“Did you mean that, Ronald--that you are really going away to-morrow?”
“Indeed and alas, I meant it, Lily. It is the middle of the session. How
could I stay longer? It was, as I said to the minister--though you never
more than half believe what I say--a real piece of business with Sir
John’s factor at Ardenlennie that gave me the occasion of spending a few
days with my Lily, which I seized upon without giving you any warning,
as you know.”
“And me that thought you could not do without me one day longer, and
were coming hurrying to bring your wife home!”
“My darling!” said Ronald, with no lack of ardor on his part. “But then
my bonnie Lily has always sense to know that the longing of the heart
changes nothing, and that it is no more the term in March than it is in
January. Where could I find a place to put you now, or till Whit-Sunday
comes?”
Was it true? Oh, yes; it was true. In Scotland you do not find an empty
house and go into it whenever you want to--especially not in the
Scotland of those days. You have to wait for the term, which is the
legitimate time. Nevertheless Lily was very sure that, if she were now
in Edinburgh looking for a place to establish her nest in, she would
find it; but perhaps a man has not the time, perhaps he cannot take the
trouble, going upstairs and down stairs looking at all kinds of unlikely
places. This, Lily felt sure, was another of the things that gentlemen
could not abide.
“We must make the best of you, then, while we have you,” she said,
drawing her chair to the side of the fire after their dinner together.
It was cold at night, though the hardy folk of the North were content to
believe that spring was coming, and that there was a different “feel” in
the air. The wind was sweeping over the moor as keen as a knife, bending
the gray bushes of the ling and spare rowan-trees that cowered before it
like human travellers caught in the cutting breeze. There was a cold
moon shining fitfully, with frightened, swift-flying glimpses from among
the clouds which flew over her face. Colder than the depth of winter
outside, but within, with the firelight and lamplight, and Lily making
the best of her husband’s flying visit, very bright and very warm.
“I will just look for the next term, Ronald, and pack up all my things
and be ready, so that if you came suddenly, as you did the other
day----”
“Do you bid me, then,” he said, “not to come till Whit-Sunday? which is
a long time to be without a sight of my Lily. If I should have another
chance like this of getting a day or two--which is better than
nothing----”
“Oh, no, do not miss the day or two,” cried Lily; “how could you think I
meant that? But I’ll look for the term-time, like the maids when they’re
changing their places. It’s more than that to me, for it will be the
first home I have ever had. Uncle Robert’s house was never a home--there
was no woman in it.”
“Nor will there be any woman, Lily----”
“I will be the woman,” she cried, with a playful blow on his shoulder;
“it is me that will make it home. And you will be the man. And if any
stranger comes into it--not to say a poor, motherless bairn like what I
was--their hearts will sing for pleasure; for there will be one for
kindness and warmness, and one for protecting and caring, and that will
make it home. Uncle Robert was but one, and not one that was caring. If
you were there, he just let you be. ‘Oh,’ he would say, ‘you are here!’
as if it was a surprise. Do you wonder that I hunger and thirst for my
own home, Ronald, when I never had in my life any thing but that?”
“It will come in its time, my Lily,” he said, holding her close to him,
with her hands in his.
“Ay, but you mind what Shakespeare says: ‘While the grass grows----’”
“If the proverb was musty then,” said Ronald, with a laugh, “it’s
mustier now.”
“So it is; but as true as ever. And I weary for it, I weary for it!”
cried the girl. “However, sit you there, and me here; and we’ll think it
is our own house--that you will have come in, and you will have had your
dinner, and you will be telling me every thing that has passed in the
day.”
“What, all the pleas before the Fifteen, and old Watty’s speeches, and
the jokes of Johnny Law, and the wiles of----”
“Every one of them! When you are in a profession, you should know every
thing about it. If you were a--tailor, say, who would make your fine
buttonholes, and the braiding of the grand waistcoats, but your wife? Or
a--school-master it would be me to look after the exercises; and
wherefore not an advocate’s wife to know all about the Parliament House,
and how to conduct a case if there should be occasion?”
“So that you might go down to the court instead of me, and plead for me
if I had a headache,” said Ronald, laughing. “It would be grand for my
clients, Lily, for I’ll answer for it, with Symington on the bench, and
Hoodiecraw and the two Elders, you would gain every plea.”
