COLTONSLOUGH.
Francis Tredethlyn went back to his hotel in Covent Garden after that
quiet dinner at the Cedars, and his mind was full of the new images
suggested by that brief glimpse of a life that was strange to him. He
had been very much interested by Miss Desmond, and he tried to believe
that he preferred her to Maude Hillary. Had she not been kinder to him,
more friendly and familiar? and was it not reasonable that he should
like her the better of the two? He was naturally of a grateful
disposition, disposed to think meanly of his own merits; and he
attributed all Miss Desmond’s kindness to the purest promptings of a
benevolent disposition. The idea that the young lady had regarded him
from a speculative point of view, that she had entertained any notion of
possible marriage contracts and settlements, by which she might acquire
the use of his thirty thousand per annum, never for a moment entered Mr.
Tredethlyn’s mind. He knew, in a general way, that he was admitted to
Mr. Hillary’s drawing-room because his money gave him a kind of right to
such society as that of the merchant’s household; but he never for a
moment imagined that any one of these delightful and high-bred creatures
could contemplate any contingency by which his money might become of
service to them. Wealth and beauty, elegance and refinement, seemed to
find their natural home at the Cedars. Miss Desmond of course was rich,
like Miss Hillary.
Francis counted the days which must elapse before that delightful
Sabbath to be spent by him at the Cedars. Only three days, and during
those three days stern duty called him away from London. Had he not
declared himself ready to go to the end of the world in search of his
cousin Susan Tredethlyn? He felt ashamed even of that one wasted day on
the banks of the Thames. He had left his hotel in the morning, intending
to despatch his City business with all possible speed, and start
immediately afterwards for Coltonslough. He had found out all about
Coltonslough by means of all manner of inquiries; for it seemed rather
an out-of-the-way place, known to very few people as yet. Indeed,
Coltonslough turned out to be a recently discovered watering-place on
the Essex coast, a place whose shores were supposed to be washed by the
salt waves of the ocean; but the waste of waters that rolled along the
muddy shores of Coltonslough was only an ocean in its hobbledehoyhood,
and savoured too much of the Thames and Medway to be considered a
full-grown sea.
To the traveller who has grown familiar with the centre of Africa; to
that bold explorer who has spent lonely days and nights amidst those
darksome forests in which the forgotten cities of America lie buried; to
the prisoner newly released from solitary confinement in the great
prison-house of New York, so pleasantly entitled the Tombs--to one of
these a newly discovered watering-place may not appear dull. He who has
been used to hear no more familiar voice than the distant cry of the
bittern, far away amongst the swampy wildernesses, may endure Herne Bay
and live. The criminal who has undergone a decade of solitary
confinement in the Tombs may possibly survive a month at Southend: but
to the ordinary mind there is a modern abomination of desolation lurking
in the unfinished terraces of a budding watering-place, or in a
watering-place which has put forth its tender blossoms in the way of
bow-windowed receptacles for the concentrated bleakness of perpetual
east winds, and has been blighted in the bud.
Coltonslough was very young; it was in the most infantine stage of
watering-place existence. Speculative builders had bought half-a-dozen
plots of swamp and mud, and had erected dismal rows of houses, which
turned their backs upon one another, and started off at right angles
from one another, in utter contempt for all uniformity. If the
melancholy sojourner at Coltonslough was of an active turn of mind, he
was apt to be tormented by a wild desire to pull down and re-arrange
those straggling terraces, between which stretched hideous deserts of
waste ground, with here and there a lurking pitfall, whence gravel, or
sand, or clay, or chalk, had been dug by unknown persons, who seemed
always digging something or other out of Coltonslough, whereby an
appearance of volcanic disruption was imparted to a place whose chief
merit had been its agreeable flatness.
