Evenings At Donaldson Manor Part 8

"Father, how did you know I was hurt?"

"He whom we have thought a dumb boy called me, and told me he could not find you," said Captain Durbin, looking earnestly, almost sternly at Edward, who colored as he felt that eyes he dared not meet were upon him. But the gentle, loving Emily took his hand, and said, "Did our good Heavenly Father make you speak?--I am so glad--please speak to me!"

Edward could not raise his eyes to hers, but covering his face with his other hand, he fell on his knees, saying to her and Captain Durbin, "I am afraid it was very wicked, but indeed I couldn't help it. I could speak all the time, Emily, but I was afraid of being beaten as I used to be, if I seemed like other people--now if they beat me I must bear it--better for me to be beaten than to have Emily lie there with no one to help her."

"But who is going to beat you? n.o.body will beat you--we all love you--don't we, father?" cried Emily, bending forward and putting her arm around the neck of her _protege_.

"We must hear first whether he is worthy of our love, my dear," said Captain Durbin, as he attempted to withdraw his daughter's arm, and to make her lie down again--but Edward had seized the little hand and held it around his neck, while he exclaimed in the most imploring tones, "Oh, sir I let Emily love me--n.o.body else except my poor mother ever loved me. Beat me as much as you please, and I will not say a word, but oh!

pray, sir! don't tell Emily she must not love me."

"And, father, if he were wicked, you know you told me once that we must love the wicked and try to do them good, because our Father in Heaven loved us while we were yet sinners," urged Emily.

That gentle voice could not be unheeded, and as Captain Durbin kissed her, he laid his hand kindly on the boy's head, saying in more friendly tones, "I hope he has not been wicked, but we will hear more about it to-morrow--I cannot stay longer with you now, and you must lie still just where I have put you, or you may roll out and get hurt. We shall have a rough sea most of the night, though, thank G.o.d! no danger, for the wind had shifted and slackened a little before that great wave swept you away!"

"May I not stay by Emily, sir, and tell her what made me not speak? I will not let her sit up again."

"Oh, yes! do, father, let him stay till you come down again."

Captain Durbin consented, and when he came down again at midnight from the deck, the children had both fallen asleep, but their hands were clasped in each other's, and the flushed cheeks and dewy lashes of both showed that they had been weeping. The next morning Captain Durbin heard the story of the orphan boy. Emily Durbin stood beside him while he told it, and he needed the courage which her presence gave him, for his cowed spirit could not yet rise to confidence in man. The mingled indignation and pity with which Captain Durbin heard the simple but touching narrative of his life--the earnest kindness with which, at the conclusion, he drew him to his side, and told him that he would be his father, and Emily his sister, adding, "G.o.d gave you to me, and as His gift I will love you and care for you," first taught him that his friend Emily was not the one only angel of mercy in our world. As time pa.s.sed on, and Captain Durbin kept well the promise of those words, instructing him with care and guarding him with tenderness as well as with fidelity, his faith became firm, not only in his fellow-men, but in Him who had brought such great good for him out of the darkest evil. His long repressed affections sprang into vigorous growth, his intellect expanded rapidly in their glow, his eye grew bright, his step elastic, and his whole air redolent of a joy which none but those who have suffered as he had done can conceive. In the handsome youth who returned two years afterwards with Captain Durbin to Boston, and who walked so proudly at his side, leading Emily by the hand, few could have recognized the wild boy of that western Island.

Such was the transformation which the spirit of love, breathing itself through the lips of a little child, had effected. "Verily, of such"

children "is the kingdom of heaven."

CHAPTER VI.

The entertainment of the evening gave its character to our conversation on the following morning. It was a conversation too grave for introduction into a work intended only to aid in the entertainment of festive hours: it commenced with the English "poor-laws," and ended with a discussion of the tenure of property in that land, and the wisdom of our own republican fathers in abolishing entails--a subject affording a fair opportunity to us Americans, to indulge a little in that self-glorification which we are accused of loving so well.

"What a curious book would a 'History of Entails' be!" exclaimed Mr.

Arlington, "how full of the romance of life!"

"Romance!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Annie.

"Yes, romance; for under this system, the poor man, whose life seemed doomed to one unbroken struggle with fortune, for the necessaries of existence, finds himself, by some unexpected casualty, the possessor of rank, and of what seems to him boundless wealth."

