CORRESPONDENCE.
_From Clement Hazeldine to Hermia Rivers_.
"In the course of our many talks together, you have more than once
confided to me certain details of your earliest impressions and
recollections. What I now want you to do is, to shut your eyes and go
back in memory to those early days, and then to write down in detail,
and with careful minuteness, everything you can call to mind about
your childhood previously to your adoption by Uncle John and Aunt
Charlotte. I am afraid that all you can tell me will amount to very
little, but I want the information in question for a certain purpose,
about which I may have more to tell you by-and-bye. Meanwhile, I shall
await your reply with as much patience--or as little--as Providence
has seen fit to endow me with."
_From Hermia Rivers to Clement Hazeldine_.
"You are quite right in your assumption that anything I may be able to
tell you of my earliest recollections will amount to very little.
Until I heard from Uncle John the story of his adoption of me, I had
no absolute knowledge of any existence apart from, or prior to, my
life with him and Aunt Charlotte. It is true that I seemed to remember
certain people and certain incidents with whom or which uncle and aunt
seemed to be in no way mixed up, although there was nothing to prove
to me that I was not living under uncle's roof at the time to which
they referred. Indeed, so shadowy were they that at times there came
over me a doubt as to whether they had any basis of fact whatever; and
in any case they lived in my recollections as so many faded pictures,
which each year that passed tended to render dimmer and more
indistinct; and there is little question that had it not been for what
Uncle John told me they would by-and-bye have vanished utterly from my
memory.
"Uncle John, as you are aware, had no information to give me beyond
the fact that, after he had arranged to adopt me, I was taken to his
house one evening after dark by a respectable-looking, middle-aged
woman, who, judging from her appearance, might be the wife of a
well-to-do mechanic. Uncle asked no questions and the woman proffered
no statement. She was not more than five minutes in the house, and he
never saw her again.
"Well, Uncle John's statement threw me back upon myself, so to speak.
Again and again I went over my confused and half-forgotten
recollections, striving to piece them together, and bring them into
clearer relief, but to very little purpose, I'm afraid. However, I
will now proceed to sketch for you in outline the three incidents, if
I may term them such, which stand out most definitely in my memory as
evidently pertaining to a time which I now know must have been
anterior to that of my adoption.
"Incident the first. I see myself, as a very little girl, seated in a
shut-up carriage in company with a man and a woman, neither of whose
faces I can bring to mind. I am hugging to my breast a gaily-dressed
doll as my dearest earthly treasure. It is a gloomy evening, and the
rain is falling fast. I seem to have been in the carriage a long time,
jolting over the dreary country roads, but as to where I came from and
how I happened to be there at all, I can remember nothing whatever.
Then I seem to wake up from sleep, roused by the sudden stoppage of
the carriage, and, looking out, I see someone open two large iron
gates, which swing slowly back on their hinges. But what takes my
childish attention more than anything else is the fact that on the top
of one of the supporting pillars--I can only see one from where I
sit--there is fixed a strange-looking animal carved in stone, as it
might be a griffin, or a dragon, holding a shield between its paws.
But one half of the shield and one of the creature's paws are broken
away and missing, and I remember thinking how strangely forlorn it
looked in its maimed condition, and how the rain-drops, trickling from
the end of its nose, seemed like tears, so that I felt quite to pity
the poor thing.
"After that comes a blank.
"In the next scene of which I retain anything like a clear
recollection--although how long a time elapsed between it and the
preceding one I am unable to say--I am in a gloomy panelled room, the
two high, narrow windows of which look out upon a small, semi-circular
lawn shut in by a tall hedge. A case-clock in one corner ticks slowly
and solemnly. Against the wall on one side of the room stands a tall
bureau of black oak carved with fruit and quaint figures. There is a
large open fireplace, in which a few embers glow faintly red. On two
high, straight-backed chairs sit two angular, straight-backed ladies;
both elderly, both with long, thin faces, both having the same cold,
unsympathetic eyes and the same frozen expression, and so much alike
generally, that I can only now conclude they must have been sisters.
As I stand before them in my white frock and bronze shoes, with my
hands behind my back, I glance timidly from one to the other. They are
talking about me in a language I don't understand; but all the same, I
am quite aware that I am the subject of their conversation. It is
growing dusk, and presently a man--the same, I fancy, that was with me
in the carriage--brings in two lighted candles in silver candlesticks
on a silver tray, and sets them down on the table between the two
ladies. Then one of the ladies takes up the snuffers--also of
silver--and solemnly extinguishes one of the candles. Somehow, I have
an impression, how or whence derived I am quite at a loss to know,
that it is a nightly custom for the manservant to bring in two lighted
candles, and for one of them to be at once put out.
"The manservant, having raked together the dying embers in the grate,
is on the point of leaving the room, when the same lady who had put
out the candle holds up her hand, covered with a black lace mitten, to
arrest him. 'You may take her away,' she says, evidently alluding to
me. 'I have no wish ever to see her again.' With that, the man leads
me by the hand from the room, and with the shutting of the door
everything becomes a blank again.
