THERE came a great sense of desolation and misery into the heart of Jeanie after she had witnessed, with eyes averted and without a sign of affection, wrapped up in offence and estrangement, the departure of her sister. She was angry with Kirsteen and deeply disappointed, and incapable of comprehending that it must be so, and that she, Jeanie, was to be crossed at last and after all, her plaint disregarded, her prayer refused. It had been her lot hitherto to get all her little requirements in the end, however her mother or Marg’ret might at first stand out. And the boys had been much ruled by Jeanie’s will, and had yielded to her as big brothers often fail to do. She had never been crossed, in the end. Opposition had been made to her, difficulties insisted upon, but in the end they had always given way. Only once before had Jeanie come face to face with a disappointment, which could not by anything she could do be changed into happiness and content. It was the central incident in her life, but it had been up to this moment the exception, the one adverse event she had ever known. And it had been so great, so startling and astonishing that the girl’s pride and all her strength had been roused to conceal and surmount it, so that no one should ever suspect that to her, Jeanie, any slight had ever come. To nobody but to Kirsteen, and to her only when taken utterly by surprise, had this secret ever been betrayed. Young Gordon had visited Glendochart from time to time during the last years. He had come in the intervals of his service while Jeanie grew and blossomed into womanhood. While she was still half child, half woman, he had awakened in her heart that first delicious and strange sense of power which is so great a revelation to a girl. His eyes had said a thousand indistinct sweetnesses to her, which his lips had not ventured to confess. He had been reverent of her extreme youth. He had been kept back by his own uncertain prospects, by his want of money and unsettled life, a soldier seeking advancement wherever it was to be found. But none of these honourable reasons had been taken into account by the girl who, convinced as she had been of his love, had seen him go away with an amazement and shock of feeling scarcely comprehensible out of the first absolutism and certainty of youth. He had gone away, saying never a word. That he was overwhelmed with agitation and distress when the summons to join his regiment (for which he professed to be looking eagerly) came; that he had spoken of returning, of hopes that were involved in his return, with allusions and suggestions that the poor fellow thought plain enough, had all been invisible to Jeanie, or disdained by her, as so many evidences of falsehood. Her little imperious soul had been shaken as by a tempest. She to be forsaken, wooed and abandoned, she before whom every one bowed, the flower of the Highlands, as they called her!
And now Kirsteen had done the same. Once again, till the last moment Jeanie had believed that her sister would yield, and she would have her way. Just as she had expected that word which never came from Lewis Gordon, she had expected from Kirsteen if it were but a word, a whisper of consent at the last. Even while she held her cheek to be kissed, turning away her eyes which were sullen with anger yet expectation, the girl expected that Kirsteen might still whisper—“Come.” She had contrived all in her own mind ready for that last moment—Kirsteen would say, “Come, I’ll wait for you at the clachan,”—and all unsuspected, the stranger having visibly departed, Jeanie would steal out, nobody taking any notice, and fly along the road, and spring up light as a feather beside Miss Macnab. What would it matter to her that there was no room? She had planned it all. At the very last, as her mother used to do, as Marg’ret did, compunction at the sight of Jeanie’s averted face would seize upon Kirsteen. None of them could bear to see her vexed—and at the last that feeling would be stronger than prudence or any wise sentiment. Jeanie within herself had been sure of this; but she had been deceived. And after she had watched with incredulous angry eyes full of a mist of bitterness—for tears she would not shed to acknowledge herself defeated—the actual going away without a word of her sister, she had fled to her room and flung herself upon her bed, even now not without an ear intent on any sound that might indicate Kirsteen’s return, to say yet the tardy “Come,” to her little sister. But the wintry afternoon closed down, the light faded away, and stillness fell upon the house. There was nothing to be heard but the echo of the linn which always mingled with everything, and Merran’s heavy footstep and Marg’ret’s distant voice in the kitchen. Kirsteen was gone. It was impossible to believe it, but it was true. She was gone like him—him for whom she had spoken, who was her friend, for like draws to like, Jeanie cried furiously to herself, in the silence. They had gone away—both of them!—the man who loved her, and the sister who was evidently born for no such important end as to save and succour Jeanie—both! They had gone away, and she was left alone—to meet her fate.
