‘If you please, sir,’ said the old man, trying to erect himself, ‘I wanted to speak to you.’
‘Well.’
‘If you please, sir, chimney smokes so as a body can scarce bide in the house, and the blacks come down terrible.’
‘Wants sweeping,’ roared Humfrey, into his deaf ears.
‘Have swep it, sir; old woman’s been up with her broom.’
‘Old woman hasn’t been high enough. Send Jack up outside with a rope and a bunch o’ furze, and let her stand at bottom.’
‘That’s it, sir!’ cried the old man, with a triumphant snap of the fingers over his shoulder. ‘Thank ye!’
‘Here’s Miss Honor, John;’ and Honora came forward, her gravity somewhat shaken by the domestic offices of the old woman.
‘I’m glad to see you still able to bring out the cows, John. Here’s my favourite Daisy as tame as ever.’
‘Ay! ay!’ and he looked at his master for explanation from the stronger and more familiar voice. ‘I be deaf, you see, ma’am.’
‘Miss Honor is glad to see Daisy as tame as ever,’ shouted Humfrey.
‘Ay! ay!’ maundered on the old man; ‘she ain’t done no good of late, and Mr. West and I—us wanted to have fatted her this winter, but the squire, he wouldn’t hear on it, because Miss Honor was such a terrible one for her. Says I, when I hears ’em say so, we shall have another dinner on the la-an, and the last was when the old squire was married, thirty-five years ago come Michaelmas.’
Honora was much disposed to laugh at this freak of the old man’s fancy, but to her surprise Humfrey coloured up, and looked so much out of countenance that a question darted through her mind whether he could have any such step in contemplation, and she began to review the young ladies of the neighbourhood, and to decide on each in turn that it would be intolerable to see her as Humfrey’s wife; more at home at the Holt than herself. She had ample time for contemplation, for he had become very silent, and once or twice the presumptuous idea crossed her that he might be actually about to make her some confidence, but when he at length spoke, very near the house, it was only to say, ‘Honor, I wanted to ask you if you think your father would wish me to ask young Sandbrook here?’
‘Oh! thank you, I am sure he would be glad. You know poor Owen has nowhere to go, since his uncle has behaved so shamefully.’
‘It must have been a great mortification—’
‘To Owen? Of course it was, to be so cast off for his noble purpose.’
‘I was thinking of old Mr. Sandbrook—’
‘Old wretch! I’ve no patience with him!’
‘Just as he has brought this nephew up and hopes to make him useful and rest some of his cares upon him in his old age, to find him flying off upon this fresh course, and disappointing all his hopes.’
‘But it is such a high and grand course, he ought to have rejoiced in it, and Owen is not his son.’
‘A man of his age, brought up as he has been, can hardly be expected to enter into Owen’s views.’
‘Of course not. It is all sordid and mean, he cannot even understand the missionary spirit of resigning all. As Owen says, half the Scripture must be hyperbole to him, and so he is beginning Owen’s persecution already.’
It was one of Humfrey’s provoking qualities that no amount of eloquence would ever draw a word of condemnation from him; he would praise readily enough, but censure was very rare with him, and extenuation was always his first impulse, so the more Honora railed at Mr. Sandbrook’s interference with his nephew’s plans, the less satisfaction she received from him. She seemed to think that in order to admire Owen as he deserved, his uncle must be proportionably reviled, and though Humfrey did not imply a word save in commendation of the young missionary’s devotion, she went indoors feeling almost injured at his not understanding it; but Honora’s petulance was a very bright, sunny piquancy, and she only appeared the more glowing and animated for it when she presented herself at the breakfast-table, with a preposterous country appetite.
Afterwards she filled a vase very tastefully with her varieties of leaves, and enjoyed taking in her cousin Sarah, who admired the leaves greatly while she thought they came from Mrs. Mervyn’s hothouse; but when she found they were the product of her own furrows, voted them coarse, ugly, withered things, such as only the simplicity of a Londoner could bring into civilized society. So Honora stood over her gorgeous feathery bouquet, not knowing whether to laugh or to be scornful, till Humfrey, taking up the vase, inquired, ‘May I have it for my study?’
‘Oh! yes, and welcome,’ said Honora, laughing, and shaking her glowing tresses at him; ‘I am thankful to any one who stands up for carrots.’
Good-natured Humfrey, thought she, it is all that I may not be mortified; but after all it is not those very good-natured people who best appreciate lofty actions. He is inviting Owen Sandbrook more because he thinks it would please papa, and because he compassionates him in his solitary lodgings, than because he feels the force of his glorious self-sacrifice.
* * * * *
The northern slope of the Holt was clothed with fir plantations, intersected with narrow paths, which gave admission to the depths of their lonely woodland palace, supported on rudely straight columns, dark save for the snowy exuding gum, roofed in by aspiring beam-like arms, bearing aloft their long tufts of dark blue green foliage, floored by the smooth, slippery, russet needle leaves as they fell, and perfumed by the peculiar fresh smell of turpentine. It was a still and lonely place, the very sounds making the silence more audible (if such an expression may be used), the wind whispering like the rippling waves of the sea in the tops of the pines, here and there the cry of a bird, or far, far away, the tinkle of the sheep-bell, or the tone of the church clock; and of movement there was almost as little, only the huge horse ants soberly wending along their highway to their tall hillock thatched with pine leaves, or the squirrel in the ruddy, russet livery of the scene, racing from tree to tree, or sitting up with his feathery tail erect to extract with his delicate paws the seed from the base of the fir-cone scale. Squirrels there lived to a good old age, till their plumy tails had turned white, for the squire’s one fault in the eyes of keepers and gardeners was that he was soft-hearted towards ‘the varmint.’
A Canadian forest on a small scale, an extremely miniature scale indeed, but still Canadian forests are of pine, and the Holt plantation was fir, and firs were pines, and it was a lonely musing place, and so on one of the stillest, clearest days of ‘St. Luke’s little summer,’ the last afternoon of her visit at the Holt, there stood Honora, leaning against a tree stem, deep, very deep in a vision of the primeval woodlands of the West, their red inhabitants, and the white man who should carry the true, glad tidings westward, westward, ever from east to west. Did she know how completely her whole spirit and soul were surrendered to the worship of that devotion? Worship? Yes, the word is advisedly used; Honora had once given her spirit in homage to Schiller’s self-sacrificing Max; the same heart-whole veneration was now rendered to the young missionary, multiplied tenfold by the hero being in a tangible, visible shape, and not by any means inclined to thwart or disdain the allegiance of the golden-haired girl. Nay, as family connections frequently meeting, they had acted upon each other’s minds more than either knew, even when the hour of parting had come, and words had been spoken which gave Honora something more to cherish in the image of Owen Sandbrook than even the hero and saint. There then she stood and dreamt, pensive and saddened indeed, but with a melancholy trenching very nearly on happiness in the intensity of its admiration, and the vague ennobling future of devoted usefulness in which her heart already claimed to share, as her person might in some far away period on which she could not dwell.
A sound approached, a firm footstep, falling with strong elasticity and such regular cadences, that