The situation of Ronald Lumsden, for whom Lily felt herself to have
sacrificed so much, and who showed, as she felt at the bottom of her
heart, so little inclination to sacrifice any thing for her, was, in
reality, a difficult one. It would have been false to say that he did
not love her, that her loss was no grief to him, or that he could make
himself comfortable without her--which was what various persons thought
and said, and he was not unaware of the fact. Neither was he unaware
that Lily herself had a half grudge, a whole consciousness, that the way
out of the difficulty was a simple one; and that he should have been
ready to offer her a home, even though it would not be wealthy, and the
protection of a husband’s name and care against all or any uncles in the
world. He knew that she was quite willing to share his poverty, that she
had no objection to what is metaphorically called a garret--and would
really have resembled one more than is common in such cases: a little
flat, high up under the roofs of an Edinburgh house--and to make it into
a happy and smiling little home. And as a matter of fact that garret
would not have been inappropriate, or have involved any social downfall
either on his side or Lily’s. Young Edinburgh advocates in those days
set up their household gods in such lofty habitations without either
shame or reluctance. Not so very long before the man whom we and all the
world know as Lord Jeffrey set out in the world on that elevation and
made his garret the centre of a new kind of empire. There was nothing
derogatory in it: invitations from the best houses in Edinburgh would
have found their way there as freely as to George Square; and Lily’s
friends and his own friends would have filled the rooms as much as if
the young pair had been lodged in a palace. He could not even say to
himself that there would have been privations which she did not
comprehend in such a life; for, little though they had, it would have
been enough for their modest wants, and there was a prospect of more if
he continued to succeed as he had begun to do. Many a young man in
Edinburgh had married rashly on as little and had done very well indeed.
All this Ronald knew as well as any one, and the truth of it rankled in
his mind and made him unhappy. And yet on the other side there was, he
felt, so much to be said! Sir Robert Ramsay’s fortune was not a thing to
be thrown away, and to compare the interest, weight, and importance of
that with the suffering involved to young people who were sure of each
other in merely waiting for a year or two was absurd. According to all
laws of experience and life it was absurd. Lily was very little over
twenty; there was surely no hurry, no need to bring affairs to a climax,
to insist on marrying when it would no doubt be better even for her to
wait. This was what Lumsden said to himself. He would rather, as a
matter of preference, marry at once, secure the girl he loved for his
life-companion, and do the best he could for her. But when all things
were considered, would it be sensible, would it be right, would it be
fair?
This was how he conversed with himself during many a lonely walk, and
the discussion would break out in the midst of very different thoughts,
even on the pavement of the Parliament House as he paced up and down.
Sir Robert’s fortune--that was a tangible thing. It meant in the future,
probably in the near future, for Sir Robert was a self-indulgent old
man, a most excellent position in the world, safety from all pecuniary
disasters, every comfort and luxury for Lily, who would then be a great
lady in comparison with the struggling Edinburgh advocate. And the cost
of this was nothing but a year’s, a few years’, waiting for a girl of
twenty-two and a young man of twenty-eight. How preposterous, indeed, to
discuss the question at all! If Lily had any feeling of wrong in that
her lover did not carry her off, did not in a moment arrange some
makeshift of a poor life, the prelude to a continual, never-ending
struggle, it could only be girlish folly on Lily’s part, want of power
to perceive the differences and the expediencies. Could any thing be
more just than this reasoning? There is no one in his senses who would
not agree in it. To wait a year or two at Lily’s age--what more natural,
more beneficial? He would have felt that he was taking advantage of her
inexperience if he had urged her to marry him at such a cost. And
waiting cost nothing, at least to him.
Not very long after Lily left Edinburgh Lumsden had encountered Sir
Robert one evening at one of the big dinner-parties which were the old
gentleman’s chief pleasure, and he had taken an opportunity to address
the young fellow on the subject which could not be forgotten between
them. He warned Lumsden that he would permit no nonsense, no clandestine
correspondence, and that it was a thing which could not be done, as his
faithful servants at Dalrugas kept him acquainted with every thing that
passed, and he would rather carry his niece away to England or even
abroad (that word of fear and mystery) than allow her to make a silly
and unequal marriage. “You are sensible enough to understand the
position,” the old man had said. “From all I hear of you you are no
hot-headed young fool. What you would gain yourself would be only a wife
quite unused to shifts and stress of weather, and probably a mere
burden upon you, with her waiting-woman serving her hand and foot, and
her fine-lady ways--not the useful helpmate a struggling man requires.”
“I should not be afraid of that,” said Lumsden, with a pale smile, for
no lover, however feeble-hearted, likes to hear such an account of his
love, and no youth on the verge of successful life can be any thing but
impatient to hear himself described as a struggling man. “I expect to
make my way in my profession, and I have reason to expect so. And
Lily----”
“Miss Ramsay, if you please. She is a fine lady to the tips of her
fingers. She can neither dress nor eat nor move a step without Robina at
her tail. She is not fitted, I tell you, for the wife of a struggling
man.”
