If the squire saw this growing attachment between the young people, he neither favoured nor discouraged it. He had never cared very much for Millicent. She and her brother were the children of a woman whom he had married for the sake of a handsome fortune, and who died unnoticed and unregretted — some people said, of a broken heart — before Millicent was a twelvemonth old.
So things went on pretty smoothly. Millicent and Darrell rode together through the shady green lanes, and over the stunted grass and heather on Compton Moor, while the squire read his Postboys and Gazeteers and smoked his pipe in the oak-panelled parlour or the Dutch garden, and while Ringwood idled about the village or lounged at the bar of the Black Bear: and life seemed altogether very easy and pleasant at Compton Hall, until a catastrophe occurred which changed the whole current of events.
Darrell and Ringwood Markham had a desperate quarrel; a quarrel in which blows were struck and hard words spoken upon both sides, and which abruptly ended Darrell’s residence at Compton Hall.
It has been said that Ringwood Markham was a coxcomb and an idler. There were not wanting those in Compton who called him something worse than either of these. There were some who called him a heartless coward and a liar, but who never so spoke of him in the presence of his stalwart cousin Darrell.
The day came when Darrell himself called the Squire’s idolized son by these cruel names. He had discovered a flirtation between Ringwood and a girl of seventeen, the daughter of a small farmer; a flirtation which, but for this timely discovery, might have ended in shame and despair. Scarlet with passion, the young man had taken his foppish cousin by the collar of his velvet coat and dragged him safe into the presence of the father of the girl, saying, with an oath, such as was unhappily only too common a hundred years ago,—”You’d better keep an eye on this young man, Farmer Morrison, if you want to save your daughter from a scoundrel.”
Ringwood turned very white — he was one of those who grow pale and not red with passion — and springing at his cousin like a cat, caught at his throat as if he would have strangled him; but one swinging blow from Darrell’s fist laid the young man on Farmer Morrison’s sanded floor, with a general illumination glittering before his dazzled eyes.
Darrell strode back to the Hall, where he packed some clothes in his saddle-bags, and wrote two letters, one to his uncle, telling him, abruptly enough, that he had knocked Ringwood down, because he had found him acting like a rascal, and that he felt, as there was now bad blood between them, they had better part. His second letter was addressed to Millicent, and was almost as brief as the first. He simply told her of the quarrel, adding that he was going to London to seek his fortune, and that he should return to claim her as his wife.
He left the letters on the high chimney-piece in his bedroom, and went down to the stables, where he found his own nag Balmerino, fastened his few possessions to the saddle, mounted the horse in the yard, and rode slowly away from the house in which his boyhood and youth had been spent.
He went away very sad at heart, but possessed and sustained by that hopeful spirit common to generous youth. It seemed such an easy thing to make a fortune to carry back to his cousin Millicent. That great oyster, the world, was waiting to be opened by the bold thrust of an adventurous sword, and who could doubt what rare and priceless pearls were lurking within the shell, ready to fall into the open hands of the valiant adventurer?
Ringwood Markham went home late at night with a pale face and a blood-stained handkerchief bound about his forehead.
He found his father sitting over a spark of fire in the oak parlour on one side of the hall. The door of this parlour was ajar, and as the young man tried to creep past on his way upstairs, the squire called to him sharply, “Ringwood, come here!”
He went sulkily into the room, hanging his dilapidated head, and looking at the floor; altogether an abject creature to behold.
“What’s the matter with your head, Ringwood?” asked the squire.
“The pony shied at some sheep on the moor, and threw me against a stone,” muttered the young man.
“You’re telling a lie, Ringwood Markham!” cried his father fiercely. “I’ve a letter from your cousin Darrell in my pocket. Bah, man! you’re the first of the Markhams who ever took a blow without paying it back with interest. You’ve your mother’s milk-and-water disposition, as well as your mother’s pink-and-white face.”
“You needn’t talk about her,” said Ringwood; “you didn’t treat her too well, if folks that I know speak the truth.”
