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The Queen of Hearts

by Wilkie Collins

October, 1999 [Etext #1917]

Project Gutenberg's Etext The Queen of Hearts, by Wilkie Collins

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[Etext by James Rusk (jrusk@cyberramp.net)

Italics are indicated with underscore]

The Queen of Hearts

by Wilkie Collins

LETTER OF DEDICATION.

EMILE FORGUES.

AT a time when French readers were altogether unaware of the

existence of any books of my writing, a critical examination of

my novels appeared under your signature in the _Revue des Deux

Moudes_. I read that article, at the time of its appearance, with

sincere pleasure and sincere gratitude to the writer, and I have

honestly done my best to profit by it ever since.

At a later period, when arrangements were made for the

publication of my novels in Paris, you kindly undertook, at some

sacrifice of your own convenience, to give the first of the

series--"The Dead Secret"--the great advantage of being rendered

into French by your pen. Your excellent translation of "The

Lighthouse" had already taught me how to appreciate the value of

your assistance; and when "The Dead Secret" appeared in its

French form, although I was sensibly gratified, I was by no means

surprised to find my fortunate work of fiction, not translated,

in the mechanical sense of the word, but transformed from a novel

that I had written in my language to a novel that you might have

written in yours.

I am now about to ask you to confer one more literary obligation

on me by accepting the dedication of this book, as the earliest

acknowledgment which it has been in my power to make of the debt

I owe to my critic, to my translator, and to my friend.

The stories which form the principal contents of the following

pages are all, more or less, exercises in that art which I have

now studied anxiously for some years, and which I still hope to

cultivate, to better and better purpose, for many more. Allow me,

by inscribing the collection to you, to secure one reader for it

at the outset of its progress through the world of letters whose

capacity for seeing all a writer's defects may be matched by many

other critics, but whose rarer faculty of seeing all a writer's

merits is equaled by very few.

WILKIE COLLINS.

THE QUEEN OF HEARTS.

CHAPTER I.

OURSELVES.

WE were three quiet, lonely old men, and SHE was a lively,

handsome young woman, and we were at our wits' end what to do

with her.

A word about ourselves, first of all--a necessary word, to

explain the singular situation of our fair young guest.

We are three brothers; and we live in a barbarous, dismal old

house called The Glen Tower. Our place of abode stands in a

hilly, lonesome district of South Wales. No such thing as a line

of railway runs anywhere near us. No gentleman's seat is within

an easy drive of us. We are at an unspeakably inconvenient

distance from a town, and the village to which we send for our

letters is three miles off.

My eldest brother, Owen, was brought up to the Church. All the

prime of his life was passed in a populous London parish. For

more years than I now like to reckon up, he worked unremittingly,

in defiance of failing health and adverse fortune, amid the

multitudinous misery of the London poor; and he would, in all

probability, have sacrificed his life to his duty long before the

present time if The Glen Tower had not come into his possession

through two unexpected deaths in the elder and richer branch of

our family. This opening to him of a place of rest and refuge

saved his life. No man ever drew breath who better deserved the

gifts of fortune; for no man, I sincerely believe, more tender of

others, more diffident of himself, more gentle, more generous,

and more simple-hearted than Owen, ever walked this earth.

My second brother, Morgan, started in life as a doctor, and

learned all that his profession could teach him at home and

abroad. He realized a moderate independence by his practice,

beginning in one of our large northern towns and ending as a

physician in London; but, although he was well known and

appreciated among his brethren, he failed to gain that sort of

reputation with the public which elevates a man into the position

of a great doctor. The ladies never liked him. In the first

place, he was ugly (Morgan will excuse me for mentioning this);

in the second place, he was an inveterate smoker, and he smelled

of tobacco when he felt languid pulses in elegant bedrooms; in

the third place, he was the most formidably outspoken teller of

the truth as regarded himself, his profession, and his patients,

that ever imperiled the social standing of the science of

medicine. For these reasons, and for others which it is not

necessary to mention, he never pushed his way, as a doctor, into

the front ranks, and he never cared to do so. About a year after

Owen came into possession of The Glen Tower, Morgan discovered

that he had saved as much money for his old age as a sensible man

could want; that he was tired of the active pursuit--or, as he

termed it, of the dignified quackery of his profession; and that

it was only common charity to give his invalid brother a

companion who could physic him for nothing, and so prevent him

from getting rid of his money in the worst of all possible ways,

by wasting it on doctors' bills. In a week after Morgan had

arrived at these conclusions, he was settled at The Glen Tower;

and from that time, opposite as their characters were, my two

elder brothers lived together in their lonely retreat, thoroughly

understanding, and, in their very different ways, heartily loving

one another.

Many years passed before I, the youngest of the three--christened

by the unmelodious name of Griffith--found my way, in my turn, to

the dreary old house, and the sheltering quiet of the Welsh

hills. My career in life had led me away from my brothers; and

even now, when we are all united, I have still ties and interests

to connect me with the outer world which neither Owen nor Morgan

possess.

I was brought up to the Bar. After my first year's study of the

law, I wearied of it, and strayed aside idly into the brighter

and more attractive paths of literature. My occasional occupation

with my pen was varied by long traveling excursions in all parts

of the Continent; year by year my circle of gay friends and

acquaintances increased, and I bade fair to sink into the

condition of a wandering desultory man, without a fixed purpose

in life of any sort, when I was saved by what has saved many

another in my situation--an attachment to a good and a sensible

woman. By the time I had reached the age of thirty-five, I had

done what neither of my brothers had done before me--I had

married.

As a single man, my own small independence, aided by what little

additions to it I could pick up with my pen, had been sufficient

for my wants; but with marriage and its responsibilities came the

necessity for serious exertion. I returned to my neglected

studies, and grappled resolutely, this time, with the intricate

difficulties of the law. I was called to the Bar. My wife's

father aided me with his interest, and I started into practice

without difficulty and without delay.

For the next twenty years my married life was a scene of

happiness and prosperity, on which I now look back with a

grateful tenderness that no words of mine can express. The memory

of my wife is busy at my heart while I think of those past times.

The forgotten tears rise in my eyes again, and trouble the course

of my pen while it traces these simple lines.

Let me pass rapidly over the one unspeakable misery of my life;

let me try to remember now, as I tried to remember then, that she

lived to see our only child--our son, who was so good to her, who

is still so good to me--grow up to manhood; that her head lay on

my bosom when she died; and that the last frail movement of her

hand in this world was the movement that brought it closer to her

boy's lips.

I bore the blow--with God's help I bore it, and bear it still.

But it struck me away forever from my hold on social life; from

the purposes and pursuits, the companions and the pleasures of

twenty years, which her presence had sanctioned and made dear to

me. If my son George had desired to follow my profession, I

should still have struggled against myself, and have kept my

place in the world until I had seen h im prosperous and settled.

But his choice led him to the army; and before his mother's death

he had obtained his commission, and had entered on his path in

life. No other responsibility remained to claim from me the

sacrifice of myself; my brothers had made my place ready for me

by their fireside; my heart yearned, in its desolation, for the

friends and companions of the old boyish days; my good, brave son

promised that no year should pass, as long as he was in England,

without his coming to cheer me; and so it happened that I, in my

turn, withdrew from the world, which had once been a bright and a

happy world to me, and retired to end my days, peacefully,

contentedly, and gratefully, as my brothers are ending theirs, in

the solitude of The Glen Tower.

How many years have passed since we have all three been united it

is not necessary to relate. It will be more to the purpose if I

briefly record that we have never been separated since the day

which first saw us assembled together in our hillside retreat;

that we have never yet wearied of the time, of the place, or of

ourselves; and that the influence of solitude on our hearts and

minds has not altered them for the worse, for it has not

embittered us toward our fellow-creatures, and it has not dried

up in us the sources from which harmless occupations and innocent

pleasures may flow refreshingly to the last over the waste places

of human life. Thus much for our own story, and for the

circumstances which have withdrawn us from the world for the rest

of our days.

And now imagine us three lonely old men, tall and lean, and

white-headed; dressed, more from past habit than from present

association, in customary suits of solemn black: Brother Owen,

yielding, gentle, and affectionate in look, voice, and manner;

brother Morgan, with a quaint, surface-sourness of address, and a

tone of dry sarcasm in his talk, which single him out, on all

occasions, as a character in our little circle; brother Griffith

forming the link between his two elder companions, capable, at

one time, of sympathizing with the quiet, thoughtful tone of

Owen's conversation, and ready, at another, to exchange brisk

severities on life and manners with Morgan--in short, a pliable,

double-sided old lawyer, who stands between the clergyman-brother

and the physician-brother with an ear ready for each, and with a

heart open to both, share and share together.

Imagine the strange old building in which we live to be really

what its name implies--a tower standing in a glen; in past times

the fortress of a fighting Welsh chieftain; in present times a

dreary land-lighthouse, built up in many stories of two rooms

each, with a little modern lean-to of cottage form tacked on

quaintly to one of its sides; the great hill, on whose lowest

slope it stands, rising precipitously behind it; a dark,

swift-flowing stream in the valley below; hills on hills all

round, and no way of approach but by one of the loneliest and

wildest crossroads in all South Wales.

Imagine such a place of abode as this, and such inhabitants of it

as ourselves, and them picture the descent among us--as of a

goddess dropping from the clouds--of a lively, handsome,

fashionable young lady--a bright, gay, butterfly creature, used

to flutter away its existence in the broad sunshine of perpetual

gayety--a child of the new generation, with all the modern ideas

whirling together in her pretty head, and all the modern

accomplishments at the tips of her delicate fingers. Imagine such

a light-hearted daughter of Eve as this, the spoiled darling of

society, the charming spendthrift of Nature's choicest treasures

of beauty and youth, suddenly flashing into the dim life of three

weary old men--suddenly dropped into the place, of all others,

which is least fit for her--suddenly shut out from the world in

the lonely quiet of the loneliest home in England. Realize, if it

be possible, all that is most whimsical and most anomalous in

such a situation as this, and the startling confession contained

in the opening sentence of these pages will no longer excite the

faintest emotion of surprise. Who can wonder now, when our bright

young goddess really descended on us, that I and my brothers were

all three at our wits' end what to do with her!

CHAPTER II.

OUR DILEMMA.

WHO is the young lady? And how did she find her way into The Glen

Tower?

Her name (in relation to which I shall have something more to say

a little further on) is Jessie Yelverton. She is an orphan and an

only child. Her mother died while she was an infant; her father

was my dear and valued friend, Major Yelverton. He lived long

enough to celebrate his darling's seventh birthday. When he died

he intrusted his authority over her and his responsibility toward

her to his brother and to me.

