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The Dead Secret: A Novel

by Wilkie Collins · English · Gutenberg #43092 · 829,556 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Dead Secret: A Novel

Author: Wilkie Collins


        
Release date: July 5, 2013 [eBook #43092]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43092

Credits: Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEAD SECRET: A NOVEL ***

Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal
  signs=.

  On page 202, a reference to "Uncle John" has been changed to "Uncle
  Joseph."




  [Illustration: "I SIT DOWN UNASKED, AND I ANNOUNCE MY OWN NAME--ANDREW
   TREVERTON."]




     THE DEAD SECRET;

     A Novel.

     BY WILKIE COLLINS,

     AUTHOR OF

     "THE WOMAN IN WHITE," "POOR MISS FINCH," "NO NAME,"
     "MAN AND WIFE," "THE MOONSTONE," &c.

     _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS._

     _NEW YORK:_
     HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
     FRANKLIN SQUARE.
     1874.




WILKIE COLLINS'S NOVELS.


HARPER'S ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY EDITION.

_12mo, Cloth, $1 50 per Volume._

     _ARMADALE._
     _BASIL._
     _HIDE-AND-SEEK._
     _THE NEW MAGDALEN._
     _NO NAME._
     _MAN AND WIFE._
     _POOR MISS FINCH._
     _THE MOONSTONE._
     _THE WOMAN IN WHITE._
     _THE DEAD SECRET._
     _QUEEN OF HEARTS._


     PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.


     Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by
     HARPER & BROTHERS,
     In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.




THE DEAD SECRET.




BOOK I.




CHAPTER I.

THE TWENTY-THIRD OF AUGUST, 1829.


"Will she last out the night, I wonder?"

"Look at the clock, Mathew."

"Ten minutes past twelve! She HAS lasted the night out. She has lived,
Robert, to see ten minutes of the new day."

These words were spoken in the kitchen of a large country-house
situated on the west coast of Cornwall. The speakers were two of the
men-servants composing the establishment of Captain Treverton, an
officer in the navy, and the eldest male representative of an old
Cornish family. Both the servants communicated with each other
restrainedly, in whispers--sitting close together, and looking round
expectantly toward the door whenever the talk flagged between them.

"It's an awful thing," said the elder of the men, "for us two to be
alone here, at this dark time, counting out the minutes that our
mistress has left to live!"

"Robert," said the other, "you have been in the service here since you
were a boy--did you ever hear that our mistress was a play-actress
when our master married her?"

"How came you to know that?" inquired the elder servant, sharply.

"Hush!" cried the other, rising quickly from his chair.

A bell rang in the passage outside.

"Is that for one of us?" asked Mathew.

"Can't you tell, by the sound, which is which of those bells yet?"
exclaimed Robert, contemptuously. "That bell is for Sarah Leeson. Go
out into the passage and look."

The younger servant took a candle and obeyed. When he opened the
kitchen-door, a long row of bells met his eye on the wall opposite.
Above each of them was painted, in neat black letters, the
distinguishing title of the servant whom it was specially intended to
summon. The row of letters began with Housekeeper and Butler, and
ended with Kitchen-maid and Footman's Boy.

Looking along the bells, Mathew easily discovered that one of them was
still in motion. Above it were the words Lady's-Maid. Observing this,
he passed quickly along the passage, and knocked at an old-fashioned
oak door at the end of it. No answer being given, he opened the door
and looked into the room. It was dark and empty.

"Sarah is not in the housekeeper's room," said Mathew, returning to
his fellow-servant in the kitchen.

"She is gone to her own room, then," rejoined the other. "Go up and
tell her that she is wanted by her mistress."

The bell rang again as Mathew went out.

"Quick!--quick!" cried Robert. "Tell her she is wanted directly.
Wanted," he continued to himself in lower tones, "perhaps for the last
time!"

Mathew ascended three flights of stairs--passed half-way down a long
arched gallery--and knocked at another old-fashioned oak door. This
time the signal was answered. A low, clear, sweet voice, inside the
room, inquired who was waiting without? In a few hasty words Mathew
told his errand. Before he had done speaking the door was quietly and
quickly opened, and Sarah Leeson confronted him on the threshold, with
her candle in her hand.

Not tall, not handsome, not in her first youth--shy and irresolute in
manner--simple in dress to the utmost limits of plainness--the
lady's-maid, in spite of all these disadvantages, was a woman whom it
was impossible to look at without a feeling of curiosity, if not of
interest. Few men, at first sight of her, could have resisted the
desire to find out who she was; few would have been satisfied with
receiving for answer, She is Mrs. Treverton's maid; few would have
refrained from the attempt to extract some secret information for
themselves from her face and manner; and none, not even the most
patient and practiced of observers, could have succeeded in
discovering more than that she must have passed through the ordeal of
some great suffering at some former period of her life. Much in her
manner, and more in her face, said plainly and sadly: I am the wreck
of something that you might once have liked to see; a wreck that can
never be repaired--that must drift on through life unnoticed,
unguided, unpitied--drift till the fatal shore is touched, and the
waves of Time have swallowed up these broken relics of me forever.
This was the story that was told in Sarah Leeson's face--this, and no
more.

No two men interpreting that story for themselves, would probably have
agreed on the nature of the suffering which this woman had undergone.
It was hard to say, at the outset, whether the past pain that had set
its ineffaceable mark on her had been pain of the body or pain of the
mind. But whatever the nature of the affliction she had suffered, the
traces it had left were deeply and strikingly visible in every part of
her face.

Her cheeks had lost their roundness and their natural color; her lips,
singularly flexible in movement and delicate in form, had faded to an
unhealthy paleness; her eyes, large and black and overshadowed by
unusually thick lashes, had contracted an anxious startled look, which
never left them, and which piteously expressed the painful acuteness
of her sensibility, the inherent timidity of her disposition. So far,
the marks which sorrow or sickness had set on her were the marks
common to most victims of mental or physical suffering. The one
extraordinary personal deterioration which she had undergone consisted
in the unnatural change that had passed over the color of her hair. It
was as thick and soft, it grew as gracefully, as the hair of a young
girl; but it was as gray as the hair of an old woman. It seemed to
contradict, in the most startling manner, every personal assertion of
youth that still existed in her face. With all its haggardness and
paleness, no one could have looked at it and supposed for a moment
that it was the face of an elderly woman. Wan as they might be, there
was not a wrinkle in her cheeks. Her eyes, viewed apart from their
prevailing expression of uneasiness and timidity, still preserved that
bright, clear moisture which is never seen in the eyes of the old. The
skin about her temples was as delicately smooth as the skin of a
child. These and other physical signs which never mislead, showed
that she was still, as to years, in the very prime of her life. Sickly
and sorrow-stricken as she was, she looked, from the eyes downward, a
woman who had barely reached thirty years of age. From the eyes
upward, the effect of her abundant gray hair, seen in connection with
her face, was not simply incongruous--it was absolutely startling; so
startling as to make it no paradox to say that she would have looked
most natural, most like herself, if her hair had been dyed. In her
case, Art would have seemed to be the truth, because Nature looked
like falsehood.

What shock had stricken her hair, in the very maturity of its
luxuriance, with the hue of an unnatural old age? Was it a serious
illness, or a dreadful grief, that had turned her gray in the prime of
her womanhood? That question had often been agitated among her
fellow-servants, who were all struck by the peculiarities of her
personal appearance, and rendered a little suspicious of her, as well,
by an inveterate habit that she had of talking to herself. Inquire as
they might, however, their curiosity was always baffled. Nothing more
could be discovered than that Sarah Leeson was, in the common phrase,
touchy on the subject of her gray hair and her habit of talking to
herself, and that Sarah Leeson's mistress had long since forbidden
every one, from her husband downward, to ruffle her maid's
tranquillity by inquisitive questions.

She stood for an instant speechless, on that momentous morning of the
twenty-third of August, before the servant who summoned her to her
mistress's death-bed--the light of the candle flaring brightly over
her large, startled, black eyes, and the luxuriant, unnatural gray
hair above them. She stood a moment silent--her hand trembling while
she held the candlestick, so that the extinguisher lying loose in it
rattled incessantly--then thanked the servant for calling her. The
trouble and fear in her voice, as she spoke, seemed to add to its
sweetness; the agitation of her manner took nothing away from its
habitual gentleness, its delicate, winning, feminine restraint.
Mathew, who, like the other servants, secretly distrusted and disliked
her for differing from the ordinary pattern of professed lady's-maids,
was, on this particular occasion, so subdued by her manner and her
tone as she thanked him, that he offered to carry her candle for her
to the door of her mistress's bed-chamber. She shook her head, and
thanked him again, then passed before him quickly on her way out of
the gallery.

The room in which Mrs. Treverton lay dying was on the floor beneath.
Sarah hesitated twice before she knocked at the door. It was opened by
Captain Treverton.

The instant she saw her master she started back from him. If she had
dreaded a blow she could hardly have drawn away more suddenly, or with
an expression of greater alarm. There was nothing in Captain
Treverton's face to warrant the suspicion of ill-treatment, or even of
harsh words. His countenance was kind, hearty, and open; and the tears
were still trickling down it which he had shed by his wife's bedside.

"Go in," he said, turning away his face. "She does not wish the nurse
to attend; she only wishes for you. Call me if the doctor--" His voice
faltered, and he hurried away without attempting to finish the
sentence.

Sarah Leeson, instead of entering her mistress's room, stood looking
after her master attentively, with her pale cheeks turned to a deathly
whiteness--with an eager, doubting, questioning terror in her eyes.
When he had disappeared round the corner of the gallery, she listened
for a moment outside the door of the sick-room--whispered affrightedly
to herself, "Can she have told him?"--then opened the door, with a
visible effort to recover her self-control; and, after lingering
suspiciously on the threshold for a moment, went in.

Mrs. Treverton's bed-chamber was a large, lofty room, situated in the
western front of the house, and consequently overlooking the sea-view.
The night-light burning by the bedside displayed rather than dispelled
the darkness in the corners of the room. The bed was of the
old-fashioned pattern, with heavy hangings and thick curtains drawn
all round it. Of the other objects in the chamber, only those of the
largest and most solid kind were prominent enough to be tolerably
visible in the dim light. The cabinets, the wardrobe, the full-length
looking-glass, the high-backed arm-chair, these, with the great
shapeless bulk of the bed itself, towered up heavily and gloomily into
view. Other objects were all merged together in the general obscurity.
Through the open window, opened to admit the fresh air of the new
morning after the sultriness of the August night, there poured
monotonously into the room the dull, still, distant roaring of the
surf on the sandy coast. All outer noises were hushed at that first
dark hour of the new day. Inside the room the one audible sound was
the slow, toilsome breathing of the dying woman, raising itself in its
mortal frailness, awfully and distinctly, even through the far
thunder-breathing from the bosom of the everlasting sea.

"Mistress," said Sarah Leeson, standing close to the curtains, but not
withdrawing them, "my master has left the room, and has sent me here
in his place."

"Light!--give me more light."

The feebleness of mortal sickness was in the voice; but the accent of
the speaker sounded resolute even yet--doubly resolute by contrast
with the hesitation of the tones in which Sarah had spoken. The strong
nature of the mistress and the weak nature of the maid came out, even
in that short interchange of words spoken through the curtain of a
death-bed.

Sarah lit two candles with a wavering hand--placed them hesitatingly
on a table by the bedside--waited for a moment, looking all round her
with suspicious timidity--then undrew the curtains.

The disease of which Mrs. Treverton was dying was one of the most
terrible of all the maladies that afflict humanity, one to which women
are especially subject, and one which undermines life without, in most
cases, showing any remarkable traces of its corroding progress in the
face. No uninstructed person, looking at Mrs. Treverton when her
attendant undrew the bed-curtain, could possibly have imagined that
she was past all help that mortal skill could offer to her. The slight
marks of illness in her face, the inevitable changes in the grace and
roundness of its outline, were rendered hardly noticeable by the
marvelous preservation of her complexion in all the light and delicacy
of its first girlish beauty. There lay her face on the pillow--tenderly
framed in by the rich lace of her cap, softly crowned by her shining
brown hair--to all outward appearance, the face of a beautiful woman
recovering from a slight illness, or reposing after unusual fatigue.
Even Sarah Leeson, who had watched her all through her malady, could
hardly believe, as she looked at her mistress, that the Gates of Life
had closed behind her, and that the beckoning hand of Death was
signing to her already from the Gates of the Grave.

Some dog's-eared books in paper covers lay on the counterpane of the
bed. As soon as the curtain was drawn aside Mrs. Treverton ordered her
attendant by a gesture to remove them. They were plays, underscored in
certain places by ink lines, and marked with marginal annotations
referring to entrances, exits, and places on the stage. The servants,
talking down stairs of their mistress's occupation before her
marriage, had not been misled by false reports. Their master, after he
had passed the prime of life, had, in very truth, taken his wife from
the obscure stage of a country theatre, when little more than two
years had elapsed since her first appearance in public. The
dog's-eared old plays had been once her treasured dramatic library;
she had always retained a fondness for them from old associations;
and, during the latter part of her illness, they had remained on her
bed for days and days together.

Having put away the plays, Sarah went back to her mistress; and, with
more of dread and bewilderment in her face than grief, opened her lips
to speak. Mrs. Treverton held up her hand, as a sign that she had
another order to give.

"Bolt the door," she said, in the same enfeebled voice, but with the
same accent of resolution which had so strikingly marked her first
request to have more light in the room. "Bolt the door. Let no one in,
till I give you leave."

"No one?" repeated Sarah, faintly. "Not the doctor? not even my
master?"

"Not the doctor--not even your master," said Mrs. Treverton, and
pointed to the door. The hand was weak; but even in that momentary
action of it there was no mistaking the gesture of command.

Sarah bolted the door, returned irresolutely to the bedside, fixed her
large, eager, startled eyes inquiringly on her mistress's face, and,
suddenly bending over her, said in a whisper:

"Have you told my master?"

"No," was the answer. "I sent for him, to tell him--I tried hard to
speak the words--it shook me to my very soul, only to think how I
should best break it to him--I am so fond of him! I love him so
dearly! But I should have spoken in spite of that, if he had not
talked of the child. Sarah! he did nothing but talk of the child--and
that silenced me."

Sarah, with a forgetfulness of her station which might have appeared
extraordinary even in the eyes of the most lenient of mistresses,
flung herself back in a chair when the first word of Mrs. Treverton's
reply was uttered, clasped her trembling hands over her face, and
groaned to herself, "Oh, what will happen! what will happen now!"

Mrs. Treverton's eyes had softened and moistened when she spoke of her
love for her husband. She lay silent for a few minutes; the working of
some strong emotion in her being expressed by her quick, hard, labored
breathing, and by the painful contraction of her eyebrows. Ere long,
she turned her head uneasily toward the chair in which her attendant
was sitting, and spoke again--this time in a voice which had sunk to a
whisper.

"Look for my medicine," said she; "I want it."

Sarah started up, and with the quick instinct of obedience brushed
away the tears that were rolling fast over her cheeks.

"The doctor," she said. "Let me call the doctor."

"No! The medicine--look for the medicine."

"Which bottle? The opiate--"

"No. Not the opiate. The other."

Sarah took a bottle from the table, and looking attentively at the
written direction on the label, said that it was not yet time to take
that medicine again.

"Give me the bottle."

"Oh, pray don't ask me. Pray wait. The doctor said it was as bad as
dram-drinking, if you took too much."

Mrs. Treverton's clear gray eyes began to flash; the rosy flush
deepened on her cheeks; the commanding hand was raised again, by an
effort, from the counterpane on which it lay.

"Take the cork out of the bottle," she said, "and give it to me. I
want strength. No matter whether I die in an hour's time or a week's.
Give me the bottle."

"No, no--not the bottle!" said Sarah, giving it up, nevertheless,
under the influence of her mistress's look. "There are two doses left.
Wait, pray wait till I get a glass."

She turned again toward the table. At the same instant Mrs. Treverton
raised the bottle to her lips, drained it of its contents, and flung
it from her on the bed.

"She has killed herself!" cried Sarah, running in terror to the door.

"Stop!" said the voice from the bed, more resolute than ever, already.
"Stop! Come back and prop me up higher on the pillows."

Sarah put her hand on the bolt.

"Come back!" reiterated Mrs. Treverton. "While there is life in me, I
will be obeyed. Come back!" The color began to deepen perceptibly all
over her face, and the light to grow brighter in her widely opened
eyes.

Sarah came back; and with shaking hands added one more to the many
pillows which supported the dying woman's head and shoulders. While
this was being done the bed-clothes became a little discomposed. Mrs.
Treverton shuddered, and drew them up to their former position, close
round her neck.

"Did you unbolt the door?" she asked.

"No."

"I forbid you to go near it again. Get my writing-case, and the pen
and ink, from the cabinet near the window."

Sarah went to the cabinet and opened it; then stopped, as if some
sudden suspicion had crossed her mind, and asked what the writing
materials were wanted for.

"Bring them, and you will see."

The writing-case, with a sheet of note-paper on it, was placed upon
Mrs. Treverton's knees; the pen was dipped into the ink, and given to
her; she paused, closed her eyes for a minute, and sighed heavily;
then began to write, saying to her waiting-maid, as the pen touched
the paper--"Look."

Sarah peered anxiously over her shoulder, and saw the pen slowly and
feebly form these three words: _To my Husband_.

"Oh, no! no! For God's sake, don't write it!" she cried, catching at
her mistress's hand--but suddenly letting it go again the moment Mrs.
Treverton looked at her.

The pen went on; and more slowly, more feebly, formed words enough to
fill a line--then stopped. The letters of the last syllable were all
blotted together.

"Don't!" reiterated Sarah, dropping on her knees at the bedside.
"Don't write it to him if you can't tell it to him. Let me go on
bearing what I have borne so long already. Let the Secret die with you
and die with me, and be never known in this world--never, never,
never!"

"The Secret must be told," answered Mrs. Treverton. "My husband ought
to know it, and must know it. I tried to tell him, and my courage
failed me. I can not trust you to tell him, after I am gone. It must
be written. Take you the pen; my sight is failing, my touch is dull.
Take the pen, and write what I tell you."

Sarah, instead of obeying, hid her face in the bed-cover, and wept
bitterly.

"You have been with me ever since my marriage," Mrs. Treverton went
on. "You have been my friend more than my servant. Do you refuse my
last request? You do! Fool! look up and listen to me. On your peril,
refuse to take the pen. Write, or I shall not rest in my grave.
_Write, or as true as there is a Heaven above us, I will come to you
from the other world!_"

Sarah started to her feet with a faint scream.

"You make my flesh creep!" she whispered, fixing her eyes on her
mistress's face with a stare of superstitious horror.

At the same instant, the overdose of the stimulating medicine began to
affect Mrs. Treverton's brain. She rolled her head restlessly from
side to side of the pillow--repeated vacantly a few lines from one of
the old play-books which had been removed from her bed--and suddenly
held out the pen to the servant, with a theatrical wave of the hand,
and a glance upward at an imaginary gallery of spectators.

"Write!" she cried, with an awful mimicry of her old stage voice.
"Write!" And the weak hand was waved again with a forlorn, feeble
imitation of the old stage gesture.

Closing her fingers mechanically on the pen that was thrust between
them, Sarah, with her eyes still expressing the superstitious terror
which her mistress's words had aroused, waited for the next command.
Some minutes elapsed before Mrs. Treverton spoke again. She still
retained her senses sufficiently to be vaguely conscious of the effect
which the medicine was producing on her, and to be desirous of
combating its further progress before it succeeded in utterly
confusing her ideas. She asked first for the smelling-bottle, next
for some Eau de Cologne.

This last, poured onto her handkerchief and applied to her forehead,
seemed to prove successful in partially clearing her faculties. Her
eyes recovered their steady look of intelligence; and, when she again
addressed her maid, reiterating the word "Write," she was able to
enforce the direction by beginning immediately to dictate in quiet,
deliberate, determined tones. Sarah's tears fell fast; her lips
murmured fragments of sentences in which entreaties, expressions of
penitence, and exclamations of fear were all strangely mingled
together; but she wrote on submissively, in wavering lines, until she
had nearly filled the first two sides of the note-paper. Then Mrs.
Treverton paused, looked the writing over, and, taking the pen, signed
her name at the end of it. With this effort, her powers of resistance
to the exciting effect of the medicine seemed to fail her again. The
deep flush began to tinge her cheeks once more, and she spoke
hurriedly and unsteadily when she handed the pen back to her maid.

"Sign!" she cried, beating her hand feebly on the bed-clothes. "Sign
'Sarah Leeson, witness.' No!--write 'Accomplice.' Take your share of
it; I won't have it shifted on me. Sign, I insist on it! Sign as I
tell you."

