University of Virginia Library

21. CHAPTER XXI.

During the five or six minutes that elapsed before
the youth and Major re-appeared, Judge
Temple and the Sheriff, together with most of the
volunteers, ascended to the terrace, where the latter
begun to express their conjectures of the result,
and to recount their individual services in the
conflict. But the sight of the peace-makers, ascending
the ravine, shut every mouth.

On a rude chair, covered with undressed deer-skins,
they supported a human being, whom they
seated carefully and respectfully in the midst of
the assembly. His head was covered by long,
smooth locks, of the colour of snow. His dress,
which was studiously neat and clean, was composed
of such fabrics as none but the wealthiest
classes wear, but was threadbare and patched;
and on his feet were placed a pair of moccasins,
ornamented in the best manner of Indian ingenuity.
The outlines of his face were grave
and dignified, though his vacant eye, which opened
and turned slowly to the faces of those around
him in unmeaning looks, too surely announced

that the period had arrived, when age brings the
mental imbecility of childhood.

Natty had followed the supporters of this unexpected
object to the top of the cave, and took his
station at a little distance behind him, leaning on
his rifle, in the midst of his pursuers, with a fearlessness
which showed that heavier interests than
those which affected himself were to be decided.
Major Hartmann placed himself beside the aged
man, uncovered, with his whole soul beaming
through those eyes which so commonly danced with
frolic and humour. Edwards rested with one hand
familiarly, but affectionately, on the chair, though
his heart was swelling with emotions that denied
him utterance.

All eyes were gazing intently; but each tongue
continued mute. At length the decrepid stranger,
turning his vacant looks from face to face,
made a feeble attempt to rise, while a faint smile
crossed his wasted face, like an habitual effort at
courtesy, as he said, in a hollow, tremulous voice—

“Be pleased to be seated, gentlemen. The
council will open immediately. Each one who
loves a good and virtuous king, will wish to see
these colonies continue loyal. Be seated—I pray
you, be seated, gentlemen. The troops shall halt
for the night.”

“This is the wandering of insanity!” said Marmaduke;
“who will explain this scene?”

“No, sir,” said Edwards, firmly, “'tis only the
decay of nature; who is answerable for its pitiful
condition, remains to be shown.”

“Will the gentlemen dine with us, my son?”
said the old stranger, turning to a voice that he
both knew and loved. “Order a repast suitable
for his Majesty's officers. You know we have the
best of game always at our command.”

“Who is this man?” asked Marmaduke, in a

hurried voice, in which the dawnings of conjecture
united with interest to put the question.

“This man!” returned Edwards, calmly, his
voice, however, gradually rising as he proceeded;
“this man, sir, whom you behold hid in caverns,
and deprived of every thing that can make life
desirable, was once the companion and counsellor
of those who ruled your country. This man,
whom you see, helpless and feeble, was once a
warrior, so brave and fearless, that even the intrepid
natives gave him the name of the Fire-eater.
This man, whom you now see destitute of
even the ordinary comfort of a cabin in which to
shelter his head, was once the owner of great
riches; and, Judge Temple, he was the rightful
proprietor of this very soil on which we stand.
This man was the father of”—

“This, then,” cried Marmaduke, with powerful
emotion, “this, then, is the lost Major Effingham!”

“Emphatically so,” said the youth, fixing a
piercing eye on the other.

“And you! and you!” continued the Judge,
articulating with difficulty.

“I am his grandson.”

A minute passed in profound silence. All eyes
were fixed on the speakers, and even the old German
appeared to wait the issue in deep anxiety.
But the moment of agitation soon passed. Marmaduke
raised his head from his bosom, where it
had sunk, not in shame, but in devout mental
thanksgivings, and, as large tears fell over his
fine, manly face, he grasped the hand of the youth
warmly, and said—

“Oliver, I forgive all thy harshness—all thy
suspicions. I now see it all. I forgive thee every
thing, but suffering this aged man to dwell in

such a place, when not only my habitation, but
my fortune, were at his and thy command.”

“He's true as ter steel!” shouted Major Hartmann;
“titn't I tell't you, lat, dat Marmatuke
Temple vast a frient dat woult never fail in ter
dime as of neet!”

“It is true, Judge Temple, that my opinions of
your conduct have been staggered by what this
worthy gentleman has told me. When I found it
impossible to convey my grandfather back whence
the enduring love of this old man brought him,
without detection and exposure, I went to the Mohawk
in quest of one of his former comrades, in
whose justice I had dependence. He is your
friend, Judge Temple, but if what he says
be true, both my father and myself may have
judged you harshly.”

