Isa awoke on the following morning with a feeling of oppression on her heart, a vague impression that something had been neglected which ought to have been done, and she connected that something with the lecture which she had heard on the preceding day. Several minutes passed, however, before she could trace back the links of thought to the actual cause of her uneasiness, as it lay out of the general course of reflection suggested by the subject of the lecture. Then Isa recalled the words which at the time that she heard them had painfully reminded her of a death-bed scene, perhaps the saddest recollection left on a mind which had had of late much experience of sorrow. “The Christian may be called to draw upon himself the anger of men by defending the truth, or upholding the cause of the oppressed.”
“It is more than two years,” reflected Isa, “since I received a sacred charge from the dying lips of my dear father; and that charge I have never obeyed. For more than two years may an orphan have been suffering wrong on account of my brother, and during all this time I have let the sin rest on his soul. I first put off an explanation till I should meet him; then, when we met, I shrank from doing my duty. I quieted conscience with every kind of frivolous excuse; he was too delicate, too sensitive, too busy, it would be better to delay speaking till we should be alone together in some peaceful home. We have been alone together, we have passed hours, days, weeks in each other’s society, with nothing to hinder me from speaking, except my own cowardly dislike of saying what might probably offend. Surely cowardice like this is another Midianite in possession, and I shall never know real peace till I have wrestled it down. Whenever the remembrance of that charge comes over my mind, it is like a cloud darkening the sunshine, and throwing a chill around. God help me to fulfil at length a neglected duty! I will speak to Gaspar before this day has passed over.”
To some strong natures there might have appeared little that was formidable in the task before her, but to Isa it was peculiarly painful. Brought up as an only daughter, tenderly nurtured from her cradle, she had hardly known what it was to have to encounter even a grave look or a hasty word,—Isa had never learned to endure hardness. Fond of pleasing, both from natural kindliness of heart and love of approbation, Isa never willingly gave offence; with her to inflict pain was to suffer it. Isa delighted in deeds of kindness and works of beneficence; to comfort the sorrowing, or rejoice with the happy was congenial to her womanly spirit; but to restrain, rebuke, oppose—the sterner duties which are sometimes assigned to the most gentle of the sex in the battle-field of life—cost Isa an effort which can only be appreciated by those of a disposition like her own.
Isa’s heart throbbed uneasily with the feeling that the explanation so long dreaded, so long put off, was at hand, as she sat in the apartment which she called her boudoir, but which was always used as a breakfast-room. The bronze urn was hissing on the table, on which was spread a somewhat meagre repast. Awaiting her brother, who was late, Isa placed herself by the window, and gazed forth on the prospect before her. There was little to charm in that prospect, even on a bright spring day. A tract of common spread in front, dotted with golden patches of blossoming furze; but the picturesqueness of heath land was marred by the low-lying hamlet which was the foreground of the landscape. The cottages, or rather hovels of Wildwaste, wore an appearance of squalor and decay, which was not softened by the charm which moss and lichen and clustering ivy can throw around even ruins. They appeared rather falling to pieces because originally ill-built, than because they were ancient. The only tenement at Wildwaste which looked in perfect repair, and with some pretension to beauty, was the neat little school-house, erected by a Madden, but not, as Isa had soon learned from Lottie, either by Lionel or by Cora. “How pleasant,” mused Isa, as she watched the little clusters of cottage children entering the low-browed porch—“how pleasant to leave behind such a memorial of a passing visit to a place as that young Arthur has left!” and as she thought of her brother, with his ample means yet penurious disposition, she felt painfully how far better it is to possess the heart to give than the money.
The soap manufactory, lying a little to the right of the prospect, a huge unsightly square-windowed pile of brick and mortar, was a yet more conspicuous object than the hamlet of Wildwaste. It stood not two hundred yards from Isa’s home, so that when the wind blew from that quarter she dared not open the windows to let in the breezes, so polluted were they by smoke and evil scent. The only redeeming feature in the landscape seen from the lodge was the park which skirted the road beyond the common, the beautiful park above whose light leafy screen rose the gray turrets of Castle Lestrange. There, indeed, beauty and peace might dwell; thence no ruder sound would be heard than the cuckoo’s note or the nightingale’s song. Isa’s eyes, overlooking nearer and less pleasing objects, constantly wandered to those verdant woods, those lofty picturesque towers.
Gaspar entered the sitting-room with a complaint on his lips against “treacherous weather” on that clear April morn, for he was never weary of contrasting the climate of England with that of Jamaica, much to the disadvantage of the former, though the heat of the latter seemed to have dried up and withered his frame. He seated himself at the table, and began cutting the stale loaf (bread at the lodge was always stale), but interrupted himself with the observation, “How one misses the papers of a morning! Isa, I wish you’d ask your uncle, the baronet, to send over the Times every day.”
“I should hardly like to ask that favour,” replied Isa, leaving the window, and joining her brother at the breakfast-table.
