Black Swan Inn, Ullerton, October 2nd.
As the work I am now employed in is quite new to me, and I am to keep Sheldon posted up in this business day by day, I have decided on jotting down the results of my inquiries in a kind of diary. Instead of writing my principal a formal letter, I shall send a copy of the entries in the diary, revised and amended. This will insure exactitude; and there is just the possibility that the record may be useful to me hereafter. To remember all I hear and pick up about these departed Haygarths without the aid of pen and ink would be out of the question; so I mean to go in for unlimited pen and ink like a hero, not to say a martyr.
And I am to do all this for twenty shillings a week, and the remote possibility of three thousand pounds! O genius, genius! in all the markets of this round world is there no better price for you than that?
How sweetly my Charlotte looked at me yesterday, when I told her I was going away! If I could have dared to kneel at her feet under those whispering elms — unconscious of the children, unconscious of the nursemaids — if I could have dared to cry aloud to her, “I am a penniless reprobate, but I love you; I am a disreputable pauper, but I adore you! Have pity upon my love and forget my worthlessness!” If I could have dared to carry her away from her prim suburban home and that terrible black-whiskered stockbroking stepfather! But how is a man to carry off the woman he adores when he has not the de quoi for the first stage of the journey?
With three thousand pounds in my pocket, I think I could dare anything. Three thousand pounds! One year of splendour and happiness, and then — the rest is chaos!
I have seen the oldest inhabitant. Ay de mi! Sheldon did not exaggerate the prosiness of that intolerable man. I thought of the luckless wedding guest in Coleridge’s grim ballad as I sat listening to this modern-ancient mariner. I had to remind myself of all the bright things to be bought for three thousand pounds, every now and then, in order to endure with fortitude, if not serenity. And now the day’s work is done, I begin to think it might as well have been left undone. How am I to disintegrate the mass of prosiness which I have heard this day? For three mortal hours did I listen to my ancient mariner; and how much am I the wiser for my patience? Clever as you may fancy yourself, my friend Hawkehurst, you don’t seem to be the man for this business. You have not the legal mind. Your genius is not the genius of Scotland-yard, and I begin to fear that in your new line you may prove yourself a failure.
However, where all is dark to me the astute Sheldon may see daylight, so I’ll observe the letter of my bond, and check off the residuum of the ancient mariner’s prosiness.
By dint of much pumping I obtained from my ancient, first, his father’s recollections of Matthew Haygarth a few years before his death, and secondly, his grandfather’s recollections of Matthew in his wild youth. It seems that in those last years of his life Matthew was a most sober and estimable citizen; attended the chapel of a nonconforming sect; read the works of Baxter, and followed in the footsteps of his departed father; was a kind husband to a woman who appears to me to have been rather a pragmatical and icy personage, but who was esteemed a model of womanly virtue, and who had money. Strange that these respectable and wealthy citizens should be so eager to increase their store by alliance with respectable and wealthy citizenesses.
In his later years Matthew Haygarth seems to have imitated his father in many respects. Like his father, he executed more than one will; and, like his father, he died intestate. The lawyer who drew up his will on more than one occasion was a man called Brice — like his client, eminently respectable.
After his marriage, our esteemed Matthew retired to a modest mansion in the heart of the country, and some ten or fifteen miles from Ullerton. The mansion in question is at a place called Dewsdale, and was the property of the wife, and accrued to him through her.
This house and estate of some thirty acres was afterwards sold by the rev. intestate, John Haygarth, shortly after his coming of age, and within a year of his mother’s death.
This much and no more could I extort from the oldest inhabitant relative to the latter days of our Matthew.
Respecting his wild youth I obtained the following crumbs of enlightenment. In the year 1741-2, being then one-and-twenty years of age, he left Ullerton. It is my ancient mariner’s belief that he ran away from home, after some desperate quarrel with his father; and it is also the belief of my ancient that he stayed away, without intermission, for twenty years — though on what precise fact that belief is founded is much more than I can extract from the venerable proser.
My ancient suggests — always in the haziest and most impracticable manner — the possibility that Matthew in his wild days lodged somewhere Clerkenwell way. He has a dim idea that he has heard his grandfather speak of St. John’s-gate, Clerkenwell, in connection with Matthew Haygarth; but, as my ancient’s grandfather seems to have been almost imbecile at the time he made such remarks, this is not much.
He has another idea — also very vague and impracticable — of having heard his grandfather say something about an adventure of Matthew Haygarth’s, which was rather a heroic affair in its way — an adventure in which, in some inexplicable manner, the wild Matthew is mixed up with a dancing-girl, or player-girl, of Bartholomew Fair, and a nobleman.
This is the sum-total of the information to be extracted in three mortal hours from my ancient. Altogether the day has been very unsatisfactory; and I begin to think I’m not up to the sort of work required of me. Oct. 3rd. Another long interview with my ancient. I dropped in directly after my breakfast, and about an hour after his dinner. I sat up late last night, occupied till nearly ten in copying my diary for Sheldon — which was just in time for the London post — and lingering over my cigar till past midnight, thinking of Charlotte. So I was late this morning.
My ancient received me graciously. I took him half a pound of mild bird’s-eye tobacco, on diplomatic grounds. He is evidently the sort of person who would receive Mephistopheles graciously, if the fiend presented him with tobacco.
I returned to the charge — diplomatically, of course; talked about Ullerton and Ullerton people in general, insinuating occasional questions about the Haygarths. I was rewarded by obtaining some little information about Mrs. Matthew. That lady appears to have been a devoted disciple of John Wesley, and was fonder of travelling to divers towns and villages to hear the discourses of that preacher than her husband approved. It seems they were wont to disagree upon this subject.
For some years before her marriage Mrs. Matthew was a member of a Wesleyan confraternity, in those days newly established at Ullerton. They held meetings and heard sermons in the warehouse of a wealthy draper; and shortly before Mrs. Matthew’s demise they built a chapel, still extant, in a dingy little thoroughfare known as Waterhouse-lane.
On these points my ancient mariner is tolerably clear. They belong to the period remembered by his father.
And now I believe him to be pumped dry. I gave him my benediction, and left him smoking some of my tobacco, content with himself and with the world — always excepting the authorities, or board, of the almshouses, against whom he appears to nourish a grievance.
After leaving him, I walked about Ullerton for an hour or so before returning to my humble hostelry. The streets of Ullerton are sealed with the seal of desolation — the abomination of desolation reigns in the market-place, where the grass flourishes greenly in the interstices of the pavement. The place has known prosperity, and is prosperous no longer; but although its chief trade has left it, there are still some three or four factories in full swing. I heard clanging bells, and met bare-headed women and uncouth-looking men hurrying to and fro. I went to look at the Wesleyan chapel in Waterhouse-lane. It is a queer little building, and bears some resemblance to a toy Noah’s Ark in red brick. Tall warehouses have arisen about it and hemmed it in, and the slim chimney-shaft of a waterworks throws a black shadow aslant its unpretending facade. I inquired the name of the present minister. He is called Jonah Goodge, began life as a carpenter, and is accounted the pink and pattern of piety. Oct. 4th. A letter from Sheldon awaited me in the coffee-room letter-rack when I went downstairs to breakfast.
“MY DEAR HAWKEHURST — Don’t be disheartened if the work seems slow at first. You’ll soon get used to it.
“I should recommend you to adopt the following tactics:
“1st. Go to the house at Dewsdale, inhabited by M.H. and his wife. You may have some difficulty in obtaining admission — and full liberty to explore and examine — from the present servant or owner; but you are not the man I take you for if you cannot overcome such a difficulty. I enclose a few of my cards, which you can use at your discretion. They show professional status. It would be as well to call yourself my articled clerk, and to state that you are prosecuting an inquiry on the behalf of a client of mine, who wishes to prove a certain event in the past connected remotely with the H. family. If asked whether your business relates to the property left by the rev. intestate, you must reply decisively in the negative. But I must remind you that extreme caution is required in every move you make. Wherever you can do your work without any reference to the name of Haygarth, avoid such reference. Always remember that there may be other people on the same scent.
“2nd. Examine the house in detail; look for old pictures, old furniture, old needlework — if you are lucky enough to find the Haygarth furniture was sold with the property, which I should think probable. The rev. intestate must have been at the University when he made the sale; and a young Cantab would in all likelihood pass over his ancestral chairs and tables to the purchaser of his ancestral mansion, as so much useless lumber. It is proverbial that walls have ears. I hope the Dewsdale walls may have tongues, and favour you with a little information.
“3rd. When you have done all that is to be done at Dewsdale, your next work must be to hunt up any scion of the lawyer Brice, if such scion be in existence at Ullerton. Or if not to be found in Ullerton, ascertain where the descendant, or decendants, of Brice is, or are, to be found. Brice, the lawyer, must have known the contents of those wills executed and afterwards destroyed by Haygarth, and may have kept rough draughts, copies, or memoranda of the same. This is most important. — Yours truly, G.S.”
This Sheldon is a wonderful man, and a cautious! — no Signature to his letter.
I started for Dewidale immediately after my breakfast. I have made arrangements for boarding in this house, which is a second-rate commercial inn. They have agreed to give me board and lodging for twenty shillings a week — the full amount of my stipend: so all that I gain by my researches in the affairs of the departed Matthew is food and shelter. However, as this food and shelter is perhaps more honestly obtained than those little dinners which I have so often eaten with the great Horatio, I will try to fancy a sweetness in the tough steaks and greasy legs of mutton. O sheep of Midlandshire! why cultivate such ponderous calves, and why so incline to sinews? O cooks of Midlandshire! why so superficial in the treatment of your roasts, so impetuous and inconsiderate when you boil?
A railroad now penetrates the rural district in which the village of Dewsdale is situated. There is a little station, something like a wooden Dutch oven, within a mile of the village; and here I alighted. The morning savoured of summer rather than autumn. The air was soft and balmy, the sunshine steeped the landscape in warm light, and the red and golden tints of the fading foliage took new splendour from that yellow sunshine. A man whose life is spent in cities must be dull of soul indeed if he does not feel a little touched by the beauty of rustic scenery, when he finds himself suddenly in the heart of the country. I had seen nothing so fair as those English fields and copses since I left the pine-clad hills of Forêtdechêne. An idiotic boy directed me across some fields to Dewsdale. He sent me a mile out of the way; but I forgave and blest him, for I think the walk did me good. I felt as if all manner of vicious vapours were being blown out of my head as the soft wind lifted my hair.
And so to Dewsdale. Strolling leisurely through those quiet meadows, I fell to thinking of many things that seldom came into my mind in London. I thought of my dead mother — a poor gentle creature — too frail to carry heroically the burden laid upon her, and so a little soured by chronic debt and difficulty. I have reason to remember her tenderly; we shared so much misery together. I believe my father married her in the Rules of the Bench; and if I am not sure upon this point, I know for a certainty that I was born within those mystic boundaries.
And then my mind wandered to those nomadic adventures in which poor Diana Paget and I were so much together. I think we were a little fond of each other in those days; but in that matter I was at least prudent; and now the transient fancy has faded, on Di’s part as well as on mine.
If I could be as prudent where Charlotte H. is concerned!
But prudence and Charlotte’s eyes cannot hold their own in the same brain. Of two things, one, as our neighbours say: a man must cease to be prudent, or he must forget those bewitching gray eyes.
I know she was sorry when she heard of my intended departure.
This is her birthday. She is twenty-one years of age to-day. I remember the two girls talking of it, and Miss Halliday declaring herself “quite old.” My dear one, I drink your health in this poor tavern liquor, with every tender wish and holy thought befitting your innocent girlhood!
I found the house at Dewsdale without difficulty. It is a stiff, square, red-brick dwelling-place, with long narrow windows, a high narrow door, and carved canopy; a house which savours of the Tatler and Spectator; a house in which the short-faced gentleman might have spent his summer holidays after Sir Roger’s death. It stands behind a high iron gate, surmounted by a handsome coat of arms; and before it there lies a pleasant patch of greensward, with a pond and a colony of cackling geese, which craned their necks and screamed at me as I passed them.
The place is the simplest and smallest of rural villages. There is a public-house — the Seven Stars; a sprinkling of humble cottages; a general shop, which is at once a shoemaker’s, a grocer’s, a linen draper’s, a stationer’s, and a post office. These habitations, a gray old church with a square tower, half hidden by the sombre foliage of yews and cedars, and the house once inhabited by the Haygarths, comprise the whole of the village. The Haygarthian household is now the rectory. I ascertained this fact from the landlord of the Seven Stars, at which house of entertainment I took a bottle of soda-water, in order to sonder le terrain before commencing business.
The present rector is an elderly widower with seven children; an easy good-natured soul, who is more prone to bestow his money in charity than to punctuality in the payment of his debts.
