SIGNED "DANIEL MORTIMER."--CANADA.
"The log's burn red; she lifts her head
For sledge-bells tinkle and tinkle, O lightly swung.
'Youth was a pleasant morning, but ah! to think 'tis fled,
Sae lang, lang syne,' quo' her mother, 'I, too, was young.'
"No guides there are but the North star,
And the moaning forest tossing wild arms before,
The maiden murmurs, 'O sweet were yon bells afar,
And hark! hark! hark! for he cometh, he nears the door.'
"Swift north-lights show, and scatter and go.
How can I meet him, and smile not, on this cold shore?
Nay, I will call him, 'Come in from the night and the snow,
And love, love, love in the wild wood, wander no more.'"
An hour after the conversation between Brandon and old Daniel Mortimer,
they parted, and nothing could be more unlike than his travels were and
those of the Melcombes. First, there was Newfoundland to be seen. It
looked at a distance like a lump of perfectly black hill embedded in
thick layers of cotton wool; then as the vessel approached, there was
its harbour, which though the year was nearly half over, was crackling
all over with brittle ice. Then there was Halifax Bay, blue as a great
sapphire, full of light, and swarming with the spawn of fish. And there
was the Bras d'Or, boats all along this yellow spit of sand, stranded,
with their sails set and scarcely flapping in the warm still air; and
then there was the port where he was to meet his emigrants, for they had
not crossed in the same ship with him; and after that there were wild
forests and unquiet waters far inland, where all night the noise of the
"lumber" was heard as it leaped over the falls; while at dawn was added
the screaming of white-breasted fowl jostling one another in their
flight as they still thronged up towards the north.
We almost always think of Canada as a cold country. Its summer counts
for little; nor meadow-grass waist deep, over which swarms of mosquitoes
hover, tormenting man and horse; nor sunshine that blisters the face,
nor natural strawberry-grounds as wide as Yorkshire, nor a sky clearer,
purer, and more intensely blue than any that spans Italian plains. No;
Canada means winter, snow, quivering northern lights, log-fires, and
sledge-bells!
Brandon found Canada hot, but when he had finished his work there, he
left it, and betook himself to the south, while it became the Canada of
our thought.
He went through the very heart of the States, and pleased himself with
wild rough living in lands where the rich earth is always moist and
warm, and primeval forest still shelters large tracts of it.
Camping out at night, sometimes in swampy hollows, it was strange to
wake when there was neither moon nor star, and see the great decaying
trees that storm had felled or age had ruined, glow with a weird
phosphorescent light, which followed the rents in them, and hovered
about the seams in their bark, making them look like the ghosts of huge
alligators prone in the places they had ravaged, and giving forth
infernal gleams. Stranger yet it was to see in the dark, moving near the
pine-wood fire, two feeble wandering lights, the eyes of some curious
deer that had come to gaze and wonder, and show its whereabouts by those
soft reflections.
And then, when he and his companions wanted venison, it was strange to
go forth into the forest in the dark, two of them bearing a great iron
pot slung upon a long rod, and heaped with blazing pine-cones. Then
several pairs of these luminous spots would be seen coming together, and
perhaps a dangerous couple would glare down from a tree, and a wounded
panther would come crashing into their midst.
After that, he went and spent Christmas in Florida. He had had frequent
letters from home and from his step-father. He wished to keep away till
a certain thing was settled one way or the other, but every letter
showed that it was still unsettled; the sea-nymph that he had been
wasting his heart upon had not yet decided to accept his brother's, but
there was every likelihood that she would.
As time went on, however, he felt happy in the consciousness that
absence was doing its work upon him, and that change had refreshed his
mind. He was beginning to forget her. When the woman whom one loves is
to marry one's brother, and that brother happens to be of all the family
the one whom one prefers, what quality can be so admirable as
inconstancy?
Still, for a man who was really forgetting, he argued the matter too
much in his mind. Even when he got far south, among the Florida keys,
and saw the legions of the heron and the ibis stalking with stately gait
along the wet sand, and every now and then thrusting in their "javelin
bills," spiking and bringing out long wriggling flashes of silver that
went alive down their throats, he would still be thinking it over. Yes;
he was forgetting her. He began to be in better spirits. He was in very
good spirits one day in January when, quite unknown to him, the snow was
shovelled away from the corner of a quiet churchyard in which his mother
slept, and room was made beside her for the old man who had loved him as
his own.
