CHAPTER I

CASTLE BRANDON AND CASTLE ANGRY.

I don't know whether Brandon Mountain was called from us or we from the mountain. The country people say that there were Brandons in the land before the mountains were made. Anyhow the mountains are likely to be there when there are no Brandons, so far as I can see. For how is a family to last when it has come to living on nothing, and the number of the family all told nine,--they being nearly all healthy and hungry people? At least there were nine before Pierce and Freda left us, and now there are seven. I foresee that one of these days, in spite of our vows to the contrary, we shall have to sell Brandon after all.

Now if some nice English lord would come along and buy it, to sell it would not be so bitter. Sometimes places do sell just for sheer beauty, and Brandon has nothing else. Time was when it had deer and grouse and pheasants and wild little black cattle, to say nothing of hares and curlews and such small fry. But that was before the prosperity went from us to "the bad De Lacys", as they are called far and near.

I suppose they deserved their name in the old days when they won it. They were a persecuting, wild-living, hard-riding, hard-drinking race ever and always, and the people do not forget it to them that they burned chapels and flayed peasants at the cart-wheel in the old unhappy times that, thank God, are passed for ever.

The Brandons of Brandon and the De Lacys of Angry used in the old days to rule the county between them, though the Brandons, to believe the talk of the peasants and the more reliable county histories, were always good to their people. There was as much difference between them, say the country people, as between Brandon Hill and Angry Mountain.

Dear Brandon, that we all opened our eyes upon nearly as soon as we were born! Brandon always seems to take the sunshine. There, beyond the trees of our park, the blue peak lifts gloriously a smiling face to heaven. The gold of sunset crowns it, and the roses of the dawn fall first upon its head. Usually it is purple as a pansy, but if the clouds lie on it they are silver wisps finer than gossamer. The cold weather turns Brandon to bronze and gold. There are times when the slopes of it are as golden as a May pasture with the gorse in bloom, and times again when the drifts of heather are like fields of scattered rose-leaves.

Up there, where the little woods are, is like fairy-land. You are in a world of feathery aisles and arches. The ground under your feet in spring is dancing with the daffodils, or a little later with the wild hyacinths, and below them a carpet of the greenest moss. There are little trout-rivers, amber-brown, and always singing as softly as Oona, our nurse, used to sing her "Cusha Loo" to us to put us asleep. But for those same trout-streams often and often had we Brandons gone hungry.

Angry Mountain no doubt had its name from its looks. No one ever saw its head out of the clouds. When there is thunder it bellows terribly out of the wall of cloud on Angry. There is a great chasm in the side of it, "The Devil's Slice" they call it, which looks like the track of an avalanche. There are some who say that the hidden lake on top of Angry once emptied itself and swept a whole tract of boggy country before it down upon the villages and churches and farms and cabins. Angry Woods, that clothe the mountain base, have a bad name. People say that the kindly growths of other woods are sparse and thin there--that it is a place of gnarled old trees flinging themselves about in horrible attitudes--that it is damp and full of fungus--and that you never know when you may plunge into a bog-hole unaware, and be drowned there, and dried into a brown mummy, no one knowing your fate.

I expect most of those who have visited Angry Woods have gone there by nightfall, and with their hearts in their mouths, prepared for all manner of horrors. By day the fear of Sir Rupert De Lacy and his bloodhounds is too great. Yet it would be quite in keeping with Sir Rupert's character, if he suspected an intruder in his woods by night, to let the bloodhounds loose. If some poor creature were torn to pieces by them, God help us, no one supposes that Sir Rupert would care; and, from the glimpse I once caught of him, I could believe any ill of him.

That was before I had lamed myself, and become the weak and ugly duckling of the handsome Brandons. There is a great chestnut tree that has grown through the walls of Brandon Abbey and brought down the solid masonry before it. I had my summer withdrawing-room in the chestnut, and nobody knew for a long time. When we were all in the woods, Esther and Hugh, and Donald, and the twins and I, it used to be my sport to disappear into my tree, where the others could never find me. Delicious it was--like a world under the sea--in the midst of green leaves. When the boughs hung up their lamps in spring, and the leaves had just shaken out their delicate fans, I used to feel as if the chestnut tree were fairyland, and too beautiful for anything of earth.

I used to read in the chestnut--I was always the reading one of the family--and used to love to hide in it while the others ran here and there calling me through the woods.

