Chapter IV: Applewood

As the carriage drew up, the front door of the house was opened by a servant in livery, and in the lighted hall beyond there appeared a young girl, who, by her stature, by her figure--which was light and graceful--and by the unconfined masses of her flowing dark-brown hair, could not have been more than seventeen--the age of all heroines in the good old-fashioned times.

Messrs. Quirky and Macfarisee sprang out and ascended the steps.

"I am so glad you have come at last," said the young lady, in a tremulous voice of welcome. "My aunt has longed for you both so much, but more especially for you, Mr. Macfarisee; she says that your prayers and pious conversation achieve for her a greater ease of mind and body than the ministrations of any clergyman or physician."

"My dear Miss Amy, I fear you flatter my partner," snarled Mr. Quirky; "but we hastened from town (though hard pressed by a first-rate jury case) the moment we received your letter, stating that she wished to settle her worldly affairs."

"And how does the Lord deal with her?" asked Macfarisee, in his most bland and dulcet manner.

"Severely, sir," replied the young girl whom he named Amy, with her eyes full of tears; "you know she is always believing herself to be dying, but she has been in great suffering for three nights, and for these three nights and as many days I have never left her bedside."

I now perceived that the girl's dark-blue eyes were dimmed and bloodshot with tears and watching.

"Miss Amy," said Macfarisee, in the slow and impressive tone, which he used to all but his clerks, to whom he spoke sharply enough, "I feel happy--a holy happiness--that illness has enlightened her mind, and that at last she has resolved to take my advice."

"Sir----"

"I have so frequently recommended her to--to settle her worldly affairs; but she weakly shunned all that reminded her of mortality, ever replying that sufficient for the day was the evil thereof; but, alas! my dear child," he continued, in a sing-song voice, "lo you now, death cometh like a thief in the night; but I trust he finds the Lord's faithful servant duly prepared for the great change that is at hand."

"Bravo, old six-and-eightpence!" thought I, as Quirky, whom his partner's prosing wearied at times, snatched the green bag from me impatiently, saying,--

"Here you, sir,--give me the documents. Miss Amy, your aunt's state of health has long been precarious; but what says the doctor of her?"

"That--that----"

"What?"

"She cannot last long now; and she has been in misery, waiting for you."

"The deuce! then we have no time to lose," said Macfarisee, with one of his keen office glances at Quirky, through a pair of eyes which were always "half-closed, like those of a night-bird in the daytime."

"My dear, dear aunt!" sobbed the poor young girl; "follow me to her room, if you please, and this young gentleman----"

"Oh, he is only one of our young men, and may remain here quite well."

"_Here_, in this cold lobby? Oh, that would never do! Walk into this room, sir; please to excuse us," said the girl politely; and while my two employers, whom for their pride and hypocrisy I consigned to very warm quarters indeed, walked gingerly up stairs, I was left to my own reflections in a dark parlour.

In this sudden trip to the country there was something mysterious; and as I gazed through the window upon the dark branches of the trees, tossing on the night-wind, and pictured to myself the old woman dying up stairs, strange and gloomy thoughts came over me; but on a footman entering with candles, I asked him the name of the house.

"Applewood," said he.

"The house of Mrs. Rose?"

"Yes."

Then a sudden light broke in upon me. I remembered that we had a wealthy client--an old widowed lady--whose failing health, credulity, and ample funds, had long rendered her a source of the deepest solicitude to Messrs. Quirky and Macfarisee, whose passive victim she had to every purpose and intent become; for she believed devoutly in the worth, piety, and good works of our third partner. In his double capacity of elder of his kirk and legal adviser, Macfarisee had long been one of those who hovered by the bedside of the dying, as vultures hover round a piece of carrion, and this wealthy old lady, Mrs. Rose, of Applewood, had long been marked by him as fair game to be run down at last.

It was by a studied system of cant, and by an external aspect of piety in its most fervid form, that Nathaniel Macfarisee usually recommended himself to those whom he deluded, and the number of legacies left to him by departed friends was really somewhat surprising, though many of them were averred to be for purposes of religion and philanthropy; and when conversing with a bewildered client, whom

He darkened by elucidation,
And mystified by explanation.

it was amusing to hear him interlarding all his remarks with phrases and texts from scripture.

Amy Lee, the only living relation possessed by the old proprietress of Applewood, was the orphan daughter of a younger sister whom she never loved, for having married a young officer whose attentions had been long and provokingly divided between them. Amy had been sent from India to her care and kindness, penniless and otherwise friendless, for her father and mother, with many friends and relations, had perished in the dungeons of Tippo Saib.

The grudge which the old lady bore her sister in youth, for depriving her of a first love, had taken some strange and fantastic form of aversion in maturer years; and thus, though the poor and lonely Amy attended her sick bed, noting anxiously and sedulously all her querulous fancies, seeking to soothe her gusts of petulance, with the filial tenderness of a daughter and the patience of a little saint, she never could win the regard of, and barely earned a smile from, this strange old woman, whose days and ailments were now drawing to a close. Yet, the orphan girl loved this kinswoman who loved not her, for she had traced something of her dead mother's features in her face--a mother for whom she still sorrowed,--and she found the best solace for that grief was to discharge the duties of affection, which fate had transferred from one sister to the other.

Mrs. Rose was the sole residuary legatee of her late husband, an old nabob, who had returned from India with a visage the colour of the gold he had acquired, and a heart that had narrowed and shrunk as his liver increased; thus, her fortune was ample, and, as she was without children, she had long given her whole thoughts and attention to the welfare and success of the Rev. Mr. Pawkie's dissenting meeting-house, of which Macfarisee was an elder, and the porch of which edifice she had become fully assured was the only avenue to Heaven; thus, the three had long gone hand-in-hand, in holding conventicles and meetings for the out-pouring of the spirit, amid tea, toast, and cold water--for humiliation, prayer, and the regeneration of all those wicked and benighted heathens, who did not occupy pews in the square-windowed, low-roofed, and barnlike edifice in which the Rev. Jedediah Pawkie expounded the pure gospel, inspired by the light that shone from the new Jerusalem, and consigned to very hot quarters indeed all who took their own way to Heaven instead of his.

Of this fustian spirit of religion and fanaticism, when combined with an aversion for the only living tie that existed between her and the world, the worthy Macfarisee--that inflexible Mede and upright pillar of the Kirk--hastened to take his usual advantage; and in the sequel he proved himself to be a greater wolf in sheep's clothing than I could ever have imagined.