I left London for Ballater the very next day; and having sent Ferguson on in advance to prepare the place for me, I found Larkhall just as I had left it four years before, down to a newspaper which had been lying on my study table. But the spirit of home had deserted the place; Ta-ta was still at Newcastle. To-to recognised me indeed, but with more sulky impatience at my absence than pleasure at my return. The cottage was shut up and empty; I got the key from Janet after dinner, and wandered through the unused, damp-smelling little rooms. The furniture had been left, by my orders, just as it had been during the occupation of Babiole and her mother. But I found that instead of recalling the child Babiole, as I had seen her so often flitting about the sitting-room, or, in the latter days, leaning back, languid and listless, with glistening dreamy eyes, in the rocking-chair by the fire, it was the pale little London lady with pretty conventional manners and worn weary face that I was trying to picture to myself in the uninhabited rooms. I came out again, locked the door carefully, and finished my cigar in the porch. It seemed to me a remarkably odd thing that Babiole's degeneration from the faultless angel she used as a child to appear, into a mere soured and sorrowful woman who looked six or seven years more than her age, had deepened my interest in her, while my knowledge that she had been lost to me through nothing but my own diffidence had changed its character.
To get the better of the unhealthy and morbid state of mind into which I now found myself falling, I began to break through my old habits of retirement, and to avail myself of such society as Ballater and its neighbourhood afforded. The hot weather had begun early this year, and the summer residents were already established before my arrival. I was a sort of 'great unknown' concerning whom there were floating about many interesting and romantic stories; therefore I found no lack of eager acquaintances as soon as I cared to make them. Prominent among these was a certain Mr. Farington, a Liverpool solicitor, who, after having made a yearly retreat to the Highlands each autumn, had now retired from business and taken the lease of a large house at the foot of Craigendarroch. He had been married twice, first to a lady of dazzling pecuniary charms who had left him one daughter, and after her death to a large and handsome lady who gave me a strong impression of having had doubtful antecedents. This second wife had a numerous family, ranging from five years old to fifteen, between whom and their half-sister was fixed the gulf of her mother's fortune.
At a very early stage of our acquaintance the eldest Miss Farington, who was a good-looking young woman of three and twenty, with a strong sense of the importance attached to an income of fifteen hundred a year, had honoured me by a marked partiality for which I, in my new sociability, at first felt grateful. It was pleasant to find some one who could pass an opinion, even if it was not a very original opinion, on a picture, a book, or a landscape, and Miss Farington could always do that with great precision. Perhaps, too, it flattered my vanity to be appealed to as the one representative of high civilisation amidst barbarian hordes. But when it became plain even to my modest merit that the lady proposed to annex me, I grew suddenly coy; and I then found to my surprise that, diffident as my disfigurement had made me, I was still, like the rest of my sex, humble only to one woman, and mightily fatuous as regarded the rest. But if Miss Farington was merely what one calls 'a nice girl,' with no particularly conspicuous qualities of alluring sweetness or captivating vivacity, she had one virtue which would not have shamed an ancient Roman—an indomitable resolution that would not know defeat.
I am not making an idle boast; I am recording a fact when I say that that girl laid siege to me with a skill and patience which filled me alternately with admiration, gratitude, and alarm. She learned my tastes, she studied my habits, she mastered my opinions, until I began to think that if a person who apparently knew me so well could like me so much, I must be an infinitely more amiable man than I had ever supposed. This frame of mind naturally led me to look kindly on the lady who had enabled me to make such a pleasing discovery, and I knew myself to be softening to such an extent that I felt that, unless Mr. Farington should leave Ballater before the summer was over, I should be 'a gone coon' before autumn. If she held on until the evenings grew cold and long, until the winds began to howl about lonely Larkhall, and to bring swirling showers of dead leaves to the ground with the hissing sound of a beach of pebbles under the retreating waves of a wintry sea, then I felt that I should give way, that I should see in Miss Farington's prosaic gray eyes pleasant domestic pictures, in her erect figure and sloping shoulders an attraction which to a lonely man, when the deer-stalking and fishing seasons were over, were quite irresistible.
I had had one plaintive little letter from Babiole, in which she entreated me, in rather stiff and stilted language, out of which peeped a most touching anxiety, to beware of her father, who, she assured me, was more desperate and dangerous in his intentions to do me harm than she had even dared to suggest when face to face with me. I wrote back in a clumsy letter as stiff as her own, but not so touching, that she need have no fear, as her father had settled down quietly at Aberdeen. I dared not tell her the truth, which I had found out through Ferguson—that Mr. Ellmer had indeed come up to the Highlands with the avowed intention of doing me some desperate harm; but that, having availed himself too freely, through his daughter's generosity, of his favourite indulgences, he had had an attack of delirium tremens, and had been placed under restraint in the county lunatic asylum.
Babiole's letter I carried about with me, and sometimes—for loneliness among the hills would make a sentimental fool of the most robust of us—I fancied that the little sheet of paper, in spite of Miss Farington and the domestic pictures, burnt into my heart.
It was in the middle of August, while the weather was still—everywhere but in the Highlands—insufferably hot, that I received a letter from Fabian which gave me a great shock. His wife had been very ill, he said, and although she had now been declared out of danger, she recovered strength so slowly that it had become imperative to send her away somewhere. Mrs. Ellmer, who was now with her, having suggested her old home in the Highlands, the doctor had agreed warmly, and Fabian therefore begged, as an old friend, that I would lend his wife and her mother the cottage for a short time, adding that he was sure I would look after my little favourite until, in a few days' time, he could rejoin her.
I took this letter up to Craigendarroch, and had first a cigar and then a pipe over it. To refuse Fabian's request was impossible; to lend the cottage and go away myself would be inhospitable and suspicious; to lend it and stay would be dangerous. With the last whiffs of tobacco an inspiration came. I swung back home, wrote back to Fabian that Larkhall itself, the cottage, the garden, the stables, and every toolshed about the place were entirely at Mrs. Scott's disposal, together with all the live stock, human and otherwise; and that she had only to fix the time of her arrival and Mrs. Ellmer's.
