THE
MOORS AND THE FENS.
BY
F. G. TRAFFORD.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.
LONDON:
SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL.
1858.
[_The Right of Translation is reserved._]
London:
Printed by SMITH, ELDER & CO., Little Green Arbour Court, Old Bailey.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I.— A Warning 1
II.— Home 26
III.— “Life at Paradise” 53
IV.— Craigmaver 74
V.— Cecilia brews Mischief 90
VI.— A Crisis 114
VII.— Out on the World 138
VIII.— Death 158
IX.— Reading the Will 178
X.— Urgent Private Affairs 203
XI.— A Consultation 221
XII.— Right or Wrong 249
XIII.— Back to the Fens 271
XIV.— Conclusion 293
THE MOORS AND THE FENS.
CHAPTER I.
A WARNING.
It was the day before that fixed for the ceremony when a grey-haired
man, with high cheek bones, clear, keen, blue eyes, and a frame wiry and
still erect, alighted from one of the numerous coaches that, in those
days, conveyed passengers from the Eastern Counties—safely, perhaps, but
not very speedily—into London. His dress seemed that of another country
and a byegone age; his accent was Scotch, and sounded harsh and almost
unintelligible in the ears of those of whom he inquired his route
through the many devious thoroughfares and lanes and squares of
England’s capital.
He wanted to understand his way, he said, to a place they called
“Shedlock Street;” and accordingly, by dint of constant questioning and
much weary walking, he found it. He paced through the streets without
once pausing to look at the public buildings, or the shop windows, or
the endless crowd of people; he braved the crossings with the air of a
man whose mind was too much disturbed to permit him to feel any anxiety
concerning the safety of his body. When, at length, he reached the abode
of which he had come so far in search, he asked, almost breathlessly,
“to be let see Miss Mina;” but the servant, not immediately
comprehending the meaning of his request, he impatiently bade her say
“to the young leddy, that one Colin Saunders was below.”
“One Colin Saunders,” cried Mina when the message was repeated to her,
and, springing up and passing the astonished domestic on the landing,
she sped down the stairs to welcome him, as she might have done had he
been a father or a brother.
“Colin, old friend,” she said, taking his hard hand in both of hers, and
looking through blinding tears in the honest face that worked with
uncontrollable emotion at this reception, “why did you never come to see
me before?”
The scene and the actors appeared out of place in a matter-of-fact
London street; many a passer-by turned a curious glance back at the old
man, with his gaunt figure and antiquated garments, who stood on the
pipe-clayed stone steps of that modern house, his hat off and his long
grey hair fluttering in the breeze.
The meeting, perhaps, was very unlike what it should have been amongst
houses and pavements and the proud, cold, exclusive conventionalities of
every day city, or indeed, for that matter, every day country life. It
could only, in fact, have seemed thoroughly “in keeping” upon the top of
some lonely mountain in that land whence both had come, amidst the
broken shafts and pillars and moss-covered monuments of a ruined abbey,
or by the margin of some stern, dark, silent lake: but the human heart
refuses to be always bound by custom, place, or circumstances, for, in
the forms of emotions and passions, it possesses wings of its own, which
bear it, in moments of excitement, far beyond all ordinary rules of
society; and, in times of pleasure or of sorrow, it sets the bonds and
fetters of what is so erroneously termed decorum at defiance, and
either, in the excess of its joy or the intensity of its agony, stands
for one brief instant—free.
Thus it was with Mina: when she heard the sound of that familiar name,
which came on her soul like a smile or a breath or a voice from the time
of her childhood, such a rush of old feelings and associations and
memories swelled tumultuously up in her bosom, that it seemed almost as
though the severe and sudden strain would have snapped her life strings.
The past was recalled so vividly to mind, that, for the minute, the
present was completely forgotten; but the flush of pleasure rapidly
faded from her cheek, and the sorrowful, troubled look stole back over
her face as Mina brought her humble friend into her most humble home “to
talk to her.”
He gazed around the room and then at her, ere the words,
“Time was, and that no so very long ago either, Miss Mina, when I didna
think it would ever be my misfortune to see you in a place like this,”
came forth almost unwittingly from his lips.
