"With my life," he answered.
"What's this I'm saying?" again Maud cried, checking herself. "There's a dark hour at hand for thy house, I tell thee. God give thee the strength to bear it!"
And she faltered away as quickly as she could, passed through the gate, and entered the lodge, leaving Randolph still seated, motionless, upon the timber.
Old Maud Basset was deeply versed in all the wild superstitions which still lingered among the Cornubians. She knew the presages which foretold sorrow or death to different old houses. Here, the fall of one of the trees in the avenue was the harbinger of dole; there, ancient logs of timber rose to the surface of the pool in the park before a coming vacancy at the family board. She could tell, too, how drowned persons broke the stillness of night by hailing their own names; of the candle borne by unseen hands in the track of a future funeral; of many a kind of unholy augury; of evil spirits who led wayfarers astray, and precipitated them from the summit of their carns; and in particular of Tregagel, condemned for his many ill deeds to empty the fathomless pool of Dosmary by means of a limpet shell with a hole in it.
The incoherence of the old woman's speech, and her half-uttered predictions, tallied very exactly with some of the feelings which had of late been familiar to Randolph. Mildred, indeed, still occupied by far the greatest portion of them; but his thoughts not unfrequently wandered from her to the dream which had visited him the first night of his return to the castle, and the fair face which had been pressed to his own. That the features so revealed were those of his mother he never doubted, and he felt a restless desire to learn something of the parent whom he had lost before he was three years' old. But to whom should he apply for information? Where could he find the sympathy which such a topic demanded? The long silence that had been observed respecting it, within the castle, must, he thought, have been the effect, in part, of a deficiency of interest, and therefore he was reluctant to open his wishes, even to the chaplain. And without the walls he knew no one to confer with on such a subject. So he was at once fascinated by old Maud's sudden allusion to her child, and answered her questions from the recollections of his dream.
But what did she mean by her reiterated reference to Margaret's death, and her dark announcement of coming calamity? The latter, indeed, harmonized but too well with his own gloomy forebodings—"Who said there was no marriage?—Thou wilt defend her fame?" What was the meaning of such ominous insinuations? Randolph mused on them, without quitting the posture in which Maud had left him, until they became so oppressive, that he resolved to learn all the story from Polydore, without delay.
In the dusk of the evening, he walked with the chaplain in the picture-gallery of the castle. The dim light which came through the high Gothic windows, gave strange and unintended expression to some of the portraits, and left others in such deep shadow that they could hardly be discerned, while the vaulted ceiling hung indistinct over head. Randolph paused at length before the likeness of his father. It was painted when Henry Trevethlan was in the prime of youth, and presented the aspect of a man very different indeed from the cold and stern personage with whom his son was acquainted.
"What changed that countenance, Mr. Riches?" Randolph asked. "What swept away the ardour and enthusiasm which beam from all those lineaments? From what he told me himself, in his dying hour, I framed a tale of hopeless attachment, of love striving to forget itself in ruin. Was it so? Did Esther Pendarrel indeed break my poor father's heart, after trifling with its affection? Methinks, he was not a man to be made a mock of. Yet the mocker has prevailed."
"Randolph," Polydore answered, with a deep sigh, "your speech brings back days of sorrow, which I would were forgotten. But that was all past before I became a resident here. From the steward only, and from popular report, did I learn the intimacy which once subsisted between your father and Mrs. Pendarrel. It was in a thoughtless hour, if all that's said be true, that she crushed his last hopes by wedding. And so, by this time, she knows, perhaps, too well."
"Did she love him, then, Mr. Riches?" Randolph inquired quickly.