CHAPTER VI
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THE END OF THE WORLD.
The sun was low when Francis Tredethlyn left the Crown Inn, and walked slowly up the village street. The sun was low, and already a crimson glory flickered here and there upon the quaint old casements. The young man walked slowly, looking about him with a half-doubtful, half-bewildered gaze, like a man who sees his native village in a dream. And indeed no village in the vision of a sleeper could be more tranquil in its rustic repose than this Cornish street, steep and stony, mounting to the summit of a hill, upon whose top the great gates of Landresdale loomed grim and stately, like the entrance to an ogre’s castle in fairyland. You climbed the steep little street; and you came to the big gates of Landresdale; and that was all. The village ended here; and there was nothing for you to do but to go back again. It was like coming to the end of the world, and finding a great Elizabethan door of ponderous oak and iron barred against any chaotic realm that might lie beyond our every-day earth. There may have been occasions--indeed, the inhabitants of Landresdale would have testified to many such--on which those ponderous doors swung open on their mighty hinges: but the ignorant traveller, looking at them shut, found it difficult to realize the possibility of their ever being opened. They looked like the doors of a mausoleum: which may open once in half a century to admit the coffined dead, but can never be unclosed for any meaner purpose. Grim towers flanked the stony arch on either side, and two old rusty cannon displayed their iron noses within the shadow of the towers, ready to fire a volley down the hilly street whenever the simple folks of Landresdale should evince any revolutionary tendencies.
To the right of the great gates there was a handsome wing of solid masonry, whose Tudor windows opened upon a square courtyard, where there were more cannon, and upon a prim, old-fashioned garden, shut in by a high wall, and only visible to the wanderer through the iron rails and arabesques of a lofty gate, amidst whose scrollwork the arms of the Landresdales and Treverbyns, the Courtenays and Polwheles, were interlaced and entangled.
The garden wall bounded the estate of Rashleigh Vyvyan Trevannence, Marquis of Landresdale; and beneath the shelter of that old ivy-covered red brick wall lay the churchyard, quiet and shadowy, dark with the dense foliage of great yew-trees, thick with long tangled grass, that grew high amongst the slanting headstones. Francis Tredethlyn stopped by the low wooden gate, and leaning against the moss-grown pillar that supported it, looked up at the square towers which seemed like stony sentinels for ever keeping guard over the entrance to Landresdale. The light was red upon the corner window that faced the western sky, but all the other casements stared blankly and darkly out upon the graves in the churchyard, and the empty village street, in which one woman, toiling slowly upwards with a pitcher of water that slopped and trickled at intervals upon the pavement, was the only living presence.
“The great gates look just the same as they used to look,” thought Francis Tredethlyn. “When I was a boy, and read fairy-tales, I always fancied that the enchanted castle the wandering prince came to in the middle of a wood, or on the summit of a great mountain, was like Landresdale, a castle standing all alone in the middle of the way, with no road to the right nor to the left, so that the prince _must_ go in and ask shelter, though he knew that harm would come of it, or else go back and lose all the trouble of his journey. How I used to long to pull that bell when I was a lad!” thought Francis, looking at the iron ring which swung from a massive chain on one side of the archway.
“But I’ve no need to dawdle here,” he thought, as he pushed the gate open and went into the churchyard. “It seems as if the nearer I get to the place where I am certain to hear the truth about Susan, the more I dread hearing it.”
The ignorant traveller who might turn away from the great gates of Landresdale to descend the hill under the impression that the county of Cornwall came to an abrupt termination upon the threshold of the Marquis’s domain, would have been mistaken. There were other and higher lands, broad stretches of hill and moorland, lying beyond the churchyard, to the right of the quaint old garden and the Gothic towers and casements: and it was thitherward that Francis Tredethlyn directed his steps. He crossed the churchyard, only pausing briefly before one tombstone, upon which the names of Sarah and John Tredethlyn were cut, low down on the stone, at the bottom of a long list of Tredethlyns, who lay buried in that churchyard. The young man let himself out of the solemn precinct by a little rusty iron gate that opened on a broad expanse of common land sloping upward towards the western sky, and only broken here and there by a quarry or a patch of water.
“It looks bleak and barren enough,” thought Francis, with a shudder; “but it’s hereabouts that my uncle Oliver picked up a good bit of his money. The tin mines lie out yonder; and the stone quarry in the hollow there brought him in plenty, if folks tell the truth.”