Sarah obeyed; and Mrs. Treverton taking the paper from her, pointed to
it solemnly, with a return of the stage gesture which had escaped her
a little while back.

"You will give this to your master," she said, "when I am dead; and
you will answer any questions he puts to you as truly as if you were
before the judgment-seat."

Clasping her hands fast together, Sarah regarded her mistress, for the
first time, with steady eyes, and spoke to her for the first time in
steady tones.

"If I only knew that I was fit to die," she said, "oh, how gladly I
would change places with you!"

"Promise me that you will give the paper to your master," repeated
Mrs. Treverton. "Promise--no! I won't trust your promise--I'll have
your oath. Get the Bible--the Bible the clergyman used when he was
here this morning. Get it, or I shall not rest in my grave. Get it,
_or I will come to you from the other world_."

The mistress laughed as she reiterated that threat. The maid
shuddered, as she obeyed the command which it was designed to impress
on her.

"Yes, yes--the Bible the clergyman used," continued Mrs. Treverton,
vacantly, after the book had been produced. "The clergyman--a poor
weak man--I frightened him, Sarah. He said, 'Are you at peace with all
the world?' and I said, 'All but one.' You know who."

"The Captain's brother? Oh, don't die at enmity with any body. Don't
die at enmity even with _him_," pleaded Sarah.

"The clergyman said so too," murmured Mrs. Treverton, her eyes
beginning to wander childishly round the room, her tones growing
suddenly lower and more confused. "'You must forgive him,' the
clergyman said. And I said, 'No, I forgive all the world, but not my
husband's brother.' The clergyman got up from the bedside, frightened,
Sarah. He talked about praying for me, and coming back. Will he come
back?"

"Yes, yes," answered Sarah. "He is a good man--he will come back--and
oh! tell him that you forgive the Captain's brother! Those vile words
he spoke of you when you were married will come home to him some day.
Forgive him--forgive him before you die!"

Saying those words, she attempted to remove the Bible softly out of
her mistress's sight. The action attracted Mrs. Treverton's attention,
and roused her sinking faculties into observation of present things.

"Stop!" she cried, with a gleam of the old resolution flashing once
more over the dying dimness of her eyes. She caught at Sarah's hand
with a great effort, placed it on the Bible, and held it there. Her
other hand wandered a little over the bed-clothes, until it
encountered the written paper addressed to her husband. Her fingers
closed on it, and a sigh of relief escaped her lips.

"Ah!" she said, "I know what I wanted the Bible for. I'm dying with
all my senses about me, Sarah; you can't deceive me even yet." She
stopped again, smiled a little, whispered to herself rapidly, "Wait,
wait, wait!" then added aloud, with the old stage voice and the old
stage gesture: "No! I won't trust you on your promise. I'll have your
oath. Kneel down. These are my last words in this world--disobey them
if you dare!"

Sarah dropped on her knees by the bed. The breeze outside,
strengthening just then with the slow advance of the morning, parted
the window-curtains a little, and wafted a breath of its sweet
fragrance joyously into the sick-room. The heavy beating hum of the
distant surf came in at the same time, and poured out its unresting
music in louder strains. Then the window-curtains fell to again
heavily, the wavering flame of the candle grew steady once more, and
the awful silence in the room sank deeper than ever.

"Swear!" said Mrs. Treverton. Her voice failed her when she had
pronounced that one word. She struggled a little, recovered the power
of utterance, and went on: "Swear that you will not destroy this paper
after I am dead."

Even while she pronounced these solemn words, even at that last
struggle for life and strength, the ineradicable theatrical instinct
showed, with a fearful inappropriateness, how firmly it kept its place
in her mind. Sarah felt the cold hand that was still laid on hers
lifted for a moment--saw it waving gracefully toward her--felt it
descend again, and clasp her own hand with a trembling, impatient
pressure. At that final appeal, she answered faintly,

"I swear it."

"Swear that you will not take this paper away with you, if you leave
the house, after I am dead."

Again Sarah paused before she answered--again the trembling pressure
made itself felt on her hand, but more weakly this time--again the
words dropped affrightedly from her lips--

"I swear it."

"Swear!" Mrs. Treverton began for the third time. Her voice failed her
once more; and she struggled vainly to regain the command over it.

Sarah looked up, and saw signs of convulsion beginning to disfigure
the white face--saw the fingers of the white, delicate hand getting
crooked as they reached over toward the table on which the
medicine-bottles were placed.

"You drank it all," she cried, starting to her feet, as she
comprehended the meaning of that gesture. "Mistress, dear mistress,
you drank it all--there is nothing but the opiate left. Let me go--let
me go and call--"

A look from Mrs. Treverton stopped her before she could utter another
word. The lips of the dying woman were moving rapidly. Sarah put her
ear close to them. At first she heard nothing but panting, quick-drawn
breaths--then a few broken words mingled confusedly with them:

"I hav'n't done--you must swear--close, close, come close--a third
thing--your master--swear to give it--"

The last words died away very softly. The lips that had been forming
them so laboriously parted on a sudden and closed again no more. Sarah
sprang to the door, opened it, and called into the passage for help;
then ran back to the bedside, caught up the sheet of note-paper on
which she had written from her mistress's dictation, and hid it in her
bosom. The last look of Mrs. Treverton's eyes fastened sternly and
reproachfully on her as she did this, and kept their expression
unchanged, through the momentary distortion of the rest of the
features, for one breathless moment. That moment passed, and, with the
next, the shadow which goes before the presence of death stole up and
shut out the light of life in one quiet instant from all the face.

The doctor, followed by the nurse and by one of the servants, entered
the room; and, hurrying to the bedside, saw at a glance that the time
for his attendance there had passed away forever. He spoke first to
the servant who had followed him.

"Go to your master," he said, "and beg him to wait in his own room
until I can come and speak to him."

Sarah still stood--without moving or speaking, or noticing any one--by
the bedside.

The nurse, approaching to draw the curtains together, started at the
sight of her face, and turned to the doctor.

"I think this person had better leave the room, Sir?" said the nurse,
with some appearance of contempt in her tones and looks. "She seems
unreasonably shocked and terrified by what has happened."

"Quite right," said the doctor. "It is best that she should
withdraw.--Let me recommend you to leave us for a little while," he
added, touching Sarah on the arm.

She shrank back suspiciously, raised one of her hands to the place
where the letter lay hidden in her bosom, and pressed it there firmly,
while she held out the other hand for a candle.

"You had better rest for a little in your own room," said the doctor,
giving her a candle. "Stop, though," he continued, after a moment's
reflection. "I am going to break the sad news to your master, and I
may find that he is anxious to hear any last words that Mrs. Treverton
may have spoken in your presence. Perhaps you had better come with me,
and wait while I go into Captain Treverton's room."

"No! no!--oh, not now--not now, for God's sake!" Speaking those words
in low, quick, pleading tones, and drawing back affrightedly to the
door, Sarah disappeared without waiting a moment to be spoken to
again.

"A strange woman!" said the doctor, addressing the nurse. "Follow her,
and see where she goes to, in case she is wanted and we are obliged to
send for her. I will wait here until you come back."

When the nurse returned she had nothing to report but that she had
followed Sarah Leeson to her own bedroom, had seen her enter it, had
listened outside, and had heard her lock the door.

"A strange woman!" repeated the doctor. "One of the silent, secret
sort."

"One of the wrong sort," said the nurse. "She is always talking to
herself, and that is a bad sign, in my opinion. I distrusted her, Sir,
the very first day I entered the house."




CHAPTER II.

THE CHILD.


The instant Sarah Leeson had turned the key of her bedroom door, she
took the sheet of note-paper from its place of concealment in her
bosom--shuddering, when she drew it out, as if the mere contact of it
hurt her--placed it open on her little dressing-table, and fixed her
eyes eagerly on the lines which the note contained. At first they swam
and mingled together before her. She pressed her hands over her eyes,
for a few minutes, and then looked at the writing again.

The characters were clear now--vividly clear, and, as she fancied,
unnaturally large and near to view. There was the address: "To my
Husband;" there the first blotted line beneath, in her dead mistress's
handwriting; there the lines that followed, traced by her own pen,
with the signature at the end--Mrs. Treverton's first, and then her
own. The whole amounted to but very few sentences, written on one
perishable fragment of paper, which the flame of a candle would have
consumed in a moment. Yet there she sat, reading, reading, reading,
over and over again; never touching the note, except when it was
absolutely necessary to turn over the first page; never moving, never
speaking, never raising her eyes from the paper. As a condemned
prisoner might read his death-warrant, so did Sarah Leeson now read
the few lines which she and her mistress had written together not half
an hour since.

The secret of the paralyzing effect of that writing on her mind lay,
not only in itself, but in the circumstances which had attended the
act of its production.

The oath which had been proposed by Mrs. Treverton under no more
serious influence than the last caprice of her disordered faculties,
stimulated by confused remembrances of stage words and stage
situations, had been accepted by Sarah Leeson as the most sacred and
inviolable engagement to which she could bind herself. The threat of
enforcing obedience to her last commands from beyond the grave, which
the mistress had uttered in mocking experiment on the superstitious
fears of the maid, now hung darkly over the weak mind of Sarah, as a
judgment which might descend on her, visibly and inexorably, at any
moment of her future life. When she roused herself at last, and pushed
away the paper and rose to her feet, she stood quite still for an
instant, before she ventured to look behind her. When she did look, it
was with an effort and a start, with a searching distrust of the empty
dimness in the remoter corners of the room.

Her old habit of talking to herself began to resume its influence, as
she now walked rapidly backward and forward, sometimes along the room
and sometimes across it. She repeated incessantly such broken phrases
as these: "How can I give him the letter?--Such a good master; so kind
to us all.--Why did she die, and leave it all to _me_?--I can't bear
it alone; it's too much for me." While reiterating these sentences,
she vacantly occupied herself in putting things about the room in
order, which were set in perfect order already. All her looks, all her
actions, betrayed the vain struggle of a weak mind to sustain itself
under the weight of a heavy responsibility. She arranged and
re-arranged the cheap china ornaments on her chimney-piece a dozen
times over--put her pin-cushion first on the looking-glass, then on
the table in front of it--changed the position of the little porcelain
dish and tray on her wash-hand-stand, now to one side of the basin,
and now to the other. Throughout all these trifling actions the
natural grace, delicacy, and prim neat-handedness of the woman still
waited mechanically on the most useless and aimless of her occupations
of the moment. She knocked nothing down, she put nothing awry; her
footsteps at the fastest made no sound--the very skirts of her dress
were kept as properly and prudishly composed as if it was broad
daylight and the eyes of all her neighbors were looking at her.

From time to time the sense of the words she was murmuring confusedly
to herself changed. Sometimes they disjointedly expressed bolder and
more self-reliant thoughts. Once they seemed to urge her again to the
dressing-table and the open letter on it, against her own will. She
read aloud the address, "To my Husband," and caught the letter up
sharply, and spoke in firmer tones. "Why give it to him at all? Why
not let the secret die with her and die with me, as it ought? Why
should he know it? He shall _not_ know it!"

Saying those last words, she desperately held the letter within an
inch of the flame of the candle. At the same moment the white curtain
over the window before her stirred a little, as the freshening air
found its way through the old-fashioned, ill-fitting sashes. Her eye
caught sight of it, as it waved gently backward and forward. She
clasped the letter suddenly to her breast with both hands, and shrank
back against the wall of the room, her eyes still fastened on the
curtain with the same blank look of horror which they had exhibited
when Mrs. Treverton had threatened to claim her servant's obedience
from the other world.

"Something moves," she gasped to herself, in a breathless whisper.
"Something moves in the room."

The curtain waved slowly to and fro for the second time. Still fixedly
looking at it over her shoulder, she crept along the wall to the door.

"Do you come to me already?" she said, her eyes riveted on the curtain
while her hand groped over the lock for the key. "Before your grave
is dug? Before your coffin is made? Before your body is cold?"

She opened the door and glided into the passage; stopped there for a
moment, and looked back into the room.

"Rest!" she said. "Rest, mistress--he shall have the letter."

The staircase-lamp guided her out of the passage. Descending
hurriedly, as if she feared to give herself time to think, she reached
Captain Treverton's study, on the ground-floor, in a minute or two.
The door was wide open, and the room was empty.

After reflecting a little, she lighted one of the chamber-candles
standing on the hall-table, at the lamp in the study, and ascended the
stairs again to her master's bedroom. After repeatedly knocking at the
door and obtaining no answer, she ventured to go in. The bed had not
been disturbed, the candles had not been lit--to all appearance the
room had not even been entered during the night.

There was but one other place to seek him--the chamber in which his
wife lay dead. Could she summon the courage to give him the letter
there? She hesitated a little--then whispered, "I must! I must!"

The direction she now compelled herself to take led her a little way
down the stairs again. She descended very slowly this time, holding
cautiously by the banisters, and pausing to take breath almost at
every step. The door of what had been Mrs. Treverton's bedroom was
opened, when she ventured to knock at it, by the nurse, who inquired,
roughly and suspiciously, what she wanted there.

"I want to speak to my master."

"Look for him somewhere else. He was here half an hour ago. He is gone
now."

"Do you know where he has gone?"

"No. I don't pry into other people's goings and comings. I mind my own
business."

With that discourteous answer, the nurse closed the door again. Just
as Sarah turned away from it she looked toward the inner end of the
passage. The door of the nursery was situated there. It was ajar, and
a dim gleam of candle-light was flickering through it.

  [Illustration: "AND TOWARD THE OPENING THUS MADE SARAH NOW ADVANCED."]

She went in immediately, and saw that the candle-light came from an
inner room, usually occupied, as she well knew, by the nursery-maid
and by the only child of the house of Treverton--a little girl named
Rosamond, aged, at that time, nearly five years.

"Can he be there?--in that room, of all the rooms in the house!"

Quickly as the thought arose in her mind, Sarah raised the letter
(which she had hitherto carried in her hand) to the bosom of her
dress, and hid it for the second time, exactly as she had hidden it on
leaving her mistress's bedside.

She then stole across the nursery on tiptoe toward the inner room. The
entrance to it, to please some caprice of the child's, had been
arched, and framed with trellis-work, gayly colored, so as to resemble
the entrance to a summer-house. Two pretty chintz curtains, hanging
inside the trellis-work, formed the only barrier between the day-room
and the bedroom. One of these was looped up, and toward the opening
thus made Sarah now advanced, after cautiously leaving her candle in
the passage outside.

The first object that attracted her attention in the child's bedroom
was the figure of the nurse-maid, leaning back, fast asleep, in an
easy-chair by the window. Venturing, after this discovery, to look
more boldly into the room, she next saw her master sitting with his
back toward her, by the side of the child's crib. Little Rosamond was
awake, and was standing up in bed with her arms round her father's
neck. One of her hands held over his shoulder the doll that she had
taken to bed with her, the other was twined gently in his hair. The
child had been crying bitterly, and had now exhausted herself, so that
she was only moaning a little from time to time, with her head laid
wearily on her father's bosom.

The tears stood thick in Sarah's eyes as they looked on her master and
on the little hands that lay round his neck. She lingered by the
raised curtain, heedless of the risk she ran, from moment to moment,
of being discovered and questioned--lingered until she heard Captain
Treverton say soothingly to the child:

"Hush, Rosie, dear! hush, my own love! Don't cry any more for poor
mamma. Think of poor papa, and try to comfort him."

Simple as the words were, quietly and tenderly as they were spoken,
they seemed instantly to deprive Sarah Leeson of all power of
self-control. Reckless whether she was heard or not, she turned and
ran into the passage as if she had been flying for her life. Passing
the candle she had left there, without so much as a look at it, she
made for the stairs, and descended them with headlong rapidity to the
kitchen-floor. There one of the servants who had been sitting up met
her, and, with a face of astonishment and alarm, asked what was the
matter.

"I'm ill--I'm faint--I want air," she answered, speaking thickly and
confusedly. "Open the garden door, and let me out."

The man obeyed, but doubtfully, as if he thought her unfit to be
trusted by herself.

"She gets stranger than ever in her ways," he said, when he rejoined
his fellow-servant, after Sarah had hurried past him into the open
air. "Now our mistress is dead, she will have to find another place, I
suppose. I, for one, sha'n't break my heart when she's gone. Shall
you?"




CHAPTER III.

THE HIDING OF THE SECRET.


The cool, sweet air in the garden, blowing freshly over Sarah's face,
seemed to calm the violence of her agitation. She turned down a side
walk, which led to a terrace and overlooked the church of the
neighboring village.

The daylight out of doors was clear already. The misty auburn light
that goes before sunrise was flowing up, peaceful and lovely, behind a
line of black-brown moorland, over all the eastern sky. The old
church, with the hedge of myrtle and fuchsia growing round the little
cemetery in all the luxuriance which is only seen in Cornwall, was
clearing and brightening to view, almost as fast as the morning
firmament itself. Sarah leaned her arms heavily on the back of a
garden-seat, and turned her face toward the church. Her eyes wandered
from the building itself to the cemetery by its side, rested there,
and watched the light growing warmer and warmer over the lonesome
refuge where the dead lay at rest.

"Oh, my heart! my heart!" she said. "What must it be made of not to
break?"

She remained for some time leaning on the seat, looking sadly toward
the church-yard, and pondering over the words which she had heard
Captain Treverton say to the child. They seemed to connect themselves,
as every thing else now appeared to connect itself in her mind, with
the letter that had been written on Mrs. Treverton's death-bed. She
drew it from her bosom once more, and crushed it up angrily in her
fingers.

"Still in my hands! still not seen by any eyes but mine!" she said,
looking down at the crumpled pages. "Is it all my fault? If she was
alive now--if she had seen what I saw, if she had heard what I heard
in the nursery--could she expect me to give him the letter?"

Her mind was apparently steadied by the reflection which her last
words expressed. She moved away thoughtfully from the garden-seat,
crossed the terrace, descended some wooden steps, and followed a
shrubbery path which led round by a winding track from the east to the
north side of the house.

This part of the building had been uninhabited and neglected for more
than half a century past. In the time of Captain Treverton's father
the whole range of the north rooms had been stripped of their finest
pictures and their most valuable furniture, to assist in redecorating
the west rooms, which now formed the only inhabited part of the house,
and which were amply sufficient for the accommodation of the family
and of any visitors who came to stay with them. The mansion had been
originally built in the form of a square, and had been strongly
fortified. Of the many defenses of the place, but one now remained--a
heavy, low tower (from which and from the village near, the house
derived its name of Porthgenna Tower), standing at the southern
extremity of the west front. The south side itself consisted of
stables and out-houses, with a ruinous wall in front of them, which,
running back eastward at right angles, joined the north side, and so
completed the square which the whole outline of the building
represented.

The outside view of the range of north rooms, from the weedy, deserted
garden below, showed plainly enough that many years had passed since
any human creature had inhabited them. The window-panes were broken
in some places, and covered thickly with dirt and dust in others.
Here, the shutters were closed--there, they were only half opened. The
untrained ivy, the rank vegetation growing in fissures of the
stone-work, the festoons of spiders' webs, the rubbish of wood,
bricks, plaster, broken glass, rags, and strips of soiled cloth, which
lay beneath the windows, all told the same tale of neglect. Shadowed
by its position, this ruinous side of the house had a dark, cold,
wintry aspect, even on the sunny August morning when Sarah Leeson
strayed into the deserted northern garden. Lost in the labyrinth of
her own thoughts, she moved slowly past flower-beds, long since rooted
up, and along gravel walks overgrown by weeds; her eyes wandering
mechanically over the prospect, her feet mechanically carrying her on
wherever there was a trace of a footpath, lead where it might.

The shock which the words spoken by her master in the nursery had
communicated to her mind, had set her whole nature, so to speak, at
bay, and had roused in her, at last, the moral courage to arm herself
with a final and desperate resolution. Wandering more and more slowly
along the pathways of the forsaken garden, as the course of her ideas
withdrew her more and more completely from all outward things, she
stopped insensibly on an open patch of ground, which had once been a
well-kept lawn, and which still commanded a full view of the long
range of uninhabited north rooms.

"What binds me to give the letter to my master at all?" she thought to
herself, smoothing out the crumpled paper dreamily in the palm of her
hand. "My mistress died without making me swear to do that. Can she
visit it on me from the other world, if I keep the promises I swore to
observe, and do no more? May I not risk the worst that can happen, so
long as I hold religiously to all that I undertook to do on my oath?"

She paused here in reasoning with herself--her superstitious fears
still influencing her out of doors, in the daylight, as they had
influenced her in her own room, in the time of darkness. She
paused--then fell to smoothing the letter again, and began to recall
the terms of the solemn engagement which Mrs. Treverton had forced her
to contract.

