The Heart of a Mystery

by T. W. Speight

After this, Broome saw little of its master except at infrequent intervals. His visits rarely lasted longer than a fortnight at a time, after which he would be off again, either to London, or to the country house of one or another of his many friends. Meanwhile, Lady Pengarvon vegetated from year end to year end in the gloomy old house, seeing scarcely any company and rarely going from home, bringing up her daughters, giving sparingly to the poor, and being exercised in her mind for weeks before she ventured on the extravagance of ordering a new gown. All this time no heir male came to gladden his parents' hearts. Sir Jasper felt himself to be a deeply injured man, while his wife pined in secret and shut herself up from the world more closely than ever.

The Baronet had not been idle all this time. He had been doing his best, with the aid of the gaming-table, to dissipate the broad acres which had come down to him from a dozen generations of thrifty ancestors. It was a pleasant life, but unfortunately it couldn't last for ever. The end came when his eldest daughter was seventeen years old. His own fortune, his wife's fortune, the proceeds of the sale of every acre of land and every foot of timber that he had the power to sell had slipped through his fingers as easily as water through a sieve, till nothing was left save the old house of Broome, with a few acres of sparsely-timbered land about it, together with two small farms of the rental value of eighty pounds a year each, which it was not in the Baronet's power to touch. Beyond that the ruin was complete.

It was when affairs had come to this pass that Lady Pengarvon took it into her head to die. Her husband admitted that, under the circumstances, it was the most sensible thing she could have done. The poor lady was well out of her troubles.

Hardly was the funeral over before the Baronet packed off his daughters to some of their mother's relatives, and shut up the house, after which nothing definite was known as to his movements for nearly three years. At the end of that time information came to hand that Sir Jasper Pengarvon was about to take to himself a second wife, in the person of the daughter of a rich London drysalter, with a fortune of twenty-five thousand pounds.

The new Lady Pengarvon proved to be an unrefined, good-natured woman, who had probably been very pretty when she was a dozen years younger. Between her and the young ladies, her step-daughters, there was a great gulf, which they took care she should never overpass. She was their father's wife, and as such they treated her with civility and a certain amount of respect; but it was with a civility that chilled, and with a respect which seemed ever to imply, "We cannot rid ourselves of you, and consequently must tolerate you, bat don't look to us for anything more."

At the end of half a dozen years the second Lady Pengarvon went the way of her predecessor, fading slowly out of life under the cold, watchful eyes of Miss Barbara and her sister, which seemed to say, "We know you can't last long, and we shall not mourn you over-much when you are gone." She left behind her one little daughter, Isabel by name, who was at once packed off to a sister of her mother, near London; then the two Misses Pengarvon breathed more freely, and felt that Providence had not been unkind to them.

Meanwhile, Sir Jasper had resumed his old career in London as though there had never been a break in it. The young ladies saw little more of their father after the second Lady Pengarvon's death than they had before. He went down to Broome occasionally for a few days at a time, but that was all. He lived five years longer; then one morning he was found dead in his Mayfair lodging with a bullet through his heart. Once more he had come to the end of his resources. It was hopeless to think of marrying a third fortune. There stared him in the face an old age of obscure penury away from the haunts he loved so well, and the prospect daunted him. He died as he had lived, an utter pagan.

A few years later, the aunt with whom Isabel had gone to live died, and Miss Pengarvon found herself under the necessity of sending Barney Dale for the child, there being no other home for her than Broome. Isabel at this time was a blue-eyed, yellow-haired little lady of seven, the very presentment in features and expression of a certain youthful Miss Pengarvon whose portrait by Sir Joshua graced the gallery at Broome. In truth, the drysalter's little grand-daughter had all the traditional beauty of the women of her father's race--a beauty which had so unaccountably lapsed in the case of her elder half-sisters, niece though their mother had been to an earl.

It was in the dusk of an autumn afternoon that Barney Dale and his charge reached Broome. The Misses Pengarvon were awaiting the child in the old oak parlor, which even on the brightest day in summer was gloomy and full of strange shadows. The elder sister came forward a step or two, and taking Isabel by the hand, gazed down in frowning silence on the fair young face, which returned her look with wondering, frightened eyes. A faint momentary color flushed her sallow cheeks. Then she stooped and pressed her thin, cold lips to Isabel's forehead.

"So you are come back to Broome, child. They had better have found you another home," she said in her dry, hard voice, in which not the slightest chord of sympathy ever seemed to vibrate. Miss Letitia, who copied her sister in everything, went through a similar formula.