“I’ve no reason to think she’s wanting any hold upon me,” said Archie, with a little irritation.
“Eh!” said his aunt, holding up a warning finger, “she’s laying her spell on you too! I’ll no go near her, or she might make a fool o’ me. It’s easy enough to make a fool o’ me. I just greet at a kind word—I canna help mysel’. When I got her letter wi’ a’ its fine words, I just grat till I was blin’; but then I asked myself what for should she be that ceevil to me?”
“It was maybe only for kindness after all,” said Archie.
“Dinna you be a born idiot to trust in that. Na, na, it’s no without a motive, take my word for it,” Jane said.
It was hard, however, for the closest observer to find out what the motive could be. Evelyn had no small effort to make to overcome her own natural objections to the society of the two young people, one of whom studied her like a pattern book, while the other eyed her from his corner with a hostility scantily veiled by that attempt to be “ceevil” which his aunt had enjoined upon him. Archie’s attitude, however, was on the whole less trying than that of Marion, who studied and copied Mrs. Rowland’s manners, her tone, as far as she could master it, her little tricks of gesture, till Evelyn became ridiculous to herself; which is a very curious experience. When she saw little Marion with her slight person throw back her head as Evelyn was aware she had herself the habit of doing, and drop her hand by her side, which was another peculiarity, swaying it slightly as she walked, a trick for which Evelyn had suffered much in her youth, the laugh which burst from her in spite of herself was not pleasant. Evelyn was tall, while Marion was little; she was forty, and Marion was eighteen. She belonged a little, she was aware, to a bye-gone school, which had been stately rather than piquant, and Marion’s infantile prettiness was adapted to a quite different principle. It was ludicrous to watch growing and increasing day by day the travesty of herself which was before her eyes in her husband’s little girl. Sometimes her impatience with the copy was so great that the woman’s instincts of outraged personality were upon her, and she could have seized and shaken the folly out of the little flatterer and imitator. But I need not say that this was the merest flutter of nerves on Evelyn’s part, and that she never really departed from her rôle of patience. The worst of it was that James began gradually to perceive, and not only to perceive, but regard with delight, this imitation process. “I really think she is growing a little like you, Evelyn!” he said, when his wife had been driven nearly to an end of her toleration, and it was all she could do to keep from her countenance a contraction—which Marion would probably have reproduced next day, to the confusion of all concerned.
In this way, however, a great superficial improvement was notable in the girl. She learned in an inconceivably short time how to manage all the circumstances of her changed life, adapting herself to everything as one to the manner born. No temptation of being respectful to the butler ever came to Marion. She treated him and the rest of the fine servants as if they were cabbages; which was her rendering of the easy and genial indifference with which Mrs. Rowland received the services she had never been accustomed to consider extraordinary. Evelyn’s manner to the maid in her room, though she might not say a word to her, was the easy composure of a woman perfectly considerate and friendly, and ready on any occasion to show her natural interest in the fellow-creature so near to her, both by word and deed. But Marion’s indifference went the length of insult, though she had no intention of anything but to follow exactly her stepmother’s example. The demeanour of the one was just that kind of quiet familiar affability and ease which characterises a relationship in which there is no desire, on the part of the superior at least, for any more demonstration than is felt, or unnecessary intercourse; but Marion’s was a kind of brutality by which the inferior was made to feel as if she had no existence at all except as a ministrant to certain wants. Thus the little girl achieved that polish of the Tartar, which, when scratched, shows the savage through.
Archie was not at all of this kind. And sometimes when Evelyn looked up suddenly and found him with his averted head, shoulder turned the side she was sitting on, and blank of dull opposition, she felt it almost a relief. Now and then some sentiment on her part, something quite unthought of which she said or did, and which probably had no connection whatever with himself, would make him look full at her with those eyes which Rowland had called his mother’s eyes—the honest soft blue, not too profound, but clear as the sky, in which at least the perception of the heart was not wanting, whether it was accompanied or not by any higher light of the spirit. What Archie knew or did not know it was difficult to say, for he never spoke when he could help it, and then chiefly in answer to questions which were seldom of an intellectual kind. Something had been said at first about the University, or rather, as both Archie and his father called it, “the College,” which meant, as Evelyn came slowly to understand, the same thing—only so far different that Glasgow or Edinburgh was the University meant, and not Oxford or Cambridge. That his son should go to “the College” had been Rowland’s intent, but the idea seemed to drop all the more completely, of course, that it was the summer vacation, and nothing could be done for the moment. Archie, however, instead of exerting himself like Marion to acquire a new, if it should happen to be a fictitious standing ground, remained a sort of unknown quantity in his father’s house. With all the efforts she could make Evelyn did not succeed in forming anything but the most slight acquaintance with her stepson, and neither (which was more extraordinary still) did his father attain to more than an acquaintance. Sometimes Archie would be drawn into an expression of opinion on a political subject, which naturally was, as a rule, in opposition to his father, and at once crushed by him; upon which the boy with not unnatural wrath returned into his shell more closely than before. One time, indeed, Evelyn had found herself on the very verge of attaining his confidence, or so at least she thought. It was on the day—momentous day—when Rankin judged the two little dogs to be sufficiently mature to be sent home to their master. They were brought up to the great door, which was at one end of the colonnade. Nothing more amusing could be than the two little bundles of fur and fun deposited at her feet by Sandy the groom, who was delighted with his errand, though a little discomposed to find nobody but “the mistress.”
“They’ll be for the young gentleman,” he said shamefaced.
“What delightful little things,” said Evelyn, who, like all well-conditioned persons, loved dogs. “Go and find Mr. Archibald, Sandy. I’ll take care of them till he comes.”
When Archie appeared in great haste and for once glowing with pleasure, he found her seated in the centre of a great rug on the floor of the hall with the two little dogs in convulsions of delight beside her, barking, biting, rolling and struggling upon the soft carpet, and undaunted with the something so unknown to them—a lady in a soft silken dress to play with. Perhaps the little things recognised only this of Evelyn’s many excellences, that she wore an exceptionally soft gown—not like Jenny Rankin’s rough homespun. Dogs are very susceptible to this superiority of texture.