“At last!” He came out from the shadow of the firs and took her hands, and drew her toward him. “At last! my Margaret, my own Margaret! Such a weary time it has been waiting, but this repays all. Say that it is not your doing, darling. You have been kept back; you have not forgotten me, or that I was waiting here?”
“No,” she said; “but I did not know you were waiting here. I did not know, even, if I would find you to-night.”
“It would have been strange, indeed, if you had not found me. Every evening, as sure as the gloaming came, I have been here waiting for you, Margaret. I did not think you would have kept me so long. But it is not as it used to be between us, when I thought, perhaps, you might cast me off at any moment. I a poor farmer’s son, you the young lady of Earl’s-hall; but that could not be now; for you are mine, and I am yours.”
“It would not have been at any time—for that reason,” said Margaret. She was uneasy about the very close proximity he wished for, and avoided his arm. In her great trouble she had not thought of this, but now it troubled and partially shocked her, though she could scarcely tell why. She was roused, however, by the idea that she could have slighted him for any ignoble reason. “It is you that have always been kind to me,” she said. “I, who am only a country-girl, and know nothing at all.”
“You are a princess,” said Rob; “you are a queen to me. My queen and my Margaret: but you will not keep me so long hungering and thirsting out here, far from the light of your sweet countenance? you will not leave me so long again?”
“Oh, Mr. Glen!” said Margaret, “I ought to let you know at once, we are going away.”
“Do not, for Heaven’s sake, call me Mr. Glen! Do you want to make me very unhappy, to take away all pleasures from me? Surely the time is over in which you should call me Mr. Glen. You cannot want to play with me and make me wretched, Margaret?”
“No,” she said, with a tremor in her voice; “I will call you by your name, as I used to do when I was little. But it is quite true that I said—we are going away.”
“Going away? Where are you going, and who are we? Oh yes, I knew it was not likely they would stay here,” cried Rob, with mingled irritation and despair. “Where are they going to take you, my Margaret?—nowhere that I cannot come and see you, nowhere that I will not follow you, my darling. I would go after you to the world’s-end.”
“I am going with my sisters, Jean and Grace. They are my guardians now. I am to live with them till—for three years at least, till I am twenty-one; then they say I can do what I like. What does it matter now about doing what I like? I do not think I care what becomes of me, now that I have no one, no one that has a right to me! and they will not even let me cry.”
She began to weep, and he did not stop her, though his mind was full of impatience. He drew her to him close, and this time she did not resist him.
“Cry there,” he said, “Margaret—my Margaret! I will never try to keep you from crying. Oh! he deserved it well. He loved you better than all the earth. You were the light of his eyes, as you are of mine. They! what does it matter to them? They will bother you; they will make you do what they like; they will not worship you as he did, and as I do. But, Margaret, there is still one that has a right to you. Had he known, had I but had the courage to go and tell him everything, he would have given you to me; I am certain he would. He would have thought, like you, that it was better, far better for you, to have some one of your very own. The others! what are you to them? But to him you were everything, and to me you are everything. Margaret! say this, darling! Say, Rob, I am yours; I will always be yours, as you are mine!”
Margaret looked in his face with her wet eyes. But she did not say the words he dictated to her. Her heart was full of emotion of another kind. She was thankful to Rob for his kindness, and he was not like—any one else; he had a special standing-ground of his own with her. To nobody else could she talk as she was talking, on nobody else would she lean; but still it did not occur to her to obey him, to say what he asked her to say.
“I found that picture you made,” she said, “only to-day. It is him, just himself. I took it away to my own room that nobody might see it. It must have been some angel that put it into your mind to do that.”
“Yes, Margaret,” he said, “it was an angel, for it was you. And it was not I that did it, but love that did it; but if you will give it to me, I will make it still more like him. I will never forget how he looked, and how you looked—and my heart all full, and running over with love, which I dared not say.”
Alas! there was this peculiarity in the conversation, that while Rob was eager to speak of himself and his love, Margaret, in the most innocent and unwitting way, made it apparent that this was not the subject that interested her most. She was too polite not to listen to him, too grateful and sensitively affected by the curious link between them to show any opposition; but when she could, she turned aside from this subject, which to him was the most interesting subject in heaven or earth; and it is impossible to say how this fact moved Rob, who had never met with anything of the kind before. It piqued him, and it made him more eager. He watched her with an anxiety and impatience which he could scarcely keep in check, while she, with downcast eyes full of tears, pursued that part of the subject which interested her most.
“I should not like it touched,” she said; “I would not give it for all the pictures in the world! If I gave it to you, it would be only that it might be put into some case that would preserve it. I have folded it in paper, but that is not enough. I would not give it for all the pictures in the world!”
