“Mother!” he said, furious, “do you think I would hold a girl to her written promise, if she did not want to keep her word?”
“I canna say what you would do,” said Mrs. Glen; “you’re just a great gomerel, that’s what you are. Ye have mair confidence in her being in love with ye, a lang leggit ne’er-do-weel, than in onything that’s reasonable: but, Robbie, my man, love comes and love goes. You’re no bad-looking, and you have the gift of the gab, which goes a lang way—and maybe she’ll stick to ye, as you think, against a’ her friends can say; but for me, I’ve aye a great confidence in what’s put down in black and white, and I wouldna say but you would be fain to come to me for my bit o’ paper, for a’ so muckle as you despise it now.”
“Never will I build my faith on such a foundation—never will I hold Margaret to her bond!” cried Rob; but his mother locked the precious bit of paper in the old secretary which stood in the parlor, with a cynical disregard to his protestations.
“It’s there in the left-hand drawer, if anything should happen to me; if you should ever want it, you’ll ken where to find it,” she said.
And several weeks went on without any impatience on the part of either in respect to Margaret; even the conversation which Rob had with the new Sir Ludovic, who summoned him curtly to give up all idea of his sister, had rather encouraged than depressed him; for it was evident that Margaret had showed no signs of yielding, and her brother was not even her guardian, and had no power whatever over her. When he thus ascertained from Sir Ludovic’s inadvertent admission that Margaret had remained steadfast, Rob had metaphorically snapped his fingers at the Baronet. He had been perfectly civil, but he had given Sir Ludovic to understand that he cared little enough for his disapprobation. “If I was in your position I should no doubt feel the same,” he had said with fierce candor; “I should think that Margaret was about to throw herself away; but she does not think so, which is the great matter.”
“She will think so when she comes to her senses—when she is fit to form an opinion,” Sir Ludovic cried; and Rob had smilingly assured him that he was contented to wait and put this to the proof. But after that interview, when Earl’s-hall was dismantled and left vacant, and everything belonging to the Leslies seemed about to disappear, and not a word came out of the distance in which Margaret was, both Rob and his mother began to be uneasy. Rob had not calculated upon any correspondence; but yet he had felt that somehow or other she would manage to communicate with him, and to find some means by which he could communicate with her. Girls of Margaret’s condition do not submit to entire separation as those of Jeanie’s do; and when day after day passed, and week after week, it was natural that he should become uneasy. Nor was the anxiety which he felt as a lover unshared by the cooler spectator. Mrs. Glen began to ply him with questions, anxious, fretful, scornful, derisive.
“Ony word to-day, Rob?” she would say; “I saw you gang out to meet the lassie with the post.” “Dear, dear, Rob, I hope our bonnie young lady may be well!” would be the burden of the next inquiry—and then came sharper utterances: “Lord! if I was a lad like you, I wouldna stick there waiting and waiting, but I would ken the reason.” “Do you think that’s the way to court a lass, even if she be a lady? I would give her no peace if it were me; I would let her see that I wasna the one to play fast and loose with.” These repeated assaults were followed by practical consequences quite as disagreeable. Instead of the indulgence with which he had been for some time treated, the tacit consent given to his do-nothingness, the patience of his mother, though it went sorely against the grain, with an existence which produced no profit and was of no use—he began to be once more the object of those bitter criticisms and flying insults which she knew so well how to make use of, to the exasperation of the compelled listener. “What it is to be a man and a good scholar!” she would say. “I couldna sit hand-idle, looking at other folk working—no! if it were to save my life. Eh, ay, there’s a wonderful difference atween them that are born to earn their living, and them that are content to live on their friends. I hope the time will never come when that will be my lot. But no one of a’ my friends would help me, that’s one thing, certain, though there are some that have aye the luck to get somebody to toil and moil, while they live pleasantly and gang lightly. It is the way of the world.”
Another time she would burst out with all the fervor of roused temper. “Lord, man, how can ye sit there and see every creature in the house working but yoursel’? I would sooner weed the turnips or frichten the craws—but you’re of less use than a bairn of three years auld.”
Rob steeled himself as best he could against these blighting words. He would stroll forth whistling by way of defiance and be absent the whole day, absent at meal-times when his mother exacted punctuality, and late of returning at night. It was a struggle of constant exasperation between them. He had no money and no means of getting any, or he would gladly have left the farm, where there was no longer even anything to amuse him, anything to give him the semblance of a pursuit. To be sure, he worked languidly at his drawings still, and resumed the interrupted sketch of Earl’s-hall which had occupied so important a place in his recent history.
To have before you the hope of being rich in three years, of being able to enter another sphere and cast away from you all those vulgar necessities of work which fill the lives of most people—to have ease before you, happiness, social elevation, but only on the other side of that long chasm of time, which for the moment you can see no way of getting through—it is impossible to imagine a more tantalizing position. Say that it is utterly mean and miserable of any man to fix his entire hopes upon an elevation procured in such a way; but Rob was not conscious of this. A rich wife, who was also pretty and young, seemed to him a most satisfactory way of making a fortune. Had she been old and ugly the case would have been different; but he had no more hesitation about enriching himself by means of Margaret, than he had felt in securing Margaret to himself in the incaution and prostration of her grief. His conscience and his honor had in these particulars nothing to say. But as day after day went on and he received nothing from Margaret to prove his power over her, no stolen letter, no secret assurance of her love and faithfulness, Rob’s mind became more and more uneasy, and his thoughts more and more anxious. She was the sheet-anchor of his safety, without which he must return into a chaos all the more dark that it had been irradiated by such a hope.