Mrs. Oliphant

“ I came this morning to warn her, or rather to warn Madame Roche,” said Cosmo, recalled to the ostensible cause of his visit. “A Frenchman, called Pierrot, came home with Huntley—”
But before he could finish his sentence, Desirée started up with a scream at the name, and seizing his arm, in her French impatience overwhelmed him with terrified questions:—
“Pierrot? quick! speak! where is he? does he seek Marie? is he here? quick, quick, quick, tell me where he is! he must never come to poor Marie! he must not find us—tell me, Cosmo! do you hear?” ”

“ But I have trained my Desirée to love honor and virtue, and to be generous as the Livingstones. Shall I say to you, my child, what would glad my heart most to see? Our poor Marie has thrown away her happiness and her liberty; she can not reward any man, however noble; she can not make any compensation to those whom we must supplant, and her heart wanders after that vagabond, that abandoned one! But my Desirée is young, only a child, and has not begun to think of lovers. My love, keep your little heart safe till Huntley returns—your mother bids you, Desirée. ”

“ Though the tears are in her eyes, and grief in her face, she is still the beautiful old lady whom Cosmo Livingstone loved to watch from his window in St. Ouen. Time himself, the universal conqueror, can never take from Mary of Melmar that gift which surrounded her with love in her youth, and which has lighted all her troubled life like a fairy lamp. The sweet soft cheek{382} where even wrinkles are lovely, the beautiful old eyes which even in their tears can not choose but smile, the footstep so light, yet so firm, which still might ring “like siller bells,” though its way is heavy. ”

“ He could see at a glance how pretty and graceful was this addition to the household of Melmar—and Oswald Huntley was a dilettanti. He liked a pretty person as well as a pretty picture. He begged to know how they could find any pleasure out of doors in this ferocious climate on such a day—and with a glance, and a shrug and a shiver at the frosty languor of the diminished Kelpie, drew his cloak close round him, and turned towards the house, whither, Joanna eagerly, and Desirée with great reluctance and annoyance, the girls were constrained to follow. ”

“ And Cosmo hurried on through the narrow paths to Melmar, his heart a-flame with a young man’s resentment, and impatience, and love. He scarcely could tell what it was which excited him so entirely. Not, certainly, the vagabond Pierrot, or any fears for Marie; not even the displeasure of his mother. He would not acknowledge to himself the eager, jealous fears which hurried him through those flowery bye-ways where the blossoms of the hawthorn had fallen in showers like summer snow, and the wild roses were rich in the hedgerows. ”

“ But the far off tinkle of the Kirkbride bell, though it was no wonder of harmony, dropped into Cosmo’s ear and heart like the voice of an angel. Just then, his mother, proudly leaning upon Huntley’s arm, was going up the bank of Tyne to thank God for her son’s return. Just then, Desirée, who had left Melmar before him, was walking softly, in her white summer robes, to the Sabbath service, little doubting to see Cosmo there; and out of all the country round, the rural families, in little groups, were coming up every path, all tending toward the same place. ”

“ I speak of love because Marie is his wife; but a young girl is different! She must obey her destiny! You are young—you will forget it. A year hence, you will smile when you think of your passion. No—my friend Cosmo, hear me! No, no, you must not have Desirée—I will give you any thing else in this world that you wish, if I can procure it, but Desirée is destined otherwise. No, no, I can not change—you can not have Desirée!”
And on this point the tender and soft Madame Roche was inexorable—no intreaty, no remonstrance, no argument could move her! ”

“ She thinks she is very sad just now as she sits half in the shade and half in the sunshine, leaning her head upon her hand, while the playful wind occasionally sprinkles over her those snowy drops of spray from the Kelpie which shine on her hair; but the truth is that nothing just now{342} could make Desirée sad, save sudden trouble, change, or danger falling upon one person—that one person is he who devours the way with eager, flying steps, and who, still more disturbed than she is, still knows no trouble in the presence of Desirée; and that is Cosmo Livingstone. ”

“ And as he thought of it, the French household at Melmar, with its fancies, its agitations, its romantic plans and troubles of feeling, looked more and more to Cosmo discordant and inharmonious with the time; and he himself jarred like a chord out of tune upon this calm of the house and the Sabbath; jarred strangely, possessed as he was by an irritated and injured self-consciousness—that bitter sensation of wrong and disappointment, which somehow seemed to separate Cosmo from every thing innocent and peaceful in the world. ”

