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The House on the Moor. Volume 1

CHAPTER III

THERE were strange elements of incongruity in the scene presented by that dinner-table. Mr. Scarsdale sat at the head of the table, with his son and daughter at the sides, and Peggy behind his chair, erect and stately in his evening dress. All the furniture of the table, the linen, the silver, the china, were of the finest description, and in beautiful order; and strangely around this little centre of light gloomed the meagre unadorned walls, the homely furniture, the heavy hangings of the cheerless apartment, which, however, scarcely formed a greater contrast to the dainty arrangements of the table than Horace Scarsdale’s gray morning jacket, and disordered hair, did to the formal toilette of his father. Susan sat at Mr. Scarsdale’s right hand, in her clean collar. Her dress was very homely; but Susan, at seventeen, was one of those women who have a natural fitness for their place everywhere, and never fall out of harmony. Perhaps she was not over-sensitive by nature; at all events, she was not distressed by the silence of this meal, at which there was no conversation. It was their invariable custom, and Susan had seen no other family-table to make her aware of the misery of this. Horace was of another temper: everything was an offence to the unhappy lad; the silence galled almost beyond endurance; and when his father addressed him as he did always, with formal politeness, upon helping him to anything, the blood rushed to the young man’s cheeks with such sudden violence and force, that no one, who watched his countenance, could have been surprised to see him answer with some demonstration of passion. But he never did; he replied, in the stifled voice of rage, with thanks and formal courtesy. Thus they sat like two enemies, forced to civility by the circumstances of sitting at the same table, and together ate, as if it choked them, their unblessed bread. “Shall I help you to some soup?” asked Mr. Scarsdale, and Horace made a stubborn bow and said, “Thank you.” Neither spoke the other’s name, neither even looked in the other’s face – yet, by that strange magic of antagonism, which is as strong as love, were aware, instinctively, of every movement, almost of every sentiment, which influenced each other’s conduct for the moment. But they had this little duel all to themselves – Susan, dulled by habit, and knowing that it had always been so, observed it not – Peggy, behind her master’s chair, saw everything, and said nothing. Sometimes, indeed, an acute observer might have noticed that the faithful servant set down something on the table with an unnecessary emphasis, which answered, instead of words, to give her impatience vent, and which her master never failed to notice. Peggy, too, did not hesitate to interfere in the business of the table – to remark that Mr. Horace did not eat, and to recommend a particular dish to Miss Susan. Peggy’s dialect was rather a remarkable one, and difficult to identify. She was a North-countrywoman by birth, but had lived in many districts of England, and had taken up, with great impartiality and candour of mind, their different manners of speech. But Mr. Scarsdale, who had killed all natural utterance in his children, had no power over Peggy; he never even tried to restrain her. Her discourse ran on a cheerful chorus during the whole solemn period of dinner; and this it was, more perhaps than anything else, which prevented a positive outbreak between the father and the son.

“Young Master Roger, Miss Susan, dear, he’s agoin’ hoam,” said Peggy; “he’s got father and mother livin’ after all, as I hear say, and none so poorly off neither, for all his goin’ off in a despair wi’ talk o’ ’listin’. Natur’s a mystery, that’s for certain – to turn off a manchild upon a godfayther, and rather to ’list nor to go hoam! I dunno know which is worst if ye ask me. Stewed chicken, master, and done perfect, though I say it as should not; but I’m none so pleased with the peatoes. I’ll not have no more from the mill – they’re agoin’ in the disease. Wine? – this very minute, if I had the keys.”

Mr. Scarsdale brought forth the keys from his pocket; and, totally regardless of Peggy’s monologue, which ran on in further gossip, broke the silence of the table in his own person – a most portentous and unusual incident. He spoke without either addressing or looking at anyone, though it was, in fact, a question which he asked.

“There is, I believe,” observed Mr. Scarsdale, “a spare bedroom in the house?”

Peggy did not hear for the first moment, being taken aback by the unusual event; and Susan said, timidly, “Yes, papa,” taking the remark to herself.

“The door was open this very day, master,” said Peggy, when she recovered her surprise; “I judge you wur lookin’ with your own eyes what like it was; but the good of a spare bedroom in this house I would wish a wise woman to tell to me.”

Mr. Scarsdale made no response, but delivered himself of his further intelligence as though he heard her not. “I wish it to be put in order,” he said, briefly; “Colonel Sutherland arrives here on a visit, to-morrow.”

Even Horace was moved to a momentary start and look of surprise at his father’s immovable countenance, while Susan clasped her hands in spite of herself, and cried – “Oh! papa, is it my uncle?” with the most eager and joyful anxiety suddenly suffusing her face.

