As Long as she Lived

Book 1

" Slje 33nr%r!raa_ of tbe gjfoMe |loor.' OIIAPTEK PAGE I. Saint Lazarus . " . . . . 3 II. Adam Halfday 20 HI. At the Mitre 39 IV. Dorcas warns Mabel Westbrook . 54 V. The Curator 67 VI. An Escort Home 77 VII. A Surprise 86 VIII. Mabel accepts Mr. Salmon's kind Invitation 96 IX. An Ally 115 X. In Adam Halfday's Koom . . . 124 XI. The Discovery 137 XII. Found 150 XIII. How Adam Halfday took the Good News CONTENTS. VI CHAPTER PAGE XIV. After the Shock .... 172 XV. Brian Explains 186 XVI. The Money Question . . . .197 XVH. The Man on the Doavns . . .208 XVHI. Father and Son 223 XIX. Me. Halfday hears the News . . 234 XX. Peter Scone considers himself Slighted 258 XXI. Business Postponed .... 270 XXH. The Letter from Penton . . . 285 XXHI. By the graa-e of Adam Halfday . book: i. " €\)t £ro t&erJ.oo& of tfje poor," VOL. I. B

Chapter I. Saint Lazarus

nnHE Hospital of St. Lazarus, a quaint old pile -*- of Norman stonework, stood grey and grim in the meadow-lands of Pentonshire, a mile and a quarter from the old cathedral city, very grey and grim to match. An excellent institution this of St. Lazarus, which a wealthy cardinal of the fifteenth century had repaired and re-endowed for the sole use and benefit of " The Brotherhood of the Noble Poor." Here the noble poor had lived and thrived, and grumbled and grown garrulous ; been thankful for small mercies or for none ; had had their trials and temptations, their dinners and their B perquisites ; had known peace and rest, and discontent and envy, after their kind, and had died and been buried, for the last four hundred years. There were not many to die or to be buried at the time our story opens.

The ancient charity had gone the way of similar " foundations," and strange stories were extant of funds wasted and misapplied, of lands stolen or given away, of trustees neglectful or un principled — all of course happening in the good old times, when humanity was very different, and such dreadful things as these were possible! Thoughtful and superstitious people wondered if the original founders of the edifice rested in their graves, there had been such wholesale peculation in the centuries since they had thought it seemly to remember God's un fortunates ; and there was a well-authenticated ghost-walk in the neighbourhood, where a figure had been seen so very like the portrait of his Eminence the Cardinal in the refectory, that more than one respectable villager, coming home late from the " Rising Sun," had been prepared to swear to bim.

The Cardinal had been a man of figures in bis day, a far-seeing, shrewd old gentleman, who estimated that lands would grow in value, and rents rise high, when sight-seers should be gaping at his marble effigy in the cathedral yonder. The Cardinal bad calculated for everything but wholesale robbery and men waxing fat at the charity's expense, and the " Hundred Mennes " dwindling down for want of funds to thirteen tottering old fellows in black gowns and serge skull-caps, who in their penury and decrepitude now represented all the forces of the Brother hood ofthe Noble Poor. They were thirteen men, well cared for and well looked after by the Master of the Hospital, whose salary was large, and whose residence was large too, having been built on the site of some forty houses once belonging to the brotherhood, and which had been demolished to make room for him in the dreadful old days to which allusion has been made.

Still the charity existed ; men duly qualified found a refuge here, as a something better than the workhouse ; and honest folk, it was rumoured, were now looking after the funds, and after those who had a hold upon them, fairly or unfairly, as circumstances and courts of law might eventu ally decide. It was a show-place, this Hospital of St. Lazarus, dear to antiquaries and to lovers of tradition, and possessed a show church, which restorers had re-touched and re-scraped, and so wonderfully and terribly re-coloured, that only art-critics of the first degree of refinement could see anything in it but lumps of red and blue. It was a place where people stepped back to the past as they entered the gateway in the entrance tower, and drank of the beer which was offered them at the porter's lodge, by order of tbe cardinal, who must have fancied that Englishmen were fond of beer, or might grow to like it in good time.

