Ralph took the letter with more indifference than Mr. Drayton thought altogether proper toward the hand and seal of his fair influential mistress, and then, having opened it, he read as follows:
"I write to you in haste, dear friend, for since you left me I have heard much which requires to be spoken of between you and me immediately. Some mistakes have evidently been committed--where or how I can not stop to inquire; and it is needful, before you take any step whatever, that you should consult with some one, even though it be so humble a counselor as myself. There are more dangers surrounding you than you at all imagine, very different from those which alarmed me on the day that you left me, and which have now passed away from my mind. These can not be explained by letter; but you must now--I enjoin and require you, by courtesy and gallantry, which I know you possess, if you would but show them--to remain a close prisoner in my house till you see me without doing act or deed which can bring any one to know where you are concealed. I may add that there are warrants out against you for crimes less merciable than the simply fighting of a duel, and that you must not be found at present, till the doubts and fears which shake men's minds have passed away. Do not suppose that I will keep you long waiting, although I do not choose to commit the facts of which I am cognizant to the peril of a letter; but I am following you as rapidly as may be, bold in my independence, and, I trust, in my right purposes. Nevertheless, to escape the world's forked tongue, I have written to an amiable but antique cousin--married and widowed--to come over to Danvers's New Church. Should she arrive before myself, show her all courtesy and kindness, and believe me, if you will let me be so, your kind sister,
"Hortensia Danvers."
Ralph studied the letter with much attention; read and re-read every sentence several times, and ultimately resolved to abide by the counsel it contained, and to await the coming of his fair hostess ere he took any step whatever. It was evident--so he argued--that Lady Danvers was disabused of the idea that he had killed his cousin Henry in a duel; but what were the circumstances of peril to which she alluded, he could not divine.
Could it be, he asked himself, that the influence of Lord Woodhall, attributing to him his son's death, had been exerted with such effect as to have a factitious accusation of some other offense against the laws brought against him to secure vengeance? Such an idea would never occur to any Englishman in the present day, and the very mention of it would be laughed to scorn. But we must recollect that this was no vain and improbable fancy in the times of which we are speaking. Trumped-up charges, for the purpose of destroying a political adversary or a private enemy, had been for more than twenty years, and still were, as common as daisies; nor had such villainy yet reached its height; for the three succeeding years displayed an amount of villainous practices of this kind which probably never before, and certainly never after, stained the history of any Christian country. Courts of law, too, were notoriously corrupt; judges were bought, sold, and influenced. Scroggs and Jeffries had befouled the judgment-seat; attorneys general were at the beck and call of every political enmity or court intrigue; and corrupt sheriffs selected, packed, and instructed the juries of the day on the basest motives for the most infamous purposes. It was no chimera of the imagination, then, that Ralph Woodhall dreaded, but a real and substantial danger, which might affect any man who had incurred the enmity of power and influence.
There could be no great harm done, he thought, by delay; and he determined not to send the letters which he had written on the preceding evening till Lady Danvers had arrived.
On questioning the man who had brought her letters, he found that she might be expected in two days more; and, to follow her directions exactly, he took a strong resolution to confine himself to the house till after he was made more fully aware of the peril that menaced him.
But alas for human resolutions, and for the young man's above all! Ralph was uneasy and restless. The anxiety of his mind left him no repose. He tried to read, and the fine library of Danvers's New Church afforded ample opportunity; but he soon found that the delight in books was for the time gone. He thought of Margaret, and of his poor cousin Henry, and, with a feeling of sympathy and pity, of old Lord Woodhall himself. He knew well that the first effect of his son's violent death would be to produce rage and a thirst for vengeance, which might be turned against him by the slightest accident; but he knew also that this would subside, and that profound grief would take the place of anger, and very probably affect the old man's health, if not his intellect.
He paced up and down the room. He gazed forth from the window, full of thought. He tasted very little of the dinner set before him. He looked at his watch often to see how the dull day went. In fact, to use a vulgar but significant expression, "he could settle to nothing."
At length, as the sun began to go down, he felt that longing for the free, open air which is so hard to be resisted. He persuaded himself that there could be no harm in wandering out into the park. He would go no further, he thought; and, as he had seen no one throughout the whole livelong day but the servants coming to and fro, or a game-keeper, with a gun on his shoulder, crossing the wide expanse within the walls, his walk, he fancied, was likely to be solitary and uninterrupted. Resolution soon gave way under such reasoning, and out he went, wandering quietly along, and soon losing himself amid the scattered trees and undulations of the ground. It is very pleasant to lose one's self sometimes, to shake us free from every thing habitual, to lose sight of houses and men, and the busy scene of mortal coil, to comrade with nature, and see naught but nature's handiwork around; and Ralph certainly had ample opportunity of doing so; for, quitting the path, and taking his way across the green turf, he was soon out of sight of the house, and wandering on among the old fantastic hawthorns, with the fern waving its plumes up to his knees, and here and there a chestnut or an oak spreading its green branches over his head. Every now and then a rabbit or a hare would dart away from his foot, and cunningly gallop through the tall, concealing fern, marking its course by a long wavy line. A herd of deer, here and there, would stand and gaze at him as he passed, keeping him at a fearful distance, or trot away with increasing speed if he came suddenly near. A solitary doe, too, started up as he approached her lair among the longest leaves, and scampered off in a different direction from the herd; and Ralph would moralize upon her somewhat in the vein of Jacques, asking himself what she had done to be thus shut out from fellowship with her kind--what offense she had committed against the laws and proprieties of the deer.