POWDERED WITH TEARS.
A mounted footman, who approached him at full speed, pulled up for a
moment and respectfully touched his hat, for he was one of the
Lamorna household.
"What is the matter?" asked Richard.
"Oh, sir--oh, Mr. Richard--my lord is taken very ill."
"Ill--my uncle?"
"He is quite senseless, and Mr. Downie Trevelyan has sent me for the
doctor."
"Then ride on and lose no time," replied Richard, as he hastened to
the house, where he found confusion and dismay predominant, the
servants hovering in the vestibule, conversing in whispers and
listening at the library door, while Jasper Funnel and Mrs.
Duntreath, the old housekeeper (a lineal descendant of the Dolly
Duntreath, so well-known in Cornwall), were mingling their sighs and
regrets for the loss of so good a master.
"Where is my uncle?" asked Richard, impetuously.
"In the lib--lib--library," sobbed the housekeeper, with her black
silk apron at her eyes, and as Richard advanced, Jasper Funnel softly
opened the door. The favourite nephew entered the long spacious and
splendid apartment, which occupied nearly the entire length of one of
the wings of Rhoscadzhel, its shelves of dark wainscot filled by
books in rare and magnificent bindings, with white marble busts of
the great and learned men of classical antiquity looking calmly down
on what was passing below.
The fire-place wras deep and old; but a seacoal fire was burning
cheerily in the bright steel modern grate; and as if he was in a
dream, seeing the far stretching lawn, with its tufts of waving fern
and stately lines of elm and oak, as he passed the tall windows
noiselessly on the soft Turkey carpet, Richard drew hastily near the
great arm-chair, in which his uncle was seated, dead--stone-dead,
with Downie, somewhat pale and disordered in aspect, bending over him!
The old man had suddenly passed away--disease of the heart, as it
proved eventually, had assailed him while seated at his writing-table.
On Richard's entrance and approach, Downie hurriedly took from the
table and thrust into his pocket, a document which looked most
legally and suspiciously like a "last will and testament;" but quick
though the action, Richard could perceive that the document, whatever
it was, had no signatures of any kind.
Richard knelt by his uncle's side; he felt his pulses; they had
ceased to beat; his heart was cold and still, and there came no sign
of breath upon the polished surface of the mirror he held before the
fallen jaw; with something of remorse Richard thought,--
"No later than this morning I deceived him--and he loved me so--was
ever my friend and second father!--I thought," he added aloud, to
Downie, "that his eyes wore an unusual expression this morning--a
weird, keen, farseeing kind of look, such as I never read in them
before."
"I fancied that I perceived some such expression myself, and
consequently, at his years, was the less alarmed, or shall I say
shocked, when in the very act of speaking to me, a sudden spasm came
over his features--a deep sigh, almost a faint cry escaped him, and
he sank back in his chair, when just about to write. See, there is
the pen on the floor, exactly where it fell from his relaxed fingers."
Richard's honest eyes were filled with tears, and mechanically he
picked up the pen and laid it on the desk.
"Writing, say you, Downie; and what was he writing?"
"Oh, I cannot say--a letter to his steward, I believe."
"But--I see no letter."
"He was just about to commence it," replied Downie, whose usually
pale face coloured a little.
"And that paper you pocketed in such haste, Downie, what was it?"
"Nothing, Richard, that can concern you (by-the-by, you are Lord
Lamorna now!) or that fair one whose portrait you exhibit so
ostentatiously just now."
Richard started, alike at the title so suddenly accorded to him by
his brother, and at the reference to the portrait, for in the
confusion or haste, as he bent over his dead uncle, a little
miniature, which he wore at a ribbon round his neck, depicting a very
beautiful dark-eyed woman, had slipped from his vest, and with an
exclamation of annoyance, he hastened to conceal it.
"_Who_ is the lady, Richard?" asked Downie.
"As yet, that must remain my secret," replied Richard; "a little
time, my dear fellow, and we shall have no mysteries among us."
Downie, secretly, was not ill-pleased by this diversion, in which
Richard forgot the subject of the paper.