Having discovered thus much, I rang the bell at the iron gate and boarded the Haygarthian mansion. The rector was at home, and received me in a very untidy apartment, par excellence a study. A boy in a holland blouse was smearing his face with his inky fingers, and wrestling with a problem in Euclid, while his father stood on a step-ladder exploring a high shelf of dusty books.
The rector, whose name is Wendover, descended from the step-ladder and shook the dust from his garments. He is a little withered old man, with a manner so lively as to be on the verge of flightiness. I observed that he wiped his dusty palms on the skirts of his coat, and argued therefrom that he would be an easy person to deal with. I soon found that my deduction was correct.
I presented Sheldon’s card and stated my business, of course acting on that worthy’s advice. Could Mr. Wendover give me any information relating to the Haygarth family?
Fortune favoured me throughout this Dewsdale expedition. The rector is a simple garrulous old soul, to whom to talk is bliss. He has occupied the house five-and-thirty years. He rents it of the lord of the manor, who bought it from John Haygarth. Not a stick of furniture has been removed since our friend Matthew’s time; and the rev. intestate may have wrestled with the mysteries of Euclid on the same old-fashioned mahogany table at which I saw the boy in brown holland.
Mr. Wendover left his books and manuscripts scattered on the floor of the study, and conducted me to a cool shady drawing-room, very shabbily furnished with the spindle-legged chairs and tables of the last century. Here he begged me to be seated, and here we were ever and anon interrupted by intruding juveniles, the banging of doors, and the shrill clamour of young voices in the hall and garden.
I brought all the diplomacy of which I am master to bear in my long interview with the rector; and the following is a transcript of our conversation, after a good deal of polite skirmishing:—
Myself. You see, my dear sir, the business I am concerned in is remotely connected with these Haygarths. Any information you will kindly afford me, however apparently trivial, may be of service in the affair I am prosecuting.
The Rector. To be sure, to be sure! But, you see, though I’ve heard a good deal of the Haygarths, it is all gossip — the merest gossip. People are so fond of gossip, you know — especially country people: I have no doubt you have remarked that. Yes, I have heard a great deal about Matthew Haygarth. My late clerk and sexton — a very remarkable man, ninety-one when he died, and able to perform his duties very creditably within a year of his death — very creditably; but the hard winter of ‘56 took him off, poor fellow, and now I have a young man. Old Andrew Hone — that was my late clerk’s name — was employed in this house when a lad, and was very fond of talking about Matthew Haygarth and his wife. She was a rich woman, you know, a very rich woman — the daughter of a brewer at Ullerton; and this house belonged to her — inherited from her father.
Myself. And did you gather from your clerk that Matthew Haygarth and his wife lived happily together?
The Rector. Well, yes, yes: I never heard anything to the contrary. They were not a young couple, you know. Rebecca Caulfield was forty years of age, and Matthew Haygarth was fifty-three when he married; so, you see, one could hardly call it a love-match. [Abrupt inroad of bouncing damsel, exclaiming “Pa!“] Don’t you see I’m engaged, Sophia Louisa? Why are you not at your practice? [Sudden retreat of bouncing damsel, followed by the scrambling performance of scale of C major in adjoining chamber, which performance abruptly ceases after five minutes.] You see Mrs. Haygarth was not young, as I was about to observe when my daughter interrupted us; and she was perhaps a little more steadfast in her adherence to the newly arisen sect of Wesleyans than was pleasing to her husband, although he consented to become a member of that sect. But as their married life lasted only a year, they had little time for domestic unhappiness, even supposing them not to be adapted to each other.
Myself. Mrs Matthew Haygarth did not marry again?
The Rector. No; she devoted herself to the education of her son, and lived and died in this house. The room which is now my study she furnished with a small reading-desk and a couple of benches, now in my nursery, and made it into a kind of chapel, in which the keeper of the general shop — who was, I believe, considered a shining light amongst the Wesleyan community — was in the habit of holding forth every Sunday morning to such few members of that sect as were within reach of Dewsdale. She died when her son was nineteen years of age, and was buried in the family vault in the churchyard yonder. Her son’s adherence to the Church of England was a very great trouble to her. [Inroad of boy in holland, very dejected and inky of aspect, also exclaiming “Pa!“] No, John; not till that problem is worked out. Take that cricket-bat back to the lobby, sir, and return to your studies. [Sulky withdrawal of boy.] You see what it is to have a large family, Mr. — Sheldon. I beg pardon, Mr. ———
Myself. Hawkehurst, clerk to Mr. Sheldon.
The Rector. To be sure. I have some thoughts of the Law for one of my elder sons; the Church is terribly overcrowded. However, as I was on the point of saying when my boy John disturbed us, though I have heard a great deal of gossip about the Haygarths, I fear I can give you very little substantial information. Their connection with Dewsdale lasted little more than twenty years. Matthew Haygarth was married in Dewsdale church, his son John was christened in Dewsdale church, and he himself is buried in the churchyard. That is about as much positive information as I can give you; and you will perhaps remark that the parish register would afford you as much. After questioning the good-natured old rector rather closely, and obtaining little more than the above information, I asked permission to see the house.
“Old furniture and old pictures are apt to be suggestive,” I said; “and perhaps while we are going over the house you may happen to recall some further particulars relating to the Haygarth family.”
Mr. Wendover assented. He was evidently anxious to oblige me, and accepted my explanation of my business in perfect good faith. He conducted me from room to room, waiting patiently while I scrutinised the panelled walls and stared at the attenuated old furniture. I was determined to observe George Sheldon’s advice to the very letter, though I had little hope of making any grand melodramatic discovery in the way of documents hidden in old cabinets, or mouldering behind sliding panels.
I asked the rector if he had ever found papers of any kind in forgotten nooks and corners of the house or the furniture. His reply was a decided negative. He had explored and investigated every inch of the old dwelling-place, and had found nothing.
So much for Sheldon’s idea.
Mr. Wendover led me from basement to garret, encountering bouncing daughters and boys in brown holland wherever we went; and from basement to garret I found that all was barren. In the whole of the house there was but one object which arrested my attention, and the interest which that one object aroused in my mind had no relation to the Haygarthian fortune.
Over a high carved chimney-piece in one of the bedchambers there hung a little row of miniatures — old-fashioned oval miniatures, pale and faded — pictures of men and women with the powdered hair of the Georgian period, and the flowing full-bottomed wigs familiar to St. James’s and Tunbridge-wells in the days of inoffensive Anne. There were in all seven miniatures, six of which specimens of antique portraiture were prim and starched and artificial of aspect. But the seventh was different in form and style: it was the picture of a girlish face looking out of a frame of loose unpowdered locks; a bright innocent face, with gray eyes and marked black eyebrows, pouting lips a little parted, and white teeth gleaming between lips of rosy red; such a face as one might fancy the inspiration of an old poet. I took the miniature gently from the little brass hook on which it hung, and stood for some time looking at the bright frank face.
It was the picture of Charlotte Halliday. Yes; I suppose there is a fatality in these things. It was one of those marvellous accidental resemblances which every man has met with in the course of his life. Here was this dead-and-gone beauty of the days of George the Second smiling upon me with the eyes and lips of Philip Sheldon’s stepdaughter!
Or was it only a delusion of my own? Was my mind so steeped in the thought of that girl — was my heart so impressed by her beauty, that I could not look upon a fair woman’s face without conjuring up her likeness in the pictured countenance? However this may be, I looked long and tenderly at the face which seemed to me to resemble the woman I love.
Of course I questioned the rector as to the original of this particular miniature. He could tell me nothing about it, except that he thought it was not one of the Caulfields or Haygarths. The man in the full-bottomed Queen-Anne wig was Jeremiah Caulfield, brewer, father of the pious Rebecca; the woman with the high powdered head was the pious Rebecca herself; the man in the George-the-Second wig was Matthew Haygarth. The other three were kindred of Rebecca’s. But the wild-haired damsel was some unknown creature, for whose presence Mr. Wendover was unable to account.
I examined the frame of the miniature, and found that it opened at the back. Behind the ivory on which the portrait was painted there was a lock of dark hair incased in crystal; and on the inside of the case, which was of some worthless metal gilded, there was scratched the name “Molly.”
How this Molly with the loose dark locks came to be admitted among the prim, and pious Caulfields is certainly more than I can understand.
My exploration of the house having resulted only in this little romantic accident of the likeness to Charlotte, I prepared to take my departure, no wiser than when I had first crossed the threshold. The rector very politely proposed to show me the church; and as I considered that it would be well to take a copy of the Haygarthian entries in the register, I availed myself of his offer. He despatched a maid-servant to summon his clerk, in order that that functionary might assist in the investigation of the registers. The girl departed on this errand, while her master conducted me across his garden, in which there is now a gate opening into the churchyard.
It is the most picturesque of burial-grounds, darkened by the shadow of those solemn yews and spreading cedars. We walked very slowly between the crumbling old tombstones, which have almost all grown one-sided with time. Mr. Wendover led me through a little labyrinth of lowly graves to a high and ponderous iron railing surrounding a square space, in the midst of which there is a stately stone monument. In the railing there is a gate, from which a flight of stone step leads down to the door of a vault. It is altogether rather a pretentious affair, wherein one sees the evidence of substantial wealth unelevated by artistic grace or poetic grandeur.
This is the family vault of the Caulfields and Haygarths.
“I’ve brought you to look at this tomb,” said the rector, resting his hand upon the rusted railing, “because there is rather a romantic story connected with it — a story that concerns Matthew Haygarth, by the bye. I did not think of it just now, when we were talking of him; but it flashed on my memory as we came through the garden. It is rather a mysterious affair; and though it is not very likely to have any bearing upon the object of your inquiry, I may as well tell you about it — as a leaf out of family history, you know, Mr. Hawkehurst, and as a new proof of the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.”
I assured the rector that I should be glad to hear anything he could tell me.
“I must premise that I only tell the story as I got it from my old clerk, and that it may therefore seem rather indistinct; but there is an entry in the register yonder to show that it is not without foundation. However, I will waste no more words in preamble, but give you the story, which is simply this:"—
The rector seated himself on a dilapidated old tombstone, while I leaned against the rails of the Haygarth vault, looking down upon him.
“Within a month or two of Matthew Haygarth’s death a kind of melancholy came over him,” said the rector. “Whether he was unhappy with his wife, or whether he felt his health declining, is more than I can say. You must remember that my informant was but a lad at the time of which I speak, and that when he talked to me about the subject sixty years afterwards he was a very old man, and his impressions were therefore more or less vague. But upon certain facts he was sufficiently positive; and amongst the circumstances he remembered most vividly are those of the story I am going to tell you.
“It seems that within a very few weeks of Matthew’s death, his wife, Rebecca Haygarth, started on an expedition to the north, in the company of an uncle, to hear John Wesley preach on some very special occasion, and to assist at a love-feast. She was gone more than a fortnight; and during her absence Matthew Haygarth mounted his horse early one morning and rode away from Dewsdale.
“His household consisted of three maids, a man, and the lad Andrew Hone, afterwards my sexton. Before departing on his journey Mr. Haygarth had said that he would not return till late the next evening, and had requested that only the man (whose name I forget) should sit up for him.” He was punctiliously obeyed. The household, always of early habits, retired at nine, the accustomed hour; and the man-servant waited to receive his master, while the lad Andrew, who slept in the stables, sat up to keep his fellow-servant company.
“At ten o’clock Mr. Haygarth came home, gave his horse into the charge of the lad, took his candle from the man-servant, and walked straight upstairs, as if going to bed. The man-servant locked the doors, took his master the key, and then went to his own quarters. The boy remained up to feed and groom the horse, which had the appearance of having performed a hard day’s work.
“He had nearly concluded this business when he was startled by the slamming of the back door opening into the courtyard, in which were the stables and outhouses. Apprehending thieves, the boy opened the door of the stable and looked out, doubtless with considerable caution.
“It was broad moonlight, and he saw at a glance that the person who had opened the door was one who had a right to open it. Matthew Haygarth was crossing the courtyard as the lad peeped out. He wore a long black cloak, and his head drooped upon his breast as if he had been in dejection. The lad — being, I suppose, inquisitive, after the manner of country lads — made no more ado, but left his unfinished work and crept stealthily after his master, who came straight to this churchyard — indeed to this very spot on which we are now standing.
“On this spot the boy Andrew Hone became the secret witness of a strange scene. He saw an open grave close against the rails yonder, and he saw a little coffin lowered silently into that grave by the sexton of that time and a strange man, who afterwards went away in a mourning coach, which was in waiting at the gate, and in which doubtless the stranger and the little coffin had come.