The letter finished and put in the bag, I had a glass of sherry; and fortified by that and by an heroic sense of duty, I sallied forth in the direction of the Mill o' Sterrin, in which neighbourhood Miss Farington, who did everything by rule, was always to be found district-visiting on a Thursday.
I suppose no man with ever so little brain or ever so little heart, who has deliberately made up his mind to propose to a girl, sees the moment approaching without a certain trepidation. I own that when I saw the moment and Miss Farington approaching together, although I had very little doubt about her answer, and very little enthusiasm about the result, I had a thumping at my heart and a singing in my ears. With the memory of Babiole and the thought of her visit in my mind, not even the sherry would cast a glamour over those exceedingly sloping shoulders, which seemed almost to argue some moral deficiency, some terrible lack of some quality without which no woman's character is complete. In the meantime, she was bearing down upon me, and I was still without an opening speech. But she was not.
'What a treat to see you in this part of the world, Mr. Maude,' said she, holding out her hand. 'I confess I did you the injustice to think you would forget your promise.'
'Promise!' I repeated vaguely. 'I am afraid I must confess——'
'You had forgotten?' she said smiling. 'Really this is too bad.'
'At least, you see, I hadn't forgotten that this is the way you always walk on a Thursday,' said I, with a look that was intended to convey much.
'And had forgotten my beautiful site for a new school!'
However, she was more pleased with me for what I had remembered than angry for what I had forgotten.
'At any rate you can come and see it now,' she said, and turning back she led the way towards a broad meadow in the valley of the Muick, with a fair view of the little river and of the hills beyond, which would have been a very good site for a school, if a school had been needed.
'An awfully nice place for it,' I agreed, as she expatiated upon the merits of a rising ground with drainage towards the river, and shelter from the woods above. 'And if the school ever gets built, I expect there will be only one thing it will want.'
'Go on, though I know what you are going to say,' said she.
'Scholars,' I finished briefly.
Miss Farington nodded. 'They will come,' she said confidently, 'if the thing is properly organised.'
Organisation was her hobby. If that little affair came off, my library would be partly catalogued and partly burnt, and To-to would be organised into the stable-yard. Still I did not flinch.
'Think,' said she enthusiastically, 'what it would mean! To plant the first footing of knowledge, civilisation, refinement, among these peasants! To give them eyes to see the beauty of the nature which surrounds them! To give them resources for refined enjoyment when winter closes the door of nature to them! To widen their knowledge of the world, and teach them that "hinter den Bergen sind auch Leute!" Oh, Mr. Maude, if building and starting this school were to cost ten thousand pounds, I should say the money had been well spent if in it but one single Highland boy were taught to read!'
Rather appalled by the thought of the lengths to which such a boundless enthusiasm might carry her, I murmured something to the effect that it would be rather expensive. Whereat she turned upon me—
'And can you, Mr. Maude, who profess to revel in Montaigne and Shakespeare, delight in Charles Lamb and Alfred de Vigny, deny such pleasures to your humble neighbours?'
'But my humble neighbours wouldn't read Shakespeare or Montaigne, nor even Wilkie Collins nor Dumas the Elder. They'd read the Bow Bells novelettes. And as to teaching them to admire their own hills, why they love them more than you do, for Nature isn't to them a closed book in winter as it seems to you.'
I was on the wrong tack altogether, as I felt, when by good luck the lady herself brought me to more congenial ground.
'Then I suppose I mustn't expect much help from you, Mr. Maude,' she said, rather stiffly.
'Yes, you may indeed, you may expect every help,' I said, rushing at the opportunity, and growing hot over it. 'It's true I—that—I don't much care—I mean I'm not deeply interested in Highland children, except as scenery, you know, picturesqueness and all that; but—er—but for you—in a plan of yours, that is to say, I should be delighted to do whatever lay in my power.'
During this lame performance Miss Farington listened with a perfectly stolid face, but with a heightened colour which told that she knew, in vulgar parlance, what I was driving at. Now that I was coming to the point, however, she did not mean to have any 'humbugging about.' At least, some such determination as that, rather than maiden coyness, seemed to prompt her next speech.
'I don't think I quite understand you, Mr. Maude.'
This was a challenge. I took it up.
'I think, Miss Farington, you must have noticed my growing interest in——'
'In my plans? No, indeed I haven't. Don't you remember your saying the other day that it seemed a pity to waste good drainage and sanitary regulations upon people who were never ill?'
'I—I only mean that my interest in—er—in drainage was swallowed up in my interest in you.'
It was the very last way in which I should have chosen to introduce a declaration of love, but with a girl too much absorbed in the progress of humanity to encourage that of the individual man, there is nothing for you but to take what opening you can get. It was all right, at any rate, for she smiled and gave me her hand, the glove of which I respectfully kissed, noticing at the time that it smelt of treacle, and wondering how it had acquired that particular perfume. It occurred to me, even as I stood there trying to think of something to say, that the little boys she had been teaching must have been eating bread and treacle, and imparted its fragrance to their lesson-books.
'You have surprised me very much, Mr. Maude,' she said. 'Are you quite sure that I deserve this honour?'
Perhaps the question was not so insincere as it seemed to me, for she looked pleased, though not at all agitated. But I felt, as I reassured her with some conventional words, that my heart would have gone out more to the emptiest-headed little fool that ever giggled and blushed than to this most intelligent and matter-of-fact young woman. And I fell to wondering, as we began to walk back together, why the sentimental and the practical were so oddly divided in the feminine mind that a girl could glow with enthusiasm while talking about impracticable plans for making her neighbours uncomfortable, and listen quite coolly to a proposal to pass her life with the man she had made no secret of liking best. I had an awkward sense of not knowing what to talk about, and I asked her how she liked Larkhall. She had evidently considered that matter well already, and was quite prepared with her answer.