“Thank you, my darling,” he said. “It is something to have done a thing that so pleases you. If you will bring it to me, I will get it put in a case for you. Indeed, it was an angel that put that scene before me; for now when you look at that, and think of him, you will think of me too.”
“Oh no, Mr. Glen,” said Margaret—then she stopped, confused: “I mean, Rob— I am very, very thankful to you. But when I look at that, all the world goes away, and there is only papa leaning back, sleeping. I am glad he was sleeping. He slept a great deal, do you know, before he died. But it was better to see him in his chair, as he used always to be, than in his bed. I don’t want any one to see it but myself—other people do not understand it. They would hand it about from one to another, and say, ‘Is it not like?’ and talk. I could not bear that; I prefer to keep it to myself.”
“But you don’t mind me seeing it?” he said. “I should not be so unfeeling. Many a time when we are together—when we are married, darling—we will look at it together; and I will make a picture from it, a real picture, with you at my elbow, and it shall be hung in the best place in our house.”
At this Margaret winced slightly, but made no remark. She had not the courage to contradict him, to say anything against this strange view; but it disturbed her all the same. Probably it would have to be some time. There seemed a necessity for it, though she could not quite tell why: but as it could not be now, nor for a long time, why should it be spoken of, or brought in to disturb everything? She said, not knowing how to put aside this subject gently, yet to say something all the same: “Jean and Grace are going to take me to the Grange—to my house.”
“To your house!” Rob felt the blood flush to his face with the excitement of this thought. “I did not know you had a house of your own, Margaret.”
“Oh yes; it was my mother’s. It is away in England, where I never was. I have seen a picture of it. They say it is very English, with creepers hanging about the walls, roses and honeysuckle, and beautiful great trees. Jean thinks everything in England is better than anything in Scotland. However pretty it may be, it will never, never be like old gray Earl’s-hall.”
Rob dropped his arm from her, and hung his head. “What am I thinking of?” he said; “you a great lady, with beautiful houses and lands, and I a poor man, with nothing. I must be mad to think that you could care for me—that you would even think of me at all.”
“Mr.—Rob! oh, what must you think of me that you say so? Do I care for money or for a house? Are you going away? Are you going to—leave me? oh!” cried Margaret, penitent, clasping her hands; “did you not know I had a fortune? But what does that matter? You have been kind, very kind to me, thinking I was poor—Rob! are you going to cry, you!—no, don’t, don’t; you will break my heart! I am calling you by your name now,” she said, anxiously, with one hand upon his arm, and with the other pulling down the hand which covered his face. She put her own face close to his in her generous, foolish earnestness—“I am calling you by your name now, Rob; don’t hide your face from me, don’t go away and leave me. If I am rich, is it not all the better? There will be plenty for us both.”
“It makes a difference,” he said; and indeed he was able to play his part very well, for never before in his life had Rob been so entirely ashamed of himself. Her very earnestness, she who had been so cool and calm before, her generous trouble and importunity humbled him to the very depths. A man may do a great many things that will not bear examination before he finds himself out; but to act such a falsehood as this—to pretend that he did not know what he knew so much more definitely than she did—to pretend to resist her generous anxiety—to avert his face, and let her woo him, she who had taken his hot wooing with such shy coldness! This made Rob feel himself the most wretched creature, the most despicable, miserable, mercenary wretch. He could not endure himself. Well might he hide his face for a poor swindler and cheat, worse, far worse than he had ever known himself before! To breathe deceitful vows, to say more than he meant, to promise more than he intended to perform, all this was not a thousandth part so bad; for indeed he had always been “in love,” when he made love; and a promise more or less, what is that? The common coin of young deceivers. Hitherto Rob had not been bad, only fickle and false. But what was he now? A cheat, a liar, a traitor, unfit to breathe where such innocent creatures were. Thus he played his part very well; his misery was not dissembled; and when he allowed himself to yield to her entreaties, to be moved by the eager eloquence of that soft lip which was so ready to quiver, what vows he made in his heart to be to Margaret something more than ever man had been before!
After this their intercourse was more easy, and by-and-by Rob came to feel that perhaps the momentary fear of losing him (which was how, in his native vulgarity and self-importance, he put it, after a while, to himself) had been a good thing. More than ever now she had committed herself. They wandered about among the trees and talked. They talked of her departure, and of how he could write to her—which Margaret was half shy again to think of, yet half happy too, a novelty as it was. But she could not tell him how this was to be managed, or how he could come to see her; all was strange, and Jean and Grace were very different from anything she had known in all her previous life.
