General Murray, the only son of Sir Patrick, had, like his father
before him, married at a very early age, so that his eldest daughter
was not more than twenty-two years younger than himself, and he was,
when he married for the second time a wife younger than Margaret, a
man but little over forty, in the prime of his life and strength, as
handsome as he had ever been, and attractive enough to take any girl's
fancy. The second wife had been poor, but she had been noble, and the
entail of the old hereditary estate, upon which stood at once the
old Castle and the new unfinished palace, was broken in order that
it might be secured to the children of Lady Lilias, whether sons or
daughters. Who could doubt that so young and blooming a bride, out of
a well-conditioned family, would bring both in abundant measure to the
old house? Margaret and Jean, the two daughters of the first marriage,
were left in the south country in possession of their mother's little
estate when their father began life for the second time. They felt
themselves a little injured, shut out of their natural rights, as was
natural, and held themselves aloof from the new _ménage_, which was
established joyously in the old Castle with every augury of happiness.
But when, no more than a year after, the blooming young wife was
carried to the church-yard, and a second poor little Lilias left in her
stead, the two sisters flew, with many a compunction and self-reproach,
to the infant's cradle. Margaret especially, who, though she was young,
was already disposed to believe that everything went wrong when she was
absent, reproached herself bitterly for not being on the spot to watch
over her father's wife. It would not have happened had she been there,
she felt convinced, and this perfectly visionary self-blame no doubt
helped to give a certain bias to her already peculiar character. "I
must do my best for the daughter. I did not do it for the mother," she
acquired a habit of saying when any other career was suggested to her.
She did not feel quite sure that she was not her father's elder sister,
so confusing were their relations. He was broken down with grief and
disappointment, and she took charge of him at once, and of his home.
It would perhaps be going too far to say that this was the reason why
she did not marry. Had any great love arisen in her heart, no doubt
Margaret would, like other people, have considered it her duty to obey
its dictates; but, when suitors to whom she was indifferent came, Miss
Murray metaphorically pushed them aside out of her path, with a curt
intimation that she had no time to think of such nonsense. Miss Jean,
who was of a sentimental turn, had not so easily escaped the common
dangers of youth, but she did so in a more romantic way, poor lady, by
loving, unfortunately, a young hero who had not a penny, and who died
in an obscure Indian battle when she was a little more than twenty.
This was shortly after the time when the infant Lilias was thrown upon
her sisters' hands, and it was enough to determine the celibacy of the
gentle young woman, who was indeed an old maid born: an old maid more
tender and indulgent than any mother, an old maid who is still young,
and can enter into the troubles of childhood and youth not only by
recollection of her own, but in the sense of actual understanding and
fellowship as one who had herself never thrown quite behind her the
state of youth or even childhood. The more perfectly developed are apt
to smile at this arrested being, but there is nothing in the world more
delightful, tender, and sweet.
Between these two, Lilias' childhood had been passed. Her father was
less at home than ever after this destruction of his hopes. He held
some military appointments, and saw a good deal of service. In the
intervals, when he returned to Scotland, his young daughter adored and
made a playmate of him, his elder daughter kept him in order. Never was
a man taken better care of; when the breach with Sir Patrick happened,
the ladies stood by him with all the determined partisanship of women.
He was living with them then on their little estate of the south,
in the little feminine house called Gowanbrae, which had been their
mother's, and where they had taken the baby after her mother's death.
So long as they had that independent house, which they preferred, what
was the Castle of Murkley to them? When Sir Patrick died, they "came
north," as they expressed it, with the general, to show Lilias her
home, and to acquaint her at first hand with those glories of the
family which they pretended to scorn, but were in reality very proud of.
"All that money might have been in your pocket if your grandfather had
been a man of sense," Miss Margaret said, pointing to the bleached
walls of the unfinished palace.
But Jean and Lilias had both a wondering awe and admiration for folly
which was so magnificent. Lilias was sixteen when she saw it first. She
uttered a great cry of admiration and delight.
