“Dear parents, indeed,” sniffed Lady Glencairn to herself suspiciously as she followed their hostess to the door of the “ben.”
With a nervous little laugh Jean rose quickly from her chair by the window and walked toward the door through which they had entered. “The accident has quite upset me, Lady Glencairn,” she said constrainedly. “Would you mind if I stroll about the fields until my nerves are settled?” she asked with a forced laugh.
“No, child, go by all means,” replied her ladyship indolently. “The air will do you good, no doubt.”
“I warn you not to wander too far from the house,” interposed Lord Glencairn with a kindly smile. “We will not be detained much longer.” With a smile of thanks she hastily left the room just as Mrs. Burns entered from the “ben” bearing a large blue pitcher filled with foaming milk, which she placed on the table before her smiling visitors.
Jean breathed a sigh of relief as she closed the door behind her. She felt in another moment she would have screamed aloud in her nervousness. That fate should have brought her to the very home of the man she had thought still in Mauchline, and to see whom she had hurriedly left Edinburgh, filled her with wonder and dread. “I must see him before we leave,” she said nervously, clasping and unclasping her hands. But where should she find him? She walked quickly down the path and gazed across the fields, where in the distance she could see several men at work, repairing the disabled coach. Anxiously she strained her eyes to see if the one she sought was among them, but he was not there. Quickly she retraced her steps. “I must find him. I must speak with him this day,” she said determinedly. As she neared the cottage she turned aside and walked toward the high stone fence which enclosed the house and yard. Swiftly mounting the old stile, she looked about her. Suddenly she gave a sharp little exclamation, and her heart bounded violently, for there before her, coming across the field, was the man she sought, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent low in the deepest meditation. With a sigh of relief she sank down on the step and calmly awaited his approach.
CHAPTER VI
Robert flung the last of his seed corn into the earth with a sigh of thankfulness, for though he gave the powers of his body to the labors of the farm, he refused to bestow on them his thoughts or his cares. He longed to seek the quiet of his attic room, for his soul was bursting with song and his nervous fingers fairly itched to grasp his pencil and catch and hold forever the pearls dropped from the lap of the Goddess Muse into his worshipful soul, ere they faded and dissolved into lusterless fragments. Mechanically he turned his footsteps toward the cottage, plunged in deep reverie. As he walked slowly along his mind suddenly reverted to the year he had spent in Mauchline. It had been his first taste of town life. Blessed with a strong appetite for sociability, although constitutionally melancholy, and a hair-brained imagination, he had become an immediate favorite and welcome guest wherever he visited. Vive l’amour and vive la bagatelle had soon become his sole principle of action. His heart, which was completely tinder, was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other, and it was not long before he regarded illicit love with levity, which two months previously he had thought of with horror. Poesy was still a darling walk for his mind, but it was only indulged in according to the humor of the hour. Having no aim in life he had been easily led from the paths of virtue into many forms of dissipation, which, when indulged in, afterwards plunged him into the deepest melancholy. A few months after his advent into the village he had met Jean Armour, the daughter of a master builder. She was one of the belles of Mauchline, a wild, willful, imprudent lass, whose sensual charms soon ensnared the susceptible heart of the unsophisticated farmer lad. The fatal defect of his character was the comparative weakness of his volition, and his passions, once lighted up, soon carried him down the stream of error and swept him over the precipice he saw directly in his course.
Such being their temperaments, it was not to be wondered at when their procedure soon became decidedly irregular, their intimacy becoming the common talk and gossip of Mauchline.