“This country is not like ours, I admit, Colin,” she sadly replied, “and
there is a vast deal of difference between this house and my old home;
but one gets to care less for these sort of things as one grows older,
and I have never repined because the first part of my life was the best
of it.”
“After I first came to England, Miss Mina,” resumed the old man, not
directly replying to her observation, “Jessie and I used to be talking
ever and always, about you, and she still would be asking me, as you did
but just now, why I never came to see you. ‘I dinna want till see her,’
I kept saying, and she thought it hard and made answer,
“‘I have never, father, been about her as you were, and yet I wish I
could just get one sight of her bonny face; I would be glad to see her,
and I wonder you can say you would not.’
“But then I told her that, though I might be glad enough to speak to you
once more in one way, I would be more vexed in another, for I knew I
could not expect to find you, as you ought to be, in a fine place of
your own; and I felt, when I thought of the changes that have come upon
you and the house you were born in, that my heart would be sore to look
on the child of my dear old master.”
“He died in time, Colin,” answered Mina; “so did my poor mother: would
to God I could say I feel as resigned to His will in all things as I do
to their deaths.”
“Miss Mina, do you mind how the sun used to shine down upon the loch?”
he said abruptly, after a pause.
“It has not seemed to shine so anywhere else for many years,” she
responded.
“And how quiet, and solemn, and beautiful the islands looked with the
bright waters rippling round about them?”
“When I close my eyes any hour, either by day or by night, I can see
them still,” Mina sighed.
“And you have not forgot a garden where a bit of a child wi’ long
streaming hair——”
“Used to pull up your plants to see if they were growing, Colin,” she
added. “No, no, I have forgotten nothing: the hills and the valleys, the
rivers and the mountains, the spreading trees and the blooming flowers
are fresh in my memory as the day I last looked on them; and my parents
and my uncle I know are living, though I cannot see them; and the child,
too, I recollect; but, alas! the years that have passed since then, have
changed me into a very world-tired, weary, indifferent sort of woman;”
and the tears started into her eyes as she thought of that, her life’s
bright early dawn, and of this, which she considered its dark mournful
setting.
“You are a child no longer, Miss Mina, it is true,” he said; “but the
child’s heart is in ye still, for all that; weary, ye may be, and no
doubt are, but the world, nor its troubles, nor its pomps, nor its
vanities has not destroyed the nature that was in ye then. No; ye came
down like as ye might have done years and years ago, with the old kindly
look in your face, to speak to the grey-headed man who was about your
father before you were born, who saw you when you were but a helpless
baby, who was fond and proud of his master’s child, who has come at
last, Miss Mina, to see you where he once hoped never to see you, but
where he would now make so free as humbly to ask you to stay.”
“How!” exclaimed his auditor, a sudden flush mounting to her temples.
“Dinna be angry with me,” he pleaded; “dinna be offended wi’ one that
would die to serve you; it is very free of me, I know, but somebody
ought to tell ye,—why not I?”
“What?” demanded Mina.
“That marry, ye mauna; come to that place, ye canna: isn’t it true what
they told me, that ye were thinking of taking for a husband my master’s
son?”
“And suppose it be true, why should I not?” she asked.
“Because you could not live among them; you would die.”
“So much the better,” she replied.
“When God’s time comes, so much the better for us all, Miss Mina, but
not till then,” he said, reverently; “it is against my rule and my
custom and my conscience to speak ill of those whose money I earn, whose
pleasure I serve, whose servant I am; but in regard of you, I have felt
it to be my duty to tell you this one thing, that, though as far as the
gentleman himself is concerned I have little to say—and that little,
good—yet I would rather follow you to your grave than hear of your
wedding. It would not give me as sad a heart to hear you were lying in
your coffin, or even working for your daily bread, as to know you were
coming to that place—as I fear you will—to eat it in sorrow and
repentance many and many a day.”
She rose from her chair, and commenced pacing up and down the room, as
was her wont when strongly agitated: but she never answered; she did not
seem to dream of doing so; and, after a pause, the old man proceeded,
“Often and often at Craigmaver—the time you and Mr. Malcolm was there,
the time before the last, you remember, Miss Mina—when I saw how proud
and happy they were all to have you with them, and the colour that was
in your face, and the light that was in your eye, I thought within
myself—it was foolish, and, perhaps, I ought not now to speak of my
quiet notions—but I did think that if you and the young laird could have
made it up, many a one besides me would have been glad to see you coming
home to your own country to live always there.”
