 
Transcriber's Notes:
IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT.A Novel.
IN THREE VOLUMES.VOL. I.
LONDON: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. | |
| CHAPTER | |
| I. | OVER THE CLIFF. |
| II. | THE HERMIT OF GATEHOUSE FARM. |
| III. | THE FOUNDATION OF A FRIENDSHIP. |
| IV. | GOLDEN TIDINGS. |
| V. | EDITH WEST. |
| VI. | FIRST DAYS AT PARK NEWTON. |
| VII. | KESTER ST. GEORGE. |
| VIII. | A MIDNIGHT INTRUDER. |
| IX. | MR. PERCY OSMOND. |
| X. | MASTER AND MAN. |
| XI. | IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT. |
| XII. | TOM BRISTOW'S RETURN. |
| XIII. | A DINNER AT PINCOTE. |
| XIV. | AT ALDER COTTAGE. |
IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT.
CHAPTER I.
OVER THE CLIFF.
A hot, windless August day had settled down into a dull, brooding evening, presageful of a coming storm. It was nearly dark by the time Lionel Dering was ready to turn his face homeward. The tide was coming in with an ominous muffled roar; the wind, unfelt all day, was now blowing in fitful puffs from various points of the compass, so that the weathercock on the green, in front of the Silver Lion, was more undecided than usual, and did not know its own mind for two minutes at a time. The boatmen were busy with their tiny craft, making everything fast for the night; and the bathing men were dragging their machines high and dry beyond reach of the incoming tide. Many of the excursionists--those with families chiefly--were already making their way towards the railway station; but others there were who seemed bent on keeping up their merriment to the last moment. These latter could be seen through the wide-open windows of the Silver Lion, footing it merrily on the club-room floor, to the music of two wheezy fiddles. A few minutes later there comes a warning whistle from the engine. The music stops suddenly; the country-dance is left unfinished; pipes are laid aside; glasses are quickly emptied; and the lads and lasses, with many a shout and burst of laughter, rush helter-skelter across the green, to find their places in the train.
"We shall have a rough night, Ben," said Mr. Dering to a man who was coming up from the beach.
"Yes, sir, there's a storm brewin' fast," answered Ben, carrying a finger to his forehead. "If I was you, Mr. Dering," he added, "I wouldn't go over the cliffs to-night. It ain't safe after dark, and the storm'll break afore you get home." But Mr. Dering merely shook his head, laughed, bade Ben good-night, and kept on his way.
The old boatman's words proved true. The first flash of lightning came just as the last houses of Melcham were lost to view behind a curve of the road, and when Lionel had two miles of solitary walking still before him. The thunder and the rain, however, were still far out at sea.
By this time it was almost dark, but Mr. Dering pressed forward without hesitation or delay. The cliff road, dangerous as it would have been under such circumstances to any ordinary wayfarer, had for him no terrors. He knew every yard of it as well as he knew the walk under the apple-trees in his own garden. It was not the first time by any means that he had traversed it after nightfall. As for the lightning, it was rather an assistance than otherwise, serving every two or three minutes, as it did, to show him exactly where he was. It was a bad road enough, certainly. Unfenced in several places, with here and there a broad, yawning chasm in the direct path, where some huge bulk of the soft earthy cliff, undermined by fierce winter tides, had broken bodily away and had gone to feed the ever-hungry waves. But to Lionel every dangerous point was familiar, and he followed the little circuitous bends in the path, necessitated by the breaks in the frontage of the cliff, instinctively and without thought.
He had been thinking of Edith West--his ladye-love, whom he might not hope ever to see again. In his long solitary walks both by day and night she was almost always in his thoughts. Not but what Lionel, this evening, had an eye for the lightning, so beautifully terrible in its apparently purposeless vagaries. Fast following one another, came the blue, quivering flashes, lighting up, for one brief moment at a time, the barren skyward-climbing cliff, and the still more barren waste of sea.
"Like my life--like my life," murmured Lionel to himself, his eyes still bent on the wide tract of moorland, which had just been lighted up by a more vivid flash than common. "Barren and unprofitable. Without byre or homestead. Left unploughed, unfenced, uncared for. Of no apparent use, were it not that a few wild-flowers choose to grow there, and a few birds, equally wild, to build their nests there. But over it, as over more favoured spots, the free breeze of heaven blows day and night, and keeps it sweet; and the sea makes everlasting music at its feet."
These thoughts were still in Mr. Dering's mind when a sudden turn in the pathway brought him in view of the lighthouse, whose gleaming lantern, although full half a mile away, shone out through the coming storm like the cheery welcome of a friend.
The thunder was coming nearer, bringing the rain with it. The flashes were becoming more vividly painful. The sea's hoarse chorus was growing more loud, and triumphant. Lionel had paused for a moment to gather breath. A flash--and there, not fifty yards away, and coming towards him, was a man--a stranger! It was the work of an instant for the lightning to photograph the picture on his brain, but that one instant was enough for him to see and recognize the deadly peril in which the man was placed. He was marching unknowingly to his death. Not six yards in front of him yawned the most dangerous chasm in the whole face of the cliff.
In another moment Lionel had recovered his presence of mind. "Stop! stop for your life!" he shouted at the top of his voice. "Don't stir another step." It was too dark for him to see whether the man had heard and understood his warning cry. He must wait for the next flash to tell him that. The words had hardly left his lips when the thunder burst almost immediately overhead, as it seemed, and the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. Lionel, meantime, was making his way as quickly as he could round the back of the chasm. Two minutes more would bring him to the very spot where he had seen the stranger. But while he had still some dozen yards or more of the dangerous path to traverse, there came another blinding flash. It had come and gone in the twinkling of an eye, but that brief second of time was sufficient to show Lionel that the man was no longer there. An inarticulate cry of horror burst from his lips. With beating heart and straining nerves, he pressed forward till he stood on the very spot where he had seen the man; but he was standing there alone.
The storm was at its height. The forked flashes came thick and fast. One crack of thunder was followed by another, before the echoed mutterings of the last had time to die away. A wild hurricane of wind and rain was beating furiously over land and sea. Utterly regardless of the storm, Lionel lay down at full length on the short, wet turf, and shading his eves with his hands, peered down into the black gulf below. It was a dangerous thing to do, but in the excitement of the moment all sense of personal fear was forgotten. He waited for the flashes; but when they came they showed him nothing save the wild turmoil of the rising tide as it dashed itself in fury against the huge boulders with which the beach was thickly strewn. It would be high water in half-an-hour. Already the base of the cliff was washed by the inrushing waves. Lionel shouted with all his might, but the wind blew the sound back again, and the thunder drowned it. He stood up despairingly. What should he do to succour the poor wretch who lay there, dying or, perhaps, already dead, at the foot of the cliff? What could he do? Alone and unaided he could do nothing. He must seek the help of others. But where? The nearest point where he could hope to get assistance was the lighthouse, and that was nearly half-a-mile away. But long before the lighthouse could have been reached, and help brought back, the rising tide would have completely barred the passage along the foot of the cliffs, and would, in all probability, have washed the body out to sea. At the point where he was standing, the cliff had a sheer descent of a hundred feet to the beach. But suddenly Mr. Dering remembered, and it seemed to him like a flash of inspiration, that no great distance away there was a slight natural break in the cliff, known as "The Smugglers' Staircase." It was merely a narrow gully or seam in the face of the rock, not much wider than an ordinary chimney. If it had ever really been used by smugglers in years gone by as a natural staircase, by means of which access could be had to the beach, they must have been very active and reckless fellows indeed. But what had been made use of by one man might be made use of by another, Lionel thought, and, with some faint renewal of hope in his breast, he made his way along the cliff in the direction of the staircase. If he could only get down to the beach before the tide had risen much higher, and could succeed in finding the body, he might, perhaps, be able to obtain some foothold among the crannies of the cliff, where he would be beyond reach of the waves, and where he might wait till daybreak, and the ebbing of the tide, should give him a chance of seeking help elsewhere.
