COMING HOME.
When the jaded horses of the “Electric” coach from Falmouth stopped
before the Crown Inn at Landresdale, in the county of Cornwall, on the
13th of July, 1852, the landlord of the little hostelry was somewhat
startled by an event which was of very rare occurrence in those parts. A
passenger alighted from the back of the coach, and demanded his
portmanteau from the guard,--a passenger who, carrying his portmanteau
as easily as if it had been a parcel of flimsy milliner’s ware, walked
straight to the little private parlour opposite the bar, and ensconced
himself therein.
“I shall want my dinner, and a bed, Joseph Penruffin,” he said to the
proprietor of the Crown. “You’d better see the coach off, and then you
can come and talk to me.”
Mr. Penruffin retired aghast and staring.
“I don’t know who he _is_, Sarah,” he remarked to a comely-looking
woman, who was sitting amongst a noble array of shelves and bottles in a
shady little bar that seemed a good deal too small for such a portly
presence. “His name’s as clean gone out of my mind as if I’d never set
eyes upon him; but I know him, and he knows me, Sarah, for he called me
by my name as glib as you please, and his face--Lord bless us and save
us!--his face is as familiar to me as yourn.”
The passenger who had surprised the Crown Inn from its lazy tranquillity
stood at the little window looking out at the coach. The passenger was
Francis Tredethlyn, lately a foot-soldier in her Majesty’s service, now
a gentleman of landed estate and funded property; but very little
changed by the change in his fortune. As he had been independent and
fearless in the days when he ruled his life by the orders of other men,
so was he simple and unpretending now in the hour of his sudden
prosperity. What he had said to his master in the cottage at Port Arthur
in the first flush of his new fortunes appeared to be equally true of
him now. He did not seem to care about his wealth. He was in no way
elated by a change of fortune which would have sent some men into a
madhouse.
“It seems to me, somehow, as if there was a kind of balance kept up in
this world between good and evil, like the debtor and creditor sides of
a ledger. I put down my uncle Oliver’s fortune on one side, and it looks
as if I was the luckiest fellow in Christendom. But there’s the loss of
poor little Susy must go down on the other side, and then the book looks
altogether different. The loss of her--yes, the loss--that’s the word!
If the earth had opened and swallowed her up, she couldn’t seem more
lost to me than she is.”
The passengers of the “Electric” had recruited themselves by this time,
and a fresh pair of horses had replaced the tired animals who now stood
steaming in the great stable-yard. The coach rolled slowly off, along a
road that lay straight before the windows of the Crown--a road that
crept under the steep slope of a thickly wooded hill, defended by an old
crumbling wall, which, even in its decay, was grander and stronger than
any modern wall that ever girdled a modern gentleman’s estate. The
dark-red brick wall, and all the sombre woods above it, belonged to the
Marquis of Landresdale, upon whose mansion and estate the little town or
village of Landresdale was a kind of dependant, the inhabitants being
almost all of them supported indirectly or directly by the patronage of
the great man and his household. By these simple people the Cornish
nobleman was spoken of with awe and reverence as the “Marquis;” and that
the world held any other creature with a claim to that title was a fact
utterly ignored--it may be, even discredited--by the ratepayers of
Landresdale. Under the shadow of Landresdale House they were born and
lived; and in a church which was only a kind of mausoleum for the
departed nobles and dames of the house of Landresdale they worshipped
every sabbath-day, until in the minds of some hero-worshippers, the
figure of the Marquis grew into a giant shape that blotted out all the
world beyond Landresdale.
“How familiar the old place seems to me, and yet how strange!” thought
Francis Tredethlyn, as he stood at the window. “There’s Jim Teascott the
cobbler over the way, sitting in the very same attitude he was in when I
stopped at the corner below to take my last look at Landresdale. But the
street seems as if it had dwindled and shrunk away into half the size it
used to be; and I feel as strange--as strange as if I’d been dead and
buried, and had come to life again after folks had forgotten all about
me; even the very seasons are all wrong, somehow, to my mind, as they
might seem to a man that had been lying dead ever so long.”
Francis Tredethlyn rubbed his broad palm across his forehead, as if to
clear some kind of cloud away from his intellect. It was scarcely
strange that he should be confused and mystified by the seasons. He had
left autumnal clouds and winds in the Antipodes; and after a hundred
days or so at sea, he found a blazing July sky above his native land,
and he felt as if he had, somehow or other, been cheated out of a
winter. He looked at a little pocket-book, in which he had written some
names and addresses and other memoranda, and in which the initials “S.
T.” occurred very often. Those initials meant Susan Tredethlyn, and the
memoranda in the pocket-book chiefly related to inquiries which Francis
had made about his lost cousin.
