COLLECTION
OF
B R I T I S H A U T H O R S
TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
VOL. 1419.
FOR LOVE AND LIFE BY MRS. OLIPHANT.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.

“The device on his shield was a young oak tree pulled up by the roots, with the Spanish word Desdichado, signifying Disinherited.”

FOR LOVE AND LIFE.

BY
MRS. OLIPHANT,
AUTHOR OF
“CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,” “OMBRA,” “MAY,” ETC.
COPYRIGHT EDITION.
I N T W O V O L U M E S.
VOL. I.
LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1874.
The Right of Translation is reserved.

FOR LOVE AND LIFE.

CHAPTER I.
On the Shores of Loch Arroch.

Three people were walking slowly along together by the side of the water. One of them an invalid, as was apparent by the softly measured steps of her companions, subdued to keep in harmony with hers. These two attendants were both young; the girl about twenty, a little light creature, with the golden hair so frequent in Scotland, and a face of the angelic kind, half-childish, half-visionary, over-brimming with meaning, or almost entirely destitute of it, according to the eyes with which you happened to regard her. Both she and the invalid, a handsome old woman of about seventy, were well and becomingly dressed in a homely way, but they had none of the subtle traces about them which mark the “lady” in conventional parlance. They were not in the smallest degree what people call “common-looking.” The girl’s beauty and natural grace would have distinguished her anywhere, and the old lady was even dignified in her bearing. But yet it was plain that they were of a caste not the highest. They moved along the narrow path, skirting the newly-cut stubble, with the air of people entirely at home, amid their natural surroundings. The homely farm-house within sight was evidently their home. They belonged to the place and the place to them. Notwithstanding the angelic face of the one, and the natural stateliness of the other, they were farmer folk, of a kind not unusual on that proud half-Highland soil. I will not even pretend to say that good blood gave a grace to their decayed fortunes; I do not believe their race had ever held a more exalted position than it did now. They were independent as queens, proud yet open-hearted, sociable, courteous, hospitable, possessed of many of the special virtues which ought to belong to the nobly born; but they were only farmer folk of Loch Arroch, of a family who had lived for ages on that farm, and nothing more.

It would have been unnecessary to dwell on this particular, had not the appearance of the young man upon whose arm the invalid leant, been so different. As distinctly as they were native to the place, and to the position, was he stranger to them. He was not so handsome by nature as they, but he had about him all those signs of a man “in good society” which it is impossible to define in words, or to mistake in fact. His dress was extremely simple, but it was unmistakeably that of a gentleman. Not the slightest atom of pretension was in his aspect or manner, but his very simplicity was his distinction. The deferential way in which he bent his head to hear what his companion was saying, the respect he showed to them both, was more than a son or brother in their own rank would ever have dreamed of showing. He was kind in all his words and looks, even tender; but the ease of familiarity was wanting to him; he was in a sphere different from his own. He showed this only by a respect infinitely more humble and anxious than any farmer-youth or homely young squire would have felt; yet to his own fastidious taste it was apparent that he did show it; and the thought made him condemn himself. His presence introduced confusion and difficulty into the tranquil picture; though there was nothing of the agitation of a lover in his aspect. Love makes all things easy; it is agitating, but it is tranquillizing. Had he been the lover of the beautiful young creature by his side, he would have been set at his ease with her old mother, and with the conditions of her lot. Love is itself so novel, so revolutionary, such a break-down of all boundaries, that it accepts with a certain zest the differences of condition; and all the embarrassments of social difference such as trouble the acquaintance, and drive the married man wild, become in the intermediate stage of courtship delightful auxiliaries, which he embraces with all his heart. But Edgar Earnshaw was not pretty Jeanie Murray’s lover. He had a dutiful affection for both of the women. Mingled with this was a certain reverential respect, mingled with a curious painful sense of wrong, for the elder; and a pitying and protecting anxiety about the girl. But these sentiments were not love. Therefore he was kind, tender, respectful, almost devoted, but not at his ease, never one with them; in heart as in appearance, there was a difference such as could not be put into words.

“I cannot accept it from you,” said old Mrs. Murray, who was the grandmother of both. She spoke with a little vehemence, with a glimmering of tears in the worn old eyes, which were still so bright and full of vital force. She was recovering from an illness, and thus the tears came more easily than usual. “Of all that call kin with me, Edgar, my bonnie lad, you are the last that should sacrifice your living to keep up my auld and weary life. I canna do it. It’s pride, nothing but pride, that makes me loth to go away—loth, loth to eat other folk’s bread. But wherefore should I be proud? What should an old woman like me desire better than a chair at my ain daughter’s chimney-corner, and a share of what she has, poor woman? I say to myself it’s her man’s bread I will eat, and no hers; but Robert Campbell will be kind—enough. He’ll no grudge me my morsel. When a woman has been a man’s faithful wife for thirty years, surely, surely she has a right to the gear she has helped to make. And I’ll no be that useless when I’m weel; there’s many a thing about a house that an old woman can do. Na, na, it’s nothing but pride.”

“And what if I had my pride too?” he asked. “My dear old mother, it goes against me to think of you as anywhere but at Loch Arroch. Mr. Campbell is an excellent man, I have no doubt, and kind—enough, as you say; and his wife very good and excellent—”

“You might say your aunt, Edgar,” said the old lady, with a half-reproach.

He winced, though almost imperceptibly.

“Well,” he said with a smile, “my aunt, if you prefer it. One thing I don’t like about you proud people is, that you never make allowance for other people’s pride. Mine demands that my old mother should be independent in her own old house; that she should have her pet companion with her to nurse her and care for her.” Here he laid his hand kindly, with a light momentary touch, upon the girl’s shoulder, who looked up at him with wistful tender eyes. “That she should keep her old servants, and continue to be the noble old lady she is—”

“Na, na, Edgar; no lady. You must not use such a word to me. No, my bonnie man; you must not deceive yourself. It’s hard, hard upon you, and God forgive me for all I have done to make my good lad unhappy! We are decent folk, Edgar, from father to son, from mother to daughter; but I’m no a lady; an old country wife, nothing more—though you are a gentleman.”

“We will not dispute about words,” said Edgar, with a shrug of his shoulders. “What would become of Jeanie, grandmother, if you went to your daughter, as you say?”

“Ah!” cried the old woman, pausing suddenly, and raising both her hands to her face, “that’s what I canna bear—I canna bear it! Though I must,” she added hurriedly, drying her eyes, “if it’s God’s will.”

“I would go to my uncle in Glasgow,” said Jeanie; “he’s not an ill man. They would take me in if I was destitute; that’s what they aye said.”

“If you were destitute!” cried Edgar. “My poor little Jeanie destitute, and you, my old mother, eating the bread of dependence, watching a coarse man’s look to see if you are welcome or not! Impossible! I have arranged everything. There is enough to keep you both comfortable here—not luxuriously, as I should wish; not with the comfort and the prettiness I should like to spread round you two; but yet enough. Now listen, grandmother. You must yield to me or to some one else; to me or to—Mr. Campbell. I think I have the best right.”

“He has the best right,” said little Jeanie, looking in her grandmother’s face. “Oh, granny, he would like to be good to you and me!”

“Yes; I should like to be good to you,” said Edgar, turning to the girl gratefully. “That is the truth. It is the highest pleasure you could give me.”

“To heap coals of fire,” said the old woman in her deep voice.

“I know nothing about coals,” said Edgar, laughing; “they should be more in Mr. Campbell’s way, who trafficks in them. Come, Jeanie, we must take her in, the wind grows cold. I shall go off to Loch Arroch Head to get the newspaper when the boat comes, and you must persuade her in the meantime. You are my representative. I leave it all to you.”

A flush ran over Jeanie’s angelic little countenance. She looked at him with eyes full of an adoring admiration as he led the old woman carefully to the door of the farm-house. He patted her pretty shoulder as she followed, looking kindly at her.

“Take care of the old mother, Jeanie,” he said, smiling. “I make you my representative.”

Poor little innocent Jeanie! There was no one like him in all her sphere. She knew no other who spoke so softly, who looked so kindly, who was so thoughtful of others, so little occupied with himself. Her little heart swelled as she went into the low, quaint room with its small windows, where the grandmother had already seated herself. To be the parlour of a farm-house, it was a pretty room. The walls were greenish; the light that came in through foliage which overshadowed the small panes in the small windows was greenish too; but there were book-cases in the corners, and books upon the table, for use, not ornament, and an air of wellworn comfort and old respectability were about the place. It was curiously irregular in form; two windows in the front looked out upon the loch and the mountains, a prospect which a prince might have envied; and one on the opposite side of the fire-place, in the gable end of the house, in a deep recess, looked straight into the ivied walls of the ruin which furnished so many stories to Loch Arroch. This window was almost blocked up by a vast fuchsia, which still waved its long flexile branches in the air laden with crimson bells. In front of the house stood a great ash, dear northern tree which does not disdain the rains and winds. Its sweeping boughs stood out against the huge hill opposite, which was the background of the whole landscape. The blue water gleamed and shone beneath that natural canopy. Mrs. Murray’s large high-backed easy-chair was placed by the side of the fire, so that she had full command of the view. The gable window with its fuchsia bush was behind her. Never, except for a few months, during her whole seventy years of life, had she been out of sight of that hill. She seated herself in the stillness of age, and looked out wistfully upon the familiar scene. Day by day through all her lifetime, across her own homely table with its crimson cover, across the book she was reading or the stocking she was knitting, under the green arch of the ash-branches, she had seen the water break, sometimes with foaming wrath, sometimes quietly as a summer brook, upon the huge foot of that giant hill. Was this now to be over? The noiseless tears of old age came into her eyes.

“We’ll aye have the sky, Jeanie, wherever we go,” she said, softly; “and before long, before long, the gates of gold will have to open for me.”

“But no for me,” said Jeanie, seating herself on a stool by her grandmother’s side. The little girlish face was flashing and shining with some illumination more subtle than that of the firelight. “We canna die when we will, Granny, you’ve often said that; and sometimes,” the girl added shyly, “we might not wish if we would.”

This brought the old woman back from her momentary reverie.

“God forbid!” she cried, putting her hand on Jeanie’s golden locks; “though Heaven will scarce be Heaven without you, Jeanie. God forbid! No, my bonnie lamb, I have plenty there without you. There’s your father, and his mother, and my ain little angel Jeanie with the gold locks like you —— her that I have told you of so often. She was younger than you are, just beginning to be a blessing and a comfort, when, you mind?—oh, so often as I have told you!—on the Saturday after the new year—”

“I mind,” said Jeanie softly, holding the withered hand in both of hers; “but, granny, even you, though you’re old, you cannot make sure that you’ll die when you want to die.”

“No; more’s the pity; though it’s a thankless thing—a thankless thing to say.”

“You canna die when you will,” repeated Jeanie. “Wasna your father ninety, granny, and Aunty Jean a hundred? Granny, listen to me. You must do what he says.”

“He, Jeanie?”

“Ay, he. I might say his name if there were two like him in the world,” said Jeanie, with enthusiasm. “It’s your pride that will not let him serve you as he says. It would make him happy. I saw it in his kind e’en. I was watching him while he was speaking to you. It was like the light and the shadows over Benvohrlan. The brightness glinted up when he spoke, and when you said ‘No,’ granny, the cloud came over. Oh, how could you set your face against him? The only one of us a’ (you say) you ever did an ill turn to; and him the only one to bring you back good, and comfort, and succour.”

“Jeanie, you must not blame the rest,” said the old woman. “They have no siller to give me. They would take me into their houses. What more could they do? No, Jeanie; you may be just to him, and yet no cruel to them. Besides, poor lad,” said Mrs. Murray with a sigh, “he has a rich man’s ways, though he’s rich no more.”

“He has the kindest ways in all the world,” cried Jeanie. “Granny, you’ll do what he says.”

The old woman leant back in her chair, crossing her thin hands in her lap; her musing eyes sought the hills outside and the gleam of the water, her old, old counsellors, not the anxious face of the child at her feet. She was but a farmer’s wife, a farmer herself, a lowly, homely woman; but many a princess was less proud. She sat and looked at the blue loch, and thought of the long succession of years in which she had reigned as a queen in this humble house, a centre of beneficence, giving to all. She had never shut her heart against the cry of the poor, she who was poor herself; she had brought up children, she had entertained strangers, she had done all that reigning princesses could do. For forty years all who had any claim on her kindness had come to her unhesitatingly in every strait. Silver and gold she had little, but everything else she gave, the shelter of her house, her best efforts, her ready counsel, her unfailing help. All this she had bestowed munificently in her day; and now—had she come to the point when she must confess that her day was over, when she must retire from her place, giving way to others, and become dependent—she who had always been the head of her house? I do not say that the feelings in the mind of this old Sovereign about to be dethroned were entirely without admixture of ignoble sentiment. It went to her heart to be dethroned. She said to herself, with a proud attempt at philosophy, that it was the natural fate, and that everything was as it ought to be. She tried to persuade herself that a chair in the chimney-corner was all the world had henceforth for her, and that her daughter and her daughter’s husband would be kind—enough. But it went to her heart. She was making up her mind to it as men make up their minds to martyrdom; and the effort was bitter. I do not know whether it ever occurred to her painfully that she herself, had she been in the fulness of her powers, would never have suffered her old mother to be driven from that homely roof which she loved—or if something whispered in her soul that she had done better by her children than they were doing by her; but if such thoughts arose in her mind, she dismissed them unembodied, with an exercise of her will, which was as proud as it was strong. Her very pride prevented her from assuming even to herself the appearance of a victim. “It is but the natural end,” she said, stoically, trying to look her trouble in the face. She was ready to accept it as the inevitable, rather than own to herself that her children failed in their duty—rather than feel, much less admit, that she had expected more of them than they were willing to give.

