The Story of Valentine and His Brother

by Mrs. Oliphant

This was the first thing that met the eyes of the travelling party when—duly heralded by the Castleton paper, which in its last issue had announced the approaching return of “Lord and Lady Eskside, the Hon. Richard and Mrs Ross, Mr Valentine Ross, M.P. for Eskshire, and Mr Richard Ross the younger”—they arrived at Lasswade. The old lord himself was the first to read it when they got out at the little railway station on the new branch line, which, as everybody knows, is still a mile or two distant from the village. There were two carriages waiting—the great barouche, which was Lady Eskside’s favourite, and a vehicle of the genus dog-cart for “the boys;” and the usual little commotion which always attends an arrival left a few minutes to spare while the carriage drew up. Lord Eskside came and took his old wife by the arm, and led her to the place where this address, blazoned in great letters, “To the Electors of Eskshire,” held a prominent position. “Is it something new?” she asked with a sickness at her heart; “oh, don’t let Val see it!” When she had read it, however, the old pair looked at each other and laughed with tremulous enjoyment. I am afraid it did not occur to them to look at this as a high-minded atonement, or to see any generosity in the confession. “Sandy Pringle is worsted at last,” the old lord said, with a gleam of light from under his eyebrows. But the exhilaration of unquestionable victory filled their hearts, and made them forget for the moment the other drawbacks which attended their return.

With this sense of having beaten their adversary strong in their minds, they no longer hesitated to drive home through Lasswade, which they had not intended to do; where they had a most flattering reception. What with the curiosity excited by this probable éclaircissement of a romantic story and the eagerness of everybody to see Richard Ross’s wife, and the new excitement produced by that placard on the walls—which most people, I fear, received as Lord Eskside received it—every one was agog. It was not a formal entrance with triumphal arches, &c., for this is not a kind of demonstration very congenial to the natural independence of the Lowland Scotch mind, which is much disposed to be friendly towards its great neighbours, but very little disposed to feudal notions of the respect due to a superior. Willie Maitland, it is true, had once thought of suggesting something of the sort, but he had fortunately forborne; and accordingly, though there was an absence of flags and decorations, a very warm spontaneous welcome was given to the travellers. They stopped at the door of the Bull, and the carriage was instantly surrounded by a genial crowd, attracted, it is true, quite as much by a desire for information, as by a wish to do honour to Lord Eskside’s family; and there, sure enough, by my lady’s side sat the unknown Mrs Ross, looking out with large eyes, in which a certain terror and wonder combated the look of abstraction which was habitual to them. She had been here before—how well she remembered how! not in the chief street, honoured of everybody, but dragging through the muddy roads, dull and despairing, with her two crying children. The cold wild March night of her recollection was not more unlike the soft sunshine of this May-day, than was her own position now and then. Was she more happy? She did not ask herself the question. Only people in a more or less artificial state of self-consciousness do ever ask themselves if they are happy or not; the uninstructed soul takes life as it comes. But her aspect impressed the people of Lasswade. They concluded that she was “not very happy with her husband;” and as Richard was not popular in the county he despised, this rather prepossessed the popular mind in her favour; but that this woman had ever been the “beggar-wife” of the popular legend, the county ever after refused to believe.

The Dowager-Duchess had driven into Lasswade, of course “by accident,” on that afternoon, and so had Sir John and his lady; and it is astonishing how many other carriages of lesser potentates the Eskside party met on their way home. It was a fine day to be sure; everybody was out; and every separate detachment of anxious neighbours had its own remarks to make. “The second son looks a fine lad,” the good people said; for indeed Dick had beamed with grateful smiles upon every one who had a welcome for Val. And thus the family, at last united, with glad welcome of all their neighbours, and retractation of their enemy’s slanders, made their way home. “You see we’ve brought Sandy Pringle to his marrow-bones, my lord!” cried Willie Maitland the factor, my lord’s right-hand man, as they drove away from the door of the Bull. “Ay, ay, the auld sneck-drawer!” said Lord Eskside in his glee. This was all Mr Pringle made by his apology. Val, I am happy to say, was otherwise disposed—he took it generously touched by the confession, not triumphing in it, as extorted from his assailant; and his explanation of the placard, which he too had read eagerly to his brother and confidant, was made in a very different tone. “I knew old Pringle was a good fellow,” said Val; “he was forced to it by his party; but the moment he hears the truth he comes forward and owns it like a man. Our fathers and mothers think differently from us, Dick, old fellow. They think because old Pringle is out of it so long as you and I are to the fore, that therefore he must be our enemy. I always knew it was nothing of the sort, but only a party move,” said Valentine, flourishing his whip with that delicious sense of generous superior wisdom which dwells in the bosom of youth; and then he added, softly, “After this, surely they can’t make any more row about Violet and me.”

