I will not dwell on the desolation of orphanage. It cannot be described. My Maker only knows the bitterness of my grief for days, weeks, even months. But time gradually warms the cold clay over the grave of love; then the grass springs up, and the flowers bloom, and the waste places of life become beautiful with hope, and the wilderness blossoms like the rose.
But oh, my mother! my gentle, longsuffering mother! thou hast never been forgotten. By day and by night, in sunshine and shadow, in joy and in sorrow, thou art with me, a holy spirit, a hallowed memory, a chastening influence, that passeth not away.
CHAPTER XI.
What a change, from the little gray cottage in the woods to the pillared walls of Grandison Place.
This ancestral looking mansion was situated on the brow of a long, winding hill, which commanded a view of the loveliest valley in the world. A bold, sweeping outline of distant hills, here and there swelling into mountains, and crowned with a deeper, mistier blue, divided the rich green of the earth from the azure of the heavens. Far as the eye could reach, it beheld the wildest luxuriance of nature refined and subdued by the hand of cultivation and taste. Man had reverenced the grandeur of the Creator, and made the ploughshare turn aside from the noble shade-tree, and left the streams rejoicing in their margins of verdure; and far off, far away beneath the shadow of the misty blue hills,—of a paler, more leaden hue,—the waters of the great sea seemed ready to roll down on the vale, that lay smiling before it.
Built of native granite, with high massive walls and low turreted roof, Grandison Place rose above the surrounding buildings in castellated majesty. It stood in the centre of a spacious lawn, zoned by a girdle of oaks, beneath whose dense shade the dew sparkled even at noonday. Within this zone was a hedge of cedar, so smooth, with twigs so thickly interwoven, that the gossamer thought it a framework, on which to stretch its transparent web in the morning sun. Near the house the lawn was margined with beds of the rarest and most beautiful flowers, queen roses, and all the fragrant populace of the floral world. But the grandest and most beautiful feature of all was a magnificent elm-tree, standing right in the centre of the green inclosure, toweling upward, sweeping downward, spreading on either side its lordly branches, "from storms a shelter and from heat a shade."
I never saw so noble a tree. I loved it,—I reverenced it. I associated with it the idea of strength and protection. Had I seen the woodman's axe touch its bark, I should have felt as if blood would stream from its venerable trunk. A circular bench with a back formed of boughs woven in checker-work surrounded it, and at twilight the soft sofas in the drawing-room were left vacant for this rustic seat.
Edith loved it, and when she sat there with her crutches leaning against the rough back, whose gray tint subdued the bright lustre of her golden hair, I would throw myself on the grass at her feet and gaze upon her, as the embodiment of human loveliness.
One would suppose that I felt awkward and strange in the midst of such unaccustomed magnificence; but it was not so. It seemed natural and right for me to be there. I trod the soft, rich, velvety carpeting with a step as unembarrassed as when I traversed the grassy lawn. I was as much at home among the splendors of art as the beauties of nature,—both seemed my birthright.