It was very young. A few straggling excursionists came on the blazing
summer Sundays, and prowled about the shore with countenances expressive
of supreme disappointment and disgust. Half-a-dozen families of cockney
children were wont to congregate by the dismal waters every summer,
provided with baskets for the collection of shells--and there were no
shells at Coltonslough,--and further provided with wooden spades for the
undermining of sand--and there was no sand at that baby watering-place.
Families did certainly come, beguiled by representations of impossibly
cheap provisions, though the place was in reality very expensive, for
every tradesman was a monopolist on a small scale. Families came, but no
family ever came a second time to Coltonslough; and it may be that, in
the wonderful scheme of the universe, this new-born watering-place was
not without its special use; inasmuch as it made people contented with
London. The inhabitant of Bermondsey, returning to that locality after a
sojourn at Coltonslough, found beauties in some dismal street which
until that hour had appeared to his prosaic mind a street, and nothing
more. The denizen of Ratcliff Highway sat down amongst his household
gods well pleased with a neighbourhood which, although not
unobjectionable, was a paradise as compared with Coltonslough.
It was to this place of desolation that a newly-finished offshoot of the
railway then known as the Eastern Counties conveyed Francis Tredethlyn.
He went to look for his cousin with no better clue to help him in his
search than that one word, “Coltonslough,” copied from the post-mark of
Susan’s letter.
“But I won’t be baffled,” the young man thought, as he sat in the
railway carriage thinking of the task that lay before him. “Coltonslough
may be a big place, but I’ll question every living creature in it before
I’ll give up the chance of finding out something about my cousin.”
Luckily for Mr. Tredethlyn’s chances, Coltonslough was a very small
place, and after walking backwards and forwards for some quarter of an
hour, before the emporium of the one butcher; the solitary baker, who
dabbled a little in the fruit and confectionery line; and the single
grocer, who was also a linendraper, and beyond that a stationer, who had
a side of bacon hanging on one side of his door, and a piece of showy
cotton stuff upon the other, and who moreover was sole master of the
Coltonslough post-office,--Francis determined upon his plan of action.
He had thought of his cousin very constantly in the few days before his
visit to Mr. Hillary’s mansion; he had thought of her a great deal since
then, though he had not found it quite so easy to concentrate his ideas,
by reason of a certain bright face and slender figure all in a flutter
of white and blue, that would sometimes intrude themselves upon his
meditations.
Francis knew that his uncle’s daughter had left Tredethlyn Grange with
only a few sovereigns in her pocket, perhaps not much more than enough
to defray her journey to London. Without money, without friends, she had
fled from her home, and had not perished; but had lived to write to her
father from this dismal watering-place of Coltonslough some years after
her flight. It was clear, therefore, that in the interim she must have
either been supported by the benevolence of strangers, or she must have
earned her own living. The last hypothesis was the more likely to be
correct. Susan Tredethlyn had been educated to habits of industry, and
had no doubt confronted the battle of life as fearlessly as any
Tredethlyn should confront any battle.
“Poor little girl! she went out as a servant, I dare say,” thought the
young man. “She drudged and slaved for some hard mistress, perhaps,
while her father was adding every day to the money that has come to
me--to me--and he refused me a couple of hundred pounds the night my
mother was dying.”
Mr. Tredethlyn went in at the grocer’s doorway. There was scarcely room
enough for him to pass between the bacon and the cotton stuff, which
some aboriginal of Coltonslough would some day transform into wearing
apparel. The postmaster was chopping some very sallow-hued lump-sugar in
the dusky inner-regions of the shop; but he left off chopping, and
advanced to meet the stranger.
Francis Tredethlyn was no diplomatist; he was quite unskilled in that
peculiar science known as beating about the bush; so he began to make
inquiries respecting his cousin with as little preface as he would have
employed had he been asking for a pound of sugar.
“I’m a stranger to this place,” he said, “and I want to ask a few
questions; and I fancy, as you’re postmaster, you must be about the
likeliest person to answer them.”
