THE confidence which Marjory thus injudiciously, and on the impulse of the moment, shared with her uncle, was premature and indiscreet. No doubt it is hard to shut up a discovery of importance in one’s own bosom, and for a woman accustomed to all the continual intercourse and confidence of domestic life, to carry on a series of secret operations, is almost impossible; but the relief afforded was not so great as she had hoped. Mr. Charles could think of nothing else. He questioned and cross-questioned—who was Isabell? what were her people? where did they come from? how did Marjory know that they were respectable or trustworthy? how had she made acquaintance with them? To these questions she could give but scanty answers. Mr. Charles groaned when he heard of the irregular marriage. He shook his head till it ached with the movement.
“In all our records,” he said, in piteous tones, “I do not believe, May, that such a scandal has ever happened before. We’ve had none but virtuous women, my dear, none but good women, and clever women, May. It has always been our strong point. God bless us! and all to end in two fools like these young women at Pitcomlie, and a—— I humbly beg your pardon, my dear.”
“Uncle, this girl, who is dying, is like a saint.”
Once more Mr. Charles shook his head.
“I never heard yet of a saint that made an irregular marriage,” he said, “and as for her dying, my dear, if she’s really the heir’s mother, far the best thing she can do will be to die. A woman like that would be a dreadful sort of apparition at Pitcomlie. Whatever her people are, they cannot be in a position that would do the infant any credit. Lord preserve us! am I speaking of my own family?” cried Mr. Charles, feeling the wound go to his heart. “One a fool, and the other a—— Poor fellows, they’ve gone to their account—but there must have been some imperfection in those two lads, my dear, though they were your brothers; there must have been some imperfection. They say the wife a man chooses is the best revelation of his own character. You need not be angry, my dear; I am saying nothing against the poor boys.”
“Let us say nothing at all about it, uncle, till we know.”
“That’s easy said, that’s easy said, my dear. You may be able to put it out of your mind, but I cannot. The whole future of the family! Perhaps I had better see the girl, May, and examine her myself?”
“Uncle, she is ill.”
“I’ll do her no harm, my dear,” said Uncle Charles; and he resumed the subject in the morning, to Marjory’s dread. He had been brought up to the law, and he had some faith, as was natural, in his own knowledge. “If I once hear her story, I will see at once what is to be made of it,” he said; and as he had been further stimulated by another letter about the proceedings, or intended proceedings of Miss Bassett, the old man was much in earnest. It was the agent of the Bank in Pitcomlie who had sent him this information, and Mr. Charles had come down to breakfast with his hair standing on end, at all the audacities that were contemplated. “I know no precedent—no precedent,” he said, with his forehead puckered into a hundred lines. “They say women are conservatives; but I never heard of rebels like them, when they take that lawless turn. A man would think twice before he would meddle with an old-established house; he would think that the past might have its rights, no to speak of the future.”
“I don’t think folly is of either sex,” said Marjory, who was not fond of hearing her own side assailed; “though Verna is not a fool——”
“Verna!” cried Mr. Charles, in his indignation, “she is out of the question, May. I might stand something from your brother’s wife. She’s a foolish creature, but she’s not without good points—at all events she’s pretty, which is aye something; and she is poor Charlie’s widow; but the other young woman! Do you know, my dear, it’s my duty to see this girl, and hear her story myself?”
All that Marjory could do was to effect a compromise—to go herself and prepare poor Isabell, putting off Mr. Charles’s visit for another day. Mr. Charles accordingly went out, though late, and hung about the Club all the morning, talking with every lounger who came in his way (and their name was legion). He told nothing, he was quite convinced; and yet, oddly enough, a vague impression that some story about the House of Pitcomlie—some romance in real life, such as now and then fills every county with lively interest and delight—was about to be made known to the world—came into existence. There were various versions of it instantly created by the conversationalists of the Golf Club.
“I don’t know what’s afloat among the Heriots,” said Mr. Morrison, of St. Rule’s; “auld Charlie is going about like a clucking hen; he has some mystery under his wing, that’s sure. Either it’s some new claimant turned up from Australia, like the one they’re making so great a fuss about in London, or——”
“I don’t see how that can be,” said Major Vee or Captain Eff. “All the Heriots and all their comings and goings are too well known in Fife, and besides, there never was one that disappeared, or did anything he oughtn’t to have done.”
