“I don’t do that, Margaret.” He looked at her so earnestly that she was almost abashed, yet, fearing nothing, went on, moved by the flowing of her own newly awakened thoughts. “You and Jean, you talk as if a little bit of a cup or a plate—what we call pigs in Fife—was of more importance— What are you laughing at, Aubrey?—because I said pigs? But it is the common word.”
“My dear little Margaret,” he said, “don’t make me laugh, with your pigs. Lecture me. Let us go and sit under the pine and look out upon the sea, and do you preach me a little sermon about real right and real wrong. I am just in the mood to profit by it now.”
“You are doing what papa used to do,” said Margaret, half laughing, half crying; “he would always make a fool of me. And how should I lecture you? You must know much better than I do.”
“I ought, I suppose,” he said. The pine stood on a little point, one of those innumerable fairy headlands that line that lovely coast, the sea lapping softly, three parts round, the foot of the cliff on which it holds its place. The air was more fresh there than anywhere else. The pine held high its clump of big branches and sharp evergreen needles high over their heads: behind them was a bosquet of shrubs which almost hid them as they sat together. The blue sea thus softly whispering below upon the beach, the delicate rose that tinted the sky, the great pine isolated and splendid, how could they recall to Margaret the dark wood, all worn with the winds, the mossy knoll, the big elbows of the silver fir, the moan of the Northern sea with which she had been so familiar? The one scene, though made up of almost the same details, bore no more resemblance to the other than Aubrey Bellingham did to Rob Glen: and where could a greater difference be?
“Yes,” he said; “so far as wrong is concerned, I should suppose so. I must be better up in that than you are; but, all the same, I should like you to teach me. Let it be about the right; there you are strong. What must I do to cease to be a useless dilettante—as you say I am?”
“Me? I never said so, Aubrey—not such a word. I never said such a word.”
“But you meant it. Tell me, Margaret: if I can cease to be a dilettante and a trifling person, what would you have me be?”
He bent toward her, looking into her eyes, and half put out his hand to take hers; and Margaret, startled, saw once more what it had so much bewildered her to see in Mr. St. John, the same look which she knew in the eyes of Rob Glen. What an amount of experience she was acquiring, ever renewed and extended! This frightened her greatly. She drew away from him upon the garden-seat, and kept her hands clasped firmly together, and beyond the reach of any other hand.
“I do not want you to be anything,” she said, “you are very well as you are. You might think upon—perhaps you might think upon—the common folk a little more. When you came to Earl’s-hall we did not know what you meant; and sometimes even now Jean and you— I know most about the common folk, they are just as interesting as the others.”
“Ah,” he said, laughing, but a little discomfited, “you mean the poor. Must I take to visiting the poor?”