But here he was at the staircase--a place, of a truth, to try a man's nerve, even by broad daylight. Although Lionel had never ventured either up or down it, he was no stranger to its peculiar features. More than once, in his rambles along the cliffs, he had paused to examine it, and to wonder whether the jagged, misshapen ledges of protruding rock from which it was supposed to derive its likeness to a gigantic staircase, were the result of nature's handiwork or that of man.
Lionel had lost no time. From his first sight of the stranger till now was not more than five or six minutes. Pausing for a moment on the edge of the staircase, he flung his hat aside, buttoned his coat, and then, instinctively, turned up his cuffs. Then he went down on his hands and knees, and was just lowering one leg over the edge of the cliff; when his collar was roughly seized, and a hoarse voice growled in his ear: "In heaven's name, Mr. Dering, what are you about?"
For the moment, Lionel was startled. Next instant he recognized Bunce, the coastguardsman--a very worthy fellow, to whom he was well known. A few rapid words from Lionel explained everything. "All the same, Mr. Dering, you can't bring the dead back to life, do how you will," said Bunce, "and that man's as dead as last year's mackerel, you may depend on't. Let alone which, the tide's right up to the bottom of the cliff. No, no, Mr. Dering--axing your pardon--but one live man is worth twenty dead uns."
"Bunce, you are a fool!" said Lionel, wrathfully. "If I were not in a hurry, I would prove it to you. Take your hand off my collar, sir. I tell you I am going down here. If you choose to help me, go to the lighthouse and get Jasper to come back with you, and bring some ropes and a lantern or two, and whatever else you think might be useful. If you don't choose to help me, go about your business, and leave me to do mine."
"But you are going to certain death; you are indeed, Mr. Dering," pleaded the coastguardsman.
"Bunce," said Lionel, "you are an old woman. Goodbye." There was a flash, and Bunce caught a momentary glimpse of a stern white face, and two resolute eyes. When the next flash came, Lionel was not to be seen. He was on his perilous journey down the Smugglers' Staircase.
"A madman--a crazy madman," muttered Bunce. "If he gets safe to the bottom of the staircase, he'll go no farther. Not as I'm going to desert him. Not likely. Though he did call me a old woman."
Going down on one knee on the wet grass, he put both his hands to his mouth, and shouted with all his might: "I'm going to the lighthouse for help, Mr. Dering." He listened, but there came no answer. Presently, with a little quaking of the heart, he rose to his feet. "He needn't have called me a old woman," he muttered. With that he pulled his hat fiercely over his brow, and set off for the lighthouse at a rapid walk, which soon quickened into a run.
How Lionel got down to the bottom of the staircase he could never afterwards have told. He only knew that when about half way down his foot slipped. The next thing he remembered was finding himself among the rocks at the bottom, bruised, bleeding, and partially stunned. A larger wave than usual, which dashed completely over him, gave him a shock which helped to revive him. Not the least perilous part of his enterprise was still before him. Already the tide was two feet deep at the foot of the cliff. Fortunately, the wind had gone down, and the rain had in some measure abated; but had it not been for the lightning's friendly flashes, Lionel's task would have been a hopeless one. The road he had to take was thickly strewn with huge boulders, and gigantic masses of rock which had fallen--some of them centuries ago--from the cliffs overhead. Between and over these Lionel had to make his way to the point where the stranger had fallen. It was a work of time and peril, more especially now that the tide was coming in so dangerously fast, beating and eddying round the rocks and dashing over them in showers of stinging spray. Lionel saw clearly that, in any case, it would be quite impossible for him to return by the way he was going till ebb of tide. He must find some "coign of vantage" among the fallen rocks, or high up in the face of the cliff, beyond reach of the waves, and there wait patiently for further help. But first to find the stranger.
Manfully, gallantly, Lionel Dering set himself to the task before him. Foot by foot, yard by yard, he fought his way forward. The lightning showed him at once the dangers he had to contend against, and how best to avoid them. Over some of the rocks he had to clamber on all fours; round others he had to pick his way, waist-deep in water. Now and then, a larger wave than common would seize him, dash him like a log against the rocks, and then leave him, bruised and breathless, to gather up its forces for another attack. But Lionel never faltered or looked back. Onward he went, slowly but surely nearing the object of which he was in search. Nearly exhausted, all but worn out, at length he reached the heap of dÉbris formed by the falling of the cliff--or rather that portion of it which the sea had spared. He was terribly anxious by this time. If the body of the stranger when it fell had been caught by any of the ledges or rough projecting angles of the dÉbris, and had lodged there, there was just a faint possibility that the man might be still alive. But if, on the contrary, it had rolled down to the foot of the cliff, the waves would long ago have claimed it as their own.
The storm was passing away inland. The lightning was no longer either so frequent or so vivid. Lionel's difficulty was to find the exact point of the cliff from which the stranger had fallen. At the most he could only guess at it. Still, here was the mass of fallen cliff, and the body, unless washed away by the tide, could not be far off.
Having accomplished so much, he had neither long nor far to search. Putting out his hand in the dark to grasp a projecting ledge of rock, which the last flash of lightning had shown to him, his fingers touched a clammy ice-cold face. He drew back his arm with an involuntary shudder. Next moment his heart gave a great throb of relief, and he felt that, whether the man were alive or dead, his labour had not been entirely in vain.
The body was lying among a heap of jagged rocks, half in and half out of the water. Lionel's first idea was that the man was stone dead. But a more careful examination, which he made as soon as he had dragged the body beyond reach of the still-rising tide, convinced him that there were still some flickering signs of life--just the faintest possible pulsation of the heart. The forehead was marked by a thin streak of blood, which Lionel tried to stanch with his handkerchief. For the rest, he made out, by the momentary glimpses which the lightning afforded him, that the man was young, fair, slightly built, and, to all appearance, a gentleman. Feeling some hard substance, Lionel put his hand into the stranger's pocket, and drew from it a small travelling flask. It contained a little brandy, with which Lionel moistened the unconscious lips, but the stranger's teeth were so firmly set that he found it impossible to open them. What more could he do? he asked himself, and he was obliged to answer, Nothing. If Bunce had not deserted him, help would be forthcoming before long. Otherwise, he must wait there for daybreak and the ebbing of the tide.
