The Queen of Hearts | Page 5

can express. The memory of my wife is busy at my heart
while I think of those past times. The forgotten tears rise in my eyes
again, and trouble the course of my pen while it traces these simple
lines.
Let me pass rapidly over the one unspeakable misery of my life; let me

try to remember now, as I tried to remember then, that she lived to see
our only child--our son, who was so good to her, who is still so good to
me--grow up to manhood; that her head lay on my bosom when she
died; and that the last frail movement of her hand in this world was the
movement that brought it closer to her boy's lips.
I bore the blow--with God's help I bore it, and bear it still. But it struck
me away forever from my hold on social life; from the purposes and
pursuits, the companions and the pleasures of twenty years, which her
presence had sanctioned and made dear to me. If my son George had
desired to follow my profession, I should still have struggled against
myself, and have kept my place in the world until I had seen h im
prosperous and settled. But his choice led him to the army; and before
his mother's death he had obtained his commission, and had entered on
his path in life. No other responsibility remained to claim from me the
sacrifice of myself; my brothers had made my place ready for me by
their fireside; my heart yearned, in its desolation, for the friends and
companions of the old boyish days; my good, brave son promised that
no year should pass, as long as he was in England, without his coming
to cheer me; and so it happened that I, in my turn, withdrew from the
world, which had once been a bright and a happy world to me, and
retired to end my days, peacefully, contentedly, and gratefully, as my
brothers are ending theirs, in the solitude of The Glen Tower.
How many years have passed since we have all three been united it is
not necessary to relate. It will be more to the purpose if I briefly record
that we have never been separated since the day which first saw us
assembled together in our hillside retreat; that we have never yet
wearied of the time, of the place, or of ourselves; and that the influence
of solitude on our hearts and minds has not altered them for the worse,
for it has not embittered us toward our fellow-creatures, and it has not
dried up in us the sources from which harmless occupations and
innocent pleasures may flow refreshingly to the last over the waste
places of human life. Thus much for our own story, and for the
circumstances which have withdrawn us from the world for the rest of
our days.

And now imagine us three lonely old men, tall and lean, and
white-headed; dressed, more from past habit than from present
association, in customary suits of solemn black: Brother Owen,
yielding, gentle, and affectionate in look, voice, and manner; brother
Morgan, with a quaint, surface-sourness of address, and a tone of dry
sarcasm in his talk, which single him out, on all occasions, as a
character in our little circle; brother Griffith forming the link between
his two elder companions, capable, at one time, of sympathizing with
the quiet, thoughtful tone of Owen's conversation, and ready, at another,
to exchange brisk severities on life and manners with Morgan--in short,
a pliable, double-sided old lawyer, who stands between the
clergyman-brother and the physician-brother with an ear ready for each,
and with a heart open to both, share and share together.
Imagine the strange old building in which we live to be really what its
name implies--a tower standing in a glen; in past times the fortress of a
fighting Welsh chieftain; in present times a dreary land-lighthouse,
built up in many stories of two rooms each, with a little modern lean-to
of cottage form tacked on quaintly to one of its sides; the great hill, on
whose lowest slope it stands, rising precipitously behind it; a dark,
swift-flowing stream in the valley below; hills on hills all round, and no
way of approach but by one of the loneliest and wildest crossroads in
all South Wales.
Imagine such a place of abode as this, and such inhabitants of it as
ourselves, and them picture the descent among us--as of a goddess
dropping from the clouds--of a lively, handsome, fashionable young
lady--a bright, gay, butterfly creature, used to flutter away its existence
in the broad sunshine of perpetual gayety--a child of the new generation,
with all the modern ideas whirling together in her pretty head, and all
the modern accomplishments