They telegraphed to Gerald from New York next day. His father was dead. It is heart disease, to which sudden deaths are attributed now-a-days. It saves many a pang to the loving hearts of survivors. It saved poor Martha an accession to her grief, and even the world began to talk pityingly of one who had seemed so rich so short a time before. For really the world is not a very bad one. With time and leisure it likes to do a good-natured thing, and does it, if it remembers in time. And then it has a most valuable code of proprieties. It holds it wanton and brutal to speak evil of the dead. And so it came to be in bad taste to mention the Herkimer story at all. The poor man was dead--gone to his own place. What more was there to say?
Even the Indians profited. Their trial came on, but no one took much interest in it. The young lady had come to no harm; she was even to marry the son of the man whose name had been dragged into the transaction. They pleaded guilty, and profited largely by the leniency of the court.
The weddings were unavoidably postponed. It was Matilda herself who proposed that they should wait six months, out of respect for Martha. Her extravagant haste and eagerness had been for Muriel's behoof. She feared that the past might get more fully canvassed, and arrange itself into some kind of barrier, which, though Muriel might ignore, Gerald might feel ashamed to overpass.
Jordan's career did not close itself so abruptly as his friend's had done, and there were times when he envied Ralph the speedy conclusion of his troubles. His affairs proved to be like an old woman's knitting; when once a stitch of it is dropped, nobody can tell how great may be the devastation. Jordan's fortune had crumbled to pieces; he was a discredited man, and worse, a pensioner on his wife's bounty; and that last, all who knew the charming Amelia--and all who knew her, voted her charming--agreed was no enviable position. About a year after Randolph was married, and settled in a government office at Ottawa, the Minister of Drainage and Irrigation exerted his influence, and got the old man--he is really old now, seventy is the next decade he will touch, and that before long--made stipendiary magistrate at Anticosti, where among the sleet storms of the gulf of St. Lawrence he dispenses justice to litigious fishermen. Amelia did not accompany him. Why should she? To be an ornament of society in Montreal or Ottawa is the role nature intended her to fill, and she works the part industriously. An oldhabitantewoman makes Jordan an infinitely more efficient housekeeper in the far East, where comforts are few, and there is no society, and she writes him every week the most delightful letter, with all the chit-chat and scandal about his old friends carefully chronicled. This affords him nearly as much amusement to read as it gave her to write, and is far more persistently pleasant than he finds the writer, when he spends his annual holiday with her at St. Euphrase.
Gerald and Muriel are an old married couple now. Their boy is just the age of his mother when she was stolen away. He would spend all his time, if he had his way, with his grandmother Selby, who adores him, and often calls him Edith in forgetfulness. There is a drawer upstairs in her room, where there are little shoes, red, white and blue, and sashes of gay colours, and little lace frocks. They are all nicely washed and ironed now--the frocks, that is--and the little fellow puts them on for a lark, at times, though he is getting too big for most of them now. But there was a time when no one was permitted to touch or see those things, and when the tears of ten years and more dropping on the muslin and the lace had rumpled them and blotted them into a faded yellow. They are precious still--his mother wore them when she was his age--but the urchin himself is more precious yet by far. It amuses him to try them on, and, therefore, they have been newly done up for his lordship's greater gratification.
Muriel's fortune turned out less than it might have been. The portion in Jordan's hands having disappeared, Considine offered to make good the deficiency to the last cent he possessed as far as it would have gone. But the moiety he had manipulated himself had prospered, and made a very pretty fortune as it was; and for the rest--no one doubts that some day Muriel will fall heir to all that he, his wife, and her sister possess.
The man with the two wives, is how his acquaintance speak of Considine, for the three go everywhere together. He is as attentive to Penelope as to his wife, and she is far more adoring than her sister, who, being married, has her rights, to criticise, to have little tempers--though, indeed, Matilda's are of the smallest--and so forth.
And now there seems no more to say. Betsey Bunce is in her right place as mistress of a farm. Her poultry lay larger eggs, and her cows give more butter than those of any one else. She is busy and cheery all day long, and neither man nor maid dare ever be idle on the premises. She has proved a fortune to her husband, if she brought him none, and he owns now that the bad luck which first made him think of Betsey was the luckiest circumstance of his life. She is bound to make a rich man of him, and a legislator at Ottawa, some day soon.
Footnote 1: Sugar-bush. A grove of maple trees. The farmers tap the juice in spring, and boil it into sugar. In Lower Canada and New Hampshire, scarcely any other sugar is consumed in the country places.
Footnote 2: Jennie Jeffers, queen of the gypsies in the United States, died in Greenfield, Tennessee, March 10, 1884, and was buried at Dayton, Ohio, April 16. Fifteen hundred gipsies from all parts of the country were present.--American Paper.