Edgar followed his beautiful cousin to the house with pitying eyes. He did not want her to marry Harry Thornleigh, but even to marry Harry Thornleigh, though she did not love him, seemed less degrading than to hang upon the smile, the careless whistle to his hand, of a man so inferior to her. I don’t know if, in reality, Willie was inferior to Margaret. She, for one, would have been quite satisfied with him; but great beauty creates an atmosphere about it which dazzles the beholder. It was not fit, Edgar felt, in spite of himself, that a woman so lovely should thus be thrown away.
As this is but an episode in my story, I may here follow Margaret’s uncomfortable wooing to its end. Poor Harry, tantalized and driven desperate by a letter, which seemed, to Margaret, the most gently temporising in the world, and which was intended to keep him from despair, and to retain her hold upon him until Willie’s purposes were fully manifested, at last made his appearance at Loch Arroch Head, where she was paying the Campbells a visit, on the day after Edgar left the loch. He came determined to hear his fate decided one way or another, almost ill with the excitement in which he had been kept, wilder than ever in the sudden passion which had seized upon him like an evil spirit. He met her, on his unexpected arrival, walking with Willie, who, having nothing else to do, did not object to amuse his leisure with his beautiful cousin, whose devotion to him, I fear, he knew. Poor Margaret! I know her behaviour was ignoble, but I regret—as I have confessed to the reader—that she did not become the great lady she might have been; and, notwithstanding that Edgar’s position would have been deeply complicated thereby, I wish the field had been left clear for Harry Thornleigh, who would have made her a good enough husband, and to whom she would have made, in the end, a very sweet wife. Forgive me, young romancist, I cannot help this regret. Even at that moment Margaret did not want to lose her young English Squire, and her friends were so far from wanting to lose him that Harry, driven to dire disgust, hated them ever after with a strenuous hatred, which he transferred to their nation generally, not knowing any better. He lingered for a day or more, waiting for the answer which Margaret was unwilling to give, and tortured by Willie, who, seeing the state of affairs, felt his vanity involved, and was more and more loverlike to his cousin. The issue was that Harry rushed away at last half mad, and went abroad, and wasted his substance more than he had ever done up to that moment, damaged his reputation, and encumbered his patrimony, and fell into that state of cynical disbelief in everybody, which, bad as are its effects even upon the cleverest and brightest intelligence, has a worse influence still upon the stupid, to whom there is no possibility of escape from its withering power.
When Harry was fairly off the scene, his rival slackened in his attentions; and after a while Margaret returned to her brother, and they did their best to retrieve their standing at Tottenham’s, and to make the position of the doctor’s family at Harbour Green a pleasant one. But Lady Mary, superior to ordinary prejudices as she was, was not so superior as to be altogether just to Margaret, who, though she deserved blame, got more blame than she deserved. The Thornleighs all believed that she had “laid herself out” to “entrap” Harry—which was not the case; and Lady Mary looked coldly upon the woman who had permitted herself to be loved by a man so far above her sphere. And then Lady Mary disliked the doctor, who never could think even of the most interesting “case” so much as to be indifferent to what people were thinking of himself. So Harbour Green proved unsuccessful, as their other experiments had proved, and the brother and sister drifted off again into the world, where they drift still, from place to place, always needy, anxious, afraid of their gentility, yet with that link of fraternal love between them, and with that toleration of each other and mutual support, which gives a certain beauty, wherever they go, to the family group formed by this handsome brother and sister, and the beautiful child, whom her uncle cherishes almost as dearly as her mother does.
Ah, me! if Margaret had made that “good match,” though it was not all for love, would it not have been better for everybody concerned?
CHAPTER XXII.
Another Winding-up.
I hope it will not give the reader a poor idea of Edgar’s heart if I say that it was with a relief which it was impossible to exaggerate that he felt the last dreary day of darkness pass, and was liberated from his melancholy duties. This did not affect his sorrow for the noble old woman who had made him at once her confidant and her inheritor—inheritor not of land or wealth, but of something more subtle and less tangible. But indeed for her there was no sorrow needed. Out of perennial disappointments she had gone to her kind, to those with whom she could no longer be disappointed. Heaven had been “but a step” to her, which she took smiling. For her the hearse, the black funeral, the nodding plumes, were inappropriate enough; but they pleased the family, of whom it never could be said by any detractor that they had not paid to their mother “every respect.”
Edgar felt that his connection with them was over for ever when he took leave of them on the evening of the funeral. The only one over whom his heart yearned a little was Jeanie, who was the true mourner of the only mother she had ever known, but who, in the midst of her mourning, poor child, felt another pang, perhaps more exquisite, at the thought of seeing him, too, no more. All the confusion of sentiment and feeling, of misplaced loves and indifferences, which make up the world were in this one little family. Jeanie had given her visionary child’s heart to Edgar, who, half aware of, half disowning the gift, thought of her ever with tender sympathy and reverence, as of something sacred. Margaret, less exquisite in her sentiments, yet a loving soul in her way, had given hers to Willie, who was vain of her preference, and laughed at it—who felt himself a finer fellow, and she a smaller creature because she loved him. Dr. Charles, uneasy soul, would have given his head had he dared to marry Jeanie, yet would not, even had she cared for him, have ventured to burden his tottering gentility with a wife so homely.
Thus all were astray from the end which might have made each a nobler and certainly a happier creature. Edgar never put these thoughts into words, for he was too chivalrous a man even to allow to himself that a woman had given her heart to him unsought; but the complications of which he was conscious filled him with a vague pang—as the larger complications of the world—that clash of interests, those broken threads, that never meet, those fulnesses and needinesses, which never can be brought to bear upon each other—perplex and pain the spectator. He was glad, as we all are, to escape from them; and when he reached London, where his love was, and where, the first thing he found on his arrival was the announcement of his appointment, his heart rose with a sudden leap, spurning the troubles of the past, in elastic revulsion. He had his little fortune again, not much, at any time, but yet something, which Gussy could hang at her girdle, and his old mother’s watch for her, quaint, but precious possession. He was scarcely anxious as to his reception, though she had written him but one brief note since his absence; for Edgar was himself so absolutely true that it did not come into his heart that he could be doubted. But he could not go to Gussy at once, even on his arrival. Another and a less pleasant task remained for him. He had to meet his sister at the hotel she had gone to, and be present at the clandestine marriage—for it was no better—which was at last to unite legally the lives of Arthur Arden and Clare.
Clare had arrived in town the evening before. He found her waiting for him, in her black dress, her children by her, in black also. She was still as pale as when he left her at Arden, but she received him with more cordiality than she had shown when parting with him. There was something in her eyes which alarmed him—an occasional vagueness, almost wildness.
“We did wrong, Edgar,” she said, when the children were sent away, and they were left together—“we did wrong.”