MARJORY’S letter was brought to Fanshawe before he had left his room in the morning. This room was in the Albany, and though a most comfortable chamber, was not luxurious, nor of a character to have called forth the strictures of any reasonable Mentor. There were no opera-dancers on the walls. Fanshawe had long got over the period of artistic taste which delights in opera-dancers, if indeed he had ever gone through it. The few prints on his walls were good. To be sure there was a racehorse or two, but of these, of late days, he had the grace to be ashamed; and over his mantel-piece he had quite lately hung a print of one of Raphael’s Madonnas, in which he thought he saw a resemblance to Marjory. It was a fantastic resemblance, wholly existing in the imagination of the beholder; but such compliments of the heart have been paid before now even to plain women, and Marjory was not plain. It seemed to Fanshawe—to carry out the fantastical character of the idea—that it was only in his best moments that he saw this likeness. Sometimes he looked for it vainly, and called himself a fool to have entertained such a notion; but at other times it would shine out upon him, filling him with a kind of heavenly pleasure—that pleasure which glows in a man’s heart, and makes him feel his own nature exalted in a consciousness of the excellence of his love. Marjory’s little notes were very rare delights, and this all the more so for being utterly unexpected. He had written to her a long letter only two days before, and he had expected no reply. Was it possible that this could be the answer? The question was all the more interesting to him because he had delicately implied in his letter an inclination to visit St. Andrews. He had heard so much of that ancient borough; he had been quite excited by the account some of his friends had given him (he said) of the charms of the place; and London was empty, void, null, and unprofitable; he had never seen it so vacant, so uninteresting; he could not believe that he had ever found any pleasure in such a mental and moral desert. So he wrote, not without a certain eloquence. The centre of the world had shifted; it was no longer in London, but in St. Andrews; this, however, though he implied it, he did not say. And to receive so rapid an answer seemed to him a fortunate sign. He jumped out of bed in haste, and clothed himself, that he might read it with due respect. But soon the vague delight of anticipation on his face changed into something more serious. Marjory’s note was singularly different from the diffuse and much implying epistles which he was in the constant habit of addressing to her. In this there was not a word more than was absolutely necessary. It ran as follows:—
“I have made a discovery which is of the very deepest importance to us, and to the memory of my poor brother Tom, who was your friend. I have no right to ask your help, but I do, knowing you will not refuse me. Come to me, I beg of you, for Tom’s sake. I write in great haste to save the post. Oh, Mr. Fanshawe, come!
“M. H. H.”
Across this brief letter was written, very much blotted, a single line. “I have found——” He made out as much as this, but the last letters were so blotted that he could not decipher them. It looked like a name. Whom had she found? or what could have happened to excite her so? But he scarcely paused to ask himself these questions. He was too late for the day mail to Scotland—how he cursed himself for his indolence!—and had to wait the whole day through till the evening. At one time he thought of telegraphing to her; but there lingered a hope in Fanshawe’s mind that perhaps she had sent for him of her own impulse, and that “everybody” was not in the secret, a hope which he loved to cherish. He waited accordingly, most drearily, trying to get through the time as he best could, and finding it drag so that the day seemed to him as long as all the preceding year. He went from one club to another, by way of getting through the time; he went and made all sorts of ridiculous purchases; he looked at his watch about a million times; indeed, he kept dragging it in and out of his pocket, and watching the slow fluctuations of light in the afternoon, like a man possessed by one sole idea—which was a perpetual calculation how soon it would be nine o’clock.
Fanshawe arrived next day at St. Andrews, with a mist of excitement about him, through which he seemed to see but dimly the actual features of the place. He watched the long lines of the Links flying past the windows of the railway carriage, as he had seen all the intermediate plains and hills of the Scotch border and Midland counties since daybreak, with a strange sense that he himself was making no progress, but that they were rushing past and away from him. When he saw at last the group of spires which ended those long lines of grass, and stepped out upon ground which did not fly under his foot, it was as if he had dropped from the clouds into some mystic country which could not but bring him the uttermost weal or woe, yet was unknown to him as fairyland. He felt a tremour in his very frame as he stepped into that strange world, where it seemed impossible to him to conceive of the common accidents of every day, where there could be nothing, he felt, but great emotions, passions, excitement—events which he could not foresee, changes which he dared not anticipate. To fall into the ordinary stream of people arriving at a railway, calmed him down to some extent, and he set out to walk into the town without any self-betrayal. But he had not gone far before he saw a slight tall figure, clothed in black, detaching itself from the groups on the Links, and coming towards him with a step and bearing which he could not mistake. He stood still, restraining himself with difficulty from the cry of joy that seemed ready to burst from his lips. They say that love is but an accident in a man’s life, while it is everything in a woman’s; but it would be nearer the truth to say that a man’s absorption in this dream cannot last, while a woman’s may. Nothing could be more absolute than Fanshawe’s absorption at this moment in thought of the woman thus approaching him. Adam, when he saw Eve, the only human companion for him, could not have been more entirely bound and limited to the one being. This man saw nothing else, heard nothing else, felt nothing else in heaven or earth. He had asked himself sometimes whether he was at all, what is called, in love with Marjory Hay-Heriot. He asked himself no questions now. He did not care for what she was going to tell him, for what her business was, for the discovery affecting her family, for his friend’s memory, or anything else. He felt, saw, heard nothing but her. He did not seem even to have strength enough in himself to go to meet her. The very sight of her had caught him as in a trance of rapture. He felt that he could have wept over the hand she held out to him, like a baby, and mumbled it like an idol-worshipper. That he did neither, but only grasped it, and gazed at her with eyes full of speechless joy, seemed to him the most wonderful power of self-control. But Marjory’s eagerness was of a very different kind. As always, one of the two was at a disadvantage. He thought first and only of her; she thought of a great many other things, and then finally of him. Common consent allots this state of feeling to the man, but common consent is often wrong. It depends upon which of the two, man or woman, is the most deeply in earnest. “L’un qui se laisse aimer” is not always of the masculine gender, as a great many people know.
