THE STRAIGHT ROAD IS SHORTEST AND SUREST.

BY

A. L. O. E.

LONDON:

FREDERICK WARNE AND CO.

BEDFORD STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

1867.

CONTENTS. ——————

CHAP.

I. A MISHAP IN THE WOODS

II. THE OAK ROOM

III. FIRE

IV. EARTH

V. PUT TO THE QUESTION

VI. FACING IT OUT

VII. WATER

VIII. A CHASE

IX. CONJECTURES

X. DECISION

THE STRAIGHT ROAD

IS

SHORTEST AND SUREST. ———————————

CHAPTER I.

A MISHAP IN THE WOODS.

IT was a glowing, sultry day in the glorious month of June. In the drawing-room of Cortley Hall every window was thrown wide open to admit the breeze, which scarcely stirred the muslin curtains, or moved one leaf of the delicate maiden-hair fern which drooped from a fancy basket. In the deep recess of one of these windows sat a merry black-eyed girl, with a quantity of white satin ribbon heaped loosely upon her knee, and her workbox placed upon a little table beside her. A graceful young maiden stood near, and pensively and tenderly, as if each blossom were linked in her mind with thoughts of a home she was soon to quit, was arranging a quantity of flowers—roses, fuchsias, and geraniums—to fill a porcelain vase. Mina, was less inclined to laugh and chat than was Rosa, her gay young cousin, whose tongue rattled merrily on, while her nimble fingers transformed the ribbon into piles of rosettes and favours.

In the corner of the room a gentleman, not much beyond middle age, but whose broad bald forehead and "sable-silvered" hair made him seem older than he really was, was seated writing at a desk. This was Mr. Marsden, the master of Cortley Hall, and the father of Mina, the young bride-elect. He was engaged in writing orders on a munificent scale for donations to the sick and poor, on the occasion of the approaching wedding. In every cottage, for miles around, the plentiful feast would be spread; for Mr. Marsden was a benefactor to all who came within reach of his large-hearted charity, and many had had reason to bless the day when he had entered into possession of Cortley Hall.

"What on earth can have become of Wilfred!" exclaimed Rosa May, looking impatiently towards the door. "How am I to finish off these favours, with not a sprig of orange-blossom to put in the middle! He does not usually play the snail, that young brother of yours!"

"Nay, you must remember," said Mina, "that the town is full three miles distant, and the weather exceedingly hot; I was vexed when I heard that you had sent him upon such an errand!"

"Oh! All the servants are busy, you know, in making grand preparations for Thursday; and I thought," added Rosa with a laugh, "that it was an act of public utility to get a boy out of the way for a couple of hours, and tame down his wild spirits a little by teaching him to make himself useful. You have spoilt Wilfred sadly, I fear!"

"How can you say so!" cried the smiling Mina.

"How dare you say so!" exclaimed a merry voice from without, and—not through the door, but the window—in sprang a fine-looking boy of fourteen, with heated face, and moistened hair, and a bright good-humoured smile in his clear blue eyes, from which seemed to look forth a spirit free and open as the day.

"Why, Wilfred, you truant knight; what can have delayed you so long?" exclaimed Rosa May, with her finger raised in an affected attitude of reproof. "We thought that you would have been back an hour ago, laden with orange-blossom from the town, ready to cut, clip, run messages, do the dutiful in every possible way to both bridesmaid and bride! But is anything the matter?" she added. "Your clothes seem torn; your face scratched."

"You have not met with any accident, dear Will?" exclaimed the fair young bride; and at the question, asked in her gentle tone of concern, Mr. Marsden turned round from his desk, and glanced at the handsome lad, who was his only son and heir.

"Oh! I don't care a straw for a few rents in my clothes, or scratches on my face!" exclaimed Wilfred Marsden. "But this is what provokes me: look here, I've crushed your dainty box of orange-blossoms as flat as a pancake!" And with an air of vexation, the boy rather threw down than placed upon the table a light millinery box, which appeared in deplorable plight.

"Oh! dear; how could you manage to do this!" cried his cousin the bridesmaid, opening and surveying with a rueful air the crushed blossoms within.

"Never mind, Wilfred dear," said Mina, approaching with a kindly smile; "it was very good in you to go yourself to Manton for the flowers, buy them, and bring them—"

"And smash them on the way!" added Wilfred.

