“I will not risk it, my dear,” said the doctor; “they are a pig-headed race, like all the partially educated. I wish there was a higher standard of education in our schools. Reading and writing are very well, but a little attention to the common phenomena of the elements would be a great matter—as I said to Mr. Tom the last time he was here—”
“Speaking of your brother Tom,” said Mrs. Murray briskly; “what is this I hear about Charlie? A second boy, and him not above two years and a-half married! My certy, but they’re losing no time; and I hope both doing well?”
“Oh yes,” said Marjory, with a shade of indifference stealing over her face; “people always do well in those circumstances, don’t they? Fancy our Charlie with a family of children about him! I think it spoils a young man. It makes them grand-fatherly—not to say grandmotherly—and knowing about domestic matters. Charlie, of all people in the world! but it cannot be helped, or put a stop to, I suppose?”
“Whisht, my dear, whisht; that’s a strange thing for a woman to say.”
“Is it?” said Marjory, with a sudden blush. “What I meant was that the thought of Charlie turned into an old wife—Charlie knowing all about nurseries, and what to give a baby when it has a cold—is so very queer. I don’t like it; Charlie was always my pet brother. Poor fellow! and he so far away!”
“I have no doubt he’s very happy—as he ought to be with a nice wife and two bonnie bairns,” said Mrs. Murray, a little annoyed at Marjory’s anti-matrimonial views; but this remark passed unnoticed in the doctor’s question about what she was reading, which changed the character of the conversation. Mrs. Murray was not booky, as she herself said; she was too old for anything but novels; and though she had great enjoyment of these on a wet afternoon, by the fireside, or when the doctor was busy with his sermon, she did not say much about them, and kept them in the background with a certain sense of weakness. Marjory, on the contrary, discussed her reading with some eagerness, while the old lady and little Milly cooed and whispered to each other in the background; the child’s fair hair pressed lovingly against the net border—white and softly plaited—of Mrs. Murray’s cap. And so long was the discussion carried on that Marjory at last sprang up suddenly and held out her hand in alarm to take leave, when the bell rang for the early dinner, which reminded her how time was passing.
“Aunt Jean will be waiting for us,” she cried, with a compunction which was quickened by the well-known tradition of punctuality which distinguished the Hay-Heriots.
“Well, well, my dear, it will do her no harm for once,” said Mrs. Murray, going to the door with the visitors, and opening it for them with her own hands. She came out to the step to see them on their way, while her husband stood behind. “Be sure you don’t sit too long with Miss Jean—for there’s a storm coming up, as the doctor says; and come soon back again,” said the old lady, smiling and waving her hand, while her cap-strings wantoned in front of her in the rising wind. “That lassie has strange notions,” she said, as she came in and shut the door. “I wish I saw her with a good man and bairns of her own.”
“She’s a fine girl,” said the doctor, turning along the passage to his dressing-room, to wash his hands before dinner. These words did not at all resemble in sense the other expression of applause, “a fine woman”—which they resemble in sound. Dr. Murray did not mean to imply that he found May “fine” in physical development—belle femme, as the French say, with a similar signification. He meant that she was delightful, charming, the best specimen he knew of everything a young woman should be.
We are obliged to confess, however, that it was with a somewhat undignified precipitation that the two sisters crossed the wide street to the dwelling-place of their old aunt. Miss Jean Hay-Heriot was grand-aunt to the younger generation. Her father, the Laird of Pitcomlie, was grandfather of the present Laird: but as she had been the youngest of her family, she was scarcely ten years older than her nephew. She had lived in this gabled house for five and forty years, since the time when, still a young woman, she had given up the world in disgust, after five or six years of wandering in places where lone ladies resort to—Bath, and Cheltenham, and Harrowgate—for in those days it had not become the custom to go abroad. Five and forty years! What a waste of time to look back upon, and what a monotonous, unfeatured expanse, May thought, who sometimes pondered over her old aunt’s fate as one chapter among many of the phenomena of feminine existence. But to Miss Jean this waste of years was not so unfeatured as to her young relative. There seemed no reason why she should not go on for ever in the same active yet tranquil way. From her window in the gable she superintended all that Comlie did, every stranger who came into it (they were not many), all the mild visiting that took place among the higher classes, and the family movements of the lower, quarrels, flirtations, marriages, catastrophes of all kinds. She was seated in this same window, when Marjory, a little flushed with haste, hurriedly gathering up her riding-habit, and finding it much in the way, became visible running over from the Manse, Milly close behind, with her long hair streaming. Miss Jean quietly smiled to herself, and prepared for tempest. It roused her up sometimes, and gave her a pleasant exhilaration, to get an opportunity of setting “that girl of Thomas’s” right.