The Interloper

by Violet Jacob

BOOK I

[CHAPTER I
THE HEIR]

HALF-WAY up the east coast of Scotland, the estuary of the North Lour cuts a wide cleft in an edge of the Lowlands, and flows into the North Sea among the sands and salmon nets.

The river winds in large curves through the shingles and green patches where cattle graze, overhung by woods of beech and birch, and pursuing its course through a country in full cultivation—a country of large fields; where rolling woods, purple in the shadow, stretch north towards the blue Grampians.

A bridge of eight arches spans the water before it runs out to sea, the bank on its further side rising into a line of plough-fields crowning the cliffs, where flights of gulls follow the ploughman, and hover in his track over the upturned earth. As the turnpike runs down to the bridge, it curls round the policies of a harled white house which has stood for some two hundred years a little way in from the road, a tall house with dead-looking windows and slates on which the lichen has fastened. A clump of beech-trees presses round it on two sides, and, in their bare branches, rooks’ nests make patches against the late autumn skies.

Inside the mansion of Whanland—for such is its name—on a December afternoon in the first year of the nineteenth century, two men were talking in the fading light. The room which they occupied was panelled with wood, polished and somewhat light-coloured, and had two arched alcoves, one on either side of the chimney-piece. These were filled with books whose goodly backs gave a proper solemnity to the place. The windows were narrow and high, and looked out to the beeches. A faint sound of the sea came droning in from the sand-hills which flanked the shore, and were distant but the space of a few fields.

The elder of the two men was a person who had reached that convenient time of life when a gentleman may attend to his creature comforts without the risk of being blamed for it. He was well-dressed and his face was free from any obvious fault. He produced, indeed, a worse effect than his merits warranted, for his hair, which had the misfortune to look as though it were dyed, was, in reality, of a natural colour. Nothing in his appearance hinted at the fact that he was the family lawyer—or ‘man of business,’ as it is called in Scotland—of the young man who stood on the hearthrug, nor did his manner suggest that they had met that day for the first time.

He sat looking up at Gilbert Speid[^[1]] with considerable interest. Though he was not one to whom the finer details of another’s personality were apparent, he was yet observant in the commoner way. It did not escape him that his companion was shy, but he did not suspect that it was with the shyness of one, who, though well accustomed to the company of his kind, had no intimacies. A few hours ago, when starting to meet him at Whanland, he had told himself that his task would be easy, and he meant to be friendly, both from inclination and policy, with the strange laird, who was a stranger to his inheritance. But though he had been received with politeness a little different from the amenity of anyone he had known before, he felt that he was still far from the defences of the young man’s mind. As to Gilbert’s outward appearance, though it could hardly be called handsome, the lawyer was inclined to admire it. He was rather tall, and had a manner of carrying himself which was noticeable, not from affectation, but because he was a very finished swordsman, and had a precision of gesture and movement not entirely common. He did not speak with the same intonation as the gentry with whom it was Alexander Barclay’s happiness to be acquainted, professionally or otherwise, for, though a Scot on both sides of his family, he had spent most of his youth abroad, and principally in Spain. His head was extremely well set and his face gave an impression of bone—well-balanced bone; it was a face, rather heavy, and singularly impassive, though the eyes looked out with an extraordinary curiosity on life. It seemed, to judge from them, as though he were always on the verge of speaking, and Barclay caught himself pausing once or twice for the expected words. But they seldom came and Gilbert’s mouth remained closed, less from determination to silence than from settled habit.

It was in the forenoon that Gilbert Speid had arrived at Whanland to find Barclay awaiting him on the doorstep; and the two men had walked round the house and garden and under the beech-trees, stopping at points from which there was any view to be had over the surrounding country. They had strolled up a field parallel with the road which ran from the nearest town of Kaims to join the highway at the bridge. There Gilbert had taken in every detail, standing at an angle of a fence and looking down on the river as it wound from the hazy distance of bare woods.

‘And my property ends here?’ he asked, turning from the fascinating scene to his companion.

‘At the bend of the Lour, Mr. Speid; just where you see the white cottage.’

‘I am glad that some of that river is mine,’ said Gilbert, after a long pause.

Barclay laughed with great heartiness, and rubbed his hands one over the other.

‘Very satisfactory,’ he said, as they went on—‘an excellent state of things.’

When they returned to the house they found a stack of papers which the lawyer had brought to be examined, and Speid, though a little oppressed by the load of dormant responsibility it represented, sat gravely down, determined to do all that was expected of him. It was past three o’clock when Barclay pulled out his watch and inquired when he had breakfasted, for his own sensations were reminding him that he himself had done so at a very early hour.

Gilbert went to the bell, but, as he stood with the rope in his hand, he remembered that he had no idea of the resources of the house, and did not even know whether there were any available servant whose duty it was to answer it. His companion sat looking at him with a half-smile, and he coloured as he saw it.

When the door opened, a person peered in whom he dimly recollected seeing on his arrival in the group which had gathered to unload his post-chaise. He was a small, elderly man, whose large head shone with polished baldness. He was pale, and had the pose and expression we are accustomed to connect—perhaps unjustly—with field-preachers, and his rounded brow hung like the eaves of a house over a mild but impudent eye. His was the type of face to be seen bawling over a psalm-book at some sensational religious meeting, a face not to be regarded too long nor too earnestly, lest its owner should be spurred by the look into some insolent familiarity. He stood on the threshold looking from Speid to Barclay, as though uncertain which of the two he should address.

It took Gilbert a minute to think of what he had wanted; for he was accustomed to the well-trained service of his father’s house, and the newcomer matched nothing that had a place in his experience.

‘What is it?’ inquired the man at the door.

‘Is there any dinner—anything that we can have to eat? You must forgive me, sir; but you see how it is. I am strange here, and I foolishly sent no orders.’

‘I engaged a cook for you and it is hardly possible that she has made no preparation. Surely there is something in the kitchen, Macquean?’

‘I’ll away down an’ see,’ said the man, disappearing.

‘Who is that?’ asked Gilbert, to whom the loss of a dinner seemed less extraordinary than the possession of such a servant.

‘His name is Mungo Macquean. He has had charge of the house for a great part of the time that it has stood empty. He is a good creature, Mr. Speid, though uncouth—very uncouth.’

In a few minutes the door opened again to admit Macquean’s head.

‘There’s a chicken she’ll roast to ye, an’ there’s brose. An’ a’m to tell her, are ye for pancakes?’

‘Oh, certainly,’ said Gilbert. ‘Mr. Barclay, when shall it be?’

‘The sooner the better, I think,’ said the other hopefully.

‘Then we will dine at once,’ said Gilbert.

Macquean’s mouth widened and he stared at his master.

‘You’ll get it at five,’ he said, as he withdrew his head.

The lawyer’s face fell.

‘I suppose it cannot be ready before then,’ he said, with a sigh.

The two drew up rather disconsolately to the fireside. The younger man’s eyes wandered round the room and lit upon one of those oil-paintings typical of the time, representing a coach-horse, dock-tailed, round-barrelled, and with a wonderfully long rein.

‘That is the only picture I have noticed in the house,’ he observed. ‘Are there no more—no portraits, I mean?’

‘To be sure there are,’ replied Barclay, ‘but they have been put in the garret, which we forgot to visit in our walk round. We will go up and see them if you wish. They are handsomely framed and will make a suitable show when we get them up on the walls.’

The garret was approached by a steep wooden stair, and, as they stood among the strange collection it contained in the way of furniture and cobwebs, Speid saw that the one vacant space of wall supported a row of pictures, which stood on the floor like culprits, their faces to the wainscot. Barclay began to turn them round. It irked the young man to see his fat hands twisting the canvases about, and flicking the dust from the row of faces which he regarded with a curious stirring of feeling. Nothing passed lightly over Gilbert.

He was relieved when his companion, whose heart was in the kitchen, and who was looking with some petulance at the dust which had fallen on his coat from the beams above, proposed to go down and push forward the preparations for dinner.

Speid stood absorbed before the line of vanished personalities which had helped to determine his existence, and they returned his look with all the intelligent and self-conscious gravity of eighteenth-century portraiture. Only one in the row differed in character from the others, and he took up the picture and carried it to the light. It represented a lady whose figure was cut by the oval frame just below the waist. Her hands were crossed in front of her, and her elbows brought into line with her sides, as were those of the other Speid ancestresses; there was something straight and virginal in her pose. Never had Gilbert seen such conventionality of attitude joined to so much levity of expression. She wore a mountain of chestnut hair piled high on her head and curling down one side of her neck. Her open bodice of warm cream colour suggested a bust rather fuller than might be expected from the youthful and upright stiffness of her carriage, and, over her arm, hung an India muslin spotted scarf, which had apparently slipped down round her waist. Her eyes were soft in shade and hard in actual glance, bold, bright, scornful, under strongly marked brows. The mouth was very red, and the upper lip fine; the lower lip protruded, and drooped a little in the middle. Her head was half turned to meet the spectator.

Her appearance interested him, and he searched the canvas for an inscription. Turning it round, he saw a paper stuck upon the back and covered with writing: ‘Clementina Speid, daughter of John Lauder, Esq., of Netherkails, and Marie La Vallance, his wife. 1767.’

The lady was his mother; and the portrait had been painted just after her marriage, three years before his own birth.

Never in his life had he seen any likeness of her. His father had not once mentioned her name in his hearing, and, as a little boy, he had been given by his nurses to understand that she existed somewhere in that mysterious and enormous category of things about which well-brought-up children were not supposed to inquire. There was a certain fitness in thus meeting her unknown face as he entered Whanland for the first time since he left it in the early months of his infancy. She had been here all the time, waiting for him in the dust and darkness. As he set the picture against the wall her eyes looked at him with a secret intelligence. That he had nothing to thank her for was a fact which he had gathered as soon as he grew old enough to draw deductions for himself; but, all the same, he now felt an unaccountable sympathy with her, not as his mother—for such a relationship had never existed for him—but as a human being. He went to the little window under the slope of the roof and looked out over the fields. On the shore the sea lay, far and sad, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The even, dreary sound came through a crack in the two little panes of glass. He turned back to the picture, though he could hardly see it in the strengthening dusk; her personality seemed to pervade the place with a brave, unavailing brightness. It struck him that, in that game of life which had ended in her death, there had been her stake too. But it was a point of view which he felt sure no other being he had known had ever considered.

Mr. Barclay’s voice calling to him on the staircase brought him back from the labyrinth of thought. He hurried out of the garret to find him on the landing, rather short of breath after his ascent.

‘The Misses Robertson are below, Mr. Speid; they have driven out from Kaims to bid you welcome. I have left them in the library.’

‘The Misses Robertson?’

‘Miss Hersey and Miss Caroline Robertson; your cousins. The ladies will not be long before they find you out, you see. They might have allowed you a little more law, all the same. But women are made inquisitive—especially the old ones.’

‘I think it vastly kind,’ said Speid shortly. ‘I remember now that my father spoke of them.’

As they entered the library, two small figures rose from their chairs and came forward, one a little in front of the other.

The sisters were both much under middle height, and dressed exactly alike; it was only on their faces that the very great difference in them was visible. There was an appealing dignity in the full acknowledgment of her seventy years which Miss Hersey carried in her person. She had never had the smallest pretension to either intellect or attraction, but her plain, thin face, with its one beauty of gray hair rolled high above her forehead, was full of a dignity innocent, remote, and entirely natural, that has gone out of the modern world. Miss Caroline, who was slightly her senior, was frankly ugly and foolish-looking; and something fine, delicate, and persuasive that lay in her sister’s countenance had, in hers, been omitted. Their only likeness was in the benignity that pervaded them and in the inevitable family resemblance that is developed with age. The fashion of their dresses, though in no way grotesque, had been obsolete for several years.

‘Welcome, Mr. Speid,’ said Miss Hersey, holding out a gentle, bony hand. ‘Caroline, here is Mr. Speid.’

It was no slight effort which the two feeble old ladies had made in coming to do him honour, for they had about them the strangeness which hangs round very aged people when some unaccustomed act takes them out of their own surroundings, and he longed to thank them, or to say something which should express his sense of it. But Barclay’s proximity held him down. Their greeting made him disagreeably aware of the lawyer’s presence; and his incongruity as he stood behind him was like a cold draught blowing on his back. He made a hurried murmur of civility, then, as he glanced again at Miss Hersey’s face, he suddenly set his heels together, and, bending over her hand, held it to his lips.

She was old enough to look as if she had never been young, but seventy years do not rob a woman, who has ever been a woman, of everything; she felt like a queen as she touched her kinsman’s bent head lightly with her withered fingers.

‘Welcome, Gilbert,’ she said again. ‘God bless you, my dear!’

‘We knew your father,’ said the old lady, when chairs had been brought, and she and her sister installed, one on either side of the fireplace.

‘We knew your father,’ echoed Miss Caroline, smiling vaguely.

‘I do not remember that he was like you,’ said Miss Hersey, ‘but he was a very handsome man. He brought your mother to see us immediately after he was married.’

‘You’ll have to keep up the custom,’ observed Mr. Barclay jocosely. ‘How soon are we to look for the happy event, Mr. Speid? There will be no difficulty among the young ladies here, I’m thinking.’

‘My cousin will do any lady honour that he asks, Mr. Barclay, and it is likely he will be particular,’ said Miss Hersey, drawing herself up.

‘He should be particular,’ said Miss Caroline, catching gently at the last word.

‘Your mother was a sweet creature,’ continued the younger sister. ‘He brought her to our house. It was on a Sunday after the church was out. I mind her sitting by me on the sofy at the window. You’ll mind it, too, Caroline.’

‘A sweet creature indeed; a sweet creature,’ murmured Miss Caroline.

‘She was so pleased with the lilies of the valley in the garden, and I asked Robert Fullarton to go out and pull some for her. Poor thing! it is a sad-like place she is buried in, Gilbert.’

‘I have never seen it, ma’am,’ said Speid.

‘It’s at Garviekirk. The kirkyard is on the shore, away along the sands from the mouth of the river. Your father wished it that way, but I could never understand it.’

‘I shall be very pleased to show you the road there,’ broke in Barclay.

‘It was a bitter day,’ continued Miss Robertson. ‘I wondered your father did not get his death o’ cold, standing there without his hat. He spoke to no one, not even to Robert Fullarton who was so well acquainted with him. And when the gentlemen who had come to the burying arrived at the gate of Whanland, he just bade them a good-day and went in. There was not one that was brought in to take a glass of wine. I never saw him after; he went to England.’

While her sister was speaking, Miss Caroline held her peace. Her chin shook as she turned her eyes with dim benevolence from one to the other. At seventy-two, she seemed ten years older than Miss Hersey.

Gilbert could not but ask his cousins to stay and dine with him and they assented very readily. When, at last, dinner was brought, he and Mr. Barclay handed them to the table. There was enough and to spare upon it, in spite of Macquean’s doubts; and Miss Hersey, seated beside him, was gently exultant in the sense of kinship. It was a strange party.

Gilbert, who had never sat at the head of his own table before, looked round with a feeling of detachment. It seemed to him that he was acting in a play and that his three guests, whom, a few hours before, he had never seen, were as unreal as everything else. The environment of this coming life was closing in on him and he could not meet its forces as easily as a more elastic nature would have met them. He accepted change with as little equanimity as a woman, in spite of the many changes of his past, because he knew that both duty and temperament would compel him to take up life, and live it with every nerve alongside the lives running parallel with his own. He could see that he had pleased Miss Hersey and he was glad, as he had a respect for ties of blood imbibed from the atmosphere of ceremonious Spain. He was glad to find something that had definite connection with himself and the silent house he had entered; with its wind-blown beech-trees and the face upstairs in the dust of the garret.

When dinner was over, the Miss Robertsons sent out for the hired coach and pair which they had considered indispensable to the occasion. When they had taken their leave, Gilbert stood and watched the lights of the vehicle disappearing down the road to Kaims. Their departure relieved him, for their presence made him dislike Barclay. Their extreme simplicity might border on the absurd, but it made the lawyer’s exaggerated politenesses and well-to-do complacency look more offensive than they actually were.

It was quite dark as he turned back, and Barclay, who was a man much in request in his own circle, was anxious to get home to the town, where he proposed to enjoy a bottle with some friends. He looked forward keenly to discussing the new-comer over it.

Before he went to bed, Speid strolled out into the damp night. He set his face towards the sea, and the small stir of air there was blew chill upon his cheek. Beyond a couple of fields a great light was flaring, throwing up the blunt end of some farm buildings through which he had passed that morning in his walk with Barclay. Figures were flitting across the shine; and the hum of human voices rose above a faint roar that was coming in from the waste of sea beyond the sand-hills. He strode across the paling, and made towards the light. When he reached the place he found that a bonfire was shooting bravely upward, and the glow which it threw on the walls of the whitewashed dwelling-house was turning it into a rosy pink. The black forms of twenty or thirty persons, men and women—the former much in the majority—were crowding and gyrating round the blaze. Some were feeding it with logs and stacks of brushwood; a few of the younger ones were dancing and posturing solemnly; and one, who had made a discreet retirement from the burning mass, was sitting in an open doorway with an empty bottle on the threshold beside him. Some children looked down on the throng from an upper window of the house. The revel was apparently in an advanced stage.

The noise was tremendous. Under cover of it, and of the deep shadows thrown by the bonfire, Gilbert slipped into a dark angle and stood to watch the scene. The men were the principal dancers, and a knot of heavy carter-lads were shuffling opposite to each other in a kind of sentimental abandonment. Each had one hand on his hip and one held conscientiously aloft. Now and then they turned round with the slow motion of joints on the spit. One was singing gutturally in time to his feet; but his words were unintelligible to Speid.

He soon discovered that the rejoicings were in honour of his own arrival and the knowledge made him the more inclined to keep his hiding-place. He could see Macquean raking at the pile, the flame playing over his round forehead and unrefined face. He looked greatly unsuited to the occasion, as he did to any outdoor event.

All at once a little wizened woman looked in his own direction.

‘Yonder’s him!’ she cried, as she extended a direct forefinger on his shelter.

A shout rose from the revellers. Even the man in the doorway turned his head, a thing he had not been able to do for some time.

‘Heh! the laird! the laird!’

‘Yon’s him. Come awa’, laird, an’ let’s get a sicht o’ ye!’

‘Here’s to ye, laird!’

‘Laird! laird! What’ll I get if I run through the fire?’

‘Ye’ll get a pair o’ burned boots!’ roared the man in the doorway with sudden warmth.

Speid came out from the shadow. He had not bargained for this. Silence fell at once upon the assembly, and it occurred to him that he would do well to say a few words to these, his new dependents. He paused, not knowing how to address them.

‘Friends,’ he began at last, ‘I see that you mean this—this display as a kind welcome to me.’

‘Just that,’ observed a voice in the crowd.

‘I know very little about Whanland, and I do not even know your names. But I shall hope to be friendly with you all. I mean to live here and to try my best to do well by everybody. I hope I have your good wishes.’

‘Ye’ll hae that!’ cried the voice; and a man, far gone in intoxication, who had absently filled the tin mug he had drained with small stones, rattled it in accompaniment to the approving noise which followed these words.

‘I thank you all,’ said the young man, as it subsided.

Then he turned and went up the fields to the house.

And that was how Gilbert Speid came back to Whanland.

---

[^[1]]Pronounced Speed.

[CHAPTER II
AT GARVIEKIRK]

THE woman who lay in her grave by the sands had rested there for nearly thirty years when her son stood in the grass to read her name and the date of her death. The place had been disused as a burial-ground; and it cost Gilbert some trouble to find the corner in which Clementina Speid’s passionate heart had mixed with the dust from which, we are told, we emanate. The moss and damp had done their best to help on the oblivion lying in wait for us all, and it was only after half an hour of careful scraping that he had spelt out the letters on the stone. There was little to read: her name, and the day she died—October 5, 1770—and her age. It was twenty-nine; just a year short of his own. Underneath was cut: ‘Thus have they rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my goodwill (Ps. cix. 4).’

He stood at her feet, his chin in his hand, and the salt wind blowing in his hair. The smell of tar came up from the nets spread on the shore to windward of him, and a gull flitted shrieking from the line of cliff above.

He looked up.

He had not heard the tread of nearing hoofs, for the sea-sound swallowed everything in its enveloping murmur, and he was surprised to find that a person, from the outer side of the graveyard wall, was regarding him earnestly. He could not imagine how she had arrived at the place; for the strip of flat land which contained this burying-ground at the foot of the cliffs appeared to him to end in the promontory standing out into the ocean a half-mile further east. The many little tracks and ravines which cut downward to the coast, and by one of which the rider had descended to ride along the bents, were unknown to him. He had not expected to see anyone, and he was rather embarrassed at meeting the eyes of the middle-aged gentlewoman who sat on horseback before him. She was remarkable enough to inspire anyone with a feeling of interest, though not from beauty, for her round, plain face was lined and toughened by the weather, and her shrewd and comprehensive glance seemed more suited to a man’s than to a woman’s countenance. A short red wig of indifferent fit protruded from under a low-crowned beaver; and the cord and tassels, with which existing taste encircled riding-hats, nodded over one side of the brim at each movement of the head below. A buff waistcoat, short even in those days of short waists, covered a figure which in youth could never have been graceful, and the lady’s high-collared coat and riding-skirt of plum colour were shabby with the varied weather of many years. The only superfine things about her were her gloves, which were of the most expensive make, the mare she rode, and an intangible air which pervaded her, drowning her homeliness in its distinction.

Seeing that Gilbert was aware of her proximity, she moved on; not as though she felt concern for the open manner of her regard, but as if she had seen all she wished to see. As she went forward he was struck with admiration of the mare, for she was a picture of breeding, and whoever groomed her was a man to be respected; her contrast to the shabbiness of her rider was marked, the faded folds of the plum-coloured skirt showing against her loins like the garment of a scarecrow laid over satin.

She was a dark bay with black points, short-legged, deep-girthed; her little ears were cocked as she picked her way through the grass into the sandy track which led back in the direction of the Lour’s mouth and the bridge. The lady, despite her dumpish figure, was a horsewoman, a fact that he noticed with interest as he turned from the mound, and, stepping through a breach in the wall, took his way homewards in the wake of the stranger.

It was a full fortnight since he had come to Whanland. With the exception of Barclay and the Miss Robertsons, he had heard little and seen nothing of his neighbours, for his time had been filled by business matters. He knew his own servants by sight, and that was all; but, with regard to their functions, he was completely in the dark, and glad enough to have Macquean to interpret domestic life to him. He had made some progress in the understanding of his speech, which he found an easier matter to be even with than his character; and he was getting over the inclination either to laugh or to be angry which he had felt on first seeing him; also, it was dawning on him that, in the astounding country he was to inhabit, it was possible to combine decent intentions with a mode of bearing and address bordering on grossness.

As he went along and watched the rider in front, he could not guess at her identity, having nothing to give him the smallest clue to it; he was a good deal attracted by her original appearance, and was thinking that he would ask Miss Robertson, when he next waited on her, to enlighten him, when she put the mare to a trot and soon disappeared round an angle of the cliff.

The clouds were low; and the gleam of sunshine which had enlivened the day was merging itself into a general expectation of coming wet. Gilbert buttoned up his coat and put his best foot forward, with the exhilaration of a man who feels the youth in his veins warring pleasantly with outward circumstances. He was young and strong; the fascination of the place he had just left, and the curious readiness of his rather complicated mind to dwell on it, and on the past of which it spoke, ran up, so to speak, against the active perfection of his body. He took off his hat and carried it, swinging along with his small head bare, and taking deep breaths of the healthy salt which blew to him over miles of open water from Jutland opposite. The horse he had seen had excited him. So far, he had been kept busy with the things pertaining to his new position, but, interesting as they were, it occurred to him that he was tired of them. Now he could give himself the pleasure of filling his stable. He had never lacked money, for his father had made him a respectable allowance, but, now that he was his own master, with complete control of his finance, he would be content with nothing but the best.

He thought of his two parents, one lying behind him in that God-forgotten spot by the North Sea and the other under the cypresses in Granada, where he had seen him laid barely three months ago. It would have seemed less incongruous had the woman been left with the sun and orange-trees and blue skies, and the man at the foot of the impenetrable cliffs. But it was the initial trouble: they had been mismated, misplaced, each with the other, and one with her surroundings.

For two centuries the Speids of Whanland had been settled in this corner of the Eastern Lowlands, and, though the property had diminished and was now scarcely more than half its original size, the name carried to initiated ears a suggestion of sound breeding, good physique, and unchangeable custom, with a smack of the polite arts brought into the family by a collateral who had been distinguished as a man of letters in the reign of George I. The brides of the direct line had generally possessed high looks, and been selected from those families which once formed the strength of provincial Scotland, the ancient and untitled county gentry. From its ranks came the succession of wits, lawyers, divines, and men of the King’s service, which, though known only in a limited circle, formed a society in the Scottish capital that for brilliancy of talent and richness of personality has never been surpassed.

The late laird, James Speid, had run contrary to the family custom of mating early and was nearing forty when he set out, with no slight stir, for Netherkails, in the county of Perth, to ask Mr. Lauder, a gentleman with whom he had an acquaintance, for the hand of his daughter, Clementina. He had met this lady at the house of a neighbour and decided to pay his addresses to her; for, besides having a small fortune, not enough to allure a penniless man, but enough to be useful to the wife of one of his circumstance, she was so attractive as to disturb him very seriously. He found only one obstacle to the despatch of his business, which was that Clementina herself was not inclined towards him, and told him so with a civility that did not allay his vexation; and he returned to Whanland more silent than ever—for he was a stern man—to find the putting of Miss Lauder from his mind a harder matter than he had supposed.

But, in a few weeks, a letter came from Netherkails, not from the lady, but from her father, assuring him that his daughter had altered her mind, and that, if he were still constant to the devotion he had described, there was no impediment in his way. Mr. Speid, whose inclination pointed like a finger-post to Netherkails, was now confronted by his pride, which stood, an armed giant, straddling the road to bar his progress. But, after a stout tussle between man and monster, the wheels of the family chariot rolled over the enemy’s fallen body; and the victor, taking with him in a shagreen case a pearl necklace which had belonged to his mother, brought back Clementina, who was wearing it upon her lovely neck.

Whatever may have been the history of her change of mind, Mrs. Speid accepted her responsibilities with a suitable face and an apparent pleasure in the interest she aroused as a bride of more than common good looks. Her coach was well appointed, her dresses of the best; her husband, both publicly and in private, was precise in his courtesy and esteem, and there was nothing left to be desired but some sympathy of nature. At thirty-eight he was, at heart, an elderly man, while his wife, at twenty-seven, was a very young woman. The fact that he never became aware of the incongruity was the rock on which their ship went to pieces.

After three years of marriage Gilbert was born. Clementina’s health had been precarious for months, and she all but paid for the child’s life with her own. On the day that she left her bed, a couch was placed at the window facing seaward, and she lay looking down the fields to the shore. No one knew what occurred, but, that evening, there was a great cry in the house and the servants, rushing up, met Mr. Speid coming down the stairs and looking as if he did not see them. They found their mistress in a terrible state of excitement and distress and carried her back to her bed, where she became so ill that the doctor was fetched. By the time he arrived she was in a delirium; and, two days after, she died without having recognised anyone.

When the funeral was over James Speid discharged his servants, gave orders for the sale of his horses, shut up his house, and departed for England, taking the child with him under the charge of a young Scotchwoman. In a short time he crossed over to Belgium, dismissed the nurse, and handed over little Gilbert to be brought up by a peasant woman near the vigilant eye of a pasteur with whom he had been friendly in former days. Being an only son, Mr. Speid had none but distant relations, and, as he was not a man of sociable character, there was no person who might naturally come forward to take the child. He spent a year in travel and settled finally in Spain, where the boy, when he had reached his fifth birthday, joined him.

Thus Gilbert was cut off from all intercourse with his native country, growing up with the sons of a neighbouring Spanish nobleman as his companions. When, at last, he went to school in England, he met no one who knew anything about him, and, all mention of his mother’s name having been strictly forbidden at his home, he reached manhood in complete ignorance of everything connected with his father’s married life. The servants, being foreign, and possessing no channel through which they could hear anything to explain the prohibition, made many guesses, and, from scraps of their talk overheard by the boy, he discovered that there was some mystery connected with him. It was a great deal in his mind, but, as he grew older, a certain delicacy of feeling forbade his risking the discovery of anything to the detriment of the mother whose very likeness he had never seen. His father, though indifferent to him, endeavoured to be just, and was careful in giving him the obvious advantages of life. He grew up active and manly, plunging with zest into the interests and amusements of his boyhood’s companions. He was a good horseman, a superb swordsman, and, his natural gravity assimilating with something in the Spanish character, he was popular. Mr. Speid made no demands upon his affection, the two men respecting each other without any approach to intimacy, and, when the day came on which Gilbert stood and looked down at the stern, dead face, though his grief was almost impersonal, he felt in every fibre that he owed him a debt he could only repay by the immediate putting into effect of his wishes. Mr. Speid had, during his illness, informed him that he was heir to the property of Whanland, and that he desired him to return to Scotland and devote himself conscientiously to it.

And so he had come home, and was now making his way up to the bridge, wondering why he had not seen the figure of the strange lady crossing it between him and the sky. She must have turned and gone up the road leading from it to the cliffs and the little village of Garviekirk, which sat in the fields above the churchyard.

He looked at the shoe-marks in the mud as he went up the hill, following them mechanically, and, at the top, they diverged, as he had expected, from his homeward direction. As he stopped half-way and glanced over the bridge parapet into the swirling water of the Lour slipping past the masonry, the smart beat of hoofs broke on his ear. The mare was coming down towards him at a canter, the saddle empty, the stirrup-leather flying outwards, the water splashing up as she went through the puddles. Something inconsequent and half-hearted in her pace showed that whatever fright had started her had given way to a capricious pleasure in the unusual; and the hollow sound of her own tread on the bridge made her buck light-heartedly.

Gilbert stepped out into the middle of the way and held up his walking-stick. She swerved, stopped suddenly with her fore-feet well in front of her, and was going to turn when he sprang at the reins. As he grasped them she reared up, but only as a protest against interference, for she came down as quietly as if she had done nothing at which anyone could take offence. She had evidently fallen, for the bit was bent and all her side plastered with mud. He plucked a handful of grass and cleaned down the saddle before starting with her towards Garviekirk. There was no one to be seen, but there stood, in the distance, a roadside cottage whose inmates might, he thought, know something of the accident. He hurried forward.

The cottage-door opened on the side-path, and, as he drew near, he saw the mare’s owner standing on the threshold, watching his approach. She had been original-looking on horseback and she was now a hundred times more so; for the traces of her fall were evident, and, on one side, she was coated with mud from head to heel. Her wig was askew, her arms akimbo, and her hat, which she held in her hand, was battered out of shape. She stood framed by the lintel, her feet set wide apart; as she contemplated Gilbert and the mare, she kept up a loud conversation with an unseen person inside the cottage.

‘Nonsense, woman!’ she was exclaiming as he stopped a few paces from her. ‘Come out and hold her while this gentleman helps me to mount. Sir, I am much obliged to you.’

As she spoke she walked round the animal in a critical search for damage.

‘She is quite sound, madam,’ said Gilbert. ‘I trotted her as I came to make sure of it. I hope you are not hurt yourself.’

‘Thanky, no,’ she replied, rather absently.

He laid the rein on the mare’s neck. The lady threw an impatient look at the house.

‘Am I to be kept waiting all day, Granny Stirk?’ she cried.

There was a sound of pushing and scuffling, and an old woman carrying a clumsy wooden chair filled the doorway. She was short and thin, and had the remains of the most marked good looks.

The lady broke into a torrent of speech.

‘What do I want with that? Do you suppose I have come to such a pass that I cannot mount my horse without four wooden legs to help me up? Put it down, you old fool, and come here as I bid you—do you hear?’

Granny Stirk advanced steadily with the chair in front of her. She might have looked as though protecting herself with it had her expression been less decided.

‘Put it down, I tell you. God bless me, am I a cripple? Leave her head, sir—she will stand—and do me the favour to mount me.’

Gilbert complied, and, putting his hand under the stranger’s splashed boot, tossed her easily into the saddle. She sat a moment gathering up the reins and settling her skirt; then, with a hurried word of thanks, she trotted off, standing up in her stirrup as she went to look over at the mare’s feet. Granny had put down her burden and was staring at Gilbert with great interest.

‘Who is that lady?’ he inquired, when horse and rider had disappeared.

‘Yon’s Leddy Eliza Lamont,’ she replied, still examining him.

‘Does she live near here?’

‘Ay; she bides at Morphie, away west by the river.’

‘And how did she meet with her accident?’

‘She was coming in by the field ahint the house, an’ the horse just coupet itsel’. She came in-by an’ tell’t me. She kens me fine.’

It struck Gilbert as strange that, in spite of Lady Eliza’s interest as she watched him over the burying-ground wall, she had not had the curiosity to ask his name, though they had spoken and he had done her a service. He looked down at the mud which her boot had transferred to his fingers.

‘Ye’ve filed your hands,’ observed Granny. ‘Come ben an’ I’ll gie ye a drappie water to them.’

He followed her and found himself in a small, dark kitchen. It was clean, and a great three-legged caldron which hung by a chain over the fire was making an aggressive bubbling. A white cat, marked with black and brown, slunk deceitfully out of its place by the hearth as they entered. The old woman took an earthenware bowl and filled it. When he had washed his hands, she held out a corner of her apron to him, and he dried them.

‘Sit down a whilie to the fire,’ she said, pushing forward the wooden chair that Lady Eliza had despised.

‘Thank you, I cannot,’ he replied. ‘I must be going, for it will soon be dark; but I should like to pay you another visit one day.’

