“She is like that harp the winds do play upon; mark her well. She
shall tell you what she dreams unwittingly, for her face is no
mask--nothing but a veil, and under it you shall see her heart
beat.”--OLD PLAY.
Helen Buchanan stood alone at the gate of her mother’s garden; there was
a nervous tremor about her as she leaned upon the hawthorn-hedge, with
her face towards the setting sun. These October nights were becoming
chill, and the shawl she drew round her was not a warm one; but her
trembling sprung from quite another cause. She was young and proud and
poor; and William Oswald, walking as if for a wager, and looking almost
as nervously firm as she did, had newly left the gate.
He had been telling her something which to him seemed perfectly
reasonable, something which certainly in the abstract did not look
unreasonable in any view: that he, a man, able to exercise judgment for
himself, and able honourably to earn his own bread, did not feel himself
bound by the decision of his father, did not feel by any means that his
father’s iron will should or could restrain him in those early, strong,
energetic years of his manhood; that honouring his father as a father
should be honoured, he yet felt some individual rights, which no man
could exercise for him. So far was well enough; the daughter of Walter
Buchanan drew up her elastic figure, and strengthening herself in
nervous stillness waited for what she knew would follow.
It came in a flood--bold, and grave, and decided as William Oswald
always was, when his reserve was broken through. The world was all
before them where to choose, and Helen felt that when he spoke of
independent labour for which he was strong and able, and of success to
be won by that, he spoke the truth, and for a moment the hereditary
pride ebbed, and her heart rose to the congenial struggle; but it could
not be. Before half the words of her answer were spoken, he had learned
it all from the unmistakeable language of her face. “Never, unless
received in honour and goodwill, with the respect and tenderness which
became a daughter. Never!”
They had parted--not in anger, but with some degree of excitement and
pain--each with a stronger resolution to overcome the other, each only
the more determined to persevere and win. The matter had become a
single-handed combat, the combatants were well matched, the issue
doubtful; time and the hour could alone decide.
And still, that nervous thrill passing over her like wind, Helen stood
at the gate looking towards the west. With one of those sudden changes
to which her temperament is liable, a flood of bitter thoughts had
suddenly stolen into her mind. It was not envious repining, it was
scarcely discontent; but she began to remember that there in her youth
she stood alone--that the very strength which she had to earn bread for
herself and her mother, by her own honourable labour, had cast her down
in the small society about them, to a lower and to a solitary
place--that those bright youthful days, to others so instinct with
joyous life, were to her days of gloomy labour, evenings of solitude.
And thronging in the rear of these, were hosts of indefinite, rapid,
inexpressible feelings; remembrances of petty slights and proud
swellings of the wounded heart, which in spite of its years of
independent working, was still but a girl’s. The deep melancholy and
depression peculiar to her nature--peculiar only in transient fits, soon
swept away by the inherent strength of life and hope within--lowered
over her like a cloud. There came to her eyes involuntary causeless
tears: her heart grew blank and dark within her, and wistfully she
looked upward to the sky--the wonderful western sky with its flushed
clouds of sunset--thinking in her sad, proud loneliness that only this
was left to her of the natural gladnesses of youth.
Just then an eager hand was thrust into hers, and the joyous voice of
Hope Oswald broke in upon her reverie.
“Helen, Helen, what makes you always stand here and look at the sun?”
The momentary distemper tinged even her speech.
“Because I like to see him sink, Hope. I like to watch him gliding away
yonder behind the hill, and see how blank and cold it all looks after he
is gone.”
“Ay! but, Helen, look how beautiful the clouds are,” said Hope, “you
would think the sun was hiding yonder. See, see! how grand it is!--and
him away all the time beyond the hill. You will not look, Helen: but _I_
think the clouds are as beautiful as the sun.”
“And in half an hour they will all have melted away,” said the young
moralizer, “and so does everything in the world that is beautiful, Hope.
The fair colours fade into that pale, blank grey, and the air grows
chill and mournful, and then comes the night.”
“But do you not like the night, Helen?” asked the wondering Hope.
“I was not thinking of the night, I was thinking of what comes upon us
in the world,” said Helen dreamily in her self-communion, “and how the
dull colourless sky droops over us, and the light passes away, and the
inexorable darkness comes.”
She paused--she was fairly afloat on this dark stream of thought,
becoming sadder and more downcast with every word she spoke. The
causeless tears hung upon her eyelashes, her lips quivered and faltered;
the deep cloud of characteristic melancholy had fallen like a veil upon
her heart.
“But Helen,” said Hope, in a low alarmed voice, as she pressed close to
her friend’s side. “Helen, is that true? People say it in books, and
ministers say it. It is in the Bible I heard one say, but _I_ never saw
it in the Bible, Helen.”
“Saw what?”
“What the minister said--what you were saying, Helen--that the world is
very miserable, that everybody must be unhappy. Helen, you are old, you
know better than me; but I think it is not true.”