'I think it only wants the south wing raised a storey, and the drawing-room enlarged by taking in that space between the outer wall and that row of lilacs and guelderroses at the back, to make it one of the pleasantest of the country houses about here,' she replied promptly.
I felt a cold shiver up my back, perceiving that even my study might be already doomed.
'But I like it even as it is because it is your home,' she added, with a touch of human feeling for which I felt grateful.
'Thank you,' I said, and I took her hand again. I hesitated about using her Christian name, and decided not to. 'Lucy' seemed such an inappropriate appellation for Miss Farington; she ought at least to have been 'Henrietta.'
'I will try to make you like it still more,' I said, quietly and sincerely, upon which she went the length of returning the pressure of my fingers on hers.
But she could not keep long away from those confounded plans. As we drew near the grounds of Larkhall, and could see the stables and one corner of the roof of the cottage, she stopped short and said pensively—
'I've often thought, Mr. Maude, what a pity it is that cottage should be kept empty, when it is so nicely furnished too. Your housekeeper, Mrs. Janet, took me over it one day.' Perhaps it was anger at the thought that this young lady had mentally disposed of all my property prematurely, perhaps annoyance that she should have intruded in the cottage at all, which helped to augment the sudden fury which seized me at this suggestion. She went on, quite unaware of what she had done. 'Now I was thinking what a charming convalescent home a place like that would make for poor widows in reduced circumstances who——'
'Unfortunately I am too selfish to give up to strangers the accommodation which has always been reserved for my friends.'
Miss Farington might be cold, might be prosaic, but she was not stupid. She saw at once she had gone too far, and hastened to apologise with very maidenly humility.
'I am afraid you will think I care more for my plans than for the great happiness and honour you have just done me. But indeed, Mr. Maude, it is not so. It is only that I never find any one to sympathise with my efforts but you, and so I tax your patience too much in my delight at meeting some one who is kind to me.'
'Be kind to me too, then,' I suggested, venturing, now that we had got among the trees of the garden, to put my hand lightly on her waist. She understood, and with a real blush at last, she let me kiss her. 'I have been a hermit a long time,' I said in a low voice, 'and I have fallen out of the ways of the world and of women. But if you will only have patience with me, and not be too much frightened by my uncouth ways, I will make you a very good husband; and I promise you it shall be your own fault if I do not make you happy.'
'I am sure of it,' she said simply, with a confidence which was flattering, if still astonishingly prosaic.
I led her round the garden, gathered for her my best roses and fastened them together, while she critically surveyed the front of the house.
'It wants a coat of whitewash, doesn't it?' I suggested, anxious to show her that I was not too conservative.
'Ye—es, and the ivy wants trimming. Why don't you put it in the hands of the painters, Mr. Maude?'
'What, and go away—already! Surely that is too much to expect,' I ventured, looking down into her eyes, which, if not boasting any poetical attractions of 'hidden depths,' were very clear and straightforward.
'Oh no, I don't mean that; but you could come and stay nearer to us. The people at Lossie Villa are just going to leave, I know.'
'I am bound here for a little while, as one of my oldest friends has just asked me to give shelter to his wife and her mother for a few weeks.'
'Indeed! Oh, they will be some people to know. Have I ever heard of them?'
'I don't know. The mother's name is Mrs. Ellmer, the daughter's—Mrs. Scott. She has been ill, I believe.'
'Mrs. Ellmer! Why, surely those are the people who used to live at the cottage! Oh, I have heard about them and your kindness to them. People said——' She hesitated.
'Well, what did they say?'
'Oh, well, they said you used to be very fond of—the daughter.'
'So I was; so I am. But you need not be jealous.'
She laughed, a bright clear laugh, scarcely without a touch of good-humoured contempt at the suggestion.
'I jealous! Oh, Mr. Maude, you would not seriously accuse me of such a paltry feeling! It would be unworthy of you, unworthy of me.'
I felt, when I had taken my fiancée home and formally received her parents' sanction to our engagement, that I was myself unworthy to live in the intellectual and moral heights on which she flourished. But I could creep after her in a humble fashion, and do my best to make her love me.
And in the meantime my loyalty to my friend and my friend's wife was strengthened by a new and sacred bond.
I suppose no man ever tried harder to be deeply, earnestly, sincerely in love than I tried to be with Miss Farington; and I suppose no man ever failed more completely. I believe now that to any other woman I have ever met, being a man by no means without affectionate impulses, and being also in a most propitious mood for sentiment, I should have been by the end of the week a submissive if not adoring slave. I wanted to be a slave; I was even anxious to become, for the time at least, the mere chattel of somebody else, a gracious and kindly somebody, be it well understood, who would give me the wages of affection in return for my best efforts in her service.
But Miss Farington's heart and mind were far too well regulated for her to tolerate, much less seek, such an empire over the man who was to be her lord and master. She despised sentiment, and meant to begin as she intended to keep on, neither giving nor accepting an unreasonable amount of affection. Respect and esteem, and above all, compatibility of aim, she used to say, not harshly, but with an implied reproach to my own more vulgar and sensual views, were the only sure foundation of happy married life; and I felt that so long as there was an unrepaired pig-stye within a mile of Larkhall, I was an object of comparatively small importance in my fiancée's eyes. And the worst of it was I couldn't contradict her. Reserving all her philanthropic projects, she was on other matters the incarnation of common sense; and I soon found that it was the vague reputation for intellect which any man gets in the country who likes his books better than his neighbours, which had attracted her attention to my unworthy self. She was disappointed with her bargain already; I was sure of that: but having made it, she was not the woman to go back from her word. She even had the good taste, on finding that her 'plans' palled upon me, to drop them out of her conversation to a great extent, but I had a shrewd suspicion that they would be let loose upon me again with full force as soon as she should be installed as mistress of Larkhall. I was secretly resolved however, since my lady-love declined to rule me in the right woman's way—through her heart—to assert my supremacy of the head in a startling and unexpected manner so soon as I should be legally the master.
