EFFIE OGILVIE.
PUBLISHED BY
JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW.
* * * * *
MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON AND NEW YORK.
_London_, _Hamilton, Adams and Co._
_Cambridge_, _Macmillan and Bowes_.
_Edinburgh_, _Douglas and Foulis_.
* * * * *
MDCCCLXXXVI.
EFFIE OGILVIE:
_THE STORY OF A YOUNG LIFE_.
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT,
AUTHOR OF “CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,” ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
COMPLETE
GLASGOW:
JAMES MACLEHOSE & SONS,
Publishers to the University.
LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO.
1886.
_All rights reserved._
EFFIE OGILVIE:
_THE STORY OF A YOUNG LIFE_.
CHAPTER I.
The family consisted of Effie’s father, her stepmother, her brother Eric
who was in the army, and a little personage, the most important of all,
the only child of the second Mrs. Ogilvie, the pet and plaything of the
house. You may think it would have been more respectful and becoming to
reverse this description, and present Mr. and Mrs. Ogilvie first to the
notice of the reader, which we shall now proceed to do. The only excuse
we can offer for the irregularity of the beginning consists in the fact
that it is the nature of their proceedings in respect to the young
people, and particularly to Mr. Ogilvie’s daughter Effie, which induces
us to disturb the decorous veil which hangs over the doors of every
respectable family, in the case of these worthy persons.
In their own lives, had we time and space to recount all that befell
them, there would, no doubt, be many interesting particulars, as in the
lives of most other people: but when a country gentleman has attained
the age of fifty or a little more, with enough of money for his
necessities, and no more ambition than can be satisfied by the
regulation of the affairs of the parish, it is inevitably through the
fortunes of a son or daughter that he comes within reach of the
sympathies of the world. These troublesome productions, of whom we take
so little thought at first, who are nothing but playthings and
embellishments of our own estate for so many years, have a way of
pushing us out of our commanding position as the chief actors in our
own lives, setting us aside into a secondary place, and conferring upon
us a quite fictitious interest as influences upon theirs. It is an
impertinence of fate, it is an irony of circumstance; but still it is
so. And it is, consequently, as Effie’s father, a character in which he
by no means knew himself, that Mr. Ogilvie of Gilston, a gentleman as
much respected as any in his county, the chief heritor in his parish,
and a deputy-lieutenant, has now to be presented to the world.
He was a good man in his way, not perfect, as in the general he was
himself very willing to allow, though he did not, any more than the rest
of us, like that niggling sort of criticism which descends to
particulars. He was a man who would have suffered a little personal
inconvenience rather than do anything which he was convinced was wrong,
which most of us, who are old enough to be acquainted with our own ways,
will be aware is no small thing to say. But, ordinarily, also like most
of us, his wrong acts were done without taking time to identify them as
wrong, on the spur of the moment, in the heat of a present impulse which
took from them all the sting of premeditation.
Thus, when he gave good Glen, the virtuous collie, as he came forward
smiling and cheerful, with a remark upon the beauty of the morning
glistening in his bright eyes and waving majestically in his tail, that
sudden kick which sent the good fellow off howling, and oppressed his
soul all day with a sense of crime, Mr. Ogilvie did not do it by
intention, did not come out with the purpose of doing it, but only did
it because he had just got a letter which annoyed him. Glen, who had a
tender conscience, lived half the day under a weight of unnecessary
remorse, convinced that he must himself have done something very wicked,
though a confused moral sense and the absence of a recognized code made
him sadly incapable of discovering what it was; but his master had not
the slightest intention of inflicting any such mental torture.
He treated his human surroundings in something of the same way,
convincing Effie sometimes, by a few well-chosen words, of her own
complete mental and physical incompetency; as, for example, when she ran
into his library to call his attention to something quite unimportant at
the very moment when he was adding up his “sundries,” and had nearly
arrived at a result.
“If you had any sense of propriety in you, and were not a born idiot
that never can be taught there’s a time for everything, you would know
better than to dart in like a whirlwind in your high heels, and all that
nonsense in your mouth, to drive a man frantic!”
