LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2647, 30 September 1882, Page 4

LITERATURE.

SCARFSIDE. (Fr m "London Society.") CIIAI’TEU I To dny, I, Grace Benion, am thirty years yea’s of ago, and 1 am a thankful woman. Whichever way I look. T aea a happy prospeat. A strong wall --r love abuts me in, so that the cold b'aats of what is, I know, a roTcafal world cannot chill my content. Siding by the fire, ide in the oak-panelled parlor at Scarfside, with my husband’s stalwart arm around me, and _my two children at my knee, I am, I say it again, a happy a thankful woman. But, that I may tho more enjoy these present things, and be moved to show in very deed the gratitude I feel, it is in my mind that I should write down some of the troubles I (and he too) nave seen ; for thing* were not always so, and with ns It was darkest before the dawn, Tho things I toll are even now ao recent that I grow sad and creepy as I set myself to recall them ; but gratitude is sometimes a sense of dangers that are past, as well as of favors to come, and it the things themselves were unable to crush us, the memory of them cannot do mo harm, bat, as I have said rather good. Good to me, and through me to others.

My earliest recollection is of a great open space surrounded by lofty buildings dimly seen through the darkness and fog; in the centre of it, a high column and wide pavements. Now I know that it was Trafalgar square. It was night, and the wind and rain swept roughly in our faoes as we crept along, my father and I j and the plash of the fountains seemed the echo of the rtorm’a cruel play. I think I was crying : the cold pierced my limbs, for my shabby clothes were almost in rags, though ho sheltered me ns well as could with the skirt of his coat. The pasiera hurried by, fall of their plans, thslr own pains and pleasures, and thought so little of the broken down man, with the child by his side, who moved slowly along the slippery pavement, in which the lamps were dimly reflected. I was hungry as well aa cold ; for I had boen sitting, shivering and waiting, since middle day. in a corner, as near as I dared to a chestnut seller’s fire’ while my father called again and again at a great bonse iu vho crowded street hard by. where, so I hoped, he had friends who would help us. I have bean taken thera sines, and I was able to point out the very home on whose steps my father spent most of his last hours. They told mo that it was a famous club, to which ho had once belonged, and that he had called again and again in tho hope of meeting some fellow officer who would aid him for the sake of old days. But it was Christmas time, and many were out of town, and so cone whom he knew passed the doors daring those hours of waiting. Times were changed : the servants were fresh, and did not know him ; the honso had no longer a welcome. And so, late in the evening, he gave up tho hope, and came back to me and took my hand in his, and we plodded wearily through the rain. Whither we were going, or what was la his mind, the past or the present—my poor father!—ldo not know. By St. Martin’s Cburoh he sat down, as if worn out, in a corner against the rails, and drew me to him, and kissed me, aud tried so warm me in bis arms. I was sobbing w’lth the cold and with hunger ; but he, though I had often of late known him cry over mo, was soon quite still- I thought he was asleep, and only mooned aoft'y, leet I should awake him ; but when tho passing policeman, glancing Into our nook, turned hla lantern upon the wretched group, he saw that which spoke to hla practised eye of no common case of want. He called another and another, among them a stoat man with gray hair and keen eyes under bushy eyebrows ; and they drew my father from me, and raised him up, and some one carried me, and said, to quiet me, that I should be taken with him ; but how he went I cannot toll. I suppose they wanted to hide my father’s dead face from me. They took me to what I now know was a workhouse ; but every one was kind, and I was wanned and fed; and then 1 cried to go to my father, for he was all I had. They took me la to see him —dead : so handsome and stately he looked, as 1 had never seen him in life. Snch, perhaps, he was when he courted my mother among the dear Derbyshire hills. Of course I did not think of that then; but the little group in that bsre whitewashed room, where he lay on the bod, looked at him and me with something more than pity. Some one —the doctor, I think—had pinned upon bis breast a bit of crimson ribbon taken from one of tho pockets. That was all they found about him, save a letter, written and directed, but not sent, for—God save the mark !—ill and starved and broken down, where conld he get even the stamp ? They fetched a thick red book—an army list I have been told it was—and looked in it; and spoke of my father, and called him Major Folliott. And one—tho doctor it was again, I think—stood at the foot of the bed and told a well known story of the Orimean war, then still fresh la all men’s thoughts; and when he had done, and It moved them—maybe the policeman was an old army man, for ho looked very sternly at bis helmet—ho pointed to the stiT calm face lying there before ua ; * That was the man. ’