But faithful, good-hearted Bunce had not deserted him. He had roused up Jasper, the lighthouse-keeper, out of his first snooze--Jasper's two mates being on duty--and had brought that individual, still half dazed, but responding manfully to the call, together with a quantity of stout rope, and a couple of ship's lanterns, not forgetting a blanket and a nip of cognac, and was back again on the cliffs only a few minutes after Lionel's search was at an end.
Never had human voice sounded so welcome to Lionel as did the coastguardsman's hoarse shouts that August night. They soon made each other out, and then the rest was comparatively easy. A rope was slung round the body of the still unconscious stranger, which was then hauled up by the two men with all possible care to the top of the cliff; a process which was repeated in the case of Lionel.
"I never thought to see you alive again, Mr. Dering," said Bunce, with tears in his eyes, as Lionel grasped him warmly by the hand. "Where do you wish to have the gentleman taken to?"
"To Gatehouse Farm, of course," said Lionel. "Jasper, you run into the village, and borrow a horse and cart, and some straw, and another blanket or two, and get back again as if your life depended on it."
And so about midnight the stranger, who had never recovered consciousness, was laid in Mr. Dering's own bed at Gatehouse Farm. They had found a card-case in his pocket, the cards in which were inscribed with the name of "Mr. Tom Bristow," but that was the only clue to his identity. Dr. Bell, the local practitioner, was quickly on the spot.
"A serious case, Mr. Dering--a very serious case," said the little man, two hours later, while pulling on his gloves and waiting for his cob to be brought round, "But we have an excellent constitution to fall back upon, and, with great care, we shall pull through. We have dislocated our left shoulder; we have broken three of our ribs; and we have got one of the ugliest cuts on the back of our head that it was ever our good fortune to have to deal with. But with care, sir, we shall pull through."
Somewhat comforted in mind by the doctor's assurance, Lionel went back upstairs, and having taken a parting glance at his guest, and satisfied himself that nothing more could be done for the present, he lay down on the sofa in the next room to catch an hour's hurried sleep.
He had no prevision of the future, that August morning: there was no voice to whisper in his ear that the man whose life he had just saved at the risk of his own would, before many months were over, repay the obligatby rescuing him, Lionel Dering, from a still more bitter strait, and be the means of restoring him both to liberty and life.
CHAPTER II.
THE HERMIT OF GATEHOUSE FARM.
Lionel Dering at this time was twenty-eight years old. A tall, well-built, fair-complexioned man, but bronzed by much exposure to the sun and wind. His eyes were dark gray, very steady and penetrating. He had a habit of looking full into the faces of those with whom he talked, as though he were trying to penetrate the mask before him. It was a habit which some people did not like. He had never shaved in his life, and the strong, firm lines of his mouth, betokening immense power of will, and great tenacity of purpose, were all but hidden by the soft, flowing outlines of a thick beard and moustache, pale golden as to colour. His free, outdoor life, and the hard work to which he had accustomed himself of late years, had widened his chest and hardened his muscles, and had ripened him into a very tolerable specimen of those stalwart, fair-bearded islanders whose forms and figures are familiar wherever the English language is spoken. For three years past he had been living the life of a modern hermit at Gatehouse Farm. His reasons for choosing thus to isolate himself entirely from the world of his old friends and associations, to bury himself alive, as it were, while all the pleasures of life were still sweet to his lips, will not take long to explain.
Lionel Dering came of a good family on both his father's side and his mother's. Unfortunately, on his father's side there was little or no money, and his mother's side never forgave the marriage, which was one of those romantic run-away affairs of which people used to hear every week at a time when the blacksmith of Gretna Green was a legal forger of matrimonial fetters.
After nine years of married happiness, Godfrey Dering died, leaving his widow with two children, Lionel, aged eight, and Richard, aged six. Mrs. Dering found herself with an annuity of six hundred pounds a year, which her husband's care and prevision had secured to her. For the future, this would be the sole means of subsistence of herself and children. Her own family had repudiated her from the day of her marriage, and she was too proud to court them now. She sent her two boys away to a good school, and while still undecided where she would permanently fix her home, she went to live for a while with some of her husband's friends at Cheltenham--and at Cheltenham she stayed till the day of her death. The Langshaws, under whose roof she found a home during the first year of her bereavement, were worthy well-to-do farmers, distant relations of Godfrey; who seemed as if they could never do enough for pretty Mrs. Dering and her two fatherless boys. After a time she took lodgings in the town itself, where her money and her good looks, combined with her amiability and easy, cheerful disposition, soon attracted around her a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. She had several offers of marriage during the ten years of her widowhood, but she remained steadily faithful to the memory of her first love, and when she died her husband's name was the last word on her lips.
His mother died when Lionel Dering was eighteen years old, six months after his younger brother, Richard, had gone to India to carve out for himself that mythical fortune which every youthful enthusiast believes must one day infallibly be his.
Lionel had been brought up to no business or profession. While still a youth at school, a great part of his holidays had been spent at the Langshaw's farm, three miles out of Cheltenham, where he was always a welcome guest. Here he learned to ride, to drive, to shoot, and to take an interest in all those outdoor avocations which mark the due recurrence of the seasons on a large and well-managed farm. But when his school-days were really at an end, both Lionel and his mother were utterly at a loss to decide in which particular groove the young man's talents--genius Mrs. Dering called it--would be likely to meet with their amplest and most speedy recognition.
Truth to tell, the widowed mother trembled at the idea of parting from her favourite boy, of letting him go out unprotected into the great world, so full of wickedness and temptation, of which she herself knew so little, but about which she had heard such terrible tales. So week passed after week, and month after month, and Lionel Dering still stayed at home with his mother. An inquiry was made here and there, a letter written now and then, but all in a half-hearted sort of way, and Mrs. Dering never heard the postman's knock without trembling lest it should be the herald of a summons which would tear Lionel from her side for ever. When, at last, the dreadful summons did come, in the shape of the offer of an excellent situation in India, Mrs. Dering declared that it would break her heart if Lionel left her. She was a very delicate little woman, be it borne in mind, and Lionel, who loved her tenderly, fully believed every word she said--believed that her heart would really break if they were separated--as in all probability it would have done. "I won't leave you, mother--I won't go away to India," said Lionel, as he kissed away her tears.
"You might let me go, mother, instead of Li," said Richard, as he too kissed her. "If you love me, mother, let me go."
So Richard went to India in place of his brother, and Lionel still stayed at home. Six months later, Mrs. Dering, who had been a partial invalid for years, died quite suddenly, and Lionel found himself, after the payment of all expenses, with about fifty pounds in ready money, and no ascertainable means of earning his own living.
In this emergency, a certain Mr. Eitzenschlager, a German merchant, who had met Mrs. Dering in society some five or six years previously, and had fallen in love with her to no purpose, came to the rescue by offering Lionel a stool in his counting-house, at Liverpool. But to Lionel, with his outdoor tastes, the thought of any mode of life which involved confinement within doors was utterly distasteful. He preferred taking up his quarters for a time with his old friends the Langshaws, and there waiting till another opening should give him an opportunity of joining his brother in India.
