Dorrien of Cranston

Chapter Thirty Five.

Redivivus

Again we must ask the reader to stand with us in the cheerful dining-room within which he obtained his first introduction to Cranston Hall. Now, as then, the breakfast table looks bright and inviting, as its owner sits at it, opening his letters with a grave, serious face; but now, unlike then, no warm summer sunshine searches out every corner of the floor, for the sky is thickly overcast, and tossing eddies of snowflakes are whirling past, and powdering with a sugary carpet the half-frozen lawn. Nor do the clustering roses softly beat their bruised fragrance against the window panes; in their stead only bare branches, tossing in the wintry wind which, dismally whistling round the corners of the house, enhances the snugness of the cosy room, with its blazing fire, whence reflects a sparkling glow upon the breakfast-things and the snowy cloth.

And he who now sits at the table is not him whom we first saw there, for this is a much younger man. Time, which brought its rude buffets, has at length brought its compensations, and Roland Dorrien now reigns in the halls of his ancestors. Let us look at him as he sits there. A little thinner perhaps, certainly graver, and with a brow never quite free from an expression of anxious care; there is an occasional thread of grey in his dark hair, and in the deep blue eyes may be descried a tinge of sadness which is seldom absent. He has aged, too, in appearance, and that greatly; yet barely two years have gone over his head since the night the mysterious stranger altered the hands of the old clock standing in the hall of “The Silver Fleece Inn” at Battisford.

General Dorrien is dead – has lain in Cranston churchyard a year and a half – and his son reigns in his stead.

But whatever our opinion of the deceased Squire of Cranston, the important part he has played in our story entitles him to something more than the above brief obituary. One evening at the period named, the General failed to return home, whereas it was his wont to appear punctually at the dressing bell. His wife, astonished at this deviation from his rigidly unchanging habits, grew alarmed. The dinner-bell rang – still the General did not appear. Then inquiry elicited that he had been last seen by one of the under-gardeners strolling near the ornamental water, it might have been an hour ago. No, the man noticed nothing strange about his master, who seemed quite well, if anything, rather cheerful. Thoroughly alarmed now, Mrs Dorrien collected the gardeners and proceeded to the spot where her husband had last been seen. It was, as the man had stated, close to the lake – being, in fact, barely thirty yards distant therefrom. While directing the men to scatter and proceed through the shrubbery in search of their master, Mrs Dorrien’s eye fell upon an object floating in the water, and the sight well-nigh deprived her of speech and power. In response to her signs as she sank down half-fainting, the men pushed off the boat and quickly returned with the General’s cane. That was enough. All hope was at an end. But a few minutes more and the body of the missing Squire was found, lying in barely four feet of water. Suicide? No. The medical examination proved that the deceased had been suddenly seized with a fit while standing on the brink of the pool, and had fallen in.

Those who knew the family legend were now more awestruck than they chose to admit. Within a few months of each other, two more Dorriens had miserably perished – alone, unseen, and by the agency of water. Of a truth there was something in the prophecy. When the exile, in response to an urgent advertisement for the late Squire of Cranston’s missing son, presented himself at the offices of Messrs Swan and Simcox, solicitors, Furnival’s Inn, and having duly satisfied those gentlemen as to his identity, was informed that General Dorrien had died suddenly, and that every search having been made for his will without avail, he, the applicant – who, as he stood there, could not have put down two shillings and a sixpence if his life depended on it – was heir-at-law to the splendid estate of Cranston with its dependency, Minchkil Down, etc, etc, and all personal property besides, the deceased having died intestate, it struck those respected practitioners, Messrs Swan and Simcox, that this new client was a very extraordinary sort of man indeed. For he had sunk into a chair muttering something about “too late,” and turning ghastly white, till they became quite alarmed on his account. However, good news does not kill, and the first shock over, Roland Dorrien, without any fuss, quietly, and as if he had never left it, entered upon his own.

