“You are mistaken,” interrupted Mr. Leslie, contemptuously, “if you think I believe my wife to be anything but the victim of some wilful misrepresentation on your part. Your malice is harmless there."
“Possibly,” replied Mr. Wareham, who felt that he had but his last card to play. “Hark you, Robert Leslie. You think I owe you an explanation of this night’s proceedings. Mrs. Leslie is with me voluntarily; but ostensibly, I may say, on affairs relating to certain family antecedents with which it is not desirable that you should become acquainted.”
“You may speak freely,” said Mr. Leslie, looking at him coldly.
“I intend to do so—in Trowchester,” replied Mr. Wareham, his face growing white. “You have won from me the only woman I ever loved. Guard yourself from the tongues of the fools who have hitherto looked up to you. Hide yourself from scoffing eyes, from your mother’s reproaches, from your friends’ sneers. It may be a poor revenge, and it has been long in coming, but it will be some satisfaction to me to see your position, when it is known in your small world that your wife is the daughter of a returned convict.”
And with that last shaft, flung with the bitterest look of hatred, Mr. Wareham turned and left the room. Mr. Leslie closed the door, and stood thoughtfully before his wife.
“It is true, Robert,” she said, the tears raining from her eyes, “but I did not know it when I married you. I did not know how much I had injured you till my mother’s death. My poor father wished to see me before he died, and Mr. Wareham was taking me to him.”
“My poor girl! My poor Milly!” he said, taking her in his arms. “He is dead. I stood beside his grave this morning. It was to see him carried to it that I went to London. Some day we will go and look at it together. Milly, you remember the night before our marriage? I left your mother’s house later than usual. I found a wretched-looking man watching by the door. He evidently knew who and what I was. At first I could hardly believe his statements; but when I recalled many circumstances connected with your mother, I began to think that what he said might be true. It was a sad, sad story; and he was both ill and desperate. In the morning the whole affair would be known in Trowchester. I had but a few minutes to choose between giving you up, or purchasing his silence. I took him to an out-of-the-way inn, where he could rest and refresh himself, till a train started for London, and I did not lose sight of him till he was safely in it. I then wrote to an old friend in London, in whom I knew I could place confidence, directing him to provide your father with necessaries, and to procure him medical advice. From time to time I have learnt that all efforts to restore his health have been unavailing, and on Tuesday morning you saw me open the letter which announced his death. How Mr. Wareham got possession of the secret, and how far he intended to abuse his knowledge of it, I shall never seek to know. I only have been to blame, for I have acted like a coward from first to last. Forgive me, Milly!”
What more he said, and in what words she replied, is it not written in the memories of both?
“Although the day be ever so long,
At last it will ring for evening song.”
Robert Leslie and his wife left Trowchester a few weeks afterwards. He had been offered a better and wider field for his ministry in London, whither his mother did not care to follow him; his successor giving her far greater satisfaction, in a doctrinal point of view, than he had ever done.
Mr. Wareham went out to Australia, having married the daughter of a farmer a few days before his departure,—a kind-hearted, cherry-cheeked girl, who had long hopelessly admired him in secret, and who accepted gratefully the small amount of affection he proffered. And if the Trowchester people repeated every story but the right one concerning them all, what did it signify? We are mistaken, if we think a wonder ever lasts out the nine days which the old saying allots to it.
STRANGE WILLS.
Of course we ought to begin with Adam’s will, the father of all wills; and if we could produce that patriarchal document, we should undoubtedly find in it the germs of all the merits, faults, and eccentricities of wills to come. But, unfortunately, though a Testament of Adam does exist, it is a forgery; and nothing will convince us to the contrary,—not even the Mussulman tradition, which asserts that on the occasion of our great forefather beginning to make his bequests, seventy legions of angels brought him sheets of paper and quill pens, nicely nibbed, all the way from Paradise; and that the Archangel Gabriel set-to his seal as witness. What! four hundred and twenty thousand sheets of paper!—surely a needless consumption of material, when there was nothing to be bequeathed but a view over the hedge of an impracticable garden.
If we pass to Noah’s testament, we are again among the apocrypha. In it, Noah portions his landed property, the globe, into three shares, one for each son: America is not included in the division for obvious reasons. It was left for “manners’” sake, and manners has never got it; though each of the three sons or their descendants has had a rubble, but Brother Japhet seems most likely to get it all, for he is bowing Brother Shem[1] out, and using Brother Ham as his bondsman. Sharp fellow, Japhet! especially in America.
The testament of the twelve Patriarchs must be glanced at, as it is received as canonical by the Armenian Church, and learned men have hesitated to pronounce it a forgery. Reuben speaks of sleep as having been, in Paradise, only a sweet ecstacy; whilst now, after the Fall, it has become a continually recurring image of death. Simeon bewails his former hostility to Joseph; and relates, that his brother’s bones were preserved in the Royal treasury of Egypt. Levi is oracular; Judah rejoices in the sceptre left to his race; Issachar- ↑ The Red Indian is of Semitic origin.
