'Erema' Summary

The novel is narrated by the heroine of the story. Erema is the child of a Captain Castlewood, who had been imprisoned on a charge of murdering his father, an English peer, had made his escape from jail while the enquiry was pending, and spent the rest of his life in a miserable exile. His six children had died of diphtheria while he was in prison, and his wife had quickly followed them, leaving only Erema, a newborn infant, to share her father's exile and disgrace. Hand-in-hand these two have wandered together over the earth, till Erema has become a girl of fifteen, and fate brings the luckless pair to California. Here, in a wild parched region of desert, the father dies, and Erema is left solitary. But at this point of her story she is rescued and taken in hand by an old countryman of her father's, Sampson Gundry, who with his grandson, young Ephraim, works a sawmill in the district. He owns a stretch of country along the banks of the swift Blue River. He made a fortune, not by gold-digging, though the very soil he trod on sparkled with nuggets, but by cutting wood. He takes in the orphan child and rears her as his own. 

In time Erema picks up the story of her father's life—the accusation of murder that had driven him abroad, but which had never been either proved or contradicted. At last she is determined to devote as much of her own life as shall be found necessary to clearing his memory from all shame and blame. With this purpose she crosses the Atlantic, visits her birthplace, and sets to work to hunt out the mystery. By a series of chances she succeeds in discovering the real murderer, and establishes the fact that her father was not only innocent of the crime, but had acted in silence a hero's part. Moreover, by the death of the reigning Lord Castlewood, her cousin, she comes into the family title and estates. Having completed her self-imposed mission, she sets out on her way back to California and the sawmill; reaches the other side of the Atlantic in time to help in nursing the sick and wounded in the civil war; and among them finds her old friends, Sampson Gundry and his grandson, arrayed on opposite sides in the war. The young peeress concludes her romantic history by becoming the wife of the sawyer's grandson.