The Ancestral Footstep (fragment)

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"How is it possible!" exclaimed Middleton. "Was it Wentworth?"

"Even so," said Alice, still with the same sad calmness and not
withdrawing her steady eyes from his face. "After his ruin; after the
catastrophe that overwhelmed him and hundreds more, he took to flight;
guilty, perhaps, but guilty as a fallen conqueror is; guilty to such an
extent that he ceased to be a cheat, as a conqueror ceases to be a
murderer. He came to England. My father had an original nobility of
nature; and his life had not been such as to debase it, but rather such
as to cherish and heighten that self-esteem which at least keeps the
possessor of it from many meaner vices. He took nothing with him; nothing
beyond the bare means of flight, with the world before him, although
thousands of gold would not have been missed out of the scattered
fragments of ruin that lay around him. He found his way hither, led, as
you were, by a desire to reconnect himself with the place whence his
family had originated; for he, too, was of a race which had something to
do with the ancient story which has now been brought to a close. Arrived
here, there were circumstances that chanced to make his talents and
habits of business available to this Mr. Eldredge, a man ignorant and
indolent, unknowing how to make the best of the property that was in his
hands. By degrees, he took the estate into his management, acquiring
necessarily a preponderating influence over such a man."

"And you," said Middleton. "Have you been all along in England? For you
must have been little more than an infant at the time."

"A mere infant," said Alice, "and I remained in our own country under the
care of a relative who left me much to my own keeping; much to the
influences of that wild culture which the freedom of our country gives to
its youth. It is only two years that I have been in England."

"This, then," said Middleton thoughtfully, "accounts for much that has
seemed so strange in the events through which we have passed; for the
knowledge of my identity and my half-defined purpose which has always
glided before me, and thrown so many strange shapes of difficulty in my
path. But whence,--whence came that malevolence which your father's
conduct has so unmistakably shown? I had done him no injury, though I had
suffered much."

"I have often thought," replied Alice, "that my father, though retaining
a preternatural strength and acuteness of intellect, was really not
altogether sane. And, besides, he had made it his business to keep this
estate, and all the complicated advantages of the representation of this
old family, secure to the person who was deemed to have inherited them. A
succession of ages and generations might be supposed to have blotted out
your claims from existence; for it is not just that there should be no
term of time which can make security for lack of fact and a few
formalities. At all events, he had satisfied himself that his duty was to
act as he has done."

"Be it so! I do not seek to throw blame on him," said Middleton.
"Besides, Alice, he was your father!"

"Yes," said she, sadly smiling; "let him [have] what protection that
thought may give him, even though I lose what he may gain. And now here
we are at the house. At last, come in! It is your own; there is none that
can longer forbid you!"

They entered the door of the old mansion, now a farmhouse, and there were
its old hall, its old chambers, all before them. They ascended the
staircase, and stood on the landing-place above; while Middleton had
again that feeling that had so often made him dizzy,--that sense of being
in one dream and recognizing the scenery and events of a former dream. So
overpowering was this feeling, that he laid his hand on the slender arm
of Alice, to steady himself; and she comprehended the emotion that
agitated him, and looked into his eyes with a tender sympathy, which she
had never before permitted to be visible,--perhaps never before felt. He
steadied himself and followed her till they had entered an ancient
chamber, but one that was finished with all the comfortable luxury
customary to be seen in English homes.

"Whither have you led me now?" inquired Middleton.

"Look round," said Alice. "Is there nothing here that you ought to
recognize?--nothing that you kept the memory of, long ago?"

He looked round the room again and again, and at last, in a somewhat
shadowy corner, he espied an old cabinet made of ebony and inlaid with
pearl; one of those tall, stately, and elaborate pieces of furniture that
are rather articles of architecture than upholstery; and on which a
higher skill, feeling, and genius than now is ever employed on such
things, was expended. Alice drew near the stately cabinet and threw wide
the doors, which, like the portals of a palace, stood between two
pillars; it all seemed to be unlocked, showing within some beautiful old
pictures in the panel of the doors, and a mirror, that opened a long
succession of mimic halls, reflection upon reflection, extending to an
interminable nowhere.