‘Haste ye back, then,’ she said, as he went out of the door.

Gilbert turned as he stood on the side-path, and looked at the old woman. A question was in her face.

‘You’ll be the laird of Whanland?’ she inquired, rather loudly.

He assented.

‘You’re a fine lad,’ said Granny Stirk, as she went back into the cottage.

[CHAPTER III
FRIENDSHIP]

LADY ELIZA LAMONT splashed along the road and over the bridge; her heart was beating under the outlandish waistcoat, and behind her red face, so unsuggestive of emotion of any sort, a turmoil was going on in her brain. She had seen him at last.

She breathed hard, and her mouth drew into a thin line as she passed Whanland, and saw the white walls glimmering through the beech-trees. There was a light in one of the upper windows, the first she had seen there for thirty years in the many times she had ridden past.

He was so little like the picture her mind had imagined that she would scarcely have recognised him, she told herself. Yet still there was that in his look which forbade her to hate him unrestrainedly, though he represented all that had set her life awry. He was now her neighbour and it was likely they would often meet; indeed, sooner or later, civility would compel her to invite him to wait upon her. She gave the mare a smart blow with her riding-cane as they turned into the approach to Morphie House.

Up to the horse-block in the stable-yard she rode, for her fall had made her stiff, and, though she usually objected to dismounting upon it, she was glad of its help this evening. The groom who came out exclaimed as he saw her plight, but she cut him short, merely sending him for a lantern, by the light of which they examined the mare together in the growing dusk; she then gathered up her skirt and went into the house by the back entrance. Her gloves were coated with mud, and she peeled them off and threw them on a table in the hall before going into the long, low room in which she generally sat. The lights had not been brought and it was very dark as she opened the door; the two windows at the end facing her were mere gray patches of twilight through which the dim white shapes of a few sheep were visible; for, at Morphie, the grass grew up to the walls at the sides of the house. A figure was sitting by the hearth between the windows and a very tall man rose from his chair as she entered.

Lady Eliza started.

‘Fullarton!’ she exclaimed.

‘It is I. I have been waiting here expecting you might return earlier. You are out late to-night.’

‘The mare put her foot in a hole, stupid brute! A fine roll she gave me, too.’

He made an exclamation, and, catching sight of some mud on her sleeve, led her to the light. She went quietly and stood while he looked at her.

‘Gad, my lady! you have been down indeed! You are none the worse, I trust?’

‘No, no; but I will send for a dish of tea, and drink it by the fire. It is cold outside.’

‘But you are wet, my dear lady.’

‘What does that matter? I shall take no harm. Ring the bell, Fullarton—the rope is at your hand.’

Robert Fullarton did as he was desired, and stood looking at the ragged grass and the boles of the trees. His figure and the rather blunt outline of his features showed dark against the pane. At sixty he was as upright as when he and Lady Eliza had been young together, and he the first of the county gentlemen in polite pursuits. At a time when it was hardly possible to be anything else, he had never been provincial, for though he was, before anything, a sportsman, he had been one of the very few of his day capable of combining sport with wider interests.

The friendship between his own family and that of Morphie House had gone far back into the preceding century, long before Mr. Lamont, second son of an impoverished earl, had inherited the property through his mother, and settled down upon it with Lady Eliza, his unmarried sister. At his death she had stepped into his place, still unmarried, a blunt, prejudiced woman, understood by few, and, oddly enough, liked by many. Morphie was hers for life and was to pass, at her death, to a distant relation of her mother’s family. She was well off, and, being the only occupant of a large house, with few personal wants and but one expensive taste, she had become as autocratic as a full purse and a life outside the struggles and knocks of the world will make anyone who is in possession of both.

The expensive taste was her stable; for, from the hour that she had been lifted as a little child upon the back of her father’s horse, she had wavered only once in her decision that horses and all pertaining to them presented by far the most attractive possibilities in life. Her hour of wavering had come later.

The fire threw bright flickerings into the darkness of the room as Lady Eliza sat and drank her tea. The servant who had brought it would have brought in lights, too, but she refused to have them, saying that she was tired and that the dusk soothed her head, and she withdrew into the furthest corner of a high-backed settee, with the little dish beside her on a spindle-legged table.

Fullarton sat at the other end of the hearth, his elbows on his knees and his hands spread to the blaze. They were large hands, nervous and well formed. His face, on which the firelight played, had a look of preoccupation, and the horizontal lines of his forehead seemed deeper than usual—at least, so his companion thought. It was easily seen that they were very intimate, from the silence in which they sat.

‘Surely you must be rather wet,’ said he again, after a few minutes. ‘I think it would be wise if you were to change your habit for dry clothes.’

‘No; I will sit here.’

‘You have always been a self-willed woman, my lady.’

She made no reply, merely turning her cane round and round in her hand. A loud crash came from the fire, and a large piece of wood fell into the fender with a sputter of blue fireworks. He picked it up with the tongs and set it back in its place. She watched him silently. It was too dark to read the expression in her eyes.

‘I have seen young Whanland,’ she said suddenly.

‘Indeed,’ said Fullarton.

‘He caught the mare and brought her to me at Granny Stirk’s house.’

‘What is he like?’ he asked, after a pause.

‘A proper young fellow. He obliged me very greatly. Have you not met him? He has been at Whanland this fortnight past, I am told.’

‘No,’ said Fullarton, with his eyes on the flame, ‘never. I have never seen him.’

‘As I came by just now I saw the lights in Whanland House. It is a long time that it has been in darkness now. I suppose that sawney-faced Macquean is still minding it?’

‘I believe so,’ said the man, drawing his chair out of the circle of the light.

‘How long is it now since—since Mrs. Speid’s death? Twenty-eight or twenty-nine years, I suppose?’

‘It is thirty,’ said Robert.

‘It was a little earlier in the year than this,’ continued Lady Eliza. ‘I remember seeing Mr. Speid’s travelling-carriage on the road, with the nurse and the baby inside it.’

‘You build your fires very high,’ said Fullarton. ‘I must move away, or the cold will be all the worse when I get out of doors.

‘But I hope you will stay and sup, Fullarton. You have not been here since Cecilia came back.’

‘Not to-night,’ said he, rising; ‘another time. Present my respects to Cecilia, for I must go.’

Lady Eliza sat still. He stood by the settee holding out his hand. His lips were shaking, but there was a steadiness in his voice and a measured tone that told of great control.

‘Good-night,’ he said. ‘I left my horse in the stable. I will walk out myself and fetch him.’

He turned to go to the door. She watched him till he had almost reached it.

‘Fullarton!’ she cried suddenly; ‘come back!’

He looked round, but stood still in his place.

‘Come back; I must speak—I must tell you!’

He did not move, so she rose and stood between him and the fire, a grotesque enough figure in the dancing light.

‘I know everything; I have always known it. Do you think I did not understand what had come to you in those days? Ah! I know now—yes, more than ever, now I have seen him. He has a look that I would have known anywhere, Robert.’

He made an inarticulate sound as though he were about to speak.

She held up her hand.

‘There is no use in denying it—you cannot! How can you, with that man standing there to give you the lie? But I have understood always—God knows I have understood!’

‘It is untrue from beginning to end,’ said Fullarton very quietly.

‘You are obliged to say that,’ she said through her teeth. ‘It is a lie!’

But for this one friendship, he had lived half his life solely among men. He had not fathomed the unsparing brutality of women. His hand was on the door. She sprang towards him and clasped both hers round his arm.

‘Robert! Robert!’ she cried.

‘Let me go,’ he said, trying to part the hands; ‘I cannot bear this. Have you no pity, Eliza?’

‘But you will come back? Oh, Robert, listen to me! Listen to me! You think because I have spoken now that I will speak again. Never! I never will!’

‘You have broken everything,’ said he.

‘What have I done?’ she asked fiercely. ‘Have I once made a sign of what I knew all those years? Have I, Robert?’

‘No,’ he said thickly; ‘I suppose not. How can I tell?’

The blood flew up into her face, dyeing it crimson.

‘What? what? Do you disbelieve me?’ she cried. ‘How dare you, I say?’

She shook his arm. Her voice was so loud that he feared it might be overheard by some other inmate of the house. He felt almost distracted. He disengaged himself and turned to the wall, his hand over his face. The pain of the moment was so intolerable. Lady Eliza’s wrath dropped suddenly and fell from her, leaving her standing dumb, for there was something in the look of Fullarton’s bowed shoulders that struck her in the very centre of her heart. When she should have been silent she had spoken, and now, when she would have given worlds to speak, she could not.

He turned slowly and they looked at each other. The fire had spurted up and each could see the other’s face. His expression was one of physical suffering. He opened the door and went out.

He knew his way in every corner of Morphie, and he went, as he had often done, through the passage by which she had entered and passed by the servants’ offices into the stable-yard. He was so much preoccupied that he did not hear her footsteps behind him and he walked out, unconscious that she followed. In the middle of the yard stood a weeping-ash on a plot of grass, and she hurried round the tree and into an outbuilding connected with the stable. She entered and saw his horse standing on the pillar-rein, the white blaze on his face distinct in the dark. The stablemen were indoors. She slipped the rings and led him out of the place on to the cobble-stones.

Robert was standing bareheaded in the yard. He took up the rein mechanically without looking at her, and put his foot in the stirrup iron. As he was about to turn, she laid hold of the animal’s mane.

‘Lady Eliza!’ he exclaimed, staring down through the dusk.

‘You have left your hat, Fullarton,’ she said. ‘I will go in and fetch it.’

Before he could prevent her, she had vanished into the house. He sat for a moment in his saddle, for there was no one to take the horse; but he followed her to the door, and dismounted there. In a couple of minutes she returned with the hat.

‘Thank you—thank you,’ he said; ‘you should not have done such a thing.’

‘What would I not do?’

‘Eliza,’ he said, ‘can I trust you?’

‘You never have,’ she replied bitterly, ‘but you will need to now.’

He rode out of the yard.

She reached her room without meeting anyone, and sank down in an armchair. She longed to weep; but Fate, that had denied her the human joys which she desired, but for which she had not, apparently, been created, withheld that natural relief too. The repressed womanhood in her life seemed to confront her at every step. She lifted her head, and caught sight of herself in a long cheval glass, her wig, her weather-beaten face, her clumsy attitude. She had studied her reflection in the thing many and many a time in the years gone by, and it had become to her almost as an enemy—a candid enemy. As a girl going to county balls with her brother, she had stood before it trying to cheat herself into the belief that she was less plain in her evening dress than she had been in her morning one. Now she had lost even the freshness which had then made her passable. She told herself that, but for that, youth had given her nothing which age could take away, and she laughed against her will at the truth. She looked down at the pair of hands shining white in the mirror. They were her one ornament and she had taken care of them. How small they were! how the fingers tapered! how the pink of the filbert-shaped nails showed against the cream of the skin! They were beautiful. Yet they had never felt the touch of a man’s lips, never clung round a lover’s neck, never held a child. Everything that made a woman’s life worth living had passed her by. The remembrance of a short time when she had thought she held the Golden Rose for ever made her heart ache. It was Gilbert’s mother who had snatched it from her.

And friendship had been a poor substitute for what she had never possessed. The touch of love in the friendship of a man and a woman which makes it so charming, and may make it so dangerous, had been left out between herself and Robert. She lived before these days of profound study of sensation, but she knew that by instinct. The passion for inflicting pain which assails some people when they are unhappy had carried her tongue out of all bounds, and she realized that she was to pay for its short indulgence with a lasting regret. She did not suppose that Fullarton would not return, but she knew he would never forget, and she feared that she also would not cease to remember. She could not rid her mind of the image printed on it—his figure, as he stood in the long-room below with his face turned from her. She had suffered at that moment as cruelly as himself and she had revelled in her own pain.

When she had put off her riding-habit, she threw on a wrapper and lay down on the bed, for she was wearied, body and soul, and her limbs were beginning to remind her of her fall. It was chilly and she shivered, drawing up the quilt over her feet. The voices of two servants, a groom and a maid, babbled on by the ash-tree in the yard below; she could not distinguish anything they said, but the man’s tone predominated. They were making love, no doubt. Lady Eliza pressed her head into the pillow, and tried to shut out the sound.

She was half asleep when someone tapped at the door, and, getting no answer, opened it softly.

‘Is it Cecilia?’ said she, sitting up.

‘My dearest aunt, are you asleep? Oh, I fear I have awakened you.’

The girl stood holding back the curtains. As she looked at the bed her lips trembled a little.

‘I have only this moment heard of your accident,’ she said.

‘I am not hurt, my dear, so don’t distress yourself.’

‘Thank Heaven!’ exclaimed the other.

‘My patience, Cecilia, you are quite upset! What a little blockhead you are!’

For answer, Cecilia took Lady Eliza’s hand in both her own, and laid her cheek against it. She said nothing.

‘It must be almost supper-time,’ said the elder woman. ‘I will rise, for you will be waiting.’

‘May I not bring something up to your room, ma’am? I think you should lie still in bed. I am very well alone.’

‘Nonsense, child! Go downstairs, and let me get up. I suppose you think I am too old to take care of myself.’

Cecilia went out as she was bid, and took her way to the dining-room. Her face was a little troubled, for she saw that Lady Eliza was more shaken than she had been willing to admit, and she suspected the presence of some influence which she did not understand; for the two women, so widely removed in character and age, had so strong a bond of affection, that, while their minds could never meet on common ground, there was a sympathy between them apart from all individual bias.

Cecilia was one of those unusual people whose outward personalities never look unsuitable to the life encompassing them, though their inward beings may be completely aloof from everything surrounding them physically. She sat down by the table, her gray gown melting into the background of the walls, and the whiteness of her long neck rising distinct from it. Her dress was cut open in front and bordered by a narrow line of brown fur which crossed on her bosom. Though she was so slim, the little emerald brooch which held the fastening of it together sank into the hollow made by her figure; her hair was drawn up on the top of her head, and piled in many rolls round a high, tortoiseshell comb. Her long eyes, under straight brows, seemed, in expression, to be holding something hidden behind the eyelashes, something intangible, elusive. To see her was to be reminded, consciously or unconsciously, of mists, of shadows, of moonlit things—things half seen, things remembered. Her lips closed evenly, though in beautiful lines, and the upper, not short enough for real beauty, had an outward curve, as it rested on its fellow, which held a curious attraction. She was very pale with a pallor that did not suggest ill-health.

Though she was the only young inhabitant of Morphie, she existed among the dusty passages—dusty with the powdering of ages—and the sober unconventionality of the place as naturally as one of those white plants which haunt remote waterways exists among the hidden hollows and shadows of pools. She was very distantly related to Lady Eliza Lamont, but, when the death of both parents had thrown her on the world, a half-grown, penniless girl, she had come to Morphie for a month to gain strength after an illness, and remained there twelve years. Lady Eliza, ostentatiously grumbling at the responsibility she had imposed upon herself, found, at the end of the time, that she could not face the notion of parting with Cecilia. It was the anxiety of her life that, though she had practically adopted the girl, she had nothing she could legally leave her at her death but her own personal possessions.

A few minutes later she came down in the ancient pelisse which she found comfortable after the exertions of the day. She had taught Cecilia something of the activity which, though now a part of most well-bred women’s lives, was then almost an eccentricity. The female part of the little society which filled Kaims in the winter months nodded its ‘dressed’ head over its cards and teacups in polished dismay at the effect such ways would surely have on the young women; at other times one might hardly have guessed at the lurking solicitude in so many womanly bosoms; for, though unwilling, for many reasons, to disagree with Lady Eliza, their owners were apt, with the curious reasoning of their sex, to take her adopted daughter as a kind of insult to themselves. It was their opinion that Miss Cecilia Raeburn, though a sweet young lady, would, of course, find the world a very different place when her ladyship’s time should come, and they only hoped she was sensible of the debt she owed her; these quiet-looking girls were often very sly. With prudent eyes the matrons congratulated themselves and each other that their own Carolines and Amelias were ‘less unlike other people,’ and had defined, if modest, prospects; and such of the Carolines and Amelias who chanced to be privily listening would smirk in secure and conscious unison. Even Miss Hersey Robertson, who mixed a little in these circles, was inclined to be critical.

The advent of a possible husband, though he would present in himself the solution of all difficulties, had only vaguely entered Lady Eliza’s mind. Like many parents, she supposed that the girl would ‘marry some day,’ and, had anyone questioned the probability in her presence, it is likely that she would have been very angry. Fullarton, who was consulted on every subject, had realized that the life at Morphie was an unnatural one for Cecilia and spoken his mind to some purpose. He suggested that she should pass a winter in Edinburgh, and, though Lady Eliza refused stubbornly to plunge into a society to whose customs she felt herself unable to conform, it was arranged by him that a favourite cousin, widow of the late Lord Advocate of Scotland, should receive the girl. This lady, who was childless, and longed for someone to accompany her to those routs and parties dear to her soul, found in her kinsman’s suggestion something wellnigh providential. So kind a welcome did she extend, that her charge, whose pleasure in the arrangement had been but a mixed business, set out with an almost cheerful spirit.

A nature inclined to study and reflection, and nine years of life with a person of quick tongue, had bred in Cecilia a different calibre of mind to that of the provincial young lady of her time; and Lady Eliza had procured her excellent tuition. The widow had expected to find in her guest a far less uncommon personality, and it was with real satisfaction that she proceeded to introduce her to the very critical and rather literary society which she frequented. There were some belonging to it who were to see in Miss Raeburn, poor as she was, an ideal future for themselves. Cecilia, when she returned to Morphie, left more than one very sore heart behind her. To many it seemed wonderful that her experiences had not spoiled her, and that she could take up life again in the draughty, ill-lit house, whose only outward signs of animation were the sheep grazing under its windows and the pigeons pluming in rows under the weathercock swinging crazily on the stable roof.

What people underrated was her devoted attachment to Lady Eliza, and what they could not understand was the fact that, while she was charmed, interested, and apparently engrossed by many things, her inner life might hold so completely aloof as never to have been within range of them.

[CHAPTER IV
JIMMY]

INLAND from the river’s mouth the dark plough-fields stretched sombre, restful, wide, uncut by detail. The smaller roads intersecting the country were treeless in the main, and did not draw the eye from the majesty of the defined woods. There was everything to suggest breadth and full air; and the sky, as Gilbert rode up towards a farm cresting the swell of the high horizon, was as suggestive of it as the earth. The clear gray meeting the sweep of the world was an immensity on which cloud-masses, too high for rain, but full of it, looked as though cut adrift by some Titanic hand and left to sail derelict on the cold heavens.

The road he was travelling was enlivened by a stream of people, all going in the same direction as himself, and mostly on foot, though a couple of gigs, whose occupants looked as much too large for them as the occupants of country gigs generally do, were ascending to the farm at that jog which none but agriculturally-interested persons can suffer.

A displenishing sale, or ‘roup,’ as it is called, had been advertised there, which was drawing both thrifty and extravagant to its neighbourhood. Curiosity was drawing Gilbert. A compact little roan, bought for hacking about the country, was stepping briskly under him, showing its own excellent manners and the ease and finish of its rider’s seat. Beside the farm a small crowd was gathered round the pursy figure of a water-butt on high legs, which stood out against the sky.

As he went, he observed, coming down a cart-road, two other mounted people, a man and a woman. He judged that he and they would meet where their respective ways converged and he was not wrong, for in another minute he was face to face with Robert Fullarton and Lady Eliza Lamont. He drew aside to let them pass on. Lady Eliza bowed and her mare began to sidle excitedly to the edge of the road, upset by the sudden meeting with a strange horse.

‘Good-day to you, sir,’ she said, as she recognised him. ‘I am fortunate to have met you. It was most obliging of you to come and inquire for me as you did.’

‘Indeed, I could do no less,’ replied Gilbert, hat in hand, ‘and I am very glad to see your ladyship on horseback again.’

‘Lord, sir! I was out the next day. Fullarton, let me make you acquaint with Mr. Speid of Whanland. Sir, Mr. Robert Fullarton of Fullarton.’

The two gentlemen bowed gravely.

Lady Eliza was so anxious to assure the man beside her of her perfect good faith and good feeling after the painful meeting of a few weeks ago that she would willingly have gone arm-in-arm to the ‘roup’ with Gilbert, had circumstances and decorum allowed it. She brought her animal abreast of the roan and proceeded with the two men, one on either side of her. Robert, understanding her impulse, would have fallen in with it had not the sharp twinge of memory which the young man’s presence evoked almost choked him. It was a minute before he could speak.

‘You are newly come, sir,’ he said at last. ‘I am to blame for not having presented myself at Whanland before.’

Gilbert made a civil reply.

‘I hear this is likely to be a large sale,’ observed Fullarton, as they rode along. ‘There is a great deal of live stock, and some horses. Have you any interest in it?’

‘The simple wish to see my neighbours has brought me,’ replied Gilbert. ‘I have so much to learn that I lose no chance of adding anything to my experience.’

While they were yet some way from their destination the crowd parted for a moment, and Lady Eliza caught sight of the object in its midst. She pointed towards it.

‘Ride, Fullarton! ride, for God’s sake, and bid for the water-butt!’ she cried.

‘Tut, tut, my lady. What use have you for it?’

‘It will come very useful for drowning the stable terrier’s puppies. She has them continually. Ride, I tell you, man! Am I to be overrun with whelps because you will not bestir yourself?’

Gilbert could scarce conceal his amusement, and was divided between his desire to laugh aloud and an uneasy feeling that the lady would appeal to him.

The auctioneer was seen at this juncture to leap down from the wood-pile on which he stood, and a couple of men hurried forward and began to remove the water-butt. It was being hustled away like some corpulent drunkard, its legs trailing the ground stiffly and raising a dust that threatened to choke the bystanders.

The yard was full of people, and, as the auctioneer had paused between two lots, and was being refreshed at the expense of the farm’s owner, tongues were loose, and the air was filled with discussion, jests, and the searching smell of tobacco and kicked-up straw. Among the few women present Gilbert perceived Granny Stirk, seated precariously on the corner of the wood-pile from which the auctioneer had just descended. Beside her was a tall, shock-headed lad of nineteen or so, whom only the most unobservant could suspect of belonging to the same category as the farm-boys, though his clothes were of the same fashion as their own, and his face wore the same healthy tanned red. He was spare and angular, and had that particular focus of eye which one sees in men who steer boats, drive horses, pay out ropes, and whose hands can act independently while they are looking distant possibilities in the face. A halter dangled from his arm. He was very grave and his thoughts were evidently fixed on the door of the farm stable. In spite of his sharp-cut personality, he stood by Granny Stirk in a way that suggested servitude.

Gilbert left his companions and went towards the couple. Granny’s face was lengthened to suit the demands of a public occasion, and her little three-cornered woollen shawl was pinned with a pebble brooch.

‘What ails ye that ye canna see the laird of Whanland?’ she said, turning to the boy as Speid stopped beside them.

He shuffled awkwardly with his cap.

‘He’s ma grandson, an’ it’s a shelt[^[1]] he’s after.’

Gilbert was getting a little more familiar with local speech.

‘Do you intend to buy?’ he said to the lad.

Jimmy Stirk brought his eyes back to his immediate surroundings, and looked at the speaker. They were so much lighter than the brown face in which they were set, and their gaze was so direct, that Gilbert was almost startled. It was as though someone had gripped him.

‘Ay, that’s it. He’s to buy,’ broke in Granny. ‘He’s aye wanted this, an’ we’d be the better of twa, for the auld ane’s getting fairly done.’

‘I doubt I’ll no get it yet,’ said the boy.

‘He’s sold near a’ the things he’s got,’ continued Granny, looking at her grandson’s feet, which Gilbert suddenly noticed were bare. ‘A’m fair ashamed to be seen wi’ him.’

‘How much have you got together?’ inquired the young man.

Jimmy opened his hand. There were ten pounds in the palm.

‘He got half that, July month last, from a gentleman that was like to be drowned down by the river’s mouth; he just gaed awa an’ ca’ed him in by the lugs,’[^[2]] explained his grandmother.

‘Did you swim out?’ asked Speid, interested.

‘Ay,’ replied Jimmy, whose eyes had returned to the door.

‘That was well done.’

‘I kenned I’d get somethin’,’ observed the boy.

The auctioneer now emerged from the farm-house and the crowd began to draw together like a piece of elastic. He came straight to the wood-pile.

‘Are you needing all that to yoursel’?’ he enquired, looking jocosely at the bystanders as he paused before Granny Stirk.

‘Na, na; up ye go, my lad. The biggest leear in the armchair,’ said the old woman as she rose.

‘It’s ill work meddling wi’ the Queen o’ the Cadgers,’ remarked a man who stood near.

Gilbert determined to stay in his place by the Stirks, for the commotion and trampling going on proclaimed that the live stock were on the eve of being brought to the hammer. The cart-horses were the first to be disposed of, so, having found someone who offered to put the roan into a spare stall, he abandoned himself to the interest with which the scene inspired him.

Jimmy Stirk’s face, when the last team had been led away, told him the all-important moment had come. The boy moistened his lips with his tongue and looked at him. His hand was shut tightly upon the money it held.

It was difficult to imagine what use the owner of the farm might have found for the animal being walked about before the possible buyers, for he was just fifteen hands and seemed far too light to carry a heavy man, or to be put between the shafts of one of those clumsy gigs which rolled unevenly into Kaims on market-days. In spite of the evident strain of good blood, he was no beauty, being somewhat ewe-necked and too long in the back. But his shoulder sloped properly to the withers and his length of stride behind, as he was walked round, gave promise of speed; his full eye took a nervous survey of the mass of humanity surrounding him. The man who led him turned him abruptly round and held him facing the wood-pile. Gilbert could hear Jimmy Stirk breathing hard at his shoulder.

The auctioneer looked round upon the crowd with the noisome familiarity of his class, a shepherd’s crook which he held ready to strike on the planks at his feet substituting the traditional hammer.

‘You’ll no’ hae seen the like o’ lot fifty-seven hereabout,’ he began. ‘Yon’s a gentleman’s naig—no ane o’ they coorse deevils that trayvels the road at the term wi’ an auld wife that’s shifting hoose cocked up i’ the cart—he wouldna suit you, Granny.’

He looked down at the old woman, the grudge he bore her lurking in his eye.

‘Hoots!’ she exclaimed; ‘tak him yoursel’, gin ye see ony chance o’ bidin’ on his back!’

The auctioneer was an indifferent horseman.

‘A gentleman’s naig, I’m telling ye! Fit for the laird o’ Fullarton, or maybe her ladyship hersel’,’ he roared, eager to cover his unsuccessful sally and glancing towards Robert and Lady Eliza, who sat on horseback watching the proceedings. ‘Aicht pounds! Aicht pounds! Ye’ll na get sic a chance this side o’ the New Year!’

There was a dead silence, but a man with a bush of black whisker, unusual to his epoch, cast a furtive glance at the horse.

‘Speak up, Davie MacLunder! speak up!’

Another dead silence followed.

‘Fiech!’ said David MacLunder suddenly, without moving a muscle of his face.

‘Seven pound! Seven pounds! Will nane o’ you speak? Will I hae to bide here a’ the day crying on ye? Seven pound, I tell ye! Seven pound!’

‘Seven pound five,’ said a slow voice from behind a haystack.

‘I canna see ye, but you’re a grand man for a’ that,’ cried the auctioneer, ‘an’ I wish there was mair like ye.’

‘Seven ten,’ said Jimmy Stirk.

‘Aicht,’ continued the man behind the haystack.

Though Gilbert knew lot fifty-seven to be worth more than all the money in Jimmy’s palm, he hoped that the beast’s extreme unsuitability to the requirements of those present might tell in the lad’s favour. The price rose to eight pound ten.

‘Nine,’ said Jimmy.

‘And ten to that,’ came from the haystack.

‘Ten pound,’ said the boy, taking a step forward.

There was a pause, and the auctioneer held up his crook.

‘Ten pounds!’ he cried. ‘He’s awa at ten pounds! Ane, twa——’

‘Ten pound ten!’ shouted Davie MacLunder.

Jimmy Stirk turned away, bitter disappointment in his face. In spite of his nineteen years and strong hands, his eyes were filling. No one knew how earnestly he had longed for the little horse.

‘Eleven,’ said Gilbert.

‘Eleven ten!’

‘Twelve.’

The auctioneer raised his crook again, and threw a searching glance round.

‘Twelve pound! Twelve pound! Twelve pound for the last time! Ane, twa, three——’

The crook came down with a bang.

‘Twelve pound. The laird of Whanland.’

‘He is yours,’ said Speid, taking the bewildered Jimmy by the elbow. ‘Your grandmother was very civil to me the first time I saw her, and I am glad to be able to oblige her.’

The boy looked at him in amazement.

Gilbert had slipped some money into his pocket before starting for the sale; he held the two gold pieces out to him.

‘You can take him home with you now,’ he said, smiling.

Jimmy Stirk left the ‘roup’ in an internal exultation which had no outward nor visible sign but an additional intensity of aspect, the halter which had hung over his arm adorning the head of the little brown horse, on whose back he jogged recklessly through the returning crowd. His interest in the sale had waned the moment he had become owner of his prize; but his grandmother, who had set out to enjoy herself and meant to do so thoroughly, had insisted on his staying to the end. She kept her seat at the foot of the wood-pile till the last lot had changed hands, using her tongue effectively on all who interfered with her, and treating her grandson with a severity which was her way of marking her sense of his good fortune.

Granny Stirk, or ‘the Queen of the Cadgers,’ as local familiarity had christened her, was one of those vigorous old people, who, having lived every hour of their own lives, are always attracted by the possibilities of youth, and whose sympathy goes with the swashbuckling half of the world. For the tamer portion of it, however respectable, they have little feeling, and are often rewarded by being looked upon askance during life and very much missed after death. They exist, for the most part, either in primitive communities or in very old-fashioned ones, and rarely in that portion of society which lies between the two. Gilbert, with his appearance of a man to whom anything in the way of adventure might happen, had roused her interest the moment she saw him holding Lady Eliza’s mare outside her own cottage door. His expression, his figure, his walk, the masculine impression his every movement conveyed, had evoked her keenest sympathy, and, besides being grateful for his kindness to Jimmy, she was pleased to the core of her heart by the high-handed liberality he had shown. It was profitable to herself and it had become him well, she considered.

The cadgers, or itinerant fish-sellers, who formed a distinct element in the population of that part of the coast, were a race not always leniently looked upon by quiet folk, though there was, in reality, little evil that could be laid to their charge but the noise they made. While they had a bad name, they were neither more nor less dishonest and drunken than other people, and had, at least, the merit of doing their business efficiently. It was they who carried the fish inland after the boats came in, and those who stood on their own feet and were not in the pay of the Kaims fishmongers, kept, like the Stirks, their own carts and horses. When the haul came to be spread and the nets emptied, the crowding cadgers would buy up their loads, either for themselves or for their employers, and start inland, keeping a smart but decent pace till they were clear of the town, and, once on the road, putting the light-heeled screws they affected to their utmost speed. Those whose goal was the town of Blackport, seven or eight miles from the coast, knowing that the freshest fish commanded the highest price, used the highroad as a racecourse, on which they might be met either singly or in a string of some half-dozen carts, pursuing their tempestuous course.

The light carts which they drove were, in construction, practically flat boxes upon two wheels, on the front of which sat the driver, his legs dangling between the shafts. As they had no springs and ran behind horses to which ten miles an hour was the business of life, the rattle they made, as they came bowling along, left no one an excuse for being driven over who had not been born deaf. Those in the employ of the Kaims fishmongers would generally run in company, contending each mile hotly with men, who, like Jimmy Stirk, traded for themselves, and took the road in their own interests.

More than forty years before the time of which I speak, Granny Stirk, then a strikingly handsome young woman, lived with her husband in the cottage which was still her home. Stirk, a cadger well known on the road for his blasphemous tongue and the joyfulness of his Saturday nights, was reported to be afraid of his wife, and it is certain that, but for her strong hand and good sense, he would have been a much less successful member of society. As it was, he managed to lead an almost decent life, and was killed, while still a young man, in an accident.

Mrs. Stirk thus found herself a widow, with two little boys under ten, a cart, a couple of angular horses, and no male relations; in spite of the trouble she had had with him, she missed her man, and, after his funeral, prepared herself to contend with two things—poverty and the dulness of life. She cared little for the company of her own sex, and the way in which her widowhood cut her off from the world of men and movement galled and wearied her. So it was from inclination as well as necessity that she one day mounted the cart in her husband’s vacant place, and appeared at Kaims after the boats came in, to be greeted with the inevitable jeers. But the jeers could not stop her shrewd purchasing, nor alter the fact that she had iron nerves and a natural judgment of pace, and in the market she was soon let alone as one with whom it was unprofitable to bandy words. For curses she cared little, having heard too many; to her they were light things to encounter in the fight for her bread, her children, and the joy of life.

Her position became assured one day, when, after a time of scarcity in the fish-market, a good haul held out the prospect of an unusual sale inland. A string of cadgers who had started before Mrs. Stirk were well out on the road when she appeared from a short-cut considered unfit for wheels, and, having hung shrewdly to their skirts, passed them just outside Blackport, her heels on the shaft, her whip ostentatiously idle, and her gold earrings swinging in her ears.

When her eldest son was of an age to help her, he ran away to sea; and when she gave up the reins to the second, she retired to the ordinary feminine life of her class with the nickname of the ‘Queen of the Cadgers’ and a heavier purse. Behind her were a dozen years of hard work. When her successor died, as his father had done, in the prime of life, the sailor son, as a sort of rough payment for his own desertion, sent his boy Jimmy to take his place; the arrangement suited Mrs. Stirk, and her grandson took kindly to his trade. They had spent a couple of years together when Gilbert Speid came into their lives as owner of the land on which their cottage stood.

