EACH VOLUME SOLD SEPARATELY.
COLLECTION
OF
BRITISH AUTHORS
TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
VOL. 1323.
MAY BY MRS. OLIPHANT
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LEIPZIG: BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ.
PARIS: C. REINWALD, 15, RUE DES SAINTS PÈRES.
PARIS: THE GALIGNANI LIBRARY, 224, RUE DE RIVOLI,
AND AT NICE, 15, QUAI MASSENA.

This Collection is published with copyright for Continental circulation, but all purchasers are earnestly requested not to introduce the volumes into England or into any British Colony.

“Maggio
Non ha paraggio.”
ITALIAN PROVERB.

M A Y.

BY
M R S. O L I P H A N T,
AUTHOR OF
“THE MINISTER’S WIFE,” ETC.
COPYRIGHT EDITION.
I N T W O V O L U M E S.
VOL. I.
LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1873.
The Right of Translation is reserved.

TO
THE HONOURABLE CAPTAIN
AND
MEMBERS OF THE ROYAL AND ANCIENT GOLF CLUB OF ST. ANDREWS
(Especially to those among that noble Company whom the Author
ventures to call Friends)
THIS BOOK
IS
REVERENTIALLY, AND ADMIRINGLY INSCRIBED.

MAY.

CHAPTER I.

The house of Hay-Heriot had been established at Pitcomlie for more centuries than could easily be reckoned. It was neither very rich nor very great, but it was well connected, and had held itself sturdily above the waves of fate like one of the rocks along its wild coast line, often threatened by rising tides, but never submerged. There had never been any great personages in the family to raise it above its natural level, but neither had there been any distinguished profligates or spendthrifts to pull it down. Most of the lairds had been respectable, and those who were not had never been more than moderately wicked, keeping clear of ruinous vices. The history of the house had been very monotonous, without ups or downs to speak of. In the vicissitudes of the rebellions they had kept clear, being too far south to be seriously compromised; and though a younger son was out in the ’45, that did not affect either the character or the circumstances of the family. In short, this was the Hay-Heriot way of sowing its wild oats. Its younger sons were its safety-valve; all that was eccentric in the race ran into those stray branches, leaving the elder son always steady and respectable, a most wise arrangement of nature.

Thus the house itself derived even profit and glory from the adventurous irregularity of its younger members, while its stability was uninjured. Indian curiosities of all kinds, warlike trophies, and the splendid fruit of those pilferings which are not supposed to be picking and stealing when they are the accompaniments of war, decorated the old mansion on every side. A curiously decorated scimitar, which had been taken from Tippoo Saib, hung over the mantelpiece in the library along with a French sabre from Waterloo, and the shield of a Red Indian barbarically gay with beads and fringes. These were all contributions from the heroic ne’er-do-weels who linked the staidest of households to the tumult and commotion of distant worlds. Sometimes the ne’er-do-weels would cost the head of the house some money, but on the whole the balance was kept tolerably even, and the younger Hay-Heriots conscientiously forbore from leaving orphan children, or other incumbrances, to burden the old house—a considerateness quite unlike the habit of younger sons, which was applauded and envied by many families in the country who had no such exemption.

The present family differed, however, in many respects from the traditions of the race. Thomas Hay-Heriot of Pitcomlie was indeed all that his ancestors had been, an excellent country gentleman, homely in his manners and thrifty in his habits, but hospitable, charitable, and not ungenerous—a man of blameless life and high character. His brother Charles, however, who, according to all the family rules ought to have been a scapegrace, was not so in the smallest degree, but, on the contrary, as respectable as his elder brother; a man who had never been further than Paris in his life, a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh; a man of method and order, who had done exactly the same thing at the same hour every day for thirty years, and who was as good as a clock to his servants and neighbours. This is not in general an attractive description of a man, but there was a great deal to be said in Uncle Charles’ favour, as the reader who has patience to follow out this history will learn.

The fact that he was Uncle Charles will at once reveal one important part of his life. He had never married, he had always been more or less a member of his brother’s household, and now, when age began to creep upon both, lived almost continually in the home of his youth. It was he who sat in the triangular corner of a settee by the fire with a newspaper in his hand, which he was not reading, in the Pitcomlie drawing-room, on a bright March day not very many years ago, in the half hour which preceded luncheon in that orderly house. We are aware that we ought to have afforded a glimpse of Pitcomlie House, before thus dragging the reader head and shoulders into its domestic centre—but after all it is the interior which is the most important, and this is how it looked.

A long room with three large windows opening upon a lawn, beyond which surged and swelled an often angry and boisterous sea. The fireplace was opposite the central window, and the room had been handsomely furnished forty years before, and bore that air of continuance and use which in itself gives a charm to all human habitations.

It had, however, as all such rooms have, various points of contact with the immediate present, in the shape of low chintz-covered easy-chairs and other modern vanities. Uncle Charles’ chimney-corner was formed by placing an arm across the long settee fitted to the wall, thus leaving him a roomy triangular seat at the end, where his lean limbs got all the benefit of the warmth. He was a man of nearly sixty, with scanty fair hair, scarcely touched with grey, a forehead which wrinkled up in folds or smoothed itself miraculously out according to his moods as he talked, and a pair of light yellowish grey eyes with scanty eyelashes, also light in colour, over which he puckered his brows continually, being shortsighted. He was one of the thinnest of men, as light and agile as many a boy, and sat with his long legs crossed in the acutest of angles.

His brother stood with his back to the fire, older by two years, and heavier by at least six stone. He was dressed in grey morning clothes, with boots and leather gaiters, and an atmosphere of the fields and free air about him. Indeed, he had just come in from his home-farm, which he managed very carefully, and by which he proudly declared he had never lost a penny. There was no one else in the room. The walls were painted gray-green and hung with family portraits. The round table at the east end—for in this part of Scotland everything is spoken of geographically—was laden with books; and in the west end the room blossomed out into a deeply recessed bay window, half veiled with lace curtains, within which stood one easy-chair and small table. This recess, and indeed the air of the place generally, betrayed the habitation of a woman, and one whose tastes and “ways” were very influential—but no woman was present. The aspect of the room was south and west, so that the sharp east wind then blowing outside did not affect so much as might have been feared the temperature within. An east wind in Fife is not always the grey and withering misery it is in other places; under some peculiar modifications of the atmosphere it makes the sea blue and the sky clear, and such was the effect on this particular morning. This it may be imagined was an effect most deeply to be desired at Pitcomlie, which so far, at least, as the drawing-room was concerned, was like a ship at sea, seeing little besides the water; but as the Hay-Heriots had all been, so to speak, born and bred in an east wind, they were more indifferent than most people to its penetrating power.

“I have another letter from Tom,” said Mr. Heriot, sighing and raising his arms with his coat tails under them.

“Always wanting something?” said Uncle Charles, with a shrug.

“Well, when all’s done and said, he is the first to be considered,” said the laird, with a faint glimmer as of incipient resentment. “It is to him that everything must come; he must carry on the name like his fathers before him. Being a younger son yourself, Charlie, you have your prejudices, as is but natural. Your word is always for the others—never for Tom.”

Uncle Charles gave another shrug of his lean shoulders. “Tom cares little for my good word,” he said, “and has little need of it. You’re quite capable of spoiling your son yourself, so far as I can see, without me to help. The girls are my thought; young men can shift for themselves, and it was always the way of our family to let them; but the girls, Thomas—there’s two of them. There’s my niece Marjory, as fine a young woman as any in the county—”

“Oh, ay, May; she’s the first in your thoughts. But girls are neither here nor there,” said Mr. Heriot, “they have their pickle money, more or less, and there’s an end of them. What’s Marjory to do with money? What can she do at her age—”

“Marry, I suppose, like the rest,” said Uncle Charles.

“Marry!” said the father. “I don’t see any necessity for my part; she’s a great deal better as she is, with you and me.”

“That may be or mayn’t be,” said Uncle Charles; “but at least you are not the man to say so; you married twice yourself.”

“And a great deal I have made by it,” said Mr. Heriot, with a mixture of complaint and discontent. “My first wife was an excellent creature, an excellent creature, as you know; but she was taken away from me just when I and the bairns wanted her most. Providence is very queer in some things. Just when May was a growing girl, and Tom at the age when a woman is of use, their mother was taken away. It is not for us to complain, but it’s a strange way of acting, a very strange way of acting. I could not take the responsibility of guiding my hinds in such a manner. Well, and then I married poor Jeanie, hoping she would keep everything in order, and set the house to rights—and what does she do but slip away too, poor thing, leaving me with a helpless bit baby on my hands? A great deal I have made by it that you should quote my example. What would Marjory do to marry? She is far better as she is, mistress and more of this house, petted as no husband would ever pet her, getting her own way in everything. Bless my soul, man, what would you like for her more?”

“Well, a house of her own,” said Uncle Charles, no way daunted, “and a good man. I have not your experience, Thomas, but I suppose that’s the best for a woman. She is more of your way of thinking than mine, but it’s our duty to think for her, you know. We’re old now, and Tom’s extravagant—and she’s not precisely growing younger herself.”

“Toots, she’s young enough,” said the laird; and then he began to walk up and down the room, still with his coat-tails under his arms. “To tell the truth,” he said, “Marjory’s marriage would be the worst thing that could happen for us. I would not stand in her way if it was for her good. When there’s a family of daughters, of course it becomes of consequence; what else can they do, poor things? but Marjory is in a very different position. Poor little Milly is not ten, and what would you and I do, left in a house like this, with a bit creature of ten years old? Her sister is her natural guardian; and what can be more natural than that May should take care of her father’s house and keep everything going? What can a woman want more? A house of her own! isn’t this house her own? and as nice a house as any in Fife; and as for a man—if she knew as much about men as I do, Charlie, or you either for that matter—”

Uncle Charles gave a half-stifled, chuckling laugh. The humour of this remonstrance overcame his graver sense; and that Marjory’s marriage would have been as great a drawback—perhaps a greater misfortune—to himself than even to her father there could be no doubt.

“I don’t say but what that’s an indisputable argument,” he replied; “she might get a bonny bargain, and repent it all her days. But there’s the luncheon bell, and where is she? I don’t think I ever knew her to be late before.”

“Are you not going to wait?” said the laird.

Mr. Charles had hoisted himself up at the sound of the bell; he had folded his newspaper and laid it down upon his seat. He had picked up his shortsighted spectacles, which lay as they always did, when he was reading, on the edge of the wainscot, which was high and served him as a stand; and he had lifted the poker to administer, as he invariably did at this hour, a farewell poke to the fire before leaving it. He turned round upon his brother, looking at him over his shoulder with the poker in his hand.

“Wait!” he said. It was altogether a new idea. Marjory was punctuality itself, trained to it from her earliest years, and time was inexorable at Pitcomlie, waiting for no man or woman either.

“Wait?” he repeated, laying down the poker. “Thomas, my man, you’re not well.”

“Bah!” said the laird, taking up the poker which his brother had dropped, and applying such a blow to the coal as sent blazing sparks all over the hearth-rug. It was exactly what might have been expected, but his brother stood helplessly and looked at him, feeling that chaos itself had come, until the smell of the burning wool startled them both. Mr. Heriot stooped down, which did not agree with him, to pick up the smouldering sparks with his hands, out of which the morsels of fire tumbled again, sprinkling little pin-points of destruction all over the Turkey rug. Mr. Charles ran and opened the window, which let in a steady strong blast from the Firth, enough to wither up the very soul of any man not to the manner born. “Bless my soul!” they both said, between the fire and the cold, in confusion and discouragement. It was entirely Marjory’s fault. Why was not Marjory at home? What did she mean by staying out at an hour when she was so much wanted? Mr. Heriot spoke quite sharply when old Fleming, the butler, came to answer the bell. “Where is Miss Marjory?” he said. “Come and pick up these cinders, and don’t stand and stare at me. Where is Miss Marjory, I ask you? What do you mean by ringing the bell when she’s not here?”

