The Disappearance I - The Place & The Man

Near the centre of one of the most flourishing of the western counties of Ontario, and on the line of the Great Western branch of the Grand Trunk Railway, stands a pleasant little town, which, for the purposes of this narrative, may be called Millbrook. Not that its real name is Millbrook, or any thing in the least similar thereto; but as this story, so far as its main events are concerned, is strictly true, and some of the actors in it are still living, it is perhaps desirable not to be too precise in the matter of locality. The strange disappearance of Mr. Savareen made a good deal of noise at the time, not only in the neighbourhood, but throughout Upper Canada. It was a nine days' wonder, and was duly chronicled and commented upon by the leading provincial newspapers of the period; but it has long since passed out of general remembrance, and the chain of circumstances subsequently arising out of the event have never been made known beyond the limited circle immediately interested. The surviving members of that circle would probably not thank me for once more dragging their names conspicuously before the public gaze. I might certainly veil their personalities under the thin disguise of initial letters, but to this mode of relating a story I have always entertained a decided objection. The chief object to be aimed at in story-telling is to hold the attention of the reader, and, speaking for myself, I am free to confess that I have seldom been able to feel any absorbing interest in characters who figure merely as the M. or N. of the baptismal service. I shall therefore assign fictitious names to persons and places, and I cannot even pretend to mathematical exactness as to one or two minor details. In reporting conversations, for instance, I do not profess to reproduce the ipsissima verba of the speakers, but merely to give the effect and purport of their discourses. I have, however, been at some pains to be accurate, and I think I may justly claim that in all essential particulars this story of Savareen's disappearance is as true as any report of events which took place a good many years ago can reasonably be expected to be.

First: As to the man. Who was he?

Well, that is easily told. He was the second son of a fairly well-to-do English yeoman, and had been brought up to farming pursuits on the paternal acres in Hertfordshire. He emigrated to Upper Canada in or about the year 1851, and had not been many weeks in the colony before he became the tenant of a small farm situated in the township of Westchester, three miles to the north of Millbrook. At that time he must have been about twenty-five or twenty-six years of age. So far as could be judged by those who came most frequently into personal relations with him, he had no very marked individuality to distinguish him from others of his class and station in life. He was simply a young English farmer who had migrated to Canada with a view to improving his condition and prospects.

In appearance he was decidedly prepossessing. He stood five feet eleven inches in his stockings; was broad of shoulder, strong of arm, and well set up about the limbs. His complexion was fair and his hair had a decided inclination to curl. He was proficient in most athletics; could box and shoot, and if put upon his mettle, could leap bodily over a five-barred gate. He was fond of good living, and could always be depended upon to do full justice to a well-provided dinner. It cannot be denied that he occasionally drank more than was absolutely necessary to quench a normal thirst, but he was as steady as could be expected of any man who has from his earliest boyhood been accustomed to drink beer as an ordinary beverage, and has always had the run of the buttery hatch. He liked a good horse, and could ride anything that went on four legs. He also had a weakness for dogs, and usually had one or two of those animals dangling near his heels whenever he stirred out of doors. Men and things in this country were regarded by him from a strictly trans-Atlantic point of view, and he was frequently heard to remark that this, that, and the other thing were "nothink to what we 'ave at 'ome."

He was more or less learned in matters pertaining to agriculture, and knew something about the current doctrines bearing on the rotation of crops. His literary education, moreover, had not been wholly neglected. He could read and write, and could cast up accounts which were not of too involved and complicated a character. It cannot truly be said that he had read Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and Pierce Egan's Life in London. He regarded Cruikshank's illustrations to the last named work—more particularly that one depicting Corinthian Tom "getting the best of Charley,"—as far better worth looking at than the whole collection in the National Gallery, a place where he had once whirled away a tedious hour or two during a visit to town.

