A Secret Inheritance. Volume 1 of 3

All was still and quiet; only shadows lived and moved about. Midnight struck. That hour to me was always fraught with mysterious significance.

From where I sat I could see the house in which my mother lay. It had happened on that day, as I strolled through the woods, that I had been witness of the love which a mother had for her child. The child was young, the mother was middle-aged, and not pretty, but when she looked at her child, and held out her arms to receive it, as it ran laughing towards her with its fair hair tumbled about its head, her plain face became glorified. Its spiritual beauty smote me with pain; the child's glad voice made me tremble. Some dim sense of what had never been mine forced itself into my soul.

I had the power-which I had no doubt unconsciously cultivated-of raising pictures in the air, and I called up now this picture of the mother and her child. "Are all children like that," I thought, "and are all mothers-except me and mine?" If so, I had been robbed.

The door of the great house slowly opened, and the form of a woman stepped forth. It walked in my direction, and stopped beneath my window.

"Are you up there, Master Gabriel?"

It was Mrs. Fortress who spoke.

"Yes, I am here."

"Your mother wishes to see you."

I went down immediately, and joined Mrs. Fortress.

"Did she send you for me?"

"Yes, or I should not be here."

"She is very ill?"

"She is not well."

The grudging words angered me, and I motioned the woman to precede me to the house. She led me to my mother's bedside.

I had never been allowed so free an intercourse with my mother as upon this occasion. Mrs. Fortress did not leave the room, but she retired behind the curtains of the bed, and did not interrupt our conversation.

"You are ill, mother?"

"I am dying, Gabriel."

I was prepared for it, and I had expected to see in her some sign of the shadow of death. When the dread visitant stands by the side of a mortal, there should be some indication of its presence. Here there was none. My mother's face retained the wild beauty which had ever distinguished it. All that I noted was that her eyes occasionally wandered around, with a look in them which expressed a kind of fear and pity for herself.

"You speak of dying, mother," I said. "I hope you will live for many years yet."

"Why do you hope it?" she asked. "Has my life given you joy-has it sweetened the currents of yours?"

There was a strange wistfulness in her voice, a note of wailing against an inexorable fate. Her words brought before me again the picture of the mother and her child I had seen that day in the woods. Joy! Sweetness! No, my mother had given me but little of these. It was so dim as to be scarcely a memory that when I was a little babe she would press me tenderly to her bosom, would sing to me, would coo over me, as must surely be the fashion of loving mothers with their offspring. It is with no idea of casting reproach upon her that I say she bequeathed to me no legacy of motherly tenderness.

We conversed for nearly an hour. Our conversation was intermittent; there were long pauses in it, and wanderings from one subject to another. This was occasioned by my mother's condition; it was not possible for her to keep her mind upon one theme, and to exhaust it.

"You looked among your father's papers, Gabriel?"

"Yes, mother."

"What did you find?" She seemed to shrink from me as she asked this question.

"Only his Will, and a few unimportant papers."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing."

"Gabriel," she said, presently, "I wish you to promise me that you will make, in years to come, a faithful record of the circumstances of your life, and of your secret thoughts and promptings." She paused, and when she spoke again appeared to lose sight of the promise she wished to exact from me. "You are sure your father left no special papers for you to read after his death?"

"I found none," I said, much moved at this iteration of a mystery which was evidently weighing heavily upon her.

"Perhaps," she murmured, "he thought silence kindest and wisest."

I strove to keep her mind upon this theme, for I was profoundly agitated by her strange words, but I found it impossible. Her hands moved feebly about the coverlet, her eyes wandered still more restlessly around. My cunningest endeavours failed to woo her back to the subject; her speech became so wild and whirling that I was not ungrateful to Mrs. Fortress when she emerged from behind the curtains, and led me firmly out of the room. I turned on the threshold to look at my mother; her face was towards me, but she did not recognise me.

