Miss Jean returned to her work after tea. It was her time for taking her walk, either with her sister, if Margaret had any inclination that way, or by herself, in the contemplative stillness of the Ghost's Walk. But this afternoon she sat still over that carnation which was never ending, with its many little leaves and gradations of colour; the carnation in the glass which she was copying had twice been removed, and perhaps it was the little apology with which she thought it necessary to account for her departure from her usual habit of taking a little relaxation at this time of the day, that aroused Miss Margaret's suspicion.
"I think I must just finish this flower. I have been a terrible time at it," Miss Jean said.
"Ye may well say that," said her sister; "it will never be done. You will come back and work at it to frighten Lilias' grandchildren after we are all in our graves."
"I will never do that," said Miss Jean firmly, "whatever I may do."
"There is no telling," said Miss Margaret. "I have often thought, if there were any ghosts, that a poor thing in that condition might just wander back to its old dwelling and hover about its old ways, without a thought that it might be a terror to those that behold it. It would not be easy to conceive that kindly folk in your house would be frightened at you."
"But, Margaret, how would a blessed existence that had passed into the heavens themselves come back to hover about earthly howffs and haunts? Oh, no, I cannot think that. To do a service or to give a warning, you could well understand; but just to wander about and frighten the innocent——"
"It is not a subject I have studied," said Miss Margaret, "though there's Lady Jean out there in the walk has had a weary time of it, summer and winter, if all tales be true. The music this afternoon must have been very moving, and you and your musician, you have grown great friends. I would have said you had both been greeting, if there could be any possible reason for it."
Jean's head was bent over her work, but Margaret kept her keen eyes fixed upon her. It was not a look which it was easy to ignore.
"It was Handel," said Miss Jean, softly; "there are some parts that would just wile your heart out of your breast, and some that are like the thunder rolling and the great winds. Friends, did you say? Oh, yes, we are great friends; and we were greeting together, though you may wonder, Margaret. He was telling me of his own affairs: and somehow, before ever I knew, I found that I was telling him about mine: and we both shed tears, I will not deny, he for my trouble, I am thinking, and me partly for his."
"And what was his, if one might ask?" Miss Margaret said.
"Mostly the troubles of a young spirit that has not learned to measure the world like you and me, Margaret, and that has little sense of what is out of his reach and what is in. And me, I was such an old haverel that I could not keep myself to myself, but just comforted him with telling him. He is a fine lad, Margaret; I never saw one that was more ready to feel."
"More ready, perhaps, than was wanted," cried Margaret, who could not divest herself of a little indignation and alarm.
"It's not easy to be too ready with your sympathy," said her sister, mildly. "Few folk are that."
Margaret was silent, wondering much what had passed. She stood at the window pretending to look out. She was perhaps a little jealous of the love of her life's companion. Had she known nothing of Lewis' intentions, there was indeed no indication to warn her that Jean's calm had been thus disturbed. She had expected some flutter in her sister's gentle spirit. She had expected perhaps a little anger, a few tears, or, what would have been worse, an exaggerated pity for the young man, and a flattered sense of power on Jean's part. Not one of these sentiments was visible in her. An anxious eye could see some traces of emotion: and that she had been much moved was certain, or she would not have "comforted him by telling him," as she had said. Margaret, who was excited and uneasy, was almost jealous that, even by way of crushing this young man's presumptuous hopes, Jean should so far have admitted him into her confidence as to tell him her own story; even that was a great deal too much.
"I would like to know," she said, "what right a strange lad could have, that is not a drop's blood to us, to come with his stories to you?"
"Poor callant!" said Miss Jean, "he has no mother. It was perhaps that, Margaret."
"Was he looking for a mother in you?" cried Margaret, sharply. If she had detected a blush, a smile, a movement of womanly vanity still lingering, there is no telling what Miss Margaret would have been capable of. But Jean worked on at her carnation in her tremulous calm, and made no sign. Perhaps it was the last sublimated essence of that womanly vanity which made her so tender of the young intruder. She would not hand him over to ridicule any more than to indignation. It was perhaps the first secret she had ever kept from Margaret; but then it was his secret, and not hers.
