Marjory, I am sorry to say, thought nothing at all of the interest she
had excited; she was not so much as conscious of it; and she did not
even think of Fanshawe, who was rather an embarrassment than a comfort
to the household. She had been sinking into a certain calm, close as she
still was to the great misfortune which had befallen her family; but
time travels very quickly at such moments, and it already seemed ages to
her since she entered poor Tom’s sick-chamber, and since she saw him
die. She had been quieted by the calm of the silent Sunday after the
funeral; but her visitors had driven all her quiet away. When the
Minister had bidden her to be resigned, she had felt a wild impatience
fill her mind; she hastened to her own room, dismissing Milly, and then
threw herself upon her sofa, and wept as a child weeps. It was sorrow,
but it was not such sorrow as Marjory was capable of feeling. Her
brother had been dear to her; but he was not all in all to her.
Impatience, a painful sense of the narrowness of human sympathy, and the
imperfection of human good sense, mingled, in this little outburst, with
natural grief, and that painful pity with which, wherever no deep
religious sense of gain comes in, the death of a young man cut off in
his prime must be regarded.
Marjory’s mind was not one of those which are apt to speculate upon the
possibilities of damnation; but on the other hand, it was impossible to
think of poor Tom as an evangelical conqueror, a saint-like personage in
robes of white and crown of glory. He could not have reached that
height, poor fellow! and therefore the ache of pity with which his
sister thought of his early severance from all he had cared for, was
very sore and painful. The human comparison seemed to add an edge of
sharper pain to grief. His companions lived and flourished--and he was
gone. They had their easy mornings, their gay evenings, their sports and
amusements, and enjoyed them all with light hearts. In the papers that
very day, had been an announcement of the marriage of one of them--and
Tom was dead!
Marjory’s heart contracted with a pang of pain, as though some gigantic
hand had crushed it. She thought it was grief, but it was something more
than simple grief. Under the sway of this feeling she went to the table
upon which his desk had been placed, and seated herself once more before
it. The last time she had done so--that time when she had ineffectually
questioned Fanshawe--she had felt herself shrink from the painful task,
and had not really made any investigation into poor Tom’s secrets. Now
she opened the desk with her eyes full of tears for him, with that
painful contraction at her heart.
There is nothing in the world so sad as thus to open some human
creature’s most cherished repositories, when the poor soul is gone, and
can guard his foolishness no more. How trivial half the things are! a
fourth part of them, at least, thrown there in that light-hearted
inadvertence which death makes to appear like a solemn intention,
puzzling the survivors with its want of meaning. Why did he keep this or
that? an unimportant invitation, a letter about nothing at all, an empty
envelope, a memorandum about a race, a receipt for physic for a horse.
What a curious mixture of awe and astonishment was in her as she
gathered them together! They were good for nothing but the waste-basket;
and yet the fact that Tom had treasured them gave the worthless scraps
an interest. She cleared away a mass of these remains of his life. There
is a little hill near Rome which is made, they say, of fragments of
crockery, and such other valueless relics of an ended existence; but ah
me! when one remembers what sacred spot lies there under the cypress, in
the shadow of Testaccio, how solemn and sacred does that mound of
classic rubbish become to us! Something of the same effect was wrought
upon Marjory by the sight of poor Tom’s rubbish, now that death had made
it mysterious. She tried hard to get some meaning out of it, and failing
in that, put it aside in a pile, with a certainty that it must be her
perceptions which were in fault. Was there nothing to be found but these
miserable débris, that had so little signification? There were bills
besides, and letters about bills; letters which Marjory knew would be
very little welcome to her father. How was she to tell him of them? Tom,
poor fellow, had become as a god, as an angel to his father, since his
life ended; and to plunge him back again into the old atmosphere of debt
and promises to pay--how miserable it would be! She made these too up
into a parcel by themselves with a sense of humiliation. Was this all
that was left of Tom? His bills; and those frivolous scraps that meant
nothing--that had no human value, that threw no light upon his
existence. Was it worth while for a man to have been born, to have lived
and died, for nothing better than that? Marjory felt that even ill-doing
would have been better than no doing at all; and grew scornful almost of
her own fears. She had felt as if she were about to thrust herself into
Tom’s secrets--and lo! Tom had no secrets at all.