“They tell me to sit down when I am standing, and to stand up when I am sitting down; they will always have me doing something different,” she avowed, though gently, and with a faint sense of humor. But this made it very evident that the life before her would be quite unlike the past. And it did not occur to Margaret that Jean and Grace ought perhaps to be informed of Rob, and the understanding between him and herself. Rob naturally said nothing about this, and to Margaret the thought did not occur. She had no idea of concealment, but simply did not think of her sisters in connection with this “secret,” which was something too strange and confusing to herself to be capable of explanation to others, who could not know how it had come about.
“Will you come up to the tower?” said Effie Leslie to Randal Burnside, who had walked home with her from the Manse. Randal had been much about Earl’s-hall since Sir Ludovic’s death. He had been ready to do anything for the family, and the family had been very willing to employ him. It was a kindness to give him something to do, his mother said, who was glad to throw him in Margaret’s way; and the decorousness of the grief which made Mrs. Bellingham and Miss Leslie quite unable to see anybody was put aside on his behalf as well as on his father’s. And Margaret and he had grown friends, though she was almost the only one in the house who never gave him any commissions in that moment of bustle. She had never ceased to be grateful to him for calling the doctor when her father’s illness began, but she was too independent to have any personal wants to which he could minister, and too shy to have asked his aid if she had. Effie was much more disposed to make use of the young man. She was not unhappy—why should she be, having seen so little of grandpapa? She was a little elated, indeed, to think that mamma was now my lady, and she herself entitled to precedence as a baronet’s daughter, and she was very glad to have some one to speak to who did not melt into tears in the middle of the conversation, or say, “Hush, child! remember that this is a house of mourning.” The Manse was not a house of mourning, and she liked to go there, and she liked Randal to walk home with her and talk. Lady Leslie was still looking at the brown cow and John’s pigsty, and Mrs. Bellingham, as has been said, had a headache. Effie peeped into the West Chamber and the long room, and saw nobody. And then she said, “Have you ever been on the tower, Mr. Burnside? Oh, do come up to the tower.”
Randal had climbed the tower a hundred times in former days. He went up the winding stair very willingly, thinking he would have all the better chance of seeing “the others,” when the falling night drove them in from their walks. Perhaps “the others” meant only the new Sir Ludovic; perhaps it had another significance. He was interested about Margaret, he allowed to himself—more interested than he dared let any one know; for had he not almost seen a lover’s parting between her and Rob Glen?—a secret knowledge which made him very uneasy. Randal felt that he could not betray them; it would be a base thing in their contemporary—or so, at least, he thought; but he was uneasy. Many thoughts had gone through his mind on this subject. He did not know what to do. The only thing that seemed to him possible was to speak to Rob Glen himself, to represent to him that it was not manly or honorable to engage a girl in Margaret’s position, without the knowledge and consent of her friends. But to make such a statement to a young man of your own age, with whom you have not the warrant of friendship for your interference, nor even the warrant of equality, is a difficult thing to do. If Rob, resenting it, could have called him out, there would have been less harm; but that was ridiculous, and what could be done to expiate such an affront? There was nothing to be done, unless he permitted Rob to knock him down, and he did not feel that his forbearance was equal to that. So that Randal remained very uneasy on this subject, and did not know what to do. To let Margaret fall into the hands of a—of Rob Glen, seemed desolation and sacrilege; but what could Randal—who had known them both from his cradle—what could he do between them. Was it his part to tell—most despicable of all offices in the opinion of youth? This train of uneasy thought was brought back when Effie looked into the little white-panelled sitting-room, the West Chamber, where Margaret, he knew, spent most of her time. She liked it better than the long room, every nook of which was so full of her father’s memory; and the ladies humored her, and, small as it was, made the West Chamber their centre. Where was she, if she was not there? Possibly out-of-doors in the soft evening, confiding all her griefs to Rob Glen. Possibly it was the thought that Randal himself would have liked to have those griefs confided to him, and to act the part of comforter, that made his blood burn at this imagination. So soon after her father’s death! He felt disposed to despise Margaret too.
“Go softly just here,” said Effie, whispering; “for there is Aunt Jean’s room, and we must not do anything to disturb her headache. It is a very good thing, you know, that she has a headache sometimes: even Aunt Grace says so—for otherwise she would wear herself out. Perhaps it is a little too late for the view, but the sky was still full of glow when we came in. Ah! it is very dark up here; but now there is only another flight. Oh no, it is not too late for the view,” Effie cried, her young voice coming out soft yet ringing, as they emerged into the open air. “Nobody can hear us here,” she said, with a laugh; for at seventeen it is not easy to be serious all day, especially when it is only a grandfather, nothing more, who is dead.
