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The Light of Scarthey: A Romance

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Title: The Light of Scarthey: A Romance

Author: Egerton Castle


        
Release date: July 12, 2008 [eBook #26045]

Language: English

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E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Karen Dalrymple, and the Project
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THE LIGHT OF SCARTHEY

A Romance

by

EGERTON CASTLE

  Author of
  "The Pride of Jennico," "Young
  April," etc.







"Take whichsoever way thou wilt--the ways are all alike;
But do thou only come--I bade my threshold wait thy coming.
From out my window one can see the graves, and on my life
The graves keep watch." _Luteplayer's Song._



New York
Frederick A. Stokes Company
MCM

Copyright, 1899,
by Frederick A. Stokes Company.
All rights reserved.

Fourth Edition.




  I Dedicate
  THIS BOOK TO THE
  MEMORY OF
  FREDERICK ANDREWS LARKING
  OF THE ROCKS, EAST MALLING, KENT
  THAT, SO LONG AS ANYTHING OF MINE SHALL ENDURE,
  THERE MAY ENDURE ALSO
  A RECORD OF OUR FRIENDSHIP AND OF
  MY SORROW




PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.


_Among the works of every writer of Fiction there are generally one or
two that owe their being to some_ haunting _thought, long communed
with--a thought which has at last found a living shape in some story
of deed and passion._

_I say one or two advisedly: for the span of man's active life is
short and such haunting fancies are, of their essence, solitary. As a
matter of fact, indeed, the majority of a novelist's creations belong
to another class, must of necessity (if he be a prolific creator) find
their conception in more sudden impulses. The great family of the
"children of his brain" must be born of inspirations ever new, and in
alluring freshness go forth into the world surrounded by the
atmosphere of their author's present mood, decked in the colours of
his latest imaginings, strengthened by his latest passional
impressions and philosophical conclusions._

_In the latter category the lack of long intimate acquaintance between
the author and the friends or foes he depicts, is amply compensated
for by the enthusiasm appertaining to new discoveries, as each
character reveals itself, often in quite unforeseen manner, and the
consequences of each event shape themselves inevitably and sometimes
indeed almost against his will._

_Although dissimilar in their genesis, both kinds of stories can, in
the telling, be equally life-like and equally alluring to the reader.
But what of the writer? Among his literary family is there not one
nearer his heart than all the rest--his_ dream-child? _It may be the
stoutest of the breed or it may be the weakling; it may be the
first-born, it often is the Benjamin. Fathers in the flesh know this
secret tenderness. Many a child and many a book is brooded over with a
special love even before its birth.--Loved thus, for no grace or merit
of its own, this book is my dream-child._

       *       *       *       *       *

_Here, by the way, I should like to say my word in honour of
_Fiction_--"fiction" contradistinguished from what is popularly termed
"serious" writing._

_If, in a story, the characters and the events are truly convincing;
if the former are appealingly human and the latter are so carefully
devised and described as never to evoke the idea of improbability,
then it can make no difference in the_ intellectual pleasure _of the
reader whether what he is made to realise so vividly is a record of
fact or of mere fancy. Facts we read of are of necessity past: what is
past, what is beyond the immediate ken of our senses, can only be
realised in imagination; and the picture we are able to make of it for
ourselves depends altogether on the sympathetic skill of the recorder.
Is not Diana Vernon, born and bred in Scott's imagination, to the full
as living now before us as Rob Roy Macgregor whose existence was so
undeniably tangible to the men of his days? Do we not see, in our
mind's eye, and know as clearly the lovable "girt John Ridd" of_ Lorna
Doone _the romance as his contemporaries, Mr. Samuel Pepys of the hard
and uncompromising_ Diary _or King James of_ English Annals?

_Pictures, alike of the plainest facts or of the veriest imaginings,
are but pictures: it matters very little therefore whether the man or
the woman we read of but never can see in the flesh has really lived
or not, if what we do read raises an emotion in our hearts. To the
novelist, every character, each in his own degree, is almost as
living as a personal acquaintance; every event is as clear as a
personal experience. And if this be true of the story written_ a la
grace de la plume, _where both events and characters unfold themselves
like the buds of some unknown plant, how much more strongly is it the
case of the story that has so long been mused over that one day it had
to be told! Then the marking events of the actors' lives, their
adventures, whether of sorrow or of joy, their sayings and doings,
noble or bright or mistaken, recorded in the book, are but a tithe of
the adventures, sayings and doings with which the writer seems to be
familiar. He might write or talk about them, in praise or
vindictiveness as he loves or dreads them, for many a longer day--but
he has one main theme to make clear to his hearers and must respect
the modern canons of the Story-telling Art. Among the many things
therefore he could tell, an he would, he selects that only which will
unravel a particular thread of fate in the tangle of endless
consequences; which will render plausible the growth of passions on
which, in a continuous life-drama, is based one particular episode._

_Of such a kind is the story of Adrian Landale._

_The haunting thought round which the tale of the sorely
tempest-tossed dreamer is gathered is one which, I think, must at one
time or other have occurred to many a man as he neared the maturity of
middle-life:--What form of turmoil would come into his heart if, when
still in the strength of his age but after long years of hopeless
separation, he were again brought face to face with the woman who had
been the one passion of his life, the first and only love of his
youth? And what if she were still then exactly as he had last seen
her--she, untouched by years even as she had so long lived in his
thoughts: he, with his soul scarred and seamed by many encounters
bravely sustained in the Battle of Life?_

_The problem thus propounded is not solvable, even in fiction, unless
it be by "fantastic" treatment. But perhaps the more so on this
account did it haunt me. And out of the travail of my mind around it,
out of the changing shadows of restless speculation, gradually
emerged, clear and alive, the being of Adrian Landale and his two
loves._

_Here then was a man, whose mind, moulded by nature for grace and
contemplation, was cast by fate amid all the turmoils of_ Romance _and
action. Here was one of those whose warm heart and idealising
enthusiasm must wreathe the beauty of love into all the beauties of
the world; whose ideals are spent on one adored object; who, having
lost it, seems to have lost the very sense of love; to whom love never
could return, save by some miracle. But fortune, that had been so
cruelly hard on him, one day in her blind way brings back to his door
the miraculous restitution--and there leaves him to struggle along the
new path of his fate! It is there also that I take up the thread of
the speculation, and watch through its vicissitudes the working of the
problem raised by such a strange circumstance._

_The surroundings in a story of this kind are, of the nature of
things, all those of_ Romance. _And by_ Romance, _I would point out,
is not necessarily meant in tale-telling, a chain of events fraught
with greater improbability than those of so-called real life. (Indeed
where is now the writer who will for a moment admit, even tacitly,
that his records are not of reality?) It simply betokens, a
specialisation of the wider genus_ Novel; _a narrative of strong
action and moving incident, in addition to the necessary analysis of
character; a story in which the uncertain violence of the outside
world turns the course of the actors' lives from the more obvious
channels. It connotes also, as a rule, more poignant emotions--emotions
born of strife or peril, even of horror; it tells of the shock of arms
in life, rather than of the mere diplomacy of life._

_Above all_ Romance _depends upon picturesque and varied setting; upon
the scenery of the drama, so to speak. On the other hand it is not
essentially (though this has sometimes been advanced) a narrative of
mere adventures as contrasted to the observation and dissection of
character and manners we find in the true "novel." Rather be it said
that it is one in which the hidden soul is made patent under the
touchstone of blood-stirring incidents, of hairbreadth risks, of
recklessness or fierceness. There are soaring passions, secrets of the
innermost heart, that can only be set free in desperate
situations--and those situations are not found in the tenor in
every-day, well-ordered life: they belong to Romance._

_Spirit-fathers have this advantage that they can bring forth their
dream-children in what age and place they list: it is no times of
now-a-days, no ordinary scenery, that would have suited such
adventures as befell Adrian Landale, or Captain Jack, or "Murthering
Moll the Second."_

_Romantic enough is the scene, which, in a manner, framed the display
of a most human drama; and fraught it is, even to this day, in the
eyes of any but the least imaginative, with potentialities for strange
happenings.[A] It is that great bight of Morecambe; that vast of brown
and white shallows, deserted, silent, mysterious, and treacherous with
its dreaded shifting sands; fringed in the inland distance by the
Cumbrian hills, blue and misty; bordered outwards by the Irish sea,
cold and grey. And in a corner of that waste, the islet, small and
green and secure, with its ancient Peel, ruinous even as the noble
abbey of which it was once the dependant stronghold; with its still
sturdy keep, and the beacon, whose light-keeper was once a Dreamer of
Beautiful Things._

[Footnote A: _Those who like to associate fiction with definite places
may be interested to know that the prototype of Scarthey is the_ Piel
of Foudrey, _on the North Lancashire coast, near the edge of Morecambe
Bay, and that Pulwick was suggested by Furness Abbey. Barrow-in-Furness
was then but a straggling village. A floating light, facing the mouth
of the Wyre, now fulfils the duties devolving on the beacon of Scarthey
at the time of this story._]

_And romantic the times, if by that word is implied a freer scope than
can be found in modern years for elemental passions, for fighting and
loving in despite of every-day conventions; for enterprise, risks,
temptations unknown in the atmosphere of humdrum peace and order. They
are the early days of the century, days when easy and rapid means of
communication had not yet destroyed all the glamour of distance, when
a county like Lancashire was as a far-off country, with a spirit, a
language, customs and ideas unknown to the Metropolis; days when, if
there were no lifeboat crews, there could still be found rather
experienced "wreckers," and when the keeping of a beacon, to light a
dangerous piece of sea, was still within the province of a
public-spirited landlord. They are the days when the spread of
education had not even yet begun (for weal or for woe) its levelling
work; days of cruel monopolies and inane prohibitions, and ferocious
penal laws, inept in the working, baleful in the result; days of
keel-hauling and flogging; when the "free-trader" still swung, tarred
and in chains, on conspicuous points of the coast--even as the
highwayman rattled at the cross-road--for the encouragement of the
brotherhood; when it was naturally considered more logical (since hang
you must for almost any misdeed) to hang for a sheep than a lamb, and
human life on the whole was held rather cheap in consequence. They are
the days when in Liverpool the privateers were daily fitting out or
bringing in the "prizes," and when, in Lord Street Offices, distant
cargoes of "living ebony" were put to auction by steady, intensely
respectable, Church-going merchants. But especially they are the days
of war and the fortunes of war; days of pressgangs, to kidnap
unwilling rulers of the waves; of hulks and prisons filled to
overflowing, even in a mere commercial port like Liverpool, with
French prisoners of war._

_A long course of relentless hostilities, lasting the span of a
full-grown generation, had cultivated the predatory instinct of all
men with the temperament of action, and seemed to justify it.
Venturesome, hot-spirited youths, with their way to make in the world
(who in a former age might have been reduced to "the road") took up
privateering on a systematic scale. In such an atmosphere there could
not fail to return a belief in the good old_ border rule, _"the simple
plan: that they should take who have the power, and they should keep
who can." And it must be remembered that an island country's border is
the enemy's coast! On that ethical understanding many privateer owners
built up large fortunes, still enjoyed by descendants who in these
days would look upon high-sea looting of non-combatants with definite
horror._

_The years of the great French war, however, fostered a species of
nautical enterprise more venturesome even than privateering, raiding,
blockade-running and all the ordinary forms of smuggling that are
usual when two coast lines are at enmity. I mean that smuggling of
gold specie and bullion which incidentally was destined to affect the
course of Sir Adrian's life so powerfully._

       *       *       *       *       *

_As Captain Jack's last venture may, at this distance of time, appear
a little improbable, it is well to state here some little-known facts
concerning the now rather incomprehensible pursuit of gold
smuggling--a romantic subject if ever there was one._

_The existence at one time of this form of "free-trade" is all but
forgotten. Indeed very little was ever heard of it in the world,
except among parties directly interested, even at the time when it
played an important part in the machinery of governments. Its rise
during the years of Napoleonic tyranny on the continent of Europe, and
its continuance during the factitious calm of the First Restoration in
France, were due to circumstances that never existed before and are
little likely to occur again._

_The accumulation of a fund of_ gold _coin, reserved against sudden
contingency, was one of Bonaparte's imperial ideas. In a modified and
more modern form, this notion of a "war-chest," untouched and
unproductive in peace-time, is still adhered to by the Germans: they
have kept to heart many of their former conqueror's lessons, lessons
forgotten by the French themselves--and the enormous treasure of gold
bags guarded at Spandau is a matter of common knowledge. Napoleon,
however, in his triumphant days never, and for obvious reasons, lacked
money. It was less an actual treasure that he required and valued so
highly for political and military purposes, than an ever ready reserve
of wealth easily portable, of paramount value at all times;
"concentrated," so to speak. And nothing could come nearer to that
description than rolls of English guineas. Indeed the vast numbers of
these coins which fitfully appeared in circulation throughout Europe
justified the many weird legends concerning the power of "British
Gold"_--l'or Anglais!

_There is every reason to believe that, in days when the national
currency consisted chiefly of lumbering silver_ ecus, _the Bourbon
government also appreciated to the full the value of a_ private _gold
reserve. At any rate it was at the time of the first Restoration that
the golden guinea of England found in France its highest premium._

_Without going into the vexed and dreary question of single or double
standard, it will suffice to say that during the early years of the
century now about to close, gold coin was leaving England at a rate
which not only appeared phenomenal but was held to be injurious to the
community._

_As a matter of fact most of it was finding its way to France, whilst
Great Britain was flooded with silver. It was then made illegal to
export gold coin or bullion. The prohibition was stringently, indeed
at one time, ruthlessly, enforced. In this manner the new and highly
profitable traffic in English guineas entered the province of the
"free-trader"; the difference introduced in his practice being merely
one of degree. Whereas, in the case of prohibited imports, the chief
task lay in running the illicit goods and distributing them, in the
case of guinea-smuggling its arduousness was further increased by the
danger of collecting the gold inland and clearing from home harbours._

_Very little, as I said, has ever been heard of this singular trade,
and for obvious reasons. In the first place it obtained only for a
comparatively small number of years, the latter part of the Great War:
the last of it belonging to the period of the_ Hundred Days. _And in
the second it was, at all times, of necessity confined to a very small
number of free-trading skippers. Of adventurous men, in stirring days,
there were of course a multitude. But few, naturally, were the men to
whose honour the custody of so much ready wealth could safely be
intrusted. "That is where," as Captain Jack says sometimes in this
book, "the 'likes of me' come in."_

_The exchange was enormously profitable. As much as thirty-two
shillings in silver value could, at one time, be obtained on the other
side of the water for an English guinea. But the shipper and broker,
in an illegal venture where contract could not be enforced, had to be
a man whose simple word was warranty--and indeed, in the case of large
consignments, this blind trust had to be extended to almost every man
of his crew. What a romance could be written upon this theme alone!_

_In the story of Adrian Landale, however, it plays but a subsidiary
part. Brave, joyous-hearted Captain Jack and his bold venture for a
fortune appear only in the drama to turn its previous course to
unforeseen channels; just as in most of our lives, the sudden
intrusion of a new strong personality--transient though it may be, a
tempest or a meteor--changes their seemingly inevitable trend to
altogether new issues._

       *       *       *       *       *

_It was urged by my English publishers that, in_ "The Light of
Scarthey," _I relate two distinct love-stories and two distinct phases
of one man's life; and that it were wiser (by which word I presume was
meant more profitable) to distribute the tale between two books, one
to be a sequel to the other. Happily I would not be persuaded to cut a
fully composed canvas in two for the sake of the frames. "It is the
fate of sequels," as Stevenson said in his dedication of _Catriona_,
"to disappoint those who have waited for them." Besides, life is
essentially continuous.--It may not be inept to state a truism of this
kind in a world of novels where the climax of life, if not indeed its
very conclusion, is held to be reached on the day of marriage! There
is often, of course, more than one true passion of love in a man's
life; and even if the second does not really kill the memory of the
first, their course (should they be worth the telling) may well be
told separately. But if, in the story of a man's love for two women,
the past and the present are so closely interwoven as were the reality
and the "might-have-been" in the mind of Adrian Landale, any
separation of the two phases, youth and maturity, would surely have
stultified the whole scheme of the story._

_I have also been taken to task by some critics for having, the tale
once opened at a given time and place, harked back to other days and
other scenes: an inartistic and confusing method, I was told. I am
still of contrary opinion. There are certain stories which_ belong,
_by their very essence, to certain places. All ancient buildings have,
if we only knew them, their human dramas: this is the very soul of the
hidden but irresistible attraction they retain for us even when
deserted and dismantled as now the Peel of Scarthey. For the sake of
harmonious proportions, and in order to give it its proper atmosphere,
it was imperative that in this drama--wherever the intermediate scenes
might be placed, whether on the banks of the Vilaine, on the open sea,
or in Lancaster Castle--the Prologue should be witnessed on the green
islet in the wilderness of sands, even as the Crisis and the Closing
Scene of rest and tenderness._

  _E. C.,
  49, Sloane Gardens,
  London, S. W.

  October 1899._




TABLE OF CONTENTS


PART I

SIR ADRIAN LANDALE, LIGHT-KEEPER OF SCARTHEY

  CHAP.                                                         PAGE

       I. The Peel of Scarthey                                     1
      II. The Light-Keeper                                         6
     III. Day Dreams: A Philosopher's Fate                        16
      IV. Day Dreams: A Fair Emissary                             32
       V. The Awakening                                           43
      VI. The Wheel of Time                                       53
     VII. Forebodings of Gladness                                 63
    VIII. The Path of Wasted Years                                70
      IX. A Genealogical Epistle                                  85


PART II

"MURTHERING MOLL THE SECOND"

       X. The Threshold of Womanhood                              97
      XI. A Masterful Old Maid                                   113
     XII. A Record and a Presentment                             122
    XIII. The Distant Light                                      136
     XIV. The Tower of Liverpool: Master and Man                 144
      XV. Under the Light                                        156
     XVI. The Recluse and the Squire                             174


PART III

"CAPTAIN JACK," THE GOLD SMUGGLER

    XVII. Gold Smuggler and the Philosopher                      191
   XVIII. "Love Gilds the Scene and Woman Guides the Plot"       211
     XIX. A Junior's Opinion                                     224
      XX. The Quick and the Dead                                 244
     XXI. The Dawn of an Eventful Day                            252
    XXII. The Day: Morning                                       262
   XXIII. The Day: Noon                                          276
    XXIV. The Night                                              294
     XXV. The Fight for the Open                                 309
    XXVI. The Three Colours                                      323
   XXVII. Under the Light Again: The Lady and the Cargo          335
  XXVIII. The End of the Thread                                  349
    XXIX. The Light Goes Out                                     364
     XXX. Husband and Wife                                       375
    XXXI. In Lancaster Castle                                    382
   XXXII. The One He Loved and the One Who Loved Him             393
  XXXIII. Launched on the Great Wave                             406
   XXXIV. The Gibbet on the Sands                                413
    XXXV. The Light Rekindled                                    430




PART I

SIR ADRIAN LANDALE, LIGHT-KEEPER OF SCARTHEY

    _We all were sea-swallowed, though some cast again;
    And by that destiny to perform an act,
    Whereof what's past is Prologue._

    THE TEMPEST




THE LIGHT OF SCARTHEY




CHAPTER I

THE PEEL OF SCARTHEY

    He makes a solitude and calls it peace.

    BYRON.


Alone in the south and seaward corner of the great bight on the
Lancastrian coast--mournfully alone some say, gloriously alone to my
thinking--rises in singular unexpected fashion the islet of Scarthey;
a green oasis secure on its white rocky seat amidst the breezy
wilderness of sands and waters.

There is, in truth, more sand than water at most times round Scarthey.
For miles northward the wet strand stretches its silent expanse, tawny
at first, then merging into silver grey as in the dim distance it
meets the shallow advance of briny ripple. Wet sand, brown and dull,
with here and there a brighter trail as of some undecided river
seeking an aimless way, spreads westward, deep inland, until stopped
in a jagged line by bluffs that spring up abruptly in successions of
white rocky steps and green terraces.

Turn you seaward, at low tide there lies sand again and shingle
(albeit but a narrow beach, for here a depth of water sinks rapidly)
laved with relentless obstinacy by long, furling, growling rollers
that are grey at their sluggish base and emerald-lighted at their
curvetting crest. Sand yet again to the south, towards the nearer
coast line, for a mile or perhaps less, dotted, along an irregular
path, with grey rocks that look as though the advance guard of a giant
army had attempted to ford its insecure footing, had sunk into its
treacherous shifting pits, and left their blanching skull-tops half
emerging to record the disaster.

On the land side of the bight, far away beyond the grandly desolate,
silent, yellow tract, a misty blue fringe on the horizon heralds the
presence of the North Country; whilst beyond the nearer beach a
sprinkling of greenly ensconced homesteads cluster round some peaceful
and paternal looking church tower. Near the salty shore a fishing
village scatters its greystone cabins along the first terrace of the
bluffs.

