“Indeed, Robin,” replied his friend, George Henley, a neighbouring laird’s son, “I fear the danger which Ovid represents as being all on the side of the sailors, who listened to these virgins, would, in your case, be transferred to the charmer; and yet they say that Mary Lee, with all her beauty and apparent mildness, has all the siren about her but the fledged tail; and, if the feathers are there awanting, I fear the deficiency is supplied by a sting.”
The hint thrown out by Henley increased the desire of Robin to get acquainted with Mary; for such is the fate of those who are consigned to the intoxications of vice, that they indulge in morbid desires, which, as in the case of the gourmand, produce in their gratifications all the effects of poison. “A fury for a lover!” he ejaculated. “Good! I have had too many soft, breaking hearts. Their very softness has palled upon my appetite; and, as the lover of gourmandize requires stimulants to whip up the jaded powers of his overwrought stomach, my wearied heart longs for a spice of piquant amativeness, to resuscitate its flagging energies.”
Such reflections are but too common with the young rakes of all times; Robin-a-Ree acted upon them, and he was not long in producing an effect upon Mary Lee. He spoke to her at first merely as the daughter of the fisherman; putting questions to her, which he could himself have answered—but, while he was apparently a careless interrogator, he did all in his power, by the shew of his properties, to become a querist of a heart which had hitherto been left to question itself, and to answer its own questions. How few young women can withstand the graces of a handsome youth—and how often is the poison drunk by the heart, before the mind is conscious of the draught! Mary Lee thought, as she looked upon the youthful Ashley, that the young fishermen of Fairhaven were surely not made of the same flesh and blood. Ashley knew the force of his natural endowments, and he brought in aid of those the flatteries of the deceiver. What more is required to complete the work of love? A good regard of the flatterer, followed by a good regard of the flattered, is, alas! often all that is necessary in the composition of female devotion.
The frequent meetings which Robin had with Mary produced the usual effects. Her heart was what every woman’s ought to be—that is, if there were no bad men in the world—it loved at once and for ever. Every pulse of life acknowledged the power which had come like a spirit and thrown a charm over her existence; the world was now centred in one object; her father and her home lost their magic influences of early associations; even the shade of her mother, which was enshrined in her imagination as a part of the mind itself, faded into a thinner existence than even that of a vision, as she revelled in the first enthusiastic enjoyment of maiden affection. Ashley saw with delight, mixed with some misgivings as to the responsibility of such a devotion, the absolute resignation of a full and bursting heart to the dissembled schemes of a professed libertine. Proud of his victory, he paused, like the cruel lord of the jungle, to play with the victim destined to a protracted immolation; and she, deluded creature! received, with panting eagerness, the caresses which she considered the fruit of a love equal to her own. As she hung upon his bosom and fed his eyes with the soft beams of a first love, shining through tears of kindness and devotion, who could have observed, in that light, more danger than belongs to so innocent a thing as a woman’s smile? Robert Ashley had known by experience, that a woman’s eye that does not shine on her seducer, generally shines not at all, unless it be in the phosphorescent brightness of the corruption of the grave. Mary Lee was, like other women, an object to be possessed, not feared; Ashley enjoyed her present devotion in the exultation of pride, and her subsequent ruin in a certain hope of reality.
Wandering through the thick woods of “The Castle,” Mary Lee drank deeper of the intoxicating draught, as her appetite was increased by the inspiring influences of romantic scenes.
“How is it, Robin,” she said, with the familiarity which love begets on innocence—“how is it that now the woods of the Castle are to me so dear, and I ever think that every mavis and blackbird in the thick groves are to me little messengers o’ guid news. Before you spoke to me, I was fond o’ the rippling waves that come as if they were sent by the corpses in the ‘dead deep,’ to tell their griefs to us on land. But now my thoughts are aff the sea, and the Castle, wi’ a’ its braw trees and flowers, is aye present to me, as used to be the shade o’ my mither.”
“Thou art fond of reasons, my gentle Mary,” replied Robin, “and perhaps canst say why thou wast formerly so fond of the sea. Perhaps some young fisherman had then a part of the heart which now I hope is all my own.”
“An’ weel, Robin, may ye say its a’ yer ain,” said Mary; “for, sleepin’ or waukin’, I think only o’ you, an’ the foes that wad tak you an’ mak you the lover o’ anither. Catherine Hamilton o’ Castlegreen kenned naething o’ my heart yesterday, when, as ye left the village, she saw me looking at her as she looked at you. The lady ca’ed the fisherman’s dochter ‘wretch,’ but she heard no answer fra me. At that time you looked back to her and smiled, and she forgot me, but I will mind her to the day I dee. I could have forgiven her if she hadna been so bonny, and if ye hadna given her the glance that should have come to me. But it’s only in the thick woods that Robin-a-Ree kens the fisherman’s dochter o’ Fairhaven.”
“Come, now, my Mary, none of thy reproofs. Thou knowest that I was a favourite of Catherine Hamilton’s before I knew thee, and it would not have been courteous to shake off an old acquaintance because my Mary was present and requested all my attention.”
“Weel, weel, ye ken I forgive ye,” answered Mary, “and my forgiveness is as real as my love, but I have ae request to mak, and that is—that, if ye dinna choose to ken me in Fairhaven when Catherine is in the village, ye will keep within the bounds o’ the Castle lands. That leddie lies far out o’ my way, if she crossna your path when I am near; but the blasts that blew owre the Mull o’ Galloway are nae sterner to the boatmen o’ the Solway than will be my scorn if she come atween me and my love.”