Page images
PDF
EPUB

"My son, my adopted son !" sobbed Anstruther as he laid his head upon my shoulder and wept.

And suddenly, as Anstruther uttered these words, a ray of light, which had never shone before entered the dark places of my brain. I started, as though I had been seared with a hot iron, and, disengaging myself from the embrace of my friend, I cried in harsh and hurried accents, "What was that you said, Mr. Anstruther?"

"My son! my heir! my adopted!

"Thus ends, then, our covenant!" said I, the energy of my manner giving place to a subdued expression of bitter disappointment. "It is over; the spell is broken; and we can no longer live together as friends."

"What mean you? Oh! tell me, Gerard, the import of those strange words."

"Listen," said I, in a calm, clear voice; "listen. I thought that I was honest: I thought that my love for you was pure gold, unmingled with the dross of selfishness; I thought that I clung to you because you lacked support; I thought that I dwelt with you because you were solitary. This faith can sustain me no longer. You speak of adoption, and call me your heir; can I any longer confide in the purity of my motives? I begin to mistrust myself already. You are rich, and I am a beggar; you are childless, and I worm myself into your affections. I am a legacy-hunter, a parasite, a rich man's minion. I bitterly despise myself already. The very servants will sneer at me; the lowest groom in the stable will point at me. The pleasant veil of delusion has been torn from my eyes, and the pillar of my faith knocked from under me. I dreamed that I was honest; and I awake from my dream, and find myself a pitiful scoundrel !"

"

Gerard, Gerard! you talk wildly. I do not comprehend what you mean."

"You called me your heir-your adopted one."

"And you are."

"Oh! no; unsay those words, I beseech you. I must not, I will not, be your heir. Love me, but do not adopt me. Let me still be assured of my honesty; let me still feel that my motives for loving, and for clinging to you, are pure. Answer me, then, one question,-Is it written?"

"It is."

"Oh! too hasty? I might have been a scoundrel, a designer; but it can be undone, and that at the moment. I will do it. Give me the papers, and then I will prove to you that I am honest."

"Gerard, Gerard!" cried Anstruther; "I never doubted it for a moment."

"But perchance I may doubt myself; so give them to me; indeed, it will be kindest. I in sist-or, if you would rather, I will quit your house, never to return to it."

There was an eart nestness and a decision in my voice, and in my manner, which fully assured Mr. Anstruther that I would execute all that I threatened. But still he hesitated; he rose from his seat, looked towards the door, then at me, and re-assumed his seat, in silence, as though he were in a painful state of incertitude. Bring them, bring them, I repeated; then pointing towards the fire, I added, "See how brightly it burns."

16

Every muscle of Anstruther's face worked convulsively, as he replied, in a scarcely audible tone," Yes Gerard !—I will-bring them."

"He walked, with tottering steps, towards the door, left the room, and presently returned with a scroll of parchment in his hand. "There Gerard!-the struggle is over, I do not love you the less."

I did not look at the document, but threw it at once upon the blazing fire. The parchment cracked, and blistered, and split; but it was long ere the tough skin was reduced to the nothingness of ashes. "Burn! burn!" said I.

[ocr errors]

"It will not be burnt," returned Anstruther ; see how it clings to existence; and why destroy it? What a silly piece of mummery! Another slip of parchment, and another stroke of the pen; why, Gerard, it costs you more time and more trouble to annihilate this old document, than it would take me to draw up a new one."

"Ha!--but it will surely perish soon; and you will not reproduce what I have destroyed.— Nay, nay, Edwin!" coaxingly, I added; "that would be hardly fair."

Anstruther answered not, and I continued: "But you will promise? I'am sure that you will, because I ask you, dear Edwin."

In the following brief passage a painful truth is very eloquently expressed!

"Oh! indeed it wears the spirit to be neglected abroad, and to meet with no sympathy at home. Man needs support either on the one side or the other; but if the world despise him, and his own particular circle make a mock of him, his must be a strong spirit indeed, if, in time, it is not utterly broken.

In the third volume, to which we are now referring, there are several very beautiful passages. The history of Anstruther is deeply affecting, and wrought up with great power. We can scarcely imagine any description of a perfect community of thought and feeling finer than that contained in the subjoined passage:

We spake to one another unreservedly. We revealed our inmost souls to one another. All our long pent-up feelings now gushed forth in a stream of words. Each was to each like the prophet's rod, which smote the rock and drew forth water. We could comprehend-fully comprehend the secretest workings of one another's souls. Emotions, which we had long conceived to be unin telligible to any but ourselves, were now described by the one and immediately understood by the other. There was a bond of sympathy between us. We felt, as we conversed, that we needed nothing-not even our most morbid sensibilities. We feared not to behold, on the other's face, a smile of sarcasm, or a look of cold indifference. Heart communed with heart; and we mutually said, "I have never revealed myself to any as to you?"