The cause of this deep but undisclosed pain was, that things had been going badly for some time with the Castle Farm. Mrs. Murray herself was growing old, and less strong than is necessary for a farmer, and she had been absent for some time, a few years before, an absence which had wrought much trouble in the homestead. These misfortunes had been complicated, as was inevitable, by one or two cold springs and wet autumns. It was October now, and the harvest was but accomplishing itself slowly even on the level fields on the loch side. The higher lying acres of corn land still lay in sickly yellow patches on the braes behind the house, half-ripened, damp and sprouting, sodden with many a rain-storm; a great part of the corn would be fit for nothing but fodder, and what remained for the woman-farmer, unable to cope with these difficulties as she once had done, before strength and courage failed—what remained for her to do? She had made up her mind to abandon the old house she loved—to sell all her belongings, the soft-eyed cows whom she called by their names, and who came at her call like children—and the standing crops, the farm implements, even her old furniture, to denude herself of everything, and pay her debts, and commit the end of her life to Providence. This had been the state of affairs when she fell ill, and Edgar Earnshaw was summoned to come to her, to receive her blessing and farewell. But then, in contradiction to all her wishes, to all that was seemly and becoming, she did not die. When she knew she was to get better, the old woman broke forth into complainings such as had never been heard from her lips in her worst moments. “To lead me forth so far on the way, and then to send me back when the worst was over—me that must make the journey so soon, that must begin all over again, maybe the morn!” she cried, with bitter tears in her eyes. But Heaven’s decree is inexorable, whether it be for life or death, and she had to consent to recover. It was then that Edgar, her grandson, had made the proposal to settle upon her a little income which he possessed, and which would secure her a peaceful end to her days in her old home. That he should do this had filled her with poignant emotions of joy and shame. The only one of her kith and kin whom she had wronged, and he was the one to make her this amends. If she accepted it, she would retain all that she desired—everything that was personally important to her in this life. But she would denude him of his living. He was young, learned (as she thought), accomplished (as she thought), able “to put his hand to anything,” doubtless able to earn a great deal more than that, did he choose to try. It might even be for his advantage, as he said, to have the spur of necessity to force him into exertion. All this was mingled together in her mind, the noble and generous feeling that would rather suffer than harm another, rather die than blame, mixed with sharp stings of pride and some sophistries of argument by which she tried to persuade herself against her conscience to do what she wished. The struggle was going on hotly, as she sat by her homely fireside and gazed out at the loch, and the shadow of the big ash, which seemed to shadow over all Benvohrlan; things which are close at hand are so much bigger and more imposing than things afar.

CHAPTER II.
Edgar.

Edgar set off on a brisk walk up the loch when he parted from the two women at the door of the farmhouse. The previous history of this young man had been an extraordinary one, and has had its record elsewhere; but as it is not to be expected that any—even the gentlest reader—could remember a story told them several years ago, I will briefly recapitulate its chief incidents. Till he was five-and-twenty, this young man had known himself only as the heir of a great estate, and of an old and honourable name, and for some few months he had been in actual possession of all the honours he believed his own. He was a great English squire, one of the most important men in his district, with an only sister, to whom he was deeply attached, and no drawback in his life except the mysterious fact, which no longer affected him except as a painful recollection, that his father, during his lifetime, had banished him from his home, and apparently regarded him with a sentiment more like hatred than affection. But Clare his sister loved him, and Edgar, on coming to his fortune, had begun to form friendships and attachments of his own, and had been drawn gently and pleasantly—not fallen wildly and vehemently—into love with the daughter of one of his near neighbours, Augusta (better known as Gussy) Thornleigh, whom he was on the very eve of asking to be his wife, when his whole existence, name, and identity were suddenly altered by the discovery that he was an innocent impostor, and had no right to any of the good things he enjoyed. I do not attempt to repeat any description of the change thus made, for it was beyond description—terrible, complete, and overwhelming. It plunged him out of wealth and honours into indigence and shame—shame not merited, but yet clinging to the victim of a long-continued deception. It not only took from him all his hopes, but it embittered his very recollections. He lost past, and present, and future, all at a blow. His identity, and all the outward apparel of life by which he had known himself, were taken from him. Not only was the girl whom he loved hopelessly lost to him, but she who had been his sister, his only relative, as he supposed, and his dearest companion, became nothing to him—a stranger, and worse than a stranger—for the man whom she loved and married was his enemy. And in place of these familiar figures, there came a crowd of shadows round him who were his real relations, his unknown family, to whom, and not to the Ardens, he now belonged. This fatal and wonderful change was made all the harder to him from the fact that he was thus transplanted into an altogether lower level, and that his new family was little elevated above the class from which he had been in the habit of drawing his servants, not his friends. Their habits, their modes of speech, their ways of thinking, were all strange to him. It is true that he accommodated himself readily to these differences, as exhibited in the old grandmother whom I have just presented to the reader, and the gentle, soft-voiced, poetic Jeanie; but with the other members of his new family, poor Edgar had felt all his powers of self-control fail him. Their presence, their contact, their familiarity, and the undeniable fact that it was to them and their sphere that he actually belonged was terrible to the young man, who, in his better days, had not known what pride meant. Life is in reality so much the same in all classes that no doubt he would have come to perceive the identity of substance notwithstanding the difference of form, had he not been cast so suddenly into this other phase of existence without preparation, without anything to break the fall; but as it was, he had no preparation, and the blow went to his heart.

This fall had taken place nearly three years before the time at which this story opens, and poor Edgar, stunned by his overthrow, repelled by his new relatives, vaguely wretched, notwithstanding the stoutness of heart with which he had braced himself to meet calamity, had done but little with his life for these two years. A small provision had been secured for him from his successor in the estates of Arden, the rightful heir whom he had unwittingly wronged, and to whom he did instant justice as soon as he heard of the wrong; and this little provision had been augmented by the small property of the Rector of Arden, Mr. Fielding, who had left him everything he possessed. He had thus enough to support him, that most dangerous of all endowments for a young man. Poor fellow! he had made his sacrifice with great bravery, and had wrenched himself away from all he cared for with the smile of a hero, neither sinking under the blow, nor exaggerating its force. “Courage!” he had said to himself, when he lost the place where he had been lord and master, and went forth poor, humble, and nameless, to face the world. He meant nothing less than to make a new life for himself better than the last, to assert the superiority of a guiltless heart and free conscience over fate. But, alas, it is so easy to do this in the general, so difficult in detail! “We will make our lives sublime,” says the poet, with such cheap magniloquence—and how many an enthusiast youth has delighted himself with the thought!

Edgar was a very sensible, reasonable young fellow, but yet it was a consolation to him, in his sudden fall, to reflect that every man may conquer circumstances, and that will and energy are better than riches. He had dreamt of “doing something,” if not to make himself known and famous, at least to be of use in this life to his fellow-creatures and to himself. He meant it firmly up to the day when he left everything he knew or cared for, and he meant it the next day, and the day after, and even the next year; but up to this moment he had done nothing. For after all what was there to do?

Young Paladins cannot kill fiery dragons, cannot meet giants in single combat, cannot deliver a whole district now-a-days by the stroke of a sword. To be sure, a man whose tastes lie that way may tackle the giant, Sewage, or attack the dragon, Ignorance; but that is slow work, seldom of a primitive, straightforward kind, and leading the fighter into many entanglements, dubious company, and very uncertain results. So the consequence was that poor Edgar meaning to do much, did nothing—not because he loved idleness, but because he did not know what to do. He wandered off abroad very soon disgusted with everything; with his downfall and his inability to surmount that downfall; with the meanness of estimating worth by rank and wealth, and the still greater meanness of his own incapacity to get quite free from that standard, which, so long as he was himself rich and great, he had disowned manfully. Cheerily he had laughed at the frivolity of the young men of fashion surrounding him when he was as they, but his laugh now had a certain bitterness, and he felt himself turn with a sickening of the heart from intercourse with a lower class, and then deeply and bitterly despised himself for this ignoble sentiment. His state of mind, indeed, though strange and miserable to himself, was no more than was natural and to be looked for in a man forcibly transplanted from the place of his natural growth, and from all the habits and traditions of his previous life.

Therefore, these three years had been a failure with Edgar. He had done nothing with them, he who had gone out of his old existence firmly determined to do so much. He had wandered about over the face of the earth, to and fro, an unquiet spirit—but no good had come from any of his wanderings. He could not help being kind and charitable; it was no virtue on his part, but “just a carnal inclination;” and except this inevitable goodness, which was an affair of temperament, nothing had come of him, nothing had come from him, in these years.

Thus, probably, he would have continued, if not always, until weariness had come on, and his vital strength was broken. He would have become, without vice, one of the thousand English vagabonds of quality who haunt every thoroughfare in Europe; and what a downfall would this have been for Edgar!—a greater downfall even than that which circumstances had brought upon him. The sudden summons which had brought him to Mrs. Murray’s sick-bed, the sudden call upon his charity, so characteristically adapted to move him, arrested him in the painful insignificance of this career. He had resolved to make the sacrifice which was involved, before it even occurred to him how much that sacrifice would involve; for he was of that species of humankind which, bestowing help and succour does first and considers afterwards. It cost him no struggle, no conflict with himself, to decide that everything he had must go at once to the aid of his mother’s mother, to her preservation in comfort—notwithstanding that she had wronged him, and that the tragic confusion and aimlessness of his life was her fault. He had taken all the steps at once which were necessary to carry out this transfer, and it was only now, when he had fully resolved upon it, that the cost to himself occurred to him. He counted that cost as he walked, stepping out as if he trod on air to the head of the loch.

What would it cost him? It would take away all his certain living, every penny he had; it would force him to work one way or another in order to maintain himself. After his brief experience of wealth and its ways, and after the vague and unsatisfactory existence which he had led when he had just “enough to live on,” he must make a fresh start again, like any country lad setting forth to seek his fortune. The third start, he said to himself, with a certain rueful amusement; for Edgar was one of those who could laugh at his own misfortunes. I cannot tell how it was that this prospect did not discourage him, but certainly it did not; a certain exhilaration crept into his soul as he faced the wind, walking fast with joyous defiance. The third time of beginning must be lucky at last; was it not a mystical number, acknowledged by the very children in their games? He had heard an urchin assuring another that very morning that “the third ca’ was canny.” It was poor Edgar’s third trial. The first time he had been foiled by no fault of his—by arbitrary circumstances. The second time he had foiled himself by want of purpose, absence of anything direct to do, and languor of motive for attempting anything. But the third ca’ would be canny—nature and necessity would help him. He would be driven to work by infallible potency of need, and he would make something of it; so he said to himself.

There was something exhilarating in the day, or else he thought so. The high wind was of itself a blessing after days of that weary rain, which is so common in the west of Scotland. The damp corn out on the fields, the still damper corn which stood in faint whiteness upon the hillside was shaking off some part of its superabundant moisture in the cheerful breeze. The white clouds were scudding over the mountains, throwing a poetic and perpetual interchange of light and shade over those silent spectators who occupied so large a share in the landscape, and whose sudden glories and brightness gave a human aspect to their everlasting strength. The deep blue of the distance, deep, and dark, and dreamy, against the open of the lighter sky; the thousand soft tones of purple, of grey, of brown, and soft green; the whiteness of a sudden peak starting into sunshine; the dark unfathomable depth of water, across which a sudden shadow would fall dramatically like an event, made even the silent country a partaker in the commotion which filled the young man’s mind.

In this dramatic tumult of the elements, there was no knoll, no hollow, no tree, which had not its share. And in the midst of the animated scene, a sudden rush of alien sound, the rustle and sputter and commotion of the little steamer fretting its busy, fussy way to the head of the loch, which was the chief medium of communication with the outside world, struck upon Edgar’s ear with not unpleasant discord. It was work, it was life, it was the labour by which a man could live and serve his generation, that was embodied to him in this little noisy interruption which he had so often condemned as alien to the scene. Yes, it was alien to the scene. But to be reminded of the world without, of the noise, and movement, and high-pressure of life, was pleasant to Edgar at this moment of his existence; it helped to stimulate the thrill of new energy which seemed to be rising in his heart.

There was, however, a motive less elevated which, I am bound to admit, affected the young man in his toleration of the steamer and its discord. He was eager to get away from Loch Arroch back into the world, where, at least, he would escape from the contemplation of that contrast between his present and his past, which was forced upon him here. All the confusion of his life, its conflicts between the sentiments which he felt he ought to entertain and those which, in spite of him, came uppermost in his mind, were kept painfully and constantly before his eyes. Every detail of the homely farmhouse existence brought them before him. The chief sting in all this was his vexation with himself for feeling these details to be of importance. Had he retained his original position, so little affected was he really by external circumstances, that I believe he would have found the life at the Castle Farm infinitely more reasonable, sensible, and natural than that which, as a man of fortune and fashion, he would himself have been compelled to lead, The simple fare, the plain rooms, the absence of luxuries, and even some of those everyday luxuries which we call comforts, did not really distress him; it was the sense of missing them, the quick and vivid consciousness of this and that a-wanting, which made the young man sore, and bitter, and ashamed of himself. And he felt in his heart that everything would be easier to him when he could but get away. I must add, however, that Edgar never showed his consciousness of the change of sphere to others, deeply as he felt it. The farmhouse servant, and little Jeanie, and even old Mrs. Murray herself, who had more insight, considered him much more “easy to please” than any other man of the kindred. “He gives just nae trouble,” Bell said, “and aye a ‘thank you, Bell,’ for every hand’s turn I do for him. Eh! when it’s Johnnie Campbell that’s i’ the house, ye can see the difference. It’s Bell here, and Bell there, like as I had nothing a do but wait upon him. But it’s a pleasure to serve Mr. Edgar, night or day.”

This was the testimony of one very clear-sighted witness; and even Mrs. Murray concluded, with a relief which it would have been impossible to put into words, that the change had passed lightly over her grandson’s head without affecting him. “He has one of those blessed natures that are aye content, and take everything easy from the hand of God,” she said to herself, with a mixture of joy and disappointment; for this blessed nature, blessed as it is, is secretly looked down upon by persons conscious of more acute feeling. I believe my good Edgar had thus something in his character of what is commonly called humbug. He deceived people as to his own feelings by very consideration for their feelings. It was so absolutely indispensable to his being to set his companions at their ease, and make them comfortable so far as he could, that he took them in habitually, to use another vulgar expression, and was believed by everybody to be as happy as the day was long at Loch Arroch, while all the while he was secretly longing to get away. I believe that in some respects this kind of nature (not a very common one) is less good, being less honest, than that more general disposition which, when uncomfortable or dissatisfied itself, loses no opportunity of making others so, and states its sentiments frankly, whether they are likely to please its companions or not. I allow that Edgar’s special peculiarities had their disadvantages. I do not attempt to excuse him, I only state what they were.