When I was summoned to the reading of the major's will, I knew

perfectly well that I should hear myself appointed guardian and

executor with his brother; and I had been also made acquainted

with my lost friend's wishes as to his daughter's education, and

with his intentions as to the disposal of all his property in her

favor. My own idea, therefore, was, that the reading of the will

would inform me of nothing which I had not known in the

testator's lifetime. When the day came for hearing it, however, I

found that I had been over hasty in arriving at this conclusion.

Toward the end of the document there was a clause inserted which

took me entirely by surprise.

After providing for the education of Miss Yelverton under the

direction of her guardians, and for her residence, under ordinary

circumstances, with the major's sister, Lady Westwick, the clause

concluded by saddling the child's future inheritance with this

curious condition:

From the period of her leaving school to the period of her

reaching the age of twenty-one years, Miss Yelverton was to pass

not less than six consecutive weeks out of every year under the

roof of one of her two guardians. During the lives of both of

them, it was left to her own choice to say which of the two she

would prefer to live with. In all other respects the condition

was imperative. If she forfeited it, excepting, of course, the

case of the deaths of both her guardians, she was only to have a

life-interest in the property; if she obeyed it, the money itself

was to become her own possession on the day when she completed

her twenty-first year.

This clause in the will, as I have said, took me at first by

surprise. I remembered how devotedly Lady Westwick had soothed

her sister-in-law's death-bed sufferings, and how tenderly she

had afterward watched over the welfare of the little motherless

child--I remembered the innumerable claims she had established in

this way on her brother's confidence in her affection for his

orphan daughter, and I was, therefore, naturally amazed at the

appearance of a condition in his will which seemed to show a

positive distrust of Lady Westwick's undivided influence over the

character and conduct of her niece.

A few words from my fellow-guardian, Mr. Richard Yelverton, and a

little after-consideration of some of my deceased friend's

peculiarities of disposition and feeling, to which I had not

hitherto attached sufficient importance, were enough to make me

understand the motives by which he had been influenced in

providing for the future of his child.

Major Yelverton had raised himself to a position of affluence and

eminence from a very humble origin. He was the son of a small

farmer, and it was his pride never to forget this circumstance,

never to be ashamed of it, and never to allow the prejudices of

society to influence his own settled opinions on social questions

in general.

Acting, in all that related to his intercourse with the world, on

such principles as these, the major, it is hardly necessary to

say, held some strangely heterodox opinions on the modern

education of girls, and on the evil influence of society over the

characters of women in general. Out of the strength of those

opinions, and out of the certainty of his conviction that his

sister did not share them, had grown that condition in his will

which removed his daughter from the influence of her aunt for six

consec utive weeks in every year. Lady Westwick was the most

light-hearted, the most generous, the most impulsive of women;

capable, when any serious occasion called it forth, of all that

was devoted and self-sacrificing, but, at other and ordinary

times, constitutionally restless, frivolous, and eager for

perpetual gayety. Distrusting the sort of life which he knew his

daughter would lead under her aunt's roof, and at the same time

gratefully remembering his sister's affectionate devotion toward

his dying wife and her helpless infant, Major Yelverton had

attempted to make a compromise, which, while it allowed Lady

Westwick the close domestic intercourse with her niece that she

had earned by innumerable kind offices, should, at the same time,

place the young girl for a fixed period of every year of her

minority under the corrective care of two such quiet

old-fashioned guardians as his brother and myself. Such is the

history of the clause in the will. My friend little thought, when

he dictated it, of the extraordinary result to which it was one

day to lead.

For some years, however, events ran on smoothly enough. Little

Jessie was sent to an excellent school, with strict instructions

to the mistress to make a good girl of her, and not a fashionable

young lady. Although she was reported to be anything but a

pattern pupil in respect of attention to her lessons, she became

from the first the chosen favorite of every one about her. The

very offenses which she committed against the discipline of the

school were of the sort which provoke a smile even on the stern

countenance of authority itself. One of these quaint freaks of

mischief may not inappropriately be mentioned here, inasmuch as

it gained her the pretty nickname under which she will be found

to appear occasionally in these pages.

On a certain autumn night shortly after the Midsummer vacation,

the mistress of the school fancied she saw a light under the door

of the bedroom occupied by Jessie and three other girls. It was

then close on midnight; and, fearing that some case of sudden

illness might have happened, she hastened into the room. On

opening the door, she discovered, to her horror and amazement,

that all four girls were out of bed--were dressed in

brilliantly-fantastic costumes, representing the four grotesque

"Queens" of Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, and Clubs, familiar to us

all on the pack of cards--and were dancing a quadrille, in which

Jessie sustained the character of The Queen of Hearts. The next

morning's investigation disclosed that Miss Yelverton had

smuggled the dresses into the school, and had amused herself by

giving an impromptu fancy ball to her companions, in imitation of

an entertainment of the same kind at which she had figured in a

"court-card" quadrille at her aunt's country house.

The dresses were instantly confiscated and the necessary

punishment promptly administered; but the remembrance of Jessie's

extraordinary outrage on bedroom discipline lasted long enough to

become one of the traditions of the school, and she and her

sister-culprits were thenceforth hailed as the "queens" of the

four "suites" by their class-companions whenever the mistress's

back was turned, Whatever might have become of the nicknames thus

employed in relation to the other three girls, such a mock title

as The Queen of Hearts was too appropriately descriptive of the

natural charm of Jessie's character, as well as of the adventure

in which she had taken the lead, not to rise naturally to the

lips of every one who knew her. It followed her to her aunt's

house--it came to be as habitually and familiarly connected with

her, among her friends of all ages, as if it had been formally

inscribed on her baptismal register; and it has stolen its way

into these pages because it falls from my pen naturally and

inevitably, exactly as it often falls from my lips in real life.

When Jessie left school the first difficulty presented itself--in

other words, the necessity arose of fulfilling the conditions of

the will. At that time I was already settled at The Glen Tower,

and her living six weeks in our dismal solitude and our humdrum

society was, as she herself frankly wrote me word, quite out of

the question. Fortunately, she had always got on well with her

uncle and his family; so she exerted her liberty of choice, and,

much to her own relief and to mine also, passed her regular six

weeks of probation, year after year, under Mr. Richard

Yelverton's roof.

During this period I heard of her regularly, sometimes from my

fellow-guardian, sometimes from my son George, who, whenever his

military duties allowed him the opportunity, contrived to see

her, now at her aunt's house, and now at Mr. Yelverton's. The

particulars of her character and conduct, which I gleaned in this

way, more than sufficed to convince me that the poor major's plan

for the careful training of his daughter's disposition, though

plausible enough in theory, was little better than a total

failure in practice. Miss Jessie, to use the expressive common

phrase, took after her aunt. She was as generous, as impulsive,

as light-hearted, as fond of change, and gayety, and fine

clothes--in short, as complete and genuine a woman as Lady

Westwick herself. It was impossible to reform the "Queen of

Hearts," and equally impossible not to love her. Such, in few

words, was my fellow-guardian's report of his experience of our

handsome young ward.

So the time passed till the year came of which I am now

writing--the ever-memorable year, to England, of the Russian war.

It happened that I had heard less than usual at this period, and

indeed for many months before it, of Jessie and her proceedings.

My son had been ordered out with his regiment to the Crimea in

1854, and had other work in hand now than recording the sayings

and doings of a young lady. Mr. Richard Yelverton, who had been

hitherto used to write to me with tolerable regularity, seemed

now, for some reason that I could not conjecture, to have

forgotten my existence. Ultimately I was reminded of my ward by

one of George's own letters, in which he asked for news of her;

and I wrote at once to Mr. Yelverton. The answer that reached me

was written by his wife: he was dangerously ill. The next letter

that came informed me of his death. This happened early in the

spring of the year 1855.

I am ashamed to confess it, but the change in my own position was

the first idea that crossed my mind when I read the news of Mr.

Yelverton's death. I was now left sole guardian, and Jessie

Yelverton wanted a year still of coming of age.

By the next day's post I wrote to her about the altered state of

the relations between us. She was then on the Continent with her

aunt, having gone abroad at the very beginning of the year.

Consequently, so far as eighteen hundred and fifty-five was

concerned, the condition exacted by the will yet remained to be

performed. She had still six weeks to pass--her last six weeks,

seeing that she was now twenty years old--under the roof of one

of her guardians, and I was now the only guardian left.

In due course of time I received my answer, written on

rose-colored paper, and expressed throughout in a tone of light,

easy, feminine banter, which amused me in spite of myself. Miss

Jessie, according to her own account, was hesitating, on receipt

of my letter, between two alternatives--the one, of allowing

herself to be buried six weeks in The Glen Tower; the other, of

breaking the condition, giving up the money, and remaining

magnanimously contented with nothing but a life-interest in her

father's property. At present she inclined decidedly toward

giving up the money and escaping the clutches of "the three

horrid old men;" but she would let me know again if she happened

to change her mind. And so, with best love, she would beg to

remain always affectionately mine, as long as she was well out of

my reach.

The summer passed, the autumn came, and I never heard from her

again. Under ordinary circumstances, this long silence might have

made me feel a little uneasy. But news reached me about this time

from the Crimea that my son was wounded--not dangerously, thank

God, but still severely enough to be la id up--and all my

anxieties were now centered in that direction. By the beginning

of September, however, I got better accounts of him, and my mind

was made easy enough to let me think of Jessie again. Just as I

was considering the necessity of writing once more to my

refractory ward, a second letter arrived from her. She had

returned at last from abroad, had suddenly changed her mind,

suddenly grown sick of society, suddenly become enamored of the

pleasures of retirement, and suddenly found out that the three

horrid old men were three dear old men, and that six weeks'

solitude at The Glen Tower was the luxury, of all others, that

she languished for most. As a necessary result of this altered

state of things, she would therefore now propose to spend her

allotted six weeks with her guardian. We might certainly expect

her on the twentieth of September, and she would take the

greatest care to fit herself for our society by arriving in the

lowest possible spirits, and bringing her own sackcloth and ashes

along with her.

The first ordeal to which this alarming letter forced me to

submit was the breaking of the news it contained to my two

brothers. The disclosure affected them very differently. Poor

dear Owen merely turned pale, lifted his weak, thin hands in a

panic-stricken manner, and then sat staring at me in speechless

and motionless bewilderment. Morgan stood up straight before me,

plunged both his hands into his pockets, burst suddenly into the

harshest laugh I ever heard from his lips, and told me, with an

air of triumph, that it was exactly what he expected.

"What you expected?" I repeated, in astonishment.

"Yes," returned Morgan, with his bitterest emphasis. "It doesn't

surprise me in the least. It's the way things go in this

world--it's the regular moral see-saw of good and evil--the old

story with the old end to it. They were too happy in the garden

of Eden--down comes the serpent and turns them out. Solomon was

too wise--down comes the Queen of Sheba, and makes a fool of him.

