Hew’s frank happy laugh rang into the dim air pleasantly; its sound always cheered me, but the remembrance that I might not hear it again for years fell upon me in blank pain. We made a great many hysterical attempts after that to be merry, but failed so woefully in every case, that we turned at last in silence round the brow of the hill, and looked out upon the sea: the noble Firth spreading its silvery lengths far away in the distance, with its dark islands and steady lights, and the broad line of its princely highway leading forth into the foreign world!
The cold, strange, alien world where home was not, nor friends. Hew Murray’s hand grasped my arm for a moment with a convulsive pressure, and there were tears under our eyelids,—tears which we were not ashamed to shed under cover of the gentle night.
The next day I watched a white sail gliding smoothly over the peaceful Firth, until I lost it on the horizon far away—and my dearest friend was gone.
For Charlie Graeme, brother-like as we were, was less closely joined to me than Hew. It is a vulgar notion that the warmest friendship requires a contrast of minds. Charlie and I had very distinct individualizations. Hew resembled me closely—I had almost said, that in matters of the mind and heart Hew Murray and I had all things common. In things physical there was the same connection between my cousin and myself; but heartily as I liked Charlie, there were many points on which I certainly knew that we could by no possibility agree; there were many matters of feeling and thought which I shrank from bringing under his keen glance—that glance which pierced through my bashful sentimentalities with so little pity.
Maxwell got on delicately with those medical studies of his. He was a great favourite everywhere, his weakness, as usual, bringing him in for much more than his average share of consideration. Charlie and Walter toiled manfully at the dry initiatory necessities of their profession. They were “clever lads” of good parts and promise, both, and both too well endowed with stout common sense and the natural self-interest and ambition, to be, except in rare outbursts, loiterers or idlers. For my desultory self, I dabbled in all scientific crafts; was a metaphysician for one fit, and a chemist for another, and an antiquarian for a third; I dipped into Charlie’s dreary quartos, and lingered at the threshold of the dissecting-room with Edward, and for my own hand got through heaps of reading, systematic and unsystematic, not always drawn from the venerable shelves of the college library. It formed a pile of strange rubbish altogether, built up as it was with the crude philosophies peculiar to my years.
But sauntering along the Calton Hill now, alone, to dream over the Old Town, in its antique grace and beauty, made me sick at heart. Hew Murray was one of those rare friends whom one does not need to be continually talking to. A stranger who observed our few words might have taken us for very indifferent companions, but this was above all, the sign of our closest brotherhood. When Charlie was with us, we were talkative enough, for then a foreign element was introduced, but we were too much one when we were alone to have any such constraint upon us. And when from these silent walks we emerged into the bustle and light of the street below, and throwing off the charm, began to be as loud as our neighbours, we felt, both of us, that the chain of our regard was drawn closer by these communings. Never friend in this world did I appropriate and feel mine so entirely as Hew, and the dim hill-side where my silence was unshared, where there was none to dream beside me as I dreamt, or to feel as I felt, became painful to my solitary eyes. I did not return to Edinburgh after Hew went away. It had lost its charm for me. I remained alone at Mossgray.
I was then a man. I had nearly reached my majority, and having perhaps exaggerated notions of what became my place and position in respect to the tenants and cottages around me, I began to bestir myself to ascertain how I could do some work in this brief district, allotted to me by Providence. I have always been inclined to the contemplative, but I am not idle, and with all the proud hopes and ambitions of youth to buoy me up, I laboured and deliberated “for the good of the people,” with much enjoyment of the philanthropy.
Lucy Murray had grown into a young woman; graceful and grave, with lines of thought upon her forehead, printed perhaps too deeply for one so young. That slender ring upon her finger was Charlie’s gift, and contains in its small enclosure one of those circlets of his sunny hair, which cling so lovingly about his temples and become them so well; for their engagement is a grave matter now, acknowledged and known. And yet I fancy them scarcely like each other yet, for Lucy has dwelt long with her own thoughts silently, and in solitude, and Charlie, with his whole soul, has embarked on the busy sea of life; but the contrast gives them singular grace when they are together, and Lucy is more than ever a sister to me.
The bright face at Greenshaw, which, with all its happy changes, has been the angel of my boyish dreams for years, is brighter now in the grace of early womanhood than ever before. I fancy her the inmate of some pure and holy atmosphere, the star of some loftier sky. I forget when I am near Greenshaw that there is sin in the world—I become heterodox in my very faith—for evil has no share in Lilias.
The name echoes in my ear with a ring of silvery music. The beautiful and pure of all ages shed their glory about her, and claim my devouter homage. The Rachel of yonder plains of Syria, the Mary, blessed among women, the Una, the Desdemona of our own land. Their shadow is upon her in all places; the very neighbours, common-place as they are, speak low, I fancy, when they speak of “Lillie,” and I forgive them the familiarity for the sake of the gracious name; for the stately flower in its royal purity symbolizes my ideal well, and my garden at Mossgray grows white with snowy lilies, and I wander among them dreamily, in a mist of indefinite hopes, and fancied future gladnesses, too bright to tell.