The road runs under the Abbey walls. There used to be a fortified wall running round Brandon to protect it from the Irish chieftains, with whom afterwards we Brandons became such good friends, and even inter-married. The outer wall of the Abbey is an integral part of the old wall.

Well, as I was sitting high in my leafy house one day, I heard the sound of hoofs, and looked out to see who might be passing. There were two men, mounted, and at their heels three heavily-built, lumbering dogs, of a variety new to me. It was easy to guess that they were the bloodhounds of whom the country people stood in such dread.

Poor beasts! I should not have feared them myself half as much as I should have feared either of those men. They looked weary and footsore, being indeed of a breed too heavy to follow mounted men, and they were plodding along in the dust of the road and the hot sun, in a way that made me feel very sorry for them.

The rider in front was evidently Sir Rupert De Lacy. He was a big old man, with square relentless jaws, and the colour of gray granite. His hair was quite white and soft, such hair as might have belonged to an innocent, gentle old man. But Sir Rupert had eyes as ferocious as a wild beast's, with curious red lights in them which I should say were the lights of madness.

You will wonder how I saw all this, but as it happened Sir Rupert was riding bareheaded, and as he passed below my tree he pointed with his whip towards Brandon, and then laughed. My description of him owes nothing at all to fancy, though the others laughed at me about it, and said it was only my romantic way to fancy I could see the fires in our old enemy's eyes.

Behind him a pace or two rode James Gaskin, Sir Rupert's steward--Sir Rupert's "devil", as I have heard him called. When a man has a mind to be wicked indeed Satan generally gives him tools to his liking, and if half the stories about Gaskin were true, he was as much more wicked than Sir Rupert as hell is wickeder than earth.

Gaskin was yellow and shrivelled, with a slight hump between his shoulders. He was grinning in answer to Sir Rupert's speech, and the grin showed teeth like fangs. I have never, indeed, seen a face in which evil was so terribly written.

Now as they passed below, Paudeen, my little half-bred Irish terrier, who was lying in my lap, must needs cock his ears and growl. The men did not hear it, but the dogs did, and growled in answer. Then the man, Gaskin, snatched from his pocket a horrible knotted whip, and, leaning over, lashed at the poor beasts that were doing no harm. Two of them shrank away whimpering. The third never flinched, but, lifting her tremendous jowl, faced the man with her black lips drawn back over her great teeth, and every hair on her bristling. I almost laughed aloud to see how Mr. Gaskin trotted forward to put a good space between himself and the brute.

Sir Rupert burst into laughter, a harsh and insolent laughter without merriment.

"Take care, Gaskin," he spluttered, "or Venom will pay off old scores on you one of these days. She hasn't forgotten that touch you gave her with the red-hot irons. She'll do you a mischief if she can. I'd confine my attentions to the other brutes if I were you."

So much I heard before the pair rode away out of hearing--a blot on the sunny day. It was seldom that Sir Rupert was seen in our part of the world, or indeed anywhere outside his own Castle of Angry, where they say that he and Gaskin drink together, and the peasants suppose that the devil himself often makes a third.

Somehow I guessed that he had come, casting his shadow on Brandon, that he might see the place he is bent on making his own. Alas! Sir Rupert is our one probable purchaser for our dear old home. Who else would want it?--all gone to ruin as it is, and stripped of all but its beauty. How often we have declared hotly that we would die ere he should have it, every one of us, from Aline to the youngest twin. But there he sits like a great gray old spider in his web, waiting and waiting till we are obliged to walk into it and he gobbles us and our poor Brandon up; and also the poor innocent people as well, in their wretched neglected mountain farms, who exist simply by reason of our forbearance.

Yet Oona, our nurse, remembers when Sir Rupert was a dashing young gentleman,--no one ever suspected that he would grow into an ogre.

"He had the bad drop, though," Oona will say, wagging her old head. "He was personable, but never to my liking. Your grandmama, Miss Hilda, could never abide him, and wouldn't have married him not if your grand-papa had never been born. She guessed at the bad drop in him, dear young lady, though her ears had been kept from hearing what other people knew of him. Your grandpapa and he were like day and night, the one all goodness and brightness, the other with the black passions already marking his face."

Oona has told me over and over again the story of the love of the two men for my grandmother, an episode which has ruined us Brandons, and made Sir Rupert our implacable enemy.

