NEWS ABOUT THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS.
NEXT morning Margaret Fanshawe was unusually silent at breakfast, except
to her new friends the squirrels, whose cage she placed on a little
table close by, and who had already begun to attach themselves to her.
To them she talked, as she gave them their nuts, a great deal of that
silvery nonsense which is pleasant to hear as any other pleasant sound
in nature. But good old Miss Sheckleton thought her out of spirits.
"She's vexing herself about my conjectures," thought the old lady. "I'm
sorry I said a word about it. I believe _I_ was a fool, but _she's_ a
greater one. She's young, however, and has that excuse."
"_How_ old are you, Margaret?" said she abruptly, after a long silence.
"Twenty-two, my last birth-day," answered the young lady, and looked, as
if expecting a reason for the question.
"Yes; so I thought," said Miss Sheckleton. "The twenty-third of June--a
midsummer birth-day--your poor mamma used to say--the glow and flowers
of summer--a brilliant augury."
"Brilliantly accomplished," added the girl; "don't you think so, Frisk,
and you, little Comet? Are you not tired of Malory already, my friends?
_My_ cage is bigger, but so am I, don't you see; you'd be happier
climbing and hopping among the boughs. What am _I_ to you, compared with
liberty? I did not _ask_ for you, little fools, did I? You came to me;
and I will open the door of your cage some day, and give you back to the
unknown--to chance--from which you came."
"You're sad to-day, my child," said Miss Sheckleton, laying her hand
gently on her shoulder. "Are you vexed at what I said to you last
night?"
"What did you say?"
"About these little things--the squirrels."
"No, darling, I don't care. Why should I? They come from Fortune, and
that little brown boy. They came no more to _me_ than to _you_," said
the girl carelessly. "Yes, another nut; you shall, you little wonders!"
"Now, that's just what I was going to say. _I_ might just as well have
bought them as _you_; and I must confess I coloured my guess a little,
for I only mentioned poor Whisk in passing, and I really don't know that
he heard me; and I think if he had thought of getting a squirrel for us,
he'd have asked leave to send it to _me_. I could not have objected to
that, you know; and that little boy may be ill, you know; or something
may have happened to delay him, and he'll turn up; and you'll have to
make a bargain, and pay a fair price for them yet."
"Yes, of course; I never thought anything else--eventually; and I knew
all along you were jesting. I told these little creatures so this
morning, over and over again. If they could speak they would say so.
Would not you, you two dear little witches?"
So she carried out her pets with her, and hung their cage among the
boughs of the tree that stood by the rustic seat to which she used to
take her book.
"Well, I've relieved her mind," thought Miss Sheckleton.
But oddly enough, she found the young lady not sad, but rather cross and
fierce all that afternoon--talking more bitterly than ever to her
squirrels, about Malory, and with an angry kind of gaiety, of her
approaching exile to France.
"It is not always easy to know how to please young ladies," thought Miss
Sheckleton. "They won't always take the trouble to know their own
minds. Poor thing! It _is_ very lonely--very lonesome, to be sure;--and
this little temper will blow over."
So, full of these thoughts, Miss Sheckleton repaired to that mysterious
study door within which Sir Booth, dangerous as a caged beast, paced his
floor, and stormed and ground his teeth, over--not his own vices,
prodigalities, and madness, but the fancied villanies of mankind--glared
through his window in his paroxysms, and sent his curses like muttered
thunder across the sea over the head of old Pendillion--and then would
subside, and write long, rambling, rubbishy letters to his attorneys in
London, which it was Miss Sheckleton's business to enclose and direct,
in her feminine hand, to her old friend Miss Ogden, of Bolton Street,
Piccadilly, who saw after the due delivery of these missives, and made
herself generally useful during the mystery and crisis of the Fanshawe
affairs.
Outside the sombre precincts of Malory Margaret Fanshawe would not go.
Old Miss Sheckleton had urged her. Perhaps it was a girlish perversity;
perhaps she really disliked the idea of again meeting or making an
acquaintance. At all events, she was against any more excursions. Thus
the days were dull at Malory, and even Miss Sheckleton was weary of her
imprisonment.
