“Thy due from me
Is tears: and heavy sorrows of the blood,
Which nature, love, and filial tenderness
Shall, O dear father, pay thee plenteously!”
_Second Part of Henry IV._, Act iv. Sc. 4.
IT was late at night when the chaise that bore Maltravers stopped at the
gates of a park lodge. It seemed an age before the peasant within was
aroused from the deep sleep of labour-loving health. “My father,” he
cried, while the gate creaked on its hinges; “my father--is he better?
Is he alive?”
“Oh, bless your heart, Master Ernest, the squire was a little better
this evening.”
“Thank Heaven!--On--on!”
The horses smoked and galloped along a road that wound through venerable
and ancient groves. The moonlight slept soft upon the sward, and the
cattle, disturbed from their sleep, rose lazily up, and gazed upon the
unseasonable intruder.
It is a wild and weird scene, one of those noble English parks at
midnight, with its rough forest-ground broken into dell and valley, its
never-innovated and mossy grass, overrun with fern, and its immemorial
trees, that have looked upon the birth, and look yet upon the graves,
of a hundred generations. Such spots are the last proud and melancholy
trace of Norman knighthood and old romance left to the laughing
landscapes of cultivated England. They always throw something of shadow
and solemn gloom upon minds that feels their associations, like that
which belongs to some ancient and holy edifice. They are the cathedral
aisles of Nature with their darkened vistas, and columned trunks, and
arches of mighty foliage. But in ordinary times the gloom is pleasing,
and more delightful than all the cheerful lawns and sunny slopes of the
modern taste. _Now_ to Maltravers it was ominous and oppressive: the
darkness of death seemed brooding in every shadow, and its warning voice
moaning in every breeze.
The wheels stopped again. Lights flitted across the basement story; and
one above, more dim than the rest, shone palely from the room in which
the sick man slept. The bell rang shrilly out from amidst the dark ivy
that clung around the porch. The heavy door swung back--Maltravers was
on the threshold. His father lived--was better--was awake. The son was
in the father’s arms.