The doctor soon came--a village practitioner--fussy and full of
importance; but nevertheless skilful; and he decided that disease of
the heart--a malady under which, though ignorant of its existence,
the deceased had long laboured--had proved the immediate cause of
death. The poor shrivelled remains of the proud old lord were
conveyed to the principal bed-room of the mansion, and there laid in
a species of state, upon a four-posted bed, that rose from a daïs,
and was all draped with black. His coronet and Order of the Bath,
together with that of St. Anne, which he received when ambassador in
Russia, were deposited at his feet upon a crimson velvet cushion,
that was tasseled with gold; while two tall footmen in complete
livery with long canes draped with crape, mounted guard beside the
coffin day and night, to their own great disgust and annoyance, till
the time of the funeral, of which Richard took the entire charge; and
which, in a spirit of affection and good taste, he resolved should be
in all respects exactly what the deceased peer would have wished it
to be.
The features of the latter became, for a time, young and beautiful in
their manliness and perfect regularity, while all the lines engraven
there by Time were smoothed out, if not completely effaced.
"How like our father, as I can remember him, he looks!" whispered
Downie, more softened than usual, by the hallowing presence of death.
But Richard was thinking of another face whom the dead man
resembled--a young and beloved face to him.
"Denzil did you say?" he stammered.
"I said our father," replied Downie, sharply.
"True, he died young," was the confused reply.
"Your mind wanders, surely?" said Downie, with a dark and
inexplicable expression in his now averted face; but Richard saw it
not, he was simply taking a farewell glance of one who had loved him
so well; his manly heart was soft, and his dark-blue eyes were full
with the tears of honest affection and gratitude.
So Audley Lord Lamorna was dead, and all now turned to Richard as
their new and future master; all the blinds in Rhoscadzhel were drawn
down by order of Mrs. Duntreath, and all went about on tiptoe or
spoke in subdued voices, especially Downie, who in his heart thought
that Richard was spending "far too much in ostrich feathers, crimson
coffins, and other mummery," among undertakers, and heraldic
painters, too; but he was more politic than to say so--even to his
wife, who, with her daughter Gartha, a pretty girl in her teens, had
been on a visit to General Trecarrel, and now duly arrived to act as
mistress of the mansion, _pro tem._, during the solemnities of which
it was to be the scene.
She was warmly welcomed by Richard Trevelyan; she was his only
brother's wife, and he had none of his own to take her place
there--as yet.
A peevish and foolish woman of fashion, who had once possessed
undoubted beauty, Mrs. Downie Trevelyan was generally treated as a
kind of cypher now by her husband; but nevertheless he consulted her
at times, on certain matters of common interest. She still clung
tenaciously to the tradition of her former beauty, and sought to
retain it by the aid of pearl powder, the faintest indication of
rouge perhaps, and by the prettiest of matronly headdresses made of
the costliest lace. She was always languid, somewhat dreary, and
spent most of her time with a novel in one hand, and a magnificent
little bottle of ether, or some strong perfume, in the other. To
Richard her society was decidedly a bore; but at this crisis he was
full of business, and occupied by a depth of thought that was
apparent to all.
Six tall servants in mourning scarfs, and in the livery of the
Trevelyans, bore upon their shoulders the crimson velvet coffin
containing the remains of the late lord, to the vault where his
forefathers lay, and where many of them had been interred by
torchlight, in times long past.
There was something feudal, stately, and solemn in the aspect of the
procession, when between two lines of all the tenantry, standing
bare-headed, it wound down the old avenue, where the leaves were
almost as thick, the sun as bright, and the birds singing as merrily
as they might have been when Lord Launcelot rode there by the Queen's
bridle, or when he and his cavaliers fled from Fairfax to seek
shelter in Trewoofe; and so his descendant Audley was laid at last,
where so many of his predecessors lie side by side, "ranged in
mournful order and in a kind of silent pomp," each coffin bearing the
names, titles and arms of its mouldering occupant.
Pondering on who might stand here when his turn came to be lowered
down there, Richard, the new lord, stood at the head of the tomb,
pale, and with more emotion than met the eye; Downie stood on his
right hand, and the heir of the latter, well bronzed by the sun of
India, on his left, three of his younger brothers, held with a
ribbon. Their old friend, General Trecarrel, stood grimly and erect
at the foot. The vault was closed, and the body of Audley, tenth
Lord Lamorna, that frail tenement, which he had petted and pampered,
of which he had been so careful and so vain, for some seventy years,
was left to the worms at last!
The assemblage dispersed, and the world went on as usual.
The bell of the village church, which had all morning tolled minute
strokes, ceased; and after a time the new chimes rang out a merry
peal in honour of his successor. It was in Cornwall as at St. Cloud;
_le Roi est mort--vive le Roi!_
The old general, who had no fancy for a mansion of gloom, departed,
and took back with him Downie's son Audley, a jolly young subaltern,
whom we shall soon meet elsewhere.