It is a nice thing to hit the exact point of reserve and difficulty at
which an interest of a certain sort is piqued, without danger of being
extinguished. Perhaps it is seldom compassed by art, and a fluke
generally does it. I am absolutely certain that there was no design
here. But there is a spirit of contrariety--a product of pride, of a
sensitiveness almost morbid, of a reserve gliding into duplicity, a
duplicity without calculation--which yet operates like design. Cleve was
piqued--Cleve was angry. The spirit of the chase was roused, as often as
he looked at the dusky woods of Malory.
And now he had walked on three successive days past the old gateway, and
on each of them, loitered long on the wind-beaten hill that overlooks
the grounds of Malory. But in vain. He was no more accustomed to wait
than Louis XIV. Now wonder he grew impatient, and meditated the wildest
schemes--even that of walking up to the hall-door, and asking to see Sir
Booth and Miss Sheckleton, and, if need be, Miss Fanshawe. He only knew
that, one way or another, he _must_ see her. He was a young man of
exorbitant impatience, and a violent will, and would control events.
There are consequences, of course, and these subjugators are controlled
in their turn. Time, as mechanical science shows us, is an element in
power; and patience is in durability. God waits, and God is might. And
without patience we enter not into the kingdom of God, which is the
kingdom of power, and the kingdom of eternity.
Cleve Verney's romance, next morning, was doomed to a prosaic
interruption. He was examining a chart of the Cardyllian estuary, which
hangs in the library, trying to account for the boat's having touched
the bank at low water, at a point where he fancied there was a fathom to
spare, when the rustic servant entered with--
"Please, sir, a gentleman which his name is Mr. Larkin, is at the door,
and wishes to see you, sir, on partickler business, please."
"Just wait a moment, Edward. Three fathom--two--four feet--by Jove! So
it is. We might have been aground for five hours; a shame there isn't a
buoy there--got off in a coach, by Jove! _Larkin_? Has he no card?"
"Yes, sir, please."
"Oh! yes--very good. Mr. Larkin--The Lodge. Does he look like a
gatekeeper?"
"No, sir, please; quite the gentleman."
"What the devil can he want of me? Are you certain he did not ask for my
uncle?"
"Yes, sir--the Honourable Mr. Verney--which I told him he wasn't here."
"And why did not you send him away, then?"
"He asked me if you were here, and wished to see you partickler, sir."
"Larkin--The Lodge; what is he like--tall or short--old or young?" asked
Cleve.
"Tall gentleman, please, sir--not young--helderley, sir, rayther."
"By Jove! Larkin? I think it _is_.--Is he bald--a long face, eh?" asked
Cleve with sudden interest.
"Yes, sir, a good deal in that way, sir--rayther."
"Show him in," said Cleve; "I shall hear all about it, now," he
soliloquised as the man departed. "Yes, the luckiest thing in the
world!"
The tall attorney, with the tall bald head and pink eyelids, entered
simpering, with hollow jaws, and a stride that was meant to be perfectly
easy and gentlemanlike. Mr. Larkin had framed his costume upon something
he had once seen upon somebody whom he secretly worshipped as a great
authority in quiet elegance. But every article in the attorney's
wardrobe looked always new--a sort of lavender was his favourite tint--a
lavender waistcoat, lavender trowsers, lavender gloves--so that, as the
tall lank figure came in, a sort of blooming and vernal effect, in
spite of his open black frock-coat, seemed to enter and freshen the
chamber.
"How d'ye do, Mr. Larkin? My uncle is at present in France. Sit down,
pray--can I be of any use?" said Cleve, who now recollected his
appearance perfectly, and did not like it.
