



Produced by Sandra Laythorpe.  HTML version by Al Haines.










LADY HESTER;

OR,

URSULA'S NARRATIVE.


by

CHARLOTTE M. YONGE





CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.     SAULT ST. PIERRE

CHAPTER II.    TREVORSHAM

CHAPTER III.   THE PEERAGE CASE

CHAPTER IV.    SKIMPING'S FARM

CHAPTER V.     SPINNEY LAWN

CHAPTER VI.    THE WHITE DOE'S WARNING

CHAPTER VII.   HUNTING

CHAPTER VIII.  DUCK SHOOTING

CHAPTER IX.    TREVOR'S LEGACY





CHAPTER I.

SAULT ST. PIERRE.


I write this by desire of my brothers and sisters, that if any reports
of our strange family history should come down to after generations the
thing may be properly understood.

The old times at Trevorsham seem to me so remote, that I can hardly
believe that we are the same who were so happy then.  Nay, Jaquetta
laughs, and declares that it is not possible to be happier than we have
been since, and Fulk would have me remember that all was not always
smooth even in those days.

Perhaps not--for him, at least, dear fellow, in those latter times; but
when I think of the old home, the worst troubles that rise before me
are those of the back-board and the stocks, French in the school-room,
and Miss Simmonds' "Lady Ursula, think of your position!"

And as to Jaquetta, she was born under a more benignant star.  Nobody
could have put a back-board on her any more than on a kitten.

Our mother had died (oh! how happily for herself!) when Jaquetta was a
baby, and Miss Simmonds most carefully ruled not only over us, but over
Adela Brainerd, my father's ward, who was brought up with us because
she had no other relation in the world.

Besides, my father wished her to marry one of my brothers.  It would
have done very well for either Torwood or Bertram, but unluckily, as it
seemed, neither of them could take to the notion.  She was a dear
little thing, to be sure, and we were all very fond of her; but, as
Bertram said, it would have been like marrying Jaquetta, and Torwood
had other views, to which my father would not then listen.

Then Bertram's regiment was ordered to Canada, and that was the real
cause of it all, though we did not know it till long after.

Bertram was starting out on a sporting expedition with a Canadian
gentleman, when about ten miles from Montreal they halted at a farm
with a good well-built house, named Sault St. Pierre, all looking
prosperous and comfortable, and a young farmer, American in his
ways--free-spoken, familiar, and blunt--but very kindly and friendly,
was at work there with some French-Canadian labourers.

Bertram's friend knew him and often halted there on hunting
expeditions, so they went into the house--very nicely furnished, a
pretty parlour with muslin curtains, a piano, and everything pleasant;
and Joel Lea called his wife, a handsome, fair young woman. Bertram
says from the first she put him in mind of some one, and he was trying
to make out who it could be.  Then came the wife's mother, a neat
little delicate, bent woman, with dark eyes, that looked, Bertram said,
as if they had had some great fright and never recovered it.  They
called her Mrs. Dayman.

She was silent at first, and only helped her daughter and the maid to
get the dinner, and an excellent dinner it was; but she kept on looking
at Bertram, and she quite started when she heard him called Mr. Trevor.
When they were just rising up, and going to take leave, she came up to
him in a frightened agitated manner, as if she could not help it, and
said--

"Sir, you are so like a gentleman I once knew.  Was any relation of
yours ever in Canada?"

"My father was in Canada," answered Bertram.

"Oh no," she said then, very much affected, "the Captain Trevor I knew
was killed in the Lake Campaign in 1814.  It must be a mistake, yet you
put me in mind of him so strangely."

Then Bertram protested that she must mean my father, for that he had
been a captain in the --th, and had been stationed at York (as Toronto
was then called), but was badly wounded in repulsing the American
attack on the Lakes in 1814.

"Not dead?" she asked, with her cheeks getting pale, and a sort of
excitement about her, that made Bertram wonder, at the moment, if there
could have been any old attachment between them, and he explained how
my father was shipped off from England between life and death; and how,
when he recovered, he found his uncle dying, and the title and property
coming to him.