On the evening of the following day I was walking moodily about the grounds between the house and the cottage, thinking of the interview, and reproaching myself for want of feeling. Was it that I was deficient in humanity that I did not find myself overwhelmed with grief by the conviction that my mother was dying? No thought but of her critical condition should have held place in my mind, and the weight of my genuine sorrow should have impressed itself upon surrounding nature. It was not so; my grief was trivial, artificial, and I bitterly accused myself. But if natural love would not come from the prompting of my heart, I could at least perform a duty. My mother should not be left to draw her last breath with not one of her kin by her bedside.

I entered the house. In the passage which led to my mother's room I was confronted by Mrs. Fortress. She had heard my footsteps, and came out to meet me.

"What do you want, Mr. Gabriel?"

"I must see my mother."

"You cannot; It would hasten her end."

"Has she not asked for me?"

"No; if she wished to see you she would have sent for you."

It was a truthful indication of the position; I had never gone unbidden to my mother's room.

We spoke in low tones. My voice was tremulous, Mrs. Fortress's was cold and firm.

"If not now," I said, "I must see her to-morrow."

"You shall see her," said Mrs. Fortress, "within the next twenty-four hours."

I passed the evening in my cottage, trying to read. I could not fix my mind upon the page. I indulged in weird fancies, and once, putting out the lights, cried:

"If the Angel of Death is near, let him appear!"

There was no sign, and I sat in the dark till I heard a tapping at my door. I opened it, and heard Mrs. Fortress's voice.

"You can see your mother," she said.

I accompanied her to the sick room, the bedside of my mother. She was dead.

"It is a happy release," Mrs. Fortress said.

CHAPTER V

This event, which set me completely free, caused a repetition of certain formalities. The doctor visited me, and regaled me with doleful words and sighs. In the course of conversation I endeavoured to extract from him some information as to the peculiar form of illness from which my mother had been so long a sufferer, but all the satisfaction I could obtain from him was that she had always been "weak, very weak," and always "low, very low," and that she had for years been "gradually wasting away." She suffered from "sleeplessness," she suffered from "nerves," her pulse was too quick, her heart was too slow, and so on, and so on. His speech was full of feeble medical platitudes, and threw no light whatever upon the subject.

"In such cases," he said, "all we can do is to sustain, to prescribe strengthening things, to stimulate, to invigorate, to give tone to the constitution. I have remarked many times that the poor lady might go off at any moment. She had the best of nurses, the best of nurses! Mrs. Fortress is a most exemplary woman. Between you and me she understood your mother's ailments almost as well as I did."

"If she did not understand them a great deal better," I thought, "she must have known very little indeed."

In my conversations with the lawyer Mrs. Fortress's name also cropped up.

"A most remarkable woman," he said, "strong-minded, self-willed, with iron nerves, and at the same time exceedingly conscientious and attentive to her duties. Your lamented father entertained the highest opinion of her, and always mentioned her name with respect. The kind of woman that ought to have been born a man. Very tenacious, very reserved-a very rare specimen indeed. Altogether an exception. By the way, I saw her a few minutes ago, and she asked me to inform you that she did not consider she had any longer authority in the house, and that she would soon be leaving."

At my desire the lawyer undertook for a while the supervision of affairs, and sent a married couple to Rosemullion to attend to domestic matters.

Three days after my mother's funeral Mrs. Fortress came to wish me good-bye. Although there had ever been a barrier between us I could not fail to recognise that she had faithfully performed her duties, and I invited her to sit down. She took a seat, and waited for me to speak. She was wonderfully composed and self-possessed, and had such perfect control over herself that I believe she would have sat there in silence for hours had I not been the first to speak.

"You are going away for good, Mrs. Fortress?" I said.

"Yes, sir," she answered, "for good."

It was the first time she had ever called me "sir," and I understood it to be a recognition of my position as Master of Rosemullion.

"Do you intend to seek another service?" I asked.

"No, sir; it is not likely I shall enter service again. You are aware that your father was good enough to provide for me."

"Yes, and I am pleased that he did so. Had he forgotten, I should have been glad to acknowledge in a fitting way your long service in our family."