Just as he came in sight of Loch Arroch head—the village which, seated at the extremity of the loch, was the post town and general centre of the district—Edgar was joined by Robert Campbell, the husband of his eldest aunt, a man to whom he was expected to give the title of uncle, and who regarded him with a mingled feeling of rough amity, respect (for, was he not independent, with an income of his own, and able to live like a gentleman?), and conscientious conviction that something might be got out of him. He was a land-agent, in not a very great way, a factor for some of the less important land-owners of the district, a man not without education and information in his way, with considerable practical knowledge of law, and still greater of agriculture, racy of the soil, the sort of person whom a great landed proprietor from England, such as poor Edgar had been a few years before, would have appreciated mightily, and quoted for months after their meeting. But to enjoy the shrewdness and profit by the conversation of such an individual, when you are elevated a whole world above him,—and to take him into your heart as one of your own relatives, are very different things. Edgar shrank with a whimsical sense of moral cowardice as he saw this personage approaching. He laughed ruefully at himself. “Oh, why are uncles made so coarse, and nephews made so fine?” he said. But to see the fun of a situation does not always enable you to bear it with equanimity. He would have been very glad to get out of Robert Campbell’s way had that been possible; but as it was not possible he did his best to meet him with a smile.

“How’s the auld leddy the day?” said Campbell, stretching out a huge hand to grasp Edgar’s; “living, and like to live, I’ll be bound. We maunna grumble, for she’s given an aixcellent constitution to her descendants, of which my lad is one as well as you. But, puir body, if it had been the Almighty’s will—lang life’s a grand thing when you’re well provided for,” Mr. Campbell concluded, with a sigh.

“I hope none of her descendants will grudge her the little she wants,” Edgar began—

“Saftly, saftly, my man! nobody grudges her the little she wants. The difficulty is, wha’s to provide that little,” said Campbell. “We’re all decently well off in one sense, with no scrimping of meal or milk and a good suit of black for a Sunday or a funeral, and a silk gown for the wife. But to keep up a farm upon our joint contributions, as I hear is what you’re thinking of—a farm, the chanciest thing in creation!—I allow I canna see my way to that. Excuse me, Mr. Edgar, for speaking my mind, but you’re young, and your notions are too grand for the like of us—I’m no saying it’s your fault. We maun cut our coat according to our cloth. I’m no fond of relations in the house; but she’s a harmless body, and I’ll stretch a point for once: and John Bryce, in Sauchiehall St., will take Jeanie. He’s a man in a very decent way of business, and I’ve no doubt he could make her useful in the shop.”

“But cannot you see,” cried Edgar, with a start and sudden wince, interrupting him, “that my poor old grandmother would be wretched without Jeanie? And Jeanie herself is too delicate a creature for any such life. They must stay together. Surely, surely,” cried the young man, “when she is helpless who has done so much for everybody, it is not too much that we should provide for something beyond her mere existence—her happiness as well.”

Campbell had watched him very closely while he made this speech. The generous feeling with which he spoke brought the colour to Edgar’s cheek; he was unsuspicious of the meaning of the close scrutiny to which he was thus subjected, and made no effort to conceal this glow of natural emotion.

“If it’s Jeanie you’re meaning,” said Campbell, with a laugh and significant look, “no doubt there are other arrangements that might be thought of; and a good man’s aye the best thing, especially when he has enough to live on. If that’s your thought, my lad, I am not the one to say you nay.”

“If what is my thought?” said Edgar, bewildered.

I do not think the idea had ever occurred to him before, and I cannot describe the thrill of wounded pride with which he received this shock. Jeanie! A child—a creature altogether out of his sphere. Jeanie! with her pretty peasant manners, and poetic homely dialect, a little girl whom he could be kind to, as he would be kind to the maid who milked the cows, or the child who ran his errands! In all the course of the three painful years that were past, I do not think Edgar had received any such cutting and sudden blow. He realized all his own humiliation when he saw himself placed in the imagination of the neighbourhood by little Jeanie’s side—her cousin, her often companion, her so-possible wooer! The thought stiffened him up all at once to stone. He forgot even his usual consideration for the feelings of others.

“I have no thought of any kind in respect to Jeanie,” he said, coldly, “except in so far as concerns my grandmother. The two ought not to be separated. I cannot indeed allow them to be separated,” he added, still more proudly. “I have a little money, as you know, and if nobody else will do it, I must do it. I will make over to my grandmother my little income, such as it is. She can live and keep her favourite with her, if she has that.”

“Your—income!” Mr. Campbell could scarcely gasp out the words, so breathless was he and dumb-foundered. “Your—income! And what will you do yoursel’? But you mean an allowance; that’s a different matter,” he added, recovering himself. “You’ll give in proportion to what the rest of us give? Ay, ay. I can understand that.”

CHAPTER III.
Jeanie.

Edgar did not come home till the evening was considerably advanced. He went with Campbell to his house, and partook of the substantial family tea in the best parlour, which Mrs. Campbell, his aunt, called the drawing-room—so that it was late before he returned home.

“There’s a moon,” Campbell said. “Ye need be in no hurry. A young fellow in certain states of mind, as we a’ know, takes to moonlight walks like a duck to the water.”

At which speech Mrs. Campbell laughed, being evidently in the secret; but John, the only son, who was a student at the University of Glasgow, and just about to set out for the winter session, looked black and fierce as any mountain storm. These inferences of some supposed sentiment, which he was totally ignorant of, might have passed quite innocuously over Edgar only a day before, but they filled him now with suppressed rage and deep mortification. Perhaps unreasonably; but there is nothing which a man resents so much as to be supposed “in love” with some one whom he considers beneath him. Even when there is truth in the supposition, he resents the discovery which brings all the inappropriateness of the conjunction before his mind; and if there is no truth in it, he feels himself injured in the tenderest point—ill-used, humbled, wronged. Edgar’s impulse was to leave the house where he was thus insulted by inference; but partly pride, partly his usual deference to other people’s feelings, and partly the necessity which was now stronger than ever of carrying out his intentions and leaving the place where he was subject to such an insane suggestion triumphed over his first impulse.

Even Campbell was staggered in his vulgar notion that only Jeanie and her fresh beauty could account for the young man’s prolonged stay and unusual devotion, when he began to perceive the munificence of Edgar’s intentions. A young man who wanted to marry might indeed be guilty of a great many foolishnesses; he might be ready, Mr. Campbell thought, to burden himself with the old mother for the sake of the pretty child; but to alienate a portion of his income (for Edgar did not enter fully into his plan) was a totally different and quite impossible sort of sacrifice. What could be his motive? Was it that Jeanie might be educated and made a lady of before he should marry her? As for pure duty towards the old mother, honour of her long and virtuous life, compassion for the downfall of so proud a spirit, being motives strong enough for such a sacrifice, at this the worthy man guffawed loudly.

“I’m no the man to be taken in with fine words,” he said, with a broad smile.

While these jokes and discussions were going on in the best parlour at Loch Arroch Head, Jeanie, unconscious of any debate in which her name could be involved, went about her usual occupations at home. She got the tea ready, coming and going with soft steps from the parlour to the kitchen, carrying in the tray, and “masking” the tea with her own hands. As for Bell, she was “suppering” the kye, and looking after the outdoor work, and had no time for such daintier service. Jeanie would steal a moment now and then, while she prepared this simple meal, to step noiselessly to the ever open door, and cast a wistful look up the loch-side to see “if he was coming.” The gloaming grew darker and darker, the stars came out over the hill, the moon rose, and still Jeanie strained her eyes to see if any figure approached on the long line of almost level road by the side of the loch. Once her heart leaped up, thinking she saw him; but it was only a shearer taking his way home from the West Park, where, taking advantage of a good day, the harvest had gone on as long as the light permitted. Poor Jeanie! what a difference there was between this heavy rustic form as it drew near, relieved against the dark yet gleaming water of the loch, and the erect, light-footed, elastic figure she looked for! As she washed the old china cups brought out in his honour, and put the tea-things away, she wondered with a pang in her kind little heart what could have kept him? Had he met some of his grand friends, sportsmen arriving by the boat, or those tourists whom the natives looked upon with mingled admiration and scorn? or could any accident have happened? a thought which blanched her pretty cheek with fear.

She would have liked to talk to her grandmother about Edgar, but she did not venture to do more than wonder “what could be keeping him?” a question to which Mrs. Murray responded placidly that no doubt he was “drinking tea” with somebody at Loch Arroch Head. The old lady was not discomposed by Edgar’s absence as Jeanie was; and poor Jeanie, in the flutter and warmth of her feelings, could have cried with vexation at the contrast between her own agitated heart and this calm, which she thought indifference. Her grandmother “did not care.” “Oh, how could she help caring, and him so good to her!” poor Jeanie said to herself. And Bell went about her work out of doors, cheerily singing, in her full rustic voice, as she prepared the supper for the kye, and carried it out to the byre, coming and going in her strong shoes, with clink of pails, and loud talking now and then to Sandy, who was helping. Nobody cared but Jeanie that he was so late of coming home.

Then she went upstairs with her grandmother, who was still an invalid, and helped her to bed, and read “the chapter” with which the day was always concluded; and put a great old stick, with a gold head, which had belonged to some ancestor, by the bedside, in order that Mrs. Murray, if she wanted anything, should “knock down,” for there were not many bells in the little farmhouse. The sitting-room was immediately below, and this was the recognised way at the Castle Farm of calling for the attendants. When this last duty was done, Jeanie was free for the night to “take her book” or “her seam,” and do as she pleased, for she had never had anything to do with “the beasts” or outdoor matters.

By this time Bell had finished with her clinking pails. She was in the kitchen, still moving about, frying the cold potatoes into a savoury mess, with which Sandy and she were about to regale themselves. Where Bell’s strong shoes were, and her hearty voice, not to speak of Sandy’s, which was very deep bass, there could scarcely be stillness in the house; but when the kitchen door was closed, and the two (who were sweethearts) talked lower, the spell of the quiet grew strong upon Jeanie. She put down her seam, and stole out very quietly to the door, which still stood innocently open; for at the Castle Farm they feared no evil. If you could but have seen her, no prettier figure ever watched for a tardy lover. She was dressed in a plain little brown frock, without any furbelows, with a little rim of white collar round her neck. Her golden hair was fastened up with a large tortoise-shell comb, thought “very old-fashioned” by all the girls about Loch Arroch, which had belonged to Jeanie’s mother, and of which, as a valuable article, costing originally “more than a pound-note,” as her grandmother had often told her, Jeanie was proud. The comb was scarcely visible in the soft bright mass of hair, which Jeanie had not neglected to twist up in its abundance into some semblance of “the fashion.” She leant against the doorway with her chin propped in the hollow of her hand, and one folded arm supporting the elbow of the other.

The stars shone high over head, high up above the big summit of Benvohrlan, which shut out from her half the heavens. The moon was behind, silvering over the red roof of the house, and falling glorious upon the dark water, making it one sheet of silver from where it opened out of the bigger loch up to the very foot of the mountain. The side of Benvohrlan was almost as light as in the day-time, and Loch Long on the other turn of the gigantic corner formed by the hill, went gleaming away into invisible space, betraying itself in undefinable distance by here and there a line or speck of silver. All up the loch side, at Jeanie’s left hand, the path lay clear and vacant, without a shadow on it. On the other side, the glimmering lightness of the stubble field, with its sheaves looking like strange animals in the moonlight, extended to the water edge, rounding out to where it too gained the margin of the parent loch. I do not know any finer combination of hill and water. The level fields of the Castle Farm on one side, and Big Benvohrlan on the other, form the doorway by which the lesser loch enters the greater; on one side an angle of cultivated land: on the other a gigantic angle of mountain. But little Jeanie thought little of the familiar scene around her. The moon, newly risen, cast a soft shadow of her little figure, the same way as her heart went, upon the road from the loch-head by which Edgar was coming. He saw this shadow with a little impatient vexation as he approached the house, but not till long after little Jeanie’s heart had jumped to perceive him.

Poor little gentle soul! her large eyes made larger and softer still by her wistful anxiety and longing for his presence, had watched with patience unwavering for more than an hour. She had not minded the chill wind nor the weariness of standing so long, with no support but the doorway. The attitude, the strained look, the patience, were all characteristic of Jeanie. She was the kind of being which in all second-rate poetry, and most second-rate imaginations, is the one sole type of woman. Looking for some one who was the lord of her life, or looking to some one—with soft eyes intent, with quick ears waiting, with gentle heart ready to receive whatever impression he wished to convey, the soft soul turned to the man who had caught her heart or her imagination as the flower turns to the sun. To use the jargon of the day, poor little Jeanie was receptive to the highest degree. She never originated anything, nor advised anything, nor took any part as an individual being in the conduct of life, either her own or that of others. Hers were not those eager youthful opinions, those harsh judgments, those daring comments which belong as much to youth as its bloom. She was too artless to know anything of the prettiness of her uplifted eyes, or the delicious flattery which lay in her absolute submissiveness. Poor Jeanie did not know that these were charms much more potent than the talents which she was aware she did not possess. She listened, and looked, and watched for those signs of guidance, which she obeyed by instinct with the docility of a dumb creature, because it was her nature. She did not even intend to please; though she was happy beyond description when she found that she had pleased, she did but act as she could not help acting, according as her disposition moved her. Edgar, who had not been used to this kind of woman, had been half annoyed, half amused by her powerlessness to advise or help, her soft devotion of look, now addressed to himself, now to Mrs. Murray. He had wondered at it, and objected to it; yet he had been moved like any other man to a softening sense of protection and almost tenderness. He was flattered too in spite of himself to find her thus watching for him. It made him more than half angry, but yet it pleased him involuntarily.

“You will catch cold standing out here in the night air,” he said pettishly at the first moment. Then he added with compunction, “It is kind of you to look for me, Jeanie; but you should not stand out in the cold without a shawl.”

“I’m glad you’re come home,” said Jeanie, with instinctive policy ignoring this reproof. “Grannie is in her bed, and it is lonely without you. Will I make you some tea? or will you have your supper? You’ve been long away.”

“Not so very long,” said Edgar, touched by the soft complaint, “but I ought to have recollected that you were alone. Are you afraid, Jeanie, at night with no one but Bell and the granny to take care of you? It is a lonely house.”

“Oh, no,” said Jeanie, looking brightly round upon him, as he followed her into the low parlour, where two candles were flickering on the table before the fire.

“But it is a lonely house?”

