EDGAR did not come home till the evening was considerably advanced. He went with Campbell to his house, and partook of the substantial family tea in the best parlour, which Mrs. Campbell, his aunt, called the drawing-room—so that it was late before he returned home.
“There’s a moon,” Campbell said. “Ye need be in no hurry. A young fellow in certain states of mind, as we a’ know, takes to moonlight walks like a duck to the water.”
At which speech Mrs. Campbell laughed, being evidently in the secret; but John, the only son, who was a student at the University of Glasgow, and just about to set out for the winter session, looked black and fierce as any mountain storm. These inferences of some supposed sentiment, which he was totally ignorant of, might have passed quite innocuously over Edgar only a day before, but they filled him now with suppressed rage and deep mortification. Perhaps unreasonably; but there is nothing which a man resents so much as to be supposed “in love” with some one whom he considers beneath him. Even when there is truth in the supposition, he resents the discovery which brings all the inappropriateness of the conjunction before his mind; and if there is no truth in it, he feels himself injured in the tenderest point—ill-used, humbled, wronged. Edgar’s impulse was to leave the house where he was thus insulted by inference; but partly pride, partly his usual deference to other people’s feelings, and partly the necessity which was now stronger than ever of carrying out his intentions and leaving the place where he was subject to such an insane suggestion triumphed over his first impulse.
Even Campbell was staggered in his vulgar notion that only Jeanie and her fresh beauty could account for the young man’s prolonged stay and unusual devotion, when he began to perceive the munificence of Edgar’s intentions. A young man who wanted to marry might indeed be guilty of a great many foolishnesses; he might be ready, Mr. Campbell thought, to burden himself with the old mother for the sake of the pretty child; but to alienate a portion of his income (for Edgar did not enter fully into his plan) was a totally different and quite impossible sort of sacrifice. What could be his motive? Was it that Jeanie might be educated and made a lady of before he should marry her? As for pure duty towards the old mother, honour of her long and virtuous life, compassion for the downfall of so proud a spirit, being motives strong enough for such a sacrifice, at this the worthy man guffawed loudly.
“I’m no the man to be taken in with fine words,” he said, with a broad smile.
While these jokes and discussions were going on in the best parlour at Loch Arroch Head, Jeanie, unconscious of any debate in which her name could be involved, went about her usual occupations at home. She got the tea ready, coming and going with soft steps from the parlour to the kitchen, carrying in the tray, and “masking” the tea with her own hands. As for Bell, she was “suppering” the kye, and looking after the outdoor work, and had no time for such daintier service. Jeanie would steal a moment now and then, while she prepared this simple meal, to step noiselessly to the ever open door, and cast a wistful look up the loch-side to see “if he was coming.” The gloaming grew darker and darker, the stars came out over the hill, the moon rose, and still Jeanie strained her eyes to see if any figure approached on the long line of almost level road by the side of the loch. Once her heart leaped up, thinking she saw him; but it was only a shearer taking his way home from the West Park, where, taking advantage of a good day, the harvest had gone on as long as the light permitted. Poor Jeanie! what a difference there was between this heavy rustic form as it drew near, relieved against the dark yet gleaming water of the loch, and the erect, light-footed, elastic figure she looked for! As she washed the old china cups brought out in his honour, and put the tea-things away, she wondered with a pang in her kind little heart what could have kept him? Had he met some of his grand friends, sportsmen arriving by the boat, or those tourists whom the natives looked upon with mingled admiration and scorn? or could any accident have happened? a thought which blanched her pretty cheek with fear.
She would have liked to talk to her grandmother about Edgar, but she did not venture to do more than wonder “what could be keeping him?” a question to which Mrs. Murray responded placidly that no doubt he was “drinking tea” with somebody at Loch Arroch Head. The old lady was not discomposed by Edgar’s absence as Jeanie was; and poor Jeanie, in the flutter and warmth of her feelings, could have cried with vexation at the contrast between her own agitated heart and this calm, which she thought indifference. Her grandmother “did not care.” “Oh, how could she help caring, and him so good to her!” poor Jeanie said to herself. And Bell went about her work out of doors, cheerily singing, in her full rustic voice, as she prepared the supper for the kye, and carried it out to the byre, coming and going in her strong shoes, with clink of pails, and loud talking now and then to Sandy, who was helping. Nobody cared but Jeanie that he was so late of coming home.
Then she went upstairs with her grandmother, who was still an invalid, and helped her to bed, and read “the chapter” with which the day was always concluded; and put a great old stick, with a gold head, which had belonged to some ancestor, by the bedside, in order that Mrs. Murray, if she wanted anything, should “knock down,” for there were not many bells in the little farmhouse. The sitting-room was immediately below, and this was the recognised way at the Castle Farm of calling for the attendants. When this last duty was done, Jeanie was free for the night to “take her book” or “her seam,” and do as she pleased, for she had never had anything to do with “the beasts” or outdoor matters.
