Nevertheless, the one great bitter fact still remained, that her lover had given her up. "If he had only called to see me--or even written!" she said to herself. But days, weeks, months, passed away, and there came no further sign from Lionel. So Edith locked up her love, as some sacred thing, in the innermost casket of her heart, and the name that was sweeter to her than all other earthly names, never passed her lips after that day except in her prayers.
Lionel was not long in making up his mind as to his future course. He had still two or three hundred pounds in ready money, and one small plot of ground that he could truly call his own. The tiny estate in question was known as Gatehouse Farm, and consisted of nothing more than an old-fashioned, tumbledown house, terribly out of repair; an orchard of tolerable dimensions, and about twenty acres of poorish grass-land; the whole being situated in a remote corner of the north-east coast of England. This modest estate had been his father's sole patrimony, and for that father's sake Lionel had long ago resolved never to part from it. He had visited it once or twice when quite a boy, and from that time it had lived in his memory as a pleasant recollection. To this spot he made up his mind that he would retire for awhile. Here he would shut himself up from the world, and, like King Arthur, "heal him of his wounds." He confessed to himself that he was slightly hipped; a little at odds with Fortune. The ordinary objects and ambitions of his age, which, under other circumstances would probably have found him an eager partizan, had, for the present at least, lost their savour. He was not without friends--good friends, who would have been willing and able to help him on in any career he might have chosen to adopt, but just at that time all their propositions seemed equally distasteful to him. Ambition for the moment was dead within him. All he asked was to be allowed to drop quietly out of the circle of those who knew him, and cherish, or cure, in a solitude of his own seeking, those inward hurts for which Time is the sole physician.
As it happened, the tenant of Gatehouse Farm was lately dead; there was, consequently, nothing to stand in the way of its immediate occupation by Lionel. It was neither a very picturesque nor a very comfortable residence, but sufficiently the latter to satisfy its owner's simple wants. Its upper story consisted of four or five bedrooms. Downstairs was a large and commodious kitchen, together with a house-room, or, as we should call it, a parlour. This latter room was chosen by Lionel for his own particular den. It had white-washed walls, and two diamond-paned windows of dull thick glass, but the floor was made of splendid oaken Planks. The walls Lionel left as he found them, except that over the fireplace he hung a portrait of Edith, and his two favourite rifles; but on the floor he spread two or three skins of wild animals, trophies of his prowess in the chase. In a corner near the fireplace, handy to reach, were the twenty or thirty authors whom he had brought with him to be the companions of his solitude. In the opposite corner was the only article de luxe to be found in the house: a splendid cottage piano, of Erard's build.
The dead and gone builder of the house, whose initials, with the date 1685, were still conspicuous on a tablet over the front door, had never been troubled with that mania for the picturesque in nature and art about which we moderns are perpetually prating. In its own little way his house was intensely ugly, and he had persistently built it with its back to the only fine view that could be seen from its windows in any direction. Even after all these years, there was not another house within a mile of it. The only point of habitable life visible from it was the lighthouse. But it was this solitariness, this isolation from the world, which formed its great feature of attraction in the eyes of Lionel. One other attraction it had for him. You had only to cross a couple of small fields, and follow, for a hundred yards or more, a climbing footway that led across a patch of sandy common, and then, all at once, you saw spread out, far and wide before you, the ever-glorious sea.
To this place came Lionel Dering in less than a month after writing his last letter to Edith West, and here he had since stayed. Two farm labourers and one middle-aged woman constituted the whole of his household. What further labour he might require in his farming operations, he hired. He rose at five o'clock in summer and at six in winter. From the time he got up till two o'clock he worked as hard as any of his own men. The remainder of the day he claimed for his own private uses. He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped. At one time he planted potatoes, at another he dug them up; and nowhere within a score of miles were such fine standard-roses to be seen as at Gatehouse Farm. He found some land to let conveniently near his own small patch, and he hired it. At the end of his second year at the farm he calculated his profits at one hundred and eighty pounds, and was perfectly satisfied.
Lionel saw no company, and never went into society. He was well known to the lighthouse keepers and to most of the boatmen. With them he would talk freely enough. Their racy sayings, their homely, vigorous diction, their simple mode of life, pleased him. When talking with them he forgot, for a time, himself and his own thoughts, and the change did him good. Not that there was anything of the melancholy, lovesick swain about Lionel--any morbid brooding over his own disappointment, and troubles. No one ever saw him otherwise than cheerful. He was perfectly healthy both in mind and body. Nevertheless, his solitary mode of life, and his persistent isolation of himself from his friends and equals, all tended to throw him back upon his own thoughts, and to make him habitually self-introspective, to confirm him in a growing habit of mental analysis.
Whatever the state of the weather, Lionel hardly ever let a day pass without taking a long, solitary ramble into the country for eight or ten miles. Then he had his books, and his piano--which latter was, perhaps, the greatest consolation of his solitude--and the luxury of his own lonely musings as he sat and smoked, hour after hour, with unlighted lamp, and marked how the glowing cinders shaped themselves silently to the fashion of his thoughts.
Two years had by no means sufficed to tire Lionel Dering of his solitary life. In fact, he grew to like it better, to cling to it more emphatically, every day. It satisfied his present needs and ambitions, and that was all he asked. Calmly indifferent, he allowed himself to drift slowly onward towards a future in whose skies there seemed for him no bright bow of promise--nothing but the unbroken grayness of an autumn day that has neither wind, nor sunshine, nor any change.
CHAPTER III.
THE FOUNDATION OF A FRIENDSHIP.
Notwithstanding Dr. Bell's hopeful hopeful prognostications, it seemed very doubtful whether Mr. Tom Bristow would ever leave Gatehouse Farm alive. "I did not think his hull was quite so badly damaged as it is," said the worthy doctor, who had formerly been in the navy, to Lionel. "And his figure-head has certainly been terribly knocked about, but he's an A 1 craft, and I can't help thinking that he'll weather the storm."
And weather the storm he did--thanks to good nursing and a good constitution. When he once took a turn for the better, his progress towards recovery was rapid. But September had come and gone, and the frosts of early winter lay white on meadow and fold, before the doctor's gray pony ceased calling at Gatehouse Farm on its daily rounds. Long before this time, however, a feeling of more than ordinary friendship had grown up between Lionel Dering and Tom Bristow. The points of dissimilarity in the characters of the two men were very marked, but it may be that they liked each other none the less on that account. In any case, this dissimilarity of disposition lent a piquancy to their friendship which it would not otherwise have possessed.
But who and what was this Mr. Tom Bristow?
The account which he gave of himself to Lionel, one afternoon, when far advanced towards recovery, was somewhat vague and meagre; but it more than satisfied the master of Gatehouse Farm, who was one of the least inquisitive of mortals; and, for the present, it will have to satisfy the reader also.
They were sitting on a rustic bench just outside the farm porch, basking in the genial September sunshine. Lionel had his meerschaum between his lips, and was fondling the head of his favourite dog, Osric. Tom Bristow, who never smoked, was busy with a piece of boxwood and a pocket-knife. Little by little he was fashioning the wood into a capital but slightly caricatured likeness of worthy doctor Bell--a likeness which the jovial medico would be the first