First Love. Mrs. Loudon
want. But don’t be frightening yourself with the thoughts of that, Molly. The young masther, after all that cum and gone, will surely do for him that’s his foster-brother, any way; and may be do something for his foster-sister too.
“Why I trouble your ladyship I forgot to mintion, but thim that it concarns most are not to the fore, and, besides, you have the boy.—Your sarvent till death: and that, I think, won’t be long now.
“I’m jist thinking, that may be your ladyship would’nt be happy without you’d a boy to be doing for: and there’s him, sure, that’s up at the castle now, my poor boy, and there isn’t a finer boy in the wide world; and if I thought that your ladyship would jist take him in place of the misthress’s child, and do for him, I would die quite aisy.”
Thus ended the nurse’s epistle.
“I should certainly,” observed Mrs. Montgomery to Mr. Jackson, “believe this strange letter to be genuine, from the perfect simplicity of the style, but that the writer appears to be too illiterate to have been any thing so decent as a nurse in such a family as is here described.”
“That,” replied Mr. Jackson, “does not at all invalidate the evidence of this extraordinary document; for, nurses intended merely to supply the nutriment denied by unnatural mothers to their offspring, must be chosen with reference chiefly to their youth, health, and wholesomeness of constitution; and, in great country families, they are naturally selected from among the simplest of the surrounding peasantry.”
The letter, bearing, as we have said, no date of time or place, the first and most obvious step seemed to be, to inquire very particularly where, and by whom, it had been brought to the house. The outside of the mysterious dispatch was shown to, and examined, by most of the servants, without other effect than a disclaiming shake of the head, although each turned it upside down, and downside up, and viewed it, not only before the light, but through the light, as with the light through, is generally expressed.
Mrs. Smyth, indeed, allowed that, as the bit of a scrawl was vara like a petition, it was no impossible that she hersel’ meud ha’ just laid it o’ the mistress’s table; for the mistress, to be sure, never refused tle read ony peur body’s bit o’ paper, however unlarned or dirty it meud be.
At length John, the under-footman, made his appearance, and after examining the shape, hue, and dimensions of the folded paper, said, that it was not unlike one which he had taken about six months since from a strange looking man, who had come to the door, requesting to see his mistress, on the very day that——, and he hesitated—that every body was in so much trouble, he added.
Mr. Jackson, seeing Mrs. Montgomery turn pale, took up the questioning of John. And here, lest the said John’s powers of description should not do justice to his subject, we shall give the scene between him and the nurse’s messenger, exactly as it occurred.
The stranger was tall and well made, with a countenance, the leading characteristic of which was, now drollery, and now defiance; whilst its secondary, and more stationary expression, was equally contradictory, being made up of shrewdness and simplicity, most oddly blended. He carried a reaping-hook in one hand, and, with the other, held over his shoulder a large knotted stick, with a bundle slung on the end of it.
This personage, on the melancholy day alluded to, arrived at the closed and silent entrance of Lodore House. Disdaining to use the still muffled, and therefore, in his opinion, noneffective knocker, he substituted the thick end of his own stick. This strange summons was answered by John.
“And is it affeard of a bit of a noise you are?” was the first question asked by the stranger. Without, however, waiting for reply, he was about to pass in, saying, “Just show us which is the mistress, will yee?”
The powdered lackey, astonished at such want of etiquette, placed an opposing hand against the breast of the intruder; upon which the stranger, after a momentary look of unfeigned surprise, very quietly laid down his reaping-hook, bundle, and stick, behind him, (for the latter he would not deign to use against an unarmed foe,) then planting his heels as firmly together as though he had grown out of the spot whereon he stood, he cocked his hat (none of the newest) on three hairs, put his arms a-kimbo, and his head on one side; and, his preparations thus completed, with a knowing wink, said, “Now I’ll tell you what, my friend, I’d as soon crack the scull of yee, as look at yee!”
John, even by his own account, stepped back a little, while saying, “You had better not raise a hand to me: for if you do, there are half a dozen more of us within, to carry you to Carlisle gaol.”
“Half a dozen!” cried our unknown hero, in a voice of contempt, and snapping his fingers as he spoke, “the divil a much I’d mind half a dozen of you, Englishers, with your gingerbread coats, and your floured pates, for all the world as if you had been out in the snow of a Christmas day, with never a hat on; that is, if I had you onest in my own dacent country, where one can knock a man down in pace and quietness if he desarve it, without bothering wid yeer law for every bit of a hand’s turn.”
During the latter part of this speech he turned to his bundle, and kneeling on one knee, untied it, took a small parcel out of it, unrolled a long bandage of unbleached linen cloth from about the parcel, next a covering of old leather, that seemed to have once formed a part of a shamoy for cleaning plate, then several pieces of torn and worn paper, and at length, from out the inmost fold, he produced a letter, which, as he concluded, he held up between his thumb and finger, saying, “There it is now! I mane no harm at all at all, to the misthress; nothing but to give her this small bit of paper, that the dying woman put into my hands, in presence of the priest, and that hasn’t seen the light o’ day since till now.”
John told him, that if that was all, he might be quite easy, as his delivering the letter at the house was the same thing as if he handed it to his lady herself; for that all his lady’s letters were carried in by the servants.
“And is she so great a lady as all that,” said the stranger, “that a poor man can’t have spache of her? But I’ve had spache, before now, of the great lady up at the castle, sure, and its twiste, aye, three times as big as that house.”
After some more parleying, in the course of which John disclosed the peculiar circumstances in which his mistress then was, our faithful messenger, after ejaculating, with a countenance of true commiseration, “And has she, the crathur?” at length seemed to feel the necessity of consenting to what he considered a very irregular proceeding, namely, the sending in of the letter; not, however, till he had first compelled John to kiss the back of it, and, in despite of the evidence of his own senses, to call it a blessed book, and holding one end, while our pertinacious friend held the other, to repeat after him the words of a long oath, to deliver it in safety. This, John proceeded to say, he did immediately, by giving the letter to one of the women to carry into his mistress’s room.
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Montgomery, with a sigh, “I must have laid it down without opening, and forgotten it.”
Mr. Jackson observed, that from the expression, “over seas to the harvest,” and also the man’s appearance, it was very evident he must be one of those poor creatures who come over in shiploads from the north of Ireland to Whitehaven, during the reaping season; and that this fact, once admitted, seemed to render it more than probable, that the noble family spoken of were Irish. As to the important particulars of names and titles, there seemed but one chance of obtaining them; which was, to institute an immediate search after the young man who had brought the letter. Every inquiry was accordingly made, but in vain.
After some months, Mr. Jackson himself, in the warmth of his zeal, undertook a journey to Ireland; but returned, without having been able to discover any clue to the business. Advertisements were next resorted to, but no one claimed Edmund. The letter had said, that “those it concerned most were,” in the nurse’s phraseology, “not to the fore.” Whether death, or absence from the kingdom was meant, it was impossible to say.
The harvest season of the next year came and went, but the wandering knight of the reaping-hook was heard of no more; and Mrs. Montgomery, while her better judgment condemned the feeling, could not conceal from herself, that she