Effie would withdraw in tears. But Mr. Ogilvie had not really meant any
harm.
He had succeeded to his father’s little estate when he was still in his
twenties, and had many aspirations. He had not intended to withdraw from
the bar, although he had few clients to speak of. He had indeed fully
intended to follow up his profession, and it had not seemed impossible
that he might attain to the glorious position of Lord Advocate, or, if
not, to that of Sheriff-Substitute, which was perhaps more probable. But
by degrees, and especially after his marriage, he had found out that
professional work was a great “tie,” and that there were many things to
be done at home.
His first wife had been the only daughter of the minister, which
concentrated his affections still more and more in his own locality.
When she died, leaving him with two children, who had never been
troublesome to him before, the neighbourhood was moved with the deepest
sympathy for poor Ogilvie. Some people even thought he would not survive
it, they had been so united a couple, and lived so entirely for each
other: or, at least, that he would go away, abandoning the scene of his
past happiness.
But, on the contrary, he stayed at home, paying the tribute of the
profoundest dulness for one year to the lost partner of his life,
cheering up a little decorously afterwards, and at the end of the second
year marrying again. All this was done, it will be seen, in the most
respectable and well-regulated way, as indeed was everything that Mr.
Ogilvie did when he took time to think of it, being actuated by a
conscientious desire to do his duty, and set an example to all honest
and virtuous men.
Mrs. Ogilvie was not too young to be the second wife of a gentleman of
fifty. She was “quite suitable,” everybody said--which, seeing that he
might have married a chit of twenty, as mature widowers have been known
to do, was considered by everybody a virtuous abstinence and concession
to the duties of the position. She was thirty-five, good-looking, even
handsome, and very conscientious. If it was her husband’s virtuous
principle to submit to personal inconvenience rather than do anything
that he knew to be wrong, she went many steps farther in the way of
excellence, and seldom did anything unless she was convinced that it was
right.
With this high meaning she had come to Gilston, and during the four
years of her reign there had, not sternly--for she was not stern: but
steadily, and she was a woman of great steadiness of mind and
purpose--adhered to it.
These years had been very important years, as may be supposed, in the
life of the two young people whom Mrs. Ogilvie described as “the first
family.” The boy had been seventeen and the girl fifteen when she came
home a bride. And their mother had been dead only two years: an age at
which criticism is more uncompromising, or circumstances under which it
would be more difficult to begin married life, could scarcely be. They
gazed at her with two pairs of large eyes, and countenances which did
not seem able to smile, noting everything she did, putting a mute
criticism upon the silent record, objecting dumbly to everything, to her
entrance there at all, to her assumption of their mother’s chair, their
mother’s name, all that was now legally and honourably hers.
Can any one imagine a more terrible ordeal for a woman to go through?
She confided to her sister afterwards that if she had acted upon
impulse, as Robert, poor dear, so often did, the house would have become
a hell on earth.
“I would have liked to have put that boy to the door a hundred times a
day: and as for Effie!--I never can tell till this day how it was that
I kept my hands off her,” she said, reddening with the recollection of
many exasperations past. Women who have filled the office of stepmother,
aunt, or any other such domestic anomaly, will understand and
sympathize. And yet, of course, there was a great deal to be said on the
other side too.
The children had heard with an indignation beyond words of their
father’s intention. It had been said to them, with that natural
hypocrisy which is so transparent and almost pardonable, that he took
this step very much for their sakes, to give them a new mother.
A new mother! Seven and five might have taken this in with wondering
ears and made no remark; but seventeen and fifteen! The boy glowed with
fierce wrath; the girl shed torrents of hot tears. They formed plans of
leaving Gilston at once, going away to seek their fortunes--to America,
to Australia, who could tell where? Effie was certain that she would
mind no hardship, that she could cook and wash, and do everything in the
hut, while Eric (boys are always so much luckier than girls!) spent the
day in the saddle after the cattle in the ranche.
Or they would go orange-farming, ostrich-farming--what did it matter
which?--anything, in fact, but stay at home. Money was the great
difficulty in this as in almost all other cases, besides the dreadful
fact that Effie was a girl, a thing which had always been hard upon her
in all their previous adventures, but now more than ever.
