“You must not think of that, sir,—indeed you must not. Am I in a position to be set up before the county, and have every fact of my life brought up against me? No, father, anything else you like—but let me stay among strangers, where the circumstances of my existence need not be inquired into.”
“I don’t know that you have anything to be ashamed of,” said Lord Eskside, with a husky voice.
“Anyhow, I cannot offer myself as a subject to be discussed by all the world,” said Richard. Courage, he said to himself—to-morrow and all this will be over! He made a strenuous effort to be patient, strengthened by the thought.
“Well, Richard, if you have made up your mind—but you know our wishes,” said the old lord with a sigh. Little Val had been exercising his grandfather’s temper by his excursions round the table a little while before. He had been obstinate and childishly disobedient till he was carried off by the ladies; and Lord Eskside, somewhat out of temper, as I have said, by reason of being depressed in spirits, had been ready to augur evil of the child’s future career. But the contradiction of Val’s father was more grave. When he resisted his parent’s wishes it was of little use to be angry. The old lord sighed with a dreary sense that nothing was to be made by struggling. Of all hopeless endeavours that of attempting to make your children carry out the plans you have formed, is (he thought to himself) the most hopeless. Everything might favour the project which would make a man’s friends happy, and satisfy all their aspirations for him; when, lo! a causeless caprice, a foolish dislike, would balk everything. It is true that he had for years resigned the hope of seeing Richard take his true place in the county, and show at once to the new men what the good old blood was worth, and to the old gentry that the Rosses were still their leaders, as they had been for generations; but this visit had brought a renewal of all the old visions. He had seen with a secret pride, of which, even to his wife, he had not breathed a word, his son assume with ease a social position above his brightest hopes. The county had not only received him, but followed him, admired him, listened to his opinions as those of an oracle. To bring him in for the county after this, and to carry his election by acclamation, would be child’s-play, his father thought. But Richard did not see it. He was, or assumed to be, indifferent to the applause of “the county.” He cared nothing for his own country, or for that blessedness of dwelling among his own people which Scripture itself has celebrated. No wonder that Lord Eskside should sigh. “I believe you think more of these fiddling play-acting foreigners,” he said, after an interval of silence, during which his eyebrows and his underlip had been in full activity, “than for all our traditions, and all the duties of your condition in life.”
“Every man has his taste, sir,” Richard answered, with a shrug of his shoulders, which irritated his father still more deeply.
“Well, you are old enough to judge for yourself,” he said, getting up abruptly from the table. A great many things to say to his son had been in the old lord’s mind. He had meant to expound to him his own view of the politics of the day, at home, to which naturally Richard had not paid much attention. He had meant to impress upon him the line the Rosses had always taken in questions exclusively Scotch. But all this was cut short by Richard’s refusal even to consider the question. Being sad beforehand by reason of his son’s departure, I leave you to imagine how melancholy-cross and disappointed Lord Eskside was now.
“What! is that imp still up?” he said, as going into the drawing-room he stumbled over his own best-beloved stick, upon which Val had been riding races round the room. “How dared you take my stick, sir? If you do that again you shall be whipped.”
“You daren’t whip me,” cried saucy Valentine. “Grandma says I am never to be frightened no more—but I ain’t frightened; and I’m to have what I want. Grandma! he is taking my stick away!”
“Yourstick, ye little whipper-snapper! No; one generation succeeds another soon enough, but not so soon as that. Send the boy to his bed, my lady. He ought to have been there an hour ago.”
“Just for this night,” said Lady Eskside, as she caught the little rebel, and, holding him close in her arms, smoothed the ruffled curls on his forehead, and whispered in his ear that he was to be good, and not to make grandpa angry. “Just for this night—as his father is going away.”
“Oh, his father!” said her husband, with a slight snort of irritation which showed Lady Eskside that the last evening had been little more satisfactory to him than to herself. Her own voice had faltered a little as she spoke of Richard’s departure, and she looked at her son wistfully, with an incipient tear in the corner of her eye, hoping (though she might have known better) for some response; but Richard, as bland and gentle as ever, had seated himself by Mary, to whom he was talking, and altogether ignored his mother’s furtive appeal. Valentine gave her enough to do just at that moment to hold him, which, perhaps, was well for her; and Lord Eskside walked away to the other end of the room, pretending to look at the books which were scattered about the tables, and whistling softly under his breath, which was one of his ways of showing irritation. Even Mary was agitated she scarcely knew why; not on Richard’s account, she said to herself, but as feeling the suppressed excitement in the house, the secret sense of disappointment and deep heart-dissatisfaction which was in those two old people, who had but little time before them to be happy in, and so wanted the sunshine of life all the more. Richard’s visit had been a success in one sense. It had answered to their highest hopes, and more than answered; but yet in more intimate concerns, in a still closer point of view, it had been a failure; and of this the father and mother were all the more tremulously sensible that he showed so little consciousness of it—nay, no consciousness at all. He sat for a long time by Mary, talking to her of the most ordinary subjects, while his mother sat silent in her chair, and Lord Eskside, at the other end of the room, made-believe to look for something in the drawers of one of the great cabinets, opening and shutting them impatiently. Richard sat and talked quite calmly during these demonstrations, unaffected by them. He kissed his child coolly on the forehead, and bid him good-bye, with something like a sentiment of internal gratitude to be rid of the little plague, who rather repelled than attracted him. Mary went to her room shortly after Valentine’s removal, which was effected with some difficulty, pleading a headache, and in reality unable to bear longer the painful atmosphere of family constraint—Lady Eskside’s half-appealing, half-affronted looks, and anxious consciousness of every movement her son made, and the old lord’s irritation, which was more demonstrative. Then the three who were left gathered together round the fire, and some commonplace conversation—conversation studiously kept on the level of commonplace—ensued. Richard was to start early next morning, and proposed to take leave of his mother that night—“not to disturb her at such an unearthly hour,” he said. “Did you ever leave the house at any hour when I did not make you your breakfast and see you away?” Lady Eskside asked, with a thrill of pain in her voice. And as she left the room, she grasped his hand, and looked wistfully in his face, while he stooped to kiss her. “Richard,” she said in a half whisper, as the two faces approached close to each other, “for myself I do not ask anything—but, oh, mind, your father is an old man! Please him if you can.”
Lord Eskside was leaning upon the mantelpiece, gazing into the fire. He continued the same commonplace strain of talk when his son came back to him. How badly the trains corresponded; how hard it would be, without waiting at cross stations and losing much time, to accomplish the journey. “And as you have to make so early a start you should go to your bed soon, my boy,” he said, and held out his hand; then grasping his son’s, as his wife had done, added hastily, his eyebrows working up and down—“What I have been saying to you, Richard, may look less important to you than it does to me; but if you would make an effort to please your mother! She’s been a good mother to you; and neither I nor anything in the world can give her the pleasure that you could. Good night. I shall see you in the morning;” and Lord Eskside took up his candle and hurried away.
The effect of this double appeal, so pathetically repeated, was not, I fear, all that it should have been. When he reached his own room, Richard yawned, and stretching his arms above his head—“Thank heaven! I shall be out of this to-morrow,” he said.
