Mohawks: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3

Those were the last words the dying lips uttered. She dropped asleep soon after this, her head resting against her husband's shoulder, and so out of that dim land of slumber passed silently into that deeper darkness which living eyes have never penetrated.

The Squire flung his bridle to a groom who had been hanging about the drive watching for his master's return, and stalked into the stately old hall, panelled with age-blackened oak, adorned with many trophies of the battle-field and the chase, and further embellished with the portraits of Mr. Bosworth's ancestors, which he valued less than the canvas upon which they were painted. He was as proud as Lucifer, but his was not that kind of pride which fattens itself, ghoul-like, upon the dead. The captains and learned judges looming from those dark walls were to him the most worthless of all shadows. The hall was spacious and gloomy, and opened into a still more spacious dining-room, where the Squire had never eaten a dinner since he came of age. A noble saloon or music-room, painted white, and furnished exactly as it had been in the days of Charles II., opened on the other side of the hall; but the only apartments which the Squire occupied on this ground floor were three small rooms at the end of a long passage, which served him as dining-room, study, and office. A steep narrow little staircase built in the wall, which stair had once been a secret means of communication between upper and lower stories, conducted to the Squire's bedchamber and dressing-room. His child and her nurse had their abode in the opposite wing; and thus all the state rooms, constituting the centre and main body of the house, were given over to emptiness.

The establishment was on the smallest scale. There were less than half a dozen servants where there had once been twenty.

No portly powdered footman came to Mr. Bosworth's summons, but a little old man in a very shabby livery shambled along the passage at the sound of his master's bell.

"Has there been a child brought here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Send Mrs. Layburne here."

The man shambled out again. The Squire flung off hat and riding-gloves, and seated himself by his solitary hearth. There were some logs smouldering there, for the September mornings were cool, and the Squire was of a chilly temper. The table was laid for a frugal breakfast of tea and toast; not by any means the kind of meal which would have satisfied the average country gentleman of that era; a scrivener's or a garreteer's breakfast rather.

The Squire poured himself out a cup of tea, and sat sipping it with an absent stir, and his eye upon the door.

It was flung open abruptly, and a woman entered, tall, with noble neck and shoulders, and the carriage of Dido herself – a magnificent ruin. No one could doubt that the creature had once been eminently beautiful; there were traces still of those vanished charms: eyes of velvety brown, full, fiery, splendid, and the outline of fine features. But the skin was withered and yellow, the raven hair was grizzled, some of the teeth had gone, and nose and chin had both become too prominent. The queen had degenerated into the hag.

She was shabbily and carelessly dressed in a black stuff gown, with laced bodice and muslin kerchief. She wore no cap, and her coarse unkempt hair was gathered into a loose knot on the top of her head.

"An extinct volcano," thought the student of character, as he looked at that haggard countenance, with its premature wrinkles and unhealthy pallor. "A slumbering volcano, rather," he might say to himself upon closer scrutiny.

"Well," said the Squire, "I sent you home a child."

"You sent me some beggar's daughter, I should say, by her rags. I have washed her, and dressed her in some of Rena's clothes. What put it into your astute head to interfere with the people whose duty it may be to take charge of vagrants?"

"I don't usually act without a motive, as I think you know, Barbara. If the child is sound in wind and limb – a healthy child – I intend to adopt her. Rena wants a companion, I am told – "

"Nurse Bridget's fancy. I wonder you lend your ear to an ignorant country wench."

"The country wench is sustained by the doctor, and by facts. Rena has been drooping of late. Another baby's company may enliven her. Have you put them together?"

"Not I," protested Barbara; "it would have been more than my place is worth to act without orders. I never forget that I am a servant. You ought to know that."

"You tell me of it often enough," said the Squire, shrugging his shoulders. "The misfortune is that you never let me forget you were once something else."

"O, but the memory of it never ruffles your peace," sneered the woman, with a flashing glance at the stern, cold face. "It was so long ago, you see, Squire, and you have a knack of taking things coolly."

"Come and let us introduce the children to each other," said Bosworth, rising; and he followed Barbara Layburne to the further end of the house, where the sound of a crying baby indicated the neighbourhood of the nursery.

It was not the friendless waif who thus bewailed her inarticulate misery. The little stranger was asleep in Barbara's room on the upper story. It was the heiress who was lamenting her infantine woes. Buxom, apple-cheeked Bridget was marching up and down the room, trying to hush her to sleep.

"She's cutting another tooth, sir," she said apologetically.

"She seems to be everlastingly cutting teeth," muttered Bosworth, with a vexed air; "I never come to see her that she is not wailing. Fetch me the other child, Barbara; I want to see them together."

The other child was brought, newly awakened from the refreshing slumber that had been induced by her bath. Her large blue eyes explored the unknown room, full of a pleased wonder. There were bright-coloured chintz curtains, worsted-work shepherds and shepherdesses framed and glazed upon the flowered wall-papering. The nurseries were the brightest rooms in the rambling old house; had been brightened by the young mother before the coming of her baby.

The nameless child had a sweet placidity which appealed to the Squire.

"I suppose she has teeth to cut, too," he said, "but you see she doesn't cry."

"She cried loud enough while I was dressing her," retorted Barbara.

"Put them on the floor side by side," ordered the Squire.

The two infants were set down at his command. They were both at the crawling stage of existence, that early dawn in which humanity goes upon all fours. They seemed about the same size and age, as nearly as might be guessed. They had eyes and hair of the same colour, and had that resemblance common to pretty children. The heiress had a sicklier air than the waif, and was less beautiful in colouring.

"They would pass for twin sisters," said Bosworth; "come, now, Mistress Bridget, do you think you would know them apart?"

Bridget resented the suggestion as an insult to her affection and her intellect.