“That’s while I am young and----” said Lily, with a little toss of her
head. She was saucy and gay and full of malice, as he had never seen
her, for this was not much Lily’s way. “I did not say I would plead; but
I would have to know. Every thing you would have to tell me, as well as
the jokes of the old lords.”
“Well,” said Ronald, “I might do that, and you would take no harm, for
you would not understand them, my Lily. But they all like a bonnie lass,
and you would win every plea. I’ll tell you all the stories, Lily, and
there are plenty of them. The plainstanes of the Parliament House know
more human trouble and vice than any other place in Edinburgh. I’ll tell
you----”
“Oh, not the wicked things!” cried Lily, clasping her hands, “for how
could we help those that suffer by them? or what could that have to do
with you and me?”
“If you leave out the wicked things, there would be little to do,” said
Ronald, “for the courts of law.”
“But we will leave them out!” cried Lily. “All our cases shall be about
mistakes, or something that comes from not understanding; so that as
soon as you put it to them very clear they will see the right and own it
and go back to the just way. For there is nobody that would not rather
be in the right than in the wrong if they knew, and that is my
principle; things are so twisted in and out it’s hard to understand; and
bad advice and thinking too much of himself make a man do a sudden thing
without thinking, till he finds that it is wrong. And then when he sees,
he is sorry and puts it back.”
“If it were so easy as all that, Lily, it would be new heavens and a new
earth.”
“Well, we’ll try,” said Lily gayly. She was so gay, she was so full of
quips and cranks, so ready with amusing turns of speech and audacious
propositions, that Ronald found her a new Lily, full of brightness and
fun and novel, ridiculous suggestions and high-flown notions, which she
was ready herself to laugh at as high-flown, yet taking his sober
thoughts to pieces and turning them upside down. What would it be,
indeed, to carry her away with him, to have her always there, turning
every little misfortune into fun and laughter, making every misadventure
a source of amusement instead of trouble! A gleam of light rose in his
eyes, and then he shook his head slightly to himself and sighed. The
shake of the head and the sigh were when Lily’s back was turned. He
dared not let her see them, divine them, answer them with a hundred
quick-flashing arguments. She had an answer for every thing, he knew.
She cared nothing for the things that were, after all, the chief things
to care for--money, progress in the world, that sound foundation in life
without which no man could make sure of rising to the head of his
profession. Some did it without doubt. There was Lord Pleasaunce, that
had fought his way to the bench, marrying a wife and beginning in a
garret, as Lily wished; now he thought of it, she was something like
Lily, the judge’s wife, though fat now and roundabout. They had even
been Lord Advocate in their time, and gone to London (with such a
couple, even Ronald felt instinctively, you don’t say he, but they) and
struggled through somehow; but always poor, always poor! They did not
seem to mind; but then Ronald knew that he would always mind. They had
no fortunes for their daughters nor to put out their sons well in the
world. He shook his head again as he rejected once more that possibility
which for a moment, only for a moment, had caught and almost beguiled
him. Lily had gone out of the room, but, coming back, caught that last
shake of his head.
“And what is that for?” she said. “You will have been thinking that Lily
is good for very little, that she could not keep the house and make the
meat as she thinks, but would look to be served herself, hand and foot,
as she is here.”
“Not that--but still my Lily has always been served hand and foot. There
is Beenie, without whom we cannot budge a step----”
“No,” said Lily gravely, “without Beenie I could not budge a step--not
because Beenie is my maid, and I need her to serve me, but because it
would break her heart.”
“My love, poor folk as we shall be cannot afford to think of breaking
hearts.”
“I will break yours rather!” cried Lily, with a little stamp of her
foot. “I will give ye ill dinners and a house that is never redd up, and
keep Beenie like a lady in the best room and give her all the good
things.”
“That is just what I say,” said Ronald; “we will have a train--all the
old servants that cannot endure their lives without Miss Lily, perhaps
Katrin and Dougal, too.”
Lily stood looking at him for a moment, with her eyes enlarged and her
face pale. “Is it in fun, or in earnest?” she said, with a little gasp.
