The Railway Man and His Children

by Mrs. Oliphant

Eddy, in spite of his self-control, turned pale. “Archie,” he said, in a tone of horror, “put out of his share!”

Marion gave him a keen, investigating look. “When a man has two children,” she said, “and one of them flies in his face every time he can, and the other is very careful always to do her duty, whether it is pleasing herself or not, I would not wonder at anything, for my part. He might like the son best for the name and all that, but if the lassie would do him most justice? I am not saying if it would be a good thing or not. But the man might see that in the one there would be no credit, but plenty in the other. I am thinking of it just in a general way,” Marion said.

“Then good-bye to me,” said Eddy, “if you were to be a great heiress—and Archie! Good life!” he let her hand go, and, cold though the morning air was, wiped the moisture from his forehead. “I’d better take a header into the loch and be done with it,” he said.

“You will not do that, Mr. Eddy, for you like yourself best: though perhaps you may like Archie a little—or, perhaps, me.”

“Perhaps even you!” cried Eddy. “Perhaps I do, or I shouldn’t have stayed down here in the north for a month with nothing to do. You are a dreadful little thing to talk quietly of tossing me over after all that has passed, like an old glove. And to take Archie’s place, as if it were nothing, as if it were the most natural thing in the world!”

“And is it not?” said Marion. “I never would have done a thing to harm Archie. It is none of my doing; but if it opens papa’s eyes, and makes him ask who will do him the most credit—him, that would never be anything but a common lad at the best, or me, that might be at the Queen’s court, and do him great justice.”

Eddy clapped his hands together, with a quick laugh. “Marry the Duke,” he said.

“Well,” said Marion, with dignity, “and if I did that? What more would it be than I would deserve, and doing great justice to papa!”

Eddy stood for a moment looking at her, with a curious mixture of pain which was quite new to him, in being thus left out of Marion’s cold-blooded philosophy, and of cynical amusement, tempered by wonder at the progress this very young and apparently simple person had made in the mystery of worldliness. He had the sensation, too, of having done it all, of having wrought that ruin to Archie which might place Archie’s sister in a position to balk his own plans and humiliate himself. He had meant to have the upper hand himself in all the arrangements between them. He had meant, indeed, this very morning to bind her by a quasi engagement, while leaving himself free for whatever eventualities might come. But Marion, with these cool, matter-of-fact dispositions, had turned the tables upon Eddy. And he was discomposed besides to find that it actually hurt him. He, the accomplished man of the world that he was, so infinitely above Marion in experience and knowledge! it gave him a confused pang which he could not understand, to find that he was no more to her than half-an-hour before he had believed her to be to him. He was more or less stunned by that sensation, which was unexpected, and stood vaguely gazing at her, coming to himself before he could reply. “I don’t find much place for me in all this,” he said, ruefully. He could have laughed at his own discomfiture if he had not been so ridiculously wounded and sore.

It was perhaps a sign that she was not very sure of herself, but she did not look at him, which also took away one of Eddy’s weapons. She walked on quite calmly by his side, looking straight before her, neither to the right hand nor the left.