WHILE her father and uncle were thus fuming over her absence, Marjory Hay-Heriot, with her little sister, had been making her way quietly about the little town of Comlie, whither they had ridden down in the morning, tempted by the sunshine, after some days of rainy weather. Comlie was a little old clean and quaint place, an old-fashioned Fife borough, devoted to fishing in its lower parts, but possessing such a High Street as not one of all its sister-towns possessed. This High Street had a wide causeway, clean and straight, and a broad footpath into which many old-fashioned large houses stepped forward with their white gables, in a true picturesque old Scotch way, telling of better times and characteristics more decided than our own. A quaint little semi-metropolitan air was about this silent street, through which the broad sunshine fell with few shadows to obstruct it. A little town-hall with a quaint ancient steeple stood in the middle of the street, with one square unglazed window protected by iron rails, the window of the town Bridewell, raised just above the heads of the passers-by, and looking as like the little town prison of an Italian mountain village as two similar things could look in places so unlike. At the west end was an old inn, a little hostel which, no doubt, was doing a good trade in the days when queens and courts were at Falkland Palace, and archbishops reigned in St. Andrews. The houses on the south side of the street with their projecting gables, whitewashed and many-windowed, looked out upon the sea to the back, over the fringe of fisher cottages which lay lower, close to the beach. At the east end of the town stood the church, an old church cobbled into mediocrity, but still displaying to instructed eyes the lines of its original structure, and tempting archæologists with hopes of restoration. It was surrounded by a churchyard full of monuments of the sixteenth century, with skulls and cross-bones and urns and puffing cherubs. It is astonishing how many dead people belonging to that century could afford to leave behind them those cumbrous masses of stone. The Manse, a solid, and in its way, spacious square stone house, stood at a little distance overlooking the sea; and outside the church gates, where the broad street had widened into a kind of triangular place, there were several “genteel” houses—one decorated with iron gates and trees in front, but the rest old, of characteristic Fife architecture, each with its white gable. The sea is the background to everything in this country, and to-day it was blue, a keen and chill, but brilliant tone of colour, throwing up the whitewashed houses and light grey stone with a brightness almost worthy of Italy; though no Italian wind, unless, indeed, a Tramontana fresh from the snowy hills, ever penetrated human bones like that steady blast from the east, which came natural to the people of Comlie.
Marjory had left her horse and little Milly her tiny pony at John Horsburgh’s inn, and they were now going up and down the silent street in the sunshine about their various businesses, holding up their riding-skirts, the little girl keeping very close by her sister’s side like a little shadow, and communicating with the outer world almost exclusively by means of a large pair of limpid blue eyes, clear as heaven, and wide open, which said almost all that Milly had to say, and learned a great deal more than Milly ever betrayed. Wherever Marjory went, this little shade went with her, sometimes holding by her dress, always treading in her very footsteps, a creature with no independent existence of her own, any more than if she had been part of Marjory’s gown, or an ornament she wore. As for Marjory herself, she went along the street of Comlie with the free yet measured step of a princess, aware that every eye in the place (there were not many visible), was turned to her; but so used to that homage that it gave her only a fine backing of moral strength and support, and made her neither vain nor proud. Vain! why should Marjory Hay-Heriot be vain? She knew her position exactly and accepted it, and was aware of all its duties, and considered it natural. She was like a princess in Comlie; she would have told you so simply without more ado, as calm in the consciousness as any young grand-duchess in her hereditary dominions. She had been going over her kingdom that morning, and had found a great many things to do.
At this moment when, if the reader pleases, we shall join ourselves like little Milly to her train, she was coming up from “the shore” as it was called, the fisher-region, where she had been paying a sorrowful visit. One of the boats had gone down in the last gale, a too frequent accident, and a young widow with a three months old baby, a poor young creature who not two years before had left Pitcomlie House to marry her Jamie, was sitting rocking herself and her child in the first stupor of grief, and replying by monosyllables to all the kindly attempts to console her.
