Wilfrid Cumbermede

‘You don’t find it enlivening, do you—eh?’ said my companion.

‘I never saw such a frightfully desolate spot,’ I said, ‘to have yet the appearance of a place of Christian worship. It looks as if there were a curse upon it. Are all those the graves of suicides and murderers? It cannot surely be consecrated ground?’

‘It’s not nice,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect you to like it. I only said it was odd.’

‘Is there any service held in it?’ I asked.

‘Yes—once a fortnight or so. The rector has another living a few miles off.’

‘Where can the congregation come from?’

‘Hardly from anywhere. There ain’t generally more than five or six, I believe. Let’s have a look at the inside of it.’

‘The windows are much too high, and no foothold.’

‘We’ll go in.’

‘Where can you get the key? It must be a mile off at least, by your own account. There’s no house nearer than that, you say.’

He made me no reply, but going to the only flat gravestone, which stood on short thick pillars, he put his hand beneath it, and drew out a great rusty key.

‘Country lawyers know a secret or two,’ he said.

‘Not always much worth knowing,’ I rejoined,—‘if the inside be no better than the outside.’

‘We’ll have a look, anyhow,’ he said, as he turned the key in the dry lock.

The door snarled on its hinges, and disclosed a space drearier certainly, and if possible uglier, than its promise.

‘Really, Mr Coningham,’ I said, ‘I don’t see why you should have brought me to look at this place.’

‘It answered for a bait, at all events. You’ve had a good long ride, which was the best thing for you. Look what a wretched little vestry that is!’

It was but a corner of the east end, divided off by a faded red curtain.

‘I suppose they keep a parish register here,’ he said. ‘Let us have a look.’

Behind the curtain hung a dirty surplice and a gown. In the corner stood a desk like the schoolmaster’s in a village school. There was a shelf with a few vellum-bound books on it, and nothing else, not even a chair in the place.

‘Yes; there they are!’ he said, as he took down one of the volumes from the shelf. ‘This one comes to a close in the middle of the last century. I dare say there is something in this, now, that would be interesting enough to somebody. Who knows how many properties it might make change hands?’

‘Not many, I should think. Those matters are pretty well seen to now.’

‘By some one or other—not always the rightful heirs. Life is full of the strangest facts, Mr Cumbermede. If I were a novelist, now, like you, my experience would make me dare a good deal more in the way of invention than any novelist I happen to have read. Look there, for instance.’

He pointed to the top of the last page, or rather the last half of the cover. I read as follows:

‘MARRIAGES, 1748

‘Mr Wilfrid Cumbermede Daryll, of the Parish of {–} second son of Sir Richard Daryll of Moldwarp Hall in the County of {–} and Mistress Elizabeth Woodruffe were married by a license Jan. 15.’

‘I don’t know the name of Daryll,’ I said.

‘It was your own great-grandfather’s name,’ he returned. ‘I happen to know that much.’

‘You knew this was here, Mr Coningham,’ I said. ‘That is why you brought me here.’

‘You are right. I did know it. Was I wrong in thinking it would interest you?’

‘Certainly not. I am obliged to you. But why this mystery? Why not have told me what you wanted me to go for?’

‘I will why you in turn. Why should I have wanted to show you now more than any other time what I have known for as many years almost as you have lived? You spoke of a ride—why shouldn’t I give a direction to it that might pay you for your trouble? And why shouldn’t I have a little amusement out of it if I pleased? Why shouldn’t I enjoy your surprise at finding in a place you had hardly heard of, and would certainly count most uninteresting, the record of a fact that concerned your own existence so nearly? There!’

‘I confess it interests me more than you will easily think—inasmuch as it seems to offer to account for things that have greatly puzzled me for some time. I have of late met with several hints of a connection at one time or other between the Moat and the Hall, but these hints were so isolated that I could weave no theory to connect them. Now I dare say they will clear themselves up.’

‘Not a doubt of-that, if you set about it in earnest.’

‘How did he come to drop his surname?’

‘That has to be accounted for.’

‘It follows—does it not?—that I am of the same blood as the present possessors of Moldwarp Hall?’

‘You are—but the relation is not a close one,’ said Mr Coningham.

