“I think I must have been about ten years old when an event occurred that disturbed the even tenour of our placid life. One winter’s morning I had risen betimes, and it so chanced that I was the first to open the massive door that opened on to the street. The snow was falling in slow, heavy flakes. It was scarcely light. There were no passers-by. The street was deserted, and covered deep by snow. I was peering through the gloom, looking for I know not what, when I was startled by a feeble wail that seemed to come from my very feet. I became aware of a small bundle, nigh buried in the cold coverlet of snow, that rested on the top most step of the broad flight that led from the street to the door. I stooped and picked up the bundle, and brushed off the snow, and carried it hastily into the kitchen, where the maid was lighting the fire. Between us we undid the wraps, and within we found a tiny infant, but a few months old. A scrap of paper was pinned to the poor, thin dress in which the babe was clad, and on it was scrawled in a rude hand: ‘Her name is Esmeralda.’ My mother was hastily summoned from her room. I was banished the kitchen, and when I was suffered to return beheld the child washed and kempt and clad in soft, warm flannels, and slumbering peacefully before a roaring fire on my mother’s lap.
“Now, whether it was that my mother’s heart yearned for a girl child, or that the forlornness and helplessness of the babe appealed to her, or that my own delight in the foundling—whom I made no delay in claiming as my own treasure-trove—influenced her, I know not, but to all the counsels of her friends to send the infant to the workhouse she turned a deaf ear. I cannot, for time presses, and my strength ebbs fast away, tell how the infant grew in years, in strength, and grace; how we were brought up together, as though she were indeed my little sister. Now when I was nineteen years of age, and she a beautiful dark-eyed maiden some nine years younger, I was sent to the University of Oxford to pursue my studies and qualify for the ministry, to which my mother had destined me from my cradle. My vacations were spent mostly in foreign travel, making the Grand Tour, as it used to be called in my young days. And so it chanced that I saw little of Esmeralda, until, education being considered complete, my degree taken, and I admitted to deacon’s orders, I returned in my twenty-seventh year to my mother’s house to await my first curacy. And I found the little maid I had nursed in my arms and dandled on my knees a beautiful, bewitching woman, with a beauty rare it made men thrill to look upon. I suppose there must have been some strain of Eastern blood in her, for though but seventeen she looked older; her form was fuller, more rounded than those of the maidens of our colder clime, and there was a seductiveness and a passionate warmth about her whole being that allured me probably all the more that both by temperament and from my training my passions were not lightly kindled.
“I should have told you that some faint-hearted efforts had been made by my mother to ascertain the mystery of Esmeralda’s parentage. Advertisements had been inserted in the papers and the police had been communicated with shortly after Esmeralda was received into our household—more from a sense of duty on my mother’s part than from any desire she felt to part with the child. But these efforts, if efforts they could be called, bore no fruit. But I have reason to believe that when Esmeralda was in her early teens she received secret communications that revealed to her the mystery of her birth, and that she had established secret relations with the author of her being, who, I strongly suspect, preyed upon the slender allowance of pin-money my mother gave to Esmeralda.
“But I must be brief. You will have guessed already that Esmeralda and I, thus brought together again when both were in the full flush of youth, and when nature clamours for love and love’s fulfilling, loved, and loved none the less ardently that we must conceal our passion. Though my mother for me ever a tender and thoughtful parent, her indulgence I knew to have its limits. She was proud of her kith and kin—the middle classes have their family pride, Abel, not less than and perhaps with as good a reason as the upper. Moreover she had long laid her plans for my alliance. I was to mate with the daughter of an old friend of my father’s, a manufacturer like himself, a girl fair enough to look upon and well dowered to boot, and whom ’tis like enough I should have learned to love had not my heart been engrossed by Esmeralda’s image. I knew that to thwart my mother in her long-cherished design would be to court my ruin, for gentle though she was she could ill bear crossing.
“Have I told you that the man who had been my tutor as a boy and youth, who had accompanied me on my foreign travels, had remained all these years an inmate of my mother’s house, partly to guide the studies of the maid, Esmeralda, whom my mother intended for a companion, and perchance a nurse, and partly as my mother’s secretary and business manager—for my mother’s estate, so frugally did she live, and so jealously did she guard her store, had grown to no mean dimensions? This man, this viper I should rather call him, had wormed himself into my confidence. I regarded him as a friend. It was not so much that I confided to him my love for Esmeralda as that he divined it—the wonder is that my mother had not herself divined it. When I spoke to him of my fixed resolve to make Esmeralda my wife he professed the utmost alarm if my mother should become aware of my infatuation, as he termed it. He affected to dissuade me from my purpose, and when he found that I laughed his warnings to the wind he counselled me to a secret marriage—anything rather than tell my mother, though I am persuaded that had I but been frank and firm my mother’s love would in the end have proved stronger than her pride and she would have blessed our union. But, I yielded to the insidious advice of the tempter the more readily, doubtless, that I saw therein the means of gratifying my love and avoiding a rupture with a parent who, by a stroke of the pen, could leave me penniless save for the meagre pittance of a curate.
“Let me hasten to the end. My tutor secured a charming cottage in the neighbourhood of Grasmere. My mother had gone to Matlock for a three months’ cure. Esmeralda and I journeyed by coach to Gretna Green, and there were made man and wife. Look in that box, and you will find a copy of the certificate of our marriage.”
I found the document—I found other things as well that made me catch my breath, but of these anon. It was a certificate of what used to be called a “red-hot wedding,” welded on the anvil for an altar. It ran:
“KINGDOM OF SCOTLAND.
“PARISH OF GRETNA.
“THESE ARE TO CERTIFY TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN that James Garside, of the City of Manchester, in the County of Lancaster, Clerk in Holy Orders, and Esmeralda Atkinson, of the same city, Spinster, being now both here present, and having declared to me that they are single persons, have now been married after the manner of the laws of Scotland. As witness our hands at Gretna the 13th day of April, 1812.