NEXT day was Sunday, the last day that Margaret was to spend at home; not like the brilliant Sunday on which old Sir Ludovic, for the last time, attended “a diet of worship” in the parish church, and was reminded of his latter end by good Dr. Burnside; but gray, and dull, and cloudy, with no light on the horizon, and the whole landscape, hill and valley and sea, all expressed in different tones of a flat lead color, the change of all others which most affects the landscape. In Fife, as has been candidly allowed, the features of the country have no splendor or native nobleness; and accordingly there is no power in them to resist this invasion of grayness. Mr. Aubrey Bellingham, though he did pretend to “go in” for the beauties of nature, intimated very plainly his discontent with the scene before him.
“Anything poorer in the way of landscape I don’t know that I ever saw,” he said, and sighed, when he was made to take his place in the old carriage to be driven to Fifeton, to the “English Chapel.” It was six miles off; whereas the parish church, with the Norman chancel, was scarcely one. But, as Mrs. Bellingham said, if you do not hold by your church, what is to become of you?
“Only the common people go there,” she said—“the farmers, and so forth. The gentry are all Episcopalian. My brother, Sir Ludovic, may go now and then for the sake of example, and because Dr. Burnside is an old family friend; but Sir Claude, and everybody of importance, you will find at our church. All the elite go there. I can’t think what the gentry were thinking of, to allow the Presbyterians to seize the endowments. It is quite the other way in England, where it is the common people who are dissenters, and we have a church which is really fit for ladies and gentlemen to go to. But things are all very queer in Scotland, Aubrey. That is one thing, I suppose, that gives the common people such very independent ways.”
“Well, Aunt Jean, let us be thankful we were not born to set it right,” said Aubrey, reconciled to see that his six-miles’ drive was to be in company with Margaret. But she, in her deep mourning, did not afford much good diversion during the drive. The fact that it was the last day—the last day! had at length penetrated her mind; and a vague horror of what might happen, of something hanging over her which she did not understand, of leave-takings, and engagements to be entered into and promises to be made, had come over Margaret like a cloud. She had passively obeyed her sisters’ orders, and followed them into the carriage, though not without an acute recollection of her last drive in that carriage by her father’s side at a time when she was not passive at all, but liked her own way and had it, and was not aware how happy she was.
Margaret took all the other changes as secondary to the one great change, and did not feel them as an old man’s darling, a somewhat spoiled child, accustomed to unlimited indulgence for all her fancies, might have been expected to do. But her individuality came back to her, and with it a sense of unknown troubles to be encountered, as she leaned back in her corner, saying nothing. She drew herself as far as possible away from Aubrey Bellingham, and she let her veil drop, with its heavy burden of crape, and took refuge within herself. She had to part with her home, and Bell and John, the attendants of her life, but, more alarming still and strange, she had to part with Rob Glen. Ludovic’s interposition had increased tenfold the importance of everything about Rob Glen, the circumstances of which she had thought so little when the first step had been taken. How could she have thought of the young man’s position, or of any consequences that might follow, at the moment when her father lay dying? Rob had been very kind; his tenderness, his caresses, had gone to her heart. There were indeed moments, after the first, when they no longer impressed her with such a sense of kindness, when she would have been glad enough to avoid the close contact, and when the touch of his arm round her gave Margaret a sense of shy shrinking, rather than of the utter confidence and soothing which she had felt at first—and when she had not liked to vex him by resistance, but had edged and shrunk away, and made herself as small as possible to avoid the embarrassing pressure.
But all this vague shyness and shrinking had changed at their last interview, when Margaret, in generous impetuosity, and terror lest he should think she considered herself raised above him by her fortune, had taken the matter into her own hands and made all the vague ties definite. What an extraordinary sensation it was to feel that she belonged to him—she, Margaret Leslie, to him, Rob Glen! She could not realize or understand it, but felt, with a sense of giddiness through her whole being, that something existed which bound her to him forever. Yes, no doubt, when you came to think of it, that was what it meant. She had not been aware of it at first, but this no doubt was how it was. And Ludovic’s questioning had made it all so much more real. After what her brother had said, there was no avoiding the certainty.
