Amberhill

Chapter I

I was a child of thfrteen years old ; a girl among a family of brothers. A long dlness had taken away my strength, and on that mid summer afternoon I lay upon a sofa in my father's study, bstening to distant thunder from a long black cloud in the horizon, wishing that the wind would blow and bring me the smeb of flowers through the glass door standing open near me, and watching lan guidly the drowsy butterflies as they floated over the smooth lawn and its beds of roses in the hot sunshiny air. But chiefly I watched the changes hi my father's countenance, for I loved him as only VOL. I. B AMBERHILL a chfld can love, and he sat where I could see him, bending over a large family Bible, on a table covered with green baize, looking at first so troubled, and then after he had sighed and clasped his hands together and faden back in his chafr, so calm, and stid so melancholy, that it fided me with a strange wonder and an un conscious grief, tdl by degrees I forgot ad other things, and lay gazing at him only.

My father's face was the kindest I ever looked upon; there was something mournful in his eyes, and something feeble in the out line of his pale features, but this only added tenderness to the gentle and caressing smile which was part of thefr habitual expression. I never feared him. I had a kind of loving pity for him without knowing why. When I heard the wood-doves cooing in the branches, and could not see them, I used to think they were like my father. Alas! this perpetual kindness had its root in a nature too weak to deny itself the plea sure of pleasing others, and too sensitive to bear the pain of being severe ; but I learned this long afterwards, and had not so much as AMBERHILL. 3 dreamed that it could be so then, for I was not old enough to think any evd of my father. He was a clergyman, and we lived in a pretty house, with a large garden, just outside the vibage, in a very richly-cultivated country.

The house was white, or nearly so, but not much could be seen of the walls, for ivy, and pyracanthas, and trading roses, had already reached the eaves in many places ; and in summer we had to cut away the young shoots from the windows, and check the luxuriance of many climbing annuals, always sown in too great abundance during the spring, opening thefr bright blue and yellow blossoms for a short, glorious season, among the leaves of the evergreens, making the house itself bke a bank of flowers, where vegetation took the place of architecture. It was buflt upon a lawn, sloping a little towards a broad gravel drive, and scooped out in a semicircle before the en trance. Our outbuildings were ad behind, made invisible by the shrubberies, so that, on three sides of the house, the smooth grass was seen coming close up to it, with cfrcular flower beds cut in it here and there, and sometimes a AMBERHILL. few sods taken away at the foot of the wad for the better nourishing of some favourite cbmber whose leaves were seen to look sickly, or whose long arms, ceasing to grow longer, showed symptoms of premature decay.

In front of the house, beyond the gravel, there was another grass plat; a very large one, of an oval shape, with a broad walk, and then a deep flower border, and then a belt of shrubberies ab round it, except before our windows, where it was open ; and the view we had when the blacs were in flower, or when the deciduous shrubs were changing colour in the autumn, was very beautiful indeed. In the centre of this grass plat a great cedar of Lebanon showed the antiquity of the place, and spread out its broad black branches like layers of clouds in the twibght and heavy wings by day. I coidd see it where I was lying, for my father's study was one of the front rooms. There were garden chairs under the tree; we used to sit there, I and my poor mother, at work, in summer afternoons, before my illness; AMBERHILL. but I never loved the old cedar, and now I felt afraid of it, and turned my eyes upon the roses.

It was darker even than the thunder cloud behind. But I soon forgot the gay flowers and the drowsy butterflies, the black horizon and the blacker cedar tree, and thought of my father only. " And he that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me." He repeated the words in a low voice to himself, bending over the Bible, and again sighed heavily. " He that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me." I had never noticed those words before ; I never forgot them afterwards. They are graven on my heart, and burned into my brain, and chained bke heb-hounds to my memory. I have made them my tempters here, and they wib be my accusers in the great hereafter. There was a gentle opening of the door ; the rustle of a bght dress past the sofa ; the waving of bright locks above me, and then my mother AMBERHILL. stood bending over him, her hand upon his shoulders, and ab the sweetness of heaven in her loving eyes.

" Husband, you are hesitating." " I am seeking strength," he said, in a voice of plaintive melancholy. "It is a hard task, Mary, and whether I can do it I cannot ted. God does not ask of us more than we are made to bear." " He makes our weakness strength, Henry. He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. He is life and ab things to those who, for his sake, have given themselves to the burning furnace or the lion's den." " Oh, Mary, there must needs be martyrs. It is a splendid calling : but not ab, not ab, Mary, are worthy to be cabed. If I should fail hereafter; if I shoidd faint; if I should repine : is it not better to turn away from hob ness than to put it on and then profane it ? " " Is God ignorant, dear love ? Does he cab unwittingly? Who knows you best, yourself or your Creator? If he thinks you strong enough to try you, can you be weak enough to fad ?"

