The Trial; Or, More Links of the Daisy Chain Part 58

The next step was to mention Averil's letter to Mary, which could not be sent on till tidings had been permitted by Mr. Cheviot.

'Let us see it,' said the Doctor.

'Do you think Charles Cheviot would like it?'

'Cheviot is a man of sense,' said the open-hearted Doctor, 'and there may be something to authorize preventing this unlucky transfer of her fortune.'

Nothing could be further from it; but it was a long and interesting letter, written in evidently exhilarated spirits, and with a hopeful description of the new scenes. Ethel read it to her father, and he told every one about it when they came in. Tom manifested no particular interest; but he did not go by the mail train that night, and was not visible all the morning. He caught Ethel alone however at noon, and said, 'Ethel, I owe you this,' offering the amount she had paid for the letter.

'Thank you,' she said, wondering if this was to be all she should hear about it.

'I am going by the afternoon train,' he added; 'I have been over to Blewer. It is true, Ethel, the fellow can't stand it! he has sent down a manager, and is always in London! Most likely to dispose of it by private contract there, they say.'

'And what has become of old Hardy?'

'Poor old fellow, he has struck work, looks terribly shaky. He took me for my father at first sight, and began to apologize most plaintively--said no one else had ever done him any good. I advised him to come in and see my father, though he is too far gone to do much for him.'

'Poor old man, can he afford to come in now?'

'Why, I helped him with the cart hire. It is no use any way, he knows no more than we do, and his case is confirmed; but he thinks he has offended my father, and he'll die more in peace for having had him again. Look here, what a place they have got to.'

And without further explanation of the 'they,' Tom placed a letter in Ethel's hands.

'My Dear Mr. Thomas,

'I send you the objects I promised for your microscope; I could not get any before because we were in the city; but if you like these I can get plenty more at Ma.s.sissauga, where we are now. We came here last week, and the journey was very nice, only we went b.u.mp b.u.mp so often, and once we stuck in a marsh, and were splashed all over. We are staying with Mr. Muller and Cora till our own house is quite ready; it was only begun a fortnight ago, and we are to get in next week. I thought this would have been a town, it looked so big and so square in the plan; but it is all trees still, and there are only thirteen houses built yet.

Ours is all by itself in River Street, and all the trees near it have been killed, and stand up all dead and white, because n.o.body has time to cut them down. It looks very dismal, but Ave says it will be very nice by and by, and, Rufus Muller says it has mammoth privileges. I send you a bit of rattlesnake skin. They found fifteen of them asleep under a stone, just where our house is built, and sometimes they come into the kitchen. I do not know the names of the other things I send; and I could not ask Ave, for she said you would not want to be bothered with a little girl's letter, and I was not to ask for an answer. Rosa Willis says no young lady of my age would ask her sister's permission, and not even her mother's, unless her mamma was very intellectual and highly educated, and always saw the justice of her arguments; but Minna and I do not mean to be like that. I would tell Ave if you did write to me, but she need not read it unless she liked.

'I am, your affectionate little friend, 'ELLA.'

'Well!' said Tom, holding out his hand for more when she had restored this epistle. 'You have heard all there was in it, except--'

'Except what I want to see.'

And Ethel, as she had more or less intended all along, let him have Averil's letter, since the exception was merely a few tender words of congratulation to Mary. The worst had been done already by her father; and it may here be mentioned that though nothing was said in answer to her explanation of the opening of the letter, the head-master never recovered the fact, and always attributed it to his dear sister Ethel.

'For the future,' said Tom, as he gave back the thin sheets, 'they will all be for the Cheviots' private delectation.'

'I shall begin on my own score,' said Ethel. 'You know if you answer this letter, you must not mention that visit of yours, or you will be prohibited, and one would not wish to excite a domestic secession.'

'It would serve the unnatural scoundrel right,' said Tom. 'Well, I must go and put up my things. You'll keep me up to what goes on at home, and if there's anything out there to tell Leonard--'

'Wait a moment, Tom!'--and she told him what the Doctor had said about his plans.

'Highly educated and intellectual,' was all the answer that Tom vouchsafed; and whether he were touched or not she could not gather.

Yet her spirit felt less weary and burdened, and more full of hope than it had been for a long time past. Averil's letter showed the exhilaration of the change, and of increasing confidence and comfort in her friend Cora Muller. Cora's Confirmation had brought the girls into contact with the New York clergy, and had procured them an introduction to the clergyman of Winiamac, the nearest church, so that there was much less sense of loneliness, moreover, the fuller and more systematic doctrine, and the development of the beauty and daily guidance of the Church, had softened the bright American girl, so as to render her infinitely dearer to her English friend, and they were as much united as they could be, where the great leading event of the life of one remained a mystery to the other. Yet perhaps it helped to begin a fresh life, that the intimate companion of that new course should be entirely disconnected with the past.