"I should like to save up every penny and finish it and live in it,"
she cried.
Her father shook his handsome white head: but Miss Margaret "had no
patience with such nonsense," as she said.
"Live in it!--what income do you think you would require to live in it?
The Queen has not so grand a house," said the elder sister, with the
pride that aped indignation, "except perhaps Windsor Castle and the
palace in London. Taymouth is not much bigger. You would want fifty
thousand a year at the very least penny. All we have for the whole
family on both sides would not so much as furnish it."
"Unless," said the general, with a laugh, "you make a great match, my
little Lily, and get your duke to do it for you--or perhaps a Glasgow
man would do?"
"A child of _our_ bringing up would not be likely to demean herself so
far, I hope," said Miss Margaret, with emphasis.
"A Glasgow man!" cried Miss Jean with a quaver of horror. "No, no,
Lilias will never come down to that."
The general liked to gibe at his daughters; perhaps, though they were
his daughters, he was not without some of that contempt for them which
men of all ages feel towards unmarried women.
"I have seen some fine fellows at Glasgow," he said, "and rolling in
money. I will look out for one, and bring him for your inspection,
Lilias. But, Meg and Jean, you must not prejudice my candidate--you
must let the child choose."
"Do, papa--it will be fun!" cried Lilias.
Miss Margaret had a high idea of her father's rights. She would not
make any direct protest, as Jean was anxious to do, but she took her
little sister aside when they returned home.
"My dear," she said, "gentlemen say many things that women-folk do not
agree in, and papa is fond of his joke. You must not suppose that is
all in earnest, that way he has of talking."
Lilias was "as quick as a needle," her sisters said. She made a
momentary pause, and then said, with a laugh,
"About the Glasgow man?"
"About any man," cried Miss Margaret. "My darling, gentlemen will be
gentlemen, even when they are your father. They think those sort of
pleasantries just innocent, but they are not pretty for a girl; you
must remember that. Jean and I have never let you hear anything of the
kind. A girl, above all things, Lilias, must be unspotted from the
world."
"Unspotted from the world!" the girl repeated, with a half-startled
look at her sister; and then she added, with a little emotion, "Oh,
what bonnie words, Margaret!"
"Yes, they are bonnie words; and they are better than bonnie, for
you know where they come from. Look at Jean, if you want to know the
meaning of them. You are just our child--we would like you to be like
that. Papa says nothing that is not worth your attention, but he likes
his joke, and when all's said he's a gentleman, Lilias, not like you
and me."
Lilias gave her sister a kiss, throwing her arms round her neck.
Margaret would say, "Hoot!" or "Toot!" when thus embraced, but yet
she liked it. "I understand," the girl said. But when she was by
herself she laughed a little at her old sister's delicacy. She did
not think there was any particular harm in the general's joke. It
seemed to her in her childish self-sufficiency that she understood
papa (who certainly was a man, there could be no doubt of it) better
than Margaret and Jean did. She was not herself a bit shocked. She
thought, on the whole, she would like to have the Glasgow man up to be
looked at; it would be fun. And then the girl asked herself, with a
blush, whether fun of this sort was incompatible with keeping yourself
"unspotted from the world." She repeated these words over and over to
herself for some time after. Yes, Margaret was right; when you looked
at Jean, you could understand what that meant. Margaret herself was
of much more consequence than Jean, but she was not so unspotted from
the world. Lilias had in her mind a sense of the pure and perfect
thing which it was her sister's ideal she herself should be, mingled
oddly with a little soft derision of those sisters of which she was
ashamed. They were old maids. She felt as if there might be a larger
life which would not be afraid of any touch from without, and yet would
be stainless: and then she grew red with indignation at herself for
presuming to smile at Margaret and Jean. A lily, like her name, all
sweetness and fragrance and purity, holding itself high, aloof from
every soil--she understood that: that was what they wanted her to be.
