THE letter of Mrs. Charles aroused a great consternation in the house of Pitcomlie; they did not venture to tell Mr. Heriot of it. Fanshawe went and called Mr. Charles out of his room in the tower, and they all gathered in the bow-window in the drawing-room, and read it sentence by sentence, and talked it over. Marjory was the only one who took no comfort by this meeting. Mr. Charles was very much cast down for the first moment, but it did not last. “She’s a very silly woman, a very silly woman,” he said over and over. “I’m not meaning to vex you, May; but nothing except a woman could be so silly and so heartless; she is thinking only of herself. However, on the other hand, if Charlie had been so bad as you think, she would have been frightened. There’s something in a book I once read about having that fever thrice; the third time is the—God bless me! I cannot remember what my book said.”
The fact was, Mr. Charles remembered only too well, and was appalled; he was struck dumb for the moment in his voluble consolations. When he spoke again, he was a great deal less assured in his tone. “Depend upon it,” he said, “she is making the worst of everything. I suppose it is her way. She’s evidently a silly woman, a very silly woman, and I would say a very selfish one. But she would not run on like that about herself and the baby, if Charlie was as ill as you think.”
“Charlie might be very ill, and she might not know it,” said Marjory, “they might not tell her—they might think it would be too much for her in her circumstances. Her baby not six weeks old, and her husband coming home to—”
“To get better, my dear,” said Uncle Charles cheerily. “You may be sure to get better. He is young, and has everything in his favour. The very sea-breezes would stir him up. I do not think I would take any notice, my love, to your father. It would only worry him. It will be time enough when you get word from Southampton; and how that will cheer him! Poor Thomas—poor man! I begin to think now that there’s some hope for your father, May.”
“But what will there be if Charlie—”
“Toots, nonsense, Charlie! Charlie will come home quite well, you’ll see,” said Mr. Charles. “But as for you, you’re looking like a ghost. I’ll go and order the horses, and we’ll take Mr. Fanshawe out and show him the country. We are all dying for a breath of air.”
“I could not go, I cannot go,” said Marjory. “Mr. Fanshawe will forgive me, that I cannot think of anything but one thing. Oh, Uncle Charles! have we done anything to bring such misery on the house?”
“My dear,” said Mr. Charles, “the rain and the sun come on the just and on the unjust, as the Scriptures say. We are not justified in forming any rash judgment on ourselves.”
“And we have been happy so long!” said Marjory with tears. It seemed a kind of reason for all the misery that was coming now.
“Happy, humph! I would not say—there is many a thing that looks like happiness when you are in great trouble, that was little to brag of when it was here. But in the meantime, I’m going back to my papers,” said Mr. Charles, “Mr. Fanshawe, my man, come you with me, you’ll perhaps find something to divert you. She’s better left to herself—far better left to herself,” he added in an undertone. “Women-folk are not like us, she’ll take a cry and she’ll be better. To be sure,” said Mr. Charles, as he led the way to his tower, looking back upon his reluctant follower, “there’s ill men and good men in all the degrees; but I cannot think of a difference so great among us as between that girl, my niece, May, and the like of the selfish creature that wrote that letter. Not a word, not a thought of poor Charlie, as fine a lad as ever stepped—but all her bit miserable bantling of a baby, and her weary self.”
“I suppose, Sir, when a woman has a child she thinks of nothing else,” said Fanshawe, “or so at least people say.”
“Then the Lord preserve my niece, May, from ever having children!” said Mr. Charles, striding up the steps of his tower with his long legs, and with hot but holy indignation in his tone. Luckily the echoing of the spiral staircase drowned the laugh with which his companion listened. Fanshawe laughed only from his lips, for to tell the truth the suggestion annoyed him. He seemed immediately to see Marjory with a child in her arms, lavishing fondness upon it, while some idiot of a husband looked complacently on. Sometimes men love to weave such associations about women, sometimes on the contrary they are revolted by the notion; and the latter was Fanshawe’s case. He had not gone so far as even to dream of the possibility of marrying Marjory, or anyone else himself—and of course she would marry, some fool, some Johnnie something or other who never could, never would satisfy that woman’s mind. She would do it out of mere kindness, to please him, or to please somebody else, some old grandmother or uncle, or ancient bore of one kind or another, and drop into a mere child-producing, baby-worshipping dowdy; she would be compelled to take to babies, the husband being a fool and unworthy of her. Fanshawe listened to Mr. Charles’s lecture on the history of the Fife families with languor after this, making now and then an impertinent observation which startled the sage.
