Only a clod
which swung from a massive chain on one side of the archway.
“But I’ve no need to dawdle here,” he thought, as he pushed the gate
open and went into the churchyard. “It seems as if the nearer I get to
the place where I am certain to hear the truth about Susan, the more I
dread hearing it.”
The ignorant traveller who might turn away from the great gates of
Landresdale to descend the hill under the impression that the county of
Cornwall came to an abrupt termination upon the threshold of the
Marquis’s domain, would have been mistaken. There were other and higher
lands, broad stretches of hill and moorland, lying beyond the
churchyard, to the right of the quaint old garden and the Gothic towers
and casements: and it was thitherward that Francis Tredethlyn directed
his steps. He crossed the churchyard, only pausing briefly before one
tombstone, upon which the names of Sarah and John Tredethlyn were cut,
low down on the stone, at the bottom of a long list of Tredethlyns, who
lay buried in that churchyard. The young man let himself out of the
solemn precinct by a little rusty iron gate that opened on a broad
expanse of common land sloping upward towards the western sky, and only
broken here and there by a quarry or a patch of water.
“It looks bleak and barren enough,” thought Francis, with a shudder;
“but it’s hereabouts that my uncle Oliver picked up a good bit of his
money. The tin mines lie out yonder; and the stone quarry in the hollow
there brought him in plenty, if folks tell the truth.”
Francis Tredethlyn might have echoed the boast of Helen Macgregor had he
chosen, and with stronger justification than that lady, for the earth
upon which he trod was not only his native land but his own peculiar
property, by virtue of certain yellow-looking parchments under the
sign-manual of an Earl and Baron of Landresdale who flourished in the
reign of James I. and by payment of an eccentric annual tribute in the
shape of a young doe and a hundredweight of virgin tin. It was all his
own, this bleak waste land which Francis Tredethlyn, late private
soldier in her Majesty’s service, late valet to a capricious master, now
trod under his feet. Nor was it the less to be considered for its
barrenness of aspect, for rich metals lay deep below the heathery
surface, in mines that were amongst the oldest and most valuable in
Cornwall.
But Francis Tredethlyn was in no wise elated or disturbed by the
importance of his possession. He had never felt any ardent desire for
wealth, and as yet he had not begun to realize its manifold advantages.
He saw the effect of his fortune upon other men, and smiled at their
weakness; but what had been true of him in the first hour of his altered
position was true of him now,--he had no power either to realize or
rejoice in the extent of his riches.
He walked slowly across the barren moorland, always upward, always
mounting towards a long ridge of western hill, behind which two streaks
of yellow light stretched low against the darkening sky,--a bleak,
bare-looking hill, that seemed the very end of the world. It was upon
this hillside that Tredethlyn Grange had been built four centuries ago,
in the days when men built their houses with a view to endurance; and it
stood there still, a long gray tenement of moss-grown stone, with narrow
casement windows, looking darkly out upon the twilight moor. The larger
portion of the old house had been uninhabited during the tenantship of
the Tredethlyns, who, in a spirit of economy, had located themselves in
the interior rooms lying at one end of the rambling mansion. It was in
one of these rooms that a light now twinkled faintly; and it was towards
this end of the house that Francis Tredethlyn directed his steps. There
had been a moat once on two sides of the house, but cabbages now grew
upon the sloping earth. There had been a garden once before the Grange,
and an old stone sun-dial still marked the spot; but of all the trim
flower-beds and angular paths there remained no vestige now. A field of
trefoil, bounded by a low stone wall, lay beyond two broken pillars that
had once supported a pair of handsome gates; and the sheep browsed close
beneath the dim latticed windows.
“It seems like the end of the world to me to-night,” thought Mr.
Tredethlyn; “and yet once it was comfortable and home-like enough, when
I sat with Susy of a night by the fire in the kitchen, while she darned
the old man’s gray worsted stockings. And to think that he had such
oceans of money all that time, and yet seemed almost to grudge his only
child every gown she wore, and every bit of bread she put into her
mouth.” The young man was close to the familiar threshold by this time.
He knocked at a low, narrow door in the neighbourhood of the one dimly
lighted window, and then drew back a few paces, looking up at the
old-fashioned casements.
“This is the window of Susy’s room,” he thought. “How black and dark it
looks to-night! I remember coming up here the night before I ran away to
Falmouth to enlist. I remember standing by the low wall yonder, in the
cold autumn night, looking up at that very window. There was a light
burning then, and I thought of how I should see it burning just the same
when I came back, and how I’d throw a handful of earth up at the old
window, and Susy would look out, startled and wondering, to find her
faithful sweetheart come back to her from the end of the world. And now
it’s this place that seems like the end of the world somehow, and I’m
every bit as far from Susy now as ever I was out yonder.”
The door was opened only a very little way, and a woman’s face, so hard
and angular that it seemed almost to cut into the dusky atmosphere,
peered out at the traveller.
“What do you please to want, sir?” she asked, suspiciously.
“I want to ask you a few questions, Martha Dryscoll. I’ve come from the
Antipodes to ask them.”