Our grandmother's picture hangs in the boudoir, where Aline sits sewing or writing letters, or puzzling over wretched sums, poor darling! There are beautiful women nowadays, but women like our grandmother seem to have left the world altogether. She must have been very tall; the folds of her white silk dress sweep away an endless distance in the picture. She has the neck of a swan, and a face, pure oval, with large melancholy eyes. Ringlets fall on either side of her exquisite face, and so innocent is her expression that she seems rather a creature for heaven than for earth. And indeed she did not live long after our dear father was born.

Grandpapa I can remember dimly, and can well believe that he was a handsome young man. Trouble had bent him, but there was no bitterness in the blue eyes--"eyes of youth", though youth had long left him. Even for Sir Rupert he had forgiveness at last, so true a Christian was he, so humbly emulous of the Master he loved and served.

Why, Aline is exactly what he must have been at her age, except that Aline has borne the burden of us all so long that she has more lines of care round her dear blue eyes and her gentle mouth than ought to be there.

However, Oona says that grandpapa, good as he was, was as spirited a young gentleman as any of his compeers. No one could say of him that he was a milksop. He and Sir Rupert were ever something of rivals from the days they were boys at school together, and not in bookish matters. At games and sports they strove to outstrip each other. They were ensigns in the same regiment, and in the wars abroad none could say which was the better man in the field, though even then Sir Rupert had begun to have something of a bad reputation. Then the peace came, and the two young gentlemen swaggered it a while against each other in London drawing-rooms before coming back to their neighbouring patrimonies. There both fell in love with the same woman.

There was never any doubt from the beginning as to the way Aline Ashburton's heart had gone. But Sir Rupert would not believe it till she was actually married. Then he seemed to accept the triumph of his rival so generously, to all appearance, that our dear grandfather was full of remorse for the bad opinion he had held of him for long. Among the Brandon jewels is, or was, the collet of diamonds which Sir Rupert sent our grandmother. Inside the clasp is written, "To the Fairest", with the date of grandmother's marriage.

To make a long story short, Sir Rupert most wickedly wormed himself into grandfather's confidence. I can well believe that the generous heart was full of pity and tenderness for its unsuccessful rival. My grandmother, Oona says, never liked the friendship, but she could give no reason, except her feminine instincts, for her distrust of her old suitor, and those were not enough.

Ah! dear grandpapa was surely easily duped. Even when his pseudo-friend had betrayed him, no mist of suspicion ever gathered between those blue eyes and the world. In his latter days, indeed, he grew so much like heaven, so little like earth, that his righteous anger against Rupert De Lacy was lost in his profound pity for the sinner--such pity as an angel might have, who should realize all the horror of sin, and yet yearn over the soul for which Christ died.

Sir Rupert, even in those early days, had had something of a taste for science, and in the years that followed his disappointment in love he had devoted a certain amount of time to study in the laboratory which he had fitted up in his house.

Now there was, where Brandon estate wanders away to the mountain, a bit of unenclosed land, bare and poor, which up to that time had been regarded as waste. It was beyond Brandon walls, and nearly trenched on the lands of Castle Angry.

Well, Sir Rupert easily enough cozened my grandfather out of it. There was water there, he said, and his cattle had but brackish bog-pools. My grandfather was for giving it to him, but Sir Rupert would not have it so, and the deeds were regularly made out, signed, and delivered. Then, too late, it was discovered why Sir Rupert wanted the land. Why, underneath its docks and dandelions it was one great seam of copper!

The copper mines made the De Lacys rich and the Brandons poor. When grandfather discovered how he had been cheated, and that there was no remedy, he began to sink for copper on his own account. People said that by means of paid agents Sir Rupert fostered in my grandfather what soon became a craze. How many thousands of pounds were poured into those wretched pits over there towards Angry I would not like to say. Sometimes copper was found in small quantities, placed there, people said, by Sir Rupert's agents. Such finds only set my grandfather to harder and more feverish endeavour, but they all ended in nothing. The one seam, and that apparently inexhaustible, was on Whinny Waste, as the No Man's Land was called.

While my grandfather was ruining himself and future Brandons, Sir Rupert was heaping up gold. But now the mines are no longer his, for a few years ago he sold them for a great sum to an English company. People say it was because he had a profound contempt for the business capacity of his grandson, a young fellow of whom we see nothing in this country, his youth having been spent with his mother's people in an English rectory. Indeed, Castle Angry would have been no place for a young life to grow up in; and the young man may be like his father, about whose marriage Sir Rupert was so furious that he never laid eyes on him afterwards.

Anyhow, he must be the better for not having known, in the tender days of his youth, his terrible old grandfather and James Gaskin.

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