THE dead calm into which Lily fell after all the agitations of this wonderful period was like death itself, she thought, after the tumult and commotion of a climax of life. Those days during which she had trotted down to the village on Rory, the mountain breezes in her face, and all the warmest emotions stirred in her breast, days full of anxiety and expectation, sometimes of more painful feelings, agitations of all kinds, but threaded through and through with the consciousness that for hours to come she would be with her lover, ministering to his wants, hearing him speak, going over and over with him, in the low-voiced talk to which the old minister behind his newspaper gave, or was supposed to give, no heed, their own prospects and hopes, their plans for the future—all those things that are more engrossing and delightful to talk of than any other subjects in heaven or earth—were different from all the days that had passed over her before. Her youthful existence was like a dream, thrown back into the distance by the superior force and meaning of all that had happened since: both the loneliness and the society, the bitter time of self-experience and solitude, the joy of the reunion, the love so crossed and mingled which had grown with greater intensity with every chance. The little simple Lily who had “fallen in love,” as she thought, with Ronald Lumsden, as she might have fallen in love with any one of a half-dozen of young men, was very, very different from the Lily who had been torn out of her natural life on his account, who had doubted him and found him wanting, who had been converted into the faith of an enthusiast in him, and conviction that it was she, and not he, that was in the wrong. Their stolen meetings on the moor, which had startled her back into the joy of existence, which had been so few, yet so sweet; their little meal together, which was like a high ceremony and sacrament of a deeper love and union; the tremendous excitement of the accident, and the agitated chapter of constant yet disturbed intercourse which followed (disturbed at last by a renewed creeping in of the old doubts, and anxiety to push him forward, to make him act, to make him think not always of himself, as he was so apt to do)—all these things had formed an epoch in her life, behind which every thing was childish and vague. She herself was not the same. It happens often in a woman’s life that the change from youth and its lighter atmosphere of natural, simple things comes before the mind is developed, before the character is able to bear that wonderful transformation. Lily at first had been essentially in this condition. Her trial came to her before she had strength for it, and every new point of progress was marked, so to speak, with a new wound, quickly healed over, as became her youth, yet leaving a scar, as all internal wounds do. Even when the thrill of happiness had been in her young frame and mind it had been intensified by a thrill of pain: the pang of secrecy, the sharp sting of falsehood—falsehood which was abhorrent to Lily’s nature. She had laughed as other girls laugh at the stratagems of lovers, their devices to escape the observation of jealous parents, the evils that are said to be legitimate in love and war. Nobody is so severe as to judge harshly these aberrations from duty. Even the sternest parent smiles at them when they are not directed against himself. But when it came to inventing a story day by day; when it came to deceiving Katrin, with her sharp eyes, at one end, and Helen’s unsuspicious soul at the other—then Lily could not bear the tangled web in which she had wound herself. She had to go on; it was too late to tell the truth now, she had said to herself, day by day, her heart aching from those thanks which Helen showered upon her for her kind attendance upon the unexpected guest. “If it had not been for you, Lily, what could I have done?” the minister’s daughter had said, again and again; and Lily’s heart had grown sick in the midst of her strained and painful happiness at Ronald’s side.
Now this was over and another phase come. She had urged him to go, feeling the position untenable any longer in a way which his robust self-confidence had not felt; but when suddenly he had taken the step she urged, Lily felt herself flung back upon herself, the words taken out of her mouth, and the meaning from her mind. All her little fabric of life tumbled down about her. Those habits which are formed so quickly, which a few days suffice to bind upon the soul like iron, dropped from her, and she felt as if the framework by which she was sustained had broken down, and she could no longer hold herself erect. Her life seemed suddenly to have lost all its meaning, all its occupations. There was no sense in going on, no reason for its continuance merely to eat meals, to take walks, to go to bed and to get up again. She looked behind her, to the immediate past, with a pang, and before her, to the immediate future, with a blank sense of vacancy which was almost despair. When the “geeg” that carried him away was gone quite out of sight, Lily went slowly back to the drawing-room, and seated herself at the window from which she had first seen him appearing across the moor. It had been then all ablaze with the heather, which now had died away into rustling bunches of dead flowers, all dried like husks upon the stalks, gray and dreary, like the dull evening of a glowing day. Her heart beat dull with the reverberation of all those convulsions that had gone through it. And now they were all over, like the glow of the heather—and what was before her? The winter creeping on, with its short days and long nights; storm and rain, when even Rory would not face the keen wind; solitude unbroken for weeks and months; and beyond that what was there to look forward to? Oh, if it had been but poverty—the little flat under the roofs in a tall Edinburgh house, and to work her fingers to the bone! Poor Lily, who knew so little what working your fingers to the bone meant! who thought that would be blessedness beside one you loved, and in the world where you were born! So, no doubt, it would have been; but yet, in all probability, though she did not intend it so, it would have been Robina’s fingers, not hers, that were worked to the bone.
