CHAPTER V
.
COMING HOME.
When the jaded horses of the “Electric” coach from Falmouth stopped before the Crown Inn at Landresdale, in the county of Cornwall, on the 13th of July, 1852, the landlord of the little hostelry was somewhat startled by an event which was of very rare occurrence in those parts. A passenger alighted from the back of the coach, and demanded his portmanteau from the guard,--a passenger who, carrying his portmanteau as easily as if it had been a parcel of flimsy milliner’s ware, walked straight to the little private parlour opposite the bar, and ensconced himself therein.
“I shall want my dinner, and a bed, Joseph Penruffin,” he said to the proprietor of the Crown. “You’d better see the coach off, and then you can come and talk to me.”
Mr. Penruffin retired aghast and staring.
“I don’t know who he _is_, Sarah,” he remarked to a comely-looking woman, who was sitting amongst a noble array of shelves and bottles in a shady little bar that seemed a good deal too small for such a portly presence. “His name’s as clean gone out of my mind as if I’d never set eyes upon him; but I know him, and he knows me, Sarah, for he called me by my name as glib as you please, and his face--Lord bless us and save us!--his face is as familiar to me as yourn.”
The passenger who had surprised the Crown Inn from its lazy tranquillity stood at the little window looking out at the coach. The passenger was Francis Tredethlyn, lately a foot-soldier in her Majesty’s service, now a gentleman of landed estate and funded property; but very little changed by the change in his fortune. As he had been independent and fearless in the days when he ruled his life by the orders of other men, so was he simple and unpretending now in the hour of his sudden prosperity. What he had said to his master in the cottage at Port Arthur in the first flush of his new fortunes appeared to be equally true of him now. He did not seem to care about his wealth. He was in no way elated by a change of fortune which would have sent some men into a madhouse.
“It seems to me, somehow, as if there was a kind of balance kept up in this world between good and evil, like the debtor and creditor sides of a ledger. I put down my uncle Oliver’s fortune on one side, and it looks as if I was the luckiest fellow in Christendom. But there’s the loss of poor little Susy must go down on the other side, and then the book looks altogether different. The loss of her--yes, the loss--that’s the word! If the earth had opened and swallowed her up, she couldn’t seem more lost to me than she is.”
The passengers of the “Electric” had recruited themselves by this time, and a fresh pair of horses had replaced the tired animals who now stood steaming in the great stable-yard. The coach rolled slowly off, along a road that lay straight before the windows of the Crown--a road that crept under the steep slope of a thickly wooded hill, defended by an old crumbling wall, which, even in its decay, was grander and stronger than any modern wall that ever girdled a modern gentleman’s estate. The dark-red brick wall, and all the sombre woods above it, belonged to the Marquis of Landresdale, upon whose mansion and estate the little town or village of Landresdale was a kind of dependant, the inhabitants being almost all of them supported indirectly or directly by the patronage of the great man and his household. By these simple people the Cornish nobleman was spoken of with awe and reverence as the “Marquis;” and that the world held any other creature with a claim to that title was a fact utterly ignored--it may be, even discredited--by the ratepayers of Landresdale. Under the shadow of Landresdale House they were born and lived; and in a church which was only a kind of mausoleum for the departed nobles and dames of the house of Landresdale they worshipped every sabbath-day, until in the minds of some hero-worshippers, the figure of the Marquis grew into a giant shape that blotted out all the world beyond Landresdale.
“How familiar the old place seems to me, and yet how strange!” thought Francis Tredethlyn, as he stood at the window. “There’s Jim Teascott the cobbler over the way, sitting in the very same attitude he was in when I stopped at the corner below to take my last look at Landresdale. But the street seems as if it had dwindled and shrunk away into half the size it used to be; and I feel as strange--as strange as if I’d been dead and buried, and had come to life again after folks had forgotten all about me; even the very seasons are all wrong, somehow, to my mind, as they might seem to a man that had been lying dead ever so long.”
Francis Tredethlyn rubbed his broad palm across his forehead, as if to clear some kind of cloud away from his intellect. It was scarcely strange that he should be confused and mystified by the seasons. He had left autumnal clouds and winds in the Antipodes; and after a hundred days or so at sea, he found a blazing July sky above his native land, and he felt as if he had, somehow or other, been cheated out of a winter. He looked at a little pocket-book, in which he had written some names and addresses and other memoranda, and in which the initials “S. T.” occurred very often. Those initials meant Susan Tredethlyn, and the memoranda in the pocket-book chiefly related to inquiries which Francis had made about his lost cousin.