"He did not just say that, or perhaps think it," said Miss Jean; "he may have thought I would be affronted, being a single person: but that was what he meant."
"I hope you will never encourage such folly," said Margaret. "It is a thing that always ends in trouble. You are not old enough to be a man's mother, and it is very unbecoming; it is even not—delicate. You, that have been all your life like the very snowdrift, Jean!"
Jean raised her mild eyes to her sister. They were more luminous than usual with the tears that had been in them. There was a look of gentle wonder in their depths. The accusation took her entirely by surprise, but she did not say anything in her own defence. If there was any reproach in the look, it was of the gentlest kind. It was perhaps the first time in her life that Jean felt herself Margaret's superior. But she did not take any pleasure in her triumph. As for Margaret, her suspicion or temper could not bear that look. She stamped her foot suddenly on the floor with a quick cry.
"I am just a fool!" she said, turning all her weapons against herself in a moment—"just a fool! There's not another word to say."
"You were never that, Margaret."
"I have just been that all my life, and I will be so to my dying day!" cried Margaret, vehemently; and then she laughed, but not at her own want of grammar, of which she was unconscious. "And you are just a gowk too," she added, in her more usual tone.
"That may very well be, Margaret," said Miss Jean, returning to her carnation; and not a word more was said between the sisters of this curious incident.
But it was a long time before Margaret dismissed it from her mind. She watched Jean and all her movements, with many attempts to discover what effect had been produced upon her. But Jean went about her gentle occupations just as usual. The one departure from her customary routine was the omission of that evening walk. No doubt such a thing had happened before without attracting any notice; and if she were more still and silent than usual during the evening, where could there be a more natural explanation of that than in the fact which she had confessed that she had told her own story to her visitor? Not for nothing are those doors of the past opened. However entirely the sorrow that is long over may dwell in the mind, there is an agitation, a renewal of the first acuteness of the pain in the retelling of it. Miss Margaret said all this to herself, and fully accounted for any little change which her keen inspection found out in the demeanour of her sister; but, indeed, had it not been for that close watch, there was no change. She had not been disturbed in the calm of her spirit—perhaps she had not quite realised what Lewis meant. Afterwards it was certain, when she thought it over, she rejected altogether the hypothesis which had been forced upon her by his words, and said to herself that she must have taken him up altogether wrong. What motive could he have in speaking so to her? She was old, she was without money or any recommendation, and it was not as if he had known her long, to grow fond of her, as will happen sometimes without thought or premeditation on either side. She thought to herself that it was very fortunate she had not been betrayed into any expression that could have shown her mistake, for it must have been a mistake. And how fortunate that it had blown over so easily, for they were better friends than ever, and the sweet-hearted lad had wept actual tears for her trouble. The Lord bless him for it! Miss Jean said, with gratitude and tender pleasure. And then she fell to thinking how wonderful it was that you will sometimes unbar your secret heart to a stranger when you could not do it to those you see every day. How strange that was, with a confusing sort of sense in it, that in the dimness of this world, where you can only see the outside, those that were made to be the dearest of friends might never find each other out. But that was too deep a thought for Miss Jean, who returned to her carnation, and worked away a bit of musing into it in little broken half-suggestions, which never made themselves into words, but which made her life far more full and sweet, as she sat there and patiently worked the silken flowers into a piece of stuff not half worth the trouble—than anyone knew or suspected. Margaret would be a little impatient of its long duration sometimes, and even of the stooping of Jean's head, as she sat against the light in the window, with her basket of silks and the carnation in the glass.