“Before the man departed he assisted to fill up the grave; and when it was filled Matthew Haygarth gave money to both the men — gold it seemed to the lad Andrew, and several pieces to each person. The two men then departed, but Mr. Haygarth still lingered.
“As soon as he fancied himself alone, he knelt down beside the little grave, covered his face with his hands, and either wept or prayed, Andrew Hone could not tell which. If he wept, he wept silently.
“From that night, my sexton said, Matthew Haygarth faded visibly. Mistress Rebecca came home from her love-feast, and nursed and tended her husband with considerable kindness, though, so far as I can make out, she was at the best a stern woman. He died three weeks after the event which I have described, and was buried in that vault close to the little grave.” I thanked Mr. Wendover for his succinct narrative, and apologised for the trouble I had occasioned him.
“Do not speak of the trouble,” he answered kindly; “I am used to telling that story. I have heard it a great many times from poor old Andrew, and I have told it a great many times.”
“The story has rather a legendary tone,” I said; “I should have scarcely thought such a thing possible.”
The rector shrugged his shoulders with a deprecating gesture.
“In our own day,” he replied, “such an occurrence would be almost impossible; but you must remember that we are talking of the last century — a century in which, I regret to say, the clergy of the Church of England were sadly lax in the performance of their duties. The followers of Wesley and Whitefield could scarcely have multiplied as they did if the flocks had not been cruelly neglected by their proper shepherds. It was a period in which benefices were bestowed constantly on men obviously unfitted for the holy office — men who were gamblers and drunkards, patrons of cock-pits, and in many cases open and shameless reprobates. In such an age almost anything was possible; and this midnight and unhallowed interment may very well have taken place either with the consent or without the knowledge of the incumbent, who, I am told, bore no high character for piety or morality.”
“And you say there is an entry in the register?”
“Yes, a careless scrawl, dated Sept. 19th, 1774, recording the burial of one Matthew Haygarth, aged four years, removed from the burial-ground attached to the parish church of Spotswold.”
“Then it was a reinterment?”
“Evidently.”
“And is Spotswold in this county?”
“Yes; it is a very small village, about fifty miles from here.”
“And Matthew Haygarth died very soon after this event?”
“He did. He died very suddenly — with an awful suddenness — and died intestate. His widow was left the possessor of great wealth, which increased in the hands of her son John Haygarth, a very prudent and worthy gentleman, and a credit to the Church of which he was a member. He only died very lately, I believe, and must therefore have attained a great age.”
It is quite evident that Mr. Wendover had not seen the advertisement in the Times, and was ignorant of the fact that the accumulated wealth of Haygarths and Caulfields is now waiting a claimant.
I asked permission to see the register containing the entry of the mysterious interment; and after the administration of a shilling to the clerk — a shilling at Dewsdale being equal to half a crown in London — the vestry cupboard was opened by that functionary, and the book I required was produced from a goodly pile of such mouldy brown leather-bound volumes.
The following is a copy of the entry:—
“On Thursday last past, being ye 19 Sep’tr, A.D. 1774, was interr’d ye bodie off onne Matthewe Haygarthe, ag’d foure yeres, remoov’d fromm ye Churcheyarde off St. Marie, under ye hil, Spotswolde, in this Co. Pade forr so doeing, sevven shill.”
After having inspected the register, I asked many further questions, but without eliciting much further information. So I expressed my thanks for the courtesy that had been shown me, and took my departure, not wishing to press the matter so closely as to render myself a nuisance to the worthy Wendover, and bearing in mind that it would be open to me to return at any future time.
And now I ask myself — and I ask the astute Sheldon — what is the meaning of this mysterious burial, and is it likely to have any bearing on the object of our search? These are questions for the consideration of the astute S.
I spent my evening in jotting down the events of the day, in the above free-and-easy fashion for my own guidance, and in a more precise and business-like style for my employer. I posted my letter before ten o’clock, the hour at which the London mail is made up, and then smoked my cigar in the empty streets, overshadowed by gaunt square stacks of building and tall black chimneys; and so back to my inn, where I took a glass of ale and another cigar, and then to bed, as the worthy Pepys might have concluded.
Oct. 5th. My dreams last night were haunted by the image of gray-eyed Molly, with her wild loose hair. She must needs have been a sweet creature; and how she came amongst those prim fishy-eyed men and women with absurd head-gear is much more than I can understand. That she should mix herself up with Diana Paget, and play rouge-et-noir at Forêtdechêne in a tucked-up chintz gown and a quilted satin petticoat, in my dreams last night — that I should meet her afterwards in the little stucco temple on the Belgian hills, and stab her to the heart, whereon she changed into Charlotte Halliday — is only in the nature of dreams, and therefore no subject for wonder.
On referring to Sheldon’s letter I found that the next people to be looked up were descendants of Brice the lawyer; so I devoted my breakfast-hour to the cultivation of an intimacy with the oldest of the waiters — a very antique specimen of his brotherhood, with a white stubble upon his chin and a tendency to confusion of mind in the matter of forks and spoons.
“Do you know, or have you ever known, an attorney of the name of Brice in this town?” I asked him.
He rubbed the white stubble contemplatively with his hand, and then gave his poor old head a dejected shake. I felt at once that I should get very little good out of him.
“No,” he murmured despondently, “not that I can call to mind.”
I should like to know what he could call to mind, piteous old meanderer!
“And yet you belong to Ullerton, I suppose?”
“Yes; and have belonged to it these seventy-five years, man and boy;” whereby, no doubt, the dreary confusion of the unhappy being’s mind. Figurez donc, mon cher. Qui-que-ce-soit, fifty-five years or so of commercial breakfasts and dinners in such a place as Ullerton! Five-and-fifty years of steaks and chops; five-and-fifty years of ham and eggs, indifferently buttered toasts, and perennial sixes of brandy-and-water! After rambling to and fro with spoons and forks, and while in progress of clearing my table, and dropping the different items of my breakfast equipage, the poor soddened faded face of this dreary wanderer became suddenly illumined with a faint glimmer that was almost the light of reason.
“There were a Brice in Ullerton when I were a lad; I’ve heard father tell on him,” he murmured slowly.
“An attorney?”
“Yes. He were a rare wild one, he were! It was when the Prince of Wales were Regent for his poor old mad father, as the saying is, and folks was wilder like in general in those times, and wore spencers — lawyer Brice wore a plum-coloured one.”
Imagine then again, mon cher, an attorney in a plum-coloured spencer! Who, in these enlightened days, would trust his business to such a practitioner? I perked up considerably, believing that my aged imbecile was going to be of real service to me.
“Yes, he were a rare wild one, he were,” said my ancient friend with excitement. “I can remember him as well as if it was yesterday, at Tiverford races — there was races at Tiverford in those days, and gentlemen jocks. Lawyer Brice rode his roan mare — Queen Charlotte they called her. But after that he went wrong, folks said — speckilated with some money, you see, that he didn’t ought to have touched — and went to America, and died.” “Died in America, did he? Why the deuce couldn’t he die in Ullerton? I should fancy it was a pleasanter place to die in than it is to live in. And how about his sons?”
“Lawyer Brice’s sons?”
“Yes, of course.”
My imbecile’s lips expanded into a broad grin.
“Lawyer Brice never had no sons,” he exclaimed, with a tone which seemed to express a contemptuous pity for my ignorance; “he never married.”
“Well, well; his brothers. He had brothers, I suppose?”
“Not as I ever heard tell on,” answered my imbecile, relapsing into hopeless inanity.
It was clear that no further help was to be obtained from him. I went to the landlord — a brisk business-like individual of Transatlantic goaheadism. From him I learned that there were no Brices in Ullerton, and never had been within the thirty years of his experience in that town. He gave me an Ullerton directory in confirmation of that fact — a neat little shilling volume, which I begged leave to keep for a quarter of an hour before returning it.
Brice was evidently a failure. I turned to the letter G, and looked up the name of Goodge. Goodge, Jonah, minister of Beulah Chapel, resided at No. 7, Waterhouse-lane — the lane in which I had seen the chapel.
I determined upon waiting on the worthy Goodge. He may be able to enlighten me as to the name of the pastor who preached to the Wesleyan flock in the time of Rebecca Caulfield; and from the descendants of such pastor I may glean some straws and shreds of information. The pious Rebecca would have been likely to confide much to her spiritual director. The early Wesleyans had all the exaltation of the Quietists, and something of the lunatic fervour of the Convulsionists, who kicked and screamed themselves into epilepsy under the influence of the Unigenitus Bull. The pious Rebecca was no doubt an enthusiast.
I found No. 7, Waterhouse-lane. It is a neat little six-roomed house, with preternaturally green palings enclosing about sixty square feet of bright yellow gravel, adorned by a row of whitewashed shells. Some scarlet geraniums bloomed in pots of still more vivid scarlet; and the sight of those bright red blossoms recalled Philip Sheldon’s garden at Bayswater, and that sweet girl by whose side I have walked its trim pathways.
But business is business; and if I am ever to sue for my Charlotte’s hand, I must present myself before her as the winner of the three thousand. Remembering this, I lifted Mr. Goodge’s knocker, and presently found myself in conversation with that gentleman.
Whether unordained piety has a natural tendency to become greasy of aspect, and whether, among the many miracles vouchsafed to the amiable and really great Wesley, he received for his disciples of all time to come the gift of a miraculous straightness and lankiness of hair, I know not; but I do know that every Methodist parson I have had the honour to know has been of one pattern, and that Mr. Goodge is no exception to the rule.
I am bound to record that I found him a very civil person, quite willing to afford me any help in his power, and far more practical and business-like than the rector of Dewsdale.
It seems that the gift of tongues descended on the Goodges during the lifetime of John Wesley himself, and during the earlier part of that teacher’s career. It was a Goodge who preached in the draper’s warehouse, and it was the edifying discourse of a Goodge which developed the piety of Miss Rebecca Caulfield, afterwards Mrs. Haygarth.
“That Goodge was my great-uncle,” said the courteous Jonah, “and there was no one in Ullerton better acquainted with Rebecca Caulfield. I’ve heard my grandmother talk of her many a time. She used to send him poultry and garden-stuff from her house at Dewsdale, and at his instigation she contributed handsomely to the erection of the chapel in which it is my privilege to preach.”
I felt that I had struck upon a vein of gold. Here was a sharp-witted, middle-aged man — not an ancient mariner, or a meandering imbecile — who could remember the talk of a grandmother who had known Matthew Haygarth’s wife. And this visit to Mr. Goodge was my own idea, not prompted by the far-seeing Sheldon. I felt myself advancing in the insidious arts of a private inquirer.
“I am employed in the prosecution of a business which has a remote relation to the Haygarth family history,” I said; “and if you can afford me any information on that subject I should be extremely obliged.”
I emphasised the adjective “remote,” and felt myself, in my humble way, a Talleyrand.
“What kind of information, do you require?” asked Mr. Goodge thoughtfully.
“Any information respecting Matthew Haygarth or his wife.”
Mr. Goodge became profoundly meditative after this.
“I am not given to act unadvisedly,” he began — and I felt that I was in for a little professional discourse: “the creatures of impulse are the children of Satan, the babes of Lucifer, the infants of Beelzebub. I take counsel in the silence of the night, and wait the whispers of wisdom in the waking hours of darkness. You must allow me time to ponder this business in my heart and to be still.”
I told Mr. Goodge that I would willingly await his own time for affording me any information in his power to give.
“That is pleasant,” said the pastor blandly: “the worldly are apt to rush blindly through life, as the roaring lion rushes through the forest. I am not one of those rushing worldlings. I presume, by the way, that such information as I may afford is likely to become a source of pecuniary profit to your employer?”
I began to see that my friend Goodge and the rector of Dewsdale were very different kind of people, and that I must play my cards accordingly.
“That will depend upon the nature of your information,” I replied diplomatically; “it may be worth something to us, or it may be worthless.”
“And in case it should be worth something?”
“In that case my employer would be glad to remunerate the person from whom he obtained it.”
Mr. Goodge again became meditative.
“It was the habit of the sainted Wesley to take counsel from the Scriptures,” he said presently: “if you will call again tomorrow, young man, I shall have taken counsel, and may be able to entreat with you.”
I did not much relish being addressed as “young man,” even by such a shining light as the Rev. Jonah Goodge. But as I wanted the Rev. Jonah’s aid, I submitted with a tolerable grace to his patriarchal familiarity, and bade him good morning, after promising to call again on the following day. I returned to my inn and wrote to Sheldon in time for the afternoon mail, recounting my interview with Mr. Goodge, and asking how far I should be authorised to remunerate that gentleman, or to pledge myself to remunerate him for such information as he might have to dispose of.
Oct. 6th. A letter from Sheldon.