But prior to this departure, there had been the reading of the will,
an affair of great solemnity, in the library, the same apartment
where the late lord died; and his solicitors, Messrs. Gorbelly and
Culverhole, a fat and a lean pair of lawyers, felt all their vulgar
importance on the occasion.
There were a few handsome presents to old and faithful servants,
including Jasper Funnel and Mrs. Duntreath (whose sobs became
somewhat intrusive), and Richard found himself Lord of Rhoscadzhel
and Lamorna, with an unfettered fortune of thirty thousand per annum;
while Downie had a bequest of less than the third of that sum,
together with some jewelry, including the Russian diamond ring for
his wife and daughter Gartha.
So whatever had been the object or the tenor of that document which
the astute barrister had so evidently prepared, and which he had
thrust into his pocket so hastily and awkwardly on that eventful
morning, Richard was as safely installed in the estates as in his
hereditary title; and the moment he found himself alone, he became
immersed in letter-writing.
Opening the crimson morocco blotting pad which his uncle had last
used, and which had his coronet and crest, the wild-cat, stamped in
gold thereon, he saw some words written in his brother's hand, and
these, on investigation proved to be, "This is the last will and
testament of me, L----" (doubtless Lord Lamorna); further on, as if
at the bottom of the page, he could detect the name of "Porthellick,"
and a dark flush of passion crimsoned the face of Richard. He
thought again of the document he had seen in Downie's hand; their
uncle could certainly never have signed it, but some painful
doubts--added to intense sorrow for their existence--grew strong in
Richard's heart, which was a true and generous one.
"My dear Constance--my long suffering darling!" he muttered, almost
aloud; "the day is now near when all your doubts and my dissimulation
to the world shall end. Thank God, the time has almost come."
And he rode forth, to post with his own hand a letter he had written.
He was barely gone ere Downie, who had been quietly observing his
motions, also made an investigation of the blotting pad which Richard
had just closed, and therein he saw what seemed to be the address of
a recent letter. He held the pink sheet between his eyes and the
light, and read clearly enough, "Mrs. Devereaux, Porthellick Cottage."
And the lawyer smiled sourly, but with great uneasiness,
nevertheless, and he muttered aloud,
"I had but vague suspicions before--and now all my knowledge has come
too late--too late!"
"I am so sorry to hear you say so, dear," said his graceful little
wife, the rustle of whose fashionable mourning suit he had been too
much preoccupied to hear, as she glided into the library, in search
of one of the many uncut novels that now littered the tables; "sorry
chiefly for the sake of our dear Audley, and Gartha, and the other
little ones."
"Your know to what I refer--the succession; it may not be so hopeless
or irreparable as we think."
"But your uncle died with his will unchanged."
"True; I pressed upon him lately my belief that Richard had formed
that--of which he had a horror so great--a _mésalliance_--in fact, a
low or improper attachment for one beneath us in rank and name. My
uncle's fury became great, and to take advantage of the time, I
placed before him a will, leaving all his estates, as he had a
hundred times threatened to do, to me and mine. I had the document
ready written, and placed it before him; but as fate would have it,
in his pride, fury, and resentment, a spasm seized the old man, and
he fell back dying, actually with the pen in his hand, after I had
dipped it in that silver inkstand and placed it between his fingers."
"How extremely unfortunate!" said Mrs. Downie Trevelyan, placing her
scent-bottle languidly to her little pink nostrils.
"Unfortunate? It was a narrow chance by which to lose thirty
thousand a year!" said Downie, grinding his teeth, while his eyes
gleamed like two bits of grey glass in moonlight. "There is some
mystery about Richard's life; moreover, he wears a woman's miniature
at his neck."
"Young--is she?"
"Well--yes--she seems so."
"And pretty?" added Mrs. Downie, glancing at herself in a mirror.
"Very."
"His intended, perhaps?"
"I hope she is not more than that; but time must soon show now."
And over the porte-cochère of Rhoscadzhel there now hung a vast
lozenge-shaped hatchment or funeral escutcheon, the sight of which
would have delighted him, whose memory it was meant to honour, being
the achievement of a bachelor peer, representing the arms of Lamorna
in a shield complete--the demi-horse _argent_ of the Trevelyans
rising from the sea; over all, the baron's coronet, crest, motto, and
mantling, collared by the Orders of the Bath and St. Anne; and after
some old fashion, retained still only in Germany, Scotland, and
France, the herald-painter had depicted at each corner a death-head,
while all the black interstices were _powdered with tears_.