AFTER this first experience of his feeling on the subject, Lady Eskside, though with a painful effort, wisely resolved to avoid further embarrassment by letting things fall into their natural course, and making no effort to thrust his child upon Richard’s notice. The little fellow, already familiar with the house, and fully reconciled, with a child’s ease and insouciance, to the change in his lot, ran about everywhere, making the great hall resound with his voice, and beginning to reign over Harding and the rest of the servants, as the spoiled darling, the heir of the race, is apt to do, especially in the house of its grandparents. The only person Val was shy of was his father, who took little or no notice of him, but after his first introduction expressed no active feeling towards the child one way or another. Perhaps, indeed, Richard was slightly ashamed of that uncalled-for demonstration of his feelings. Valentine was his son, whether he liked it or not, and must be his heir and representative as well as his father’s; and though it never occurred to him to contemplate the moment when he himself should reign in his father’s stead, he felt it wise to make up his mind that his boy should do so, and to give his parents the benefit of his own experience as to Val’s education. “You must be prepared for an ungovernable temper and utter unreasonableness,” he said to his mother, making a decided and visible effort to open the subject.
“My dear, there is nothing of the kind,” cried Lady Eskside, eagerly; “the bairn is but a bairn, and thoughtless—but nothing of the kind can I see——”
“He is seven years old, and he is fooled to the top of his bent—everybody gives in to him,” said Richard. “Mark my words, mother,—this is what you will have to strive against. Self-control is unknown to that development of character. So long as they don’t care very much for anything, all may go well; but the moment that he takes a fancy into his head——”
Mary was present at this interview, and it was not in human nature to refrain from a glance at his mother to see how she received this lofty delineation of a character which Richard evidently thought entirely different from his own. Lady Eskside saw the glance, and understood it, and faltered in her reply.
“Many do that, my dear,” she said, meekly, “that are gentle enough in appearance. I will remember all the hints you give me. But Val, though he is very high-spirited, is a good child. I think I shall be able to manage him.”
“Send him to school,” said Richard—“that is the best way; let him find his level at school. Send him to Eton, if you like, when he is old enough, but in the mean time, if my advice is worth anything, put him under some strict master who will keep him well in hand, at once. My dear mother, you are too good, you will spoil him. With the blood he has in his veins he wants a firmer hand.”
“My hand is getting old, no doubt,” said Lady Eskside, with a little glow of rising colour.
“I do not mean that; you are not old—you will never be old,” said her son, with that flattery which mothers love. This put the disagreeable parts of his previous speech out of her mind. She smiled at her boy, and said, “Nonsense, Richard!” with fond pleasure. To be sure it was nonsense; but then nonsense is often so much better than the sagest things which wisdom itself can say.
As for the meeting with Mary Percival, that was got over more easily than she herself could have expected. There were so many other things in Richard’s mind that he took her presence there the first evening as a matter of course; and though that too had its sting, she was so great a comfort and help to them all in the excitement and embarrassment involved in the first meeting, that Mary was made into a person of the first importance—a position which always sheds balm upon the mind of one who has been, or thinks she has been, slighted. This state of comfort was somewhat endangered next morning, when Richard thought it proper to express his sense of her great kindness in coming to meet him. “It was very good of you,” he said—“like yourself; you were always much kinder to me than I deserved.” Now this is not a kind of acknowledgment which sensitive women are generally much delighted to receive, from men of their own age at least.
“Was I?” said Mary, trying to laugh; “but in this case at least I had no intention of being kind. I was here before there was any question of your coming; and I do not know that I should have stayed—for when she has you, Lady Eskside wants no other companion—but that I was very anxious to know about Val.”
“I ought to be grateful to Val,” said Richard; “he seems to have supplanted me with all my friends—even my mother is more interested, a great deal, in Val’s digestion, than she is in my tastes, nowadays. I have to fall back upon the consolation of all whose day is over. It was not always so.”
There was the slightest touch of bitterness in this, which partially conciliated Mary, though it would be difficult to tell why.
“I suppose that is a consolation,” she said. “I feel it too; but in your case there is no occasion. They worship the child because he is your son.”
