Edmund had begged Grace Seymour to consent to be married before they left England; but the girl had some unaccountable longing for her own land, which, though he smiled at as childish, he nevertheless was too chivalrous to combat. He was to follow speedily, with George Charteris as groomsman, and an older friend, a priest bound for some of the Indian missions.
So the ocean was crossed once more, and in her own home, the beautiful marriage-gift she brought her husband, Grace Seymour was married. Mr. Ashmead, whom, with characteristic courtesy, she would not exclude from her quiet, unattended wedding, told her solemnly, as he walked by her side to her mother's grave under the thick-shaded elms, that he had had a secret once, which he wished to tell her now.
In grave wonderment she turned her eyes upon him. "My child," he said sadly, but with no shame flushing his clear cheek, "I once dreamt to have you for my own, and I waited from the moment I saw you first, standing here, bending down to look into the unfilled grave, till I saw your mind unfolding and blossoming, as in a cloistered garden, all alone; but when I knew that your faith was disturbed, my heart bled for you and for myself, for I saw that I had no spell wherewith to give you back what you had lost. And since the day your father left us, the dream faded as a thing that God had ordained not to be. So now, though our faiths are widely different, and though the memory of those times is very dear to me still, I can take your hand in all a father's freedom, and give you and your husband a father's blessing. Let us be friends for ever, Grace, will you?"
She had listened to him with a bright blush and attentive expression; she now took his hand, and said earnestly: "Yes, Mr. Ashmead; God bless you!"
The years sped on. Edmund Oakhurst soon owned estates that would have thrice bought the old homestead of his wife's early days; his fields were the fullest, his experiments the most successful, his men the best cared for, his profits the largest, his prosperity the most steady, in the whole country around. People left off calling him the "Britisher," and spoke respectfully of him as the "Squire"; even his religion was favorably regarded in consideration of his position and his well-known generosity. Children like himself rose up around him, and the convict's child seemed only like the elder brother of the rest. Things gradually changed, and Catholic schools and colleges made their appearance in the land. Oakhurst thought it more prudent to send his sons and his so-called nephew to American centres of Catholic education, rather than to the more advanced universities of France; but he reserved for home-teaching the nameless refinement he wished to stamp on his children. His wife was the worthy successor of her mother, whose sweet presence had once been so dear to the villagers of Walcot; only her silent influence was now directed to that end which, after death, had become that of her mother too.
When, fifteen years later, the man who had left England a convict landed in America an emigrant, he found his oldest boy studying for the priesthood, and fast and enthusiastically outstripping his companion and rival in theological learning, Oakhurst's own second son. Again another change and another joy had been added to Grace's life, when her brother, on attaining his majority, came over with his uncle, George Charteris, now a tolerably well-behaved married man, and paid her a long visit within the walls of the old home, untouched and unchanged from what he recollected, save by accumulation of mosses, and a denser growth of creepers round the gables and the porch.
They have all gone to their rest now, these friends with whom we have been treading the past—all, save the sons of Grace and Edmund, and their only daughter, who afterwards married George Howard's son and heir. The old name that had been alternately the watchword of Catholicism and Low-Churchism in Gloucestershire veered round again in their persons to its first allegiance, and contributed unwavering steadfastness to the sum of heroic courage shown forth by that army whose chiefs in England are called Newman, and Manning, and that modern S. Bernardine of Sienna, Frederick Faber.
Walcot, too, though of Puritan breeding, knows the sound of Catholic bells now, and the priest's house is the unchanged old Seymour cottage, while the pastor himself is the English convict's child.
Edmund Seymour's sacrifice had sown the first grain of which Grace Oakhurst's children reaped a hundred-fold.