As for Geoff, he became, as he had a way of doing, the sun of the house at Penninghame; even the old Squire took notice of his kind, cheerful young face. He neglected Elfdale and his young cousins, and even Cousin Mary, whom he loved. But it was not to be supposed that John Musgrave would allow a series of love passages to go on indefinitely for years between his young neighbour and his daughter Lilias, as yet not quite thirteen years old. The young man was sent away after a most affecting parting, not to return for three years. Naturally, Lady Stanton rebelled much, she who had kept her son at home during all his life; but what could she do? Instead of struggling vainly she took the wiser part, and though it was a trial to tear herself from Stanton and all the servants, who were so kind, and the household which went upon wheels, upon velvet, and gave her no trouble, she made up her mind to it, and took her maid and Benson and Mr. Tritton and went “abroad” too. What is it to go abroad when a lady is middle-aged and has a grown-up son and such an establishment?—but she did it: “for I shall not have him very long!” she said, with a sigh.
Lilias was sixteen when Geoff came home. Can any one doubt that the child had grown up with her mind full of the young hero who had acted so great a part in her young life? When the old Squire died and Nello went to school, a very different school from Mr. Swan’s, the idea of “Mr. Geoff” became more and more her companion. It was not love, perhaps, in the ordinary meaning of the word; Lilias did not know what that meant. Half an elder brother, half an enchanted prince, more than half a hero of romance, he wove himself with every story and every poem that was written, to Lilias. He it was, and no Prince Ferdinand, whom Miranda thought so fair. It was he who slew all the dragons and giants, and delivered whole dungeons full of prisoners. Her girlhood was somewhat lonely, chiefly because of this soft mist of semi-betrothal which was about her. Not only was she already a woman, though a child, but a woman separated from others, a bride doubly virginal because he was absent to whom all her thoughts were due. “What if he should forget her?” Mary Musgrave would say, alarmed. She thought it neither safe nor right for the child, who was the beauty and flower of Penninghame, as she herself had been, though in so different a way. Mary now had settled down as the lady of Penninghame, as her brother was its lawful lord. John was not the kind of man to make a second marriage, even if, as his sister sometimes fancied, his first had but little satisfied his heart. But of this he said nothing, thankful to be able at the end to redeem some portion of the life thus swallowed up by one of those terrible, but happily rare, mistakes, which are no less wretched that they are half divine. He had all he wanted in his sister’s faithful companionship and in his children. There is no more attractive household than that in which, after the storms of life, a brother and sister set up peacefully together the old household gods, never dispersed, which were those of their youth. Mary was a little more careful, perhaps, of her niece, a little more afraid of the troubles in her way, than if she had been her daughter. She watched Lilias with great anxiety, and read between the lines of Geoff’s letters with vague scrutiny, looking always for indications of some change.
Lilias was sixteen in the end of October, the third after the previous events recorded here. She had grown to her full height, and her beauty had a dreamy, poetical touch from the circumstances, which greatly changed the natural expression appropriate to the liquid dark eyes and noble features she had from her mother and her mother’s mother. Her eyes were less brilliant than they would have been had they not looked so far away, but they were more sweet. Her brightness altogether was tempered and softened, and kept within that modesty of childhood to which her youthful age really belonged, though nature and life had developed her more than her years. Though she was grown up she kept many of her childish ways, and still sat, as Mary had always done, at the door of the old hall, now wonderfully decorated and restored, but yet the old hall still. The two ladies shared it between them for all their hours of leisure, but Mary had given up her seat at the door to the younger inhabitant, partly because she loved to see Lilias there with the sun upon her, partly because she herself began to feel the cool airs of the north less halcyon than of old. The books that Lilias carried with her were no longer fairy tales, but maturer enchantments of poetry. And there she sat absorbed in verse and lost to all meaner delights, on the eve of her birthday, a soft air ruffling the little curls on her forehead, the sun shining upon her uncovered head. Lilias loved the sun. She was not afraid of it nor her complexion, and the sun of October is not dangerous. She had a hand up to shade the book, which was too dazzling in the light, but nothing to keep the golden light from her. She sat warm and glorified in the long, slanting, dazzling rays.
Mary had heard a horse’s hoofs, and, being a little restless, came forward softly from her seat behind to see who it was; but Lilias, lost in the poetry and the sunshine, heard nothing.
“She wept with pity and delight,
She blush’d with love and virgin shame,
And like the murmur of a dream
I heard her breathe my name.
“Her bosom heaved, she stepp’d aside
As conscious of my look she stept,
Then suddenly, with timorous eye,
She fled to me and wept.”
Mary saw what Lilias did not see, the horseman at the foot of the slope. He looked and smiled, and signed to her over the lovely head in the sunshine. He was brown and ruddy with health and travel, his eyes shining, his breath coming quick. Three years! as long as a lifetime—but it was over. Suddenly, “Lily—my little Lily,” he cried, unable to keep silence more.
She sprang to her feet like a startled deer; the book fell from her hands; her eyes gave a great gleam and flash, and softened in the golden light of sunset and tenderness. The poetry or the life, which was the most sweet? “Yes, Mr. Geoff,” she said.
THE END.