The attorney, smiling engagingly, more and more, and placing a very
smooth new hat upon the table, sat himself down, crossing one long leg
over the other, throwing himself languidly back, and letting one of his
long arms swing over the back of his chair, so that his fingers almost
touched the floor, said--
"Oh?" in a prolonged tone of mild surprise. "They quite misinformed me
in town--not at Verney House--I did not allow myself time to call there;
but my agents, they assured me that your uncle, the Honourable Kiffyn
Fulke Verney, was at present down here at Ware, and a most exquisite
retreat it certainly is. My occupations, and I may say my habits, call
me a good deal among the residences of our aristocracy," he continued,
with a careless grandeur and a slight wave of his hand, throwing himself
a little more back, "and I have seen nothing, I assure you, Mr. Verney,
more luxurious and architectural than this patrician house of Ware, with
its tasteful colonnade, and pilastered front, and the distant view of
the fashionable watering-place of Cardyllian, which also belongs to the
family; nothing certainly lends a more dignified charm to the scene, Mr.
Verney, than a distant view of family property, where, as in this
instance, it is palpably accidental--where it is at all forced, as in
the otherwise highly magnificent seat of my friend Sir Thomas Oldbull,
baronet; so far from elevating, it pains one, it hurts one's taste"--and
Mr. Jos. Larkin shrugged and winced a little, and shook his head--"Do
_you_ know Sir Thomas?--_no_--I dare say--he's quite a new man, Sir
Thomas--we all look on him in that light in our part of the world--a--in
fact, a _parvenu_," which word Mr. Larkin pronounced as if it were
spelled _pair vennew_. "But, you know, the British Constitution, every
man may go up--we can't help it--we can't keep them down. Money is
power, Mr. Verney, as the old Earl of Coachhouse once said to me--and so
it is; and when they make a lot of it, they come up, and we must only
receive them, and make the best of them."
"Have you had breakfast, Mr. Larkin?" inquired Cleve, in answer to all
this.
"Thanks, yes--at Llwynan--a very sweet spot--one of the sweetest, I
should say, in this beauteous country."
"I don't know--I dare say--I think you wished to see me on business, Mr.
Larkin?" said Cleve.
"I must say, Mr. Verney, you will permit me, that I really have been
taken a little by surprise. I had expected confidently to find your
uncle, the Honourable Kiffyn Fulke Verney, here, where I had certainly
no hope of having the honour of finding you."
I must here interpolate the fact that no person in or out of England was
more exactly apprised of the whereabout of the Verneys, uncle and
nephew, at the moment when he determined to visit Ware, with the
ostensible object of seeing the Hon. Kiffyn Fulke, and the real one of
seeing Mr. Cleve, than was my friend Mr. Larkin. He was, however, as we
know, a gentleman of ingenious morals and labyrinthine tastes. With
truth he was, as it were, on bowing terms, and invariably spoke of her
with respect, but that was all. There was no intimacy, she was an
utterly impracticable adviser, and Mr. Larkin had grown up under a more
convenient tuition.
"The information, however, I feel concerns you, my dear sir, as nearly,
in a manner, as it does your uncle; in fact, your youth taken into
account, more momentously than it can so old a gentleman. I would,
therefore, merely venture to solicit one condition, and that is, that
you will be so good as not to mention me to your uncle as having
conveyed this information to you, as he might himself have wished to be
the first person to open it, and my having done so might possibly induce
in his mind an unpleasant feeling."
"I shan't see my uncle before the fifteenth," said Cleve Verney.
"A long wait, Mr. Verney, for such intelligence as it falls to my lot to
communicate, which, in short, I shall be most _happy_ to lay before you,
provided you will be so good as to say you desire it on the condition I
feel it due to all parties to suggest."
"You mean that my uncle need not be told anything about this interview.
I don't see that he _need_, if it concerns _me_. What concerns _him_, I
suppose you will tell him, Mr. Larkin."
"Quite so; that's quite my meaning; merely to avoid unpleasant feeling.
I am most anxious to acquaint you--but you understand the delicacy of my
position with your uncle--and that premised, I have now to inform
you"--here he dropped his voice, and raised his hand a little, like a
good man impressing a sublime religious fact--"that your uncle, the
Honourable Arthur Verney, is no more."
The young man flushed up to the very roots of his hair. There was a
little pink flush, also, on the attorney's long cheeks; for there was
something exciting in even making such an announcement. The consequences
were so unspeakably splendid.
