THE HERMIT OF GATEHOUSE FARM.
Lionel Dering at this time was twenty-eight years old. A tall,
well-built, fair-complexioned man, but bronzed by much exposure to the
sun and wind. His eyes were dark gray, very steady and penetrating. He
had a habit of looking full into the faces of those with whom he
talked, as though he were trying to penetrate the mask before him. It
was a habit which some people did not like. He had never shaved in his
life, and the strong, firm lines of his mouth, betokening immense power
of will, and great tenacity of purpose, were all but hidden by the
soft, flowing outlines of a thick beard and moustache, pale golden as
to colour. His free, outdoor life, and the hard work to which he had
accustomed himself of late years, had widened his chest and hardened
his muscles, and had ripened him into a very tolerable specimen of
those stalwart, fair-bearded islanders whose forms and figures are
familiar wherever the English language is spoken. For three years past
he had been living the life of a modern hermit at Gatehouse Farm. His
reasons for choosing thus to isolate himself entirely from the world of
his old friends and associations, to bury himself alive, as it were,
while all the pleasures of life were still sweet to his lips, will not
take long to explain.
Lionel Dering came of a good family on both his father’s side and his
mother’s. Unfortunately, on his father’s side there was little or no
money, and his mother’s side never forgave the marriage, which was one
of those romantic run-away affairs of which people used to hear every
week at a time when the blacksmith of Gretna Green was a legal forger
of matrimonial fetters.
After nine years of married happiness, Godfrey Dering died, leaving his
widow with two children, Lionel, aged eight, and Richard, aged six.
Mrs. Dering found herself with an annuity of six hundred pounds a year,
which her husband’s care and prevision had secured to her. For the
future, this would be the sole means of subsistence of herself and
children. Her own family had repudiated her from the day of her
marriage, and she was too proud to court them now. She sent her two
boys away to a good school, and while still undecided where she would
permanently fix her home, she went to live for a while with some of her
husband’s friends at Cheltenham—and at Cheltenham she stayed till the
day of her death. The Langshaws, under whose roof she found a home
during the first year of her bereavement, were worthy well-to-do
farmers, distant relations of Godfrey; who seemed as if they could
never do enough for pretty Mrs. Dering and her two fatherless boys.
After a time she took lodgings in the town itself, where her money and
her good looks, combined with her amiability and easy, cheerful
disposition, soon attracted around her a wide circle of friends and
acquaintances. She had several offers of marriage during the ten years
of her widowhood, but she remained steadily faithful to the memory of
her first love, and when she died her husband’s name was the last word
on her lips.
His mother died when Lionel Dering was eighteen years old, six months
after his younger brother, Richard, had gone to India to carve out for
himself that mythical fortune which every youthful enthusiast believes
must one day infallibly be his.
Lionel had been brought up to no business or profession. While still a
youth at school, a great part of his holidays had been spent at the
Langshaw’s farm, three miles out of Cheltenham, where he was always a
welcome guest. Here he learned to ride, to drive, to shoot, and to take
an interest in all those outdoor avocations which mark the due
recurrence of the seasons on a large and well-managed farm. But when
his school-days were really at an end, both Lionel and his mother were
utterly at a loss to decide in which particular groove the young man’s
talents—genius Mrs. Dering called it—would be likely to meet with their
amplest and most speedy recognition.
Truth to tell, the widowed mother trembled at the idea of parting from
her favourite boy, of letting him go out unprotected into the great
world, so full of wickedness and temptation, of which she herself knew
so little, but about which she had heard such terrible tales. So week
passed after week, and month after month, and Lionel Dering still
stayed at home with his mother. An inquiry was made here and there, a
letter written now and then, but all in a half-hearted sort of way, and
Mrs. Dering never heard the postman’s knock without trembling lest it
should be the herald of a summons which would tear Lionel from her side
for ever. When, at last, the dreadful summons did come, in the shape of
the offer of an excellent situation in India, Mrs. Dering declared that
it would break her heart if Lionel left her. She was a very delicate
little woman, be it borne in mind, and Lionel, who loved her tenderly,
fully believed every word she said—believed that her heart would really
break if they were separated—as in all probability it would have done.
“I won’t leave you, mother—I won’t go away to India,” said Lionel, as
he kissed away her tears.
“You might let _me_ go, mother, instead of Li,” said Richard, as he too
kissed her. “If you love me, mother, let me go.”