In the meantime we jogged on with our engagement, and I found in my daily walks with Lucy, and in luncheons and teas at her father's, no charm strong enough to make me for a moment forget the fact that in a few days Babiole would be under my own roof.
For I had decided that not honour enough could be done to my guests at the cottage; and, Ferguson and old Janet joining in the work with a heartiness which made me love them, we turned out the whole house from garret to basement, and for a week there was such a sweeping and garnishing as never was known. We had only just got it in order when Fabian's telegram came announcing that they were off, and for the next forty-eight hours nobody could stop to take breath. The stable-boy had insisted on erecting at the entrance a lop-sided triumphal arch which, after having required constant renewing of its branches for a day and a half, having been put up much too soon, had to be taken down at the last moment, as it was found that a carriage could not drive under it without either the arch carrying away the coachman, or the coachman carrying away the arch. They were to break the journey by spending one night at Edinburgh, and I had proposed to meet them at Aberdeen on the following day. But Miss Farington's uncle having come to Ballater on purpose to annoy me—I mean on purpose to meet me—I was forced to attend a most dull luncheon at Oak Lodge where I, in absence of mind, made myself very objectionable by expressing a doubt whether any lawyers would be found in heaven.
They made me stay to tea, though I'm sure nobody wanted me, and I was dying to get away. It was nearly six before I could leave, and I rushed to the little station just as the passengers were streaming out of the train. I knew that Babiole was among them, and I came upon her suddenly as I got through the door on to the platform. She was leaning on her mother, pale, thin, wasted so that for pity and terror I could not speak, but just held out my arm and supported her to the carriage which, by my orders, was waiting outside. As we drove off she leaned against her mother and held out her hand to me.
'Again—after four years, to be back with you under old Craigendarroch,' she said, almost in a whisper, with moist eyes.
'Yes, yes, we'll set you up again as none of your London doctors could do,' I said huskily.
She smiled at me, still keeping my hand.
'Will you, Mr. Maude?' she asked half doubtingly, like a child.
'See what marriage has done for her!' broke in Mrs. Ellmer half mournfully, half tartly. 'She wouldn't be satisfied till she'd tried it, and look at the result.'
At that moment a yelping and barking behind us attracted our attention, and the next moment poor old Ta-ta, released from the van in which she had been travelling, overtook the carriage, and tried to leap up from the road to lick my face.
'Ta-ta, old girl, why, we're going to have the old times back again,' I cried, much moved; and after a drive in which only Mrs. Ellmer talked much, we all reached Larkhall in a more or less maudlin condition, overcome by old recollections.
All the men and boys about the place had assembled in two rows at the entrance, and gave us a hearty cheer as we drove past. Ferguson was standing at the door, and I vow his hard old eyes were moist as he insisted on helping the little lady out himself. Janet, in a cap which rendered the wearer insignificant, made a respectful curtsey to Mrs. Scott as she came up the steps, but threw her arms around her as soon as she was fairly inside the hall.
Mrs. Ellmer and I were rather afraid of the effects of fatigue and excitement on a frame scarcely convalescent, but the pleasure of being back among the hills was such a powerful stimulant that within half an hour of going upstairs to the big south bedroom, which had been aired and cleaned and done up expressly for her, she flitted down again with quick steps, and with a faint stain of pink colour showing under the transparent skin of her thin cheeks.
I was just outside the front door, where I had been hovering about with an unlighted cigar between my lips, when I caught a glimpse of soft white drapery in the heavy shadows of the old staircase. I went back into the hall and looked up at her, as she stopped with one hand on the bannisters, smiling down at me but saying nothing. She wore a transparent white dress that looked like muslin only that it was silky, with a long train that remained stretched on the stairs above her as she stopped.
'I thought it was an angel flying over my staircase,' I said gently.
'And all the while it was only a silly moth that had singed its wings in the big bright candle you had warned it to keep away from,' she answered gravely, after a pause.
'The wings will grow again, and when it goes back to the light——'
'We won't talk about going back yet,' she broke in with a little shiver. 'I want to forget all about London for a little while, and try to feel just as I used to do here. I wouldn't bring Davis with me. Poor mamma is going to be my nurse, and you to be my doctor, and I am going to take Craigendarroch after every meal.'
'You must be ready for one now, one meal, I mean, not one mountain. Where is poor mamma?'
'Oh, she's gone to talk to Janet. She thinks I am still waiting for her to do my hair. But she shall see that I am not an invalid any longer.'
But as she spoke, the light died out of her eyes, and I saw the fragile white hand, the blue-veined delicacy of which had alarmed me, suddenly clutch the bannister-rail tightly.
'You mustn't boast too soon,' said I, as I ran up the stairs and supported her.
She recovered herself in a few moments, being only very weak and tired, and she suddenly lifted her face to mine quite merrily.
'Shall we take Froude to-morrow, Mr. Maude? Or shall I prepare a chapter of Schiller's Thirty Years' War?' she asked, just in the old manner. 'Or a couple of pages of Ancient History?'
'I think,' I answered slowly, while my heart leapt up as a salmon does at a fly, and I honestly tried not to feel so disloyally, unmistakably happy, 'that we'll do a little modern poetry, and that we'll begin with "The Return of the Wanderer."'
I was leading her slowly downstairs, when Mrs. Ellmer's high piercing voice, coming towards us as the door of the housekeeper's room was opened, suddenly broke upon our ears.
'Well, I must go and congratulate him. I'm sure I always said that a nice wife was just the one thing he wanted.'
'Who's that?' asked Babiole quite sharply.
'Why, don't you know your own mother's voice?'
'Yes, yes, but who is she talking about? Who is it wants a nice wife?'
'I suppose most of us do, only we are not all so lucky as a certain young actor I know,' I said brightly; but my heart beat violently, and I felt Babiole's fingers trembling on my arm.
