The House on the Moor. Volume 3

Horace came upon Marchmain from behind, on an afternoon of May. The moor was no wilderness at that season. The whins were burning under the sunshine, the heather blooming purple and fragrant, thrusting its flowery spires against the foot that disturbed their growth; and the young seedlings, sown here and there in little clumps, waved their delicate young leaves to the soft air, and glittered in the light with a genial spring triumph over the intractable soil. Even the dark moorburns and rivulets of water in the deep cuttings caught a grace from the sky, and brightened over their brown surface with a gleam of the blue heavens and white clouds above. Everything was sweet, and bright, and hopeful in that dull waste of unproductive soil, which at other times could look so dreary. The clump of firs on the hill-top looked down wistfully, no longer weird spies, but gentle gazers upon the changed scene. But no change had passed upon Marchmain. The house, if any thing, was a little more lonely than of old, betraying unconsciously that some of the little life it had, had ebbed out of it. Susan’s flowerpots stood naked in the window, with withered stalks of plants, long since dead, standing up dead and dismal from the dry mould in which they had once grown; left here by Peggy as a grim reminder to her master of the daughter – the only chance of love and kindness which he had remaining in the world – whom he had thrust remorselessly away; and with that calm sky declining towards evening, the sun slanting westward, the home-going hour lengthening its shadows over the long stretches of moorland, where by-and-bye a few labouring men should cross the sunlight to cottages clustered somewhere on the road, hid in the lower nooks of the hills, few objects more desolate and solitary than the house of Marchmain could have been imagined. Human step or human shadow was not near. The undisturbed heather almost brushed against the step of the door. In most of the windows the blinds were down, as though the heart within was too sick to bear the light. This was how Horace found the house which had nursed his childhood and imprisoned his youth.

When the young man essayed to enter at the kitchen door, he found even that entrance, once hospitably ajar, now closed and bolted. He had scarcely courage to seek admittance boldly. He hovered about, making a faint noise among the rustling herbage and broken stones, enough in that solitude to bring Peggy peering to the kitchen window. Peggy had changed for the worse, like the house. She looked, at last, as if patience and strength were being exhausted out of her: her eyes were peevish and dilated, with dark rings round them; and she looked out with a keen, suspicious glance, as if even confidence in her own powers – that last stronghold – was failing her. When she saw Horace, a softening sentiment came over Peggy’s face: she came softly to open the door to him, and brought him into the kitchen, without a word either of welcome or comment. Then she wheeled her own cushioned chair out of the immediate range of the fire, and half led, half forced him into it. “You’ll be tired,” said Peggy, under her breath, with a tear twinkling bright in the corner of her eye. The surprise overcame her for the moment, and made her forget the sad difference between Susan’s brother and Susan herself.

And Horace, too, for that instant was not like the Horace of old times. He was subdued by his own thoughts. An involuntary tremor seized him, to think of the dark purpose in his mind, and of why he had obtruded himself into this melancholy-familiar house. He could have supposed that his dreadful secret impulse – the horrible secret instruments he carried about with him – were betrayed and visible to any eye that looked keenly at him. But Peggy did not look keenly; she faltered with a real emotion at the sight of him, and he trembled before her salutation with an intense anguish and remorse, of which he could not have supposed himself capable. Warnings sharp and terrible, of the remorse not to be removed, which should cling for ever to the traces of the deed done; but Horace shut his eyes to that consideration. In another moment he was fully himself – recovered from his rare and strange qualm of feebleness – pleased to find, in Peggy’s softened mood, no suspicion of him or his intentions, and resolved to make the most of that unusual grace.

“I came to see how you were. How is he, Peggy?” said Horace, pointing to the door which opened into the hall.

“Speak low! – oh! speak low, for your life!” cried Peggy, in a whisper. “If he knowed I let you into this house he would murder me!”

“I should like to see him try,” said Horace, grimly, with a smile over the fantastic idea; that, indeed, would be a better mode of removing this hindrance than any expedient he could devise. “He hates me so, does he?” he added, with a white smile of enmity. He was glad to hear of it – it spurred him to a passionate emulation in that unnatural art.

“’Tis himsel’ he hates and mortifies – the Lord forgive him!” cried Peggy. “Eyeh, Master Horry, if you knowed the wreck and the ruin that the devil, and pride, and ill-will have made of that man!”

“I daresay he has not much pleasure in his life?” said Horace, half interrogatively.

