George Dawson had been very successful in life. He was not an old man
when he took possession of his estate of Saughleas. He had many years
before him in which to enjoy the fruit of his labours, he told himself,
and he exulted in the thought.
What happy years the first years there were! His children were good and
bonny and strong; his wife was--not very strong--but oh! so sweet and
dear! What lady among them all could compare with her, so good and
true, so fair and stately, and yet so kindly and so well-beloved?
"I will grow a better man to deserve her better," he said to himself
with a vague presentiment of change upon him--a fear that such happiness
could not last. For who was he, that he should have so much more than
other men had? So he walked softly, and did justly, and dealt
mercifully in many a case where he might have been severe with justice
on his side, and strove honestly and wisely to make himself worthy of
the woman who had been growing dearer day by day.
Growing dearer? Yes--but who was slipping away from him, slowly, but
surely, day by day. He strove to shut his eyes to that which others
clearly saw, but deep down in his heart was the certain knowledge that
he must lose her. But not yet. Not for a long time yet. With care in
a warmer climate, under sunnier skies, she might live for years yet--
many years. So he set himself to the task of so arranging his affairs,
that he might take her away for the winter at least, away from the bleak
sea winds to one of the many places where he had heard that health and
healing had come to many a one far more ill than she was.
And if he could have got her away in time, who knows but so it might
have been. But illness came in amongst the children, and she would not
leave them even to the wise and loving care of their aunt; and when
first one, and then another little life went out, her husband could see
with a sinking heart, that she longed to follow where they had gone.
When the other children grew better he took her away for a little while.
But the drawing of those little graves, and the longing to die at home
among those who were still left, brought them back to Saughleas--only
just in time. He did not lay her in the bleak kirkyard of Portie. He
_could_ not do it. It was a foolish thing to do, it was said, but in
the quietest, bonniest spot in Saughleas, in a little wood that lay in
sight of the house, he laid her down, when he could keep her no longer,
and by and by he lifted her bonny little bairns and laid them down
beside her. And then it seemed for a while that to him life was ended.
But life was not ended. He had more to do, and more to suffer yet, and
indeed had to become a changed man altogether before he could be ready
and worthy to look again upon the face that he so longed to see.
Oh, the length of the days! the weariness of all things! He used to
wonder at the sickness that lay heavy on his heart all day--at the
anguish that made the night terrible to him. He was growing an old man,
he said to himself, and he had thought it was only the young who strove
and suffered, and could not yield themselves to the misery of loss and
pain. But then--who, old or young, of all the men he had ever known,
had lost what he had lost? No wonder that he suffered and could find no
comfort.
"Ay! No wonder that you suffer," said his sister to him once. "But
take tent lest ye add rebellion to the sin of overmuch sorrow. Have you
ever truly submitted to God's will all your life, think ye, George, man?
Things had mostly gone well and easily with ye. But now this has come
upon you, and take ye thought of it. For ye're no' out of God's hand
yet, and `whom He loveth He chasteneth.'"
She did not speak often to him, but he heard her and made no answer.
That was Jean's way of looking at things, he thought; and because she
had had sore troubles of her own, he did not answer her roughly, as he
felt inclined to do. There was nothing to be said.
He sent his two daughters away to be educated, first to Edinburgh and
afterwards to London, and after that, the house of Saughleas, except a
room or two, was shut up for a time. The father and son left it early
and returned to it late, and the father spent his days in working as
hard as ever he had done in the days when he was making his own way in
the world. The winter was hard to bear, but the coming of the
spring-time was even worse. Every bonny flower looked up at him with
the eyes of her he had lost; every bird, and breeze, and trembling leaf
spoke to him with her voice. The sunlight lying on her grave, the
still, soft air, the sweetness of the season,--all brought back on him
like a flood, the longing for her presence; and he must have gone away
or broken down altogether, if it had not been for his son George, his
only son.
He was a handsome, kindly lad, more like his mother than any of his
bairns, and dearer than any of them to his father, because he was her
firstborn. George had mourned his mother deeply and truly, but her name
had never been spoken between them till on one of the first sunny days
of spring, the father found the son lying on his face among the long
withered grass that covered her grave. Sitting there then, lips and
hearts were opened to each other, and it was never so bad to either
after that.
By and by hope sprang up in the father's heart, in the presence of the
son who was so like his mother, and so the weight of his heavy sorrow
was lightened.
But there were folk in Portie, and his sister Jean was one of them, who
doubted whether the father was doing the best that could be done for his
son. He held a situation in the Portie Bank, and his father's intention
was, that he should there, and elsewhere, when the right time came,
acquire such a knowledge of business, as should enable him, if not to
make money for himself, at least to make a wise use of the money already
made for him.
