Only a clod
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.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI.
THE END OF THE WORLD.
The sun was low when Francis Tredethlyn left the Crown Inn, and walked
slowly up the village street. The sun was low, and already a crimson
glory flickered here and there upon the quaint old casements. The young
man walked slowly, looking about him with a half-doubtful,
half-bewildered gaze, like a man who sees his native village in a dream.
And indeed no village in the vision of a sleeper could be more tranquil
in its rustic repose than this Cornish street, steep and stony, mounting
to the summit of a hill, upon whose top the great gates of Landresdale
loomed grim and stately, like the entrance to an ogre’s castle in
fairyland. You climbed the steep little street; and you came to the big
gates of Landresdale; and that was all. The village ended here; and
there was nothing for you to do but to go back again. It was like coming
to the end of the world, and finding a great Elizabethan door of
ponderous oak and iron barred against any chaotic realm that might lie
beyond our every-day earth. There may have been occasions--indeed, the
inhabitants of Landresdale would have testified to many such--on which
those ponderous doors swung open on their mighty hinges: but the
ignorant traveller, looking at them shut, found it difficult to realize
the possibility of their ever being opened. They looked like the doors
of a mausoleum: which may open once in half a century to admit the
coffined dead, but can never be unclosed for any meaner purpose. Grim
towers flanked the stony arch on either side, and two old rusty cannon
displayed their iron noses within the shadow of the towers, ready to
fire a volley down the hilly street whenever the simple folks of
Landresdale should evince any revolutionary tendencies.
To the right of the great gates there was a handsome wing of solid
masonry, whose Tudor windows opened upon a square courtyard, where there
were more cannon, and upon a prim, old-fashioned garden, shut in by a
high wall, and only visible to the wanderer through the iron rails and
arabesques of a lofty gate, amidst whose scrollwork the arms of the
Landresdales and Treverbyns, the Courtenays and Polwheles, were
interlaced and entangled.
The garden wall bounded the estate of Rashleigh Vyvyan Trevannence,
Marquis of Landresdale; and beneath the shelter of that old ivy-covered
red brick wall lay the churchyard, quiet and shadowy, dark with the
dense foliage of great yew-trees, thick with long tangled grass, that
grew high amongst the slanting headstones. Francis Tredethlyn stopped by
the low wooden gate, and leaning against the moss-grown pillar that
supported it, looked up at the square towers which seemed like stony
sentinels for ever keeping guard over the entrance to Landresdale. The
light was red upon the corner window that faced the western sky, but all
the other casements stared blankly and darkly out upon the graves in the
churchyard, and the empty village street, in which one woman, toiling
slowly upwards with a pitcher of water that slopped and trickled at
intervals upon the pavement, was the only living presence.
“The great gates look just the same as they used to look,” thought
Francis Tredethlyn. “When I was a boy, and read fairy-tales, I always
fancied that the enchanted castle the wandering prince came to in the
middle of a wood, or on the summit of a great mountain, was like
Landresdale, a castle standing all alone in the middle of the way, with
no road to the right nor to the left, so that the prince _must_ go in
and ask shelter, though he knew that harm would come of it, or else go
back and lose all the trouble of his journey. How I used to long to pull
that bell when I was a lad!” thought Francis, looking at the iron ring