Molly pictured him to herself as a quite ineffable individual, with fathomless dark eyes and flowing locks of ebony, such as should befit an immortal poet. And “immortal” Scott doubtless is, in the literary sense, with still no peer, but hardly as a poet. Popular judgment made a mistake there—not for the first or the last time in its existence.
“Where, where, is he of the radiant brow,
The faulchion glance and the flashing eye,
Whose lofty mien and dazzling air
Bespeaks——” etc.
This is not a quotation; it is merely a specimen of the kind of thing that our great-grandmothers and grandmothers in their early youth admired and doted on. The bump of veneration must have been more highly developed on people’s heads in those days than in these. And how they did admire and did dote, the dear young things! Just as Molly Baron did that evening. She sat upon her quiet seat, neglected, yet perfectly happy at the thought of the glorious poet-form, which her gaze was soon to rest upon. She did not care to talk. She did not wish to dance. She was wrapped in a dream, from which Mrs. Bryce’s decisive finger-tips aroused her.
“Wake up, my dear. Are you asleep, Molly? Here he comes.”
Molly looked rapturously around and about in eager quest. But she saw no wondrous human form to correspond to the image in her mind. A lame man, of good height, rather robust in make, healthy, but scarcely “elegant,” with brown hair, flaxen eyebrows, a long upper lip, and a frank genial expression—no, that was not Molly Baron’s ideal of an immortal poet. His eyes were only light grey in colour, not dark and wild, as a poet’s should have been. Yet the gleams of arch brightness which lighted up his face, as he talked, went a long way towards redeeming it from homeliness.
Then Molly was called up to be presented to the poet; and he said a few kind words to the young girl—she could not afterwards remember what they were. In later years she would be glad to know always that she had seen and spoken with him; but at the moment her mind was full of its sudden disillusionment.
Mr. Walter Scott passed on, surrounded by a host of friends; and Molly retreated again to her seat. Plenty was going on to amuse and interest her. She had danced twice, and now a rather long pause had come, no fresh partners turning up. Molly was of course under Mrs. Bryce’s wing, but that lady had too many irons in the fire to spare much time for the quiet country girl at her side. Molly cared little. She liked to look and listen, indulging in cogitations of her own. Mrs. Bryce’s gay talk was entertaining enough, as the good lady expatiated on this person and that, flirted her fan at one elderly gentleman and captured another, dissected theoretically one lady’s “bewitching gown,” and descanted on the “superb equipage” possessed by another, reverting then to the “London Particular Madeira” which had been served at a recent grand dinner-party, and hoping for some of the same at supper.