“Oh, yes,” she repeated softly, “but what o’ that? Nobody would meddle with us. Granny is as well known as Loch Arroch Kirk. Nobody dares meddle with us. I’m never lonely, except when granny is ill and goes to her bed, and I can hear Bell and Sandy in the kitchen. That makes me think I would like somebody to speak to, too.”

“But Bell and Sandy,”—Edgar began: if he was going to be so incautious as to add,—“are sweethearts,” I don’t know what would have become of him; but happily Jeanie, with a sudden blush interposed.

“I was not meaning Bell and Sandy; any voices have the same sound. They make you feel how lone you are.”

“That is true,” said Edgar, seating himself by the fire, which Jeanie had kept bright, with a clean-swept hearth, and a clear red glow for his coming. He sat down meditatively in the old mother’s chair. “That is true,” he repeated slowly, “I have felt it often of winter nights when I have gone upstairs to my chilly room, and heard the people chatting together as I passed their doors.”

“You have felt that, too?” said Jeanie timidly, with reverential wonder, “but you need never be your lane unless you like.”

“I assure you I have often been ‘my lane,’ as you call it, when I did not like at all,” said Edgar smiling, “you have much too high an opinion, Jeanie, of what I can do ‘if I like.’”

“Oh, no,” said Jeanie, “you are not the same as the like of us; you are a man, which is a great difference,—and then you’re a grand gentleman.”

“Jeanie, my foolish little Jeanie! I am your cousin and your granny’s child like you,” he cried, putting his hand upon hers, to stop her in the little outburst of innocent enthusiasm, which was, he felt, for an ideal Edgar—not for him.

“It’s very hard to understand,” said Jeanie shaking her head softly with a little sigh, “why you should be yonder the greatest of the land, and now only granny’s son, like me. I’ll no try. When I think, I get back a pain in my head like what I had—when I was ill.”

“You must not think,” said Edgar, “but, Jeanie, tell me, did you do my commission? Did you persuade granny to let me do what I wish?”

“Yes,” said Jeanie eagerly; she came forward and stood by him in the pleasure of making this report of her own faithfulness,—and the cheerful ruddy gleam of the firelight flickered about her, shining in her hair and eyes, and adding a tint to the colour on her cheek, which was pale by nature. “I told her a’ you said, I did not miss a word. I said it would be fine for her, but better for you; that you would do something then, and now you were doing nothing; and that you would be glad aye to think of Loch Arroch, and that there was a house there where you were thought upon day and night, and named in a’ the prayers, and minded, whatever you did, and whatever we did.”

“That was your own, Jeanie,” said Edgar, taking her hand, and looking up at her with gratified tenderness. She was to him as a little sister, and her affectionate half-childish enthusiasm brought a suffusion to his eyes.

“If it was, may I no say what I think—me too?” said Jeanie, with modest grace. “I told her that you couldna bear the thought of her away in another man’s house, after so long keeping her own over a’ our heads, that the siller was nothing to you, but that her—and me—were something to you, your nearest friends in this world. Eh, I’m glad we’re your nearest friends! though it’s strange, strange to think of,” said Jeanie, in a parenthesis. “I told her that though she couldna work and I couldna work, you could work, and win a fortune if you liked. I did not forget a single word,” cried the girl, “not a word! I told her all you said.”

For a moment Edgar made no reply. He listened with a half smile, wonderingly endeavouring to put himself in the place of this limited yet clear intelligence, which was capable of stating his own generous arguments so fully, yet incapable, as it seemed, of so much reflection as would make her hesitate to expound them. Jeanie, so far as her personal sentiment went, accepted his sacrifice with matter-of-fact simplicity, without ever thinking of his side of it, or of the deprivations involved. She took his offer to denude himself of everything he had, with the same absolute pleasure and satisfaction with which a child would accept a present. Was it her unbounded confidence in his power to win a fortune if he liked? Or was it her simple instinct that this was natural, and that the weak and helpless had a right to the services of the strong? Edgar was bewildered by this question which never entered into Jeanie’s mind. He was almost glad of her incapacity to see beyond the surface of things, and yet wondered at it with something between amusement and pain. Here was the primitive nature, commonplace, unsophisticated, he said to himself, which believed what was said to it simply demanding without motive or reason. No second thoughts troubled the limpid surface of Jeanie’s gentle mind. She believed unhesitatingly not only that he meant what he said (which was true), but that the arguments she repeated were infallible, without perceiving the sophistry of which Edgar himself, the author of them, was fully conscious. Truly and sincerely she made as light of his self-renunciation as he himself had made—a thing which is bewildering to the self-sacrificer, though it may be the thing which is most desirable to him and suits his purpose best. I do not know if Jeanie was aware of the half tone of descent in the moral scale which made itself apparent in Edgar’s voice.

“You have been a clever advocate, Jeanie,” he said with a smile, “and I hope a successful one,” and with that he dropped her hand and took out his newspaper. Was there anything amiss, or was it merely his lordly pleasure to end the conversation? With a momentary sense of pain, Jeanie wondered which it was, but accepted the latter explanation, got her seam, and sat down within reach of the pleasant warmth of the fire, happy in the silence, asking nothing more.

CHAPTER IV.
A Family Consultation.

A few days after, various members of the family arrived at the Castle Farm, with the intention of deciding what was to be done. An arrangement had been partially made with a young farmer of the district, who was ready to enter upon the remainder of the lease, and whom the factor on the part of the Duke was ready to accept as replacing Mrs. Murray in the responsibilities of the tenancy. This, of course, everybody felt was the natural step to be taken, and it left the final question as to how the old lady herself was to be disposed of, clear and unembarrassed. Even Edgar himself was not sufficiently Quixotic to suppose that Mrs. Murray’s feelings and pride should be so far consulted as to keep up the farm for her amusement, while she was no longer able to manage its manifold concerns.

Mr. and Mrs. Campbell arrived first in their gig, which was seated for four persons, and which, indeed, Mr. Campbell called a phaeton. Their horse was a good steady, sober-minded brown horse, quite free from any imaginativeness or eccentricity, plump and sleek, and well-groomed; and the whole turnout had an appearance of comfort and well-being. They brought with them a young man whom Edgar had not yet seen, a Dr. Charles Murray, from the East-country, the son of Mrs. Murray’s eldest son, who had arrived that morning by the steamboat at Loch Arroch Head. From Greenock by the same conveyance—but not in Mr. Campbell’s gig—came James Murray, another of the old lady’s sons, who was “a provision merchant” in that town, dealing largely in hams and cheeses, and full of that reverential respect for money which is common with his kind. Lastly there arrived from Kildarton on the other side of Loch Long, a lady who had taken the opportunity, as she explained to Edgar, of indulging her young people with a picnic, which they were to hold in a little wooded dell, round the corner of the stubble field, facing Loch Long, while she came on to join the family party, and decide upon her mother’s destiny. This was Mrs. MacKell, Mrs. Murray’s youngest daughter, a good-looking, high-complexioned woman of forty-five, the wife of a Glasgow “merchant” (the phrase is wide, and allows of many gradations), who had been living in sea-side quarters, or, as her husband insisted on expressing it, “at the saut water,” in the pleasant sea-bathing village of Kildarton, opposite the mouth of Loch Arroch. The boat which deposited her at the little landing-place belonging to the Castle Farm, was a heavy boat of the district, filled with a bright-coloured and animated party, and provided with the baskets and hampers necessary for their party of pleasure. Mrs. MacKell stood on the bank, waving her hand to them as they hoisted the sail and floated back again round the yellow edge of the stubble field.

“Mind you keep your warm haps on, girls, and don’t wet your feet,” she called to them; “and oh, Andrew, my man, for mercy’s sake take care of that awful sail!”

This adjuration was replied to by a burst of laughter in many voices, and a “Never fear, mother,” from Andrew; but Mrs. MacKell shook her good-looking head as she accepted Edgar’s hand to ascend the slope. All the kindred regarded Edgar with a mixture of curiosity and awe, and it was, perhaps, a slight nervous shyness in respect to this stranger, so aristocratical-looking, as Mrs. MacKell expressed herself, which gave a little additional loudness and apparent gaiety to that excellent woman’s first address.

“I’m always afraid of those sails. They’re very uncanny sort of things when a person does not quite understand the nature of our lochs. I suppose, Mr. Edgar, you’re in that case?” said Mrs. MacKell, looking at him with an ingratiating smile.

He was her nephew, there could be no doubt of it, and she had a right to talk to him familiarly; but at the same time he was a fine gentleman and a stranger, and made an impression upon her mind which was but inadequately counter-balanced by any self-assurances that he was “just an orphan lad—no better—not to say a great deal worse off than our own bairns.” Such representations did not affect the question as they ought to have done, when this strange personage, “no better, not to say a great deal worse” than themselves, stood with his smile which made them slightly uncomfortable, before them. It was the most open and genial smile, and in former times Edgar had been supposed a great deal too much disposed to place himself on a level with all sorts of people; but now-a-days his look embarrassed his humble relations. There was a certain amusement in it, which bore no reference to them, which was entirely at himself, and the quaintly novel position in which he found himself, but which nevertheless affected them, nobody could have told why. He was not laughing at them, respectablest of people. They could not take offence, neither could they divine what he was laughing at; but the curious, whimsical, and often rueful amusement which mingled with many much less agreeable feelings, somehow made itself felt and produced an effect upon which he had never calculated. It was something they did not understand, and this consciousness partially irritated, partially awed these good people, who felt that the new man in their midst was a being beyond their comprehension. They respected his history and his previous position, though with a little of that characteristic contempt which mingles so strangely in Scotland with many old prejudices in favour of rank and family; they respected more honestly and entirely his little property, the scraps of his former high estate which made him still independent; but above all they now respected, though with some irritation, what seemed to them the unfathomableness of his character, the lurking smile in his eyes. It confirmed the superiority which imagination already acknowledged.

“I have not had much experience of the lochs,” said Edgar, following with his eyes the clumsy but gay boat, with its cargo of laughter, and frankly gay, if somewhat loud, merry-making.

Mrs. MacKell saw his look and was gratified.

“You’ll not know which are your cousins among so many,” she said; “and, indeed, the girls have been plaguing me to write over and ask you to come. They were all away back in Glasgow when my mother took ill, and just came down last week on my account. It’s late for sea-bathing quarters in Scotland; and, indeed, when they took it into their heads about this pic-nic, I just raged at them. A pic-nic in October, and on the loch! But when children set their hearts on a thing the mother’s aye made to give way; and they had to be kept quiet, you see, while my mother was ill, not knowing how it might end.”

“That is true,” said Edgar; “otherwise, so far as my poor grandmother is concerned, this cannot be called a very joyful occasion.”

“I don’t see that for my part,” cried Mrs. MacKell, feeling herself attacked, and responding with instant readiness. “Dear me! if I were in my mother’s position, to see all my children about me, all that remain, would aye be a joyful occasion, whatever was the cause; and what better could she do at her age than go up the loch to my sister Jean’s comfortable house, where she would be much made of, and have all her old friends about her? My mother has been a good mother. I have not a word to say against that; but she’s always been a proud woman, awfully proud, holding her head as high as the Duchess, and making everybody stand about. I’ll not say but what it has been very good for us, for we’ve never fallen among the common sort. But still, you know, unless where there’s siller that sort of thing cannot be kept up. Of course, I would like it better,” added Mrs. MacKell, “to have my mother near, where I could send the bairns—excuse me for using the words of the place.”

“Oh, I like the words,” said Edgar, with a laugh, which he could not quite restrain—better than the sentiments, he would have said.

“Where I could send any of my young folk that happened to be looking white, at any moment,” she went on; “far different from what I could do with Jean, who has the assurance to tell me she always invites her friends when she wants them, though her son has his dinner with us every Sunday of his life during the Session! Therefore it’s clear what my interest is. But you see, Mr. Edgar,” she continued, softening, “you have the ways of a rich man. You never think of the difficulties. Oh! Charles, is that you? I’m glad to see you looking so well; and how are things going in the East country? and how is your sister Marg’ret, and little Bell? If my young folk had known you were here, they would have wanted you away with them in the boat. But I must go ben and see my mother before all the folk come in. I suppose you are going to look over the farm, and the beasts, with the rest.”

The young doctor—upon whom as a man of his own age, and one more like the people he had been accustomed to than those he now found around him, Edgar had looked, with more interest than any of his other relations had called from him—came up to him now with a face overcast with care.

“May I speak to you about this painful subject,” he said, “before the others come in?”

“Why a painful subject?” asked Edgar, with a smile, which was half tremulous with feeling, and half indignant, too proud for sympathy.

“It may not be so to you,” said the young man. “She brought us up, every one of my family; but what can I do? I have a brother in Australia, too far off to help, and another a clerk in London. As for me, I have the charge of my eldest sister, who is a widow with a child. You don’t know what a hard fight it is for a young medical man struggling to make his way.”

“No, not yet,” said Edgar, with a smile.

“Not yet? How can you know? If I were to take my grandmother home with me, which I would do gladly, she would be far from everything that she knows and cares for—in a new place, among strangers. Her whole life would be broken up. And I could not take Jeanie,” the young man added, with a thrill of still greater pain in his voice. “There would be other dangers. What can we do? I cannot bear to think that she must leave this place. But I have so little power to help, and consequently so little voice in the matter.”

“I have not very much,” said Edgar; “but yet enough, I think, to decide this question. And so long as I have a shilling, she shall not be driven away from her home. On that I have made up my mind.”

His new cousin looked at him with admiration—then with a sigh:

“What a thing money is,” he said; “ever so little of it. You can take a high hand with them, having something; but I, to whom Robert Campbell and Mr. MacKell have both lent money to set me going—”

Edgar held out his hand to his companion.

“When this is settled I shall be in the same position,” he said; “worse, for you have a profession, and I have none. You must teach me how I can best work for daily bread.”

“You are joking,” said the young doctor, with a smile.

Like the others, he could not believe that Edgar, once so rich, could ever be entirely poor; and that he should denude himself altogether of his living for the sake of the old mother, whom they were all quite ready to help—in reason, was an idea impossible to be comprehended, and which nobody believed for a moment. He said nothing in reply, and the two stood together before the door waiting for the other men of the party, who were looking over “the beasts” and farm implements, and calculating how much they would bring.

