Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as printed.
[Illustration: ROSA WAS PEERING INTO THE BASKET.]
THE
STRAIGHT ROAD
IS
SHORTEST AND SUREST.
BY
A. L. O. E.
[Illustration]
LONDON:
FREDERICK WARNE AND CO.
BEDFORD STREET, COVENT GARDEN.
1867.
CONTENTS.
——————
CHAP.
I. A MISHAP IN THE WOODS
II. THE OAK ROOM
III. FIRE
IV. EARTH
V. PUT TO THE QUESTION
VI. FACING IT OUT
VII. WATER
VIII. A CHASE
IX. CONJECTURES
X. DECISION
THE STRAIGHT ROAD
IS
SHORTEST AND SUREST.
———————————
CHAPTER I.
A MISHAP IN THE WOODS.
IT was a glowing, sultry day in the glorious month of June. In the
drawing-room of Cortley Hall every window was thrown wide open to
admit the breeze, which scarcely stirred the muslin curtains, or
moved one leaf of the delicate maiden-hair fern which drooped from a
fancy basket. In the deep recess of one of these windows sat a merry
black-eyed girl, with a quantity of white satin ribbon heaped loosely
upon her knee, and her workbox placed upon a little table beside her.
A graceful young maiden stood near, and pensively and tenderly, as if
each blossom were linked in her mind with thoughts of a home she was
soon to quit, was arranging a quantity of flowers—roses, fuchsias, and
geraniums—to fill a porcelain vase. Mina, was less inclined to laugh
and chat than was Rosa, her gay young cousin, whose tongue rattled
merrily on, while her nimble fingers transformed the ribbon into piles
of rosettes and favours.
In the corner of the room a gentleman, not much beyond middle age,
but whose broad bald forehead and "sable-silvered" hair made him seem
older than he really was, was seated writing at a desk. This was Mr.
Marsden, the master of Cortley Hall, and the father of Mina, the young
bride-elect. He was engaged in writing orders on a munificent scale
for donations to the sick and poor, on the occasion of the approaching
wedding. In every cottage, for miles around, the plentiful feast would
be spread; for Mr. Marsden was a benefactor to all who came within
reach of his large-hearted charity, and many had had reason to bless
the day when he had entered into possession of Cortley Hall.
"What on earth can have become of Wilfred!" exclaimed Rosa May, looking
impatiently towards the door. "How am I to finish off these favours,
with not a sprig of orange-blossom to put in the middle! He does not
usually play the snail, that young brother of yours!"
"Nay, you must remember," said Mina, "that the town is full three miles
distant, and the weather exceedingly hot; I was vexed when I heard that
you had sent him upon such an errand!"
"Oh! All the servants are busy, you know, in making grand preparations
for Thursday; and I thought," added Rosa with a laugh, "that it was
an act of public utility to get a boy out of the way for a couple of
hours, and tame down his wild spirits a little by teaching him to make
himself useful. You have spoilt Wilfred sadly, I fear!"
"How can you say so!" cried the smiling Mina.
"How dare you say so!" exclaimed a merry voice from without, and—not
through the door, but the window—in sprang a fine-looking boy
of fourteen, with heated face, and moistened hair, and a bright
good-humoured smile in his clear blue eyes, from which seemed to look
forth a spirit free and open as the day.
"Why, Wilfred, you truant knight; what can have delayed you so long?"
exclaimed Rosa May, with her finger raised in an affected attitude of
reproof. "We thought that you would have been back an hour ago, laden
with orange-blossom from the town, ready to cut, clip, run messages,
do the dutiful in every possible way to both bridesmaid and bride! But
is anything the matter?" she added. "Your clothes seem torn; your face
scratched."
"You have not met with any accident, dear Will?" exclaimed the fair
young bride; and at the question, asked in her gentle tone of concern,
Mr. Marsden turned round from his desk, and glanced at the handsome
lad, who was his only son and heir.
"Oh! I don't care a straw for a few rents in my clothes, or scratches
on my face!" exclaimed Wilfred Marsden. "But this is what provokes me:
look here, I've crushed your dainty box of orange-blossoms as flat as
a pancake!" And with an air of vexation, the boy rather threw down
than placed upon the table a light millinery box, which appeared in
deplorable plight.
