May: Volume 2 by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXII.

IT is needless to trace all the steps by which the real heir of the Heriots was placed in such possession of his rights as a poor little orphan baby of three months’ old could attain. Before his young mother was carried to the family grave, where she was laid, under silent protest from her humble family, who stood aloof with a pride familiar to the Scotch peasant, giving up the child with a certain grim and indignant reluctance—the infant was taken to St. Andrews, and placed under Marjory’s care. This was done by Agnes, who all along had regarded Tom Heriot’s sister as her rival and enemy. She carried the child herself, scorning all aid, to Mr. Charles Heriot’s house. If possible, her peasant appearance—the air of a respectable maidservant, which was natural to her—was more manifest than ever. She would not allow it to be supposed that she wished to approach herself, by ever so little, to the “gentles,” with whom her sister had been connected.

“I’ve brought you the bairn,” she said, confronting Marjory, with that defiant look which had never quite left her face; and she unfolded the sleeping baby from the shawl in which he was muffled, and laid him down upon the sofa, sternly repressing all sign of emotion. “He was to be mine,” she said, briefly, “I promised to be a mother to him, but it’s reasonable now that he should be in your hands. My sister, up to her last day,” and here a spasm crossed the resolute features, “never knew that he was the heir—nor my mother. They thought the bairn would be provided for, that was a’. I knew well enough—but why should I have troubled her innocent mind, that heeded no such vanities? And I allow that a bairn like this, born the heir, should be in the hands of the family. You and me will, maybe, never meet again—”

“Agnes,” said Marjory, “you cannot think that I would wish to separate you like this from Isabell’s child?”

Again Agnes’s comely face was swept as by a wind of emotion, and again she banished all trace of feeling. “I know you are kind,” she said. “It is your nature; but I’m of the nature that I canna bide kindness. I’ll take it from my equals—but no from you—and nothing else can be between us—- though I respect ye—I respect ye,” she added, hurriedly. “I’ve no a word to say. If I had been to choose, I would have chosen different. I would rather he had been a poor lad’s son, with little siller. I would have bred him up, and watched him night and day, and put my hope and my heart on him; but oh, being otherwise, it’s a blessing of Providence that it’s come to light now, and no later. Time makes no marks upon a helpless infant, as it would do upon a grown lad. It’s best to part with him now.”

Here two tears, big and bitter, fell upon the child’s white frock, making two large spots, which Agnes, taking out her handkerchief, did her best to wipe away.

“He shall know all that you did for his mother—all that you would have done for him,” said Marjory. “He will grow up to reward you, at least, with his love.”

“Reward me!” said Agnes, with a hot flush on her cheeks.

“I said, with his love,” said Marjory, gently, “which is what no one would scorn, not the Queen.”

“No, no the Queen. She’s a good leddy,” said Agnes; “but ye can take many a thing from them below you that you canna take from them above you. Love’s no love unless you’re a kind of equals. I would rather he kent nothing about us. We’re no of his condition, and never can be. Eh, my poor Bell! my poor Bell! that was so pleased he should be a gentleman’s son, without thinking that it parted him from all belonging to her,” cried Agnes, the tears rushing down her face in a sudden tempest. Then she dried her eyes hurriedly. “Miss Heriot, I ken he’s in good hands. We’ll never trouble you, and you’ll no breed him up to despise us. I must away now; there’s aye plenty to do, God be praised.”

“But, Agnes, I shall see you again? You will not go away without coming to see the child and me?”

“It would serve no purpose,” she said. “I’ll see you where I once saw you before, in the churchyard.” “Oh, little did I think how I was to go there next! I grudge her to you, I grudge her to you! though I do not deny it’s an honour, a’ the honour that can be shown now—”

“All that we have ever had it in our power to show,” said Marjory.

“I’m saying nothing against that,” said Agnes, with her unquenchable look of rivalry, of unsuccessful rivalry, compelled to yield to superior power. She bent over the child, who slept peacefully on the sofa, for a moment, and then she turned and left the room with scant ceremony. Her heart was too sore for politeness, and politeness is not the cardinal virtue of her kind. Thus she passed away out of Marjory’s life. The strange interlude of her connection with the Heriots must have looked like a dream to her in after-days. She never interfered, never claimed to see the child, never asserted any right to him. Partly with that stoicism which belongs to her class and nation, and partly for very love’s sake, she gave him up, making the sacrifice absolute and perfect, as only a powerful nature can do. How could she? many a feeble critic said afterwards. The peasant-girl could, because of love, and because she was tenderer and stronger than most; the effort rent her heart, but she did it, feeling the fitness of the sacrifice.