When Dorothy St. George ran away from home to marry Godfrey Dering, she never afterwards saw her father, nor any member of her family, except her youngest brother, Lionel--the brother after whom her eldest boy was named. He was a soldier, and shortly after Dorothy's marriage he was ordered abroad, but he wrote occasionally to the sister whom as a boy he had loved so well, therein disobeying his father's express command, that no communication of any kind should henceforth be held with the disgraced daughter of the house. But many years passed before Lionel St. George had an opportunity of seeing his sister--not, in fact, till some time after their father's death: not till he had won his way up, step by step, to the rank of general, and had come back from India, a grizzled veteran, with a year's leave of absence in which to recruit his health, and pay brief visits to such of his relatives and friends as death had spared. His sister Dorothy was one of the first whom he made a point of seeing. For Lionel he contracted a great liking, chiefly, perhaps, because his nephew was named after him, and because in the tall, bronzed young man he saw, or fancied that he saw, many points of resemblance to what he himself had been in happy days long gone by. It was a pity, the general said to himself, that such a fine young fellow should be kept tied to his mother's apron string. So, after he got back to India, he brought his influence to bear, and an eligible opening for Lionel was quickly found. But, as we have already seen, Lionel did not avail himself of his uncle's offer. Richard went to India in his stead, and Lionel was by his mother's side when she died.
Left thus alone, it seemed to Lionel that he could not do better than join his brother, and he wrote his uncle to that effect.
But before he could possibly get an answer from India, something happened which changed the whole current of his life. Mr. Eitzenschlager, the German merchant, died, and left Lionel a legacy of twenty thousand pounds.
What a fund of quiet, unsuspected romance there must have been in the heart of the old Teuton! At fifty years of age he had fallen in love with pretty Mrs. Dering; but Mrs. Dering had nothing but esteem to give him in return. Once rejected, he never spoke of his feelings again, but went on loving in secret and in silence. Had Mrs. Dering outlived him, the twenty thousand pounds would have been left to her. As it was, the money was left to the son whom she had loved so well.
An unexpected legacy of twenty thousand pounds is enough to upset the calculations of most men. It upset Lionel's. The idea of going out to India was abandoned indefinitely. Now had come the time when he could carry out the cherished wish of his life. Time and money were both at his command, and he would travel--travel far and wide, studying "men and manners, climates, councils, governments." When he was tired of travel, he would buy a little estate somewhere, and settle down quietly for the remainder of his days as a gentleman farmer. Such were some of the daydreams of simple-minded Lionel--daydreams which the future would laugh to scorn.
Hitherto Lionel had escaped scathless and heart-whole from all the soft seductive wiles prepared by Love to ensnare the unwary. But his time had come at last, as it comes to all of us. He saw Edith West, and acknowledged himself a lost man. Nor could any one who knew Edith wonder at his infatuation. She was an orphan and an heiress. She lived with her uncle, Mr. Garside, who was also her guardian. Lionel saw her for the first time in a railway carriage, when she and Mrs. Garside were travelling from London to Cheltenham. There was a slight accident to the train, and Lionel was enabled to show the ladies some little attention. Three weeks after that chance meeting, Lionel proposed in form for the hand of Mr. Garside's niece.
Lionel's proposal was very favourably received, for Mr. Garside was prudence itself, and young men worth twenty thousand pounds are not to be met with every day. Very wisely, however, he stipulated that the lovers should wait a year before fastening themselves irrevocably together.
So Lionel, after spending two months in London, where he had an opportunity of seeing Edith every day, set out on his travels. In ten months from the date of his departure he was to come back and claim her for his wife. He left the Continent and the ordinary lines of tourist travel to be done by Edith and himself after marriage, and started direct for America. Cities and city life on the other side of the Atlantic did not detain him long. He panted for the wild, free life and noble sports of the prairies and mountain slopes of the Far West. He spent six happy months with his rifle and an Indian guide on the extreme borders of civilized life. Then he crossed the Rocky Mountains, and found himself, after a time, at San Francisco. There letters from home awaited. One of the first that he opened told him of the failure of the bank in which the whole of his legacy, except a few hundred pounds, had been deposited. Lionel Dering was a ruined man.
One morning, about three months later, Lionel was ushered into the private office of Mr. Garside, in Old Broad Street, City. The rich merchant shook hands with him, and was polite but freezing. Lionel went at once to the object of his visit. "You have heard of my loss, Mr. Garside?" he said.
"I have, and am very sorry for it," said the merchant.
"I have saved nothing from the wreck but a few hundred pounds. Under these circumstances, I come to you, as Miss West's guardian, to tell you that I give up at once, and unreservedly, all pretensions to that lady's hand. I absolve her freely and entirely from the promise she made me. Miss West is an heiress: I am a poor man: we have no longer anything in common."
"Very gentlemanly, Mr. Dering--very gentlemanly, indeed. But only what I should have expected from you."
Lionel cut him short somewhat impatiently. "You will greatly oblige me--for the last time--by giving this note to Miss West. I wish her to understand, direct from myself, the motives by which I have been actuated. This is hardly a place," looking round the office, "in which to talk of love, or even of affection; but, in simple justice to myself, I may say--and I think you will believe me--that the feelings with which I regarded Miss West when I first spoke to you twelve months ago, are utterly unchanged, and, so far as a fallible human being may speak with certainty, they will remain unchanged. I think I have nothing more to say."
But Lionel's note never reached Edith West. When Mr. Garside had finished recounting to his wife the details of his interview with "that strange young man," he gave her the note to give to Edith; but the giving of it was accompanied by a look which his wife was not slow to comprehend. The note was never alluded to again between husband and wife, but somehow it failed to reach the hands for which it was intended. Edith was simply told by her guardian that Mr. Dering, with a high-minded feeling which did him great credit, had broken off the engagement. "He is a poor man--a very poor man, my dear," said Mr. Garside, "and he has the good sense to know that you are not calculated for a poor man's wife."
"How does he know that--or you--or anybody?" flashed out Edith. "But Lionel Dering never made use of those words, uncle. They are an addition of your own."
Nevertheless, the one great bitter fact still remained, that her lover had given her up. "If he had only called to see me--or even written!" she said to herself. But days, weeks, months, passed away, and there came no further sign from Lionel. So Edith locked up her love, as some sacred thing, in the innermost casket of her heart, and the name that was sweeter to her than all other earthly names, never passed her lips after that day except in her prayers.
