Margaret Maliphant

								


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MARGARET MALIPHANT
A Novel
BY
MRS. COMYNS CARR
AUTHOR OF "PAUL CREW'S STORY" ETC.
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1889

PROLOGUE.

It is twilight upon the marsh: the land at the foot of the hill lies
a level of dim monotony, and even the sea beyond is lost in mystery.
In the middle of the plain one solitary homestead, with its clump of
trees, stands out just a little darker than anything else, and from
afar there comes to me the sound of the sea, sweetly lulling, as it has
come to me ever since I was a little child. A chill breeze creeps up
among the aspens on the cliff, and for a moment there steals over me
the sense of loneliness of ten years ago, and I seem to see once more
a tall, dark figure thread his way down among the trees, and disappear
forever onto the wide plain. But this is only for a moment; for as
I look, the past lies stretched, as the plain is stretched, before
me--vivid, yet distant as a dream. The white mill detaches itself upon
the dark hill-side, the cattle rest upon the quiet marsh; and still
the sound of the sea comes to me, tenderly murmuring, as it did when I
was a happy child, and tells me of a present that is wide and fair as,
above the lonely land, the coming night is blue and vast.

CHAPTER I.

My sister Joyce is older than I am. At the time of which I am thinking
she was twenty-one, and I was barely nineteen. We were the only
children of Farmer Maliphant of Knellestone Grange, in the county
of Sussex. The Maliphants were an old family. Their names were on
the oldest tombstones in the graveyard of the abbey, whose choir and
ruined transepts were all that was left standing of a splendid church
that had been the mother of a great monastery, and of many other
churches in the popish days, when our town was a feature in English
history. I am not sure that our family dated as far back as that. I
had read of knights in helmets and coats of mail skirmishing beneath
the city wall, of which there were still fragments standing, and
of gallant captains bringing the King's galleys to port in the bay
that had become marsh-land, and I hoped that there might have been
Maliphants too, riding up and down the hill under the gate-ways that
were now ivy-grown; but I am afraid that, even if the family had been
in existence at the time, they would only have been archers, shooting
their arrows from behind the turrets on the hill.
At all events--to leave romancing alone--Maliphants had owned or rented
land upon the Udimore hills and the downs of Brede for more than three