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Ebook has 2308 lines and 129723 words, and 47 pages

From the earliest period of which I can remember, I had fixed upon pursuing the career of a soldier. Notwithstanding the grim specimens I had seen of it, during my father's service in the States, I deemed it a life of glitter, change, and jollity--a chain of pleasures--a long and romantic panorama. I saw only scarlet and feathers, gold lace, the glitter of epaulettes and the flash of steel, with music and sunshine; and from amid this chaos came forth those airy castles and brilliant visions, which the mind of every imaginative and impulsive boy can fashion so readily--and too readily at times for his own peace; as such fragile creations are but ill calculated to stand the rough shock of awakening, or the stern realities of every-day life.

So it was with me. My new occupation, with its intolerable monotony, seemed a death-blow to all my hopes and romantic fancies; while the manner and bearing of Messrs. Harpy, Quirky, and Macfarisee, were in no way calculated to reconcile me to my lot, or to enhance the value of the dog's pittance they doled out me, and a few other drudges of the quill. If, after a trial, I liked the law, I was to be indentured for five years, and to commence my legal studies at the college--to dive deep into "Stair's Institutes," "Dirlton's Doubts," and other light literature of a similar kind: money was to be raised to enable me pass muster; but my growing repugnance to a civil life caused many delays in making the final arrangements.

It was my misfortune to have to do with three of the worst specimens of those legal and religious charlatans who bring discredit on a profession which, for three hundred years, has shed a brilliance over Scottish literature and Scottish society. If any such, now living, recognize themselves in my delineation, the resemblance is entirely fortuitous, and they had better not boast of it.

They had, I have said, a vast amount of "sharp practice," and law proved a dear commodity to those who dealt with them.

The first partner was a wealthy idler, who gave himself insufferable airs, and affected to be "a man about town;" but then he brought business to the firm, and gave it an air of respectability; the second was a legal bully, miserly and underbred, longheaded and narrow-hearted; for Mr. Quirky had been educated in one of the many charitable institutions with which the city abounds, and had come forth into the world a master in the science of subtlety, and without an emotion of sympathy for anything human or divine.

Macfarisee was one of the most amusing of rogues. With the vanity of the first and the subtlety of the second, he covered his many failings by a bland aspect of meek sanctity, and that entire garb of accurate blackcloth which, with a long visage and a white necktie, go far to impose upon the simple in Scotland.

He was an elder, and reputed an upright pillar of the Church, and on each successive Sunday might be seen, with hands meekly folded, standing behind the brass platter wherein the offerings of the charitable were dropped. He never hid his holy candle under a bushel, but subscribed only to charities which published lists of the donors; he outwardly and vehemently eschewed strong waters, laughter, gaiety, the world, the flesh, and the devil; and yet, withal, had privately the reputation of being on the best possible terms with the latter.

Hard work, however distasteful to a hero in embryo, I could have endured with patience; but the bearing of the three parvenus whom I served, and who were cold, thankless, consequential as bashaws, and rude at times even to the verge of brutality, soured my temper and maddened my fiery spirit.

On the summit of that legal tripod, the three-legged stool already referred to, I passed the greater portion of the year 1791.

There are times now when I think I viewed the poor ephemerae, whose drudge I deemed myself, through a false medium; as I considered all who stood between me and the army as the natural enemies of mankind; and, doubtless too often, when I should have been drawing a deed or engrossing an account, I was drawing a phantom sword, engrossed in the pages of a novel, or following the merry drums, the glittering accoutrements, and flaunting cockades of a recruiting party. In short, I believe the reader will already perceive that it was not in human power to make a lawyer out of such quicksilver material as Master Oliver Ellis.

It was towards the close of the year already named, that a change came over the monotonous tenor of my way; and, like many other heroes who have flourished since the days of Mark Antony, I must needs fall in love. The way in which this event--so important in such a narrative as mine--came about was as follows.

The month was October, and the woods wore the sombre hues of autumn. The wild rose still bloomed in the wayside hedges; the house-martin, the redwing, and the swallow, were still twittering about in search of the red berries, the haw, the hip, the sloe, and the elder, which now furnished a feast for them all. We whirled on amid copsewood and long lines of trees, that bordered or sheltered the bare fields, and exhibited on their dropping leaves all shades of russet, yellow, amber, dark-green, and red. The time was evening, and the dewy gossamer spread its silver web, laden with dew, from tree to tree; and as those persons whom I accompanied never deigned to address me, but conversed together in whispers, I had nothing to draw my attention from the objects visible on each side of the way, through the hackney-coach glasses, after the dusk enabled me to lay aside a canting tract, which Macfarisee had solemnly put into my hand when we started, and which, in politeness rather than hypocrisy, I had been pretending to peruse for some time.