“Ringwood Markham, don’t provoke me. It’s hard enough for a Markham of Compton to have a son that can’t take his own part. Go to bed.”
The young man left the room with the same slouching step with which he had entered it. He stole cautiously upstairs, for he thought his cousin Darrell was still in the house, and he had no wish to arouse that gentleman.
So Millicent was left alone at Compton Hall; utterly alone, for she had now no one to love her.
Perhaps modern physiologists would have discovered in the nature of Millicent Markham much to wonder at and to explain. It was a delicate and fragile piece of mechanism — very exquisite if you could only keep it in order, but terribly liable to be injured or destroyed. The squire’s daughter was not a clever girl; her intellectual amusements were of the simplest order. An old romance would make her happy for days, and she would cry over the mildest verses ever written by starveling poets in garrets east of Temple Bar. With her the heart took the place of the mind. Appeal to her affection, and you might make her what you pleased. If Darrell had asked her to learn Greek for his sake, she would have toiled valiantly through dreary obscurities of grammar, she would have dug patiently at the dryest roots, and would have seated herself meekly by his side to construe the hardest page in Homer. Love her, and her whole nature expanded like some beautiful flower that spreads itself out beneath the morning sun. Withdraw this benign influence, and the same nature contracted into something smaller and meaner than itself — something easily crushed into any shape whatever by a little rough handling.
Darrell, therefore, being gone, and dear old Sally Masterson having left the Hall to become mistress of the Black Bear, poor Millicent was abandoned to the tender mercies of her father and brother, neither of whom cared much more for her than they did for the meek white and liver-coloured spaniel that followed her about the house. So the delicate piece of mechanism got out of order, and Millicent’s days were devoted to novel reading and to poring over an embroidered waistcoat-piece that was destined for Darrell, and the colours of which were dull and faded from the tears that had dropped upon the stitches as the patient worker bent over her labour of love, and thought of the absent lover for whose adornment the garment was intended.
She kept Darrell’s letter in her bosom. In all the ways of the world she was as unlearned as on that day when Darrell had peeped in upon her as she lay asleep in her cradle, and she had no more doubt that her cousin would make a fortune and return in a few years to claim her as his wife than she had of her own existence. But in spite of this hope, the days were long and dreary, her father neglectful, her brother supercilious and disagreeable, and her home altogether very miserable.
The bitterest misery was yet to come. It came in the person of a certain Captain George Duke, who dropped into Compton on his way from Marley Water to the metropolis, and who contrived to scrape acquaintance with Squire Markham in the best parlour at the Black Bear. Captain George and Master Ringwood became sworn friends in a day or two, and the hearty sailor promised to stop at Compton again on his return to his ship the Vulture.
The simple villagers readily accepted Captain Duke as that which he had represented himself — an officer of his majesty’s navy; but there were people in the seaport of Marley Water who said that the good ship whose name was written down as the Vulture in the Admiralty books was quite a different class of vessel from the trim little craft which lay sometimes in a quiet corner of the obscure harbour of Marley. Th
ere were malicious people who whispered such words as ‘privateer — pirate — slaver;’ but the boldest of the slanderers took good care to whisper these things out of the Captain’s hearing, for George Duke’s sword was as often out of his scabbard as in it, during his brief visits to the little seaport.
However this might be, handsome, rollicking, lighthearted, free-handed George Duke became a great favourite with Squire Markham and his son Ringwood. His animal spirits enlivened the dreary old mansion, and stirred the stagnation of the quiet village life very pleasantly for the Squire and his son. The sailor’s roystering stories of sea-going adventures pleased the two landsmen: and the sailor himself, who was a man of the world, and knew how to flatter a profitable acquaintance, seemed the most agreeable of men, and the heartiest of good fellows.
So Compton Hall rang night after night with the gay peals of his cheery laughter; corks flew, and glasses jingled, as the three men sat up till midnight (a terrible hour at Compton) over their Burgundy and claret. It was in one of these half-drunken bouts that Squire Markham promised the hand of his daughter Millicent to Captain George Duke.