Francis Tredethlyn might have echoed the boast of Helen Macgregor had he chosen, and with stronger justification than that lady, for the earth upon which he trod was not only his native land but his own peculiar property, by virtue of certain yellow-looking parchments under the sign-manual of an Earl and Baron of Landresdale who flourished in the reign of James I. and by payment of an eccentric annual tribute in the shape of a young doe and a hundredweight of virgin tin. It was all his own, this bleak waste land which Francis Tredethlyn, late private soldier in her Majesty’s service, late valet to a capricious master, now trod under his feet. Nor was it the less to be considered for its barrenness of aspect, for rich metals lay deep below the heathery surface, in mines that were amongst the oldest and most valuable in Cornwall.
But Francis Tredethlyn was in no wise elated or disturbed by the importance of his possession. He had never felt any ardent desire for wealth, and as yet he had not begun to realize its manifold advantages. He saw the effect of his fortune upon other men, and smiled at their weakness; but what had been true of him in the first hour of his altered position was true of him now,--he had no power either to realize or rejoice in the extent of his riches.
He walked slowly across the barren moorland, always upward, always mounting towards a long ridge of western hill, behind which two streaks of yellow light stretched low against the darkening sky,--a bleak, bare-looking hill, that seemed the very end of the world. It was upon this hillside that Tredethlyn Grange had been built four centuries ago, in the days when men built their houses with a view to endurance; and it stood there still, a long gray tenement of moss-grown stone, with narrow casement windows, looking darkly out upon the twilight moor. The larger portion of the old house had been uninhabited during the tenantship of the Tredethlyns, who, in a spirit of economy, had located themselves in the interior rooms lying at one end of the rambling mansion. It was in one of these rooms that a light now twinkled faintly; and it was towards this end of the house that Francis Tredethlyn directed his steps. There had been a moat once on two sides of the house, but cabbages now grew upon the sloping earth. There had been a garden once before the Grange, and an old stone sun-dial still marked the spot; but of all the trim flower-beds and angular paths there remained no vestige now. A field of trefoil, bounded by a low stone wall, lay beyond two broken pillars that had once supported a pair of handsome gates; and the sheep browsed close beneath the dim latticed windows.
“It seems like the end of the world to me to-night,” thought Mr. Tredethlyn; “and yet once it was comfortable and home-like enough, when I sat with Susy of a night by the fire in the kitchen, while she darned the old man’s gray worsted stockings. And to think that he had such oceans of money all that time, and yet seemed almost to grudge his only child every gown she wore, and every bit of bread she put into her mouth.” The young man was close to the familiar threshold by this time. He knocked at a low, narrow door in the neighbourhood of the one dimly lighted window, and then drew back a few paces, looking up at the old-fashioned casements.
“This is the window of Susy’s room,” he thought. “How black and dark it looks to-night! I remember coming up here the night before I ran away to Falmouth to enlist. I remember standing by the low wall yonder, in the cold autumn night, looking up at that very window. There was a light burning then, and I thought of how I should see it burning just the same when I came back, and how I’d throw a handful of earth up at the old window, and Susy would look out, startled and wondering, to find her faithful sweetheart come back to her from the end of the world. And now it’s this place that seems like the end of the world somehow, and I’m every bit as far from Susy now as ever I was out yonder.”
The door was opened only a very little way, and a woman’s face, so hard and angular that it seemed almost to cut into the dusky atmosphere, peered out at the traveller.
“What do you please to want, sir?” she asked, suspiciously.
“I want to ask you a few questions, Martha Dryscoll. I’ve come from the Antipodes to ask them.”
“Mr. Tredethlyn!” cried the woman, opening the door to its widest extent; “Mr. Francis Tredethlyn come home to his own like a ghost in the night! I make so bold as to bid you welcome, sir. Your uncle’s empty chair stands ready for you. The house seems strange and lonesome without him.”
It was not everybody who would have ascribed to Mr. Oliver Tredethlyn the power to enliven any house with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, or brighten any fireside with so much as the faintest glimmer of light. But Martha Dryscoll spoke in all good faith. She had believed in her master, and had worked for him, and pinched for him, and half-starved herself and other people for his sake, throughout five-and-thirty years of the dreariest and hardest life that woman ever endured. He had picked her up, starved and almost dying, upon a high road near one of his outlying farms, and had taken her from field-labour and all its attendant pains, to be his housekeeper and--slave; and she had repaid this favour a thousandfold by a devotion that knew no weariness, and a rigid economy that extended itself to the saving of a grain of salt in the old spindle-legged leaden saltcellars.