I havenow to change the scene and bring before the notice of the reader another group, representing another side of the picture, with interests still more opposite to those of Lord Eskside and his heir-apparent than were, even, the interests of that heir-apparent’s mother. But to exhibit this other side, I have fortunately no need to descend to the lower levels of society, to Jean Macfarlane’s disreputable tavern, or any haunt of doubtful people. On the contrary, I know no region of more unblemished respectability or higher character than Moray Place in Edinburgh, which is the spot I wish to indicate. Strangers and tourists do not know much ofMoray Place. To them—and great is their good-fortune—Edinburgh means the noble crowned ridge of the Old Town, fading off misty and mysterious into the wooded valley beneath; the great crags of the castle rising into mid-sky, and the beautiful background of hills. Upon this they gaze from the plateau of Princes Street; and far might they wander without seeing anything half so fine as that storied height, lying grey in sunshine, or twinkling with multitudinous lights, as the blue poetic twilight steals over the Old Town. But on the other side of that middle ground of Princes Street lies a New Town, over which our grandfathers rejoiced greatly as men rejoice over the works of their own hands, despite the fullest acknowledgment of the work of their ancestors. There lie crescents, squares, and places, following the downward sweep of the hill, with, it is true, no despicable landscape to survey (chiefly from the back windows), yet shutting themselves out with surprising complacency from all that distinguishes Edinburgh amid the other cities of the world. Nobody can say that we of the Scots nation are not proud of our metropolis; but this is how our fathers and grandfathers—acute humorous souls as most of them were, with a large spice of romance in them, and of much more distinctly marked individual character than we possess in our day—asserted the fundamental indifference of human nature, in the long-run, to natural beauty. How comfortable, how commodious are those huge solid houses!—houses built for men to be warm in, to feast in, and gather their friends about them, but not with any æsthetical meaning. Of all these streets, and squares, and crescents, Moray Place perhaps is the most “palatial,” or was, at least, at the period of which I speak. Personally, I confess that it makes a very peculiar impression on me. Years ago, so many that I dare not count them, there appeared in the pages of ‘Blackwood’ a weird and terrible story called the “Iron Shroud,” in which the feelings of an unhappy criminal shut up in an iron cell (I think, to make the horror greater, of his own invention) which by some infernal contrivance diminished every day, window after window disappearing before the wretch’s eyes, until at last the horrible prison fell upon him and became at once his grave and his shroud—were depicted with vivid power. This thrilling tale always returns to my mind when I stand within the grand and gloomy enclosure of Moray Place. Itseems to me that the walls quiver and draw closer even while I look at them; and if the circle were gradually to lessen, one window disappearing after another, and the whole approaching slowly, fatally towards the centre, I should not be surprised. But in Edinburgh, Moray Place is, or was, considered a noble circus of houses, and nobody feels afraid to live in it. I suppose as it has now stood so long, it will never crash together, and descend on the head of some breathless wretch in the garden which forms its centre; but a superstitious dread of this catastrophe, I own, would haunt me if I were rich enough to be able to live in Moray Place.
Mr Alexander Pringle, however, never once thought of this when he established his tabernacle there. This gentleman was an advocate, to use the Scotch term—the cosmopolitan and universal term, instead of the utterly conventional and unmeaning appellation of barrister common to the English alone—at the Scotch bar. His father before him had been a W.S., or Writer to the Signet—a title of which I confess myself unable to explain the exact formal meaning. How these comparatively unimportant people came to be the heirs-at-law, failing the Rosses, of the barony of Eskside, I need not tell. Pringle is a name which bears no distinction in its mere sound like Howard or Seymour; but notwithstanding, it is what is called in Scotland “a good name;” and this branch of the Pringles were direct descendants from one of the Eskside barons. When Dick Ross’s misfortunes happened, and his wife forsook him, Mr Alexander Pringle, then himself recently married, producing heirs at a rate which would have frightened any political economist, and possessing a wife far too virtuous ever to think of running away from him, became all at once a person of consequence. He felt it himself more than any one, yet all society (especially in Moray Place) had felt it. By this time he had a very pretty little family, seven boys and one girl, all healthy, vigorous, and showing every appearance of long and prosperous life.
Fear not, dear reader! I do not mean to follow in this history the fortunes of Sandy, Willie, Jamie, Val, Bob, Tom, and Ben. They were excellent fellows, and eventually received an admirable education at the Edinburgh Academy; but I dare not enter upon the chronicle of such a race of giants. Val was born about the time that Richard Ross’s children disappeared, and the Pringles christened the babyValentine Ross, feeling that this might be a comfort to the old lord, whose “name-son” had thus mysteriously disappeared. Mr Pringle spoke of the event as an “inscrutable dispensation,” and lamented his cousin’s strange misfortunes to everybody he encountered. But dreadful as the misfortune was, it made him several inches higher, and threw a wavering and uncertain glimmer of possible fortune to come over the unconscious heads of Sandy, Willie, Val, and the rest. They cared very little, but their father cared much, and was very wide awake, and constantly on the watch for every new event that might happen on Eskside. The seven years of quiet, during which nothing was heard of Richard’s children, ripened his hopes to such an extent that he almost felt himself the next in succession; for a milddilettantelike Dick Ross, who always lived abroad, did not seem an obstacle worth counting. Perhaps he was in consequence a little less careful of his practice at the bar; for this tantalising shadow of a coronet had an effect upon his being which was scarcely justified by the circumstances. But at all events, though they managed to keep up their establishment in Moray Place, and to give the boys a good education, the Pringles did not advance in prosperity and comfort as they ought to have done, considering how well-connected they were, and the “good abilities” of the head of the house. Though he would sometimes foolishly show a disregard for the punctilios of the law in his own person, and was now and then outwitted in an argument, yet Mr Pringle was understood to be an excellent lawyer; and he had a certain gift of lucidity in stating an argument which found him favour alike in the eyes of clients and of judges. Had he been a little more energetic, probably he would have already begun to run the course of legal preferment in Scotland. He was Sheriff of the county in which his little property lay; and at one time no man had a better chance of rising to the rank of Solicitor-General or even Lord Advocate, and of finally settling as Lord Pringle or Lord Dalrulzian (the name of his property) upon the judicial bench. But his progress was arrested by this shadow of a possible promotion with which his profession would have nothing to do. Lord Dalrulzian might be a sufficiently delightful title if no more substantial dignity was to be had, but Lord Eskside was higher; and the man’s imagination went off wildly after the hereditary barony, leaving the reward of legal eminence far in the background. Gradually he had built himself up with the thought of this advancement; and though they were by no means rich enough to afford it, nothing but his wife’s persistent holding back would have kept him from sending Sandy, his eldest boy, to Eton, by way of preparing him for his possible dignity. For the days when boys were sent from far and near to the High School of Edinburgh are over; and it is now the Scottish parent’s pride to make English schoolboys of his sons, and to eliminate from the speech of his daughters all trace of their native accent. Mrs Pringle, however, was prudent enough to withstand her husband’s desire. “What would he do at Eton?” she said. “Learn English? If he’s not content with the English you and I speak, it’s a pity; and as for manners, he behaves himself very well in company as it is, and you’ll never convince me that ill-mannered louts will be made into gentlemen by a year or two at a public school. You may send him if you like, Alexander—you’re the master—but you will get no countenance from me.” When a well-conditioned husband is told that he is the master there is an end of him. Mr Pringle was not made of hard enough material to resist so strong an opposition; and then it would have cost a great deal of money. “Well, my dear, we’ll talk it over another time,” he said, and put off the final decision indefinitely; which was a virtual giving in without the necessity of acknowledging defeat.
