Маргарет Олифант
The House on the Moor. Volume 2
CHAPTER XXIII
THE little inn at Tillington, to which Horace betook himself for his night’s lodging, had suffered little change from the day when he conducted his uncle there. Sam, it is true, was fighting the Caffres in Africa, far enough distant; but his mother had recovered her bustling good spirits, and his father his philosophy, and even Sergeant Kennedy, great and pompous as of old, dominated over the little sanded parlour, and fired the village lads with martial tales, unabashed, under Mrs. Gilsland’s very eye. It was not to the sanded parlour, however, that Horace now betook himself. He was no longer the sullen country lad, whole idler and half gentleman, whose deportment had distressed Colonel Sutherland; and his old gamekeeper acquaintances and alehouse gossips scarcely knew him, in his changed dress and altered manner. He was the nephew of “the Cornel,” a name which Mrs. Gilsland and Sergeant Kennedy had made important in the village, and he was flourishing in the world and likely to come to higher fortune, circumstances which mightily changed the tide of public opinion towards him. Mrs. Gilsland received the young man with her best curtsey, and with profuse salutations. She opened the door of “the best room” for him, and suggested a fire as the evenings were still cold, and offered a duck for his supper, “or dinner, I was meaning,” added the landlady, as Horace shrugged his shoulders at the chilly aspect of the room, and tossed his great-coat on a chair with lordly pretension and incivility. The good woman was daunted in spite of her indignation. “The Cornel,” it is true, had shown no such scorn of her humble parlour, and she was not disposed to overestimate the comforts of Marchmain. Still, there is something imposing to the vulgar imagination in this manner of insolence. The room had never before looked so mean to its mistress. She stopped herself in her unencouraged talk, and began to displace the faded paper ornaments in the fireplace, which concealed a fire laid ready for lighting, and kindled the wood herself with a somewhat unsteady hand. “It’s just as it was when the Cornel was here, and he was very well pleased with everything,” she said, half to herself. Horace took no notice of the implied apology and defence.
“Send me candles, please, and I’ll see about dinner later,” he said, loftily; “lights in the meanwhile, and immediately; never mind the fire – I want lights, and at once!”
Mrs. Gilsland withdrew, awed, but deeply wrathful. “I would like to know how many servants he had to wait upon him at Marchmain!” she exclaimed to herself as she left the room – “with his candles, and lights, and his immediantely! Immediantely, quotha! Eh me, the difference of men! Would the Cornel, or young Mr. Roger, order a person that gate? I would just say no! – but the like of an upstart like him!”
However, the candles did come immediately, in Mrs. Gilsland’s best candlesticks, and in elaborate frills of white paper; and the duck was killed, as a great gabble in the yard gave immediate notice, and all the preparations which she could make set on foot instantly for her fastidious guest. Clean linen, snowy and well-aired, was spread upon the bed which “the Cornel” had once occupied; and greater commotion than even the advent of the Cornel himself would have caused diffused itself through the house. Meanwhile Horace addressed himself at his leisure to his immediate business. He had come thus far without being able to perceive that he had gained nothing by his inroad into his father’s privacy. He was still possessed by the excitement of the act. All the way, while he walked as if for a race, he had been going over these unfatherly words, and they moved him to an unreasoning and unusual amount of emotion, rather more than a personal encounter would have done – confirming all his own sentiments, and adding to them a certain bitterness; but in the haste and fervor of his thoughts he still imagined himself to have acquired something, and now took out the letter which he had seized and crumpled into his pocket, only in the idea that it might supplement and confirm his visionary information. It was, as he supposed, from Colonel Sutherland, and chiefly occupied with that earnest invitation to Susan which her father had declined. What concerned himself was brief enough, and was to the following effect: —
“You will probably say that I have very little right to address you on subjects so intimate and personal. I merely throw myself upon your indulgence, pleading our old acquaintance and connection. I have no right whatever to say a word, and I trust you will pardon all the more kindly what I do say on this account. Your son Horace is a very peculiar and remarkable young man. That miserable circumstance that happened when he was a child seems to have had an effect upon the boy unawares, little as he knows of it. And you, my dear Scarsdale, have you forgotten that this boy is your own child, and not a rival unjustly preferred to you? I acknowledge the wicked and desperate injustice of the whole proceeding, but Horace was not to blame. Would it not have been better, I appeal to you, to make an open effort to overthrow this iniquitous will, than to suffer it to produce results so deplorable? Hear me, I beseech you: receive the boy into your confidence before it is too late. It is your only means of really defeating and forestalling the evil objects of that posthumous punishment and vengeance. Suffer me to speak. I have no interest in it, save that of natural affection; let your own heart plead with me, as I am sure it will, if you permit it. Let him know his singular and unhappy fortune, and I am grievously mistaken in human nature if the attempt does not prove to you how little you need to apprehend from the temper and disposition of your son.”
