Arrived at the house of Veuve Peter Ross, they found it clean and inviting; warmed by a wood stove and carpeted with home-made rugs. The old woman took a great interest in their arrival and belongings and jabbered away incessantly, in French. Did they but request her to "cherchez un autre blankette!" or fry an additional egg, up went her hands, her eyes and her shoulders, and such a tirade of excited French was visited upon them that they soon forebore asking her for anything but went about helping themselves. At first they thought she was angry when these outbreaks took place, but Bovey, who could partially understand her, gathered that she was far from offended, but given over to the national habit of delivering eloquent and theatrical monologues on the slightest provocation. She had no lodgers at the present moment; a Frenchman had left the day before, and the prospect was in every way favorable, to the comfort of the two friends.

When the dusk fell, Bovey made a camp-fire.

"It's what we came for," he said, "and we can't begin too early or have enough of it, and I feel chilly, queer, quite unlike myself to-night. It's a depressing country just about here."

"It is," said Clarges, anxious to keep his friend a little longer in the dark. "We'll be all right when it's really night, you know, and the fire blazes up. What a jolly tent and what glorious blankets? We ought to go to bed early, for it was awfully late the last night There! now its getting better. Hoop-la! more sticks Bovey! Throw them on, make it blaze up. Here we are in the primeval forest at last, Bovey, pines and moss, and shadows and sounds—What's that now? Is that on the river?"

For suddenly they heard the most wonderful strain coming from that direction. The river was about three or four hundred yards away across the road, in front of them, and upon a raft slowly passing by were a couple of habitans singing. What strain was this, so weird, so solemn, so earnest, yet so pathetic, so sweet, so melodious!

"Descendez a l'ombre Ma jolie blonde."

Those were the words they caught, no more, but the tune eluded them.

"It's the queerest tune I ever heard!" ejaculated Clarges. He had a smattering of music, and not a bad ear.

"Can't get it for the life of me. It's like—I tell you what it's like Bovey, its got the same—you know—the same intervals—that's the word—that the priests chant in! And then, just when you're thinking it has, off it goes into something like opera bouffe or those French rounds our nurse used to sing. But isn't it pretty? I say—where's Lady Violet now, Bovey, eh? Don't you wish she could see us, see you there, quite the pioneer, looking like Queen Elizabeth's giant porter in this queer light? and how she would catch up that tune and bring it out on the piano, and make ever so much more of it with her clever fingers, first like a battle-cry, men marching and marching you know, and then put in a wonderful chord that would make us all creep and sigh as she would glide into the loveliest nocturne, you know—I say, what a nocturne we're having, eh! Do you think it's any livelier now?"

"My boy," said the Hon. Bovyne, solemnly, "You are right, it is a nocturne and a wonderful one. I'm not given to expressing myself poetically as you know, so I shall content myself with saying that its immense, and now will you pass the whiskey? I certainly feel shaky to-night, but I shall sleep out here all the same. What are you going to do?"

"I prefer to try the house, I think," answered Clarges, and so he did. When he was going to bed, heartily grateful that his cousin was as yet ignorant of his interference, he looked long and earnestly from his one window in the roof at the scene outside before he attempted again the process of self-vaccination. He could see the mighty flames of Bovey's camp-fire, a first-class fire, well planned and well plied. He could see the pale outline of the tent and the dark figure of his cousin wrapped in rugs and blankets by the side of the fire. He could see the tall pines and the little firs, the glistening line of river and the circles of gleaming white stones that marked the garden beds in front. The first snow of the year was just beginning to fall in tiny flakelets that melted as soon as they touched the ground.

"When they're all covered with snow, it must be pretty," thought Clarges. "Like all the Christmas trees in the world put together! The winter is beginning, the long cold, constant Canadian winter we have heard so much about. Good-bye, dear Lady Violet, good-bye, dear old England!" Clarges sat on the side of the bed with his arm ready. But the faintness came again, this time with a sickening thrill of frightful pain and apprehension, and he rolled over in a deathly swoon with his own words ringing in his ears.

When the morning broke, it broke in bright sunshine and with an inch or so of snow on the ground. The Hon. Bovyne, though feeling unaccountably ill and irritable, was delighted.

"Still I fear we are too late in the season for much camping," he said, "I must see Arthur about it."

He waited till ten, eleven, half-past eleven. No Arthur, not even the old woman about. He wondered very much. He approached the house, and finding nobody coming at his knock, opened the door and went in. Something wrong. He knew that at once. The air was stifling, horrible, with an unknown quantity in it, it seemed to him. He threw open the front room door. Veuve Peter Ross was in her bed, ill, and of small-pox. He could tell her that, for certain. He rushed up-stairs and found Clarges on his bed, raving, delirious.

What was it he heard?

"Bovey's all right! Bovey's all right?" This was all, repeated over and over.

The Hon. Bovyne was neither a fool nor a coward. He tore off his coat and looked at his arm, then he dragged his cousin out of the room, down the stairs and out of the fatal house. Propping him up against a sturdy pine and covering him with all available warm clothing, he sped like wind to the nearest house. But neither the swift, keen self-reproaches of Bovey, nor the skill of the best physician to be found in the town, nor the pure, fresh pine-scented air, nor the yearning perchance of a dead yet present mother could prevail. The young life went out in delirium and in agony, but "thank God," thought Bovey, "in complete unconsciousness."

When he set about removing his tent and other camping apparatus some time later, he was suddenly struck with the appearance of the tree against which poor Clarges had been propped. He looked again and again. "I must be dreaming," said the Hon. Bovyne. "That tree—oh! its impossible—nevertheless, that tree has its counterpart in the one opposite it, and both have extraordinary branches! They bend upward, making a kind of—of—what was it Arthur saw in those imaginary trees of his only—yesterday—my God—it is true—a kind of lyre shape! There it is, and the more I look at it the clearer it grows, and to think he has died there—!! And beneath there he is buried, and the raftsmen will pass within a few hundred yards of him where he lies, and will sing the same strain that so fascinated him, but he will not hear it, and learn it and bring it back for Lady Violet, the loveliest woman in England! For he has gone down into the eternal shadow that no man ever penetrates."



The Prisoner Dubois.

Miss Cecilia Maxwell was the only child of Sir Robert Maxwell, K. C. M. G., member of the Cabinet, chief orator of the Liberal party, and understudy for the part of Premier, who, although a Scotchman by birth, was a typical Canadian—free, unaffected, honest and sincere. His bushy iron-gray hair, his keen gray eyes, his healthy florid color, and the well-trimmed black moustache, which gave his face an unusually youthful appearance for a man of his age, went with a fine stalwart physique and a general bodily conformation apparently in keeping with the ideas of early rising, cold ablutions and breakfasts of oatmeal porridge that the ingenuous mind is apt to associate with Scotch descent and bringing-up. His daughter was a very beautiful girl. Born in the shadow of the pines, she had been educated successively in Edinburgh, Brussels and Munich, had been presented at Court, been through two London seasons, spent half of one winter in South America, another in Bermuda, had been ogled by lords, worshipped by artists, and loved by everybody.

Once more in Canada, she took her place in the limited yet exacting political circles of the Capital, of Toronto, and of distant Winnipeg. Life was full of duties, and she shirked none, though on days when they were put away earlier than usual she would fall to musing of the country place down the river she had not seen for years, with the beautiful woods, and the simple, contented French, and the evenings on the water.

"That great, lonely river," she thought on one occasion, looking idly out of her window. "What other river in the world is like it?— and the tiny French villages with the red roofs and doors, and the sparkling spires and the queer people. Delle Lisbeth, and veuve Macleod, and Pierre—poor Pierre. I have never forgotten Pierre, with his solemn eyes and beautiful brown hair. And how he knew the flowers in the wood, and what were those songs he used to sing?" And Cecilia sang a couple of verses of:

"Un Canadian errant, Banni de ses foyers."

When Sir Robert entered later he found her listless and preoccupied. "You mustn't look like that to-night," he said. "Don't forget that this is your first important dinner-party: three French members and their wives, and La Colombiere, the new Minister of Finance, to whom you must be as charming as possible. This North-West business is quickening as fast as it can. The Metis are really up, there's no doubt about it."

"In rebellion?" asked Cecilia breathlessly. There was an added interest in life directly to the imaginative girl.

"Ay," said her father, "there's a rascal at the bottom of it we've been after for a long time; but now, run away and look bright at dinner, like a good girl."

The small clique of Frenchmen and their wives could not but have been charmed with their reception that evening. The dinner was good, and not too heavy nor long, the wines excellent (for Sir Robert did not as yet favor the "Scott" Act), and the suavity of his manner combined with the appearance and grace of his daughter, in a delicate dress of primrose and brown, with amber in her beautiful golden plaits and round her whitest neck, left nothing to be desired. And yet on that very first night in her capacity as hostess, Cecilia found she had to learn to play a part, the part of woman, which all women who have just left off being girls find so hard to play at first. For naturally the report of the Metis revolt had spread. Sir Robert did a brave thing. He referred to it directly they were seated, and then everybody felt at ease. Now it could be talked about if anybody chose—and Cecilia did so choose.

