DOVE IN HER SORROW.
So they were parted these two young and loving hearts in the full
flush of their tenderness, hope, and affection; and Dove's home was,
to her, a broken home from thenceforward. Therein were an empty
room, a vacant chair--ever a vacant place. A species of living death
seemed to have been among them; a familiar voice was hushed, and a
well-known footstep had gone forth to return no more; and the heart
of the young girl was exceedingly sorrowful.
The sudden disappearance of Gillian had to be accounted for to
friends, to whom Mr. Gainswood answered in general terms, that, in
consequence of his father's death, he had gone abroad, and would
probably emigrate. A few there were who, with honest interest in the
lad whom they loved, inquired after his welfare from time to time;
but after a while even they ceased to do so, and the very existence
of Gillian seemed to be forgotten, or committed to oblivion.
Before friends and visitors, especially such a close observer as her
particular ally and gossip, Flora Stuart, poor Dove had to make great
efforts to preserve appearances, and seem to be still in her former
happy spirits; but to Flora, and even to Mr. Gainswood, dull and
obtuse as he was in all that pertained to tenderness or sympathy, it
was evident that Dove's gentle nature was changing. Her piano was
never opened, her music lay unused, and when left to herself, she
fell into long reveries of silence and abstraction.
From these she would seem to awaken with a half-startled air, and
with her dark blue eyes dilated, her manner excited, would begin to
talk rapidly about anything that came to hand, as if to lull the
suspicions to which her silent reverie gave rise.
At times she was quiet, gentle, and without will; at others, her
temper, which had been so charming from its sweetness and softness,
became irritable, captious, and wayward. This made Mr. Gainswood
occasionally sharp and harsh, as it worried him, and he cursed
Gillian Lamond all the more bitterly that he could only do so in the
secrecy of his own heart; and this bitterness to the absent increased
when an eminent physician gently hinted that unless great care was
taken with Dove, whose ailment was solely mental, she might go into a
decline; and in that event, thought Gideon Gainswood, to what end, or
of what avail would be all the riches that, without scruple or pity
to others, he had been garnering up for years!
Yet, compunction for the mischief he had wrought, had he none. He
had gone too far to recede, nor would he, even if he could have done
so.
Days passed on and became weeks, and the weeks grew into months, and
yet no message, letter, or tidings came of the absent one; and
meanwhile, Lord Campsie, encouraged by the countenance of her father,
for whom he nevertheless had the most profound contempt, had the
peculiarly bad taste to continue his visits, and annoy her by his
presence and attentions.
Of her fancy, as he called it, for Gillian, Campsie was not in the
least jealous; he did not love enough to be so; but idleness, ennui,
and want of the "ready," were his chief spurs to the present pursuit.
Love-making would fill up what he was wont to call his "period of
expatriation in Edinburgh;" and at this phrase Mr. Gainswood could
not resist the little and sardonic grimace which served him usually
for a smile, as he thought of how his lordship's ancestor, stout old
William of Kilsythe, who fell by King James's side at Flodden, or the
later William who fought at Dunblane, would have truncheoned him for
using such a term.
"I have the game in my own hands now, Gainswood, as that fellow
Lamond has bolted," his lordship would sometimes say, "over the wine
and walnuts."
"Of course, my lord," the other would reply, with his feeble smile,
for even to him it was evident that the heir of Kilsythe made but
little progress.
"Oh, yes, I don't despair, don't you know, of having her yet. Wine,
women, and luck always change, according to a Portuguese proverb."
"Of course, my lord, only a few months' delicate attention--you see
she is in mourning yet--are necessary as an honourable and necessary
sacrifice to time and appearances; we all live more or less for
appearances."
"Here in this sanctimonious hole, by Jove, you do!" was the courteous
response of my Lord Campsie, who in his own languid way was perhaps
falling in love with Dove's person as well as her purse, and could
find no pleasanter mode of passing the afternoons when he was not
hunting, playing, or at drill on the seashore, than in her society,
though to any one possessed of keener perceptions, it would have been
evident to him that he made no progress.
Dove was too remarkable a girl not to have many admirers, whom
Gillian's perpetual presence and society had somewhat "scared,"
though she gave no encouragement to one more than another, while her
love for him rendered her indifferent to them all. But now all her
elasticity had departed, and Dove was ever sad and triste.
"She'll get over it in time," the Elder would growl to himself.
But she did not get over it "in time."
She had a little respite from annoyance, when Lord Campsie, alleging
that he had become greatly bored by the utter emptiness of the town
in the summer months, donned a plum-coloured velvet knickerbocker
suit, and departed with Sir Hayward Carington in his yacht to shoot
and fish in Norway ostensibly, but in reality to keep out of the way
of "the chosen people," who held so much of his blue paper, that even
Gideon Gainswood was at his wit's end to get matters squared.