After all this gradually growing satisfaction and confidence in his own prospects, it is almost impossible to describe the tremendous effect which the news of Richard’s return, and of the strange events which had taken place at Rosscraig, had upon the presumptive heir. He spoke not a word to any one for the first two days, but went about his business moodily, like a man under the shadow of some deadly cloud. The first shock was terrible, and scarcely less terrible was the excitement with which he listened to every rumour that reached him, piecing the bits of news together. For a week he neglected his business; forsook, except when his attendance was compulsory, the Parliament House; and, if he could have had his will, would have done nothing all day but discuss the astounding tale, which at first he declared to be entire fiction, a made-up story, and pretended to laugh at. He hung about his dressing-room door in the morning, while his wife finished her toilet, talking of it through the doorway; he hovered round the breakfast-table,after he had finished his meal, neglecting his ‘Scotsman’; he was continually appearing in the drawing-room when Mrs Pringle did not want him, and “deaved her,” as she said, with this eternal subject. To no one else could he speak with freedom; but this sweet privilege of wifehood, instead of being an unmingled good, often becomes, in the imperfection of all created things, a bore to the happy being who is thus elevated into the ideal position of her spouse’salter ego. Mrs Pringle was not sentimental, and she soon got heartily sick of the subject. She would have cheerfully sold, at any time, for a new dinner dress—a thing she was pretty generally in want of—all her chances, which she had no faith in, of ever becoming Lady Eskside.
“Don’t you think, Alexander,” she said, having been driven beyond endurance by his rejection of a proposed match at golf on Musselburgh Links—a thing which proved the profound gravity of the crisis,—-“don’t you think that the best thing you could do would be to take the coach and go out to Lasswade, and inquire for yourself? Take Violet with you—a little fresh air would do her good; and if you were to talk this over with somebody who knows about it, instead of with me, that know nothing more than yourself——”
“Go—to Lasswade!” said Mr Pringle—“that is a step that never occurred to me. No; I have not been invited to Rosscraig to meet Dick, and it would look very strange if I were to go where nobody is wanting me. If you think, indeed, that Vi would be better for a little change—— But no; Lord Eskside would not like it—there would be an undignified look about it—an underhand look; still, if you think an expedition would be good for Vi——”
It was thus that under pressure of personal anxiety a man maundered and hesitated who could give very sound advice to his clients, and could speak very much to the purpose before the Lords of Session. Mrs Pringle knew all this, and did not despise her husband. She felt that she herself was wiser in their own practical concerns than he was, but gave him full credit for all his other advantages, and for that ability in his profession which did not always make itself apparent at home. And she had a great many things to do on this particular afternoon, and was driven nearly out of her senses, she allowed afterwards, by this eternal discussion about Dick Boss’s children and the succession to Eskside.
“Do you remember,” she said, exercising her ingenuity, with as little waste of words as possible—for the mother of seven sons, not to speak of one little daughter besides, who is not rich enough to keep a great many servants, has not much time to waste in talk—“that little cottage at the Hewan, which I was always so fond of? The children are fond of it too. As you are off your match, and have the afternoon to spare, go away down and see if the Hewan is let, and whether we can have it for the summer.”
“But, my dear, it is not half big enough for us,” Mr Pringle began.
His wife turned upon him a momentary look of impatience. “What does it matter whether it’s big or little, when you want to see what is going on?” she said. “Take the child with you, and ask about it. It would be fine to have such a place, to send Vi when the heat gets too much for her.” These last words were spoken in perfect good faith, for people in Edinburgh keep up a fiction of believing that the heat is too much for them—as if they were in London or Paris, or anywhere else, where people love a yearly change.
“So it would,” said Mr Pringle; “and you could go out yourself sometimes and spend a long day. It would do you good, my dear. I think I will go.”
“Run and tell nurse to put on your best hat, Violet,” said her mother; “and you may have your kid gloves, if you will be sure not to lose them. You are going out to the country with papa.”
Little Violet rose from where she had been sitting, with a family of dolls round her, on the carpet. She had been giving her family their daily lessons, and felt it a very important duty. She was but six years old—one of those fair-haired little maidens who abound in Scotland, with hair of two shades of colour, much brighter in the half-curled locks which lay about her shoulders than on her head. With these light locks she had dark eyes, an unusual combination, and pretty infant features, scarcely formed yet into anything which gave promise of beauty. She was so light that Sandy, her big brother, could hold her up on his hand, to the admiration of all beholders. One daughter in such a family holds an ideal position, such as few girls achieve otherwise at so early an age. Their little sister was the very princess of all these boys. The big ones petted and spoiled her, the little ones believed in and reverenced her.To the one she was something more dainty than any plaything—a living doll, the prettiest ornament in the house, and the only one which could be handled without breaking wantonly, on purpose to have them punished, in their hands; and to the others she was a small mother, quaintly unlike the big one, yet imposing upon them by her assumption of the maternal ways and authority. When she addressed the nursery audience with, “Now you ’ittle boys, mind what I say to you,” the babies acknowledged the shadow of authority, and felt that Vi wielded a visionary sceptre. She was very serious in her views of life, and held what might appear to some people exaggerated ideas as to the guilt of spilling your tea upon your frock, or tearing your pinafore; and was apt to wonder where naughty little children who did such things expected to go to, with an unswerving and perfectly satisfied faith in everlasting retribution, such as would have edified the severest believer. Violet awarded these immense penalties to very trifling offences, not being as yet wise enough to discriminate or get her landscape into perspective. Her dolls were taught their duty in the most forcible way, and she herself carried out her tenets by punishing them severely when they displeased her. She got up from the midst of them now, and though she had been lecturing them solemnly a few minutes before, huddled them up, with legs and arms in every kind of contortion, into a corner which was appropriated to her. She walked up-stairs very gravely to be dressed, but made such a fuss about her kid gloves, that nurse, with two baby boys on her hands, was nearly driven to her wits’ end. On ordinary occasions, Vi wore little cotton gloves, with the tops of the fingers sewed inside in a little lump, which made her small hands (as they used to make mine) extremely uncomfortable. When she was fully equipped, she was a very trim little woman—not fine, but as imposing and dignified in her appearance as a lady of six can manage to be; and when the anxious heir-at-law to the Eskside barony came down-stairs with her to start on this mission of inquiry, she was very particular that he should have his umbrella nicely rolled, and that his hat should be brushed to perfection. She liked her papa to be neat, as she was, and took, in short, a general charge of him, as of all the house.
This, dear reader, is the villain of this history, who is bent on spoiling, if he can, the hero’s prospects, and working confusion in all the arrangements of the Eskside family, for the advantage of himself and his Sandy, the next heir, failing Richard Ross’s problematical children. But on this particular day when he lifted his little girl into the coach, and made her comfortable, and smiled at her as she chatted to him, notwithstanding all his preoccupations, he was not a very bad villain. He would have liked to turn out to the streets the little beggar’s brat of whom he had heard such incredible stories, and who was supposed to be likely to supplant in his lawful inheritance himself and his handsome boys; but then he had never realised the individuality of this beggar’s brat, while his heart was very much set upon his own children and their advantage—a state of mind not very uncommon. He was as good to little Violet as if he had been an example of all the virtues, and instead of feeling at all ashamed of so very small a companion, was as proud of her as if she had been a duchess. To see her brighten up as the coach rolled on through the green country roads distracted him for the first time from his all-absorbing anxiety; and as they came in sight of the village of Lasswade, and he pointed out the river and the woods and the village houses to little Vi, he almost forgot all about the barony of Eskside. You would say that evil intentions could scarcely take very deep root in a heart so occupied; but human nature is very subtle in its combinations, and it is curious how easily virtue can sometimes accommodate itself by the side of very ill neighbours. Mr Pringle had no idea or intention of working mischief, though mischief might no doubt arise by chance in his path. All that he wanted, so far as he was aware, was justice, and to make sure that there was no cuckoo’s egg foisted into the nest at Eskside.