And the baby who had been born amid the peat-smoke in a Highland cottage, who had been frantically concealed at first, a shame to everybody belonging to him, entered upon another kind of existence without knowing it, in equal ignorance of his cloudy entry into life, and of this sudden revolution. He lay on the soft sofa, softly sleeping, placid as if he had not been laid in a hard bed, and pillowed on dying arms. He never knew any existence but that which he thus began, as it were, for the second time under Marjory’s shadow. He had no surroundings but those that belonged to the natural level on which he was to spend his life.

Fanshawe remained in St. Andrews while all these steps were being taken. His conduct was quite in accordance with his character. He intended to go away daily, but every day found some pretext to detain him. He lingered, and was ready to aid in everything required, and bade himself begone at night, only to feel that to go was impossible every morning. People made a hundred comments on him. He was gibed at, gravely questioned, made the object of many a conjecture, but nothing moved him. He stayed through the Autumn, with now and then a divergence into the Highlands for a day’s shooting; he saw the Autumn steal into Winter, and never budged. Mr. Charles became so used to him that he received the suggestion of his departure with indignation at last.

“Go away! why should he go away? Where could he be better?” Mr. Charles said; and did his best to teach him golf, and initiate him into all the delights of the place. It was Fanshawe who stood by Marjory in the disagreeable assault she sustained from Mrs. Charles, who drove into St. Andrews in the Pitcomlie carriage, and stormed so loudly against her husband’s family, that the wanderers in the ruined Cathedral heard the sound through the open windows, and came gaping and wondering to listen. Matilda denounced every kind of vengeance upon the heads of those who had got up this conspiracy against her, and were about to hunt her and her orphan boy from their home.

“But do not think you will get rid of me,” she said. “I am not the outcast you think. Providence has given me another home, where I shall be able to watch and find you out when you are not thinking. Oh, don’t imagine you are rid of me!”

Poor Johnnie Hepburn stood by during this objurgation, shrinking from Marjory’s eye, looking on, now red with shame, now pale with distress, while his future wife made this exhibition of herself. He stood between the ideal he had worshipped all his life, and the real upon which he had fallen, poor fellow, breaking not his bones, but his heart, by the fall. He was too much cowed to say a word. And neither of the others said much; they allowed the young widow to drive off triumphant with the sense that she had humbled them all, and vindicated her superiority. “That must have done her a deal of good,” Fanshawe said when it was over, “and it has not done you much harm.”

“It has done me a great deal of harm,” said Marjory, paling out of her flush of excitement, and looking ready to cry; and then after a while, she said softly, “Poor Johnnie!” These were not the words of a woman who had entertained any very elevated feeling for the man whom she thus pitied; but they were enough to make Fanshawe quite unhappy.

“Idiot!” he said to himself without any pity; and spent that evening mournfully by himself to the wonder of the Heriot household, and the consternation of Marjory, who felt that he had been her best support; and who had not an idea what he could mean by absenting himself on that particular evening when she was so grateful to him.

They were brought together also by another duty, not of an agreeable kind. Mrs. Charles gave her sister a summary dismissal when she herself left Pitcomlie. It was Spring when this occurred, and Matilda was to go to Edinburgh, her year of mourning being nearly out, to prepare for her second marriage. But Verna, whose courage and temper had both given way under the failure of all her hopes, protested so warmly and so injudiciously against this precipitate marriage, that there was a violent quarrel, and the weaker sister was turned out to find her way back to India, or where she pleased. She went to St. Andrews, not knowing why, and threw herself upon Marjory’s compassion. She had nowhere to go to but India, where her father did not want her. Nobody in the world wanted poor Verna. While they were trying to arrange for her return voyage, she fell ill of a brain-fever, and lay between life and death for weeks. When she got better, somehow she had acquired a niche in the household of which she had intended to be the most active enemy. She stayed in her loneliness as Milly’s governess, or in any other capacity that could be invented for her; and finally married Dr. Murray’s successor, and made an admirable parish Minister’s wife, interfering too much with the poor people, but gradually learning their character. She and Mrs. John Hepburn were sometimes friends—when the latter was in want of help; and sometimes enemies, when Matilda felt well enough to be insolent; but Verna’s vicinity made poor Johnnie’s life less miserable, and his home less hopeless, than in her absence they could have been.