“Lord bless us, Sir,” said old Fleming, gazing at his master with a consternation beyond words. “What for should I no ring the bell? I’ve rung it night and morning, midday and dinner-time, in a’ times and seasons, even when there was death in the house; and what for should we hold our peace now?”

“Confound you!” said the laird; and then he recollected himself, and put on that peculiar politeness which is with some men a symptom of wrath. “Be so good as to leave the room at once, and bring me word if Miss Marjory has come in,” he said.

Mr. Charles by this time had closed the window, subdued by his brother’s unusual fractiousness. “Tom’s letter must have been more trying than ordinary,” he said to himself, and then in the curious pause that followed he looked at his watch. A quarter to two o’clock! In the memory of man it had not been known that the Pitcomlie household should be later than half-past one, in sitting down to its luncheon. Mr. Charles did not know what to do with himself. In his scheme of existence this half hour, and no other, was filled with lunch. He had other duties for all the other half hours, and every one of them must be pushed out of its proper place by May’s singular error. This fretted him more than he could say. He walked about the room with his hands in his pockets and in much bewilderment of soul. “If you will not come, I will go by myself,” he said at length to his brother, “I can’t afford to lose all my afternoon. May must have stayed in Comlie with old Aunt Jean for lunch.”

“Lose your afternoon!” said Mr. Heriot. “Bless my soul, what’s your afternoon, an idle man! If it had been me that had complained”—

“There’s Scotch collops,” said old Fleming, suddenly appearing at the door, “and chicken with cucumber. They’ll both spoil if they’re no eaten; and Miss Marjory’s not to be seen, no even from the towerhead where I sent little James to look. You’ll do her little good waiting, if I may make so bold to say so, and the good meat will be spoiled.”

“I told you so,” said Mr. Charles, who profited by this interruption to march briskly past Fleming and hasten to the dining-room. Mr. Heriot followed him with a less satisfied air; and the two gentlemen placed themselves at table, and being hungry eat a hearty meal and said no more about Marjory. Her absence indeed was nothing to be anxious about, and the chicken and cucumber was very good, as were also the Scotch collops, a dish for which Mrs. Simpson, the cook, was famous. Mrs. Simpson, indeed, was famous for a great many things; she was partly the creation and partly the instructress of Mr. Charles Hay-Heriot himself, to whom she had been solemnly bequeathed by one of his old friends in Edinburgh, who had bragged of her greatly in his life-time, and had meant to survive her, and publish her lore in a book. But it was she who had survived instead, and Mr. Charles was of opinion that he himself had immensely improved her. She was supposed to be the last depositary of many old Scotch recipes, the only person who knew how to send up Friar’s chicken, and a howtowdie with drappit eggs. The Scotch collops were brown and fragrant, sending a delicious flavour through all the house, and the little momentary annoyance of the past half hour sank into insignificance before them. The two gentlemen made a hearty meal, both of them having had fresh air enough to make it acceptable, and talked of other things. With Fleming behind his master’s chair, even Tom’s letter became no matter for discussion, and though the table with its two vacant places looked somewhat dreary, there was no further remark made on that subject. “They are dining with old Aunt Jean,” Mr. Charles said to himself; and as for his brother he was a little ashamed of the fuss he had made. That fuss had not been, as he very well knew, for Marjory’s absence, but because Tom’s letter was such a one as irritates a parent; and Mr. Charles’ readiness to side against Tom in all domestic controversies irritated the father still further, who did not choose that any one but himself should blame his heir. Indeed one of Mr. Heriot’s chief grievances against his eldest son was this way he had of laying himself open to animadversion. He felt it was against the dignity of all eldest sons and heads of houses that this should be possible. The Charlies of life, the younger sons, the girls, were open to reasonable discussion; but when the heir thus exposed himself, all family discipline and subordination was in danger. It was almost as bad as if he himself, Thomas Hay-Heriot of Pitcomlie, had been openly criticised by his family. And Tom was a young man who continually laid himself open to animadversion. Even Fleming had been known to have his fling at him, and the only one of Marjory’s revolutionary qualities which really annoyed her father, was her want of proper respect for her brother’s position. He had been the eldest son himself, and had always been treated with the highest consideration; and the head of the house entertained very strongly this esprit de corps. He made no further allusion therefore to the subject which really engrossed all his thoughts.

CHAPTER II.

While her father and uncle were thus fuming over her absence, Marjory Hay-Heriot, with her little sister, had been making her way quietly about the little town of Comlie, whither they had ridden down in the morning, tempted by the sunshine, after some days of rainy weather. Comlie was a little old clean and quaint place, an old-fashioned Fife borough, devoted to fishing in its lower parts, but possessing such a High Street as not one of all its sister-towns possessed. This High Street had a wide causeway, clean and straight, and a broad footpath into which many old-fashioned large houses stepped forward with their white gables, in a true picturesque old Scotch way, telling of better times and characteristics more decided than our own. A quaint little semi-metropolitan air was about this silent street, through which the broad sunshine fell with few shadows to obstruct it. A little town-hall with a quaint ancient steeple stood in the middle of the street, with one square unglazed window protected by iron rails, the window of the town Bridewell, raised just above the heads of the passers-by, and looking as like the little town prison of an Italian mountain village as two similar things could look in places so unlike. At the west end was an old inn, a little hostel which, no doubt, was doing a good trade in the days when queens and courts were at Falkland Palace, and archbishops reigned in St. Andrews. The houses on the south side of the street with their projecting gables, whitewashed and many-windowed, looked out upon the sea to the back, over the fringe of fisher cottages which lay lower, close to the beach. At the east end of the town stood the church, an old church cobbled into mediocrity, but still displaying to instructed eyes the lines of its original structure, and tempting archæologists with hopes of restoration. It was surrounded by a churchyard full of monuments of the sixteenth century, with skulls and cross-bones and urns and puffing cherubs. It is astonishing how many dead people belonging to that century could afford to leave behind them those cumbrous masses of stone. The Manse, a solid, and in its way, spacious square stone house, stood at a little distance overlooking the sea; and outside the church gates, where the broad street had widened into a kind of triangular place, there were several “genteel” houses—one decorated with iron gates and trees in front, but the rest old, of characteristic Fife architecture, each with its white gable. The sea is the background to everything in this country, and to-day it was blue, a keen and chill, but brilliant tone of colour, throwing up the whitewashed houses and light grey stone with a brightness almost worthy of Italy; though no Italian wind, unless, indeed, a Tramontana fresh from the snowy hills, ever penetrated human bones like that steady blast from the east, which came natural to the people of Comlie.

Marjory had left her horse and little Milly her tiny pony at John Horsburgh’s inn, and they were now going up and down the silent street in the sunshine about their various businesses, holding up their riding-skirts, the little girl keeping very close by her sister’s side like a little shadow, and communicating with the outer world almost exclusively by means of a large pair of limpid blue eyes, clear as heaven, and wide open, which said almost all that Milly had to say, and learned a great deal more than Milly ever betrayed. Wherever Marjory went, this little shade went with her, sometimes holding by her dress, always treading in her very footsteps, a creature with no independent existence of her own, any more than if she had been part of Marjory’s gown, or an ornament she wore. As for Marjory herself, she went along the street of Comlie with the free yet measured step of a princess, aware that every eye in the place (there were not many visible), was turned to her; but so used to that homage that it gave her only a fine backing of moral strength and support, and made her neither vain nor proud. Vain! why should Marjory Hay-Heriot be vain? She knew her position exactly and accepted it, and was aware of all its duties, and considered it natural. She was like a princess in Comlie; she would have told you so simply without more ado, as calm in the consciousness as any young grand-duchess in her hereditary dominions. She had been going over her kingdom that morning, and had found a great many things to do.

At this moment when, if the reader pleases, we shall join ourselves like little Milly to her train, she was coming up from “the shore” as it was called, the fisher-region, where she had been paying a sorrowful visit. One of the boats had gone down in the last gale, a too frequent accident, and a young widow with a three months old baby, a poor young creature who not two years before had left Pitcomlie House to marry her Jamie, was sitting rocking herself and her child in the first stupor of grief, and replying by monosyllables to all the kindly attempts to console her.

“Oh ay, Miss Marjory,” “I ken that,” “Yes, Mem, its a’true,” poor Jean had said, with the weary assent which means so little. Marjory came back to the High Street with a grave face, and her own mind full of the dreariness of that inevitable assent. What could any woman answer more to the kind voices that bid her bear her trial and have patience, and remember that it is God’s will? “Its a’ true.” May was not of a melancholy mind; but that pitiful assent to everything she had said went to her heart. She walked on with her light step that did no more than effleurer the ground, stopping sometimes to nod and smile to some woman at her door.

“All well to-day, Mary?”

“Oh, ay, Miss Marjory, just about our ordinary, nae mair to complain o’ than maist puir folk; if thae weary cauld winds would bide away that gie us a’ our death.”

“This is the first east wind we’ve had for a fortnight,” said Marjory. “I think we have very little reason to complain.”

“Ye see I’m frae the south,” said the woman; “and my man has a hoast that drives ye wild to hear; and when we havena the east wind in Comlie we have the rain, and the bairns canna gang to the school, and there’s naething but dirt and wet, and misery and quarrelling. It’s a weary world, as our grannie says. Whatever the Almighty sends, there’s aye something folk would like better.”

“But perhaps that might be the folk’s fault, and not the Almighty’s,” suggested Marjory.

“Maybe; I’m no saying,” answered Mary Baxter, cautiously. “I hope’s a’ weel at Pitcomlie, and good news o’ the young gentlemen. They tell me Mr. Charles’s wife out in India yonder, has another son. Bless us! and I mind himself so well, a curly-headed laddie! It would have been mair like the thing if Mr. Tammas would settle down, and bring hame some bonnie young leddy and gie Mr. Heriot childhers’ childher, as it’s in the Bible. But there’s nae word o’ that that I can hear?”

“No, there is no word of that. I hope Nancy is doing well in her new place,” said Miss Heriot, changing the subject with the same unconscious artifice which had prompted her humble interlocutor to carry the war into the enemy’s country by introducing Charles’s marriage and Tom’s bacherlorhood. These two subjects were not pleasing to the house of Heriot; for Tom, the heir, unfortunately, showed no inclination to marry at all, and Charlie in India had become a husband and a father much too soon, contrary to all traditions. Marjory passed on when she had been satisfied on the subject of Nancy, but was stopped a few steps further on by a bareheaded girl in a pretty pink short-gown, the costume of the country, who ran after her with her fair locks falling loose in the wind.

“Eh, Miss Marjory, would you come in and speak to my mither?” cried this new applicant. This was Jenny Patterson, who lived up a stair just behind the Tolbooth, and a little out of Miss Heriot’s way. How Jenny admired the young lady as she gathered up her heavy cloth skirts, and with a smile and a nod went on to the well-known door! If Jenny had ever heard of goddesses, just so would she have impersonified a feminine divinity; that mixture of splendid superiority and familiar kindness being of all things the most captivating to the unsophisticated soul. Jenny’s brother, who was a watchmaker in Dundee, and held very advanced political opinions, considered her devotion servile, but blushed to feel that he himself shared it whenever he was brought under the same influence. “But it’s no the leddy, it’s the woman I think of,” Radical Jock explained to himself—an explanation as false as most such explanations are.