There were sights here worth a journey across the fields from Penton to St. Lazarus, and the members of the brotherhood acted as showmen and looked after the sight-seers and the fees. There were a few old paintings, as well as old buildings and old men ; there were leathern jacks and iron candlesticks, and carved oak and stained glass, and a porridge-pot, and other relics of the times when Merry England lay a few centuries further back in history. The pilgrims came in the tourist season thick and fast enough, but in the Spring and Winter "business was awful slack," as one despondent brother of eighty-two, saving up fees for a rainy day, was in the habit of declaring. Business at St. Lazarus — the business of the brotherhood — had been very slack indeed on the day we take our readers into Pentonshire.

It was the end of May too, when a few stray tourists are generally to be discovered on the march, the flying squadron of the great army of knapsacks advancing in the later months. It had been a cold, disagreeable May, with the winds of March and the damps of April cling ing to its skirts still, and with not a glimpse of the coming Summer in the leaden sky. It was close on sundown at St. Lazarus, with the wind in the east, and the thermometer low. There had been no visitors that day to the hospital or the church, and the doors of the brothers' houses in the quadrangle were, as a rule, closed. The monastic life seemed nearer to the nine teeth century on such a day as this — all was still and peaceful, even the rooks were depressed and sulky in the giant elms beyond the walls, and the swollen river flowed on silently past the hospital, and in a broad silver band across the green fields to the sea.

The solitary man in his monastic dress at the open door of one of the houses surely belonged to the old days, as he sat there nursing a crutch across his knees ; we have seen him on the can vas of half a hundred pictures in the galleries abroad. The long, black robe, somewhat rusty in the light, the close-fitting cap pulled down till it met the shaggy, white eyebrows, the rugged, angular face, the big-veined, claw-like hands, the silver cross hanging on the left side of the gaberdine, seemed all parts of a portrait of past history — the priest resting from prayers and penance, and dreaming of the world beyond his four stone walls. In the hall, across the square plot of garden ground, sat ten or eleven monks like unto him, cowering and shivering round a coke fire in the centre of the hall, a fire kept within bounds by a large rusty hoop of iron, and the fumes rising to the raftered roof above, and mixing with the darkness there.

The old men were all silent — three-fourths of them asleep, and the others blinking like grey " mousers " at the fire, and brooding over things that had been, or life that might be presently. The heaviness of the day had crept into the refectory, and settled on the spirits of the inmates, and the light through the stained glass windows was dying fast away. The monks of the times gone by had looked and dozed and croned like that over their wood fires in this very hall, until the bell for even-song bad roused them, as a bell roused them on this particular occasion, and set them upright and listening — the bell of the outer gates, which Hodsman, the porter, had banged to for the night at seven hours by the clock. It was a visitor to see the church and inspect the hospital, and Hodsman, through a little trap in the door, informed the late comer that the hour was too late.

The visitor was pertina cious — for she was a lady — and would not go away. From her seat in the open fly which had brought her from the hotel at Penton, she argued the point with the gate-keeper, spoke of the trouble and expense to which she had been put in coming thither, of the value of her time, and the shortness of her stay in Penton, of the unnecessary rigour of the rules of St. Lazarus, that would not allow five minutes' grace to a lady, until the porter wavered beneath the stream of eloquence with which she favoured him. " I will go and ask the Master," he said at last; "but I don't think it is of any use, mind." The trap was closed, and the lady sank back in her seat and into the heavy folds of sable in which she had enshrouded herself that cold Spring afternoon, and waited for the porter's reappearance.

