Peter Atherly had been four months in England, but knew little of the
country until one summer afternoon when his carriage rolled along the
well-ordered road between Nonningsby Station and Ashley Grange.
In that four months he had consulted authorities, examined records,
visited the Heralds' College, written letters, and made a few friends. A
rich American, tracing his genealogical tree, was not a new thing--even
in that day--in London; but there was something original and simple in
his methods, and so much that was grave, reserved, and un-American in
his personality, that it awakened interest. A recognition that he was a
foreigner, but a puzzled doubt, however, of his exact nationality, which
he found everywhere, at first pained him, but he became reconciled to
it at about the same time that his English acquaintances abandoned their
own reserve and caution before the greater reticence of this melancholy
American, and actually became the questioners! In this way his quest
became known only as a disclosure of his own courtesy, and offers
of assistance were pressed eagerly upon him. That was why Sir Edward
Atherly found himself gravely puzzled, as he sat with his family
solicitor one morning in the library of Ashley Grange.
“Humph!” said Sir Edward. “And you say he has absolutely no other
purpose in making these inquiries?”
“Positively none,” returned the solicitor. “He is even willing to sign a
renunciation of any claim which might arise out of this information. It
is rather a singular case, but he seems to be a rich man and quite able
to indulge his harmless caprices.”
“And you are quite sure he is Philip's son?”
“Quite, from the papers he brings me. Of course I informed him that
even if he should be able to establish a legal marriage he could expect
nothing as next of kin, as you had children of your own. He seemed to
know that already, and avowed that his only wish was to satisfy his own
mind.”
“I suppose he wants to claim kinship and all that sort of thing for
society's sake?”
“I do not think so,” said the solicitor dryly. “I suggested an interview
with you, but he seemed to think it quite unnecessary, if I could give
him the information he required.”
“Ha!” said Sir Edward promptly, “we'll invite him here. Lady Atherly can
bring in some people to see him. Is he--ahem--What is he like? The usual
American, I suppose?”
“Not at all. Quite foreign-looking--dark, and rather like an Italian.
There is no resemblance to Mr. Philip,” he said, glancing at the
painting of a flaxen-haired child fondling a greyhound under the elms of
Ashley Park.
“Ah! Yes, yes! Perhaps the mother was one of those Southern creoles, or
mulattoes,” said Sir Edward with an Englishman's tolerant regard for
the vagaries of people who were clearly not English; “they're rather
attractive women, I hear.”
“I think you do quite well to be civil to him,” said the solicitor. “He
seems to take an interest in the family, and being rich, and apparently
only anxious to enhance the family prestige, you ought to know him. Now,
in reference to those mortgages on Appleby Farm, if you could get”--
“Yes, yes!” said Sir Edward quickly; “we'll have him down here; and, I
say! YOU'LL come too?”
The solicitor bowed. “And, by the way,” continued Sir Edward, “there was
a girl too,--wasn't there? He has a sister, I believe?”
“Yes, but he has left her in America.”
“Ah, yes!--very good--yes!--of course. We'll have Lord Greyshott and
Sir Roger and old Lady Everton,--she knows all about Sir Ashley and the
family. And--er--is he young or old?”
“About thirty, I should say, Sir Edward.”
“Ah, well! We'll have Lady Elfrida over from the Towers.”
Had Peter known of these preparations he might have turned back to
Nonningsby without even visiting the old church in Ashley Park, which
he had been told held the ashes of his ancestors. For during these four
months the conviction that he was a foreigner and that he had little or
nothing in common with things here had been clearly forced upon him. He
could recognize some kinship in the manners and customs of the people to
those he had known in the West and on the Atlantic coast, but not to his
own individuality, and he seemed even more a stranger here--where he had
expected to feel the thrill of consanguinity--than in the West. He
had accepted the invitation of the living Atherly for the sake of the
Atherlys long dead and forgotten. As the great quadrangle of stone
and ivy lifted itself out of the park, he looked longingly towards the
little square tower which peeped from between the yews nearer the road.
As the carriage drove up to the carved archway whence so many Atherlys
had issued into the world, he could not believe that any of his blood
had gone forth from it, or, except himself, had ever entered it before.