“Oh, sir, no, sir,” said the smiling landlord at the Black Bull, where Mr Pringle went to have some luncheon and to order “a machine,” to take Vi and himself to the Hewan—the little cottage, which was the ostensible end of his mission—“there’s different stories going about the country, but we must not believe all we hear. The real truth is, I’m assured by them that ought to know, that the little boy came over from foreign parts with his father, the Honourable Richard Ross, to be brought up as is befitting, in a decent-like house, and among folk that have some fear of God before their eyes,—which it’s no easy to find, so far as I can hear, abroad.”
“Came over with his father!” cried Mr Pringle, through whose soul this information smote like a sword. If this was the case, farewell to the beggar’s brat theory, and to all hope both for Sandy and himself.
“Well, that’s the most reasonable story,” said the landlord; “there’s plenty of other nonsense flying about the country. What we a’ heard at first was, that some gangrel body knockit loud and lang at the ha’ door the night of that awfu’ storm, and threw in a bundle, nigh knocking over auld Harding the butler; and when lights were got—for the lamp was blown out by the wind—it was found to be this boy. It’s an awfu’ age for sensation this, and that’s the sensational story, folk ca’ it. But Mr Richard, there can be nae doubt, has been home direct from Florence and Eitaly, and what so likely as that he should bring the bairn himsel’? So far as I can learn, a’body that is anybody, so to speak, the gentry and them that ought to ken, believes he came with his father. The servants and folk about the town uphold the other story; but you ken, sir, the kind of story that pleases common folk best? Aye something wonderful; fancy afore reason.”
“But surely it is very easy to get to the bottom of it,” said Mr Pringle, with a beating heart. “Was the child with Mr Ross, for instance, when he arrived?”
“Na, I never heard that,” said the landlord, swaying over to the other side. “The carriage passed by our windows. So far as I could see, there was but himself inside, and his man on the box. We maunna inquire too close into details, sir—especially you that are a relation of the family.”
“That is exactly why it is so important I should know.”
“Well-a-well, sir! they do say, I allow,” said the man, sinking his voice, “that the little laddie was here before his father; that’s rather my own opinion—no that I ever saw him. They sent down here, about a week before Mr Ross came home, to inquire about a woman and a wean; naewoman or wean had been here. There was one I heard, at Jean Macfarlane’s on the other side of the bridge, which is a place no decent person can be expected to ken about.”
“And who was the woman?” said Mr Pringle, with breathless interest.
“Na, that’s mair than I can tell. Some say a randy wife that’s been seen of late about the country-side; some says one thing and some another. Auld Simon the postman and Merran Miller were twa I’m told that saw her; but this is a’ hearsay—a’ hearsay; I ken naething of my own knowledge. I must say, however,” added the landlord, seriously, “that I blame themselves up at the big house for most of the stir. They sent down inquiring and inquiring, putting things into folk’s heads about this woman and the wean. My lord had a’ them that saw her up to the house, and put them through an examination. It was not a prudent thing to do—it was that, more than anything else, that made folk begin to talk.”
“And was that before Richard Ross came home?”
“Oh ay, sir—oh ay; a good week before.”
“At the time, in short, that the child came?” said Mr Pringle, with legal clearness.
“Well, Mr Pringle—about the time the bairn was said to have come, I’ll no deny; but a’body that’s best able to judge has warned me no to build my faith on a coincidence like that. Maist likely it was nothing more than a co-inn-cidence. They’re queer things, as you that are a lawyer must know.”
“Yes, they are queer things,” said Mr Pringle, with a flicker of hope; and then he changed the conversation, and began to inquire about the Hewan, and whether it was let for the season, or if any one had been in treaty for it. “My wife has a fancy for the place. She knew it when she was young,” he said, half apologetically.
“But it’s a wee bit box of a place—no fit for your fine family. It would bring the roses, though, into little Miss’s cheeks, for the air’s grand up on that braehead.”
“It is just for her we want it,” Mr Pringle said, with an unusual openness of confidence. “She is rather pale. Come, Vi, there is the gig at the door.”
Vi walked down-stairs very demurely and got into the gig, trying to look as if she mounted with some dignified difficulty, and not to clamber up with the speed and sureness which her breeding among so many boys had taught her.She had been listening, though she took no part in the talk. “Who is the little boy, papa?” she said, curiously, as they drove briskly along through the keen but sunshiny air.
“A little boy at Rosscraig up yonder among the trees. Do you see the turrets, Vi?”
“Yes, I see them: are they made of gold? and is he a bad little boy, papa?”
“No, Vi; I don’t suppose he means it, and you don’t understand, my pet; but it would be very bad for Sandy and the rest if he were to stay there.”
“Then, papa, if it will be bad for Sandy, and the little boy is naughty, why not drive up the avenue and take him and carry him away somewhere where he can do no harm?”
This was Violet’s incisive way of dealing with difficulties. She had all the instincts of a grand inquisitor: and would have acted with the same benevolent absorption in the grand object of doing good to her patient whether he liked it or no. The pair drove at a spanking pace up the pretty road among the budding trees, through which at intervals there were glimpses of Esk brawling over his boulders, his brown impetuous stream all flecked with foam, like a horse in full career. A sensation of positive happiness was in Mr Pringle’s mind as he drove along the familiar road through the country which he hoped might yet acknowledge his influence and authority. He could not have kidnapped the little offender as Violet suggested; but he was glad to think that there was every chance he was an impostor, and the field clear for himself and his heir. A lawsuit rose up before him in fullest dramatic detail, a kind of thing very attractive to his professional imagination. He saw how much more difficult it would be on the other side to prove the right of this supposititious heir, than it would be on his to throw doubt upon him. I do not think the thought ever crossed his mind that the child might not be supposititious at all, but the real grandson of Lord Eskside. It is so much easier when you are deeply interested in a subject to see your own side of the question, and to believe that yours is the side of right. In his sense of the possibilities of the case his spirits rose, and he enjoyed his drive to the Hewan with his innocent little girl beside him. Up they went, mounting the long slope, now letting the horse walk at the steep parts, now urging him to a momentary spurt, now rolling rapidly along on a shady level, with the branches almost meeting overhead. The day was warm for April, yet the wind was fresh and chilly, and blew in their faces with a keen and sweet freshness which brought the colour to little Violet’s cheek. “Little Vi would change into Little Rose up here on Eskside,” said Violet’s father—he had not felt so light of heart for many a day.
