John opened the door, stumbled across to the stable, saddled his horse and, riding hard, was at Bosula with dawn.
When the farm girl went to call Arethusina next morning she found the room empty and the bed had not been slept in. Selina sent to the Squire at once, but the youngest Miss Tregellas had not returned. They discovered her eventually in an old rab pit halfway between the two houses, her neck broken; she had fallen over the edge in the dark. It was supposed she was trying to find her way home.
Since that night, seventeen years before, John Penhale had done no love-making nor had he again visited Tregors. The Tregellas affair had broken his nerve, but it had not impaired that of his aunt in the slightest degree, and he was frightened of her, being assured that, did he give her a chance, she would try again.
And now the old lady was dead, and in dying had tried again. John pictured her casting her final noose sitting up, gaunt and tall, in her four-poster bed dictating her last will and testament to the Helston attorney, awed farm hands waiting to affix their marks, sunset staining the west window and the black bull roaring in the yard below. And it was a shrewd cast she had made; John could feel its toils tightening about him. He had always been given to understand that Tregors was as good as his, and now it was as good as Carveth Donnithorne’s—Carveth Donnithorne! John gritted his teeth at the thought of the suave and ever prospering ship chandler. Tregors had always been a strong farm, but in the last seventeen years Selina had increased the acreage by a third, by one hundred acres of sweet upland grazing lopped from the Tregellas estate. There were new buildings too, built of moor granite to stand forever, and the stock was without match locally. John’s yeoman heart yearned to it. Oh, the clever old woman! John pictured Carveth Donnithorne taking possession, Carveth Donnithorne with his condescending airs, patronizing wife and school of chubby little boys. Had not Carveth goods enough in this world but that he must have Tregors as well?
John swore he should not have Tregors as well, not if he could stop it. How could he stop it? He puzzled his wits, but returned inevitably to the one answer he was trying to evade, “Marry within twelve months! Marry within twelve months!” His aunt had made a sure throw, he admitted with grim admiration, the cunning old devil! It was all very well saying “marry,” but who would marry a man that even the rough fisher girls avoided and children hid from? He would have no more force or subterfuge. If any woman consented to marry him it must be in full knowledge of what she was doing and of her own free will. There should be no repetition of that night seventeen years before. He shuddered. “No, by the Lord, no more of that; rather let Tregors go to Carveth.”