CHAPTER VI.
Mrs. Pennant was a woman of some strength of character, which had never before come out so vividly as it did on the occasion of her husband’s death.
She spent very little time in weeping over his loss. She was one of those women in whom the instincts of maternal affection are much stronger than the marital; and in truth her patience had been so hardly tried by Captain Pennant’s almost imbecile mismanagement of his affairs and the necessity of controlling her exasperation into the outer aspect of submissive respect, that there was a touch of relief even in her sorrow.
The few days between the death and the funeral were passed by all in an uneasy state of apprehension as to what would follow. Rees was hardly ever in the house, and could not be approached on the subject of his future actions. Hervey mooned about, comforting himself, after his usual fashion, by great thoughts of life and death, and the impracticable things he would do to get his family out of their difficulties. Godwin went quietly backwards and forwards to the bank as usual. Deborah kept out of Mrs. Pennant’s way, believing, poor child, that as that lady had never liked her, and had only suffered her to remain a member of the household in consequence of the captain’s express wish, she should now be ignominiously expelled on the first decent opportunity.
Deborah was Captain Pennant’s truest mourner. During the days when he lay dead in the house, she spent most of her time watching by his coffin, gazing at the passionately loved face of her “father,” as she had always called him, and grieving over her loss with all the intensity of her fiercely loving nature. The remaining hours of her time she spent, not in luxurious regret at leaving the old house which had so long been her home, but in looking over the clothes of the boys and mending such as wanted repairs, and in doing every little bit of active work she could think of to save Mrs. Pennant trouble. She did not love Mrs. Pennant; sometimes she had felt she almost hated her; but she appreciated the sense of duty to her husband which had made the lady tolerate her presence, and she felt bound to make what small return she could before breaking what she believed to be to the elder lady a galling tie.
So, on the day after the funeral, Deborah presented herself early in the day before Mrs. Pennant in her walking dress. The elder lady was writing at the table, and the girl stood for some moments watching her, without speaking; she was a good deal affected by the prospect of parting, now that it was so near, more especially as she noticed that Mrs. Pennant had aged suddenly, and that her handsome face showed the lines and wrinkles brought by care and anxiety more clearly than ever before. At last Mrs. Pennant looked up.
“Oh, are you going out, Deborah? Would you mind taking these letters to the post for me? I have just finished.”
Deborah murmured assent, and Mrs. Pennant bent over her writing. As she closed the last envelope, she looked up again. The girl stepped forward and quietly took up the letters. Then, turning to go, she addressed Mrs. Pennant without facing her, for she was afraid of breaking down, and bringing upon herself a cold reproof.
“I am going away, mamma. I came in to say good-bye to you. I am afraid you will not believe me when I say I am sorry to leave you; you think me ungrateful, but I am not. I am afraid I have been a burden on you for a great many years; but, thanks to your goodness, I can support myself now. I shall never forget you, or the boys, or—or my dear, dear father—I mean Captain Pennant.”
Mrs. Pennant was entirely taken aback. It was not until this moment that she knew how much she should miss the bright, beautiful face, or how lonely she should feel without the girl whom, in spite of herself, she had long secretly looked upon as a daughter.
“This, this is very sudden. You might have spoken to me. I had a right to expect to be consulted,” she said, trying to speak coldly, but with a tremor in her voice.
“I didn’t know how—I didn’t like to trouble you,” faltered the girl.
“Where are you going to? What do you want to do?”
“I have got a situation as help, lady-help they call it, at a little town the other side of Monmouth.”
“Lady—help! A girl brought up as Captain Pennant’s daughter!” cried the poor lady, in disgust and dismay.
“Well, mamma, what could I do? I should never have had the patience to teach children; and I can cook and sew a little, and I’m sure I could scrub. Nobody will ever know me as Captain Pennant’s daughter any more,” she said sadly. “I am simply Deborah Audaer, the fisherman’s daughter.”
“But you can’t go back like that, it’s impossible,” said Mrs. Pennant pettishly. “You are a lady now, whatever you were born. And my husband adopted you as his daughter, so his daughter you will always be to me. And you must remain with me. Understand that.”
She spoke sharply and querulously, but with determination. Still Deborah stood before her, looking perturbed and undecided.
“Do you hear what I say?” asked the old lady, peremptorily.