James Murray, the provision merchant, was the typical Scotchman of fiction and drama—a dry, yellow man, with keen grey eyes, surrounded by many puckers, scrubby sandy hair, and a constant regard for his own interest. The result had been but indifferent, for he was the poorest of the family, always in difficulties, and making the sparest of livings by means of tremendous combinations of skill and thought sufficient to have made the most fabulous fortune—only fortune had never come his way. He had been poking the cows in the ribs, and inspecting the joints of every plough and harrow as if his life depended upon them. As he came forward to join the others, he put down in the note-book which he held in his hand, the different sums which he supposed they would bring. Altogether, it was a piece of business which pleased him. If he had ever had any sentimental feeling towards his old home, that was over many a long year ago; and that his mother, when she could no longer manage the farm, should give it up, and be happy and thankful to find a corner at her daughter’s fireside, was to him the most natural thing in life. The only thing that disturbed him, was the impossibility of making her seek a composition with her creditors, and thus saving something “for an emergency.”

“James has aye an eye to what may come after,” Mr. Campbell said, with his peculiar humour, and a laugh which made Edgar long to pitch him into the loch; “he’s thinking of the succession. Not that I’m opposed to compounding with the creditors in such a case. She’s well-known for an honest woman that’s paid her way, and held up her head with the best, and we all respect her, and many of us would have no objection to make a bit small sacrifice. I’m one myself, and I can speak. But your mother is a woman that has always had a great deal of her own way.”

“More than was good for her,” said James Murray, shaking his head. “She’s as obstinate as an auld mule when she takes a notion. She’s been mistress and mair these forty year, and like a women, she’ll hear no reason. Twelve or fifteen shillings in the pound is a very fine composition, and touches no man’s credit, besides leaving an old wife something in her pocket to win respect.”

“And to leave behind her,” said Campbell, laughing and slapping his brother-in-law on the back.

This was at the door of the farm-house, where they lingered a moment before going in. The loud laugh of the one and testy exclamation of the other, sounded in through the open windows of the parlour, where the mistress of the house sat with her daughters; probably the entire conversation had reached them in the same way. But of that no one took any thought. This meeting and family consultation was rather “a ploy” than otherwise to all the party. They liked the outing, the inspection, the sense of superiority involved. The sons and the daughters were intent upon making their mother hear reason and putting all nonsense out of her head. She had been foolish in these last years of her life. She had brought up Tom’s bairns, for instance, in a ridiculous way. It was all very well for Robert Campbell’s son, who was able to afford it, to be sent to College, but what right had Charlie Murray to be made a gentleman of at the expense of all the rest? To be sure his uncles and aunts were somewhat proud of him now that the process was completed, and liked to speak of “my nephew the doctor;” but still it was a thing that a grandmother, all whose descendants had an equal right to her favours, had no title to do.

“My bairns are just as near in blood, and have just as good a right to a share of what’s going; and when you think how many there are of them, and the fight we have had to give them all they require,” Mrs. MacKell said to Mrs. Campbell.

“Many or few,” said Mrs. Campbell to Mrs. MacKell, “we have all a right to our share. I’ve yet to learn that being one of ten bairns gives more claim than being an only child. Johnnie ought to be as much to his grandmother as any grand-bairn she has—as much as Charlie Murray that has cost her hundreds. But she never spent a pound note on my Johnnie all his life.”

“There have been plenty pound-notes spent on him,” said the younger sister, “but we need not quarrel, for neither yours nor mine will get anything from their grandmother now. But I hope the men will stand fast, and not yield to any fancies. My mother’s always been a good mother to us, but very injudicious with these children. There’s Jeanie, now, never taught to do a hand’s turn, but encouraged in all her fancies.”

“I would like to buy in the china,” said Mrs. Campbell. “Auld china is very much thought of now-a-days. I hear the Duchess drinks her tea out of nothing else, and the dafter-like the better. You’ll be surprised when you see how many odds and ends there are about the house, that would make a very good show if they were rightly set out.”

“My mother has some good things too, if all the corners were cleared, that are of no use to her, but that would come in very well for the girls,” said Mrs. MacKell; and with these kind and reverential thoughts they met their mother, who perhaps also—who knows?—had in her day been covetous of things that would come in for the girls. This was the easy and cheerful view which the family took of the circumstances altogether. Not one of them intended to be unkind. They were all quite determined that she should “want for nothing;” but still it was, on the whole, rather “a ploy” and pleasant expedition, this family assembly, which had been convened for the purpose of dethroning its head.

CHAPTER V.
The Family Martyr.

I need not say that the feelings with which the old woman awaited the decision of her fate were of a very different character. She had lain awake almost the whole night, thinking over the long life which she had spent within those walls. She had been married at eighteen, and now she was seventy. I wonder whether she felt in herself one tithe of the difference which these words imply. I do not believe she did; except at special moments we never feel ourselves old; we are, to ourselves, what we always were, the same creature, inexhaustible, unchangeable, notwithstanding all vulgar exterior transformation. Poor old Mrs. Murray at seventy, poor, aged, ruined, upon whom her children were to sit that day and give forth her sentence of banishment, her verdict of destitution, never more to call anything her own, to lodge in the house of another, to eat a stranger’s bread—was to her own knowledge the same girl, eighteen years old, who had opened bright eyes in that chamber in those early summer mornings fifty years ago when life was so young. Fifty years passed before her as she lay with her eyes turned to the wall. How many joys in them, how many sorrows! how tired she had lain down, how lightly risen up, how many plans she had pondered there, how many prayers she had murmured unheard of by any but God, prayers, many of them never answered, many forgotten even by herself, some, which she remembered best, granted almost as soon as said. How she had cried and wept in an agony, for example, for the life of her youngest child, and how it had been better almost from that hour! The child was her daughter, Mrs. MacKell, now a virtuous mother of a family; but after all to her own mother, perhaps it would not now have mattered very much had that prayer dropped unheard. How many recollections there are to look back on in seventy years, and how bewildering the effort to remember whether the dreamer lying there is eighteen, or forty, or seventy! and she to be judged and sentenced and know her doom to-day.

She did not shed any tear or make any complaint, but acknowledged to herself with the wonderful stoicism of the poor that it was natural, that nothing else was to be looked for. Jean and her husband would be kind—enough; they would give the worn-out mother food and shelter; they would not neglect nor treat her cruelly. All complaint was silent in her heart; but yet the events of this day were no “ploy” to her. She got up at her usual time, late now in comparison to the busy and active past, and came down with Jeanie’s help to the parlour, and seated herself in the arm-chair where she had sat for so many years. There she passed the morning very silent, spending the time with her own thoughts. She had told Jeanie what to do, to prepare for the early dinner, which they were all to eat together.

“You would be a good bairn,” she had said with a smile, “if you would take it upon you to do all this, Jeanie, and say nothing to me.”

Jeanie had sense enough to take her at her word, and thus all the morning she had been alone, sitting with eyes fixed on Benvohrlan, often with a strange smile on her face, pondering and thinking. She had her stocking in her hands, and knitted on and on, weaving in her musing soul with the thread. When her daughters came in she received them very kindly with a wistful smile, looking up into their faces, wondering if the sight of the mother who bore them had any effect upon these women. Still more wistfully she looked at the men who followed. Many a volume has been written about the love of parents, the love of mothers, its enthusiasms of hope and fancy, its adorations of the unworthy, its agony for the lost; but I do not remember that anyone has ventured to touch upon a still more terrible view of the subject, the disappointment, for example, with which such a woman as I have attempted to set before the reader—a woman full of high aspirations, noble generosities, and perhaps an unwarrantable personal pride, all intensified by the homely circumstances of life around her—sometimes looks upon the absolutely commonplace people whom she has brought into the world. She, too, has had her dreams about them while they were children and all things seemed possible—while they were youths with still some grace and freshness of the morning veiling their unheroic outlines. But a woman of seventy can cherish no fond delusions about her middle-aged sons and daughters who are to all intents and purposes as old as she is. What a dismal sense of failure must come into such a woman’s heart while she looks at them! Perhaps this is one reason why grandfathers and grandmothers throw themselves so eagerly into the new generation, by means of which human nature can always go on deceiving itself. Heavens! what a difference between the ordinary man or woman at fifty, and that ideal creature which he, or she, appeared to the mother’s eyes at fifteen! The old people gaze and gaze to see our old features in us; and who can express the blank of that disappointment, the cruel mortification of those old hopes, which never find expression in any words?

Mrs. Murray, from the household place where she had ruled so long, where she had brought up upon her very life-blood like the pelican, those same commonplace people—where she had succoured the poor, and entertained strangers, and fed from her heart two generations—looked wistfully, half wonderingly at them as they all entered, and sat down round her, to decide what was to be done with her. Something of a divine despair, like that God Himself might have felt when the creation he had pronounced good, turned to evil—but with a more poignant thrill of human anguish in the fact of her own utter powerlessness to move to good or to evil those independent souls which once had seemed all hers, to influence as she would—swept through her like a sudden storm. But to show any outward sign of this was impossible. Theirs now was the upper hand; they were in the height of life, and she was old. “When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not;” she said these words to herself with a piteous patience and submission; but unheard by any soul,—unless, indeed, it was by those sympathisers in Heaven, who hear so much, yet make no sign that we can hear or see.

They came in quite cheerfully all of them, full of the many and diversified affairs which, for the moment, they were to make the sacrifice of laying aside to settle the fate of their mother, and held over her body, as it were, a pleasant little family palaver.

“The children have gone down the loch for a pic-nic; they would have come in to see Granny, but I said you would have no time for them to-day. The weather is just wonderful for this time of the year, or I never would have allowed such a thing.”

“It’s all very well for you town-folk to praise up a good day,” said Mr. Campbell, “which is no doubt pleasant when it comes to them that have no interest in the land—but a kind of an insult to us after all the soft weather that has ruined the corn. What’s the use of one good day except for your pic-nics and nonsense? nothing but to make the handful of wheat sprout the faster. And the glass is down again—We’ll have more rain the morn.”

“You’ll find it very dry in the East country, Chairles,” said Mrs. Campbell; “more pleasant for walking, but very stour and troublesome to keep a house clean, and a great want of water. Your sister Marg’ret was aye ill to please about the weather; but after a’ that’s come and gone, I hope she’s no so fanciful now?”

“You’ll be setting up a gig soon?” said James Murray, “or, perhaps, you’ve done it already? It’s expensive, but it’s a kind of necessity for a doctor.”

“Indeed I cannot see that; a strong young man like Charles that’s well able to walk! but some folk are always taking care of themselves,” said Mrs. MacKell. “In Glasgow, the richest men in the place think nothing of a walk, wet or dry—and my bairns, I assure you, are never spoiled with such luxuries.”

“A gig to a doctor is like a spade to a labouring man,” said Robert Campbell, sententiously; “that’s an expense that I approve. Keep you up appearances, Charles—that’s as long as you can do it out of your own pocket,” he said with a laugh, thrusting his hand deep into his own.

“I know where you could lay your hand on a very decent machine, cheaper, I answer for’t, than anything you’ll get in the East country,” said James.

“And I am sure you have plenty of old harness that could be cleaned up, Robert,” said Mrs. Campbell, “if it’s thought necessary. To be sure, if he was sent for in a hurry to some country place, perhaps, or the other side of the town—”

“Thank you all,” said the young doctor, “but I have a—conveyance. I could not do without it. I took it from my predecessor, along with the house and the goodwill.”

“Did you hear what he said?” said Mrs. MacKell, aside, to Mrs. Campbell, “a conveyance, not a gig, as we were all saying. Depend upon it, it’s some grand landau, or something, where Marg’ret can lie and take her ease. To think how my mother spoiled these bairns!”

Mrs. Murray took no part in all their talk. She sat with her old eyes sadly turned upon them, eyes that were clear with the pallid liquid light of a sky just cleared from rain. I think the only one who was at all interested in the old woman, beyond the matter-of-fact interest which belonged to her as the cause of the meeting, was Edgar, who had seated himself close to her, and who now laid his hand, in a silent sympathy which nobody else felt, upon the hand with which she held the arm of her chair. Her hand was grey-white, the colour of old age, with all the veins visible on the wrinkled surface. When he put his young warm hand upon it, it felt almost as cold as death.

“Don’t you think,” he said, with some abruptness, “that my grandmother’s concerns ought to be settled before we talk of anything else?”

They had all, as I have said, a respect for Edgar, and his voice had an immediate effect.

“That’s true,” said Mr. Campbell, “it would be better to settle everything before dinner;” and with this comfortable levity they all gathered more closely round the table. The drawing in of chairs and the little noise of coughing and clearing throats which heralded the commencement of a new subject, occupied the first minute; then James Murray edged slightly away from the table the chair which he had drawn close to it, and prepared to speak. But before he had opened his lips an unforeseen interruption arose; Mrs. Murray herself took the initiative, a thing entirely unexpected by her children, who had felt, with a sense of security, that they had her fairly in hand.

“Bairns,” she said slowly, and at first in a low tone, while they all turned upon her with surprise, “bairns, I am leaving you to settle everything. I am old; I would fain have gone to them that’s passed before me, but the Lord hasna been of my mind. Things have gone badly with the farm, partly by His providence, partly by my fault—you know that as well as I do. In my time, I’ve commanded you and done what I thought best. Now the power has gone out of my hands; settle as ye will, and I’ll no complain, so long as every man has his ain, and no debt is left, nor any person to rise up against me and call me an unjust dealer. I’ve done my best for you while it was in my power. Now, do your best, I’ll no complain. Beggars should not be choosers. It’s all in your hands.”

“Mother, you shouldna speak like that! as if you doubted that we could think of anything but your good,” cried both her daughters in a breath; “and as for beggars—not one of us would use such a word.”

“It’s what I am,” said the old woman firmly. “And there’s but one word I have to say. You ken all of you what I would like best; that’s all I’ll say; every one of you kens what I would like best. But, failing that, I’ll do whatever’s settled on. I’ll no complain.”

“What you would like, we all know very well,” said James Murray, hastily; “but it’s impossible, mother, impossible. You canna afford the farm, you canna afford to keep up a house, doing nothing for it, or to keep up a family. There’s you, and we’ll do our best.”

She made a little gesture with her hands, and relapsed into the stillness which she had not broken when they talked of other affairs. The discrowned monarch sat still to let whoever would take her sceptre from her. She took up the stocking she had laid in her lap, and began knitting again, looking at them with eyes out of which the wistfulness had faded. An almost stern submission had replaced the wondering anxious look with which she had looked round to see if anyone would understand her, if any would deal with her as she had dealt by them.