“DEAR HAWKEHURST — There may be something very important behind that mysterious burial at Dewsdale. Go without delay to Spotswold; examine registers, tombstones, &c; hunt up oldest inhabitant or inhabitants, from whom you may be able to discover whether any Haygarth or Haygarths ever lived there, and all that is known respecting such Haygarth or Haygarths. You have got a cine to something. Follow it up till it breaks off short, as such clues often do, or till you find it is only leading you on a wild-goose chase. The Dewsdale business is worth investigation.
“Mem. How about descendants of lawyer Brice? — Yours truly, G.S.
“G.‘s Inn, Oct. 5th.”
Before starting for Spotswold it was necessary for me to see Mr. Goodge. I found that gentleman in a pious and yet business-like frame of mind. He had taken counsel from the Scriptures, like the founder of his sect; but I fancy with rather less spiritual aspirations.
“The text upon which the lot fell was the 12th verse of the 9th chapter in the Book of Proverbs, ‘If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself,’” he said solemnly; “whereby I perceive that I shall not be justified in parting with that which you seek without fitting recompense. I ask you, therefore, young man, what are you prepared to give?”
The Rev. Jonah’s tone could scarcely have been more lofty, or his manner more patronising, if he had been Saul and I the humble David; but a man who is trying to earn three thousand pounds must put up with a great deal. Finding that the minister was prepared to play the huckster, I employed no further ceremony.
“The price must of course depend on the quality of the article you have to sell,” I said; “I must know that before I can propose terms.”
“Suppose my information took the form of letters?”
“Letters from whom — to whom?”
“From Mrs. Rebecca Haygarth to my great-uncle, Samson Goodge.”
“How many of such letters have you to sell?”
I put it very plainly; but the Rev. Jonah’s susceptibilities were not of the keenest order. He did not wince.
“Say forty odd letters.”
I pricked up my ears; and it needed all my diplomacy to enable me to conceal my sense of triumph. Forty odd letters! There must be an enormous amount of information in forty odd letters; unless the woman wrote the direst twaddle ever penned by a feminine correspondent.
“Over what period do the dates of these letters extend?” I asked.
“Over about seven years; from 1769 to 1776.”
Four years prior to the marriage with our friend Matthew; three years after the marriage.
“Are they tolerably long letters, or mere scrawls?”
“They were written in a period when nobody wrote short letters,” answered Mr. Goodge sententiously — “the period of Bath post and dear postage. The greater number of the epistles cover three sides of a sheet of letter-paper; and Mrs. Rebecca’s caligraphy was small and neat.”
“Good!” I exclaimed. “I suppose it is no use my asking you to let me see one of these letters before striking a bargain — eh, Mr. Goodge?” “Well, I think not,” answered the oily old hypocrite. “I have taken counsel, and I will abide by the light that has been shown me. ‘If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself;’ such are the words of inspiration. No, I think not.”
“And what do you ask for the forty odd letters?”
“Twenty pounds.”
“A stiff sum, Mr. Goodge, for forty sheets of old letter-paper.”
“But if they were not likely to be valuable, you would scarcely happen to want them,” answered the minister. “I have taken counsel, young man.”
“And those are your lowest terms?”
“I cannot accept sixpence less. It is not in me to go from my word. As Jacob served Laban seven years, and again another seven years, having promised, so do I abide by my bond. Having said twenty pounds, young man, Heaven forbid that I should take so much as twenty pence less than those twenty pounds!”
The solemn unction with which he pronounced this twaddle is beyond description. The pretence of conscientious feeling which he contrived to infuse into his sordid bargain-driving might have done honour to Molière’s Tartuffe. Seeing that he was determined to stick to his terms, I departed. I telegraphed to Sheldon for instructions as to whether I was to give Goodge the money he asked, and then went back to my inn, where I devoted myself for the next ten minutes to the study of a railway time-table, with a view to finding the best route to Spotswold.
After a close perusal of bewildering strings of proper names and dazzling columns of figures, I found a place called Black Harbour, “for Wisborough, Spotswold, and Chilton.” A train left Ullerton for Black Harbour at six o’clock in the afternoon, and was due at the latter place at 8.40.
This gave me an interval of some hours, in which I could do nothing, unless I received a telegram from Sheldon. The chance of a reply from him kept me a prisoner in the coffee-room of the Swan Inn, where I read almost every line in the local and London newspapers pending the arrival of the despatch, which came at last.
“Tell Goodge he shall have the sum asked, and get the letters at once. Money by to-night’s post.”
This was Sheldon’s message; sharp and short, and within the eighteen penny limit. Acting upon this telegram, I returned to the abode of Mr. Goodge, told him his terms were to be complied with, showed him the telegram, at his request, and asked for the letters.
I ought to have known my reverend friend better than to imagine he would part with those ancient documents except for money upon the counter.
He smiled a smile which might have illuminated the visage of Machiavelli.
“The letters have kept a long time, young man,” he said, after having studied the telegram as closely as if it had been written in Punic; “and lo you, they are in nowise the worse for keeping: so they will keep yet longer. ‘If thou be wise, then shalt be wise for thyself.’ You can come for the letters tomorrow, and bring the money with you. Say at 11 A.M.”
I put on my hat and bade my friend good day. I have often been tempted to throw things at people, and have withheld my hand; but I never felt Satan so strong upon me as at that moment, and I very much fear that if I had had anything in the way of a kitchen-poker or a carving-knife about me, I should have flung that missile at the patriarchal head of my saintly Jonah. As it was, I bade him good day and returned to the Swan, where I took a hurried repast and started for the station, carrying a light carpet-bag with me, as I was not likely to return till the following night, at the earliest.
I arrived at the station ten minutes before the starting of the train, and had to endure ten minutes of that weariness called waiting. I exhausted the interest of all the advertisements on the station walls; found out how I could have my furniture removed with the utmost convenience — supposing myself to possess furniture; discovered where I ought to buy a dinner-service, and the most agreeable kind of blind to screen my windows in sunny weather. I was still lingering over the description of this new invention in blinds, when a great bell set up a sudden clanging, and the down train from London came thundering into the station.
This was also the train for Black Harbour. There were a good many passengers going northwards, a good many alighting at Ullerton; and in the hurry and confusion I had some difficulty in finding a place in a second-class carriage, the passengers therein blocking up the windows with that unamiable exclusiveness peculiar to railway travellers. I found a place at last, however; but in hurrying from carriage to carriage I was startled by an occurrence which I have since pondered very seriously.
I ran bolt against my respected friend and patron Horatio Paget.
We had only time to recognise each other with exclamations of mutual surprise when the clanging bell rang again, and I was obliged to scuffle into my seat. A moment’s delay would have caused me to be left behind. And to have remained behind would have been very awkward for me; as the Captain would undoubtedly have questioned me as to my business in Ullerton. Was I not supposed to be at Dorking, enjoying the hospitality of an aged aunt?
It would have been unlucky to lose that train.
But what “makes” the gallant Captain in Ullerton? That is a question which I deliberated as the train carried me towards Black Harbour.
Sheldon warned me of the necessity for secrecy, and I have been as secret as the grave. It is therefore next to an impossibility that Horatio Paget can have any idea of the business I am engaged in. He is the very man of all others to try and supersede me if he had an inkling of my plans; but I am convinced he can have no such inkling.
And yet the advertisement of the Haygarth property in the Times was as open to the notice of all the world as it was open to the notice of George Sheldon. What if my patron should have been struck by the same advertisement, and should have come to Ullerton on the same business?
It is possible, but it is not likely. When I left town the Captain was engaged in Philip Sheldon’s affairs. He has no doubt come to Ullerton on Philip Sheldon’s business. The town, which seems an abomination of desolation to a man who is accustomed to London and Paris, is nevertheless a commercial centre; and the stockbroker’s schemes may involve the simple Ullertonians, as well as the more experienced children of the metropolis.
Having thought the business out thus, I gave myself no further trouble about the unexpected appearance of my friend and benefactor.
At Black Harbour I found a coach, which carried me to Spotswold, whither I travelled in a cramped and painful position as regards my legs, and with a pervading sensation which was like a determination of luggage to the brain, so close to my oppressed head was the heavily-laden roof of the vehicle. It was pitch dark when I and two fellow-passengers of agricultural aspect were turned out of the coach at Spotswold, which in the gloom of night appeared to consist of half a dozen houses shut in from the road by ghastly white palings, a grim looming church, and a low-roofed inn with a feeble light glimmering athwart a red stuff curtain.
At this inn I was fain to take up my abode for the night, and was conducted to a little whitewashed bedchamber, draperied with scanty dimity and smelling of apples — the humblest, commonest cottage chamber, but clean and decent, and with a certain countrified aspect which was pleasing to me. I fancied myself the host of such an inn, with Charlotte for my wife; and it seemed to me that it would be nice to live in that remote and unknown village, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot.” I beguiled myself by such foolish fancies — I, who have been reared amidst the clamour and riot of the Strand!
Should I be happy with that dear girl if she were mine? Alas! I doubt it. A man who has led a disreputable life up to the age of seven-and-twenty is very likely to have lost all capacity for such pure and perfect happiness as that which good men find in the tranquil haven of a home.
Should I not hear the rattle of the billiard-balls, or the voice of the croupier calling the main, as I sat by my quiet fireside? Should I not yearn for the glitter and confusion of West-end dancing-rooms, or the mad excitement of the ring, while my innocent young wife was sitting by my side and asking me to look at the blue eyes of my first-born?
No; Charlotte is not for me. There must be always the two classes — the sheep and the goats; and my lot has been cast among the goats.
And yet there are some people who laugh to scorn the doctrines of Calvin, and say there is no such thing as predestination.
Is there not predestination? Was not I predestined to be born in a gaol and reared in a gutter, educated among swindlers and scoundrels, fed upon stolen victuals, and clad in garments never to be paid for? Did no Eumenides preside over the birth of Richard Savage, so set apart for misery that the laws of nature were reversed, and even his mother hated him? Did no dismal fatality follow the footsteps of Chatterton? Has no mysterious ban been laid upon the men who have been called Dukes of Buckingham?
What foolish lamentations am I scribbling in this diary, which is intended to be only the baldest record of events! It is so natural to mankind to complain, that, having no ear in which to utter his discontent, a man is fain to resort to pen and ink.
I devoted my evening to conversation with the landlord and his wife, but found that the name of Haygarth was as strange to them as if it had been taken from an inscription in the tomb of the Pharaohs. I inquired about the few inhabitants of the village, and ascertained that the oldest man in the place is the sexton, native-born, and supposed by mine host never to have travelled twenty miles from his birthplace. His name is Peter Drabbles. What extraordinary names that class of people contrive to have! My first business to-morrow morning will be to find my friend Drabbles — another ancient mariner, no doubt — and to examine the parish registers.
Oct. 7th. A misty morning, and a perpetual drizzle — to say nothing of a damp, penetrating cold, which creeps through the thickest overcoat, and chills one to the bone. I do not think Spotswold can have much brightness or prettiness even on the fairest summer morning that ever beautified the earth. I know that, seen as I see it to-day, the place is the very archetype of all that is darksome, dull, desolate, dismal, and dreary. (How odd, by the way, that all that family of epithets should have the same initial!) A wide stretch of moorland lies around and about the little village, which crouches in a hollow, like some poor dejected animal that seeks to shelter itself from the bitter blast. On the edge of the moorland, and above the straggling cottages and the little inn, rises the massive square tower of an old church, so far out of proportion to the pitiful cluster of houses, that I imagine it must be the remnant of some monastic settlement.
Towards this church I made my way, under the dispiriting drip, drip of the rain, and accompanied by a feeble old man, who is sexton, clerk, gravedigger, and anything or everything of an official nature.
We went into the church after my ancient mariner No. 2 had fumbled a good deal with a bunch of ghostly-looking keys. The door opened with a dismal scroop, and shut with an appalling bang. Grim and dark as the church is without, it is grimmer and darker within, and damp and vault-like, à faire frémir. There are all the mysterious cupboards and corners peculiar to such edifices; an organ-loft, from which weird noises issue at every opening or closing of a door; a vaulted roof, which echoes one’s footsteps with a moan, as of some outraged spirit hovering in empty space, and ejaculating piteously, “Another impious intruder after the sacramental plate! another plebeian sole trampling on the brasses of the De Montacutes, lords of the manor!”