“You’re in love with her, George, and you shall have her,” the old man said. “I can give her a couple of thousand pounds at my death, and if anything should happen to Ringwood, she’ll be sole heiress to the Compton property. You shall have her, my boy. I know there’s some sneaking courtship been going on between Milly and a broad-shouldered fair-haired nephew of mine, but that shan’t stand in your way, for the lad is no favourite with me; and if I choose to say it, my fine lack-a-daisical miss shall marry you in a week’s time.”
Captain Duke sprang from his chair, and wringing the Squire’s hand in his, cried out with a lover’s rapture, —
“She’s the prettiest girl in England! and I’d sooner have her for my wife than any duchess at St. James’s.”
“She’s pretty enough, as for that,” said Ringwood superciliously, “and she’d be a deal prettier if she was not always whimpering.”
Farmer Morrison could have told how Master Ringwood himself had gone whimpering out of the sanded kitchen on the day that Darrell Markham knocked him down. The plain-spoken farmer had felt no little contempt for the heir of Compton Hall, whose wounded head he had dressed for charity’s sake, before dismissing the young man with an emphatic assurance that if he ever came about those premises again, it would be to get such a thrashing as he would easily be able to remember.
Both the children inherited something of the nervous weakness of that poor delicate and neglected mother who had died seventeen years before in Sally Masterson’s arms; but timid and sensitive as Millicent was, I think that the higher nature had been given to her, and that beneath that childish timidity and that nervous excitability which would bring tears into her eyes at the sound of a harsh word, there was a latent and quiet courage that had no existence in Ringwood’s selfish and frivolous character.
Having promised to bestow his daughter’s hand on his new favourite, the Captain, Squire Markham lost no time in carrying out his intention. He summoned Millicent to the oak parlour early on the morning after the drunken carouse, and acquainted her with the manner in which he had disposed of her destiny.
Harsh words on this occasion, as on every other, did their work with Millicent Markham. She heard her father’s determination that she should marry George Duke, at first with a stupid apathetic stare, as if the calamity were too great for her to realize its misery at one grasp; then, as he repeated his command, her clear blue eyes brimmed over with big tears, and she fell on her knees at the Squire’s feet.
“You don’t mean it, sir?” she said piteously, clasping her poor little feeble hands and lifting them towards her father in passionate supplication. “You know that I — love my cousin Darrell; that we have loved each other dearly and truly ever since we were little children; and that we are to be man and wife when you are pleased to give your consent. You must have known it all along, sir, though we had not the courage to tell you. I will be your obedient child in everything but this; but I never, never can marry any one but Darrell!”
What need to tell the old story of a stupid, obstinate, narrow-minded country squire’s fury and tyranny? Did not poor Sophia Western suffer all these torments, though in the dear old romance all is so happily settled in the last chapter? But in this case it was different — Squire Markham would hear of no delay; and before Darrell could get the letter which Millicent addressed to a coffee-house near Covent Garden, and bribed one of the servants to give to the Compton postmaster — before the eyes of the bride had recovered from long nights of weeping — before the village had half discussed the matter — before Mrs. Sarah Pecker could finish the petticoat she was quilting very sorrowfully for the wedding clothes — the bells of Compton church were ringing a cheery peal in the morning sunshine, and Millicent Markham and George Duke were standing side by side at the altar.
When Darrell Markham received the poor little tear-stained letter, telling him of this ill-omened marriage, he fell into an outburst of rage; an outburst of blind fury which swept alike upon the Squire, young Ringwood, Captain George Duke, and even poor unhappy Millicent herself. It is so difficult for a man to understand the influence brought so bear upon a weak helpless woman by the tyranny of a brutal father. Darrell cried out passionately that Millicent ought to have been true to him in spite of the whole world, as he would have been to her through every trial. He hurried down to Compton to creep stealthily about the village after dusk, lest his presence should bring evil upon the woman he loved, and to discover that he was indeed too late — that the piteous blotted letter had told him no more than the cruel truth, and that the Squire had kept his word.
