'Of course not; where would your list end if we went on thus?'
Blanche either meant Ellinor's lover, or made a mistake; but somehow both Colville and Sir Redmond Sleath noted her words.
After a time it was discovered that 'the young man' referred to was Dr. Wodrow's only son, so his name was included in the list.
'How many such acquaintances as these people are made in a year and then dropped,' observed Blanche, unaware that Captain Colville coloured with something of pain and even annoyance at her remark.
To all this sort of thing Sir Redmond Sleath listened with attention. We need not conceal the fact or circumstance that this enterprising baronet had marked out the soft, dreamy, artistic, and gentle Ellinor for a kind ofaffaire du cœurpeculiarly his own. Mary Wellwood, from her natural strength of character, he knew to be beyond the range of his nefarious views or schemes; and eventually, the warmth of his attentions to Ellinor were only curbed in public or veiled by a wholesome fear of his new acquaintance, Captain Colville, who, he thought, was 'idiotically smitten' by a fancy for or interest in Mary, for a time, of course, he supposed, 'as these things never lasted;' and he hoped, when the Guardsman went back to town and was fully under the influence of Blanche and her mother, to return to the vicinity of Birkwoodbrae on any pretence, and then have the field to himself.
For a man like Sir Redmond there was a strange fascination in achieving the conquest of, or in 'running to earth,' as he would have phrased it, a girl so pure and confiding as Ellinor, and whose beauty and helplessness inspired him with a kind of love, as he thought it, but a selfish love peculiarly his own.
It may excite surprise that such worldlings as Lord and Lady Dunkeld did not prefer a baronet as apartifor their daughter's hand; but Leslie Colville was by far the richer of the two, and possessed landed property in various directions; and, however Sir Redmond might admire Blanche Galloway, he dared not raise his eyes to her, for very sufficient reasons yet to be explained.
Finding that Colville, as we have said, was curiously disposed to resent some of his off-hand remarks about Mary and Ellinor Wellwood, he began to take refuge in professions of the greatest esteem for them both, and occasionally urged his regard for the youngest.
'In love again—you—and with a little country lass?' said Colville, laughing. 'You who were over head and ears, as the saying is, with Lady Sarah, all last season, as repute said.'
'When she loved me—if she was capable of it,' replied Sleath, with a dark look, 'she was indeed my Queen of Hearts.'
'And now, having married that millionaire fellow, she is Queen of Diamonds. But what could you expect of a girl who was engaged to two men at once, and wore the engagement rings ofboth?'
'Of course her heart was no longer her own when the millionaire solicited. She accepted him, and made a hecatomb of my letters and those of another fool, who is now broiling with his regiment in South Africa. 'The world well lost for love' is poetic, certainly, but devilish stupid practically.'
Though entirely opposite and different in character and disposition, both these men looked forward with pleasure to the anticipated garden-party—Colville with real satisfaction to the hope of meeting Mary Wellwood once more; and Sir Redmond to the chances of furthering his own particular views.
Putting some constraint upon themselves, we are sorry to say, Lady Dunkeld and her daughter on the following afternoon drove over to Birkwoodbrae, and sent in their cards to Mary and Ellinor Wellwood, who were busy in their little drawing-room with some piles of freshly-cut flowers; and though both were startled—or certainly surprised—by this unusual visit, nothing of that emotion was perceptible in their manner; yet the arrival of the London carriage, with its showy hammercloth, with the Dunkeld arms on the panels, a row of plated coronets round the top, the elaborate 'snobbery,' if we may call it so, of rank—Scottish rank, too often without patriotism—was there—excited something akin to terror among the old servants; and the way in which one of the tall 'matched footmen' pulled the door bell, and the other banged down the carriage steps, went quite 'upon the nerves' of old Elspat Gordon, and the visitors sailed in, displaying those perfect toilettes which were suited to the Row, and which London alone can produce.
The beauty of the day, of the weather generally, more than all the beauty of Birkwoodbrae and its garden, 'which seemed quite a love of a place, with all its roses and flowers,' were all discoursed on rapidly and fluently by Lady Dunkeld and Blanche Galloway, while their observant eyes took in every detail of the sisters, their appearance, dress, and surroundings, with all of which they felt secretly bound to admit that no solid fault could be found, though the carpets, hangings, and so forth had certainly seen better times.
'We are to have a garden-party in a few days, Miss Wellwood,' said Lady Dunkeld, 'and hope to have the pleasure of seeing you and Miss Ellinor. Lest you might be out, I have brought your cards; but, being a country gathering, it will be, I fear, rather a tame affair,' she added, smiling, as she laid the embossed and scented missives on the table.
Mary's long lashes quivered as she glanced at Ellinor. Both bowed an assent, and murmured thanks, adding that they led very quiet lives now, and seldom went much abroad.
'What are you making with all these beautiful flowers?' asked Blanche Galloway; 'two funeral chaplets apparently.'
'They are so—green ivy leaves, white roses, and lily of the valley,' replied Mary.
'For what purpose?'
'To lay on the graves of papa and mamma. To-morrow is the anniversary of her death—she died in summer, papa in winter,' she added, with the slightest perceptible break in her voice.
'Oh, indeed; how good of you!' murmured Lady Dunkeld.
'How pretty!' cooed her daughter, one of those young ladies so carefully trained as to think it 'awfully bad form' to betray any emotion or feeling that was in any way natural.
'Sir Redmond Sleath was so enchanted with your drawings, Miss Ellinor,' said Lady Dunkeld, to change the subject, as woful ones were eminently distasteful to her. 'He is never weary of singing their praises.'
This was not strictly true, for the baronet had just barely mentioned the matter once, but poor Ellinor blushed with real pleasure.
'He is very good-natured,' said Miss Galloway, lest the listener might value Sir Redmond's praises too highly; 'but fastidious—oh, very fastidious. Don't you think he has handsome eyes?'
'I did not observe them.'
'Indeed! They are a lovely blue.'
'I never before heard a man's eyes called lovely,' said Mary, laughing.
'And he is such a flirt!'
'Blanche, child!' expostulated her mother.
'But he has strange ideas—people say he will never marry,' added the 'child,' who was determined that, whatever Ellinor might think, she was not to flatter herself that she had made anything approaching a conquest. 'He has been everywhere, and, of course, has seen everything.'
'And is a male flirt, you say?' said Mary, smiling.
'Too awfully so; but then, most of the young ladies he knows are not disinclined to a little flirtation, and can take very good care of themselves.'
As Miss Galloway spoke, there was the slightest derisive erection of her delicate eyebrows, and the pointed intonation of mockery in her well-bred voice. All this was meant for Ellinor's edification, and she did not entirely forget it; but to Mary there seemed something discordant, flippant, and strange in thus discussing a visitor's ways or character.
'We all travelled together,' said Lady Dunkeld, 'and came straight from London to Perth. As for tarrying in Edinburgh, that was not to be thought of.'
'Of course not,' added Blanche, shrugging her shoulders. 'I don't think even Captain Colville with all his patriotism could stand the dulness, the narrow ideas, and the bad style of people there. All provincial towns are so unbearable after London.'
