''Pon my word, cousin, I think I should actually fall in love with you, but that—that——'
'What?' asked the girl, with a curious smile.
'One so seldom falls in love with one they have known for a life long.'
The girl sighed softly, and said, still smiling sweetly:
'Looking upon her as almost a sister, you mean, Roland.'
'Or almost as a brother, as the case may be.'
'Then how about Paul and Virginia? They knew each other all their lives, and yet loved each other tenderly.'
'Or desperately, rather, Hester; but that was in an old story book greatly appreciated by our grandmothers.'
'Instead of talking nonsense here, I really think you should go home, Roland,' said the girl, with a tone of pain and pique at his nonchalant manner; 'home for a time, at least.'
'To Earlshaugh?'
'Yes.'
'Are you tired of me already, Hester?'
'Tired of you, Roland?—oh, no,' replied the girl softly, while playing with the petals of a flower.
The speakers were Roland Lindsay, a young captain of the line, home on leave from Egypt, and his cousin, Hester Maule, a handsome girl in her eighteenth year; and the scene in which they figured was a shady, green and well-wooded grassy bank that sloped down to the Esk, in front of the pretty villa of Merlwood, where he swung lazily in a net hammock between two beautiful laburnum-trees, smoking a cigar, while she sat on the turf close by, with a fan of peacock feathers in her slim and pretty hand, dispersing the midges that were swarming under the trees in the hot sunshine of an August evening.
While the heedless fellow who swung there, enjoying his cigar and his hammock, and the charm of the whole situation, twitted her with her unconcern, Hester—we need not conceal the fact—loved him with a love that now formed part of her daily existence; while he accorded her in return the half-careless affection of a brother, or as yet little more.
At his father's house of Earlshaugh, at his uncle's villa of Merlwood, and elsewhere, till he had joined his regiment, they had been brought up together, and together had shared all the pleasures and amusements of childhood. In the thick woods of Earlshaugh, and along the sylvan banks of the Esk, in the glorious summer and autumn days, it had been their delight to clamber into thick and leafy bowers—vast and mysterious retreats to them—where, with the birds around them, and the flowers, the ivy, and the ferns beneath their feet, they wove fairy caps of rushes and conned their tasks, often with cheek laid against cheek and ringlets intermingled; and in their days of childhood Roland had often told her tales of what they would do and where they would go when they became man and wife, and little Hester wondered at the story he wove, as it seemed impossible that they could ever be happier than they were then. He always preferred her as a companion and playmate to his only sister Maude, greatly to the indignation of that young lady.
She had borne her part in many of Roland's boyish pastimes, even to spinning tops and playing marbles, until the days came when they cantered together on their sturdy little Shetlands through Melville Woods and by the braes of Woodhouselee, or where Earlshaugh looked down on the pastoral expanse near Leuchars and Balmullo, in the East Neuk of Fife.
When the time came that Roland had inexorably to go forth into the world and join his regiment, poor Hester Maule wept in secret as if her heart would have burst; while he—with all a boy's ardour for his red coat and the new and brilliant life before him—bade her farewell with provoking equanimity and wonderful philosophy; and now that he had come back, and she—in the dignity of her eighteen years—could no longer aid him in birdnesting (if he thought of such a thing), or holding a wicket for him, she had—during the few weeks he had been at home—felt her girl's heart go back to the sweet old days and the starting-point, which he seemed to have almost forgotten, or scarcely referred to.
And yet, when she came along the grassy bank, and tossed her garden hat aside on seating herself on the grass near him, there was something in her bearing then which haunted him in after-years—a shy, unconscious grace in all her movements, a flush on her soft cheek, a bright expression in her clear and innocent eyes, brightened apparently by the flickering shadows that fell between the leaves upon her uncovered head, and flushed her white summer dress with touches of bright colour; and looking at him archly, she began, as if almost to herself, to sing a song she had been wont to sing long ago—an old song to the older air of the 'Bonnie Briar Bush':
'The visions of the buried past
Come thronging, dearer far
Than joys the present hour can give,
Than present objects are——'
'Go on, Hester,' said Roland, as she paused.
'No,' said she with a little moue, 'you don't care for these old memories now.'