So Richard went to India in place of his brother, and Lionel still
stayed at home. Six months later, Mrs. Dering, who had been a partial
invalid for years, died quite suddenly, and Lionel found himself, after
the payment of all expenses, with about fifty pounds in ready money,
and no ascertainable means of earning his own living.
In this emergency, a certain Mr. Eitzenschlager, a German merchant, who
had met Mrs. Dering in society some five or six years previously, and
had fallen in love with her to no purpose, came to the rescue by
offering Lionel a stool in his counting-house, at Liverpool. But to
Lionel, with his outdoor tastes, the thought of any mode of life which
involved confinement within doors was utterly distasteful. He preferred
taking up his quarters for a time with his old friends the Langshaws,
and there waiting till another opening should give him an opportunity
of joining his brother in India.
When Dorothy St. George ran away from home to marry Godfrey Dering, she
never afterwards saw her father, nor any member of her family, except
her youngest brother, Lionel—the brother after whom her eldest boy was
named. He was a soldier, and shortly after Dorothy’s marriage he was
ordered abroad, but he wrote occasionally to the sister whom as a boy
he had loved so well, therein disobeying his father’s express command,
that no communication of any kind should henceforth be held with the
disgraced daughter of the house. But many years passed before Lionel
St. George had an opportunity of seeing his sister—not, in fact, till
some time after their father’s death: not till he had won his way up,
step by step, to the rank of general, and had come back from India, a
grizzled veteran, with a year’s leave of absence in which to recruit
his health, and pay brief visits to such of his relatives and friends
as death had spared. His sister Dorothy was one of the first whom he
made a point of seeing. For Lionel he contracted a great liking,
chiefly, perhaps, because his nephew was named after him, and because
in the tall, bronzed young man he saw, or fancied that he saw, many
points of resemblance to what he himself had been in happy days long
gone by. It was a pity, the general said to himself, that such a fine
young fellow should be kept tied to his mother’s apron string. So,
after he got back to India, he brought his influence to bear, and an
eligible opening for Lionel was quickly found. But, as we have already
seen, Lionel did not avail himself of his uncle’s offer. Richard went
to India in his stead, and Lionel was by his mother’s side when she
died.
Left thus alone, it seemed to Lionel that he could not do better than
join his brother, and he wrote his uncle to that effect.
But before he could possibly get an answer from India, something
happened which changed the whole current of his life. Mr.
Eitzenschlager, the German merchant, died, and left Lionel a legacy of
twenty thousand pounds.
What a fund of quiet, unsuspected romance there must have been in the
heart of the old Teuton! At fifty years of age he had fallen in love
with pretty Mrs. Dering; but Mrs. Dering had nothing but esteem to give
him in return. Once rejected, he never spoke of his feelings again, but
went on loving in secret and in silence. Had Mrs. Dering outlived him,
the twenty thousand pounds would have been left to her. As it was, the
money was left to the son whom she had loved so well.
An unexpected legacy of twenty thousand pounds is enough to upset the
calculations of most men. It upset Lionel’s. The idea of going out to
India was abandoned indefinitely. Now had come the time when he could
carry out the cherished wish of his life. Time and money were both at
his command, and he would travel—travel far and wide, studying “men and
manners, climates, councils, governments.” When he was tired of travel,
he would buy a little estate somewhere, and settle down quietly for the
remainder of his days as a gentleman farmer. Such were some of the
daydreams of simple-minded Lionel—daydreams which the future would
laugh to scorn.
Hitherto Lionel had escaped scathless and heart-whole from all the soft
seductive wiles prepared by Love to ensnare the unwary. But his time
had come at last, as it comes to all of us. He saw Edith West, and
acknowledged himself a lost man. Nor could any one who knew Edith
wonder at his infatuation. She was an orphan and an heiress. She lived
with her uncle, Mr. Garside, who was also her guardian. Lionel saw her
for the first time in a railway carriage, when she and Mrs. Garside
were travelling from London to Cheltenham. There was a slight accident
to the train, and Lionel was enabled to show the ladies some little
attention. Three weeks after that chance meeting, Lionel proposed in
form for the hand of Mr. Garside’s niece.
Lionel’s proposal was very favourably received, for Mr. Garside was
prudence itself, and young men worth twenty thousand pounds are not to
be met with every day. Very wisely, however, he stipulated that the
lovers should wait a year before fastening themselves irrevocably
together.