She was a young woman, for certainly twenty Summers all told would have sufficed for her life's calendar. She was a very pretty young woman also — which is a matter of importance to our readers as well as to her self ; a pale-faced beauty, with soft brown hair, and clear-cut features of a Grecian type, and big grey eyes that looked out boldly at the world, and seemed to have no fear of it. She was a shade above the middle height of woman, we may add, to render our sketch as complete as these few lines will allow, and was " almost too thin to live," her maid had said confidentially to Mrs. George's maid, when the maids and mistresses were steaming across the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool last week. The porter's head reappeared at the open trap. " The Master says as how he can't make any hexception to the rules, and you must come to-morrow."

" Did you tell him all I said ?" " All I could remember," answered Mr. Hods man, who was a cautious man, and not disposed to commit himself if he could help it. " Let me see. What is the name of the Master of this hospital V she said. " Salmon." " Ah ! yes. The Reverend Gregory Salmon," she said, musingly; "wait one moment, if you please." From the pocket of her dress she drew forth a capacious morocco purse, which she opened, and took out a letter and a card. " Will you present these to Mr. Salmon at once," she said, " and tell that gentleman the bearer is waiting without?" She gave the letter and card to the flyman, who tumbled off the box and delivered them to the porter, who went away once more on this persevering young lady's business. •' I would have preferred to do without it," she murmured to herself, as she once more sub sided into sable, and looked thoughtfully before her.

Meanwhile Mr. Hodsman had passed from the outer quadrangle to the inner, and rang the bell once more of Mr. Salmon's private and palatial domicile. Mr. Salmon was in his study, aud iu his second doze — he was dreaming of preferment and more loaves and fishes, when Mrs. Salmon came softly into the room and touched him on the shoulder. " My dear Gregory," she lisped, " I hardly liked to wake you." " But you have waked me, ma'am," he said, sharply. He was an easy kind of man, as a rule ; but he did not care to be roused from his nap twice in five minutes ; the masculine biped very seldom does. "It's the lady again," Mrs. Salmon informed him. " Now— upon my word— this is too much !" and Mr. Salmon, a portly little man of fifty five, sat up and planted his hands upon his knees. '• She brings a letter of introduction — from our boy — our dear Angelo !"

" How do you know that ? " I have opened the letter," said Mrs. Salmon, meekly, " I thought I would not disturb you unless it was absolutely necessary." She did not inform the Reverend Gregory Salmon, M.A., that female curiosity had got the better of her sense of etiquette as regarded epistles addressed to her lord and master, especially epistles in a lady's handwriting, ac companied by a lady's card, and sent in by a lady who was waiting outside in a fly, and dis inclined to go away again. She gave him the letter, on the outer envelope of which was written, " With Miss Westbroob's compli ments," and from which he took a second letter that had been sealed a few minutes since, and was in the handwriting of his son. As the letter is characteristic in its way and has its future bearing on our story, we make no apology for reading it with Mr. Salmon : " Boston, United States of America, " April 3, 18—.

" Mt Dear Father, " The bearer of this letter of introduction is a personal friend of mine, and one for whom I entertain the highest feelings of respect, esteem, and admiration ; therefore I need not press upon your attention the necessity to wel come her with all that kindness and geniality which any friend of mine is sure to receive at your hands. Miss Westbrook is a lady — an orphan lady, having lost both father and mother — a calamity from which I hope to be long and mercifully spared. She occupies one of the highest social positions in the great country wherein I sojourn for a while, is a lady of immense fortune, highly intelligent, highly edu cated, deeply read, singularly observant, and wonderfully meek and kind. I cannot, in a hurried letter of this description, enter into full particulars of all the virtues and accomplish ments which this American lady undoubtedly possesses, but I trust you will judge quickly for yourself, and become her friend, guide, and even counsellor, in the distant land whither she has taken her way.