Marjory came up to him with an eagerness and satisfaction which would have been—oh! how delightful—had there not been other causes for it. She held out her hand to him, and then took his arm as if he had been her—brother. Yes, a great deal too much as if he had been her brother; but let that pass; it was very pleasant all the same, and then she said,
“How good of you to come! but I knew you would come. I felt myself safe in appealing to you.”
She had thought then of appealing to some one else! This was not satisfactory; but Fanshawe was too happy at that moment to insist upon having everything his own way.
“Could there be any question about that?” he said, smiling at her with that look of imbecile emotion which no woman can mistake. Marjory, however, was too deeply absorbed with her own private anxieties to pay much heed to his looks. She said nothing more that could give him an opening for the disclosure of any personal feeling; but rushed into her story at once, a proceeding which was flattering, yet unsatisfactory. It was with an effort that he brought himself to attend. Even though it was the voice which most interested him in the world which spoke, herself, her presence, the sensation of her vicinity, the glimpse of a new world about him—a world entirely identified with her, a new scene of which he knew nothing save through her, strange people passing who sent her greetings from over the way, smiles as she passed them—did so entirely occupy and bewilder the new-comer, that it cost him as serious an effort as he had ever made in his life to understand what Marjory was saying to him, or even to listen to what she said. She told him such a story as might have caught the ear of any man capable of listening, but yet somehow it did not catch Fanshawe’s. Her hand on his arm, her head bent forward, so much more eagerly than he had ever seen it before, even the fall of her dress, the very hanging sleeve that touched him, the veil that once fluttered across his face, all and every one of these things dissipated his mind. He had no intellect at all to speak of at that moment, and hers was in the liveliest action. By moments, a half comic sense of his incapacity to come up to her requirements seized upon him. He grew rueful and humble as he was compelled over and over again to ask for new explanations.
“Forgive me, I did not quite catch what you said. Will you tell me that again, Miss Heriot? I am stupid. I did not quite make out—”
After a great many of these interruptions, Marjory began to feel a little check upon her enthusiasm, and to grow chilled in her warm expectation of sympathy.
“I fear I am making too great a call upon you,” she said coldly, drawing back with a perceptible diminution of warmth; and there can be no doubt that for that moment the accusations against Fanshawe which she had opposed so warmly rushed back upon her mind all at once, though with a generous effort she thrust them away from her. The light failed all in a moment out of her eager upturned face, her head returned to its ordinary pose of quiet and proud decorum, something changed even in the touch with which her hand held his arm. Fanshawe woke up to this with sudden alarm. He roused himself in a moment from the haze and torpor of happiness in which he had not known what he was doing—or rather he leapt out of it suddenly, startled by the sense that his happiness, if he did not rouse himself, might slip out of his hands.
“You find me very stupid?” he said, “I am sure you must think so; but I have some excuses I cannot tell you of—and there is one that I can tell you; I have been travelling all night.”
“To be sure, I should have thought of that,” said Marjory, but she did not resume her former tone; and poor Fanshawe, knowing it was so different a reason which had made him dull of comprehension, had to accept the excuse which he had given for himself, of being weary, though he felt it the most miserable of excuses. He had to put up with it, though he felt that it gave her quite a false impression of him, and brought him low in her eyes, a thing which people are compelled to do often, yet which is always hard. They walked on together accordingly, Marjory, with a little impatient sigh of submission, giving up her great subject for the moment; and talked of the journey and its fatigues, and the time occupied, and what the traveller thought of the country he had passed through, &c., &c. He was perfectly able to understand whatever she said to him now; fully roused up, with his intellect restored to him, and all his senses. But she was courteously, gently silent, accepting what he chose to say to her—to the poor wretch’s infinite misery and confusion, need it be said?
