“That you will never see me, mother,” cried Elsie, with hot tears, “for his siller! I would rather die——”
“It need not be altogether for his siller,” Mrs. Buchanan said, “and, oh! if you but knew what a difference that makes. To marry a poor man is just often like this. Your youth flies away fighting, and you grow old before your time, with nothing but bills on every hand, bills for your man, and bills for your bairns, hosen and shoes, meat and meal—and then to put the lads and lassies out in the world when all’s done. Oh, Elsie, the like of you! how little you know!”
“You married a poor man yourself, mother,” the girl cried.
“The better I’m fitted to speak,” said Mrs. Buchanan. “But,” she said, putting down her work, and rising from her chair, “I married your father, Elsie! and that makes all the difference,” she said with dignity, as she went away.
What was the difference it made? Elsie asked herself the question, shaking back her hair from her face, and the tears from her eyes. Her cheeks were so hot and flushed with this argument, that the drops from her eyes boiled as they touched them. What made the difference? If ever she married a man, she said to herself, he should be a man of whom she would think as her mother did, that being him was what made all the difference. The image that rose before her mind was not, alas! of a man like her father, handsome and dignified and suave, a man of whom either girl or woman might be proud. She was not proud of his appearance, if truth must be told: there were many things in him that did not please her. Sometimes she was impatient, even vexed at his inaptitudes, the unconscious failures of a man who was not by birth or even by early breeding a gentleman. This thought stung her very sorely. Upon the sands ploutering, as she said, in the salt water, his bonnet pushed back, his shirt open at the neck, his coat hanging loosely on his shoulders! Elsie would have liked to re-dress that apparition, to dust the yellow sand from him and the little ridges of shattered shells which showed on his rough clothes as they did on the sea-shore. But no hand could keep that figure in order, even in a dream. And alas! he would be no placed minister like her father, or like Marion’s husband, with a pleasant manse and a kirk in which all men would do him honour. Alas, alas, no! They did not reverence Johnny. They came plucking at him, crowding about him, calling to him, the very littlest of them, the very poorest of them, Elsie said to herself, to let them see the new beast! But at this thought her heart melted into the infinite softness of that approval, which is perhaps the most delightful sentiment of humanity, the approval of those we love—our approval of them more exquisite still than their approval of us. Elsie did not care the least for the new beast. She was altogether unscientific. She did not see the good of it, any more than the most ignorant. But when she thought of his genial countenance beaming over the small, the poor, the ignorant, her heart swelled, and she approved of him with all her soul.
Elsie had no easy life during the remaining months of the summer. After Frank Mowbray’s birthday, when all was settled, and he had begun to trim up and brighten Mr. Anderson’s old house, which was to be his future home, she had a great deal to bear from the members of her family, who one and all supported Frank’s suit, which the young man lost no time in making. He for himself would take no refusal, but came back and back with a determination to be successful, which everybody said would eventually carry the day: and each one in succession took up his cause. All St. Rule’s indeed, it may be said, were partisans of Frank. What ailed her at him, her friends said indignantly? who was Elsie Buchanan that she should look for better than that? A fine fellow, a good income, a nice house, and so near her mother! Girls who were going to India, or other outlandish places, asked, with tears in their eyes, what she could desire more? It was not as if there was any one else to disturb her mind, they said: for by this time Ralph Beaton and the rest were all drifting away to India and the Colonies to fulfil their fate: and to think of Johnny Wemyss as lifting his eyes to the minister’s daughter, was such a thing as no one could have believed. Marion came in expressly from the country, with her three babies, to speak powerfully to the heart of her sister. “You will regret but once, and that will be all your life,” she said solemnly. And it has already been seen how her mother addressed her on the subject. Rodie, too, made his wishes distinctly known.
“Why will you not take him?” he said; “he is as decent a chap as any in the town. If you scorn him, very likely you will never get another: and you must mind you will not always have me to take you about everywhere, and to get your partners at the balls.”
“You to get me partners!” cried Elsie, wildly indignant; “you are a bonnie one! You just hang for your own partners on me; and as for taking me to places, where do you ever take me? That was all ended long ago.”
But things became still more serious for Elsie, when her father himself came to a pause in front of her one day, with a grave face.
“Elsie,” he said, “I hear it is in your power to make a young man’s life, or to mar it; at least that is what he says to me.”