"This is weakness, Mrs. Coe. The skull is harmless; and it rolled because your son upset it."

"Yes, my son," gasped the other, trembling. "It is for him I fear. It augurs death--death--death!"

There was a ring at the front-door, decisive, sharp, and resonant.

"Great Heaven!" cried Harry; "if it should be he himself! Hide me away; put me out of sight." Her terror was piteous to behold: she shook in every limb.

"It is the post," said Mrs. Basil, contemptuously; and she was right.

The servant brought in a letter for her mistress.

"I don't know the hand," mused she. "Black-bordered, and black-sealed too." She opened it without excitement, and read it through: it was but a few lines.

"Your omen has proved true for once, Mrs. Coe," said she, in quiet tones. "This speaks of death."

"Whose death?" cried Harry.

"My husband's, Richard's father. Carew of Crompton died last night."

There was no sorrow in the aged woman's face: a gravity, unmixed with tenderness, possessed it. Carew was naught to her, and had been naught for twoscore years. But the tide of memory was at its flow within her brain; and because the Past _is_ Past it touches us. This man had loved her once, after his own scornful manner, when he was young, and before power and selfishness had made him stone. He had been the father of her only son, and now he was Dead.

"I am so sorry," said Harry, not quite knowing what to say.

"There is no need for sorrow," replied the other, quietly. "Let us go up stairs and finish our work."

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

WITCHERY.

Carew of Crompton was really dead, as men said, "at last," not that he had been long dying, or was an old man, but that he had eventually succ.u.mbed to one of those deadly risks to which he had so often voluntarily exposed himself. On the occasion which had been fatal to him he had started from home one frosty morning at the gallop, with a cigar in his mouth, the reins on his horse's neck, and both his hands in his pockets, and had been pitched off and broken his neck within half a mile of his own door. His chaplain, who had dispatched the news to Mrs.

Basil, had been riding by his side at the very moment. "He was a good friend to me," was the laconic remark that poor Parson Whymper had added to the bare intelligence.

To judge by the regretful excitement in the Midlands, Carew might have been a good friend to every body. The news was at once telegraphed to town, and appeared in the evening papers. The public interest in his mad freaks had of late years grown somewhat faint--his extravagances were, perforce, on a less splendid scale--but his death revived it. "So that mad Carew has killed himself, after all," was the observation frequently overheard that evening, as acquaintance met acquaintance on their homeward way from business. "Well, he's had his whack of most things,"

was the reply of the philosophers; "He has not left much to tempt his heirs to be extravagant, I reckon," of the cynics; "He was a deuced good fellow at bottom, I believe," remarked those who were secretly desirous of earning the same eulogium for themselves; "He was altogether wrong at top," answered the charitable.

Solomon Coe came home to his new abode in such a state of elation that it even made him communicative to his wife. Mrs. Basil happened to be with her in the drawing-room, but he only acknowledged her presence by a hasty nod. "Well, what d'ye think, Carew of Crompton, that was your father's landlord and mine"--Solomon never said "ours" with reference to property--"has broken his neck at last!"

Of course the very name of Carew was a sore subject between man and wife, on account of Richard Yorke's connection with him; but it suited Solomon's purpose on this occasion to ignore that circ.u.mstance. It would be necessary for some time to come to allude to the Crompton property more or less, and it was just as well to begin at once; it was also less embarra.s.sing to do so in the presence of a third person.

"Yes, Solomon, I knew Mr. Carew was dead," said Harry, gravely. The next instant she turned scarlet with the consciousness of her thoughtless indiscretion.

"Oh," grunted her husband, annoyed at what he deemed her sulky manner, when he himself was so graciously inclined to be conciliatory, and also displeased to find his news antic.i.p.ated, "you've been buying an evening paper, have you? You must have more money than you know what to do with, it seems to me."

Harry was thankfully accepting this imputation in silence, when Mrs.

Basil's soft voice was heard. "No, Sir; it was I who told your good lady. I had a letter from Crompton by the afternoon's post."

"The devil you did!" cried Solomon, turning sharply upon her. "How came that about?"

"I was housekeeper at Crompton, Sir, in old Mrs. Carew's time, for some years, and one of the servants wrote to let me know of the accident."

"Housekeeper, were you?" said Solomon, with interest. "That must have been a good place, with deuced good pickings, eh?"

"Solomon, Solomon," remonstrated his wife, in a low voice, "Mrs. Basil is quite a lady. Don't you see that you offend her?"