This episode, however, was lost in the stir of the preparations for Lilias' first appearance in the world. Needless to say that no idea of the possibility of any incident in which she herself was not the central figure ever crossed the mind of Lilias. Her sisters were her guardians, the chief upholders of the little world of which she herself was the interest and living centre. That anything apart from herself should happen to them was as impossible as that everything should not happen to her, standing as she did upon the threshold of life. A natural conviction so undoubting would have closed her eyes even if there had been anything to see; and there was nothing, save in Miss Margaret's anxious fancy. She was the one of the party who was disturbed by the visit of Lewis. When he came back, as he did very soon, it is impossible to describe the restless anxiety of Margaret. She would have liked to see from some coign of vantage what they were doing; she would have liked to overhear their talk. Her impatience was almost irrestrainable while she sat and listened to Lilias reading. What was Queen Elizabeth to her? It was right, no doubt, that the child should be brought up in right views. But what if in the mean time all that mysterious scene which had passed downstairs out of her knowledge should be gone over again, and Jean, always too gentle, be this time over-persuaded? So restless did she become that Lilias at last paused in her reading.
"You are tired, Margaret; you are anxious about something. What is it?" the girl said.
"Me—anxious—what should I be anxious about? I am thinking of your dress, if it was right to have it silk—muslin would have been better at your age; and then there is Jean no doubt just taigled with that young lad, and not able to get him off her hands."
"Oh, as for Jean, do you not hear the piano, Margaret? You may be sure she is perfectly happy: for, you know, Mr. Murray is a great performer. Mrs. Seton says so, and she knows about music."
"I am sick of Mrs. Seton and her great performers. Murray! who knows even if he is a Murray? He cannot tell who he belongs to. If he was come of any Murray that has ever been heard tell of, he would know that——"
"I daresay," said Lilias, boldly, "there are a great many Murrays, very nice people, that have never been heard tell of——"
"Lilias!" said her sister, in dismay. "It is a great deal you can know about it," she added, with a somewhat angry laugh. Her mind was more easy when she heard the piano. Nothing of importance could be talked about while it went on in full force.
"I don't know very much, Margaret; but everybody is allowed to think," said the girl; "and old families, like old clothes, most surely wear out. I am not sure that it is such an advantage to be old. If I were a new man, I think I would be proud of it. It would be all my own doing; or, if I were a new man's daughter, it would be grand to think that it was all from my father, him and nobody else. That would be something to be proud about."
"Money," Margaret said, laconically, and with an accent of disdain.
"Money! Oh, but I did not mean money."
"Do you know what you meant?" said Miss Margaret, scornfully. "What does a new man, as you call it, make but money? For honours, you must have time and opportunity. In these days it is a quack medicine, or a new invention for taking work out of poor men's hands, or the grand art of selling water for milk, and carrion for meat, and the sweepings of the house for honest cloth. It's that that makes a new man; and it would be a great credit and honour, no doubt, to be his daughter."
"Margaret, you know that is not what I meant," cried Lilias, indignant. "I was not thinking of the people that are only rich. I was thinking——"
"I well understand that you know nothing about it; and how should you? But one thing of this age is that the babes and sucklings just think themselves as wise as Solomon in all his glory. I cannot hear if that piano is aye bumming. Bless me, what a waste for a young man that might be on the hill-side—or he might be in the colonies making corn grow for the good of man—or taming down the savages in Africa."
"He could not be on the hill-side, if you mean shooting, Margaret, for you forget it's only July——"
"He might be doing many better things than sitting at a piano at his age, deluding an old maid."
"Margaret!" cried Lilias, springing up with flashing eyes. "Is it my Jean you are calling that?"
"Well! and what else is she? or me, either, for that matter. Just two old maids: and, for anything we know, you may be a third yourself, more likely than not, unless you take the first that offers—which was what neither her nor me were allowed to do."
"I will never take the first that offers," cried Lilias, indignantly. "What is the matter with you, Margaret? Music is always called such a fine thing in books. If we do not care for it, perhaps it is our fault; and Jean is so fond of it, which shows it must be good."
There had been a lull in the sound of the piano which had called forth Margaret's outburst. She was more charitable as it went on.
"If you are going to read your book, Lilias," she said, "go on with it: but, if you are going to argue, just put the other away first. For my part, I think it is about time for the tea."