Yet when this happened his affairs were in a very desperate condition indeed. For months after his terrible experience with Olive Ingelow on the tide-swept coast he had supported himself by sheer physical labour, more by way of forcing his mind to forget, than with the desire of prolonging his wretched existence, for he had now no longer the means of leaving the country. This could not last long. To a man of his temperament there was but one end – mental prostration, with its dire result, the lunatic asylum or the suicide’s grave. And from this his father’s death had befallen just – but only just – in time to save him.

How it was that General Dorrien should not only have allowed his unforgiven son to succeed him, but also, by dying intestate, have left his wife and Nellie almost entirely dependent upon that son’s bounty, is one of those mysteries that will never be solved in this world. His wife had a small income of her own, but out of the estate she could not touch a penny otherwise than as a free gift from Roland. And this she positively refused to do – and persevered in her refusal.

Greatly did the family solicitors puzzle over the non-transpiration of any will. They were aware of the quarrel between the General and his son, and that the former should die without testamentary instructions was not quite satisfactory. At first they suspected that there was a will, but that it had somehow got lost, but when after a most careful search it was not forthcoming, then their suspicions took the direction of foul play, in which, however, they acquitted the heir-at-law of any complicity.

And the said heir-at-law shared their suspicions, though he breathed no word of it to them or to any other living ear. But no precaution would he neglect to render secure to himself that which he regarded as rightfully his own, and which had come to him, if by chance, yet at the most fortunate of times. If it should transpire that others had the legal right, at any rate he had the moral right, and it should not be his fault if he did not keep it. So the first thing he did upon entering on possession was to institute a most thorough and exhaustive search for the missing document on his own account. He would ensure the safety of his position once and for all, and leave nothing to chance. So for several nights, when no living eye could behold him, did he remain up till early dawn, carrying on his search. Not a desk or a drawer was left unrifled, not an article of furniture unmoved. Even the very wails he carefully sounded for hollow places and sliding panels, and more than one escritoire suspected of secret drawers did he hew in pieces with his own hand, alone and with locked doors. Once, indeed, his breath came thick and his heart stood still as he lit upon a bundle of legal-looking parchments in one of these forgotten recesses. But they were only records of a private and delicate transaction of his father’s early life, and with a sigh of relief he burnt them to ashes. Had one of them been the genuine document, which was to dispossess him, it would have shared the fate of the rest. No scruples would have stayed his hand. He had drained the cup of poverty and destitution to the very dregs; but the tide had turned at last. What he had got he meant to keep, at all and every hazard.

But that was a year and a half ago, and now here he sits opening his letters. A frown comes over his face as his eye falls upon the address of one of them, and with a couple of impatient tugs at his moustache he chucks the obnoxious missive aside. Then a light step is heard in the passage and his brow clears. There is a place laid opposite his, and behind the urn, evidently awaiting its occupant. Surely that is she outside. Who is it? His sister, Nellie?

Then the door opens, and enter – not Nellie, but Olive. No longer Olive Ingelow, however, for it is rather over a year ago that she changed it, and never in all his priestly experience had the rector of Wandsborough pronounced the blessing of his Church upon a happier union than these the nuptials of his best-loved child have up till now proved.

Olive’s happiness suits her well, for she is looking lovelier than ever, and seems to bring a ray of sunshine in with her this biting, tempestuous winter morning. She seems, too, to have recovered a large portion of her old irresistible spirits, though the sparkling piquancy of the beautiful girl whom we first saw in Wandsborough church has given way to the more thoughtful sweetness of the woman who has passed to her happiness through the dark days of trial and affliction. Her husband is wont sportively to tell her that she is fast acquiring the staidness of the conventional British matron – an imputation which she makes believe greatly to resent. But Roland Dorrien’s love and adoration of his beautiful wife is as warm to-day as it was when they stood together two years ago beneath the cliffs, in the dim gloaming, with the spray dashing in their faces as they watched the huge waves thundering in, and knew that in another hour they would be lying dead in each other’s embrace.

She goes across to him now and puts her arm round his neck and lays her cheek against his.

“What is it, dear? Any bad news? No. Only those stupid old business letters,” she says, looking over his shoulder. “Put them away till later and don’t let them bore you. But just look how it’s snowing. You won’t be able to shoot to-day.”

