THE PRIMROSE PATH

A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife
By MRS. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF
“THE CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD” “AGNES” “A SON OF THE SOIL” “CARITÀ” “FOR LOVE AND LIFE” “MISS MARJORIBANKS” “INNOCENT” &c.

“A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more.”

—“the primrose path of dalliance!”
Hamlet, Act I., Scene III.

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1878

By Mrs. Oliphant.

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TO
THE VERY REVEREND THE PRINCIPAL:
THE RIGHT REVEREND
T H E M O D E R A T O R:
ONE OF THE CHIEF LIVING ILLUSTRATIONS OF FIFE:
FROM
THE HUMBLE CHRONICLER OF THE KINGDOM
Greeting!

JUNE, 1878.

THE PRIMROSE PATH.

CHAPTER I.

The old house of Earl’s-hall stands on a long strip of land between two rivers, in that county affectionately known to its inhabitants as the kingdom of Fife. It is not a great house, but neither is it an insignificant one, though fortune has brought the family low which once held some primitive state in it: a quaint, gray dwelling, not formed for modern wants. To make an ordinary dining-room and drawing-room in it would be as impossible as to content an ordinary band of modern servants with the accommodation provided in the low vaulted chambers below, which are all the old house possesses in the way of kitchen or servants’ hall; but when you see its gray gable and turret projecting from among a cloud of trees, the old Scotch manor-house looks as imposing as any castle. The belt of wood round the little park, or what in Scotland is called “the policy,” is old too, and as well-grown as the winds will permit. It is true that a great turnip-field, reaching up to the walls of the garden which lies on the southern side, has been thrust in between the house and the wood, and the policy is as ragged as a poor pony badly groomed and badly fed; but these are imperfections which a little money could remedy very quickly. The house itself is very peculiar in form, and consisted once of two buildings built on two sides of a court, and united by a mere screen of wall, in which is an arched door-way surmounted by a coat of arms. Probably, however, the second of these buildings, which has now fallen into ruins, was a modern addition, the other being the ancient body of the house. It is of gray stone, three stories high, with a round turret at the western side, which rises higher than the rest by one flight of the old winding stone staircase, and has a little square battlement and terrace at the top, from which you look abroad upon a wide landscape, not beautiful, perhaps, but broad and breezy, rich fields and low hills and vacant sea. To the right lies the village, with its church built upon a knoll in the rich plain, and its houses, gray, red, and blue, as the topping of chill bluish slate or rough-red generous tile predominates, clinging about the little height. Cornfields wave and nestle round this centre of rural population, and behind are the hills of Forfarshire, and a farther line of the Grampians, half seen among the mists. The softly swelling heights of the Lomonds lie in the nearer distance, and in the foreground the Eden sweeps darkly blue, with a line of breakers showing the bar at its mouth, toward the low sand-hills and stormy waters of St. Andrews Bay, a place in which no ship likes to find itself; while over the low sweep of the sands St. Andrews itself stands misty and fine, its long line of cliff and tower and piled houses ending in the jagged edge of the ruined castle, and the tall mystery of St. Rule’s—the square tower which baffles archæology. Such is the scene, rural and fresh and green, with a somewhat chill tone of color, and many a token of the winds in the bare anatomy and shivering branches of the trees, and with no great amount of beauty to boast of: yet ever full of attraction and suggestion, as such a width of firmament, such a great circle of horizon, such variety of sea and land and hills and towers must ever be.

Through the door-way in the wall, which is rich with rough but effective ornamentation, boldly cut string-courses, which look as if there might once have been some kind of fortification to be supported, you enter a little court, from which the house opens—a square court, turfed and green, and containing a well and an old thorn-tree. The ruined portion of the house, roofless and mouldering, is on the east side; the habitable part on the west, an oblong block of building; and at the well, on the day when this history opens, two figures, one old, one young, both full in the gleam of westering sunshine which breaks over the wall. One-half of the court is in deepest shade, but this all bright, so bright that the girl shades her eyes with one hand, while with the other she pumps water into the old woman’s pail, who stands with arms a-kimbo, shaking her head, and giving vent to that murmur of remonstrative disapproval, inarticulate yet very expressive, which is made by the tongue against the palate.

“Tt-tt-tt,” says old Bell. “If ever there was a masterful miss and an ill-willy, and ane that will have her ain way!”

“How can I be masterful and a miss too?” said the girl, laughing. Her arm grew tired, however, with the pumping, and she left off before the vessel was half full. “There!” she said, “I’ll cry on Jeanie to do the rest for you. I’m tired now.”

“Oh, Miss Margret! but you need not cry upon Jeanie. I am fit enough, though I’m old, to do that much for mysel’.”

“It’s the sun has got into my eyes,” said the girl; and she strayed away into the shade, and seated herself upon a heavy old wooden chair that had been placed close to the door. The sun would not have seemed unbearably hot to any one accustomed to his warmer sway; but Margaret Leslie was not used to overmuch sunshine, and what she called the glare fatigued her. Such a mild glare as it was—a suffusion of soft light, more regretful at giving so little than triumphant in delight over its universal victory! It had been rainy weather, and the light had a wistful suddenness in it, like a smile in wet eyes. Margaret withdrew into the shade. She was a girl of seventeen or so, the only daughter of this old gray house, the only blossom of youth about it except Jeanie in the kitchen, whom she did not “cry on” to help old Bell—not so much because old Bell declined the help, but because she herself forgot next moment all about it. Margaret had no idea that to say she would “cry upon” Jeanie was not the best English in the world. She was as entirely and honestly of the soil as her maid was; a little more careful, perhaps, of her dialect; not “broad” indeed, in her use of the vernacular, because of the old father up-stairs, but with an accent which would make a young lady of Fife of the present day shiver, and a proud and determined aversion to the “high English” which only disapproving visitors ever spoke—ladies who looked with alarm upon her, suggesting schools and governesses. Nowhere could there have been found a more utterly neglected girl than Margaret, whom nobody, except old Bell, had ever taken any care of, all her life. Bell had been very careful of her—had kept her feet warm and her head cool, had seen that she ate her porridge all the mornings of her childhood, and that there were no holes in her stockings; but what more could Bell do? She discoursed her young mistress continually, putting all kinds of homely wisdom into her head; but she could not teach her French, or to play the “piany,” which were the only accomplishments of which Bell was even aware.

“It’s no my fault,” the old woman said, putting out her open palms with a natural gesture of mild despair. “If I were to speak till I was hoarse (and so I have), what would that do to mend the maitter? The maister he turns a deaf ear, though I was to charm ever so wisely; and Miss Margret hersel’—oh, Miss Margret hersel’, if she could learn a’ that a young leddy should, in twa minutes by the clock, it might be done; but hold her to one thing I canna—it wants somebody with more authority than me; and a bonny creature like that, and with a fortune coming till her from her mother! How is she ever to learn the piany, or a word but broad Scots out here?”

Little Margaret cared for such lamentations. She sat softly swinging the heavy chair against the wall, which was not an easy thing to do. She had not the aspect or physiognomy adapted for a hoyden; her features were small and refined; her color more pale than warm, lighted up by evanescent rose-flushes, but never brilliant; her hair singularly fine in texture and abundant in quantity, but of no tint more pronounced than brown, the most ordinary and commonplace of shades. Her face was a cloudy, shadowy little face, but possessed by a smile which came and went in the suddenest way, brightening her and everything about her. No particular art of the toilet aided or hindered the prettiness of her little slight figure. If she was not as God made her, she was at least as Miss Buist in the village made her—in a dress of blue serge, as near the fashion as possible, of which the peculiarity was that it was rather tight where it ought to be loose, and loose where it ought to be tight. But Margaret’s soul had not been awakened to the point of dress, and so long as it did not hurt, she minded little. Her shoes were made, and strongly made, by the village shoemaker; everything about her was of the soil. When she had swung her chair to the wall, she let it drop back again to its place, and swallowed a little yawn as she watched the water brim into the pail.

“What will I do, Bell?” she said. “What will I do next, Bell?”

(If any one thinks that Margaret ought to have said, “What shall I do?” they are to remember that this is not how we use our verbs in the kingdom of Fife.)

“Oh, Miss Margret! if you would but do one thing, just wan thing, without changin’ for wan hour by the clock!”

“You’ve been saying that as long as I can mind. You, you never change, and that’s why I like to be aye changing. There are so few things to do in the afternoon. The morning’s better—there’s something in the air. I’m always content in the morning.”

“Eh ay! you’re very content, flichterin’ about like the birds among the trees, wan moment on this branch, the ither on that; but the afternoon, Miss Margret, the afternoon’s the time for rest—if you’ve been doing onything the fore part of the day.”

“If you want to rest,” said Margaret; “you, perhaps, Bell, that are getting old, and papa— I’ve seen him sleepin’. Figure such a thing! Sleepin’! with the sun in the sky!”

“I can figure it real well,” said Bell; “it’s no often a poor body gets the chance: but just to close your eyes in the drowsy time, when a’s well redd up, the fire burning steady, and the kettle near the boil, and pussy bumming by your side, ah, that’s pleasant! it’s a kind o’ glimmer o’ heaven.”

“Heaven! the kettle on the boil, and pussy—that’s a funny heaven,” said Margaret, with a laugh.

“Weel, maybe it’s ower mateerial an image; but we’re poor fleshly creatures; and I was meaning a Sawbath afternoon, when you’ve come hame from the kirk, your Bible at hand, and a’ sae quiet,” said Bell, amending her first flight. “Jeanie stepping saft about the place, waiting till it’s time to mask the tea, and auld John on the other side of the fire, and nothing to do but to thank your Maker for a’ his mercies and think upon the sermon—if it was a sound sermon,” Bell added, after a pause, taking up her pail; “for I wouldna say they’re a’ of the kind that ye would like to mind and think upon in a Sawbath afternoon in the gloamin’. Miss Margret, what do you say to run up the stair and see if your papaw’s wanting onything? That would aye be something to do.”

“Oh, Bell, if you only had more imagination! You always tell me to run and see if papa is wanting anything: and he never wants anything, except, perhaps, a book from the high shelf, where they’re all Greek, and I have to climb up upon the steps, and get no good.”

“And whase fault’s that?” said Bell, reproachfully. She had set down the pail again and paused, looking with mournful eyes at the young creature seventeen years old, who did not know what to do with herself. “Whase fault’s that? Did I no beg ye on my bended knees to learn your French book?—a’ wee words, as easy! I could have learned it mysel’; and then ye would have had a’ the shelfs and a’ the books open to you, and your papaw’s learnin’ at your finger’s-end.”

“Do you think French and Greek are the same?” cried Margaret. “Why, they’re different print even—the a b c’s different; they are no more like the same thing than you and me.”

“I’m no saying they’re just the same,” said Bell, a little discomfited. “One thing’s aye different from another. When I was learnin’ it was aw, bay, say that they learned me, no clip-pit and short like your English. But the creature kens something after a’,” she said to herself as she went in-doors with her pail. “A thing like that, with a’ her wits about her, canna be near a learned man without learning something. But no a note o’ the piany!” Bell said, with a real sense of humiliation. For that want what could make up?

Margaret was left alone in the little court, and she soon tired of being alone. When she had remained there for about five minutes, watching the sun shine upon the ruin opposite to her, and print all the irregularities of the wall which connected it with the house upon the broken turf of the court, she got up suddenly and went up-stairs. Musing and dreaming were the only things upon which she could spend with pleasure more than “twa minutes by the clock,” as Bell said. She would read, indeed, as long as any one pleased, but that was an unprofitable exercise, and tended to nothing; for what was it all but foolish stories and daft-like poetry, and play-acting and nonsense? These things were naught in the estimation of the people in the house who were anxious about Margaret’s education. The only member of the household who took no thought of her education at all was the master, who sat up-stairs in solitary state. Even Jeanie, the handmaiden in the kitchen, was very anxious on Miss Peggy’s account. She wanted to see her young mistress go to balls, and have pretty dresses from Edinburgh, and enjoy herself. What was the use of being bonny and young if you stayed aye in one auld house and nobody saw ye? Jeanie asked herself. And this was a question which much disturbed and occupied her mind. Old John, too, who was Bell’s husband, and the male factotum, as she was the female, had his anxieties about Miss Peggy. When she began to want to have pairties and young folk about her, what should they all do? John demanded. He would be willing, and so would Bell, to “put themselves about” to the utmost; but what was to be done for chiney and plate? Wan dozen of everything might be enough for the family, but what would that do for a pairty? So that John’s mind was disturbed also. But old Sir Ludovic, what did he mind? Give him a book, and ye might mine the cellars, and throw your best bomb-shells at the tower, and he would never hear ye. Such was the general opinion of the house.

