This was a very offensive speech to the amiable peacemaker. In the first place, of itself, that “Johnnie” made an end of him from the beginning. Of all names to apply to an aspiring young man intending to assume an elevated position, and feeling himself a person of influence, it is, perhaps, the cruellest title. Marjory smiled in spite of herself, protected by the darkness; and Mr. Charles—for he it was who made up the party, repeated that “humph!” which had broken in so disagreeably before.
“Don’t sit in the corner and hum, hum, like that!” said Miss Jean promptly; “if you have a cold, Charlie, go to your bed, and be taken care of; but I cannot bide a hoasting man. We’re all in a hum, hum sort of way, Johnnie Hepburn. Go away quick and change your clothes, and come back to your dinner; we’ll be more amiable then; but come quick, for the fish will spoil; and Jess’s temper is none of the best. Lord preserve us all!” said Miss Jean, turning upon her companions with her hand uplifted, when he was gone. “That woman’s turned the laddie’s head, the first time he’s seen her! Now that’s the old-fashioned way that used to be in my day; and I respect the lad!”
“You ought to respect the lady,” said Marjory. She was amused; but yet not altogether amused. Johnnie Hepburn, for whom in himself she had a sort of elderly sisterly regard, had been her slave since ever she could remember. He had teased Marjory, and been very troublesome to her on many occasions; but he had worshipped her at all times, never thinking of any other woman. Miss Heriot was very much inclined to laugh at his championship of Mrs. Charles; but her amusement was mingled with a surprise which, perhaps, was not altogether agreeable. She had seldom been more startled; and when he came back to dinner, and the lamplight showed his youthful countenance considerably flushed with haste, or emotion of some kind, the wonder grew. The half-pique of which she was conscious, and which amused her too in its way, made Marjory somewhat satirical. “So you found Mrs. Charles very nice?” she said, when they were at table, looking up with a twinkle of laughter, which had been long absent from them, in her eyes.
“Nice?” said Hepburn, with hesitation. “Well, I do not know if that is the word I would use. It is touching to see a woman in her circumstances, so young and so——. She is very delicate, I think.”
“She is very pretty, I think!” Marjory said, laughing.
Hepburn could not tell how it was that the laugh sounded so much less pleasant to him than ordinary. Was she laughing at him? She had done so before now, and he had only worshipped her the more. But now he had just come from the spectacle of grief, borne in a becoming manner, and it seemed almost wrong of Marjory to be able to laugh; it disturbed his ideal. He took care to say as little as possible about Mrs. Charles for the rest of the evening, but still he did manage to intimate that he thought Marjory had not, perhaps, quite understood that delicate spirit. And Marjory replied that it was quite possible, but laughed again. Bell, the maid, was rather of Mr. Hepburn’s opinion—that Marjory’s capacity for laughter showed itself too soon.
“If it had been but the auld gentleman, indeed!” said Bell; “but three deaths, one after anither!” and Jess in the kitchen shook her head also, and said Miss Marjory had aye thought too little of appearances. They all kept a very close watch upon her, to make sure that she mourned enough, and not too much. Resignation is an excellent thing, and always to be encouraged; but resignation never was known to do more than smile.
And Marjory, I do not quite know why, wrote to Fanshawe that evening. She had meant to write to him some day or other; but it is possible that Johnnie Hepburn’s desertion (though she had never made any account of Johnnie Hepburn), quickened her proceedings. She wrote him a most matter-of-fact little note, filling one page only of a sheet of note paper—without a word in it that would bear two meanings, or, indeed, possessed any meaning at all to speak of.
“This will put a stop to any further nonsense,” she said to herself, as she wrote his address at his club—and she did this with much decision and promptitude. She was going with her uncle in a few days to St. Andrews; she was about cutting off all the threads that bound her to her old life. This was a bit of her old life, though it occupied the very last chapter. Fanshawe too, perhaps, might come back to Pitcomlie, and might think that she had not “understood” its new mistress. Marjory was about to begin a different kind of existence; she snapt this thread without, she thought, caring much about it; but it was better, certainly better, that it should come to an end.