THIS same evening, while Susan sat at her patchwork, comforting herself with fancies concerning the unknown uncle who was to make so strange and unexpected a break upon their solitude, an old gentleman, carrying his own carpet-bag, went into one of the carriages of the night-trains about to start from Edinburgh for the south. He was not a first-class passenger, but the railway people put up instinctive fingers to their caps as he addressed them. He was tall, thin, erect—of a soldierly bearing, with a grey moustache and gray hair, wearing thin upon the crown. That he was a little deaf it was easy to perceive, from the sudden stoop he made when the person sitting next him in the carriage put a question to him unexpectedly; and that his eyes were touched by years and usage was equally apparent when, unable to find his spectacles, he held his time-bill at arm’s length to read it the better. But there was something ingratiating and prepossessing even in the bend which brought his ear to the level of the voice which addressed him, with that instinctive and delicate courtesy which will not treat the most trivial application with carelessness. The good woman who spoke felt flattered—she could not tell how; it was only to ask when the train would start—a thing which her next neighbour knew no better than she did—but the ready attention, and sincere endeavour which the old soldier instantly made to satisfy her, gave the questioner all the feeling of a personal compliment. When the long line of carriages got under weigh, our friend wrapped himself up in his warm cloak, and leaned back in his unluxurious corner. It was a gloomy, rainy, miserable night; the little lamp jolting in the roof, and throwing a feeble illumination over four benches full of drowsing night-travellers, was the only light visible in earth and heaven, save when the nocturnal express plunged with ostentatious speed through some little oasis of a station, with faint lamps gleaming through the universal gloom. The old soldier, however, was not easily disturbed by the discomforts of his journey; if there were any special meditations in his mind, he showed no sign of them; but, with his face half buried in his cloak, kept motionless in his corner—where, in the very midst of the black night, or, to speak more properly, about three o’clock in the winter morning, the guard awaked him. He had reached the end of his journey. The rest of the night he passed in the Railway Inn of a country town, from which he set out next morning in a gig, to face the raw February blast for a drive of fourteen miles over an exposed country. Colonel Edward Sutherland, though he had been twenty years in India, had come home still a poor man; and habits of economy were strong upon the old officer, accustomed all his life, even in the luxurious eastern climate, to spare and restrain unnecessary expenses. He was a solitary man, but he was not a free old bachelor, at liberty to expend his own means on his own pleasure; wife and many children had been left behind in Indian graves, but he had a boy at Addiscombe, and one at St. Andrew’s, and consequently not a shilling of his income to spare; so he placed his carpet bag carefully below the seat out of the reach of rain, and tied a travelling-cap over his ears, and muffled his cloak half over his face, and so turned his face to the wind for his chilly journey to Lanwoth Moor.
“Ay, sure the wind’s in the east—it’s ever in the east on this road,” said the man who drove him. “When it’s could as could all the country over, it’s double could Lanwoth way. Beg your pardon, Cornel,” said the man, touching his cap, “but it’s strange for a gen’l’man to goo this gate in ought but a shay.”
“That is my business, my man,” said the traveller, quietly; “is it a good road?”
“Bits,” said the postboy, shrugging his shoulders; “and bits the very dyeuce for the poor beasts; but we never goo this direction, Cornel, not twicest in a year—not all the way. There’s Tillington, five mile this side o’ Lanwoth, but the road strikes off to the reet—Lord blees you, gen’l’men know better nor to build on a moorside. The wind comes down off the fells fit to pull your skin off, Cornel; and ne’er a shelter, and ne’er a tree, but bits o’ saplings in the moss. Rain and snow and hail, they sweep a’ things before them. I’d never set a brute beast, let alone a christian, with its nose to Lanwoth Moor.”
“Yet somebody must live there,” said the traveller, shivering in spite of himself within his cloak.
“Not a soul, Cornel, but the one house,” said the driver, eagerly; “not a thatch roof or a clay wall—nought but Marchmain. They say it was built at the riding of the Marches, that’s once in the hunderd year, and a’ foor strife, foor to part the lands of the twae Allonbys, brothers and foes as should never be seen in God’s world. But sure there it stands, black as hate, and——“—the man made a sudden pause, and looked suddenly up in the old officer’s face—“Cornel, you’re gooing there?”