So Lionel, after spending two months in London, where he had an
opportunity of seeing Edith every day, set out on his travels. In ten
months from the date of his departure he was to come back and claim her
for his wife. He left the Continent and the ordinary lines of tourist
travel to be done by Edith and himself after marriage, and started
direct for America. Cities and city life on the other side of the
Atlantic did not detain him long. He panted for the wild, free life and
noble sports of the prairies and mountain slopes of the Far West. He
spent six happy months with his rifle and an Indian guide on the
extreme borders of civilized life. Then he crossed the Rocky Mountains,
and found himself, after a time, at San Francisco. There letters from
home awaited. One of the first that he opened told him of the failure
of the bank in which the whole of his legacy, except a few hundred
pounds, had been deposited. Lionel Dering was a ruined man.
One morning, about three months later, Lionel was ushered into the
private office of Mr. Garside, in Old Broad Street, City. The rich
merchant shook hands with him, and was polite but freezing. Lionel went
at once to the object of his visit. “You have heard of my loss, Mr.
Garside?” he said.
“I have, and am very sorry for it,” said the merchant.
“I have saved nothing from the wreck but a few hundred pounds. Under
these circumstances, I come to you, as Miss West’s guardian, to tell
you that I give up at once, and unreservedly, all pretensions to that
lady’s hand. I absolve her freely and entirely from the promise she
made me. Miss West is an heiress: I am a poor man: we have no longer
anything in common.”
“Very gentlemanly, Mr. Dering—very gentlemanly, indeed. But only what I
should have expected from _you_.”
Lionel cut him short somewhat impatiently. “You will greatly oblige
me—for the last time—by giving this note to Miss West. I wish her to
understand, direct from myself, the motives by which I have been
actuated. This is hardly a place,” looking round the office, “in which
to talk of love, or even of affection; but, in simple justice to
myself, I may say—and I think you will believe me—that the feelings
with which I regarded Miss West when I first spoke to you twelve months
ago, are utterly unchanged, and, so far as a fallible human being may
speak with certainty, they will remain unchanged. I think I have
nothing more to say.”
But Lionel’s note never reached Edith West. When Mr. Garside had
finished recounting to his wife the details of his interview with “that
strange young man,” he gave her the note to give to Edith; but the
giving of it was accompanied by a look which his wife was not slow to
comprehend. The note was never alluded to again between husband and
wife, but somehow it failed to reach the hands for which it was
intended. Edith was simply told by her guardian that Mr. Dering, with a
high-minded feeling which did him great credit, had broken off the
engagement. “He is a poor man—a very poor man, my dear,” said Mr.
Garside, “and he has the good sense to know that you are not calculated
for a poor man’s wife.”
“How does he know that—or you—or anybody?” flashed out Edith. “But
Lionel Dering never made use of those words, uncle. They are an
addition of your own.”
Nevertheless, the one great bitter fact still remained, that her lover
had given her up. “If he had only called to see me—or even written!”
she said to herself. But days, weeks, months, passed away, and there
came no further sign from Lionel. So Edith locked up her love, as some
sacred thing, in the innermost casket of her heart, and the name that
was sweeter to her than all other earthly names, never passed her lips
after that day except in her prayers.
Lionel was not long in making up his mind as to his future course. He
had still two or three hundred pounds in ready money, and one small
plot of ground that he could truly call his own. The tiny estate in
question was known as Gatehouse Farm, and consisted of nothing more
than an old-fashioned, tumbledown house, terribly out of repair; an
orchard of tolerable dimensions, and about twenty acres of poorish
grass-land; the whole being situated in a remote corner of the
north-east coast of England. This modest estate had been his father’s
sole patrimony, and for that father’s sake Lionel had long ago resolved
never to part from it. He had visited it once or twice when quite a
boy, and from that time it had lived in his memory as a pleasant
recollection. To this spot he made up his mind that he would retire for
awhile. Here he would shut himself up from the world, and, like King
Arthur, “heal him of his wounds.” He confessed to himself that he was
slightly hipped; a little at odds with Fortune. The ordinary objects
and ambitions of his age, which, under other circumstances would
probably have found him an eager partizan, had, for the present at
least, lost their savour. He was not without friends—good friends, who
would have been willing and able to help him on in any career he might
have chosen to adopt, but just at that time all their propositions
seemed equally distasteful to him. Ambition for the moment was dead
within him. All he asked was to be allowed to drop quietly out of the
circle of those who knew him, and cherish, or cure, in a solitude of
his own seeking, those inward hurts for which Time is the sole
physician.