“Mr. Tredethlyn!” cried the woman, opening the door to its widest
extent; “Mr. Francis Tredethlyn come home to his own like a ghost in the
night! I make so bold as to bid you welcome, sir. Your uncle’s empty
chair stands ready for you. The house seems strange and lonesome without
him.”
It was not everybody who would have ascribed to Mr. Oliver Tredethlyn
the power to enliven any house with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, or
brighten any fireside with so much as the faintest glimmer of light. But
Martha Dryscoll spoke in all good faith. She had believed in her master,
and had worked for him, and pinched for him, and half-starved herself
and other people for his sake, throughout five-and-thirty years of the
dreariest and hardest life that woman ever endured. He had picked her
up, starved and almost dying, upon a high road near one of his outlying
farms, and had taken her from field-labour and all its attendant pains,
to be his housekeeper and--slave; and she had repaid this favour a
thousandfold by a devotion that knew no weariness, and a rigid economy
that extended itself to the saving of a grain of salt in the old
spindle-legged leaden saltcellars.
Oliver Tredethlyn had not been actuated by any Quixotic motive in this
eccentric choice of a servant. He took his housekeeper from the wayside
because he saw in her a stuff he had vainly sought in the pampered
menials who had hitherto presented themselves to his notice. He had been
attracted to Martha in the first instance by her gaunt face and gaunter
figure, which would have been sufficiently alarming in one of King
Frederick William’s chosen grenadiers. He had been attracted still more
by her curt answers to his curt questions, in which she told him that
she had walked thirty miles that day before lying down, as she believed,
to die; that she had walked twenty miles the day before, and
five-and-twenty the day before that; that she had not tasted food for
the last eight-and-forty hours; and that she had worked in the fields
and lived upon an average of two-pence a day ever since she could
remember.
It was upon this that a bargain was struck between Oliver Tredethlyn, of
Tredethlyn Grange, of the one part, and Martha Blank, Martha Anybody, of
the other part, for the poor creature had no knowledge of any special
surname to which she might lay claim. She had been called Carroty Jane
in one place because her hair was red and her name was not Jane. She had
been called Gawky Bet, and Lanky Poll, at other places, on account of
her abnormal height; but the name she had received in the Union, where
her earlier years had been passed, was Martha, and it was this name
which she herself recognised as her legitimate appellation. She went
home with Oliver Tredethlyn in one of his empty waggons, and ate her
first spare meal in the Grange kitchen before nightfall; and from that
hour until the old man’s death she served him well and faithfully. She
lived with him all the days of his bachelorhood, and resignedly united
herself to his bailiff when he commanded her so to do. This faithful
creature welcomed Mr. Tredethlyn’s wife when he took it into his head to
bring home a small tenant-farmer’s pretty daughter, who had been forced
into a marriage with a man whom she detested; and, faithful and untiring
to the last, this rough-handed, brawny-armed servant watched by the
young wife’s sick bed during those dull years in which she slowly
withered and faded, from a fresh, blooming girl, into a prematurely old
woman, and so sank by lingering stages into an early grave, leaving
behind her one only child, whose infancy and girlhood were brightened by
no softer light than such as might be shed from the grim, grenadier-like
affection of Martha Dryscoll.
Jonathan Dryscoll, the farm-bailiff whom Oliver Tredethlyn had desired
his housekeeper to marry, was ten years younger than his wife, and was
so poor and weak a creature morally and physically in her hands, that he
seemed at least half a century her junior. If she told him to do
anything, he did it. If she told him to think anything, he thought it;
or would have done so, if the mental exercise had not been generally
beyond the scope of his faculties. He was as honest and faithful as
Martha herself; but if Martha had told him to go and fire all the ricks
on Oliver Tredethlyn’s property, he would have done it with the blind
trustfulness of a princess in a child’s story-book, who obeys the
eccentric behests of a fairy godmother. That Martha Dryscoll could do
anything wrong, or think anything wrong, was an hypothesis which
Jonathan her husband had never contemplated. Perhaps the pleasantest
thing about this couple was that there was no disagreeable evidence of
Martha’s authority. Indeed, that worthy woman was most punctilious in
respect to her liege lord and husband, whom she always spoke of as “the
master.” Jonathan obeyed and trembled, but the sceptre which his wife
wielded was an invisible one, and the chains that bound her slave were
as impalpable as if they had been fashioned of cobwebs.
Martha Dryscoll was not renowned for her capacity of expressing any
species of emotion; but some faint ray of pleasure kindled in her grim
face as she conducted Francis Tredethlyn through the kitchen to an
apartment that had served as a kind of state chamber for three
generations of his race. She set the candle on the polished mahogany
table, and, folding her arms, contemplated the new master of the Grange
at her leisure. In that dim light, in her quaint, scanty dress, with a
brown background of oaken wainscot behind her, she looked like a quaint
figure in one of Jan Steen’s pictures, a hard-faced, angular housewife,
honest, laborious, and economical, with her ear perpetually open to the
leaking of beer-barrels, or the boiling-over of soup-kettles; her eye
ever on the alert to perceive waste or destruction.