"And what is this?" said Middleton,--"a cabinet? Why do you draw my
attention so strongly to it?"

"Look at it well," said she. "Do you recognize nothing there? Have you
forgotten your description? The stately palace with its architecture,
each pillar with its architecture, those pilasters, that frieze; you
ought to know them all. Somewhat less than you imagined in size, perhaps;
a fairy reality, inches for yards; that is the only difference. And you
have the key?"

And there then was that palace, to which tradition, so false at once and
true, had given such magnitude and magnificence in the traditions of the
Middleton family, around their shifting fireside in America. Looming afar
through the mists of time, the little fact had become a gigantic vision.
Yes, here it was in miniature, all that he had dreamed of; a palace of
four feet high!

"You have the key of this palace," said Alice; "it has waited--that is,
its secret and precious chamber has, for you to open it, these three
hundred years. Do you know how to find that secret chamber?"

Middleton, still in that dreamy mood, threw open an inner door of the
cabinet, and applying the old-fashioned key at his watch-chain to a hole
in the mimic pavement within, pressed one of the mosaics, and immediately
the whole floor of the apartment sank, and revealed a receptacle within.
Alice had come forward eagerly, and they both looked into the
hiding-place, expecting what should be there. It was empty! They looked
into each other's faces with blank astonishment. Everything had been so
strangely true, and so strangely false, up to this moment, that they
could not comprehend this failure at the last moment. It was the
strangest, saddest jest! It brought Middleton up with such a sudden
revulsion that he grew dizzy, and the room swam round him and the cabinet
dazzled before his eyes. It had been magnified to a palace; it had
dwindled down to Liliputian size; and yet, up till now, it had seemed to
contain in its diminutiveness all the riches which he had attributed to
its magnitude. This last moment had utterly subverted it; the whole great
structure seemed to vanish.

"See; here are the dust and ashes of it," observed Alice, taking
something that was indeed only a pinch of dust out of the secret
compartment. "There is nothing else."

II.

_May 5th, Wednesday_.--The father of these two sons, an aged man at the
time, took much to heart their enmity; and after the catastrophe, he
never held up his head again. He was not told that his son had perished,
though such was the belief of the family; but imbibed the opinion that he
had left his home and native land to become a wanderer on the face of the
earth, and that some time or other he might return. In this idea he spent
the remainder of his days; in this idea he died. It may be that the
influence of this idea might be traced in the way in which he spent some
of the latter years of his life, and a portion of the wealth which had
become of little value in his eyes, since it had caused dissension and
bloodshed between the sons of one household. It was a common mode of
charity in those days--a common thing for rich men to do--to found an
almshouse or a hospital, and endow it, for the support of a certain
number of old and destitute men or women, generally such as had some
claim of blood upon the founder, or at least were natives of the parish,
the district, the county, where he dwelt. The Eldredge Hospital was
founded for the benefit of twelve old men, who should have been wanderers
upon the face of the earth; men, they should be, of some education, but
defeated and hopeless, cast off by the world for misfortune, but not for
crime. And this charity had subsisted, on terms varying little or nothing
from the original ones, from that day to this; and, at this very time,
twelve old men were not wanting, of various countries, of various
fortunes, but all ending finally in ruin, who had centred here, to live
on the poor pittance that had been assigned to them, three hundred years
ago. What a series of chronicles it would have been if each of the
beneficiaries of this charity, since its foundation, had left a record of
the events which finally led him hither. Middleton often, as he talked
with these old men, regretted that he himself had no turn for authorship,
so rich a volume might he have compiled from the experience, sometimes
sunny and triumphant, though always ending in shadow, which he gathered
here. They were glad to talk to him, and would have been glad and
grateful for any auditor, as they sat on one or another of the stone
benches, in the sunshine of the garden; or at evening, around the great
fireside, or within the chimney-corner, with their pipes and ale.

