Robert, if he had given himself the gratification of teasing his nephew, had yet expressed himself willing to take the part of Noah’s dove, and go out across the troubled waters to look for a piece of dry land and an olive-branch. His task had not been an easy one at first, and he had been obliged to make a personal matter of it before he could smooth the path of the unlucky lover. But his appeal was one which could not fail, and, as a concession to himself, his friend had consented to look with favour upon Crauford, should he return bringing the letter she demanded.
Having disposed of one difficulty, Fullarton found that his good offices were not to end; he was allowed no rest until he sat down with his pen to bring his sister, Lady Fordyce, to a more reasonable point of view and a suitable expression of it. As he had expected, she proved far more obdurate than Lady Eliza; for her there was no glamour round him to ornament his requests. ‘God gave you friends, and the devil gave you relations,’ says the proverb, but it does not go on to say which power gave a man the woman who loves him. Perhaps it is sometimes one and sometimes the other. Be that as it may, though Robert returned successful from Morphie, it took him more time and pains to deal with Lady Fordyce than he had ever thought to expend on anybody.
He sat down upon the bench while Lady Eliza drew off her gloves and began to break the seal with her tapered fingers. He wondered, as he had done many times, at their whiteness and the beauty of their shape.
‘You have the most lovely hands in the world, my lady,’ he said at last; ‘some of the hands in Vandyke’s portraits are like them, but no others.’
He was much relieved by having finished his share in a business which had begun to weary him, and his spirits were happily attuned. She blushed up to the edge of her wig; in all her life he had never said such a thing to her. Her fingers shook so that she could hardly open the letter. She gave it to him.
‘Open it,’ she said; ‘my hands are stiff with picking fruit.’
He took it complacently and spread it out before her.
It was Crauford’s distressed appeals rather than her brother’s counsels which had moved Lady Fordyce. She was really fond of her son, and, in company with almost every mother who has children of both sexes, reserved her daughters as receptacles for the overflowings of her temper; they were the hills that attract the thunderstorms from the plain. Crauford was the plain, and Sir Thomas represented sometimes one of these natural objects and sometimes the other. Of late the whole household had been one long chain of mountains.
She was unaware of what had happened to her former letter; uncle and nephew had agreed that it was unnecessary to inform her of it, and Robert had merely explained that Crauford would not be suffered by Lady Eliza to approach his divinity without the recommendation of her special approval. It was a happy way of putting it.
‘MY DEAR CRAUFORD,