Outwards, ever changing in colour and temper roll and fret the grey
waters of the Irish Sea, turbulent at times, but generally lenient
enough to the brown-sailed ketches that break the regular sweep of the
western horizon as they toil at the perpetual harvest of the deep.

Thus stands Scarthey. Although appearing as an island on the charts,
at low tides it becomes accessible dry-foot from the land by a narrow
causeway along the line of the white shallow reefs, which connect the
main pile to the rocky steps and terraces of the coast. But woe betide
man or beast that diverges many feet from the one secure path! The
sands of the great bay have already but too well earned their sinister
reputation.

During the greater part of the day, however, Scarthey justifies its
name--Skard- or Scarth-ey, the Knoll Island in the language of the old
Scandinavian masters of the land.

In fair weather, or in foul, whether rising out of sunny sands when
the ebbing waters have retired, or assailed on all sides by ramping
breakers, Scarthey in its isolation, with its well-preserved ruins and
its turret, from which for the last hundred years a light has been
burning to warn the seafarer, has a comfortable look of security and
privacy.

The low thick wall which in warlike times encompassed the bailey (now
surrounding and sheltering a wide paddock and neat kitchen gardens)
almost disappears under a growth of stunted, but sturdy trees; dwarf
alders and squat firs that shake their white-backed leaves, and swing
their needle clusters, merrily if the breeze is mild, obstinately if
the gale is rousing and seem to proclaim: "Here are we, well and
secure. Ruffle and toss, and lash, O winds, the faithless waters, _we_
shall ever cling to this hospitable footing, the only kindly soil
amid this dreariness; here you once wafted our seed; here shall we
live and perpetuate our life."

On the sea front of the bailey walls rise, sheer from the steep rock,
the main body and the keep of the Peel. They are ruinous and shorn of
their whilom great height, humbled more by the wilful destruction of
man than by the decay of time.

But although from a distance the castle on the green island seems
utterly dismantled, it is not, even now, all ruin. And, at the time
when Sir Adrian Landale, of Pulwick, eighth baronet, adopted it as his
residence, it was far from being such.

True, the greater portion of that mediaeval building, half monastic,
half military, exposed even then to the searching winds many bare and
roofless chambers; broken vaults filled with driven sands; more than
one spiral stair with hanging steps leading into space. But the
massive square keep had been substantially restored. Although roofless
its upper platform was as firm as when it was first built; and in a
corner, solidly ensconced, rose the more modern turret that sheltered
the honest warning light.

The wide chambers of the two remaining floors, which in old warlike
days were maintained bare and free, and lighted only by narrow
watching loopholes on all sides, had been, for purposes of peaceful
tenanncy, divided into sundry small apartments. New windows had been
pierced into the enormous thickness of stone and cement; the bare
coldness of walls was also hidden under more home-like panellings.
Close-fitting casements and solid doors insured peace within; the wind
in stormy hours might moan or rage outside this rocky pile, might hiss
and shriek and tear its wings among the jagged ruins, bellow and
thunder in and out of opened vaults, but it might not rattle a window
of the modern castellan's quarters or shake a latch of his chamber
door.

There, for reasons understood then only by himself, had Sir Adrian
elected, about the "year seven" of this century and in the prime of
his age, to transplant his lares and penates.

The while, this Adrian Landale's ancestral home stood, in its placid
and double pride of ancient and settled wealth, only some few miles
away as the bee flies, in the midst of its noble park, slightly
retired from the coast-line; and from its upper casements could be
descried by day the little green patch of Scarthey and the jagged
outline of its ruins on the yellow or glimmering face of the great
bay, and by night the light of its turret. And there he was still
living, in some kind of happiness, in the "year fourteen," when, out
of the eternal store of events, began to shape themselves the latter
episodes of a life in which storm and peace followed each other as
abruptly as in the very atmosphere that he then breathed.

For some eight years he had nested on that rock with no other
companions but a dog, a very ancient housekeeper who cooked and washed
for "t' young mester" as she obstinately persisted in calling the man
whom she had once nursed upon her knee, and a singular sturdy foreign
man (Rene L'Apotre in the language of his own land, but known as Renny
Potter to the land of his adoption); which latter was more than
suspected of having escaped from the Liverpool Tower, at that time the
lawful place of custody of French war prisoners.

His own voluntary captivity, however, had nothing really dismal for
Adrian Landale. And the inhabited portions of Scarthey ruins had
certainly nothing prison-like about them, nothing even that recalled
the wilful contrition of a hermitage.

On the second floor of the tower (the first being allotted to the use,
official and private, of the small household), clear of the
surrounding walls and dismantled battlements, the rooms were laid out
much as they might have been up at Pulwick Priory itself, yonder
within the verdant grounds on the distant rise. His sleeping quarters
plainly, though by no means ascetically furnished, opened into a large
chamber, where the philosophic light-keeper spent the best part of his
days. Here were broad and deep windows, one to the south with a wide
view of the bay and the nearer coast, the other to the west where the
open sea displayed her changeable moods. On three sides of this room,
the high walls, from the white stone floor to the time-blackened beams
that bore the ceiling, almost disappeared under the irregular rows of
many thousand of volumes. Two wooden arm-chairs, bespeaking little
aversion to an occasional guest, flanked the hearth.

The hearth is the chief refuge of the lone thinker; this was a cosy
recess, deep cut in the mediaeval stone and mortar; within which, on
chilly days, a generous heap of sea-cast timber and dried turf shot
forth dancing blue flames over a mound of white ash and glowing
cinders; but which, in warmer times, when the casements were unlatched
to let in with spring or summer breeze the cries of circling sea-fowls
and the distant plash of billows, offered shelter to such green plants
as the briny air would favour.

At the far end of the room rose in systematical clusters the pipes of
a small organ, built against the walls where it bevelled off a corner.
And in the middle of the otherwise bare apartment stood a broad and
heavy table, giving support to a miscellaneous array of books, open or
closed, sundry philosophical instruments, and papers in orderly
disorder; some still in their virginal freshness, most, however,
bearing marks of notemaking in various stages.

Here, in short, was the study and general keeping-room of the master
of Scarthey, and here, for the greater part, daily sat Sir Adrian
Landale, placidly reading, writing, or thinking at his table; or at
his organ, lost in soaring melody; or yet, by the fireside, in his
wooden arm-chair musing over the events of that strange world of
thought he had made his own; whilst the aging black retriever with
muzzle stretched between his paws slept his light, lazy sleep, ever
and anon opening an eye of inquiry upon his master when the latter
spoke aloud his thoughts (as solitary men are wont to do), and then
with a deep, comfortable sigh, resuming dog-life dreams.




CHAPTER II

THE LIGHT-KEEPER

    He who sits by the fire doth dream,
    Doth dream that his heart is warm.
    But when he awakes his heart is afraid for the bitter cold.

    _Luteplayer's Song._


The year 1814 was eventful in the annals of the political world.
Little, however, of the world's din reached the little northern
island; and what there came of it was not willingly hearkened to.
There was too much of wars past and present, too many rumours of wars
future about it, for the ear of the recluse.

Late in the autumn of that red-letter year which brought a short
respite of peace to war-ridden Europe--a fine, but rather tumultuous
day round Scarthey--the light-keeper, having completed the morning's
menial task in the light-turret (during a temporary absence of his
factotum) sat, according to custom, at his long table, reading.

With head resting on his right hand whilst the left held a page ready
to turn, he solaced himself, pending the appearance of the mid-day
meal, with a few hundred lines of a favourite work--the didactic
poems, I believe, of a certain Doctor Erasmus Darwin, on the analogies
of the outer world.

There was quite as little of the ascetic in Adrian Landale's physical
man as of the hermitage in his chosen abode.

With the exception of the hair, which he wore long and free, and of
which the fair brown had begun to fade to silver-grey, the master of
Scarthey was still the living presentment of the portrait which, even
at that moment, presided among the assembly of canvas Landales in the
gallery of Pulwick Priory. Eight years had passed over the model since
the likeness had been fixed. But in their present repose, the features
clear cut and pronounced, the kindly thoughtful eyes looked, if
anything, younger than their counterfeit; indeed, almost
incongruously young under the flow of fading hair.

Clean shaven, with hands of refinement, still fastidious, his long
years of solitude notwithstanding, as to general neatness of attire,
he might at any moment of the day have walked up the great stair of
honour at Pulwick without by his appearance eliciting other remarks
than that his clothes, in cut and colour, belonged to fashions now
some years lapsed.

The high clock on the mantelshelf hummed and gurgled, and with much
deliberation struck one. Only an instant later, lagging footsteps
ascended the wooden, echoing stairs without, and the door was pushed
open by the attendant, an old dame. She was very dingy as to garb,
very wrinkled and feeble as to face, yet with a conscious achievement
of respectability, both in appearance and manner, befitting her post
as housekeeper to the "young master." The young master, be it stated
at once, was at that time fast approaching the end of his second score
years.

"Margery," said Adrian, rising to take the heavy tray from the
knotted, trembling hands; "you know that I will not allow you to carry
those heavy things upstairs yourself." He raised his voice to
sing-song pitch near the withered old ear. "I have already told you
that when Renny is not at home, I can take my food in your kitchen."

Margery paused, after her wont, to wait till the sounds had filtered
as far as her intellect, then proceeded to give a few angry
headshakes.

"Eh! Eh! It would become Sir Adrian Landale o' Pulwick--Barrownite--to
have 's meat i' the kitchen--it would that. Nay, nay, Mester Adrian,
I'm none so old but I can do my day's work yet. Ah! an' it 'ud be well
if that gomerl, Renny Potter, 'ud do his'n. See here, now, Mester
Adrian, nowt but a pint of wine left; and it the last," pointing her
withered finger, erratically as the palsy shook it, at a cut-glass
decanter where a modicum of port wine sparkled richly under the
facets. "And he not back yet, whatever mischief's agate wi' him,
though he kens yo like your meat at one." And then circumstances
obliged her to add: "He is landing now, but it's ower late i' the
day."

"So--there, Margery," sang the "Squire," giving his old nurse
affectionate little taps on the back. "Never fash yourself; tides
cannot always fit in with dinner-hours, you know. And as for poor
Renny, I believe after all you are as fond of him, at the bottom of
your heart, as I am. Now what good fare have you got for me to-day?"
bending from his great height to inspect the refection, "Ah--hum,
excellent."

The old woman, after another pause for comprehension, retired battling
with dignity against the obvious pleasure caused by her master's
affectionate familiarity, and the latter sat down at a small table in
front of the south window.

Through this deep, port-hole-like aperture he could, whilst disposing
of his simple meal, watch the arrival of the yawl which did ferrying
duty between Scarthey and the mainland. The sturdy little craft,
heavily laden with packages, was being hauled up to its usual place of
safety high on the shingle bank, under cover of a remnant of walling
which in the days of the castle's strength had been a secure
landing-place for the garrison's boats, but which now was almost
filled by the cast-up sands and stone of the beach.

This was done under the superintendence of Rene, man of all work, and
with the mechanical intermediary of rollers and capstan, by a small
white horse shackled to a lever, and patiently grinding his steady
rounds on the sand.

His preliminary task achieved, the man, after a few friendly smacks,
set the beast free to trot back to his loose pasture: proceeding
himself to unship his cargo.

Through the narrow frame of his window, the master, with eyes of
approval, could see the servant dexterously load himself with a
well-balanced pile of parcels, disappearing to return after intervals
empty-handed, within the field of view, and select another burden, now
heavier now more bulky.

In due course Rene came up and reported himself in person, and as he
stopped on the threshold the dark doorway framed a not unstriking
presentment; a young-looking man for his years (he was a trifle junior
to his master), short and sturdy in build, on whose very broad
shoulders sat a phenomenally fair head--the hair short, crisp, and
curly, in colour like faded tow--and who, in smilingly respectful
silence, gazed into the room out of small, light-blue eyes, brimful of
alertness and intelligence, waiting to be addressed.

"Renny," said Adrian Landale, returning the glance with one of
comfortable friendliness, "you will have to make your peace with
Margery; she considers that you neglect me shamefully. Why, you are
actually twenty minutes late after three days' journeying, and perils
by land and sea!"

The Frenchman answered the pleasantry by a broader smile and a scrape.

"And, your honour," he said, "if what is now arriving on us had come
half an hour sooner, I should have rested planted there" (with a jerk
of the flaxen head towards the mainland), "turning my thumbs, till
to-morrow, at the least. We shall have a grain, number one, soon."

He spoke English fluently, though with the guttural accent of
Brittany, and an unconquerable tendency to translate his own jargon
almost word for word.

In their daily intercourse master and man had come for many years past
to eschew French almost entirely; Rene had let it be understood that
he considered his proficiency in the vernacular quite undeniable, and
with characteristic readiness Sir Adrian had fallen in with the little
vanity. In former days the dependant's form of address had been
_Monseigneur_ (considering, and shrewdly so, an English landowner to
stand in that relation to a simple individual like himself); in later
days "Monseigneur" having demurred at the appellation, "My lord," in
his own tongue, the devoted servant had discovered "Your honour" as a
happy substitute, and adhered to this discovery with satisfaction.

"Oh, we are going to have a squall, say you," interpreted the master,
rising to inspect the weather-glass, which in truth had fallen deep
with much suddenness. "More than a squall, I think; this looks like a
hurricane coming. But since you are safe home, all's well; we are
secure and sound here, and the fishing fleet are drawing in, I see,"
peering through the seaward window. "And now," continued Adrian,
laying down his napkin, and brushing away a few crumbs from the folds
of a faultless silk stock, "what have you for me there--and what
news?"

"News, your honour! Oh, for that I have news this time," said Mr.
Renny Potter, with an emphatic nod, "but if your honour will permit, I
shall say them last. I have brought the clothes and the linen, the
wine, the brandy, and the books. Brandy and wine, your honour, I
heard, out of the last prize brought into Liverpool, and a Nantes ship
it was, too"--this in a pathetically philosophical tone. Then after a
pause: "Also provisions and bulbs for the devil's pot, as Margery will
call it. But there is no saying, your honour eats more when I have
brought him back onions, eschalot, and _ail_; now do I lie, your
honour? May I?" added the speaker, and forthwith took his answer from
his master's smile; "may I respectfully see what the old one has
kitchened for you when I was not there?"

And Adrian Landale with some amusement watched the Frenchman rise from
the package he was then uncording to examine the platters on the table
and loudly sniff his disdain.

"Ah, ah, boiled escallops again. Perfectly--boiled cabbage seasoned
with salt. Not a taste in the whole affair. Prison food--oh, yes, old
woman! Why, we nourished ourselves better in the Tower, when we could
have meat at all. Ah, your honour," sighed the man returning to his
talk; "you others, English, are big and strong, but you waste great
things in small enjoyment!"

"Oho, Renny," said the light-keeper squire, as he leant against the
fireplace leisurely filling a long clay pipe, "this is one of your
epigrams; I must make a note of it anon; but let me see now what you
really have in those parcels of books--for books they are, are they
not? so carefully and neatly packed."

"Books," assented the man, undoing the final fold of paper. "Mr. Young
in the High Street of Liverpool had the packets ready. He says you
must have them all; and all printed this year. What so many people can
want to say, I for my count cannot comprehend. Three more parcels on
the stairs, your honour. Mr. Young says you must have them. But it
took two porters to carry them to the Preston diligence."

Not without eagerness did the recluse of Scarthey bend over and finger
the unequal rows of volumes arrayed on the table, and with a smile of
expectation examine the labels.

"The Corsair" and "Lara" he read aloud, lifting a small tome more
daintily printed than the rest. "Lord Byron. What's this? Jane Austen,
a novel. 'Roderick, last of the Goths.' Dear, dear," his smile fading
into blankness; "tiresome man, I never gave him orders for any such
things."

Rene, battling with his second parcel, shrugged his shoulders.

"The librarian," he explained, "said that all the world read these
books, and your honour must have them."

"Well, well," continued the hermit, "what else? 'Jeremy Bentham,' a
new work; Ricardo, another book on economy; Southey the Laureate,
'Life of Nelson.' Really, Mr. Young might have known that naval deeds
have no joy for me, hardly more than for you, Renny," smiling grimly
on his servant. "'Edinburgh Review,' a London magazine for the last
six months; 'Rees's Cyclopaedia,' vols. 24-27; Wordsworth, 'The
Recluse.' Ah, old Willie Wordsworth! Now I am anxious to see what he
has to say on such a topic."

"Dear Willie Wordsworth," mused Sir Adrian, sitting down to turn over
the pages of the 'Excursion,' "how widely have our lives drifted apart
since those college days of ours, when we both believed in the coming
millennium and the noble future of mankind--noble mankind!"

He read a few lines and became absorbed, whilst Rene noiselessly
busied himself in and out of the chamber. Presently he got up, book in
hand, slowly walked to the north window, and passively gazed at the
misty distance where rose the blue outline of the lake hills.

"So my old friend, almost forgotten," he murmured, "that is where you
indite such worthy lines. It were enough to tempt me out into men's
world again to think that there would be many readers and lovers
abroad of these words of yours. So, that is what five and twenty years
have done for you--what would you say to what they have done for
me...?"

It was a long retrospect.

Sir Adrian was deeply immersed in thought when he became aware that
his servant had come to a standstill, as if waiting for a return of
attention. And in answer to the mute appeal he turned his head once
more in Rene's direction.

"Your honour, everything is in its place," began the latter, with a
fitting sense of his own method. "I have now to report that I saw your
man of business in Lancaster, and he has attended to the matter of the
brothers Shearman's boat that was lost. I saw the young men themselves
this morning. They are as grateful to Sir Adrian as people in this
country can express." This last with a certain superiority.

Sir Adrian received the announcement of the working of one of his
usual bounties with a quiet smile of gratification.

"They also told me to say that they would bring the firewood and the
turf to-morrow. But they won't be able to do that because we shall
have dirty weather. Then they told me that when your honour wants fish
they begged your honour to run up a white flag over the lantern--they
thought that a beautiful idea--and they would bring some as soon as
possible. I took on myself to assure them that I could catch what fish
your honour requires; and the prawns, too ... but that is what they
asked me to say."

"Well, well, and so you can," said the master, amused by the show of
sub-acute jealousy. "What else?"

"The books of the man of business and the banker are on the table. I
have also brought gazettes from Liverpool." Here the fellow's
countenance brimmed with the sense of his news' importance. "I know
your honour cares little for them. But this time I think you will read
them. Peace, your honour, it is the peace! It is all explained in
these journals--the 'Liverpool Mercury.'"

Renny lifted the folded sheets from the table and handed them with
contained glee. "There has been peace these six months, and we never
knew it. I read about it the whole way back from the town. The Emperor
is shut up on an island--but not so willingly as your Honour, ah,
no!--and there is an end of citizen Bonaparte. Peace, France and
England no longer fighting, it is hard to believe--and our old kings
are coming back, and everything to be again as in the old days."

Sir Adrian took the papers, not without eagerness, and glanced over
the narrative of events, already months old, with all the surprise of
one who, having wilfully shut himself out from the affairs of the
world, ignored the series of disasters that had brought about the
tyrant's downfall.

"As you say, my friend, it is almost incredible," he said, at length.
Then thoughtfully: "And now you will be wanting to return home?" said
he.

Rene, who had been scanning his master's face with high expectation,
felt his heart leap as he thought he perceived a hidden tone of regret
in the question.

He drew himself up to his short height, and with a very decided voice
made answer straightway:

"I shall go away from your honour the day when your honour dismisses
me. If your honour decides to live on this rock till my hour, or his,
strikes--on this rock with him I remain. I am not conceited, I hope,
but what, pray, will become of your honour here without me?"

There was force in this last remark, simply as it was pronounced.
Through the mist of interlacing thoughts suggested by the word Peace!
(the end of the Revolution, that distant event which, nevertheless,
had had such sweeping influence over the course of his whole life), it
brought a faint smile to Sir Adrian's lips.

He took two steps forward and laid his hand familiarly on the man's
broad shoulder, and, in a musing way, he said at intervals:

"Yes, yes, indeed, good Renny, what would become of me?--what would
have become of me?--how long ago it seems!--without you? And yet it
might have been as well if two skeletons, closely locked in embrace,
blanched by the grinding of the waters and the greed of the crabs, now
reposed somewhere deep in the sands of that Vilaine estuary.... This
score of years, she has had rest from the nightmare that men have made
of life on God's beautiful earth. I have been through more of it, my
good Renny."

Rene's brain was never equal to coping with his master's periodic fits
of pessimism, though he well knew their first and ever-present cause.
In a troubled way he looked about the room, so peaceful, so retired
and studious; and Sir Adrian understood.

"Yes, yes, you are right; I have cut off the old life," he made answer
to the unspoken expostulation, "and that I can live in my own small
world without foregoing all my duties, I owe to you, my good friend;
but startling news like this brings back the past very livingly, dead
though it be--dead."

Rene hesitated; he was pondering over the advisability of disburdening
himself of yet another strange item of information he had in reserve;
but, as his master, rousing himself with an effort as if to dismiss
some haunting thought, turned round again to the table, he decided
that the moment was not propitious.

"So you have seen to all these things," said Sir Adrian wearily.
"Good; I will look over them."