But Susan’s voice was drowned in Peggy’s more decided accents. “Master Edward!” cried Peggy, with a restrained shout of triumph – “blessings on his honest face! he never crossed a door but he brought comfort – and as handsome a man as eye could see, and the pleasantest gentleman to speak to that ever said good-morrow. So he’s Cornel now! – and well deserves it, I’ll be bold to say. Custard, master? – as light as a May breeze – and the very tarts you had in holiday times, when you were a boy. I had a thought of old times, and knew no reason – to be sure, it was for a forewarning of the news!”

Mr. Scarsdale thrust the china dish containing the tarts out of his way with an unusual expression of impatience. Then, recollecting himself, took it up and turned to Horace – that is to say, turned his head to him, without turning his eyes, as was his custom. “May I have the pleasure of helping you?” said the father, with a tone of suppressed bitterness. Horace put forth his plate immediately; Peggy’s harmless confectionery was evidently vexatious and annoying to Mr. Scarsdale, and his son took pains to express his enjoyment of it, and compliment Peggy on her handiwork. It was as rare an event to hear Horace’s voice at dinner as his father’s. The approaching event seemed to have loosed the tongues of both.

This little incident put an end to Peggy’s gossip; she removed the remainder of her tarts with a visible flutter of offence, and set down the wine on the table with double emphasis. When Peggy withdrew, Mr. Scarsdale took a book from his pocket, and set up a small folding reading-desk, which had been placed by his hand when the cloth was withdrawn. There he sat, with his glass of purple claret reflected in the shining mahogany, and the two tall, slender candles illuminating a little circle round him, and his head relieved against the dark curtains, which looked almost black in the feeble light. A line of magic drawn round him could not have screened him more completely from the other inmates of the room. Horace thrust his chair away rudely, and leaving it thus at a little distance from the table, went to the window and disappeared behind the curtains to look out on the night. Susan stole quietly round to the side of the table, and produced out of her big bag her evening work – an occupation dear to her heart, though it was only a patchwork quilt, the only fancy work that Susan knew; but before she sat down, withdrew her brother’s chair noiselessly to the side of the fire, where it looked human and companionable. Then silence, entire as if these three human creatures were statues, fell upon the room, where still Mr. Scarsdale sat at the shining table with its two lines of reflection, with the claret jug at his elbow, and his book supported on the reading-desk, and the glass before him half-full of purple wine. He turned the leaves at regular intervals, and went through them with mechanical gravity; but his ears were keen to every rustle of the curtain, and with all the virulence of domestic strife the mind of this singular father watched his son.

As for Susan, her whole mind, as she worked in silence, was full of the wonderful intimation she had just heard. Perhaps by this time you are disposed to think that Susan was very insensible and dull in her feelings not to be miserable about the enmity which existed between her father and brother; but Susan was accustomed to it, and had never seen other fathers and sons, and had seen this go on in the same way so long, that, though she felt it uncomfortable, she entertained no apprehensions about it. As for Horace, if he would remain by himself in the window, looking out upon the black night, Susan could not help it. He was not more miserable there than he would be at the table with his father’s austere shadow upon him; and conversation was tacitly prohibited in those dismal evenings. Susan’s was still an unawakened mind; her brother did not encourage her to think her own influence over him of any importance, nor permitted her to suppose that she had any power to soothe him; and the trembling, timid, mediatory love, which holds a fearful balance in many a divided household, needs love and softness of some kind, on one side or the other, to keep it alive. Love Susan found none in either of her two nearest relatives. She loved them by nature and custom; sometimes a terrible impatience of their discord seized her, and a momentary impulse of passion, to do something or say something which should stir this stagnant, stormy calm, or perhaps change the manner of their existence, had possessed her once or twice in her life; but the tender, anxious, intense love which cruelty cannot kill when it has once developed itself, never can develop itself without the stimulus and creating power of dear love from some one to begin with. Thus it was that Susan beheld with vexation and distress sometimes, but without agony, the unnatural feud beside her, that she took neither side, because either side was equally cold, repulsive, and unaffectionate. She did not know life; she knew not even the fictitious life of books. She did not fear when her brother rushed out into the night, as he did often, that Horace would fall into the rude snares of village dissipation, or run in the way of vulgar crime. She was not alarmed for a possible outbreak of violence between the father and son; such things had never been suggested to her inexperienced mind.

So she sat in the silence, not resenting it for her own part, content in herself, and making out of that dismal quiet a little circle of domestic tranquillity when she arranged her patches and contrasted her colours, and secretly entertained vague anticipations of unknown pleasure, and a warmth of inextinguishable personal happiness, in the very heart of the misery through which her life had grown.