Lady Eliza remained in her saddle for the whole of the sale, though Fullarton put his horse in the stable. She beckoned to Gilbert to join them, and the two men stood by her until the business was over and the crowd began to disperse. They rode homewards together, their roads being identical for a few miles, threading their way through the led horses, driven cattle, and humanity which the end of the ‘roup’ had let loose. Jimmy Stirk passed them on his new acquisition, for he had flung himself on its back to try its paces, leaving his grandmother to follow at her leisure.

‘Did you buy that horse for the saddle or for harness?’ inquired Fullarton, as the boy passed them.

‘He is not mine,’ replied Gilbert. ‘It was young Stirk who bought him.’

‘But surely I heard the auctioneer knock him down to you?’

‘I outbid him by two pounds. He had not enough, so I added that on for him. I never saw anyone so much in earnest as he was,’ explained Gilbert.

Fullarton was silent, and Lady Eliza looked curiously at the young man.

‘I don’t know anything about the boy,’ he added, feeling rather foolish under her scrutiny. ‘I fear you think me very soft-hearted.’

‘That is to your credit,’ said Fullarton, with the least touch of artificiality.

‘Perhaps you have the quality yourself, sir, and are the more leniently inclined towards me in consequence,’ replied Gilbert, a little chafed by the other’s tone.

‘We shall have all our people leaving us and taking service at Whanland,’ said Lady Eliza. ‘You have obliged me also, for my fish will arrive the fresher.’

‘Do you deal with the Stirks?’ inquired Gilbert.

‘I have done so ever since I came to this part of the country, out of respect for that old besom, Granny. I like the boy too; there is stout stuff in that family.’

‘Then I have committed no folly in helping him?’ said Speid.

‘Lord, no, sir! Fullarton, this is surely not your turning home?’

‘It is,’ said he, ‘and I will bid you good-evening, for Mr. Speid will escort you. Sir, I shall wait upon you shortly, and hope to see you later at my house.’

Gilbert and Lady Eliza rode on together, and parted at the principal gate of Morphie; for, as he declined her invitation to enter on the plea of the lateness of the hour, she would not suffer him to take her to the door.

From over the wall he got a good view of the house as he jogged down the road, holding back the little roan, who, robbed of company, was eager for his stable. With its steep roofs and square turrets at either end of the façade, it stood in weather-beaten dignity among the elms and ashes, guiltless of ornament or of that outburst of shrubs and gravel which cuts most houses from their surroundings, and is designed to prepare the eye for the transition from nature to art. But Morphie seemed an accident, not a design; an adjunct, in spite of its considerable size, to the pasture and the trees. The road lay near enough to it for Speid to see the carved coat-of-arms over the lintel, and the flagged space before the door stretching between turret and turret. He hurried on when he had passed it, for splashes of rain were beginning to blow in his face, and the wind was stirring in the tree-tops.

Where a field sloped away from the fringe of wood, he paused a moment to look at one of those solid stone dovecots which are found in the neighbourhood of so many gentlemen’s houses in the northern lowlands of Scotland. Its discoloured whitewash had taken all the mellow tones that exposure and damp can give, and it stood, looking like a small but ancient fort, in a hollow among the ragged thorn-trees. At either end of its sloping roof a flight of crowsteps terminated in a stone ball cutting the sky. Just above the string-course which ran round the masonry a few feet below the eaves was a row of pigeon-holes; some birds circling above made black spots against the gray cloud.

Gilbert buttoned up his coat, and let the roan have his way.

---

[^[1]]Pony.

[^[2]]Ears.

[CHAPTER V
THE STRIFE OF TONGUES]

MR. BARCLAY held the happy position of chief bachelor in the polite circles of Kaims. Although he had viewed with displeasure the advent of a young and sporting banker and the pretensions of the doctor’s eldest son, who had an agreeable tenor voice, his position remained unshaken. Very young ladies might transfer their interest to these upstarts and their like, but, with the matrons who ruled society, he was still the backbone of every assembly, and its first male ornament. He was an authority on all local questions, and there clung about him that subdued but conscious gallantry acceptable to certain female minds.

It was a cold night when he gave his overcoat and muffler to the maid in the hall of a house which stood a little back from the High Street. A buzz of talk came to him through an open door, and, as he ascended the stairs, the last notes of a flute had just died away. The wife of the coastguard inspector was giving a party, at which tea, conversation, and music were the attractions. The expression which had been arranging itself on his face culminated as he entered the drawing-room.

Mrs. Somerville, the inspector’s wife, formed the link in the chain between town and county, and numbered both elements in her acquaintance; her husband, who, disabled by a wound, had retired from the active branch of his profession, being the only representative of His Majesty’s service in the neighbourhood. Her parties, therefore, were seen by Kaims through a certain halo caused by the presence, outside the house, of a string of family chariots, and the absence, inside it, of one of Captain Somerville’s legs.

The room was half full. A group of young ladies and two or three young men were at the piano, and, near the drawn curtains of the window a whist-table was set, at which four elderly people were seated in the throes of their game.

The two Miss Robertsons occupied a sofa a little apart from the rest of the company and Miss Hersey was talking to Captain Somerville, whose infirmity forbade him to rise and welcome individual guests, while it enabled him to consistently entertain the principal ones.

‘You are late, Mr. Barclay,’ said the hostess, as she held out her hand. ‘We had been hoping for you to join the rubber which is going on, but some of our friends were impatient, and so they have settled down to it.’

‘I was detained, ma’am,’ said the lawyer. ‘I have been out to Whanland, and nothing would content Speid but that I should stay and dine with him.’

‘See what it is to be such a popular man!’ exclaimed the coastguard’s lady, looking archly over her fan.

She was not above the acceptance of the little compliments with which Barclay, who was socially ambitious, plied her.

‘You flatter me sadly, I fear, Mrs. Somerville; but that is your kindness and not my merit.’

‘I have not yet seen Mr. Speid,’ said Mrs. Somerville, ‘but I hear he is a very well-looking young man. Quite the dandy, with his foreign bringing up.’

‘Yes, that is exactly what I tell him,’ replied Barclay. ‘A very affable fellow, too. He and I are great friends. Indeed, he is always plaguing me to go out to Whanland.’

That he had never gone there on any errand but business was a fact which he did not reveal to his hostess.

‘So many stories are afloat respecting his—his antecedents,’ said the lady, dropping her eyes, ‘one hardly knows what to believe. However, there he is, master of his—of the Speid property. I think bygones should be bygones, don’t you, Mr. Barclay?’

As she said this, she glanced towards a corner of the room in which Lucilla Somerville, a homely virgin in white muslin and red arms, was whispering with a girl friend.

Barclay knew as much as his hostess of Gilbert’s history, and very little more, whatever his conjectures might be, but he relapsed instantly from the man of the world into the omniscient family lawyer.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, raising two fingers; ‘forbidden ground with me, madam—forbidden ground, I fear!’

‘Well, I will not be naughty, and want to know what I should not hear,’ said the lady. ‘I fear it is a sad world we live in, Mr. Barclay.’

‘It would be a much sadder one if there were no fair members of your sex ready to make it pleasant for us,’ he replied, with a bow.

‘You are incorrigible!’ she exclaimed, as she turned away.

At this moment a voice rose from the neighbourhood of the piano, whence the doctor’s son, who had discovered an accompanist among the young ladies, sent forth the first note of one of a new selection of songs. It was known to be a new one, and the company was silent.

‘Give me a glance, a witching glance,

This poor heart to illume,

Or else the rose that through the dance

Thy tresses did perfume.

Keep, cruel one, the ribbon blue

From thy light hand that flows;

Keep it—it binds my fond heart true;

But oh, give me the rose!’

‘How well it suits Mr. Turner’s voice,’ said Lucilla, as the singer paused in the interval between the verses.

‘The words are lovely,’ said her friend—‘so full of feeling!’

‘The sighs that, drawn from mem’ry’s fount,

My aching bosom tear—

O bid them cease! nor, heartless, count

My gestures of despair.

Take all I have—the plaints, the tears

That hinder my repose,

The heart that’s faithful through the years;

But oh, give me the rose!’

A polite murmur ran through the room as Mr. Turner laid down his music.

‘I notice that our musical genius keeps his eyes fixed on one particular spot as he sings,’ observed an old gentleman at the whist-table, as he dealt the cards. ‘I wonder who the young puppy is staring at.’

‘If you had noticed that I threw away my seven of clubs, it would have been more to the purpose, and we might not have lost the trick,’ remarked the spinster who was his partner, acidly.

‘People have no right to ask one to play whist in a room where there is such a noise going on,’ said the first speaker.

‘Did I hear you say whist?’ inquired the lady sarcastically.

Mr. Barclay passed on to the little group formed by his host and the Misses Robertson.

‘How are you, Barclay?’ said the sailor, looking up from his chair, and reflecting that, though the lawyer was more than a dozen years his junior, and had double as many legs as himself, he would not care to change places with him. He was a man of strong prejudices.

‘I have not had the pleasure of meeting you since our afternoon together at Whanland,’ said Barclay, pausing before the sofa with a bow which was as like Gilbert’s as he could make it.

‘We go out very little, sir,’ said Miss Hersey.

‘Speid will be a great acquisition,’ continued Barclay; ‘we all feel the want of a few smart young fellows to wake us up, don’t we, Miss Robertson?’

‘We like our cousin particularly,’ said Miss Hersey; ‘it has been a great pleasure to welcome him back.’

Miss Caroline’s lips moved almost in unison with her sister’s, but she said nothing and sat still, radiating an indiscriminate pleasure in her surroundings. She enjoyed a party.

‘That must be another arrival even later than myself,’ remarked the lawyer, as a vehicle was heard to draw up in the street outside. ‘I understand that you expect Lady Eliza Lamont; if so, that is likely to be her carriage.’

Mrs. Somerville began to grow visibly agitated as the front-door shut and voices were audible on the staircase. In a few moments Lady Eliza Lamont and Miss Raeburn were announced.

It was only a sense of duty which had brought Lady Eliza to Mrs. Somerville’s party, and it would hardly have done so had not Robert Fullarton represented to her that having three times refused an invitation might lay her open to the charge of incivility. As she entered, all eyes were turned in her direction; she was dressed in the uncompromising purple gown which had served her faithfully on each occasion during the last ten years that she had been obliged, with ill-concealed impatience, to struggle into it. She held her fan as though it had been a weapon of offence; on her neck was a beautifully wrought amethyst necklace. Behind her came Cecilia in green and white, with a bunch of snowdrops on her breast and her tortoiseshell comb in her hair.

‘We had almost despaired of seeing your ladyship,’ said Mrs. Somerville; ‘and you, too, dear Miss Raeburn. Pray come this way, Lady Eliza. Where will you like to sit?’

‘I will take that seat by Captain Somerville,’ said the newcomer, eyeing a small cane-bottomed chair which stood near the sofa, and longing to be rid of her hostess.

‘Oh, not there!’ cried the lady. ‘Lucilla, my dear, roll up the velvet armchair. Pray, pray allow me, Lady Eliza! I cannot let you sit in that uncomfortable seat—indeed I cannot!’

But her victim had installed herself.

‘I am not able to offer you this one,’ said Captain Somerville; ‘for I am a fixture, unfortunately.’

‘Lady Eliza, let me beg you——’

‘Much obliged, ma’am; I am very comfortable here. Captain Somerville, I am glad to find you, for I feared you were away,’ said Lady Eliza. She had a liking for the sailor which had not extended itself to his wife.

‘I have been up the coast these last three weeks inspecting; my wife insisted upon my getting home in time for to-night. I had not intended to, but I obeyed her, you see.’

‘And why did you do that?’

‘God knows,’ said the sailor.

The sound of the piano checked their conversation, as a young lady with a roving eye was, after much persuasion, beginning to play a selection of operatic airs. To talk during music was not a habit of Lady Eliza’s, so the two sat silent until the fantasia had ended in an explosion of trills and a chorus of praise from the listeners.

‘Is that your daughter?’ she inquired; ‘I move so seldom from my place that I know very few people here.’

‘Heaven forbid, ma’am! That’s my Lucy standing by the tea-table.’

‘You don’t admire that kind of music?’

‘If anyone had presumed to make such a noise on any ship of mine, I’d have put ’em in irons,’ said Captain Somerville.

They both laughed, and Lady Eliza’s look rested on Cecilia, who had been forced into the velvet chair, and sat listening to Barclay as he stood before her making conversation. Her eyes softened.

‘What do you think of my girl?’ she said.

‘I have only seen one to match her,’ replied the old man, ‘and that was when I was a midshipman on board the flagship nearly half a century ago. It was at a banquet in a foreign port where the fleet was being entertained. She was the wife of some French grandee. Her handkerchief dropped on the floor, and when I picked it up she gave me a curtsey she might have given the King, though I was a boy more fit to be birched at school than to go to banquets. Another young devil, a year or two my senior, said she had done it on purpose for the flag-lieutenant to pick up instead of me; he valued himself on knowing the world.’

Lady Eliza’s eyes were bright with interest.

‘I taught him a little more of it behind the flag-lieutenant’s cabin next morning, and got my leave ashore stopped for it; but it was a rare good trouncing,’ added Captain Somerville, licking his lips.

‘I am sorry your leave was stopped,’ said his companion; ‘I would have given you more if I had been in command.’

‘You can’t eat your cake and have it, ma’am—and I enjoyed my cake.’

‘I suppose you never saw her again,’ said she.

‘Never; but I heard of her—she was guillotined in the Revolution a dozen years later. I shall never forget my feelings when I read it. She made a brave business of it, I was told; but no one could look at her and mistake about that.’

They sat silent for some time, and, Mrs. Somerville appropriating Barclay, Cecilia had leisure to turn to Miss Hersey; both she and Lady Eliza had a regard for the old ladies, though between them there was little in common save good breeding. But that can be a strong bond.

‘Come, come; we cannot allow you to monopolize Miss Raeburn any more!’ exclaimed Mrs. Somerville, tapping the lawyer playfully on the arm. ‘We need you at the tea-table; duty first and pleasure after, you know.’

‘If you will watch my destination, Mrs. Somerville, you will see that it is purely duty which animates me,’ said Barclay, starting off with a cup of tea in one hand and a plate of sweet biscuits in the other.

His hostess watched him as he offered the tea with much action to Miss Caroline Robertson.

‘Fie, sir! fie!’ she exclaimed, as he returned; ‘that is too bad!’

‘For my part, I would shut up all members of your sex after forty,’ said he, rather recklessly.

‘Indeed?’ said Mrs. Somerville, struggling with her smile. She was forty-seven.

‘I meant sixty, ma’am—sixty, of course,’ gasped Barclay, with incredible maladroitness.

‘That would be very sad for some of our friends,’ she observed, recovering stoutly from the double blow and looking with great presence of mind at Lady Eliza. ‘How old would you take her ladyship to be, for instance?’

Barclay happened to know that Lady Eliza would, if she lived, keep her fifty-third birthday in a few months; it was a fact of which some previous legal business had made him aware.

‘I should place her at forty-eight,’ he replied, ‘though, of course, if she understood the art of dress as you do, she might look nearly as young as yourself.’

‘Go away; you are too foolish, Barclay! Mr. Turner, we are talking of age: at what age do gentlemen learn wisdom?’

‘Never, very often,’ replied Turner, who, in spite of his tenor voice, had a sour nature.

Barclay gave him a vicious glance; he did not admire him at the best of times, and the interruption annoyed him. He turned away.

‘I trust you have been attended to, Miss Robertson,’ said the hostess.

She despaired of separating her husband and Lady Eliza, and approached Miss Hersey, whose intimate connection with the county made her presence and that of her sister desirable adjuncts to a party. The old lady made room for her on the sofa.

‘Yes, many, many thanks to you; we have enjoyed our evening. Caroline, Mrs. Somerville is asking if we have all we need. We have been very much diverted.’

Miss Caroline smiled; she had not quite caught the drift of her sister’s words, but she felt sure that everything was very pleasant.

Mrs. Somerville did not know whether the vague rumours about Gilbert’s parentage which had been always prevalent, and which had sprung up afresh with his return, had ever reached the old ladies’ ears. Their age and the retirement in which they lived had isolated them for a long time, but she reflected that they had once taken part in the life surrounding them and could hardly have remained in complete ignorance. She longed to ask questions.

‘Mr. Barclay seems a great favourite at Whanland,’ she began.

‘He was there when we went to welcome my cousin,’ replied Miss Hersey; ‘he is his man of business.’

‘He is most agreeable—quite the society man too. I do not wonder that Mr. Speid likes to see him; it is a dull life for a young gentleman to lead alone in the house—such a sad house, too, what with his poor mother’s death there and all the unfortunate talk there was. But I have never given any credit to it, Miss Robertson, and I am sure you will say I was right. I am not one of those who believe everything they hear.’

The old lady made no reply, staring at the speaker; then her face began to assume an expression which Mrs. Somerville, who did not know her very well, had never seen on it, and the surprise which this caused her had the effect of scattering her wits.

‘I despise gossip, as you know,’ she stammered; ‘indeed, I always said—I always say—if there’s anything unkind, do not bring it to me; and I said—what does it matter to me? I said—his poor mother is dead and buried, and if there is anything discreditable——’

Miss Hersey rose from the sofa, and turned to her sister.

‘Come, Caroline, it is time we went home. Ma’am,’ she said, curtseying as deeply as her age would permit to the astonished Mrs. Somerville, ‘we have outstayed your good manners. I have the honour to wish you a good-evening.’

The Misses Robertson’s house stood barely a hundred yards from that of Captain Somerville, so Miss Hersey had decided that the coach which was usually hired when they went abroad was unnecessary; the maidservant who was to have presented herself to escort them home had not arrived when they put on their cloaks, so they went out alone into the moonlit street.

‘What was that she was saying, Hersey?’ inquired Miss Caroline, as she clung to her sister’s arm, rather bewildered by her situation, but accepting it simply.

‘Mrs. Somerville is no gentlewoman, sister. She was bold enough to bring up some ill talk to which I have never been willing to listen.’

‘That was very wrong—very wrong,’ said Miss Caroline.

Miss Hersey was murmuring to herself.

‘Discreditable?’ she was saying—‘discreditable? The impertinence!’

[CHAPTER VI
THE DOVECOT OF MORPHIE]

THE vehicle used by Captain Somerville on his tours of inspection was standing in the Whanland coach-house; it was an uncommon-looking concern, evolved from his own brain and built by local talent. The body was hung low, with due regard to the wooden leg of its owner, and the large permanent hood which covered it faced backwards instead of forwards, so that, when driving in the teeth of bad weather, the Captain might retire to its shelter, with a stout plaid to cover his person and his snuffbox to solace it.

This carriage was made to convey four people—two underneath the hood and one in front on a seat beside the coachman. On fine days the sailor would drive himself, defended by the Providence that watches over his profession; for he was a poor whip.

It was a soft night, fresh and moist; the moon, almost at the full, was invisible, and only the dull light which pervaded everything suggested her presence behind the clouds. Captain Somerville, sitting with Gilbert over his wine at the dining-room table, was enjoying a pleasant end to his day; for Speid, knowing that his inspection work would bring him to the neighbourhood of Whanland, had delayed his own dinner till a comparatively late hour, and invited the old gentleman to step aside and share it before returning to Kaims.

A sound behind him made the younger man turn in his chair and meet the eyes of Macquean, who had entered.

‘Stirk’s wantin’ you,’ he announced, speaking to his master, but looking sideways at Captain Somerville.

‘Tell him to wait,’ said Gilbert; ‘I will see him afterwards.’

Macquean slid from the room.

The two men talked on until they were again aware of his presence. He stood midway between Speid and the door, rubbing one foot against the other.

‘It’s Stirk,’ he said.

‘I am not ready to see him,’ replied Gilbert with some impatience; ‘I will ring when I am.’

When they had risen from the table and the sailor had settled himself in an armchair, Gilbert summoned Macquean.

‘What does young Stirk want with me?’ he inquired.

Macquean cast a circular look into space, as though his master’s voice had come from some unexpected quarter.

‘It’s poachers,’ he said apologetically.

‘What?’ shouted Somerville.

‘Just poachers.’

‘But where? What do you mean?’ cried Gilbert.

‘It’s poachers,’ said Macquean again. ‘Stirk’s come for you.’

‘Where are they?’

‘They’re awa west to net the doo’cot o’ Morphie; but they’ll likely be done by now,’ added Macquean.

‘Is that what he wanted me for?’ cried Gilbert.

‘Ay.’

Captain Somerville had dragged himself up from his chair.

‘But, God bless my sinful soul!’ he exclaimed, ‘why did you not tell us?’

Macquean grinned spasmodically.

‘I’m sure I couldna say,’ he replied.

Gilbert took him by the shoulders and pushed him out of his way, as he ran into the hall shouting for Jimmy; the boy was waiting outside for admittance, and he almost knocked him down.

‘It’s they deevils frae Blackport that’s to net the doo’cot o’ Morphie!’ began Jimmy breathlessly.

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m newly come from Blackport mysel’, an’ I heard it i’ the town.’

Speid’s eyes glittered.

‘Where is your cart? We will go, Jimmy.’

‘It’s no here, sir; I ran.’

The sailor had come to the door, and was standing behind his friend.

‘My carriage is in the yard,’ he said. ‘Take it, Speid; it holds four. Are you going, boy?’

Jimmy did not think reply necessary.

‘Macquean, run to the farm, and get any men you can find. I will go to the stable, Captain Somerville, and order your phaeton; my own gig only holds two. Oh, if I had but known of this earlier! What it is to have a fool for a servant!’

‘It is worse to have a stick for a leg,’ said Somerville; ‘but I am coming, for all that, Speid. Someone must drive, and someone must hold the horse.’

‘Do, sir, do!’ cried Gilbert, as he disappeared into the darkness.

With Jimmy’s help, he hurried one of his own horses into the shafts of the Captain’s carriage and led it to the doorstep. As the sailor gathered up the reins, Macquean returned breathless.

‘I didna see onybody,’ he explained; ‘they’re a’ bedded at the farm.’

An exclamation broke from Gilbert.

‘But you should have knocked them up, you numskull! What do you suppose I sent you for?’

Macquean shook his head with a pale smile of superiority.

‘They wadna rise for me,’ he said; ‘I kenned that when I went.’

‘Then you shall come yourself!’ cried Speid. ‘Get in, I tell you! get in behind with Jimmy!’

Macquean shot a look of dismay at his master, and his mouth opened.

‘Maybe I could try them again,’ he began; ‘I’ll awa and see.’

‘Get in!’ thundered Gilbert.

At this moment Jimmy Stirk’s arm came out from under the hood, and Macquean was hauled into the seat beside him; Captain Somerville took a rein in each hand, and they whirled down the short drive, and swung out into the road with a couple of inches to spare between the gatepost and the box of the wheel.

‘You will hardly find that man of yours very useful,’ observed the sailor, as they were galloping down the Morphie road; ‘I cannot think why you brought him.’

Gilbert sat fuming; exasperation had impelled him to terrify Macquean, and, as soon as they had started, he realized the futility of his act.

‘The boy behind is worth two,’ he said.

‘There may be four or five of these rascals at the dovecot.’

‘We must just do our best,’ said Gilbert, rather curtly.

Somerville thought of his leg and sighed; how dearly he loved a fray no one knew but himself.

As they approached Morphie, they stopped to extinguish their lights, and he began, in consequence, to drive with what he considered great caution, though Gilbert was still forced to cling to the rail beside him; Macquean, under the hood, was rolled and jolted from side to side in a manner that tended to make him no happier. His companion, seldom a waster of words, gave him little comfort when he spoke.

‘Ye’ve no gotten a stick wi’ ye,’ he observed, as they bowled through the flying mud.

‘Na,’ said Macquean faintly.

‘Ye’ll need it.’

There was a pause.

‘I kent a man that got a richt skelp from ane o’ they Blackport laddies,’ continued Jimmy; ‘’twas i’ the airm, too. It swelled, an’ the doctor just wheepit it off. I mind it well, for I was passin’ by the house at the time, an’ I heard him skirl.’

There was no reply from the corner of the hood and they pressed on; only Somerville, who had a habit of chirruping which attacked him the moment he took up the reins and only left him when he laid them down, relieved the silence. Thanks to the invisible moon, the uniform grayness which, though not light, was yet luminous, made the way plain, and the dark trees of Morphie could be seen massed in the distance.

‘I wonder they wad choose sic a night as this,’ remarked Jimmy; ‘it’s a peety, too, for they’ll likely see us if we dinna gang cannylike under the trees. Can ye run, Mr. Macquean?’

‘Ay, can I,’ replied the other, grinning from under the safe cover of the darkness. A project was beginning to form itself in his mind.

‘There’ll be mair nor three or four. I’d like fine if we’d gotten another man wi’ us; we could hae ta’en them a’ then. They’re ill deevils to ficht wi’.’

‘I could believe that,’ said Macquean.

His expression was happily invisible to Stirk.

‘If I’d time, I could cut ye a bit stick frae the hedge,’ said Jimmy.

‘Heuch! dinna mind,’ replied Macquean soothingly.

They were nearing the place where the dovecot could be seen from the road and Captain Somerville pulled up. Gilbert and Jimmy got out quietly and looked over a gate into the strip of damp pasture in which the building stood. There was enough light to see its shape distinctly, standing as it did in the very centre of the clearing among the thorn-bushes. It was not likely that the thieves would use a lantern on such a night, and the two strained their eyes for the least sign of any moving thing that might pass by the foot of the bare walls. Macquean’s head came stealthily out from under the hood, as the head of a tortoise peers from beneath its shell. No sound came from the dovecot and Gilbert and Jimmy stood like images, their bodies pressed against the gateposts. Somerville, on the driving-seat, stared into the gray expanse, his attention fixed. They had drawn up under a roadside tree, for better concealment of the carriage. Macquean slipped out into the road, and, with a comprehensive glance at the three heads all turned in one direction, disappeared like a wraith into the night.

Presently, to the straining ears of the watchers came the sound of a low whistle.

‘There,’ said Speid under his breath, ‘did you hear that, Jimmy?’

The boy nodded.

‘Let Macquean hold the horse,’ burst out Somerville, who was rolling restlessly about on the box. ‘I might be of use even should I arrive rather late. At least, I can sit on a man’s chest.’

At this moment Jimmy looked into the back of the carriage.’

‘Mr. Macquean’s awa!’ he exclaimed as loudly as he dared.

Gilbert ground his teeth; only the necessity for silence stopped the torrent which rose to the sailor’s lips.

Speid and Jimmy slid through the bars of the gate; they dared not open it nor get over it for fear it should rattle on its hinges. They kept a little way apart until they had reached the belt of thorn-trees, and, under cover of these, they drew together again and listened. Once they heard a boot knock against a stone; they crept on to the very edge of their shelter, until they were not thirty yards from the dovecot. The door by which it was entered was on the farther side from the road, and the pigeon-holes ran along the opposite wall a few feet below the roof. Three men were standing by the door, their outlines just distinguishable. Jimmy went down on his hands and knees, and began to crawl, with that motion to which the serpent was condemned in Eden, towards a patch of broom that made a spot like an island in the short stretch of open ground between the thorns and the building, Gilbert following.

Now and then they paused to listen, but the voices which they could now hear ran on undisturbed, and, when they had reached their goal, they were close enough to the dovecot to see a heap lying at its foot which they took to be a pile of netting. Evidently the thieves had not begun their night’s work.

The nearest man approached the heap and began to shake it out.

‘I’ll gi’e ye a lift up, Robbie,’ said one of the voices; ‘there’s stanes stickin’ out o’ the wa’ at the west side. I had a richt look at it Sabbath last when the kirk was in.’

‘My! but you’re a sinfu’ man!’ exclaimed Robbie.

‘We’re a’ that,’ observed a third speaker piously.

Two of the men took the net, and went round the dovecot wall till they found the stones of which their companion had spoken; these rough steps had been placed there for the convenience of anyone who might go up to mend the tiling.

‘Lie still till they are both up,’ whispered Gilbert. ‘There are two to hold the net, and one to go in and beat out the birds.’

They crouched breathless in the broom till they saw two figures rise above the slanting roof between them and the sky. Each had a length of rope which he secured round one of the stone balls standing at either end above the crowsteps; it was easy to see that the business had been carefully planned. Inside the dovecot, a cooing and gurgling showed that the birds were awakened.

The two men clambered down by the crowsteps, each with his rope wound round his arm and supporting him as he leaned over to draw the net over the pigeon-holes.

‘Now then, in ye go,’ said Robbie’s voice.

The key was in the door, for the third man unlocked it and entered.

Speid and Jimmy Stirk rose from the broom; they could hear the birds flapping among the rafters as the intruder entered, and the blows of his stick on the inner sides of the walls. They ran up, and Gilbert went straight to the open doorway and looked in. His nostrils were quivering; the excitement which, with him, lay strong and dormant behind his impassive face, was boiling up. It would have been simple enough to turn the key of the dovecot on its unlawful inmate, but he did not think of that.

‘You scoundrel!’ he exclaimed—‘you damned scoundrel!’

The man turned round like an animal trapped, and saw his figure standing against the faint square of light formed by the open door; he had a stone in his hand which he was just about to throw up into the fluttering, half-awakened mass above his head. He flung it with all his might at Speid, and, recognising his only chance of escape, made a dash at the doorway. It struck Gilbert upon the cheek-bone, and its sharp edge laid a slanting gash across his face. He could not see in the blackness of the dovecot, so he leaped back, and the thief, meeting with no resistance, was carried stumbling by his own rush a few feet into the field, dropping his stick as he went. As he recovered himself, he turned upon his enemy; he was a big man, bony and heavy, and, had he known it, the want of light was all in his favour against a foe like Gilbert Speid, to whom self-defence, with foil or fist, was the most fascinating of sciences. Flight did not occur to him, for he was heavy-footed, and he saw that his antagonist was smaller than himself.

Speid cursed the darkness; he liked doing things neatly, and the situation was sweet to him; it was some time since he had stood up to any man, either in play or in earnest. He determined to dodge his opponent until he had reversed their positions and brought him round with his back to the whitewash of the dovecot; at the present moment he stood against the dark background of the trees. The two closed together, and, for some minutes, the sound of blows and heavy breathing mingled with the quiet of the night.

The blood was dripping down Gilbert’s face, for the stone had cut deep; he was glad the wound was below his eye, where the falling drops could not hamper his sight. He guarded himself very carefully, drawing his enemy slowly after him, until he stood silhouetted sharply against the whitewash. He looked very large and heavy, but the sight pleased Speid; he felt as the bull feels when he shakes his head before charging; his heart sang aloud and wantonly in his breast. Now that he had got the position he desired, he turned from defence to attack, and with the greater interest as his antagonist was no mean fighter. He had received a blow just below the elbow, and one on the other side of his face, and his jaw was stiff. He grew cooler and more steady as the moments went by. He began to place his blows carefully, and his experience told him that they were taking effect. Breath and temper were failing his enemy; seeing this, he took the defensive again, letting him realize the futility of his strength against the skill he met. Suddenly the man rushed in, hitting wildly at him. He was struck under the jaw by a blow that had the whole weight of Gilbert’s body behind it, and he went over backwards, and lay with his face to the sky. He had had enough.

Meanwhile, the two men on the dovecot had been a good deal startled by hearing Gilbert’s exclamation and the noise of the rush through the door. One, who had fastened the net on the eaves, clambered up the crowsteps, and, holding fast to the stone ball, looked over to see that his friend’s design had been frustrated by someone who was doing his utmost to destroy his chances of escape. He came down quickly to the lower end of the roof, meaning to drop to the ground and go to his assistance; but he found himself confronted by Jimmy Stirk, who had sidled round the walls, and stood below, looking from himself to his partner with the air of a terrier who tries to watch two rat-holes at once. A few birds had come out of the pigeon-holes, and were struggling, terrified, in the meshes. The two men did the most sensible thing possible: they dropped, one from either end of the tiling, and ran off in opposite directions.

Unable to pursue both, the boy pounced upon the man on his left, and would have laid hands on him as he landed, had he not slipped upon a piece of wet mud and stumbled forward against the wall. When he recovered himself, his prey had put twenty yards between them, and was running hard towards the thorn-trees. The net had fallen to the ground, and the pigeons were escaping from it, flying in agitated spirals above the dovecot; their companions were emerging from the holes, dismayed with the outraged dismay felt by the feathered world when its habits are disturbed. The air was a whirl of birds. Jimmy gathered himself together and gave chase with all his might.

Captain Somerville’s state of mind as he watched Gilbert and Jimmy Stirk disappear was indescribable; as he sat on the box and the minutes went by, his feelings grew more poignant, for impotent wrath is a dreadful thing. Had he happened upon Macquean, he would have been congenially occupied for some time, but the darkness had swallowed Macquean, and there was nothing for him to do but sit and gaze into the grayness of the field.

At last he heard what he fancied was Speid’s voice and the clattering of feet upon the dovecot roof. The night was still, and, though middle-age was some way behind him, his hearing was acute. He found his position beyond his endurance.

The horse was old, too, and stood quiet while he descended painfully to the ground. He led him to the gatepost and tied him to it securely; to squeeze between the bars as Jimmy and Gilbert had done was impossible for him, so he opened it with infinite caution, and closed it behind him. Then he set out as best he could for the thorn-trees.

His wooden leg was a great hindrance in the moist pasture, for the point sunk into the earth as he walked, and added to his exertions. He paused in the shadow of the branches, as his friends had done, and halted by a gnarled bush with an excrescence of tangled arms. While he stood, he heard steps running in his direction from the dovecot. He held his breath.

A figure was coming towards him, making for the trees. As it passed, the sailor took firm hold of a stem to steady himself, and stuck out his wooden leg. The man went forward with a crash, his heels in the air, his head in the wet moss, and before he knew what had happened, a substantial weight had subsided upon his back.