He touched the neat pile of books and papers, listlessly, as he spoke,
yet, instead of sitting down, remained as he was, with eyes that had
grown wondering, staring out across the sea.

"Look," he said presently, in a low voice, and Rene noticed a rare
flush of colour rise to the thin cheeks. "Look--is not this day just
like--one we both remember well...? Listen, the wind is coming up as
it did then. And look at yonder sky!"

And taking the man by the arm, he advanced slowly with him towards the
window.

In the west the heavens on the horizon had grown threateningly dark;
but under the awe-inspiring slate-coloured canopy of clouds there
opened a broad archway filled with primrose light--the luminous arch,
well known to seafarers, through which charge the furious southwestern
squalls. The rushing of the storm was already visible in the distance
over the grey waters, which having been swayed for days by a steady
Aquilon were now lashed in flank by the sudden change of wind.

The two men looked out for a while in silence at the spectacle of the
coming storm. In the servant's mind ran various trivial thoughts
bearing on the present--what a lucky matter it was that he should have
returned in time; only just in time it was; from the angry look of the
outer world the island would now, for many a day be besieged by seas
impassable to such small craft as alone could reach the reef. Had he
tarried but to the next tide (and how sorely he had been tempted to
remain an hour more in the gatekeeper's lodge within sight and hearing
of buxom Moggie, Margery's grand-daughter), had he missed the tide,
for days, maybe for weeks, would the master have had to watch and
tend, alone, the beacon fire. But here he was, and all was well; and
he had still the marvellous news to tell. Should he tell them now? No,
the master was in one of his trances--lost far away in the past no
doubt, that past that terminated on such a day as this. And Sir
Adrian, with eyes fixed on the widening arch of yellow light, was
looking inwards on the far-away distance of time.

Men, who have been snatched back to life from death in the deep,
recall how, before seeming to yield the ghost, the picture of their
whole existence passed in vivid light before the eye of their mind.
Swift beyond the power of understanding are such revelations; in one
flash the events of a good or an evil life leap before the seeing
soul--moment of anguish intolerable or of sublime peace!

On such a boisterous day as this, some nineteen years before, by the
sandy mouth of the river Vilaine, on the confines of Brittany and
Vendee had Adrian Landale been drowned; under such a sky, and under
the buffets of such an angry wind had he been recalled to life, and in
the interval, he had seen the same pictures which now, coursing back
many years in a few seconds, passed before his inward vision.




CHAPTER III

DAY DREAMS: A PHILOSOPHER'S FATE

Le beau temps de ma jeunesse ... quand j'etais si malheureux.


The borderland between adolescence and manhood, in the life of men of
refined aspirations and enthusiastic mettle, is oftener than not an
unconsciously miserable period--one which more mature years recall as
hollow, deceiving, bitterly unprofitable.

Yet there is always that about the memories of those far-off young
days, their lofty dreams long since scattered, their virgin delights
long since lost in the drudgery of earthly experience, which ever and
anon seizes the heart unawares and fills it with that infinite
weakness: that mourning for the dead and gone past, which yet is not
regret.

In the high days of the Revolutionary movement across the water,
Adrian Landale was a dreamy student living in one of those venerable
Colleges on the Cam, the very atmosphere of which would seem
sufficient to glorify the merits of past ages and past institutions.

Amidst such peaceful surroundings this eldest scion of an ancient,
north-country race--which had produced many a hardy fighter, though
never yet a thinker nor even a scholar--amid a society as prejudiced
and narrow-minded as all privileged communities are bound to become,
had nevertheless drifted resistlessly towards that unfathomable sea
whither a love for the abstract beautiful, a yearning for
super-earthly harmony and justice, must inevitably waft a young
intelligence.

As the academical years glided over him, he accumulated much classical
lore, withal read much latter-day philosophy and developed a fine
youthful, theoretical love for the new humanitarianism. He dipped
aesthetically into science, wherein he found a dim kind of help
towards a more recondite appreciation of the beauties of nature. His
was not a mind to delight in profound knowledge, but rather in
"intellectual cream."

He solaced himself with essays that would have been voted brilliant
had they dealt with things less extravagant than Universal Harmony and
Fraternal Happiness; with verses that all admitted to be highly
polished and melodious, but something too mystical in meaning for the
understanding of an every-day world; with music, whereof he was
conceded an interpreter of no mean order.

In fact the worship of his soul might have been said to be the
Beautiful in the abstract--the Beautiful in all its manifestations
which include Justice, Harmony, Truth, and Kindliness--the one
indispensable element of his physical happiness, the Beautiful in the
concrete.

This is saying that Adrian Landale, for all his array of definite
accomplishments, which might have been a never-failing source of
interest in an easy existence, was fitted in a singularly unfortunate
manner for the life into which one sudden turn of fortune's wheel
unexpectedly launched him.

During the short halcyon days of his opening independence, however, he
was able to make himself the centre of such a world as he would have
loved to live in. He was not, of course, generally popular, either at
college or at home; nor yet in town, except among that small set in
whose midst he inevitably found his way wherever he went; his
inferiors in social status perhaps, these chosen friends of his; but
their lofty enthusiasms were both appreciative of and congenial to his
own. Most of them, indeed, came in after-life to add their names to
England's roll of intellectual fame, partly because they had that in
them which Adrian loathed as unlovely--the instinct and will of
strife, partly; it must be added, because they remained free in their
circumstances to follow the lead of their nature. Which freedom was
not allotted to him.

       *       *       *       *       *

On one magnificent frosty afternoon, early in the year 1794, the
London coach deposited Adrian Landale in front of the best hostelry in
Lancaster, after more than a year's separation from his family.

This separation was not due to estrangement, but rather to the
instigation of his own sire, Sir Thomas--a gentleman of the "fine old
school"--who, exasperated by the, to him, incomprehensible and
insupportable turn of mind developed by his heir (whom he loved well
enough, notwithstanding, in his own way), had hoped, in good
utilitarian fashion, that a prolonged period of contact with the
world, lubricated by a plentiful supply of money, might shake his "big
sawney of a son" out of his sickly-sentimental views; that it would
show him that _gentlemen's_ society--and, "by gad, ladies' too"--was
not a thing to be shunned for the sake of "wild-haired poets, dirty
firebrands, and such cattle."

The downright old baronet was even prepared, in an unformed sort of
way, to see his successor that was to be return to the paternal hearth
the richer for a few gentlemanly vices, provided he left his nonsense
behind him.

As the great lumbering vehicle, upon the box seat of which sat the
young traveller, lost in dreamy speculation according to his wont,
drew clattering to a halt, he failed at first to notice the central
figure in the midst of the usual expectant crowd of inn guests and inn
retainers, called forward by the triumphant trumpeting which heralds
the approach of the mail. There, however, stood the Squire of Pulwick,
"Sir Tummus" himself, in portly and jovial importance.

The father's eyes, bright and piercing under his bushy white brows,
had already detected his boy from a distance; and they twinkled as he
took note, with all the pride of an author in his work, of the
symmetry of limb and shoulders set forth by the youth's faultless
attire--and the dress of men in the old years of the century was
indeed calculated to display a figure to advantage--of the lightness
and grace of his frame as he dismounted from his perch; in short of
the increased manliness of his looks and bearing.

But a transient frown soon came to overshade Sir Thomas's ruddy
content as he descried the deep flush (an old weakness) which mantled
the young cheeks under the spur of unexpected recognition.

And when, later, the pair emerged from the inn after an hour's
conversation over a bottle of burnt sherry--conversation which, upon
the father's side, had borne, in truth, much the character of
cross-examination--to mount the phaeton with which a pair of
high-mettled bays were impatiently waiting the return homewards, there
was a very definite look of mutual dissatisfaction to be read upon
their countenances.

Whiling away the time in fitful constrained talk, parcelled out by
long silences, they drove again through the gorgeous, frost-speckled
scenery of rocky lands until the sheen of the great bay suddenly
peered between two distant scars, proclaiming the approach to the
Pulwick estate. The father then broke a long spell of muteness, and
thus to his son, in his ringing country tones, as if pursuing aloud
the tenor of his thoughts:

"Hark'ee, Master Adrian," said he, "that you are now a man of parts,
as they say, I can quite see. You seem to have read a powerful lot of
things that do not come our way up here. But let us understand each
other. I cannot make head or tail of these far-fetched new-fangle
notions you, somehow or other, have fallen in love with--your James
Fox, your Wilberforce, your Adam Smith, they may be very fine fellows,
but to my humble thinking they're but a pack of traitors to king and
country, when all is said and done. All this does not suit an English
gentleman. You think differently; or perhaps you do not care whether
it does or not. I admit I can't hold forth as you do; nor string a lot
of fine words together. I am only an old nincompoop compared to a
clever young spark like you. But I request you to keep off these
topics in the company I like to see round my table. They don't like
Jacobins, you know, no more do I!"

"Nor do I," said Adrian fervently.

"Nor do you? Don't you, sir, don't you? Why, then what the devil have
you been driving at?"

"I am afraid, sir, you do not understand my views."

"Well, never mind; I don't like 'em, that's short, and if you bring
them out before your cousin, little Madame Savenaye, you will come off
second best, my lad, great man as you are, and so I warn you!"

In tones as unconcerned as he could render them the young man sought
to turn the intercourse to less personal topics, by inquiring further
anent this unknown cousin whose very name was strange to him.

Sir Thomas, easily placable if easily roused, started willingly enough
on a congenial topic. And thus Adrian conceived his first impression
of that romantic being whose deeds have remained legendary in the
French west country, and who was destined to exercise so strong an
influence upon his own life.

"Who is she?" quoth the old gentleman, with evident zest. "Ay. All
this is news to you, of course. Well: she _was_ Cecile de Kermelegan.
You know your mother's sister Mary Donoghue (murthering Moll, they
called her on account of her killing eyes) married a M. de Kermelegan,
a gentleman of Brittany. Madame de Savenaye is her daughter (first
cousin of yours), that means that she has good old English blood in
her veins and Irish to boot. She speaks English as well as you or I,
her mother's teaching of course, but she is French all the same; and,
by gad, of the sort which would reconcile even an Englishman with the
breed!"

Sir Thomas's eyes sparkled with enthusiasm; his son examined him with
grave wonder.

"The very sight of her, my boy, is enough to make a man's heart warm.
Wait till you see her and she begins to talk of what the red-caps are
doing over there--those friends of yours, who are putting in practice
all your fine theories! And, bookworm as you are, I'll warrant she'll
warm your sluggish blood for you. Ha! she's a rare little lady. She
married last year the Count of Savenaye."

Adrian assumed a look of polite interest.

"Emigre, I presume?" he said, quietly.

"Emigre? No, sir. He is even now fighting the republican rapscallions,
d--n them, and thrashing them, too, yonder in his country. She stuck
by his side; ay, like a good plucked one she did, until it became
palpable that, if there was to be a son and heir to the name, she had
better go and attend to its coming somewhere else, in peace. Ho, ho,
ho! Well, England was the safest place, of course, and, for her, the
natural one. She came and offered herself to us on the plea of
relationship. I was rather taken aback at first, I own; but, gad, boy,
when I saw the woman, after hearing what she had had to go through to
reach us at all, I sang another song. Well, she is a fine
creature--finer than ever now that the progeny has been satisfactorily
hatched; a brace of girls instead of the son and heir, after all! Two
of them; no less. Ho, ho, ho! And she was furious, the pretty dear!
However, you'll soon see for yourself. You will see a woman, sir, who
has loaded and fired cannon with her own hands, when the last man to
serve it had been shot. Ay, and more than that, my lad--she's brained
a hulking sans-culotte that was about to pin her servant to the floor.
The lad has told me so himself, and I daresay he can tell you more if
you care to practise your French with master Rene L'Apotre, that's the
fellow! A woman who sticks to her lord and master in mud and
powder-smoke until there is precious little time to spare, when she
makes straight for a strange land, in a fishing-smack, with no other
protector than a peasant; and now, with an imp of a black-eyed infant
to her breast (Sally Mearson's got the other; you remember Sally, your
own nurse's daughter?), looks like a chit of seventeen. That's what
you'll see, sir. And when she sails downstairs for dinner, dressed up,
powdered and high-heeled, she might be a princess, a queen who has
never felt a crumpled roseleaf in her life. Gad! I'm getting poetical,
I declare."

In this strain did the Squire, guiding his horses with strong,
dexterous hand, expatiate to his son; the crisp air rushing past them,
making their faces glow with the tingling blood until, burning the
ground, they dashed up the avenue that leads to the white mansion of
Pulwick, and halted amidst a cloud of steam before its Palladian
portico.

What happened to Adrian the moment after happens, as a rule, only once
in a man's lifetime.

Through the opening portals the guest, whose condensed biography the
Squire had been imparting to his son (all unconsciously eliciting
thereby more repulsion than admiration in the breast of that
fastidious young misogynist), appeared herself to welcome the return
of her host.

Adrian, as he retired a pace to let his father ascend the steps, first
caught a glimpse of a miraculously small and arched foot, clad in pink
silk, and, looking suddenly up, met fully the flash of great dark
eyes, set in a small white face, more brilliant in their immense
blackness than even the glinting icicles pendant over the lintel that
now shot back the sun's sinking glory.

The spell was of the kind that the reason of man can never sanction,
and yet that have been ever and will be while man is. This youth,
virgin of heart, dreamy of head who had drifted to his twentieth
year, all unscathed by passion or desire, because he had never met
aught in flesh and blood answering to his unconscious ideal, was
struck to the depth of his soul by the presence of one, as unlike this
same ideal as any living creature could be; struck with fantastic
suddenness, and in that all-encompassing manner which seizes the
innermost fibres of the being.

It was a pang of pain, but a revelation of glory.

He stood for some moments, with paling cheeks and hotly-beating heart,
gazing back into the wondrous eyes. She, yielding her cheek carelessly
to the Squire's hearty kiss, examined the new-comer curiously the
while:

"Why--how now, tut, tut, what's this?" thundered the father, who,
following the direction of her eyes, wheeled round suddenly to
discover his son's strange bearing, "Have you lost all the manners as
well as the notions of a gentleman, these last two years? Speak to
Madame de Savenaye, sir!--Cecile, this is my son; pray forgive him, my
dear; the fellow's shyness before ladies is inconceivable. It makes a
perfect fool of him, as you see."

But Madame de Savenaye's finer wits had already perceived something
different from the ordinary display of English shyness in the young
man, whose eyes remained fixed on her face with an intentness that
savoured in no way, of awkwardness. She now broke the spell with a
broader smile and a word of greeting.

"You are surprised," said she in tripping words, tinged with a
distinct foreign intonation, "to see a strange face here, Mr.
Adrian--or, shall I say cousin? for that is the style I should adopt
in my Brittany. Yes, you see in me a poor foreign cousin, fleeing for
protection to your noble country. How do you do, my cousin?"

She extended a slender, white hand, one rosy nail of which, bending
low, Adrian gravely kissed.

"_Mais, comment donc!_" exclaimed the lady, "my dear uncle did you
chide your son just now? Why, but these are Versailles manners--so
gallant, so courtly!"

And she gave the boy's fingers, as they lingered under hers, first a
discreet little pressure, and then a swift flip aside.

"Ah! how cold you are!" she exclaimed; and then, laughing, added
sweetly: "Cold hands, warm heart, of course."

And with rapping heels she turned into the great hall and into the
drawing-room whither the two men--the father all chuckles, and the son
still struck with wonder--followed her.

She was standing by the hearth holding each foot alternately to the
great logs flaming on the tiles, ever and anon looking over her shoulder
at Adrian, who had advanced closer, without self-consciousness, but
still in silence.

"Now, cousin," she remarked gaily, "there is room for you here, big as
you are, to warm yourself. You must be cold. I know already all about
your family, and I must know all about you, too! I am very curious, I
find them all such good, kind, handsome people here, and I am told to
expect in you something quite different from any of them. Now, where
does the difference come in? You are as tall as your father, but in
face--no, I believe it is your pretty sisters you are like in face."

Here the Squire interrupted with his loud laugh, and, clapping his
hand on his stalwart son's head:

"You have just hit it, Cecile, it's here the difference lies. Adrian,
I really believe, is a little mistake of Dame Nature; his brain was
meant for a girl and was tacked on to that big body by accident, ho,
ho, ho! He is quite lady-like in his accomplishments--loves music, and
plays, by gad, better than our organist. Writes poetry, too. I found
some devilish queer things on his writing-table once, which were not
_all_ Latin verses, though he would fain I thought so. And as for
deportment, Madame Cecile, why there is more propriety, in that
hobbedehoy, at least, more blushing in him, than in all the
bread-and-butter misses in the county!"

Adrian said nothing; but, when not turned towards the ground, his gaze
still sought the Countess, who now returned the look with a ripening
smile open to any interpretation.

"Surely," she remarked, glancing then at the elder for an instant with
some archness, "surely you English gentlemen, who have so much
propriety, would not rather ... there was young Mr. Bradbury, we heard
talked of yesterday, whom every farmer with a red-cheeked lass of his
own--"

"No, no!" hastily interrupted the baronet, with a blush himself, while
Adrian's cheek in spite of the recent indictment preserved its smooth
pallor--in truth, the boy, lost in his first love-dream, had not
understood the allusion. "No, I don't want a Landale to be a
blackguard, you know, but--" And the father, unable to split this
ethical hair, to logical satisfaction, stopped and entered another
channel of grumbling vituperation, whilst the Countess, very much
amused by her private thoughts, gave a little rippling laugh, and
resumed her indulgent contemplation of the accused.

"What a pity, now, school-boy Rupert is not the eldest; there would be
a country gentleman for you! Whereas, this successor that is to be of
mine is a man of books and a philosopher. Forsooth, a first-class
bookworm; by gad, I believe the first of our race! And he might make a
name for himself, I've been told, among that lot, though the pack o'
nonsense he treats us to at times cannot, I'm thinking, really go down
even among those college fuzzle-heads. But I am confounded if that
chap will ever be of any use as a landlord whenever he steps into my
shoes. He hates a gun, and takes more pleasure--what was it he said
last time he was here?--oh, yes, more pleasure in watching a bird dart
in the blue than bringing it down, be it never so neat a shot. Ho, ho!
did ye ever hear such a thing? And though he can sit a horse--I will
say that for him (I should like to see a Landale that could not!)--I
have seen this big boy of mine positively sicken, ay! and scandalise
the hunt by riding away from the death. Moreover, I believe that, when
I am gone, he will always let off any poaching scoundrel on the plea
that the vermin only take for their necessity what we preserve for
sport."

The little foreign lady, smiling no longer, eyed her big cousin with
wondering looks.

"Strange, indeed," she remarked, "that a man should fail to appreciate
the boon of man's existence, the strength and freedom to dominate, to
be up and doing, to _live_ in fact. How I should long to be a man
myself, if I ever allowed myself to long for anything; but I am a
woman, as you see," she added, rising to the full height of her
exquisite figure, "and must submit to woman's lot--and that is just
now to the point, for I must leave you to go and see to the wants of
that _mioche_ of mine which I hear whining upstairs. But I do not
believe my uncle's account of you is a complete picture after all,
cousin Adrian. I shall get it out of you anon, catechise you in my own
way, and, if needs be, convert you to a proper sense of the glorious
privileges of your sex."

And she ran out of the room.

"Well, my lad," said Sir Thomas, that evening, when the ladies had
left the two men to their decanter, "I thought my Frenchwoman would
wake you up, but, by George, I hardly expected she would knock you all
of a heap so quick. Hey! you're winged, Adrian, winged, or this is not
port."

"I cannot say, sir," answered Adrian, musing.

The old man caught up the unsatisfactory reply in an exasperated
burlesque of mimicry: "I cannot say, sir--you cannot say? Pooh, pooh,
there is no shame in being in love with her. We all are more or less;
pass the bottle. As for you, since you clapped eyes on her you have
been like a man in the moon, not a word to throw to a dog, no eyes, no
ears but for your own thoughts, so long as madam is not there. Enter
madam, you're alive again, by George, and pretty lively, too! Gad, I
never thought I'd ever see _you_ do the lady's man, all in your own
queer way, of course; but, hang it all, she seems to like it, the
little minx! Ay, and if she has plenty of smiles for the old man she's
ready to give her earnest to you--I saw her, I saw her. But don't you
forget she's married, sir, very much married, too. She don't forget it
either, I can tell you, though you may think she does. Now, what sort
of game is she making of you? What were you talking about in the
picture gallery for an hour before dinner, eh?"

"To say the truth," answered the son, simply, "it was about myself
almost the whole time."

"And she flattered you finely, I'll be bound, of course," said his
elder, with a knowing look. "Oh, these women, these women!"

"On the contrary, sir, she thinks even less of me than you do. That
woman has the soul of a savage; we have not one thought in common."

The father burst into a loud laugh. "A pretty savage to look at,
anyhow; a well-polished one in the bargain, ho, ho, ho! Well, well, I
must make up my mind, I suppose, that my eldest son is a lunatic in
love with a savage."

