“You see, you allow it is Venetian, after all.”
“Or point de France. It is very much the same thing. Sometimes you can scarcely tell that it has travelled over the Alps. But I think I have an eye for lace. Any china?” said Aubrey, walking to a door in the panelling and opening it coolly. “Ay, I thought it was a cupboard. But here’s only common stuff.”
“The best tea-things!” said Miss Grace, with a little shriek, “that have always been kept there ever since I was a child.”
“In that case, perhaps they are better than they appear,” said Aubrey, calmly; and after a closer inspection, he decided that this was the case. They were Chelsea, “but not much.” From this it will be seen that young Mr. Bellingham was a young man of extended and various information. He went up-stairs to the high room with them, and was really excited by the old clothes. The house, though he appreciated its curiousness, did not otherwise attract the young man. “If one could spend a few thousands on old oak and tapestry, it might be made very nice,” he acknowledged; but there were some old cups and saucers here and there in the various rooms which pleased him. And as he accompanied the ladies up and down, and examined everything, he gave an occasional thought to Margaret, which ought to have made her proud, had she been aware of the distinction. She would do very well. She was not at all the kind of person whom, in such circumstances, it would have been natural to see. A red-haired young woman, with high cheek-bones—was not that the recognized type of a Scotch heiress? Aubrey knew that the conventional type does not always hold; but he had thought of Miss Leslie’s nose and her short sight, and he had also thought of his aunt’s plumpness, and that peculiarity of tone which many Scotchwomen in England attain, with the proud consciousness of having lost all their native accent.
There are few things so disagreeably provincial as this tone, which is not Scotch, which is the very triumph and proclaimed conviction of having shaken off Scotch and acquired the finest of Southern speech. Aubrey had been afraid of all these things; but Margaret had not come up to the conventional requirements of her position. Her soft native Fife, even with its modulations, did not alarm him like Aunt Jean’s high English, and her nose would never be like that of Aunt Grace. Altogether, she was an unexceptionable heiress, sweet and sorrowful, and “interesting.” It was a commonplace sort of word, but yet even a superfine young man is sometimes obliged to use such ordinary mediums of expression. For a man who, previously set up at much too high a figure (to quote his own metaphor), and commanding no offers, was ready to accept a moderate fortune even under disadvantageous conditions, the thought of a nice little property, weighted only by Margaret, was very consolatory indeed.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Next day was Sunday, the last day that Margaret was to spend at home; not like the brilliant Sunday on which old Sir Ludovic, for the last time, attended “a diet of worship” in the parish church, and was reminded of his latter end by good Dr. Burnside; but gray, and dull, and cloudy, with no light on the horizon, and the whole landscape, hill and valley and sea, all expressed in different tones of a flat lead color, the change of all others which most affects the landscape. In Fife, as has been candidly allowed, the features of the country have no splendor or native nobleness; and accordingly there is no power in them to resist this invasion of grayness. Mr. Aubrey Bellingham, though he did pretend to “go in” for the beauties of nature, intimated very plainly his discontent with the scene before him.
“Anything poorer in the way of landscape I don’t know that I ever saw,” he said, and sighed, when he was made to take his place in the old carriage to be driven to Fifeton, to the “English Chapel.” It was six miles off; whereas the parish church, with the Norman chancel, was scarcely one. But, as Mrs. Bellingham said, if you do not hold by your church, what is to become of you?
“Only the common people go there,” she said—“the farmers, and so forth. The gentry are all Episcopalian. My brother, Sir Ludovic, may go now and then for the sake of example, and because Dr. Burnside is an old family friend; but Sir Claude, and everybody of importance, you will find at our church. All the elite go there. I can’t think what the gentry were thinking of, to allow the Presbyterians to seize the endowments. It is quite the other way in England, where it is the common people who are dissenters, and we have a church which is really fit for ladies and gentlemen to go to. But things are all very queer in Scotland, Aubrey. That is one thing, I suppose, that gives the common people such very independent ways.”
“Well, Aunt Jean, let us be thankful we were not born to set it right,” said Aubrey, reconciled to see that his six-miles’ drive was to be in company with Margaret. But she, in her deep mourning, did not afford much good diversion during the drive. The fact that it was the last day—the last day! had at length penetrated her mind; and a vague horror of what might happen, of something hanging over her which she did not understand, of leave-takings, and engagements to be entered into and promises to be made, had come over Margaret like a cloud. She had passively obeyed her sisters’ orders, and followed them into the carriage, though not without an acute recollection of her last drive in that carriage by her father’s side at a time when she was not passive at all, but liked her own way and had it, and was not aware how happy she was.