Thus she sat absorbed in her homely occupation, whenshe heard voices approaching through the soft air. One of them she recognised at once with a thrill of pleasure to be Val’s. He was coming slowly along, pointing out everything to some one with him. The woman dropped the peas out of her hands, and listened. The window was open, and so near the road that every sound was distinctly heard. It was some time before any one replied to Val, and the listener had leisure enough for many wild fears and throbs of anxious suspense. At last the answer came—in a lady’s voice, which she knew as well as if she had heard it yesterday, with its soft Scotch accent, its firm tone and character, unlike any other she knew. The woman rose suddenly, noiselessly, to her feet; she grew white and blanched, as with deadly terror.
“Here is where Brown lives,” said Val, in his cheery voice—“and his mother, whom I want you particularly to see. A nice little house, isn’t it? Stop and look at the boats down the river before we go in. Isn’t it pretty, grandma? not like our Esk, to be sure, but with a beauty of its own.”
“Far gayer and brighter than Esk, certainly,” said Lady Eskside, quite willing to humour the boy; though her own opinion of the broad, flat, unshadowed, and unfeatured Thames was not too flattering. She stood leaning upon his arm, rapt in a soft Elysium of pride and happiness. The lovely morning, and the good accounts she had been hearing of her boy, and the fact that he was going home with her, and that she was leaning on his arm, and seeing more beauty in his kind young face than the loveliest summer morning or the fairest scene could have shown her—all combined to make everything fair to Lady Eskside. She was going to visit his humble friends—to seal with her approbation that kindly patronage of the “deserving” poor, which is as creditable to their superiors as a love of low society is discreditable. They stood together talking for a minute at the open door.
At that same moment Dick was on his way to the back door which communicated with the boat-building yard—but was met, to his wonder and dismay, by his mother, flying from the house with a face blanched to deadly paleness, and a precipitate haste about her, which nothing but fear could have produced. She seized him by the arm without a word—indeed she was too breathless and panting to speak—anddragged him with her, too much amazed to resist. “For God’s sake, what is the matter, mother?” he said, when surprise would let him speak. She made no answer, but holding fast by him, took refuge in a boat-house built against the side wall of the little backyard through which she had flown. Dick, who was a patient fellow, not easily excited, stood by her wondering, but refraining to question when he saw the state of painful excitement in which she was. “Listen!” she said, under her breath; and presently he heard Val’s voice in the yard calling her. “Mrs Brown!” cried Val; though it was the first time after her disavowal of it that he had used that name, which was now adopted by everybody else, as of course the name of Dick Brown’s mother. “I can’t think where she can have gone to,” he added, with some vexation; “and I wanted you to see her specially—almost more than Brown himself.”
“Well, my dear, it cannot be helped,” said the voice of Lady Eskside, much more composed than Val’s—for I cannot say that she was deeply disappointed. “No doubt the honest woman has run out about some needful business—leaving her peas, too. Come, Val, since you can’t find her; your grandpapa will be waiting for us, my dear.”
“I can’t see Brown, either,” he said, with still greater annoyance, coming back after an expedition into the yard. “The men say he went home. I can’t tell you how annoyed I am.”
“Well, well, I can see them another time, my dear,” said my lady, smiling within herself at the boy’s disappointment—“and we must be going to meet your grandfather. I wonder where she got that cover on her table. I had a shawl just like it once; but come, dear, come; think of my old lord waiting. We must not lose any more time, Val.”
Dick put his arm round his mother; he thought she was going to faint, so deadly white was her face—white as the kerchief on her head. She laid her head on his shoulder, and moaned faintly. Her closed eyes, her blanched cheeks, her lips falling helplessly apart, gave Dick an impression of almost death.
“Mother, tell me, for God’s sake, who is this, and what is the matter with you?” he cried.
“Youmust hold yourself ready to be called back at a moment’s notice, Val,” said the old lord. “It must be some time next year, and it may be any day. That is to say, we can scarcely have it, I suppose, before Parliament meets, except in some unforeseen case. Therefore see all you can as soon as you can, and after February hold yourself in readiness to be recalled any day.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Val, with a blithe assent which was trying to his grandfather. He was quite ready to do anything that was wanted of him—to make up his mind on any political subject on the shortest notice, and sign anything that was thought desirable; but as for personal enthusiasm on the subject, or excitement in the possibility of being elected member for the county, I am afraid Val was as little moved as the terrier he was caressing. Perhaps, however, he was all the more qualified on that account to carry the traditionary principles of the Rosses to the head of the poll, and to vote as his fathers had voted before him, when they had the chance,—or would have voted had they had the chance. Val was setting out on his travels when this warning was given. He was going to see his father in Florence, and, under his auspices, to visit Italy generally, which was a very pleasant prospect. Up to this time he had done the whole duty of boy in this world; and now he had taken his degree, and had a right to the prouder title of man.
Not that Val was very much changed from his Eton days. He was still slim and slight, notwithstanding all his boating. His brown complexion was a trifle browner, if that were possible, with perpetual exposure to the sun; his hair as full of curls, and as easily ruffled as ever, rising up like a crest from his bold brown forehead; and I do not think he had yet got his temper under command, though its hasty flashes were always repented of the moment after. “A quick temper, not an ill temper,” Lady Eskside said; and she made out that Valentine Ross, the tenth lord, her husband’s father—he whose portrait in the library her son called “a Raeburn,” and between whom and Val she had already attempted to establish a resemblance—was very hasty and hot-tempered too; which was an infinite comfort to her, asproving that Val got his temper in the legitimate way—“from his own family”—and not through that inferior channel, “his mother’s blood.” He was slightly excited about the visit to his father, and about his first progress alone into the great world—much more excited, I am sorry to say, than he was about representing the county; but on that point Lord Eskside did everything that was necessary, filling up what was wanting on Valentine’s part in interest and emotion. He had again filled Rosscraig with a party which made the woods ring with their guns all morning, and talked politics all night; and there was not a voter of importance in the whole county who had not already been “sounded,” one way or other, as to how he meant to dispose of his vote. “The first thing to be done is to make sure of keeping the Radicals out,” Lord Eskside said; for, indeed, a Whig lawyer was known to be poising on well-balanced wing, ready to sweep down upon a constituency which had always been stanch—faithful among the faithless known. The present Member, I must explain, was in weak health; and but for embarrassing his party, and thwarting the cherished purpose of Lord Eskside, who was one of the leading members of the Conservative party in the county, would have retired before now.
Val’s term of residence at home was not, therefore, much more than a visit. He did what an active youth could do to renew all his old alliances, and climbed up the brae to the Hewan many times without seeing any of the family there, except the younger boys, who were mending of some youthful complaint under Mrs Moffatt’s care, and who looked up to him with great awe, but were not otherwise interesting to the young man. “Are any of the others coming—is your mother coming—or Vi?” said Valentine; but these youthful individuals could afford him no information. “Oh ay, they’re maybe coming next month,” said old Jean, who took a feminine pleasure in the dismay that was visible in Valentine’s face. “They were here a’ the summer, June and July; and I wouldna wonder but we’ll see them all October—if it’s no too cauld,” the old woman added, with a twinkle in her eye.
