“It makes a difference,” he said; and indeed he was able to play his part very well, for never before in his life had Rob been so entirely ashamed of himself. Her very earnestness, she who had been so cool and calm before, her generous trouble and importunity humbled him to the very depths. A man may do a great many things that will not bear examination before he finds himself out; but to act such a falsehood as this—to pretend that he did not know what he knew so much more definitely than she did—to pretend to resist her generous anxiety—to avert his face, and let her woo him, she who had taken his hot wooing with such shy coldness! This made Rob feel himself the most wretched creature, the most despicable, miserable, mercenary wretch. He could not endure himself. Well might he hide his face for a poor swindler and cheat, worse, far worse than he had ever known himself before! To breathe deceitful vows, to say more than he meant, to promise more than he intended to perform, all this was not a thousandth part so bad; for indeed he had always been “in love,” when he made love; and a promise more or less, what is that? The common coin of young deceivers. Hitherto Rob had not been bad, only fickle and false. But what was he now? A cheat, a liar, a traitor, unfit to breathe where such innocent creatures were. Thus he played his part very well; his misery was not dissembled; and when he allowed himself to yield to her entreaties, to be moved by the eager eloquence of that soft lip which was so ready to quiver, what vows he made in his heart to be to Margaret something more than ever man had been before!
After this their intercourse was more easy, and by-and-by Rob came to feel that perhaps the momentary fear of losing him (which was how, in his native vulgarity and self-importance, he put it, after a while, to himself) had been a good thing. More than ever now she had committed herself. They wandered about among the trees and talked. They talked of her departure, and of how he could write to her—which Margaret was half shy again to think of, yet half happy too, a novelty as it was. But she could not tell him how this was to be managed, or how he could come to see her; all was strange, and Jean and Grace were very different from anything she had known in all her previous life.
“They tell me to sit down when I am standing, and to stand up when I am sitting down; they will always have me doing something different,” she avowed, though gently, and with a faint sense of humor. But this made it very evident that the life before her would be quite unlike the past. And it did not occur to Margaret that Jean and Grace ought perhaps to be informed of Rob, and the understanding between him and herself. Rob naturally said nothing about this, and to Margaret the thought did not occur. She had no idea of concealment, but simply did not think of her sisters in connection with this “secret,” which was something too strange and confusing to herself to be capable of explanation to others, who could not know how it had come about.
“Will you come up to the tower?” said Effie Leslie to Randal Burnside, who had walked home with her from the Manse. Randal had been much about Earl’s-hall since Sir Ludovic’s death. He had been ready to do anything for the family, and the family had been very willing to employ him. It was a kindness to give him something to do, his mother said, who was glad to throw him in Margaret’s way; and the decorousness of the grief which made Mrs. Bellingham and Miss Leslie quite unable to see anybody was put aside on his behalf as well as on his father’s. And Margaret and he had grown friends, though she was almost the only one in the house who never gave him any commissions in that moment of bustle. She had never ceased to be grateful to him for calling the doctor when her father’s illness began, but she was too independent to have any personal wants to which he could minister, and too shy to have asked his aid if she had. Effie was much more disposed to make use of the young man. She was not unhappy—why should she be, having seen so little of grandpapa? She was a little elated, indeed, to think that mamma was now my lady, and she herself entitled to precedence as a baronet’s daughter, and she was very glad to have some one to speak to who did not melt into tears in the middle of the conversation, or say, “Hush, child! remember that this is a house of mourning.” The Manse was not a house of mourning, and she liked to go there, and she liked Randal to walk home with her and talk. Lady Leslie was still looking at the brown cow and John’s pigsty, and Mrs. Bellingham, as has been said, had a headache. Effie peeped into the West Chamber and the long room, and saw nobody. And then she said, “Have you ever been on the tower, Mr. Burnside? Oh, do come up to the tower.”