Between Rob Glen and herself was an invisible link, woven so closely that nothing could undo it. How changed all the world was! Once it lay free and bright and open before her, with but one restriction, and that her natural obedience to her father and loyalty to her home. Now, with a giddiness and dazzling in her eyes, she felt how different it all was. She had no longer any home, and the world was closed up to her by that figure of Rob Glen. She did not know that she objected to him, or disliked his presence, but it made everything different. And chiefly it made her giddy, so that she herself and the whole universe seemed to be going round and round—Rob Glen. She was not sure, even—but all was confusion in her mind—that she thought of him now just as she had thought of him in those old, old times, when he had sat among the potatoes and made his picture; when he had seemed so clever, such a genius, such a poet, making a common bit of paper into a landscape, in which the sun would shine and the wind blow forever.
That side of the subject was dim to her now. Rob was no longer an artist doing wonders before her eyes, but a man whose touch made her shrink, yet held her fast; one whom she was more shy of, yet more bound to, than to anybody else in the world; from whom she would like to steal a little farther off, if she could do it unnoticed, yet move a step nearer to, should he find her out. This strange jumble of feeling seemed to be brought to a climax by the thought that she was going away to-morrow. To-night—there was no avoiding the necessity—she must go again and meet him, and explain everything to him, and part with him. What might he say, or make her do and say? She could not wound his feelings by refusing, by letting him see that she shrank from him. She felt that she must yield to him, not to hurt his feelings. A mingled sense of sympathy and gratitude, and (though the word is so inadequate) politeness, made it seem terrible to Margaret to withdraw from her lover.
To betray to a person who loves you that his gaze, his touch, his close vicinity is distasteful, what a dreadful thing to do—what a wound to his feelings, and his pride, and his fondness! If he would not do it; if he would keep a little farther off, and keep his arms by his side like other people, how much more pleasant; but to be so unsympathetic, so unfeeling, as to show him that you did not like what he meant in such great kindness! this was more than Margaret could do. As she sat back in the carriage and was carried along through the gray landscape, with a whiff of Mrs. Bellingham’s mille-fleurs pervading the atmosphere, and a sea of crape all about her, and the voices of the others flowing on, Margaret, whom they thought so impassive, was turning over this question, with flushes of strange confusion and trouble. What would he say? what would he ask of her? what promises would she have to make, and pledges to give? To give him up was a thing that did not enter into her mind; she could not have done anything so cruel; but she looked forward to the next meeting with an alarm which was very vivid, while at the same time she was aware that it was quite inevitable that she must see him, and that in all likelihood she would do what he wanted her to do.
This pervading consciousness confused Margaret much in respect to the morning’s service, and the people who came up to her and pressed her hand, and said things they meant to be kind. It was a little chapel, very like, as Mrs. Bellingham said indignantly, the chapels which the dissenters had in England; and to see all the common folk going to the big church with the steeple, to which they were called by all the discordancy of loudly clanging bells, while the carriages drew up before that little non-conforming tabernacle, was very offensive to all right-minded people.
“Things must have been dreadfully mismanaged, Aubrey, at the time when all was settled,” Mrs. Bellingham said, very seriously; “for you see for yourself all the best people were there. One advantage is that it is much pleasanter sitting among a congregation that is all ladies and gentlemen; but surely, surely, taking the most liberal view of it, it is more suitable that we should have the churches, and the common people be dissenters, as they are in England? I would not prevent them— I would let them have their way; but naturally it is not we that should give place to them, but they to us.”
“But, dearest Jean, we were all once—”
“And when you think—Grace, I wish you would let me get in a word—that we really cannot get a very good set of clergy because there is no money to give them, while the Presbyterians have got it all, though it comes out of our pockets! I have never studied history as I ought to have done, for really education was not so much attended to in our days; but I am sure the Scots gentry must have been very badly treated. For that John Knox, you know, sprang of the common people himself, and they were all he cared about, and no pains were taken, none at all, to suit the Church to the better classes. But Margaret has been more seen to-day; and we have had more condolences and sympathy from our own kind of people at this one service than we would have had at the parish church in twenty years.”
These shakings of hands, however, and the words of sympathy were too much for Margaret, who was not perhaps in the best condition for being inspected and condoled with, after all the secret agitation of this long, silent drive, and who had to be sent home, finally, alone, while her sisters and their attendant stopped half-way to take luncheon with Sir Claude.
“You will send back the carriage for us, Margaret, since you don’t feel equal to staying? Of course, it is a very different thing to her, who never was away from him, to what it is to us, who had not been with him for years,” Mrs. Bellingham said, while Miss Leslie lingered at the carriage-door, and could not make up her mind to leave her dearest Margaret.
