THE LETTERS AND THEIR STORY.
As soon as Charley went to bed, I betook myself to my grandmother’s
room, in which, before discovering my loss, I had told Styles to kindle
a fire. I had said nothing to Charley about my ride, and the old
church, and the marriage-register. For the time, indeed, I had almost
lost what small interest I had taken in the matter--my new bereavement
was so absorbing and painful; but feeling certain, when he left me,
that I should not be able to sleep, but would be tormented all night by
innumerable mental mosquitoes if I made the attempt, and bethinking me
of my former resolution, I proceeded to carry it out.
The fire was burning brightly, and my reading lamp was on the table,
ready to be lighted. But I sat down first in my grandmother’s chair and
mused for I know not how long. At length my wandering thoughts
rehearsed again the excursion with Mr Coningham. I pulled the copy of
the marriage-entry from my pocket, and in reading it over again, my
curiosity was sufficiently roused to send me to the bureau. I lighted
my lamp at last, unlocked what had seemed to my childhood a treasury of
unknown marvels, took from it the packet of yellow withered letters,
and sat down again by the fire to read, in my great-grandmother’s
chair, the letters of Wilfrid Cumbermede Daryll--for so he signed
himself in all of them--my great-grandfather. There were amongst them a
few of her own in reply to his--badly written and badly spelt, but
perfectly intelligible. I will not transcribe any of them--I have them
to show if needful--but not at my command at the present moment;--for I
am writing neither where I commenced my story--on the outskirts of an
ancient city, nor at the Moat, but in a dreary old square in London;
and those letters lie locked again in the old bureau, and have lain
unvisited through thousands of desolate days and slow creeping nights,
in that room which I cannot help feeling sometimes as if the ghost of
that high-spirited, restless-hearted grandmother of mine must now and
then revisit, sitting in the same old chair, and wondering to find how
far it was all receded from her--wondering, also, to think what a work
she made, through her long and weary life, about things that look to
her now such trifles.
I do not then transcribe any of the letters, but give, in a connected
form, what seem to me the facts I gathered from them; not hesitating to
present, where they are required, self-evident conclusions as if they
were facts mentioned in them. I repeat that none of my names are real,
although they all point at the real names.
Wilfrid Cumbermede was the second son of Richard and Mary Daryll of
Moldwarp Hall. He was baptized Cumbermede from the desire to keep in
memory the name of a celebrated ancestor, the owner, in fact, of the
disputed sword--itself alluded to in the letters,--who had been more
mindful of the supposed rights of his king than the next king was of
the privations undergone for his sake, for Moldwarp Hall at least was
never recovered from the Roundhead branch of the family into whose
possession it had drifted. In the change, however, which creeps on with
new generations, there had been in the family a re-action of sentiment
in favour of the more distinguished of its progenitors; and Richard
Daryll, a man of fierce temper and overbearing disposition, had named
his son after the cavalier. A tyrant in his family, at least in the
judgment of the writers of those letters, he apparently found no
trouble either with his wife or his eldest or youngest son; while,
whether his own fault or not, it was very evident that from Wilfrid his
annoyances had been numerous.
A legal feud had for some time existed between the Ahab of Moldwarp
Hall and the Naboth of the Moat, the descendant of an ancient yeoman
family of good blood, and indeed related to the Darylls themselves, of
the name of Woodruffe. Sir Richard had cast covetous eyes upon the
field surrounding Stephen’s comparatively humble abode, which had at
one time formed a part of the Moldwarp property. In searching through
some old parchments, he had found, or rather, I suppose, persuaded
himself he had found, sufficient evidence that this part of the
property of the Moat, then of considerable size, had been willed away
in contempt of the entail which covered it, and belonged by right to
himself and his heirs. He had therefore instituted proceedings to
recover possession, during the progress of which their usual bickerings
and disputes augmented in fierceness. A decision having at length been
given in favour of the weaker party, the mortification of Sir Richard
was unendurable to himself, and his wrath and unreasonableness, in
consequence, equally unendurable to his family. One may then imagine
the paroxysm of rage with which he was seized when he discovered that,
during the whole of the legal process, his son Wilfrid had been making
love to Elizabeth Woodruffe, the only child of his enemy. In Wilfrid’s
letters, the part of the story which follows is fully detailed for
Elizabeth’s information, of which the reason is also plain--that the
writer had spent such a brief period afterwards in Elizabeth’s society
that he had not been able for very shame to recount the particulars.
