“You must not be hard on her, Graeme. You do not know her yet. She is not so wise as you are, perhaps, but she is a gentle, yielding little thing; and removed from her stepmother’s influence and placed under yours, she will become in time all that you could desire.”
She would have given much to be able to respond heartily and cheerfully to his appeal, but she could not. Her heart refused to dictate hopeful words, and her tongue could not have uttered them. She sat silent and grave while her brother was speaking, and when he ceased she hardly knew whether she were glad or not, to perceive that, absorbed in his own thoughts, he did not seem to notice her silence or miss her sympathy.
That night Graeme’s head pressed a sleepless pillow, and among her many, many thoughts there were few that were not sad. Her brother was her ideal of manly excellence and wisdom, and no exercise of charity on her part could make the bride that he had chosen seem other than weak, frivolous, vain. She shrank heartsick from the contemplation of the future, repeating rather in sorrow and wonder, than in anger, “How could he be so blind, so mad?” To her it was incomprehensible, that with his eyes open he could have placed his happiness in the keeping of one who had been brought up with no fear of God before her eyes—one whose highest wisdom did not go beyond a knowledge of the paltry fashions and fancies of the world. He might dream, of happiness now, but how sad would be the wakening.
If there rose in her heart a feeling of anger or jealousy against her brother’s choice, if ever there came a fear, that the love of years might come to seem of little worth beside the love of a day, it was not till afterwards. None of these mingled with the bitter sadness and compassion of that night. Her brother’s doubtful future, the mistake he had made, and the disappointment that must follow, the change that might be wrought in his character as they went on; all these came and went, chasing each other through her mind, till the power of thought was well nigh lost. It was a miserable night to her, but out of the chaos of doubts and fears and anxieties, she brought one clear intent, one firm determination. She repeated it to herself as she rose from her sister’s side in the dawn of the dreary autumn morning, she repeated it as part of her tearful prayer, entreating for wisdom and strength to keep the vow she vowed, that whatever changes or disappointments or sorrows might darken her brother’s future, he should find her love and trust unchanged for ever.
Chapter Twenty Eight.
Arthur Elliott was a young man of good intellect and superior acquirements, and he had ever been supposed to possess an average amount of penetration, and of that invaluable quality not always found in connection with superior intellect—common sense. He remembered his mother, and worshipped her memory. She had been a wise and earnest-minded woman, and one of God’s saints besides. Living for years in daily intercourse with his sister Graeme, he had learnt to admire in her the qualities that made her a daughter worthy of such a mother. Yet in the choice of one who was to be “till death did them part” more than sister and mother in one, the qualities which in them were his pride and delight, were made of no account. Flesh of his flesh, the keeper of his honour and his peace henceforth, the maker or marrer of his life’s happiness, be it long or short, was this pretty unformed, wayward child.
One who has made good use of long opportunity for observation, tells me that Arthur Elliott’s is by no means a singular case. Quite as often as otherwise, men of high intellectual and moral qualities link their lot with women who are far inferior to them in these respects; and not always unhappily. If, as sometimes happens, a woman lets her heart slip from her into the keeping of a man who is intellectually or morally her inferior, happiness is far more rarely the result. A woman, may, with such help as comes to her by chance, keep her solitary way through life content. But if love and marriage, or the ties of blood, have given her an arm on which she has a right to lean, a soul on whose guidance she has a right to trust, it is sad indeed if these fail her. For then she has no right to walk alone, no power to do so happily. Her intellectual and social life must grow together, or one must grow awry. What God has joined cannot be put asunder without suffering or loss.
But it is possible for a man to separate his intellectual life from the quiet routine of social duties and pleasures. It is not always necessary that he should have the sympathy of his housekeeper, or even of the mother of his children, in those higher pursuits and enjoyments, which is the true life. The rising doubt, whether the beloved one have eyes to see what is beautiful to him in nature and art, may come with a chill and a pang; the certain knowledge of her blindness must come with a shock of pain. But when the shudder of the chill and the shock of the pain are over, he finds himself in the place he used to occupy before a fair face smiled down on him from all high places, or a soft voice mingled with all harmonies to his entranced ear. He grows content in time with his old solitary place in the study, or with striving upward amid manly minds. When he returns to the quiet and comfort of his well-arranged home, the face that smiles opposite to him is none the less beautiful because it beams only for home pleasures and humble household successes. The voice that coos and murmurs to his baby in the cradle, that recounts as great events the little varieties of kitchen and parlour life, that tells of visits made and received, with items of harmless gossip gathered up and kept for his hearing, is none the less dear to him now that it can discourse of nothing beyond. The tender care that surrounds him with quiet and comfort in his hours of leisure, in a little while contents him quite, and he ceases to remember that he has cares and pains, aspirations and enjoyments, into which she can have no part.