Once in the great house he felt like a prisoner as he wandered through
the long corridors to his room; even the noble trees beyond his
mullioned windows seemed of another growth than those he had known.
There was no doubt that he created a sensation at Ashley Grange, not
only from his singular kinship, but from his striking individuality. The
Atherlys and their guests were fascinated and freely admiring. His very
originality, which prevented them from comparing him with any English
or American standard of excellence, gave them a comfortable assurance
of safety in their admiration. His reserve, his seriousness, his
simplicity, very unlike their own, and yet near enough to suggest a
delicate flattery, was in his favor. So was his naive frankness in
regard to his status in the family, shown in the few words of greeting
with Sir Ashley, and in his later simple yet free admissions regarding
his obscure youth, his former poverty, and his present wealth. He
boasted of neither; he was disturbed by neither. Standing alone, a
stranger, for the first time in an assemblage of distinguished and
titled men and women, he betrayed no consciousness; surrounded for the
first time by objects which he knew his wealth could not buy, he showed
the most unmistakable indifference,--the indifference of temperament.
The ladies vied with each other to attack this unimpressible
nature,--this profound isolation from external attraction. They
followed him about, they looked into his dark, melancholy eyes; it was
impossible, they thought, that he could continue this superb acting
forever. A glance, a smile, a burst of ingenuous confidence, a covert
appeal to his chivalry would yet catch him tripping. But the melancholy
eyes that had gazed at the treasures of Ashley Grange and the
opulent ease of its guests without kindling, opened to their first
emotion,--wonder! At which Lady Elfrida, who had ingenuously admired
him, hated him a little, as the first step towards a kindlier feeling.
The next day, having declared his intention of visiting Ashley Church,
and, as frankly, his intention of going there alone, he slipped out in
the afternoon and made his way quietly through the park to the square
ivied tower he had first seen. In this tranquil level length of the wood
there was the one spot, the churchyard, where, oddly enough, the green
earth heaved into little billows as if to show the turbulence of that
life which those who lay below them had lately quitted. It was a
relief to the somewhat studied and formal monotony of the well-ordered
woodland,--every rood, of which had been paced by visitors, keepers, or
poachers,--to find those decrepit and bending tombstones, lurching
at every angle, or deeply sinking into the green sea of forgetfulness
around them. All this, and the trodden paths of the villagers towards
that common place of meeting, struck him as being more human than
anything he had left behind him at the Grange.
He entered the ivy-grown porch and stared for a moment at the half-legal
official parochial notices posted on the oaken door,--his first
obtrusive intimation of the combination of church and state,--and
hesitated. He was not prepared to find that this last resting-place of
his people had something to do with taxes and tithes, and that a certain
material respectability and security attended his votive sigh. God and
the reigning sovereign of the realm preserved a decorous alliance in the
royal arms that appeared above the official notices. Presently he pushed
open the door gently and entered the nave. For a moment it seemed to him
as if the arched gloom of the woods he had left behind was repeated
in the dim aisle and vaulted roof; there was an earthy odor, as if the
church itself, springing from the fertilizing dust below, had taken root
in the soil; the chequers of light from the faded stained-glass windows
fell like the flicker of leaves on the pavement. He paused before the
cold altar, and started, for beside him lay the recumbent figure of
a warrior pillowed on his helmet with the paraphernalia of his trade
around him. A sudden childish memory of the great Western plains, and
the biers of the Indian “braves” raised on upright poles against the
staring sky and above the sunbaked prairie, rushed upon him. There,
too, had lain the weapons of the departed chieftain; there, too, lay the
Indian's “faithful hound,” here simulated by the cross-legged
crusader's canine effigy. And now, strangest of all, he found that this
unlooked-for recollection and remembrance thrilled him more at that
moment than the dead before him. Here they rested,--the Atherlys of
centuries; recumbent in armor or priestly robes, upright in busts that
were periwigged or hidden in long curls, above the marble record of
their deeds and virtues. Some of these records were in Latin,--an
unknown tongue to Peter,--some in a quaint English almost as
unintelligible; but none as foreign to him as the dead themselves. Their
banners waved above his head; their voices filled the silent church, but
fell upon his vacant eye and duller ear. He was none of them.
