May; vol. I

by Mrs. Oliphant

There is nothing in the world so sad as thus to open some human creature’s most cherished repositories, when the poor soul is gone, and can guard his foolishness no more. How trivial half the things are! a fourth part of them, at least, thrown there in that light-hearted inadvertence which death makes to appear like a solemn intention, puzzling the survivors with its want of meaning. Why did he keep this or that? an unimportant invitation, a letter about nothing at all, an empty envelope, a memorandum about a race, a receipt for physic for a horse. What a curious mixture of awe and astonishment was in her as she gathered them together! They were good for nothing but the waste-basket; and yet the fact that Tom had treasured them gave the worthless scraps an interest. She cleared away a mass of these remains of his life. There is a little hill near Rome which is made, they say, of fragments of crockery, and such other valueless relics of an ended existence; but ah me! when one remembers what sacred spot lies there under the cypress, in the shadow of Testaccio, how solemn and sacred does that mound of classic rubbish become to us! Something of the same effect was wrought upon Marjory by the sight of poor Tom’s rubbish, now that death had made it mysterious. She tried hard to get some meaning out of it, and failing in that, put it aside in a pile, with a certainty that it must be her perceptions which were in fault. Was there nothing to be found but these miserable débris, that had so little signification? There were bills besides, and letters about bills; letters which Marjory knew would be very little welcome to her father. How was she to tell him of them? Tom, poor fellow, had become as a god, as an angel to his father, since his life ended; and to plunge him back again into the old atmosphere of debt and promises to pay—how miserable it would be! She made these too up into a parcel by themselves with a sense of humiliation. Was this all that was left of Tom? His bills; and those frivolous scraps that meant nothing—that had no human value, that threw no light upon his existence. Was it worth while for a man to have been born, to have lived and died, for nothing better than that? Marjory felt that even ill-doing would have been better than no doing at all; and grew scornful almost of her own fears. She had felt as if she were about to thrust herself into Tom’s secrets—and lo! Tom had no secrets at all.

These thoughts were in her mind, filling her with a kind of angry shame, when she picked up, out of a corner, a letter, badly folded and badly written; but put away, it was evident, with some care. It had no envelope or address. The paper was very finely glazed and gilt-edged; but it was folded awry, and the handwriting was quite unformed. “No doubt a letter from his groom,” Marjory said to herself, with a painful sense of the unsatisfactory character of Tom’s correspondences; but when she had read the first few lines, her countenance changed. She paused—she looked at the signature. A momentary look of haughty displeasure and disgust crossed her face, and she let the letter drop, as if with the intention of tossing it from her; but on second thoughts she changed her mind. She lifted it once more gingerly, as if it were something which might stain the white fingers in which she held it, and with a deep and painful blush began again to read. I do not think there was anything in the letter to call that blush to Marjory’s cheek; but she had the same prejudices as other women, and was deeply susceptible to everything that felt like shame. The writing was not absolutely coarse—it was like the writing of a child, unformed and uncertain, written upon ruled lines, which had been partially rubbed out; but the sentiments were not those of a child. This was what, with a proud sense of humiliation, keen disgust and indignation, Marjory read—all her natural prejudices starting into warmest life.

“I cannot write to you in the way you tell me—I would think shame. Oh, Sir, you must not expect much from a poor lass that never has learned anything, till I tried to do it, to please you. There is nothing I would not do to please you. Ye’ve been very kind to me, Mr. Heriot, like a good man. And, eh! I hope I’ll make a good wife, if I could but learn quicker, no to be a shame to you. Sorry, sorry I am that I did not take more advantage of the schule as I might have done—for, oh! Mr. Heriot, them that say ‘your face is your fortune,’ say little that is pleasant to hear. When I think whiles that it’s but for my face ye fancied me; and that, maybe, if any accident happened—if I lost my colour, or my teeth, or what not, ye would think of me nae mair! Oh, Sir, dinna be like that! If you were blind and cripplit, and pock-markit, like old John in the clachan, I would but think the more of you. And you that are a gentleman, Mr. Heriot, and know everything, you should not be less than poor me; for although I am little to set store by, and no a scholar, nor instructed, I’m better than my face, which is just a bit of painted flesh, as the Minister says. If I thought you cared for me, and no just it—oh, but I would be happy! I have a great deal to say, but I cannot tell how to say it. I am feared for making you think me more ignorant than ever. My heart’s full, full; but I think shame to say all that’s in it; you know, Sir, better than I can tell you. When will you come back? oh! when will ye come back? I’m weary of wishing and wishing. My sister Agnes will not go to her place, thinking ye might not like it. John Ogilvy, my first cousin, the son of Uncle John, that is the smith, is away to the College to learn to be a Minister. I do not mind anything else you would like to hear; but that I’m wearying, wearying sore, and aye, the longer the time is, the mair wearying to see my” (here there were a great many erasures—one word written over another till it was impossible to make out what they had been—until it finished in the clearly written words) “my Mr. Heriot again.