There was no entrance-hall in this primitive house; but only a little space at the “stair-foot,” the bottom of the well through which the spiral staircase wound its narrow way; but though it was dark, and the twist of the unprotected steps a little alarming to a stranger, Margaret ran up as lightly as a bird. At about half the height of an ordinary flight of stairs there were two doors close to each other, forming a little angle. One of these Margaret pushed open softly. It led into a long room, running all the length of the building, panelled wherever the wall was visible, and painted white, as in a French house: one side, however, was covered entirely with book-shelves. The depth of the recesses in which the small windows were embedded showed the thickness of the wall. One at each end and one in the middle were all that lighted the long room, two or three others which had belonged to the original plan having been blocked up on account of the window tax, that vexatious impost. In the centre of the room stood a large old japanned screen, stretched almost across the whole breadth, and dividing it into two. On the south side, into which the door opened, a large writing-table was placed upon the old and much-worn Turkey-carpet which covered the middle of the floor; and seated at this, but with his back to the sunshine, which was pouring in, sat an old man in a chair, reading. The window behind him and the window in the side each poured its stream of sunshine between the deep cuttings of the ancient walls, five or six feet thick, but neither of these rays of warmth and light touched this solitary inhabitant. He was so much absorbed in his reading that he did not hear the door open. Margaret came in behind him and stood in the sunshine, the impersonation of youth—the light catching her at all points, gleaming in her eyes, bringing color to her cheek, making her collar and the edge of white round her hands blaze against the darkness of her dress. But no ray touched the old man in his chair. He was as still as if he had been cut out of gray marble, his face motionless, the movement of his eyes as he read, the unfrequent movement necessary to turn the page, being all the sign of life about him. The book he was reading was a large old folio, propped up upon a sort of reading-desk in front of him. A large wide garment, something between a long coat and a dressing-gown, of dark-colored and much-worn velvet, and wrapped round his thin person, gave it some dignity; and he wore a little black velvet skull-cap, which made his fine head and thin white locks imposing. Margaret stood breathless, making no sound for a moment, and then said, suddenly, “You look like Archimage in the cave, papa!”

The old man made a faint movement of surprise; a wrinkle of impatience came into his forehead, a momentary smile to his lip. “Yes, yes, my little Peggy; go and play,” he said. She stood for a moment behind him, hesitating, looking round her with eager eyes in search of something, anything, to interest her. She was neither surprised nor wounded to find herself thus summarily disposed of: she was used to it. Finally, seeing nothing likely to interest her, Margaret turned lightly away, and disappeared through a second door which was close to the one by which she had entered. This brought her into a small rounded room, with one window, a little white-panelled Scotch-French boudoir, with a high mantel-piece and small antique furniture—a little square of Turkey-carpet on the floor, a pretty old marquetry cabinet, and some high-backed chairs of the same covered with brocaded silk from some great-grandmother’s gown. Margaret knew nothing about the value of these old furnishings. She thought the walnut-wood table, with its elaborate clustered legs, a much finer article, though it was often in her way. There were some old pictures on the walls, some books, and more ornament and grace than in all the rest of the house put together. What did Margaret care? She sang an old tune to herself, drumming with her fingers upon the window-sill, and thinking what she should do. Then she drew open a drawer in the cabinet and took from it some old fancy-work, faded but fine, with a bundle of wools and silks in the same condition. It was the relic of some old lady’s industry (Lady Jean, old Bell said; but how should she know?) which had been found in one of the periodical routings out of old presses and drawers in which Margaret delighted. The linen on which the work was half done was yellow and the colors faded, but it had struck the girl’s fancy, and she had carried it off with her to finish (this time a hundred years, Bell said, satirically). Margaret took it out now and laid it on the table; then she went flying up the stone stairs, and all over the rooms, to find her thimble and her scissors, which were not to be found.

And while she tries to find these, what can we do better than let the reader know who old Sir Ludovic was, and how he came to have so young a child? Margaret’s foot flying up-stairs, and the sound she made of doors and drawers opening, and now an impatient exclamation (for the way thimbles hide themselves and refuse to be found!) and now a little snatch of song, was all that was audible in the still old house. Bell and John and Jeanie in the kitchen had their cracks, indeed, as they took their tea; but sounds did not travel easily up the spiral stair, and the long room with its one inhabitant was as void of all movement as was the vacant little white-panelled chamber with Lady Jean’s old work thrown on the table. All silence, languor, stillness; and yet one creature in the house to whom stillness was as death.

CHAPTER II.

The Leslies had been settled at Earl’s-hall since before the memory of man. Now they were related to other Leslies in Fife; and out of it, I do not pretend to say. But this family itself was old enough to have carried any amount of honors, much less the poor baronetcy which was all it had got out of the sometimes lavish hand of fame. The family was old enough to have supported a dukedom, but not rich enough. Sir Ludovic had got but a moderate fortune from his father, and that which he would transmit to his son would be considerably less than moderate. Indeed, it was not worth calling a fortune at all. When the Baronet began his life, the policy was a real policy, a pretty small park enough, with its girdle of hardy trees. No turnip-field then thrust its plebeian presence and odor between the house and its own woods; the garden was kept up with care, the other part of the house was still habitable and inhabited, and the greatest people in the country did not scorn to dine and dance in the rooms so well adapted for either purpose. But of all these good things, the rooms and old Sir Ludovic were all that remained. He had not done any particular harm at any time, nor had he wasted his means in lavish living, and nobody was so much surprised as he when his money was found to have been spent. “What have I done with it?” he had asked all his life. But nobody could tell; he had no expensive tastes—indeed, he had no tastes at all, except for books, and his own library was a very good one. It was true, he had indulged in three wives and three families, which was inconsiderate, but each of the wives had, greatly to the comfort of her respective children, possessed something of her own. Time went and came, however, taking these ladies away in succession, but leaving Sir Ludovic still in his great high-backed chair, older, but otherwise not much different from what he had ever been. The eldest son, also called Ludovic, was the only one now surviving of the first marriage. He was a man of forty-five, with a family of his own; a hard-working lawyer in Edinburgh, with no great income to keep up his position, and little disposed to welcome the burden of his father’s little title when it should come. A baronetcy, and an old house altogether uninhabitable by a family, and entirely out of modern fashion—what should he make of these additions when his father died? He had made his own way as much as if he had been a poor school-master’s son, instead of the heir of an ancient and important family. He could not even take his children home to the old place, or give them any associations with it, for there was no room at Earl’s-hall. “Your father might as well be in Russia,” his wife sometimes said when she wanted a change for a little boy who was delicate. And privately, Mr. Leslie had made up his mind to sell the place, though it had been so long in the family, when Sir Ludovic died.

Of the second family there were two remaining, two daughters, one of whom had been married and had settled in England; the other, who had not married, living with her. They were twins, and some five years younger than their elder brother. And neither did they come often to Earl’s-hall. The same objection was in everybody’s way—there was no room for them. And Sir Ludovic disliked letter-writing. They came occasionally to see their father, and to hold up their hands and shake their heads at the way in which little Margaret was being brought up. But what could these ladies do? To live at Earl’s-hall was impossible, and to go and stay in a little cottage in the Kirkton, all for the sake of a small step-sister, and without even any security that they could really be of any use to her, was something more of a test than their lukewarm family affection could bear. And they hesitated about recommending a governess; for with an old gentleman so much addicted to marriage, who could tell what might happen? Though he was seventy-five, he was the same man as ever, and very fascinating when he chose to exert himself; and to have a new Lady Leslie would be a still greater horror than to have a young rustic for a step-sister. And then the child would be rich. It does not require much learning, as Mrs. Hardcastle says, to spend fifteen hundred a year.

So that Margaret was left alone. Her mother had been the richest of all Sir Ludovic’s wives. She had been—more wonderful still—a young beauty, courted and flattered, and how it was that she passed over all her younger admirers and fixed upon a man of fifty-five, a poor old Scotch baronet, nobody could divine. But she did so, and came home with him to Earl’s-hall, and brightened it a while with her youth and her wealth, and would have done wonders for the old house. Nothing less had been intended than to rebuild the ruin, though Sir Ludovic himself discouraged this, as the house, he reminded her, must pass into other hands. But poor Lady Leslie’s fine projects came to a premature end, by means of a bad cold which she caught just after her little girl was born. She died, and the last gleam of prosperity died away with her. Margaret, it was true, was rich, and the allowance her trustees made her was no small help even now to the impoverished household; though, indeed, the trouble these trustees gave, her father thought, was more than the money was worth. They wrote to Sir Ludovic about her education till he was roused to swear at, though not to profit by, the perpetual remonstrance.

“Education! what would they have at her age? A mere child,” he said.

“Eh, Sir Ludovic! but she’s sixteen,” Bell said, who was the only one in the house who ever ventured to keep up an argument with her old master.

“Pshaw!” the old man said; for what is sixteen to seventy-five? And besides, did he not see her before him a slim stripling of a girl, flitting about in perpetual motion, a singing voice, a dancing step, a creature never in the same place, as Bell said, for “twa minutes by the clock?” What does that kind of small thing want with education? Sir Ludovic liked her better without it, and so perhaps would most people; for are not the fresh wonder, curiosity, and intelligent ignorance of a child its most captivating qualities? If we could but venture to take the good of them with a clear conscience and no thought of what the child will say to us when it ceases to be a child! Sir Ludovic had this courage. He did not think much of his duties to Margaret. She had duties to him—to be always pretty and cheerful, not to speak too broad Scotch, to get his books down for him when he wanted them, to put everything ready on his table, pens, pencils, and note-book, in case he should want to write something (which he never did), and to be neat and in order at meal-times. In this one particular he certainly did his duty. Margaret had not the privilege of being untidy, which is allowed to most neglected heroines. Sir Ludovic required scrupulous neatness, hair that shone, and garments that were spotless, and ribbons as fresh as the day. Should not we all like just such a creature about us, fair as a new-blown rose, with a voice so toned and harmonious, a step with rhythm in it, a pair of eyes running over with understanding and interest, and no education to speak of? If only the creature would not arise upon us after and upbraid us for its want of knowledge! But of this risk Sir Ludovic never dreamed. She could read, he supposed, for he saw her reading; and she could write, he knew, for he had seen her do it. What could they want more?

Thus they lived, not uncontented, from year to year. No one told Margaret to read, but she did so, perhaps with all the more pleasure because nobody told her. She read all the best poetry that is written in English, and a great deal that was not the best. She was so great in history that she had been a Lancastrian and taken an active, even violent, part on the side of her namesake, Margaret of Anjou, as long as she could remember—a more violent part even than she took for Queen Mary, though to that also she was bound as a true Scot. She had read Clarendon and Sir Thomas Brown, and Burton on “Melancholy” (not caring much for that) and an old translation of Froissart, and “Paul and Virginia,” and Madame Cottin’s “Elizabeth,” and “Don Quixote,” all in translations; so that her range was tolerably wide; and everything came natural to Margaret, the great and the small. Needless to say that all Sir Walter was hers by nature, as what well-conditioned Scots person of seventeen has not possessed our homelier Shakspeare from his or her cradle? Whether she loved best the Spanish Don, or Lord Falkland, or Sir Kenneth in the “Talisman,” was not to her mind perfectly clear. In this respect she was not so sure about Shakspeare. His lovers and heroes did not satisfy her youthful requirements; she loved Henry the Fifth, and Faulcon-bridge, and Benedick, but was not at all satisfied about the relations between Hamlet and Ophelia, naturally standing by her own side, and thinking that poor maiden badly used: which is as much as to say that the spell of story was still strong upon her, though the poetry went to her head all the same. These were the books Sir Ludovic saw her reading—but he took no notice and no oversight. He did not think of her at all as a responsible creature to be affected one way or other by what she read, or as undergoing any process of training for the future. The future! what is that at seventy-five? especially to a man who amiably and without evil intention has always found himself the centre of the world! It is like the future of a child—to-morrow. He did not want to pry any further. What was to come, would come without any intervention of his. Had his child been penniless, probably he would have thought it necessary to remember that in all probability (as he expressed it) she would survive him. But she was rich, and where was the need of thinking? The great thing was that there was no room. The bedrooms in the house were so few. Where could they put a governess, he asked Bell; and even Bell, though full of resources, could not reply. There was one good-sized room which Sir Ludovic himself occupied, and another quaint small panelled chamber in which Margaret was very snug and cosy, but beyond these scarcely any bedchamber in the house was in a proper state of repair. What could any one say against so evident a fact? “We could dine fifty folk,” Bell said, half proudly, half sadly, “and we could gie a grand ball after that up the stair; but pit up one single gentleman that is no very particular, that’s all we could do beside.” It was a curious state of affairs. The two long rooms, one above the other, were the whole house.

Of the wealth which Margaret was to inherit, she knew absolutely nothing. There was a house “in England,” a vague description which the girl had never much inquired into, seeing that till her twenty-first birthday it was very unlikely that she would have anything whatever to do with it. In the mean time it served a very pleasant purpose in her life. It was the scene of so many dreams and visions of that future which was everything to Margaret, that it could not be said to be an unknown place. She built it and furnished it, and planted trees and invented glades about the unrevealed place, such as in reality it could not boast of. Everything that she thought most beautiful in her small experience of things, or which she found in her considerable experience of books, she placed in this distant mansion, where all manner of pleasant verdure was, which was not to be found in Scotland, flowers and fruits, and green lawns, and abundant foliage, and sunshine such as never shone in Fife. She made pictures of it, and dreamed dreams, but no troublesome dash of reality disturbed the vision. She was the lady of the manor, a title which pleased her fancy hugely, and which she wove into many a fancy; but it was all as visionary as if she had found the Grange in a novel and appropriated it.