At eight o’clock to a minute Peggy brought in the tea-tray, and removed the claret-jug, which, though he had only once filled his glass, stood all that time by Mr. Scarsdale’s side. Then he took his cup of tea from his daughter’s hand without even looking at her, and went on with his reading. Comfort was not to be got out of anything in this house. Horace drank his standing – told his sister it did not rain now, and went off out of the room like a wind. And when Susan looked over her tea-tray to see her father’s eyes fixed upon his book, and the door closed upon her brother, and herself compelled to sit formally there till Mr. Scarsdale, sipping it slowly and by intervals, had finished his second cup of tea – a certain forlorn sensation of solitude and discomfort moistened Susan’s eyes, and brought an ache to her heart. Then her thoughts went back with a joyful rebound to the promised visitor of to-morrow – her mother’s brother, an actual relation, whose love and kindness she had a claim on. She lost herself in wonder what like he would be, and how he would treat his sister’s children. To-morrow would solve Susan’s long and troubled problem – whether all men were like papa: to-morrow would give her a glimpse into that world of which she knew nothing. Nature was sceptical in Susan’s heart: she could not believe that papa was the type and impersonation of man. Kindness, unknown and longed for, seemed coming to her in the person of that uncle. She returned to her patches, longing to run into the cheerful kitchen to Peggy, to ask all about the new-comer; but bound by the customary punctilio of the house to sit there silent and occupied opposite the reading-desk – a bondage which Susan had never felt more oppressive than on this particular night – while Mr. Scarsdale still turned the mechanical pages, and Horace roamed through the black moor and the falling rain, cursing his fate.

CHAPTER IV

THIS same evening, while Susan sat at her patchwork, comforting herself with fancies concerning the unknown uncle who was to make so strange and unexpected a break upon their solitude, an old gentleman, carrying his own carpet-bag, went into one of the carriages of the night-trains about to start from Edinburgh for the south. He was not a first-class passenger, but the railway people put up instinctive fingers to their caps as he addressed them. He was tall, thin, erect – of a soldierly bearing, with a grey moustache and gray hair, wearing thin upon the crown. That he was a little deaf it was easy to perceive, from the sudden stoop he made when the person sitting next him in the carriage put a question to him unexpectedly; and that his eyes were touched by years and usage was equally apparent when, unable to find his spectacles, he held his time-bill at arm’s length to read it the better. But there was something ingratiating and prepossessing even in the bend which brought his ear to the level of the voice which addressed him, with that instinctive and delicate courtesy which will not treat the most trivial application with carelessness. The good woman who spoke felt flattered – she could not tell how; it was only to ask when the train would start – a thing which her next neighbour knew no better than she did – but the ready attention, and sincere endeavour which the old soldier instantly made to satisfy her, gave the questioner all the feeling of a personal compliment. When the long line of carriages got under weigh, our friend wrapped himself up in his warm cloak, and leaned back in his unluxurious corner. It was a gloomy, rainy, miserable night; the little lamp jolting in the roof, and throwing a feeble illumination over four benches full of drowsing night-travellers, was the only light visible in earth and heaven, save when the nocturnal express plunged with ostentatious speed through some little oasis of a station, with faint lamps gleaming through the universal gloom. The old soldier, however, was not easily disturbed by the discomforts of his journey; if there were any special meditations in his mind, he showed no sign of them; but, with his face half buried in his cloak, kept motionless in his corner – where, in the very midst of the black night, or, to speak more properly, about three o’clock in the winter morning, the guard awaked him. He had reached the end of his journey. The rest of the night he passed in the Railway Inn of a country town, from which he set out next morning in a gig, to face the raw February blast for a drive of fourteen miles over an exposed country. Colonel Edward Sutherland, though he had been twenty years in India, had come home still a poor man; and habits of economy were strong upon the old officer, accustomed all his life, even in the luxurious eastern climate, to spare and restrain unnecessary expenses. He was a solitary man, but he was not a free old bachelor, at liberty to expend his own means on his own pleasure; wife and many children had been left behind in Indian graves, but he had a boy at Addiscombe, and one at St. Andrew’s, and consequently not a shilling of his income to spare; so he placed his carpet bag carefully below the seat out of the reach of rain, and tied a travelling-cap over his ears, and muffled his cloak half over his face, and so turned his face to the wind for his chilly journey to Lanwoth Moor.

“Ay, sure the wind’s in the east – it’s ever in the east on this road,” said the man who drove him. “When it’s could as could all the country over, it’s double could Lanwoth way. Beg your pardon, Cornel,” said the man, touching his cap, “but it’s strange for a gen’l’man to goo this gate in ought but a shay.”

