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                           OLD MR. TREDGOLD

                                  BY
                             MRS. OLIPHANT
                  AUTHOR OF “IN TRUST,” “MADAM,” ETC.

                       LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
                     LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY
                                 1896
                         _All rights reserved_




                           OLD MR. TREDGOLD.




CHAPTER I.


They were not exactly of that conventional type which used to be common
whenever two sisters had to be described--the one dark and the other
fair, the one sunny and amiable, the other reserved and proud; the one
gay, the other melancholy, or at least very serious by nature. They were
not at all like Minna and Brenda in the “Pirate,” which used to be a
contrast dear to the imagination. But yet there was a very distinct
difference between them. Katherine was a little taller, a little bigger,
a little darker, than Stella. She was three years older but was supposed
to look ten. She was not so lively in her movements either of mind or
person, and she was supposed to be slow. The one who was all light threw
a shadow--which seems contradictory--on the other. They were the two
daughters of an old gentleman who had been that mysterious being called
a City man in his time. Not that there was anything at all mysterious
about old Mr. Tredgold; his daughters and his daughters’ friends were
fond of saying that he had come to London with the traditionary
half-crown in his pocket; but this was, as in so many cases, fabulous,
Mr. Tredgold having in fact come of a perfectly creditable Eastern
Counties family, his father being a well-to-do linen draper in Ipswich,
whose pride it was to have set forth all his boys comfortably, and done
everything for them that a father could do. But perhaps it is easier to
own to that half-crown and the myth of an origin sudden and
commercially-romantic without antecedents, than to a respectable shop
in a respectable town, with a number of relatives installed in other
shops, doing well and ready to claim the rights of relationship at
inconvenient moments. I do not know at all how fortunes are made “in the
City.” If you dig coals out of the bowels of the earth, or manufacture
anything, from cotton to ships, by which money is made, that is a
process which comes within the comprehension of the most limited
faculties; but making money in the City never seems to mean anything so
simple. It means handing about money, or goods which other people have
produced, to other third or fourth people, and then handing them back
again even to the Scriptural limits of seventy times seven; which is why
it appears so mysterious to the simple-minded.

But, indeed, if anybody had investigated the matter, Mr. Tredgold’s
progress had been quite easy to follow, at least in the results. He had
gone from a house in Hampstead to a house in Kensington, and thence to
Belgravia, changing also his summer residences from Herne Bay to
Hastings, and thence to the wilds of Surrey, and then to the Isle of
Wight, where, having retired from the cares of business, he now lived in
one of those beautiful places, with one of the most beautiful prospects
in the world before him, which so often fall to the lot of persons who
care very little about beauty in any shape. The house stood on a cliff
which was almost a little headland, standing out from the line of the
downs between two of the little towns on the south side of that favoured
island. The grounds were laid out quite regardless of expense, so much
so that they were a show in the district, and tourists were admitted by
the gardeners when the family was absent, to see such a collection of
flowering shrubs and rare trees as was not to be found between that
point, let us say, and Mr. Hanbury’s gardens at Mortola. The sunny
platform of the cliff thus adorned to the very edge of the precipice was
the most delightful mount of vision, from which you could look along the
lovely coast at that spot not much inferior to the Riviera, with its
line of sunny towns and villages lying along the course of the bay on
one hand, and the darker cliffs clad with wood, amid all the
picturesque broken ground of the Landslip on the other; and the dazzling
sea, with the additional glory of passing ships giving it a continual
interest, stretching out far into the distance, where it met the circle
of the globe, and merged as all life does in the indefinite Heaven
beyond--the Heaven, the Hades, the unknown--not always celestial,
sometimes dark with storm or wild with wind, a vague and indeterminate
distance from which the tempests and all their demons, as well as the
angels, come, yet the only thing that gives even a wistful satisfaction
to the eyes of those who sway with every movement of this swaying globe
in the undiscovered depths of air and sky.

Very little attention, I am sorry to say, was paid to this beautiful
landscape by the family who had secured it for their special
delectation. The girls would take their visitors “to see the view,” who
cast a careless glance at it, and said, “How pretty!” and returned with
pleasure to the tennis or croquet