Kitabı oku: «Dorrien of Cranston», sayfa 8
“A terrible gale raged all that night, and in the morning fragments of the missing boat were washed ashore. The craft had been splintered almost to matchwood. It was not till many days afterwards that Hubert Dorrien’s corpse came to light. At first the survivor would hardly mention the subject, much less give any account of it. Eventually, however, it leaked out that the boat had been driven upon The Skegs by the gale, and its occupants, thrown into the water, were forced to swim for their lives. And now, although nothing can be more reasonable and probable than this solution of the matter, it was not long before dark rumours began to get about. Of course, there could be no vestige of proof either way; for the tragedy out there in the black and storm-lashed bay was witnessed by no mortal eye. Months went by. The survivor became more and more morose, shunned everybody, and took to hard drinking. The cause of all the turmoil left the neighbourhood the week following on the tragedy. One morning. Cranston was in a state of alarm. The Squire was missing. Enquiry at length elicited that he had put out to sea the previous night accompanied only by his huge hound. Richard Dorrien was never seen again, neither was his dog. The night was wild and tempestuous, and it was at first thought that his boat had been swamped. But days and weeks went by, and no trace of wreckage came to light – and finally all hope was abandoned.
“Then suddenly an awful state of scare arose among the seafaring population. Ghostly bayings began to be heard at night on the cliff in the neighbourhood of The Skegs. They were heard by fishermen in their boats at sea and by belated wanderers out on the down. Some had even made out the shape of a large dog resting on the summit of the loftier of The Skegs. Forthwith, the theory took root that Richard Dorrien had, beyond doubt, murdered his brother, and in expiation was doomed to haunt the scene of the tragedy and take the shape of his huge and savage boar-hound. Those who have any idea to what depths of superstition the country population was in those days plunged, can easily imagine the frantic terror which such an apparition would have for the pliers of a dangerous calling. Why, to this day you can’t induce one of the fisher folk to venture too near The Skegs – let alone land there.”
“But wasn’t there a death warning conveyed by the apparition?” asked Roland.
“Ah! now we come to the strangest part of the whole story. There got about soon afterwards a curious prophecy; no one has ever been able to tell with whom it originated. Perhaps you know it?”
“I know that this shape is said to appear whenever one of us had lived long enough, and that it is predicted that we are none of us to die in our beds, but yet bloodlessly, which is a consolation to any of us who may be engaged in a scrimmage. But the prediction has been falsified – on the last occasion at any rate. My brother Vernon tumbled into a crevasse, you know, and as the poor chap must have been dashed to pieces the tradition fails.”
“Well, I don’t want to encourage you in any uncomfortable apprehensions, Dorrien; but what you say does not necessarily follow.”
“Now you mention it, no more it does. And it is undoubtedly a queer thing that we should all have come to grief by water. I suppose, as a glacier is frozen water, the last instance holds good. Then there was my uncle, who died suddenly on deck, and was buried at sea. My grandfather, again, was drowned while skating, and they say the tradition carries itself further back still. However, as we seem all born to be drowned we can none of us be hanged, so there’s a bright side to even that situation. By the way, was the ‘Ban’ to the fore on the last occasion?”
“I only know that so it was reported. A shepherd came running in from Durnley Downs one night, with a white face and chattering teeth, and vowed he had seen and heard the dog on The Skegs. Two days afterwards the news of the disaster arrived. But I wouldn’t trouble my head about the affair, if I were you.”
“Not I. Life is a precious deal too prosaic and tangible a concern for a man to bother himself about local superstitions.”
“Well, I should have imagined that would be your idea, or I would not have opened my mind upon a gruesome tradition which is supposed to concern you and yours,” was the rector’s reply, in a more careless tone than he had adopted yet.
One side of the prophecy, however, he withheld from his questioner. This was, that though every male Dorrien should under it meet with a bloodless death – presumably by water – the power of the “Ban” would at last be broken – broken by some terrible and tragic eventuality, obscurely and ambiguously hinted at.
“By Jove, Doctor, but you do know how to tell a ghost story,” laughed Roland, when the other had done. “Why, you spun that yarn as if you believed every word of it yourself.”
“Well? That’s the right way to tell any story, isn’t it?” said the rector carelessly. And then, as it was getting late, Roland got up to leave.
Later, as he was sending his bicycle through the pouring rain at a pace which should make short work of the three miles of smooth but hilly road which lay between the Rectory and Cranston – Roy, a draggled mass of woolly mud, galloping behind – the incidents of the strange and gruesome tale seemed to take hold of his mind in the darkness.
