CHAPTER X

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COLTONSLOUGH.

Francis Tredethlyn went back to his hotel in Covent Garden after that quiet dinner at the Cedars, and his mind was full of the new images suggested by that brief glimpse of a life that was strange to him. He had been very much interested by Miss Desmond, and he tried to believe that he preferred her to Maude Hillary. Had she not been kinder to him, more friendly and familiar? and was it not reasonable that he should like her the better of the two? He was naturally of a grateful disposition, disposed to think meanly of his own merits; and he attributed all Miss Desmond’s kindness to the purest promptings of a benevolent disposition. The idea that the young lady had regarded him from a speculative point of view, that she had entertained any notion of possible marriage contracts and settlements, by which she might acquire the use of his thirty thousand per annum, never for a moment entered Mr. Tredethlyn’s mind. He knew, in a general way, that he was admitted to Mr. Hillary’s drawing-room because his money gave him a kind of right to such society as that of the merchant’s household; but he never for a moment imagined that any one of these delightful and high-bred creatures could contemplate any contingency by which his money might become of service to them. Wealth and beauty, elegance and refinement, seemed to find their natural home at the Cedars. Miss Desmond of course was rich, like Miss Hillary.

Francis counted the days which must elapse before that delightful Sabbath to be spent by him at the Cedars. Only three days, and during those three days stern duty called him away from London. Had he not declared himself ready to go to the end of the world in search of his cousin Susan Tredethlyn? He felt ashamed even of that one wasted day on the banks of the Thames. He had left his hotel in the morning, intending to despatch his City business with all possible speed, and start immediately afterwards for Coltonslough. He had found out all about Coltonslough by means of all manner of inquiries; for it seemed rather an out-of-the-way place, known to very few people as yet. Indeed, Coltonslough turned out to be a recently discovered watering-place on the Essex coast, a place whose shores were supposed to be washed by the salt waves of the ocean; but the waste of waters that rolled along the muddy shores of Coltonslough was only an ocean in its hobbledehoyhood, and savoured too much of the Thames and Medway to be considered a full-grown sea.

To the traveller who has grown familiar with the centre of Africa; to that bold explorer who has spent lonely days and nights amidst those darksome forests in which the forgotten cities of America lie buried; to the prisoner newly released from solitary confinement in the great prison-house of New York, so pleasantly entitled the Tombs--to one of these a newly discovered watering-place may not appear dull. He who has been used to hear no more familiar voice than the distant cry of the bittern, far away amongst the swampy wildernesses, may endure Herne Bay and live. The criminal who has undergone a decade of solitary confinement in the Tombs may possibly survive a month at Southend: but to the ordinary mind there is a modern abomination of desolation lurking in the unfinished terraces of a budding watering-place, or in a watering-place which has put forth its tender blossoms in the way of bow-windowed receptacles for the concentrated bleakness of perpetual east winds, and has been blighted in the bud.

Coltonslough was very young; it was in the most infantine stage of watering-place existence. Speculative builders had bought half-a-dozen plots of swamp and mud, and had erected dismal rows of houses, which turned their backs upon one another, and started off at right angles from one another, in utter contempt for all uniformity. If the melancholy sojourner at Coltonslough was of an active turn of mind, he was apt to be tormented by a wild desire to pull down and re-arrange those straggling terraces, between which stretched hideous deserts of waste ground, with here and there a lurking pitfall, whence gravel, or sand, or clay, or chalk, had been dug by unknown persons, who seemed always digging something or other out of Coltonslough, whereby an appearance of volcanic disruption was imparted to a place whose chief merit had been its agreeable flatness.

It was very young. A few straggling excursionists came on the blazing summer Sundays, and prowled about the shore with countenances expressive of supreme disappointment and disgust. Half-a-dozen families of cockney children were wont to congregate by the dismal waters every summer, provided with baskets for the collection of shells--and there were no shells at Coltonslough,--and further provided with wooden spades for the undermining of sand--and there was no sand at that baby watering-place. Families did certainly come, beguiled by representations of impossibly cheap provisions, though the place was in reality very expensive, for every tradesman was a monopolist on a small scale. Families came, but no family ever came a second time to Coltonslough; and it may be that, in the wonderful scheme of the universe, this new-born watering-place was not without its special use; inasmuch as it made people contented with London. The inhabitant of Bermondsey, returning to that locality after a sojourn at Coltonslough, found beauties in some dismal street which until that hour had appeared to his prosaic mind a street, and nothing more. The denizen of Ratcliff Highway sat down amongst his household gods well pleased with a neighbourhood which, although not unobjectionable, was a paradise as compared with Coltonslough.

It was to this place of desolation that a newly-finished offshoot of the railway then known as the Eastern Counties conveyed Francis Tredethlyn. He went to look for his cousin with no better clue to help him in his search than that one word, “Coltonslough,” copied from the post-mark of Susan’s letter.