We've been too comfortable at The Glen Tower--down comes a woman,

and sets us all three by the ears together. All I wonder at is

that it hasn't happened before." With those words Morgan

resignedly took out his pipe, put on his old felt hat and turned

to the door.

"You're not going away before she comes?" exclaimed Owen,

piteously. "Don't leave us--please don't leave us!"

"Going!" cried Morgan, with great contempt. "What should I gain

by that? When destiny has found a man out, and heated his

gridiron for him, he has nothing left to do, that I know of, but

to get up and sit on it."

I opened my lips to protest against the implied comparison

between a young lady and a hot gridiron, but, before I could

speak, Morgan was gone.

"Well," I said to Owen, "we must make the best of it. We must

brush up our manners, and set the house tidy, and amuse her as

well as we can. The difficulty is where to put her; and, when

that is settled, the next puzzle will be, what to order in to

make her comfortable. It's a hard thing, brother, to say what

will or what will not please a young lady's taste."

Owen looked absently at me, in greater bewilderment than

ever--opened his eyes in perplexed consideration--repeated to

himself slowly the word "tastes"--and then helped me with this

suggestion:

"Hadn't we better begin, Griffith, by getting her a plum-cake?"

"My dear Owen," I remonstrated, "it is a grown young woman who is

coming to see us, not a little girl from school."

"Oh!" said Owen, more confused than before. "Yes--I see; we

couldn't do wrong, I suppose--could we?--if we got her a little

dog, and a lot of new gowns."

There was, evidently, no more help in the way of advice to be

expected from Owen than from Morgan himself. As I came to that

conclusion, I saw through the window our old housekeeper on her

way, with her basket, to the kitchen-garden, and left the room to

ascertain if she could assist us.

To my great dismay, the housekeeper took even a more gloomy view

than Morgan of the approaching event. When I had explained all

the circumstances to her, she carefully put down her basket,

crossed her arms, and said to me in slow, deliberate, mysterious

tones:

"You want my advice about what's to be done with this young

woman? Well, sir, here's my advice: Don't you trouble your head

about her. It won't be no use. Mind, I tell you, it won't be no

use."

"What do you mean?"

"You look at this place, sir--it's more like a prison than a

house, isn't it? You, look at us as lives in it. We've got

(saving your presence) a foot apiece in our graves, haven't we?

When you was young yourself, sir, what would you have done if

they had shut you up for six weeks in such a place as this, among

your grandfathers and grandmothers, with their feet in the

grave?"

"I really can't say."

"I can, sir. You'd have run away. _She'll_ run away. Don't you

worry your head about her--she'll save you the trouble. I tell

you again, she'll run away."

With those ominous words the housekeeper took up her basket,

sighed heavily, and left me.

I sat down under a tree quite helpless. Here was the whole

responsibility shifted upon my miserable shoulders. Not a lady in

the neighborhood to whom I could apply for assistance, and the

nearest shop eight miles distant from us. The toughest case I

ever had to conduct, when I was at the Bar, was plain sailing

compared with the difficulty of receiving our fair guest.

It was absolutely necessary, however, to decide at once where she

was to sleep. All the rooms in the tower were of stone--dark,

gloomy, and cold even in the summer-time. Impossible to put her

in any one of them. The only other alternative was to lodge her

in the little modern lean-to, which I have already described as

being tacked on to the side of the old building. It contained

three cottage-rooms, and they might be made barely habitable for

a young lady. But then those rooms were occupied by Morgan. His

books were in one, his bed was in another, his pipes and general

lumber were in the third. Could I expect him, after the sour

similitudes he had used in reference to our expected visitor, to

turn out of his habitation and disarrange all his habits for her

convenience? The bare idea of proposing the thing to him seemed

ridiculous; and yet inexorable necessity left me no choice but to

make the hopeless experiment. I walked back to the tower hastily

and desperately, to face the worst that might happen before my

courage cooled altogether.

On crossing the threshold of the hall door I was stopped, to my

great amazement, by a procession of three of the farm-servants,

followed by Morgan, all walking after each other, in Indian file,

toward the spiral staircase that led to the top of the tower. The

first of the servants carried the materials for making a fire;

the second bore an inverted arm-chair on his head; the third

tottered under a heavy load of books; while Morgan came last,

with his canister of tobacco in his hand, his dressing-gown over

his shoulders, and his whole collection of pipes hugged up

together in a bundle under his arm.

"What on earth does this mean?" I inquired.

"It means taking Time by the forelock," answered Morgan, looking

at me with a smile of sour satisfaction. "I've got the start of

your young woman, Griffith, and I'm making the most of it."

"But where, in Heaven's name, are you going?" I asked, as the

head man of the procession disappeared with his firing up the

staircase.

"How high is this tower?" retorted Morgan.

"Seven stories, to be sure," I replied.

"Very good," said my eccentric brother, setting his foot on the

first stair, "I'm going up to the seventh."

"You can't," I shouted.

"_She_ can't, you mean," said Morgan, "and that's exactly why I'm

going there."

"But the room is not furnished."

"It's out of her reach."

"One of the windows has fallen to pieces."

"It's out of her reach."

"There's a crow's nest in the corner."

"It's out of her reach."

By the time this unanswerable argument had attained its third

repetition, Morgan, in his turn, had disappeared up the winding

stairs. I knew him too well to attempt any further protest.

Here was my first difficulty smoothed away most unexpectedly; for

here were the rooms in the lean-to placed by their owner's free

act and deed at my disposal. I wrote on the spot to the one

upholsterer of our distant county town to come immediately and

survey the premises, and sent off a mounted messenger with the

letter. This done, and the necessary order also dispatched to the

carpenter and glazier to set them at work on Morgan's sky-parlor

in the seventh story, I began to feel, for the first time, as if

my scattered wits were coming back to me. By the time the evening

had closed in I had hit on no less than three excellent ideas,

all providing for the future comfort and amusement of our fair

guest. The first idea was to get her a Welsh pony; the second was

to hire a piano from the county town; the third was to send for a

boxful of novels from London. I must confess I thought these

projects for pleasing her very happily conceived, and Owen agreed

with me. Morgan, as usual, took the opposite view. He said she

would yawn over the novels, turn up her nose at the piano, and

fracture her skull with the pony. As for the housekeeper, she

stuck to her text as stoutly in the evening as she had stuck to

it in the morning. "Pianner or no pianner, story-book or no

story-book, pony or no pony, you mark my words, sir--that young

woman will run away."

Such were the housekeeper's parting words when she wished me

good-night.

When the next morning came, and brought with it that terrible

waking time which sets a man's hopes and projects before him, the

great as well as the small, stripped bare of every illusion, it

is not to be concealed that I felt less sanguine of our success

in entertaining the coming guest. So far as external preparations

were concerned, there seemed, indeed, but little to improve; but

apart from these, what had we to offer, in ourselves and our

society, to attract her? There lay the knotty point of the

question, and there the grand difficulty of finding an answer.

I fall into serious reflection while I am dressing on the

pursuits and occupations with which we three brothers have been

accustomed, for years past, to beguile the time. Are they at all

likely, in the case of any one of us, to interest or amuse her?

My chief occupation, to begin with the youngest, consists, in

acting as steward on Owen's property. The routine of my duties

has never lost its sober attraction to my tastes, for it has

always employed me in watching the best interests of my brother,

and of my son also, who is one day to be his heir. But can I

expect our fair guest to sympathize with such family concerns as

these? Clearly not.

Morgan's pursuit comes next in order of review--a pursuit of a

far more ambitious nature than mine. It was always part of my

second brother's whimsical, self-contradictory character to view

with the profoundest contempt the learned profession by which he

gained his livelihood, and he is now occupying the long leisure

hours of his old age in composing a voluminous treatise,

intended, one of these days, to eject the whole body corporate of

doctors from the position which they have usurped in the

estimation of their fellow-creatures. This daring work is

entitled "An Examination of the Claims of Medicine on the

Gratitude of Mankind. Decided in the Negative by a Retired

Physician." So far as I can tell, the book is likely to extend to

the dimensions of an Encyclopedia; for it is Morgan's plan to

treat his comprehensive subject principally from the historical

point of view, and to run down all the doctors of antiquity, one

after another, in regular succession, from the first of the

tribe. When I last heard of his progress he was hard on the heels

of Hippocrates, but had no immediate prospect of tripping up his

successor, Is this the sort of occupation (I ask myself) in which

a modern young lady is likely to feel the slightest interest?

Once again, clearly not.

Owen's favorite employment is, in its way, quite as

characteristic as Morgan's, and it has the great additional

advantage of appealing to a much larger variety of tastes. My

eldest brother--great at drawing and painting when he was a lad,

always interested in artists and their works in after life--has

resumed, in his declining years, the holiday occupation of his

schoolboy days. As an amateur landscape-painter, he works with

more satisfaction to himself, uses more color, wears out more

brushes, and makes a greater smell of paint in his studio than

any artist by profession, native or foreign, whom I ever met

with. In look, in manner, and in disposition, the gentlest of

mankind, Owen, by some singular anomaly in his character, which

he seems to have caught from Morgan, glories placidly in the

wildest and most frightful range of subjects which his art is

capable of representing. Immeasurable ruins, in howling

wildernesses, with blood-red sunsets gleaming over them;

thunder-clouds rent with lightning, hovering over splitting trees

on the verges of awful precipices; hurricanes, shipwrecks, waves,

and whirlpools follow each other on his canvas, without an

intervening glimpse of quiet everyday nature to relieve the

succession of pictorial horrors. When I see him at his easel, so

neat and quiet, so unpretending and modest in himself, with such

a composed expression on his attentive face, with such a weak

white hand to guide such bold, big brushes, and when I look at

the frightful canvasful of terrors which he is serenely

aggravating in fierceness and intensity with every successive

touch, I find it difficult to realize the connection between my

brother and his work, though I see them before me not six inches

apart. Will this quaint spectacle possess any humorous

attractions for Miss Jessie? Perhaps it may. There is some slight

chance that Owen's employment will be lucky enough to interest

her.

Thus far my morning cogitations advance doubtfully enough, but

they altogether fail in carrying me beyond the narrow circle of

The Glen Tower. I try hard, in our visitor's interest, to look

into the resources of the little world around us, and I find my

efforts rewarded by the prospect of a total blank.