"You are very kind, sir."

"Where do you go to from here?"

"I have a home in Cornwall, sir."

"Indeed. I do not remember that you have ever visited it."

"It is many years since I saw it, sir."

"Not once, I think, since you have been with us."

"Not once, sir."

"Your duties here have been onerous. Although we are in mourning you must be glad to be released." I pointed to her dress; she, like myself, was dressed in black; but she made no comment on my remark. "Will you give me your address, Mrs. Fortress?"

"Willingly, sir."

She wrote it on an envelope which I placed before her, and I put it into my pocket-book.

"If I wish to communicate with you, this will be certain to find you?"

"Yes, sir, quite certain."

"Circumstances may occur," I said, "which may render it necessary for me to seek information from you."

"Respecting whom, or what, sir?"

"It is hard to say. But, perhaps respecting my mother."

"I am afraid, sir, it will be useless to communicate with me upon that subject."

"Mrs. Fortress," I said, nettled at the decisive tone in which she spoke, "it occurs to me that during the many years you have been with us you have been unobservant of me."

"You are mistaken, sir."

"Outwardly unobservant, perhaps I should have said. When you entered my father's service I must have been a very young child. I am now a man."

"Yes, sir, you will be twenty-two on your next birthday. I wish you a happy life, whether it be a long or a short one."

"And being a man, it is natural that I should desire to know something of what has been hidden from me."

"You are assuming, sir, that something has been hidden."

"I have not been quite a machine, Mrs. Fortress. Give me credit for at least an average amount of intelligence. It is not possible for me to be blind to the fact that there has been a mystery in our family."

"It is you who say so, sir, not I."

"I know, and know, also, that of your own prompting you will say little or nothing. To what can I appeal? To your womanly sympathies, to your sense of justice? Until this moment I have been silent. As a boy I had to submit, and latterly as a man. My parents were living, and their lightest wish was a law to me. But the chains are loosened now; they have fallen from me into my mother's grave. Surely you cannot, in reason or injustice, refuse to answer a few simple questions."

"Upon the subject you have referred to, sir, I have nothing to tell."

"That is to say, you are determined to tell me nothing."

She rose from her chair, and said, "With your permission, sir, I will wish you farewell."

"No, no; sit down again for a few minutes. I will not detain you long, and I will endeavour not to press unwelcome questions upon you. In all human probability this is the last opportunity we shall have of speaking together; for even supposing that at some future time you should yourself desire to volunteer explanations which you now withhold from me, you will not know how to communicate with me."

"Is it your intention to leave Rosemullion, sir?"

"I shall make speedy arrangements to quit it for ever. It has not been so filled with light and love as to become endeared to me. I shall leave it not only willingly but with pleasure, and I shall never again set foot in it."

"There is no saying what may happen in the course of life, sir. Have you made up your mind where you are going to live?"

"In no settled place. I shall travel."

"Change of scene will be good for you, sir. It is altogether the best thing you could do."

"Of that," I said impatiently, "I am the best judge. My future life can be of no interest to you. It is of the past I wish to speak. Have you any objection to inform me for how long you have been in my mother's service?"

"You were but a little over two years of age, sir, at the time I entered it."

"For nearly twenty years, then. You do not look old, Mrs. Fortress."

"I am forty-two, sir."

"Then you were twenty-three when you came to us?"

"Yes, sir."

"We were poor at the time, and were living in common lodgings in London?"

"That is so, sir."

"My father's means were so straitened, if my memory does not betray me, that every shilling of our income had to be reckoned. You did not-excuse me for the question, Mrs. Fortress-you did not serve my parents for love?"

"No, sir; it was purely a matter of business between your father and me."

"You are-again I beg you to excuse me-not the kind of person to work for nothing, or even for small wages."

"Your father paid me liberally, sir."

"And yet we were so poor that until we came suddenly and unexpectedly into a fortune, my father could never afford to give me a shilling. Truly your duties must have been no ordinary ones that you should have been engaged under such circumstances. It is, I suppose, useless for me to ask for an explanation of the nature of those duties?"