“But I won’t be baffled,” the young man thought, as he sat in the railway carriage thinking of the task that lay before him. “Coltonslough may be a big place, but I’ll question every living creature in it before I’ll give up the chance of finding out something about my cousin.”

Luckily for Mr. Tredethlyn’s chances, Coltonslough was a very small place, and after walking backwards and forwards for some quarter of an hour, before the emporium of the one butcher; the solitary baker, who dabbled a little in the fruit and confectionery line; and the single grocer, who was also a linendraper, and beyond that a stationer, who had a side of bacon hanging on one side of his door, and a piece of showy cotton stuff upon the other, and who moreover was sole master of the Coltonslough post-office,--Francis determined upon his plan of action. He had thought of his cousin very constantly in the few days before his visit to Mr. Hillary’s mansion; he had thought of her a great deal since then, though he had not found it quite so easy to concentrate his ideas, by reason of a certain bright face and slender figure all in a flutter of white and blue, that would sometimes intrude themselves upon his meditations.

Francis knew that his uncle’s daughter had left Tredethlyn Grange with only a few sovereigns in her pocket, perhaps not much more than enough to defray her journey to London. Without money, without friends, she had fled from her home, and had not perished; but had lived to write to her father from this dismal watering-place of Coltonslough some years after her flight. It was clear, therefore, that in the interim she must have either been supported by the benevolence of strangers, or she must have earned her own living. The last hypothesis was the more likely to be correct. Susan Tredethlyn had been educated to habits of industry, and had no doubt confronted the battle of life as fearlessly as any Tredethlyn should confront any battle.

“Poor little girl! she went out as a servant, I dare say,” thought the young man. “She drudged and slaved for some hard mistress, perhaps, while her father was adding every day to the money that has come to me--to me--and he refused me a couple of hundred pounds the night my mother was dying.”

Mr. Tredethlyn went in at the grocer’s doorway. There was scarcely room enough for him to pass between the bacon and the cotton stuff, which some aboriginal of Coltonslough would some day transform into wearing apparel. The postmaster was chopping some very sallow-hued lump-sugar in the dusky inner-regions of the shop; but he left off chopping, and advanced to meet the stranger.

Francis Tredethlyn was no diplomatist; he was quite unskilled in that peculiar science known as beating about the bush; so he began to make inquiries respecting his cousin with as little preface as he would have employed had he been asking for a pound of sugar.

“I’m a stranger to this place,” he said, “and I want to ask a few questions; and I fancy, as you’re postmaster, you must be about the likeliest person to answer them.”

The grocer rubbed his hands and smirked, in a manner that was expressive of a general desire to do anything obliging--of course with an eye to ultimate profit.

“A young woman--a relation of mine--left her home four years ago this month. For nearly three years no one belonging to her could discover where she was. At the end of that time a letter was received from her, bearing the post-mark of this place. I want to find out whether she is still here; or, if not, when she left. I have only just come back from Van Diemen’s Land, to find things changed in the place that was once my home. So I’m groping in the dark, you see, and shall be very thankful to any one that’ll lend me a helping hand.”

Something in the frankness of his manner, the earnestness of his face, went straight home to the heart of the Coltonslough postmaster, who became less a tradesman, and more a man.

“It’s rather puzzling, you see, in the way you put it,” he said, scratching his nose meditatively. “You want a young woman who wrote a letter--or leastways had a letter posted at this place. But, lor’ bless you, not being under Government y’rself, you see, you’ve no notion of the dodges they’re up to when they want to throw any one off the scent like with a post-mark. You mustn’t fancy a person’s in this place or in that place, because you happen to get a letter from them with such and such a post-mark. Why, I dessay I could get a letter posted from Jericho to-morrow morning, if I only gave my mind to it. What might be the name of the young woman as you’re anxious to find?”

“Her name is Tredethlyn,” Francis answered, hopelessly; “but as she ran away from home, and most likely wanted to hide herself from her relations, she may have changed her name.”

The postmaster mused for a few moments, and then shook his head gravely.

“I never heard of no Tredevillings in Coltonslough,” he said. “The young person was independent in her circumstances, I suppose?”

“Oh no, indeed! she had very little money when she left home. She must have worked for her living. I should think it likely that she went out for a servant; for she was a country-bred girl, and had been used to a hard life, though her father was a very rich man.”

A very rich man! That part of the business sounded interesting, and the grocer pricked up his ears.

“A country-bred young person,” he repeated, “by the name of Tredevillane. And what might be the date of the letter with the Coltonslough post-mark?”

Francis did not know the exact date. He could only inform the postmaster that the letter must have reached Cornwall about eighteen months, or it might be rather less than eighteen months, before the present time.

“Cornwall!” cried the postmaster; “then the country-bred young woman was a Cornwall young woman?”

“Yes, my cousin, Susan Tredethlyn, was a Cornish woman.”

“A Cornish woman, and by the name of Susan! Why, if you’d put the date of the letter a good three years back instead of a year and a half, I should have been able to lay my hand upon y’r cousin there and then, in a manner of speaking.”

