Margaret stood by, and looked on with a dreary helplessness. She had no tears for her father, no room for him even in her overladen and guilty soul. And this she felt acutely, with a pang the more, feeling as if all love had died out of her heart, and nothing but darkness and confusion, and ingratitude and insensibility, was in her and about her. She took up the picture with a slight shudder, as she touched it, and put it away in the corner where hung the faded portrait of her mother’s young lover.
This touch of contact with the story of one who had gone before her, whom somehow—she scarcely knew how—she could not help identifying with herself, gave her a little fanciful consolation. Margaret did not long, as so many girls have done, to have a mother to flee to, and in whom to confide all her troubles; but it seemed to her, in some confused way, that it must have been but a previous chapter in her own life, which had passed under this same roof, in this same house, twenty years ago. She seemed almost dimly to recollect it, as she recollected (but far more vividly) that time of folly in which she had “encouraged” and “led on” Rob Glen.
It was better for her to obey Jean’s call, to go down-stairs and try to forget it all, for a moment, than to stay here and drive herself wild, wondering what he might do next, and what, oh what! it would be necessary for her to do. Grace, who was a little disappointed not to find her dissolved in tears, recommended that she should bathe her eyes, and brought her some water, and took a great deal of pains to obliterate the traces of weeping which did not exist. She tucked Margaret’s hand under her arm, and patted it and held it fast.
“My poor darling!” she said, cooing over the unresponsive girl. Jean, too, who was not given to much exhibition of feeling, received her, when she came back, with something like tenderness.
“Put a chair for Margaret by the fire, Aubrey,” she said, “the child will be cold coming through all those passages; that is the worst of an old house, there are so many passages, and a draught in every one of them. I would not say a word against old houses, which are of course all the fashion, and very picturesque, and all that; but I must say I think you suffer from draughts. And what good is the fireplace in the hall? the heat all goes up that big chimney. It does not come into the house at all. I would like hot-water pipes, but they are a great expense, and of course you would all tell me they were out of keeping. So is gas out of keeping. Oh, you need not cry out; I don’t mean in the drawing-room, of course, which is a thing only done in Scotland, and quite out of the question; but to wander about those passages in the dark, and never to stir a step without a candle in your hand! I think it a great trouble, I must allow.”
“Your ancestral home, Miss Leslie,” said Mr. St. John, who had secured a place in front of the fire, “must be a true mediæval monument. I am very much interested in domestic architecture. And so I am sure you must be, familiar with two such houses—”
“People who possess old houses seldom care for them,” said Aubrey, taking up a position on the other side. “You know what my aunt says about gas and hot-water pipes. Tell me,” he said, half whispering, stooping over her, to the great indignation of the clergyman, “what I must call you. I must reserve the endearing title of aunt for the family circle, but I can’t say Miss Leslie, you knew, for you are not Miss Leslie; and Margaret, tout court, would be a presumption.”
“Everybody calls me Margaret,” she said.
“That man did at Killin. I felt disposed to pitch him into the loch when I heard him; but probably,” said Aubrey, laughing, “there might have been two words to that, don’t you think? Perhaps, if it had come to a struggle, it would have been I who was most likely to taste the waters of the loch.”
“Oh, Randal is very good-natured,” said Margaret, making an effort to recover herself, “and perhaps he would not have known what you meant if you had spoken about a loch. I never saw this house till just a little while ago,” she added to Mr. St. John, anxious to be civil. “I never was out of Fife.”