Disclosing it to Justice Thornycroft.
Back at Coastdown. Isaac and his wife were staying at the Red Court.
Mr. Thornycroft wished them to remain at it altogether; but Isaac
doubted. If his sister were to marry, why then he would heartily
accede; and Anna could take up her position as its mistress--in
anticipation of the period when she would legally be entitled to it.
At present he thought it would be better for them to rent a small
house near.
Mary Anne had received the news of the marriage with equanimity--not
to say apathy. In the dreadful calamities that had overwhelmed her,
petty troubles were lost. Cordially indeed did she welcome her brother
and his wife home, and hoped they would remain. To be alone there was,
as she truly told them, miserable.
A ship letter had been received from Richard, written when he was
nearly half way on his voyage. It appeared that he had written on
embarking, just a word to tell the name of his ship, and whither it
was bound, and had sent it on shore by the pilot. Isaac could only
suppose that the man had forgotten to post it.
His destination was New Zealand. Some people whom he knew had settled
there, he said, and he intended to join them. He should purchase some
land and farm it; but he would never again set foot on European soil.
He supposed he should get on; and he hoped in time some sort of peace
would return to him.
"I would advise your telling my father the whole, if you have not
already done so," the letter concluded. "It is right that he should
know the truth about Cyril, and that I shall never come home again.
Tell him that the remorse lies very heavily upon me; that I would have
given my own life ten times over--given it cheerfully--to save my
brother's. Had it been any one but a brother, I should not feel it so
deeply. I think of myself always as a second Cain. I will write you
again when we arrive. Meanwhile, address to me at the post-office,
Canterbury. I suppose you will not object to correspond with me.
Perhaps my father will write. Tell him I should like it."
Before the arrival of this letter to Isaac, he had been consulting
with his sister about the expediency of enlightening their father. His
own opinion entirely coincided with Richard's--that it ought to be
done. Mr. Thornycroft was in a state of doubt about Cyril; and also as
to the duration of Richard's exile, and restlessly curious always in
regard to what had led to it.
One balmy June day, when the crop of hay was being got in, Isaac told
his father. They were leaning upon a gate in the four-acre mead,
watching the haymakers, who were piling the hay into cocks at the
farther end of the field.
Mr. Thornycroft was like a man stunned.
"Hunter not dead! Cyril lying there, and not Hunter! It can't _be_,
Isaac!"
Isaac repeated the facts again, and then went into details. He
concluded by showing Richard's last letter. "Poor Dicky! Poor Dicky!"
cried the justice, melted to compassion. "Yes, as you say, Isaac,
Cyril is in a happier place than this--gone to his rest. And
Dick--Dick sent him there in cruelty. I think I'll go in if you'll
give me your arm."
Wonderingly Isaac obeyed. Never had the strong, upright Justice
Thornycroft sought or needed support from any one. The news must have
shaken him terribly. Isaac went with him across the fields, and saw
him shut himself in his room.
"Have you been telling him?" whispered Mary Anne.
"Yes."
"And how has he borne it? Why did he lean upon you in coming in?"
"He seemed to bear it exceedingly well. But it must have had a far
deeper effect upon him than I thought, or he would not have asked for
my arm."
Mary Anne Thornycroft sighed. A little pain, more or less, seemed to
her as nothing.
On the following morning Mr. Thornycroft sent for his son. Isaac found
him seated before his portable desk; some papers upon it. The crisis
of affairs had prompted the justice to disclose certain facts to his
children, that otherwise never might have been disclosed. Richard
Thornycroft was not his own son, though he had been treated as such.
Isaac listened in utter amazement. Of all the strange things that had
lately fallen upon them, this appeared to him to be the strangest.
"I have been writing to Richard," said Mr. Thornycroft, taking up some
closely-written pages. "You can read it; it will save me going over
the details to you."
Isaac took the letter, and read it through. But his senses were
confused, and it was not very clear to him.
"It seems that I cannot understand it now, sir."
"Not understand it?" repeated the justice, with a touch of his old
heat. "It is plain enough to be understood. When my father died, he
left this place, the Red Court Farm, to my elder brother, your uncle
Richard--whom you never knew. A short while afterwards, Richard met
with an accident in France, and I went over with my wife, to whom I
was just married. We found him also with a wife, which surprised me,
for he had never said anything of it; she was a pretty little
Frenchwoman; and their child, a boy, was a year old. Richard, poor
fellow, was dying, and of course I thought my chance of inheriting the
Red Court was gone--that he would naturally leave it to his little
son. But he took an opportunity of telling me that he had left it to
me; the only proviso attached to it being that I should bring up the
boy, as my son. He talked with me further: things that I cannot go
into now: and I promised. That is how the Red Court came to me."
"But why should he have done this, sir?" interrupted Isaac, who liked
justice better than wrong. "The little boy had a right to it."
"No," said Mr. Thornycroft, quietly. "Richard had not married his
mother."
Isaac saw now. There was a pause.