Jeanie was not of the simple fibre of her family. Perhaps her condition of spoiled child had done something towards the development of a different character, but that character was there in the first place to be developed. Her impatient determination to have what she wanted, to be happy, to get such amusements, privileges, and advantages as were comprehensible to her, without consideration as to whether they were possible or not, or what the result of her satisfaction would be—was very different both from the steadfastness of Kirsteen, and the calm self-seeking of Mary. Jeanie had a passion in her which would not be gainsaid. She did not understand obstacles except as things to be eluded, pushed aside, thrust out of the way, arbitrarily, imperiously, whether they were just or even necessary or not. She could not understand that she had been born for anything but to be paramount, to be loved and admired, and happy. Her lover and heaven itself had wronged her by holding back that happiness that was her due. And when there seemed a prospect that it was to come back to her, Jeanie’s heart rushed at the hope with a fervour which was largely made up of fury and indignation. The thought of a future more brilliant than any she could have had with Gordon filled her with fierce delight, principally from the hope that he would hear of it, perhaps see it and recognize her superior bliss and his loss. This, more than a girl’s natural vanity in being followed by one so much above her in rank, and far more than any feeling for Lord John, had made his attentions delightful to her. Jeanie had been taken like her sisters before her to the ball at the Castle; but hers were not merely the good looks of Kirsteen or the comeliness of Mary. It had not been possible to keep the little beauty in the background. Even the noble party of visitors and relations who were usually so little interested by the lairds and their belongings were moved by Jeanie. She was introduced among them, danced with, talked to, while the others of her class looked on grim or smiling as their case might be. That Jeanie had been excited and delighted by her triumph it is needless to say; what was much more extraordinary was that her father, though he said nothing, felt for the first time the true sensation of that superiority which he had believed in and asserted all his life. The beauty and brightness which dazzled everybody were but the natural emanation of her blood, to Drumcarro. “Oh, ay, she’s of the real auld Douglas kind,” he said with proud carelessness when compliments were paid him. That the Douglases should gain a triumph through a lassie was a thing that he had scarcely been able to bring himself to believe; but when this triumph was accomplished for him, his pride accepted it as a thing to be looked for. Was not she a Douglas? That explained all.
And when Lord John appeared “incognity” as Marg’ret said, in the little shooting lodge on the hill, both father and daughter had responded after their kind. Drumcarro had felt the suggestion of an alliance with the other noble house which had outstripped his in honours, but never to his consciousness excelled or even equalled it in antiquity and nobility, to be a gratifying circumstance and high testimonial to his superiority to everything around, but he had not contemplated it with any surprise. To get a Douglas as his wife was honour enough for any duke’s son; but the thought of being so closely allied to the Duke gave him on his side a proud satisfaction. It was a great thing for a daughter to do who was only a daughter, and of no account whatever. Jeanie too felt a subtle elation in her veins, a sense of high promotion, but not in so simple a way. When he heard of it what would he think? was the burden of her thoughts. He would see that Jeanie Douglas was not one to be deserted, left or taken up again at his pleasure. She pictured to herself meeting him in some vague grandeur of a party in London, and a hundred times in her heart rehearsed the bow she would give him, the sweeping curtsey, the fine progress past him which she would make on her husband’s arm. The husband himself had a very secondary place—but that did not occur to Jeanie. He was understood as the occasion of all that grandeur, the sharer of it no doubt; but the exquisite revenge of such an encounter was what in her first vague sense of triumph, Jeanie chiefly pictured to herself.