“Yes, I hear, mamma,” answered Deborah, in a low-toned, broken voice. Then, after a moment’s further hesitation, she moved two steps nearer, sank down on her knees, and hid her face in Mrs. Pennant’s chair. “Mamma,” she whispered, “I can’t stay—if you speak to me like that. You must try to be fond of me, and I’ll stay, and be good to you, work for you if I can, comfort you if I can. You would never let me love you before—will you try now? Captain Pennant is gone, Rees doesn’t care for me now; I can’t live without any love, in the place where I had so much. I would rather go away among strangers; I could bear that better.”
Mrs. Pennant was touched. At last she felt her heart go out to the brave, frank girl, and she put a trembling hand upon her neck, where the soft brown hair strayed from under the sombre black bonnet.
“Stay, child,” she whispered. “You shall not have to complain.”
Half a word was enough for Deborah, craving, as she did, an affection to replace what she had lost. She threw her strong young arms round her with a clasp in which the poor harassed lady felt at last not only comfort, but support. And from that hour Deborah transferred, if not all, at least a great part of the affection she had felt for her adopted father to his widow, whom she cherished and served with a true daughter’s devotion.
Meanwhile, the unhappiest member of the household was poor Rees, who, before his father had been dead a week, found that his own position as head of the family had been practically usurped by his younger brother Godwin. This shrewd and energetic fellow, on learning Lord St. Austell’s offer to Rees and the latter’s refusal of it, had instantly been seized with the idea of applying himself for the post.
The earl was rather cold at first, feeling, on account of Rees’s conduct, a temporary disgust with the whole family. But Godwin insisted so humbly, representing truly enough that he had had, young as he was, much more business experience than his elder brother, that at last he gained his point to the extent of being appointed assistant steward on trial.
When Rees learnt this, although he tried to congratulate his brother, and to wish him God-speed on his journey northwards, he fell into a passion of remorse and anger, and, rushing out of the house towards the spot which he now began to haunt as regularly as Goodhare himself, he flung himself down under the trees in a large field which stretched under the western wall of the castle, and burying his face in his hands, gave himself up to a paroxysm of despair.
What had he done, he the spoiled favorite of the county, who had begun to look upon all men’s indulgence as his right, that he should suddenly find himself thrown down from his long-established position, an exile from Llancader, cut by all its inmates, neglected by Goodhare, and even avoided by his faithful slave, Deborah? For the girl’s spirit had at last rebelled against his curt assumption of indifference towards her; while, as for Amos, he had had reasons for his own for giving the young man a wide berth for a few days. Those few days, however, were now over; and that very afternoon Amos, having seized the opportunity of his dinner-hour for a prowl round the goal of his dreams, saw the young fellow as he lay stretched on the grass, and instantly decided that the time was ripe for another step. He came down to the lower ground, therefore, and called Rees gently by his name before the young fellow had heard his footsteps.
The lad sprung up with a flushed, wild face and reckless manner.
“Goodhare,” cried he, hoarsely, “I’ll begin hunting to-night, this very night.”
The elder man smiled gravely, and stroked his beard in a meditative manner.
“You have decided, then, to give Lord St. Austell the third part of a handsome fortune, if indeed we are so fortunate as to find anything at all, which possibly we may not do.”
“Well, let’s find it first, and we can talk about Lord St. Austell afterwards. The finders of a big hoard are entitled to something, I suppose?”
“Very little. They may claim a trifling percentage, I believe, perhaps 2 per cent. or 3 per cent., on the value of the find as assessed by the Crown. Enough to pay the expenses of the journey to London to claim it. But even then, there are such pleasures in London, such wines, such lovely faces—a week’s visit would be well worth all the trouble.”
“Wines! I don’t suppose the finest wine that ever was made would intoxicate me like a gallop over the hills here!” said Rees, doubtfully. “And as for faces, I don’t believe there’s another in England as handsome as Deborah’s!”
An ugly flush rose in the elder man’s cheeks at the mention of her name.
“Deborah! Why, she’s a negress compared to the London girls. They are the pick of the beauty-basket, as I think you will say. For if you cannot judge a woman’s beauty, who should, when all the pretty lasses in the county are waiting for you to throw them the handkerchief? But they are dumpy, dowdy creatures you will find when you get to London.”