She asked me no more questions, and I took her into the dining-room to admire the roses with which we had loaded the table. But when her mother joined us a moment later, brimming over with excitement about my engagement, Babiole nodded and said, 'Yes, mother, I've heard all about it,' and offered no congratulations.
As for me, the remembrance of my fiancée this evening threw me into a reckless mood. 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we—marry Miss Farington' was the kind of thought that lay at the bottom of my deliberate abandonment of myself to the enthralling pleasure the mere presence of this little white human thing had power to give me. Mrs. Ellmer and I were very lively both at dinner and afterwards in the study, where we all went merely to look at To-to, but where Babiole insisted on our staying. She did not talk much; but on the other hand, her face never for a moment fell into that listless sadness which had pained and shocked me so much in London. When at last she was so evidently tired out that we had reluctantly to admit that she must go to bed, she let her mother see that she wanted to speak to me, and remained behind to say—
'I want to see this lady you are going to marry. For I'm not going to congratulate you till I see whether she is sweet, and beautiful, and noble, and worthy to—worship you, Mr. Maude,' she ended earnestly.
'She is a very nice girl,' said I, playing with To-to with unconscious roughness, which the monkey resented.
'A nice girl for you!' she said scornfully. 'She must be more than that, or I will forbid the banns. I was afraid you would think it strange that I didn't say something about it,' she went on, after a moment's pause, rather nervously; 'but when I heard it—just now—I prayed about it—I did indeed—just as I used to for myself and Fabian.'
A fear evidently struck her here that the reminiscence was ill-omened, for she hastened to add, 'But then I didn't deserve to be happy—and you do. Good-night,' she concluded abruptly, and drawing her hot hand with nervous haste out of mine she left me.
The next day came a reaction from the excitement of her arrival, and Babiole was not able to leave her room until late in the afternoon. I had paid my duty-call at Oak Lodge in the morning, and had been disconcerted to find that common sense and philanthropy had grown less attractive than ever. Lucy expressed her intention of calling upon Mrs. Scott that very afternoon, and when I explained that she was tired and not likely to make her appearance before dinnertime, my philanthropist said she would drive round to Larkhall in the evening. From this pertinacity I concluded that Miss Farington was perhaps not so entirely free from human curiosity and perhaps feminine jealousy as she would have liked me to suppose. At any rate she kept me with her all day, an unquiet conscience having made me exceedingly docile; and it was six o'clock before I got home.
I went straight into the drawing-room, where Babiole, lying on a sofa before one of the windows, was enjoying the warm light of the declining sun.
'Better?' said I simply, coming up to the sofa and looking down. All the energy and animation of the evening before were gone now; but to me Babiole never lost one charm without gaining a greater; she had been fascinating in a lively mood, she was irresistible in a quiet one. She gave me her hand and answered in a weak voice—
'Yes, I'm better, thank you.'
'What have you been thinking about so quietly all by yourself? I don't fancy you ought to be allowed to think at all.'
'I've been thinking about poor papa. Have you heard anything more about him?'
'Yes, he's all right, I believe, settled down in Aberdeen. I don't think you'd better try to see him though. It might set him worrying again on the old subject, which perhaps he has forgotten.'
She shook her head. 'You don't know papa as mamma and I do. He wastes his life so that people despise him, and believe that he cares for nothing but the day's enjoyment. But they are wrong. He is fierce and sullen, and he never forgets. He came up here to see you, and to do you harm; and he will never rest until at least he's tried to.'
'Well, he and I were very good friends, and there is nothing I should like better than to meet him and make him listen to reason—as I'm sure he would do.'
'He—he might not give you the chance.'
I was pleased by her solicitude for me, but I showed her how very far-fetched her fears were, and assured her, moreover, that if Mr. Ellmer, with the brutal ferocity which had been ascribed to him, should ever go so far as to attack me personally, he would probably find his match in a man who lived so hardily as I.
I did not mention Miss Farington's threatened visit until the very moment when, after dinner, as we were all turning out for a walk round the garden, I caught a glimpse of her little pony carriage between the trees of the drive. Babiole, wrapt in a long shawl of Indian embroidery which I had taken a fancy to in a bazaar in Calcutta, and had sent home to her, was standing by a rose-tree and choosing the flowers which I was to cut. Mrs. Ellmer, with characteristic vivacity, was running little races with old Ta-ta, whose failing energy was now satisfied with such small performances as these. The dog stopped short to bark at the carriage, to which Mrs. Ellmer now directed my attention.
'Oh yes, it's Miss Farington, I think; she said she might come round this evening.'
'What! Miss Farington? Your young lady? And you could forget that she was coming! Oh, naughty, naughty!' cried Mrs. Ellmer.
Babiole's face had flushed from chin to forehead.
'We must go and meet her,' she said quietly, setting the example of going up the steps which led from terrace to terrace to the house.
Reminded of my duty, I hastened up to the lawn, and was just in time to help my visitor out of the little carriage. She wore a gray dress, a dark blue jacket, a brown hat, and black silk gloves—a costume in which I had seen her often before, but which had not struck me as being a hideous combination until I saw it straightway after looking at a figure which, seen in the soft evening shadows which had begun to creep up under the trees, had left in my mind an intoxicating vision of rich colours and soft outlines, like the conception of an Indian princess by an Impressionist painter.
Lucy Farington's manner suffered as much by contrast with Mrs. Scott's as her dress had done. Never before had she seemed so matter-of-fact, so brusque, so blind and deaf to everything that was not strictly useful or severely intellectual. On finding that Mrs. Scott took but a tepid interest in the subject of artisans' dwellings, and had no acquaintance with the writings either of Kant or Klopstock, she glanced at me, who had never been bold enough to avow the whole depth of my indifference to the one and my ignorance of the other subject, with an expression of scarcely disguised contempt.
'I'm afraid Henry and I shall scarcely find in you a warm sympathiser with our plans, Mrs. Scott,' she said with rather a pitying smile. 'But of course we must not expect you London ladies to condescend to take an interest in cottagers; and it is only we poor country girls who, for want of anything better to do, have to improve our minds.'