“They’re a fearfully respectable family,” said another golfer, with a great emphasis on the adjective; “but Tom Heriot was thrown away upon them. He was not of that mould. If anything’s gone wrong, or there’s a chance of revelations, I back Tom to be the hero. He was never one of your cut and dry men, foredoomed to be a Laird, and do his duty.”
“He was a simple ne’er-do-weel,” said Mr. Seton, “like his friend Fanshawe, whom I saw in the town the other day, by the bye. They were an excellent pair. And there’s a sympathy among that sort of people. Miss Heriot, who is as proud as Lucifer, and looks down upon most people, was hanging upon that fellow’s arm. If it’s some peccadillo of Tom’s, no doubt Fanshawe was in it.”
“I don’t see what Miss Heriot could have to do with any peccadillo of Tom’s,” said another speaker. “Whatever you may say against women, toleration of their brother’s peccadillos is not one of their faults. But Mrs. Charles, I hear, is making a bonny business at Pitcomlie, pulling down the house to build some fine castle or other. That’s enough, I should say, to account for old Charlie’s troubles. He’s like a hen on a hot girdle, fluttering about everywhere. God be praised, he’s engaged for a foursome at three o’clock with old Adam of St. Edgar’s, and the two Wolffs. A bonny time they will have of it. I saw him lose a putt yesterday that an infant might have played. And talk of putting——”
Here the speaker went off into golf, and left the Heriots. Mr. Charles, however, fulfilled the prophecy in every respect. He produced the most unchristian temper in the partner of his game, and gave his opponents an opportunity for gibes innumerable. Up to this present date a description of the worse putt ever made on the Links, as perpetrated on that unhappy day by Mr. Charles Hay-Heriot of the Pitcomlie family, is told for the edification of beginners. The reader, who knows the reason why, will not blame Mr. Charles. He could not, as he acknowledged, get all these complications out of his head. His placid soul was torn by so many unforeseen calamities. The existing state of affairs was bad enough, and the personal contentions which lay before him, the struggle with “these young women,” in which Mr. Charles felt it quite possible that he might be worsted, would, had there been nothing else, have been enough to embitter his peaceful days. The other question, however, came into it with a painful excitement. It did not obliterate the first, as it ought reasonably to have done, since, if the second story was true, Mrs. Charles could have no authority or place at Pitcomlie. Some minds have a faculty for getting all the annoyance possible out of their surroundings, just as some others get all the sweetness possible. Mr. Charles hugged both to his bosom. He groaned over the possibility of having to insert a name never heard of before, and the record of an irregular marriage into the genealogical papers of the Heriots, which had not known such profanation from the time of the Jameses. Talk of the whaling captain, indeed, who had vitiated the blood of the Morrisons! perhaps it was a judgment upon Mr. Charles for his remarks on that flaw; for this was a thousand times worse than any whaling captain. And yet while he groaned over the prospective humiliation, he afflicted his soul at the same time with thoughts of how he was to manage Mrs. Charles and her impertinent sister, who took so much upon her, and yet was not so much as related to the Heriots. The one misery was incompatible with the other; but yet he took the good, or rather the evil, of them both.
The existence of this doubting, questioning, perplexed, and perplexing companion by her side was no addition to Marjory’s comfort. She postponed her visit to the cottage for motives which she scarcely ventured to define—foremost among which was a vague reluctance to meet Agnes again, and to discuss with her the work which she had taken out of her hands. In every such enterprise there comes a moment of discouragement, of painful difficulty, of disgust even, with circumstances which at first filled the mind only with pity and fellow-feeling. Marjory felt that she would gladly have turned her back on the matter altogether; she would fain have forgotten all about it from the day when she first saw the patient face of the sick girl at the cottage door. What had she to do with it? Such an intruder is usually rejected, or at least held at arm’s length by “the family.” A mésalliance is seldom acknowledged or insisted upon by the sister of the man who has made it. Sometimes it occurred to her that it was even unmaidenly on her part to have interfered in the matter; after all, such a marriage was, she said to herself, no marriage at all—unblessed by religion, unhonoured by publicity, a secret expedient to make guilt less guilty—was not that all that could be said for it? and yet what a difference this poor formula made! Without it the girl was a lost creature, covered with shame; with it she was surrounded by the sanctity of a woman wronged, almost a martyr; and yet it was nothing, nothing! a mere expedient to make guilt less guilty. This was only one of a hundred ways in which Marjory contemplated the subject; and hers was a woman’s view of the matter altogether, though not less forcible on that account. The sting of these thoughts was that they had never occurred to her before. She had committed herself in many ways—to Isabell; and still more, to Fanshawe; she had filled