“Pleasure! I’m the auldest friend he has in this world, though I’m but a servant,” said Peggy, her eyes dilating still more with tears, which did not flow, but only reddened and expanded the limits which they filled; “but there’s scarce an hour in the day, nor a day in the year, but I would see him die sooner than live as he’s living now.”

“You speak,” said Horace, playing with his own self-terror, and turning a pale, ominous look upon her, before which she shrank instinctively, “as if you thought it would be a charity to rid him of his life.”

“Eh, Mr. Horry? – the Lord forgive ye! Would you put such an accursed thought on me?” cried Peggy, with an ebullition of violence as tearful and faltering as her kindness. “God help us, master and servant, two lone people, without comfort in this world! But it would be a new sight, and a strange sight, to see comfort come from you.”

“Why, Peggy, you said as much,” said Horace, with momentary weakness.

“Then, I tell you, sir, murder’s no charity,” said Peggy, sharply. “I’ve little pleasure in my life by what I had in my young days, but I would have died more cheerful then nor now; and the master takes grit care, moor care nor I ever knew him take before, of his health and strength, as behoves a man at his time of life. He’s aye at his medicine-chest off and on; and has the doors bolted and pistols in his room, for fear of robbers, though I’m aye saying there’s no robbers like to come here. He’s afflicted his flesh in the times that are past, but he’s a careful liver now.”

“That he may keep me a little longer out of my inheritance,” said Horace, between his teeth.

Peggy stopped short in the middle of the kitchen, where she had been hastily laying out a rapidly prepared meal for her master’s son.

“Keepin’ ye out of what?” she said solemnly, and with a scared look in her eyes.

“Of my inheritance – it’s no use humbugging me any longer,” said Horace – “I know it all.”

Peggy set down the dish she had in her hands, dropped upon the stool before the fire, and throwing her apron over her head, rocked herself for a few moments back and forward, in silence.

“Amen! it ought to have comed sooner; it must have comed some time,” said Peggy at last to herself; “but the Lord forgive me, didn’t I say and prophesy that when wance the bairns knowed it the end would come? Oh, Mr. Horry! for the love of God and your mother, if you have any love in you, go your ways, and tarry not a moment in this doomed house.”

“You are not very charitable, Peggy,” said Horace, who, by some diabolical impulse, began to recover his spirits at this stage of the interview; “especially as I presume your preparations were for me – and I’m rather hungry. You can’t surely refuse me a dinner, if it is in the kitchen, in my father’s house?”

Peggy rose without a word, and placed bread and ale on the table beside the little dish of meat which she had abstracted from her master’s dinner for his son’s benefit.

“Eat, if ye can eat in this house and with sitch thoughts,” said Peggy; “but I crave of ye to give God thanks ere ye break the bread.”

As Peggy stood over him, severe and disapproving, the remembrance of many such scenes in his childhood came to the memory of Horace; scenes in which Susan appeared, sweetly saying her child’s grace, and he himself rebelling and refusing, with Peggy standing by exactly as she did now – her judicial eye fixed sternly on him. He was a man now, and had bigger rebellions in hand. With a little sneer and levity in that momentary diabolical exhilaration of spirits, he said the child’s grace which Peggy herself had taught him nearly twenty years ago. When he had repeated the amen, his father’s faithful servant turned away from him to go about her needful business, for it was drawing near to Mr. Scarsdale’s dinner hour. But Horace put down his knife and fork upon his plate with a shudder of self-horror – the food choked him – he could not swallow the bread on which his lips, without any help from his heart, had dared at that terrible moment to ask God’s blessing. The time of opportunity, which he tried to persuade himself he did not premeditate, but which was forcing itself upon him, approached moment by moment. He got up from the table with a nervous, imperceptible trembling, and went to stand by the fire where Peggy was busy, and then to wander through the apartment, always restlessly returning to that bright spot. An impulse of flight seized him at one moment – at another, a wild thought of thrusting himself into his father’s very presence, by way of escaping the devil within him, and rather getting into hot words and a violent contest than this miserable guilt. But while he was at the height of his horrible excitement, Peggy, calmly doing her usual business, went out of the kitchen to spread the table in her master’s lonely dining-room. Horace, wild as in a fever, drew with trembling hands out of his pocket one of his mysterious packets. He burst the paper open clumsily, awkwardly, with fingers which seemed made of lead. A great shower of white powder fell upon the floor at his feet, but none reached the dish to which he supposed he had directed it. Trying to remedy this failure, he was startled by a sound, as of Peggy’s return. With a great start, which spilt still more of that fatal dust, he thrust it back into his breast, and in a horror of discovery snatched at something near him, he could not see what it was, and swept into the fire that evidence of his purpose. Having done, or thinking that he had done this, he threw the cloth out of his hands into the fire, and rushed out of the room and the house. As he escaped he saw somehow, by virtue of his passion and fever of overpowering excitement, Peggy coming quietly with a napkin over her arm, and her great white apron shining through the obscurity of the narrow passage, into the kitchen. That home figure, in its everyday occupation, struck him bitterly in his own tremor; he had failed, but he was guilty. No harm to his father had the parricide left behind him, but he was his father’s murderer in his own heart; and all the world and all its riches could never make of him again the same Horace Scarsdale who scowled sullen but innocent upon that same Peggy, before the baleful knowledge for which he thirsted had scorched all nature out of his heart.

