As Sir Noel was about to mount the terrace steps, a lad in uniform came up the chestnut avenue, and gave him a telegram, which he tore open with more agitation than such papers had ever produced in him before.
A young relative of ours, the daughter of William Jessup, a gardener at 'Norston's Rest,' is with us, in a state of health that requires immediate attention. I found her, by accident, in the office of the Australian line of packets. She had taken a passage, but not in her own name, and I could only persuade her to go home with me by a promise that I must break, or permit her to depart as she evidently wishes, unknown to her friends. I send this in urgent haste, and confiding in your discretion.
The signature was that of a young artist, whose name was attached to a picture of some promise that Sir Noel had bought because he remembered that the person was a connection of Jessup's.
With his pencil Sir Noel wrote a brief reply, which the boy carried away with him.
Two events of unusual importance happened at "Norston's Rest," the next day. It was given out in the village that Sir Noel and his family had gone up to the London house that the young man might be nearer his physicians, and that Lady Rose had taken Ruth Jessup with her, thinking that change of scene might soften the melancholy into which she had fallen. This sudden movement hardly found general discussion, when something more terrible filled the public mind. The body of Richard Storms had been found floating in the Black Lake, three days after Sir Noel's departure. It had evidently risen from the depths, and become entangled in the broken timbers still swaying from the balcony. When he failed to return from the fair, as he had promised, his mother, remembering the weird visitor who had called her up in the dead of the night, betook herself to the lake, and was at last joined by the old farmer, whose distress was even greater than her own, for he had a deeper knowledge of the young man's character, and this gave ground for fears of which she, kind woman, was made ignorant by her deep motherly love.
Thus fear-haunted, these two old people wandered about the lake day after day, until, one morning, they found a group of men upon the bank, talking solemnly together, and looking down upon the broken timbers still weltering in the water, as if some painful interest had all at once been attached to them.
When these people saw the old man and woman coming toward them, they shrunk back and left a passage by which they could pass into the old building, but no one spoke a word.
No noise, no outcry came from those two people when they saw their only son lying upon the bench where the neighbors had laid him down; but when one of them went in, troubled by the stillness, he found the old man standing against the wall, mournful and dumb, looking upon the dead face, as if the whole world had for him been cast down there. He did not even seek to comfort the poor mother, who was kneeling by the bench, with her arms clasped about all that was left of her son, unconscious that his dripping garments were chilling her bosom through to the heart, or that the face to which she laid hers with such pathetic mournfulness had been frozen to marble in the depths of the lake.
As the kind neighbor drew near and would gladly have offered consolation, the poor old woman looked up with a piteous smile on her lips and said:
"My brave, brave lad lost his life in saving a poor creature, who would have been drowned but for him."