“How so?”

“Because I did know a young person that lived with Mrs. Burfield, in Trafalgar Terrace. But that young person left Coltonslough full three years ago, and I’ve never set eyes on her since.”

“But tell me all you know about her!” exclaimed Francis, almost breathless in his eagerness. “What was she like? Why do you fancy that she was the girl I’m looking for?”

“Because, in the first place, she was Cornish. I’d noticed that her talk was different somehow from that of the folks about here--though she was as soft-spoken as any lady bred and born; but one day she was standing in my shop, with the children as she had care of, taking shelter from a storm--and a regular pelter it was too--and she stood looking out to sea through yonder half-glass door, which it were shut for the time being, and I made some remark about the unpleasantness of the weather, out of politeness like--for the young woman came very often to my shop for groceries, and with lodgers’ letters,--Mrs. Burfield takes lodgers, and so forth;--but she looked at me in a kind of absent way, and said ‘Oh, I like it! I like it!’ ‘You like the storm, Miss?’ I exclaimed; and then she answered all of a sudden, ‘Yes, I like to see it. This place doesn’t seem so strange to me to-day as it generally does. I have seen just such a storm as this from the moor on which my father’s house stands, and I could almost fancy I was at home in Cornwall.’”

“And that’s how you found out she was a Cornish woman? I think you’ve about hit it, Mr. Sanders. I think the girl who talked to you about the storm must have been my cousin, Susan Tredethlyn.”

“Her name _was_ Susan,” answered Mr. Sanders; “I’ve heard Mrs. Burfield’s children call her so in this very shop. She came to Coltonslough as governess to Mrs. Burfield’s young family.”

“A governess!” said Francis, with some slight sense of relief. “She was a governess, then, and not a servant?”

“Oh dear no! Though Coltonslough being a very small place, you see, sir, and most of the inhabitants being a good deal dependent upon lodgers, which gives a kind of fluctuating character to life, as you may say, sir, a governess in Coltonslough might not be looked upon exactly in the same light as elsewhere. Or, to put it plainer, sir, a governess in Coltonslough would _not_ be expected to be proud.”

“Oh, I understand,” Mr. Tredethlyn answered, rather bitterly. “Yes, my cousin was a genteel drudge,--not so well paid, perhaps, as vulgar drudges, and rather harder worked.”

“The young person was always genteel, sir, even to the extent of wearing gloves, which is not looked upon as indispensable in Coltonslough; but in the matter of going errands and opening the door, or carrying in a lodger’s tea-tray, at a push, she would _not_ be expected to be proud.”

“And she left three years ago?”

“She did, sir.”

The postmaster looked very grave as he said this,--so grave that Francis Tredethlyn could not fail to perceive that something worse than he had yet heard remained to be told. He was not a man to diplomatize, nor yet to make any display of his emotion; but his breath came a little faster for a few moments, and then he asked abruptly,--

“How did she leave?”

Mr. Sanders hesitated a little, and then said, with some embarrassment,--

“Why, Coltonslough bein’ a gossiping kind of a place, sir, you’re apt to hear ever so many different versions of the same thing, and it isn’t for me to say which is right and which is wrong. I think, as it’s a long story, sir, you’d better hear the rights of it from Mrs. Burfield.”

“A long story!” repeated Francis Tredethlyn, in an undertone,--“a long story! Ah, my poor little cousin--my poor ill-used girl! And it seems only a little while ago when we played together in the churchyard at Landresdale, in the sunny hour when they let us out of school.”

It did seem to him but a very little while since he and his cousin had sat side by side, under one of the big yew-trees in Landresdale churchyard, dining upon some simple repast of home-made bread and fat bacon, with a dessert of unripe apples, in the drowsy sultriness of summer noontide. He sat for some few minutes silently thinking of that departed time. The memory of it seemed almost like a sharp physical pain, now that he knew that some great sorrow, some bitter woman’s trial, had come to his cousin. A story about her--a long story! What story should gossiping tongues have to tell of any woman, except a history of suffering and wrong?

He did not press the postmaster to tell him anything further: but he said presently, in an altered voice--a voice that had lost something of its power and ringing vibration,--

“I can get to see this Mrs. Burfield, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir; I make no doubt you can. She is a very genteel person, is Mrs. Burfield, which she have known better days, and finds herself often a little drove like with her lodgers. Her house is Number 2, sir, in the Terrace, Trafalgar Square, fronting sideways, and rather slantin’ like, to the sea. You can see it, sir, from where you stand.”

Following the direction of the postmaster’s extended forefinger, Francis Tredethlyn did see a row of unfinished-looking houses, with the inevitable seaside bow-windows, staring out of a patch of waste ground. Why these houses, and almost all the other houses at Coltonslough, should have slanted away from the sea, obliging their occupants to look out upon the expanse of waters in a sideways and sinister manner, when they might have been built directly facing that single feature of attraction, was a problem far beyond the comprehension of any visitor to the infantine watering-place.

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