“Jenny says you want me, Mrs. Patterson,” said Marjory, sitting down on the chair which Jenny carefully dusted and placed in front of the fire. It was a small room, with but a little space between the bed and the fire, and with one window veiled by an immense geranium stretched upon a fan-like frame, which was the pride of its mistress’s heart, consumed half the air and light in the little place, and curiously enough condescended to grow with splendid luxuriance. Jenny’s mother was an invalid, but a good needlewoman, who got through a great deal of “white-seam” in her chair by the fire, and lived, she, her daughter, and her geranium on the earnings thus acquired, supplemented by help from her sons. Jenny stood by smiling and open-mouthed, twisting up the hair which invariably came down when she flew out into the street on any errand; and little Milly, familiar to the place, actually took the independent step of going to the window, and chirruping to the canary which hung above that geranium forest, and was the best singer in all Comlie, not even excepting the Minister’s bullfinch, a strange and foreign bird.

“Dinna think I’m wanting anything from you, Miss Marjory. The worst o’ puir folk is that they’re aye wanting. Na, na, it was only for a sight o’ your face, which does a poor body good, and to read ye my Willie’s letter. Jenny, ye taupie, bring me Willie’s letter. I can maistly say it off by heart, but Miss Heriot will like to see it, and I might forget something. Eh, I’m a happy woman! The captain o’ the ‘William and Mary’s’ dead out yonder (pointing her thumb over her shoulder, which was the way or indicating distance in Comlie), and Willie’s to bring the boat home. It’s as good as a ship to him; for ance a captain aye a captain, and his owners are no the men to put him back in a mate’s place.”

“I am very glad to hear of Willie’s promotion,” said Marjory; “was the captain a Comlie man?”

“Eh, you’ll think me awfu’ hard-hearted,” said Mrs. Patterson, struck with compunction, and pausing with her large horn spectacles in her hand; “but you canna suppose I would have spoke as free and been as thankfu’ if he had been a Comlie man. Na, na, if another house in the town had been mourning I would have held my peace. I’ve had trouble enough myself to have mair feeling; but he’s no frae Comlie nor nearhand. He’s a Dundee man, and I ken naething about him. His name was Brown, like mony mair, and he’s no even married that I ever heard tell of, and it’s to be hoped he’s in a better place.”

With this the new captain’s mother dismissed the old one, and put on her big spectacles. “It’s dated Riga, the fourteenth February, for that’s the port where they were bound. ‘My dear mother, I hope you and Jenny’s in good health as this leaves me. Many and many a time I think of you and the cosy little room, and the flower, and the canary-bird—’ Bless the laddie,” said Mrs. Patterson, stopping abruptly, “he had aye the kindest heart!”

The reader probably, however, will not be so much interested in this letter as Marjory was, who listened and made her comments with thorough sympathy, feeling quite relieved, as was Willie’s mother, by the fact that the dead captain was not a Comlie man. Dundee was large and vague, and far away, and was able enough to mourn her own dead. But as they went down the stairs after their visit was over, Marjory said to her little sister, “We shall be too late for luncheon at home; are you hungry, dear? I think we might go and dine with Aunt Jean.”

“I am a little hungry,” Milly confessed, not without a blush.

“Then run and tell Betty we are coming, and I will go on to the Manse; you can come after me or stay at Aunt Jean’s, as you like.”

“Walk slow, May, and I will make up to you,” cried little Milly, who ran off instantly like a gleam of sunshine, her long fair hair fluttering in the breeze, anxious to be absent as short a time as possible from her sister’s side. Marjory went on slowly making her royal progress through her dominions, casting a smile now and then through the low windows on the ground floor, stopping to nod and say a passing word to some one on an outside stair. The doctor, setting out in his gig on some distant visit, jumped down and crossed the street to speak to her, to ask for Mr. Heriot and Mr. Charles, and tell her how his patients were, of many of whom she had a secondary charge, if not as consulting physician, yet with a responsibility almost as great. “James Tod, poor lad, would be the better of some books,” the doctor said, “and you’re a better deceiver than I am, Miss Heriot; you might persuade old Mrs. Little that your father has some rare wine in his cellar, wine she could not get to buy.”

“You pay me a charming compliment,” said Marjory. “Could you not cheat her yourself with all your powers?”

“She laughed in my face,” said the doctor, who was young, and not very rich, “and asked me how I could get finer wines than other folk? She was sure I might spend my siller better. And poor little Agnes dying before my eyes!”

“Will she die?”

“Don’t ask me,” said the too tender-hearted doctor, springing into his gig again. He was too sensitive to be a doctor, his wife said. As the gig drove away, some one else came up taking off his hat with profound respect. This was young Mr. Hepburn who lived in the house with the iron gates, and was the only unemployed person in Comlie. He was a young man tolerably well off, and more than tolerably good-looking, who had been brought up in a desultory way, was more accomplished than any other individual within twenty miles, did not in the least know what to do with himself, and was treated by Marjory with mingled kindness and condescension, as a clever schoolboy is sometimes treated by a young lady. For his part, Hepburn admired Marjory as he had never admired anyone else in his life. He was three or four years her junior, and he thought he was in love with, nay, adored her. The sight of her he said was as sunshine in the dreary silent place; and he had said this so often that it had come to Marjory’s ears. It was not very original, and she had thought it impertinent, and treated him with more lofty condescension than ever.

“Oh, Mr. Hepburn,” she said holding out her hand to him; “I did not know you were here. Some one told me you had gone abroad. I should have asked you to come to us sometimes at Pitcomlie, and bring your music, had I known. Not that we are very lively—”

“Pitcomlie is a great deal better than lively,” said the young man. “I am not of such a frivolous mind as to be always looking for amusement. You know, Miss Heriot, how glad I am always to be there.”

“But amusement is a very good thing,” said Marjory. “Indeed, it is bad for young people to be without it. When Milly is a little older, I intend to make papa give balls and be very lively. I have always thought it a most essential part of training. I hope you go on with your music, and practice as much as you used to do?”

“I don’t practice at all in the ordinary sense of the word,” said young Hepburn, with an annoyance he could not conceal. Marjory had Scotch prejudices and many old-fashioned notions, and it was her conviction that a man with an immortal soul who “practised” three or four hours a day was a phenomenon to be looked on with something like contempt. Girls did it, poor things! not being able to help themselves—but a man! This young woman, though she thought herself enlightened, was a tissue of prejudices, and we do not in the least defend her old world ways of thinking. She sang very sweetly herself, with a voice which was very flexible and true, but only moderately cultivated; and she thought of music as a pleasant thing to fill up stray corners, but not as an inspiration or occupation of life. And when she kindly asked Mr. Hepburn to come and bring his music, what she meant was undoubtedly contempt.

“I don’t mean to use any word I ought not to use,” said Marjory, with her gracious smile, “but I hope you keep it up, that and your drawing. It is good to have such resources when one has only a quiet life to look forward to. Of course a gentleman has many ways of occupying himself; but I am so sorry my education has been neglected. When I am dull, there is scarcely anything I can do but read.”

“I should not think you were ever dull,” said Hepburn, with adoring looks.

“Not very often, just now; but some time probably I shall be, and then I shall envy you your resources. Will you dine with us at Pitcomlie to-morrow, Mr. Hepburn? I fear we shall be quite alone; but if you will take the trouble to come—and bring your—”

“I will come with the greatest pleasure,” said the young man, precipitately, drowning that last objectionable request. He would take no music, he vowed, for any inducement which might be offered him. His right hand would make an effort to forget its cunning. He would give himself up to riding and shooting, and trudge about the ploughed fields in leather gaiters, like her father, and make a boor of himself, by way of proving to her that he was not a schoolboy nor a dilettante. This he vowed to himself as she went on smiling, and little Milly passed him like a gleam of light, rushing after her sister. How unlike these two were to anything else far or near! Marjory, with her little sister, was like a deep-hearted rose, not full blown, yet perfect—one of those roses which you can look down into, as into a lovely nest of colour and fragrance—with a tiny little bud just showing the pink on the same stem. Young Hepburn had a great deal of superficial poetry about him, and this was the image which came into his mind. Not full blown—keeping the form of a bud, deep, many-folded, odorous as the very soul of Summer. That was the similitude which best expressed Marjory Heriot to his mind.

And she, laughing softly at him, wondering to herself what God could mean by making such men, deciding within herself that he would have made a nice sort of girl, pleasant and rather loveable, went on to the Manse, which indeed had been her destination all along.

CHAPTER III.

The minister of Comlie was an old man who had held that appointment for a great many years. In many respects he was like a traditional Scotch minister, but in others he did not come up to that ideal. He had baptized the entire body of his parishioners, and married a great many of them, but he was not the genial, kindly old soul who is ordinarily conceived of as filling that position. When he walked through the town the children did not run after him, nor seek sweetmeats in his pockets. Any boy or girl in Comlie who had entertained that fond delusion would have been fixed to the earth by the Doctor’s frown, and repented, all his or her life after, the profane thought and word. Dr. Murray was a man addicted to literature, full of Biblical criticism, great in exegesis—a man who had been Moderator of the Assembly, and thus reached the highest honour of which the incumbent of a Scottish parish is capable. After this a great calm in respect to distinctions and worldly advantages had been visible in him—he had contemned them gently with a benevolent superiority. His spirit had been, as indeed it ought to have been, in a professional point of view, rather that of Solomon than of Alexander; no new world to conquer had occupied his thoughts, but only a sense of that completion and fulness which must always be more or less sad. The thing that hath been is that which shall be, he said. He had everything the world could give him, and now there was no more to wish for. But this sense of having attained the highest honour that earth could afford, if somewhat depressing, had also a great deal of satisfaction in it. No doubt his career was over, and all its splendour and majesties were among the things that had been; but yet he had the profound and tranquillizing conviction that he had not lived in vain. Not in any way had he lived in vain. He had written the article on Hyssop in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and he had had a large share in the Popular Commentary on the Bible, which was considered the very best authority upon Eastern customs and geography, and the local peculiarities which throw light upon the sacred text. His name was one of those which had been connected from the very first with the “Christian Herald,” and it was he who wrote all the articles, signed Alpha, in that well-conducted magazine. Therefore it will be at once perceived that his life had been well worth living, that he was not in any respect an unsuccessful man, and that the evening of his days might well breathe forth a certain gentle satisfaction. Comlie was very proud of the doctor, and even Fife was proud of him. When he heard that Marjory was in the drawing-room, he laid down the book he was reading and put a marker in it, and after five minutes or so had elapsed—for it did not suit his dignity to make any hasty movements—he left his library to see the young lady whom he felt a great interest in, as he always said. “She has too much imagination and a hasty mind that runs away with her sometimes; but she has fine instincts,” he would say. The Manse stood on a knoll, and the drawing-room faced the sea. It was an old-fashioned room, with small windows set in the deep walls, and furniture which was somewhat dark and solemn. “You’ll stay and take a bit of dinner with us, May, now you’re here,” Mrs. Murray was saying as the doctor came in. “It’s no often we get a sight of you, and there’s nobody the Minister likes so well to see. Milly, my dear, take off your hat, and tell Margaret, the table-maid, to get out some of the apple-puffs you’re aye so fond of. Marjory likes them too.”

“But, dear Mrs. Murray, we are going to Aunt Jean,” said Marjory. “I will come back another day. Now the weather is mending, I shall be often in Comlie. We are all very well, Doctor, thank you, but wondering not to see you. Uncle Charles has some great argument, which, he says, he keeps in his pocket ready for you. I don’t know what it is about. I thought perhaps you would come up quietly to dinner to-morrow, and then you could have it out?”

“We’ll do that, my dear,” said Mrs. Murray briskly; but the doctor was more formal in his ways.