“I think I ought to go with her, dear child. Don’t you think so, dear Aubrey? But then Sir Claude and Lady Jane are so kind; and then it will be such a trouble sending back the carriage. Darling Margaret, are you sure, are you quite sure you don’t mind going alone? for I will come with you in a minute. I don’t really care to stay at all, but for Jean, who always likes a change; and dear Sir Claude is so kind; and it will be a change, you know, for dear Aubrey—the chief people in Fife!” she added, anxiously putting her nose into the carriage, “if you are quite sure, dearest Margaret, that you don’t mind.”
Free of the crape, and of that sense of a multitude which belongs to a closely packed carriage, Margaret went home very much more tranquilly in her corner, and cried, and was relieved as the heavy old vehicle rolled along between the well-known hedge-rows, and passed the well-known church upon its mound where her old father lay sleeping the sleep of the weary and the just. She gazed out wistfully through her tears at the path round the old apse of the church where she had walked with him so lately, and close to which he was now laid. In these days no idea of floral decorations had visited Scotch grave-yards, and the great gray stone-work of the Leslie tomb, rearing its seventeenth-century skulls and crossbones against the old twisted Norman arches, was not favorable to any loving deposit of this kind. But a rose-bush that grew by the side door had thrown a long tendril round the gray wall, which was drooping with a single half-opened rose upon it straight across those melancholy emblems, pointing, as it seemed to Margaret, to the very spot where old Sir Ludovic lay. This went to her heart, poor child. They were taking her away, but the rose would remain and shed its leaves over the place, and make it sweet; and kind eyes would look at it, and kind people would talk of old Sir Ludovic, and be sorry for his poor little Peggy, whose life was so changed.
There is something in the pang of self-pity in a young mind which is more poignant, and yet more sweet, than any other sorrow. There is nothing so ready to bring the tears that give relief. They would talk about her, all the kind poor people; not the ladies and the gentlemen, perhaps, who went to the English chapel, and of whom Jean was so fond, but a great many people in the high town and the “laigh toun” whom Margaret knew intimately, and the family in the Manse, Dr. Burnside and his wife and Randal. Randal had been kind too. How he had run for the doctor that day, though it was of no use! and how many things he had done after, not stopping, Margaret thought, to talk to her, but always doing what was most wanted! Ah!—this thought brought her to the other end of the circle again with a spring. It was always herself, Margaret remembered, that Rob had thought of, always her first. She began to go over all the course of events as the carriage rolled on, too quickly now, to Earl’s-hall. Had she forgotten, she asked herself, that time when he came to her father’s aid on the church-yard path—how careful he had been of the old man—and how much trouble he had taken to please him afterward? Thinking of her own troubles, she had forgotten half that Rob had done. How kind he had been! and Sir Ludovic had liked him—he had got to be fond of him; surely he had been fond of him! He had allowed her to be with Rob, drawing, talking, as much as she pleased. He had never said “You must give up Rob Glen.” Perhaps, indeed, that was what her father meant. What did it matter about being what people called a gentleman? Sir Claude was all that; but except when he sent a servant to ask how Sir Ludovic was, what had he ever done, though Grace said he was so kind? The great people had all been the same. They had sent a servant; they had sent their carriages to the funeral. But Rob had held up her father when he stumbled, and had come to talk to him and amuse him, and had made a picture of him which was more to Margaret than all the National Gallery. Oh, that was what it was to be kind! The carriage heaving horribly as it turned into the rut inside the gate, stopped Margaret in the full current of these thoughts. But they were a great support to her in the prospect that lay before her, the farewell scene that she knew she would have to go through, when he would be so sorry, and she would not know what to say.
The Leslies, like so many kind people, dined earlier than usual on Sundays. They dined at five, to the great discomfort of the party who had lunched with Sir Claude, and who arrived just in time for this second meal. Mr. Aubrey Bellingham thought it was done in deference to the national desire to be uncomfortable on Sunday, and submitted with a shrug of his shoulders; but Mrs. Bellingham, having more right to express an opinion, did so frankly, and with much indignation. She said:
“I know it’s Mary’s way in Edinburgh; and there may be excuses where there is a young family, and servants have to be considered. Of course they are not rich, and servants insist on being considered when they know they have you in their power; but at Earl’s-hall, and when we are here! I think it is very unnecessary. Last Sunday we were not thinking of dinner, and I am sure I cannot tell you when we had it; but just when people are recovering their spirits, and when a cheerful meal is your best restorative! It may be very good of Mary to consider her servants, but I must say she might just as well, for once in a way, have considered you and me.”