How

"We had both suffered very much from the imperfect sympathies of all around us. delicious, therefore, was it to meet with a kindred spirit, before whom we could pour our souls freely when our beings overflowed with emotion. Now did we embody, in words, all our most delicate sensations-feelings which, we thought, would have been for ever unexpressed, now found their way into language. All our hopes, our fears, our desires, our joys, and our sorrows, were Tevealed to the other; and what delight in the revealing !

"We were by nature similar. In Mary Penruddock I beheld a feminine incarnation of myself. Do not mistake me, Gerard; she was as far above me in the scale of morality, as the sun is above the moon, and yet elementally we were alike. The fruits were different, but the trees were the same. She had grown in a different soil; she had been nurtured by other hands; she had been watched more carefully, and tended more assiduously; she had not been exposed to the winds of circumstance and the blights of temptation as I had; she was pure, and I was corrupt; she like a river at its course, unsullied and untainted, I, like the same river when it had passed through many cities and collected impurity from them all.

In this same history of Anstruther there is a very powerful description of the evils resulting from that strange caprice and perversity of human nature which leads a parent to prefer one child to another. Anstruther is misled by this caprice into the ill-treatment of the being he had idolized, and actually imagines her nature to have become malevolent when it was really most affectionate. The passage describing his conduct, and its result, is one of exceeding power: it is perfectly heart-rending, but not, we feel persuaded, at all exaggerated or out

of nature.

"In proportion as I doated upon my two younger children, did I loathe and abhor their elder brother. The one passion seemed to spring out of the other, and they kept pace in their subsequent development. But to her first-born did the mother still cling the more tenaciously, as I thought, for my hatred of him. And then another unclean spirit began to tear my diseased soul. I thought that Mary loved the deformed child solely from a spirit of opposition; that she caressed him, and was kind to him to work my annoyance; that she derived a malicious pleasure from praising the amia. ble qualities of the boy in my presence, and always endeavoured to conciliate my affections in his behalf, at those very seasons when I was most exasperated against him. The effect of this monamania was, that in time I became a brute, and treated my poor wife — my saint-like Mary — with barbarity.

"But still would she appeal to me in behalf of my first-born. Fully confiding in the justice of her cause; no unkindness could shake her resolution. She was the unshrinking advocate of the persecuted, and the helpless. I might frown upon her, but she was not to be shaken; oh! thou plessed martyr in a righteous cause, I look upon my hands and they are incarnadined.

"One day-one dreadful day-now, at length, I have come to the crisis of my history,-the merciless dæmon was at work in my bosom. I was in one of my most turbulent moods, when Mary entered my study with her favorite deformity-my study, where it had never been before !— where I had peremtorily forbidden it to be brought. She came there, with a book in her hand, to shew me the marvellous progress that the child had made in his studies. She came to taunt me, as I thought, with the moral worth and the intellectual beauty of the little monster, and to upbraid me for setting up matter above mind, for thinking more of the shell than of the kernel. She did say something about this, but there was exceeding mildness in the words that she employed, and

[ocr errors]

exceeding gentleness in the tones, which uttered them. But they were enough to lash my spirit into a whirlpool of passionate excitement, Never before had the exacerbation of my feelings been so intense as they were at that moment. I scarcely knew what I did! I was insane! I uttered a terrific imprecation, dashed the book, that I had been reading, to the ground, struck the child with the palm of my hand on the face, so violently that be howled with anguish, and then thrust the 'mother and her deformed favourite, with frantic energy, out of my chamber!

"I locked the door, and I picked up the book that I had been reading, but I found that I could not read. So I rang the bell, ordered a horse to be saddled, and was soon scouring the country, in one of those terrific fevers of excitement, which rapidity of motion alone can allay. When I returned, I sate myself down again to my desk, but the book which I had been reading was gone; and in its place I found a small slip of paper, marked with the hand-writing of my wife.

"She had taken the book, Gerard; it was the last thing she had seen me touch, and she took it as a memorial, for she had fled. Yes, Gerard, the wife of my bosom had gone from me, taking with her our three children. She did not, she could not mean to desert me altogether: she had gone, as a warning, as a lesson to me; terrible the warning, and long-abiding the lesson; for on that night, Gerard, a storm arose. I saw it rising from my chamber window, I saw the heavens blackening, and I heard the winds howling; then thought I of my wife and children, and trembled.

"I knew that the vessel in which she had sailed, for I had visited the quay, hoping that I might stay the progress of the fugitives, was but a small craft, and I trembled for its safety. It was indeed, a dreadful night, and 1 trembled. The thunder roared, and I thought that it was the voice of God speaking to me, and bidding me to despair. I did not attempt to sleep. I did not lay my head upon the pillow. I sate by the open widow, watching the storm, and ever and anon in a voice of agony, beseeching God to pacify the elements. But he hearkened not, Gerard; he hear kened not, and the vessel perished in the storm; my wife and my children were drowned in the great waters; my idols were all broken."