Chaftes 11. I wag eleven years old when my consin, John Penton, transplanted my little white face and shy brown eyes to the farmhouse where my mother had onoe lived. Gathering from the letter I spoke of above that my father was about to auk him for help—for me, not for himself—the people In London sent to him ; and he took charge of me with a readiness which was quickened, though then I did not know it, by anger ; against my father’s kinsfolk. The Derbyshire farmer was determined not to be outdone by the Cheshire squire, who had thought an alliance with bis family a crime to be punished in the person of the offender by a lifelong disgrace. And so John Penton took me to Scarfslde, How shall I fitly tell of the home that then became mine, and which, I pray Heaven, may be home to me to the end of the chapter ? I have seen Scarfsido in the early morning sunlight, when the little brook that flowed past it has murmured and twinkled with the brightness of awakening life, And I have seen it when that same brook was pouring its angry flood into the black curtain of mist that was stretched across the valley, and every hilltop around was quivering with the crash of the storm, and the valley itself was like a blackroofed vault. But It was always home to me, from the wit-try night whan its owner set me down, a forlorn little creature, on the hearth of the great kltohen, and the blaze cast back from the black beams seemed to bid me welcome.

Try to see a valley as narrow as valley can be, so that at each end there Is hardly room for a cart to' pass in or -out j a valley, too, so steep that the brook, full or low, is always lu a hurry to get through It. On one side, like a green wall with a gray rook here and there jutting out, rises the Razor’s Edge, the summit of which Is as narrow as Its name would show. Soarfside, ou the other side of the valley, so near that, as yon poize yourself on the top of Razor’s Edge, taking oare not to fall backwards into Kirtlsdale, you fancy yon could throw a stone over It; Bcarfaida—the hill, not the house—is leas hard to climb, and has a nice spacious cono on which to rest when you get to the top. Ah, the feasts that I and Kelpie, the sheep dog, have had on its green sides, the races wo have run, ay, and rolled down them, and the hurts wo have got against the boulders! Poor Kelpie, she lies under the gnarled plum tree by the orchard gate. The long, low, grey house, with Its stone chimneys and deep-set windows, has a large porch to protect one from the wind, which in winter sweeps by so keenly. The narrow garden running down the brookslde, and the orchard with its old stunted fruit trees and its stone gate pillars —they are far too Imposing to bo styled posts— fill up all tho rest of the tiny glen. Over the doorway a co»t-of-arma Is carved in stone; for Scarfside—now only a farmstead, and a email one—was a gentleman’s house when Prince Charlie was over the water, and the Pentono, though bat a few acres of barren bill-side are left, and they have sank to the level of the farmers around, have as much right to oall themselves armigeri as the wealthiest baronet in the county. Something, it may be, of bygone onltnre has descended to the present owner ; and la all outward things, save his courtesy, a rough Derbyshire yeoman, John Fenton, mixing little with his neighbors, baa spent mnoh of his time over books, and tended very carefully the seed sown when he was a boy at Derby school. His equals

