The Queen of Hearts
The Queen of HeartsTHE QUEEN OF HEARTS.BROTHER GRIFFITH'S STORY of THE FAMILY SECRET.BROTHER MORGAN'S STORY of THE DREAM-WOMAN.BROTHER GRIFFITH'S STORY of MAD MONKTONBROTHER MORGAN'S STORY of THE DEAD HANDBROTHER GRIFFITH'S STORY of THE BITER BIT.BROTHER OWEN'S STORY of THE PARSON'S SCRUPLE.BROTHER GRIFFITH'S STORY of A PLOT IN PRIVATE LIFE.BROTHER MORGAN'S STORY of FAUNTLEROY.BROTHER OWEN'S STORY of ANNE RODWAY.Copyright
The Queen of Hearts
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
consecutive 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'llrun 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."Shecan'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
happened? 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 callyouuncle, 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, and 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 cheeks 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?