Horace read this over with an interest only more intense than the contempt which it produced in him. “The old twaddler!” he exclaimed to himself, in the first impulse of his disdain. That feeling moved him, even before curiosity. He could not take time to think what it was which his father was urged to reveal to him, in his scorn of the anticipated result, the natural affection, the generous response, which his innocent old uncle believed in. Then he put the letter back into his pocket, and set his mind to consider what information he had really gained. What was it? Some vague intimation about a will, which Mr. Scarsdale had better have tried to set aside: some mysterious hint at posthumous punishment and vengeance, and his own singular and unhappy fortune; and on his father’s side a declaration of dislike and enmity, but nothing more. That was what he had discovered – this was the information which had sent him in nervous haste out of Marchmain, and quickened his solitary walk over the moor – and this was all. He ground his teeth together when he perceived it, with savage disappointment and rage. He had been deceived – he, so boldly confident in his own powers, had allowed himself to be blinded and circumvented by his own excitement and childish commotion of feeling. For a moment he had enjoyed such command of his father’s house as a midnight thief might have gained, and had sacrificed all the results of that precious instant by a piece of involuntary self-deceit and ridiculous weakness, an indulgence absurd and contemptible. His feelings were not enviable as he sat in Mrs. Gilsland’s dark little parlour, with the two faint candles burning, and the damp wood hissing in the grate. He might have borne to be deceived, but it was hard to consent to the humiliating idea of having deceived himself. However, he could make nothing better of it, and grinding his teeth did no harm to anybody, and certainly could do little service to himself. So he swallowed his mortification as he best could, put Colonel Sutherland’s letter in his pocket-book, and addressed himself with what content he might to Mrs. Gilsland’s duck. He was not without appetite, in spite of his disappointment. Then he sauntered into the public room, and opened his heart so far as to bestow a pint or two of ale upon his old acquaintances. Even this divertissement, however, did not withdraw his thoughts from his own affairs – he lounged at the door of the sanded parlour, doing a little grandeur and superiority as he loved to do, but turning over his secret strain of thought without intermission, notwithstanding. A will! – then there was a will which concerned himself, and lay at the bottom of all these hints and mysteries. Wills are accessible to curious eyes in this country, in spite of all the safeguards which the most jealous care can take. The young man started when that idea interposed the flicker of its taper into the darkness. He raised his head again and renewed his courage: after all, his invasion of his father’s private sanctuary had not been entirely in vain. There was comfort to his self-esteem, as well as a definite direction to his efforts, in the thought.
CHAPTER XXIV
MR. SCARSDALE had left his room and the house in a sudden flush of impatience beyond bearing, as his son had imagined. The very idea of the will to which Colonel Sutherland referred plainly in his letter was maddening to the solitary man. He could not bear the name, much less any discussion of this fatal document; and when he found himself constrained to mention it in his own person, a violent and angry petulance overpowered him; he dashed his pen to the ground, threw his paper into the desk, and rushed out of doors into the spring air, which had no softening effect upon him. Half consciously to himself, he had lived with more freedom since the departure of his son, and felt himself relieved of a certain clog upon his movements; and it was not now so extraordinary an event as Horace had supposed that he should be out of doors in daylight and sunshine. Mr. Scarsdale had strayed deep into the moor in an opposite direction to Tillington, with thoughts even more bitter than those of Horace – thoughts which the well-meant intervention of the Colonel only raised to a passionate virulence. He, too, like his son, scorned, with a deep contempt, the tender simplicity of the old soldier, which neither of them comprehended; and coming back over that desolate waste of moorland to see his own desolate house standing out solitary and wistful in the bosom of the wilderness, Mr. Scarsdale realized, with a bitter superiority, the kind of house which was likely to call his brother-in-law master – the house full of warmth and kindliness, at which he sneered dismally, with the disgust of an evil spirit. The very desire which her uncle showed to have Susan with him increased the scorn of Susan’s father. What did he want the girl for? To make an old man’s pet of her, and amuse himself with the fondness of dotage? Thus the recluse returned to his house to conclude his letter, and to intimate, in words few and strong, as befitted his present temper, his desire to receive no further “favours” in