"Ah, yes!" said I, "but you have given us only the bright side of the picture. To make room for this stranger, whose only connection with the house of which he has so unexpectedly become the head is probably that preserved in genealogical tables, the daughters of the house, or their children it may be, reared in luxury, must go forth to a life of comparative privation. I met, some years ago, in one of my visits to the Far West, a young Englishman, who--but I will read you the story of his life, as I wrote it out soon after parting with him."

"Have you a picture of him, Aunt Nancy?" asked Robert Dudley.

"Yes, Robert," I replied with a smile, "but you must have patience, for I shall neither show the picture nor tell the story till evening."

When we were a.s.sembled in the evening, Annie, with much ceremony, led me to the high-backed arm-chair, which she called the Speaker's Chair, and placed before me the small travelling desk, in which she knew my ma.n.u.scripts were kept. I unlocked it, and soon found the scroll of which I was in search.

"But the picture, Aunt Nancy--where is the picture?" cried the eager Robert.

"Here it is," I cried, as I loosened the ribbon with which the ma.n.u.script was bound together, and produced a small engraving; a fancy subject, however, rather than an actual portrait, and of no general interest. The print was eagerly caught by Robert, and handed around the circle, with exclamations of, "How handsome!" "What an exquisite picture!" Mr. Arlington looked at it a moment, then, with a smiling glance at me, handed it, without a word of comment, to Col. Donaldson.

"The impertinent puppy!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the Colonel, "engrossed with his hawk and his hound, and wearing such an insolent air of self-absorption in the presence of a lady" (for the artist had introduced a lovely young maiden in the scene). "Poor girl!" continued the Colonel; "if she were in any way connected with him, I am not surprised that she should look so sad and reproachful."

Mr. Arlington's smiling glance was again turned on me; and I met it with a hearty laugh.

"Indeed, Aunt Nancy," said the Colonel, who seemed strangely annoyed at my laughter, "I think your friend does you little credit, and I can only hope that he had some of these lordly airs drubbed out of him at the West."

As Col. Donaldson spoke he threw down the engraving which he had held, and pushed his chair from the table.

"I a.s.sure you, sir," I replied, "my friend has as few lordly airs as it is possible to conceive in one born to such lordly circ.u.mstances. It was not my intention to impose on you that picture as an actual likeness of him--though had you ever seen him I might easily have done so, as it really resembles him very much in his personal traits."

"Well, I am glad he did not sit for this picture," said Col. Donaldson; "now I can listen to your story with some pleasure."

"Thank you; you must first take some reflections suggested to me by the incidents I have here narrated. Of the character of these reflections, you will form some conception from the t.i.tle I have given to the tale into which I have interwoven them. I have called it

"LIFE IN AMERICA."

"Men and Manners in America" was the comprehensive t.i.tle of a book issued some fifteen or twenty years ago, by a gentleman from Scotland, to whom, we fear, Americans have never tendered the grateful acknowledgments he deserved for his disinterested efforts to teach them to eat eggs properly, and to give due time to the mastication of their food. This benevolently instructive work was the precursor of a host of others on the same topics, and others of a kindred character.

America has been the standard subject for the trial essays of European tyros in philosophy, political economy, and book-making in general.

Society in America has been presented, it would seem, in all its aspects--religious, educational, industrial, political, commercial, and fashionable. Our schools and our prisons, our churches and our theatres, have been in turn the subject of investigation, of unqualified censure, and of scarcely less unqualified laudation.

The subject thus dissected, put together, and dissected again, has not been able to restrain some wincing and an occasional outcry, when the scalpel has been held by a more than usually unskilful hand--demonstrations of sensibility which have occasioned apparently as much disapprobation as surprise in the anatomists. We flatter ourselves that there is peculiar fitness in the metaphor just used, for the outer form only of American life has been touched by these various writers.

Its spirit, that which gives to it its peculiar organization, has evaded them as completely as the soul of man evades the keenest investigations of the dissecting room. Even of the seat of the spirit--of the point whence it sends forth its subtle influences, giving activity and direction to every member--of the HOMES of America, they have little real knowledge. The anatomist--the reader will pardon the continuation of a figure so ill.u.s.trative of our meaning--the anatomist knows that not only can he never hope to lay his finger upon the principle of life, but that ere he can pry into those cells in which its mysterious processes are evolved, they must have been dismantled of all that could have guided him to any certain deductions respecting its nature and mode of action. And seldom is the eye of the stranger, never that of the professed bookmaker, suffered to rest upon our homes till they have undergone changes that will as completely baffle his penetration. Nor is this always designedly. It is from a delicate instinct which shrinks from subjecting its most sacred and touching emotions to the rude gaze and ruder comment of the world.