"Who is this young Frenchman," she asked of La Colombiere, "that is identified with this new rising? I have been away, and am ignorant of it all."

"His name is Dubois—Pierre Dubois," returned La Colombiere with a gleaming smile. "He calls himself the representative of the French-Canadian party. Bah! such men!" But Cecilia's heart had given a mighty leap and then stopped, she almost thought, for ever.

"Pierre—Pierre Dubois?" she reiterated in her surprise. Her fan of yellow feathers dropped from her lap, and her face showed extraordinary interest for a moment.

"You know him M'lle.?" said La Colombiere, returning her the fan. For an instant she was the centre of attention. Then with a flutter of the yellow feathers that subjugated the four impressionable Frenchmen completely, she resumed her usual manner.

"I know the name, certainly. There was somebody of that name living at Port Joli where we go in the Summer you know."

"Oh!" said Laflamme carelessly, a little man with a bald head and a diplomatist's white moustache, "Dubois is not a new offender. He has been recognized as an agitator for three or four years. He has the eyes of the ox and the wavy hair of the sculptor. He is to be admired— vraiment—and has the gift of speech."

When the dinner was over Cecilia played for them in the drawing-room. Somehow or other, she wandered into the tender yet buoyant melody of the chanson she had hummed earlier in the day.

"Un Canadien errant, Banni de ses foyers."

"Hum-hum," trolled little Laflamme. "So you know our songs? Ca va bien!"

"That was taught me" said Cecilia, "once down the river at Port Joli." But she did not say who had taught her. Later on when the guests were gone and Sir Robert was preparing to go back to the office, his daughter said very quietly.

"Papa do you remember that young man at Port Joli who was staying with the cure for his health, the one who was so kind and showed me so many things, the woods, you know and the water, and who talked so beautifully?"

"I remember the one you mean, I think, but not his name. Why, dear child?"

"His name was Dubois," returned Cecilia. "Pierre Dubois!"

"Dubois? Are you sure? That is very singular" said her father. "And he talked beautifully you say? It must be this one."

"That is what I think" said Cecilia, seeing her father to the door.

Then ensued a period of hard work for Cecilia. She read the papers assiduously, going up every day to the Parliamentary reading-rooms for that purpose that she might lose no aspect of the affair. She followed every detail of the rebellion, even possessing herself of many of her father's papers bearing on the matter. Those details are well known; how the whisper ran through our peaceful land, breathing of war and battle and blood-shed; how our gallant men marched to the front in as superb a faith and as perfect a manhood as ever troops have shown in this country or the Old; how some fell by the way, and how others were reserved to be clasped again to the bosoms of wife and mother and how some met with the finest fate of all, or at least the most fitting fate for a true soldier—death on the battle-field. For a month the country was in a delirium. Then joy-bells rang, and bonfires blazed, and hands were struck in other hands for very delight that the cause of all the mischief, the rebel chief, the traitor Dubois was taken. Cecilia alone sat in her room in horror.

"What will they do with the prisoner Dubois?" she said with a vehemence that dismayed Sir Robert.

"The prisoner Dubois? Why, they will hang him of course. He has caused too much blood to be shed not to have to give some of his own." Cecilia writhed as if in extreme pain. Her beauty, her grace, her youth all seemed to leave her in a moment, and she stood faded and old before her father.

"Oh, they will not do that! Imprison him or send him away—anything, anything save that! See, they do not know him—poor Pierre, so kind, so good—they do not know him as I knew him. Father, he could not hurt a thing—he would step aside from the smallest living thing in the path when we walked together that summer, and he helped everybody that wanted help, there was nothing he could not do. And he loves his country—at least he did so then. There is that song, 'O mon cher Canada,' he used to sing, and he told me of the future of his country, and how he had prayed to be allowed to aid it and push it forward. And he does not hate the English, only how can he help loving the French more when he is one of them, and has good French blood in his veins—better than many of the so-called English! And he was born to be a leader and to bring men away from their home into battle and make war for them, and where in that does he differ from other heroes we are taught to love and admire? If you had ever heard him talk, and had seen the people all gathered round him when he spoke of all these things—as for his church and the Virgin, and the priests, it would be well if you and all of us thought as much about our religion, and loved and revered it as he did his!"

Cecilia broke down into incoherent sobs. Sir Robert sat aghast at this startling confession. No need to tell him that it was prompted by love.

"But what if he be insane, my dear?" he asked very quietly.

"Then it is still bad—it is worse," said Cecilia. "Will hanging an insane man bring back the others that are slain? Will it make foul fair and clean still cleaner? Will it bring peace and friendliness, and right feeling, or will it bring a fiercer fire and a sharper sword than our country has yet seen—a hand-to-hand fight between rival races, a civil war based on national distinction!"

"What would you do?" said her father, walking up and down the room. "What can I or anybody do? It is common law and common justice; if he be found guilty he must swing for it. Personal intercession—"

"Might save him!" said the girl.

"Must not be thought of!" said her father.

"You mean, you may not think of it. But others may—I may. I am a woman, free and untrammelled by either party or personal considerations of any kind. Father, let me try!"

"Cecilia, it is madness to take such a thing upon yourself. How is it possible? What are your plans?"

"I do not know. I have not thought. All is in a haze through which I see that vision of the hangman and the rope Father, let me try!"

Sir Robert thought for a moment, then he said: "Very well, my dear, you shall try, on one condition; that first of all you have an interview with Dubois himself. In fact, for your purpose it is absolutely necessary that you should see him, in order to identify him with the other Dubois you used to know. After that interview, if you still persist in your course, I promise—rash as it certainly seems—to help you. Now hold yourself in readiness to start for the North-West at a moment's notice. I have private information that tells me Dubois will be hung and any intervention on your part or that of anybody else must be set on foot immediately, do you see?"

A few days afterwards Cecilia, unveiled, and dressed in an irreproachable walking costume of gray, was taken to the gloomy prison outside the little northern town of ——, where the prisoner Dubois was confined. There was a bit of tricolor in her hat and her cheeks were very pale—As the beautiful daughter of Sir Robert Maxwell her way was sufficiently paved with politeness as she presented her private order to see the prisoner. Her heart was beating tumultuously and the blood surged round her temples. The turnkey showed her into a small whitewashed room, opposite the cell in which Dubois spent his time and informed her that in compliance with strict orders he would have to be present during the interview, to which Cecilia bent her head in assent; she could not have spoken just then. "It is a strange thing that I am doing," she thought, "but I shall see Pierre—poor Pierre." Approaching footsteps were soon heard and the prisoner Dubois entered, escorted by two warders. He started when he saw his visitor, and—stared.

"Mademoiselle,—" he said, evidently trying to recall her name and failing.

"Cecile," she said, eagerly, "Ma'amselle Cecile you always called me, and I liked it so much better than Cecilia. I think I like it still— Pierre—I—."

The prisoner Dubois frowned.

"If Mdme. Dubois had ears through these walls, you had not called me 'Pierre.' But—" laying his hand on his heart and bowing low, "Pierre himself is flattered—oui, mademoiselle—by your attention— oui, vraiment—and he is rejoiced to know that his image is still cherished in that heart so fair, so Anglaise, so pure, so good. Belle-enfant, Je n'ai pas oublie nos amours!"

The three men in the room suppressed a smile. Dubois stood with his head thrown back, his arms folded and his soft dark eyes fixed on Cecilia. She was still standing, indeed there was no chair in the room, and her eyes were fixed on him as his upon herself. It was Pierre, and yet not her Pierre. Rather an exaggerated growth—of the man she had once known. The same soft brown hair, only thicker and rougher, one drooping wave looking tangled and unkempt—the dreamy eyes with the latent sneer in them dreamier than ever and yet the sneer more visible, the thin sensitive nose thinner, the satisfied mouth more satisfied and conscious, the weak chin fatally weaker. And he was married, too! Mdme. Dubois—that must be his wife! How strange it was! Cecilia's brain was in a frightful state of doubt and fever and hesitation. It was necessary for her to explain her presence there, however, for she could not but resent the opening speech of the prisoner Dubois. She was growing very tired of standing, moreover, but she would have died rather than have demanded a chair. At length the turnkey observed her fatigue and sent one of the warders for a chair.

"Fetch two," interposed Dubois, with a flourish of his hand. "I myself shall sit down." When the man returned, bringing only one chair on the plea that he could not find another, Cecilia, whose nerve was returning, offered it to Dubois. He accepted it calmly and sat down upon it, waiting to hear what she had to say. At this signal instance of arch selfishness Cecilia felt her heart tighten and her temples grow cold as if fillets of fire had been exchanged for ribbons of snow.