There was one old man who attracted much of his attention, by the
venerableness of his aspect; by something dignified, almost haughty and
commanding, in his air. Whatever might have been the intentions and
expectations of the founder, it certainly had happened in these latter
days that there was a difficulty in finding persons of education, of good
manners, of evident respectability, to put into the places made vacant by
deaths of members; whether that the paths of life are surer now than they
used to be, and that men so arrange their lives as not to be left, in any
event, quite without resources as they draw near its close; at any rate,
there was a little tincture of the vagabond running through these twelve
quasi gentlemen,--through several of them, at least. But this old man
could not well be mistaken; in his manners, in his tones, in all his
natural language and deportment, there was evidence that he had been more
than respectable; and, viewing him, Middleton could not help wondering
what statesman had suddenly vanished out of public life and taken refuge
here, for his head was of the statesman-class, and his demeanor that of
one who had exercised influence over large numbers of men. He sometimes
endeavored to set on foot a familiar relation with this old man, but
there was even a sternness in the manner in which he repelled these
advances, that gave little encouragement for their renewal. Nor did it
seem that his companions of the Hospital were more in his confidence than
Middleton himself. They regarded him with a kind of awe, a shyness, and
in most cases with a certain dislike, which denoted an imperfect
understanding of him. To say the truth, there was not generally much love
lost between any of the members of this family; they had met with too
much disappointment in the world to take kindly, now, to one another or
to anything or anybody. I rather suspect that they really had more
pleasure in burying one another, when the time came, than in any other
office of mutual kindness and brotherly love which it was their part to
do; not out of hardness of heart, but merely from soured temper, and
because, when people have met disappointment and have settled down into
final unhappiness, with no more gush and spring of good spirits, there is
nothing any more to create amiability out of.

So the old people were unamiable and cross to one another, and unamiable
and cross to old Hammond, yet always with a certain respect; and the
result seemed to be such as treated the old man well enough. And thus he
moved about among them, a mystery; the histories of the others, in the
general outline, were well enough known, and perhaps not very uncommon;
this old man's history was known to none, except, of course, to the
trustees of the charity, and to the Master of the Hospital, to whom it
had necessarily been revealed, before the beneficiary could be admitted
as an inmate. It was judged, by the deportment of the Master, that the
old man had once held some eminent position in society; for, though bound
to treat them all as gentlemen, he was thought to show an especial and
solemn courtesy to Hammond.

Yet by the attraction which two strong and cultivated minds inevitably
have for one another, there did spring up an acquaintanceship, an
intercourse, between Middleton and this old man, which was followed up in
many a conversation which they held together on all subjects that were
supplied by the news of the day, or the history of the past. Middleton
used to make the newspaper the opening for much discussion; and it seemed
to him that the talk of his companion had much of the character of that
of a retired statesman, on matters which, perhaps, he would look at all
the more wisely, because it was impossible he could ever more have a
personal agency in them. Their discussions sometimes turned upon the
affairs of his own country, and its relations with the rest of the world,
especially with England; and Middleton could not help being struck with
the accuracy of the old man's knowledge respecting that country, which so
few Englishmen know anything about; his shrewd appreciation of the
American character,--shrewd and caustic, yet not without a good degree of
justice; the sagacity of his remarks on the past, and prophecies of what
was likely to happen,--prophecies which, in one instance, were singularly
verified, in regard to a complexity which was then arresting the
attention of both countries.

"You must have been in the United States," said he, one day.

"Certainly; my remarks imply personal knowledge," was the reply. "But it
was before the days of steam."

"And not, I should imagine, for a brief visit," said Middleton. "I only
wish the administration of this government had the benefit to-day of your
knowledge of my countrymen. It might be better for both of these kindred
nations."

"Not a whit," said the old man. "England will never understand America;
for England never does understand a foreign country; and whatever you may
say about kindred, America is as much a foreign country as France itself.
These two hundred years of a different climate and circumstances--of life
on a broad continent instead of in an island, to say nothing of the
endless intermixture of nationalities in every part of the United States,
except New England--have created a new and decidedly original type of
national character. It is as well for both parties that they should not
aim at any very intimate connection. It will never do."

