Frank was sorry. The happiest days of his life had been spent at Millbank. He liked the house, and the handsome grounds, with the grand old woods in the rear, and the river beyond, where in a little sheltered nook lay moored the boat he called his own. He liked the spotted pony which he always rode. He liked the freedom from restraint which he found in the country, and he liked the old man who was so kind to him, and who petted him sometimes when Roger was not by. Roger had been absent on the occasion of Frank’s last visit to Millbank, and his grandfather had taken more than usual notice of him,—had asked him many questions as to what he meant to be when he grew to manhood, and what he would do, supposing he should some day be worth a great deal of money. Would he keep it, or would he spend it as fast and as foolishly as his father had spent the portion allotted to him?
“You’d keep it, wouldn’t you, and put it at interest?” his mother had said, laying her hand upon his hair with a motion which she meant should convey some suggestion or idea to his mind.
But Frank had few ideas of his own. He never took hints or suggestions, and boy-like he answered:
“I’d buy a lot of horses, and Roger and me would set up a circus out in the park.”
It was an unlucky answer, for the love of fast horses had been the ruin of Frank’s father, but the mention of Roger went far toward softening the old man. Frank had thought of Roger at once; he would be generous with him, let what would happen, and the frown which the mention of horses had brought to the squire’s face cleared away as he said:
“Hang your horses, boy; keep clear of them as you would shun the small-pox, but be fair and just with Roger; poor Roger, I doubt if I did right.”
This speech had been followed by the squire’s going hastily out upon the terrace, where, with his hands behind him and his head bent forward, he had walked for more than an hour, while Mrs. Walter Scott peered anxiously at him from time to time, and seemed a good deal disturbed. They had returned to the city the next day, and Frank had noticed some changes in their style of living. Another servant was added to their establishment; they had more dishes at dinner, while his mother went oftener to the opera and Stewart’s. Now, his grandfather was dead, and she sat there looking at him across the table as the tears gathered in his eyes, and when he stammered out, “We shall never go to Millbank any more,” she said soothingly to him, “We may live there altogether. Would you like it?”
He did not comprehend her clearly, but the thought that his grandfather’s death did not necessarily mean banishment from Millbank helped to dry his eyes, and he began to whistle merrily at the prospect of going there at once, for they were to start that very day on the three-o’clock train. “It was better to be on the ground as soon as possible,” Mrs. Walter Scott reflected, and after a visit to her dressmaker, who promised that the deepest of mourning suits should follow her, she started with Frank for Millbank.
Mrs. Walter Scott Irving had never been a favorite at Millbank since her husband had taken her there as a bride, and she had given mortal offence to the two real heads of the household, Aleck and Hester Floyd, by putting on all sorts of airs, snubbing little Roger, and speaking of his mother as “that low creature, whose disgraceful conduct could never be excused.” Hester Floyd, to whom this was said, could have forgiven the airs; indeed, she rather looked upon them as belonging by right to one who was so fortunate as to marry into the Irving family. But when it came to slighting little Roger for his mother’s error, and to speaking of that mother as a “low creature,” Hester’s hot blood was roused, and there commenced at once a quiet, unspoken warfare, which had never ceased, between herself and the offending Mrs. Walter Scott. Hester was as much a part of Millbank as the stately old trees in the park, a few of which she had helped Aleck to plant when she was a girl of eighteen and he a boy of twenty. She had lived at Millbank more than thirty years. She had come there when the first Mrs. Irving was a bride. She had carried Walter Scott to be christened. She had been his nurse, and slapped him with her shoe a dozen times. She had been married to Aleck in her mistress’s dining-room. She had seen the old house torn down, and a much larger, handsomer one built in its place; and then, just after it was completed, she had followed her mistress to the grave, and shut up the many beautiful rooms which were no longer of any use. Two years passed, and then her master electrified her one day with the news that he was about bringing a second bride to Millbank, a girl younger than his son Walter, and against whom Hester set herself fiercely as against an usurper of her rights. But when the sweet, pale-faced Jessie Morton came, with her great, sad blue eyes, and her curls of golden hair, Hester’s resentment began to give way, for she could not harbor malice toward a creature so lovely, so gentle, and so sad withal: and after an interview in the bed-chamber, when poor Jessie threw herself with a passionate cry into Hester’s arms, and sobbed piteously, “Be kind to me, won’t you? Be my friend. I have none in all the world, or I should not be here. I did not want to come,”—she became her strongest ally, and proved that Jessie’s confidence had not been misplaced. There had come a dark, dark day for Millbank since then, and Jessie’s picture, painted in full dress, with pearls on her beautiful neck and arms, and in her golden hair, had been taken from the parlor-wall and banished to the garret; and Jessie’s name was never spoken by the master, either to his servants or his little boy Roger, who had a dash of gold in his brown hair, and a look in his dark-blue eyes, like that which Jessie’s used to wear, when, in the long evenings before his birth, she sat with folded hands gazing into the blazing fire, as if trying to solve the dark mystery of her life, and know why her lot had been cast there at Millbank with the old man, whom she did not hate, but whom she could not love. There was a night, too, which Hester never forgot,—a night when, with nervous agony depicted in every lineament, Jessie made her swear that, come what might, she would never desert or cease to love the boy Roger, sleeping so quietly in his little crib. She was to care for him as if he were her own; to consider his interest before that of any other, and bring him up a good and noble man. That was what Jessie asked, and what Hester swore to do; and then followed swiftly terror and darkness and disgrace, and close upon their footsteps came retribution, and Jessie’s golden head was lying far beneath the sea off Hatteras’s storm-beaten shore, and Jessie’s name was rarely heard. But Hester kept her vow, and since the dreadful morning when Jessie did not answer to the breakfast call, and Jessie’s room was vacant, Roger had never wanted for a mother’s care. Hester had no children of her own, and she took him instead, petting and caring for, and scolding him as he deserved, and through all, loving him with a brooding, clinging, unselfish love, which would stop at nothing which she could make herself believe was right for her to do in his behalf. And so, when the young bride looked coldly upon him and spoke slightingly of his mother, Hester declared battle at once; and the hatchet had never been buried, for Mrs. Walter Scott, in her frequent visits to Millbank, had only deepened Hester’s first impressions of her.
“A proud, stuck-up person, with no kind of reason for bein’ so except that she married one of the Irvingses,” was what Hester said of her, and this opinion was warmly seconded by Aleck, who always thought just as Hester did.