This, however, is an incursion into the future which we are scarcely warranted in making, seeing that the fate of the two principal persons of this history still remains unsettled. Fanshawe lingered at St. Andrews through all the Winter and Spring. He made himself of use to everybody, and was deeply ashamed of his own absolute uselessness. Never had he been so conscious of the good-for-nothing existence which he did not seem able to shake himself clear of. It closed his mouth in Marjory’s presence. What could he say for himself? how could he recommend himself to her? He would go and sit by her, or walk by her side when permitted, silent, embarrassed; doing nothing to win her attention, wondering if she despised him, or if she pitied him, or if she thought him worth thinking of at all? His feelings grew exaggerated and unreal in the profound consciousness he had of his own helpless unimportance, and in his constant surmises as to what she thought of him, and the questions concerning him which must arise in her mind. One half of these questions, however, never arose in Marjory’s mind at all, and the other half appeared to her in a different light, and affected her differently; but the man was in love and humble, and never divined this. He lingered on, hoping for he knew not what; that something might break the ice between them, that she might offer herself to him, or something else equally improbable. Marjory’s sentiments were of a very different character. She did not feel herself to stand on that vast pinnacle of superiority which was so visible to him; her eyes were not so clear as he supposed them. To be sure, he was not at all her ideal of what a man ought to be; but I am not sure that she liked him less on that account. Probably Marjory, like many other young women, supposed herself to prefer that glorious being of romance whom romantic girls dream of, whom they can look up to, upon whom they can hang in sweet but abject inferiority, and who is to them, as Mr. Trollope says, a god. I say probably she supposed that she would have liked this; but I doubt much whether she would have liked it; for men like gods seldom appear to the visual organs of any but very susceptible feminine adorers, after five-and-twenty, and Marjory had reached that ripe age. But I fear she liked Fanshawe all the better for not being a god. She liked him for the very qualities which he felt she must despise him for. To her the vague and unsettled character of his life appeared but dimly, while his generosities shone out very bright. All her good sense and discrimination failed her in this point, as such qualities invariably do just at the moment when they might be of practical use. In matters so closely concerning personal happiness they never are of the slightest use; as soon as the heart is touched, such poor bulwarks of the mind yield as if they were made of broken reeds. She saw nothing ignoble, nothing unworthy in the life full of so many kindly uses, of which Fanshawe thought with so much shame, yet felt himself incapable of changing.

“Most people come here for golf,” she would say, when his long lingering was remarked. “Why should he not stay—for his own pleasure—if he likes it? Is golf such an elevating occupation?”

This was said, not because she despised golf, but because of him whom she felt herself bound to defend, and who had not even golf—who had only herself, for his excuse.

The way in which all this ended was as follows: Marjory had gone out to the Spindle on a bright Winter day to pay a farewell visit to that spot which had occupied so important a place in her past life. Who does not know the keen and radiant brightness of a sunny day in Winter, when there is no wind to chill the still air, no clouds upon the deepened blue, none of the languid softening of Summer, but every outline sharp, and every tint brought out by the radiant sun and clear atmosphere? The rocks unfolded all their glittering veins, all their ruddy stains of colour under the sunshine. There were no trees to keep the fact of decay before the spectator by means of fallen leaves and bare anatomy of branches. The sea was like a great blue mirror, except where the crisped surface, still, though ruffled, betrayed some breath of wandering air. The sails of the fishing boats rose brown out of this dazzling surface, and in the distance some far white ships glided like great sea-birds along the bright broad line of the horizon to which both sky and sea went out widening and paling. The sun was warm, and Marjory seated herself, for a few moments, on a dry rock from which the sea had long ebbed. This stillness was more intense than it ever is on a Summer day—the brightness almost more intense too. She sat and thought of all that had passed there—of Isabell and her death-bed—of the strange way in which this corner of rocky beach had been thrust into her own story. She was disturbed and annoyed when she heard a step approaching, scattering the pebbles, and sounding through the Winter’s stillness. She was still more disturbed, but perhaps not annoyed, when she saw that the intruder was Fanshawe. He was the only intruder whose presence she could have endured; and when she saw him, she rose and went to meet him, taking the path towards home, which somehow made the encounter less embarrassing. He turned and accompanied her. It is a long walk, winding up and down by many a fold of the bold coast, now at the foot of the cliffs, now above—an endless walk to people who are embarrassed by finding themselves together; and yet not disagreeable—one of those opportunities of pleasant pain which few have the courage to avoid; and which may become, who knows, all pleasure, and no pain, by the chance of a sudden word.