The vestry is, if anything, more ghostly than the general run of vestries; but the business mind is compelled to waive all considerations of a supernatural character. For the moment there flashed across my brain the shadows of all the Christmas stories I had ever read or heard concerning vestries; the phantom bridal, in which the bride’s beautiful white hand changed to the bony fingers of a skeleton as she signed the register; the unearthly christening, in which all at once, after the ceremony having been conducted with the utmost respectability, to the edification of the unauthorised intruder hiding behind a pillar, the godfathers and godmothers, nurse and baby, priest and clerk, became in a moment dilapidated corpses; whereon the appalled intruder fell prone at the foot of his pillar, there to be discovered the next morning by his friends, and the public generally, with his hair blanched to an awful whiteness, or his noble intellect degraded to idiocy. For a moment, the memory of about a hundred Christmas stories was too much for me — so weird of aspect and earthy of atmosphere was the vestry at Spotswold. And then “being gone” the shadows of the Christmas stories, I was a man and a lawyer’s clerk again, and set myself assiduously to search the registers and interrogate my ancient.
I found that individual a creature of mental fogginess compared with whom my oldest inhabitant of Ullerton would have been a Pitt, Earl of Chatham. But I questioned and cross-questioned him until I had in a manner turned his poor old wits the seamy side without, and had discovered, first, that he had never known any one called Haygarth in the whole course of those seventy-five years’ vegetation which politeness compelled me to speak of as his “life;” secondly, that he had never known any one who knew a Haygarth; thirdly, that he was intimately acquainted with every creature in the village, and that he knew that no one of the inhabitants could give me the smallest shred of such information as I required.
Having extorted so much as this from my ancient with unutterable expenditure of time and trouble, I next set to work upon the registers.
If the ink manufactured in the present century is of no more durable nature than that abominable fluid employed in the penmanship of a hundred years ago, I profoundly pity the generations that are to come after us. The registers of Spotswold might puzzle a Bunsen. However, bearing in mind the incontrovertible fact that three thousand pounds is a very agreeable sum of money, I stuck to my work for upwards of two hours, and obtained as a result the following entries:—
“1. Matthew Haygarthe, aged foure yeares, berrid in this churcheyarde, over against ye tombe off Mrs. Marttha Stileman, about 10 fete fromm ye olde yue tre. Febevarie 6th, 1753.”
“2. Mary Haygarthe, aged twentie sevene yeers, berrid under ye yue tree, Nov. 21, 1754.”
After copying these two entries, I went out into the churchyard to look for Mary Haygarth’s grave.
Under a fine old yew — which had been old a hundred years ago, it seems — I found huddled amongst other headstones one so incrusted with moss, that it was only after scraping the parasite verdure from the stone with my penknife that I was able to discover the letters that had been cut upon it. I found at last a brief inscription:
“Here lieth ye body of MARY HAYGARTH, aged 27. Born 1727. Died 1754. This stone has been set up by one who sorroweth without hope of consolation.” A strange epitaph: no scrap of Latin, no text from Scripture, no conventional testimony to the virtues and accomplishments of the departed, no word to tell whether the dead woman had been maid, wife, or widow. It was the most provoking inscription for a lawyer or a genealogist, but such as might have pleased a poet.
I fancy this Mary Haygarth must have been some quiet creature, with very few friends to sorrow for her loss; perhaps only that one person who sorrowed without hope of consolation.
Such a tombstone might have been set above the grave of that simple maid who dwelt “beside the banks of Dove.”
This is the uttermost that my patience or ingenuity can do for me at Spotswold. I have exhausted every possibility of obtaining further information. So, having written and posted my report to Sheldon, I have no more to do but to return to Ullerton. I take back with me nothing but the copy of the two entries in the register of burials. Who this Matthew Haygarth or this Mary Haygarth was, and how related to the Matthew, is an enigma not to be solved at Spotswold.
Here the story of the Haygarths ends with the grave under the yew-tree.
At an early hour upon the day on which Valentine Hawkehurst telegraphed to his employer, Philip Sheldon presented himself again at the dingy door of the office in Gray’s Inn.
The dingy door was opened by the still more dingy boy; and Mr. Sheldon the elder — who lived in a state of chronic hurry, and had a hansom cab in attendance upon him at almost every step of his progress through life — was aggravated by the discovery that his brother was out.
“Out!” he repeated, with supreme disgust; “he always is out, I think. Where is he to be found?”
The boy replied that his master would be back in half an hour, if Mr. Sheldon would like to wait.
“Like to wait!” cried the stockbroker; “when will lawyers’ clerks have sense enough to know that nobody on this earth ever liked to wait? Where’s your master gone?”
“I think he’s just slipped round into Holborn, sir,” the boy replied, with some slight hesitation. He was very well aware that George had secrets from his brother, and that it was not judicious to be too free in his communications to the elder gentleman. But the black eyes and white teeth of the stockbroker seemed very awful to him; and if Philip chose to question him, he must needs answer the truth, not having been provided by his master with any convenient falsehood in case of inquiry.
“What part of Holborn?” asked Philip sharply.
“I did hear tell as it was the telegraph office.”
“Good!” exclaimed Mr. Sheldon; and then he dashed downstairs, leaving the lad on the threshold of the door staring after him with eyes of wonder.
The telegraph office meant business; and any business of his brother’s was a matter of interest to Mr. Sheldon at this particular period. He had meditated the meaning of George’s triumphant smile in the secluded calm of his own office; and the longer he had meditated, the more deeply rooted had become his conviction that his brother was engaged in some very deep and very profitable scheme, the nature of which it was his bounden duty to discover.
Impressed by this idea, Mr. Sheldon returned to the hansom-cab, which was waiting for him at the end of Warwick-court, and made his way to the telegraph office. The ostensible motive of his call in Gray’s Inn was sufficient excuse for this following up of his brother’s footsteps. It was one of those waifs and strays of rather disreputable business which the elder man sometimes threw in the way of the younger.
As the wheel of the hansom ground against the kerbstone in front of the telegraph office, the figure of George Sheldon vanished in a little court to the left of that establishment. Instead of pursuing this receding figure, Philip Sheldon walked straight into the office.
It was empty. There was no one in any of the shaded compartments, so painfully suggestive of pecuniary distress and the stealthy hypothecation of portable property. A sound of rattling and bumping in an inner office betrayed the neighbourhood of a clerk; but in the office Mr. Sheldon was alone.
Upon the blotting-pad on the counter of the central partition the stockbroker perceived one great blot of ink, still moist. Ha laid the tip of his square forefinger upon it, to assure himself of that fact, and then set himself deliberately to scrutinise the blotting-paper. He was a man who seldom hesitated. His greatest coups on the money-market had been in a great measure the result of this faculty of prompt decision. To-day he possessed himself of the blotting-pad, and examined the half-formed syllables stamped upon it with as much coolness and self-possession as if he had been seated in his own office reading his own newspaper. A man given to hesitation would have looked to the right and the left and watched for his opportunity — and lost it. Philip Sheldon knew better than to waste his chances by needless precaution; and he made himself master of all the intelligence the blotting-pad could afford him before the clerk emerged from the inner den where the rattling and stamping was going forward.
“I thought as much,” muttered the stockbroker, as he recognised traces of his brother’s sprawling penmanship upon the pad. The message had been written with a heavy hand and a spongy quill pen, and had left a tolerably clear impression of its contents on the blotting-paper.
Here and there the words stood out bold and clear; here and there, again, there was only one decipherable letter amongst a few broken hieroglyphics. Mr. Sheldon was accustomed to the examination of very illegible documents, and he was able to master the substance of that random impression. If he could not decipher the whole, he made out sufficient for his purpose. Money was to be offered to a man called Goodge for certain letters. He knew his brother’s affairs well enough to know that these letters for which money was to be offered must needs be letters of importance in some search for an heir-at-law. So far all was clear and simple; but beyond this point he found himself at fault. Where was this Goodge to be found? and who was the person that was to offer him money for the letters? The names and address, which had been written first, had left no impression on the blotting-pad, or an impression so faint as to be useless for any practical purpose.
Mr. Sheldon put down the pad and lingered by the door of the office deliberating, when the rattling and hammering came to an abrupt termination, and the clerk emerged from the interior den.
“O,” he exclaimed, “it’s all right. Your message shall go directly.”
The stockbroker, whose face was half averted from the clerk, and who stood between that functionary and the light from the open doorway, at once comprehended the error that had arisen. The clerk had mistaken him for his brother.
“I’m not quite clear as to whether I gave the right address,” he said promptly, with his face still averted, and his attention apparently occupied by a paper in his hand. “Just see how I wrote it, there’s a good fellow.”
The clerk withdrew for a few minutes, and returned with the message in his hand.
“From George Sheldon to Valentine Hawkehurst, Black Swan Inn, Ullerton,” he read aloud from the document.
“All right, and thanks,” cried the stockbroker.
He gave one momentary glance at the clerk, and had just time to see that individual’s look of bewilderment as some difference in his voice and person from the voice and person of the black-whiskered man who had just left the office dawned upon his troubled senses. After that one glance Mr. Sheldon darted across the pavement, sprang into his cab, and called to the driver, “Literary Institution, Burton-street, as fast as you can go.”
“I’ll try my luck in the second column of the Times,” he said to himself. “If George’s scheme is what I take it to be, I shall get some clue to it there.” He took a little oblong memorandum-book from his pocket, and looked at his memoranda of the past week. Among those careless jottings he found one memorandum scrawled in pencil, amongst notes and addresses in ink, “Haygarth — intestate. G.S. to see after.”
“That’s it,” he exclaimed; “Haygarth — intestate; Valentine Hawkehurst not at Dorking, but working for my brother; Goodge — letters to be paid for. It’s all like the bits of mosaic that those antiquarian fellows are always finding in the ruins of Somebody’s Baths; a few handfuls of coloured chips that look like rubbish, and can yet be patched into a perfect geometric design. I’ll hunt up a file of the Times at the Burton Institution, and find out this Haygarth, if he is to be found there.”
The Burton Institution was a somewhat dingy temple devoted to the interests of science and literature, and next door to some baths that were very popular among the denizens of Bloomsbury. People in quest of the baths were apt to ascend the classic flight of steps leading to the Institution, when they should have descended to a lowlier threshold lurking modestly by the side of that edifice. The Baths and the Institution had both been familiar to Mr. Sheldon in that period of probation which he had spent in Fitzgeorge-street. He was sufficiently acquainted with the librarian of the Institution to go in and out uninterrogated, and to make any use he pleased of the reading-room. He went in to-day, asked to see the latest bound volumes of the Times and the latest files of unbound papers, and began his investigation, working backwards. Rapidly and dexterously as he turned the big leaves of the journals, the investigation occupied nearly three-quarters of an hour; but at the expiration of that time he had alighted on the advertisement published in the March of the preceding year.
He gave a very low whistle — a kind of phantom whistle — as he read this advertisement. “John Haygarth! — a hundred thousand pounds!”
The fortune for which a claimant was lacking amounted to a hundred thousand pounds! Mr. Sheldon knew commercial despots who counted their wealth by millions, and whose fiat could sway the exchanges of Europe; but a hundred thousand pounds seemed to him a very nice thing nevertheless, and he was ready to dispute the prize the anticipation whereof had rendered his brother so triumphant.
“He has rejected me as a coadjutor,” he thought, as he went back to his cab after having copied the advertisement; “he shall have me as an antagonist.”
“Omega-street, Chelsea, next call,” he cried to the driver; and was soon beyond the confines of Bloomsbury, and rattling away towards the border-land of Belgravia. He had completed his search of the newspapers at ten minutes past twelve, and at twenty minutes to one he presented himself at the lodging-house in Omega-street, where he found Captain Paget, in whose “promoting” business there happened to be a lull just now. With this gentleman he had a long interview; and the result of that interview was the departure of the Captain by the two o’clock express for Ullerton. Thus had it happened that Valentine Hawkehurst and his patron encountered each other on the platform of Ullerton station.
Oct. 7th, Midnight. I was so fortunate as to get away from Spotswold this morning very soon after the completion of my researches in the vestry, and at five o’clock in the afternoon I found myself once more in the streets of Ullerton. Coming home in the train I meditated seriously upon the unexpected appearance of Horatio Paget at the head-quarters of this Haygarthian investigation; and the more I considered that fact, the more I felt inclined to doubt my patron’s motives, and to fear his interference. Can his presence in Ullerton have any relation to the business that has brought me here? That is the question which I asked myself a hundred times during my journey from Spotswold; that is the question which I ask myself still.
I have no doubt I give myself unnecessary trouble; but I know that old man’s Machiavellian cleverness only too well; and I am inclined to look with suspicion upon every action of his. My first business on returning to this house was to ascertain whether any one bearing his name, or answering to my description of him, had arrived during my absence. I was relieved by finding that no stranger whatever had put up at the inn since the previous forenoon. Who may have used the coffee-room is another question, not so easily set at rest. In the evening a great many people come in and go out; and my friend and patron may have taken his favourite brandy-and-soda, skimmed his newspaper, and picked up whatever information was to be obtained as to my movements without attracting any particular attention.