By this time Bell had finished with her clinking pails. She was in the kitchen, still moving about, frying the cold potatoes into a savoury mess, with which Sandy and she were about to regale themselves. Where Bell’s strong shoes were, and her hearty voice, not to speak of Sandy’s, which was very deep bass, there could scarcely be stillness in the house; but when the kitchen door was closed, and the two (who were sweethearts) talked lower, the spell of the quiet grew strong upon Jeanie. She put down her seam, and stole out very quietly to the door, which still stood innocently open; for at the Castle Farm they feared no evil. If you could but have seen her, no prettier figure ever watched for a tardy lover. She was dressed in a plain little brown frock, without any furbelows, with a little rim of white collar round her neck. Her golden hair was fastened up with a large tortoise-shell comb, thought “very old-fashioned” by all the girls about Loch Arroch, which had belonged to Jeanie’s mother, and of which, as a valuable article, costing originally “more than a pound-note,” as her grandmother had often told her, Jeanie was proud. The comb was scarcely visible in the soft bright mass of hair, which Jeanie had not neglected to twist up in its abundance into some semblance of “the fashion.” She leant against the doorway with her chin propped in the hollow of her hand, and one folded arm supporting the elbow of the other.
The stars shone high over head, high up above the big summit of Benvohrlan, which shut out from her half the heavens. The moon was behind, silvering over the red roof of the house, and falling glorious upon the dark water, making it one sheet of silver from where it opened out of the bigger loch up to the very foot of the mountain. The side of Benvohrlan was almost as light as in the day-time, and Loch Long on the other turn of the gigantic corner formed by the hill, went gleaming away into invisible space, betraying itself in undefinable distance by here and there a line or speck of silver. All up the loch side, at Jeanie’s left hand, the path lay clear and vacant, without a shadow on it. On the other side, the glimmering lightness of the stubble field, with its sheaves looking like strange animals in the moonlight, extended to the water edge, rounding out to where it too gained the margin of the parent loch. I do not know any finer combination of hill and water. The level fields of the Castle Farm on one side, and Big Benvohrlan on the other, form the doorway by which the lesser loch enters the greater; on one side an angle of cultivated land: on the other a gigantic angle of mountain. But little Jeanie thought little of the familiar scene around her. The moon, newly risen, cast a soft shadow of her little figure, the same way as her heart went, upon the road from the loch-head by which Edgar was coming. He saw this shadow with a little impatient vexation as he approached the house, but not till long after little Jeanie’s heart had jumped to perceive him.
Poor little gentle soul! her large eyes made larger and softer still by her wistful anxiety and longing for his presence, had watched with patience unwavering for more than an hour. She had not minded the chill wind nor the weariness of standing so long, with no support but the doorway. The attitude, the strained look, the patience, were all characteristic of Jeanie. She was the kind of being which in all second-rate poetry, and most second-rate imaginations, is the one sole type of woman. Looking for some one who was the lord of her life, or looking to some one—with soft eyes intent, with quick ears waiting, with gentle heart ready to receive whatever impression he wished to convey, the soft soul turned to the man who had caught her heart or her imagination as the flower turns to the sun. To use the jargon of the day, poor little Jeanie was receptive to the highest degree. She never originated anything, nor advised anything, nor took any part as an individual being in the conduct of life, either her own or that of others. Hers were not those eager youthful opinions, those harsh judgments, those daring comments which belong as much to youth as its bloom. She was too artless to know anything of the prettiness of her uplifted eyes, or the delicious flattery which lay in her absolute submissiveness. Poor Jeanie did not know that these were charms much more potent than the talents which she was aware she did not possess. She listened, and looked, and watched for those signs of guidance, which she obeyed by instinct with the docility of a dumb creature, because it was her nature. She did not even intend to please; though she was happy beyond description when she found that she had pleased, she did but act as she could not help acting, according as her disposition moved her. Edgar, who had not been used to this kind of woman, had been half annoyed, half amused by her powerlessness to advise or help, her soft devotion of look, now addressed to himself, now to Mrs. Murray. He had wondered at it, and objected to it; yet he had been moved like any other man to a softening sense of protection and almost tenderness. He was flattered too in spite of himself to find her thus watching for him. It made him more than half angry, but yet it pleased him involuntarily.
“You will catch cold standing out here in the night air,” he said pettishly at the first moment. Then he added with compunction, “It is kind of you to look for me, Jeanie; but you should not stand out in the cold without a shawl.”
“I’m glad you’re come home,” said Jeanie, with instinctive policy ignoring this reproof. “Grannie is in her bed, and it is lonely without you. Will I make you some tea? or will you have your supper? You’ve been long away.”
“Not so very long,” said Edgar, touched by the soft complaint, “but I ought to have recollected that you were alone. Are you afraid, Jeanie, at night with no one but Bell and the granny to take care of you? It is a lonely house.”
“Oh, no,” said Jeanie, looking brightly round upon him, as he followed her into the low parlour, where two candles were flickering on the table before the fire.
“But it is a lonely house?”