Mary Wellwood resented, but silently, their ungracious remarks. Her memories of Edinburgh were experiences never to be forgotten; and she thought of the lovely valley gardens, the veritable river of greenery under the vast Castle Rock, the glorious white terraces of the New Town, the dark and history-haunted masses of the Old—the Regalia, Mons Meg, and all the rest of it, as she had seen them in the happiest days of her girlhood; and she felt pleased when Lady Dunkeld said:
'Captain Colville had not been there for years; and hewasdisposed to stay a day or two behind us.'
'Surely not for the sake of any beauty he saw,' exclaimed Blanche, laughing; 'but in many ways he is very different from Sir Redmond.'
He was indeed, we are glad to say; but in what particular manner the Hon. Blanche referred to, the sisters were not fated to know, as Lady Dunkeld now rose, the carriage was summoned, and saying with one of her sweet but stereotyped smiles, 'we shall expect to see you at our little affair, gave them the tips of her gloved fingers and swept away.
Mary and Ellinor looked at each other with a little expression of surprise and bewilderment in their faces, and both felt that Blanche Galloway had, to say the least of it, disappointed them by her general style.
Their emotions varied—one moment they felt flattered and pleased by the recognition of their own position and that once held by their parents in society which the sudden visit from the ladies of the great house implied.
At another moment they felt the reverse—feared they were being patronised, and thought they should decline the invitation.
Yet why?
To do so would be, perhaps, to adopt the position of an inferior; and the invitation might be the result of real kindness of heart, after all.
They knew not that they were indebted for the whole affair chiefly to a few friendly remarks made by Lord Dunkeld, and more especially by Leslie Colville, though those of the latter caused some afterthoughts.
'Men are very weak,' surmised Lady Dunkeld; 'but, of course, a man in Captain Colville's position can mean nothing more than simplest kindness, but the girls are pretty—unfortunately for themselves, I think, more than pretty.'
The pride, admiration, and half-alarm of Elspat Gordon and other old servitors on the subject of the visit, which proved their nine days' wonder, amused while it annoyed Mary. She had her own ideas—it might be fears for the future—and, though she said little, she thought a good deal.
The acceptances were written and despatched; and costumes were the next thing to be considered for the entertainment, of which Robert Wodrow heard the tidings with a very dark expression in his face indeed.
'Of what are you thinking, Ellinor?' asked Mary, softly, seeing the dark eyes of her sister fixed apparently on vacancy.
'Only of how differently the lives of some of us are allotted, and how pleasantly some people are circumstanced, compared with others.'
'Meaning ourselves and such as Blanche Galloway?'
'Well, yes.'
'Never mind, Ellinor dear,' replied Mary; 'I always say, blessed be God for all His gifts,' she added, thinking of the legend over the old doorway.
The sun of a soft and balmy summer afternoon was, as the song has it,
'Glinting brightOn Invermay's sweet glen and stream,'
on all the silver birches that grow thereby, on the rocky gullies through which the stream gurgles and babbles as it forces a passage towards the Earn, and on the green mound of the Holy Hill, of which its ceaseless current has swept so much away, when Mary Wellwood, alone, or attended only by her dog, and full of her own happy and innocent day-dreams, took a narrow path that leads northward down the side of the sylvan strath.
Her dress was plain, but fitted well her lithe and slender figure. She had on the daintiest of white cuffs and collar; a sunshade over her head lined with pink imparted to her soft face a glow that it did not naturally possess, and over her left arm were the two chaplets she and Ellinor had been so lately preparing.
No sound but the rustle of leaves and the twitter of birds broke the sunny stillness, till she eventually heard Jack, her fox-terrier, who was careering in front of her, barking and yelping with all the satisfaction of a joyous dog that has met with a friend, and almost immediately afterwards a turn of the rocky path brought her face to face with Captain Colville, who, rod in hand and basket on shoulder, had just quitted his fishing in the May after a satisfactory day's sport, and about whose well-gaitered legs Jack was leaping and bounding noisily.
'When Jack was here, I knew his mistress could not be far off,' said Colville, lifting his fly-garnished wideawake and presenting a hand with his brightest smile. 'You know the saw, Miss Wellwood, "Love me, love my dog," but it would seem that Jack loves me. And Jack is a travelled dog, I understand—one who has seen the world?'
'Yes; Jack was a soldier's dog—was with Roberts' army in India, and in more than one battle,' replied Mary.
'I too have been in India—a bond between Jack and me,' said Colville, as he produced a biscuit from his pocket, and the dog caught it with a snap.
'He wags his dear old tail quite as if he recognised a comrade,' said Mary, laughing, while Colville accompanied her along the narrow path over which the silver birches drooped their graceful foliage.
'And so you and your sister, Miss Ellinor, are cousins of my brother-officer, Wellwood?' said Colville, after a pause, and a little abruptly, as Mary thought.
'I am sorry to say we are.'
'Why sorry—he is not half a bad fellow?'
'Well, I have no reason to be otherwise than quite indifferent on the subject of his existence. It was some family matter. Our parents were never friends, and he—he——'
'What?'
'Has chosen to forget there were such persons in the world as Ellinor and I; and considering that we have so few relations—none else nearly now——' Mary paused, and her eyes fell on the chaplets through which her slender arm was passed.
'He could never have seen you,' said Colville, earnestly; 'had he done so he would never have forgotten you, believe me; and when I tell him——'
'Tell him nothing, pray.'
'As you please, Miss Wellwood. I knew him in India, before I was in the Guards.'
'Indeed.'
'Yes; I remember his first dinner with our mess at Lahore—got screwed, as the phrase is; and how do you think he was taken to his bungalow?'
'In a cab, perhaps,' suggested Mary.
'We carried him through the lines shoulder-high upon a door, with the bugles playing the "Dead March in Saul," before him.'
'Then he is dissipated?'
'Oh—awfully—a wild fellow, in that sense.'
'He was wounded in an affair with a hill tribe?'
'So was I. Had your odious cousin been shot, I suppose you would not have cared much?'
'Nay—nay—nay,' exclaimed Mary; 'can you think so vilely of me? Perhaps I might have wept for him?'
'Indeed. Why?'
'In the knowledge that, like Ellinor and myself, he had no father, mother, or other kindred to sorrow for him.'
Her voice, musical at all times, and sweetly modulated—for a chord seemed to run through every word—broke a little just then; and she coloured on seeing how earnestly her companion was regarding her.
'For what purpose are those wreaths of flowers?' he asked, softly, after a pause.
'To lay upon our graves.'
'Our graves,' he repeated.
'Papa and mamma's graves, I mean.'
'A melancholy duty.'
'The only one that is left us now.'
'May I accompany you?'
'If you choose, Captain Colville.'
'And where are they buried?'
'Here,' replied Mary, as she gently opened the gate of the churchyard, and they entered together.