Mr. Charles caught a glimpse of them from the window of the club. He was sitting quietly discussing a match; but when he saw this sudden apparition, he started up and went to the window.
“Bless me! that’s very like Fanshawe,” he said to himself; and after a long gaze, which assured him that it was Fanshawe, and no one else, he retired, much perplexed, to his chair, and henceforward left the most exciting game that had been played for years to be discussed by the other speakers. “It’s not that I have any objection to him personally,” Mr. Charles mused, not knowing what to make of it; and then he asked himself what it was he had heard of Fanshawe?—that he drank, or gambled, or something? What was it? Thus a lively scandal had crept up in Mr. Charles’s mind by means of the very simple and passive one promulgated by Mr. Seton. He was much troubled. If Marjory should really show a liking for one whose reputation was compromised in any such way, what was he, her uncle and guardian, to do? To be sure, she was old enough to judge for herself, which was a great relief to his mind; and the chances were very strong that she would prefer her own opinion to his, in any circumstances. But still Mr. Charles saw very stormy waters before him, on the supposition that Marjory liked Fanshawe, and that Fanshawe gambled or drank. He took his way home in an anxious state of mind, and found that his fears were so far justified. Mr. Fanshawe had sent his bag to the “Royal,” but he had walked across with Miss Heriot to dinner. He was very conciliatory, asking many questions about golf, and doing his very best to make himself agreeable. If he had not been such a faulty person, he would have been a great acquisition to the little party. But then, Mr. Charles asked himself, was it right to countenance the introduction into Marjory’s society of a man who gambled or drank? What would Miss Jean say? He felt himself so weak in this respect, that he instinctively resorted to her judgment, as the only standard he knew of. If it was on Marjory’s account (and what more likely?) that Fanshawe had come—and if Marjory liked him, what then was Mr. Charles to do? He had not (he said to himself) a father’s authority; he would not for the world make the girl unhappy; and yet how far would this be from marrying her well? “Confound marrying!” Mr. Charles said, with unusual emphasis, when he found himself left alone after dinner—the unexpected, and, so far as he knew, uninvited guest having left him “to join the ladies,” at a very early period. He had never married himself; and Marjory was very well off, and had everything her own way—far more, probably, than she would have with a husband. If she did anything to change this beatific state of affairs, the blame would be on her own head. Mr. Charles washed his hands of it for his part. But yet he could not wash his hands of Marjory, nor of Miss Jean and her requirements; and there never was old bachelor disposed to a quiet life, yet anxious to please everybody, whose mind was more painfully bewildered and held in suspense.
Fanshawe hastened to the drawing-room, more anxious to regain his lost ground than even to conciliate the uncle, though that, too, seemed to him very necessary. He found Marjory seated in her usual place in the deep, narrow window, with a background made up of pale sky, a gleam of deeper-coloured blue, which was the sea, and a pale shaft of the ruin between, as graceful and light as Gothic art could make it. Her profile was marked out against these deepening tones of blue, and the grey time-bleached canopy work of the old Cathedral enclosed it like the picture of a saint. This was how he felt it, being, as the reader perceives, in an excited and exalted condition of mind; for in reality, Marjory was neither like a Saint nor a Madonna, being too human, too modern a woman for any abstractions. But if men in love did not fancy such things, what would become of poetry? He drew a chair to her side, approaching as near as he dared venture, or rather as near as he could; for little Milly, her sister’s shadow, sat on her foot-stool with her golden locks in a glory round her, leaning upon Marjory’s lap, and dividing her from all new-comers.
“I am not so stupid as I seem,” said Fanshawe. “I have my wits about me now. Will you tell me all about it again?”
“Not all,” said Marjory, laying her hand upon little Milly’s head. Poor little Milly! She had been in the highest spirits about Fanshawe’s arrival; and the wretch felt her so dreadfully in his way! He restrained his impatience, however, as he best could, with a sigh which roused a certain sense of the humour of the situation in Marjory’s mind.
“I hope you have quite recovered from your fatigue,” she said.
“Do not be too hard upon me,” said poor Fanshawe. “It was not fatigue. My head was turned with being here, and seeing you again. But tell me, now? I have shaken myself up, and come back to ordinary life. We are still mortal; we have to tie white ties, and dine on fish and mutton, as if we were on common unenchanted soil, and not in Fife at all; therefore, I am capable now of listening and understanding. Tell me as much as you can.”
This speech roused Marjory to a certain girlish levity, notwithstanding the seriousness of the situation.
“It is a new thing to hear Fife spoken of as if it could be enchanted soil,” she said, with a smile, which felt to Fanshawe like a stray ray of sunshine. And then her face grew graver, like that of the Virgin Mother in his picture. “All I have to say is—about her,” she added, her voice sinking almost into a whisper; so low as to tantalize Milly, who was listening with all her ears.
“About whom?”
“You did not understand me? I feared so, Mr. Fanshawe, I know now what poor Tom meant when he was dying, when he thought he had told me. I have found Isabell!”