The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3

"Not yet; not since that Mr. Harwin turned out a minister, just as I thought he would, and your case went to the court to be decided. You'll have the first news, I suppose, but I don't doubt what it will be."

"Neither do I," returned the girl, resolutely.

"We shall see," said Mrs. Eveleigh. "Do you know," she added, "that Mr. Edmonson came yesterday when you were out?"

"Yes."

Then there fell between the pair as long an interval of silence as Mrs. Eveleigh ever permitted where she was concerned. She broke it by asking, energetically:—

"Elizabeth, if you really believed that you were not Mr. Archdale's wife, why, in the name of wonder, did you go and put your whole fortune into his business? And why did your father let you?"

"My father had no legal right to interfere," said the girl, ignoring the first question, "and he did not choose to strain his authority. When was he ever unkind to me?"

"I think he was then, decidedly." And the speaker nodded her head with emphasis. "But you have not told me why you did it," she continued.

Elizabeth was silent a moment. "I had been the means of the whole thing being discovered," she said, "and I had hurt him enough already."

"And he let you risk your whole fortune just because you had happened to put your finger through a hole in the hall tapestry."

"No," cried Elizabeth, "he did no such thing. He is very angry with me now because I invested it; he is not willing, even though he knows that it's for Katie's sake."

"I thought you said just now that it was for Mr. Archdale's." Elizabeth looked at her, and smiled triumphantly.

"I did," she answered. "It's the same thing; I have always told you so."

"Um!" said Mrs. Eveleigh, and returned to the attack. "If he wouldn't take the money, how could you give it?" The girl was silent. "It was the father, I know; they say a penny never comes amiss to him."

"How did you find this out, Cousin Patience?" But Mrs. Eveleigh laughed instead of answering. "You have not spoken of it?" cried Elizabeth.

"Not a word. Why, I don't want to proclaim any one of my own family a goose." The only answer was a smile of satisfaction. "You don't mind being called a goose, I see," pursued the speaker.

"Not at all. I know it's often true. Only it doesn't happen to be true here."

Though Mrs. Eveleigh had so openly criticised Elizabeth, it would have gone ill with any one who had dared to follow her example. She was often annoyed by things in Elizabeth; but she believed in the girl's truth more than she did in her own. And there she was quite right. Now she began to talk about the portrait scene, and declared that Mr. Edmonson looked very handsome standing beside the old picture that he so much resembled.

"That portrait was Colonel Archdale's grandfather, his mother's father, Mr. Edmonson," explained Elizabeth, perceiving that her companion's ideas were somewhat mixed. And then Mrs. Eveleigh confessed that she had been trying to explain about the portrait and the relationship, and that though she had talked learnedly about the matter, she had been a little confused in her own mind.

"This portrait was in the colonel's father's house, lent him to be copied, and when he fled he took the original with him, and left the copy. It was a duel that he fought, and there was something irregular that he did about it. He went to Virginia, you remember, and while there he changed his name. Then he came here, and the search for him died out. The matter was hushed up some way, I suppose."

"And pretended that he belonged to a different race of Archdales in another part of England," asserted Mrs. Eveleigh, contemptuously.

"Perhaps we should, too, if we had been in his place."

"What! in his place, Elizabeth? Can you even imagine how you would feel if you had murdered anybody, or about the same as that?"

"Yes."

"Nonsense, my dear. You must have a powerful imagination; I shouldn't think it was healthy. There's no use, any way, in being so odd."

"No."

"First 'yes,' and then 'no,' and neither of them means anything. But if you haven't anything to say, I wish you would tell me how those people, the colonel's father and mother, happened to have a son living that they didn't know anything about."

Elizabeth, full of remembrance of the time when a human life, even if her own, had seemed light to her, could not help smiling at Mrs. Eveleigh's literal interpretation of things. "They had to escape at once," she said, "and the doctor said the child would die if he undertook a sea-voyage in that state. So she sent him to her father's home with a nurse who was very fond of him; he was a baby then. And she went away with her husband with the understanding that when the child recovered, as the doctor expected him to do, the nurse should bring him to her in America. And she left open some way of communication. But, instead of the baby, there came news that he was dead."

"And he wasn't dead?"

