“Ah, my dear friend!” said Mrs. Kirkman, and she bent her head forward pathetically to Mrs. Ochterlony’s, and shook it in her face, and kissed her, “if one could always feel ones’ self justified in leaving it in the hands of the clergyman! But you are suffering, and I will say no more to-day.”
And Miss Sorbette, too, made a pretence of having something very absorbing to say to Mrs. Ochterlony; and the exit of the visitors was made in a kind of scuffle very different from their dignified entrance. They had to walk back to the station in the heat of the afternoon, and to sit there in the dusty waiting-room an hour and a half waiting for the train. Seldom is justice so promptly or poetically executed. And they took to upbraiding each other, as was natural, and Emma Askell cried, and said it was not her fault. And the new Captain’s wife asked audibly, if that was the Madonna Mary the gentlemen talked about, and the house that was so pleasant? Perhaps the three ladies in the Cottage did not feel much happier; Aunt Agatha rose up tremblingly when they were gone, and went to Winnie and kissed her. “Oh, what does it all mean?” Miss Seton cried. It was the first time she had seen any one belonging to her pointed at by the finger of scorn.
“It means that Mary’s friends don’t approve of me,” said Winnie; but her lip quivered as she spoke. She did not care! But yet she was a woman, and she did care, whatever she might say.
And then Mary, too, came and kissed her sister. “My poor Winnie!” she said, tenderly. She could not be her sister’s partizan out and out, like Aunt Agatha. Her heart was sore for what she knew, and for what she did not know; but she could not forsake her own flesh and blood. The inquisition of Uncle Penrose and Sir Edward was a very small matter indeed in comparison with this woman’s insult, but yet it drew Winnie imperceptibly closer to her only remaining friends.
CHAPTER XXXII.
T was not likely that Will, who had speculated so much on the family history, should remain unmoved by all these changes. His intellect was very lively, and well developed, and his conscience was to a great extent dormant. If he had been in the way of seeing, or being tempted into actual vices, no doubt the lad’s education would have served him in better stead, and his moral sense would have been awakened. But he had been injured in his finer moral perceptions by a very common and very unsuspected agency. He had been in the way of hearing very small offences indeed made into sins. Aunt Agatha had been almost as hard upon him forgetting a text as if he had told a lie—and his tutor, the curate, had treated a false quantity, or a failure of memory, as a moral offence. That was in days long past, and it was Wilfrid now who found out his curate in false quantities, and scorned him accordingly; and who had discovered that Aunt Agatha herself, if she remembered the text, knew very little about it. This system of making sins out of trifles had passed quite harmlessly over Hugh and Islay; but Wilfrid’s was the exceptional mind to which it did serious harm. And the more he discovered that the sins of his childhood were not sins, the more confused did his mind become, and the more dull his conscience, as to those sins of thought and feeling, which were the only ones at present into which he was tempted. What had any one to do with the complexion of his thoughts? If he felt one way or another, what matter was it to any one but himself? Other people might dissemble and take credit for the emotions approved of by public opinion, but he would be true and genuine. And accordingly he did not see why he should pretend to be pleased at Hugh’s advancement. He was not pleased. He said to himself that it went against all the rules of natural justice. Hugh was no better than he; on the contrary, he was less clever, less capable of mental exertion, which, so far as Will knew, was the only standard of superiority; and yet he was Mr. Ochterlony of Earlston, with a house and estate, with affairs to manage, and tenants to influence, and the Psyche and the Venus to do what he liked with: whereas Will was nobody, and was to have two thousand pounds for all his inheritance. He had been talking, too, a great deal to Mr. Penrose, and that had not done him any good; for Uncle Penrose’s view was that nothing should stand in the way of acquiring money or other wealth—nothing but the actual law. To do anything dishonest, that could be punished, was of course pure insanity—not to say crime; but to let any sort of false honour, or pride, or delicacy stand between you and the acquisition of money was almost as great insanity, according to his ideas. “Go into business and keep at it, and you may buy him up—him and his beggarly estate”—had been Uncle Penrose’s generous suggestion; and it was a good deal in Wilfrid’s mind. To be sure it was quite opposed to the intellectual tendency which led him to quite a different class of pursuits. But what was chiefly before him in the meantime was Hugh, preferred to so much distinction, and honour, and glory; and yet if the truth were known, a very stupid fellow in comparison with himself—Will. And it was not only that he was Mr. Ochterlony of Earlston. He was first with everybody. Sir Edward, who took but little notice of Will, actually consulted Hugh, and he was the first to be thought of in any question that occurred in the Cottage; and, what went deepest of all, Nelly—Nelly Askell whom Will had appropriated, not as his love, for his mind had not as yet opened to that idea, but as his sympathizer-in-chief—the listener to all his complaints and speculations—his audience whom nobody had any right to take from him—Nelly had gone over to his brother’s side. And the idea of going into business, even at the cost of abandoning all his favourite studies, and sticking close to it, and buying him up—him and his beggarly estate—was a good deal at this moment in Wilfrid’s thoughts. Even the new-comer, Winnie, who might if she pleased have won him to herself, had preferred Hugh. So that he was alone on his side, and everybody was on his brother’s—a position which often confuses right and wrong, even to minds least set upon their own will and way.
He was sauntering on Kirtell banks a few days after the visit above recorded, in an unusually uncomfortable state of mind. Mrs. Askell had felt great compunction about her share in that event, and she had sent Nelly, who was known to be a favourite at the cottage, with a very anxious letter, assuring her dear Madonna that it was not her fault. Mary had not received the letter with much favour, but she had welcomed Nelly warmly; and Hugh had found means to occupy her attention; and Will, who saw no place for him, had wandered out, slightly sulky, to Kirtell-side. He was free to come and go as he liked. Nobody there had any particular need of him; and a solitary walk is not a particularly enlivening performance when one has left an entire household occupied and animated behind. As he wound his way down the bank he saw another passenger on the road before him, who was not of a description of man much known on Kirtell-side. It seemed to Will that he had seen this figure somewhere before. It must be one of the regiment, one of the gentlemen of whom the Cottage was a little jealous, and who were thought to seek occasions of visiting Kirtell oftener than politeness required. As Will went on, however, he saw that the stranger was somebody whom he had never seen before, and curiosity was a lively faculty in him, and readily awakened. Neither was the unknown indifferent to Will’s appearance or approach; on the contrary, he turned round at the sound of the youth’s step and scrutinized him closely, and lingered that he might be overtaken. He was tall, and a handsome man, still young, and with an air which only much traffic with the world confers. No man could have got that look and aspect who had lived all his life on Kirtell; and even Will, inexperienced as he was, could recognise this. It did not occur to him, quick as his intellect was at putting things together, who it was; but a little expectation awoke in his mind as he quickened his steps to overtake the stranger, who was clearly waiting to be overtaken.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, as soon as Wilfrid had come up to him; “are you young Ochterlony? I mean, one of the young Ochterlonys?”
“No,” said Will, “and yet yes; I am not young Ochterlony, but I am one of the young Ochterlonys, as you say.”