"I should know my own little darling anywheres," she said; "and this strange child ain't half so pretty."

"There's a mark she'll carry for life, anyhow," said Barbara Layburne, taking up the stranger, and baring the baby's right arm just where it joined the shoulder. "A burn or a scald, you see, Squire. I can't say which it is, but I don't think she'll outlive the scar."

Bosworth glanced at it indifferently.

"A deep brand," he said, and that was all.

He was watching his own child, who was staring at the intruder with looks of keenest interest. She had left off crying, and was crawling assiduously towards the baby-waif, whom Barbara Layburne had set down upon the floor a little way off. The two infants crawled to each other like two puppies, and climbed and tumbled over each other just as young animals might have done, obeying instinct rather than reason.

Presently the little lady uplifted her voice and crowed aloud, and then began to talk after her fashion, which was backward, as of a child brought up amidst gloom and silence.

"Gar, gar, gar!" she reiterated, in a gurgling monotone.

The other baby looked about her, and murmured piteously, "Dada, dada!" and seeing not him whom she sought, she began to cry.

"Another fountain!" exclaimed the Squire, turning upon his heel.

He stopped on the threshold to look back at nurse and children.

"You have had your whim, Mistress Bridget," he said, shaking his forefinger at her; "look you that no harm comes of it;" and with that he stalked away, and went back to his den, without so much as a word to Barbara Layburne, who looked after him with strangely wistful eyes.

Then, when the sound of his firm tread had died into silence, she too left the nurse and the babies, and stalked away to her own den.

"A pretty pair," muttered Bridget, as she squatted down upon the ground to play with her charges; but whether she meant the two babies, or the Squire and his housekeeper, remains an open question.

There had been a time when the presence of Squire Bosworth's housekeeper at Fairmile had caused some vague murmurs in the way of scandal; but time accustoms people to most things, and after ten years Mistress Barbara Layburne, with her flashing eyes and her unkempt hair, her majestic figure and her shabby gown, her imperious manners and her menial capacity, came to be accepted as only a detail in the numerous eccentricities of the Squire. Only such a man could have had such a housekeeper.

The tradition of her first appearance at Fairmile was still talked of, and sounded like a fairy tale. She had arrived there late at night, in a coach and four, during a thunderstorm which was still remembered in those parts. So might Medea have come to Jason in her fiery car drawn by dragons, said the parson, who was an Oxford scholar, and loved the classics. She had arrived in a velvet gown and jewels, with all the style of a lady of fashion. She had been closeted with the Squire for an hour, during which time the sound of their alternate voices in scorn and anger had never ceased. The storm within had raged no less furiously than the storm without. Then had the door been flung open by the Squire, and he had come out into the hall, where he gave an order that a room should be got ready for his unexpected visitor: and, the order given, he had dashed out of the house, mounted into the coach which was waiting before the portico, and had driven off upon the first stage to London, leaving the stranger mistress of the field.

The Squire did not return for a month, during which time the lady had gradually settled down into the position of housekeeper, her status assured by a letter in which Mr. Bosworth bade his old butler obey Mrs. Layburne in all matters connected with the interior of Fairmile Court. So henceforth it was Mrs. Layburne who gave the cook her orders, and who paid all the bills, and who doled out wages to coachman and gardener. She was every whit as great a niggard as her master, people said; and under her rule the miserly ways of the house began to take a settled form and consistency. Every superfluous servant was dismissed, all luxurious living was put down with a high hand, and the gloom which had fallen upon the abandoned house while Roland Bosworth was leading a life of riot and dissipation in London only grew deeper now that he had returned, a reformed rake, to the hearth of his forefathers.

He came back to Fairmile Court at the end of a month, nodded curtly to Mistress Barbara as he passed her in the hall, and took no more notice of her than of any other hireling. She had established herself in his house; but whatever claim she might have upon his friendship was but little honoured. There were occasional conferences in the little red parlour in which the Squire passed most of his indoor life; there were occasional storms; but there was never any touch of tenderness to provoke the scandal of the household as to the present relations of master and servant. As to what those relations had been in the past, the neighbourhood, from parson to innkeeper, from high to low, had its opinions and ideas; but nothing ever occurred to throw any clearer light upon the antecedents of the lady who had come to Fairmile in velvet and jewels, which she was never seen to wear again after that night of tempest. She seemed to age suddenly by twenty years within the first few months of her residence in that melancholy house. Her oval cheeks grew hollow, her complexion faded to a sickly sallow, her ebon hair whitened, and deep lines came in the wan face. She never left the boundary of the park; she never had a friend to visit her. A cloistered nun's life would have been far less lonely. If she was by birth and breeding a lady, as most people supposed, she had not a creature of her own grade with whom to hold converse. To the servants she rarely spoke, save in the way of business. She had her own den, as the Squire had his: she read a good deal; and sometimes of an evening, when the heavy oak shutters were all closed and barred, she would open the spinet – an instrument which had belonged to her master's mother – and sing to it in a strange language, in a wonderful deep voice, which thrilled those who heard her.

The Squire's marriage made no difference in Mrs. Layburne's position, and brought no diminution of her authority. Lady Harriet had no longing for power, and was content to let the house be managed exactly as it had been before her coming. She saw that avarice was the pervading spirit of the household, but she made no complaint; and she was too innocent and simple-minded to have any suspicion of evil in the past history of her husband and his strange housekeeper. It was only when Lady Harriet was about to become a mother that she asserted herself so far as to insist upon some small expenditure upon the rooms which her baby was to occupy. Under her own directions the old nursery wing, in which generation after generation of Bosworths had been reared, was cleansed, renovated, and decorated, in the simplest fashion, but with taste and refinement.