We have been led to these observations by certain events of which we have lately become informed, and which we would here record, as ill.u.s.trative of some peculiarities of social life in America, and especially of the new development of character manifested by women under the influence of these peculiarities.

The ringing of bells, the firing of cannon, the huzzaing of the a.s.sembling mult.i.tude on the announcement in London of the victory of Waterloo, must have seemed a bitter mockery to many a heart, mad with the first sharp agony of bereavement. "The few must suffer that the many may rejoice," say the statesman and the warrior while they plan new conquests. It may be so, but we have at present to do with the sufferings of the few.

On the list of the killed in that battle appeared the name of Horace Danforth, Captain in the 41st Regiment of Infantry. It was a name of little note, but there was one to whom it was the synonyme of all that gave beauty or gladness to life; and ere the bells had ceased to sound, or the eager crowd to huzza, her heart was still. With her last quivering sigh had mingled the wail of a new-born infant.

Thus was Horace Maitland Danforth ushered into life. He had been born at the house of his maternal uncle, Sir Thomas Maitland, and as his mother had been wholly dependent on this gentleman, and his father had been a soldier of fortune, leaving to his son no heritage but his name, he continued there, as carefully reared and tenderly regarded as though he had been the heir to Maitland Park and to all its dependencies. Though Sir Thomas had, for many years after the birth of his nephew intended to marry, it was an intention never executed, and when Horace attained his twenty-first birthday, his majority was celebrated as that of his uncle's heir, and as such he was presented by Sir Thomas Maitland to his a.s.sembled tenantry. Soon after this event, the Baronet obtained for his nephew a right to the name and arms of Maitland--a measure to which, knowing little of his father's family, Horace readily consented. Sir Thomas Maitland died suddenly while yet in the prime of life, and was succeeded by Sir Horace, then twenty-four years of age. In the enjoyments of society, of travel, and of those thousand luxuries, mental and physical, which fortune secures, three years pa.s.sed rapidly away with the young, handsome, and accomplished Baronet.

One of the earliest convictions of Horace Maitland's life had been, that the refining presence of woman was necessary to the perfection of Maitland Park, and when Sir Thomas said to him, "Marry, Horace--do not be an old bachelor like your uncle"--though he answered nothing, he vowed in the inmost recesses of his heart that it should not be his fault if he did not obey the injunction. Yet to the world it seemed wholly his own fault that at twenty-seven he had not given to Maitland Park a mistress, and even he himself could not attribute his continued celibacy to the coldness or cruelty of woman; for, in truth, though he had "knelt at many a shrine," he had "laid his heart on none." If hardly pressed for his reason, he might have said with Ferdinand,--

"For several virtues Have I liked several women; never any With so full soul, but some defect in her Did quarrel with the n.o.blest grace she own'd, And put it to the foil."

He who after the death of his uncle continued to urge Sir Horace most on the subject of matrimony, was the one of all the world who might have been supposed least desirous to see him enter into its bonds. This was Edward Maitland, a distant cousin, somewhat younger than himself, to whom he had been attached from his boyhood, and who had been saved by his generosity from many of those painful experiences to which a very narrow income would otherwise have subjected him. It had more than once been suggested to Edward Maitland, that should his cousin die unmarried, he might not unreasonably hope to become his heir, as he was supposed to be uncontrolled by any entail in the disposal of his property, and had few nearer relations than himself, and none with whom he maintained such intimate and affectionate intercourse. Nor could Edward Maitland fail to perceive that his own value in society was in an inverse ratio to the chances of the Baronet's marrying, as a report of an actual proposal on the part of the latter had more than once occasioned a visible declension in the number and warmth of his invitations. These considerations appeared, however, only to stimulate the young man's activity in the search of a wife for his cousin. Had he been employed by a marriage broker with a prospect of a liberal commission, he could hardly have been more indefatigable.

"Well, Horace," exclaimed the younger Maitland, as the two sat loitering over a late London breakfast one morning, "how did you like the lady to whom I introduced you last evening?"

A smile lighted the eyes of Sir Horace as he replied, "Very much, Ned--she is certainly intelligent, and has read and thought more than most ladies of her age."

"She will make a capital manager, I am sure."

"And an agreeable companion," added Sir Horace.

"And a good wife--do you not think so, Horace?"

"She doubtless would be to one who could fancy her, Ned; for me her style is a little too _p.r.o.nonce_."