Is there any presentable living soul in the neighborhood whom we

can invite to meet her? Not one. There are, as I have already

said, no country seats near us; and society in the county town

has long since learned to regard us as three misanthropes,

strongly suspected, from our monastic way of life and our dismal

black costume, of being popish priests in disguise. In other

parts of England the clergyman of the parish might help us out of

our difficulty; but here in South Wales, and in this latter half

of the nineteenth century, we have the old type parson of the

days of Fielding still in a state of perfect preservation. Our

local clergyman receives a stipend which is too paltry to bear

comparison with the wages of an ordinary mechanic. In dress,

manners, and tastes he is about on a level with the upper class

of agricultural laborer. When attempts have been made by

well-meaning gentlefolks to recognize the claims of his

profession by asking him to their houses, he has been known, on

more than one occasion, to leave his plowman's pair of shoes in

the hall, and enter the drawing-room respectfully in his

stockings. Where he preaches, miles and miles away from us and

from the poor cottage in which he lives, if he sees any of the

company in the squire's pew yawn or fidget in their places, he

takes it as a hint that they are tired of listening, and closes

his sermon instantly at the end of the sentence. Can we ask this

most irreverend and unclerical of men to meet a young lady? I

doubt, even if we made the attempt, whether we should succeed, by

fair means, in getting him beyond the servants' hall.

Dismissing, therefore, all idea of inviting visitors to entertain

our guest, and feeling, at the same time, more than doubtful of

her chance of discovering any attraction in the sober society of

the inmates of the house, I finish my dressing and go down to

breakfast, secretly veering round to the housekeeper's opinion

that Miss Jessie will really bring matters to an abrupt

conclusion by running away. I find Morgan as bitterly resigned to

his destiny

as ever, and Owen so affectionately anxious to make himself of

some use, and so lamentably ignorant of how to begin, that I am

driven to disembarrass myself of him at the outset by a

stratagem.

I suggest to him that our visitor is sure to be interested in

pictures, and that it would be a pretty attention, on his part,

to paint her a landscape to hang up in her room. Owen brightens

directly, informs me in his softest tones that he is then at work

on the Earthquake at Lisbon, and inquires whether I think she

would like that subject. I preserve my gravity sufficiently to

answer in the affirmative, and my brother retires meekly to his

studio, to depict the engulfing of a city and the destruction of

a population. Morgan withdraws in his turn to the top of the

tower, threatening, when our guest comes, to draw all his meals

up to his new residence by means of a basket and string. I am

left alone for an hour, and then the upholsterer arrives from the

county town.

This worthy man, on being informed of our emergency, sees his

way, apparently, to a good stroke of business, and thereupon wins

my lasting gratitude by taking, in opposition to every one else,

a bright and hopeful view of existing circumstances.

"You'll excuse me, sir," he says, confidentially, when I show him

the rooms in the lean-to, "but this is a matter of experience.

I'm a family man myself, with grown-up daughters of my own, and

the natures of young women are well known to me. Make their rooms

comfortable, and you make 'em happy. Surround their lives, sir,

with a suitable atmosphere of furniture, and you never hear a

word of complaint drop from their lips. Now, with regard to these

rooms, for example, sir--you put a neat French bedstead in that

corner, with curtains conformable--say a tasty chintz; you put on

that bedstead what I will term a sufficiency of bedding; and you

top up with a sweet little eider-down quilt, as light as roses,

and similar the same in color. You do that, and what follows? You

please her eye when she lies down at night, and you please her

eye when she gets up in the morning--and you're all right so far,

and so is she. I will not dwell, sir, on the toilet-table, nor

will I seek to detain you about the glass to show her figure, and

the other glass to show her face, because I have the articles in

stock, and will be myself answerable for their effect on a lady's

mind and person."

He led the way into the next room as he spoke, and arranged its

future fittings, and decorations, as he had already planned out

the bedroom, with the strictest reference to the connection which

experience had shown him to exist between comfortable furniture

and female happiness.

Thus far, in my helpless state of mind, the man's confidence had

impressed me in spite of myself, and I had listened to him in

superstitious silence. But as he continued to rise, by regular

gradations, from one climax of upholstery to another, warning

visions of his bill disclosed themselves in the remote background

of the scene of luxury and magnificence which my friend was

conjuring up. Certain sharp professional instincts of bygone

times resumed their influence over me; I began to start doubts

and ask questions; and as a necessary consequence the interview

between us soon assumed something like a practical form.

Having ascertained what the probable expense of furnishing would

amount to and having discovered that the process of transforming

the lean-to (allowing for the time required to procure certain

articles of rarity from Bristol) would occupy nearly a fortnight,

I dismissed the upholsterer with the understanding that I should

take a day or two for consideration, and let him know the result.

It was then the fifth of September, and our Queen of Hearts was

to arrive on the twentieth. The work, therefore, if it was begun

on the seventh or eighth, would be begun in time.

In making all my calculations with a reference to the twentieth

of September, I relied implicitly, it will be observed, on a

young lady's punctuality in keeping an appointment which she had

herself made. I can only account for such extraordinary

simplicity on my part on the supposition that my wits had become

sadly rusted by long seclusion from society. Whether it was

referable to this cause or not, my innocent trustfulness was at

any rate destined to be practically rebuked before long in the

most surprising manner. Little did I suspect, when I parted from

the upholsterer on the fifth of the month, what the tenth of the

month had in store for me.

On the seventh I made up my mind to have the bedroom furnished at

once, and to postpone the question of the sitting-room for a few

days longer. Having dispatched the necessary order to that

effect, I next wrote to hire the piano and to order the box of

novels. This done, I congratulated myself on the forward state of

the preparations, and sat down to repose in the atmosphere of my

own happy delusions.

On the ninth the wagon arrived with the furniture, and the men

set to work on the bedroom. From this moment Morgan retired

definitely to the top of the tower, and Owen became too nervous

to lay the necessary amount of paint on the Earthquake at Lisbon.

On the tenth the work was proceeding bravely. Toward noon Owen

and I strolled to the door to enjoy the fine autumn sunshine. We

were sitting lazily on our favorite bench in front of the tower

when we were startled by a shout from above us. Looking up

directly, we saw Morgan half in and half out of his narrow window

In the seventh story, gesticulating violently with the stem of

his long meerschaum pipe in the direction of the road below us.

We gazed eagerly in the quarter thus indicated, but our low

position prevented us for some time from seeing anything. At last

we both discerned an old yellow post-chaise distinctly and

indisputably approaching us.

Owen and I looked at one another in panic-stricken silence. It

was coming to us--and what did it contain? Do pianos travel in

chaises? Are boxes of novels conveyed to their destination by a

postilion? We expected the piano and expected the novels, but

nothing else--unquestionably nothing else.

The chaise took the turn in the road, passed through the gateless

gap in our rough inclosure-wall of loose stone, and rapidly

approached us. A bonnet appeared at the window and a hand gayly

waved a white handkerchief.

Powers of caprice, confusion, and dismay! It was Jessie Yelverton

herself--arriving, without a word of warning, exactly ten days

before her time.

CHAPTER III.

OUR QUEEN OF' HEARTS.

THE chaise stopped in front of us, and before we had recovered

from our bewilderment the gardener had opened the door and let

down the steps.

A bright, laughing face, prettily framed round by a black veil

passed over the head and tied under the chin--a traveling-dress

of a nankeen color, studded with blue buttons and trimmed with

white braid--a light brown cloak over it--little neatly-gloved

hands, which seized in an instant on one of mine and on one of

Owen's--two dark blue eyes, which seemed to look us both through

and through in a moment--a clear, full, merrily confident

voice--a look and manner gayly and gracefully

self-possessed--such were the characteristics of our fair guest

which first struck me at the moment when she left the postchaise

and possessed herself of my hand.

"Don't begin by scolding me," she said, before I could utter a

word of welcome. "There will be time enough for that in the

course of the next six weeks. I beg pardon, with all possible

humility, for the offense of coming ten days before my time.

Don't ask me to account for it, please; if you do, I shall be

obliged to confess the truth. My dear sir, the fact is, this is

an act of impulse."

She paused, and looked us both in the face with a bright

confidence in her own flow of nonsense that was perfectly

irresistible.

"I must tell you all about it," she ran on, leading the way to

the bench, and inviting us, by a little mock gesture of

supplication, to seat ourselves on either side of her. "I feel so

guilty till I've told you. Dear me! how nice this is! Here I am

quite at home already. Isn't it odd? Well, and how do you think

it happene d? The morning before yesterday Matilda--there is

Matilda, picking up my bonnet from the bottom of that remarkably

musty carriage--Matilda came and woke me as usual, and I hadn't

an idea in my head, I assure you, till she began to brush my

hair. Can you account for it?--I can't--but she seemed, somehow,

to brush a sudden fancy for coming here into my head. When I went

down to breakfast, I said to my aunt, 'Darling, I have an

irresistible impulse to go to Wales at once, instead of waiting

till the twentieth.' She made all the necessary objections, poor

dear, and my impulse got stronger and stronger with every one of

them. 'I'm quite certain,' I said, 'I shall never go at all if I

don't go now.' 'In that case,' says my aunt, 'ring the bell, and

have your trunks packed. Your whole future depends on your going;

and you terrify me so inexpressibly that I shall be glad to get

rid of you.' You may not think it, to look at her--but Matilda is

a treasure; and in three hours more I was on the Great Western

Railway. I have not the least idea how I got here--except that

the men helped me everywhere. They are always such delightful

creatures! I have been casting myself, and my maid, and my trunks

on their tender mercies at every point in the journey, and their

polite attentions exceed all belief. I slept at your horrid

little county town last night; and the night before I missed a

steamer or a train, I forget which, and slept at Bristol; and

that's how I got here. And, now I am here, I ought to give my

guardian a kiss--oughtn't I? Shall I call you papa? I think I

will. And shall I call _you_ uncle, sir, and give you a kiss too?

We shall come to it sooner or later--shan't we?--and we may as

well begin at once, I suppose."

Her fresh young lips touched my old withered cheek first, and

then Owen's; a soft, momentary shadow of tenderness, that was

very pretty and becoming, passing quickly over the sunshine and

gayety of her face as she saluted us. The next moment she was on

her feet again, inquiring "who the wonderful man was who built

The Glen Tower," and wanting to go all over it immediately from

top to bottom.

As we took her into the house, I made the necessary apologies for

the miserable condition of the lean-to, and assured her that, ten

days later, she would have found it perfectly ready to receive

her. She whisked into the rooms--looked all round them--whisked

out again--declared she had come to live in the old Tower, and

not in any modern addition to it, and flatly declined to inhabit

the lean-to on any terms whatever. I opened my lips to state

certain objections, but she slipped away in an instant and made

straight for the Tower staircase.

"Who lives here?" she asked, calling down to us, eagerly, from

the first-floor landing.

"I do," said Owen; "but, if you would like me to move out--"

She was away up the second flight before he could say any more.

