Sawn Off: A Tale of a Family Tree. Fenn George Manville

insult me.”

      “Silence, sir!” roared his lordship. “Listen to what I say. Insult you! Puppy! How dare you! The father’s an adventurer, and you’re mad after a big-eyed adventuress.”

      “She is a lady, sir.”

      “Silence! And as for you, Lady Pinemount, you must have been mad to call upon them. That was the beginning of the mischief.”

      “Miss Salado is a very sweet, refined girl, Edward,” said her ladyship quietly, “and it was a social duty to call.”

      “Then you’ve done your duty, and there’s an end of it. I won’t have it, and I won’t have the fellow staring over into my park. Coming and sticking himself there! Won’t sell the place again, won’t he? Never another inch of timber or head of beasts does that auctioneer sell for me.”

      The Honourable Denis Rolleston was about to speak, but a meaning look from handsome, dignified Lady Pinemount silenced him, and the angry head of the family rose from his half finished lunch and paced the room.

      “Taken a fancy to the place, has he? I’ll make him take a fancy to go. The sooner he’s out of Lescombe the better. Like to buy the manor, perhaps? But I’ll make it too hot for him. And you, Denis, understand me at once. I can’t interfere about the title; but look here, sir, you marry as I wish you to, – keep up the dignity of our family tree. You are the head, sir, but if you don’t do as I tell you, sir, not a penny do you have to support the title, for I’ll disinherit you. Yes, sir, you think you’re a devilish fine branch, no doubt, but damme, I’ll saw you off!”

      As his lordship spoke, he bounced out of the dining-room, banged the door, and directly after mother and son saw him going straight across the fields to inspect the hoarding he had ordered to be put up.

      “I am very sorry, Denis, my dear,” said Lady Pinemount.

      “Can’t be helped, mother dear,” said the young man, passing his arm round her and walking up towards the window, where they stood watching his lordship’s diminishing figure. “I want to be a good son, and I never kick against the dad’s eccentricities, except when they are too bad. That is such a petty, ungentlemanly trick – an insult to as fine a fellow as ever breathed, and – ”

      “You do love Veronica, my boy?” said Lady Pinemount, gazing wistfully at her son.

      “Love her?” said the young man, with his frank, handsome English face lighting. “Mother dear, could I pick out a sweeter wife?”

      Lady Pinemount sighed, and kissed her son.

      Volume One – Chapter Three.

      How the Doctor Hit

      “Down again, Very!” cried the Doctor, a week later, as he came in from a botanical ramble to breakfast. “Why, eh? – yes – no: it has been burned.”

      “Yes, papa: didn’t you see the flames?”

      “Not I. Slept like a top, and I went out through the sandpits and among the fir trees this morning.”

      He hurried out of the French window, and out into the road, and looked over the hedge into the park and then returned.

      “Seems to have been splashed with petroleum or paraffin. Twice cut down, and once burned. Well, somebody else does not like the hoarding.”

      “But, papa, you gave orders for it to be destroyed!”

      “I? Hang it all, Very, am I the sort of man to do such a shabby thing?”

      “No, papa: I beg your pardon.”

      “Granted, pet. Some one in the village thinks it’s a paltry thing to do, and has constituted himself our champion. Confound his insolence! What did he say in his letter?”

      “That if you dared to destroy his property, he would prosecute you, papa,” said Veronica.

      “Yes, and he has sent me a summons.”

      “Oh, papa!”

      “Fact, my dear; and I shall be puzzled as to how to defend myself and prove my innocency. I say, Very, my dear, this looks bad for you.”

      The girl sighed, and bent over her cup.

      “Wouldn’t be a pleasant alliance, my dear, even if it could come off,” continued the Doctor, watching his child furtively. “Ah, dear me! how strangely things do work! Who’d have thought, when we landed in England, that there was the heir to a baron bold waiting to go down on bended knee to my little tyrant, and make her an offer of his heart and hand?”

      “Oh, papa, how you do delight in teasing me!”

      “Teasing you? Well, isn’t it a fact? You shot him through and through first time we were at church, and your victim has been our humble servant ever since.”

      “But, papa, do you think Thomas could have destroyed the hoarding?”

      “Well, I don’t know, my dear. He was very indignant about it, and said if this was his place he would soon down with the obstruction.”

      “Then it must have been he. You ought to scold him well.”

      “What, for getting rid of a nuisance?”

      “No: for getting you into such trouble with Lord Pinemount.”

      “Hah!” said the Doctor dreamily; “it’s a strange world, Very. Perhaps we had better go back to Iquique.”

      “Oh, papa!” cried the girl in dismay.

      “Don’t you want to go?”

      “What, leave this lovely place, where it is always green, and the flowers are everywhere, for that dreadful dry desert place where one is parched to death? Ah, no, no, no!”

      “Humph!” said the Doctor – “always green. Don’t seem so, Very: something, to my mind, is getting ripe at a tremendous rate.”

      “I don’t know what you mean, dear,” said the girl consciously.

      “Don’t you? Ah well, never mind. But you need not be uneasy, – I do not mean to go back: this place will just suit me to write my book, and I’m not going to stir for all the Lord Pinemounts in England.”

      “I wonder how you could ever leave so beautiful a country as England, papa,” said Veronica, as the breakfast went on.

      “You wouldn’t wonder, if you knew all,” said the Doctor thoughtfully.

      “All, papa? – all what?”

      The Doctor was silent, and his child respected his silence. The breakfast was ended, and the paper was thrown down.

      “I don’t see why you should not know, my dear. You are a woman now, and thinking about such things.”

      Veronica looked across at him wonderingly.

      “You asked me why I left England, or some such question. It was because of the woman I loved, my dear.”

      “Mamma? To join her at Iquique?”

      “No,” said the Doctor thoughtfully; “it was before I knew of her existence.”

      “Ah, papa!”

      “Yes, my dear. I was desperately in love with a lady before I knew your dear mother.”

      Veronica rose with wondering eyes, and knelt down beside her father, resting her elbows on his knees and gazing up in his face.

      “Do people – ? You loved mamma very dearly, papa?” she whispered.

      “Very, my child; and we were very happy till it pleased Heaven to take her away. She taught a poor, weak, foolish man what a good woman really is.”

      There was a long pause, and then Veronica said, —

      “Do people love more than once, papa?”

      “I don’t know, dear,” he said, smiling. “I loved here in England very desperately, and when the lady I worshipped threw me over for another, I swore I would never look