In the words of the immortal lessee of the Globe Theatre, “Why I should fear I know not... and yet I feel I fear!”
I found a registered letter from George Sheldon, enclosing twenty pounds in notes, and furnished therewith I went straight to my friend Jonah, whom I found engaged in the agreeable occupation of taking tea. I showed him the money; but my estimate of the reverend gentleman’s honour being of a very limited nature, I took care not to give it to him till he had produced the letters. On finding that I was really prepared to give him his price, he went to an old-fashioned bureau, and opened one of those secret recesses which cannot for three minutes remain a secret to any investigator possessed of a tolerably accurate eye or a three-foot rule. From this hiding-place — which he evidently considered a triumph of mechanical art, worthy the cabinet of a D’Argenson or a Fouché— he produced a packet of faded yellow letters, about which there lurked a faint odour of dried rose-leaves and lavender, which seemed the very perfume of the past.
When my reverend friend had laid the packet on the table within reach of my hand, and not till then, I gave him the bank-notes. His fat old fingers closed upon them greedily, and his fishy old eyes were illumined by a faint glimmer which I believe nothing but bank-notes could have kindled in them.
After having assured himself that they were genuine acknowledgments of indebtedness on the part of the old lady in Thread-needle-street, and not the base simulacra of Birmingham at five-and-twenty shillings a dozen — thirteen as twelve — Mr. Goodge obligingly consented to sign a simple form of receipt which I had drawn up for the satisfaction of my principal.
“I think you said there were forty-odd letters,” I remarked, before I proceeded to count the documents in the presence of Mr. Goodge.
That gentleman looked at me with an air of astonishment, which, had I not known him to be the most consummate of hypocrites, would have seemed to be simplicity itself.
“I said from thirty to forty,” he exclaimed; “I never said there were forty-odd letters.”
I looked at him and he looked at me. His face told me plainly enough that he was trying to deceive me, and my face told him plainly enough that he had no chance of succeeding in that attempt. Whether he was keeping back some of the letters with a view to extorting more money from me hereafter, or whether he was keeping them with the idea of making a better bargain with somebody else, I could not tell; but of the main fact I was certain — he had cheated me.
I untied the red tape which held the letters together. Yes, there was a piece of circumstantial evidence which might have helped to convict my friend had he been on his trial in a criminal court. The red tape bore the mark of the place in which it had been tied for half a century; and a little way within this mark the trace of a very recent tying. Some of the letters had been extracted, and the tape had been tied anew.
I had no doubt that this had been done while my negotiation with Mr. Goodge had been pending. What was I to do? Refuse the letters, and demand to have my principal’s money returned to me? I knew my friend well enough to know that such a proceeding would be about as useless as it would be to request the ocean to restore a cup of water that had been poured into it. The letters he had given me might or might not afford some slight link in the chain I was trying to put together; and the letters withheld from me might be more or less valuable than those given to me. In any case the transaction was altogether a speculative one; and George Sheldon’s money was hazarded as completely as if it had been put upon an outsider for the Derby.
Before bidding him a polite farewell, I was determined to make Mr. Goodge thoroughly aware that he had not taken me in.
“You said there were more than forty letters,” I told him; “I remember the phrase ‘forty-odd,’ which is a colloquialism one would scarcely look for in Tillotson or in John Wesley, who cherished a prejudice in favour of scholarship which does not distinguish all his followers. You said there were forty-odd letters, and you have removed some of them from the packet. I am quite aware that I have no legal remedy against you, as our contract was a verbal one, made without witnesses; so I must be content with what I get; but I do not wish you to flatter yourself with the notion that you have hoodwinked a lawyer’s clerk. You are not clever enough to do that, Mr. Goodge, though you are knave enough to cheat every attorney in the Law List.”
“Young man, are you aware ——?”
“As I have suffered by the absence of any witness to our negotiation, I may as well profit by the absence of any witness to our interview. You are a cheat and a trickster, Mr. Goodge, and I have the honour to wish you good afternoon!” “Go forth, young man!” cried the infuriated Jonah whose fat round face became beet-root colour with rage, and who involuntarily extended his hand to the poker — for the purpose of defence and not defiance, I believe. “Go forth, young man! I say unto you, as Abimelech said unto Jedediah, go forth.”
I am not quite clear as to the two scriptural proper names with which the Rev. Jonah embellished his discourse on this occasion; but I know that sort of man always has a leaning to the Abimelech and Jedediahs of biblical history; solely, I believe, because the names have a sonorous roll with them that is pleasant in the mouth of the charlatan.
As I was in the act of going forth — quite at my leisure, for I had no fear of the clerical poker — my eye happened to alight on a small side-table, covered with a chessboard-patterned cloth in gaudy colours, and adorned with some of those sombre volumes which seem like an outward evidence of the sober piety of their possessor. Among the sombre volumes lay something which savoured of another hemisphere than that to which those brown leather-bound books belonged. It was a glove — a gentleman’s glove, of pale lavender kid — small in size for a masculine glove, and bearing upon it the evidence of the cleaner’s art. Such might be the glove of an exiled Brummel, but could never have encased the squat paw of a Jonah Goodge. It was as if the point d’Alen?on ruffle of Chesterfield had been dropped in the study of John Wesley.
In a moment there flashed into my mind an idea which has haunted me ever since. That glove had belonged to my respected patron, Horatio Paget, and it was for his benefit the letters had been abstracted from the packet. He had been with Jonah Goodge in the course of that day, and had bought him over to cheat me.
And then I was obliged to go back to the old question, Was it possible that the Captain could have any inkling of my business? Who could have told him?
Who could have betrayed a secret which was known only to George Sheldon and myself?
After all, are there not other people than Horatio Paget who wear cleaned lavender gloves? But it always has been a habit with the Captain to leave one loose glove behind him; and I daresay it was the recollection of this which suggested the idea of his interference in the Goodge business.
I devoted my evening to the perusal of Mrs. Rebecca Haygarth’s letters. The pale ink, the quaint cramped hand, the old-fashioned abbreviations, and very doubtful orthography rendered the task laborious; but I stuck to my work bravely, and the old clock in the market-place struck two as I began the last letter. As I get deeper into this business I find my interest in it growing day by day — an interest sui generis, apart from all prospect of gain — apart even from the consideration that by means of this investigation I am obtaining a living which is earned almost honestly; for if I tell an occasional falsehood or act an occasional hypocrisy, I am no worse than a secretary of legation of an Old Bailey barrister.
The pleasure which I now take in the progress of this research is a pleasure that is new to me: it is the stimulus which makes a breakneck gallop across dreary fields gridironed with dykes and stone walls so delicious to the sportsman; it is the stimulus which makes the task of the mathematician sweet to him when he devotes laborious days to the solution of an abstruse problem; it is the stimulus that sustains the Indian trapper against all the miseries of cold and hunger, foul weather, and aching limbs; it is the fever of the chase — that inextinguishable fire which, once lighted in the human breast, is not to be quenched until the hunt is ended.
I should like to earn three thousand pounds; but if I were to be none the richer for my trouble, I think, now that I am so deeply involved in this business, I should still go on. I want to fathom the mystery of that midnight interment at Dewsdale; I want to know the story of that Mary Haygarth who lies under the old yew-tree at Spotswold, and for whose loss some one sorrowed without hope of consolation.
Was that a widower’s commonplace, I wonder, and did the unknown mourner console himself ultimately with a new wife? Who knows? as my Italian friends say when they discuss the future of France. Shall I ever penetrate that mystery of the past? My task seems to me almost as hopeless as if George Sheldon had set me to hunt up the descendants of King Solomon’s ninety-ninth wife. A hundred years ago seems as far away, for all practical purposes, as if it were on the other side of the flood.
The letters are worth very little. They are prim and measured epistles, and they relate much more to spiritual matters than to temporal business. Mrs. Rebecca seems to have been so much concerned for the health of her soul that she had very little leisure to think of anything so insignificant as the bodies of other people. The letters are filled with discourses upon her own state of mind; and the tone of them reveals not a little of that pride whose character it is to simulate humility. Mrs. Rebecca is always casting ashes on her head; but she takes care to let her friend and pastor know what a saintly head it is notwithstanding.
I have laid aside three of the most secular letters, which I selected after wading through unnumbered pages of bewailings in the strain of a Wesleyan Madame Guyon. These throw some little light upon the character of Matthew Haygarth, but do not afford much information of a tangible kind. I have transcribed the letters verbatim, adhering even to certain eccentricities of orthography which were by no means unusual in an age when the Pretender to the crown of Great Britain wrote of his father as Gems.
The first letter bears the date of August 30th, 1773, one week after the marriage of the lady to our friend Matthew.
“REVERED FRIEND AND PASTOR — On Monday sennite we arriv’d in London, wich seems to me a mighty bigg citty, but of no more meritt or piety than Babylon of old. My husband, who knows ye towne better than he knows those things with wich it would more become him to be familiar, was pleas’d to laugh mightily at that pious aversion wherewith I regarded some of ye most notable sights in this place. We went t’other night to a great garden called by some Spring Garden, by others Vauxhall — as having been at one time ye residence or estate of that Arch Fiend and Papistical traitor Vaux, or Faux; but although I felt obligated to my husband for ye desire to entertain me with a fine sight, I could not but look with shame upon serious Christians disporting themselves like children amongst coloured lamps, and listening as if enraptured to profane music, when, at so much less cost of money or of health, they might have been assembled together to improve and edify one another.
“My obliging Mathew would have taken me to other places of the like character; but inspir’d, as I hope and believe, by ye direction of ye spirit, I took upon myself to tell him what vain trifling is all such kind of pleasure. He argu’d with me stoutly, saying that ye King and Queen, who are both shining examples of goodness and piety, do attend Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and are to be seen there frequent, to the delight of their subjects. On which I told him that, much as I esteemed my sovereign and his respectable consort, I would compleat my existence without having seen them rather than I would seek to encounter them in a place of vain and frivolous diversion. He listen’d to my discoorse in a kind and sober temper, but he was not convinc’d; for by and by he falls of a sudden to sighing and groaning, and cries out, ‘O, I went to Vauxhall once when ye garden was not many years made, and O, how bright ye lamps shone, like ye stars of heaven fallen among bushes! and O, how sweet ye music sounded, like ye hymns of angels in ye dewy evening! but that was nigh upon twenty years gone by, and all ye world is changed since then.’
“You will conceive, Reverend Sir, that I was scandalised by such a foolish rapsodie, and in plain words admonish’d my husband of his folly. Whereupon he speedily became sober, and asked my pardon; but for all that night continued of a gloomy countenance, ever and anon falling to sighing and groning as before. Indeed, honour’d Sir, I have good need of a patient sperrit in my dealings with him; for altho’ at times I think he is in a fair way to become a Christian, there are other times when I doubt Satan has still a hold upon him, and that all my prayers and admonitions have been in vaine.
“You, who know the wildness and wickedness of his past life — so far as that life was ever known to any but himself, who was ever of a secret and silent disposition concerning his own doings in this city, tho’ free-spoken and frank in all common matters — you, honour’d sir, know with how serious an intention I have taken upon myself the burden of matrimony, hoping thereby to secure the compleat conversion of this waywarde soul. You are aware how it was ye earnest desire of my late respected father that Mathew Haygarth and I shou’d be man and wife, his father and my father haveing bin friends and companions in ye days of her most gracious majesty Queen Anne. You know how, after being lost to all decent company for many years, Mathew came back after his father’s death, and lived a sober and serious life, attending amongst our community, and being seen to shed tears on more than one occasion while listening to the discourse of our revered and inspired founder. And you, my dear and honour’d pastor, will feel for me when I tell you how I am tormented by ye fear of backsliding in this soul which I have promised to restore to ye fold. It was but yesterday, when walking with him near St. John’s Gate at Clerkenwell, he came to a standstill all of a sudden, and he cried in that impetuous manner which is even yet natural to him, ‘Look ye now, Becky, wouldst like to see the house in which the happiest years of my life was spent?’ And I making no answer, as thinking it was but some sudden freak, he points out a black dirty-looking dwelling-place, with overhanging windows and a wide gabled roof. ‘Yonder it stands, Becky,’ he cries; ‘number seven John-street, Clerkenwell; a queer dingy box of four walls, my wench — a tumble-down kennel, with a staircase that ‘twould break your neck to mount, being strange to it — and half a day’s journey from the court-end of town. But that house was once paradise to me; and to look at it even now, though ’tis over eighteen years since I saw the inside of it, will bring the tears into these poor old eyes of mine’. And then he walk’d on so fast that I could scarce keep pace with him, till we came to Smithfield; and then he began to tell me about Bartholomew-fair and the brave sights he had seen; and must needs show me where had stood the booth of one Fielding — since infamously notorious as the writer of some trashy novels, the dulness whereof is only surpassed by their profligacy: and then he talks of Fawkes the conjurer, who made a great fortune, and of some humble person called ‘Tiddy Doll,’ a dealer in gingerbread and such foolish wares. But he could tell me nothing of those early preachings of our revered founder in Moorfields, which would have been more pleasant to me than all this vain babble about drolls and jesters, gingerbread bakers and showmen.