“Oh, in fun, in fun,” he said hastily, “though considering how they have
fulfilled their duty to Sir Robert, it would not be strange if he turned
them out of his doors--and whom, then, could they turn to but you and
me?”
“It is not for you and me to blame them,” said Lily, still under the
impression of what he had said, “and this is not the kind of fun that is
good fun. But it is true, after all, though I never thought of that
before. Katrin is kind, but she has, perhaps, not been quite as true to
Uncle Robert as to me; but Dougal, he knows nothing. Dougal has never
known any thing; he has never meant to desert Uncle Robert. Ronald,”
cried Lily, with sudden affright, “we have all been cheating Uncle
Robert! This is what we have done, and nothing else, since you first
came here.”
“I am well aware of it, Lily,” said Ronald, with a laugh, “and for my
part I am quite agreed to go on cheating Uncle Robert for as long as you
please.”
“It does not please me!” she said; “I would like to cheat nobody. It is
a new thing to me--I did not think of that. Oh, Ronald, take me away! I
laugh and I chatter, but my heart’s breaking. We are cheating every
body--not Uncle Robert only, but Helen Blythe and every creature that
knows me. What do I care how poor we are, or if I have to work for my
living? I will work, oh, with a good heart! but take me away, take me
away!”
Ronald held her hands in his and steadied her against her will. He had
foreseen such an outburst, as well as the other manifestations of her
agitated and disturbed life. He was ready to allow even that it was no
wonder she became excited by times, that she had been more patient than
he could have hoped. He was himself very cool, and could afford to be
moderate and humor her. He held her hands in his, and restrained the
violence of her feelings by that steady clasp. “My Lily, my Lily!” he
said. The girl yielded to that restraining influence in spite of
herself. She could almost have struck him in the vehemence of her
passion and in the intolerable sensation of this sharp light upon the
situation altogether; but the cool touch of his hands, his firm hold,
his soothing voice, subdued her. The question between two people at such
a crisis is almost entirely the question which is stronger, and on this
occasion Ronald was certainly the stronger. When Lily’s passion ended in
the natural flood of tears, she shed them on his shoulder, encircled by
his arm, all her resistance quenched. And he was very kind to her; no
one could have consoled her more lovingly, or more tenderly soothed the
nervous and excited feelings which had got beyond her control. He was
master of the situation, and felt it, but used his power in the most
gentle way. And Lily said not a word more--what was there to be said?
She had put herself in the wrong by her passion and by her tears. This
was not the calm reason with which a woman ought to discuss the
beginning of her life--with which, she said to herself, a man expected
his wife to consider and discuss these affairs. She had neither been
calm nor reasonable. She had been passionate, excited, perhaps
hysterical. Lily was deeply ashamed of herself. She was humble toward
him who must, she thought, be disappointed in her, and find her like the
women in books, all folly and excitement, instead of a creature able to
take all the circumstances into consideration. Nothing could have
subdued her spirits like that sense of being in the wrong.
Later in the evening she endeavored to make up for her foolishness by
returning to the mood of gayety with which she began the evening. She
gave Ronald a little sketch of the humors of Rory, and the respect in
which Dougal held that small and fiery personage. She told him about
Katrin’s cows and her chickens, and the amusement which these living
creatures had given during the long winter days to the little family at
Dalrugas.
“But spring is coming,” he said.
“Oh, yes; spring is coming; the moor will soon be dry enough for
walking, and many a ramble I will have. I am beginning,” said Lily, “to
grow very fond of the moor. You see, it is all we have. It’s cross and
market and college and court and all together to me. In the morning the
bees will be busy among the whins--there is always a bud somewhere on a
whin bush--and full of honey as they can hold; and then in the evening
there is the sunset, and the hills all standing out against the west,
with their old purple cloaks around them. What with the barnyard and
what with the moor, there’s no want of diversion here.”
“My bonnie Lily,” he cried in sudden compunction, “not much diversion
for the like of you!”
“What do you call the like of me? I am very well off. I have neighbors
and all. There is Helen Blythe, poor thing, she is not so well off. The
minister is a handful; he holds her night and day. And who was yon glum
man, Ronald, and what had he to do with her? Her eyes were red, and she
had been crying; and I am sure it was something about that man.”