Old Daniel Mortimer had no such _following_ as had attended the funeral
of his mother, and no such peaceful sunshine sleeping on a landscape all
blossom and growth. The wind raged, and the snow whirled all about his
grave and in it. The coffin was white before the first clod of earth was
thrown on it, and the mourners were driven out of the churchyard, when
the solemn service was over, by such gusts of storm and whirling wind as
they could hardly stand against.
His will was read. He had hardly anything to leave. His directions were
very simple and few, and there was a little desk locked up in a cabinet
that nobody thought about, and that the one person who could have opened
it supposed to concern exclusively himself. So when he came, six months
after, and looked about him with regretful affection; when he had put
the old man's portrait up in a place of honour, and looked to the paying
of all the debts, for everything, even to the furniture, was now his
own; when he had read the will, and sealed up all such papers as he
thought his half-brother Valentine might afterwards want to refer to--he
betook himself to his own particular domain, his long room in the top of
the house. There, locking himself in, he opened his cabinet, and taking
out the little desk, sat down to look for and read this letter.
The desk was soon opened. He lifted one half, saw several old miniatures
which had belonged to his own father's family, a lock of his father's
hair which he remembered to have seen in his mother's possession, and
one or two trinkets. No letter.
It was not without some slight trepidation that he opened the other
side, and there, nothing else being with it, a large letter sealed with
black and directed to himself in his step-father's well-known hand, it
was lying.
As he took the letter up, a sensation so faint, so ethereal that it is
hard to describe or characterize it, but which most of us have felt at
least once, came over him, or rather came about him, as if something
from without suggested a presence.
He was free from any sensation of fear, but he chose to speak; lifting
up his face as if the old man had been standing before him, he said
aloud, "Yes, I promised." The feeling was gone as he spoke, and he broke
the seal.
A long letter. His eyes, as it was folded, fell first on these
surprising words, "I forbade my mother to leave her property to me," and
then, "I have never judged her," the aged writer continued, "for in her
case I know not what I could have done."
Brandon laid the letter down, and took a moment for thought, before he
could make up his mind to read it through. Some crime, some deep
disgrace, he perceived was about to be confided to him. With a hurried
sense of dislike and shrinking from acquaintance with it, he wondered
whether his own late mother had known anything of it, then whether he
was there called upon to divulge it now, and to act. If not, he argued
with himself, why was it to be confided to him?
Then he addressed himself to his task, and read the letter through,
coming to its last word only to be still more surprised, as he perceived
plainly that beyond what he could gather from those two short sentences
already quoted, nothing was confided or confessed, nothing at all--only
a request was made to him, and that very urgently and solemnly, but it
concerned not himself, but his young brother Valentine, for not content
with repudiating the family property for himself, the old father was
desirous, it was evident, through his step-son, to stand in the way and
bar his own son's very remote chance of inheriting it either.
A thing that is very unexpected and moderately strange, we meet with
wide-opened eyes, with a start and perhaps exclamations; but a thing
more than strange, utterly unaccounted for, quite unreasonable, and the
last thing one could have supposed possible as coming from the person
who demanded it, is met in far quieter fashion.
Brandon leaned back in his chair and slowly looked about him. He was
conscious that he was drawing deeper breath than usual, and that his
heart beat quickly, but he was so much surprised that for the moment his
thoughts appeared to scatter themselves about, and he knew not how to
marshal them and make them help him as to what this might mean.
Mystery in romance and in tales is such a common vulgar thing, in
tragedy and even in comedy it is so completely what we demand and
expect, that we seldom consider what an astonishing and very uncommon
thing it is when it appears in life. And here in a commonplace,
well-conducted, happy, and united family was a mystery pointing to
something that one of its best-loved members had never had a hint of.
Whatever it was, it concerned a place little more, than fifty miles off,
and a man in whose presence he had lived from his early childhood; the
utmost caution of secrecy was demanded, and the matter spoken of
entirely changed the notions he had always held concerning his
step-father, whom he had thought he knew better than any man living.
