THE slip between the cup and the lip came in two ways. The first was the arrival from India—in advance of Eric who was to get the short leave which his stepmother thought such a piece of extravagance, in order to be present at the marriage of his only sister—of Ronald Sutherland, in order to take possession of the inheritance which had fallen to him on the death of his uncle.
It was not a very great inheritance—an old house with an old tower, the old “peel” of the Border, attached to it; a few farms, a little money, the succession of a family sufficiently well known in the countryside, but which had never been one of the great families. It was not much certainly. It was no more to be compared with the possessions in fact and expectation of Fred Dirom than twilight is with day; but still it made a great difference.
Ronald Sutherland of the 111th, serving in India with nothing at all but his pay, and Ronald Sutherland of Haythorn with a commission in her Majesty’s service, were two very different persons. Mrs. Ogilvie allowed that had old David Hay been so sensible as to die three years previously, she would not have been so absolutely determined that Ronald’s suit should be kept secret from Effie; but all that was over, and there was no use thinking of it. It had been done “for the best”—and what it had produced was unquestionably the best.
If it had so happened that Effie had never got another “offer,” then indeed there might have been something to regret; but as, on the contrary, she had secured the best match in the county, her stepmother still saw no reason for anything but satisfaction in her own diplomacy. It had been done for the best; and it had succeeded, which is by no means invariably the case.
But Mrs. Ogilvie allowed that she was a little anxious about Ronald’s first appearance at Gilston. It was inevitable that he should come; for all the early years of his life Gilston had been a second home to him. He had been in and out like one of the children of the house. Mrs. Ogilvie declared she had always said that where there were girls this was a most imprudent thing: but she allowed at the same time that it is difficult to anticipate the moment when a girl will become marriageable, and had better be kept out of knowing and sight of the ineligible, so long as that girl is a child. Consequently, she did not blame her predecessor, Effie’s mother, for permitting an intimacy which at six was innocent enough, though it became dangerous at sixteen.
“Even me,” she said candidly, “I cannot throw my mind so far forward as to see any risks that little Annabella Johnston can run in seeing Rory every day—though sixteen years hence it will be different; for Rory, to be sure, will never be an eligible young man as long as his step-brother Eric is to the fore—and God forbid that anything should happen to Eric,” she added piously.
On this ground, and also because Ronald had the latest news to give of Eric, it was impossible to shut him out of Gilston, though Mrs. Ogilvie could not but feel that it was very bad taste of him to appear with these troubled and melancholy airs, and to look at Effie as he did. It was not that he made any attempt to interfere with the settlement of affairs. He made the proper congratulations though in a very stiff and formal way, and said he hoped that they would be happy. But there was an air about him which was very likely to make an impression on a silly, romantic girl.
He was handsomer than Fred Dirom—he was bronzed with Indian suns, which gave him a manly look. He had seen a little service, he was taller than Fred, stronger, with all those qualities which women specially esteem. And he looked at Effie when she was not observing—oh, but Mrs. Ogilvie said: “It is not an easy thing to tell when a girl is not observing!—for all that kind of thing they are always quick enough.”
And as a matter of fact, Effie observed keenly, and most keenly, perhaps, when she had the air of taking no notice. The first time this long, loosely clothed, somewhat languid, although well-built and manly figure had come in, Effie had felt by the sudden jump of her heart that it was no ordinary visitor. He had been something like a second brother when he went away, Eric’s invariable companion, another Eric with hardly any individual claim of his own: but everything now was very different. She said to herself that this jump of her heart which had surprised her so much, had come when she heard his step drawing near the door, so that it must be surely his connection with Eric and not anything in himself that had done it; but this was a poor and unsatisfactory explanation.
After that first visit in which he had hoped that Miss Effie would be very happy, and said everything that was proper, Effie knew almost as well as if she had been informed from the first, all that had passed: his eyes conveyed to her an amount of information which he was little aware of. She recognized with many tremors and a strange force of divination, not only that there had been things said and steps taken before his departure of which she had never been told, but also, as well as if it had been put into words, that he had come home, happy in the thought of the fortune which now would make him more acceptable in the eyes of the father and stepmother, building all manner of castles in the air; and that all these fairy fabrics had fallen with a crash, and he had awakened painfully from his dream to hear of her engagement, and that a few weeks more would see her Fred Dirom’s wife.
The looks he cast at her, the looks which he averted, the thrill imperceptible to the others which went over him when he took her hand at coming and going, were all eloquent to Effie. All that she had felt for Fred Dirom at the moment when the genuine emotion in him had touched her to the warmest sympathy, was nothing like that which penetrated her heart at Ronald’s hasty, self-restrained, and, as far as he was aware, self-concealing glance.
In a moment the girl perceived, with a mingled thrill of painful pleasure and anguish, what might have been. It was one of those sudden perceptions which light up the whole moral landscape in a moment, as a sudden flash of lightning reveals the hidden expanse of storm and sea.