Adrian remained silent for a while, toying with his glass, his young
brow contracted under a painful frown. At length, checking a sigh, he
answered with deliberation:

"Since it is so palpable to others, I suppose it must be love, as you
say. I had thought hitherto that love of which people talk so much was
a feeling of sweetness. What I feel in this lady's presence is much
more kin to anguish; for all that, as you have noticed, I appear to
live only when she is nigh."

The father looked at his son and gaped. The latter went on, after
another pause:

"I suppose it is so, and may as well own it to myself and to you,
though nothing can come of it, good or bad. She is married, and she is
your guest; and even if any thought concerning me could enter her
heart, the merest show of love on my part would be an insult to her
and treason to you. But trust me, I shall now be on my guard, since my
behaviour has already appeared strange."

"Tut, tut," said the Baronet, turning to his wine in some dudgeon, his
rubicund face clouding as he looked with disfavour at this strange
heir of his, who could not even fall in love like the rest of his
race. "What are you talking about? Come, get out of that and see what
the little lady's about, and let me hear no more of this. She'll not
compromise herself with a zany like you, anyhow, that I'll warrant."

But Adrian with all the earnestness of his nature and his very young
fears was strenuously resolved to watch himself narrowly in his
intercourse with his too fascinating relative; little recking how
infinitesimal is the power of a man's free-will upon the conduct of
his life.

The next morning found the little Countess in the highest spirits.
Particularly good news had arrived from her land with the early
courier. True, the news were more than ten days old, but she had that
insuperable buoyancy of hopefulness which attends active and healthy
natures.

The Breton peasants (she explained to the company round the breakfast
table), headed by their lords (among whom was her own _Seigneur et
Maitre_) had again crushed the swarms of ragged brigands that called
themselves soldiers. From all accounts there was no hope for the
latter, their atrocities had been such that the whole land, from
Normandy to Guyenne, was now in arms against them.

And in Paris, the hot pit whence had issued the storm of foulness that
blasted the fair kingdom of France after laying low the hallowed heads
of a good king and a beautiful queen, in Paris, leaders and led were
now chopping each other's heads off, _a qui mieux mieux_. "Those
thinkers, those lofty patriots, _hein, beau cousin_, for whom, it
seems, you have an admiration," commented the lady, interrupting her
account to sip her cup of cream and chocolate, with a little finger
daintily cocked, and shoot a mocking shaft at the young philosopher
from the depth of her black eyes.

"Like demented wolves they are destroying each other--Pray the God of
Justice," quoted she from her husband's letter, "that it may only
last; in a few months, then, there will be none of them left, and the
people, relieved from this rule of blood, will all clamour for the
true order of things, and the poor country may again know peace and
happiness. Meanwhile, all has yet to be won, by much devotion and
self-sacrifice in the cause of God and King; and afterwards will come
the reward!...

"And the revenge," added Madame de Savenaye, with a little, fierce
laugh, folding the sanguine budget of news. "Oh! they must leave us a
few for revenge! How we shall make the hounds smart when the King
returns to his own! And then for pleasures and for life again. And we
may yet meet at the mansion of Savenaye, in Paris," she went on gaily,
"my good uncle and fair cousins, for the King cannot fail to recall
his faithful supporter. And there will be feasts and balls. And there,
maybe, we shall be able to repay in part some of your kindness and
hospitality. And you, cousin Adrian, you will have to take me through
pavanne and gavotte and minuet; and I shall be proud of my northern
cavalier. What! not know how one dances the gavotte? _Fi donc!_ what
ignorance! I shall have to teach you. Your hand, monsieur," slipping
the missive from the seat of war into her fair bosom. "La! not that
way; with a _grace_, if you please," making a profound curtsey. "Ah,
still that cold hand; your great English heart must be a very
furnace. Come, point your right foot--so. And look round at your
partner with--what shall I say--_admiration serieuse_!"

That she saw admiration, serious enough in all conscience in Adrian's
eyes, there was little doubt. With sombre heart he failed not to mark
every point of this all-human grace, but to him goddess-like beauty,
the triumph and glory of youth. The coy, dainty poise of the adorable
foot--pointed _so_--and treading the ground with the softness of a
kitten at play; the maddening curve of her waist, which a sacque,
depending from an exquisite nape, partly concealed, only to enhance
its lithe suppleness; the divinely young throat and bust; and above
all the dazzling black rays from eyes alternately mocking, fierce or
caressing.

Well might his hand be cold with all his young untried blood, biting
at his heart, singing in his head. Why did God place such creatures on
His earth to take all savour from aught else under the sun?

"Fair cousin, fair cousin, though I said serious admiration, I did not
mean you to look as if you were taking me to a funeral. You are
supposed to be enjoying yourself, you know!"

The youth struggled with a ghastly smile; and the father laughed
outright. But Madame de Savenaye checked herself into gravity once
more.

"Alas! _Nous n'en sommes pas encore la_," she said, and relinquished
her adorer's hand. "We have still to fight for it.... Oh! that I were
free to be up and doing!"

The impatient exclamation was wrung out of her, apparently, by the
appearance of two nurses, each bearing an infant in long, white robes
for the mother's inspection; a preliminary to the daily outing.

The elder of these matrons was Adrian's own old nurse who, much
occupied with her new duties of attendant to Madame de Savenaye and
one of her babies, now beheld her foster-son again for the first time
since his return.

"Eh--but you've grown a gradely mon, Mester Adrian!" she cried, in her
long-drawn Lancastrian, dandling her bundle energetically from side to
side in the excess of her admiration, and added with a laugh of
tender delight: "Eh, but you're my own lad still, as how 'tis!" when,
blushing, the young man crossed the room and stooped to kiss her,
glancing shyly the while at the white bundle in her arms.

"Well, and how are the little ones?" quoth Madame de Savenaye,
swinging her dainty person up to the group and halting by beaming
Sally--the second nurse, who proudly held forth her charge--merely to
lay a finger lightly on the infant's little cheek.

"Ah, my good Sally, your child does you credit!--Now Margery, when you
have done embracing that fine young man, perhaps you will give me my
child, _hein_?"

Both the nurses blushed; Margery at the soft impeachment as she
delivered over the minute burden; her daughter in honest indignation
at the insulting want of interest shown for her foster-babe.

"No, I was not made to play with puppets like you, mademoiselle," said
the comtesse, addressing herself to the unconscious little being as
she took it in her arms, but belying her words by the grace and
instinctive maternal expertness with which she handled and soothed the
infant. "Yes, you can go, Sarah--_au revoir_, Mademoiselle Madeleine.
Fie the little wretch, what faces she pulls! And you, Margery, you
need not wait either; I shall keep this creature for a while. Poor
little one!" sang the mother, walking up and down, and patting the
small back with her jewelled hand as she held the wee thing against
her shoulder, "indeed I shall have soon to leave you----"

"What's this--what's this?" exclaimed the master of the house with
sudden sharpness. He had been surveying the scene from the hearthrug,
chuckling in benevolent amusement at little Madam's ways.

Yes, it was her intention to return to her place by the side of her
lord, she explained, halting in her walk to face him gravely; she had
come to that resolution. No doubt her uncle would take the children
under his care until better times--those good times that were so fast
approaching. Buxom Sally could manage them both--and to spare, too!

Adrian felt his heart contract at the unexpected announcement; a look
of dismay overspread Sir Thomas's face.

"Why--what? what nonsense, child!" cried he again in rueful tones.
"_You_, return to that place now ... what good do you think you could
do--eh?" But here recollecting himself, he hesitated and started upon
a more plausible line of expostulation. "Pooh, pooh! You can't leave
the little ones, your husband does not ask you to come back and leave
them, does he? In any case," with assumed authority, "I shall not let
you go."

She looked up with a smile.

"Would _you_ allow your friends to continue fighting alone for all you
love, because you happened to be in safe and pleasant circumstances
yourself?" she asked. Then she added ingenuously: "I have heard you
say of one that was strong of will and staunch to his purpose, that he
was a regular Briton. I thought that flattering: I am a Briton, of
Brittany, you know, myself, uncle: would you have _me_ be a worthless
Briton? As to what a woman can do there--ah, you have no idea what it
means for all these poor peasants of ours to see their lords remain
among them, sharing their hardship in defence of their cause.
Concerning the children," kissing the one she held and gazing into its
face with wistful look, "they can better afford to do without me than
my husband and our men. A strong woman to tend them till we come back,
is all that is wanted, since a good relative is willing to give them
shelter. Rene cannot be long in returning now, with the last news.
Indeed, M. de Savenaye says that he will only keep him a few days
longer, and, according to the tidings he brings must I fix the date
for my departure."

Sir Thomas, with an inarticulate growl, relapsed into silence; and she
resumed her walk with bent head, lost in thought, up and down the
great room, out of the pale winter sunshine into the shadow, and back
again, to the tune of "Malbrook s'en va t'en guerre," which she hummed
beneath her breath, while the baby's foolish little head, in its white
cap from which protruded one tiny straight wisp of brown hair, with
its beady, unseeing black eyes and its round mouth dribbling
peacefully, bobbed over her shoulder as she went.

Adrian stood in silence too, following her with his eyes, while the
picture, so sweet to see, so strange to one who knew all that was
brewing in the young mother's head and heart, stamped itself upon his
brain.

At the door, at length, she halted a moment, and looked at them both.

"Yes, my friends," she said, and her eyes shot flame; "I must go
soon." The baby bobbed its head against her cheek as if in
affirmative; then the great door closed upon the pair.




CHAPTER IV

DAY DREAMS: A FAIR EMISSARY


Many guests had been convened to the hospitable board of Pulwick upon
the evening which followed Adrian's return home; and as, besides the
fact that the fame of the French lady had spread enthusiasm in most of
the male breasts of the district and anxious curiosity in gentler
bosoms, there was a natural neighbourly desire to criticise the young
heir of the house after his year's absence, the county had responded
in a body to the invitation.

It was a goodly company therefore that was assembled in the great
withdrawing rooms, when the Countess herself came tripping down the
shallow oaken stairs, and found Adrian waiting for her in the hall.

He glanced up as she descended towards him to cover her with an ardent
look and feast his eyes despairingly on her beauty; and she halted a
moment to return his gaze with a light but meaning air of chiding.

"Cousin!" she said, "you have very singular manners for one supposed
to be so shy with ladies. Do you know that if my husband were here to
notice them you might be taken to task?"

Adrian ran up the steps to meet her. The man in him was growing apace
with the growth of a man's passion, and by the boldness of his answer
belying all his recent wise resolutions, he now astonished himself
even more than her.

"You are going back to him," he said, with halting voice. "All is
well--for him; perhaps for you. For us, who remain behind there is
nothing left but the bitterness of regret--and envy."

Then in silence they descended together.

As they were crossing the hall there entered suddenly to them,
stumbling as he went, Rene, the young Breton retainer, whom the lord
of Savenaye had appointed as squire to his lady upon her travels, and
who, since her establishment at Pulwick, had been sent to carry news
and money back to Brittany.

No sooner had the boy--for such he was, though in intelligence and
blind devotion beyond his years--passed into the light, than on his
haggard countenance was read news of disastrous import. Recent tears
had blurred his sunburnt cheek, and the hand that tore the hat from
his head at the unexpected sight of his mistress, partly in
instinctive humility, partly, it seemed, to conceal some papers he
held against his breast, twitched with nervous anguish.

"Rene!" cried the Countess, eagerly, in French. "What hast thou
brought? Sweet Jesu! Bad news--bad news? Give!"

For an instant the courier looked around like a hunted animal seeking
a retreat, and then up at her in dumb pleading; but she stamped her
foot and held him to the spot by the imperiousness of her eye.

"Give, I tell thee," she repeated; and, striking the hat away,
snatched the papers from his hand. "Dost thou think I cannot bear ill
news--My husband?"

She drew nearer to a candelabra, and the little white hands
impatiently broke the seals and shook the sheets asunder.

Sir Thomas, attracted by his favourite's raised tones and uneasy at
her non-appearance, opened the drawing-room door and came forward
anxiously, whilst his assembled guests, among whom a sense that
something of importance was passing had rapidly spread, now gathered
curiously about the open doorway.

The Countess read on, unnoticing, with compressed lips and knitted
brows--those brows that looked so black on the fair skin, under the
powdered hair.

"My husband! ah, I knew it, my Andre ... the common fate of the
loyal!" A sigh lifted the fair young bosom, but she showed no other
sign of weakness.

Indeed those who watched this unexpected scene were struck by the
contrast between the bearing of this young, almost girlish creature,
who, holding the written sheets with firm hands to the light, read
their terrible contents with dry eyes, and that of the man who had
sunk, kneeling, at her feet, all undone, to have had the bringing of
the news.

The silence was profound, save for the crackling of the pages as she
turned them over, and an occasional long-drawn sob from the messenger.

When she came to the end the young widow--for such she was
now--remained some moments absorbed in thought, absently refolding the
letter into its original neatness. Then her eyes fell on Rene's
prostrate figure and she stooped to lay a kind hand for an instant on
his shoulder.

"Bear up, my good Rene," she said. At her voice and touch he dragged
his limbs together and stood humbly before her.

"We must be brave," she went on; "your master's task is done--ours,
yours and mine, is not."

He lifted his bloodshot eyes to her with the gaze of a faithful dog in
distress, scraped an uncouth bow and abruptly turned away, brushing
the tears from his cheek with his sleeve, and hurrying, to relieve his
choking grief in solitude. She stood a while, again absorbed in her
own reflection, and of those who would have rushed to speak gentle
words to her, and uphold her with tender hands, had she wept or
swooned, there was none who dared approach this grief that gave no
sign.

In a short time, however, she seemed to recollect herself and awaken
to the consciousness of the many watching eyes.

"Good uncle," she said, going up to the old man and kissing his cheek,
after sweeping the assembled company with dark, thoughtful gaze. "Here
are news that I should have expected sooner--but that I would not
entertain the thought. It has come upon us at last, the fate of the
others ... Andre has paid his debt to the king, like many hundreds of
true people before--though none better. He has now his reward. I glory
in his noble death," she said with a gleam of exaltation in her eyes,
then added after a pause, between clenched teeth, almost in a whisper:

"And my sister too--she too is with him--but I will tell you of it
later; they are at rest now."

Jovial Sir Thomas, greatly discomposed and fairly at a loss how to
deal with the stricken woman, who was so unlike any womankind he had
ever yet come across, patted her hand in silence, placed it within his
arm and quietly led her into the drawing-room, rolling, as he did so,
uneasy eyes upon his guests. But she followed the current of her
thoughts as her little feet kept pace beside him.

"That is bad--but worse--the worst of all, the cause of God and king
is again crushed; everything to begin afresh. But, for the present,
we"--here she looked round the room, and her eyes rested an instant
upon a group of young men, who were surveying her from a corner with
mingled admiration and awe--"we, that is Rene and I, have work to do
in this country before we return. For you will keep us a little
longer?" she added with an attempt at a smile.

"Will I keep you a little longer?" exclaimed the squire hotly, "will I
ever let you go, now!"

She shook her head at him, with something of her natural archness.
Then, turning to make a grave curtsey to the circle of ladies around
her:

"I and my misfortune," she said, "have kept your company and your
dinner waiting, I hardly know how long. No doubt, in their kindness
they will forgive me."

And accepting again her uncle's arm which, delighted at the solution
of the present difficulty, and nodding to Adrian to start the other
guests, he hastened to offer her, she preceded the rest into the
dining-hall with her usual alert bearing.

The behaviour of the Countess of Savenaye, had affected the various
spectators in various ways. The male sex, to a man, extolled her
fortitude; the ladies, however, condemned such unfeminine strength of
mind, while the more charitable prophesied that she would pay dearly
for this unnatural repression. And the whispered remark of one of the
prettier and younger damsels, that the loss of a husband did not seem
to crush her, at any rate, met, on the whole, with covert approval.

As for Adrian, who shall describe the tumult of his soul--the regret,
the hungering over her in her sorrow, the wild unbidden hopes and his
shame of them? Careful of what his burning eyes might reveal, he
hardly dared raise them from the ground; and yet to keep them long
from her face was an utter impossibility. The whispered comments of
the young men behind him, their admiration, and astonishment drove him
to desperation. And the high-nosed dowager, whom it was his privilege
to escort to his father's table, arose from it convinced that Sir
Thomas's heir had lost in his travels the few poor wits he ever
possessed.

The dinner that evening was without doubt the most dismal meal the
neighbourhood had ever sat down to at the hospitable board of Pulwick,
past funeral refections not excepted. The host, quite taken up with
his little foreign relative, had words only for her; and these,
indeed, consisted merely in fruitless attempts to induce her to
partake largely of every course--removes, relieves, side-dishes,
joints, as their separate turn came round. Long spells of silence fell
upon him meantime, which he emphasised by lugubriously clearing his
throat. Except for the pretty courtesy with which she would answer
him, she remained lost in her own thoughts--ever and anon consulting
the letter which lay beside her to fall again, it seemed, into a
deeper muse; but never a tear glinted between her black lashes.

More than once Adrian from his distant end of the table, met her eyes,
fixed on him for a moment, and the look, so full of mysterious
meanings made his heart beat in anguish, expecting he knew not what.

Among the rest of the assembly, part deference to a calamity so
stoutly borne, part amazement at such strange ways, part discomfort at
their positions as feasters in the midst of mourning, had reduced
conversation to the merest pretence. The ladies were glad enough when
the time came for them to withdraw; nor did most of the men view with
reluctance a moment which would send the decanters gliding freely over
the mahogany, and relieve them from this unwonted restraint.

Madame de Savenaye had, however, other interests in store for these
latter.

She rose with the rest of the ladies, but halted at the door, and
laying her hand upon her uncle's arm, said an earnest word in his ear,
in obedience to which he bundled out his daughters, as they hung back
politely, closed the door upon the last skirt, and reconducted the
Countess to the head of the table, scratching his chin in some
perplexity, but ready to humour her slightest whim.

She stood at her former place and looked for a moment in silence from
one to another of the faces turned with different expressions of
astonishment and anticipation towards her--ruddy faces most of them,
young, or old, handsome or homely, the honest English stamp upon each;
and distinct from them all, Adrian's pallid, thoughtful features and
his ardent eyes.

Upon him her gaze rested the longest. Then with a little wave of her
hand she prayed them to be seated, and waited to begin her say until
the wine had passed round.

"Gentlemen," then quoth she, "with my good uncle's permission I shall
read you the letter which I have this night received, so that English
gentlemen may learn how those who are faithful to their God and their
King are being dealt with in my country. This letter is from Monsieur
de Puisaye, one of the most active partisans of the Royal cause, a
connection of the ancient house of Savenaye. And he begins by telling
me of the unexpected reverses sustained by our men so close upon their
successes at Chateau-Gonthier, successes that had raised our loyal
hopes so high. 'The most crushing defeat,' he writes, 'has taken place
near the town of Savenaye itself, on your own estate, and your
historic house is now, alas! in ruins.... During the last obstinate
fight your husband had been wounded, but after performing prodigies of
valour--such as, it was hoped or trusted, the king should in time hear
of--he escaped from the hands of his enemies. For many weeks with a
few hundred followers he held the fields in the Marais, but he was at
last hemmed in and captured by one of the monster Thureau's _Colonnes
Infernales_, those hellish legions with an account of whose deeds,' so
says this gallant gentleman our friend, 'I will not defile my pen, but
whose boasts are like those of Attila the Hun, and who in their malice
have invented obscene tortures worthy of Iroquois savages for all who
fall into their clutches, be they men, women, or children.... But, by
Heaven's mercy, dear Madame,' says M. de Puisaye to me, 'your noble
husband was too weak to afford sport to those demons, and so he has
escaped torment. He was hanged with all speed indeed, for fear he
might die first of his toils and his wounds, and so defeat them at the
last.'"

A rustling murmur of horror and indignation went round the table; but
the little woman faced the audience proudly.

"He died," she said, "as beseems a brave man. But this is not all. I
had a sister, she was very fair--like me some people said, in
looks--she used to be the merry one at home in the days of peace," she
gave a little smile, far more piteous than tears would be--"She chose
to remain among her people when they were fighting, to help the
wounded, the sick." Here Madame de Savenaye paused a moment and put
down the letter from which she had been reading; for the first time
since she had begun to speak she grew pale; knitting her black brows
and with downcast eyes she went on: "Monsieur de Puisaye says he asks
my pardon humbly on his knees for writing such tidings to me, bereaved
as I am of all I hold dear, but 'it is meet,' he says, 'that the
civilised world should know the deeds these followers of _liberty_ and
_enlightenment_ have wrought upon gallant men and highborn ladies,'
and I hold that he says well."

She flashed once more her black gaze round upon the men, who with
heads all turned towards her and forgetting their wine, hung upon her
words. "It is right that I should know, and you too! It is meet that
such deeds should be made known to the world: my sister was taken by
these men, but less fortunate than my husband she had life enough left
for torture--she too is dead now; M. de Puisaye adds: Thank God! And
that is all that I can say too--Thank God!"