“No, I shan’t. But it doesn’t really matter – Marsland won’t care – and I asked the Colonel, but I believe the good old chap will be only too glad of the excuse to sit quietly at home. Tom Barnes will be rather sold, I’m afraid – but we can give him a shoot at any time.”

“Of course. And now we’ll have a snug day together, all to ourselves – won’t we?”

“Olive, darling, I can’t help thinking sometimes you must be dull here, shut up all the year round with such a cross-grained animal as this,” he says, after a minute’s pause. “It must be such a contrast as compared with the jolly days at the old Rectory. Now confess.”

“I’ll confess this much – that if you don’t get that idea out of your wise old head, I shall begin to have a bad opinion of you,” she replies affectionately. “Why, I can run over at any moment and look them up, or get them up here, as in fact I’m always doing. What more can you think I want? Now let’s see what the arbiter of Fate has brought forth,” continues she, going round to her place. “Two bills – that’s your department. Letters – only one, and that from Eusty. His regiment has been ordered to India – wonder how Nellie will like that – and he is coming down here the week after next. He will be here in time for the festival.”

“That’s a goodish bit of news. Will he come to us or to the Rectory first?”

“Don’t know. That’ll have to be decided.”

“By the way, where’s Roy?” he asks suddenly. “He hasn’t been in this morning. Ah, there he is.”

For the servant entering with a tray has also admitted our woolly friend, who makes for his master and thrusts his nose into his hand with an affectionate whine, his brush wagging like a flail.

Roy, too, is restored to his rightful place in society, as his master puts it. One of the first things Roland did when the tide of his misfortunes turned, was to take steps for the recovery of his faithful follower, and Roy’s new owner, who was a good-hearted fellow, had refused the somewhat extravagant sum which was offered him for his purchase, and had handed him back at the same price. Roy’s exuberant glee on his restoration to his old master was something indescribable. But now he has long been an institution in the Cranston household and is a favourite with everyone, except Johnston, the head-gardener, of whom more anon.

The airy mood of the new Squire of Cranston fades as suddenly as it arose. He eyes for a moment the unwelcome missive which he has cast aside, then, as if with an effort, he tears it open. It is only a letter from his mother.

“Oh! What is it, darling?” cries Olive anxiously, half starting up. For with a furious imprecation Roland has dashed down the open sheet upon the table, and sits back in his chair, his face ashy white.

Only a couple of lines does this letter contain, and they are in his mother’s handwriting.

“Since you force me to speak plainly, I will – I can hold no communication with a murderer – a fratricide.”

“Roland, tell me what it is. Tell me, darling, and let me share it with you,” urges Olive pleadingly. “What cruel thing does she say?”

His hand is trembling as it heavily lies upon the open paper, as if to blot out the accusing words.

“Nothing but what is evil and ill-conditioned,” he answers hoarsely. “See what comes of doing the right thing. It’s only her reply to that letter of mine offering to make a settlement upon her. This is the fifth time I’ve done it, and each time I get more abused than before. One’s mother!”

Oh, the biting satire in the last two words. Roland Dorrien has never seen his mother since the day he passed her in anger on the stairs. There had been no affection between them at any time, and now he would not pretend to any. But he had his code of honour, and under this he would willingly have made a liberal settlement upon her out of the estate. Mrs Dorrien, however, refused to touch a penny – and went further. She rejected his overtures with scorn and even reproach. An idea had rooted itself in her mind that he was responsible for his younger brother’s death – that he had made away with him, in short, for his own advantage. It was the merest fancy, wholly destitute of the slightest clue, but it took firmer and firmer hold upon her till she was convinced of its truth, as though she had beheld with her own eyes that terrible scene on the cliff. But she had never gone so far as to put her suspicion into words until now, when, in an access of fierce grief for the lost, and fury against those who had benefited by her bereavement, she had penned those fearful words.

“I won’t let you leave me while you are like this,” pleads Olive tenderly, with her arm on his shoulder. He had been gathering up his letters to go, a move which she was determined to circumvent. “Whatever it is, remember nothing can separate us now.”