"Quite useless, sir."

"Will you tell me nothing, Mrs. Fortress, that will throw light upon the dark spaces of my life?"

"I have nothing to tell, sir."

To a man less under control than myself this iteration of unwillingness would have been intolerable, but I knew that nothing was to be gained by giving way to anger. I should have been the sufferer and the loser by it.

"Looking down, Mrs. Fortress, upon the dead body of my mother, you made the remark that it was a happy release."

"Death is to all a happy release, sir."

"A common platitude, which does not deceive me."

"You cannot forget, sir, that your mother was a great sufferer."

"I forget very little. Mrs. Fortress, in this interview I think you have not behaved graciously-nay, more, that you have not behaved with fairness or justice."

"Upon that point, sir," she said composedly, "you may not be a competent judge."

Her manner was so perfectly respectful that I could not take exception to this retort. She seemed, however, to be aware that she was upon dangerous ground, for she rose, and I made no further attempt to detain her. But now it was she who lingered, unbidden, with something on her mind of which she desired to speak. I raised my head, and wondered whether, of her own free will, she was about to satisfy my curiosity.

"If I thought you were not angry, sir," she said, "and would not take offence, I should like to ask you a question, and if you answer it according to my expectation, one other in connection with it."

"I shall not take offence," I said, "and I promise to exercise less reserve than you have done."

"I thank you, sir," she said, gazing steadily at me, so steadily, indeed, as to cause me to doubt whether, in a combat of will-power between us I should be the victor. "My questions are very simple. Do you ever hear the sounds of music, without being able to account for them?"

The question, simple as it was, startled, and for a moment almost unnerved me. What she suggested had occurred to me, at intervals perhaps of two or three months, and always when I was alone, and had worked myself into a state of exaltation. I do not exactly know at what period of my life this strange experience commenced, but my impression is that it came to me first in the night when I awoke from sleep, and was lying in the dark. It had occurred at those times within the last two or three years, and had it not been that it had already become somewhat familiar to me in hours of sunshine as well as in hours of darkness, I should probably have decided that it was but the refrain of a dream by which I was haunted. In daylight I frequently searched for the cause, but never with success. Lately I had given up the search, and had argued myself into a half belief that it was a delusion, produced by my dwelling upon the subject, and magnifying it into undue importance. For the most part the mysterious strains were faint, but very sweet and melodious; they seemed to come from afar off, and as I listened to them they gradually died away into a musical whisper, and grew fainter and more faint till they were lost altogether. But it had happened on two or three occasions, instead of their dying softly away and leaving me in a state of calm happiness, that the sweet strains were abruptly broken by what sounded now like a wail, now like a suppressed shriek. This violent and, to my senses, cruel termination of the otherwise melodious sounds set my blood boiling dangerously, and unreasonably infuriated me-so much so that the power I held over myself was ingulfed in a torrent of wild passion which I could not control. The melodious strains were always the same, and the air was strange to me. I had never heard it from a visible musician.

Not to a living soul had I ever spoken of the delusion, and that the subject should now be introduced into our conversation, and not introduced by me, could not but strike me as of singular portent. As Mrs. Fortress asked the question I heard once more the soft spiritual strains, and I involuntarily raised my right hand in the act of listening; I hear them at the present moment as I write, and I lay aside my pen a while, until they shall pass away. So! They are gone-but they will come again.

I answered Mrs. Fortress briefly, but not without agitation.

"Yes, I have heard such sounds as those you mention."

"You hear them now?"

"Yes, I hear them now. Do you?"

"My powers of imagination, sir, are less powerful than yours," she said evasively, and passed on to her second question. "It is not an English air, sir?"

"No, it is not English, so far as I am a judge."

"It comes probably," she suggested, and I was convinced that she spoke with premeditation, "from a foreign source."

"Most probably," I said.

"Perhaps from the mountains in the Tyrol."