Her heart swelled with a touching humility, yet visionary emotion,
desiring to attain, yet wondering how she could be supposed capable
of so sweet a perfection; and then she laughed a little gentle laugh,
which, it is to be feared, was at some little peculiarities of theirs.
Was it quite impossible that the fun should be had in addition? She did
justice to the ideal, but----
The general thought his lily perfect, whatever she pleased to do,
and the girl knew this very well, and had a little disdain for his
judgment, though she adored himself. She had thus grown already into
an independent creature, with a judgment of her own, bringing them all
secretly to the bar, and forming her opinion in a way which bewildered
these elder people who had brought her up. She was not an echo of
any one of them, as at her age she might have been expected to be.
She was all herself, and took nothing now for granted. To be sure,
it was chiefly Margaret who noticed this. The general was not given
to analysis of character, and thought his child the perfection of
everything a girl ought to be, and Miss Jean was much of the same frame
of mind, though a breath of anxiety would ruffle her soul from time to
time. The household on the whole was unanimous enough in the worship
of Lilias. As for their father, he was something of a trouble to the
ladies. The sense that he was a gentleman, a being she understood but
imperfectly, gave Miss Jean a certain embarrassment in his presence.
She played all her music to him with a wondering doubt, which she never
solved, as to whether he liked it, or if it was a bore to him, and felt
that papa was far younger than herself, and that there was no telling
with so handsome a man what was the next step he might take. Margaret
felt him with still more force to be her junior, and kept his house
much as she might have done for a widowed nephew--that was the kind of
relationship which would have been natural between them. They sometimes
speculated between themselves whether there was any chance that he
might marry again. He was only sixty, very young-looking, in reality
very young; as active as he had ever been, a man who could ride all
day, and, if need were, dance all night as if he had been twenty. "I
never see the like of him wherever I go," Miss Margaret said. But then
he had nothing to settle, he was himself but a life-renter in Murkley,
and the fortune that had always been expected from old Sir Patrick had
gone to the dogs--or, at least, to a stranger.
The subject of these questions solved them all very summarily one
winter evening by dying. He had not been ill. He had a slight
cold--that, and nothing more. He had taken a hot drink to please
Margaret, and had put his feet in hot water when he went to rest. But
the next morning he was found dead in his bed. It was a very great
shock to his children; but perhaps, when the shock was over, Margaret
and Jean felt, though they would have thought it dreadful to say so,
that an embarrassing charge was removed from them, and that perhaps
it was for the best. For Lilias, who was the chief object of their
thoughts, it was scarcely to be doubted that it was for the best. There
would be no longer any contention, any struggle in her life. Not that
there had ever been a struggle. Margaret was too judicious and the
general too good-natured for that; but still, an element so out of
accord with all the principles of her education as her father, with
his free and easy ways, his experiences of the camp and the world, was
perhaps--better away. Margaret put it in the right way, in the only
permissible way, when she said, "Providence is inscrutable. A young
man, comparatively speaking, and younger in his ways than any of us.
And oh, so like to live! Nobody would have thought but that he would
see us all out. It is a terrible loss to us, especially to Lilias. She
was bound up in him, poor thing--perhaps more bound up in him than was
good for her--and a gentleman is always an interruption to education.
Poor thing! we must just put her back to her work as soon as she is
able. It will be the best thing to take off her thoughts."
As for Lilias, she did not want anything to take off her thoughts.