Presently he was conscious of a footstep, so faint, so subtle, that it
might have come from a peregrinating ghost. He turned quickly and saw
Lady Elfrida, half bold, yet half frightened, halting beside a pillar
of the chancel. But there was nothing of the dead about her: she was
radiating and pulsating with the uncompromising and material freshness
of English girlhood. The wild rose in the hedgerow was not more tangible
than her cheek, nor the summer sky more clearly cool and blue than her
eyes. The vigor of health and unfettered freedom of limb was in her
figure from her buckled walking-shoe to her brown hair topped by a
sailor hat. The assurance and contentment of a well-ordered life, of
secured position and freedom from vain anxieties or expectations, were
visible in every line of her refined, delicate, and evenly quiescent
features. And yet Lady Elfrida, for the first time in her girlhood, felt
a little nervous.
Yet she was frank, too, with the frankness of those who have no thought
of being misunderstood. She said she had come there out of curiosity to
see how he would “get on” with his ancestors. She had been watching him
from the chancel ever since he came,--and she was disappointed. As far
as emotion went she thought he had the advantage of the stoniest and
longest dead of them all. Perhaps he did not like them? But he must be
careful what he SAID, for some of her own people were there,--manifestly
this one. (She put the toe of her buckled shoe on the crusader Peter had
just looked at.) And then there was another in the corner. So she had a
right to come there as well as he,--and she could act as cicerone! This
one was a De Brecy, one of King John's knights, who married an Atherly.
(She swung herself into a half-sitting posture on the effigy of the
dead knight, composed her straight short skirt over her trim ankles,
and looked up in Peter's dark face.) That would make them some kind of
relations,--wouldn't it? He must come over to Bentley Towers and see the
rest of the De Brecys in the chapel there to-morrow. Perhaps there might
be some he liked better, and who looked more like him. For there was no
one here or at the Grange who resembled him in the least.
He assented to the truth of this with such grave, disarming courtesy,
and yet with such undisguised wonder,--as she appeared to talk with
greater freedom to a stranger than an American girl would,--that she at
once popped off the crusader, and accompanied him somewhat more demurely
around the church. Suddenly she stopped with a slight exclamation.
They had halted before a tablet to the memory of a later Atherly,
an officer of his Majesty's 100th Foot, who was killed at Braddock's
defeat. The tablet was supported on the one side by a weeping Fame,
and on the other by a manacled North American Indian. She stammered and
said: “You see there are other Atherlys who went to America even before
your father,” and then stopped with a sense of having made a slip.
A wild and inexplicable resentment against this complacent historical
outrage suddenly took possession of Peter. He knew that his rage was
inconsistent with his usual calm, but he could not help it! His swarthy
cheek glowed, his dark eyes flashed, he almost trembled with excitement
as he hurriedly pointed out to Lady Elfrida that the Indians were
VICTORIOUS in that ill-fated expedition of the British forces, and that
the captive savage was an allegorical lie. So swift and convincing was
his emotion that the young girl, knowing nothing of the subject and
caring less, shared his indignation, followed him with anxious eyes, and
their hands for an instant touched in innocent and generous sympathy.
And then--he knew not how or why--a still more wild and terrible idea
sprang up in his fancy. He knew it was madness, yet for a moment he
could only stand and grapple with it silently and breathlessly. It
was to seize this young and innocent girl, this witness of his
disappointment, this complacent and beautiful type of all they valued
here, and bear her away--a prisoner, a hostage--he knew not why--on a
galloping horse in the dust of the prairie--far beyond the seas! It was
only when he saw her cheek flush and pale, when he saw her staring at
him with helpless, frightened, but fascinated eyes,--the eyes of the
fluttering bird under the spell of the rattlesnake,--that he drew his
breath and turned bewildered away. “And do you know, dear,” she said
with naive simplicity to her sister that evening, “that although he was
an American, and everybody says that they don't care at all for those
poor Indians, he was so magnanimous in his indignation that I fancied
he looked like one of Cooper's heroes himself rather than an Atherly. It
was such a stupid thing for me to show him that tomb of Major Atherly,
you know, who fought the Americans,--didn't he?--or was it later?--but I
quite forgot he was an American.” And with this belief in her mind, and
in the high expiation of a noble nature, she forbore her characteristic
raillery, and followed him meekly, manacled in spirit like the
allegorical figure, to the church porch, where they separated, to meet
on the morrow. But that morrow never came.