“Looks as if the prediction was going to be fulfilled again in my own case at the rate this infernal rain’s coming down,” he said to himself, half jocosely, half grimly.
Chapter Fifteen.
At Ardleigh
In due course, Roland availed himself of the invitation to which we heard his father make reference, and transferred himself and his luggage to the ancestral home of the Nevilles.
There the cordiality of his reception surprised and pleased him. The Colonel was, as we have seen, very well disposed towards the son of his old friend and comrade-in-arms, and, moreover, was delighted to have a companion for the smoking-room and the morning lounge; one, too, who was such a capital listener; for to Roland the old man’s stories were all new, and being good in themselves when not heard too often, the normal quiet of Ardleigh was apt to be disturbed by much uproarious mirth when the two got together. As for Clara, she seemed to have quite forgotten any little unpleasantness which had taken place when they last met, and had put on her most gracious and agreeable manner for their guest’s benefit; and as she knew how to show to advantage when she chose, and was exceedingly clever and well informed, Roland found himself beginning to feel rather ashamed of his former bad opinion of her. Mrs Neville, who was somewhat of an invalid and of an argumentative – not to say contradictious – turn, forbore to snub him as she was wont to snub everything male under the age of fifty. “Young men want continually putting down, even when they are right” – was her creed, and, truth to say, she acted up to it most religiously. But in Roland’s favour exception was made; whether it was that he was known to possess “a queer temper” – his father’s own son, in fact – or that there was some ulterior reason for making his stay a particularly attractive one, his conversational remarks were allowed to pass unchallenged by his hostess to an extent which caused the girls to exchange frequent glances of surprise. Even Roy’s presence was not only tolerated, but welcomed, and the woolly rascal, before he had been twenty-four hours at Ardleigh, ran in and out as he pleased, according to his usual way of making himself perfectly at home wherever he went.
“By the way, how does our reformed black sheep, Steve Devine, get on in the capacity of a thief set to catch a thief?” asked Roland, as he and his host were smoking their after-breakfast cigars on the terrace one morning.
“All right as yet,” replied the latter, who being in want of an under-keeper, had, on Roland’s representations partly, appointed the ex-poacher to that office a few days after his release from gaol – “in order to give him a fair chance of starting afresh,” as the kind-hearted old soldier put it. The latter’s friends, indeed, shook their heads over the arrangement, and prophesied that it would lead to no good – but the Colonel was not to be upset in his benevolent scheme once he had made up his mind. So Devine found himself installed in a snug berth with good wages, and if, being in such a fair way to doing well, he did not do it, why, he would have himself only to thank for it as an ungrateful rascal.
Now the ex-poacher knew perfectly well that he owed this piece of luck largely to Roland’s good word for him, for his employer had told him as much; and this being so, of course, by all the rules of that maudlin and slobbery optimism which usually characterises human nature in fiction – especially cad human nature – he should have become eternally grateful, and his former hostility straightway have been metamorphosed to lifelong devotion. But was this the case?
Not even a little bit. No idea of gratitude ever entered his head. It was only for his own purposes that the young Squire of Cranston had helped him, argued this ruffian, with the low suspicious cunning of his class, but he, Devine, would keep a weather eye open, never fear.
He was right in a way. Roland had acted to serve his own purposes, but in a directly opposite sense to that suspected by Gipsy Steve.
“By the way, Roland,” went on the Colonel, “that daughter of his is a monstrously pretty girl, eh! By Jove, sir, but I don’t believe you’d have bothered your head about them if she’d had a snub nose and a squint, eh?”
“No, I shouldn’t. Beauty in distress appeals to the susceptibilities of man, whereas hideosity in similar case does not – unchivalric, even brutal as the confession may sound. But as the girl is only on a visit to her father – doesn’t live with him – my character may be regarded as clear.”
“Ha-ha! You dog!” laughed the jolly Colonel. “That reminds me of – ”
But what it reminded him of did not transpire, for at that moment they were joined by Clara, basket in hand. She was going to gather some roses, she said. Roland, however much he might or might not have preferred his cigar and his host’s more or less sporting stories, could do nothing less than offer to help her. Which offer was graciously accepted.
“Ha-ha! Roland, she’ll make you do all the finger-licking part of the business,” jocosely cried the Colonel after them.
“By the bye, what was the sequel to that unlucky smash in the conservatory?” said Clara, as they turned into the garden path. “The orchid, I mean. Did you get frightfully scolded?”
This in reference to a casualty which had befallen during the speaker’s stay at Cranston, when again the sweep of Roy’s blundering tail had wrought mischief, breaking a fairly valuable orchid.