When one had believed that one absolutely understood another, how it
startles the mind to discover that this is a mistake! A beautiful old
man this had been--pious, not very worldly-wise, but having a sweetness
of nature, a sunny smile, and a native ease about him that would not
have been possible without a quiet conscience. This he had possessed,
but "I forbade my mother to leave her property to me." His step-son
turned back the page, and looked at those words again. Then his eyes
fell lower. "In her case I know not what I could have done." "When did
he forbid this--was it ten years ago, twenty years, fifty years? He was
really very well off when he married my mother. Now where did he get the
property that he lost by his speculations? Not by the law; his
profession never brought him in more than two hundred a year. Oh! he had
it from the old cousin that he and Grand often talk of, old John
Mortimer. And that's where the old silver plate came from. Of course,
and where John got his name.
"We always knew, I think, that there was an aged mother; now why did I
take for granted that she must be in her second childhood? I wonder
whether John put that into my head. I think I did remark to him once
when I was a boy and he was living at home, that it was odd there was no
portrait of her in either of the houses. (But no more there is of Grand
now I come to think of it; John never could make him sit.) Before the
dear old man got so infirm he used generally to go out about once a year
and come back in low spirits, not liking to be questioned. He may have
gone then to see his mother, but I know sister used to think he went to
see the relations of that wretched woman, his first wife. Who shall say
now?"
And then he sat down and thought and thought, but nothing came of his
thinking. Peter Melcombe, so far as he knew, was perfectly well; that
was a comfort. Valentine was very docile; that was also a comfort; and
considering that what his father had wished for him nearly four years
ago was actually coming to pass, and everything was in train for his
going to one of the very best and healthiest of our colonies, there
seemed little danger that even if Melcombe fell to him he should find
the putting it from him a great act of self-denial.
And what a strange thing it was, Brandon thought, that through the force
of circumstances he himself should have been made to bring about such an
unlikely thing! That so young a man should want to marry was strange
enough. It was more strange that he should have fixed on the only woman
in the world that his brother wanted. This said brother had thought it
the very climax of all that was strange that it should have devolved on
him who had command of money and who knew the colonies, to make this
early marriage possible. But surely the climax of strangeness was
rather here, that he had all this time been working as if on purpose to
bring about the longing desire of his old step-father, which till then
he had never heard of, depriving Valentine as much as was possible of
his freedom, shutting him up to the course his father wanted him to
follow, and preparing to send him as far as in this world he could be
sent from the dreaded precincts of Melcombe.
Brandon had devoted out of his moderate patrimony a thousand pounds each
to his step-brother and his step-sisters. In the case of Valentine he
had done more; he had in a recent visit to New Zealand bought some land
with a dwelling-house on it, and to this place it was arranged that
immediately on his marriage Valentine should sail.
Brandon felt a strong desire to go and look at Melcombe, for his
step-father's conduct with regard to it kept coming back to his mind
with ever-fresh surprise; but though he searched his memory it could
yield him nothing, not a hint, not a look, from any one which threw the
least light on this letter.
"But that there's crime at the core of it, or some deep disgrace," he
soliloquized, "appears to me most evident, and I take his assurance in
its fullest meaning that he had nothing to do with it."
The next morning, having slept over the contents of the letter, he went
to his upper room, locked himself in, and read it again. Then after
pausing a while to reconsider it, he went up to the wall to look at a
likeness of Dorothea Graham. Valentine had a photographing machine, and
had filled the house with portraits of himself and his beloved. This was
supposed to be one of the best. "Lucky enough that I had the sense to
leave this behind me," thought Brandon. "Yes, you sweet thing, I am by
no means breaking my heart now about you and your love for that boy. You
are sure to marry him; you have a faithful heart, so the best thing for
him will be to let you marry as soon as possible. I'll tell him so as we
walk to John Mortimer's to-day. I'll tell him he may do it as soon as
he likes."
Accordingly as about six o'clock he and Valentine walked through a wood,
across a common, and then over some fields, Brandon began to make some
remarks concerning the frequent letters that passed between these
youthful lovers. "It is not to be supposed," he observed, "that any lady
would correspond with you thus for years if she had not fully made up
her mind to accept you in the end."