"I should be sorry to think so," said Middleton; "they are at all events
two noble breeds of men, and ought to appreciate one another. And America
has the breadth of idea to do this for England, whether reciprocated or
not."

_Thursday, May 6th._--Thus Middleton was established in a singular way
among these old men, in one of the surroundings most unlike anything in
his own country. So old it was that it seemed to him the freshest and
newest thing that he had ever met with. The residence was made infinitely
the more interesting to him by the sense that he was near the place--as
all the indications warned him--which he sought, whither his dreams had
tended from his childhood; that he could wander each day round the park
within which were the old gables of what he believed was his hereditary
home. He had never known anything like the dreamy enjoyment of these
days; so quiet, such a contrast to the turbulent life from which he had
escaped across the sea. And here he set himself, still with that sense of
shadowiness in what he saw and in what he did, in making all the
researches possible to him, about the neighborhood; visiting every little
church that raised its square battlemented Norman tower of gray stone,
for several miles round about; making himself acquainted with each little
village and hamlet that surrounded these churches, clustering about the
graves of those who had dwelt in the same cottages aforetime. He visited
all the towns within a dozen miles; and probably there were few of the
inhabitants who had so good an acquaintance with the neighborhood as this
native American attained within a few weeks after his coming thither.

In course of these excursions he had several times met with a young
woman,--a young lady, one might term her, but in fact he was in some
doubt what rank she might hold, in England,--who happened to be wandering
about the country with a singular freedom. She was always alone, always
on foot; he would see her sketching some picturesque old church, some
ivied ruin, some fine drooping elm. She was a slight figure, much more so
than English women generally are; and, though healthy of aspect, had not
the ruddy complexion, which he was irreverently inclined to call the
coarse tint, that is believed the great charm of English beauty. There
was a freedom in her step and whole little womanhood, an elasticity, an
irregularity, so to speak, that made her memorable from first sight; and
when he had encountered her three or four times, he felt in a certain way
acquainted with her. She was very simply dressed, and quite as simple in
her deportment; there had been one or two occasions, when they had both
smiled at the same thing; soon afterwards a little conversation had taken
place between them; and thus, without any introduction, and in a way that
somewhat puzzled Middleton himself, they had become acquainted. It was so
unusual that a young English girl should be wandering about the country
entirely alone--so much less usual that she should speak to a
stranger--that Middleton scarcely knew how to account for it, but
meanwhile accepted the fact readily and willingly, for in truth he found
this mysterious personage a very likely and entertaining companion. There
was a strange quality of boldness in her remarks, almost of brusqueness,
that he might have expected to find in a young countrywoman of his own,
if bred up among the strong-minded, but was astonished to find in a young
Englishwoman. Somehow or other she made him think more of home than any
other person or thing he met with; and he could not but feel that she was
in strange contrast with everything about her. She was no beauty; very
piquant; very pleasing; in some points of view and at some moments
pretty; always good-humored, but somewhat too self-possessed for
Middleton's taste. It struck him that she had talked with him as if she
had some knowledge of him and of the purposes with which he was there;
not that this was expressed, but only implied by the fact that, on
looking back to what had passed, he found many strange coincidences in
what she had said with what he was thinking about.

He perplexed himself much with thinking whence this young woman had come,
where she belonged, and what might be her history; when, the next day, he
again saw her, not this time rambling on foot, but seated in an open
barouche with a young lady. Middleton lifted his hat to her, and she
nodded and smiled to him; and it appeared to Middleton that a
conversation ensued about him with the young lady, her companion. Now,
what still more interested him was the fact that, on the panel of the
barouche were the arms of the family now in possession of the estate of
Smithell's; so that the young lady, his new acquaintance, or the young
lady, her seeming friend, one or the other, was the sister of the present
owner of that estate. He was inclined to think that his acquaintance
could not be the Miss Eldredge, of whose beauty he had heard many tales
among the people of the neighborhood. The other young lady, a tall,
reserved, fair-haired maiden, answered the description considerably
better. He concluded, therefore, that his acquaintance must be a visitor,
perhaps a dependent and companion; though the freedom of her thought,
action, and way of life seemed hardly consistent with this idea. However,
this slight incident served to give him a sort of connection with the
family, and he could but hope that some further chance would introduce
him within what he fondly called his hereditary walls. He had come to
think of this as a dreamland; and it seemed even more a dreamland now
than before it rendered itself into actual substance, an old house of
stone and timber standing within its park, shaded about with its
ancestral trees.