'When soldiering, Hester, we have to keep our minds so much in the present that, by Jove! a fellow has not much time for brooding over the past.'
Hester made no reply, but cast down her lashes, and proceeded to roll and unroll the ribbons of her hat round her slender fingers.
Roland Lindsay manipulated another cigar, lit it leisurely, and relapsed into silence too.
He was a remarkably good-looking young fellow, and perhaps one who knew himself to be so, having been somewhat spoiled by ladies already. Though not quite regular, his features were striking, and—like his bearing—impressed those who did not know him well with a high opinion of his strength of character, which was not great, we must admit, in some respects; though his chin was well defined and even square, as shown by his being closely shaven all save a carefully trimmed dark moustache.
His grayish hazel eyes looked almost black at night, and were expressive and keen yet soft. In figure he was well set up—the drill-sergeant had done that; and unmistakably he was a manly-looking fellow in his twenty-seventh year, dressed in a plain yet irreproachably-made tweed suit of light gray that well became his dark and dusky complexion, with spotlessly white cuffs and tie, and a tweed stalking-cap peaked before and behind. He had an air of well-bred nonchalance, of being perfectly at home; and now you have him—Captain Roland Lindsay of Her Majesty's Infantry, with a face and neck burned red and blistered by the fierce sun of Egypt and the Soudan.
Merlwood, the house of Hester's father, which he was now favouring with a protracted visit, is situated on the north bank of the Esk, and was so named as being the favourite haunt of the blackbird, whose voice was heard amid its thickets in the earliest spring, as that of the throstle was heard not far off in the adjacent birks of Mavis-wood on the opposite side of that river, which, from its source in the hills of Peebles till it joins the sea at Musselburgh, displays sylvan beauties of which no other stream in Scotland can boast—the beauties of which Scott sang so skilfully in one of his best ballads:
'Sweet are the paths, O, passing sweet!
By Esk's fair streams that run
O'er airy steep, through copsewood deep,
Impervious to the sun,
'From that fair dome where suit is paid,
By blast of bugle free,
To Auchindinny's hazel shade,
And haunted Woodhouselee,
'Who knows not Melville's beechy grove
And Roslin's rocky glen,
Dalkeith, which all the virtues love,
And classic Hawthornden?
Embosomed amid the beautiful scenery here, the handsome modern villa of Merlwood, with its Swiss roof and plate-glass oriel windows half smothered amid wild roses, clematis, and jasmine, crowned a bank where the dreamy and ceaseless murmur of the Esk was ever heard; and in the cosy if not stately rooms of which old Sir Harry Maule, K.C.B., a retired Lieutenant-General, and the veteran of more than one Indian war, had stored up the mementoes of his stirring past—the tusky skulls, striped skins, and giant claws of more than one man-eating tiger, trophies of his breechloader; and those of other Indian conflicts at Lucknow, Jhansi, and elsewhere, in the shape of buffalo shields, tulwars, inlaid Afghan juzails, battle axes, and deadly khandjurs, with gorgeous trappings for horse and elephant.
And picturesque looked the home of the old soldier and his only daughter Hester, as seen in the August sunshine, at that season when autumn peeps stealthily through the openings made in thicket and hedge, when the sweet may-buds are dead and gone, the feathered grasses are cut down, but the ferns and the ivy yet cover all the rocks of the Esk, and flowering creepers connect the trees; the blue hare-bell still peeped out, and in waste places the ox-eye daisy and the light scarlet poppy were lingering still, for August is a month flushed with the last touches of summer, and though the latter was past and gone, those warm tints which make the Scottish woods so peculiarly lovely in autumn had not yet begun to mellow or temper the varied greenery of the bosky valley of rocks and timber through which the mountain Esk flows to the Firth of Forth.
To the eyes of Roland Lindsay, how still and green and cool it all seemed, after the arid sands, the breathless atmosphere, and the scorching heat of Southern Egypt!
'By Jove, there is no place like home!' thought he, and he tossed out of his hammock Punch, the Graphic, and Clery's 'Minor Tactics,' with which he had been killing time, till his fair cousin joined him; and with his cigar alight, his stalking cap tilted forward over his eyes, his hands behind his head, he swung to and fro in the full enjoyment of lazy indolence.