“That is my business, my man,” said the traveller, quietly; “is it a good road?”

“Bits,” said the postboy, shrugging his shoulders; “and bits the very dyeuce for the poor beasts; but we never goo this direction, Cornel, not twicest in a year – not all the way. There’s Tillington, five mile this side o’ Lanwoth, but the road strikes off to the reet – Lord blees you, gen’l’men know better nor to build on a moorside. The wind comes down off the fells fit to pull your skin off, Cornel; and ne’er a shelter, and ne’er a tree, but bits o’ saplings in the moss. Rain and snow and hail, they sweep a’ things before them. I’d never set a brute beast, let alone a christian, with its nose to Lanwoth Moor.”

“Yet somebody must live there,” said the traveller, shivering in spite of himself within his cloak.

“Not a soul, Cornel, but the one house,” said the driver, eagerly; “not a thatch roof or a clay wall – nought but Marchmain. They say it was built at the riding of the Marches, that’s once in the hunderd year, and a’ foor strife, foor to part the lands of the twae Allonbys, brothers and foes as should never be seen in God’s world. But sure there it stands, black as hate, and – “ – the man made a sudden pause, and looked suddenly up in the old officer’s face – “Cornel, you’re gooing there?”

“Do you know me, driver?” said Colonel Sutherland, with a little curiosity.

The man held down his head with a sly, half-abashed smile, not quite sure whether to pretend knowledge or to confess that he acquired his information from the card on the carpet bag. The result of his deliberations was an equivocal reply. “I know an army gen’l’man when I see him, sir,” he said, raising his slouching rustic shoulders, and quickening his speech out of its Cumbrian drawl. “My father was an ould 53d, and Cornel Toppe Sawyer’s own man; and, begging your pardon, Cornel, a blind man could see you had borne command.”

Colonel Sutherland was human; he was not only human, but a little amiable vanity was one of his foibles. He inclined his ear blandly to this clever compliment, and perhaps thought his driver rather a sensible fellow; but at that moment the blast came wild in their faces – wet, dismal, cold – a wind that cut to the bone, and the chattering teeth and shivering frame which owned its influence was not lively enough for conversation. The horse winced, and turned his unfortunate head aside, making a momentary pause. The hills – low, gray, and piebald, with their yellow circles of lichen, and brown turrets of rock – were blurred into the dull horizon, which expressed nothing but that dismal, penetrating moisture and murderous cold; and when, by a sudden turn of the road, the hapless traveller found himself suddenly under the shelter of high banks and hedges which intercepted the blast, the sudden contrast was so grateful that Colonel Sutherland withdrew his cloak from his blue face, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. There was nothing very particular to see: a common country road descending a slope – for which some necessity of the soil had made a deep cutting expedient – with a village within sight, and a soft, broad valley; green fields, dotted with farm-houses and haystacks, and leafless trees. The houses were all of the silvery-grey limestone of the district, and walls of the same stone, more frequent than hedge-rows, divided the fields. The old Colonel, drawing breath under the shadow of the bank, thought to himself that under sunshine the prospect would be very pleasant, and was scarcely pleased to find that this, the only comfortable bit of the road, was the one on which their progress was most rapid – and to hear that they were still ten long dreary miles from Marchmain.

“There was talk enow in the country, Cornel,” said the driver, resuming his discourse, “when a strange gen’l’man coom’d to take that ’ouse. Ne’er a sowl in twenty mile but had heard of Marchmain. I reckon you’ve never been there?”

“No,” said the traveller, briefly.

“He’s a terrible quiet gen’l’man too, as we hear say,” continued the man; “a great scholard, I do suppose – and ignorant folks have little understanding on the ways of sich. They say strange foot has never crossed the door this nine year. It’s a terrible place to bring up children, Cornel, is Lanwoth Moor, and the young gen’l’man and Miss they’re kepp as close at hoam as if they were but six-year-olds; never a gun on young master’s shoulder, and the young lady ne’er saw a dance in her born days. Them things come natural to young folks. I’m saying but what I hear: it might be a parcel o’ stories for ought I know – but Mr. Scarsdale yonder, he’s a very uncommon man.”