Such intimations are most often given when they are ineffectual—not when they might guide the mind to a choice which would secure its happiness, but after all such possibilities are over and that happy choice can never be made. When he had gone away Effie slid out of sight too, and sought the shelter of her room, that little sanctuary which had hid so many agitations within the last few weeks, but none so tremendous as this. The discovery seemed to stun her. She could only sit still and look at it, her bosom heaving, her heart beating loudly, painfully like a funeral toll against her breast.
So, she said to herself, that might have been; and this was. No, she did not say it to herself: such discoveries are not made by any rational and independent action of mind. It was put before her by that visionary second which is always with us in all our mental operations, the spectator, “qui me resemblait comme mon frère,” whom the poet saw in every crisis of his career. That spiritual spectator who is so seldom a counsellor, whose office is to show the might-have-beens of life and to confound the helpless, unwarned sufferer with the sight of his mistakes when they are past, set this swiftly and silently before her with the force of a conviction. This might have been the real hero, this was the true companion, the mate congenial, the one in the world for Effie. But in the moment of beholding she knew that it was never to be.
And this was not her fault—which made it the more confusing, the more miserable. When it is ourselves who have made the mistake that spoils our lives, we have, at least, had something for it, the gratification of having had our own way, the pleasure of going wrong. But Effie had not even secured this pleasure. She would be the sufferer for other people’s miscalculations and mistakes. All this that concerned her so deeply she had never known. She faced the future with all the more dismay that it thus appeared to her to be spoiled for no end, destroyed at once for herself and Ronald and Fred. For what advantage could it be to Fred to have a wife who felt that he was not her chief good, that her happiness was with another? Something doubly poignant was in the feeling with which the poor girl perceived this.
Fred even, poor Fred, whom she approved and liked and sympathized with and did all but love—Fred would be none the better. He would be wronged even in having his heart’s desire conceded to him, whereas—it all came before Effie with another flash of realization—Fred would never have thought of her in that way had she been pledged to Ronald. They would have been friends—oh! such good friends. She would have been able to appreciate all his good qualities, the excellence that was in him, and no close and inappropriate relationship could have been formed between the two who were not made for each other.
But now all was wrong! It was Fred and she, who might have been such excellent friends, who were destined to work through life together, badly matched, not right, not right, whatever might happen. If trouble came she would not know how to comfort him, as she would have known how to comfort Ronald. She would not know how to help him. How was it she had not thought of that before? They belonged to different worlds, not to the same world as she and Ronald did, and when the first superficial charm was over, and different habits, different associations, life, which was altogether pitched upon a different key, began to tell!
Alarm seized upon Effie, and dismay. She had been frightened before at the setting up of a new life which she felt no wish for, no impulse to embrace; but she had not thought how different was the life of Allonby from that of Gilston, and her modest notions of rustic gentility from the luxury and show to which the rich man’s son had been accustomed. Doris and Phyllis and their ways of thought, and their habits of existence, came before her in a moment as part of the strange shifting panorama which encompassed her about. How was she to get to think as they did, to accustom herself to their ways of living? She had wondered and smiled, and in her heart unconsciously criticised these ways: but that was Fred’s way as well as theirs. And how was she with her country prejudices, her Scotch education, her limitations, her different standard, how was she to fit into it? But with Ronald she would have dwelt among her own people—oh, the different life! Oh, the things that might have been!
Poor Ronald went his way sadly from the same meeting with a consciousness that was sharp and confusing and terrible. After the first miserable shock of disappointment which he had felt on hearing of Effie’s engagement, he had conversed much with himself. He had said to himself that she was little more than a child when he had set his boyish heart upon her, that since then a long time had passed, momentous years: that he had changed in many ways, and that she too must have changed—that the mere fact of her engagement must have made a great difference—that she had bound herself to another kind of existence, not anything he knew, and that it was not possible that the betrothed of another man could be any longer the little Effie of his dreams.
But he had looked at her, and he had felt that he was mistaken. She was his Effie, not that other man’s: there was nothing changed in her, only perfected and made more sweet. Very few were the words that passed between them—few looks even, for they were afraid to look at each other—but even that unnatural reluctance said more than words. He it was who was her mate, not the stranger, the Englishman, the millionaire, whose ways and the ways of his people were not as her ways.
And yet it was too late! He could neither say anything nor do anything to show to Effie that she had made a mistake, that it was he, Ronald, whom Heaven had intended for her. The young man, we may be sure, saw nothing ludicrous in this conviction that was in his mind; but he could not plead it. He went home to the old-fashioned homely house, which he said to himself no wife of his should ever make bright, in which he would settle down, no doubt, like his old uncle, and grow into an old misanthrope, a crotchety original, as his predecessor had done. Poor old uncle David! what was it that had made him so? perhaps a fatal mistake, occurring somehow by no fault of his—perhaps a little Effie, thrown away upon a stranger, too—
“What made you ask him to his dinner, though I made you signs to the contrary?” said Mrs. Ogilvie to her husband, as soon as, each in a different direction, the two young people had disappeared. “You might have seen I was not wanting him to his dinner; but when was there ever a man that could tell the meaning of a look? I might have spared my pains.”
