CHAPTER IX.
A PAGE OF LIFE TURNED OVER.
The Horse Guards did not seem in haste regarding Cecil's affair; some days passed on, and hope began to flicker up in the hearts of all—even the heart of Cecil—of all save Hew, we should say, as that worthy scanned the morning papers, for what he wished to see, in vain.
Evening was always an intolerable time to Cecil at this period—debarred the mess, and secluded in his room, where, left totally to himself, he was wont to indulge in those dreamy reveries that are engendered by a good cigar.
At six-and-twenty or so, it is indeed a dreary thing, when, as a writer says, 'much of life seems still before us, and a dark unfathomable future lies between us and the grave; when it is a bitter thing to sit alone and ponder on the days to come, and discover no bright spot in the darkness, discern no kind hand to beckon us forward.'
There was an evening which Cecil was fated to remember long, when amid other scenes, and when surrounded by much of peril and suffering.
It was the sunset of a lovely spring day. Beyond the ramparts of that great fortress, to look on which to every Scotsman must seem 'the phantasy of a thousand years comprised within a single moment,' the distant glories of the departing sun threw forward in dark and rugged outline the wooded hills of Corstorphine, bathing in ruddy light the waters of the Forth, with its shores and isles seeming to substitute the hues of heaven for those of earth.
Lost in sad thoughts he sat by the window of his lonely room, dreamily watching the evening haze tinted with gold by the sinking sun, that already involved in obscurity the lower portions of the city, the gardens where of old the North Loch lay, and out of which the castle rock, the spires and fantastic masses, the pillared buildings on the Mound, rose as from a sea, the gathering obscurity, lending a strange witchery to that wonderful view.
Cecil was then in one of his saddest moments. In his hand was a tiny packet, and gently and tenderly he fingered it, for it contained the withered daisies culled from his mother's grave; and his heart grew very full as her image came vividly to memory with all the idolatrous love she had for him, her only son.
'Thank God she knows nothing of all this shame and misery! Yet, who can say—perhaps?' he muttered, and cast his eyes upward for a moment.
An essayist tells us that 'memory is the peculiar domain of the individual. In going back in recollection to the scenes of other years, he is drawing on the secret storehouse of his own unconsciousness, with which a stranger must not intermeddle.' So Cecil felt himself a child again, and into that storehouse he looked back to much of love and sorrow, to many struggles, anxieties, and triumphs, known to him and his mother only—his dead mother, of whom we may learn much more anon; and now by the course of events believing that Mary Montgomerie was utterly lost to him, he clung more than ever to the memory of his mother, for she had been all the world to him, as he to her.
'Could I expect that she would spend all the best years of her life waiting for a fellow who might never be able to marry her?' he had said once to Fotheringhame.
'But, man alive!' responded the other; 'she is able to marry you.'
'Was, you may say; we are separated now for ever.'
Times there were when Cecil thought he should go mad, as the whole situation in all its details of too probable ruin and disgrace, together with the certain loss of Mary, swept through his brain with painful and provoking iteration.
Could it be that he was the victim of some plot? Hew had been near him on that night, he had heard; but that was all. Had twenty nights or twenty years elapsed since that fatal ball? he sometimes thought, for most strange seemed the confusion of time and inversion of events.
So full was he of much and heavy thought, that he did not hear his door open, or was conscious of any one approaching, till a dog suddenly leaped upon him, thrusting its cold nose into his hand, and anon licked it with hot, flapping tongue—Snarley, as if conscious that his friend was in trouble, for Snarley it was, grovelling and abasing himself at his feet.
Tommy Atkins had ushered in three ladies and Fotheringhame, their escort.
'Mary!'
'Cecil!'
The two names on each tongue conveyed a world of tenderness, and tender was the light that shone in the eyes of each—tender and yearning too, as they held each other's hands, poor souls, and oblivious of those who stood by and tried to look unconscious, held their hands fast mutually, as if each had recovered some dear treasure, combined with heart and soul.
'You here, Mary!' exclaimed Falconer.
'Yes, Cecil, with Mrs. Garth and Annabelle.'
'If the general knew that I had chaperoned Mary here,' said Mrs. Garth, tremulously, as she pressed his hand, 'I should certainly be discarded, and find myself homeless in my old age.'
'I thank you, from my soul, Mrs. Garth!' exclaimed Cecil; 'after all the evil that has befallen me, is he still implacable as ever?'