“Oh, yes,” she repeated softly, “but what o’ that? Nobody would meddle with us. Granny is as well known as Loch Arroch Kirk. Nobody dares meddle with us. I’m never lonely, except when granny is ill and goes to her bed, and I can hear Bell and Sandy in the kitchen. That makes me think I would like somebody to speak to, too.”
“But Bell and Sandy,”—Edgar began: if he was going to be so incautious as to add,—“are sweethearts,” I don’t know what would have become of him; but happily Jeanie, with a sudden blush interposed.
“I was not meaning Bell and Sandy; any voices have the same sound. They make you feel how lone you are.”
“That is true,” said Edgar, seating himself by the fire, which Jeanie had kept bright, with a clean-swept hearth, and a clear red glow for his coming. He sat down meditatively in the old mother’s chair. “That is true,” he repeated slowly, “I have felt it often of winter nights when I have gone upstairs to my chilly room, and heard the people chatting together as I passed their doors.”
“You have felt that, too?” said Jeanie timidly, with reverential wonder, “but you need never be your lane unless you like.”
“I assure you I have often been ‘my lane,’ as you call it, when I did not like at all,” said Edgar smiling, “you have much too high an opinion, Jeanie, of what I can do ‘if I like.’”
“Oh, no,” said Jeanie, “you are not the same as the like of us; you are a man, which is a great difference,—and then you’re a grand gentleman.”
“Jeanie, my foolish little Jeanie! I am your cousin and your granny’s child like you,” he cried, putting his hand upon hers, to stop her in the little outburst of innocent enthusiasm, which was, he felt, for an ideal Edgar—not for him.
“It’s very hard to understand,” said Jeanie shaking her head softly with a little sigh, “why you should be yonder the greatest of the land, and now only granny’s son, like me. I’ll no try. When I think, I get back a pain in my head like what I had—when I was ill.”
“You must not think,” said Edgar, “but, Jeanie, tell me, did you do my commission? Did you persuade granny to let me do what I wish?”
“Yes,” said Jeanie eagerly; she came forward and stood by him in the pleasure of making this report of her own faithfulness,—and the cheerful ruddy gleam of the firelight flickered about her, shining in her hair and eyes, and adding a tint to the colour on her cheek, which was pale by nature. “I told her a’ you said, I did not miss a word. I said it would be fine for her, but better for you; that you would do something then, and now you were doing nothing; and that you would be glad aye to think of Loch Arroch, and that there was a house there where you were thought upon day and night, and named in a’ the prayers, and minded, whatever you did, and whatever we did.”
“That was your own, Jeanie,” said Edgar, taking her hand, and looking up at her with gratified tenderness. She was to him as a little sister, and her affectionate half-childish enthusiasm brought a suffusion to his eyes.
“If it was, may I no say what I think—me too?” said Jeanie, with modest grace. “I told her that you couldna bear the thought of her away in another man’s house, after so long keeping her own over a’ our heads, that the siller was nothing to you, but that her—and me—were something to you, your nearest friends in this world. Eh, I’m glad we’re your nearest friends! though it’s strange, strange to think of,” said Jeanie, in a parenthesis. “I told her that though she couldna work and I couldna work, you could work, and win a fortune if you liked. I did not forget a single word,” cried the girl, “not a word! I told her all you said.”
For a moment Edgar made no reply. He listened with a half smile, wonderingly endeavouring to put himself in the place of this limited yet clear intelligence, which was capable of stating his own generous arguments so fully, yet incapable, as it seemed, of so much reflection as would make her hesitate to expound them. Jeanie, so far as her personal sentiment went, accepted his sacrifice with matter-of-fact simplicity, without ever thinking of his side of it, or of the deprivations involved. She took his offer to denude himself of everything he had, with the same absolute pleasure and satisfaction with which a child would accept a present. Was it her unbounded confidence in his power to win a fortune if he liked? Or was it her simple instinct that this was natural, and that the weak and helpless had a right to the services of the strong? Edgar was bewildered by this question which never entered into Jeanie’s mind. He was almost glad of her incapacity to see beyond the surface of things, and yet wondered at it with something between amusement and pain. Here was the primitive nature, commonplace, unsophisticated, he said to himself, which believed what was said to it simply demanding without motive or reason. No second thoughts troubled the limpid surface of Jeanie’s gentle mind. She believed unhesitatingly not only that he meant what he said (which was true), but that the arguments she repeated were infallible, without perceiving the sophistry of which Edgar himself, the author of them, was fully conscious. Truly and sincerely she made as light of his self-renunciation as he himself had made—a thing which is bewildering to the self-sacrificer, though it may be the thing which is most desirable to him and suits his purpose best. I do not know if Jeanie was aware of the half tone of descent in the moral scale which made itself apparent in Edgar’s voice.
“You have been a clever advocate, Jeanie,” he said with a smile, “and I hope a successful one,” and with that he dropped her hand and took out his newspaper. Was there anything amiss, or was it merely his lordly pleasure to end the conversation? With a momentary sense of pain, Jeanie wondered which it was, but accepted the latter explanation, got her seam, and sat down within reach of the pleasant warmth of the fire, happy in the silence, asking nothing more.