the girl with false hopes, and, perhaps, still falser hopes had been raised in the man’s mind by her appeal to him. She had sent him out against his will, against his own idea of what was needful—and now she repented! This is the danger of possessing an impulsive temperament. Such disgust and discouragement seldom come until the world has been set on fire by the hasty spirit. Marjory felt (for the moment) that she would gladly have turned her back upon it all now; she would have liked to go away to the end of the world, and get out of sight and hearing of everybody who could remind her of this chapter of her existence. So she thought; and the fact that she could not have taken three steps in her flight before compunction and a revival of all her anxious interest would have seized her, dragging her back again, had really nothing to do with the question. She kept away from the cottage, fearing any intercourse with the sisters, whose cause, for the moment, she felt herself to have abandoned. And it was not until she was roused from this curious discouragement, by the sight of an advertisement in the second column of the “Times,” calling upon John Macgregor to disclose himself, that she was roused to something of her former feeling. This took her by surprise; to her consciousness all progress had been arrested, and everything stayed by the change in her mind; she had done nothing, and she had concluded that nothing was being done. But the sight of the advertisement roused her; she saw that she had set forces in action that could not be stopped, and whatever her own languor might be, she had no longer any right to keep still. As soon as she had realized this, her disgust evaporated like the dew on the grass, and good sense and judgment regained the upper hand. John Macgregor might still be in Scotland, notwithstanding Agnes’s failure, and in that case, the “Times” was a very unlikely vehicle of communication with him. She bestirred herself instantly, with a glow at her heart, which, after all, was not immediately caused either by devotion to her brother’s memory or regard for Isabell. Who was it that had called Fanshawe good-for-nothing? Marjory laughed softly by herself at the ludicrous inappropriateness of the word—good-for-nothing! She had heard his voice as it were in the dark, calling out to her, telling her he was at work, encouraging her to go on. Marjory filled all the Scotch papers with advertisements during the next week; she demanded John Macgregor from all the winds; but still she did not go to the cottage. Now that she had fairly re-commenced work, it seemed to her that she must wait until she had something to tell.
One day, however, a sudden thought came to her of Isabell’s dying condition, and of the possible consequences of suspense, unbroken by any ray of hope. She set out towards the Spindle on a dreary afternoon, when the clouds hung low, and the sea was black with rising wind. It was the heaviest time of the day—that hour when life runs lowest—when Fanshawe had bidden her think of him. The few vessels visible were struggling between two dark leaden lines of sky and sea; nothing was cheerful or encouraging in the external surroundings. The waves came in with a threatening rush round the Spindle; the wind sighed with a sound of rain; and though she had not expected Isabell to be outside on such a day, yet a sense of unreasonable disappointment arose in Marjory’s mind at the absence of the well-known figure from the cottage-door. The door was closed, and no one was visible about. In all the earth and air there seemed no living thing, except in the few ships—big and little, which struggled across the horizon.
“Oh mercy! to myself I said,
If Lucy should be dead!”
The thought was natural enough, so far as Isabell was concerned, but it filled Marjory with remorse as she hurried forward. If Isabell were to die before, one way or other, this matter was cleared up!—it was but too likely she would; but the thought seemed to lend wings to Marjory’s feet.
In the little cottage chamber, however, which she thought so still, there was pain enough to demonstrate life, could she but have known. It was a dark little room at all times, for though there were two windows, these windows were little casements composed of very small and very dim panes of greenish glass—one in the front of the house towards the sea, and the other to the back. A smouldering fire burned in the grate, at which stood Isabell’s mother in her white mutch, making tea for her invalid. Isabell herself lay in the box, or press-bed, fitted into the wall, which is universal in such cottages. From the airless wooden enclosure her pale face looked out strangely, most unlike, in its pathetic beauty, to everything about. The mother’s back was turned, but between the fire and the bed sat Agnes, her ruddy, comely countenance overcast with vexation and care. She was doing nothing, her head was thrown back listlessly, and her hands laid in her lap. They were brown hands, bearing the traces of toil, and their idleness had a certain pathos in it. She sat, too, almost in the middle of the room, as if she had thrown herself down by chance, not knowing, or not caring where. As the mother went and came she stumbled over Agnes’s foot, or her chair, and uttered a little querulous exclamation: “Canna you sit in a corner? canna ye get something to do?” she said. “I canna bide to see a woman doing naething; take John’s stockings, if you’ll do nothing else.”