CHAPTER XIV

HORACE never knew how he passed that night; during the twilight and the early darkness he hovered about the moor, lying down among the fragrant heather, when now and then for a moment he could keep still, and feeling the penetrating damp of the bog steal into his limbs, and the dark, noiseless prick of the whin bushes, startling him into energy as he rose out of that feverish, momentary rest. When the night had quite fallen – a dark summer night, soft, but gloomy, with a few faint stars, but no moon – he stole once more, circling and sweeping about the house, towards Marchmain; for no purpose, only to look in at the uncurtained window, and see sitting there in his utter solitude the formal figure, erect and motionless, which had shadowed, like a baleful tree, all his own young life. There he sat, a little turned aside from his familiar position at the head of the table, as though even he was glad to seek a little companionship in the morsel of evening fire which Peggy lighted in silent compassion every night; with his little reading-desk upon the table, and his glass of claret reflected in that shining surface, and the two tall candles lighting his white, worn visage, and the open page. There he sat, reading like an automaton, turning the leaves at regular intervals, doing the business to which he enforced himself, with his pale fingers and his rigid face. To think that one wicked, lawful expression of a dead man’s will could have drained the humanity thus out of one who was a woman’s husband and the father of children, when that devilish stroke smote him in full career! The woman was dead ages since, and the children banished; and dead down in its miserable solitude had stiffened that vexed heart. Did he ever have a heart, that dismal man, at his dreary occupation, forlorn by the evening fire? – or was this life which he lived, hugging to his bosom through all these years that big wrong which he had made the pivot of his impoverished existence? Who could tell? but there might, at least, have been pity in the kindred eyes which watched him through that melancholy night.

There was no pity, however, in the eyes of Horace: when his first guilty fear of being discovered was over, he stood and gazed, with a burning, steady gaze, upon his enemy. Years and days of his own existence rose before Horace as he looked; he heard himself once more addressed with that killing politeness which murdered nature in him; he saw himself once more lowering in a fierce, unnatural restraint at that same miserable table, cursing, and not blessing, the very bread he ate. He saw Susan’s head drooping, in timid and terrified silence, opposite that lonely man. Had there been heart or hope in him, would he have banished the harmless girl, to whom Horace did contemptuous justice for once in his life? And as the young man gazed the fire burned. For a moment he seemed to see, by a better revelation, all the injury – a thousand times worse than disinheritance – which his father had done him; and became aware furiously, without regretting it, by some extraordinary magic of hatred, of his own unlovely character, the malicious creation of his father’s cruelty. These were dreadful thoughts; but he did not seek to get rid of them – rather encouraged the baleful imagination, and wrapped himself in its hostile suggestions. Nature! that was abrogated long ago by Mr. Scarsdale’s own words. They were rivals to the death – nothing but the bitterest dislike and mutual enmity could exist between that father and son; and Horace felt himself acquitted from any tie of nature by the thought.

While he stood thus, watching, Mr. Scarsdale, innocent of any enemy at the window, put up his hand to his head for a few minutes, as if in suffering, and then, rising, left the room. When he entered again he carried in his hand a mahogany box, bound with brass, not unlike a small desk. Horace, who watched all his proceedings keenly, with excited attention, saw him take out a vial, hold it up to the light, and then measure out for himself a minute dose of the medicine it contained. With eyes that burned through the darkness, Horace watched and noted. The box was left standing by his father’s side on the table – where had he brought it from? The young man watched and waited, shivering for long hours, till Mr. Scarsdale’s time for retiring came. Then he followed eagerly with his eyes the ghostly figure which glided out of the room, with the box under one arm. The light reappeared a few minutes after in the window of Mr. Scarsdale’s bedroom, into the secrets of which he had no power of spying. Then he wandered away blindly over the invisible heather, feeling nothing of the pricks that caught him on every side, insensible to the fresh night breezes blowing about his cheeks, unthinking where he went. When the morning came he could have fancied that he had slept there, so profound was his miserable preoccupation. But he had not slept there. The other man within him had struck out resolutely across the night, and gained shelter in a roadside public-house, from whence it was, refreshed and resolute, that he now came.