“Mr. Charles is no contemptible antagonist,” he said; “it will be our old question about mortifications. I know I am on the unpopular side, but a man who has convictions must make up his mind to that sometimes. Did you say to-morrow? I do not remember what engagements I have, but if Mrs. Murray says so——”

“Hoots, doctor, you’ve no engagements,” said lively little Mrs. Murray; “you forget you’re at home in Comlie, and no in Edinburgh, where, to my tribulation, we go out to our dinner every night. You may laugh, but it’s no laughing matter, May, my dear, and a destruction to my best gown—no to say to all my habits. You may wear point lace when it’s dirty, but point lace is too good for a poor Minister’s wife, and my suit of Mechlin is as black as if I had swept the chimney in it; and as for working a stocking, or doing any rational thing after one of their late dinners! But we’ll come to you, my dear.”

“I am afraid we are going to have a storm,” said the doctor; “the wind is blowing strong up the Firth, and I doubt we’ll have a dirty night. Nothing will teach these fishers to be careful when they’re getting what they think a good haul. I have a great mind, when I see the glass falling and the wind rising, to send old Tammas to ring the church bells and warn their boats.”

“And why not do it?” said Marjory, with a slight start which was peculiar to her when she heard anything that roused her interest. “There could not be a better use for church bells. Do it, doctor! If the men knew, it might save some of these poor fellows. Poor Jamie Horsburgh, for instance; I saw Jean to-day, and it almost broke my heart.”

“Her that was laundry-maid at Pitcomlie?” said Mrs. Murray. “Ah, poor thing! and what she is to do to gain her bread with that bit infant of hers? But I do not advise you, doctor, to set any newfangled plan agoing for ringing the bells. Nobody would pay any attention. They would say: ‘What does the minister know about the weather? Let him bide at his books, and leave the winds to us.’ That’s what they would say. And if you take my opinion, I cannot but think they would have justice on their side.”

“I will not risk it, my dear,” said the doctor; “they are a pig-headed race, like all the partially educated. I wish there was a higher standard of education in our schools. Reading and writing are very well, but a little attention to the common phenomena of the elements would be a great matter—as I said to Mr. Tom the last time he was here—”

“Speaking of your brother Tom,” said Mrs. Murray briskly; “what is this I hear about Charlie? A second boy, and him not above two years and a-half married! My certy, but they’re losing no time; and I hope both doing well?”

“Oh yes,” said Marjory, with a shade of indifference stealing over her face; “people always do well in those circumstances, don’t they? Fancy our Charlie with a family of children about him! I think it spoils a young man. It makes them grand-fatherly—not to say grandmotherly—and knowing about domestic matters. Charlie, of all people in the world! but it cannot be helped, or put a stop to, I suppose?”

“Whisht, my dear, whisht; that’s a strange thing for a woman to say.”

“Is it?” said Marjory, with a sudden blush. “What I meant was that the thought of Charlie turned into an old wife—Charlie knowing all about nurseries, and what to give a baby when it has a cold—is so very queer. I don’t like it; Charlie was always my pet brother. Poor fellow! and he so far away!”

“I have no doubt he’s very happy—as he ought to be with a nice wife and two bonnie bairns,” said Mrs. Murray, a little annoyed at Marjory’s anti-matrimonial views; but this remark passed unnoticed in the doctor’s question about what she was reading, which changed the character of the conversation. Mrs. Murray was not booky, as she herself said; she was too old for anything but novels; and though she had great enjoyment of these on a wet afternoon, by the fireside, or when the doctor was busy with his sermon, she did not say much about them, and kept them in the background with a certain sense of weakness. Marjory, on the contrary, discussed her reading with some eagerness, while the old lady and little Milly cooed and whispered to each other in the background; the child’s fair hair pressed lovingly against the net border—white and softly plaited—of Mrs. Murray’s cap. And so long was the discussion carried on that Marjory at last sprang up suddenly and held out her hand in alarm to take leave, when the bell rang for the early dinner, which reminded her how time was passing.

“Aunt Jean will be waiting for us,” she cried, with a compunction which was quickened by the well-known tradition of punctuality which distinguished the Hay-Heriots.

“Well, well, my dear, it will do her no harm for once,” said Mrs. Murray, going to the door with the visitors, and opening it for them with her own hands. She came out to the step to see them on their way, while her husband stood behind. “Be sure you don’t sit too long with Miss Jean—for there’s a storm coming up, as the doctor says; and come soon back again,” said the old lady, smiling and waving her hand, while her cap-strings wantoned in front of her in the rising wind. “That lassie has strange notions,” she said, as she came in and shut the door. “I wish I saw her with a good man and bairns of her own.”

“She’s a fine girl,” said the doctor, turning along the passage to his dressing-room, to wash his hands before dinner. These words did not at all resemble in sense the other expression of applause, “a fine woman”—which they resemble in sound. Dr. Murray did not mean to imply that he found May “fine” in physical development—belle femme, as the French say, with a similar signification. He meant that she was delightful, charming, the best specimen he knew of everything a young woman should be.

We are obliged to confess, however, that it was with a somewhat undignified precipitation that the two sisters crossed the wide street to the dwelling-place of their old aunt. Miss Jean Hay-Heriot was grand-aunt to the younger generation. Her father, the Laird of Pitcomlie, was grandfather of the present Laird: but as she had been the youngest of her family, she was scarcely ten years older than her nephew. She had lived in this gabled house for five and forty years, since the time when, still a young woman, she had given up the world in disgust, after five or six years of wandering in places where lone ladies resort to—Bath, and Cheltenham, and Harrowgate—for in those days it had not become the custom to go abroad. Five and forty years! What a waste of time to look back upon, and what a monotonous, unfeatured expanse, May thought, who sometimes pondered over her old aunt’s fate as one chapter among many of the phenomena of feminine existence. But to Miss Jean this waste of years was not so unfeatured as to her young relative. There seemed no reason why she should not go on for ever in the same active yet tranquil way. From her window in the gable she superintended all that Comlie did, every stranger who came into it (they were not many), all the mild visiting that took place among the higher classes, and the family movements of the lower, quarrels, flirtations, marriages, catastrophes of all kinds. She was seated in this same window, when Marjory, a little flushed with haste, hurriedly gathering up her riding-habit, and finding it much in the way, became visible running over from the Manse, Milly close behind, with her long hair streaming. Miss Jean quietly smiled to herself, and prepared for tempest. It roused her up sometimes, and gave her a pleasant exhilaration, to get an opportunity of setting “that girl of Thomas’s” right.

“Quick, quick, Miss Marjory,” said Betty, at the door. The door was in the gable, and opened into a square hall, which was underneath the drawing-room. “Quick, like good bairns, and dinna keep your aunty waiting. The broth’s ready to come up, and Jessie making a terrible fyke in the kitchen—and Miss Jean’s no pleased.”

She threw open the door of a little bedroom at the end of the passage as she spoke—it was thought convenient in that region to have sleeping rooms on the ground-floor—and began instantly to take off Milly’s outer jacket, which was worn over her long riding-skirt. May smoothed her own hair with a trepidation which was quite unusual to her. It was bright brown hair, not so blond as Milly’s, but still full of soft colour, though not red, nor even golden. Her eyes were brown too, large and serious, but capable of lighting up with searching golden gleams. She was softly coloured in every way, with an evanescent bloom that came and went, and the most changeable of faces. Sometimes strangers thought her almost plain, when her upper lip fixed on her lower with the resolute look she sometimes had, and her eyes looked straight before her full of silent thought. But most people who knew Marjory held it impossible that she could ever be plain. She smoothed her hair as best she could, in her hurry, for those were the days when young ladies were expected to have smooth and shining hair—and put her tall hat and her riding gloves on the table, and pulled out her handkerchief from her bodice. “Am I tidy, Betty; shall I do?” asked, with tremulous accents, the young woman who half an hour before had felt herself princess of Comlie. All these pleasant pretensions failed before the tribunal of Miss Jean.

“Oh, ay, Miss Marjory, you’ll do,” cried anxious Betty; and attended as ever closely by her little sister, Marjory ran upstairs. Miss Jean sat in the end window, her favourite seat of inspection—and all her “borders,” which were of blonde, not so closely put together as those of Mrs. Murray, were quivering round her old face. “So you’ve come at last, Miss May,” she said. “It’s a great honour to my humble house, and folk that are gratified with the visits of their betters must be content to wait.”

“Oh, Aunt Jean, I am very sorry! We ought to have come here at once, instead of going to the Manse—”

“Far be it from me to say what a young lady like you should do. I’m nothing but an old-fashioned person myself. In my days the young were brought up to obedience and consideration of other folks’ ways. But I’m not a learned man like the doctor, nor a whillie-wha like the doctor’s wife. I’m of the old Hay-Heriot stock, that always spoke their mind. Betty, bring ben the broth—if our young ladies can sup broth. They tell me my nephew Charlie has brought a grand cook to the house, far above our old-fashioned Scots dishes.”

“Indeed, Aunt Jean, it is the old dishes she is famous for,” said May, very conciliatory. “She says she knows nothing about kickshaws, and one of the things I specially wanted was to ask you for the old family receipt for shortbread, which you always promised me, and your particular fish and sauce, which Uncle Charles says is the best he ever tasted.”

“I suppose you think you can win me over with your nonsense about fish and sauce,” said Miss Jean. “Set Charlie up with his cooks and his newfangled ways! In my days a man ate what was set before him, and said his grace, and was thankful. The mistress of a house, with all her family to provide for, might be excused for giving her mind to it; but, ugh! a man studying what he’s to put into his vile stomach! If there’s a thing I cannot abide—Dinner’s ready! You need not tell me that; it’s been ready any time this twenty minutes. You may say to Jess I’m truly sorry for her, but it’s our young ladies’ way. Go first, bairn, and go quick, for I’ll not wait another moment, if it was for the Queen herself.”

Thus adjured, Milly ran downstairs, followed by her sister. The old lady brought up the rear, with her big cane. She was a little old woman over seventy, in a large cap with many ribbons and borders of broad blonde, which waved about her withered face as she moved. It was a small face, much shrivelled up, but lighted with two blazing sparks of light, deeply sunk within the eaves and folds of her eyelids—eyes which could see what happened a mile off, and burn through and through any unfortunate who was subjected to their gaze. She wore a red China crape shawl, very old, but once very richly embroidered and handsome, on her thin shoulders, and her short footstep and the tap of her cane rang through the house as she moved. Everybody within her range increased their exertions, and moved with doubled activity when the tap of Miss Jean’s cane became audible.

As for Milly, running on before, her aunt was to her as the exacting, but, on the whole, benevolent fairy who appears in all the tales, who scolded Cinderella, yet gave her the pumpkin coach, and who had drawers upon drawers full of shreds and patches, strings of beads, bright bits of silk, everything that was necessary for the dressing of dolls and making of needlebooks. The pat-pat of the cane seemed part of the old lady to Milly’s ear, and she was by no means sure that the cane was not a third leg upon which Aunt Jean moved as ordinary mortals did on the more usual complement. No one except Miss Jean said a word as they sat down to table, and Betty, with a speed and noiselessness, which were born at once of terror and of long practice, served the broth. Milly said they were very good, and asked for a little more of them, without any perception that she was ungrammatical, and as they were hot and savoury Miss Jean mollified by degrees.

“There’s one good thing,” she said, “that you cannot spoil broth by waiting. That and porridge should always be well boiled. I hope your grand cook knows that among her other accomplishments. But, maybe Milly is above porridge, though her father was brought up upon them, and his father before him, and all the best Scots gentry from the days of Robert Bruce.”