Mina smiled bitterly, while Colin fixed a keen eye on her as if to read
a secret which existed not in her heart, which had never existed there;
and she replied,
“Yes, I feel sure you would; and I thank all the true, honest, Highland
hearts that dwell about Craigmaver for the undeserved affection they
cherished for me: but you see,” she added, in a lighter tone, intended
to put an end to the discussion, “it was predestined from the
commencement of time, as you would say, that we were not to ‘make it
up.’ My cousin Allan has chosen a handsomer, and a gayer, and a
wealthier wife than I could ever have been, even had misfortune in early
times passed by our dwelling: she brought sunshine into the old house,
was like a daughter to my uncle—a friend to all, and I—I voluntarily
chose another land for my abiding place, new friends, new acquaintances,
new ties, finally a husband, whom—spite of your warnings—I mean to
marry.”
“Is’t for love?” he asked simply.
“Do people generally wed without affection?” she said, in a hurried and
somewhat stern tone; but the old man merely shook his head, sorrowfully,
in answer; whilst resting both his hands on the black thorn stick he
carried, he gazed earnestly in her face.
“I daurna say more about that,” he at length began, “for there’s a look
in your eye that I dinna like,—that never was there when you were a
child, unless pain or anger, or some sort of vexation ruffled your
temper: but I must speak out my mind about the other thing—about your
wedding; if you marry Mr. Ivraine, you will marry to certain misery; to
a life that must be full of sorrow and care for years and years, most
likely never bring any pleasure. The gentleman is not happy himself; how
he expects you to be so—that is, supposing he does—I canna tell. His own
heart has been broken there, and so will yours if you do not think in
time: they tell me he was as free and fine a lad as ever lived, till his
mother died; but that after that, as the baronet got closer and closer
and harder, and himself older, he grew more sorrowful and silent day by
day, till at last nobody would have known him for the same. He has a
father and an aunt, Miss Mina, who would grind the spirit out of any
one; misers, and almost demons, they are counted: this young man has
hardly a shilling he can call his own; and, though some people think he
will be sole heir when his father dies, others say he will not have a
guinea excepting the entailed estate, which Sir Ernest has mortgaged
till it is of no value at all. The old baronet likes to keep everything
in his own power; and it is my belief he is just living, nobody knows
how, for spite, and to prevent his son ever saying he owns an acre of
ground, and mortgaging the property, so that if he ever does come into
possession of it, he may not have a bit of enjoyment of the swampy
place.”
Mina paused to listen, and, as he proceeded, a sort of half-surprised,
half-sympathising expression stole over her face. Colin Saunders surely
knew nothing of the nature of “womankind,” or he never would have drawn
such a picture in order to deter her from matrimony. The tempers and
characters of the feminine portion of the creation are various as those
of the opposite sex; but there is one point in which they all agree,
namely, to “love best those who need love most.” Test a woman by the
contact of adversity, and whether you be her parent, brother, friend,
husband, child, feel assured she will stand the severest trial nobly; if
not, feel equally assured she is merely a base counterfeit, wearing the
woman’s garb, carrying the woman’s face, but wanting the woman’s heart,
deficient in woman’s best attribute. Moore has condensed the whole thing
into two musical lines:—
“I know not, I ask not, if guilt’s in that heart,
I but know that I love thee whatever thou art.”
Which sounds very foolish and overstrained in poetry, perhaps, but
occasionally seems sublime in actual life.
The propensity may, however, be indulged to an absurd extent, and it
occasionally makes ladies appear very ridiculous, especially when they
carry these Quixotic ideas with them to the threshold of
matrimony,—whence, sometimes, it might be well for them if they carried
their notions away again without crossing the frontier separating fancy
from reality, the theoretical sentimental part of poverty from its
practical every-day details; and it was preeminently ridiculous of Mina
not to take warning in time, because she had once affirmed she was
“marrying for a home”—not for love—Ernest Ivraine, and certainly the
home presented now for her imagination to dwell upon was not so
particularly inviting as to tempt her to enter it.