Oliver Tredethlyn had not been actuated by any Quixotic motive in this eccentric choice of a servant. He took his housekeeper from the wayside because he saw in her a stuff he had vainly sought in the pampered menials who had hitherto presented themselves to his notice. He had been attracted to Martha in the first instance by her gaunt face and gaunter figure, which would have been sufficiently alarming in one of King Frederick William’s chosen grenadiers. He had been attracted still more by her curt answers to his curt questions, in which she told him that she had walked thirty miles that day before lying down, as she believed, to die; that she had walked twenty miles the day before, and five-and-twenty the day before that; that she had not tasted food for the last eight-and-forty hours; and that she had worked in the fields and lived upon an average of two-pence a day ever since she could remember.
It was upon this that a bargain was struck between Oliver Tredethlyn, of Tredethlyn Grange, of the one part, and Martha Blank, Martha Anybody, of the other part, for the poor creature had no knowledge of any special surname to which she might lay claim. She had been called Carroty Jane in one place because her hair was red and her name was not Jane. She had been called Gawky Bet, and Lanky Poll, at other places, on account of her abnormal height; but the name she had received in the Union, where her earlier years had been passed, was Martha, and it was this name which she herself recognised as her legitimate appellation. She went home with Oliver Tredethlyn in one of his empty waggons, and ate her first spare meal in the Grange kitchen before nightfall; and from that hour until the old man’s death she served him well and faithfully. She lived with him all the days of his bachelorhood, and resignedly united herself to his bailiff when he commanded her so to do. This faithful creature welcomed Mr. Tredethlyn’s wife when he took it into his head to bring home a small tenant-farmer’s pretty daughter, who had been forced into a marriage with a man whom she detested; and, faithful and untiring to the last, this rough-handed, brawny-armed servant watched by the young wife’s sick bed during those dull years in which she slowly withered and faded, from a fresh, blooming girl, into a prematurely old woman, and so sank by lingering stages into an early grave, leaving behind her one only child, whose infancy and girlhood were brightened by no softer light than such as might be shed from the grim, grenadier-like affection of Martha Dryscoll.
Jonathan Dryscoll, the farm-bailiff whom Oliver Tredethlyn had desired his housekeeper to marry, was ten years younger than his wife, and was so poor and weak a creature morally and physically in her hands, that he seemed at least half a century her junior. If she told him to do anything, he did it. If she told him to think anything, he thought it; or would have done so, if the mental exercise had not been generally beyond the scope of his faculties. He was as honest and faithful as Martha herself; but if Martha had told him to go and fire all the ricks on Oliver Tredethlyn’s property, he would have done it with the blind trustfulness of a princess in a child’s story-book, who obeys the eccentric behests of a fairy godmother. That Martha Dryscoll could do anything wrong, or think anything wrong, was an hypothesis which Jonathan her husband had never contemplated. Perhaps the pleasantest thing about this couple was that there was no disagreeable evidence of Martha’s authority. Indeed, that worthy woman was most punctilious in respect to her liege lord and husband, whom she always spoke of as “the master.” Jonathan obeyed and trembled, but the sceptre which his wife wielded was an invisible one, and the chains that bound her slave were as impalpable as if they had been fashioned of cobwebs.
Martha Dryscoll was not renowned for her capacity of expressing any species of emotion; but some faint ray of pleasure kindled in her grim face as she conducted Francis Tredethlyn through the kitchen to an apartment that had served as a kind of state chamber for three generations of his race. She set the candle on the polished mahogany table, and, folding her arms, contemplated the new master of the Grange at her leisure. In that dim light, in her quaint, scanty dress, with a brown background of oaken wainscot behind her, she looked like a quaint figure in one of Jan Steen’s pictures, a hard-faced, angular housewife, honest, laborious, and economical, with her ear perpetually open to the leaking of beer-barrels, or the boiling-over of soup-kettles; her eye ever on the alert to perceive waste or destruction.
“I wish you welcome, Mr. Tredethlyn,” she said; and then, with something like sadness in her tone, “If the money _was_ to go away from her, better that it should go to you than to strangers. I don’t think that you’d turn your back upon her, if she was to need your help; would you now, Mr. Francis?”
“Turn my back upon her!” cried the young man,--“turn my back upon my cousin Susy! Do you think I want the money that ought to have been hers? With God’s blessing, I will go to the end of the world to find my poor little girl. But tell me--tell me all about it, Martha. I know you are a good creature. I know you were fond of Susan, though you seemed hard and stern, like the old man. Tell me all you know about my lost cousin, and don’t fear but I’ll make good use of my knowledge.”