“For you see,” continued James Murray, doggedly, “mother, we are none of us rich, to be guided by your fancies. If we were great ones of this earth, and you the auld Duchess, say, for example’s sake, you might have your will, whatever it cost. But we’re all poor folk—or comparatively poor folk. We may give you a welcome to our houses, such as they are, and a share of what we have; but as for siller we have not got it, and we cannot give you what we have not got to give.”

“That’s just about the real state of the case,” said Robert Campbell. “There are many things more rife among us than siller. We’ve all sense enough to see what’s for our advantage, and we’re all industrious folk, doing our best; but siller is not rife. As for us, Jean and me have long made up our minds what to do. It’s our duty, or at least it’s her duty, as the eldest of the daughters; and your mother was always a kind guid-mother to me, and never interfered or made mischief; so I would never oppose Jean’s righteous desire. We’ll take the old leddy in. She shall have a room to herself, and nothing to do, one way or other, more than she pleases. If she likes to do any small turn in the house, in the way of helping, well and good; but nothing will be asked from her. And anything that the rest of you think that you could spare—I’m not a man to haggle about my good-mother’s board. She shall have her share of all that’s going the same as one of ourselves; but if any of you have anything to spare——”

“Would it not be more satisfactory to us all, and more agreeable to my grandmother,” said Edgar, suddenly, “if, without charging Mr. Campbell above the rest, we were to make up a little income for her, to enable her to keep her own house?”

This suggestion fell like a sudden cannon-ball into the group. There was a universal movement.

“Well, well, I’m no forcing myself on anybody. Try what you can do,” cried Campbell, offended, pushing his chair from the table.

“It’s just all stuff and nonsense!” cried his wife, reddening with anger.

The other two elder people regarded Edgar with a mixture of disapproval and dismay. And the young doctor, the only one of the party who showed some sympathy for him, grew very red, and hesitated and cleared his throat as if to speak—but said nothing. After a moment’s pause, James Murray turned upon the inconsiderate speaker with a certain solemnity.

“Who are you, young man,” he said, “that you should put in your word and do what you can to unsettle a well-considered family arrangement? You heard me say not ten minutes since that just the thing we were wanting in was money. We’re no in a position to make up incomes either for auld wives or young lads. We’re all ready to acknowledge our duty to my mother, and to pay it in kind according to our ability. If she tires of Jean, she may come to me; none of us would shut our houses against her; but as for an income, and to leave her free to make her house a refuge for the destitute, as she has aye done, more’s the pity—”

“Mother,” cried Mrs. MacKell, suddenly, “what for are you looking so at me? Do you think I wouldna rather, far rather, see you in your own house? But I’m no an independent woman as you’ve been a’ your days. I’m a man’s wife that has plenty to do with his siller. I brought him not a sixpence, as ye well know, but a large expensive family, that wants a great deal mair than ever we got, as I often tell them. And what can I do? I went to my man without a penny, and how can I ask him to spend his siller on my folk? Mother,” and here Mrs. MacKell burst into hasty sudden crying, half-vexation, half-shame, “it’s awfu’ unkind, when you ken how I am situate, to give such looks at me!”

“I gave you no looks, Agnes,” said the old woman. “Oh, Sirs, hold all your tongues. I’m the mother that bore you, and never counted the cost for aught that was in my power to get for you. But I will have no strife of tongues over me. Ye shall not quarrel what you’re to give, or how little you’re to give. I canna bear it. Edgar, my bonnie man, you mean well, but every word is another stab. Robert Campbell, I take your offer kindly. I’ll no be much trouble. I canna promise that I’ll no last long, for that’s in the Lord’s hand, and waes me, I canna cut it short, no by an hour. But it’s little I want, and I’ll give little trouble—”

She paused, with a piteous smile upon her face, gulping down something which rose in her throat. With this smile she made her abdication, looking round upon them with an anguish of submission and endurance so curiously compounded of a hundred different ingredients of pain, each giving sharpness and poignancy to the others, that to describe them all exceeds my power.

“We’ll go ben and get our dinner,” she added hurriedly; “we’ll say no more about it. I take it a’ for granted, and the rest you can settle among yourselves.”

“But I cannot take it for granted,” said Edgar. “Stop a little. I will not give any stabs, my old mother. Look here, my aunts and uncles.” He said this with a momentary hesitation, with the half-smile which they resented; but still they listened, having a respect for him and his independence. “I am not like you,” said Edgar, still with that half-smile. “The only thing I have is money, a little, not worth speaking of, but still it is mine to do what I like with it. Is it not true that there is some talk of building a new farmhouse for the new farmer, as this one is old and in want of repair? I think I heard you say so the other day.”

“It’s true enough—what’s about it?” said Campbell, shortly.

“Then my grandmother shall stay here,” said Edgar, decisively; “she shall not be turned out of her home, either by her creditors, or—by her sons and daughters. I have nobody to stop me, neither wife, nor sister, nor child, nor duty. Thank heaven, I have enough left for that! If you will take the trouble to settle all about it, Mr. Campbell, I shall be grateful; it is all we will ask you for, not your hospitality, only a little trouble. I don’t suppose the Duke will make any difficulties, nor the young farmer whom I saw yesterday. Thank you for your kind intentions. My grandmother will not be able to set up a refuge for the destitute, but no doubt she will serve you all when you require her services, as she has been used to do all her life,” said Edgar, with some excitement. “Mother, not a word; it is all done, past my power of changing as well as yours.”

They all sat and looked at him with momentary stupefaction, staring, turning to give questioning looks at each other. Was the young man mad? When Edgar ended by pushing some papers across the table to Campbell, they all drew close to look, James Murray taking out eagerly, and putting on with hands that trembled, a large pair of clumsy spectacles. All the four heads of the elder people clustered about these documents; they read the papers each over the other’s shoulder.

“It’s all in order—all in order. Young idiot! he’s bound himself as long as she lives,” Campbell muttered in an undertone. “Why the deevil didn’t ye let us know your intentions and save us a’ this trouble?” he exclaimed aloud, putting away the women from behind him with a gesture, and turning with well-put-on indignation to the young man, whose excitement had not yet calmed down.

“Saftly, saftly,” said James Murray, “we must not let ourselves be carried away by our feelings. I approve the lad; it’s just what I would have done myself had I been without the burden of a family, and plenty of siller to come and go upon. I’ll shake hands with you, Edgar, my lad; it’s well done and well thought! Robert, here, may have a little feeling on the subject, as being the one that offered his house; but for my part, I’ve no hesitation in saying it’s well done, Edgar—well done—just what, in your circumstances, I would have done myself!”

“By George! you’re a clever fellow, Jamie Murray!” cried Campbell, with a loud laugh.

The two women did not say anything; they looked at each other, and Mrs. MacKell, who was the most soft-hearted, began to cry.

“It’s what we would all have liked to have done,” she said feebly, after an interval.

Her sister turned round sharply and scolded Jeanie, who had been sitting behind backs looking on, and who now looked up at Edgar with a face so radiant that it struck her aunt with sharp offence—more sharp than the real offence of the stranger’s superior generosity, of which it was a reflection.

“What are you doing there,” she said, “you little idle cutty? Did not Granny tell you to see after the dinner? It may be good for her, but it’s ruination to you, if you had the sense to see it. Dinna let me see you sit there, smil—smiling at a young lad! I wonder you dinna think shame! It’s all my mother’s fault,” she added bitterly, placing herself in the chair by the window, which Jeanie, in dismay and tears, hastily evacuated; “we were kept to our work and kept in order, in our day; but she’s spoiled every creature that’s come near her since. I’m glad I’ve nae girls mysel that she can ruin as she’s ruined Jeanie!”

“Poor thing, she has nae mother to keep her right,” said the softer sister.

I think, for my part, that the sharp offence and bitterness of the women at the sudden turn that things had taken, showed a higher moral sense than the eager satisfaction with which, after the first moment, the men received it. Murray and Campbell both felt the immediate relief, as far as they themselves were concerned. The women felt first the shame and stigma of not having attempted to do for their mother what this stranger was so ready to do. The result was much less pleasant and less amiable to witness, but it showed, I think, a higher feeling of right and wrong.

CHAPTER VI.
A Party in a Parlour.

The dinner which followed was not, the first part of it at least, a very comfortable meal. Mrs. Murray herself was profoundly shaken by the conference altogether. She was unable to say anything to her grandson except the almost wild “No, lad; no, Edgar, my bonnie man!” with which she had endeavoured to stop him at first. After this she had not uttered a word. She had taken his hand between her old and worn hands, and raised her face as if to God—praying for blessings on him? No—I do not think her mind was capable of such an effort—she was looking up to the Divine Friend who had been her refuge in everything these seventy years, in a strange rapture of surprise and joy. How much part the sudden change in her circumstances had to do with the joy, I cannot tell—very little I think, infinitesimally little. “I have one son, one true son, after all; heart of my heart, and soul of my soul!” This was the predominating thought in her mind, the half-ecstatic feeling which flooded her old being like sudden sunshine. Amid all the griefs and disappointments to which such a soul is liable, there remains to one now and then the tender and generous delight of seeing others do by her as she would have done by them. How sweet it is; before all delight in gifts, or even in affection! We think of the golden rule more often in the way of a command, employing it to touch our own souls to languid duty; but there are occasions when it is given back to us, so to speak, in the way of recompense, vivified and quickened into rapture. This old woman had practised it as she could all her life, and others had not done to her as she had done to them; but here, at the end of her existence, came one—her reward, one heir of her nature, one issue of her soul. Thus she had her glimpse of heaven in the very moment of her lowest humiliation. She had done little personally for him—little—nothing—except to harm him; but she had done much for others, sacrificing herself that they might live, and the stranger, in whose training she had had no hand, who had with her no link of union but the mystic tie of blood, gave back to her full measure, heaped up, and running over. I must leave to the imagination of the reader the keen satisfaction and joy, sharp and poignant almost as pain, with which this aged soul, worn out and weary, received full in her heart, all at once, as by a shot or thunderbolt, the unthought of, unhoped-for recompense.

The men, as I have said, were the first to reconcile themselves to the sudden revolution. If any thrill of shame came over them, it was instantly quenched, and ceased to influence the hardened mail, beaten by much vicissitude of weather, which covered them. The women were thinner-skinned, so to speak, more easily touched in their pride, and were sensible of the irony with which, half-consciously to himself, Edgar had spoken. But, perhaps, the person most painfully affected of all was the young doctor, who had listened to Edgar with a painful flush on his face, and with a pang of jealous pain and shame, not easy to bear. He went up to the old lady as soon as the discussion was over, and sat down close by her, and held a long conversation in an undertone.

“Grandmother,” he said, the flush returning and covering his face with painful heat, “you do not think me ungrateful or slow to interfere? You know it is not want of will, but want of means. You know—”

“Charlie, was I asking anything, that you speak so to me? I know you could not interfere. You are in their debt still, poor lad?”

“Yes, I am in their debt still. I don’t know how to get out of it; it grinds me to the ground!” cried the young man. “But what can I do?”

Mrs. Murray patted his hand softly with her old worn fingers; but she was silent, with that silence which the weak nature, eager for approbation, but unable to make a bold effort after good, feels so profoundly.

“You don’t say anything,” said Dr. Charles, with a mixture of petulance. “You think I might have done more?”

“No, Charlie, no,” said the old woman; “as you say not. I would be glad to see you free of this bondage; but you must know best yourself.”

“There is so much to do,” said the young doctor. “I must get a position. I must make an appearance like others in my profession. So many things are necessary that you never think of here in a country place; and you know Margaret has no health to speak of. There is so much expense in every way.”

“She was always handless,” said Mrs. Murray. “She should come to me with little Bell, and let you take your chance. Living costs but little here, and what is enough for one is enough for two,” said the old woman, with her perennial and instinctive liberality of heart.

“Enough for one! Jeanie is going to leave you then, as the Campbells told me,” said the young man hastily. “He is to marry her as they said?”

“I ken nothing about marrying or giving in marriage,” said the grandmother, with some severity of tone. “If that is still in your mind, Charlie—”

“It is not in my mind—it was never in my mind,” he said with an eagerness which was almost passionate. “She has a lovely face, but she never was or could be a fit wife for a man in my position. There never was anything in that.”

“Charlie, my man, you think too much of your position,” said the old woman, shaking her head; “and if there was nothing in it, why should you gloom and bend your brows at the thought that Edgar might care for the bonnie face as well as you? He does not, more’s the pity.”

“And why should you say more’s the pity? Do you want to be rid of Jeanie? Do you want to be left alone?”

“I’m but a bruised reed for anyone to trust to,” she said. “Soon, soon I’ll have passed away, and the place that now knows me will know me no more. I would be glad to see my poor bairn in somebody’s hand that would last longer than me.”

A momentary flush of strong feeling passed over the young man’s face.

“Grandmother,” he said, “you were too good to me. If I had been bred a farmer like yourself—”

“You would have made but a weirdless farmer, Charlie, my man. It’s not the trade that does it,” said Mrs. Murray, with some sadness. “But Marg’ret had better come to me. She may hinder you, but she’ll no help you. The bairns are maybe right; I was injudicious, Charlie, and grieved for you that were all delicate things without a mother. I should have known better. You are little able to fend for yourselves in this world, either Marg’ret or you.”

“I don’t know why you should say so, grandmother. I am making my way in my profession,” said Dr. Charles, not without offence, “and Margaret is very greatly thought of, and asked to the best houses. If you have nothing more to blame yourself with than you have in our case—”

Mrs. Murray sighed, but she made no answer. It was not for nothing that her daughters had reproached her. Charles Murray and his sister Margaret had been the two youngest of the flock, her eldest son Tom’s children, whom the brave old woman had taken into her house, and brought up with the labour of her own hands. The others were scattered about the world, fighting their way in all regions; but Charlie and Margaret had been as apples of her eye. She had done everything for them, bringing up the son to a learned profession, and “making a lady of” the gentle and pretty girl, who was of a stock less robust than the other Murrays. And as Mrs. Murray had no patent of exemption from the failures that follow sometimes the best efforts, she had not succeeded in this case. Charles Murray, without being absolutely unsuccessful, had fulfilled none of the high hopes entertained concerning him; and Margaret had made a foolish marriage, and had been left in a few years a penniless widow dependent upon her brother. No one knew exactly what the two were doing now. They were “genteel” and “weirdless,” living, it was feared, above their means, and making no attempt to pay back the money which had been lent by their wealthier friends to set the young doctor afloat.