‘My knife is in my hand,’ observed Captain Somerville, laying the thin edge of his metal snuff-box against the back of the thief’s neck, ‘but, if you move, it will be in your gizzard.’

*****

By the time his absence was discovered, Macquean had put some little distance between himself and the carriage. For the first few minutes of his flight he crept like a shadow, crouching against the stone wall which flanked one side of the road, and terrified lest his steps should be heard. He paused now and then and stood still to listen for the sound of pursuit, taking courage as each time the silence remained unbroken. The white face of a bullock standing by a gate made his heart jump as it loomed suddenly upon him. When he felt safe, he took his way with a bolder aspect—not back towards Whanland, but forward towards Morphie House. He burned with desire to announce to someone the sensational events that were happening, and he realized very strongly that it would be well to create an excuse for his own defection.

He was panting when he pealed the bell and knocked at the front-door, feeling that the magnitude of his errand demanded an audience of Lady Eliza herself. It was opened by a maidservant with an astonished expression.

‘Whaur’s her ladyship?’ said Macquean. ‘A’m to see her.’

‘What is’t?’ inquired the girl, closing the door until it stood barely a foot open.

‘A’m seeking her leddyship, a’ tell ye.’

She looked at him critically.

‘Who is there?’ said a cool voice from the staircase.

The maid stood back, and Cecilia came across the hall.

‘Where do you come from?’ she asked, as the lamplight struck Macquean’s bald head, making it shine in the darkness.

‘From Whanland,’ replied he. ‘You’ll be Miss Raeburn? Eh! There’s awfu’ work down i’ the field by the doo’cot! The laird’s awa’ there, an’ Jimmy Stirk an’ the ane-leggit Captain-body frae Kaims. They’re to net it an’ tak’ the birds.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Cecilia, puzzled, and seeing visions of the inspector engaged in a robbery. ‘Do you mean Captain Somerville?’

‘A’ do, indeed,’ said Macquean, wagging his head, ‘an’ a’m sure a’ hope he may be spared. He’s an auld man to be fechtin’ wi’ poachers, but we’re a’ in the hands o’ Providence.’

A light began to break on Cecilia.

‘Then, are the poachers at the dovecot? Is that what you have come to say?’

Macquean assented.

The maidservant, who had been listening open-mouthed, now flew up to Lady Eliza’s bedroom, and found her mistress beginning to prepare herself for the night. She had not put off her dress, but her wig stood on a little wooden stand on the toilet-table. She made a snatch at it as the girl burst in with her story.

‘Cecilia, what is all this nonsense?’ exclaimed Lady Eliza, seeing her adopted niece’s figure appear on the threshold. ‘(Stop your havering, girl, till I speak to Miss Raeburn.) Come here, Cecilia. I can’t hear my own voice for this screeching limmer. (Be quiet, girl!) What is it, Cecilia? Can’t you answer, child?’

The maid had all the temperament of the female domestic servant, and was becoming hysterical.

‘Put her out!’ cried Lady Eliza. ‘Cecilia! put her into the passage.’

‘There’s a man downstairs,’ sobbed the maid, who had talked herself into a notion that Macquean was a poacher trying to effect an entrance into the house.

‘A man, is there? I wish there were more, and then we should not have a parcel of whingeing[^[1]] women to serve us! I wish I could put you all away, and get a few decent lads in instead. Take her away, Cecilia, I tell you!’

When the door was shut behind the servant, and Lady Eliza had directed her niece to have the stablemen sent with all despatch to the dovecot, she drew a heavy plaid shawl from the cupboard and went downstairs to sift the matter. Her wig was replaced and she had turned her skirt up under the plaid.

Macquean was still below. Having delivered himself of his news, he had no wish to be sent out again. He did not know where the servants’ hall might be, or he would have betaken himself there, and the maid had fled to her own attic and locked herself in securely.

‘Have you got a lantern?’ said Lady Eliza over the banisters. ‘I am going out, and you can light me.’

‘Na,’ said Macquean, staring.

Without further comment she went out of the house, beckoning him to follow. She crossed the yard and opened the stable-door, to find Cecilia, a cloak over her shoulders, caressing the nose of the bay mare. Seeing the maid’s distracted state of mind, she had roused the men herself. A small lantern stood on the corn-bin. The mare whinnied softly, but Lady Eliza took no notice of her.

‘Here, my dear; give the lantern to Macquean,’ she exclaimed. ‘I am going to see what is ado in the field.’

‘It gives little light,’ said Cecilia. ‘The men have taken the others with them.’

‘Ye’d best bide whaur ye are,’ said Macquean suddenly. ‘It’s terrible dark.’

Lady Eliza did not hear him. She had gone into the harness-room, and the two women were searching every corner for another lantern. Finding the search fruitless, they went into the coach-house. There was no vestige of such a thing, but, in a corner, stood a couple of rough torches which had been used by the guizards[^[2]] at Hogmanay.

When Macquean, compelled by Lady Eliza, had lit one, she ordered him to precede her, and they left the stable, Cecilia following. The arms of the trees stood out like black rafters as they went under them, the torchlight throwing them out theatrically, as though they made a background to some weird stage scene. Occasionally, when Macquean lowered the light, their figures went by in a fantastic procession on the trunks of the limes and ashes. The darkness overhead seemed measureless. The fallen twigs cracked at their tread, and beech-nuts underfoot made dry patches on the damp moss among the roots. As they emerged from the trees and looked down the slope, they saw the stablemen’s lanterns and heard the voices of men.

Lady Eliza redoubled her pace. When they had almost come to the dovecot, she told Macquean to hold up his torch. Cecilia, whose gown had caught on a briar, and who had paused to disentangle herself, hurried after her companions, and rejoined them just as he raised the light.

As she looked, the glare fell full upon the walls, and on the figure of Gilbert Speid standing with the blood running down his face.

---

[^[1]]Whining.

[^[2]]Masqueraders who, in Scotland, go from house to house at Hogmanay, or the last day of the year.

[CHAPTER VII
THE LOOKING-GLASS]

GILBERT hurried forward as he saw Lady Eliza.

‘The pigeons are safe,’ he said. ‘I have locked up two of these rascals in the dovecot. The third, I fear, has got away.’

‘Indeed, sir, I am vastly obliged to you,’ exclaimed she. ‘You seem considerably hurt.’

‘He has had a stiff fight, ma’am,’ said Captain Somerville.

‘You are very good to have protected my property,’ she continued, looking at the two gentlemen. ‘All I can do now is to send for the police from Kaims, unless the dovecot is a safe place for them until morning.’

‘Young Stirk has gone to Kaims with my carriage,’ said Somerville, ‘for the door is not very strong, and I fancy your men have no wish to watch it all night.’

‘It seems,’ said Lady Eliza, turning to Speid, ‘that I have only to be in a difficulty for you to appear.’

Her voice was civil, and even pleasant, but something in it rang false. Gilbert felt the undercurrent instinctively, for, though he had no idea of her real sentiments towards himself, he recognised her as a person in whose doings the unexpected was the natural.

‘I think I can do nothing more,’ he said, with a formality which came to him at times, ‘so I will wish your ladyship a good-night.’

‘May I ask where you are going, sir, and how you propose to get there in that condition?’

‘It is nothing,’ replied Gilbert, ‘and Whanland is a bare four miles from here. With your permission I will start at once.’

‘Nonsense, Mr. Speid! You will do nothing of the sort. Do you suppose I shall allow you to walk all that way, or to leave Morphie till your face has been attended to? Come, Captain Somerville, let us go to the house. Sir, I insist upon your coming with us.’

The men from the stable were instructed to remain at the dovecot door until Jimmy should return with the police, and Gilbert recognised Macquean as Lady Eliza again drove him forward to light the party back under the trees. He made no comment, feeling that the moment was unsuitable, and being somewhat interested in the fact that a young woman, of whose features he could only occasionally catch a glimpse, was walking beside him; as the torchlight threw fitful splashes across her he could see the outline of a pale face below a crown of rather elaborately dressed dark hair. Lady Eliza had directed him to follow his servant, and was herself delayed by the sailor’s slow progress. Though he had never seen his companion before, she was known to him by hearsay. Her silent step, and the whiteness of her figure and drapery against the deep shadows between the trees, gave him a vague feeling that he was walking with Diana. He grew aware of his bloody face, and immediately became self-conscious.

‘I fear I am a most disagreeable object, Miss Raeburn,’ he said.

‘I had not observed it, sir,’ she replied.

‘You are very kind, but you must think me unpleasant company in this condition, all the same.’

‘I can think of nothing but that you have saved my aunt’s pigeons. She says little, but I knows he is grateful. There has always been a large flock at Morphie, and their loss would have vexed her very much.’

‘I owe Stirk—Stirk, the young cadger—a debt for bringing me word of what was going to happen. He heard of it in Blackport, and came straight to tell me.’

‘I wonder why he went to you instead of warning us,’ said she.

‘We are rather friendly, he and I. I suppose he thought he would like the excitement, and that I should like it, too. He was not wrong, for I do,’ replied Gilbert, unconsciously using the present tense.

‘Then what has brought Captain Somerville? It all happened so suddenly that there has been no time for surprise. But it is strange to find him here.’

‘He was dining with me when the news was brought, and he insisted on coming. He managed to trip a man up, and sit on him till Stirk and I came to his help. He did it with his wooden leg, I believe,’ said Gilbert, smiling in spite of his injured face.

Cecilia laughed out.

‘I think that is charming,’ she said.

Gilbert had known many women more or less intimately, but never one of his own countrywomen. He had heard much of the refinement and delicacy of the British young lady. This one, who seemed, from the occasional view he could obtain of her, and from the sound of her voice, to possess both these qualities in the highest degree, struck him as having a different attitude towards things in general to the one he had been led to expect in the class of femininity she represented. As she had herself said, there had been no time for surprise, and he now suddenly found that he was surprised—surprised by her presence, surprised to find that she seemed to feel neither agitation nor any particular horror at what had happened. He had known women in Spain who found their most cherished entertainment in the bull-ring, but he had never met one who would have taken the scene she had broken in upon so calmly.

The changed customs of our modern life have made it hard to realize that, in the days when Gilbert and Cecilia met by torchlight, it was still a proof of true sensibility to swoon when confronted by anything unusual, and that ladies met cows in the road with the same feelings with which they would now meet man-eating tigers. Indeed, the woman of the present moment, in the face of such an encounter, would probably make some more or less sensible effort towards her own safety, but, at the time of which I speak, there was nothing for a lady to do at the approach of physical difficulties but subside as rapidly as possible on to the cleanest part of the path. But Cecilia had been brought up differently. Lady Eliza led so active a life, and was apt to require her to do such unusual things, that she had seen too many emergencies to be much affected by them. There was a deal of the elemental woman in Cecilia, and she had just come too late to see the elemental man in Speid brush away the layer of civilization, and return to his natural element of fight. She was almost sorry she had been too late.

She walked on beside him, cool, gracious, the folds of her skirt gathered up into her hand, and he longed for the lamp-lit house, that he might see her clearly.

‘The man with the torch is your servant, is he not?’ said she. ‘He told me he had come from Whanland.’

‘He is,’ replied Speid; ‘but how long he will remain so is another matter. I am very angry with him—disgusted, in fact.’

‘What has he done, sir, if I may ask?’

‘Everything that is most intolerable. He drove me to the very end of my patience, in the first instance.’

‘How long is your patience, Mr. Speid?’

‘It was short to-night,’ replied Gilbert.

‘And then?’

‘Then I brought him here to be of some use, and while I was looking over the wall for these thieving ruffians, he ran away.’

‘He does not look very brave,’ observed Cecilia, a smile flickering round her lips. ‘He arrived at the door, and rang up the house, and I could see that he was far from comfortable.’

‘He will be more uncomfortable to-morrow,’ said Gilbert grimly.

‘Poor fellow,’ said Cecilia softly. ‘It must be a terrible thing to be really afraid.’

‘It is inexcusable in a man.’

‘I suppose it is,’ replied she slowly, ‘and yet——’

‘And yet—you think I should put up with him? He has enraged me often enough, but he has been past all bearing to-night.’

‘Do you really mean to send him away? He has been years at Whanland, has he not?’

‘He has,’ said Gilbert; ‘but let us forget him, Miss Raeburn, he makes me furious.’

When they reached the house, Lady Eliza led the way to the dining-room, and despatched such servants as were to be found for wine. Her hospitable zeal might even have caused a fresh dinner to be cooked, had not the two men assured her that they had only left the table at Whanland to come to Morphie.

‘If I may have some water to wash the cut on my face, I will make it a little more comfortable,’ said Speid.

He was accordingly shown into a gloomy bedroom on the upper floor, and the maid who had opened the door to Macquean, having recovered from her hysterics, was assiduous in bringing him hot water and a sponge. As the room was unused, it had all the deadness of a place unfrequented by humanity, and the heavy curtains of the bed and immense pattern of birds and branches which adorned the wall-paper gave everything a lugubrious look. He examined his cut at the looking-glass over the mantelshelf, an oblong mirror with a tarnished gilt frame.

The stone which had struck him was muddy, and he found, when he had washed the wound, that it was deeper than he supposed. It ached and smarted as he applied the sponge, for the flint had severed the flesh sharply. As he dried his wet cheek in front of the glass, he saw a figure which was entering the room reflected in it.

‘Lady Eliza has sent me with this. Can I help you, sir?’ said Cecilia rather stiffly, showing him a little case containing plaster.

She held a pair of scissors in her hand. He turned.

‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, as she saw the long, red scar; ‘that is really bad! Do, pray, use this plaster. Look, I will cut it for you.’

And she opened the case, and began to divide its contents into strips.

‘You are very good,’ he said awkwardly, as he watched the scissors moving.

She did not reply.

‘I had no intention of disturbing the house in this way,’ he continued; ‘it is allowing to Macquean’s imbecility. You need never have known anything till to-morrow morning.’

‘You are very angry with Macquean,’ said Cecilia. ‘I cannot bear to think of his leaving a place where he has lived so long. But you will be cooler to-morrow, I am sure. Now, Mr. Speid, I have made this ready. Will you dip it in the water and put this strip across the cut?’

Gilbert did as he was bid, and, pressing the edges of the wound together, began to lay the plaster across his cheek.

‘You can hardly see,’ said she. ‘Let me hold the light.’

She raised the candle, and the two looked intently into the glass at his fingers, as he applied the strip. He met with scant success, for it stuck to his thumb and curled backwards like a shaving. He made another and more careful attempt to place it, but, with the callous obstinacy often displayed by inanimate things, it refused to lie flat.

The two pairs of eyes met in the looking-glass.

‘I cannot make it hold,’ said he. ‘It is not wet enough, and I am too clumsy.’

His arm ached where it had been hit below the elbow; it was difficult to keep it steady.

‘I can do it,’ said Cecilia, a certain resolute neutrality in her voice. ‘Hold the candle, sir.’

She took the strip from him, and, dipping it afresh in the water, laid it deftly across his cheek-bone.

As her cool fingers touched his hot cheek he dropped his eyes from her face to the fine handkerchief which she had tucked into her bosom, and which rose and fell with her breathing. She took it out, and held it pressed against the plaster.

‘You will need two pieces,’ she said. ‘Keep this upon the place while I cut another strip.’

He had never been ordered in this way by a girl before. Caprice he had experience of, and he had known the exactingness of spoilt women, but Cecilia’s impersonal commanding of him was new, and it did not displease him. He told himself, as he stood in front of her, that, were he to describe her, he would never call her a girl. She was essentially a woman.

‘That is a much better arrangement,’ observed Captain Somerville, as Gilbert entered the dining-room alone. ‘I did not know you were such a good surgeon, Speid.’

‘Don’t praise me. I was making such a clumsy job of it that Miss Raeburn came to my help; she has mended it so well that a few days will heal it, I expect.’

‘You will have a fine scar, my lad,’ said the sailor.

‘That doesn’t matter. I assure you, the thing is of no consequence. It is not really bad.’

‘It is quite bad enough,’ said Lady Eliza.

‘You think far too much of it, ma’am.’

‘At any rate, sit down and help yourself to some wine. I have not half thanked you for your good offices.’

‘I fancy he is repaid,’ said Somerville dryly, glancing at the strips of plaster.

Lady Eliza had ordered a carriage to be got ready to take Speid and the sailor home, and Captain Somerville had sent a message to Kaims by Jimmy Stirk, telling his family to expect his return in the morning, as he had accepted Gilbert’s suggestion that he should remain at Whanland for the night. He looked kindly on this arrangement, for he was over sixty, and it was a long time since he had exerted himself so much.

While they stood in the hall bidding Lady Eliza good-night, Cecilia came downstairs. She had not followed Gilbert to the dining-room. She held out her hand to him as he went away.

‘Thank you,’ said he, looking at her and keeping it for a moment.

He leaned back in the carriage beside Somerville, very silent, and, when they reached Whanland and he had seen his friend installed for the night, he went to his own room. What had become of Macquean he did not know and did not care. He sat late by the fire, listening to the snoring of the sailor, which reached him through the wall.

A violent headache woke him in the morning and he lay thinking of the events of the preceding night. He put his hand up to his cheek to feel if the plaster was in its place. Macquean came in, according to custom, with his shaving-water, looking neither more nor less uncouth and awkward than usual. Though he shifted from foot to foot, the man had a complacency on his face that exasperated his master.

‘What did you mean by leaving the carriage last night?’ said Gilbert.

‘A’ went awa’ to Morphie,’ said Macquean.

‘And who told you to do that?’

‘Aw! a’ didna’ speir[^[1]] about that. A’ just tell’t them to gang awa’ down to the doo’cot. Her ladyship was vera well pleased,’ continued Macquean, drawing his lips back from his teeth in a chastened smile.

‘Get out of the room, you damned fellow! You should get out of the house, too, if it weren’t for—for—get out, I say!’ cried Gilbert, sitting up suddenly.

Macquean put down the shaving-water and went swiftly to the door. When he had shut it behind him he stood a moment to compose himself on the door-mat.

‘He shouldna speak that way,’ he said very solemnly, wagging his head.

---

[^[1]]Ask.

[CHAPTER VIII
THE HOUSE IN THE CLOSE]

TO say that the Miss Robertsons were much respected in Kaims was to give a poor notion of the truth. The last survivors of a family which had lived—and, for the most part, died—in the house they still occupied, they had spent the whole of their existence in the town.

It was nearly a hundred years since a cousin of the Speid family, eldest and plainest of half a dozen sisters, had, on finding herself the sole unmarried member of the band, accepted the addresses and fortune of a wealthy East India merchant whose aspiring eye was turned in her direction.

The family outcry was loud at his presumption, for his birth was as undistinguished as his person, and the married sisters raised a chorus of derision from the calm heights of their own superiority. Mr. Robertson’s figure, which was homely; his character, which was ineffective; his manners, which were rather absurd, all came in for their share of ridicule. The only thing at which they did not make a mock was his money.

But Isabella was a woman of resolute nature, and, having once put her hand to the plough, she would not look back. She not only married Mr. Robertson in the face of her family, but had the good sense to demean herself as though she were conquering the earth; then she settled down into a sober but high-handed matrimony, and proceeded to rule the merchant and all belonging to him with a rod of iron. The only mistake she made was that of having thirteen children.

And now the tall tombstone, which rose, with its draped urn, from a forest of memorials in the churchyard of Kaims, held records of the eleven who lay under it beside their parents. The women had never left their own place; two or three of the men had gone far afield, but each one of the number had died unmarried, and each had been buried at home. The two living would look in at it, on the rare occasions on which they passed, with a certain sense of repose.

After his marriage, Mr. Robertson had met with reverses, and the increase of his family did not mend his purse. At his death, which took place before that of his wife, he was no more than comfortably off; and the ample means possessed by Miss Hersey and Miss Caroline were mainly due to their own economical habits, and the accumulated legacies of their brothers and sisters.

In the town of Kaims the houses of the bettermost classes were completely hidden from the eye, for they stood behind those fronting on the street, and were approached by ‘closes,’ or narrow covered ways, running back between the buildings. The dark doorways opening upon the pavement gave no suggestion of the respectable haunts to which they led. The Robertson house stood at the end of one of these. Having dived into the passage, one emerged again on a paved path, flanked by deep borders of sooty turf, under the windows of the tall, dead-looking tenements frowning squalidly down on either side, and giving a strange feeling of the presence of unseen eyes, though no sign of humanity was visible behind the panes. From the upper stories the drying underwear of the poorer inhabitants waved, particoloured, from long poles. The house was detached. It was comfortable and spacious, with a wide staircase painted in imitation of marble, and red baize inner doors; very silent, very light, looking on its further side into a garden.

It was Sunday; the two old ladies, who were strict Episcopalians, had returned from church, and were sitting dressed in the clothes held sacred to the day, in their drawing-room. June was well forward and the window was open beside Miss Hersey, as she sat, handkerchief in hand, on the red chintz sofa. The strong scent of lilies of the valley came up from outside, and pervaded that part of the room. At her elbow stood a little round table of black lacquer inlaid with mother-of-pearl pagodas. Miss Caroline moved about rather aimlessly among the furniture, patting a table-cover here and shifting a chair there, but making no appreciable difference in anything she touched. Near the other window was set out a tray covered with a napkin, holding some wineglasses, a decanter, and two plates of sponge-cakes.

The Miss Robertsons’ garden formed a kind of oasis in the mass of mean and crowded houses which lay between the High Street and the docks; for the populous part of Kaims, where the sailors, dockmen, and fishing-people lived, stretched on every side. A wide grass-plot, which centred in a wooden seat, crept close under the drawing-room windows, and from this a few steps ran down to the walled enclosure in which flower and kitchen garden were combined. The gate at their foot was overhung by an old jessamine plant which hid the stone lintel in a shower of white stars. Round the walls were beds of simple flowering plants, made with no pretence of art or arrangement, and dug by some long-forgotten gardener who had died unsuspicious of the oppressive niceties which would, in later times, be brought into his trade. Mignonette loaded the air with its keen sweetness, pansies lifted their falsely-innocent faces, sweet-williams were as thick as a velvet-pile carpet in shades of red and white, the phlox swayed stiffly to the breeze, and convolvulus minor, most old-fashioned of flowers, seemed to have sprung off all the Dresden bowls and plates on which it had ever been painted, and assembled itself in a corner alongside the lilies of the valley. The whole of the middle part of the place was filled with apple-trees, and the earth at their feet was planted with polyanthus and hen-and-chicken daisies. At the foot of the garden a fringe of white and purple lilacs stood by the gravel path, and beyond these, outside the walls, a timber-merchant’s yard made the air noisy with the whirring of saws working ceaselessly all the week.

But to-day everything was quiet, and the Miss Robertsons sat in their drawing-room expecting their company.

The Edinburgh coach reached Kaims late on Saturday nights, and those who expected mails or parcels were obliged to wait for them until Sunday morning, when, from half-past one to two o’clock, the mail-office was opened, and its contents handed out to the owners. Church and kirk were alike over at the time of distribution, and the only inconvenience to people who had come in from the country was the long wait they had to endure after their respective services had ended, till the moment at which the office doors were unlocked. From time immemorial the Miss Robertsons had opened their house to their friends between church hour and mail hour, and this weekly reception was attended by such county neighbours as lived within reasonable distance of the town, and did not attend the country kirks. Their carriages and servants would be sent to wait until the office should open, while they themselves would go to spend the interval with the old ladies.

Like moss on an ancient wall, a certain etiquette had grown over these occasions, from which no one who visited at the house in the close would have had the courage or the ill-manners to depart. Miss Hersey, who had virtually assumed the position of elder sister, would sit directly in the centre of the sofa, and, to the vacant places on either side of her, the two ladies whose rank or whose intimacy with herself entitled them to the privilege, would be conducted. She was thinking to-day of the time when Clementina Speid had sat for the first time at her right hand and looked down upon the lilies of the valley. Their scent was coming up now.

The drawing-room was full on a fine Sunday, and Miss Caroline, who generally retired to a little chair at the wall, would smile contentedly on her guests, throwing, from time to time, some mild echo of her sister’s words into the talk around her. When all who could reasonably be expected had arrived, Miss Hersey would turn to the husband of the lady occupying the place of honour, and, in the silence which the well-known action invariably created, would desire him to play the host.

‘Mr. Speid, will you pour out the wine?’

Sunday upon Sunday the words had been unaltered; then, for thirty years, a different name. But now it was the same again, and Gilbert, like his predecessor, would, having performed his office, place Miss Hersey’s wineglass on the table with the mother-of-pearl pagodas.

It was nearing one o’clock before the marble-painted entrance-hall echoed to the knocker, but, as one raindrop brings many, its first summons was the beginning of a succession of others, and the drawing-room held a good many people when Gilbert arrived. Two somewhat aggressive-looking matrons were enthroned upon the sofa, a group of men had collected in the middle of the room, and a couple or so of young people were chattering by themselves. Miss Caroline on her chair listened to the halting remarks of a boy just verging on manhood, who seemed much embarrassed by his position, and who cast covert and hopeless glances towards his own kind near the window.

Robert Fullarton was standing silent by the mantelpiece looking out over the garden as Miss Hersey had done, and thinking of the same things; but whereas, with her, the remembrance was occasional, with him it was constant. He had hardly missed his Sunday visit once since the Sunday of which he thought, except when he was absent from home. It was a kind of painful comfort to him to see the objects which had surrounded her and which had never changed since that day. He came back into the present at the sound of Miss Hersey’s voice.

‘You have not brought your nephew with you,’ she said, motioning him to a chair near her.

‘Ah, he is well occupied, ma’am,’ replied Robert, sitting down, ‘or, at least, he thinks he is. He has gone to Morphie kirk.’

‘One may be well occupied there also,’ said Miss Hersey, from the liberality of her Episcopalian point of view. ‘I did not know that he was a Presbyterian.’

‘Neither is he,’ said Fullarton, raising his eyebrows oddly, ‘but he has lately professed to admire that form of worship.’

Miss Robertson felt that there was the suspicion of something hidden in his words, and was a little uncomfortable. She did not like the idea of anything below the surface. The two women beside her, who were more accustomed to such allusions, smiled.

‘I do not understand, sir,’ said the old lady. ‘You seem to have some other meaning.’

‘I fancy there is another meaning to his zeal, and that it is called Cecilia Raeburn,’ said Fullarton.

‘Oh, indeed!’ exclaimed one of the ladies, putting on an arch face, ‘that is an excellent reason for going to church.’

Robert saw that Miss Hersey was annoyed by her tone.

‘I dare say he profits by what he hears as much as another,’ he said. ‘One can hardly be surprised that a young fellow should like to walk some of the way home in such attractive company. There is no harm in that, is there, Miss Robertson?’

‘No, no,’ said Miss Hersey, reassured.

‘Mr. Crauford Fordyce has a fine property in Lanarkshire, I am told,’ said one of the ladies, who seldom took the trouble to conceal her train of thought.

‘His father has,’ replied Fullarton.

Gilbert had entered quietly, and, in the babble of voices, Miss Hersey had not heard him announced. Having paid his respects to her sister, he did not disturb her, seeing she was occupied; but, for the last few minutes, he had been standing behind Fullarton in the angle of a tall screen. His face was dark.

‘Ah, Gilbert,’ exclaimed the old lady; ‘I was wondering where you could be.’

‘Take my chair, Speid,’ said Fullarton. ‘I am sure Miss Robertson is longing to talk to you.’

‘You are like a breath of youth,’ said Miss Hersey, as he sat down. ‘Tell me, what have you been doing since I saw you?’

Gilbert made a great effort to collect himself. The lady who had been speaking possessed an insatiable curiosity, and was bombarding Fullarton with a volley of questions about his nephew and the extent of his nephew’s intimacy at Morphie, for she was a person who considered herself privileged.

‘For one thing, I have bought a new cabriolet,’ said the young man.

‘And what is it like?’ asked Miss Hersey.

Carriages and horses were things that had never entered the range of her interest, but, to her, any belonging of Gilbert’s was important.

‘It is a high one, very well hung, and painted yellow. I drive my iron-gray mare in it.’

‘That will have a fine appearance, Gilbert.’

‘It would please me very much to take you out, ma’am,’ said he, ‘but the step is so high that I am afraid you would find it inconvenient.’

‘I am too old, my dear,’ said Miss Hersey, looking delighted; ‘but some day I will come to the head of the close and see you drive away.’

Gilbert’s ears were straining towards Fullarton and his companion, who, regardless of the reticence of his answers, was cross-examining him minutely.

‘I suppose that Lady Eliza would be well satisfied,’ she was saying, ‘and I am sure she should, too. Of course, it would be a grand chance for Miss Raeburn if Mr. Fordyce were to think seriously of her; she has no fortune. I happen to know that. For my part, I never can admire those pale girls.’

The speaker, who had the kind of face that makes one think of domestic economy, looked haughtily from under her plumed Leghorn bonnet.

Fullarton grew rather uncomfortable, for he suspected the state of Gilbert’s mind, and the lady, whom social importance rather than friendship with Miss Robertson had placed on the red chintz sofa, was a person whose tongue knew no bridle. He rose to escape. Gilbert rose also, in response to a nameless impulse, and a newcomer appropriating his chair, he went and stood at the window.

Though close to the lady who had spoken, he turned from her, unable to look in her direction, and feeling out of joint with the world. His brows were drawn together and the scar on his cheek, now a white seam, showed strong as he faced the light. It was more than three months’ since Cecilia had doctored it, and he had watched her fingers in the looking-glass. He had met her many times after that night, for Lady Eliza had felt it behoved her to show him some attention, and had, at last, almost begun to like him. Had her feelings been unbiassed by the past, there is little doubt that she would have become heartily fond of him, for, like Granny Stirk, she loved youth; and her stormy explanation with Fullarton constantly in the back of her mind, she strove with herself to accept the young man’s presence naturally.

To Fullarton, Gilbert was scarcely sympathetic, even laying aside the initial fact that he was the living cause of the loss whose bitterness he would carry to the grave. A cynicism which had grown with the years was almost as high as his heart, like the rising shroud supposed to have been seen by witches round the bodies of doomed persons. In spite of his wideness of outlook in most matters, there was a certain insularity in him, which made him resent, as a consequence of foreign up-bringing, the very sensitive poise of Gilbert’s temperament. And, in the young man’s face, there was little likeness to his mother to rouse any feeling in Robert’s breast.

Speid’s thoughts were full of Cecilia and Crauford Fordyce. He had seen the latter a couple of times—for it was some weeks since he had arrived to visit his uncle—and he had not cared for him. Once he had overtaken him on the road, and they had walked a few miles together. He had struck him as stupid, and possibly, coarse-fibred. He only realized, as he stood twirling the tassel of the blind, how important his occasional meetings with Cecilia had become to him, how much she was in his thoughts, how her words, her ways, her movements, her voice, were interwoven with every fancy he had. He had been a dullard, he told himself, stupid and coarse-fibred as Fordyce. He had been obliged to wait until jealousy, like a flash of lightning, should show him that which lay round his feet. Fool, idiot, and thrice idiot that he was to have been near to such a transcendent creature, and yet ignorant of the truth! Though her charm had thrilled him through and through, it was only here and now that the chance words of a vulgar woman had revealed that she was indispensable to him.

Though self-conscious, he was not conceited, and he sighed as he reflected that he could give her nothing which Fordyce could not also offer. From the little he had heard, he fancied him to be a richer man than himself. Cecilia did not strike him as a person who, if her heart were engaged, would take count of the difference. But what chance had he more than another of engaging her heart? Fordyce was not handsome, certainly, but then, neither was he ill-looking. Gilbert glanced across at a mirror which hung in the alcove of the window, and saw in it a rather sinister young man with a scarred face. He was not attractive, either, he thought. Well, he had learned something.

‘Mr. Speid, will you pour out the wine?’

Miss Hersey’s voice was all ceremony. Not for the world would she have called him Gilbert at such a moment.

He went forward to the little tray and did as she bid him.

[CHAPTER IX
ON FOOT AND ON WHEELS]

THE yellow cabriolet stood at the entrance to the close. The iron-gray mare, though no longer in her first youth, abhorred delay, and was tossing her head and moving restlessly, to the great annoyance of the very small English groom who stood a yard in front of her nose, and whose remonstrances were completely lost on her. Now and then she would fidget with her forefeet, spoiling the ‘Assyrian stride’ which had added pounds to her price and made her an object of open-mouthed amazement to the youth of the Kaims gutter.

A crowd of little boys were collected on the pavement; for the company which emerged from the Miss Robertsons’ house on Sundays was as good as a peep-show to them, and the laird of Whanland was, to their minds, the most choice flower of fashion and chivalry which this weekly entertainment could offer. Not that that fact exempted him from their criticism—no fact yet in existence could protect any person from the tongue of the Scotch street-boy—and the groom, who had been exposed to their comment for nearly twenty minutes, was beginning, between the mare and the audience, to come to the end of his temper.

‘Did ever ye see sic a wee, wee mannie?’ exclaimed one of the older boys, pointing at him.

‘He’s terrible like a monkey.’

‘An’ a’m fell feared he’ll no grow. What auld are ye, mun?’ continued the other, raising his voice to a shout.

There was no reply.

‘Hech! he winna speak!’

‘He’ll no be bigger nor Jockie Thompson. Come awa here, Jockie, an’ let’s see!’

A small boy was hauled out from the crowd and pushed forward.

‘Just stand you aside him an’ put your heedie up the same prood way he does.’

The urchin stepped down off the pavement, and standing as near the victim as he dared, began to inflate himself and to pull such faces as he conceived suitable. As mimicry they had no merit, but as insult they were simply beyond belief.

A yell of approval arose.