Sir Hayward's invitation was extended to the Fair One from St. John's
Wood, over whose little bills for diamond bracelets, &c., Gainswood
groaned in a spirit of avarice, not reprehension.
"I am a great believer in luck," said Campsie, in a letter written at
Christiania; "it is a divinity we often have to worship in our set,
and, by Jove, Gainswood, you're a trump, don't you know. Life to me
has ever been a kind of merry-go-round, and things always come right
in the end somehow. Moses, Aaron, and all the rest of them are
pretty familiar with my noble autograph, my expectations, and all
that sort of thing, so I never worry about a bill for six hundred
falling due when I have only a sixpence to meet it. I always pull
through on settling day."
And yet to a creature so brainless and heedless as this he would
entrust Dove's happiness. As for her dowry he would take means to
secure that pretty tightly.
When Campsie returned from his partially enforced voyage among the
fiords, that which poor Dove deemed her persecution began afresh, and
even her general patient endurance was sorely tested, and every
attempt was made to hurry her to, and through, scenes in which, a
young girl though she was, she had not the slightest interest.
Pic-nic parties with the band and regimental drag, with _carte
blanche_ to invite whom she chose; proposed riding parties, and
yachting excursions in Sir Hayward's schooner (the pride of Cowes) to
the castle on the Bass, to the Priory on the Isle of May, round the
Bell Rock, and even to the Fame Islands, were all declined by Dove,
though she was a good sailor and expert horsewoman. Why? She saw,
or feared, that Lord Campsie admired, and was learning to love
her--or thought he was--and knew that her father was slavishly--oh,
how slavishly!--obsequious to him.
"Rum girl--eccentric girl! What does it all mean?" asked his
lordship, who detested to be much troubled about any thing.
"The girl is mad--blind to her own interests," thought her father;
"and yet I have removed effectually the cause of her contumacy. It
hath been a dispensation of Providence to give me a child so
fractious."
So Campsie began to be bored again, and said abruptly one day, as he
reined up his horse in the street:
"I am going on leave, Gainswood, old man."
"Leave again, my lord?" asked the lawyer.
Campsie muttered under his moustache something with reference to a
pot of money he had "put on the winner of the late Gold Cup at Ascot,
and how Drawler of the Blues wouldn't stump up."
Mr. Gainswood thought shrewdly that the Fair One with the golden hair
was sweeping him away with her for a time, yet he said:
"So sorry, my lord, to lose your society--all the more, that nothing
is settled anent that which is so near our hearts; but the
All-seeing-Eye knoweth what is for the best."
"Canting old beggar!" thought Campsie, but he replied:
"Oh, all in good time. You helped me over that pinch at the Derby,
for which, thanks. Keep your eye on our little Dove; I shall be
away, and the enterprising cousin is away, so don't let Shoddy and
Co. take the field against me."
"Shoddy and Co., my lord?" asked the lawyer.
"Oh, I mean those priggish little barrister fellows that come about
your house, and blow themselves up like the bull-frog in the
fable--the 'Young Reekies,' as Dove calls them--members of the mutual
admiration society, who deem themselves the swells of the village in
the north; so ta, ta, old fellow, till I return;" and touching his
bay with the spur, he cantered laughingly away.
His temporary absence relieved Dove again; but the girl's spirits
seldom or never rose, and she ever preferred solitude to society.
"Nothing seems changed but me!" Dove would mutter, as she sat alone,
and looked from the windows on the same scene that met the languid
gaze of Campsie, on the afternoon of his first visit. Setting beyond
the wooded ridges of Corstorphine, the evening sun was as bright, the
sky as blue and cloudless, as it used to be in the dear old days when
Gillian was with her. The woods were less green, for autumn was
mellowing them, and the golden grain had been shorn and gathered on
the upland slopes; the crows were wheeling and cawing above the
ancient rookeries in the Dean Hollow, where the river brawled over
its rocky bed, and sometimes fell in thunder over its broad white
weir, and the last sweet songs of the birds filled the air with
melody, just as they were wont to do when she and Gillian were
together, and oh where, she asked in her heart, was Gillian now!
Aware that nothing lasts for ever, Gideon Gainswood awaited some
change in her, with that, which for him, was wonderful patience;
while, young girl-like, Dove's love for the absent seemed too holy,
pure, and sacred a thing to be "trotted" forth, as it sometimes was,
upbraidingly in the light of day. She shrunk from the roughness of
his scornful taunts, and took refuge in tears and silence.
Little indeed could she imagine all that Gillian, with his
antecedents and hopes, the tenor of his past life, high education,
bearing, and accomplishments, was undergoing now.