Hunter's Marjory / A Story for Girls

by Margaret Bruce Clarke

Mr. Davidson smiled as he put down Captain Shaw's letter. He had received both the communications within a mail of each other, and one supplied information that the other lacked. He had turned the matter over in his mind this way and that, and he now felt very little doubt that this Marjory Davidson was indeed his child. And yet why should the fact that he had a child have been kept from him all these years? What reason could his brother-in-law have had for withholding the knowledge from him? It was all a mystery. He looked back over the lonely years since his wife's death, remembering how in the bitterness of his grief he had thrown himself heart and soul into his work, and had laid the foundations of a fortune. He thought of the time when the rush of gold-seekers to the Klondike had first started, and he had left the company he then represented to start on his own account in the shipping and transportation business, seeing at once that here was a certain road to success. And so it had proved, for to-day his was the best-known and most highly-respected name in all that broad region. But there had been times such as that to which Mr. Hilary Forester had alluded in his letter—when money, success, popularity, all seemed as nothing compared with a wife, a home, a child to love him. He envied the poorest labourer with these blessings. He now felt like a man in a dream. Fifteen years! He saw in fancy the little child he would have loved to take upon his knee; the growing girl learning her first lessons. How he would have cared for her and watched over her, trying to be both father and mother to the motherless child! Now she was growing quickly to womanhood, and he knew nothing of her, nor she of him. A great wave of indignation against his brother-in-law swept over him; it was a downright crime to have kept him in ignorance all these years, and the man should be brought to book. All the old bitterness against his wife's unreasonable brother took hold of him, and Captain Shaw's suggestion as to the forgetting of bygones seemed for a time little likely to be acted upon. But this mood passed, and then a great tenderness towards this unknown daughter of his welled up in his heart, and he made up his mind. He would go as soon as he could, and find out the truth.

Other influences were at work to bring about this meeting of father and child. Dr. Hunter, yielding at last to the voice of conscience, had written to Hugh Davidson, but he had sent the letter to the care of the company to which he had belonged in the old days. This company had since gone out of existence, and the letter had come back, as Mary Ann had told Marjory, and nothing more was done for a time.

Mrs. Forester, ever since the beginning of their acquaintance, had made periodical attacks upon the doctor, declaring that it was his duty to take steps to bring back Marjory's father. It must be remembered that Mrs. Forester knew nothing of the part Dr. Hunter had played, and blamed the cold-heartedness of a man who could leave his child unclaimed for fifteen years.

While Marjory was ill, Mrs. Forester renewed the attack with many arguments. At last one day, in a moment of expansion, the doctor confessed what he had done. In the face of Mrs. Forester's amazed displeasure, his reasons for his conduct seemed absurdly inadequate. She told him in no measured terms exactly what she thought of him, and indignantly reproached him for the course which he had taken. She quite pooh-poohed the suggestion that Hugh Davidson might be dead, as the letter had come back.

"I know he isn't dead," she protested. "I feel it as strongly as if he were standing before me at this moment. That child's father is alive, Dr. Hunter, and you have got to find him!"

The doctor made a mental reflection as to the "queerness" of women, with their intuitions and unfounded assertions, without reason or logic to guide them, but before he and Mrs. Forester parted that day he had promised to take steps at once. In the end he decided to go to America and meet face to face the man he had wronged, and ask his forgiveness. It was the least he could do. One stipulation he made: Marjory must not know the real object of his journey, in case nothing came of it.

The first step was to find out where Hugh Davidson was likely to be found, if alive. Dr. Hunter felt as though he were beginning to search for the proverbial needle in a haystack; but by Mrs. Forester's advice he entrusted the matter to his lawyers, and in an incredibly short space of time he heard from them that the man he wanted was now the manager of the A1 Shipping and Transportation Company at Skaguay, Alaska, the largest organization of its kind in that part of the world.

So the doctor made up his mind to go in search of his brother-in-law. His friends the Foresters (he told no one else of his real intentions) tried to dissuade him, representing to him the length of the journey and its fatigues, the heat at that time of the year, and any and every reason they could think of to alter his purpose. But the doctor did nothing by halves, and having once realized the great wrong he had done, he would not spare himself anything till he had tried to make reparation, and it seemed that a personal meeting could do more in that direction than any number of letters.

"Besides," he said, "it'll do me good. I begin to think that I've kept myself and Marjory shut up too long. I shall never be anything but an old fogey, but a little change and knocking about may make me a more agreeable one."

The scientific meetings at New York served as a plausible excuse for his going, and the Foresters kept his secret.