“No – I was let down rather easily. The veteran said it wasn’t a very rare one, and only remarked in his glum way that he supposed dogs would be happier outside conservatories than in them.”
“Ah! I’m glad of that; I was afraid the General would have been dreadfully vexed. Can you reach that, Mr Dorrien? There, if I hold down the bough – so – thanks. Now that other one.”
Her tall, elegant figure showed to advantage in the light morning dress, as in easy attitude she reached up to hold the refractory bough – Clara Neville was not one to indulge in unbecoming exertions. Her voice was low and well modulated, and fell pleasantly upon the ear – around them blossoming rose-bushes and the fragrant scents of the garden – and in the background bits of the red-brick Elizabethan house peeped at them through the trees. In no wise was he insensible to the influences of the picture and its central figure, the graceful, handsome girl talking to him in easy, familiar manner and with her most attractive smile; and then for the first time his father’s words, spoken on the evening of the day he first saw Clara Neville, darted across his mind, “She will have Ardleigh Court” – and now it also dawned upon him that the words had been spoken with design.
Yet how many men would willingly have changed places with him! And, even as things stood, his father’s cherished scheme, for now he felt instinctively that such it was, would not have come adversely to him – if – ah! that little “if!”
“Oh, Mr Dorrien – there, look, you’ve splashed me all over by letting go of that branch too soon,” cried Clara, with a little shiver. “And it has all gone up my sleeve, and it’s rather cold. But never mind,” she added with a laugh, “you’ve come off second best. How you’ve scratched yourself!”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” he replied hastily, apologising for his remissness and feeling guilty. The branch which he had let go of was thorny, and had torn his hand at the same time as it had sprinkled his fair companion with the rain-drops which hung upon its leaves.
“I think we’ve picked enough now, so we can go in. By the way, papa warned you that you would find the thorns your portion, didn’t he?” she said, with a smile.
In his present train of thought the phrase struck him as prophetic. He feared that many thorns would encompass the path by which he was to reach his desired goal, yet none the less was he determined to reach it.
“Mr Dorrien,” said Maud Neville, at luncheon, “the Fates have ordained that you shall go to a tennis party with us at the Pagnells’ this afternoon. Now, don’t swear – secretly, I mean.”
“Maud!” ejaculated her mother.
“If you only knew how urgently Isabel entreats us to bring you, Mr Dorrien,” said Clara, “you would be far too much flattered – or ought to be.”
“Ho-ho! Roland,” laughed the Colonel. “No slipping away to smoke a quiet weed this time, no matter how heavy in hand the entertainment.”
“I don’t think it’ll be heavy,” said Clara. “Isabel generally manages to get together a lively enough set. Too lively sometimes, for it is a favourite trick of hers to ask all the people to meet each other who are most ‘at dead cuts.’”
“Very bad taste of her,” put in Mrs Neville. “But I don’t know what girls are coming to now-a-days.”
Bankside, the Pagnells’ house, was a pretty, old-fashioned box, perched on the side of a hill and commanding a lovely view of the Wandsborough valley. A snug, leafy retreat, all shrubbery and flowers and smooth lawns – it was just the place for open-air festivities. We have already made the acquaintance of its lord on the magisterial bench, which is as well, as we shall not see him here. He has a horror of social gatherings, and leaves all duties of entertaining to his eldest daughter, Isabel – a tall, handsome girl of five-and-twenty.
“So here you are at last, Clara,” was the latter’s greeting, as she came forward to receive the Ardleigh party. “You disappointing girl! I particularly asked you to come rather early, and so you wait until the last moment. How are you, Mr Dorrien? And now – come and have some tea.”
“You seem to have got together a good many new people, Isabel,” said Clara, as they made their way to the tennis ground. “First of all, who is that tall young fellow in white flannels over there, laughing as if he would never stop?”
“Where? Oh, that. That’s Eustace Ingelow. Nice looking boy, isn’t he? Odd you’ve never met him – and hasn’t he grown handsome? I’ll introduce him,” and in obedience to her beckoning signal, the subject under discussion hastened lip and was introduced in due course. Even Clara, who was not fond of the family, readily admitted that in appearance the rector’s son bore out her friend’s eulogium. Tall and well-made, his sun-browned, handsome face wearing the brightest and merriest of expressions, and his manner, though perfectly free and unaffected, devoid of all approach to bumptiousness, the young fellow had been winning golden opinions from everybody.
