Evenings At Donaldson Manor Part 9

"Well, really, Horace, I cannot imagine what you would have. One woman is too frivolous--another wants refinement--one is too indolent and exacting--and when you can make no other objection, why her style is a little too _p.r.o.nonce_"--the last words were given with ludicrous imitation of his cousin's tone. "If an angel were to descend from heaven for you, I doubt if you would be suited."

"So do I," replied Horace, with a gay laugh at his cousin's evident vexation.

And thus did he meet all Edward's well-intended efforts. The power of choice had made him fastidious, and his life of luxury and freedom had brought him no experiences of the need of another and gentler self as a consoler. But that lesson was approaching.

A call from his lawyer for some papers necessary to complete an arrangement in which he was much interested, had sent Sir Horace to Maitland Park, in the midst of the London season, to explore the yet unfathomed recesses of an old _escritoire_ of Sir Thomas. He had been gone but two days when Edward received the following note from him, written, as it seemed, both in haste and agitation:--

"Come to me immediately on the receipt of this, dear Edward. I have found here a paper of the utmost importance to you as well as to me.

Come quickly--take the chariot and travel post.

"Yours, H. D. MAITLAND."

In less than an hour after the reception of this note Edward Maitland was on the road: and travelling with the utmost expedition, he arrived at Maitland Park just as the day was fading into dusky eve.

"How is Sir Horace?" he asked of the man who admitted him.

"I do not think he seems very well, sir. You will find him in the library, Mr. Edward--shall I announce you, sir?"

"No;" and with hurried steps and anxious heart Edward Maitland trod the well-known pa.s.sages leading to the library.

When he entered that room, Sir Horace was standing at one of its windows gazing upon the landscape without, and so absorbed was he that he did not move at the opening of the door. Edward spoke, and starting, he turned towards him a face haggard with some yet untold suffering. He advanced to meet his cousin, and with an almost convulsive grasp of the hand, said, "I am glad you have come, Edward,"--then, without heeding the anxious inquiries addressed to him by Edward, he rang the bell, and ordered lights in a tone which caused them to be brought without a moment's delay. As soon as the servant who had brought them had left the room, Horace resumed: "Now, Edward, here is the paper of which I wrote to you; read it at once."

Agitated by his cousin's manner, Edward took the old stained paper from him without a word, and seating himself near the lights, began to read, while Sir Horace stood just opposite him, eyeing him intently. In a very few minutes Edward looked up with a puzzled air and said, "I do not understand one word of it. What does it all mean, Horace?"

"It means that you are Sir Edward Maitland--that you are master here--and that I am a beggar."

"Horace, you are mad!" exclaimed the young man, starting from his chair, with quivering limbs and a face from which every trace of color had departed.

Hitherto the tone in which Sir Horace had spoken, the alternate flush and pallor on his face, and the shiver that occasionally pa.s.sed over his frame, had shown him to be fearfully excited; but as Edward became agitated, all these signs of emotion pa.s.sed away, and with wonderful calmness taking the paper in his hand, he commenced reading that part of it which explained its purpose. This was to secure the descent of the baronetcy of Maitland and the property attached to it in the male line.

Having made Edward Maitland comprehend this purpose, Sir Horace drew towards him a genealogical table of their family, and showed him that he was himself the only living descendant in a direct line through an unbroken succession of males from the period at which this entail was made.

"And now, Edward," he said in conclusion, "I am prepared to give up every thing to you. That you have so long been defrauded of your rights has been through ignorance on my part, and equal ignorance, I am convinced, on the part of my uncle. You know he paid little attention to business, leaving it wholly to his agents. I have often heard him express a wish to examine the papers in the old _escritoire_ in which I found this deed, saying that they had been sent home by old Harris when he gave up his business to his nephew--the old man writing to my uncle, that as they consisted of leases that had fallen in, or of antiquated deeds, they were no longer of any value except as family records. It was a just Providence that led me to that _escritoire_, to search for the missing t.i.tle-deeds of the farm I was about to sell."