This is very tragical; but there are few such exciting and distressing passages in the work, its general characteristic is composure, not excitement.

We have already shewn, in our notice of Jerningham, that the author excels in the delineation of a love scene. That we quoted was highly wrought and altogether exceedingly beautiful, and in keeping with the very excitable

actors in it.

The scene of Gerard's love-making to Ella, is one of simple beauty and pathos :

I was left alone with Ella, on that morning. Seating myself beside the beloved one, I took her little hand into mine, and looking upon it smilingly, I said, " Ella, methinks that this small white hand is an index of high birth.”

Ella blushed; and then, looking into my face, she said, with a sweet smile, though her face wore a thoughtful aspect," Often does an index indicate falsely. There is no rule without an exception." "Oh! but small white hands are very certain tests of aristocracy. Napoleon, and Byron, and Ali Pasha, have all been of this opinion."

"A trick of their self-love," returned Ella. "I dare say, that they had white hands themselves."

"But tell me now, Ella, would it make you happy, if it were proved, beyond all doubt, that you are the daughter of a great man."

"I am an orphan," returned Ella, thoughtfully.

"And, therefore, you could not grieve to find that you have a parent living."

Ella cast down her eyes, but answered not, and I continued, "Methinks, you would change a dead parent for a living one. Better to rejoice over a treasure found, than to grieve over one lost." "I do not understand you," said Ella.

"Do you ever attempt to look into the future; do you ever speculate upon your probable destiny?

"Michael and I together have talked over our plans; but as yet we have made no definite arrangements. Sir Reginald has promised to get him employment, and wherever he goes, I will go; his home will be my home, and his people my people."

"But you will not dwell with him all your life long."

"And why not?" asked Ella, looking up into my face with an expression of beautiful sim.

"Because, peradventure, you might find another friend, with whom you would rather live all your days, than with Michael."

"What other friend, Gerard? I think that I must be very dull this morning, for I do not understand half of what you say."

[ocr errors]

Perhaps, it is that I am obscure. But, tell me, is there no one in the world, whom you love even better than Michael?

Ella spoke not; but the blush, which my question elicited, was an answer more significant than words.

"Tell me, Ella," and I took her hand into mine, "is there no one whom you love better than Michael?"

"I am fatherless and motherless," said Ella.

But the love of kindred is not always the strongest. Ella, dear Ella!" and I passed my arm around her waist, "is there no one beside your brother, whom you would be content to live with to the end of your days?"

Ella answered not; her head drooped, and slightly her frame trembled.

"Do not be angry with me, Ella, for asking you these strange questions. Indeed, indeed, I am not sporting with you, Tell ine, my sweet girl, is your brother Michael dearer to you than all the world beside? Is there no one for whose sake you would leave him? Is there no one dearer to you than Michael? And as I said this, I drew the young maiden closer to my side, and bending down, I looked into her eyes with an expression of supplicating fondness.

Ella lifted up her head, and silently she turned her face towards me. derness and love was there. I no longer desired that she should speak.

Oh! such a look of ten

"Gerard!"

She laid her head upon my shoulder, and the only word that she uttered was, We were happy ; but for a few brief minutes. Such joy as this could not last. The dream was soon over; and Ella Moore was the first to awake into consciousness.

[ocr errors]

Suddenly she withdrew herself from my embrace. Gerard," she said, in a decisive tone of voice, with a supernatural effort of strength, collecting all the powers of her mind to aid her in this extremity," Gerard, this must not, this ought not to be. We can never be to one another more

We

than we are now; already I fear that we are to much. Forgive me that I have ever dared to regard you with any other feelings than of humble respect and gratitude. You are far above me in rank, and education, riches, everything; I am fit only to be the handmaid of such as you are. I am nothing but a poor cottage girl, and I am not to selfish as to desire that you should demean yourself by thinking of me as being any other than a lowly dependent upon your bounty. I know that you are generous and devoted; I know that you would willingly set aside what the world calls the distinction of society; but I love you too well to suffer this sacrifice to be made on my account. had better part; we had better dwell asunder. It is decreed that we are to move in different spheres. Michael will labour for me, and protect me; we are not ever likely to cross one another in the paths of life. A few days will divide us for ever. Forget that you have ever known me. My prayers will ever be lifted up for your safety; my blessing will ever be upon your head. Forgive me, that I have spoken thus plainly; I fear that my words have caused you anguish; but believe me that I have no other desire but the advancement of your happiness and welfare. Mr. Doveton, it would be better for us both that I should leave this place with all speed; it would be better-' but she could not utter one word more She had no longer any strength to support her. The trial was too great; it was an effort beyond her nature that she was struggling to make. She could not subdue her rising emotions; they overcame her thoroughly at last, and, hiding her face between her hands, she burst into a paroxysm of tears.