If anything could have been more unlike an English manor-house than the quaint old dwelling in which her childhood had been passed, it was the dreams Margaret wove of her future home. Claude Melnotte’s palace was more like that sunshiny fancy. No castle in Spain or in the air was ever more unreal. There wants no education to teach a girl how to dream, and the less she knows, so much the more gorgeous and delightful becomes the imagination. But naturally this was a branch of her training totally unknown to everybody connected with her. Sir Ludovic knew a great deal, but had not a notion of that branch of human effort; neither, it may well be supposed, did Bell, though her instincts were clearer. When she saw her young mistress sit abstracted, her eyes far away, a half smile on her lips, Bell knew that there must be something going on within the small head. What was it? There were no young men, or, as Bell called them, “lauds,” about that could have caught her youthful eye. Bell knew that the romance of life begins early, and had some glimmering of recollection that before any “lauds” appear on the horizon in reality, there are flutters of anticipation in maiden souls, dreams of being wooed like the rest, “respectit like the lave.” But Margaret had seen none of the rural wooings which are a recognized institution in Scotland, those knocks at the window and whispers at the door, which add the charm of mystery to the never-ending romance. Bell had taken care even that Jeanie’s “laud” and his evening visits should be kept out of the young lady’s notice. But then, if it was not the glimmer of poetic love that flickered on the horizon, what was it? And except Bell, and perhaps Jeanie, no one had noticed the soft abstracted look that sometimes stole into Margaret’s eyes, or knew her capacity for dreams. Mr. Leslie, when he came, took but little notice of his step-sister. He had a daughter who was older than she, indeed Margaret had become a great-aunt, to the amusement of everybody, during the previous winter. Her brother took very little notice of her. When he looked at her, he breathed a private thanksgiving that she was provided for, and would not be an additional burden upon him when his father died. It was only when Sir Ludovic was ill or in difficulty, that Mr. Leslie came, and the reflection, “Thank Heaven I have not the lassie to think of,” was the foremost sentiment in his breast. He had plenty of his own to exhaust all the fund of interest in his heart. She had no business ever to have been, this young creature whose presence in the old house made a certain difference naturally in all the arrangements; but, being there, the chief fact was this fortunate one that she was provided for. So far as Margaret was concerned, this was the only thing in his thoughts.

As for Mrs. Bellingham and her sister, Miss Leslie, they lived a long way from Fife. They were ladies who travelled a great deal, and spent all they had to spend in making their life pleasant. Mrs. Bellingham was childless, and a widow, so that her married life did not count for much, though she herself regarded the elevation it gave her with much contentment. Now and then, instead of going to Switzerland or the Italian lakes, they would come to Scotland, making expeditions into the Highlands, and preserving everywhere their character as British tourists. Once there had been some question between them of inviting Margaret to accompany them on one of these expeditions, which it was thought might do her good and improve her manners, and give her a little acquaintance with the world. But on more mature reflection, it became apparent that the maid whom the two ladies shared between them, when on their travels, was by no means disposed to undertake the packing and toilet of a third.

“Many a girl would be glad to give a little assistance herself rather than trouble, for the chance of such a treat,” Miss Leslie said, who was the weak-minded sister; “and in that way I really think we might manage—if dear Margaret was a sensible girl.”

“Margaret is not a sensible girl, and we could not manage at all, and I won’t have Forrester put about,” Mrs. Bellingham said, who took the management of everything upon her. “Besides, a girl—she would be an endless trouble to you and me. We should have to change our route to let her see this thing and that thing, and you would be afraid she did not enjoy herself, and the Lord knows what besides. There are many things in conversation even that have to be stopped before a girl. No, no; it would never do.”

And thus one hope for Margaret’s improvement came to an end. A similar failure happened about the same time in Edinburgh. When Mrs. Ludovic got that German governess, who was at once her pride and her dread, she was so much affected by the grandeur and superiority as to suggest an arrangement to her husband by which his little sister might be benefited.

“It appears to me that we, who have such advantages, ought, perhaps, to share them a little with others that are not so well off. There is little Margaret at the Hall. What do you think? Sir Ludovic might send her to us to share the children’s lessons. Fräulein is an expensive luxury, and a little help with her salary would be no harm. And if Margaret had six months with our girls, it would do her a great deal of good; if it was only to learn German—”

“What does she want with German? What good would it do her to learn German?” said Ludovic, testily.

“Well, I’m sure, Ludovic, that’s not an easy question. I never thought you were one to ask for an immediate result. I am sure you all say learning anything is an advantage, whether the thing they learn is any use or not. I do not always see it myself,” said Mrs. Leslie; “but many is the time I’ve heard you all say so. And if we could do Margaret a good turn, and at the same time save something on our own expenses—”

“Do Margaret a good turn! I do not see what claim she has on me. She has plenty of people to look after her if they would do their duty. Trustees of her money, and her mother’s relations, not to speak of my father himself, who has plenty of energy left when you cross him. Indeed, if you come to that, Jane and Grace are nearer to her than I.”

“Because the second is nearer the third than the first is,” Mrs. Ludovic said, who had some sense of humor. But she added, “Well! I never made any attempt to fathom you Leslies but I was baffled. I think there was never a set of people like you. I hope I’ll never be so left to myself as to try again.”

“We Leslies! The most of the Leslies nowadays are your own bairns.”

“That’s true, and more’s the pity,” said the lady, discharging an arrow as she went away.

And thus another attempt to do something for Margaret came to nothing. Everything failed. It was nobody’s business, perhaps. The trustees were strangers who did not know. Her father was old, and did not care to be troubled, and liked her best as she was. Her brothers and sisters, what had they to do with it? They were not their little sister’s keeper. So between them all she was left to grow as she pleased, like a flower or a weed, nobody responsible for her, whatever might happen. Even a School Board, had there been one in the parish, what right would it have had to interfere?

CHAPTER III.

Margaret searched a whole half-hour for her thimble, which was found at the end of that time in the pocket of a dress which she had not worn for a week; but when she had found it, she no longer thought of Lady Jean’s work. That purpose had faded altogether from her mind. She forgot even what she wanted the thimble for, and being seized with a sudden fancy for remedying the disorder of her drawers, immediately set to work to do so, with a zeal more fervent than discreet; for as soon as she had turned the top drawer out, scattering all her light possessions, her collars and ribbons and bits of lace, out upon her bed, she was summoned by the bell for dinner, and thought of them no more. Margaret hastily arranged her hair, put on a bit of fresh ribbon, and rushed down-stairs; for to keep Sir Ludovic waiting was a sin beyond excuse. On the other side of the great japanned screen which divided the room into two, stood the table, laid with scrupulous care, and served by John in his rusty but trim and sober “blacks,” with a gravity that would not have misbecome an archbishop. Sir Ludovic had put down his book, he had washed his hands, and he was ready. He stood dignified and serious, almost as serious as John himself in the centre of the room, by the edge of the screen. J’ai failli attendre might be read in the curve above his eyebrows; and yet he received his erring child with perfect temper, which was more than could be said for John, who gloomed at her from under his heavy eyebrows.

“Oh, papa, I am sorry,” Margaret began. “I was busy—”

“If you were busy, that is no reason for being sorry; but you should not forget hours—they are our best guide in life,” said her father. But he was not angry; he took her by the hand and led her in, handing her to her seat with stately ceremony. This daily ceremonial, which Margaret hated, and would have done anything to avoid, was the means by which Sir Ludovic every day made his claim of high-breeding and unforgotten courtliness of demeanor, in presence of men and angels. Whosoever might think he had forgotten what was due to his daughter as a young lady and a Leslie, and what was due to himself as a gentleman of the old school, not a modern man of no manners, here was his answer. John looked on at this solemnity with gloomy interest; but Margaret hated it. She reddened all over her youthful countenance, brow and throat. Between the two old men she moved, passive but resentful, to her seat, and slid into it the moment her father released her, with ungrateful haste to get done with the disagreeable ceremony. They were “making a fool of her,” Margaret thought. Though it occurred every evening, she never got less impatient of this formula. Then Sir Ludovic took his own place. He was not tall, but of an imposing appearance, now that he was fully visible. In the other half of the room, where all his work was done, he sat invariably with his back to the light. But here he was fully revealed. His white locks surrounded a fine and remarkable face, in which every line seemed drawn on ivory. He had no color save in his lips, and the wonderful undimmed dark eyes, darkly lashed and eyebrowed, which shone in all the lustre of youth. With those eyes Sir Ludovic could do anything—“wile a bird from the tree,” old Bell said; and, indeed, it was his eyes which had beguiled Margaret’s mother, and brought her to this old-world place. But Margaret was used to them; perhaps she had not that adoring love for her father which many girls have; and especially at dinner, after the little ceremony we have recorded, she was more than indifferent to, she was resentful of his attractions. At that age he might have known better than “to make a fool,” before John, day after day, of his little girl.

This day, however, the dinner went on harmoniously enough; for Margaret never ventured to show her resentment, except by the sudden angry flush, which her father took for sensitiveness and quickly moved feeling. He talked to her a little with kind condescension, as to a child.

“You were busy, you said; let us hear, my little Peggy, what the busy-ness was.”

“I was doing—a great many things, papa.”

“Ah! people who do a great many things all at once are apt to get into confusion. I would do one thing, just one thing at a time, my Peggy, if I were a little girl.”

“Papa!” said Margaret, with another wave of color passing over her, “indeed, if you would look at me, you would see that I am not a little girl.”

“Yes, you have grown a great deal lately, my dear. I beg your pardon. It is hard to teach an old person like myself where babyhood ends. You see, I like to think that you are a little girl. Eh, John? we like something young in the house; the younger the better—”

“No me, Sir Ludovic,” said John.

He was very laconic, wasting no words; and Margaret felt that he disapproved of her youth altogether. But this restored her to herself, and she laughed. For John, though morose in outward aspect, was, as she very well knew, her slave actually. This made her laugh, and the two old men liked the laugh. It brought a corresponding light into Sir Ludovic’s fine eyes, and it melted a little the morose muscles about John’s closely shut mouth.

“But I am not so very young,” she said. “Jeanie’s sister, who is just my age, has been in a place for a long time; and most people are considered grown-up at my age. You ought not to make a fool of me.”

“My little Peggy,” said Sir Ludovic, “that is an incorrect expression. Nobody could make a fool of you except yourself. It is Scotch, my dear, very Scotch, which is a thing your sisters Jean and Grace have already often warned me against. You are very Scotch, they tell me.”

“Set them up!” ejaculated old John, under his breath.

Margaret reddened with ready wrath.

“And I am Scotch,” she said. “How could I speak otherwise? They were always going on about something. Either it was my shoulders, or it was my hair, or it was my tongue—”

“Your tongue! My Peggy, your idioms are strange, it must be allowed; but never mind. What had they to say against your hair? It is very pretty hair. I don’t see any ground to find fault there.”

“Oh, it was not in the fashion,” said Margaret. “You know, papa, you like it smooth, and that is not the fashion now; it ought to be all towzy, like my little dog, and hanging in my eyes.”

“The Lord preserve us!” said old John. He was in the habit of giving utterance to his sentiments as constrained by some internal movement plus fort que lui; and no one ever interfered with this habit of his. “What next?” said the old man, with a shrug of his shoulders behind his master’s chair.

“Then you must continue to be old-fashioned so long as I live,” said Sir Ludovic. “Your sisters are very well-meaning women, my Peggy; but even when you are as clever as Mrs. Bellingham and as wise as Miss Leslie, you will not have fathomed everything. We’ll leave the philosophy to them, my little woman, and you and I will manage the hair-dressing. That is evidently the point in which our genius lies.”

Margaret looked up, somewhat jealously, to see whether she was again being made “a fool of;” but as no such intention appeared in her father’s face, she returned to the consideration of her dinner. It was not a heavy meal. A little fish—“haddies,” such as were never found but in the Firth, little milk-white flounders, the very favorites of the sea, or the homely herring, commonest, cheapest, and best of fish. But then, perhaps, they require to be cooked as Bell knew how to cook them. No expensive exotic salmon, turbot, or other aristocrat of the waters ever came to Sir Ludovic’s table. Let them be for the vulgar rich, who knew no better. The native product of his own coasts was good enough, he would say, in mock humility, for him. And then came one savory dish of the old Scotch cuisine now falling out of knowledge; no vulgar dainty of the haggis kind, but stews and ragoûts which the best of chefs would not disdain. This was all; the plat doux has never been a regular concomitant of a Scotch dinner; and Sir Ludovic was a small eater, and had his digestion to consider. It was not, therefore, a very lengthened meal; and as six o’clock was the dinner-hour at Earl’s-hall, there were still several long hours of sunshine to be got through before night came.

Now was the time when Margaret felt what it was to be alone. The long summer evening, loveliest, most wistful, and lingering hour of all the day, when something in the heart demands happiness, demands that which is unattainable one way or another—is it possible to be young, to be void of care, to possess all the elements of happiness, without wishing for something more, a visionary climax, another sweetness in those soft, lingering, visionary hours? Margaret did not know what she wanted, but she wanted something. She could not rest contented as her father did, to sit over a book and see through the west window (when he chanced to look up) the flush of the sunset glories. To feel that all this was going on in the sky, and nothing going on within, nor anything that concerned herself in earth and heaven, was not to be borne.

The little withdrawing-room—the East Chamber, as it was called, though its window faced to the south—was already all dim, deserted by the sunshine. Lady Jean’s work lay on the table, where Margaret had thrown it in the afternoon, but nothing living, nothing that could return glance for glance and word for word. It was but seven o’clock, and it would be ten o’clock, ten at the earliest, before night began to fall. Margaret got her hat and ran down-stairs. She did not know what she should do, but something she must do. The little court was by this time quite abandoned by the sunshine, the body of the house lying between it and the west; but all the sky overhead was warm with pink and purple, and Bell was seated outside, with her knitting dropped upon her lap. Jeanie had gone out to milk the cow; and even old John had strolled forth with his hands behind him, to see, he said, how the “pitawties” were getting on. The “pitawties” would have got on just as well without his supervision, but who could resist the loveliness of the evening light?