It was an old and sequestered burying-ground—older than the days when Fordoun, the Father of Scottish History, wrote of the district as Fortevioch, a supposed corruption of the Gaelic for distant and remote. Old headstones, spotted with lichens and green with moss, were there half sunk in the ground amid the long rank grass; but the two graves that Mary sought so lovingly, were smoothly turfed and adorned with flowers planted by the hands of herself and Ellinor.
As she knelt to deposit a chaplet at the head of each, Colville read the inscription on the modest tombstone to the memory of Colonel Wellwood, of the Scots Fusiliers, and Ellinor his wife, and Mary, glancing upwards, saw that as he read a soft expression stole into his face, while he hastily, almost surreptitiously, lifted his hat, and then looked more kindly, if possible, at her.
'Well,' thought the girl, 'he is, at least, the best of good fellows to feel this interest in total strangers. It is, I suppose, what poor papa used to call "the Freemasonry of the service."'
Anon came other thoughts that were less pleasing to her. Did real emotion and kindness prompt all this, or was it but a cunning attempt, by an affectation of sympathy and friendly interest, to gain her favour.
But she repelled the suspicion as something unworthy of him and of herself.
Quitting the churchyard in silence, he softly closed the gate, and they continued to walk on slowly a little way together, and Colville was silently recalling Mary's curious legendary story of the funereal light seen by Elspat, the old soldier's widow.
Mary Wellwood's manner and bearing proved to Colville wonderfully attractive. Easy, unaffected, and apparently unconscious of her own beauty, she was charming. She was equal, in all the attributes of good society, to any girl he had met, and Leslie Colville was no bad judge, as he had been brought up in an exclusive set, among whom any faults of breeding were discrepancies never to be atoned for.
And she—how was she affected towards him? Stealing a glance at his handsome face and figure from time to time, and listening to his very pleasant voice, Mary—somewhat of a day-dreamer—was thinking how delightful it would have been had God given her and Ellinor such a man as a brother to guide, love, and protect them.
It began to seem to both that they had been friends—companions certainly—for a longer time than they had known each other; they discovered so much in common between them, so far as sentiment and opinion went; but remembering Mr. Wodrow's assurance that Captain Colville was engaged to Blanche Galloway, she compelled herself to be somewhat reserved in her manner towards him, yet more than once it thawed unconsciously. However, she was a little startled when, after a pause, he said suddenly, in a low and earnest tone, while looking down into her face,
'Tell me something of your life here at Invermay, Miss Wellwood?'
'Something of my life—what a strange request!' exclaimed Mary, her dark blue eyes dilating as she spoke. 'What can I tell you that could be of interest to you?'
'Pardon me—how your time passes, for instance, I mean.'
'As you see,' she replied, smiling, 'and as you have seen; my daily duties but repeat themselves. I have my little household to look after, accounts and taxes to pay—thanks to our kind kinsman abroad (for Birkwoodbrae is entailed) we have no rent to pay; I have my feathered family in the yard to supervise; my garden with its flowers and fruits; my poor pensioners in the village and all round about.'
'A grey life for one so young and winning,' thought Colville; 'and with you,' he added aloud, 'so runs the world away?'
'Yes.'
'And all your people love you, Dr. Wodrow tells me?'
'I hope so—nay, I am sure they do,' replied Mary, with one of her brightest smiles.
'And you love the scenery here?'
'Yes—every rock and tree and stream; they have all their old stories and young associations to me.'
'And your old home at Birkwoodbrae?' he added, smiling at her enthusiasm.
'Yes—dearly, every stone of it!'
He paused a little, as if lost in thought, and then said,
'But surely you must miss something in your life, Miss Wellwood—you must be lonely amid these birchen woods?'
'Lonely with Ellinor and all my work? Oh! no. I assure you I am not.'
'But you cannot expect to have her—a girl so very handsome—always with you?'
'Perhaps not,' said Mary, and her long dark lashes drooped, as her thoughts hovered between poor Robert Wodrow and his probable rival, the tawny-haired Englishman.
'Nor can she always have you; and what then?' said Colville, lightly touching her hand, and lowering his voice in a way that to some there would have been no mistaking; but Mary, devoid of vanity, was all unconscious of it, and, disliking to talk about herself, now talked of other things.
Again and again Colville thought, in her perfect sweetness, humility, and composure, how utterly dissimilar she was in many ways from the town-bred girls he had been wont to meet in his London life especially, where the beautiful was so often combined with the artificial, and even youth with utter hollowness of heart. Amid dinners, garden-parties, the Row, and the generalrôleof his life as a Guardsman, the pet of many a woman and her fair brood, all the more that he was now the inheritor of a revenue that was great, he had been conscious of all that.
To Mary—who was a close observer in her way—it sometimes seemed that there was in Captain Colville's face, when he addressed her, a half-amused expression, mingling with much of undoubted admiration. The first was occasionally a source of pique to her; and the other was a source of pique, too, rather than pleasure; for, if he was thefiancéof Miss Galloway, he had no business to amuse himself with, or bestow admiration on, any other young lady, and these ideas made her manner to him reserved at times.
In being assisted over an awkward stone stile, though she required no aid, yet she was compelled to take his proffered grasp, but even then unconsciously her
'Very coldness still was kind,And tremulously gentle her small handWithdrew itself from his, but left behindA little pressure, thrilling, and so blandAnd slight, that to the mind 'twas but a doubt.'
As her slim hand was quickly withdrawn from his, and she murmured her 'thanks,' Mary's first thought was that it was cased in a somewhat too well-worn glove, and Colville perhaps remarked this too, for he said,
'Do you always wear gauntlet gloves?'
'No; but then I am so much in the garden among thorns and bushes that ordinary gloves are useless, and I used to get through so many of six and a quarter.'
'Surely even that is too large for a hand like yours,' said he; and Mary now fairly blushed at the tenor of the conversation, and when he attempted again to take her shapely little hand in his she resolutely withheld it, and, thinking of Blanche Galloway, said,
'Please don't, Captain Colville; and now I must bid you farewell, with many thanks for your escort.'
And Colville, who was under the impression, from Blanche Galloway's mistaken remark, that Robert Wodrow was 'the lover of the elder sister,' thought he would not just then press his society further upon Mary Wellwood. Nor could he have done so, for just where the little wooded path they had been pursuing opened upon the highway, a well-appointed little park phaeton, drawn by a pair of beautiful ponies, and driven by Blanche Galloway, was seen drawn up under the trees about forty yards off.
'The time has passed so quickly when with you, Miss Wellwood,' said Colville, lifting his hat with an air of positive confusion, 'that I forgot—I quite forgot——'
'What, Captain Colville?'
'That Miss Galloway's pony carriage was to meet me here, and drive me home. Ah, there it is——'
'And she too, I think,' said Mary, turning, and growing pale with absolute pain and annoyance at the whole situation; yet, after all, there was nothing in it. However, the Honourable Blanche, after a glance at Mary from under her tied veil, turned away also; and Mary, with pride awakened and a sense of mortification, pursued the path to Birkwoodbrae.