“Do you know me, driver?” said Colonel Sutherland, with a little curiosity.
The man held down his head with a sly, half-abashed smile, not quite sure whether to pretend knowledge or to confess that he acquired his information from the card on the carpet bag. The result of his deliberations was an equivocal reply. “I know an army gen’l’man when I see him, sir,” he said, raising his slouching rustic shoulders, and quickening his speech out of its Cumbrian drawl. “My father was an ould 53d, and Cornel Toppe Sawyer’s own man; and, begging your pardon, Cornel, a blind man could see you had borne command.”
Colonel Sutherland was human; he was not only human, but a little amiable vanity was one of his foibles. He inclined his ear blandly to this clever compliment, and perhaps thought his driver rather a sensible fellow; but at that moment the blast came wild in their faces—wet, dismal, cold—a wind that cut to the bone, and the chattering teeth and shivering frame which owned its influence was not lively enough for conversation. The horse winced, and turned his unfortunate head aside, making a momentary pause. The hills—low, gray, and piebald, with their yellow circles of lichen, and brown turrets of rock—were blurred into the dull horizon, which expressed nothing but that dismal, penetrating moisture and murderous cold; and when, by a sudden turn of the road, the hapless traveller found himself suddenly under the shelter of high banks and hedges which intercepted the blast, the sudden contrast was so grateful that Colonel Sutherland withdrew his cloak from his blue face, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. There was nothing very particular to see: a common country road descending a slope—for which some necessity of the soil had made a deep cutting expedient—with a village within sight, and a soft, broad valley; green fields, dotted with farm-houses and haystacks, and leafless trees. The houses were all of the silvery-grey limestone of the district, and walls of the same stone, more frequent than hedge-rows, divided the fields. The old Colonel, drawing breath under the shadow of the bank, thought to himself that under sunshine the prospect would be very pleasant, and was scarcely pleased to find that this, the only comfortable bit of the road, was the one on which their progress was most rapid—and to hear that they were still ten long dreary miles from Marchmain.
“There was talk enow in the country, Cornel,” said the driver, resuming his discourse, “when a strange gen’l’man coom’d to take that ’ouse. Ne’er a sowl in twenty mile but had heard of Marchmain. I reckon you’ve never been there?”
“No,” said the traveller, briefly.
“He’s a terrible quiet gen’l’man too, as we hear say,” continued the man; “a great scholard, I do suppose—and ignorant folks have little understanding on the ways of sich. They say strange foot has never crossed the door this nine year. It’s a terrible place to bring up children, Cornel, is Lanwoth Moor, and the young gen’l’man and Miss they’re kepp as close at hoam as if they were but six-year-olds; never a gun on young master’s shoulder, and the young lady ne’er saw a dance in her born days. Them things come natural to young folks. I’m saying but what I hear: it might be a parcel o’ stories for ought I know—but Mr. Scarsdale yonder, he’s a very uncommon man.”