The Hewan is the tiniest of little cottages, perched high up on a bank of the Esk, and surveying for a mile or two the course of the picturesque little stream between its high wooded banks, with here and there a pretty house shining far off among the trees, on some little plateau of greensward, and the sound of the river filling the air with a soft rustling and tinkling. Alas! there are paper-mills now along the course of that romantic stream. I was but six years old, like Violet, when I first saw that wild little place, and ever since (how long a time!) it has remained in my mind, charming me with vague longings. Vi trotted to the grassy ridge and gazed down the course of the stream, and said nothing: for what can a child say, who has no phrases about the beautiful at her tongue’s end, and can only stare and wonder, and recollect all her life after, that brawling, surging river, those high trees, inclining from either bank towards each other, and that ineffable roof of sky? The old woman who kept the cottage consented that it was still unlet, and threw no difficulties in the way; and Mr Pringle secured it there and then for the summer. “I should like to buy it,” he said to himself, “if it were not——” If it were not?—that perhaps the turrets within sight might one day be his—a castle of dreams. The idea of the great possibilities before him suddenly surged upwards, flooding his soul; and then a hunger seized him for the river, and the woods, and the fair country which they threaded through. He wanted to have them, to possess them—not the rent of them, or the wealth of them, but themselves—a passion of acquisition which is something like love, swelling suddenly in his heart. He forgot himself gazing at them, till Vi roused him, plucking at his coat, “Papa, it is bonnie; but why do you look and look, with your eyes so big and strange, like the wolf that ate little Red Riding Hood?”
“Am I like a wolf?” he said, half laughing, yet tremulous in his momentary passion, seizing the child in his arms, and lifting her up to share his view. “Look, Vi! perhaps some day all that may be yours and mine.”
Violet looked gravely as a duty; but there was something in his strenuous grasp that frightened her, and she struggled to be put down. “I do not think,” she said, with precocious philosophy, “that it would be any bonnier if it was yours, papa—or even mine.”
Mr Pringle was tremulous after this burst of unusual emotion, for what has a respectable middle-aged lawyer to do with passion either of one kind or another? The fit went off, and he felt slightly ashamed of himself; but the thrill and flutter of feeling did not go off for some time. He sent the gig and horse to meet him at the Eskside gates, and taking Vi’s hand in his, went down by a pathway through the woods to a side entrance. “Perhaps we shall see this little boy we were talking of,” he said; but he was far from having made up his mind to confront the two old people, my lord and my lady, who would see through his pretences, as people are clever to see through the guiles of their heirs. He was reluctant to face them boldly; but yet he was—how curious!—eager to look the present crisis in the face, and see for himself what he had to fear. After they had gone a little way along the woodland path, which was still high above the course of the stream, though accompanied all the way by the sound of its waters as by a song, Violet escaped from her father’s hand, and ran on in advance, making excursions of her own, hither and thither, darting about in her brown coat and scarlet ribbons like a robin-redbreast under the budding branches. Mr Pringle, lost in his own thoughts, let her stray before him, expecting no encounter. Presently, however, there came from Vi a little cry of surprise and excitement, which quickened his steps. He hurried on after her, and came to an opening in the trees where the path widened out. It was a small circular platform, open to the slope of the river-bank, and with a rustic seat placed in an excavation on the higher side of the way. Into this open space another little figure had rushed from the other side, panting and flushed, grasping a tall stick, and stood, suddenly arrested, in front of Violet, facing her, with an answering cry, with big brown eyes expanded to twice their natural size, and a face suddenly filled with curiosity and wonder. Mr Pringle it may be supposed wasblaséin the matter of boys, and I do not think that the affectionate father of an honest plain family is ever a great amateur of childish beauty. This little figure, however, in his fantastic velvet dress, with his hatperched on the back of his head, and all his dark curls ruffled back from his bold brown forehead, struck him with a certain keen perception of beauty which was almost pain. Ah! and with a perception of something else which was still sharper pain. He fell back a step to recollect himself, staggered by the sudden impression. What made the child so like Richard Ross? What malignant freak of fortune had so amalgamated with the dark complexion and look which was not Richard’s, those family features? Mr Pringle stood as if spell-bound, contemplating the child about whom he had been so curious, about whom his curiosity was so fatally satisfied now.
“You are the little boy that lives at Rosscraig,” said Violet, feeling the responsibility of a first address to lie with her, but somewhat frightened, with tremblings in her voice.
“Yes; and who are you?” cried the little fellow. Mr Pringle behind noticed with a pang that he spoke with an “English accent,” that advantage which the ambitious Scotch parent so highly estimates. This gave him a still deeper pang than the resemblance, for it seemed to give the final blow to the beggar’s brat theory. Beggar’s brats in Mr Pringle’s experience spoke Scotch.
“Who are you?” said Val. “I never saw you before. Will you come and play? It’s dull here, with no one to play with. Do you hear any one coming? I’ve run away from grandpapa.”
“But you oughtn’t to run away from your grandpapa,” said Violet. “It is very naughty to run away, especially when the other people can’t run so fast as you.”
“That’s the fun,” cried the other, with a laugh. “If you’ll come and play, I’ll show you squirrels and heaps of things. But help me first to hide this big stick. I think I hear him coming—quick, quick!”
“Would he beat you with it?” said Vi, growing pale with terror.
“Quick, quick!” cried the boy, seizing her by the wrist; but just then there was a rush of steps along the sloping path which wound down the brae to this centre, and Lord Eskside himself appeared, half angry, half laughing, pulling aside the branches to look through. “Give me back my stick, you rogue!” he cried, then paused, arrested, as Mr Pringle had been, by that pretty woodland picture. It wassomething between a Watteau group, and the ruder common rendering of the “Babes in the Wood:” the girl in her scarlet ribbons with liquid dark eyes uplifted, her face somewhat pale, with mingled terror, and self-control; the boy, all flushed and beautiful in his cavalier dress, grasping her by the wrist; with the faintly green branches meeting over their heads, and the brown harmonious woods, all musical with evening notes of birds and echoes of the running water, for a background. The men on either side were so impressed by the picture that they paused mutually, in involuntary admiration. But they had both perceived each other, and though their sentiments were not very friendly, politeness commanded that they should speak.
“I hope you are well, Lord Eskside,” said Mr Pringle, stepping with an effort into the charmed circle. “I had just brought my little girl through the woods to see how beautiful they are. This is my Violet; and this fine little fellow is—a visitor, I suppose?”
“Is it you, Alexander Pringle?” said Lord Eskside. “I could not believe my eyes. It is a sight for sore een to see you here.”
“Indeed it is chance—mere chance,” said Pringle, with a fulness of apology which he was himself uneasily conscious was quite uncalled for. “I have been up at the Hewan, which I have taken for the summer.”
“The Hewan for the summer! why, man, it’s a mere cottage; and what has become of your own place?”
“Oh, I retain my old place; but it is a long way off, and best for the autumn, when we can flit altogether. My wife is fond of the Hewan, though it is so small; and we thought it would be handy to run out for a day, now and then. In short, it suits us. Does this little fellow, Lord Eskside, belong to the place? or is he a visitor? He seems to have struck up a sudden friendship with my little girl.”
“A visitor!” said Lord Eskside. “Do you mean to say you have not heard—do you see no likeness in him? This is my grandson, Pringle—my successor one day, I hope—Richard’s eldest son.”
“Richard’s son!—you are joking,” said Mr Pringle, growing pale, but with a smile that hurt him,—“you are joking, Lord Eskside; a child of that complexion Richard’s son!”
Lord Eskside felt that his adversary had hit the blot—and, to tell the truth, he himself had never perceived Val’s resemblance to Richard. “Colouring is not everything,” he said; “I suppose he has his complexion from his mother:” then with a return blow,—“but I cannot expect you to be very much delighted with the sight of him, Pringle; he takes the wind out of your sails—yours and your boys’.”
“I hope my boys will be able to manage for themselves,” said Pringle, with a forced laugh. “If I say that I don’t see the resemblance, it is for no such reason. I have never hungered for other folk’s rights: but that is one thing and justice is another. Vi, my dear, we must go.”