AMBERHILL. " But if I am wrong — if I am wrong, Mary ? Mine is a poor human judgment, and it may be that I am bringing all this ruin on these many heads for a mere phantasy of my own. It is honible to think of — honible !" " My husband, your tender heart is mis leading you. I know your judgment may be wrong, but it is your judgment, and to deny it is to bve a be. This is plain, palpable evil, for it may be helped ; the other cannot." He bent his head upon her shoulder, and she smiled above him, bke a protecting angel. " Mary, you are my staff, my crutch : I think I can be strong with you beside me." " We will lean together on a better Staff : I am mortal, dearest, and a woman." He raised his head again, with a look of pain and writhing. " Oh, I cannot think of it ! Our chddren ! the old, old bitterness : our children !"

" God gave them to bless us, not to tempt us, Henry. Better they should die at our feet than bve by thefr father's sin." " There is Abee, my sister's chdd, have I AMBERHILL, not wronged her enough? Must I take the orphan's bread to buy peace for my own sold ? Oh, never, Mary, never ! " "Think manfuhy, dear love; dismiss the thoughts that tempt you, tdl they can tempt no longer. Remember, too, we are not penni less. I have™ an income whde I bve, and Abee shall be cared for. Do I look old yet, Henry ?" She shook the bright hair, which no cap had yet concealed, from her beautiful face and forehead, still almost gfrbsh in their ap pearance, though she was nearly forty years old. My father looked up into her sweet eyes, but he did not smile. "And Amberliib?" " Wib be a spot of bght, my husband, in ab oiumemories."

" An Eden, Mary : a Paradise, whence heaven expels us, to be wanderers on a stony world." "]STo, Henry, the beautiful gate of the Tem ple, which we leave only because it is the hom os sacrifice !" AMBERHILL. 9 A sharp rustle over head — a dull, plashing sound upon the grass, and a shower of rose leaves fell round my mother's feet where she was kneeling. It was the first great drop of the thunder-rain falling through the trading boughs over the open glass door. There was no more sunshine on the lawn ; the black shadow of the cloud lay upon the breathless flowers, and the drowsy butterflies had disap peared. The note of a single bird broke the stfllness ; but it was a plaintive sound, like a whisper, and full of fear. A quick flash of bghtning followed immediately, with the thun der close behind.

My mother started up and went to the open door. My youngest brother, a beautiful child about four years old, was in the garden driving his hoop round the large lawn. She called to him to come in before the rain fell. He stopped and laughed, but did not come any nearer to the house. My mother caded again, but the child stood stid, laughing and tapping his hoop, which was in his hand. He was too far off to hear twhat she had said, and too daring to care about the thunder. Another drop of AMBERHILL. the heavy rain fed, lead-like, among the roses. She ran out into the garden, across the lawn, over the gravel walk, and among the shrubs, where the bttle fellow, seeing her coming, had flown, with a merry scream of pleasure, to hide himself; and soon reappeared, bearing him in her arms, kissing his laughing cheeks and pressing the bttle struggling limbs to her bosom.

Thus burdened, with bare head and flowing hair, she came running towards the house, the nearest way, over the grass again, and under the frowning boughs of the dark cedar tree. I could see it all without moving. Then there was a blinding bght, and a great shock of sound, and in the midst of the bght I saw my father spring forward, and I heard his scream above the noise of that terrible thunder-clap ; — then all was dark, and I saw nothing, and the rolling sound pressed upon my brain like mountains ; and then my sight came back, and I was standing at the open door, and the great cedar before me was cleft in two and smoking ; and imder it AMBERHILL. I was there in an instant ; yet my father was already kneeling beneath the black, smoulder ing boughs, with the head of his dead wife upon his knee, and his dead child upon the grass beside him. AMBERHILL.

Chapter II

It was thus that my life began, at thirteen years old. Began, I say; for the pale passion less images of earber years that stid linger in my memory, are no more portions of my present being than the story of a stranger. They stand apart, like things that have been seen, not felt. They are dim moonbght fields beside a burning prairie ; the rush and the wild bght are before my eyes, and if I turn to those calm distant scenes, they are bke pictures of another world. I received a baptism of sonow : the sorrow that worketh death. I was born again, but it was to passion, not to peace. There have been seasons of wdd hope, of honied sweetness, of intoxicating debght ; there has come too, Oh ! God of mercy! a season far more blest than AMBERHILL. 13 these ; but between my present being and my early life, there is a gulf of agony and gudt which no bridge can span.