But Jack, as if loth that the two should part, scoured backwards and forwards between them, till, after a time, he finally followed his mistress, and even from this, probably, Blanche angrily drew deductions.
We fear the captain did not enjoy much his drive home, though driven by a Park beauty in that luxurious pony phaeton, as Blanche put her own construction on the meeting and sudden parting—a construction far apart from the reality. She was sorely piqued, and he was not surprised by her taciturnity, though he strove to ignore it, and expatiated on the beauty of the scenery, on lights and shades, tints and effects, as if he had been a Royal Academician; nor was he surprised when she remarked to him very pointedly and plainly in the drawing-room after dinner, when she was idling over the piano,
'I don't think mamma will approve much of your cultivating those strange girls at Birkwoodbrae.'
'I do not do so,' said he, stooping close to her pretty head; 'but did not you and Lady Dunkeld call for them the other day?'
'Out of curiosity—and urged, perhaps, by Dr. Wodrow, who greatly affects to favour them.'
'Surely this is severe?' urged Colville, gently.
'Men, like women, cannot be too wary of chance medley acquaintances,' persisted Blanche, cresting up her handsome head.
'I have somewhere read,' said her mamma, who was nowau faitof the whole episode, 'that men may study women as they do a barometer, but only understand them on a subsequent day.'
'It may be so,' said Colville, 'but what then?'
'I agree with Blanche in her views of these Wellwood girls. People may do much in town that they cannot do in country places, where everyone's actions are, as it were, under a microscope; where every trivial movement is known, freely commented upon, and often exaggerated by menials and the vulgar. Thus,' continued Lady Dunkeld, with a very set expression on her usually placid face, 'I am not sure—nay, I am quite certain—it does not agree with what society callsles convenances, visiting these young girls.'
'In some respects you are right,' replied Colville, colouring with real pain; 'but I was not visiting. I only met Miss Wellwood near the old burying-ground—moreover, they are ladies, she and her sister, perfect ladies!' he urged, with a gleam in his dark eyes, which Lady Dunkeld was not slow to detect.
'But living so eccentrically alone?'
'So independently, let us say,' he continued.
'Captain Colville is quite their champion,' said Blanche, with a laugh that was not very genuine; and then the subject dropped.
Lady Dunkeld exchanged a quick glance with her daughter, and slowly fanned herself with an inscrutable expression on her certainly aristocratic face, and adopting the imperturbable placidity generally peculiar to her class and style.
Her somewhat unmotherly and selfish views deeply pained Colville, for reasons peculiarly his own, but had quite an opposite and most encouraging effect upon the enterprising mind of Sleath, who had listened in attentive silence.
A day or two subsequently a parcel came for Mary, addressed to Birkwoodbrae, but having with it no other clue than the vague one of the Edinburgh postmark. It contained, for both sisters, two beautiful boxes of gloves, all of the most delicate tints and finest quality. Each box was a miracle of carved white Indian ivory, lined with blue satin, a sachet of perfume on the under side of each lid, and their initials in silver on the upper.
Remembering what had passed at the stile, Mary Wellwood could not doubt who the donor was, and she flushed hotly with pleasure; yet it could all mean nothing—nothing but gallantry.
To decline the gifts would seem churlish and ungracious. She could not write, and resolved to wait for the first meeting with Colville to thank him.
Ellinor was quite in a flutter about the gifts—more so than Mary, who really felt, after a time, some confusion and dismay, for in the course of her simple life no such episode had occurred before; and she was all unlike the fair Blanche, to whom boxes of gloves were as nothing, and who could book her bets for far more than gloves on the winner of the Oaks or the Derby with the prettiest air ofsang froidin the world.
Mary's mind became filled with pleasant dreams, that joined with unpleasant doubts.
Was Colville really becoming an admirer of hers; or dared he be so, if the rumour about Blanche Galloway was true?
Robert Wodrow, full of thought, pursuing his way through a green hedge-bordered lane that led to Birkwoodbrae from the manse, suddenly heard the shrill yelp of a dog, followed by an execration, and at a little distance perceived Sir Robert Sleath, issuing from the garden gate at the mansion, in the act of picking up a large stone to hurl at Jack—Mary Wellwood's pet. Jack, by dashing through the hedge, shirked the stone, as all wise dogs do, but if the baronet had bestowed upon him a kick, as Robert never doubted, the terrier had enough of the bull in his blood to remember it well, as Sleath found to his cost when the time came.
Closing the garden gate, he found himself face to face with young Wodrow. He had his hat partly on the back of his head, his hands thrust into the back pockets of his morning coat, a cigar in his mouth, and with aninsouciantstare, and a species of dry nod that was supremely insolent and infinitely worse than no recognition at all, he passed on his way without speaking. Robert Wodrow, whose heart was already sore enough in more ways than one, felt it swell with passion as he entered the garden, which was still in all the beauty of summer.
He had lately felt in many ways that a change had come over Ellinor, but he had been, as yet, too proud to notice it to herself.
The baronet was shooting now every day, and Wodrow thought that, even if Ellinor was under that person's influence, she might give him a little more of her society, as of old—even twenty minutes; but no, he could seldom or never see her alone; and while love and sorrow made him humble at one time, jealousy and disappointment made him proud and rancorous at others.
The sweetness of his disposition had departed; his studies were becoming confused or neglected; and none saw the change that was coming over him with more pain and anger than his mother.
Of all the men that had seen and admired Ellinor, his instinct told him that this man Sleath would prove the most dangerous; yet to his own sex the manners of the latter seemed far from winning.
And already Elspat Gordon and other old servants, with the keen observance and love of gossip peculiar to their class, had begun to prognosticate a more brilliant future for Ellinor Wellwood than the obscure career of a country doctor's wife, and saw her the lady of 'a real live baronet,' and riding in a chariot to which that of Cinderella was as nothing in comparison; and, as if to make the mischief worse, rumours oftheirsurmises and of their hopes reached somehow—but readily enough in a sequestered district—the ears of Robert Wodrow, and were as gall and wormwood to his soul.
All this might be mere wretched gossip; and though Ellinor might not actually have any regard for Sir Redmond, yet Robert Wodrow feared that somehow she was already in a dumb way yielding to or feeling his influence and power.
The subtle homage, the studied phraseology, and flattering air of gallantry and devotion which Sir Redmond infused into his conversation when alone—but only when alone—with Ellinor, had somewhat turned the girl's little head, and led her to draw comparisons between all that kind of thing and poor Robert Wodrow's 'use and wont' style of attention and 'matter of course' position, as the lover of her maidenhood expanded from the playmate of her childhood.
Mary was away on some of her errands of mercy or work; Ellinor was alone when Robert approached, and found her idling in the garden, with a sunshade over her head; and his heart, of course, foreboded that there she must have been with the obnoxious visitor who had just departed.
Elspat bad been brushing out her long and flowing dark brown hair, that was so rich and heavy as to seem almost a burden to her shapely head and slender neck; and Robert reflected savagely that thus she must have appeared before 'that fellow.'