“What good will that do me?” said Val; and he leapt the dyke and went home through the ferns angry with disappointment. And yet he was not at all in love with Violet, he thought, but only liked her as the nicest girlhe knew. When he remarked to Lady Eskside that it was odd to find none of the Pringles at the Hewan, my lady arose and slew him on the spot. “Why should the Pringles be at the Hewan?” she said; “they have a place of their own, where it becomes them much better to be. To leave Violet there so long by herself last year was a scandal to her mother, and gave much occasion for talking.”
“Why should it give occasion for talking?” said Val.
“A boy like you knows nothing about the matter,” the old lady answered, putting a stop to him decisively. Perhaps that was true enough; but it was also true that Val took a long walk to the linn next day, and sat down under the beeches, and mused for half an hour or so, without quite knowing what he was thinking about. How clearly he remembered those two expeditions, mingling them a little in his recollection, yet seeing each so distinctly! the small Violet in her blue cloak, sleeping on his shoulder (which thought made him colour slightly and laugh in the silence, such intimate companionship being strangely impossible to think of nowadays), and the elder Violet, still so sweet and young, younger than himself, though he was the very impersonation of Youth, repeating all the earlier experiences except that one. “By Jove, how jolly Mary is!” said Valentine to himself at the end of this reverie; and when he went home he devoted himself to Miss Percival, who was again at Rosscraig, as she always was when Lady Eskside was exposed to the strain and fatigue of company. “Do you remember our picnic at the linn last year?” he said, standing over Mary in a corner after dinner, to the great annoyance of an elderly admirer, who had meant to take this opportunity of making himself agreeable to a woman who seemed the very person to “make an excellent stepmother” to his seven children. Mary, who was conscious in some small degree of the worthy man’s meaning, was grateful to Val for once; and enjoyed, as the quietest of women do, the discomfiture of her would-be suitor.
“Yes,” she said, smiling; “what of it, you unruly boy?”
“I am not a proper subject for such epithets,” said Val. “I have attained my majority, and made a speech to the tenantry. I say, Mary, do you know, that’s a lovely spot, that linn. I was there to-day——”
“Oh, you were there to-day?”
“Yes, I was there. Is there anything wonderful in that?” said Val, not sure whether he ought not to take offence at the laughing tone, which seemed to imply something. “Tell Violet, when you see her, that it was uncommonly shabby of her not to come this year. We’d have gone again.”
“There’s a virtue in three times, Val,” said Mary. “If you go again, it will be more than a joke; and I don’t think I’ll give your message to Vi.”
“Why should it be more than a joke? Or why should it be a joke at all?” said Val, reddening, he scarcely knew why. He withdrew after this, slightly confused, feeling as if some chance touch had got at his heart, giving it adinnlewhich was half pleasure and half pain. Do you know what adinnleis, dear English reader? It means that curious sensation which you, in the poverty of your language, call “striking the funny bone.” You know what it is in the elbow. Valentine had that kind of sensation in his heart; and I think if this half-painful jar of the nerve lasted, and suggested quite new thoughts to the boy, it was all Mary Percival’s fault. I am happy to say that her widower got at her on Val’s withdrawal, and made himself most overpoweringly agreeable for the rest of the night.
And then the boy went away on his grand tour, leaving the old people at home rather lonely, longing after him; though Lord Eskside was too much occupied to take much notice of Val’s departure. My lady was very busy, too, paying visits all over the country, and paying court to great and small. She promised the widower her interest with Mary, but judiciously put him off till Miss Percival’s next visit, saying, cunningly, that she must have time to prepare her young friend for the idea, and trusting in Providence that the election might be over before an answer had to be given. It was gratifying to the Esksides to find a devoted canvasser for Valentine in the person of Lord Hightowers, the only possible competitor who could have “divided the party” in the county. Hightowers, however, was not fond of politics, and had no ambition for public life; it would have suited him better to be a locksmith, like Louis Seize. And among them all, they got the county into such a beautiful state of preparation that Lord Eskside could scarcely contain his rapture—and having laid allhis trains, and holding his match ready, sat down, in a state of excitement which it would be difficult to describe, to wait until the moment of explosion came.
In other places, too, Valentine’s departure had caused far more excitement than he was at all aware of. He had seen and said good-bye to Dick with the most cordial kindness, on the day he left Oxford. But Val had not failed to remark a gravity and preoccupation about his humble friend which troubled him in no small degree. When he recounted to Dick the failure of Lady Eskside and himself on the day before, the young man had received the information with a painful attempt to seem surprised, which made Val think for a moment that Dick’s mother had avoided the visit of set purpose. But as he knew of no hidden importance in this, the idea went lightly out of his head; and a few days after he remembered it no more. Very much more serious had been the effect upon Dick. His mother’s flight and her panic were equally unintelligible to him. The thought that there must be “something wrong” involved, in order to produce such terror, was almost irresistible; and Dick’s breeding, as I have said, had been of that practical kind which makes the mind accustomed to the commoner and vulgarer sorts of wrong-doing. He did not insist upon knowing what it was that made his mother afraid of Val’s grandmother; but her abject terror, and the way in which she dragged him too, out of sight, as if he had been a partner of her shame, had the most painful effect upon the young man. In the rudimentary state of morals which existed among the class from which he sprang, and where all his primitive ideas had been formed, dishonesty was the one crime short of murder which could bring such heavy shame along with it. He who steals is shunned in all classes, except among the narrow professional circles of thieves themselves; and Dick could not banish from his thoughts a painful doubt and uncertainty about his mother’s relations with “Mr Ross’s people.” She herself was so stunned and petrified by the great danger which she seemed to herself to have escaped, that she was very little capable of giving a rational explanation of her conduct. “You knew this lady before, mother?” said Dick to her, half pitifully, half severely, as he took her back to the parlour and placed her in a chair after the visitors were gone. “Yes,” she answered, but no more. And though he asked her manyother questions, nothing more than repeated Yes and No could he get in reply.
I do not know what wild sense of peril was in the poor creature’s heart. She feared, perhaps, that they could have taken her up and punished her for running away from her husband; she felt sure that they would separate her from her remaining boy—though had they not the other, whom she had given up to them? and in her panic at the chance of being found out, all power of reasoning (if she ever had any) deserted her. Ah, she thought to herself, only a tramp is safe! As soon as you have a settled habitation, and are known to neighbours, and can be identified by people about, all security leaves you: only on the tramp is a woman who wishes to hide herself safe. In her first panic, the thought of going away again, of deserting everything, of taking refuge on those open roads—those outdoor bivouacs which are full in the eye of day, yet better refuges than any mysterious darkness—came so strongly over her, that it was all she could do to withstand its force. But when she looked at her son, active and trim, in his boat-building yard, or saw him studying the little house at night, with his tools in his hand, to judge where he could put up something or improve something—his mother felt herself for the first (or perhaps it was the second) time in her life, bound as it were by a hundred minute threads which made it impossible for her to please herself. It was something like a new soul which had thus developed in her. In former times she had done as the spirit moved her, obeying her impulses whenever they were so strong as to carry everything else before them. Now she felt a distinct check to the wild force of these impulses. The blood in her veins moved as warmly as ever, impelling her to go, and she knew that she was free to go if she would, and that Dick too could be vanquished, and would come with her, however unwillingly. She was free to go, and yet she could not. For the first time in her life she had learned consciously to prefer another to herself. She could not ruin Dick. The struggle that she maintained with her old self was violent, but it was within herself, and was known to nobody; and finally, the new woman, the higher creature, vanquished the old self-willed and self-regarding wanderer. She set herself to meet the winter with a dogged resolution, feeling less, perhaps, the absence of that visionary solace which she had found in the sight of Val, in consequence ofthe hard and perpetual battle she had to fight with herself. And, to make it harder, she had not the cheery gratitude and tender appreciation of the struggle, which had rewarded her much less violent effort before. Dick was gloomy, overcast, pondering upon the strange thing that had happened. He could not get over it: it stood between him and his mother, making their intercourse constrained and unhappy. Had sherobbedthe old lady from whom she had fled in so strange a panic? Short of that, or something of that kind, why, poor Dick thought, should one woman be so desperately afraid of another? He did not, it is true, say, or even whisper to himself, this word so terrible to one in his insecure position, working his way in the world with slow and laborious advances; but the suspicion rankled in his heart.