correspondence from Colonel Sutherland. He went in unsuspicious, where there seemed nothing to suspect, seeing, as he passed, Susan seated near the window with her work on her knee, and her wistful young eyes gazing across the moor. She had come in from her walk and her stolen interview with the one sole companion whom she ever had any intercourse with. She was leaning her head upon the pretty hand, which had dimpled into womanly roundness and softness, thinking over some stray thoughts put into her mind by the romantic Letty, and dispersing, with her own honest womanly good sense, the boarding-school absurdities of the half-educated girl whom Susan so devoutly believed to be her own superior; and perhaps wondering a little wistfully, as girls will, when, if ever, her fate and fortune would come to her over that blank of moorland. She was not discontented, little as she had to content her; she was only a domestic woman – a household creature; word of flattery or voice of compliment had never sounded in her ears all her life. She could still brighten her dull firmament not a little with a new pattern for her muslin work, or a new story privately borrowed from Letty, though perhaps only out of the Sunday School library, and nothing remarkable in point of literature; but still wandering ideas will float into minds of nineteen, and eyes that have grown weary even over a new pattern might be pardoned if they searched the horizon with a little wistfulness, and wondered if nobody ever would appear again on the purple blank of Lanwoth Moor.
Susan, at least, was thinking so secretly to herself when her father entered, running over in her own mind the few, very few, people she had ever known. She did not count the turnpikeman and his wife and children upon the road, nor the chance cottager whom she knew by sight. But who were the others? The Rector, and Letty’s father, the poor Presbyterian minister, the first of whom she had heard preach, and the latter had spoken to her when she gave him a chance, which was seldom; Letty herself, who was older now, and had ideas of lovers, and made Susan, a little to her own confusion, shame, and amusement, her chosen confidante; Uncle Edward, dearest of friends, whom, alas, it was like enough she might never see again; and, yes – among so few it was impossible to omit him – Mr. Roger, who had thrown the gipsy’s husband over the hedge, and had taken off his hat to her, and who was lost in the distant world and unknown mists of life. Which of them had Susan a chance of seeing across that moor? Nobody, poor child; not even the postman, the one messenger of brightness to her life; for it was too late for that emissary; but she sat at the window, with her work in one hand, leaning her head upon the other; perhaps dreaming of some figure which it would have lightened her heart to see, appearing in the evening light on the road across the moor.
She was still seated thus, and the light was failing, giving an excuse for her sweet wistful idleness and half melancholy mood of thought, when Mr. Scarsdale suddenly flung open the door, and appeared, as he had once appeared to his daughter before, swift and sudden as a wind, white with passion, and lost in a fiery, silent excitement, which terrified and shocked her. He came close up to her, with a long, noiseless stride, and grasped her arm furiously: but for that grasp the man might have been a ghost, with his shadowy, attenuated form, his long open dressing-gown streaming behind him, his noiseless step, and face of speechless passion. Not entirely speechless either, though he might as well have been so for any meaning which she could comprehend in the words which fell hissing and sharp on Susan’s ears.
“Where is it?” he cried, shaking her whole frame with the fury of his grasp – “where is it? – what have you done with it? Restore it instantly, dishonourable fool! Do you think it is anything to you?”
“What, papa?” cried Susan, trembling, and drawing back unawares with a shrinking of terror. It was a strange interruption of her innocent girlish dreams.
“What!” he cried, holding her tighter – “what! Do you dare to ask me? Restore it at once, or I shall be tempted to something beyond reason. Child! idiot! do you think you can cheat me?”
Susan stood still in his hold, shaken by it, and trembling from head to foot – but she shrank no more. “I have never cheated you in all my life,” she said, raising her honest blue eyes to his face – that face which scowled over hers with a devilish force of passion; was it possible that there could be kindred or connection between the two?
He looked at her with a baffled rage, incomprehensible to Susan. “There is neither man nor woman in the world, nor child either, who does not lie to me and deceive me!” said Mr. Scarsdale. “Do you suppose I do not know – do you think I have no eyes to see you smile over that old fool’s fondling letters? Give it up this moment, or I swear to you I will cast you out of my house, and leave you to find your way to him as you can! Give it up at once, I say!”
“Do you mean Uncle Edward’s letter, papa?” asked Susan. “I will get it this moment, if you will let me go; all of them, if you please.”