“Our John he’s awa’, like Isaac, to meditate among the fields at even-tide,” Bell said. “Eh, but it’s an auld custom that! and nae doubt auld Sawra, the auld mither, would sit out at the ha’ door, and ponder in her mind just like me.”

“But John is not your son, Bell,” said Margaret, with the literal understanding of youth.

“Na, I never had a son, Miss Margret, naething but wan daughter, and she’s been married and gone from me this twenty years. Eh, my dear, we think muckle of our bairns, but they think little and little enough of us. I might as well have had nane at all but for the thought.”

To this Margaret made no reply, her mind not taking in the maternal relation. She stood musing, with her eyes afar, while Bell went on:

“They say a woman has no after-pain when her first bairn’s born, because of the Virgin Mary, that had but wan. But ay me, I’ve had mony an after-pain, and her too, poor woman, though no the same kind. I think of her mony a day, Miss Margret, how she would sit and ponder things in her heart. Eh, they would be so ill to understand—till the time came.”

Still Margaret said nothing. The old woman pondered the past, but the girl’s brain was all throbbing and thrilling with the future. The sound of something coming was in her ears, a ringing, a singing, a general movement and flutter of she knew not what. To Bell the quiet was everything; to Margaret, she herself was the universe, and all the horizon was not too big to hold the rustling pinions and approaching foot-balls of the life to come.

“I think I will take a walk down the road,” she said, suddenly, over Bell’s head.

“Take a hap with you, in case it should get cauld. Sometimes there’s a wind gets up when the sun goes down. And you’ll no bide too long, Miss Margret,” Bell called after her as she ran lightly away.

Margaret did not care for the wind getting up, nor foresee the possibility of the evening chillness after the warmth of the day. It was always chilly at night so near the sea; but seventeen years’ experience to the contrary had not dispelled Margaret’s conviction that as the weather was at one bright moment, so would it always be.

The road down which Margaret went was not very attractive as a road. The hedges were low and the country bare. It is true that even the rigor of Fife farming had not cut down the wild roses, which made two broken lines of exquisite bloom on either side of the way. Long branches all bloomed to the very tips waved about in the soft air, and concealed the fact that the landscape on either side was limited to a potato-field on the right and a turnip-field on the left. But the wild roses were enough for Margaret. Were they not repeated all over the skies in those puffs of snowy vapor tinted to the same rose hue, and in the girl’s cheeks, which bloomed as softly, when the exercise, and the flowering of the flowers, and the reflection of the sunset reflections had got into her young veins? The color and sweetness rapt her for a moment in an ecstasy, mere beauty satisfying her as it does a child. But human nature, even in a child, soon wants something more, and in Margaret the demand came very quickly. She forgot the loveliness all at once, and remembered the something that was wanted, the blank that required filling up. She turned aside into a by-way, along the edge of a cornfield, with a sigh. The corn was not high, as it was but June, and when she turned her face away from the sunset, the world paled all at once all around her.

Margaret went on more slowly, unconscious why. She went on hanging her young head till she came to a brook at the end of the field, over which there was but a plank for a bridge. The brook (she called it a burn) ran between two fields, and on one side of it grew an old ash-tree, its trunk lost among the bushes of the hedge. Here a post, which had been driven into the ground to support the homely bridge, made a kind of seat upon which the wayfarer might pause and look at the homely yet pretty Kirkton, with its old church on the brae. Margaret herself had intended to rest upon this seat. But when she was half-way across the plank, a sudden sound so startled her that she lost her footing; and though she saved herself from plunging into the burn altogether by a despairing grasp at the bushes, yet she got her foot fast imbedded in the damp bank, and there stuck, to her infinite embarrassment and disgust. Some one started from the seat at the sound of the suppressed cry she gave, and rushed to the rescue. It was, need it be said, a young man? yet not exactly of heroic guise.

Margaret, crimson to the hair, and feeling herself the most gawky, the most awkward, the most foolish of distressed damsels, her ungloved hand all torn and pricked with the thorns of the branch which she had caught at, her foot held fast in the tenacious clay, did not know what kind of hoyden, what rude village girl, red and blowzy, she must have looked to the stranger. She looked a nymph out of the poetic woods, a creature out of the poets, a celestial vision to him. He sprang forward, his heart beating, to offer his hand and his assistance. Was it his fault? He feared it was his fault; he had startled her, moving just when she was in the act of crossing the plank. He made her a thousand apologies. It was all his doing; he hoped she would forgive him. He expended himself so in apologies that Margaret felt it necessary to apologize too.

“It was me that was silly,” she said. “Generally, I never mind a sudden sound. What should it matter? Nobody would do me harm, and there’s no wild beasts, that I should be so silly. Oh, it’s nothing; and it was all my fault.”

“You are the queen in your own country. There should be nothing in your path to startle you.”

“Oh no, I’m not the queen,” said Margaret, laughing. “I have to take my chance like other folk. You are a stranger here,” she said, with friendly innocence. The fact that she was, if not the queen, as she said, yet at least a princess, the first young lady hereabouts, and known to everybody as such, made her friendly and made her bold. Supremacy has many agreeable accessories. The young man, who had taken off his hat and held it in his hand, half in respect, half in awkwardness, here blushed more deeply than she had done when she saw him first.

“I am not a stranger, Miss Margaret. I am Robert Glen, whom you used to play with when you were a little girl; but I cannot expect you to remember me, for I have been long away.”

“Oh, Rob!” she cried. Margaret was delighted. The vivid color came flushing back to her cheeks out of pure pleasure. She held out her hand to him. He had not been so respectful when they had parted, which was ten years ago. “Indeed, I mind you quite well, though I should not have known you after all this long time; but how did you know me?”

“The first moment I saw you,” he said, “and there is nothing wonderful in that. There are many like me, but only one Miss Margaret, here or anywhere else.”

The last words he murmured in an undertone, but Margaret made them out. She laughed, not in ridicule, but in pleasure, just touched with amusement. How funny to see him again, and that he should know her; and still more funny, though not disagreeable, that he should speak to her so.

“I was vexed,” she said, “very vexed that a stranger should see me so, my shoe all dirty and my hand all torn—it looked so strange; but I am not vexed now, since it is only you, and not a stranger. Just look at me—such a figure! and what will Bell say?”

“You have still Bell?”

“Still Bell! who should we have but Bell?” cried Margaret, the idea of such a domestic change as the displacement of Bell never having so much as crossed her fancy. Then she added, quickly, “But tell me, for I have not heard of you for such a long, long time. You went to the college, Rob?”

She said his name unadvisedly in the first impulse; but looking up at him, and seeing him look at her in a way she was unused to, Margaret’s countenance flamed once more with a momentary blush. She shrank a little. She said to herself that he was not a little boy now as he used to be, and that she would never call him Rob again.

“Yes, Miss Margaret, I went to the college. I went through all the curriculum, and took my degree sometime ago.”

“Then are you a minister now?”

Margaret spoke with a little chill in her tone. She thought that to be a minister implied a withdrawal from life of a very melancholy and serious description, and that she might not be able to keep up easy relations with poor Rob if he had passed that Rubicon. She looked at him earnestly, with a great deal of gravity in her face. Margaret had not known many ministers close at hand, and never any so nearly on a level with her own youthful unimportance as Rob Glen.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. My poor mother! I will never give her the pleasure I ought. I am not a minister, and never will be. I say it with sorrow and shame.”

“Oh!” cried Margaret, growing so much interested that her breast heaved and her breath came quick. “Oh! and what was that for, Mr.—Rob? You have not done anything wrong?”

“No,” he said, with a smile; “nothing wicked, and yet perhaps you will think it wicked. I cannot believe just what everybody else believes. There are papers and things to sign, doctrines—”

Margaret put her hands together timidly and looked into his face.

“You are not an infidel?” she said, with a look of awe and pain.

“No; I am— I don’t quite know what. I don’t examine too closely, Miss Margaret. I believe as much as I can, and I don’t think anybody does more; but I can’t sign papers, can I, when I do not know whether they are true or not? I cannot do it. I may be wrong, but I cannot say I believe what I don’t believe.”

“No,” said Margaret, doubtfully. This was something entirely out of her way, and she did not know how to treat it. She made a hurried sweep over her own experiences. “I always think it is because I don’t understand,” she said; and then, after another pause, “When papa says things I don’t understand, I just hold my tongue.”

“But I am obliged to say yes or no, and I can’t say yes. I hope you will not blame me, Miss Margaret; that would make me very unhappy. I have often thought you were one that would be sure to understand what my position was.”

Margaret did not ask herself why it was that she was expected to understand; but she was vaguely flattered that he should think her approbation so important.

“Me! what do I know?” she said. “I have not been at the college, like you. I have never learned anything;” and, for almost the first time, it occurred to Margaret that there might be some reason in the animadversions and lamentations over her ignorance, of her sisters Grace and Jean.

“You know things without learning.”

“Oh!—but you are making a fool of me, like papa,” cried Margaret. “And what are you doing now, if you are not a minister? You have never been back again till now at the Farm?”

“I am doing just nothing, that is the worst of it. I cannot dig, and to beg I am ashamed.”

“Beg!” She looked at him with a merry laugh. He was what Bell would have called “very well put on.” Margaret saw, by instinct, though she was without any experience, that Rob Glen could not have been a gentleman; but yet he was well dressed, and very superior to everybody else about the Kirkton. “I suppose you have come home on a visit, and to rest.”

“Yes; but, Miss Margaret, all this time your foot is wet and your hand is scratched. Will you come to the house? Shall I go and get you dry shoes from Bell? What can I do?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Margaret; “do you think I never got my feet wet before? I will change them when I get in. But I think I will go home now. What have you been doing? Oh, drawing!” she exclaimed, with a cry of delight. She seized the book which he half showed, half withdrew. “Oh, I should like to see it—it is the Kirkton! Oh, I would like to draw like that! Oh,” cried Margaret, with a deep-drawn breath, and all her heart in it, “what I would give!” and then she remembered that she had nothing to give, and stopped short, her lips half open, her eyes aflame.

“Will you let me show you how to do it? It would make me so happy. It is as easy as possible. You have only to try.”

Margaret did not make any reply in her eagerness. She turned over the book with delight. The sketches were not badly done. There was the Kirkton, breezy and sunny, with its cold tones of blue; there were all the glimpses of Earl’s-hall that could be had at a distance; there was the estuary and the sand-banks, and the old pale city on the headland. But Margaret had never come across anything in the shape of an artist before, and this new capability burst upon her as something more enviable, more delightful than any occupation she had as yet ever known.

“I have a great many more,” said the young man. “If you will come to the house, or here to the burn to-morrow, I will show you some that are better than these.”

“Oh yes, I will come,” said Margaret, without hesitation. “I would like to see them. I never saw anything so beautiful. The Kirkton its very self, and Earl’s-hall, old Earl’s-hall. Papa says it will tumble down about our ears; but it never can quite tumble down and come to an end while there’s that!” the girl said. If the artist had been Turner himself he could not have had finer praise.

And she let him walk the length of the field with her, telling her about his wonderful art—then ran home, her heart beating, her mind roused, and amused, and delighted. The slow twilight was just beginning to draw a magical silvery veil over earth and sky. Margaret ran home hurried and breathless, occupied to the full, conscious of no more deficiencies.

“Have you been out all this time, Miss Margret?” said Bell, just rising from her seat by the door, “and you’ve had your foot in the burn. Go quick and change, my bonnie pet. I’ve been ower lang in the court, and the dew’s falling, and a’ the stairch out o’ my cap. We’re twa fuils for the bonny gloamin’, me and you.”

CHAPTER IV.

Margaret went up-stairs with her heart and her feet equally light. She was full of excitement and pleasure. It was true that she had not many excitements in her life, especially of a pleasurable kind; but those she had encountered had not been straightway communicated to some one, as the happy privilege of her age in most cases. Out of sheer inability to contain her sentiments and sensations in one small bosom, she had indeed often poured forth innocent disclosures into the ear of Bell. And when these concerned anything that troubled her, specially the remarks and criticisms of her sisters, Bell had been the best of confidants, backing her up steadfastly, and increasing her indignation by the sympathy of warm and strong resentment. But of other troubles and pleasures, Bell had not been equally understanding. And she was the last person, Margaret felt, to whom she could tell the story of this evening’s encounter. Bell would not have been amused and interested like Margaret. She would have opened great eyes of astonishment and exclaimed upon the audacity of Rob Glen in venturing to approach Miss Margaret. “Rob Glen! who was he to proffer his acquaintance to the young lady of Earl’s-ha’?” Margaret knew as well how Bell would have said this, as if she had actually delivered the tirade. Therefore the girl made no mention of her new friend. She ran up-stairs, where she found Jeanie lighting a pair of candles on the table in the East Chamber.

“I’ve lighted Sir Ludovic’s lights, and will you want anything more the nicht, Miss Margaret?” said Jeanie, her fair fresh face giving out more light than did the candles.

“Oh, Jeanie!”—the girl began, but then she checked herself. No, she would not tell any one, why should she? Better to keep it in her own mind, and then there would be no harm. Margaret was not often scolded, but she had a misgiving that she might come in the way of that unusual discipline were she too communicative on the subject of her long conversation with Rob Glen.

