Cosmo ran down the stairs, and out of the gate of Madame Roche’s house,
much too greatly excited to think of returning to his little room. The
discovery was so sudden and so extraordinary that the lad was quite
unable to compose his excitement or collect his thoughts. Strange
enough, though Mary of Melmar had been so much in his mind, he had never
once, until this day, associated her in the smallest degree with the
beautiful old lady of St. Ouen. When he began to think of all the
circumstances, he could not account to himself for his extraordinary
slowness of perception. At, least a score of other people, totally
unlikely and dissimilar, had roused Cosmo’s hopes upon his journey.
Scarcely a place they had been in which did not afford the imaginative
youth a glimpse somewhere of some one who might be the heroine; yet here
he had been living almost by her side without a suspicion, until a
sudden confidence, given in the simplest and most natural manner,
disclosed her in a moment--Mary of Melmar! He had known she must be
old--he had supposed she must have children--but it was strange,
overpowering, a wild and sudden bewilderment, to find in her the mother
of Desirée and Marie.
Cosmo did not go home to his little room--he hurried along the narrow
streets of St. Ouen, carried on by the stress and urgency of his own
thoughts. Then he emerged upon the river side, where even the
picturesque and various scene before him failed to beguile his own
crowding fancies. He saw without seeing the river boats, moored by the
quay, the Norman fishermen and market-women, the high-gabled houses,
which corresponded so pleasantly with those high caps and characteristic
dresses, the whole bright animation and foreign coloring of the scene.
In the midst of it all he saw but one figure, a figure which somehow
belonged to it, and took individuality and tone from this
surrounding;--Mary of Melmar! but not the pensive, tender Mary of that
sweet Scottish country-side, with all its streams and woodlands--not a
Mary to be dreamt of any longer on the leafy banks of Tyne, or amid
those roofless savage walls of the old Strength of Norlaw. With an
unexpressed cry of triumph, yet an untellable thrill of disappointment,
the lad hurried along those sun-bright banks of Seine. It was this scene
she belonged to; the quaint, gray Norman town, with its irregular roofs
and gables, its cathedral piling upward to a fairy apex those marvelous
pinnacles and towers, its bright provincial costume and foreign tints of
color, its river, bright with heavy picturesque boats, and floating
baths, and all the lively life of a French urban stream. It was not that
meditative breadth of country, glorious with the purple Eildons and
brown waters, sweet with unseen birds and burns, where the summer
silences and sounds were alike sacred, and where the old strongholds lay
at rest like old warriors, watching the peace of the land. No--she was
not Mary of Melmar--she was Madame Roche de St. Martin, the beautiful
old lady of St. Ouen.
When Cosmo’s thoughts had reached this point, they were suddenly
arrested by the sight of Cameron, standing close to the edge of the
quay, looking steadily down. His remarkable figure, black among the
other figures on that picturesque river-side--his fixed, dark face,
looking stern and authoritative as a face in profile is apt to look--his
intense, yet idle gaze down the weather-stained, timber-bound face of
the river-pier, startled his young companion at first into sudden
terror. Cosmo had, till this moment, forgotten Cameron. His friendship
and sympathy woke again, with a touch of alarm and dread, which made him
sick. Cameron!--religious, enthusiastic, a servant of God as he was,
what was the disappointed man, in the shock of his personal suffering,
about to do? Cosmo stood behind, unseen, watching him. The lad did not
know what he feared, and knew that his terror was irrational and
foolish, but still could not perceive without a pang that immovable
figure, gazing down into the running river, and could not imagine but
with trembling what might be in Cameron’s thoughts. He was of a race to
which great despairs and calamities were congenial. His blood was fiery
Celtic blood, the tumultuous pulses of the mountaineer. Cosmo felt his
heart beat loud in his ears as he stood watching. Just then one of the
women he had been in the habit of buying flowers from, perceived Cameron
and went up to him with her basket. He spoke to her, listened to her,
with a reckless air, which aggravated Cosmo’s unreasonable alarm; the
lad even heard him laugh as he received a pretty bouquet of spring
flowers, which he had doubtless ordered for Marie. The woman went away
after receiving payment, with a somewhat doubtful and surprised face.
Then Cameron began to pull the pretty, delicate blossoms asunder, and
let them fall one by one into the river--one by one--then as the number
lessened, leaf by leaf, scattering them out of his fingers with an
apparent determination of destroying the whole, quite unconscious of the
wistful eyes of two little children standing by. When the last petal had
fallen into the river, and was swept down under the dark keel of one of
the boats, the Highlander turned suddenly away--so suddenly, indeed,
that Cosmo did not discover his disappearance till he had passed into
the little crowd which hung about a newly-arrived vessel lower down the
quay;--his step was quick, resolute, and straightforward--he was going
home.