Edward Maitland had sunk into his chair from sheer inability to stand, and for several minutes after his cousin had ceased speaking, he still sat, with his elbows resting on the table before him, and his face buried in his clasped hands. At length looking up, he said, "Horace, let us burn this paper and forget it."

"Forget! that is impossible, Edward."

"Why?--why not live as we have done? You speak of defrauding me, but what have I wanted that you had? Has not your purse been as my own? Your home--has it not been mine? It shall be so still. We shall share the fortune, and as to the t.i.tle, you will wear it more gracefully than I."

"Dear Edward! Such proof of your generous affection ought to console me for all changes, and it shall. I will confess to you that I have suffered, but it is past. My people----" his voice faltered, his chest heaved, and turning away he walked more than once across the room before he resumed--"they are mine no longer--but you will be kind to them, Edward, I know."

"Horace, you will drive me mad!" cried Edward Maitland. "Promise, I conjure you, promise me to say nothing more of this."

He threw himself as he spoke into his cousin's arms with an agitation which Horace vainly sought to soothe, until he promised "to _speak_" no further on this subject at present to any one. Satisfied with this promise, and exhausted by the emotions of the last hour, Edward soon retired to his own room. It was long before he slept, and had he not been in a distant part of the house, he would have heard the hurried steps with which, for many an hour after he was left alone, Sir Horace Maitland continued to pace the floor of the dimly lighted library. The clock was on the stroke of three when he seated himself and began the following letter:

DEAR EDWARD:--I must go, and at once. I cannot without the loss of self-respect continue to play the master here another day, neither can I live as a dependent within these walls--no, not for an hour. Do not attempt to follow me, for I will not see you. I will write to you as soon as I arrive at my point of destination--I know not yet where that will be. Feel no anxiety about me. I shall take with me a thousand pounds, and will leave an order for Decker to receive from you and hold subject to my draft whatever sum may accrue from the sale, at a fair valuation, of Sir Thomas Maitland's personal property, which he had an undoubted right to will as he pleased, the amount of the mesne rents expended by me during the last three years having been deducted therefrom. Do not attempt to force favors upon me, Edward--I cannot bear them now. Such attempts would only compel me to cut myself loose from you and your affection--the one blessing that earth still holds for me.

My trunks have been packed two days, for my first resolve was to go from this place and from England. I shall take the chariot in which you came down and fresh horses, but I will send them back to you from London.

G.o.d bless you, Edward. I dare not speak of my feelings to you now, lest I should lose the strength and self-command I need so much. G.o.d bless you.

H. D. MAITLAND.

Stealthily did Sir Horace move through the wide halls and ascend the lofty stairs of this home of his life, feeling at every step the rushing tide of memory conflicting with the sad thought that he was treading them for the last time. Having reached his sleeping apartments, he rang a bell which he knew would summon his own man. Rapidly as the man moved, the time seemed long to him ere the summons was obeyed, and he had given the necessary orders to have the carriage prepared and the trunks brought down as soon as possible, "and as quietly," he added, "as he did not wish to disturb Mr. Edward, who had retired to bed late."

"Will you not take breakfast, sir, before you set out?" asked the man.

"No, John. Let the carriage follow me. I shall walk on. Be quick, and make no noise."

A faint streak of light was just beginning to appear in the east, when the heretofore master of that lordly mansion went out into a world which held for him no other home. ACCIDENT, as short-sighted mortals name events controlled by no human will, decided whither he should direct his course from London. He had called at his lawyer's--the already mentioned "nephew of old Harris"--determined to communicate his discovery to him, perhaps with some faint hope of learning that the entail had been in some way set aside, before Sir Thomas had ventured to make his sister's son his heir. Mr. Decker was not in his rooms, and sitting down to wait for him he took up mechanically the morning paper that lay on his table.

The first thing on which his eye rested was the advertis.e.m.e.nt of a steam packet about to sail from Liverpool for America.

