Next Esmond opened that long cupboard over the woodwork of the mantel-piece, big enough to hold a man, and in which Mr. Holt used to keep sundry secret properties of his.  The two swords he remembered so well as a boy, lay actually there still, and Esmond took them out and wiped them, with a strange curiosity of emotion.  There were a bundle of papers here, too, which no doubt had been left at Holt’s last visit to the place, in my Lord Viscount’s life, that very day when the priest had been arrested and taken to Hexham Castle.  Esmond made free with these papers, and found treasonable matter of King William’s reign, the names of Charnock and Perkins, Sir John Fenwick and Sir John Friend, Rookwood and Lodwick, Lords Montgomery and Allesbury, Clarendon and Yarmouth, that had all been engaged in plots against the usurper; a letter from the Duke of Berwick too, and one from the King at St. Germains, offering to confer upon his trusty and well-beloved Francis Viscount Castlewood the titles of Earl and Marquis of Esmond, bestowed by patent royal, and in the fourth year of his reign, upon Thomas Viscount Castlewood and the heirs-male of his body, in default of which issue the ranks and dignities were to pass to Francis aforesaid.

This was the paper, whereof my lord had spoken, which Holt showed him the very day he was arrested, and for an answer to which he would come back in a week’s time.  I put these papers hastily into the crypt whence I had taken them, being interrupted by a tapping of a light finger at the ring of the chamber-door:  ’twas my kind mistress, with her face full of love and welcome.  She, too, had passed the night wakefuly, no doubt; but neither asked the other how the hours had been spent.  There are things we divine without speaking, and know though they happen out of our sight.  This fond lady hath told me that she knew both days when I was wounded abroad.  Who shall say how far sympathy reaches, and how truly love can prophesy?  “I looked into your room,” was all she said; “the bed was vacant, the little old bed!  I knew I should find you here.”  And tender and blushing faintly with a benediction in her eyes, the gentle creature kissed him.

They walked out, hand-in-hand, through the old court, and to the terrace-walk, where the grass was glistening with dew, and the birds in the green woods above were singing their delicious choruses under the blushing morning sky.  How well all things were remembered!  The ancient towers and gables of the hall darkling against the east, the purple shadows on the green slopes, the quaint devices and carvings of the dial, the forest-crowned heights, the fair yellow plain cheerful with crops and corn, the shining river rolling through it towards the pearly hills beyond; all these were before us, along with a thousand beautiful memories of our youth, beautiful and sad, but as real and vivid in our minds as that fair and always-remembered scene our eyes beheld once more.  We forget nothing.  The memory sleeps, but wakens again; I often think how it shall be when, after the last sleep of death, the reveillee shall arouse us for ever, and the past in one flash of self-consciousness rush back, like the soul revivified.