‘Sir Giles was but distantly related to the stock of which you come.’

‘Then—but I must turn it over in my mind. I am rather in a maze.’

‘You have got some papers at the Moat?’ he said—interrogatively.

‘Yes; my friend Osborne has been looking over them. He found out this much—that there was once some connection between the Moat and the Hall, but at a far earlier date than this points to, or any of the hints to which I just now referred. The other day, when I dined at Sir Giles’s, Mr Alderforge said that Cumbermede was a name belonging to Sir Giles’s ancestry—or something to that effect; but that again could have had nothing to do with those papers, or with the Moat at all.’

Here I stopped, for I could not bring myself to refer to the sword. It was not merely that the subject was too painful: of all things I did not want to be cross-questioned by my lawyer-companion.

‘It is not amongst those you will find anything of importance, I suspect. Did your great-grandmother—the same, no doubt, whose marriage is here registered—leave no letters or papers behind her?’

‘I’ve come upon a few letters. I don’t know if there is anything more.’

‘You haven’t read them, apparently.’

‘I have not. I’ve been always going to read them, but I haven’t opened one of them yet.’

‘Then I recommend you—that is, if you care for an interesting piece of family history—to read those letters carefully, that is constructively.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean—putting two and two together, and seeing what comes of it; trying to make everything fit into one, you know.’

‘Yes. I understand you. But how do you happen to know that those letters contain a history, or that it will prove interesting when I have found it?’

‘All family history ought to be interesting—at least to the last of his race,’ he returned, replying only to the latter half of my question.’ It must, for one thing, make him feel his duty to his ancestors more strongly.’

‘His duty to marry, I suppose you mean?’ I said with some inward bitterness. ‘But to tell the truth, I don’t think the inheritance worth it in my case.’

‘It might be better,’ he said, with an expression which seemed odd beside the simplicity of the words.

‘Ah! you think then to urge me to make money; and for the sake of my dead ancestors increase the inheritance of those that may come after me? But I believe I am already as diligent as is good for me—that is, in the main, for I have been losing time of late.’

‘I meant no such thing, Mr Cumbermede. I should be very doubtful whether any amount of success in literature would enable you to restore the fortunes of your family.’

‘Were they so very ponderous, do you think? But in truth I have little ambition of that sort. All I will readily confess to is a strong desire not to shirk what work falls to my share in the world.’

‘Yes,’ he said, in a thoughtful manner—‘if one only knew what his share of the work was.’

The remark was unexpected, and I began to feel a little more interest in him.

‘Hadn’t you better take a copy of that entry?’ he said.

‘Yes—perhaps I had. But I have no materials.’

It did not strike me that attorneys do not usually, like excise-men, carry about an ink-bottle, when he drew one from the breast-pocket of his coat, along with a folded sheet of writing-paper, which he opened and spread out on the desk. I took the pen he offered me, and copied the entry.

When I had finished, he said—

‘Leave room under it for the attestation of the parson. We can get that another time, if necessary. Then write, “Copied by me”—and then your name and the date. It may be useful some time. Take it home and lay it with your grandmother’s papers.’

‘There can be no harm in that,’ I said, as I folded it up, and put it in my pocket. ‘I am greatly obliged to you for bringing me here, Mr Coningham. Though I am not ambitious of restoring the family to a grandeur of which every record has departed, I am quite sufficiently interested in its history, and shall consequently take care of this document.’

‘Mind you read your grandmother’s papers, though,’ he said.

‘I will,’ I answered.

He replaced the volume on the shelf, and we left the church; he locked the door and replaced the key under the gravestone; we mounted our horses, and after riding with me about half the way to the Moat, he took his leave at a point where our roads, diverged. I resolved to devote that very evening, partly in the hope of distracting my thoughts, to the reading of my grandmother’s letters.

CHAPTER XLVI. MY FOLIO

When I reached home I found Charley there, as I had expected.

