Wonderful sights and sounds of nature unchangeable in all their varying—wonderful human heart which twines its memories about them, and growing old, dwells in the past, by aid of the great earth and greater sun!
By the fireside stood an old carved chair; the room was so much the hermitage of its owner, that its furniture was very scanty; there was no accommodation for any companionship; but when every other article in the room was piled with books, this solitary chair remained always unencumbered. For years it had stood in the same position, turned towards the fire, its high carved back standing up, a kind of gloomy screen against the light. This day its position had been slightly altered, and the sunshine streaming in, threw its fantastic gilding over the antique carving and faded old embroidery of the unused seat. The old man started slightly as his eye fell upon it, and it was some time before he recollected himself. Lilias had been in the study early this morning, and she it was who had, unconsciously, made this alteration.
It was the chair of Charlie Graeme. This room, now the study of the thoughtful, aged man, had been the favourite haunt of the schoolboy cousins long ago. Rusty armour, and heavy swords and axes, borne by the chiefs of Mossgray, when peace was unknown upon the Border, hung still upon the low bare walls, and in one corner a pile of youthful implements, fishing-rods and the like, still bore witness to the different occupations once pursued under its roof; through all these long intervening years, since the household traitor left for the last time the house of the trustful friend, to whom his lost honour brought so severe a pang, “Charlie’s chair” remained as he had left it, unoccupied by the solitary fireside. Now for the first time the sunlight slanted on this relic of the false man, and Mossgray sat with his eyes fixed upon it, thinking of the dead.
That morning he had received a letter from the Reverend Matthew Monikie, the pragmatical licentiate of the church, who kept the Aberdeenshire school, where Charlie’s son had spent his youth. The letter was formally written, as became the man’s profession, age, and character, with deductions somewhat authoritative. Halbert Graeme was nearly one and twenty; it was absolutely necessary, Mr Monikie represented, that some provision should be made for his future life; that he should be placed in some situation where he could maintain himself.
Mossgray had made a resolution, and was determined to keep it. The son of Charlie Graeme should never be heir to the house in which his father had meditated so much treachery; it was better than the line of the old race should be utterly extinguished, than that it should spring anew from a stock which displayed so much guile, and falsehood, and dishonour. Mossgray resolved to continue the yearly allowance he had given this youth, and to refuse him no specific aid or influence which he asked; but, “Let him not enter my presence,” repeated the old man; “let me not be brought into contact with one whose motives I cannot trust, whose conduct may steel my heart both against himself and others. I wish him well, but let him not come near me.”
It was unjust: it was almost the single conscious injustice with which even his own conscience could tax Adam Graeme of Mossgray, and in consequence he tried to banish it from his mind. As he sat thus musing, a melting of the heart came upon him. He could almost fancy, as he saw the sunbeams stealing over Charlie’s chair, that Charlie himself had risen from it even now.
Very shortly afterwards he joined Lilias. She was still sitting in the deep window-seat of the cheerful, old-fashioned drawing-room. The ruddy sunbeams just touched her pale head with a shadowy glory; her fingers were busily employed, her mind no less active. Not as Helen Buchanan would have done in the vivid dreams which took possession of her less serene spirit, but in the flush of a tranquil, gentle hope, weaving the mystic thread of her imagined destiny over the unknown future which lay before her.
“Lilias,” said her guardian, when they had been for some time engaged in conversation less personal, “I am the last of my race, but I have a fancy that I should like ill to be the last of my name. When I was as young as you are, there seemed to me a peculiar charm and grace in the name I would have you bear—you must be Lilias Graeme.”
“Gladly, if it pleases you, Mossgray,” answered Lilias.
“It pleases me,” said the old man, with his gentle smile; “it is strange how sometimes, Lilias, we have our early fancies realized in a way which, could we foresee it when we form them, we should think bitter mockery. This name! well, but the years fall tranquilly, and do a good work in the content they bring. I think they bring content—acquiescence at least in what Providence sends us.”