The groom was beginning to meditate a dive at the whip-socket when the solid shape of Jockie Thompson’s father appeared in the distance. His son, who had eluded him before kirk and who still wore his Sunday clothes, sprang back to the pavement, and was instantly swallowed up by the group.

By the time that the groom had recovered his equanimity the mare began to paw the stones, for she also had had enough of her present position.

‘Whoa, then!’ cried he sharply, raising his hand.

‘Gie her the wheep,’ suggested one of the boys.

Though there was an interested pause, the advice had no effect.

‘He’s feared,’ said a boy with an unnaturally deep voice. ‘He’s no muckle use. The laird doesna let him drive; ye’ll see when he comes oot o’ the close an’ wins into the machine, he’ll put the mannie up ahint him an’ just drive himsel’.’

‘Ay, will he.’

The man threw a vindictive glance into the group, and the mare, having resumed her stride, tossed her head up and down, sending a snow-shower of foam into the air. A spot lit upon his smart livery coat, and he pulled out his handkerchief to flick it off.

A baleful idea suggested itself to the crowd.

‘Eh, look—see!’ cried a tow-headed boy, ‘gie’s a handfu’ o’ yon black durt an’ we’ll put a piece on his breeks that’ll match the t’other ane!’

Two or three precipitated themselves upon the mud, and it is impossible to say what might have happened had not Gilbert, at this moment, come up the close.

‘Whisht! whisht! here’s Whanland! Michty, but he’s fine! See, now, he’ll no let the mannie drive.’

‘Gosh! but he’s a braw-lookin’ deevil!’

‘Haud yer tongue. He doesna look vera canny the day. I’d be sweer[^[1]] to fash him.’

Gilbert got into the cabriolet gathering up the reins, his thoughts intent upon what he had heard in the house. The mare, rejoiced to be moving, took the first few steps forward in a fashion of her own, making, as he turned the carriage, as though she would back on to the kerbstone. He gave her her head, and drew the whip like a caress softly across her back. She plunged forward, taking hold of the bit, and trotted down the High Street, stepping up like the great lady she was, and despising the ground underneath her.

However preoccupied, Speid was not the man to be indifferent to his circumstances when he sat behind such an animal. As they left the town and came out upon the flat stretch of road leading towards Whanland, he let her go to the top of her pace, humouring her mouth till she had ceased to pull, and was carrying her head so that the bit was in line with the point of the shaft. A lark was singing high above the field at one side of him, and, at the other, the scent of gorse came in puffs on the wind from the border of the sandhills. Beyond was the sea, with the line of cliff above Garviekirk graveyard cutting out into the immeasurable water. The sky lay pale above the sea-line. They turned into the road by the Lour bridge from where the river could be seen losing itself in an eternity of distance. In the extraordinary Sunday stillness, the humming of insects was audible as it only is on the first day of the week, when nature itself seems to suggest a suspension of all but holiday energy. The natural world, which recognises no cessation of work, presents almost the appearance of doing so at such times, so great is the effect of the settled habit of thousands of people upon its aspect.

The monotony of the motion and the balm of the day began to intoxicate Gilbert. It is not easy to feel that fate is against one when the sun shines, the sky smiles, and the air is quivering with light and dancing shadow; harder still in the face of the blue, endless sea-spaces of the horizon; hard indeed when the horse before you conveys subtly to your hand that he is prepared to transport you, behind the beating pulse of his trot, to Eldorado—to the Isles of the Blessed—anywhere.

His heart rose in spite of himself as he got out of the cabriolet at the door of Whanland, and ran his hand down the mare’s shoulder and forelegs. He had brought her in hotter than he liked, and he felt that he should go and see her groomed, for he was a careful horse-master. But somehow he could not. He dismissed her with a couple of approving slaps, and watched her as she was led away. Then, tossing his hat and gloves to Macquean, who had come out at the sound of wheels, he strolled up to the place at which he had once paused with Barclay, and stood looking up the river to the heavy woods of Morphie.

‘If she were here!’ he said to himself, ‘if she were here!’

*****

As Speid’s eyes rested upon the dark woods, the little kirk which stood at their outskirts was on the point of emptying, for public worship began in it later than in the kirks and churches of Kaims.

The final blessing had been pronounced, the last paraphrase sung, and Lady Eliza, with Cecilia, sat in the Morphie pew in the first row of the gallery. Beside them was Fullarton’s nephew, Crauford Fordyce, busily engaged in locking the bibles and psalm-books into their box under the seat with a key which Lady Eliza had passed to him for the purpose. His manipulation of the peculiarly-constructed thing showed that this was by no means the first time he had handled it.

The beadle and an elder were going their rounds with the long-handled wooden collecting-shovels, which they thrust into the pews as they passed; the sound of dropping pennies pervaded the place, and the party in the Morphie seat having made their contributions, that hush set in which reigned in the kirk before the shovel was handed into the pulpit, and the ring of the minister’s money gave the signal for a general departure not unlike a stampede. Lady Eliza leaned, unabashed, over the gallery to see who was present.

When the expected sound had sent the male half of the congregation like a loosed torrent to the door, and the female remainder had departed more peacefully, the two women went out followed by Fordyce.

Lady Eliza was in high good temper. Though content to let all theological questions rest fundamentally, she had scented controversy in some detail of the sermon, and was minded to attack the minister upon them when next he came in her way. Fordyce, who was apt to take things literally, was rash enough to be decoyed into argument on the way home, and not adroit enough to come out of it successfully.

Robert Fullarton’s nephew—to give him the character in which he seemed most important to Lady Eliza—belonged to the fresh-faced, thickset type of which a loss of figure in later life may be predicted. Heavily built, mentally and physically, he had been too well brought up to possess anything of the bumpkin, or, rather, he had been too much brought up in complicated surroundings to indulge in low tastes, even if he had them. He took considerable interest in his own appearance, though he was not, perhaps, invariably right in his estimate of it, and his clothes were always good and frequently unsuitable. He was the eldest son of an indulgent father, who had so multiplied his possessions as to become their adjunct more than their owner; to his mother and his two thick-ankled, elementary sisters he suggested Adonis; and he looked to politics as a future career. Owing to some slight natural defect, he was inclined to hang his under-lip and breathe heavily through his nose. Though he was of middle height, his width made him look short of it, and the impression he produced on a stranger was one of phenomenal cleanliness and immobility.

The way from the kirk to Morphie house lay through the fields, past the home farm, and Lady Eliza stopped as she went by to inquire for the health of a young cart-horse which had lamed itself. Cecilia and Crauford waited for her at the gate of the farmyard. A string of ducks was waddling towards a ditch with that mixture of caution and buffoonery in their appearance which makes them irresistible to look at, and a hen’s discordant Magnificat informed the surrounding world that she had done her best for it; otherwise everything was still.

‘We shall have to wait some time, I expect, if it is question of a horse,’ observed Cecilia, sitting down upon a log just outside the gate.

‘I shall not be impatient,’ responded Fordyce, showing two very large, very white front teeth as he smiled.

‘I was thinking that Mr. Fullarton might get tired of waiting for you and drive home. The mails will have been given out long ago, and he is probably at Morphie by this time.’

‘Come now, Miss Raeburn; I am afraid you think me incapable of walking to Fullarton, when, in reality, I should find it a small thing to do for the pleasure of sitting here with you. Confess it: you imagine me a poor sort of fellow—one who, through the custom of being well served, can do little for himself. I have seen it in your expression.’

Cecilia laughed a little. ‘Why should you fear that?’ she asked.

‘Because I am extremely anxious for your good opinion,’ he replied,—‘and, of course, for Lady Eliza’s also.’

‘I have no doubt you have got it,’ she said lightly.

‘You are not speaking for yourself, Miss Raeburn. I hope that you think well of me.’

‘Your humility does you credit.’

‘I wish you would be serious. It is hard to be set aside by those whom one wishes to please.’

‘But I do not set you aside. You are speaking most absurdly, Mr. Fordyce,’ said Cecilia, who was growing impatient.

‘But you seem to find everyone else preferable to me—Speid, for instance.’

‘It has never occurred to me to compare you, sir.’

Her voice was freezing.

‘I hope I have not annoyed you by mentioning his name,’ said he clumsily.

‘You will annoy me if you go on with this conversation,’ she replied. ‘I am not fond of expressing my opinion about anyone.’

Fordyce looked crestfallen, and Cecilia, who was not inclined to be harsh to anybody, was rather sorry; she felt as remorseful as though she had offended a child; he was so solid, so humourless, so vulnerable. She wondered what his uncle thought of him; she had wondered often enough what Fullarton thought about most things, and, like many others, she had never found out. It often struck her that he was a slight peg for such friendship as Lady Eliza’s to hang on. ‘Il y’a un qui baise et un qui tend la joue.’ She knew that very well, and she had sometimes resented the fact for her adopted aunt, being a person who understood resentment mainly by proxy.

As she glanced at the man beside her she thought of the strange difference in people’s estimates of the same thing; no doubt he represented everything to someone, but she had spoken with absolute truth when she said that it had not occurred to her to compare him to Speid. She saw the same difference between the two men that she saw between fire and clay, between the husk and the grain, between the seen and the unseen. In her twenty-four years she had contrived to pierce the veils and shadows that hide the eyes of life, and, having looked upon them, to care for no light but theirs. The impression produced on her when she first saw Gilbert Speid by the dovecot was very vivid, and it was wonderful how little it had been obliterated or altered in their subsequent acquaintance. His quietness and the forces below it had more meaning for her than the obvious speeches and actions of other people. She had seen him in a flash, understood him in a flash, and, in a flash, her nature had risen up and paused, quivering and waiting, unconscious of its own attitude. Simple-minded people were inclined to call Cecilia cold.

‘I am expecting letters from home to-day,’ said Fordyce at last. ‘I have written very fully to my father on a particular subject, and I am hoping for an answer.’

‘Indeed?’ said she, assuming a look of interest; she felt none, but she was anxious to be pleasant.

‘I should like you to see Fordyce Castle,’ said he. ‘I must try to persuade Lady Eliza to pay us a visit with you.’

‘I am afraid you will hardly be able to do that,’ she answered, smiling. ‘I have lived with her for nearly twelve years, and I have never once known her to leave Morphie.’

‘But I feel sure she would enjoy seeing Fordyce,’ he continued; ‘it is considered one of the finest places in Lanarkshire, and my mother would make her very welcome; my sisters, too, they will be delighted to make your acquaintance. You would suit each other perfectly; I have often thought that.’

‘You are very good,’ she said, ‘and the visit would be interesting, I am sure. The invitation would please her, even if she did not accept it. You can but ask her.’

‘Then I have your permission to write to my mother?’ said Crauford earnestly.

It struck Cecilia all at once that she was standing on the brink of a chasm. Her colour changed a little.

‘It is for my aunt to give that,’ she said. ‘I am always ready to go anywhere with her that she pleases.’

The more Fordyce saw of his companion the more convinced was he, that, apart from any inclination of his own, he had found the woman most fitted to take the place he had made up his mind to offer her. The occasional repulses which he suffered only suggested to him such maidenly reserve as should develop, with marriage, into a dignity quite admirable at every point. Her actual fascination was less plain to him than to many others, and, though he came of good stock, his admiration for the look of breeding strong in her was not so much grounded in his own enjoyment of it as in the effect he foresaw it producing on the rest of the world, in connection with himself. Her want of fortune seemed to him almost an advantage. Was he not one of the favoured few to whom it was unnecessary? And where would the resounding fame of King Cophetua be without his beggar-maid?

The letter he had written to his father contained an epitome of his feelings—at least, so far as he was acquainted with them; and, when he saw Lady Eliza emerge from a stable-door into the yard, and knew that there was no more chance of being alone with Cecilia, he was all eagerness to step out for Morphie, where his uncle had promised to call for him on his way home from Kaims. Fullarton might even now be carrying the all-important reply in his pocket.

He wondered, as they took their way through the fragrant grass, how he should act when he had received it, for he had hardly settled whether to address Miss Raeburn in person or to lay his hopes before Lady Eliza, with a due statement of the prospects he represented. He leaned towards the latter course, feeling certain that the elder woman must welcome so excellent a fate for her charge, and would surely influence her were she blind enough to her own happiness to refuse him. But she would never refuse him. Why should she? He could name twenty or thirty who would be glad to be in her place. He had accused her of preferring Speid’s company to his own, but he had only half believed the words he spoke. For what was Whanland? and what were the couple of thousand a year Speid possessed?

Yet poor Crauford knew, though he would scarce admit the knowledge to himself, that the only situation in which he felt at a disadvantage was in Speid’s society.

---

[^[1]]Loth.

[CHAPTER X
KING COPHETUA’S CORRESPONDENCE]

‘FORDYCE CASTLE,

‘LANARK.

‘June 26, 1801.

‘MY DEAR SON,

‘Your letter, with the very important matter it contains, took me somewhat by surprise, for although you had mentioned the name of the young lady and that of Lady Eliza Lamont, I was hardly prepared to hear that you intended to do her the honour you contemplate. A father’s approval is not to be lightly asked or rashly bestowed, and I have taken time to consider my reply. You tell me that Miss Raeburn is peculiarly fitted, both in mind and person, to fill the position she will, as your wife, be called upon to occupy. With regard to her birth I am satisfied. She is, we know, connected with families whose names are familiar to all whose approval is of any value. I may say, without undue pride, that my son’s exceptional prospects might have led him to form a more brilliant alliance, and I have no doubt that Miss Cecilia Raeburn, possessing such qualities of mind as you describe, will understand how high a compliment you pay to her charms in overlooking the fact. Your statement that she is dowerless is one upon which we need not dwell; it would be hard indeed were the family you represent dependent upon the purses of those who have the distinction of entering it. I am happy to say that my eldest son need be hampered by no such considerations, and that Mrs. Crauford Fordyce will lack nothing suitable to her station, and to the interest that she must inevitably create in the society of this county. It now only remains for me to add that, having expressed my feelings upon your choice, I am prepared to consent.

‘Your mother is, I understand, writing to you, though I have only your sister’s authority for saying so, for I have been so much occupied during the last day or two as to be obliged to lock the door of my study. I am afraid, my dear Crauford (between ourselves), that, though she knows my decision, your mother is a little disappointed—upset, I should say. I think that she had allowed herself to believe, from the pleasure you one day expressed in the society of Lady Maria Milwright when she was with us, that you were interested in that direction. Personally, though Lord Milborough is an old friend of the family, and his daughter’s connection with it would have been eminently suitable, her appearance would lead me to hesitate, were I in your place and contemplating marriage. But that is an objection, perhaps, that your mother hardly understands.

‘I am, my dear Crauford,

‘Your affectionate father,

‘THOMAS FORDYCE.’

‘P.S.—Agneta and Mary desire their fond love to their brother.’

Fordyce was sitting in his room at Fullarton with his correspondence in front of him; he had received two letters and undergone a purgatory of suspense, for, by the time he reached Morphie, his uncle had been kept waiting for him some time. Finding nothing for himself in his private mail-bag, Fullarton had it put under the driving-seat, and the suggestion hazarded by his nephew that it should be brought out only resulted in a curt refusal. The elder man hated to be kept waiting, and the culprit had been forced to get through the homeward drive with what patience he might summon.

Lady Fordyce’s letter lay unopened by that of Sir Thomas, and Crauford, in spite of his satisfaction with the one he had just read, eyed it rather apprehensively. But, after all, the main point was gained, or what he looked upon as the main point, for to the rest of the affair there could be but one issue. He broke the seal of his mother’s envelope, and found a second communication inside it from one of his sisters.

‘MY DEAR CRAUFORD (began Lady Fordyce),

‘As your father is writing to you I will add a few words to convey my good wishes to my son upon the decided step he is about to take. Had I been consulted I should have advised a little more reflection, but as you are bent on pleasing yourself, and your father (whether rightly or wrongly I cannot pretend to say) is upholding you, I have no choice left but to express my cordial good wishes, and to hope that you may never live to regret it. Miss Cecilia Raeburn may be all you say, or she may not, and I should fail in my duty if I did not remind you that a young lady brought up in a provincial neighbourhood is not likely to step into such a position as that of the wife of Sir Thomas Fordyce’s eldest son without the risk of having her head turned, or, worse still, of being incapable of maintaining her dignity. As I have not had the privilege of speaking to your father alone for two days, and as he has found it convenient to sit up till all hours, I do not know whether the consent he has (apparently) given is an unwilling one, but I should be acting against my conscience were I to hide from you that I suspect it most strongly. With heartfelt wishes for your truest welfare,

‘I remain, my dear Crauford,

‘Your affectionate mother,

‘LOUISA CHARLOTTE FORDYCE.’

‘P.S.—Would it not be wise to delay your plans until you have been once more at home, and had every opportunity of thinking it over? You might return here in a few days, and conclude your visit to your uncle later on—say, at the end of September.’

Crauford laid down the sheet of paper; he was not apt to seize on hidden things, but the little touch of nature which cropped up, like a daisy from a rubbish-heap, in the end of his father’s letter gave him sympathy to imagine what the atmosphere of Fordyce Castle must have been when it was written. He respected his mother, not by nature, but from habit, and the experiences he had sometimes undergone had never shaken his feelings, but only produced a sort of distressed bewilderment. He was almost bewildered now. He turned again to Sir Thomas’s letter, and re-read it for comfort.

The enclosure he had found from his sister was much shorter.

‘MY DEAR BROTHER,

‘Mary and I wish to send you our very kind love, and we hope that you will be happy. Is Miss Raeburn dark or fair? We hope she is fond of tambour-work. We have some new patterns from Edinburgh which are very pretty. We shall be very glad when you return. Our mother is not very well. There is no interesting news. Mrs. Fitz-Allen is to give a fête-champêtre with illuminations next week, but we do not know whether we shall be allowed to go as she behaved most unbecomingly to our mother, trying to take precedence of her at the prize-giving in the Lanark flower show. Lady Maria Milwright is coming to visit us in September. We shall be very pleased.

‘Your affectionate sister,

‘AGNETA FORDYCE.’

Fullarton’s good-humour was quite restored as uncle and nephew paced up and down the twilit avenue that evening. A long silence followed the announcement which the young man had just made.

‘Do you think I am doing wisely, sir?’ he said at last.

Fullarton smiled faintly before he replied; Crauford sometimes amused him.

‘In proposing to Cecilia? One can hardly tell,’ he replied; ‘that is a thing that remains to be seen.’

Perplexity was written in Crauford’s face.

‘But surely—surely—’ he began, ‘have you not a very high opinion of Miss Raeburn?’

‘The highest,’ said the other dryly.

‘But then——’

‘What I mean is, do you care enough to court a possible rebuff? You are not doing wisely if you don’t consider that. I say, a possible rebuff,’ continued his uncle.

‘Then you think she will refuse me?’

‘Heaven knows,’ responded Robert. ‘I can only tell you that to-day, when Miss Robertson inquired where you were, and I said that you were walking home from Morphie kirk with Cecilia, Speid was standing by looking as black as thunder.’

To those whose ill-fortune it is never to have been crossed in anything, a rival is another name for a rogue. Fordyce felt vindictive; he breathed heavily.

‘Do you think that Miss Raeburn is likely to—notice Speid?’

Robert’s mouth twitched. ‘It is difficult not to notice Gilbert Speid,’ he replied.

‘I really fail to see why everyone seems so much attracted by him.’

‘I am not sure that he attracts me,’ said the elder man.

‘He looks extremely ill-tempered—most unlikely to please a young lady.’

‘There I do not altogether agree with you. We are always being told that women are strange things,’ said Fullarton.

‘I am astonished at the view you take, uncle. After all, I am unable to see why my proposal should be less welcome than his—that is, if he intends to make one.’

‘You certainly have solid advantages. After all, that is the main point with women,’ said the man for whose sake one woman, at least, had lost all. The habit of bitterness had grown strong.

‘I shall go to Morphie to-morrow, and ride one of your horses, sir, if you have no objection.’

‘Take one, by all means; you will make all the more favourable impression. It is a very wise way of approaching your goddess—if you have a good seat, of course. Speid looks mighty well in the saddle.’

He could not resist tormenting his nephew.

The very sound of Gilbert’s name was beginning to annoy Fordyce, and he changed the subject. It was not until the two men parted for the night that it was mentioned again.

‘I am going out early to-morrow,’ said Robert, ‘so I may not see you before you start. Good luck, Crauford.’

Fordyce rode well, and looked his best on horseback, but Cecilia having gone into the garden, the only eye which witnessed his approach to Morphie next day was that of a housemaid, for Lady Eliza sat writing in the long room.

She received him immediately.

‘I am interrupting your ladyship,’ he remarked apologetically.

‘Not at all, sir, not at all,’ said she, pushing her chair back from the table with a gesture which had in it something masculine; ‘you are always welcome, as you know very well.’

‘That is a pleasant hearing,’ replied he, ‘but to-day it is doubly so. I have come on business of a—I may say—peculiar nature. Lady Eliza, I trust you are my friend?’

‘I shall be happy to serve you in any way I can, Mr. Fordyce.’

‘Then I may count on your good offices? My uncle is so old a friend of your ladyship’s that I am encouraged to——’

‘You are not in any difficulty with him, I hope,’ said Lady Eliza, interrupting him rather shortly.

‘Far from it; indeed, I have his expressed good wishes for the success of my errand.’

‘Well, sir?’ she said, setting her face and folding her beautiful hands together. She was beginning to see light.

‘You may have rightly interpreted the frequency of my visits here. In fact, I feel sure that you have attributed them—and truly—to my admiration for Miss Raeburn.’

‘I have hardly attributed them to admiration for myself,’ she remarked, with a certain grim humour.

Crauford looked rather shocked.

‘Have you said anything to my niece?’ she inquired, after a moment.

‘I have waited for your approval.’

‘That is proper enough.’

Her eyes fixed themselves, seeing beyond Crauford’s clean, solemn face, beyond the panelled walls, into the dull future when Cecilia should have gone out from her daily life. How often her spirits had flagged during the months she had been absent in Edinburgh!

‘Cecilia shall do as she likes. I will not influence her in any way,’ she said at last.

‘But you are willing, Lady Eliza?’

‘——Yes.’

There was not the enthusiasm he expected in her voice, and this ruffled him; a certain amount was due to him, he felt.

‘You are aware that I can offer Miss Raeburn a very suitable establishment,’ he said. ‘I should not have taken this step otherwise.’

‘Have you private means, sir?’ asked Lady Eliza, drumming her fingers upon the table, and looking over his head.

‘No; but that is of little importance, for I wrote to my father a short time ago, and yesterday, after leaving you, I received his reply. He has consented, and he assures me of his intention to be liberal—especially liberal, I may say.’

She was growing a little weary of his long words and his unvaried air of being official. She was disposed to like him personally, mainly from the fact that he was the nephew of his uncle, but the prospect of losing Cecilia hung heavily over any satisfaction she felt at seeing her settled. Many and many a time had she lain awake, distressed and wondering, how to solve the problem of the girl’s future, were she herself to die leaving her unmarried; it had been her waking nightmare. Now there might be an end to all that. She knew that she ought to be glad and grateful to fate—perhaps even grateful to Crauford Fordyce. Tears were near her eyes, and her hot heart ached in advance to think of the days to come. The little share of companionship and affection, the wreckage she had gathered laboriously on the sands of life, would soon slip from her. Her companion could not understand the pain in her look; he was smoothing out a letter on the table before her.

She gathered herself together, sharp words coming to her tongue, as they generally did when she was moved.

‘I suppose my niece and I ought to be greatly flattered,’ she said; ‘I had forgotten that part of it.’

‘Pray do not imagine such a thing. If you will read this letter you will understand the view my father takes. The second sheet contains private matters; this is the first one.’

‘Sit down, Mr. Fordyce; the writing is so close that I must carry it to the light.’

She took the letter to one of the windows at the end of the room, and stood by the curtain, her back turned.

A smothered exclamation came to him from the embrasure, and he was wondering what part of the epistle could have caused it when she faced him suddenly, looking at him with shining eyes, and with a flush of red blood mounting to her forehead.

‘In all my life I have never met with such an outrageous piece of impertinence!’ she exclaimed, tossing the paper to him. ‘How you have had the effrontery to show me such a thing passes my understanding! Take it, sir! Take it, and be obliging enough to leave me. You are never likely to “live to regret” your marriage with Miss Raeburn, for, while I have any influence with her, you will never have the chance of making it. You may tell Lady Fordyce, from me, that the fact that she is a member of your family is sufficient reason for my forbidding my niece to enter it!’

Crauford stood aghast, almost ready to clutch at his coat like a man in a gale of wind, and with scarcely wits left to tell him that he had given Lady Eliza the wrong letter. The oblique attacks he had occasionally suffered from his mother when vexed were quite unlike this direct onslaught. He went towards her, opening his mouth to speak. She waved him back.

‘Not a word, sir! not a word! I will ring the bell and order your horse to be brought.’

‘Lady Eliza, I beg of you, I implore you, to hear what I have got to say!’

He was almost breathless.

‘I have heard enough. Do me the favour to go, Mr. Fordyce.’

‘It is not my fault! I do assure you it is not my fault! I gave you the wrong letter, ma’am. I had never dreamed of your seeing that.’

‘What do I care which letter it is? That such impertinence should have been written is enough for me. Cecilia “unable to support the dignity of being your wife”! Faugh!’

‘If you would only read my father’s letter,’ exclaimed Crauford, drawing it out of his pocket, ‘you would see how very different it is. He is prepared to do everything—anything.’

‘Then he may be prepared to find you a wife elsewhere,’ said Lady Eliza.

At this moment Cecilia’s voice was heard in the passage. He took up his hat.

‘I will go,’ he said, foreseeing further disaster. ‘I entreat you, Lady Eliza, do not say anything to Miss Raeburn. I really do not know what I should do if she were to hear of this horrible mistake!’

He looked such a picture of dismay that, for a moment, she pitied him.

‘I should scarcely do such a thing,’ she replied.

‘You have not allowed me to express my deep regret—Lady Eliza, I hardly know what to say.’

‘Say nothing, Mr. Fordyce. That, at least, is a safe course.’

‘But what can I do? How can I induce you or Miss Raeburn to receive me? If she were to know of what has happened, I should have no hope of her ever listening to me! Oh, Lady Eliza—pray, pray tell me that this need not destroy everything!’

The storm of her anger was abating a little, and she began to realize that the unfortunate Crauford was deserving of some pity. And he was Robert’s nephew.

‘I know nothing of my niece’s feelings,’ she said, ‘but you may be assured that I shall not mention your name to her. And you may be assured of this also: until Lady Fordyce writes such a letter as I shall approve when you show it to me, you will never approach her with my consent.’

‘She will! she shall!’ cried Crauford, in the heat of his thankfulness.

But it was a promise which, when he thought of it in cold blood as he trotted back to Fullarton, made his heart sink.

[CHAPTER XI
THE MOUSE AND THE LION]

HE who is restrained by a paternal law from attacking the person of his enemy need not chafe under this restriction; for he has only to attack him in the vanity, and the result, though far less entertaining, will be twice as effective. Gilbert Speid, in spite of his dislike to Mr. Barclay, did not bear him the slightest ill-will; nevertheless, he had dealt his ‘man of business’ as shrewd a blow as one foe may deal another. Quite unwittingly, he had exposed him to some ridicule.

The lawyer had ‘hallooed before he was out of the wood,’ with the usual consequences.

Kaims had grown a little weary of the way in which he thrust his alleged intimacy at Whanland in its face, and when Speid, having come to an end of his business interviews, had given him no encouragement to present himself on a social footing, it did not conceal its amusement.

As Fordyce dismounted, on his return from Morphie, Barclay was on his way to Fullarton, for he was a busy man, and had the law business of most of the adjoining estates on his hands. Robert, who had arranged to meet him in the early afternoon, had been away all day, and he was told by the servant who admitted him that Mr. Fullarton was still out, but that Mr. Fordyce was on the lawn. The lawyer was well pleased, for he had met Crauford on a previous visit, and had not forgotten that he was an heir-apparent of some importance. He smoothed his hair, where the hat had disarranged it, with a fleshy white hand, and, telling the servant that he would find his own way, went through the house and stepped out of a French window on to the grass.

Fordyce was sitting on a stone seat partly concealed by a yew hedge, and did not see Barclay nor hear his approaching footfall on the soft turf. He had come out and sat down, feeling unable to occupy himself or to get rid of his mortification. He had been too much horrified and surprised at the time to resent anything Lady Eliza had said, but, on thinking over her words again, he felt that he had been hardly treated. He could only hope she would keep her word and say nothing to Cecilia, and that the letter he had undertaken to produce from Lady Fordyce would make matters straight. A ghastly fear entered his mind as he sat. What if Lady Eliza in her rage should write to his mother? The thought was so dreadful that his brow grew damp. He had no reason for supposing that she would do such a thing, except that, when he left her, she had looked capable of anything.

‘Good heavens! good heavens!’ he ejaculated.

He sprang up, unable to sit quiet, and found himself face to face with Barclay.

‘My dear sir,’ exclaimed the lawyer, ‘what is the matter?’

‘Oh, nothing—nothing,’ said Crauford, rather startled by the sudden apparition. ‘Good-morning, Mr. Barclay; pray sit down.’

The lawyer was as inquisitive as a woman, and he complied immediately.

‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘but I can hardly believe that. I sincerely hope it is nothing very serious.’

‘It is nothing that can be helped,’ said Fordyce hurriedly; ‘only a difficulty that I am in.’

‘Then I may have arrived in the nick of time,’ said Barclay. ‘Please remember it is my function to help people out of difficulties. Come, come—courage.’

He spoke with a familiarity of manner which Crauford might have resented had he been less absorbed in his misfortunes. He had an overwhelming longing to confide in someone.

‘What does the proverb say? “Two heads are better than one,” eh, Mr. Fordyce?’

Crauford looked at him irresolutely.

‘I need hardly tell you that I shall be silent,’ said the lawyer in his most professional voice.

Fordyce had some of the instincts of a gentleman, and he hesitated a little before he could make up his mind to mention Cecilia’s name to a stranger like Barclay, but he was in such dire straits that a sympathizer was everything to him, and the fact that his companion knew so much of his uncle’s affairs made confidence seem safe. Besides which, he was not a quick reader of character.

‘You need not look upon me as a stranger,’ said the lawyer; ‘there is nothing that your uncle does not tell me.’

This half-truth seemed so plausible to Crauford that it opened the floodgates of his heart.

‘You know Miss Raeburn, of course,’ he began.

Barclay bowed and dropped his eyes ostentatiously. The action seemed to imply that he knew her more intimately than anyone might suppose.

‘She is a very exceptional young lady. I had made up my mind to propose to her.’

‘She has not a penny,’ broke in Barclay.

‘That is outside the subject,’ replied Fordyce, with something very much like dignity. ‘I wrote to my father, telling him of my intention, and yesterday I got his consent. He told me to expect a most liberal allowance, Mr. Barclay.’

‘Naturally, naturally; in your circumstances that would be a matter of course.’

‘I thought it best to have Lady Eliza’s permission before doing anything further. I was right, was I not, sir?’

‘You acted in a most gentlemanly manner.’

‘I went to Morphie. Lady Eliza was cool with me, I thought. I confess I expected she would have shown some—some——’

‘Some gratification—surely,’ finished Barclay.

‘I took my father’s letter with me, and unfortunately, I had also one in my pocket from my mother. It was not quite like my father’s in tone; in fact, I am afraid it was written under considerable—excitement. I think she had some other plan in her mind for me. At any rate I took it out, mistaking it for the other, and gave it to her ladyship to read. Mr. Barclay, it was terrible.’

The lawyer was too anxious to stand well with his companion to venture a smile.

‘Tut, tut, tut, tut!’ he said, clicking his tongue against his teeth.

‘My only comfort is that she promised to say nothing to Miss Raeburn; I sincerely trust she may keep her word. I am almost afraid she may write to my mother, and I really do not know what might happen if she did. That is what I dread, and she is capable of it.’

‘She is an old termagant,’ said the other.

‘But what am I to do? What can I do?’

There was a silence in which the two men sat without speaking a word. Barclay crossed his knees, and clasped his hands round them; Fordyce’s eyes rested earnestly upon his complacent face.

‘I suppose you know that she used to set her cap at your uncle years ago?’ said the lawyer at last.

‘I knew they were old friends.’

‘You must persuade him to go and put everything straight. He can if he likes; she will keep quiet if he tells her to do so, trust her for that. That’s my advice, and you will never get better.’

Fordyce’s face lightened; he had so lost his sense of the proportion of things that this most obvious solution had not occurred to him.

‘It seems so simple now that you have suggested it,’ he said. ‘I might have thought of that for myself.’

‘What did I tell you about the two heads, eh?’

‘Then you really think that my uncle can make it smooth?’

‘I am perfectly sure of it. Will you take another hint from a well-wisher, Mr. Fordyce?’

‘Of course, I shall be grateful!’

‘Well, do not let the grass grow under your feet, for Speid is looking that way too, if I am not mistaken.’

Crauford made a sound of impatience.

Barclay leaned forward, his eyes keen with interest.

‘Then you don’t like him?’ he said.

‘Oh, I scarcely know him,’ replied Fordyce, a look that delighted the lawyer coming into his face.

‘He is one of those who will know you one day and look over your head the next. It would be a shame if you were set aside for a conceited coxcomb of a fellow like that—a sulky brute too, I believe. I hate him.’

‘So do I,’ exclaimed Crauford, suddenly and vehemently.