All this time, however, his mother neither thought of setting herself right by telling him what her mystery was, nor once felt that she was wronging Dick by keeping the secret of his parentage so closely hidden from him. It did not occur to her that by doing this she was doing an injury to her boy. The life of gentlefolks—the luxurious and elegant existence into which her husband had tried to tame her, a wild creature of the woods—had been nothing but misery to her; and I doubt whether she was capable of realising that Dick, so different from herself in nature, would have felt differently in respect to those trammels from which she had fled. Had she been able to think, she would have seen how—unconsciously, with the instinct of another race than hers—the boy had been labouring all his life to manufacture for himself such a poor imitation of those trammels as was possible to him; but she was little capable of reasoning, and she did not see it. Besides, he was hers absolutely, and she had a right to him. She had given up the other, recognising a certain claim of natural justice on the part of the father of her children; and in so doing she had gone as far as nature could go, giving up half, with a rending of her heart which had never healed; but no principle of which she had ever heard called upon her to give up the whole. The very fact of having made a sacrifice of one seemed to enhance and secure her possession of the other—and how could she do better for Dick than she had done for herself? But this question had not even arisen in her mind as yet. She feared thattheyhad hidden emissaries, who, if they found her out,might take her remaining child from her; but that he was anyhow wronged by her silence, or had any personal rights in the matter, had not yet entered into her brooding, slowly working, confused, and inarticulate soul.
In one other house besides, Val and his concerns were productive of some little tumult of feeling—not the least important of the many eddies with which his stream of life was involved. Mr Pringle was almost as much excited about the approaching conflict as Lord Eskside. He saw in it opportunities for carrying out his own scheme, which he called exposure of fraud, but which to others much more resembled the vengeance of a disappointed man. He was the bosom friend of the eminent lawyer who meant to contest Eskside in the Liberal interest, and had no small share in influencing him to this step. His own acquaintance with the county, in the position of Lord Eskside’s heir-presumptive in past days, had given him considerable advantages and much information which a stranger could not easily command; and with silent vehemence he prepared himself for the conflict—contemplating one supreme stroke of revenge—or, as he preferred to think, contemplating a full exposure to the world of the infamous conspiracy against his rights and those of his children, from which the county also was now about to suffer. He did not speak freely to his family of these intentions, for neither his wife nor his children were in harmony with him on the subject; but this fact, instead of inducing him to reconsider a matter which appeared to other eyes in so different a light, increased the violence of his feelings, just in proportion to the necessity he felt for concealing them. It was even an additional grievance against Valentine, and the old people who had set Valentine up as their certain successor, that the lad had secured the friendship of his enemy’s own family. Sandy, who was by this time a hard-working young advocate, less fanciful and more certain of success than his father—though a very good son, and very respectful of his parents, had a way of changing the subject when the Eskside business was spoken of, which cut Mr Pringle to the quick. He could see that his son considered him a kind of monomaniac on this subject; and indeed there was sometimes very serious talk between Sandy and his mother about thisidée fixewhich had taken hold upon the father’s mind.
Thus Mr Pringle’s own family set themselves against him;but perhaps there was not one of them that had the least idea what painful results might follow except poor little Violet, who was very fond of her father, and in whose childish heart Val had established himself long ago. She alone was certain that her father meant mischief—mischief of a deeper kind than mere opposition to his election, such as Mr Pringle, as tenant of the Hewan and the land belonging to it, had a right to make if he pleased. Violet watched him with a painful mixture of dread lest her father should take some unworthy step, and dread lest Valentine should be injured, contending in her mind. She could scarcely tell which would have been the most bitter to her; and that these two great and appalling dangers should be combined in one, was misery enough to fill her young soul with the heaviest shadows. This she had to keep to herself, which was still harder to bear, though very usual in the troubles of youth. Everything which concerns an unrevealed and nascent love,—its terrors, which turn the very soul pale; its partings, which press the life out of the heart; its sickness of suspense and waiting,—must not the maiden keep all these anguishes locked up in her heart, until the moment when they are over, and when full declaration and consent make an end at once of the mystery and the misery? This training most people go through, more or less; but the trial is so much harder upon the little blossoming woman that the dawnings of the inclination, which she has never been asked for, are a shame to her, which they are not to her lover. Violet did not venture to say a word even to her mother of her wish to be at the Hewan while Val was there—of her sick disappointment when she found he had gone away without a chance of saying good-bye; and though she did venture to whisper her fears lest papa might “say something to hurt poor Val’s feelings,” which was a very mild way of putting it—she got little comfort out of this suppressed confidence. “I am afraid he will,” Mrs Pringle said. “Indeed, the mere fact that your papa is Mr Seisin’s chief friend and right-hand man, will hurt Val’s feelings. I am very sorry, and I think it very injudicious; for why should we put ourselves in opposition to the Eskside family? but it cannot be helped, and your papa must take his way.”
“Perhaps if you were to speak to him,” said Vi, with youthful confidence in a process, than which she herself knew nothing more impressive, and even terrible on occasion.
“Speak to him!” said Mrs Pringle; “if you had been married to him as long as I have, my dear, you would know how much good speaking to him does. Not that your papa is a bit worse than any other man.”
With this very unsatisfactory conclusion poor Violet had to be satisfied. But she watched her father as no one else did, fearing more than any one else. Her gentle little artifices, in which the child at first trusted much, of saying something pleasant of Val when she had an opportunity—vaunting his fondness for the boys, his care of herself (in any other case the strongest of recommendations to her father’s friendship), his respect for Mr Pringle’s opinions, his admiration of the Hewan—had, she soon perceived, to her sore disappointment, rather an aggravating than a soothing effect. “For heaven’s sake, let me hear no more of that lad! I am getting to hate the very sound of his name,” her father said; and poor Violet would stop short, with tears springing to her eyes.
