Mrs. Oliphant

“ Susan, I have wanted so to see you! I have been so melancholy shut up at home,” cried Letty; “and when I wanted to come out, mamma would not let me. I do not mind being ill. Why should not I die young like my cousin Mary? I think it must be very sweet to die young, when everybody will be sorry for you—oh, Susan, don’t you?”
“I—don’t—know,” said poor Susan, who thought this was a great sign of Letty’s superiority, and scarcely liked to confess her own worldlymindedness. “No; I should think it rather hard to die if I had a great many people who loved me like you.” ”

“ She could see him come across the moor, that celestial messenger! Not a Cupid, honest fellow; but bearing with him all the love that brightened Susan’s firmament. She thought it would be quite impossible to be dull or listless now: even to be disappointed was something which would give a point and character to the day; and all was very different from the dead blank of her former life, in which she had no expectation, no disappointment, nothing to look for, and for entertainment to her youth only her patchwork and Peggy’s talk, enjoyed by intervals. ”

“ I was there myself, with a scientific friend of mine; a blind fellow, blind as a mole to everything that concerns himself—feeling about the world in spectacles, and as useless for ordinary purposes as if he had moved in a glass case,” said Mr. Stenhouse; “extraordinary, is it not? It was he who found the first traces of that coal.”
“And found them,” said Horace, pointedly, “before the land was purchased by Mr. Pouncet and yourself from Squire Musgrave of the Grange.” ”

“ He carried his cool head and steady nerves through all the scenes of excitement and debauchery of which Kenlisle was capable—and it had its hidden centre of shame and vice, like every other town—sometimes as an observer, often as a partaker; but he was never “carried away”—never forgot himself—never, by any chance, either in pleasure, or frolic, or vice more piquant than either, ceased to hold himself, Horace Scarsdale, closer and dearer than either sin or pleasure. He was the kind of man to be vicious in contradistinction to being a victim or a slave of vice. ”

“ He was elated to find himself a person of importance, though he despised the community which honoured him; and between the honours of the little Kenlisle society, the pleasures deep down below the surface, which gave a black side to the humanity of even that secluded place, and the new sense of freedom, solitude, and self-government in this new life—the whole put together effaced from his mind for the time all that eagerness for his father’s secret which had preyed upon him when his life was idle and unoccupied, and when he sat by that father’s table every day. ”

“ But when she dropped at length into a chair, and yielded to the hysterical passion of tears and sobbing which overpowered her, beneath all her shame, mortification, and terror, a guilty gleam of joy which frightened her shot through poor Susan’s heart. She thought it guilty, poor child. She was dismayed to feel that sudden pang of hope and comfort breaking the sense of this calamity. To be expelled from her father’s house, cast out upon the moor and upon the world, with the stigma upon her of having robbed and deceived him! ”

“ She clasped her hands together with such an anxious entreaty not to be answered, that Peggy paused involuntarily. “Peggy,” said Susan, under her breath, “don’t tell papa—for pity’s sake, don’t tell papa! He will do nothing worse to me than he has threatened. I am only a girl—he would not strike me nor fight me. But Horace! Peggy, for mercy’s sake, if you love me or any of us, let him believe that I did it. Let him never know that Horace has been here.” ”

“ Sometime or other nature and youth must come even to Marchmain; sometime it would be Susan’s turn; sooner or later there would be some one in the world to whom she too would be the first and dearest. This inalienable privilege of womankind came to every Laura and Lucy in her novels, happily or unhappily; and the novels were not so far wrong either—so it does, to be sure, in life; but Susan did not take into her consideration the sad chance that liberation might be offered to the bewitched princess only by the wrong knight. ”

“ Susan would have thought it strange and hard if she had known that she herself, the darling of Peggy’s heart, came in only at the end of this long musing upon others; and that even her brother, with his hard and ungenerous spirit, had a larger share in the sorrowful cogitations of the old family servant than she herself had. Susan was only a sufferer—she was young, she had friends who would love her. Peggy would “miss” her sorely and heavily, but it was well for Susan. She had nothing to do with that long line of perversity, and cruelty, and guilt which ran in the Scarsdale blood. ”

“ The young man paced in front of his house, among the dark trees, revolving over and over these questions which were of so much importance to him, and stimulated in all his hopes, without being aware of it, by that letter of his mother’s, which he prized so much; and Colonel Sutherland sending out for paper, pens, and ink, and receiving in answer a dusty inkstand, a rusted steel pen, and two sheets of post paper highly glazed and with gilt edges, wiped his spectacles, lighted his low bedroom candle, that the light might suit his eyes, and sat down to write. ”

“ The only wonderful thing of the whole was that while Susan, without running, reached Marchmain with an incredible silent speed, and got in with her pulse high and her eyes shining, and the most profound amazement in her mind, Roger scarcely ever drew breath, on his part, till he had reached his own deserted house, though that was five miles off. Why they should have used such prodigious pains to get as far distant as possible from each other, in the shortest conceivable time, remains until this hour the mystery of that day. ”

