Chapter 45. Umberden Church

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_ CHAPTER XLV. UMBERDEN CHURCH

My companion chatted away, lauded my mare, asked if I had seen Clara lately, and how the library was getting on. I answered him carelessly, without even a hint at my troubles.

'You seem out of spirits, Mr Cumbermede?' he said. 'You've been taking too little exercise. Let's have a canter. It will do you good. Here's a nice bit of sward.'

I was only too ready to embrace the excuse for dropping a conversation towards which I was unable to contribute my share.

Having reached a small roadside inn, we gave our horses a little refreshment; after which, crossing a field or two by jumping the stiles, we entered the loveliest lane I had ever seen. It was so narrow that there was just room for horses to pass each other, and covered with the greenest sward rarely trodden. It ran through the midst of a wilderness of tall hazels. They stood up on both sides of it, straight and trim as walls, high above our heads as we sat on our horses; and the lane was so serpentine that we could never see further than a few yards ahead; while, towards the end, it kept turning so much in one direction that we seemed to be following the circumference of a little circle. It ceased at length at a small double-leaved gate of iron, to which we tied our horses before entering the churchyard. But instead of a neat burial-place, which the whole approach would have given us to expect, we found a desert. The grass was of extraordinary coarseness, and mingled with quantities of vile-looking weeds. Several of the graves had not even a spot of green upon them, but were mere heaps of yellow earth in huge lumps, mixed with large stones. There was not above a score of graves in the whole place, two or three of which only had gravestones on them. One lay open, with the rough yellow lumps all about it, and completed the desolation. The church was nearly square--small, but shapeless, with but four latticed windows, two on one side, one in the other, and the fourth in the east end. It was built partly of bricks and partly of flint stones, the walls bowed and bent, and the roof waved and broken. Its old age had gathered none of the graces of age to soften its natural ugliness, or elevate its insignificance. Except a few lichens, there was not a mark of vegetation about it. Not a single ivy leaf grew on its spotted and wasted walls. It gave a hopeless, pagan expression to the whole landscape--for it stood on a rising ground, from which we had an extensive prospect of height and hollow, cornfield and pasture and wood, away to the dim blue horizon.

'You don't find it enlivening, do you--eh?' said my companion.

'I never saw such a frightfully desolate spot,' I said, 'to have yet the appearance of a place of Christian worship. It looks as if there were a curse upon it. Are all those the graves of suicides and murderers? It cannot surely be consecrated ground?'

'It's not nice,' he said. 'I didn't expect you to like it. I only said it was odd.'

'Is there any service held in it?' I asked.

'Yes--once a fortnight or so. The rector has another living a few miles off.'

'Where can the congregation come from?'

'Hardly from anywhere. There ain't generally more than five or six, I believe. Let's have a look at the inside of it.'

'The windows are much too high, and no foothold.'

'We'll go in.'

'Where can you get the key? It must be a mile off at least, by your own account. There's no house nearer than that, you say.'

He made me no reply, but going to the only flat gravestone, which stood on short thick pillars, he put his hand beneath it, and drew out a great rusty key.

'Country lawyers know a secret or two,' he said.

'Not always much worth knowing,' I rejoined,--'if the inside be no better than the outside.'

'We'll have a look, anyhow,' he said, as he turned the key in the dry lock.

The door snarled on its hinges, and disclosed a space drearier certainly, and if possible uglier, than its promise.

'Really, Mr Coningham,' I said, 'I don't see why you should have brought me to look at this place.'

'It answered for a bait, at all events. You've had a good long ride, which was the best thing for you. Look what a wretched little vestry that is!'

It was but a corner of the east end, divided off by a faded red curtain.

'I suppose they keep a parish register here,' he said. 'Let us have a look.'

Behind the curtain hung a dirty surplice and a gown. In the corner stood a desk like the schoolmaster's in a village school. There was a shelf with a few vellum-bound books on it, and nothing else, not even a chair in the place.

'Yes; there they are!' he said, as he took down one of the volumes from the shelf. 'This one comes to a close in the middle of the last century. I dare say there is something in this, now, that would be interesting enough to somebody. Who knows how many properties it might make change hands?'

'Not many, I should think. Those matters are pretty well seen to now.'

[Illustration: "COUNTRY LAWYERS KNOW A SECRET OR TWO," HE SAID.]

'By some one or other--not always the rightful heirs. Life is full of the strangest facts, Mr Cumbermede. If I were a novelist, now, like you, my experience would make me dare a good deal more in the way of invention than any novelist I happen to have read. Look there, for instance.'

He pointed to the top of the last page, or rather the last half of the cover. I read as follows:

'MARRIAGES, 1748.

'Mr Wilfrid Cumbermede Daryll, of the Parish of [----] second son of Sir Richard Daryll of Moldwarp Hall in the County of [----] and Mistress Elizabeth Woodruffe were married by a license Jan. 15.'

'I don't know the name of Daryll,' I said.

'It was your own great-grandfather's name,' he returned. 'I happen to know that much.'