"Oh! I don't believe that they are spoilt," said the bride, taking up a sprig in her delicate fingers. "A little twist here, a little pulling out there, and see—now is not that perfectly lovely?" And she held up the renovated flower.

"If it is not, I know who is!" cried the boy, looking with fond admiration upon his only sister, and thinking what a happy fellow Edward Lyle was going to be. "I hope that there's not much harm done, after all. I thought that the poor flowers were demolished when my foot came smash on the lid of the box!"

"How did it happen, awkward boy?" asked the bridesmaid.

"The story is soon told," said Wilfred, sitting down, and fanning his heated face with his straw hat. "You know that the day is grilling hot, and I thought that I should be fairly baked if I took the straight path across the fields, where there is not a yard of shade."

"So you went round by the wood?" said Mina.

"A fine roundabout way!" cried her cousin.

"I fancied that I could make a cut through the thicket, so struck out from the path and tried to get across through the bushes. But it seemed as if Puck and all the fairies had conspired to catch me prisoner! Now my jacket was caught in a bramble; then a bough nearly knocked off my hat; when I got free from the thorns on the right hand, I was caught by a long straggling briar on the left! Then suddenly I felt a sharp sting on my neck, just underneath my collar—" Wilfred clapped his hand on the place—"I dropped the box like a hot potato, and what betwixt wasp and briars and brambles, hardly knew what I was about, till I felt my unlucky foot crunching through the pasteboard of the box!"

"Ah! Well, things might have been worse!" said Mina, with smiling philosophy. "Your kind intention was all the same. Your long walk has enabled me—"

"To show that you have the sweetest temper as well as the fairest face in the world!" interrupted Wilfred.

"And it has taught you, I hope," said Rosa, "that the straight road is the shortest and surest."

"Ay, I wished often enough in the wood that I had taken my way through the fields, however hot it might have been," said Wilfred.

"That proverb, my boy," observed Mr. Marsden, who had locked his desk and joined the group, "holds good in more important matters than your adventure of to-day. There's many a sharp, clever fellow, with more wit in his brain than truth in his heart, who has found in the end that through life the straightest road is the shortest and surest."

"You mean the path of honour, papa."

"I mean the path of duty."

"Duty and honour, surely they are the same," cried Wilfred. "They are but two names for one thing."

"Scarcely so," said the father. "I shall call honour a high sense of what we owe to 'ourselves;' duty, a high sense of what we owe to 'our God!'"

"But if they be not the same thing, they lead to the same actions, surely. They both make a man shrink from anything false, dishonest, or mean."

Mr. Marsden looked down with something of paternal pride upon the fine, intelligent countenance of his only son, so expressive of the contempt which the mere thought of dishonourable conduct inspired. He, however, shook his head gravely as he made answer, "Honour, as we usually understand the word, is but man's standard of what is becoming in a man, and must be fallible like its author. Honour has fired the ambitious leader, who sacrifices thousands of his fellow-creatures to win for himself the name of a hero; honour has loaded the duellist's pistol, and made brave men slaves to the dread of reproach. We could as safely direct our steps by the fitful blaze of a meteor, as take earthly honour alone for the guide of our words and actions."

"Was it not honour that made Edward Lyle give up that good living which he could have had by merely letting it be thought that he was a few weeks older than he was?"

At the mention of the name of her betrothed, Mina timidly raised her blue eyes and fixed them on her father, and the tint on her soft cheek deepened as she listened for his reply.

"I think," said Mr. Marsden, "that in that occurrence Edward was guided by that which is always his pole-star—the fear and love of his God."

Wilfred glanced at his sister, and caught her look of intense pleasure at the praise of her betrothed from the lips of her father.

"Well, Edward was soon rewarded," said the boy. "It was a lucky thing that the living here fell vacant—so unexpectedly, too—not a twelvemonth after, and that it should be in your gift! A snug little nest for our ladye-bird, and just within reach of us all. What a different affair it would have been," continued the boy, "if Cortley Hall had been left to cousin Benson instead of to you!"

"I should have been working on still at my desk in Barnes' Court," observed Mr. Marsden, with his quiet smile.

"And I'd have been brought up as a clerk; and Mimi, poor darling Mina! She'd have looked like some pale withered flower, one of those crushed orange-blossoms in the smoky air of the city. Ugh! Our old great-uncle did one good thing in his life, if he never did another, when he left the Hall, and estate, and the gift of the living to such a man as my father."

