The confidence which Marjory thus injudiciously, and on the impulse of
the moment, shared with her uncle, was premature and indiscreet. No
doubt it is hard to shut up a discovery of importance in one’s own
bosom, and for a woman accustomed to all the continual intercourse and
confidence of domestic life, to carry on a series of secret operations,
is almost impossible; but the relief afforded was not so great as she
had hoped. Mr. Charles could think of nothing else. He questioned and
cross-questioned--who was Isabell? what were her people? where did they
come from? how did Marjory know that they were respectable or
trustworthy? how had she made acquaintance with them? To these questions
she could give but scanty answers. Mr. Charles groaned when he heard of
the irregular marriage. He shook his head till it ached with the
movement.
“In all our records,” he said, in piteous tones, “I do not believe, May,
that such a scandal has ever happened before. We’ve had none but
virtuous women, my dear, none but good women, and clever women, May. It
has always been our strong point. God bless us! and all to end in two
fools like these young women at Pitcomlie, and a---- I humbly beg your
pardon, my dear.”
“Uncle, this girl, who is dying, is like a saint.”
Once more Mr. Charles shook his head.
“I never heard yet of a saint that made an irregular marriage,” he said,
“and as for her dying, my dear, if she’s really the heir’s mother, far
the best thing she can do will be to die. A woman like that would be a
dreadful sort of apparition at Pitcomlie. Whatever her people are, they
cannot be in a position that would do the infant any credit. Lord
preserve us! am I speaking of my own family?” cried Mr. Charles, feeling
the wound go to his heart. “One a fool, and the other a---- Poor
fellows, they’ve gone to their account--but there must have been some
imperfection in those two lads, my dear, though they were your brothers;
there must have been some imperfection. They say the wife a man chooses
is the best revelation of his own character. You need not be angry, my
dear; I am saying nothing against the poor boys.”
“Let us say nothing at all about it, uncle, till we know.”
“That’s easy said, that’s easy said, my dear. You may be able to put it
out of your mind, but I cannot. The whole future of the family! Perhaps
I had better see the girl, May, and examine her myself?”
“Uncle, she is ill.”
“I’ll do her no harm, my dear,” said Uncle Charles; and he resumed the
subject in the morning, to Marjory’s dread. He had been brought up to
the law, and he had some faith, as was natural, in his own knowledge.
“If I once hear her story, I will see at once what is to be made of
it,” he said; and as he had been further stimulated by another letter
about the proceedings, or intended proceedings of Miss Bassett, the old
man was much in earnest. It was the agent of the Bank in Pitcomlie who
had sent him this information, and Mr. Charles had come down to
breakfast with his hair standing on end, at all the audacities that were
contemplated. “I know no precedent--no precedent,” he said, with his
forehead puckered into a hundred lines. “They say women are
conservatives; but I never heard of rebels like them, when they take
that lawless turn. A man would think twice before he would meddle with
an old-established house; he would think that the past might have its
rights, no to speak of the future.”
“I don’t think folly is of either sex,” said Marjory, who was not fond
of hearing her own side assailed; “though Verna is not a fool----”
“Verna!” cried Mr. Charles, in his indignation, “she is out of the
question, May. I might stand something from your brother’s wife. She’s a
foolish creature, but she’s not without good points--at all events she’s
pretty, which is aye something; and she is poor Charlie’s widow; but the
other young woman! Do you know, my dear, it’s my duty to see this girl,
and hear her story myself?”
All that Marjory could do was to effect a compromise--to go herself and
prepare poor Isabell, putting off Mr. Charles’s visit for another day.
Mr. Charles accordingly went out, though late, and hung about the Club
all the morning, talking with every lounger who came in his way (and
their name was legion). He told nothing, he was quite convinced; and
yet, oddly enough, a vague impression that some story about the House of
Pitcomlie--some romance in real life, such as now and then fills every
county with lively interest and delight--was about to be made known to
the world--came into existence. There were various versions of it
instantly created by the conversationalists of the Golf Club.
“I don’t know what’s afloat among the Heriots,” said Mr. Morrison, of
St. Rule’s; “auld Charlie is going about like a clucking hen; he has
some mystery under his wing, that’s sure. Either it’s some new claimant
turned up from Australia, like the one they’re making so great a fuss
about in London, or----”
“I don’t see how that can be,” said Major Vee or Captain Eff. “All the
Heriots and all their comings and goings are too well known in Fife, and
besides, there never was one that disappeared, or did anything he
oughtn’t to have done.”
