Erema; Or, My Father's Sin Part 30

"Never mind about that. The drayman made a fool of himself. I proceeded upon true principles. That fellow knew nothing of leverage."

"Well, dear, of course you understand it best. But he told cook that it was quite a mercy that you got off without a broken leg; and compared with that, two gallons of spilled ale--" Mrs. Hockin made off, without finishing her sentence.

"What a woman she is!" cried the Major; "she takes such a lofty view of things, and she can always find my tools. Erema, after dinner I must have a talk with you. There is something going on here--on my manor--which I can not at all get a clew to, except by connecting you with it, the Lord knows how. Of course you have nothing to do with it; but still my life has been so free from mystery that, that--you know what I mean--"

"That you naturally think I must be at the bottom of every thing mysterious. Now is there any thing dark about me? Do I not labor to get at the light? Have I kept from your knowledge any single thing? But you never cared to go into them."

"It is hardly fair of you to say that. The fact is that you, of your own accord, have chosen other counselors. Have you heard any more of your late guardian, Mr. Shovelin? I suppose that his executor, or some one appointed by him, is now your legal guardian."

"I have not even asked what the law is," I replied. "Lord Castlewood is my proper guardian, according to all common-sense, and I mean to have him so. He has inquired through his solicitors as to Mr. Shovelin, and I am quite free there. My father's will is quite good, they say; but it never has been proved, and none of them care to do it. My cousin thinks that I could compel them to prove it, or to renounce in proper form; but Mr. Shovelin's sons are not nice people--as different from him as night from day, careless and wild and dashing."

"Then do you mean to do nothing about it? What a time she is finding that hammer!"

"I leave it entirely to my cousin, and he is waiting for legal advice.

I wish to have the will, of course, for the sake of my dear father; but with or without any will, my mother's little property comes to me. And if my dear father had nothing to leave, why should we run up a great lawyer's bill?"

"To be sure not! I see. That makes all the difference. I admire your common-sense," said the Major--"but there! Come and look, and just exercise it here. There is that very strange woman again, just at the end of my new road. She stands quite still, and then stares about, sometimes for an hour together. n.o.body knows who she is, or why she came. She has taken a tumble-down house on my manor, from a wretch of a fellow who denies my t.i.tle; and what she lives on is more than any one can tell, for she never spends sixpence in Bruntsea. Some think that she walks in the dark to Newport, and gets all her food at some ship stores there. And one of our fishermen vows that he met her walking on the sea, as he rowed home one night, and she had a long red bag on her shoulder.

She is a witch, that is certain; for she won't answer me, however politely I accost her. But the oddest thing of all is the name she gave to the fellow she took the house from. What do you think she called herself? Of all things in the world--'Mrs. Castlewood!' I congratulate you on your relative."

"How very strange!" I answered. "Oh, now I see why you connect me with it; and I beg your pardon for having been vexed. But let me go and see her. Oh, may I go at once, if you please, and speak to her?"

"The very thing I wish--if you are not afraid. I will come with you, when I get my hammer. Oh, here it is! Mary, how clever you are! Now look out of the window, and you shall see Erema make up to her grandmamma."

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

NOT AT HOME

Mrs. Hockin, however, had not the pleasure promised her by the facetious Major of seeing me "make up to my grandmamma." For although we set off at once to catch the strange woman who had roused so much curiosity, and though, as we pa.s.sed the door of Bruntlands, we saw her still at her post in the valley, like Major Hockin's new letter-box, for some reason best known to herself we could not see any more of her. For, hurry as he might upon other occasions, nothing would make the Major cut a corner of his winding "drive" when descending it with a visitor. He enjoyed every yard of its length, because it was his own at every step, and he counted his paces in an under-tone, to be sure of the length, for perhaps the thousandth time. It was long enough in a straight line, one would have thought, but he was not the one who thought so; and therefore he had doubled it by judicious windings, as if for the purpose of breaking the descent.

"Three hundred and twenty-one," he said, as he came to a post, where he meant to have a lodge as soon as his wife would let him; "now the old woman stands fifty-five yards on, at a spot where I mean to have an ornamental bridge, because our fine saline element runs up there when the new moon is perigee. My dear, I am a little out of breath, which affects my sight for the moment. Doubtless that is why I do not see her."

"If I may offer an opinion," I said, "in my ignorance of all the changes you have made, the reason why we do not see her may be that she is gone out of sight."

"Impossible!" Major Hockin cried--"simply impossible, Erema! She never moves for an hour and a half. And she was not come, was she, when you came by?"

"I will not be certain," I answered; "but I think that I must have seen her if she had been there, because I was looking about particularly at all your works as we came by."

"Then she must be there still; let us tackle her."

This was easier said than done, for we found no sign of any body at the place where she certainly had been standing less than five minutes ago.

We stood at the very end and last corner of the ancient river trough, where a little seam went inland from it, as if some trifle of a brook had stolen down while it found a good river to welcome it. But now there was only a little oozy gloss from the gleam of the sun upon some lees of marshy brine left among the rushes by the last high tide.

"You see my new road and the key to my intentions?" said the Major, forgetting all about his witch, and flourishing his geological hammer, while standing thus at his "nucleus." "To understand all, you have only to stand here. You see those leveling posts, adjusted with scientific accuracy. You see all those angles, calculated with micrometric precision. You see how the curves are radiated--"

"It is very beautiful, I have no doubt; but you can not have Uncle Sam's gift of machinery. And do you understand every bit of it yourself?"

