kildhurm's Oafz.

CHAPTER I.

OLD LADY MAINWARING.

I SEE by the papers that this grand old lady is dead. She had passed her eighty-ninth birthday. Born in a year when Warren Hastings was still on his trial for high crimes and misdemeanours, the only child of Sir Philip Kildhurm of Kildhurm Tower, she was married at seventeen to Captain Frank Mainwaring, of His Britannic Majesty's Navy—a man who enjoyed the distinction of being wounded at Trafalgar. Captain Mainwaring (knighted in 1811 on acceding to his uncle's estates) died in 1840; he left two sons and a daughter. Both the sons died in the cholera epidemic of 1832, unmarried. The daughter was wedded to a gentleman of family and estate, and accompanied him to India, where he held some official position. But this whole family (several children had been born) were murdered in the Sepoy outbreak. Thus it came about that, for the last twenty years, Lady Mainwaring has been the sole survivor of her race; and now she is gone, they are extinct.

She was a grand, serene old lady: with a noble face, whose beauty time could not altogether take away, and a majestic figure that scarcely stooped beneath the weight of fourscore years and nine. Her eyes were remarkable-large, black, and keen, and innocent of spectacles to the very end; but her hair, famous two generations since for its sable luxuriance, became in later times snow-white, although the long arched eyebrows kept their former hue. A wonderful old lady: endowed to the last with singular personal fascination, her manner the perfection of gentle dignity, in looking at her, or listening to the inflections of her low deep voice, you felt that hers was a spirit of no ordinary capacities and powers. But she was the descendant of no ordinary ancestry. Several of her progenitors had been endowed with gifts of the kind that modern science is always no less quick to explain away than slow to explain, but in which the folk of a less sophisticated age did powerfully and potently believe. I am not at this moment concerned to enter upon a discussion of supernatural phenomena, so called, beyond remarking that no physiologist can pretend to any right to be heard at all on the subject: the credulity which can

believe witchcraft and sorcery to be the bugbears of a diseased imagination being too gross to command attention. Reasonable people believe that the human body has a soul; that there is a spiritual sight answering to the bodily sight; and that when this spiritual sight is opened, it must inevitably behold the objects of a spiritual world. Concerning the spiritual world two or three facts, at least, are self-evident. Being a world of the mind, only the laws of the mind can hold sway there; it is therefore free from the trammels of space and time. Further, it is a world of real substance, in contradistinction to the apparent substantiality of the world of matter. Thus far logic carries us; and we do not at present need to go farther. For if man, living as to his body in the material world, lives at the same time as to his spirit in the spiritual world, then prophecy, soothsaying, second-sight, or whatever 'miracle' involves the transgression of no spiritual principle, becomes only the corollary of our theorem. The wonder-workers of old are justified. As for the Charlatans, they are not tricksters merely, but profaners, whose doom is spiritual death.

It was not unknown to some of the more intimate of Lady Mainwaring's friends that she possessed abnormal powers; and though she was constitutionally reserved in her communications, she occasionally came out with some noteworthy utterance on the subject. But if she saw and knew things beyond the ordinary scope, these influenced her spiritual rather than her material existence. She was well poised; there was no one-sidedness in her character; the spirit was so soundly and healthily wedded to the body that neither was in excess; they performed their several functions in such harmony that one was seldom engaged apart from the other. But although this was happily the case with Lady Mainwaring, it had been otherwise with some of her ancestors. They could not walk the world with even and measured steps, but ever and anon plunged or soared into abysses which no mortal plummet has sounded. In Lady Mainwaring's later years, a spirit of sweet and dignified garrulity occasionally inspired her, under the influence of which she would relate to discreet and sympathetic ears many strange particulars both of her own and of her forefathers' history. Now that she is gone, I am at liberty to reproduce some of these communications; giving them, so far as is possible, a connected and consecutive form. Her singularly fascinating narrative faculty, however, I cannot pretend to imitate. She was full of unrhymed and unwritten poetry of an elevated and mystic stamp. She had no ambition to be a writer, and after all she could never have done herself justice on paper. Whoever had listened to the subdued melody of her tones, flexible, various, con

trolled, and reflecting every emotional phase of the tale as it was told; whoever had felt the blood shrink to his heart at crises of the story, marked by a slight movement of her long white hands, a quiver of the black brows, an unexpected hush in the voice— whoever had had experience of this would have known that it was not to be sought on any printed page. Yet there was nothing histrionic in Lady Mainwaring's demeanour. A person sitting a dozen yards away from her could not have distinguished a word she said, and would scarcely have perceived that she was making use of gestures to enforce her meaning. It needed a close eye to catch

all the subtle play of that venerable countenance.

The story I have compiled begins at a period now distant; yet the series of events appears compact and coherent. What fact is there more tough and undeniable than an oak in an English park? Yet, firmly rooted though it be among the things of to-day, its beginnings date back a thousand years; it is a creature of the Dark Ages, a contemporary of legendary heroes and heroines, giants and fairies. It is a tangible proof of the mysterious past; but, in bringing vanished ages into the light of the passing moment, it takes from them the very reality whereof they testify.

CHAPTER II.

SIR BRIAN'S TROUBLES.