"Sir," she began, "I am sorry to find you here." Dubois smiled the smile of a great man who listens with condescension to what an inferior has to say. "I am glad you have not forgotten me, because all the time I was away, and it has been a long time, I never—it is quite true—forgot you—I mean (for Dubois smiled again) I never forgot that summer you spent near us at Port Joli, and the things you talked about, about your future. When I came home I found you had gone so much further than I know you ever intended to, and have been the cause of so much trouble, and the death of brave men, and I was very sorry." Cecilia leant on the bare table before her, and felt that every moment as it passed brought with it a cooling of the once passionate feeling she had entertained for the Dubois of her childhood. But if the lover were gone, there remained the man, husband and father, maybe the leader, the orator, the martyr, the dear human being.

"So I thought that if it were possible at all, some step should be taken to—to prevent the law from taking its course—its final course perhaps." Cecilia felt her throat tighten as she spoke. "You have plenty of friends—you must have—all the French will help and many, many English, for it is no cause to die for, it is no cause at all! There should never have been bloodshed on either side!"

Dubois uncrossed his long legs at last and said in his loftiest tone:

"Chere enfant, the French will not let me die. I—I myself—Pierre Dubois—allowed to hang by the neck until I am dead! That will never happen. Voyez-vous donc cherie, I am their King, their prophet, their anointed, their fat priests acknowledge me, their women adore me!"

Cecilia shrunk together as she listened. She had sought and she had not found, she had expected and it had been denied her. At this moment, the turnkey signified that time was up. She felt her heart burning in an agony of undefined grief and disappointment in which was also mingled the relief of resignation. The prisoner Dubois bowed low with his hand on his heart and then pressing her own hand lingeringly, gave her a tenderly insinuating glance. As she turned away she heard him exchange a laugh and a jest with one of the wardens, and her cheeks flamed with indignant anger. "Were he a good or suffering man as I dreamed he was, I would have bent low and kissed his hand; as it was, I am sorry I let him take mine."

She was calm when she reached her carriage in which sat her father waiting. He divined at once that his plan had been successful. "You look tired, my dear," was all he said.

"Yes, I have been standing for some time," Cecilia returned in a peculiar voice.

"Could they not find you a chair in the establishment?"

"They found one," she said grimly, "and that was appropriated by the prisoner Dubois."

"The prisoner Dubois!" thought Sir Robert. "It is well. We shall hear no more of Pierre."

Two days before Christmas the prisoner Dubois underwent the extreme penalty of the law. Cecilia sat in her room all that day. She never quite made up her mind as to whether Pierre had been a lunatic or a fanatic, a martyr or a fiend, an inspired criminal or a perverted enthusiast. Perhaps he was a mixture of all.



How the Mr. Foxleys Came, Stayed and Never Went Away.



CHAPTER I.

There flows in Western Canada, by which I mean a region east of the Saskatchewan and west of the Thousand Islands, a singular and beautiful stream. It is beautiful because it is narrow, undulating and shallow, because it has graceful curves and rounded bends, because its banks are willow-clad and its bed boulder-strewn, because it flows along between happy farms and neat white villages, because at one spot, it boasts a picturesque and ruined mill and a moss-covered bridge and because—chiefly because—it is above all things—placid. The mind familiar with our Canadian streams will easily understand then, that if these be its attributes of beauty, they also attest to its claim of singularity. For the Canadian river is seldom placid, but oftener seething and steaming and foaming; or else deep and dark and dangerous with many a mighty gorge and tumbling cascade, wide and lonely and monotonous for the most part; pine hung down to the very edge, black and lowering, or displaying waving wisps of dry gray foliage that only resembles human hair. What a contrast, then, does this cherished river I speak of, afford! No local Laureate has as yet written it up, though picnic parties used to gather themselves together on its banks and in its well-wooded shades, defiling everything they touched from bark to beach, leaving bits of bread here, dead pie there, buttering the leaves, peppering the grass, salting the stones, and scattering greasy crumpled paper—PAPER—PAPER—everywhere. That is what picnic parties do all over the world, and with such gusto all of them, even the Sunday-schools, Dorcases, W. C. T. U's. and all the rest of them, that I really think it must be intended as a serious part of the Picnicker's Ritual and forms very likely a peace-offering or sacrifice of propitiation towards some unknown God. I don't think the Druids left paper about underneath their oaks. But presumably they left worse. Well, if as yet, this river I love so well has not been immortalized in fiction, travels or verse, it has however attracted the attention of several gifted members of the Royal Academy—Royal Canadian of course, who have from time to time invaded its peaceful shores and stuffing themselves into adjacent if inconvenient farmhouses, sketched it in water and oil, in the common-place pencil, and the more ambitious charcoal. The results are charming and you may see them any day in the studios of our foremost artists or in the picture dealers' windows or haply on the terra-cotta tinted walls of our esteemed collectors, the retired grocers of Montreal, or the aesthetic lawyers of a more western and more ambitious city. Still though the sketches are charming both in conception and execution, I, were I a Canadian artist, eager to secure Canadian subjects for my pencil, would hardly choose this particular river as one likely to give the most correct idea of Canadian scenery. No, I would chose the St. Maurice or the Richelieu, the Lievre or the Saguenay, the Ottawa or portions of the St. Lawrence, with the grim Azoic rocks, the turbulent rapids and the somber pines. What a superb river system it is! Tell them off on your fingers and you'll have to go on borrowing from them afterwards and then all over again. Think of all those rivers that cluster in the French Canada and feed the mighty Gulf of St. Lawrence. There are the Ottawa, the Gatineau, the Rideau, the Richelieu, the Lievre, the Matanne, the Metapedia, the Metis, the Saguenay. Those are the ones we know. Then look at the Peribonka, the Maniconagan, all the Ste. Anne's, all the Rouge or Red rivers, the Du Moine, the Coalonge, the Vermilion, the St. Francis. Then, look at that cluster of great Saxon named streams, the Churchill, the Nelson, the Severn, the English, the Albany! Lastly, glance at the magnificent Saskatchewan with the historic streams of Battle and Qu'Appelle Rivers! And now I have omitted the Athabasca, the Peace, the Moose and the Assiniboine! There is no end to them; they defy enumeration while they invite it.

Now, most of these Canadian rivers are Azoic in character; hence their grim and formidable beauty. But my river has nothing the least Azoic about it. It belongs to a more recent, a more comfortable, more placid, more satisfying a formation. It is as idyllic a stream as any English one that Tennyson noted in a contemplative ramble to work up later into the "Brook."

Crossing the moss-grown bridge I have alluded to, a gradual ascent presents itself on the opposite side, of firm white road well macadamized and leading through small neat low houses, each with a little garden in front, to a church with a needle-like spire on the top of the hill, and the parson's house adjoining. On a June day, for example, it made a pleasant picture. Pastoral and prosperous the landscape, contented the people on foot, in the fields, at the windows, and most delightful of all—a certain Old World haze hanging over it.

This is what struck the Mr. Foxleys, driving out slowly from the town one Saturday afternoon. George, the elder, pale with dark hair, lay back in the phaeton with folded arms. Joseph, the younger, fair-haired and freckled, sat up, driving. They had hardly exchanged a word since entering the phaeton. For eight miles they had proceeded in almost perfect silence. This did not mean that they were out of sorts, or not on pleasant terms with one another. On the contrary, it proved that they were the very best of friends, and never bored each other. I may as well say at once that they were Englishmen, which was easy to gather from their picturesque and unusual attire of neat gray small-clothes meeting gray stockings at the knee, low white shoes, a striped blue and white flannel shirt and canoe-shaped hats of gray, each bearing a snow-white "puggree" with blue and gold fringed ends. Such was the outward adorning of the Mr. Foxleys. Behind the phaeton ran a pretty brown retriever answering to the name of "Bess," and laid across the floor of the little carriage were a couple of walking canes, a couple of fishing rods and a gun case strapped together, while under the seat was a medium-sized portmanteau, and a peculiar long box with a leather handle. The eight miles having been traversed by them in silence, George, the elder, broke it by remarking, as they slackened their pace, before advancing over the bridge, "This is better."

"Very much so. Rather. I should think so," answered Joseph, the younger, who had a slightly more lively manner than his brother, and very laughing eyes. "It looks a little more like the—the Old Country."

The elder brother made no reply. A kind of weary smile flitted across his face instead.

"It's a little bit after—Devonshire, don't you think?" went on Joseph, surveying the green meadows, the neat painted fences, the sleeping cows, the rising uplands in the distance leaning lovingly next the sky, the bridge, the distant church, and the placid narrow river with the overhanging willows and the stony amber floor.

"A long way after," said George, without unfolding his arms or looking around him at all. He was gazing straight before him.

"But you don't half see the beauty of it," said the younger brother, stopping the horse and standing up in the phaeton, "especially after that horrid eight miles of half-cleared ugly-stumpy stubble! This is really beautiful, such soft lines you know and little corners—oh! quite English!" Some of his enthusiasm reached the quieter brother, who apparently roused himself and looked around as directed. A faint pink came into his pale cheeks, a new gleam into the weary eyes, "Well, it is better, as I said before—you'll remember, I noticed it first—but not English."

