapid
succession of her recent sorrow and joy had somewhat shaken her.
The girls were both excited, both ready to laugh and jest. Tanty,
satisfied to see Adrian preside at the head of the table with a grave,
courteous, and self-contained manner that completely fulfilled her
notions of what family dignity required of him, cracked her jokes, ate
her dinner, and quaffed her cup with full enjoyment, laughing
indulgently at her grand-nieces' sallies, and showing as marked a
disfavour to Rupert as she deemed consistent with good manners.
The poor old lady little guessed how the workings in each brother's
mind were all the while, silently but inevitably, tending towards the
destruction of her newly awakened hopes.
* * * * *
There was silence between Sir Adrian and Rupert when at last they were
left alone together. The elder's gaze wandering in space, his absent
hand softly beating the table, his relaxed frame--all showed that his
mind was far away from thought of the younger's presence. The relief
to be delivered from the twin echoes of a haunting voice--once the
dearest on earth to him--was immense. But his whole being was still
quivering under the first acuteness of so disturbing an impression.
His years of solitude, moreover, had ill prepared him for social
intercourse; the laughter, the clash of conversation, the noise on
every side, the length of the meal, the strain to maintain a fit and
proper attitude as host, had tried to the utmost nerves by nature
hypersensitive.
Rupert, who had leisure to study the suddenly lined and tired
lineaments of the abstracted countenance before him, noted with
self-congratulation the change that a few hours seemed to have wrought
upon it, and decided that the moment had come to strike.
"So, Adrian," he said, looking down demurely as he spoke into the
glass of wine he had been toying with--Rupert was an abstemious man.
"So, Adrian, you have been playing the chivalrous role of rescuer of
distressed damsels--squire of dames and what not. The last one would
have ascribed to you at least at this end of your life. Ha," throwing
up his head with a mirthless laugh; "how little any of us would have
thought what a blessing in disguise your freak of self-exile was
destined to become to us!"
At the sound of the incisive voice Adrian had returned with a slight
shiver from distant musing to the consciousness of the other's
presence.
"And did you not always look upon my exile as a blessing undisguised,
Rupert?" answered he, fixing his brother with his large grave gaze.
Rupert's eyelids wavered a little beneath it, but his tone was coolly
insolent as he made reply:
"If it pleases you to make no count of our fraternal affection for
you, my dear fellow; if by insisting upon _our_ unnatural depravity
you contrive a more decent excuse for your own vagaries, you have my
full permission to dub me Cain at once and have done with it."
A light sigh escaped the elder man, and then he resolutely closed his
lips. It was by behaviour such as this, by his almost diabolical
ingenuity in the art of being uncongenial, that Rupert had so largely
contributed to make his own house impossible to him. But where was the
use of either argument or expostulation with one so incapable of even
understanding the mainsprings of his actions? Moreover (_he_, above
all, must not forget it) Rupert had suffered through him in pride and
self-esteem. And yet, despite Sir Adrian's philosophic mind, despite
his vast, pessimistic though benevolent tolerance for erring human
nature, his was a very human heart; and it added not a little to the
sadness of his lot at every return to Pulwick (dating from that first
most bitter home-coming) to feel in every fibre of his being how
little welcome he was where the ties of flesh and blood alone, not to
speak of his most ceaseless yet delicate generosity, should have
ensured him a very different reception.
Again he sighed, this time more deeply, and the corners of Rupert's
lips, the arch of his eyebrows, moved upwards in smiling
interrogation.
"It must have given you a shock," said Mr. Landale, carelessly, "to
see the resemblance between Molly and poor Cecile; not, of course,
that _I_ can remember her; but Tanty says it is something startling."
Adrian assented briefly.
"I daresay it seems quite painful to you at first," proceeded Rupert,
much in the same deliberate manner as a surgeon may lay bare a wound,
despite the knowledge of the suffering he is inflicting, "I noticed
that you seemed upset during dinner. But probably the feeling will
wear off."
"Probably."
