LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 362, 10 August 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE ATHELSTONS OF MORTE d’ ATHELSTON.

(From ijic Dublin University Magazine.)

( Continued.)

Lord Athelston bowed his head and cried aloud for the young man who, from his orphan boyhood, had been to him even as a son. While old Mrs Binny, the housekeeper, remarked, ‘ How beautiful it was to see her ladyship so calm and resigned, hiding her own grief to try and be a comfort to her father.’

The next morning’s post brought a few lines from the valet in Loudon :

*My Lord,’ he wrote, ‘ I deeply grieve at not being able to give you any intelligence of my master, Captain Athelston. The whole affair seems veiled in mystery, and I greatly fear will remain so, at all events for the present. I. however, will remain in London, and will write to your Lordship again if I should have any satisfactory information to communicate. I have written to Mr Sprot, asking him to forward me whatever things I have left at Morte d’Athelston. * I have the honor to remain your Lordship’s most obedient servant, ‘T. Broughton.’

It was a curious letter Lord Athelston thought, though he could hardly tell why he thought so. He showed it to Mr Sprot, the butler (who shook his head wisely over it, but said nothing), and desired him to write to Broughton and tell him all that had occurred since his departure, and the fear, which had now almost become a certainty, that Captain Athelston had fallen from the old ruins, and perished in the waves beneath; his body, however, had not as yet been found, but that was not in the least unaccountable, as he must have fallen about the return of the tide, and had, most probably, been carried out to sea. Chapter IV. Gradually the search for the lost heir had died away; no busy looking men were any longer to be seen rooting and dragging the half-dried moat, or watching anxiously the ebb and flow of the tide. Life had subsided back into its old routine, excitement and wonder had died away, and the world, as included in Morte d’Athelston and its neighbourhood, had become accustomed to the idea, and no longer discussed the mystery of Captain Athelston’s disappearance.

So it ever is, and ever will be, till time is swallowed up in eternity. Some terrible misfortune comes swooping down upon a happy home, bringing, so it seems at first, life-long desolation and inconsolable woe ; but, though the grave is dug to-day for all we love in life, we must eat and drink and live, and to-morrow the closed windows are opened, and the blinds drawn up to admit the joyous light of day, and we go about our accustomed occupations, and again interest ourselves in local affairs, read the daily papers with their register of deaths, carelessly, unconcernedly, little recking that such simple announcements may be the record of a great desolation coming down ruthlessly on a once happy home, leaving no consolation, till time comes creeping slowly on with healing on its wings. As it is with the world so it was at Morte d’Athelston. The Lady Rowena’s vivid silks were changed for robes of heavy black, and the baby beauty of her face seemed gone, and a harder, sterner look to have taken its place. But there was little other apparent change in her ; and for the old lord, her father, he was more bent and broken than of yore, and the furrows had deepened upon his brow ; but even then he could talk of other things now, taking an interest in his farms and gardens, and even discoursing with the head keeper about the game on the estate, ‘ Not that I shall ever fire another shot,’ he said, with a mournful shake of his head, ‘ or perhaps even live to hear a shot in the old woods again. God only knows, His will be done.’

The old man rarely spoke of Modred now; but regularly, in the dusk of every evening, Lady Rowena watched him as, with his hands clasped behind his back, and his figure bent and stooping, he turned his steps down the straight gravel walk, and passed through the little white gate that led to the ruined Castle by the sea. At first this habit of her father’s filled the lady with a vague dread. She pictured his return with hurried footsteps, and the trampling of men bearing a dead burden, whose face, in tender pity for her, they would never let her see ; but as time wore on, she conquered her nervous terror, and smiled at what she considered mere woman’s weakness.

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon of a bright frosty clay, when Lady Eowena quitted the window from whence she had been watching Lord Athelston turn into his usual path ; she saw him pass the little white gate towards the spot where she had never once been since that fatal day, and a faint shudder passed over her slight frame, she could not tell why ; but she felt anxious and uneasy, restless in mind and body; she wrapped a shawl round her, and went up to what was called the Picture Gallery—-a long kind of corridor at the far end of the house, looking altogether away from the ruined Castle and the sea, where lay the dread secret of her life.

Up and down, up and (down, she paced, sometimes stopping to think and reason with herself, then hurrying on again, as if she was bound to do the measured mile in a limited space of time. Husk deepened into dark-

ness in the gloomy gallery, and the moon shone in with a ghostly light, while the girl paced to and fro, unmindful of the painted images of her ancestors that frowned or smiled upon her from their heavy frames upon the wall. The white moon, shining wan and cold, whispered never a word of a dead man walking pale and ghastly, Hitting like a shadow among the grey ruins of the Castle over yonder by the sea. Dorcas, the under-housemaid, was having a clandestine meeting with Job Brushwood, woodranger, under cover of the gable end of one of the farm buildings. They were extremely close to each other, Job’s arm might almost have been said to be round the damsel’s waist, and he was looking into her face with an insinuating expression, _ which betokened him on the point of indulging in a more demonstrative proof of his affection, when the happy pair were suddenly startled, as Dorcas subsequently declared, ‘ out of her seven senses, till she did not know whether she was on ’er ’ead or ’er ’eels by the hap parition of a ghost. ’ To he continued.