Fair, through the lattice of yon cloud, the sun
Throws to us, half in stealth, his parting smile.
Night comes anon.
IT was June weather now--warm and full, and a deep peace had fallen
over Allenders. Harry, who was not naturally temperate in anything,
was almost intemperate in his reformation now. He applied himself to
business with devotion, had long consultations with Armstrong every
morning, and repulsed coldly the usual familiarities of Gilbert
Allenders. In his library, they always found the table covered with
estimates and calculations, with expensive schemes for thrift, and
elaborate economics of farming; while out of doors, Harry went blithely
about his fields again, conciliating once more the half-alienated
favour of his workmen, and regaining for himself the elastic vigour
and health, which had begun to be shaken. Agnes sang to her baby all
day long, till the very air within the house grew rich with ballad
fragments. Rose, still a little weary in her heart, and longing
secretly for a new beginning to her old dreams, began to interest
herself in the pleasant pursuits of free young womanhood, and forgot
the family care, as well as her own individual one. Martha sank back
quietly into a temporary repose--was ill for a few days, and afterwards
very quiet--for her frame had been shaken by severe exhaustion; very
different from the natural good hope of common life, was the desperate
stake for which she played; and when the moment, with all its pent-up
and restrained excitement, was past, experience lifted its cold,
prophetic voice again, and she could not choose but hear.
But the gossips at Maidlin Cross, glad to return to their kindlier
opinion--for Harry’s good looks, and naturally gracious manners,
gave them a strong prepossession in his favour--congratulated each
other that Allenders was steady now, and quite another man, and that
“it bid to be” a great comfort to his sister and his wife--for they
unconsciously put Martha before Agnes, doing reverence to the more
absorbing love. And young Mr. Dunlop, seeing Harry’s frank face
brightened by renewed hope and wholesome pleasure, and hearing how
sedulously he had begun to attend to all his concerns, was smitten with
remorse for his rudeness, and brought his mother in state to call on
Mrs. Allenders, which her good-humoured ladyship would have done months
ago but for his restraining. Prosperity and peace returned again, as it
seemed; and Harry’s last thousand was still very little diminished.
But it chanced that Cuthbert Charteris suddenly looked in upon the
astonished household, on the very day of Lady Dunlop’s call. Cuthbert
did not know that this call had a value quite separate from their
pleasure in itself, to the family at Allenders; and he thought the
tremulous agitation of both Agnes and Rose originated in a cause very
different from its real one. So Cuthbert was cold, constrained and
unhappy; scarcely able to conceal his contempt of Mr. Dunlop, and
resolutely declining to remain, even for a single night. They, in
their turn, misunderstood him; they thought he had heard something
unfavourable of Harry, and while they redoubled their attentions to
himself, they overwhelmed him with references to Harry’s goodness, and
stories of the kindness with which all his labourers, and the little
group of cottar wives at Maidlin, regarded Allenders. If Cuthbert had
been sufficiently disengaged from his own engrossing concerns, these
continual defences would have made him fear: as it was, he could think
of nothing but the Rose, which had never seemed so fair in his eyes as
now, when he convinced himself that another was about to bear it away.
Rose did not know what to think of Cuthbert. Had he been indifferent
to her all along? But Rose, with a natural pride in many things,
conjoined the most perfect and unconscious humility in her estimate of
herself; that he should be jealous, never entered into her mind--it was
far easier to believe that he had never “cared;” and Rose blushed even
to acknowledge to herself that she once thought he “cared,” by doubting
it now. Yet there was something in Cuthbert’s eyes--something in the
full, grave look she sometimes met, which filled Rose with a vague
thrill of emotion; and when he was gone she remembered this, and ceased
to comment upon the rest.
About a week after Cuthbert’s call, Harry went to Stirling, taking
Agnes with him. They were going on business--to draw money, of which
Agnes claimed a considerable portion for her household expenses;
and Harry himself, to the great content of all, had invited her to
accompany him. They were quite at ease and quiet at home, and with the
children, who rejoiced in a holiday, had taken a long ramble through
woods and lanes in the afternoon, coming home laden with wild flowers.
