THE SUSPENSE.
The ill-assorted, discordant party pushed on as fast as possible along a
road that, as it neared inhabited country, became rough and uncertain,
and under a sky of diminished light, for the heather on this portion of
the moor had been burnt early in the day, and hardly any of the embers
remained aglow.
No combination was possible that would content all, for every one except
the good-humoured Bessie had some private grudge against another, and
Bessie herself was depressed by the general dissatisfaction.
Anthony Cleverdon was vexed that he had not been left to convey Urith to
her home undisturbed, though he admitted to himself that for her sake
the present accidental arrangement was the best. Julian Crymes, still
incandescent in her anger and jealousy, was unwilling to speak to
Anthony, and unwilling to allow him to leave her side to address a word
to, and show attention to, Urith. When she did speak to him, it was in a
taunting tone, and his answers were curt, almost to rudeness.
The temper of Fox Crymes, never smooth, was now fretted to considerable
asperity; for he was smarting under the sense of rejection. He had asked
for the hand of Urith, and had been refused, and he saw, or suspected
that he saw, a reason for his rejection--an attachment for Anthony
Cleverdon. Fox was vain and conceited, and envious of his namesake, who
had superior physical powers, a finer person, and a better fortune than
himself. He was not sorry that his half-sister was disappointed, for
whatever might distress her, gave pleasure to him. However, the occasion
of her distress on this occasion was something that wounded him as well
as her.
Fox loved Urith, as far as he was capable of loving, but the jealousy he
now felt was no measure of his love; like the famous Serpent's Egg, it
was bred of a score of parents. It was the produce of mortified vanity,
of envy of Anthony Cleverdon's superior gifts of nature and fortune, of
disappointed avarice, quite as much as of rejected love.
Fox Crymes' suit for Urith was not instigated wholly by his admiration
for her charms; it sprang quite as much out of his desire to obtain the
small patrimony which would fall to her on her mother's decease.
Willsworthy was an ancient manor, never of great importance, and without
fertility, yet not despicable in the eyes of a poor gentleman. It lay on
the extreme limits of cultivated land, or rather it may be said to have
occupied the debateable ground between the waste and culture. It
occupied a hill that ran as a spur out of the moorland, between
torrents, and seemed to be what, no doubt, it was, a portion of
wilderness snatched from savagery, and hedged in. It possessed no good
soil, it lay too high for wheat to ripen on it, it was destitute of
these pasture meadows by the waterside, where the grass grows knee-deep,
and is gold-sprinkled in spring with buttercups; it was dominated by
rugged tors, and stood near the entrance of the gorge of the Tavy, where
it roared and leaped, and shot as it came down into the lowlands, and
with it came down the cold blasts that also roared and whirled, and
beat about the lone Manor of Willsworthy.
Mrs. Malvine talked disparagingly of her farm, her brother Solomon Gibbs
averred it was an estate on which to starve, and not to live. Urith
accepted their verdict as final, she knew the need for money that ever
prevailed in her house; and yet Fox Crymes cast greedy eyes upon the
estate. He saw that it possessed capabilities that were disregarded by
the widow and her brother. The manor owned considerable rights. It had
the freedom of the moor, to send out upon it an unlimited number of
sheep and cattle and colts; at a time when English wool was fetching a
high price, and was exported to the Mediterranean, to Cadiz, to Leghorn,
to Palermo, to Marseilles; this was important--it afforded exceptional
opportunities of making money. There needed but the initial outlay on
the stock, their keep was free. Not only so, but sheep in lowlands were,
in wet seasons, afflicted with disease which slew them in great numbers,
which sometimes exterminated entire flocks. But sheep on the moor were
never known thus to suffer; they enjoyed perfect immunity from the many
maladies which attend keeping them on cultivated land.
The climate in the West of England is so mild that it was possible to
let the sheep run on the moor through the major portion of the year,
only for a few months in the depth of the winter, possibly only when
snow lay on the moor, was it needful to provide them with food; and the
meadows of Willsworthy, though they did not produce rank grass, yet
produced hay that was extraordinary sweet and nutritious, and in
sufficient abundance to support a large number of sheep and cattle for
the short time during which they were debarred from foraging for
themselves. Anthony Crymes saw plainly enough, that if he had the
management of the estate of Willsworthy he would make it a mine of gold;
and that the reason why it did not now flourish was the lack of capital
in the acres, and mismanagement. Anthony Crymes knew that some money
would come to him from his father, not indeed much, but just sufficient
for his purpose, should he acquire this property--and he was very
ambitious of obtaining it.
At present, Mrs. Malvine entrusted the conduct of the farm to her
brother Solomon who belied his name; he was a man without any knowledge
of farming, and with no interest save in his violin, and who took
delight only in good company. The farm was allowed to take its course,
which was naturally a retrograde one--a relapse from former culture into
pristine wilderness.
