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It was a party gotten up by the foreign guests to the ladies of the fort, prepared and arranged by the active Lady Elfrida, assisted by the only gentleman of the party, Peter Atherly, who, from his acquaintance with the locality, was allowed to accompany them. The other gentlemen, who with a large party of officers and soldiers were shooting in the vicinity, were sufficiently near for protection.
Quieted at last by opiates, she fell into a more lucid but scarcely less distressing attitude. She knew that Sally Atherly of Rough and Ready wasn't considered fit company for "Atherly of Atherly" by his fine new friends. This and much more in a voice mingling maudlin sentiment with bitter resentment, and with an ominous glitter in her bloodshot and glairy eyes.
'Yes, said Lucy, 'I have heard what you say about those things before, but I never saw them in connection with each other. 'Nor should I have seen them in this light, if it had not been for a conversation between Captain Atherly and another gentleman, one day at Dykelands, said Helen.
As far as emotion went she thought he had the advantage of the stoniest and longest dead of them all. Perhaps he did not like them? But he must be careful what he SAID, for some of her own people were there, manifestly this one. So she had a right to come there as well as he, and she could act as cicerone! This one was a De Brecy, one of King John's knights, who married an Atherly.
He could recognize some kinship in the manners and customs of the people to those he had known in the West and on the Atlantic coast, but not to his own individuality, and he seemed even more a stranger here where he had expected to feel the thrill of consanguinity than in the West. He had accepted the invitation of the living Atherly for the sake of the Atherlys long dead and forgotten.
"I suggested an interview with you, but he seemed to think it quite unnecessary, if I could give him the information he required." "Ha!" said Sir Edward promptly, "we'll invite him here. Lady Atherly can bring in some people to see him. Is he ahem What is he like? The usual American, I suppose?" "Not at all. Quite foreign-looking dark, and rather like an Italian. There is no resemblance to Mr.
It seemed ridiculous that a woman of thirty, of masculine character, should require a chaperon in a brother of equal age; but Peter knew the singular blending of childlike ignorance with this Amazonian quality. He had made his arrangements for an absence from Atherly of three or four years, and they departed together. The young fair-haired lawyer came to the stage-coach office to see them off.
In the intervals of her delirium she called Peter by name, talked frenziedly and mysteriously of his "high connections" alluded to himself and his sister as being of the "true breed" and with a certain vigor of epithet, picked up in the familiarity of the camp during the days when she was known as "Old Ma'am Atherly" or "Aunt Sally," declared that they were "no corn-cracking Hoosiers," "hayseed pikes," nor "northern Yankee scum," and that she should yet live to see them "holding their own lands again and the lands of their forefathers."
An indefinable uneasiness crept over the little party, which reached its climax in the summoning of the other officers, and the sudden flashing out of news. The reconnoitring party had found the dead bodies of Peter Atherly and his sister on the plains at the edge of the empty wood. The women were gathered in the commandant's quarters, and for the moment seemed to have been forgotten.
With the energy of malevolence, she stammered: "There wasn't no records there wasn't no family Bible! it's all a lie you hear me! Your Atherly that you're so proud of was just a British bummer who was kicked outer his family in England and sent to buzz round in Americky.
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