There was brief space now for Nelly's buying pearlins and pinners, and
sacques and mantles, and all a young matron's bravery, or for decorating
a guest chamber for the ceremony. But Lady Carnegie was not to be balked
for trifles. Nanny Swinton stitched night and day, with salt tears from
aged eyes moistening her thread; and Nelly did not swerve from her
compact, but acted mechanically with the others as she was told. With a
strange pallor on the olive of her cheek, and swollen, burning lids,
drooping over sunk violent lines beneath the hot eyeballs, and cold,
trembling hands, she bore Staneholme's stated presence in these long,
bleak March afternoons. He never addressed her particularly, although he
took many a long, sore look. Few and formal then were the lover's
devoirs expected or permitted.
The evening was raw and rainy; elderly gentlemen would have needed
"their lass with a lantern," to escort them from their chambers. The
old city guard sputtered their Gaelic, and stamped up and down for
warmth. The chairmen drank their last fee to keep out the cold--and
in and out of the low doorways moved middle-aged women barefooted,
and in curch and short gown, who, when snooded maidens, had gazed on
the white cockade, and the march of Prince Charlie Stuart and his
Highlandmen. Down the narrow way, in the drizzly dusk, ran a slight
figure, entirely muffled up. Fleet of foot was the runner, and blindly
she held her course. Twice she came in contact with intervening
obstacles--water-stoups on a threshold, gay ribbons fluttering from a
booth. She was flying from worse than death, with dim projects of
begging her way to the North, to the brother she had parted from when a
child; and ghastly suggestions, too, like lightning flashes, of seizing
a knife from the first butcher's block and ending her misery.
Hasty steps were treading fast upon her track. She distinguished them
with morbid acuteness through the speed of her own flight. They were
mingled steps--a feeble hurrying footfall, and an iron tread. She
threaded a group of bystanders, and, weak and helpless as she was,
prepared to dive into a mirk close. Not that black opening, Nelly
Carnegie, it is doomed to bear for generations a foul stain--the scene
of a mystery no Scottish law-court could clear--the Begbie murder. But
it was no seafaring man, with Cain's red right hand, that rushed after
trembling, fainting Nelly Carnegie. The tender arms in which she had
lain as an infant clutched her dress; and a kindly tongue faltered its
faithful, distressed petition--
"Come back, come back, Miss Nelly, afore the Leddy finds out; ye hae nae
refuge, an' ye're traced already by mair than me."
But in a moment strong hands were upon her, holding her like a
fluttering moth, or a wild panting leveret, or a bird beating its wings;
doing her no violence, however, for who would brush off the down, or
tear the soft fur, or break the ruffled feathers? She struggled so
frantically that poor old Nanny interposed--
"Na, sir; let her be; she'll gae hame wi' me, her ain born
serving-woman. And oh, Staneholme, be not hard, it's her last nicht."
That was Nelly Carnegie's marriage eve.
On the morrow the marriage was celebrated. The bridegroom might pass, in
his manly prime and his scarlet coat, although a dowf gallant; but who
would have thought that Nelly Carnegie in the white brocade which was
her grandmother's the day that made her sib to Rothes--Nelly Carnegie
who flouted at love and lovers, and sported a free, light, brave heart,
would have made so dowie a bride? The company consisted only of Lady
Carnegie's starched cousins, with their husbands and their daughters,
who yet hoped to outrival Nelly with her gloomy Lauderdale laird.
The hurried ceremony excused the customary festivities. The family party
could keep counsel, and preserve a discreet blindness when the ring
dropped from the bride's fingers, and the wine stood untasted before
her, while Lady Carnegie did the honours as if lonely age and narrow
circumstances did not exist.