At the period of this tale, some two hundred years ago, every squire
farmed, if not his entire estate, at all events a portion of it. Men of
ancient pedigree, proud of their ancestral properties and mansions, of
their arms and their alliances, did not disdain to ride to market and
cheapen cattle.
The Civil War ruined most of the squires who had taken up arms for the
King, litigation ruined others; then came in the great merchants and
bought the old owners out, and established themselves in their room.
They understood nothing of farming, and esteemed it despicable and
unworthy of their new-fangled gentility to pursue it.
With the gall of envy bitter in his heart did Fox see the other Anthony
walk alongside of Urith, and assume towards her an intimacy to which he
himself had never attained. The girl had ever avoided him, had treated
him with coldness tinged with ill-disguised disdain. She had not made
that effort to veil her dislike which will gloss over a repulse. Fox saw
another man better favoured than himself, reach at a bound a position he
had laboriously tried to mount, and had failed.
Hall, or as the country-folk called it "Yall," was the house of the
Cleverdons. It had belonged to the Glanville estates--had been bought by
old Judge Glanville, in the reign of Elizabeth, who had founded the
family. The Glanvilles had flourished for awhile, and had spread over
the country-side, taking up estate after estate, and had collapsed as
suddenly as they had risen. The Cleverdons had been farmers, renting
Hall, and when that estate was sold old Cleverdon by some means got
together sufficient money to purchase it, and since the purchase had
laid out considerable sums to transform what had been a modest farmhouse
into a pretentious squire's mansion.
Old Anthony was in that transitional state in which, passing from one
rank of life to another, he was comfortable in neither. He was sensitive
and ambitious--sensitive to slights, and ambitious to push himself and
his son into a better social position than that which had been occupied
by his ancestors; and, indeed, by himself in early life. The Crymes
family had been connected with the Glanvilles by marriage, and now old
Anthony schemed on the acquisition of another portion of the Glanville
property, through the marriage of his son and heir with Julian Crymes.
The old man's success had fostered his ambition. He indulged in a dream
of the Cleverdons, by skilful management, assuming eventually the
position once maintained by the Glanvilles.
The Civil Wars had produced vast displacement in the social strata. The
old gentry were failing, and those who had taken part with neither side,
but had waited on their own interests in selfish or indifferent
neutrality, were rewarded by emerging, where others were falling into
ruin, into ripe prosperity. After that Anthony Cleverdon, the elder, had
acquired the freehold of Hall, he had become a widower, and showed no
disposition to take to himself another wife. His marriage had not been a
happy experience, and none had felt the disagreement in it more than
Elizabeth, his eldest daughter, who, after her mother's death, had been
called to manage the household. If the opinion of Magdalen Cleverdon
were to be taken--the unmarried sister of Anthony, senior--who lived in
a small house in Tavistock, the blame of the unhappiness of her
brother's married life lay with his wife; but then the judgment of
Magdalen was warped and partial. When Anthony brought home his young
wife, she--Magdalen--had endeavoured to remain at the head of the house,
to interfere where she could not direct, Mrs. Cleverdon had taken a very
decided line, and refused all intermeddlement, and Magdalen, after a
sharp struggle for supremacy, had left the house routed. Disappointment
had embittered her estimate of her sister-in-law.
But there were other and more substantial grounds for her charging her
sister-in-law with having rendered the marriage an unhappy one. Mrs.
Anthony had been a portionless girl, the daughter of a poor parson;
Margaret Penwarne might have been regarded as a suitable match socially,
but pecuniarily, she was most unsuitable, especially to an ambitious and
money-grasping man.
What her brother could see to admire in Margaret Penwarne, Miss
Cleverdon protested she never could see--she entirely forgot that
Margaret had been endowed with surpassing beauty.
Others beside Magdalen Cleverdon had marvelled at the choice of Anthony,
knowing the character of the man. What could induce a man, whose main
features were ambition and greed, to select as his partner one who had
not a penny, nor was connected with any of the gentle families of the
neighbourhood? Magdalen had not reckoned on the girl's beauty; the
others who wondered had not counted on Anthony's ambition, which would
exert itself in other directions than they considered. His ambition was
deeply tinctured with, if it did not originate in, personal vanity.