“I have a few porridge in a saucer every morning,” said Milly, proudly, “and May gives me the rest of the cream after papa’s last cup of tea.”

“A few in a saucer!” Miss Jean retorted, with renewed vehemence. (N.B. The Scotch reader does not need to be informed that porridge is plural as well as broth.) “I hope, Marjory Hay-Heriot, that you may never have to give a severe account of the way you’ve brought up that motherless bairn.”

“Cream is not immoral, I hope, aunty?” said Marjory, with rising spirit.

“Immoral! Luxury’s immoral, indulgence is immoral, and they’re immoral that say a word to the contrary,” cried the old lady. “Will you tell me that to bring up a fellow-creature to self-indulgence is no a sinful act? But I never understood the ways of this generation, nor do I want to understand them. You’re all alike—all alike! from Tom’s horse-racing to Milly’s saucer of parritch—it is the same thing over again. What you please! and not what’s your duty, and the best thing for you in this world and the next. Betty, the boiled beef is too plain for these young ladies. Bring it to me, and put the chicken before Miss Marjory. A queen may eat a bit of chicken, but the boiled beef’s aye good enough for me.”

The fact was that the chicken had been added to the meal, expressly for the benefit of Marjory and Milly.

“Bairns are brought up different to what they were in my time,” Miss Jean had said to her cook, benevolently, an hour before. “That chucky’s young and tender, and they’ll like it better than the beef.”

But all this kindness had been turned to gall by the unfortunate delay. Milly took this as a simple necessity of nature—rustled a little in her chair, and ate her chicken; but Marjory resented the ungracious reception.

“I am sorry we have come to trouble you, aunt,” she said. “I would rather not have anything, thank you; I’m not hungry. The wind is cold, and it has given me a headache. If I might go and sit quiet in the drawing-room, while you finish your dinner, I should get well again.”

“The thing for a headache is to eat a meal,” said Miss Jean, alarmed. “Bring me the chicken, Betty, till I cut Miss Marjory a bit of the breast. You cannot carve; that’s why you want to go away. In my day, carving was part of a lady’s education—and cooking too, for that matter. My own mother, as good a woman as ever stepped, took lessons from Mrs. Glass in Edinburgh. I had not that advantage myself, but I know how to divide a chicken. And, Betty, bring in the apple-tart. We’ll all go up to the drawing-room by-and-bye, and before ye go ye shall have a cup of tea.”

Thus the storm fell a little, but still continued to growl at intervals; however, when the dinner was over, and May took her place in the square gable, her headache—if she had one—had disappeared. Miss Jean’s drawing-room was a curious room, stretching the whole width of the house, and wider at the back than at the other end. The narrower part was the gable. It had an end window looking out upon the street, and one on the east side, from which you could see the line of reddish rocks rounding off towards the point on which stood Pitcomlie; the white mansion-house of the present day shining in the sunshine; the old house, with its high, peaked roof and half-ruined tourelles standing up on the top of the cliff hard by, and the sea breaking in a white line underneath upon the rocks. Though she professed no sentiment, that window which commanded Pitcomlie was dear to Miss Jean’s heart.

On the south side of the room was another window, looking straight out upon the sea, from which you could see far off the dim lion couchant of Arthur’s Seat, and sometimes a ghostly vision of the Calton Hill, with its pillars, and all kinds of cloudy pageants and phantasmagoria of the elements. It was a grand view, Miss Jean allowed; but she preferred the gable window looking down upon the High Street of Comlie; and here, too, Marjory betook herself instinctively. The Firth, with its splendours, was at her command any day, but so was not this little centre of humanity. That curiosity about her neighbours and their doings, which was sharp and bitter in Miss Jean, had a warmer development in Marjory, who was young, and thought well of humanity in general; but probably it was the same sentiment. She placed herself on the old-fashioned window-seat, and looked out while she answered all the old lady’s questions.

Comlie High Street was very quiet, especially at this tranquil after-dinner hour, when the little world rested after its meal. The children had returned to the school, and such men as had any business to do had gone back to it till the evening. Marjory watched young Hepburn walking up and down slowly, something between a spy and a sentinel, keeping watch, as she very well knew, for her own re-appearance. She smiled with a certain gentle contempt as she watched him, moving slowly across the unbroken light in the still street. What odd fancies boys take into their heads! What good could it do him to wait for her?

When Hepburn disappeared, another figure became visible coming the other way—a man with a clump of his own shadow about his feet, which gradually disengaged itself as he “came east,” and stalked along by his side in a portentous lengthened line. The changes of this shadow diverted her as she sat talking to Aunt Jean. “Yes, there had been another letter about Charlie’s second baby—a note from Mrs. Charles herself—well, no, not a very nice letter—a consequential little personage, I think, aunty; as proud of her baby as if it was any virtue of hers.” And here Marjory gave a little laugh, not at Mrs. Charles, but at the dark shadow of the man approaching, which lay along the causeway, and moved so, as if it pushed itself along, lying on its side. After she had laughed, Marjory, half ashamed of herself, looked at the man, and saw he was one of the porters from the nearest railway station, and then that he was approaching the house. She raised herself up with a little thrill of—something—yes, surprise, and more than surprise—though probably it was only some parcel for Aunt Jean arrived by the railway, which was ten miles off. By the time he had reached the door, and had knocked heavily with his hand, May was sure that it was a parcel for her aunt, but nevertheless was aware of a little fluttering at her heart.

“Do you often get things by the railway, aunty?” she asked.

“Me get things by the railway? You forget I’m a lone old woman, and no acquainted with all your new-fangled ways. Not me. When I want anything not to be had in Comlie, which is not often, it comes in the boat to Anstruther, as was always our way, and then by the road, or private hand when there’s an opportunity. Railway! said she?—What’s a’ this, Betty?—what’s a’ this? A letter? Give it to me, you taupie, and make no fuss. Oh! for Miss Marjory! My certy! Miss Marjory’s in great request when her letters come following her here.”

“Eh, Miss Jean! it’s what they call a telegraph—it’s come from the railway at Kinnucher, wi’ a man and horse. Eh, I’m awfu’ feared it’s ill news!”

A telegram is always alarming to those who are unfamiliar with such startling messages; and even in these accustomed days there are few women who open one without a tremor. But at the time of which we write, they were unusual and inevitably meant something tragical. Betty stood gaping with excitement and terror, looking on, and Miss Jean let her knitting drop on her knee, and turned her sharp eyes towards her niece, while little Milly, pressing close to her sister, interposed her blond head almost between Marjory and the brief, fated letter. Somehow, as she read it, she felt in the suddenness of the shock a conviction that she had known it all along, mingled with a curious confused self-reproach for the levity of her thoughts about that man’s shadow. She read it, and her head seemed to buzz and shoot as if a hundred wheels had started into motion, and then stood still. She looked round at her aunt, as if across a sudden distance at once of time and of space; all the colour fled from her cheeks, and her voice changed like her feelings. “Tom has had a bad accident,” she said.

“God bless us! Marjory, you’re trying to break it to me quietly; the boy’s dead.”

“No!” said Marjory, with a slight shiver. “A bad accident; read it, aunty. And, Milly, run quick and get on your things.”

Miss Jean, sobered too in a moment, took the terrible missive, which, to her ignorant eyes, looked something diabolical. It was from somebody in England she made out, and was worded with what she felt to be cruel conciseness. “Tom has had a bad accident; thrown from his horse; symptoms dangerous. He wishes you to tell his father; and to come to him at once.”

“It may be a lie,” said Miss Jean in a low voice, and trembling; “very likely it’s a lie. There’s no beginning and no ending; and the man, if it is a man, has not signed his name.”

“Oh, I know his, name; he is one of Tom’s friends. It is no lie!” said Marjory. And then she added, trembling too: “Aunt Jean, don’t you feel, like me, that you always knew this would be the end?”

“The end! Who’s speaking of the end?” cried Miss Jean impatiently; and then, all at once, she fell crying and sobbing. “Oh, poor Thomas, poor Thomas; that was so very proud of his boy! Who’s to tell him?”

“Will I run for the Minister?” said Betty, who had come back with Marjory’s hat in her hand, the tears streaming down her cheeks, and all the excitement of a great family event in her mind.

“The Minister is the right person to tell the father such ill news,” said Miss Jean; “and it’s best to have him at hand, whatever happens. Betty, you can run—”

Marjory put up her hand to stop the eager messenger. In spite of herself, even at that moment of excitement, a vision of Dr. Murray clearing his throat, and preparing his way by a little speech about the vicissitudes of life gleamed before her. She could see him hemming and taking out his handkerchief with a look as tragically important as if he were the chief actor in the scene.

“No!” she said; “not the Minister; send down to John Horsburgh’s to get out our horses, Betty. I will tell him myself.”

“You’re not equal to it, my poor bairn.”

“He will take it best from me; and it’s Tom’s wish,” said Marjory, putting on her hat. She felt the tears rising to her eyes; but this was not a moment to let them fall.

“I doubt if Thomas will take it as he ought to take it,” said Miss Jean; “he’s a good man, but he’s always had his own way. Perhaps, as you say, Marjory, it is best to keep it all in the family, for a man’s apt to say what he should not say in a sudden trouble. And I’m sorry I was so ill to you about keeping me waiting; what was ten minutes, here or there? Oh May, my bonnie lamb! the eldest son!”

And with this Miss Jean, melted by the bad news into use of the pet name which had scarcely passed her lips since Marjory was a child, gave her niece a sudden embrace, by putting her thin hands on May’s two arms, and touching her chin with her own withered cheek. Very seldom was she moved to such an outburst of affection. The wave of her blonde borders across Marjory’s face was the most passionate demonstration she was capable of; but when her nieces had gone, Miss Jean sat down at the window which looked to Pitcomlie, with a genuine ache in her old heart. “Eh, the bonnie laddie he was!” she said to herself; “eh, the stout and strong young man! There never was an heir cut off that I mind of in our family before. But Thomas was aye foolish, very foolish; and many a time I’ve told him what indulgence would come to. Lord help us all, both living and dying! It’s aye a special blessing of Providence, whatever happens, that Marjory’s a courageous creature; and that Charlie’s babies are both sons.”

Thus the old woman comforted herself, who was near the ending of all mortal vicissitude; and Pitcomlie lay fair and calm in the sun, greatly indifferent who might come or go—one or another, what did it matter to the old house, which had outlasted so many generations? what did it matter to the calm world, which takes all individual sorrows so easily? But to some atoms of humanity what a difference it made! How dark the heavens had grown all at once, and how clouded the sun!

Marjory said not a word all the way home, as she rode with her little sister by her side. How they had chattered as they came; and how Milly had called “May! May!” a dozen times in a minute; the prelude of every sentence. Milly kept as close to her sister now as she could, and sometimes stroked her skirt with her little hand and the whip in it, in token of silent sympathy. There was urgent need to reach home; but Marjory did not go fast. It was no easy task she had before her. Her father was fond of her she knew; perhaps more fond than of either of his sons; but his heir, with all his extravagances, with all his folly and wildness, had been his delight and pride. There are some women who are saved from all the shocks and pains of life; everyone around them instinctively standing forth to protect them, and shield off the blow; but there are some, on the other hand, to whom it comes natural to receive the sharpest and first thrusts of adversity, and blunt the spear in their own bosoms before it penetrates any other. Marjory was one of this class,—a class instantly recognized and put to use by the instinct of humanity. It had seemed natural to Tom to put this duty upon her; natural to Tom’s friend to communicate it to her, without any attempt at breaking the news. And she herself accepted her office, simply, feeling it natural too.

CHAPTER IV.