“But, dearest Jean! dear Mary is the most unselfish! She does not mind any inconvenience—”
“Oh, inconvenience! don’t speak to me—she likes it!” cried Mrs. Jean, indignant. “She is just the kind of woman that relishes a tea-dinner, and all that sort of thing; and if she can make out that she saves sixpence, what a thing that is! And Ludovic just lets her do what she likes. She is getting him into all her huggermugger ways. If a woman has not more self-respect, she ought, at least, to have some respect for her husband. But everything is made to give in to the children and the servants, in that house. I could have put up with it, not that I ever like it, in Edinburgh, for there one knows what one has to expect. But here, where Bell and John were so used to my father—and when we are in the house, and without even asking my opinion, and the excellent luncheon we have just had! she might have thought of Aubrey, who is not accustomed to any nonsense of consideration for servants; but I always said, though she is a good enough wife to Ludovic, that she was a woman of no perception,” Mrs. Bellingham said.
After this little storm, the untimely dinner was marred by some sulkiness on Jean’s part, as was perhaps natural. And though Aubrey made himself very agreeable, with the most noble and Christian forgiveness of injuries, devoting himself to little Effie, whom he regaled with historiettes of a less piquant description than those of his début, yet there was a general irritability about the simple meal which, it must be allowed, often attends that well-meant expedient for the keeping of Sunday. The company dispersed early, flocking off to their rooms, where Mrs. Bellingham, with her feet up, instructed her maid as to her packing, and once more turned over the packet of lace which had fallen to her share. Margaret, when she had seen the rest of the party go away, fled too, to escape another interview with her brother, who looked, she thought, as if meditating a renewal of his remonstrances, and, having watched her opportunity, stole softly down-stairs. Even Bell was still busy after the dinner. Her chair stood in the court outside the door, but she had not yet come out to enjoy her favorite seat. And Bell’s heart was so heavy that her work went but slowly. She had no thought of anything but Miss Margaret, who to-morrow was to be taken away.
Margaret stole out like one who had learned that she was guilty. Never before had she emerged so stealthily from the shadow of the old house. She did not go the usual way, to run the risk of being seen, but crept round by the garden-wall, as she had done sometimes when returning, when Rob was with her. There was a feeble attempt at a sunset, though the sun had not shone all day, and consequently had no right to his usual pomps, but in the west there was a redness breaking through the gray, which brightened the face of the country, and changed the character of the landscape. Under the trees it fell like lamps of rich gold, escaping here and there through broken openings in the clouds, and warming the wood with gleams of color which had looked so dark and wind-scathed in the morning. Margaret went softly, threading through the colonnades of the great fir trunks, and sat down on the little mossy knoll under the silver-fir. She placed herself so that she could not be seen from the house, but yet could spy through the branches the approach of any danger from that side.
It was the first time she had been first at the place of meeting, and her heart beat as she sat and waited. She, who had shrunk from the prospect of this meeting, she became alarmed now lest he should not come, and longed for him with a kind of sick anxiety. Oh that he would come, that she might get it over! She did not know what it was to be, but instinctively felt that there must be something painful in this last meeting. The last! She would not be sorry to have met, perhaps, when she was away and had no longer any chance of seeing him. She would understand better what he meant, and what she herself meant; and there is something which subdues the pride in thus waiting for one who does not come. She did not seem so sure that it was he who cared, that it was he only who would break his heart, as she sat there alone; and she had almost lost herself in fancies more bitter than any she had yet known—in dreamy realization of her loneliness and a sense that no one, perhaps, would care much when she went away. Who did care? Not Ludovic, who wished her to do well, but would not have suffered much had Margaret died with her father; nor his wife, who was very kind, but had so many girls of her own; nor Effie, though she would cry and think she was sorry. Nobody would care; and Jean and Grace would often find her a trouble; and nobody in the world belonged to Margaret, cared for her above everything else, was happy when she was happy, and grieved when she was sorry;—nobody—except, perhaps, him alone.
“Margaret!” A low eager voice that seemed the very essence of subdued delight, trembling with satisfaction and happiness, and he suddenly made a spring to her side from under the trees, through which he had been threading his way to the place of meeting. He threw himself on his knees by her, and seized and kissed her hands a hundred times. “You here before me! waiting for me! To think I should have lost a moment of the little time I may have you! I shall never forgive myself; but I thought it was too early for you, even now.”
