Millbank;

by Mary Jane Holmes

There was a doubt in his mind as to whether she had ever been baptized, and thinking it better to be baptized twice than not at all, he determined to have the ceremony performed, and Mrs. Col. Johnson consented to stand as sponsor for the child, whom Hester carried to the church, performing well her part as nurse, and receiving back into her arms the little Magdalen Lennox, who had crowed, and laughed, and put her fat hand to her head, to wipe off the drops of water which fell upon her as she was “received into Christ’s flock and signed with His sign” upon her brow.

During the entire summer Roger remained at Millbank, where he made a few changes, both in the grounds and in the house, which began to wear a more modern look than during the old squire’s life. Some of the shrubbery was rooted up, and a few of the oldest trees cut down, so that the sunshine could find freer access to the rooms, which had rarely been used since Jessie went away, but which Roger opened to the warmth and sunlight of summer. On the wall, in the library, Jessie’s picture was hung. It had been retouched and brightened up in Springfield, and the beautiful face always seemed to smile a welcome on Roger whenever he came where it was. On the monument in the graveyard Jessie’s name was cut beneath her husband’s, and every Saturday Roger carried a bouquet of flowers from the Millbank garden, and laid it on the grassy mound, in memory, not so much of his father, as of the young mother whose grave was in the sea. Thither he sometimes brought little Magdalen, who could walk quite easily now, and it was not an uncommon sight, on pleasant summer days, to see the boy seated under the evergreens which overshadowed his father’s grave, while toddling among the gray head-stones of the dead, or playing in the gravel-walks, was Magdalen, with her blanket pinned about her neck, and her white sun-bonnet tied beneath her chin. Thus the summer passed, and in the autumn Roger went away to Andover, where he was to finish preparing for college, instead of returning to his old tutor in St. Louis. After his departure, the front rooms above and below were closed, and Magdalen, who took more kindly to the parlors than to the kitchen, was taught that such things were only for her when Master Roger was at home; and if, by chance, she stole through an open door into the forbidden rooms, she was brought back at once to her corner in the kitchen. Not roughly though, for Hester Floyd was always kind to the child,—first, for Roger’s sake, and then for the affection she herself began to feel for the little one, whose beauty, and bright, pretty ways everybody praised.

And now, while the doors and shutters of Millbank are closed, and only the rear portion of the building is open, we pass, without comment, over a period of eleven years, and open the story again, on a bright day in summer, when the sky was as blue and the air as bland as was the air and sky of Italy, where Roger Irving was travelling.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE STRANGER IN BELVIDERE.

During the eleven years since her disappointment, Mrs. Walter Scott had never once been to Millbank. She had seen the house several times from the car window as she was whirled by on her way to Boston, and she managed to keep a kind of oversight of all that was transpiring there, but she never crossed the threshold, and had said she never would. Frank, on the contrary, was a frequent visitor there. He bore no malice to its inmates on account of the missing will. Roger had been very generous with him, allowing him more than the four hundred a year, and assisting him out of many a “deuced scrape,” as Frank termed the debts he was constantly incurring, with no ostensible way of liquidating them except through his Uncle Roger. He called him uncle frequently for fun, and Roger always laughed good-humoredly upon his fair-haired nephew, whom he liked in spite of his many faults.

Frank was now at Yale; but he was no student, and would have left college the very first year but for Roger, who had more influence over him than any other living person. Frank believed in Roger, and listened to him as he would listen to no one else, and when at last, with his college diploma and his profession as a lawyer, won, Roger went for two or three years’ travel in the old world, Frank felt as if his anchorage was swept away and he was left to float wherever the tide and his own vacillating disposition might take him. The most of his vacations were spent at Millbank, where he hunted in the grand old woods, with Magdalen trudging obediently at his side in the capacity of game carrier, or fished in the creek or river, with Magdalen to carry the worms and put them on his hook. Frank was lazy,—terribly, fearfully lazy,—and whatever service another would render him, he was ready to receive. So Magdalen, whose hands and feet never seemed to tire, ministered willingly to the city-bred young man, who teased her about her dark face and pulled her wavy hair, and laughed at her clothes with the Hester stamp upon them, and called her a little Gypsy, petting her one moment, and then in a moody fit sending her away “to wait somewhere within call,” until he wanted her. And Magdalen, who never dreamed of rebelling from the slavery in which he held her when at Millbank, looked forward with eager delight to his coming, and cried when he went away.

Roger she held in the utmost veneration and esteem, regarding him as something more than mortal. She had never carried the game-bag for him, or put worms upon his hook, for he neither fished nor hunted; but she used to ride with him on horseback, biting her lips and winking hard to keep down her tears and conquer her fear of the spirited animal he bade her ride. She would have walked straight into the crater of Vesuvius if Roger had told her to, and at his command she tried to overcome her mortal terror of horses,—to sit and ride, and carry her reins and whip as he taught her, until at last she grew accustomed to the big black horse, and Roger’s commendations of her skill in managing it were a sufficient recompense for weary hours of riding through the lanes, and meadows, and woods of Millbank.

So, too, when Roger gave her a Latin grammar and bade her learn its pages, she set herself at once to the task, studying day and night, and growing feverish and thin, and nervous, until Hester interfered, and said “a child of ten was no more fit to study Latin than she was to build a ship, and Roger must let her alone till she was older if he did not want to kill her.”

Then Roger, who in his love for books had forgotten that children did not all possess his tastes or powers of endurance, put the grammar away and took Magdalen with him to New York to a scientific lecture, of which she did not understand a word, and during which she went fast asleep with her head on his shoulder, and her queer little straw bonnet dreadfully jammed and hanging down her back. Roger tied on her bonnet when the lecture was over, and tried to straighten the pinch in front, and never suspected that it was at all different from the other bonnets around him. The next night he took her to Niblo’s, where she nearly went crazy with delight; and for weeks after, her little room at Millbank was the scene of many a pantomime, as she tried to reproduce for Bessie’s benefit the wonderful things she had seen.