She did not hear him; the words fell on her ear indefinite as the sound of the stream without, for words do not bring comfort to the desolate heart of grief when the blow has fallen newly.
And then she went away again slowly and painfully to her own darkened room. Halbert met her on the stair but she did not speak to him, and her wan face, and deep mourning dress, awed the light-hearted Halbert into reverential silence. He was not light-hearted then—he almost felt that his own happiness was selfish in the presence of such grief.
And the old man paced heavily his large, low, study-room, thinking with tender compassion of his ward, the orphan, and the widowed. It brought back the days of his own pained and struggling youth, and he remembered how gentle to him would have been this hand of death instead of the more cruel stroke which laid his early dreams in the dust. He thought of Lucy Murray and of her tears—tears which fell singly in their force and bitterness like the words of Lilias; and he thanked God that rather thus the stroke had fallen upon his child. She was now doubly his child—left to him alone for care and succour—set apart from all the world.
But Lilias grew calm; there was no fever in the great stillness of this grief—no antagonist powers of hope and uncertainty to sicken her with its fretting painful life. She was fitted for her lot; and when she entered again the little world in which they lived, there was a saintly repose about her mourning, a hush of deep melancholy in her atmosphere, which subdued and mellowed all who approached her. But there was no elasticity left; the human hopes, the warm links which unite the living to the world they dwell in, had all been snapt for Lilias. Except the reverend duty of a child for the old man who mourned with her for the dead, she had no other bond to the world.
And so it happened that she came to stand, as we sometimes see the afflicted, alone upon the solitary isthmus between the earth and heaven. The changing tide of human life seemed to have left her there—above the reach of the benign and gentle hand of change—above the happy impatiences—the impulse and varying motive of the common lot; standing alone among the stars, waiting till her summons came.
She was very gentle, very mild, very calm—but it was less sympathy than reverence that attended her. The human life had ebbed away from her lonely feet, and she grew feeble as she moved in her melancholy, shadowy grace about that old house of Mossgray. They tended her in silent pity as they might have tended a hermit spirit, and she repaid them as she could with her resigned and patient mildness; but they thought of her as one about to pass away, fated to another life than this of earth.
CHAPTER VIII.
I’m young and stout, my Marion,
Nane dances like me on the green,
And gin ye forsake me, Marion,
I’ll e’en gae draw up wi’ Jean.—Song.
It was past midsummer. Halbert Graeme, younger of Mossgray, was already a famous man in the country-side, and had not his gentle kinsman been more gravely occupied through that long, slow summer, we are not sure that the Laird would have been quite satisfied with the considerable number of incipient flirtations which Halbert had on his hands. At Firthside, at Mount Fendie, and all neighbouring places where youthful people were, Halbert was immensely popular; and it was very true that Miss Georgina Maxwell and he had been experimenting a little upon each other; very true that Adelaide Fendie blushed her dull blush when her mischievous sister plied her with railleries touching the gallant Halbert. Adelaide was seventeen, and her large, soft, good-humoured face was not uncomely; besides she had begun to read greedily Maxwell Dickson’s select and edifying collection of novels, and seventeen is quite the heroic age for young ladies of the Minerva Press. Adelaide thought it was full time that she should begin a private romance of her own.
And Halbert’s letters to the North were by no means so frequent as they used to be. He was often very busy now, and really believed that he had not time to write; besides that, there had been a very pretty quarrel between him and the gentle Menie, provoked on her side by some saucy allusions to the Lilias whom he praised so much, and on his by some pique at a certain young Laird, who began to bulk very largely in the Aberdeenshire glen.