Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume XXIII Part 16

[note *: Executors.]

George entered the house, trembling with agitation.

"Father," he said--"for thou hast taught me to call thee father; and if thou art not, tell me who I am."

"Ha'n't I told thee, lad?" answered the old man. "Go to Coomberland; I know noughts about thee."

"To c.u.mberland!" exclaimed George; and he thought of the young officer whom he had twice met, who belonged to that county, and whose features were the picture of his own. "Why should I go to c.u.mberland?"

"Whoy, I can't tell thee whoy thou shouldst go," said the old man; "but thou was zent me from there, and there thou moost go back again, vor a bad bargain thou hast been to me. Zquire Morris zent thee here, and forgot to pay for thee; and if thou lodgest here to-night, thou won't forget to be a-moving, bag and baggage, in the morning."

George was wearied, and glad to sleep beneath the inhospitable roof of those whom he had considered as his parents; but on the following morning he took leave of them, after learning from them all that they knew of his history.

But I must again leave him, and return to Colonel Morris, and his son Charles.

They came to England together, and hastened towards Morris House; and there the long disowned son learned that his father was dead, and that his mother and his sisters knew not where his child was, or what had become of him. But his kindred had ascertained that he was now rich, and they repented of their unkindness towards him.

"Son," said his mother, "I know nothing of thy child. Thy father was a strange man--he told little to me. If any one can tell thee aught concerning thy boy, it will be John Bell, the old coachman; but he has not been in the family for six years, and where he now is I cannot tell, though I believe he is still somewhere in the neighbourhood."

With sad and anxious hearts the colonel and his son next visited the house of Mr. Sim--the dwelling-place in which the infancy, the childhood, and what may be called the youth, of the latter had been pa.s.sed.

Tears gathered in the eyes of Charles as he approached the door. He knew that his grandsire and his grandmother had acted wrongly towards him, in never speaking to him of his father, or making known to him that such a person lived; but when he again saw the house which had been the scene of a thousand happy days, round which he had chased the gaudy b.u.t.terfly and the busy bee, or sought the nest of the chaffinch, the yellowhammer, and the hedge-sparrow, the feelings of boyhood rose too strong in his soul for resentment; and on meeting Mr. Sim (his grandfather) as they approached the door of the house, Charles ran towards him, and, stretching out his hand, cried, "Father!"

The old man recognised him, and exclaimed, "Charles!--Charles!--child of my Maria!" and wept.

At the mention of her name, the colonel wept also.

"What gentleman is this with thee, Charles?" inquired Mr. Sim.

"It is _my father!_" was the reply.

Mr. Sim, who was now a grey-haired man, reeled back a few paces--he raised his hands--he exclaimed, "Can I be forgiven?"

"Forgiven!--ay, doubly forgiven!" answered Colonel Morris, "as the father of lost, loved Maria, and as having been more than a father to my boy, who is now by my side. But know you nothing of my other son? My Maria bore twins."

"Nothing! nothing!" replied Mr. Sim; "that question has cost me many an anxious thought. It has troubled also the conscience of my wife; for it was her fault that he also was not committed to my charge; and I would have inquired after your child long ago, but that there was no good-will between your father and me; and I was a plain, retired citizen--he a magistrate, and a justice of the peace for the county, who could do no wrong."

The colonel groaned.

They proceeded towards the villa together. Mrs. Sim met her grandson with a flood of tears, and, in her joy at meeting him, she forgot her dislike to his father and her hatred to that father's family.

The colonel endeavoured to obtain information from his father-in-law respecting his other son; and he told him all that his mother had said, of what she had spoken regarding the coachman, and also of what Charles had told him, in twice meeting one who so strongly resembled himself.

"Colonel," said Mr. Sim, "I know the John Bell your mother speaks of; he now keeps an inn near Langholm. To-morrow we shall go to his house, and make inquiry concerning all that he knows."

"Be it so, father," said the colonel. And on the following day they took a chaise and set out together--the grandfather, the father, and the son.

They had to cross the Annan, and to pa.s.s the churchyard where Maria slept. As they drew near to it, the colonel desired the driver to stop.