“Oh ay, Miss Marjory,” “I ken that,” “Yes, Mem, its a’true,” poor Jean had said, with the weary assent which means so little. Marjory came back to the High Street with a grave face, and her own mind full of the dreariness of that inevitable assent. What could any woman answer more to the kind voices that bid her bear her trial and have patience, and remember that it is God’s will? “Its a’ true.” May was not of a melancholy mind; but that pitiful assent to everything she had said went to her heart. She walked on with her light step that did no more than effleurer the ground, stopping sometimes to nod and smile to some woman at her door.
“All well to-day, Mary?”
“Oh, ay, Miss Marjory, just about our ordinary, nae mair to complain o’ than maist puir folk; if thae weary cauld winds would bide away that gie us a’ our death.”
“This is the first east wind we’ve had for a fortnight,” said Marjory. “I think we have very little reason to complain.”
“Ye see I’m frae the south,” said the woman; “and my man has a hoast that drives ye wild to hear; and when we havena the east wind in Comlie we have the rain, and the bairns canna gang to the school, and there’s naething but dirt and wet, and misery and quarrelling. It’s a weary world, as our grannie says. Whatever the Almighty sends, there’s aye something folk would like better.”
“But perhaps that might be the folk’s fault, and not the Almighty’s,” suggested Marjory.
“Maybe; I’m no saying,” answered Mary Baxter, cautiously. “I hope’s a’ weel at Pitcomlie, and good news o’ the young gentlemen. They tell me Mr. Charles’s wife out in India yonder, has another son. Bless us! and I mind himself so well, a curly-headed laddie! It would have been mair like the thing if Mr. Tammas would settle down, and bring hame some bonnie young leddy and gie Mr. Heriot childhers’ childher, as it’s in the Bible. But there’s nae word o’ that that I can hear?”
“No, there is no word of that. I hope Nancy is doing well in her new place,” said Miss Heriot, changing the subject with the same unconscious artifice which had prompted her humble interlocutor to carry the war into the enemy’s country by introducing Charles’s marriage and Tom’s bacherlorhood. These two subjects were not pleasing to the house of Heriot; for Tom, the heir, unfortunately, showed no inclination to marry at all, and Charlie in India had become a husband and a father much too soon, contrary to all traditions. Marjory passed on when she had been satisfied on the subject of Nancy, but was stopped a few steps further on by a bareheaded girl in a pretty pink short-gown, the costume of the country, who ran after her with her fair locks falling loose in the wind.
“Eh, Miss Marjory, would you come in and speak to my mither?” cried this new applicant. This was Jenny Patterson, who lived up a stair just behind the Tolbooth, and a little out of Miss Heriot’s way. How Jenny admired the young lady as she gathered up her heavy cloth skirts, and with a smile and a nod went on to the well-known door! If Jenny had ever heard of goddesses, just so would she have impersonified a feminine divinity; that mixture of splendid superiority and familiar kindness being of all things the most captivating to the unsophisticated soul. Jenny’s brother, who was a watchmaker in Dundee, and held very advanced political opinions, considered her devotion servile, but blushed to feel that he himself shared it whenever he was brought under the same influence. “But it’s no the leddy, it’s the woman I think of,” Radical Jock explained to himself—an explanation as false as most such explanations are.
“Jenny says you want me, Mrs. Patterson,” said Marjory, sitting down on the chair which Jenny carefully dusted and placed in front of the fire. It was a small room, with but a little space between the bed and the fire, and with one window veiled by an immense geranium stretched upon a fan-like frame, which was the pride of its mistress’s heart, consumed half the air and light in the little place, and curiously enough condescended to grow with splendid luxuriance. Jenny’s mother was an invalid, but a good needlewoman, who got through a great deal of “white-seam” in her chair by the fire, and lived, she, her daughter, and her geranium on the earnings thus acquired, supplemented by help from her sons. Jenny stood by smiling and open-mouthed, twisting up the hair which invariably came down when she flew out into the street on any errand; and little Milly, familiar to the place, actually took the independent step of going to the window, and chirruping to the canary which hung above that geranium forest, and was the best singer in all Comlie, not even excepting the Minister’s bullfinch, a strange and foreign bird.