At last we turned into an avenue of fine sycamores, through the waving branches of which the moonlight fell in flaky gleams, and under which were two lines of the flowering arbutus and monthly rose in full bloom. The hoofs and wheels scattered wide the rustling autumn leaves that lay thick in the old avenue, and we speedily drew up on the gravel that lay before the portico of a handsome mansion.

APPLEWOOD.

As the carriage drew up, the front door of the house was opened by a servant in livery, and in the lighted hall beyond there appeared a young girl, who, by her stature, by her figure--which was light and graceful--and by the unconfined masses of her flowing dark-brown hair, could not have been more than seventeen--the age of all heroines in the good old-fashioned times.

Messrs. Quirky and Macfarisee sprang out and ascended the steps.

"I am so glad you have come at last," said the young lady, in a tremulous voice of welcome. "My aunt has longed for you both so much, but more especially for you, Mr. Macfarisee; she says that your prayers and pious conversation achieve for her a greater ease of mind and body than the ministrations of any clergyman or physician."

"My dear Miss Amy, I fear you flatter my partner," snarled Mr. Quirky; "but we hastened from town the moment we received your letter, stating that she wished to settle her worldly affairs."

"And how does the Lord deal with her?" asked Macfarisee, in his most bland and dulcet manner.

"Severely, sir," replied the young girl whom he named Amy, with her eyes full of tears; "you know she is always believing herself to be dying, but she has been in great suffering for three nights, and for these three nights and as many days I have never left her bedside."

I now perceived that the girl's dark-blue eyes were dimmed and bloodshot with tears and watching.

"Miss Amy," said Macfarisee, in the slow and impressive tone, which he used to all but his clerks, to whom he spoke sharply enough, "I feel happy--a holy happiness--that illness has enlightened her mind, and that at last she has resolved to take my advice."

"I have so frequently recommended her to--to settle her worldly affairs; but she weakly shunned all that reminded her of mortality, ever replying that sufficient for the day was the evil thereof; but, alas! my dear child," he continued, in a sing-song voice, "lo you now, death cometh like a thief in the night; but I trust he finds the Lord's faithful servant duly prepared for the great change that is at hand."

"Bravo, old six-and-eightpence!" thought I, as Quirky, whom his partner's prosing wearied at times, snatched the green bag from me impatiently, saying,--

"Here you, sir,--give me the documents. Miss Amy, your aunt's state of health has long been precarious; but what says the doctor of her?"

"What?"

"She cannot last long now; and she has been in misery, waiting for you."

"The deuce! then we have no time to lose," said Macfarisee, with one of his keen office glances at Quirky, through a pair of eyes which were always "half-closed, like those of a night-bird in the daytime."

"Oh, he is only one of our young men, and may remain here quite well."

In this sudden trip to the country there was something mysterious; and as I gazed through the window upon the dark branches of the trees, tossing on the night-wind, and pictured to myself the old woman dying up stairs, strange and gloomy thoughts came over me; but on a footman entering with candles, I asked him the name of the house.

"Applewood," said he.

"The house of Mrs. Rose?"

"Yes."

Then a sudden light broke in upon me. I remembered that we had a wealthy client--an old widowed lady--whose failing health, credulity, and ample funds, had long rendered her a source of the deepest solicitude to Messrs. Quirky and Macfarisee, whose passive victim she had to every purpose and intent become; for she believed devoutly in the worth, piety, and good works of our third partner. In his double capacity of elder of his kirk and legal adviser, Macfarisee had long been one of those who hovered by the bedside of the dying, as vultures hover round a piece of carrion, and this wealthy old lady, Mrs. Rose, of Applewood, had long been marked by him as fair game to be run down at last.

It was by a studied system of cant, and by an external aspect of piety in its most fervid form, that Nathaniel Macfarisee usually recommended himself to those whom he deluded, and the number of legacies left to him by departed friends was really somewhat surprising, though many of them were averred to be for purposes of religion and philanthropy; and when conversing with a bewildered client, whom

He darkened by elucidation, And mystified by explanation.

it was amusing to hear him interlarding all his remarks with phrases and texts from scripture.