“ Oh, Ned, Ned, how miserable we can make ourselves when we get leave to do our own will! The man is wretched—you can read it in every line of his face; but he will not yield to open his heart to his boy, to receive him into his confidence, to make a friend of his only son. This miserable lucre—and I am sure in his better days, when your poor aunt was alive, nobody imagined that Scarsdale had set his heart much upon it—has turned his whole nature into gall. ”

“ To see his father, much more likely; for steady opposition and enmity is almost as exigeant as affection, and loves to contemplate and study its object with a clear and bitter curiosity, more particular and observing even than love. He reached Marchmain on a spring afternoon, when even Lanwoth Moor owned the influence of the season; when solitary specks of gold were bursting on the whin-bushes, and purple stalks of heather-bells rose from the brown underground. Under that sunshine and genial spring stir the very house looked less desolate. ”

“ That half-hour was sweet to Horace. Mr. Pouncet’s secret flush of rage; his visible determination to restrain himself; his forced politeness, and uneasy, unnatural deference to the studied rudeness of the young bear before him, were so many distinct expressions of homage dear to the young victor’s soul. He could strip the respectability off that grave, uneasy figure; he could hold up the man who had betrayed his trust to the odium of the world, and force out of his stores the riches he had gained so unjustly. ”

“ Susan, sobbing upon Peggy’s breast, naturally felt, in the youthful petulance of that sudden calamity, that it was herself who ought to be sorrowed for, and not her father. She raised herself a little, wiping her eyes, with a flush of momentary independence and involuntary self-assertion. For once in her life the forlorn pride and excess of unappreciated suffering, so dear to very young people, came in a flood of desolate luxury to Susan’s heart. ”

“ He had been deceived—he, so boldly confident in his own powers, had allowed himself to be blinded and circumvented by his own excitement and childish commotion of feeling. For a moment he had enjoyed such command of his father’s house as a midnight thief might have gained, and had sacrificed all the results of that precious instant by a piece of involuntary self-deceit and ridiculous weakness, an indulgence absurd and contemptible. His feelings were not enviable as he sat in Mrs. Gilsland’s dark little parlour, with the two faint candles burning, and the damp wood hissing in the grate. ”

“ CHAPTER VI. THAT day was an important one to Roger Musgrave. To live in that Grange, a great, empty, deserted house, where every desolate apartment echoed to his footstep as if he were a dozen men, and which contained through all its ample rooms nothing but a rude table and chair in the library, where he took his solitary food, a truckle bed where he slept, and some homely implements for poor old Sally in the kitchen, which the unfortunate young man had redeemed out of his mother’s twenty pounds—became at last and once for all impossible to him. ”

“ Colonel Sutherland bowed very gravely; the appeal touched on griefs too profound to be exposed to the compassion of a stranger. “He was a very good fellow when I knew him,” said the Colonel; “I hear he was on terms of very intimate friendship with a Mr. Musgrave—he who died lately—is that true?”
“Ah, Mr. Musgrave?—yes, I knew him very well; an unfortunate, imprudent man, lavish and foolish,” said the Rector. “He had a very good fortune to begin with, but lived with the most entire recklessness, like a man of three times his means. ”

“ Horace Scarsdale has chosen to leave Marchmain; I say nothing against that—he is perfectly welcome to choose his own residence; but I desire you to understand, both of you, that on no pretence whatever must this young man return into my house—not even for a visit; he has placed himself among those strangers whom I decline to admit. I make no complaint,” added the recluse, coldly, “that my family conspire against me, and that messages are received, and my property sent away, without my knowledge.” ”

“ Mr. Scarsdale stamped his foot on the floor in lack of words, and pointed to the door with a violent gesture; and before he knew what he was about, Peggy rushed against John, thrust him out before her, and closed and bolted the door after him. The amazed and sheepish look with which he rubbed his shoulders, and gazed at the inhospitable door from which he had been so summarily expelled, would have been worth a comic actor’s while to see. The honest fellow stood outside, looking first at the house and then at his mare, with a ludicrous astonishment. “The devil’s in the woman!” said John. ”

“ Scarsdale realized, with a bitter superiority, the kind of house which was likely to call his brother-in-law master—the house full of warmth and kindliness, at which he sneered dismally, with the disgust of an evil spirit. The very desire which her uncle showed to have Susan with him increased the scorn of Susan’s father. What did he want the girl for? To make an old man’s pet of her, and amuse himself with the fondness of dotage? ”

“ Black in its unbroken midnight of gloom lay the moor, a waste of desolate darkness on every side, rain falling, masses of black clouds sweeping over the sky, a shrill gleam of the windy horizon far away, shining over the top of the distant hills. And Horace, if he should be near, if he should still be coming home, remorselessly shut out! Susan sat up half the night, listening with a nervous terror to all the mysterious sounds which creep and creak in the absolute silence of the dead hours of night. ”

“ The house altogether was old-fashioned, and much behind its neighbours. Smooth polished stone, square-topped windows, palladian fronts, and Italian villas have strayed into Inveresk as to other quarters of the world. But Milnehill remained red-tiled and picturesque, with eaves in which the swallows built, and lattice windows which opened wide to the sweet air and sunshine, and smoke curling peacefully through the branches over the red ribs of the tiled roof. ”