“Alick Duff? Nonsense, Lily! He is a black sheep, if ever there was one.
That was all a foolish story, we’ll suppose. A good little thing like
the minister’s daughter should never be thrown away on him.”
“Perhaps she is a good little thing. We are all good little things till
we show ourselves different. But her eyes were red and her cheeks were
pale. I must see if I can comfort her,” said Lily half to herself. “And
now, sir, if you are going away to-morrow, you should go to your bed,
for you’ll have a weary day.”
“Yes, I shall have a weary day; but I could bear that and more to see my
Lily,” Ronald said.
“Well, if you care for her at all, you would need to do that, for she
must either be there or here,” Lily said. “It’s a pity I’m solid, that I
cannot fly away like the birds, and tap at your window as the lady does
in the ballad. What ballad? I don’t remember. Perhaps it was after she
was dead. And does Mrs. Buchanan always make you comfortable and cook as
well as Katrin? Oh, Katrin is very good for some things, though you
think her an ill housekeeper for Uncle Robert. But never mind that. Tell
me about Luckie Buchanan. I will wager you a silver bawbee, as Beenie
says, that she does not send you up your bird as good as we do here.”
“Nothing is so good as it is here. You take me up too quick, Lily.”
“Me take you up quick? I do nothing but try to please you. But I know
how it is, Ronald. You think shame of Luckie Buchanan. She burns your
bird, and she does your chop in the frying-pan, and her kettle is not
half boiled. Young men are very badly treated in their lodgings. I know
very well. Uncle Robert’s men that came to see him were always
complaining, and they were old men that could make their curries
themselves and drive womenfolk desperate, whereas you’re only young and
would think shame to look as if you cared. I wonder if she brushes your
clothes right, and gives you nice burnished boots, as you like them to
be,” said Lily, with a critical look at the sleeve of his coat, which
she was smoothing down with her hand.
“You will make me think myself a terrible being, taken up with my own
wants,” he said in a vexed tone.
“It is me that am taken up with your wants,” she said, “and what more
right than that--a man’s wife! What is the good of her but to look after
her man! And when I cannot do it for failure of circumstances, not good
will, then I must just ask and plague you till you tell me there’s
nothing more for me to do--till the term comes, and I go home to my
place,” cried Lily, with a laugh, but with two tears, which she turned
away her head that he might not see. “It’s my first place!” she cried.
“You cannot wonder I am excited about it, Ronald; and I hope I will give
you satisfaction--Beenie and me!”
Next morning Lily got up without, as appeared, any cloud on her face,
and gave him his breakfast, and saw to the packing of his bag, and that
his big coat was well strapped on to Sandy’s shoulders, who was to walk
into the town with him and carry his small belongings. “You will not
want it walking, but you will want it in the coach,” she said, “and be
sure you keep yourself warm, for, though it’s March, the wind is
terrible cold over the moor; and here is a scarf to put round your neck
for the night journey. It will keep you warm, and it will mind you of
me.”
“Do I want that to mind me of my Lily?” he said reproachfully.
“No, after I have been giving you such a taste of my humors, and you
know I am not just the good thing you thought. But you might be more
grateful for my bonnie scarf that I took out of the lavender to give you
to wrap round your throat at night! And it is a very bonnie scarf,” said
Lily; “look at the flowers worked upon it, the same on both sides, and
as soft as a dove’s feathers that are of silver. You will put it round
your neck and say Lily gave me this; and then at Whit-Sunday, when I
take up my place, I will find it again, laid away in some drawer, and I
will take it back, and it will belong then both to you and me.”
“That is a bargain,” he said, more moved by the parting than he had ever
been; but Lily went with him to the head of the stairs, and there stood
looking after him from the staircase window, to keep up some sort of
transparent fiction for Dougal’s sake, with her eyes shining and a smile
upon her mouth. She was resolved that this was how he should see her
when he went away. There should be no more breakings down. She would
importune him no more. She would not shed a tear. When he turned round
to wave his hand before he disappeared under the bank, she was still
smiling and calm. It was, perhaps, a little startling to Ronald, who had
never seen her so reasonable before--and reasonableness, though so
desirable, is sometimes a little alarming too.