We were all in the drawing-room now, to my great regret, for I felt that if we had remained in the garden we might have dispersed ourselves, and I might have been spared hearing my fiancée's unaccountable outbreak of bad taste. Babiole answered very quietly.
'You have misunderstood me a little, I am afraid, Miss Farington,' she said. 'It is not that my mother and I don't take an interest in cottagers; but that, having been cottagers ourselves, and having known and visited cottagers rather as friends than as patrons, we can't at once jump into the habit of considering them wholesale, as if we were poor-law guardians.'
'And as for improving one's mind,' broke in Mrs. Ellmer, who was growing exceedingly irate at the persistent manner in which the philanthropist ignored her, 'you must blame Mr. Maude if she is not learned enough, for it was he who educated her.'
This bold speech made a great sensation. Miss Farington drew herself up. Babiole shot at me an eloquent involuntary glance from eyes which were suddenly filled with tears; while I confess that if I had been called upon to speak at that moment I should have gone near to choking. In the meantime Mrs. Ellmer went on undaunted.
'I suppose it's very old-fashioned to think that one's studies ought to be with the object of giving pleasure to other people. But I'm sure it's pleasanter to hear a girl play a nice piece of music than to hear her talk about books that most of us have never heard of.'
'I love music—good music,' said Lucy coldly. 'No study is more refining and more profound than that of the great masters of harmony. I had no idea, Mrs. Scott, that you were an accomplished amateur. Will you not give me the pleasure of hearing you?'
'I am afraid I am not a very scientific student,' said Babiole, as she walked towards the piano, which I opened for her.
She looked so pale and tired that I suggested in a low voice that she had better not play to-night. She glanced at Miss Farington, however, and I, following the direction of her eyes, saw that my fiancée was watching us in a displeased manner. I therefore beat a retreat from the piano, and Babiole began to play. She was a good performer, and though not one of phenomenal accomplishment, she seemed to me to give something of her own grace and charm to the music she interpreted. She was nervous this evening on account of the critical element in the audience; but I thought she played with even more of sympathy and of power than usual. She had chosen one of the less hackneyed of Mendelssohn's 'Songs without Words,' and when she had finished I thanked her heartily, while Miss Farington chimed in with more reserve.
'I am afraid,' said Babiole, 'that it is not the sort of music to give you great pleasure, but I can't play much by heart, and that is one of the few things I know.'
'Of course,' agreed Miss Farington readily, 'I acquit you of such a terrible charge as an enthusiasm for the shallow sentimentalism of the "Lieder ohne Worte." Some day, I hope, in the daytime, you will let me have the pleasure of hearing you play something you really like. It is really very good of you to have received me at all so late, but I had heard so much about you that I really must plead guilty to the childish charge of not being able to control my impatience to see you.'
And Miss Farington took leave of the two ladies and sailed out of the room, followed meekly by me. I was in no affectionate mood, having been astonished and disgusted by her undreamt-of powers of making herself disagreeable.
'I want you to come and spend the day at Oak Lodge to-morrow, Henry,' she said in a kinder tone than she had used during the evening, as soon as she was seated in the pony-carriage. 'I have some designs of a new church to show you, which I think even you will like; and my Uncle Matthew is most anxious to see more of you than he had a chance of doing yesterday.'
'Thank you; it is very kind,' I answered rather coldly; 'and of course I shall be happy to come and see you to-morrow as usual if you will let me. But I couldn't spend the whole day at Oak Lodge, because, you see, I have guests to consider.'
'And can't they spare you for a single afternoon?' asked Lucy with a hard laugh. 'I shall really begin to feel quite jealous.'
'You need not indeed,' I broke out hastily and earnestly, 'I assure you——'
She interrupted me in a very abrupt and icy manner. 'Pray do not take the trouble. No man who was such a flimsy creature as to give me reason for jealousy could possibly retain a hold upon my affections.'
'Of course not,' I assented, in my usual mean-spirited way, but with a dawning suspicion that my fiancée's affections would not prove strong enough for even a less flimsy creature than I to obtain a firm grip on.
'My father and Mrs. Farington will drive over to-morrow,' Lucy went on; 'I believe they intend to ask Mrs. Scott to dinner. I suppose one must ask the mother too,' she added dubiously.
'It will certainly be better, unless you wish to insult them both,' I said in an unnaturally subdued tone the significance of which I think she failed to notice. 'But in any case the invitation will have no awful results, for Mrs. Scott is not well enough to go out to dinners.'
'Ah, poor thing, I suppose not. She looks very ill. It seems almost impossible to believe what they tell me, that she was once very pretty. Perhaps she would not look so bad though if somebody could only persuade her to dress like other people. Did you ever see anything like that shawl arrangement she had on when I first came?'
'Never,' said I calmly. 'But I confess I am barbarous enough to think that a merit. Every lady's style of dress should have something unique about it.'
'Indeed! Then how about mine?'
'Your style of dress is unique too,' said I politely.
Miss Farington looked at me doubtfully, but came, I think, to the conclusion that she had been disagreeable enough for one day, even if this compliment were a dubious one. So she contented herself with begging me warmly to come early the next day and to remember that my guests were not to absorb me too entirely, and then she advanced her cheek for me to kiss and drove away through the trees. When I turned back into the house I found a great turmoil prevailing. 'Mistress Scott had been on her way to her room when she had swooned awa' on the stairs,' Janet said. I stole presently up the staircase to her door, and Mrs. Ellmer came out to tell me that Babiole had indeed been overcome by fatigue and had fainted, but that she was much better now, and would be all right in the morning after the night's rest.
But I was anxious about the poor child; for her pallor during the evening had frightened me. My Lucy's new departure too had given me something to think about, so that sleep for the present was out of the question. I therefore determined to keep my vigil comfortably; going into the study, I threw another log on the fire which, winter and summer, was always necessary in the evening, and, lighting my pipe, stretched myself in my old chair and gave myself up to meditation, which resolved itself before long into a doze.