“They’re a fearfully respectable family,” said another golfer, with a
great emphasis on the adjective; “but Tom Heriot was thrown away upon
them. He was not of that mould. If anything’s gone wrong, or there’s a
chance of revelations, I back Tom to be the hero. He was never one of
your cut and dry men, foredoomed to be a Laird, and do his duty.”
“He was a simple ne’er-do-weel,” said Mr. Seton, “like his friend
Fanshawe, whom I saw in the town the other day, by the bye. They were
an excellent pair. And there’s a sympathy among that sort of people.
Miss Heriot, who is as proud as Lucifer, and looks down upon most
people, was hanging upon that fellow’s arm. If it’s some peccadillo of
Tom’s, no doubt Fanshawe was in it.”
“I don’t see what Miss Heriot could have to do with any peccadillo of
Tom’s,” said another speaker. “Whatever you may say against women,
toleration of their brother’s peccadillos is not one of their faults.
But Mrs. Charles, I hear, is making a bonny business at Pitcomlie,
pulling down the house to build some fine castle or other. That’s
enough, I should say, to account for old Charlie’s troubles. He’s like a
hen on a hot girdle, fluttering about everywhere. God be praised, he’s
engaged for a foursome at three o’clock with old Adam of St. Edgar’s,
and the two Wolffs. A bonny time they will have of it. I saw him lose a
putt yesterday that an infant might have played. And talk of
putting----”
Here the speaker went off into golf, and left the Heriots. Mr. Charles,
however, fulfilled the prophecy in every respect. He produced the most
unchristian temper in the partner of his game, and gave his opponents an
opportunity for gibes innumerable. Up to this present date a description
of the worse putt ever made on the Links, as perpetrated on that unhappy
day by Mr. Charles Hay-Heriot of the Pitcomlie family, is told for the
edification of beginners. The reader, who knows the reason why, will not
blame Mr. Charles. He could not, as he acknowledged, get all these
complications out of his head. His placid soul was torn by so many
unforeseen calamities. The existing state of affairs was bad enough, and
the personal contentions which lay before him, the struggle with “these
young women,” in which Mr. Charles felt it quite possible that he might
be worsted, would, had there been nothing else, have been enough to
embitter his peaceful days. The other question, however, came into it
with a painful excitement. It did not obliterate the first, as it ought
reasonably to have done, since, if the second story was true, Mrs.
Charles could have no authority or place at Pitcomlie. Some minds have a
faculty for getting all the annoyance possible out of their
surroundings, just as some others get all the sweetness possible. Mr.
Charles hugged both to his bosom. He groaned over the possibility of
having to insert a name never heard of before, and the record of an
irregular marriage into the genealogical papers of the Heriots, which
had not known such profanation from the time of the Jameses. Talk of the
whaling captain, indeed, who had vitiated the blood of the Morrisons!
perhaps it was a judgment upon Mr. Charles for his remarks on that flaw;
for this was a thousand times worse than any whaling captain. And yet
while he groaned over the prospective humiliation, he afflicted his soul
at the same time with thoughts of how he was to manage Mrs. Charles and
her impertinent sister, who took so much upon her, and yet was not so
much as related to the Heriots. The one misery was incompatible with
the other; but yet he took the good, or rather the evil, of them both.
The existence of this doubting, questioning, perplexed, and perplexing
companion by her side was no addition to Marjory’s comfort. She
postponed her visit to the cottage for motives which she scarcely
ventured to define--foremost among which was a vague reluctance to meet
Agnes again, and to discuss with her the work which she had taken out of
her hands. In every such enterprise there comes a moment of
discouragement, of painful difficulty, of disgust even, with
circumstances which at first filled the mind only with pity and
fellow-feeling. Marjory felt that she would gladly have turned her back
on the matter altogether; she would fain have forgotten all about it
from the day when she first saw the patient face of the sick girl at the
cottage door. What had she to do with it? Such an intruder is usually
rejected, or at least held at arm’s length by “the family.” A
_mésalliance_ is seldom acknowledged or insisted upon by the sister of
the man who has made it. Sometimes it occurred to her that it was even
unmaidenly on her part to have interfered in the matter; after all, such
a marriage was, she said to herself, no marriage at all--unblessed by
religion, unhonoured by publicity, a secret expedient to make guilt less
guilty--was not that all that could be said for it? and yet what a
difference this poor formula made! Without it the girl was a lost
creature, covered with shame; with it she was surrounded by the sanctity
of a woman wronged, almost a martyr; and yet it was nothing, nothing! a
mere expedient to make guilt less guilty. This was only one of a
hundred ways in which Marjory contemplated the subject; and hers was a
woman’s view of the matter altogether, though not less forcible on that
account. The sting of these thoughts was that they had never occurred to
her before. She had committed herself in many ways--to Isabell; and
still more, to Fanshawe; she had filled the girl with false hopes, and,
perhaps, still falser hopes had been raised in the man’s mind by her
appeal to him. She had sent him out against his will, against his own
idea of what was needful--and now she repented! This is the danger of
possessing an impulsive temperament. Such disgust and discouragement
seldom come until the world has been set on fire by the hasty spirit.
