In a small room in this château, very quietly furnished, sat a group of people, with some of whom the reader is already acquainted, enjoying a pleasant dessert of wild strawberries and light Burgundy wine. Perfect contentment was upon all their countenances, and harmony in all their hearts. One young man, indeed, was pale and grave, though serene in aspect.
But I must begin with those of whom the reader as yet knows little. They consisted of two elderly people and one young lady. The first was a fine dignified man, somewhat beyond the middle age, with hair very grey but with eyes still bright and keen. The second was a lady younger, but not by many years; and, though they were both advanced in life, as I have said, they continued to call each other by the names of early affection.
Passing from one part of the chain of life to another very distant, we must notice that bright-looking curly-headed boy, little more than two years old, seated on the knee of that very beautiful girl whom he calls "mother," in the good old Saxon tongue. It is Emmeline's boy, and I need not say who is that gentleman by her side. An old lady close by, now a little bowed with age, is the Dowager Countess of Eskdale.
But who are the two whom I have mentioned as rather beyond middle life? Emmeline calls them "father, mother;" and looks at them with love none the less because she was so long bereaved of their fostering care. The pale young man in a military dress, with signs of mourning, too, in his apparel, is Richard Newark, and that fat, round, rosy-pippin personage--Heaven! what a crowd of leaden figures rush upon the imagination as one looks at him!
"It is strange, Dick," said Lord Eskdale, "that you and good Van Noost should have arrived here this morning after we have not met for so long a time! Do you know, Emmeline," he continued, turning to his wife, "that this is the anniversary of the day on which I first set eyes on that dear face?"
"Do you think I can ever forget it, Henry?" she answered. "It is the first of my days of brightness. It is like a sweet song remembered in a happy dream."
"And how can I ever thank you, my dear Lord," continued her husband, addressing her father, "for giving me that commission to seek and regain for you your daughter, which has ended in bestowing such happiness on myself?"
"There are two things, my dear Harry, for which many sage friends have blamed me," replied Lord Newark, "which I can never regret, and of the wisdom of which even those who blamed me are now convinced; the one, my having trusted a young man, whom I knew to be the soul of real honour, with so delicate a task; the other, my having set at nought all ideas of imaginary dignity, and, as a merchant, having secured to my family that competence which I had lost by doing my duty as a soldier. I am proud of both these acts, and both have ended in happiness. Had my poor boys but lived to see this day, there would be little in the past even to bring one cloud of melancholy over my setting sun."
Richard Newark looked up in his face as he spoke, and asked--
"Would you never regret, my good Lord and cousin, having lost in the cause of a bad prince those fair lands in Devonshire, to which I am sure, if you feel like me, you must cling even in memory?"