THE SHADOW ON GILBERT MONCKTON’S LIFE.
Tolldale Priory was a red brick mansion, lying deep in a valley,
almost hidden amidst the thick woodland that surrounded it; a stately
dwelling-place, shrouded and well-nigh entombed by the old trees that
shut it in on every side, and made a screen through which only a
glimpse of crimson brick could be seen from the bye-road or lane that
approached the great iron gates.
From the hill-tops, high above the wooded valley, looking down into the
sombre depths of verdure, one could see the gabled roof of the mansion,
glimmering amid the woodland, like some rich jewel in its casket; and,
at a little distance, the massive square tower of an ivy-grown old
church, at which a few tenant-farmers about Tolldale, and the lords of
the Priory and their retainers, were wont to worship.
The house was large and handsome; there was a long banqueting hall with
a roof of black oak, rich in quaint carvings, and a gloomy corridor,
which were said to belong to the reign of Henry the Second; but the
rest of the mansion had been built in the time of Queen Anne, and was
of that prim and square order of architecture which Sir John Vanbrugh
and his followers affected.
The garden was prim and square, like the house, and shut in from the
road by high red brick walls, over some part of which the stone-moss
had crept, and the ivy trailed for centuries; but the garden had grown
out of the stiffness of Queen Anne’s day, for every tree and shrub,
every flower and weed, patch of grass, or cluster of ivy, grew so
luxuriantly in this fertile valley, that it would have needed three
times the number of gardeners that had been kept at Tolldale for the
last twenty years, to preserve the neat order of the flower-beds and
pathways, the holly hedges, the huge bushes of boxwood that had once
been fashioned into the grim semblances of lions, swans, dragons, and
elephants, and all the other stiff beauties of the pleasure-grounds.
Behind the house a couple of peacocks stalked moodily about a stony
courtyard, and a great watch-dog showed his sulky head at the mouth of
his kennel, and barked incessantly at the advent of any visitor, as
if the Priory had been some weird and enchanted dwelling to which no
stranger had right of approach. The entrance to the house most commonly
used, opened into this stony courtyard; and in the dusky, flagged hall,
hung the ponderous and roomy riding-boots and the heavy saddle of some
Tolldale who had distinguished himself in the civil wars.
The rainbow colours that glimmered on the stone pavement of this dusky
entrance-hall were reflected from the crests and coats of arms, the
interlaced ciphers, the coronets and bloody hands, emblazoned on the
mullioned windows, whose splendour chastened and subdued the daylight;
tempering the garish glory of heaven for the benefit of aristocratic
eyes. But of all these crests and ciphers, of all these honourable
insignia, not one belonged to the present owner of the house—Mr.
Gilbert Monckton, the lawyer.
Tolldale Priory had changed hands several times since the monkish
days, in which the older part of the house had been built. Gilbert
Monckton had bought the estate twenty years before of a Mr. Ravenshaw,
a reckless and extravagant gentleman, with an only daughter, whose
beauty had been very much talked about in the neighbourhood. Indeed,
report had gone so far as to declare that Gilbert Monckton had been
desperately in love with this Margaret Ravenshaw, and that it was for
her sake he had invested a great part of the splendid fortune left him
by his father in the purchase of the Tolldale estate; thereby freeing
the young lady’s father from very terrible embarrassments, and enabling
him to retire to the Continent with his only child.
There had been, certainly, considerable grounds for this report, as,
immediately after the transfer of the property, Gilbert Monckton
quitted England, leaving his business in the hands of the two junior
partners of the house—both much older men than himself, by the bye.
He remained abroad for nearly two years; during which time everybody
believed him to be travelling with Mr. Ravenshaw and his daughter, and
at the end of that time returned—an altered man.
Yes; every one who had been intimate with Gilbert Monckton declared
that a blight had fallen upon his life; and it was only natural that
they should go a little farther than this, and conclude that this
change had been brought about by an unhappy attachment; or, in plainer
words, that Margaret Ravenshaw had jilted him.
However this might be, the lawyer kept his secret. There was no unmanly
sentimentalism in his nature. Whatever his sorrow was, he bore it very
quietly, keeping it entirely to himself, and asking sympathy from no
living creature. But from the hour of his return to England, he devoted
himself to his profession with a determination and an assiduity that he
had never before displayed.
This was the great change that his disappointment—whatever that
disappointment may have been—had made in him. He did not become either
a misanthrope or a bore. He became purely and simply a man of business.
The frank, generous-hearted young squire, who had shunned his father’s
office as if every sheet of parchment or scrap of red tape had been
infected by the pestilent vapours of a plague-stricken city, was
transformed into a patient and plodding lawyer, whose gigantic grasp of
thought and unfailing foresight were almost akin to genius.
For ten years Tolldale Priory was uninhabited by its new master,
and left in the care of a snuff-taking old housekeeper, and a deaf
gardener, who effectually kept all visitors at bay by a systematic
habit of failing to hear the great bell at the iron gates; which
might clang never so loudly under the shadow of its wooden pent-house
without apparently producing the faintest impression upon the aural
nerves of these two superannuated retainers. But at last the day came
upon which Mr. Monckton grew tired of his London dwelling-place in a
dingy square in Bloomsbury, and determined to take possession of his
Berkshire estate. He sent a couple of upholsterers to Tolldale Priory,
with strict injunctions to set the old furniture in order, but to do
nothing more; not so much as to alter the adjustment of a curtain, or
the accustomed position of a chair or table.
Perhaps he wished to see the familiar rooms looking exactly as they
had looked when he had sat by Margaret Ravenshaw’s side, a bright and
hopeful lad of twenty. He kept the snuff-taking old housekeeper and the
deaf gardener, and brought his own small staff of well-trained servants
from London. The town-bred servants would have willingly rebelled
against their new dwelling-place, and the verdant shades that seemed to
shut them in from the outer world; but their wages were too liberal to
be resigned for any but a very powerful reason, and they submitted as
best they could to the solitude of their new abode.
Mr. Monckton travelled backwards and forwards between Tolldale and
London almost every day, driving to the station in his phaeton in the
morning, and being met by his groom on his return in the evening. The
lawyer’s professional duties had taxed his strength to the utmost,
and grave physicians had prescribed country air and occasional repose
as absolutely necessary to him. For nearly ten years, therefore, he
had lived at the Priory, forming few acquaintances, and positively
no friends. His most intimate associates had been the De Crespignys.
This had no doubt arisen from the circumstance of the Woodlands estate
adjoining Tolldale. Mr. Monckton accepted the acquaintances whom
accident forced upon him, but he sought none. Those who knew him best
said that the shadow which had so early fallen upon his life had never
passed away.
Of course Eleanor Vane had heard these things during her residence at
Hazlewood. The knowledge of them invested the grave lawyer with a halo
of romance in her girlish eyes. He, like herself, had his secret, and
kept it faithfully.