Valentinewent off gaily upon his journey, without any thought of the tragic elements he had left behind him. I think, had Dick been still at the rafts at Eton, his young patron would have proposed to him to accompany him to Italy in that curious relationship which exists in the novel and drama, and could perhaps exist in former generations, but not now, among men—as romantic humble servant and companion. But Dick was grown too important a man to make any such proposal possible. Valentine dallied a little in Paris, which he saw for the first time, and made his way in leisurely manner across France, and along the beautiful Cornice road, as people used to do in the days before railways were at all general, or the Mont Cenis tunnel had been thought of. He met, I need not add, friends at every corner—old “Eton fellows,” comrades from Oxford, crowds of acquaintances of his own class and kind—a peculiarity of the present age which is often very pleasant for the traveller, but altogether destroys the strangeness, the novelty, thecharacteristic charm, of a journey through a foreign country. A solid piece of England moving about over the Southern landscape could not be more alien to the soil on which it found itself than were those English caravans in which the young men travelled; talking of cricket if they were given that way—of hits to leg, and so many runs off one bat; or, if they were boating men, of the last race, or what happened at Putney or at Henley, while the loveliest scenes in the world flew past their carriage-windows like a panorama. I think Mr Evelyn saw a great deal more of foreign countries when he made the grand tour; and even Val, though he was not very learned in the jargon of the picturesque, got tired of those endlessréchauffésof stale games and pleasures. He got to Florence about a fortnight after he left England, and made his way at once to the steep old Tuscan palace, with deeply-corniced roof and monotonous gloom of aspect, which stood in one of the smaller streets opening into the Via Maggio on the wrong side of the river. The wrong side—but yet the Pitti palace is there, and certain diplomatists preferred that regal neighbourhood. Val found a servant, a bland and splendid Italian major-domo, waiting for him when he arrived, but not his father, as he had half hoped; and even when they reached the great gloomy house, he was received by servants only—rather a dismal welcome to the English youth. They led him through an endless suite of rooms, half lighted, softly carpeted, full of beautiful things which he remarked vaguely in passing, to an inner sanctuary, where his father lay upon a sofa with a luxurious writing-table by his side. Richard Ross sprang up when he heard his son announced, and came forward holding out his hand. He even touched Valentine’s face with his own, first one cheek, then the other,—a salutation which embarrassed Val beyond measure; and then he bade him welcome in set but not unkindly terms, and began to ask him about his journey, and how he had left “everybody at home.”
This was only the third time that Val had seen his father, and Richard was now a man approaching fifty, and considerably changed from the elegant young diplomatist, who had surveyed with so little favour fourteen years ago the boy brought back to him out of the unknown. Richard’s first sensation now on seeing his son was one of quick repugnance. He was so like—the vagrant woman against whom Mr Ross was bitter as having destroyed his life. But he was too wiseto allow any such feeling to show, and indeed did his best to make the boy at home and comfortable. He asked him about his studies, and received Val’s half-mournful confession of not having perhaps worked so well as he might have done, with an indulgent smile. “It was not much to be expected,” he said; “boys like you, with no particular motive for work, seldom do exert themselves. But I heard you had gained reputation in a still more popular way,” he added; and spoke of the boat-race, &c., in a way that made Val deeply ashamed of that triumph, though up to this moment he had been disposed to think it the crowning triumph of his life. “You were quite right to go in for it, if your inclination lies that way,” said his bland father. “It is as good a way as another of getting a start in society.” And he gave Val a list of “who” was in Florence, according to the usage established on such occasions. He even took the trouble of going himself to show him his room, which was a magnificent chamber, with frescoed walls and gilded ceilings, grand enough for a prince’s reception-room, Val thought; and told him the hours of meals, and the arrangements of the household generally. “My house is entirely an Italian one,” he said, “but two or three of the people speak French. I hope you know enough of that language at least, to get on easily. Your own servant, of course, will be totally helpless, but I will speak to Domenico to look after him. If you know anything at all of Italian, you should speak it,” he added, suavely; “you will find it the greatest help to you in your reading hereafter. Now I will leave you to rest after your long journey, and we shall meet at dinner,” said the politest of fathers. Val sat staring before him half stupefied when he found himself left alone in the beautiful room. This was not the kind of way in which a son just arrived would be treated at Eskside. How much he always had to explain to his grandmother, to tell her of, to hear about! What a breathless happy day the first day at home always was, so full of talk, news, consultations, interchange of the family nothings that are nothing, yet so sweet! Val’s journey had only been from Leghorn, no further, so he was not in the least fatigued; and why he should be shut up here in his room to rest he had not a notion, any desire to rest being far from his thoughts. After a while he got up and examined the room, which was full of handsome old furniture. How he wished Dick had been with him,who would have enjoyed all those cabinets, and followed every line of the carvings with interest! Valentine himself cared little for such splendours. And finally he went out, and found as usual a school-fellow round the first corner, and marched about the strange beautiful place till it was time for dinner, and felt himself again.
It was very strange, however, to English—or rather Scotch—Valentine, to find himself in this Italian house, with a man so polished, so cultivated, so exotic as his father for his sole companion. Not that they saw very much of each other. They met at the twelve o’clock breakfast, where every dish was new to Val, for theménagewas thoroughly Italian; and at dinner on the days when Richard dined at home. Sometimes he took his handsome boy with him to great Italian houses, where, in the flutter of rapid conversation which he could not follow, poor Val found himself hopelessly left out, and looked asgaucheand unhappy as any traditionary lout of his age; and sometimes Val himself would join an English party at a hotel, where the hits to leg and the Ladies’ Challenge Cup would again be the chief subjects of conversation; if not (which was still more dreary) the ladies’ eager comparing of notes over Lady Southsea’s garden party, or that charming Lady Mary Northwood’s afternoon teas. On the whole, Val felt that his father’s banquets were best adapted to the locality; and when a lovely princess, with jewels as old as her name and as bright as her eyes, condescended to put up with his indifferent French, the young man was considerably elated, and proud of his father and his father’s society—as, when the same fair lady congratulated Richard upon thebeaux yeuxof Monsieurson fils, his father was of him.
One of the rare evenings which they spent together, Val informed his father of Lord Eskside’s eager preparations for the ensuing election, and of the place he was himself destined to take in the eyes of his county and country. Richard Ross did not receive this information as his son expected. His face grew immediately overcast.
“I wonder my father is so obstinate about this,” he said. “He knows my feeling on the subject. It is the most terrible ordeal a man can be subjected to. I wish you had let me know, all of you, before making up your minds to this very foolish proceeding. Parliament!—what should you want with Parliament at your age?”
“Not much,” said Val, somewhat uneasy to hear his grandfather attacked by his father, and a little dubious whether it became him to take the old man’s side so warmly as he wished; “but I hope I shall do my duty as well as another,” he said, with a little modest pride, “though I have still everything to learn.”
“Do your duty! stuff and nonsense,” said Richard; “what does a boy of your age know about duty? Please your grandfather you mean.”
Val felt the warm blood mounting to his face, and bit his lip to keep himself down. “And if it was so, sir,” he said, his eyes blazing in spite of himself, “there might be worse things to do.”
Richard stopped short suddenly and looked at him—not at his face, but into his eyes, which is of all things in the world the most trying to a person of hot temper. “Ha!” he said, with a soft smile, raising his eyebrows a little in gentle surprise, “you have a temper, I see! how is it I never found that out before?”