"Madeleine resembles her father, I am told; but then you never saw the
_feu Comte_, did you? Well, they are both fine handsome girls, full of
life and spirits. It is our revered relative's intention to leave them
here--as perhaps she has told you--for two months or so."
"I have begged her," said Sir Adrian gravely, "to make them understand
that I wish them to look upon Pulwick as their home."
"Very right, very proper," cried the other; "in fact I knew that was
what you would wish--and your wishes, of course, are my law in the
matter. By the way, I hope you quite understand, Adrian, how it
happened that I did _not_ notify to you the arrival of these guests
extraordinary--knowing that you have never got over their mother's
death, and all that--it was entirely from a wish to spare you.
Besides, there was your general prohibition about my visitors; I did
not dare to take the responsibility in fact. And so I told Tanty."
"I do not wish to doubt the purity of your motives, though it would
have grieved me had _these_ visitors (no ordinary ones as you yourself
admit) come and gone without my knowledge. As it fell out, however,
even without that child's dangerous expedition, I should have been
informed in any case--Rene knew."
"Rene knew?" cried Rupert, surprised; and "damn Rene" to himself with
heart-felt energy.
That the infernal little spy, as he deemed his brother's servant,
should have made a visit to Pulwick without his knowledge was
unpleasant news, and it touched him on his tenderest point.
But now, replenishing his half-emptied glass to give Adrian no excuse
for putting an end to the conference before he himself desired it, he
plunged into the heart of the task he had set himself without further
delay:
"And what would you wish me to do, Adrian," he asked, with a pretty
air of deference, "in the matter of entertaining these ladies? I have
thought of several things likely to afford them amusement, but, since
you are here, you will readily understand that I should like your
authorisation first. I am anxious to consult you when I can," he
added, apologetically. "So forgive my attacking you upon business
to-night when you seem really so little fitted for it--but you know
one cannot count upon you from one minute to another! What would you
say if I were to issue invitations for a ball? Pulwick was noted for
its hospitality in the days of our fathers, and the gloom that has
hung over the old home these last eight years has been (I suppose)
unavoidable in the circumstances--but none the less a pity. No fear
but that our fair cousins would enjoy such a festivity, and I think I
can promise you that the sound of our revels should not reach as far
as your hermitage."
A slow colour had mounted to Adrian's cheeks; he drew his brows
together with an air of displeasure; Rupert, quick to read these
symptoms, hastened to pursue the attack before response should be
made:
"The idea does not seem to please you," he cried, as if in hurt
surprise. "'Tis true I have now no legal right to think of reviving
the old hospitable traditions of the family; but you must remember,
Adrian, you yourself have insisted on giving me a moral right to act
host here in your absence--you have over and over again laid stress
upon the freedom you wished me to feel in the matter. Hitherto I have
not made use of these privileges; have not cared to do so, beyond an
occasional duty dinner to our nearest neighbours. A lonely widower
like myself, why should I? But now, with these gay young things in the
house--so near to us in blood--I had thought it so much our duty to
provide fitting entertainment for them that your attitude is
incomprehensible to me. Come! does it not strike you as savouring a
little of the unamiable dog in the fable? I know you hate company
yourself, and all the rest of it; but how can these things here affect
you upon your island? As for the budget, it will stand it, I assure
you. I speak hotly; pray excuse me. I own I have looked forward to the
thought of seeing once more young and happy faces around me."
"You mistake me," said Sir Adrian with an effort; "while you are
acting as my representative you have, as you know, all liberty to
entertain what guests you choose, and as you see fit. It is natural,
perhaps, that you should now believe me anxious to hurry back to the
lighthouse, and I should have told you before that it is my intention
this time to remain longer than my wont, in which circumstance the
arrangements for the entertaining of our relatives will devolve upon
myself."
Rupert broke into a loud laugh.
"Forgive me, but the idea is too ludicrous! What sort of funeral
festivities do you propose to provide to the neighbourhood, with you
and Sophia presiding, the living images of mourning and desolation?