Those inquiries had resulted in very little information. The lawyers had
only been able to tell Francis the bare facts relating to his uncle’s
death; how one day, when they least expected to see the old man, he had
suddenly presented himself at their offices, very pale, very feeble, and
with an awful something, which even they recognized as the sign-manual
of the King of Terrors himself, imprinted on his haggard features: how
he had seated himself quietly in his accustomed place, and had dictated
to them, deliberately and unflinchingly, the terms of a will, by which
he bequeathed every shilling he possessed to his nephew, Francis
Tredethlyn; how, when they, as in duty bound, remonstrated with him
about the injustice that such a will would inflict upon his only
daughter, a hideous frown had distorted his face, and he had struck his
clenched fist upon the office-table, crying, with the most horrible
imprecation ever uttered in that place, that no penny of his getting
should ever go to save his daughter from rotting in a workhouse or
starving to death on the king’s highway;--he had said this, and in such
a manner as most effectually to put an end to all remonstrance on the
part of his solicitors. This was all that the lawyers could tell Francis
Tredethlyn about his cousin Susan; but they had gone on to tell him how
his uncle had insisted on leaving the office alone and on foot; how he
had walked the best part of the way from Gray’s Inn to an old-fashioned
commercial inn in the Borough, and how he had broken down at last, only
a hundred yards from his destination, and had fainted away on the
threshold of a chemist’s shop, whence he had been carried to his
death-bed. This had happened on the 30th of June in the preceding year;
and this was all that the lawyers had to tell Francis Tredethlyn, over
and above such intelligence as related only to the extent and nature of
the property bequeathed to him by his late uncle.
But in Landresdale the name of Oliver Tredethlyn was almost as well
known as that of the Marquis himself; and in Landresdale Francis hoped
to learn the true story of his cousin’s fate. He stood now looking out
of the window into the rustic highway, as quiet in the summer evening
calm as if it had been a street in one of the buried cities of Italy, as
peaceful in its drowsy aspect as if no palpitating human heart had ever
carried its daily burden of care and sorrow along the narrow footways,
beneath the shadow of the peaked roofs and quaint abutting upper
stories. He stood looking out, and remembering himself a boy in that old
hill-side street; he stood there now, wondering alike at the past and
the present, which by contrast seemed both equally strange and
unnatural; he stood there in all the flush and vigour of his youth, a
tall, broad-shouldered, simple-hearted soldier, with a fortune far
exceeding the narrow limits of his arithmetical powers, as ignorant of
all the real world that lay before him as a little country lad who rides
to town upon the top of a load of hay and expects to find the streets
paved with gold, and the Queen dressed in her crown and robes, and
sitting on her throne with the ball and sceptre in her hands for ever
and ever.
The landlord of the Crown came bustling in presently with a wooden tray
of knives and forks, and glasses and cruets, that would have amply
served for a dinner-party of half-a-dozen. He laid the cloth with great
ceremony, although with a certain air of briskness inseparable from
innkeeping, even in the laziest and dullest village in all England; and
he kept a furtive watch upon his guest throughout all his operations,
from the preparatory polishing down of the mahogany table, to the final
flourish with which he removed a very large cover from a very small
rumpsteak.
“I think I ought to know you, sir,” he said, courteously, as Francis
Tredethlyn seated himself at the table.
“I think you ought, Joseph Penruffin; I think you ought to remember
Francis Tredethlyn, son of your old friend John Tredethlyn, of Pen
Gorbold, who was a little bit too friendly in this house, perhaps, for
his own prosperity.”
“Francis Tredethlyn!” cried the landlord, clapping his hand upon his
knee, “Francis Tredethlyn! To be sure it is! To think that I should
forget a face that was once as familiar to me as my own son’s! Francis
Tredethlyn! Why, I remember you a lad playing cricket on the green
yonder with my own boys. And you’ve come into a very fine fortune, sir,
I understand; and I hope you will excuse the liberty, if I make so bold
as to wish you every happiness with it, Francis Tredethlyn. Lord bless
us and save us! why, I can remember you a little bit of a toddling child
coming into Landresdale Church with your mother on a summer Sunday
morning, as if it was yesterday! I ask pardon for being so bold and
free-like, but the sight of your face takes me back to old times, and
I’m apt to forget myself.”
Mr. Penruffin’s mind was curiously divided between the memories of the
past and his desire to be duly reverential to Francis Tredethlyn’s new
fortunes. The young man smiled as he recognized the influence of his
newly acquired wealth at war with the associations of his boyhood. He
had seen pretty much the same thing in the office of Messrs. Krusdale
and Scardon. He was beginning already to perceive that an income of
thirty thousand a year made a kind of barrier between himself and poorer
men, and that they regarded him with the same feeling of mingled
reverence and familiarity with which they would have looked at a very
ordinary statue seen across a wonderful screen of virgin gold.