Barclay wondered whether his companion had any idea of the tissue of rumours hanging round Gilbert, but he did not, just then, give voice to the question. It was a subject which he thought it best to keep until another time. Fullarton might return at any minute and he would be interrupted. The friendly relations which he determined to establish between himself and Fordyce would afford plenty of opportunity. If he failed to establish them, it would be a piece of folly so great as to merit reward from a just Providence. All he could do was to blow on Crauford’s jealousy—an inflammable thing, he suspected—with any bellows that came to his hand. Speid should not have Cecilia while he was there to cheer him on.

‘You should get Mr. Fullarton to go to Morphie to-morrow, or even this afternoon; my business with him will not take long, and I shall make a point of going home early and leaving you free.’

‘You are really most kind to take so much interest,’ said Crauford. ‘How glad I am that I spoke to you about it.’

‘The mouse helped the king of beasts in the fable, you see,’ said the lawyer.

The simile struck Crauford as a happy one. He began to regain his spirits. His personality had been almost unhinged by his recent experience, and it was a relief to feel it coming straight again, none the worse, apparently, for its shock.

Barclay noted this change with satisfaction, knowing that to reunite a man with his pride is to draw heavily on his gratitude, and, as Fordyce’s confidence grew, he spoke unreservedly; his companion made him feel more in his right attitude towards the world than anyone he had met for some time. Their common dislike of one man was exhilarating to both, and when, on seeing Fullarton emerge from the French window some time later, they rose and strolled towards the house, they felt that there was a bond between them almost amounting to friendship. At least that was Crauford’s feeling; Barclay might have omitted the qualifying word.

[CHAPTER XII
GRANNY TAKES A STRONG ATTITUDE]

IF an Englishman’s house is his castle, a Scotchman’s cottage is his fortress. The custom prevailing in England by which the upper and middle classes will walk, uninvited and unabashed, into a poor man’s abode has never been tolerated by the prouder dwellers north of the Tweed. Here, proximity does not imply familiarity. It is true that the Englishman, or more probably the Englishwoman, who thus invades the labouring man’s family will often do so on a charitable errand; but, unless the Scot is already on friendly terms with his superior neighbour, he neither desires his charity nor his company. Once invited into the house, his visit will at all times be welcomed; but the visitor will do well to remember, as he sits in the best chair at the hearth, that he does so by privilege alone. The ethics of this difference in custom are not understood by parochial England, though its results, one would think, are plain enough. Among the working classes of European nations the Scot is the man who stands most pre-eminently upon his own feet, and it is likely that the Millennium, when it dawns, will find him still doing the same thing.

When Granny Stirk, months before, had stood at her door, and cried, ‘Haste ye back, then,’ to Gilbert Speid, she meant what she said, and was taken at her word, for he returned some days after the roup, and his visit was the first of many. Her racy talk, her shrewd sense, and the masterly way in which she dominated her small world pleased him, and he guessed that her friendship, once given, would be a solid thing. He had accepted it, and he returned it. She made surprising confidences and asked very direct questions, in the spring evenings when the light was growing daily, and he would stroll out to her cottage for half an hour’s talk. She advised him lavishly on every subject, from underclothing to the choice of a wife and her subsequent treatment, and from these conversations he learned much of the temper and customs of those surrounding him.

In the seven months which had elapsed since his arrival he had learned to understand his poorer neighbours better than his richer ones. The atmosphere of the place was beginning to sink into him, and his tenants and labourers had decided that they liked him very well; for, though there were many things in him completely foreign to their ideas, they had taken these on trust in consideration of other merits which they recognised. But, with his equals, he still felt himself a stranger; there were few men of his own age among the neighbouring lairds, and those he had met were as local in character as the landscape. Not one had ever left his native country, or possessed much notion of anything outside its limits. He would have been glad to see more of Fullarton, but the elder man had an unaccountable reserve in his manner towards him which did not encourage any advance. Crauford Fordyce he found both ridiculous and irritating. The women to whom he had been introduced did not impress him in any way, and four only had entered his life—the Miss Robertsons, who were his relations; Lady Eliza, who by turns amused, interested, and repelled him; and Cecilia Raeburn, with whom he was in love. The two people most congenial to him were Granny Stirk and Captain Somerville.

Between himself and the sailor a cordial feeling had grown, as it will often grow between men whose horizon is wider than that of the society in which they live, and, though Somerville was almost old enough to be Speid’s grandfather, the imperishable youth that bubbled up in his heart kept it in touch with that wide world in which he had worked and fought, and which he still loved like a boy. The episode at the dovecot of Morphie had served to cement the friendship.

Jimmy Stirk also reckoned himself among Gilbert’s allies. Silent, sullen, fervid, his mind and energies concentrated upon the business of his day, he mentally contrasted every gentleman he met with the laird of Whanland, weighed him, and found him wanting. The brown horse, whose purchase had been such an event in his life, did his work well, and the boy expended a good deal more time upon his grooming than upon that of the mealy chestnut which shared the shed behind the cottage with the newcomer, and had once been its sole occupant. On finding himself owner of a more respectable-looking piece of horseflesh than he had ever thought to possess, he searched his mind for a name with which to ornament his property; it took him several days to decide that Rob Roy being, to his imagination, the most glorious hero ever created, he would christen the horse in his honour. His grandmother, systematically averse to new notions, cast scorn on what she called his ‘havers’; but as time went by, and she saw that no impression was made upon Jimmy, she ended in using the name as freely as if she had bestowed it herself.

It occurred to Mr. Barclay, after leaving Fullarton, that, as Granny Stirk knew more about other people’s business than anyone he could think of, he would do sensibly in paying her a visit. That Gilbert often sat talking with her was perfectly well known to him, and if she had any ideas about the state of his affections and intentions, and could be induced to reveal her knowledge, it would be valuable matter to retail to Fordyce. Her roof had been mended a couple of months since, and he had made the arrangements for it, so he was no stranger to the old woman. It behoved him in his character of ‘man of business’ to examine the work that had been done, for he had not seen it since its completion. He directed his man to drive to the cottage, and sat smiling, as he rolled along, at the remembrance of Fordyce’s dilemma and his own simple solution of it.

Jimmy’s cart, with Rob Roy in the shafts, was standing at the door, and had to be moved away to enable him to draw up; it had been freshly painted, and the three divisions of the tailboard contained each a coloured device. In the centre panel was the figure of a fish; those at the sides bore each a mermaid holding a looking-glass; the latter were the arms of the town of Kaims. Barclay alighted, heavily and leisurely, from his phaeton.

‘How is the business, my laddie?’ he inquired affably, and in a voice which he thought suitable to the hearty habits of the lower orders.

‘It’s fine,’ said Jimmy.

‘The horse is doing well——eh?’

‘He’s fine,’ said Jimmy again.

‘And your grandmother? I hope she is keeping well this good weather.’

‘She’s fine.’

True to his friendly pose, the lawyer walked round the cart, running his eye over it and the animal in its shafts with as knowing an expression as he could assume. As he paused beside Rob Roy he laid his hand suddenly on his quarter, after the manner of people unaccustomed to horses; the nervous little beast made a plunge forward which nearly knocked Jimmy down, and sent Barclay flying to the sanctuary of the doorstep. His good-humour took flight also.

‘Nasty, restive brute!’ he exclaimed.

The boy gave him an expressive look; he was not apt to pay much attention to anyone, whether gentle or simple, beyond the pale of his own affairs, and Barclay had hitherto been outside his world. He now entered it as an object of contempt.

The sudden rattle of the cart brought Granny to the door.

‘That is a very dangerous horse of yours,’ said the lawyer, turning round.

‘Whisht! whisht!’ exclaimed she, ‘it was the laird got yon shelt to him; he’ll na thole[^[1]] to hear ye speak that way.’

‘May I come in?’ asked Barclay, recalled to his object.

She ushered him into the cottage.

‘Yes, yes, I have heard about that,’ he remarked, as he sat down. ‘No doubt Jimmy is proud of the episode; it is not often a gentleman concerns himself so much about his tenant’s interests. I dare say, Mrs. Stirk, that you have no wish to change your landlord, eh?’

‘No for onybody hereabout,’ said the old woman.

‘Then I gather that you are no admirer of our gentry?’

‘A’ wasna saying that.’

‘But perhaps you meant it. We do not always say what we mean, do we?’ said Barclay, raising his eyebrows facetiously.

‘Whiles a’ do,’ replied the Queen of the Cadgers, with some truth.

‘You speak your mind plainly enough to Mr. Speid, I believe,’ said Barclay.

‘Wha tell’t ye that?’

‘Aha! everything comes round to me in time, I assure you, my good soul; my business is confidential—very confidential. You see, as a lawyer, I am concerned with all the estates in this part of the country.’

‘Where the money is, there will the blayguards be gathered together,’ said Granny, resenting the patronage in his tone.

‘Come, come! that is surely rather severe,’ said Barclay, forcing a smile. ‘You don’t treat the laird in that way when he comes to see you, I am sure; he would not come so often if you did.’

‘He canna come ower muckle for me.’

‘What will you do when he gets a wife? He will not have so much idle time then.’

‘Maybe she’ll come wi’ him.’

‘That’ll depend on what kind of lady she is,’ observed Barclay; ‘she may be too proud.’

‘Then Whanland ’ll no tak’ her,’ replied Granny decisively.

It did not escape Mrs. Stirk that Barclay, who had never before paid her a visit unconnected with business, had now some special motive for doing so. It was in her mind to state the fact baldly and gratify herself with the sight of the result, but she decided to keep this pleasure until she had discovered something more of his object. She sat silent, waiting for his next observation. She had known human nature intimately all her life, and much of it had been spent in driving bargains. She was not going to speak first.

‘Well, every man ought to marry,’ said Barclay at last; ‘don’t you think so, Mrs. Stirk?’

‘Whiles it’s so easy done,’ said she; ‘ye havna managed it yersel’, Mr. Barclay.’

‘Nobody would have me, you see,’ said the lawyer, chuckling in the manner of one who makes so preposterous a joke that he must needs laugh at it himself.

‘Ye’ll just hae to bide as ye are,’ observed Granny consolingly; ‘maybe it would be ill to change at your time of life.’

Barclay’s laugh died away; he seemed to be no nearer his goal than when he sat down, and Granny’s generalities were not congenial to him. He plunged into his subject.

‘I think Mr. Speid should marry, at any rate,’ he said; ‘and if report says true, it will not be long before he does so.’

A gleam came into the old woman’s eye; she could not imagine her visitor’s motives, but she saw what he wanted, and determined instantly that he should not get it. Like many others, she had heard the report that Gilbert Speid was paying his addresses to Lady Eliza Lamont’s adopted niece, and, in her secret soul, had made up her mind that Cecilia was not good enough for him. All femininity, in her eyes, shared that shortcoming.

‘He’ll please himsel’, na doubt,’ she observed.

‘But do you think there is any truth in what we hear?’ continued Barclay.

‘A’ll tell ye that when a’ ken what ye’re speirin’ about.’

‘Do you believe that he is courting Miss Raeburn?’ he asked, compelled to directness.

‘There’s jus’ twa that can answer that,’ said Granny, leaning forward and looking mysterious; ‘ane’s Whanland, and ane’s the lassie.’

‘Everybody says it is true, Mrs. Stirk.’

‘A’body’s naebody,’ said the old woman, ‘an’ you an’ me’s less.’

‘It would be a very suitable match, in my opinion,’ said the lawyer, trying another tack.

‘Aweel, a’ll just tell Whanland ye was speirin’ about it,’ replied Granny. ‘A’ can easy ask him. He doesna mind what a’ say to him.’

‘No, no, my good woman; don’t trouble yourself to do that! Good Lord! it does not concern me.’

‘A’ ken that, but there’s no mony folk waits to be concairned when they’re seeking news. A’ can easy do it, sir. A’ tell ye, he’ll no tak’ it ill o’ me.’

‘Pray do not dream of doing such a thing!’ exclaimed Barclay. ‘Really, it is of no possible interest to me. Mrs. Stirk, I must forbid you to say anything to Mr. Speid.’

‘Dod! ye needna fash yersel’; a’ll do it canny-like. “Laird,” a’ll say, “Mr. Barclay would no have ye think it concairns him, but he’d like fine to ken if ye’re courtin’ Miss Raeburn. He came here speirin’ at me,” a’ll say——’

‘You will say nothing of the sort,’ cried he. ‘Why I should even have mentioned it to you I cannot think.’

‘A’ dinna understand that mysel’,’ replied Granny.

All Barclay’s desire for discovery had flown before his keen anxiety to obliterate the matter from his companion’s mind. He cleared his throat noisily.

‘Let us get to business,’ he said. ‘What I came here for was not to talk; I have come to ask whether the repairs in the roof are satisfactory, and to see what has been done. I have had no time to do so before. My time is precious.’

‘It’ll do weel eneuch. A’ let Whanland see it when he was in-by,’ replied she casually.

‘It’s my duty to give personal inspection to all repairs in tenants’ houses,’ said he, getting up.

She rose also, and preceded him into the little scullery which opened off the back of the kitchen; it smelt violently of fish, for Jimmy’s working clothes hung on a peg by the door. Barclay’s nose wrinkled.

She was pointing out the place he wished to see when a step sounded outside, and a figure passed the window. Someone knocked with the head of a stick upon the door.

‘Yon’s the laird!’ exclaimed Granny, hurrying back into the kitchen.

Barclay’s heart was turned to water, for he knew that the old woman was quite likely to confront him with Speid, and demand in his name an answer to the questions he had been asking. He turned quickly from the door leading from scullery to yard, and lifted the latch softly. As he slipped out he passed Jimmy, who, with loud hissings, was grooming Rob Roy.

‘Tell your grandmother that I am in a hurry,’ he cried. ‘Tell her I am quite satisfied with the roof.’

‘Sit down, Whanland,’ said Granny, dusting the wooden armchair as though the contact of the lawyer’s body had made it unfit for Gilbert’s use; ‘yon man rinnin’ awa’s Mr. Barclay. Dinna tak’ tent o’ him, but bide ye here till a’ tell ye this.’

The sun was getting low and its slanting rays streamed into the room. As Gilbert sat down his outline was black against the window. The light was burning gold behind him, and Granny could not see his face, or she would have noticed that he looked harassed and tired.

It was pure loyalty which had made her repress Barclay, for curiosity was strong in her, and it had cost her something to forego the pleasure of extracting what knowledge she could. But though she had denied herself this, she meant to speak freely to Gilbert. The lawyer had escaped through her fingers and robbed her of further sport, but she was determined that Speid should know of his questions. She resented them as a great impertinence to him, and as an even greater one to herself. She was inclined to be suspicious of people in general, and everything connected with her landlord made her smell the battle afar off, like Job’s war-horse, and prepare to range herself on his side.

‘Laird, are ye to get married?’ said she, seating herself opposite to the young man.

‘Not that I am aware of,’ said Gilbert. ‘Why do you ask, Granny? Do you think I ought to?’

‘A’ couldna say as to that, but Mr. Barclay says ye should.’

‘What has he to do with it?’ exclaimed Gilbert, his brows lowering.

‘Fegs! A’ would hae liked terrible to ask him that mysel’. He came ben an’ he began, an’ says he, “A’ve heard tell he’s to get married,” says he; an’ “What do ye think about it?” says he. A’ was that angered, ye ken, laird, an’ a’ just says till him, “Just wait,” says I, “an’ a’ll speir at him,” says I, “an’ then ye’ll ken. A’ll tell him ye’re terrible taken up about it—impident deevil that ye are.” A’ didna say “deevil” to him, ye ken, laird, but a’ warrant ye a’ thocht it. What has the likes of him to do wi’ you? Dod! a’ could see by the face o’ him he wasna pleased when a’ said a’d tell ye. “My good woman,” says he—here Granny stuck out her lips in imitation of Barclay’s rather protrusive mouth, “dinna fash yersel’ to do that;” an’ syne when ye came in-by, he was roond about an’ up the road like an auld dog that’s got a skelp wi’ a stick.’

‘Did he say anything more?’ inquired Gilbert gravely.

‘Ay, did he—but maybe a’ll anger ye, Whanland.’

‘No, no, Granny, you know that. I have a reason for asking. Tell me everything he said.’

‘Ye’ll see an’ no be angered, laird?’

‘Not with you, Granny, in any case.’

‘Well, he was sayin’ a’body says ye’re courtin’ Miss Raeburn. “Let me get a sicht o’ the roof,” says he “that’s what a’ come here for.” By Jarvit! he didna care very muckle about that, for a’ the lang words he was spittin’ out about it!’

Gilbert got up, and stood on the hearth with his head turned from the old woman.

‘A’ve vexed ye,’ she said, when she saw his face again.

‘Listen to me, Granny,’ he began slowly; ‘I am very much annoyed that he—or anyone—should have joined that lady’s name and mine together. Granny, if you have any friendship for me, if you would do me a kindness, you will never let a word of what you have heard come from your lips.’

As he stood looking down on the Queen of the Cadgers the light from the evening sun was full upon her marked features and the gold ear-rings in her ears.

‘Ye needna fear, Whanland,’ she said simply.

‘I will tell you why,’ burst out Gilbert, a sudden impulse to confidence rushing to his heart like a wave; ‘it is true, Granny—that is the reason. If I cannot marry her I shall never be happy again.’

Sitting alone that night, he asked himself why he should have spoken.

What power, good or evil, is answerable for the sudden gusts of change that shake us? Why do we sometimes turn traitor to our own character? How is it that forces, foreign to everything in our nature, will, at some undreamed-of instant, sweep us from the attitude we have maintained all our lives? The answer is that our souls are more sensitive than our brains.

But Gilbert, as he thought of his act, did not blame himself. Neither did eternal wisdom, which watched from afar and saw everything.

---

[^[1]]Endure.

[CHAPTER XIII
PLAIN SPEAKING]

THE outward signs of Lady Eliza’s wrath endured for a few days after Crauford’s untimely mistake, and then began to die a lingering death; but her determination that the enemy should make amends was unabated. In her heart, she did not believe that Cecilia cared for her suitor, and that being the case, she knew her well enough to be sure that nothing would make her marry him. For this she was both glad and sorry. It would have been easy, as Crauford had applied to her, to discover the state of the girl’s feelings; and should she find her unwilling to accept him, convey the fact to Fullarton and so end the matter.

But that course was not at all to her mind; Lady Fordyce should, if Cecilia were so inclined, pay for her words. She should write the letter her son had undertaken to procure, and he should present it and be refused. She was thinking of that as she sat on a bench in the garden at Morphie, and she smiled rather fiercely.

The development she promised herself was, perhaps, a little hard on Crauford, but, as we all know, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and that did not concern her; written words had the powerful effect upon her that they have upon most impulsive people. She was no schemer, and was the last being on earth to sit down deliberately to invent trouble for anyone; but all the abortive maternity in her had expended itself upon Cecilia, and to slight her was the unforgivable sin.

She sat in the sun looking down the garden to the fruit-covered wall, her shady hat, which, owing, perhaps, to the wig beneath it, was seldom at the right angle, pulled over her eyes. No other lady of those days would have worn such headgear, but Lady Eliza made her own terms with fashion. All the hot part of the afternoon she had been working, for her garden produce interested her, and she was apt to do a great deal with her own hands which could more safely have been left to the gardeners. Cecilia, who was picking fruit, had forced her to rest while she finished the work, and her figure could be seen a little way off in a lattice of raspberry-bushes; the elder woman’s eyes followed her every movement. Whether she married Fordyce or whether she did not, the bare possibility seemed to bring the eventual separation nearer, and make it more inevitable. Lady Eliza had longed for such an event, prayed for it; but now that it had come she dreaded it too much. It was scarcely ever out of her mind.

When her basket was full Cecilia came up the path and set it down before the bench. ‘There is not room for one more,’ she said lightly.

‘Sit down, child,’ said her companion; ‘you look quite tired. We have got plenty now. That will be—let me see—five baskets. I shall send two to Miss Robertson—she has only a small raspberry-bed—and the rest are for jam.’

‘Then perhaps I had better go in and tell the cook, or she will put on all five to boil.’

‘No, my dear, never mind; stay here. Cecilia, has it occurred to you that we may not be together very long?’

The idea was so unexpected that Cecilia was startled, and the blood left her face. For one moment she thought that Lady Eliza must have some terrible news to break, some suddenly-acquired knowledge of a mortal disease.

‘Why?’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, aunt, what do you mean?’

‘I suppose you will marry, Cecilia. In fact, you must some day.’

The blood came back rather violently.

‘Don’t let us think of that, ma’am,’ she said, turning away her head.

‘You do not want to leave me, Cecilia?’

The two women looked into each other’s eyes, and the younger laid her hand on that of her companion. The other seized it convulsively, a spasm of pain crossing her features.

‘My little girl,’ she said; ‘my darling!’

In those days, endearments, now made ineffective by use and misuse, had some meaning. Young people addressed their elders as ‘ma’am’ and ‘sir,’ and equals, who were also intimates, employed much formality of speech. While this custom was an unquestionable bar to confidence between parents and children, it emphasized any approach made by such as had decided to depart from it; also, it bred strange mixtures. To address those of your acquaintance who had titles as ‘your lordship’ or ‘your ladyship’ was then no solecism. Women, in speaking to their husbands or their men friends, would either use their full formal names or dispense with prefix altogether; and Lady Eliza, whose years of friendship with Fullarton more than justified his Christian name on her tongue, called him ‘Fullarton,’ ‘Robert,’ or ‘Mr. Fullarton,’ with the same ease, while to him she was equally ‘your ladyship’ or ‘Eliza.’ Miss Hersey Robertson spoke to ‘Gilbert’ in the same breath in which she addressed ‘Mr. Speid.’

Though Cecilia called her adopted aunt ‘ma’am,’ there existed between them an intimacy due, not only to love, but to the quality of their respective natures. The expectancy of youth which had died so hard in Lady Eliza had been more nearly realized in the loyal and tender devotion of her adopted niece than in any other circumstance in life. There was so fine a sympathy in Cecilia, so great a faculty for seizing the innermost soul of things, that the pathos of her aunt’s character, its nobility, its foibles, its prejudices, its very absurdities, were seen by her through the clear light of an understanding love.

‘I suppose you have guessed why Mr. Crauford Fordyce has been here so much?’ said Lady Eliza in a few minutes. ‘You know his feelings, I am sure.’

‘He has said nothing to me.’

‘But he has spoken to me. We shall have to decide it, Cecilia. You know it would be a very proper marriage for you, if—if—— He annoyed me very much the other day, but there is no use in talking about it. Marry him if you like, my dear—God knows, I ought not to prevent you. I can’t bear his family, Cecilia, though he is Fullarton’s nephew—insolent fellow! I have no doubt he is a very worthy young man. You ought to consider it.’

‘What did you say to him, ma’am?’

‘Oh—well, I cannot exactly tell you, my dear. I would not bias you for the world.’

‘But you promised him nothing, aunt? You do not mean that you wish me to accept him?’ exclaimed Cecilia, growing pale again.

‘You are to do what you please. I have no doubt he will have the face to come again. I wish you were settled.’

‘If he were the only man in the world, I would not marry him,’ said the girl firmly.

‘Thank Heaven, Cecilia! What enormous front teeth he has—they are like family tombstones. Take the raspberries to the cook, my dear; I am so happy.’

As Cecilia went into the house a man who had ridden up to the stable and left his horse there entered the garden. Fullarton’s shadow lay across the path, and Lady Eliza looked up to find him standing by her. Her thoughts had been far away, but she came back to the present with a thrill. He took a letter from his pocket, and handed it to her, smiling.

‘This is from my sister,’ he said. ‘If you knew her as well as I do you would understand that it has taken us some trouble to get it. But here it is. Be lenient, Eliza.’

Robert, if he had given himself the gratification of teasing his nephew, had yet expressed himself willing to take the part of Noah’s dove, and go out across the troubled waters to look for a piece of dry land and an olive-branch. His task had not been an easy one at first, and he had been obliged to make a personal matter of it before he could smooth the path of the unlucky lover. But his appeal was one which could not fail, and, as a concession to himself, his friend had consented to look with favour upon Crauford, should he return bringing the letter she demanded.

Having disposed of one difficulty, Fullarton found that his good offices were not to end; he was allowed no rest until he sat down with his pen to bring his sister, Lady Fordyce, to a more reasonable point of view and a suitable expression of it. As he had expected, she proved far more obdurate than Lady Eliza; for her there was no glamour round him to ornament his requests. ‘God gave you friends, and the devil gave you relations,’ says the proverb, but it does not go on to say which power gave a man the woman who loves him. Perhaps it is sometimes one and sometimes the other. Be that as it may, though Robert returned successful from Morphie, it took him more time and pains to deal with Lady Fordyce than he had ever thought to expend on anybody.

He sat down upon the bench while Lady Eliza drew off her gloves and began to break the seal with her tapered fingers. He wondered, as he had done many times, at their whiteness and the beauty of their shape.

‘You have the most lovely hands in the world, my lady,’ he said at last; ‘some of the hands in Vandyke’s portraits are like them, but no others.’

He was much relieved by having finished his share in a business which had begun to weary him, and his spirits were happily attuned. She blushed up to the edge of her wig; in all her life he had never said such a thing to her. Her fingers shook so that she could hardly open the letter. She gave it to him.

‘Open it,’ she said; ‘my hands are stiff with picking fruit.’

He took it complacently and spread it out before her.

It was Crauford’s distressed appeals rather than her brother’s counsels which had moved Lady Fordyce. She was really fond of her son, and, in company with almost every mother who has children of both sexes, reserved her daughters as receptacles for the overflowings of her temper; they were the hills that attract the thunderstorms from the plain. Crauford was the plain, and Sir Thomas represented sometimes one of these natural objects and sometimes the other. Of late the whole household had been one long chain of mountains.

She was unaware of what had happened to her former letter; uncle and nephew had agreed that it was unnecessary to inform her of it, and Robert had merely explained that Crauford would not be suffered by Lady Eliza to approach his divinity without the recommendation of her special approval. It was a happy way of putting it.

‘MY DEAR CRAUFORD,

‘I trust that I, of all people, understand that it is not wealth and riches which make true happiness, and I shall be glad if you will assure Lady Eliza Lamont that you have my consent in addressing the young lady who is under her protection. I shall hope to become acquainted with her before she enters our family, and also with her ladyship.

‘I remain, my dear Crauford,

‘Your affectionate mother,

‘LOUISA CHARLOTTE FORDYCE.

‘P.S.—When do you intend to return home?’

She ran her eyes over the paper and returned it to Fullarton.

‘From my sister that is a great deal,’ he observed; ‘more than you can imagine. She has always been a difficulty. As children we suffered from her, for she was the eldest, and my life was made hard by her when I was a little boy. Thomas Fordyce has had some experiences, I fancy.’

‘And this is what you propose for Cecilia?’ exclaimed Lady Eliza.

‘My dear friend, they would not live together; Crauford will take care of that.’

‘And Cecilia too. She will never marry him, Fullarton. She has told me so already. I should like to see Lady Fordyce’s face when she hears that he has been refused!’ she burst out.

Fullarton stared.

‘I think your ladyship might have spared me all this trouble,’ he said, frowning; ‘you are making me look like a fool!’

‘But I only asked her to-day,’ replied she, her warmth fading, ‘not an hour ago—not five minutes. I had meant to say nothing, and let him be refused, but you can tell him, Fullarton—tell him it is no use.’

A peculiar smile was on his face.

‘My dear Eliza,’ he said, ‘Crauford is probably on his way here now. I undertook to bring you the letter and he is to follow it. I left him choosing a waistcoat to propose in.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Lady Eliza, too much cast down by his frown to be amused at this picture.

‘Well, what of it?’ he said, rather sourly. ‘He must learn his hard lessons like the rest of the world; there are enough of them and to spare for everyone.’

‘You are right,’ she replied, ‘terribly right.’

He looked at her critically.

‘What can you have to complain of? If anyone is fortunate, surely you are. You are your own mistress, you are well enough off to lead the life you choose, you have a charming companion, many friends——’

‘Have I? I did not know that. Who are they?’

‘Well, if there are few, it is your own choice. Those you possess are devoted to you. Look at myself, for instance; have I not been your firm friend for years?’

‘You have indeed,’ she said huskily.

‘There are experiences in life which mercifully have been spared you, Eliza. These are the things which make the real tragedies, the things which may go on before the eyes of our neighbours without their seeing anything of them. I would rather die to-morrow than live my life over again. You know I speak truly; I know that you know; you made me understand that one day.’

She had turned away during his speech, for she could not trust her face, but at these last words she looked round.

‘I have never forgiven myself for the pain I caused you,’ she said; ‘I have never got over that. I am so rough—I know it—have you forgiven me, Robert?’

‘It took me a little time, but I have done it,’ replied he, with an approving glance at the generosity he saw in his own heart.

‘I behaved cruelly—cruelly,’ she said.

‘Forget it,’ said Fullarton; ‘let us only remember what has been pleasant in our companionship. Do you know, my lady, years ago I was fool enough to imagine myself in love with you? You never knew it, and I soon saw my folly; mercifully, before you discovered it. We should have been as wretched in marriage as we have been happy in friendship. We should never have suited each other.’

‘What brought you to your senses?’ inquired Lady Eliza with a laugh. She was in such agony of heart that speech or silence, tears or laughter, seemed all immaterial, all component parts of one overwhelming moment.

He looked as a man looks who finds himself driven into a cul-de-sac.

‘It was—she,’ said Lady Eliza. ‘Don’t think I blame you, Fullarton.’

She could say that to him, but, as she thought of the woman in her grave, she pressed her hands together till the nails cut through the skin.

At this moment Crauford, in the waistcoat he had selected, came through the garden door.

As he stood before Lady Eliza the repressed feeling upon her face was so strong that he did not fail to notice it, but his observation was due to the fact that he saw his mother’s letter in Fullarton’s hand; that, of course, was the cause of her agitation, he told himself. But where was Cecilia? He looked round the garden.

His civil, shadeless presence irritated Lady Eliza unspeakably as he stood talking to her, evidently deterred by his uncle’s proximity from mentioning the subject uppermost in his mind. He possessed the fell talent for silently emphasizing any slight moment of embarrassment. Robert watched him with grim amusement, too indolent to move away. Fordyce was like a picture-book to him.

The little group was broken up by Cecilia’s return; Crauford went forward to meet her, and pompously relieved her of the two garden baskets she carried. This act of politeness was tinged with distress at the sight of the future Lady Fordyce burdened with such things.

‘Let us go to the house,’ exclaimed Lady Eliza, rising from her bench. If something were not done to facilitate Crauford’s proposal she would never be rid of him, never at leisure to reason with her aching heart in solitude. When would the afternoon end? She even longed for Fullarton to go. What he had said to her was no new thing; she had known it all, all before. But the words had fallen like blows, and, like an animal hurt, she longed to slink away and hide her pain.

‘Put the baskets in the tool-house, Cecilia. Fullarton, come away; we will go in.’

The tool-house stood at the further end of the garden, outside the ivy-covered wall, and Crauford was glad of the chance given him of accompanying Cecilia, though he felt the difficulty of approaching affairs of the heart with a garden basket in either hand. He walked humbly beside her. She put the baskets away and turned the key on them.

‘May I ask for a few minutes, Miss Raeburn?’ he began. ‘I have come here for a serious purpose. My uncle is the bearer of a letter to her ladyship. It is from my mother, and is written in corroboration of one which I lately received from my father. I had written to ask their approval of a step—a very important step—which I contemplate. Miss Raeburn—or may I say Cecilia?—it concerns yourself.’

‘Really, sir?’ said Cecilia, the cheerfulness of despair in her voice.

‘Yes, yourself. No young lady I have ever seen has so roused my admiration—my affection, I may say. I have made up my mind on that subject. Do not turn away, Miss Raeburn; it is quite true, believe me. My happiness is involved. To-morrow I shall hope to inform my parents that you will be my wife.’

He stopped in the path and would have taken her hand. She stepped back.

‘I cannot,’ she said. ‘I am sorry, but I cannot.’

‘You cannot!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why?’

‘It is impossible, sir, really.’

‘But you have Lady Eliza’s permission. She told me so herself. This is absurd, Miss Raeburn, and you are distressing me infinitely.’

‘Please put it out of your head, Mr. Fordyce. I cannot do it; there is no use in thinking of it. I do not want to hurt you, but it is quite impossible—quite.’

‘But why—why?’ he exclaimed. He looked bewildered.

Cecilia’s brows drew together imperceptibly.

‘I do not care for you,’ she said; ‘you force me to speak in this way. I do not love you in the least.’

‘But what is there that you object to in me?’ he cried. ‘Surely you understand that my father, in consenting, is ready to establish me very well. I am the eldest son, Miss Raeburn.’

Cecilia’s pale face was set, and her chin rose a little higher at each word.

‘That is nothing to me,’ she replied; ‘it does not concern me. I do not care what your prospects are. I thank you very much for your—civility, but I refuse.’

He was at a loss for words; he felt like a man dealing with a mad person, one to whom the very rudiments of reason and conduct seemed to convey nothing. But the flagrant absurdity of her attitude gave him hope; there were some things too monstrous for reality.

‘I will give you time to think it over,’ he said at last.

‘That is quite useless. My answer is ready now.’

‘But what can be your objection?’ he broke out. ‘What do you want, what do you expect, that I cannot give you?’

‘I want a husband whom I can love,’ she replied, sharply. ‘I have told you that I do not care for you, sir. Let that be the end.’

‘But love would come after, Miss Raeburn; I have heard that often. It always does with a woman; you would learn to love me.’

He stopped and looked at her. Through her growing exasperation his very fatuity, as he stood there, almost touched her. To her mind he was so unfit an object for the love he spoke of, parrot-fashion, so ignorant of realities. A man cannot understand things for which he has been denied the capacity; like Lady Eliza, in the midst of her anger, she could see the piteous side of him and be broad-minded enough to realize the pathos of limitation.