“Yes, it is a consolation,” said Richard, “so far as anything can console one for the loss of opportunities, the change of circumstances. I find it safer to say nothing on such subjects, and to live among people who know nothing; but now that I am forced to stand here again, to recollect all that might have been——”
It was a still afternoon, the sun shining with lavish warmth and force, the grass growing, the leaves opening, so that you could almost see their silent haste of progress. They were standing on the terrace outside the windows, looking down over the brown woods all basking in the sunshine, to Esk, which showed here and there in a wider eddy of foam round some great boulder which interrupted his course. It was too early for the twitter of swallows; but some of those hardy birds that dwell all the year at home were interchanging their genial babble, deep among the multitudinous branches, and a few daring insects hummed in the air which was so full of sunshine. Floods of golden crocus had come out on all the borders. It was not the moment for recollection; but these words raised a swell and expansion of feeling in Mary’s heart which it was not safe to indulge. Soft moisture came to her eyes. Happily that rush of sensation was not strong enough to make her wretched, but it confused her so much that she could not reply.
“All the same,” said Richard, quickly, “I do not agree with Browning in his rapture over an English spring. You should see Italy at this season: everything here is pale, a mere shadow of the radiance yonder. From Bellosguardo, for instance, looking down upon Florence; you have never been in Italy, Mary?—a sky to which this is darkness, air all lambent with light and warmth, such towers, such roofs rising up into it, and the Val-d’Arno stretching away in delicious distance, like the sea, as ignorant people say—as if the sea could ever be so full of grace and interest! It is, I suppose, the junction of art with exquisite nature which gives such a landscape its great charm. Here we have nature to be sure, pretty enough in its way; but everything that man touches is monstrous. Those square horrible houses! Happily we don’t see them here.”
The soft flow of feeling which had risen in Mary’s mind, and had filled her eyes with moisture, suddenly turned into gall. “No,” she said, “I have never been in Italy. I don’t know that I want to go. I prefer to think my own country the most beautiful in the world.”
“Well,” said Richard, “perhaps if you are obliged to live in it all your life it is the most philosophical way.”
How little Mary was thinking of philosophy at that moment! It was well for her that his mother came out from the open window, ready to walk down to the village, which she had made her son promise somewhat unwillingly to do. “Mary will go with us,” Lady Eskside had said as an inducement to Richard, not perhaps taking Mary’s inclinations much into account; for, of course (she reckoned securely), Mary would put her own feelings in her pocket rather than take away a motive from Richard to do his duty; and there could be no doubt that it was his duty to visit the old people who remembered him, and who would be wounded if he took no notice of them. “We must go to our old Merran’s, your nurse that used to be. She is married to the smith, you remember, Richard? and doing well, I believe, though always a great gossip, as she was when she was a young woman. Her son has come to be under-gamekeeper, and your father thinks he will give him one of the lodges if he turns out well, for he is going to be married,” said Lady Eskside, walking briskly down the winding path through the wood, which was shorter than the avenue,—and full of a country lady’s satisfaction in that sway over her humble neighbours and full knowledge of their concerns which is so good for both parties. Richard went dutifully by her side, and listened at least; while Mary came behind with little Valentine in wonderful new fine clothes, velvet and lace, the strangest contrast to his former appearance. He had been a beautiful child in his poor garments; he was like a little prince now, with aristocrat (a stranger would have said) written in every fine line of those features, upon which the noble father and the vagrant mother had both impressed their image. The mother not being by, the child was universally wondered over for his resemblance to his father; but to that father’s eyes Val had nothing that had not come to him from the other—that other who had once been Richard’s idol, and now was his enemy and his shame.
Merran Miller, you may be sure, had heard every word of the story, and more, and knew exactly how the beautiful boy, in his fantastic, costly dress, had been brought to Rosscraig, and remembered how she had herself seen him make his entry into his future kingdom, muddy and crying, “a beggar-wean” by the side of the mother who went to lodge at Jean Macfarlane’s. She knew it all, but this did not lessen the warmth of her enthusiasm for Mr Richard’s boy, the bonnie wee gentleman who was so like his papaw. “Eh, bless him, he’s like a prince! I wish the queen herself might have the like!” she cried, with all the loyalty of an old retainer, and wiped her eyes with her apron at thought of the kindness of Mr Richard coming so far to see “the like of me!” Richard, after he had said all that was civil to his old nurse, fell back, while his mother inquired into her domestic affairs, and informed her of Lord Eskside’s intended favour to the young gamekeeper who was about to be married. “We cannot forget that you were a good nurse to our boy,” said the old lady, gracious in her happiness; “and as Providence has been good to us, giving us back our grandchild, who is the heir, and his father at the same time, my lord and myself take a pleasure in seeing other folk happy too.” “Eh, my lady, but you’re kind and good! and what can I say to you for my Willie—for such a grand start in life!” cried Merran, once more applying her apron to her eyes. Richard strayed aside, and would have fallen back upon Mary, not feeling much interest in this conversation, had not Mary, still affronted, eluded his address.
