Book I.

I

"Aye, it's a bit dampish,"said Dixon, as he brought a couple more logs to replenish a fire that seemed to have no heart for burning.

The absurd moderation of the statement irritated the person to whom it was addressed.

"What I'm thinkin'"—said Mrs. Dixon, impatiently, as she moved to the window—"is that they'll mappen not get here at all! The watter'll be over t'road by Grier's mill. And yo'know varra well, it may be runnin'too fasst to get t'horses through—an'they'd be three pussons inside, an'luggage at top."

"Aye, they may have to goa back to Pengarth—that's varra possible."

"An'all t'dinner spoilin', an't'fires wastin'—for nowt."The speaker stood peering discontentedly into the gloom without:"But you'll not trouble yoursen, Tammas, I daursay."

"We ll, I'm not Godamighty to mak't'rain gie over,"was the man's cheerful reply, as he took the bellows to the damp wood which lay feebly crackling and fizzing on the wide hearth. His exertions produced a spasmodic flame, which sent flickering tongues of light through the wide spaces and shadows of the hall. Otherwise the deepening gloom of the October evening was lightened only by the rays of one feebly burning lamp standing apparently in a corridor or gallery just visible beyond a richly pillared archway which led from the hall to the interior of the house. Through this archway could be seen the dim ascending lines of a great double staircase; while here and there a white carved doorway or cornice glimmered from the darkness.

A stately Georgian house, built in a rich classical style, and dating from 1740: so a trained eye would have interpreted the architectural and decorative features faintly disclosed by lamp and fire. But the house and its contents—the house and its condition—were strangely at war. Everywhere the seemly lines and lovely ornament due to its original builders were spoilt or obliterated by the sordid confusion to which some modern owner had brought it. It was not a house apparently, so far as its present use went, but a warehouse. The re was properly speaking no furniture in it; only a multitude of packing-cases, boxes of all shapes and sizes, piled upon or leaning against each other. The hall was choked with them, so that only a gangway a couple of yards wide was left, connecting the entrance door with the gallery and staircase. And any one stepping into the gallery, which with its high arched roof ran the whole length of the old house, would have seen it also disfigured in the same way. The huge deal cases stood on bare boards; the splendid staircase was carpetless. Nothing indeed could have been more repellant than the general aspect, the squalid disarray of Threlfall Tower, as seen from the inside, on this dreary evening.

The fact impressed itself on Mrs. Dixon as she turned back from the window toward her husband.

She looked round her sulkily.

"We ll, I've done my best, Tammas, and I daursay yo'have too. But it's not a place to bring a leddy to—an'that's the truth."

"Foaks mun please theirsels,"said Dixon with the same studied mildness as before. Then, having at last made the logs burn, as he hoped, with some brightness, he proceeded to sweep up the wide stone hearth."Is t'rooms upstairs finished?"

"Aye—hours ago."His wife dropped with a weary gesture upon a chair near the fire."Tammas, yo'know it's a queer thing awthegither! What are they coomin'here for at all?"

"We ll, master's coom into t'property, an'I'm thinkin'it's nobbut his dooty to coom an'see it. It's two year sen he came into't; an'he's done nowt but tak't'rents, an'turn off men, an'clutter up t'house wi'boxes, iver sense. It's time, I'm thinkin', as he did coom an'luke into things a bit."

Thomas rose from his knees, and stood warming himself at the fire, while he looked pensively round him. He was as tired as his wife, and quite as mistrustful of what might be before them; but he was not going to confess it. He was a lean and gaunt fellow, blue-eyed and broad-shouldered, of a Cumbria type commonly held to be of Scandinavian origin. His eye was a little wandering and absent, and the ragged gray whiskers which surrounded his countenance emphasized the slight incoherence of its expression. Quiet he was and looked. But his wife knew him for one of the most incurably obstinate of men; the inveterate critic moreover of everything and every one about him, beginning with herself. This trait of his led her unconsciously to throw most of her remarks to him into the form of questions, as offering less target to criticism than other forms of statement. As for instance:

"Tammas, did yo'hear me say what I'd gotten from Mr. Tyson?"

"Aye."

"That the mistress was an Eye-talian."

"Aye—by the mother—an'popish, besides."

Mrs. Dixon sighed.

"How far'ull it be to t'chapel at Scargill Fell?"

"Nine mile. She'll not be for takkin'much notice of her Sunday dooties

I'm thinkin'."

"An'yo'unnerstan'she'll be juist a yoong thing? An't'baby only juist walkin'."

Dixon nodded. Suddenly there was a sound in the corridor—a girl's laugh, and a rush of feet. Thomas started slightly, and his wife observed him as sharply as the dim light permitted.