She was adjusting with slender and deft little fingers, while a sweet, soft, self-satisfied smile rippled over her face, in her lace collarette, a tuft of stephenotis with two buds of a particular kind of rose that Robert knew grew in the conservatory of Craigmhor alone; and his eyes fastened angrily on them at once, though she made no reference to them, or how they came to be there. The presence of the personage he had just passed fully accounted for that; he had doubtless transferred them from his own buttonhole to her hand, and Robert knew quite enough of 'the language of the flowers' to know what two rosebuds, so given, implied. And now her face wore—so Robert thought—just such a smile as that of Faust's Marguerite, when plucking the mystical rose-leaves in her garden.
Robert felt that the gap between them was widening; he did not present his hand, nor did she offer hers, but continued to adjust her little bouquet, while he stood before her with his hands thrust into the pockets of his grey morning-coat, and kicked away a pebble or two that lay in the gravelled walk.
'Ellinor!'
'Well, Robert,' she replied, a little nervously; 'you have come to tell me that you have passed, I suppose?'
'No.'
'Why—what then?'
'Because I have not passed.'
'Not passed!' said Ellinor, looking at him with genuine regret.
'No—on the first of this month the medical degrees were conferred as usual, but not on me—not perhaps that you care much now,' he added, in a thickening voice. 'I shall have to try again—if, indeed, I ever try more.'
'Why, Robert, what has come to you that you talk to me thus? I am most sorry for you indeed.' She looked him earnestly, but Robert thought not honestly, in the face.
'You are more intent on your own flirtations than my failure—a failure perhaps caused by yourself.'
'Who can I flirt with here?'
'You know best,' replied Robert, sulkily.
'Really, Robert, you are very unpleasant!' exclaimed the girl, tears almost starting to her eyes, though there was a provoking twinkle in their hazel depths, nevertheless.
'Now perhaps I am; but how long do you think I am going to stand this sort of thing?'
'What sort of thing?'
'The dangling after you of that English fool who has just left.'
'This is going from bad to worse, Robert,' replied Ellinor, with a pout on her beautiful lip. 'It is being downright rude, and national reflections are in the worst possible taste.'
'You have not been treating me well for some time past, Ellinor; you seem to grudge every moment you give me, and the little time you do spend with me, you seem no longer your old pleasant and hopeful self, but abstracted anddistraite.'
'You are always worrying me,' retorted the girl, 'and hinting of broken promises when I have never made any.'
'Between us, they were scarcely necessary, Ellinor, and yet you have made me scores.'
'I—when?'
'Since we were children.'
'Oh—of course, when we played at being sweethearts, and all that sort of thing.'
'Played! It has been no child's play with me at least.'
'Such child's play is ended now—and I won't be scolded thus.'
She had never adopted this tone to him before, and young Wodrow was shocked, startled, and enraged; but still he dissembled, for love will tame and subdue the proudest heart, and his was full of great love for the girl who now stood before him, biting her nether lip, and shuffling the gravel with a little impatient foot.
'Ellinor,' said Robert, yet without attempting to take her hand, 'if you did not quite encourage my love, you permitted and adopted it—you accepted it since we were happy little children that toddled and played about together—and that love has gone on, growing with my growth and strengthening with my strength; and I never dreamed of, never thought of picturing the time when you might cast me off. And now I never doubted that when I graduated——'
'Oh, Robert,' interrupted the girl, nervously, 'you are too romantic; too much of a boy——'
'I am not a boy now, and I won't be called one! and as for a romance—certainly you have become very matter-of-fact, when I have heard you laugh at even a competence as not being sufficient.'
'Shall I tell you what I think it should be?' said Ellinor, a little defiantly.
'Do,' he responded, gloomily.
'I think it means a handsome house—not a cottage (love in that is all very well, but may be apt to fly out of the windows); fine furniture—beautiful pictures and dresses—lots of servants—a carriage——'
'Oh, stop, please! Since when have you found all these things necessary for existence? Dear Ellinor, people can be very happy together with less.'
'Quiet as our lives have been here, Robert, poor Mary and I have often had wrung hearts and harassed spirits to keep up an outward and an empty show.'
'What is enough for one, as mother often says, is enough for two.'
'Perhaps, and perhaps not,' said Ellinor, with a waggish expression.
Robert Wodrow did not reflect just then that erelong there might be more mouths than two to feed.
'And all these new views of our prospects and of life generally, have occurred to you because——'
'Because what?'
'This man Sleath has come to Invermay.'
Ellinor grew pale. There were a few moments' silence, and when Robert Wodrow spoke again his voice sounded strange even to himself.
'I was never half good enough for you, Ellinor—I know that,' said he, humbly, 'yet I will never give you up until—until I hear you are fully engaged to him.'
'Engaged! How your tongue does run on, Robert,' replied Ellinor, with a curious laugh. 'He has never even spoken to me in any very pointed manner; but rather than be worried thus,' she added, with a swelling in her slender throat, 'I must ask you to forget me—do.'
'Men such as I am do not forget so easily, Ellinor.' The angry colour died out of Wodrow's dark face, and, clenching his hands, he muttered under his thick moustache—'Curse him!'
'He would not speak thus, Robert, if it is Sir Redmond you mean. He has seen a great deal of the best of society.'
'And a great deal more of the worst, I suspect,' said her lover, more exasperated by the slightest defence of his supposed rival; but, nerving himself to be calm, he asked—'Am I, then, to suppose that you have not promised your future—the future that I have a right to say was not yours to assign—to this stranger—to this sudden interloper?'
'I have not. But why be so mysterious, tragic, and absurd, Robert?' she exclaimed, with a little gasping laugh that nearly became a sob; for, sooth to say, Ellinor's secret heart upbraided her, and she felt that she was treating the lover of her girlhood and the friend of all her years with duplicity.
'Then,' said he, 'why do you permit attentions that are purposeless to you, and most distasteful to me?'
'Robert, what do you mean?' she asked, plaintively.
'I mean, why do you permit that tawny-haired fellow to flirt with you, and excite the comment of lookers-on?'
'He does not flirt with me, Robert.'
'Do you mean to say that his attentions are more serious than what is called flirtation?'
'I say nothing about them,' said Ellinor, annoyed and alarmed by his vehemence and categorical questioning.
'Ah—indeed!' he hissed through his clenched teeth.
'I cannot prevent him saying things sometimes—without—without making a scene. Do not be hard upon me, Robert—I do love you—I always loved you; not perhaps as you wish—but—but——'
She paused, sobbed, and laid her sweet face upon his arm, which went caressingly round her bent and beautiful head, with all its wealth of dark brown flowing hair.
'You love me!' he whispered, softly.
'As an old friend—oh, yes.'
He withdrew, and again eyed her gloomily and silently.
'Advise me, Robert,' said she, imploringly.
'In what can I advise you, if your own heart does not?'
'We are both so miserably poor.'
'And your new admirer is so rich?'
They were drifting among shoals again, so Ellinor made no reply.
'I suppose he loves you? To judge by my own heart, Ellinor, I don't wonder at it—but if so, why does he not at once come to the point and end his dangling? Why delay, and why conceal?'