But a change had again come over him. He was nervous, restless, apparently anxious. I questioned him about his mother and sister. He had met them as planned, and had, he assured me, done his utmost to impress them with the truth concerning me. But he had found his mother incredulous, and had been unable to discover from her how much she had heard; while Mary maintained an obstinate silence, and, as he said, looked more stupid than usual. He did not tell me that Clara had accompanied them so far, and that he had walked with her back to the entrance of the park. This I heard afterwards. When we had talked a while over the sword-business—for we could not well keep off it long—Charley seeming all the time more uncomfortable than ever, he said, perhaps merely to turn the talk into a more pleasant channel—

By the way, where have you put your folio? I’ve been looking for it ever since I came in, but I can’t find it. A new reading started up in my head the other day, and I want to try it both with the print and the context.’

‘It’s in my room,’ I answered, ‘I will go and fetch it.’

‘We will go together,’ he said.

I looked where I thought I had laid it, but there it was not. A pang of foreboding terror invaded me. Charley told me afterwards that I turned as white as a sheet. I looked everywhere, but in vain; ran and searched my uncle’s room, and then Charley’s, but still in vain; and at last, all at once, remembered with certainty that two nights before I had laid it on the window-sill in my uncle’s room. I shouted for Styles, but he was gone home with the mare, and I had to wait, in little short of agony, until he returned. The moment he entered I began to question him.

‘You took those books home, Styles?’ I said, as quietly as I could, anxious not to startle him, lest it should interfere with the just action of his memory.

‘Yes, sir. I took them at once, and gave them into Miss Pease’s own hands;—at least I suppose it was Miss Pease. She wasn’t a young lady, sir.’

‘All right, I dare say. How many were there of them?’

‘Six, sir.’

‘I told you five,’ I said, trembling with apprehension and wrath.

‘You said four or five, and I never thought but the six were to go. They were all together on the window-sill.’

I stood speechless. Charley took up the questioning.

‘What sized books were they?’ he asked.

‘Pretty biggish—one of them quite a large one—the same I’ve seen you, gentlemen, more than once, putting your heads together over. At least it looked like it.’

‘Charley started up and began pacing about the room. Styles saw he had committed some dreadful mistake, and began a blundering expression of regret, but neither of us took any notice of him, and he crept out in dismay.

It was some time before either of us could utter a word. The loss of the sword was a trifle to this. Beyond a doubt the precious tome was now lying in the library of Moldwarp Hall—amongst old friends and companions, possibly—where years on years might elapse before one loving hand would open it, or any eyes gaze on it with reverence.

‘Lost, Charley!’ I said at last.—‘Irrecoverably lost!’

‘I will go and fetch it,’ he cried, starting up. ‘I will tell Clara to bring it out to me. It is beyond endurance this. Why should you not go and claim what both of us can take our oath to as yours?’

‘You forget, Charley, how the sword-affair cripples us—and how the claiming of this volume would only render their belief with regard to the other the more probable. You forget, too, that I might have placed it in the chest first, and, above all, that the name on the title-page is the same as the initials on the blade of the sword,—the same as my own.’

‘Yes—I see it won’t do. And yet if I were to represent the thing to Sir Giles?—He doesn’t care for old books–’

‘You forget again, Charley, that the volume is of great money-value. Perhaps my late slip has made me fastidious; but though the book be mine—and if I had it, the proof of the contrary would lie with them—I could not take advantage of Sir Giles’s ignorance to recover it.’

‘I might, however, get Clara—she is a favourite with him, you know—’

‘I will not hear of it,’ I said, interrupting him, and he was forced to yield.

‘No, Charley,’ I said again; ‘I must just bear it. Harder things have been borne, and men have got through the world and out of it notwithstanding. If there isn’t another world, why should we care much for the loss of what must go with the rest?—and if there is, why should we care at all?’

‘Very fine, Wilfrid! but when you come to the practice—why, the less said the better.’

‘But that is the very point: we don’t come to the practice. If we did, then the ground of it would be proved unobjectionable.’

‘True;—but if the practice be unattainable—’

‘It would take much proving to prove that to my—dissatisfaction I should say; and more failure besides, I can tell you, than there will be time for in this world. If it were proved, however—don’t you see it would disprove both suppositions equally? If such a philosophical spirit be unattainable, it discredits both sides of the alternative on either of which it would have been reasonable.’

‘There is a sophism there of course, but I am not in the mood for pulling your logic to pieces,’ returned Charley, still pacing up and down the room.