“What! won’t you come and see my lady? She will be affronted if you pass so near without calling; and you see,” said the old lord, with an effort at cordiality, “the children have made friends already. Come and have some dinner, man, before you go home. You know me of old. My bark is waur than my bite—I meant no harm.”
“Oh, there is no offence,” said the heir-at-law; “but it’s getting late for a delicate child, and our gig is waiting at the Woodgate. Violet, you must bid the little man good-bye.”
“He is not a naughty boy, papa, as you said—he is a nice boy,” said Vi, looking up with an appeal in her eyes; “please, I should like to stay.”
“And what made you think he was naughty, my bonnie little girl?” said Lord Eskside, in insinuating tones.
“Come, come, Violet, you must be obedient,” said her father, hastily, shaking hands with his kinsman, whose old face, half grim, half humorous, was lighted up with sudden and keen enjoyment of the situation. Mr Pringle hurried his daughter on almost harshly in the confusion of his feelings. He had never been harsh to her before; and Violet, in her disappointment, took to crying quietly under her breath. “I should like to stay—I should like to stay!” she murmured; till out of pure exasperation the kindest of fathers could have whipped her, and thought of that operation as an actual relief to his feelings. Lord Eskside, on his part, stood still in the clearing, holding back Val, who was more vehement. “I want her to play with me; and you said I was to have whatever I wanted,” the boy cried, struggling with all his might to break away.
“You must know, my man, that there are many things which we all want and cannot get,” cried the old lord, holding him fast; and then he burst into a low laugh. “Here’s a bonnie state of affairs already,” he said to himself: “Richard’s son breaking bounds to be after Sandy Pringle’s daughter! It’s the best joke I’ve heard for many a day. Come, Val, come, like a good boy. We’ll go and tell grandma. She may have a little girl in her pocket for anything you and I know.”
“But I don’t want any little girl; I wantthatlittle girl,” cried Val, with precocious discrimination. The old lord chuckled more and more as he half led, half dragged him up the steep path towards the house.
“Man, if you’re after them like this already, we’ll have our hands full by the time you’re of age!” But when he had said this, Lord Eskside paused and contemplated his grandson, and shook his head. “Can he be Richard’s son after all?” the old man asked himself.
Lord Eskside, however, looked grim enough before he went into the house, where he betook himself at once to the drawing-room in which his wife sat alone, at a window overlooking the river. He went in to her moody, with the air of a man who has something to say.
“What is the matter?” said Lady Eskside.
“Oh, nothing’s the matter. We’re entering into the botherations I foresaw, that’s all that’s the matter. Who do you think I met in the woods but that lawyer-rascal Sandy Pringle, come to spy out the nakedness of the land!”
“And what nakedness is there to spy into? and what can Sandy Pringle do to you or me?” said the old lady, with a slight elevation of her head.
“Not much, perhaps, to you or me. He’s taken the Hewan, Catherine, where he can lie in wait like an auld spider till he gets us into his net.”
“I don’t understand you,” said the old lady, with the light of battle waking in her eyes. “What does it matter to us where Sandy Pringle lives? He has been out of the question, poor man, as everybody knows, since Providence sent to my son Richard his two bonnie boys.”
“It’s fine romancing,” said Lord Eskside. “Where’s the t’other of your bonnie boys, my lady? And where is your proof of this one that will satisfy a court of law? Likeness is all very well, and natural instinct’s all very well, but they’ll have little effect on the Court of Session. And though he’s a haverel in private life, Sandy Pringle was always a clever lawyer. If you do not find the womanthere will be a lawsuit, that will leave Eskside but an empty title, and melt all the lands away.”
“We’ll find the woman,” said the old lady, clasping her fine nervous hands. “I’ll move earth and heaven before I’ll let anything come in my boy’s way.”
At this moment Val burst in, rosy and excited, with his grandfather’s stick, which in the vehemence of their new ideas both the child and the old man had forgotten. “Grandma, I want that little girl to play with. Send over directly,” cried Val, in hot impatience, “to get me the little girl!”
“You have enough on your hands, my lady,” said Lord Eskside.
TheHewan was not a cottage of gentility. It was too small, too homely, too much like a growth of the soil, to belong to any class that could be described asornée. The roof indeed was not thatched, but it was of red tiles, so overgrown with lichens as almost to resemble a thatch, except in the rich colour, which, to tell the truth, very few people appreciated. Its present owner was a shopkeeper in Lasswade, in whose heart there were many searchings about the vulgarity of its appearance, which he felt sure was the reason why it was not more easily let for the summer; and this good man had almost made up his mind to the expense required for a good slate roof, when Mr Pringle fortunately appeared and engaged it “as it was.” A sort of earthen embankment, low and thick, encircled the little platform on which it stood. There was nothing behind it but sky, with a light embroidery of trees; for it occupied the highest “brae head” in the neighbourhood, and in a more level country would have been described as situated on the top of a hill. Before it lay the whole course of the Esk, not all visible indeed, narrowing here and there between high banks, now and then hiding itself under the foliage, or capriciously turning a corner out of sight,—but always lending to the landscape that charm of life which water more than anything imparts to the inanimate world around. Cliffs and trees, and bits ofbold brown bank, and soft stretches of greensward, all took a certain significance, and explained theirraison d’êtreby the river. The houses, too, from the dignified roofs of Rosscraig lower down the stream, showing their turrets, which little Violet supposed to be made of gold, between the clouds of trees—down to the square white houses of the paper-mill people on the other side, and here and there rough red tiles of a cottage of earlier date—were all harmonised by the river, which was the link which held them together. The usual geographical indications on Eskside were not by the points of the compass, as is so common in Scotland, but by the stream—“up the water” or “down the water” was the popular indication; and a more picturesque one it would be difficult to find.
The Hewan was a long way up the water from Lasswade, yet not so far but that many a visitor would climb the brae to “get their tea” with old Mrs Moffatt, who was the mother of the proprietor,—living in charge of the house, and not too proud to superintend the domestic arrangements of small families who hired it for the summer. She had a little room with a “box-bed,” that mystery of discomfort and frowsiness, but which was neither frowsy nor uncomfortable in the hands of the brisk little old woman—which her son had built on to the back of the house for her, and in which she continued summer and winter, retiring herself there in dignified privacy when “a family” was in full possession. Mrs Moffatt’s little room, which had been made on purpose for her, had no communication with the cottage. She considered it a very dignified retirement for her old age. John Moffatt, her son, was a shoemaker in Lasswade; and when the savings of his cobbling enabled him to buy the Hewan, and establish his mother there, no noble matron in a stately jointure-house was ever half so proud. Such a feeling indeed as pride, or even satisfaction, rarely moves the mind of the dethroned queen who has to move out of the house she has swayed for years, and descend into obscurity when the humiliation of widowhood befalls her. Mrs Moffatt, good old soul, had no such past to look back upon. She had been long a widow, knocking about the world, doing whatever homely job she could find, struggling to bring up her children; and the Hewan and the little back room represented a kind of earthly paradise to the cobbler’s mother. The summer lodgers who paid her for cooking and keeping in order theirlittle rooms, gave the frugal old soul enough to live on during the winter; and when by chance “a family” came which had no need of her, good John, out of the abundance of the rent, allowed his mother the few weekly shillings she required. She had a little kitchen-garden to the back, surrounding her nest, as she called it, and kept a pig, which was her pride and joy, and a few chickens. If she could but have had a cow, the old woman would have been perfectly happy; but as it is not, I suppose—or at least so people say—good for us to be perfectly happy, the cow was withheld from her list of mercies granted. Good little soul, her mouth watered sometimes when she thought of the butter she could make, and of the cheeriness of having “a neebor’s lassie” coming in with her pitcher for the milk, or even the luxury of a “wee drap real cream” in her cup of tea. But to mourn for unattainable things had never been her way; and when she went “doon the toun” with a basketful of eggs for her daughter-in-law, she was as proud and happy in her homely gift as if it had been gold or diamonds. She was a friendly body everybody testified, and known up the water and down the water as always serviceable and always cheery. When there was any gossip going on of an interesting nature, some one in Lasswade or the neighbourhood always found opportunity of taking a walk up to the Hewan, and a cup of tea with old Jean, who was every one’s friend.
