‘It is not my ghost,’ said the figure at the window, advancing to shake hands with Mr. Ponsonby, who was still a little excited. ‘A ghost was never so dusty nor so thirsty. I have walked down from town all the way, to get a breath of air, and very much mystified I was to see a man in the dining-room from the end of the avenue as I came along. I thought at first it must be Ben.’
‘So there was some one about!’ said Mr. Ponsonby; ‘that explains my sensation. I had just been giving your cousin a lecture upon sitting alone with the windows open. Yes, Laurie, my boy, here I am, come to look over the ground for the last time, before it is given up to the heir.’
‘Ben will not be hard upon you,’ said Laurie, with a laugh; but as he spoke he looked fixedly at the solicitor, hoping,—which was like Laurie,—to beguile that astute practitioner into self-betrayal.
‘I don’t know any thing about Ben,’ he answered, smiling at the simple artifice; ‘but I know I must set my affairs in order, and be prepared to give up my trust. I want Mary to go with me over the estate. She is moping and pale, and a brisk canter will do her good. Will you see if there is anything she can ride?’
And then there ensued a little consultation as to whether Fairy was up to it. Fairy was a pet pony, as old as the hills, who had been eating herself into a plethoric condition for years; but Mary, who was not a very bold horsewoman, believed in the venerable animal, as did every soul about Renton. ‘She’s hold in years, but she’s young at ‘art, Miss; she’ll carry you like a bird,’ was the coachman’s opinion when he was called into the consultation. And then Laurie had a vast tankard brought to him, and refreshed himself after his long walk. When Mr. Ponsonby retired, the cousins stepped out again on to the lawn, and Mary looked on and talked while Laurie had his cigar. The moon, which was half over and late of rising, began to lighten slowly upwards, shining upon the river far below, while they were still left in darkness on the higher bank. ‘It is so strange to think we are all on the brink of a new life,’ Mary said, as she gazed down through an opening in the trees upon that silvery gleam, which was framed in by the dark, rustling branches. ‘Are we?’ said Laurie, with a kind of echo in his voice. Somehow he had taken his life awry, by the wrong corner, and there did not seem vigour enough left in him to care for a new beginning,—at least for himself.
‘Laurie,’ she said, encouraged by the darkness. He had thrown himself down in a garden-chair, and was visible only as a shadow, with a red point of cigar indicating his face; while she stood leaning on one of the lower branches of the lime-tree which framed in that glimpse of the light below. Their voices had the softened, mysterious sound which such a moment gives, and as neither of them was happy enough to draw new delight out of the influence of the night, both of them, by natural necessity, grew a little sad. ‘Laurie,’ Mary said, and faltered. ‘Sometimes I think I should like to know a little about you. I do know something about the others,—even Ben,—but you have always been a mystery to me since you first went away.’
‘I don’t think I am much of a mystery,’ said Laurie, not moving from his chair.
‘But you are a mystery,’ Mary repeated, with a little eagerness. ‘I don’t know what has come to you,—whether it is love, or whether it is loss,—don’t be angry, Laurie.’
‘It might be love and loss too,’ he said, with a little laugh, which was not cheerful, and then he rose and tossed away his cigar. ‘What if I were to say you were a mystery, too?’ he continued, not knowing how Mary’s cheeks burned in the darkness. ‘We all are, I suppose; and my poor old father that meant to do so well for us, and tossed us all abroad to scramble anyhow for life,—what do you say to that for a mystery, Mary? and here is the moment coming to prove which of us is preferred and which condemned. I am the poor fellow with one talent, who laid it up in the napkin. If he had not been so mean as to abuse his master, I think I should have sympathised with that poor wretch.’
‘I cannot say I sympathise with him,’ cried Mary, woman-like. ‘To be able to do, and not to do, that is what I cannot understand. But you have not hid your talent in a napkin, Laurie. I wish you had a better opinion of yourself.’