This was why the children she had trained so carefully could give their old mother no help. Margaret had cried bitterly when she heard that the old home was about to be broken up, and Charles’s heart was torn with a poignant sense of inability to help. But the tears and the pain would have done Mrs. Murray little good, and they were not of any profound importance to the brother and sister, both of whom were capable of some new piece of extravagance next day by way of consoling themselves. But though Mrs. Murray was not aware of it, the sharp shock of Edgar’s unlooked-for munificence towards her, and the jealousy and shame with which Dr. Charles witnessed it, was the most salutary accident that had happened to him all his life. The contrast of his own conduct, he who was so deeply indebted to her, and that of his unknown cousin, gave such a violent concussion to all his nerves as the young man had never felt before; and whatever might be the after result of this shock, its present issue was not agreeable. A sullen shadow came over him at the homely dinner to which they all sat down with such changed feelings. He had been the only one to whom Edgar had turned instinctively for sympathy, and Edgar was the first to feel this change. James Murray and Robert Campbell were the only two who kept up the languid conversation, and their talk, we need not add, was not of a very elevated kind.

“The mutton’s good, mother,” said James; “you’ve aye good mutton at Loch Arroch; not like the stuff that’s vended to us at I canna tell how much the pound. That’s a great advantage you have in the country. Your own mutton, or next thing to it; your own fowls and eggs, and all that. You should go on keeping poultry; you were a very good henwife in the old days, when we were all young; and there’s nothing that sells better than new-laid eggs and spring chickens. Though you give up the farm, I would advise you to keep them on still.”

“And I would not wonder but you might have grass enough for a cow,” said Campbell. “A cow’s a great thing in a house. There’s aye the milk whatever happens, and a pickle butter is never lost. It sells at as much as eighteen pence a pound on the other side of the loch, when those Glasgow people are down for the saut water. Asking your pardon, Agnes, I was not meaning the like of you; there are plenty Glasgow people that are very decent folk, but it cannot be denied that they make everything very dear.”

“And what is that but an advantage to everybody as long as we can pay, aye, the double if we like?” cried Mrs. MacKell, forgetting her previous plea of comparative poverty. “We like everything of the best, I don’t deny it; and who has a better right, seeing our men work hard for every penny they make?”

“For that matter so do the colliers and that kind of cattle, that consume all they earn in eating and drinking,” said Campbell. “I like a good dinner myself; but the way you Glasgow folk give yourselves up to it, beats me. That’s little to the purpose, however, in the present case. James’s advice is very good advice, and so you’ll find is mine. I would not object to being at the expense of buying in that bonnie brown cow, the one you fancied, Jean—women are aye fanciful in these matters—if there will be anybody about the house that could supper and milk a cow?”

He looked doubtfully at Jeanie as he spoke, and they all looked at her, some suspiciously, some contemptuously. They all seemed to Jeanie to reproach her that she was not a strong, robust “lass” ready to help her grandmother.

“I can milk Brounie; she’s so gentle,” said Jeanie, half under her breath, looking wistfully at her critics. James Murray uttered a suppressed “humph!”

“A bonnie young woman for a farm-house!” he said, “that can milk a cow when it’s gentle. I hope you’ll save the lad’s siller as much as possible, mother; no running into your old ways, taking folk into your bosom, or entertaining strangers on the smallest provocation, as you used to do.”

“I hope my grandmother will do precisely as she likes—in the way that pleases her best,” said Edgar with emphasis.

“I am saying,” said Campbell with emphasis, “a cow; and the cocks and hens, according to James. An honest penny is aye a good thing, however it’s got. If young Glen gets the farm, as is likely, he’ll be wanting a lodging till the new house is built. I would take the lad in and give him accommodation, if it was me. In short, there’s a variety of things that would be little trouble, and would show a desire to make the best of what’s given you; and any assistance that I can be of, or Jean—”

“Oh my mother’s above my help or yours either,” said Mrs. Campbell, with some bitterness. “You need not push yourself in, Rob, when neither you nor me are wanted.”

Mrs. Murray listened to all this with grave patience and forbearance. She smiled faintly at her daughter’s petulance, and shook her head. “Bairns,” she said, gently, “I guided my own concerns before you were born.” It was the only reproof she attempted to administer, and it was followed by a pause, during which the sound of knives and forks was very audible, each individual of the party plying his as for a wager, in the sudden stillness which each affronted person thought it doubly incumbent on him and her to keep up. Mrs. Murray looked round upon them all with a smile, which gradually softened into suppressed but genial humour. “I hope you are all making a good dinner,” she said.

The afternoon after this passed as a Sunday afternoon often passes in a family gathering. They all stood a little on their defence, but, with a keen appreciation of the fact, that the mother, whom they all intended to advise and lecture, had certainly got the upper hand, and had been on the verge of laughing at them, if she had not actually done so, were prudent, and committed themselves no further. They all went out after dinner to see the site where the new farm-house was to be built, and to speculate on the way in which young Glen would manage the farm, and whether he would succeed better than its previous occupant. The women of the party visited “the beasts,” as the men had done before dinner, and the men strolled out to the fields, and weighed in their hands the damp ears of corn, and shook their heads over the length of the straw, and pointed out to each other how badly the fields were arranged, and how the crops had been repeated year after year. “It’s time it was all in other hands,” they said to each other. As for Dr. Charles, he avoided the other members of the party—the uncles who might ask for the money they had lent him, and the aunts who might inquire with an undue closeness of criticism into his proceedings and those of his sister. He sat and talked with his grandmother in the parlour, answering her questions, and making conversation with her in a way which was somewhat formal. In short, it was very like a Sunday afternoon—and the sense of being in their best clothes, and having nothing to do, and being, as it were, bound over to keep the peace, was very wearisome to all these good people. The little excitement of pulling to pieces, so to speak, the house which had sheltered and reared them, was over, and thus a certain flat of disappointment and everyday monotony mingled with the sense of something unusual which was in their meeting. Their purpose was foiled altogether, and the business manqué, yet they could not but profess pleasure in the unexpected turn that things had taken. It was very like a Sunday afternoon.

And it is impossible to tell what a relief it was to all, when the big fishing-boat came heavily round the corner with the picnic party, and Jeanie, in her plain brown frock, ran down to the landing to bid her cousins come into tea. There were some six or seven in the boat, slightly damp and limp, but in high spirits; three of whom were girls, much more gaily dressed than Jeanie, yet with a certain general resemblance to her. They all rushed fluttering in their gay ribbons up to the farm-house, glad of the novelty, and threw themselves upon “Granny,” whom they admired without the criticism in which their mother indulged less than her brothers and sisters. They did not take much notice of Jeanie, but Dr. Charles was full of interest for them, and the unknown Edgar, who was still more emphatically “a gentleman,” excited their intensest curiosity. “Where is he? which is him?” they whispered to each other; and when Bell, the youngest, exclaimed with disappointment, that he was just like Charlie Murray, and nothing particular after all, her two elder sisters snubbed her at once. “If you cannot see the difference you should hold your tongue,” said Jeanie MacKell, who called herself Jane, and had been to a school in England, crowning glory of a Scotch girl on her promotion. “Not but what Charles is very nice-looking, and quite a gentleman,” said Margaret, more meekly, who was the second daughter. The presence of these girls, and of the young men in attendance upon them, to wit Andrew, their brother, and two friends of his own class, young men for whom natural good looks did not do so much as for the young women, and who were, perhaps, better educated, without being half so presentable—made the tea-table much merrier and less embarrassed than the dinner had been. The MacKells ended by being all enthralled by Edgar, whose better manners told upon them, (as a higher tone always tells upon women,) whose superiority to their former attendants was clear as daylight, and who was not stiff and afraid to commit himself like Charles Murray; “quite a gentleman,” though they all held the latter to be. As for Edgar himself, he was so heartily thankful for the relief afforded by this in-road of fresh guests, that he was willing to think the very best of his cousins, and to give them credit—that is the female part of them—for being the best of the family he had yet seen. He walked with them to their boat, and put them in, when sunset warned them to cross the loch without delay, and laughingly excused himself from accepting their eager invitations, only on the ground that “business” demanded his departure on the next day. Mrs. MacKell took him aside before she embarked, and shook his hand with tears gathering in her eyes.

“I could not say anything before them all,” she said, with an emotion which was partly real; “but I’ll never forget what you’ve done for my mother—and oh, what a comfort it is to me to think I leave her in her ain old house! God bless you for it!”

“Good-bye,” said Edgar, cheerily, and he stood on the banks and watched the boat with a smile. True feeling enough, perhaps, and yet how oddly mingled! He laughed to himself as he went back to the house with an uneasy, mingling of pain and shame.

CHAPTER VII.
Gentility.

Charles Murray did not return to the Campbells’ house for the night as he had originally intended. The relatives were all out of sorts with each other, and inclined to quarrel among themselves in consequence of the universal discomfiture which had come upon them, not from each others’ hands, but from the stranger in their midst. And as it was quite possible that Campbell, being sore and irritable, might avenge himself by certain inquiries into Dr. Charles’s affairs, the young man thought it wiser on the whole to keep out of his way. And the grandmother’s house was common property. Although only a few hours before they had all made up their minds that it was to be no longer hers, and that she thenceforward was to be their dependent, the moment that she became again certain of being mistress in her own house, that very moment all her family returned to their ancient conviction that they had a right to its shelter and succour under all and every kind of circumstances.

James Murray went away arranging in his own mind that he would send his youngest daughter “across” before the winter came on, “to get her strength up.” “One bairn makes little difference in the way of meals, and she can bring some tea and sugar in a present,” he said to himself; while Dr. Charles evidenced still more instantaneously the family opinion by saying at once that he should stay where he was till to-morrow.

“It seems much more natural to be here than in any other house,” he said caressingly to his grandmother.

She smiled, but she made no reply. Even, she liked it, for the position of a superior dispensing favours had been natural to her all her life, and the power to retain this position was not one of the least advantages that Edgar’s liberality gave her. But even while she liked it, she saw through the much less noble sentiment of her descendants, and a passing pang mingled with her pleasure. She said nothing to Dr. Charles; but when Edgar gave her his arm for the brief evening walk which she took before going to rest, she made to him a curious apology for the rest. Charles was standing on the loch-side looking out, half-jealous that it was Edgar who naturally took charge of the old mother, and half glad to escape out of Edgar’s way.

“We mustna judge them by ourselves,” she said, in a deprecating tone. “Charlie was aye a weak lad, meaning no harm—and used to depend upon somebody. Edgar, they are not to be judged like you and me.”

“No,” said Edgar, with a smile; then rapidly passing from the subject which he could not enter on. “Does he want to marry Jeanie?” he asked.

“That I canna tell—that I do not know. He cannot keep his eyes off her bonnie face; but, Edgar, the poor lad has strange fancies. He has taken it into his head to be genteel—and Marg’ret, poor thing, is genteel.”

“What has that to do with it?” said Edgar, laughing.

“We are not genteel, Jeanie and me,” said the old woman, with a gleam of humour. “But, Edgar, my man, still you must not judge Charlie. You are a gentleman, that nobody could have any doubt of; but the danger of being a poor man’s son, and brought up to be a gentleman, is that you’re never sure of yourself. You are always in a fear to know if you are behaving right—if you are doing something you ought not to do.”

“Then, perhaps,” said Edgar, “my cousin would have been happier if he had not been brought up, as you say, to be a gentleman.”

“What could I make him? Farming’s but a poor trade for them that have little capital and little energy. Maybe you will say a Minister? but it’s a responsibility bringing up a young man to be a Minister, when maybe he will have no turn that way but just seek a priest’s office for a piece of bread. A good doctor serves both God and man; and Charlie is not an ill doctor,” she added, hurriedly. “His very weakness gives him a soft manner, and as he’s aye on the outlook whether he’s pleasing you or not, it makes him quick to notice folk’s feelings in general. Sick men, and still more sick women, like that.”

“You are a philosopher, grandmother,” said Edgar.

“Na, na, not that,” said the old woman; “but at seventy you must ken something of your fellow-creature’s ways, or you must be a poor creature indeed.”

Meanwhile Charles Murray had gone back to the house, and was talking to Jeanie, who for some reason which she did not herself quite divine, had been shy of venturing out this special evening with the others. Perhaps the young doctor thought she was waiting for him. At all events it was a relief to go and talk to one in whom no criticism could be.

“You feel quite strong and well again, Jeanie?” he said.

“Oh yes, quite strong and well—quite better,” she said, looking up at him with that soft smile of subjection and dependence which most people to whom it is addressed find so sweet.

“You should not say quite better,” he said, smiling too, though the phrase would by times steal even from his own educated lips. “I wonder sometimes, Jeanie, after passing some months in England as you did, that you should still continue so Scotch. I like it, of course—in a way.”

Here Jeanie, whose face had overcast, brightened again and smiled—a smile which this time, however, did not arrest him in his critical career.

“I like it, in a way,” said Charles, doubtfully. “Here on Loch Arroch side it is very sweet, and appropriate to the place; but if you were going out—into the world, Jeanie.”

“No fear of that,” said Jeanie, with a soft laugh.

“On the contrary, there is much fear of it—or much hope of it, I should say. There are many men who would give all they have in the world for a smile from your sweet face. I mean,” said the young man, withdrawing half a step backward, and toning himself down from this extravagance, “I mean that there is no doubt you could marry advantageously—if you liked to exert yourself.”

“You should not speak like that to me,” cried Jeanie, with a sudden hot flush; “there is nothing of the kind in my head.”

“Say your mind, not your head, Jeanie; and like the dear good girl you are, say head, not heed,” said Dr. Charles with a curious mixture of annoyance and admiration; and then he added, drawing closer. “Jeanie, do you not think you would like to go to school?”

“To school? I am not a little bairn,” said Jeanie with some indignation, “I have had my schooling, all that Granny thought I wanted. Besides,” she continued proudly, “I must look after Granny now.”

“She has asked Margaret to come to her,” said the young man, “and don’t you think, Jeanie, if you could be sent to a school for a time—not to learn much you know, not for lessons or anything of that kind; but to get more used to the world, and to what you would have to encounter if you went into the world—and perhaps to get a few accomplishments, a little French, or the piano, or something like that?”

“What would I do, learning French and the piano?” said Jeanie; her countenance had over-clouded during the first part of his speech, but gradually gave way to wonder and amusement as he went on. “Are you thinking of Jeanie MacKell who can play tunes, and speak such fine English? Granny would not like that, and neither would I.”

