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?
But with prosperity his heart grew soft again, and with it the voice of compunction made itself heard—at first, but faintly, and only at long intervals. Then, little by little, the haunting vision of a face in its agony of death-terror stole across the unclouded brightness of his life, and Time, which in its course blurs over all recollections as it rolls on, only served to bring out this one more vividly. In the dead of night would that face be staring at him, in the golden hours of the bright and peaceful day, that awful, agonised gasp would sound in his ears as he heard it on the brink of the abyss; and as the horror of this ever-brooding cloud across his sunshine swept full upon him with a weird and supernatural, yet none the less real a consciousness, a dejection settled down upon his mind, which, if allowed to grow apace, might end in the most disastrous of results.
And Olive—did she ever regret the step which had linked her lot to his, burdened as it was with a secret grief in which she had no share? Never, for the fraction of a moment. Always brave, loving, and patient, she strove to lighten his load. Even when suffering from a temporary depression of spirits herself, she would brace herself with an effort and cast care away in order that she might cheer him. She studied his moods, and when in her clear-sightedness she saw the dark hour about to come upon him, any sacrifice of her own comfort and convenience did she deem of small account if only she could keep up his spirits and lift him out of himself. And she had her reward. Never was he so happy as when alone with her—and as amid the night horrors of the fatal cave, with the wild waters surging around them, he had found refuge in her slumbering innocence and purity from the supernatural terrors which came crowding in, thick and fast, upon his soul, so now, in his dark and conscience-stricken moods, hers was the image that caused the evil spirit to fly; her tones, the music that rendered his ears deaf to the accusing voice; hers the protecting presence, beneath the weight of the ever-threatening cloud which he felt would sooner or later descend upon him and overwhelm him in his doom.
Yet why should it? No human eye witnessed that moonlight tragedy. Already the circumstances had faded into past history; nor at the time had any suspicion of violence arisen to fix people’s memory. But for all that, Roland was as firmly convinced that sooner or later the reckoning would overtake him, as that he himself was a living man, and when it did, he had little enough doubt as to the issue. And now, as we see him once more after two years, that crisis seems to him within measurable distance.