Prior to all this, Sir Piers had taken poor little Mary seriously to task in person.
She was full of her own fond, happy thoughts, and in her own peculiar sanctum or boudoir, when the general, influenced no doubt by some recent remarks of Hew, came in looking black as a thundercloud—as black, at least, as he ever could find it in his brave old heart to be with her; and here she was queen, for her boudoir was her pet place in the Edinburgh mansion.
The walls were silver-grey, picked out with bouquets of roses. There were delicate cretonne hangings to match, and funny little black and gold chairs with crimson satin cushions; wood-brackets from Switzerland, and all manner of pretty china things, including porcelain pugs of all sorts and sizes; and here she received him with that charming, coaxing air, which no one could resist, and Sir Piers, perhaps, least of all.
She knew that a lecture was coming, and on what subject, too; thus she was a little nervous, and her pretty dimples came and went, so fast!
It never occurred to Sir Piers that there was gross selfishness in thus seeking to control Mary, and to absorb her fortune into the exchequer of the future baronets of Eaglescraig; though he certainly deemed that he was fully justified in preventing another family mesalliance, and with a nameless gamester.
'Give way to the whim of a girl!' he thought; 'no—no; I shall not be a chicken-hearted fool in my old age!'
'You have been out and abroad again, I understand, and without Mrs. Garth, Mary,' he began, while caressing her head, as she seated herself on a low stool by his side.
'I am close on twenty, and surely old enough to be trusted out of sight now!' said Mary, laughing.
'Hew says no—when that fellow is about.'
'Hew forgets himself!' said she, with a shrug of her pretty shoulders; 'I shall soon reach my twenty-first birthday, dearest grand-uncle, and surely then I shall be my own mistress,' she added, laughing.
To the general she had ever looked up in a sweet, grave, old-fashioned and child-like manner that gave him great power over her, but this he felt was, somehow, passing away. He felt some sympathy for her too, for the human heart is, perhaps, the only part of us that does not grow old with years; but he deemed that he had a duty to do, and heard her now with uneasiness, as he withdrew his hand from her head that nestled on his knee.
'Even in your twenty-first year, child, you will not be independent of me,' he said; 'I have still a control over your fortune, if I fail to control your future.'
'I care not for it!' said she, pouting.
'You know not what you possess, and therefore know not what you would lose; thus I am anxious—more than ever—to lose no time in transferring you and your heritage to the care of a husband I can trust.'
'Meaning the inevitable Hew!' she exclaimed, with a little angry laugh.
'Precisely, girl; I am proud to have an inheritor of our own blood, to my family honours, which, but for him, would pass away. If my poor Piers had only lived——'
'I would to Heaven he had!' sighed Mary, with all her heart.
'You tell me, Mary, that when of age you will be the mistress of your own actions. True. You never talked to me in this way before,' he continued, raising his voice and starting to his feet; 'but I tell you, that if you dare to countenance that fellow Falconer——'
'Oh, uncle, don't break my heart by talking thus!'
'Stuff! hearts don't break, though bones do. Let there be no clandestine correspondence, still less any meetings; but I trust to your honour, Mary—I trust to your honour, child.'
She blushed deeply, painfully, for she had an appointment with Cecil that very afternoon. She remained silent, and Sir Piers interpreted her silence his own way.
He knew that they must inevitably meet at the ball given by the regiment, and for himself to be at that especial ball was, he deemed, a duty he owed to the old corps; so, as for the chances of Mary and Falconer meeting, he would ensure that it would only be as strangers in a crowded ball-room.
'Yes, Mary,' he resumed, 'I trust to your honour, that you will keep this fortune-hunter at a distance.'
'I do believe, uncle—nay, I am certain of it,' she said, in a pretty and coy, yet half-petulant manner, 'that Captain Falconer would marry me whether I had money or not. Oh how I wish I were without it!'
'Indeed!' said he with a cynical smile; 'for a commercial age, your ideas, my dear, are—to say the least of them—rather peculiar.'
'Now, you dear old pet, I wish you would say no more on this subject,' said Mary, glancing anxiously at a clock.'
'Why?'
'Because, grand-uncle, I don't want to marry anyone, and, any way, I will never commit the sin—for such it would be—of marrying one I do not, and never can love—there!'