It would be an unspeakable comfort to me to find that she is one of us — one of our happy and united family— when I return to the shores of my country the month after next, probably about the 15th or 16th of July, D.V. I will write to you all the news by the next mail. Meanwhile, with love to mamma and all my relations, " Believe me " Your affectionate son, "Angelo Salmon.1 " My dear," said the Master of St. Lazarus, " this lady must be seen to at once." " It is Angelo's wish." "And mine, Mrs. Salmon," he added, with emphasis. " Certainly." " I will attend upon Miss Westbrook immediately. Tell Hodsman to inform the lady that I shall have the greatest pleasure in waiting upon her — and that he is to bring the lady round here and show her into the drawing-room, if she will be kind enough — bless my soul, what have I done with my boots !" and Mr. Salmon, full of excitement, kicked his slippers across the room, and trotted in an insane fashion the full length of his library.

Mr. Hodsman delivered the mes sage in due course to Miss Westbrook, who in clined her head slightly to the communication, and sat for a few moments longer in the fly, looking at the landscape, or at something further away than the Pentonshire hills, dusky and grey in the dim light. Presently, and at her leisure, she desceuded, and, in her deep, rich mourning, passed under the Cardinal's Tower into the first quadrangle. "This way, ma'am," said Mr. Hodsman ; and the late visitor followed her guide to the inner court, where the church rose before her, grand and imposing in its nobility of stone. The houses of the brotherhood, with their tall twisted chimneys in dark relief against the sky, were on her left, the Master's house, and the great hall, or refectory, making up the square. The day was dying out, the shadows were thickening on this haven for old age ; the fig-trees were dank and drooping in the twilight, and the big elms, towering above the house-roofs, seemed steeped in ink against the dull dead sky.

There was an unearthly stillness in the place at that hour ■but then business was slack ! Miss Westbrook gave a little shudder at the prospect, and pointed to the alms-houses. " Where the brotherhood live ?" she asked, in an inquiring tone of Mr. Hodsman. Mr Hodsman nodded an affirmative. " And die?" she added. " Ay— and die. Pretty sharpish, too, some times, ma'am, when the Winter comes, and catches 'em in the chest. We had one die yesterday." "Ha! who was that?" And Miss Westbrook turned with such sud denness upon Mr. Hodsman that he nearly bit his tongue in half. " Martin Drycot was his name, my lady. He was eighty-three, but we've older men than that here — ay, and younger too." "Have you?" And then Miss Westbrook stopped, and pointed to a something dark and indistinct, heaped as it were against the wall or doorway of one of the distant houses.

" What is that ?" she asked. "Ay — lor bless us — if it bean't one of the C VOL. I. brothers ! And I'll bet a shilling now, ma'am," he said, with a sudden outburst of cackling laughter that startled Miss Westbrook in her turn, " that I guess who it is." "It is late for him to be sitting out there, in the night-mists." " He can go in to the fire if he likes — but be don't like. He can go into the house to his grand-daughter — but he don't go." " Why not ?" " He's sulky. Somebody's offended him — another brother, perhaps, or Dorcas — that's the grandchild I was speaking of," said the man ; " he's often like that, in his tantrums, and he's precious hard to please when the fit is on him. Hi! Adam!" called the porter; "Adam Halfday — here !" " Adam Halfday — here!" murmured the young woman, with a gloved hand suddenly uplifted to the bosom of her mantle.

" Did you speak, ma'am?" " No ; that is, not to you," said Miss West brook. " He's pretending to be deaf, — that's a trick of his, the old artful, but he can't come over me in that way. I'm not a brother, thank good ness ! Here — hi ! Adam — here's a lady wants to see the church. If that don't stir him up, he's in a fine temper, to be sure." The figure in the shadow moved, and the face of an old man looked towards them for an in stant, white and gleaming, and then was turned away again. " I thought he was dead," said the porter. "Now, Heaven forbid !" ejaculated the visitor, fervently. " Oh ! they goes off in all kinds of fashions here, ma'am — like the snuffs of all kinds of candles. They " He paused and touched his hat, and it became apparent to Miss Westbrook that no less a per sonage had come upon the scene than the Master of St. Lazarus. c2