Then, he was not altogether ignorant concerning several notable events in the history of his native land. That is to say, he knew that a certain king named Charles the First had been beheaded a good many years ago, and that a disreputable personage named Oliver Cromwell had somehow been mixed up in the transaction. He understood that the destinies of Great Britain were presided over by Queen Victoria and two Houses of Parliament, called respectively the House of Lords and the House of Commons; and he had a sort of recollection of having heard that those august bodies were called Estates of the Realm. In his eyes, everything English was ipso facto to be commended and admired, whereas everything un-English was ipso facto to be proportionately condemned and despised. Any misguided person who took a different view of the matter was to be treated as one who had denied the faith, and was worse than an infidel.

I have said that his appearance was prepossessing, and so it was in the ordinary course of things, though he had a broad scar on his left cheek, which, on the rare occasions when he was angry, asserted itself somewhat conspicuously, and imparted, for the nonce, a sinister expression to his countenance. This disfigurement, as I have heard, had been received by him some years before his arrival in Canada. During a visit to one of the market towns in the neighbourhood of his home, he had casually dropped into a gymnasium, and engaged in a fencing bout with a friend who accompanied him. Neither of the contestants had ever handled a foil before, and they were of course unskilled in the use of such dangerous playthings. During the contest the button had slipped from his opponent's weapon, just as the latter was making a vigorous lunge. As a consequence Savareen's cheek had been laid open by a wound which left its permanent impress upon him. He himself was in the habit of jocularly alluding to this disfigurement as his "bar sinister."

For the rest, he was stubborn as a mule about trifles which did not in the least concern him, but as regarded the affairs of every-day life he was on the whole pleasant and easy-going, more especially when nothing occurred to put him out. When anything of the kind did occur, he could certainly assume the attitude of an ugly customer, and on such occasions the wound on his cheek put on a lurid hue which was not pleasant to contemplate. His ordinary discourse mainly dealt with the events of his everyday life. It was not intellectually stimulating, and for the most part related to horses, dogs, and the crop prospects of the season. In short, if you have ever lived in rural England, or if you have been in the habit of frequenting English country towns on market-days, you must have encountered scores of jolly young farmers who, to all outward seeming, with the solitary exception of the sinister scar, might pretty nearly have stood for his portrait.

Such was Reginald Bourchier Savareen, and if you have never come across anybody possessing similar characteristics—always excepting the scar— your experience of your fellow-creatures has been more limited than might be expected from a reader of your age and manifest intelligence.

His farm—i.e., the farm rented by him—belonged to old Squire Harrington, and lay in a pleasant valley on the western side of the gravel road leading northward from Millbrook to Spotswood. The Squire himself lived in the red brick mansion which peeped out from the clump of maples a little further down on the opposite side of the road. The country thereabouts was settled by a thrifty and prosperous race of pioneers, and presented a most attractive appearance. Alternate successions of hill and dale greeted the eye of the traveller as he drove along the hard-packed highway, fifteen miles in length, which formed the connecting link between the two towns above mentioned. The land was carefully tilled, and the houses, generally speaking, were of a better class than were to be found in most rural communities in Upper Canada at that period. Savareen's own dwelling was unpretentious enough, having been originally erected for one of the squire's "hired men," but it was sufficient for his needs, as he had not married until a little more than a year before the happening of the events to be presently related, and his domestic establishment was small. His entire household consisted of himself, his young wife, an infant in arms, a man servant and a rustic maid of all work. In harvest time he, of course, employed additional help, but the harvesters were for the most part residents of the neighborhood, who found accommodation in their own homes. The house was a small frame, oblong building, of the conventional Canadian farm-house order of architecture, painted of a drab color and standing a hundred yards or so from the main road. The barn and stable stood a convenient distance to the rear. About midway between house and barn was a deep well, worked with a windlass and chain. During the preceding season a young orchard had been planted out in the space intervening between the house and the road. Everything about the place was kept in spick and span order. The tenant was fairly successful in his farming operations, and appeared to be holding his own with the world around him. He paid his rent promptly, and was on excellent terms with his landlord. He was, in fact, rather popular with his neighbors generally, and was regarded as a man with a fair future before him.