There, my dear fellow, I _must_ laugh. It will be the skeleton at the
feast with a vengeance. Why, even to-night, in the bosom of your
family, as it were, your presence lay so like a wet blanket upon us
all that, 'pon my soul, I nearly cracked my voice trying to keep those
girls from noticing it! Seriously, I am delighted, of course, that you
should feel so sportive, and it is high time indeed that the
neighbourhood should see something of you, but I fear you are
reckoning beyond your strength. Anyhow, command me. I shall be anxious
to help you all I can in this novel departure. What are your plans?"
"I have laid no plans," answered Sir Adrian coldly, after a slight
pause, "but you do not need me to tell you, Rupert, that to surround
myself with such gaiety as you suggest is impossible."
"You mean to make our poor little cousins lead as melancholy an
existence as you do yourself then," cried Rupert with an angry laugh.
Matters were not progressing as he could have wished. "I fear this
will cause a good deal of disappointment, not only to them but to our
revered aunt--for she is very naturally anxious to see her charges
married and settled, and she told me that she more or less counted
upon my aid in the matter. Now as you are here of course I have, thank
Heaven, nothing more to say one way or another. But you will surely
think of asking a few likely young fellows over to the house,
occasionally? We are not badly off for eldest sons in the
neighbourhood; Molly, who is as arrant a little flirt, they tell me,
as she is pretty, will be grateful to you for the attention, on the
score of amusement at least."
Mr. Landale, speaking somewhat at random out of his annoyance to have
failed in immediately disgusting the hermit of the responsibilities
his return home might entail, here succeeded by chance in producing
the desired impression.
The idea of Molly--Cecile's double--marrying--worse still, making
love, coquetting before his eyes, was intolerable to Adrian. To have
to look on, and see _Cecile's_ eyes lavish glances of love; _her_
lips, soft words and lingering smiles, upon some country fool; to have
himself to give this duplicate of his love's sweet body to one
unworthy perhaps--it stung him with a pain as keen as it was
unreasonable. It was terrible to be so made, that the past was ever as
living as the present! But he must face the situation, he must grapple
with his own weakness. Tender memories had lured him from his retreat
and made him for a short time almost believe that he could live with
them, happy a little while, in his own home again; but now it was
these very memories that were rising like avengers to drive him hence.
Of course the child must marry if there her happiness lay. Ay, and
both Cecile's children must be amused, made joyful, while they still
could enjoy life--Rupert was right--right in all he said--but he,
Adrian, could not be there to see. That was beyond his endurance.
It was impossible of course, for one so single-minded himself, to
follow altogether the doublings of such a mind as Rupert's; but
through the melancholy relief of this sudden resolution, Adrian was
distinctly conscious of the underlying duplicity, the unworthy motives
which had prompted his brother's arguments.
He rose from the table, and looked down with sad gaze at the younger's
beautiful mask of a face.
"God knows," he said, "God knows, Rupert, I do not so often inflict my
presence upon you that you should be so anxious to show me how much
better I should do to keep away. I admit nevertheless the justice of
all you say. It is but right that Mesdemoiselles de Savenaye should be
surrounded with young and cheerful society; and even were I in a state
to act as master of the revels (here he smiled a little dreamily), my
very presence, as you say, would cast a gloom upon their
merrymaking--I will go. I will go back to the island to-night--I can
rely upon you to assist me to do so quietly without unnecessary scenes
or explanations--yes--yes--I know you will be ready to facilitate
matters! Strange! It is only a few hours ago since Tanty almost
persuaded me that it was my duty to remain here; now you have made me
see that I have no choice but to leave. Have no fear, Rupert--I go. I
shall write to Tanty. But remember only, that as you treat Cecile's
children, so shall I shape my actions towards you in future."
Slowly he moved away, leaving Rupert motionless in his seat; and long
did the younger brother remain moodily fixing the purple bloom of the
grapes with unseeing eyes.
PART III
"CAPTAIN JACK," THE GOLD SMUGGLER