THE Oak of Kildhurm does not date back a thousand years. Its exact age is not known, but it grew to be a sturdy vegetable, great of girth and royal in its spread of limb. It was first recognisable as a tree in the hither outskirts of Queen Elizabeth's time, or in King James's earlier years: about the epoch, say, of the Gunpowder Treason, when the struggles between King and Parliament which culminated in the rebellion of two-score years later were just beginning: when people wore ruffs and tight waists, and cultivated a stiffness of aspect as if they were continually sitting for their portraits; when the names of Bacon, Raleigh, Shakespeare, and Drake had as yet acquired no legendary halo; when gentlemen were haughty and punctilious, wore long swords with basket hilts, and were bloodthirstily polite in using the same; when women were almost as beautiful and virtuous as they are at the present day, but less squeamish upon certain points; when Spain was as much of a scapegoat for English vituperation as Russia is now; when popery was not merely a picturesque opinion, but a matter of blazing faggots and iron virgins; when El Dorado still gleamed along the horizons of the Spanish main. At about this time it

was that two men riding in opposite directions along a lonely road, met beneath a huge oak tree, whose gnarled limbs, thickly clothed with sombre foliage, extended nearly across the way.

The name of only one of these men has been preserved to us by tradition. Sir Brian Kildhurm, a valiant knight of Queen Elizabeth's manufacture, had fought with distinction in the Spanish wars, and afterwards (though himself of Irish descent) had unsheathed his sword for the repression of the Irish difficulties of that day. He owned a fair estate on the coast of Cumberland, a castle with a broad-bottomed tower on its seaward corner, a little black-haired son, and a very beautiful wife. With regard to this same wife, however, there was a difficulty, it would be hard to say exactly what: but, at all events, the personage who chanced to encounter Sir Brian beneath the overhanging branches of the oak tree on the lonely road was, in Sir Brian's opinion, in some way responsible for it.

They reined-in their horses, and exchanged a few words, which were doubtless of a courteous but hardly of a conciliating tendency. Each wore some light armour on head, arms, and breasts, high heavy boots, and the customary sword and dagger. But it is to be noted that, whereas Sir Brian's sword was of the rapier description, that of his opponent was a ponderous double-edged weapon, fitter to be wielded with two hands than with one. however, was a man of vast size and strength, broad of beam and massive of limb, and with a great sheaf of rough red beard blowing about his face and chest ; and he could flirt the huge sword about as lightly as if it had been a bamboo walking-stick. Sir Brian, on the other hand, like all the men of his race, was tall, lithe, and agile, and terribly skilful of fence.

Its owner,

It will be understood that these details would not have been dwelt upon, had the encounter between the two gentlemen been destined to pass off peacefully. But peace was far from the hearts of either of them. They meant deadly mischief to one another; and Sir Brian at least had long looked for an opportunity of doing his share of it. Accordingly, after levelling a proper amount of fantastic and quaint abuse at one another, these two sons of Adam dismounted from their steeds, placed themselves face to face on the greensward beneath the oak tree, and then and there presently set to work to spill each other's life-blood. Meanwhile, their horses peaceably cropped the herbage, and took the little intermission in their labours in very good part.

Sir Brian never appeared to have a chance against his gigantic adversary. What avails a cunning guard, when sheer strength beats it down, and when blow follows blow so rapidly and with

such outrageous force, that the wiriest opponent has much ado to hop out of the way of them, leaving all attempt at retaliation out of the question for the present? In spite of Sir Brian's best activity, the giant's weapon several times reached his body, crushing the light plates of iron armour, and once or twice biting through them to the flesh. The caitiff must needs wax scant of breath ere long,' thought Sir Brian to himself, as he saw that steel flail flash up and down; but it was dangerous work waiting for that time to arrive. In a moment a blow fell upon his helmet, sheared away the left side of it, and grazed the scalp, so that blood rushed forth and made gory the knight's face and gorget. A little giddy from this shock, Sir Brian staggered, his knees bent, and his neck felt an inch or two shorter than was comfortable. Perceiving this, his enemy resolved to make an end of him forthwith; for there was no question of giving quarter in this fight, but one or both must never fight again. Grasping his sword with both hands, therefore, he poised it for a back-stroke into which he threw the whole force and weight of his body. Sir Brian, glancing dizzily up, saw the keen blade glitter above him; then down it came-but not all the way down! For in mid descent it came in contact with a low-lying limb of the oak treenine inches thick of hard living wood-sheared through it to the last half-inch, and the hilt flew from the striker's grasp. His arms dropped to his sides, tingling to the shoulder. At the same moment Sir Brian had lunged forward with the strength of despair, and his rapier passed clean through the other's neck, who fell backwards with a groan and a gurgle, breaking the rapier-blade short off in the wound. He never spoke a word, but bled like a bull, and in a few minutes was dead.

Sir Brian Kildhurm leaned upon the fragment of his sword, recovering his breath, and staring at the red-bearded face of his dead enemy.

'So much for my Lady Ursula's sweetheart!' he muttered to

himself.

After standing a little longer, he wiped his sword and slapped it home in the sheath; unlaced and flung away the pieces of his helmet; and at length, kneeling on one knee beside the burly corpse, he cut open with his dagger the front of the doublet. A broad gold chain and locket were revealed, the sight whereof caused Sir Brian's lean visage to wrinkle itself painfully. He took up the locket, sticky as it was with blood, and opened it. It contained, not the lock of crisp black hair that he had put in it ten years ago, but a soft brown coil of a woman's braid. He closed the locket and thrust it into his bosom. He took his enemy's dagger, which

VOL. XLI. NO, CLXIII,

2