What had she actually bound herself to do? Not to destroy the letter,
and not to take it away with her if she left the house. Beyond that,
Mrs. Treverton's desire had been that the letter should be given to
her husband. Was that last wish binding on the person to whom it had
been confided? Yes. As binding as an oath? No.

As she arrived at that conclusion, she looked up.

At first her eyes rested vacantly on the lonely, deserted north front
of the house; gradually they became attracted by one particular window
exactly in the middle, on the floor above the ground--the largest and
the gloomiest of all the row; suddenly they brightened with an
expression of intelligence. She started; a faint flush of color flew
into her cheeks, and she hastily advanced closer to the wall of the
house.

The panes of the large window were yellow with dust and dirt, and
festooned about fantastically with cobwebs. Below it was a heap of
rubbish, scattered over the dry mould of what might once have been a
bed of flowers or shrubs. The form of the bed was still marked out by
an oblong boundary of weeds and rank grass. She followed it
irresolutely all round, looking up at the window at every step--then
stopped close under it, glanced at the letter in her hand, and said to
herself abruptly--

"I'll risk it!"

As the words fell from her lips, she hastened back to the inhabited
part of the house, followed the passage on the kitchen-floor which led
to the housekeeper's room, entered it, and took down from a nail in
the wall a bunch of keys, having a large ivory label attached to the
ring that connected them, on which was inscribed, "Keys of the North
Rooms."

She placed the keys on a writing-table near her, took up a pen, and
rapidly added these lines on the blank side of the letter which she
had written under her mistress's dictation--

     "If this paper should ever be found (which I pray with my
     whole heart it never may be), I wish to say that I have
     come to the resolution of hiding it, because I dare not
     show the writing that it contains to my master, to whom it
     is addressed. In doing what I now propose to do, though I
     am acting against my mistress's last wishes, I am not
     breaking the solemn engagement which she obliged me to
     make before her on her death-bed. That engagement forbids
     me to destroy this letter, or to take it away with me if I
     leave the house. I shall do neither--my purpose is to
     conceal it in the place, of all others, where I think there
     is least chance of its ever being found again. Any hardship
     or misfortune which may follow as a consequence of this
     deceitful proceeding on my part, will fall on myself.
     Others, I believe in my conscience, will be the happier for
     the hiding of the dreadful Secret which this letter
     contains."

She signed those lines with her name--pressed them hurriedly over the
blotting-pad that lay with the rest of the writing materials on the
table--took the note in her hand, after first folding it up--and then,
snatching at the bunch of keys, with a look all round her as if she
dreaded being secretly observed, left the room. All her actions since
she had entered it had been hasty and sudden; she was evidently afraid
of allowing herself one leisure moment to reflect.

On quitting the housekeeper's room, she turned to the left, ascended a
back staircase, and unlocked a door at the top of it. A cloud of dust
flew all about her as she softly opened the door; a mouldy coolness
made her shiver as she crossed a large stone hall, with some black old
family portraits hanging on the walls, the canvases of which were
bulging out of the frames. Ascending more stairs, she came upon a row
of doors, all leading into rooms on the first floor of the north side
of the house.

She knelt down, putting the letter on the boards beside her, opposite
the key-hole of the fourth door she came to after reaching the top of
the stairs, peered in distrustfully for an instant, then began to try
the different keys till she found one that fitted the lock. She had
great difficulty in accomplishing this, from the violence of her
agitation, which made her hands tremble to such a degree that she was
hardly able to keep the keys separate one from the other. At length
she succeeded in opening the door. Thicker clouds of dust than she had
yet met with flew out the moment the interior of the room was visible;
a dry, airless, suffocating atmosphere almost choked her as she
stooped to pick up the letter from the floor. She recoiled from it at
first, and took a few steps back toward the staircase. But she
recovered her resolution immediately.

"I can't go back now!" she said, desperately, and entered the room.

She did not remain in it more than two or three minutes. When she came
out again her face was white with fear, and the hand which had held
the letter when she went into the room held nothing now but a small
rusty key.

After locking the door again, she examined the large bunch of keys
which she had taken from the housekeeper's room, with closer attention
than she had yet bestowed on them. Besides the ivory label attached to
the ring that connected them, there were smaller labels, of parchment,
tied to the handles of some of the keys, to indicate the rooms to
which they gave admission. The particular key which she had used had
one of these labels hanging to it. She held the little strip of
parchment close to the light, and read on it, in written characters
faded by time--

"_The Myrtle Room._"

The room in which the letter was hidden had a name, then! A prettily
sounding name that would attract most people, and keep pleasantly in
their memories. A name to be distrusted by her, after what she had
done, on that very account.

She took her housewife from its usual place in the pocket of her
apron, and, with the scissors which it contained, cut the label from
the key. Was it enough to destroy that one only? She lost herself in a
maze of useless conjecture; and ended by cutting off the other labels,
from no other motive than instinctive suspicion of them.

Carefully gathering up the strips of parchment from the floor, she put
them, along with the little rusty key which she had brought out of the
Myrtle Room, in the empty pocket of her apron. Then, carrying the
large bunch of keys in her hand, and carefully locking the doors that
she had opened on her way to the north side of Porthgenna Tower, she
retraced her steps to the housekeeper's room, entered it without
seeing any body, and hung up the bunch of keys again on the nail in
the wall.

Fearful, as the morning hours wore on, of meeting with some of the
female servants, she next hastened back to her bedroom. The candle
she had left there was still burning feebly in the fresh daylight.
When she drew aside the window-curtain, after extinguishing the
candle, a shadow of her former fear passed over her face, even in the
broad daylight that now flowed in upon it. She opened the window, and
leaned out eagerly into the cool air.

Whether for good or for evil, the fatal Secret was hidden now--the act
was done. There was something calming in the first consciousness of
that one fact. She could think more composedly, after that, of
herself, and of the uncertain future that lay before her.

Under no circumstances could she have expected to remain in her
situation, now that the connection between herself and her mistress
had been severed by death. She knew that Mrs. Treverton, in the last
days of her illness, had earnestly recommended her maid to Captain
Treverton's kindness and protection, and she felt assured that the
wife's last entreaties, in this as in all other instances, would be
viewed as the most sacred of obligations by the husband. But could she
accept protection and kindness at the hand of the master whom she had
been accessory to deceiving, and whom she had now committed herself to
deceiving still? The bare idea of such baseness was so revolting, that
she accepted, almost with a sense of relief, the one sad alternative
that remained--the alternative of leaving the house immediately.

And how was she to leave it? By giving formal warning, and so exposing
herself to questions which would be sure to confuse and terrify her?
Could she venture to face her master again, after what she had
done--to face him, when his first inquiries would refer to her
mistress, when he would be certain to ask her for the last mournful
details, for the slightest word that had been spoken during the
death-scene that she alone had witnessed? She started to her feet, as
the certain consequences of submitting herself to that unendurable
trial all crowded together warningly on her mind, took her cloak from
its place on the wall, and listened at her door in sudden suspicion
and fear. Had she heard footsteps? Was her master sending for her
already?

No; all was silent outside. A few tears rolled over her cheeks as she
put on her bonnet, and felt that she was facing, by the performance of
that simple action, the last, and perhaps the hardest to meet, of the
cruel necessities in which the hiding of the Secret had involved her.
There was no help for it. She must run the risk of betraying every
thing, or brave the double trial of leaving Porthgenna Tower, and
leaving it secretly.

Secretly--as a thief might go? Without a word to her master? without
so much as one line of writing to thank him for his kindness and to
ask his pardon? She had unlocked her desk, and had taken from it her
purse, one or two letters, and a little book of Wesley's Hymns, before
these considerations occurred to her. They made her pause in the act
of shutting up the desk. "Shall I write?" she asked herself, "and
leave the letter here, to be found when I am gone?"

A little more reflection decided her in the affirmative. As rapidly as
her pen could form the letters, she wrote a few lines addressed to
Captain Treverton, in which she confessed to having kept a secret from
his knowledge which had been left in her charge to divulge; adding,
that she honestly believed no harm could come to him, or to any one in
whom he was interested, by her failing to perform the duty intrusted
to her; and ended by asking his pardon for leaving the house secretly,
and by begging, as a last favor, that no search might ever be made for
her. Having sealed this short note, and left it on her table, with her
master's name written outside, she listened again at the door; and,
after satisfying herself that no one was yet stirring, began to
descend the stairs at Porthgenna Tower for the last time.

At the entrance of the passage leading to the nursery she stopped. The
tears which she had restrained since leaving her room began to flow
again. Urgent as her reasons now were for effecting her departure
without a moment's loss of time, she advanced, with the strangest
inconsistency, a few steps toward the nursery door. Before she had
gone far, a slight noise in the lower part of the house caught her ear
and instantly checked her further progress.

While she stood doubtful, the grief at her heart--a greater grief than
any she had yet betrayed--rose irresistibly to her lips, and burst
from them in one deep gasping sob. The sound of it seemed to terrify
her into a sense of the danger of her position, if she delayed a
moment longer. She ran out again to the stairs, reached the
kitchen-floor in safety, and made her escape by the garden door which
the servant had opened for her at the dawn of the morning.

On getting clear of the premises at Porthgenna Tower, instead of
taking the nearest path over the moor that led to the high-road, she
diverged to the church; but stopped before she came to it, at the
public well of the neighborhood, which had been sunk near the cottages
of the Porthgenna fishermen. Cautiously looking round her, she dropped
into the well the little rusty key which she had brought out of the
Myrtle Room; then hurried on, and entered the church-yard. She
directed her course straight to one of the graves, situated a little
apart from the rest. On the head-stone were inscribed these words:

     SACRED TO THE MEMORY
     OF
     HUGH POLWHEAL,
     AGED 26 YEARS.
     HE MET WITH HIS DEATH
     THROUGH THE FALL OF A ROCK
     IN
     PORTHGENNA MINE,
     DECEMBER 17TH, 1823.

Gathering a few leaves of grass from the grave, Sarah opened the
little book of Wesley's Hymns which she had brought with her from the
bedroom of Porthgenna Tower, and placed the leaves delicately and
carefully between the pages. As she did this, the wind blew open the
title-page of the Hymns, and displayed this inscription on it, written
in large, clumsy characters--"Sarah Leeson, her book. The gift of Hugh
Polwheal."

Having secured the blades of grass between the pages of the book, she
retraced her way toward the path leading to the high-road. Arrived on
the moor, she took out of her apron pocket the parchment labels that
had been cut from the keys, and scattered them under the furze-bushes.

"Gone," she said, "as I am gone! God help and forgive me--it is all
done and over now!"

With those words she turned her back on the old house and the
sea-view below it, and followed the moorland path on her way to the
high-road.

       *       *       *       *       *

Four hours afterward Captain Treverton desired one of the servants at
Porthgenna Tower to inform Sarah Leeson that he wished to hear all she
had to tell him of the dying moments of her mistress. The messenger
returned with looks and words of amazement, and with the letter that
Sarah had addressed to her master in his hand.

The moment Captain Treverton had read the letter, he ordered an
immediate search to be made after the missing woman. She was so easy
to describe and to recognize, by the premature grayness of her hair,
by the odd, scared look in her eyes, and by her habit of constantly
talking to herself, that she was traced with certainty as far as
Truro. In that large town the track of her was lost, and never
recovered again.

Rewards were offered; the magistrates of the district were interested
in the case; all that wealth and power could do to discover her was
done--and done in vain. No clew was found to suggest a suspicion of
her whereabouts, or to help in the slightest degree toward explaining
the nature of the secret at which she had hinted in her letter. Her
master never saw her again, never heard of her again, after the
morning of the twenty-third of August, eighteen hundred and
twenty-nine.




BOOK II.




CHAPTER I.

FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER.


The church of Long Beckley (a large agricultural village in one of the
midland counties of England), although a building in no way remarkable
either for its size, its architecture, or its antiquity, possesses,
nevertheless, one advantage which mercantile London has barbarously
denied to the noble cathedral church of St. Paul. It has plenty of
room to stand in, and it can consequently be seen with perfect
convenience from every point of view, all around the compass.

The large open space around the church can be approached in three
different directions. There is a road from the village, leading
straight to the principal door. There is a broad gravel walk, which
begins at the vicarage gates, crosses the church-yard, and stops, as
in duty bound, at the vestry entrance. There is a footpath over the
fields, by which the lord of the manor, and the gentry in general who
live in his august neighborhood, can reach the side door of the
building, whenever their natural humility may incline them to
encourage Sabbath observance in the stables by going to church, like
the lower sort of worshipers, on their own legs.

At half-past seven o'clock, on a certain fine summer morning, in the
year eighteen hundred and forty-four, if any observant stranger had
happened to be standing in some unnoticed corner of the church-yard,
and to be looking about him with sharp eyes, he would probably have
been the witness of proceedings which might have led him to believe
that there was a conspiracy going on in Long Beckley, of which the
church was the rallying-point, and some of the most respectable
inhabitants the principal leaders. Supposing him to have been looking
toward the vicarage as the clock chimed the half-hour, he would have
seen the vicar of Long Beckley, the Reverend Doctor Chennery, leaving
his house suspiciously, by the back way, glancing behind him guiltily
as he approached the gravel walk that led to the vestry, stopping
mysteriously just outside the door, and gazing anxiously down the road
that led from the village.

Assuming that our observant stranger would, upon this, keep out of
sight, and look down the road, like the vicar, he would next have seen
the clerk of the church--an austere, yellow-faced man--a Protestant
Loyola in appearance, and a working shoemaker by trade--approaching
with a look of unutterable mystery in his face, and a bunch of big
keys in his hands. He would have seen the vicar nod in an abstracted
manner to the clerk, and say, "Fine morning, Thomas. Have you had your
breakfast yet?" He would have heard Thomas reply, with a suspicious
regard for minute particulars: "I have had a cup of tea and a crust,
Sir." And he would then have seen these two local conspirators, after
looking up with one accord at the church clock, draw off together to
the side door which commanded a view of the footpath across the
fields.

Following them--as our inquisitive stranger could not fail to do--he
would have detected three more conspirators advancing along the
footpath. The leader of this treasonable party was an elderly
gentleman, with a weather-beaten face and a bluff, hearty manner. His
two followers were a young gentleman and a young lady, walking
arm-in-arm, and talking together in whispers. They were dressed in the
plainest morning costume. The faces of both were rather pale, and the
manner of the lady was a little flurried. Otherwise there was nothing
remarkable to observe in them, until they came to the wicket-gate
leading into the church-yard; and there the conduct of the young
gentleman seemed, at first sight, rather inexplicable. Instead of
holding the gate open for the lady to pass through, he hung back,
allowed her to open it for herself, waited till she had got to the
church-yard side, and then, stretching out his hand over the gate,
allowed her to lead him through the entrance, as if he had suddenly
changed from a grown man to a helpless little child.

Noting this, and remarking also that, when the party from the fields had
arrived within greeting distance of the vicar, and when the clerk had
used his bunch of keys to open the church-door, the young lady's
companion was led into the building (this time by Doctor Chennery's hand),
as he had been previously led through the wicket-gate, our observant
stranger must have arrived at one inevitable conclusion--that the
person requiring such assistance as this was suffering under the
affliction of blindness. Startled a little by that discovery, he would
have been still further amazed, if he had looked into the church, by
seeing the blind man and the young lady standing together before the
altar rails, with the elderly gentleman in parental attendance. Any
suspicions he might now entertain that the bond which united the
conspirators at that early hour of the morning was of the hymeneal
sort, and that the object of their plot was to celebrate a wedding
with the strictest secrecy, would have been confirmed in five minutes
by the appearance of Doctor Chennery from the vestry in full
canonicals, and by the reading of the marriage service in the reverend
gentleman's most harmonious officiating tones. The ceremony concluded,
the attendant stranger must have been more perplexed than ever by
observing that the persons concerned in it all separated, the moment
the signing, the kissing, and congratulating duties proper to the
occasion had been performed, and quickly retired in the various
directions by which they had approached the church.

Leaving the clerk to return by the village road, the bride,
bridegroom, and elderly gentleman to turn back by the footpath over
the fields, and the visionary stranger of these pages to vanish out of
them in any direction that he pleases--let us follow Doctor Chennery
to the vicarage breakfast-table, and hear what he has to say about his
professional exertions of the morning in the familiar atmosphere of
his own family circle.

The persons assembled at the breakfast were, first, Mr. Phippen, a
guest; secondly, Miss Sturch, a governess; thirdly, fourthly, and
fifthly, Miss Louisa Chennery (aged eleven years), Miss Amelia
Chennery (aged nine years), and Master Robert Chennery (aged eight
years). There was no mother's face present, to make the household
picture complete. Doctor Chennery had been a widower since the birth
of his youngest child.

The guest was an old college acquaintance of the vicar's, and he was
supposed to be now staying at Long Beckley for the benefit of his
health. Most men of any character at all contrive to get a reputation
of some sort which individualizes them in the social circle amid
which they move. Mr. Phippen was a man of some little character, and
he lived with great distinction in the estimation of his friends on
the reputation of being A Martyr to Dyspepsia.

Wherever Mr. Phippen went, the woes of Mr. Phippen's stomach went with
him. He dieted himself publicly, and physicked himself publicly. He
was so intensely occupied with himself and his maladies, that he would
let a chance acquaintance into the secret of the condition of his
tongue at five minutes' notice; being just as perpetually ready to
discuss the state of his digestion as people in general are to discuss
the state of the weather. On this favorite subject, as on all others,
he spoke with a wheedling gentleness of manner, sometimes in softly
mournful, sometimes in languidly sentimental tones. His politeness was
of the oppressively affectionate sort, and he used the word "dear"
continually in addressing himself to others. Personally, he could not
be called a handsome man. His eyes were watery, large, and light gray;
they were always rolling from side to side in a state of moist
admiration of something or somebody. His nose was long, drooping,
profoundly melancholy--if such an expression may be permitted, in
reference to that particular feature. For the rest, his lips had a
lachrymose twist; his stature was small; his head large, bald, and
loosely set on his shoulders; his manner of dressing himself
eccentric, on the side of smartness; his age about five-and-forty; his
condition that of a single man. Such was Mr. Phippen, the Martyr to
Dyspepsia, and the guest of the vicar of Long Beckley.

Miss Sturch, the governess, may be briefly and accurately described as
a young lady who had never been troubled with an idea or a sensation
since the day when she was born. She was a little, plump, quiet,
white-skinned, smiling, neatly dressed girl, wound up accurately to
the performance of certain duties at certain times; and possessed of
an inexhaustible vocabulary of commonplace talk, which dribbled
placidly out of her lips whenever it was called for, always in the
same quantity, and always of the same quality, at every hour in the
day, and through every change in the seasons. Miss Sturch never
laughed, and never cried, but took the safe middle course of smiling
perpetually. She smiled when she came down on a morning in January,
and said it was very cold. She smiled when she came down on a morning
in July, and said it was very hot. She smiled when the bishop came
once a year to see the vicar; she smiled when the butcher's boy came
every morning for orders. Let what might happen at the vicarage,
nothing ever jerked Miss Sturch out of the one smooth groove in which
she ran perpetually, always at the same pace. If she had lived in a
royalist family, during the civil wars in England, she would have rung
for the cook, to order dinner, on the morning of the execution of
Charles the First. If Shakspeare had come back to life again, and had
called at the vicarage at six o'clock on Saturday evening, to explain
to Miss Sturch exactly what his views were in composing the tragedy of
Hamlet, she would have smiled and said it was extremely interesting,
until the striking of seven o'clock; at which time she would have left
him in the middle of a sentence, to superintend the housemaid in the
verification of the washing-book. A very estimable young person, Miss
Sturch (as the ladies of Long Beckley were accustomed to say); so
judicious with the children, and so attached to her household duties;
such a well-regulated mind, and such a crisp touch on the piano; just
nice-looking enough, just well-dressed enough, just talkative enough;
not quite old enough, perhaps, and a little too much inclined to be
embraceably plump about the region of the waist--but, on the whole, a
most estimable young person--very much so, indeed.

On the characteristic peculiarities of Miss Sturch's pupils, it is not
necessary to dwell at very great length. Miss Louisa's habitual
weakness was an inveterate tendency to catch cold. Miss Amelia's
principal defect was a disposition to gratify her palate by eating
supplementary dinners and breakfasts at unauthorized times and
seasons. Master Robert's most noticeable failings were caused by
alacrity in tearing his clothes, and obtuseness in learning the
Multiplication Table. The virtues of all three were of much the same
nature--they were well grown, they were genuine children, and they
were boisterously fond of Miss Sturch.