Mr. Larkin saw a vision of permanent, confidential, and lucrative
relations with the rich Verney family, such as warmed the cool tide of
his blood, and made him feel for the moment at peace with all mankind.
Cleve was looking in the attorney's eyes--the attorney in his. There was
a silence for while you might count three or four. Mr. Larkin saw that
his intended client, Cleve--the future Viscount Verney--was dazzled, and
a little confounded. Recollecting himself, he turned his shrewd gaze on
the marble face of Plato, who stood on his pedestal near the window, and
a smile seraphic and melancholy lighted up the features and the sad pink
eyes of the godly attorney. He raised them; he raised his great hand in
the lavender glove, and shook his long head devoutly.
"Mysterious are the dealings of Providence, Mr. Verney; happy those who
read the lesson, sir. How few of us so favoured! Wonderful are his
ways!"
With a little effort, and an affectation of serenity, Cleve spoke--
"No very great wonder, however, considering he was sixty-four in May
last." The young man knew his vagabond uncle Arthur's age to an hour,
and nobody can blame him much for his attention to those figures. "It
might not have happened, of course, for ten or twelve years, but it
might have occurred, I suppose, at any moment. How did it happen? Do you
know the particulars? But, is there--is there no" (he was ashamed to say
hope) "no chance that he may still be living?--is it quite certain?"
"Perfectly certain, _perfectly_. In a family matter, I have always made
it a rule to _be_ certain before speaking. No trifling with sacred
feelings, that has been my rule, Mr. Verney, and although in this case
there are mitigations as respects the survivors, considering the life of
privation and solitude, and, as I have reason to know, of ceaseless
self-abasement and remorse, which was all that remained to your unhappy
relative, the Honourable Arthur Verney, it was hardly to be desired that
the event should be very much longer deferred."
Cleve Verney looked for a moment on the table, in the passing contagion
of the good attorney's high moral tone.
Cleve just said "_yes_," in a low tone, and shook his head. But
rallying, he remarked--
"You, of course, know how the title is affected by this event--and the
estates?" And as he raised his eyes, he encountered the attorney's fixed
upon him with that peculiar rat-like vigilance, concentrated and
dangerous, which, as we know, those meek orbs sometimes assume when his
own interests and objects were intensely present to his mind.
Cleve's eye shrank for a second under the enigmatic scrutiny which as
instantly gave way, in turn, before _his_ glance.
"Oh, certainly," said the attorney, "the public know always something of
great houses, and their position; that is, _generally_, of
course--details are quite another affair. But everyone knows the truly
magnificent position, Mr. Verney, in which the event places your uncle,
and I may say you. At the same time the House of Lords, _your_ house, I
may call it now, are, very properly, particular in the matter of
evidence."
"Our consul, I suppose," said Cleve----
"If he were cognisant of all the points necessary to put in proof, the
case would be a very simple one indeed," said Mr. Larkin, with a sad
smile, slowly shaking his tall head.
"Where, Mr. Larkin, did my poor uncle die?" inquired Cleve, with a
little effort at the word "uncle."
"In Constantinople, sir--a very obscure quarter. His habits, Mr. Verney,
were very strange; he lived like a rat--I beg pardon, I should say a
_rabbit_ in a burrow. Darkness, sir, obscurity--known, I believe,
personally to but two individuals. Strange fate, Mr. Verney, for one
born to so brilliant an inheritance. Known to but two individuals, one
of whom died--what a thing life is!--but a few months before him,
leaving, I may say, but one reliable witness to depose to his death;
and, for certain reasons, that witness is most reluctant to leave
Constantinople, and not very easily to be discovered, even there. You
see, Mr. Verney, now, probably, something of the difficulty of the case.
Fortunately, I have got some valuable information, confidential, I may
say, in its nature, and with the aid of a few valuable local agents,
providentially at this moment at my disposal, I think the difficulty may
be quite overcome."
"If old Arthur Verney is dead, I'll find proof of the fact," said Cleve;
"I'll send out people who will know how to come at it."