"Follow me, Charles," he said; and Mr. Sim accompanied them. They entered the churchyard; the colonel led them to the humble grave-stone that he had raised to the memory of his Maria. He sat down upon it, he pressed his lips to it and wept.

"Charles," said he, "look on your mother's grave. Here, on this stone, day after day, I was wont to sit with you and your brother upon my knee, fondling you, breathing your mother's name in your ears; and though neither of you knew what I said, you smiled as I wept and spoke. Oh Charles! though you then filled my whole heart (and you do now), I could only distinguish you from each other by the ribbons on your arms. Would to Heaven that I may discover my child! and, whatever be his condition, I shall forgive my father for the injustice he has done me and mine--I shall be happy. And, oh! should we indeed find your brother--should he prove to be the youth whom you have twice met--I shall say that Heaven has remembered me when I forgot myself! But come hither, Charles--come, kneel upon your mother's grave--kiss the sod where she lies, and angels will write it in their books, and show it to your mother, where she is happy. Come, my boy."

Charles knelt on his mother's grave. He had arisen, and they were about to depart; for his grandfather had accompanied them, and was a silent but tearful spectator of the scene.

They were leaving the churchyard, joined in the arms of each other, when two strangers entered it. The one was John Bell, the other George Prescot.

"Colonel! Colonel! there is John Bell that you spoke of," exclaimed Mr.

Sim.

"Father! father!" at the same instant cried his son, "he is here--it is him!--my brother--or--he whom I have told you of, who so strangely resembles me."

Charles rushed forward--it was George Prescot--and he took the proffered hand of the other, and said, "Sir, I rejoice to meet thee again--it seems I belong to c.u.mberland as well as thou dost; and this gentleman (pointing to John Bell), who seems to know more of me than I do myself, has promised to show me here my mother's grave!"

"And where is that grave?" cried the colonel earnestly, who had been an interested spectator of all that pa.s.sed.

"Even where the wife of your youth is buried, your honour," answered John Bell; "you have with you one son--behold his twin brother!"

The colonel pressed his new-found son to his breast. With his children he sat down on the stone over Maria's grave, and they wept together.

Our tale is told. Colonel Morris and his sons had met. His elder brothers died, and he became the heir of his father's property. Mr. Sim also stated that, in his will, he should divide his substance equally between the brothers; and he did so. I have but another word to add.

George forgot not Caroline Paling, who had a.s.sisted him when his heart was full and his pocket empty, and within twelve months he again visited Dartmouth; but when he returned from it, Caroline accompanied him as his wife; and when he introduced her to his father and his brother--"Behold,"

said he, "what a halfpenny, delicately tendered, may produce."

THE STORY OF THE GIRL FORGER.

It is a common thing for writers of a certain cla.s.s, when they want to produce the feeling of wonder in their readers, to introduce some frantic action, and then to account for it by letting out the secret that the actor was mad. The trick is not so necessary as it seems, for the strength of human pa.s.sions is a potentiality only limited by experience; and so it is that a sane person may under certain stimulants do the maddest thing in the world. The pa.s.sion itself is always true--it is only the motive that may be false; and therefore it is that in narrating for your amus.e.m.e.nt, perhaps I may add instruction, the following singular story--traces of the main parts of which I got in the old books of a former procurator-fiscal--I a.s.sume that there was no more insanity in the princ.i.p.al actor, Euphemia, or, as she was called, Effie Carr, when she brought herself within the arms of the law, than there is in you, when now you are reading the story of her strange life. She was the only daughter of John Carr, a grain merchant, who lived in Bristo Street. It would be easy to ascribe to her all the ordinary and extraordinary charms that are thought so necessary to embellish heroines; but as we are not told what these were in her case, we must be contented with the a.s.surance that nature had been kind enough to her to give her power over the hearts of men. We shall be nearer our purpose when we state, what is necessary to explain a peculiar part of our story, that her father, in consequence of his own insufficient education, had got her trained to help him in keeping his accounts with the farmers, and in writing up his books; nay, she enjoyed the privilege of writing his drafts upon the Bank of Scotland, which the father contrived to sign, though in his own illiterate way, and with a peculiarity which it would not have been easy to imitate.