“Poor children!” said Colonel Sutherland half aloud, with a sigh. The open air, the rustle of the wind, and the noise of the wheels improved the Colonel’s hearing, as it so often does a gentle imperfection of the kind. He beard every word of these scattered observations, and began to feel more anxiety touching his visit to his morose brother-in-law than he would have thought possible when he started. He knew, it was true, the secret calamity which had driven his sister’s husband to the wilderness; but his own simple, pious, cheery spirit had no understanding of the unwholesome passions of a self-regarding soul. He had blamed himself for years for unconsciously feeling his relative’s withdrawal from life to be pusillanimous and unworthy of a man; but nothing had suggested to the practical and innocent-minded soldier a gloomy retreat such as that which began to be revealed to him by hints and suggestions now. He was unable to conceive how a man with children could make an utter hermit of himself, “especially children under their extraordinary circumstances,” said the Colonel anxiously, in his own heart. He grew silent, absorbed, troubled, as they proceeded on their way. When, immediately after settling himself on his return from India in a home of his own, that home often longed for, to which his sons could come in their holidays, he had volunteered a visit to his brother-in-law – it was the reciprocity of honest affection and kindred which the veteran wished to re-establish between his own family and their nearest relatives. He set out to visit the Scarsdales in the full idea that they too would visit him, and that the father of that household lived like himself in the tenderest friendship with those inheritors of his blood in whom he renewed his own youth; and with an old man’s sentiment of tender gallantry, this old soldier thought of Susan, the only surviving woman of his race, his sister’s daughter and representative, his baby-favourite long ago. Perhaps a floating idea of appropriating this only woman of the house had dawned upon his fatherly mind with other matters – for the Addiscombe cadet was a year older than Susan, and boys are so likely to marry when they go to India. At all events, it was a sunny, simple picture of family kindness and comfort which had presented itself to the honest eyes of the old soldier when he set out upon his journey. This prospect began to cloud over sadly now; he could not understand nor explain these singular circumstances, which must be facts, and visible to the common eye. A lonely house which no one else would live in, a seclusion which no stranger ever broke, young people shut out from the society of their fellows, and gloom and mystery upon the whole house! The Colonel wrapt his face once more in his cloak and subsided into deafness and silence, pondering painfully in his own mind what might be required of himself under such unexpected circumstances, and what he could do for the relief of Horace and Susan, whom in his kind heart he fondly called “the children.” These deliberations had come to no satisfactory result, when, rounding a corner of the road, the bare extent of Lanwoth Moor became suddenly visible, stretching to the fells, and the sky to the horizon, blurred with rain, where it was scarcely possible to tell which was hill and which was cloud.

They drove along in silence, a long half mile, seeing nothing but that same blank expanse traversed by the long, deep cuttings of an attempted drainage, until at last the driver silently, with a certain sympathy for the silence of his companion, pointed out the solitary walls rising on the edge of the moor. The house was a square, common-place erection of two stories, with no remarkable feature, but that one side was raised a story higher than the other, and stood up square and gray, like the little distinguishing tower of an Italian house. Like – yet how unlike! – the rough, gray limestone, unpolished and savage, the deep walls into which those small windows sank like cavernous eyes, the cold blue slated roof, the cold door coming bare out upon the path, without a morsel of garden or any enclosure, all enclosed and backed by that monotonous mystery of moor, the distant spectral hills, the clouds that carried them out in ghostly ranges, the wind and the rain so blended together that they made but one – and they went to the heart with a chill indescribable, and not to be resisted.

Colonel Sutherland looked upon all this with a sensation of anguish. It was incomprehensible to him. That he should find his relatives here, and not in the cheerful village house he had expected, overpowered him with complete wonder. He ceased even to be indignant at the father who sacrificed wilfully the happiness of his children – he suspended his judgment till he should hear what extraordinary circumstances had fixed them thus. In his unsuspecting heart he felt certain that something which he did not know must have produced this exaggerated and unnatural retirement. The sudden impression produced upon him by the sight of this house made his cheek pale, and added a nervous trembling to the shiver of the cold; he got down, stumbling at the door, which the driver watched with undisguised curiosity, as if something unnatural and portentous was about to make its appearance – and, in his emotion, let the money fall out of the purse which he took out to pay his conductor. While he stooped to pick it up, the door opened hastily, and Peggy rushed forth and seized the carpet-bag. At sight of her the Colonel recovered a little from his confusion and tremor.

“Thank God!” he exclaimed fervently, “there is some sunshine here at last.”

The driver opened his eyes somewhat disappointed. Peggy was not known at the country town, though Mr. Scarsdale’s extraordinary life had been heard of there; and the vigorous servant-woman, who began to scold forthwith between the exclamations of her joyful recognition, reduced the mysterious house to matter-of-fact. The man drove off, not knowing what to make of it; and fearing to hear of some new misfortune, with his honest heart beating with grief, sympathy, and anxiety to mend the position of his friends, Colonel Sutherland, after twenty years’ absence, entered at his brother-in-law’s inhospitable door.