Vanity is but ambition in a fool's cap, and that of Cleverdon was well
hung with bells. Because he considered himself the richest man in the
neighbourhood of his class, he esteemed himself also irresistible as a
wooer. He had been treated with considerable severity by his father in
his early years, for the old man had been a strait Puritan, though not
such an one as to risk any money for his cause, or compromise his safety
for it in any way. He allowed his son no freedom, consulted his wishes
in no particular, and allowed him no pocket-money. When the old man
died, Anthony was left with a good deal of hoarded money, and freedom to
act as he listed. His fancy was taken by Margaret Penwarne, and his
vanity and ambition stimulated by the knowledge that she was already the
object of the attentions of Richard Malvine, the son of a neighbouring
parson, without profession and without inheritance. Richard Malvine was
a handsome man, and Margaret Penwarne certainly was attached to him, but
the marriage could not be thought of till Richard had a competence on
which to support himself and a wife. Anthony Cleverdon entered the list
against the handsomest young man in the district, but he had money and a
good farm to set against good looks. He and Richard had been together at
the Grammar School, and had been rivals there, Richard ever taking the
lead, and on one occasion had thrashed Anthony severely. It was with
eagerness that Cleverdon seized the opportunity of gratifying his malice
by snatching from Malvine the girl of his heart, and it flattered his
vanity to have it said of him that he had won the most beautiful girl of
the district over the head of the handsomest man. Margaret struggled
for some time between her affection and her ambition; the urgency of her
father and mother prevailed, she cast off Malvine and accepted
Cleverdon.
Anthony Cleverdon's pride was satisfied. He had gained a triumph, and
was wrapped up in the sense of victory for a while, then the gloss of
novelty wore off, and he began to regret his precipitancy in taking to
him a wife who brought nothing into the family save good looks. The
thriftiness of the father now came out in the son. He did not grudge and
withhold money where he could make display, but he cut down expenses
where no show was made, to the lowest stage of meanness. Margaret's
father died. She thought to take her mother to live with her at Hall,
but to this her husband would not consent, nor could she wring a silver
coin from him wherewith to assist her mother, reduced to great poverty.
This occasioned the first outbreak of domestic hostilities. Margaret was
a woman of temper, and would not submit tamely to the domination of her
husband. His sister Magdalen took sides against her, and fanned the
embers of strife when they gave token of expiring. If Margaret had been
of a meek and yielding temperament, the marriage might not have been so
full of broils; her husband would have crushed her, and then ignored
her. But her spirit rose against him, and stirred the discord that was
only temporarily allayed. She could not shut her eyes to his
infirmities, she would not condescend to flatter him. In her heart she
contrasted him with the man she had loved and had betrayed; her heart
never warmed to her husband; on the contrary, indifference changed into
hatred. She made no scruple about showing him the state of her mind, she
pitilessly unmasked his meannesses, and held them up to mockery; she
scoffed at his efforts to thrust himself into a position for which he
was not born; he found no more penetrating, remorseless critic of all he
did, than his own wife.
Anthony Cleverdon believed, and was justified in believing, that his old
rival, Richard Malvine, stood between him and domestic peace, as a
shadow that blighted and engalled his relations to his wife; that,
though he had triumphed formally over his rival, that rival had gained
the lasting and substantial success. Anthony Cleverdon might prize
himself as high as he pleased, but he could no longer blind himself to
the fact, that his money bags which had won his wife for him, were
unavailing to buy her affections, and secure to him the fruits of his
triumph.
This consciousness stimulated his hatred of Malvine to fresh acridity,
and in his meanness, he found a base satisfaction in humiliating his
wife by every means in his power, and on every available opportunity.
The birth of Bessie did not serve to unite the pair, for Anthony
Cleverdon had set his heart on having a son, and when, after the lapse
of a considerable interval of time, the desired son arrived, it was too
late to serve as a link of reconciliation. Mrs. Cleverdon died shortly
after his birth, her only regret being that she had to leave her
daughter, whom she loved with double passion, partly because her
desolate heart naturally clung to some object, and had none other to
which to attach itself, partly also because little Bessie was totally
disregarded by her father.
Richard Malvine consoled himself for his disappointment by marrying
Marianne Gibbs, of Willsworthy; he took her for the sake of Willsworthy,
as Margaret Penwarne had taken Anthony Cleverdon for the sake of Hall.
He was a feckless man, who had lived at home in the parsonage with his
father, had hunted, had shot, and had never earned a penny for himself.
He died, thrown from his horse, in hunting, a few years after his
marriage, leaving an only child, Urith.
The death of the mother produced no alteration in the conduct of Anthony
Cleverdon towards her daughter. What love he had in his heart was
bestowed on his son--the heir to his name and estate.
In nature all forces are correlated. Indeed it is said that force is a
pure and unique factor, and that light, heat, sound, etc., are but
various manifestations or aspects of the one primal force. It would be
hard to say whether old Anthony's love for his boy might not be
considered as another phase of his ambition. He had never himself been a
firm-built, handsome man; undersized and of mean appearance, he had felt
the slight that this physical defect had entailed on him. But the young
Tony was robust of constitution, burly of frame, and had inherited his
mother's beauty. At Hall, from the hour of his birth, young Anthony had
become a sovereign, and every one was placed beneath his footstool.
Every inmate of the house laboured to spoil him, either because he was
himself provocative of love, or out of a desire to curry favour with the
father. He tyrannised over his sister, he was despotic with his father,
he was wayward and exacting with the servants. Nothing that he did was
wrong in his father's eyes; he grew up into manhood demanding of the
outer world, as a right, that which was accorded to him in his home as a
favour.