‘Don’t think I wish to hurt you,’ she said gently, ‘but do not allow yourself to hope for anything. I could never love you—not then any more than now. I am honestly sorry to give you pain.’

‘Then why do you do so?’ he asked pettishly.

She almost laughed; his attitude was invincible.

‘You will regret it some day,’ he said.

‘But you never will; you will be very happy one day with someone else who finds importance in the same things as you do. I should never suit you.’

‘Not suit me? Why not? You do yourself injustice.’

‘But it is true, sir.’

‘You are fitted for the very highest position,’ he said, with solemnity.

That night Cecilia sat in her room at the open window. Her dark hair fell in a long, thick rope almost to the ground as she leaned her arms on the sill, and looked out over the dew. High in the sky the moon sailed, the irresponsible face on her disc set above the trailing fragments of cloud. From fields near the coast the low whistle of plover talking came through the silence, and a night-jar shrieked suddenly from the belt of trees near the dovecot. She turned her face towards the sound, and saw in its shadow a piece of stonework glimmering in the white light. To her mind’s eye appeared the whole wall in a flare of torchlight, and a figure standing in front of it, panting, straight and tense, with a red stain on brow and cheek. She had told Crauford Fordyce that she could not marry him because she did not love him, and, assuredly, she had not lied. She had spoken the truth, but was it the whole truth?

Out there, far over the woods, lay Whanland, with the roar of the incoming sea sending its never-ceasing voice across the sandhills, and the roll of its white foam crawling round the skirts of the land. It was as though that sea-voice, which she could not hear, but had known for years, were crying to her from the distant coast. It troubled her; why, she knew not. In all the space of night she was so small, and life was vast. She had been completely capable of dealing with her own difficulties during the day, of choosing her path, of taking or leaving what she chose. Now she felt suddenly weak in spirit. A sense of misgiving took her, surrounded as she was by the repose of mighty forces greater than herself, greater, more eternal, more changeless than humanity. She laid her head upon her arms, and rested so till the sound of midnight rang from the tongue of the stable-clock across the sleeping house. The plover had ceased their talking.

She drew down the blind and stretched herself among the dim curtains of the bed, but, though she closed her eyes, she lay in a kind of waking trance till morning; and when, at last, she fell asleep, her consciousness was filled by the monotony of rolling waters and the roar of the seas by Whanland.

[CHAPTER XIV
STORM AND BROWN SILK]

AGNETA and Mary Fordyce were in the drawing-room of Fordyce Castle, an immensely solemn apartment rendered more so by the blinds which were drawn half-mast high in obedience to an order from Lady Fordyce. She was economical, and the carpet was much too expensive to be looked upon by the sun. In the semi-darkness which this induced the two girls were busy, one with her singing, which she was practising, and the other with the tambour-work she loved. Mary, the worker, was obliged to sit as close as possible to the window in order to get light by which to ply her needle. Agneta’s voice rose in those desolate screams which are the exclusive privilege of the singer practising, and for the emitting of which any other person would justly be punished. Though thin, she was very like Crauford, with the same fresh colour and the same large front teeth, now liberally displayed by her occupation. Mary was short-sighted and a little round-shouldered from much stooping over her work-frame.

‘I am afraid from what mamma has heard that Lady Eliza Lamont is not a very nice person; so eccentric and unfeminine, she said,’ observed Mary.

‘Perhaps Miss Raeburn is the same. I am afraid poor Crauford is throwing himself away. A-a-ah-ah!’ replied Agneta, leaping an octave as though it were a fence.

‘He has never answered your letter, Agneta. I really wonder what she is like. Mamma only hopes she is presentable; one can never trust a young man’s description of the person he is in love with, she says.’

‘Oh-h-h-oh! A-a-a-ah! I shall be very curious to see her, shan’t you, Mary?’

‘I suppose she will be invited here soon. It would be funny if she were here with Lady Maria, would it not?’

‘Mamma says it is all Uncle Fullarton’s doing, because he is so much mixed up with that dreadful Lady Eliza. Ah-a-a-a-ah!’

‘I know; she has always thought that very undesirable, she says. I wonder how she has consented to write; I am sure she would never have done it for anyone but Crauford.’

‘I wonder what it is like to have a sister-in-law?’ said Agneta, pausing in her shrieks.

‘It would depend very much what kind of person she is,’ replied her sister, with some show of sense.

‘Yes, but should we be allowed to go anywhere with her? Perhaps she would take us out,’ said Agneta.

Lady Fordyce was one of those mothers who find it unnecessary to take their daughters into society, and yet confidently expect them to marry well. Though Agneta, the youngest, was twenty-five, and Mary was past thirty, Lady Maria Milwright was the only young person who had ever stayed in the house. A couple of stiff parties were given every year, and, when there was a county ball, the Misses Fordyce were duly driven to it, each in a new dress made for the occasion, to stand one on either side of their mother’s chair during the greater part of the evening. Had anyone suggested to Lady Fordyce that Mary was an old maid and that Agneta would soon become one, she would have been immoderately angry. ‘When my daughters are married I shall give up the world altogether,’ she would sometimes say; and her hearer would laugh in his sleeve; first, at the thought of any connection between Lady Fordyce and the world, and secondly, at the thought of any connection between the Misses Fordyce and matrimony. Had they been houris of Paradise their chances would have been small, and unfortunately, they were rather plain.

‘I should think Crauford will soon come back,’ continued Agneta, as she put away her music. ‘I shall ask him all sorts of questions.’

To do Fordyce justice, he was a kind brother in an ordinary way, and had often stood between his sisters and the maternal displeasure when times were precarious. He did not consider them of much importance, save as members of his own family, but he would throw them small benefits now and again with the tolerant indulgence he might have shown in throwing a morsel to a pet animal.

‘He has never said whether she is pretty,’ observed Mary reflectively. ‘He always calls her “ladylike,” and I don’t think mamma believes him; but, after all, she may be, Agneta.’

‘Mamma says she must have had a deplorable bringing-up with Lady Eliza.’

‘If she comes we must do what we can to polish her,’ rejoined Mary, who was inclined to take herself seriously; ‘no doubt there are a lot of little things we could show her—how to do her hair and things like that. I dare say she is not so bad.’

Agneta pursed up her lips and looked severe.

‘I think it is a great pity he did not choose Lady Maria. Of course, she is not at all pretty, but mamma says it is nonsense to think about such things. He has been very foolish.’

‘I really can hardly see this dull day,’ sighed Mary. ‘I wonder if I might pull up the blind ever so little. You see, mamma has made a pencil-mark on all the sashes to show the housemaids where the end of the blind is to come, and I am afraid to raise it.’

‘There is no sun,’ observed her sister; ‘I think you might do it.’

Mary rose from her frame, but, as she did so, a step was heard outside which sent her flying back to her place, and her mother entered.

Lady Fordyce was a short, stout woman, whose nose and forehead made one perpendicular outline without any depression between the brows. Her eyes were prominent and rather like marbles; in her youth she had been called handsome. She had married late in life, and was now well over sixty, and her neck had shortened with advancing years; her very tight brown silk body compressed a figure almost distressingly ample for her age.

She installed herself in a chair and bade her daughter continue practising.

‘I have practised an hour and my music is put away,’ said Agneta. ‘We were talking about Miss Raeburn. Will she come here, ma’am?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Lady Fordyce; ‘but whether you will see much of her depends upon whether I consider her desirable company for you.’

‘She may be nice after all,’ hazarded Mary.

‘I trust that I am a fit judge of what a young lady should be,’ replied her mother. ‘As Lady Eliza Lamont spends most of her time in the stable, she is hardly the person to form my daughter-in-law successfully.’

‘She is Lady Eliza’s niece, ma’am, is she not?’

‘She is a relation—a poor relation, and no doubt gets some sort of salary for attending to her ladyship. I must say a paid companion is scarcely the choice that I should have made for Crauford. What a chance for her!’

‘She is most fortunate,’ echoed Agneta.

‘Fortunate? A little more than fortunate, I should think! Adventuresses are more often called skilful than fortunate. Poor, poor boy!’

With this remark Lady Fordyce opened an account-book which lay on her lap, and began to look over its items. The girls were silent.

Mary stitched on, and Agneta spread out some music she was copying; the leaden cloud which hung over domestic life at Fordyce Castle had settled down upon the morning when there was a sound of arrival in the hall outside. No bell had rung, and the sisters, astonished, suspended their respective employments and opened their mouths. Though there were things they proposed to teach Cecilia, their ways were not always decorative. Lady Fordyce, who was a little deaf, read her account-book undisturbed, and, when the door opened to admit Crauford, it slid off her brown silk knee like an avalanche.

‘I hardly expected you would take my hint so quickly,’ she said graciously, when the necessary embraces were over.

Crauford’s face, not usually complicated in expression, was a curious study; solemnity, regret, a sense of injury, a sense of importance, struggled on it, and he cleared his throat faintly now and then, as some people will when they are ill at ease.

‘I am sorry to tell you, ma’am, that your trouble has been useless. I have had a great disappointment—a very great one: Miss Raeburn has refused my offer.’

He looked round at his sisters as though appealing to them to expostulate with Providence.

‘What?’ cried his mother.

‘She has refused,’ repeated Crauford.

‘Refused? Oh, my dear boy, it is impossible! I refuse—I refuse to believe it! Nonsense, my dear Crauford! It is unheard of!’

Mary, who had never taken her eyes off her brother’s face, laid down her needle and came forward.

‘Sit down!’ thundered her mother. ‘Sit down, and go on with your work! Or you can leave the room, you and Agneta. There is nothing so detestable as curiosity. Leave the room this moment!’

Dreadfully disappointed, they obeyed. Though it was safer in the hall, the other side of the door was far more entertaining.

Crauford moved uneasily about; he certainly was not to blame for what had happened, but the two lightning-conductors had gone, and the clouds looked black around him. Also he had no tact.

‘You need not be annoyed, ma’am,’ he began; ‘you did not approve of my choice.’

‘Happy as I am to see you deterred from such a fatal step, I cannot submit to the indignity to which you—and we all—have been subjected,’ said his mother. ‘That a paid companion should have refused my son is one of those things I find it hard to accept.’

‘She may yet change,’ replied he. ‘I told her I should give her time.’

Lady Fordyce’s prominent eyes were fixed. ‘Do you mean to tell me that you will ask her again? That you will so far degrade yourself as to make another offer?’

He made a sign of assent.

She threw up her hands. ‘What have I done?’ she exclaimed, addressing an imaginary listener—‘what have I done that my own children should turn against me? When have I failed in my duty towards them? Have I ever thought of myself? Have I ever failed to sacrifice myself where their interests were concerned?’

She turned suddenly on Crauford.

‘No, never,’ he murmured.

During her life Lady Fordyce had seldom bestirred herself for anyone, but habit had made everybody in the house perjure themselves at moments like the present. Declamation was one of her trump-cards; besides, her doctor had once hinted that apoplexy was not an impossible event.

‘As a mother, I have surely some right to consideration. I do not say much—I trust I understand these modern times too well for that—but I beg you will spare us further mortification. Are there no young ladies of suitable position that you must set your heart upon this charity-girl of Lady Eliza Lamont’s?’

‘I don’t understand why you should be so much set against her, ma’am; if you only saw Miss Raeburn you would be surprised.’

‘I have no doubt that I should!’ exclaimed his mother in a sarcastic voice; ‘indeed, I have no doubt that I should!’

Like violin playing, sarcasm is a thing which must be either masterly or deplorable, but she was one of the many from whom this truth is hidden.

‘It would be a good thing if my sisters had one half of her looks or manners,’ retorted he, goaded by her tone. ‘Beside her, Agneta and Mary would look like dairy-maids.’

‘Am I to sit here and hear my own daughters abused and vilified?’ exclaimed Lady Fordyce, rising and walking about. ‘You have indeed profited by your stay among those people! I hope you are satisfied. I hope you have done enough to pain me. I hope you will never live to repent the way in which you have insulted me.’

‘My dear mother, pray, pray be calmer. What am I doing that you should be in this state?’

‘You have called your sisters dairy-maids—servants! You are throwing yourself away upon this worthless creature who has been trying all the time to entrap you.’

‘How can you say such a thing, ma’am, when I tell you that she has refused me? Not that I mean to accept it.’

‘Refused you, indeed! I tell you I do not believe it; she merely wants to draw you on. I ask you, is it likely that a girl who has not a penny in the world would refuse such prospects? Pshaw!’ cried Lady Fordyce, with all the cheap sense of one who knows nothing of the varieties of human character.

‘I wish you could see her,’ sighed her son.

‘If you persist in your folly I shall no doubt have that felicity in time.’

‘My father has not taken this view,’ said Crauford. ‘You are very hard upon me, ma’am.’

‘Let me remind you that you have shown no consideration for me throughout the whole matter,’ she replied. ‘I, of course, come last. I ask you again, will you be guided by one who is more fitted to judge than you can be, and put this unjustifiable marriage out of your head?’

She stood waiting; their eyes met, and he cast his down.

‘I must try again,’ he said with ineffective tenacity.

She turned from him and left the room, brown silk, account-book, and all.

He was accustomed to scenes like the one he had just experienced, but generally it was someone else who played the part of victim, not himself. For a week or more the world had used him very badly; his visit to Lady Eliza had been startling, his interview with Cecilia humiliating, and his reception by his mother terrific; even his uncle had maintained an attitude towards him that he could not understand. His thoughts went back to Barclay, the one person who seemed to see him in his true colours, and he longed for him as a man who has had an accident longs for the surgeon to come and bind his wounds. He had left Fullarton hurriedly and now he was sorry for what he had done.

He was certainly not going to accept Cecilia’s mad folly as final; his mother had rated him for his want of pride in not abandoning his suit, but, had she understood him, she would have known that it was his pride which forbade him to relinquish it, and his vanity which assured him that he must be successful in the end. Each man’s pride is a differently constructed article, while each man is certain that his private possession is the only genuine kind existing.

Lady Fordyce’s own pride had received a rude blow, and she looked upon her brother as the director of it; he it was who had thrown her son into the society of the adventuress, he it was who had persuaded her to give unwilling countenance to what she disapproved. From their very infancy he had gone contrary to her. As a little boy he had roused her impatience over every game or task that they had shared. There had always been something in him which she disliked and which eluded her, and one of her greatest grievances against him had been her own inability to upset his temper. She was anything but a clever woman, and she knew that, though his character was weaker than her own, his understanding was stronger. Brother and sister, never alike, had grown more unlike with the years; his inner life had bred a semi-cynical and indolent toleration in him, and her ceaseless worldly prosperity had brought out the arrogance of her nature and developed a vulgarity which revolted Robert.

As her brown silk dress rustled up the staircase, her son, driven into an unwonted rebellion, made up his mind that, having seen his father, he would depart as soon as he could decide where to go. He hankered after Kaims. He had written to Barclay, bidding his ally farewell and telling him of Cecilia’s refusal, and the ally had written a soothing reply. He praised his determination to continue his suit, assured him of his willingness to keep him acquainted with anything bearing on his interests, and, finally, begged him to remember that, at any time or season, however unpropitious, a room in his house would be at his disposal. Protestations of an admiring friendship closed the letter.

When the rustling was over, and he heard his mother’s door close, he left the drawing-room with the determination of accepting the lawyer’s offer; while he had sense enough to see that there was something undignified in such a swift return to the neighbourhood of Morphie, he yet so longed for the balm in Gilead that he made up his mind to brave the opinion of Fullarton, should he meet him. He would only spend a few quiet days in Kaims and then betake himself in some other direction. Fordyce Castle had grown intolerable.

While he pondered these things, Agneta, at her mother’s dictation, was writing to Lady Milborough to ask if her daughter Maria might hasten her promised visit, and pay it as soon as possible, instead of waiting until the autumn.

‘The girls were so impatient,’ said Lady Fordyce; ‘and it would be such a kindness on Lady Milborough’s part if she could be prevailed upon to spare her dear Maria.’

Thus two letters were dispatched; one by Crauford unknown to his mother, and one by his mother unknown to Crauford. It chanced that the two answers arrived each on the same day.

Lady Fordyce’s serenity was somewhat restored by the one which found its way into her hands. Her correspondent expressed herself much gratified by the appreciation shown of her Maria. Her daughter, under the care of an elderly maid, should start immediately.

‘We shall all be pleased to welcome Lady Maria, shall we not, Crauford?’ said Lady Fordyce, as the family were gathered round the dinner-table.

‘I shall not be here, ma’am,’ replied her son, looking up from his veal pie. ‘I am starting on a visit the day after to-morrow.’

[CHAPTER XV
THE THIRD VOICE]

SPEID stood at the corner of a field, in the place from which he had looked up the river with Barclay on the day of his arrival. His steps were now often turned in that direction, for the line of the Morphie woods acted as a magnet to his gaze. Since the day he had spoken so freely to Granny Stirk he had not once met Cecilia, and he was weary. It was since he had last seen her that he had discovered his own heart.

Away where the Lour lost itself in the rich land, was the casket that held the jewel he coveted. He put his hand up to his cheek-bone. He was glad that he would carry that scar on it to his death, for it was an eternal reminder of the night when he had first beheld her under the branches, as they walked in the torchlight to Morphie House. He had not been able to examine her face till it looked into his own in the mirror as she put the plaster on his cheek. That was a moment which he had gone over, again and again, in his mind. It is one of the strangest things in life that we do not recognise its turning-points till we have passed them.

The white cottage which Barclay had pointed out to him as the march of his own property was a light spot in the afternoon sunshine, and the shadows were creeping from under the high wooded banks across the river’s bed. Beyond it the Morphie water began. By reason of the wide curves made by the road, the way to Morphie House was longer on the turnpike than by the path at the water-side. He crossed the fence and went down to the Lour, striking it just above the bridge. To follow its bank up to those woods would bring him nearer to her, even if he could not see her. It was some weeks since he had been to Morphie, and he had not arrived at such terms with Lady Eliza as should, to his mind, warrant his going there uninvited. Many and many times he had thought of writing to Cecilia and ending the strain of suspense in which he lived, once and for all; but he had lacked courage, and he was afraid; afraid of what his own state of mind would be when he had sent the letter and was awaiting its answer. How could he convince her of all he felt in a letter? He could not risk it.

He looked round at the great, eight-spanned bridge which carried the road high over his head, and down, between the arches, to the ribbon of water winding out to sea; to the cliffs above that grave lying in the corner of the kirkyard-wall; to the beeches of Whanland covering the bank a hundred yards from where he stood. He had come to love them all. All that had seemed uncouth, uncongenial to him, had fallen into its place, and an affinity with the woods and the wide fields, with the grey sea-line and the sand-hills, had entered into him. He had thought to miss the glory of the South when he left Spain, months ago, but now he cared no more for Spain. This misty angle of the East Coast, conveying nothing to the casual eye in search of more obvious beauty, had laid its iron hand on him, as it will lay it on all sojourners, and blinded him to everything but its enduring and melancholy charm. There are many, since Gilbert’s day, who have come to the country in which he lived and loved and wandered, driven by some outside circumstance and bewailing their heavy fate, who have asked nothing better than to die in it. And now, for him, from this mist of association, from this atmosphere of spirit-haunted land and sea, had risen the star of life.

He crossed the march of Whanland by green places where cattle stood flicking the flies, and went onwards, admiring the swaying heads of mauve scabious and the tall, cream-pink valerian that brushed him as he passed. He did not so much as know their names, but he knew that the world grew more beautiful with each step that brought him nearer to Morphie.

The sun was beginning to decline as he stood half a mile below the house, and the woods were dark above his head. A few moss-covered boulders lay in the path and the alders which grew, with their roots almost in the water, seemed to have stepped ashore to form a thicket through which his way ran. The twigs touched his face as he pushed through them.

On the further side stood Cecilia, a few paces in front of him, at the edge of the river. She had heard the footsteps, and was looking straight at him as he emerged. At the sight of her face he knew, as surely as if he had been told it, that she was thinking of him.

They stood side by side in a pregnant silence through which that third voice, present with every pair of lovers who meet alone, cried aloud to both.

‘I did not expect to see you here, sir,’ she began.

(‘He has come because he cannot keep away; he has come because the very sight of the trees that surround your home have a glamour for him; because there is no peace any more for him, day nor night,’ said the voice to her.)

(‘She has come here to think of you, to calm her heart, to tell herself that you are not, and never can be, anything to her, and then to contradict her own words,’ it cried to him.)

He could not reply; the third voice was too loud.

‘Let us go on a little way,’ said Cecilia.

Her lips would scarcely move, and the voice and the beating of her heart was stopping her breath.

Gilbert turned, and they went through the alders, he holding back the twigs for her to pass.

(‘He loves you! he loves you! he loves you!’ cried the voice.)

As she brushed past him through the narrow way her nearness seemed to make the scar on his face throb, and bring again to him the thrill of her fingers upon his cheek. He could bear it no more. They were at the end of the thicket, and, as she stepped out of it in front of him, he sprang after her, catching her in his arms.

‘Cecilia!’ he said, almost in a whisper.

He had grown white.

She drew herself away with an impulse which her womanhood made natural. He followed her fiercely, on his face the set look of a man in a trance.

There are some things in a woman stronger than training, stronger than anything that may have hedged her in from her birth, and they await but the striking of an hour and the touch of one man. As he stretched out his arms anew she turned towards him and threw herself into them. Their lips met, again—again. He held her close in silence.

‘Ah, I am happy,’ she exclaimed at last.

‘And I have been afraid to tell you, torturing myself to think that you would repulse me. Cecilia, you understand what you are saying—you will never repent this?’

‘Never,’ she said. ‘I shall love you all my life.’

He touched the dark hair that rested against his shoulder.

‘I am not worthy of it,’ he said. ‘My only claim to you is that I adore you. I cannot think why the whole world is not in love with you.’

She laughed softly.

‘I have been half mad,’ he went on, ‘but I am cured now. I can do nothing by halves, Cecilia.’

‘I hope you may never love me by halves.’

‘Say Gilbert.’

‘Gilbert.’

‘How perfect it sounds on your lips! I never thought of admiring my name before.’

‘Gilbert Speid,’ repeated she. ‘It is beautiful.’

‘Cecilia Speid is better,’ he whispered.

She disengaged herself gently, and stood looking over the water. The shadow lay across it and halfway up the opposite bank. He watched her.

‘I have lived more than thirty years without you,’ he said. ‘I cannot wait long.’

She made no reply.

‘We must speak to my aunt,’ she said, after a pause. ‘We cannot tell what she may think. At least, I shall not be going far from her.’

‘I cannot offer you what many others might,’ said he, coming closer. ‘I am not a rich man. But, thank God, I can give you everything you have had at Morphie. Nothing is good enough for you, Cecilia; but you shall come first in everything. You know that.’

‘If you were a beggar, I would marry you,’ she said.

Honesty, in those days, was not supposed to be a lady’s accomplishment, but, to Cecilia, this moment, the most sacred she had ever known, was not one for concealment of what lay in the very depths of truth. She had been unconscious of it at the time, but she now knew that that first moment at the dovecot had sealed the fate of her heart. Looking back, she wondered why she had not understood.

‘May God punish me if I do not make you happy,’ said Gilbert, his eyes set upon her. ‘A woman is beyond my understanding. How can you risk so much for a man like me? How can you know that you are not spoiling your life?’

‘I think I have always known,’ said she.

He stood, neither speaking nor approaching her. The miracle of her love was too great for him to grasp. In spite of the gallant personality he carried through life, in spite of the glory of his youth and strength, he was humble-hearted, and, before this woman, he felt himself less than the dust. In the old life in Spain which had slipped from him he had been the prominent figure of the circle in which he lived. His men friends had admired and envied him, and, to the younger ones, Gilbert Speid, who kept so much to himself, who looked so quiet and could do so many things better than they, was a model which they were inclined to copy. To women, the paradox of his personal attraction and irregular face, and the fact that he only occasionally cared to profit by his own advantages, made him consistently interesting. He had left all that and come to a world which took little heed of him, to find in it this peerless thing of snow and flame, of truth and full womanhood, and she was giving her life and herself into his hand. He was shaken through and through by the charm of her eyes, her hands, her hair, her slim whiteness, the movements of her figure, the detachment which made approach so intoxicating. He could have knelt down on the river-bank.

The sun had gone from the sky when the two parted and Cecilia went up through the trees to Morphie. He left her at the edge of the woods, standing to watch her out of sight. Above his head the heavens were transfigured by the evening, and two golden wings were spread like a fan across the west. The heart in his breast was transfigured too. As he neared Whanland and looked at the white walls of the palace that was to contain his queen, the significance of what had happened struck him afresh. She would be there, in these rooms, going in and out of these doors; her voice and her step would be on the stair, in the hall. He entered in and sat down, his elbows on the table, his face hidden in his hands, and the tears came into his eyes.

When the lights were lit, and Macquean’s interminable comings-in and goings-out on various pretexts were over, he gave himself up to his dreams of the coming time. In his mind he turned the house upside down. She liked windows that looked westward; he would go out of his own room, which faced that point, and make it into a boudoir for her. She liked jessamine, and jessamine should clothe every gate and wall. She had once admired some French tapestry, and he would ruin himself in tapestry. She should have everything that her heart or taste could desire.

He would buy her a horse the like of which had never been seen in the country, and he would go to England to choose him; to London, to the large provincial sales and fairs, until he should come upon the animal he had in his mind. He must have a mouth like velvet, matchless manners and paces, the temper of an angel, perfect beauty. He thought of a liver-chestnut, mottled on the flank, with burnished gold hidden in the shades of his coat. But that would not do. Chestnuts, children of the sun, were hot, and he shivered at the bare idea of risking her precious body on the back of some creature all nerves and sudden terrors and caprices. He would not have a chestnut. He lost himself in contemplation of a review of imaginary horses.

She must have jewels, too. He had passed them over in his dreams, and he remembered, with vivid pleasure, that he need not wait to gratify his eyes with the sight of something fit to offer her. In a room near the cellar was a strong box which Barclay had delivered to him on his arrival, and which had lain at Mr. Speid’s bankers all the years of his life in Spain. He had never opened it, although he kept the key in the desk at his elbow, but he knew that it contained jewels which had belonged to his mother. He sprang up and rang for a light; then, with the key in his hand, he went down to the basement, carried up the box, and set it on the table before him.

He found that it was made in two divisions, the upper being a shelf in which all kinds of small things and a few rings were lying; the lower part was full of cases, some wooden and some made of faded leather. He opened the largest and discovered a necklace, each link of which was a pink topaz set in diamonds. The stones were clear set, for the artificer had not foiled them at the back, as so many of his trade were apt to do, and the light flowed through them like sunlight through roses. Gilbert was pleased, and laid it again in its leather case feeling that this, his first discovery, was fit even for Cecilia.

The next thing that he opened was a polished oval wooden box, tied round and round with a piece of embroidery silk, and having a painted wreath of laurel-leaves encircling the ‘C. L.’ on the top of the lid. It was a pretty, dainty little object, pre-eminently a woman’s intimate property; a little thing which might lie on a dressing-table among laces and fans, or be found tossed into the recesses of some frivolous, scented cushion close to its owner. It did not look as though made to hold jewels. Inside lay the finest and thinnest of gold chains, long enough to go round a slender throat, and made with no clasp nor fastening. It was evidently intended to be crossed over and knotted in front, with the ends left hanging down, for each terminated in a pear-shaped stone—one an emerald set in diamonds, and one a diamond set in emeralds. The exquisite thing charmed him, and he sat looking at it, and turning it this way and that to catch the light. He loved emeralds, because they reminded him of the little brooch he had often seen on Cecilia’s bosom. It should be his first gift to her.

He next came upon the shagreen case containing the pearl necklace which Mr. Speid had carried with him when he went to fetch his bride, and which had adorned his mother’s neck as she drove up in the family chariot to Whanland. He did not know its history, but he admired the pearls and their perfect uniformity and shape, and he pictured Cecilia wearing them. He would have her painted in them.

Instinctively he glanced up to the wall where Clementina Speid’s portrait hung. By his orders it had been taken from the garret, cleaned, and brought down to the room in which he generally sat. She had always fascinated him, and the discovery of her brilliant, wayward face hidden in the dust, put away like a forgotten thing in gloom and oblivion, had produced an unfading impression on his mind. What a contrast between her smiling lips, her dancing eyes, her mass of curling chestnut hair, and the forlorn isolation of her grave on the shore with the remorseless inscription chosen for it by the man he remembered! Those words were not meant to apply to her, but to him who had laid her there. Gilbert had no right to think of her as aught but an evil thing, but, for all that, he could not judge her. Surely, surely, she had been judged.

And this was her little box, her own private, intimate little toy, for a toy it was, with its tiny, finely-finished wreath of laurel, and its interlaced gilt monogram in the centre. He took the candle and went up close to the wall to look at her. The rings he had found in the jewel-box were so small that he wondered if the painted fingers corresponded to their size. The picture hung rather high, and though he was tall, he could not clearly see the hands, which were in shadow. He brought a chair and stood upon it, holding the light. The portrait had been cleaned and put up while he was absent for a few days from Whanland, and he had not examined it closely since that time. Yes, the fingers were very slender, and they were clasped round a small, dark object. He pulled out his silk handkerchief and rubbed the canvas carefully. What she held was the laurel-wreathed box.

He took it up from the table again with an added interest, for he had made sure that she prized it, and it pleased him to find he was right. On the great day on which he should bring Cecilia to Whanland he would show her what he had discovered.

He replaced all the other cases and boxes, locking them up, but the painted one with the emerald and diamond drops inside it he put into a drawer of his desk—he would need it so soon. As he laid it away there flashed across him the question of whether Cecilia knew his history. It had never occurred to him before. He sat down on the edge of his writing-table, looking into space. In his intoxication he had not remembered that little cloud in the background of his life.

That it would make any difference to Cecilia’s feelings for him he did not insult her by supposing, but how would it affect Lady Eliza? Like a breath of poison came the thought that it might influence her approval of the marriage. He needed but to look back to be certain that the shadow over his birth was a dark one. Whether the outer world were aware of it he did not know.

Any knowledge which had reached the ears of the neighbourhood could only have been carried by the gossip of servants, and officially, there was no stain resting upon him. He had been acknowledged as a son by the man whom he had called father, he had inherited his property, he had been received in the county as the representative of the family whose name he bore. Lady Eliza herself had accepted him under it, and invited him to her house. For all he knew, she might never have heard anything about the matter. But, whether she had, or whether she had not, it was his plain duty, as an honourable man, to put the case before her, and when he went to Morphie to ask formally for Cecilia he would do it.

But he could not believe that it would really go against him. From Lady Eliza’s point of view, there was so much in his favour. She need scarcely part with the girl who was to her as her own child. Besides which, the idea was too hideous.

[CHAPTER XVI
BETWEEN LADY ELIZA AND CECILIA]

LADY ELIZA LAMONT was like a person who has walked in the dark and been struck to the ground by some familiar object, the existence and position of which he has been foolish enough to forget. Straight from her lover, Cecilia had sought her, and put what had happened plainly before her; she did not know what view her aunt might take, but she was not prepared for the effect of her news. She sat calm under the torrent of excited words, her happiness dying within her, watching with miserable eyes the changes of her companion’s face. Lady Eliza was shaken to the depths; she had not foreseen the contingency which might take her nearest and dearest, and set her in the very midst of the enemy’s camp.

Though she forced herself to be civil to Gilbert Speid, and felt no actual enmity towards him, everything to do with him was hateful to her. Cecilia, whom she loved as a daughter, and to whom she clung more closely with each passing year, would be cut off from her, not in love nor in gratitude, as she knew well enough, but by the barrier of such surroundings as she, Lady Eliza, could never induce herself to penetrate. That house from which, as she passed its gates, she was wont to avert her face, would be Cecilia’s home. For some time she had been schooling herself to the idea of their parting. When Crauford’s laborious courtship had ended in failure, she had been glad; but, in comparison to this new suitor, she would have welcomed him with open arms. He had a blameless character, an even temper, excellent prospects, and no distance to which he could have transported Cecilia would divide them so surely as the few miles which separated Morphie from Whanland. She would hear her called ‘Mrs. Speid’; she would probably see her the mother of children in whose veins ran the blood of the woman she abhorred. The tempest of her feelings stifled all justice and all reason.

‘Why did you not take Crauford Fordyce, if your heart was set on leaving me?’ she cried.

The thrust pierced Cecilia like a knife, but she knew that it was not the real Lady Eliza who had dealt it.

‘I did not care for him,’ she replied, ‘and I love Gilbert Speid.’

‘He is not Gilbert Speid!’ burst out her companion; ‘he is no more Speid than you are! He is nothing of the sort; he is an impostor—a man of no name!’

‘An impostor, ma’am?’

‘His mother was a bad woman. I would rather see you dead than married to him! If you wanted to break my heart, Cecilia, you could not have taken a better way of doing it.’

‘Do you mean that he is not Mr. Speid’s son?’ said Cecilia, her face the colour of a sheet of paper.

‘Yes, I do. He has no business in that house; he has no right to be here; his whole position is a shameful pretence and a lie.’

‘But Whanland is his. He has every right to be there, ma’am.’

‘Mr. Speid must have been mad to leave it to him. You would not care to be the wife of an interloper! That is what he is.’

‘All that can change nothing,’ said Cecilia, after a moment. ‘The man is the same; he has done no wrong.’

‘His very existence is a wrong,’ cried Lady Eliza, her hand shutting tightly on the gloves she held; ‘it is a wrong done by an infamous woman!’

‘I love him,’ said Cecilia: ‘nothing can alter that. You received him, and you told me nothing, and the thing is done—not that I would undo it if I could. How could I know that you would be so much against it?’

‘I had rather anything in the world than this!’ exclaimed the other—‘anyone but this man! What has driven you to make such a choice?’