"No," answered Valentine with perfect confidence; "but she knows that I
promised my father to wait a few months more before I decidedly engaged
myself, but for that promise I was to have had an answer from her half a
year ago."
Brandon fully believed that Dorothea Graham loved his brother, and that
her happiness was in his own hands. He had found it easy to put the
possibility of an early marriage in Valentine's way, but nothing could
well go forward without his sanction, and since his return he had
hitherto felt that the words which would give it were too difficult for
him to say. Now, however, that remarkable letter, cutting in across the
usual current of his thoughts, had thrown them back for awhile. So that
Dorothea seemed less real, less dear, less present to him.
The difficult words were about to be said.
"If she knows why you do not speak, and waits, there certainly is an
understanding between you, which amounts almost to the same thing."
"Yes," said Valentine, "and in August, _as she knows_, I shall ask her
again."
"Then," said Brandon, almost taking Valentine's breath away with sudden
delight, "I think, old fellow, that when she has once said 'yes,' you
had better make short work with the engagement; you will never be more
ready to marry than you are now; you are a few months older than John
was when he went and did it; and here you are, with your house in New
Zealand ready built, your garden planted, a flock of sheep bought, and
all there is to do is to turn out the people now taking care of the
place, as soon as you are ready to come in."
Brandon was standing on a little plank which bridged a stream about two
feet wide; he had turned to say this, for Valentine was behind him.
Valentine received the communication first with silence, then with a
shout of triumph, after which he ran completely round his brother
several times, jumping over the stream and flourishing a great stick
that he held, with boyish ecstasy, not at all dignified, but very
sincere. When he had made at least three complete circles, and jumped
the stream six times, Giles gravely walked on, and Valentine presently
followed, wiping his forehead.
"Nobody could have expressed my own sentiments in more charming
English," he exclaimed; "I never heard such grammar in my life; what a
brick you are, St. George!"
Giles had great faith in his theory that absence always cured love, also
in his belief that his was cured and half forgotten. At that moment he
experienced a sharp pang, however, that was not very like forgetfulness,
but which Valentine converted almost into self-scorn when he said--
"You know, Giles, she always did show the most undisguised liking for me
from our first meeting; and then look how constant she has been, and
what beautiful letters she writes, always trying, too, to improve me. Of
course I cannot even pretend to think she would not have engaged herself
to me months ago if I might have asked her."
"All true, perfectly true," he thought to himself; "he loves her and she
loves him, and I believe if she had never met with Valentine, she would
still never have married me. What a fool I am!"
"Why wouldn't you take this view of things yesterday, when I tried to
make you?" asked Valentine.
"I was not ready for it," answered Giles, "or it was not ready for me."
Thereupon they passed through a wicket-gate into a kind of glen or
wilderness, at the end of John Mortimer's garden, and beyond the stream
where his little girls acted Nausicaa and his little boys had preserves
of minute fishes, ingeniously fenced in with sticks and fine netting.
"There's Grand," exclaimed Valentine, "they've brought him out to look
at their water-snails. What a venerable old boy he is! he looks quite
holy, doesn't he?"
"Hold your tongue," said Brandon, "they'll hear you. He's come to see
their newts; they had a lot yesterday at the bottom of the punt. Little
Hugh had one in his hand, a beast with an orange breast, and it was
squinting up at him."
It would be hard to say of any man that he is _never_ right. If he is
always thinking that he has forgotten a certain lady, surely he is right
sometimes.
They went in to dinner, a party of four, for John Mortimer since his
wife's death did not entertain ladies, and Miss Christie Grant always
presided at an early dinner, when the governess and the children dined.
As the dinner advanced St. George and Valentine both got into high
spirits, the former because a stronger conviction than usual assured him
that he was forgetting Dorothea Graham; the latter, because instead of
being pulled back, he had at last got a shove in the other direction. In
short, Valentine was so happy in his jokes and so full of fun, that the
servants had no sooner withdrawn than John Mortimer taxed him with
having good reason for being so, mentioned the probable cause, and asked
to see Miss Graham's portrait, "which, no doubt," he said, "you have got
in your pocket."
