APPLEWOOD.
As the carriage drew up, the front door of the house was opened by a
servant in livery, and in the lighted hall beyond there appeared a
young girl, who, by her stature, by her figure--which was light and
graceful--and by the unconfined masses of her flowing dark-brown
hair, could not have been more than seventeen--the age of all
heroines in the good old-fashioned times.
Messrs. Quirky and Macfarisee sprang out and ascended the steps.
"I am so glad you have come at last," said the young lady, in a
tremulous voice of welcome. "My aunt has longed for you both so
much, but more especially for you, Mr. Macfarisee; she says that your
prayers and pious conversation achieve for her a greater ease of mind
and body than the ministrations of any clergyman or physician."
"My dear Miss Amy, I fear you flatter my partner," snarled Mr.
Quirky; "but we hastened from town (though hard pressed by a
first-rate jury case) the moment we received your letter, stating
that she wished to settle her worldly affairs."
"And how does the Lord deal with her?" asked Macfarisee, in his most
bland and dulcet manner.
"Severely, sir," replied the young girl whom he named Amy, with her
eyes full of tears; "you know she is always believing herself to be
dying, but she has been in great suffering for three nights, and for
these three nights and as many days I have never left her bedside."
I now perceived that the girl's dark-blue eyes were dimmed and
bloodshot with tears and watching.
"Miss Amy," said Macfarisee, in the slow and impressive tone, which
he used to all but his clerks, to whom he spoke sharply enough, "I
feel happy--a holy happiness--that illness has enlightened her mind,
and that at last she has resolved to take my advice."
"Sir----"
"I have so frequently recommended her to--to settle her worldly
affairs; but she weakly shunned all that reminded her of mortality,
ever replying that sufficient for the day was the evil thereof; but,
alas! my dear child," he continued, in a sing-song voice, "lo you
now, death cometh like a thief in the night; but I trust he finds the
Lord's faithful servant duly prepared for the great change that is at
hand."
"Bravo, old six-and-eightpence!" thought I, as Quirky, whom his
partner's prosing wearied at times, snatched the green bag from me
impatiently, saying,--
"Here you, sir,--give me the documents. Miss Amy, your aunt's state
of health has long been precarious; but what says the doctor of her?"
"That--that----"
"What?"
"She cannot last long now; and she has been in misery, waiting for
you."
"The deuce! then we have no time to lose," said Macfarisee, with one
of his keen office glances at Quirky, through a pair of eyes which
were always "half-closed, like those of a night-bird in the daytime."
"My dear, dear aunt!" sobbed the poor young girl; "follow me to her
room, if you please, and this young gentleman----"
"Oh, he is only one of our young men, and may remain here quite well."
"_Here_, in this cold lobby? Oh, that would never do! Walk into
this room, sir; please to excuse us," said the girl politely; and
while my two employers, whom for their pride and hypocrisy I
consigned to very warm quarters indeed, walked gingerly up stairs, I
was left to my own reflections in a dark parlour.
In this sudden trip to the country there was something mysterious;
and as I gazed through the window upon the dark branches of the
trees, tossing on the night-wind, and pictured to myself the old
woman dying up stairs, strange and gloomy thoughts came over me; but
on a footman entering with candles, I asked him the name of the house.
"Applewood," said he.
"The house of Mrs. Rose?"
"Yes."
Then a sudden light broke in upon me. I remembered that we had a
wealthy client--an old widowed lady--whose failing health, credulity,
and ample funds, had long rendered her a source of the deepest
solicitude to Messrs. Quirky and Macfarisee, whose passive victim she
had to every purpose and intent become; for she believed devoutly in
the worth, piety, and good works of our third partner. In his double
capacity of elder of his kirk and legal adviser, Macfarisee had long
been one of those who hovered by the bedside of the dying, as
vultures hover round a piece of carrion, and this wealthy old lady,
Mrs. Rose, of Applewood, had long been marked by him as fair game to
be run down at last.
It was by a studied system of cant, and by an external aspect of
piety in its most fervid form, that Nathaniel Macfarisee usually
recommended himself to those whom he deluded, and the number of
legacies left to him by departed friends was really somewhat
surprising, though many of them were averred to be for purposes of
religion and philanthropy; and when conversing with a bewildered
client, whom
He darkened by elucidation,
And mystified by explanation.
it was amusing to hear him interlarding all his remarks with phrases
and texts from scripture.
Amy Lee, the only living relation possessed by the old proprietress
of Applewood, was the orphan daughter of a younger sister whom she
never loved, for having married a young officer whose attentions had
been long and provokingly divided between them. Amy had been sent
from India to her care and kindness, penniless and otherwise
friendless, for her father and mother, with many friends and
relations, had perished in the dungeons of Tippo Saib.
The grudge which the old lady bore her sister in youth, for depriving
her of a first love, had taken some strange and fantastic form of
aversion in maturer years; and thus, though the poor and lonely Amy
attended her sick bed, noting anxiously and sedulously all her
querulous fancies, seeking to soothe her gusts of petulance, with the
filial tenderness of a daughter and the patience of a little saint,
she never could win the regard of, and barely earned a smile from,
this strange old woman, whose days and ailments were now drawing to a
close. Yet, the orphan girl loved this kinswoman who loved not her,
for she had traced something of her dead mother's features in her
face--a mother for whom she still sorrowed,--and she found the best
solace for that grief was to discharge the duties of affection, which
fate had transferred from one sister to the other.
Mrs. Rose was the sole residuary legatee of her late husband, an old
nabob, who had returned from India with a visage the colour of the
gold he had acquired, and a heart that had narrowed and shrunk as his
liver increased; thus, her fortune was ample, and, as she was without
children, she had long given her whole thoughts and attention to the
welfare and success of the Rev. Mr. Pawkie's dissenting
meeting-house, of which Macfarisee was an elder, and the porch of
which edifice she had become fully assured was the only avenue to
Heaven; thus, the three had long gone hand-in-hand, in holding
conventicles and meetings for the out-pouring of the spirit, amid
tea, toast, and cold water--for humiliation, prayer, and the
regeneration of all those wicked and benighted heathens, who did not
occupy pews in the square-windowed, low-roofed, and barnlike edifice
in which the Rev. Jedediah Pawkie expounded the pure gospel, inspired
by the light that shone from the new Jerusalem, and consigned to very
hot quarters indeed all who took their own way to Heaven instead of
his.
Of this fustian spirit of religion and fanaticism, when combined with
an aversion for the only living tie that existed between her and the
world, the worthy Macfarisee--that inflexible Mede and upright pillar
of the Kirk--hastened to take his usual advantage; and in the sequel
he proved himself to be a greater wolf in sheep's clothing than I
could ever have imagined.