CHAPTER V.
AN UNSELFISH FATHER.
The city of Daneford, on the river Weeslade, is about eighteen miles from the small watering-town, Seacliff, which stands in a little bay at the mouth of the river. Between Daneford and Seacliff the width of the river varies, but is never less than a mile.
At a distance of less than four miles from the city the river widens considerably into a loop, and in the loop is the island of Warfinger. The island, which rarely is called by its particular name, but is spoken of as "The Island," measures a mile long by half a mile broad. It rises gradually from the shores to the centre, and on the highest point of it stands Island Castle, the seat of the Midharsts for generations. In the neighbourhood the title of Island Castle is cut down also, and no one at all familiar with the locality ever calls it anything but "The Castle."
In the early part of the year 1866 the tenant for life of Island Castle was old Sir Alexander Midharst, a widower, who lived in the Castle in great retirement and the meanest economy. His wife had then been dead twenty years. She had died in giving birth to her only child, Maud, now rapidly approaching her majority; a girl of such gentle beauty and simple childlike manners that all who met her spoke of her beauty and her grace with tender respect and ready enthusiasm.
Maud Midharst did not need any adventitious aid to make her beauty apparent and her presence acceptable, but her delicate complexion, her dark sweet eyes, her pleasant smile, all came out in strong contrast with her surroundings at the Castle.
In the building everything, including the structure itself, seemed hastening to decay. The walls, the floor, the furniture, the servants, the master, all were old. She formed the one exception to the general appearance of approaching dissolution. The outer walls of the pile were seamed and lined, the water had eaten into the stone, the frost had cracked the mortar, and unsightly yellow stains lay upon the masonry, like long skeleton fingers pointing to the earth into which the walls were hastening.
When castles were places of defence as well as of residence, Island Castle was well known. It had stood two sieges, and had been a famous place of meeting among the Jacobites. Its insular position, the wide prospect it commanded, the fact that it could not be invested on all sides at once except by a whole army, the facilities it afforded to approach and flight of friends, and the difficulty, amounting almost to an impossibility, of reaching it by surprise except under the favour of night or a fog, all added together made it a place of great importance once upon a time.
The Castle had not always been in the Midharst family. It had come to them early in the eighteenth century, upon the failure in heirs male of the great Fleurey family, by which failure the historic earldom of Stancroft was lost to the blood for ever. The Midharsts had some of the female Fleurey blood in their veins, but it was of distant origin; and title to the fine castle and property was declared to Sir John Midharst, the first of his name who laid claim to it, only after long and expensive litigation and much scandal.
Up to that time the Midharsts had been poor baronets. The property accompanying the Island in the year 1866 brought in a rental of more than twenty-two thousand pounds a year.