His friend responded to the communication very sensibly, trying, without exactly saying it, and without a shadow of success, to make him see what a fool he was. He congratulated him all the more warmly on his good fortune that a vague hope went up in him of a share in the same. For Cornelius had not failed to use large words in making mention of the estate and the fortune accompanying it. In the higher position, as Vavasor considered it, which Mr. Raymount would henceforth occupy as one of the proprietors of England, therefore as a man of influence in his country and its politics, he saw something like an approximative movement in the edges of the gulf that divided him from Hester. She would likely come in for a personal share in this large fortune. And if he could but see a possibility of existence without his aunt’s money, he would, he almost said to himself, marry Hester, and take the risk of his aunt’s displeasure. At the same time she would doubtless now look with more favour on Hester. There could be nothing offensive to her aunt’s pride at least in his proposing to marry the daughter of a country squire. If she were the heiress of a rich brewer, that is, of a brewer rich enough, his aunt would, like the rest of them, get over it fast enough!

Mr. Raymount went to look at his property, returning more delighted with house, land, and landscape than he had expected. He seldom spoke of his good fortune, however, except to his wife, or betrayed his pleasure except by the glistening of his eyes. As soon as the warm weather came, they would migrate. Immediately they began their preparations—the young ones by packing and unpacking several times a day a most unlikely assemblage of things. The house was to be left in charge of old Sarah, who would also wait on Cornelius.

—Thirteen —

Yrndale

It was a lovely morning when they left London. The trains did not then travel so fast as now, and it was late in the afternoon when they reached the station at which they must leave the railway for the road. Before that the weather had changed, or they had changed their weather, for the sky was one mass of cloud, and rain was falling persistently. They had been for some time in the region of hills, but those they were passing through, though not without wonder and strange interest, were but an inferior clan, neither lofty nor lovely. Through the rain and the mist they looked lost and dreary. They were mostly bare, except for a little grass, and broken with huge brown and yellow gulleys, worn by such little torrents as were now rushing along them straight from the clouded heavens. It was a vague sorrowful region of tears, whence the streams in the valleys below were forever fed.

Saffy had been sound asleep through this part of the journey, but Mark had been standing at the window of the railway carriage, gazing out on an awful world. What would he do, he thought, if he were lost there? Would he be able to sit still all night without being frightened, waiting for God to come and take him? As they rushed along, it was not through the brain alone of the child the panorama flitted, but through his mind and heart as well. There, like a glacier, it scored its passage, or rather, it left its ghosts behind it, ever shifting forms and shadows, each atmosphered in its own ethereal mood. They were hardly thoughts, but a strange other consciousness of life and being.