But our gentle clerk did not consider these duties imposed upon her by her father as excluding her either from gratifying her love of domestic habits, by a.s.sisting her mother in what at that time was denominated hussyskep or housekeeping, or from a certain other gratification, which might without a hint from us be antic.i.p.ated--no other than the luxury of falling head and ears, and heart too we fancy, in love with a certain dashing young student of the name of Robert Stormonth, then attending the University, more for the sake of polish than of mere study, for he was the son of the proprietor of Kelton, and required to follow no profession. How Effie got entangled with this youth we have no means of knowing, so we must be contented with the Scotch proverb--

"Tell me where the flea may bite, And I will tell where love may light."

The probability is, that from the difference of their stations and the retiring nature of our gentle clerk, we shall be safe in a.s.suming that he had, as the saying goes, been smitten by her charms in some of those street encounters, where there is more of love's work done than in "black-footed" tea coteries expressly held for the accommodation of Cupid. And that the smiting was a genuine feeling we are not left to doubt; for in addition to the reasons we shall afterwards have too good occasion to know, he treated Effie not as those wild students who are great men's sons do "the light o' loves" they meet in their escapades, for he entrusted his secrets to her, he took such small counsel from her poor head as a "learned clerk" might be supposed able to give; nay, he told her of his mother, and how one day he hoped to be able to introduce her at Kelton as his wife. All which Effie repaid with the devotedness of that most wonderful affection called the first or virgin love--the purest, the deepest, the most thorough-going of all the emotions of the human heart. But as yet he had not conceded to her wish that he should consent to their love being made known to Effie's father and mother.

Love is only a leveller to itself and its object: the high-born youth, inured to refined manners, shrank from a family intercourse, which put him too much in mind of the revolt he had made against the presumed wishes and intentions of his proud parents. Wherein, after all, he was only true to the instincts of that inst.i.tution, apparently so inhumane as well as unchristian in its exclusiveness, called aristocracy, and yet with the excuse that its roots are pretty deeply set in human nature.

But, proud as he was, Bob Stormonth, the younger of Kelton, was amenable to the obligations of a necessity, forged by his own imprudent hands. He had, by a fast mode of living, got into debt--a condition from which his father, a stern man, had relieved him twice before, but with a threat on the last occasion, that if he persevered in his prodigality, he would withdraw from him his yearly allowance, and throw him upon his own resources. The threat proved ineffectual, and this young heir of entail, with all his pride, was once in the grasp of low-born creditors; nay, things in this evil direction had gone so far that writs were out against him, and one in the form of a caption was already in the hands of a messenger-at-arms. That the debts were comparatively small in amount, was no amelioration where the purse was all but empty; and he had exhausted the limited exchequers of his chums, which with college youths was, and is, not difficult to do. So the gay Bob was driven to his last shift, and that, as is generally the case, was a mean one; for necessity, as the mother of inventions, does not think it proper to limit her births to genteel or n.o.ble devices to please her proud consort. He even had recourse to poor Effie to help him; and, however ridiculous this may seem, there were reasons that made the application appear not so desperate as some of his other schemes. It was only the caption that as yet quickened his fears; and as the sum for which the writ was issued was only twenty pounds, it was not, after all, so much beyond the power of a clerk.

It was during one of their ordinary walks in the Meadows that the pressing necessity was opened by Stormonth to the vexed and terrified girl. He told her that, but for the small help he required in the meantime, he would be ruined. The wrath of his father would be excited once more, and probably to the exclusion of all reconciliation; and he himself compelled to flee, but whither he knew not. He had his plan prepared, and proposed to Effie, who had no means of her own, _to take a loan_ of the sum out of her father's cash-box--words very properly chosen according to the euphemistic policy of the devil; but Effie's genuine spirit was roused and alarmed.

"Dreadful!" she whispered, as if afraid that the night wind would carry her words to honest ears. "Besides," she continued, "my father, who is a hard man, keeps his desk lockit."

Words which took Stormonth aback, for even he saw there was here a necessity as strong as his own; yet the power of invention went to work again.

"Listen, Effie," said he. "If you cannot help me, it is not likely we shall meet again. I am desperate, and will go into the army."