“And why not?” inquired Gaspar peevishly; “are you afraid of robbing the servant’s hall?”
“No,” said Isa, as she occupied herself with the tea-caddy; “but my uncle would naturally think that we might take in a paper for ourselves, instead of putting him to the inconvenience of sending a mile every morning.”
“I’m not the idiot to throw away my money on what may be had for the asking; you have so much foolish pride,” muttered Mr. Gritton. “I feel myself out of the world where I can’t get a glimpse of the money-market or the shipping report.”
That word “shipping” served as a cue to Isa. While sitting by the window she had been revolving in her mind how she should introduce the subject of her father’s dying message to Gaspar. Isa was convinced that her long silence had been sinful, and having “screwed up her courage to the sticking point,” was on the watch for an opportunity of saying what she had determined should be said. Too anxious to make some commencement to be able to do so without the appearance of effort, Isa abruptly remarked, in a tone that betrayed a little nervousness, “Is not your interest in the shipping chiefly on account of the Orissa?”
“The Orissa?” repeated Mr. Gritton in accents of surprise; “why, all the world knows that she foundered nigh four years ago, passengers saved, cargo lost, and the greater part uninsured.”
“Had you anything to do with the vessel?” asked Isa, timidly feeling her way.
Gaspar looked a little embarrassed by the question. “Yes—no,” he replied, almost with a stammer. “I might have had a stake in that vessel—I thought of having—’twas lucky I had not; there had been such a run for certain goods in the West Indian market, that the cargo was expected to bring double its value. But—but you know nothing and care nothing about matters of business,” he added, stretching out his hand for the cup of tea which his sister had poured out. “Has the post brought any letters this morning?”
Isa did not suffer the current of conversation to be thus abruptly turned. Merely shaking her head in reply to the question, she nerved herself to go one step further. “Who was the orphan whose property was in some way or other connected with the Orissa?”
“Orphan! what do you mean? Who on earth talked to you about an orphan?” Isa felt—for she dared not look up—that her brother’s eyes were keenly scrutinising her face.
“Better have the whole truth out at once,” thought poor Isa, who, in her nervousness, was emptying the milk-jug into the tea-pot. “The fact is, dear Gaspar,” she said, speaking with rapidity and a sensation of breathlessness, “I have been anxious for a long time to talk to you about some words uttered by our beloved father a very, very short time before we lost him. When he was almost too ill to speak, he said”—Isa pressed her forehead as if to collect her thoughts—“he said, ‘Gaspar—you will be with him—the Orissa—not her money lost—tell him from me;’ the dear lips had not power to finish the sentence.”
“Did my father say anything more than these words?” asked Gaspar, who saw from the quivering of Isa’s lashes and the trembling of her lip that she at least attached some importance to the fragmentary message.
Isa pressed her hands very tightly together; she could hardly articulate the broken sentences—“He said, ‘something wrong—he should deal fairly by that orphan’—I can remember no more.”
THE CONVERSATION AT BREAKFAST.
Gaspar rose abruptly from his seat and walked to the window. Isa felt the brief silence which followed almost unendurable, and yet was thankful that she had been enabled to speak out the whole truth at last. After a few seconds Gaspar returned to his seat, and with a rapid—Isa fancied a slightly tremulous utterance—thus addressed his sister:—
“Isa, your ears deceived you—your memory is at fault—or—or there was a wandering of mind at the last. You shall know exactly how the case lies. A young lady, known to my father and myself, had some thousands of pounds which she wished to invest, four years ago, during my short visit to England. My father was consulted on the business. There was a sudden demand for a particular kind of goods in the West Indies; money invested in them might double itself if no time were lost; the girl was eager to increase her property—natural enough,—I was employed in making the arrangement—ship went down—goods uninsured—she had staked her property, and lost it. This was no fault of mine; you might blame the captain or the crew, or the winds and the waves; I was never blamed by Cora Madden herself.”
“Cora Madden!” ejaculated Isa.
“You know the whole truth now,” said Gaspar; “let us never come on the subject again.”
Isa felt bewildered by the sudden disclosure of the name of the orphan in whom she had taken such painful interest; so much so, that she could hardly tell at that time whether the explanation of Gaspar were satisfactory or not to her mind. When the name of Cora was uttered, Isa’s surprise had made her for a moment look full in the face of her brother, and that face—which had been almost ghastly—had become suffused with a colour which she had never before seen upon it, and the eyes of Gaspar had instantly sunk beneath the gaze of her own. Isa hardly noticed this in the excitement of the instant, but it afterwards often recurred to her mind, with an ever-strengthening persuasion that her brother had not told her all.