That same afternoon Horace once more essayed an entrance at Marchmain. Peggy received him with a suspicious face, but thrust him into the kitchen with a haste and force which betrayed to Horace that, as once before, her master was out, and everything propitious for him. He asked the question hurriedly.

“What does the like of you want here, Mr. Horry, two days running?” said the startled woman; “and what’s your business if he’s out or in? I tauld ye last time, and ye know what came o’t. It’s no’ your meaning that you came to see him, like a dutiful son?”

“No, Peggy; but only to look for something I want in my old room. I confess I got frightened yesterday,” said Horace, with a grim, and somewhat tremulous smile. “I had no desire to meet him, fierce and furious as he used to be, or polite, which is worse. I ran away: but to-day you will surely let me go upstairs?”

“And what for,” said Peggy, steadily fixing her eyes on his face, “did you throw yon napkin in the fire?”

Horace grew pale in spite of himself. “A napkin? Did I throw it in the fire? I was not aware of it,” he said, with all the boldness he could muster. “However, let me go upstairs.”

Peggy looked at him, and shook her head. “Ye’ll be a-going and rummaging again,” she said, with a voice of grieved uncomprehension. She had brought him up, and her heart warmed to him, unlovable as he was.

“I tell you I have found out everything. What should I rummage for? – and a great deal of good it is to me, now I know all,” said Horace, in a tone more natural than Peggy had yet heard from his lips. “Go you and watch, Peggy, and let me know when my father appears.”

Peggy followed him mournfully. Still, shaking her head, she went in after him with suspicion, and looked round the bare walls of his old room. “I’m bound to say I can see nowght to look for here,” said Peggy, sharply; but, after another inspection, she went reluctantly up to her watch-tower – the store-room – to look for her master’s approach. Whenever she was gone, Horace stole noiselessly as a ghost into his father’s apartment. It was not a murderous light that shone from the May skies into that room, the most comfortable in the house – but the young felon had night and darkness in his face. The box stood on the dressing-table, beside that chair of Mr. Scarsdale’s, in which some malicious ghost might have sat, it looked so occupied and observant. With a trembling yet rapid hand, Horace opened the box, and took out of it the little phial which he had seen his father use. It was carefully closed, with a piece of pink leather tied over the cork, and a very peculiar knot, which Horace, with his excited fingers, found great difficulty in opening. When he had succeeded, he poured out its contents, and replaced them from another of his own sealed packets. He did this mechanically and methodically, but with the cold dew bursting on his face, and his fingers, in their haste and tremble, fumbling over the knot, which he did not seem able to tie as it was before. When he had replaced it, and closed the box, he stood, trembling and miserable, looking at it. He could not tell whether he had placed the phial exactly as it was before: the box now would not close perfectly, and he could not remember, with his scared and desperate wits, whether it had been so when he opened it. At last, impatient, he put down the lid violently, with a jar which startled him into a fever of apprehension. Somebody must have heard it! – it went through his own head and heart with a thrill of terror. Then he skulked out, with that stealthy horror in his face which should henceforward be the prevailing sentiment of Horace Scarsdale’s unhappy countenance. Twice a parricide! – without calling Peggy from her watch, or daring to look in her face, he stole out the back-way from his father’s house, leaving Death and Murder there!

A week after, Mr. Pouncet’s confidential clerk returned to Kenlisle. He was restless, and deadly pale, and went to his desk to look for letters with a horrible anxiety. There were no letters there; and he turned out again with a breathless flutter of excitement to see his principal, and speak as he best could about business. But neither Mr. Pouncet nor any other person had heard anything from Marchmain, and Horace went out again in a miserable fever, which all his efforts could not quite conceal. He had laid the train; but heaven knows how long it might smoulder before the spark was set to that thread of death!

