The Laird of Norlaw; A Scottish Story. Маргарет Олифант
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these pretty stories have a dark enough aspect often on the other side; and the Mistress, mortified, silent, indignant, cheated in her own perfect confidence and honest tenderness, when you saw her behind the scenes of the other pretty picture, took a great deal of the beauty out of that first-love and romantic constancy of Norlaw.
When Mrs. Livingstone went to her room, the sons, vexed and troubled, were a long time silent. Cosmo withdrew into a corner, and leaned his head on his mother’s little table. He, too, was deeply mortified, and could not keep back the hot boyish tears from his eyes—he felt himself set aside like a child—he felt the shame of a sensitive temperament at perceiving how greatly his mother was disturbed. Somehow she seemed to have betrayed herself, and Cosmo, jealous for her perfect honor, was uneasy and abashed at this disturbance of it; while still his heart, young, eager, inexperienced, loving romance, secretly longed to hear more of this mystery, and secretly repeated his determination. Huntley, who was pacing up and down the room, lifting and replacing every thing in his way which could be lifted, was simply confounded and thunderstruck, which emotions Patie shared with his elder brother. Patie, however, was the most practical of the three, and it was he who first broke the silence.
“Somehow or other this vexes my mother,” said Patie; “let us ask her no more questions about it; but, Huntley, you ought to know all the hiding-holes about the house. You should look up this will and put it in safe hands.”
“In safe hands?—I’ll act upon it forthwith! Are we to keep terms with Melmar after all that’s past, and with power to turn him out of his seat?” cried Huntley; “no, surely; I’ll put it into hands that will carry it into effect, and that without delay.”
“They would want either this Mary, or proof that she was dead, before they would do any thing in it,” said Patie, doubtfully; “and yet it’s a shame!”
“She is not dead!” interrupted Cosmo; “why my mother should be angry, I can’t tell; but I’ll find out Mary of Melmar, I know I shall, though it should be twenty years!”
“Be quiet, Cosmo,” said his elder brother, “and see that no one troubles my mother with another question; she does not like it, and I will not have her disturbed; but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. We know little about business, and we’re not of a patient race. Me’mar had better not come near any of us just now, unless it were you, Patie, that can master yourself. I should like to knock him down, and my mother would do worse. I’ll write to this friend of the minister’s, this writer, and put it all in his hands—it’s the best thing I can see. What do you say?”
Patie gave his assent readily; Cosmo did not say any thing. The boy began to feel his youth somewhat bitterly, and to think that they did not care for his opinion; so he went out, and swung himself up by an old elm tree into one of the vacant windows of the castle, a favorite seat of Cosmo, where, among the cool ivy, and hidden by the deep recess of the thick old wall, he could see the sunset, and watch how the shadows stole over the earth. The Eildons were at his right hand, paling gradually out of their royal purple against the pale sky in the east, and the last long rays of the sunset, too low to reach them, fell golden-yellow upon Tyne, and shed a pathetic light on the soft green bank before the door of Norlaw. The common sounds of life were not so subdued now about this lonely house; even the cackle of poultry and bark of dogs seemed louder since the shutters were opened and the curtains drawn back—and Marget went firmly forth upon her errands to the byre, and the hush and stealth of mourning had left the place already. Who would not escape somewhere into some personal refuge out of the oppressive shadow of grief, while youth remains to make that possible? Huntley had been startled to feel that there was such an escape for himself when Katie Logan took his hand in the fullness of her sympathy—and Huntley and Patie together were seeking a similar ease now in discussing the plans of their future life together. Cosmo was only a boy; he had no plans yet which could be called plans—and he was too young to be moved by the hand or the voice of any woman. So he sat among the ivy in the ledge of the deep old window, with his head uncovered, his fair hair falling over his long white hands, and those dark liquid eyes of his gazing forth upon as fair a landscape as ever entered into the dream of a poet.
If Cosmo was a poet he was not aware of it; yet his heart was easing itself after his fashion. He was too young to apprehend the position of his mother, and how it broke into the superficial romance of his father’s life. He thought only of Mary of Melmar, of the girl, beautiful, young, and unfortunate, who ran away “for love,” and had literally left all for her husband’s sake; he thought of displacing his father’s enemy and restoring his father’s first love to her rights. In imagination he pursued her through all the storied countries to which a young fancy naturally turns. He saw himself delivering her out of dangers, suddenly appearing when she was in peril or poverty, dispersing her enemies like a champion of chivalry, and bringing her home in triumph. This was how, while his brothers comforted themselves with an earnest discussion of possibilities, and while his mother, differing from them as age differs from youth—and as personal bereavement, which nothing can ever make up, and which changes the whole current of a life, differs from a natural removal and separation—returned into the depths of the past and lived them over again—this is how Cosmo made his first personal escape out of his first grief.
CHAPTER XIII
“Oh! Patricia! Sinclair has been telling me such a story,” cried a young girl, suddenly rushing upon another, in a narrow winding road through the woods which clothed a steep bank of Tyne; at this spot, for one exclusive mile, the rapid little river was “private property,” the embellishment of a gentleman’s grounds—shut out from vulgar admiration. Tyne, indifferent alike to admiration and exclusivism, was not less happy on that account; but foamed over his stony channel as brisk, as brown, and as clear, as when he ran in unrestricted freedom by the old castle walls of Norlaw. The path was slippery and irregular with great roots of trees, and one or two brooks, unseen, trickled down the brae below the underwood, only detected by the slender, half visible rivulet on the path which you had to step across, or the homely plank half penetrated by water, which bridged over Tyne’s invisible tributary. They did not appear, these fairy springs, but they added each a tingle, like so many harp strings, to the many sounds of Nature. Through this winding road, or rather upon it, for she was not going anywhere, the elder of these two interlocutors had been for some time wandering. She was a delicate looking girl of seventeen, with blue eyes and pale golden hair, rather pretty, but very slight, and evidently not in strong health. The sudden plunge down upon her, which her younger sister made from the top of the brae, took away Patricia’s breath, and made her drop the book which she had been reading. This was no very great matter, for the book was rather an indifferent production, being one of those books of poetry which one reads at seventeen, and never after—but it was rather more important that the color came violently into her pale cheek, and she clasped her hands upon her side, with a gasp which terrified the young hoiden.
“Oh, I forgot!” she cried, in sympathy, as eager as her onslaught had been. “Oh! have I hurt you? I did not mean it, you know.”
“No, Joanna,” said Patricia, faintly, “but you forget my nerves always—you never had any yourself.”
Which was perfectly true, and not to be denied. These two, Patricia and Joanna Huntley, were the only daughters of their father’s house—the only children, indeed, save one son, who was abroad. There were not many feminine family names in this branch of the house of Huntley, and invention in this matter being very sparely exercised in these parts, it came about that the girls were called after their uncles, and that the third girl, had there been such an unlucky little individual, following in the track of her sisters, would have turned out Jemima or Robina, according as the balance rose in favor of her father’s brother or her mother’s. Fortunately, Joanna was the last fruit of the household tree, which had blossomed sparely. She was only fifteen, tall, strong, red haired, and full of vigor—the greatest contrast imaginable to her pretty pale sister, whom Joanna devoutly believed in as a beauty, but secretly did somewhat grieve over as a fool. The younger sister was not in the least pretty, and knew it, but she was clever, and Joanna knew that also, which made an agreeable counterpoise. She was extremely honest, downright and straightforward, speaking the truth with less elegance than force, but speaking it always; and on the whole was a good girl, though not always a very