Archie looked at his sister, endeavouring to catch her eye, but Marion refused him all help. She betook herself to the task of buttoning her glove, which required all her energies, and then she got up shaking out her skirts: “I’ll die,” she said, “if I stay longer here—it’s so hot, and there’s a smell of dougs. You can come when you’re ready. I want the fresh air.”
“Dear me,” said Rankin with scorn; “this’ll be a very delicate Miss! and ower grand for the likes of us. Lady Jean never minded the smell of the dougs. Sandy, man, what made you bring such a grand lady here? Are ye for them, or are ye no for them?” he added, severely, turning to Archie. “It’s no of the least consequence to me—but you’ll have to say.”
Archie, with his hair standing on end at his own audacity, gave the order hurriedly, and went out after his sister, with a sort of despairing sense that he had now committed himself beyond recall, and that the stories he had read in books about the miseries of men who had large sums to make up and no prospect of finding the wherewithal, were about in his dread experience to come true. The gamekeeper and the groom discussed the abrupt withdrawal after their fashion, and with no particular precaution not to be heard by the subjects of their discourse.
“Yon’s a queer pair to be gentry,” said Rankin. “I would have said a lad and a lass from Glesco in an excursion; just the kind that comes doun at the fair-time, and has nae manners nor education. I’m no much accustomed to that kind—A smell o’ dougs! set her up! Mony a leddy has sat there and had her crack, and never a word about the dougs, poor things. The smell of a mill would maybe be more in her way.”
“Whisht, man,” said the groom, “they’re maybe listening. Where could they get their manners or their eddication? They’re just Jims Rowland’s bairns that my father knew when he was in the foundry; and they’ve lived a’ their lives with Jane Brown, that was ance the auld man’s joe, and micht have been my mother if a’ things had gane straight—think o’ that! I micht have been their cousin, and I’m just the groom in the stables. ‘Od! I could have brought doun Missie’s pride if I had been a drap’s blood to her. They’re no a preen better nor you and me.”
“In the sicht o’ heaven,” said Rankin, “there’s no one person better than anither: I dinna just rank myself with the commonality. But I’ll allow that the auld family has the pull of it even with me. There’s something about Lady Jean now—ye canna say what it is, and yet it maks a difference. I’m a man that has seen a’ kinds. The real gentry, and what ye may call the Glesco gentry, and them that’s just shams through and through. The Glesco gentry has grand qualities sometimes. They just never care what they spend. If ye put a fancy price upon a little doug, they just say, ‘Oh ay, nae doubt you have great trouble in rearing them,’ and gies ye your price without a word. The tither kind’s no that liberal—they canna bide to be imposed upon. They just stiffen up, and they say, ‘That’s mair than I thought of giving, and good day to ye.’ But I canna bide them that would and then they wouldna, that just hankers and grudges and have nae money in their pouches. Without money, nae man has any right to take up my time coming here.”
Archie heard this diatribe as he stood outside, waiting under the protection of the great ash tree till a passing shower should have blown over, with a sense of the truth of it which went over him in a great wave of heat and discomfiture down to his very boots. That was just what he was, a sham with nothing in his pocket, combining all the defects of the Glesco great people with an absolute want of that real foundation on which they stood. He had no education, no manners, nothing upon which any claim of superiority could be put forth. Superiority! he did not mean that. Poor Archie felt himself the equal of nobody, not even of Sandy the groom, who, at least, had an occupation of his own and knew how to do it. And no money in his pocket! that was perhaps the worst of all. He had always heard a great deal about money all his life. Mrs. Brown had an unlimited reverence for it, and for those who possessed it. She had no particular knowledge of the gentry. But to be able to pay your way, to be able to lay by a little, to have something in the bank, that was the height of her ambition. And though she highly disapproved of large expenditure, she admired it as the most dazzling of greatness. “He just never minds what he spends,” she had said of Rowland a hundred times, almost with awe. Archie had been accustomed to admire this quality in his father from his earliest consciousness. And to stand on the soil which to him was his father’s (though the people of the place were so strong upon the fact that he was only a tenant), almost within sight of the great house which was being fitted up regardless of expence, and to have nothing in his pocket, filled the lad with the bitterest shame and humiliation. “If I had only five pounds—or knew where to get it,” he said to himself with a gesture of disgust and despair. “Five pounds,” said Marion, who heard him though he did not want to be heard, and repeated it in her usual clear very distinct voice, not lowered in the least, “What do ye want with five pounds? and why don’t you get it from papa?” Archie thought he heard a laugh from the cottage which proved that the men inside had heard. It wrought him almost to fury. He dashed out into the rain and left her standing there astonished. Marion did not care for what the groom and the gamekeeper said. She was quite confident that she had only to “ask papa,” and that whatever she wished would fall into her lap. She had not, like Archie, any difficulty in asking papa. After a few moments of hesitation she too stepped out of the shelter of the ash, and followed her brother through the wood. The shower was over, the sun had come out again, every branch and leaf was glistening. The birds had taken up their songs at the very note where they left off, with renewed vigour. Marion too broke out into a little song as she went on. The boughs as she brushed past scattered shining drops like diamonds over her, which she eluded with a little run and cry. Even the woodland walk was thus more amusing than she thought.
