CHAPTER VII.
It was June weather now—warm and full, and a deep peace had fallen over Allenders. Harry, who was not naturally temperate in anything, was almost intemperate in his reformation now. He applied himself to business with devotion, had long consultations with Armstrong every morning, and repulsed coldly the usual familiarities of Gilbert Allenders. In his library, they always found the table covered with estimates and calculations, with expensive schemes for thrift, and elaborate economics of farming; while out of doors, Harry went blithely about his fields again, conciliating once more the half-alienated favour of his workmen, and regaining for himself the elastic vigour and health, which had begun to be shaken. Agnes sang to her baby all day long, till the very air within the house grew rich with ballad fragments. Rose, still a little weary in her heart, and longing secretly for a new beginning to her old dreams, began to interest herself in the pleasant pursuits of free young womanhood, and forgot the family care, as well as her own individual one. Martha sank back quietly into a temporary repose—was ill for a few days, and afterwards very quiet—for her frame had been shaken by severe exhaustion; very different from the natural good hope of common life, was the desperate stake for which she played; and when the moment, with all its pent-up and restrained excitement, was past, experience lifted its cold, prophetic voice again, and she could not choose but hear.
But the gossips at Maidlin Cross, glad to return to their kindlier opinion—for Harry’s good looks, and naturally gracious manners, gave them a strong prepossession in his favour—congratulated each other that Allenders was steady now, and quite another man, and that “it bid to be” a great comfort to his sister and his wife—for they unconsciously put Martha before Agnes, doing reverence to the more absorbing love. And young Mr. Dunlop, seeing Harry’s frank face brightened by renewed hope and wholesome pleasure, and hearing how sedulously he had begun to attend to all his concerns, was smitten with remorse for his rudeness, and brought his mother in state to call on Mrs. Allenders, which her good-humoured ladyship would have done months ago but for his restraining. Prosperity and peace returned again, as it seemed; and Harry’s last thousand was still very little diminished.
But it chanced that Cuthbert Charteris suddenly looked in upon the astonished household, on the very day of Lady Dunlop’s call. Cuthbert did not know that this call had a value quite separate from their pleasure in itself, to the family at Allenders; and he thought the tremulous agitation of both Agnes and Rose originated in a cause very different from its real one. So Cuthbert was cold, constrained and unhappy; scarcely able to conceal his contempt of Mr. Dunlop, and resolutely declining to remain, even for a single night. They, in their turn, misunderstood him; they thought he had heard something unfavourable of Harry, and while they redoubled their attentions to himself, they overwhelmed him with references to Harry’s goodness, and stories of the kindness with which all his labourers, and the little group of cottar wives at Maidlin, regarded Allenders. If Cuthbert had been sufficiently disengaged from his own engrossing concerns, these continual defences would have made him fear: as it was, he could think of nothing but the Rose, which had never seemed so fair in his eyes as now, when he convinced himself that another was about to bear it away.
Rose did not know what to think of Cuthbert. Had he been indifferent to her all along? But Rose, with a natural pride in many things, conjoined the most perfect and unconscious humility in her estimate of herself; that he should be jealous, never entered into her mind—it was far easier to believe that he had never “cared;” and Rose blushed even to acknowledge to herself that she once thought he “cared,” by doubting it now. Yet there was something in Cuthbert’s eyes—something in the full, grave look she sometimes met, which filled Rose with a vague thrill of emotion; and when he was gone she remembered this, and ceased to comment upon the rest.
About a week after Cuthbert’s call, Harry went to Stirling, taking Agnes with him. They were going on business—to draw money, of which Agnes claimed a considerable portion for her household expenses; and Harry himself, to the great content of all, had invited her to accompany him. They were quite at ease and quiet at home, and with the children, who rejoiced in a holiday, had taken a long ramble through woods and lanes in the afternoon, coming home laden with wild flowers. Even Martha, amused with Katie’s radiant pleasure, and Violet’s mingled reverie and mirth, had brightened quite insensibly, and Rose was as gay as the little girls themselves. They were all seated under the walnut tree on the lawn when Harry and Agnes returned, and not a shadow crossed any of them, except the ill-favoured one of Gilbert Allenders, as he came in at the gate, resolved to stay to dinner whether he was asked or no.
But the dinner past, and still Harry kept Gilbert steadily at a distance. They could not sufficiently admire his strength and resolution, and how bravely he resisted the tempter. Gilbert himself seemed slightly surprised and baffled; and not a single disconcerted glance was lost on the rejoicing Agnes, with whom there was only a single step between the greatest alarm for Harry’s stability, and the greatest pride and confidence in it.
But when the evening was considerably advanced, and they had all assembled in the drawing-room, Harry began to talk of what they had seen and heard in Stirling.
“Who do you think I met, Martha?” said the unthinking Harry. “Dick Buchanan, my old plague in Glasgow; and what do you think he told me?—I scarcely can believe it—that our friend Charteris was actually going to be married to his sister Clemie, a good-natured clumsy girl, whom I used to see going to school. I could not have expected such a thing of Charteris.”
And as Harry’s eye rested on Rose, he stopped suddenly, his face flushing all over with the deepest colour; yet Rose displayed no motion. A slight start, a momentary paleness, and then she put out her hand as if to grasp at something, drawing it back by and bye with an unconscious motion of imagination, as if her prop had pained her—though she did not say a word.
But her head grew giddy, and the light swam in her darkening eyes; and constantly in her mind was this impulse to take hold of something to keep herself from falling. When Gilbert took reluctant leave, and she rose to bid him good-night, her hand clutched at the back of an empty chair; and when she went to rest, with a ringing in her ears and a dimness before her eyes, Rose held by the wall on her way to her own chamber—not to support herself, though even her form tottered, but to support her heart, which tottered more.
