She also noticed, in one of the open drawers of Mrs. Melrose"s bedroom, a photograph, evidently forgotten, lying face downward. Examining it, she saw that it was a picture of Netta, with the baby, taken apparently in Italy during the preceding summer. The c.u.mbrian woman, shrewdly observant like all her race, was struck by the tragic differences between the woman of the picture and the little blighted creature who had just made a flitting from the Tower.
She showed the photograph to her husband, returned it to the drawer, and thought no more about it.
News was of course sent to Mr. Melrose in Paris, and within three days he had come rushing back to the Tower, beside himself with rage and grief, not at all, as George Tyson soon a.s.sured himself, for the loss of his wife and child, but entirely for the theft of the priceless Florentine bronze, a loss which he had suspected on the first receipt of the news of the forced door, and verified at once on his arrival.
He stood positively aghast at Netta"s perfidy and wickedness, and he wrote at once to the apartment in the Via Giugno, to denounce her in the most emphatic terms. As she had chosen to steal one of his most precious possessions, which she had of course converted into money, she had no further claim on him whatever, and he broke off all relations with her.
Eighty pounds a year would be paid by his lawyers to a Florentine lawyer, whom he named, for his daughter"s maintenance, so long as Netta left him unmolested. But he desired to hear and see no more of persons who reminded him of the most tragical event of his history as a collector, as well as of the utter failure of his married life. Henceforth they were strangers to each other, and she might arrange her future as she pleased.
The letter was answered by Mrs. Robert Smeath in the third person, and all communications ceased. As a matter of fact the Smeath family were infinitely relieved by Melrose"s letter, which showed that he did not intend to take any police steps to recover the bronze or its value.
Profiting by the paternal traditions, Netta had managed the sale of the Hermes in London, where, owing to Melrose"s miserly hiding of it, it was quite unknown, with considerable skill. It had realized a small fortune, and she had returned, weary, ill, but triumphant, to the apartment in the Via Giugno.
Twelve months later, Melrose had practically forgotten that he had ever known her. He returned for the winter, to Threlfall, and entered upon a course of life which gradually made him the talk and wonder of the countryside. The rooms occupied by Netta and her child were left just as he had found them when he returned after her flight. He had turned the key on them then, and n.o.body had since entered them. Tyson wondered whether it was sentiment, or temper; and gave it for the latter.
The years pa.s.sed away. Melrose"s hair turned from black to gray; Thyrza married a tradesman in Carlisle and presented him with a large family; the Dixons, as cook and manservant, gradually fitted themselves more and more closely to the queer conditions of life in the Tower, and grew old in the service of a master whose eccentricities became to them, in process of time, things to be endured without comment, like disagreeable facts of climate. In Dixon, his Methodist books, his Bible, and his weekly chapel maintained those forces of his character which were--and always continued to be--independent of Melrose; and Melrose knew his own interests well enough not to interfere with an obstinate man"s religion.
While Tyson, after five years, pa.s.sed on triumphantly to a lucrative agency in the Dukeries, having won a reputation for tact and patience in the impossible service of a mad master, which would carry him through life. Melrose, being Melrose, found it hopeless to replace him satisfactorily; and, as he continued to buy land greedily year after year, the neglected condition of his immense estate became an ever-increasing scandal to the county.
Meanwhile, for some years after the departure of Netta, Lady Tatham was obliged for reason of health to spend the winters on the Riviera, and she and her boy were only at Duddon for the summer months. Intercourse between her and her cousin Edmund Melrose was never renewed, and her son grew up in practical ignorance of the relationship. When, however, the lad was nearing the end of his Eton school days Duddon became once more the permanent home, summer and winter, of mother and son, and young Lord Tatham, curly-haired, good-humoured, and good-hearted, became thenceforward the favourite and princeling of the countryside. On the east and north, the Duddon estates marched with Melrose"s property.
Occasions of friction constantly arose, but the determination on each side to have no more communication with the other than was absolutely necessary generally composed any nascent dispute; so long at least as Lady Tatham and a very diplomatic agent were in charge.