The subject of the death-bed message was dropped, but Isa felt during the remainder of that morning that her brother’s nerves had been shaken, and that his spirits were utterly out of tune; and she could not but refer this to its natural cause—the conversation at breakfast. Nothing pleased Mr. Gritton: the tea was bitter, cold, undrinkable; the room full of draughts; Lottie a useless idiot, and Mr. Eardley little better for having ever recommended her. Isa came in for her full share of peevish reproach, almost more difficult to be borne than angry rebuke. It was a great relief to the young lady when her companion at length quitted her boudoir to go down to his accounts, though Isa well knew that these accounts would afford a new cause of grievance, and that all her care to manage household affairs with strict economy would not prevent pettish remarks on the extravagance of the Saturday bills.
“I shall not be able to endure this kind of life long,” murmured Isa to herself, as she returned from ordering dinner, having had to encounter the ill-temper of Hannah, who, while her master inveighed against reckless extravagance, complained on the other hand that there were “some ladies as think that their servants can live upon nothing.” “I was never made to bear all this constant fret and worry,” sighed the discouraged Isa; “this perpetual effort to please, without the possibility of succeeding in doing so.” Isa was, like so many others, tempted to think that the post in which Providence had placed her was not the one that suited her; that she would do better, be better in another. Disappointment, discontent, distrust, had not been driven forth from her heart. Again Isa seated herself by the window which commanded a view of the towers of Lestrange, feeling disinclined to settle to any occupation, to take up her work, or to finish her book.
A visit from Edith made a delightful break on the dreary solitude of Isa.
“I have come with a message from papa, dear Isa,” cried the baronet’s daughter, after an affectionate greeting had passed between the cousins; “he has charged me to carry you back captive with me to the Castle, to remain there as long as we can make our prisoner happy. Oh, don’t make resistance—lay down your arms and surrender at once!” The pleading eyes seconded well the playful petition of the lips.
A prisoner! nay, to Isa the invitation came like an offer of freedom to one in irksome bondage. Her countenance lighted up with pleasure. “I should gladly surrender to so generous a foe,” she replied, “only—my brother—”
“He will let me carry you off, I am sure that he will,” cried Edith.
“I will go and ask him,” said Isa, hastily rising and quitting the room.
Edith, left thus alone, looked around the boudoir of her cousin with mingled pity and surprise. “Poor Isa, is this her abode? so small, so wretchedly furnished, so dreary and bare. And what a view from the window!” added the heiress, as she sauntered up to the casement; “the very look of those tumble-down cottages would make one miserable; and as for that hideous manufactory, it would spoil the fairest landscape in the world. No wonder that Isa was not able to echo my words when I said, ‘There is no place like home.’”
Isa soon returned with her brother’s permission for her to accompany her cousin, a permission which he could hardly have withheld. Edith knew not how ungraciously it had been accorded, how bitterly Gaspar had remarked, “I knew that you would never care to stay quietly here with an invalid brother.”
“Had he been like a brother to me,” was Isa’s mental comment when she quitted the room, “no pleasure would have drawn me from his side.” Nevertheless Mr. Gritton’s observation gave pain to his sister, and so did the distressed look on the face of Lottie, when hastily summoned to help her young mistress in her preparations for quitting the Lodge.
“O Miss Isa, I hope you’ll not be long away; we’ll be just lost without you;” and Isa saw that moisture rose in Lottie’s black eyes.
Isa returned with Edith to the Castle, where she was graciously received by her stately uncle. Two beautiful rooms, exquisitely furnished, one opening into the other, had been assigned to her; none in the Castle commanded a more beautiful prospect. Swiftly the hours rolled by amidst varied occupations. Cheerful was the afternoon saunter in the park with Edith, and the little dinner-party in the evening, when Isa met with congenial society. Pleasant on the following morning was the drive to the distant church, and very refreshing to the spirit the sacred service, conducted with none of the lifeless formality which cast such a chill over Isa’s devotion in the church which she had attended with Gaspar. Delightful was the evening converse with Edith; converse on high and holy themes. Then, on the Monday morning, Isa much enjoyed visiting with her sweet young cousin some of the dwellings of Sir Digby’s poorer tenants, bearing little delicacies to invalids from the baronet’s luxurious table. All these employments were in themselves innocent and good, and to Isa would have afforded unmixed gratification, but for a feeling which would intrude itself on her mind, that she was where she liked to be rather than where she ought to be—that even her holiest pleasures were rather of her own taking than of God’s bestowing. Whenever Gaspar or Wildwaste were mentioned, a slightly uncomfortable sensation was experienced by Isa. Well she knew that her presence was more needed in the dreary Lodge than in the stately Castle; more by the peevish invalid than by the happy young girl; a brother, an only brother, had a stronger claim on her care than a cousin. Isa suspected, though she cared not to search for confirmation of the suspicion, that Self-indulgence was another Midianite in possession of her soul.
So passed the time till Tuesday brought the little meeting in the cottage of Holdich, which the cousins attended. The first face which Isa caught sight of on entering the crowded room was that of her maid, Lottie Stone, beaming with an expression of honest pleasure at seeing her mistress again. Isa and Edith were a little late in joining the meeting, the former had therefore no opportunity of speaking to Lottie till the lecture and prayers were over.
