Then through the wet cobwebs, that hung like movable diaphragms on each
blade and bough, he pushed his way down to the furrow which led from the
secluded fir-tree island to the wide world beyond the field.
He was not a stranger to enterprise, and still less to the contemplation
of enterprise; but an enterprise such as this he had never even outlined.
That his dear lady was troubled at the situation he had placed her in by
not going himself on that errand, he could see from her letter; but,
believing an immediate marriage with her to be the true way of restoring
to both that equanimity necessary to serene philosophy, he held it of
little account how the marriage was brought about, and happily began his
journey towards her place of sojourn.
He passed through a little copse before leaving the parish, the smoke
from newly lit fires rising like the stems of blue trees out of the few
cottage chimneys. Here he heard a quick, familiar footstep in the path
ahead of him, and, turning the corner of the bushes, confronted the foot-
post on his way to Welland. In answer to St. Cleeve's inquiry if there
was anything for himself the postman handed out one letter, and proceeded
on his route.
Swithin opened and read the letter as he walked, till it brought him to a
standstill by the importance of its contents.
They were enough to agitate a more phlegmatic youth than he. He leant
over the wicket which came in his path, and endeavoured to comprehend the
sense of the whole.
The large long envelope contained, first, a letter from a solicitor in a
northern town, informing him that his paternal great-uncle, who had
recently returned from the Cape (whither he had gone in an attempt to
repair a broken constitution), was now dead and buried. This
great-uncle's name was like a new creation to Swithin. He had held no
communication with the young man's branch of the family for innumerable
years,--never, in fact, since the marriage of Swithin's father with the
simple daughter of Welland Farm. He had been a bachelor to the end of
his life, and had amassed a fairly good professional fortune by a long
and extensive medical practice in the smoky, dreary, manufacturing town
in which he had lived and died. Swithin had always been taught to think
of him as the embodiment of all that was unpleasant in man. He was
narrow, sarcastic, and shrewd to unseemliness. That very shrewdness had
enabled him, without much professional profundity, to establish his large
and lucrative connexion, which lay almost entirely among a class who
neither looked nor cared for drawing-room courtesies.