“Your ain and your very ain, oh dear, dear Sir,

“Isabell.”

Marjory read this innocent and natural letter with a buzzing of excited pulses in her ears, and a blaze of hot colour in her face. The mere fact that it was a letter from a woman moved her (naturally) as no other kind of secret could have done. Indeed what other kind of secret would have been worth considering in comparison? She drew a long breath when she had read it. Her face was scarlet, as if the shame (if shame there was) had been her own. And it was hardly possible for her, at least for the first moment, to realise that there might be no shame in it. To have felt so, would have been such a triumph over prejudice and over natural feeling as Marjory was not equal to. The bad writing, the bad spelling, the peasant dialect, struck her more strongly than the sentiments did. They seemed to imply vice—vice which to a young and pure-minded woman is the same as crime—nay, is the worst kind of crime. There was then, after all, a mystery in Tom’s life, and here it was; a vulgar degrading mystery—the kind of horror which people say is so common in the lives of young men, a suggestion which Marjory loathed as every woman ought to loath it. It filled her with disgust of Tom and of all men.

She threw the paper out of her hand with a cry of indignant wrath, and then slowly, reluctantly, took it up again, unable to resist the fascination. The second time a different impression was made upon her mind. “I’ll make a good wife”—what did that mean? Marjory pondered over it with excitement, which was not calmed down by this new discovery. Had he really meant—was it possible he could have intended to make the writer of this letter his wife? His sister thrilled all over with an indignant movement of horror, Yes, I do not know how to excuse it—but Marjory, who had been blazing hot with shame at the idea of a disreputable connection on her brother’s part, felt a shiver of horror go over her at the thought that there might be no shame in it, that his mind might be honourable and his love pure, that he might have intended this woman, this peasant, this Isabell, to be her sister and his wife. Her eyes fixed on those words with a painful stare. “Good heavens, his wife!” and under her breath, in her throat, Marjory murmured, “Thank God!” Thank God for what? that Tom was dead? that he had not lived to carry that intention out? was this what she meant? She stopped short in absolute dismay, when her reason perceived to what length instinct and impulse had carried her.

She hid her burning face in her hands. She fell a-weeping; tears more poignant and real than any she had yet shed for Tom. Her mind turned against itself, lost in that misery of moral confusion which makes the problem of life so doubly bitter. She dared not say to herself that the least honourable explanation was the least terrible; but her thoughts went on in spite of her, against her will, shaping before her a picture of what might have been. This peasant woman in Pitcomlie, mistress of everything, the successor of all the Heriot ladies, filling her own mother’s place, Marjory’s sister, Milly’s guardian placed on the same level with them, almost superior to them—good heavens! She disowned the thoughts that thus struggled in her. She tried to drive them from her mind, to ignore them, to introduce other feelings in their place, and cried, and hid her face and could not. God had stepped in and preserved the house from this degradation; He had saved them perhaps at the last moment. And things being as they were, and poor Tom doomed anyhow, God be thanked, might not she say it? deep down where nobody could hear, in the depths of her heart.

Marjory was breathless after this battle with her thoughts; she dragged herself out of it she scarcely knew how, frightened to think what she had been thinking, scared as a man is who has travelled in the dark, when morning shows him the precipices he has passed—or like a drowning man who has been struggling with the angry waves, she crept forth upon dry land, and lay there exhausted, trying not to think, hearing the great searollers break beneath, too low to harm her. It seemed to her that she had passed through a terrible conflict, and it made her heart sick to think that this perhaps was the secret which Tom had intended to tell her. Perhaps he had meant to commend the girl to her care, to claim her affection and sympathy; and for the moment she felt fiercely glad that he had not done so, that she was bound by no sort of visible or invisible tie to this unknown Isabell. Yes, she was glad he had not lived to tell that secret, glad he had been stopped from disgracing the family. It hardly seemed to her, for the moment, that the exemption of the house from so great a shame and injury by Tom’s death, was too great a thing to have been done by Providence for the sake of the Heriots. She seemed no longer sorry, no longer a mourner, but glad and comforted to think that God had stepped in and stopped it, perhaps, at the last moment when there was no time to lose.