These thoughts were in her mind, filling her with a kind of angry shame,
when she picked up, out of a corner, a letter, badly folded and badly
written; but put away, it was evident, with some care. It had no
envelope or address. The paper was very finely glazed and gilt-edged;
but it was folded awry, and the handwriting was quite unformed. “No
doubt a letter from his groom,” Marjory said to herself, with a painful
sense of the unsatisfactory character of Tom’s correspondences; but when
she had read the first few lines, her countenance changed. She
paused--she looked at the signature. A momentary look of haughty
displeasure and disgust crossed her face, and she let the letter drop,
as if with the intention of tossing it from her; but on second thoughts
she changed her mind. She lifted it once more gingerly, as if it were
something which might stain the white fingers in which she held it, and
with a deep and painful blush began again to read. I do not think there
was anything in the letter to call that blush to Marjory’s cheek; but
she had the same prejudices as other women, and was deeply susceptible
to everything that felt like shame. The writing was not absolutely
coarse--it was like the writing of a child, unformed and uncertain,
written upon ruled lines, which had been partially rubbed out; but the
sentiments were not those of a child. This was what, with a proud sense
of humiliation, keen disgust and indignation, Marjory read--all her
natural prejudices starting into warmest life.
“I cannot write to you in the way you tell me--I would think shame.
Oh, Sir, you must not expect much from a poor lass that never has
learned anything, till I tried to do it, to please you. There is
nothing I would not do to please you. Ye’ve been very kind to me,
Mr. Heriot, like a good man. And, eh! I hope I’ll make a good wife,
if I could but learn quicker, no to be a shame to you. Sorry, sorry
I am that I did not take more advantage of the schule as I might
have done--for, oh! Mr. Heriot, them that say ‘your face is your
fortune,’ say little that is pleasant to hear. When I think whiles
that it’s but for my face ye fancied me; and that, maybe, if any
accident happened--if I lost my colour, or my teeth, or what not,
ye would think of me nae mair! Oh, Sir, dinna be like that! If
_you_ were blind and cripplit, and pock-markit, like old John in
the clachan, I would but think the more of you. And you that are a
gentleman, Mr. Heriot, and know everything, you should not be less
than poor me; for although I am little to set store by, and no a
scholar, nor instructed, I’m better than my face, which is just a
bit of painted flesh, as the Minister says. If I thought you cared
for me, and no just _it_--oh, but I would be happy! I have a great
deal to say, but I cannot tell how to say it. I am feared for
making you think me more ignorant than ever. My heart’s full, full;
but I think shame to say all that’s in it; you know, Sir, better
than I can tell you. When will you come back? oh! when will ye come
back? I’m weary of wishing and wishing. My sister Agnes will not go
to her place, thinking ye might not like it. John Ogilvy, my first
cousin, the son of Uncle John, that is the smith, is away to the
College to learn to be a Minister. I do not mind anything else you
would like to hear; but that I’m wearying, wearying sore, and aye,
the longer the time is, the mair wearying to see my” (here there
were a great many erasures--one word written over another till it
was impossible to make out what they had been--until it finished in
the clearly written words) “my Mr. Heriot again.
“Your ain and your very ain, oh dear, dear Sir,
“ISABELL.”
Marjory read this innocent and natural letter with a buzzing of excited
pulses in her ears, and a blaze of hot colour in her face. The mere fact
that it was a letter from a woman moved her (naturally) as no other kind
of secret could have done. Indeed what other kind of secret would have
been worth considering in comparison? She drew a long breath when she
had read it. Her face was scarlet, as if the shame (if shame there was)
had been her own. And it was hardly possible for her, at least for the
first moment, to realise that there might be no shame in it. To have
felt so, would have been such a triumph over prejudice and over natural
feeling as Marjory was not equal to. The bad writing, the bad spelling,
the peasant dialect, struck her more strongly than the sentiments did.
They seemed to imply vice--vice which to a young and pure-minded woman
is the same as crime--nay, is the worst kind of crime. There was then,
after all, a mystery in Tom’s life, and here it was; a vulgar degrading
mystery--the kind of horror which people say is so common in the lives
of young men, a suggestion which Marjory loathed as every woman ought to
loath it. It filled her with disgust of Tom and of all men.
She threw the paper out of her hand with a cry of indignant wrath, and
then slowly, reluctantly, took it up again, unable to resist the
fascination. The second time a different impression was made upon her
mind. “I’ll make a good wife”--what did that mean? Marjory pondered over
it with excitement, which was not calmed down by this new discovery.
Had he really meant--was it possible he could have intended to make the
writer of this letter his wife? His sister thrilled all over with an
indignant movement of horror, Yes, I do not know how to excuse it--but
Marjory, who had been blazing hot with shame at the idea of a
disreputable connection on her brother’s part, felt a shiver of horror
go over her at the thought that there might be no shame in it, that his
mind might be honourable and his love pure, that he might have intended
this woman, this peasant, this Isabell, to be her sister and his wife.
Her eyes fixed on those words with a painful stare. “Good heavens, his
wife!” and under her breath, in her throat, Marjory murmured, “Thank
God!” Thank God for what? that Tom was dead? that he had not lived to
carry that intention out? was this what she meant? She stopped short in
absolute dismay, when her reason perceived to what length instinct and
impulse had carried her.