“When we had walked the round of the place, and it was time to take coach for our lodging at Chelsea — he having brought me thus far to see St. Paul’s and the prison of Newgate, the Mint and Tower — the gloomy fit came on him again, and all that evening he was dull and sorrowful, though I read aloud to him from the printed sermons of a rising member of our community. So you will see, honour’d sir, how difficult it is for these children of Satan to withdraw themselves from that master they have once served; since at the sober age of fifty-three yeares my husband’s weak heart yet yearns after profligate faires and foolish gardens lighted by color’d lampes.
“And now no more, reverend friend, my paper being gone and it being full time to reflect that y’r patience must be gone also. Service to Mrs. Goodge. I have no more room but to assure you that y’r gayeties of this foolish and erring citty have no power to withdraw y’r heart of her whose chief privilege it is to subscribe herself,
“Your humble follower and servant.”
“Rebecca Haygarth.”
To my mind there seems just a shadowy hint of some bygone romance in this letter. Why did the dingy house in John-street bring the tears into Matthew’s eyes? and why did the memory of Vauxhall and Bartholomew fair seem so sweet to him? And then that sighing and groaning and dolefulness of visage whenever the thought of the past came back to him?
What did it all mean, I wonder? Was it only his vanished youth, which poor, sobered, converted, Wesleyanised Matthew regretted? or were there pensive memories of something even sweeter than youth associated with the coloured lamps of Vauxhall and the dinginess of Clerkenwell? Who shall sound the heart of a man who lived a hundred years ago? and where is the fathom-line which shall plumb its mysteries? I should need a stack of old letters before I could arrive at the secret of that man’s life.
The two other letters, which I have selected after some deliberation, relate to the last few weeks of Matthew’s existence; and in these again I fancy I see the trace of some domestic mystery, some sorrowful secret which this sober citizen kept hidden from his wife, but which he was on several occasions half inclined to reveal to her.
Perhaps if the lady’s piety — which seems to have been thoroughly sincere and praiseworthy, by the bye — had been a little less cold and pragmatical in its mode of expression, poor Matthew might have taken heart of grace and made a clean breast of it.
That there was a secret in the man’s life I feel convinced; but that conviction goes very little way towards proving any one point of the smallest value to George Sheldon.
I transcribe an extract from each of the two important letters; the first written a month before Matthew’s death, the second a fortnight after that event.
“And indeed, honour’d sir, I have of late suffered much uneasinesse of speritt concerning my husband. Those fits of ye mopes of w’h I informed you some time back have again come upon him. For awhile I did hope that these melancholic affections were ye fruit put forth by a regenerate soul; but within this month last past it has been my sorrow to discover that these gloomy disorders arise rather from ye promptings of the Evil One. It has pleased Mr. Haygarthe of late to declare that his life is nigh at an end; and indeed he affects a conviction that his days are number’d. This profane and impertinent notion I take to be a direct inspiration of Satan, of a like character to ye sudden and unaccountable fitts of laughter which have seized upon many pious Christians in the midst of earnest congregations; whereby much shame and discomfiture has been brought upon our sect. Nor is there any justification for this presumptuous certainty entertained by my husband, inasmuch as his health is much as it has ordinarily been for ye last ten years. He does acknowledge this with his own lips, and immediately after cries out that his race is run, and ye hand of death is upon him; which I cannot but take as ye voice of ye enemy speaking through that weak mouth of ye flesh.
“On Sunday night last past, ye gloomy fitt being come upon him after prayers, Mr. Haygarthe began all on a sudden, as it is his habit to do:
“‘There is something I would fain tell ye, wench,’ he cries out, ‘something about those roistering days in London, which it might be well for thee to know.’
“But I answered him directly, that I had no desire to hear of profane roisterings, and that it would be better for him to keep his peace, and listen reverently to the expounding of the Scriptures, which Humphrey Bagot, our worthy pastor and friend, had promised to explain and exemplify after supper. We was seated at ye time in ye blue parlour, the table being spread for supper, and were awaiting our friend from the village, a man of humble station, being but a poor chapman and huckster, but of exalted mind and a most holy temper, and sells me the same growth of Bohea as that drunk by our gracious queen at Windsor. After I had thus reproved him — in no unkind speritt —” Mr. Haygarthe fell to sighing; and then cries out all at once:
“‘When I am on my death-bed, wife, I will tell thee something: be sure thou askest me for it; or if death come upon me unawares, thou wouldst do well to search in the old tulip-leaf bureau for a letter, since I may tell thee that in a letter which I would not tell with these lips.’
“Before there was time to answer him in comes Mr. Bagot, and we to supper; after which he did read the sixth chapter of Hebrews and expound it at much length for our edifying; at the end whereof Satan had obtained fast hold of Mr. Haygarthe, who was fallen asleep and snoring heavily.”
Here is plain allusion to some secret, which that pragmatical idiot, Mrs. Rebecca, studiously endeavoured not to hear. The next extract is from a letter written when the lips that had been fain to speak were stilled for ever. Ah, Mistress Rebecca, you were but mortal woman, although you were also a shining light amongst the followers of John Wesley; and I wonder what you would have given for poor Matthew’s secret then.
“Some days being gone after this melancholic event, I bethought me of that which my husband had said to me before I left Dewsdale for that excursion to the love-feasts at Kemberton and Kesfield, Broppindean and Dawnfold, from which I returned but two short weeks before my poor Matthew’s demise. I called to remembrance that discourse about approaching death which in my poor human judgment I did esteem a pestilent error of mind, but which I do now recognise as a spiritual premonition; and I set myself earnestly to look for that letter which Matthew told me he would leave in the tulip-leaf bureau. But though I did search with great care and pains, my trouble was wasted, inasmuch as there was no letter. Nor did I leave off to search until ev’ry nook and crevvis had been examin’d. But in one of ye secret drawers, hidden in an old dog’s-eared book of prayers, I did find a lock of fair hair, as if cut from the head of a child, entwin’d curiously with a long plait of dark hair, which, by reason of ye length thereof, must needs have been the hair of a woman, and with these the miniature of a girl’s face in a gold frame. I will not stain this paper, which is near come to an end, by the relation of such suspicions as arose in my mind on finding these curious treasures; nor will I be of so unchristian a temper as to speak ill of the dead. My husband was in his latter days exemplarily sober, and a humble acting Xtian. Ye secrets of his earlier life will not now be showne to me on this side heaven. I have set aside ye book, ye picture, and ye plaited hair in my desk for conveniency, where I will show them to you when I am next rejoic’d by y’r improving conversation. Until then, in grief or in happiness, in health and sickness, I trust I shall ever continue, with y’r same sincerity,
“Your humble and obliged Servant and disciple
“REBECCA HAYGARTHE.”
Thus end my excerpts from the correspondence of Mrs. Haygarthe. They are very interesting to me, as containing the vague shadow of a vanished existence; but whether they will ever be worth setting forth in an affidavit is extremely uncertain. Doubtless that miniature of an unknown girl which caused so much consternation in the mind of sober Mrs. Rebecca was no other than the “Molly” whose gray eyes reminded me of Charlotte Halliday.
As I copied Mrs. Rebecca’s quaint epistles, in the midnight stillness, the things of which I was writing arose before me like a picture. I could see the blue parlour that Sunday evening; the sober couple seated primly opposite to each other; the china monsters on the high chimneypiece; the blue-and-white Dutch tiles, with queer squat figures of Flemish citizens on foot and on horseback; the candles burning dimly on the spindle-legged table — two poor pale flames reflected ghastly in the dark polished panels of the wainscot; the big open Bible on an adjacent table; the old silver tankard, and buckhorn-handled knives and forks set out for supper; the solemn eight-day clock, ticking drearily in the corner; and amid all that sombre old-fashioned comfort, gray-haired Matthew sighing and lamenting for his vanished youth.
I have grown strangely romantic since I have fallen in love with Charlotte Halliday. The time was when I should have felt nothing but a flippant ignorant contempt for poor Haygarth’s feeble sighings and lamentings; but now I think of him with a sorrowful tenderness, and am more interested in his poor commonplace life, that picture, and those two locks of hair, than in the most powerful romance that ever emanated from mortal genius. It has been truly said, that truth is stranger than fiction: may it not as justly be said, that truth has a power to touch the human heart which is lacking in the most sublime flights of a Shakespeare, or the grandest imaginings of an Aeschylus? One is sorry for the fate of Agamemnon; but one is infinitely more sorrowful for the cruel death of that English Richard in the dungeon at Pomfret, who was a very insignificant person as compared to the king of men and of ships.
Oct. 10th. Yesterday and the day before were blank days. On Saturday I read Mrs. Rebecca’s letters a second time after a late breakfast, and spent a lazy morning in the endeavour to pick up any stray crumbs of information which I might have overlooked the previous night. There was nothing to be found, however; and, estimable as I have always considered the founder of the Wesleyan fraternity, I felt just a little weary of his virtues and his discourses, his journeyings from place to place, his love-feasts and his prayer-meetings, before I had finished with Mrs. Haygarth’s correspondence. In the afternoon I strolled about the town; made inquiries at several inns, with a view to discover whether Captain Paget was peradventure an inmate thereof; looked in at the railway-station, and watched the departure of a train; dawdled away half an hour at the best tobacconist’s shop in the town on the chance of encountering my accomplished patron, who indulges in two of the choicest obtainable cigars per diem, and might possibly repair thither to make a purchase, if he were in the place. Whether he is still in Ullerton or not I cannot tell; but he did not come to the tobacconist’s; and I was fain to go back to my inn, having wasted a day. Yet I do not think that George Sheldon will have cause to complain of me, since I have worked very closely for my twenty shillings per week, and have devoted myself to the business in hand with an amount of enthusiasm which I did not think it possible for me to experience — except for —
I went to church on Sunday morning, and was more devoutly inclined than it has been my habit to feel; for although a man who lives by his wits must not necessarily be a heathen or an atheist, it is very difficult for him to be anything like a Christian. Even my devotion yesterday was not worth much, for my thoughts went vagabondising off to Charlotte Halliday in the midst of a very sensible practical sermon.
In the afternoon I read the papers, and dozed by the fire in the coffee-room — two-thirds coke by the way, and alternating from the fierceness of a furnace to the dreary blackness of an exhausted coal-mine — still thinking of Charlotte.
Late in the evening I walked the streets of the town, and thought what a lonely wretch I was. The desert of Sahara is somewhat dismal, I daresay; but in its dismality there is at least a flavour of romance, a smack of adventure. O, the hopeless dulness, the unutterable blankness of a provincial town late on a Sunday night, as it presents itself to the contemplation of a friendless young man without a sixpence in his pocket, or one bright hope to tempt him to forgetfulness of the past in pleasant dreaming of the future!
Complaining again! O pen, which art the voice of my discontent, your spluttering is like this outburst of unmanly fretfulness and futile rage! O paper, whose flat surface typifies the dull level of my life, your greasy unwillingness to receive the ink is emblematic of the soul’s revolt against destiny!
This afternoon brought me a letter from Sheldon, and opened a new channel for my explorations in that underground territory, the past. That man has a marvellous aptitude for his work; and has, what is more than aptitude, the experience of ten years of failure. Such a man must succeed sooner or later. I wonder whether his success will come while I am allied to him. I have been used to consider myself an unlucky wretch, a creature of ill-fortune to others as well as to myself. It is a foolish superstition, perhaps, to fancy one’s self set apart for an evil destiny; but the Eumenides have been rather hard upon me. Those “amiable” deities, whom they of Colonae tried so patiently to conciliate with transparent flatteries, have marked me for their prey from the cradle — I don’t suppose that cradle was paid for, by the bye. I wonder whether there is an avenging deity whose special province it is to pursue the insolvent — a Nemesis of the Bankruptcy Court.
My Sheldon’s epistle bears the evidence of a very subtle brain, as I think. It is longer than his previous letters. I transcribe it here, as I wish this record to be a complete brief of my proceedings in this Haygarth business.
“Gray’s Inn, Sunday night.
“DEAR HAWKEHURST — The copies of the letters came duly to hand, and I think you have made your selections with much discretion, always supposing you have overlooked nothing in the remaining mass of writing. I will thank you to send me the rest of the letters, by the way. You can take notes of anything likely to be useful to yourself, and it will be as well for me to possess the originals.