CHAPTER XV

WHILE these dark elements of tragedy were gathering about the lonely house of Marchmain, things went on very cheerfully in Milnehill, where everybody was vaguely encouraged by the idea of the investigation going on which might restore some wreck of fortune to the young Rifleman; and where a still more engrossing pursuit reconciled that hero himself to the necessity of waiting for news of this possible enrichment. Roger, who had no great hopes on the subject, bore the suspense with the greatest patience, and never, indeed, showed the least signs of anxiety, except when it seemed likely that a word or two of lamentation over his fate would call forth the compassion of the ladies – which compassion was very sincere on Susan’s part, and good-humouredly satirical on that of Mrs. Melrose. “It’s easy to see the poor young man’s losing heart altogether with this waiting,” the old lady would say with much gravity; “for you see, Susan, my dear, it’s not to be expected that he can find anything here to amuse him, poor man, seeing nothing but two old people and a quiet little girl like you.” Mrs. Melrose had quite taken up her abode at Milnehill since Roger’s arrival. She said it was good for her health to smell the chestnut blossoms, and overlook Uncle Edward’s gardening – and a very cheerful and lively addition she made to the happy house.

One morning, however, the quiet progress of affairs was interrupted by a letter, which Roger read not without a little agitation at the breakfast-table. When he had come to the end he handed it over suddenly, with a slight impetuous impulse, to the Colonel, who took it with his usual kind look of serious attention, put on his spectacles immediately, and addressed himself to the perusal of the letter with much gravity and earnestness. It was from Roger’s mother, and written partly under the inspiration of little Edmund, messages from whom were mixed with everything the timid woman said —

“MY DEAREST BOY – Your dear letter and the news of your arrival brought the greatest pleasure I have known for many a long day, though it came in the midst of great trouble, my dear Mr. Stenhouse having been buried just a few days before; a very great affliction, which I trust, for all your sakes, my dear boy, yours and little Edmund’s, and your dear sisters’, I shall have strength to bear. Little Edmund interrupts me to say – and I must give you the very words of his message, or he will not be pleased – that, please, you’re to come home directly, and that his papa has left him a great deal of money, and he means to give you half of it, and wants so very, very much to see his brother Roger. My own boy, I must ask you to be very good to dear little Edmund; he has been such an invalid, the dear child, that everybody has always yielded to him all his life, and he does love you so! Since ever he could speak he has kept on entreating me to tell him of his brother Roger, and he thinks there is not such another in the world; and he is very good, the dear little fellow, when he is not in pain, and one takes a little care and knows his way. However, I have something to tell you besides. The day before yesterday along with your letter there came a letter to my dear Mr. Stenhouse, which Edmund opened before I saw what he was doing. Edmund tells me to say that he does so hope you will come soon to see the cricketing in Leasough Park; and he thinks if you would join the Leasough eleven – Leasough is a village two miles off, where we always go for our drive, and where everybody knows Edmund – they would be sure to win. But about Mr. Pouncet’s letter, my dear son. It seemed written in a great fright, saying that Sir John Armitage had written to him something about you, and what should he do? – and speaking in a very improper manner, actually cursing the day he did something, which it seems my dear Mr. Stenhouse must have known of, and asking that young Mr. Scarsdale, Colonel Sutherland’s nephew, who seemed to know about it too, might be sent to Kenlisle at once. Edmund said, ‘Mamma, send for Mr. Scarsdale directly’ (he is so clever, the dear child), and so I did. But I must first go back to tell you that my dear Mr. Stenhouse himself had sent for young Mr. Scarsdale, and spoke with him in private, and charged him, as I heard with my own ears – dear Julius being taken very bad, and not knowing what he said – that ‘the boy was not to know’ – just the day before his death. When Mr. Scarsdale came, I am sorry to say he was not so polite as I should have expected from Colonel Sutherland’s nephew, and would not tell either Edmund or me anything, but rather sneered at my poor child, and went off all in haste, keeping the letter in his hand. I should have sent it to you if he had not taken it away. Now, I do not know what this may mean – nor can it be expected that Edmund should, as he is only a child; but both he and I, my dear boy, beg of you to ask the Colonel what he thinks, and to try to find out yourself. And whatever you do, dear, don’t trust to that Mr. Pouncet; for it was quite clear to me by his letter that he had somehow done you wrong, and wanted to conceal it. Edmund says, ‘Tell Roger, mamma, he’s not to trust Scarsdale either;’ but indeed I scarcely have the heart to say so, remembering that he’s the dear good Colonel’s nephew – only he was not so kind as he might have been, you know, and I have some reason to think he is fond of Amelia – which should surely keep him from doing anything that would harm her brother.