But as he looked round the cottage, something which interested him still more attracted his eye. It was the “aumrie” or oak press in which Merran and her mother before her had kept their “napery” for ages. The connoisseur rushed at it, and examined every line of its old carving; he opened the doors and looked over all the drawers and intricacies inside. “Here is something as fine as any piece of furniture in your house. Ask her if she will part with it,” he said rapidly to his mother in French. His blue eyes sparkled with pleasant excitement, and his colour rose. Since he came back, nothing—not his unknown child, not his parents, not Mary, nor the associations of home—had given him so warm a glow of pleasurable feeling. He was in his natural element once more.
It became still more apparent, however, and in a more agreeable way, how much Richard was changed when the first dinner-party convoked in his honour assembled at Rosscraig. The best people in the county were there, straining a point to show the dear old Esksides (as the Dowager-Duchess herself said) that for their sake their son’s misdoings would be overlooked, and himself received again as if nothing had happened. They all came prepared to be kind to him, to forget the disgrace he had brought upon himself and his family, and to condone all past offences on condition of future good conduct. But lo! Richard was civil to the people who had intended to be good to him—he received them with the quiet self-assured air of a man of the world, which was ever so far removed from that of the conscious offender against social laws whom they had come to meet. He spoke with a certain gentle authority as a man much better acquainted with the great world and the highest levels of life than were his critics—giving them pieces of information about political matters, and deciding which was the real version of fashionable scandals in a way which struck the neighbours dumb. “My dears, we are all under a delusion,” said the same Dowager-Duchess whom we have already quoted, addressing a little group in the corner of the drawing-room to which they had retired to compare notes, and make their astonished comments on leaving the dinner-table. “Depend upon it it’s no tramp he has married, but some foreign princess. He’s no more ashamed of himself than I am.” And, indeed, a rumour to this effect ran through all Mid-Lothian. In the dining-room all the gentlemen were equally impressed. Before they rose from table, Sir John Gifford, the greatest land-owner in the district, and son-in-law to the Marquess of Tranent, asked Richard’s opinion as to what the Ministry would do about the then existing crisis (I do not remember what it was) in foreign politics; and they all listened to what he said about the state of feeling in Italy, and the condition of the smaller courts, as if it had been gospel. “That son of Eskside’s, whatever he may have done to compromise himself in his youth, is a rising man, you may take my word for it,” Sir John said solemnly at the next assembly of the county. “And the less we inquire into most men’s youth the better, my dear Sir John,” said the Dowager-Duchess, of whose tongue most people stood in awe; and Sir John coloured, and felt more and more sympathetic with Dick Ross; for he, too, had known the drawbacks of a jeunesse orageuse.