"Thyrza!"she raised her voice peremptorily."What are you doing there?"

Another laugh, and the girl from whom it came ran forward into the lamp-light, threading her way through the packing-cases, and followed by a small fox-terrier who was jumping round her.

"Doin'? The re's nowt more to do as I know on. An'I'm most droppin'."

So saying the girl jumped lightly on one of the larger packing-cases and sat there, her feet dangling.

Mrs. Dixon looked at her with disapproval, but held her tongue. Thyrza was not strictly her underling, though she was helping in the housework. She was the daughter of the small farmer who had been for years the tenant of part of the old house, and had only just been evicted in preparation for the return of the owner of the property with his foreign wife. If Thyrza were too much scolded she would take her ways home, and, as her parents spoilt her, she would not be coerced into returning. And how another"day-girl"was to be found in that remote place, where, beyond the farm, a small house belonging to the agent, and a couple of cottages, the nearest house to the Tower was at least three miles away, Mrs. Dixon did not know.

"My word! what a night!"said Thyrza with another laugh a little stifled by the sweets she had just transferred from her pocket to her mouth."They'll be drowned oot afore they get here."

As she spoke, a wild gust flung itself over the house, as though trying its strength against the doors and windows, and the rain swished against the panes.

"Are t'fires upstairs burnin'reet?"asked Mrs. Dixon severely. She had already told Thyrza half a dozen times that day that such a greed for sweet things as she displayed would ruin her digestion and her teeth; and it ruffled a dictatorial temper to be taken no more notice of than if she were a duck quacking in the farmyard.

"Aye, they're burnin',"said Thyrza, with a shrug. Then she looked round her with a toss of her decidedly graceful head."But it's a creepy old place howivver. I'd not live here if I was paid. What does Muster Melrose want wi'coomin'here? He's got lots o'money, Mr. Tyson says. He'll nivver stay. What was the use o'turnin'father out, an'makkin'a lot o'trouble?"

"This house is not a farmin'house,"said Dixon slowly, surveying the girl, as she sat on the packing-case swinging her feet, her straw-coloured hair and pink cotton dress making a spot of pleasant colour in the darkness as the lamp-light fell on them."It's a house for t'gentry."

"We ll, then, t'gentry might clean it up an'put decent furnishin's into't,"said Thyrza defiantly."Not a bit o'paperin'doon anywhere—juist two three rooms colour-washed, as yo'med do'em at t'workhouse. An'that big hole in t'dinin'-room ceilin', juist as'twas—and such shabby sticks o'things upstairs an'down as I nivver see! I'll have a good sight better when I get married, I know!"

Contempt ran sharply through the girl's tone.

As she ceased speaking a step was heard in the corridor. Thyrza leapt to the ground, Mrs. Dixon picked up her brush and duster, and Dixon resumed his tending of the fire.

A man in a dripping overcoat and leggings pushed his way rapidly through the cases, looking round him with an Air of worried authority.

"I don't call that much of a fire, Dixon."

"I've been at it, sir, for near an hour."

"You've got some damp wood. What about the drawing-room?"

He threw open a door on the right. The others followed him in.

The open door revealed a room of singular architectural charm; an oval room panelled in dark oak, with a stucco ceiling, in free It alianate design. But within its stately and harmonious walls a single oil lamp, of the cheapest and commonest pattern, emitting a strong smell of paraffin, threw its light upon furniture, quite new, that most seaside lodgings would have disdained; viz., a cheap carpet of a sickly brown, leaving edges of bare boards between itself and the wainscot; an ugly"suite"covered with crimson rep, such as only a third-rate shop in a small provincial town could have provided; with a couple of tables, and a"chiffonier,"of the kind that is hawked on barrows in an East End street.

Mr. Tyson looked at the room uneasily. He had done his best with the ridiculous sum provided; but of course it was all wrong.

He passed on silently through a door in the wainscoting of the drawing-room. The others again followed, Thyrza's mouth twitching with laughter.

Another large room, almost dark, with a few guttering candles on the table. Mrs. Dixon went hastily to the fire and stirred it up. Then a dining-table spread for supper was seen, and a few chairs. Everything here was as cheap and nasty as in the drawing-room, including the china and glass on the table.

Thyrza pointed to the ceiling.

"That's a pity howivver!"she said."Yo'might ha'had it mended up a bit, Mr. Tyson. Why t'rats will be coomin'through!"

She spoke with the pert assurance of a pretty girl who is only playing the servant"to oblige."The agent looked irritably at the ugly gap in the fine tracing overhead, and then at Thyrza.

"Mind your own business, please, Miss Thyrza!"And he walked quickly on toward a farther door.