I would not have the reader think that, translated into ordinary parlance, all this meant the vulgar fact that Lily was longing to be married, and would not accept the counsels of patience and wait, though she was only twenty-three, and had so many, many years before her. Had Ronald been an eager lover, ready to brave fortune for her sake, and consider that, for love, the world were well lost, she would no doubt have taken the other side of the question, and preached patience to him, and borne her own part of the burden with a smile. But it is very different when it is the lover who is prudent, and when the girl, with an unsatisfied heart, has to wait and know that her happiness, her society, her life, are of less value to him than the fortune which he hopes, by patience, to secure along with her; also that she can do nothing to emancipate herself, nothing to escape from whatever painful circumstances may surround her, till he gives the word, which he shows no inclination to give, and which womanly pride and feeling forbid her even to suggest; also, and above all, that in his hesitation, in his prudence and delay, he is falling short of the ideal which every lover should fulfil or lose his place and power. This was the worst of all: not only that Ronald was acting so, but that it was so far, far different from the manner in which Ronald, had he been the Ronald she thought, would have acted. This gave the bitterness under which Lily’s heart sank. Again, she did not know what he meant to do, or if he meant to do any thing, or if she were to remain as she was, perhaps for long years, consuming her heart in loneliness and vacancy, diversified by moments of clandestine meeting and unlovely happiness, bought by deceit. She could not again yield to that, she said to herself, with passionate tears. Though her heart were to break, she would not heal it at the cost of lies. It might not have given Lily many compunctions, perhaps, to have deceived her uncle; but to deceive Helen, to deceive kind Katrin and Dougal, to give false accounts of the simplest circumstances—oh! no, no; never again, never again! She said this to herself, with passionate tears falling like rain, as she sat at her lonely window on many a dreary day, straining her eyes across the moor, where the rain so often fell to double the effect of those tears. Let them give each other up mutually; let them part and be done with it if he chose; but to deceive every-body and meet secretly, or meet openly upon the falsest of pretences—oh! no, no, Lily said to herself, never more!
But how these decisions melted when, in the heart of the winter, there began to dawn the promise of the New Year, it is easy to imagine, and I do not need to say. Lily, it must be remembered, had no one but Ronald to represent to her happiness and life. She had never had many people to love. Her father and mother had both died before she was old enough to know them. She had no aunt, though that is often an unsatisfactory relation, not even cousins whom she knew, which is strange to think of in Scotland—nobody to take her part or whom she could repose her heart upon but Beenie, her maid, to whom Lily’s concerns were her own sublimated, and who could only agree in and intensify Lily’s own natural impulses and thoughts. Ronald was all she had, the only one who could help her, the sole deliverer possible, and opener to her of the gates of life. To be sure, she might have renounced him and so returned to her uncle, to be dragged about in a back seat of his chariot, if not at its wheels; though, indeed, even this was problematical, for Sir Robert was a selfish old man, who was, on the whole, very glad to have got rid of the burden of a young woman to take about with him, and considered that she would do very well at the old Tower, and might be quite content with such a quiet and comfortable home, a good cook (which Katrin was), a pony to ride upon, and the run of the moor. He had half forgotten her existence by this time, as Lily divined, and was absent “abroad” in that vague and wide world of which stayers at home in Scotland knew so much less then than every-body knows now. And as the time approached for Ronald’s return, Lily, in her longing for him, added to her longing for something, for some one, for society, emancipation, something that was life, began to forget all her old aches and troubles of mind; the doubts flew away; she remembered only that Ronald was coming, that he was coming, that the sun was about to shine again, that there was happiness in prospect, love and company and talk and sympathy, and all that is good in youth and life. This time she must manage so that the deceit of old would be necessary no longer. Helen should know that the two who had met so often in the Manse parlor had come to love each other. What so natural, what so fitting, seeing they had spent so much time together under her own wing and her own mild eyes? And Katrin and Dougal should be permitted to see what Lily was very sure they had divined already, that the poor gentleman whom Lily had nursed so faithfully was more to her than any other gentleman in the world. He should come to Dalrugas to see her, and be with her openly as her lover in the sight of all men. If Sir Robert heard of it, why, then she must escape, she must fly; the pair must at last take it, as Ronald had said, into their own hands—and Lily did not feel that she would be very sorry if this took place. At all events now every thing should be open and honest, clandestine no more.