'Do not let us quarrel, Robert,' said the girl, gently and sweetly, with her soft hazel eyes full of unshed tears; 'we have always been such chums—such friends. Some one is coming—kiss me once more—and kiss me quickly!'
A light step was heard on the ground near the garden gate, and the welcoming bark of Jack announced it was that of Mary returning.
The mutual kiss was swiftly given and taken; but to neither did it seem like the kisses of old.
Robert Wodrow felt that it sealed only a truce between him and Ellinor Wellwood; that neither were happy now, and that her heart was drifting away from him. Their farewell seemed to be like the summary of Lord Lytton's advice,
'In short, my deary, kiss me and be quiet.'
Despite the disparaging remarks or comments so ungenerously made by Lady Dunkeld and her daughter, a subsequent afternoon saw both Sir Redmond Sleath and Leslie Colville seated in the pretty drawing-room of the sisters at Birkwoodbrae.
Sir Redmond had inadvertently dropped a hint that he meant to visit there, and, greatly to his annoyance, Colville proposed to accompany him.
It was an early day in August, and every breath of air was still; not a leaf was stirring in the silver birches without, or among the monthly roses that clambered round the open windows which faced the pretty garden. Within the room all was arranged with care and taste, while the polished grate, filled with fresh flowers, the bouquets in jars and vases, the snow-white curtains, and other etcetera bore token of feminine diligence and skill.
Stretched on a deer-skin, Jack lay with sleepy eyes, half open to watch the movements of his mistress, when 'visitors' were announced by Elspat, with a peculiar and provoking smirk of satisfaction on her hard Scotch visage, and the costumes for the forthcoming garden-party, on which those clever fingers of the sisters were busy, were hastily tossed aside; the two gentlemen were ushered in, and Jack snarled and barked so furiously at Sir Redmond that he had to be carried bodily out of the room by Elspat.
The baronet affected to laugh, but felt in his heart that nothing would please him better than to get 'a quiet pot-shot at that d——d cur!'
'We merely dropped in when passing,' said Sir Redmond, who, strange to say, seemed to be constrained, even awkward, in manner, and Ellinor was somewhat silent and abashed too.
'It is kind of you to visit us,' replied Mary, addressing herself, however, to Colville; 'we have so little amusement to offer; there is so little attraction; we live so quietly here at Birkwoodbrae.'
Colville looked as if he thought there was a good deal to attract, and his dark eyes seemed to say so as he looked into Mary's, which drooped beneath his gaze.
'Your presents came, Captain Colville. They are beautiful, and fit to perfection. Ellinor and I cannot sufficiently thank you,' she said, in a low voice.
'Oho!' thought Sir Redmond, 'he has been sending them presents. Eh! a sly dog.'
'A few gloves are not worth mentioning,' replied Colville, hurriedly. And then he added—'How beautiful is the view all round this place, especially that with the silver birches and the stream glittering under their shadow. Ere I leave this, Miss Wellwood, you must show me some of your favourite places, your pet nooks—the scenery here is so full of picturesque spots.'
'Ellinor knows all such places hereabout better than I do. They employ her pencil freely,' said Mary, diffidently; 'and they are the very abode of old legends, fairies, and so forth.'
'I know that she is an artist possessed of both taste and skill,' said Colville; 'but is she also the musician?' he asked, turning to the piano, which was open.
'I am chiefly,' replied Mary, smiling; 'but I think you should hear Ellinor sing the "Birks of Invermay."'
'Who—or what are they?' asked Sir Redmond, with a drawl.
'Those very birches you see from the window,' replied Mary, laughing.
'And there is a song about them?'
'There are several.'
'Do let us hear at least one, Miss Ellinor,' urged Sir Redmond, as he placed the piano stool before the instrument.
Accordingly Ellinor, without further preface or pressing, seated herself, and sang with great sweetness and pathos neither David Mallet's affected stanzas nor Bryce's ludicrous lines, but the simple old song of the sixteenth century to its wonderfully beautiful air:—
'The evening sun was glinting brightOn Invermay's sweet glen and stream;The woods and rocks in ruddy lightAppeared as in a fairy dream.In loving fear I took my pathTo seek the tryst that happy day,With bonnie Mary, young and fair,Among the Birks of Invermay.
'It wasna till the pale moonshineWas glancing deep in Mary's e'e,That with a smile she said, "I'm thine,And ever true to thee will be!"One kiss—the lover's pledge—and thenWe spoke of all that lovers say,And wandered hameward through the glen,Among the Birks of Invermay.'
At the mention of Mary's name in the song, the eyes of Colville involuntarily sought those of her who bore it, and she coloured perceptibly. The performance of Ellinor was duly applauded by Sir Redmond, though he afterwards confided to Colville it was 'the silliest piece of Scotch twaddle' he had ever heard. Yet his admiration of Ellinor personally was open and unconcealed, perhaps too much so, and of its own kind was no doubt genuine enough, and while she sang, Ellinor was inwardly hoping her hair was tidy and looked well, as she felt conscious he was gazing straight down on it; while Mary had an uncomfortable feeling that visits from these gentlemen might be misconstrued by Lady Dunkeld, their hostess, and still more so by her daughter—a conviction that at times made her almost cold in her manner to Captain Colville, whom she believed to be that young lady's especial property. And she blamed herself, and blushed for herself, in the consciousness that she sometimes treasured up, and repeated to herself, little things he had said—appeals to her taste, her opinion, and so forth. While Colville, however he was situated with regard to Miss Galloway, made no secret of how he delighted in the quaint frankness of Mary Wellwood since the afternoon he had first met her, when both were fishing in the May.
'And so this locality is full of old legends of fairies and so forth?' said Colville, referring to a previous remark of Mary's.
'Yes; but then every foot of ground in Scotland has about it something historical or legendary—all teems with the past.'
'The present is more to my taste, Miss Wellwood,' said Sleath, twirling out his straw-coloured moustache.
'It would not be so if you lived always, as we do, under the shadow of the Ochil mountains.'
'I agree with you, by Jove.'
But Mary did not perceive that they misunderstood each other.
'Sir Redmond is guiltless of romance as any man living, I believe, Miss Wellwood,' said Captain Colville, 'but London life makes one sadly prosaic and incredulous.'
'Has it made you so?'
'I hope not—I can scarcely say. But did not my old friend Dr. Wodrow hint that some old legend is connected with those stones, or the ruin, on yonder knoll by the river?'
'The Holy Hill?'
'Yes.'
'Ah,' said Mary, as a smile rippled over her bright face, 'that is not a legend—it is history.'
'About what?'
'A miller's daughter who married a king.'
'Then it is a tale of the days
"When King Cophetua loved the beggar maid."'
'Something of that kind. But in the remoter ages of Scottish history the Holy Hill was the site of a royal residence; for there King Kenneth II. died, and there Malcolm III. was born—he who married Margaret of England.'
'These things didn't happen yesterday,' said Colville, smiling down into her earnest and animated face.
