General Dorrien sits at the breakfast table in the cheerful dining-room
at Cranston Hall, with a frown upon his face and an open letter in his
hand.
He is a handsome man, with severe, regular features; a man of whom his
dependents would certainly stand in awe, and his family would fear more
than love. There is sternness in the glance of his keen eyes, in the
cut of the closely-trimmed grey moustache and whisker, and in every
movement of the erect military figure. A man of iron will, not to be
turned aside from his own hard and fast rule of right and wrong by any
consideration--what chance had the foibles and follies of youth with one
of this mould? And there he sits, motionless, gazing upon the open
letter, the frown deepening upon his brow.
The letter bears an American postmark and is from his eldest son, whom
he has not seen for eight years. It is business-like in the terse
brevity of its wording, for it merely, and as a matter of duty,
announces the writer's intended return to England, tidings one would
think that should gladden a father's heart.
But in this case not so. Roland Dorrien and his father had parted in
bitter anger. Faults on both sides, of course. The former wild,
reckless and imprudent, as youth too strictly and needlessly restrained
is almost sure to prove; the latter merciless and unbending. Resentful
feelings and hot, hasty temper, met by additional severity and cold
scorn--thus they had parted, and save two or three curt communications
on money matters had held no intercourse since. And the son, sharing
largely in the paternal force of will, has made no attempt at apology or
conciliation during his exile; and now he is coming home.
So the General's reflections are not of a comforting nature. He has not
softened during these years. Never was he known to give way; all must
yield to him. The exile has not done this; therefore Time, rather than
heal the paternal anger, has only consolidated it.
Roland is not his first-born. There was another, a fine cavalry
soldier, who had already begun to distinguish himself in his father's
profession, and him the General had loved as the apple of his eye. But
one day news of a terrible Alpine fatality arrived at Cranston Hall. An
Englishman and his two guides--both incompetent--had been lost on the
Lauteraar glacier. They were seen by another party not very far behind
them on that dangerous pass suddenly to disappear--and upon these
arriving at the spot, a fresh rift in the brink of a black, bottomless
crevasse showed that the edge had given way beneath the doomed trio who
had approached it regardless of proper precaution. There yawned the
horrible fissure, its glassy blue sides falling perpendicular into
unknown depths, and revealing the barest possible traces of the
catastrophe to the horror-stricken witnesses. The Englishman who had
thus found a nameless grave in the most stupendous of Nature's vaults
was Vernon Dorrien, the General's eldest son, and the light of the old
soldier's life seemed thenceforth to be buried there also.
Roland was now the heir and would reign in his dead brother's place.
Not of legal right though, for the entail ended with the present Squire,
who had it in his power to will Cranston as he chose. But the General
had his own stern ideas of right. The Dorriens had always held Cranston
from father to son, or, failing male issue, from brother to brother, and
in spite of his aversion to his eldest surviving son the latter would
succeed him in the ancestral domain. Right and justice would not allow
Roland to be disinherited, but that he should fill his dead brother's
place was very unpalatable to General Dorrien.
And now he sits with the letter in his hand gazing meditatively out upon
the sunlit lawn and the noble elms in the park, and on the wooded
hollows beneath the brown heather-clad uplands; and his soul is filled
with bitterness as he thinks of the man who was to have owned all this
fair domain now lying cold and stiff in his vast and icy tomb. The
cawing of rooks floats in through the half-open window, and the
flower-beds are stirred by a cool, soft breath from yon patch of
amethyst sea just glimpsed through a dip in the downs away there to the
right.
The window shuts with an angry slam, the result of the sudden opening of
a door. He looks up quickly as a lady enters--an elderly lady with a
strong-minded face. She must have been very handsome in her youth--she
is handsome yet, though her dark hair is only just beginning to turn
grey, and her large eyes are clear and lustrous still; but the firm
moulding of mouth and chin seems to show that her will is nearly, if not
quite, as determined as that of her husband. She takes her place
opposite to him at the table.
"I have a letter here"--he begins--"from Roland."
"Yes? And what does he say?" Her tone betrays scant interest in the
subject, and she busies herself with the urn.
"Very little that he ought to say--very little indeed. Why, madam, you
have taught your children the Fifth Commandment to small purpose." And
he hands her the letter with a bitter smile.
She takes it frowning, but without a word, for she has long learnt the
futility of trying to stem his taunts or his anger. Her domineering
spirit would long since have reduced most men to submission, but in her
husband she had found her master; and thus for many a year a
cold-hearted peace has reigned between them, but their characters are
too much alike ever to harmonise, and they know it.
"He does not say he is coming home," she remarks, handing back the
letter--"only to England."
"And he does not express a shadow of regret for his shameful behaviour
before he went away, or for his treatment of me. And yet he talks about
`his duty to inform me of his return.' His duty!" repeats the General
with bitter sarcasm.
"You know I told you, at the time, you were too hard on him. Things
might have been worse."
"Too hard on him! Might have been worse! Eleanor, are you mad? A son
of mine to be threatened with a common breach of promise action by
common low people. I don't see what could be worse."
"Well, it was only a threat. The boy was imprudent, of course; but
then, he was very young."
"But old in vice, no doubt. But it was not so much the disgraceful
affair itself that I felt, as that a son of mine should be mixed up with
low, vulgar people."
"They were not so very low. The father was a professional man--a
surgeon in good practice, and--"
"And would assess his daughter's affections at 4,000 pounds, and would
exhibit the young _lady_ in open court as a butt for the ribald wit of a
filthy mob, and for the questioning and brow-beating and broad jeers of
a set of profligate barristers. Really, Eleanor, I am at a loss to see
how lowness and vulgarity could descend much further."