"Oh! dear; how could you manage to do this!" cried his cousin the
bridesmaid, opening and surveying with a rueful air the crushed
blossoms within.
"Never mind, Wilfred dear," said Mina, approaching with a kindly smile;
"it was very good in you to go yourself to Manton for the flowers, buy
them, and bring them—"
"And smash them on the way!" added Wilfred.
"Oh! I don't believe that they are spoilt," said the bride, taking up a
sprig in her delicate fingers. "A little twist here, a little pulling
out there, and see—now is not that perfectly lovely?" And she held up
the renovated flower.
"If it is not, I know who is!" cried the boy, looking with fond
admiration upon his only sister, and thinking what a happy fellow
Edward Lyle was going to be. "I hope that there's not much harm done,
after all. I thought that the poor flowers were demolished when my foot
came smash on the lid of the box!"
"How did it happen, awkward boy?" asked the bridesmaid.
"The story is soon told," said Wilfred, sitting down, and fanning his
heated face with his straw hat. "You know that the day is grilling hot,
and I thought that I should be fairly baked if I took the straight path
across the fields, where there is not a yard of shade."
"So you went round by the wood?" said Mina.
"A fine roundabout way!" cried her cousin.
"I fancied that I could make a cut through the thicket, so struck out
from the path and tried to get across through the bushes. But it seemed
as if Puck and all the fairies had conspired to catch me prisoner! Now
my jacket was caught in a bramble; then a bough nearly knocked off my
hat; when I got free from the thorns on the right hand, I was caught by
a long straggling briar on the left! Then suddenly I felt a sharp sting
on my neck, just underneath my collar—" Wilfred clapped his hand on
the place—"I dropped the box like a hot potato, and what betwixt wasp
and briars and brambles, hardly knew what I was about, till I felt my
unlucky foot crunching through the pasteboard of the box!"
"Ah! Well, things might have been worse!" said Mina, with smiling
philosophy. "Your kind intention was all the same. Your long walk has
enabled me—"
"To show that you have the sweetest temper as well as the fairest face
in the world!" interrupted Wilfred.
"And it has taught you, I hope," said Rosa, "that the straight road is
the shortest and surest."
"Ay, I wished often enough in the wood that I had taken my way through
the fields, however hot it might have been," said Wilfred.
"That proverb, my boy," observed Mr. Marsden, who had locked his desk
and joined the group, "holds good in more important matters than your
adventure of to-day. There's many a sharp, clever fellow, with more wit
in his brain than truth in his heart, who has found in the end that
through life the straightest road is the shortest and surest."
"You mean the path of honour, papa."
"I mean the path of duty."
"Duty and honour, surely they are the same," cried Wilfred. "They are
but two names for one thing."
"Scarcely so," said the father. "I shall call honour a high sense of
what we owe to 'ourselves;' duty, a high sense of what we owe to 'our
God!'"
"But if they be not the same thing, they lead to the same actions,
surely. They both make a man shrink from anything false, dishonest, or
mean."
Mr. Marsden looked down with something of paternal pride upon the
fine, intelligent countenance of his only son, so expressive of the
contempt which the mere thought of dishonourable conduct inspired.
He, however, shook his head gravely as he made answer, "Honour, as we
usually understand the word, is but man's standard of what is becoming
in a man, and must be fallible like its author. Honour has fired the
ambitious leader, who sacrifices thousands of his fellow-creatures to
win for himself the name of a hero; honour has loaded the duellist's
pistol, and made brave men slaves to the dread of reproach. We could
as safely direct our steps by the fitful blaze of a meteor, as take
earthly honour alone for the guide of our words and actions."
"Was it not honour that made Edward Lyle give up that good living which
he could have had by merely letting it be thought that he was a few
weeks older than he was?"
At the mention of the name of her betrothed, Mina timidly raised her
blue eyes and fixed them on her father, and the tint on her soft cheek
deepened as she listened for his reply.
"I think," said Mr. Marsden, "that in that occurrence Edward was guided
by that which is always his pole-star—the fear and love of his God."
Wilfred glanced at his sister, and caught her look of intense pleasure
at the praise of her betrothed from the lips of her father.
