III

It would perhaps benefit the reader to elucidate certain points concerning the enigmatic Mr. Shawhannock.
As the sole heir of the Shawhannock fortune following the mysterious concurrent deaths of his five elder brothers, Berkeley Shawhannock took up dwelling primarily in East Wellington, and was known there as the master of Felstaff, the family estate; though a romantic figure among the women of the village, he was counted by all a most mysterious man indeed--one would oft observe, in the late hours of night, his silhouette, stock-still against the lavish illumination of the famous Shawhannock wrought-iron candelabras, and shiver quite unexpectedly. 'A sad, isolated man--perhaps dangerous--but oh! He is good-looking, very good-looking indeed,' was the common whisper, accompanied by unrestrained giggles, amongst East Wellington's lesser-to-do womenfolk.
It was a most uncommon occurrence that Shawhannock ever left Felstaff. Only the allure of Saddlebright Park in Freemanor, which had just let not a month past, and the perpetual supplications of his old friends Jaffrey Winslough and his sister Elinor, and of course the happier memories of childhood in Freemanor, persuaded him to leave the fog and cold iron of Felstaff for the wider fields and merrier company he knew awaited him at Saddlebright. Indeed, there was a marked change in the man; the Shawhannock who laughed so freely with Louisa and Rebecca Winslough they would scarcely have recognized but two months prior, as he had shaved his beard.

Berkeley Shawhannock was no stranger to the world of enlightening pursuits, and could oft be found in the parlor, or the porch, or the dining room, or the library, or the dressing room, or any one of twenty bedrooms, sprawled vegetable-like across a velvet chaise, a book dangling from his well-shaped fingers as he slept or perused its contents, which tended toward the esoteric and sensational. This was his current occupation when he was unhappily disturbed by a loud commotion from the general direction of the front parlor.
'Oh! oh!--do someone help!' came a woman's cry; then a tumbling of servants' feet; the throwing open of a door; the sounds of a thunderstorm freshly invited into the marble halls of Saddlebright; then the hysteric ramblings of a woman of some class reduced to classless gibbering, the subject of which he only caught the barest excerpts--words which seemed to concern a dead woman and a carriage.
Shawhannock frowned; then dismissed this as highly uninteresting nonsense and returned to the pleasanter skies and lovelorn shepherd girls in Andeline.