To complete the gallery of family portraits, an outline, at the least,
must be attempted of the vicar himself. Doctor Chennery was, in a
physical point of view, a credit to the Establishment to which he was
attached. He stood six feet two in his shooting-shoes; he weighed
fifteen stone; he was the best bowler in the Long Beckley
cricket-club; he was a strictly orthodox man in the matter of wine and
mutton; he never started disagreeable theories about people's future
destinies in the pulpit, never quarreled with any body out of the
pulpit, never buttoned up his pockets when the necessities of his poor
brethren (Dissenters included) pleaded with him to open them. His
course through the world was a steady march along the high and dry
middle of a safe turnpike-road. The serpentine side-paths of
controversy might open as alluringly as they pleased on his right hand
and on his left, but he kept on his way sturdily, and never regarded
them. Innovating young recruits in the Church army might entrappingly
open the Thirty-nine Articles under his very nose, but the veteran's
wary eye never looked a hair's-breadth further than his own signature
at the bottom of them. He knew as little as possible of theology, he
had never given the Privy Council a minute's trouble in the whole
course of his life, he was innocent of all meddling with the reading
or writing of pamphlets, and he was quite incapable of finding his way
to the platform of Exeter Hall. In short, he was the most unclerical
of clergymen--but, for all that, he had such a figure for a surplice
as is seldom seen. Fifteen stone weight of upright muscular flesh,
without an angry spot or sore place in any part of it, has the merit
of suggesting stability, at any rate--an excellent virtue in pillars
of all kinds, but an especially precious quality, at the present time,
in a pillar of the Church.

As soon as the vicar entered the breakfast-parlor, the children
assailed him with a chorus of shouts. He was a severe disciplinarian
in the observance of punctuality at meal-times; and he now stood
convicted by the clock of being too late for breakfast by a quarter of
an hour.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting, Miss Sturch," said the vicar; "but I
have a good excuse for being late this morning."

"Pray don't mention it, Sir," said Miss Sturch, blandly rubbing her
plump little hands one over the other. "A beautiful morning. I fear we
shall have another warm day.--Robert, my love, your elbow is on the
table.--A beautiful morning, indeed!"

"Stomach still out of order--eh, Phippen?" asked the vicar, beginning
to carve the ham.

Mr. Phippen shook his large head dolefully, placed his yellow
forefinger, ornamented with a large turquoise ring, on the centre
check of his light-green summer waistcoat--looked piteously at Doctor
Chennery, and sighed--removed the finger, and produced from the breast
pocket of his wrapper a little mahogany case--took out of it a neat
pair of apothecary's scales, with the accompanying weights, a morsel
of ginger, and a highly polished silver nutmeg-grater. "Dear Miss
Sturch will pardon an invalid?" said Mr. Phippen, beginning to grate
the ginger feebly into the nearest tea-cup.

"Guess what has made me a quarter of an hour late this morning," said
the vicar, looking mysteriously all round the table.

"Lying in bed, papa," cried the three children, clapping their hands
in triumph.

"What do _you_ say, Miss Sturch?" asked Doctor Chennery.

Miss Sturch smiled as usual, rubbed her hands as usual, cleared her
throat softly as usual, looked at the tea-urn, and begged, with the
most graceful politeness, to be excused if she said nothing.

"Your turn now, Phippen," said the vicar. "Come, guess what has kept
me late this morning."

"My dear friend," said Mr. Phippen, giving the Doctor a brotherly
squeeze of the hand, "don't ask me to guess--I know! I saw what you
eat at dinner yesterday--I saw what you drank after dinner. No
digestion could stand it--not even yours. Guess what has made you late
this morning? Pooh! pooh! I know. You dear, good soul, you have been
taking physic!"

"Hav'n't touched a drop, thank God, for the last ten years!" said
Doctor Chennery, with a look of devout gratitude. "No, no; you're all
wrong. The fact is, I have been to church; and what do you think I
have been doing there? Listen, Miss Sturch--listen, girls, with all
your ears. Poor blind young Frankland is a happy man at last--I have
married him to our dear Rosamond Treverton this very morning!"

"Without telling us, papa!" cried the two girls together in their
shrillest tones of vexation and surprise. "Without telling us, when
you know how we should have liked to see it!"

"That was the very reason why I did not tell you, my dears," answered
the vicar. "Young Frankland has not got so used to his affliction yet,
poor fellow, as to bear being publicly pitied and stared at in the
character of a blind bridegroom. He had such a nervous horror of being
an object of curiosity on his wedding-day, and Rosamond, like a
kind-hearted girl as she is, was so anxious that his slightest
caprices should be humored, that we settled to have the wedding at an
hour in the morning when no idlers were likely to be lounging about
the neighborhood of the church. I was bound over to the strictest
secrecy about the day, and so was my clerk Thomas. Excepting us two,
and the bride and bridegroom, and the bride's father, Captain
Treverton, nobody knew--"

"Treverton!" exclaimed Mr. Phippen, holding his tea-cup, with the
grated ginger in the bottom of it, to be filled by Miss Sturch.
"Treverton! (No more tea, dear Miss Sturch.) How very remarkable! I
know the name. (Fill up with water, if you please.) Tell me, my dear
doctor (many, many thanks; no sugar--it turns acid on the stomach), is
this Miss Treverton whom you have been marrying (many thanks again; no
milk, either) one of the Cornish Trevertons?"

"To be sure she is!" rejoined the vicar. "Her father, Captain
Treverton, is the head of the family. Not that there's much family to
speak of now. The Captain, and Rosamond, and that whimsical old brute
of an uncle of hers, Andrew Treverton, are the last left now of the
old stock--a rich family, and a fine family, in former times--good
friends to Church and State, you know, and all that--"

"Do you approve, Sir, of Amelia having a second helping of bread and
marmalade?" asked Miss Sturch, appealing to Doctor Chennery, with the
most perfect unconsciousness of interrupting him. Having no spare room
in her mind for putting things away in until the appropriate time came
for bringing them out, Miss Sturch always asked questions and made
remarks the moment they occurred to her, without waiting for the
beginning, middle, or end of any conversations that might be
proceeding in her presence. She invariably looked the part of a
listener to perfection, but she never acted it except in the case of
talk that was aimed point-blank at her own ears.

"Oh, give her a second helping, by all means!" said the vicar,
carelessly; "if she must over-eat herself, she may as well do it on
bread and marmalade as on any thing else."

"My dear, good soul," exclaimed Mr. Phippen, "look what a wreck I am,
and don't talk in that shockingly thoughtless way of letting our sweet
Amelia over-eat herself. Load the stomach in youth, and what becomes
of the digestion in age? The thing which vulgar people call the
inside--I appeal to Miss Sturch's interest in her charming pupil as an
excuse for going into physiological particulars--is, in point of fact,
an Apparatus. Digestively considered, Miss Sturch, even the fairest
and youngest of us is an Apparatus. Oil our wheels, if you like; but
clog them at your peril. Farinaceous puddings and mutton-chops;
mutton-chops and farinaceous puddings--those should be the parents'
watch-words, if I had my way, from one end of England to the other.
Look here, my sweet child--look at me. There is no fun, dear, about
these little scales, but dreadful earnest. See! I put in the balance
on one side dry bread (stale, dry bread, Amelia!), and on the other
some ounce weights. 'Mr. Phippen, eat by weight. Mr. Phippen! eat the
same quantity, day by day, to a hair's-breadth. Mr. Phippen! exceed
your allowance (though it is only stale, dry bread) if you dare!'
Amelia, love, this is not fun--this is what the doctors tell me--the
doctors, my child, who have been searching my Apparatus through and
through for thirty years past with little pills, and have not found
out where my wheels are clogged yet. Think of that, Amelia--think of
Mr. Phippen's clogged Apparatus--and say 'No, thank you,' next time.
Miss Sturch, I beg a thousand pardons for intruding on your province;
but my interest in that sweet child--Chennery, you dear, good soul,
what were we talking about? Ah! the bride--the interesting bride! And
so she is one of the Cornish Trevertons? I knew something of Andrew
years ago. He was a bachelor, like myself, Miss Sturch. His Apparatus
was out of order, like mine, dear Amelia. Not at all like his brother,
the Captain, I should suppose? And so she is married? A charming girl,
I have no doubt. A charming girl!"

"No better, truer, prettier girl in the world," said the vicar.

"A very lively, energetic person," remarked Miss Sturch.

"How I shall miss her!" cried Miss Louisa. "Nobody else amused me as
Rosamond did, when I was laid up with that last bad cold of mine."

"She used to give us such nice little early supper-parties," said Miss
Amelia.

"She was the only girl I ever saw who was fit to play with boys," said
Master Robert. "She could catch a ball, Mr. Phippen, Sir, with one
hand, and go down a slide with both her legs together."

"Bless me!" said Mr. Phippen. "What an extraordinary wife for a blind
man! You said he was blind from his birth, my dear doctor, did you
not? Let me see, what was his name? You will not bear too hardly on my
loss of memory, Miss Sturch? When indigestion has done with the body,
it begins to prey on the mind. Mr. Frank Something, was it not?"

"No, no--Frankland," answered the vicar, "Leonard Frankland. And not
blind from his birth by any means. It is not much more than a year ago
since he could see almost as well as any of us."

"An accident, I suppose!" said Mr. Phippen. "You will excuse me if I
take the arm-chair?--a partially reclining posture is of great
assistance to me after meals. So an accident happened to his eyes? Ah,
what a delightfully easy chair to sit in!"

"Scarcely an accident," said Doctor Chennery. "Leonard Frankland was a
difficult child to bring up: great constitutional weakness, you know,
at first. He seemed to get over that with time, and grew into a quiet,
sedate, orderly sort of boy--as unlike my son there as possible--very
amiable, and what you call easy to deal with. Well, he had a turn for
mechanics (I am telling you all this to make you understand about his
blindness), and, after veering from one occupation of that sort to
another, he took at last to watch-making. Curious amusement for a boy;
but any thing that required delicacy of touch, and plenty of patience
and perseverance, was just the thing to amuse and occupy Leonard. I
always said to his father and mother, 'Get him off that stool, break
his magnifying-glasses, send him to me, and I'll give him a back at
leap-frog, and teach him the use of a bat.' But it was no use. His
parents knew best, I suppose, and they said he must be humored. Well,
things went on smoothly enough for some time, till he got another
long illness--as I believe, from not taking exercise enough. As soon
as he began to get round, back he went to his old watch-making
occupations again. But the bad end of it all was coming. About the
last work he did, poor fellow, was the repairing of my watch--here it
is; goes as regular as a steam-engine. I hadn't got it back into my
fob very long before I heard that he was getting a bad pain at the
back of his head, and that he saw all sorts of moving spots before his
eyes. 'String him up with lots of port wine, and give him three hours
a day on the back of a quiet pony'--that was my advice. Instead of
taking it, they sent for doctors from London, and blistered him behind
the ears and between the shoulders, and drenched the lad with mercury,
and moped him up in a dark room. No use. The sight got worse and
worse, flickered and flickered, and went out at last like the flame of
a candle. His mother died--luckily for her, poor soul--before that
happened. His father was half out of his mind: took him to oculists in
London and oculists in Paris. All they did was to call the blindness
by a long Latin name, and to say that it was hopeless and useless to
try an operation. Some of them said it was the result of the long
weaknesses from which he had twice suffered after illness. Some said
it was an apoplectic effusion in his brain. All of them shook their
heads when they heard of the watch-making. So they brought him back
home, blind; blind he is now; and blind he will remain, poor dear
fellow, for the rest of his life."

"You shock me; my dear Chennery, you shock me dreadfully," said Mr.
Phippen. "Especially when you state that theory about long weakness
after illness. Good Heavens! Why, _I_ have had long weaknesses--I have
got them now. Spots did he see before his eyes? I see spots, black
spots, dancing black spots, dancing black bilious spots. Upon my word
of honor, Chennery, this comes home to me--my sympathies are painfully
acute--I feel this blind story in every nerve of my body; I do,
indeed!"

"You would hardly know that Leonard was blind, to look at him," said
Miss Louisa, striking into the conversation with a view to restoring
Mr. Phippen's equanimity. "Except that his eyes look quieter than
other people's, there seems no difference in them now. Who was that
famous character you told us about, Miss Sturch, who was blind, and
didn't show it any more than Leonard Frankland?"

"Milton, my love. I begged you to remember that he was the most famous
of British epic poets," answered Miss Sturch with suavity. "He
poetically describes his blindness as being caused by 'so thick a drop
serene.' You shall read about it, Louisa. After we have had a little
French, we will have a little Milton, this morning. Hush, love, your
papa is speaking."

"Poor young Frankland!" said the vicar, warmly. "That good, tender,
noble creature I married him to this morning seems sent as a
consolation to him in his affliction. If any human being can make him
happy for the rest of his life, Rosamond Treverton is the girl to do
it."

"She has made a sacrifice," said Mr. Phippen; "but I like her for
that, having made a sacrifice myself in remaining single. It seems
indispensable, indeed, on the score of humanity, that I should do so.
How could I conscientiously inflict such a digestion as mine on a
member of the fairer portion of creation? No; I am a sacrifice in my
own proper person, and I have a fellow-feeling for others who are like
me. Did she cry much, Chennery, when you were marrying her?"

"Cry!" exclaimed the vicar, contemptuously. "Rosamond Treverton is not
one of the puling, sentimental sort, I can tell you. A fine, buxom,
warm-hearted, quick-tempered girl, who looks what she means when she
tells a man she is going to marry him. And, mind you, she has been
tried. If she hadn't loved him with all her heart and soul, she might
have been free months ago to marry any body she pleased. They were
engaged long before this cruel affliction befell young Frankland--the
fathers, on both sides, having lived as near neighbors in these parts
for years. Well, when the blindness came, Leonard at once offered to
release Rosamond from her engagement. You should have read the letter
she wrote to him, Phippen, upon that. I don't mind confessing that I
blubbered like a baby over it when they showed it to me. I should have
married them at once the instant I read it, but old Frankland was a
fidgety, punctilious kind of man, and he insisted on a six months'
probation, so that she might be certain of knowing her own mind. He
died before the term was out, and that caused the marriage to be put
off again. But no delays could alter Rosamond--six years, instead of
six months, would not have changed her. There she was this morning as
fond of that poor, patient blind fellow as she was the first day they
were engaged. 'You shall never know a sad moment, Lenny, if I can help
it, as long as you live'--these were the first words she said to him
when we all came out of church. 'I hear you, Rosamond,' said I. 'And
you shall judge me, too, Doctor,' says she, quick as lightning. 'We
will come back to Long Beckley, and you shall ask Lenny if I have not
kept my word.' With that she gave me a kiss that you might have heard
down here at the vicarage, bless her heart! We'll drink her health
after dinner, Miss Sturch--we'll drink both their healths, Phippen, in
a bottle of the best wine I have in my cellar."

"In a glass of toast-and-water, so far as I am concerned, if you will
allow me," said Mr. Phippen, mournfully. "But, my dear Chennery, when
you were talking of the fathers of these two interesting young people,
you spoke of their living as near neighbors here, at Long Beckley. My
memory is impaired, as I am painfully aware; but I thought Captain
Treverton was the eldest of the two brothers, and that he always
lived, when he was on shore, at the family place in Cornwall?"

"So he did," returned the vicar, "in his wife's lifetime. But since
her death, which happened as long ago as the year 'twenty-nine--let me
see, we are now in the year 'forty-four--and that makes--"

The vicar stopped for an instant to calculate, and looked at Miss
Sturch.

"Fifteen years ago, Sir," said Miss Sturch, offering the accommodation
of a little simple subtraction to the vicar, with her blandest smile.

"Of course," continued Doctor Chennery. "Well, since Mrs. Treverton
died, fifteen years ago, Captain Treverton has never been near
Porthgenna Tower. And, what is more, Phippen, at the first opportunity
he could get, he sold the place--sold it, out and out, mine,
fisheries, and all--for forty thousand pounds."

"You don't say so!" exclaimed Mr. Phippen. "Did he find the air
unhealthy? I should think the local produce, in the way of food, must
be coarse now, in those barbarous regions? Who bought the place?"

"Leonard Frankland's father," said the vicar. "It is rather a long
story, that sale of Porthgenna Tower, with some curious circumstances
involved in it. Suppose we take a turn in the garden, Phippen? I'll
tell you all about it over my morning cigar. Miss Sturch, if you want
me, I shall be on the lawn somewhere. Girls! mind you know your
lessons. Bob! remember that I've got a cane in the hall, and a
birch-rod in my dressing-room. Come, Phippen, rouse up out of that
arm-chair. You won't say No to a turn in the garden?"

"My dear fellow, I will say Yes--if you will kindly lend me an
umbrella, and allow me to carry my camp-stool in my hand," said Mr.
Phippen. "I am too weak to encounter the sun, and I can't go far
without sitting down.--The moment I feel fatigued, Miss Sturch, I open
my camp-stool, and sit down any where, without the slightest regard
for appearances.--I am ready, Chennery, whenever you are--equally
ready, my good friend, for the garden and the story about the sale of
Porthgenna Tower. You said it was a curious story, did you not?"

"I said there was some curious circumstances connected with it,"
replied the vicar. "And when you hear about them, I think you will say
so too. Come along! you will find your camp-stool, and a choice of all
the umbrellas in the house, in the hall."

With those words, Doctor Chennery opened his cigar-case, and led the
way out of the breakfast-parlor.




CHAPTER II.

THE SALE OF PORTHGENNA TOWER.


"How charming! how pastoral! how exquisitely soothing!" said Mr.
Phippen, sentimentally surveying the lawn at the back of the
vicarage-house, under the shadow of the lightest umbrella he could
pick out of the hall. "Three years have passed, Chennery, since I last
stood on this lawn. There is the window of your old study, where I had
my attack of heart-burn last time--in the strawberry season; don't
you remember? Ah! and there is the school-room! Shall I ever forget
dear Miss Sturch coming to me out of that room--a ministering angel
with soda and ginger--so comforting, so sweetly anxious about stirring
it up, so unaffectedly grieved that there was no sal-volatile in the
house! I do so enjoy these pleasant recollections, Chennery; they are
as great a luxury to me as your cigar is to you. Could you walk on the
other side, my dear fellow? I like the smell, but the smoke is a
little too much for me. Thank you. And now about the story? What was
the name of the old place--I am so interested in it--it began with a
P, surely?"

"Porthgenna Tower," said the vicar.

"Exactly," rejoined Mr. Phippen, shifting the umbrella tenderly from
one shoulder to the other. "And what in the world made Captain
Treverton sell Porthgenna Tower?"

"I believe the reason was that he could not endure the place after the
death of his wife," answered Doctor Chennery. "The estate, you know,
has never been entailed; so the Captain had no difficulty in parting
with it, except, of course, the difficulty of finding a purchaser."

"Why not his brother?" asked Mr. Phippen. "Why not our eccentric
friend, Andrew Treverton?"

"Don't call him my friend," said the vicar. "A mean, groveling,
cynical, selfish old wretch! It's no use shaking your head, Phippen,
and trying to look shocked. I know Andrew Treverton's early history as
well as you do. I know that he was treated with the basest ingratitude
by a college friend, who took all he had to give, and swindled him at
last in the grossest manner. I know all about that. But one instance
of ingratitude does not justify a man in shutting himself up from
society, and railing against all mankind as a disgrace to the earth
they walk on. I myself have heard the old brute say that the greatest
benefactor to our generation would be a second Herod, who could
prevent another generation from succeeding it. Ought a man who can
talk in that way to be the friend of any human being with the
slightest respect for his species or himself?"

"My friend!" said Mr. Phippen, catching the vicar by the arm, and
mysteriously lowering his voice--"My dear and reverend friend! I
admire your honest indignation against the utterer of that exceedingly
misanthropical sentiment; but--I confide this to you, Chennery, in
the strictest secrecy--there are moments--morning moments
generally--when my digestion is in such a state that I have actually
agreed with that annihilating person, Andrew Treverton! I have woke up
with my tongue like a cinder--I have crawled to the glass and looked
at it--and I have said to myself, 'Let there be an end of the human
race rather than a continuance of this!'"

"Pooh! pooh!" cried the vicar, receiving Mr. Phippen's confession with
a burst of irreverent laughter. "Take a glass of cool small beer next
time your tongue is in that state, and you will pray for a continuance
of the brewing part of the human race, at any rate. But let us go back
to Porthgenna Tower, or I shall never get on with my story. When
Captain Treverton had once made up his mind to sell the place, I have
no doubt that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have thought of
offering it to his brother, with a view, of course, to keeping the
estate in the family. Andrew was rich enough to have bought it; for,
though he got nothing at his father's death but the old gentleman's
rare collection of books, he inherited his mother's fortune, as the
second son. However, as things were at that time (and are still, I am
sorry to say), the Captain could make no personal offers of any kind
to Andrew; for the two were not then, and are not now, on speaking, or
even on writing terms. It is a shocking thing to say, but the worst
quarrel of the kind I ever heard of is the quarrel between those two
brothers."