“It isn’t much I have to tell, sir,” answered the housekeeper, very gravely. “You remember old Mr. Restwick, of Pen Gorbold. Folks say that he’s almost as rich as our master was. However it is, he and master were always fast friends; and when Mrs. Restwick had been dead a little over a twelvemonth, he and master seemed to get friendlier than ever, and was always laying their heads together about something, old Restwick hanging about this place, and sitting in our kitchen, and in this very room--for master made quite a fuss with the old man, and would sit in the parlour on his account--all the summer time. Miss Susan usen’t to like the old man, but she daredn’t say as much, seeing as he was her father’s friend. Heaven, as looks down upon me, knows, Mr. Francis, than the real reason of old Restwick pottering about our place night after night never came into my head, no more than if it had been so much Greek or Latin. But one night--one quiet summer evening, after such a day as to-day--the truth came out all at once; and it came upon Susan Tredethlyn as it came upon me--like a thunderbolt. Can you guess what it was, Mr. Francis?”
“No!” exclaimed the young man, staring at Martha Dryscoll with a bewildered expression on his face.
“Nor any one else, Mr. Francis, that wasn’t so wrapped up in the love of his money that the very heart inside of him had turned to stuff as hard as big golden guineas, or harder; for there’s some kind of furnace as will melt _them_, isn’t there, Mr. Francis? On the night I am telling you of, my master told Susan the meaning of old Restwick’s visits. She was to marry him--poor, pretty young thing. He’d promise to make such and such--settlements--I think master called ’em, and she’d be mistress of Pen Gorbold farm, and one of the richest women in this part of the country. The poor dear only gave one shriek, Mr. Francis, and fell down upon the floor at her father’s feet as white and as quiet as a corpse.”
“The hard-hearted villain!” cried Francis, pacing up and down the room; “the infernal villain!”
“She didn’t lie there long; she wasn’t let to do that. Mr. Tredethlyn lifted her up by the arm, and set her on her feet, fierce and savage-like; and when she opened her eyes, and looked about her, all stupefied and bewildered, he began to talk to her. It was cruel talk to hear from a father to his child; it was a cruel sight to see her trembling and shivering, and only held from falling by his hard hand clenched upon her arm. I tried to interfere between them, Mr. Francis; but my master let his daughter drop into a chair, and pushed me out of the room. Me and Jonathan was sleeping in the room over the stables then, and Mr. Tredethlyn took me by the shoulders, and put me out of the door that opens from the kitchen into the stone-yard at back. I heard the door bolted against me, and I knew I could be no help or comfort to that poor child all night. The door’s thick, but I could just hear Susan Tredethlyn’s sobs now and then, like as if they’d been blown towards me on the winds, and her father’s voice speaking loud and stern; I listened till all seemed quiet, and I was in hopes his heart was softened towards her. But when I got up at four o’clock next morning--for it was harvest-time, and we were very busy--Susan Tredethlyn’s room was empty, and the front door was unlocked and unbolted. She’d run away, Mr. Francis; she’d let herself out some time in the night, and run away. There was a little scrap of a shawl she used to wear hanging to the latch of the door. That was bad news for me to tell my master, Mr. Francis; but I had to tell it. He turned white, and glared at me for a minute just like a wild beast, and there was a choking, gurgling kind of noise in his throat. But he was as quiet after that one minute as if he had been made of iron. ‘So much the better, Mrs. Dryscoll,’ he said, ‘an undutiful daughter isn’t worth the meat she eats.’”
“But he went after her,” said Francis; “surely he made some attempt to bring her back? He didn’t let a poor ignorant girl go out into the world without a friend--without a sixpence?”
“She had a little money, Mr. Francis. Her father had given her a sovereign on her birthday every year for the last ten years, making her promise to save the money. She had saved the money, for she had no chance to spend it, poor child; and she took that money with her, for when I looked about her room I missed the little box she used to keep it in. As to looking for her, Mr. Tredethlyn never stirred hand or foot to do it, though I went on my bended knees to him, begging and praying of him to bring her back. As to me, Mr. Francis, I’m but a poor ignorant countrywoman, that never learned to read and write till I was getting on for thirty; but I got my husband to go to Falmouth with an advertisement for the county paper, saying as ‘S. T. was to remember she had a true friend in M. D., and was to be sure and write to her whenever she wanted help.’ I daredn’t say more, sir; and I think when master saw that advertisement he knew what it meant, for he glared at me across the paper, just as he glared at me when I told him his daughter was gone.”
“And he never relented--he never softened towards that poor unhappy girl?”
