And he smiled, and took both her hands, and kissed her on the forehead, a salutation which made little Scotch Jeanie—little used to such caresses—flame crimson with shame. Charles Murray looked on with sullen fury. He dared not do as much. This way of saying farewell was not cousinly or brotherly to him.
CHAPTER VIII.
A Railway Journey: The Scotch Express.
The two young men set out together from Loch Arroch. The old lady whose children they both were, waved her handkerchief to them from her window as the steamer rustled down the loch, and round the windy corner of the stubble field into Loch Long. They stood on the deck, and gazed at the quiet scene they were leaving till the farmhouse and the ruin died out of sight. How peaceful it all looked in the bright but watery sunshine! The ivy waving softly from the walls of the ruin, the smoke rising blue from the roof of the farmhouse, which nestled under the shadow of the old castle, the stooks standing in the pale field glistening with morning dew. Bell stood at the door in her short petticoats, shading her eyes with one hand as she watched them, and old Mrs. Murray showed a smiling, mournful face at her window, and the long branches of the fuchsias waved and made salutations with all their crimson bells. Even Bell’s shadow had a distinct importance in the scene, which was so still—still as the rural country is between mountain and water, with mysterious shadows flitting in the silence, and strange ripples upon the beach. The scene was still more sweet from the shore, though not so entirely enveloped in this peaceable habitual calm; for great Benvohrlan was kept in constant life with moving clouds which crossed the sunshine; and the eyes of the spectators on the land did not disdain the bright, many-coloured boat, floating, as it seemed, between three elements—the water, the mountain, and the sky. The shadow-ship floated over the side of the shadow-hill among all the reflected shades; it floated double like the swan on St. Mary’s Lake, and it was hard to tell which was the reality and which the symbol. Such were the variations of the scene from the loch and from the shore.
But though Bell was visible and Bell’s mistress, Jeanie was not to be seen. She had disappeared within the ruins of the Castle, and watched the boat from behind an old block of masonry, with eyes full of longing and sadness. Why had she been so harsh, so hard? Why had she not parted with him “friends?” What did it matter what he said, so long as he said that he looked upon her as an elder brother? Was it not better to be Edgar’s sister than any other man’s beloved? She cried, reflecting sadly that she had not been so kind, so gentle as she ought to this man who was so unlike all others. Like an elder brother—what more could she wish for? Thus poor little Jeanie began to dree her fate.
The day was fine, notwithstanding the prophecy of “saft weather” with which all the observers of sea and sky in the West of Scotland keep up their character as weather prophets as Edgar and Charles Murray travelled to Edinburgh. There was no subject of quarrel between them, therefore they did not quarrel; indeed Edgar, for his part, was amused, when he was not pained, by his cousin’s perpetual self-consciousness and painful desire to keep up his profession of gentleman, and conduct himself in all details of behaviour as a gentleman should. The young Doctor nervously unbuttoned his over-coat, which was much more spruce and glossy than Edgar’s, when he observed that his companion, never a model of neatness or order, wore his loose. He looked with nervous observation at Edgar’s portmanteau, at the shape and size of his umbrella. Edgar had lived in the great world; he had been (or so at least his cousin thought) fashionable; therefore Dr. Charles gave a painful regard to all the minutiæ of his appearance. Thus a trim poor girl might copy a tawdry duchess, knowing no better—might, but seldom does, having a better instinct. But if any one had breathed into Charles Murray’s ear a suggestion of what he was consciously (yet almost against his will) doing, he would have forgiven an accusation of crime more readily. He knew his own weakness, and the knowledge made him wretched; but had any one else suspected it, that would have been the height of insult, and would have roused him to desperate passion.
Thus they travelled together, holding but little communication. The young Doctor’s destination was one of the smaller stations before they reached Edinburgh, where Edgar saw, as the train approached, a graceful young woman, with that air of refinement which a slim and tall figure gives, but too far off to be recognizable, accompanied by a little girl—waiting by the roadside in a little open carriage, half phaeton, half gig.
“Is that your sister?” he asked, taking off his hat, as the lady waved her hand towards them.
“Yes,” said Dr. Charles, shortly, and he added, in his usual tone of apology, “a doctor can do nothing without a conveyance, and as I had to get one, and Margaret is so delicate, it was better to have something in which she could drive with me.”
“Surely,” said Edgar, with some wonder at the appealing tone in which this half statement, half question was made. But a little sigh came from his heart, against his will, as he saw Charles Murray’s welcome, and felt himself rolled away into the cold, into the unknown, without any one to bear him company. He too had once had, or thought he had, a sister, and enjoyed for a short time that close, tender, and familiar friendship which only can exist between a young man and woman when they are thus closely related. Edgar, who was foolishly soft-hearted, had gone about the world ever since, missing this, without knowing what it was he missed. He was fond of the society of women, and he had been shut out from it; for he neither wished to marry, nor was rich enough so to indulge himself, and people with daughters, as he found, were not so anxious to invite a poor man, nor so complacent towards him as they had been when he was rich. To be sure he had met women as he had met men at the foreign towns which he had chiefly frequented during the aimless years just past; but these were chiefly old campaigners, with all the freshness dried out of them, ground down into the utmost narrowness of limit in which the mind is capable of being restrained, or else at the opposite extreme, liberated in an alarming way from all the decorums and prejudices of life. Neither of these classes were attractive, though they amused him, each in its way.
But somehow the sight of his two cousins, brother and sister, gave him a pang which was all the sharper for being entirely unexpected. It made him feel his own forlornness and solitude, how cut off he was from all human solace and companionship. Into his ancient surroundings he could not return; and his present family, the only one which he had any claim upon, was distasteful beyond description. Even his grandmother and Jeanie, whom he had known longest, and with whom he felt a certain sympathy, were people so entirely out of his sphere, that his intercourse with them never could be easy nor carried on on equal terms. He admired Mrs. Murray’s noble character, and was proud to have been able to stand by her against her sordid relations; he even loved her in a way, but did not, could not adopt the ways of thinking, the manners and forms of existence, which were natural and seemly in the little farm-house.