"Pardon me, my dear friend," said Mr. Phippen, opening his camp-stool,
which had hitherto dangled by its silken tassel from the hooked handle
of the umbrella. "May I sit down before you go any further? I am
getting a little excited about this part of the story, and I dare not
fatigue myself. Pray go on. I don't think the legs of my camp-stool
will make holes in the lawn. I am so light--a mere skeleton, in fact.
Do go on!"

"You must have heard," pursued the vicar, "that Captain Treverton,
when he was advanced in life, married an actress--rather a violent
temper, I believe; but a person of spotless character, and as fond of
her husband as a woman could be; therefore, according to my view of
it, a very good wife for him to marry. However, the Captain's friends,
of course, made the usual senseless outcry, and the Captain's
brother, as the only near relation, took it on himself to attempt
breaking off the marriage in the most offensively indelicate way.
Failing in that, and hating the poor woman like poison, he left his
brother's house, saying, among many other savage speeches, one
infamous thing about the bride, which--which, upon my honor, Phippen,
I am ashamed to repeat. Whatever the words were, they were unluckily
carried to Mrs. Treverton's ears, and they were of the kind that no
woman--let alone a quick-tempered woman like the Captain's wife--ever
forgives. An interview followed between the two brothers--and it led,
as you may easily imagine, to very unhappy results. They parted in the
most deplorable manner. The Captain declared, in the heat of his
passion, that Andrew had never had one generous impulse in his heart
since he was born, and that he would die without one kind feeling
toward any living soul in the world. Andrew replied that, if he had no
heart, he had a memory, and that he should remember those farewell
words as long as he lived. So they separated. Twice afterward the
Captain made overtures of reconciliation. The first time when his
daughter Rosamond was born; the second time when Mrs. Treverton died.
On each occasion the elder brother wrote to say that, if the younger
would retract the atrocious words he had spoken against his
sister-in-law, every atonement should be offered to him for the harsh
language which the Captain had used, in the hastiness of anger, when
they last met. No answer was received from Andrew to either letter;
and the estrangement between the two brothers has continued to the
present time. You understand now why Captain Treverton could not
privately consult Andrew's inclinations before he publicly announced
his intention of parting with Porthgenna Tower."

Although Mr. Phippen declared, in answer to this appeal, that he
understood perfectly, and although he begged with the utmost
politeness that the vicar would go on, his attention seemed, for the
moment, to be entirely absorbed in inspecting the legs of his
camp-stool, and in ascertaining what impression they made on the
vicarage lawn. Doctor Chennery's own interest, however, in the
circumstances that he was relating, seemed sufficiently strong to make
up for any transient lapse of attention on the part of his guest.
After a few vigorous puffs at his cigar (which had been several times
in imminent danger of going out while he was speaking), he went on
with his narrative in these words:

"Well, the house, the estate, the mine, and the fisheries of
Porthgenna were all publicly put up for sale a few months after Mrs.
Treverton's death; but no offers were made for the property which it
was possible to accept. The ruinous state of the house, the bad
cultivation of the land, legal difficulties in connection with the
mine, and quarter-day difficulties in the collection of the rents, all
contributed to make Porthgenna what the auctioneers would call a bad
lot to dispose of. Failing to sell the place, Captain Treverton could
not be prevailed on to change his mind and live there again. The death
of his wife almost broke his heart--for he was, by all accounts, just
as fond of her as she had been of him--and the very sight of the place
that was associated with the greatest affliction of his life became
hateful to him. He removed, with his little girl and a relative of
Mrs. Treverton, who was her governess, to our neighborhood, and rented
a pretty little cottage across the church fields. The house nearest to
it was inhabited at that time by Leonard Frankland's father and
mother. The new neighbors soon became intimate; and thus it happened
that the couple whom I have been marrying this morning were brought up
together as children, and fell in love with each other almost before
they were out of their pinafores."

"Chennery, my dear fellow, I don't look as if I was sitting all on one
side, do I?" cried Mr. Phippen, suddenly breaking into the vicar's
narrative, with a look of alarm. "I am shocked to interrupt you; but
surely your grass is amazingly soft in this part of the country. One
of my camp-stool legs is getting shorter and shorter every moment. I'm
drilling a hole! I'm toppling over! Gracious Heavens! I feel myself
going--I shall be down, Chennery; upon my life, I shall be down!"

"Stuff!" cried the vicar, pulling up first Mr. Phippen, and then Mr.
Phippen's camp-stool, which had rooted itself in the grass, all on one
side. "Here, come on to the gravel walk; you can't drill holes in
that. What's the matter now?"

"Palpitations," said Mr. Phippen, dropping his umbrella, and placing
his hand over his heart, "and bile. I see those black spots
again--those infernal, lively black spots dancing before my eyes.
Chennery, suppose you consult some agricultural friend about the
quality of your grass. Take my word for it, your lawn is softer than
it ought to be.--Lawn!" repeated Mr. Phippen to himself,
contemptuously, as he turned round to pick up his umbrella. "It isn't
a lawn--it is a bog!"

"There, sit down," said the vicar, "and don't pay the palpitations and
the black spots the compliment of bestowing the smallest attention on
them. Do you want any thing to drink? Shall it be physic, or beer, or
what?"

"No, no! I am so unwilling to give trouble," answered Mr. Phippen. "I
would rather suffer--rather, a great deal. I think if you would go on
with your story, Chennery, it would compose me. I have not the
faintest idea of what led to it, but I think you were saying something
interesting on the subject of pinafores!"

"Nonsense!" said Doctor Chennery. "I was only telling you of the
fondness between the two children who have now grown up to be man and
wife. And I was going on to tell you that Captain Treverton, shortly
after he settled in our neighborhood, took to the active practice of
his profession again. Nothing else seemed to fill up the gap that the
loss of Mrs. Treverton had made in his life. Having good interest with
the Admiralty, he can always get a ship when he applies for one; and
up to the present time, with intervals on shore, he has resolutely
stuck to the sea--though he is getting, as his daughter and his
friends think, rather too old for it now. Don't look puzzled, Phippen;
I am not going so wide of the mark as you think. These are some of the
necessary particulars that must be stated first. And now they are
comfortably disposed of, I can get round at last to the main part of
my story--the sale of Porthgenna Tower.--What is it now? Do you want
to get up again?"

Yes, Mr. Phippen did want to get up again, for the purpose of
composing the palpitations and dispersing the black spots, by trying
the experiment of a little gentle exercise. He was most unwilling to
occasion any trouble, but would his worthy friend Chennery give him an
arm, and carry the camp-stool, and walk slowly in the direction of the
school-room window, so as to keep Miss Sturch within easy hailing
distance, in case it became necessary to try the last resource of
taking a composing draught? The vicar, whose inexhaustible good nature
was proof against every trial that Mr. Phippen's dyspeptic infirmities
could inflict on it, complied with all these requests, and went on
with his story, unconsciously adopting the tone and manner of a
good-humored parent who was doing his best to soothe the temper of a
fretful child.

"I told you," he said, "that the elder Mr. Frankland and Captain
Treverton were near neighbors here. They had not been long acquainted
before the one found out from the other that Porthgenna Tower was for
sale. On first hearing this, old Frankland asked a few questions about
the place, but said not a word on the subject of purchasing it. Soon
after that the Captain got a ship and went to sea. During his absence
old Frankland privately set off for Cornwall to look at the estate,
and to find out all he could about its advantages and defects from the
persons left in charge of the house and lands. He said nothing when he
came back, until Captain Treverton returned from his first cruise; and
then the old gentleman spoke out one morning, in his quiet, decided
way.

"'Treverton,' said he, 'if you will sell Porthgenna Tower at the price
at which you bought it in, when you tried to dispose of it by auction,
write to your lawyer, and tell him to take the title-deeds to mine,
and ask for the purchase-money.'

"Captain Treverton was naturally a little astonished at the readiness
of this offer; but people like myself, who knew old Frankland's
history, were not so surprised. His fortune had been made by trade,
and he was foolish enough to be always a little ashamed of
acknowledging that one simple and creditable fact. The truth was, that
his ancestors had been landed gentry of importance before the time of
the Civil War, and the old gentleman's great ambition was to sink the
merchant in the landed grandee, and to leave his son to succeed him in
the character of a squire of large estate and great county influence.
He was willing to devote half his fortune to accomplish this scheme;
but half his fortune would not buy him such an estate as he wanted, in
an important agricultural county like ours. Rents are high, and land
is made the most of with us. An estate as extensive as the estate at
Porthgenna would fetch more than double the money which Captain
Treverton could venture to ask for it, if it was situated in these
parts. Old Frankland was well aware of that fact, and attached all
possible importance to it. Besides, there was something in the feudal
look of Porthgenna Tower, and in the right over the mine and
fisheries, which the purchase of the estate included, that flattered
his notions of restoring the family greatness. Here he and his son
after him could lord it, as he thought, on a large scale, and direct
at their sovereign will and pleasure the industry of hundreds of poor
people, scattered along the coast, or huddled together in the little
villages inland. This was a tempting prospect, and it could be secured
for forty thousand pounds--which was just ten thousand pounds less
than he had made up his mind to give, when he first determined to
metamorphose himself from a plain merchant into a magnificent landed
gentleman. People who knew these facts were, as I have said, not much
surprised at Mr. Frankland's readiness to purchase Porthgenna Tower;
and Captain Treverton, it is hardly necessary to say, was not long in
clinching the bargain on his side. The estate changed hands; and away
went old Frankland, with a tail of wiseacres from London at his heels,
to work the mine and the fisheries on new scientific principles, and
to beautify the old house from top to bottom with bran-new mediæval
decorations under the direction of a gentleman who was said to be an
architect, but who looked, to my mind, the very image of a Popish
priest in disguise. Wonderful plans and projects were they not? And
how do you think they succeeded?"

"Do tell me, my dear fellow!" was the answer that fell from Mr.
Phippen's lips.--"I wonder whether Miss Sturch keeps a bottle of
camphor julep in the family medicine-chest?" was the thought that
passed through Mr. Phippen's mind.

"Tell you!" exclaimed the vicar. "Why, of course, every one of his
plans turned out a complete failure. His Cornish tenantry received him
as an interloper. The antiquity of his family made no impression upon
them. It might be an old family, but it was not a Cornish family, and,
therefore, it was of no importance in their eyes. They would have gone
to the world's end for the Trevertons; but not a man would move a
step out of his way for the Franklands. As for the mine, it seemed to
be inspired with the same mutinous spirit that possessed the tenantry.
The wiseacres from London blasted in all directions on the profoundest
scientific principles, and brought about sixpennyworth of ore to the
surface for every five pounds spent in getting it up. The fisheries
turned out little better. A new plan for curing pilchards, which was a
marvel of economy in theory, proved to be a perfect phenomenon of
extravagance in practice. The only item of luck in old Frankland's
large sum of misfortunes was produced by his quarreling in good time
with the mediæval architect, who was like a Popish priest in disguise.
This fortunate event saved the new owner of Porthgenna all the money
he might otherwise have spent in restoring and redecorating the whole
suite of rooms on the north side of the house, which had been left to
go to rack and ruin for more than fifty years past, and which remain
in their old neglected condition to this day. To make a long story
short, after uselessly spending more thousands of pounds at Porthgenna
than I should like to reckon up, old Frankland gave in at last, left
the place in disgust to the care of his steward, who was charged never
to lay out another farthing on it, and returned to this neighborhood.
Being in high dudgeon, and happening to catch Captain Treverton on
shore when he got back, the first thing he did was to abuse Porthgenna
and all the people about it a little too vehemently in the Captain's
presence. This led to a coolness between the two neighbors, which
might have ended in the breaking off of all intercourse, but for the
children on either side, who would see each other just as often as
ever, and who ended, by dint of willful persistency, in putting an end
to the estrangement between the fathers by making it look simply
ridiculous. Here, in my opinion, lies the most curious part of the
story. Important family interests depended on those two young people
falling in love with each other; and, wonderful to relate, that (as
you know, after my confession at breakfast-time) was exactly what they
did. Here is a case of the most romantic love-match, which is also the
marriage, of all others, that the parents on both sides had the
strongest worldly interest in promoting. Shakspeare may say what he
pleases, the course of true love does run smooth sometimes. Never was
the marriage service performed to better purpose than when I read it
this morning. The estate being entailed on Leonard, Captain
Treverton's daughter now goes back, in the capacity of mistress, to
the house and lands which her father sold. Rosamond being an only
child, the purchase-money of Porthgenna, which old Frankland once
lamented as money thrown away, will now, when the Captain dies, be the
marriage-portion of young Frankland's wife. I don't know what you
think of the beginning and middle of my story, Phippen, but the end
ought to satisfy you, at any rate. Did you ever hear of a bride and
bridegroom who started with fairer prospects in life than our bride
and bridegroom of to-day?"

Before Mr. Phippen could make any reply, Miss Sturch put her head out
of the school-room window; and seeing the two gentlemen approaching,
beamed on them with her invariable smile. Then addressing the vicar,
said in her softest tones:

"I regret extremely to trouble you, Sir, but I find Robert very
intractable this morning with his Multiplication Table."

"Where does he stick now?" asked Doctor Chennery.

"At seven times eight, Sir," replied Miss Sturch.

"Bob!" shouted the vicar through the window. "Seven times eight?"

"Forty-three," answered the whimpering voice of the invisible Bob.

"You shall have one more chance before I get my cane," said Doctor
Chennery. "Now, then, look out! Seven times--"

"My dear, good friend," interposed Mr. Phippen, "if you cane that very
unhappy boy he will scream. My nerves have been tried once this
morning by the camp-stool. I shall be totally shattered if I hear
screams. Give me time to get out of the way, and allow me also to
spare dear Miss Sturch the sad spectacle of correction (so shocking to
sensibilities like hers) by asking her for a little camphor julep, and
so giving her an excuse for getting out of the way like me. I think I
could have done without the camphor julep under any other
circumstances; but I ask for it unhesitatingly now, as much for Miss
Sturch's sake as for the sake of my own poor nerves.--Have you got
camphor julep, Miss Sturch? Say yes, I beg and entreat, and give me an
opportunity of escorting you out of the way of the screams."

While Miss Sturch--whose well-trained sensibilities were proof against
the longest paternal caning and the loudest filial acknowledgment of
it in the way of screams--tripped up stairs to fetch the camphor
julep, as smiling and self-possessed as ever, Master Bob, finding
himself left alone with his sisters in the school-room, sidled up to
the youngest of the two, produced from the pocket of his trowsers
three frowsy acidulated drops looking very much the worse for wear,
and, attacking Miss Amelia on the weak, or greedy side of her
character, artfully offered the drops in exchange for information on
the subject of seven times eight. "You like 'em?" whispered Bob. "Oh,
don't I!" answered Amelia. "Seven times eight?" asked Bob.
"Fifty-six," answered Amelia. "Sure?" said Bob. "Certain," said
Amelia. The drops changed hands, and the catastrophe of the domestic
drama changed with them. Just as Miss Sturch appeared with the camphor
julep at the garden door, in the character of medical Hebe to Mr.
Phippen, her intractable pupil showed himself to his father at the
school-room window, in the character, arithmetically speaking, of a
reformed son. The cane reposed for the day; and Mr. Phippen drank his
glass of camphor julep with a mind at ease on the twin subjects of
Miss Sturch's sensibilities and Master Bob's screams.

"Most gratifying in every way," said the Martyr to Dyspepsia, smacking
his lips with great relish, as he drained the last drops out of the
glass. "My nerves are spared, Miss Sturch's feelings are spared, and
the dear boy's back is spared. You have no idea how relieved I feel,
Chennery. Whereabouts were we in that delightful story of yours when
this little domestic interruption occurred?"

"At the end of it, to be sure," said the vicar. "The bride and
bridegroom are some miles on their way by this time to spend the
honey-moon at St. Swithin's-on-Sea. Captain Treverton is only left
behind for a day. He received his sailing orders on Monday, and he
will be off to Portsmouth to-morrow morning to take command of his
ship. Though he won't admit it in plain words, I happen to know that
Rosamond has persuaded him to make this his last cruise. She has a
plan for getting him back to Porthgenna, to live there with her
husband, which I hope and believe will succeed. The west rooms at the
old house, in one of which Mrs. Treverton died, are not to be used at
all by the young married couple. They have engaged a builder--a
sensible, practical man, this time--to survey the neglected north
rooms, with a view to their redecoration and thorough repair in every
way. This part of the house can not possibly be associated with any
melancholy recollections in Captain Treverton's mind, for neither he
nor any one else ever entered it during the period of his residence at
Porthgenna. Considering the change in the look of the place which this
project of repairing the north rooms is sure to produce, and taking
into account also the softening effect of time on all painful
recollections, I should say there was a fair prospect of Captain
Treverton's returning to pass the end of his days among his old
tenantry. It will be a great chance for Leonard Frankland if he does,
for he would be sure to dispose the people at Porthgenna kindly toward
their new master. Introduced among his Cornish tenants under Captain
Treverton's wing, Leonard is sure to get on well with them, provided
he abstains from showing too much of the family pride which he has
inherited from his father. He is a little given to overrate the
advantages of birth and the importance of rank--but that is really the
only noticeable defect in his character. In all other respects I can
honestly say of him that he deserves what he has got--the best wife in
the world. What a life of happiness, Phippen, seems to be awaiting
these lucky young people! It is a bold thing to say of any mortal
creatures, but, look as far as I may, not a cloud can I see any where
on their future prospects."

"You excellent creature!" exclaimed Mr. Phippen, affectionately
squeezing the vicar's hand. "How I enjoy hearing you! how I luxuriate
in your bright view of life!"

"And is it not the true view--especially in the case of young
Frankland and his wife?" inquired the vicar.

"If you ask me," said Mr. Phippen, with a mournful smile, and a
philosophic calmness of manner, "I can only answer that the direction
of a man's speculative views depends--not to mince the matter--on the
state of his secretions. Your biliary secretions, dear friend, are all
right, and you take bright views. My biliary secretions are all wrong,
and I take dark views. You look at the future prospects of this young
married couple, and say there is no cloud over them. I don't dispute
the assertion, not having the pleasure of knowing either bride or
bridegroom. But I look up at the sky over our heads--I remember that
there was not a cloud on it when we first entered the garden--I now
see, just over those two trees growing so close together, a cloud that
has appeared unexpectedly from nobody knows where--and I draw my own
conclusions. Such," said Mr. Phippen, ascending the garden steps on
his way into the house, "is my philosophy. It may be tinged with bile,
but it is philosophy for all that."

"All the philosophy in the world," said the vicar, following his guest
up the steps, "will not shake my conviction that Leonard Frankland and
his wife have a happy future before them."

Mr. Phippen laughed, and, waiting on the steps till his host joined
him, took Doctor Chennery's arm in the friendliest manner.

"You have told a charming story, Chennery," he said, "and you have
ended it with a charming sentiment. But, my dear friend, though your
healthy mind (influenced by an enviably easy digestion) despises my
bilious philosophy, don't quite forget the cloud over the two trees.
Look up at it now--it is getting darker and bigger already."




CHAPTER III.

THE BRIDE AND BRIDEGROOM.


Under the roof of a widowed mother, Miss Mowlem lived humbly at St.
Swithin's-on-Sea. In the spring of the year eighteen hundred and
forty-four, the heart of Miss Mowlem's widowed mother was gladdened by
a small legacy. Turning over in her mind the various uses to which the
money might be put, the discreet old lady finally decided on investing
it in furniture, on fitting up the first floor and the second floor of
her house in the best taste, and on hanging a card in the parlor
window to inform the public that she had furnished apartments to let.
By the summer the apartments were ready, and the card was put up. It
had hardly been exhibited a week before a dignified personage in black
applied to look at the rooms, expressed himself as satisfied with
their appearance, and engaged them for a month certain, for a newly
married lady and gentleman, who might be expected to take possession
in a few days. The dignified personage in black was Captain
Treverton's servant, and the lady and gentleman, who arrived in due
time to take possession, were Mr. and Mrs. Frankland.

The natural interest which Mrs. Mowlem felt in her youthful first
lodgers was necessarily vivid in its nature; but it was apathy itself
compared to the sentimental interest which her daughter took in
observing the manners and customs of the lady and gentleman in their
capacity of bride and bridegroom. From the moment when Mr. and Mrs.
Frankland entered the house, Miss Mowlem began to study them with all
the ardor of an industrious scholar who attacks a new branch of
knowledge. At every spare moment of the day, this industrious young
lady occupied herself in stealing up stairs to collect observations,
and in running down stairs to communicate them to her mother. By the
time the married couple had been in the house a week, Miss Mowlem had
made such good use of her eyes, ears, and opportunities that she could
have written a seven days' diary of the lives of Mr. and Mrs.
Frankland with the truth and minuteness of Mr. Samuel Pepys himself.