"Cousin Benson does not think so, I guess," laughed Rosa, who had just finished her pile of white satin cockades.

"Cousin Benson is no more fit to be a lauded proprietor than I am to be king of the Cannibal Islands!" exclaimed Wilfred. "A mean, sneaking, stingy fellow; one who would skin a flint; one—"

"Oh! Wilfred!" expostulated Mina.

"No ill words of the absent, my boy," said Mr. Marsden.

"We'd better talk of some one else, then," cried Wilfred, "for I can never think of Tom Benson with patience."

"I had a note from Sophia to-day," said Mina.

"Sophia! Oh, how is it she is not here? I thought that she was to arrive to-day. I know that you ordered the Oak room to be made ready."

"She comes this morning," replied his sister, "but she does not wish the Oak room."

"How do you know that?" asked Wilfred.

"She writes so in her note. Here it is."

"You don't mean to say," cried Wilfred, with a look of amused curiosity, "that Sophia is afraid to sleep in that room, because she fancies that it is haunted?"

"Not exactly 'haunted,'" began Mina Marsden, as she handed the letter to her brother; "but she writes about disagreeable associations."

"Oh! I see; here it is." And Wilfred read aloud snatches from the letter of one of his sister's expected bridesmaids: "'Don't laugh at me as absurd—' That's more than I can promise, fair lady!—'but the idea of occupying a room in which your poor old great-uncle was actually burnt to death would so affect my nerves.'—Oh! Hang nerves!" exclaimed Wilfred, tossing back the note to his sister. "That was a wise old dame who was glad that she was born before nerves were invented."

"But you wont mind exchanging rooms, dear Wilfred?"

"Mind! I should think not!" cried the boy. "I shall have much the best of the exchange. Oak panels instead of twopenny paper, carved ceiling instead of white plaster, stained glass instead of square panes, one of which, by-the-bye, I cracked right across yesterday with my elbow! I wish that everybody would fancy that grand, gloomy room to be haunted, that I might keep it, ghost and all, to myself! But what a joke I'll have against Sophia! I think I'll bring in something about it when I propose the health of the four lovely bridesmaids on Thursday."

"Nay," cried Rosa, "if you take to quizzing any of the bridesmaids, I think that, after to-day's exploit in the woods, they may fairly turn the tables upon you, and let the bridesman come in for his share of the banter. You have proved yourself not a much better messenger than the valiant squire in the song." And in a high, clear voice Rosa trilled forth a merry lay.

THE SQUIRE. A squire set out one moonlit night, And prayed to the moon to give good light, For he had many miles to travel that night, All through the forest glen, O! He bore a lock of his master's hair, A tender gift to his ladye fair; At peril of his life he the pledge must bear, All through the forest glen, O! Quoth he, "I fear there are robbers near, Or goblins stalk the thicket drear, Or merry witches hold their revels here, All in the forest glen, O!" An oak o'er the path its long arms spread— Sudden it strikes him—he starts with dread: Terrified and wild, at speed he sped All through the forest glen, O! He never looked behind him, or turned his head All through the forest glen, O! Panting and pale, at length he came To the sheltered hall of the noble dame; "I've brought a pledge from a knight of fame, All through the forest glen, O!" And he hunted—he searched—he sought for the same, Lost in the forest glen, O! Where was the pledge of the lover's vow? Waving in the breeze on the oak's long bough; And for aught that I know, it may wave there now,

All in the forest glen, O!

CHAPTER II.

THE OAK ROOM.

VERY merrily passed that Tuesday evening at Cortley Hall. Neighbours "dropped in" to tea, Sophia arrived from London, her luggage swelled to an unreasonable size by divers boxes and parcels labelled "glass," and "with care," with which she had been entrusted for the bride. There were so many presents, of which the unpacking gave no small amusement to Wilfred, that he declared that his wedding-gift to Mina ought to have been a manifold writer instead of a "lady's companion," that she might not have had half her time taken up in penning letters of thanks. Tom Benson, the churl, was the only one, as Wilfred affirmed, who had not done his duty, nor given so much as a flower to the bride.

There were songs and mirth, laughing and banter, interspersed with the pleasant preparations for a village wedding, in the feasting and gladness of which all the poor around were to share. The young clergyman and his betrothed were deeply, tranquilly happy, the bridesmaids full of frolic and fun, and Wilfred, the merriest, noisiest "best man" that ever wore a white favour. There was to him nothing but pleasure in the prospect of the marriage. There would be no separation from the sister whom he fondly loved, for the Vicarage was so near to the Hall that Wilfred considered that he should only possess two happy homes instead of one.