Marjory felt (for the moment) that she would gladly have turned her back
upon it all now; she would have liked to go away to the end of the
world, and get out of sight and hearing of everybody who could remind
her of this chapter of her existence. So she thought; and the fact that
she could not have taken three steps in her flight before compunction
and a revival of all her anxious interest would have seized her,
dragging her back again, had really nothing to do with the question. She
kept away from the cottage, fearing any intercourse with the sisters,
whose cause, for the moment, she felt herself to have abandoned. And it
was not until she was roused from this curious discouragement, by the
sight of an advertisement in the second column of the “Times,” calling
upon John Macgregor to disclose himself, that she was roused to
something of her former feeling. This took her by surprise; to her
consciousness all progress had been arrested, and everything stayed by
the change in her mind; she had done nothing, and she had concluded that
nothing was being done. But the sight of the advertisement roused her;
she saw that she had set forces in action that could not be stopped, and
whatever her own languor might be, she had no longer any right to keep
still. As soon as she had realized this, her disgust evaporated like the
dew on the grass, and good sense and judgment regained the upper hand.
John Macgregor might still be in Scotland, notwithstanding Agnes’s
failure, and in that case, the “Times” was a very unlikely vehicle of
communication with him. She bestirred herself instantly, with a glow at
her heart, which, after all, was not immediately caused either by
devotion to her brother’s memory or regard for Isabell. Who was it that
had called Fanshawe good-for-nothing? Marjory laughed softly by herself
at the ludicrous inappropriateness of the word--good-for-nothing! She
had heard his voice as it were in the dark, calling out to her, telling
her he was at work, encouraging her to go on. Marjory filled all the
Scotch papers with advertisements during the next week; she demanded
John Macgregor from all the winds; but still she did not go to the
cottage. Now that she had fairly re-commenced work, it seemed to her
that she must wait until she had something to tell.
One day, however, a sudden thought came to her of Isabell’s dying
condition, and of the possible consequences of suspense, unbroken by
any ray of hope. She set out towards the Spindle on a dreary afternoon,
when the clouds hung low, and the sea was black with rising wind. It was
the heaviest time of the day--that hour when life runs lowest--when
Fanshawe had bidden her think of him. The few vessels visible were
struggling between two dark leaden lines of sky and sea; nothing was
cheerful or encouraging in the external surroundings. The waves came in
with a threatening rush round the Spindle; the wind sighed with a sound
of rain; and though she had not expected Isabell to be outside on such a
day, yet a sense of unreasonable disappointment arose in Marjory’s mind
at the absence of the well-known figure from the cottage-door. The door
was closed, and no one was visible about. In all the earth and air there
seemed no living thing, except in the few ships--big and little, which
struggled across the horizon.
“Oh mercy! to myself I said,
If Lucy should be dead!”
The thought was natural enough, so far as Isabell was concerned, but it
filled Marjory with remorse as she hurried forward. If Isabell were to
die before, one way or other, this matter was cleared up!--it was but
too likely she would; but the thought seemed to lend wings to Marjory’s
feet.
In the little cottage chamber, however, which she thought so still,
there was pain enough to demonstrate life, could she but have known. It
was a dark little room at all times, for though there were two windows,
these windows were little casements composed of very small and very dim
panes of greenish glass--one in the front of the house towards the sea,
and the other to the back. A smouldering fire burned in the grate, at
which stood Isabell’s mother in her white mutch, making tea for her
invalid. Isabell herself lay in the box, or press-bed, fitted into the
wall, which is universal in such cottages. From the airless wooden
enclosure her pale face looked out strangely, most unlike, in its
pathetic beauty, to everything about. The mother’s back was turned, but
between the fire and the bed sat Agnes, her ruddy, comely countenance
overcast with vexation and care. She was doing nothing, her head was
thrown back listlessly, and her hands laid in her lap. They were brown
hands, bearing the traces of toil, and their idleness had a certain
pathos in it. She sat, too, almost in the middle of the room, as if she
had thrown herself down by chance, not knowing, or not caring where. As
the mother went and came she stumbled over Agnes’s foot, or her chair,
and uttered a little querulous exclamation: “Canna you sit in a corner?
canna ye get something to do?” she said. “I canna bide to see a woman
doing naething; take John’s stockings, if you’ll do nothing else.”