The house of Pitcomlie lay very still and quiet in the fitful sunshine, when the daughters of the family reached its open door. The door stood always open, unsuspicious, disclosing the way into its most private corners to any comers. It had nothing to conceal. At this hour in the afternoon, it was exceptionally still. The gentlemen were out, the servants all absorbed into their own part of the house, and not a stir nor sound announced the presence of a large household. The brightness of the day was clouded, but yet held its own by moments, the sun coming out now and then with double brilliancy from the edge of the clouds which were driven over its face one by one. As Marjory and her little sister rode up the avenue, one of those great masses of cloud had floated up, and threw a heavy shadow over the house, and the blue broad sea beyond; but as they alighted at the door, the sun burst forth again, blazing upon the wide open doorway.

“Is my father at home, Rob?” asked Marjory of the groom who came to take her horse.

“The laird’s out, ma’am, and so’s Mr. Charles. They’re baith away wast,” said Rob, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

Marjory stood musing on the steps before she would go in; she did not know whether to seek her father “away wast,” or to wait for him. How still the house was, so unsuspecting, so serene and peaceful! It seemed treacherous to go into it with a secret so deeply affecting its existence in her hands. Somehow it seemed to Marjory’s excited fancy that she was about to give a blow without warning, without preparation, to some one whose smiling unalarmed countenance looked trustfully up at her. It seemed a treachery even to know it, and above all to go on knowing it, keeping the secret, into the old gentle family house that feared nothing. When she went upstairs she changed her dress, and gave her maid instructions to pack a few necessaries for her.

“My brother has met with an accident,” she said, as calmly as she could.

To say it even in this form relieved her mind. She did not feel such a traitor to the kindly old house.

Mr. Heriot fortunately came back as soon as her preparations were made, and now the worst part of her duty was to come. She ran down and met him at the door.

“What made you so late, May?” he said, his face brightening involuntarily at sight of her.

“I was detained,” she said; and came out and loitered in front of the door, playing with the dogs, who always accompanied him. He was as unsuspicious as his house. If he had been anxious in the morning, he had thrown his anxieties off. He pointed out to his daughter the good points of a pointer puppy, which, large-limbed and imbecile, came roving round from the stables, scenting the arrival of the others.

“He’ll make a grand dog before September,” he said, “when he’s grown and trained. Tom will be delighted with him.”

May interrupted him hastily, for she was choking with the news.

“Come round to the cliff, papa, there is a storm brewing,” she said.

Unsuspicious, he went with her. They took what Mr. Heriot called “a turn” round the soft lawn which surrounded that side of the house. It was too much exposed for flowers or even shrubs, but green and smooth as velvet. The sea dashed with a muttering suppressed roar on the beach beneath. It was of a steely blue, sometimes flashing in the gleams of sunshine, sometimes leaden under the shadow. Towards the east, on the very angle of the coast, stood the old mansion house, tall and narrow, with its tourelles—all but one tower, which adjoined the present house, was ruinous and roofless—but it was draped by branches which burst out from the broken walls, and a wild luxuriance of ivy. The existing house stood lower, and looked warm, and peaceful, and safe, like the present under the protection of the past. Marjory and her father made their turn round and round, she talking against time, not knowing how to introduce her subject. At last, as they turned to come back, she pointed out to him one of those sudden dramatic changes of the clouds.

“Look, papa, how quickly the lights change. It was in sunshine just now, and how black everything is already! It makes one feel eerie. It is like a cloud of misfortune enveloping the old house.”

She was foolishly in hopes that he would have taken up this metaphorical strain, and thus given her an opening to say what she had to say.

“Nothing more natural, my dear,” said Mr. Heriot. “The clouds are driving up from the mouth of the Firth. It’s an ill sign when they come and go so fast. I hope those foolish fellows from Comlie shore will be warned in time.”

“Oh, papa,” cried Marjory, seizing this opening. “It is dreadful to think how seldom we are warned in time! How we go on to the very edge of a precipice, and then—”

“Phoo!” said Mr. Heriot, “if a man does not keep a look-out before him, it’s nobody’s fault but his own.”

Thus the door was shut upon her again. She looked at him with a kind of despair, and put both her hands round his arm.

“Papa,” she said, “I think we have had a very tolerably happy life—nothing very much to find fault with. Everything has gone on comfortably. We have had no great troubles, no misfortunes to speak of—”

“I don’t know what you call misfortunes,” said her father. “That affair of the Western Bank was anything but pleasant.”

“It was only money, papa.”

“Only money! What would you have, I should like to know? Only money! May, my dear, to be a sensible girl as you are, you sometimes speak very like a haverel. Loss of money is as great a misfortune as can befall a family. It brings a hundred other things in its train—loss of consideration, troubles of all kinds. Personal losses may hurt more for the moment, but so far as the family is concerned—”

“Oh, don’t say so,” cried Marjory. “Papa, I am afraid there are things that hurt a great deal more. I have heard—something about Tom—”

“What about Tom?” he said, turning upon her with an eagerness much unlike his former calm.

“It may not perhaps be so bad as appears. He has had—an accident,” she said, breathless and terrified.

To her surprise, the anxiety in her father’s face calmed down.

“An accident! is that all?” he said, with a long-drawn breath of relief.

“All! papa!”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Heriot, half-impatiently, “you think I’ve no feeling. You are mistaken, May. But that boy, that brother of yours, has been in worse scrapes—scrapes that no doctor could mend. However, that’s not the question. How did you hear? and when did it happen? and what is it? Arm, or leg, or collar-bone? I know how lads lame themselves. Hunting is all very well in moderation, but these young men pay dear for it. They think no more of breaking a limb than if it was the branch of a rotten tree.”

“But, papa, I am afraid it is, perhaps, more serious than you think,” faltered Marjory, half rendered hopeful by his ease, half frightened by indifference.

“Never fear,” said Mr. Heriot; “women always think worse of such things than they deserve. Tom’s not the lad to come to harm that way. It’s long or the de’il dee at a dykeside.”

Then a moment of silence followed. She felt as if her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. She was bewildered by her father’s strange levity. She strolled round the cliff slowly, as if she were in a dream, not feeling sure for one dizzy moment whether her senses might not have deceived her, whether the telegram might not be some mere delusion and her father right. He was so confident and easy in his confidence—and surely on these kind of subjects, at least, he must know better than she did. But then, to be sure, it was not on her judgment the matter rested. It was Tom’s friend who had communicated news which nobody’s opinion could change; and already the lights were lengthening and the afternoon passing away.

“Papa, you will not mind my going to him,” she said, hurriedly. “He wishes it; he has sent for me. And I wish very much to go at once.”

“He has sent for you?”

“For all of us. He says, ‘Tell my father—’ I fear, I fear, he must be very bad. Oh! my poor Tom, my poor Tom!”

“You are talking nonsense,” said her father, letting her hand drop from his arm with a certain impatience. “Tom might have known better than to make such an appeal to you. Where is he? And if he were so very bad how could he have written? Phoo, phoo, May; this fuss and nonsense is not like you.”

“It is not my doing,” she cried. “Oh! papa, look, the afternoon is flying away, and we shall lose the train.”

He looked up at the sky as she did, and somehow this practical reference seemed to alarm him more than all she had said. In the bright, slanting sunshine which suddenly burst upon him at this moment, his face paled as suddenly as if some evil breath had passed over it.

“The train! I did not think of that. You can order the carriage if you like,” he said. “It is nonsense; but I will put some things into a bag, if I must be foolish and go with you on a fool’s errand—”

“Your things are all ready, papa; I have seen to everything. If we do not miss the train—”

“I will go round to the stables myself,” he said; and then he turned upon her with a forced smile. “Mind, I think it a fool’s errand—a fool’s errand; but to please you, May—”

Marjory stood motionless, as with a harsh little laugh he strode away from her. She could not have borne any more; but when Uncle Charles came suddenly round the corner of the old house, blown so suddenly round by the wind, which seemed to sway his long legs and slight, stooping figure, there burst from her, too, a little hysterical laugh, which somehow seemed to relieve her as tears might have done.

“What a wind!” said Mr. Charles. “You may laugh, but a slim person has hard ado to stand before it; and rising every moment, May. I should not like to be on the Firth to-night.”

“I hope we shall get across,” said May, eagerly, “before it is quite dark.”

“Get across?” said Uncle Charles, in consternation. “Who is going to Edinburgh to-night?”

“Oh! Uncle Charles, my heart is breaking! Tom has had a terrible accident. Perhaps he is dying. We must go to him at once. And papa will not believe me; he will not understand how serious it is.”

“God bless me!” said Mr. Charles. He made a few sudden steps towards the house, and then he came back. “My dear May, there’s you to think of. What is it? I’ll go myself.”

“No, no, no,” she said. “It was me he sent for. Oh, uncle, quick! bid them make haste with the carriage; we shall lose the train.”

When the carriage came round to the door ten minutes after, Mr. Charles put aside the two travelling bags which had been placed inside, and took his place opposite the father and daughter on the front seat.

“I’m coming too,” he said.

Mr. Heriot gave vent to another strange little laugh.

“We had better have Milly in, and Mrs. Simpson, and all the rest,” he cried; but he made no further remark or objection. His ruddy, rural countenance had paled somehow. It looked as Marjory had seen it after a period of confinement in town (town meant Edinburgh more than London to the Hay-Heriots, though sometimes they went to London too), when the sun-burnt brownness had worn off. He leant back in his corner and did not speak; he had not even asked where they were going. He seemed eager to keep up his appearance of indifference; but his heart had failed him. Mr. Charles, however, on the contrary, seemed to feel that all the amusement of the party depended upon him. He kept up a perpetual stream of talk, till the very sound of his voice made Marjory sick.

“We’ll find him drinking beer, like the man in Thackeray’s book,” said Mr. Charles; “a ruffianly sort of hero in my way of thinking; but that’s what you like, you young folk. We’ll find him drinking beer, I’m saying, May, as well as ever he was. I think I can hear the great laugh he will give when he sees the whole procession of us coming in.”

Mr. Heriot was nettled by his brother’s interference, yet not disposed to depart from his own rôle of indifference.

“It’s a fool’s errand,” he said; “but you may diminish the procession, Charles, if you like. It will be no procession, if there is only May and me.”

Mr. Charles made no reply to this; he continued his cheerful talk.

“It’s the penalty of all violent sports,” he said; “even your cricket that such a fuss is made about. There’s no risks of that kind with golf, now, for instance; and in my way of thinking, a far nobler game; but as for horses and hounds, they’re simple destruction—in the first place to a man’s living, and in the second to his bones.”

“You never were great across country,” said Mr. Heriot, satirically. “It was never one of the sins you were inclined to commit. That must be taken into account.”

“And the consequence is I never had a broken limb,” said Mr. Charles; “no surgeon has ever been needed for me; whereas the rest of you have spent, let us say three weeks in the year on an average, in your beds—”

With intervals, this kind of talk went on until the travellers had reached the edge of the stormy Firth, which spread like some huge boiling cauldron in black and white between them and the misty heights of Edinburgh. It was late twilight failing into night; but as there was a moon somewhere, the stormy landscape was held between light and dark in a pale visibleness which had something unearthly in it. Arthur’s Seat appeared through the mist like a giant, with huge sullen shoulders turned upon them, and head averted. The boiling Firth was black and covered with foam.

While Marjory sat wrapping her cloak close round her in the most sheltered corner, her uncle, with the fierce wind catching at his slim legs, came and leaned over her, and tried what he could, in gasps between the gusts of the storm, to keep up his consolatory remarks.