The girl was not, however, herself enlightened by this curious evidence of the state of her mind. She had not begun to think about her thoughts; all was straightforward and simple with her, as with a young savage. On the other side Lord John did not leave her in any doubt as to his feelings. His declaration of love was not delayed by any scruples—but neither was it followed by any of those practical steps which even in Jeanie’s limited experience were usual in the circumstances. It is true that Jeanie herself was coy, and held off from the warm love-making of her suitor, keeping him at arm’s length; but no reference to her father, none of the suggestions and arrangements into which happy lovers rush ever came from Lord John’s lips. He spoke indeed of the time when they should be always together, but said not a word as to when or how that should be. It was less difficult to Jeanie to keep such a secret than it would have been for most girls. Her mother was ill, her father, as she supposed, utterly indifferent, no sister near to whom her heart could be opened. And to be secret in love was one of the traditions of the time and country. But still after a time she began to feel that there was something, she could not tell what, unexpected, undesirable, in her lover. When he spoke of marriage it was with a scoff and jeer. Even, however, when the moment came in which he told her that marriage in the ordinary way, with all the publicity usually surrounding that event, was impossible to him, Jeanie was not suspicious enough to be defiant. “You’ll have to steal out some night, and trust yourself to me and let me carry you away,” he said, “that’s what we’ll have to do. My bonny Jeanie will trust herself to me.”
“That is what Anne did,” cried Jeanie, startled. “My father would not give his consent; and he has never seen her again. We dare not say her name. But maybe,” she added after a pause, “it would be different with you.”
“I think it would be different with me,” he said, with a laugh that somehow offended Jeanie, she could not tell how. But then he began to lavish sweet words and praises upon her, so that the girl’s vanity was soothed and her imagination excited. He told her where he would take her—to London, and then abroad, which was a word of no tangible import to her ignorance, but meant only everything that was brilliant and splendid—and of all the beautiful places she should see, and the beautiful things she should have.
“I suppose,” said Jeanie, “we would go to see the king?”
“There is no king, in that way,” he said, with a laugh.
“But there is a court, for we see it in the paper,” said Jeanie. “If it is the prince, it would just be the same.”
“We’ll not go to the court this time,” he said, with another of those laughs which wounded Jeanie, she could not tell how.
“I thought it was the right way,” said Jeanie, thoughtfully. What she was thinking was, that in that case she would not meet him, and that the heart of her triumph would be lost.
“In some cases,” he said, still laughing, “but not in ours, my lovely dear. We will never think of the world, we’ll think only of love. Whatever’s pleasantest my Jeanie shall see, but nothing so bonny as herself.”
“There will be many things in London besides the court—there is my sister Kirsteen,” said Jeanie, still musing. “Oh, I will be glad to see Kirsteen.”
“It’s clear I am not enough for my Jeanie, though my Jeanie is enough for me!”
“Oh, it is not that,” said Jeanie, vaguely. In her heart, however, there was no doubt a sensation that to dazzle him with her grandeur, and to make her sister a spectator of her new and exalted life, were the things to which she looked forward most.
“I’ll not promise to take you to Kirsteen, any more than to take you to court,” he said. “I’ll promise nothing that takes your mind off me. To think of having you all to myself is enough for me. I mean to carry you off to some Italian bower, where there will be nothing to do but love, and love, and——”
“Till you are tired of love, as you call it, and me too,” said Jeanie, with a little disdain.
He gave her a curious look, wondering if at last the little simplicity had fathomed what he really meant. But Jeanie’s eyes were all untroubled, and her brow serene. She was disappointed and dissatisfied with his way; but only because it was not her way, and contrary to her expectations, not that she had divined the shame that was in his heart.
But one day a gleam of strange light burst upon the girl. He had been telling her of one of his friends, who had gone to those Italian bowers, and of the life he led; the lake, the moonlight, the myrtles and roses in the middle of winter, till Jeanie’s eyes grew bright. “We will get him to look for a place for us, on the water’s edge,” Lord John said. No thought of suspicion, or of finding her lover out, was in Jeanie’s mind. She asked, as a girl does, eager to hear of others in the same circumstances as herself, “And is he married, too?”
For the moment she could not comprehend the hurried demonstration, the embarrassment of Lord John among his caresses, the laugh, always so distasteful to her. “They don’t think of that out there,” he said, “they don’t put you in chains out there, they trust everything to love—as my Jeanie is going to do.”
What did it mean? She was always shy of these vehement caresses—she freed herself, with a strange chill upon her, and said that she must go. They had been wandering by the side of the linn, under the bare, over-arching trees; and Jeanie would not listen to the explanations which he was anxious to make, and which she understood no more than the offence. She was sure of nothing but that she must get away.