Val dug his heels into the rich old Turkey carpet; he pressed his nails into his flesh, wounding himself to keep himself still. One glance he gave at the perfect calm of his father’s face, then cast down his eyes that he might not see it. Richard looked at him with amused calculation, as if measuring his forces, then waited, evidently expecting an outburst. When none came, he said with that precise and nicely-modulated voice, every tone of which ministers occasions of madness to the impatient mind—
“Of course, with that face you must have a temper; I should have seen it at the first glance. But you have learnt to restrain it, I perceive. I congratulate you—it augurs well for your success in life.”
Then he fell back quite naturally into the previous subject, changing his tone in a moment to one of polite and perfect ease.
“I am sorry, as I said before, that my father is so obstinate. Why doesn’t he put in some squire or other whom he might influence as much as he pleases? But you; I tell you there isn’t such an ordeal in existence. Everything a man has ever done is raked up.”
“They may rake up as much as they please,” said Val, with a violent effort, determined not to be outdone by his father in power of self-control. His voice, however, wasunsteady, and so was the laugh which he forced. “They may rake up what they please; I don’t think they can make much of that, so far as I am concerned.”
“So far as you are concerned!” repeated Richard, impatiently. “Why, if your grandaunt made afaux pasa hundred years ago, it would be brought up against you. You! It was not robbing of orchards I was thinking of. My father is very foolish; and it is wilful folly, for I told him my sentiments on the subject.”
“I wish, sir, if it was the same to you, you would remember that my grandfather—is my grandfather,” said Val, not raising his eyes.
“Oh, very well. He is not my grandfather, you see, and that makes me, perhaps, less respectful,” said Richard. “You have taken away my comfort with this news of yours, and it is hard if I may not abuse somebody. Do you know what an election is? If your great-grandaunt, as I said, ever made afaux pas——”
“I don’t suppose she did,” said Val. “Why should we be troubled about the reputation of people who live only in the picture-gallery? I am not afraid of my grandaunt.”
“It is because you do not know,” said Richard, with a sigh. “Write to your grandfather, and persuade him to give it up. It is infinitely annoying to me. Tell him so. I shall not have a peaceful moment till it is over. One’s whole history and antecedents delivered up to the gossip of a vulgar crowd! I think my father must have taken leave of his wits.”
And he began to pace about the great dimly-lighted room in evident perturbation. The rooms in the Palazzo Graziani were all dimly lighted. A few softly burning lamps, shaded with delicateabâtjours, gave here and there a silvery glimmer in the midst of the richly-coloured and balmy darkness—just enough to let you see here a picture, there a bit of tapestry, an exquisite cabinet, or some priceless “bit” of the sumptuous furniture which belongs of right to such houses. Richard’s slight figure moving up and down in this lordly place, with impatient movements, disturbed its calm like a pale ghost of passions past.
“Every particular of one’s life!” he continued. “I told him so. It is all very well for men who have never stirred from home. If you want to save us all a great deal of annoyance, and yourself a great many stings and wounds,write to your grandfather, and beseech him to give it up.”
“I will tell him that you wish it, sir,” said Val, hesitating; “but I cannot say that I do myself, or that I distrust his judgment. Will you tell me what wounds I have to fear should they bring up all my antecedents—every particular of one’s life?”
Richard eyed his son from the shade in which he stood. Val’s face was in the full light. It was pale, with a certain set of determination about the mouth, on which there hovered a somewhat forced smile. He paused a moment, wondering how to reply. A dim room is an admirable field for deliberation, with one face in the shade and the other in the light. Should he settle the subject with a high hand, and put the young man summarily down? Should he yield? He did neither. He altered his voice again with the consummate skill of a man trained to rule and make use of even his self-betrayals, and knowing every possible way of doing so. He laughed softly as he came back to the table, throwing off his impatience as if it had been a cloak.
“A snare! a snare!” he said. “If you think I am so innocent as to fall into it, or if you hope to see me draw a chair to the table and begin, ‘My son, listen to the story of my life,’ you are mistaken, Val. I am like most other men. I have done things, and known people whom I should not care to have talked about—and which will be talked about inevitably if you are set up as a candidate for Eskside. Never mind! I shall have to put up with it, I suppose, since my father has set his heart upon it; but I warn you that it may come harder on you than me; and when I say so I have done. Give me your photographs, and let me look over them—a crowd of your Eton and Oxford friends, I suppose.”
Val looked at his father with a question in his eyes, which he tried to put with his lips, and could not. During all these years he had thought little enough of his mother. Now and then the recollection that there was such a person wandering somewhere in the world would come to him at the most unlikely time—in the middle of the night, in the midst of some moment of excitement, rarely when he could make any inquiries about her, even had it been possible for him to utter such inquiries. Now at once these suppressed recollections rushed into his mind. Here was the fountain-head of information; and no doubt the story which he did not know, which no one had ever told him, was what his father feared. “Father,” he began, his mouth growing dry with excitement, his heart beating so loudly that he could scarcely hear himself speak.
Probably Richard divined what he was going to say—for Val, I suppose, had hardly ever addressed him solemnly by this title before. He called him “Sir,” when he spoke to him, scarcely anything else. Richard stopped him with a rapid movement of his hand.
“Don’t, for heaven’s sake, speak to me so solemnly,” he said, half fretfully, half playfully. “Let me look at your photographs. There is a good man here, by the way, where you should go and get yourself done. The old people at home would like it, and it might prove a foundation, who knows, for the fine steel engraving of the member for Eskside, which, no doubt will be published some day or other. Come round to this side and tell me who they are.”
The words were stopped on Valentine’s lips; and if any one could have known how bitter these words were to him, his relinquishment of the subject would be more comprehensible to them. Are we not all glad to postpone a disagreeable explanation? “It must be done some time,” we say; “but why now, when we are tolerably comfortable?” Valentine acted upon this natural feeling. His sentiments towards his father were of a very mingled character. He was proud of him; his refinement and knowledge of the world made a powerful impression upon the boy’s mind; Val even admired the man who was so completely unlike himself—admired him and almost disliked him, and watched him with mingled wonder and respect. He had never had a chance of regarding him with the natural feelings of a child or forming the usual prejudices on his behalf. He met him almost as one stranger meets another, and could not but judge him accordingly on his merits rather than receive him blindly, taking those merits for granted, which is in most cases the more fortunate lot of a son. His father was only a relation of whom he knew very little, and with whom he was upon quite distant and independent, yet respectful terms. They were both glad, I think, to take refuge in the photographs; and Richard asked with a very good grace, “Who is this?” and “Who is that?”—through showers of young Oxford men and younger Etonians. When he hadmade his way through them, there was still a little pack of cards to be turned over—photographs not dignified enough to find a place in any book. Hunter, the gamekeeper, Harding, the butler, his wife the housekeeper, and many other humble personages, were amongst them; and Richard turned them over with more amusement than the others had given him. Suddenly, however, his remarks came to a dead stop. Val, who was standing close by him, felt that his father started and moved uneasily in his chair. He said nothing for the moment; then in a voice curiously unlike his former easy tone, yet curiously conquered into a resemblance of it, he said, with a little catching of his breath, “And who is this, Val?”