But, as the Hibernian said, there is undoubtedly a contrariness about
pigs, geese, and women, which always induces them to go just the
opposite way, and do just the opposite thing, from that which it was
desired or expected they should; and thus, in answer to poor Colin’s
detail of Paradise and its inhabitants, Mina merely softly soliloquised,
“So, Ernest Ivraine is poor and unhappy?”
“Poor as he can be,” interposed Colin, who hoped—most erroneously,
however—that his words had produced the desired effect. “Poor as he can
be, and, as those who are most about and nearest him say, perfectly
miserable.”
“It is well,” she remarked, “sorrow should marry sorrow; it ought never
to sit down by a happy hearth, to cast a shadow there: the suffering can
feel for those who have suffered.”
“You will not, though——” he began.
“I would not draw back now,” she said, “if you could give me a kingdom
for doing so.”
“You were always rash and headstrong and hard to turn, Miss Mina,” he
ejaculated, “and——”
“Am so still,” she finished; “Colin, you have meant most kindly, and
have done me a service you little dream of, though not in the way you
intended: but remonstrance is of no use; I will brave father and
aunt—enter even the miser’s home, and try whether, by patience and hope,
I cannot make that home happier for _him_.”
The words fell with a heavy crash on the old man’s heart; he knew what
she was bringing on herself, though she did not: if he had thought his
corpse lying across the portal would have prevented her entering that
dreary abode, he would cheerfully have stretched himself dead in her
path. There was a sort of despair in his face, a tone of dread and
horror in his voice, that might have deterred the girl from the perilous
step she expressed her determination of taking; but she would not be
warned.
“Oh! Miss Mina,” he cried, flinging himself before her, “oh! Miss Mina,
child of my dear old master, whom I have loved so well—that which I
would do most for, you or my own flesh and blood, I never could well
tell: I never knelt to mortal being before; never, but to Him who
created and died for us all; but now, on my bended knees, I implore you
not to become wife to an Ivraine, not to bring your young heart to that
wretched house, for it to be darkened by trouble deeper and heavier than
it has ever yet known: by your father’s memory, for the sake of your
dead mother, as you value your own happiness, I implore of you think in
time and break off the match.”
“Do not kneel before me, old friend,” said the girl, with a gush of
tears, laying her hand on the shoulder of her father’s faithful
servitor; “what am I, to be so thought of, so remembered, to meet with
such devotion? Break off the match, as you want me, I cannot; and if I
could, I would not: poverty and sorrow might perhaps prove preventives
to some, but to me they seem merely recommendations. Stay, stay,” she
added, seeing him turn sadly, as if to depart, “you must wait to see Mr.
Malcolm and to eat something.”
But the old man answered in a choking voice,
“I dinna want to see or hear anything more, Miss Mina; and I couldna eat
now, if you would set the brawest feast before me: no, no, my heart’s
too full; it’s full to bursting, for I have come on a useless errand,
and I am going back with a black answer; and ye winna take warning till
the time rins past for it to be of any use till ye; and you’re set to
come amongst ye don’t know what, to a place where you have never been,
to a home where you won’t be welcome, at the asking of a man who can
never make you happy;” and, as he spoke the last words with a sort of
despairing emphasis, he passed from the room and out into the street
hurriedly, as if afraid of trusting himself with another glance at her
who, with those last stinging words rankling in her memory, remained
still resolute in her determination to marry Mr. Ivraine.
“I said I would do so when I thought him haughty, rich, and proud,” she
reflected; “I will not retract now, when I find he is only poor,
reserved, miserable.”
But though, as regarded himself, a different feeling had sprung up in
her heart, there were others to dread, others to think of: quite
sufficient remained to render the future a dreadful uncertainty, a thing
to fear, a journey to shrink from.