But his work was made easy to the lad, as was natural enough, by others
besides his father, and his comings and goings were not so carefully
noted, as if he had not been his father's son. He had time and money at
his disposal; not so very much of either, but more than any of his
companions had, and certainly more than was good for him. Not that he
fell into ill ways at this time, though that was said of him. That only
came afterwards; and it might have been helped, if his father had been
as wise then as he was determined with him afterwards.
But that which raised his father's anger, was almost worse, to his
thought, than falling into ill ways, in the common acceptation of the
term, would have been. He might have spent money freely, even
foolishly, and his name might have been spoken with the names of men
whose society his father would have shunned or scorned, and he might
have been reproved and then forgiven. But that he should love and be
determined to marry a girl in humble life, the daughter of a sailor's
widow, and he not one and twenty, seemed to his father worse than folly
and even worse than sin. The father had never given a thought to any
woman except his sister, till he was thirty-five, and that his son, a
mere lad, should wish to marry any one, was a folly not to be tolerated.
He blamed his sister in the matter, for bonny Elsie Calderwood was the
daughter of the man who had brought home to her the bitter tidings that
her lover was lost, and Jean had cared for and comforted his widow and
orphans when their turn came to weep for one who returned no more. But
he was wrong in this, for she had known nothing of the young man's
wishes, certainly she had never abetted him in his folly, as was said.
Indeed she had taken no thought of danger for him. "They were just a'
bairns thegither," she had said, "and had kenned one another all their
lives."
For the Calderwood bairns had been the chosen companions of Geordie and
his sisters in the days when, openly scorning the attendance of
nursemaids, they had clambered over the rocks, and waded in the shallows
along the shore, and gathered dulse and birds' eggs with the rest of the
bairns of the town. When his sisters went away, after their mother's
death; the intimacy was naturally enough continued by George, and all
the more closely that he missed his sisters, and was oppressed by the
dreariness of the life at home. It was natural enough, though the
father could not see it so, and he spoke angrily and unwisely to his
son.
But Mrs Calderwood was as proud in her way as Mr Dawson was in his,
and she scorned the thought of keeping the rich man's son to the promise
he had made without leave asked of her. She was also as hard in her way
as he was in his, and forbade the young man to enter her house, and gave
him no chance to disobey her. But in a place like Portie young folks
can meet elsewhere than at home, and one or other of them must be sent
away.
So with Miss Jean's advice and help Elsie was sent to get a year at a
boarding-school, as was wise and right, all her friends in Portie were
given to understand. But she went away without giving back her promise
for all that her mother could say. She went cheerfully enough, "to make
herself fitter to be his wife," she said. But she never returned; a
slow strong fever seized her where she was, and first her mother went to
her, and then Miss Jean, whose heart was sore for them all.
And then Miss Jean did what the mother never would have done. When she
saw that the end was drawing near, she wrote one letter to her nephew
telling him to come and take farewell of his love, and another to his
father telling him that so she had done. All this mattered little
however. For it was doubtful whether the dying girl recognised the
lover who called so wildly on her name. But she died in his arms, and
he went home with her mother and his aunt to Portie and laid her down in
the bleak kirkyard; and then he went away speaking no word to his
father, in his youthful despair and anger, indeed never looking on his
face.
There had been something said, before all this came to pass between
them, of the lad's being sent to London for a while, to learn how
business was done in a great banking-house, one of the partners of which
was a friend of his father; and after a time he was heard of there. But
he did not write to his father directly, and he never drew a shilling of
the money that his father had deposited in his name.
He did not stay long in his place in the London bank, but went away,
leaving no trace behind him, and was lost to them all; and it was long
before his name was spoken by his father again. Even Miss Jean, having
no words of comfort to put with it, never named to him the name of his
son, for whom she knew he was grieving with anger and pain unspeakable.
It was to be doubted, Jean thought, whether these days were not longer,
and drearier, and "waur to thole" than even the days that had followed
the death of the mother of the lad.
But they had to be borne, and he left himself in these days little time
for brooding over his troubles. He devoted himself to business, with
all his old earnestness, and wealth flowed in upon him, and the fear was
strong in his sister's heart, that he was beginning, in the desolation
that had fallen upon him, to love it for its own sake. He added to
Saughleas a few fields on one side, and a farm or two on the other,
which the necessities of the owners had put into the market, at this
time; but it was more to oblige these needy men, than because he wanted
their land. He had the money in hand, he said indifferently to his
sister, and the land would ay bring its price. But he took little
pleasure in Saughleas for a while.