It was late before the cheerful circle dispersed, for time seemed too rich in enjoyment for much to be wasted in sleep. With a light step and lighter heart, whistling the merry song of "The Squire," Wilfred retired to the old Oak chamber; but there was something in the solemn aspect of the room which, as soon as he entered, stopped his music if it did not damp his spirits. The gleam of his solitary candle so dimly lighted the dark carved panels, the massive furniture, the heavily-draperied bed, that it seemed but to make darkness visible. One of the pillars of that bed, blackened and charred, bore token yet of the awful fate which had befallen the last owner of Cortley Hall.

Wilfred examined it with thrilling interest, and felt less disposed than he had done by day to laugh at the feelings of Sophia. His mind would perpetually recur to the miserable old man who had retired to rest in that very room, as little expecting to rise no more as the boy who now occupied his place. There had he lain, just there, the candle by the bedside, the bottle on the table, the novel in his hand. There had he fallen asleep—and oh! What an awful waking!

Wilfred found such thoughts depressing after the gay excitement of the evening. He hurried over his toilet, extinguished his candle, and stretched himself on the bed; he wished to sleep, but sleep would not come at his bidding. He tried to turn his mind to Mina and her fair prospects, but his thoughts again and again returned to the poor old man who had perished by fire in that place, unwarned and unprepared!

"I think that this room has never lost the suffocating heat of that fire!" exclaimed Wilfred at last, with feverish restlessness. "I feel hardly able to breathe! How stupid I was not to throw the window wide open, to let in a little fresh air!"

The boy pulled back his curtain, and rose, feeling his way towards the window by the wall. As he groped thus along, passing his hand over each panel, to his surprise Wilfred felt one of them slightly move under his pressure. He felt angry with himself for the little start which he gave; and his curiosity being aroused, the boy drew the panel backwards with stronger force, and thus assured himself that he had made no mistake in imagining that he was able to move it.

"I may have made some grand discovery," said Wilfred, half aloud. "I may have found some secret hiding-place for treasure! There's no saying what a store of old family plate or family jewels may lie behind that sliding panel. If only the room were not so dark. The moon is up, I fancy, and the window looks to the east; but there's as much stone as glass in it, and the glass itself is stained, so that the casement seems expressly contrived to let in as little light as may be. I must light my candle again, if only I knew where to find the matchbox."

Wilfred groped, and felt, and fumbled, knocked over the candlestick in his search for the box, and started at the sudden noise in the stillness of that dark apartment. It was several minutes before he was able to get a light, which seemed to burn dimly and heavily in the hot, close air of the room. Wilfred instantly returned with the candle to the spot where he had moved back the panel. The place was marked by what looked like a broad black line on the wall; the boy soon widened the opening, and put his hand into the recess. Wilfred could feel but one thing within it, and that was a long parchment roll. Burning with intense curiosity to know its contents, he drew out the roll, and, after placing his candle upon a table, seated himself on a heavy carved armchair beside it, to examine his prize at his leisure.

"Some great document, awfully long, and all written in black letter, with a big red seal at the bottom! I dare say that I shall understand as little of it as if it were all in Hebrew. Oh! Here's a date. I guess that it will show the deed to be centuries old. No, 'eighteen hundred and thirty-eight,' that's only ten years before I was born. Here are signatures at the bottom. What a frightfully crabbed hand! 'Josiah Marsden,' that's the name of my great-uncle, who was burned to death in this room. I dare say that this is only some document relating to the Cortley estate."

Wilfred rolling up the parchment from the bottom, so as to examine with greater ease what was written at the top. "Last will and testament of Josiah Marsden." Wilfred felt a little nervousness, for which he could hardly have accounted, as he slowly made out the first line. With a little difficulty, as he was unaccustomed to read black letter, and the tedious forms and repetitions of a law-deed made it difficult to be understood, Wilfred went on with his perusal.

A description of all the demesnes of the Cortley estate, which, comprising the minutest particulars, stretched through some hundred most tedious lines, closed with one which, like a sudden apparition, blanched the cheek of the boy, made his hand tremble, and his heart beat fast. "To my nephew Thomas Benson and his heirs."