On such occasions Mrs Moffatt carefully skimmed everything that looked like cream from the milk which had been standing in a bowl for this purpose since the morning, and put on her little kettle, and took out her best china, and even prepared some “toasted breed” over and above the oat-cakes, which were her usual fare. The window of the old woman’s nest looked out upon a dark wilderness of trees, which descended down a steep bank to the upper Esk, and shut out any view. Her door was generally open, as well as the window, so that the rustling of the trees and the singing of the kettle kept pleasant company. Her boarded floor was as clean as soap and water could make it, and her hearth well swept and bright; a huge rug, made by her own hands (for she was a capable old wife) out of strips of cloth of all colours, looked cosy before the fire. Her bed, like a berth in a ship, appeared behind, with a very bright bit of chintz for curtains, and covered with a gay patchworkquilt. She had some brilliantly-coloured pictures on the walls—a wonderful little boy with big eyes and a curly dog, and a little girl with long curls and a doll, not more staring and open-eyed than herself. The old lady thought they were like “our wee Johnnie and Phemie down the town,” and found them “grand company.” She had some brass candlesticks and a glorious tea-caddy on the mantelpiece, and such a tea-tray set up against the wall as would have made all other ornamentation pale. “The worst o’t is, ye maun be awfu’ solitary, especially in the winter time, when there’s naebody ben the house, and few on the road that can help it,” her friends would say. “Me solitary!” said old Jean. “I’m thankful to my Maker I never was ane that was lanesome. I’m fond o’ company, real fond o’ company—but for a while now and then it’s no’ that ill to have your ain thoughts. And then there’s the hens, poor things, aye canty and neighbour-like, troubling their heads about their sma’ families, just as I used to do mysel’—and Grumphy yonder’s just a great diversion; and when it’s a cauld night, and I shut to the door, there’s the fire aye stirring and birring, and the wee nest as warm as can be, and the auld clock, tick, tick, aye doing its duty, poor thing, though it might be tired this hunder year or twa it’s been at it; and there’s a hantle reading in the ‘Courant,’ though maybe the ‘Scotsman’s bigger, and I’m on the Leeberal side mysel’. Toots! solitary! there’s naebody less solitary than me.”
A cheerful soul is always a social centre, however humble it may be. Jean’s friends accordingly went to see her, not out of pity, as to cheer a poor solitary old woman, but for their own amusement, which in this kind of social duty is by far the strongest motive. She was about the best-informed woman on all Eskside. Every kind of gossip made its way to her; and I doubt whether the people in Rosscraig House themselves, knew so well all that had happened and all that everybody said on the night of little Valentine’s arrival. She heard a great deal even from Mrs Harding herself, the housekeeper, who could not resist the temptation of confiding a few details, not generally known, to her old friend’s keeping. For Jean was known to be a person in whom it was possible to repose confidence, not one that would betray the trust placed in her. Besides, Mrs Moffatt had become a person of importance since it was known in Rosscraig thatMr Pringle had taken the Hewan for the season. Lady Eskside herself got out of her carriage one day as she passed, and went to pay the old woman a visit. She went into the cottage and complimented old Jean on the excellent order in which she kept it. “I hear it has been taken by a relation of ours—Mr Pringle,” she said.
“I didna ken he was a relation of your leddyship’s; but it’s Mr Pringle sure enough. I was sure I kent the face—no doubt I’ve seen him coming or going about the House.”
“He comes very seldom to see us,” said Lady Eskside. “In fact, before my grandson was born he considered himself the heir—after my son, you know; and he has been dreadfully disappointed, poor man, since. Val, don’t go too near the dyke!”
“And this is the heir, nae doubt, my lady?—eh, what a bonnie bairn! Nane that see him need ever ask the rank he’s born to. He has the look of a bit little prince. And I wouldna say but he was fond of his own way whiles——”
“More than whiles, more than whiles,” said the old lady, graciously; “he is just a handful. But Mr Pringle has a large family, if it’s him. He will never find room for his bairns in this little bit of a place.”
“It’s chiefly for the wee Miss he had with him, my lady. She’s delicate, they say; and if ever a man was wrapt up in a bairn—and her so delicate——”
“Dear me, I am sorry to hear it!” said Lady Eskside, whose sympathy was instantly aroused; “will it be anything the matter with the chest? I am always most afraid for the chest in children. Mr Pringle is a most excellent man. He has been a little disappointed and soured perhaps—but he is an excellent person. The air is sharp up here, Jean—too sharp for a delicate child. If she should want anything, cream or fresh milk in the morning, be sure you let me know. Cream is excellent for the lungs. I like it better than that oil that doctors give now—nasty-smelling stuff. But if there is anything the poor child should want, be sure you send to me.”
Lady Eskside was an acute woman, but she was foolish in this particular. She caught her own healthy blooming grandchild on the edge of the low embankment, where he was hazarding his life in warm enjoyment of the risk, and gave him a kiss though he deserved a whipping, and said, “PoorSandy Pringle!” with the most genuine feeling. She went into Lord Eskside’s library, when her drive was over, full of this information. “You need not alarm yourself about Sandy Pringle, poor man,” she said; “he has taken the Hewan on account of his poor little girl who is delicate—her chest, I am afraid. If you remember, his mother died of consumption quite young. It’s a terrible scourge when it’s in a family. My heart is sore for him, poor man. When the child comes we must have her here, and see if anything can be done. Perhaps if they were to take it in time, and send her to Madeira or some of these mild places; there is always hope with a bairn.”
“My word, my lady, but you go fast,” said the old lord, with his little keen eyes twinkling under his shaggy eyebrows. But he did not convince her any more than she convinced him. And indeed, when the Pringle family began to appear about the woods, every member of the household at Rosscraig, down to my lady’s young footman, felt that curiosity of opposition in respect to them which is almost as eager as the curiosity of partisanship. Mrs Harding the housekeeper had for her part taken up Lord Eskside’s view of the subject, and when she too made a visit to Jean Moffatt one evening of the early summer, her purpose was of a more sternly investigating order than that of Lady Eskside.