I am a woman, and have been a girl, but I have lost my childhood. It was some weeks after the fatal afternoon, before any prolonged consciousness returned to me. The awe and horror of my mind, and the chill of the heavy rain upon my sickly body, brought violently back a return of my former malady, and whde funeral dresses were pre paring in the house, and long aster they had become habituady worn by its inmates, I lay between delirious frenzy and death-bke tor por, struggling, though in vain, to follow on the red wings of fever, those gentle souls who had been swept upwards in the chariot of fire. Mother, mother ! I saw you in that moment of death, under those fatal boughs, and never again ! Not upon your bed, laid out in the last sleep on earth ; not in your coffin, waiting for its heavy lid to shut up the arms that nursed me, and the lips that kissed me, for ever and ever more from all living eyes that look upon the sim.

Tears fell upon your face, large as the AMBERHILL, thunder-drops, but they were not mine; anguish, keener to the heart, than bghtning to the eye, passed through the darkened chamber when that coffin closed, but it had no pangs for me ; they laid you in the grave and left you to darkness and corruption, whde I was soul-less and insensible, and the agony of life came back, only to tell me that I should see you in this world of storm and terror, nevermore, never more ! — God ! God forgive me. — My grief rods back upon me, and the great wave covers me : the wind shrieks, and there are monsters in the deep : but peace, peace my soul ! — I have seen the stars. The first day that I left my chamber, very weak and thin, and with my eyes quite scorched with crying — for though they would not talk to me about my mother, I lay remembering her almost from the moment the fever left me ; that first day, I was carried by the nurse down stafrs, and taken into my father's study.

There was no mother's heart to foresee, and save me from this cruel trial. The kind but careless servant laid me on the very sofa from which I had started in the fierce glare of the bghtning ; the AMBERHILL. glass door was again set open ; the summer bght still fell upon the later roses, and straight before me on the grass plat, stood the bbghted ruin of the cedar tree. One half of it had been torn away ; the remainder rose, like the black banner of death, between me and the blue cloudless heaven of a July afternoon. I did not cry out, or faint, or shed any tears ; but the nurse was frightened by my looks as she laid me down, and asked anxiously if I felt sick or in pain. A single " no " was ab the answer I could give : my eyes were fixed upon the dark omi nous boughs ; I felt their shadow sinking into my mind, becoming at once a memory and a prophecy.

There rose that moment in my soul, the chil ling voice of the Presage of coming Tenor : the voice which has never ceased to speak within me through such a storm of years. Is it sdent now? Oh, God! there are sweeter voices, celestial comforters, angebc harmonies. I hear them and I bless Thee; but amidst them all it is not silent, and will not be till the end. must pause at the threshold of my story, to relate some of those matter-of-fact cfrcum stances concerning my family, which otherwise I might forget to ted at the proper time. My father was educated for the church ; his parents desfred it, and unhappdy they did not see that there was a natural bias in his mind, which woidd one day lead him to fly off from its formularies, as surely as the retreating comet from the sun. In the vigour of his youth, while nothing more narcotic than a curacy of fifty pounds a year had yet soothed his intedect and tempered his vision, he indulged his own mental inclina tion without restraint, and his early sermons were ponderous and speculative : — "You are too abstruse, O'May," said the Reverend Dr. Goodchest, my father's " principal," after one of those dry orations.

" It is a clergyman's business to think for his flock, and give them the results of his medi tations. Your sermons deal with the process much more than the results ; you send your hearers on voyages of discovery after the webs of truth, instead of drawing up the water with AMBERHILL. your own hands. You are fluent and your manner is good ; preach what everybody can understand without mental fatigue, and you will soon be noted in the pulpit." My father was timid as well as fluent; he took Dr. Goodchest's advice andfulfilledhis prediction. The lady patroness of Amberhill, the parish where I was born, heard him soon after he had obtained ftdl orders, and finally presented him to the living on its becoming vacant — it was worth a thousand a-year. My father manied soon afterwards, and to all appearance was one of the happiest of men.