The next sound we heard, as we slowly followed her, was a

peremptory drumming against the room door of the second story.

"Anybody here?" we heard her ask through the door.

I called up to her that, under ordinary circumstances, I was

there; but that, like Owen, I should be happy to move out--

My polite offer was cut short as my brother's had been. We heard

more drumming at the door of the third story. There were two

rooms here also--one perfectly empty, the other stocked with odds

and ends of dismal, old-fashioned furniture for which we had no

use, and grimly ornamented by a life-size basket figure

supporting a complete suit of armor in a sadly rusty condition.

When Owen and I got to the third-floor landing, the door was

open; Miss Jessie had taken possession of the rooms; and we found

her on a chair, dusting the man in armor with her cambric

pocket-handkerchief.

"I shall live here," she said, looking round at us briskly over

her shoulder.

We both remonstrated, but it was quite in vain. She told us that

she had an impulse to live with the man in armor, and that she

would have her way, or go back immediately in the post-chaise,

which we pleased. Finding it impossible to move her, we bargained

that she should, at least, allow the new bed and the rest of the

comfortable furniture in the lean-to to be moved up into the

empty room for her sleeping accommodation. She consented to this

condition, protesting, however, to the last against being

compelled to sleep in a bed, because it was a modern

conventionality, out of all harmony with her place of residence

and her friend in armor.

Fortunately for the repose of Morgan, who, under other

circumstances, would have discovered on the very first day that

his airy retreat was by no means high enough to place him out of

Jessie's reach, the idea of settling herself instantly in her new

habitation excluded every other idea from the mind of our fair

guest. She pinned up the nankeen-colored traveling dress in

festoons all round her on the spot; informed us that we were now

about to make acquaintance with her in the new character of a

woman of business; and darted downstairs in mad high spirits,

screaming for Matilda and the trunks like a child for a set of

new toys. The wholesome protest of Nature against the artificial

restraints of modern life expressed itself in all that she said

and in all that she did. She had never known what it was to be

happy before, because she had never been allowed, until now, to

do anything for herself. She was down on her knees at one moment,

blowing the fire, and telling us that she felt like Cinderella;

she was up on a table the next, attacking the cobwebs with a long

broom, and wishing she had been born a housemaid. As for my

unfortunate friend, the upholsterer, he was leveled to the ranks

at the first effort he made to assume the command of the domestic

forces in the furniture department. She laughed at him, pushed

him about, disputed all his conclusions, altered all his

arrangements, and ended by ordering half his bedroom furniture to

be taken back again, for the one unanswerable reason that she

meant to do without it.

As evening approached, the scene presented by the two rooms

became eccentric to a pitch of absurdity which is quite

indescribable. The grim, ancient walls of the bedroom had the

liveliest modern dressing-gowns and morning-wrappers hanging all

about them. The man in armor had a collection of smart little

boots and shoes dangling by laces and ribbons round his iron

legs. A worm-eaten, steel-clasped casket, dragged out of a

corner, frowned on the upholsterer's brand-new toilet-table, and

held a miscellaneous assortment of combs, hairpins, and brushes.

Here stood a gloomy antique chair, the patriarch of its tribe,

whose arms of blackened oak embraced a pair of pert, new deal

bonnet-boxes not a fortnight old. There, thrown down lightly on a

rugged tapestry table-cover, the long labor of centuries past,

lay the brief, delicate work of a week ago in the shape of silk

and muslin dresses turned inside out. In the midst of all these

confusions and contradictions, Miss Jessie ranged to and fro, the

active center of the whole scene of disorder, now singing at the

top of her voice, and now declaring in her lighthearted way that

one of us must make up his mind to marry her immediately, as she

was determined to settle for the rest of her life at The Glen

Tower.

She followed up that announcement, when we met at dinner, by

inquiring if we quite understood by this time that she had left

her "company manners" in London, and that she meant to govern us

all at her absolute will and pleasure, throughout the whole

period of her stay. Having thus provided at the outset for the

due recognition of her authority by the household generally and

individually having briskly planned out all her own forthcoming

occupations and amusements over the wine and fruit at dessert,

and having positively settled, between her first and second cups

of tea, where our connection with them was to begin and where it

was to end, she had actually succeeded, when the time came to

separate for the night, in setting us as much at our ease, and in

making herself as completely a necessary part of our household as

if she had lived among us for years and years past.

Such was our first day's experience of the formidable guest whose

anticipated visit had so sorely and so absurdly discomposed us

all. I could hardly believe that I had actually wasted hours of

precious time in worrying myself and everybody else in the house

about the best means of laboriously entertaining a lively,

high-spirited girl, who was perfectly capable, without an effort

on her own part or on ours, of entertaining herself.

Having upset every one of our calculations on the first day of

her arrival, she next falsified all our predictions before she

had been with us a week. Instead of fracturing her skull with the

pony, as Morgan had prophesied, she sat the sturdy, sure-footed,

mischievous little brute as if she were part and parcel of

himself. With an old water-proof cloak of mine on her shoulders,

with a broad-flapped Spanish hat of Owen's on her head, with a

wild imp of a Welsh boy following her as guide and groom on a

bare-backed pony, and with one of the largest and ugliest

cur-dogs in England (which she had picked up, lost and starved by

the wayside) barking at her heels, she scoured the country in all

directions, and came back to dinner, as she herself expressed it,

"with the manners of an Amazon, the complexion of a dairy-maid,

and the appetite of a wolf."

On days when incessant rain kept her indoors, she amused herself

with a new freak. Making friends everywhere, as became The Queen

of Hearts, she even ingratiated herself with the sour old

housekeeper, who had predicted so obstinately that she was

certain to run away. To the amazement of everybody in the house,

she spent hours in the kitchen, learning to make puddings and

pies, and trying all sorts of recipes with very varying success,

from an antiquated cookery book which she had discovered at the

back of my bookshelves. At other times, when I expected her to be

upstairs, languidly examining her finery, and idly polishing her

trinkets, I heard of her in the stables, feeding the rabbits, and

talking to the raven, or found her in the conservatory,

fumigating the plants, and half suffocating the gardener, who was

trying to moderate her enthusiasm in the production of smoke.

Instead of finding amusement, as we had expected, in Owen's

studio, she puckered up her pretty face in grimaces of disgust at

the smell of paint in the room, and declared that the horrors of

the Earthquake at Lisbon made her feel hysterical. Instead of

showing a total want of interest in my business occupations on

the estate, she destroyed my dignity as steward by joining me in

my rounds on her pony, with her vagabond retinue at her heels.

Instead of devouring the novels I had ordered for her, she left

them in the box, and put her feet on it when she felt sleepy

after a hard day's riding. Instead of practicing for hours every

evening at the piano, which I had hired with such a firm

conviction of her using it, she showed us tricks on the cards,

taught us new games, initiated us into the mystics of dominoes,

challenged us with riddles, an even attempted to stimulate us

into acting charades--in short, tried every evening amusement in

the whole category except the amusement of music. Every new

aspect of her character was a new surprise to us, and every fresh

occupation that she chose was a fresh contradiction to our

previous expectations. The value of experience as a guide is

unquestionable in many of the most important affairs of life;

but, speaking for myself personally, I never understood the utter

futility of it, where a woman is concerned, until I was brought

into habits of daily communication with our fair guest.

In her domestic relations with ourselves she showed that

exquisite nicety of discrimination in studying our characters,

habits and tastes which comes by instinct with women, and which

even the longest practice rarely teaches in similar perfection to

men. She saw at a glance all the underlying tenderness and

generosity concealed beneath Owen's external shyness,

irresolution, and occasional reserve; and, from first to last,

even in her gayest moments, there was always a certain

quietly-implied consideration--an easy, graceful, delicate

deference--in her manner toward my eldest brother, which won upon

me and upon him every hour in the day.

With me she was freer in her talk, quicker in her actions,

readier and bolder in all the thousand little familiarities of

our daily intercourse. When we met in the morning she always took

Owen's hand, and waited till he kissed her on the forehead. In my

case she put both her hands on my shoulders, raised herself on

tiptoe, and saluted me briskly on both checks in the foreign way.

She never differed in opinion with Owen without propitiating him

first by some little artful compliment in the way of excuse. She

argued boldly with me on every subject under the sun, law and

politics included; and, when I got the better of her, never

hesitated to stop me by putting her hand on my lips, or by

dragging me out into the garden in the middle of a sentence.

As for Morgan, she abandoned all restraint in his case on the

second day of her sojourn among us. She had asked after him as

soon as she was settled in her two rooms on the third story; had

insisted on knowing why he lived at the top of the tower, and why

he had not appeared to welcome her at the door; had entrapped us

into all sorts of damaging admissions, and had thereupon

discovered the true state of the case in less than five minutes.

From that time my unfortunate second brother became the victim of

all that was mischievous and reckless in her disposition. She

forced him downstairs by a series of maneuvers which rendered his

refuge uninhabitable, and then pretended to fall violently in

love with him. She slipped little pink three-cornered notes under

his door, entreating him to make appointments with her, or

tenderly inquiring how he would like to see her hair dressed at

dinner on that day. She followed him into the garden, sometimes

to ask for the privilege of smelling his tobacco-smoke, sometimes

to beg for a lock of his hair, or a fragment of his ragged old

dressing-gown, to put among her keepsakes. She sighed at him when

he was in a passion, and put her handkerchief to her eyes when he

was sulky. In short, she tormented Morgan, whenever she could

catch him, with such ingenious and such relentless malice, that

he actually threatened to go back to London, and prey once more,

in the unscrupulous character of a doctor, on the credulity of

mankind.

Thus situated in her relations toward ourselves, and thus

occupied by country diversions of her own choosing, Miss Jessie

passed her time at The Glen Tower, excepting now and then a dull

hour in the long evenings, to her guardian's satisfaction--and,

all things considered, not without pleasure to herself. Day

followed day in calm and smooth succession, and five quiet weeks

had elapsed out of the six during which her stay was to last

without any remarkable occurrence to distinguish them, when an

event happened which personally affected me in a very serious

manner, and which suddenly caused our handsome Queen of Hearts to

become the object of my deepest anxiety in the present, and of my

dearest hopes for the future.

CHAPTER IV.

OUR GRAND PROJECT.

AT the end of the fifth week of our guest's stay, among the

letters which the morning's post brought to The Glen Tower there

was one for me, from my son George, in the Crimea.

The effect which this letter produced in our little circle

renders it necessary that I should present it here, to speak for

itself.

This is what I read alone in my own room:

"MY DEAREST FATHER--After the great public news of the fall of

Sebastopol, have you any ears left for small items of private

intelligence from insignificant subaltern officers? Prepare, if

you have, for a sudden and a startling announcement. How shall I

write the words? How shall I tell you that I am really coming

home?