But at the age of twenty-four, Harry Tatham succeeded to the sole management of his estates, and his mother soon realized that her son was not likely to treat their miserly neighbour with the same patience as herself.
And with the changes in human life, went changes even more subtle and enduring in the c.u.mbria county itself. Those were times of crisis for English agriculture. Wheat-lands went back to pasture; and a surplus population, that has found its way for generations to the factory towns, began now to turn toward the great Canadian s.p.a.ces beyond the western sea. Only the mountains still rose changeless and eternal, at least to human sense; "ambitious for the hallowing" of moon and sun; keeping their old secrets, and their perpetual youth.
And after twenty years Threlfall Tower became the scene of another drama, whereof what has been told so far is but the prologue.
III
It was a May evening, and Lydia Penfold, spinster, aged twenty-four, was sketching in St. John"s Vale, that winding valley which, diverging from the Ambleside-Keswick road in an easterly direction, divides the northern slopes of the Helvellyn range from the splendid ma.s.s of Blencathra.
So beautiful was the evening, so ravishing under its sway were heaven and earth, that Lydia"s work went but slowly. She was a professional artist, to whom guineas were just as welcome as to other people; and she had very industrious and methodical views of her business. But she was, before everything, one of those persons who thrill under the appeal of beauty to a degree that often threatens or suspends practical energy. Save for the conscience in her, she could have lived from day to day just for the moments of delight, the changes in light and shade, in colour and form, that this beautiful world continually presents to senses as keen as hers.
Lydia"s conscience, however, was strong; though on this particular evening it did little or nothing to check the sheer sensuous dreaming that had crept over her.
The hand that held her palette had dropped upon her knee, her eyes were lifted to the spectacle before her, and her lips, slightly parted, breathed in pleasure.
She looked on a pair of mountains of which one, torn and seamed from top to toe as though some vast Fafnir of the prime had wreaked his dragon rage upon it, fronted her sheer, rimmed with gold where some of its thrusting edges still caught the sunset, but otherwise steeped in purple shades already prophesying night; while the other, separated from the first by a gap, yet grouping with it, ran slanting away to the northwest, offering to the eyes only a series of lovely foreshortened planes, rising from the valley, one behind the other, sweeping upward and backward to the central peak of Skiddaw, and ablaze with light from base to summit.
The evenings in the north are long. It was past seven on this May day; yet Lydia knew that the best of the show was still to come; she waited for the last act, and refused to think of supper. That golden fusion of all the upper air; that "intermingling of Heaven"s pomp," spread on the great slopes of Skiddaw--red and bronze and purple, shot through each other, and glorified by excess of light; that sharpness of the larch green on the lower slopes; that richness of the river fields; that shining pageantry of cloud, rising or sinking with the mountain line: pondering these things, absorbing them, she looked at her drawing from time to time in a smiling despair; the happy despair of the artist, who amid the failure of to-day looks forward with pa.s.sion to the effort of to-morrow.
Youth and natural joy possessed her.
What scents from the river-bank, under the softly breathing wind which had sprung up with the sunset! The girl brought her eyes down, and saw a bank of primroses, and beyond, in the little copse on the farther side of the stream, a gleam of blue, where the wild hyacinth spread among the birches. While close to her, at her very feet, ran the stream, with its slipping, murmuring water, its stones splashed with white, purple, and orange, its still reaches paved with evening gold.
"What a mercy I wrote that letter!" she said to herself, with a sigh of content. She was thinking of a proposal that had come to her a few days before this date, to take a post as drawing mistress in a Brighton school. The salary was tempting; and, at the moment, money was more than usually scarce in the family purse. Her mother"s eyes had looked at her wistfully.
Yet she had refused; with a laughing bravado that had concealed some inward qualms.
Whereupon the G.o.ds had immediately and scandalously rewarded her. She had sold four of her drawings at a Liverpool exhibition for twenty pounds; and there were lying beside her on the gra.s.s some agreeable press notices just arrived, most of which she already knew by heart.