“I find one very strong point in the first letter of your selection, viz. the allusion to a house in John-street. It is clear that Matthew lived in that house, and in that neighbourhood there may even yet remain some traces of his existence. I shall begin a close investigation to-morrow within a certain radius of that spot; and if I have the good luck to fall upon any clear-headed centenarians, I may pick up something.
“There are some alms-houses hard by Whitecross-street prison, where the inmates live to ages that savour of the Pentateuch. Perhaps there I may light upon some impoverished citizen fallen from a good estate who can remember some contemporary of Matthew’s. London was smaller in those days than it is now, and men lived out their lives in one spot, and had leisure to be concerned about the affairs of their neighbours. As I have now something of a clue to Matthew’s roistering days, I shall set to work to follow it up closely; and your provincial researches and my metropolitan investigations proceeding simultaneously, we may hope to advance matters considerably ere long. For your own part, I should advise you forthwith to hunt up the Judson branch. You will remember that Matthew’s only sister was a Mrs. Judson of Ullerton. I want to find an heir-at-law in a direct line from Matthew; and you know my theory on that point. But if we fail in that direction, we must of course fall back upon the Judsons, who are a disgustingly complicated set of people, and will take half a lifetime to disentangle, to say nothing of other men who may be working the same business, and who are pretty sure to have pinned their faith on the female branch of the Haygarthian tree.
“I want you to ferret out some of the Judson descendants with a view to picking up further documentary evidence in the shape of old letters, inscriptions in old books, and so on. That Matthew had a secret is certain; and that he was very much inclined to reveal that secret in his later days is also certain. Who shall say that he did not tell it to his only sister, though he was afraid to tell it to his wife?
“You have acted with so much discretion up to this point, that I do not care to trouble you with any further hints or suggestions. When money is wanted, it shall be forthcoming; but I must beg you to manage things economically, as I have to borrow at a considerable sacrifice; and should this affair prove a failure, my ruin is inevitable.
“Yours, &c. G.S.”
My friend Sheldon is a man who can never have been more than “yours et-cetera” to any human creature. I suppose what he calls ruin would be a quiet passage through the Bankruptcy Court, and a new set of chambers. I should not suppose that sort of ruin would be very terrible for a man whose sole possessions are a few weak-backed horsehair chairs, a couple of battered old desks, half a dozen empty japanned boxes, a file of Bell’s Life, and a Turkey carpet in which the progress of corruption is evident to the casual observer.
The hunting-up of the Judsons is a very easy matter as compared to the task of groping in the dimness of the past in search of some faint traces of the footsteps of departed Haygarths. Whereas the Haygarth family seem to be an extinct race, the Judsonian branch have bred and mustered in the land; and my chief difficulty in starting has been an embarras de richesse, in the shape of half a page of Judsons in the Ullerton directory.
Whether to seek out Theodore Judson, the attorney, in Nile street East, or the Rev. James Judson, curate of St. Gamaliel; whether to appeal in the first instance to Judson & Co., haberdashers and silk mercers, of the Ferrygate, or to Judson of Judson and Grinder, wadding manufacturers in Lady-lane — was the grand question. On inquiring of the landlord as to the antecedents of these Judsons, I found that they were all supposed to spring from one common stock, and to have the blood of old Jonathan Haygarth in their veins. The Judsons had been an obscure family — people of “no account,” my landlord told me, until Joseph Judson, chapman and cloth merchant in a very small way, was so fortunate as to win the heart of Ruth Haygarth, only daughter of the wealthy Nonconformist grocer in the market-place. This marriage had been the starting-point of Joseph Judson’s prosperity. Old Haygarth had helped his industrious and respectable son-in-law along the stony road that leads to fortune, and had no doubt given him many a lift over the stones which bestrew that toilsome highway. My landlord’s information was as vague as the information of people in general; but it was easily to be made out, from his scanty shreds and scraps of information, that the well-placed Judsons of the present day had almost all profited to some extent by the hard-earned wealth of Jonathan Haygarth. “They’ve nearly all of them got the name of Haygarth mixed up with their other names somehow,” said my landlord. “Judson of Judson and Grinder is Thomas Haygarth Judson. He’s a member of our tradesman’s club, and worth a hundred thousand pounds, if he’s worth a sixpence.”
I have observed, by the way, that a wealthy tradesman in a country town is never accredited with less than a hundred thousand; there seems a natural hankering in the human mind for round numbers.
“There’s J.H. Judson of St. Gamaliel,” continued my landlord —“he’s James Haygarth Judson; and young Judson the attorney’s son puts ‘Haygarth Judson’ on his card, and gets people to call him Haygarth Judson when they will — which in a general way they won’t, on account of his giving himself airs, which you may see him any summer evening walking down Ferrygate as if the place belonged to him, and he didn’t set much value on it. They do say his father’s heir-at-law to a million of money left by the last of the Haygarths, and that he and the son are trying to work up a claim to the property against the Crown. But I have heard young Judson deny it in our room when he was spoken to about it, and I don’t suppose there’s much ground for people’s talk.”
I was sorry to discover there was any ground for such talk; Mr. Judson the lawyer would be no insignificant opponent. I felt that I must give a very wide berth to Mr. Theodore Judson the attorney, and his stuck-up son, unless circumstances should so shape themselves as to oblige us to work with him. In the meanwhile any move I made amongst the other Judsons would be likely, I thought, to come to the knowledge of these particular members of the family.
“Are the Judson family very friendly with one another?” I artfully inquired.
“Well, you see, some of ’em are, and some of ’em ain’t. They’re most of ’em third and fourth cousins, you see, and that ain’t a very near relationship in a town where there’s a good deal of competition, and interests often clash. Young Theodore — Haygarth Judson as he calls himself — is very thick with Judson of St. Gamaliel’s, they were at college together, you see: and fine airs they give themselves on the strength of a couple of years or so at Cambridge. Those two get on very well together. But Judson of the Lady-lane Mills don’t speak to either of ’em when he meets ’em in the street, and has been known to cut ’em dead in my room. William Judson of Ferrygate is a dissenter, and keeps himself to himself very close. The other Judsons are too fast a lot for him: though what’s the harm of a man taking a glass or two of brandy-and-water of an evening with his friends is more than I can find out,” added mine host, musingly.
It was to William Judson the dissenter, who kept himself to himself, that I determined to present myself in the first instance. As a dissenter, he would be likely to have more respect for the memory of the Nonconformist and Wesleyan Haygarths, and to have preserved any traditions relating to them with more fidelity than the Anglican and frivolous members of the Judson family. As an individual who kept himself to himself, he would be unlikely to communicate my business to his kindred.
I lost no time in presenting myself at the house of business in Ferrygate, and after giving the servant George Sheldon’s card, and announcing myself as concerned in a matter of business relating to the Haygarth family, I was at once ushered into a prim counting-house, where a dapper little old gentleman in spotless broadcloth, and a cambric cravat and shirt frill which were soft and snowy as the plumage of the swan, received me with old-fashioned courtesy. I was delighted to find him seventy-five years of age at the most moderate computation, and I should have been all the better pleased if he had been older. I very quickly discovered that in Mr. Judson the linen draper I had to deal with a very different person from the Rev. Jonah Goodge. He questioned me closely as to my motive in seeking information on the subject of the departed Haygarth, and I had some compunction in diplomatising with him as I had diplomatised with Mr. Goodge. To hoodwink the wary Jonah was a triumph — to deceive the confiding linen draper was a shame. However, as I have before set down, I suppose at the falsest I am not much farther from the truth than a barrister or a diplomatist. Mr. Judson accepted my account of myself in all simplicity, and seemed quite pleased to have an opportunity of talking about the deceased Haygarths.
“You are not concerned in the endeavour to assert Theodore Judson’s claim to the late John Haygarth’s property, eh?” the old man asked me presently, as if struck by a sudden misgiving.
I assured him that Mr. Theodore Judson’s interests and mine were in no respect identical.
“I am glad of that,” answered the draper; “not that I owe Theodore Judson a grudge, you must understand, though his principles and mine differ very widely. I have been told that he and his son hope to establish a claim to that Haygarth property; but they will never succeed, sir — they will never succeed. There was a young man who went to India in ‘41; a scamp and a vagabond, sir, who was always trying to borrow money in sums ranging from a hundred pounds, to set him up in business and render him a credit to his family, to a shilling for the payment of a night’s lodging or the purchase of a dinner. But that young man was the great-grandson of Ruth Haygarth — the eldest surviving grandson of Ruth Haygarth’s eldest son; and if that man is alive, he is rightful heir to John Haygarth’s money. Whether he is alive or dead at this present moment is more than I can tell, since he has never been heard of in Ullerton since he left the town; but until Theodore Judson can obtain legal proof of that man’s death he has no more chance of getting one sixpence of the Haygarth estate than I have of inheriting the crown of Great Britain.”
The old man had worked himself into a little passion before he finished this speech, and I could see that the Theodore Judsons were as unpopular in the draper’s counting-house as they were at the Swan Inn.
“What was this man’s Christian name?” I asked.
“Peter. He was called Peter Judson; and was the great-grandson of my grandfather, Joseph Judson, who inhabited this very house, sir, more than a hundred years ago. Let me see: Peter Judson must have been about five-and-twenty years of age when he left Ullerton; so he is a middle-aged man by this time if he hasn’t killed himself, or if the climate hasn’t killed him long ago. He went as supercargo to a merchant vessel: he was a clever fellow, and could work hard when it suited him, in spite of his dissipated life. Theodore Judson is a very good lawyer; but though he may bring all his ingenuity to bear, he will never advance a step nearer to the possession of John Haygarth’s money till he obtains evidence of Peter Judson’s death; and he’s afraid to advertise for that evidence for fear he might arouse the attention of other claimants.”
Much as I was annoyed to find that there were claimants lying in wait for the rev. intestate’s wealth, I was glad to perceive that Theodore Judson’s unpopularity was calculated to render his kindred agreeably disposed to any stranger likely to push that gentleman out of the list of competitors for these great stakes, and I took my cue from this in my interview with the simple old draper.
“I regret that I am not at liberty to state the nature of my business,” I said, in a tone that was at once insinuating and confidential; “but I think I may venture to go so far as to say, without breach of trust to my employer, that whoever may ultimately succeed to the Rev. John Haygarth’s money, neither Mr. Judson the lawyer nor his son will ever put a finger on a penny of it.”
“I am not sorry to hear it,” answered Mr. Judson, enraptured; “not that I owe the young man a grudge, you must understand, but because he is particularly undeserving of good fortune. A young man who passes his own kindred in the streets of his native town without the common courtesy due to age or respectability; a young man who sneers at the fortune acquired in an honest and reputable trade; a young man who calls his cousins counter-jumpers, and his aunts and uncles ‘swaddlers’— a vulgar term of contempt applied to the earlier members of the Wesleyan confraternity — such a young man is not the individual to impart moral lustre to material wealth; and I am free to confess that I had rather any one else than Theodore Judson should inherit this vast fortune. Why, are you aware, my dear sir, that he has been seen to drive tandem through this very street, as it is; and I should like to know how many horses he would harness to that gig of his, or how openly he would insult his relatives, if he had a hundred thousand pounds to deal with?”
“A hundred thousand pounds!” exclaimed I; “am I to understand that the fortune left by the Reverend John Haygarth amounts to that sum?”
“To every penny of it, sir; and a nice use Theodore Judson and that precious son of his would make of it if it fell into their hands.”
For a second time Mr. Judson the draper had worked himself into a little passion, and the conversation had to be discontinued for some minutes while he cooled down to his ordinary temperament.
“O ho!” said I within myself, while awaiting the completion of this cooling-down process; “so this is the stake for which my friend Sheldon is playing!”
“I’ll tell you what I will do for you, Mr. — Mr. Hawke-shell,”— Mr. Judson said at last, making a compound of my own and my employer’s names; “I will give you a line of introduction to my sister. If any one can help you in hunting up intelligence relating to the past she can. She is two years my junior — seventy-one years of age, but as bright and active as a girl. She has lived all her life in Ullerton, and is a woman who hoards every scrap of paper that comes in her way. If old letters or old newspapers can assist you, she can show you plenty amongst her stores.”
Upon this the old man wrote a note, which he dried with sand out of a perforated bottle, as Richard Steele may have dried one of those airy tender essays which he threw off in tavern parlours for the payment of a jovial dinner.
Provided with this antique epistle, written on Bath post and sealed with a great square seal from a bunch of cornelian monstrosities which the draper carried at his watch-chain, I departed to find Miss Hephzibah Judson, of Lochiel Villa, Lancaster-road.