“This is nothing, Marjory, my dear; nothing to what it used to be,” he said in snatches, blown about, now by the wind, now by the lurches of the steamer, “when we used to have to go, in a sailingboat, from Kinghorn to Leith. This is nothing, nothing; I have seen the day—”

But here being driven first into her lap, and then forced to retreat violently backwards, in obedience to the next wave, Mr. Charles for the moment succumbed.

What a strange tragi-comedy it was! The boats from Comlie shore were out in that merciless storm, and the poor fisher-wives at their windows, or marching with bare feet on the sharp rocks, were looking out upon the struggles of their “men” to reach the harbour, which that wild suppressed light permitted them the additional misery of seeing. On the other hand, far away in the peaceful inland depths of England, Tom Heriot was lying tragically gay with fever; sometimes delirious, shouting out all kinds of strange follies in the ear of his friend, who was no better than himself. While yet between the two the wind made a jest and plaything of Mr. Charles Heriot, seizing him by his legs and tossing him about as in a rough game of ball, taking the words out of his mouth, though they were words of wisdom, and dispersing his axioms to the merciless waves. Even Marjory could not but laugh as she wrapped herself closer in her cloak. She laughed, and then felt the sobs struggle upward choking into her throat.

Then came the long night journey, silent, yet loud, with the perpetual plunging and jarring of the railway, that strange, harsh, prosaic jar—which yet, to those who listen to it all through an anxious night as May did—is an awful sound. Ordinary wheels and hoofs make a very different impression on the mind; but there is something in the monotonous clang of a railway which sounds unearthly to an excited mind, thus whirled through the darkness. How fast the colourless hedgerows, the dark spectres of trees, the black stretches of country fly past, with now and then a flitting phantasmagoria of lights from some town or village; and yet how slow, how lingering, how dreary are the minutes which tick themselves out one by one with a desperate persistence and steadiness! In the faint and uncertain lamplight the face of her father dozing uneasily in the corner opposite to her, seemed to Marjory so blanched and worn, that she could scarcely keep herself from watching him in alarm, to make sure that he was living and well. Uncle Charles was at the other end of the carriage, shifting his long legs uneasily, sometimes uttering a dismal groan as he awoke, with a twinge of cramp, to which he was subject. He had filled the carriage with newspapers and railway books, by way of amusing Marjory.

“I don’t pretend that I can read myself by this unsteady light,” he said; “but you’re young, May, and they’ll keep you from thinking.”

Poor Marjory! it was her youth (she thought) which made her so capable of thinking, and kept from her eyes the broken sleep which brought momentary rest to her companions. Thus passed the lingering weary night.

CHAPTER V.

After this long journey, to step out into the bright daylight of a March morning—cold, but sunshiny; and into the unfamiliar clean little streets of an English country-town, gave the most curious sensation to the travellers. Marjory stepped out of the carriage like one in a dream. The long sleepless night, the fatigue of the journey, the ache of anxiety in her mind, seemed to wrap a kind of painful mist about her, through which she saw vaguely the circumstances of the arrival, the unknown figures moving about; the strange houses—some still shuttered and closed up as for the night, while the cheerful stir of early morning had begun with others. Was it possible that all these unknown people had slept softly and soundly all that long night through; and knew of nothing to pluck away their rest from them, or pull their life asunder? The simplest things startled this little weary group as they hurried along the quiet sunshiny street. A cheerful red and white maid-of-all-work opening the windows, looking out with fresh vacant face upon them as they passed, looked as if she must have something to tell them. And so did the milkman clashing with his pails; and the early errandboy stopping in the midst of his whistle to contemplate the two tall old men—Mr. Heriot, with that strangely blanched hue struggling through his brownness—Mr. Charles long and thin, and shaky with fatigue.

“A clean little place; a clean little place!” the latter was saying encouragingly to Marjory, as if there was some faint consolation to be drawn from that fact. It was very unlike Comlie. Some of the houses were old, with peaked gables and lattice windows, but the line of flat brick buildings, such as the Scottish mind regards with disdain, with the cleanest of curtains and shutters, and tidy ugly orderliness, filled up the greater part of the street. The inn to which they were bound had a projecting sign, upon which the sun shone—a white horse, which swung, and pranced, and creaked in the morning air, over the low deep gateway by which the house was approached. The travellers were met by a little blear-eyed ostler, who peered at them anxiously from under the shelter of his hand.

“For Mr. ’Eriot?” he said, putting up his disengaged hand to his forehead, by way of salutation.

“How is he?” cried Marjory, a sudden sickness coming over her; the sickness of suspense which is never so tremendous as when it is about to be satisfied.

The little ostler shrugged his shoulders, and shook his ragged, shaggy head.

“I don’t know as he’s worse nor better,” he said. “Much the same, they tell me. He’s in the hands o’ them doctors, as is enough to kill twenty men. That’s why I’ve come to meet ye, my lady and gentlemen. There’s a bone-setter in this place as ’ud set him right in a jiffy; you take my word. He’s a nice gentleman; he gave me ten bob jist for nothing at all. You make ’em send for Job Turner, my lady. I know him. That’s your sort for broken bones. What am I doing, master? Party for Mr. ’Eriot! nothin’ in the world but showing the lady the way.”

The ostler’s speech had been interrupted by the master of the hotel, who came to the door bowing solemnly, endeavouring to combine the usual smiling benignity with which he received new guests with the gravity befitting the occasion.

“Walk in, gentlemen,” he said. “I think I may make bold to say that the news is good, so far as it goes. We’ve spent a pretty comfortable night, sir, on the whole—a pretty comfortable night. Perhaps the lady would like to rest a bit afore breakfast. Mr. Fanshawe, Sir, as is with Mr. ’Eriot, made sure as you’d come. Your rooms are all ready, and I hope as I’ll be able to make you and the lady as comfortable—as comfortable as is to be expected under the circumstances.”

“Cheer up, May,” said Mr. Heriot. It was the first time he had spoken since their arrival. “I told you it would turn out a trifle. You see the boy’s better already. Cheer up,” said the old man, faltering, and looking at her with glassy eyes. “We’ve had a fright, but, thank God, it’s over. Cheer up, my bonny May!”

For Marjory, so far from cheering up, had sunk down on the first chair, altogether overcome by the suspense and the information, and the sense of still more sickening suspense until she should see with her own eyes and judge how it was.

Tom Heriot had been far from passing, as the landlord said, a comfortable night; but he had slept for some hours towards the morning, and had awoke feeling, as he said, better, and in high spirits.

“After all I’ll cheat the doctors yet,” he had said to his friend. “I am half sorry now you sent for May. It will frighten them all to death at home. Odd as it may seem to you, the old boy’s fond of me in his way. And, by Jove, Fanshawe, I’ll try if I can’t make a change somehow, and be a comfort to him, and all that. Life’s a queer sort of business after all,” said the prodigal, raising his shoulders from the pillows, and supporting himself on his hands. “It isn’t the straightforward thing a fellow thinks when he’s beginning. Have your swing, that’s all very well—and God knows I’ve had mine, and done some things I can’t undo; but when one goes in for having one’s swing, one expects to have a steady time after, and settle to work and put all straight. Look here, Fanshawe—if I had died, as I thought I should last night! By Jove, to have nothing but your swing and end there, it isn’t much, is it, for a man’s life?”

“No, it isn’t much,” said his friend; “but don’t get on thinking, Tom, it’s bad for your back.”

“I don’t believe it’s my back,” said Tom; “it’s my legs or something. I’m as light as a bird, all here.” And he struck himself some playful blows across the chest. “When the doctor comes, you’ll see he’ll say there’s a difference. Get me some breakfast, there’s a good fellow. I wonder if they’ve come. You’ve heard me talk of May, Fanshawe? She’s not the sort of girl every fellow likes, and I’ve thought she was hard on me sometimes. Superior, you know—that sort of thing. Looking down, by Jove, upon her brother.” And here Tom laughed loudly, with an exquisite enjoyment of the joke. “But it would be pleasant to see her all the same. Who is that at the door? What! My sister! By George, May, this is being a thorough brick, and no mistake.”

“Oh, Tom, you are better!” cried Marjory, struck with a sudden weakness of delight as she saw the colour in his face and his sparkling eyes.

“Almost well,” he said, cheerfully, while she stooped over him; “well enough to be sorry I sent for you, and glad you’ve come. So you thought your poor wicked old brother worth looking after? You’re a good girl, May; you’re a dear girl. It’s a pleasure to see you. And you’re a beauty, too, by Jove, that can stand the morning light.”

“Tom!” said Marjory, gently.

She was struck to the heart by the sight she saw. His countenance had melted into soft lines like a child’s; the tears were standing in his over-bright eyes. Who does not know that human sentiment which trembles to see a sick man look too amiable, too angelical, too good? This sudden dread came over Marjory. She stood gazing at him and at the moisture in his eyes with a feeling that blanched all the morning freshness out of her face.

“All right,” said Tom. “I won’t praise you to your face,—especially as Fanshawe’s there; though he’s as good a fellow as ever was. I’ll tell you after, all I owe to him. But who came with you, May? and how did you persuade the two old boys to let you go? and how’s my father and little Milly, and all the rest of them? Sit down here, where I can reach you. Fanshawe, she wants a cup of tea or something.”

“I want to hear about you, Tom,” said Marjory, mastering, as well as she could, the impression made upon her by her brother’s emotion, and by the dark uncheering looks of Fanshawe, his previous nurse, who had shaken hands with her, but who avoided her eye. “But first I must tell you, the two old boys, as you call them, came with me. My father is here.”

“My father—here!” said the prodigal, once more raising his head from the pillow. A crimson flush came over his face, and his eyes filled with tears. “I told you they were fond of me at home,” he said, turning faltering to his friend, “and by Jove, May—no, I won’t say that—By God, as you’re both witnesses, I’ll turn over a new leaf, and be a comfort to him from this day!”

By an impulse which she could scarcely define, Marjory turned from her brother’s flushed and excited face to Fanshawe, who had retired to the other side of the room, and whom she had seen joining his hands together with a sudden movement of pain. When he caught her eye he shook his head gently. Then she knew what was before them.

Mr. Heriot, however, suspected nothing; he came in, still with something of the paleness which had come upon him when he first realized the news; but in five minutes had recovered his colour, and composure, and was himself.

“Your sister was anxious, my boy!” he said. “It is a woman’s fault; and, for my part, I don’t blame them. Rather that than man’s indifference, Tom. May would go through fire and water for anybody belonging to her. It makes them troublesome to steady-going folks, now and then; but it’s a good fault—a good fault.”

And Mr. Heriot, after a few minutes, cheerfully invited Mr. Fanshawe—to whom he made many old-fashioned acknowledgments—to go downstairs with him to breakfast, leaving Marjory with her brother.

“We’ll send her something upstairs,” he said; “I know she’ll like best to be with Tom.”

“She should get a rest first,” said Mr. Charles, grumbling momentarily in behalf of his favourite; but finally they all left the sick-room, going down to breakfast in high spirits. Tom, by this time, somewhat pale, lay back on his pillows, and looked admiringly and gratefully at his sister. A certain calm of well-being seemed to have fallen over him, which, in spite of herself, gave Marjory hope.

“And to think,” he said softly, “that last night—only last night, I had given everything up, and never hoped to see one of you again. May, give me your hand; you’re a good girl. It’s true what my father said: you would go through fire and water. That’s the old Scotch way; not so much for other people as women are now-a-days; but through fire and water—through fire and water, for your own! If you had been here last night I might have told you something—”

“Tell it to me now, Tom.”

“No; I don’t want you to think worse of me than you do. Please God, I will live and mend, and take up all my tangled threads, as Aunt Jean says. How is old Aunt Jean? Cankered body! but I suppose she would have done it too—through fire and water. Do you know, May, there’s a great deal of meaning, sometimes, in what these old boys say.”