“We might have gone to sea and worked our passages before the mast, if
you had only been a laddie and not a lassie,” Eric said with a sigh and
a profound sense of the general contrariety of events. This unalterable
misfortune, which somehow seemed (though it was she who suffered from it
most) her fault, stopped Effie’s tears, and brought instead a look of
despair into her round face. There flashed through her mind an idea of
the possibility of neutralizing this disability by means of costume.
Rosalind did so in Shakespeare, and Viola, and so had other heroines in
less distant regions.
But at the idea of _trousers_ Effie’s countenance flamed, and she
rejected the thought. It was quite possible to endure being unhappy,
even in her small experience she was well aware of that--but unwomanly!
Oh, what would mamma say? That utterance of habit, the words that rose
to her lips without thinking, even now when mamma was about to have a
successor--a new mother! brought back the tears in torrents. She flung
herself upon Eric’s shoulder, and he, poor fellow, gave her with
quivering lips a little furtive kiss, the only consolation he could
think of, though they were not at all used to caressing each other. Poor
children! and yet Mr. Ogilvie had done nothing cruel, and Mrs. Ogilvie
was the best-intentioned woman in the world.
It was lucky that they were found at this critical moment by an
individual who is of great importance in this little record of events,
as he was in the parish and the neighbourhood generally,--that is Uncle
John. He was the minister of Gilston; he was their mother’s brother; and
he was one of the men selected by Providence for the consolation of
their fellow-creatures.
Perhaps he was not always very wise. He was too much under the sway of
his heart to be infallible in the way of advice, although that heart was
so tender and full of sympathy that it often penetrated secrets which
were undiscoverable to common men. But in his powers of comfort-giving
he was perfect. The very sight of him soothed the angry and softened the
obdurate, and he dried the tears of the young by some inspiration given
to him alone.
“What is the matter?” he said in his large soft voice, which was deep
bass and very masculine, yet had something in it too of the
wood-pigeon’s brooding tones. They were seated at the foot of a tree in
the little wood that protected Gilston House from the east, on the roots
of the big ash which were like gray curves of rock among the green moss
and the fallen leaves. He came between them, sitting down too, raising
Effie with his arm.
“But I think I can guess. You are just raging at Providence and your
father, you two ungrateful bairns.”
“Ungrateful!” cried Effie. She was the most speechless of the two, the
most prostrate, the most impassioned, and therefore was most ready to
reply.
“Oh, what have we to be grateful for?--our own mamma gone away and we’ll
never see her more; and another woman--another--a Mistress Ogilvie----”
In her rage and despair she pronounced every syllable, with what
bitterness and burning scorn and fury! Uncle John drew her little hands
down from her face and held them in his own, which were not small, but
very firm, though they were soft.
“Your own mother was a very good woman, Effie,” said Uncle John.
The girl paused and looked at him with those fiery eyes which were not
softened, but made more angry, by her tears, not seeing how this bore
upon the present crisis of affairs.
“Have you any reason to suppose that being herself, as we know she is,
with the Lord whom she loved”--and here Uncle John took off his hat as
if he were saluting the dearest and most revered of friends--“that she
would like you and the rest to be miserable all your lives because she
was away?”
“Miserable!” cried Effie. “We were not miserable; we were quite happy;
we wanted nothing. Papa may care for new people, but we were happy and
wanted nothing, Eric and me.”
“Then, my little Effie,” said Uncle John, “it is not because of your
own mother that you are looking like a little fury--for you see you have
learned to let her go, and do without her, and be quite contented in a
new way--but only because your father has done the same after his
fashion, and it is not the same way as yours.”
“Oh, Uncle John, I am not contented,” cried Effie, conscience-stricken;
“I think of mamma every day.”
“And are quite happy,” he said with a smile, “as you ought to be. God
bless her up yonder, behind the veil. She is not jealous nor angry, but
happy too. And we will be very good friends with Mistress Ogilvie, you
and me. Come and see that everything is ready for her, for she will not
have an easy handful with you two watching her night and day.”