The Moon Rock | Page 3

His regrets increased
with the birth of a second daughter. He wanted a son to succeed him in
the title--when he gained it. Time passed, and he became enraged. His
anger crushed the timid woman who shared his strange lot. His
dominating temperament and moody pride were too much for her
gentle soul. She became desperately afraid of him and his stern ways,
of that monomania which kept them wandering through the country
searching for links in a [pedigree] which had to be traced back for
hundreds of years before Robert Turold could grasp his heart's desire.
When She died in the house on the cliffs where they had come six
months before, Robert Turold had accomplished the task to which his
life had been devoted. Some weeks before he had summoned his
brother from London to disclose his future plans. The brothers had not
met for many years, but Austin was quick to obey when he learnt that a
fortune and a title were at stake. The sister and her husband, Mr. and
Mrs. Pendleton, had reached Cornwall two days before the funeral.
They were to take Sisily back to London with them. It was Robert
Turold's intention to part with his daughter and place her in his sister's
charge. For a reason he had not yet divulged, Sisily was to have no
place in his brilliant future. He disliked his daughter. Her sex was a
fatal bar to his regard. He had heaped so many reproaches on her
mother for bringing another girl into the world that the poor woman
had descended to the grave with a confused idea that she was to blame.

Sisily had a strange nature, reticent, yet tender. She had loved her
mother passionately, and feared and hated her father because he had
treated his wife so harshly. She had been the witness of it all--from her
earliest childhood to the moment when the unhappy woman had died
with her eyes fixed on her husband's implacable face, but holding fast
to her daughter's hand, as though she wanted to carry the pressure of
those loving fingers into the grave.
A clock on the mantel-piece ticked loudly. But it was the only sound
which disturbed the quietness of the room. The representatives of the
family eyed one another with guarded indifference. Circumstances had
kept them apart for many years, and they now met almost as strangers.
Mrs. Pendleton sat on a sofa with her husband. She was a notable
outline of a woman, large and massive, with a shrewd capable face and
a middle-class mind. She lived, when at home, in the rarefied
atmosphere of Golders Green, in a red house with a red-tiled roof, one
of a streetful similarly afflicted, where she kept two maids and had a
weekly reception day. She was childless, but she disdained to carry a
pet dog as compensation for barrenness. Her husband was a meagre
shrimp of a stockbroker under his wife's control, who golfed on
Sundays and played auction bridge at his club twice a week with cyclic
regularity. He and his wife had little in common except the habit of
living together, which had made them acquainted with each other's
ways.
Mrs. Pendleton had not seen either of her brothers for a long time.
Robert had been too engrossed in digging into the past for the skeletons
of his ancestors to do more than write intermittent letters to the living
members of his family, acquainting them with the progress of his
search. Austin Turold, Robert's younger brother, had spent a portion of
his life in India and had but recently returned. He had gone there more
than twenty years before to fill a Government post, taking with him his
young wife, but leaving his son at school in England for some years.
His wife had languished and died beneath an Indian sun, but her
husband had become acclimatized, and remained until his time was up
and he was free to return to England with a pension. His sister and he

met on the previous day for the first time since he had left England for
India, and Mrs. Pendleton had some difficulty in identifying the elderly
and testy Anglo-Indian with the handsome young brother who had bade
her farewell so many years before. And, she had even more difficulty in
recognizing the fair-haired little boy of that time in the good-looking
but rather moody-faced young man who at the present moment was
seated near the window, staring out of it.
The fifth member of the party was Dr. Ravenshaw, who practised in the
churchtown where Mrs. Turold had been buried, and had attended her
in her illness.
But he had not been asked to share in the family council on that
account. His presence was due to his