"Well, not English altogether of course, I know," said Joseph gathering up his reins, "but its a jolly spot enough whatever it is, and—I say, look at that now, that oak, on the other side of the road, in front of that little cottage, we'll be up with it now in a minute."

"By Jove, what a splendid tree!" Now I do not in the least wonder at the Mr. Foxleys stopping opposite this mighty oak to admire it, because I myself am quite familiar with it and have seen it scores of times, and must agree with them in pronouncing it one of the finest trees I have ever seen anywhere. Of course it has no story attached to it that the world knows, at least it never talked that I am aware of, never hid or screened anybody of importance—or anything of that sort—so naturally it has little or no interest about it. And yet, for that very reason, it is so much easier to think of it as a tree, to consider it and admire it, and learn to love and understand it just as a tree. So the Mr. Foxleys thought, as they gazed at its monstrous trunk, its glorious branches of deep, dark glossy green with here and there an upstart arm of glowing bronze or a smaller shoot of younger yellow.

"It might have grown in the Manor Park!" said the younger brother airily with a keen sense of pleasure in the suggestion.

"It might have grown in the Manor Park, as you say", rejoined the elder brother gravely.

Then they went on again, slowly up the hill, that they might the better examine the church, the parsonage and the road beyond. What they wanted now was an Inn. Presently they espied one, just on the other side of a tiny bridge spanning a tinier brook. It was no upstart brick building of flaring red with blind white windows and a door flush with the street, a dirty stable at one side and a ragged kitchen garden at the other. But low and white and irregular with a verandah running along in front, it had red curtains that would draw over the lower halves of the windows and hints of chintz at the upper portions; the door was open and revealed a tall clock in the hall, a stand of flowers, and a cat asleep in a large round chair; at one side a flight of steps led down to the kitchen door at which a buxom maid in bare arms stood in a pink gown and a pinker face, and at the other side was the boarded square that held the pump—the village pump—around which were gathered five or six bare-footed children, the hostler of the Inn, the village butcher, tailor, and cobbler. A sign swung out from the verandah.

"The Ipswich Inn, by M. Cox," said the younger Mr. Foxley. Then he looked at his brother. His brother looked at him. They understood one another at once, and Joseph pulled up in good style at the door. The hostler, dressed in old corduroy and with a fiddle under his arm, sprang forward to assist them. He dropped his H's. "Delightful," cried Mr. Joseph. So did the landlady, a cheery person of about fifty in a silk apron. The brothers were so content that they remained all night, "to look at the place."

Next morning, endless surprises awaited and greeted them. They found that the large room in front was a kind of drawing-room, in which rose-leaves, china-bowls, old engravings, a shining mahogany book-case, and a yellow-keyed piano atoned for the shortcomings of funeral horsehair and home-made carpets. They thought it on the whole a charming room, only to be eclipsed by the kitchen. For the kitchen, which was underneath the ground floor and nearly the entire size of the house, was therefore very spacious and comfortable, possessing three large pantries and an out-house or summer kitchen; besides, moreover, it was dark-raftered, ham-hung, with willow-pattern slates in a neat dresser, and peacock feathers over the high mantel; with, in one corner—the darkest—a covered well, into which I used to see myself the beautiful golden pats of butter lowered twice a week in summer time. One window, a small one, curtained with chintz and muslin drawn on a string, looked out on a small terraced garden at the back leading to an orchard; the other window, large and long, with twelve small panes and no curtains at all, adjoined the door opening on the court or yard at the side of the house. This yard was paved irregularly with grey stone slabs, between which the grass had wedged itself, with an occasional root of the persistent and omnipresent dandelion; it contained a cistern, a table with flower-pots, a parrot in one cage, a monkey in another, garden implements, rods, buckets, tins and tubs! A pleasant untidiness prevailed in the midst of irreproachably clean and correct surroundings, and the Mr. Foxleys having finished their breakfast up-stairs in the public dining-room—a bare, almost ugly apartment, devoid of anything in furniture or appointments to make it homelike, except a box of mignonette set in the side-window, looked longingly out at the little paved court-yard beneath. They had had the most delicious rasher of ham, eggs sans peur et sans reproche, some new and mysterious kind of breakfast cake, split and buttered while hot, and light and white inside as it was golden and glazed outside, and three glasses of fresh milk each! They had been waited on by the buxom girl in a blue gown this time, against which her arms looked pinker than ever, and during the meal the landlady of the inn had looked in, with her hands too floury and her mind too full of coming loaves to do more than inquire generally as to their comfort. Looking over the mignonette, Mr. Joseph Foxley espied her presently talking to the parrot and tending the monkey. This was more than the frivolous Mr. Joseph could stand. He took his brother and made a tour of the house accordingly, discovering in turn as I have said the drawing-room, the kitchen, the court-yard, the garden and orchard and lastly the bar! That proved the most comfortable, most enticing room of all. More red curtains, at the windows and over one door, an old-fashioned hearth paved with red brick and bearing even in June a couple of enormous logs against the possible cold of a rainy evening, two cases of stuffed birds, a buffalo's head over the fireplace, colored prints of Love Lies Bleeding, Stocks and Bachelor's Buttons, and over all, that odour of hot lemons and water, with something spirituous beyond, that completely won the refractory heart of the elder Mr. Foxley and caused him to drop down in a chair by the hearth with an incoherent expression of wonder and relief that did not escape his brother.

"How long shall we say, George," he asked. "She will want to know, because there are other men who come out here from town occasionally it seems, and of course it's only fair to let her know about the room.

"What shall I say?" Mr. George Foxley crossed his long legs in evident comfort and took in the entire room in a smiling gaze before he answered. Outside it was beautifully quiet, in front of the house. From the back there came the faintest sounds of crow and cackle and farm-yard stir just audible, from the kitchen rose cheerful laughter, and merry voices, the smell of baking, and a fainter odor of herbs. Milly, the girl, in the blue gown, passed with a milk pail in either hand. She looked in shyly. Mr. Joseph waved his hand gallantly then laughed. Then Mr. George said, very slowly.

"Say? Oh, say that we will take the room—the one we have now, you know—for the rest of the Summer."

"That is, you will take it, and remain here, while I knock about in town and come out on Saturdays or whenever I can," said Joseph.

"Exactly," said his brother.

That afternoon Mr. Joseph returned to town in the neat hired phaeton leaving his brother in full possession of the charming and comfortable Inn. In a couple of days he came back, this time in the stage that passed through Ipswich three times a week, and bringing with him a couple of English trunks and a stout portmanteau. Thus the Mr. Foxleys entered upon life in earnest in this dear placid little village, not far from the river described in the beginning of my story.



CHAPTER II.

The Mr. Foxleys, after a week's sojourn or so at the Ipswich Inn, made a mutual discovery. This was, that not only were the landlady of the Inn, her son and the ostler all of English origin and descent, but that the entire village appeared to be populated by people of English extraction. The butcher was a Englishman, the blacksmith was a Cockney answering to the name of 'Enry Ide, the cobbler was from South Devon somewhere, and the parson was an undergraduate of Oxford. The farmers were mostly Scotch, and the village store-keeper was David Macpherson. The driver of the stage was an Irishman, and the sexton of the pretty church on the hill was an odd product of that odd corner of the world known as the Isle of Man. Certainly the two brothers found and made themselves at home. Milly perhaps was the only native Canadian that came in their way. It was a thoroughly British settlement, and it is a noteworthy fact that the only well-to-do man in the place was an American. It was he who lived in the square, red brick house with white blinds always pulled down, even in soft welcome spring days, and with plaster casts of lions and deer couchant on futile little wooden pedestals in the garden. It was he who owned the new and prosperous mill which had superseded the worn-out one lower down the stream, the old mill that the artists loved, and that reminded the Mr. Foxley's of home. It was he who owned the only family carriage in the neighborhood, other people had "buggies." It was his daughter who had been sent to New York for her education—who now appeared in church on Sundays, in muslin costumes garnished with a greater number of yards of ribbons in myriads of bows and ends than the village store had ever possessed at one time in its life. It was he who once or twice a year walked as far as the Inn and sitting down stiffly in the stiff dining room would hold a short conversation with the landlady on village matters and subjects in general. On these occasions the good woman was secretly amused and not a little bored. She knew gentlemen when she saw them and he was not one—that is, he was not one according to her knowledge of types. The aristocracy of money was as yet a phase unknown to her simple English mind accustomed to move in traditional and accepted groves. So not much interchange of civilities took place between the mill and the Inn. Not for Mr. Simon P. Rattray did the oleanders blossom in the big green tubs and the wall-flowers and mignonette in the windows. Not for him did the Jessamine climb and the one hawthorn tree at the back gate leading to the orchard yield its sweet white May, not for him did the tall clock strike and the parrot talk. Talk!! Why, the only time the creature was ever known to be quiet was when Mr. Simon P. Rattray made his portentous visits twice or three times a year. And as for the hidden sweetness of the drawing-room or the comforts of the kitchen or the fascinations of the bar, Mr. Simon P. Rattray knew nothing whatever about them. He was a total abstainer you see, and the blue ribbon appeared in his buttonhole on certain important ceremonial days and even on Sundays, and he was known to be interested in the fortunes of a cold, dismal little place built of plaster and presided over by a male Methodist just outside the village limits, known as a "Temperance Hotel." It will be easily gathered that the advent of the Mr. Foxleys did not affect the fortunes of such a person as Mr. Simon P. Rattray, nor was their subsequent career as residents in Ipswich affected in any way by his existence, prejudices or peculiarities. But to the remaining portions of the village, their arrival proved full of interest The landlady took them to her heart at once. They were gentlemen, she said, and that was enough for her. Her son, a heavy lout, unlike his mother, accepted them as he did everything and everybody by remaining outwardly profoundly unconscious of their existence; the hostler adored them, especially Mr. Joseph; when the latter was there, which he was every Saturday till Monday, he would stroll over the stable with Squires—that was the hostler's name—joking incessantly, and treating the latter to an occasional cigar. Urbane Mr. Joseph would joke with anybody, Mr. George was more severe and had according to the landlady, the most perfect and distinguished manners.