There was a dead silence in the room as she ceased speaking, broken at
last, here and there, along the table by exclamations and groans and a
deep execration from Sir Thomas, which was echoed deep-mouthed by his
guests.

Adrian himself, the pacific, the philosopher, with both arms,
stretched out on the table, clenched his hands, and set his teeth and
gazed into space with murderous looks.

Then the clear young voice went on again:

"You, who have honoured mothers and wives of your own, and have young
sweethearts, or sisters or daughters--you English gentlemen who love
to see justice, how long will you allow such things to be done while
you have arms to strike? We are not beaten yet; there are French
hearts still left that will be up and doing so long as they have a
drop of blood to shed. Our gallant Bretons and Vendeens are uniting
once more, our emigres are collecting, but we want aid, brave English
friends, we want arms, money, soldiers. My task lies to my hand; the
sacred legacy of my dead I have accepted; is there any of you here who
will help the widow to maintain the fight?"

She had risen to her feet; the blood glowed on her cheek as she
concluded her appeal; a thousand stars danced in her eyes.

Old men and young they leapt up, with a roar; pressing round her,
pouring forth acclamations, asseverations and oaths--Would they help
her? By God--they would die for her--Never had the old rafters of
Pulwick rung to such enthusiasm.

And when with proud smiles and crimsoned face she withdraws at last
from so much ardour, the door has scarcely fallen behind her before
Sir Thomas proposes her health in a bellow, that trembles upon tears:

"Gentlemen, this lady's courage is such as might put most men's
strength to shame. Here is, gentlemen, to Madame de Savenaye!"

And she, halting on the stairs for a moment, to still her high-beating
heart, before she lay her babe against it, hears the toast honoured
with three times three.

       *       *       *       *       *

When the Lancastrian ladies had succeeded at length in collecting and
carrying off such among the hiccupping husbands, and maudlin sons, who
were able to move, Sir Thomas re-entering the hall, after speeding the
last departing chariot, and prudently leaning upon his tall son--for
though he had a seasoned head the night's potations had been deep and
fiery--was startled well-nigh into soberness, at the sight of his
niece waiting for him at the foot of the stairs.

"Why, Cis, my love, we thought you had been in bed this long while!
why--where have you been then since you ran away from the dining-room?
By George!" chuckling, "the fellows were mad to get another glimpse of
you!"

His bloodshot eye hung over her fondly. There was not a trace of
fatigue upon that delicate, pretty face.

"I wanted to think--I have much to think on now. I have had to read
and ponder upon my instructions here,"--tapping her teeth with the
letter, she still carried, "Good uncle, I would speak with you--yes,
even now," quick to notice Adrian's slight frown of disapproval (poor
fellow, he was sober enough at any rate!), "there is no time like the
present. I have my work to do, and I shall not rest to-night, till I
have planned it in my head."

Surely the brilliancy of those eyes was feverish; the little hands she
laid upon them to draw them into the dim-lit library were hot as fire.

"Why, yes, my pretty," quoth the good uncle, stifling a portentous
yawn, and striving to look wondrous wise, "Adrian, she wants to
consult me, sir, hic!"

He fell into an arm-chair as he spoke, and she sank on her knees
beside him, the firelight playing upon her eager face, while Adrian,
in the shadow, watched.

"Do you think," she asked of the old man, eagerly, "that these
gentlemen, who spoke so kindly to me a few hours ago, will be as much
in earnest in the morning?"

"Why d--n them! if they go back on their word, I'll call them out!"
thundered Sir Thomas, in a great rage all of a sudden. She surveyed
him inquiringly, and shot a swift keen glance from the placid, bulky
figure in the chair, to Adrian pale and erect, behind it, then rose to
her feet and stood a few paces off, as it were pondering.

"What is now required of me--I have been thinking it well over," she
said at last, "can hardly be achieved by a woman alone. And yet, with
proper help and support, I think I could do more than any man by
himself. There is that in a woman's entreaties which will win, when a
man may fail. But I must have a knight at my side; a protector, at the
same time as a faithful servant. These are not the times to stand on
conventional scruples. Do you think, among these gentlemen, any could
be found with sufficient enthusiasm, for the Royal cause, here
represented by me, to attend, and support me through all the fatigues,
the endless errands, the interviews--ay, also the rebuffs, the
ridicule at times, perhaps the danger of the conjuration, which must
be set on foot in this country--to do all that, without hope of other
reward than the consciousness of helping a good cause, and--and the
gratitude of one, who may have nothing else to give?"

She stopped with a little nervous laugh: "No, it is absurd! no man,
on reflection would enter into such a service unless it were for his
own country."

As the last words fell from her lips, she suddenly turned to Adrian
and met his earnest gaze.

"Or for his kindred," said the young man, coming up to her with grave
simplicity, "if his kindred required it."

A gleam of satisfaction passed across her face. The father, who had
caught her meaning--sharp enough, as some men can be in their
cups--nodded his head with great vigour.

"Yes, why should you think first of strangers," he grumbled, "when you
have your own blood, to stand by you--blood is thicker than water,
ain't it? Am I too old, or is he too young, to wait on you--hey,
madam?"

She extended her hand, allowing it to linger in Adrian's grasp, whilst
she laid the other tenderly on the old man's shoulder.

"My good uncle! my kind cousin! Have I the choice already between two
such cavaliers? I am fortunate indeed in my misfortune. In other
circumstances to decide would be difficult between two men, each so
good; but," she added, after a moment's hesitation, and looking at
Adrian in a manner that made the young man's heart beat thickly, "in
this case it is obvious I must have some one whom I need not fear to
direct."

"Ay, ay," muttered the baronet, "I'd go with you, my darling, to the
world's end; but there's that young philosopher of mine breaking his
heart for you. And when all's said and done, it's the young fellow
that'll be the most use to you, I reckon. Ay, you've chosen already,
I'll be bound. The gouty old man had best stop at home. Ho, ho, ho!
You've the luck, Adrian; more luck than you deserve."

"It is I who have more luck than I deserve," answered Madame de
Savenaye, smiling upon her young knight as, taking heart of grace, he
stooped to seal the treaty upon her hand. "To say the truth, I had
hoped for this, yet hardly dared to allow myself to count upon it. And
really, uncle, you give your own son to my cause?--and you, cousin,
you are willing to work for me? I am indeed strengthened at the outset
of my undertaking. I shall pray that you may never have cause to
regret your chivalrous goodness."

She dropped Adrian's hand with a faint pressure, and moved sighing
towards the door.

"Do you wonder that I have no tears, cousin?" she said, a little
wistfully; "they must gather in my heart till I have time to sit down
and shed them."

Thus it was that a letter penned by this unknown M. de Puisaye from
some hidden fastness in the Bocage of Brittany came to divert the
course of Adrian Landale's existence into a channel where neither he,
nor any of those who knew him, would ever have dreamed to see it
drift.




CHAPTER V

THE AWAKENING

    Oh, what hadst thou to do with cruel Death,
    Who wast so full of life, or Death with thee?

    LONGFELLOW.


Sir Adrian Landale, in his sea-girt fastness, still absorbed in dreams
of bygone days, loosed his grasp of faithful Rene's shoulder and fell
to pacing the chamber with sombre mien; while Rene, to whom these fits
of abstraction in his master were not unfamiliar, but yet to his
superstitious peasant soul, eerie and awe-inspiring visitations,
slipped unnoticed from his presence.

The light-keeper sate down by his lonely hearth and buried his gaze in
the glowing wood-embers, over which, with each fitful thundering rush
of wind round the chimney, fluttered little eddies of silvery ash.

So, that long strife was over, which had wrought such havoc to the
world, had shaped so dismally the course of his own life! The monster
of selfish ambition, the tyrannic, insatiable conqueror whose very
existence had so long made peaceable pursuits unprofitable to mankind,
the final outcome of that Revolution that, at the starting point, had
boded so nobly for human welfare--he was at last laid low, and all the
misery of the protracted struggle now belonged to the annals of the
past.

It was all over--but the waste! The waste of life and happiness, far
and wide away among innocent and uninterested beings, the waste
remained.

And, looking back on it, the most bitter portion of his own wrecked
life was the short time he had yet thought happy; three months, spent
as knight-errant.

How far they seemed, far as irrevocable youth, those days when, in the
wake of that love-compelling emissary, he moved from intrigue to
intrigue among the emigres in London, and their English sympathisers,
to bustling yet secret activity in seafaring parts!

The mechanical instrument directed by the ingenious mind of Cecile de
Savenaye; the discreet minister who, for all his young years, secured
the help of some important political sympathiser one day, scoured the
country for arms and clothing, powder and _assignats_ another; who
treated with smuggling captains and chartered vessels that were to run
the gauntlet on the Norman and Breton coast, and supply the means of
war to struggling and undaunted loyalists. All this relentless work,
little suited, on the whole, to an Englishman, and in a cause the
rights of which he himself had, up to then, refused to admit, was then
repaid a hundredfold by a look of gratitude, of pleasure even, a few
sweet moments of his lady's company, before being sent hence again
upon some fresh enterprise.

Ah, how he loved her! He, the youth on the threshold of manhood, who
had never known passion before, how he loved this young widowed mother
who used him as a man to deal for her with men, yet so loftily treated
him as a boy when she dealt with him herself. And if he loved her in
the earlier period of his thraldom, when scarce would he see her one
hour in the twenty-four, to what all-encompassing fervour did the
bootless passion rise when, the day of departure having dawned and
sunk, he found himself on board the privateer, sailing away with her
towards unknown warlike ventures, her knight to protect her, her
servant to obey!

On all these things mused the recluse of Scarthey, sinking deeper and
deeper into the past: the spell of haunting recollection closing on
him as he sat by his hearthside, whilst the increasing fury of the
gale toiled and troubled outside fighting the impassable walls of his
tower.

Could it have been possible that she--the only woman that had ever
existed for him, the love for whom had so distorted his mind from its
natural sympathies, had killed in him the spring of youth and the
savour of life--never really learnt to love him in return till the
last?

And yet there was a woman's soul in that delicious woman's body--it
showed itself at least once, though until that supreme moment of union
and parting, it seemed as if a man's mind alone governed it, becoming
sterner, more unbendable, as hardships and difficulties multiplied.

In the melancholy phantasm passing before his mind's eye, of a period
of unprecedented bloodshed and savagery, when on the one side Chouans,
Vendeens, and such guerillas of which Madame de Savenaye was the
moving spirit, and on the other the _colonnes infernales_ of the
revolutionary leaders, vied with each other in ferocity and cunning,
she stood ever foremost, ever the central point of thought, with a
vividness that almost a score of years had failed to dim.

When the mood was upon him, he could unfold the roll of that story
buried now in the lonely graves of the many, or in the fickle memories
of the few, but upon his soul printed in letters of fire and blood--to
endure for ever.

Round this goddess of his young and only love clustered the sole
impressions of the outer world that had ever stirred his heart: the
grandeur of the ocean, of the storm, the glory of sunrise over a
dishevelled sea, the ineffable melancholy of twilight rising from an
unknown strand; then the solemn coldness of moonlight watches, the
scent of the burnt land under the fierce sun, when all nature was
hushed save the dreamy buzz of insect-life: the green coolness of
underwood or forest, the unutterable harmony of the sighing breeze,
and the song of wild birds during the long patient ambushes of
partisan war; the taste of bread in hunger, of the stream in the fever
of thirst, of approaching sleep in exhaustion--and, mixed with these,
the acrid emotions of fight and carnage, anguish of suspense, savage
exultation of victory--all the doings of a life which he, bred to
intellectual pleasures and high moral ideas, would have deemed a
nightmare, but which, lived as it was in the atmosphere of his longing
and devotion, yet held for him a strange and pungent joy: a cup of
cruel memories, yet one to be lingered over luxuriously till the
savour of each cherished drop of bitterness be gathered to the
uttermost.

Now, in the brightness of the embers, between the fitful flames of
crumbling wood, spreads before his eyes the dreary strand near
Quiberon, immense in the gathering darkness of a boisterous evening.
Well hidden under the stone table of a Druidical men-hir glows a small
camp-fire sedulously kept alive by Rene for the service of The Lady.
She, wrapped up in a coarse peasant-cloak, pensively gazes into the
cheerless smoke and holds her worn and muddy boots to the smouldering
wood in the vain hope of warmth.

And Adrian stands silently behind her, brooding on many things--on the
vicissitudes of that desultory war which has left them not a roof
whereunder they can lay their heads, during which the little English
contingent has melted from them one by one; on the critical action of
the morrow when the republican columns, now hastening to oppose the
landing of the great royalist expedition to Quiberon (that supreme
effort upon which all their hopes centre) must be surprised and cut
off at whatever cost; on the mighty doings to follow, which are to
complete the result of the recent sea fight off Ushant and crown their
devoted toil with victory at last....

And through his thoughts he watches the pretty foot, in its hideous
disguise of patched, worn, ill-fitting leather, and he sees it as on
the first day of their meeting, in its gleaming slipper and dainty
silken stocking.

Now and then an owl-cry, repeated from point to point, tells of
unremitting guard, but for which, in the vast silence, none could
suspect that a thousand men and more are lying stretched upon the
plain all around them, fireless, well-nigh without food, yet patiently
waiting for the morrow when their chiefs shall lead them to death; nor
that, in a closer circle, within call, are some fifty _gars_, remnant
of the indomitable "Savenaye band," and tacitly sworn bodyguard to The
Lady who came back from ease and safety over seas to share their
peril.

No sound besides, but the wind as it whistles and moans over the
heath--and the two are together in the mist which comes closing in
upon them as if to shroud them from all the rest, for even Rene has
crept away, to sleep perhaps.

She turns at last towards him, her small face in the dying light of
this sullen evening, how wan and weather-beaten!

"Pensive, as usual, cousin?" she says in English, and extends her
hand, browned and scratched, that was once so exquisite, and she
smiles, the smile of a dauntless soul from a weary body.

Poor little hands, poor little feet, so cold, so battered, so
ill-used! He, who would have warmed them in his bosom, given his heart
for them to tread upon, breaks down now, for the first time; and
falling on his knees covers the cold fingers with kisses, and then
lays his lips against those pitiful torn boots.

But she spurns him from her--even from her feet:

"Shame on you!" she says angrily; and adds, more gently, yet with some
contempt: "_Enfant, va!_--is this the time for such follies?"

And, suddenly recalled to honour and grim actuality, he realises with
dismay his breach of trust--he, who in their earlier days in London
had called out that sprightly little emigre merely for the vulgar
flippancy (aimed in compliment, too, at the grave aide-de-camp), "that
the fate of the late Count weighed somewhat lightly upon Madame de
Savenaye;" he, who had struck that too literary countryman of his own
across the face--ay, and shot him in the shoulder, all in the secret
early dawn of the day they left England--for daring to remark within
his hearing: "By George, the handsome Frenchwoman and her cousin may
be a little less than kin, but they are a little more than kind."

But yet, as the rage of love contending in his heart with
self-reproach, he rises to his feet in shame, she gives him her hand
once more, and in a different voice:

"Courage, cousin," says she, "perhaps some day we may both have our
reward. But will not my knight continue to fight for my bidding, even
without hope of such?"

Pondering on this enigmatic sentence he leaves her to her rest.

       *       *       *       *       *

When next he finds himself by her side the anticipated action has
begun; and it is to be the last day that those beautiful burning eyes
shall see the glory of the rising sun.

The Chouans are fighting like demons, extended in long skirmishing
lines, picking out the cluster of gunners, making right deadly use of
their English powder; imperceptibly but unflinchingly closing their
scattered groups until the signal comes and with ringing cries:
"_Notre Dame d'Auray!_" and "_Vive le roi!_" they charge, undismayed
by odds, the serried ranks of the Republicans.

She, from the top of the druidical stone, watches the progress of the
day. Her red, parted mouth twitches as she follows the efforts of the
men. Behind her, the _gars_ of Savenaye, grasping with angry clutch,
some a new musket, others an ancient straightened scythe, gaze
fiercely on the scene from under their broad felts. Now and then a
flight of republican bullets hum about their ears, and they look
anxiously to Their Lady, but that fearless head never bends.

Then the moment arrives, and with a fervent, "God be with you, brave
people," she hurls, by a stirring gesture, the last reserve on to the
fight.

And now he finds himself in the midst of the furious medley, striking
mechanically, his soul away behind on that stone, with her. Presently,
as the frenzy waxes wilder, he is conscious that victory is not with
them, but that they are pressed back and encompassed, and that for
each blue coat cast down amidst the yells and oaths, two more seem to
come out of the rain and smoke; whilst the bare feet and wooden shoes
and the long hair of his peasants are seen in ever-lessening ranks.
And, in time, they find themselves thrown back to the men-hir; she is
there, still calm but ghastly white, a pistol in each hand. Around
her, through the wet smoke, rise and fall with sickening thuds the
clubbed muskets of three or four men, and then one by one these sink
to the ground too. With a wailing groan like a man in a nightmare, he
sees the inevitable end and rushes to place his body before hers. A
bullet shatters his sword-blade; now none are left around them but the
begrimed and sinister faces of their enemies.

As they stand prisoners, and unheeding the hideous clamour, he, with
despair thinking of her inevitable fate at the hands of such victors,
and scarcely daring to look at her, suddenly sees _that_ in her eyes
which fills his soul to overflowing.

"All is lost," she whispers, "and I shall never repay you for all you
have done, cousin!"

The words are uttered falteringly, almost plaintively.

"We are not long now for this world, friend," she adds more firmly.
"Give me your forgiveness."

How often has Adrian heard this dead voice during the strange
vicissitudes of these long, long years! And, hearing it whisper in the
vivid world of his brain, how often has he not passionately longed
that he also had been able to yield his poor spark of life on the last
day of her existence.

For the usual fate of Chouan prisoners swiftly overtakes the surviving
leaders of the Savenaye "band of brigands," as that doughty knot of
loyalists was termed by their arch-enemy, Thureau.

A long journey towards the nearest town, in an open cart, under the
pitiless rain, amidst a crowd of evil-smelling, blaspheming, wounded
republicans, who, when a more cruel jolt than usual awakens their
wounds, curse the woman in words that should have drawn avenging bolts
from heaven. She sits silent, lofty, tearless; but her eyes, when they
are not lost in the grey distance, ever wistfully seek his face.

The day is drawing to a close; they reach their goal, a miserable,
grey, draggled town at the mouth of the Vilaine, and are roughly
brought before the arbiter of their lives--Thureau himself, the
monstrous excrescence of the times, who, like Marat and Carrier, sees
nothing in the new freedom but a free opening for the lowest instincts
of ferocity.

And before this monstrous beast, bedizened in his general's frippery,
in a reeking tavern-room, stand the noble lady of Savenaye and the
young heir of Pulwick.

The ruffian's voice rings with laughter as he gazes on the silent
youthful pair.

"Aha, what have we here; a couple of drowned rats? or have we trapped
you at last, the ci-devant Savenaye and her _godam_ from England? I
ought really to send you as a present to the Convention, but I am too
soft-hearted, you see, my pigeons; and so, to save time and make sure,
we will marry you to-day."

One of the officers whispers some words in his ear, which Thureau,
suddenly growing purple with rage, denies with a foul oath and an
emphatic thump of his huge fist on the table.

"Hoche has forbidden it, has he? Hoche does not command here. Hoche
has not had to hunt down the brigands these last two years. Dead the
beast, dead the venom, I say. And here is the order," scribbling
hurriedly on a page torn from a pocket-book. "It shall not be said
that I have had the bitch of Savenaye in my hands and trusted her on
the road again. Hoche has forbidden it! Call the cantineer and hop:
the marriage and quick--the soup waits."

Unable to understand the hidden meaning of the order, Adrian looks at
his lady askance, to find that, with eyes closed upon the sight of the
grinning faces, she is whispering prayers and fervently crossing
herself. When she turns to him again her face is almost serene.

"They are going to drown us together; that is their republican
marriage of aristocrats," she says in soft English. "I had feared
worse. Thank heaven there is no time now for worse. We shall be firm
to the last, shall we not, cousin?"

There is a pathetic smile on her worn weather-stained face, as the
cantineer and a corporal enter with ropes and proceed to pinion the
prisoners.

But, as they are marched away once more under the slanting rain, are
forced into a worn-out boat and lashed face to face, her fortitude
melts apace.

"There, my turtle-doves," sneers the truculent corporal, "another
kindness of the general. The Nantes way is back to back, but he
thought it would amuse you to see each other's grimaces."

On the strand resounds the muffled roll of wet drums, announcing the
execution of national justice; with one blow of an axe the craft is
scuttled; a push from a gaff sends it spinning on the swift swollen
waters into the estuary. Adrian's lips are on her forehead, but she
lifts her face; her eyes now are haggard.

"Adrian," she sobs, "you have forgiven me? I have your death on my
soul! Oh, Adrian, ... I could have loved you!"

Helpless and palsied by the merciless ropes, she tries passionately to
reach her little mouth to his. A stream of fire rushes through his
brain--maddening frenzy of regret, furious clinging to escaping
life!--Their lips have met, but the sinking craft is full, and, with a
sudden lurch, falls beneath the eddies.... A last roll of the drums,
and the pinioned bodies of these lovers of a few seconds are silently
swirling under the waters of the Vilaine.

