And, hand in hand, we walked swiftly but quietly towards the high road to Milford.
The foregoing pages are sufficient record for those of my children and grandchildren who have heard the tale from my lips, and sufficient explanation for the remoter posterity of Eustace Brandling and myself, of the mystery which overhung their family in the latter part of the eighteenth century. I have only a few legal details to add.
By the explosion which my husband"s skill in chemistry and mechanics had enabled him to procure and to time, all the main buildings of St.
Salvat"s Castle had been utterly destroyed; hiding in their ruins the fate alike of the faithful Davies and of the atrocious Hubert; and hiding, for anything, that was known to the contrary, two other presumable victims--my husband and myself. The gang of villains, deprived of its headquarters, and deprived of its master spirit, speedily fell to pieces. Richard and Gwyn appear to have come to a violent end in quarrelling over the booty of the last wicked expedition; Simon and Evan, and some of their followers ended in prison, on a charge of pillaging the ruins and digging for treasure while the property, in the absence of it master, was still in the hands of the law; but it is probable that this condemnation was intended to save them from a worse punishment, as the authorities gradually got wind of the real trade which had been carried on in the castle.
From the villains of St. Salvat"s Eustace and I were now safe. But we had taken the law into our own hands; and the justice which had been unable to defend us while innocent, was bound to punish our acts towards the guilty. My husband"s words had been true: he and I were outlaws and felons. Our case was privily placed before the King and his ministers, when we had left England and had rejoined my mother in her country. In consideration of the unusual circ.u.mstances it was decided that the baronetcy should not lapse, nor the lands be forfeited to the Crown, but be held over for our possible heirs, while ourselves should be accounted as mysteriously disappeared, and forbidden to enter the kingdom. So we wandered for many years in the new world and the old; and it was far from St. Salvat"s that our children were successively born. And it was only on the death of my dear husband, which occurred in 1802, that a Brandling, our eldest son, reappeared and claimed his t.i.tle and inheritance. It was the wish of my son Piers that I should accompany him and his wife to England, and help to rebuild the home which I had helped to destroy. But the recollection of the place had only grown in terror, and I have ever adhered to my resolution not to set eyes on it again. I have spent the years of my widowhood at Grandfey, my dear dead mother"s little property in Switzerland, where Eustace and I had been so happy before he succeeded to St. Salvat"s. And it is at Grandfey, among the meadows again white with hemlock and the lime avenues again in blossom, that I await, amid the sound of cowbells and of mountain streams, Death, who had held me in his clutches fifty years ago in that castle hidden among the trees above the white wailing Northern sea.