"What they call hawtoor in the Family Herald," she told Milly, "only I never see it gone too far with." Milly of course was in love with them both.

In time, the entire village succumbed to the charms of the Mr. Foxleys. The parson called, accompanied by his eldest daughter who was the organist of the choir and chief promoter of the Sunday-school. They found the objects of their social consideration seated outside the kitchen in the little paved yard that had rapidly grown dear. When the brothers appeared upstairs in the drawing-room into which rose-scented and chintz-hung apartment the reverend Mr. and Miss had been shown in appreciation of their station, Mr. Joseph had tuned his laughing eye to a decorum as new as it was unnatural. It was a hot day in August and Mr. George was so excessively languid and long and speechless that but for his brother conversation would have been an impossibility. But he and the parson soon discovered mutual friends at home, a cousin in the Engineers, and a friendly coach at the University.

"Charles James Foxley? Oh! I knew him well, very well" said the Rev. Mr. Higgs, referring to the latter. "It is a somewhat—ah—unusual name. The only other time I remember meeting with the name was once— let me see—it was a meet, I think, at Foxley Manor, in Derbyshire it was, and a very beautiful place."

"In Nottinghamshire," said Mr. Joseph smiling. "Yes, that is—or was— our home. My father still resides there."

"Indeed?" said Mr. ——. "Is it possible! And you have come out here? Really, it is most interesting, most fortunate that you should have chosen our little village, should have pitched your tent so to speak— ah! quite so."

"My brother likes the country," said Mr. Joseph.

"Ah! yes, quite so. And there is much to see in this new country, in Canada, much to see. You will remain some time?"

"We will remain as long as it suits my brother," said Mr. Joseph. "At present, we can hardly tell."

"Quite so, quite so. I hope—I am sure my daughter concurs in the hope, that we shall see you in church as often as you can come and also—ah! at the Rectory. Such society as we can give you here you may be assured we will endeavor to give with all our—ah! heart to the best of our ability."

"Thanks very much" returned Mr. Joseph. "I am sure my brother and I will be exceedingly glad to go and see you at the Rectory. About church I will say that we never go very regularly anywhere, but when it isn't too hot, too hot, you know, or too cold, or anything of that sort, I am sure we'll try to turn up there as well."

The rector, smiled indulgently. No call to be hard on the Mr. Foxleys, of Foxley Manor. Miss Maria left the Inn smitten for the fiftieth time.

"I knew I should marry an Englishman," she exclaimed ecstatically up the road with her father.

"The dark one, oh! the dark one!"

"They are somewhat peculiar young men I fancy, Maria. Of course Mrs. Cox is a very careful and a very good woman and—ah! her place is a very respectable and comfortable one, and the order of travellers one meets, that is, one would meet if one went there, is quite proper indeed, but still, I thought, mind I do not say anything, I do not express any opinion Maria, I simply say, I thought, that they would have smoked for instance in the dinning-room or the, the bar, or on the verandah instead of in that very conspicuous manner just outside the kitchen door." But this was the first and last stricture that the rector made as to the conduct of the Mr. Foxleys, for by appearing in church two Sundays after his call and spending an evening on the vine-covered verandah of the pretty Rectory, they were speedily entered in the very best books kept by that worthy if slightly common-place gentleman and his gushing daughter.

The next persons of distinction in the village were the Miss Dexters, who lived with their father, at one time a prominent medical man, in the little cottage graced by the presence of the mighty oak which had so charmed the strangers when they first beheld it. Their father was old, very old indeed, and slightly shaken in his mind. He was also an Englishman and the daughters, not daring to enter upon life in town with their small income and a helpless old man on their hands into the bargain had retired to the country some ten years before the advent of the Mr. Foxleys. Charlotte the elder was now forty and Ellen over thirty-five. Neither of them had ever been beautiful and now they were, more or less pinched and worn in their aspect, but they were gentlewomen, neat and sweet spoken, and capable of offering small evening entertainments of cribbage and hot weak tea with bread and butter with a gracious and well bred air that marked them off as people who had seen "better times." God help such all over the world and thank Him too for the colonies, where such people can retreat without being said to hide, and live down their misfortunes or their follies or their weaknesses, and be of some use to others after a while! It would be hard to say why the Mr. Foxleys went as often as they did, especially Mr. Joseph—to the Miss Dexters for tea. Perhaps the oak had much to do with it.

It had something I am sure, for indeed, it was the most beautiful tree for miles around and it was worth a good deal to sit under its cool shade in the Summer afternoons or to look up into its dark vault in the slowly dusking twilights. I can't defend Mr. Joseph further than this. For between cribbage and choir practice, Sunday rambles in the woods and rows on the river, the lending of books and the singing of songs, the handing of bread and butter and the drinking of tea, Mr. Joseph had caused both the Miss Dexters to fall hopelessly and indeed fatally in love with him. When the Xmas holidays came, Joseph, who had a clerkship in town, spent his vacation naturally at the Inn with his brother, and then ensued a period of very mixed delight for the Miss Dexters.

For the callous Joseph made as violent love to the unresisting Miss Higgs over the Xmas tree and carols as she herself would have chosen to make to Mr. George had she been given the chance.

As for Mr. George, he was just as languid and silent as ever. He hardly ever went into the town at all, but preferred to remain on quietly at the inn, fishing, shooting and taking long walks in the summer days when it was fine, and when it rained, lounging in Mrs. Cox's kitchen. Here he always had his meals, for the kind friend he had found in his landlady gratified every whim, and any fancy he chose to profess, and cooked for him, washed for him and waited on him with unceasing and in fact ever-increasing devotion. Mr. Foxley's shirts and Mr. Foxley's socks, Mr. Foxley's white coats and Mr. Foxley's jane boots, his dog, his gun, and his effects generally were all sacred, all in irreproachable order, all objects of the greatest value and interest to Mrs. Cox and her niece. You see there were no children in this comfortable menage and really, when the baking and the washing and the preserving and the churning were all done with early in the day or in the week there remained a good deal of time on Mrs. Cox's hands, which in her earnest womanly heart she felt she must fill up in some way. So it came that all this time and energy and devotion were after a while centred on Mr. George Foxley, late of Foxley Manor, Notts. As for Mr. Joseph, the good woman oftener told him to "go along!" than anything else, for though she liked him, his love of mischief and several practical jokes he had played her which she termed "his ways," had rendered her cautious and a little distrustful of him. Such an existence proved very charming to all parties concerned, excepting perhaps the Miss Dexters, and their companion in misery, at the rectory. For the worst of it was, Xmas passed and Easter came, and another spring dawned for the pretty little village of Ipswich and found the Mr. Foxleys still there. They never spoke of going away and nobody hinted it to them. The impression, natural in the extreme, that they were a couple of wealthy young Englishmen going about for pleasure, who just happening to come to Ipswich and being taken with it had stayed a little longer than they intended, was fast giving way to another. For it was a well-known fact that the Mr. Foxleys did not spend too much money either on themselves or on other people. They paid their way and that was all one could say about them. Squires was not included in this arrangement, however, but was forced to remain content with cigars, cast-off studs and a present at Christmas-time of a collie pup. I grieve to think of those poor Miss Dexters—foolish souls—going without butter on their bread and sugar in their tea that they might have both to offer Mr. Joseph when he might come in airily for a cup, and making their already too thin gowns last another winter, that they might spend a little money on a smoking cap for the same gentleman and a pair of knitted wristlets for his brother. All these tokens of friendship and attachment the brothers accepted in the most charming and unconcerned way and never troubled themselves about returning the compliment as we say. It was quite true that they had not much money, but a little management of what they did possess would have left a small sum over each year, which might have been expended on say a pair of fur-lined gloves for Charlotte or a canary for Ellen, who was fond of pets and used to keep Bess with her for days, feeding the unconscious animal for its master's sake better than she was fed herself. And all this time Mr. Joseph never proposed and never hinted at his prospects or affairs in any way whatever!