"I have a private opportunity of sending this letter, and only a

short time to write it in; so I must put many things, if I can,

into few words. The doctor has reported me fit to travel at last,

and I leave, thanks to the privilege of a wounded man, by the

next ship. The name of the vessel and the time of starting are on

the list which I inclose. I have made all my calculations, and,

allowing for every possible delay, I find that I shall be with

you, at the latest, on the first of November--perhaps some days

earlier.

"I am far too full of my return, and of something else connected

with it which is equally dear to me, to say anything about public

affairs, more especially as I know that the newspapers must, by

this time, have given you plenty of information. Let me fill the

rest of this paper with a subject which is very near to my

heart--nearer, I am almost ashamed to say, than the great triumph

of my countrymen, in which my disabled condition has prevented me

from taking any share.

"I gathered from your last letter that Miss Yelverton was to pay

you a visit this autumn, in your capacity of her guardian. If she

is already with you, pray move heaven and earth to keep her at

The Glen Tower till I come back. Do you anticipate my confession

from this entreaty? My dear, dear father, all my hopes rest on

that one darling treasure which you are guarding perhaps, at this

moment, under your own roof--all my happiness depends on making

Jessie Yelverton my wife.

"If I did not sincerely believe that you will heartily approve of

my choice, I should hardly have ventured on this abrupt

confession. Now that I have made it, let me go on and tell you

why I have kept my attachment up to this time a secret from every

one--even from Jessie herself. (You see I call her by her

Christian name already!)

"I should have risked everything, father, and have laid my whole

heart open before her more than a year ago, but for the order

which sent our regiment out to take its share in this great

struggle of the Russian war. No ordinary change in my life would

have silenced me on the subject of all others of which I was most

anxious to speak; but this change made me think seriously of the

future; and out of those thoughts came the resolution which I

have kept until this time. For her sake, and for her sake only, I

constrained myself to leave the words unspoken which might have

made her my promised wife. I resolved to spare her the dreadful

suspense of waiting for her betrothed husband till the perils of

war might, or might not, give him back to her. I resolved to save

her from the bitter grief of my death if a bullet laid me low. I

resolved to preserve her from the wretched sacrifice of herself

if I came back, as many a brave man will come back from this war,

invalided for life. Leaving her untrammeled by any engagement,

unsuspicious perhaps of my real feelings toward her, I might die,

and know that, by keeping silence, I had spared a pang to the

heart that was dearest to me. This was the thought that stayed

the words on my lips when I left England, uncertain whether I

should ever come back. If I had loved her less dearly, if her

happiness had been less precious to me, I might have given way

under the hard restraint I imposed on myself, and might have

spoken selfishly at the last moment.

"And now the time of trial is past; the war is over; and,

although I still walk a little lame, I am, thank God, in as good

health and in much better spirits than when I left home. Oh,

father, if I should lose her now--if I should get no reward for

sparing her but the bitterest of all disappointments! Sometimes I

am vain enough to think that I made some little impression on

her; sometimes I doubt if she has a suspicion of my love. She

lives in a gay world--she is the center of perpetual

admiration--men with all the qualities to win a woman's heart are

perpetually about her--can I, dare I hope? Yes, I must! Only keep

her, I entreat you, at The Glen Tower. In that quiet world, in

that freedom from frivolities and temptations, she will listen to

me as she might listen nowhere else. Keep her, my dearest,

kindest father--and, above all things, breathe not a word to her

of this letter. I have surely earned the privilege of being the

first to open her eyes to the truth. She must know nothing, now

that I am coming home, till she knows all from my own lips."

Here the writing hurriedly broke off. I am only giving myself

credit for common feeling, I trust, when I confess that what I

read deeply affected me. I think I never felt so fond of my boy,

and so proud of him, as at the moment when I laid down his

letter.

As soon as I could control my spirits, I began to calculate the

question of time with a trembling eagerness, which brought back

to my mind my own young days of love and hope. My son was to come

back, at the latest, on the first of November, and Jessie's

allotted six weeks would expire on the twenty-second of October.

Ten days too soon! But for the caprice which had brought her to

us exactly that number of days before her time she would have

been in the house, as a matter of necessity, on George's return.

I searched back in my memory for a conversation that I had held

with her a week since on her future plans. Toward the middle of

November, her aunt, Lady Westwick, had arranged to go to her

house in Paris, and Jessie was, of course, to accompany her--to

accompany her into that very circle of the best English and the

best French society which contained in it the elements most

adverse to George's hopes. Between this time and that she had no

special engagement, and she had only settled to write and warn

her aunt of her return to London a day or two before she left The

Glen Tower.

Under these circumstances, the first, the all-important necessity

was to prevail on her to prolong her stay beyond the allotted six

weeks by ten days. After the caution to be silent impressed on me

(and most naturally, poor boy) in George's letter, I felt that I

could only appeal to her on the ordinary ground of hospitality.

Would this be sufficient to effect the object?

I was sure that the hours of the morning and the afternoon had,

thus far, been fully and happily occupied by her various

amusements indoors and out. She was no more weary of her days now

than she had been when she first came among us. But I was by no

means so certain that she was not tired of her evenings. I had

latterly noticed symptoms of weariness after the lamps were lit,

and a suspicious regularity in retiring to bed the moment the

clock struck ten. If I could provide her with a new amusement for

the long evenings, I might leave the days to take care of

themselves, and might then make sure (seeing that she had no

special engagement in London until the middle of November) of her

being sincerely thankful and ready to prolong her stay.

How was this to be done? The piano and the novels had both failed

to attract her. What other amusement was there to offer?

It was useless, at present, to ask myself such questions as

these. I was too much agitated to think collectedly on the most

trifling subjects. I was even too restless to stay in my own

room. My son's letter had given me so fresh an interest in Jessie

that I was now as impatient to see her as if we were about to

meet for the first time. I wanted to look at her with my new

eyes, to listen to her with my new ears, to study her secretly

with my new purposes, and my new hopes and fears. To my dismay

(for I wanted the very weather itself to favor George's

interests), it was raining heavily that morning. I knew,

therefore, that I should probably find her in her own

sitting-room. When I knocked at her door, with George's letter

crumpled up in my hand, with George's hopes in full possession of

my heart, it is no exaggeration to say that my nerves were almost

as much fluttered, and my ideas almost as much confused, as they

were on a certain memorable day in the far past, when I rose, in

brand-new wig and gown, to set my future prospects at the bar on

the hazard of my first speech.

When I entered the room I found Jessie leaning back languidly in

her largest arm-chair, watching the raindrops dripping down the

window-pane. The unfortunate box of novels was open by her side,

and the books were lying, for the most part, strewed about on the

ground at her feet. One volume lay open, back upward, on her lap,

and her hands were crossed over it listlessly. To my great

dismay, she was yawning--palpably and widely yawning--when I came

in.

No sooner did I find myself in her presence than an irresistible

anxiety to make some secret discovery of the real state of her

feelings toward George took possession of me. After the customary

condolences on the imprisonment to which she was subjected by the

weather, I said, in as careless a manner as it was possible to

assume:

"I have heard from my son this morning. He talks of being ordered

home, and tells me I may expect to see him before the end of the

year."

I was too cautious to mention the exact date of his return, for

in that case she might have detected my motive for asking her to

prolong her visit.

"Oh, indeed?" she said. "How very nice. How glad you must be."

I watched her narrowly. The clear, dark blue eyes met mine as

openly as ever. The smooth, round cheeks kept their fresh color

quite unchanged. The full, good-humored, smiling lips never

trembled or altered their expression in the slightest degree. Her

light checked silk dress, with its pretty trimming of

cherry-colored ribbon, lay quite still over the bosom beneath it.

For all the information I could get from her look and manner, we

might as well have been a hundred miles apart from each other. Is

the best woman in the world little better than a fathomless abyss

of duplicity on certain occasions, and where certain feelings of

her own are concerned? I would rather not think that; and yet I

don't know how to account otherwise for the masterly manner in

which Miss Jessie contrived to baffle me.

I was afraid--literally afraid--to broach the subject of

prolonging her sojourn with us on a rainy day, so I changed the

topic, in despair, to the novels that were scattered about her.

"Can you find nothing there," I asked, "to amuse you this wet

morning?"

"There are two or three good novels," she said, carelessly, "but

I read them before I left London."

"And the others won't even do for a dull day in the country?" I

went on.

"They might do for some people," she answered, "but not for me.

I'm rather peculiar, perhaps, in my tastes. I'm sick to death of

novels with an earnest purpose. I'm sick to death of outbursts of

eloquence, and large-minded philanthropy, and graphic

descriptions, and unsparing anatomy of the human heart, and all

that sort of thing. Good gracious me! isn't it the original

intention or purpose, or whatever you call it, of a work of

fiction, to set out distinctly by telling a story? And how many

of these books, I should like to know, do that? Why, so far as

telling a story is concerned, the greater part of them might as

well be sermons as novels. Oh, dear me! what I want is something

that seizes hold of my interest, and makes me forget when it is

time to dress for dinner--something that keeps me reading,

reading, reading, in a breathless state to find out the end. You

know what I mean--at least you ought. Why, there was that little

chance story you told me yesterday in the garden--don't you

remember?--about your strange client, whom you never saw again: I

declare it was much more interesting than half these novels,

_because_ it was a story. Tell me another about your young days,

when you were seeing the world, and meeting with all sorts of

remarkable people. Or, no--don't tell it now--keep it till the

evening, when we all want something to stir us up. You old people

might amuse us young ones out of your own resources oftener than

you do. It was very kind of you to get me these books; but, with

all respect to them, I would rather have the rummaging of your

memory than the rummaging of this box. What's the matter? Are you

afraid I have found out the window in your bosom already?"

I had half risen from my chair at her last words, and I felt that

my face must have flushed at the same moment. She had started an

idea in my mind--the very idea of which I had been in search when

I was pondering over the best means of amusing her in the long

autumn evenings.

I parried her questions by the best excuses I could offer;

changed the conversation for the next five minutes, and then,

making a sudden remembrance of business my apology for leaving

her, hastily withdrew to devote myself to the new idea in the

solitude of my own room.

A little quiet thinking convinced me that I had discovered a

means not only of occupying her idle time, but of decoying her

into staying on with us, evening by evening, until my son's

return. The new project which she had herself unconsciously

suggested involved nothing less than acting forthwith on her own

chance hint, and appealing to her interest and curiosity by the

recital of incidents and adventures drawn from my own personal

experience and (if I could get them to help me) from the

experience of my brothers as well. Strange people and startling

events had connected themselves with Owen's past life as a

clergyman, with Morgan's past life as a doctor, and with my past

life as a lawyer, which offered elements of interest of a strong

and striking kind ready to our hands. If these narratives were

written plainly and unpretendingly; if one of them was read every

evening, under circumstances that should pique the curiosity and

impress the imagination of our young guest, the very occupation

was found for her weary hours which would gratify her tastes,

appeal to her natural interest in the early lives of my brothers

and myself, and lure her insensibly into prolonging her visit by

ten days without exciting a suspicion of our real motive for

detaining her.