The electric touch was given; there needed no more; bravely upon the
rising tide the distempered thoughts went out, not to return again until
their time. The tears went back to their fountain--the face brightened
with its varying, fluttering colour--the dark mood was gone.
“Did I say so, Hope? did you think I said so? No, no, it is not true!”
said Helen, the words coming quick and low, in her rapid revulsion of
feeling; “there is sorrow and there is joy, as there are darkness and
light; but the night is good as well as the day, and it is blessed to
live--blessed to have all the changes God sends to us--good and
evil--the sweet and the bitter--blessed and not miserable, Hope.”
The clouds were hovering over the blank hill far away in golden masses,
rounded with the soft advancing gloom of night, and overhead was the
peaceful sky, pure and pale in the stillness of its rest.
“Sometimes we have storms, Hope,” said the repentant Helen, “and
sometimes it is dark--dark--you do not know how dark it grows sometimes;
but the sun rises every morning, and every night--look up yonder, how
quiet the sky is--do you think the world could be miserable, Hope, so
long as there is the sky and the sun?”
Hope looked up wistfully but did not speak, for she could not quite
understand yet, either the melancholy itself or the sudden change; but
she hung upon Helen’s arm in her affectionate girlish way, and they
stood together in silence watching how the colours faded one by one,
till the hill in the west grew only a great dark shadow, and parting
into long pale misty streaks, the clouds lay motionless upon the calm,
cold heaven. There is a long stretch of wet sand yonder where the broad
Firth ought to be, and something chill and disconsolate, speaking of
early winter, is in that gusty inconsistent breeze, which already
carries past them a yellow leaf or two, dead so soon; but Helen
Buchanan, wayward and inconsistent too, has bright life in her eyes, and
sees nothing sad in all she looks upon. Within herself has risen this
wilful, strong, capricious light proper to her nature--a nature
strangely formed, as God builds not as man does--with every delicate
line and shadowy curve, belonging separately to the gentle weak,
conspiring to perfect it as strong.
Mrs Buchanan was a cheerful, sanguine woman; she liked to have her
little parlour look bright after its homely fashion, though not with
tawdry embellishments, or those poor ornamental shifts of poverty with
which women dwelling at home are apt to solace their vacant hours, and
imitate the costly follies of their richer sisters. A little bright fire
burned in the grate, not without a certain aroma which whispered of the
fragrant _peat_, that helped to compose it; and the parlour with only
its one candle was full of cheerful light. The gentle, kindly mother was
jealous of the varying moods of her sole child, and was fain to use all
simple arts to throw the spell of quiet cheerfulness over the room in
which they spent these long evenings almost constantly alone.
“Mrs Buchanan,” said Hope, “Helen is sad--I want you to tell me why
everybody in Fendie is sad; they never used to be before--it is only
this year.”
Mrs Buchanan had already read her daughter’s face; but she saw that the
cloud, if there had been a cloud, was gone, and that it was not
expedient to speak of it.
“If you will tell me, Hope, my dear,” said Helen’s good mother, “who
everybody is, I shall answer your question; but I am very sure I saw a
great number of people in Fendie to-day, who had no sadness about them.”
“Oh, but who were they, Mrs Buchanan?” asked Hope.
Mrs Buchanan smiled.
“There was Robert Johnston, the grocer--he got another daughter last
night; and there was Maxwell Dickson at the library--his son Robbie got
a prize yesterday at the academy; and there was--”
Hope was disdainful; and even the face of her friend Helen glowed into
genial laughter, as she threw back her unruly hair and interrupted Mrs
Buchanan in great impatience.
“But I did not mean them! I was not thinking of _them_. Maxwell Dickson!
as if he knew what it was to be sad--and that great lout Robbie; but I
don’t care about them--it’s our own folk--it’s--”
“When do you go back to Edinburgh?” interrupted Helen.
“Oh, next month,” was the answer, “my mother says I may stay till
Hallowe’en; but, Helen, my mother is going to ask Miss Swinton to come
with me to Fendie next summer, at the vacation.”
“You seem to be very fond of Miss Swinton, Hope?” said Mrs Buchanan.
“Oh, yes, everybody is--you would like her too, Mrs Buchanan.”
“Should I? and why do you think that, Hope?”
“Oh, I know,” said Hope, in wise certainty, “because she likes Helen.”
The argument was irresistible, and Mrs Buchanan confessed it, by pulling
Hope’s exuberant hair.
“Likes me!” the varying colour heightened on Helen’s face. “She does not
know me, Hope.”
“Yes, but she does, Helen,” answered the sagacious Hope, “for I used to
tell her; and she knows you quite well, and she says you are brave.
Helen, if you only saw Miss Swinton! but you will when she comes.”
“She says I am brave;” Helen repeated the consolatory words under her
breath, and asked herself “why?”
“But I do not know, my dear,” said Mrs Buchanan, “how Helen is to see
this friend of yours, unless she calls on us--and we are strangers to
her, you know.”
Mrs Buchanan was a little proud--she had no idea of being condescended
to.