“ Those slow days of household gloom and darkness, when death lies in the house, and every thought and every sound still bears an involuntary reference to the solemn inmate, resting unconscious of them all, went slowly over the roof of Norlaw. Sunday came, doubly mournful; a day in which Scottish decorum demanded that no one should stir abroad, even to church, and which hung indescribably heavy in those curtained rooms, and through the unbroken stillness of its leisure, upon the three youths who had not even their mother’s melancholy society to help them through the day. ”

“ He scarcely drew breath till he had reached the summit of that fertile slope from whence he could just see in the distance the gray towers of Melrose and the silvery gleam of Tweed shining in the hazy golden sunshine beyond the purple Eildons. The broad country shone before him in all its tints of color and glow of summer light, wide, great, and silent as the life upon whose brink he stood—and at his feet lay Norlaw, with its humble homestead and its ruined castle, where sat this lad’s mother, who was a widow. ”

“ Huntley, who had come out of the languid August afternoon, red in a glow of sunshine and heat, to which the very idea of long labor was alien, which accorded well enough with his own ambitious dreams and thoughts of sudden fortune—could not help feeling somehow as if Jaacob’s hammer, beneath the strokes of which the sparks flew, struck himself as well as the iron. Melmar dissipated into thin air, in the ruddy atmosphere of the smithy. ”

“ It was too much for Madame Roche.
“Mamma, listen,” whispered Desirée, soothingly. “Ah, mamma, you might force mine—I should always obey you—but you can not force Huntley’s heart—he does not care for me; bah, that is nothing!—but there is one whom he cares for—one whom he has come home for—Katie, whom they all love! Mamma, you were right! he is noble, he is generous; but what is Melmar to Huntley? ”

“ The Mistress stood by herself in the middle of the room, with her hand on the table—her eyes shone with a mortified and grieved fire through unshed tears—her heightened color—her frame, which seemed to vibrate with a visible pang—the pain of unappreciated love, which looked like anger in her face—showed how little congenial to her mind was Huntley’s self-abnegation. There was no sacrifice in the world which she herself could not and would not have made for her children ”

“ And when Cosmo reached Norlaw, which was solitary and quiet like a house deserted, and when the little girl who helped Marget in the dairy rose from her seat at the clean table in the kitchen, where, with her Bible open before her, she was seeking out “proofs” for her “questions,” to let him in, not without a wondering air of disapproval, the feeling grew even stronger. He threw himself into his mother’s easy-chair, in the dining-parlor, feeling the silence grow upon him like a fascination. ”

“ But Providence does not desert those poor, suffering, wicked children who fly to death’s door at the impulse of passion as Desirée did. A laborer, hastening home by the footpath through the Melmar woods, wandered out of his way, by chance, and stumbled over the poor little figure lying in the path. When the man had got over his first alarm, he lifted her up and carried her like a child—she was not much more—to Melmar, where he went to the side door and brought her in among the servants to that great kitchen, which was the most cheerful apartment in the house. ”

“ If I can not love every man I see, I can love Him who loves all!” said the Highlander, raising his high head with an unconscious loftiness and elevation of gesture. Cosmo made no answer and no comment—he was awed for the moment with the personal reality of that heavenly affection which made this limited earthly man, strong in his own characteristic individualities, and finding it impossible to abound in universal tenderness, still to do with fervor those works of the Evangelist which were for love of One who loved the all, whom he himself had not a heart expansive enough to love. ”

“ The High Street of Edinburgh, lined with expectant lookers-on, darkening downwards towards the picturesque slope of the Canongate, with its two varied and noble lines of lofty old houses, black with time, between which the sunshine breaks down in a moted and streamy glory, as into a well, is no contemptible object among street sights; and the population of Edinburgh loves its streets as perhaps only the populations of places rich in natural beauty can love them. ”

“ Then Cosmo went on, in the natural current of his changed thoughts, to think of the present family, the frank and friendly Joanna, the unknown brother whom bowed Jaacob respected as a virtuoso, and who, doubtless, firmly believed himself the heir—the father who, though an enemy, was still a homeborn and familiar countryman. Well, that household must fall suddenly out of prosperity and wealth into ruin—his own must forego at once a well-warranted and honorable hope—all to enrich a family of St. Ouen, who knew neither Melmar nor Scotland, and perhaps scorned them both! ”

“ It is not easy to sew, nor to read, nor even to think, out of doors on a June morning, with a sweet river drowsing by, and the leaves, and the roses, and the birds, and the breeze making among them that delightful babble of sound and motion which people call the quiet of the country. Still Katie did work; she was making shirts for Colin, who had just gone into Edinburgh to Cousin Charlie’s office;—stitching wristbands! and in spite of the sunshine and her perplexed thoughts, Katie’s button-holes were worth going ten miles to see. ”