The grocer rubbed his hands and smirked, in a manner that was expressive
of a general desire to do anything obliging--of course with an eye to
ultimate profit.
“A young woman--a relation of mine--left her home four years ago this
month. For nearly three years no one belonging to her could discover
where she was. At the end of that time a letter was received from her,
bearing the post-mark of this place. I want to find out whether she is
still here; or, if not, when she left. I have only just come back from
Van Diemen’s Land, to find things changed in the place that was once my
home. So I’m groping in the dark, you see, and shall be very thankful to
any one that’ll lend me a helping hand.”
Something in the frankness of his manner, the earnestness of his face,
went straight home to the heart of the Coltonslough postmaster, who
became less a tradesman, and more a man.
“It’s rather puzzling, you see, in the way you put it,” he said,
scratching his nose meditatively. “You want a young woman who wrote a
letter--or leastways had a letter posted at this place. But, lor’ bless
you, not being under Government y’rself, you see, you’ve no notion of
the dodges they’re up to when they want to throw any one off the scent
like with a post-mark. You mustn’t fancy a person’s in this place or in
that place, because you happen to get a letter from them with such and
such a post-mark. Why, I dessay I could get a letter posted from Jericho
to-morrow morning, if I only gave my mind to it. What might be the name
of the young woman as you’re anxious to find?”
“Her name is Tredethlyn,” Francis answered, hopelessly; “but as she ran
away from home, and most likely wanted to hide herself from her
relations, she may have changed her name.”
The postmaster mused for a few moments, and then shook his head gravely.
“I never heard of no Tredevillings in Coltonslough,” he said. “The young
person was independent in her circumstances, I suppose?”
“Oh no, indeed! she had very little money when she left home. She must
have worked for her living. I should think it likely that she went out
for a servant; for she was a country-bred girl, and had been used to a
hard life, though her father was a very rich man.”
A very rich man! That part of the business sounded interesting, and the
grocer pricked up his ears.
“A country-bred young person,” he repeated, “by the name of
Tredevillane. And what might be the date of the letter with the
Coltonslough post-mark?”
Francis did not know the exact date. He could only inform the postmaster
that the letter must have reached Cornwall about eighteen months, or it
might be rather less than eighteen months, before the present time.
“Cornwall!” cried the postmaster; “then the country-bred young woman was
a Cornwall young woman?”
“Yes, my cousin, Susan Tredethlyn, was a Cornish woman.”
“A Cornish woman, and by the name of Susan! Why, if you’d put the date
of the letter a good three years back instead of a year and a half, I
should have been able to lay my hand upon y’r cousin there and then, in
a manner of speaking.”
“How so?”
“Because I did know a young person that lived with Mrs. Burfield, in
Trafalgar Terrace. But that young person left Coltonslough full three
years ago, and I’ve never set eyes on her since.”
“But tell me all you know about her!” exclaimed Francis, almost
breathless in his eagerness. “What was she like? Why do you fancy that
she was the girl I’m looking for?”
“Because, in the first place, she was Cornish. I’d noticed that her talk
was different somehow from that of the folks about here--though she was
as soft-spoken as any lady bred and born; but one day she was standing
in my shop, with the children as she had care of, taking shelter from a
storm--and a regular pelter it was too--and she stood looking out to sea
through yonder half-glass door, which it were shut for the time being,
and I made some remark about the unpleasantness of the weather, out of
politeness like--for the young woman came very often to my shop for
groceries, and with lodgers’ letters,--Mrs. Burfield takes lodgers, and
so forth;--but she looked at me in a kind of absent way, and said ‘Oh, I
like it! I like it!’ ‘You like the storm, Miss?’ I exclaimed; and then
she answered all of a sudden, ‘Yes, I like to see it. This place doesn’t
seem so strange to me to-day as it generally does. I have seen just such
a storm as this from the moor on which my father’s house stands, and I
could almost fancy I was at home in Cornwall.’”