He almost shudders at her words. Can it not? he thinks. Yes, but it can – and in a manner so grisly and awful as she would never dream of suspecting. His brain is in a whirl. What could have set his mother’s suspicions to work? Even though they could have no foundation to go upon, a fixed idea like that, in such a mind as hers, might be in the highest degree dangerous.

“I must go,” he answers. “But, my darling, I promise to come back to you here in half an hour. Will that do?”

She is satisfied. A clinging kiss, and then she stands gazing after the tall, fine figure in its shooting-suit of light homespun. She sees him enter the study – his father’s study that was – and hears the snap of the key in the lock, then, turning to the window, she stands looking thoughtfully and with a troubled expression out upon the whirling snowflakes and the white, cold earth, in contrast whereto the dark trunks and gaunt limbs of the trees in the park show out like starved spectres, and the dismal howling of the wintry blast is as the warning voice of impending woe.

Amid the joys which encompass Olive Dorrien’s married life there is yet room for one great sorrow. Over her husband’s peace there hangs some dark and terrible secret, the weight of which he must bear alone.

Chapter Thirty Six.

The Sword

Although the neighbourhood had by this time got thoroughly accustomed to the new state of things at Cranston, and had voted it a great improvement on the old, yet the said vicinity was unanimous in its opinion that the General’s successor was decidedly queer.

True, a man in his position should be popular and not eccentric, but then, there were extenuating circumstances. If the county was not so much entertained at Cranston Hall as it deemed it had a right to expect, at any rate open house was kept periodically; and, as all things are relative, the contrast between even this and the inhospitality which characterised the late General’s tenure, told to tenfold advantage. Another claim had Roland Dorrien upon the indulgence of the neighbourhood. He had taken his wife from among the daughters of the land. No stranger to them and theirs had he brought into their midst, but one whom they had seen grow up among them, and right nobly did she grace her far from unimportant, and at first rather trying, position. So, taking all things into account, the neighbourhood was inclined to congratulate itself on the acquisition of a new lord for Cranston, and to look with indulgent eyes upon his moods and vagaries.

And these were multifold. Though not of a hilarious disposition, yet there were times when he would yield himself up to the excitement of the hour with an unthinking abandon which made even the youngest and liveliest of his guests stare, and then, while they were wondering with an agreeable surprise how it was that they had never suspected Dorrien of having so much in him, the mercury would fall with alarming suddenness, and he would relapse into a moody taciturnity, for which there was no accounting. Sometimes, too, those staying at Cranston never saw their host for days at a time, except at meals, and these he seemed to get through in a half-absent kind of way, answering in monosyllables if appealed to, but never originating a remark. In his normal frame of mind, however, Roland Dorrien struck his acquaintance as somewhat cold and uncomfortably reticent, but as a peculiarly keen-witted and observant man.

For a long time he had steadfastly refused to be placed on the Commission of the Peace, and his old friend, Colonel Neville, had waxed very sore and disappointed thereat. For Dorrien of Cranston not to have his place among the judicial luminaries adorning the Wandsborough Bench was, in the gallant veteran’s eyes, a thing simply unheard of in the annals of the county. Why, it was tantamount to a prediction of the family downfall. But Roland had stood firm, and the Colonel had taken the matter quite seriously to heart. Then all of a sudden, just as his friends had given up trying to persuade him, he had, of his own accord, expressed his willingness to serve, and the Colonel was overjoyed. But from the day of his appointment up till now he had only taken his seat on the bench three times, and then, either by accident or design, when there was a peculiarly light list of cases for adjudication. Moreover, his voice had been strenuously raised on the side of mercy, to the no small astonishment of those who had ever been wont to look upon his name as a convertible term for unbending severity. “A hard Dorrien” was how inferiors and dependents had been wont to speak of the heads of the family.

“I don’t think it exactly my line in life,” he observed to Mr Curtis, the vicar of Cranston, in reply to that worthy’s expostulation with him for his scant attendance at Petty Sessions, “to sit in judgment on a lot of poor devils who knock over a rabbit when they’re half-starving. It doesn’t seem a very ennobling kind of office to fill, does it?”