It seemed as if he had come to the same decision when he arrived on the night which was then called in Scotland, and is perhaps still to some extent, Hogmanay—why I do not know, nor I believe does any one—the last night of the year. He came in the early twilight, when the short, dark day was ending, and the long, cheerful evening about to begin. What a cheerful evening it was! the fire so bright, the candles twinkling, the curtains drawn, and from the kitchen the sound of the children singing who had come out in a band all the way from the village to call upon Katrin:
“Get up, gudewife, and shake your feathers,
And dinna think that we are beggars,
For we are bairns, come out to play;
Get up and gie’s our Hogmanay.”
Lily was about to go down, flying down the spiral stairs, her heart beating loud with expectation, wondering breathlessly when he would come, how he would come, who alone could bring the Hogmanay cheer to her, and in the meantime ready, for pure excitement, and to keep herself still, to join the women in the kitchen, and fill the children’s wallets with cakes, cakes par excellence, the oatmeal cakes to wit, which are still what is meant in Scotland by that word, baked thin and crisp, and fresh from the girdle, making a pleasant smell; and over and above these with shortbread, in fine, brown farls, the true New Year’s dainty, and great pieces of bun, the Scotch bun, which is something between a plum-pudding and the Pan Giallo of the Romans, a mass of fruit held together by flour and water. Great provision of these delights was in the kitchen, which was all “redd up” and shining for the festival, with Katrin in her best cap, and Beenie in a silk gown and muslin apron, a resplendent figure. A band of “guisards” had accompanied the children, ready to enact some scene of the primitive drama of prehistoric tradition. Lily was hastening down to join this party, in a white dress which she too had put on in honor of the occasion. The kitchen was very noisy, full of these visitors, and nobody but she heard the summons at the big hall-door. Lily hesitated for a moment, her heart giving a bound as loud as the knock—then opened it. And there he stood—the hero and the centre of all!
“And, eh, what a lucky thing to come this night that Miss Lily may have her ploy too! You will just stop and eat your bit dinner with her, Maister Lumsden!” Katrin cried.
“Will it be a ploy for Miss Lily? I would like to be sure of that.”
“Eh, nae need to pit it in words,” said Katrin: “look at her bonnie e’en; and reason good, seeing that she has never spoken to one of her own kind, and least of all to a young gentleman, since the day ye gaed away.”
“I am staying at Tam the shepherd’s, on the other side of the moor,” said Ronald.
“Losh me! at Tam the shepherd’s, for the shootin’?” she asked in a tone of consternation.
“Well,” he said, with a laugh, “you can judge, Katrin, for yourself.”
“Ay, ay,” she said, brightening all over, “I judge for mysel’, sir, and I see it’s just the auld story. Tam the shepherd’s an awfu’ haverel, but his wife’s an honest woman, and clean,” she added, “as far as she kens. But you shall have a good dinner with Miss Lily, I promise you, for once in a way.”
