Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/70

62 at the carriage. She wished me to spend the evening with them. Margaret did not know of Hugh's presence at the cottage; but I think, even had he been absent, I should not have gone to them that night. Grace gave me a pleading word and look, but I was firm. I said:

"I am going to visit a patient up the Glen, but I shall not have time to call."

At twilight that evening I passed near the gates of Bracken Hollow at a part where the wall that separates the place from the Glen road runs very low, and a stream stumbles its way through the wild briars and the tall reeds and brackens from whose luxuriance the house takes its name. I was startled by a figure rising up like a ghost from among the ferns and moss-grown stones beside me. It was Grace. She had watched and waited for me there. She wanted to know the meaning of my words spoken in the hall that morning about her cousin. Was he her cousin? Why had he been wronged? Who had wronged him?

I considered a little, and then thought it best to tell her all. She would be sure to hear the story, and it was right she should. I told her all Hugh's history; not, I am sure, without a dash of the bitterness which would always escape me when I spoke on the subject. As I went on she flushed deeper and deeper, till the crimson blood burned under her hair, and even coloured her throat. When I had finished speaking it had ebbed away, leaving her unusually pale. She stood before me, straight and white and scared looking, with the breeze blowing the dark hair from her forehead. I moved to go on, but she stayed me again imploringly, and commenced asking rapid passionate questions. If she had never been born, or if—if she had died as a child, would Hugh's grandmother have been forced to give him her affection, to make him her heir?

I answered as my conscience dictated:

"I believe she would. Your grandmother can be stern, but she must have something to love. If there had been no one else, I think it is likely that she would have relented towards Hugh."

She opened her lips, and cried vehemently, with a strain of high-wrought suffering:

"Doctor! I—" She stopped short, her lips whitened, blue shadows gathered under her eyes. I thought she was going to swoon.

"My dear child!" I cried, in surprise and alarm, taking her cold hand and placing it firmly on my own arm, "my dear child, you must not distress yourself so deeply about this,this. [sic] It is not your fault."

She gave me a piteous glance, bent down her head, and burst into a passion of tears, sobbing violently, with her forehead against my sleeve.

"It is a strange, wayward, and I believe generous nature," I thought, as I went on my way, having sent her back to the house.

Returning past the gates, and finding myself in a different mood from that in which I had refused Margaret Avon's invitation, I turned into the avenue, and walked along by the soft, noiseless turf. Soon I was startled for the second time that night by seeing a slight figure moving among the trees. It was passing to and fro, to and fro upon the grass quite near me. I stopped where a tree hid me from the danger of being seen. Heaven knows I did not mean to be a spy upon the poor girl, but I was deeply interested in her. The moon shone large and clear down through the branches on the mossy roots and trunks, and on the rich wilderness of the underwood, throwing dim flitting shadows over the impatient white figure that paced and paced, and would not weary nor rest. While I stood, with a fear and a foreboding of I knew not what stealing upon me and mingling with the sympathy which had been keenly awakened, the figure suddenly paused in its walk, the arms were flung above the head in an attitude of abandonment, and a loud groaning whisper reached me through the clear still air—

"Not my fault—not my fault! O God, pity me!"

I went home.

the discovery by French novelists of the singular fact that the men who are the salt of the earth and the saviours of society are to be sought in convict prisons, to which they have been mistakenly condemned for robbery "with effraction," there existed another criminal type, which for a long time was greatly in vogue, alike with romance-writers and playwrights. Most of our readers must recollect how, in the dramas of a certain class, the hero and scoundrel was wont in the prologue to commit robbery and murder, say of a bank clerk, with his pocket-book full of notes; and how, when an interval of twenty years had been supposed to elapse, the villain reappeared in great splendour (generally as a marquis), having just returned to the scene of his former crimes with enormous wealth. How eagerly all watched his subtle machinations to entangle the poor but virtuous hero or heroine, who had discovered the secret of his life; and how all rejoiced when at last he was overwhelmed by the opportune appearance of three gendarmes in the doorway at the back of the