I woke up suddenly before the fire had got low, and heard the old boards of the floor above me creaking repeatedly, as if some one were hurrying about on them with a soft tread. The room over my study was that which had been assigned to Mrs. Scott, so that I was on the alert at once, afraid that she had been taken ill again in the night, and that her mother, who slept in a little room next to hers, was running to and fro in attendance upon her.
I jumped up from my chair, with the intention of going upstairs to ask Mrs. Ellmer whether I could be of any use; but before I had taken two steps, in a slow sleepy fashion, listening all the time, the creaking ceased, and I heard the sound of a door being opened on the landing above. The study-door was ajar, so that in the complete stillness of the night the faintest noise was audible to me. I crossed the room softly, creeping nearer to the door with keenly open ears and with something more than curiosity in my mind. For without being at all one of those highly sensitive persons who can distinguish without fail one footfall from another, I knew the difference between Mrs. Ellmer's quick active step, and the slow soft tread which I now heard on the polished uncarpeted floor of the corridor. The steps became inaudible as I caught the light sound of a skirt sweeping from stair to stair: then again I heard a slow tread on the polished floor of the hall. Although I knew well enough who it was, a long sigh which suddenly reached my ears and proclaimed beyond doubt the wanderer's identity, seemed to pierce my body and leave a deep wound. It was Babiole, either in misery or in pain, who was wandering about the house in the middle of the night. She was feeling about for something in the darkness when I opened wide the door of my study, and let the lamplight fall upon her just as the chain of the front door rattled in her hands and fell with a loud noise against the oak.
She glanced back at me in a startled manner, but proceeded to unlock the door and to turn the handle. She had on the muslin dress she had worn during the evening, with her travelling cloak and bonnet. I saw by the vacant manner in which her eyes rested for a moment upon me, without surprise or recognition, that there was some cloud in her brain. I advanced quickly into the hall and laid my fingers upon the handle of the door.
'What are you doing down here to-night?' I asked in a low voice, but with an air of authority. 'You ought to be sleeping.'
She drew back a little and looked helplessly from the door to me.
'Now go upstairs again and get into bed as fast as you can,' I continued coaxingly, 'or your mother will find out that you have left your room, and be very much frightened.'
But recalling her purpose, she made a spring towards the door, and as I stood firm and prevented her opening it, she fell to wild and piteous entreaties.
'Let me pass, please. I must go, I tell you I must go, before they know—before they guess. It will all come right if I go.'
'Tell me first why you want to go,' said I gently.
The lamplight streamed out from the open study door upon us, showing me her dazed, almost haggard face, her disordered dress, the nervous trembling of her hands. She looked at me for a moment more steadily, and I thought she was coming to herself.
'I can't tell you,' she whispered, still fumbling with the door handle and looking down at her own fingers.
'Well, then, go upstairs now, and you shall tell me all about it to-morrow,' I said persuasively.
'No, no, no,' she broke out wildly and vehemently as at first, seeming again to lose all control of herself as she became excited. 'To-morrow I shall be happy again, and I shall not be able to go. He cannot care for this girl while I'm here, I know it! I am spoiling everything for them: I want to go back to my husband, and not wait for him to come and fetch me. Don't you see? Don't you understand?'
Even while she babbled out these secrets, ignorant who I was, her instinct of confidence in me made her support herself on my arm, and lean upon me as she whispered excitedly in my ear.
'Well, but it is night, and there are no trains till the morning, you know.'
For a moment she seemed bewildered. Then with an expression of childlike simplicity she said, 'I shall find my way. God told me I was right to go. I can pray up here among the hills, just as I used when I was a child, and He told me it was right.'
Luckily, perhaps, her strength was failing her even as she spoke. She swayed unsteadily on my arm and made little resistance but a faint murmur of protest as I half carried her back to the staircase. As her head fell languidly against my shoulder I saw that again, as fatigue overcame excitement, she was recovering her wandering consciousness, and I made haste to take advantage of the fact.
'Come,' said I, 'you had better go upstairs and rest a little while—before you start, you know.'
She looked up at me in a dreamy bewildered manner as she leant, supported by my arms, against the staircase, and two tears, shining in the darkness, rolled down her cheeks. 'I am afraid,' said she in a broken whisper, 'that I shall not be able to go at all.'
Then, with a long sigh, she stood up, twined her arms within mine and let me lead her upstairs. The door of her room was open, and the two candles, flickering and smoking in the draught, cast moving shadows over a disorder of dress and dainty woman's clothing flung in confusion about the room. Babiole glanced inside and then looked up at me in bewilderment and alarm, like one roused out of sleep to see something strange and terrible. I wanted her to go to rest before her memory should overtake her. So I took off her bonnet and cloak, and profiting by the utter docility she showed me, glanced into the room and said, in a tone of authority, such as one would use to a child—
'Now, I shall come upstairs again in exactly five minutes and shall knock at your door. If you are in bed by that time you are to call out "good-night." If you are not, I shall wake your mother up, and send her to you. Now will you do as I tell you?'
'Yes, yes,' said she meekly.
'Then good-night.'
'Good-night, Mr. Maude.'
She knew me then; but I somehow fancied, from the old-fashioned demureness with which she gave her hand, that she believed herself to be once more the little maid of Craigendarroch, and me to be her old master.
