CHAPTER III.
Oh, youth! for years so many and sweet
’Tis known that thou and I were one;
I’ll think it but a fond deceit—
It cannot be that thou art gone;
Thy vesper-bell hath not yet tolled,
And thou wert aye a masquer bold;
What strange disguise hast now put on
To make believe that thou art gone?
I see these locks in silvery slips,
This drooping gait, this altered size;
But spring-tide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes!
Life is but thought; so think I will
That youth and I are housemates still.—Coleridge.
The Laird of Mossgray stood alone beneath a high beech, whose silvery trunk and delicate buds made it the most noticeable of all the neighbouring trees. His figure was tall, thin, and stooping; his hair the most delicate silvery gray; his face full of thoughtful fortitude and wisdom in its gentlest guise; but his usual serenity was ruffled to-day, the calm of his meditative age was broken.
Those dim lands of memory in whose gentle twilight he did so much love to wander, among the fairy shadows, tender and pensive, of things which once were stern and hard enough, had been suddenly illuminated by a flash of the intense and present reality which once they had. The old man’s quietness had suddenly been rent asunder, and floated away from him like a mist, while the stormy blood of his more vehement days was swelling in his veins again.
He held a letter in his hand; the fingers which traced its trembling lines were now lying in a nameless grave. A worn-out, wearied woman, prematurely old, and glad to lay down her head in that one place where the weary are at rest, was the writer of those earnest, living words. The Laird of Mossgray did not remember that she was old—the past years were in this moment a fable and a dream to him. He thought of Lilias only as he saw her last, enshrined in all the pure and gentle dignity of his young fancies; for Lilias was dead.
And dying, she had revealed to the old man what she was. Not indeed the lofty lady of his dreaming days, but a gentle, chastened, meek woman, who knew now, and had long known, the worth of the generous heart she threw away. In the bitterness of his soul he had believed her an unsubstantial vision; but the faithful hand of death had brought back to him the true Lilias, worthy of the place he had given her in his best days.
“I do not ask you to forgive me,” wrote the dying Lilias, “because I know that long ago you must have forgiven the witless girl’s heart that did itself so much more wrong than you. I did not know myself, my own slight, shallow, girlish self, and pardon me then, Adam Graeme, that I did not know you. Since then I have learned—what have I not learned that is bitter and sorrowful? Care, poverty, death, and miserable shames and humiliations, such as never crossed your path, have been the constant companions of mine: they are all ending now. I am going hence to my Lord, and to the children whom He took from me one by one, till my heart was well-nigh broken; but I cannot go till I make one prayer to you, one last entreaty for the sake of our youth.
“I would not speak of the time when we last met; in pity to my bitter lot, and to the dead whose faults we lay with them in the grave to be forgotten, as I have laid Edward, and as stranger hands shall soon lay me, do not think of that time. I have one last treasure remaining to me, one last request to make, and there is no one in the world but you, whom I have wronged, to whom I can address my prayer.
“Mossgray, I have a child; a friendless, unprotected, solitary girl, who will soon be left utterly alone. If I shrink from subjecting her to the cold charity of Walter’s wife, forgive me, because I am her mother. I know that Lilias is not what I was. I know that our subdued and clouded life has given to her youth a greater maturity than I had when I was her mother. I have fancied often that Lilias is what you thought me to be, and there has been a sad pleasure in the hope, that for her weak mother’s sake, your heart would melt to my child.
“I cannot ask you. I feel that I cannot venture to beg of you this last service; my heart fails me, when I remember how little I deserve any grace at your hands. But you who have always been so kind and pitiful, think of the misery of leaving her thus, alone in an evil world. If you think I presume upon you, if you refuse to hear my prayer, I still must plead it for her sake. Adam Graeme, will you protect my Lilias? Will you forgive the sins we have done against you, and protect our child?”