She sat down in the East Chamber alone, her face and her eyes glowing. How pleasant it was to have an adventure! The little white-panelled room was but poorly lighted by the two candles. The window still full of twilight, clouds of gray here and there, with a lingering tinge upon them of the sun or its reflections, hung like a great picture on the wall. There were one or two actual pictures, but they were small, and dark, and old, not very decipherable at any time, and entirely invisible now. On the table, in the speck of light which formed the centre of the room, of itself a picture had there been any one to see, lay Lady Jean’s old work, with its faded colors, in pretty harmony with all the scene around; and centre of the centre, Margaret’s face, not faded, but so soft in its freshness, so delicate in girlish bloom. She sat with her elbows on the table, her face set in the palms of her hands, her eyes looking into the light, making the two little flames of the candles into stars reflected in their clearness. A half-formed smile played about the soft curve of her lips. How pleasant it was to have an adventure at all! And how agreeable the kind of the adventure! Rob Glen! yes, she remembered him quite well when she was seven years old. He had been twelve, a big boy, and very kind to little Miss Peggy.

The farm, which was a small farm, not equal to the large farms of wealthy Fife, a little bit of a place, which his mother had kept up when she became a widow, was close to Earl’s-hall; and Margaret recollected how “fond” she had been of her playfellow in these old days, very fond of him! before he went into St. Andrews to school, and then away to his uncle in Glasgow (it all came back upon her) to college. She remembered even, now she came to think of it, the scoffs she had heard directed by Bell and John at the Glens in general, who had not thought St. Andrews good enough for their son, but had to send him to Glasgow, to set him up! And here he was again. Margaret remembered how he had carried her across the ditches and muddy places, and how she had kissed him when he went away; she blushed at the thought, and laughed a little. And now he had come back! and he could draw! That was the most interesting of all. He could make beautiful pictures of everything he saw.

The Kirkton, poor little place, had never looked so attractive before. It had been only a little village of no interest, which sisters Jean and Grace held in the utmost contempt, driving Margaret wild with suppressed rage by the comparison they made between the Scotch hamlet and their English villages; and now it was a picture! She wondered what they would think of it now. Margaret gazed into the flame of the candles and seemed to see it hanging upon a visionary background. A beautiful picture: the gray old church with its rustic tombs, and all the houses clustered below, where people were living, waiting their advance and preferment into the grassy graves above. Here was the real mission of art accomplished by the humblest artist—to make of the common and well-known a dazzling undiscovered glory. Only the Kirkton, yet a picture! and all the doing of the old friend equally glorified and changed—Rob Glen. Margaret was more pleasantly excited, more amused, more roused in mind and imagination than perhaps she had ever been in her life.

A stirring in the long room close by roused her to a sense of her duties. That windowful of sky had darkened; it was almost night: as much as it ever is night in Scotland in June—a silvery night, with no blackness in it but a vague whiteness, a soft celestial reflection of the departed day. Evidently it was late, time to go to bed. Margaret pushed the door open which led into the long room. Sir Ludovic was closing his book. He kept early hours; for it was his habit to wake very early in the morning, as is so usual to old people. He turned to her with a smile upon his face.

“My Peggy, you are late; what has kept you amused so long to-night? It is you generally who let me know when it is time for bed. What have you been doing?”

“Nothing, papa;” but Margaret blushed. However, as she blushed so often this was nothing to remark.

“Put it up upon the shelf,” he said; “I have done with that one. It is heavy for you to lift, my dear. It is a sign that I am an old man, a very old man, my little Peggy, that I allow you to do everything for me; but at the same time there is a suitability in it. The young should learn to serve. When you are a full-blown lady, it is then that all the men you meet will serve you.”

“I want no men to serve me, papa. When I am middle-aged, as you say, I will have no servants but women. Is not Jeanie better to hand you your plate and fill you your wine than old John?”

“Old John and I have grown old together, my Peggy; but I think your taste is very natural. A young woman is a pleasanter object than an old man.”

“I did not mean that,” she cried, with compunction; “you, papa, you are the handsomest of us all. There is no one to match you; but the like of Jeanie looks so clean and fresh, and John in his black clothes—”

“Looks like an old Cameronian minister, that is true; but, my Peggy, you must not judge by appearances. Before you are—middle-aged, as you say, you will learn that appearances are not to be trusted to. And, by-the-way, what is it to be middle-aged? For my instruction I would like to know.”

Margaret paused to think. She stood looking at him with the big book in her hand, leaning it against the table, embracing it with one arm; then, naturally, as she moved, her eyes sought the uncovered window, and went afar out into the silvery clouds to find her answer. As for her father, he sat with his ivory hands spread out on the arms of his chair, looking at her with a smile. Her slimness and gracefulness and soft-breathing youth were a refreshment to him. It was like the dew falling, like the morning breaking to the old man; and, besides the sense of freshness and new life, it was a perpetual amusement to him to watch the workings of her unaccustomed mind, and the thoughts that welled up in the creature’s face. He had perhaps never watched the growth of a young soul before, and he had never got over his first surprise and amusement at the idea that such a little being, only the other day a baby, only the other day running after a ball like a kitten, should think or have opinions at all.

“Middle-aged,” said Margaret, with her pretty head upon one side, and great gravity in her face. “Perhaps, papa, you will not have the same idea as I have. Would it be twenty-five? That is not old, of course; but then it is not young either. If you were going to have any sense, I think you would have it by that age.”

“Do you think so, my Peggy? That is but a little way to travel to get sense. Where is sense to be found, and can you tell me the place of understanding? It would be easily learned if it could be got at twenty-five.”

“Oh, but twenty-five is a very good age, papa. Me— I am only seventeen.”

“And you think you have a good deal of sense already, and have found out whereabouts wisdom dwells?” said Sir Ludovic; “then, to be sure, in eight years more you will have gone a long way toward perfection.”

“Papa, you are making a fool of me again.”

“No, my dear, only admiring and wondering. It is such a long time since I was twenty-five; and I am not half so sure about a great many things as I was then. Perhaps you are right, my little Peggy; one changes one’s opinions often after—but it may be that just then you are at the crown of the brae. Far be it from me to pronounce a judgment. Dante puts it ten years later.”

“But what Dante means,” said Margaret, boldly—for, ignorant as she was, she had read translations of many things, even of the Divine Comedy, not having, perhaps, anything more amusing to read, which was the origin of most of the better knowledge she possessed—“what Dante means was the half of life, when it was half done.”

“Ay, ay, that was it,” said the old man, “half done! yet you see here I am, at seventy-five, still in everybody’s way.”

“Oh, papa,” she said, fixing upon him reproachful eyes which two tears flooded, brimming the crystal vessels over—“oh, papa!”

“Well, my Peggy; I wonder if it is the better for you that your old father should live on? Well, my dear, it’s better for some things. The old nest is gray, but it’s warm. Though Jean and Grace, you know—Jean and Grace, and even Mrs. Ludovic, my dear, all of them think it’s very bad for you. You would be better, they tell me, in a fine boarding-school in London.”

“Papa!”

“Oh, I’m not going to send you away, my little Peggy, not till the old man’s gone—a selfish old man. You must be a good girl, and prove me right to everybody concerned. Now, good-night, and run away to your bed; and you can tell John.”

“Good-night, papa. I will be a good girl,” she said, half laughing, with the tears in her eyes, as she had done when she was a child; and she made a little pause when she kissed him, and asked herself whether she should speak to him about Rob Glen, and ask if he would like to see the pictures? Surely to see such pictures would be a pleasure to anybody. But something kept Margaret silent. She could not tell what it was; and in the end she went away to tell John, without a word about her old acquaintance. Down-stairs she could hear Bell already fastening the shutters, and Jeanie passed her on the stair, fresh and smiling, though sleepy, with a “Gude-nicht, Miss Margret.”

“Good-night, Jeanie; and you’ll call me early?” she said; upon which Jeanie shook her head with a soft smile.

“If you were aye as ready to rise as me to cry upon you!”

“I will rise to-morrow,” said Margaret. How good she was going to be to-morrow! Light as a bird she ran down to the old couple down-stairs. “John, papa is ready. You are to go to him this very minute. I stopped on the stair to speak to Jeanie, and papa will be waiting.”

John answered with a grunt and groan. “And me, I’m to pay for it because little miss tarries!”

Bell pushed him out of the kitchen with a laugh. “Gae away with you,” she said. “Miss Margret, my man John would stand steady and be cut in sma’ pieces with a pair o’ scissors sooner than that any harm should come to you. But his bark is aye waur than his bite. And what have you been doing all this night, my bonnie bird? I’ve neither seen your face nor heard your fit upon the stair.”

“Oh, I was thinking,” said Margaret, after a pause; “thinking—”

“Lord bless us and save us, when the like of you begin thinking! And what were you thinking upon, my bonnie dear?”

“Nothing,” said Margaret, musing. She had fallen back into the strain of her usual fanciful thoughts.

“Naething? That’s just the maist dangerous subject you can think upon,” said Bell, shaking her head; “that’s just what I dinna like. Think upon whatever you please, but never upon naething, Miss Margret. Will I come with you and see you to your bed? It’s lang since I’ve put a brush upon your bonnie hair.”

“Oh, my hair is quite right, Bell. I brush it myself every night.”

“And think about naething all the time. Na, Miss Margret, you maunna do that. I’ve gathered the fire, and shut the shutters, and put a’ thing ready for Sir Ludovic’s tea in the morning. Is there onything mair? No, not a thing, not a thing. Now come, my lamb, and I’ll put you to your bed.”

Margaret made no objection. She could follow her own fancies just as easily while Bell was talking as when all was silent round her. They went together up the winding stair, Bell toiling along with a candle in her hand, which flickered picturesquely, now here, now there, upon the spiral steps. Margaret’s room was on the upper story, and to reach it you had to traverse another long hall, running the whole length of the building, like the long room below. This room was scarcely furnished at all. It had some old tapestry hanging on the walls, an old harpsichord in a corner, and bits of invalided furniture which were beyond use.

“Eh, the bonnie dances and the grand ladies I’ve seen in this room!” Bell said, shaking her head, as she paused for breath. The light of the one little candle scarcely showed the long line of the wall, but displayed a quivering of the wind in the tapestry, as if the figures on it had been set in motion. “Lord bless us!” said Bell. “Oh, ay, I ken very well it’s naething but the wind; but I’ve never got the better o’ my first fright. The first time I was in this grand banqueting-hall—and oh, but it was a grand hall then! never onything so grand had the like of me a chance to see. I thought the Queen’s Grace herself could not possess a mair beautiful place.”

“If it was any use,” said Margaret, with a sigh.

“Oh, whisht, my bonnie bird. It’s use to show what great folk the Leslies were wance upon a time, and that’s what makes us a’ proud. There’s none in the county that should go out o’ the room or into the room afore you, Miss Margret. You’ve the auldest blood.”

“But what good does that do if I am the youngest girl?” said Margaret, half piqued, half laughing.

She was proud of her race, but the empty halls were chill. She did not wait for any more remarks on Bell’s part, but led the way into her room, which opened off this banqueting-hall, a turret room of a kind of octagon shape, panelled like all the rest. It looked out through its deepest window on entirely a different scene, on the moonlight rising pale on the eastern side, and the whitening of the sea, the tremolar della marina, was in the distance, the silvery glimmer and movement of the great broad line of unpeopled water.

The girl stood and looked out while the old woman lighted the candles on the table. How wide the world was, all full of infinite sky and sea, not to speak of the steady ground under foot, which was so much less great. Margaret looked out, her eyes straying far off to the horizon, the limit beyond which there was more and more water, more and more widening firmament. She was very reluctant to have it shut out. To draw down a blind, and retire within the little round of those walls, what a shrinking and lessening of everything ensued! “But it’s more sheltered like; it’s no so cold and so far,” said Bell, with a little shiver. She was not so fond of the horizon. The thick walls that kept out the cold, the blind that shut out that blue opening into infinity, were prospect enough for Bell. She made her young lady sit down, and undid the loops of her silken hair. This hair was Bell’s pride; so fine, so soft, so delicate in texture, not like the gold wire, all knotted and curly, on Jeanie’s good-looking head, who was the other representative of youth in the house. “Eh, it is a pleasure to get my hands among it,” said Bell, letting the long soft tresses ripple over her old fingers. How proud she was of its length and thickness! She stood and brushed and talked over Margaret’s head, telling her a hundred stories, which the girl, half hearing, half replying, yet wholly absorbed in her own fancies, had yet a certain vague pleasure in as they floated over her.

It was good to have Bell there, to feel the touch of homely love about her, and the sound of the voice which was as familiar as her own soft breath. Bell was pleased too. She was not offended when she perceived that her nursling answered somewhat at random. “What is she but a bairn? and bairns’ ways are wonderful when their bit noddles begin working,” Bell said, with the heavenly tolerance of wise affection. She went out of the room afterward, with her Scotch delicacy, to give Margaret time to say her prayers, then came back and covered her carefully with her hard-working hand, softened miraculously by love. “And the Lord bless my white doo,” the old woman said. There were no kisses or caresses exchanged, which was not the habit of the reserved Scotchwoman; but her hand lingered on the coverlet, “happing” her darling. Summer nights are sweet in Fife, but not overwarm. And thus ended the long midsummer day.

CHAPTER V.

Robert Glen, whose reappearance had so interested and excited the innocent mind of Margaret Leslie, was no other than the farmer’s son, in point of locality her nearest neighbor, but in every other respect, childhood being fairly over, as far removed from her as if she had been a princess, instead of the child of an impoverished country gentleman. In childhood it had not been so. Little Margaret had played with Rob in the hay-fields, and sat by him while he fished in the burn, and had rides upon the horses he was leading to the water, many a day in that innocent period. She had been as familiar about the farm “as if it had belonged to her,” Mrs. Glen had said, and had shared the noonday “piece” of her little cavalier often enough, as well as his sports. Even Bell had found nothing to say against this intimacy.