Averil threw herself into the present with as resolute a will as she could muster. With much spirit she described the arrival at the Winiamac station, and the unconcealed contempt with which the ma.s.s of luggage was regarded by the Western world, who 'reckoned it would be fittest to make kindlings with.' Heavy country wagons were to bring the furniture; the party themselves were provided for by a light wagon and a large cart, driven by Cora's brother, Mordaunt, and by the farming-man, Philetus, a gentleman who took every occasion of a.s.serting his equality, if not his superiority to the new-comers; demanded all the Christian names, and used them without prefix; and when Henry impressively mentioned his eldest sister as Miss Warden, stared and said, 'Why, Doctor, I thought she was not your old woman!'--the Western epithet of a wife. But as Cora was quite content to leave Miss behind her in civilized society, and as they were a.s.sured that to stand upon ceremony would leave them without domestic a.s.sistance, the sisters had implored Henry to waive all preference for a polite address.

The loveliness of the way was enchanting--the roads running straight as an arrow through glorious forest lands of pine, beech, maple, and oak, in the full glory of spring, and the perspective before and behind making a long narrowing green bower of meeting branches; the whole of the borders of the road covered with lovely flowers--May-wings, a b.u.t.terfly-like milkwort, pitcher-plant, convolvulus; new insects danced in the shade--golden orioles, blue birds, the great American robin, the field officer, with his orange epaulettes, glanced before them. Cora was in ecstasy at the return to forest scenery, the Wards at its novelty, and the escape from town. Too happy were they at first to care for the shaking and b.u.mping of the road, and the first mud-hole into which they plunged was almost a joke, under Mordaunt Muller's a.s.surances that it was easy fording, though the splashes flew far and wide. Then there was what Philetus called 'a mash with a real handsome bridge over it,' i. e. a succession of tree trunks laid side by side for about a quarter of a mile. Here the female pa.s.sengers insisted on walking--even Cora, though her brother and Philetus both laughed her to scorn; and more especially for her foot-gear, delicate kid boots, without which no city damsel stirred. Averil and her sisters, in the English boots scorned at New York, had their share in the laugh, while picking their way from log to log, hand in hand, and exciting Philetus's further disdain by their rapture with the glorious flowers of the bog.

But where was Ma.s.sissauga? Several settlements had been pa.s.sed, the houses looking clean and white in forest openings, with fields where the lovely spring green of young maize charmed the eye.

At last the road grew desolate. There were a few patches of corn, a few squalid-looking log or frame houses, a tract of horrible dreary blackness; and still more horrible, beyond it was a region of spectres--trees white and stripped bare, lifting their dead arms like things blasted. Averil cried out in indignant horror, 'Who has done this?'

'We have,' answered Mordaunt. 'This is Maclellan Square, Miss Warden, and there's River Street,' pointing down an avenue of skeletons. 'If you could go to sleep for a couple of years, you would wake up to find yourself in a city such as I would not fear to compare with any in Europe. Your exhausted civilization is not as energetic as ours, I calculate.'

The energetic young colonist turned his horse's head up a slight rising ground, where something rather more like habitation appeared; a great brick-built hotel, and some log houses, with windows displaying the wares needed for daily consumption, and a few farm buildings. It was backed by corn-fields; and this was the great Maclellan Street, the chief ornament of Ma.s.sissauga. Not one house had the semblance of a garden; the wilderness came up to the very door, except where cattle rendered some sort of enclosure necessary.

Cora exclaimed, 'Oh, Mordaunt, I thought you would have had a garden for me!'

'I can fix it any time you like,' said he; 'but you'll be the laughing-stock of the place, and never keep a flower.'

The Mullers' abode was a sound substantial log house, neatly whitened, and with green shutters, bearing a festal appearance, full of welcome, as Mr. Muller, his tall bearded son Rufus, and a thin but motherly-looking elderly woman, came forth to meet the travellers; and in the front, full stare, stood a trollopy-looking girl, every bar of her enormous hoop plainly visible through her washed-out flimsy muslin.

This was Miss Ianthe, who condescended to favour the family with her a.s.sistance till she should have made up dollars enough to buy a new dress! The elder woman, who went by the name of Cousin Deborah, would have been a housekeeper in England--here she was one of the family--welcomed Cora with an exchange of kisses, and received the strangers with very substantial hospitality, though with pity at their unfitness for their new home, and utter incredulity as to their success.