This revolution was made not gradually but in a single evening. The first dinner-party at Rosscraig was intended more or less to represent that entertainment at which the fatted calf was eaten; but in the curious change of sentiment that ensued there was no more thought of fatted calves. The indulgent reception intended to be given to the exile, almost the outlaw, of whom every one had spoken for years with bated breath, turned imperceptibly into the welcome accorded to a distinguished guest. Richard’s manners were allowed to be perfect; he had all the savoir vivre, the easy grace, the perfect self-possession of a man of the world. He knew everybody, he had seen everything; he was learned in art of every description, from the old masters in painting to lace and china; and every lady in the county who possessed either was proud of his approbation. Perhaps he was not quite so great out of doors, where neither agriculture nor sport were in his way; but men forgive much to a political authority, as women do to a connoisseur, and Richard’s visit was an event in the neighbourhood. Lady Eskside’s feelings on witnessing this revolution were of the strangest. She watched it with a certain consternation, half frightened, half triumphant; the poor boy’s humiliation and sufferings, she said to herself, were all being repaid to him; yet Lady Eskside was a just woman, and I do not think she was quite sure that Richard deserved to be thus received with an ovation. But where was there ever a mother who did not glow with pride and happiness to see her son the observed of all observers, the hero of her world? Mary Percival, who stood by and looked on closely, a spectator less prejudiced in Richard’s favour, yet full of the keenest interest, wondered still more, judging him differently in her heart. Mary’s feelings were of a kind which would not bear analysing. She could not keep from watching him, she heard everything that was said of him, she noted his words and actions with a keen and never-failing concern; but this wondering interest and a partial amusement which pained herself, yet would not be altogether subdued, were not sympathy. She seemed to herself to be behind the scenes, and to see more than the rest did; and by this means it came about that the rush of blood to her heart, and the thrill through all her frame with which Mary had acknowledged Richard’s approach at first in spite of herself, died away and left her quite calm as all the world awoke to his merits. This second and less important revolution Lady Eskside perceived dimly, but did not understand.
However, Richard’s sudden popularity was the most fortunate incident possible for his child. Many people, after the first eager interest with which they had received the romantic story of little Val’s first appearance at Rosscraig, began to doubt it because it was so romantic, and pointed out to each other the much more likely and sensible way of accounting for it. “The beggar-wife is all a myth, depend upon it,” said the Dowager-Duchess,—“a myth founded upon the popular conviction that Dick Ross was unfortunate in his marriage. Most of us are unfortunate in our marriages; but it seldom comes to that sort of thing. No, no; depend upon it, the child came with his father, as was natural and proper. What better explanation would you have?” There can be no doubt that this method of introducing a child who is heir to a peerage is a much more comprehensible and reasonable one than a wild tale by which he was represented as having been thrust in at the hall-door on a stormy night. There had been much excitement caused by the story; but that very excitement was a proof to many sober people that it was ridiculous. Why search further? they said. His father had come home on a visit, a very rising young man, and extremely agreeable, and he had brought the child with him. Valentine’s appearance confirmed the district in this sensible view of the question. In his velvet tunic and collar of falling lace, he was utterly unlike anything but a dainty little dandy born to luxury and bred with every care, whose cheek the winds had never been allowed to touch rudely. To look at the child was quite enough, said many. He to have been wandering about the country with a tramp!—the idea was preposterous. He was a little aristocrat all over—from his dark curls to the buckles on his dainty shoes. And when the gentry of the country inquired, as they almost all did individually, into the origin of the other absurd story, it was universally traced to the servants’ hall. My Lady Gifford’s maid had got it from Joseph the footman at Rosscraig, and the Dowager-Duchess had heard it from an under-gardener who kept the lodge, and with whom she did not disdain an occasional gossip. There is no limit to the imagination of persons in that class of life, many people said; and it became a mark of fashion on Eskside by which you could decide whether any individual really belonged to the cream of society or not. Belief in the common-sense theory that (of course) Richard had brought his son to his mother’s care, was for a long time the shibboleth of the county. Those who had faith in the romantic part of the story were given over to a reprobate imagination, and stamped themselves vulgar at once by adopting a theory so ridiculous. Nothing could have been more fortunate for the young heir. Lady Eskside awoke to the importance of maintaining this “sensible” view before she had been tempted to utter the true occasion of her joy to any dear friend. Nobody knew the real facts of the case except Mary and the servants. Mary was safe as Lady Eskside herself, and as careful of the honour of the family; and as for the servants, with their well-known love of the marvellous, how could any one pin his faith on them? Thus circumstances arranged themselves for little Val a hundred times better than the most sanguine imagination could have believed.
But the story lingered in the lower levels of society, where nobody was deceived. Merran Miller herself, though she had been Richard’s nurse, and felt herself a partisan of the family, paused to give an elaborate description of the child and his finery to her friends, when, throwing her apron over her cap, she rushed out to proclaim her Willie’s good fortune to all the world: “I wish I was at the bottom o’t,” cried Merran; “it’s an awfu’ queer story. I’m real glad now that it came into my head to give the weans a piece, and that I was civil to the woman. But to see yon bairn decked up like a cheeny image! and him gaun greeting with a beggar-wife nae later than Wednesday at e’en——!”