“Yet he will be kind to me,” she murmured; “for if he have been unhappy
himself, he will feel for me, and he can surely make them treat his wife
with some consideration. I know he will help Malcolm on to wealth and
rank, or, at worst, employment, a subsistence: and for me, why he must
be fond of me, as he wishes me to marry him, and it will still be a
home;” and once again the painful smile, which had become almost
habitual to her, but which Colin’s words had dispelled for a few
minutes, flickered over her face as she thought of how she once had
dreamed of something more in a home than a mere shelter; of the visions
of success, the hopes of wealth, the thoughts of wild romantic scenery,
amid which Malcolm was to own an estate, and she and Miss Caldera were
to keep house for him; of long pleasant rides over the breezy moors, of
walks on the lonely hills, where the heather sprang up again after light
feet had bent it; of moonlight evenings on the bosom of the waters. She
had dreamed of a home like this,—a retreat surrounded by beauty and
luxury and happiness in the land of her birth; not near Craigmaver,
however: and the vision she woke to in a London street was marrying—for
a “mere shelter, and not for love”—a man who called a miser father and
who dwelt, with a cloud on his brow and trouble in his heart, amidst the
fens and swamps and flat desolation of Lincolnshire.
Then she tried to forget all, save that he was unhappy, which fact
seemed occasionally to make her feel perfectly tranquil: she laid out a
scheme for bearing everything patiently and striving to render his life
more endurable, if she could. She commenced forthwith to foster a number
of very absurd unworldly ideas; and, for the benevolent purpose of
warning any sentimental young lady who may ever feel tempted to cherish
any similarly ridiculous fancies, I must chronicle here—a little in
advance of my story, it is true, but that is a matter of secondary
importance—that it would have been far better for Mina Frazer, and
happier and altogether more desirable for both, if her intended husband
had been a little richer, a little franker, a little less miserable, a
little less of a slave; her position as a wife would have proved much
pleasanter, had his home and his relatives and his circumstances been a
little more like what they ought, for a man to dream of marrying upon;
but I am walking on too fast for the tedious progress of events to keep
pace with, which is a pity,—seeing that, if the fair reader cannot find
all the above out for herself ere very long, Mina’s marriage must have
turned out a most happy one, as all marriages, whether in books or out
of books, ought to do, but which, unhappily, they very frequently do
not.
So Mina spent that day, sometimes despairing, sometimes rejoicing,
sometimes fearing, sometimes hoping; and the next morning put a
termination to the possibility of drawing back in time, or of thinking
to any purpose, or to the usefulness of despairing or fearing, or
dreading, or anything save bearing patiently, for Mina then became Mrs.
Ivraine, and entered herself as student in the school of resignation;
but for years, spite of her good resolutions and good conduct and
earnest struggles with herself, she never passed her examination nor
obtained a degree in that extremely needful and beautiful branch of
female education, which some have a natural genius for and others spend
their lives striving to master. A very few walk into their graves
without ever finding it necessary to learn, or deeming it possible for
the practice of so very vulgar a virtue to contribute to their own or
other’s happiness. Few like to con the lesson, most have to do it: the
saints of this world, those who seem too good to be sent upon the earth
at all, alone take kindly to it. Mina did not, but she tried hard; she
had refused to listen to advice in time, and was consequently forced to
submit to the results; and, considering her nature, she did bear
patiently—wonderfully so—for long.
Meanwhile, he who had travelled so far and so uselessly to warn the
child of his dead master of the characters of those amongst whom she
persisted in casting her lot, after hurrying out of the house, rushed
on, wandering through London he hardly knew whither, till his senses
were restored in a somewhat singular manner, by coming unexpectedly in
such rough contact with a gentleman at the corner of a street as
effectually, to borrow a phrase from an Irish hod-man, “knocked his
brains into shape again.”
“Where the devil are you going to?” growled out the individual in
question, who felt himself to be the aggrieved party in the rencontre,
and, perhaps, so he was.
“No the same gait as you, at any rate, Lord be praised,” retorted Colin,
stooping to pick up his hat, which had been pitched off by the force of
the concussion, and contriving to render this sentence more in the form
of a malediction against his opponent than a thanksgiving on his own
account.
“Some infernal Scotch rascal,” muttered the other, pushing past the old
man, who, catching a full view of his face as he did so, first stood
still and gaped in blank amazement, and then, uttering a “Gude save us
a’,” that distinctly proved on which side of the Tweed he had been born,
turned and followed him.