Those inquiries had resulted in very little information. The lawyers had only been able to tell Francis the bare facts relating to his uncle’s death; how one day, when they least expected to see the old man, he had suddenly presented himself at their offices, very pale, very feeble, and with an awful something, which even they recognized as the sign-manual of the King of Terrors himself, imprinted on his haggard features: how he had seated himself quietly in his accustomed place, and had dictated to them, deliberately and unflinchingly, the terms of a will, by which he bequeathed every shilling he possessed to his nephew, Francis Tredethlyn; how, when they, as in duty bound, remonstrated with him about the injustice that such a will would inflict upon his only daughter, a hideous frown had distorted his face, and he had struck his clenched fist upon the office-table, crying, with the most horrible imprecation ever uttered in that place, that no penny of his getting should ever go to save his daughter from rotting in a workhouse or starving to death on the king’s highway;--he had said this, and in such a manner as most effectually to put an end to all remonstrance on the part of his solicitors. This was all that the lawyers could tell Francis Tredethlyn about his cousin Susan; but they had gone on to tell him how his uncle had insisted on leaving the office alone and on foot; how he had walked the best part of the way from Gray’s Inn to an old-fashioned commercial inn in the Borough, and how he had broken down at last, only a hundred yards from his destination, and had fainted away on the threshold of a chemist’s shop, whence he had been carried to his death-bed. This had happened on the 30th of June in the preceding year; and this was all that the lawyers had to tell Francis Tredethlyn, over and above such intelligence as related only to the extent and nature of the property bequeathed to him by his late uncle.
But in Landresdale the name of Oliver Tredethlyn was almost as well known as that of the Marquis himself; and in Landresdale Francis hoped to learn the true story of his cousin’s fate. He stood now looking out of the window into the rustic highway, as quiet in the summer evening calm as if it had been a street in one of the buried cities of Italy, as peaceful in its drowsy aspect as if no palpitating human heart had ever carried its daily burden of care and sorrow along the narrow footways, beneath the shadow of the peaked roofs and quaint abutting upper stories. He stood looking out, and remembering himself a boy in that old hill-side street; he stood there now, wondering alike at the past and the present, which by contrast seemed both equally strange and unnatural; he stood there in all the flush and vigour of his youth, a tall, broad-shouldered, simple-hearted soldier, with a fortune far exceeding the narrow limits of his arithmetical powers, as ignorant of all the real world that lay before him as a little country lad who rides to town upon the top of a load of hay and expects to find the streets paved with gold, and the Queen dressed in her crown and robes, and sitting on her throne with the ball and sceptre in her hands for ever and ever.
The landlord of the Crown came bustling in presently with a wooden tray of knives and forks, and glasses and cruets, that would have amply served for a dinner-party of half-a-dozen. He laid the cloth with great ceremony, although with a certain air of briskness inseparable from innkeeping, even in the laziest and dullest village in all England; and he kept a furtive watch upon his guest throughout all his operations, from the preparatory polishing down of the mahogany table, to the final flourish with which he removed a very large cover from a very small rumpsteak.
“I think I ought to know you, sir,” he said, courteously, as Francis Tredethlyn seated himself at the table.
“I think you ought, Joseph Penruffin; I think you ought to remember Francis Tredethlyn, son of your old friend John Tredethlyn, of Pen Gorbold, who was a little bit too friendly in this house, perhaps, for his own prosperity.”
“Francis Tredethlyn!” cried the landlord, clapping his hand upon his knee, “Francis Tredethlyn! To be sure it is! To think that I should forget a face that was once as familiar to me as my own son’s! Francis Tredethlyn! Why, I remember you a lad playing cricket on the green yonder with my own boys. And you’ve come into a very fine fortune, sir, I understand; and I hope you will excuse the liberty, if I make so bold as to wish you every happiness with it, Francis Tredethlyn. Lord bless us and save us! why, I can remember you a little bit of a toddling child coming into Landresdale Church with your mother on a summer Sunday morning, as if it was yesterday! I ask pardon for being so bold and free-like, but the sight of your face takes me back to old times, and I’m apt to forget myself.”
Mr. Penruffin’s mind was curiously divided between the memories of the past and his desire to be duly reverential to Francis Tredethlyn’s new fortunes. The young man smiled as he recognized the influence of his newly acquired wealth at war with the associations of his boyhood. He had seen pretty much the same thing in the office of Messrs. Krusdale and Scardon. He was beginning already to perceive that an income of thirty thousand a year made a kind of barrier between himself and poorer men, and that they regarded him with the same feeling of mingled reverence and familiarity with which they would have looked at a very ordinary statue seen across a wonderful screen of virgin gold.