thought him odd, and so did his servant*. But they set thla down to the wrong motive : they and all the countryside thought him ‘ cea”,’ It may bo that a child’s vision is c:psr.K- n ’ .to a good man's thoughts; for from th j first I knew that it was ambit'.on, not gteed, ..hat poaasts d him, and that in his l.ne’y hillside homo he was always drea.ning of raising his rams and family to their ohi piac >. So he was able to teach me by the o lay kitchen fire mary things which a score or 1 ss of years ago gir*a wore not wont to ■ o taught. True, of French, German, and music I got none; hut of Gatin, I'ngli.h.j, d hi-tory I get much; and I well remember John Ponton one spring evening taking me to the old London road two miles away over the hill*, and telling me how Prince Charles, the yonng Pretender, passed that way to Derby in the ’45 There was not a soul In sight, and the hilia -were red with the sunset, as he described, with the eloquence of one to whom it was very real, the stirring scene that had onoe startled the desolate road : the kilted Highlanders with their targets and pipes, the Lancashire riders, the handsome Prince on foot, the ‘ seven men of Moidart,’ and the long string of sight-seers ; and how the John Penton of that time had brought waggons of food andale to that very cross road, and given it to the weary and half hearted troops. Many and many a time afterwards, when I had given Marjory the slip, I used to go to the same place and sit and dream of the bonnie Prince marching by. We were an odd group round the deep fireplace in winter. John, In his rongh clothes, yellow gaiters, and heavy boots, at the little round table at one side, reading to me Macaulay's history (which ho did In order to Impress upon mo its disloyal and Badlcal views), or hearing me some grammar. Marjory, the kindest of old women, who had nnrsed my mother, would be on the settle at the other side, her rhenmatio back well protected from the draught; and David Boag, my cousin’s shadow, as c.noe In a pet I called him, so closely did he always attend hie master, would be in the chimney-corner, his legs in the firelight, but his face in the shade, sleeping perhaps, though often his piercing eyes would seem to glint through the shadow as they caught mine, giving mo an eerie feeling. Ho was such a favorite, however, with my cousin, that I could not | bat like him. They were all good to me, ,aad those were six pleasant, healthy, quiet years, the fust that I spent at Scarfside. I have lingered over thia pleasmt time because I have something to tell now which I hardly know how to tell. Not that it was pleasant; far from that. But I must explain it as well as 1 can. I was always glad to be with John, sometimes learning from him, sometimes teasing him, and I was never so happy as when I could ramble after bin} when he went about his work. But there came a time when he silent ; the lessons almost oea -ed, and ha seemed to avoid me, and was often cross with ns. He wont out earlier, and he c ims homo later than of old, and even Boag’s attendance seemed to give him no pleasure. I asked Harj ory if I had offended him, but she only kissed me and said it was the master's way.. It was a way which I think must have been catching ; for I too grew shy when we were together, though I was angry with myself, and did not know why; my teasing ways had taken flight, and if he scolded mo I felt aa If I could cry, though when a child 1 had laughed at him in his sternest mood. And ao when I would be out for a solitary walk, it began to oeme home to me that £ had been living so long upon his kindness, and that it was time I did something for myself. A governess I could not be ; but I might get a place perhaps as housekeeper, though I was yonng, for I had learnt all Marjory had to teaoh, and could keep the accounts even better. I would have liked to have gene without telling him, though it might seem thankless, but thla could not be So one fine morning, after breakfast, I spoke to him In the parlor, which we always kept for serious business, and told him my plan. He asked me, looking gravely through the window aa he spoke. If I were tired of Scarfside and its middle-aged people ; and. If I bed not bean ■o angry with him for saying such a thing, I should have cried bitterly. As it was, I told him how dear It would always be to me, aad that I had not forgotten the cruel streets of London from which he had taken me. Whereupon he said something of his thirty-two years and hla roughness, to which, aa being untrue and having nothing to do with the matter, I sold nothing; and he asked me to be his wife. Then I did ory ; but it was with joy, not anger, I was seventeen then, and he was thiity-two, then and now and ever to me all that Is strong and brave and good. I was not afraid to tell him yes, for my shyness seemed to have fled. 1 was only proud and glad, for I knew that I loved him well. And John kissed my tears away, and took me to Marjory, and told her ; and so I and John found oat oar love, and the old wainscoted parlor U dear to us both even now. (To ie continued )