"You must be well advised, and very cautious, Mr. Verney--in fact, I may
tell you, you can't be _too_ cautious, for I happen to know that a
certain low firm are already tampering with the witness."
"And how the devil can it concern any firm to keep us--my uncle Kiffyn
Verney out of his rights?" said Mr. Cleve Verney, scornfully.
"Very true, Mr. Verney, in one sense, _no_ motive; but I am older in the
sad experience of the world than you, Mr. Verney. At your age I _could_
not believe it, much later I _would_ not. But, ah! Mr. Verney, in the
long-run, the facts are too strong for us. Poor, miserable, fallen human
nature, it is capable of _anything_. It is only too true, and too
_horrible_. It sticks at _nothing_, my dear Mr. Verney, and their object
is to command the witness by this means, and to dictate terms to you--in
fact, my dear Mr. Verney, it is shocking to think of it--to _extort
money_."
"I hope you over-estimate the difficulty. If the death _has_ occurred I
wager my life we'll _prove_ it, and come what will I hope my uncle will
never be persuaded to give those scoundrels a shilling."
"Certainly not--not a shilling--not a farthing--but I have taken prompt,
and I trust decisive steps to check-mate those gentlemen. I am not at
liberty, just at present, to disclose all I know; I don't say that I
could exactly undertake the management of the case, but I shall be very
happy to volunteer all the assistance in my power; and as I say, some
accidental circumstances place me in a position to undertake that you
shall not be defeated. A break down, I may mention, would be a more
serious matter than you seem to suppose; in fact, I should prefer the
Honourable Arthur Verney's living for twelve years more, with clear
proof of his death at the end of that time, than matters as they stand
at present, with a failure of the necessary proof."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Larkin; my uncle, I am sure, will also be
_very_ much obliged. I understand, of course, the sort of difficulty you
apprehend."
"It's not conjectural, Mr. Verney, I wish it were--but it's past _that_;
it _exists_," said the attorney, sadly.
"Well, I can only say, we are very much obliged," said Cleve, quite
honestly. "I shan't forget your wish, that I should not mention our
conversation to my uncle, and if you should learn anything further----"
"_You_ shall certainly hear it, Mr. Verney. I must now take my leave.
Sweet day, and a beauteous country! How blest are you, Mr. Verney, in your
situation! I allude to your scenery, and I may add, the architectural
magnificence of this princely residence. What a row of windows as I
approached the house! What a number of bed-rooms you must have! Hardly so
many, let us hope, as there are mansions, Mr. Verney, in that house to
which we humbly trust we are proceeding." Mr. Larkin, who, on his way had
called professionally upon a subscriber to the Gylingden Chapel--an
"eminent Christian"--and talked accordingly--perceived that his meat was a
little too strong for a babe of Mr. Verney's standing, and concluded more
like an attorney of this world.
"Splendid and convenient residence, and in all respects suitable, Mr.
Verney, to the fine position of usefulness, and, I may say, splendour,
to which you are about being called," and he smiled round upon the
book-cases and furniture, and waved his hand gently, as if in the act of
diffusing a benediction over the chairs and tables.
"Won't you take something, Mr. Larkin, before you go?" asked Cleve.
"No--thanks--no, Mr. Verney--many thanks. It is but an hour since I had
my modest _dejeuner_ at that sweet little inn at Llwynan."
So on the door-steps they parted; the attorney smiling quite
celestially, and feeling all a-glow with affability, virtue, and a
general sense of acceptance. In fact he was pleased with his morning's
work for several reasons--pleased with himself, with Cleve Verney, and
confident of gliding into the management of the Verney estates, and in
great measure of the Verneys themselves; now seeing before him in the
great and cloudy vista of his future, a new and gorgeous castle in the
air. These _chateaux_, in the good man's horizon had, of late, been
multiplying rapidly, and there was now quite a little city of palaces in
his perspective--an airy pageant which, I think, he sometimes mistook
for the New Jerusalem, he talked and smiled so celestially when it was
in view.