And now the end of this poor life has come--with heart-breaking sorrow
of mind and struggle of body, overpowering horror at the writhings of
torture in the limbs lashed against his--and vainly he strives to
force his last breath into her hard-clenched mouth.

Such was the end of Adrian Landale, aged twenty--the end that should
have been--The pity that it was not permitted!

After the pangs of unwelcome death, the misery of unwelcome return to
life. Oh, Rene, Rene, too faithful follower; thou and the other true
men who, heedless of danger, hanging on the flanks of the victorious
enemy, never ceased to watch your lady from afar. You would have saved
her, could courage and faithfulness and cunning have availed! But,
since she was dead, Rene, would thou hadst left us to drift on to the
endless sea! How often have I cursed thee, good friend, who staked thy
life in the angry bore to snatch two spent bodies from its merciless
tossing. It was not to be endured, said you, that the remains of the
Lady of Savenaye should drift away unheeded, to be devoured by the
beasts of the sea! They now repose in sacred ground, and I live on!
Oh, hadst thou but reached us a minute later!--ah, God, or a minute
earlier!

Rarely had Sir Adrian's haunting visions of the past assumed such
lurid reality. Rising in torment from the hearth to pace unceasingly
the length and breadth of the restful, studious room, so closely
secure from the outer turmoil of heaven and earth, he is once more
back in the unknown sea-cave, in front of the angry breakers. Slowly,
agonisingly, he is recalled to life through wheeling spaces of pain
and confusion, only that his bruised and smarting eyes may see the
actual proof of his own desolateness--a small, stark figure wrapped in
coarse sailcloth, which now two or three ragged, long-haired men are
silently lifting between them.

He wonders, at first, vaguely, why the tears course down those wild,
dark faces; and then, as vainly he struggles to speak, and is gently
held down by some unknown hand, the little white bundle is gone, and
he knows that _there_ was the pitiful relict of his love--that he will
never see her again!

       *       *       *       *       *

Sir Adrian halted in front of his seaward window, staring at the
driven rain, which bounded and plashed and spread in minute torrents
down the glass, obscuring the already darkening vision of furious sea
and sky.

The dog, that for some moments had shown an anxious restlessness in
singular concert with his master's, now rose at last to sniff beneath
the door. No sound penetrated the roar of the blast; but the old
retriever's uneasiness, his sharp, warning bark at length recalled Sir
Adrian's wandering thoughts to the present. And, walking up to the
door, he opened it.

Oh, God! Had the sea given up its dead?

Sir Adrian staggered back, fell on his knees and clapped his hands
together with an agonised cry:

"Cecile...!"




CHAPTER VI

THE WHEEL OF TIME

                     And to his eye
    There was but one beloved face on earth,
    And that was shining on him.

    BYRON.


Upon the threshold she stood, looking in upon him with dark, luminous
eyes; round the small wet face tangles of raven hair fell limp and
streaming; dark raiments clung to her form, diapered with sand and
sea-foam, sodden with the moisture that dripped from them to the
floor; under the hem of her skirt one foot peered forth, shoeless in
its mud-stained stocking.

Sir Adrian stared up at her, his brain whirling with a frenzy of joy,
gripped in its soaring ecstasy by terror of the incomprehensible.

On the wings of the storm and the wind had she come to him, his
love--across the awful barriers that divide life and death? Had his
longings and the clamour of his desolate soul reached her, after all
these years, in the far-beyond, and was her sweet ghost here to bid
him cease from them and let her lie at rest? Or, yet, had she come to
call him from the weary world that their souls might meet and be one
at last?... Then let her but lay her lips against his, as once in the
bitterness of death, that his sorely-tried heart may break with the
exquisite pang and he, too, may die upon their kiss.

Swift such thoughts were tossing in the turmoil of his mind when the
vision smiled ... a young, rosy, living smile; and then reason,
memory, the wonder of her coming, the haunting of her grave went from
him; possessed by one single rapturous certainty he started up and
gathered the wet form into his strong arms--yet gently as if he feared
to crush the vision into void--and showered kisses on the wet face.

Not death--but life! A beating heart beneath his; a lithe young form
under his hand, warm lips to his kisses, ... Merciful Heaven! Were,
then, these twenty years all an evil, fevered dream, and was he awake
at length?

She turned her face from him after a moment and put her hand against
his breast to push him from her; and as she did so the wonder in the
lovely, familiar eyes turned to merriment, and the lips parted into
laughter.

The sound of the girlish laughter broke the spell. Sir Adrian stepped
back, and passed his hand across his forehead with a dazed look.

And still she laughed on.

"Why, cousin Landale," she said, at length between the peals; "I came
to throw myself upon your kindness for shelter from the storm, but--I
had not anticipated such a reception."

The voice, clear and sweet, with just a tinge of outlandish
intonation, struck Adrian to the heart.

"I have not heard," he faltered, "that voice for twenty years...!"

Then, coming up to her, he took her hands; and, drawing her towards
the firelight, scanned her features with eager, hungering eyes.

"Do not think me mad, child," he said at last; "tell me who you
are--what has brought you here? Ah, God, at such a moment! Who is it,"
he pursued, as if to himself, whilst still she smiled mockingly and
answered not; "who is it, then, since Cecile de Savenaye is dead--and
I am not dreaming--nor in fever? No vision either--this is flesh and
blood."

"Yes, indeed," mocked the girl with another burst of merriment; "flesh
and blood, please, and very living! Why, cousin Landale, you that knew
Cecile de Savenaye so well have you forgotten two babes that were born
at your own house of Pulwick? I believe, 'tis true, I have somewhat
altered since you saw me last."

And again the old room echoed to the unwonted sound of a girl's
laughter.

Now was the hallucination clearing; but the reality evoked a new and
almost as poignant tenderness. Cecile--phantom of a life-time's love,
reborn in the flesh, young as on the last day of her earthly
existence, coming back into his life again, even the same as she had
left it! A second wonder, almost as sweet as the first! He clung to
it as one clings to the presence of a dream, and, joy unspeakable, the
dream did not melt away, but remained, smiling, beautiful, unchanged.

"Cecile's daughter ..." he murmured: "Cecile's self again; but she was
not so tall, I think," and drew trembling, reverent hands from her
head to her straight young shoulders. And then he started, crying in a
changed voice:

"How wet and cold you are! Come closer to the fire--sit you into this
chair, here, in the warmth."

He piled up the hearth with faggots till the flames roared again. She
dropped into the proffered chair with a little shiver; now that he
recalled her to it, she was wet and cold too.

He surveyed her with gathering concern.

"My child," he began, and hesitated, continuing, after a short pause
of musing--for the thought struck him as strange--"I may call you so,
I suppose; I that am nearly old enough to be your father; my mind was
so unhinged by your sudden appearance, by the wonderful resemblance,
that I have neglected all my duties as host. You will suffer from
this--what shall we do to comfort you? Here, Jem, good dog! Call
Rene!"

The old retriever who, concluding that the visitor was welcome, had
returned to his doze, here gathered his stiff limbs together, hobbled
out through the doorway to give two or three yelping barks at some
point on the stairs, and then crawl back to his cosy corner by the
hearth.

The girl laughed again. It was all odd, new, exciting. Adrian looked
down at her. Cecile, too, had had a merry heart, even through peril
and misfortune.

And now there were hasty steps upon the stairs, creaking above the
outer tumult of sea and wind; and, in accordance with the
long-established custom of summoning him, Rene appeared upon the
threshold, holding a pair of candles.

At the sight of the figure sitting by the fire he halted, as if rooted
to the ground, and threw up his hands, each still clutching its
candle.

"Mademoiselle...!" he ejaculated. "Mademoiselle here!" Then, rapidly
recovering his quick wits, he deposited his burden of light upon the
table, advanced towards the lady, made an uncouth but profound bow,
and turned to his master.

"And this, your honour," he remarked, oracularly, and in his usual
manner of literal adaptation, "was also part of the news I had for
your honour from my last journey; but, my faith, I did not know how to
take myself to it, as your honour was so much occupied with old times
this evening. But I had seen Mademoiselle at the castle, as
Mademoiselle can tell you herself. And if your honour," he added, with
a look of astonishment, "will have the goodness to say how it is
possible that Mademoiselle managed to arrive here on our isle, in this
weather of all the devils--reverence speaking, and I humbly beg the
pardon of Mademoiselle for using such words--when it was with pain I
could land myself, and that before the storm--I should be grateful to
your honour. For I avow I cannot comprehend it at all. Ah, your
honour!" continued Rene, with an altered tone, "'tis a strange thing,
this!"

The looks of master and man crossed suddenly, and in the frank blue
eyes of the Breton peasant, Sir Adrian read a reflex of his own
thoughts.

"Yes," he said, more in answer to the look than to the exclamation,
"yes, it is a strange thing, friend."

"And his Honour cannot read the riddle any more than you yourself,
Rene," quoth Mademoiselle de Savenaye, composedly from her corner;
"and, as for me, I can give no explanations until I am a little
warmer."

"Why, truly," exclaimed Sir Adrian, striking his forehead, "we are a
very pair of dolts! Hurry, Renny, hurry, call up Margery, and bid her
bring some hot drink--tea, broth, or what she has--and blankets. Stay!
first fetch my furred cloak; quick, Rene, every moment is precious!"

With all the agitation of a rarely excited man Sir Adrian threw more
wood on the fire, hunted for a cushion to place beneath her feet, and
then, seizing the cloak from Rene's hands, he helped her to rise, and
wrapped its ample folds round her as carefully as if she were too
precious almost to be touched.

Thus enveloped she sank back in the great arm-chair with a cosy,
deliberate, kitten-like movement, and stretched out her feet to the
blaze, laying the little shoeless one upon Jem's grey muzzle.

Adrian knelt beside her, and began gently to chafe it with both hands.
And, as he knelt, silence fell between them, and the storm howled out
yonder; he heard her give a little sigh--that sigh which would escape
from Cecile's weariness in moments of rest, which had once been so
familiar and so pathetic a sound in his ear. And once more the power
of the past came over him; again he was upon the heath near Quiberon,
and Cecile was sitting by him and seeking warmth by the secret fire.

"Oh, my darling," he murmured, "your poor little feet were so cold;
and yet you would not let me gather them to my breast." And, stooping
slowly, he kissed the pretty foot in its torn, stained stocking with a
passion he had not yet shown.

The girl looked on with an odd little smile. It was a novel
experience, to inspire--even vicariously--such feelings as these; and
there was something not unpleasant in the sense of the power which had
brought this strange handsome man prostrate before her--a maidenly
tremor, too, in the sensation of those burning lips upon her feet.

He raised his eyes suddenly, with the old expectation of a rebuff; and
then, at the sight of the youthful, curious face above him, betook
himself to sighing too; and, laying the little foot back tenderly upon
the cushion, he rose.

From between the huge fur collar which all but covered her head, the
black eyes followed him as alertly as a bird's; intercepting the soft
melancholy of his gaze, she smiled at him, mischievous, confident, and
uncommunicative, and snuggled deeper into the fur.

Leaning against the high mantel-board, he remained silent, brooding
over her; the clock ticked off solemnly the fleeting moments of the
wonderful hour; and ever and anon the dog drew a long breath of
comfort and stretched out his gaunt limbs more luxuriously to the
heat. After a while Sir Adrian spoke.

"He who has hospitality to dispense," said he, smiling down at her
mutinous grace, "should never ask whence or how the guest came to his
hearth ... and yet--"

She made a slight movement of laziness, but volunteered nothing; and
he continued, his look becoming more wistful as he spoke:

"Your having reached this rock, during such weather, is startling
enough; it is God's providence that there should live those in these
ruins who are able to give you succour. But that you should come in to
me at the moment you did--" He halted before the bold inquisitive
brightness of her eyes. "Some day perhaps you will let me explain," he
went on, embarrassed. "Indeed I must have seemed the most absolute
madman, to you. But he who thinks he sees one returned from death in
angry waters, may be pardoned some display of emotion."

The girl sat up briskly and shook herself as if in protest against the
sadness of his smile and look.

"I rise indeed from a watery grave," she said lightly, "or at least
from what should have been my grave, had I had my deserts for my
foolishness; as it has turned out I do not regret it now; though I
did, about midway."

The red lips parted and the little teeth gleamed. "I have found such
kindness and welcome." She caressed the dog who, lazily, tried to lick
her hand. "It is all such an adventure; so much more amusing than
Pulwick; so much more interesting than ever I fancied it might be!"

"Pulwick; you come from Pulwick?" said Sir Adrian musing; "true, Rene
has said it but just now. Yet, it is of a piece with the strangeness
of it all."

"Yes," said Mademoiselle de Savenaye, once more collecting her cloak,
which her hurried movement had thrown off her shoulder. "Madelon and I
are now at Pulwick--I am Molly, cousin, please to remember--or rather
I am here, very warm now, and comfortable, and she is somewhere along
the shore--perhaps--she and John, as wet as drowned rats. Well, well,
I had best tell you the tale from the beginning, or else we never
shall be out of the labyrinth.--We started from Pulwick, for a ride by
the shore, Madelon and I. When we were on the strand it came on to
rain. There was smoke out of your chimney. I proposed a canter as far
as the ruins, for shelter. I knew very well Madelon would not follow;
but I threw poor Lucifer--you know Lucifer, Mr. Landale has reserved
him for me; of course you know Lucifer, I believe he belongs to you!
Well, I threw him along the causeway. John, he's the groom you know,
and Madelon, shrieked after me. But it was beautiful--this magnificent
tearing gallop in the rain--I was not going to stop.--But when we
were half way, Lucifer and I, I saw suddenly that the foam seemed to
cover the sand in front of me. Then I pulled up quick and turned round
to look behind me. There was already a frightful wind, and the sand
and the rain blinded me almost, but there was no mistake--the sea was
running between the shore and me. Oh! my God! but I was frightened
then; I beat poor Lucifer until my whip broke, and he started away
with a will. But when his feet began to splash the water he too became
frightened and stopped. I did not know what to do; I pulled out my
broach to spur him with the pin, but, at the first prick I gave him,
he reared, and swerved and I fell right on my face in the froth. I got
up and began to run through the water; then I came to some stones and
I knew I was saved, though the water was up to my knees and rushing by
like a torrent. When I had clambered up the beach I thought again of
poor Lucifer. I looked about and saw him a little way off. He was
shaking and tossing his dear black head, and neighing, though I really
did not hear him, for the wind was in my ears; his body was stock
still, I could not see his legs.... And gradually he sank lower, and
lower, and lower, and at last the water passed over his head. Oh! it
was horrible, horrible!"

The girl shuddered and her bright face clouded. After a moment she
resumed:

"It was only then I thought of the moving sands they spoke of the
other day at Pulwick--and that was why Madelon and that poltroon groom
would not follow me! Yet perhaps they were wise, after all, for the
thought of being buried alive made me turn weak all of a sudden. My
knees shook and I had to sit down, although I knew I had passed
through the danger. But I was so sorry for poor Lucifer! I thought if
I had come down and led him, poor fellow, he might have come with me.
Death is so awful, so hideous; he was so full of life and carried me
so bravely, only a few minutes before! Is it not a shame that there
should be such a thing as death?" she cried, rebelliously, and looked
up at the man above her, whose face had grown white at the thought of
the danger she had barely escaped.

"I waited," she resumed at length, "till I thought he must be quite
dead, there below, and came up to the ruins, and looked for an
entrance. I knocked at some doors and called, but the wind was so
loud, no one heard. And then, at last, there was one door I could
open, so I entered and came up the stairs and startled you, as you
know. And that is how I came here and how Lucifer is drowned."

As she finished her tale at last, she looked up at her companion. But
Sir Adrian, who had followed her with ever-deepening earnestness of
mien, remained silent; noticing which she added quickly and with a
certain tinge of defiance:

"And now, no doubt, you are not quite so pleased as you seemed at
first with the apparition which has caused you the loss of one of your
best horses!"

"Why child," cried Sir Adrian, "so that you be safe you might have
left all Pulwick at the bottom of the sands for me!" And Rene who
entered the room at that moment, heading the advance of Dame Margery
with the posset, here caught the extraordinary sound of a laugh on his
master's lips, and stepped back to chuckle to himself and rub his
hands.

"Who would have believed that!" he muttered, "and I who was afraid to
tell his honour! Oh, yes, there are better times coming. Now in with
you, Mother Margery, see for yourself who is there."

Holding in both hands a fragrant, steaming bowl, the old crone made
her slow entrance upon the scene, peering with dim eyes, and dropping
tremulous curtseys every two or three steps.

"Renny towd me as you wanted summat hot for a lady," she began
cautiously; and then having approached near for recognition at last,
burst forth into a long-drawn cry!

"Eh, you never says! Eh, dear o' me," and was fain to relinquish the
bowl to her fellow-servant who narrowly watching, dived forward just
in time to catch it from her, that she might clasp her aged hands
together once and again with ever-renewed gestures of astonishment.
"An' it were truth then, an' I that towd Renny to give over his
nonsense--I didn't believe it, I welly couldn't. Eh, Mester Adrian,
but she's like the poor lady that's dead and gone, the spit an' image
she is--e-eh, she is!"

Molly de Savenaye laughed aloud, stretched out her hand for the bowl,
and began with dainty caution to sip its scalding contents.

"Ah, my dear Margery," said the master, "we little thought what a
guest the sea would cast up at our doors to-night! and now we must do
our best for her; when she's finished your comforting mixture I shall
give her into your charge. You ought to put her to bed--it will not be
the first time."

"Ah! it will not, and a troublesome child she was," replied Margery,
after the usual pause for the assimilation of his remark, turning to
the speaker from her palsied yet critical survey of her whilom
nursling.

"And I'll see to her, never fear, I'll fettle up a room for her at
once--blankets is airing already, an' sheets, an' Renny he's seen to
the fire, so that as soon as Miss, here, is ready, I am."

Upon which, dropping a last curtsey with an assumed dignity which
would have befitted a mistress of the robes, she took her departure,
leaving Adrian smiling with amusement at her specious manner of
announcing that his own bedroom--the only one available for the
purpose in the ruins--was being duly converted into a lady's bower.

"It grieves me to think," mused he after a pause, while Rene still
bursting with ungratified curiosity, hung about the further end of the
room, "of the terrible anxiety they must be in about you at Pulwick,
and of our absolute inability to convey to them the good news of your
safety."

The girl gave a little laugh, with her lips over the cup, and shrugged
her shoulders but said nothing.

"My God, yes," quoth Rene cheerfully from his corner. "Notre Dame
d'Auray has watched over Mademoiselle to-day. She would not permit the
daughter to die like the mother. And now we have got her ladyship we
shall keep her too. This, if your honour remembers his sailor's
knowledge, looks like a three-days' gale."

"You are right, I fancy," said Sir Adrian, going over to him and
looking out of the window. "Mademoiselle de Savenaye will have to take
up her abode in our lighthouse for a longer time than she bargained. I
do not remember hearing the breakers thunder in our cave so loud for
many years. I trust," continued the light-keeper, coming down to his
fair guest again, "that you may be able to endure such rough
hospitality as ours must needs be!"

"It has been much more pleasant and I feel far more welcome already
than at Pulwick," remarked Mademoiselle, between two deliberate sips,
and in no way discomposed, it seemed, at the prospect held out to her.

"How?" cried Sir Adrian with a start, while the unwonted flush mounted
to his forehead, "you, not welcome at Pulwick! Have they not welcomed
a child of Cecile de Savenaye at Pulwick?... Thank God, then, for the
accident that has sent you to me!"

The girl looked at him with an inquisitive smile in her eyes; there
was something on her lips which she restrained. Surrendering her cup,
she remarked demurely:

"Yes, it was a lucky accident, was it not, that there was some one
to offer shelter to the outcast from the sea? It is like a tale of
old. It is delightful. Delightful, too, not to be drowned, safe and
sound ... and welcome in this curious old place."

She had risen and, as the cloak fell from her steaming garments, again
she shivered.

"But you are right," she said, "I must go to bed, and get these damp
garments off. And so, my Lord of Scarthey, I will retire to my
apartments; my Lady in Waiting I see yonder is ready for me."

With a quaint mixture of playfulness and gravity, she extended her
hand, and Adrian stooped and kissed it--as he had kissed fair Cecile
de Savenaye's rosy finger-tip upon the porch of Pulwick, twenty years
before.




CHAPTER VII

FOREBODINGS OF GLADNESS


Molly de Savenaye in her improvised bedroom, wet as she was, could
hardly betake herself to disrobing, so amused was she in surveying the
fresh and romantic oddity of her surroundings, with their mixture of
barbarous rudeness and almost womanish refinement.

Old Margery's fumbling hands were not nimble either, and it was long
since she had acted as attendant upon one of her own sex. And so the
matter progressed but slowly; but the speed of Margery's tongue was
apparently not affected by its length of service. It wagged
ceaselessly; the girl between her own moods of curious speculation
vouchsafing an amused, half-contemptuous ear.