“Dinna think I’m wanting anything from you, Miss Marjory. The worst o’ puir folk is that they’re aye wanting. Na, na, it was only for a sight o’ your face, which does a poor body good, and to read ye my Willie’s letter. Jenny, ye taupie, bring me Willie’s letter. I can maistly say it off by heart, but Miss Heriot will like to see it, and I might forget something. Eh, I’m a happy woman! The captain o’ the ‘William and Mary’s’ dead out yonder (pointing her thumb over her shoulder, which was the way or indicating distance in Comlie), and Willie’s to bring the boat home. It’s as good as a ship to him; for ance a captain aye a captain, and his owners are no the men to put him back in a mate’s place.”
“I am very glad to hear of Willie’s promotion,” said Marjory; “was the captain a Comlie man?”
“Eh, you’ll think me awfu’ hard-hearted,” said Mrs. Patterson, struck with compunction, and pausing with her large horn spectacles in her hand; “but you canna suppose I would have spoke as free and been as thankfu’ if he had been a Comlie man. Na, na, if another house in the town had been mourning I would have held my peace. I’ve had trouble enough myself to have mair feeling; but he’s no frae Comlie nor nearhand. He’s a Dundee man, and I ken naething about him. His name was Brown, like mony mair, and he’s no even married that I ever heard tell of, and it’s to be hoped he’s in a better place.”
With this the new captain’s mother dismissed the old one, and put on her big spectacles. “It’s dated Riga, the fourteenth February, for that’s the port where they were bound. ‘My dear mother, I hope you and Jenny’s in good health as this leaves me. Many and many a time I think of you and the cosy little room, and the flower, and the canary-bird—’ Bless the laddie,” said Mrs. Patterson, stopping abruptly, “he had aye the kindest heart!”
The reader probably, however, will not be so much interested in this letter as Marjory was, who listened and made her comments with thorough sympathy, feeling quite relieved, as was Willie’s mother, by the fact that the dead captain was not a Comlie man. Dundee was large and vague, and far away, and was able enough to mourn her own dead. But as they went down the stairs after their visit was over, Marjory said to her little sister, “We shall be too late for luncheon at home; are you hungry, dear? I think we might go and dine with Aunt Jean.”
“I am a little hungry,” Milly confessed, not without a blush.
“Then run and tell Betty we are coming, and I will go on to the Manse; you can come after me or stay at Aunt Jean’s, as you like.”
“Walk slow, May, and I will make up to you,” cried little Milly, who ran off instantly like a gleam of sunshine, her long fair hair fluttering in the breeze, anxious to be absent as short a time as possible from her sister’s side. Marjory went on slowly making her royal progress through her dominions, casting a smile now and then through the low windows on the ground floor, stopping to nod and say a passing word to some one on an outside stair. The doctor, setting out in his gig on some distant visit, jumped down and crossed the street to speak to her, to ask for Mr. Heriot and Mr. Charles, and tell her how his patients were, of many of whom she had a secondary charge, if not as consulting physician, yet with a responsibility almost as great. “James Tod, poor lad, would be the better of some books,” the doctor said, “and you’re a better deceiver than I am, Miss Heriot; you might persuade old Mrs. Little that your father has some rare wine in his cellar, wine she could not get to buy.”
“You pay me a charming compliment,” said Marjory. “Could you not cheat her yourself with all your powers?”
“She laughed in my face,” said the doctor, who was young, and not very rich, “and asked me how I could get finer wines than other folk? She was sure I might spend my siller better. And poor little Agnes dying before my eyes!”
“Will she die?”