"America; the very place for me. I shall meet no acquaintances there,"

was the thought which flashed through his mind. Another glance at the paper of the day and hour of the packet's sailing, an examination of his watch, an impatient look from the window up and down the street, and again he mused, "I have not a moment to spare, and if I wait for Decker I may be kept for hours, and so lose the packet; and why should I wait?

Have I not seen the deed? This indecision is folly."

The result of these reflections was a note rapidly written to Mr.

Decker, stating his discovery of the deed of entail, his consequent surrender of all claim to the property to Edward Maitland, and his determination to quit England immediately. All arrangements respecting the settlement of his claims on the estate, and the claims of the present proprietor upon him, he left to Sir Edward and Mr. Decker, empowering the latter to receive and retain for his use and subject to his order, whatever, on such a settlement, should appertain to him.

This note was left on Mr. Decker's table, and in one hour after leaving his office Horace Maitland was advancing to Liverpool with the rapidity of steam. The packet waited but the arrival of the train in which he was a pa.s.senger, to leave the sh.o.r.es of England. With what bitterness he watched those receding sh.o.r.es, while memory wrote upon his bare and bleeding heart the record of joys identified with them, and fading like them for ever from his life, let each imagine for himself, for to such emotions no language can do justice.

A voyage across the Atlantic is now too common an event to stay, even for a moment, the pen of a narrator. From Boston, Horace--no longer Sir Horace--wrote to his cousin as follows--

DEAR EDWARD--Here I am among the republicans, with whom I may flatter myself I have lost nothing by sinking Sir Horace Maitland into plain Mr.

Danforth. Such is now my address, a.s.sumed not from fear that in this distant quarter of the world I shall meet any to whom the name of Maitland is familiar but because much of which I do not desire to be reminded is a.s.sociated with that came. I said to you when leaving my home, dear Edward, "Do not fear for me." I can now repeat this with better reason. The first stunning shock of the change to which I was so suddenly subjected has been borne. My past life already seems to me as a dream from which I have been rudely but effectually awakened. I am now first to begin life in reality.

The accident which determined me to seek these sh.o.r.es was a happy one. I cannot well dream here where all around me is active, vigorous life. We are accustomed in England to think of the American sh.o.r.es as the Ultima Thule in a western direction, but when we reach these sh.o.r.es we find that the movement is still west. The daily papers are filled with accounts of persons migrating west, and thither am I going. "The world is all before me where to choose" the theatre of my new life--my life of work---and I would have it far from the blue sea, out of hearing of the murmur of the waves that lave my island home. I will go where the wide prairies sweep away on every side of the horizon--where every link with other lands will be severed, and America below and Heaven above const.i.tute my universe. "You will find no society at the West," has been said to me. This is another attraction to that region. I would work out my destiny in solitude. I desire to travel without company, and have made my arrangements accordingly. I have purchased three substantial horses for a little more than one hundred pounds, and have engaged a shrewd, active lad as groom, valet, and he seems to think, companion, at about two pounds per month. A very light carriage, sometimes driven by my servant and sometimes by myself, will transport the moderate wardrobe which I shall deem it necessary to take with me to the outermost verge of civilization and good roads, where leaving carriage and wardrobe, or at least all of the latter which may not be borne by a led-horse, I shall penetrate still further into the old forests of this New World. I long to be alone with "Nature's full, free heart"--perchance, there, my own may beat as of yore.

Farewell, dear Edward. You may hear of me next among the Sacs and Foxes;--at present address H. Danforth, care of G---- & D----, Merchants, ---- ---- street, Boston.

Yours ever, H. DANFORTH.

A new external life had indeed opened upon this child of luxury and conventional refinement. He whose movements had been chronicled as matter of interest to the public, for whose presence the "world" had postponed its fetes, might now travel hundreds of miles without observation or inquiry. He upon whose steps had waited a crowd of obsequious attendants, now found himself with one follower, whose tone of independence hardly permitted him to call him servant. In cities, where he would still have been surrounded by those conventional distinctions of which he had himself been deprived, the sense of a great loss would have been ever present with him, and the contrast with the past would have made the fairest present to which he could now attain, desolate. But there could be no comparison, and therefore no painful contrast, between the wild life of the prairies and the ultra-civilization of English aristocratic society. In the excitement and adventure of the one, he hoped to forget the other. He sought to forget--not to be resigned, to acquiesce. His inner life was unchanged.

