SEARCH.
When Charlie reached home again, very tired, and in a somewhat moody
frame of mind, he found the room littered with various old boxes
undergoing examination, and Agnes seated before the cabinet, with a
lapful of letters, and her face bright with interest and excitement,
looking them over. At the present moment, she held something of a very
perplexing nature in her hand, which the trained eye of Charlie caught
instantly, with a flash of triumph. Agnes herself was somewhat excited
about it, and Marian stood behind her, looking over her shoulder, and
vainly trying to decipher the ancient writing. “It’s something, mamma,”
cried Agnes. “I am sure, if Charlie saw it, he would think it something;
but I cannot make out what it is. Here is somebody’s seal and somebody’s
signature, and there, I am sure, that is Atheling; and a date, ‘xiij. of
May, M.D.LXXII.’ What does that mean, Marian? M. a thousand, D. five
hundred; there it is! I am sure it is an old deed--a real something
ancestral--1572!”
“Give it to me,” said Charlie, stretching his hand for it over her
shoulder. No one had heard him come in.
“Oh, Charlie, what did Miss Anastasia say?” cried Marian; and Agnes
immediately turned round away from the cabinet, and Mamma laid down her
work. Charlie, however, took full time to examine the yellow old
document they had found, though he did not acknowledge that it posed him
scarcely less than themselves, before he spoke.
“She said she’d look up her papers, and speak to the old gentleman’s
solicitor. I don’t see that _she’s_ much good to us,” said Charlie. “She
says I might call her as a witness, but what’s the good of a witness
against documents? This has nothing to do with Aunt Bridget, Agnes--have
you found nothing more than this? Why, you know there must have been a
deed of some kind. The old lady could not have been so foolish as to
throw away her title. Property without title-deeds is not worth a straw;
and the man that drew up her will is my lord’s solicitor! I say, he must
be what the Yankees call a smart man, this Lord Winterbourne.”
“I am afraid he has no principle, my dear,” said Mrs Atheling with a
sigh.
“And a very bad man--everybody hates him,” said Marian under her breath.
She spoke so low that she did not receive that reproving look of Mamma
which was wont to check such exclamations. Marian, though she had a will
of her own, and was never like to fall into a mere shadow and reflection
of her lover, as his poor little sister did, had unconsciously imbibed
Louis’s sentiments. She did not know what it was to _hate_, this
innocent girl. Had she seen Lord Winterbourne thrown from his horse, or
overturned out of his carriage, these ferocious sentiments would have
melted in an instant into help and pity; but in the abstract view of the
matter, Marian pronounced with emotion the great man’s sentence,
“Everybody hates Lord Winterbourne.”
“That is what the old lady said,” exclaimed Charlie; “she asked me who I
thought would believe him against her? But that’s not the question. I
don’t want to pit one man against another. My father’s worth twenty of
Lord Winterbourne! But that’s no matter. The law cares nothing at all
for his principles. What title has he got, and what title have
you?--that’s what the law’s got to say. Now, I’ll either have something
to put in against him or I’ll not plead. It’s no use taking a step in
the matter without proof.”
“And won’t that do, Charlie?” asked Mrs Atheling, looking wistfully at
the piece of parchment, signed and sealed, which was in Charlie’s hands.
“That! why, it’s two hundred and fifty years old!” said Charlie. “I
don’t see what it refers to yet, but it’s very clear it can’t be to Miss
Bridget. No, mother, that won’t do.”
“Then, my dear,” said Mrs Atheling, “I am very sorry to think of it;
but, after all, we have not been very long here, and we might have laid
out more money, and formed more attachments to the place, if we had gone
on much longer; and I think I shall be very glad to get back to
Bellevue. Marian, my love, don’t cry; this need not make any difference
with _anything_; but I think it is far better just to make up our minds
to it, and give up the Old Wood Lodge.”
“Mother! do you think I mean that?” cried Charlie; “we must find the
papers, that’s what we must do. My father’s as good an Englishman as the
first lord in the kingdom; I’d not give in to the king unless he was in
the right.”
“And not even then, unless you could not help it,” said Agnes, laughing;
“but I am not half done yet; there is still a great quantity of
letters--and I should not be at all surprised if this romantic old
cabinet, like an old bureau in a novel, had a secret drawer.”
Animated by this idea, Marian ran to the antique little piece of
furniture, pressing every projection with her pretty fingers, and
examining into every creak. But there was no secret drawer--a fact which
became all the more apparent when a drawer _was_ discovered, which once
had closed with a spring. The spring was broken, and the once-secret
place was open, desolate, and empty. Miss Bridget, good old lady, had no
secrets, or at least she had not made any provision for them here.
Agnes went on with her examination the whole afternoon, drawn aside and
deluded to pursue the history of old Aunt Bridget’s life through scores
of yellow old letters, under the pretence that something might be found
in some of them to throw light upon this matter; for a great many
letters of Miss Bridget’s own--careful “studies” for the production
itself--were tied up among the others; and it would have been amusing,
if it had not been sad, to sit on this little eminence of time, looking
over that strange faithful self-record of the little weaknesses, the
ladylike pretences, the grand Johnsonian diction of the old lady who was
dead. Poor old lady! Agnes became quite abashed and ashamed of herself
when she felt a smile stealing over her lip. It seemed something like
profanity to ransack the old cabinet, and smile at it. In its way, this,
as truly as the grass-mound, in Winterbourne churchyard, was Aunt
Bridget’s grave.
But still nothing could be found. Charlie occupied himself during the
remainder of the day in giving a necessary notice to Mr Lewis the
solicitor, that they had made up their minds to resist Lord
Winterbourne’s claim; and when the evening closed in, and the candles
were lighted, Louis made his first public appearance since the arrival
of the stranger, somewhat cloudy, and full of all his old haughtiness.
This cloud vanished in an instant at the first glance. Whatever
Charlie’s qualities were, criticism was not one of them; it was clear
that though his “No” might be formidable enough of itself, Charlie had
not been a member of any solemn committee, sitting upon the pretensions
of Louis. He gave no particular regard to Louis even now, but sat poring
over the old deed, deciphering it with the most patient laboriousness,
with his head very close over the paper, and a pair of spectacles
assisting his eyes. The spectacles were lent by Mamma, who kept them,
not secretly, but with a little reserve, in her work-basket, for special
occasions when she had some very fine stitching to do, or was busy with
delicate needlework by candle-light; and nothing could have been more
oddly inappropriate to the face of Charlie, with all the furrows of his
brow rolled down over his eyebrows, and his indomitable upper-lip
pressed hard upon its fellow, than these same spectacles. Then they made
him short-sighted, and were only of use when he leaned closely over the
paper--Charlie did not mind, though his shoulders ached and his eyes
filled with water. He was making it out!
And Agnes, for her part, sat absorbed with her lapful of old letters,
reading them all over with passing smiles and gravities, growing into
acquaintance with ever so many extinct affairs,--old stories long ago
come to the one conclusion which unites all men. Though she felt herself
virtuously reading for a purpose, she had forgotten all about the
purpose long ago, and was only wandering on and on by a strange
attraction, as if through a city of the dead. But it was quite
impossible to think of the dead among these yellow old papers--the
littlest trivial things of life were so quite living in them, in these
unconscious natural inferences and implications. And Louis and Marian,
sometimes speaking and often silent, were going through their own
present romance and story; and Mamma, in her sympathetic middle age,
with her work-basket, was tenderly overlooking all. In the little dim
country parlour, lighted with the two candles, what a strange epitome
there was of a whole world and a universal life.