III.
The dining-room, with its low roof, its crimson walls, dark furniture and handsome fire (the fires at Cockhoolet were always handsome: Bessie was the architect and superintended the building herself; they never looked harum-scarum nor meaningless nor thoughtless, nor as if they were not meant to burn; they combined taste, comfort, and, as a consequence, economy; everything tasteful and comfortable is in the long run economical), its table-cloth, glistening like the summit of the Alps and laden with good things, looked a place where people even not in love with each other might, unless naturally perverse, be very happy.
Mrs. Parker, being from town, was in raptures with every country eatable, especially the scones, which she found were manufactured by Miss Ormiston herself.
"And have they," asked Mr. Parker, "the sustaining power that the cakes made here of old had?"
"If you eat enough of them you may get to Edinburgh to-night before you are very hungry," said John.
"The abbey cakes were unleavened," Bessie explained, "which these are not, so that they are less substantial fare."
"What do you raise them with?" asked Mrs. Parker.
"Butter, milk and carbonate of soda," said Miss Ormiston.
"We call Bessie a doctor of the Carbon," said John: "she makes very good scones, although you would hardly go from here to Canterbury on the strength of one of them."
"Mr. Forrester, are you dull?" asked Jessie: "you are not saying anything."
"I am too busy eating the holy cakes, Jessie," said Edwin: "your sister is a master in her art."
"I say," Jessie went on, "are you ever dull at home? When I told Bessie that you had come she was surprised, and said that you must surely be dull at home. I am sorry for you if you are: you should come here oftener—we are never dull here."
"Perhaps," said Edwin, "your sister thinks I come too often, as it is."
Bessie was so deeply engaged pressing Mr. Parker to eat strawberry jam, with cheeks the color of the fruit, that of course she could not have heard what her sister had been saying.
"Oh no, I don't think she thinks that at all," Jessie said: "we never think any one can come too often. Bessie, can Mr. Forrester come too often?"
But still Miss Ormiston was so occupied with Mr. Parker that she did not hear.
And Mrs. Parker said, "It is a most intensely interesting old place, this: do not people come to look at it?"
"Oh yes," replied Bessie, "especially in summer: we generally have several parties every week. One of the servants takes them over the castle—grand people often, with carriages and livery servants."
"Do you not keep a book for them to write their names in?"
"No, we have never done that."
"I would do it if I were you: it would be interesting to know who comes and how many. Why, very remarkable people may have been here without your knowing."
"I doubt we are not sufficiently alive to our privileges," Bessie said.
"It's fine moonlight," said the boys, who, seeing that they and every one had ceased eating, were impatient to be out again. "Come, Mr. Parker, we'll show you the echo: Mr. Forrester, come."
"I'll go too," said Mrs. Parker; and they all went but the Rose, who stayed behind for a little to direct about household matters.
The echo was a favorite with the boys, it gave such unlimited scope to their powers of shouting: it was the sight they most enjoyed exhibiting to strangers. And it was an echo that could repeat every word of a sentence with such perfection that it was difficult to believe that it was not a human being shouting back from the other side of the park, where stood some houses inhabited by the farm-servants and their families.
"Hallo, Abbot John! is that you?" shouted one of the boys, and the other cried, "Yes, I'm taking a walk," so quickly that the one sentence seemed the answer to the other, and both came back loud and distinct on the still night-air.
"Are the Ormistons ancient? It's all fudge," shouted John.
"Well," said Mr. Parker, "that's the most perfect echo I ever heard. I've no doubt the holy fathers of the Middle Ages knew of it, and used it in some shape to keep the superstitious people in awe."
"It is awesome," said his wife, "here in the moonlight, with the old castle so near: if I were alone, positively I should feel eerie."
"Are you dull at home, Mr. Forrester?" was sent out from the depths of Will's chest, and sent back again just as Bessie came out and joined the party.
"Boys! boys!" she said, "don't be foolish."
"Why, it was what you said yourself," her sister remarked.
"Are you ever dull?" the lad shouted again.
"Often," answered Edwin, and "Often" came back instantly.
"In that case, Mr. Forrester," said Mrs. Parker, "why don't you get a wife? There's no company for a young man like a good wife. Here's Miss Ormiston; I don't think you could do better."
Think of the delicate wound of these young people being thus openly probed in broad moonlight in the presence of so many people! What could Mrs. Parker be thinking of? Not of her own love-passages surely, or, if she was, they must have been of a blunter order than those of the Rose and her lover.
"Oh no," said Bessie in cool, indifferent tones: "Mr. Forrester knows better than that."
"There!" said Edwin, "you see, Mrs. Parker, I have been refused."
"'Faint heart never won fair lady,'" said Mrs. Parker.
The boys hallooed this sentiment to the echo, and the echo took it up and sent it back so vigorously that even a timid man might have been inspired. "Mary Stuart," "Henry Darnley," "James Bothwell," the lads went on calling to the echo alternately—names which are not mere echoes even after three hundred years, but live on by sheer force of tragic romance. And it was possible that here, on this very spot, that historical trio had stood and laughed and talked and amused themselves as the young Ormistons and their visitors were doing. What words had they used to rouse the echo? If only it could be made to give them back now, what a wonderful echo it would be! The world would come to listen to it. Would it tell of the passions of love and ambition, grief and hatred, all hurrying their victims to their doom? or was the place sacred only to gentler memories and softer moods—the scene of enjoyment and freedom from care for however short a time? Who can tell?
There was a woman in the village of Cockhoolet who was ninety-eight years old, having all her faculties not perhaps quite so fresh as when she was nineteen, but in wonderful preservation after having been in daily use for little short of a century. She was one of a long-lived race: her father had been eighty-nine when he died, and her grandfather ninety-nine. Now, it is perfectly possible—and, as the family had been on the spot for centuries, it is even probable—that her great-grandfather might have dug the hole in which Mary planted her tree, or he may have saddled the queen's horse when she went hunting, or stood by the roadside and lifted his bonnet as she and her gay train swept by. Or he may have been despatched upon royal errands through the subterranean passage which is said to exist all the way between Cockhoolet Castle and Edinburgh—the private telegraph of those days, when wires in the air or under the sea by which to send messages would have cost the inventors their lives as guilty of witchcraft. While shaking hands with this old woman and speaking to her, you lost sight of her and the present time and felt the air of the sixteenth century blow in your face. Mary came up before you in moving habit as she lived—the young Mary who caught all hearts, not heartless herself, and laid hold of mere straws to save herself as she drifted desperately with circumstances; not the woman who has been painted as an actor from first to last, as coming forth draped for effect at the very closing scene,—not that woman, but the girlish queen who laughed and called to the echo, and forgot the cares of a kingdom while she could.