Lionel was not long in making up his mind as to his future course. He had still two or three hundred pounds in ready money, and one small plot of ground that he could truly call his own. The tiny estate in question was known as Gatehouse Farm, and consisted of nothing more than an old-fashioned, tumbledown house, terribly out of repair; an orchard of tolerable dimensions, and about twenty acres of poorish grass-land; the whole being situated in a remote corner of the north-east coast of England. This modest estate had been his father's sole patrimony, and for that father's sake Lionel had long ago resolved never to part from it. He had visited it once or twice when quite a boy, and from that time it had lived in his memory as a pleasant recollection. To this spot he made up his mind that he would retire for awhile. Here he would shut himself up from the world, and, like King Arthur, "heal him of his wounds." He confessed to himself that he was slightly hipped; a little at odds with Fortune. The ordinary objects and ambitions of his age, which, under other circumstances would probably have found him an eager partizan, had, for the present at least, lost their savour. He was not without friends--good friends, who would have been willing and able to help him on in any career he might have chosen to adopt, but just at that time all their propositions seemed equally distasteful to him. Ambition for the moment was dead within him. All he asked was to be allowed to drop quietly out of the circle of those who knew him, and cherish, or cure, in a solitude of his own seeking, those inward hurts for which Time is the sole physician.
As it happened, the tenant of Gatehouse Farm was lately dead; there was, consequently, nothing to stand in the way of its immediate occupation by Lionel. It was neither a very picturesque nor a very comfortable residence, but sufficiently the latter to satisfy its owner's simple wants. Its upper story consisted of four or five bedrooms. Downstairs was a large and commodious kitchen, together with a house-room, or, as we should call it, a parlour. This latter room was chosen by Lionel for his own particular den. It had white-washed walls, and two diamond-paned windows of dull thick glass, but the floor was made of splendid oaken Planks. The walls Lionel left as he found them, except that over the fireplace he hung a portrait of Edith, and his two favourite rifles; but on the floor he spread two or three skins of wild animals, trophies of his prowess in the chase. In a corner near the fireplace, handy to reach, were the twenty or thirty authors whom he had brought with him to be the companions of his solitude. In the opposite corner was the only article de luxe to be found in the house: a splendid cottage piano, of Erard's build.
The dead and gone builder of the house, whose initials, with the date 1685, were still conspicuous on a tablet over the front door, had never been troubled with that mania for the picturesque in nature and art about which we moderns are perpetually prating. In its own little way his house was intensely ugly, and he had persistently built it with its back to the only fine view that could be seen from its windows in any direction. Even after all these years, there was not another house within a mile of it. The only point of habitable life visible from it was the lighthouse. But it was this solitariness, this isolation from the world, which formed its great feature of attraction in the eyes of Lionel. One other attraction it had for him. You had only to cross a couple of small fields, and follow, for a hundred yards or more, a climbing footway that led across a patch of sandy common, and then, all at once, you saw spread out, far and wide before you, the ever-glorious sea.
To this place came Lionel Dering in less than a month after writing his last letter to Edith West, and here he had since stayed. Two farm labourers and one middle-aged woman constituted the whole of his household. What further labour he might require in his farming operations, he hired. He rose at five o'clock in summer and at six in winter. From the time he got up till two o'clock he worked as hard as any of his own men. The remainder of the day he claimed for his own private uses. He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped. At one time he planted potatoes, at another he dug them up; and nowhere within a score of miles were such fine standard-roses to be seen as at Gatehouse Farm. He found some land to let conveniently near his own small patch, and he hired it. At the end of his second year at the farm he calculated his profits at one hundred and eighty pounds, and was perfectly satisfied.
Lionel saw no company, and never went into society. He was well known to the lighthouse keepers and to most of the boatmen. With them he would talk freely enough. Their racy sayings, their homely, vigorous diction, their simple mode of life, pleased him. When talking with them he forgot, for a time, himself and his own thoughts, and the change did him good. Not that there was anything of the melancholy, lovesick swain about Lionel--any morbid brooding over his own disappointment, and troubles. No one ever saw him otherwise than cheerful. He was perfectly healthy both in mind and body. Nevertheless, his solitary mode of life, and his persistent isolation of himself from his friends and equals, all tended to throw him back upon his own thoughts, and to make him habitually self-introspective, to confirm him in a growing habit of mental analysis.
Whatever the state of the weather, Lionel hardly ever let a day pass without taking a long, solitary ramble into the country for eight or ten miles. Then he had his books, and his piano--which latter was, perhaps, the greatest consolation of his solitude--and the luxury of his own lonely musings as he sat and smoked, hour after hour, with unlighted lamp, and marked how the glowing cinders shaped themselves silently to the fashion of his thoughts.
Two years had by no means sufficed to tire Lionel Dering of his solitary life. In fact, he grew to like it better, to cling to it more emphatically, every day. It satisfied his present needs and ambitions, and that was all he asked. Calmly indifferent, he allowed himself to drift slowly onward towards a future in whose skies there seemed for him no bright bow of promise--nothing but the unbroken grayness of an autumn day that has neither wind, nor sunshine, nor any change.
CHAPTER III.
THE FOUNDATION OF A FRIENDSHIP.
Notwithstanding Dr. Bell's hopeful hopeful prognostications, it seemed very doubtful whether Mr. Tom Bristow would ever leave Gatehouse Farm alive. "I did not think his hull was quite so badly damaged as it is," said the worthy doctor, who had formerly been in the navy, to Lionel. "And his figure-head has certainly been terribly knocked about, but he's an A 1 craft, and I can't help thinking that he'll weather the storm."
And weather the storm he did--thanks to good nursing and a good constitution. When he once took a turn for the better, his progress towards recovery was rapid. But September had come and gone, and the frosts of early winter lay white on meadow and fold, before the doctor's gray pony ceased calling at Gatehouse Farm on its daily rounds. Long before this time, however, a feeling of more than ordinary friendship had grown up between Lionel Dering and Tom Bristow. The points of dissimilarity in the characters of the two men were very marked, but it may be that they liked each other none the less on that account. In any case, this dissimilarity of disposition lent a piquancy to their friendship which it would not otherwise have possessed.
But who and what was this Mr. Tom Bristow?
The account which he gave of himself to Lionel, one afternoon, when far advanced towards recovery, was somewhat vague and meagre; but it more than satisfied the master of Gatehouse Farm, who was one of the least inquisitive of mortals; and, for the present, it will have to satisfy the reader also.
They were sitting on a rustic bench just outside the farm porch, basking in the genial September sunshine. Lionel had his meerschaum between his lips, and was fondling the head of his favourite dog, Osric. Tom Bristow, who never smoked, was busy with a piece of boxwood and a pocket-knife. Little by little he was fashioning the wood into a capital but slightly caricatured likeness of worthy doctor Bell--a likeness which the jovial medico would be the first to recognize and laugh at when finished. Tom was a slim-built, aquiline-nosed, fair-complexioned, young fellow; rather under than over the ordinary height; and looking younger than he really was--he was six-and-twenty years old--by reason of his perfectly smooth and close-shaven face, which cherished not the slightest growth of whiskers, beard, or moustache. Tom's first action on coming to his senses after his accident was to put his hand to his chin, just then bristling with a stubble of several days' growth; and his first words to the startled nurse were, "My dear madam, I shall feel greatly obliged by your sending for a barber." His eyes were blue, full of vivacity, and keenly observant of all that went on around him. He had a very good-natured smile, which showed off to advantage a very white and even set of teeth. His hands and feet were small, and he was rather inclined to be proud of them. His dress, while studiously plain in appearance, was made of the best materials, and owed its origin to one of the most famous of London tailors.
