The uplands looked their very greyest and worst on that December day. A low grey sky stooped to meet the hill-sides, on which brown heather and brown bracken made a depressing tone of colour, to mingle with the greyness of the clouds, and of the mists that crept up from the valleys. The bareness of the wide stretch of moor was broken here and there by a clump of fir-trees, which showed dark and sombre against the grey background, and the fogginess of the atmosphere obscured the great view, which was usually the chief charm of the uplands. Sir Arthur was at no time an admirer of scenery, and to-day he turned his gaze shudderingly from the barren landscape; and, drawing a paper from his pocket, proceeded to bury himself in its contents, and to thrust the outer world as far as possible away from his consciousness. By nature an unimaginative man, he had ruthlessly stamped out any germ of imagination or poetry, which might have been latent within him, setting himself with grim resolution to thrust away the beautiful as a snare, and to regard everything about him as merely temporal and destructible. He forgot, or perhaps he deliberately chose not to recognise, that the eternal is set around the temporal, not as a thing apart, but encompassing it, permeating it, so that temporal and eternal are one. He had sternly set his face against all the softer aspects of life, doing his duty grimly, and with stiff back, disinclined at any time to any relaxation in discipline either for himself or his fellow-sinners—more ready to rule by fear than by love, a man who would have made an equally excellent Ironside or Grand Inquisitor, according to the peculiar turn of his religious convictions.
As he drove now along the lonely white road, his thoughts chiefly centred themselves upon Margaret, his beautiful sister Margaret, who, in spite of her sins and follies, as he considered them to be, had always held a place in her brother's heart. He gave her the place grudgingly; he would have gone to the stake rather than confess that her beauty made, or ever had made, any appeal to him. And yet, as he was driven quickly onwards under the lowering skies, it was his sister's beautiful face that rose persistently before him, her face, as he had last seen it, when she was a radiant girl, in the glory of her happy girlhood. It was odd; it was even annoying to him that just this particular vision out of the past should fill his mind now, but for once in his grim and well-disciplined life, he was unable to drive away the haunting vision.
The garden of the old house made the setting of the picture—the garden that was now his own, and the sunk lawn, with the sun-dial amongst the rose-trees, that had been his father's pride. Margaret had stood beside the sun-dial, on that far-off June day, her fingers lightly tracing the motto that ran round the dial's face, her laughing eyes lifted to her brother.
"Ah! but you don't believe in the motto, you see." The words came echoing back to him across the years, until he almost felt as though he could actually hear the low voice again, and Margaret's voice had always had such unspeakable charm.
"You think a motto like this just silly and sentimental, don't you, Arthur?" And once more her fingers had traced the faint lettering, whilst she slowly read the words aloud.
"Per incertas, certa amor." (Through uncertainty, certain is love.)
"I mean that to be my motto, as well as the motto of the sun-dial"; just a tiny ring of defiance seemed to creep into her voice with the last words; Sir Arthur remembered it even now, and he had answered her gravely, out of the depths of his convictions. He had spoken with solemnity, of duty, as higher than love; and she had laughed again, her deep soft laugh, though the look in her eyes had belied her laughter.
"Love is the greatest thing in the world," she had said, very slowly, very quietly, but the words rang with the sureness of a great certainty. "Love is the only thing that matters in all the world, because to love properly is to be perfect. Duty, right, goodness, they all follow upon love—real love. Love is the greatest thing in the world. Through all uncertainty—love is—sure."
Well, she had acted up to her creed. She had loved and suffered for a man who was not worthy to touch the hem of her garment, in his, Sir Arthur's, opinion;—but women, as he had before reflected, women had no sense of proportion; they were incomprehensible; Margaret no less incomprehensible than all the rest of her sex. He had reached this point in his reflections when he observed that the carriage was no longer bowling along the smooth high road, but had turned into a steep, and rather rough lane, which wound downwards between high hedges, that presently merged themselves into dense woods, ending abruptly at last in a small clearing, upon which stood a house surrounded by a wall. Before the green gate in this wall, the carriage stopped. Sir Arthur's keen eyes noted with approval, the quietly respectful manner of the old servant who admitted him; he had been more than half expecting to find himself in some kind of dread and unwonted Bohemia, the very thought of which sickened his soul; and Elizabeth, with that air of the old-fashioned maid, who has only lived in the right sort of house, impressed him favourably.
"My mistress wished me to take you straight to her room, sir," she said; "and the doctor asked me to say, that any great agitation would be very bad for her."