was gone.
Let moralists perpend. Ruth Josselin had knocked at that door after a
sharp struggle between conscience and crying want. The poverty known to
Ruth was of the extreme kind that gnaws the entrails with hunger.
It had furthermore starved her childhood of religion, and her sole code
of honour came to her by instinct. Yet she had knocked at the door with
no thought but that the Collector's guinea had come to her hand by
mistake, and no expectancy but that the Collector would thank her and
take it back. She was shy, moreover. It had cost courage.
"Honesty is the best policy." True enough, no doubt. Yet, when all is
said, but for some radical instinct of honesty, untaught, brave to
conquer a more than selfish need, Ruth had never brought back her
guinea. And, yet again, from that action all the rest of this story
flows. When we have told it, let the moralists decide.
Chapter VI.
PARENTHETICAL--OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL.
Captain Oliver Vyell, as we have seen, set store upon pedigree: and
here, as well in compliment to him as to make our story clearer, we will
interrupt it with a brief account of his family and descent.
The tomb of Sir Thomas Vyell, second Baronet, at whose house of
Carwithiel in Cornwall our Collector spent some years of his boyhood,
may yet be seen in the church of that parish, in the family transept.
It bears the coat of the Vyells (gules, a fesse raguly argent) with no
less than twenty-four quarterings: for an Odo of the name had fought on
the winning side at Hastings, and his descendants, settling in the West,
had held estates there and been people of importance ever since.
The Wars of the Roses, to be sure, had left them under a cloud, shorn of
the most of their wealth and a great part of their lands. Yet they kept
themselves afloat (if this riot of metaphor may be pardoned) and their
heads moderately high, until Sir William, the first Baronet, by
developing certain tin mines on his estate and working them by new
processes, set up the family fortunes once more.
His son, Sir Thomas, steadily bettered them. A contemporary narrative
describes him as "chief of a very good Cornish family, with a very good
estate. His marrying a grand-daughter of the Lord Protector (Oliver)
first recommended him to King William, who at the Revolution made him
Commissioner of the Excise and some years after Governor of the Post
Office. . . . The Queen, by reason of his great capacity
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