He had been a dreamer--a pleasure-seeker--and a dreamer and pleasure-seeker he continued, though the dreams and the pleasures must be wrought from new materials. To sketch the progress of such a character through the shifting scenes of his new existence--to observe him in his a.s.sociation with the strong, daring, acute, but uncultivated denizens of our frontier States--to stand with sympathizing heart beside him as he first entered upon those unpeopled solitudes in whose silence G.o.d speaks to the soul, is not permitted us at present. This may be the work of another day; but now we must pa.s.s at once with him from Boston to a scene within the confines of Iowa. His carriage had been left behind, and for two days he had been riding over a rolling country, whose gra.s.sy knolls, dotted here and there with clumps of trees, brought occasionally to his mind the park scenery of his own land. Early in this day he had pa.s.sed a farm with a comfortable house and substantial out-buildings, but no dwelling of man had since presented itself to him, though the sun was now low in the western sky. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances this would have been of little consequence, for he had already spent more than one night in the open air without discomfort; but his attendant had heard a distant muttering of thunder, and John Stacy was not the lad to encounter without murmuring a night of storm unsheltered. John's anxiety made him keen-sighted, and he was the first to perceive and announce the approach of a rider. We use the neutral term _rider_ not without consideration, for he was one in whom a certain ease of manner, and even an air of command, contradicted the testimony of habiliments made and worn after a fashion recognized nowhere as characteristic of the _genus_ gentleman. A courteous inquiry from Horace Danforth respecting the nearest place at which a night's shelter might be obtained, led to a cordial invitation to him to return with him to his own house. It was an invitation not to be disregarded under existing circ.u.mstances, and it was accepted with evident pleasure both by master and man.

Mr. Grahame, for so the new-comer had announced himself, led the way back for a short distance over the route just pursued by our travellers, and then striking off to the left, rode briskly forward for several miles. The light gray clouds which had long been gathering in the western sky had deepened into blackness as they proceeded, and flashes of lightning were darting across their path, and large drops of rain were falling upon them when they neared a house constructed of logs, yet bearing some evidence of taste in the grounds around it, as well as in its position, which was on the side of a gently sloping hill, looking out upon a landscape through which wound a clear and rapid, though narrow stream.

"Like good cavaliers, we will see our horses housed first," said Mr.

Grahame, riding past the main building to one of the out-houses, built also of logs, which served as a stable. Here Horace Danforth relinquished his tired steed to the care of John Stacy, and Mr. Grahame having himself rubbed down his own beautiful animal, and thrown a bundle of hay before him, with a slight apology to his visitor for the detention, led the way into the house. As they entered the vacant parlor a shade of something like dissatisfaction pa.s.sed over the master's countenance, and having seen his guest seated by a huge fireplace, whose cheerful blaze of wood a chilly evening made by no means unwelcome, he left him alone. He soon returned, however, with a brighter expression, which was explained by his saying, "I feared, on finding this room empty, that my daughter had been sent for to a sick woman with whom she has lately spent several days and nights, and that I could offer you only the discomforts of a bachelor's establishment; but I find she is at home, and will soon give us supper."

During the absence of his host, our Englishman had looked around with increasing surprise at the contents of the parlor. The furniture was of the most simple description, yet marked by a certain neatness and gracefulness of arrangement, indicative, as he could not but think, of a cultivated taste. The same mingling of even rude simplicity of material and tasteful arrangement prevailed in the chamber to which his host now conducted him, and where the luxury, for such he had learned to regard it, of abundance of clear water and clean napkins awaited him. In a few minutes after his return to the parlor a door was opened, through which he obtained a view of an inner apartment, well lighted, and containing a table so spread as to present no slight temptation to a traveller who had not broken his fast since the morning meal. At the head of this table stood a young woman of graceful form, whom his host introduced to him as his daughter, Miss Grahame.