I sat down at my desk; I hid my face in my hands to keep out all

impressions of external and present things; and I searched back

through the mysterious labyrinth of the Past, through the dun,

ever-deepening twilight of the years that were gone.

Slowly, out of the awful shadows, the Ghosts of Memory rose about

me. The dead population of a vanished world came back to life

round me, a living man. Men and women whose earthly pilgrimage

had ended long since, returned upon me from the unknown spheres,

and fond, familiar voices burst their way back to my ears through

the heavy silence of the grave. Moving by me in the nameless

inner light, which no eye saw but mine, the dead procession of

immaterial scenes and beings unrolled its silent length. I saw

once more the pleading face of a friend of early days, with the

haunting vision that had tortured him through life by his side

again--with the long-forgotten despair in his eyes which had once

touched my heart, and bound me to him, till I had tracked his

destiny through its darkest windings to the end. I saw the figure

of an innocent woman passing to and fro in an ancient country

house, with the shadow of a strange suspicion stealing after her

wherever she went. I saw a man worn by hardship and old age,

stretched dreaming on the straw of a stable, and muttering in his

dream the terrible secret of his life.

Other scenes and persons followed these, less vivid in their

revival, but still always recognizable and distinct; a young girl

alone by night, and in peril of her life, in a cottage on a

dreary moor--an upper chamber of an inn, with two beds in it; the

curtains of one bed closed, and a man standing by them, waiting,

yet dreading to draw them back--a husband secretly following the

first traces of a mystery which his wife's anxious love had

fatally hidden from him since the day when they first met; these,

and other visions like them, shadowy reflections of the living

beings and the real events that had been once, peopled the

solitude and the emptiness around me. They haunted me still when

I tried to break the chain of thought which my own efforts had

wound about my mind; they followed me to and fro in the room; and

they came out with me when I left it. I had lifted the veil from

the Past for myself, and I was now to rest no more till I had

lifted it for others.

I went at once to my eldest brother and showed him my son's

letter, and told him all that I have written here. His kind heart

was touched as mine had been. He felt for my suspense; he shared

my anxiety; he laid aside his own occupation on the spot.

"Only tell me," he said, "how I can help, and I will give every h

our in the day to you and to George."

I had come to him with my mind almost as full of his past life as

of my own; I recalled to his memory events in his experience as a

working clergyman in London; I set him looking among papers which

he had preserved for half his lifetime, and the very existence of

which he had forgotten long since; I recalled to him the names of

persons to whose necessities he had ministered in his sacred

office, and whose stories he had heard from their own lips or

received under their own handwriting. When we parted he was

certain of what he was wanted to do, and was resolute on that

very day to begin the work.

I went to Morgan next, and appealed to him as I had already

appealed to Owen. It was only part of his odd character to start

all sorts of eccentric objections in reply; to affect a cynical

indifference, which he was far from really and truly feeling; and

to indulge in plenty of quaint sarcasm on the subject of Jessie

and his nephew George. I waited till these little

surface-ebullitions had all expended themselves, and then pressed

my point again with the earnestness and anxiety that I really

felt.

Evidently touched by the manner of my appeal to him even more

than by the language in which it was expressed, Morgan took

refuge in his customary abruptness, spread out his paper

violently on the table, seized his pen and ink, and told me quite

fiercely to give him his work and let him tackle it at once.

I set myself to recall to his memory some very remarkable

experiences of his own in his professional days, but he stopped

me before I had half done.

"I understand," he said, taking a savage dip at the ink, "I'm to

make her flesh creep, and to frighten her out of her wits. I'll

do it with a vengeance!"

Reserving to myself privately an editorial right of supervision

over Morgan's contributions, I returned to my own room to begin

my share--by far the largest one--of the task before us. The

stimulus applied to my mind by my son's letter must have been a

strong one indeed, for I had hardly been more than an hour at my

desk before I found the old literary facility of my youthful

days, when I was a writer for the magazines, returning to me as

if by magic. I worked on unremittingly till dinner-time, and then

resumed the pen after we had all separated for the night. At two

o'clock the next morning I found myself--God help

me!--masquerading, as it were, in my own long-lost character of a

hard-writing young man, with the old familiar cup of strong tea

by my side, and the old familiar wet towel tied round my head.

My review of the progress I had made, when I looked back at my

pages of manuscript, yielded all the encouragement I wanted to

drive me on. It is only just, however, to add to the record of

this first day's attempt, that the literary labor which it

involved was by no means of the most trying kind. The great

strain on the intellect--the strain of invention--was spared me

by my having real characters and events ready to my hand. If I

had been called on to create, I should, in all probability, have

suffered severely by contrast with the very worst of those

unfortunate novelists whom Jessie had so rashly and so

thoughtlessly condemned. It is not wonderful that the public

should rarely know how to estimate the vast service which is done

to them by the production of a good book, seeing that they are,

for the most part, utterly ignorant of the immense difficulty of

writing even a bad one.

The next day was fine, to my great relief; and our visitor, while

we were at work, enjoyed her customary scamper on the pony, and

her customary rambles afterward in the neighborhood of the house.

Although I had interruptions to contend with on the part of Owen

and Morgan, neither of whom possessed my experience in the

production of what heavy people call "light literature," and both

of whom consequently wanted assistance, still I made great

progress, and earned my hours of repose on the evening of the

second day.

On that evening I risked the worst, and opened my negotiations

for the future with "The Queen of Hearts."

About an hour after the tea had been removed, and when I happened

to be left alone in the room with her, I noticed that she rose

suddenly and went to the writing-table. My suspicions were

aroused directly, and I entered on the dangerous subject by

inquiring if she intended to write to her aunt.

"Yes," she said. "I promised to write when the last week came. If

you had paid me the compliment of asking me to stay a little

longer, I should have returned it by telling you I was sorry to

go. As it is, I mean to be sulky and say nothing."

With those words she took up her pen to begin the letter.

"Wait a minute," I remonstrated. "I was just on the point of

begging you to stay when I spoke."

"Were you, indeed?" she returned. "I never believed in

coincidences of that sort before, but now, of course, I put the

most unlimited faith in them!"

"Will you believe in plain proofs?" I asked, adopting her humor.

"How do you think I and my brothers have been employing ourselves

all day to-day and all day yesterday? Guess what we have been

about."

"Congratulating yourselves in secret on my approaching

departure," she answered, tapping her chin saucily with the

feather-end of her pen.

I seized the opportunity of astonishing her, and forthwith told

her the truth. She started up from the table, and approached me

with the eagerness of a child, her eyes sparkling, and her cheeks

flushed.

"Do you really mean it?" she said.

I assured her that I was in earnest. She thereupon not only

expressed an interest in our undertaking, which was evidently

sincere, but, with characteristic impatience, wanted to begin the

first evening's reading on that very night. I disappointed her

sadly by explaining that we required time to prepare ourselves,

and by assuring her that we should not be ready for the next five

days. On the sixth day, I added, we should be able to begin, and

to go on, without missing an evening, for probably ten days more.

"The next five days?" she replied. "Why, that will just bring us

to the end of my six weeks' visit. I suppose you are not setting

a trap to catch me? This is not a trick of you three cunning old

gentlemen to make me stay on, is it?"

I quailed inwardly as that dangerously close guess at the truth

passed her lips.

"You forget," I said, "that the idea only occurred to me after

what you said yesterday. If it had struck me earlier, we should

have been ready earlier, and then where would your suspicions

have been?"

"I am ashamed of having felt them," she said, in her frank,

hearty way. "I retract the word 'trap,' and I beg pardon for

calling you 'three cunning old gentlemen.' But what am I to say

to my aunt?"

She moved back to the writing-table as she spoke.

"Say nothing," I replied, "till you have heard the first story.

Shut up the paper-case till that time, and then decide when you

will open it again to write to your aunt."

She hesitated and smiled. That terribly close guess of hers was

not out of her mind yet.

"I rather fancy," she said, slyly, "that the story will turn out

to be the best of the whole series."

"Wrong again," I retorted. "I have a plan for letting chance

decide which of the stories the first one shall be. They shall be

all numbered as they are done; corresponding numbers shall be

written inside folded pieces of card and well mixed together; you

shall pick out any one card you like; you shall declare the

number written within; and, good or bad, the story that answers

to that number shall be the story that is read. Is that fair?"

"Fair!" she exclaimed; "it's better than fair; it makes _me_ of

some importance; and I must be more or less than woman not to

appreciate that."

"Then you consent to wait patiently for the next five days?"

"As patiently as I can."

"And you engage to decide nothing about writing to your aunt

until you have heard the first story?"

"I do," she said, returning to the writing-table. "Behold the

proof of it." She raised her hand with theatrical solemnity, and

closed the paper-case with an impressive bang.

I leaned back in my chair with my mind at ease for the first time

since the receipt of my son's letter.

"Only let George return by the first of November," I thought to

myself, "and all the aunts in Christendom shall not prevent

Jessie Yelverton from being here to meet him."

THE TEN DAYS.

THE FIRST DAY.

SHOWERY and unsettled. In spite of the weather, Jessie put on my

Mackintosh cloak and rode off over the hills to one of Owen's

outlying farms. She was already too impatient to wait quietly for

the evening's reading in the house, or to enjoy any amusement

less exhilarating than a gallop in the open air.

I was, on my side, as anxious and as uneasy as our guest. Now

that the six weeks of her stay had expired--now that the day had

really arrived, on the evening of which the first story was to be

read, I began to calculate the chances of failure as well as the

chances of success. What if my own estimate of the interest of

the stories turned out to be a false one? What if some unforeseen

accident occurred to delay my son's return beyond ten days?

The arrival of the newspaper had already become an event of the

deepest importance to me. Unreasonable as it was to expect any

tidings of George at so early a date, I began, nevertheless, on

this first of our days of suspense, to look for the name of his

ship in the columns of telegraphic news. The mere mechanical act

of looking was some relief to my overstrained feelings, although

I might have known, and did know, that the search, for the

present, could lead to no satisfactory result.

Toward noon I shut myself up with my collection of manuscripts to

revise them for the last time. Our exertions had thus far

produced but six of the necessary ten stories. As they were only,

however, to be read, one by one, on six successive evenings, and

as we could therefore count on plenty of leisure in the daytime,

I was in no fear of our failing to finish the little series.