But, learn as much as we may, the longer we live the more information
there is to acquire. Seven days' patient accumulation of facts in
connection with the honey-moon had not placed Miss Mowlem beyond the
reach of further discoveries. On the morning of the eighth day, after
bringing down the breakfast tray, this observant spinster stole up
stairs again, according to custom, to drink at the spring of knowledge
through the key-hole channel of the drawing-room door. After an
absence of five minutes she descended to the kitchen, breathless with
excitement, to announce a fresh discovery in connection with Mr. and
Mrs. Frankland to her venerable mother.

"Whatever do you think she's doing now?" cried Miss Mowlem, with
widely opened eyes and highly elevated hands.

"Nothing that's useful," answered Mrs. Mowlem, with sarcastic
readiness.

"She's actually sitting on his knee! Mother, did you ever sit on
father's knee when you were married?"

"Certainly not, my dear. When me and your poor father married, we were
neither of us flighty young people, and we knew better."

"She's got her head on his shoulder," proceeded Miss Mowlem, more and
more agitatedly, "and her arms round his neck--both her arms, mother,
as tight as can be."

"I won't believe it," exclaimed Mrs. Mowlem, indignantly. "A lady like
her, with riches, and accomplishments, and all that, demean herself
like a housemaid with a sweetheart. Don't tell me, I won't believe
it!"

It was true though, for all that. There were plenty of chairs in Mrs.
Mowlem's drawing-room; there were three beautifully bound books on
Mrs. Mowlem's Pembroke table (the Antiquities of St. Swithin's,
Smallridge's Sermons, and Klopstock's Messiah in English prose)--Mrs.
Frankland might have sat on purple morocco leather, stuffed with the
best horse-hair, might have informed and soothed her mind with
archæological diversions, with orthodox native theology, and with
devotional poetry of foreign origin--and yet, so frivolous is the
nature of woman, she was perverse enough to prefer doing nothing, and
perching herself uncomfortably on her husband's knee!

She sat for some time in the undignified position which Miss Mowlem
had described with such graphic correctness to her mother--then drew
back a little, raised her head, and looked earnestly into the quiet,
meditative face of the blind man.

"Lenny, you are very silent this morning," she said. "What are you
thinking about? If you will tell me all your thoughts, I will tell you
all mine."

"Would you really care to hear all my thoughts?" asked Leonard.

"Yes; all. I shall be jealous of any thoughts that you keep to
yourself. Tell me what you were thinking of just now! Me?"

"Not exactly of you."

"More shame for you. Are you tired of me in eight days? I have not
thought of any body but you ever since we have been here. Ah! you
laugh. Oh, Lenny, I do love you so; how can I think of any body but
you? No! I sha'n't kiss you. I want to know what you were thinking
about first."

"Of a dream, Rosamond, that I had last night. Ever since the first
days of my blindness--Why, I thought you were not going to kiss me
again till I had told you what I was thinking about!"

"I can't help kissing you, Lenny, when you talk of the loss of your
sight. Tell me, my poor love, do I help to make up for that loss? Are
you happier than you used to be? and have I some share in making that
happiness, though it is ever so little?"

She turned her head away as she spoke, but Leonard was too quick for
her. His inquiring fingers touched her cheek. "Rosamond, you are
crying," he said.

"I crying!" she answered, with a sudden assumption of gayety. "No,"
she continued, after a moment's pause. "I will never deceive you,
love, even in the veriest trifle. My eyes serve for both of us now,
don't they? you depend on me for all that your touch fails to tell
you, and I must never be unworthy of my trust--must I? I did cry,
Lenny--but only a very little. I don't know how it was, but I never,
in all my life, seemed to pity you and feel for you as I did just at
that moment. Never mind, I've done now. Go on--do go on with what you
were going to say."

"I was going to say, Rosamond, that I have observed one curious thing
about myself since I lost my sight. I dream a great deal, but I never
dream of myself as a blind man. I often visit in my dreams places that
I saw and people whom I knew when I had my sight, and though I feel as
much myself, at those visionary times, as I am now when I am
wide-awake, I never by any chance feel blind. I wander about all sorts
of old walks in my sleep, and never grope my way. I talk to all sorts
of old friends in my sleep, and see the expression in their faces
which, waking, I shall never see again. I have lost my sight more than
a year now, and yet it was like the shock of a new discovery to me to
wake up last night from my dream, and remember suddenly that I was
blind."

"What dream was it, Lenny?"

"Only a dream of the place where I first met you when we were both
children. I saw the glen, as it was years ago, with the great twisted
roots of the trees, and the blackberry bushes twining about them in a
still shadowed light that came through thick leaves from the rainy
sky. I saw the mud on the walk in the middle of the glen, with the
marks of the cows' hoofs in some places, and the sharp circles in
others where some countrywomen had been lately trudging by on pattens.
I saw the muddy water running down on either side of the path after
the shower; and I saw you, Rosamond, a naughty girl, all covered with
clay and wet--just as you were in the reality--soiling your bright
blue pelisse and your pretty little chubby hands by making a dam to
stop the running water, and laughing at the indignation of your
nurse-maid when she tried to pull you away and take you home. I saw
all that exactly as it really was in the by-gone time; but, strangely
enough, I did not see myself as the boy I then was. You were a little
girl, and the glen was in its old neglected state, and yet, though I
was all in the past so far, I was in the present as regarded myself.
Throughout the whole dream I was uneasily conscious of being a grown
man--of being, in short, exactly what I am now, excepting always that
I was not blind."

"What a memory you must have, love, to be able to recall all those
little circumstances after the years that have passed since that wet
day in the glen! How well you recollect what I was as a child! Do you
remember in the same vivid way what I looked like a year ago when you
saw me--Oh, Lenny, it almost breaks my heart to think of it!--when you
saw me for the last time?"

"Do I remember, Rosamond! My last look at your face has painted your
portrait in my memory in colors that can never change. I have many
pictures in my mind, but your picture is the clearest and brightest of
all."

"And it is the picture of me at my best--painted in my youth, dear,
when my face was always confessing how I loved you, though my lips
said nothing. There is some consolation in that thought. When years
have passed over us both, Lenny, and when time begins to set his mark
on me, you will not say to yourself, 'My Rosamond is beginning to
fade; she grows less and less like what she was when I married her.' I
shall never grow old, love, for you! The bright young picture in your
mind will still be my picture when my cheeks are wrinkled and my hair
is gray."

"Still your picture--always the same, grow as old as I may."

"But are you sure it is clear in every part? Are there no doubtful
lines, no unfinished corners any where? I have not altered yet since
you saw me--I am just what I was a year ago. Suppose I ask you what I
am like now, could you tell me without making a mistake?"

"Try me."

"May I? You shall be put through a complete catechism! I don't tire
you sitting on your knee, do I? Well, in the first place, how tall am
I when we both stand up side by side?"

"You just reach to my ear."

"Quite right, to begin with. Now for the next question. What does my
hair look like in your portrait?"

"It is dark brown--there is a great deal of it--and it grows rather
too low on your forehead for the taste of some people--"

"Never mind about 'some people;' does it grow too low for your taste?"

"Certainly not. I like it to grow low; I like all those little natural
waves that it makes against your forehead; I like it taken back, as
you wear it, in plain bands, which leave your ears and your cheeks
visible; and above all things, I like that big glossy knot that it
makes where it is all gathered up together at the back of your head."

"Oh, Lenny, how well you remember me, so far! Now go a little lower."

"A little lower is down to your eyebrows. They are very nicely shaped
eyebrows in my picture--"

"Yes, but they have a fault. Come! tell me what the fault is."

"They are not quite so strongly marked as they might be."

"Right again! And my eyes?"

"Brown eyes, large eyes, wakeful eyes, that are always looking about
them. Eyes that can be very soft at one time, and very bright at
another. Eyes tender and clear, just at the present moment, but
capable, on very slight provocation, of opening rather too widely, and
looking rather too brilliantly resolute."

"Mind you don't make them look so now! What is there below the eyes?"

"A nose that is not quite big enough to be in proper proportion with
them. A nose that has a slight tendency to be--"

"Don't say the horrid English word! Spare my feelings by putting it in
French. Say _retroussé_, and skip over my nose as fast as possible."

"I must stop at the mouth, then, and own that it is as near perfection
as possible. The lips are lovely in shape, fresh in color, and
irresistible in expression. They smile in my portrait, and I am sure
they are smiling at me now."

"How could they do otherwise when they are getting so much praise? My
vanity whispers to me that I had better stop the catechism here. If I
talk about my complexion, I shall only hear that it is of the dusky
sort; and that there is never red enough in it except when I am
walking, or confused, or angry. If I ask a question about my figure, I
shall receive the dreadful answer, 'You are dangerously inclined to be
fat.' If I say, How do I dress? I shall be told, Not soberly enough;
you are as fond as a child of gay colors--No! I will venture no more
questions. But, vanity apart, Lenny, I am so glad, so proud, so happy
to find that you can keep the image of me clearly in your mind. I
shall do my best now to look and dress like your last remembrance of
me. My love of loves! I will do you credit--I will try if I can't make
you envied for your wife. You deserve a hundred thousand kisses for
saying your catechism so well--and there they are!"

While Mrs. Frankland was conferring the reward of merit on her
husband, the sound of a faint, small, courteously significant cough
made itself timidly audible in a corner of the room. Turning round
instantly, with the quickness that characterized all her actions, Mrs.
Frankland, to her horror and indignation, confronted Miss Mowlem
standing just inside the door, with a letter in her hand and a blush
of sentimental agitation on her simpering face.

"You wretch! how dare you come in without knocking at the door?" cried
Rosamond, starting to her feet with a stamp, and passing in an instant
from the height of fondness to the height of indignation.

Miss Mowlem shook guiltily before the bright, angry eyes that looked
through and through her, turned very pale, held out the letter
apologetically, and said in her meekest tones that she was very
sorry.

"Sorry!" exclaimed Rosamond, getting even more irritated by the
apology than she had been by the intrusion, and showing it by another
stamp of the foot; "who cares whether you are sorry? I don't want your
sorrow--I won't have it. I never was so insulted in my life--never,
you mean, prying, inquisitive creature!"

"Rosamond! Rosamond! pray don't forget yourself!" interposed the quiet
voice of Mr. Frankland.

"Lenny, dear, I can't help it! That creature would drive a saint mad.
She has been prying after us ever since we have been here--you have,
you ill-bred, indelicate woman!--I suspected it before--I am certain
of it now! Must we lock our doors to keep you out?--we won't lock our
doors! Fetch the bill! We give you warning. Mr. Frankland gives you
warning--don't you, Lenny? I'll pack up all your things, dear: she
sha'n't touch one of them. Go down stairs and make out your bill, and
give your mother warning. Mr. Frankland says he won't have his rooms
burst into, and his doors listened at by inquisitive women--and I say
so too. Put that letter down on the table--unless you want to open it
and read it--put it down, you audacious woman, and fetch the bill, and
tell your mother we are going to leave the house directly!"

At this dreadful threat, Miss Mowlem, who was soft and timid, as well
as curious, by nature, wrung her hands in despair, and overflowed
meekly in a shower of tears.

"Oh! good gracious Heavens above!" cried Miss Mowlem, addressing
herself distractedly to the ceiling, "what will mother say! whatever
will become of me now! Oh, ma'am! I thought I knocked--I did, indeed!
Oh, ma'am! I humbly beg pardon, and I'll never intrude again. Oh,
ma'am! mother's a widow, and this is the first time we have let the
lodgings, and the furniture's swallowed up all our money, and oh,
ma'am! ma'am! how I shall catch it if you go!" Here words failed Miss
Mowlem, and hysterical sobs pathetically supplied their place.

"Rosamond!" said Mr. Frankland. There was an accent of sorrow in his
voice this time, as well as an accent of remonstrance. Rosamond's
quick ear caught the alteration in his tone. As she looked round at
him her color changed, her head drooped a little, and her whole
expression altered on the instant. She stole gently to her husband's
side with softened, saddened eyes, and put her lips caressingly close
to his ear.

"Lenny," she whispered, "have I made you angry with me?"

"I can't be angry with you, Rosamond," was the quiet answer. "I only
wish, love, that you could have controlled yourself a little sooner."

"I am so sorry--so very, very sorry!" The fresh, soft lips came closer
still to his ear as they whispered these penitent words; and the
cunning little hand crept up tremblingly round his neck and began to
play with his hair. "So sorry, and so ashamed of myself! But it was
enough to make almost any body angry, just at first--wasn't it, dear?
And you will forgive me--won't you, Lenny?--if I promise never to
behave so badly again? Never mind that wretched whimpering fool at the
door," said Rosamond, undergoing a slight relapse as she looked round
at Miss Mowlem, standing immovably repentant against the wall, with
her face buried in a dingy-white pocket-handkerchief. "I'll make it up
with her; I'll stop her crying; I'll take her out of the room; I'll do
any thing in the world that's kind to her, if you will only forgive
me."

"A polite word or two is all that is wanted--nothing more than a
polite word or two," said Mr. Frankland, rather coldly and
constrainedly.

"Don't cry any more, for goodness sake!" said Rosamond, walking
straight up to Miss Mowlem, and pulling the dingy-white
pocket-handkerchief away from her face without the least ceremony.
"There! leave off, will you? I am very sorry I was in a
passion--though you had no business to come in without knocking--I
never meant to distress you, and I'll never say a hard word to you
again, if you will only knock at the door for the future, and leave
off crying now. _Do_ leave off crying, you tiresome creature! We are
not going away. We don't want your mother, or the bill, or any thing.
Here! here's a present for you, if you'll leave off crying. Here's my
neck-ribbon--I saw you trying it on yesterday afternoon, when I was
lying down on the bedroom sofa, and you thought I was asleep. Never
mind; I'm not angry about that. Take the ribbon--take it as a
peace-offering, if you won't as a present. You _shall_ take it!--No,
I don't mean that--I mean, please take it! There, I've pinned it on.
And now, shake hands and be friends, and go up stairs and see how it
looks in the glass." With these words, Mrs. Frankland opened the door,
administered, under the pretense of a pat on the shoulder, a
good-humored shove to the amazed and embarrassed Miss Mowlem, closed
the door again, and resumed her place in a moment on her husband's
knee.

"I've made it up with her, dear. I've sent her away with my bright
green ribbon, and it makes her look as yellow as a guinea, and as ugly
as--" Rosamond stopped, and looked anxiously into Mr. Frankland's
face. "Lenny!" she said, sadly, putting her cheek against his, "are
you angry with me still?"

"My love, I was never angry with you. I never can be."

"I will always keep my temper down for the future, Lenny!"

"I am sure you will, Rosamond. But never mind that. I am not thinking
of your temper now."

"Of what, then?"

"Of the apology you made to Miss Mowlem."

"Did I not say enough? I'll call her back if you like--I'll make
another penitent speech--I'll do any thing but kiss her. I really
can't do that--I can't kiss any body now but you."

"My dear, dear love, how very much like a child you are still in some
of your ways! You said more than enough to Miss Mowlem--far more. And
if you will pardon me for making the remark, I think in your
generosity and good-nature you a little forgot yourself with the young
woman. I don't so much allude to your giving her the ribbon--though,
perhaps, that might have been done a little less familiarly--but, from
what I heard you say, I infer that you actually went the length of
shaking hands with her."

"Was that wrong? I thought it was the kindest way of making it up."

"My dear, it is an excellent way of making it up between equals. But
consider the difference between your station in society and Miss
Mowlem's."

"I will try and consider it, if you wish me, love. But I think I take
after my father, who never troubles his head (dear old man!) about
differences of station. I can't help liking people who are kind to
me, without thinking whether they are above my rank or below it; and
when I got cool, I must confess I felt just as vexed with myself for
frightening and distressing that unlucky Miss Mowlem as if her station
had been equal to mine. I will try to think as you do, Lenny; but I am
very much afraid that I have got, without knowing exactly how, to be
what the newspapers call a Radical."

"My dear Rosamond! don't talk of yourself in that way, even in joke.
You ought to be the last person in the world to confuse those
distinctions in rank on which the whole well-being of society
depends."

"Does it really? And yet, dear, we don't seem to have been created
with such very wide distinctions between us. We have all got the same
number of arms and legs; we are all hungry and thirsty, and hot in the
summer and cold in the winter; we all laugh when we are pleased, and
cry when we are distressed; and, surely, we have all got very much the
same feelings, whether we are high or whether we are low. I could not
have loved you better, Lenny, than I do now if I had been a duchess,
or less than I do now if I had been a servant-girl."

"My love, you are not a servant-girl. And, as to what you say about
being a duchess, let me remind you that you are not so much below a
duchess as you seem to think. Many a lady of high title can not look
back on such a line of ancestors as yours. Your father's family,
Rosamond, is one of the oldest in England: even _my_ father's family
hardly dates back so far; and we were landed gentry when many a name
in the peerage was not heard of. It is really almost laughably absurd
to hear you talking of yourself as a Radical."

"I won't talk of myself so again, Lenny--only don't look so serious. I
will be a Tory, dear, if you will give me a kiss, and let me sit on
your knee a little longer."

Mr. Frankland's gravity was not proof against his wife's change of
political principles, and the conditions which she annexed to it. His
face cleared up, and he laughed almost as gayly as Rosamond herself.

"By the bye," he said, after an interval of silence had given him time
to collect his thoughts, "did I not hear you tell Miss Mowlem to put a
letter down on the table? Is it a letter for you or for me?"

"Ah! I forgot all about the letter," said Rosamond, running to the
table. "It is for you, Lenny--and, goodness me! here's the Porthgenna
postmark on it."

"It must be from the builder whom I sent down to the old house about
the repairs. Lend me your eyes, love, and let us hear what he says."

Rosamond opened the letter, drew a stool to her husband's feet, and,
sitting down with her arms on his knees, read as follows:

     "TO LEONARD FRANKLAND, ESQ.:

     "SIR,--Agreeably to the instructions with which you favored
     me, I have proceeded to survey Porthgenna Tower, with a
     view to ascertaining what repairs the house in general, and
     the north side of it in particular, may stand in need of.

     "As regards the outside, a little cleaning and new pointing
     is all that the building wants. The walls and foundations
     seem made to last forever. Such strong, solid work I never
     set eyes on before.

     "Inside the house, I can not report so favorably. The rooms
     in the west front, having been inhabited during the period
     of Captain Treverton's occupation, and having been well
     looked after since, are in tolerably sound condition. I
     should say two hundred pounds would cover the expense of
     all repairs in my line which these rooms need. This sum
     would not include the restoration of the western staircase,
     which has given a little in some places, and the banisters
     of which are decidedly insecure from the first to the
     second landing. From twenty-five to thirty pounds would
     suffice to set this all right.

     "In the rooms on the north front, the state of
     dilapidation, from top to bottom, is as bad as can be. From
     all that I could ascertain, nobody ever went near these
     rooms in Captain Treverton's time, or has ever entered them
     since. The people who now keep the house have a
     superstitious dread of opening any of the north doors, in
     consequence of the time that has elapsed since any living
     being has passed through them. Nobody would volunteer to
     accompany me in my survey, and nobody could tell me which
     keys fitted which room doors in any part of the north side.
     I could find no plan containing the names or numbers of
     the rooms; nor, to my surprise, were there any labels
     attached separately to the keys. They were given to me, all
     hanging together on a large ring, with an ivory label on
     it, which was only marked--Keys of the North Rooms. I take
     the liberty of mentioning these particulars in order to
     account for my having, as you might think, delayed my stay
     at Porthgenna Tower longer than is needful. I lost nearly a
     whole day in taking the keys off the ring, and fitting them
     at hazard to the right doors. And I occupied some hours of
     another day in marking each door with a number on the
     outside, and putting a corresponding label to each key,
     before I replaced it on the ring, in order to prevent the
     possibility of future errors and delays.

     "As I hope to furnish you, in a few days, with a detailed
     estimate of the repairs needed in the north part of the
     house, from basement to roof, I need only say here that
     they will occupy some time, and will be of the most
     extensive nature. The beams of the staircase and the
     flooring of the first story have got the dry rot. The damp
     in some rooms, and the rats in others, have almost
     destroyed the wainscotings. Four of the mantel-pieces have
     given out from the walls, and all the ceilings are either
     stained, cracked, or peeled away in large patches. The
     flooring is, in general, in a better condition than I had
     anticipated; but the shutters and window-sashes are so
     warped as to be useless. It is only fair to acknowledge
     that the expense of setting all these things to
     rights--that is to say, of making the rooms safe and
     habitable, and of putting them in proper condition for the
     upholsterer--will be considerable. I would respectfully
     suggest, in the event of your feeling any surprise or
     dissatisfaction at the amount of my estimate, that you
     should name a friend in whom you place confidence, to go
     over the north rooms with me, keeping my estimate in his
     hand. I will undertake to prove, if needful, the necessity
     of each separate repair, and the justice of each separate
     charge for the same, to the satisfaction of any competent
     and impartial person whom you may please to select.