“Only wait till she comes,” said Hope, triumphantly, “I know she will
want to see Helen sooner than anybody else, because she says Helen is--”
Helen interposed. She fancied that Hope intended to repeat the same word
of commendation, and the quick spirit did not choose to hear it again.
She was mistaken--Hope intended to bestow upon her friend the highest
title in her vocabulary--that of gentlewoman--in name of Miss Swinton.
“When Miss Swinton speaks of me so kindly,” said Helen in haste, “let me
hear what she calls you, Hope.”
Hope hesitated--she liked very well to repeat the commendation to
herself, but had a little tremor in saying it aloud--if Helen laughed at
her!
“I don’t know--perhaps she did not mean it,” said Hope, slowly, “but
Miss Swinton says I am sensible, Helen.”
Mrs Buchanan shed the rebellious hair off Hope’s open candid forehead,
and Helen laughed in such kindly wise as could by no possibility mean
ridicule, as her mother said,--
“And so you are, Hope--and a good bairn besides. Miss Swinton is quite
right.”
Whereupon Hope launched forth into another panegyric upon Miss Swinton.
Helen did not very distinctly hear her. There was a good deal of the
suggestive in Hope’s conversation, and her friend had snatched from it
in her hasty fashion the germ of an important idea.
“Mother,” said Helen, breaking in abruptly upon Hope, “should you like
to live in Edinburgh?”
Mrs Buchanan’s mind was not so rapid as her daughter’s. She looked up
with a quiet unmoved smile.
“I do not doubt I should, Helen; most people like Edinburgh; but why do
you ask me?”
Mrs Buchanan laid down her work as she spoke, and waited for the
proposal which she knew was to follow. She had yet no glimmering of what
it was, but she had studied those kindling eyes too long not to know
that the sudden flush of some new purpose possessed them.
“Suppose we could go,” said Helen, rapidly; “suppose I could get a
situation, mother, with some one like Miss Swinton, with Miss Swinton
herself perhaps; should you like it? would you go to Edinburgh?”
Mrs Buchanan paused to think; the glowing moving face before her was not
of the kind which takes time to deliberate. Helen clasped her small
nervous fingers and looked into the vacant air, with her fixed
unconscious eyes, and saw no obstacle in the way; no lingering
tenderness to subdue; no sickness of heart to overcome; when they came
hereafter she would do battle against them bravely--now, she saw them
not.
“Oh, Helen!” exclaimed Hope, breathless with her first surprise and
delight; but Hope recollected herself; this would be a death-blow to all
her schemes, so she added,--“Helen, the teachers all live with Miss
Swinton. Mrs Buchanan, you would not like to be alone?”
Mrs Buchanan still said nothing. It was very true she would not like to
be alone, and very true it was also that she shrank from the unknown
evils of change, and was better pleased to remain with the quiet cares
she knew, than encounter those she did not know; but, unlike Hope, she
said nothing. She did not choose to throw down, by any sudden decision,
the dreams with which her daughter was already filling the air.
“Do you think I would not do for Miss Swinton, Hope?” asked Helen.
“Helen!” exclaimed Hope, indignantly.
“Well then, why do you say that?”
“Because,” and Hope tried to put wise meanings into her own girlish open
face, and to make it as eloquent as Helen’s; “because, Helen, I should
not like you to go away from Fendie. Oh! no, no, you must stay always
at home.”
And as Helen lifted her flushed face, the elaborate look of Hope and her
mother’s anxious glance fell upon her together. They only made the blood
rush more warmly about her heart. She started with a rapid nervous
impulse: “Mother, if you do not disapprove, let me write to Miss Swinton
to-morrow.”
Poor Hope Oswald! she had been _too_ sensible--she had defeated her own
well-digested, painfully-constructed plan. Miss Swinton instead of a
powerful auxiliary threatened to become the most hopeless barrier in her
way, and Hope was almost in despair. She began immediately to belie
Edinburgh; to manufacture grievances; and to represent how very hard,
especially for the teachers, was the laborious life at school; but
Helen’s fixed dreamy, unconscious face warned her it was all lost, and
very disconsolately she said good-night.
“My father would be pleased enough if it was Miss Maxwell,” thought Hope
with some disdain, as she went home, “all because Mr Graeme will leave
her Mossgray. I wish somebody would give Helen a place like
Mossgray--but I don’t either--because Helen is better than we are,
though she is poor. Who’s that?”
Hope’s reverie concluded very abruptly--who was it?
Alas, it was the interesting, sentimental, young minister newly placed
in the church of Fendie, whom all the town delighted to honour. He did
not see her as he went steadily down the dim road, and the dismayed Hope
stood still to watch him, with prophetic terror. Yes, indeed, it is Mrs
Buchanan’s gate he stops at; and now the door is opened, and a flash of
warm light shines for a moment into the garden, and the Reverend Robert
Insches is admitted. Burning with suppressed anger, the jealous Hope
hurried home, eager to defy and defeat her father, and utterly to
destroy any presumptuous hopes which the Reverend Robert Insches might
entertain in regard to Helen Buchanan.