“It was not exactly that,” she said, with a smile; and then her face changed, as it did from moment to moment, like the moor which she loved, yet hated—shadows flying over it as swift, as sudden, and as deep. “But it’s all past, and why should we think more of it? When I come back, Uncle Robert, we’ll be cheery, you and me together by the fireside all the winter through, and never ask whether there are neighbors or not—or other folk in the world.”
“I would not go so far as that,” said the old gentleman. “We’ll get the world to come to us, Lily, a small bit at a time. But you have never told me where you are going when you leave me here.”
“To Edinburgh,” she said.
“To Edinburgh! I thought you had consulted with the doctor, and were going to the seaside, or to the Bridge of Allan, or some of the places where invalids go.”
“Uncle,” said Lily, “I have been two years upon the moor, and in all that time I have not got a new gown, nor a bonnet, nor any thing whatsoever. Oh, yes, we will go to the sea, or the Bridge of Allan, or to some place. But we are not fit to be seen, neither Beenie nor me. You do not take these things into consideration. You think, when I speak to you like a rational creature, that I am above the wants of my kind; but rational or not, a woman must always have some clothes to wear!”
Sir Robert laughed and clapped his hands. “Bravo, Lily!” he cried. “You cannot do better, my dear, than own you’re just a woman and are as fond of your finery as the rest. By all means, then, go to Edinburgh and fit yourself out; but do not stay there, go out to Portobello, if you do not care to go farther, or a little more to the West, where it’s milder, and you will get a warm blink before the winter weather sets in. And that reminds me that you will want money, Lily.”
“A good deal of money, Uncle Robert,” she said, with a smile. “You know I have had none for two years.”
It was with a sensation of shame that he heard her allusions to those two years, and perhaps Lily was aware of it. She wanted money, she wanted freedom, and that her steps should not be watched nor her movements constrained. And the old gentleman was startled and humiliated when he realized that his heiress, his only relation, his brother’s child, had been banished to this wilderness without a shilling in her pocket or a friend to help her. He could not imagine how he could have forgotten so completely her existence or her claims upon him and right to his support. He was glad to wipe that recollection from his own mind as well as hers by his liberality now. And Lily received from him an order upon his “man of business” in Edinburgh for an amount which seemed to her almost fabulous—for she knew nothing of money, had never had any, nor required it, although when she retired to her room with that piece of paper in her hand which meant so much, the reflection of what might have happened and what she could have done had she only at any time during these two years possessed as much, or half as much, came upon her with almost a convulsive sense of opportunities lost. She flung herself upon Beenie’s shoulder when she reached the safe shelter of her room, where it was no longer necessary to keep herself up and make a smile for her uncle. “Oh, Beenie!” she cried, “if he had given me the half of that before, or the quarter! how every thing might have been changed.”
“Oh, mem, my bonnie leddy,” cried Beenie, who never now addressed her mistress as Miss Lily, “it’s little, little that siller can do!”
Anger flashed in Lily’s eyes. “It could just have done every thing!” she said. “Do you think I would have been put off and off if I could have put my hand in my pocket and taken the coach and gone, you and me, to see to every thing ourselves? Oh! many a time I have wished for it, and longed for it—but what could we do, you and me, and nothing, nothing to take us there? Oh, never say siller can do little! It might have spared us all that’s happened—think! all that’s happened! I might be thinking now as I thought yon New Year’s time in the snow. I might be as sure and as full of trust. I might never have learned what it was to deceive and to be deceived. I might never have been a desolate woman without man or bairn—without my little bairn, my little baby!”