“How do you like the folk ben the house?” she said, as she sat at tea; the cake she had brought “in a present” was placed on the table in the place of honour, and the tea was “masking” before the fire. It was a soft evening in May. The door was open, but the fire was not disagreeable, and the sound of the Esk far down below the brae, and the rustling of the leaves close round the house, were softened by the air of spring into a pleasant murmur. The family “ben the house” being separated by a good Scotch stone wall from old Mrs Moffatt’s nest, gave no sound of their neighbourhood, and nothing but that wild but soft cadence of the waters and the trees interrupted the homely domestic harmonies more closely at hand—the cheery little stir andpétillementof the fire, the singing of the kettle, the purring of the cat, the ticking of the old clock. Mrs Harding combined an earnest desire for information with a very pleasant sense of the immediate comfort and ease which she was enjoying. My lord and my lady were “out to their dinner,” and Harding himself had promised to daunder up to the Hewan in the gloaming and fetch his wife home. Being “out to her tea” was an unusual event in the housekeeper’s responsible life, and the enjoyment it gave her was great. “Eh, how quiet and pleasant it is!” she added, almost with enthusiasm; “this is one of the days you can hear the grass growin’: and to get away from a’ the stew and bustle o’ the dinner, the hot fire, and the smell o’ the meat, and thae taupies that let one thing burn, and another boil over. If I were to envy onybody in the world, I think, Jean Moffatt, it would be you.”
“Hoots,” said the old woman, with a pleasant consciousness that her lot was enviable; “when you and your man make up your mind to retire, my certy, ye’ll be a hantle better off than the like o’ me.”
“And when will that be?” said Mrs Harding, with a sigh; “no as lang asTheylive, for they couldna do without my man an’ me. But I was saying, how do you like the folk ben the house?”
“You shouldna let yourself be keepit in bondage,” said Jean, with a touch of sarcasm; “when folkmaundo without ye, theycando without ye—I’ve aye seen that. Oh, I like them real well. They come and they gang, and now it’s a breakfast and now the bairns’ dinner—nothing more—and aye a maid to serve them; so it suits me fine. The lads are stirring boys, and Missie’s a darling. She makes me think upon one I lost, that was the sweetest o’ a’ my flock. Eh, if you could but keep a girlie like that aye the same, what a pleasure it would be in a house! But the bit things grow up and marry, and have weans of their own, and get to be just as careworn and wrinkled as yoursel’. I think whiles my Marg’ret, with ten of a family, and a man no better than he should be, is aulder than me.”
“It’s the course of nature,” said Mrs Harding—“we maunna grumble; but I’m sure when I see a’ that folk have to go through with their families, I’m thankful I have nane o’ my ain. Ye ken your Mr Pringle sets up to beourheir! It’s real ridiculous if it wasna provoking. I could laugh when I think o’t. He must have been terrible cast down when Mr Richard brought hame his boy.”
“But I thought it was a randy wife, not Mr Richard——”
“Whisht!” said the housekeeper; “we’ll say no more about that. It’s no’ a story I pretend to understand, butI’m rather thinking it was some Italian or other that Mr Richard sent with the bairn. Foreigners are strange cattle. And whether it was man or woman I wouldna say, for nobody saw them but my man, and he’s confused about the story. But this is clear, it was Mr Richard sent the bairn hame; and reason guid. You should have heard his man on Eetaly and thae places. You might as well sell your soul to Satan, and better too, for you would aye get something by the bargain—and there’s no eventhatcomfort out there. Ye canna but wonder at Providence that lets a’ that play-acting and fiddling and breaking o’ the Sabbath gang on, and takes nae mair heed than if a’ thae reprobats were sober, decent, kirk-going folk like ourselves. But I’m thinking their time will come.”
“Poor bodies! I daur to say they ken nae better,” said Jean. “It’ll be by the mother’s side that the Pringles and the Rosses count kin?”
“Na, how could that be, when he thinks himsel’ the heir? When ye’ve ance lived in a high family, ye learn a heap of things. Titles never gang the way o’ the spinning-wheel, nor land that’s entailed, as they call it. It’s lad comes after lad, and the lasses never counted. I canna say it’s according to justice, but it’s law, and there’s nae mair to be said. This is the way of it, for my lady told me hersel’: A Ross married a Pringle that was an heiress two or three hunder years ago, and took his wife’s name, which was a poor exchange, though I’m saying nothing against the name of Pringle; my first place was with the Pringles of Whytfield, a real fine family. And now that a’ the Rosses have died down to the present family, the Pringles have come uppermost. My lady herself was six or seven years married before Mr Richard was born. So ye see they’ve had the cup to their lips, as you may say, more than once. That’s a thing I could not bide. I would rather be my man’s wife, knowing I could be no better all my days, than expect to be my lady, and never win further ben.”
“It’s much the same in a’ ranks o’ life,” said Jean. “There’s my Marg’ret; it’s been her desire a’ her days to get the house at the Loanhead, with a nice bit land, that would gang far to feed her family. She’s had the promise o’t for ten years back. Old John Thomson was to flit afore he died, but that fell through; and when he died, they couldna refuse to let his son come in; and then it wasreported through a’ the parish that young John was to emigrate——”
“I’ve heard that,” said Mrs Harding; “and I aye give my advice against it: for nae man will ever succeed if he doesna work hard; and if he’ll work hard, he’ll do very well at hame.”
“Young John was to emigrate,” continued Mrs Moffatt; “and it was a’ settled about his roup, and Marg’ret was sure of getting in by the term; when what does he do but change his mind! I thought the poor lass would have broken her heart; and oh, the fecht she has with a’ thae bairns and a weirdless man. Then he had that awfu’ illness, and it was reported he was dying. My poor Marg’ret came to me the day he was prayed for in the kirk, with red een. ‘I’m doing naething but pray for him,’ she said; ‘for oh, if I didna pray for him to mend, I would wish him dead, mother; and what comfort could I have in onything that came to me after that?’ The man got weel,” said the old woman, with a sigh; “he’s as weel as you or me, and a hantle younger, and he canna make up his mind if he’ll go or bide. It’s awfu’ tantalising; and it happens in a’ classes of life. I’m real sorry for the poor gentleman, and I hope he doesna take it to heart like my Marg’ret, poor lass!”
“Ye mean well,” said Mrs Harding, half affronted; “but to pity the next heir is like grudging the Almighty’s mercies to us. Folk should learn to be content. I’m no’ saying for your Marg’ret; but Mr Pringle is as weel off as he has ony right to be, and why should he come spying upon my lord and my lady? Folk should learn to be content.”
“It’s awfu’ easy when it’s no’ your ain case,” said Jean; “an’ I suppose we’ve a’ as much or mair than we deserve; but that does not satisfy your wame when you’re hungry, nor your back when you’re cauld. The maister has never been out here since the first time. The leddy came once, a fine sensible woman, that looks weel after her family; but it’s Missie that’s the queen o’ the Hewan. As it’s such a fine night, and nane but bairns in the house, if you’ll come ben we’ll maybe see them. I’ll have to think o’ some supper for them, for thae lang laddies are just wolves for their supper. Or maybe you’ll first take another cup o’ tea?”
Mrs Harding declined this hospitable offer, and rose, taking her shawl and bonnet with her, for it was nearly the time, she remarked, when she “must be going.” The twolingered outside to look at the hens, and especially that careful but premature mother who had begun to “sit,” though the weather was still but moderately adapted for the fledglings; and then they made a momentary divergence to see “Grumphy,” who was the pride of his mistress’s heart. “I’ll no’ kill him till after harvest, and I’ll warrant you there’ll be no better meat between this and Edinburgh. Poor beast!” she said, with a mixture of the practical and sentimental, “he’s a fine creature, and has a fine disposition; but it’s what we a’ must come to. And yonder’s where I would keep the coo—if I had ane,” she added with a sigh, pointing to a little paddock. The cow was to old Jean what the barony of Eskside was to Mr Pringle, and the house at the Loanhead to her daughter Marg’ret: but the old woman’s lot was the easiest, in that the object of her desire was not almost within her longing grasp.