"Dering," said Tom suddenly--they had been sitting for full five minutes without a word--"it is five weeks to-day since you saved my life."
"What a memory you have!"
"Seeing that one's life is not saved every day, I may be excused for remembering the fact, unimportant though it may seem to others. It is five weeks to-day since I was brought to Gatehouse Farm, and during all that time you have never asked me a question about myself or my antecedents. You don't even know whether you have been entertaining a soldier, a sailor, a tinker, a tailor, a what's-his-name, or a thief."
"I didn't wait to ask myself any question of that kind when I went down the cliff in search of you, and I don't see why I need trouble myself now."
"As a matter of simple justice both to you and himself, the mysterious stranger will now throw off his mystery, and appear in the commonplace garb of real life."
"I wouldn't bother if I were you," said Lionel. "Your object just now is to get thoroughly well. Never mind anything else."
"There's no time like the time present. I'm ashamed of myself for not having spoken to you before."
"If that's the matter with you, I know you must have your say. Proceed, worthy young man, with your narrative, and get it over as quickly as possible."
"I was born at a little town in the midland counties," began Tom. "My father was chief medical practitioner in the place, and attended all the swells of the neighbourhood. His intention from the first was to bring me up to the law; so, as soon as I was old enough, he had me articled to old Hoskyns, his bosom friend, and the chief solicitor in the little town. I didn't like the law--in fact, I hated it; but there seemed no better prospect for me at that time, so I submitted to my fate without a murmur. My father died when I was seventeen, leaving me a fortune of six thousand pounds. I stayed quietly on with Hoskyns till I was twenty-one. The day I was of age, the old gentleman called me into his private room, congratulated me on having attained my majority, and asked me in what way I intended to invest my six thousand pounds. 'I am not going to invest it: I am going to speculate with it,' was my answer. The old lawyer looked at me as if I were a madman. 'Going to speculate in what?' he asked faintly. 'Going to speculate on the Stock Exchange,' was my reply. Well, the old gentleman raved and stormed, and talked to me as though I were a son of his own, even hinting at a possible partnership in time to come. But my mind had long been made up, and nothing he had to say could move me. It seemed to me that in my six thousand pounds I had the foundation of a fortune which might in time grow into something colossal. It is true that the course I had laid down for myself was not without its risks. It was quite possible that instead of building up a large fortune, I should lose the little one I had already. Well, should that black day ever come, it would be time enough then to think of going back to Hoskyns, and of settling down for life as the clerk of a provincial lawyer.
"My father's death left me without any relations, except some far-away cousins whom I had never seen. There was nothing to keep me in my native town, so I set out for London, with many prophecies of coming ruin ringing in my ears. I hired a couple of cheap rooms in a quiet city court, and set up in business as a speculator, and to that business I have stuck ever since."
"Which is as much as to say that you have been successful in it," said Lionel.
"I have been successful in it. Not perhaps quite so successful as my sanguine youthful hopes led me to believe I should be; but still sufficiently so to satisfy myself that in choosing such a career I did not choose altogether unwisely."
"But how is it possible," said Lionel, "that you, a raw country lad of one and twenty, could go and settle down in the great world of London; and, without experience of your own, or any friendly hand to guide you, could venture to play at a game which exercises some of the keenest intellects of the age--and not only venture to play at it, but rise from it a winner?"
"The simplest answer to that question would be, that I did do it. But really, after all, the matter is not a very difficult one. I have always been guided by three or four very simple rules, and so long as I stick to them, I don't think I can go very far amiss. I never invest all my money in one or even two speculations, however promising they may seem. I never run great risks for the sake or problematical great profits. Let my profits be small but sure, and I am quite content. Lastly, I put my money, as far as possible, into concerns that I can examine personally for myself, even though I should have to make a journey of three hundred miles to do it. See the affair with your own eyes, judge it for yourself, and then leave it for your common sense to decide whether you shall put your money into it or no. In all such professions, natural aptitude--the gift that we possess almost unconsciously to ourselves--is the grand secret of success."
"Success in your case means that you are, on the high road to being a millionaire?"
"Now you are laughing at me."
"Not at all. I am only judging you by your own standard."
"And is the standard such a very poor one?"
"Not a poor one at all, as the world goes. I should like very much to be a millionaire."
"To say that I am not richer to-day than I was the day I was twenty-one would not be true," said Tom, with a demure smile. "I am years and years, half a lifetime at the very least, from being a millionaire--if; indeed, I ever live to be one. But I no longer live in two cheap rooms in the city, and dine at an eating-house for fifteen pence. I have very nice chambers just out of Piccadilly, where you must look me up when you are next in town. I belong to a club where I have an opportunity of meeting good people--by 'good people' I mean people who may some day be useful to me in my struggle through life. Finally, I ride my hack in the Park two or three afternoons a week during the season, and am on bowing terms with a duchess."
"I can no longer doubt that you are a rising man," said Lionel, with a laugh.
"My head is full of schemes of one kind or another," said Tom, a little wearily. "Or rather it was full of them before I met with that confounded accident. In one or the other of those schemes the duchess will play her part like any other pawn that may be on my chess-board at the time. There is no keener speculator in the whole City of London than her Grace of Leamington."
"What a martyrdom it must seem to you to be shut up here, in this dull old house, so far away from the exciting life you have learned to love so well!"
"A martyrdom, Dering? It is anything but that. Had I been well in health, I can't tell what my feelings might have been. I should probably have considered it a waste of time to have spent a month, either here or anywhere else, in absolute idleness. But being ill, and having just been dragged back, by main force as it were, from Death's very door, I cannot tell you how grateful, how soothing to me is the quietude of this old spot. If, now and then, when I feel better and stronger, there come moments when I long to glance over the money article of 'The Times,' or to write a long, impatient letter to my broker in London, there are days and nights when such things have no longer the faintest interest for me--times when bare life itself seems a burden almost too heavy for endurance, and all my ambitious schemes and speculations nothing more than a tissue of huge mistakes."
"Your old interest in everyday matters will gradually come back to you as you grow better," said Lionel, "and with it will come the desire to be up and doing."
"I suppose you are right," said Tom. "It would never do for a little illness to change the plans and settled aims of a lifetime."
"No chance of your settling down here at Gatehouse Farm as Hermit Number Two?"
Tom shook his head and laughed. "Do you know, Dering," he said, "that you are one of the greatest riddles, one of the most incomprehensible fellows, it was ever my fortune to meet with! But, pardon me," he added hastily. "Of all men in the world, you are the one to whom I ought least to say such words."
"Nothing of the kind," said Lionel, with a smile. "I like your frankness. I am aware that many people look upon me as a sort of harmless lunatic, though what there is so incomprehensible about me I am at a loss to imagine."
