“The Lord preserve us!” said old John. He was in the habit of giving utterance to his sentiments as constrained by some internal movement plus fort que lui; and no one ever interfered with this habit of his. “What next?” said the old man, with a shrug of his shoulders behind his master’s chair.
“Then you must continue to be old-fashioned so long as I live,” said Sir Ludovic. “Your sisters are very well-meaning women, my Peggy; but even when you are as clever as Mrs. Bellingham and as wise as Miss Leslie, you will not have fathomed everything. We’ll leave the philosophy to them, my little woman, and you and I will manage the hair-dressing. That is evidently the point in which our genius lies.”
Margaret looked up, somewhat jealously, to see whether she was again being made “a fool of;” but as no such intention appeared in her father’s face, she returned to the consideration of her dinner. It was not a heavy meal. A little fish—“haddies,” such as were never found but in the Firth, little milk-white flounders, the very favorites of the sea, or the homely herring, commonest, cheapest, and best of fish. But then, perhaps, they require to be cooked as Bell knew how to cook them. No expensive exotic salmon, turbot, or other aristocrat of the waters ever came to Sir Ludovic’s table. Let them be for the vulgar rich, who knew no better. The native product of his own coasts was good enough, he would say, in mock humility, for him. And then came one savory dish of the old Scotch cuisine now falling out of knowledge; no vulgar dainty of the haggis kind, but stews and ragoûts which the best of chefs would not disdain. This was all; the plat doux has never been a regular concomitant of a Scotch dinner; and Sir Ludovic was a small eater, and had his digestion to consider. It was not, therefore, a very lengthened meal; and as six o’clock was the dinner-hour at Earl’s-hall, there were still several long hours of sunshine to be got through before night came.
Now was the time when Margaret felt what it was to be alone. The long summer evening, loveliest, most wistful, and lingering hour of all the day, when something in the heart demands happiness, demands that which is unattainable one way or another—is it possible to be young, to be void of care, to possess all the elements of happiness, without wishing for something more, a visionary climax, another sweetness in those soft, lingering, visionary hours? Margaret did not know what she wanted, but she wanted something. She could not rest contented as her father did, to sit over a book and see through the west window (when he chanced to look up) the flush of the sunset glories. To feel that all this was going on in the sky, and nothing going on within, nor anything that concerned herself in earth and heaven, was not to be borne.
The little withdrawing-room—the East Chamber, as it was called, though its window faced to the south—was already all dim, deserted by the sunshine. Lady Jean’s work lay on the table, where Margaret had thrown it in the afternoon, but nothing living, nothing that could return glance for glance and word for word. It was but seven o’clock, and it would be ten o’clock, ten at the earliest, before night began to fall. Margaret got her hat and ran down-stairs. She did not know what she should do, but something she must do. The little court was by this time quite abandoned by the sunshine, the body of the house lying between it and the west; but all the sky overhead was warm with pink and purple, and Bell was seated outside, with her knitting dropped upon her lap. Jeanie had gone out to milk the cow; and even old John had strolled forth with his hands behind him, to see, he said, how the “pitawties” were getting on. The “pitawties” would have got on just as well without his supervision, but who could resist the loveliness of the evening light?
“Our John he’s awa’, like Isaac, to meditate among the fields at even-tide,” Bell said. “Eh, but it’s an auld custom that! and nae doubt auld Sawra, the auld mither, would sit out at the ha’ door, and ponder in her mind just like me.”
“But John is not your son, Bell,” said Margaret, with the literal understanding of youth.
“Na, I never had a son, Miss Margret, naething but wan daughter, and she’s been married and gone from me this twenty years. Eh, my dear, we think muckle of our bairns, but they think little and little enough of us. I might as well have had nane at all but for the thought.”
To this Margaret made no reply, her mind not taking in the maternal relation. She stood musing, with her eyes afar, while Bell went on:
“They say a woman has no after-pain when her first bairn’s born, because of the Virgin Mary, that had but wan. But ay me, I’ve had mony an after-pain, and her too, poor woman, though no the same kind. I think of her mony a day, Miss Margret, how she would sit and ponder things in her heart. Eh, they would be so ill to understand—till the time came.”