The Glens were very decent folks, not on a level with the great farmers of Fife, yet well to do and well doing; and Rob’s devoted care of the little lady had saved Bell, as she herself expressed it, “many a trail;” but in the ten years from seven to seventeen many changes occur. Rob, who was the youngest, had been the clever boy of the family at the farm. His mother, proud of his early achievements, had sent him to St. Andrews to the excellent schools there, with vague notions of advancement to come. That he should be a minister was, of course, her chief desire, and the highest hope of her ambition; but at this early period there was no absolute necessity for a decision. He might be a writer if he proved to have no “call” for the ministry; or he might be a doctor if his mind took that turn. However, when he had reached the age at which in Scotland the college supplants the school (too early, as everybody knows), Rob was quite of opinion that he had a call to be a minister; and he would have gone on naturally to his college career at St. Andrews, but for the arrival of an uncle, himself sonless, from Glasgow, whose family pride was much excited by Rob’s prizes and honors. This was his mother’s brother, like herself come of the most respectable folk, “a decent, honest man,” which means everything in Scottish moral phraseology. He was “a merchant” in Glasgow, meaning a shopkeeper, and had a good business and money in the bank, and only one little daughter—a fact which opened his heart to the handsome, bright boy who was likely to bring so much credit to his family. Whether Robert Hill (for the boy was his namesake) would have thought so highly of his nephew without these prizes is another question; but as it was, he took an immediate and most warm interest in him. Mr. Hill, however, felt the usual contempt of a member of a large trading community for every small and untrading place.

“St. An’rews!” he said; “send the boy to St. An’rews to sleep away his time in an auld hole where there’s naething doing! Na, na, I’ll no hear o’ that. Send him to me, and I’ll look after him. We know what we’re about in Glasskie; nane o’ your dreamin’ and dozin’ there. We ken the value o’ time and the value o’ brains, and how to make use o’ them. There’s a room that’s never used at the tap o’ the house, and I’ll see till ’im,” said the generous trader.

Mrs. Glen, though half offended at this depreciation of native learning, was pleased and proud of her brother’s liberality.

“I’ll no hear a word against St. An’rews,” she said. “Mony a clever man’s come out of it; but still I’m no blind to the advantages on the other side. The lad’s at an age when it’s a grand thing to have a man over him. No but what he’s biddable: but laddies will be laddies, and a man in the house is aye an advantage. So if you’re in earnest, Robert (and I’m much obliged to ye for your guid opinion of him), I’m no saying but what I’ll take ye at your word.”

“You may be sure I mean it, or I wadna say it,” said her brother; and so the bargain was made.

Rob went to Glasgow, half eager, half reluctant, as is the manner of boys, and in due time went through his classes, and was entered at the Divinity Hall. A Scotch student of his condition has seldom luxurious or over-dainty life in his long vacations—six months long; and calculated for this purpose, that the student may be self-supporting, Rob did many things which kept him independent. He helped his uncle in the shop at first with the placidity of use and wont, thinking a good shop a fine thing, as who can doubt it is? But when Rob began to get on in his learning, and was able to take a tutorship, he discovered with a pang that a shop was not so fine a thing as he supposed.

Early, very early, the pangs of intellectual superiority came upon him. He was clever, and loved reading, and thus got himself, as it were, into society before he was aware of the process that was going on within him, making friends of very different social position from his own. Then the professors noticed him, found him what is easily called “cultivated”—for he had read much in his little room over the shop, with constantly growing ambition to escape from his lowly place and find a higher—and one of them recommended him to a lady in the country as tutor to her boys. This was a most anxious elevation at first, but it trained him to the habits of a class superior to his own; and after that the shop and its homely ways were anguish to Rob. Very soon he found out that it was inconvenient to go so far to college; then he found occupations in the evening, even during the college session, and thus felt justified in separating himself from his kind uncle, who accepted his excuses, though not without a shade of doubt. “Well, laddie, well, laddie, we’re no the folk to keep you if you can do better for yourself,” the good shopkeeper said, affronted yet placable. The process is not uncommon; and, indeed, the young man meant no great harm. He meant that his younger life was pushing out of the husk in which it had been confined, that he was no longer altogether the same as the people to whom he belonged. It was true enough, and if it was hard, who could help that? It gave him more pain to take his plentiful meal rudely in the room behind the shop than it could give them to take it without him.

So he reasoned, and was right and wrong, as we all are, in every revolutionary crisis. Had he been bred a shopkeeper or a farmer lad, no such thoughts would have distracted his mind, and probably he would have been happier; but then he had not been brought up either to the shop or to the farm, and how could he help the natural development which his circumstances and training brought with them? So by degrees he dropped the shop. There was no quarrel, and he went to see them sometimes on the wintry Sunday afternoons, and restrained all his feelings of dismay and humiliation, and bore their “ways” as best he could; but there is nobody so quick as a vulgar relation to find out when a rising young man begins to be ashamed of him. The Hills were sore and angry with the young man to whom they had been so kind. But the next incident in Rob’s career was one that called all his relations round him, out of sheer curiosity and astonishment, to see a prodigy unprecedented in their lives.

After he had gone through all the Latin and Greek that Glasgow could furnish, and he had time for, and had roamed through all the philosophies and begun Hebrew, and passed two years at the Divinity Hall, this crisis came. Six months more and Rob would have been ready to begin his trials before the Presbytery for license as a probationer, when he suddenly petrified all his friends, and drove his mother half out of her senses, by the bewildering announcement that his conscience made it impossible for him to enter the Scotch Church. The shock was one which roused the entire family into life. Cousins unheard of before aroused themselves to behold this extraordinary spectacle. Such hesitations are not so common with the budding Scotch minister as with the predestined English parson, and they are so rare in Rob’s class, that this announcement on his part seemed to his relations to upset the very balance of heaven and earth. Made up his mind not to be a minister! The first sensation in their minds was one of absolute incredulity, followed by angry astonishment when the “infatuated” young fellow repeated and stood by his determination. Not to be a minister! What would he be, then? what would satisfy him? Set him up! they all cried. It was like a fresh assertion of superiority, a swagger and flourish over them all, unbounded presumption and arrogance. Doubts! he was a bonnie one to have doubts. As if many a better man had not signed the Confession before him, ay, and been glad to have the Confession to sign!

This at first was the only view which the kindred felt capable of taking. But by-and-by, when it became apparent that this general flutter of horror was to have no effect, and that Rob stood by his resolution, other features in his enormity began to strike the family. All the money spent upon him at the college, all the time he had lost; what trade could he go into now with any chance of getting on? Two-and-twenty, and all his time gone for nothing! His uncle, Robert Hill, who had been as indignant as any, here interposed. He sent for his sister, and begged her to compose herself. The lad’s head was turned, he said. He had made friends that were not good for a lad in his class of life, that had led him away in other ways, and had made him neglectful of his real friends. But still the lad was a fine lad, and not beyond the reach of hope. This placable sentiment was thought by everybody to proceed from Uncle Robert’s only daughter, Anne, who was supposed to regard her cousin with favorable eyes; but anyhow the suggestion of the Hills was that “the minister,” their own minister, should be got to “speak to” Rob. Glad was the mother of this or any other suggestion, and the minister undertook the office with good-will.

“Perhaps I may be able to remove some of your difficulties,” he said, and he called to himself a professor, one of those who had the young man’s training in hand. Thus Rob became a hero once more among all belonging to him. Had the minister spoken? What had the minister said? Had he come to his right mind? the good people asked. And, indeed, the minister did speak, and so did the professor, both of whom thought Rob’s a most interesting case. They were most anxious to remove his difficulties; nay, for that matter, to remove everything—doctrines and all—to free the young man from his scruples. They spoke, but they spoke with bated breath, scarcely able to express the full amount of the “respect and sympathy” with which they regarded these difficulties of his. “We too—” they said, in mysterious broken sentences, with imperfect utterance of things too profound for the common ear. And they did their best to show him how he might gulp down a great many things without hurting his conscience, which the robust digestion of the past had been able to assimilate, but which were not adapted for the modern mind. “There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds,” these gentlemen said. But Rob held out. He would have been foolish, indeed, as well as rarely disinterested and unsusceptible to the most delicate of flatteries, had he not held out. He had never been of so much importance in the course of his life.

It may be doubtful, however, if it was his conscience alone which stopped him short in his career. Rob had learned in his tutorships, and among the acquaintances acquired at college, to know that a Scotch minister did not possess so elevated a position as in rural Fife he was thought to do. The young man had a large share of ambition in him, and he had read of society and of the great world, that abstraction which captivates inexperienced youth. A minister could no more reach this than, indeed, could the country laird who was the highest representative of greatness known to Rob; but literature could (he thought), art could: and he could write (he flattered himself), and he could draw. Why, then, should he bind himself to the restraints necessary for that profession, when other means of success more easy and glorious were in his power?

This was a very strong supplementary argument to strengthen the resistance of his conscience. And he did not give in; he preferred to go home with his mother, to take, as all his advisers entreated him, time to think everything over. Rob had no objections to take a little time. He wanted money to take him to London, to start him in life, even to pay off the debts which he said nothing of, but which weighed quite as heavily upon him as his troubles of conscience. This was how he came to be, after such a long interval, once more living with his mother at Earl’s-hall farm. He had come home in all the importance of a sceptical hero, a position very dazzling to the simple mind, and very attractive to many honest people. But it was not so pleasant at home. Instead of being the centre of anxious solicitude, instead of being plied by conciliatory arguments, coaxed and persuaded, and respected and sympathized with, he found himself the object of his mother’s irony, and treated with a contemptuous impatience which he fain would have called bigotry and intolerance.

Mrs. Glen was not at all respectful of honest doubt, and she had a thorough contempt for anything and everything that kept a man from making his way in the world. She was not indeed a person of refinement at all. She had lived a hard life, struggling to bring up her children and to “push them forrit,” as she said. The expression was homely, and the end to be obtained perhaps not very elevated. To “push forrit” your son to be Lord Chancellor, or even a general officer, or a bishop, is a fine thing, which strikes the spectator; but when all you can do is to push him “forrit” to a shop in Dundee, is the struggle less noble? It is less imposing, at all events. And the struggling mother who had done her best to procure such rise in life and in comfort as was within her reach for her children was not a person of noble mind or generous understanding. When Rob came home, upon whom her highest hopes had been set, not prosperous like the others, but a failure and disappointment, doing nothing, earning nothing, and with no prospect before him of either occupation or gain, her mortification made her bitter. Fury and disappointment filled her heart. She kept silent for the first day, only going about her household affairs with angry energy, scolding her servants, and as they said, “dinging everything about.” “So lang as she disna ding me!” said Jean the dairy-maid; but it was not to be expected that any long time should pass before she began to “ding” some one, and ere long the culprit himself began to feel the force of her trouble.

“What are you doing?” she cried; “do you call that doing onything—drawing a crookit line with a pencil and filling it up with paint? Paint! ye might paint the auld cart if that’s the trade you mean to follow. It would aye be worth a shilling or twa, which is mair than ever thae scarts and splashes will be.” Or when Rob escaped into the seclusion of a book: “Read, oh ay, ye can read fast enough when it’s for naething but diversion and to pass the time; but ye’ll ne’er gather bawbees with your reading, nor be a credit to them that belong to you.” This was the sting of the whole. He was no credit to those who belonged to him, rather he was an implied shame; for who would believe, Mrs. Glen asked, that this sudden return was by his own will? “Na, na,” she said, “they’ll think it is for ill-doing, and that he’s turned away out of the college. It’s what I would do mysel’. And to think of all I’ve done, and all I’ve put up with, and a’ to come to naething! Eh, man! I would soon, soon have put an end to your douts. I would have made ye sure of ae thing, if it hadna been your uncle Robert and his ministers, ye should hae had nae douts about that: that no idle lad should sit at my fireside and devour the best o’ everything. If ye had the heart of a mouse ye couldna do it. Me, I would starve first; me, I would sweep the streets. I would go down a coal-pit, or work in a gawley chain afore I would sorn on my ain mother, a widow-woman, and eat her out o’ house and hame!”

Poor Rob! he was not very sensitive, and he had been used to his mother’s ways and moods, or these reproaches would have been hard upon him. No doubt, had he been the innocent sufferer for conscience’ sake which he half believed himself to be, life would have been unendurable in these circumstances; but as it was, he only shrugged his shoulders, or jibed in return and paid her back in her own coin. They were both made of the same rough material, and were able to give and take, playing with the blows which would have killed others. Rob was not driven out of the house, out upon the world in despair, as a more sensitive person might have been. He stayed doggedly, not minding what was said, till he should succeed in extracting the money which would be necessary for his start; and from this steady purpose a few warm words were not likely to dissuade him. He, on his side, felt that he was too much of a man for that. But it is not pleasant to have your faults dinned into your ears, however much you may scorn the infliction, and Rob had gone out on the day he met Margaret very much cast down and discouraged. He had almost made up his mind to confront fate rather than his mother. Almost—but he was not a rash young man, notwithstanding all that had happened to him, and the discomfort of issuing forth upon the world penniless was greater than putting up (he said to himself) with an old wife’s flyting; but still the flyting was not pleasant to bear.

“Wha’s that?” his mother said when he returned. “Oh, it’s you! bless me, I thought it was some person with something to do. There was not the draigh in the foot that I’m getting used to. Maybe something’s happened! You’ve gotten something to do, or you’ve ta’en another thought! and well I wot it’s time.”

