Hector Garret had his girl wife at Otter, and very sunny her existence
was for the lustrum of that honeymoon. It was almost sufficient for her
to be at liberty, fairly installed in her castle in the air, a country
home. And its lord and master was generous and indulgent, and wasted, he
did not care to say how many days, in displaying to her the green
ruinousness of Ferndean--in climbing the hills and hunting out the
widest views for her--in taking her out in his boat, and rowing her in
sunshine and shade, enjoying her wonder and exultation most
benevolently. In a short time he left her to herself, for he had much
property, to whose numerous details he attended with rigid
conscientiousness, and he had been a student from his youth, and sat
almost as much as Dr. Bower in his library, although it was an airier
and more heterogeneously fitted-up sanctuary. Leslie was perfectly
satisfied; in fact, while the novelty around her was fresh, she
preferred to wander about at her leisure, and find out places for
herself, because Hector Garret was always hurrying her, and she was
trying so hard to be clever, active, and amiable. Ah, that slight strain
already perceptible, that growth of ignorance, misconception, and
extravagant reverence--what fruit would it bear?
Otter was a rambling white house in a green meadow opening to the sea.
Its salient points were its size and age. The slowest-growing shrubs in
its pleasance were tough, seamed, branched and bowed with time. There
were few trees in the neighbourhood except at forsaken Ferndean; but
there were slow swelling hills crowned with heather closing in the
valley over which Otter presided with the dignified paternal character
of the great house of strath, or glen. Leslie smiled when she first
heard the natives of the district term the grey or glittering track that
bounded the western horizon, "The Otter Sea," but very soon she fell
into the use of the same name, and was conscious of feeling far more
interest in the boats and ships that crossed that limited space, than in
those which she saw from the hilltops spread far and wide over a great
expanse broken only by the misty Irish coast-line. Indeed, Hector Garret
explained to her that he had seignorial claims over that strip of
waves--that the seaweed, and, after certain restrictions, the fragments
of wreck cast upon its sands, were his property, quite as much as if he
had waved his banner over it, like the gallant Spaniard, in the name of
his Most Catholic Majesty.
Leslie had variety in her locality; the beach, with its huge boulders
and inspiring music; the fields and "uplands airy," with their hedge
wealth of vetch, briar, and bramble; the garden, the ancient walled
garden, at whose antiquities Hector Garret laughed.
Leslie played sad pranks in the early season of her disenthralment. She
wandered far and near, and soiled her white gowns, to the despair of the
Otter servant who did up the master's shirts and managed the mistress's
clear-starching, but who never dreamt, in those days of frills, robes,
and flounces, of styling herself a laundress. Leslie filled her apron
with mosses and lichens: she stole out after the reapers had left the
patch of oats which was not within sight of the house, and gathered
among the sheaves like a Ruth. She grew stout and hardy, and, in spite
of her gipsy bonnet, as brown as a berry under this out-of-door life,
until no one would have known the waxen-faced city girl; and many a time
when Hector Garret left his study in the dusk and found his way to the
drawing-room, he discovered her asleep from very weariness, with her
head laid down on her spindle-legged work-table, and the white moonbeams
trying to steal under her long eyelashes. He would tread softly, and
stand, and gaze, but he never stooped and kissed her cheek in merry
frolic, never in yearning tenderness.
Such was Leslie's holiday; let her have it--it ended, certainly. The
black October winds began to whistle in the chimneys and lash the Otter
sea into foam; the morning mists were white and dense on the hills, and
sometimes the curtain never rose the whole day; the burns were hoarse
and muddy, the sheep in fold, the little birds silent. Leslie loved the
prospect still, even the wild grey clouds rent and whirled across the
sky, the watery sun, and the ragged, wan, dripping verdure; but it made
her shiver too, and turn to her fireside, where she would doze and yawn,
work and get weary in her long solitary hours. Hector Garret was patient
and good-humoured; he took the trouble to teach her any knowledge to
which she aspired; but he was so far beyond her, so hopelessly superior,
that she was vexed and ashamed to confess to him her ignorance, and it
was clear that when he came up to her domain in the evening he liked
best to rest himself, or to play with her in a fondling, toying way.
After the first interminable rainy day which she had spent by herself at
Otter, when he entered and proceeded in his cool, rather lazy fashion to
tap her under the chin, to inquire if she had been counting the rain
drops, to bid her try his cigar, she felt something swelling in her
throat, and answered him shortly and crossly; but when she found that he
treated her offended air as the whim of a spoilt child, and was rather
the more amused by it, she determined that he should not be entertained
by her humours. Perilous entertainment as it was, Leslie could not have
afforded it; her wilderness tamed her so that she welcomed Hector Garret
eagerly, submitted to be treated as a child, exerted herself to prattle
away gaily and foolishly when her heart was a little heavy and her
spirits languid.
Leslie saw so little of her husband--perhaps it was the case with all
wives; her father and mother were as much apart--but Leslie did not
understand the necessity. She did not like her life to be selfish,
smooth, and aimless, except for her own fancies, as it had been from
the first. She wanted to share Hector Garret's cares and his work which
he transacted so faithfully. She wished he thought her half as worth
consulting as his steward. She had faith in woman's wit. She had a
notion that she herself was quick and could become painstaking. She
tried entering his room once or twice uninvited, but he always looked so
discontented, and when she withdrew so relieved, that she could not
persevere in the attempt.