"No; his grandfather adopted him, and gave him his name. He hated Mr. Archdale; he had lost his daughter through him, and he determined to keep the child. So he bribed the nurse to report his death, and persuaded her that it was better for the little fellow to stay with him as his sole heir than follow the fortunes of a haunted man in a wilderness, as America must have been then."

"And do you really believe they never knew of this son of theirs being alive?"

"Mr. Archdale's will, if nothing else, proves that. He had three sons here, you remember; and the colonel, the eldest of these, was named Walter, after the one supposed to have died in England. And, now, you see how this trouble all happened. The will left the greater part of the property to Mr. Archdale's oldest son, Walter, whom he supposed the colonel. But the real oldest son, Walter, was this Mr. Edmonson's father. So that the colonel was really left penniless."

"Yes, yes, now I see," cried Mrs. Eveleigh. "You are like your father when you come to explanations, Elizabeth; a person can always get at what you mean. Now tell me about the portrait, how it came there, and how in the world Mr. Edmonson found it."

"I don't know how it came there," she answered, leading away from the rest of the question by adding, "I have never asked a word about it."

"Elizabeth! you are odd, that's certain. And if Mr. Archdale is never coming here any more, you will never have a chance now to ask him. It's a pity to be so diffident."

Elizabeth smiled a little. "What else did you hear this morning?" she asked.

"Nothing that will interest you, though of course I thought it would when I heard it. Stephen Archdale has come back from his expedition up to the Penobscots with Colonel Pepperell. I wonder how they succeeded?"

"I can tell you that. The Indians have sent word that they will not fight against their brothers of St. John's and New Brunswick. That means that they'll fight for them. We shall have an Indian war with the French one. Think of the horrors of it." She shuddered as she spoke.

"Yes," returned Mrs. Eveleigh, with calm acquiescence. "It will be dreadful for the people that live in the little villages and in the open country."

This calmness, as if one were gazing from an impregnable fortress upon the tortures and deaths of others, silenced Elizabeth. She looked the speaker over slowly and turned away.

"Any more news?" asked Mrs. Eveleigh in a cheerful tone.

"I can tell you nothing more," returned Elizabeth.

This was literally true. It would not have been true if she had said that she had heard nothing else, for she had been sitting with her father for an hour, and had learned of a secret scheme,—a scheme so daring that the very idea of it made her eyes kindle and her breath come quickly,—a scheme that if it should fail would be hooted at as the dream of vain-glorious madmen, and if it should succeed, would be called a stroke of genius—magnificent. It interested her to know that among the most eager to carry out the scheme was Major Vaughn, the man whose valor she had asserted to Sir Temple Dacre a few months before. A small band of men had pledged themselves to put reality into this dream of grand achievement. "Its failure means," thought Elizabeth, "that America is to be French and Jesuit; its success that Englishmen, and liberty of mind and conscience, rule here." She prayed and hoped for success, and took an eager interest in all the details of the scheme that had reached her; but these were meagre enough, for, as yet, it was only outlined; the main thing was that it was resolved upon. The prisoners captured at Canso had been at last exchanged. They had been brought to Boston, and had given valuable information about the place of their captivity, the stronghold of France in America. Governor Shirley had declared that Louisburg was to be captured, and that Colonel Pepperell was the man to do it. Elizabeth, as she looked across at Mrs. Eveleigh, wondered what she would say to the project. But she wondered in silence, not only because silence had been enjoined, but because this was not a woman to trust with the making of great events. She had heard of an Indian war, and her chief thought had been that she would be safe.

The war had been talked about all the autumn. It was a terrible necessity, but this new direction that it was to take was something worth pondering over.

Elizabeth naturally, took large views of things, and, as her father's companion, she had not learned to restrict them. But, also, for the last months she had perceived dimly that there was a power within her which might never be called into action. And this power rose, sometimes, with vehemence against the monotony of her surroundings, in the midst of her wealth of comforts and of affection.

It was the last of November, only two days after this conversation, that Stephen Archdale was announced.

"He has come to tell me the decision," said Elizabeth to Mrs. Eveleigh; "he promised he would come immediately. It's good news."

"Then what makes you so pale? And you're actually trembling."

Elizabeth looked at her companion in surprise, for all her years of acquaintance with her.

"Don't you understand?" she said. "The strain is to be taken off. The certainty must be good; and yet there is the possibility that it is not. This and the thought that the moment has come make me tremble."