In sum, nothing would come of all our talk but the assurance that the volume was equally irrecoverable with the sword, and indeed with my poor character—at least, in the eyes of my immediate neighbours.

CHAPTER XLVII. THE LETTERS AND THEIR STORY

As soon as Charley went to bed, I betook myself to my grandmother’s room, in which, before discovering my loss, I had told Styles to kindle a fire. I had said nothing to Charley about my ride, and the old church, and the marriage-register. For the time, indeed, I had almost lost what small interest I had taken in the matter—my new bereavement was so absorbing and painful; but feeling certain, when he left me, that I should not be able to sleep, but would be tormented all night by innumerable mental mosquitoes if I made the attempt, and bethinking me of my former resolution, I proceeded to carry it out.

The fire was burning brightly, and my reading lamp was on the table, ready to be lighted. But I sat down first in my grandmother’s chair and mused for I know not how long. At length my wandering thoughts rehearsed again the excursion with Mr Coningham. I pulled the copy of the marriage-entry from my pocket, and in reading it over again, my curiosity was sufficiently roused to send me to the bureau. I lighted my lamp at last, unlocked what had seemed to my childhood a treasury of unknown marvels, took from it the packet of yellow withered letters, and sat down again by the fire to read, in my great-grandmother’s chair, the letters of Wilfrid Cumbermede Daryll—for so he signed himself in all of them—my great-grandfather. There were amongst them a few of her own in reply to his—badly written and badly spelt, but perfectly intelligible. I will not transcribe any of them—I have them to show if needful—but not at my command at the present moment;—for I am writing neither where I commenced my story—on the outskirts of an ancient city, nor at the Moat, but in a dreary old square in London; and those letters lie locked again in the old bureau, and have lain unvisited through thousands of desolate days and slow creeping nights, in that room which I cannot help feeling sometimes as if the ghost of that high-spirited, restless-hearted grandmother of mine must now and then revisit, sitting in the same old chair, and wondering to find how far it was all receded from her—wondering, also, to think what a work she made, through her long and weary life, about things that look to her now such trifles.

I do not then transcribe any of the letters, but give, in a connected form, what seem to me the facts I gathered from them; not hesitating to present, where they are required, self-evident conclusions as if they were facts mentioned in them. I repeat that none of my names are real, although they all point at the real names.

Wilfrid Cumbermede was the second son of Richard and Mary Daryll of Moldwarp Hall. He was baptized Cumbermede from the desire to keep in memory the name of a celebrated ancestor, the owner, in fact, of the disputed sword—itself alluded to in the letters,—who had been more mindful of the supposed rights of his king than the next king was of the privations undergone for his sake, for Moldwarp Hall at least was never recovered from the Roundhead branch of the family into whose possession it had drifted. In the change, however, which creeps on with new generations, there had been in the family a re-action of sentiment in favour of the more distinguished of its progenitors; and Richard Daryll, a man of fierce temper and overbearing disposition, had named his son after the cavalier. A tyrant in his family, at least in the judgment of the writers of those letters, he apparently found no trouble either with his wife or his eldest or youngest son; while, whether his own fault or not, it was very evident that from Wilfrid his annoyances had been numerous.

A legal feud had for some time existed between the Ahab of Moldwarp Hall and the Naboth of the Moat, the descendant of an ancient yeoman family of good blood, and indeed related to the Darylls themselves, of the name of Woodruffe. Sir Richard had cast covetous eyes upon the field surrounding Stephen’s comparatively humble abode, which had at one time formed a part of the Moldwarp property. In searching through some old parchments, he had found, or rather, I suppose, persuaded himself he had found, sufficient evidence that this part of the property of the Moat, then of considerable size, had been willed away in contempt of the entail which covered it, and belonged by right to himself and his heirs. He had therefore instituted proceedings to recover possession, during the progress of which their usual bickerings and disputes augmented in fierceness. A decision having at length been given in favour of the weaker party, the mortification of Sir Richard was unendurable to himself, and his wrath and unreasonableness, in consequence, equally unendurable to his family. One may then imagine the paroxysm of rage with which he was seized when he discovered that, during the whole of the legal process, his son Wilfrid had been making love to Elizabeth Woodruffe, the only child of his enemy. In Wilfrid’s letters, the part of the story which follows is fully detailed for Elizabeth’s information, of which the reason is also plain—that the writer had spent such a brief period afterwards in Elizabeth’s society that he had not been able for very shame to recount the particulars.

