Madonna Mary

by Mrs. Oliphant

“Ah, I have no doubt you know all about it,” said Mr. Penrose, turning his arms upon her. “You should have taken my advice. If you had come to Liverpool, as I wanted you, and married some steady-going fellow with plenty of money, and gone at a more reasonable pace, you would not have changed so much at your age. Look at Mary, how well preserved she is: I don’t know what you can have been doing with yourself to look so changed.”

“I am sorry you think me a fright,” said Winnie, with an angry sparkle in her eye.

“You are not a fright,” said Uncle Penrose; “one can see that you’ve been a very handsome woman, but you are not what you were when I saw you last, Winnie. The fault of your family is that you are extravagant,—I am sure you did not get it from your mother’s side;—extravagant of your money and your hospitality, and your looks and everything. I am sure Mary has nothing to spare, and yet I’ve found people living here for weeks together. I can’t afford visitors like that—I have my family to consider, and people that have real claims upon me—no more than I could afford to set up a museum. If I had a lot of curiosities thrown on my hands, I should make them into money. It is not everybody that can appreciate pictures, but everybody understands five per cent. And then he might have done something worth while for his brothers: not that I approve of a man impoverishing himself for the sake of his friends, but still two thousand pounds isn’t much. And he might have done something for his mother, or looked after Will’s education. It’s family pride, I suppose; but I’d rather give my mother a house of her own than set up an Ochterlony Museum. Tastes differ, you know.”

“His mother agrees with him entirely in everything he is doing,” said Mary, with natural resentment. “I wish all mothers had sons as good as mine.”

“Hush,” said Hugh, who was crimson with indignation and anger: “I decline to discuss these matters with Uncle Penrose. Because he is your uncle, mother, he shall inquire into the estates as much as he likes; but I am the head of the house, and I am responsible only to God and to those who are dead—and, mother, to you,” said Hugh, with his eyes glistening and his face glowing.

Uncle Penrose gave another contemptuous prolonged whistle at this speech, but the others looked at the young man with admiration and love; even Winnie, whose heart could still be touched, regarded the young paladin with a kind of tender envy and admiration. She was too young to be his mother, but she did not feel herself young; and her heart yearned to have some one who would stand by her and defend her as such a youth could. A world of softer possibilities than anything she would permit herself to think of now, came into her mind, and she looked at him. If she too had but been the mother of children like her sister! but it appeared that Mary was to have the best of it, always and in every way.

As for Will, he looked at the eldest son with very different feelings. Hugh was not particularly clever, and his brother had long entertained a certain contempt for him. He thought what he would have done had he been the head of the house. He was disposed to sneer, like Mr. Penrose, at the Ochterlony Museum. Was it not a confession of a mean mind, an acknowledgment of weakness, to consent to send away all the lovely things that made Will’s vision of Earlston like a vision of heaven? If it had been Will he would not have thought of five per cent., but neither would he have thought of making a collection of them at Dalken, where the country bumpkins might come and stare. He would have kept them all to himself, and they would have made his life beautiful. And he scorned Hugh for dispossessing himself of them, and reducing the Earlston rooms into rooms of ordinary habitation. Had they but been his—had he but been the eldest, the head of the house—then the world and the family and Uncle Penrose would have seen very different things.

But yet Hugh had character enough to stand firm. He made his mother get her bonnet and go out with him after dinner; and everybody in the house looked after the two as they went away—the mother and her firstborn—he, with his young head towering above her, though Mary was tall, and she putting her arm within his so proudly—not without a tender elation in his new importance, a sense of his superior place and independent rank, which was strangely sweet. Winnie looked after them, envying her sister, and yet with an envy which was not bitter; and Will stood and looked fiercely on this brother who, by no virtue of his own, had been born before him. As for Aunt Agatha, who was fond of them all, she went to her own room to heal her wounds; and Mr. Penrose, who was fond of none of them, went up to the Hall to talk things over with Sir Edward, whom he had once talked over to such purpose. And the only two who could stray down to the soft-flowing Kirtell, and listen to the melody of the woods and waters, and talk in concert of what they had wished and planned, were Mary and Hugh.

“The great thing to be settled is about Will,” the head of the house was saying. “You shall see, mother, when he is in the world and knows better, all that will blow away. His two thousand pounds is not much, as Uncle Penrose says; but it was all my father had: and when he wants it, and when Islay wants it, there can always be something added. It is my business to see to that.”

“It was all your father had,” said Mary, “and all your uncle intended; and I see no reason why you should add to it, Hugh. There will be a little more when I am gone; and in the meantime, if we only knew what Will would like to do——”