Here the Wards had been since their arrival. Their frame-house, near the verdant bank of the river, was being finished for them; and a great bra.s.s plate, with Henry's new name and his profession, had already adorned the door. The furniture was coming; Cousin Deborah had hunted up a Cleopatra Betsy, who might perhaps stay with them if she were treated on terms of equality, a field was to be brought into cultivation as soon as any labour could be had. Minna was looking infinitely better already, and Averil and Cora were full of designs for rival housewifery, Averil taking lessons meantime in ironing, dusting, and the arts of the kitchen, and trusting that in the two years' time, the skeletons would have given place--if not indeed to houses, to well-kept fields. Such was her account.

How much was reserved for fear of causing anxiety? Who could guess?

CHAPTER XXI

Quanto si fende La rocca per dar via a chi va suso N'andai 'nfino ove'l cerchiar si prende Com'io nel quinto giro fui dischiuso Vidi gente per esso che piangea Glacendo a terra tutta volta in giuso Adhaesit pavimento anima mia Sentia dir loro con si alti sospiri Che la parola appena s'intendea.

'O eletti di Deo, i cui soffriri E giustizia e speranza fan men duri--'

DANTE. Purgatorio

Ah, sir, we have learnt the way to get your company,' said Hector Ernescliffe, as he welcomed his father-in-law at Maplewood; 'we have only to get under sentence.'

'Sick or sorry, Hector; that's the attraction to an old doctor.'

'And,' added Hector, with the importance of his youthful magisterial dignity, 'I hope I have arranged matters for you to see him. I wrote about it; but I am afraid you will not be able to see him alone.'

Great was the satisfaction with which Hector took the conduct of the expedition to Portland Island; though he was inclined to enc.u.mber it with more lionizing than the good Doctor's full heart was ready for.

Few words could he obtain, as in the bright August sunshine they steamed out from the pier at Weymouth, and beheld the gray sides of the island, scarred with stone quarries, stretching its lengthening breakwater out on one side, and on the other connected with the land by the pale dim outline of the Chesill Bank. The water was dancing in golden light; white-sailed or red-sailed craft plied across it; a ship of the line lay under the lee of the island, practising gunnery, the three bounds of her b.a.l.l.s marked by white columns of spray each time of touching the water, pleasure parties crowded the steamer; but to Dr.

May the cheerfulness of the scene made a depressing contrast to the purpose of his visit, as he fixed his eyes on the squared outline of the crest of the island, and the precipitous slope from thence to the breakwater, where trains of loaded trucks rushed forth to the end, discharged themselves, and hurried back.

Landing at the quay, in the midst of confusion, Hector smiled at the Doctor's innocent proposal of walking, and bestowed him in a little carriage, with a horse whose hard-worked patience was soon called out, as up and up they went, through the narrow, but lively street, past the old-fashioned inn, made memorable by a dinner of George III.; past the fossil tree, clamped against a house like a vine; past heaps of slabs ready for transport, a church perched up high on the slope, and a parsonage in a place that looked only accessible to goats. Lines of fortification began to reveal themselves, and the Doctor thought himself arrived, but he was to wind further on, and be more struck with the dreariness and inhospitality of the rugged rock, almost bare of vegetation, the very trees of stone, and older than our creation; the melancholy late ripening harvest within stone walls, the whole surface furrowed by stern rents and crevices riven by nature, or cut into greater harshness by the quarries hewn by man. The grave strangeness of the region almost marked it out for a place of expiation, like the mountain rising desolate from the sea, where Dante placed his prisoners of hope.

The walls of a vast enclosure became visible; and over them might be seen the tops of great cranes, looking like the denuded ribs of umbrellas. Buildings rose beyond, with deep arched gateways; and a small town was to be seen further off. Mr. Ernescliffe sent in his card at the governor's house, and found that the facilities he had asked for had been granted. They were told that the prisoner they wished to see was at work at some distance; and while he was summoned, they were to see the buildings. Dr. May had little heart for making a sight of them, except so far as to judge of Leonard's situation; and he was pa.s.sively conducted across a gravelled court, turfed in the centre, and containing a few flower-beds, fenced in by Portland's most natural productions, zamias and ammonites, together with a few stone coffins, which had once inclosed corpses of soldiers of the Roman garrison.

Large piles of building inclosed the quadrangle; and pa.s.sing into the first of these, the Doctor began to realize something of Leonard's present existence. There lay before him the broad airy pa.s.sage, and either side the empty cells of this strange hive, as closely packed, and as chary of s.p.a.ce, as the compartments of the workers of the honeycomb.

'Just twice as wide as a coffin,' said Hector, doing the honours of one, where there was exactly width to stand up between the bed and the wall of corrugated iron; 'though, happily, there is more liberality of height.'