It was a scrap of an unmounted photograph, a bit cut off from the corner of a river scene—a portrait taken unawares and unintentionally by a wandering artist who was making studies of the river. It was Dick Brown’s mother, as she had been used to stand every day within her garden wall, looking at Val’s boat as it passed. Val had seen the picture with her figure in it, and had bought and kept it as a memento of two people in whom he took so much interest: for by an odd chance Dick was in it too, stooping to push off a boat from the little pier close by, and very recognisable by those who knew him, though his face was scarcely visible. “Oh, sir,” said Val, instinctively putting out his hand for it, “that is nothing. It was taken by chance. It’s the portrait of a woman at Oxford, the mother of a fellow I know.”
“A fellow you know—who may that be? is his portrait among those I have been looking at? This,” said Richard, holding it fast and disregarding Val’s hand, which was stretched out to take it, “is an interesting face.”
What feelings were in the man’s breast as he looked at it who can tell? Surprise, almost delirious, though he hid it as he had trained himself to hide everything; quick-springing curiosity, almost hatred, wild eagerness to know what his son knew of her. He made that remark about the interesting face not unfeelingly, but unawares, to fill up the silence, because everything in him was stirred up into such wild impulses of emotion. The light swam in his eyes; yet he continued to see the strange little picture thus blown into his hand as it seemed by some caprice of fate. As for Valentine, he felt a repugnance incomprehensible to himself to say anything about Dick or his mother, and could havesnatched the scrap of photograph out of his father’s hand, though he could not tell why.
“Oh, it is not much,” he said—“it is not any one you would know. It is the mother of a lad I took a great fancy to a few years ago. He was on the rafts at Eton, and used to do all sorts of things for me. That’s his mother—and indeed there’s himself in the corner, if you could see him. I found it in a photograph of the river; and as I knew the people, and it is so seldom one sees people who are unconscious of their likenesses being taken, I bought it; but of course it has no interest to any one who does not know the originals,” and he put out his hand for it again.
“Pardon,” said Mr Ross, serenely—“it has an interest. The face is a very remarkable face, like one I remember seeing years ago. What sort of a person was her son?”
By skilful questions he drew from Val all that he knew: the whole story of Dick’s struggle upwards; of his determination to do well; of the way he had risen in the world. Val mixed himself as little as he could with the narrative, but could not help showing unwittingly how much share he had in it; and at last grew voluble on the subject, flattered by the interest his father took in it. “You say the son was at the rafts at Eton, and yet this picture was taken at Oxford. How was that?” said Richard. Val was standing behind him all this time, and their looks had not met.
“Well, sir,” said Val, “I hope you won’t think, as Grinder did, that it was my love of what he called low society. If Brown is low society, I should like to know where to find better.”
“So Grinder said it was your love of low society?”
“He wrote to my grandfather,” said Val, sore at the recollection, “but fortunately they knew me better; and when I explained everything, grandmamma, like the old darling she is, sent me ten pounds to buy Brown a present. I got him some books, and crayons, and carving things——”
“Yes; but you have not told me how this came to be taken at Oxford,” said Richard, persistent.
“Well, sir, I was going to tell you. I heard that old Styles wanted a man. Styles, perhaps you recollect him down at—— Yes, that’s him. So I told him I could recommend Brown, and so could Lichen, who had been captain of the boats in my time. Lichen of Christ’s-Church. You won’t know his name? He rowed stroke——”
“Yes, yes; but let us come back to Brown.”
“There is not much more,” said Val, a little disconcerted. “Styles took him on our recommendation, and hearing what an excellent character he had—and that’s where he is now. He and his mother have got Styles’ little house, and the old man’s gone into the country. I shouldn’t wonder if Brown had the business when he dies. He has got on like a house on fire,” said Val—“educated himself up from nothing, and would be a credit to any one. I’ve always thought,” said the lad, with an innocent assumption of superior insight, “that he cannot have been born a cad, as he seemed, when I first saw him; for the mother looks as if she had been a lady. You laugh, sir, but I dare swear it’s true.”
“I was not laughing,” said Richard, bundling up the photographs together, and handing them over to his son; “indeed, I think you have behaved very creditably, and shown yourself capable of more than I thought. Now, my dear fellow, I’m going to work to-night. Take your pictures. They have amused me very much; and I think you should go to bed.”
Val had been doing a great deal that day, and I think he was not sorry to take his father’s advice. He gathered all his treasures together, and bade him a more cordial good-night than usual, as he went away with his candle through the dim suite of rooms. As soon as he had turned his back, Richard Ross pushed away the papers he had drawn before him, and watched the young figure with its light, walking down the long vista of curtained rooms. The man was not genial enough to let that same gentle apparition come in and illuminate with love the equally dim and lonely antechambers of his heart; but some thrill of natural feeling quickened within him, some strange movement of unwonted emotion as he looked after the lad, and felt how wonderful was this story, and how unwittingly, in natural friendliness of his boyish soul, Val had done a brother’s part to his brother. The idea moved him more than the reality did. He took up the little photograph again, which he had kept without Valentine’s knowledge, and gazed at it, but not with love. “Curse of my life!”—he said to himself, murmuring the words in sonorous Tuscan, which he spoke like a native; and clenching his teeth as he gazed at the image of the woman who had ruined him, as he thought. She to look“as if she had been a lady!”—he laughed within himself secretly and bitterly at the thought—a lady! the tramp-girl who had been his curse, and whom he had never been able to teach anything to. When the first vehemence of these feelings was over, he sat down and wrote a long letter to his confidential solicitor in London, a man to whom the whole story had long been known. And I do not think Richard Ross had sound sleep that night. The discovery excited him deeply, but not with any of the pleasure with which a man finds what he has lost, with which a husband might be supposed to discover the traces of his lost wife and child. No; he wanted no tamed tramp to disgrace him with her presence, no successful mechanic-son to shame his family: as they had chosen, so let them remain. He had not even any curiosity, but a kind of instinctive repugnance to his other son. And yet he was pleased with Valentine, and thought of the boy more kindly, because he had been kind to his lost brother. How this paradox should be, I am unable to explain.
“SoMr Pringle is on the other side,” said Mary Percival. “Perhaps it is just as well, considering all things.”
“Why should it be just as well?” said Violet, with a spark of fire lighting up her soft eyes. “Is unkindness, and opposition among people who ought to be friends, ever ‘just as well’? You are not like yourself when you say so;” and a colour which was almost angry rose upon Vi’s delicate cheek.
“My dear, I have never concealed from you that I want to keep you and Val apart from each other,” said Miss Percival, with an injudicious frankness which I have never been able to understand in so sensible a woman; but the most sensible persons are often foolish on one special point, and this was Mary’s particular weakness.
“Why should we be kept apart?” said Violet, with lofty youthful indignation. “Nobody can keep us apart—neither papa’s politics nor anything else outside of ourselves.”
“Vi! Vi! I don’t think that is how a girl should speak of a young man.”
“Oh, I cannot bear you when you go on about girls and young men!” cried Violet, stamping her small foot in the vehemence of her indignation. “Is it my fault that I am a girl and Val a boy? Must I not be friends with him because of that, a thing we neither of us can help, though I have known him all my life? But we are fast friends,” cried Vi, with magnificent loftiness, her pretty nostrils dilating, her bright eyes flashing upon her companion. “Neither of us thinks for a moment of any such nonsense. We were friends when we were seven years old, and I would not give up my friend, not if he were twenty young men!”