"And he married!" she said, with a bewildered look; and Bertram told
her that he had married Lady Mary Lupton--as his uncle and father had
wished--and how we four were their children.  I can fancy how kindly
and tenderly Bertram would speak when he saw that she was anxious and
pained; and she took hold of his hand and held him, and when he said
something of mentioning that he had seen her, she cried out with a sort
of terror, "Oh no, no, Mr. Trevor, I beg you will not.  Let him think
me dead, as I thought him."  And then she drew down Bertram's tall head
to her, and fairly kissed his forehead, adding, "I could not help it,
sir; an old woman's kiss will do you no harm!"

Then he went away.  He never did tell us of the meeting till long
after.  He was not a great letter writer, and, besides, he thought my
father might not wish to have the flirtations of his youth brought up
against him.  So we little knew!

But it seems that the daughter and son-in-law were just as much amazed
as Bertram, and when he was gone, and the poor old lady sank into her
chair and burst out crying, and as they came and asked who or what this
was, she sobbed out, "Your brother Hester!  Oh! so like him--my
husband!" or something to that effect, as unawares.  She wanted to take
it back again, but of course Hester would not let her, and made her
tell the whole.

It seems that her name was Faith Le Blanc; she was half English, half
French-Canadian, and lived in a village in a very unsettled part, where
Captain Trevor used to come to hunt, and where he made love to her, and
ended by marrying her--with the knowledge of her family and his brother
officers, but not of his family--just before he was ordered to the Lake
frontier.  The war had stirred up the Indians to acts of violence they
had not committed for many years, and a tribe of them came down on the
village, plundering, burning, killing, and torturing those whom they
had known in friendly intercourse.

Faith Le Blanc had once given some milk to a papoose upon its mother's
back, and perhaps for this reason she was spared, but everyone
belonging to her was, she believed, destroyed, and she was carried away
by the tribe, who wanted to make her one of themselves; and she knew
that if she offended them, such horrors as she had seen practised on
others would come on her.

However, they had gone to another resort of theirs, where there was a
young hunter who often visited them, and was on friendly terms.  When
he found that there was a white woman living as a captive among them,
he spared no effort to rescue her.  Both he and she were often in
exceeding danger; but he contrived her escape at last, and brought her
through the woods to a place of safety, and there her child was born.

It was over the American frontier, and it was long before she could
write to her husband.  She never knew what became of her letter, but
the hunter friend, Piers Dayman, showed her an American paper which
mentioned Captain Trevor among the officers killed in their attack.
Dayman was devoted to her, and insisted on marrying her, and bringing
up her daughter as his own.  I fancy she was a woman of gentle passive
temper, and had been crushed and terrified by all she had gone through,
so as to have little instinct left but that of clinging to the
protector who had taken her up when she had lost everything else; and
she married him.  Nor did Hester guess till that very day that Piers
Dayman was not her father!

There were other children, sons who have given themselves to hunting
and trapping in the Hudson's Bay Company's territory; but Hester
remained the only daughter, and they educated her well, sending her to
a convent at Montreal, where she learnt a good many accomplishments.
They were not Roman Catholics; but it was the only way of getting an
education.

Dayman must have been a warm-hearted, tenderly affectionate person.
Hester loved him very much. But he had lived a wild sportsman's life,
and never was happy at rest.  They changed home often; and at last he
was snowed up and frozen to death, with one of his boys, on a bear
hunting expedition.

Not very long after, Hester married this sturdy American, Joel Lea, who
had bought some land on the Canadian side of the border, and her mother
came home to live with them.  They had been married four or five years,
but none of their children had lived.

So it was when the discovery came upon poor old Mrs. Dayman (I do not
know what else to call her), that Fulk Torwood Trevor, the husband of
her youth, was not dead, but was Earl of Trevorsham; married, and the
father of four children in England.

Poor old thing!  She would have buried her secret to the last, as much
in pity and love to him as in shame and grief for herself; and
consideration, too, for the sons, for whom the discovery was only less
bad than for us, as they had less to lose.  Hester herself hardly fully
understood what it all involved, and it only gradually grew on her.