'As ever,' replied Mrs. Garth, while Mary only answered with her tears, but Snarley, in the exuberance of his joy, gambolled about among her skirts, as if a lively young rat was hidden there; and Fotheringhame, thinking that the lovers had better be left to themselves, took Falconer's powerful field-glass, threw open the window at the end of his long room, and invited Mrs. Garth and Annabelle to discover, if they could, the outlines of Ben Lomond, and the lights of Stirling twinkling out at thirty miles distance, thus affording the two aching hearts a little interchange of words and caresses.
There are few women in this world who do not resolve firmly and act vigorously when the tender interests of their hearts are affected; thus Mary had somewhat stepped out of her path, at all hazards, to see and console in his affliction the man who loved her, and whom, she had begun to fear, she might never meet again.
What course events might take she knew not, but she knew well that she had been pitilessly told to expect the worst: thus a great pity filled her soul, side by side with her love for Cecil.
Cecil's heart was too full for utterance; he could only whisper to her brokenly, and fold her closely to his breast, while in a soft and cooing voice, yet brokenly too, she assured him of her belief in his perfect innocence, and of her love which would never, never change or pass away but with her life; and a great calm seemed to come over the tortured heart of Cecil as he heard her, and told her again and again how kind, and sweet, and loving—and how merciful too—it was of her to come and tell him all this.
Mary had now her own thoughts of Hew as to the fatal event—suspicions, but they were vague, intangible; and even to Cecil she said nothing of them, nor meant to do so, till the worst came, though she knew not in what form to shape them.
No one among us knows the depth or intensity of the tenderness we have for anyone we love or value, till on the eve of losing them, perhaps for ever; and the great solemn dread that falls on the heart—even as the shadow of death. And Mary, by a deep and solemn presentiment, seemed to feel this, when, after a protracted interview, during which the same broken-voiced and loving assurances were reiterated again and again, at Mrs. Garth's emphatic request she rose to leave Cecil.
Why should they be rent asunder? she thought. She was rich and thus powerful, on one hand; yet how helpless were both, on the other!
'I thank you, Mrs. Garth,' said Cecil; 'bear with us a little, for our burden is a heavy one.'
'It has been truly said, dear Captain Falconer,' replied the old lady, sententiously, yet softly, 'that we must bear the burden of our lives, whatever it be, and content us with whatever lot God is pleased to accord us.'
'True; yet mine may prove a very hard one. But Mary's face, and voice, and tears, I hope will give me strength in the days to come, if they bring greater evil to me.'
'All love you,' said Mrs. Garth, kissing him on the cheek.
And while pressing Mary's hand, Cecil replied by the quotation:
'"The love of all is but a small thing to the love of one!"
Mary had been possessed by a crave to see and to comfort him, if possible; hence the unexpected visit. Like balm poured upon a wound, it had comforted him, and assured him of her love unchanged whatever happened; but save in that instance, nothing had come of the visit, and the future was as vague and uncertain as ever.
Cecil did not leave his room at the request of Fotheringhame, who had a wholesome or nervous dread of anything approaching a scene or situation, and yet he was soon to bear a part in one himself!
Clinging to Mrs. Garth, how Mary got out of the fortress she scarcely knew; hurrying down the steep stone staircase, past the gun-batteries, on which the great-coated sentinels now trod to and fro, and then through the deep archway (where whilom the double portcullis hung), and under the shadow of the stupendous Half Moon Battery.
Neither, perhaps, did Annabelle Erroll, for she had painful thoughts of her own—bitter, jealous and fiery thoughts—all unlike those of Mary, in whose heart there gushed up a passion of love, sorrow and pity, that filled with hot and blinding tears the gentle eyes her close-drawn veil concealed.
They had not come in the carriage, but by a common cab, and as Fotheringhame, with great tenderness, was leading Annabelle to it, she saw—beyond a doubt—the veiled woman of the ball passing in by the barrier gate.
Beyond a little nervous start as she passed them—a start felt probably by Annabelle, whose hand rested on the arm of Fotheringhame. He gave no other sign of that person's vicinity; but the sign was sufficient to make Annabelle withdraw her hand instantly, and receive his farewell adieux with a brevity and coldness that rather bewildered him.
But the voice of Leslie Fotheringhame came indistinctly to her ears—he seemed to be speaking a great way further off than that barrier gate, where the Cameronian sentinel stood, and she could see the great battery with its cannon and port-holes towering overhead, as through a dull and misty haze.
What did it all mean?