Amy Lee, the only living relation possessed by the old proprietress of Applewood, was the orphan daughter of a younger sister whom she never loved, for having married a young officer whose attentions had been long and provokingly divided between them. Amy had been sent from India to her care and kindness, penniless and otherwise friendless, for her father and mother, with many friends and relations, had perished in the dungeons of Tippo Saib.

The grudge which the old lady bore her sister in youth, for depriving her of a first love, had taken some strange and fantastic form of aversion in maturer years; and thus, though the poor and lonely Amy attended her sick bed, noting anxiously and sedulously all her querulous fancies, seeking to soothe her gusts of petulance, with the filial tenderness of a daughter and the patience of a little saint, she never could win the regard of, and barely earned a smile from, this strange old woman, whose days and ailments were now drawing to a close. Yet, the orphan girl loved this kinswoman who loved not her, for she had traced something of her dead mother's features in her face--a mother for whom she still sorrowed,--and she found the best solace for that grief was to discharge the duties of affection, which fate had transferred from one sister to the other.

Mrs. Rose was the sole residuary legatee of her late husband, an old nabob, who had returned from India with a visage the colour of the gold he had acquired, and a heart that had narrowed and shrunk as his liver increased; thus, her fortune was ample, and, as she was without children, she had long given her whole thoughts and attention to the welfare and success of the Rev. Mr. Pawkie's dissenting meeting-house, of which Macfarisee was an elder, and the porch of which edifice she had become fully assured was the only avenue to Heaven; thus, the three had long gone hand-in-hand, in holding conventicles and meetings for the out-pouring of the spirit, amid tea, toast, and cold water--for humiliation, prayer, and the regeneration of all those wicked and benighted heathens, who did not occupy pews in the square-windowed, low-roofed, and barnlike edifice in which the Rev. Jedediah Pawkie expounded the pure gospel, inspired by the light that shone from the new Jerusalem, and consigned to very hot quarters indeed all who took their own way to Heaven instead of his.

Of this fustian spirit of religion and fanaticism, when combined with an aversion for the only living tie that existed between her and the world, the worthy Macfarisee--that inflexible Mede and upright pillar of the Kirk--hastened to take his usual advantage; and in the sequel he proved himself to be a greater wolf in sheep's clothing than I could ever have imagined.

THE WILL.

While seated in the parlour, into which I had been ushered, time passed slowly; and the melancholy voice of Macfarisee, singing a psalm, came drearily and hollowly through the large corridors of the house, from the sick-room up stairs. He was giving ghostly comfort, together with his legal advice, to the departing sinner, whom I had been assured was now hovering between time and eternity, and who, at most, had not many days to live. Knowing his character, as I did, there seemed a horrible mockery in the words of the psalm:--

As the quivering voice of Macfarisee emitted this verse, I could not repress a shudder of disgust and impatience, and tossed aside the religious tract he had given me; for thus it is that such professors bring a ridicule on piety itself.

I had turned over all the books in the room without finding one to interest me, as they all belonged to the literature of cant; but my eyes frequently reverted to the portrait of a young man in scarlet uniform, for it made me think of my father's regiment,--of honest men, and better things, and days long passed away. Then I thought of my mother and of dear little Lotty, and longed to be at home with them, for the night-wind sighed mournfully through the old sycamores of Applewood, and my heart grew sad, I know not why. Red sheet-lightning occasionally illuminated the far horizon, and cast forward in black outline the stems of the trees and their tossing branches. Then there would be heard the opening and shutting of doors; the sound of steps hurriedly upon the well-carpetted stairs. These made me fear that the old lady was really dead; and solemn thoughts came over me, as I gazed down the dark avenue from the window. Then I burned with impatience to be gone, but had to wait, cypher-like, the time and pleasure of others whom I heartily despised.

After the lapse of nearly two hours, Messieurs Quirky and Macfarisee entered the room. The cunning eyes of the latter were half-closed; his grizzled hair was brushed stiffly up above each ear, till it resembled two horns; and his chin was buried in his loose white necktie. The two legal pundits were so absorbed in conversation as scarcely to notice me.

"She won't last a week, now," said Quirky, in a low voice.

"You think so?"

"I am certain of it. One can never mistake that sad and dreary expression of the face."

"Alas!" said Macfarisee, in his quavering tones, while upturning the whites of his cunning eyes, "all flesh is grass; but, Heaven be praised, the blessed truths of our Christian faith have been poured into her ears by my unworthy tongue to-night; and not in vain,--let us hope--not in vain!"

"It is fortunate that this will," said Quirky, unfolding a slip of paper, "is dated so far back--fully sixty days ago; so she may die when she chooses, now."

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