“I don’t know,” said the young man, laughing and shrugging his shoulders. “Seriously, do you think it’s worth the while? I am more than half way, and it has not been so delightful. No; a short life and a merry one must be the best.”
“That was poor Tom’s idea,” said Mr. Charles, with the look of a man who is improving the occasion.
His own feeling was that no sermon could have pointed a sharper moral. At the sound of Tom’s name, little Milly began to cry; not that she knew very much of Tom, but the vague pain and sorrow which filled the house had made his name the emblem of everything that was melancholy and grievous to her. Milly’s tears gave the last aggravation to Fanshawe’s impatience.
“Poor Tom!” he cried; “he had a merry life. Better thirty years of that than a long, dull blank, with nothing particular in it. He thought so, and so should I. I don’t like—forgive me for saying so—to think of poor Heriot as a warning. On the whole, I should not object to the same sort of end. Better that than to drink the cup to the dregs—”
“As I am doing, you mean,” said Mr. Charles.
“No, indeed—far from that. As I should do, if such were to be my fate. It depends, I suppose, upon the groove one gets into,” said Fanshawe, with a short, uneasy laugh.
And then he began to talk hurriedly to Milly about the chances of a voyage to the May.
“I do not understand that young man,” said Mr. Charles, privately, to Marjory. “May, my dear, you must try your hand. There is good about him. If there had not been good about him, he would never have done what he did for Tom. But he thinks Pitcomlie dull, and he thinks a long life undesirable. I should like to understand the lad; and as we all have cause to be grateful to him, I wish you would try your hand.”
“If you wish it, uncle,” said Marjory.
This was in the silence of the evening, when she sat by the window, looking out at the flush of sunset which still dyed all the western sky, and lit up the Firth with crimson and gold. Milly stood close by her, with an arm round her neck. The child had said her hymn, and discharged all her Sunday duties. She was vaguely sad, because the others were sad—yet satisfied in that she had fulfilled all personal requirements; and over Marjory, too, a sense of quiet had stolen. The dead were in their graves and at rest; the living remained, with work, and tears, and dying all before them. She talked softly to Uncle Charles as the sunset lights faded, feeling an indescribable quiet come over her mind as the twilight came over the earth. Only Mr. Heriot sat alone in the library, with his head bent on his breast, doing nothing, reading nothing; thinking over the same thoughts for hours together. The old father felt that he had come to an end; but for the others it was not so: the pause in their lives was over, and existence had begun again.