Presently, however, as the nurse's reminiscences wandered from the
less interesting topic of her own vicissitudes, the children she had
reared or buried, and the marvellous ailments she had endured, to an
account of those days when she had served the French Madam and her
babes, Molly, slowly peeling a clinging sleeve from her arm, turned a
more eager and attentive face to her.

"Ah," quoth Margery, appraising her with blear eyes, "it's a queer
thing how ye favour your mother, miss. She had just they beautiful
shoulders and arms, as firm an' as white; but you're taller, I think,
and may be so, to speak, a stouter make altogether. Eh, dear, you were
always a fine child and the poor lady set a deal of store on you, she
did. She took you with her and left your sister with my Sally, when
she was trapesing up to London and back with Mester Adrian, ay, and me
with ye. And many the day that I wished myself safe at Pulwick! And I
mind the day she took leave of you, I do that, well."

Here Dame Margery paused and shook her head solemnly, then pursued in
another key:

"See now, miss, dear, just step out of they wet things, will ye now,
and let me put this hot sheet round ye?"

"But I want to hear about myself," said Molly, gratefully wrapping the
hot linen round her young beauty, and beginning to rub her black locks
energetically. "Where was it my mother parted from me?"

"Why, I'll tell you, miss. When Madam--we allus used to call her
Madam, ye know--was goin' her ways to the ship as was to take her to
France, I took you after her mysel' down to the shore that she might
have the very last of ye. Eh, I mind it as if it were yesterday.
Mester Adrian was to go with her--Sir Adrian, I should say, but he was
but Mester Adrian then--an' a two three more o' th' gentry as was all
fur havin' a share o' th' fightin'. Sir Thomas himsel' was theer--I
like as if I could see him now, poor owd gentleman, talkin' an'
laughin' very hard an' jov'al, an' wipin' 's e'en when he thought
nobody noticed. Eh, dear, yes! I could ha' cried mysel' to see th'
bonny young lady goin' off fro' her bairns. An' to think she niver
came back to them no more. Well, well! An' Mester Adrian too--such a
fine well-set-up young gentleman as he were--and _he_ niver comed back
for ten year an' when he did, he was that warsened--" she stopped,
shook her head and groaned.

"Well, but how about me, nurse," observed Molly, "what about _me_?"

"Miss, please it was this way. Madam was wantin' a last look at her
bairn--eh, she did, poor thing! You was allus her favoryite, ye know,
miss--our Sally was wet-nurse to Miss Maddyline, but Madam had you
hersel'. Well, miss, I'd brought you well lapped up i' my shawl an'
William Shearman--that was Thomas Shearman's son, feyther to William
an' Tom as lives over yonder at Pulwick village--well, William was
standin' in 's great sea-boots ready to carry her through th' surf
into the boat; an' Mester Adrian--Sir Adrian, I mean--stood it might
be here, miss, an' there was Renny, an' yon were th' t'other gentry.
Well, Madam stopped an' took you out o' my arms, an' hugged you to her
breast--an' then she geet agate o' kissin' you--your head an' your
little 'ands. An' you was jumpin' an' crowin' in her arms--the wind
had blown your cap off, an' your little downy black hair was standing
back. (Just let me get at your hair now, miss, please--Eh! it's cruel
full of sand, my word, it is.)"

"It's 'ard, when all's said an' done, to part wi' th' babe ye've
suckled, an' Madam, though there was niver nought nesh about 'er same
as there is about most women, an' specially ladies--she 'ad th'
mother's 'eart, she 'ad, miss, an when th' time coom for her to leave
th' little un, I could see, as it were, welly burstin'. There we stood
wi' th' wind blowin' our clothes an' our 'air, an' the waves roarin',
an' one bigger nor th' t'others ran up till th' foam reached Madam's
little feet, but she niver took no notice. Then all of a sudden she
gets th' notion that she'd like to take you with 'er, an' she turns
an' tells Mester Adrian so. 'She shall come with me,' she says, quite
sharp an' determined, an' makes a sign to William Shearman to carry
'em both over. 'No, no,' says Mester Adrian, 'quite impossible,' says
he, as wise as if he'd been an owd man i' stead o' nobbut a lad, ye
might say. 'It would be madness both for you an' th' child. Now,' he
says, very quiet an' gentle, 'if I might advise, I should say stay
here with the child.' Eh, I couldn't tell ye all he said, an' then Sir
Tummas coom bustlin' up, 'Do, now, my dear; think of it,' he says,
pattin' her o' th' hand. 'Stay with us,' he says, 'ye'll be welcome as
th' flowers in May!' An' there was Renny wi' 's 'at off, an' th' tears
pourin' down his face, beggin' an' prayin' Madam to stop--at least, I
reckoned that was what he were sayin' for it was all in 's own
outlandish gibberish. The poor lady! she'd look from one to th'
t'other an' a body a' must think she'd give in--an' then she'd
unbethink hersel' again. An' Sir Thomas, he'd say, 'Do now, my dear,'
an' then when she'd look at him that pitiful, he'd out wi' 's red
'andkercher an' frown over at Mester Adrian, an', says he, 'I wonder
ye can ax her!' Well, all of a sudden off went th' big gun in th'
ship--that was to let 'em know, miss, do ye see--an' up went Madam's
head, an' then th' wind fetched th' salt spray to her face, an' a kind
o' change came over her. She looked at the child, then across at the
ship--an' then she fair tossed ye back to me. Big William catched her
up in his arms just same as another bairn, an' carried her to the
boat."

"Yes," said Molly, gazing into the burning logs with brilliant eyes,
but speaking low, as if to herself, so that her attendant's deaf ears
failed to catch the meaning of the words. "Ah, that was life indeed!
Happy mother to have seen such life--though she did die young."

"As ye say, miss," answered Margery, making a guess at the most likely
comment from a daughter's lips, "it was cruel hard--it was that.
'Come, make haste!' cries the other young gentlemen: my word, they
were in a hurry lest Madam happen to change her mind. I could welly
have laughed to see their faces when Mester Adrian were trying to
persuade her to stop at Pulwick, and let the men go alone. 'T wern't
for that they reckoned to go all that road to France, ye may think,
miss. Well, miss, in a few minutes they was all out i' the boat wi'
th' waves tossin' 'em--an' I stood watchin' with you i' my arms,
cryin' and kickin' out wi' your little legs, an' hittin' of me wi'
your little 'ands, same as if ye knowed summat o' what was agate, poor
lamb, an' was angry wi' me for keepin' ye. Then in a little while the
big, white sails o' th' ship went swellin' out an' soon it was gone.
An' that was th' last we saw o' Madam. A two-three year arter you an'
Miss Maddyline was fetched away, to France, as I've been towd. I doubt
you didn't so much as think there was such a place as Pulwick, though
many a one there minds how they dandled and played wi' you when you
was a wee bairn, miss."

"Well, I am very glad to be back in England, anyhow," said Molly,
nimbly slipping into bed. "Oh, Margery, what delicious warm sheets,
and how good it is to be in bed alive, dry, and warm, after all!"

A new atmosphere pervaded Scarthey that night. The peaceful monotony
of years, since the master of Pulwick had migrated to his "ruins," was
broken at last, and happily. A warm colour seemed to have crept upon
the hitherto dun and dull surroundings and brightened all the
prospects.

At any rate Rene, over his busy work in the lantern, whistled and
hummed snatches of song with unwonted blithesomeness, and, after
lighting the steady watch-light and securing all his paraphernalia
with extra care, dallied some time longer than usual on the outer
platform, striving to snatch through the driven wraith a glance of the
distant lights of Pulwick. For there, in the long distance, ensconced
among the woods, stood a certain gate-lodge of greystone, much covered
with ivy, which sheltered, among other inmates, the gatekeeper's
blue-eyed, ripe and ruddy daughter--Dame Margery's pet grandchild.

The idea of ever leaving the master--even for the sake of the
happiness to be found over yonder--was not one to be entertained by
Rene. But what if dreams of a return to the life of the world should
arise after to-day in the recluse's mind? Ah, the master's eyes had
been filled with light!... and had he not actually laughed?

Rene peered again through the wind, but nothing could be seen of the
world abroad, save grey, tumbling waters foaming at the foot of the
islet; fretful waters coalescing all around with the driven, misty
air. A desolate view enough, had there been room for melancholy
thoughts in his heart.

Blithely did he descend the steep wooden stairs from the roaring,
weather-beaten platform, to the more secure inhabited keep; and,
humming a satisfied tune, he entered upon Margery in her flaming
kitchen, to find the old lady intent on sorting out a heap of feminine
garments and spreading them before the fire.

Rene took up a little shoe, sand-soiled and limp, and reverentially
rubbed it on his sleeve.

"Well, mother," he said, cheerfully, "it is a long while since you had
to do with such pretty things. My faith, these are droll doings,
ah--and good, too! You will see, Mother Margery, there will be good
out of all this."

But Margery invariably saw fit, on principle, to doubt all the
opinions of her rival.

Eh, she didn't hold so much wi' wenches hersel', an' Mester Adrian,
she reckoned, hadn't come to live here all by himsel' to have visitors
breaking in on him that gate!

"There be visitors _and_ visitors, mother--I tell you, I who speak to
you, that his honour is happy."

Margery, with a mysterious air, smoothed out a long silk stocking and
gave an additional impetus to the tremor Nature had already bestowed
upon her aged head.

Well, it wasn't for her to say. She hoped and prayed there was nowt
bad a coomin' on the family again; but sich likenesses as that of Miss
to her mother was not lucky, to her minding; it was not. Nowt good had
come to Mester Adrian from the French Madam. Ah, Mester Adrian had
been happy like with her too, and she had taken him away from his
home, an' his people, an' sent him back wi'out 's soul in the end.

"And now her daughter has come to give it him back," retorted Rene,
as he fell to, with a zest, on the savoury mess he had concocted for
his own supper.

"Eh, well, I hope nowt bad's i' the road," said Margery with senile
iteration. "They do say no good ever comes o' saving bodies from
drowning; not that one 'ud wish the poor Miss to have gone into the
sands--an' she the babby I weaned too!"

Rene interrupted her with a hearty laugh. "Yes, every one knows it
carries misfortune to save people from the drowning, but there, you
see, her ladyship, she saved herself--so that ought to bring good
fortune. Good-night, Mother Margery, take good care of the lady....
Ah, how I wish I had the care of her!" he added simply, and, seizing
his lantern, proceeded to ascend once more to his post aloft.

He paused once on his way, in the loud sighing stairs, struck with a
fresh aspect of the day's singular events--a quaint thought, born of
his native religious faith: The Lady, the dear Mistress had just
reached Heaven, no doubt, and had straightway sent them the young one
to console and comfort them. Eh bien! they had had their time of
Purgatory too, and now they might be happy.

Pleasant therefore were Rene's musings, up in the light watcher's
bunk, underneath the lantern, as, smoking a pipe of rest, he listened
complacently to the hissing storm around him.

And in the master's sleeping chamber beneath him, now so curiously
turned into a feminine sanctum, pleasant thoughts too, if less formed,
and less concerned with the future, lulled its dainty occupant to
rest.

Luxuriously stretched between the warm lavender-scented sheets,
watching from her pillow the leaping fire on the hearth, Miss Molly
wondered lazily at her own luck; at the many possible results of the
day's escapade; wondered amusedly whether any poignant sorrow--except,
indeed poor Madeleine's tears--for her supposed demise, really
darkened the supper party at Pulwick this evening; wondered agreeably
how the Lord of the Ruined Castle would meet her on the morrow, after
his singular reception of her this day; how long she would remain in
these romantic surroundings and whether she would like them as well at
the end of the visitation.

And as the blast howled with increasing rage, and the cold night drew
closer on, and the great guns in the sea-cave boomed more angrily with
the risen tide, she dimly began to dwell upon the thought of poor
Lucifer being sucked deeper into his cold rapacious grave, whilst she
was held in the warm embrace of a man whose eyes were masterful and
yet gentle, whose arm was strong, whose kisses were tender.

And in the delight of the contrast, Mademoiselle de Savenaye fell into
the profound slumber of the young and vigorous.




CHAPTER VIII

THE PATH OF WASTED YEARS

    And I only think of the woman that weeps;
    But I forget, always forget, the smiling child.
                                          _Luteplayer's Song._


That night, even when sheer fatigue had subdued the currents of blood
and thought that surged in his head, Sir Adrian was too restless to
avail himself of the emergency couch providently prepared by Rene in a
corner. But, ceasing his fretful pacing to and fro, he sat down in the
arm-chair by the hearth where she had sat--the waif of the
sea--wrapped round him the cloak that had enfolded the young body,
hugging himself in the salt moisture the fur still retained, to spend
the long hours in half-waking, firelight dreams.

And every burst of tempest rage, every lash of rain at the window,
every thud of hurricane breaking itself on impassable ramparts, and
shriek of baffled winds searching the roofless halls around, found a
strangely glad echo in his brain--made a sort of burden to his
thoughts:

Heap up the waters round this happy island, most welcome winds--heap
them up high and boiling, and retain her long captive in these lonely
ruins!

And ever the image in his mind's eye was, as before, Cecile--Cecile
who had come back to him, for all sober reason knew it was but the
child.

The child----! Why had he never thought of the children these weary
years? They, all that remained of Cecile, were living and might have
been sought. Strange that he had not remembered him of the children!

Twenty years since he had last set eyes upon the little living
creature in her mother's arms. And the picture that the memory evoked
was, after all, Cecile again, only Cecile--not the queer little
black-eyed puppet, even then associated with sea-foam and salty
breeze. Twenty years during which she was growing and waxing in
beauty, and unawares, maturing towards this wonderful meeting--and he
had never given a thought to her existence.

In what sheltered ways had this fair duplicate of his love been
growing from a child to womanhood during that space of life, so long
to look back upon--or so short and transient, according to the mood of
the thinker?

And, lazily, in his happier and tender present mood he tried to
measure once again the cycles of past discontent, this time in terms
of the girl's own lifetime.

It is bitter in misery to recall past misery--almost as bitter, for
all Dante's cry, as to dwell on past happiness. But, be the past
really dead, and a new and better life begun, the scanning back of a
sombre existence done with for ever, may bring with it a kind of
secret complacency.

Truly, mused Sir Adrian, for one who ever cherished ideal aspirations,
for the student, the "man of books" (as his father had been
banteringly wont to term him), worshipper of the muses, intellectual
Epicurean, and would-be optimist philosopher, it must be admitted he
had strangely dealt, and been dealt with, since he first beheld that
face, now returned to light his solitude! Ah, God bless the child!
Pulwick at least nursed it warmly, whilst unhappy Adrian, ragged and
degraded into a mere fighting beast, roamed through the Marais with
Chouan bands, hunted down by the merciless revolutionists, like
vermin; falling, as months of that existence passed over him, from his
high estate to the level of vermin indeed; outlawed, predatory,
cunning, slinking, filthy--trapped at last, the fit end of vermin!

Scarcely better the long months of confinement in the hulks of
Rochelle. How often he had regretted it, then, not to have been one of
the chosen few who, the day after capture, stood in front of six
levelled muskets, and were sped to rest in some unknown charnel!
Then!--not now. No, it was worth having lived to this hour, to know of
that fair face, in living sleep upon his pillow, under the safeguard
of his roof.

Good it was, that he had escaped at last, though with the blood of one
of his jailors red upon his hands; the blood of a perhaps innocent
man, upon his soul. It was the only time he had taken a life other
than in fair fight, and the thought of it had been wont to fill him
with a sort of nausea; but to-night, he found he could face it, not
only without remorse, but without regret. He was glad he had listened
to Rene's insidious whispers--Rene, who could not endure the captivity
to which his master might, in time, have fallen a passive, hopeless
slave, and yet who would have faced a thousand years of it rather than
escape alone--the faithful heart!

Yes, it was good, and he was glad of it, or time would not have come
when she (stay, how old was the child then?--almost three years, and
still sheltered and cherished by the house of Landale)--when she would
return, and gladden his eyes with a living sight of Cecile, while Rene
watched in his tower above; ay, and old Margery herself lay once more
near the child she had nursed.

Marvellous turn of the wheel of fate!

But, who had come for the children, and where had they been taken? To
their motherland, perhaps; even it might have been before he himself
had left it; or yet to Ireland, where still dwelt kinsfolk of their
blood? Probably it was at the breaking up of the family, caused by the
death of Sir Thomas, that these poor little birds had been removed
from the nest, that had held them so safe and close.

That was in '97, in the yellow autumn of which year Adrian Landale,
then French fisherman, parted from his brother Rene L'Apotre upon the
sea off Belle Isle; parted one grizzly dawn after embracing, as
brothers should. Oh, the stealthy cold of that blank, cheerless
daybreak, how it crept into the marrow of his bones, and chilled the
little energy and spirits he had left! For a whole year they had
fruitlessly sought some English vessel, to convey this English
gentleman back to his native land. He could remember how, at the
moment of separation, from the one friend who had loved both him and
her, his heart sank within him--remember how he clambered from aboard
the poor little smack, up the forbidding sides of the English brig;
how Rene's broken words had bidden God bless him, and restore him
safely home (home!); remember how swiftly the crafts had moved apart,
the mist, the greyness and desolateness; the lapping of the waters,
the hoarse cries of the seamen, all so full of heart-piercing
associations to him, and the last vision of Rene's simple face, with
tears pouring down it, and his open mouth spasmodically trying to give
out a hearty cheer, despite the sobs that came heaving up to it. How
little the simple fellow dreamed of what bitterness the future was yet
holding for his brother and master, to end in these reunions at last!

The vessel which had taken Adrian Landale on board, in answer to the
frantic signals of the fishing-smack, that had sailed from Belle Isle
obviously to meet her, proved to be a privateer, bound for the West
Indies, but cruising somewhat out of her way, in the hope of outgoing
prizes from Nantes.

The captain, who had been led to expect something of importance from
the smack's behaviour, in high dudgeon at finding that so much bustle
and waste of time was only to burden him with a mere castaway seeking
a passage home--one who, albeit a countryman, was too ragged and
disreputable in looks to be trusted in his assurances of
reward--granted him indeed the hospitality of his ship, but on the
condition of his becoming a hand in the company during the forthcoming
expedition.

There was a rough measure of equity in the arrangement, and Adrian
accepted it. The only alternative, moreover, would have been a jump
overboard. And so began a hard spell of life, but a few shades removed
from his existence among the Chouan guerillas; a predatory cruise
lasting over a year, during which the only changes rung in the gamut
of its purpose were the swooping down, as a vulture might, upon
unprotected ships; flying with superior speed from obviously stronger
crafts; engaging, with hawk-like bravery, everything afloat that
displayed inimical colours, if it offered an equal chance of fight.

And this for more than a year, until the privateer, much battered, but
safe, despite her vicissitudes made Halifax for refitting. Here, at
the first suitable port she had touched, Adrian claimed and obtained
his release from obligations which made his life almost unendurable.

Then ensued a period of the most absolute penury; unpopular with most
of his messmates for his melancholy taciturnity, despised by the more
brutal as one who had as little stomach for a carouse as for a bloody
fight, he left the ship without receiving, or even thinking of his
share of prize-money. And he had to support existence with such mean
mechanical employment as came in his way, till an opportunity was
offered of engaging himself as seaman, again from sheer necessity, on
a homeward-bound merchantman--an opportunity which he seized, if not
eagerly, for there was no eagerness left in him, yet under the
pressure of purpose.

Next the long, slowly plodding, toilsome, seemingly eternal course
across the ocean.

But even a convoy, restricted to the speed of its slowest member, if
it escape capture or natural destruction, must meet the opposite shore
at length, and the last year of the century had lapsed in the even
race of time when, after many dreary weeks, on the first of January
1801, the long low lines of sandhills on the Lancastrian coast loomed
in sight. The escort drew away, swiftly southwards, as if in joyful
relief from the tedious task, leaving the convoy to enter the Mersey,
safe and sound.

That evening Adrian, the rough-looking and taciturn sailor, set foot,
for a short while, on his native land, after six years of an exile
which had made of him at five and twenty a prematurely aged and
hopelessly disillusioned man.

And Sir Adrian, as he mused, wrapped in the honoured fur cloak, with
eyes half closed, by his sympathetic fire, recalled how little of joy
this return had had for him. It was the goal he had striven to reach,
and he had reached it, that was all; nay, he recalled how, when at
hand, he had almost dreaded the actual arrival home, dreaded, with the
infinite heart-sickness of sorrow, the emotions of the family welcome
to one restored from such perils by flood and field--if not indeed
already mourned for and forgotten--little wotting how far that return
to Pulwick, that seemed near and certain, was still away in the dim
future of life.

Yet, but for the fit of hypochondriacal humour which had fallen black
upon him that day of deliverance and made him yearn, with an intensity
increasing every moment, to separate himself from his repugnant
associates and haste the moment of solitude and silence, he might have
been rescued, then and for ever, from the quagmire in which perverse
circumstances had enslaved him.