“And why should he not be asked to his dinner?” said Mr. Ogilvie. “You go beyond my understanding. Ronald Sutherland, a lad that I have known since he was that high, and his father and his grandfather before him. I think the woman is going out of her wits. Because you’re marrying Effie to one of those rich upstarts, am I never to ask a decent lad here?”
“You and your decent lads!” said his wife; she was at the end of her Latin, as the French say, and of her patience too. “Just listen to me, Robert,” she added, with that calm of exasperation which is sometimes so impressive. “I’m marrying Effie, since you like to put it that way (and it’s a great deal more than any of her relations would have had the sense to do), to the best match on all this side of Scotland. I’m not saying this county; there’s nobody in the county that is in any way on the same footing as Fred. There is rank, to be sure, but as for money he could buy them all up, and settlements just such as were never heard of. Well, that’s what I’m doing, if you give me the credit of it. But there’s just one little hindrance, and that’s Ronald Sutherland. If he’s to come here on the ground of your knowing him since he was that high, and being Eric’s friend—that’s to say, like a son of the house—I have just this to say, Robert, that I will not answer for Effie, and this great match may not take place after all.”
“What do you mean, you daft woman? Do you mean to tell me there has been any carrying on, any correspondence——”
“Have some respect to your own child, Robert, if not to your wife. Am I a woman to allow any carrying on? And Effie, to do her justice, though she has very little sense in some respects, is not a creature of that kind; and mind, she never heard a word of yon old story. No, no, it’s not that. But it’s a great deal worse—it’s just this, that there’s an old kindness, and they know each other far better than either Effie or you or me knows Fred Dirom. They are the same kind of person, and they have things to talk about if once they begin. And, in short, I cannot tell you all my drithers—but I’m very clear on this. If you want that marriage to come off, which is the best match that’s been made in Dumfriess-shire for generations, just you keep Ronald Sutherland at arm’s length, and take care you don’t ask him here to his dinner every second day.”
“I am not so fond of having strangers to their dinner,” said Mr. Ogilvie, with great truth. “It’s very rarely that the invitation comes from me. And as for your prudence and your wisdom and your grand managing, it might perhaps be just as well, on the whole, for Effie if she had two strings to her bow.”
Mrs. Ogilvie uttered a suppressed shriek in her astonishment. “For any sake! what, in the name of all that’s wonderful, are you meaning now?”
“You give me no credit for ever meaning anything, or taking the least interest, so far as I can see, in what’s happening in my own family,” said the head of the house, standing on his dignity.
“Oh, Robert, man! didn’t I send the young man to you, and would not listen to him myself! I said her father is the right person: and so you were, and very well you managed it, as you always do when you will take the trouble. But what is this about a second string to her bow?”
Mr. Ogilvie se faisait prier. He would not at first relinquish the pride of superior knowledge. At last, when his wife had been tantalized sufficiently, he opened his budget.
“The truth is, that things, very queer things, are said in London about Dirom’s house. There is a kind of a hint in the money article of the Times. You would not look at that, even if we got the Times. I saw it yesterday in Dumfries. They say ‘a great firm that has gone largely into mines of late’—and something about Basinghall Street, and a hope that their information may not be correct, and that sort of thing—which means more even than it says.”
“Lord preserve us!” said Mrs. Ogilvie. She sat down, in her consternation, upon Rory’s favourite toy lamb, which uttered the squeak peculiar to such pieces of mechanism. Probably this helped to increase her annoyance. She seized it with impatient warmth and flung it on the floor.
“The horrible little beast!—But, Robert, this may be just a rumour. There are plenty of firms that do business in mines, and as for Basinghall Street, it’s just a street of offices. My own uncle had a place of business there.”
“You’ll see I’m right for all that,” said her husband, piqued to have his information doubted.
“Well, I’ll see it when I do see it; but I have just the most perfect confidence—What is this, George? Is there no answer? Well, you need not wait.”
“I was to wait, mem,” said George, “to let the cook ken if there was nobody expected to their dinner; for in that case, mem, there was yon birds that was quite good, that could keep to another day.”
“Cook’s just very impatient to send me such a message. Oh, well, you may tell her that there will be nobody to dinner. Mr. Dirom has to go to London in a hurry,” she said, half for the servant and half for her husband. She turned a glance full of alarm, yet defiance, upon the latter as old George trotted away.
“Well, what do you say to that?” cried Mr. Ogilvie, with a mixture of satisfaction and vexation.
“I just say what I said before—that I’ve perfect confidence.” But nevertheless a cloud hung all the rest of the day upon Mrs. Ogilvie’s brow.