Even Martha, amused with Katie’s radiant pleasure, and Violet’s mingled
reverie and mirth, had brightened quite insensibly, and Rose was as
gay as the little girls themselves. They were all seated under the
walnut tree on the lawn when Harry and Agnes returned, and not a shadow
crossed any of them, except the ill-favoured one of Gilbert Allenders,
as he came in at the gate, resolved to stay to dinner whether he was
asked or no.
But the dinner past, and still Harry kept Gilbert steadily at
a distance. They could not sufficiently admire his strength and
resolution, and how bravely he resisted the tempter. Gilbert himself
seemed slightly surprised and baffled; and not a single disconcerted
glance was lost on the rejoicing Agnes, with whom there was only a
single step between the greatest alarm for Harry’s stability, and the
greatest pride and confidence in it.
But when the evening was considerably advanced, and they had all
assembled in the drawing-room, Harry began to talk of what they had
seen and heard in Stirling.
“Who do you think I met, Martha?” said the unthinking Harry. “Dick
Buchanan, my old plague in Glasgow; and what do you think he told
me?--I scarcely can believe it--that our friend Charteris was actually
going to be married to his sister Clemie, a good-natured clumsy girl,
whom I used to see going to school. I could not have expected such a
thing of Charteris.”
And as Harry’s eye rested on Rose, he stopped suddenly, his face
flushing all over with the deepest colour; yet Rose displayed no
motion. A slight start, a momentary paleness, and then she put out
her hand as if to grasp at something, drawing it back by and bye
with an unconscious motion of imagination, as if her prop had pained
her--though she did not say a word.
But her head grew giddy, and the light swam in her darkening eyes;
and constantly in her mind was this impulse to take hold of something
to keep herself from falling. When Gilbert took reluctant leave, and
she rose to bid him good-night, her hand clutched at the back of an
empty chair; and when she went to rest, with a ringing in her ears and
a dimness before her eyes, Rose held by the wall on her way to her own
chamber--not to support herself, though even her form tottered, but to
support her heart, which tottered more.
She did not think, nor ask, nor question anything; she was too much
occupied in this same immediate necessity of holding herself up, and
propping her stricken strength.
“I believe I am a fool,” said Harry, suddenly, when Rose withdrew; “I
never thought--Charteris was here so short a time the other day, and it
is so long since he came before--I never thought of Rose; but she took
it very quietly, Martha. Is she interested, do you think? Will she feel
it? I am sure, for my own part, I always believed that Charteris liked
Rose, and I cannot tell what made me so foolish to-night.”
“Perhaps it was very well,” said Martha; “it must have been told, and
the manner of telling it is a small matter; but Rose, as you say, took
it very quietly. I dare say she will not care about it, Harry.”
Martha knew better--but she thought it well to pass over the new grief
lightly, since it was a grief which could not bear either sympathy or
consolation.
But when Lettie, next morning, prompted by a sudden caprice, ran
“all the way” to the Lady’s Well, to gather some wild roses and the
fragrant meadow-queen for Martha, she saw some one sitting on the stone
where Lady Violet sat, and was only fortified by the bright daylight to
approach. But it was Rose’s muslin gown, and not the silvery garments
of the fairy lady, which lay upon the turf; and Rose was leaning with
both her hands heavily upon the canopy of the well, and looking into
the deep brushwood, as Lettie many a time had looked--though this was
a deeper abstraction than even the long silent reveries of the poetic
child. With a sudden consciousness that there lay some unknown sorrow
here, the little girl came forward shyly, looking up with her wistful
eyes in her sister’s face. It did not seem that she interrupted Rose’s
thoughts, and Violet began silently to gather her flowers. There were
some wild roses, half-opened buds, which could be carried even by a
school girl, without risk of perishing, for one of the “young ladies”
at Blaelodge, whom Lettie liked greatly, and who much desired some
tangible memorial of the place whence the Lady Violet of Lettie’s
oft-repeated story passed away; and a sweet fairy posie of the graceful
queen of the meadow for Martha’s especial gratification, and some
drooping powdery flowers of grass, from which the seed was falling, for
Lettie herself. When they were all gathered, Lettie sat down softly on
the grass at Rose’s feet, and laid the flowers in her lap, and was very
quiet, venturing now and then a wistful glance up to the absorbed face
above her.