“Ah, Mr Dorrien, I’ve heard of you,” he said, turning his dark eyes upon this new acquaintance. “Awfully glad to meet you,” and a hearty hand-grip cemented their friendship on the spot.
“Now, Mr Dorrien, no shirking, if you please,” cried Isabel laughingly. “It has been my sole object in life this afternoon to let no two men hang together; so come along and be introduced all round, and do your duty. Can’t help it, Clara, must be done,” she added, with the faintest possible significance in her tone as she turned away.
Roland felt rather savage. He wanted to elicit some information from Eustace Ingelow, by dint of a few carelessly worded questions, but no opportunity was vouchsafed him. However, he descried Margaret on the other side of the lawn, and upon her presently he bore down.
” – Expecting them home? But they are home, Mr Dorrien,” said Margaret in surprise, answering a question as to her sisters’ return. “They came back yesterday. Olive is rather unwell to-day, and is staying at home. Have you met my brother?” as the latter passed them, talking to Nellie Dorrien, to whom he had obtained an introduction.
“I say, Margaret,” said the graceless youth, stopping a moment, “old mother Frewen seems as sulphurous as ever. Look at her over there, ‘testifying.’ You ought to have converted her by this time,” with a quizzical glance in the direction of an old lady, who was an “aggrieved parishioner” of a perfervid type.
“Don’t talk nonsense, Eusty. Someone will hear you.”
“Ha! ha! Let’s go and hear her, at a respectful distance, eh, Miss Dorrien? – it’ll be fun,” suggested crafty Eustace, with the object of beguiling Nellie for a walk round the shrubberies – an object in which he succeeded; and judging from the frequency with which the fair, sweet face was convulsed with laughter, it seemed that they managed to make the time pass right merrily.
“Nellie, your mother has been looking for you everywhere. It’s time to go home,” said a cold voice at her elbow, and turning with a little start of dismay, she found herself face to face with her father, who was looking very stern and gloomy.
“Yes, papa. I’m so sorry,” and, with a hurried farewell to her companion, she proceeded to obey the implied injunction, her experience warning her that there were squalls ahead; while her late escort, disconsolately anathematising the lord of Cranston as a cantankerous old ruffian, betook himself once more to the assemblage of his fellows.
“Who was that boy with whom you spent the afternoon, Nellie?” asked General Dorrien, in the carriage on the way home.
“I didn’t know I had spent the afternoon with anyone, papa,” she replied, as gently as she could. “But if you mean who was I talking to when you came up, it was Mr Eustace Ingelow.”
“Was it? A most impertinent boy, I call him,” went on her father, with a very dark look. “Because he meets anyone in society, that seems a sufficient reason for monopolising them for the rest of the afternoon. An impudent, pushing, and most forward young cub, to come thrusting himself upon us, and you to encourage him! Who is he, I should like to know? We’ve never seen him before, and, if I can help it, we shall never see him again.”
Poor Nellie made no reply, beyond a weary little sigh. What had she done? Why, the duration of their harmless little walk had barely exceeded half an hour. And in her heart of hearts she owned to herself that the said half-hour had flown very quickly indeed.
“I say, dad,” cried Eustace Ingelow that evening at the dinner-table. “I like that man Dorrien. Rather reserved and – er – quiet at first – the sort of man who wants knowing, eh?”
“H’m, so that’s your opinion, is it?” said the rector, somewhat attentively. “Now I shouldn’t have thought he’d have been at all the sort of fellow you’d have taken to at first sight, Eustace.”
“Yes, he is,” replied the Oxonian decidedly. “He’s a man with a lot in him, I should think. Now that brother of his – the one that’s at Queen’s – he’s a – a – well, a scrubby sort, but I like this one. Roland, don’t they call him, eh?”
“It strikes me, from all accounts, that you like his sister a great deal more,” cried Sophie. “Why, Eusty, you disgraceful boy, you know you flirted outrageously with her all the afternoon.”
“Bosh! What next?” he protested, growing very red. “You girls think a fellow can’t speak to another girl without – er – without – . Besides you weren’t there, and you should never take hearsay evidence, Sophonisba, my jewel.”
“Never mind her, Eusty,” struck in Olive, who had recovered her spirits simultaneously with the return of her brother full of the doings at the Pagnells’. “Never mind her – Nellie Dorrien’s a dear, sweet girl, and you might do worse.”
“What do you think of that, dad? Just listen to them, how they badger a fellow.”
“No – no – I won’t come to your rescue,” cried the rector, with a hearty laugh. “You must fight them single-handed. What’s the good of going to Oxford if it doesn’t teach you to take care of yourself, and against a pack of women, too?”