“You name your father!” said Marmaduke,
tenderly—“Was he, indeed, lost in the packet?”

“He was. He had left me, after several years
of fruitless application and comparative poverty,
in Nova-Scotia, to obtain the compensation for
his losses, which the British commissioners had at
length awarded. After spending a year in England,
he was returning to Halifax, on his way to a
government, to which he had been appointed, in
the West-Indies, intending to go to the place
where my grandfather had sojourned during and
since the war, and take him with us.”

“But, thou!” said Marmaduke, with powerful
interest; “I had thought that thou hadst perished
with him.”

A flush passed over the cheeks of the young
man, who gazed about him at the wondering faces
of the volunteers, and continued silent. Marmaduke
turned to the veteran captain, who just
then rejoined his command, and said—

“March thy soldiers back again, and dismiss

them; the zeal of the sheriff has much mistaken
his duty. Dr. Todd, I will thank you to attend
to the injury which Hiram Doolittle has received
in this untoward affair. Richard, you will oblige
me by sending up the carriage to the top of the
hill. Benjamin, return to your duty in my family.”

Unwelcome as these orders were to most of the
auditors, the suspicion that they had somewhat
exceeded the wholesome restraints of the law, and
the habitual respect with which all the commands
of the Judge were received, induced a prompt
compliance.

When they were gone, and the rock was left to
the parties most interested in an explanation, Marmaduke,
pointing to the aged Major Effingham,
said to his grandson—

“Had we not better remove thy parent from
this open place, until my carriage can arrive?”

“Pardon me, sir, the air does him good, and
he has taken it whenever there was no dread of a
discovery. I know not how to act, Judge Temple;
ought I, can I, suffer Major Effingham to
become an inmate of your family?”

“Thou shalt be thyself the judge,” said Marmaduke.
“Thy father was my early friend. He
intrusted his fortune to my care. When we separated,
he had such confidence in me, that he wished
no security, no evidence of the trust, even had
there been time or convenience for exacting it.—
This thou hast heard?”

“Most truly, sir,” said Edwards, or rather Effingham,
as we must now call him, with a bitter
smile.

“We divided in politics. If the cause of this
country was successful, the trust was sacred with
me, for none knew of thy father's interest. If
the crown still held its sway, it would be easy

to restore the property of so loyal a subject as
Col. Effingham.—Is not this plain?”

“The premises are good, sir,” continued the
youth, with the same incredulous look as before.

“Listen—listen, poy,” said the German. “Dere
is not a hair as of ter rogue in ter het of ter
Tchooge.”

“We all know the issue of the struggle,” continued
Marmaduke, disregarding both; “Thy
grandfather was left in Connecticut, regularly
supplied by thy father with the means of such a
subsistence as suited his wants. This I well knew,
though I never had intercourse with him, even in
our happiest days. Thy father retired with the
troops to prosecute his claims on England. At
all events, his losses must be great, for his real estates
were sold, and I became the lawful purchaser.
It was not unnatural to wish that he might
have no bar to his just recovery?”

“There was none, but the difficulty of providing
for so many claimants.”

“But there would have been one, and an insuperable
one, had I announced to the world that I
held these estates, multiplied, by the times and my
industry, a hundred fold in value, only as his trustee.
Thou knowest that I supplied him with considerable
sums, immediately after the war.”

“You did, until”—

“My letters were returned unopened. Thy father
had much of thy own spirit, Oliver; he was
sometimes hasty and rash.” The Judge continued,
in a self-condemning manner—“Perhaps
my fault lies the other way; I may possibly
look too far ahead, and calculate too deeply.
It certainly was a severe trial to allow the
man, whom I most loved, to think ill of me for
seven years, in order that he might honestly apply

for his just remunerations. But had he
opened my last letters, thou wouldst have learnt
the whole truth. Those I sent him to England,
by what my agent writes me, he did read. He
died, Oliver, knowing all. He died my friend,
and I thought thou hadst died with him.”

“Our poverty would not permit us to pay for
two passages,” said the youth, with the extraordinary
emotion with which he ever alluded to the
degraded state of his family; “I was left in the
Province to wait for his return, and when the sad
news of his loss reached me, I was nearly pennyless.”

“And what didst thou, boy?” asked Marmaduke,
in a faltering voice.

“I took my passage here in search of my
grandfather; for I well knew that his resources
were gone, with the half-pay of my father. On
reaching his abode, I learnt that he had left it
in secret; though the reluctant hireling, who deserted
him in his poverty, owned to my urgent
entreaties, that he believed he had been carried
away by an old man, who had once been his
servant. I knew at once it was Natty, for my
father often”—

“Was Natty a servant to thy grandfather?” exclaimed
the Judge.