"He said if time could come over again he would have married her, or
else not have taken her. He was dying, you see, Isaac, and right and
wrong array themselves in very distinct colours then. Anyway, it was
too late now, whatever his repentance; and he prayed me and my wife to
take the boy and not let it be known for the child's own sake that he
was not ours. We both promised; at a moment like that one could not
foresee inconveniences that might arise later, and it almost seemed as
if we owed the compliance, in gratitude for the bequeathal of the Red
Court Farm. He died, and we brought the boy with us to London--he who
has been looked upon as your brother Richard. When people here used to
say that he was more like his uncle Richard than his father Harry, my
wife would glance at me with a smile."
"And his mother?"
"She died in France shortly afterwards. She had parted with the boy
readily, glad to find he would have so good a home. Had she lived, the
probabilities are that the secret could not have been kept."
"Did you intend to keep it always, father?"
"Until my death. Every year as they went on, gave less chance of our
disclosing it. When you were all little, my wife and I had many a
serious consultation; for the future seemed to be open so some
difficulty; but we loved the boy, and neither of us had courage to
say, He is not ours; he has no legitimate inheritance. Besides, as
your mother would say to me, there was always our promise. It must
have been disclosed at my death, at least to Richard, to explain why
you, and not he, came into the Red Court."
"Perhaps his father, my uncle Richard, expected it would be left to
him?"
"No, Isaac. We talked of that. Only in the event of my having no
children of my own would the property have become his. Richard will
take his share as one of my younger children. _You_ are the eldest.
I shall at once settle this money upon him; you have read to that
effect in the letter; so that he will have enough for comfort whatever
part of the world he may choose to remain in."
Isaac mechanically cast his eyes on the letter, still in his hand.
"I have disclosed these facts to him now for his own comfort," resumed
Mr. Thornycroft. "It may bring him a ray of it to find Cyril was not
his brother."
Isaac thought it would. He folded the letter and returned it to his
father.
"There is one thing I wished to ask you, sir, and I may as well ask it
now. You do not, I presume, think of running more cargoes."
"Never again," said Mr. Thornycroft. "Richard was the right hand of
it, and he is gone. That's over for ever. But for him it would have
been given up before. And there's Kyne besides."
Isaac nodded, glad to have the matter set at rest. "May I tell Mary
Anne what you have disclosed to me?"
"Yes, but no one else. She may be glad to hear Richard is not her
brother."
How glad, the justice little thought. It seemed to Mary Anne as if
this news removed the embargo she had self-imposed upon her marriage
with Robert Hunter. Perhaps she had already begun to question the
necessity of it--to think it a very utopian, severe decision. In the
revulsion of feeling that came over her, she laid her head down on
Isaac's shoulder with a burst of tears, and told him all. Isaac
smiled.
"You must tell him that you have relented, Mary Anne."
"He will not be back for five years."
"He will be back in less than five months; perhaps in five weeks."
She sat upright, staring at him.
"Isaac!"
"He will, indeed. Anna had a letter from him yesterday. It came to
Miss Jupp's, addressed to 'Miss Chester.' Business matters are
bringing him home for a short while; personal things, he says, that
only himself can do. I wonder if he wrote to her in the hope that the
information would penetrate to Coastdown?"
She sat in silence, her colour going and coming, rather shrinking from
the merriment in Isaac's eye. Oh, would it be so?--would it be so?
"In that case--I mean, should circumstances bring him again to the Red
Court Farm--we shall have to disclose publicly the truth about Cyril,
Mary Anne. As well that it should be so, and then a tombstone can be
put. But it can wait yet."
As she sat there, looking out on the sparkling sea, a prevision came
over her that this happiness might really come to her at last, and a
sobbing sigh of thankfulness went up to heaven.
Coastdown went on in its ordinary quiet routine. The mysteries of the
Red Court Farm were at an end, never again to be enacted. Long and
perseveringly did Mr. Superintendent Kyne look out for the smugglers;
many and many a night did he exercise his eyes and his patience on the
edge of that bleak plateau; but they came no more. Old Mr.
Thornycroft, deprived, he hardly knew how, of his sons, lived on at
the Red Court, feeling at times a vacancy of pursuit: he had loved
adventure, and his occupation was gone. But the land got a better
chance of being tilled to perfection now than it ever had been.
Meanwhile the whole neighbourhood remained under a clear and immutable
persuasion that the ghost still "walked" in the churchyard. The new
right of road had come to a hot dispute; but Coastdown persisted in
using it after nightfall, to avoid the graves and their ominous
visitor. While Captain Copp, taking his glass in the parlour at
the Mermaid, did not fail to descant upon the marvels of that night,
when he and that woman-servant of his, who (he would add in a
parenthesis) was undaunted enough for a she-pirate, saw with their
own eyes the spirit of Robert Hunter. And then the parlour would fall
into a discussion of the love of roving inherent in the young
Thornycrofts--Cyril lingering away still; Richard also perhaps gone to
look after him; and speculate upon how long it would be before they
returned, and the glorious dinners were resumed at the Red Court Farm.
THE END.