Thyrza flushed, and made a face at him as he turned his back. The Dixons followed the agent into the next room, Mrs. Dixon throwing behind her an injunction to Thyrza to run upstairs and give a last look to the bedrooms.

"Why isn't there a light here?"said the agent impatiently. He struck one from some matches in his pocket, and Mrs. Dixon hastily brought a candle from a huge writing-table standing in the middle of the floor.

Except for that writing-table, and some fine eighteenth-century bookcases, brass-latticed, which ran round the walls, fitting their every line and moulding with delicate precision, the room was entirely empty. Moreover, the bookcases did not hold a single book, and the writing-table was bare. But for any person of taste, looking round him in the light of the candle which Mrs. Dixon held, the room was furnished. All kinds of human and civilized suggestion breathed from the table and the bookcases. The contriving mind, with all its happy arts for the cheating and adorning of life, was to be felt.

Mr. Tyson took it differently.

"Look here!"—he said peremptorily to Mrs. Dixon—"you mind what you're doing with that table. It's worth a mint of money."

The Dixons looked at it curiously, but coldly. To them it was nothing but a writing-table with drawers made out of a highly polished outlandish wood, with little devices of gilt rails, and drawer-furnishings, and tiny figures, and little bits of china"let in,"which might easily catch a duster, thought Mrs. Dixon, and"mak'trooble."That it had belonged to a French dramatist under Louis Quinze, and then to a French Queen; that the plaques were Sèvres, and the table as a whole beyond the purse of any but a South African or American man of money, was of course nothing to her.

"It bets me,"said Dixon, in the tone of one making conversation,"why

Muster Melrose didn't gie us orders to unpack soom more o'them cases.

Summat like thatten"—he pointed to the table—"wud ha'lukit fine i'

the drawin'-room."

Tyson made no reply. He was a young man of strong will and taciturn habit; and he fully realized that if he once began discussing with Dixon the various orders received from Mr. Edmund Melrose with regard to his home-coming, during the preceding weeks, the position that he, Tyson, intended to maintain with regard to that gentleman would not be made any easier. If you happened by mischance to have accepted an Appointment to serve and represent a lunatic, and you discovered that you had done so, there were only two things to do, either to hold on, or"to chuck it."But George Tyson, whose father and grandfather had been small land agents before him, of the silent, honest, tenacious Cumbria sort, belonged to a stock which had never resigned anything, till at least the next step was clear; and the young man had no intention whatever of"chucking it."But to hold on certainly meant patience, and as few words as might be.

So he only stopped to give one more anxious look round the table to see that no scratches had befallen it in the process of unpacking, gave orders to Mrs. Dixon to light yet another fire in the room, which struck exceedingly chill, and then left them for a final tour round the ground-floor, heaping on coals everywhere with a generous hand. On this point alone—the point of warmth—had Mr. Melrose's letters shown a disposition to part with money, in ordinary domestic way."The odiousness of your English climate is only matched by the absurdity of your English grates,"he had written, urbanely, from Paris."Get the house up to sixty, if you can. And get a man over from Carlisle to put in a furnace. I can see him the day after we arrive. My wife is It alian, and shivers already at the thought of Cumbria."

Sixty indeed! In this dank rain from the northeast, and on this high ground, not a passage in the house could be got above forty-six; and the sitting-rooms were alternately stifling and vaultlike.

"We ll, I didn't build the house!"thought the agent with a quiet exasperation in his mind, the result of much correspondence; and having completed his tour of inspection, which included the modest supper now cooking according to Mr. Melrose's orders—Mrs. Melrose had had nothing to do with it—in the vast and distant kitchen, the young man hung up his wet overcoat, sat himself down by the hall fire, drew a newspaper from his pocket, and deliberately applied himself to it, till the carriage should arrive.

Meanwhile through the rain and wind outside, the expected owner of Threlfall Tower and his wife and child were being driven through the endless and intricate lanes which divided the main road between Keswick and Pengarth from the Tower.

The carriage contained Mr. Melrose, Mrs. Melrose, their infant daughter aged sixteen months, and her It alian nurse, Anastasia Doni.

The re was still some gray light left, but the little lady who sat dismally on her husband's right, occasionally peering through the window, could make nothing of the landscape, because of the driving scuds of rain which drenched the carriage windows, as though in their mad charges from the trailing clouds in front, they disputed every inch of the miry way with the newcomers. From the wet ground itself there seemed to rise a livid storm-light, reflecting the last gleams of day, and showing the dreary road winding ahead, dim and snakelike through intermittent trees.

"Edmund!"said the lady suddenly, in a high thin voice, as though the words burst from her—"If the water by that mill they talked about is really over the road, I shall get out at once!"