“But Granny is not the only person in the world,” he said, “there are others who would like it. Men like it, Jeanie; they like to see their wife take her place with anyone, and you cannot always be with Granny—you will marry some day.”

Jeanie’s fair soft countenance glowed like the setting sun, a bright and tender consciousness lit up her features; her blue eyes shone. Dr. Charles, who had his back to the loch, as he stood at the farm-house door, did not perceive that Edgar had come into sight with Mrs. Murray leaning on his arm.

“May-be all that may be true,” said Jeanie, “I cannot tell; but in the meantime I cannot leave Granny, for Granny has nobody but me.”

“She has asked my sister Margaret, as I told you—”

“Margaret instead of me!” said Jeanie, with a slight tone of wonder.

“It is strange how disagreeable you all are to my sister,” said Dr. Charles with some impatience. “It need not be instead of you; but Granny has asked Margaret, and she and the little one will come perhaps before winter sets in—the change would do them good. I should be left alone then,” he said, softening, “and if Margaret stays with Granny, I should be left always alone. Jeanie, if you would but get a little education and polish, and make yourself more like what a man wishes his wife to be—”

Jeanie was looking behind him all the time with a vague dreamy smile upon her face. “If that is a’ he wants!” she said dreamily to herself. She was thinking not of the man before her, whose heart, such as it was, was full of her image; but of the other man approaching, who did not think of Jeanie except as a gentle and affectionate child. If that was a’ he wanted! though even in her imaginative readiness to find everything sublime that Edgar did, there passed through Jeanie’s mind a vague pang to think that he would pay more regard to French and the piano, than to her tender enthusiast passion, the innocent adoration of her youth.

“If you would do that, Jeanie—to please me!” said the unconscious young Doctor, taking her hand.

“Here is Granny coming,” said Jeanie hastily, “and—Mr. Edgar. Go ben the house, please, and never mind me. I have to see that the rooms are right and all ready. Are you tired, Granny? You have had a sore day. Mr. Edgar, say good night to her now, she ought to go to her bed.”

Thus Dr. Charles was thrust aside at the moment when he was about to commit himself. Jeanie put him away as if he had been a ploughman, or she a fine lady used to the fine art of easy impertinence. So little thought had she of him at all, that she was not aware of the carelessness with which she had received his semi-declaration, and while he withdrew stung all over as by mental nettles, abashed, insulted, and furious, she went innocently upstairs, without the faintest idea of the offence she had given. And Edgar went into the parlour after his cousin humming an air, with the freshness of the fields about him. The insouciance of the one who had that day given away his living, and the disturbed and nervous trouble of the other, self-conscious to his very finger points, irritated by a constant notion that he was despised and lightly thought of, made the strangest possible contrast between them, notwithstanding a certain family resemblance in their looks.

“I am staying to-night,” said Dr. Charles, with a certain abruptness, and that tone of irritated apology which mingled more or less in all he said, “because it is too late for me to get home.”

“And I am staying,” said Edgar, “because it is too late to start, I must go to-morrow. I suppose our road lies so far in the same direction.”

“You can get the London express at Glasgow, or even Greenock. I am going to Edinburgh.”

“I have business in Edinburgh too,” said Edgar. He was so good-humoured, so friendly, that it was very hard to impress upon him the fact that his companion regarded him in no friendly light.

“You will leave the loch with very pleasant feelings,” said Dr. Charles, “very different to the rest of us. Fortune has given you the superiority. What I would have done and couldn’t, you have been able to do. It is hard not to grudge a little at such an advantage. The man who has nothing feels himself always so inferior to the man who has something, however small.”

“Do you think so?” said Edgar, “my experience would not lead me to that conclusion; and few people can have greater experience. Once I supposed myself to be rather rich. I tumbled down from that all in a moment, and now I have nothing at all; but it seems to me I am the same man as when I was a small potentate in my way, thinking rather better than worse of myself, if truth must be told,” he added with a laugh.

“I wish I had your nothing at all,” said Dr. Charles, bitterly; “to us really poor people that is much, which seems little to you.”

“Well,” said Edgar, with a shrug of his shoulders, “my poverty is absolute, not comparative now. And you have a profession, while I have none. On the whole, whatever there may be to choose between us, you must have the best of it; for to tell the truth I am in the dismal position of not knowing what to do.”

“To do! what does it matter? you have enough to live upon.”

“I have nothing to live upon,” said Edgar, with a smile.

The young men looked at each other, one with a half-amusement in his face, the other full of wonder and consternation. “You don’t mean to say,” he asked, with a gasp, “that you have given her all?”

“I have no income left,” said Edgar. “I have some debts, unfortunately, like most men. Now a man who has no income has no right to have any debts. That is about my sole maxim in political economy. I must pay them off, and then I shall have fifty pounds or so left.”

“Good heavens!” said the other, “and you take this quite easily without anxiety——”

“Anxiety will not put anything in my pocket, or teach me a profession,” said Edgar. “Don’t let’s talk of it, ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil there-of.’”

“But,” cried the other, almost wildly, “in that case all of us—I too—”

“Don’t say anything more about it,” said Edgar. “We all act according to impulses. Perhaps it is well for those who have no impulses; but one cannot help one’s self. I should like to start by the early boat to-morrow morning, and before I go I have something to say to Jeanie.”

“I fear I am in your way,” cried Dr. Charles, rising hastily, with the feeling, which was rather pleasant to him than otherwise, that at last he had a real reason for taking offence.

“Oh, dear no, not at all. It is only to give her some advice about our old mother,” said Edgar; but they both reddened as they stood fronting each other, Charles from wild and genuine jealousy—Edgar, from a disagreeable and impatient consciousness of the silly speeches which had associated his name with that of Jeanie. He stood for a moment uncertain, and then his natural frankness broke forth, “Look here,” he said, “don’t let us make any mistake. I don’t know what your feelings may be about Jeanie, but mine are those of an elder brother—a very much elder brother,” he went on, with a laugh, “to a child.”

“Every man says that, until the moment comes when he feels differently,” said Charles, in his uneasy didactic way.

“Does he? then that moment will never come for me,” said Edgar, carelessly.

Poor little Jeanie! she had opened the door, the two young men not observing her in their preoccupation, and Edgar’s words came fully into her heart like a volley of musketry. She stood behind them for a moment in the partial gloom—for they were standing between her and the light of the feeble candles—unnoticed, holding the door. Then noiselessly she stole back, closing it, her heart all riddled by that chance discharge, wounded and bleeding. Then she went to the kitchen softly, and called Bell. “My head’s sair,” she said, which on Loch Arroch means, my head aches. “Will you see if they want anything in the parlour, Bell?”

“My poor lamb!” said Bell, “I wish it beena your heart that’s sair. Ye are as white as a ghost. Go to your bed, my bonnie woman, and I’ll see after them, Lord bless us, what a bit white face! Go to your bed, and dinna let your Granny see you like that. Oh ay! I’ll see to the two men.”

Jeanie crept up-stairs like a mouse, noiseless in the dark staircase. She needed no light, and to hide herself seemed so much the most natural thing to do. White! Jeanie felt as if her face must be scorched as her heart seemed to be. Why should he have volunteered this profession of indifference? It seemed so much the worse because it was uncalled for. Did anyone say he cared for her? Had any one accused him of being “fond” of Jeanie? Shame seemed to take possession of the little soft creature. Had she herself done anything to put such a degrading idea into his mind? Why should he care for her? “I never asked him—I never wanted him,” poor Jeanie cried to herself.

Edgar never knew the second great effect he had produced on this eventful day. When Jeanie appeared at the early breakfast before he set out next morning, he was honestly concerned to see how pale she looked. “My poor dear child, you are ill,” he cried, drawing her towards him, and his look of anxious kindness struck poor Jeanie like a blow.

“I’m not ill. It’s my head. It’s nothing,” she said, starting away from him. Edgar looked at her with mild astonished eyes.

“You are not vexed with me this last morning? Take care of the dear old mother, Jeanie—but I know you will do that—and write to me sometimes to say she is well; and talk of me sometimes, as you promised—you remember?”

His kind friendly words broke Jeanie’s heart. “Oh, how can you look so pleased and easy in your mind!” she said, turning, as was natural, the irritation of her personal pain into the first possible channel, “when you know you are going away without a penny, for our sake—for her sake——”

“And yours,” Edgar added cheerily. “That is what makes me easy in my mind.”

And he smiled, and took both her hands, and kissed her on the forehead, a salutation which made little Scotch Jeanie—little used to such caresses—flame crimson with shame. Charles Murray looked on with sullen fury. He dared not do as much. This way of saying farewell was not cousinly or brotherly to him.

CHAPTER VIII.
A Railway Journey: The Scotch Express.

The two young men set out together from Loch Arroch. The old lady whose children they both were, waved her handkerchief to them from her window as the steamer rustled down the loch, and round the windy corner of the stubble field into Loch Long. They stood on the deck, and gazed at the quiet scene they were leaving till the farmhouse and the ruin died out of sight. How peaceful it all looked in the bright but watery sunshine! The ivy waving softly from the walls of the ruin, the smoke rising blue from the roof of the farmhouse, which nestled under the shadow of the old castle, the stooks standing in the pale field glistening with morning dew. Bell stood at the door in her short petticoats, shading her eyes with one hand as she watched them, and old Mrs. Murray showed a smiling, mournful face at her window, and the long branches of the fuchsias waved and made salutations with all their crimson bells. Even Bell’s shadow had a distinct importance in the scene, which was so still—still as the rural country is between mountain and water, with mysterious shadows flitting in the silence, and strange ripples upon the beach. The scene was still more sweet from the shore, though not so entirely enveloped in this peaceable habitual calm; for great Benvohrlan was kept in constant life with moving clouds which crossed the sunshine; and the eyes of the spectators on the land did not disdain the bright, many-coloured boat, floating, as it seemed, between three elements—the water, the mountain, and the sky. The shadow-ship floated over the side of the shadow-hill among all the reflected shades; it floated double like the swan on St. Mary’s Lake, and it was hard to tell which was the reality and which the symbol. Such were the variations of the scene from the loch and from the shore.

But though Bell was visible and Bell’s mistress, Jeanie was not to be seen. She had disappeared within the ruins of the Castle, and watched the boat from behind an old block of masonry, with eyes full of longing and sadness. Why had she been so harsh, so hard? Why had she not parted with him “friends?” What did it matter what he said, so long as he said that he looked upon her as an elder brother? Was it not better to be Edgar’s sister than any other man’s beloved? She cried, reflecting sadly that she had not been so kind, so gentle as she ought to this man who was so unlike all others. Like an elder brother—what more could she wish for? Thus poor little Jeanie began to dree her fate.

The day was fine, notwithstanding the prophecy of “saft weather” with which all the observers of sea and sky in the West of Scotland keep up their character as weather prophets as Edgar and Charles Murray travelled to Edinburgh. There was no subject of quarrel between them, therefore they did not quarrel; indeed Edgar, for his part, was amused, when he was not pained, by his cousin’s perpetual self-consciousness and painful desire to keep up his profession of gentleman, and conduct himself in all details of behaviour as a gentleman should. The young Doctor nervously unbuttoned his over-coat, which was much more spruce and glossy than Edgar’s, when he observed that his companion, never a model of neatness or order, wore his loose. He looked with nervous observation at Edgar’s portmanteau, at the shape and size of his umbrella. Edgar had lived in the great world; he had been (or so at least his cousin thought) fashionable; therefore Dr. Charles gave a painful regard to all the minutiæ of his appearance. Thus a trim poor girl might copy a tawdry duchess, knowing no better—might, but seldom does, having a better instinct. But if any one had breathed into Charles Murray’s ear a suggestion of what he was consciously (yet almost against his will) doing, he would have forgiven an accusation of crime more readily. He knew his own weakness, and the knowledge made him wretched; but had any one else suspected it, that would have been the height of insult, and would have roused him to desperate passion.

Thus they travelled together, holding but little communication. The young Doctor’s destination was one of the smaller stations before they reached Edinburgh, where Edgar saw, as the train approached, a graceful young woman, with that air of refinement which a slim and tall figure gives, but too far off to be recognizable, accompanied by a little girl—waiting by the roadside in a little open carriage, half phaeton, half gig.

“Is that your sister?” he asked, taking off his hat, as the lady waved her hand towards them.

“Yes,” said Dr. Charles, shortly, and he added, in his usual tone of apology, “a doctor can do nothing without a conveyance, and as I had to get one, and Margaret is so delicate, it was better to have something in which she could drive with me.”

“Surely,” said Edgar, with some wonder at the appealing tone in which this half statement, half question was made. But a little sigh came from his heart, against his will, as he saw Charles Murray’s welcome, and felt himself rolled away into the cold, into the unknown, without any one to bear him company. He too had once had, or thought he had, a sister, and enjoyed for a short time that close, tender, and familiar friendship which only can exist between a young man and woman when they are thus closely related. Edgar, who was foolishly soft-hearted, had gone about the world ever since, missing this, without knowing what it was he missed. He was fond of the society of women, and he had been shut out from it; for he neither wished to marry, nor was rich enough so to indulge himself, and people with daughters, as he found, were not so anxious to invite a poor man, nor so complacent towards him as they had been when he was rich. To be sure he had met women as he had met men at the foreign towns which he had chiefly frequented during the aimless years just past; but these were chiefly old campaigners, with all the freshness dried out of them, ground down into the utmost narrowness of limit in which the mind is capable of being restrained, or else at the opposite extreme, liberated in an alarming way from all the decorums and prejudices of life. Neither of these classes were attractive, though they amused him, each in its way.

But somehow the sight of his two cousins, brother and sister, gave him a pang which was all the sharper for being entirely unexpected. It made him feel his own forlornness and solitude, how cut off he was from all human solace and companionship. Into his ancient surroundings he could not return; and his present family, the only one which he had any claim upon, was distasteful beyond description. Even his grandmother and Jeanie, whom he had known longest, and with whom he felt a certain sympathy, were people so entirely out of his sphere, that his intercourse with them never could be easy nor carried on on equal terms. He admired Mrs. Murray’s noble character, and was proud to have been able to stand by her against her sordid relations; he even loved her in a way, but did not, could not adopt the ways of thinking, the manners and forms of existence, which were natural and seemly in the little farm-house.