Next day Babiole did not appear at breakfast, and her mother said she was in a state of deep depression, and must, her mother thought by her manner, have had a fright in the night. I was very anxious to see her again, and to find out how much she remembered of our nocturnal adventure. So anxious was I, in fact, that I forgot all about my appointment at Oak Lodge at eleven, and it was not until Mrs. Ellmer and I were having luncheon at two that I was suddenly reminded of my neglect in a rather summary fashion by being presented by Ferguson with a note directed in my fiancée's handwriting, and told that a messenger was waiting. I opened it, conscience-stricken, but hardly prepared for the blow it contained. This was the note:—
Dear Mr. Maude—[The opening was portentous] It is with feelings of acute pain that I address thus formally a gentleman in whom I once thought I had had the good fortune to discover a heart, and more especially a mind, to which I could in all things submit the control of my own weaker and more frivolous nature.' [Lucy Farington frivolous! Shades of Aristotle and Bacon!] 'For some time past I have begun to feel that I was deceived. I do not for a moment mean that you intended deception, but that, in my anxiety to believe the best, I deceived myself. Your growing indifference to the dearest wishes of my heart, culminating in your positive non-appearance this morning (when I had prepared a little surprise for you in shape of a meeting with Mr. Finch, the architect, with his designs for a model self-supporting village laundry), leave hardly any room for doubt that our views of life are too hopelessly dissimilar for us to hope to embark happily in matrimony. If this is indeed the case, with much regret I will give you back your liberty, and request the return of my perhaps foolishly fond letters. If, on the other hand, you are not willing that all should be at an end between us, I beg that you will come to me in the pony carriage which will await your orders.—I remain, dear Mr. Maude, with my sincerest apologies if I have been unduly hasty, yours most sincerely,
My first emotion was one of anger against the girl for being such a fool; my second was of thankfulness to her for being so wise. I should have liked, in pique, to have straightway got those letters, which she was mistaken in considering compromisingly affectionate, to have made them into a small but neat parcel and despatched them forthwith. Instead of this, I excused myself to Mrs. Ellmer, went into the study in a state of excitement, half pain and half relief, and wrote a note.
My Dear Miss Farington—Your letter forbids me to address you in a more affectionate way, though you are mistaken in supposing that my feelings towards you have changed. It seems to be that we have both, if I may use the expression, been running our heads against a brick wall. You have been seeking in me a learned gentleman with a strong natural bent for philanthropy, while I hoped to find in you an intelligent and withal most kind and loving-hearted girl, who would condescend to console me for the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," in return for my very best endeavours to make her happy. Well, is the mistake past repairing? I am not too old to learn philanthropy under your guidance; you, I am sure, are too sweet not to forgive me for preferring a walk with you alone to interviews with all the architects who ever desecrated nature. I cannot come back with the carriage now to see Mr. Finch; but if you will, in the course of the afternoon, let me have another ever so short note telling me to come and see you, I shall take it as a token that you are willing to give me another chance, and within half an hour of receiving it I will be with you to take my first serious lesson in philanthropy and to pay for it in what love coin you please.—Believe me, dear Lucy if I may, dear Miss Farington if I must, yours ever most faithfully and sincerely,
I saw the groom drive off with this note, and spent the early part of the afternoon wandering about the garden, trying to make out what sort of answer I wished for. This was the one I got:—
Dear Mr. Maude—The tone of levity which characterises your note admits but of one explanation. No gentleman could so address the lady whose respect and esteem he sincerely wished to retain. I therefore return your letters and the various presents you have been kind enough to make me, and beg that you will return me my share of our correspondence. Please do not think I bear you any ill-will; I am willing to believe the error was mutual, and shall rather increase than discontinue my prayers on your behalf, that your perhaps somewhat pliable nature may not render you the victim of designing persons.—I remain, dear Mr. Maude, ever sincerely your friend,
When I got to the end of this warm-hearted effusion I rushed off to make up my parcel: seven notes, a smoking-cap, and a pair of slippers, which last I regretted giving up, as they were large and comfortable; a book on Village Architecture, and another of sermons by an eloquent and unpractical modern preacher, completed the list. I fastened them up, sealed and directed them, and sent them out to the under-gardener from 'Oak Lodge,' who had brought the note, and had been directed to wait for an answer. Then, with a sense of relief which was unmixed this time, I went back to my study, lit my pipe, and sat down in front of the parcel my late love had sent me. I was struck by its enormous superiority in neatness to the ill-shapen brown paper bundle in which I had just sent off mine; and it presently occurred to me that the remarkable deftness with which corners had been turned in and string knotted and tied could never have been attained by hands unused to any kind of active labour. Miss Farington, either too much overcome by emotion to tie her parcel up herself, or from an absence of sentiment which might or might not be considered to do her credit, had entrusted the task of sending back my presents to her maid.
Mechanically I opened the parcel and, not being deeply enough wounded by the abrupt termination of my engagement to throw my rejected gifts with passion into the fire, I arranged them on the table in a row, spread out my returned letters (which had all been neatly opened with a pen—or small paper-knife), and considered the well-meant but disastrous venture of which they were the relics with much thoughtfulness. It had been a failure from first to last: not only had it failed to draw my thoughts and affections from the little pale lady who was now the wife of my friend, but it had also unhappily resulted in rendering her by contrast a lovelier and more desirable object than before. There was no doubt of it: the only unalloyed pleasure my fiancée had afforded me was the increase of delight I had felt, after nearly three weeks of her improving society, in meeting my little witch of the hills once more. On the whole my conscience was pretty clear with regard to Miss Farington; I had been prepared to offer her affection, and she had preferred an interest in domestic architecture, which I had then sedulously cultivated: the question was, what was to be done now? I decided that the most prudent course would be to say nothing of my rupture with my lady-love, and if I should be unable to subdue a certain unwonted hilarity at dinner time, to ascribe it to other causes.
I had scarcely made this resolution, however, when I heard light sounds in the hall and a knock at my door, and I said 'Come in' with my heart leaping up and a hot and feverish conviction that it was all up with the secret; for the outspread letters which I convulsively gathered into a heap, the lace pocket-handkerchief, the chased gold smelling-bottle, and other articles for which a bachelor of retired habits would be likely to have small use, told their own tale; while, to make matters worse, To-to had got hold of the engagement ring and had placed it on the top of his box for safety while he minutely inspected its morocco case, and chewed up the velvet lining with all the zest of a gourmand.
One helpless glance was all I had time for before the door opened, and Babiole came in.