“Of that too were you ignorant!” said the
youth, in evident surprise.

“How should I know it? I never met the Major,
nor was the name of Bumppo ever mentioned
to me. I knew him only as a man of the
woods, and one who lived by hunting. Such men
are too common to excite surprise.”

“He was reared in the family of my grandfather;
served him for many years during their campaigns
at the west, where he became attached to
the woods; and he was left here as a kind of locum

tenens on the lands that old Mohegan (whose
life my grandfather once saved) induced the Delawares
to grant to him, when they admitted him
as an honorary member of their tribe.”

“This, then, is thy Indian blood?”

“I have no other,” said Edwards, smiling;—
“Major Effingham was adopted as the son of
Mohegan, who at that time was the greatest man
in his nation; and my father, who visited those
people when a boy, received the name of the Eagle
from them, on account of the shape of his face,
as I understand. They have extended his title
to me. I have no other Indian blood; though I
have seen the hour, Judge Temple, when I could
wish that such had been my lineage and education.”

“Proceed with thy tale,” said Marmaduke.

“I have but little more to say, sir. I followed
to the lake where I had so often been told that
Natty dwelt, and found him maintaining his old
master in secret; for even he could not bear to
exhibit to the world, in his poverty and dotage, a
man whom a whole people once looked up to with
respect.”

“And what did you?”

“What did I! I spent my last money in purchasing
a rifle, clad myself in a coarse garb, and
learned to be a hunter by the side of Leather-stocking.
You know the rest, Judge Temple.”

“Ant vere vast olt Fritz Hartmann!” said the
German, reproachfully; “didst never hear a name
as of olt Fritz Hartmann from ter mout of ter fader,
lat?”

“I may have been mistaken, gentlemen,” returned
the youth; “but I had pride, and could not
submit to such an exposure as this day even has
reluctantly brought to light. I had plans that
might have been visionary; but, should my parent

survive till autumn, I purposed taking him with
me to the city, where we have distant relatives,
who must have learnt to forget the Tory by this
time. He decays rapidly,” he continued, mournfully,
“and must soon lie by the side of old Mohegan.”

The air being pure, and the day fine, the party
continued conversing on the rock, until the
wheels of Judge Temple's carriage were heard
clattering up the side of the mountain, during
which time the conversation was maintained with
deep interest, each moment clearing up some
doubtful action, and lessening the antipathy of
the youth to Marmaduke. He no longer objected
to the removal of his grandfather, who displayed
a childish pleasure when he found himself
seated once more in a carriage. When placed in
the ample hall of the Mansion-house, the eyes of
the aged veteran turned slowly to the objects in
the apartment, and a look like the dawn of intellect
would, for moments, flit across his features,
when he invariably offered some useless courtesies
to those near him, wandering, painfully, in his subjects.
The exercise and the change soon produced
an exhaustion, that caused them to remove
him to his bed, where he lay for hours, evidently
sensible of the change in his comforts, and exhibiting
that mortifying picture of human nature,
which too plainly shows that the propensities of
the animal continue, even after the nobler part of
the creature appears to have vanished.

Until his parent was placed comfortably in
bed, with Natty seated at his side, Effingham did
not quit him. He then obeyed a summons
to the library of the Judge, where he found the
latter, with Major Hartmann, waiting for him.

“Read this paper, Oliver,” said Marmaduke to
him, as he entered, “and thou wilt find that, so

far from intending thy family wrong during life,
it has been my care to provide that justice should
be done at even a later day.”

The youth took the paper, which his first glance
told him was the will of the Judge. Hurried
and agitated as he was, he discovered that the
date corresponded with the time of the unusual
depression of Marmaduke. As he proceeded, his
eyes began to moisten, and the hand which held
the instrument shook violently.

The will commenced with the usual forms, spun
out by the ingenuity of Mr. Van der School; but
after this subject was fairly exhausted, the pen of
Marmaduke became plainly visible. In clear, distinct,
manly, and even eloquent language, he recounted
his obligations to Colonel Effingham, the
nature of their connexion, and the circumstances in
which they separated. He then proceeded to relate
the motives for his long silence, mentioning,
however, large sums that he had forwarded to his
friend, which had been returned, with the letters
unopened. After this, he spoke of his search for
the grandfather, who had unaccountably disappeared,
and his fears that the direct heir of the
trust was buried in the ocean with his father.