For three months nearly she cultivated everything that could make her
think of him, and keep up the sombre current. She retired to her own
room, and would stay there for hours, weeping, and keeping herself in
the atmosphere of affliction. At the end of that time the monotony of
sorrow began to press severely upon her young mind, and she was glad to
take to her lessons for a change; and thus gradually it came about that
she grew light-hearted again by unnoticed stages. When she thought of
dear papa now, it was sometimes with a little guilty sense that she had
forgotten him, partly with a half-fictitious representation to herself
that it was "far better" for him. Perhaps, indeed, it was so: but few
of us are fully able to believe that death is an advantage. And it was
very hard to realize that it would be an advantage to the general. He
had liked his life in Murkley so much; everything (except the want of
the money) had suited him so well. He liked his newspaper, his fishing
when the weather permitted, his old friends, his native place. To think
of him as denuded of all these things, and living under such different
conditions, was dreadfully difficult. And it seemed hard upon him to
be shut out of the house of his fathers so long, and to have so short
a time to enjoy it in--to be Sir George only for a year, just to be
permitted to take possession, to settle down: and then in a moment to
have to resign it all for a condition in which he would no longer be
Sir George, or derive any gratification from the possession of Murkley.
But such thoughts as these were not the sort of thoughts that she ought
to entertain, Lilias knew.
And so time went on, and the summer came back again, and happiness
returned to the girl's heart. The bonds of subjection to her sisters
was drawn a little closer, but it was so tender a tyranny that she
never resented it. It was a little hard, indeed, to be shut out from
all the innocent little parties at which Katie Seton figured, who was
younger than she; but then there was that reserved for her which would
never be in Katie Seton's power. And when the clouds of grief had
blown away from her sky, and she began to realize herself as the lady
of Murkley, it cannot be denied that there was many a flutter in the
heart of Lilias. Had Murkley been the great estate it ought to have
been, and had she been a rich heiress, she probably would not have
been half so much in love with her own position. There was a romance
in it that charmed the imagination. An heiress of poverty, with her
little old house, which was half as old as the Murrays--and what a
thing that was to say!--her tiny little estate, which, though there
was so little of it, was the original estate, land that had been in
the hands of the Murrays since the Jameses reigned in Scotland; her
great name and her small possessions delighted the girl. It did not
occur to her to think that Margaret and Jean came before herself in
the honours of the family. They were no competitors of hers--they were
aunts rather than sisters--they were their mother's children, the Miss
Murrays of Gowanbrae, in Dumfriesshire; whereas she was Lilias Murray
of Murkley. It was a curious position. She was like a young princess
whose youth had been confided to the care of two old ladies of honour
closely connected with the royal house, yet not altogether belonging to
it. Naturally Miss Margaret at forty looked an old lady to the little
princess of seventeen. They had done their best all their lives to
impress upon her the greatness of her position, and she took it in most
innocently, most sincerely. It is so natural for a young creature to
feel herself the central point, the most interesting figure, especially
when this has been impressed upon her all her life. She recognized
it fully, yet with a naturalness and sweet submission to the powers,
which were over her, yet all subservient to her interests, which took
every undesirable element out of this faith. It gave Lilias unbounded
material for dreams, and it gave her a youthful visionary dignity,
which, perhaps, had it been analyzed, would have been found to be a
little absurd by close critics, but which was very pretty in the girl,
who was so perfectly sincere in her fancy. She formed endless plans as
to what she was to do with that romantic palace, which was hers, yet
which was nobody's. Of course the first thing was to fit it up as it
was meant to be fitted up, and live in it with graceful magnificence,
holding a maiden court. And Lilias would dream of vast sums coming into
her hands, of treasures found in some old chest or secret nook in the
old house, of far-off, unknown cousins, who would send fabulous sums
from afar to restore Murkley to its greatness. It is so easy to imagine
benefactors of this kind--a novel-writer can invent them without giving
himself or herself the least trouble, much more the imagination of a
girl. Lilias was as indifferent to wealth as it was possible to be. A
single gold piece all her own, to do what she pleased with, especially
if she might spend it without putting down the items of her expenditure
in a note-book, was wealth to the young creature: but she knew just
so much as to know that it would require what she vaguely called,
following the phraseology of her sister, "thousands" to complete the
great house which her grandfather had left unfinished. If it ever
should happen that she could do that! In the long summer evenings,
especially when her sisters had gone out, and she was left alone, she
would dream out whole histories of how the money might be supplied.