But instead of letting her go, he grasped her pained arm more fiercely.
“You know what letter I mean,” he said; “that letter which only a fool could have written, and which I was a fool to think of answering. What would you call the child who takes advantage of her father’s absence to go into his room and rob him of it? Was it for love of the writer? – was it for your miserable brother’s information? – or is it a common amusement, which I have only found out because this was done too soon? Thief! have you nothing to say?”
Susan drew herself out of her father’s grasp with a boldness and force altogether unprecedented in her, and grew red over brow, neck, and face.
“I am no thief – I will not be called so!” she said, in sudden provocation; then falling as suddenly out of that unusual self-assertion, she continued, trembling, “Papa, I have never entered your room; I never went into it in my life except when you were there; I never robbed you; I know nothing even of what you mean.”
Her father looked at her closely, with a smile of disbelief and a fixed offensive stare, which she could not tolerate. He did not attempt to lay hands upon her, but stood only looking at her with eyes which were incapable of perceiving truth or honesty, and saw only fraud and falseness. “Where is the letter?” he said. Those sincere young eyes, which everybody else in the world would have trusted, conveyed no security to him.
Susan turned away from him, with a sudden outbreak of tears – tears of mortified and passionate impatience. He was her father, in spite of the small tenderness he showed her, and had a certain hold upon her habit of domestic affection. She felt the injustice keenly enough, and she felt still more keenly that his eyes were intolerable, and that she could not bear them.
“I have no letter save those my uncle has sent me,” she said, indignantly, when she had overcome her emotion; “they are all here in this box – I have no other. I can only repeat the same thing, papa, if you should ask me a hundred times – I have no letter but these.”
And Susan opened the pretty inlaid box, with its key hanging to it by a bit of ribbon, which Uncle Edward had brought her, and which she had appropriated, with a fanciful girlish affection, to hold his letters – opened it hastily and threw out the little store upon the table with trembling hands. Some trifling circumstance, perhaps the mere odour of the sandal-wood which lined the box, recalling some subtle association to him, produced a start and flush of angry colour on Mr. Scarsdale’s face. He thrust the little casket away with some muttered words which Susan could not hear, but, even in spite of that touch of nature, turned over with a cold suspicion the letters which it had contained. Nothing like what he sought was there, of course; but he was not convinced. No one else was in the house, or had been here – so far as his knowledge went – save Peggy; even Susan did not know of her brother’s hurried visit, and Peggy was beyond suspicion, even to Mr. Scarsdale; – his daughter, and she only, could be to blame.
“I know,” he said, coldly, when he had scattered the good Colonel’s letters over the table, throwing them scornfully from him, “that my desk has been opened and my papers stolen. You are clever in hiding, like all women; but such an artifice cannot deceive me, when my loss is so evident. Take this detestable thing away! the smell is suffocating,” he cried, with an interjection of rage, and once more pushing violently from him the pretty box with its pungent odour. “But stay, understand me first; it is late, and you are young; I will not turn you out upon the moor to-night, little as you deserve my consideration; but if this letter is not restored to me before to-morrow, nothing in the world will prevent me expelling you from this house – do you hear? I will have no thief under my roof. I perceive you are ready to cry, like all your kind. Crying is a very good weapon with some people, but I assure you it has no effect whatever on me.”
Susan could not have answered for her life. She stood still, gazing at him with her eyes dilated, a convulsive effort of pride keeping in her tears, but a sob bursting in spite of her, from her suffocating breast. There she still stood after he had left the room, speechless, labouring to contain herself, even after the necessity for that effort was over. But when she dropped at length into a chair, and yielded to the hysterical passion of tears and sobbing which overpowered her, beneath all her shame, mortification, and terror, a guilty gleam of joy which frightened her shot through poor Susan’s heart. She thought it guilty, poor child. She was dismayed to feel that sudden pang of hope and comfort breaking the sense of this calamity. To be expelled from her father’s house, cast out upon the moor and upon the world, with the stigma upon her of having robbed and deceived him! She repeated over to herself that accumulation of horrors, to extinguish this furtive and unpermissible glow of secret hope, and cried bitterly over her own wickedness when she found it inextinguishable; but even with that secret and unsanctioned solace, the thought was miserable enough to her youth and ignorance. To be turned away like a bad servant; to be called a thief; to be driven from her father’s house; Heaven preserve her! a young girl alone and penniless – what could she do?