That winter her mother fell ill, and Mr. Lea felt it right that the
small property she had had for her life should be properly secured to
her sons, according to the division their father had intended.  So a
lawyer was brought from Montreal and her will was made.  Thus another
person knew about it, and he was much struck, and explained to Hester
that she was really a lady of rank, and probably the only child of her
father who had any legal claim to his estates.  Lea, with a good deal
of the old American Republican temper, would not be stirred up. He
despised lords and ladies, and would none of it; but the lawyer held
that it would be doing wrong not to preserve the record.  Hester had
grown excited, and seconded him; and one day, when Lea was out, the
lawyer brought a magistrate to take Mrs. Dayman's affidavit as to all
her past history--marriage witnesses and all.  She was a good deal
overcome and agitated, and quite implored Hester never to use the
knowledge against her father; but she must have been always a passive,
docile being, and they made her tell all that was wanted, and sign her
deposition, as she had signed her will, as Faith Trevor, commonly known
as Faith Dayman.

She did not live many days after.  It was on the 3rd of February, 1836,
that she died; and in the course of the summer Hester had a son, who
throve as none of her babies had done.

Then she lay and brooded over him and the rights she fancied he was
deprived of, till she worked herself up to a strong and fixed purpose,
and insisted upon making all known to her father.  Now that her mother
was gone she persuaded herself that he had been a cruel, faithless
tyrant, who had wilfully deserted his young wife.

Joel Lea would not listen to her.  Why should she wish to make his son
a good-for-nothing English lord?  That was his view.  Nothing but
misery, distress, and temptation could come of not letting things
alone.  He held to that, and there were no means forthcoming either of
coming to England to present herself.  The family were well to do, but
had no ready money to lay out on a passage across the Atlantic. Nor
would Hester wait.  She had persuaded herself that a letter would be
suppressed, even if she had known how to address it; but to claim her
son's rights, and make an earl of him, had become her fixed idea, and
she began laying aside every farthing in her power.

In this she was encouraged, not by the lawyer who had made the
will--and who, considering that poor Faith's witnesses had been
destroyed, and her certificate and her wedding ring taken from her by
the Indians, thought that the marriage could not be substantiated--but
by a clever young clerk, who had managed to find out the state of
things; a man named Perrault, who used to come to the farm, always when
Lea was out, and talk her into a further state of excitement about her
child's expectations, and the injuries she was suffering. It was her
one idea.  She says she really believes she should have gone mad if the
saving had not occupied her; and a very dreary life poor Joel must have
had whilst she was scraping together the passage-money.  He still
steadily and sternly disapproved the whole, and when at two years' end
she had put together enough to bring her and her boy home, and maintain
them there for a few weeks, he still refused to go with her.  The last
thing he said was, "Remember, Hester, what was the price of all the
kingdoms of the world!  Thou wilt have it, then!  Would that I could
say, my blessing go with thee."  And he took his child, and held him
long in his arms, and never spoke one word over him but, "My poor boy!"




CHAPTER II.

TREVORSHAM


I suppose I had better tell what we had been doing all this time. Adela
and I had come out, and had a season or two in London, and my father
had enjoyed our pleasure in it, and paid a good deal of court to our
pretty Adela, because there was no driving Torwood into anything warmer
than easy brotherly companionship.

In fact, Torwood had never cared for anyone but little Emily Deerhurst.
Once he had come to her rescue, when she was only nine or ten years
old, and her schoolboy cousins were teasing her, and at every
Twelfth-day party since she and he had come together as by right.
There was something irresistible in her great soft plaintive brown
eyes, though she was scarcely pretty otherwise, and we used to call her
the White Doe of Rylstone.  Torwood was six or seven years older, and
no one supposed that he seriously cared for her, till she was sixteen.
Then, when my father spoke point blank to him about Adela, he was
driven into owning what he wished.

My father thought it utter absurdity.  The connection was not pleasant
to him; Mrs. Deerhurst was always looked on as a designing widow, who
managed to marry off her daughters cleverly, and he could believe no
good of Emily.