He asked “What did it matter?” when his companion enlarged upon that doubtful point in the pedigree of the Morrisons, where it was rumoured, a captain from the whale-fishing had come and married the heiress and injured the blood. “Matter!” said Mr. Charles with true indignation, “it matters just this, Sir, that the auld house of the Morrisons deriving from Sir Adam of that name, that was drowned in the ship that brought over the Maid of Norway, would be turned into mere nobodies—nobodies, Sir; with a harpoon and a fishing-net for their cognizance—”
“But even a harpoon and a fishing-net, after a century—” Fanshawe began.
“Century, Sir; what’s about a century?” said Mr. Charles.
But Fanshawe did not carry on the quarrel. He was too much occupied in considering the original question with which he had started, and how confoundedly Johnnie something or other would crow over the rest of mankind if such a woman was so silly as to marry him—a question embodying, as he felt, more human interest than any difficulty that could arise in regard to the captain of the whaling-ship.
Marjory did not do as her uncle prophesied. This last piece of news had dried up all tears from her eyes. She wandered about the upper part of the house, now pausing in that room where Fanshawe had been once called to her, and which still bore the name of “the boys’ room,” and now returning to her own. She even took a napkin and dusted carefully poor Charlie’s share of the books, and his golfing-clubs, and some small statuettes belonging to him; she put some flowers in a little vase under his portrait, and then withdrew them quickly, and threw them out of her window, some chance thought of resemblance to the decking of a grave having struck her fancy. She was sick and restless, unable to keep still, longing for news—further news—fearing to allow herself to think.
After some time, when she had made up the packet of Tom’s papers for her father, she took the letter which had so much disturbed her yesterday from the desk, and placed it in a little letter-case with the one she had received that day. Why she did this she could not have explained. She went wandering in her listlessness and suspense all over the house, finding here and there some trifle to rectify, which gave her a momentary occupation, and, what was more wonderful, finding at every turn some reminiscence of her brother Charlie, which a few hours ago she would not have noted. He had been out of the house for many years, and never till to-day had she been aware how much there was of him still in the old home, which somehow seemed to Marjory to-day like a mother preserving traces of all her children. An old fishing-rod of his hung in the hall; a bird which he had shot, and which for some boyish fancy had been stuffed and preserved, stood looking at her with its little beady eyes from the corner of the staircase. She had forgotten all about it till to-day.
At last Marjory, in the sickness of her heart, went to the old Tower, to her uncle’s room. There she could talk a little at least, which might be a relief. Mr. Fanshawe had long before left that refuge of learning and leisure, and Mr. Charles, who was compiling a family history, sat among his papers with his spectacles on his nose, collecting facts and arranging pedigrees, as calmly as though there were no present anxieties to disturb his mind, or future to thrill it into terror.
“Well, May, my dear!” he said, cheerily, looking up at her over the top of his spectacles; and then relapsed into his work. It is impossible to estimate the advantage which that work was to Mr. Charles Hay-Heriot. It kept him occupied, it kept him happy, it gave him “a duty” which he was bent on performing and a “responsibility” which he was proud to feel. He would search for days together to prove the accuracy of a date—happy days, during which he felt himself as important as Herodotus. Friends all over the country would stop him when they met, and would write him letters when they were apart, to ask how “his work” was progressing. He had come now to a very important part of that work. He had collected all the materials for his fifth chapter, which began the Reformation period, and he had now begun the work of composition, putting these materials together, which was a very interesting and solemn operation. He had not said anything about this Opus to Fanshawe the first time he had invited him to his room; but to-day, in the confidence of increasing friendship, he had told him, and the little flutter of pleasurable importance with which he had taken the stranger into his confidence hung about him still.
“Well, May, my dear,” he said, after a long pause, “you have come to see how I am getting on?”
“I am looking at you, Uncle Charles,” said Marjory, dreamily. How far off he seemed from her in that placid, gentle old age, with the occupation that pleased him as its games please a child! Could his blood boil any more, or his heart throb any more as hers was throbbing? She sighed unconsciously as she spoke. It seemed to her that Fanshawe, who was a stranger, yet who was in full tide of life, and knew what it meant to be cast about by varying tumults of feeling, would understand her better than her calm old uncle—“though he was a stranger,” Marjory, in her unconsciousness, said to herself.
“Well, my dear, I hope it’s no uninstructive,” said Mr. Charles, with a gentle laugh. “I do not set up for genius; but so far as work goes—honest work—”
There was a pause again, but that was not an unusual circumstance. Marjory was a frequent visitor in the tower, and sometimes the two, who were fond of each other, would sit together for hours pursuing their own occupations, with a pleasant sense of companionship but without any talk. His niece’s presence did not disturb the old man; he went on quite peacefully, taking it for granted that she, too, was occupied in her way. Nor did he lay down his pen, or look up at her face until she broke the silence by the sudden question,
“Now you have had time to consider it, what do you think about Charlie, Uncle Charles?”
“Toots, my dear!” said Uncle Charles. He put down his pen, as we have said, and stretched his hand to her across the table. “You are getting silly—like other women, my bonnie May.”