     "Trusting to send you the estimate in a few days,

     "I remain, Sir,

     "Your humble servant,

     "THOMAS HORLOCK."


"A very honest, straightforward letter," said Mr. Frankland.

"I wish he had sent the estimate with it," said Rosamond. "Why could
not the provoking man tell us at once in round numbers what the
repairs will really cost?"

"I suspect, my dear, he was afraid of shocking us, if he mentioned the
amount in round numbers."

"That horrid money! It is always getting in one's way, and upsetting
one's plans. If we haven't got enough, let us go and borrow of
somebody who has. Do you mean to dispatch a friend to Porthgenna to go
over the house with Mr. Horlock? If you do, I know who I wish you
would send."

"Who?"

"Me, if you please--under your escort, of course. Don't laugh, Lenny;
I would be very sharp with Mr. Horlock; I would object to every one of
his charges, and beat him down without mercy. I once saw a surveyor go
over a house, and I know exactly what to do. You stamp on the floor,
and knock at the walls, and scrape at the brick-work, and look up all
the chimneys, and out of all the windows--sometimes you make notes in
a little book, sometimes you measure with a foot-rule, sometimes you
sit down all of a sudden, and think profoundly--and the end of it is
that you say the house will do very well indeed, if the tenant will
pull out his purse, and put it in proper repair."

"Well done, Rosamond! You have one more accomplishment than I knew of;
and I suppose I have no choice now but to give you an opportunity of
displaying it. If you don't object, my dear, to being associated with
a professional assistant in the important business of checking Mr.
Horlock's estimate, I don't object to paying a short visit to
Porthgenna whenever you please--especially now I know that the west
rooms are still habitable."

"Oh, how kind of you! how pleased I shall be! how I shall enjoy seeing
the old place again before it is altered! I was only five years old,
Lenny, when we left Porthgenna, and I am so anxious to see what I can
remember of it, after such a long, long absence as mine. Do you know,
I never saw any thing of that ruinous north side of the house?--and I
do so dote on old rooms! We will go all through them, Lenny. You shall
have hold of my hand, and look with my eyes, and make as many
discoveries as I do. I prophesy that we shall see ghosts, and find
treasures, and hear mysterious noises--and, oh heavens! what clouds of
dust we shall have to go through. Pouf! the very anticipation of them
chokes me already."

"Now we are on the subject of Porthgenna, Rosamond, let us be serious
for one moment. It is clear to me that these repairs of the north
rooms will cost a large sum of money. Now, my love, I consider no sum
of money misspent, however large it may be, if it procures you
pleasure. I am with you heart and soul--"

He paused. His wife's caressing arms were twining round his neck
again, and her cheek was laid gently against his. "Go on, Lenny," she
said, with such an accent of tenderness in the utterance of those
three simple words that his speech failed him for the moment, and all
his sensations seemed absorbed in the one luxury of listening.
"Rosamond," he whispered, "there is no music in the world that touches
me as your voice touches me now! I feel it all through me, as I used
sometimes to feel the sky at night, in the time when I could see." As
he spoke, the caressing arms tightened round his neck, and the fervent
lips softly took the place which the cheek had occupied. "Go on,
Lenny," they repeated, happily as well as tenderly now, "you said you
were with me, heart and soul. With me in what?"

"In your project, love, for inducing your father to retire from his
profession after this last cruise, and in your hope of prevailing on
him to pass the evening of his days happily with us at Porthgenna. If
the money spent in restoring the north rooms, so that we may all live
in them for the future, does indeed so alter the look of the place to
his eyes as to dissipate his old sorrowful associations with it, and
to make his living there again a pleasure instead of a pain to him, I
shall regard it as money well laid out. But, Rosamond, are you sure of
the success of your plan before we undertake it? Have you dropped any
hint of the Porthgenna project to your father?"

"I told him, Lenny, that I should never be quite comfortable unless he
left the sea and came to live with us--and he said that he would. I
did not mention a word about Porthgenna--nor did he--but he knows that
we shall live there when we are settled, and he made no conditions
when he promised that our home should be his home."

"Is the loss of your mother the only sad association he has with the
place?"

"Not quite. There is another association, which has never been
mentioned, but which I may tell you, because there are no secrets
between us. My mother had a favorite maid who lived with her from the
time of her marriage, and who was, accidentally, the only person
present in her room when she died. I remember hearing of this woman as
being odd in her look and manner, and no great favorite with any body
but her mistress. Well, on the morning of my mother's death, she
disappeared from the house in the strangest way, leaving behind her a
most singular and mysterious letter to my father, asserting that in my
mother's dying moments a Secret had been confided to her which she was
charged to divulge to her master when her mistress was no more; and
adding that she was afraid to mention this secret, and that, to avoid
being questioned about it, she had resolved on leaving the house
forever. She had been gone some hours when the letter was opened--and
she has never been seen or heard of since that time. This circumstance
seemed to make almost as strong an impression on my father's mind as
the shock of my mother's death. Our neighbors and servants all thought
(as I think) that the woman was mad; but he never agreed with them,
and I know that he has neither destroyed nor forgotten the letter from
that time to this."

"A strange event, Rosamond--a very strange event. I don't wonder that
it has made a lasting impression on him."

"Depend upon it, Lenny, the servants and the neighbors were right--the
woman was mad. Any way, however, it was certainly a singular event in
our family. All old houses have their romance--and that is the romance
of our house. But years and years have passed since then; and, what
with time, and what with the changes we are going to make, I have no
fear that my dear, good father will spoil our plans. Give him a new
north garden at Porthgenna, where he can walk the decks, as I call
it--give him new north rooms to live in--and I will answer for the
result. But all this is in the future; let us get back to the present
time. When shall we pay our flying visit to Porthgenna, Lenny, and
plunge into the important business of checking Mr. Horlock's estimate
for the repairs?"

"We have three weeks more to stay here, Rosamond."

"Yes; and then we must go back to Long Beckley. I promised that best
and biggest of men, the vicar, that we would pay our first visit to
him. He is sure not to let us off under three weeks or a month."

"In that case, then, we had better say two months hence for the visit
to Porthgenna. Is your writing-case in the room, Rosamond?"

"Yes; close by us, on the table."

"Write to Mr. Horlock then, love--and appoint a meeting in two months'
time at the old house. Tell him also, as we must not trust ourselves
on unsafe stairs--especially considering how dependent I am on
banisters--to have the west staircase repaired immediately. And, while
you have the pen in your hand, perhaps it may save trouble if you
write a second note to the housekeeper at Porthgenna, to tell her when
she may expect us."

Rosamond sat down gayly at the table, and dipped her pen in the ink
with a little flourish of triumph.

"In two months," she exclaimed joyfully, "I shall see the dear old
place again! In two months, Lenny, our profane feet will be raising
the dust in the solitudes of the North Rooms."




BOOK III.




CHAPTER I.

TIMON OF LONDON.


Timon of Athens retreated from an ungrateful world to a cavern by the
sea-shore, vented his misanthropy in magnificent poetry, and enjoyed
the honor of being called "My Lord." Timon of London took refuge from
his species in a detached house at Bayswater--expressed his sentiments
in shabby prose--and was only addressed as "Mr. Treverton." The one
point of resemblance which it is possible to set against these points
of contrast between the two Timons consisted in this: that their
misanthropy was, at least, genuine. Both were incorrigible haters of
mankind.

There is probably no better proof of the accuracy of that definition
of man which describes him as an imitative animal, than is to be found
in the fact that the verdict of humanity is always against any
individual member of the species who presumes to differ from the rest.
A man is one of a flock, and his wool must be of the general color. He
must drink when the rest drink, and graze where the rest graze. Let
him walk at noonday with perfect composure of countenance and decency
of gait, with not the slightest appearance of vacancy in his eyes or
wildness in his manner, from one end of Oxford Street to the other
without his hat, and let every one of the thousands of hat-wearing
people whom he passes be asked separately what they think of him, how
many will abstain from deciding instantly that he is mad, on no other
evidence than the evidence of his bare head? Nay, more; let him
politely stop each one of those passengers, and let him explain in the
plainest form of words, and in the most intelligible manner, that his
head feels more easy and comfortable without a hat than with one, how
many of his fellow mortals who decided that he was mad on first
meeting him, will change their opinion when they part from him after
hearing his explanation? In the vast majority of cases, the very
explanation itself would be accepted as an excellent additional proof
that the intellect of the hatless man was indisputably deranged.

Starting at the beginning of the march of life out of step with the
rest of the mortal regiment, Andrew Treverton paid the penalty of his
irregularity from his earliest days. He was a phenomenon in the
nursery, a butt at school, and a victim at college. The ignorant
nurse-maid reported him as a queer child; the learned school-master
genteelly varied the phrase, and described him as an eccentric boy;
the college tutor, harping on the same string, facetiously likened his
head to a roof, and said there was a slate loose in it. When a slate
is loose, if nobody fixes it in time, it ends by falling off. In the
roof of a house we view that consequence as a necessary result of
neglect; in the roof of a man's head we are generally very much
shocked and surprised by it.

Overlooked in some directions and misdirected in others, Andrew's
uncouth capacities for good tried helplessly to shape themselves. The
better side of his eccentricity took the form of friendship. He became
violently and unintelligibly fond of one among his school-fellows--a
boy who treated him with no especial consideration in the play-ground,
and who gave him no particular help in the class. Nobody could
discover the smallest reason for it, but it was nevertheless a
notorious fact that Andrew's pocket-money was always at this boy's
service, that Andrew ran about after him like a dog, and that Andrew
over and over again took the blame and punishment on his own shoulders
which ought to have fallen on the shoulders of his friend. When, a few
years afterward, that friend went to college, the lad petitioned to be
sent to college too, and attached himself there more closely than ever
to the strangely chosen comrade of his school-boy days. Such devotion
as this must have touched any man possessed of ordinary generosity of
disposition. It made no impression whatever on the inherently base
nature of Andrew's friend. After three years of intercourse at
college--intercourse which was all selfishness on one side and all
self-sacrifice on the other--the end came, and the light was let in
cruelly on Andrew's eyes. When his purse grew light in his friend's
hand, and when his acceptances were most numerous on his friend's
bills, the brother of his honest affection, the hero of his simple
admiration, abandoned him to embarrassment, to ridicule, and to
solitude, without the faintest affectation of penitence--without so
much even as a word of farewell.

He returned to his father's house, a soured man at the outset of
life--returned to be upbraided for the debts that he had contracted to
serve the man who had heartlessly outraged and shamelessly cheated
him. He left home in disgrace to travel on a small allowance. The
travels were protracted, and they ended, as such travels often do, in
settled expatriation. The life he led, the company he kept, during his
long residence abroad, did him permanent and fatal harm. When he at
last returned to England, he presented himself in the most hopeless of
all characters--the character of a man who believes in nothing. At
this period of his life, his one chance for the future lay in the good
results which his brother's influence over him might have produced.
The two had hardly resumed their intercourse of early days, when the
quarrel occasioned by Captain Treverton's marriage broke it off
forever. From that time, for all social interests and purposes, Andrew
was a lost man. From that time he met the last remonstrances that were
made to him by the last friends who took any interest in his fortunes
always with the same bitter and hopeless form of reply: "My dearest
friend forsook and cheated me," he would say. "My only brother has
quarreled with me for the sake of a play-actress. What am I to expect
of the rest of mankind after that? I have suffered twice for my belief
in others--I will never suffer a third time. The wise man is the man
who does not disturb his heart at its natural occupation of pumping
blood through his body. I have gathered my experience abroad and at
home, and have learned enough to see through the delusions of life
which look like realities to other men's eyes. My business in this
world is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Every thing else is
superfluity--and I have done with it."

The few people who ever cared to inquire about him again, after being
repulsed by such an avowal as this, heard of him three or four years
after his brother's marriage in the neighborhood of Bayswater. Local
report described him as having bought the first cottage he could find
which was cut off from other houses by a wall all round it. It was
further rumored that he was living like a miser; that he had got an
old man-servant, named Shrowl, who was even a greater enemy to mankind
than himself; that he allowed no living soul, not even an occasional
char-woman, to enter the house; that he was letting his beard grow,
and that he had ordered his servant Shrowl to follow his example. In
the year eighteen hundred and forty-four, the fact of a man's not
shaving was regarded by the enlightened majority of the English nation
as a proof of unsoundness of intellect. At the present time Mr.
Treverton's beard would only have interfered with his reputation for
respectability. Seventeen years ago it was accepted as so much
additional evidence in support of the old theory that his intellects
were deranged. He was at that very time, as his stock-broker could
have testified, one of the sharpest men of business in London; he
could argue on the wrong side of any question with an acuteness of
sophistry and sarcasm that Dr. Johnson himself might have envied; he
kept his household accounts right to a farthing--but what did these
advantages avail him, in the estimation of his neighbors, when he
presumed to live on another plan than theirs, and when he wore a hairy
certificate of lunacy on the lower part of his face? We have advanced
a little in the matter of partial toleration of beards since that
time; but we have still a good deal of ground to get over. In the
present year of progress, eighteen hundred and sixty-one, would the
most trustworthy banker's clerk in the whole metropolis have the
slightest chance of keeping his situation if he left off shaving his
chin?

Common report, which calumniated Mr. Treverton as mad, had another
error to answer for in describing him as a miser. He saved more than
two thirds of the income derived from his comfortable fortune, not
because he liked hoarding up money, but because he had no enjoyment of
the comforts and luxuries which money is spent in procuring. To do him
justice, his contempt for his own wealth was quite as hearty as his
contempt for the wealth of his neighbors. Thus characteristically
wrong in endeavoring to delineate his character, report was,
nevertheless, for once in a way, inconsistently right in describing
his manner of life. It was true that he had bought the first cottage
he could find that was secluded within its own walls--true that nobody
was allowed, on any pretense whatever, to enter his doors--and true
that he had met with a servant, who was even bitterer against all
mankind than himself, in the person of Mr. Shrowl.

The life these two led approached as nearly to the existence of the
primitive man (or savage) as the surrounding conditions of
civilization would allow. Admitting the necessity of eating and
drinking, the first object of Mr. Treverton's ambition was to sustain
life with the least possible dependence on the race of men who
professed to supply their neighbors' bodily wants, and who, as he
conceived, cheated them infamously on the strength of their
profession.

Having a garden at the back of the house, Timon of London dispensed
with the green-grocer altogether by cultivating his own vegetables.
There was no room for growing wheat, or he would have turned farmer
also on his own account; but he could outwit the miller and the baker,
at any rate, by buying a sack of corn, grinding it in his own
hand-mill, and giving the flour to Shrowl to make into bread. On the
same principle, the meat for the house was bought wholesale of the
City salesmen--the master and servant eating as much of it in the
fresh state as they could, salting the rest, and setting butchers at
defiance. As for drink, neither brewer nor publican ever had the
chance of extorting a farthing from Mr. Treverton's pocket. He and
Shrowl were satisfied with beer--and they brewed for themselves. With
bread, vegetables, meat, and malt liquor, these two hermits of modern
days achieved the great double purpose of keeping life in and keeping
the tradesmen out.

Eating like primitive men, they lived in all other respects like
primitive men also. They had pots, pans, and pipkins, two deal tables,
two chairs, two old sofas, two short pipes, and two long cloaks. They
had no stated meal-times, no carpets and bedsteads, no cabinets,
book-cases, or ornamental knickknacks of any kind, no laundress, and
no char-woman. When either of the two wanted to eat and drink, he cut
off his crust of bread, cooked his bit of meat, drew his drop of beer,
without the slightest reference to the other. When either of the two
thought he wanted a clean shirt, which was very seldom, he went and
washed one for himself. When either of the two discovered that any
part of the house was getting very dirty indeed, he took a bucket of
water and a birch-broom, and washed the place out like a dog-kennel.
And, lastly, when either of the two wanted to go to sleep, he wrapped
himself up in his cloak, lay down on one of the sofas, and took what
repose he required, early in the evening or late in the morning, just
as he pleased.

When there was no baking, brewing, gardening, or cleaning to be done,
the two sat down opposite each other, and smoked for hours, generally
without uttering a word. Whenever they did speak, they quarreled.
Their ordinary dialogue was a species of conversational prize-fight,
beginning with a sarcastic affectation of good-will on either side,
and ending in hearty exchanges of violent abuse--just as the boxers go
through the feeble formality of shaking hands before they enter on the
serious practical business of beating each other's faces out of all
likeness to the image of man. Not having so many disadvantages of
early refinement and education to contend against as his master,
Shrowl generally won the victory in these engagements of the tongue.
Indeed, though nominally the servant, he was really the ruling spirit
in the house--acquiring unbounded influence over his master by dint of
outmarching Mr. Treverton in every direction on his own ground.
Shrowl's was the harshest voice; Shrowl's were the bitterest sayings;
and Shrowl's was the longest beard. The surest of all retributions is
the retribution that lies in wait for a man who boasts. Mr. Treverton
was rashly given to boasting of his independence, and when retribution
overtook him it assumed a personal form, and bore the name of Shrowl.

       *       *       *       *       *

On a certain morning, about three weeks after Mrs. Frankland had
written to the housekeeper at Porthgenna Tower to mention the period
at which her husband and herself might be expected there, Mr.
Treverton descended, with his sourest face and his surliest manner,
from the upper regions of the cottage to one of the rooms on the
ground-floor, which civilized tenants would probably have called the
parlor. Like his elder brother, he was a tall, well-built man; but his
bony, haggard, sallow face bore not the slightest resemblance to the
handsome, open, sunburnt face of the Captain. No one seeing them
together could possibly have guessed that they were brothers--so
completely did they differ in expression as well as in feature. The
heart-aches that he had suffered in youth; the reckless, wandering,
dissipated life that he had led in manhood; the petulance, the
disappointment, and the physical exhaustion of his latter days, had so
wasted and worn him away that he looked his brother's elder by almost
twenty years. With unbrushed hair and unwashed face, with a tangled
gray beard, and an old, patched, dirty flannel dressing-gown that hung
about him like a sack, this descendant of a wealthy and ancient family
looked as if his birthplace had been the work-house, and his vocation
in life the selling of cast-off clothes.

It was breakfast-time with Mr. Treverton--that is to say, it was the
time at which he felt hungry enough to think about eating something.
In the same position over the mantel-piece in which a looking-glass
would have been placed in a household of ordinary refinement, there
hung in the cottage of Timon of London a side of bacon. On the deal
table by the fire stood half a loaf of heavy-looking brown-bread; in a
corner of the room was a barrel of beer, with two battered pewter pots
hitched onto nails in the wall above it; and under the grate lay a
smoky old gridiron, left just as it had been thrown down when last
used and done with. Mr. Treverton took a greasy clasp-knife out of the
pocket of his dressing-gown, cut off a rasher of bacon, jerked the
gridiron onto the fire, and began to cook his breakfast. He had just
turned the rasher, when the door opened, and Shrowl entered the room,
with his pipe in his mouth, bent on the same eating errand as his
master.

In personal appearance, Shrowl was short, fat, flabby, and perfectly
bald, except at the back of his head, where a ring of bristly
iron-gray hair projected like a collar that had got hitched out of its
place. To make amends for the scantiness of his hair, the beard which
he had cultivated by his master's desire grew far over his cheeks, and
drooped down on his chest in two thick jagged peaks. He wore a very
old long-tailed dress-coat, which he had picked up a bargain in
Petticoat Lane--a faded yellow shirt, with a large torn
frill--velveteen trowsers, turned up at the ankles--and Blucher boots
that had never been blacked since the day when they last left the
cobbler's stall. His color was unhealthily florid, his thick lips
curled upward with a malicious grin, and his eyes were the nearest
approach, in form and expression, to the eyes of a bull terrier
which those features are capable of achieving when they are placed in
the countenance of a man. Any painter wanting to express strength,
insolence, ugliness, coarseness, and cunning in the face and figure of
one and the same individual, could have discovered no better model for
the purpose, all the world over, than he might have found in the
person of Mr. Shrowl.

  [Illustration: "HE HAD JUST TURNED THE RASHER, WHEN THE DOOR OPENED,
   AND SHROWL ENTERED THE ROOM."]

Neither master nor servant exchanged a word or took the smallest
notice of each other on first meeting. Shrowl stood stolidly
contemplative, with his hands in his pockets, waiting for his turn at
the gridiron. Mr. Treverton finished his cooking, took his bacon to
the table, and, cutting a crust of bread, began to eat his breakfast.
When he had disposed of the first mouthful, he condescended to look up
at Shrowl, who was at that moment opening his clasp-knife and
approaching the side of bacon with slouching steps and sleepily greedy
eyes.