'Meaning our Hew?'
'Yes, your Hew.'
'Don't be silly, Mary,' persisted the old man; 'you must and shall marry Hew, and there is an end of it!'
'But I have given my promise,' began Mary, feeling weary and desperate.
'Promise, to Captain Falconer? The devil you have! Did he dare exact one?'
'Oh no, no.'
'How then?'
'It came about somehow,' said Mary, as her fitful colour came and went.
'Did you promise—the devil, I'll explode!—to—to—marry him?' asked the general with his back against the mantel-piece.
'No.'
'What the deuce then?
'To love him—and him only,' said Mary, piteously, softly, and in a low voice, ending in a little nervous laugh.
'And all this has come of my own folly at Eaglescraig! damme, I'll—I'll—choke!' added the general, pale with anger, and feeling awkwardly conscious of the futility of it, with a genuine and honest fear of the future, through his unjust ideas of Cecil Falconer's character.
'Dear old grand-uncle, you have been more than a father to me, ever since I was a tiny tot, just so high,' said Mary, holding a little white hand about six inches from the carpet; 'and you must pardon me for all this—for Cecil does so love me,' she urged with tears, 'most tenderly and truly.'
'Folly—folly, all! has life, has position, no other claim on you than that? One born of such lineage as ours,' he continued, vaulting on his hobby-horse, 'requires to consider matters deeply. Disobey me, and I hand over your fortune to Hew; it shall never be made ducks and drakes of by a gambler and adventurer! By your father's will (how often am I to tell you this?) it is absolutely in my power to disinherit you, if you wed without my consent.'
'A most cruel and illegal will!'
'Devised to save you from yourself, and with a strange prevision of that which was to come.'
'Unjust! why should the dead be so loth to lose their grasp on, their power over, the living?'
'Your father's great dread was fortune-hunters, lest you should be sought—as Falconer seeks you—for your money. Moreover, if this young fellow really loves you, child, he ought to think more of your happiness than daring to seek your hand.'
'Daring?'
'Yes, I say so, considering his origin! You are a romantic little goose! But girls in your position must not think of men in his.'
'Were you not a captain once?' asked Mary, softly.
'Yes, and a jolly ensign too; but then, as now, I was Piers Montgomerie of the Eaglescraig! My darling Mary, you are the apple of my old eye, and I should like to see you safe and sound under Hew's protection, ere the last bugle sounds for me, and summons me away to the Land of the Leal; Hew, save yourself, is the nearest to me in blood now that my Piers is gone, finding his grave I know not where—know not where!' he added in a broken voice, as he recalled the real or fancied, but terrible vision he had seen years ago, now. 'If money can bring happiness you and Hew should certainly have something very like it,' said he, returning to the charge.
'We should be very, very miserable—at least I should—with all our united wealth.'
'Tut, tut! how much more miserable would you be without it?' asked the general; 'and yet, sooth to say, pet Mary, I shall give you even to Hew grudgingly.'
'Why?' asked Mary, hopefully.
'Because,' said the old man, with great tenderness, drawing her head into his neck, 'then you will be for ever, not mine as you are now, little one, but another's! Where Hew goes, you will go; our old life will be gone; a new one will open to you, and I shall be a lonely, old, old man, lonely as when, years ago, I lost Piers!'
'But I am not yet married to Hew,' said Mary, kissing both his withered cheeks, from which the red tan of the Indian sun had long since vanished.
So there was a kind of loving armistice between them for the present; but all the general had said against Cecil increased Mary's loathing of Hew, a loathing that took the place of the toleration with which she had hitherto accepted, not his peculiar mode of courtship, but the mere fact of a residence with him in the same family circle.
And now, as she recalled all Hew's scandalous hints and rumours, she remembered the mutual impression which she and Annabelle shared at Eaglescraig, that by the expression of his face, the young subaltern Falconer had a history; and yet she loved him not the less because, like Quentin in Scott's 'Ayrshire Tragedy,' he was:
'A young man, gentle-voiced and gentle-eyed,
Like one whom all the world had frowned on.'
So the moment Mary was left to herself, she put on a thick Shetland veil, which very effectively concealed her lovely little face, and set forth in haste to hold a certain tryst; thus the worthy old general's task had proved as yet a very fruitless one.