HELEN stayed till the first shade of the darkening stole over the moor, and till the minister’s man had told all the “clash” of the countryside to Katrin and Dougal, and received but a very limited stock of information in return. There was, indeed, much more danger to the secret which now dominated and filled the house of Dalrugas like an actual personage from that chatter in the kitchen than from any thing that could have taken place upstairs. For the minister’s man was dimly aware that the young lady from Dalrugas had been in the village on that day when something mysterious was believed to have taken place in the Manse parlor; that she had been seen with a gentleman, and that Katrin and Robina had also been visible at the Manse. “Ay, was I,” said Katrin; “I just took the minister a dizzen of my eggs. In this awfu’ weather nobody has an egg but me. I just warm them up and pepper them up till they’ve nae idea whether it’s summer or winter, and we lay regular a’ the year round. I never grudge twa-three new-laid eggs to a delicate person, and the minister, poor gentleman, is no that strong, I’m feared.”
“He’s just as strong as a horse,” said the minister’s man, “and takes his dinner as if he followed the ploo, but new-laid eggs are nae doubt aye acceptable. The gentleman was from here that was paying him yon veesit twa days after the New Year?”
“We have nae gentleman here,” said Katrin, stolid as her own cleanly scrubbed table, on which she rested her hand. Dougal cocked his bonnet over his right ear, but gave no further sign. “There’s been a gentleman, a friend of Sir Robert’s, at Tam Robison’s and we had to give him a bed a nicht or twa on account of the snaw. Now I think o’t, he was a friend o’ the minister’s too. It’s maybe him you’re meaning? but he’s back in Edinburgh as far as I ken, these twa-three——”
“Weel, it would be him, or some other person,” said the minister’s man with an affectation of indifference; but he returned to the subject again and again, endeavoring, if he had been strong enough for the rôle, or if he had been confronted by a weak enough adversary, to surprise her into some avowal; but Katrin was too strong for him. It was with difficulty she could be got to understand what he meant. “Oh, it’s aye yon same gentleman you’re havering about! Eh, what would I ken about a strange gentleman? The minister is no my maister nor yet Dougal’s. He might get a visit from Auld Nick himself and it would be naething to him or me.”
“It might be much to me,” said the minister’s man, who was known for a “bletherin’ idiot” all over the parish. “It’s just a secret, and a secret is aye worth siller.”
“Well, I wish ye may get it,” Katrin said. During this time she was, to tell the truth, more or less anxious about the demeanor of her husband. It was true that Dougal knew nothing unless what he might have found out for himself, putting two and two together. Katrin had great confidence in the slowness of his intellect and his incapacity to put together two and two. Perhaps her trust was too great in this incapacity, and too little in the dogged loyalty with which Dougal respected his own roof-tree and all that sheltered under it. At least the fact is certain that the authorized gossip of the parish carried very little with him to compensate him for the cold drive and all the miseries of the way.
Lily took out her letter and went over it again when Helen had gone. She found it far too eloquent, too argumentative, too full of a foregone conclusion. Why should she assume that Ronald did not mean to provide a home for her, that there was any reason to believe in an intention on his part of keeping their marriage a secret and their lives apart? All his behavior during the past week had been against this. How could there have been a more devoted lover, a husband more adoring? She asked herself what there was in him to justify such fears, and answered herself: Nothing, nothing! not a shadow upon his love or delight in her presence, the happiness of being with her, for which he had sacrificed every thing else. He might have spent that New Year amid all the mirth and holiday of his kind: in the merry crowd at home, or in Edinburgh, where he need never have spent an hour alone; and he had preferred to be shut up all alone with her on the edge of a snowy wintry moor. Did that look as if he loved her little, as if he made small account of her happiness? Oh, no, no! It was she who was so full of doubts and fears, who had so little trust, who must surely love him less than he loved her, or such suggestions would never have found a place in her heart. If she already felt this in the evening, how much more did she feel it next morning, when the post brought her a little note all full of love, and the sweet sorrow of farewell, which Ronald had slipped into the post in the first halting-place beyond Dalrugas?