It is more than probable that, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, Mr. Coe would have resented this rebuke with choleric vehemence; but he had his reasons for being good-humored in the present instance. "You must excuse my country manners, Mrs. Basil," said he. "As my wife will tell you, I must always have my joke; but I mean no offense. So you were housekeeper at Crompton, were you? Well, now, that's curious, for Mrs. Coe's father and I myself, as you heard me saying, have had a great deal to do with Carew. You knew him well, of course?"

"Yes, Sir; I did."

"And the place too, of course. It was a very fine one, was it not?

Plenty of pictures, and looking-gla.s.ses, and things?"

"It was very richly furnished."

It was curious to mark the difference of manner between questioner and respondent. Solomon, usually so reticent and reserved, was grown quite voluble. Mrs. Basil, on the other hand, naturally so apt in speech, seemed to reply with difficulty. She was weighing every word.

"The estate, I suppose, was out of your beat; you did not have much to do with that?"

"I used to walk in the park, Sir, most days."

"Ay; but the property generally? The friend who writes you to-day don't say any thing about _that_, I suppose--whether any of it is to be sold or not, for instance?"

"The report--of course, being a servant, she can only speak from report--is that Mr. Carew's affairs are in a sad state. Every thing, I believe, is to be sold at once. The whole estate is said to be--I don't know if I use the right term--mortgaged."

"Just so," replied Solomon; "yes, yes. That is so, no doubt." There was a slight pause; Mrs. Basil courtesied, and was about to leave the room.

"Stop a bit, ma'am," said Solomon. "My wife tells me that you are a lone woman--a widow. Perhaps you'd like to take a bit of dinner with us to-day?"

Harry began to think her husband was intoxicated. He did get occasionally so when any particularly good stroke of business was in course of progress, and on such occasions his manner was unusually affable; but she had never seen him half so gracious as at present.

Hospitality, though he did sometimes bring a mining agent or a broker home to dinner, was by no means his strong point. Mrs. Basil looked doubtfully at her dress, which, though homely, was perfectly well-made and lady-like, and murmured something about its being almost the dinner-hour, and there being "no time."

"Oh, never mind your gown" (which, by-the-by, Solomon p.r.o.nounced "gownd"); "we're quite plain people ourselves, as my wife will tell you.

You shall take pot-luck with us. Where's Charley? That boy's always late."

But at that very moment the young gentleman in question entered the room, at the same time as did the servant with the announcement that dinner was on the table.

The astonishment of the domestic at seeing her mistress taken down to the dining-room by the new lodger was only exceeded by that of Charley, as, with his mother on his arm, he followed the strangely a.s.sorted pair.

"I knew she was a witch," he murmured, "with her human skull and her Joanna Southcott; but this beats old Margery's doings at Gethin."

"Hush, hush!" whispered his mother, for Charley's high spirits and audacity always terrified her when exhibited in his father's presence: "they have found they have a common acquaintance, and so made friends."

"Father didn't know Swedenborg, did he?" answered the young man, slyly.

"My belief is, he has fallen in love with her. I saw a black cat on the stairs. She can make any body do it, as I was telling Aggey" (the young rogue had been to Soho since the morning); "I shall be the next victim, no doubt. It's no use saying to myself, 'Thou shalt not marry thy grandmother.' Her charms are too powerful for the rubric. You'll see she'll not say grace."

Mr. Charles was right in that particular of his diagnosis of their new guest. Mrs. Basil did treat that devotional formula, which Mrs. Coe never omitted to p.r.o.nounce, in spite of her husband's contemptuous shrugs, with considerable indifference. She sat opposite to Charley, and more than once, when he looked up suddenly, he caught her gaze fixed earnestly upon him. Those wondrous eyes of hers yet shone forth bright and clear; her cheeks were still smooth; and, though her brow had many a wrinkle, they were the footprints of thought and care, rather than of years.

The conversation, as was natural where the company and the guest were strangers to each other, turned upon the topics of the day, and the objects in the room, some of which, as we know, were sufficiently remarkable. At Charley's request Mrs. Basil once more narrated the story of the skull; and then epitomized, with caustic tongue, the biography of poor Joanna. Up stairs, she said, she had one of that lady's "seals"--a pa.s.sport to eternal bliss--which she would bestow as a present upon the young gentleman opposite. Her cynical humor delighted Charley, and won the approbation of his father--not the less so, perhaps, since he saw it annoyed his wife.