Lily only half listened, but she heard all that was said. And her heart danced to see his open look, and the words in which there was no pretence of shooting, or any reason, save the evident one, for his presence there. The excuses were all over; there was to be no more deception. Honestly he came as her lover, endeavoring to throw no dust in the eyes of her humble guardians. If they had been noble guardians, holding her fate in their hands, Lily could not have been more happy. They were not to be deceived. Openness and honesty were to be around her in the house which was her home. What was wanted but this to make her the happiest girl that ever piled shortbread into a child’s wallet in honor of Hogmanay, and the New Year which was coming to-morrow? A new year, a new life, a different world! Katrin came up to her with half-affected horror and tender kindness, grasping her arm. “Eh, Miss Lily,” she cried, “you’ll just ruin the family, and we’ll no have a single farl of shortbread left for our ain use; and the morn’s the New Year! Ye are giving every thing away. Na, na, we must mind oursel’s a wee. No more for you, my wee man. Miss Lily’s just ower good to you. Run up the stairs, my bonnie leddy, for Beenie is setting the table, and you’ll get your dinner, you and the gentleman, before the guisards begin.”
“The gentleman!” Lily felt her countenance flame, as she laughed and turned away. “How kind you are, Katrin,” she said, “to provide me with company, too, me that never sees any body.”
“Am I no kind,” cried Katrin in triumph, “and him for coming just at the right moment? I am awfu’ pleased that you have a pairty of your ain to bring in a good New Year.”
How strange, how delightful it was to sit down opposite to him at the table, to eat Katrin’s excellent dinner, which, though it was almost impromptu, was so good—trout and game, the Highland luxuries, which were, indeed, almost daily bread on the edge of the moor, but not to Ronald, who amid all their happiness was man enough to like his dinner and praise it. “This is how we shall sit at our own table, and laugh at all our little troubles when they are over,” he said.
“Oh, Ronald!” said Lily, with a little cloud in the midst of joy. They might be little troubles to him, but not to her, all lonely in the wilderness.
“At all events they will soon be over,” he said. His eyes were bright and his tones assured; there was no longer any doubt in his look, which she examined in the moments when he was not looking at her with an anxious criticism. “And tell me about the good folk at the Manse, and kind Miss Eelen and her assistant and successor. Is he to be her assistant, too, as well as her father’s? I had a famous letter from the old gentleman about the wine I sent him. And, Lily, I think that with very little trouble I will get him to do all we want as soon as you can make up your mind to it. After all this time we must not have any more delay.”
“To do all we want?” she said, looking up at him with surprise. The dinner was over by this time, and they had left the table and were standing by the fire.
“Yes,” he said. “What do we want but to belong to each other, Lily? You don’t need grand gowns or all the world at your wedding. Oh, yes, I should have liked to see my Lily with all her friends about her, and none so sweet as herself. But since we cannot do that, why should we mind it, when the old minister here can make every thing right in half an hour?”
“Ronald,” she said, with a gasp, “you take away my breath!”
“Why,” he cried, “is not this what has been in our minds for ever so long? Have you not promised, however poor I was, in whatever straits——”
“Yes, yes, there is no question of that.”
“And why, then, should it take away your breath? My bonnie Lily, is it not an old bargain now? We have waited and waited, but nothing has come of waiting. And Providence has put us in a quiet place, with nothing but friends round, and a good old minister, a kind old fellow, who likes a good glass of wine and knows what he’s drinking!” He laughed at this as he drew her closer toward him. “Lily, with every thing in our favor, you will not put me off and make a hesitation now?”
Oh, this was not quite the way, not the way she looked for! Yet she drew her breath hard, that breath which fluttered in spite of herself, and put both her hands in his. No, after so long waiting why should she make a hesitation now? And then they went down to the kitchen together, arm in arm, Lily yielding to the delightful consciousness that there was no need for concealment, to see the guisards act their primitive drama, and to bring in the New Year.
Oh, the New Year! which was coming in amid that rustic mirth among those true, kind, humble friends to whom the young pair were as gods in the glory of their love and youth. Lily trembled in her joy: what bride does not? What would it bring to them, that New Year?