"What do you mean by that?" asked Mr. Treverton, pointing with
indignant surprise at Shrowl's breast. "You ugly brute, you've got a
clean shirt on!"

"Thankee, Sir, for noticing it," said Shrowl, with a sarcastic
affectation of humility. "This is a joyful occasion, this is. I
couldn't do no less than put a clean shirt on, when it's my master's
birthday. Many happy returns, Sir. Perhaps you thought I should forget
that to-day was your birthday? Lord bless your sweet face, I wouldn't
have forgot it on any account. How old are you to-day? It's a long
time ago, Sir, since you was a plump smiling little boy, with a frill
round your neck, and marbles in your pocket, and trowsers and
waistcoat all in one, and kisses and presents from Pa and Ma and uncle
and aunt, on your birthday. Don't you be afraid of me wearing out this
shirt by too much washing. I mean to put it away in lavender against
your next birthday; or against your funeral, which is just as likely
at your time of life--isn't it, Sir?"

"Don't waste a clean shirt on my funeral," retorted Mr. Treverton. "I
hav'n't left you any money in my will, Shrowl. You'll be on your way
to the work-house when I'm on my way to the grave."

"Have you really made your will at last, Sir?" inquired Shrowl,
pausing, with an appearance of the greatest interest, in the act of
cutting off his slice of bacon. "I humbly beg pardon, but I always
thought you was afraid to do it."

The servant had evidently touched intentionally on one of the master's
sore points. Mr. Treverton thumped his crust of bread on the table,
and looked up angrily at Shrowl.

"Afraid of making my will, you fool!" said he. "I don't make it, and I
won't make it, on principle."

Shrowl slowly sawed off his slice of bacon, and began to whistle a
tune.

"On principle," repeated Mr. Treverton. "Rich men who leave money
behind them are the farmers who raise the crop of human wickedness.
When a man has any spark of generosity in his nature, if you want to
put it out, leave him a legacy. When a man is bad, if you want to make
him worse, leave him a legacy. If you want to collect a number of men
together for the purpose of perpetuating corruption and oppression on
a large scale, leave them a legacy under the form of endowing a public
charity. If you want to give a woman the best chance in the world of
getting a bad husband, leave her a legacy. _Make my will!_ I have a
pretty strong dislike of my species, Shrowl, but I don't quite hate
mankind enough yet to do such mischief among them as that!" Ending his
diatribe in those words, Mr. Treverton took down one of the battered
pewter pots, and refreshed himself with a pint of beer.

Shrowl shifted the gridiron to a clear place in the fire, and chuckled
sarcastically.

"Who the devil would you have me leave my money to?" cried Mr.
Treverton, overhearing him. "To my brother, who thinks me a brute now;
who would think me a fool then; and who would encourage swindling,
anyhow, by spending all my money among doxies and strolling players?
To the child of that player-woman, whom I have never set eyes on, who
has been brought up to hate me, and who would turn hypocrite directly
by pretending, for decency's sake, to be sorry for my death? To _you_,
you human baboon!--you, who would set up a usury office directly, and
prey upon the widow, the fatherless, and the unfortunate generally,
all over the world? Your good health, Mr. Shrowl! I can laugh as well
as you--especially when I know I'm not going to leave you sixpence."

Shrowl, in his turn, began to get a little irritated now. The jeering
civility which he had chosen to assume on first entering the room gave
place to his habitual surliness of manner and his natural growling
intonation of voice.

"You just let me alone--will you?" he said, sitting down sulkily to
his breakfast. "I've done joking for to-day; suppose you finish too.
What's the use of talking nonsense about your money? You must leave it
to somebody."

"Yes, I will," said Mr. Treverton. "I will leave it, as I have told
you over and over again, to the first Somebody I can find who honestly
despises money, and who can't be made the worse, therefore, by having
it."

"That means nobody," grunted Shrowl.

"I know it does!" retorted his master.

Before Shrowl could utter a word of rejoinder, there was a ring at the
gate-bell of the cottage.

"Go out," said Mr. Treverton, "and see what that is. If it's a woman
visitor, show her what a scarecrow you are, and frighten her away. If
it's a man visitor--"

"If it's a man visitor," interposed Shrowl, "I'll punch his head for
interrupting me at my breakfast."

Mr. Treverton filled and lit his pipe during his servant's absence.
Before the tobacco was well alight, Shrowl returned, and reported a
man visitor.

"Did you punch his head?" asked Mr. Treverton.

"No," said Shrowl. "I picked up his letter. He poked it under the gate
and went away. Here it is."

The letter was written on foolscap paper, superscribed in a round
legal hand. As Mr. Treverton opened it, two slips cut from newspapers
dropped out. One fell on the table before which he was sitting; the
other fluttered to the floor. This last slip Shrowl picked up and
looked over its contents, without troubling himself to go through the
ceremony of first asking leave.

After slowly drawing in and slowly puffing out again one mouthful of
tobacco-smoke, Mr. Treverton began to read the letter. As his eye fell
on the first lines, his lips began to work round the mouth-piece of
the pipe in a manner that was very unusual with him. The letter was
not long enough to require him to turn over the first leaf of it--it
ended at the bottom of the opening sheet. He read it down to the
signature--then looked up to the address, and went through it again
from the beginning. His lips still continued to work round the
mouth-piece of the pipe, but he smoked no more. When he had finished
the second reading, he set the letter down very gently on the table,
looked at his servant with an unaccustomed vacancy in the expression
of his eyes, and took the pipe out of his mouth with a hand that
trembled a little.

"Shrowl," he said, very quietly, "my brother, the Captain, is
drowned."

"I know he is," answered Shrowl, without looking up from the
newspaper-slip. "I'm reading about it here."

"The last words my brother said to me when we quarreled about the
player-woman," continued Mr. Treverton, speaking as much to himself as
to his servant, "were that I should die without one kind feeling in my
heart toward any living creature."

"So you will," muttered Shrowl, turning the slip over to see if there
was any thing worth reading at the back of it.

"I wonder what he thought about me when he was dying?" said Mr.
Treverton, abstractedly, taking up the letter again from the table.

"He didn't waste a thought on you or any body else," remarked Shrowl.
"If he thought at all, he thought about how he could save his life.
When he had done thinking about that, he had done living too." With
this expression of opinion Mr. Shrowl went to the beer-barrel, and
drew his morning draught.

"Damn that player-woman!" muttered Mr. Treverton. As he said the words
his face darkened and his lips closed firmly. He smoothed the letter
out on the table. There seemed to be some doubt in his mind whether he
had mastered all its contents yet--some idea that there ought to be
more in it than he had yet discovered. In going over it for the third
time, he read it to himself aloud and very slowly, as if he was
determined to fix every separate word firmly in his memory. This was
the letter:

     "SIR,--As the old legal adviser and faithful friend of your
     family, I am desired by Mrs. Frankland, formerly Miss
     Treverton, to acquaint you with the sad news of your
     brother's death. This deplorable event occurred on board
     the ship of which he was captain, during a gale of wind in
     which the vessel was lost on a reef of rocks off the island
     of Antigua. I inclose a detailed account of the shipwreck,
     extracted from _The Times_, by which you will see that your
     brother died nobly in the performance of his duty toward
     the officers and men whom he commanded. I also send a slip
     from the local Cornish paper, containing a memoir of the
     deceased gentleman.

     "Before closing this communication, I must add that no will
     has been found, after the most rigorous search, among the
     papers of the late Captain Treverton. Having disposed, as
     you know, of Porthgenna, the only property of which he was
     possessed at the time of his death was personal property,
     derived from the sale of his estate; and this, in
     consequence of his dying intestate, will go in due course
     of law to his daughter, as his nearest of kin.

     "I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

     "ALEXANDER NIXON."


The newspaper-slip, which had fallen on the table, contained the
paragraph from _The Times_. The slip from the Cornish paper, which had
dropped to the floor, Shrowl poked under his master's eyes, in a fit
of temporary civility, as soon as he had done reading it. Mr.
Treverton took not the slightest notice either of the one paragraph or
the other. He still sat looking at the letter, even after he had read
it for the third time.

"Why don't you give the strip of print a turn, as well as the sheet of
writing?" asked Shrowl. "Why don't you read about what a great man
your brother was, and what a good life he led, and what a wonderful
handsome daughter he's left behind him, and what a capital marriage
she's made along with the man that's owner of your old family estate?
_She_ don't want your money now, at any rate! The ill wind that blowed
her father's ship on the rocks has blowed forty thousand pounds of
good into her lap. Why don't you read about it? She and her husband
have got a better house in Cornwall than you have got here. Ain't you
glad of that? They were going to have repaired the place from top to
bottom for your brother to go and live along with 'em in clover when
he came back from sea. Who will ever repair a place for you? I wonder
whether your niece would knock the old house about for your sake, now,
if you was to clean yourself up and go and ask her?"

At the last question, Shrowl paused in the work of aggravation--not
for want of more words, but for want of encouragement to utter them.
For the first time since they had kept house together, he had tried to
provoke his master and had failed. Mr. Treverton listened, or appeared
to listen, without moving a muscle--without the faintest change to
anger in his face. The only words he said when Shrowl had done were
these two--

"Go out!"

Shrowl was not an easy man to move, but he absolutely changed color
when he heard himself suddenly ordered to leave the room.

"Go out!" reiterated Mr. Treverton. "And hold your tongue henceforth
and forever about my brother and my brother's daughter. I never _have_
set eyes upon the player-woman's child, and I never will. Hold your
tongue--leave me alone--go out!"

"I'll be even with him for this," thought Shrowl as he slowly withdrew
from the room.

When he had closed the door, he listened outside of it, and heard Mr.
Treverton push aside his chair, and walk up and down, talking to
himself. Judging by the confused words that escaped him, Shrowl
concluded that his thoughts were still running on the "player-woman"
who had set his brother and himself at variance. He seemed to feel a
barbarous sense of relief in venting his dissatisfaction with himself,
after the news of Captain Treverton's death, on the memory of the
woman whom he hated so bitterly, and on the child whom she had left
behind her.

After a while the low rumbling tones of his voice ceased altogether.
Shrowl peeped through the key-hole, and saw that he was reading the
newspaper-slips which contained the account of the shipwreck and the
Memoir of his brother. The latter adverted to some of those family
particulars which the vicar of Long Beckley had mentioned to his
guest; and the writer of the Memoir concluded by expressing a hope
that the bereavement which Mr. and Mrs. Frankland had suffered would
not interfere with their project for repairing Porthgenna Tower, after
they had gone the length already of sending a builder to survey the
place. Something in the wording of that paragraph seemed to take Mr.
Treverton's memory back to his youth-time when the old family house
had been his home. He whispered a few words to himself which gloomily
referred to the days that were gone, rose from his chair impatiently,
threw both the newspaper-slips into the fire, watched them while they
were burning, and sighed when the black gossamer ashes floated upward
on the draught, and were lost in the chimney.

The sound of that sigh startled Shrowl as the sound of a pistol-shot
might have startled another man. His bull-terrier eyes opened wide in
astonishment, and he shook his head ominously as he walked away from
the door.




CHAPTER II.

WILL THEY COME?


The housekeeper at Porthgenna Tower had just completed the necessary
preparations for the reception of her master and mistress, at the time
mentioned in Mrs. Frankland's letter from St. Swithin's-on-Sea, when
she was startled by receiving a note sealed with black wax, and
surrounded by a thick mourning border. The note briefly communicated
the news of Captain Treverton's death, and informed her that the visit
of Mr. and Mrs. Frankland to Porthgenna was deferred for an indefinite
period.

By the same post the builder, who was superintending the renovation of
the west staircase, also received a letter, requesting him to send in
his account as soon as the repairs on which he was then engaged were
completed; and telling him that Mr. Frankland was unable, for the
present, to give any further attention to the project for making the
north rooms habitable. On the receipt of this communication, the
builder withdrew himself and his men as soon as the west stairs and
banisters had been made secure; and Porthgenna Tower was again left to
the care of the housekeeper and her servant, without master or
mistress, friends or strangers, to thread its solitary passages or
enliven its empty rooms.

From this time eight months passed away, and the housekeeper heard
nothing of her master and mistress, except through the medium of
paragraphs in the local newspaper, which dubiously referred to the
probability of their occupying the old house, and interesting
themselves in the affairs of their tenantry, at no very distant
period. Occasionally, too, when business took him to the post-town,
the steward collected reports about his employers among the old
friends and dependents of the Treverton family.

From these sources of information, the housekeeper was led to conclude
that Mr. and Mrs. Frankland had returned to Long Beckley, after
receiving the news of Captain Treverton's death, and had lived there
for some months in strict retirement. When they left that place, they
moved (if the newspaper report was to be credited) to the neighborhood
of London, and occupied the house of some friends who were traveling
on the Continent. Here they must have remained for some time, for the
new year came and brought no rumors of any change in their place of
abode. January and February passed without any news of them. Early in
March the steward had occasion to go to the post-town. When he
returned to Porthgenna, he came back with a new report relating to Mr.
and Mrs. Frankland, which excited the housekeeper's interest in an
extraordinary degree. In two different quarters, each highly
respectable, the steward had heard it facetiously announced that the
domestic responsibilities of his master and mistress were likely to be
increased by their having a nurse to engage and a crib to buy at the
end of the spring or the beginning of the summer. In plain English,
among the many babies who might be expected to make their appearance
in the world in the course of the next three months, there was one who
would inherit the name of Frankland, and who (if the infant luckily
turned out to be a boy) would cause a sensation throughout West
Cornwall as heir to the Porthgenna estate.

In the next month, the month of April, before the housekeeper and the
steward had done discussing their last and most important fragment of
news, the postman made his welcome appearance at Porthgenna Tower, and
brought another note from Mrs. Frankland. The housekeeper's face
brightened with unaccustomed pleasure and surprise as she read the
first line. The letter announced that the long-deferred visit of her
master and mistress to the old house would take place early in May,
and that they might be expected to arrive any day from the first to
the tenth of the month.

The reasons which had led the owners of Porthgenna to fix a period, at
last, for visiting their country seat, were connected with certain
particulars into which Mrs. Frankland had not thought it advisable to
enter in her letter. The plain facts of the case were, that a little
discussion had arisen between the husband and wife in relation to the
next place of residence which they should select, after the return
from the Continent of the friends whose house they were occupying. Mr.
Frankland had very reasonably suggested returning again to Long
Beckley--not only because all their oldest friends lived in the
neighborhood, but also (and circumstances made this an important
consideration) because the place had the advantage of possessing an
excellent resident medical man. Unfortunately this latter advantage,
so far from carrying any weight with it in Mrs. Frankland's
estimation, actually prejudiced her mind against the project of going
to Long Beckley. She had always, she acknowledged, felt an
unreasonable antipathy to the doctor there. He might be a very
skillful, an extremely polite, and an undeniably respectable man; but
she never had liked him, and never should, and she was resolved to
oppose the plan for living at Long Beckley, because the execution of
it would oblige her to commit herself to his care.

Two other places of residence were next suggested; but Mrs. Frankland
had the same objection to oppose to both--in each case the resident
doctor would be a stranger to her, and she did not like the notion of
being attended by a stranger. Finally, as she had all along
anticipated, the choice of the future abode was left entirely to her
own inclinations; and then, to the amazement of her husband and her
friends, she immediately decided on going to Porthgenna. She had
formed this strange project, and was now resolved on executing it,
partly because she was more curious than ever to see the place again;
partly because the doctor who had been with her mother in Mrs.
Treverton's last illness, and who had attended her through all her own
little maladies when she was a child, was still living and practicing
in the Porthgenna neighborhood. Her father and the doctor had been
old cronies, and had met for years at the same chess-board every
Saturday night. They had kept up their friendship, when circumstances
separated them, by exchanges of Christmas presents every year; and
when the sad news of the Captain's death had reached Cornwall, the
doctor had written a letter of sympathy and condolence to Rosamond,
speaking in such terms of his former friend and patron as she could
never forget. He must be a nice, fatherly old man now, the man of all
others who was fittest, on every account, to attend her. In short,
Mrs. Frankland was just as strongly prejudiced in favor of employing
the Porthgenna doctor as she was prejudiced against employing the Long
Beckley doctor; and she ended, as all young married women with
affectionate husbands may, and do end, whenever they please--by
carrying her own point, and having her own way.

On the first of May the west rooms were all ready for the reception of
the master and mistress of the house. The beds were aired, the carpets
cleaned, the sofas and chairs uncovered. The housekeeper put on her
satin gown and her garnet brooch; the maid followed suit, at a
respectful distance, in brown merino and a pink ribbon; and the
steward, determining not to be outdone by the women, arrayed himself
in a black brocaded waistcoat, which almost rivaled the gloom and
grandeur of the housekeeper's satin gown. The day wore on, evening
closed in, bed-time came, and there were no signs yet of Mr. and Mrs.
Frankland.

But the first was an early day on which to expect them. The steward
thought so, and the housekeeper added that it would be foolish to feel
disappointed, even if they did not arrive until the fifth. The fifth
came, and still nothing happened. The sixth, seventh, eighth, and
ninth followed, and no sound of the expected carriage-wheels came near
the lonely house.

On the tenth, and last day, the housekeeper, the steward, and the
maid, all three rose earlier than usual; all three opened and shut
doors, and went up and down stairs oftener than was needful; all three
looked out perpetually toward the moor and the high road, and thought
the view flatter and duller and emptier than ever it had appeared to
them before. The day waned, the sunset came; darkness changed the
perpetual looking-out of the housekeeper, the steward, and the maid
into perpetual listening; ten o'clock struck, and still there was
nothing to be heard when they went to the open window but the
wearisome beating of the surf on the sandy shore.

The housekeeper began to calculate the time that would be consumed on
the railway journey from London to Exeter, and on the posting journey
afterward through Cornwall to Porthgenna. When had Mr. and Mrs.
Frankland left Exeter?--that was the first question. And what delays
might they have encountered afterward in getting horses?--that was the
second. The housekeeper and the steward differed in debating these
points; but both agreed that it was necessary to sit up until
midnight, on the chance of the master and mistress arriving late. The
maid, hearing her sentence of banishment from bed for the next two
hours pronounced by the superior authorities, yawned and sighed
mournfully--was reproved by the steward--and was furnished by the
housekeeper with a book of hymns to read to keep up her spirits.

Twelve o'clock struck, and still the monotonous beating of the surf,
varied occasionally by those loud, mysterious, cracking noises which
make themselves heard at night in an old house, were the only audible
sounds. The steward was dozing; the maid was fast asleep under the
soothing influence of the hymns; the housekeeper was wide awake, with
her eyes fixed on the window, and her head shaking forebodingly from
time to time. At the last stroke of the clock she left her chair,
listened attentively, and still hearing nothing, shook the maid
irritably by the shoulder, and stamped on the floor to arouse the
steward.

"We may go to bed," she said. "They are not coming. This is the second
time they have disappointed us. The first time the Captain's death
stood in the way. What stops them now? Another death? I shouldn't
wonder if it was."

"Now I think of it, no more should I," said the steward, ominously
knitting his brows.

"Another death!" repeated the housekeeper, superstitiously. "If it
_is_ another death, I should take it, in their place, as a warning to
keep away from the house."




CHAPTER III.

MRS. JAZEPH.


If, instead of hazarding the guess that a second death stood in the
way of Mr. and Mrs. Frankland's arrival at Porthgenna, the housekeeper
had, by way of variety, surmised this time that a birth was the
obstacle which delayed them, she might have established her character
as a wise woman, by hitting at random on the actual truth. Her master
and mistress had started from London on the ninth of May, and had got
through the greater part of their railway journey, when they were
suddenly obliged to stop, on Mrs. Frankland's account, at the station
of a small town in Somersetshire. The little visitor, who was destined
to increase the domestic responsibilities of the young married couple,
had chosen to enter on the scene, in the character of a robust
boy-baby, a month earlier than he had been expected, and had modestly
preferred to make his first appearance in a small Somersetshire inn,
rather than wait to be ceremoniously welcomed to life in the great
house of Porthgenna, which he was one day to inherit.

Very few events had ever produced a greater sensation in the town of
West Winston than the one small event of the unexpected stoppage of
Mr. and Mrs. Frankland's journey at that place. Never since the last
election had the landlord and landlady of the Tiger's Head Hotel
bustled about their house in such a fever of excitement as possessed
them when Mr. Frankland's servant and Mrs. Frankland's maid drew up at
the door in a fly from the station, to announce that their master and
mistress were behind, and that the largest and quietest rooms in the
hotel were wanted immediately, under the most unexpected
circumstances. Never since he had triump

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