The second summer of his stay saw old Mr. Dexter die. After his death Ellen drooped visibly. General disgust at life, insufficient food and sleep, and a hopeless passion for Mr. Joseph sapped a naturally weak constitution, and her sister soon realized another bitter shock when she helped Ellen to her bed one sultry September night from which she never rose again. The windows of the little cottage were open, and the unhappy girl could see the giant oak outside their door. How often she had sat there with her cruel friend, her hand on his shoulder, and her eyes fixed on his sharp, clear-cut features and laughing eyes! He had seemed so gentle, so earnest, so winning—had talked so cleverly, so hopefully, so gleefully. He had been the sunshine of her life, and alas!—of Charlotte's too! Each knew the other's secret, but by intuitive sympathy they had never alluded to it. They referred to him only as "Mr. Joseph," and on her death-bed Ellen sent her "kindest wishes to Mr. Joseph." She lingered till near the Christmas season, and then one day a small packet per English mail arrived. They occasionally heard from friends in the Old Country, and this special parcel contained a couple of silk handkerchiefs and a sprig of holly. Charlotte took them up to her in the evening, spreading them out on the bed. Ellen sat up, eagerly pressing the holly to her lips. Alas! what were the recollections it brought that the poor, weak frame and the poor, tired spirit could not brook them? Perhaps—not perhaps—O most certainly, most truly of home and of England; of the mother so long vanished, dimly remembered, almost forgotten; of winding green lanes and of ivied walls, of little solemn churchyards—in none of which she would never lie; of peeps of blue sea from the middle of a wood; of a primrose at the foot of a tree; of the crowded coach and the sounding horn; and lastly of the recreant one whom she could not even call her lover, but who had made her love him so that her very life was eaten away by sickness of fear, of apprehension, of despair!

With the holly pressed to her lips, Ellen Dexter passed out of this world into another.

Did Mr. Joseph Foxley care? Who knows? I should know if anybody ever did, but I do not hold Mr. Joseph so very much to blame after all. For a man is often innocent of love-making at the very moment a woman is fancying herself violently in love with him, and fancying, moreover, that he is in love with her. Can anything be more fatal, more pernicious, more terrible? And yet I believe there is nothing more common. There are some men who press more tenderly than the requirements of ordinary social intercourse call for or allow, the hand of every woman they meet They are not necessarily flirts. Perhaps they never go farther than that clinging hand-pressure. It is a relic of the customs of the days of chivalry—a little more and this man will kiss the hand. Let the lady be beautiful, gracious, the hour dusk, or close on midnight, the room a pretty one, and the environment pleasing, he will bend over the hand, and if he does not kiss it he will retain it just long enough to make her wish he had kissed it. If she is a woman of the world she will laugh as she returns the pressure, making it purposely as thrilling as she can— then she will forget it completely the next moment as she dispenses five o'clock tea or late coffee and cake to her husband or brother. But if she be not a woman of the world, then God help her on her tear-wet pillow, or before her slowly-dying fire as she thinks of that hand-pressure. It is enough to last her all her life, she thinks— and yet, should it not come again? But—should it come again! And the pillow is wet with fresh tears, or the brow is prematurely wrinkled watching the decaying embers, while the man—let us do him justice—is as blindly unconscious—unconscious! Why, at that very moment he is making love—what he calls making love—to the woman of his choice, his wife, his mistress, or his fiancee! These are the men who do the most mischief in the world. Your brute, your beast, your groveller in ditches, is not nearly so dangerous. Women recoil from him. They understand him. But the man who presses their hand awakes them, rouses their susceptibility, causes the tender trouble to steal over them that so often ends in grief, or despair, or death! And this is because neither sex is as yet properly trained in the vital duty of responsibility, by which I mean that faculty of self-repression which will cause a woman to try and understand what a man means when he presses her hand, and cause the man to try and understand what a woman feels when he does so. As for poor Ellen Dexter, it is dear that she was not a woman of the world; but her sister Charlotte and Miss Maria at the Rectory, if not precisely women of the world, were yet made of much sterner stuff than she had been, and consequently, after much reflection, decided that they were not going to be made fools of, in village parlance. Miss Maria had, of course, long ago given up Mr. George Foxley altogether.

"He is not human," she said to her father, "and I don't believe he is one of the Foxleys of Foxley Manor at all." "There can be no doubt about that, my dear," answered the actor. "Difficulties I should say—ah—difficulties have brought these young men out here, but we must do our duty by them, we must do our duty. Their father is a fine old gentleman, and well off, and a stanch Tory, my dear. Patience, my dear Maria. The photographs are quite correct and the seals bear quite the proper crest—ah—quite so." So Miss Maria transferred her affections to Mr. Joseph. The second Christmas passed away, and a third spring dawned for Ipswich. The Inn was just as comfortable as ever and so were apparently the two Mr. Foxleys but for one fact and that was, Mr. George's health was not as good as it had been. Always delicate, he had gradually failed, growing more and more languid, more and more whimsical in spite of his comfortable abode and the diligent care of his landlady. Poor Milly! How she worked for him too, between hours, after hours, before hours! When the attacks of pleurisy, painful in the extreme, from which he suffered, came on either in the night or during the day, Milly was always near with her strong young arms, not quite so pink as they used to be, and her quick young eyes, a shade more subtle than they used to be, ready to apprehend and quiet the pain before it came. How Miss Maria at the Rectory and Charlotte Dexter in her lonely cottage would have envied her had they known, but though there were gossips in plenty in the village, nothing that occurred in the rose-scented drawing-room ever went out into that tattling little Ipswichian world.

"Are your young gentlemen with you yet, Mrs. Cox? And one of 'em not over strong? Deary me! that makes it hard for you and the young gal But you be standing it remarkable well. And gentlemen born you say! They do say that the other one wi' the specked skin be making fools of Miss Maria up at the Rectory and old Miss Dexter at the cottage. Well! well! Poor Miss Ellen was gone afore we knew it like, poor soul, that was so kind!"

Much of this cunning volubility sprung upon Mrs. Cox in pumping fashion failed to extort from her anything but good-humoured smiles and laughs. If I have not taken the trouble to describe this beloved Mrs. Cox to you before this, it is because I fear you will say the picture is Unreal, no such landlady, no such woman could exist out of England But why not? My story, remember, deals with people and things as they were twenty years ago. Twenty years ago there were such Inns, though few at number, to be found in Western Canada—ay— and as English as any that a certain Mrs. Lupin presided over in fascinating fiction, and much more English than many Inns of the present day in England. Twenty years ago there was such a landlady, rosy and plump and cheerful, wearing a flowered gown, a black silk apron and a cap with a purple pansy in it and broad and comfortable lappets, who, when her work was done, would sit in her small private room opposite the bar also hung with red curtains, making patchwork quilts or playing a demure rubber with the Scotch store-keeper, or Irish stage driver, or an occasional gentleman from town. Such was Mrs. Cox, widow of Captain Cox, able seaman, but bad lot, who died when they had been five years in Canada, leaving her with her one child. The public business had attracted her after her loss and she accordingly went into it on the advice of her numerous friends. People who despise her calling need not listen to me if I allude to— for I have not time to recount—all her kindness, her cheerfulness, her powers of dispensing comfort, and warmth, and happiness, and promoting the direct and indirect welfare of everyone who came in her path. By what strange coincidence the brothers Foxley had been led to her glowing fireside and her motherly arms brimming over with zeal and kindness for the whole human race, does not matter. It is sufficient that they found her and found with her a sense of comparative peace and security which compensated for the one big slice of trouble Fortune had treated them to before their departure from England. For them did the wall flowers bloom and the mignonette at the window, for them did the oleander blossom and the old clock strike, for them did the jessamine climb and the one hawthorn tree yield its annual soft white drift of snow, and yet who shall say that they were altogether unworthy, even, if with that picture of poor Ellen Dexter in my mind, I have to say that they did not deserve it?



CHAPTER III.

If Mr. Joseph Foxley had but known the sentiments animating the couple of maiden breasts that awaited his Saturday visits in Ipswich, he would have been genuinely surprised. The truth is Mr. Joseph was rather what is termed a general lover. He liked the sex in its entirety. Collectively he loved all women and belonged to that hand-pressing section of humanity which I have alluded to as mischievous. Were there not at least five young ladies in town, at whose houses he visited, and who were more or less interested in the young Englishman as he in them? Did Miss Charlotte dream of them or Miss Maria at the rectory? If so, they never dared to ask Mr. Joseph to give any account of his doings in town, although they managed to glean what he did with himself in the village. He respected Charlotte Dexter enough to intend at some future day to tell her a little more about himself and his brother than he had yet done; as for Miss Maria, she only bored him and fed his contempt.