“Don’t ask me,” said the too tender-hearted doctor, springing into his gig again. He was too sensitive to be a doctor, his wife said. As the gig drove away, some one else came up taking off his hat with profound respect. This was young Mr. Hepburn who lived in the house with the iron gates, and was the only unemployed person in Comlie. He was a young man tolerably well off, and more than tolerably good-looking, who had been brought up in a desultory way, was more accomplished than any other individual within twenty miles, did not in the least know what to do with himself, and was treated by Marjory with mingled kindness and condescension, as a clever schoolboy is sometimes treated by a young lady. For his part, Hepburn admired Marjory as he had never admired anyone else in his life. He was three or four years her junior, and he thought he was in love with, nay, adored her. The sight of her he said was as sunshine in the dreary silent place; and he had said this so often that it had come to Marjory’s ears. It was not very original, and she had thought it impertinent, and treated him with more lofty condescension than ever.
“Oh, Mr. Hepburn,” she said holding out her hand to him; “I did not know you were here. Some one told me you had gone abroad. I should have asked you to come to us sometimes at Pitcomlie, and bring your music, had I known. Not that we are very lively—”
“Pitcomlie is a great deal better than lively,” said the young man. “I am not of such a frivolous mind as to be always looking for amusement. You know, Miss Heriot, how glad I am always to be there.”
“But amusement is a very good thing,” said Marjory. “Indeed, it is bad for young people to be without it. When Milly is a little older, I intend to make papa give balls and be very lively. I have always thought it a most essential part of training. I hope you go on with your music, and practice as much as you used to do?”
“I don’t practice at all in the ordinary sense of the word,” said young Hepburn, with an annoyance he could not conceal. Marjory had Scotch prejudices and many old-fashioned notions, and it was her conviction that a man with an immortal soul who “practised” three or four hours a day was a phenomenon to be looked on with something like contempt. Girls did it, poor things! not being able to help themselves—but a man! This young woman, though she thought herself enlightened, was a tissue of prejudices, and we do not in the least defend her old world ways of thinking. She sang very sweetly herself, with a voice which was very flexible and true, but only moderately cultivated; and she thought of music as a pleasant thing to fill up stray corners, but not as an inspiration or occupation of life. And when she kindly asked Mr. Hepburn to come and bring his music, what she meant was undoubtedly contempt.
“I don’t mean to use any word I ought not to use,” said Marjory, with her gracious smile, “but I hope you keep it up, that and your drawing. It is good to have such resources when one has only a quiet life to look forward to. Of course a gentleman has many ways of occupying himself; but I am so sorry my education has been neglected. When I am dull, there is scarcely anything I can do but read.”
“I should not think you were ever dull,” said Hepburn, with adoring looks.
“Not very often, just now; but some time probably I shall be, and then I shall envy you your resources. Will you dine with us at Pitcomlie to-morrow, Mr. Hepburn? I fear we shall be quite alone; but if you will take the trouble to come—and bring your—”
“I will come with the greatest pleasure,” said the young man, precipitately, drowning that last objectionable request. He would take no music, he vowed, for any inducement which might be offered him. His right hand would make an effort to forget its cunning. He would give himself up to riding and shooting, and trudge about the ploughed fields in leather gaiters, like her father, and make a boor of himself, by way of proving to her that he was not a schoolboy nor a dilettante. This he vowed to himself as she went on smiling, and little Milly passed him like a gleam of light, rushing after her sister. How unlike these two were to anything else far or near! Marjory, with her little sister, was like a deep-hearted rose, not full blown, yet perfect—one of those roses which you can look down into, as into a lovely nest of colour and fragrance—with a tiny little bud just showing the pink on the same stem. Young Hepburn had a great deal of superficial poetry about him, and this was the image which came into his mind. Not full blown—keeping the form of a bud, deep, many-folded, odorous as the very soul of Summer. That was the similitude which best expressed Marjory Heriot to his mind.
And she, laughing softly at him, wondering to herself what God could mean by making such men, deciding within herself that he would have made a nice sort of girl, pleasant and rather loveable, went on to the Manse, which indeed had been her destination all along.