It was written in pencil, it was but three lines, but after she received it Lily indignantly snatched her letter from the blotting-book and flung it into the fire, which was too good an end for such a cruel production. Was it possible that she had questioned the love of him who wrote to her like that? Was it possible that she, so adored, so longed for, should doubt in her heart whether he did not mean to conceal her like a guilty thing? Far from her be such unkind, disloyal thoughts. Ronald had gone off into the world, as it is the man’s right and privilege and his duty to do, to provide a nest for his mate. If she were left solitary for a moment, that was inevitable: it was but the natural pause till he should have prepared for her, as every husband did. Instead of the indignation, the resentment, the bitter doubt she had felt, nothing but compunction was now in Lily’s mind. It was not he but she who was to blame. She was the unfaithful one, the weak and wavering soul who could never hold steadily to her faith, but doubted the absent as soon as his back was turned, and was worthy of nothing except to undergo the fate which her feeble affection feared. She was, perhaps, a little high-flown in the revulsion of her feelings, as in the fervor of these feelings themselves. A little less might have been expected from Ronald, a little charity extended to him in his short-coming; and certainly the vehemence and enthusiasm of her faith in him now was a little excessive. “Yes, it is better you should call me Miss Lily,” she said to Robina; “it is best just to keep it to ourselves for a while. Mr. Lumsden thought of all that, though he left it entirely to me, without a word said. There would be so many questions asked, even Dougal and Helen Blythe. I would have had to summer and winter it, and her not very quick at the uptake. It is a long time till Whit-Sunday,” said Lily, with a little quiver of her lip. “I will just be Miss Ramsay till then.”
“Eh, you will aye be Miss Lily to me, whatever!” Beenie cried.
“And I am just Miss Lily,” said her mistress, with a little air of dignity which was new to the girl. It was as if a princess had consented to that humiliation, sweetly, with a grace of self-abnegation which made it an honor the more.
It cannot be denied, however, that it was difficult, after all the agitations that had passed, after the supreme excitement of the New Year, and the short, yet wonderful, union of their life together, to fall back upon that solitude, and endeavor, once more, to “take an interest” in the chickens and the ponies, and the humors of Sandy and Dougal, which Lily, in the beginning, had succeeded in occupying herself with to some extent. She did what she could now to rouse her own faculties, to fill her mind with harmless details of the practical life. How comforting it would have been had she but been compelled to plan and contrive like Katrin for all those practical necessities—how to feed her family, how to make the most of her provisions, how to diet her cows and her hens; or like Dougal to care for the comfort of the beasts, and amuse himself with Rory’s temper, and the remarks that little snorting critic made upon things in general; or even to look over the “napery” and see if it wanted any fine darning, as Beenie did, and to regulate the buttons and strings of the garments and darning of the stockings. Then Lily might have done something, trying hard to make volunteer work into duty, and consequently into occupation and pleasure. But, Beenie being there, she had no need to do what would have simply thrown Beenie, instead of herself, out of work; and this was still more completely the case with Katrin, who, gladly as she would have contributed to the amusement in any way of her little mistress, would have resented, as well as been much astonished by, any interference with her own occupations. Lily could not do much more than pretend to be busy, whatever she did. She knitted socks for Ronald; beguiled by Beenie, she began with a little enthusiasm the manufacture into household necessaries of a bale of linen found by Katrin among the stores of the establishment, but stopped soon with shame, asking herself what right she had to take Sir Robert’s goods for that “plenishing” of abundant linen which is dear to every Scotch housewife’s heart. This was a scruple which the women could not share. “Wha should have it if no you?” cried Katrin. “Sir Robert he has just presses overflowing with as nice napery as you would wish to see. There is plenty to set up a hoose already, besides what’s wanted, and never be missed, let alone that except yourself, my bonnie Miss Lily, there is nae person to use thae fine sheets. But the auld leddy’s web that she had woven at the weaver’s and never lived to make it up—wha should have it, I should like to know, but you?”
“Not while my uncle is the master, Katrin.”
“I’ve nothing to say against Sir Robert,” cried Katrin—“he’s our maister, it’s true, and no an ill maister, just gude enough as maisters go—but the auld leddy was just your ain grandmother, Miss Lily, and your plenishing would come out of her hands in the course of nature, and for wha but you would she have given all that yarn (that she span herself, most likely) to be made into a bonnie web o’ linen? There is not a word to be said, as Robina will tell ye as weel as me. It’s just a law afore a’ the laws that a woman has her daughter’s plenishing to look to as soon as the bairn is born, and her bairn’s bairn with a’ the stronger reason, the only one that is left in the auld house.”
“Eh, Miss Lily, that’s just as sure as death,” Beenie said.
But Lily was not to be convinced. She flung the great web of linen, in its glossy and slippery whiteness, at the two anxious figures standing by her, involving them both in its folds. “Take it yourselves, then,” she said, with a laugh. “I am an honest lass in one way, if not in another. I will have none of grandmamma’s linen that belongs to Sir Robert and not to me.”