Now Adela always had more power with papa than any of us.  She had a
coaxing way, which his stately old-school courtesy never could resist.
She used when we were children to beg for holidays, and get treats for
us; and even now, many a request which we should never have dared to
utter, she could, with her droll arch way, make him think the most
sensible thing in the world.

What odd things people can do who have lived together like brothers and
sisters!  I can hardly help laughing when I think of Torwood coming
disconsolately up from the library, and replying, in answer to our
vigorous demands, that his lordship had some besotted notion past all
reason.

Then we pressed him harder--Adela with indignation, and I with
sympathy--till we forced out of him that he had been forbidden ever to
think or speak again of Emily, and all his faith in her laughed to
scorn, as delusions induced by Mrs. Deerhurst.

"I'm sure I hope you'll take Ormerod, Adela," I remember he ended;
"then at least you would be out of the way."

For Sir John Ormerod's courtship was an evident fact to all the family,
as, indeed, Adela was heiress enough to be a good deal troubled with
suitors, though she had hitherto managed to make them all keep their
distance.

Adela laughed at him for his kind wishes, but I could see she meant to
plead for him.  She had her chance, for Sir John Ormerod brought
matters to a crisis at the next ball; and though she thought, as she
said, "she had settled him," he followed it up with her guardian, and
Adela was invited to a conference in the library.

It happened that as she ran upstairs, all in a glow, she came on
Torwood at the landing.  She couldn't help saying in her odd
half-laughing, half-crying voice--

"It will come right, Torwood; I've made terms, I'm out of your way."

"Not Ormerod!" he exclaimed.

"Oh! no, no!"  I can hear her dash of scorn now, for I was just behind
my brother, but she went on out of breath--

"You may go on seeing her, provided you don't say a word--till--till
she's been out two years."

"Adela! you queen of girls, how have you done it?" he began, but she
thrust him aside and flew up into my arms; and when I had her in her
own room it came out, I hardly know how, that she had so shown that she
cared for no one she had ever seen except my father, that they found
they _did_ love each other; and--and--in short they were going to be
married.

Really it seemed much less wonderful then than it does in thinking of
it afterwards.  My father was much handsomer than any young man I ever
saw, with a hawk nose, a clear rosy skin, pure pink and white like a
boy's, curly little rings of white hair, blue eyes clear and bright as
the sky, a tall upright soldierly figure, and a magnificent stately
bearing, courteous and grand to all, but sweetly tender to a very few,
and to her above all.  It always had been so ever since he had brought
her home an orphan of six years old from her mother's death-bed at
Nice.  And he was youthful, could ride or hunt all day without so much
fatigue as either of his sons, and was as fresh and eager in all his
ways as a lad.

And she, our pretty darling!  I don't think Torwood and I in the least
felt the incongruity of her becoming our step-mother, only that papa
was making her more entirely his own.

I am glad we did not mar the sunshine.  It did not last long.  She came
home thoroughly unwell from their journey to Switzerland, and never got
better.  By the time the spring had come round again, she was lying in
the vault at Trevorsham, and we were trying to keep poor little Alured
alive and help my poor father to bear it.

He was stricken to the very heart, and never was the same man again.
His age seemed to come upon him all at once; and whereas at sixty-five
he had been like a man ten years younger, he suddenly became like one
ten years older; and though he never was actually ill, he failed from
month to month.

He could not bear the sight or sound of the poor baby.  Poor Adela had
scarcely lived to hear it was a boy, and all she had said about it was,
"Ursula, you'll be his mother."  And, oh! I have tried.  If love would
do it, I think he could not be more even to dear Adela!

What a frail little life it was!  What nights and days we had with him;
doctors saying that skill could not do it, but care might; and nurses
knowing how to be more effective than I could be; yet while I durst not
touch him I could not bear not to see him.  And I do think I was the
first person he began to know.

Meantime, there was a great difference in Torwood.  He had been very
much of a big boy hitherto.  No one but myself could have guessed that
he cared for much besides a lazy kind of enjoyment of all the best and
nicest things in this world.  He did what he was told, but in an
uninterested sort of way, just as if politics and county business, and
work at the estate, were just as much tasks thrust on him as Virgil and
Homer had been; and put his spirit into sporting, &c.