It was not too late for the view, and the view was not a view to be despised. There does not seem much beauty to spare in the east of Fife. Low hills, great breadths of level fields: the sea a great expanse of blue or leaden gray, fringed with low reefs of dark rocks, like the teeth of some hungry monster, dangerous and grim without being picturesque, without a ship to break its monotony. But yet, with those limitless breadths of sky and cloud, the wistful clearness and golden after-glow, and all the varying blueness of the hills, it would have been difficult to surpass the effect of the great amphitheatre of sea and land of which this solitary gray old house formed the centre. The hill, behind which the sun had set, is scarcely considerable enough to have a name; but it threw up its outline against the wonderful greenness, blueness, goldenness of the sky with a grandeur which would not have misbecome an Alp. Underneath its shelter, gray and sweet, lay the soft levels of Stratheden in all their varying hues of color—green corn, and brown earth, and red fields of clover, and dark belts of wood. Behind were the two paps of the Lomonds, rising green against the clear serene, and on the other side entwining lines of hills, with gleams of golden light breaking through the mists, clearing here and there as far as the mysterious Grampians, far off under Highland skies.
This was one side of the circle; and the other was the sea, a sea still blue under the faint evening skies, in which the young moon was rising; the yellow sands of Forfarshire on one hand, stretching downward from the mouth of the Tay—the low brown cliffs and green headlands bending away on the other toward Fifeness—and the great bow of water reaching to the horizon between. Nearer the eye, showing half against the slope of the coast and half against the water, rose St. Andrews on its cliff, the fine dark tower of the College Church poised over the little city, the jagged ruins of the Castle marking the outline, the Cathedral rising majestic in naked pathos; and old St. Rule, homely and weather-beaten, oldest venerable pilgrim of all, standing strong and steady, at watch upon the younger centuries. This was the view at that time from Earl’s-hall. It is a little less noble now, because of the fine, vulgar, comfortable gray stone houses which have got themselves built everywhere since, and spoiled one part of the picture; but all the rest will remain forever, Heaven be praised. The little wood of Earls-hall, pinched and ragged with the wind, lay immediately below, and the flat Eden, with its homely green lines of bank on either side, lighted up by here and there a sand-bank; but the tide was out, and the Eden meandered in a desert of wet brown sand, and was not lovely. The two young people did not speak for a moment. They were moved, in spite of themselves, by all this perfect vault of sky, and perfect round of earth and sea. It is not often that you can see the great world in little, field and mountain, sunset and moonrise, land and sea, at one glance. They were silenced for sixty seconds; and then Effie Leslie drew a long breath and began to chatter again.
“Well!” she said, with as much expression as the simple word was capable of bearing, “I don’t think I should like to sell this old house where the family has been so long, if I were papa!”
“I would not sell it, if it were mine, for anything that could be offered me!” cried Randal, in the enthusiasm of the moment. Effie shook her head.
“Perhaps not, Mr. Burnside; but then you would not have ten children—or nine at least; for now Gracie is married she does not count. But oh, I wish we could keep Earl’s-hall! It must be very pleasant to live where everybody knows you, and knows exactly what you are—that is, if you are anybody. Poor Margaret will not like leaving, but then she is a lucky girl; she is an heiress; she has a house of her own; and I dare say she will get very fond of that when she knows it. Do you think I ought to call her Aunt Margaret, Mr. Burnside?”
Effie’s laugh rang out so merrily as she said this, that she checked herself with a little alarm.
“Suppose Aunt Jean should hear me!” she said; and then, after a pause, “Oh! look straight down, straight down under the fir-trees, Mr. Burnside. Oh, this is more interesting than the view! A pair of—”
“Do you think it is quite honorable to look at them?” said Randal. He had a presentiment who it must be.
“Oh, it can’t be anybody we know,” said light-hearted Effie.
Far down in the wood, under the firs, no doubt the lovers felt themselves perfectly safe; but there were treacherous groups of trees, whose branches had been swept in one direction by the wind, laying bare the two who stood beneath. They were standing close together, holding each other’s hands.
“The girl is crying, I think,” said Effie, “and leaning against the man. What can be the matter? can they have quarrelled? and she is all in black, with a thick veil—”
“Come to this side,” said Randal, hastily, “there is a break in the mist. I think I can show you Schehallion.”
“I like this better than Schehallion,” said Effie; and then she started and cried, “O-oh!” with a long breath; and suddenly blushing all over, looked Randal in the face.
“I think Schehallion is much the most interesting to look at,” he said, and, touching her elbow with his hand, endeavored to lead her away. But Effie was too much startled to conceal her wonder and alarm.
“Oh, Mr. Burnside! you are not thinking of Schehallion, you only want to get me away. I believe you know who he is.”
“I don’t know who either is, and I don’t want to know,” cried Randal; “and I think, Miss Leslie, I must bid you good-night.”
That was easy enough; but Effie did not budge, though Randal went away.