When Geordie had been gone a year and more, his sisters came home from
school. They had been away long, and their father had, as he said, to
make their acquaintance over again. They had changed from merry girls
of fifteen and sixteen, into grown up young ladies,--"fine ladies" their
father called them to their aunt, and a good many people in Portie,
called them "fine ladies" also, for a while. They looked to be fine
ladies, with their London dresses, and London manners, and some folk
added, their "London pride." They held their heads high, and carried
themselves erect and firmly as they walked, and spoke softly and in
"high English," which looked like pride to some of their old friends,
who were more than half afraid of the young ladies of Saughleas, they
said. But it soon came to be known that what looked like pride was more
than half shyness, and as for the "high English," the kindly Scotch fell
very readily from their lips on occasion.
It cannot be said that they made themselves very happy in Saughleas for
a time. They came home in November, and that is a dreary month on the
east coast, indeed all the winter is dreary there. There were gay
doings in the best houses in Portie to welcome them home, and they
enjoyed them well. For they had only been school-girls in London, and
the gayeties they had been permitted to mingle in there, had been mostly
of the kind which are supposed to blend improvement of some sort with
the pleasure to be enjoyed, and though they doubtless valued such
opportunities and made good use of them, both for pleasure and
improvement, the gayeties of Portie were quite different and more to
their taste. They were young and pretty and gay, and the kindness and
the admiration so freely bestowed on them were very pleasant to them
both. But they would have preferred the house in the High-street, where
they had all been born, in these first days, for their home.
Saughleas was dull and dreary in the short winter days, and oh! how they
missed their mother! It was like losing her again, to come home to the
great empty house, which their father left almost before the sun rose
for weeks together, not to return again till the lamps had been lighted
for hours in the wide hall.
And Geordie! When they had been at Saughleas a month or more, their
father had never spoken his name, and when Jean, the eldest and bravest
of the sisters, putting great force upon herself, asked him when her
brother was coming home, he answered so coldly, and with words so hard
and bitter, that her heart sank as she heard. They had known for some
time that something had gone wrong between them. Geordie had told them
that, when he had gone to see them in London; but the sad story of poor
Elsie Calderwood they had never heard. They mourned for their brother,
and longed for his coming home, thinking that the happy days that were
gone would come again with him.
Though the estate of Saughleas was small, the house was both large and
stately. The last owner had put into the house, the money which should
have been given to enrich the land, and make a beginning of the
prosperity of the family which he had hoped to found. So it was like a
castle almost, but it was little like a home.
The two or three great landed proprietors in the countryside were great
people in their own esteem, and in the general esteem also; and George
Dawson, notwithstanding Saughleas, was just the merchant and banker of
the High-street to them--a man much respected in his own place, and he
was not out of place on occasion, at the table of any of them all. But
an interchange of civilities on equal terms between the ladies of the
families was not likely to take place, nor was this greatly to be
desired. It might have been different if their mother had lived, they
said to one another; for in their remembrance of her, she was superior
in every way to any lady of them all. But they were quite content with
the society of Portie, and would have been content with the house in the
High-street as well.
Mr Dawson asked his sister to come and live in his house when his
daughters came home, but she declined to do so. They did not need her
as mistress of the house, and she believed that her influence over them
would be more decided and salutary should she remain in her own house.
They were good bairns, she said, who meant to do right, and though they
might whiles need a word of advice, or a restraining touch, it must be
their own guidance that their father must lippen to, and not hers. And
Auntie Jean was right.
They were good bairns on the whole, as their aunt said, and they were
"bonnie lassies" as well. The first idea that most people had on seeing
them, was that in person, mind, and manners, they were very much alike.
Even their father thought this at first. But it was not long before he
discovered that in most respects they were very different May, the
youngest, was like her mother, "though _nothing like_ so bonny," he told
himself with a sigh. Jean was like her aunt, it was said, but Auntie
Jean herself, and the two or three others who remembered Auntie Jean's
mother as she was before her husband's ship went down, said that the
elder sister was like her grandmother, who had been a far bonnier woman
than ever her daughter had been.
In form and features there was a resemblance between the sisters; May
was the fairer and slighter of the two, and was often called the
prettier. But as time went on the resemblance did not increase. Jean
was the strongest in person and in mind, and the better able of the two
to profit by the discipline, which time and circumstances brought to
them both, and of this difference in character her face gave token to
those who had eyes to see.
They loved each other, and were patient and forbearing with each other
when they did not quite agree as to the course which either wished to
pursue. But when it came about that one must yield her will to the
other, it was May who was made to yield when her will would have led her
into wrong or doubtful paths. But if pleasure were to be given up, or a
distasteful duty done, or if some painful self-denial had to be borne by
one so that the other might escape, such things generally fell to the
lot of Jean.