“Well, I wouldna say but that’s true,” said Mrs. Glen, softened. “Auld Sir Ludovic, your father, had aye a pleasant word for gentle and simple; and if it was not for that lang-tongued wife down bye yonder—”
Sir Ludovic, though he was a serious man, felt a momentary inclination to chuckle when he heard his sister Jean, the managing person of the family, described as a lang-tongued wife. But he said, gravely,
“In such a question, Mrs. Glen, there is a great deal to be considered. You would not have liked it yourself, had one of your daughters been courted without your knowledge by a penniless lover. When you see your son, if I can do anything for him, if I can advance his interests, let me know, and I will do it. He behaved like a man at the last.”
“Oh ay; when a lad plays into your hands, it’s easy to say that he’s behaving like a man,” she said. But she was mollified by the praise, and her wrath had begun to wear itself out. “I’ll gie you a word o’ warning, Sir Ludovic, though you’ve little title to it from my hands,” she added. “Here’s Randal Burnside coming back. If you’ve saved your little Miss from ae wooer, here’s another; and my word, I would sooner have a bonnie lad like my Rob, with real genius in his head, than a minister’s son, neither ae thing nor another, like Randal Burnside.”
They met a moment afterward, and Randal recounted what had happened; how Rob had caught the train, but he himself, being too late, had intended to return to the Grange for the interval, and was now on his way there. Mrs. Glen, however, would not return; she was too glad to be deposited in a shady room where she could loose her shawl and bonnet-strings, and fan herself with her large handkerchief. Sir Ludovic, who had “a warm heart for Fife,” as he himself expressed it, and who had been touched by Rob’s final self-vindication, did everything that could be done for her comfort, before he turned back with Randal. But they had no sooner left her, than he fell to talking with an appearance of relief.
“Thank God, that’s done with!” he said. “It was very foolish of poor little Margaret; but, after all, it was nothing—nothing in law. My sister Jean got a terrible fright. There is a panic abroad in the world about Scotch marriages; but a promise that is only on one side can never be anything. You don’t seem to know what I am talking of.”
“No,” said Randal, who had gone out of the hall before the climax came. He looked with bewildered curiosity in his companion’s face.
“You should have told me, you should have told me—what did you know about it, then? And what were you doing there, Randal? Excuse me, but I have a right to know.”
“You have a perfect right to know. I knew that Glen had, by some means, engaged—her—to himself,” said Randal, not knowing how to express what he meant, reddening and faltering, as if he himself had been the culprit. “I saw them together twice at Earl’s-hall; and once she was good enough to speak to me about it. I had taken no notice of her when I saw them, thinking, as one does brutally, that she understood what she was doing, as I did. And in her innocence she asked me why? What could I say but that I was a brute, and a fool—and that if I could ever serve her I would do it, should it cost me my life.”
“That is the way you young idiots speak,” said Sir Ludovic, with an impatient gesture. “Your life: how could it affect your life? But you were neither a fool nor brutal, that I can see. Poor little silly thing, she thought you were rude to pass her, did she? and what then? Innocent! oh yes, she’s innocent enough.”