And then Lily snatched her plaid from the wardrobe and wrapped it round her, and ran out from all their exclamations and struggles for a ramble on the moor. Oh, the moor was cold these February days, the frost was gone and every thing was running wet with moisture, the turf between the ling bushes yielding like bog beneath the foot, the long, withered stalks of the heather flinging off showers of water at every touch, the black cuttings gleaming, the burn running fast and full. Lily began a devious course between the hummocks, leaping from one spot to another, as she had done with Ronald, saturating herself with the chilly freshness, as well as with the actual moisture, of the moor; but this was an amusement which soon palled upon the girl alone. She felt the exercise fatigue her. And the contrast between her solitude and the hand so ready and so eager to help her was more than she could bear. It was because they had to cling to each other so, because the mutual help was so sweet, that they had loved it. Lily was reluctantly obliged to confess that it was no fun alone, and though it was a relief to walk even a little on the road, that was but a faint alleviation of the monotony of life. Sometimes the aspect of the mountains stole her from herself, or a sudden pageant of sunset, or something of a darker drama going on, if she had but any interpretation of it, among those hills. Any thing going on, if it were but the gathering of the mist and the scent of the coming storm, was a relief to Lily. It was the long blank, not a passenger on the road, not an event in the day, which she could not bear.
And then even if the walk, by dint of a sunset or some other occurrence, had been enlivening, there was always the shock of coming back, the shutting of her door against every invasion of life, the quiet that might have been comfort to her old grandmother, the old leddy who had spun the yarn for that web of linen, and received it home with triumph—was it for the plenishing of Lily unborn? Lily came to have a little horror of that old leddy. She figured her to herself spinning, spinning, the little whirr of the wheel in its monotony going on for day after day. Lily did not think of the sons away in the world—Robert wherever there was fighting; her own father always in trouble—that filled the old leddy’s thoughts, which were spun into that yarn, and might have made many a pattern of mystic meaning in the cold snowy linen which looked so meaningless. She used to sit in the silent room, feeling that from some corner the old leddy’s eye was fixed upon her over the whirring wheel, till she could bear it no more.
She went down to Kinloch-Rugas to return Helen’s visit, but that was not a happy experience. The old minister, half seen in the gloaming, seated like a large shadow by the fire, gave her always a thrill of alarm. She had hoped that he would not have treated her as a secret, that he would have addressed her by her new name, and set her at once in a true position. But he did not do this. He looked at her not unkindly, and spoke to her with a compassionate tone in his voice. But he too seemed to accept the necessity which had been forced on her by a kind of unspoken command, a dilemma from which she could not escape. In that case the consciousness of being in the presence of a man who knew all, but made no sign, sitting there by the side of innocent Helen, who knew nothing, and who treated herself in all simplicity as the girl-Lily, the same as she had known before, was intolerable; and Lily did not go back again, much as the refuge of some other house to go to was wanted in her desolate state. “You’ll come and see me, Helen?” “That will I, my dear. You must not mind my father. He is kind, kind in his heart, and always a soft place for you.” “I am not thinking that he is unkind,” said Lily. Ah, no, the minister was not unkind! He was sorry for the young abandoned wife; for, as he thought, the young betrayed woman; and Lily, though she was not aware of this last aggravation, yet resented it, feeling the pity in his tone. And why should any one pity her, or venture to be sorry for her, and she, with no secret in her own honest intention, Ronald Lumsden’s lawful wife?
As the days lengthened it was possible to be out of doors more, and Lily began to scour the country upon Rory, and to see, though in the doubly cold aspect of this formidable northern spring, many places about in which, in more genial weather, when “the families” were at home, there might be friends to be made. She had come home tired from one of these rides, and the day having been dry, had ventured a little on the moor, holding up her riding-skirt, and looking toward the western hills, where a great sunset was about to be accomplished and all the unseen spectators were hastily putting on garments of gold and rose-color and robes of purple for the ceremony. It was not like a mere bit of limited sky, but a world of color, one hue of glory surging up after another as from some great treasury in the depths below, changing, combining, deepening, melting away in every kind of magical circle. Lily’s heart was not very light, but it rose instinctively to that wonderful display of nature. Oh, how beautiful it was! Oh, if there had only been some one to whom to say that it was beautiful! Whether it was the glorious color half blinding her with excessive radiance, or the thought of the unshared spectacle, Lily’s eyes filled full of tears. Either cause was enough. At Lily’s age, and in such circumstances as hers, the tears are not slow to come.
And then in a moment she felt a touch upon her waist and a voice in her ear. “Was it ever like this before, my Lily, my Lily? or has it all lighted up for you and me, and because I am back again?”
There is one compensation for those who suffer from great anxiety, from the misery of separation, from longing after things that seem unattainable. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, a flood of blessedness comes over them in the momentary attainment, the momentary meeting, the instantaneous relief. It was like a warm tide that flooded the heart of Lily, sweeping every fancy and every doubt away. She leaned her head upon his shoulder, and murmured in her rapture: “Oh, Ronald, you’ve come back!”
“Did you think I could keep away from you?” he said. No, no; how could he have kept away from her? He had come to claim her, as he had always intended to claim her, now, this moment, before the world.