She hid her burning face in her hands. She fell a-weeping; tears more
poignant and real than any she had yet shed for Tom. Her mind turned
against itself, lost in that misery of moral confusion which makes the
problem of life so doubly bitter. She dared not say to herself that the
least honourable explanation was the least terrible; but her thoughts
went on in spite of her, against her will, shaping before her a picture
of what might have been. This peasant woman in Pitcomlie, mistress of
everything, the successor of all the Heriot ladies, filling her own
mother’s place, Marjory’s sister, Milly’s guardian placed on the same
level with them, almost superior to them--good heavens! She disowned the
thoughts that thus struggled in her. She tried to drive them from her
mind, to ignore them, to introduce other feelings in their place, and
cried, and hid her face and could not. God had stepped in and preserved
the house from this degradation; He had saved them perhaps at the last
moment. And things being as they were, and poor Tom doomed anyhow, God
be thanked, might not she say it? deep down where nobody could hear, in
the depths of her heart.
Marjory was breathless after this battle with her thoughts; she dragged
herself out of it she scarcely knew how, frightened to think what she
had been thinking, scared as a man is who has travelled in the dark,
when morning shows him the precipices he has passed--or like a drowning
man who has been struggling with the angry waves, she crept forth upon
dry land, and lay there exhausted, trying not to think, hearing the
great searollers break beneath, too low to harm her. It seemed to her
that she had passed through a terrible conflict, and it made her heart
sick to think that this perhaps was the secret which Tom had intended to
tell her. Perhaps he had meant to commend the girl to her care, to claim
her affection and sympathy; and for the moment she felt fiercely glad
that he had not done so, that she was bound by no sort of visible or
invisible tie to this unknown Isabell. Yes, she was glad he had not
lived to tell that secret, glad he had been stopped from disgracing the
family. It hardly seemed to her, for the moment, that the exemption of
the house from so great a shame and injury by Tom’s death, was too great
a thing to have been done by Providence for the sake of the Heriots. She
seemed no longer sorry, no longer a mourner, but glad and comforted to
think that God had stepped in and stopped it, perhaps, at the last
moment when there was no time to lose.
But it was with an agitated heart, and a countenance out of which she
could not altogether banish her excitement, that she went down stairs,
when old Fleming rang that inevitable bell for dinner. Dinner! with what
weary disgust Marjory thought of it, and of the compulsory meeting with
all the party, the solemn sitting down to table, the politenesses to Mr.
Fanshawe, the efforts she would have to make to interpose herself
between her father’s irritable grief and her uncle Charles’s amiable but
sometimes untimely wisdom. She changed one black gown for another
rapidly, and smoothed her brown hair, which (strangely she felt) kept
its bright colour notwithstanding her mourning. What a farce, she
thought to herself, (being bitter and sore) that mourning was? It had
just as many troublesome accessories as the gayest dress, nay, almost
more; for the most heart-broken of women in the deepest of affliction
has got to take care of her crape, that dear and odious addition to all
mourning garments. From this it is not to be supposed that Marjory was
impatient of her crape. She would not have cheated poor Tom out of a
single fold, she would have enveloped herself in it from head to foot
rather than fail in any prejudice of respect. But her heart was sore and
her mind excited. Nothing seemed to her to be true. Tom had deceived
her, leading her to suppose that some matter worthy of her ears was to
be revealed to her; and lo! it was but this vulgar, poor, conventional,
common sort of secret; and even she herself was a deceiver, for did she
not pretend to mourn for Tom even now, when she had begun to feel that
perhaps his death was expedient? All in the house gave themselves out to
be mourning for poor Tom; yet Uncle Charles had recovered his interest
in everything that was going on, and little Milly in the afternoon had
laughed--Mr. Fanshawe, who was Tom’s friend, and ought to have been more
faithful to the poor fellow’s memory, having inveigled the child into
it. Thus the party would meet, she said to herself, all longing to
escape from this gloom, and talk and think like others, but dared not
for Falsehood’s sake; and she herself, the falsest of all, even saw good
in the calamity, and gave thanks for it. What treachery, what
untruthfulness was in all this! The only one who was utterly true in his
grief, was the one who would have most chiefly suffered by Tom’s further
life if he had carried his fancy out--the heartbroken father to whom
Marjory, to-morrow, no later, would have to carry Tom’s bills, the bills
about which, alas! poor Tom had not told the truth. What a confused
tangle of falsehood, and pain, and unreality it was!
And Mr. Fanshawe spent a most dreary evening. Marjory had receded, he
thought, from all her incipient civilities. She paid scarcely any
attention to him, and evaded his skilful reference to the old house, and
the visit to it which was to be made to-morrow. If to-morrow was not
better than to-day, he felt that he must be driven from Pitcomlie. He
could not bear it any longer; and yet there were certain fascinations
which held him against his will, even in the midst of this monotony of
woe.