“And the sight of _your_ face takes _me_ back to old times, Mr.
Penruffin,” he said, with rather a mournful accent, “and I’d freely give
half this great fortune of mine if I could bring back one of those
summer Sunday mornings in the old church, and see myself a little fellow
again, trudging by my mother’s side, with a green-baize bag of
prayer-books on my arm. I’d give five thousand pounds for a silk-dress I
saw in a Plymouth draper’s fifteen years ago, when I was too poor to do
any thing but wish for it, if my mother were alive to wear it. I used to
think, when I was a lad, of what I’d buy for my mother out of the first
five-pound note I ever earned; and now I’ve got thirty thousand a year,
and there’s nothing upon all this earth that I can buy for her, except a
gravestone to mark the spot where she lies.”
“Thirty thousand a year!” muttered the landlord, in an undertone, which
had just a tinge of disappointment in it. The Landresdale people had
given their imaginations free play since the death of Oliver Tredethlyn,
and the old man’s fortune had swelled into almost fabulous proportions
with the lapse of time; so thirty thousand didn’t seem so very much,
after all. There had been an idea in Landresdale that Francis Tredethlyn
would most likely buy up the Marquis’s estate off-hand, and if
practicable make a handsome offer for the purchase of the title.
“I am sure, sir, your feelings do you credit,” said Mr. Penruffin, after
that brief sense of disappointment; “I may say very great credit,” he
added, with emphasis,--as if any display of feeling from the possessor
of thirty thousand a year were specially meritorious. “I suppose you
have come down this way to survey your property, sir; to look about you
a little, eh?” inquired the landlord of the Crown, when Francis had
finished his frugal dinner.
“Not I,” the young man answered; “I scarcely know what my property is
yet, though the lawyers told me a long rigmarole about it. No, I’ve come
on a very different errand,” he added gravely. “You remember my cousin,
Susan Tredethlyn, I dare say? I have come to look for her.”
Joseph Penruffin shook his head solemnly, and breathed a long sigh that
was almost a groan.
“If that’s your errand here, sir, I’m afraid it isn’t likely to be a
very fortunate one. Folks in Landresdale never expect to see Susan
Tredethlyn again; she went away from the farm four years ago; no one
knows exactly where she went; no one knows why she went. There’s your
uncle’s old servants, Mr. Tredethlyn, of course they _might_ have said
something, if they’d liked to it. But you may as well go and question
the tombstones in Landresdale churchyard as question _them_. All I know,
or all anybody knows in this place is, that your cousin Susan went away
and never came back again; and it stands to reason that she must have
done something very bad indeed, and made her father very desperate
against her, before the old man would have gone and left all his money
away from her--meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but only looking at it
in the light of human nature in general,” added the landlord,
apologetically.
“I’ll never believe that Susan Tredethlyn did any thing wicked or
unwomanly till her own lips tell me so,” cried Francis, bringing his
hand heavily down on the table. “She may have made my uncle desperate
against her, _that’s_ likely enough, for he was always hard with her;
and when I think of his having hoarded all this money, and remember the
life my cousin Susan used to lead, I can scarcely bring myself to
believe that she was his own flesh and blood. I’ll never believe that
she did any thing wrong. I’ll never believe that she could grow to be
any thing different from what she was when I left home,--an innocent,
modest little creature, who was almost frightened of her own pretty
looks when she caught a sight of herself in a glass. But I’m going up to
the old house; and if Martha Dryscoll or her husband know any thing of
my lost cousin, I’ll get the knowledge from them, though I have to wring
it out of their wizened old throats.”
The young man rose as he said this, and took his hat and stick from a
chair near the window. Joseph Penruffin watched him with something like
alarm upon his countenance.
“You’ll sleep here to-night, sir?” he asked.
“Yes; I’m going straight up to the Grange, and I don’t know how long I
may be gone; but I’ll come back here to sleep. I should scarcely fancy
lying down in one of those dreary old rooms; I should expect to see the
wandering spirit of my lost cousin come and look in at me from the
darkness outside my window. No; however late I may be, I’ll come back
here to sleep.”
“And perhaps you’d like some little trifle for supper, sir, having made
such an uncommon poor dinner,” suggested the landlord,--“a chicken and a
little bit of grass, or a tender young duck and a dish of peas?”
But Francis Tredethlyn was walking up the little village street out of
earshot of these savoury suggestions before the landlord had finished
his sentence.
“I don’t call that manners,” muttered Mr. Penruffin; “but I shall cook
the chicken for ten o’clock, and chance it; he can afford to pay for it,
whether he eats it or not. And I think, taking into consideration old
acquaintance and thirty thousand a year, it would only have been
friendly in Francis Tredethlyn if he’d ordered a bottle of wine with his
dinner.”
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