"Well, Edward was soon rewarded," said the boy. "It was a lucky thing
that the living here fell vacant—so unexpectedly, too—not a twelvemonth
after, and that it should be in your gift! A snug little nest for our
ladye-bird, and just within reach of us all. What a different affair it
would have been," continued the boy, "if Cortley Hall had been left to
cousin Benson instead of to you!"
"I should have been working on still at my desk in Barnes' Court,"
observed Mr. Marsden, with his quiet smile.
"And I'd have been brought up as a clerk; and Mimi, poor darling Mina!
She'd have looked like some pale withered flower, one of those crushed
orange-blossoms in the smoky air of the city. Ugh! Our old great-uncle
did one good thing in his life, if he never did another, when he left
the Hall, and estate, and the gift of the living to such a man as my
father."
"Cousin Benson does not think so, I guess," laughed Rosa, who had just
finished her pile of white satin cockades.
"Cousin Benson is no more fit to be a lauded proprietor than I am to be
king of the Cannibal Islands!" exclaimed Wilfred. "A mean, sneaking,
stingy fellow; one who would skin a flint; one—"
"Oh! Wilfred!" expostulated Mina.
"No ill words of the absent, my boy," said Mr. Marsden.
"We'd better talk of some one else, then," cried Wilfred, "for I can
never think of Tom Benson with patience."
"I had a note from Sophia to-day," said Mina.
"Sophia! Oh, how is it she is not here? I thought that she was to
arrive to-day. I know that you ordered the Oak room to be made ready."
"She comes this morning," replied his sister, "but she does not wish
the Oak room."
"How do you know that?" asked Wilfred.
"She writes so in her note. Here it is."
"You don't mean to say," cried Wilfred, with a look of amused
curiosity, "that Sophia is afraid to sleep in that room, because she
fancies that it is haunted?"
"Not exactly 'haunted,'" began Mina Marsden, as she handed the letter
to her brother; "but she writes about disagreeable associations."
"Oh! I see; here it is." And Wilfred read aloud snatches from the
letter of one of his sister's expected bridesmaids: "'Don't laugh at me
as absurd—' That's more than I can promise, fair lady!—'but the idea
of occupying a room in which your poor old great-uncle was actually
burnt to death would so affect my nerves.'—Oh! Hang nerves!" exclaimed
Wilfred, tossing back the note to his sister. "That was a wise old dame
who was glad that she was born before nerves were invented."
"But you wont mind exchanging rooms, dear Wilfred?"
"Mind! I should think not!" cried the boy. "I shall have much the best
of the exchange. Oak panels instead of twopenny paper, carved ceiling
instead of white plaster, stained glass instead of square panes, one of
which, by-the-bye, I cracked right across yesterday with my elbow! I
wish that everybody would fancy that grand, gloomy room to be haunted,
that I might keep it, ghost and all, to myself! But what a joke I'll
have against Sophia! I think I'll bring in something about it when I
propose the health of the four lovely bridesmaids on Thursday."
"Nay," cried Rosa, "if you take to quizzing any of the bridesmaids, I
think that, after to-day's exploit in the woods, they may fairly turn
the tables upon you, and let the bridesman come in for his share of the
banter. You have proved yourself not a much better messenger than the
valiant squire in the song." And in a high, clear voice Rosa trilled
forth a merry lay.
THE SQUIRE.
A squire set out one moonlit night,
And prayed to the moon to give good light,
For he had many miles to travel that night,
All through the forest glen, O!
He bore a lock of his master's hair,
A tender gift to his ladye fair;
At peril of his life he the pledge must bear,
All through the forest glen, O!
Quoth he, "I fear there are robbers near,
Or goblins stalk the thicket drear,
Or merry witches hold their revels here,
All in the forest glen, O!"
An oak o'er the path its long arms spread—
Sudden it strikes him—he starts with dread:
Terrified and wild, at speed he sped
All through the forest glen, O!
He never looked behind him, or turned his head
All through the forest glen, O!
Panting and pale, at length he came
To the sheltered hall of the noble dame;
"I've brought a pledge from a knight of fame,
All through the forest glen, O!"
And he hunted—he searched—he sought for the same,
Lost in the forest glen, O!
Where was the pledge of the lover's vow?
Waving in the breeze on the oak's long bough;
And for aught that I know, it may wave there now,
All in the forest glen, O!