“ Somehow these lines floated in upon Huntley’s mind as he stood gazing upon the summer landscape. To win Melmar with all its wealth and influence, or to lose what remained of Norlaw, with all the associations and hereditary bonds that belonged to that home of his race—should he put it to the touch? A conflict, not less stormy that it was entirely unexpressed, rose within the young, ambitious, eager mind, gazing over those fields and hills. ”

“ The elder sister liked him heartily, knew that he would be kind to her orphans, believed him every thing that was good in man; but while she reasoned with herself, the color wavered upon her cheek, and somewhere in heart a voice, which might have been the Esk river, so closely its whisper ran with her thoughts, kept saying, “Dinna forget me, Katie!” till, by dint of persistence, all the other meditations yielded, and this, with a triumphant shout, kept the field. Oh, Huntley Livingstone! who had, just as like as no’, forgotten Katie—was she right? ”

“ The whole bright summer world was as silent as a dream—the corn growing, the flowers opening, the sun shining, without a whisper to tell that dutiful Nature carried on her pious work through all the day of rest. The Tyne ran softly beneath his banks, the Kelpie rushed foaming white down its little ravine, and all the cool burns from among the trees dropped down into Tyne with a sound like silver bells. Something white shone upon the path on the very spot where Desirée once lay, proud and desolate, in the chill of the winter night, brooding over false friendship and pretended love. ”

“ The old castle of Norlaw, gaunt and bare, and windowless, not a towered and battlemented pile, but a straight, square, savage mass of masonry, with windows pierced high up in its walls in even rows, like a prison, and the gray stone-work below, as high under the first range of windows as the roof of the modern house, rising up blank, like a rock, without the slightest break or opening. ”

“ I have room in my goodwill, if not in my heart, for them that you love, Cosmo; and what should I have for them that He loved, and loved to the death? That is the secret. My boy, I would rather than gear and lands that you found it out for yourself.”
“I can understand it, at least,” said Cosmo, grasping his friend’s hand; “but I blush for myself when I look at your work and at mine. They are different, Cameron.”
“A lad may leave the plow in mid-furrow for a flower on the brae or a fish in the water,” said Cameron, with a smile; “but a man returns to the work he’s put his hand to. ”

“ Cosmo’s heart grew sad within him as he thought of this great solemn death which was coming on Marie. Poor Marie, with her invalid irritability, her little feverish weakness, her ill-bestowed love! To think that one so tender and wayward, from whom even reason and sober thought were not to be expected, should, notwithstanding, go forth alone like every other soul to stand by herself before her God, and that love and pity could no longer help her, let them strain and struggle as they{371} would! The thought made Cosmo’s heart ache, he could not tell why. ”

“ Huntley had been brought up in all the natural love and reverence of a well-ordered family; he knew there was weakness in his father’s character, beautiful, lovable, tender weakness, for which, somehow, people only seem to like him better. He had not permitted himself to see yet what harm and selfish unconsciousness of others that graceful temperament had hidden. He looked{22} at Cosmo, thinking as a strong mind thinks of that constitution which is called poetic—of the sensitive nature which would shrink from unkindness, and the tender spirit which could not bear the trials of the world ”

“ The universal human trouble broods even on these thoughts—not heavily—only like the shadow that flits along the trees of Tyne—a something ruffling the white woman’s forehead, which is more serious than the girl’s was, and disquieting the depths of those eyes which Cosmo Livingstone had called stars. Stars do not mist themselves with tender dew about the perversities of human kind as these eyes do ”

“ At sight of him, Cameron instantly left the bedside—instantly without a word, quitted the room—and began to walk up and down the corridor, where Cosmo stood waiting. Pierrot began immediately to address his wife:—His wife!—his life!—his angel! was it by her orders that strangers came to the house, that his commands were disobeyed, that he himself was kept from her side? He begged his adored one to shake off her illness, to have a brave spirit, to get up and rouse herself for his sake.
“What, my Marie! it is but courage!” cried her husband. “A man does not die who will not die! ”

“ She demands what the jeune Monsieur thinks of a so grave procession.”
“The men are displeased,” said Cosmo, hastily; “they think that the government trifles with them, and they warn it how they feel. They don’t mean to make a riot, or break the peace—we call it a demonstration here.”
“A de-mon-stracion!” said the little Frenchwoman; “I shall look for it in my dictionary. They are angry with the king—eh bien!—why do not they fight?”
“Fight! they could fight the whole world if they liked!” cried Joanna; “but they would scorn to fight for every thing like people that have nothing else to do. ”