For late in the afternoon a cable message reached him from California
asking him to return to accept a nomination to Congress from his own
district. It determined his resolution, which for a moment at the church
porch had wavered under the bright eyes of Lady Elfrida. He telegraphed
his acceptance, hurriedly took leave of his honestly lamenting kinsman,
followed his dispatch to London, and in a few days was on the Atlantic.
How he was received in California, how he found his sister married to
the blond lawyer, how he recovered his popularity and won his election,
are details that do not belong to this chronicle of his quest. And that
quest seems to have terminated forever with his appearance at Washington
to take his seat as Congressman.
It was the night of a levee at the White House. The East Room was
crowded with smartly dressed men and women of the capital, quaintly
simple legislators from remote States in bygone fashions, officers in
uniform, and the diplomatic circle blazing with orders. The invoker
of this brilliant assembly stood in simple evening dress near the
door,--unattended and hedged by no formality. He shook the hand of
the new Congressman heartily, congratulated him by name, and turned
smilingly to the next comer. Presently there was a slight stir at one
of the opposite doors, the crowd fell back, and five figures stalked
majestically into the centre of the room. They were the leading chiefs
of an Indian reservation coming to pay their respects to their
“Great Father,” the President. Their costumes were a mingling of the
picturesque with the grotesque; of tawdriness with magnificence; of
artificial tinsel and glitter with the regal spoils of the chase; of
childlike vanity with barbaric pride. Yet before these the glittering
orders and ribbons of the diplomats became dull and meaningless, the
uniforms of the officers mere servile livery. Their painted, immobile
faces and plumed heads towered with grave dignity above the meaner
crowd; their inscrutable eyes returned no response to the timid
glances directed towards them. They stood by themselves, alone and
impassive,--yet their presence filled the room with the sense of kings.
The unostentatious, simple republican court suddenly seemed to have
become royal. Even the interpreter who stood between their remote
dignity and the nearer civilized world acquired the status of a court
chamberlain.
When their “Great Father,” apparently the less important personage, had
smilingly received them, a political colleague approached Peter and took
his arm. “Gray Eagle would like to speak with you. Come on! Here's your
chance! You may be put on the Committee on Indian Relations, and pick up
a few facts. Remember we want a firm policy; no more palaver about the
'Great Father' and no more blankets and guns! You know what we used to
say out West, 'The only “Good Indian” is a dead one.' So wade in, and
hear what the old plug hat has to say.”
Peter permitted himself to be led to the group. Even at that moment he
remembered the figure of the Indian on the tomb at Ashley Grange, and
felt a slight flash of satisfaction over the superior height and bearing
of Gray Eagle.
“How!” said Gray Eagle. “How!” said the other four chiefs. “How!”
repeated Peter instinctively. At a gesture from Gray Eagle the
interpreter said: “Let your friend stand back; Gray Eagle has nothing to
say to him. He wishes to speak only with you.”
Peter's friend reluctantly withdrew, but threw a cautioning glance
towards him. “Ugh!” said Gray Eagle. “Ugh!” said the other chiefs. A few
guttural words followed to the interpreter, who turned, and facing Peter
with the monotonous impassiveness which he had caught from the chiefs,
said: “He says he knew your father. He was a great chief,--with many
horses and many squaws. He is dead.”
“My father was an Englishman,--Philip Atherly!” said Peter, with an odd
nervousness creeping over him.
The interpreter repeated the words to Grey Eagle, who, after a guttural
“Ugh!” answered in his own tongue.
“He says,” continued the interpreter with a slight shrug, yet relapsing
into his former impassiveness, “that your father was a great chief,
and your mother a pale face, or white woman. She was captured with an
Englishman, but she became the wife of the chief while in captivity. She
was only released before the birth of her children, but a year or two
afterwards she brought them as infants to see their father,--the Great
Chief,--and to get the mark of their tribe. He says you and your sister
are each marked on the left arm.”
Then Gray Eagle opened his mouth and uttered his first English sentence.
“His father, big Injin, take common white squaw! Papoose no good,--too
much white squaw mother, not enough big Injin father! Look! He big man,
but no can bear pain! Ugh!”
The interpreter turned in time to catch Peter. He had fainted.