Down lanes, across courts, through crowded thoroughfares, in quiet
streets,—he stuck to him like a shadow. The gentleman walked fast, but
so did Colin; if he paused for a moment to speak to an acquaintance, the
Highlander took refuge behind a group of neighbouring talkers, or else
skulked into some door-way or passage, keeping his eye fixed on him all
the time. From the instant he had first caught sight of the person who
thus excited his curiosity, till he dropped him at an office in Wapping,
he never once removed his gaze from his figure. It is no easy matter,
even for a Londoner, to track an individual to his den, and it is doubly
difficult for a stranger, who is liable to be jostled and pushed and
diverted from his path and his object at every turn; but Colin was
strong, not in experience or knowledge, but in a determined Scottish
temper, which enabled him to forget everything but his purpose, and to
elbow his way in a manner which drew down upon him not a few masculine
maledictions and feminine remonstrances; little he cared about either so
as he set down his man—that was all he desired.
“Can you tell me who that gentleman may be who has just gone in there,
young man?” he asked a sort of porter who was assisting to load some
casks at the next warehouse.
“Yes; that’s Mr. Westwood, old ’un,” irreverently responded the fellow,
mocking Saunders’s Highland accent with his pert English tongue; “were
you wanting to be specially introduced to him? because, if you do, I
should feel proud to stand godfather and present you.”
“It was more, I am sure, than yours did the day you were baptized, that
is, supposing you ever had a drop of clean water on your face, a thing I
scarcely think likely, looking at it now,” retorted Colin, gazing
curiously at the man’s smoke-begrimed visage, which speech turned the
laugh against the porter, whilst one of his civiler fellows exclaimed,
“See, there he be again; that is Mr. Westwood.”
The person in question was standing on the step of his office door,
speaking to a clerk, as Colin turned and gazed fixedly at him.
For a moment the successful merchant remained unconscious that a pair of
keen grey eyes were fastened on his countenance; but, at length,
chancing to glance towards the spot where Colin stood, he met that fixed
earnest look and quailed beneath it.
“Do you want half-a-crown to mend a dinge in your hat, friend?” he said
at length, with a sort of audacious coolness.
“No I don’t,” rejoined Colin, moving a step or two towards him, and
rejecting the coin so nervously proffered, with an air of insulted
dignity. “I want nothing from ye, only a fair look at ye.”
“Faith, you have taken a tolerable stare,” exclaimed Mr. Westwood; “I am
happy to have been able to gratify you in this respect: how do you think
I look?”
“Pretty well,” half whispered Colin, “for a man who has been dead and
buried these twenty years, at any rate.”
Mr. Westwood shrank back as if a blow had been dealt him, and before he
recovered his self-possession, Colin Saunders was gone, followed by a
volley of curses, none the less fervent because silent, from the partner
of the late Mr. Merapie, and by a complimentary remark from the lips of
one of the porters, who pulled a mocking face at his companions, and
said,
“Sawney was a rum old cove.”
The person so referred to went and paid a visit to his daughter and her
husband, and stayed a day or two with them, catechizing the children and
squabbling over disputed doctrines with Frith, and reading and praying
and haranguing and expounding; but through all, he never mentioned a
syllable about his accidental rencontre with Alfred Westwood to any one,
and never felt a single minute’s peace of mind concerning his poor dear
Miss Mina, to whom it is time to return after this brief digression, and
join almost at the very entrance to Paradise, for Ernest and she were
driving there.
The wind howled and moaned through the leafless trees, a lament for the
young heart coming amongst them to be crushed and broken; the heavy gate
swung back on its rusty hinges tardily as though it would fain have
denied her admission to the gloomy precincts lying beyond. There was a
weight she found it impossible to shake off lying heavy on the spirit of
the new made wife,—a shadow black as night, born half of sorrow, half of
apprehension, clouding the brow of her husband; but the carriage rolled
past the desolate porter’s lodge and along the neglected drive, where
moss and grass deadened the sound of its wheels.
The gate creaked once more on its hinges, and the grating of the key in
the lock struck on the ear of the new comer with a pang, as the sound of
a prison bolt jars on that of a criminal. The long ragged branches of
the ancient lime and beech trees bent mournfully over the passing
vehicle, and tossed their arms to and fro, as if lamenting to the winter
sky: and thus, without a word of welcome, or a thought of joy, in the
chill, cold, depressing semidarkness of a January afternoon fast fading
into night, Mina Ivraine came to that for which she had paid an
inordinate price, to that for which she had wept, pined, suffered,
struggled, married,—Home.