“No,” he said, “nothing’s happened. I’m tired enough and ready enough to take anything that offered, mother; but, worse luck, nothing has happened. I don’t know what could happen here.”

“No, nor me neither,” said Mrs. Glen; “when a lad hangs on at hame looking for luck like you, and never doing a hand’s turn, it’s far from likely luck will ever come the side he’s on. Oh, pit away your trash, and dinna trouble me with the sight o’t! Painting! paint the auld cart, as I tell ye, if you’re that fond o’ painting, or the byre door.”

“Everybody is not of your mind,” said Rob, stung by this assault. “There are some that think them worth looking at, and that not far off either: somebody better worth pleasing than—” you, he had almost said; but with better taste he added, “any one here.”

“And wha may it be that has such guid taste?” said the mother, satirically; “a lass, I’ll wager. Some poor silly thing or other that thinks Rob Glen’s a gentleman, and is proud of a word from ane sae well put on. Eh, but it’s easy to be well put on when it comes out of another person’s pocket. It would be some lass out of the Kirkton. How dare ye stand there no saying a word, but smile-smiling at me?”

“Would you like it better if I cried?” he said; “smiling is not so easy always. I have little enough to smile at; but it is good sometimes to feel that all the world is not against me.”

“And wha is’t that’s on your side? Some fool of a lass,” repeated Mrs. Glen, contemptuously. “They’re silly enough for onything when a young lad’s in the case. Who was it?” she added, raising her voice; “eh, I would just like to gie her my opinion. It’s muckle the like of them know.”

“I doubt if your opinion would matter much,” he said, with an air of superiority that drove her frantic, “I respect it deeply, of course; but she—a young lady, mother—may be allowed, perhaps, to think herself the best judge.”

“Leddy!” said Mrs. Glen, surprised; and instinctively she searched around her to find out who this could be. “You’ll be meaning Mary Fleming, the dress-maker lass; some call her Miss; or maybe the bit governess at Sir Claud’s.”

Rob laughed; in the midst of his troubles this one gleam of triumph was sweet. “I mean no stranger,” he said, “but an old friend—one that was once my companion and playfellow; and now she’s grown up into the prettiest fairy, and does not despise me even now.”

Mrs. Glen was completely nonplussed. She looked at him with an air of imperious demand, which, gradually yielding to the force of her curiosity, fell, as he made no reply, into a quite softened interrogation. “An auld companion?” she said to herself, bewildered; then added, in a gentler tone than she had used since his return, a side remark to herself: “He’s no that auld himsel’.”

“No,” he said, “but she is younger, mother, and as beautiful as an angel, I think; and she had not forgotten Rob Glen.”

His mother looked at him more and more perplexed. But with her curiosity and with her perplexity her heart melted. Lives there a mother so hard, even when her anger is hottest, as to be indifferent to any one who cares for her boy? “I canna think who you’re meaning,” she said; “auld companions are scarce even to the like o’ me— I mind upon nobody that you could name by that name, a callant like you. Auld playfellow! there’s the minister’s son, as great a credit to his family as you’re a trial; but he’s no a leddy—”

Again Rob laughed; he was indemnified for all his sufferings. “I will not keep you in doubt,” he said, with a certain condescension. “It is little Margaret Leslie; you cannot have forgotten her, mother. If she is not a lady I don’t know who is, and,” he added, sinking his voice with genuine feeling, and a tender rush of childish recollection, “my little queen.”

“Little Margaret Leslie!” said his mother, looking at him stupefied, “you’re no meaning Miss Margret at Earl’s-hall?” she cried, with a half shriek of astonishment, and gazed at him open-mouthed, like one in a dream.

CHAPTER VI.

Mrs. Glen was much more gentle with her son after this triumph of his. Margaret Leslie was but a girl, and her approbation did not mean very much; but it was astonishing how the farmer-woman calmed down, and what a different aspect things began to take to her, after she heard of this meeting. She said nothing more that night; but stared at her son, and let him go, with a half-reluctant relinquishment of her prey, for the moment. And many were the thoughts which crowded through her mind during the night. She had a respect for talent, like all her nation; but she did not admire the talent which was unpractical, and which did not serve a purpose. A young man who was clever enough to pass all his examinations with credit, to preach a good sermon, to get a living, that was what she could understand, and she had been proud by anticipation in her son’s ability to do all this; but when it turned out that he did not mean to employ his talent so, and when his cleverness dwindled down into something impalpable, something that could neither be bought and sold, nor weighed and measured, something which only made a difference between him and other men, without being of any use to him or placing him in the way of any advantage—instead of respecting it, Mrs. Glen scorned the miserable distinction. “Clever! ay, and much good it did him. Tawlent! he would be better without it.”

Such unprofitable gifts exasperated her much more than stupidity would have done. But when she heard of the interview with Margaret Leslie, and the renewal of friendship, and the girl’s delight with those “scarts,” of which she herself was so contemptuous, her practical mind stopped short to consider. Perhaps, after all, though they would never make a living for him, nor were of any earthly use that she could see, these talents might be so directed by a wise and guiding hand as yet to produce something, perhaps to bring him to fortune. A girl who was an heiress might be almost as good a thing for Rob as a kirk. To do Mrs. Glen justice, she did not put the heiress on a level with the kirk, or sceptically allow the one to be as good as the other. She only seized upon the idea as a pis aller, reflecting that, if the kirk was not to be had, a lass with a tocher might make some amends.

Here, then, was something to be done, something practical, with meaning and “an object” in it. Mrs. Glen dearly loved to have an object. It made all the difference to her. It was like going somewhere on business instead of merely taking a walk. The latter mode of exercise she could not abide; but put “an object” into it, and it changed the whole aspect of affairs. This was how her son Rob’s hitherto useless accomplishments rose in her estimation now, when they began to appear no longer useless, but possibly capable of fulfilling some certain kind of end, if not a very exalted one. At once they acquired interest in her eyes. He himself and his presence at home ceased to be aimless, useless, almost disgraceful, as she had hitherto felt them to be. When she got up next morning, it was with a sense of comfort and encouragement greater than she had felt since the unhappy moment when he had declared to her that it was not possible for him to be a minister. Even now, she could not look back without exasperation on that sudden change and downfall of her pride and comfort. But here at least was a prospect for him, a something before him, a way in which his talents, unprofitable as they seemed, might yet be made of practical use. The change in her manner was instantly apparent to her household. “The mistress has gotten word of something,” Jean, the dairy-maid, said, whose hope had been that she herself might not be “dinged” like everything else in the mistress’s way. She did not “ding” anything on that blissful morning. She was even tolerant, though it cost her a struggle, when Rob was late for breakfast. Her whole being seemed softened and ameliorated, the world had opened out before her. Here was an object for exertion, an aim to which she could look forward; and with this life could never be quite without zest to the energetic disposition of Mrs. Glen.

The first sign of the improved condition of affairs that struck Rob occurred after breakfast, when his mother, instead of flinging a jibe at his uselessness, as she went off, bustling and hot-tempered, to her own occupations, addressed him mildly enough, yet with a hasty tone that sounded half shame and half offence. It was not to be expected, was it, that she should now encourage him in the habits she had despised and abused yesterday without some sense of embarrassment and a certain shamefacedness? A weaker woman would not have done it at all, but would have thought of her consistency, and kept silent at least. But Mrs. Glen was far too consistent to have any fears for her consistency. Her embarrassment only made her tone hasty, and made her postpone her speech till she had reached the door. When she had opened it, and was about to leave the room, she turned round to her son, though without looking at him. She said,

“If you will draw, if you ca’ that drawing, there’s a very bonnie view of the Kirkton from the west green. I’m no saying you’re to waste your time on such nonsense, but if you will do’t, there’s the bonniest view.”

With this she disappeared, leaving Rob in a state of wonder which almost reached the point of consternation. It made him superstitious. His mother—his mother! to pause and recommend to him the bonniest view! Something must be going to happen. Never in his life had he been so surprised. He got up, half stupefied, as if under a mystic compulsion, and got his sketching-block and his colors, and went out to the west green. It was as if some voice had come out of the sky above him, or from the soil beneath his feet, commanding this work. What was he that he should be disobedient to the heavenly vision? He went out like a man in a dream, his feet turning mechanically to the indicated spot.

It was a fresh yet sunny morning, the dew not yet off the grass, for everything was early at the farm. The hills, far off, lay clear in softest tints of blue, dark yet transparent, the very color of aerial distance, while all the hues of the landscape between, the brown ploughed land, the green corn, the faint yellowing of here and there a prosperous field, the darkness of the trees and hedges, the pale gleams of water, rose into fuller tones of color as they neared him, yet all so heavenly clear. The morning was so clear that Jean, in the byre, shook her head, and said there would be rain. The clearness of the atmosphere brought everything near; you might have stretched out your hands and touched the Sidlaws, and even the blue peaks of the Grampians beyond; and in the centre of the landscape lay the Kirkton, glorified, every red roof in it, every bit of gray-yellow thatch and dark brown wall telling against the background of fields; the trees scarcely ruffled by the light morning wind, the church rising like a citadel upon its mound of green, flecked with the burial-places of the past, the houses clustered round it, the smoke rising, a faint darkening, as of breath in the air, to mark where human living was. What a scene! yet nothing; the homeliest country, low hills, broad fields, a commonplace village. For a moment Rob, though he had no genius, fell into a trance, as of genius, before this wonderful, simple landscape. “A voice said unto me, Write; and I said, What shall I write?” How put it into words, into colors upon dull paper? His head was filled with a magical confusion. For once in his life he approached the brink of genius—in the sense of his incapacity. He sat down, gazed, and could do no more.

By-and-by Mrs. Glen came strolling out from the house, with that assumed air of ease and leisure which is always so comically transparent. She meant to assume that she had nothing to do, and was taking a walk for pleasure, which was about as unlikely a thing as could have happened, almost as unlikely as pure interest in Rob’s work, which was her real motive. She wanted to see what he had done, whether he had taken that bonniest view, how he was getting on with it, and if it was a thing which could, by any possibility, dazzle and delight a young lady who was an heiress. Assuredly she had not sent out her son to dream over the landscape, to do anything but draw it there and then without delay, as if he had been sent to plough a field. She came up to him, elaborately unoccupied and at her ease, yet explanatory.

“I’ve just come out to look about me,” she said, with fictitious jauntiness. “So you’re at it again! Eh, laddie, what a waste o’ time and good paper, no to speak of thae colors that cost money! And how far are you on by this time? are you near done?”

Rob had the presence of mind to shut his book hastily.

“I have just begun, mother; but, I did not think you took any interest in my poor drawing.”

“Me—take an interest? No! But if you’re to waste my substance and your ain time taking pictures, I may as well see what there is to see as other folk.”

“You shall see it when it is done,” said Rob. “It is not in a condition to show now. It is not a thing that can be done in a minute. There is a great deal of thought necessary—the different harmonies of color, the relation of one part to another—”

Mrs. Glen was overawed.

“Ane would think it was some grand affair. A bit scart upon the paper, and a wheen greens and blues: and ye talk as if it was a battle to fight or a grand law-plea.”

“My dear mother,” said Rob, “many a man could fight a battle that could not draw the Kirkton, with all the hills behind it, and the clouds, and the air.”

“Air! ye can paint air, ye clever lad!” cried Mrs. Glen, with a laugh. “Maybe you can paint the coos mowing and the sheeps baaing? I would not wonder. It’s as easy as the air, which every bairn kens is no a thing you can see.”

“I don’t say I can do it myself,” said Rob; “but I’ve seen pictures where you would think you heard the cows and the sheep—yes, and the skylarks up in the sky, and the hare plashing about in the wet woods.”

“Just that,” said his mother, “and the country gomerel that believes all you like to tell her. Among a’ thae bonnie things there should be a place for the one that’s to be imposed upon; but you’ll no put me there, I’ll warrant you,” she cried, flouncing away in sudden wrath.

This interruption roused Rob and put him upon his mettle. If it was well to have thus dignified his work in her eyes so that she should be concerned in its progress, the result was not an unmitigated good. Hitherto he had worked as the spirit moved him, and when he was not sufficiently stirred had let his pencil alone. But this would not do, now that his labor had become a recognized industry. He betook himself to his task with a sigh.

Rob’s artist-powers were not great. He drew like an amateur, not even an amateur of a high order, and would not have impressed any spectator who had much knowledge of art. But he had a certain amount of that indescribable quality which artists call “feeling,” a quality which sometimes makes the most imperfect of sketches more attractive than the skilfullest piece of painting. This is a gift which is more dependent upon moods and passing impulses than upon knowledge and skill; and no doubt the subtlety of those flying shadows, the breadth of the infinite morning light, so pure, so delicate, yet brilliant, put them beyond the hand of the untrained craftsman. The consequence of this morning’s work, the first undertaken with legitimate sanction and authority, was accordingly a failure. Rob put the Kirkton upon his paper very faithfully; he drew the church and the houses so that nobody could fail to recognize them; but as for the air of which he had boasted! alas, there was no air in it. He worked till the hour of the farm dinner; worked on, getting more eager over it as he felt every line to fail, and walked home, flushed and excited, when he heard his name called through the mid-day brightness. The broth was on the table when he went in, putting down his materials on a side-table; and Mrs. Glen was impatient of the moment he spent in washing his hands.

“You have as many fykes as a fine leddy,” she said. It had not occurred to her to make this preparation for her meal. She drew her chair to the table, and said grace in the same breath with this reproach. “Bless these mercies,” she said; and then, “Ye canna say but you’ve had a lang morning, and naebody to disturb you. I hope you have something to show for it now.”

