Collingwood

Collingwood was to have a tenant at last. For twelve long years
its massive walls of dark grey stone had frowned in gloomy silence
upon the passers-by, the terror of the superstitious ones, who had
peopled its halls with ghosts and goblins, saying even that the
snowy-haired old man, its owner, had more than once been seen
there, moving restlessly from room to room and muttering of the
darkness which came upon him when he lost his fair young wife and
her beautiful baby Charlie. The old man was not dead, but for
years he had been a stranger to his former home.

In foreign lands he had wandered--up and down, up and down--from
the snow-clad hills of Russia to where the blue skies of Italy
bent softly over him and the sunny plains of France smiled on him
a welcome. But the darkness he bewailed was there as elsewhere,
and to his son he said, at last, "We will go to America, but not
to Collingwood--not where Lucy used to live, and where the boy was
born."

So they came back again and made for themselves a home on the
shore of the silvery lake so famed in song, where they hoped to
rest from their weary journeyings. But it was not so decreed.
Slowly as poison works within the blood, a fearful blight was
stealing upon the noble, uncomplaining Richard, who had sacrificed
his early manhood to his father's fancies, and when at last the
blow had fallen and crushed him in its might, he became as
helpless as a little child, looking to others for the aid he had
heretofore been accustomed to render. Then it was that the weak
old man emerged for a time from beneath the cloud which had
enveloped him so long, and winding his arms around his stricken
boy, said, submissively, "What will poor Dick have me do?"