“That’s all very well, Mr Dorrien,” had replied the vicar, who was a zealous attendant at the Wandsborough Bench, and not a little proud of his connection therewith. “But birth and station have their duties, you must remember, and if those who by virtue of these advantages are appointed to ‘execute justice and maintain truth’ shrink from their responsibilities, why, it will soon be a bad thing for the country. For what is the country to do?”

“Pay some fellow – one of the Great Unbriefed, for instance – to perform these onerous duties,” was the reply, with a careless laugh, not wholly free from satire. “Plenty of sharp fellows in these hard times would jump at the billet, any one of whom would be quite as competent as we are collectively to fine Bill Gubbins ten shillings and costs for driving a horse and cart down the street when drunk and incapable, or to decide whether John Hodge or Tom Podge shall be adjudged to contribute towards the maintenance of Sarah Timms’ latest hopeful. At any rate it doesn’t strike me that the discharge of these elevating duties should be monopolised by ‘birth and station.’”

To which the vicar, a fine, hard-headed Tory of the old school, had replied severely, that he feared his friend had become imbued with some of the Radical tendencies of the day.

Roland’s eccentricities, too, had their religious side. For weeks he would never go near a church, then he would rise in the dark, three or four times a week, mount his horse and ride over to the morning office at Wandsborough church, and the little congregation assembled in the side chapel, whose gloom was hardly dispersed by the altar tapers’ soft glow, while the rain poured down upon the roof, would be astonished by a tall figure, gaitered and mud-besplashed, suddenly arriving in its midst, perhaps, just as Dr Ingelow and his acolyte were reciting the Nicene Creed. On the subject of these pilgrimages he let drop no word to anybody, not even to his wife, turning the conversation if she alluded to them; and this, with ready tact, after the first time, she never did, in having recorded which fact, by the way, we have testified volumes to Olive’s advantage. Nevertheless, she rejoiced with a great secret joy. But Wandsborough regarded these proceedings on the part of the Squire of Cranston with undivided curiosity, but diverse feelings, and the advanced Anglicans congratulated themselves mightily on the acquisition of so influential and important a convert.

Various theories, too, were advanced to account for Roland Dorrien’s eccentricities. Some went so far as darkly to whisper that there was madness in the family. There was the late General, for instance. Look how he shut himself up and never entertained, and was always gloomy and morose, and quarrelled with everybody, his own flesh and blood included. Then, to go further back, there was the General’s brother, the former Squire, an old bachelor and most queer in his ways. And now this one – at his age, and in his fortunate circumstances, a man ought not to look and act as if life was one great and protracted mistake. A few, more charitably disposed and more superstitious withal, scouted the mania theory, but declared that the present race of Dorriens must be under a curse. At any rate, it was not a little singular that two out of the three sons had met with an untimely and tragical death, and now, no doubt, the thought of it preyed upon the mind of the surviving one. But whatever it was, it must be a very serious thing, for there could be few more enviable positions and calculated to produce happiness, as the world understands it, than that of Dorrien of Cranston. On this point the neighbourhood was thoroughly agreed.

And the neighbourhood, looking at things from its own light, argued rightly. In the full health and vigour of his manhood, possessed of one of the most beautiful seats in England, its splendid domain absolutely unencumbered, a lovely wife, who adored him – if there is such a thing as happiness in the world, assuredly Roland Dorrien should have been a happy man. Yet he was not.

As we have seen, no compunction followed upon his crime – no remorse – no fear of detection and of the awful penalty which, in the event of detection, he would be called upon to pay. He was then so overwhelmed beneath the blows of Fate, that one more or less could make no difference in the wretched hopelessness of his lot. His conscience was seared past all feeling.

Then had come the change, and from a living death a single day had sufficed to restore him to the joys of life in more than all their fulness – their sweetness, beyond measure, enhanced by the black period which had gone before. He had stretched forth his hand and grasped them, he had hastened to pluck for his own this fair flower which had languished and grown beyond his reach, and in gathering it he had filled, as he thought, his cup of bliss to the very brim. Secure in the love of his beautiful wife, prosperous in his splendid possessions, what could this one crime of a troublous past avail against him?