Chapter II. Adam Halfday

THE Reverend Gregory Salmon raised his hat and bowed to the lady, even ventured to extend his hand in greeting ; but Miss West brook did not see, or pretended not to see, this exhibition of friendliness. She looked steadily at the clergyman, and bowed in return to his salutation. Perhaps she had not quite forgiven his first reception of her application for admittance to St. Lazarus, or had considered that a slight acknowledgment of his welcome was quite sufficient at that early stage of their acquaintance. " A friend of my son Angelo's is a friend of mine, Miss Westbrook," he said, politely. " Thank you," she responded, in a low voice, " but I am scarcely his friend." " He writes to me that " " I have met him once or twice in Boston, and 1 am indebted to him for a letter of introduction," she said, interrupting him — " that is all."

" Oh, indeed ! I was led by Angelo's letter to anticipate that you and he were great friends. At all events," said Mr. Salmon, with a broad beaming smile, " it is not his fault that you are not." " No, it is not his fault, I think," said Miss Westbrook, quietly, and the corners of her red Hps twitched with a reminiscence at which it was evidently difficult to repress a smile. "You must allow me to apologize, madam, for my first reply to your request," said Mr. Salmon ; " but I was not aware that you brought a letter of introduction from my son, and we are compelled to keep to rules here very strictly. It is a habit of human nature, as strikingly ex emplified by visitors to this establishment," he added, rhetorically, " to evade every possible rule which is posted up at the entrance gates."

" Is there any rule, Mr. Salmon, to keep that old man from the cold?" asked Miss Westbrook, pointing to Adam Halfday in the distance ; " or does the brotherhood act as it pleases?" " Eh ! what old man is that, then ?" The Master of St. Lazarus shaded his eyes with his hand, and peered across the quadrangle, but Mr. Hodsman saved him the trouble of making the discovery for himself. " It's Adam Halfday, sir. He's been there all the afternoon." " Where's his grandchild ?" " I don't know, sir." " You have not seen her about ?" " No, sir.' " That will do, Hodsman. You can go." Hodsman touched his cap again and went back to the porter's lodge, and Mr. Salmon turned to his young visitor and said, " You will allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Salmon ; she is extremely anxious to make your acquaintance, after all that Angelo has said in his letter concerning you.

If you will kindly step in with me for a few minutes, whilst I run across to Halfday yonder, and see what is the matter, I *' " I would prefer to accompany you for the present, Mr. Salmon, if you have no objection," she said ; " I am greatly interested in the hos pital and the brotherhood." " It is a noble institution. Doubtless, my son Angelo has described it to you in his own graphic way." " Yes, he has described it — graphically," she added, after a moment's pause. " This brother is somewhat of a character. You will be amused with him ; you will see what we poor masters have to put up with now and then." " The brethren are old and querulous, and not too happy, I daresay," was the thoughtful com ment. " They should be as happy as the day is long." "Why?" asked Miss Westbrook, who was evidently a girl of many questions.

" They are free from anxiety, they are well provided for, they have everything they need in moderation — board, lodging, clothing, fuel, and money," answered Mr. Salmon; "I tell them this half-a-dozen times a week at least." "Do they complain, then?" " They are full of whims and fancies. They are not grateful." "Many of them, probably, have known better days ?" "Most of them," was the reply; "some of them have been shopkeepers in the town, others even gentlemen. This man, Adam Halfday, was worth fifty thousand pounds when he was young." " Indeed. "And it all went in speculation — in that dreadful greed of gain, Miss Westbrook, which makes even Christians discontented very often." " Yes," was the answer of his fair companion, "very often." They had been sauntering side by side towards the alms-houses, and were standing now before Mr. Adam Halfday, who, seated in his chair, with his crutch across his knees, seemed igno rant of his watchers.