“And if we find all this, we shall only get a few pounds? But that is not fair. What right has the Crown to it, that never heard of it? Or Lord St. Austell, who laughed at the idea of its existence?”
“That’s what I want to know. The Crown portion will perhaps be paid away in the pensions of those noblemen who are paid handsomely by the State for being the descendants of Charles the Second’s mistresses. Or it may be spent in keeping up Buckingham Palace, where the Sovereign never lives, and where a collection of splendid pictures moulders away in the company of the Royal spiders, the public not being allowed to enter and see them. I don’t know. And Lord St. Austell’s portion? Well, he will be able to enjoy himself in town upon that,” added Amos, with suggestive dryness.
“At any rate,” said Rees with excitement, “the thing is first to find it, before we settle what’s to be done with it.”
“That is just what I say.”
“How shall we begin?”
“You must take up a craze, say botany for instance, and start specimen-hunting inside the castle walls. You must have a pickaxe and spade; I will get you those up over the walls—and you must explore systematically, bit by bit. I will be on the watch outside. You will always let me know what part you are at work in, and I will keep watch. I have two hours in the middle of the day, and as many as you like at night.”
“All right. We’ll begin to-night.”
They parted with only a few more words, for Rees was oppressed by the consciousness that, explain it away as he might, he was about to do an underhand action; and Goodhare, when he had gained a point, was not a man to weaken his effect by superfluous words.
That night the search began. Day after day and night after night it continued, and always without result, until the young man’s heart grew sick within him, and the elder grew fierce with disappointed longing. In the hot afternoons, when the trees that grew thickly on the high banks of the Wye seemed to dance in a heat-mist; in the cool, summer nights, when the owls peered out with gleaming eyes from the ivy bushes which hung round the broken turrets, Rees worked on. He dug deep in the beaten earth which had collected in the ruined chambers. He clave with his pickaxe old beams that had fallen to the ground to become food for the busy worms. Not a grating in the ground that he did not examine; not a blocked-up doorway into which, by long and patient labor, he did not grope. Their way of working answered admirably. If any one from the neighborhood, or a party of tourists, approached the outer gate, Rees had instant warning from the watcher outside, and on the entrance of the visitors a handsome young man would be found seated on a broken step in the outer court or on a massive window embrasure in one of the damp, cool vaults below, attentively studying a bramble or a weed by the aid of a book or a microscope.
One curious discovery he made in the second week of his labors. It was that the earth on which the castle was built possessed the property of preserving, almost uninjured by damp or decay, anything which was buried at a certain depth within its bosom. For he came upon the bodies of various dead pets, a guinea-pig, a rabbit, and a white rat, to which his brothers, in their childhood, had given honorable sepulture within the castle walls; and they were all in a perfect state of preservation, except that they had become dry and shrivelled.
Amos Goodhare’s information here came in to account for this. He had himself visited certain caves in the neighborhood of Bordeaux, in which the bodies of a dozen dead monks were preserved, their habits still clinging, uninjured, round the shrivelled and wasted forms. He gave Rees a scientific account of the properties of the soil which produced this effect, to which the young man was too much excited to take heed.
For he had got an idea into his head that the subterranean passage, if it existed at all, by which the unlucky Lord Hugh had tried to make his escape, must start from a certain large vaulted chamber, the base of which and part of the walls were formed in the rock itself. This chamber was the lowest part of the castle, and not being so much exposed as the rest to storm and siege, was in an excellent stage of preservation. It looked out through a deep-walled window over the river, which formed at this point a beautiful bend, with trees on one side and swelling meadow ground on the other. The original level of the floor was at present not easily to be found, as the rock surface was encumbered with stones and earth.
Here it was, however, that Rees had resolved to make a search, the thoroughness of which should be complete. At last, on the fifth evening of his labors, when he had dug deep down in the piled-up earth, until the last of the daylight had faded out of the sky, he felt the floor tremble under his feet.
He was by this time in utter darkness, his spade working mechanically in the hard earth.
He stopped, shivering from head to foot, cold from excitement and an instinct of mad joy. A hoarse shout escaped his lips in spite of himself.
The next moment it turned to a low-breathed exclamation of savage impatience. For a girl’s voice called to him from the outer court, and in another minute the faint light which came through the doorway was blocked by her figure. It was Lady Marion Cenarth.
“What are you doing here, Rees Pennant,” she asked sharply.