“I have nae heart for stockings, or anything else!” said Agnes with a
sigh.
“Eh, woman! if I had been like that how could I have brought you all
up?” said the mother. “Seven of a family, and no a penny nor a penny’s
worth in the world. Do ye think I hadna often a sair heart? and many a
time darena sit down, for fear I should be ower tired to rise again.
What are your bits of trouble to that?”
“Do you call yon a bit trouble?” said Agnes, pointing to her sister’s
bed. The mother’s countenance darkened; she turned towards the fire
again, turning her back on her sick daughter. “I dinna call that trouble
at all,” she said; “that’s sin and shame.”
“Eh, mother, ye’re hard, hard! will ye never believe it--not even since
you’ve seen Miss--her man’s sister. Will ye no believe her, even now?”
“Dinna speak to me of her man,” said the old woman indignantly, pouring
the boiling water upon the tea with a certain vindictive movement. All
this conversation was carried on in an undernote, that Isabell might not
hear. “Her man has been a bonnie man to her; whatever was his meaning;
he’s brought her naething but misery and shame. What had she to do,
giving ear to ane o’ thae gentlemen with their false tongues? Gentlemen!
I wouldna give an honest man for ten gentlemen--and so it’s seen. Give
her her tea; I havena the heart to look at her white face,” said the
mother, turning away; she went and sat down noiselessly in the room, and
put up her apron to her eyes. How many different kinds of suffering were
shut up there together, all separate, and keeping themselves apart!
The tea was made in silence--the one cordial of poor women’s lives--and
then the little group subsided once more into their places.
“Have you any word from John?” said the mother, this time loud enough
for all to hear.
“I have aye word from John,” said Agnes, with a tone of indignation;
“whatever happens, he never misses his day.”
“But you’ve come to nae settlement yet about what’s to be done. It’s a
wise bargain you’ve made, him and you--as wise almost as some other
folk; to wait--till when?”
“Till I’m gone, mother!” said Isabell. “Oh, if you would have patience!
I’ll no be long. I feel the wheel breaking at the fountain, and the
silver chain being sundered, as the Bible says. When I’m gone, there
will be nae motive for keeping up all this trouble. I’ve been making a
terrible stir and commotion, I know that; no for me--and yet I mustna
conceal the truth--I had some thought for myself, too; to die so young
is sore enough without shame. But if God will have me bear shame, I must
put up with it; and you must put up with it, Agnes. John’s a good man;
he’ll never upbraid you with your poor sister, that ye did so much for;
and you’ll take my bairn. He’ll never ken he had a mother but you--and
you’ll be good--oh, you’ll be good to him! No, why should I greet?” she
went on, looking with apparent surprise at a tiny drop that fell on her
coverlet; “we must accept what God sends.”
“Oh, hold your tongue, hold your tongue!” cried the mother; “God never
sent wickedness. I’ll no be contradictit in my own house--though, to be
sure, it’s no my house, for that matter. We were a’ proud of your bonnie
face, and your genty ways; and our pride’s had a fa’; yes, you may see,
even your bonnie leddy that you were so sure of--your man’s sister, as
ye say--has come back no more. She’s given ye up like a’ the rest; and
everybody will give ye up--till you humble yourself, Bell, and put away
all your pretences, and do what Magdalen did. But naebody in heaven or
earth will show mercy to a lie.”
“Mother, you’re that hard that ye make me sick,” cried Agnes. “It’s no a
lie.”
“Let her prove it, then!” said the mother solemnly. She was in accord
with Mr. Charles, with Fanshawe, with all others except Marjory, who had
heard the tale. As for Agnes, she started up from her seat as if unable
to bear any more.
“I maun be away again,” she cried; “I canna stand it longer. If your
grand leddies and your fine gentlemen will do nothing for her, I’ll take
up my work again, myself--and I’ll clear ye yet, Bell. I’ll away to
Edinburgh this very day, and see John; maybe him and me can think of
something else. I’m ’maist glad they’ve failed ye!” cried the girl, with
tears in her eyes; “for now I’ll never rest day or night till I’ve done
it myself.”
“You’ll think first what you’re doing,” said the mother; “going to visit
a man that has no heart to marry ye; mind what’s happened to your
sister, and take heed for yourself.”
“Oh, woman!” cried Agnes, turning upon her wildly--while poor Isabell,
struck by this unexpected assault, lay back upon her pillows feebly
sobbing; and it was at this moment that Marjory knocked at the cottage
door.