CHAPTER XV.
Mr. Rowland, when his children left him, was left with a very uncomfortable prick of thought, a sort of thorn lacerating the skin, so to speak, of his mind. The suggestion which had been thrown at him as the Spanish bullfighters throw their ornamented darts, stuck as they do, and kept up an irritating smart, though it was not, he said, to himself of the least importance. No society! He came out to the colonnade in the intervals of his anxious work of supervision, and looked round him wistfully. He walked indeed all round the house, looking out in every direction. Towards the west there were visible, by glimpses among the trees, some houses of the village of Kilrossie, a high roof or two, and the white spire of the newly built church; to the east, on the other side of the loch, another village-town extended along the edge of the gleaming water, shining in the sunshine. Plenty of human habitations, fellow-creatures on every side: but society! Wealth has a very curious effect upon the mind in this respect. The people who came to the handsome houses at Kilrossie for the bathing season were many of them much superior to James Rowland in birth and education, and quite equal to him in intelligence, except in his own particular sphere; yet this man who had been only a man in a foundry when those good people were enjoying the advantages of the saut water, and all the luxuries of comparative wealth, would now have felt himself humiliated had he been obliged to accept the society of the good people at Kilrossie as all he might hope to attain. Their neighbourhood was rather a trouble than an enlivenment to his mental vision. And the county people, who had their “places” scattered about at intervals, were in many cases neither so well off, nor so intelligent as these: and they would look down upon the railway man, while the others would regard him with respect. There was no possibility of doubt as to which of the two he would be most comfortable with. And yet he slurred them over cursorily as if they were not there, and sighed into the sweet vacant air which contained no loftier indication of society. How proud he would have been to have known the Kilrossie people fifteen years ago—how it would have elated him to be asked under their roof! and now their presence irritated him as a set of imposters who perhaps would thrust themselves upon him in the guise of society: that was not the society for which he cared.
The prick of the banderilla discharged by Marion’s trifling little hand was in him all day: and in the afternoon when he had done everything he could, and given all his orders about the arrangement of the furniture, he too went out to take a walk and to spy out the nakedness of the land. He did not go into the woods as his children had done, nor would the dogs have had any charm for him. He went down to the village, where there certainly was no society except in the one house which held modest sway over the cluster of whitewashed and red-tiled cottages—the manse, where the minister represented, if not the wealthier yet the educated portion of the community, and might at least furnish information, if nothing else, as to the prospects and possibilities of the place. In spite of himself Rowland’s discouragement reflected itself in his countenance, making him, as so often happens, look angry and discontented. There was something even in the way in which his heel spurned the gravel, making it fly behind him, which betrayed the unsatisfied state of his mind. He had scarcely emerged from his own gate when he met the minister in person, who turned with him and walked along the country road by his side with great complaisance, partly because he was glad to meet any one on that not much frequented road, and partly because it was a good thing to make a friend of the inhabitant of “The House.” The shower which had caught Marion and Archie at Rankin’s cottage, made the two gentlemen pause for a few moments but no more under the shade of an overhanging tree. A shower is too common a thing in that country to disturb any one. It discharged its harmless volley, and then cleared away with rapidity as if the sportive angel who had that brief job in hand was glad on the whole to get it over; which is very often the way with the sky officials in that particular in the west of Scotland. The cloud blew away in a second, dispersing what was left of it in floating rags of white, which fled towards the hills, leaving the sky radiant over Peterston on the other side of the loch, and the loch itself as blue, reflecting the sky, as was that capricious firmament itself—for the moment. The road ran inland, with fields of wheat between it and the margin of the shining water, beyond which rose the low banks of the loch, and further off a background of mountains. If it was not quite equal to the great “view” of Rosmore House, this prospect was at least very fine, soft and clear, in all the harmony of a blueness and whiteness such as a rainy climate confers; and Mr. Rowland too, like his daughter, was comforted by the singing of the birds, which all burst forth again with unusual energy after the subduing influence of the shower. He said, “It is certainly a beautiful place,” as he paused for a moment to look over the green field at the little steamers which seemed to hang suspended in the beatific air, one on the surface of the water, one reflected below.