"Look'ee here, matey," said one of his fellow-workers to him, in a
transient fit of good-fellowship which the prospect of approaching
sprees had engendered in him even towards one whom all on board had
felt vaguely to be of a different order, and disliked accordingly,
"you don't seem to like a jolly merchantman--but, maybe, you wouldn't
take more kindly to a man-o'-war. Do you see that there ship?--a
frigate she is; and, whenever there's a King's ship in the Mersey that
means that it's more wholesome for the likes of us to lie low. You
take a hint, matey, and don't be about Liverpool to-night, or until
she's gone. Now, I know a crib that's pretty safe, Birkenhead way;
Mother Redcap's, we call it--no one's ever been nabbed at Mother
Redcap's, and if you'll come along o' me--why then if you won't, go
your way and be damned to you for a----"

This was the parting of Adrian Landale from his fellow-workers. The
idea of spending even one night more in that atmosphere of rum and
filth, in the intimate hearing of blasphemous and obscene language,
was too repulsive to be entertained, and he had turned away from the
offer with a gesture of horror.

With half a dozen others, in whose souls the attractions of the town
at night proved stronger than the fear of the press party, he
disembarked on the Lancashire side, and separating from his
companions, for ever, as he thought, ascended the miserable lanes
leading from the river to the upper town.

His purpose was to sleep in one of the more decent hotels, to call the
next day for help at the banking-house with which the Landales had
dealt for ages past, and thence to take coach for Pulwick. But he had
planned without taking reck of his circumstances. No hotel of repute
would entertain this weather-beaten common sailor in the meanest of
work-stained clothes. After failing at various places even to obtain a
hearing, being threatened with forcible ejectment, derisively referred
to suitable cribs in Love Lane or Tower Street, he gave up the
attempt; and, in his usual dejection of spirit, intensified by
unavowed and unreasonable anger, wandered through the dark streets,
brooding. Thus aimlessly wandering, the remembrance of his young
Utopian imaginings came back to him to mock him. Dreams of universal
brotherhood, of equality, of harmony. He had already seen the apostles
of equality and brotherhood at work--on the banks of the Vilaine. And
realising how he himself, now reduced to the lowest level in the
social scale, hunted with insult from every haunt above that level,
yet loathed and abhorred the very thought of associating again with
his recent brothers in degradation, he laughed a laugh of bitter
self-contempt.

But the night was piercing cold; and, in time, the question arose
whether the stench and closeness of a riverside eating-house would not
be more endurable than the cutting wind, the sleet, and the sharper
pangs of hunger.

His roaming had brought him once more to that quarter of the town
"best suited to the likes of him," according to the innkeeper's
opinion, and he found himself actually seeking a house of
entertainment in the slimy, ill-lighted narrow street, when, from out
the dimness, running towards him, with bare feet paddling in the
sludge, came a slatternly girl, with unkempt wisps of red hair hanging
over her face under the tartan shawl.

"Run, run, Jack," she cried, hoarsely, as she passed by breathless,
"t' gang's comin' up...."

A sudden loathly fear seized Adrian by the heart. He too, took to his
heels by the side of the slut with all the swiftness his tired frame
could muster.

"I'm going to warn my Jo," she gasped, as, jostling each other, they
darted through a maze of nameless alleys.

And then as, spent with running, they emerged at last into a broader
street, it was to find themselves in the very midst of another party
of man-of-war's men, whose brass belt-buckles glinted under the
flickering light of the oil-lamp swinging across the way.

Adrian stopped dead short and looked at the girl in mute reproach.

"May God strike me dead," she screamed, clapping her hands together,
"if I knew the bloody thieves were there! Oh, my bonny lad, I meant to
save ye!" And as her words rang in the air two sailors had Adrian by
the collar and a facetious bluejacket seized her round the waist with
hideous bantering.

A very young officer, wrapped up in a cloak, stood a few paces apart
calmly looking on. To him Adrian called out in fierce, yet anguished,
expostulation:

"I am a free and independent subject, sir, an English gentleman. I
demand that you order your men to release me. For heaven's sake," he
added, pleadingly, "give me but a moment's private hearing!"

A loud guffaw rang through the group. In truth, if appearances make
the gentleman, Adrian was then but a sorry specimen.

The officer smiled--the insufferable smile of a conceited boy raised
to authority.

"I can have no possible doubt of your gentility, sir," he said, with
mocking politeness, and measuring, under the glimmering light, first
the prisoner, from head to foot, and then the girl who, scratching and
blaspheming, vainly tried to make her escape; "but, sir, as a
free-born English gentleman, it will be your duty to help his Majesty
to fight his French enemies. Take the English gentleman along, my
lads!"

A roar of approbation at the officer's facetiousness ran through the
party.

"An' his mother's milk not dry upon his lips," cried the girl, with a
crow of derisive fury, planting as she spoke a sounding smack on a
broad tanned face bent towards her. The little officer grew pink.
"Come, my men, do your duty," he thundered, in his deepest bass.

A rage such as he never had felt in his life suddenly filled Adrian's
whole being. He was a bigger man than any of the party, and the rough
life that fate had imposed on him, had fostered a strength of limb
beyond the common. A thrust of his knee prostrated one of his captors,
a blow in the eye from his elbow staggered the other; the next instant
he had snatched away the cutlass which a third was drawing, and with
it he cleared, for a moment, a space around him.

But as he would have bounded into freedom, a felling blow descended on
his head from behind, a sheet of flame spread before his eyes, and
behind this blaze disappeared the last that Adrian Landale was to see
of England for another spell of years.

When he came back to his senses he was once more on board ship--a
slave, legally kidnapped; degraded by full and proper warrant from his
legitimate status for no crime that could even be invented against
him; a slave to be retained for work or war at his master's pleasure,
liable like a slave to be flogged to death for daring to assert his
light of independence.

       *       *       *       *       *

The memory of that night's doing and of the odious bondage to which
it was a prelude, rarely failed to stir the gall of resentment in Sir
Adrian; men of peaceable instincts are perhaps the most prone to the
feeling of indignation.

But, to-night, a change had come over the spirit of his dreams; he
could think of that past simply as the past--the period of time which
would have had to be spent until the advent of the wonder-working
present: these decrees of Fate had had a purpose. Had the past, by one
jot, been different, the events of this admirable day might never have
been.

The glowing edifice on the hearth collapsed with a darting of sudden
flame and a rolling of red cinders. Sir Adrian rose to rebuild his
fire for the night; and, being once roused, was tempted by the
ruddiness of the wine, glinting under the quiet rays of the lamp, to
advance to the table and partake of his forgotten supper.

The calm atmosphere, the warmth and quiet of the room, in which he
broke his bread and sipped his wine, whilst old Jem stretched by the
hearth gazed at him with yellow up-turned eyes full of lazy inquiry
concerning this departure from the usual nightly regularity; the
serene placidity of the scene indoors as contrasting with the angry
voices of elements without, answered to the peace--the strange
peace--that filled the man's soul, even in the midst of such
uncongenial memories as now rose up before him in vivid concatenation.

She was then five years old. Where was she, when he began that
seemingly endless cruise with the frigate _Porcupine_? He tried to
fancy a Cecile five years old--a chubby, curly-headed mite, nursing
dolls and teasing kittens, whilst he was bullied and browbeaten by
coarse petty officers, shunned and hated by his messmates, and flogged
at length by a tyrannizing captain for obduracy--but he could only see
a Cecile in the spring of womanhood, nestling in the arm-chair yonder
by the fire and looking up at him from the folds of a fur cloak.

She was seven years old when he was flogged. Ah, God! those had been
days! And yet, in the lofty soul of him he had counted it no disgrace;
and he had been flogged again, ay, and a third time for that obstinate
head that would not bend, that obstinate tongue that would persist in
demanding restitution of liberty. The life on board the privateer had
been a matter of bargain; he had bartered also labour and obedience
with the merchantman for the passage home, but the king had no right
to compel the service of a free man!

She was but twelve years old when he was finally released from
thraldom--it had only lasted four years after all; yet what a cycle
for one of his temper! Four years with scarce a moment of
solitude--for no shore-leave was ever allowed to one who openly
repudiated any service contract: four years of a life, where the sole
prospect of change was in these engagements, orgies of carnage, so
eagerly anticipated by officers and men alike, including himself,
though for a reason little suspected by his companions. But even the
historic sea-fights of the _Porcupine_, so far as they affected Adrian
Landale, formed in themselves a chain of monotony. It was ever the
same hurling of shot from ship to ship, the same fierce exchange of
cutlass-throws and pike-pushes between men who had never seen each
other before; the same yelling and execrations, sights, sounds, and
smells ever the same in horror; the same cheers when the enemy's
colours were lowered, followed by the same transient depression; the
cleansing of decks from stains of powder and mire of human blood, the
casting overboard of human bodies that had done their life's work,
broken waste and other rubbish. For weeks Adrian after would taste
blood, smell blood, dream blood, till it seemed in his nausea that all
the waters of the wide clean seas could never wash the taint from him
again. And before the first horrid impressions had time to fade, the
next occasion would have come round again: it was not the fate of
Adrian Landale that either steel or shot, or splintered timber or
falling tackles should put an end to his dreary life, welcome as such
an end would have been to him then.

Then ... but not now. Remembering now his unaccountable escape from
the destruction which had swept from his side many another whose
eagerness for the fray had certes not sprung, like his own, from a
desire to court destruction, he shuddered. And there arose in his mind
the trite old adage:

"Man proposeth..."

God had disposed otherwise.

It was not destined that Adrian Landale should be shot on the high
seas any more than he should be drowned in the rolling mud of the
Vilaine--he was reserved for this day as a set-off to all the
bitterness that had been meted out to him; he was to see the image of
his dead love rise from the sea once more. And, meanwhile, his very
despair and sullenness had been turned to his good. It would not be
said, if history should take count of the fact, that while the Lord of
Pulwick had served four years before the mast, he had ever disgraced
his name by cowardice....

Whether such reasonings were in accordance even with the most
optimistic philosophy, Sir Adrian himself at other times might have
doubted. But he was tender in thought this stormy night, with the
grateful relaxation that a happy break brings in the midst of
long-drawn melancholy.

Everything had been working towards this end--that he should be the
light-keeper of Scarthey on the day when out of the raging waters
Cecile would rise and knock and ask for succour at his chamber.

Cecile! pshaw!--raving again.

Well, the child! Where was she on the day of the last engagement of
that pugnacious _Porcupine_, in the year 1805, when England was freed
from her long incubus of invasion? She was then twelve.

It had seemed if nothing short of a wholesale disaster could terminate
that incongruous existence of his.

The last action of the frigate was a fruitless struggle against
fearful odds. After a prolonged fight with an enemy as dauntless as
herself, with two-thirds of her ship's company laid low, and commanded
at length by the youngest lieutenant, she was tackled as the sun went
low over the scene of a drawn battle, by a fresh sail errant; and, had
it not been for a timely dismasting on board the new-comer, would have
been captured or finally sunk then and there. But that fate was only
held in reserve for her. Bleeding and disabled, she had drawn away
under cover of night from her two hard-hit adversaries, to encounter a
squall that further dismantled her, and, in such forlorn conditions,
was met and finally conquered by the French privateer _Espoir de
Brest_, that pounced upon her in her agony as the vulture upon his
prey.

Among the remainder of the once formidable crew, now seized and
battened down under French hatches, was of course Adrian Landale--he
bore a charmed life. And for a short while the only change probable in
his prospects was a return to French prisons, until such time as it
pleased Heaven to restore peace between the two nations.

But the fortune of war, especially at sea, is fickle and fitful.

The daring brig, lettre de marque, _L'Espoir de Brest_, soon after her
unwonted haul of English prisoners, was overtaken herself by one of
her own species, the _St. Nicholas_ of Liverpool, from whose swiftness
nothing over the sea, that had not wings, could hope to escape if she
chose to give the chase.

Again did Adrian, from the darkness among his fellow-captives, hear
the familiar roar and crash of cannon fight, the hustling and the thud
of leaping feet, the screams and oaths of battle, and, finally, the
triumphant shouts of English throats, and he knew that the Frenchman
was boarded. A last ringing British cheer told of the Frenchman's
surrender, and when he and his comrades were once more free to breathe
a draught of living air, after the deathly atmosphere under hatches,
Adrian learned that the victor was not a man-of-war, but a free-lance,
and conceived again a faint hope that deliverance might be at hand.

It was soon after this action, last of the fights that Adrian the
peace-lover had to pass through, and as the two swift vessels, now
sailing in consort, and under the same colours cleaved the waters,
bound for the Mersey, that a singular little drama took place on board
the _Espoir de Brest_.

Among the younger officers of the English privateer, who were left in
charge of the prize, was a lad upon whom Adrian's jaded eyes rested
with a feeling of mournful sympathy, so handsome was he, and so young;
so full of hope and spirits and joy of life, of all, in fact, of which
he himself had been left coldly bare. Moreover, the ring of the merry
voice, the glint of the clear eye awakened in his memory some fitful
chord, the key of which he vainly sought to trace.

One day, as the trim young lieutenant stood looking across the waters,
with his brave eager gaze that seemed to have absorbed some of the
blue-green shimmer of the element he loved, all unnoting the haggard
sailor at his elbow, a sudden flourish of the spy-glass which he, with
an eager movement, swung up to bear on some distant speck, sent his
watch and seals flying out of his fob upon the deck at Adrian's feet.

Adrian picked them up, and as he waited to restore them to their
owner, who tarried some time intent on his distant peering, he had
time to notice the coat and crest engraved upon one of the massive
trinkets hanging from their black ribbons.

When at last the officer lowered his telescope, Adrian came forward
and saluted him with a slight bow, all unconsciously as unlike the
average Jack Tar's scrape to his superior as can be well imagined:

"Am I not," he asked, "addressing in you, sir, one of the Cochranes of
the Shaws?"

The question and the tone from a common sailor were, of course, enough
to astonish the young man. But there must be more than this, as Adrian
surmised, to cause him to blush, wax angry, and stammer like a very
school-boy found at fault. Speaking with much sharpness:

"My name is Smith, my man," cried he, seizing his belongings, "and
you--just carry on with that coiling!"

"And my name, sir, is Adrian Landale, of Pulwick Priory. I would like
a moment's talk with you, if you will spare me the time. The Cochranes
of the Shaws have been friends of our family for generations."

A guffaw burst from a group of Adrian's mates working hard by, at this
recurrence of what had become with them a standing joke; but the
officer, who had turned on his heels, veered round immediately, and
stood eyeing the speaker in profound astonishment.

"Great God, is it possible! Did you say you were a Landale of Pulwick?
How the devil came you here then, and thus?"

"Press-gang," was Adrian's laconic answer.

The lad gave a prolonged whistle, and was lost for a moment in
cogitation.

"If you are really Mr. Landale," he began, adding hastily, as if to
cover an implied admission--"of course I have heard the name: it is
well known in Lancashire--you had better see the skipper. It must have
been some damnable mistake that has caused a man of your standing to
be pressed."

The speaker ended with almost a deferential air and the smile that had
already warmed Adrian's heart. At the door of the Captain's quarters
he said, with the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye:

"A curious error it was you made, I assure you my name is Smith--Jack
Smith, of Liverpool."

"An excusable error," quoth Adrian, smiling back, "for one of your
seals bear unmistakably the arms of Cochrane of the Shaws, doubtless
some heirloom, some inter-marriage."

"No, sir, hang it!" retorted Mr. Jack Smith of Liverpool, his boyish
face flushing again, and as he spoke he disengaged the trinket from
its neighbours, and jerked it pettishly overboard, "I know nothing of
your Shaws or your Cochranes."

And then he rapped loudly at the cabin-door, as if anxious to avoid
further discussion or comment on the subject.

The result of the interview which followed--interview during which
Adrian in a few words overcame the skipper's scepticism, and was
bidden with all the curiosity men feel at sea for any novelty, to
relate, over a bottle of wine, the chain of his adventures--was his
passing from the forecastle to the officers' quarters, as an honoured
guest on board the _St. Nicholas_, during the rest of her cruise.

Thinking back now upon the last few weeks of his sea-going life, Sir
Adrian realised with something of wonder that he had always dwelt on
them without dislike. They were gilded in his memory by the rays of
his new friendship.

And yet that this young Jack Smith (to keep for him the nondescript
name he had for unknown reasons chosen to assume) should be the first
man to awaken in the misanthropic Adrian the charm of human
intercourse, was singular indeed; one who followed from choice the
odious trade of legally chartered corsair, who was ever ready to
barter the chance of life and limb against what fortune might bring in
his path, to sacrifice human life to secure his own end of enrichment.

Well, the springs of friendship are to be no more discerned than
those of love; there was none of high or low degree, with the
exception of Rene, whose appearance at any time was so welcome to the
recluse upon his rock, as that of the privateersman.

And so, turning to his friend in to-night's softened mood, Sir Adrian
thought gratefully that to him it was that he owed deliverance from
the slavery of the King's service, that it was Jack Smith who had made
it possible for Adrian Landale to live to this great day and await its
coming in peace.

The old clock struck two; and Jem shivered on the rug as the
light-keeper rose at length from the table and sank in his arm-chair
once more.

Visions of the past had been ever his companions; now for the first
time came visions of the future to commingle with them. As if caught
up in the tide of his visitor's bright young life, it seemed as though
he were passing at length out of the valley of the shadow of death.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rene, coming with noiseless bare feet, in the angry yellow dawn of the
second day of the storm, to keep an eye on his master's comfort, found
him sleeping in his chair with a new look of rest upon his face and a
smile upon his lips.




CHAPTER IX

A GENEALOGICAL EPISTLE

                    ... and braided thereupon
    All the devices blazoned on the shield,
    In their own tinct, and added, of her wit,
    A border fantasy of branch and flower.

                                _Idylls of the King._


Pulwick Priory, the ancestral home of the Cumbrian Landales, a
dignified if not overpoweringly lordly mansion, rises almost on the
ridge of the green slope which connects the high land with the sandy
strand of Morecambe; overlooking to the west the great brown breezy
bight, whilst on all other sides it is sheltered by its wooded park.

When the air is clear, from the east window of Scarthey keep, the tall
garden front of greystone is visible, in the extreme distance, against
the darker screen of foliage; whitely glinting if the sun is high;
golden or rosy at the end of day.

As its name implies, Pulwick Priory stands on the site of an extinct
religious house; its oldest walls, in fact, were built from the spoils
of once sacred masonry. It is a house of solid if not regular
proportions, full of unexpected quaintness; showing a medley of
distinct styles, in and out; it has a wide portico in the best
approved neo-classic taste, leading to romantic oaken stairs; here
wide cheerful rooms and airy corridors, there sombre vaulted basements
and mysterious unforeseen nooks.

On the whole, however, it is a harmonious pile of buildings, though
gathering its character from many different centuries, for it has been
mellowed by time, under a hard climate. And it was, in the days of the
pride of the Landales, a most meet dwelling-place for that ancient
race, insomuch as the history of so many of their ancestors was
written successively upon stone and mortar, brick and tile, as well
as upon carved oak, canvas-decked walls, and emblazoned windows.

       *       *       *       *       *

Exactly one week before the disaster, which was supposed to have
befallen Mademoiselle Molly de Savenaye on Scarthey sands, the acting
Lord of Pulwick, if one may so term Mr. Rupert Landale, had received a
letter, the first reading of which caused him a vivid annoyance,
followed by profound reflection.

A slightly-built, dark-visaged man, this younger brother of Sir
Adrian, and vicarious master of his house and lands; like to the
recluse in his exquisite neatness of attire, somewhat like also in the
mould of his features, which were, however, more notably handsome than
Sir Adrian's; but most unlike him, in an emphasised artificiality of
manner, in a restless and wary eye, and in the curious twist of a thin
lip which seemed to give hidden sarcastic meaning even to the most
ordinary remark.

As now he sat by his desk, his straight brows drawn over his
amber-coloured eyes, perusing the closely written sheets of this
troublesome missive, there entered to him the long plaintive figure of
his maiden sister, who had held house for him, under his own minute
directions, ever since the death in premature child-birth of his young
year-wed wife.

Miss Landale, the eldest of the family, had had a disappointment in
her youth, as a result of which she now played the ungrateful _role_
of old maid of the family. She suffered from chronic toothache, as
well as from repressed romantic aspirations, and was the _ame damnee_
of Rupert. One of the most melancholy of human beings, she was tersely
characterised by the village folk as a "_wummicky_ poor thing."

At the sight of Mr. Landale's weighted brow she propped up her own
long sallow face, upon its aching side, with a trembling hand, and,
full of agonised prescience, ventured to ask if anything had happened.

"Sit down," said her brother, with a sort of snarl--He possessed an
extremely irritable temper under his cool sarcastic exterior, a temper
which his peculiar anomalous circumstances, whilst they combined to
excite it, forced him to conceal rigidly from most, and it was a
relief to him to let it out occasionally upon Sophia's meek, ringleted
head.

Sophia collapsed with hasty obedience into a chair, and then Mr.
Landale handed to her the thin fluttering sheets, voluminously crossed
and re-crossed w

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