“You are a foolish little girl, and I am sorry for you, Vi,” said Mary, shaking her head. “At any rate, because you are fond of Val, that is no reason for being uncivil to me.”
At these words, as was natural, Violet, with tears in her eyes, flew to her friend and kissed her, and begged pardon with abject penitence. “But I wish I had nothing more on my mind than being friends with Val,” the girl said, sighing, “or the difference of people’s politics. Of course people must differ in politics, as they do in everything else. I am a Liberal myself. I think that to resist everything that is new, and cling to everything that is old, whether they are bad, or whether they are good, is very wrong. To choose what is best, whether old or new, is surely the right way.”
“Oh, you are a Liberal yourself?” said Mary, amused; “but I don’t doubt Val could easily turn you into a Conservative, Vi.”
“Val could not do anything of the kind,” said Violet, with some solemnity. “Of course I can’t have lived to be twenty without thinking on such subjects. But I wish I had nothing more on my mind than that. Both Liberals and Conservatives may be fond of their country, and do their best for it. I don’t like a man less for being a Tory, though I am a Liberal myself.”
“That is very satisfactory for us Tories, my dear,” said Mary, “and I am obliged to you for your magnanimity; but what is it then, my pretty Vi, that you have upon your mind?”
The girl paused and let fall a few sudden tears. “Mary,” she said (for there was a Scotch tie of kinship between them also which made this familiarity admissible), “I am sofrightened—and I don’t know what I am frightened at. I feel sure papa means to do something more than any one knows of, against Val.”
“Against Val! He means to oppose his election, no doubt, and give Lord Eskside and our side all the trouble possible: we know that,” cried Mary, who was a politician of the old school. “These are always the tactics of the party—to give as much trouble, and sow as many heart-burnings as possible; though they know they have not a chance of success.”
“I suppose it is just what the Tories would do if they were in the same position,” said Violet, naturally on the defensive. “But all that is nothing to me,” she cried; “if people like to fight, let them: I don’t mind it myself—the excitement is pleasant. But, of course, you know better than I do—are you sure there is nothing more than fair fighting that papa could do to Val?”
“I am sure your papa is not a man to do anything inconsistent with fair fighting,” said Mary, evasively, her curiosity strongly roused.
This stopped Violet once more. She gave a heavy sigh. “I hear them say that everything is fair in an election contest, as everything is fair in war.”
“Or love.”
“I don’t understand such an opinion,” said Violet, rising to her feet and striking her pretty hands together in impatience. “If a thing is wrong once, it is wrong always. Love! they call that love which can be pushed on by tricks and lies; and people like you, Mary—people who ought to know better—say so too. Of course, one knows you cannotthinkit,” the girl cried, with a quick-drawn breath, half sob, half sigh.
“Well, dear, I suppose we all give in to the saying of things which we don’t think,” said Miss Percival, deprecatingly; “but, Vi, you have made me curious. What is it your father means to do?”
“I wanted to ask you that; what can he do? Can he do anything?” said Violet. Mary looked at the impulsive girl, not knowing what to answer. Vi was true as truth itself in her generous young indignation against all unworthy strategy—and she was “fond of” and “friends with” Val, according to the childish phraseology which, in this respect at least, she chose to retain. But still, even Violet’s innocence was a reason for not trusting her with any admission that Valentine was open to special attack. She might assail her father with injudicious partisanship, entreating him to withhold from assaults which he had never thought of making; so that, on the whole, Mary judged it was judicious to say nothing as to any special flaw in the young candidate’s armour. She shook her head.
“I cannot think of anything that could be done against Valentine,” she said. “He has been a good boy, so far as we know; and when a boy is not a good boy it is always found out. Sir John is to propose him, and Mr Lynton of the Linn to second,—he could not have a better start; and dear old Lord Eskside to stand by him, to get his heart’s desire,” said Mary, with a little glimmer of moisture in her eyes. “You young things don’t think of the old people. It goes to my heart, after all their disappointments, to think they will have their wish at last.”
Violet did not make any reply. Though she was a Liberal herself, and looked upon politics generally from such an impartial elevation of good sense, it was no small trouble to poor Vi to know that she could not even pretend to be on Valentine’s side at this great crisis of his life;—could not go with Lady Eskside’s triumphant party to see him done honour to in the sight of all men; could not even wear a bit of ribbon, poor child, for his sake, but must put on the colours of snuffy Mr Seisin, and go with her mother to the opposition window, and pretend to look delighted at all the jokes that might be made, and all the assaults upon her friends. Violet would not allow how deeply she felt this, the merely superficial and necessary part of the situation; and, in reality, it was as nothing to her in comparison with the dread in her heart of something more, she knew not what—some masked battery which her father’s hand was arranging. She took Mary out to show her the improvements which were being made at the Hewan, the new rooms which were almost finished, and which would make of the poor little cottage a rustic villa. Jean Moffatt, whose nest had not been interfered with, though Mr Pringle had bought the place, came out as she heard the voices of the ladies, to take her share in the talk. Jean had now the privileged position of an old servant among the Pringles, and still acted as duenna and protectress to Violet on many a summer day when that little maiden escaped alonewith her maid from Moray Place. Mr Pringle had been getting on in his profession during those years; not in its honours, the tide of which he had allowed to go past him, but in its more substantial rewards. He was better off, and able to afford himself the indulgence of a whim; so the Hewan had been bought, half in love, half in hatred. In love, because the children, and Violet especially, were fond of the little place; and in hatred, because it commanded the always coveted domain of Eskside.
“You are a Liberal too, I understand, Jean,” said Mary; “you are all Mr Ross’s enemies up here.”
“I wish he might never have waur enemies,” said old Jean, “and that’s no an ill wish; but I’ll never disown my principles. I’ve aye been a Leeberal from the time of the Reform Bill, which made an awfu’ noise in the country. There’s nane o’ your contests worth speaking o’ in comparison with that. But I’m real distressed that there’s this opposition now. We’ll no get our man in, and we’ll make a great deal o’ dispeace; and two folk so muckle thought of in the county as my lord and my lady might have gotten their way for once. I canna bide the notion of going again’ Mr Valentine; but he’s a kindly lad, and will see that, whatever you are, ye maun gang with your pairty. Lord bless the callant! if it was for naething but yon chicken-pie, he’s a hantle mair to me than ony Edinburgh advocate that was ever born. But you see yoursel, Miss Percival, how we’re placed; we maun side with our ain pairty, right or wrong.”
“Yes, I see the difficulty of the position,” said Mary, laughing, “and I shall make a point of explaining it to Val.”
“Do that, mem,” said Jean, seriously. She did not see any joke in the matter, any more than Vi did, whose mind was in a very disturbed state.
“And I suppose your son will be of your mind?” said Mary, not indisposed to a little gentle canvassing on her own part.
“I couldna undertake to answer for John,” said the old woman; “nor I wouldna tamper with him,” she added, “for it’s a great responsibility, and he ought to judge for himself. There’s one thing with men, they tak a bias easy, and John was never a Leeberal on conviction, as ye may say, like his faither and me; and he has a’ the cobbling from the House, and a’ the servants’ work, and my lord’s shooting-boots, and so forth, and noo and then something to do for my lady hersel; so I wouldna say but he might have a bias. It’s a grand thing to have nae vote,” said Jean, meditatively, “and then ye can have the satisfaction of keeping to your pairty without harming your friends on the other side.”