He might have been so, truly ! My mother was one of those lovely and loving souls whom Heaven sends at intervals to refresh our faith in the warmth of its own sunshine, and the ineffable sweetness of its air. Her children blossomed around her with no shadow of death upon thefr early years, and bttle that to thefr parents' eyes seemed prophetic of future evil in thefr characters. Alas ! they did not see either the hidden seeds of crime, or the hot, unnatural dog-days of temptation which were coming to make them grow. c had four brothers : Lawrence, the eldest, was some years older than myself, who was the second chdd. The three younger boys had come after me, at intervals of a year or two. But my father's early speculations, though subdued in youth, came back to him in middle life, and when he could no longer subdue them.

He thought, and doubted, and at last dis bebeved what he had sworn to preach and to uphold. I never knew the extent of his doubts, or even thefr precise nature ; and had I known them perfectly, my own mind is so far from being a controversial one, that I should probably have felt much less interest in them on thefr own accoimt than I ought to have done. He was one of many like him. Alas ! he wasnot one of the few among them, who, having lost their faith, have stifr retained their coinage and pure integrity, and have refused to become living falsehoods for any bribe in the world. But he had a wife and a family brought up in abundance, and growing into additional expense. Bis own health was pre carious ; he had saved nothing. ' AMBERHILL. He was not fitted by habit or inclination to earn the poor pittance of a schoolmaster ; and though literary employment was open to him, he knew that this, being interpreted, too often meant only labour and bread and cheese.

And so for years his poor tender heart endured the weekly opening of its wounds ; smitten Sunday after Sunday by the sharp sword of conscience, whose tenible blade never faded to show him those burning words, " He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me ! " The worldly interest of his own rising family was not his sole temptation. He had a sister, who soon after his own ordination had married a wealthy Scotchman of the name of Campbeb, and who died two years afterwards, leaving an infant daughter, my cousin Abee, to the care of her father, who was himself stricken with consumption, and hopeless of cure. Mr. Campbeb, conscious that he was dying, endeavoured to make some wise arrangement for the future care of his daughter ; and having no nearer relations of his own, he committed the infant into the hands of his AMBERHILL. aunt, a Mrs. Murdoch ; whde he chose as his executor and trustee for the estates which Alice would inherit, a friend of the name of Mercer, a gentleman who bved in the same county.

Mr. Mercer had been my father's cobege companion and intimate acquaintance ; he was clever and showy, but with bttle true feeebng, and no principle. His property was supposed to be large, but he had engaged privately in some speculations of a dishonest land, and of this unhappdy my father was aware, When he heard that his brother-in-law had fixed upon Mercer as his trustee, my father at once resolved to caution him against so improvident a choice ; but the feelings of friendship for his febow-student, and the pain fubiess, always great to him, of saying a dis paraging word, led him to postpone his letter to the next clay. That day Mercer came to see him on the very subject of the trusteeship, which he probably feared my father's know ledge of his affairs might induce him to oppose; and partly by plausible statements about him self, partly through the influence of old AMBERHILL. acquaintance, he prevailed on him not only to withhold his intended warning, but even to write a letter to Mr. Campbell approving of his choice.

A few days after my father repented sorely of what he had done, but to recab his own words and oppose what he had just approved required more courage than he could at once cobect round his too tender feelings ; and in the meanwhile Mr. Campbed died. The new trustee appeared to perform the duties of his office with great fidebty and zeal for more than a year ; he then married, went to the continent for his wedding tour, and did not return. It was soon found that he had carried his bride and the whole of little Alice's fortune to America. Beyond the port where he disembarked he was not to be traced. My father's grief and self-accusation were of the bitterest kind. He felt, what indeed was true, that if he had not been the actual cause of this disaster, it would never have come to pass if he had done his duty.

The thought that he had robbed a helpless orphan of her heritage by his want of moral courage to speak AMBERHILL the truth against his friend, fastened itself upon his mind, and would, I bebeve, have destroyed his life if the means of atonement to some extent had not been at his disposal. He had obtained the Amberhill bving, and had manied not long before, and he immediately proposed to take his sister's child to his own home. Mrs. Murdoch refused the offer with bitter indignation; she was a stately and worthy woman, unselfish, and of a calm, winning coun tenance, but rigid in her idea of right, and a Scotch Calvinist. It was an offence to her that the sister of an Engbsh clergyman had won the heart of her nephew ; it was deepened by the appointment of the same clergyman's friend to the office of trustee to her orphan ward ; and when the chdd was suddenly made penniless, and she found to what extent my father had been to blame, her dislike became contempt and hatred, and in her own words she declared that she " would give the young chdd to Death, the servant of God, rather than to Henry O'May, the servant of the Devd."