Of the six completed stories I had written two, and had found a

third in the form of a collection of letters among my papers.

Morgan had only written one, and this solitary contribution of

his had given me more trouble than both my own put together, in

consequence of the perpetual intrusion of my brother's

eccentricities in every part of his narrative. The process of

removing these quaint turns and frisks of Morgan's humor--which,

however amusing they might have been in an essay, were utterly

out of place in a story appealing to suspended interest for its

effect--certainly tried my patience and my critical faculty (such

as it is) more severely than any other part of our literary

enterprise which had fallen my share.

Owen's investigations among his papers had supplied us with the

two remaining narratives. One was contained in a letter, and the

other in the form of a diary, and both had been received by him

directly from the writers. Besides these contributions, he had

undertaken to help us by some work of his own, and had been

engaged for the last four days in molding certain events which

had happened within his personal knowledge into the form of a

story. His extreme fastidiousness as a writer interfered,

however, so seriously with his progress that he was still sadly

behindhand, and was likely, though less heavily burdened than

Morgan or myself, to be the last to complete his allotted task.

Such was our position, and such the resources at our command,

when the first of the Ten Days dawned upon us. Shortly after four

in the afternoon I completed my work of revision, numbered the

manuscripts from one to six exactly as they happened to lie under

my hand, and inclosed them all in a portfolio, covered with

purple morocco, which became known from that time by the imposing

title of The Purple Volume.

Miss Jessie returned from her expedition just as I was tying the

strings of the portfolio, and, womanlike, instantly asked leave

to peep inside, which favor I, manlike, positively declined to

grant.

As soon as dinner was over our guest retired to array herself in

magnificent evening costume. It had been arranged that the

readings were to take place in her own sitting-room; and she was

so enthusiastically desirous to do honor to the occasion, that

she regretted not having brought with her from London the dress

in which she had been presented at court the year before, and not

having borrowed certain materials for additional splendor which

she briefly described as "aunt's diamonds."

Toward eight o'clock we assembled in the sitting-room, and a

strangely assorted company we were. At the head of the table,

radiant in silk and jewelry, flowers and furbelows, sat The Queen

of Hearts, looking so handsome and so happy that I secretly

congratulated my absent son on the excellent taste he had shown

in falling in love with her. Round this bright young creature

(Owen, at the foot of the table, and Morgan and I on either side)

sat her three wrinkled, gray-headed, dingily-attired hosts, and

just behind her, in still more inappropriate companionship,

towered the spectral figure of the man in armor, which had so

unaccountably attracted her on her arrival. This strange scene

was lighted up by candles in high and heavy brass sconces. Before

Jessie stood a mighty china punch-bowl of the olden time,

containing the folded pieces of card, inside which were written

the numbers to be drawn, and before Owen reposed the Purple

Volume from which one of us was to read. The walls of the room

were hung all round with faded tapestry; the clumsy furniture was

black with age; and, in spite of the light from the sconces, the

lofty ceiling was almost lost in gloom. If Rembrandt could have

painted our background, Reynolds our guest, and Hogarth

ourselves, the picture of the scene would have been complete.

When the old clock over the tower gateway had chimed eight, I

rose to inaugurate the proceedings by requesting Jessie to take

one of the pieces of card out of the punch-bowl, and to declare

the number.

She laughed; then suddenly became frightened and serious; then

looked at me, and said, "It was dreadfully like business;" and

then entreated Morgan not to stare at her, or, in the present

state of her nerves, she should upset the punch-bowl. At last she

summoned resolution enough to take out one of the pieces of card

and to unfold it.

"Declare the number, my dear," said Owen.

"Number Four," answered Jessie, making a magnificent courtesy,

and beginning to look like herself again.

Owen opened the Purple Volume, searched through the manuscripts,

and suddenly changed color. The cause of his discomposure was

soon explained. Malicious fate had assigned to the most diffident

individual in the company the trying responsibility of leading

the way. Number Four was one of the two narratives which Owen had

found among his own papers.

"I am almost sorry," began my eldest brother, confusedly, "that

it has fallen to my turn to read first. I hardly know which I

distrust most, myself or my story."

"Try and fancy you are in the pulpit again," said Morgan,

sarcastically. "Gentlemen of your cloth, Owen, seldom seem to

distrust themselves or their manuscripts when they get into that

position."

"The fact is," continued Owen, mildly impenetrable to his

brother's cynical remark, "that the little thing I am going to

try and read is hardly a story at all. I am afraid it is only an

anecdote. I became possessed of the letter which contains my

narrative under these circumstances. At the time when I was a

clergyman in London, my church was attended for some months by a

lady who was the wife of a large farmer in the country. She had

been obliged to come to town, and to remain there for the sake of

one of her children, a little boy, who required the best medical

advice."

At the words "medical advice" Morgan shook his head and growled

to himself contemptuously. Owen went on:

"While she was attending in this way to one child, his share in

her love was unexpectedly disputed by another, who came into the

world rather before his time. I baptized the baby, and was asked

to the little christening party afterward. This was my first

introduction to the lady, and I was very favorably impressed by

her; not so much on account of her personal appearance, for she

was but a little wo man and had no pretensions to beauty, as on

account of a certain simplicity, and hearty, downright kindness

in her manner, as well as of an excellent frankness and good

sense in her conversation. One of the guests present, who saw how

she had interested me, and who spoke of her in the highest terms,

surprised me by inquiring if I should ever have supposed that

quiet, good-humored little woman to be capable of performing an

act of courage which would have tried the nerves of the boldest

man in England? I naturally enough begged for an explanation; but

my neighbor at the table only smiled and said, 'If you can find

an opportunity, ask her what happened at The Black Cottage, and

you will hear something that will astonish you.' I acted on the

hint as soon as I had an opportunity of speaking to her

privately. The lady answered that it was too long a story to tell

then, and explained, on my suggesting that she should relate it

on some future day, that she was about to start for her country

home the next morning. 'But,' she was good enough to add, 'as I

have been under great obligations to you for many Sundays past,

and as you seem interested in this matter, I will employ my first

leisure time after my return in telling you by writing, instead

of by word of mouth, what really happened to me on one memorable

night of my life in The Black Cottage.'

"She faithfully performed her promise. In a fortnight afterward I

received from her the narrative which I am now about to read."

BROTHER OWEN'S STORY

THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK COTTAGE.

To begin at the beginning, I must take you back to the time after

my mother's death, when my only brother had gone to sea, when my

sister was out at service, and when I lived alone with my father

in the midst of a moor in the west of England.

The moor was covered with great limestone rocks, and intersected

here and there by streamlets. The nearest habitation to ours was

situated about a mile and a half off, where a strip of the

fertile land stretched out into the waste like a tongue. Here the

outbuildings of the great Moor Farm, then in the possession of my

husband's father, began. The farm-lands stretched down gently

into a beautiful rich valley, lying nicely sheltered by the high

platform of the moor. When the ground began to rise again, miles

and miles away, it led up to a country house called Holme Manor,

belonging to a gentleman named Knifton. Mr. Knifton had lately

married a young lady whom my mother had nursed, and whose

kindness and friendship for me, her foster-sister, I shall

remember gratefully to the last day of my life. These and other

slight particulars it is necessary to my story that I should tell

you, and it is also necessary that you should be especially

careful to bear them well in mind.

My father was by trade a stone-mason. His cottage stood a mile

and a half from the nearest habitation. In all other directions

we were four or five times that distance from neighbors. Being

very poor people, this lonely situation had one great attraction

for us--we lived rent free on it. In addition to that advantage,

the stones, by shaping which my father gained his livelihood, lay

all about him at his very door, so that he thought his position,

solitary as it was, quite an enviable one. I can hardly say that

I agreed with him, though I never complained. I was very fond of

my father, and managed to make the best of my loneliness with the

thought of being useful to him. Mrs. Knifton wished to take me

into her service when she married, but I declined, unwillingly

enough, for my father's sake. If I had gone away, he would have

had nobody to live with him; and my mother made me promise on her

death-bed that he should never be left to pine away alone in the

midst of the bleak moor.

Our cottage, small as it was, was stoutly and snugly built, with

stone from the moor as a matter of course. The walls were lined

inside and fenced outside with wood, the gift of Mr. Knifton's

father to my father. This double covering of cracks and crevices,

which would have been superfluous in a sheltered position, was

absolutely necessary, in our exposed situation, to keep out the

cold winds which, excepting just the summer months, swept over us

continually all the year round. The outside boards, covering our

roughly-built stone walls, my father protected against the wet

with pitch and tar. This gave to our little abode a curiously

dark, dingy look, especially when it was seen from a distance;

and so it had come to be called in the neighborhood, even before

I was born, The Black Cottage.

I have now related the preliminary particulars which it is

desirable that you should know, and may proceed at once to the

pleasanter task of telling you my story.

One cloudy autumn day, when I was rather more than eighteen years

old, a herdsman walked over from Moor Farm with a letter which

had been left there for my father. It came from a builder living

at our county town, half a day's journey off, and it invited my

father to come to him and give his judgment about an estimate for

some stonework on a very large scale. My father's expenses for

loss of time were to be paid, and he was to have his share of

employment afterwards in preparing the stone. He was only too

glad, therefore, to obey the directions which the letter

contained, and to prepare at once for his long walk to the county

town.

Considering the time at which he received the letter, and the

necessity of resting before he attempted to return, it was

impossible for him to avoid being away from home for one night,

at least. He proposed to me, in case I disliked being left alone

in the Black Cottage, to lock the door and to take me to Moor

Farm to sleep with any one of the milkmaids who would give me a

share of her bed. I by no means liked the notion of sleeping with

a girl whom I did not know, and I saw no reason to feel afraid of

being left alone for only one night; so I declined. No thieves

had ever come near us; our poverty was sufficient protection

against them; and of other dangers there were none that even the

most timid person could apprehend. Accordingly, I got my father's

dinner, laughing at the notion of my taking refuge under the

protection of a milkmaid at Moor Farm. He started for his walk as

soon as he had done, saying he should try and be back by

dinner-time the next day, and leaving me and my cat Polly to take

care of the house.

I had cleared the table and brightened up the fire, and had sat

down to my work with the cat dozing at my feet, when I heard the

trampling of horses, and, running to the door, saw Mr. and Mrs.

Knifton, with their groom behind them, riding up to the Black

Cottage. It was part of the young lady's kindness never to

neglect an opportunity of coming to pay me a friendly visit, and

her husband was generally willing to accompany her for his wife's

sake. I made my best courtesy, therefore, with a great deal of

pleasure, but with no particular surprise at seeing them. They

dismounted and entered the