“For three years, sir, he never mentioned her name. Night after night he’d sit and write, and make out his accounts, and calculate his profits, and such-like, and he’d talk to me fast enough about the business of the farm; but he never spoke his daughter’s name. One day he got a letter directed in her hand. I took it from the postman at Landresdale myself one afternoon when I was down there marketing, and I wrote down the post-mark that was on it, and that was all I ever knew of that letter. When my master saw the hand, he came over all of a tremble like, and there was something awful in the sight of that stern old man trembling and shivering like as if he had been stricken by the palsy; but he got over it in a minute, and read the letter, me watching him all the time. If his face had been stone, it couldn’t have told less. He crumpled up the letter and put it in his pocket, and for three months he never spoke of that nor of his daughter. Yet I knew somehow that he thought of her; for a kind of change came over him, and he seemed always brooding, brooding, brooding; and he’d start up all of a sudden when we was all sitting of a night quiet in this kitchen--he’d start up as if he was going right away, and then heave a long sigh, and sit down again. But he never said anything about what was in his thoughts, till one morning he came to me, and said very quietly, ‘Pack me some clothes in a carpet-bag, Mrs. Dryscoll. I’m going to London to look for my daughter.’ My husband and him went on foot down to Landresdale to catch the Falmouth coach; but our master never came back. The next news as we heard of him, Mr. Francis, came to us a month after he’d left. It was a letter from the lawyers, to say that Mr. Oliver Tredethlyn was dead.”
“And is that all?”
“Yes, Mr. Francis; I can tell you no more. My master was a good master to me, and I served him faithfully, and worked hard to save his money. But things have all seemed to come before me in a new light since that night when I saw Susan Tredethlyn fall white and cold at her father’s feet, and him without pity for her. It seems as if I’d been stone-blind up to that time, Mr. Francis; and my eyes was opened all of a sudden; and I saw that we’d been all wicked heathens, making an idol out of money that had never brought happiness or comfort to any living creature; least of all to ourselves. I saw it all at once that night, Mr. Francis, and I knew that our lives had been wrong somehow.”
Martha Dryscoll spoke very earnestly. She was a good woman, after her own manner; eager to do her duty to the uttermost, grateful for small favours, faithful and affectionate. A noble heart beat in that grenadier-like form, a gentle spirit looked out of those hard gray eyes. She told the story of her young mistress’s flight with a sorrowful solemnity, undisturbed by tears. Perhaps her hard childhood, her bitter youth, her joyless middle life had dried up the source of that tender womanly emotion; for Martha Dryscoll had never been seen by living witnesses to shed a tear. She unlocked a grim-looking workbox, and took from it a little pocket-book, out of which she tore a leaf.
“That’s the name that was on the post-mark, Mr. Francis,” she said, handing the paper to Mr. Tredethlyn.
The young man read the word Coltonslough.
“Coltonslough,” he repeated, “I never heard of a place of that name. But I’ll find it, if it’s the most obscure spot upon the earth. God bless you, Martha Dryscoll, for I believe you’re a good woman.”
He held out his hand, and grasped the housekeeper’s bony fingers as he spoke.
“We’ve been awaiting--me and the master--for orders from you as to what we was to do, sir. We’re ready to serve you faithful, if you want our service; but we’re ready to leave the old place, if we’re any burden upon you. You’ll be coming to settle here, maybe?”
“No,” answered Francis Tredethlyn, with something of a shudder. “If I’d found Susan here, as I once thought to find her, I should have been glad enough to settle somewhere in these parts. As it is, there’s something in the place that gives me the heartache, and I doubt if I shall ever come near it again. Whatever wages you and your husband had in my uncle’s time shall be doubled from to-night, Mrs. Dryscoll; and if my cousin Susan is still alive, and should ever find her way back to this place, I should like her to see a light burning in the old window, and to find a faithful friend ready to bid her welcome home.”
Francis Tredethlyn did not linger very long in the house where a great part of his boyhood had been spent. Martha’s husband came in presently, smelling very strongly of cowhouse and stable, and the two would fain have given Mr. Tredethlyn a detailed account of their stewardship: but the young man had no heart to listen to them. What did it matter to him that he was the poorer by the death of an Alderney cow on the pasture-farm down in the valley, or the richer by a great sheep-shearing season on the hill? He came home to find no creature of his kith or kin. He stood as much alone in the world as Adam before Eve was created to bear him company; and he felt very desolate in spite of his thirty thousand a year.
He walked back to Landresdale across the bleak moorland under the still summer night. Away in the distance he saw the dark expanse of purple ocean melting imperceptibly into purple sky: and vague and dim as that shadowy distance seemed the unknown future that lay before him. He slept at the Crown, and left Landresdale early the next morning by the Falmouth coach, journeying Londonward: but he had by no means abandoned his search for Susan Tredethlyn.
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