"

Then presently she rose from her seat, and moved towards the door; I followed her, and gently taking her by the hand, I prevented her sudden retreat. 'Yet, stay, Ella; but a few words more ere we part; sit down and dry our tears, for that which has caused them to flow so plentifully exists but in your own mind, Ella you are my equal, and more than my equal, What was it that you told me in the spring, about the cushions of green velvet?

"A foolish fancy of mine,” said Ella, dashing away her tears as she spoke.

"Nay, Ella, it was no foolish fancy, but a remembrance of that which once was-of a time when you were a dweller in a splendid mansion--a child born to wealth and station. Ella, did I not tell you when we parted upon the green hill behind your cottage, that I would put forth my whole strength in the endeavour to clear up this strange mystery? I have kept my promise; [ have laboured diligently, and a great success has attended my labours. Now, sweetest, listen to what I have to tell you. Already does Michael know the truth. You are neither an orphan nor a cottage maiden, but the daughter of Mr. Anstruther, my friend."

་་

"My son, my adopted son !" sobbed Anstruther as he laid his head upon my shoulder and wept.

And suddenly, as Anstruther uttered these words, a ray of light, which had never shone before entered the dark places of my brain. I started, as though I had been seared with a hot iron, and, disengaging myself from the embrace of my friend, I cried in harsh and hurried accents, "What was that you said, Mr. Anstruther?"

"My son! my heir! my adopted!

"Thus ends, then, our covenant!" said I, the energy of my manner giving place to a subdued expression of bitter disappointment. "It is over; the spell is broken; and we can no longer live together as friends."

"What mean you? Oh! tell me, Gerard, the import of those strange words."

“Listen,” said I, in a calm, clear voice; "listen. I thought that I was honest: I thought that my love for you was pure gold, unmingled with the dross of selfishness; I thought that I clung to you because you lacked support; I thought that I dwelt with you because you were solitary. This faith can sustain me no longer. You speak of adoption, and call me your heir; can L any longer confide in the purity of my motives? I begin to mistrust myself already. You are rich, and I am a beggar; you are childless, and I worm myself into your affections. I am a le gacy-hunter, a parasite, a rich man's minion. I bitterly despise myself already. The very servants will sneer at me; the lowest groom in the stable will point at me. The pleasant veil of delusion has been torn from my eyes, and the pillar of my faith knocked from under me. I dreamed that I was honest; and I awake from my dream, and find myself a pitiful scoundrel !"

"Gerard, Gerard! you talk wildly. I do not comprehend what you mean."

"You called me your heir-your adopted one."

"And you are."

"Oh! no; unsay those words, I beseech you. I must not, I will not, be your heir. Love me, but do not adopt me. Let me still be assured of my honesty; let me still feel that my motives for loving, and for clinging to you, are pure. Answer me, then, one question,-Is it written ?"

"It is."

"Oh! too hasty? I might have been a scoundrel, a designer; but it can be undone, and that at the moment. I will do it. Give me the papers, and then I will prove to you that I am honest."

"Gerard, Gerard!" cried Anstruther; "I never doubted it for a moment."

"But perchance I may doubt myself; so give them to me; indeed, it will be kindest. I in sist-or, if you would rather, I will quit your house, never to return to it."

There was an eart nestness and a decision in my voice, and in my manner, which fully assured Mr. Anstruther that I would execute all that I threatened. But still he hesitated; he rose from his seat, looked towards the door, then at me, and re-assumed his seat, in silence, as though he were in a painful state of incertitude. Bring them, bring them," I repeated; then pointing towards the fire, I added, "See how brightly it burns."

[ocr errors]

Every muscle of Anstruther's face worked convulsively, as he replied, in a scarcely audible tone," Yes Gerard !—I will—bring them.”

"He walked, with tottering steps, towards the door, left the room, and presently returned with a scroll of parchment in his hand. There Gerard !-the struggle is over, I do not love

you the less."

I did not look at the document, but threw it at once upon the blazing fire. The parchment cracked, and blistered, and split; but it was long ere the tough skin was reduced to the nothingness of ashes. Burn! burn!" said I.

[ocr errors]

"It will not be burnt," returned Anstruther; "see how it clings to existence; and why destroy it? What a silly piece of mummery! Another slip of parchment, and another stroke of the pen; why, Gerard, it costs you more time and more trouble to annihilate this old document, than it would take me to draw up a new one."

"Ha!--but it will surely perish soon; and you will not reproduce what I have destroyed.— Nay, nay, Edwin!" coaxingly, I added; "that would be hardly fair.'

"

Anstruther answered not, and I continued: “But you will promise? I'am sure that you will, because I ask you, dear Edwin."

« PreviousContinue »