Her tears fell upon his hands, which held hers. He looked at her wistfully, eagerly, in the dim light, by which he could scarcely see her face. How high life was beating in his heart as he listened to these words. Hard to get rid of life! as if it were not something priceless, full of happiness, full of possibility, which a man would do anything, bear anything, rather than be rid of. He put her cloak round her while she stood passively by him, worn out, with those tears on her cheeks—and then drew her hand within his arm, and led her away silently along the dim sea-shore with all its mysterious sounds. The light increased slowly, dimly, the pale morning broke as they moved along. To Marjory it was all like a dream. To him, what was it? Every moment he could see her more plainly, and feel her, leaning on him. Rid of life! Who would be rid of that which held such prizes still?
CHAPTER XX.
No house possessed by the Hay-Heriots had ever gone through such a night as that house by the Cathedral in St. Andrews had just passed. First there had been the blank dinner hour, with no one at home to eat the food, no one but little Milly who stood at the window and cried, and imagined misfortunes unutterable which must have befallen “my May.” The crying of the child infected the whole house. One of the maids had joined her at the window, another climbed to the top of the house to an attic which commanded the road “east the town,” leading to the Spindle, another had stolen outside to the door in the wall, where she stood watching all comers and goers, with the wind blowing her ribbons about, and ruffling her hair. In the very midst of this suspense, Miss Jean’s old coach, like a family hearse, came jolting heavily over the stones—for all the world, the excited listeners thought, like the Phantom Coach, which, as is well known, drives along the streets of St. Andrews at midnight, after a storm, carrying the drowned to the hallowed soil round the Cathedral ruins. Had it been dark, this resemblance would have been more than the nerves of the women could have borne, and the impression was scarcely lessened when Miss Jean herself, tired yet alert, with her sharp eyes looking out from the shelter of her broad “borders” and big black bonnet, got out briskly tapping upon the pavement with her cane. Milly stayed her crying, out of very excitement, to explain her sister’s absence, and was then held silent by fear while the old lady remarked upon it. “A bonny like way to leave a house with a wheen maids and one bairn!” she said. “May Hay-Heriot must be out of her senses. Out of the house at seven o’clock—the hour ye dine—did ye say it was the hour ye dine? Then it’s worse than madness, it must be wickedness. Do not look at me as if ye would eat me, ye little spirit—”
“Then do not speak of May like that!” said the child passionately, smothering her sobs. “Oh! what has become of her—what has become of her? Something has happened; oh, Aunt Jean! let you and me go and seek her out. She never left us like this before. Oh my May! my May!”
“Hold your tongue you little haverel,” said Miss Jean, “she is out to her dinner or something. Do you think Miss Heriot will leave her friends or her business because the table-maid is out at the door watching, or her own woman greeting at the window? Go in to your work this moment. Where is Mr. Charles? He will come in to his dinner and find nothing ready, and send ye about your business—or I would if it was me.”
Then it was explained to her, by three speaking at once, that Mr. Charles too had gone out mysteriously towards the Spindle, accompanied by two strangers; and Milly, whose tears had been stayed, began again to cry more piteously than before, and the maids to rush to the windows. Miss Jean gave some decisive taps of her cane upon the floor—“Fools!” she said, “have you not sense enough to see that they’re both together with some sudden engagement they had no time to tell of? Stop this nonsense and bring ben the dinner—I’m hungry with my drive, and Milly, you’re hungry with crying—”
“Oh, Aunt Jean, I could not eat a morsel. Oh, what will I do if there is anything wrong with May?”
“You’re hungry with crying,” said Miss Jean, “we’ll wait for them no longer; bring ben the dinner. Is all the house to be turned upside down because they did not leave word where they were going? Help me off with my bonnet, woman, and dinna stand gaping. Milly, hold your tongue; is that the way to give me a welcome? You’ve let the child get low, you taupies, keeping her waiting. Bring ben the dinner, I tell you, we’ll wait for them no longer. Shut the doors and the windows, and get the spare room ready. I’ve come about business, Milly, and I mean to stay all night.”
By these decisive means Miss Jean brought the house into composure and subordination, and put a stop to the growing romance which the maids had begun to build up. They said in the kitchen that Miss Heriot could not be going so much to the Spindle for nothing, that it was fine to talk about a sick lass, but that more inducement was necessary to take a young leddy there in all weathers, and that Mr. Chairles had found it out. This invention Miss Jean so far nipped in the bud, that she gave them all work to do, which occupied them fully and diverted their thoughts from this delightful fiction. The old lady had the spare room prepared for herself, and a fire lighted, a luxury never much out of place in St. Andrews, though it was but August, and the flush of Summer still ought to have been over the world. It was a gloomy night, dark clouds and darker sea, everything that was dismal and discouraging out of doors, and not much that was cheery within. Miss Jean herself, with many thoughts in her mind, established herself in the drawing-room after dinner—having sent Milly, much against her will, to bed—to wait for some news of her relations who had thus left the house empty to receive her. She sat in the unfamiliar room, looking out upon the old pinnacles of the cathedral ruins which were associated with many an early passage of her youth—and going back into her life, lived in it as old people do, feeling it present with her, notwithstanding the lively threads of present interest which crossed each other like a network over that landscape peculiarly her own which lay behind. Her quick mind darted in a moment from recollections of an evening fifty years ago, when she had wandered, not uncompanioned, through these ruins, to many a speculation as to how her grand-niece, Marjory, her representative, might be occupying herself, and what manner of interference “auld Charlie” might be making in some possible complication of affairs.
For her nephew was “auld Charlie” to Miss Jean as well as to the youngest scoffer who called him by that name. The old maiden was contemptuous of the old bachelor. His age was an object of greater scorn to her than it was to the young men who on the whole liked “auld Charlie.” “A poor creature, a poor feeble old creature, with no character to speak of,” she said of him. She scorned him for being what he was, nobody’s husband, nobody’s father, and amid the openings of her old dream, while still she seemed to herself to be straying down the vast nave traced out by its old pillars, with her hand upon some one’s arm, who was dead and gone years ago—there recurred to her, now and then, a sarcastic criticism upon the old man who was so much younger than herself. She herself was two persons in one, difficult to identify in their separate characters: young Jean Hay-Heriot among the ruins, fresh and sweet as the youngest rose in the garden: old Miss Jean with her shrivelled face surrounded by her “borders,” her wrinkled hand leaning on her cane. But as for Mr. Charles he had never been but one, the same figure throughout, always lean, long, dried up, occupied about nick-nacks, buried in old books, unbending to nothing but golf. “And now he’s meddling with Marjory,” Miss Jean said to herself with a vindictive gleam of her black eye, “him that knows no more about it than a man of wood! But I’ll see to that, I’ll see to that;” and then the sweep of the great west window caught her eye, and she was young Jean again, looking up at it to hide her confused sweet girlish face from some one who would gaze too closely. Which was the real one between these two? which the most true, the past that lives for ever, or the present that is but for a moment? The old woman sat absorbed in this bewilderment of mingled memory and observation, and did not think the dim hours long as they stole past her. She would not have the lamp brought in till late. She sat at the window as Marjory had done, her old head framed in by the delicate crown of the broken arch, perfect on one side, an exquisite flowing shaft of ancient stone, with canopy work fit for a queen of heaven—on the other nothing but gloomy sky and sea. The darkness closed over her but Miss Jean noted it not. The scene before her eyes had brought all her life back to her; in that very room she had danced a girl. What need had she of lights, of books, something to divert her? as the sympathetic maid suggested who found the old lady in the dark and was sorry for her.