As it happened, the tenant of Gatehouse Farm was lately dead; there
was, consequently, nothing to stand in the way of its immediate
occupation by Lionel. It was neither a very picturesque nor a very
comfortable residence, but sufficiently the latter to satisfy its
owner’s simple wants. Its upper story consisted of four or five
bedrooms. Downstairs was a large and commodious kitchen, together with
a house-room, or, as we should call it, a parlour. This latter room was
chosen by Lionel for his own particular den. It had white-washed walls,
and two diamond-paned windows of dull thick glass, but the floor was
made of splendid oaken Planks. The walls Lionel left as he found them,
except that over the fireplace he hung a portrait of Edith, and his two
favourite rifles; but on the floor he spread two or three skins of wild
animals, trophies of his prowess in the chase. In a corner near the
fireplace, handy to reach, were the twenty or thirty authors whom he
had brought with him to be the companions of his solitude. In the
opposite corner was the only article de luxe to be found in the house:
a splendid cottage piano, of Erard’s build.
The dead and gone builder of the house, whose initials, with the date
1685, were still conspicuous on a tablet over the front door, had never
been troubled with that mania for the picturesque in nature and art
about which we moderns are perpetually prating. In its own little way
his house was intensely ugly, and he had persistently built it with its
back to the only fine view that could be seen from its windows in any
direction. Even after all these years, there was not another house
within a mile of it. The only point of habitable life visible from it
was the lighthouse. But it was this solitariness, this isolation from
the world, which formed its great feature of attraction in the eyes of
Lionel. One other attraction it had for him. You had only to cross a
couple of small fields, and follow, for a hundred yards or more, a
climbing footway that led across a patch of sandy common, and then, all
at once, you saw spread out, far and wide before you, the ever-glorious
sea.
To this place came Lionel Dering in less than a month after writing his
last letter to Edith West, and here he had since stayed. Two farm
labourers and one middle-aged woman constituted the whole of his
household. What further labour he might require in his farming
operations, he hired. He rose at five o’clock in summer and at six in
winter. From the time he got up till two o’clock he worked as hard as
any of his own men. The remainder of the day he claimed for his own
private uses. He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped. At one time he planted
potatoes, at another he dug them up; and nowhere within a score of
miles were such fine standard-roses to be seen as at Gatehouse Farm. He
found some land to let conveniently near his own small patch, and he
hired it. At the end of his second year at the farm he calculated his
profits at one hundred and eighty pounds, and was perfectly satisfied.
Lionel saw no company, and never went into society. He was well known
to the lighthouse keepers and to most of the boatmen. With them he
would talk freely enough. Their racy sayings, their homely, vigorous
diction, their simple mode of life, pleased him. When talking with them
he forgot, for a time, himself and his own thoughts, and the change did
him good. Not that there was anything of the melancholy, lovesick swain
about Lionel—any morbid brooding over his own disappointment, and
troubles. No one ever saw him otherwise than cheerful. He was perfectly
healthy both in mind and body. Nevertheless, his solitary mode of life,
and his persistent isolation of himself from his friends and equals,
all tended to throw him back upon his own thoughts, and to make him
habitually self-introspective, to confirm him in a growing habit of
mental analysis.
Whatever the state of the weather, Lionel hardly ever let a day pass
without taking a long, solitary ramble into the country for eight or
ten miles. Then he had his books, and his piano—which latter was,
perhaps, the greatest consolation of his solitude—and the luxury of his
own lonely musings as he sat and smoked, hour after hour, with
unlighted lamp, and marked how the glowing cinders shaped themselves
silently to the fashion of his thoughts.
Two years had by no means sufficed to tire Lionel Dering of his
solitary life. In fact, he grew to like it better, to cling to it more
emphatically, every day. It satisfied his present needs and ambitions,
and that was all he asked. Calmly indifferent, he allowed himself to
drift slowly onward towards a future in whose skies there seemed for
him no bright bow of promise—nothing but the unbroken grayness of an
autumn day that has neither wind, nor sunshine, nor any change.