Lady Hester | Page 2

familiar, and blunt--but very kindly and friendly,
was at work there with some French-Canadian labourers.
Bertram's friend knew him and often halted there on hunting
expeditions, so they went into the house--very nicely furnished, a pretty
parlour with muslin curtains, a piano, and everything pleasant; and Joel
Lea called his wife, a handsome, fair young woman. Bertram says from
the first she put him in mind of some one, and he was trying to make
out who it could be. Then came the wife's mother, a neat little delicate,
bent woman, with dark eyes, that looked, Bertram said, as if they had
had some great fright and never recovered it. They called her Mrs.
Dayman.
She was silent at first, and only helped her daughter and the maid to get
the dinner, and an excellent dinner it was; but she kept on looking at
Bertram, and she quite started when she heard him called Mr. Trevor.
When they were just rising up, and going to take leave, she came up to
him in a frightened agitated manner, as if she could not help it, and
said--
"Sir, you are so like a gentleman I once knew. Was any relation of
yours ever in Canada?"
"My father was in Canada," answered Bertram.

"Oh no," she said then, very much affected, "the Captain Trevor I knew
was killed in the Lake Campaign in 1814. It must be a mistake, yet you
put me in mind of him so strangely."
Then Bertram protested that she must mean my father, for that he had
been a captain in the --th, and had been stationed at York (as Toronto
was then called), but was badly wounded in repulsing the American
attack on the Lakes in 1814.
"Not dead?" she asked, with her cheeks getting pale, and a sort of
excitement about her, that made Bertram wonder, at the moment, if
there could have been any old attachment between them, and he
explained how my father was shipped off from England between life
and death; and how, when he recovered, he found his uncle dying, and
the title and property coming to him.
"And he married!" she said, with a bewildered look; and Bertram told
her that he had married Lady Mary Lupton--as his uncle and father had
wished--and how we four were their children. I can fancy how kindly
and tenderly Bertram would speak when he saw that she was anxious
and pained; and she took hold of his hand and held him, and when he
said something of mentioning that he had seen her, she cried out with a
sort of terror, "Oh no, no, Mr. Trevor, I beg you will not. Let him think
me dead, as I thought him. And then she drew down Bertram's tall head
to her, and fairly kissed his forehead, adding, "I could not help it, sir; an
old woman's kiss will do you no harm!"
Then he went away. He never did tell us of the meeting till long after.
He was not a great letter writer, and, besides, he thought my father
might not wish to have the flirtations of his youth brought up against
him. So we little knew!
But it seems that the daughter and son-in-law were just as much
amazed as Bertram, and when he was gone, and the poor old lady sank
into her chair and burst out crying, and as they came and asked who or
what this was, she sobbed out, "Your brother Hester! Oh! so like
him--my husband!" or something to that effect, as unawares. She
wanted to take it back again, but of course Hester would not let her, and

made her tell the whole.
It seems that her name was Faith Le Blanc; she was half English, half
French-Canadian, and lived in a village in a very unsettled part, where
Captain Trevor used to come to hunt, and where he made love to her,
and ended by marrying her--with the knowledge of her family and his
brother officers, but not of his family--just before he was ordered to the
Lake frontier. The war had stirred up the Indians to acts of violence
they had not committed for many years, and a tribe of them came down
on the village, plundering, burning, killing, and torturing those whom
they had known in friendly intercourse.
Faith Le Blanc had once given some milk to a papoose upon its
mother's back, and perhaps for this reason she was spared, but everyone
belonging to her was, she believed, destroyed, and she was carried
away by the tribe, who wanted to make her one of themselves; and she
knew that if she offended them, such horrors as she had seen practised
on others would come on her.
However, they had gone to another resort of