‘Does it seem so hard to understand why anyone should love Gilbert Speid?’

‘It is a calamity that you should; think of it again—to please me—to make me happy. I can scarcely bear the thought, child; you do not know the whole of this miserable business.’

‘And I hoped that you would be so pleased!’

The tears were starting to Cecilia’s eyes; her nerves, strained to the utmost by the emotions of the day, were beginning to give way.

‘Whanland is so near,’ she said; ‘we should scarcely have to part, dear aunt.’

She was longing to know more, to ask for complete enlightenment, but her pride struggled hard, and she shrank from the mere semblance of misgiving about Gilbert. She had none in her heart.

‘Is this that you have told me generally known?’ she said at last.

‘No one knows as much as I do,’ answered the elder woman, turning her head away.

‘Does Mr. Fullarton know?’ asked Cecilia.

Lady Eliza did not reply for a moment, and, when she did, her head was still turned from the girl.

‘I know his real history—his whole history,’ she replied in a thick voice; ‘other people may guess at it, but they know nothing.’

‘You will not tell me more?’

‘I cannot!’ cried Lady Eliza, getting up and turning upon her almost fiercely; ‘there is no more to be said. If you want to marry him, I suppose you will marry him; I cannot stop you. What is it to you if my heart breaks? What is it to you if all my love for you is forgotten?’

‘Aunt! Dear, dear aunt!’ cried Cecilia, ‘you have never spoken to me like this in all your life!’

She threw her arms round Lady Eliza, holding her tightly. For some time they stood clinging to each other without speaking, and the tears in Cecilia’s eyes dropped and fell upon the shoulder that leaned against her; now and then she stroked it softly with her fingers.

They started apart as a servant entered, and Lady Eliza went out of the room and out of the house, disappearing among the trees. Though her heart was smiting her for her harshness, a power like the force of instinct in an animal fought against the idea of connecting all she loved with Whanland. She had called Gilbert an interloper, and an interloper he was, come to poison the last days of her life. She hurried on among the trees, impervious to the balm of the evening air which played on her brow; tenderness and fierceness dragged her in two directions, and the consciousness of having raised a barrier between herself and Cecilia was grievous. She seemed to be warring against everything. Of what use was it to her to have been given such powers of love and sympathy? They had recoiled upon her all her life, as curses are said to recoil, and merely increased the power to suffer.

She had come to the outskirts of the trees, and, from the place in which she stood, she could see over the wall into the road. The sound of a horse’s trotting feet was approaching from the direction of Kaims, and she remembered that it was Friday, the day on which the weekly market was held, and on which those of the county men who were agriculturally inclined made a point of meeting in the town for business purposes. The rider was probably Fullarton. He often stopped at Morphie on his way home, and it was likely he would do so now. She went quickly down to a gate in the wall to intercept him.

Yes, it was Robert trotting evenly homewards, a fine figure of a man on his sixteen-hand black. For one moment she started as he came into sight round the bend, for she took him for Speid. The faces of the two men were not alike, but, for the first time, and for an instant only, the two figures seemed to her almost identical. As he neared her the likeness faded; Fullarton was the taller of the two, and he had lost the distinctive lines of youth. She went out and stood on the road; he pulled up as he saw her, and dismounted, and they walked on side by side towards the large gate of Morphie.

‘Crauford has come back,’ he began, ‘and I have just seen him in Kaims. He is staying with Barclay; they seemed rather friendly when he was with me, but I am surprised. Why he should have come back I can’t think, for Cecilia gave him no doubt of her want of appreciation of him. In any case, it is too soon. You don’t like Barclay, I know, my lady.’

‘I can’t bear him,’ said Lady Eliza.

‘I have tolerated him for years, so I suppose I shall go on doing so. Sometimes it is as much trouble to lay down one’s load as to go on with it.’

‘I wish I could think as you do,’ said she.

‘Not that Barclay is exactly a load,’ he continued, pursuing his own train of thought, ‘but he is a common, pushing fellow, and I think it a pity that Crauford should stay with him.’

Lady Eliza walked on in silence, longing to unburden her mind to her companion, and shrinking from the mention of Gilbert’s name. He thought her dull company, and perhaps a little out of temper, and he was not inclined to go up to the house. She stood, as he prepared to remount his horse, laying an ungloved hand upon the shining neck of the black; his allusion to its beauty had made her doubly and trebly careful of it. Had he noticed her act, with its little bit of feminine vanity, he might have thought it ridiculous; but it was so natural—a little green sprig from stunted nature which had flowered out of season.

‘Fullarton, Gilbert Speid has proposed to Cecilia,’ she said.

‘And do you expect me to be astonished?’ he inquired, pausing with his foot in the stirrup-iron.

‘It came like a thunder-clap; I never thought of it!’ she exclaimed.

‘Pshaw, Eliza! Why, I told Crauford long ago that he had a pretty formidable rival in him,’ said he, from the saddle.

‘She wants to marry him,’ said Lady Eliza, looking up at him, and restraining the quivering of her lips with an effort.

‘Well, if she won’t take Crauford, she had better take him; he’ll be the more interesting husband of the two. Good-night, my lady.’

She went back to the house, her heart like lead, her excitement calmed into dull misery. Fullarton did not understand, and, while she was thankful that he did not, the fact hurt her in an unreasonable way.

The evening was a very quiet one, for, as neither of the two women could speak of what she felt, both took refuge in silence. It was the first shadow that had come between them, and that thought added to the weight of Lady Eliza’s grief. She sat in the deep window-seat, looking out at the long light which makes northern summer nights so short, seeming to notice nothing that went on in the room. The sight was torture to Cecilia, for a certain protectiveness which mingled with her love for her aunt made her feel as though she had wounded some trusting child to death. Her anticipations of a few hours ago had been so different from the reality she had found, and she could not bear to think of her lover sitting in his solitary home, happy in the false belief that all was well. If ever she had seen happiness on a human face, she had seen it on his as they parted. To-morrow Lady Eliza would receive his letter.

‘Cecilia,’ she said, turning suddenly towards the girl, ‘I said things I did not mean to you to-day; God knows I did not mean them. You must forgive me because I am almost beside myself to-night. You don’t understand, child, and you never will. Oh, Cecilia, life has gone so hard with me! I am a miserable old woman with rancour in her heart, who has made a sorry business of this world; but it is not my fault—it is not all my fault—and it shall never divide you from me. But have patience with me, darling; my trouble is so great.’

As they parted for the night, she looked back from the threshold of her room.

‘To-morrow I shall feel better,’ she said; ‘I will try to be different to-morrow.’

Cecilia lay sleepless, thinking of many things. She recalled herself, a little, thin girl, weak from a long illness, arriving at Morphie more than a dozen years ago. She had been tired and shy, dreading to get out of the carriage to face the unknown cousin with whom she was to stay until the change had recruited her. Life, since the death of her parents, who had gone down together in the wreck of an East Indiaman, had been a succession of changes, and she had been bandied about from one relation to another, at home nowhere, and weary of learning new ways; the learning had been rough as well as smooth, and she did not know what might await her at Morphie. Lady Eliza had come out to receive her in a shabby riding-habit, much like the plum-coloured one she wore now and in much the same state of repair, and she had looked with misgiving at the determined face under the red wig. She had cried a little, from fatigue of the long journey and strangeness, and the formidable lady had petted her and fed her with soup, and finally almost carried her upstairs to bed. Well could she recall the candlelight in the room, and Lady Eliza sitting at her bedside holding her hand until she fell asleep. She had not been accustomed to such things.

She remembered how, next day, she had been coaxed to talk and to amuse herself, and how surprised she had been at the wonderful things her new friend could do—how she could take horses by the ears as though they were puppies, and, undaunted, slap the backs of cows who stood in their path as they went together to search for new entertainment in the fields. She had been shown the stable, and the great creatures, stamping and rattling their head-ropes through the rings of their mangers, had filled her with awe. How familiar she had been with them since and how different life had been since that day! One by one she recalled the little episodes of the following years—some joyful, some pathetic, some absurd; as she had grown old enough to understand the character beside which she lived, her attitude towards it had changed in many ways, and, unconsciously, she had come to know herself the stronger of the two. With the growth of strength had come also the growth of comprehension and sympathy. She had half divined the secret of Lady Eliza’s life, and only a knowledge of a few facts was needed to show her the deeps of the soul whose worth was so plain to her. She was standing very near to them now.

She fell into a restless sleep troublous with dreams. Personalities, scenes, chased each other through her wearied brain, which could not distinguish the false from the true, but which was conscious of an unvarying background of distress. Towards morning she woke and set her door open, for she was feverish with tossing and greedy of air. As she stood a moment on the landing, a subdued noise in her aunt’s room made her go quickly towards it and stand listening at the door. It was the terrible sound of Lady Eliza sobbing in the dawn.

[CHAPTER XVII
CECILIA PAYS HER DEBTS]

CECILIA rose to meet a new day, each moment of which the coming years failed to obliterate from her memory. In the first light hours she had taken her happiness in her two hands and killed it, deliberately, for the sake of the woman she loved. She had decided to part with Gilbert Speid.

She hid nothing from herself and made no concealment. She did not pretend that she could offer herself up willingly, or with any glow of the emotional flame of renunciation, for she had not that temperament which can make the sacrificial altar a bed of inverted luxury. She neither fell on her knees, nor prayed, nor called upon Heaven to witness her deed, because there was only one thing which she cared it should witness, and that was Lady Eliza’s peace of mind. Nor, while purchasing this, did she omit to count the cost. The price was a higher one than she could afford, for, when it was paid, there would be nothing left.

The thing which had culminated but yesterday had been growing for many months, and only those who wait for an official stamp to be put upon events before admitting their existence will suppose that Cecilia was parting with what she had scarcely had time to find necessary. She was parting with everything, and she knew it. The piteousness of her aunt’s unquestionably real suffering was such that she determined it must end. That someone should suffer was inevitable, and the great gallantry in her rose up and told her that she could bear more than could Lady Eliza.

What she could scarcely endure to contemplate was Gilbert’s trouble, and his almost certain disbelief in the genuineness of her love. In the eyes of the ordinary person her position was correct enough. Her engagement had been disapproved of by her natural guardian, and she had, in consequence, broken it. This did not affect her in any way, for she was one to whom more than the exterior of things was necessary. What did affect her was that, without so much as the excuse of being forbidden to marry her lover, she was giving him his heart’s desire and then snatching it away. But, as either he or Lady Eliza had to be sacrificed, she determined that it should be Speid, though she never hesitated to admit that she loved him infinitely the better of the two. He was young, and could mend his life again, whereas, for her aunt, there was no future which could pay her for any present loss. And she had had so little. She understood that there was more wrapped up in Lady Eliza’s misery than she could fathom, and that, whatever the cause of the enigma might be, it was something vital to her peace.

The hours of the day dragged on. She did not know whether to dread their striking or to long for the sound, for she had told her aunt that she wished to see her lover, and tell him the truth with her own lips, and a message had been sent to Whanland to summon him to Morphie in the afternoon. There had been a curious interview between the two women, and Lady Eliza had struggled between her love for her niece and her hatred of the marriage she contemplated. She, also, had chastened her soul in the night-season, and told herself that she would let no antipathy of her own stand in the way of her happiness; but her resolution had been half-hearted, and, unable to school her features or her words, she had but presented a more vivid picture of distress. She had not deceived Cecilia, nor, to tell the truth, had Cecilia entirely succeeded in deceiving her; but her own feelings had made the temptation to shut her eyes too great for her complete honesty of purpose.

Cecilia had given her reasons for her change of intention very simply, saying merely, that, since their discussion of yesterday, she had seen the inadvisability of the marriage. To all questions she held as brave a front as she could, only demanding that she should see Gilbert alone, and tell him her decision with no intervention on the part of Lady Eliza. To be in a position to demand anything was an unusual case for a girl of those days, but the conditions of life at Morphie were unusual, both outwardly and inwardly, and the two women had been for years as nearly equals as any two can be, where, though both are rich in character, one is complicated in temperament and the other primitive. It was on Cecilia’s side that the real balance of power dipped, however unconsciously to herself the scale went down.

The task before her almost took her courage away, for she had, first, to combat Speid, when her whole heart was on his side, and then to part from him—not perhaps, finally, in body, for she was likely to meet him at any time, but in soul and in heart. One part of her work she would try, Heaven helping her, to do, but the other was beyond her. Though she would never again feel the clasp of his arm, nor hear from his lips the words that had made yesterday the crown of her life, she would be his till her pulses ceased to beat. Much and terribly as she longed to see him, dread of their parting was almost stronger than the desire; but fear lest he should suppose her decision rested on anything about his parentage which Lady Eliza had told her kept her strong. Never should he think that. Whatever reasons she had given her aunt, he should not go without understanding her completely, and knowing the truth down to the very bed-rock. She shed no tears. There would be plenty of time for tears afterwards, she knew, when there would be nothing for her to do, no crisis to meet, and nothing to be faced but daily life.

Gilbert started for Morphie carrying the note she had sent him in his pocket. He had read and re-read it many times since its arrival that morning had filled his whole being with gloom. The idea of his presenting himself, full of hope, to meet the decree which awaited him was so dreadful that she had added to her summons a few sentences telling him that he must be prepared for bad news. She had written no word of love, for she felt that, until she had explained her position to him, such words could only be a mockery.

He stood waiting in the room into which he had been ushered, listening for her step. He suspected that he had been summoned to meet Lady Eliza, but he did not mean to leave Morphie without an endeavour to see Cecilia herself. When she entered he was standing quietly by the mantelpiece. She looked like a ghost in her white dress, and under her eyes the fingers of sleeplessness had traced dark marks. He sprang forward, and drew her towards him.

‘No, no!’ she cried, throwing out her hands in front of her.

Then, as she saw his look, she faltered and dropped them, letting his arms encircle her. The intoxication of his nearness was over her, and the very touch of his coat against her face was rest, after the struggle of the hours since she had seen him.

She drew herself away at last.

‘What does that message mean?’ he asked, as he let her go.

She had thought of so many things to say to him, she had meant to tell him gently, to choose her words; but, now he was beside her, she found that everything took flight, and only the voice of her own sorrow remained.

‘Oh, Gilbert—Gilbert!’ she sighed, ‘there are stronger things than you or I! Yesterday we were so happy, but it is over, and we must not think of each other any more!’

‘Cecilia!’ he cried, aghast.

‘It is true.’

‘What are you saying?’ he exclaimed, almost roughly. ‘What did you promise me? You said that nothing should change you, and I believed it!’

‘Nothing has—nothing can—but, for all that, you must give me up. It is for my aunt’s sake, Gilbert. If you only saw her you would understand what I have gone through. It is no choice of mine. How can you think it is anything to me but despair?’

Speid’s heart sank, and the thing whose shadow had risen as he locked up the jewels and looked at his mother’s face on the wall loomed large again. He guessed the undercurrent of her words.

‘She has not forbidden me to marry you,’ continued Cecilia, ‘but she has told me it will break her heart if I do, and I believe it is true. What is the use of hiding anything from you? There is something in the background that I did not know; but if you imagine that it can make any difference to me, you are not the man I love, not the man I thought. You believe me? You understand?’

‘I understand—I believe,’ he said, turning away his head. ‘Ah, my God!’

‘But you do not doubt me—myself?’ she cried, her heart wrung with fear.

He turned and looked at her. Reproach, suffering, pain unutterable were in his eyes; but there was absolute faith too.

‘But must it be, Cecilia? I am no passive boy to let my life slip between my fingers without an effort. Let me see Lady Eliza. Let me make her understand what she is doing in dividing you and me. I tell you I will see her!’

‘She will not forbid it, for she has told me to act for myself and leave her out of my thoughts; but she is broken-hearted. It is piteous to see her face. There is something more than I know at the root of this trouble—about you—and it concerns her. I have asked her, and though she admitted I was right, she forbade me to speak of it. You would have pitied her if you had seen her. I cannot make her suffer—I cannot, even for you.’

‘And have you no pity for me?’ he broke out.

The tears she had repressed all day rushed to her eyes. She sat down and hid her face. There was a silence as she drew out her handkerchief, pressing it against her wet eyelashes.

‘Think of what I owe her,’ she continued, forcing her voice into its natural tone—‘think what she has done for me! Everything in my life that has been good has come from her, and I am the only creature she has. How can I injure her? I thought that, at Whanland, we should hardly have been divided, but it seems that we could never meet if I were there. She has told me that.’

He struck the back of the chair by which he stood with his clenched fist.

‘And so it is all over, and I am to go?’ he cried. ‘I cannot, Cecilia—I will not accept it! I will not give you up! You may push me away now, but I will wait for ever, for you are mine, and I shall get you in the end!’

She smiled sadly.

‘You may waste your life in thinking of that,’ she answered. ‘To make it afresh is the wisest thing for you to do, and you can do it. There is the difference between you and my aunt. It is nearly over for her, and she has had nothing; but you are young—you can remake it in time, if you will.’

‘I will not. I will wait.’

He gazed at her, seeing into her heart and finding only truth there.

‘You will learn to forget me,’ says the flirt and jilt, raising chaste eyes to heaven, and laying a sisterly hand on the shoulder of the man she is torturing, while she listens, with satisfaction, to his hot and miserable denial.

The only comfort in such cases is that he generally does so. But with Cecilia there was no false sentiment, nor angling for words to minister to her vanity. He knew that well. Thoroughly did he understand the worth of what he was losing. He thought of the plans he had made only last night, of the flowers to be planted, of the rooms to be transformed, of the horse to be bought, of the jewels he had chosen for her from the iron box. One was lying now in a drawer of his writing-table, ready to be brought to her, and last night he had dreamed that he was fastening it round her neck. That visionary act would have to suffice him.

He came across the room and sat down by her, putting his arm about her. They were silent for a few moments, looking together into the gulf of separation before them. Life had played both of them an evil trick, but there was one thing she had been unable to do, and that was to shake their faith in each other. Cecilia had told her lover that he should make his own afresh, and had spoken in all honesty, knowing that, could she prevent his acting on her words by the holding up of her finger, she would not raise it an inch; but for all that, she did not believe he would obey her. Something in herself, which also had its counterpart in him, could foretell that.

To struggle against her decision was, as Speid knew, hopeless, for it was based upon what it would lower him in her eyes to oppose. To a certain extent he saw its force, but he would not have been the man he was, nor, indeed, a man of any kind, had he not felt hostile to Lady Eliza. He paid small attention to the assurance that, behind her obvious objection to his own history, there lurked a hidden personal complication, for the details of such an all-pervading ill as the ruin she had made for him were, to him, indifferent. He would wait determinedly. Crauford Fordyce ran through his mind, for, though his trust in Cecilia was complete, it had annoyed him to hear that he was in Kaims. Evidently the young man was of a persevering nature, and, however little worldly advantages might impress her, he knew that these things had an almost absolute power over parents and guardians.

‘You told me to remake my life,’ he said, ‘and I have answered that I will not. Oh, Cecilia! I cannot tell you to do that! Do you know, it makes me wretched to think that Fordyce is here again. Forgive me for saying it. Tell me that you can never care for him. I do not ask to know anything more. Darling, do not be angry.’

He raised her face and looked into it. There was no anger, but a little wan ray of amusement played round her mouth.

‘You need not be afraid; there is nothing in him to care for. His only merits are his prospects, and Heaven knows they do not attract me,’ she replied.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck, and the two looked up. Outside on the grass the shadows of the grazing sheep were long. His arm tightened round her.

‘I cannot go yet,’ he said. ‘A little longer, Cecilia—a few minutes—and then the sooner it is over the better.’

The room grew very still, and, through the open window, came the long fluting of a blackbird straying in the dew. All her life the sound carried Cecilia back to that hour. There seemed nothing more to be spoken but that last word that both were dreading.

‘This is only torment,’ she said at last—‘go now.’

An overpowering longing rushed through her to break the web that circumstances had woven between them, to take what she had renounced, to bid him stay, to trust to chance that time would make all well. How could she let him go when it lay in her hands to stave off the moment that was coming? She had reached the turning-point, the last piece of her road at which she could touch hands with happiness.

He was holding her fast.

‘I am going,’ he said, in a voice like the voice of a stranger—someone a long way off.

She could not speak. There were a thousand things which, when he was gone, she knew that she must blame herself for not saying, but they would not stay with her till her lips could frame them.

‘Perhaps we shall sometimes see each other,’ he whispered, ‘but God knows if I could bear it.’

They clung together in a maze of kisses and incoherent words. When they separated, she stood trembling in the middle of the room. He looked back at her from the threshold, and turned again.

‘Gilbert! Gilbert!’ she cried, throwing her arms round his neck.

Then they tore themselves apart, and the door closed between them and upon everything that each had come to value in life.

When the sound of his horse’s feet had died, she stayed on where he had left her. One who is gone is never quite gone while we retain the fresh impression of his presence. She knew that, and she was loth to leave a place which seemed still to hold his personality. She sat on, unconscious of time, until a servant came into shut the windows, and then she went downstairs and stood outside the front-door upon the flags. The blackbird was still on the grass whistling, but at the sudden appearance of her figure in the doorway, he flew, shrieking in rich gutturals, into cover.

[CHAPTER XVIII
THE BOX WITH THE LAUREL-WREATH]

SPEID rode home without seeing a step of the way, though he never put his horse out of a walk; he was like a man inheriting a fortune which has vanished before he has had time to do more than sign his name to the document that makes it his. But, in spite of the misery of their parting, he could not and would not realize that it was final. He was hot and tingling with the determination to wear down Lady Eliza’s opposition; for he had decided, with Cecilia’s concurrence or without it, to see her himself, and to do what he could to bring home to her the ruin she was making of two lives.

He could not find any justice in her standpoint; if she had refused to admit him to her house or her acquaintance, there might have been some reason in her act, but she had acknowledged him as a neighbour, invited him to Morphie, and had at times been on the verge of friendliness. She knew that, in spite of any talk that was afloat, he had been well received by the people of the county, for the fact that he had not mixed much with them was due to his own want of inclination for the company offered him. He was quite man of the world enough to see that his presence was more than welcome wherever mothers congregated who had daughters to dispose of, and, on one or two occasions of the sort, he remembered that Lady Eliza had been present, and knew she must have seen it too.

As he had no false pride, he had also no false humility, for the two are so much alike that it is only by the artificial light of special occasions that their difference can be seen. He had believed that Lady Eliza would be glad to give him Cecilia. He knew very well that the girl had no fortune, for it was a truth which the female part of the community were not likely to let a young bachelor of means forget; and he had supposed that a man who could provide for her, without taking her four miles from the gates of Morphie, would have been a desirable suitor in Lady Eliza’s eyes. Her opposition must, as he had been told, be rooted in an unknown obstacle; but, more ruthless than Cecilia, he was not going to let the hidden thing rest. He would drag it to the light, and deal with it as he would deal with anything which stood in his way to her. Few of us are perfect; Gilbert certainly was not, and he did not care what Lady Eliza felt. It was not often that he had set his heart upon a woman, and he had never set his heart and soul upon one before. If he had not been accustomed to turn back when there was no soul in the affair, he was not going to do so now that it was a deeper question.

The curious thing was that, though it went against himself, he admired Cecilia’s attitude enormously; at the same time, the feeling stopped short of imitation. While with her he had been unable to go against her, and the creeping shadow of their imminent parting had wrought a feeling of exaltation in him which prevented him from thinking clearly. But that moment had passed. He understood her feelings, and respected them, but they were not his, and he was going to the root of the matter without scruple.

For all that, it was with a heavy heart that he stood at his own door and saw Macquean, who looked upon every horse as a dangerous wild beast, leading the roan to the stable at the full stretch of his arm. With a heavier one still he sat, when the household had gone to bed, contrasting to-night with yesterday. Last night Whanland had been filled with dreams; to-night it was filled with forebodings. To-morrow he must collect his ideas, and send his urgent request for an interview with Lady Eliza Lamont; and, if she refused to see him, he would put all he meant to ask into writing and despatch the letter by hand to Morphie.

In his writing-table drawer was the chain with the emerald and diamond ends, which he had left there in readiness to give to Cecilia, and he sighed as he took it out, meaning to return it to its iron resting-place in the room by the cellar. What if it should have to rest there for years? He opened the little laurel-wreathed box and drew out the jewel; the drop of green fire lay in his hand like a splash of magic. Though he had no heart for its beauty to-night, all precious gems fascinated Gilbert, this one almost more than any he had ever seen. Emeralds are stones for enchantresses, speaking as they do of velvet, of poison, of serpents, of forests, of things buried in enchanted seas, rising and falling under the green moonlight of dream-countries beyond the bounds of the world. But all he could think of was that he must hide it away in the dark, when it ought to be lying on Cecilia’s bosom.

He replaced it in its box, shutting the lid, and went to the writing-table behind him to close the drawer; as he turned back quickly, his coat-tail swept the whole thing off the polished mahogany, and sent it spinning into the darkness. He saw the lid open as it went and the chain flash into a corner of the room, like a snake with glittering eyes. He sprang after it, and brought it back to the light to find it unhurt, then went to recover the box. This was not easy to do, for the lid had rolled under one piece of furniture and the lower part under another; but, with the help of a stick, he raked both out of the shadows, and carried them, one in either hand, to examine them under the candle. It struck him that, for an object of its size, the lower half was curiously heavy, and he weighed it up and down, considering it. As he did so, it rattled, showing that the fall must have loosened something in its construction. It was a deep box, and its oval shape did not give the idea that it had been originally made to hold the chain he had found in it. It was lined with silk which had faded to a nondescript colour, and he guessed, from the presence of a tiny knob which he could feel under the thin stuff, that it had a false bottom and that the protuberance was the spring which opened it. This had either got out of repair from long disuse, or else its leap across the floor had injured it, for, press as he might, sideways or downwards, he could produce no effect. He turned the box upside down, and the false bottom fell out, broken, upon the table, exposing a miniature which fitted closely into the real one behind it.

It was the carefully-executed likeness of a young man, whose face set some fugitive note of association vibrating in him, and made him pause as he looked, while he mentally reviewed the various ancestors on his walls. The portrait had been taken full face, which prevented the actual outline of the features from being revealed, but it was the expression which puzzled Gilbert by its familiarity. The character of the eyebrows, drooping at the outer corner of the eyes, gave a certain look of petulance that had nothing transient and was evidently natural to the face. He had seen something like it quite lately, though whether on a human countenance or a painted one, he could not tell. The young man’s dress was of a fashion which had long died out. Under the glass was a lock of hair, tied with a twist of gold thread and not unlike his own in colour, and the gold rim which formed the frame was engraved with letters so fine as to be almost illegible. He tried to take out the miniature, but he could not do so, for it was fixed firmly into the bottom of the box, with the evident purpose of making its concealment certain. He drew the light close. The sentence running round the band was ‘Addio, anima mia,’ and, in a circle just below the hair, was engraved in a smaller size these words: ‘To C. L. from R. F., 1765.’

He was face to face with the secret of his own life, and, in an instant, he understood the impression of familiarity produced upon him by the picture, for the ‘R. F.’ told him all that he had not known. There was no drop in his veins of the blood of the race whose name he bore, for he was no Speid. Now all was plain. He was Robert Fullarton’s illegitimate son.

He sat in the sleeping house looking at the little box which had wrecked his hopes more effectually than anything he had experienced that day. Now he understood Lady Eliza; now he realized how justifiable was her opposition. How could he, knowing what he knew, and what no doubt every soul around him knew, stand up before his neighbours and take Cecilia by the hand? how ask her to share the name which everyone could say was not his own? how endure that she should face with him a state of affairs which, for the first time, he clearly understood? He had been morally certain, before, that the bar sinister shadowed him, but, though he could have asked her to live under it with him when its existence was only known to herself and to him, the question being a social, not an ethical one, it would be an impossibility when the whole world was aware of it; when the father who could not acknowledge him was his neighbour. Never should she spend her life in a place where she might be pointed at as the wife of the nameless man. Ah, how well he understood Lady Eliza!

But, thoroughly as he believed himself able to appreciate her motives, he had no idea of the extraordinary mixture of personal feeling in which they were founded, and he credited her with the sole desire to save Cecilia from an intolerable position. Though he never doubted that those among whom he lived were as enlightened as he himself now was, the substance of the posthumous revival of rumours, attributed by many to gossip arising from Mr. Speid’s actions after his wife’s death, was, in reality, the only clue possessed by anyone.

By an act the generosity of which he admired with all his soul, his so-called father had legitimized him as far as lay in his power. No person could bring any proof against him of being other than he appeared, and in the eyes of the law he was as much Speid of Whanland as the man he had succeeded. He admired him all the more when he remembered that it was not an overwhelming affection for himself which had led him to take the step, but pure, abstract justice to a human being, who, through no fault of his own, had come into the world at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, whatever his legal position, he was an interloper, a pretender. He had identified himself with Whanland and loved every stick and stone in it, but he had been masquerading, for all that. What a trick she had played him, that beautiful creature upon the wall!

That the initials painted on the box and engraved on the frame inside were C. L. and not C. S. proved one thing. However guilty she had been, it was no transient influence which had ruined Clementina. Had any chance revealed the miniature’s existence to Mr. Speid, it would have explained the letter he had received from her father after his own refusal by her, and it would have shown him an everyday tragedy upon which he had unwittingly intruded, to his own undoing and to hers. Like many another, she had given her affections to a younger son—for Robert, in inheriting Fullarton, had succeeded a brother—and, her parents being ambitious, the obstacle which has sundered so many since the world began had sundered these two also. Mr. Lauder was a violent and determined man, and his daughter, through fear of him, had kept secret the engagement which she knew must be a forlorn hope so soon as he should discover it. When chance, which played traitor to the couple, brought it to light, the sword fell, and Robert, banished from the presence of the Lauder family, returned to Fullarton and to the society of his devoted elder brother, who asked no more than that the younger, so much cleverer than himself, should share all he had. The miniature, which he had gone to Edinburgh to sit for, and for which he had caused the little box to be contrived, was conveyed to Clementina with much difficulty and some bribery. He had chosen Italian words to surround it, for he had made the ‘grand tour’ with his brother, and had some knowledge of that language. There is a fashion, even in sentiment, and, in those days, Italian was as acceptable a vehicle for it to the polite world as French would be now. She yielded to circumstances which she had no more strength to fight and married Mr. Speid a couple of years later; and she kept the relic locked away among her most cherished treasures. She had not changed, not one whit, and when, at her husband’s desire, she sat for her portrait to David Martin, then in the zenith of his work in the Scottish capital, she held the little box in her hand, telling the painter it was too pretty to go down to oblivion, and must be immortalized also. Martin, vastly admiring his sitter, replied gallantly, and poor Clementina, who never allowed her dangerous treasure to leave her hand, sat in agony till it was painted, and she could return it to the locked drawer in which it was kept. There was a vague hope in her mind that the man she had not ceased to love might, one day, see the portrait and understand the silent message it contained.

Meanwhile, at Fullarton, Robert, who had been absent when Clementina came to Whanland as a bride, was trying to cure his grief, and, superficially, succeeding well enough to make him think himself a sounder man than he was.

He went about among the neighbours far and near, plunged into the field-sports he loved, and, in so doing, saw a great deal of Mr. Lamont, of Morphie, and his sister, a rather peculiar but companionable young woman, whose very absence of feminine charm made him feel an additional freedom in her society.

At this time his elder brother, who had a delicate heart, quitted this world quietly one morning, leaving the household awestruck and Robert half frantic with grief. In this second sorrow he clung more closely to his friends, and was more than ever thrown into the company of Lady Eliza. To her, this period was the halcyon time of her life, and to him, there is no knowing what it might have become if Clementina Speid had not returned from the tour she was making with her husband, to find her old lover installed a few miles from her door. Was ever woman so conspired against by the caprices of Fate?

Afterwards, when her short life ended in that stirring of conscience which opened her lips, she confessed all. She had now lain for years expiating her sin upon the shore by Garviekirk.

And that sin had risen to shadow her son; he remembered how he had been moved to a certain comprehension on first seeing her pictured face, without even knowing the sum of the forces against her. Little had he thought how sorely the price of her misdoing was to fall upon himself. It would be a heavy price, involving more than the loss of Cecilia, for it would involve banishment too. He could not stay at Whanland. In time, possibly, when she had married—he ground his teeth as he told himself this—when she was the wife of some thrice-fortunate man whose name was his own, he might return to the things he loved and finish his life quietly among them. But not this year nor the next, not in five years nor in ten. He had no more heart for pretence. This was not his true place; he should never have come to take up a part which the very gods must have laughed to see him assume. What a dupe, what a fool he had been!

He would not try to see Cecilia again, but he would write to her, and she should know how little he had understood his real position when he had asked for her love—how he had believed himself secure against the stirring-up of a past which no one was sufficiently certain of to bring against him; which was even indefinite to himself. She should hear that he had meant to tell her all he knew, and that he believed in her so firmly as never to doubt what the result would have been. He would bid her good-bye, irrevocably this time; for she should understand that, whatever her own feelings, he would not permit her to share his false position before a world which might try to make her feel it. He thought of the lady in the Leghorn bonnet, who had sat on the red sofa at the Miss Robertsons’ house, and whose chance words had first made him realize the place Cecilia had in his heart. How she and her like would delight to exercise their clacking tongues in wounding her! How they would welcome such an opportunity for the commonplace ill-nature which was as meat and drink to them! But it was an opportunity he would not give them.

So he sat on, determining to sacrifice the greater to the less, and, in the manliness of his soul, preparing to break the heart of the woman he loved—to whose mind the approval or disapproval of many ladies in Leghorn bonnets would be unremarkable, could she but call herself his.

In less than a week he had left the country, and, following an instinct which led him back to the times before he had known Scotland, was on his way to Spain.

END OF BOOK I