Hayslope Grange: A Tale of the Civil War by Emma Leslie (best e book reader txt) 📗

"He will come to-morrow," replied Maud; "he is ill—very ill, but may get better if he has a physician."

"Tell me all about him, Maud; you saved his life, I know."

Bertram and Bessie were almost as eager as their father to hear all about their brother, and so in the hearing of them all, Maud told how she had been fetched to the cottage that evening to see Harry.

Master Drury would have had him brought to the Grange that night, had it been possible, but was at length persuaded to wait until the morning, on Maud promising to go down and prepare him for the removal as soon as it was light.

Captain Stanhope and his wife were the only ones who did not rejoice at the thought of Harry's return, and it was easy to see why they were so disappointed. The Captain, having an eye to Mary's wealth when he married her, had done all he could to increase Master Drury's anger against his son, and even persuaded him to disinherit Bertram in favour of Mary. Now the hopes this had raised were all crushed, and the next day, before the litter arrived with Harry, the disappointed pair had left for Oxford. Mistress Mabel, finding her nephew's return was inevitable, wisely made the best of it, and accorded a grim welcome, hoping they would not all be beheaded by-and-by for sheltering a traitor.

The meeting between the long-estranged father and son we will pass over in silence. Harry had not been at the Grange long before he began to improve, and soon hinted that, instead of a funeral, there would have to be a wedding for him. Master Drury too began to grow stronger, but the overthrow of his faith in King Charles was a blow he could not recover entirely; and although he confessed to his son that he believed he was right in espousing the cause of the Parliament, yet he begged him not to leave the Grange again while he lived, a promise Harry was the more willing to give since his health would not allow him to join the army again, and Maud had consented to be his wife early in the spring.

Mistress Mabel's fear of being beheaded for receiving her nephew was quite groundless, and even Captain Stanhope was glad to ask the interest and protection of the man he had sought to injure when the Royalists were ultimately defeated and the Commonwealth established. Before this, however, Harry succeeded his father as Master Drury of Hayslope Grange, for the old man never held up his head after the death of King Charles, and died a few months after the King was beheaded. His last days were calm and tranquil. "By the grace of Christ," he was wont to say—"he had conquered his pride and prejudice, which had brought such misery to Hayslope Grange."