Only a clod
crown-piece long ago, when I was a little lad. I suppose it was because
I thought then there was nothing in all the world that five shillings
wouldn’t buy, and because I’m wiser now, and know there are some things
a million of money can’t purchase. The news of this money has brought
the thoughts of my father and my mother back to me, Mr. Lowther. I’d
give every sixpence of it, if it could bring back the past, and pay out
the bailiff’s man that was sitting by our kitchen-fire at home when my
mother lay ill up-stairs. But it can’t do that. My father and mother
both died poor, and all this money can’t buy back one of the sorrowful
days they spent in the old farm, when things went from bad to worse, and
debt and ruin came down upon us. I don’t seem to care for the money, Mr.
Lowther; I am dazed and bewildered, somehow, by the greatness of the
sum, but I don’t seem to care.”
The ensign had calmed himself by this time. He got up and brushed the
tears from his eyes, real tears of rage, envy, mortification, and
despair. There was a faint blush upon his face, the one evidence of his
shame which he could not suppress in a moment, but all other evidences
of feeling had passed away.
“You’re a good fellow, Tredethlyn,” he said, “an excellent
simple-hearted fellow; as simple-hearted as a baby,--for who but a baby
ever talked as you talk about this money? and I congratulate you upon
your good luck. I see these lawyer fellows send you a bill for a couple
of hundred; that’ll buy you off here pleasantly, and get you back to
England. My advice to you is to get back as fast as ever you can, and
enter into possession of your property. It seems a complicated kind of
estate from what I can make out--mining property, and agricultural
property, and shares in half the speculations of modern times,--but it’s
a great estate, and that’s all you want to know. Go back; and as soon as
ever I can get away from this accursed hole, I’ll look you up in London;
and I--I _will_ borrow a little of that money you generously offer, and
I’ll turn bear leader, and show you what life is in the upper circle, to
which thirty thousand a year is the universal ‘open sesame.’”
The ensign slapped his hand upon his servant’s shoulder with a jovial
air, and spoke almost as gaily as if Oliver Tredethlyn’s fortune was to
be in some way or other a stroke of good luck for himself.
“Thank you, sir,” Francis answered, thoughtfully, “you’re very good; but
I don’t care to force myself in among grand folks because I’m rich
enough to do as they do. I’ve got a task before me, and it may be a long
one.”
“A task!”
“Yes; I’ve got to look for my cousin.”
“Your cousin, Susan Tredethlyn!--the girl whose portrait you showed me?”
“Yes, sir. All this money would have been hers, most likely, if she
hadn’t done something to turn my uncle against her. I can’t forget that,
you see, sir; and the first use I make of the money will be to spend
some of it in looking after her.”
“Susan Tredethlyn,” muttered Harcourt Lowther,--“Susan Tredethlyn. That
portrait you showed me was a very bad one, for I haven’t the least
notion of what your cousin is like.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V.
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