She gazed at him with round eyes of amazement.
"What is a writer? Well, I always said you were an innocent young man—I was aye sure there would be nothing in it—but you must ken very little indeed, sir, if you have never come across a writer. He's just a—well, maybe sometimes a terror to evil-doers, I would not say—but a great fyke and trouble mony a time to them that do well. He is one that will gather in the siller that's owin' ye, that ye canna get yoursel', and pretend it's a' for your gude, syne take his percentage and his profit, till there's more of it gangs into his pocket than yours. He is one that——"
"I see—a lawyer of some sort. You thought I was perhaps running away from my creditors," Lewis said, with a laugh.
Janet gave him a guilty glance. "Mony a grand gentleman has done that, and lived to pay them a' to the last farden, and never been a preen the waur."
Lewis laughed till all the attendant children, who had been looking on, waiting for the penny promised them for intimating his approach, laughed too in sympathy.
"I owe you more than I owe anybody else," he said; "but we'll talk of that after dinner, for I'm famishing now."
[CHAPTER XV.]
Lewis woke up next morning a different man. His light-hearted youth and easy views had gone from him. The musings of the night had only showed him the position in which he was, without showing him any way out of it. He had all but pledged himself to one woman, placed himself at her disposal; and his heart had gone out to another. He felt that life would not be worth living, nor the world have any charm for him, unless he could secure Lilias as the companion of his existence. Yet at the same time he recognized that it was the sister of Lilias to whom so lightly, thinking, as it now seemed, nothing of it, he had offered that life as he might have offered a flower. Was there ever a more terrible dilemma for a young man? And he had not found it out at first. It had not been till the terrible prose of the minister set the case fully before him that he had recognized the complication which was so novel, so strange, yet to him so overwhelming. Love! how could he love this creature whom he had seen but once, of whom he knew nothing. But even to ask that question seemed a sort of blasphemy against her, against the strange and potent sweetness of his own emotion. Knew nothing! he knew everything; he knew her, the wonder of creation! To see her was enough. What doubt, what hesitation was possible? "There is none like her, none;" he was as much convinced of that as if he had watched all her ways for years. And to think that he had not had the patience to wait, or any instinct to tell him that she was here! This was the strange, the incomprehensible thing. It was a fatality. So it had been ordained in Greek plays and uncompromising tragedy. That everything which was sweetest should come too late—that one should be on the very verge of the loveliest road to Paradise, and all unawares should choose another which led a different way.
Lewis awoke to a sense, no longer of a world enhanced, and made infinitely sweeter and fairer, by the presence in it of a creature more beautiful and delightful than he had ever before dreamt of, but of a universe which had gone suddenly out of joint, where the possibilities of blessedness were counteracted by malign influences, and fate took pleasure in turning happiness into trouble: one way and another the calmly smiling day, the happy commonplace, the matter-of-course existence had come to an end for him. It was very summary and very complete. He looked back for a few days, and thought how easily he had made up his mind about Miss Jean, how calmly he had determined to make her a present of his existence, with a kind of horror. In reality it had been a very small part of his existence which he had resolved to give up to her: but this he did not recollect in the excitement of his thoughts. He had meant to live as he pleased, always returning between whiles to the kind, elderly, indulgent wife who, he felt sure, would require no more of him; but this now seemed a sort of blasphemy to him, a travesty of the life which a man should wish to live with the true mate and companion who would share his every thought. He rejected his former thoughts with a self-disgust that was full of anger. It was odious to him to know that he had been capable of so thinking. All that had altered in a moment; not with the first sight of love, and what it was, in the person of Lilias, but with the first clear perception that this fair creature was some one's destined bride, but not his. In the irony of fate not his; revealed to him only after it was too late, after he had mortgaged his existence and bound himself to a world so much pettier and poorer than that of which she held the key.