“And that’s how you found out she was a Cornish woman? I think you’ve
about hit it, Mr. Sanders. I think the girl who talked to you about the
storm must have been my cousin, Susan Tredethlyn.”
“Her name _was_ Susan,” answered Mr. Sanders; “I’ve heard Mrs.
Burfield’s children call her so in this very shop. She came to
Coltonslough as governess to Mrs. Burfield’s young family.”
“A governess!” said Francis, with some slight sense of relief. “She was
a governess, then, and not a servant?”
“Oh dear no! Though Coltonslough being a very small place, you see, sir,
and most of the inhabitants being a good deal dependent upon lodgers,
which gives a kind of fluctuating character to life, as you may say,
sir, a governess in Coltonslough might not be looked upon exactly in the
same light as elsewhere. Or, to put it plainer, sir, a governess in
Coltonslough would _not_ be expected to be proud.”
“Oh, I understand,” Mr. Tredethlyn answered, rather bitterly. “Yes, my
cousin was a genteel drudge,--not so well paid, perhaps, as vulgar
drudges, and rather harder worked.”
“The young person was always genteel, sir, even to the extent of wearing
gloves, which is not looked upon as indispensable in Coltonslough; but
in the matter of going errands and opening the door, or carrying in a
lodger’s tea-tray, at a push, she would _not_ be expected to be proud.”
“And she left three years ago?”
“She did, sir.”
The postmaster looked very grave as he said this,--so grave that Francis
Tredethlyn could not fail to perceive that something worse than he had
yet heard remained to be told. He was not a man to diplomatize, nor yet
to make any display of his emotion; but his breath came a little faster
for a few moments, and then he asked abruptly,--
“How did she leave?”
Mr. Sanders hesitated a little, and then said, with some
embarrassment,--
“Why, Coltonslough bein’ a gossiping kind of a place, sir, you’re apt to
hear ever so many different versions of the same thing, and it isn’t for
me to say which is right and which is wrong. I think, as it’s a long
story, sir, you’d better hear the rights of it from Mrs. Burfield.”
“A long story!” repeated Francis Tredethlyn, in an undertone,--“a long
story! Ah, my poor little cousin--my poor ill-used girl! And it seems
only a little while ago when we played together in the churchyard at
Landresdale, in the sunny hour when they let us out of school.”
It did seem to him but a very little while since he and his cousin had
sat side by side, under one of the big yew-trees in Landresdale
churchyard, dining upon some simple repast of home-made bread and fat
bacon, with a dessert of unripe apples, in the drowsy sultriness of
summer noontide. He sat for some few minutes silently thinking of that
departed time. The memory of it seemed almost like a sharp physical
pain, now that he knew that some great sorrow, some bitter woman’s
trial, had come to his cousin. A story about her--a long story! What
story should gossiping tongues have to tell of any woman, except a
history of suffering and wrong?
He did not press the postmaster to tell him anything further: but he
said presently, in an altered voice--a voice that had lost something of
its power and ringing vibration,--
“I can get to see this Mrs. Burfield, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir; I make no doubt you can. She is a very genteel person, is
Mrs. Burfield, which she have known better days, and finds herself often
a little drove like with her lodgers. Her house is Number 2, sir, in the
Terrace, Trafalgar Square, fronting sideways, and rather slantin’ like,
to the sea. You can see it, sir, from where you stand.”
Following the direction of the postmaster’s extended forefinger, Francis
Tredethlyn did see a row of unfinished-looking houses, with the
inevitable seaside bow-windows, staring out of a patch of waste ground.
Why these houses, and almost all the other houses at Coltonslough,
should have slanted away from the sea, obliging their occupants to look
out upon the expanse of waters in a sideways and sinister manner, when
they might have been built directly facing that single feature of
attraction, was a problem far beyond the comprehension of any visitor to
the infantine watering-place.
------------------------------------------------------------------------