No sooner had Sir Richard come to a knowledge of the hateful fact, evidently through one of his servants, than, suppressing the outburst of his rage for the moment, he sent for his son Wilfrid, and informed him, his lips quivering with suppressed passion, of the discovery he had made; accused him of having brought disgrace on the family, and of having been guilty of falsehood and treachery; and ordered him to go down on his knees and abjure the girl before heaven, or expect a father’s vengeance.

But evidently Wilfrid was as little likely as any man to obey such a command. He boldly avowed his love for Elizabeth, and declared his intention of marrying her. His father, foaming with rage, ordered his servants to seize him. Overmastered in spite of his struggles, he bound him to a pillar, and taking a horse-whip, lashed him furiously; then, after his rage was thus in a measure appeased, ordered them to carry him to his bed. There he remained, hardly able to move, the whole of that night and the next day. On the following night, he made his escape from the Hall, and took refuge with a farmer-friend a few miles off—in the neighbourhood, probably, of Umberden Church.

Here I would suggest a conjecture of my own—namely, that my ancestor’s room was the same I had occupied, so—fatally, shall I say?—to myself, on the only two occasions on which I had slept at the Hall; that he escaped by the stair to the roof, having first removed the tapestry from the door, as a memorial to himself and a sign to those he left; that he carried with him the sword and the volume—both probably lying in his room at the time, and the latter little valued by any other. But all this, I repeat, is pure conjecture.

As soon as he was sufficiently recovered, he communicated with Elizabeth, prevailed upon her to marry him at once at Umberden Church, and within a few days, as near as I could judge; left her to join, as a volunteer, the army of the Duke of Cumberland, then fighting the French in the Netherlands. Probably from a morbid fear lest the disgrace his father’s brutality had inflicted should become known in his regiment, he dropped the surname of Daryll when he joined it; and—for what precise reasons I cannot be certain—his wife evidently never called herself by any other name than Cumbermede. Very likely she kept her marriage a secret, save from her own family, until the birth of my grandfather, which certainly took place before her husband’s return. Indeed I am almost sure that he never returned from that campaign, but died fighting, not unlikely, at the battle of Laffeldt; and that my grannie’s letters, which I found in the same packet, had been, by the kindness of some comrade, restored to the young widow.

When I had finished reading the letters, and had again thrown myself back in the old chair, I began to wonder why nothing of all this should ever have been told me. That the whole history should have dropped out of the knowledge of the family, would have been natural enough, had my great-grandmother, as well as my great-grandfather, died in youth; but that she should have outlived her son, dying only after I, the representative of the fourth generation, was a boy at school, and yet no whisper have reached me of these facts, appeared strange. A moment’s reflection showed me that the causes and the reasons of the fact must have lain with my uncle. I could not but remember how both he and my aunt had sought to prevent me from seeing my grannie alone, and how the last had complained of this in terms far more comprehensible to me now than they were then. But what could have been the reasons for this their obstruction of the natural flow of tradition? They remained wrapped in a mystery which the outburst from it of an occasional gleam of conjectural light only served to deepen.

The letters lying open on the table before me, my eyes rested upon one of the dates—the third day of March, 1747. It struck me that this date involved a discrepancy with that of the copy I had made from the register. I referred to it, and found my suspicion correct. According to the copy, my ancestors were not married until the 15th of January, 1748. I must have made a blunder—and yet I could hardly believe I had, for I had reason to consider myself accurate. If there was no mistake, I should have to reconstruct my facts, and draw fresh conclusions.

By this time, however, I was getting tired and sleepy and cold; my lamp was nearly out; my fire was quite gone; and the first of a frosty dawn was beginning to break in the east. I rose and replaced the papers, reserving all further thought on the matter for a condition of circumstances more favourable to a correct judgment. I blew out the lamp, groped my way to bed in the dark, and was soon fast asleep, in despite of insult, mortification, perplexity, and loss.