But thus, at all events, he was getting himself a little wrought into the
net-work of human life around him, secluded as his position had at first
seemed to be, in the farmhouse where he had taken up his lodgings. For,
there was the Hospital and its old inhabitants, in whose monotonous
existence he soon came to pass for something, with his liveliness of
mind, his experience, his good sense, his patience as a listener, his
comparative youth even--his power of adapting himself to these stiff and
crusty characters, a power learned among other things in his political
life, where he had acquired something of the faculty (good or bad as
might be) of making himself all things to all men. But though he amused
himself with them all, there was in truth but one man among them in whom
he really felt much interest; and that one, we need hardly say, was
Hammond. It was not often that he found the old gentleman in a
conversible mood; always courteous, indeed, but generally cool and
reserved; often engaged in his one room, to which Middleton had never yet
been admitted, though he had more than once sent in his name, when
Hammond was not apparent upon the bench which, by common consent of the
Hospital, was appropriated to him.

One day, however, notwithstanding that the old gentleman was confined to
his room by indisposition, he ventured to inquire at the door, and,
considerably to his surprise, was admitted. He found Hammond in his
easy-chair, at a table, with writing-materials before him; and as
Middleton entered, the old gentleman looked at him with a stern, fixed
regard, which, however, did not seem to imply any particular displeasure
towards this visitor, but rather a severe way of regarding mankind in
general. Middleton looked curiously around the small apartment, to see
what modification the character of the man had had upon the customary
furniture of the Hospital, and how much of individuality he had given to
that general type. There was a shelf of books, and a row of them on the
mantel-piece; works of political economy, they appeared to be, statistics
and things of that sort; very dry reading, with which, however,
Middleton's experience as a politician had made him acquainted. Besides
these there were a few works on local antiquities, a county-history
borrowed from the Master's library, in which Hammond appeared to have
been lately reading.

"They are delightful reading," observed Middleton, "these old
county-histories, with their great folio volumes and their minute account
of the affairs of families and the genealogies, and descents of estates,
bestowing as much blessed space on a few hundred acres as other
historians give to a principality. I fear that in my own country we shall
never have anything of this kind. Our space is so vast that we shall
never come to know and love it, inch by inch, as the English antiquarians
do the tracts of country with which they deal; and besides, our land is
always likely to lack the interest that belongs to English estates; for
where land changes its ownership every few years, it does not become
imbued with the personalities of the people who live on it. It is but so
much grass; so much dirt, where a succession of people have dwelt too
little to make it really their own. But I have found a pleasure that I
had no conception of before, in reading some of the English local
histories."

"It is not a usual course of reading for a transitory visitor," said
Hammond. "What could induce you to undertake it?"

"Simply the wish, so common and natural with Americans," said
Middleton--"the wish to find out something about my kindred--the local
origin of my own family."

"You do not show your wisdom in this," said his visitor. "America had
better recognize the fact that it has nothing to do with England, and
look upon itself as other nations and people do, as existing on its own
hook. I never heard of any people looking hack to the country of their
remote origin in the way the Anglo-Americans do. For instance, England is
made up of many alien races, German, Danish. Norman, and what not: it has
received large accessions of population at a later date than the
settlement of the United States. Yet these families melt into the great
homogeneous mass of Englishmen, and look hack no more to any other
country. There are in this vicinity many descendants of the French
Huguenots; but they care no more for France than for Timbuctoo, reckoning
themselves only Englishmen, as if they were descendants of the aboriginal
Britons. Let it he so with you."

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