After, in short, recounting in a clear narrative,
the events which our readers must now be able
to connect, he proceeded to make a fair and exact
statement of the sums left in his care by Col.
Effingham. A devise of his whole estate to certain
responsible trustees followed; to hold the
same for the benefit, in equal moieties, of his
daughter, on one part, and of Oliver Effingham,
formerly a major in the army of Great Britain,
and of his son Edward Effingham, and of his son
Edward Oliver Effingham, or to the survivor of
them, and the descendants of such survivor, for ever,
on the other part. The trust was to endure until

1810, when, if no person appeared, or could be found,
after sufficient notice, to claim the moiety so devised,
then a certain sum, calculating the principal
and interest of his debt to Col. Effingham,
was to be paid to the heirs at law of the Effingham
family, and the bulk of his estate was to be
conveyed in fee to his daughter, or her heirs.

The tears fell from the eyes of the young man,
as he read this undeniable testimony of the good
faith of Marmaduke, and his bewildered gaze was
still fastened on the paper, when a sweet voice,
that thrilled on every nerve, spoke, near him,
saying,

“Do you yet doubt us, Oliver?”

“I have never doubted you!” cried the youth,
recovering his recollection and his voice, as he
sprung to seize the hand of Elizabeth; “no, not
one moment has my faith in you wavered.”

“And my father—”

“God bless him!”

“I thank thee, my son,” said the Judge, exchanging
a warm pressure of the hand with the
youth; “but we have both erred; thou hast been
too hasty, and I have been too slow. One half
of my estates shall be thine as soon as they can be
conveyed to thee; and if what my suspicions
tell me, be true, I suppose the other must follow
speedily.” He took the hand which he held, and
united it with that of his daughter, and motioned
towards the door to the Major.

“I telt you vat, gal!” said the old German,
good humouredly; “if I vast, ast I vast, ven I servit
mit his grantfader on ter lakes, ter lazy tog shouln't
vin ter prize as for nottin.”

“Come, come, old Fritz,” cried the Judge;
“you are seventy, not seventeen; Richard waits
for you with a bowl of egg-nog, in the hall.”

“Richart! ter duyvel!” exclaimed the other,

hastening out of the room; “he makes ter nog
ast for ter horse. I vilt show ter sheriff mit my
own hants! Ter duyvel! I pelieve he sweetens
mit ter yankee melasses!”

Marmaduke smiled and nodded affectionately
at the young couple, and closed the door after
them. If any of our readers expect that we are
going to open it again, for their gratification, they
will soon find themselves in a mistake.

The tête-à-tête continued for a very unreasonable
time; how long we shall not say; but it was
ended by six o'clock in the evening, for at that
hour Monsieur Le Quoi made his appearance,
agreeably to the appointment of the preceding
day, and claimed the ear of Miss Temple. He
was admitted; when he made an offer of his hand,
with much suavity, together with his “amis beeg
and leet', his père, his mère, and his sucre-boosh.”
Elizabeth might, possibly, have previously entered
into some embarrassing and binding engagements
with Oliver, for she declined the tender of all, in
terms as polite, though perhaps a little more decided,
than those in which they were made.

The Frenchman soon joined the German and
the Sheriff in the hall, who compelled him to
take a seat with them at the table, where, by the
aid of punch, wine, and egg-nog, they soon extracted
from the complaisant Mr. Le Quoi the
nature of his visit. It was evident that he had
made the offer, as a duty which a well-bred man
owed to a lady in such a retired place, before he
left the country, and that his feelings were but
very little, if at all, interested in the matter. After
a few potations, the waggish pair persuaded
the exhilarated Frenchman that there was an inexcusable
partiality in offering to one lady, and not extending
a similar courtesy to another. Consequently,

about nine, Monsieur Le Quoi sallied forth to the
Rectory, on a similar mission to Miss Grant, which
proved as successful as his first effort in love.

When he returned to the Mansion-house, at ten,
Richard and the Major were still seated at the
table. They attempted to persuade the Gaul
that he should next try Remarkable Pettibone.
But, though he was stimulated by mental excitement
and wine, two hours of abstruse logic were
thrown away on this subject; for he declined their
advice, with a pertinacity truly astonishing in so
polite a man.

When Benjamin lighted Monsieur Le Quoi
from the door, he said, at parting—

“If-so-be, Mounsheer, you'd run alongside Mistress
Pretty-bones, as the Squire Dickens was bidding
ye, 'tis my notion you'd have been grappled;
in which case, d'ye see, you mought have
been troubled in swinging clear again in a handsome
manner; for thof Miss 'Lizzy and the parson's
young'un be tidy little vessels, that shoot by
a body on a wind, Mistress Remarkable is sum'mat
of a galliot fashion; when you once takes 'em in
tow, they doesn't like to be cast off again.”