“But suppose I tell you,” cried Lumsden with spirit, “that I shall be a
struggling man only for a little while, and that she is in every way
fitted to be _my_ wife?”
“Dismiss it from your mind, sir; dismiss it from your mind,” said Sir
Robert. “What will the world say? and what the world says is of great
consequence to a man that has to struggle, even if it is only at the
beginning. They will say that you’ve worked upon a girl’s inexperience
and beguiled her to poverty. They will say that she did not know what
she was doing, but you did. They will say you were a fool for your own
sake, and they will say you took advantage of her.”
“All which things will be untrue,” said Lumsden hotly.
But then they were disturbed and no more was said. This conversation,
though so brief, was enough to fill a man’s mind with misgivings, at
least a reasonable man’s, prone to think before and not after the event.
Lumsden was not one that is carried away by impulse. The first effect
was that he did not write, as he had intended, to Lily. What was the use
of writing if Sir Robert’s faithful servants would intercept the
letters? Why run any risk when there lay behind the greater danger of
having her carried off to England or “abroad,” where she might be lost
and never heard of more? Ronald pondered all these things much, but his
pondering was in different circumstances from Lily’s. She had nothing to
divert her mind; he had a great deal. Society had ended for her, but it
was in full circulation, and he had his full share in every thing, where
he was. The pressure is very different in cases so unlike. The girl had
nothing to break the monotony of hour after hour, and day after day. The
young man had a full and busy life: so long in the Parliament House, so
long in his chambers; a consultation; a hard piece of mental work to
make out a case; a cheerful dinner in the evening with some one; a
wavering circle of other men always more or less surrounding him. The
difficulty was not having too much time to think, but how to have time
enough; and the season of occupation and company and events hurried on
so that when he looked back upon a week it appeared to him like a day.
And he had no way of knowing how it lingered with Lily. He wondered a
little and felt it a grievance that she did not write to him, which
would have been so very easy. There were no faithful servants on his
side to intercept letters. She might have at least sent him a line to
announce her safe arrival, and tell him how the land lay. He on his side
could quite endure till the Vacation, when he had made up his mind to do
something, to have news of her somehow. Even this determination made it
more easy for him to defer writing, to make no attempt at communication;
for why warn Sir Robert’s servants and himself of what he intended to
do, so that they might concert means to balk him? whereas it was so very
doubtful whether any thing he sent would reach Lily. Thus he reasoned
with himself, with always the refrain that a year or two of waiting at
his own age and Lily’s could do no one any harm.
Yet Ronald was but mortal, though he was so wise. Sir Robert left
Edinburgh, going to pay his round of visits before he went abroad, which
he invariably did every autumn. There was no Monte Carlo in those days,
and old gentlemen had not acquired the habit of sunning themselves on
the Riviera; but, on the other hand, there was much more to attract them
at the German baths, which had many of the attractions now concentrated
at Monte Carlo; and Florence possessed a court and society where life
went on in that round of entertainment and congregation which is
essential to old persons of the world. Sir Robert disappeared some time
before the circles of the Parliament House broke up, and young Lumsden
was thus freed from the disagreeable consciousness of being more or less
under the personal observation of his enemy. And he loved Lily, though
he was willing to wait and to be temporarily separated from her in the
interests of their future comfort and Sir Robert’s fortune. So that,
when he was released from his work, and free to direct his movements for
a time as he pleased, an attraction which he could not resist led him to
the place of his lady’s exile. All the good reasons which his
ever-working mind brought forth against this were, I am happy to say,
ineffectual. He said to himself that it was a foolish thing; that if
reported to Sir Robert--and how could it fail to be reported to Sir
Robert, since his servants were so faithful, and it would be impossible
to keep them in the dark?--would only precipitate every thing and lead
to Lily’s transfer to a safer hiding-place. He repeated to himself that
to wait for a year or two at twenty-two and at twenty-eight was no real
hardship: it was rather an advantage. But none of these wise
considerations affected his mind as they ought to have done. He had a
hunger and thirst upon him to see the girl he loved. He wanted to make
sure that she was there, that there was a Lily in the world, that
eventually she would be his and share his life. It was _plus fort que
lui_.