And when she went downstairs everything was re-assuring. The music was tranquil, and Miss Jean quite calm, not even excited and ecstatic, as she had been on previous occasions. The perfect composure of the atmosphere smoothed Miss Margaret down in a moment, and, as so often happens after a false alarm, she was more gracious, more gay than usual in the relief of her mind.
"Jean," she said, "you must mind that Mr. Murray is a young man, and wants diversion—not to be kept close to a piano on a bonnie summer afternoon, when everybody that can be out, is out, and enjoying this grand weather. I would not say but what music was a great diversion too—but we are old, and he is young."
"I have had my fill of sunshine," said Lewis, "and sketched everything there is to sketch within a mile or two. And I have no piano. I hope you are not going now to turn me away."
"So you sketch too? Yes, I heard it before no doubt, but I had forgotten. You are a very accomplished young man. In our day, it was the young ladies that learned all that; the boys were packed away into the Army, or the Navy, or to India, and never had any time. It was the girls of a family——"
"But oh, Margaret! if you will think what kind of music and drawing it was! 'Rousseau's Dream' upon the piano, and a painted flower upon cardboard. I think shame when you speak of it. A real musician, and a true artist, is very different——"
"I don't merit those fine titles," said Lewis, with a laugh. "I understand what Miss Margaret means. The thing to do for me is to turn me loose upon New Murkley, and let me decorate those great rooms. I have a little turn that way. I have seen the great palaces of that architecture, and I have studied. I should be no more idle, if you would permit me to do that."
"Decorate the rooms! But that would be worse still than being idle," said Margaret. "For it would be work for no use. If no miracle happens to the family, so far as I can see, Lilias will just have to pull down that fool's palace, or sell it, one or the other. You need not cry out. What would you do with it, you silly thing, with no money to keep it up?"
"I will never sell it," cried Lilias, with flashing eyes.
"That would be the best; for we might get some new rich person, one of the men you admire, Lilias, to give a sum of money for it. And you might build a wall between it and us, and we would be none the worse. Pulling it down would be a waste, though it would be more comfortable to one's feelings; for you would get nothing but the price of old materials for that big castle that we have looked at all our lives. But, any way, to decorate a house that is doomed, and not a window in it to keep out the weather——"
"It might be made into a hospital," said Miss Jean. "That has always been my notion, Margaret. We can make no use of it ourselves, and it would be a heartbreak to sell it, and Lilias would never like to pull down such solid bonnie walls. I doubt even if it would be right."
"Why should it not be right, you veesionary? It is her own at least, to do as she pleases—if once she were of full age, and nothing can be done before that."
"But, Margaret, there's more in it—solid bonnie walls that took a long time to build, and a good warm steady roof, and all the grand, big rooms, though there's nothing in them—and when you consider the poor sick folk and the helpless bairns that have no shelter! I'm not clear in my mind that it would be a lawful thing," Miss Jean said.
"Did I not say she was a veesionary?" said Margaret. "We would have had no shelter to our own heads, let alone help for the poor folk, if I had not been here to look over the house. We are just an impracticable race. One has one whimsey, and one another. The thing has been built for a fancy, and our fancies will keep us from getting rid of it. I am not sure that I am heartwhole myself. I would not like to see a pickaxe laid upon it. We will have to make up our minds before Lilias comes of age. But, one way or another, Mr. Murray, you will see that decorations are not just our affair. We are meaning to be—in town for the next season," she added, with the solemnity which such a statement demanded. "And afterwards our movements may be a little uncertain, not knowing what that may lead to. It is just possible that we may come no more to Murkley till Lilias is of age."