She was poor herself, and had just lost half her slender income by a successful Chancery suit. Nothing AMBERHILL. else would have induced her to accept my father's second proposal of money for Alice's support and education. It was accepted without thanks, and on condition that the child should remain absolutely under her aunt's sole control. My father's wounded conscience would have agreed to anything Mrs. Murdoch might have de manded, but she would neither fix nor suggest the sum to be abowed. He paid her regularly one-fifth of his income — two hundred a year. Mrs. Murdoch lived in Gloucestershire, but whether Alice was with her, or in what way she was being educated, we were never abowed to know. This perpetual debt of honour, this yearly ransom from the tenors of remorse, was, I be beve, more than anything else, the cause of my father's inabibty to face the loss of his custom ary income.

Yet, in peace of mind, he was no gainer, for if the orphan's wrongs were in part effaced, the severe eyes of truth were fixed upon his soul, upbraiding him. He knew that his life was passing in a false profession ; that he received the wages of honesty, while in the dady practice of deceit; that to declare his AMBERHILL. changed opinions, and resign the bving, was the plainest of ab his duties. The struggle lasted for years, and the bur den grew heavier hour by hour. 0 God ! he would have cast it off for ever on that fatal day, if Thy bolt had stayed in heaven ! Yet it was just. Yes, Father, it was just : shab a man dare to bargain with his Maker, or say thus much, but no more, he wdl resign for Thee ? That terrible shock and its results overthrew the bttle strength of purpose in my poor father's resolution.

With my mother's death, he lost her income, as web as her sweet aid and consolation, and with his chddren and my cousin Abee to sup port, the thought of poverty must indeed have been full of dread. I am telling much that I did not know tib long afterwards. The secret of his grief was in part revealed to me in that short conversation whde I lay watching the thunderclouds and the butterflies. But the events that followed, swept it entfrely from my mind for a long time. My father never spoke of it, and there was sufficient to account for the melancholy hi which he soon became absorbed, AMBERHILL. without beholding in it the judgment of an ac cusing conscience. I soon learned that my own eyes had not witnessed the whole extent of our terrible misfortune. The same flash which made me motherless, had glanced too brightly before the face of my youngest brother, and in the course of time he became incurably blind.

About a year afterwards, the next boy fell ib and died. My father was a widower, and of his five children, my eldest brother, myself, and the blind boy were all that Heaven had spared. Thus, I and my father were soon left alone together. Lawrence, my eldest brother, was a law student in Edinburgh, and came home rarely ; and the bttle bbnd boy was sent to a private school for those afflicted like himself. Then, by degrees, I came to comprehend my father's feelings, and to remember what I had heard before. We said nothing on the subject, but I knew that he retained the bving from the fear of poverty alone, and that his dady prayer in misery, was for strength to resign it before he died. AMBERHILL. By degrees, too, the idea of enabling him to do so, and so restoring him to peace, came slowly into my mind, and became there, in suc cession, a desire, a hope, and a fixed resolve.

I had no plan ; but to procure money for him to bve upon presented itself at once as the great end to be accompbshed ; and, saving being the only means at my disposal, I began immediately to save. My father gave me the control of his house hold affairs before I was fifteen, and on my seventeenth birthday, I had laid by about a hundred pounds. We were very quiet at the rectory. My father spent much of his time alone, and though I loved him with the whole devotion of my heart, I could rarely cheer him into true companionship. I had one friend, however, of my own age. AMBERHILL. 27

Chapter III

Have you watched the wdd streams issuing from a glacier, seized every winter by the strong hand of frost, lying sdent, cold, deathlike and immoveable, while the touch is upon them, yet bursting anew into life and music and impetuous laughter, if the warm sun kiss them for an hour, even though the next nightwind wib again congeal the bright drops into icicles? Have you stood in the spray of an Alpine waterfab when the sun strove among flying clouds mottling the earth with shadows, and seen the rainbow come and go as bght or darkness was in the cataract ; the bright passionate colours never less bright or warm because of the last cloud that annihilated them, or the next that will do the same ? Such is the spirit of my life. I suffer with a poignant AMBERHILL. sense of anguish, that is not the aching but the cleaving of my heart ; but when the sword that stabs me is withdrawn, the deep wound closes like the track of bghtning in the cloud, and there is no delirium of joy that I am unable to feel almost the instant afterwards.