"Who can he be?" said Walter Prevost, when they had reached the little sitting-room. "Sir William called him 'my lord.'"
Edith smiled at her brother's curiosity. Oh, how much older women always are than men!
"Lords are small things here, Walter," she said, gazing forth from the window at the stately old trees within sight of the house, which for her, as for all expanding minds, had their homily. Age--hackneyed age--reads few lessons. It ponders those long received, subtilizes, refines, combines. Youth has a lesson in every external thing; but, alas! soon forgets the greater part of all.
"I do not think that lords are small things anywhere," answered her brother, who had not imbibed any of the republican spirit which was even then silently creeping over the American people. "Lords are made by kings for great deeds, or great virtues."
"Then they are lords of their own making," retorted Edith; "kings only seal the patent nature has bestowed. That great red oak, Walter, was growing before the family of any man now living was ennobled by the hand of royalty."
"Pooh, nonsense, Edith!" ejaculated her brother; "you are indulging in one of your day-dreams. What has that oak to do with nobility?"
"I hardly know," replied his sister; "yet something linked them together in my mind. It seemed as if the oak asked me, 'What is their antiquity to mine?' and yet the antiquity of their families is their greatest claim to our reverence."
"No, no!" cried Walter Prevost, eagerly; "their antiquity is nothing, for we are all of as ancient a family as they are. But it is that they can show a line from generation to generation, displaying some high qualities, ennobled by some great acts. Granted that here or there a sluggard, a coward, or a fool, may have intervened, or that the acts which have won praise in other days may not be reverenced now; yet I have often heard my father say, that, in looking back through records of noble houses, we shall find a sum of deeds and qualities suited to, and honoured by, succeeding ages, which, tried by the standard of the times of the men, shows that hereditary nobility is not merely an honour won by a worthy father for unworthy children, but a bond to great endeavours, signed by a noble ancestor, on behalf of all his descendants. Edith, you are not saying what you think."
"Perhaps not," answered Edith, with a quiet smile; "but let us have some lights, Walter, for I am well-nigh in darkness."
They were not ordinary children. I do not intend to represent them as such. But he who says that what is not ordinary is not natural, may, probably, be an ass. How they had become what they were is another question; but that is easily explained. First--Nature had not made them of her common clay; for, notwithstanding all bold assertions of that great and fatal falsehood, that all men are born equal, such is not the case. No two men are ever born equal. No two leaves are alike upon a tree, and there is a still greater dissimilarity--a still greater inequality--between the gifts and endowments of different men. God makes them unequal. God raises the one, and depresses the other, ay, from the very birth, in the scale of his creation; and man, by one mode or another, in every state of society, and in every land, recognizes the difference, and assigns the rank. Nature, then, had not made those two young people of her common clay. Their father was no common man; their mother had been one in whom mind and heart, thought and feeling, had been so nicely balanced, that emotion always found a guide in judgment. But this was not all. The one child up to the age of thirteen, the other until twelve, had been trained and instructed with the utmost care. Every advantage of education had been lavished upon them, and every natural talent they possessed had been developed, cultivated, directed. They had been taught from mere childhood to think, as well as to know; to use, as well as to receive, information. Then had come a break--the sad, jarring break in the sweet chain of the golden hours of youth--a mother's death. Till then their father had borne much from the world and from society unflinching. But then his stay and his support were gone. Visions became realities for him. What wonder if, when the light of his home had gone out, his mental sight became somewhat dim, the objects around him indistinct? He gathered together all he had, and migrated to a distant land, where small means might be considered great, and where long-nourished theories of life might be tried by the test of experience.
To his children, the change was but a new phase of education--one not often tried, but not without its uses. If their new house was not completely a solitude, it was very nearly so. Morally and physically they were thrown nearly upon their own resources. But previous training had made those resources many. Mentally, at least, they brought a great capital into the wilderness, and they found means to employ it. Everything around them, in its newness and its freshness, had a lesson and a moral. The trees, the flowers, the streams, the birds, the insects, the new efforts, the new labours, the very wants and deficiencies of their present state--all taught them something. Had they been born amidst such things; had they been brought up in such habits; had their previous training been at all of the same kind; or, even had the change been as great as it might have been; had they been left totally destitute of comforts, conveniences, attendance, books, companionships, objects of art and taste, to live the life of the savage,--the result might have been--must have been--very different. But there was enough left of the past to link it beneficially to the present. They brought all the materials with them from their old world for opening out the rich mines of the new. It is not to be wondered at, then, if they were no ordinary children; and if, at fifteen and sixteen, they reasoned and thought of things, and in modes, not often dealt with by the young. I say, not often; because, even under other circumstances, and with no such apparent causes, we see occasional instances of beings like themselves.
They were, then, no ordinary children, but yet quite natural.
The influences which surrounded them had acted differently, of course, on the boy and on the girl. He had learned to act as well as think: she to meditate as well as act. He had acquired the strength, the foot, the ear, the eye of the Indian. She, too, had gained much in activity and hardihood; but in the dim glades, and on the flower-covered banks, by the side of the rushing stream, or hanging over the roaring cataract, she had learned to give way to long and silent reveries, dealing both with the things of her own heart and the things of the wide world; comparing the present with the past, the solitude with society, meditating upon life and its many phases, and yielding herself, while the silent majesty of the scene seemed to sink into her soul, to what her brother was wont to call her "day-dreams."
I have said that she dealt with the things of her own heart. Let me not be misunderstood: the things of that heart were very simple. They had never been complicated with even a thought of love. Her own fate, her own history, her soul in its relation to God and to His creation, the sweet and bright emotions produced within her by all things beautiful in art or nature, the thrill excited by a lovely scene or a dulcet melody, the trance-like pleasure of watching the clear stream waving the many-coloured pebbles of its bed, these, and such as these, were the things of the heart I spoke of; and on them she would dwell and ponder, asking herself what they were, whence they came, how they arose, whither they tended. It was the music, the poetry, of her own nature, in all its strains, which she sought to search into; but the sweetest, though sometimes the saddest, of the harmonies in woman's heart was yet wanting.
She had read of love, it is true; she had heard it spoken of, but, with a timidity not rare in the most sensitive minds, she had excluded it even from her day-dreams. She knew that there was such a thing as passion: she might be conscious that it was latent in her own nature; but she tried not to seek it out. To her it was an abstraction. Psyche had not held the lamp to Eros.
So much it was needful to say of the two young Prevosts before we went onward with our tale; and now, as far as they were concerned, the events of that day were near their close. Lights were brought, and Walter and his sister sat down to muse over books--I can hardly say read--till their father re-appeared; for the evening prayer and the parting kiss had never been omitted in their solitude ere they lay down to rest.
The conference in the hall, however, was long, and more than an hour elapsed before the three gentlemen entered the room. Then a few minutes were passed