"Erema, not a jot of it. I like to talk about it freely when I can, because I see all its beauties. But as to understanding it, my dear, you might set to, if you were an educated female, and deliver me a lecture upon my own plan. Intellect is, in such matters, a bubble. I know good bricks, good mortar, and good foundations."

"With your great ability, you must do that," I answered, very gently, being touched with his humility and allowance of my opinion; "you will make a n.o.ble town of it. But when is the railway coming?"

"Not yet. We have first to get our Act; and a miserable-minded wretch, who owns nothing but a rabbit-warren, means to oppose it. Don't let us talk of him. It puts one out of patience when a man can not see his own interest. But come and see our a.s.sembly-rooms, literary inst.i.tute, baths, etc., etc.--that is what we are urging forward now."

"But may I not go first and look for my strange namesake? Would it be wrong of me to call upon her?"

"No harm whatever," replied my companion; "likewise no good. Call fifty times, but you will get no answer. However, it is not a very great round, and you will understand my plans more clearly. Step out, my dear, as if you had got a troop of Mexicans after you. Ah, what a fine turn for that lot now!" He was thinking of the war which had broken out, and the battle of Bull's Run.

Without any such headlong speed, we soon came to the dwelling-place of the stranger, and really for once the good Major had not much overdone his description. Truly it was almost tumbling down, though ma.s.sively built, and a good house long ago; and it looked the more miserable now from being placed in a hollow of the ground, whose slopes were tufted with rushes and thistles and ragwort. The lower windows were blocked up from within, the upper were shattered and crumbling and dangerous, with blocks of cracked stone jutting over them; and the last surviving chimney gave less smoke than a workman's homeward whiff of his pipe to comfort and relieve the air.

The only door that we could see was of heavy black oak, without any knocker; but I clinched my hand, having thick gloves on, and made what I thought a very creditable knock, while the Major stood by, with his blue-lights up, and keenly gazed and gently smiled.

"Knock again, my dear," he said; "you don't knock half hard enough."

I knocked again with all my might, and got a bruised hand for a fortnight, but there was not even the momentary content produced by an active echo. The door was as dead as every thing else.

"Now for my hammer," my companion cried. "This house, in all sound law, is my own. I will have a 'John Doe and Richard Roe'--a fine action of ejectment. Shall I be barred out upon my own manor?"

With hot indignation he swung his hammer, but nothing came of it except more noise. Then the Major grew warm and angry.

"My charter contains the right of burning witches or drowning them, according to their color. The execution is specially imposed upon the bailiff of this ancient town, and he is my own pickled-pork man. His name is Hopkins, and I will have him out with his seal and stick and all the rest. Am I to be laughed at in this way?"

For we thought we heard a little screech of laughter from the loneliness of the deep dark place, but no other answer came, and perhaps it was only our own imagining.

"Is there no other door--perhaps one at the back?" I asked, as the lord of the manor stamped.

"No, that has been walled up long ago. The villain has defied me from the very first. Well, we shall see. This is all very fine. You witness that they deny the owner entrance?"

"Undoubtedly I can depose to that. But we must not waste your valuable time."

"After all, the poor ruin is worthless," he went on, calming down as we retired. "It must be leveled, and that hole filled up. It is quite an eye-sore to our new parade. And no doubt it belongs to me--no doubt it does. The fellow who claims it was turned out of the law. Fancy any man turned out of the law! Erema, in all your far West experience, did you ever see a man bad enough to be turned out of the law?"

"Major Hockin, how can I tell? But I fear that their practice was very, very sad--they very nearly always used to hang them."

"The best use--the best use a rogue can be put to. Some big thief has put it the opposite way, because he was afraid of his own turn. The const.i.tution must be upheld, and, by the Lord! it shall be--at any rate, in East Bruntsea. West Bruntsea is all a small-pox warren out of my control, and a skewer in my flesh. And some of my tenants have gone across the line to snap their dirty hands at me."

Being once in this cue, Major Hockin went on, not talking to me much, but rather to himself, though expecting me now and then to say "yes;"

and this I did when necessary, for his principles of action were beyond all challenge, and the only question was how he carried them out.

He took me to his rampart, which was sure to stop the sea, and at the same time to afford the finest place in all Great Britain for a view of it. Even an invalid might sit here in perfect shelter from the heaviest gale, and watch such billows as were not to be seen except upon the Major's property.

"The reason of that is quite simple," he said, "and a child may see the force of it. In no other part of the kingdom can you find so steep a beach fronting the southwest winds, which are ten to one of all other winds, without any break of sand or rock outside. Hence we have what you can not have on a shallow sh.o.r.e--grand rollers: straight from the very Atlantic, Erema; you and I have seen them. You may see by the map that they all end here, with the wind in the proper quarter."

"Oh, please not to talk of such horrors," I said. "Why, your ramparts would go like pie crust."

The Major smiled a superior smile, and after more talk we went home to dinner.

From something more than mere curiosity, I waited at Bruntsea for a day or two, hoping to see that strange namesake of mine who had shown so much inhospitality. For she must have been at home when we made that pressing call, inasmuch as there was no other place to hide her within the needful distance of the spot where she had stood. But the longer I waited, the less would she come out--to borrow the good Irishman's expression--and the Major's pillar-box, her favorite resort, was left in conspicuous solitude. And when a letter came from Sir Montague Hockin, asking leave to be at Bruntlands on the following evening, I packed up my goods with all haste, and set off, not an hour too soon, for Shoxford.