And by and by, the heavy leaning of Rose’s arms relaxed, and she leaned
upon her knee instead, and looked down on Violet. “Lettie, I think my
heart will break,” said Rose, with a low sigh; and again she put out
her hand.
She could not say so much to Martha: she could not tell it to another
in all the wide world--for the shy heart would render no reason for
its sudden grief; but she could say it to her little sister, who asked
no reason--who did not speak at all in vain consolation, but who only
looked up, with such a world of innocent sympathy and wonder in her
dark, wistful eyes.
Poor Rose! a hero and martyr to her own pride of womanliness, will
never tell what this blight is--never, if it should kill her--and
she thinks it will kill her, poor, simple heart! Since she heard
“it”--and she never describes to herself more definitely what it was
she heard--she has been in a maze, and never reasoned on it. She cannot
reason on it--we so seldom _think_, after all, either in our joys or
troubles--she only is aware of long trains of musings sweeping through
her mind, like dreams, which place her in the strangest connection
with Cuthbert and Cuthbert’s bride, and bring them continually in her
way; and she always assumes a sad dignity in her fancies, and will do
anything rather than have them believe that this moves her; and then
she tries to think of Harry, and of the family cares and expectations,
to rouse her from this stupor of her own; and getting sick with the
struggle--sick alike in body and in heart--lays down her head upon her
hands, and faintly weeps.
“Now, Lettie, come; they will wonder where we are,” said Rose; and
she dipped her hand in the little marble basin of the Lady’s Well, and
bathed her aching eyes. Lettie, with a visionary awe, bathed hers too,
as if it were an act of worship; and was very sad, in the depths of her
heart.
Rose was a bad dissembler. It was quite impossible to hide from any one
of them that she was very melancholy; but Harry saw less of the truth
than the rest, for Rose struggled valiantly to smile before Harry, and
to keep all her gloom concealed. He was a man, even though he was her
dearest brother. She would suffer anything before she would disclose
her heart to him.
Agnes, troubled and perplexed, not knowing whether to take notice of
Rose’s sorrow or not, paid her all manner of little tender attentions,
as if she had been ill. Martha, asking nothing--for Martha knew very
well that Cuthbert had broken no word, nor had ever definitely _said_
to Rose anything which could give grounds for this sadness--talked
to her sometimes of the common trials which common people bear and
overcome; sometimes awoke her out of a reverie, with a kind hand upon
her shoulder, and a quick word in her ear; employed her all day long
at something; watched her perpetually with a mother’s unwavering care;
but little Lettie, looking wistfully up, with her dark, melancholy
eyes--Lettie, who knew that Rose’s heart was “like to break,” and who
deserted all her play to sit beside her on the carpet, and press close
to her feet, and caress them softly with her hand--Lettie was perhaps
the best comforter of all.
But meanwhile the unconscious Cuthbert wearied himself with
continual business, and thought murderous thoughts of the innocent
young Mr. Dunlop; till his mother, alarmed about his health, prevailed
upon him, with many solicitations, to go away for a month, and travel,
and rest. And Clemie Buchanan, more unconscious still, romped, to the
full heart’s content of a strong joyous girl of sixteen, among the
Argyleshire hills, and reverencing greatly the lofty attainments of
her cousin Cuthbert, would quite as soon have thought of marrying old
Dr. Black, who christened her, and whose sermons she had laboriously
listened to almost every Sabbath-day in all these sixteen years. Clemie
had a sweetheart of her own--a young merchant, like her brothers;
and Cuthbert, as he travelled southwards, cast longing looks towards
Stirling, and scarcely could deny himself another glance at Allenders;
but looks do not travel over straths and rivers, and Rose never knew
the affectionate longings, which could not prevail with themselves to
relinquish her remembrance and her name.