But when he was allowed to think hopefully of Emily, it seemed to make
a man of him, and he took up all that he had to do, as if it really
concerned him, and was not only a burden laid on him by his father.

And, as my father became less able to exert himself, Torwood came
forward more, and was something substantial to lean upon.  Dear fellow!
I am sure he did well earn the consent he gained at last, though not
with much satisfaction, from papa.

Emily had grown into great sweetness and grace, and Mrs. Deerhurst had
gone on very well.  Of course, people were unkind enough to say, it was
only because she had such prey in view as Lord Torwood; but, whatever
withheld her, it is certain that Emily only had the most suitable and
reasonable pleasures for a young lady, and was altogether as nice, and
gentle, and sensible, as could be desired. There never was a bit of
acting in her, she was only allowed to grow in what seemed natural to
her.  She was just one of the nice simple girls of that day, doing her
quiet bit of solid reading, and her practice, and her neat little
smooth pencil drawing from a print, as a kind of duty to her
accomplishments every day; and filling books with neat up-and-down MS.
copies of all the poetry that pleased her. Dainty in all her ways,
timid, submissive, and as it seemed to me, colourless.

But Fulk taught her Wordsworth, who was his great passion then, and
found her a perfect listener to all his Tory hopes, fears, and usages.

Papa could not help liking her when she came to stay with us, after
they were engaged, at the end of two years.  He allowed that, away from
her mother and all her belongings, she would do very well; and she was
so pretty and sweet in her respectful fear of him--I might almost say
awe--that his graceful, chivalrous courtesy woke up again; and he was
beginning absolutely to enjoy her, as she became a little more
confident and understood him better.

How well I remember that last evening!  I was happier than I had been
for weeks about little Alured: the convulsions had quite gone off, the
teeth that had caused them were through, and he had been laughing and
playing on my lap quite brightly--cooing to his mother's miniature in
my locket.  He was such an intelligent little fellow for eighteen
months!  I came down so glad, and it was so pleasant to see Emily, in
her white dress, leaning over my father while he had gone so happily
into his old delight of showing his prints and engravings; and Torwood,
standing by the fire, watching them with the look of a conqueror, and
Jaquetta--like the absurd child she loved to be--teasing them with
ridiculous questions about their housekeeping.

They were to have Spinney Lawn bought for them, just a mile away, and
the business was in hand.  Jacquey was enquiring whether there was a
parlour for The Cid, Torwood's hunter, whom she declared was as dear to
him as Emily herself.  Indeed, Emily did go out every morning after
breakfast to feed him with bread.  I can see her now on Torwood's arm,
with big Rollo and little Malta rolling over one another after them.

Then came an afternoon when we had all walked to Spinney Lawn, laid out
the gardens together, and wandered about the empty rooms, planning for
them.  The birds were singing in the March sunshine, and the tomtits
were calling "peter" in the trees, and Jaquetta went racing about after
the dogs, like a thing of seven years old, instead of seventeen.  And
Torwood was cutting out a root of primroses, leaves and all, for Emily,
when we saw a fly go along the lane, and wondered, with a sort of idle
wonder.  We supposed it must be visitors for the parsonage, and so we
strolled home, looking for violets by the way, and Jaquetta getting
shiny studs of celandine. Ah! I remember those glistening stars were
all closed before we came back.

Well, it must come, so it is silly to linger!  There stood the fly at
the hall-door, and the butler met us, saying--

"There's a person with his lordship, my lord.  She would not wait till
you came in, though I told her he saw no one on business without you--"

Torwood hastened on before this, expecting to see some importunate
person bothering my father with a petition.  What he did see was my
father leaning back in his chair, with a white, confounded, bewildered
look, and a woman, with a child on her lap, opposite.  Her back was to
the door, and Torwood's first impression was that she was a
well-dressed impostor threatening him; so he came quickly to my
father's side, and said--

"What is it father?  I'm here."

My poor father put out his hand feebly to him,