'In those days there was an old miller here in Forteviot who had one daughter named Edana, a girl of rare beauty, and who was famed therefor throughout all the land between the Earn and Forth.'
'And, of course, she had lovers in plenty?'
'So the story says; but she would listen to none, nor was her heart stirred, till one morning, about Beltane time, when filling a jar with water at the May, there came riding under the silver birches—for silver birches were here then as now—a marvellously handsome young knight on a white horse, alone and unattended, and courteously he besought her for a draught of water, saying that he had ridden that morning from the Moathill of Scone, and was sorely athirst.
'He wore an eagle's feather in his helmet, from under which his golden hair fell upon his shoulders like that of a girl. His mantle of striped scarlet, violet, and blue was fastened on his breast by a brooch of gold, and the rings of his coat-of-mail shone like silver in the morning sun.
'Edana had never looked on such a face and figure before, and he seemed equally taken by her great, if rustic, loveliness. He lingered with her long in the birchen wood; thither he came again and again, and love between them ripened fast, as it seems always to have done in the olden time, if we are to believe song, ballad, and story.
'The miller ere long heard of these stolen meetings, and his heart filled with alarm lest the so-called handsome stranger who had bewitched or won his daughter's heart might prove some evil spirit of the Flood or Fell; but Edana said he could be no evil spirit who wore a crucifix round his neck, and daily said his prayers in the old chapel of Kirktoun Mailler.
'But the miller uttered an execration under his silver beard, put his battle-axe to the grindstone, and kept watch when next the young knight came; and then, behold, his heart seemed to die within him as he recognised—the king!
'And so in time it quickly came to pass that Edana became the wife of Duncan, King of Scotland—the same king who was slain at Cawdor—and the mother of Malcolm III., who was born at the Holy Hill, and hence an ancestress of Queen Victoria.'
With a soft yet strange smile on his face, Colville listened to this old story, and, brief though it was, Sleath, as it was not to his taste, would have yawned, had not good breeding forbade him.
'Perhaps love and romance, too, still linger among the Birks of Invermay,' said he, laughingly, and with some point in his manner; and there came a time when Mary recalled these words and saw their meaning; and now, deeming that their visit had been protracted long enough, the gentlemen rose to depart—Sleath only lingering to kiss his hand to Ellinor—surreptitiously, as he thought, but the jaunty action was detected by Colville.
Somehow, Mary thought she wished that Captain Colville—Miss Blanche Galloway'sfiancé—had not called that afternoon; yet, if asked, she could not have told the reason why.
Was an interest in him growing in her heart unknown to herself—one beyond the wish that she and Ellinor had such a brother? It almost seemed so, for she felt altered in some way, but in what way she knew not, though the present and the future became curiously mingled in her thoughts, as they were just then in those of Ellinor.
Sleath was fast winning the fancy of the latter, if not her heart. She had been content with the love of Robert Wodrow and the prospect of a future with him; she thought now how different it would be to become the wife of a man who would give her rank, position, wealth, and she thought the time and 'the prince' had now come. Yet with all this it was strange that her heart never thrilled at his voice or approach, nor did her pulses quicken at the touch of his hand, as they had often done at the honest clasp of Robert Wodrow.
'Why was this?' she asked of herself.
'You are very silent, Colville,' observed Sleath, as they walked homeward together cigar in mouth.
'There is something in that girl's face which seems familiar to me, as if I had foreshadowed it in some dream!' exclaimed Colville.
'Whichgirl's face?' asked Sleath, sharply.
'Mary's—Miss Wellwood,' replied Colville, colouring with annoyance at having been betrayed into confidence with a man he disliked.
'Stuff,' said Sir Redmond; 'as if people foreshadowed faces in the Row or Regent Street! What would the fair Blanche think of this idea? And what a cock-and-bull yarn that was about the "gracious Duncan" and the miller's daughter.'
'Why doubt it?—the story is a pretty one, any way,' said Colville, with annoyance in his tone.
'Let us skip Mary—it is her sister I admire.'
'Your demeanour to that young lady is rather strange, Sir Redmond,' said Colville, with a gravity of manner and eye that did not fail to strike his listener.
'Strange—how?'
'A very short intimacy seems to have placed you on rather friendly terms.'
'Rather,' replied Sir Redmond, tugging at the end of his moustachios, with a very self-satisfied smile on hisblaséface. 'She is an unsophisticated kind of Jeanie Deans, or Effie rather, whom one may flirt with, patronise, or quarrel with and make it up again; treating her with any amount of chic when so inclined, and——'
Whatever in his profound vanity or spirit of insolence Sir Redmond was about to add, he paused. There was a dark, stern, and indignant expression in the face of Leslie Colville that there was no misunderstanding just then.
'Hey—how—what the deyvil—are you smitten in that quarter too?' asked Sleath.
'No—what do you mean?'
'Thought you were, perhaps, that's all,' was the somewhat sulky response.
'I am not what you think,' replied Colville, quietly. 'I only warn you to adopt a different tone in reference to these young ladies, and to take care what you are about!'
'Now, what the devil is all this tohim?' thought the baronet, malevolently; and he had hardihood enough to give his thought expression, on which Colville's face grew darker still.
'Sir Redmond,' said he, 'there is no use in beating about the bush with you. I have often heard you say that there was but one excuse in this world for matrimony.'
'Yes—well?'
'Miss Ellinor Wellwood is poor, as you may say, yet you seem very attentive in that quarter.'
Confounded at what he deemed the presumption of all these queries, Sleath stuck his glass into his right eye, and glared through it at his companion with undoubted surprise.
'Attention,' he muttered; 'not at all! Who is thinking of matrimony? And if I were so, may I ask what it is toyou?'
'More than you think,' replied Colville, with suppressed passion, as he adjusted his shirt cuffs; 'but enough of this subject—here is the gate of Craigmhor.'
Colville said no more; but he thought a good deal, and he muttered to himself a Spanish proverb,
'Puerto abierta, al santo tiento—the open door tempts the saint; and, by Jove, this fellow is no saint—so I shall keep my eye on him!'
Hitherto it had seemed to Ellinor, but to Mary chiefly (as she had no special admirer), that life had been dull and colourless—if a happy and contented one—at Birkwoodbrae; and already the days thereof—before these visitors came—seemed to be part of another and remoter existence; for love and the illusions of love were shedding their haloes over the present.
'I hope dear Mary Wellwood will not make a fool of herself with that Captain Colville,' said Mrs. Wodrow to her spouse, with reference to this very subject. 'I hear that he has been calling at Birkwoodbrae again, though engaged, they say, to Miss Galloway. She is old enough to know that officers are the greatest flirts in the world—men not to be trusted. WhenIwas a girl, I always heard so.'
Dr. Wodrow laughed softly, as he looked up from the notes of his next sermon, and said,
'I don't think, my dear, you ever had much experience of them out of novels; but I will own to you that officers now-a-days are not like what they were at one time. Even my worthy ancestor, in 1724, deplores in his 'Analecta' that Christian officers had left no successors to such men as Colonel Blackadder, of the Cameronians, Colonel Erskine, and Major Gardiner, of Stair's Grey Dragoons—all men who could expound on the Gospel better than I.'