"When a rather elderly old girl giggles after everything she says, conversation is difficult and sympathy out of the question," he had said to his brother! When Mr. Joseph had known these young ladies for four years, Miss Maria took her revenge in her way, that was by marrying the younger brother of Mr. Simon P. Rattray, partner in the mill and the red brick house by the river. The vision of becoming the cherished wife of an English aristocrat and going home to reside in a manor house built in the sixteenth century, with occasional visits to London and glimpses of the Royal Family had gradually faded, and she accepted the less rose-coloured lot that Mr. Lyman B. Rattray offered her, sitting in her father's study, with his hair very much brushed up on one side and very much flattened down on the other, a white tie and light-yellow duster adorning his spare person.

Such was the American of those days—twenty years ago—there are none such now I allow.

Miss Maria, who was considered "very English," shuddered as she regarded him. It so fell out that it being Saturday, Mr. Joseph was just then passing—"kind of happening along" Mr. Rattray would have said—en route to the Inn and his brother, on foot in spite of the dusty road and the hot August sun, clad in trim tight knickerbockers and carrying an immense bunch of red field lilies, a gun, and a leather satchel over his shoulder. Slight and straight and cool, he looked the picture of a contented cheerful energetic young English man. Along the road he came whistling an old country tune. Miss Maria who had sighted him afar off, begged her visitor's pardon and went to the window to arrange the blind. How her heart warmed to that cruel Mr. Joseph, how she loved him then just for that last moment! Her heart—that foolish old maid's heart—beat quickly, beat thickly, she remembered to have read something somewhere about people who could will other people to look at them, to speak to them, to even think of them, to move across a room at their pleasure. If she could but do that! She did try, with her fingers clenched on the blind, and her eyes fixed on Mr. Joseph, she did wish with all her might that he would turn his head and see her at the window and wave his hand gallantly as he had done on one or two previous occasions. Then she would beckon and he would run across and entering the room disconcert this odious Mr. Lyman B. Rattray and put an end to his stony wooing. But alas! for Miss Maria and her mesmeric powers! The harder she tried, the less she succeeded. On came Mr. Joseph, supremely unconscious of the injured heart beating behind the windowpane. At one moment it seemed as if he were about to turn and look in her direction. A very brilliant wild yellow canary crossed over his head and lit on a small shrub just inside the garden paling. Had it remained there, would Miss Maria have ever become the wife of Mr. Lyman B. Rattray? No one knows, for the canary flew away again to the other side of the road and Mr. Joseph's eyes followed it In a moment he was past, and the chance was gone for ever. Miss Maria left her window and sat down opposite her visitor. There was nothing to keep her now, nothing to give her courage and hope for the future, new fire for her faded eyes, new strength for her jaded limbs. Yet she was only thirty-four. How strange it is that some unmarried women are old at that age, even while living in luxury and surrounded by every care and all affection, while many a married woman, though beset with trials and weaknesses and perhaps a brood of restless little ones to pull her gown and get in the way of her busy feet, retains her figure and her step, her smile and her complexion, her temper and her nerves!

It but remained for Charlotte Dexter to take her revenge in her way. Going very seldom out of her house, and never visiting at the Inn she was really very ignorant of the doings of either Mr. George or Mr. Joseph Foxley. Towards the one she had never been greatly drawn, for the other she felt all the passion that only a supremely lonely woman can feel in middle age for a man younger than herself who charms her as a child, while he captivates her as a lover. Of Mrs. Cox and Milly moreover, she hardly ever thought, and in fact had not seen the latter for a long time. If she had it is not likely she would even have recognized in the tall pale shapely young woman with braids of dark hair and white linen cuffs fastened—must I tell it? with a pair of antique monogram studs, the plump little handmaiden of four years back. As it was, she only waited on day after day, to hear Mr. Joseph speak. Instead of Mr. Joseph however appeared another and less welcome confidante. This was the most malignant gossip in the village, Mrs. Woods, the wife of the butcher, a tall red faced woman with high cheek-bones on which the color seemed to have been badly smirched, watery eyes and a couple of protruding yellow teeth. She looked more like a butcher than the butcher himself who was a mild little man with soft silky fair hair and small nervous fluttering hands. Yet he managed to summon sufficient character to go on a tremendous burst—I know of no other word, every third or fourth month and disappear for a week When these periodical eclipses took place, his wife would come flying into the Inn with her bonnet hanging round her neck and a large green and red plaid shawl streaming out behind her.

"Where's Woods?" She would say. "Where's Woods? Give me Woods! Give 'im up, I tell you; give 'im up now!"

But Woods was never found inside Mrs. Cox's neat dwelling, nor indeed anywhere, although it had been whispered on, one occasion that he had been seen in the back room of the little "Temperance Hotel" with the male Methodist in attendance. This, of course, was clearly impossible.

It was this Mrs. Woods then that stopped at Dexter's Oak one Friday morning with her donkey-cart and a small piece of the neck of mutton in it. She was not an entirely bad woman, though a downright cunning virago, and perhaps some inkling of the nature of the blow that was about to fall on Miss Dexter's head caused her to come prepared by an acceptable present to somewhat mitigate its appalling approach.

"I be at the Inn bright and early this morning Miss," she began, "and brought 'em their bit of fresh meat. And I'm bringin' you a bit as was over, and it is'nt a bad piece for a stew, if you like a stew, Miss, with an onion or two."

"Thank you very much, Mrs. Woods," said Charlotte, who had come out to the front door and now stood on the lower step, looking over the cart. "I'm afraid I can't settle with you just at present," she said further, with some effort, "you can call some other time when you are passing. Will that do? and is it weighed?"

"It is, miss, and I'll not say a word about the payin'! Six pound and a 'alf, and Woods gone agen—I weighed it myself."

"Oh! I am sorry to hear that," said Charlotte. "Your husband gives you a great deal of trouble. I am very sorry, and he is not at the inn?"

If Charlotte was guilty at that moment of purposely leading the conversation up to this always for her most enthralling, most engrossing subject, she soon enough received her punishment. On she went to her own destruction.

"At the inn!" repeated the butcher's wife, with ineffable scorn on her cruel mouth. She wiped her watery eyes and settled the refractory bonnet before going on.

"No miss, he's not at the inn, and if he was sober, he wouldn't be at the inn, and you'll never see him, nor me, nor 'Ide yonder, nor anyone on us at all no more at the inn. For the inn's changed 'ands, miss. There's an end of Mrs. Cox, who was a mother to many, if not to Woods. There's an end to good old times and dancin' and singin', and honest Robert, though he was a cross 'un—there's an end to it all now, miss, for the inn's changed 'ands, and I'm the first in the village as knows it"

"Good gracious. Is it possible?" said Charlotte, genuinely surprised. "Who can have succeeded Mrs. Cox and why? I thought she was so popular and making so much money, and what—what will become of the Mr. Foxleys?"

Mrs. Woods gave a triumphant grin. "It's them, theirselves, miss; it's them that 'as it now. And the younger one will be marrying Milly in a little while and settling down comfortable in the inn. It's gentlefolks and aristocrats we'll have now at the inn, miss, and 'ard workin' people like me and Woods may trudge all day and freeze all night, and never a pot of beer or a warm at the kitchen fire and meat paid regular for year in, year out!"

Charlotte stood aghast. The woman's injured volubility rushed past her as a scene outside a railway car rushes past us, leaving only one idea, one word caught at, as from the window through which we apprehend the landscape, one scene or portion of a scene enchains the eye and lingers in the mind though other scenes fly past in varied succession.

"Marry?" she repeated. "Marry! Milly, did you say? That is the girl, isn't it, Mrs. Cox's niece? Which—"

"Ay," said the woman, "that's Milly, the 'ired girl; she's no I more than that, if she be her aunt's niece. And 'ard work for one's niece. Me and Woods, if we'd 'ad one, would have done better for her nor that, makin' her work like a slave or a dummy. Cows, and pigs, and poultry, and dish-washing, and scrubbing, and lamps, and starched fronts, and fine gentlemen—but she's well paid, she's well paid. She's to marry one of the fine gentlemen, Mr. Joseph it is, and they're to live on at the Inn with Milly as mistress, and her fine husband behind the bar, very like. Well, good-mornin', Miss Dexter; I wish you joy of the mutton. Me and Woods often says—we'll take this or that little Dexter's Oak, but it's most times forgot, for Woods is 'alf crazed, Miss Dexter, and I've got to do the whole. Good-mornin'."