Jean expressed thus the sentiments of a great many people in Eskside on the occasion of this election. Even some of the great tenant-farmers who were Liberals, instead of delighting in the contest, as perhaps they ought to have done, grumbled at the choice set before them, and regretted the necessity of vexing the Eskside family, old neighbours, by keeping to their own party. For Val Ross, as they all felt, was on the whole a much more appropriate representative than “a snuffy old Edinburgh lawyer,” said one of the malcontents, “with about as much knowledge of the county as I have of the Parliament House.” “But he knows how to bring you into the Parliament House, and squeeze the siller out of your pouch and mine,” said another. The Parliament House in question, gentle Southern reader, meant not the House of Commons, but the Westminster Hall of Edinburgh, into which, or its purlieus, it was quite easy to get with Mr Seisin’s help, but not so easy to get out again. I am afraid, indeed, that as the Liberal party was weak in the county, and there had been no contest for some time, and no active party organisation existed, there would have been no attempt to oppose Valentine at all but for the determination of Mr Pringle, who, without bringing himself very prominently forward, had kept his party sharply up to the mark, and insisted upon their action. That they had no chance of success, or so little that it was not worth calculating upon, they all acknowledged; but allowed themselves to be pushed on, notwithstanding, by the ardour of one fierce personal animosity, undisclosed and unsuspected. Mr Pringle had been gradually winding himself up to this act of vengeance through many years. I think if other people had recollected the strange way in which his young supplanter had made his first appearance at Eskside, or if any sort of stigma had remained upon Val, the feelings of the heir-presumptive would have been less exaggerated; but to find that everybody had forgotten these suspicious circumstances—that even his insinuations as to the lad’s love of low company, though sufficiently relished for the moment, had produced no permanent impression—and that the world in general accepted Valentine with cheerful satisfaction as Richard Ross’s son and Lord Eskside’s heir, without a doubt or question on the subject,—all this exasperated Mr Pringle beyond bearing. No passionate resentment and sense of injury like this can remain and rankle so long in a mind without somehow obscuring the moral perceptions; and the man had become so possessed by this consciousness of a wrong to set right and an injury to avenge, that it got the better both of natural feeling and morality. He did not even feel that the thing he meditated was beyond the range of ordinary electioneering attack; that it strained every law even of warfare, and exceeded the revenges permitted to civilised and political men. All this he would have seen in a moment had the case not been his own. He would have condemned any other man without hesitation; would have solemnly pointed out to him the deliberate cruelty of the project, and the impossibility of throwing any gloss, even of pretended justice, over it. For no virtuous impulse to punish a criminal, no philanthropic purpose of hindering the accomplishment of a crime, could be alleged for what he meant to do. The parties assailed were guiltless, and there was no chance that his assault, however virulent, could shake poor Val’s real position, however much it might impair his comfort. He could scarcely, even to himself, allege any reason except revenge.
Meanwhile Val had been summoned home. He had spent Christmas with his father, and since then had travelled farther afield, visiting, though with perhaps not much more profit than attended his tour in Italy, the classic islands of Greece. It was early spring when the summons reached him to return without delay, everything in the political horizon being ominous of change. Val got back in March, when the whole country was excited by the preliminaries of a general election. He had been so doubtful of the advantage of the abundant English society he had enjoyed abroad, that he was comforted to find himself in English society at home, where it was undeniably the right thing, and natural to the soil. When he arrived at Eskside there was a great gathering to meet him. His address was to be seen at full length on every bit of wall in Lasswade and the adjoining villages, and even in the outskirts of Edinburgh; and the day of nomination was so nearly approaching that he hadscarcely time to shake himself free from the dust and fatigue of his journey, and to think of the speech which it would be necessary to deliver in answer to all the pretty compliments which no doubt would be showered upon him. Val, I am afraid, was a great deal more concerned about making a good appearance on this occasion, and conducting himself with proper manly coolness and composure—as if being nominated for a seat in Parliament was a thing which had already happened to him several times at least in his career—than about the real entry into public life itself, the responsibility of an honourable member, or any other legitimate subject of serious consideration. When he asked after everybody on his return, the dignified seriousness with which he was told of the presence of the Pringles at the Hewan did not affect the young man much. “Ah, you never liked poor Mr Pringle, grandma,” he said, lightly. “I have little occasion to like him,” said Lady Eskside; “and now that he is the getter up of all this opposition, the only real enemy you have, my own boy——”
“Oh, enemy! come, grandma, that is too strong,” said Val. “If I never have any worse enemy than old Pringle, I shall do. But I am sorry they are on the other side,” he added, with a boyish thought that his blue colours would have looked prettier than ever near Violet’s bright locks. He paused a moment, and then burst out with a laugh. “I wonder if they will put her into old Seisin’s yellow ribbons,” he cried, quite unaware how dreadfully he was betraying himself. “Poor Vi!”
Lady Eskside and Mary looked at each other—the one with a little triumph, the other with horror and dismay. It was my lady whose face expressed the latter sentiments. She had constantly refused to believe that Val had ever “thought twice” of Sandy Pringle’s daughter. Even now she assailed Mary indignantly, as soon as Valentine’s back was turned. “What did you mean by giving me such a look? Do you mean that a boy like that cannot think of a girl he has known all his life without being in love with her? My dear Mary, that is not like you. I was laughing myself, I confess,” said the old lady, who looked extremely unlike laughter, “at the idea of their yellow ribbons on Vi’s yellow hair. The little monkey! setting herself up, forsooth, as a Liberal; I’m glad the colours are unbecoming,” Lady Eskside concluded, with the poorest possible attempt at a laugh.
Mary made no reply—but she was much more prepossessed in favour of Val than she had ever been. Women like a man, or even a boy for that matter, who betrays himself—who has not so much command of his personal sentiments but that now and then a stray gleam of them breaking forth shows whereabouts he is. Mary—who had taken Violet under her protection, determined that not if she could help it should that little girl fall a victim, as she herself had done—was entirely disarmed by the boyish ingenuousness of his self-disclosure. She thought with a half sigh, half smile, once more, as she had thought that summer day by the linn, that this boy might have been her son had things gone as they should—that he ought indeed to have been her son. Sometimes this was an exasperating, sometimes a softening thought; but it came to Mary on this occasion in the mollifying way.
“Don’t ask me anything about Vi,” she said to Valentine the same evening. “You know I never approved of too much friendship between you; she is your enemy’s daughter.”
“What do you call too much friendship?” said Val, indignantly. “If you think I am going to give her up because her old father is an old fool, and goes against us, you are very much mistaken. Why, Vi! I have known her since I wasthathigh—better than Sandy or any of them.”
“Her father is not so dreadfully old,” said Mary, laughing; “and besides, Val, I don’t put any faith in him; his opposition is a great deal more serious than you think.”
“Well, I suppose he must stick to his party,” said Val, employing in the lightness of his heart old Jean’s words; “but I know very well,” he added, with youthful confidence, “that though he may be forced for the sake of his party to show himself against me, he wishes me well in his heart.”