"Next I am in bed, where I am awakened by a kiss on my forehead. I
open two sleepy eyes, to see for a moment a tall figure in white
stealing from the room with a night-light in her hand. I do not see
her face, but something tells me it is one of the two ladies whom I
saw in the panelled room, but not the one who ordered me to be taken
away.
"Such, dear Clement, are the particulars of three scenes which live
more vividly in my memory than any others of a date prior to my
passing into the charge of Uncle John and Aunt Charlotte. I fail to
see how they can prove of the slightest service to you in the quest
you have undertaken for the sake of one who can but wish herself more
worthy of so much love and devotion."
_Clement Hazeldine to Hermia Rivers_.
"You were altogether wrong, dearest, in assuming that the particulars
which I received from you three days ago would prove of no service to
me, as shall now be demonstrated to you.
"All along--that is to say, from the time I became aware that Mr.
Hodgson had been practising in Stavering for considerably more than a
quarter of a century--the probability has seemed to me that the person
or persons who employed him as their agent in your case would be
found, if found at all, no great distance away from this place. In any
case, and more especially after the receipt of your letter, I
determined to make Stavering the centre of a systematic process of
search and inquiry, which I at once proceeded to put in execution.
'But a search for what?' I seem to hear you asking. You shall now be
told.
"The first thing I did was to hire a dog-cart, and in addition secure
the services of a driver who knew every road and lane for a dozen
miles round Stavering. Thus equipped, I began my quest. The object I
set before me first of all was to find a pair of old-fashioned lodge
gates, one of the pillars of which was surmounted by a griffin
rampant, or other heraldic monstrosity, supporting a broken shield,
but minus one of its paws. For two days I scoured the country roads
and byeways, but to no purpose. Plenty of lodge gates I saw,
surmounted, some of them, by one or another design in stone or stucco,
but nowhere the particular one I was in search of. This morning,
however, I was more fortunate.
"My driver had taken a road which we had not explored before. We had
not gone more than three miles when we came to a pair of lodge gates
of wrought iron, which drew my attention by their ruinous and
neglected condition. The driver stopped at my request and I alighted
in order to examine them more closely. The gates themselves, which
were of an intricate and finely-wrought pattern, and must at one time
have been very beautiful, were now thickly rusted and filthy with the
grime of years, and having fallen forward a little, hung loosely
together as though they were trying to support each other in their
hour of misfortune. The padlock and chain which fastened them seemed
to indicate that they were rarely, if ever, opened. Close by, however,
there was an arched entrance in the wall, evidently intended for
pedestrians, with a rude, unpainted door which formed a fitting
complement to the rusted gates. No figure of any kind crowned the
square freestone pillars on which the gates were hung, yet they seemed
to me to have a bare and unfinished aspect, as though they lacked some
crowning adornment.
"Pushing open the rude door, which yielded to my hand, I entered
the park. Inside were the remains of what had at one time been a
two-storied lodge, which was now little more than the skeleton of a
house, with huge gaps in its roof and a great part of its flooring
gone, and scarcely a whole pane in its window-frames. Unsightly weeds
and great prickly brambles grew all about, and, in short, the whole
scene was one of melancholy neglect and decay. Stepping backward a
pace or two, while wondering whether it would be worth my while to
sketch the ruined lodge and its surroundings, I caught my foot against
some hard substance in the rank grass, and with difficulty saved
myself from falling. On looking down to ascertain the nature of the
obstruction, my eyes caught sight of something which, as the saying
goes, brought my heart into my mouth. There, half-buried among the
docks and weeds, lay the identical object I had been at such pains to
find--your mutilated griffin to wit, with its broken shield. How it
had come there mattered nothing, but only that it was there. I drew a
long breath, feeling little doubt that I had now in my hands the
second link of the chain of which the first had been the tracing of
Mr. Hodgson. Where shall I find the third?
"The poor griffin, or whatever it may have been intended to represent,
was lying on its side and looking very forlorn and dirty indeed. The
first thing I did was to raise it into an upright position, then, with
my pocket-knife, I partially cleared a small space around it of weeds
and grass, and then I proceeded to make a sketch of it. That sketch I
now send you for the purpose of verification. It seems to me most
unlikely that there should have been two mutilated griffins and two
broken shields; still, that such may have been the case is by no means
impossible. But be that as it may, do not fail to drop me a line by
return post and let me know whether you recognize the creature as
being anything like the one seen by you that day out of the carriage
window while waiting for the opening of the park gates.
"As soon as I got back to the dog-cart I began to question the driver,
but all I could elicit from him was that the name of the mansion
inside the park, of which, however, nothing could be seen from the
lodge, is Broome, and that its sole inmate, with the exception of a
few domestics, is a certain Miss Pengarvon, a lady well advanced in
years, whom the fellow described in terse but caustic terms, as being
'a reg'lar old varmint, and no mistake.'
"To-morrow I shall prosecute my inquiries with regard to the aforesaid
Miss Pengarvon."
_Hermia Rivers to Clement Hazeldine_.
"The sketch you have sent me is an exact counterpart of the sculptured
creature seen by me so many years ago. The sight of it has brought
back the whole scene to my memory as freshly as if it belonged to
yesterday."