“I have nae heart for stockings, or anything else!” said Agnes with a sigh.
“Eh, woman! if I had been like that how could I have brought you all up?” said the mother. “Seven of a family, and no a penny nor a penny’s worth in the world. Do ye think I hadna often a sair heart? and many a time darena sit down, for fear I should be ower tired to rise again. What are your bits of trouble to that?”
“Do you call yon a bit trouble?” said Agnes, pointing to her sister’s bed. The mother’s countenance darkened; she turned towards the fire again, turning her back on her sick daughter. “I dinna call that trouble at all,” she said; “that’s sin and shame.”
“Eh, mother, ye’re hard, hard! will ye never believe it—not even since you’ve seen Miss—her man’s sister. Will ye no believe her, even now?”
“Dinna speak to me of her man,” said the old woman indignantly, pouring the boiling water upon the tea with a certain vindictive movement. All this conversation was carried on in an undernote, that Isabell might not hear. “Her man has been a bonnie man to her; whatever was his meaning; he’s brought her naething but misery and shame. What had she to do, giving ear to ane o’ thae gentlemen with their false tongues? Gentlemen! I wouldna give an honest man for ten gentlemen—and so it’s seen. Give her her tea; I havena the heart to look at her white face,” said the mother, turning away; she went and sat down noiselessly in the room, and put up her apron to her eyes. How many different kinds of suffering were shut up there together, all separate, and keeping themselves apart!
The tea was made in silence—the one cordial of poor women’s lives—and then the little group subsided once more into their places.
“Have you any word from John?” said the mother, this time loud enough for all to hear.
“I have aye word from John,” said Agnes, with a tone of indignation; “whatever happens, he never misses his day.”
“But you’ve come to nae settlement yet about what’s to be done. It’s a wise bargain you’ve made, him and you—as wise almost as some other folk; to wait—till when?”
“Till I’m gone, mother!” said Isabell. “Oh, if you would have patience! I’ll no be long. I feel the wheel breaking at the fountain, and the silver chain being sundered, as the Bible says. When I’m gone, there will be nae motive for keeping up all this trouble. I’ve been making a terrible stir and commotion, I know that; no for me—and yet I mustna conceal the truth—I had some thought for myself, too; to die so young is sore enough without shame. But if God will have me bear shame, I must put up with it; and you must put up with it, Agnes. John’s a good man; he’ll never upbraid you with your poor sister, that ye did so much for; and you’ll take my bairn. He’ll never ken he had a mother but you—and you’ll be good—oh, you’ll be good to him! No, why should I greet?” she went on, looking with apparent surprise at a tiny drop that fell on her coverlet; “we must accept what God sends.”
“Oh, hold your tongue, hold your tongue!” cried the mother; “God never sent wickedness. I’ll no be contradictit in my own house—though, to be sure, it’s no my house, for that matter. We were a’ proud of your bonnie face, and your genty ways; and our pride’s had a fa’; yes, you may see, even your bonnie leddy that you were so sure of—your man’s sister, as ye say—has come back no more. She’s given ye up like a’ the rest; and everybody will give ye up—till you humble yourself, Bell, and put away all your pretences, and do what Magdalen did. But naebody in heaven or earth will show mercy to a lie.”
“Mother, you’re that hard that ye make me sick,” cried Agnes. “It’s no a lie.”
“Let her prove it, then!” said the mother solemnly. She was in accord with Mr. Charles, with Fanshawe, with all others except Marjory, who had heard the tale. As for Agnes, she started up from her seat as if unable to bear any more.
“I maun be away again,” she cried; “I canna stand it longer. If your grand leddies and your fine gentlemen will do nothing for her, I’ll take up my work again, myself—and I’ll clear ye yet, Bell. I’ll away to Edinburgh this very day, and see John; maybe him and me can think of something else. I’m ’maist glad they’ve failed ye!” cried the girl, with tears in her eyes; “for now I’ll never rest day or night till I’ve done it myself.”
“You’ll think first what you’re doing,” said the mother; “going to visit a man that has no heart to marry ye; mind what’s happened to your sister, and take heed for yourself.”
“Oh, woman!” cried Agnes, turning upon her wildly—while poor Isabell, struck by this unexpected assault, lay back upon her pillows feebly sobbing; and it was at this moment that Marjory knocked at the cottage door.