“But what do you think, Uncle Charles?”
“I can think no more than I did before, for I have no more information,” said Mr. Charles, pushing back his chair, and crossing his long legs; “and thinking will do no good—no good, my dear, if we were to think till we died of it. You just make yourself unhappy indulging anxiety. We must wait till we hear.”
“But what do you think of the letter, Uncle Charles?”
“The letter—oh, that’s something tangible. It’s a very heartless letter, a very silly letter; but you heard beforehand that she was a silly thing. So far as I can see, there is very little in it about Charlie; and as for her weakness and her baby’s, that’s not so very important. No fear of them; and as for you and me, May, whatever happened to Mrs. Charles, we could get over that.”
“I wish her no harm,” said Marjory hastily.
“Certainly, no harm,” said Mr. Charles; “but oh, my dear, what a woman to be mistress of Pitcomlie! what a creature to come after my mother! and your mother, May—though she, poor thing, reigned but a short time in the old house. This one will be a new kind of lady among the Heriots. We’ve been fortunate in our wives, as I’ve often told you. I am just giving a description of how Leddy Pitcomlie, under the Regent Mary of Guise, held the old house against the French. She was one of the first converts of the Reformation. We were terrible Whigs in those days; she was a daughter of—”
“Yes,” said Marjory vaguely. “That is something new to think of—Matilda in Pitcomlie. Uncle, we never knew—you never heard—that Pitcomlie might have had another kind of mistress?”
Mr. Charles raised himself with eager interest. This was entirely in his way, and moved his curiosity to the utmost.
“Another kind of mistress? There was your stepmother, of course—a nice kind of creature; but she did not live. A wife that does not live is a misfortunate thing in a family; it deranges the records, and takes away the unity; but is it of her you are thinking? What other mistress, May, if it were not yourself?”
“This is what I found in Tom’s desk,” said Marjory, turning pale and then red with emotion and excitement. She had not meant to show it—and yet it was so hard to keep from showing it—to shut up the secret in her own breast. She drew out her letter-case slowly, and took from it the uneven paper, with its uncouth writing, so unlike Matilda’s smooth and ladylike letter. Some accidental sound in the room, some creaking of the furniture, or rustling of the papers which the wind from the open window rustled on the table, almost arrested her, and made her look up with startled awe-stricken eyes, as if some unseen messenger had come to stop her. At length she put it into her uncle’s hand. He had followed all her movements with surprise, and now he had to fumble for his spectacles, to put them on, to uncross his legs, and draw his chair close to the table. All these little preliminaries had to be gone through, for to Mr. Charles a letter was a document; it was valuable material to be put away for after-use. He read a few lines, and then he gave a startled look at Marjory. “My dear,” he said, with indignation, folding it up again; “such a thing as this should never have fallen into your hands; it’s disgraceful! it’s——. My dear, your father goes too far—putting the charge of Tom’s things on you. He was not a reprobate, but he was not an example. Forget it, May, forget it; such a thing should never have been shown to you.”
“But Uncle Charles! you see what she says—‘I’ll make a good wife.’”
“Nonsense, nonsense, my dear,” said the old man, with a flush on his face; “the sort of thing that lads say to beguile these silly fools. I am not defending men, nor is it a subject to be named between you and me; but if you but knew how these silly idiots court their destruction! not another word more. My dear May, my bonny May! to think that the like of this should have been seen by you!”
“Uncle, it is not a fool’s letter; it is not a wicked letter—”
“Whisht, whisht, my bonnie woman! as if the like of you could judge; not another word. I will burn it for poor Tom’s sake. He has answered his account with his Maker, and why should we keep evidence against him for those that come after us—”
“Give it me back again,” said Marjory, feeling her property invaded; “I cannot have it burned, uncle. Perhaps this was the something he wanted to tell me; give it me back. Oh,” she said, suddenly forced by the opposition to a great effort of nature; “it is very different from this other letter; very different! She would not have written of my Charlie as his wife does. Give it me, Uncle; I must keep it. It is Tom’s legacy to me.”
“May, May! trouble and suspense are turning your head.”
“My head is not turned,” she said; “give me back my letter, Uncle; I thought you would help me. Whatever she was, wherever she is, she was not like that.”
Mr. Charles allowed her to draw it out of his hand; he shook his head and reproved her gently.
“My dear, you are excited; you do not know what you are saying. Put it away, put it away, if you will have it; but do not speak of an unhappy girrl in the same breath with Charlie’s wife. That must never be; and such a thing should never, never have come into your hands.”
Marjory hurried away almost angry, with her letters in her hand. She could ask counsel from no one else; and here she had failed; she rushed back to her room with them, very sad at heart; she, to make herself the champion of the unknown girl, whose very existence had seemed to her no later than yesterday, such a sin and shame!