Made desperate by the shipwreck of his happiness, the young man went back to London with angry feelings burning in his breast. He rushed for a brief period into the dissipations of the town, and tried to drown Millicent’s fair face in tavern measures and long draughts of Burgundy, and to forget his troubles among the patched and painted beauties of Spring Gardens.
A marriage contracted under such circumstances was not likely to be a very happy one. Light-hearted, rollicking George Duke was by no means a delightful person by the domestic hearth. The man whose lively spirits are the delight of his tavern acquaintances is apt to be rather a dull companion in the family circle. At home the Captain was moody and ill-tempered, always ready to grumble at Millicent’s pale face and tear-swollen eyes. For the best part of the year he was away with his ship, on some of those mysterious voyages of which the Admiralty knew so little; and in these long absences, Millicent, if not happy, was at least at rest. Three months after the wedding the old Squire was found dead in his arm-chair, a victim to apoplexy engendered of sedentary habits and high living; and Ringwood, succeeding to the estate, shut up the Hall, and rushed away to London, where he was soon lost to the honest folks of Compton in a whirlpool of vice and dissipation.
This was how matters stood when George and Millicent had been married fifteen months, and Darrell Markham well-nigh lost his life at the hands of a high, way robber upon the dreary moorland road to Marley Water.
CHAPTER IV. CAPTAIN DUKE PROVES AN ALIBI.
DARRELL MARKHAM did not die from the effects of that excitement which the doctor said might be so fatal. The surgeon fought bravely with the fever, and the bone-setter from Marley Water did his work well, though not without agony to the patient; for there were no blessed anæsthetics in those days, whereby a man might be lulled into peaceful repose while the operator’s knife hacked his flesh, or the surgeon’s relentless hand dragged his unwilling muscles and distorted bones back to their proper places.
Darrell was very slow to recover, so slow that the snow lay white upon the moorland beneath the windows of the Black Bear before the shattered arm was firmly knit together, or the enfeebled frame restored to its native vigour. It was a dreary and a tedious illness. Honest Sarah Pecker was nearly worn out with nursing her sick boy, as she insisted on calling Darr
ell. The weak-eyed and weak-minded Samuel was made to wear list shoes and to creep like a thief about his roomy hostelry. The evening visitors were sent into a dark tap-room at the back of the house, in order that the sound of their revelry might not disturb the sick man. Gloom and sadness reigned in the Black Bear until that happy day upon which Dr. Jordan pronounced his patient to be out of danger. Sarah Pecker gave away a barrel of the strongest ale upon that joyous afternoon, pouring the generous liquor freely out for every loiterer who stopped at the door to ask after poor Maister Darrell.
Captain George Duke was away on a brief voyage on the Spanish coast when Darrell began to mend; but by the time the young man had completely recovered, the sailor returned to Compton.
The snow was thick in the narrow street when the Captain came back. He came without warning, and walked quietly into the little parlour, where he found Millicent sitting in her old attitude by the fire, reading a novel.
But he was in a better temper than usual on this particular occasion, and looked wonderfully handsome and dashing in his weather-beaten uniform. It was not quite the king’s uniform, as some people said; very like it; but yet with slight technical differences that told against the Captain.
George Duke caught Millicent in his arms and gave her a hearty kiss upon each cheek before he had time to notice her faint repellent shudder.
“I’ve come home to you laden with good things, Mistress Milly,” he said, as he seated himself opposite to her, while the stout servant-maid piled fresh logs upon the blazing fire. “A chest of oranges, and a cask of wine from Cadiz — liquid gold, my girl, and almost as precious as the sterling metal; and I’ve a heap of pretty barbarous trumpery for you to fasten on your -white neck and arms, and hang in your rosy little ears.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 49