“Oh, I have not been waiting long,” she said. “It was because we dined so early; and then they were all—tired.”
“Except my Margaret. God bless my Margaret, that came out and took the trouble to wait for me! How often I have sat here and watched for the sweep of your dress at the corner of the house, for the least sign of you! And to think that you should have been first to-night, and waiting—”
“Why should not I wait,” she said, “as well as you? And to-morrow I am going away.”
“To-morrow!” he cried, in a voice of despair. “How am I to endure it? how am I to go on without you? I am afraid to think of it, my darling. Margaret! Margaret! what are you going to say to me to give me strength to get through to-morrow, and all the days after it, till we meet again?”
Now it has come! said Margaret to herself; and she felt with astonishment that the emergency seemed to give her possession of her faculties.
“I do not know,” she said, steadily, “what you want me to do or say. I shall be very sorry to go away and to—part from you. But what can I do? My sisters have the right to do what they think proper with me; and I think I ought, too, to go and see my own house. I would like to take Bell or somebody, but they will not let me. And now that Ludovic is here and his family, it is natural that I should go away.”
“Yes; but first say something to comfort me, Margaret. I did not suppose you could stay here forever: but tell me you love me, and will be faithful to me. Tell me when I may come after you?”
“Come after me?” she exclaimed, with a certain dismay.
“Did you not think I would come after you? Did you think I could stay in one country while you were in another— I, who have had the happiness of seeing you every day? But it is better this should end, though it is like to break my heart, for we should have lost time, and been content just with seeing each other; and now, Margaret, my darling, we must settle something. Tell me what I may do? To wait till you are of age is a lifetime. If I come to England after you in about three months, when you are in your own house, will you receive me and tell your sisters what I am to you? Margaret! you are not frightened, darling? You did not think I would let my love go away and carry my heart with her without settling something? You could not have been so cruel!”
“I do not want to be cruel,” she said; “but oh! wouldn’t it do to wait—to wait a little? It is only three years; I am very near eighteen. I shall be eighteen in November; and three years go so quickly. Why do you look at me like that? I am not unkind. It is only that I think; it is only that—oh! I am sure that would be the best!”
“Three years!” he said; “you might as well bid me wait thirty years. How can I be sure you will not forget me long before three years are out? What! live without knowing anything of you—without seeing you, for three centuries—it would be all the same. Tell me to go out into St. Andrew’s Bay in a storm, and be cast away on the rocks—tell me to drown myself in the Eden—as you please, Margaret! I think it is in me to do it if you bid me; but wait for three years and never see you—never know what you are thinking, never hear the sound of your voice? I had rather go and hang myself at once!” cried Rob. He was walking up and down under the shadow of the trees. He was very much excited. After coming so far, after holding her in his hand, as he thought, was he going to lose her at the last?
“I did not mean that”—she stood leaning against the fir, very much troubled—“what can I do? Oh, what am I to do?”
“You must not ask me to be content without you,” he said, “for I cannot— I cannot. It is not possible for me to give you up and live without you now. If you had sent me away at the very first, perhaps— But after all that has passed, Margaret, after feeling that you were mine, to ask me to go away and give you up—now!”
“I did not say give me up; I said—”
“You said three years, darling—three lifetimes; you could not mean anything so dreadful! You would not kill me, would you? It is like taking my heart out of my breast. What good would there be in the world for me? What could I do? What would I be fit for? Margaret, Margaret! you could not have the heart to treat me so!”
“What can I do?” she said, trembling. “Ludovic has found out about you, and he asked me to give you up. I did not mean to tell you, but I cannot help it. He says they will never, never consent. And what am I to do? How can I fight with them? I said I would not give you up. I said it would break your heart.”
“And so it would, my darling!” he cried, coming to her side, putting his arm round her; “and, oh, my Margaret, yours too!”
Margaret made no reply to this. She withdrew the least little step—but how could she hurt his feelings?
“That was why I said three years,” she said; “three years is not so very long. Poor Jeanie in the house, did you ever see Jeanie? She is—very fond of some one; and she has not heard of him at all or seen him, for two years. It would pass very fast. You would become a great painter—and then; but Jeanie does not know if she will ever see him again; and his name is Rob, too, like you.”
“What has Jeanie to do with it?” he cried, with a look of dismay. Then he caught her arm and drew her away. “There is some one coming from the house; let us not wait here, but come down the other side of the wood. I must not be interrupted now. I have a great deal more to say to you, Margaret, my Margaret, this last night before we part.”