He went home, however, as in duty bound, to the spare old house on the
edge of the Highlands, where he and all his brothers and sisters had
been born and bred; where there was a little shooting, soon exhausted by
reason of the many guns brought to bear upon it, and a good deal of
company in a homely way, impromptu dances almost every night, as is the
fashion in a large family, which attracts young people round it far and
near. But in all this simple jollity Ronald only felt more the absence
of his love, and the vacant place in the world which could only be
filled by her; though what, perhaps, had as great an effect upon him as
any thing else was that his favorite sister, whom, next to her, perhaps
he liked best in the world, knew about Lily, having been taken into his
confidence before he had realized all the difficulties, and talked to
him perpetually about her, disapproving of his inactivity and much
compassionating the lonely girl. “Oh, if I were only near enough, I
would go and see her and keep up her heart!” Janet Lumsden would cry,
while her brother was fast getting into the condition of mind in which
to see her, to make sure of her existence, was a necessity. In this
condition the old house at home, with all its simple gayeties and
tumult, became intolerable to him. He could have kicked the brother who
demanded his sympathy in his engagement to a young lady with a fortune,
neither the young lady nor the fortune being worthy to be compared to
Lily, though the family was delighted by such a piece of good luck for
Rob. And it set all his nerves wrong to see the flirtations that went on
around him, though they were frank and simple affairs, the inevitable
preferences which one boy and girl among so many would naturally show
for each other. All this seemed vulgar, common, intolerable, and in the
worst taste to Ronald. It was not that he was really more refined than
his brothers, but that his own affairs had gone (temporarily) so wrong,
and his own chosen one was so far out of the way. All the jolly, hearty
winter life at home jarred on him and upset his nerves, those artificial
things which did not exist in Perthshire at that period, whatever they
may do now.
At last, when he could not endure it any longer, he announced that he
was going a-fishing up toward the North. He was not a great fisherman,
and the brothers laughed at Ronald setting out with his rod; but he had
the natural gift, common to all Scotsmen of good blood, of knowing most
people throughout his native country, or at least one part of his native
country, and being sure of a welcome in a hundred houses in which a son
of Lumsden of Pontalloch was a known and recognizable person, though
Lumsden of Pontalloch himself was by no means a rich or important man.
This is an advantage which the _roturier_ never acquires until at least
he has passed through three or four generations. Ronald Lumsden knew
that he would never be at a loss, that if rejected in one city he could
flee into another, and that if any impertinent questions were put to him
by Sir Robert’s own faithful servants, he could always say that he was
going to stay at any of the known houses within twenty miles. This
hospitality perhaps exists no longer, for many of these houses now,
probably the greater part of them, are let to strangers and foreigners,
to whom even the native names are strange and the condition of the
country means nothing. But it was so still in those days.
He set out thus, more or less at his ease, and lingered a little on his
way. Then he bethought himself, or so he said, of the Rugas, in which he
had fished once as a boy, and which justified him in getting off the
coach at the little inn, not much better than a village public-house,
where a bare room and a hard bed were to be had, and a right to fish
could be negotiated for. He had a day’s fishing to give himself a
countenance, enquiring into the history generally of the country, and
which houses were occupied, and which lairds “up for the shooting.”
“Sir Robert here? Na, Sir Robert’s not here. Bless us a’, what would
bring him here, an auld man like that, that just adores his creature
comforts, and never touches a gun, good season or bad. No, he’s no here,
nor he hasna been here this dozen years. But I’ll tell you wha’s here,
and that’s a greater ferlie: his bonnie wee niece, Maister James’s
daughter, Miss Lily, as they call her. And it’s no for the shooting,
there’s nae need to say, nor for the fishing either, poor bit thing.
But what it is for is more than I can tell ye. It’s just a black,
burning shame----”
“Why is it a shame? Is the house haunted, or what’s the matter?” Ronald
said, averting his face.
“Haunted! that’s a pack of havers. I’m not minding about haunted. But I
tell ye what, sir, that bit lassie (and a bonnie bit lassie she is) is
all her lane there, like a lily flower in the wilderness; for Lily she’s
called, and Lily she is--a bit willowy slender creature, bowing her head
like a flower on the stalk.” The landlord, who was short and red and
stout, leaned his own head to one side to simulate the young lady’s
attitude. “She’s there and never sees a single soul, and it’s mair than
her life’s worth if ye take my opinion. If there was any body to keep
her company, or even a lot of sportsmen coming and going, it would be
something; but there she is, all her lane.”
“Miss Ramsay! I have met her in Edinburgh,” Ronald said.
“Then, if I were you, I would just take my foot in my hand and gang ower
the moor and pay her a visit. She will have a grand tocher and she is a
bonnie lass, and nowadays ye canna pick up an heiress at every roadside.
It would be just a charity to give the poor thing a little diversion and
make a fool o’ yon old sneck-drawer to his very beard. Lord! but I
wouldna waste a meenit if I were a young man.”
Ronald laughed, but put on a virtuous mien. He said he had come for the
fishing, not to pay visits, and to the fishing he would go. But when he
had spent the morning on the river, it occurred to him that he might
take “a look at the moor”; and this was how it was that he stole under
the shadow of the bank when the last rays of the sunset were fading, and
suddenly came out upon the heather under Dalrugas Tower.