“I wish you would not call them old boys, Tom.”

“Well, well—they are not young boys, are they? There is one thing tho’ about women—or, so I’ve always heard, at least. They say you’re hard on other women. If you were called on now to help a woman that was not your flesh and blood?—for the sake of those who were your flesh and blood—”

Marjory’s face was covered with a deep blush; there was but one idea that could be connected with such a speech; she had to conquer a momentary repugnance, an impulse of indignation and shame. But she did conquer it.

“Tom!” she said anxiously; “I hope I could be faithful to my trust. Tell me what it is?”

“Not I!” said Tom, laughing. “No, no, Miss May; I am not going to give you the whiphand over me. I can trust myself best. I am getting well, thank Heaven; and I’ll pick up my tangled threads. It is not a bad phrase that, either. Lord, what a lot of tangled threads I seemed to be leaving last night!”

What could Marjory say? She held his hand between hers and patted it softly, and kissed it with her heart full. It was not like a sick man’s hand, white and wasted. It was brown and muscular, and strong, capable of crushing hers, had he wished; and yet lay somewhat passively embraced by her slender fingers, as if—like the tide ebbing slowly from the shore, the strength had begun to ebb away.

“However, it’s well to be warned,” said Tom. “And, after all, I have done less harm than you would think; nobody’s enemy but my own—as people say. There’s no sensation I ever felt so curious as that one—of thinking you’re dying. What an awful fool you’ve been, you say to yourself; and now it’s no good. Struggle as you like, you can’t mend it; you must just lie still and take what’s coming. I say, May,” he added, with a sudden start. “Say something and be cheery, or I’ll get into the dumps again.”

“Here’s the doctor, Tom,” said Fanshawe at the door.

Marjory rose and left the room quickly; she could not bear to meet the eye of that final authority, whose glance seems to convey life or death. She went and stood by her brother’s friend outside on the landing. It was an old-fashioned winding oak staircase; and looking down they could see the movements of the house; the waiters carrying in dishes to the room where the father and uncle were breakfasting; and sometimes, when the door opened, could hear the roll of their vigorous Northern voices. Marjory stood with her hand on the oak balustrade, and looked wistfully into Fanshawe’s face.

“Do you mean,” she said, “that there is no hope?”

He made a little gesture of pain and shook his head; his eyes looked hollow, as if with tears. It was watching that had done it, but the effect was the same.

“Then he ought to know; he must know!” said Marjory.

“To what good, Miss Heriot? Do you think God takes a man unawares like that, to exact everything from him the same as if he had had long warning? I am not so good as you; but I think better of my Maker than that.”

“Mr. Fanshawe, this is no time to argue,” said Marjory, shivering; “but my poor Tom ought to know.”

“It would kill him in a moment,” said Fanshawe, “the shock would be too great; he has few enough moments to live. Go and pray for him, Miss Heriot; that’s better than telling him. You are far more likely to be paid attention to up yonder than fellows like poor Tom or me.”

And all the while fresh dishes were being carried in from the kitchen, and Mr. Heriot’s laugh, a large sound of ease and relief—the gaiety of a man just delivered from deadly anxiety—rang like a certainty of well-being all through the house. The breakfast was still going on when the doctor went downstairs; his grave face startled Tom’s father.

“You find your patient better, doctor?” he said.

“I cannot say I do,” the doctor answered, somewhat solemnly. “Though his strength has held out better than I thought.”

“But I assure you—the boy is looking as well as I ever saw him. His colour is good, and his eyes bright; and no suffering to speak of.”

“The explanation of that is but too easy,” said the doctor. “I suppose no one has told you the particulars. So long as there was pain there was a little hope. It is a hard thing to say to a father, but I must say it. Your son’s injury, Sir, is in the spine.”

“My God!”

Mr. Heriot stumbled up blindly from his chair; he put his hand out to grope his way to the door, and with the other thrust away from him the table at which he had been seated. The doctor rushed after and seized him by the arm.

“If you go into his room with that face, you will kill him on the spot!” he cried.

“And when will you—or nature, as you call it—kill him?” cried Mr. Charles, coming forward in his turn. “Thomas, my man, Thomas! you’ve still the others left.”

“He may last a few hours longer—not more,” said the doctor. “I shall come back presently;” and he rushed away, glad to escape from such a scene, and left those whom it most concerned to bear it as they could.

The two old brothers had taken each other by the hand. They stood together as they had done when they were boys; but one had his face hidden on the wall, against which he leant and heard the words of the other vaguely through his anguish, as if they were uttered miles away.

“Thomas! think. He is not your only child! there are others well worthy of your love. We must grieve—it’s God’s will; but for God’s sake dinna despair!”

What mockery the words seemed; merest commonplaces, easy to say, but hard, impossible to give an ear to. Despair? what else was there left for the man who was about to see his son die?

CHAPTER VI.

He lingered the greater part of the day. Marjory took her place permanently by his bedside, where Fanshawe had been seated when she first appeared. She had allowed herself to be entreated to say nothing to him; but a certain fixed awe and pain in her look communicated themselves to Tom’s mind without a word said. He noticed this at first with an uneasy laugh.

“Ah, I see you think badly of me, May. You think I am going, though I deceive myself. Don’t deny it. If I was not so sure by my feelings that you are wrong, you would make me think so too.”

“I am anxious,” she said. “You know what papa says, Tom, it is a woman’s fault.”

“Ay, so he did,” said her brother; “he has sense enough for half-a-dozen. I wish I had minded him more. May, you needn’t be so frightened. If I am going, as you think—well, well! there would be nothing to be so dismal about. It has to be one time or another. If it were not for all those tangled threads, and things done that shouldn’t have been done, and left undone that should have been done, like the Prayer-book. I suppose it’s the common way. Good and bad would not say it every Sunday, if it were not the common way.”

“It is the very commonest way of all, Tom.”

“I thought so. Then I’ll be forgiven, too, like the rest, if that’s all. The old doctor at Comlie would be harder on a fellow than the Prayer-book is. You’re great for the Kirk, May, and I suppose, as we’re Scotch, you’re right; but if I were a religious fellow, which I’m not, I would go in for the Prayer-book, mind you; it’s kinder; it asks fewer questions. We have done what we ought not to have done; we have left undone—If I had time just now, and felt up to it, I would like to tell you something, May.”

“Tell me, Tom,” she said, eagerly. “We are quiet now; there’s nobody here.”

“Presently,” he said; and then fell into a musing state, from which she could not rouse him. Now and then he would brighten up, and call her attention to a fly on the ceiling; to the pattern of the paper on the walls; to an old picture over the mantel-piece; smiling and commenting upon them.

“The walls should not be papered in a room where a man is to lie ill,” he said. “If you knew what strange figures they turn into. There’s an old witch in that corner with a red nose and a red cap; don’t you see her? Last night she kept sailing about the room on a broomstick, or something; and, by Jove! there is that unhappy fly astride on her red nose!”

At this idea he laughed feebly, yet loudly. How that laugh echoed down into May’s heart! He would not allow anything more serious to be spoken of.

“I am too tired to be sensible,” he said. “Don’t disturb my fly, May. He’s numb, poor fellow, after the Winter. I only hope if the witch takes to riding about again, to-night, she won’t disturb him. I don’t see her broomstick to-day. Trifling talk, eh? To be sure, it’s nonsense; but if a man may not indulge in a little nonsense when he’s laid by the heels like this, and has a nice sister smiling at him—”

Here the poor fellow put out his hand to her, which Marjory took within her own, doing her best to keep up the smile which pleased him, though there were few exertions of strength which would not have been easier to her at the moment.

“I like nonsense,” she said, softly. “But, Tom, somebody will come in presently and disturb us. Tell me, dear, first what you wanted to say.”

“Presently,” said Tom. “I have not quite made up my mind about it. There’s time enough—time enough. Show Uncle Charles that print when he comes up. I think it’s a good one. I thought of him as soon as I saw it. What quiet steady-going lives now, these old fellows live! It’s strange for a man to think of settling down into that sort of thing, you know, but I suppose I shall come to it in time like the rest. Farming, like my father, or prints, and books, and coins, and so forth. May, you women have other kind of ideas; but fancy giving up youth, and stir, and movement, and all that makes life pleasant—for that.”

“I suppose when one is old it is the quietness that makes life pleasant,” said poor Marjory, aching to her very finger-points with a sense that this life was ebbing away while they thus talked.

“By Jove, I don’t think it would ever make life pleasant to me,” said Tom. And then with a curious consciousness, he looked up at her, half defiant, half inquiring. “You think, I suppose,” he said, “that I will never give myself the chance to try if I go on in this way. Never you fear, May; I know when to pull up as well as you do. Fun first, sobriety afterwards—never you fear. I may have had about my swing by this time. Mind, I make no rash promises, but if I keep in the same mind when I get better—— I suppose the old boy would give me a house somewhere, when I’m married and settled. Married and settled!” he repeated, with a somewhat wild laugh; and then stopped abruptly, and added, “that’s the worst of it—there’s the rub.”

Marjory did not follow this lead; she had grown confused with misery, feeling that she sinned against him, trying to think of something she could say to him which should lead his mind to other thoughts. She saw nothing but levity in what he said, and her own mind seemed paralysed. She could have thrown herself upon him and begged him in so many words to think that he was dying; but nothing less direct than this seemed possible. She sat by him, holding his hand between hers, gazing wistfully at him, but with her mind far from what he was saying, labouring and struggling to think of something that would warn without alarming him. He, for his part, looked at her somewhat wistfully too. Certain words seemed on his very lips, which one syllable from her, had she but comprehended, would have drawn forth; but, in the inscrutable isolation of humanity, the two pair of eyes met, both overbrimming with meaning, but with a meaning incommunicable. What a pitiful gaze it was on both sides!

At last Marjory, feeling the silence insupportable, burst forth into a few faltering words, from which she tried hard to keep all appearance of strong emotion.

“Tom, we used to say our prayers in the nursery together when you were ill, don’t you remember? ‘Pray God take away Tom’s fever,’ I used to say. And this is so like old times. Tom—I don’t think I said my prayers this morning—”

He put up his hand to stop her, and then his countenance changed and melted, and some moisture came into his bright eyes. He gave a strange little laugh.

“I was a better boy in those days than I am now.”

“You never made yourself out to be good,” said Marjory, with tears; “but you were always good to me. Oh, God bless you, dear Tom! if we were only to say, ‘Our Father’—after being up all night—don’t you think it would do us good?”

“Say what you like, May.”

The words were common-place, but not the tone; and Marjory, with his hand clasped tighter within hers, was kneeling down by the bed, when the door opened, and their father came in. Mr. Heriot had grown ten years older in that half hour. He came in with a miserable smile, put on at the door as a woman might have put on a veil.

“Well, Tom, my man, and how are we getting on now?” he said, with an attempt at hearty jocularity, most pitifully unlike his natural tone.

Tom looked from his father’s ghostly pretence at ease to his sister’s face, as she knelt by the bed, with his hand pressed between hers, now and then softly kissing it, and smiling at him with an effort which became more and more painful. A change came over his own countenance. With a sudden scared look, he thrust his other hand into his father’s, and grasped him tight, like a frightened child.

“Don’t let me go!” he cried, with one momentary unspeakable pang.

Then swiftly as the mind moves at moments in which a whole life-time seems concentrated, he recovered his mental balance. How few fail at that grand crisis! He recovered himself with one of those strange rallyings of mental courage which make all sorts of men die bravely with fortitude and calm. The whole revolution of feeling—enlightenment, despair, self-command—passed so quickly that only spectators equally absorbed and concentrated could have followed them.