"Why I have had that for years," said Valentine scornfully.
"And dozens of them," said Brandon; "they took them themselves."
"When is it to be?" asked old Grand with great interest.
"I don't exactly know, uncle; _even Giles_ doesn't know that! If he had
known, I'm sure he would have told you, and asked your advice, for I
always brought him up to be very respectful to his elders."
"Come, sir, come," said the old man laughing, "if you don't _exactly_
know, I suppose you have a tolerably distinct notion."
"I know when I should like it to be, and when I think D. would like it.
Not too late for a wedding tour, say October, now, or," seeing his
brother look grave, "or November; suppose we say November."
"I'm afraid there is no wedding tour in the programme," observed
Brandon. "The voyage must be the tour."
"Then I'll go without my cart. We must have a tour; it will be the only
fun I shall ever be able to give her."
Valentine had inherited only about two hundred pounds from his father,
he having been left residuary legatee, and he was much more inclined to
spend this on luxuries than on necessaries.
"You've bought me land, and actually paid for it yourself, and you've
bought me a flock, and made me a barn, and yet you deny me the very
necessaries of life, though I can pay for them myself! I must have a
tour, and D. must have a basket-carriage."
"Well, my dear fellow," said Grand, "though that matter is not yet
settled, it is evident things are so far advanced that we may begin to
think of the wedding presents. Now, what would you like to have from me,
I wonder? I mean how would you prefer to have it? John and I have
already considered the amount, and he quite agrees with me as to what I
ought to give to my only brother's only son."
"_Only brother's!_" The word struck Brandon both as showing that the
old man had almost forgotten other dead brothers, and also as evidently
being the preface to a larger gift than he had anticipated.
"Thank you, uncle," said Valentine, almost accomplishing a blush of
pride and pleasure. "As you are so kind as to let me choose, I should
like your present in money, in my pocket, you know, because there is the
tour, and it would go towards that."
"In your pocket!" exclaimed John Mortimer, with a laugh of such
amusement and raillery as almost put Valentine out of countenance. "Why,
do you think my father wants to give you a school-boy's tip?"
"I think a good deal depends on the lady," said Grand, who also seemed
amused; "if she has no fortune, it might be wise to settle it on her; if
she has, you might wish to lay it out in more land, or to invest it
here; you and Giles must consider this. I mean to give you two thousand
pounds." Then, when he saw that Valentine was silent from astonishment,
he went on, "And if your dear father had been here he would not have
been at all surprised. Many circumstances, with which you are not
acquainted, assure me of this, and I consider that I owe everything to
him." There was a certain sternness about these words; he would have, it
was evident, no discussion.
John Mortimer heard his father say this with surprise. "He must mean
that he owes his religious views to my uncle," was his thought; but to
Brandon, who did not trouble himself about those last words, the others
were full of meaning; the amount of the gift, together with the hint at
circumstances with which Valentine was not acquainted, made him feel
almost certain that the strange words, "I forbade my mother to leave her
property to me," alluded to something which was known to the next
brother.
Valentine, at first, was too much surprised to be joyous, but he thanked
his uncle with something of the cordial ingenuousness and grace which
had distinguished his father.
"I can have a tour _now_, can't I, old fellow," he said after a time to
his brother; "take my wife"--here a joyous laugh--"my WIFE on the
Continent; we shall go dashing about from place to place, you know,
staying at hotels, _and all that!_"
"To be sure," said Brandon, "staying at hotels, of course, and ordering
wonderful things for breakfast. I think I see you now--
"'Happy married lovers,
Phillis trifling with a plover's
Egg, while Corydon uncovers
With a grace the Sally Lun.'"
"That's the way this fellow is always making game of me," exclaimed
Valentine; "why I'm older than you were, John, when you married."
"And wild horses shall never drag the words out of me that I was too
young," said John Mortimer, "whatever I may think," he continued.
"John was a great deal graver than you are," said Brandon; "besides, he
knew the multiplication table."
"So do I, of course," exclaimed Valentine.
"Well," answered Brandon, "I never said you did not."