Twenty pounds! That would pay the half year"s rent. And there were three other drawings in a London show that might very well sell too. Why not--now the others had sold? Meanwhile she--thank the Lord!--had saved herself, as a fish from the hook. She was still free; free to draw, free to dream. She had not bartered her mountains for a salary. Instead of crocodile walks, two and two, with a score of stupid schoolgirls, here she was, still roaming the fells, the same happy vagabond as before. She hugged her liberty. And at the same time she promised herself that her mother should have a new shawl and a new cap for Whitsuntide.
Those at present in use came near in Lydia"s opinion to being a family disgrace.
The last act of the great spectacle rushed on; and again the artist held her breath enthralled. The gold on Skiddaw was pa.s.sing into rose; and over the greenish blue of the lower sky, webs of crimson cirrhus spun themselves. The stream ran fire; and far away the windows of a white farm blazed. Lydia seized a spare sketching-block lying on the gra.s.s, and began to note down a few "pa.s.sages" in the sky before her.
Suddenly a gust came straying down the valley. It blew the press-cuttings which had dropped from her lap toward the stream. One of them fell in, the others, long flapping things, hung caught in a tuft of gra.s.s. Lydia sprang up, with an exclamation of annoyance, and went to the rescue.
Dear, dear!--the longest and best notice, which spoke of her work as "agreeable and scholarly, showing, at tunes, more than a touch of high talent"--was quietly floating away. She must get it back. Her mother had not yet read it--not yet purred over it. And it was most desirable she should read it, so as to get rid thereby of any lingering doubt about the horrid school and its horrid proposal.
But alack! the slip of newspaper was already out of reach, speeded by a tiny eddy toward a miniature rapid in the middle of the beck. Lydia, clinging with one hand to a stump of willow, caught up a stick lying on the bank with the other, and, hanging over the stream, tried to head back the truant. All that happened was that her foot slipping on a pebble went flop into the shallow water, and part of her dress followed it.
It was not open to Lydia to swear, and she had no time for the usual feminine exclamations before she heard a voice behind her.
"Allow me--can I be of any use?"
She turned in astonishment, extricating her wet foot, and clambered back on to the bank. A young man stood there, civilly deferential. His bicycle lay on the gra.s.s at the edge of the road, which was only a few steps away.
"I saw you slip in, and thought perhaps I might help. You were trying to reach something, weren"t you?"
"It doesn"t matter, thank you," said Lydia, whose cheeks had gone pink.
The young man looked at her, and became still more civil.
"What was it? That piece of paper? Oh, I"ll get it in a moment."
And splashing from stone to stone in the river-bed, he had soon reached a point where, with the aid of Lydia"s stick, the bedraggled cutting was soon fished out and returned to its owner. Lydia thanked him.
"But you"ve wet both your feet!" She looked at them, with concern. "Won"t it be very uncomfortable, bicycling?"
"I haven"t far to go. Oh, by the way, I was just looking out for somebody to ask--about this road--and I couldn"t see a soul, till just as I came out of the little wood there"--he pointed--"I saw you--slipping in."
They both laughed. Lydia returned to her camp stool, and began to put up her sketching things.
"What is it you want to know?"
"Is this the road for Whitebeck?"
"Yes, certainly. You come to a bridge and the village is on the other side."
"Thank you. I don"t know these parts. But what an awfully jolly valley!"
He waved a hand toward it. "And what do you think I saw about a mile higher up?" He had picked up his bicycle from the gra.s.s, and stood leaning easily upon it. She could not but observe that he was tall and slim and handsome. A tourist, no doubt; she could not place him as an inhabitant.
"I know!" she said smiling. "You saw the otter hounds. They pa.s.sed me an hour ago. Have they caught him?"
"Who? the otter? Lord, no! He got right away from them--up a tributary stream."
"Good!" said Lydia, as she shut her painting-box.