The House on the Moor. Volume 2

“So my father’s out,” said Horace; “why should not I come to see you, Peggy? Has he forbidden it? He can shut his own door upon me, it is true; but neither he nor any man in the world can prevent me if I will from coming here.”

“Hush, sir! hold your peace! – the master says he’ll have none of you here again, and I’m no the woman to disobey the master!” said Peggy. “And what do you mean by staying away a year and never letting us hear word of you, Mr. Horry? Is Miss Susan nobody? – nor me? – wan would think your love was so great for your father, that you never thought of no person in the world but him!”

“So it is – perhaps,” said Horace, with a momentary smile; “and he’s out, is he? – what is he doing out in daylight and sunshine? Gone to walk with his pretty daughter, Peggy, like a good papa? Ah! I suppose these amiable little amusements would have begun sooner if I had but been wise enough to take myself away.”

“To walk with Miss Susan? – alas!” cried Peggy; “but ye allways had a bitter tongue as well as himsel’. Na, he’s out of a suddent at his own will, or rather at the good will of Providence, Mr. Horry, to prevent a meeting and unseemly words atween a father and son. What would ye have, young man? – and where have ye been? – and what are you doing? But come in here, for pity’s sake, if ye’ll no go away, and let me hear all your news, and I’ll keep a watch at the back window against the master’s coming in.”

“My news is nothing, except that I am about to leave Kenlisle,” said Horace, impatiently; “but, for heaven’s sake, Peggy, who is this father of mine? You know, though nobody else knows – who is he? what does he do here? why does he hate me? why can’t you tell me, and make an end of these mysteries? I’m a man now, and not a child; and here is your chance while we’re by ourselves – tell me, for heaven’s sake.”

“You’re very ready with your ‘heaven’s sake,’ Mr. Horry,” said Peggy, severely; “do ye no think another word might stand better? Heaven has but little to do with it all. The Lord help us! Who is he? ’Deed and he’s a man, none so vartuous as he ought to be. And what does he here? Live as it pleases him, the Lord forgive him! without heeding God nor man – that’s all about it. And as for hating of you, how much love is there lost, Mr. Horry? Do you think I could kep it on the point o’ my finger? You never were wan to waste your kindness. How much of it, think you, gos to him?”

“It is well I can equal him in something,” said Horace, with a careless but bitter tone. “However, Peggy, you’ll tell nothing, as I might have known. I suppose I may wait to see Susan; there’s nothing against that, is there? So, with your permission, I’ll go and wait for her. Don’t be afraid – only to the dining-room.”

“The Lord preserve me! – and if he comes in!” cried Peggy, half addressing herself, and half appealing to her unwelcome visitor.

“Let him come in. I am in my father’s house,” cried Horace, with that cold, hopeless smile. Peggy knew it of old, and had seen it on other faces. She put out her hand with a fierce impatience, shaking it in his face.

“Oh, man! go away, and make me rid of ye! Go where ye please; if ever mortal man has a devil incarnate in him, it’s when ye see that smile!”

Smiling still, Horace went coolly away to the dining-room, as he said; and Peggy, at her wit’s end, as she was, found no better way of averting the evil she dreaded than by fastening the doors, so that they could not be opened from without, and clambering upstairs to watch at the elevated window of the storeroom, from whence she could see her master’s approach. Horace had never felt himself so entirely in command of the house. He paused at the door of the dull apartment in which he had spent so many hours and years, and where Susan’s needlework, more ornamental now than of old, made a little unaccustomed brightness on the dark mirror of the uncovered table; but no sympathy for his young sister, shut up here hopelessly during her early bloom of life, warmed his heart, or even entered his thoughts. He thought of himself – how he used to waste and curse the days in this miserable solitude, and what a change had passed upon his life since then. Listening, in the extreme silence, he heard Peggy go upstairs to her watch. He smiled at that, too, but accepted the safeguard; and, without any more hesitation, turned round, and went across the hall to his father’s room.

The study; that dreaded, dismal, apartment; – with its dull bookcases set at right-angles, the hard elbow-chair standing stiffly before the table, the big volume laid open upon the desk, the stifling red curtains drooping over the window; his heart beat, in spite of himself, as he entered; he could scarcely believe his father was not there, somehow watching him, reading his very thoughts. With a sudden “Pshaw!” of self-contempt and temerity, he hastened forward to the table. There was no lock upon the little sloping desk which sustained the volume Mr. Scarsdale had been reading. Without hoping to find anything, but with a vague thrill of curiosity and eagerness, Horace lifted the book, and opened the desk. It was full of miscellaneous papers – Peggy’s household bills, and other things entirely unimportant; but among these lay some folds of blotting-paper. He opened them with a trembling hand; the first thing he saw there was a letter, which fell out, and which Horace grasped at, half-consciously, and thrust into his pocket; another fold concealed, apparently, the answer to it, half written, and hurriedly concluded. The young man ran his eyes over it with burning curiosity. It was addressed to Colonel Sutherland, and chiefly concerned an invitation from her uncle to Susan, which Mr. Scarsdale peremptorily declined. Then his own name caught his eye; the last paragraph abruptly broken off, as if the writer had thrown down his pen in impatience, and could continue no longer. These words, which conveyed so little information to him, burned themselves, notwithstanding, upon Horace’s memory with all the vehement interest of unnatural hate: —

“As for my son, I do not choose to answer to any man for my sentiments and actions in respect to him. I held all natural ties as abrogated between us from the period you mention, when, as you say, he seems to have ceased to appear to me as my child, and I have only viewed him as a rival, unjustly preferred to me. I do not object to adopt your words; they are sufficiently correct; but I will suffer no question on the subject; let the blame be upon the head of the true culprit. As to the will – ”

Here the letter ended, with a dash and blot, as if the pen had fallen from the writer’s fingers; it was this, evidently, which had driven him forth in wild impatience, stung by his subject. Horace read, and re-read the sentence, devouring it with his eyes of enmity. Then he restored it rudely to its place, put back the book, and left the room. He thought he had discovered something in the first flush of his excitement. It did not seem possible that he could have looked thus directly into his father’s thoughts without discovering something. He no longer cared to risk a meeting with him. In the tumult of his imaginary enlightenment he called to Peggy, hastily, that he was going away, and went out, as he entered, by the back door. Nobody was visible on the moor; the whole waste lay barren before him, under the slanting light of the setting sun. He put up the collar of his coat, set his hat over his eyes, and plunged along the narrow path among the gorse and heather, to Tillington, thinking still in his excited mind, and feeling in his tingling frame, that he had found out something; and knew more of the secret of his life than he had ever known before; deluded by his eagerness and enmity, and the excitement caused in him by the first stealthy investigation it had ever been in his power to make.

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.