“Poor children!” said Colonel Sutherland half aloud, with a sigh. The open air, the rustle of the wind, and the noise of the wheels improved the Colonel’s hearing, as it so often does a gentle imperfection of the kind. He beard every word of these scattered observations, and began to feel more anxiety touching his visit to his morose brother-in-law than he would have thought possible when he started. He knew, it was true, the secret calamity which had driven his sister’s husband to the wilderness; but his own simple, pious, cheery spirit had no understanding of the unwholesome passions of a self-regarding soul. He had blamed himself for years for unconsciously feeling his relative’s withdrawal from life to be pusillanimous and unworthy of a man; but nothing had suggested to the practical and innocent-minded soldier a gloomy retreat such as that which began to be revealed to him by hints and suggestions now. He was unable to conceive how a man with children could make an utter hermit of himself, “especially children under their extraordinary circumstances,” said the Colonel anxiously, in his own heart. He grew silent, absorbed, troubled, as they proceeded on their way. When, immediately after settling himself on his return from India in a home of his own, that home often longed for, to which his sons could come in their holidays, he had volunteered a visit to his brother-in-law—it was the reciprocity of honest affection and kindred which the veteran wished to re-establish between his own family and their nearest relatives. He set out to visit the Scarsdales in the full idea that they too would visit him, and that the father of that household lived like himself in the tenderest friendship with those inheritors of his blood in whom he renewed his own youth; and with an old man’s sentiment of tender gallantry, this old soldier thought of Susan, the only surviving woman of his race, his sister’s daughter and representative, his baby-favourite long ago. Perhaps a floating idea of appropriating this only woman of the house had dawned upon his fatherly mind with other matters—for the Addiscombe cadet was a year older than Susan, and boys are so likely to marry when they go to India. At all events, it was a sunny, simple picture of family kindness and comfort which had presented itself to the honest eyes of the old soldier when he set out upon his journey. This prospect began to cloud over sadly now; he could not understand nor explain these singular circumstances, which must be facts, and visible to the common eye. A lonely house which no one else would live in, a seclusion which no stranger ever broke, young people shut out from the society of their fellows, and gloom and mystery upon the whole house! The Colonel wrapt his face once more in his cloak and subsided into deafness and silence, pondering painfully in his own mind what might be required of himself under such unexpected circumstances, and what he could do for the relief of Horace and Susan, whom in his kind heart he fondly called “the children.” These deliberations had come to no satisfactory result, when, rounding a corner of the road, the bare extent of Lanwoth Moor became suddenly visible, stretching to the fells, and the sky to the horizon, blurred with rain, where it was scarcely possible to tell which was hill and which was cloud.
They drove along in silence, a long half mile, seeing nothing but that same blank expanse traversed by the long, deep cuttings of an attempted drainage, until at last the driver silently, with a certain sympathy for the silence of his companion, pointed out the solitary walls rising on the edge of the moor. The house was a square, common-place erection of two stories, with no remarkable feature, but that one side was raised a story higher than the other, and stood up square and gray, like the little distinguishing tower of an Italian house. Like—yet how unlike!—the rough, gray limestone, unpolished and savage, the deep walls into which those small windows sank like cavernous eyes, the cold blue slated roof, the cold door coming bare out upon the path, without a morsel of garden or any enclosure, all enclosed and backed by that monotonous mystery of moor, the distant spectral hills, the clouds that carried them out in ghostly ranges, the wind and the rain so blended together that they made but one—and they went to the heart with a chill indescribable, and not to be resisted.
Colonel Sutherland looked upon all this with a sensation of anguish. It was incomprehensible to him. That he should find his relatives here, and not in the cheerful village house he had expected, overpowered him with complete wonder. He ceased even to be indignant at the father who sacrificed wilfully the happiness of his children—he suspended his judgment till he should hear what extraordinary circumstances had fixed them thus. In his unsuspecting heart he felt certain that something which he did not know must have produced this exaggerated and unnatural retirement. The sudden impression produced upon him by the sight of this house made his cheek pale, and added a nervous trembling to the shiver of the cold; he got down, stumbling at the door, which the driver watched with undisguised curiosity, as if something unnatural and portentous was about to make its appearance—and, in his emotion, let the money fall out of the purse which he took out to pay his conductor. While he stooped to pick it up, the door opened hastily, and Peggy rushed forth and seized the carpet-bag. At sight of her the Colonel recovered a little from his confusion and tremor.
“Thank God!” he exclaimed fervently, “there is some sunshine here at last.”
The driver opened his eyes somewhat disappointed. Peggy was not known at the country town, though Mr. Scarsdale’s extraordinary life had been heard of there; and the vigorous servant-woman, who began to scold forthwith between the exclamations of her joyful recognition, reduced the mysterious house to matter-of-fact. The man drove off, not knowing what to make of it; and fearing to hear of some new misfortune, with his honest heart beating with grief, sympathy, and anxiety to mend the position of his friends, Colonel Sutherland, after twenty years’ absence, entered at his brother-in-law’s inhospitable door.