She did not think, nor ask, nor question anything; she was too much occupied in this same immediate necessity of holding herself up, and propping her stricken strength.
“I believe I am a fool,” said Harry, suddenly, when Rose withdrew; “I never thought—Charteris was here so short a time the other day, and it is so long since he came before—I never thought of Rose; but she took it very quietly, Martha. Is she interested, do you think? Will she feel it? I am sure, for my own part, I always believed that Charteris liked Rose, and I cannot tell what made me so foolish to-night.”
“Perhaps it was very well,” said Martha; “it must have been told, and the manner of telling it is a small matter; but Rose, as you say, took it very quietly. I dare say she will not care about it, Harry.”
Martha knew better—but she thought it well to pass over the new grief lightly, since it was a grief which could not bear either sympathy or consolation.
But when Lettie, next morning, prompted by a sudden caprice, ran “all the way” to the Lady’s Well, to gather some wild roses and the fragrant meadow-queen for Martha, she saw some one sitting on the stone where Lady Violet sat, and was only fortified by the bright daylight to approach. But it was Rose’s muslin gown, and not the silvery garments of the fairy lady, which lay upon the turf; and Rose was leaning with both her hands heavily upon the canopy of the well, and looking into the deep brushwood, as Lettie many a time had looked—though this was a deeper abstraction than even the long silent reveries of the poetic child. With a sudden consciousness that there lay some unknown sorrow here, the little girl came forward shyly, looking up with her wistful eyes in her sister’s face. It did not seem that she interrupted Rose’s thoughts, and Violet began silently to gather her flowers. There were some wild roses, half-opened buds, which could be carried even by a school girl, without risk of perishing, for one of the “young ladies” at Blaelodge, whom Lettie liked greatly, and who much desired some tangible memorial of the place whence the Lady Violet of Lettie’s oft-repeated story passed away; and a sweet fairy posie of the graceful queen of the meadow for Martha’s especial gratification, and some drooping powdery flowers of grass, from which the seed was falling, for Lettie herself. When they were all gathered, Lettie sat down softly on the grass at Rose’s feet, and laid the flowers in her lap, and was very quiet, venturing now and then a wistful glance up to the absorbed face above her.
And by and by, the heavy leaning of Rose’s arms relaxed, and she leaned upon her knee instead, and looked down on Violet. “Lettie, I think my heart will break,” said Rose, with a low sigh; and again she put out her hand.
She could not say so much to Martha: she could not tell it to another in all the wide world—for the shy heart would render no reason for its sudden grief; but she could say it to her little sister, who asked no reason—who did not speak at all in vain consolation, but who only looked up, with such a world of innocent sympathy and wonder in her dark, wistful eyes.
Poor Rose! a hero and martyr to her own pride of womanliness, will never tell what this blight is—never, if it should kill her—and she thinks it will kill her, poor, simple heart! Since she heard “it”—and she never describes to herself more definitely what it was she heard—she has been in a maze, and never reasoned on it. She cannot reason on it—we so seldom think, after all, either in our joys or troubles—she only is aware of long trains of musings sweeping through her mind, like dreams, which place her in the strangest connection with Cuthbert and Cuthbert’s bride, and bring them continually in her way; and she always assumes a sad dignity in her fancies, and will do anything rather than have them believe that this moves her; and then she tries to think of Harry, and of the family cares and expectations, to rouse her from this stupor of her own; and getting sick with the struggle—sick alike in body and in heart—lays down her head upon her hands, and faintly weeps.
“Now, Lettie, come; they will wonder where we are,” said Rose; and she dipped her hand in the little marble basin of the Lady’s Well, and bathed her aching eyes. Lettie, with a visionary awe, bathed hers too, as if it were an act of worship; and was very sad, in the depths of her heart.
Rose was a bad dissembler. It was quite impossible to hide from any one of them that she was very melancholy; but Harry saw less of the truth than the rest, for Rose struggled valiantly to smile before Harry, and to keep all her gloom concealed. He was a man, even though he was her dearest brother. She would suffer anything before she would disclose her heart to him.
Agnes, troubled and perplexed, not knowing whether to take notice of Rose’s sorrow or not, paid her all manner of little tender attentions, as if she had been ill. Martha, asking nothing—for Martha knew very well that Cuthbert had broken no word, nor had ever definitely said to Rose anything which could give grounds for this sadness—talked to her sometimes of the common trials which common people bear and overcome; sometimes awoke her out of a reverie, with a kind hand upon her shoulder, and a quick word in her ear; employed her all day long at something; watched her perpetually with a mother’s unwavering care; but little Lettie, looking wistfully up, with her dark, melancholy eyes—Lettie, who knew that Rose’s heart was “like to break,” and who deserted all her play to sit beside her on the carpet, and press close to her feet, and caress them softly with her hand—Lettie was perhaps the best comforter of all.
But meanwhile the unconscious Cuthbert wearied himself with continual business, and thought murderous thoughts of the innocent young Mr. Dunlop; till his mother, alarmed about his health, prevailed upon him, with many solicitations, to go away for a month, and travel, and rest. And Clemie Buchanan, more unconscious still, romped, to the full heart’s content of a strong joyous girl of sixteen, among the Argyleshire hills, and reverencing greatly the lofty attainments of her cousin Cuthbert, would quite as soon have thought of marrying old Dr. Black, who christened her, and whose sermons she had laboriously listened to almost every Sabbath-day in all these sixteen years. Clemie had a sweetheart of her own—a young merchant, like her brothers; and Cuthbert, as he travelled southwards, cast longing looks towards Stirling, and scarcely could deny himself another glance at Allenders; but looks do not travel over straths and rivers, and Rose never knew the affectionate longings, which could not prevail with themselves to relinquish her remembrance and her name.