'You knew this was here, Mr Coningham,' I said. 'That is why you brought me here.'

'You are right. I did know it. Was I wrong in thinking it would interest you?'

'Certainly not. I am obliged to you. But why this mystery? Why not have told me what you wanted me to go for?'

'I will why you in turn. Why should I have wanted to show you now more than any other time what I have known for as many years almost as you have lived? You spoke of a ride--why shouldn't I give a direction to it that might pay you for your trouble? And why shouldn't I have a little amusement out of it if I pleased? Why shouldn't I enjoy your surprise at finding in a place you had hardly heard of, and would certainly count most uninteresting, the record of a fact that concerned your own existence so nearly? There!'

'I confess it interests me more than you will easily think--inasmuch as it seems to offer to account for things that have greatly puzzled me for some time. I have of late met with several hints of a connection at one time or other between the Moat and the Hall, but these hints were so isolated that I could weave no theory to connect them. Now I dare say they will clear themselves up.'

'Not a doubt of-that, if you set about it in earnest.'

'How did he come to drop his surname?'

'That has to be accounted for.'

'It follows--does it not?--that I am of the same blood as the present possessors of Moldwarp Hall?'

'You are--but the relation is not a close one,' said Mr Coningham.

'Sir Giles was but distantly related to the stock of which you come.'

'Then--but I must turn it over in my mind. I am rather in a maze.'

'You have got some papers at the Moat?' he said--interrogatively.

'Yes; my friend Osborne has been looking over them. He found out this much--that there was once some connection between the Moat and the Hall, but at a far earlier date than this points to, or any of the hints to which I just now referred. The other day, when I dined at Sir Giles's, Mr Alderforge said that Cumbermede was a name belonging to Sir Giles's ancestry--or something to that effect; but that again could have had nothing to do with those papers, or with the Moat at all.'

Here I stopped, for I could not bring myself to refer to the sword. It was not merely that the subject was too painful: of all things I did not want to be cross-questioned by my lawyer-companion.

'It is not amongst those you will find anything of importance, I suspect. Did your great-grandmother--the same, no doubt, whose marriage is here registered--leave no letters or papers behind her?'

'I've come upon a few letters. I don't know if there is anything more.'

'You haven't read them, apparently.'

'I have not. I've been always going to read them, but I haven't opened one of them yet.'

'Then I recommend you--that is, if you care for an interesting piece of family history--to read those letters carefully, that is constructively.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean--putting two and two together, and seeing what comes of it; trying to make everything fit into one, you know.'

'Yes. I understand you. But how do you happen to know that those letters contain a history, or that it will prove interesting when I have found it?'

'All family history ought to be interesting--at least to the last of his race,' he returned, replying only to the latter half of my question.' It must, for one thing, make him feel his duty to his ancestors more strongly.'

'His duty to marry, I suppose you mean?' I said with some inward bitterness. 'But to tell the truth, I don't think the inheritance worth it in my case.'

'It might be better,' he said, with an expression which seemed odd beside the simplicity of the words.

'Ah! you think then to urge me to make money; and for the sake of my dead ancestors increase the inheritance of those that may come after me? But I believe I am already as diligent as is good for me--that is, in the main, for I have been losing time of late.'

'I meant no such thing, Mr Cumbermede. I should be very doubtful whether any amount of success in literature would enable you to restore the fortunes of your family.'

'Were they so very ponderous, do you think? But in truth I have little ambition of that sort. All I will readily confess to is a strong desire not to shirk what work falls to my share in the world.'

'Yes,' he said, in a thoughtful manner--'if one only knew what his share of the work was.'

The remark was unexpected, and I began to feel a little more interest in him.

'Hadn't you better take a copy of that entry?' he said.

'Yes--perhaps I had. But I have no materials.'

It did not strike me that attorneys do not usually, like excise-men, carry about an ink-bottle, when he drew one from the breast-pocket of his coat, along with a folded sheet of writing-paper, which he opened and spread out on the desk. I took the pen he offered me, and copied the entry.

When I had finished, he said--

'Leave room under it for the attestation of the parson. We can get that another time, if necessary. Then write, "Copied by me"--and then your name and the date. It may be useful some time. Take it home and lay it with your grandmother's papers.'

'There can be no harm in that,' I said, as I folded it up, and put it in my pocket. 'I am greatly obliged to you for bringing me here, Mr Coningham. Though I am not ambitious of restoring the family to a grandeur of which every record has departed, I am quite sufficiently interested in its history, and shall consequently take care of this document.'

'Mind you read your grandmother's papers, though,' he said.

'I will,' I answered.

He replaced the volume on the shelf, and we left the church; he locked the door and replaced the key under the gravestone; we mounted our horses, and after riding with me about half the way to the Moat, he took his leave at a point where our roads, diverged. I resolved to devote that very evening, partly in the hope of distracting my thoughts, to the reading of my grandmother's letters. _

Read next: Chapter 46. My Folio

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