What romances these would have made had she written them down! She
would figure forth to herself a stranger arriving suddenly some evening
in the gloaming--it was always in the gloaming, in the uncertainty
of light which suits women--not a handsome or interesting stranger,
not the tall hero, with dark eyes and curling hair, who, Lilias felt
assured, was the only man she would ever "care for," but a shabby
stranger, a man one would never look twice at, with all the appearance
of a nobody. Margaret and Jean were never rude to any one: they would
receive him very politely, and request him to come in to the fire, if
it was winter--and somehow it was always winter in these imaginations.
Then he would open his story to them, how he was a man who had been
much indebted to "the late Murkley," or to old Sir Patrick; or who
was a cousin-german of the old baronet, though perhaps the ladies had
never heard of him; how he had hoped and struggled to pay his debt, but
had never been able (this was to try them, and Lilias felt sure all
along that she for one would know better). But Margaret and Jean would
believe the story fully. They would be very sorry for him; they would
try immediately to think what they could do for him. If he professed to
be a relation, they would trace out his claim and satisfy themselves,
and then they would put all their resources at his disposal.
Lilias delighted in making up the dialogues which would be appropriate
to the occasion. She would picture to herself how Jean would clasp her
hands and cry, "Bless me!" as the stranger piled up his agony; and how
Margaret would say,
"Of course you will stay here till you hear of something better. We
are not rich, unfortunately because of divisions in the family, which
you shall hear about further on, but for the moment that's neither
here nor there. And we have little influence; for we have lived out of
the world, having our young sister to bring up, and being fond of the
country; but what can be done, we will do."
Lilias pictured herself as sitting silent, seeing the _dessous des
cartes_, and convinced in her own mind that all the time this shabby
old fellow was a millionnaire, like so many people who have figured
in old plays and novels, and, after a few scenes of this description,
there would come a crisis, and he would throw off his disguise, and
produce a pocket-book with "thousands" in it, and tell them that for
all his life it had been his ambition to see New Murkley finished, and
the family raised to its old grandeur. "I have neither kith nor kin but
yourselves," the old gentleman always said, "and all I have shall be
yours; only be as kind to me now I am rich as you were when I was poor."
It was not quite so easy to manage this scene as the first one; for
Lilias could not quite assure herself that Margaret's displeasure at
being taken-in might not overbalance the satisfaction of receiving
so unexpected an advantage. But it ended by her own intervention and
a vague tableau of happiness and union. How often she went over this
story! She became, in imagination, much attached to this old cousin.
She seemed to know him better than any one about her. She would even
make investigations into his life abroad, and get him to tell her
stories of the things that had happened to him. Sometimes he would have
lost his wife and an only child; sometimes he would be an old bachelor,
always faithful to the memory of some grand-aunt whose portrait was in
the library. It was a lady of the time of Queen Anne whom Lilias had
hit upon as the beloved of this old gentleman, but what did a century
or so matter! She never found the mistake out.
This was her favourite way of finishing New Murkley, and restoring the
family. But now and then, it cannot be denied, that there would gleam
across her mind a recollection of her father's suggestion. A Glasgow
man! In novels it was generally a Manchester man who took this part.
Lilias supposed they were about the same, but her mind did not play
with this idea. It flashed across her, and made her blush or made
her indignant. It did not attract her as the old relation did. There
is something in heiress-ship which changes a girl's feeling in this
respect; the idea of getting everything from a lover, from a husband,
was not pleasant to her. If she ever married, and this idea was not
one that the girl did more than contemplate furtively for a moment,
it would be without any thought of advantage. But the old cousin was
a delightful romance. And there were other expedients besides this
which now and then came in to vary the matter when she was tired of
elaborating her first fancy; people whose fortunes had been founded on
some help given by a Murray would step in; or even there might be boxes
of treasure found in the old cellars, or buried in the ghost's walk.
Who can ever tell what may happen? At seventeen everything is possible.