"You will forgive me for saying so," said Tom, "but to me it seems such an utter pity to see a man of your education and abilities wasting the best years of his life in a place like this, with no society but that of fishermen and boors: to see a man, young and strong in health, so utterly indifferent to all the ordinary claims of civilized life--to all the aims and ambitions by which the generality of his fellow men are actuated, to the bright career which he might carve out for himself, if he would but take the trouble to do so."
"Ah, that is just it, mon ami: if I would but take the trouble to do so! But is the game really worth the candle? To me, I confess that it is not."
Tom shrugged his shoulders.
"I know that you can afford to pity me--that you look upon me as a sort of good-natured imbecile."
"No--no!" in energetic protest from Tom.
"But what have you to pity me for?" asked Lionel, without heeding the interruption. "I have enough to eat and drink, I have a roof to cover me, and a bed to sleep on. In these important matters I should be no better off if I had ten thousand a-year. As for the society of boors and fishermen, believe me, there is more strength of character, more humour, more pathos, more patient endurance of the ills of this life, and a firmer trust in Providence, among these simple folk than I ever found among those whom you would term my equals in the social scale. Then your ambitions and aims, dignify them with what fine names you will, what are they, nine times out of ten, but the mere vulgar desire to grow rich as quickly as possible! So long as I can earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, and owe no man a penny, I am perfectly satisfied."
"Argue as you will, Dering, this is neither the place nor the position for a man like you."
"So long as the place and position suit me, and I them, we shall remain in perfect accord, and no longer," said Lionel. "I never said that it was my intention to live a hermit all my life; but at present I am perfectly satisfied."
Again and again, before Tom Bristow's enforced stay at Gatehouse Farm came to an end, was the same subject broached between him and Lionel, but always with the same result. As Lionel often said to himself, he was utterly without ambition. He was like a man whose active career in the world was at an end; who knowing that life could have no more prizes in store for him, had settled down quietly in his old age, content to let the race go by, and wait uncomplainingly for the end. It is probable, nay, almost certain, that had his uneventful life at Gatehouse Farm been destined to last much longer, old desires and feelings would gradually have awakened within him; that in time he would have found his way again into that busy world on which he had turned his back in a transient fit of disgust, and there have fought the fight before him like the good and true man he really was at heart.
As days went on, Tom Bristow's strength gradually came back to him, and with it came a restlessness, and a desire to be up and doing that was inherent in his disposition. Long before he was allowed down stairs, he had discovered that the old case clock in the kitchen had a trick of indicating the hours peculiar to itself, sometimes omitting to strike them at all, and sometimes going as high as a hundred and fifty; besides which, its qualities as a timekeeper were not to be depended on. To Tom's orderly and accurate mind the old clock was a great annoyance, so the very first day he came down stairs he took the works entirely to pieces. Then, little by little, as his strength would allow him, he cleaned them, put them together again, regulated them, and finally turned the old clock into so accurate a timekeeper that Mrs. Bevis, Lionel's housekeeper, was quite disturbed in her mind for several days, because she had no longer any mental calculations to go through before she could be really sure as to the hour. Then, after he had got still stronger, Tom went systematically through all the locks in the house, repairing and putting into thorough working order all that required it. Then he mended the kitchen window, and put up a couple of shelves for Mrs. Bevis in the dairy--all done as neatly as any workman could have done them. In little jobs of this sort Tom took great delight now that he had so many leisure hours on his hands.
But presently there began to arrive at Gatehouse Farm an intermittent stream of letters, newspapers, pamphlets, and blue books, the like of which had never been known within the memory of the oldest man in the village. Lionel himself stared sometimes when he saw them, but they all had a business interest for Tom, who now began to spend a great portion of his time in receiving and answering letters. Such books as there happened to be in Lionel's small library that had any interest for him--and they were very few indeed--he exhausted during the early days of his illness. How a sensible man could possibly prefer Browning to the money article of "The Times," or an essay by Elia to the account of a great railway meeting, was matter of intense wonderment to Tom. Poets, novelists, essayists, should be left to women, and to men whose fortunes were already made: but for men with a career still before them; for pushing, striving men of the world, such reading was a sheer waste of valuable time.
But let Tom Bristow be as worldly-minded as he might be, Lionel Dering could not help liking him, and it was with sincere regret he saw the day drawing near when he and his new-found friend must part. With all Tom's shrewdness and keen love of money-getting, there was a rare unselfishness about him; and it was probably this fine trait of character, so seldom found in a man of his calibre, that drew Lionel so closely to him. As for Tom, he had never met with anyone before whose character interested him so profoundly as did that of Dering. Out of that interest grew a liking almost brotherly in its warmth for the strange young hermit of Gatehouse Farm. When the day came for these two men to part, they felt as if they had known each other for years. At the last moment they shook hands without a word. Tears stood in Tom's eyes. Lionel would not trust himself to speak for fear of breaking down. One long last grip, then the horses sprang forward, and Torn was gone. Lionel turned slowly indoors, feeling more lonely and sad at heart than he had done since the day his darling Edith was lost to him for ever.
CHAPTER IV.
GOLDEN TIDINGS.
Days and weeks passed over before the feeling of loneliness caused by Tom's departure from Gatehouse Farm quite wore itself away--before Lionel got thoroughly back into his old contented frame of mind, and felt again in the daily routine of his quiet homely life that simple satisfaction which had been his before the night of the storm. But as the lengthening days of autumn deepened slowly onward towards Christmas, the restlessness and gloom that had shrouded his life of late began to vanish little by little, so that, by-and-by, as Mrs. Bevis joyfully told her husband, "Master was beginning to get quite like his old self again."
The farm preparations for winter were all made. Lionel, looking forward to a long period of leisure, had decided to begin the study of Italian. He had been into Melcham to buy the necessary books, and got back home just as candles were being lighted. On the table he found two letters which had arrived by the afternoon post. One of the two was deeply bordered with black; the other he recognized at once as being from Tom Bristow. He opened Tom's letter first.
In a few hurried lines Tom told Lionel how he had been laid up again from a severe cold which had settled on his chest, and how the doctors had ordered that he should start at once for Algeria with a view of wintering there. He wrote rather dolefully, as one whose business concerns would be altogether disarranged by this imperious mandate, which, nevertheless, he dare not disobey. "I hope to come back next spring with the swallows, thoroughly rejuvenated," he wrote; "when I will not fail to look you up at dear old Gatehouse Farm."
Lionel took up the second letter with some curiosity. But when he saw that it bore the Duxley post-mark, he guessed in a moment the tidings it was about to tell him. Nor was he mistaken. It told him of the death of his uncle, Arthur St. George, of Park Newton, near Duxley, Midlandshire--and contained an invitation to the funeral, and to the subsequent reading of the dead man's last will and testament.
"This letter is written by my uncle's lawyer," said Lionel to himself. "Why couldn't my cousin Kester write to me?"