Lewis made no reply. He had to receive the intelligence with a bow; it was not his part to criticise, or even to regret. He had come fortuitously across their path, and had not even standing ground enough with them to venture to say that he hoped the friendship might not end there. To Miss Jean, had he been alone with her, he could have said this, but not under Margaret's keen, all-inspecting eye. It was with a mixture of pain and pleasure that he felt himself in the background, listening to what they said. The very termination of his plans in respect to Miss Jean detached him, and made him feel himself a stranger in the midst of this little company of women, to which he had attached himself so completely in his own thoughts. So long as that question was unresolved, Lewis had felt, even with a sort of despairing acquiescence, that he was one of them, though they did not know it, with a certain concern in all their family arrangements, and hold upon them. Now this visionary right had gone altogether, and he knew that he was of no importance, nothing to them one way or another. It chilled him to feel it, and yet there was no doubt that it was so, and that he could expect or look for nothing else. He sat by for a while in silence, with a sort of smile, while they proceeded to talk of other things. Now and then Miss Jean would make an effort of kindness to bring him into the current, but he felt that he had nothing to do with that current. He was outside; he felt even that he ought to go away, and that it was rude not to do so; but at the same time it was difficult for him to issue forth from the charmed circle. Once gone, it seemed to Lewis that he could scarcely have a pretence for coming again.
At last he got up to go away.
"You will come again soon?" said Miss Jean.
"Bless me, Jean," said Margaret, "you must think Mr. Murray has little to do that he will come day after day at your bidding; though we are always glad to see him, I need not say," she added, with some ghost of cordiality.
He felt himself standing before her as if she had been his judge, and looked at her somewhat wistfully; but there was no encouragement in Margaret's face. Lewis felt that the hand she gave him made a gesture of dismissal. He walked to the door sadly enough. It seemed to him that, his first attempt having ended in failure, there was no further opportunity left him by which to approach the family which he had so unwittingly wronged. He felt abashed and humbled by his failure. To have been accepted by Miss Jean, although that would have been to separate him from all brighter hopes, would have been far better than this. Then at least he would have had some means of reparation. Now it seemed, as he turned his back upon them, as if he were turning his back also upon the honest wish which had brought him here, the generous desire that had been his leading principle ever since he had heard of old Sir Patrick's rightful heirs. Lewis was exceedingly cast down and troubled. He thought, as he went slowly across the old hall, that in all probability he would never be admitted to it again.
There was no servant to open the door to him, none of the usual urgency of politeness by which one of the ladies themselves, if Simon were out of the way, would accompany a visitor to the threshold. It was one sign of their dismissal of him, he thought, that he was to let himself out without a word from anyone. As he put his hand, however, reluctantly upon the door, Lewis was suddenly aware of a skim and flutter across the oak floor and the old Turkey carpet in the centre of the hall, and, looking up, perceived with a start and flush Lilias herself, and no other, who had darted after him from the open door of the drawing-room. It lasted only a moment, but he saw it like a picture. The girl in her light dress, dazzling, with her fair head and smiling countenance bent towards him: and beyond her, in the room within that open door, Margaret standing in an attitude of watchfulness, keenly listening, intent upon what passed. Lilias had flown after him, indifferent to all remonstrance. Her sweet voice, with its little trick of accent, and the faint cadence in it of the lingering vowels, had a touch of gay defiance in its sound.
"You are not going away," she said—"you are to be at the ball—you are not to forget. And perhaps we shall dance together," she said, with a smile, offering him her hand.
What was he to do with her hand when he got it? Not shake it and let it drop, like an ordinary Englishman. He had not been bred in that way. He bowed over it and kissed it before Lilias knew. He would have kissed her slipper had he dared, but that would have been an unusual homage, whereas this was the most natural, the most simple salutation in the world.
It took Lilias altogether by surprise. No lip of man had ever touched her hand before. Her fair face turned crimson. She could not have been more astonished had he kissed her cheek, though the astonishment would have been of a different kind. She stood bewildered when this wonderful thing had happened, looking at her hand almost with alarm, as if the mark would show. She was ready to say, "It was not my fault," in instinctive self-defence. And yet she was not offended or displeased, but only startled. What would Margaret say? what would Jean say? or should she tell them? To end this self-discussion, she fled upstairs suddenly to her own room, and there considered the question, and the incident which was the strangest that ever had happened to her in all her life.