A Tyrolean air! I seized upon the suggestion, and accepted it as fact, though I was quite unable to speak with authority. But why to me, who had never been out of England, should come this melody of the Tyrol? I could no more answer this question than I could say why the impassive, undemonstrative woman before me was, as it were, revealing me to myself and probing my soul to its hidden depths.

"It may be so," I said. "Do you seek for any further information from me?"

"No, sir." But there was a slight hesitancy in her voice which proved that this was not the only subject in her mind which bore upon my inner life.

"And now," I said, "I must ask you why you put these questions to me, and by what means you became possessed of my secret, mention of which has never passed my lips?" She shook her head, and turned towards the door, but I imperatively called upon her to stay. "You cannot deal with me upon this subject as you have upon all others. I have a distinct right to demand an explanation."

"I can give you no explanation, sir," she said, with deference and respect.

"You refuse?"

"I must refuse," she replied firmly, and then she bowed, and saying, "With my humble duty, sir," was gone.

CHAPTER VI

Had I yielded to passion, had I not in some small degree exercised wisdom, I should have coined out of this last meeting with Mrs. Fortress a most exquisite torture; but I schooled myself into the acceptance of what was entirely beyond my comprehension, and after an interval of agitated thought I set it down to a trick, the inspiration of which may have been derived from unguarded words escaping me while I slept, or while I was soliloquising-a habit into which I had grown-and she was watching me unobserved. It troubled me a great deal at first, but I was successful in diminishing instead of magnifying it, and it was fortunate for me that I had much to occupy my mind in other ways during the few following weeks. My lawyer demanded my time and attention. I was determined, without question as to whether a favourable market could be found for them, to dispose of the property and securities which my father had left, and which now were mine. I was determined to commence a new life, without any exact definition or idea as to what that life was to be; and to do this it was necessary, according to my view, that I should make a clearance. I was surprised to discover that my father had made a great number of investments, and it was to my advantage that they were mostly good ones. Had I possessed both the moral and the legal power I would have sold Rosemullion, but my father's will was so worded that the lawyer pointed out to me that there would be difficulties in the way, and after listening to his arguments I agreed to retain it as my freehold. But I was determined not to inhabit it, and I gave instructions that a tenant should be sought for it, and that, if one could not be obtained, it should remain untenanted.

"It had been unoccupied a great many years," the lawyer remarked, "when your father purchased it."

"For any particular reason?" I inquired.

"No," replied the lawyer, "except that there was a foolish idea that it was haunted."

"Whoever rents Rosemullion," I said, "must take his own ghosts with him if he wishes for ghostly company."

"We generally do that," said the lawyer, dryly, "wherever we go."

There were legal requirements to be attended to in the drawing up and signing of deeds, but otherwise there was no difficulty in carrying out my intention to the letter, and at the expiration of three months I found myself an absolutely free and unencumbered man, with my large fortune invested in English consols, the fluctuations of which caused me not a moment's uneasiness. During those three months I lived my usual life, read, studied, and often wandered through the adjacent woods at night. I think that the adventure I have elsewhere narrated of the tramps I befriended one stormy night had awakened my sympathies for the class, and I may say, without vanity, that it was not the only occasion on which my sympathies had taken a practical shape. A little while before I bade farewell to Rosemullion I was wandering through the woods an hour or so before the rising of the sun, when I came upon a woman sleeping on the ground. As usual, she had a child in her arms, and moans issued from the breasts of both the woman and the child. It was a pitiful sight, familiar enough in our overcrowded land. The woman was the picture of desolation. Suddenly, as I gazed, a mocking voice whispered that it would be merciful to kill her where she lay. "Do a good deed," said the silent voice, "and hasten home to bed. No one will know." I laughed aloud, and took from my pocket my purse, which was well supplied with money. The woman had an apron on. I wrapped the purse in it, and tied it securely, so that it should not escape her. Then I crept away, but scarcely knew whether to be glad or sorry that I had cheated fate once more.