“Do you know,” said Fanshawe suddenly, after some vague conversation about nothing, “that I know what a poor wretch I am, Miss Heriot? If I was good for anything—if I was of the least consequence in the world, or knew how to make myself so, I should go away.”

“Should you?” said Marjory; “I do not see the necessity. Do you know that I think you talk a great deal of nonsense on this point. You cannot expect me to agree with you, seeing what a friend you have been to us; how much you have done for us ever since we knew you. You have been good for everything—”

“And yet,” he said, “it is odd if you will think of it—that I have been of no real service whatsoever. I don’t mean to say I had not the best intentions—but there is nothing so feeble as good intentions. About these Macgregors, for instance; they were found before I got back from my wild-goose chase. I meant well, but I did nothing.”

“That is not the question,” said Marjory loftily; “their coming was a mere accident. You did everything—the accident came in and balked you. I was half disappointed myself.”

“Were you?” he said, looking at her with those melting, glowing eyes which betray secrets. And then he added quite abruptly: “The road is rough, will you take my arm?”

Marjory laughed. “I do not see how that follows,” she said, amused.

“No, it does not follow; nothing follows in life—except that the road is rough, you know, and facts count for something. They do count for something—not for much, perhaps you will say—”

“Indeed, I am not such an infidel; they count for a great deal,” she said, and though she needed no support, she accepted it to give him pleasure. But such was the fantastical nature of the man that, after the first gleam of delight that came across him at the touch of her hand, his brow clouded over.

“How good you are, Miss Heriot! too good. You drive me to despair when you are kind to me. Often, do you know, I have wanted to ask you whether, by any chance—people take odd fancies sometimes—you would have me, to try what you could make of me? and then you have been kind, and driven me to despair. It is no use, is it, telling you that I have been a greater fool than usual to-day? Do you know,” he went on, holding her hand tightly in his arm, “if you would have had me, I think something might have come of me, perhaps—”

He looked at her so that she could not bear his eyes. It was a curious kind of love-tale; but not, I suppose, less embarrassing than another. She withdrew her hand from his arm with difficulty, and with a little impatience. “Mr. Fanshawe, you vex me when you say such things—of yourself.”

Each word as she said it was lower than the preceding one; and the last two were quite inaudible to poor Fanshawe. He gave a huge sigh that came from the bottom of his heart. “Well!” he said, “I knew how it would be; I felt sure that was about what you would say. And it is quite right—I am not good enough to look at you, much less to hope. But, Miss Heriot, I am done for now, and I don’t care what becomes of me. Don’t be kind to me any more.”

Marjory looked up, and saw, to her wonder, the darkness that had come over his face. There was no time to be lost in trifling. She put her hand within his arm again—she looked at him smiling. “But I will,” she said.

“You will—what?”

The question was foolish—the answer unnecessary. So are many questions, and many answers at that crisis of life. They got home somehow, and told the others what had happened. “But I have nothing,” Fanshawe said ruefully when he recounted the matter to Mr. Charles.

“We must make some arrangement—some arrangement,” said that troubled sage, with many puckers in his forehead. Anyhow, it was a way of solving the question of Marjory’s marriage, and that was worth a sacrifice.

The Fanshawes are now settled at Pitcomlie, the guardians of the baby heir. The useless man has become the most useful of men in that work which so many useless men could shine in, the management of an estate. He has found what he can do, and does it. And Mr. Charles sits in his room in the old Tower, and has come to the second volume of the family history. It will be a long time before he comes to the entry of “Thomas Heriot, married June 16, 18—, to Isabell Jeffrey,” nobody’s daughter, which it goes to his very heart to think of. Perhaps he will not live long enough to be obliged to record that there was once an irregular marriage and a nameless wife among the Heriots; but in the meantime the others keep the name of poor Isabell always sacred; and her boy, after his long minority, will be the richest Heriot that has reigned for many a generation in the East Neuk of Fife.

THE END.