But it was not that; neither was it the evident pleasure which the young minister, who thought himself good-looking, found in Mrs Buchanan’s humble parlour, nor yet the friendship of Lilias Maxwell. The bright nature did indeed in its own warm alembic combine all these together, and draw from them a certain exhilaration; but itself in the involuntary elasticity which was its best inheritance was the source of its own happiness. A rare and precious gift, chequered as it was with the infinite variety of shadows, and all the depths of sudden depression which calmer spirits could not know.
But it was very true that the Reverend Robert Insches had called very many times of late on Mrs Buchanan, and that Helen talked to him as she would have talked to any indifferent acquaintance, in her own varied wayward fashion, and that the young minister seemed exceedingly glad to respond; whereupon Mrs Buchanan, in spite of her great favour for William Oswald, began to perceive more clearly the obstacles which stood between Helen and him, and to grow more indignant at his father. His father, the harsh, stern man whose rigid strength had done so much injury to her gentle husband, and who now cast his severe shadow over the lot of her daughter. And William had been long in possession of the field; it pleased the good mother to see it entered by another competitor, and if ordinary signs held good, a competitor the Reverend Robert Insches was beginning to be.
All this was very true; but very true it was also that Helen was supremely indifferent to the good looks of the youthful minister, and that the Reverend Robert himself had by no means decided whether he had or had not any “intentions” respecting the young schoolmistress of Fendie. She was the schoolmistress; to call her by the more ornamental name of teacher or governess would not do; and the Reverend Robert was himself of somewhat plebeian origin, and knew how apt congregations are to scrutinize the pedigree and breeding of a new minister’s wife. So he was wise though he was fascinated, and Mrs Buchanan was a little premature.
But Hope Oswald, on the journey to Edinburgh, contrived to let the banker know how assiduously the minister visited her friend, and had the consolation to perceive that her arrow did not miss its mark. It by no means weakened the resolution which the obstinate man had formed in respect to the daughter of his former friend; but acting upon the suggestive praise of Lilias Maxwell, it gave him a little misgiving about the wisdom of his unalterable decision. It was humiliating to make a mistake, but the very possibility made him cling more closely to his obstinate resolve. He would never receive Walter Buchanan’s daughter—never! He had fulminated his sentence on the matter once, and it was decided as the Medes and Persians decide—beyond the power of change.
CHAPTER XII.
I would not have a speck rest on his fame
Not if it gave me kingdoms—
’Tis very true that I am poor and friendless,
But think you for that reason I would steal
Kinsman and lands from yet another orphan?
No, no—ah, no!
Lilias Maxwell sat in the old-fashioned window-seat of the Mossgray drawing-room busy with some household sewing. It was an appropriate work then, with its licence of unlimited thought, though it had often been unwholesome enough for the solitary orphan. She was looking forward now, in that freshness of feeling with which those look who, after a long interregnum of pain, may again dare to turn their eyes to the future. Her heart was convalescent, and the haze of subdued sadness which remained about her present self made the prospect only the fairer. She was thinking of her guardian’s delicate care of her, and of the one living voice which should yet thank him for his tenderness.
The old man upstairs in his study was reading one of his philosophical favourites with some restlessness, as a duty. He was slightly ashamed of himself for so much preferring the society of his young charge to that of his old, learned, constant friends. The dust that lay upon his scientific tools, and the unusual order and solemn regularity with which these folio and quarto inhabitants of his shelves were arranged, came upon him like a reproof. His hand rested upon the fanciful records of Bishop Berkeley’s mystic system. Open before him lay the steadier disquisitions of a grave philosopher of Scotland. Upon the same table were some of those strange, wild charts which reveal to us the dreamy sea of German thought. The volumes round bore all on kindred subjects—writings of men who had given consistence to the reveries of the unformed world before their time, and of men who had but skill enough to spin their spider’s thread about the obscure college or unknown scholar’s cell in which they lived and died. Divine philosophy in its strength and its weakness encircled the Laird of Mossgray.
But from the high window of the projecting turret the ruddy winter sunshine stole in a line of dazzling light through the large low room. It was a mild day, so mild that the turret window was open, and the low hum of rural sounds ascended from beneath. Adam Graeme leant back in his chair, and looked at the steady line of sunlight, and forgot the philosophies of science. There rose in the gentle soul of the old man philosophies of older date than these, born before ever the restless mind of humanity had investigated its own formation or classified its feelings.
“The same sound is in mine ears
Which in those days I heard.”