It was the afternoon of a hot day early in August, when the sunlight bathed in glory all the scenery—green mountain and rocky glen, wood and water—about Craigmhor, giving alternately strong light and deep shadow, with a warmth of colouring over all, turning into a sheet like molten gold an artificial lochlet, where the ducks and coots swam together among the great white water-lilies.
On the balustraded terrace before the house, the rustic baskets of carved stone were ablaze with beautiful flowers; the hum of bees and the twitter of birds were all about, but were unheard amid the buzz of many voices and the music of a rifle volunteer band that played on the smoothly-mown lawn that stretched away before the house till it ended in the woodland greenery of the park, or 'policy,' as it is called in Scotland—greenery that now showed blotches of yellow and russet upon the ferns, that whilom had seemed great green fans of emerald hue, amid which the dun deer rested when dewy evening fell.
But now the deer had all gone to the hill-sides, for promenading on the lawn and in the beautiful gardens, or seated near the tall, French windows that opened on the terrace, and the lace curtains of which were wafted gently on the breeze, were the many guests of Lady Dunkeld, whose garden-party was now, as Sir Redmond Sleath slangily said, 'in full blast.'
Mellowed by distance among the trees came the murmur of the unseen May over its rocky bed.
There were lawn-tennis courts, and the all but obsolete croquet, for those who were so minded; and in a gaudy-striped marquee ices, creams, jellies, champagne-cup, et cetera, distributed by solemn valets in showy liveries with powdered heads.
There were winding paths between beautifully-trimmed shrubberies, bordered by flowers of gorgeous hues; there were leafy, tunnel-like vistas, and long and stately conservatories with tesselated floors, wherein to flirt when the heat of the day proved too great; and there were bright-coloured rugs and soft cushions spread upon the grass, whereon the lazy might lounge or loll; and, as the guests were pouring in from carriage, phaeton, and dogcart, Lady Dunkeld, in the richest of London toilettes, received them with the same insipid and stereotyped smile for each and all—her words of welcome or offer of her hand varying only according to the social position of those who approached her.
'The second of the Wellwood girls who are coming here to-day is something of an artist, I hear,' observed Lord Dunkeld.
'I believe so,' replied his lady; 'and I hope she will not make her appearance a limp figure, æsthetically-dressed in a large-patterned gown of Anglo-Saxon fashion, with a lily in her hand. Oh, here they are! Dressed in the best taste, too!'
Weak, yet aristocratic though his profile, Lord Dunkeld looked every inch a peer in style and bearing. He was undoubtedly a striking-looking, elderly man, with hair now white as the thistledown, his person erect and unbroken as when he led his battalion against the Russian trenches at Sebastopol, and he received the two sisters, Mary and Ellinor Wellwood, with a warmth and courtesy that nearly made them forget the limp hand and wan smile of Lady Dunkeld, and the ill-concealed coldness, annoyance, and secret pique of Blanche Galloway, though she veiled them under a well-bred smile of welcome, while resolved it should be their last, as it was their first, entertainment at Craigmhor, and such it eventually proved to be.
Nor were her emotions lessened by seeing how Colville hurriedly quitted a group to welcome them, and how smilingly Sir Redmond approached Ellinor from a conservatory, adjusting as he came a button-hole bouquet which he had recently received from the hand of her—Blanche Galloway, who was quite inclined to attract both gentlemen if she could.
Whatever views Lady Dunkeld and her daughter, the fair Blanche, may have had in the matter of the now wealthy Captain Colville and Sir Redmond Sleath, two little episodes in which these gentlemen were concerned developed themselves during the garden-party, which were rather beyond the calculations of the two ladies, and proceeded to some extent unknown to them—but to some extent only, as Mademoiselle Rosette was abroad in the grounds, and had her shrewd French eyes remarkably wide open.
And Blanche Galloway became disagreeably surprised when she learned on what 'friendly terms' the sisters were with those two gentlemen, who as visitors at Craigmhor she had rather been disposed to consider as her own peculiar property.
Robert Wodrow was there too, not to enjoy himself, but to watch Sir Redmond and Ellinor, as the latter could read only too distinctly in his lowering and upbraiding yet tender eyes, though he affected to converse gaily with Colville and others.
'Let me get you some iced champagne cup,' said Sir Redmond, in a low voice, as he offered Ellinor his arm and led her away, adding, with one of his unpleasant laughs, 'Here is old Dr. Wodrow, with his Sabbath-day smile, and his wife, in her awful toilette—our sulking friend the son too. They have been among the first to come, and will be the last to go away—like all stupid people. How like fish out of the water they look!'
Ellinor, to do her justice, felt a swelling in her throat at these remarks on those she had been so long accustomed to view as her dearest friends, and fanned herself almost angrily.
'And how is Jack, that surliest of curs, who always snaps and snarls at me as if I were a tramp or a beggar?' asked Sir Redmond.
Ellinor laughed now, and soon found herself chatting away with the glib Sir Redmond as if she had known him not only a few days, but a few years. How different he was in his fluency of speech, his perfect tone of manner and softness of voice, from Robert Wodrow.
Poor Robert Wodrow!
'What smooth tongues these southron fellows have,' he was thinking, savagely, as his eyes followed the pair; 'and how she seems to listen to him, drinking in every word, like a moonstruck fool!'
And already he felt all the tortures of jealousy, 'the injured lover's hell.'
A suspicion that he was watched or suspected by Colville, after the latter's very distinct and open warning, inspired Sir Redmond Sleath with a secret emotion of revenge against him—a curiously mingled hatred and desire to triumph in his love affair with Ellinor; and since that warning had been given a coolness had ensued between the baronet and the guardsman—a coolness that outlasted their visit to Lord Dunkeld.
To Sir Redmond it seemed, as he thought over and over again, that a couple of fatherless and motherless girls living as they curiously did together, and alone 'with no one to look after them but an infernal old pump of a Presbyterian parson,' were fair game to be run after in his own fashion, and Ellinor, as the one possessing less firmness of purpose, was certain to be the most easily netted.
As Sir Redmond led Ellinor away, Colville's brow grew dark as that of Robert Wodrow, and the baronet was not slow to detect this emotion and defy it.
'Was this jealousy and love of Ellinor? Did he admire her and Mary too?' thought the baronet. 'By Jove, it seems so.'
They were long absent from the main body of the guests, none of whom missed them perhaps, save Robert Wodrow and Miss Galloway. How long Colville did not precisely know, as he contrived to be elsewhere engaged himself.
While Mary was talking to old Mrs. Wodrow, who was indulging the while in a few peculiar and not very well-bred, if knowing, nods and smiles in the direction of Miss Galloway, over whose chair on the terrace Captain Colville was stooping, she overheard him say, while the former was prettily making up for him a button-hole of stephenotis, with a white rosebud and maiden-hair fern—and say—withempressementbut laughingly,