“No, no; you could not help me. It—it is an old affair, that has cropped up; it will be all right, but it has taken me by surprise. Leave me now, dear. Bartley is waiting for you.”
“Shall I tell him to come to you? He understands business, at least,” she added, with a touch of bitterness he did not notice.
“No,” he said, with a faint tinge of color coming into his white face. “Why should we worry him? Go now, dear; I would show you this letter if it could do any good, but it could not.”
She stole out, and the harassed man flung himself into a chair, and, flattening out the note, read it again and again, with the persistence of a man completely overwhelmed and bewildered.
It ran, in a hard, angular hand:
Sir—I beg to give you notice that I hold your notes of hand for various sums amounting in the whole to the total of five thousand eight hundred pounds, and that, being in want of money, I shall be obliged if you will take up the notes at my office on or before the twenty-sixth instant. I also beg to inform you that the mortgages on the Home Farm and Swivelscote have come into my possession, and that I have lodged formal notice of foreclosure with your solicitors. Trusting you will not be inconvenienced, and regretting that the tightness of the money market compels me to trouble you, I remain, your obedient servant,
Ezekiel Mowle.
The squire sat and pondered—if his confusion of mind could be termed pondering—over the letter. He had never heard this name of Mowle before, but at once understood that it must be that of some money-lender; some man who had, for reasons best known to himself, bought these debts, and, as he had a perfect right to do, required them paid.
He knew that the Home Farm and Swivelscote were both mortgaged above their value, and that any attempt to re-borrow the money would be futile. They would have to be sold. The Home Farm, that had been part and parcel of the Grange estate for centuries, and Swivelscote, which had been granted to the Vanleys by King Charles II.—they would have to be sold, and with them would go the pride and repute of the good, old name!
“Thank God, I have no son to reproach me!” murmured the squire, with quivering lips. “Thank God, my child will marry a rich man!” and he hid his face in his hands as he bowed over the letter of Ezekiel Mowle.