“Not much,” said Rob.

“No much! It’s a pretence, then, like a’ the rest! Lord bless me, I couldna spend the whole blessed day without doing a hand’s turn, no, if you would pay me for it. Eh, but we’re deceived creatures,” cried Mrs. Glen; “as glad when a bairn comes into the world as if it brought a fortune with it! A bonnie fortune! anxiety and care; and if there’s a moment’s pleasure, it’s aye ransomed by days of trouble. Sup your broth; they’re very good broth, far better than the like of you deserve; but maybe you think it’s no a grand enough dinner for such a fine gentleman? Na, when I was just making up my mind to let you take your will and see what you could do your ain way—and you set up your face and tell me, no much! No much! if it’s not enough to anger a saint!”

“There it is; you can judge for yourself,” cried Rob, with sudden exasperation. He jumped up from the table so quickly that his mother had no time to point out his want of manners in getting up in the midst of his dinner. The words were stopped on her lips, when he suddenly placed the block on which he had been drawing before her. Mrs. Glen had not condescended to look at any of these performances before. It would have seemed a sort of acceptance of his excuse had she taken any notice of the “rubbitch” with which he “played himself,” and she had really felt the contempt she expressed. Drawing pictures! it was a kind of childish occupation, an amusement to be pursued on a wet day, when nothing else was possible, or as a solace in the tedium of illness. But when Rob put down before her, relieved against the white table-cloth, the Kirkton itself in little, a very reproduction of the familiar scene she had beheld every day for years, the words were stopped upon his mother’s lips.

“Eh!” she cried, in mere excess of emotion, able for nothing but a monosyllable. The very imperfection of it gave it weight in Mrs. Glen’s unpractised eyes. “Losh me!” she cried, when she had recovered the first shock of admiration. “Rob, was it you that did that? are you sure it’s your ain doing?” She could not trust her own eyes.

“And poor enough too,” said Rob, but he liked the implied applause: who would not? Praise of what we have done well may satisfy our intellectual faculties, but praise of a failure, that is a thing which really goes to the heart.

“Poor! I would like to ken what you mean by poor?” Mrs. Glen pushed away the broth and took up the block in a rapture of surprise and delight. “It’s the very Kirkton itself!” she said; “there’s Robert Jamieson’s house, and there’s Hugh Macfarlane’s, and there’s the way you go to the post, and there’s the Kilnelly burying-ground, and the little road up to the kirk—no a thing missed out. And do you mean to tell me it’s a’ your own doing? Oh, laddie, laddie, the talents you’ve gotten frae Providence! and the little use you make o’ them,” added his mother, with a sudden recollection of the burden of her prophecy against her son, which could not be departed from even now.

Rob was so much encouraged that he ventured to laugh. “There is nothing I wish so much as to make more use of them,” he said; “I ought to study and have good teaching.”

“Teaching! what do you want with teaching? You were never one that was easy satisfied; what mair would you have?” she cried. She could not take her eyes from the drawing. She touched it lightly with her finger to make sure that it was flat, and did not owe its perspective to mechanical causes. “To think it’s naething but a cedar pencil and a wheen paints! I never saw the like! and you to do it, a laddie like you! It beats me! Ay, there’s Robert Jamieson’s house, and yon’s Hugh Macfarlane’s, and the wee gate into the kirk-yard as natural! and Widow Morrison’s small shop joining the kirk. I can ’most see the things in the window. I would like the Minister to see it,” said Mrs. Glen.

“Not that one, it is not good enough; there are others, mother.”

She cast upon him a half-contemptuous glance. He was “no judge,” even though it was he who had done it: how could he be a judge, when he had so little appreciation of this great work?

“It’s a great deal you ken,” she said; “I will take it mysel’ and let him see it. He would be awfu’ pleased. His ain kirk, and ye can just see the Manse trees, though it’s no in the picture. And a’ done in one forenoon! I suppose,” she added, suddenly, “the like of this brings in siller. It’s a business, like any other trade?”

“When they are better than that, yes—pictures sell; but you should not speak of it as a trade.”

“I wish it was half as honest and straightforward as many a trade. Better than that! that’s aye your way. But you have not suppit your broth. I would not say now,” said Mrs. Glen, in high good-humor “(sit down and finish your dinner), but Miss Margret would like a look at that.”

“It is not half good enough.”

“Hold your peace, you silly lad! I hope I ken what I’m saying. She’s but lonely, poor thing—no a young person to speak to. It would divert her to see it. I would not forbid you now to give the young leddy the like o’ that in a present. Sir Ludovic’s our landlord, after a’. He’s no an ill landlord, though he’s poor. It is aye a fine thing to be civil, and ye never can tell but what a kind action will meet with its reward. I see no reason why you should not take that to Miss Margret in a present,” Mrs. Glen said.

CHAPTER VII.

Rob had not been so light of heart since he made that momentous decision about his profession which had so strangely changed his life. For the first time since then he felt himself an allowed and authorized person, not in disgrace or under disapprobation of all men, as he had hitherto been; and the permission to carry his drawing of the Kirkton to Miss Margaret “in a present” amused him, while it gave at the same time a certain sanction to his engagement to meet her, and show her the other productions of his pencil. Rob had his wits about him more than Margaret had, though not so much as his mother. He was aware that to ask a young lady to meet him at the burn, for what purpose soever, was not exactly what was becoming, and that the advantage he had taken of their childish friendship was perhaps not quite so “like a gentleman” as he wished to be. He could not, indeed, persuade himself that his mother was any authority in such a question; but still the fact that she thought it quite natural that he should carry on his old relations with Margaret, and even encouraged him to make the young lady a present, gave him a sort of fictitious satisfaction. He would affect to take his mother’s opinion as his authority, if his conduct was called in question, and thus her ignorance was a bulwark to him. He went out again after his broth, and worked diligently all the afternoon, though Mrs. Glen thought it very unnecessary.

“’Twill just spoil it,” she said. “The like of you never knows where to stop: either you do nothing at all, or you do a hantle o’er much.”

But on this point Rob took his own way. Certainly, even when you despise the opinion of those around, it is good to be thought well off. The moral atmosphere was lighter round him, and there was the pleasant prospect of meeting Margaret in the evening, and receiving the delightful incense of her admiration; a more agreeable way of filling up this interval of leisure could not have been devised, had his leisure been the most legitimate, the most natural in the world.

While he sat at his drawing in the breezy afternoon, a further sign of the rehabilitation he had undergone was accorded to him. Voices approaching him through the garden, which lay between the house and the west green, prepared him for visitors, and these voices were too familiar to leave him in doubt who the visitors were. It was the Minister, whom Mrs. Glen was leading to the spot where her son was at work on his drawing. “I’ll no say that I expected much,” said Mrs. Glen, “for I’m not one that thinks everything fine that’s done by my ain. I think I’m a’ the mair hard to please; but, Doctor, when I saw upon the paper the very Kirkton itsel’! Losh me! there wasn’t a house but you would have kent it. Robert Jamieson’s and Hugh Macfarlane’s, just as like as if you had been standing afore them. It clean beats me how a lad can do that, that has had little time for anything but his studies; for, Doctor, I never heard but that my Rob was a good student. He hasna come to a good issue, which is awfu’ mysterious; but a good student he aye was, and there’s no a man that kens who will say me nay.”

“I am well aware of that,” said Dr. Burnside. “It makes it all the more mysterious, as you well say; but let us hope that time and thought will work a change. I’m not one to condemn a young man because he has troubles of mind. We’ve all had our experiences,” the good man said, as he came through the opening in the hedge to the west green, which was nothing more imposing than the “green,” technically so called, in which the farmer’s household dried its clothes—a green, or, to speak more circumstantially, “a washing green,” a square of grass on which the linen could be bleached if necessary, and with posts at each corner for the ropes on which it was suspended to dry, being a necessity of every house in Fife, and throughout Scotland. There was no linen hung out at present to share the breezy green with Rob. He sat on the grass on a three-legged stool he had brought with him; a low hedge ran round the little enclosure, with a little burn purling under its shadow, and beyond were the green fields and the village, with all its reds and blues. Behind him an old ash-tree fluttered its branches and sheltered him from the sun.

“Well, Robert, and how do you do?” said Dr. Burnside. “I have come out to see you, at your mother’s instance. She tells me you’ve developed a great genius for painting. I am very happy to hear of it, but I hope you will not let the siren art lead you away from better things.”

“What are better things?” said Rob; “I don’t know any,” and he got up to respond to the Minister’s salutation. Dr. Burnside shook his head.

“That is what I feared,” he said. “You must not give up for painting, or any other pleasure of this earth, the higher calling you were first bound to, my good lad. You’ve served your time to the Church, and what if you have passing clouds that trouble your spirit? Having put your hand to the plough, you must not turn back.”

“Eh, that’s what I tell him every day o’ his life,” said Mrs. Glen.

“I came on purpose to have a long conversation with you,” said the Minister. “Yes, very pretty, very pretty. I am no judge of paintings myself, but I’ve no doubt it’s very well done. I need not tell you I’m very sorry for all that’s come and gone; but I cannot give up the hope, Robert, that you will see the error of your ways. I cannot think a promising lad like you will continue in a wrong road.”

“If it is a wrong road,” said Rob.

“Whisht, lad, and hearken what the Minister says; but before I go in, Doctor, look at the picture. Is’t no wonderful? There’s your ain very trees, and the road we’ve ga’en to the kirk as long as I can mind, and a’ the whigmaleeries of the auld steeple. Na, I put nae faith in it at first, no me! but when I saw it, just a bit senseless paper, good for nothin’ in itsel’! Take a good look at it, Doctor. It’s no like the kind of thing ye’ll see every day.”

“Yes, Mrs. Glen,” said the Minister, “I do not doubt it is very pretty. I am no judge myself. I would like to hear what Sir Claude would say; he is a great connoisseur. But it was not about pictures, however pretty, that I was wanting to speak to Robert. My good lad, put away your bonnie view and all your paints for a moment, and take a walk down to the Manse with me. I would like to satisfy myself how you stand, and perhaps a little conversation might be of use. There is nothing so good for clearing the cobwebs out of the mind, as just entering into the state of the case with a competent person, one that understands you, and knows what to advise.”

“That is what I aye said when all thae professors in Glasgow was taighling at him; the Doctor at hame would understand far better, that is what I aye said. Go with the Minister, Rob, and pay great attention. I’ll carry in the things. But I wish ye would take a good look at the picture, Doctor; and ye’ll no keep him too long, for he has a friend to see, and two-three things to do. You’ll mind that, Rob, my man.”

Never since the fatal letter which disclosed his apostasy had his mother addressed him before as “my man.” And Rob knew that the Doctor was not strong in argument. He went with him across the fields he had just been putting into his sketch, with an easy mind. He was fond of discussion, like every true-born Scotsman, and here at least he was pretty sure of having the victory. Mrs. Glen, for her part, carried in “the paints” with a certain reverence. She put the sketch against the wall of the parlor, and contemplated it with pride, which was a still warmer sentiment than her pleasure. It was “our Rob” that had done that; nobody else in the country-side was so clever. It was true that Sir Claude was a connoisseur, as the Minister said, and was supposed to know a great deal about art, but nobody had ever seen a picture of his to be compared with this of “our Rob’s.” Mrs. Glen set the sketch against the wall, and got her knitting and sat down opposite to it, not to worship, but to build castles upon that foundation, which was not much more satisfactory than Alnascher’s basket of eggs. The thought passed through her mind, indeed, that he who could do so much in this accidental and chance way, what might he not have done had he followed out his original vocation? which was a grievous thought. But then it never could have been in Rob’s way to be Archbishop of Canterbury, or anything but a parish minister, like the Doctor himself; whereas, perhaps, with this unsuspected new gift, and out of his very idleness and do-nothingness, who could tell what might come? Mrs. Glen’s imagination was of a vulgar kind, but it enabled her to follow out a perfectly feasible and natural line of events, and to settle what her own line of conduct was to be with admirable good sense: not to press him, not to put herself forward as arranging anything, not to interfere with the young lady, but to wait and see how things would happen. Nothing could be more simple. The end was a mist of confusion before the farmer-woman’s eyes. Perhaps she fell asleep, nodding over her half-knitted stocking in the drowsiness of the afternoon; but if so, a vague vision of “our Rob” turned into Sir Robert, and reigning at Earl’s-hall, glistened at the end of that vista. How he could be Sir Robert, by what crown matrimonial he could be invested with the title and the lands of which Ludovic Leslie, and not Margaret, was the heir, we need not try to explain. The dreamer herself could not have explained it, nor did she try; and perhaps she had fallen asleep, and was not accountable for the fancies that had got into her drowsy brain.

As for Rob, he had a long conversation with the Minister, and posed him as he had intended and foreseen. Dr. Burnside’s theology was ponderous, and his information a trifle out of date. Even in the ordinary way of reasoning, his arguments were more apt to unsettle the minds of good believers and make the adversary rejoice, than to produce any more satisfactory result; and it may be supposed that he was not very well prepared for the young sceptic, trained in new strongholds of learning which the good Doctor knew but by name. Dr. Burnside shook his puzzled head when he went into the Manse to tea. “Yon’s a clever lad,” he said to his wife. “I sometimes think the devil always gets the cleverest.”

“Well, Doctor,” said Mrs. Burnside, who was a very strong theologian, “have you forgotten that the foolish things of this earth are to confound the strong?”