It was hardly to be expected that Lionel could either feel or express much sorrow for the death of an uncle whom he had never seen; whom he only knew by reputation as a man thoroughly selfish and hard hearted; who had persistently slighted and ignored his, Lionel's, mother, from the day she ran away from home till the day of her death--and who had been heard to declare, again and again, that neither his sister nor any child of hers should ever touch a penny of his money. Knowing all this, Lionel was surprised to have received even the acknowledgment of an invitation to his uncle's funeral. His cousin Kester was the heir, and would inherit everything. For him, Lionel, to attend as a mourner at the solemn ceremony was to make a hypocrite of himself by assuming a regret which he could not feel.
This Arthur St. George who had just died was Dorothy Dering's eldest brother. He had lived and died a bachelor. The second brother, Geoffry, had died many years before, leaving one son, Kester, who was adopted by Arthur, and always looked upon as his uncle's heir. Of the youngest brother, Lionel, we already know something. He, too, was a bachelor. He it was who, when over from India on leave of absence, had called upon Mrs. Dering, and had subsequently got that appointment for Lionel which his mother was not willing that he should accept.
While in England, General St. George, who did not believe in family feuds, contrived to bring his two nephews, Lionel and Kester, together. The result was, to a certain extent, a failure. The two young men had never met each other before; and when, after a week's intercourse, they bade each other goodbye, it is greatly to be doubted whether either of them cared about seeing the other again. Kester, who could make himself very agreeable when he chose to do so, was, as his uncle's heir, inclined to look down upon Lionel, and to treat him with a certain superciliousness which the latter could not readily brook. There was no open rupture between them, but from that time to the present they had never met again.
Before Lionel had quite made up his mind whether he would attend the funeral or not, there came a second note from Mr. Perrins, more imperative than the first one:--"Your cousin, Mr. Kester St. George, is away on the Continent. I am doubtful whether my notification of your uncle's death will reach him in time to allow of his being at the funeral. You and he are the late Mr. St. George's sole relatives, except General St. George, who is in India. If neither you nor your cousin attend the funeral, your uncle will be followed to the grave by no one of his own blood. But that apart, it is highly desirable that, as a near relative of the deceased gentleman, you should be present at the reading of the will, which is fixed to take place in the blue drawing-room at four o'clock on the afternoon of the day of interment."
After this there was nothing left for Lionel but to go.
It was not without a strange commingling of various feelings that Lionel Dering found himself under the roof of a house which had been the home of his ancestors for two hundred years. A stately and venerable old pile, truly. He had often heard his mother talk about it, but till this day he had never seen it. It was something to feel proud of, that he was the scion of a family which could call a place like Park Newton its home.
He was received by Mr. Perrins with a cordiality that was at once grave and respectful. Kester St. George had not arrived; neither had there been any message from him. They waited till the last possible moment, but he did not come. Thus it happened that Lionel found himself in the novel position of chief mourner at the funeral of a man whom he had never even seen. He was glad when the ceremony was over.
Then came the reading of the will. "I wish to goodness my cousin would come, even at this the last moment," said Lionel to the lawyer as they walked together towards the blue drawing-room.
"I don't really know that it matters greatly," replied Mr. Perrins with a significant smile. "I dare say we shall get on very well without Mr. Kester St. George."
Ten minutes later Lionel understood the meaning of the lawyer's strange remark. Ten minutes later he found himself the owner of Park Newton, and the possessor of an income of eleven thousand pounds a year.
It was even so. Everything, with the exception of a few trifling legacies to old servants, that Arthur St. George possessed in the world he had bequeathed without reservation to his nephew, Lionel Dering. The name of Kester St. George was not even mentioned in the will.
"The Park Newton estates have never been entailed," said Mr. Perrins in parenthesis, as he folded up the will. "It was quite competent to the testator to have left the whole of his property to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, had he chosen to do so."
For the moment Lionel was overwhelmed. But when Mr. Perrins had congratulated him, and the doctor had congratulated him, and the butler and the housekeeper, old servants of the family, had followed suit, he began to feel as if his good fortune were really a fact.
"Now I can marry Edith," was his first thought.
"It seems more like a dream than anything else," said Lionel to Mr. Perrins a little later on, as the latter stood sipping a glass of dry sherry with the air of a connoisseur.
"I should very much like to dream a similar dream," answered the lawyer.
"But about my cousin Kester St. George,--he was adopted by my uncle after his father's death, and was brought up at Park Newton, and it was understood by everybody that he was to be my uncle's heir?"
"It is entirely Mr. Kester St. George's own fault that he does not stand in your position to-day."
"I fail to understand you."
"For years your uncle's will was made in his favour. Everything was left to him as absolutely as it is now left to you. But about nine months ago your uncle and your cousin had a terrible quarrel. As to how it arose, or what was the cause of it, I know nothing. I can only surmise that your cousin had done something which your uncle felt that he could not forgive. But be that as it may, Mr. Kester St. George was turned out of Park Newton at ten o'clock one night, and forbidden ever to set foot across the threshold again--nor has he ever done so. Next day your uncle sent for me, and in my presence he tore up the old will which had been in existence for years, and substituted in its place the one which I had the honour of reading this afternoon."
That same night saw Lionel Dering in London. He felt that he could neither go back to Gatehouse Farm, nor make any arrangements respecting his new position, till after he had seen Edith West--till after he had seen her and told her that his love was still unchanged, and that there no longer existed any reason why she should not become his wife.
It was past ten o'clock before he got into London. His mind was too much excited either to allow of his going to bed or of his sitting quietly in the hotel. So he lighted a cigar, and set out for a quiet ramble through the streets. After a time he found himself on Westminster Bridge. He stood awhile watching the river as it flowed along so dark and mysterious--watching it, but with thoughts that were far away. Suddenly he became conscious of a dull, confused noise, like the far-away murmur of a great crowd. Swiftly the murmur grew, growing and swelling with every moment, till it swelled into a mighty roar from a thousand throats. Then, all at once, there was a flashing of lights, and the trampling of innumerable feet, and three fire-engines went thundering past with yells, and shouts, and hoarse, inarticulate cries from a huge mob that followed hard and fast behind. Lionel stood back to let this crowd of desperadoes pass,--when all at once, among them, but not of them--borne helplessly along by the press from which he was struggling in vain to free himself, he saw his cousin, Kester St. George. There was a lamp close overhead, and their eyes met for a moment in recognition across a seething mass of the crowd. It was but for a moment, and then Kester was carried away; but in that moment there flashed into his eyes a look of such deadly, fiend-like hate as thrilled Lionel from head to foot. It was a look that once seen could never be forgotten. It chilled Lionel's heart, and, for a time, even blotted out from his thoughts the sweet image of Edith West. He walked back to his hotel, gloomy, ill at ease, and oppressed with strange presentiments of some vague, far-off evil. Even after he fell asleep that look on his cousin's face oppressed him and would not be forgotten. He dreamt that Kester was pursuing him from room to room through the old house at Park Newton. As Kester came in at one door, with that terrible look in his eyes, he, Lionel, passed swiftly out at the opposite door, but on each door-handle, as he touched it, he left behind a stain of blood. The oppression of his dream grew at length too great to be any longer borne, and he awoke shivering with dread, and thankful to find that the blessed daylight was at hand.