“And the sight of _your_ face takes _me_ back to old times, Mr. Penruffin,” he said, with rather a mournful accent, “and I’d freely give half this great fortune of mine if I could bring back one of those summer Sunday mornings in the old church, and see myself a little fellow again, trudging by my mother’s side, with a green-baize bag of prayer-books on my arm. I’d give five thousand pounds for a silk-dress I saw in a Plymouth draper’s fifteen years ago, when I was too poor to do any thing but wish for it, if my mother were alive to wear it. I used to think, when I was a lad, of what I’d buy for my mother out of the first five-pound note I ever earned; and now I’ve got thirty thousand a year, and there’s nothing upon all this earth that I can buy for her, except a gravestone to mark the spot where she lies.”
“Thirty thousand a year!” muttered the landlord, in an undertone, which had just a tinge of disappointment in it. The Landresdale people had given their imaginations free play since the death of Oliver Tredethlyn, and the old man’s fortune had swelled into almost fabulous proportions with the lapse of time; so thirty thousand didn’t seem so very much, after all. There had been an idea in Landresdale that Francis Tredethlyn would most likely buy up the Marquis’s estate off-hand, and if practicable make a handsome offer for the purchase of the title.
“I am sure, sir, your feelings do you credit,” said Mr. Penruffin, after that brief sense of disappointment; “I may say very great credit,” he added, with emphasis,--as if any display of feeling from the possessor of thirty thousand a year were specially meritorious. “I suppose you have come down this way to survey your property, sir; to look about you a little, eh?” inquired the landlord of the Crown, when Francis had finished his frugal dinner.
“Not I,” the young man answered; “I scarcely know what my property is yet, though the lawyers told me a long rigmarole about it. No, I’ve come on a very different errand,” he added gravely. “You remember my cousin, Susan Tredethlyn, I dare say? I have come to look for her.”
Joseph Penruffin shook his head solemnly, and breathed a long sigh that was almost a groan.
“If that’s your errand here, sir, I’m afraid it isn’t likely to be a very fortunate one. Folks in Landresdale never expect to see Susan Tredethlyn again; she went away from the farm four years ago; no one knows exactly where she went; no one knows why she went. There’s your uncle’s old servants, Mr. Tredethlyn, of course they _might_ have said something, if they’d liked to it. But you may as well go and question the tombstones in Landresdale churchyard as question _them_. All I know, or all anybody knows in this place is, that your cousin Susan went away and never came back again; and it stands to reason that she must have done something very bad indeed, and made her father very desperate against her, before the old man would have gone and left all his money away from her--meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but only looking at it in the light of human nature in general,” added the landlord, apologetically.
“I’ll never believe that Susan Tredethlyn did any thing wicked or unwomanly till her own lips tell me so,” cried Francis, bringing his hand heavily down on the table. “She may have made my uncle desperate against her, _that’s_ likely enough, for he was always hard with her; and when I think of his having hoarded all this money, and remember the life my cousin Susan used to lead, I can scarcely bring myself to believe that she was his own flesh and blood. I’ll never believe that she did any thing wrong. I’ll never believe that she could grow to be any thing different from what she was when I left home,--an innocent, modest little creature, who was almost frightened of her own pretty looks when she caught a sight of herself in a glass. But I’m going up to the old house; and if Martha Dryscoll or her husband know any thing of my lost cousin, I’ll get the knowledge from them, though I have to wring it out of their wizened old throats.”
The young man rose as he said this, and took his hat and stick from a chair near the window. Joseph Penruffin watched him with something like alarm upon his countenance.
“You’ll sleep here to-night, sir?” he asked.
“Yes; I’m going straight up to the Grange, and I don’t know how long I may be gone; but I’ll come back here to sleep. I should scarcely fancy lying down in one of those dreary old rooms; I should expect to see the wandering spirit of my lost cousin come and look in at me from the darkness outside my window. No; however late I may be, I’ll come back here to sleep.”
“And perhaps you’d like some little trifle for supper, sir, having made such an uncommon poor dinner,” suggested the landlord,--“a chicken and a little bit of grass, or a tender young duck and a dish of peas?”
But Francis Tredethlyn was walking up the little village street out of earshot of these savoury suggestions before the landlord had finished his sentence.
“I don’t call that manners,” muttered Mr. Penruffin; “but I shall cook the chicken for ten o’clock, and chance it; he can afford to pay for it, whether he eats it or not. And I think, taking into consideration old acquaintance and thirty thousand a year, it would only have been friendly in Francis Tredethlyn if he’d ordered a bottle of wine with his dinner.”
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