No sooner had Sir Richard come to a knowledge of the hateful fact,
evidently through one of his servants, than, suppressing the outburst
of his rage for the moment, he sent for his son Wilfrid, and informed
him, his lips quivering with suppressed passion, of the discovery he
had made; accused him of having brought disgrace on the family, and of
having been guilty of falsehood and treachery; and ordered him to go
down on his knees and abjure the girl before heaven, or expect a
father’s vengeance.
But evidently Wilfrid was as little likely as any man to obey such a
command. He boldly avowed his love for Elizabeth, and declared his
intention of marrying her. His father, foaming with rage, ordered his
servants to seize him. Overmastered in spite of his struggles, he bound
him to a pillar, and taking a horse-whip, lashed him furiously; then,
after his rage was thus in a measure appeased, ordered them to carry
him to his bed. There he remained, hardly able to move, the whole of
that night and the next day. On the following night, he made his escape
from the Hall, and took refuge with a farmer-friend a few miles off--in
the neighbourhood, probably, of Umberden Church.
Here I would suggest a conjecture of my own--namely, that my ancestor’s
room was the same I had occupied, so--fatally, shall I say?--to myself,
on the only two occasions on which I had slept at the Hall; that he
escaped by the stair to the roof, having first removed the tapestry
from the door, as a memorial to himself and a sign to those he left;
that he carried with him the sword and the volume--both probably lying
in his room at the time, and the latter little valued by any other. But
all this, I repeat, is pure conjecture.
As soon as he was sufficiently recovered, he communicated with
Elizabeth, prevailed upon her to marry him at once at Umberden Church,
and within a few days, as near as I could judge; left her to join, as a
volunteer, the army of the Duke of Cumberland, then fighting the French
in the Netherlands. Probably from a morbid fear lest the disgrace his
father’s brutality had inflicted should become known in his regiment,
he dropped the surname of Daryll when he joined it; and--for what
precise reasons I cannot be certain--his wife evidently never called
herself by any other name than Cumbermede. Very likely she kept her
marriage a secret, save from her own family, until the birth of my
grandfather, which certainly took place before her husband’s return.
Indeed I am almost sure that he never returned from that campaign, but
died fighting, not unlikely, at the battle of Laffeldt; and that my
grannie’s letters, which I found in the same packet, had been, by the
kindness of some comrade, restored to the young widow.
When I had finished reading the letters, and had again thrown myself
back in the old chair, I began to wonder why nothing of all this should
ever have been told me. That the whole history should have dropped out
of the knowledge of the family, would have been natural enough, had my
great-grandmother, as well as my great-grandfather, died in youth; but
that she should have outlived her son, dying only after I, the
representative of the fourth generation, was a boy at school, and yet
no whisper have reached me of these facts, appeared strange. A moment’s
reflection showed me that the causes and the reasons of the fact must
have lain with my uncle. I could not but remember how both he and my
aunt had sought to prevent me from seeing my grannie alone, and how the
last had complained of this in terms far more comprehensible to me now
than they were then. But what could have been the reasons for this
their obstruction of the natural flow of tradition? They remained
wrapped in a mystery which the outburst from it of an occasional gleam
of conjectural light only served to deepen.
The letters lying open on the table before me, my eyes rested upon one
of the dates--the third day of March, 1747. It struck me that this date
involved a discrepancy with that of the copy I had made from the
register. I referred to it, and found my suspicion correct. According
to the copy, my ancestors were not married until the 15th of January,
1748. I must have made a blunder--and yet I could hardly believe I had,
for I had reason to consider myself accurate. If there _was_ no
mistake, I should have to reconstruct my facts, and draw fresh
conclusions.
By this time, however, I was getting tired and sleepy and cold; my lamp
was nearly out; my fire was quite gone; and the first of a frosty dawn
was beginning to break in the east. I rose and replaced the papers,
reserving all further thought on the matter for a condition of
circumstances more favourable to a correct judgment. I blew out the
lamp, groped my way to bed in the dark, and was soon fast asleep, in
despite of insult, mortification, perplexity, and loss.