" Well, Adam, old gentleman," said Mr. Sal mon, in a fussy but not unkindly tone, " is it quite wise of you to sit out so late as this ? " Mr. Halfday did not look up at the speaker, but he mumbled forth an answer. " What's the time?" he said. Mr. Salmon inspected his gold repeater. " Half-past seven." " I should have known the time for myself once," muttered Mr. Halfday, " but I haven't a fine gold watch now, and a big chain — and seals. Half-past seven is it? So early as all that ?" " It is too late for you to sit here, Adam." "There is no rule against my sitting here, Mr. Salmon ?" asked the brother, more sharply and clearly. " There is a rule that you should all be in bed by eight o'clock, you know. You have not a great deal of time before you, and there's tea to have." " I don't want any tea.

I have quite made up my mind not to have any tea. She can drink it aU ! " said Mr. Halfday. " Who is she ? " asked Miss Westbrook of the clergyman. " His grand-daughter," replied the Master. "As the brothers get weak and feeble, they are allowed a female relative— a wife, sister, daugh ter, grand-daughter, or even niece, to wait upon them." "And I hope they are waited upon better than I am, Mr. Salmon, or it's a queer kind of attention the poor wretches get," observed Mr. Halfday. "Come, come, you and Dorcas have had a little tiff, I see." " We're always having little tiffs," said the old man. " There is not a worse temper in all Pentonshire than Dorcas Halfday's. Where she got her nasty sulky ways from, the Lord knows. I can't make out myself." " I'll go and talk to Dorcas immediately," said Mr. Salmon.

" Pray excuse me for an instant," he said to Miss Westbrook — " you see I have a multiplicity of duties to perform. One instant •thank you." Mr. Salmon passed into the cottage, and Miss Westbrook moved more closely to the bowed form of the old man, stooping down even and gazing into his seamed face. "You have not found happiness, or peace, or content, amongst the Brotherhood of the Noble Poor, then, Mr. Halfday ?" she inquired in a low voice. The white shaggy eyebrows quivered as though stirred by the sweet breath of the speaker, and two keen dark eyes looked into the face so close to his. " Now — who can you be ?" he said, in a won dering tone of voice. " One whom you have never seen before," was the reply. " One ofthe curious sort, who want to know everything, our lives, histories, and adventures, who take up an hour of our time in the busy season, when people are turning in by wholesale, and there are not half guides enough to show the antiquities of this interesting spot in which we crawl about," he said, with a consider able amount of bitterness in his voice ; " but you have come too late to see the church."

" I am afraid so," replied the lady. " It's a ghastly den in the dark. It wants the sunlight behind the painted glass. It wants the Summer ; but if you'll come early to-morrow, and ask for me, Adam Halfday, I shall be most happy to act as your guide," he said, with a sudden servility exhibiting itself, to the visitor's surprise. " I flatter myself, I have more brains than the rest of the old men you'll find about, and can show you more of the hospital than anyone else in the same space of time, — and if you are pressed for time, that is." " Have you been here long ?" " Some fifteen years — a prisoner as it were," he answered, shrugging his shoulders, " and all the rest of my life a gentleman at large." " You have had reverses?" " I have been a rich man, and I have stared ruin in the face. I have spent thousands freely, and I am thankful — ay, truly thankful — for the gift of half-a-crown."

He added this with great eagerness, rubbing one thin claw over another as he spoke. Miss Westbrook took the hint thus neatly conveyed, and dropped money in his bauds. He looked down at the gift, drew a quick breath, and then peered from beneath his brows at a donor more generous that he had met of late years. " Thank you, lady — you are very kind to me. Heaven bless you !" he murmured. " Will you answer my question now, Mr. Halfday ?" she said ; " it is very rude, you know, to keep a lady waiting all this while." Mr. Halfday laughed feebly, and put his hand to the side of his skull cap, by way of military salute. " What is it that you pleased to ask me, my good lady ?" he inquired again ; " I haven't so good a memory as I used to have." " Have you found happiness, or peace, or con tent here ?" she inquired again.