And then Cosmo, brought by this means to real ground, once more began to
think, as it was impossible to forbear thinking, over all the strange
possibilities of the new events which had startled him so greatly. If
Marie had not been married--if Cameron had wooed her and won her--if,
strangest chance of all, it had thus happened that the poor Highland
student, all unwitting of his fortune had come to be master of Melmar!
As he speculated, Cosmo held his breath, with a sudden and natural
misgiving. He thought of Huntley in Australia--his own generous,
tender-hearted brother. Huntley, who meant to come home and win Melmar,
and who already looked upon himself as its real master--Huntley, whose
hopes must be put to an absolute and instant conclusion, and were
already vain as the fancies of a child. He thought of his mother at home
in Norlaw, thinking of the future which waited her son, and refusing to
think of the woman who had inflicted upon her the greatest sufferings of
her life--he thought of Patie, who, though much less concerned, had
still built something upon the heirship of Melmar. He thought of the
sudden change to the whole family, who, more or less unconsciously, had
reckoned upon this background of possible enrichment, and had borne
their real poverty all the more magnanimously, in consideration of the
wealth which was about to come--and a sudden chill came to the lad’s
heart. Strange perversity! Cosmo had scorned the most distant idea of
Huntley’s heirship, so long as it was possible; but now that it was no
longer possible, a compunction struck him. This prospect, which cheered
Huntley in his exile, and put spirit into his labor--this, which
encouraged the Mistress, for her son’s sake, to spare and to toil--this,
which even furthered the aims of Patie in his Glasgow foundery--this it
was _his_ ungracious task to turn into vanity and foolishness. His step
slackened unconsciously, his spirit fell, a natural revulsion seized
him. Madame Roche de St. Martin--the poor sick Marie, who loved only
herself and her worthless French husband, who doubtless now would find
his way back to her, and make himself the real Lord of Melmar! Alas,
what a change from Cosmo’s picturesque and generous dreams among the old
walls of Norlaw! When he thought of the vagabond Frenchman, whose
unknown existence had made Cameron miserable, Cosmo made an involuntary
exclamation of opposition and disgust. He forgot _that_ Mary of Melmar
who was now an imaginary and unsubstantial phantom; he even forgot the
beautiful old lady who had charmed him unawares--he thought only of the
French Marie and her French husband, the selfish invalid and the
worthless wanderer who had deserted her. Beautiful Melmar, among its
woods and waters, to think it should be bestowed thus!
Then Cosmo went on, in the natural current of his changed thoughts, to
think of the present family, the frank and friendly Joanna, the unknown
brother whom bowed Jaacob respected as a virtuoso, and who, doubtless,
firmly believed himself the heir--the father who, though an enemy, was
still a homeborn and familiar countryman. Well, _that_ household must
fall suddenly out of prosperity and wealth into ruin--his own must
forego at once a well-warranted and honorable hope--all to enrich a
family of St. Ouen, who knew neither Melmar nor Scotland, and perhaps
scorned them both! And it was all Cosmo’s doing!--a matter deliberately
undertaken--a heroical pursuit for which he had quite stepped out of his
way! The lad was quite as high-minded, generous, even romantic, in the
streets of St. Ouen as he had been in his favorite seat of meditation
among the ruins of Norlaw; but somehow, at this moment, when he had just
succeeded in his enterprise, he could not manage to raise within his own
heart all the elevated sentiments which had inspired it. On the
contrary, he went slowly along to his lodgings, where he should have to
communicate the news to Cameron, feeling rather crest-fallen and
discomfited--not the St. George restoring a disinherited Una, but rather
the intermeddler in other men’s matters, who gets no thanks on any hand.
To tell Cameron, who had spent the whole fiery torrent of that love
which it was his nature to bestow, with a passionate individual fervor,
on one person and no more--upon the capricious little French Marie, who
could not even listen, to its tale! Cosmo grew bitter in his thoughts as
he took down the key of his chamber from the wall in Baptiste’s room and
received a little note which the cobbler handed him, and went very
softly up stairs. The note was from Madame Roche, but Cosmo was
misanthropical, and did not care about it. He thought no longer of
Madame Roche--he thought only of Marie, who was to be the real Mary of
Melmar, and of poor Cameron heart-broken, and Huntley disappointed, and
the French vagabond of a husband, who was sure to come home.