When Hector Garret went shooting or fishing, Leslie would have
accompanied him gladly, would have delighted in his trophies, and
carried his bag or his basket, like any gillie or callant of the
Highlands or Lowlands, if he would have allowed it; but his excursions
were too remote and fatiguing, and beyond the strength that was supposed
consistent with her sex and nurture.
Little fool! to assail another's responsibilities and avocations when
her own were embarrassing her sufficiently. Her household web had got
warped and entangled in her careless, inexperienced hands, and vexed and
mortified her with a sense of incapacity and failure--an oppression
which she could not own to Hector Garret, because there was no common
ground, and no mutual understanding between them. When Leslie came to
Otter she found the housekeeping in the hands of an Irish follower of
the Garrets--themselves of Irish origin; and Hector Garret presented
Bridget Kennedy to his wife as his faithful and honoured servant, whom
he recommended to a high place in her regard. Bridget Kennedy displayed
more marked traces of race than her master, but it was the Celtic
nature under its least attractive aspect to strangers, proud,
passionate, fanciful, and vindictive. She was devoted to her master, and
capable of consideration for Leslie on his account--though jealous of
her entrance upon the stage of Otter; but she evinced this reflected
interest by encroachments and tyranny, a general determination to adhere
doggedly to her own ways, and to impose them upon her mistress.
Leslie began by admiring Bridget, as she did everything else at Otter.
Leslie would have propitiated the mayor of the palace with kind words
and attentions, but when she was snapped up in her efforts, she drew
back with a girl's aptness to be affronted and repelled. Next Leslie
began to angrily resist Bridget's unbecoming interference with her
movements, and design of exercising authority and control over the child
whom the master had chosen to set over his house; but her fitful
impulses were met and overruled by stubborn and slenderly veiled
fierceness. Leslie was not weak, but she was undisciplined; and she who
had been the young Hotspur of the most orderly and pacific of families,
learnt to tremble at the sound of Bridget's crutch in the lobbies, and
her shrill voice rating the servants who flew to do her bidding.
In proportion as Leslie cowered at her subordinate, the subordinate was
tempted to despise her and lord it over her.
Hector Garret was blind to this contention. For his own part, he
humoured Bridget or smiled at her asperities, as suited him; and it is
probable that if he had been appealed to, he would have adopted his old
favourite's side, and censured Leslie as touchy, inconsiderate, perhaps
a little spiteful. But he never was made umpire, for Leslie had all the
disadvantage of a noble temper in an unseemly struggle. Bridget plagued
Leslie, but Leslie would not injure Bridget,--no, not for the world. The
imperious old woman was Hector Garret's friend; he had said that he had
known no firmer friend than Bridget Kennedy. She had closed his father's
eyes, she had stood by himself in sickness and sorrow (for all his
strength and self-command, Hector had known sickness and sorrow--that
was a marvel to Leslie)--Bridget might clutch her rights to the end,
what did it signify? only a little pique and bitterness to an
interloper.
Leslie had ceased to credit that she would ever become the wise, helpful
woman that she had once warmly desired to see herself. Her own defects
were now familiar and sorely disheartening to her, and she had grown
aware that she could not by inspiration set and preserve in smooth,
swift motion the various wheels of Otter, not even if--unlooked for and
undesired sequel!--she received express permission to dance upon the
head of old Bridget.
Leslie had fancied once, when Hector Garret told her how few neighbours
lived within visiting distance, that she should not want society: but
the solitude was matter of regret, especially when it proved that of the
few families who exchanged rare intercourse, some of better birth than
breeding scarcely held the daughter of the disinherited laird and
Glasgow scholar as their equal in social rank, or a spouse worthy of the
master of Otter, or indeed entitled to their special esteem.
The only house without any pretension within sight of Otter was situated
at the other extremity of the bay, on a peninsula projecting far into
the sea. It had been built in the days when each mansion was a
fortalice, and when safety from enemies was of more moment than the
convenience of friends.
This Earlscraig was now little more than a grim, grey turret, seldom
occupied; the companion body of the building had been destroyed nearly a
score of years before by a fire--the tragedy of the country-side, as it
consummated the ruin of an old family--and in its horrors a lady of the
house perished miserably. So the sight of its cold cluster of chimneys,
wind-rocked walls, and scorched and crumbling vestiges of sudden
destruction, far from adding to the cheerfulness of the landscape, was a
blot on its rural prosperity.
The homes of humbler friends were foreign thresholds to Leslie; the
reserved, engrossed, dignified master of Otter crossed them with a freer
step. Leslie could but address her servants, and venture to intermeddle
bashfully with their most obvious concerns. She had neither tongue nor
eye for more distant and difficult dependants.
But Leslie was not dying of ennui or spleen, or miserable and with a
nameless fathomless misery. She was only disenchanted--conscious of
feeling a great deal older than she had done six months since. How could
she have been so credulous, so vain! Verily, every path of roses has its
panoply of thorns.