Randal had climbed the tower a hundred times in former days. He went up the winding stair very willingly, thinking he would have all the better chance of seeing “the others,” when the falling night drove them in from their walks. Perhaps “the others” meant only the new Sir Ludovic; perhaps it had another significance. He was interested about Margaret, he allowed to himself—more interested than he dared let any one know; for had he not almost seen a lover’s parting between her and Rob Glen?—a secret knowledge which made him very uneasy. Randal felt that he could not betray them; it would be a base thing in their contemporary—or so, at least, he thought; but he was uneasy. Many thoughts had gone through his mind on this subject. He did not know what to do. The only thing that seemed to him possible was to speak to Rob Glen himself, to represent to him that it was not manly or honorable to engage a girl in Margaret’s position, without the knowledge and consent of her friends. But to make such a statement to a young man of your own age, with whom you have not the warrant of friendship for your interference, nor even the warrant of equality, is a difficult thing to do. If Rob, resenting it, could have called him out, there would have been less harm; but that was ridiculous, and what could be done to expiate such an affront? There was nothing to be done, unless he permitted Rob to knock him down, and he did not feel that his forbearance was equal to that. So that Randal remained very uneasy on this subject, and did not know what to do. To let Margaret fall into the hands of a—of Rob Glen, seemed desolation and sacrilege; but what could Randal—who had known them both from his cradle—what could he do between them. Was it his part to tell—most despicable of all offices in the opinion of youth? This train of uneasy thought was brought back when Effie looked into the little white-panelled sitting-room, the West Chamber, where Margaret, he knew, spent most of her time. She liked it better than the long room, every nook of which was so full of her father’s memory; and the ladies humored her, and, small as it was, made the West Chamber their centre. Where was she, if she was not there? Possibly out-of-doors in the soft evening, confiding all her griefs to Rob Glen. Possibly it was the thought that Randal himself would have liked to have those griefs confided to him, and to act the part of comforter, that made his blood burn at this imagination. So soon after her father’s death! He felt disposed to despise Margaret too.
“Go softly just here,” said Effie, whispering; “for there is Aunt Jean’s room, and we must not do anything to disturb her headache. It is a very good thing, you know, that she has a headache sometimes: even Aunt Grace says so—for otherwise she would wear herself out. Perhaps it is a little too late for the view, but the sky was still full of glow when we came in. Ah! it is very dark up here; but now there is only another flight. Oh no, it is not too late for the view,” Effie cried, her young voice coming out soft yet ringing, as they emerged into the open air. “Nobody can hear us here,” she said, with a laugh; for at seventeen it is not easy to be serious all day, especially when it is only a grandfather, nothing more, who is dead.
It was not too late for the view, and the view was not a view to be despised. There does not seem much beauty to spare in the east of Fife. Low hills, great breadths of level fields: the sea a great expanse of blue or leaden gray, fringed with low reefs of dark rocks, like the teeth of some hungry monster, dangerous and grim without being picturesque, without a ship to break its monotony. But yet, with those limitless breadths of sky and cloud, the wistful clearness and golden after-glow, and all the varying blueness of the hills, it would have been difficult to surpass the effect of the great amphitheatre of sea and land of which this solitary gray old house formed the centre. The hill, behind which the sun had set, is scarcely considerable enough to have a name; but it threw up its outline against the wonderful greenness, blueness, goldenness of the sky with a grandeur which would not have misbecome an Alp. Underneath its shelter, gray and sweet, lay the soft levels of Stratheden in all their varying hues of color—green corn, and brown earth, and red fields of clover, and dark belts of wood. Behind were the two paps of the Lomonds, rising green against the clear serene, and on the other side entwining lines of hills, with gleams of golden light breaking through the mists, clearing here and there as far as the mysterious Grampians, far off under Highland skies.
This was one side of the circle; and the other was the sea, a sea still blue under the faint evening skies, in which the young moon was rising; the yellow sands of Forfarshire on one hand, stretching downward from the mouth of the Tay—the low brown cliffs and green headlands bending away on the other toward Fifeness—and the great bow of water reaching to the horizon between. Nearer the eye, showing half against the slope of the coast and half against the water, rose St. Andrews on its cliff, the fine dark tower of the College Church poised over the little city, the jagged ruins of the Castle marking the outline, the Cathedral rising majestic in naked pathos; and old St. Rule, homely and weather-beaten, oldest venerable pilgrim of all, standing strong and steady, at watch upon the younger centuries. This was the view at that time from Earl’s-hall. It is a little less noble now, because of the fine, vulgar, comfortable gray stone houses which have got themselves built everywhere since, and spoiled one part of the picture; but all the rest will remain forever, Heaven be praised. The little wood of Earls-hall, pinched and ragged with the wind, lay immediately below, and the flat Eden, with its homely green lines of bank on either side, lighted up by here and there a sand-bank; but the tide was out, and the Eden meandered in a desert of wet brown sand, and was not lovely. The two young people did not speak for a moment. They were moved, in spite of themselves, by all this perfect vault of sky, and perfect round of earth and sea. It is not often that you can see the great world in little, field and mountain, sunset and moonrise, land and sea, at one glance. They were silenced for sixty seconds; and then Effie Leslie drew a long breath and began to chatter again.
“Well!” she said, with as much expression as the simple word was capable of bearing, “I don’t think I should like to sell this old house where the family has been so long, if I were papa!”
“I would not sell it, if it were mine, for anything that could be offered me!” cried Randal, in the enthusiasm of the moment. Effie shook her head.