Having adjusted her bonnet and the donkey-cart to her satisfaction, Mrs. Woods drove off rather disappointed on the whole at Miss Dexter's calm demeanour. Astonishment, perplexity, doubt, contempt and disgust she had undoubtedly shown, but not a single sigh of weakness. Charlotte Dexter was not the woman to swoon or lament or even turn pale as her sister Ellen would have done. But when she came into her house and sat down in her lonely parlour, she enacted a scene which would have petrified with astonishment any inhabitant of the prosy little village in which she had dwelt so long and indeed many other people as well, for when you and I, dear reader, go to see one of these emotional plays in which the French actress writhes on the sofa; grovels on the floor, rolls up her handkerchief into a ball or tears it into strips, prays, weeps, curses, censures, implores, looks at herself in the glass until she is on the point of going mad, and strides about the stage as no woman in real life has ever been seen to stride, ending by throwing herself across an arm-chair as rigid as marble thereby assuring the audience that she is in a "dead faint"—I say, that when we see all this performed by a travelling "star," and her truly eclectic Company, comprising a Diva, a Duenna, a Diner-out and a Devil, we are apt to look around at the placid Canadian or the matter-of-fact American audience and wonder if they understand the drift of the thing at all, the situations, the allusions, even in the slightest degree, forgetting that perhaps the most placid, most commonplace person in the theatre has gone through some crisis, some tragedy as thrilling, as subtle and as terrible as the scene we have just witnessed. "Not out of Paris," we say, "can such things happen?" Do we know what we are saying? Is it only in Paris that hearts are won and tossed aside this night—as in the play? Is it only in Paris that honor is forgotten and promises are broken this night—as in the play? Is it only in Paris that money allures and rank dazzles, and a dark eye or a light step entrances, this night—as in the play? Is it only in Paris that nature is human and that humanity is vile, or weak, or pure, or firm, as this night in the play? Oh! in that obscure little Canadian village, a lonely old maid locked her door that morning and pulled down her blind that the daylight might not come in and see her misery, might not mock even more malignantly than the ignorant, impertinent and hard-hearted woman who had dealt her this blow. Like most women in such a crisis, she lost the habit of thought. Reason entirely deserted her, and she never dreamed but that it was true. For when a women has to own to herself that she holds no dominion over a man, that it is only too perfectly clear that the impulse of loving is all on her side and that she has neither anything to expect nor anything to fear from him, since indifference is the keynote of his attitude to her, she will all the more readily believe that he loves elsewhere, worthily or unworthily the same to her. A woman is not a noble object in such a situation. All trusting feminine instincts, all sweet emotions of hope, all sentiment, all passion even, retreat and fall away from her, leaving either a cold, bitter, heartless petrifaction, in a woman's clinging robe, or the Fury that is the twin sister of every little red-lipped, clear-eyed girl born into the world. She never dreamed but that this story was true. In fact so entirely had her woman's wit deserted her, she said to herself of course it was true. Her brain could work sufficiently to conjure up hints, phrases, words, looks, events, accidents that all bore testimony to the truth of the extraordinary tale. For it was extraordinary. Miss Dexter herself was the great grand-daughter of an Admiral, and the grand-daughter of a judge, and as such, respected all these accidents of birth which we are supposed to ignore or at least not expected to recognize in a new country. That such men as the Mr. Foxleys could make themselves as completely at home in the Inn as rumor had frequently asserted, and with truth, seemed at all times monstrous to her. She had lived so long out of England, over thirty years now, that she had forgotten the sweet relations that prevailed there between the aristocracy or landed gentry and their inferiors. The Mr. Foxleys were simply doing in Canada what they would have done had they been still in England, only they were assisted in so doing by the unusually English surroundings in which they found themselves. Miss Dexter looked around her in the yellow inclosed light. There was a sampler in a frame, worked by herself when a little child, another exactly similar, worked by Ellen, a couple of fine old family portraits in heavy gilt frames, half a dozen ivory miniatures scattered about on the walls, some good carvings in ivory, a rare old Indian shawl festooned over the wooden mantle-board, a couple of skins on the floor, a corner piece of furniture known as a "whatnot" crowded with bits of egg-shell china, birds' eggs and nests, a few good specimens of spar and coral and a profusion of plants everywhere. It was all neat, respectable, even dignified, superior. There was no such other room in the village. In the village? There were not many at that time even in the town. Sooner than part with the eggshell china or the Indian shawl the Miss Dexters had suffered the pains of poverty and hunger; these cherished reminders of an absent father and an artistic youth could never be lost or borne away by the hands of a stranger. And how glad those foolish Miss Dexters had been to possess such beautiful and interesting objects when it pleased Mr. George Foxley to drink tea out of the cups on summer afternoons on the verandah of the little cottage looking up into the splendid vault of the mighty oak, or when Mr. Joseph would wind the Indian shawl round his silly head in the winter evenings when the draughts of cold air would rush in through the thin walls. These and other memories crowded into Charlotte Dexter's brain as she looked around her room, crowded thick and fast, crowded fast and furious, surged, broke, leaving an empty moment of perfect blankness, then crowded again thicker, faster, surged and seethed and then broke again, leaving in the void of perfect blankness this time a fixed idea, a resolve, a determination, seen in the dark like a luminous point of phosphorus.

That afternoon as Farmer Wise was driving slowly along the road, the main road leading through Ipswich to the town, he was accosted by Miss Dexter from her verandah. She had her jacket on and held her bonnet in her hand.

"Can you give me a seat as far as the Albion?" said she. "I would have sent a message to you yesterday if I had known I was going. But if it will not trouble you—"

"Oh! no trouble no trouble at all, Miss Dexter," replied Farmer Wise. "I'm sorry I've only the waggon to offer ye. But I'm takin' in apples as you see, nine barrel of 'em, and only a waggon will do for them."

"Certainly, certainly," said Miss Dexter, hurriedly trying on her bonnet. "Can you wait a moment? I won't be longer, Mr. Wise, it is just to lock the back door."

The farmer nodded and drew up under the shade of Dexter's oak. It was a beautiful afternoon late in November, characterized by the clear cold air, the blue and gold of the sky, and the russet coloring of the foliage that mark the close of the Autumnal season. He looked in at Miss Dexter's little garden, admirably neat and well-trimmed; dahlias, hollyhocks, sweet William and asters, though done with blossoms, still bore their green leaves unsmitten by the frost. The windows appeared full of flowers too, but the blinds were skimp and faded and drawn down behind them. He started when he noticed this, for he knew the outer aspect of the house well, and had never seen such a thing before, except in case of sickness or death. The honest farmer thought and thought until Miss Dexter reappeared and assisted by him, got up in her place beside him. Even after that he went on thinking, and I must here tell you that it was not the first time Farmer Wise's thoughts had dwelt so persistently upon his companion and her house and personal history. For twelve years he had nursed a kind of mild distant passion for Miss Dexter at the Oak, unguessed at by her and his family, and only half understood by himself. He could not have said he was in love with her. He had been in love once when he married his first wife, who bore him a triad of splendid sons, one "keeping store" in the Western States and the other two at home on the farm, all three great giants of fellows, handsome in the fields or at barn-doors or in market-waggons, but plain on Sundays in black coats or at evening dances in the big ball-room at the Inn, when they would shuffle noisily through cotillons or labor clumsily through a Highland Schottische.

For himself, Farmer Wise was an honest, sincere, good-hearted man, a maker of money and a spender thereof—witness the fine red ploughs, the painted barns, the handsome team, Kentucky bred, and the inner decorations of his house, situated about five miles out of Ipswich, on the main-road. After Mr. Simon P. Rattray, he was the representative man of the district, although he did not come so closely into contact with the villagers. This penchant for the elder Miss Dexter had been a gradual, a slow but very sure and steady thing. Her father's death had increased it, so had that of Ellen her sister, and the farmer lived too far away to know as much as other people knew about the advent of the Mr. Foxleys. Had there been a sister or a daughter, or a wife or a mother, or an aunt or a cousin about the farm, he would have known very quickly. As it was, the girl who did the housework on the farm was as ignorant of gossip, its existence and the laws which govern its nature, as any male farm hand could be. When Farmer Wise put up his horses at the Inn three or four times a year, and sat down in the cheerful bar-room to drink a glass of whisky with his feet to the fire if it were winter, or a taller glass of Belfast ginger ale if it were summer, did he never notice Mrs. Cox? Mrs. Cox, well-to-do and popular herself, fresh, blooming and hearty, a young woman yet, and just the woman one would say, for him, and above all, the woman who thought most of him and ran to change her cap—the black one with the knot of rusty widow's crape—for the smart new one that held the velvet pansy when she saw the team coming. There's where he should have chosen the second time, there was the woman he should have noticed instead of poor, proud, foolish Charlotte Dexter, whom he half feared as a "lady born," and who held in her heart, had he only knew it, the image of Mr. Joseph Foxley. The farmer got on with the English gentlemen at the Inn whenever he saw them "first-rate," and it was of them he began most unsuspiciously to talk when he and Miss Dexter had crossed the bridge, ascended the hill on the other side of the river, and the team were settling to their work as they entered upon the dreary eight miles called the Plains which lay between them and the city. The farmer was consciously happy as he moved his ponderous body slightly nearer to his companion and tucked her in with his great hands, a single touch of one of them hurting her thin frame as if they were made of iron or stiff rope. He thought he was gentle too—poor man—but long years of manual labor had changed the natural soft flesh to the consistency of leather, in which immense muscles and joints seemingly of marble had been imbedded.