“I should think not,” said Dick, with a sigh; the sight of those Eskside woods, where he had seen her, came back to his mind with a strange thrill. What a moment of enchantment that had been! He had never hoped it would come back again. How could he wish it to come back, when only by injury to Val it could ever bring any happiness to him? And, to be sure, he had only seen Violet twice, never long enough to——“What a lucky fellow you are!” was what he said.

“Am I not?” cried Val, in his frank happiness; “I should think this was the very last stone rolled out of my way.”

There had been a great commotion in Rosscraig, preparing everything for the family party; the new wing had been opened, the carpets put down, the curtains up, and everything arranged according to Lady Eskside’s orders. The new wing had all kinds of conveniences in it—sitting-rooms for the young couple for whom it was prepared, nurseries for the children, everything that could help to make it agreeable to a son’s family under the same roof with his father and mother. But as it happened now, both Richard and Valentine preferred to keep their old rooms; and the new wing was given up to Dick and his mother, to whom it appeared a wilderness of grandeur, confusing and blank in its extent and wealth. It had windows which looked down upon the wooded bank of the Esk, and windows which looked to the great door and court-yard, and a suite of rooms through which you could wander from one side to another, for it ran all the breadth of the house. I am not sure that these two, transported into that luxurious place, did not feel the change more painfully and strangely than its natural occupants would have done had they been suddenly dismissed to Styles’s river-side cottage. The mother felt it most of all. She sat in her own rooms almost all the day, patiently receiving the visits of her sons and of Lady Eskside, but never seeking them in the other portions of the house—brightening to see Val, but saying little even to him. She was chilled and stifled by all these fine surroundings. Often she would rise and fling the windows open, or pull at the curtains instinctively, as if to pull them down. “I can’t breathe,” she would sometimes say to Dick, with a plaintive tone in her voice. Her life, such as it was, was gone from her. She was quite submissive, doing all that was asked of her, attempting no resistance. I cannot explain the entire cessation now of the struggle which she had kept up so long, any more than she could. Fate was too strong for her, and her strength was waning; but when she yielded, she yielded altogether, unreasoning and unreasonably, as she had struggled—her mind was not capable of compromise, or of making the best of a position. When she gave in she dropped her arms entirely, and with her arms her strength.

And strangely enough, Val, the sight of whom had kept her alive, lost his power now over his mother, and Dick, who was her own, became all in all to her. She was happy only when her familiar companion was by her, and could not be persuaded to go out except with Dick. Sometimes when they wandered into the woods a gleam of something like pleasure would come upon her face. There was one knoll which they found out by chance in the very heart of the trees, a little bank which, when they discovered it first, was covered with late primroses. The trees were very thick round, and the sun came late, and penetrated but a short time through the heavy boughs; and this, I suppose, kept them later in blooming than their rustic neighbours. It is long, long since I have seen these flowers; and perhaps it is the misty glory of that morning-time of childhood that makes me feel there never were any such primroses before or after in this commonplace world—so large, so spotless, so full of sweetness, instinct with a lovely life of their own, friends rather than flowers. Their long stalks thrilled with a youthful force of existence, their green cool leaves overlapped each other, glistening with heavenly dew, their celestial petals were not like pale gold or soft velvet, which are the first vulgar images one thinks of, but like themselves only—primroses, the very essence of spring and fragrance and everlasting youth. When I shut my eyes I can see them still, lifting up their lovely heads out of their leaves, looking you and heaven in the face with all the candour of innocence, though it is, oh, so many years since they and I saw each other! When Dick and his mother, wandering through the woods, came to this bank, it seemed to touch her heart as nothing had done. She sat down on the grass and gazed at the flowers in a transport. “If we were as we used to be,” she said, “oh, Dick, my lad, how you would have run to the cart for a basket! It seems no more than waste to gather them now. What would we do with them? there’s grander flowers in all the rooms; they’d be like you and me, Dick, out of our place. Flowers were always what I liked. I never was one for saying much,” she went on, reflectively, “but a basket of primroses, that speaks for itself.”

“How you go back upon the old days, mother! said Dick, regretfully, and perhaps with a slight reproach.

“Yes, lad; I liked them best. It’s heavy on me to be shut up in houses. I was never used to it,” she said, with a sigh.

“But you can put up with it, mother?—you will put up with it?—for the sake of Val—and me.”