CHAPTER LIX
The streets of Edinburgh looked strange and unfamiliar to Cosmo Livingstone when he stood in them once more—a very boy still in heart and experience, yet feeling himself a traveled and instructed man. He no longer dreamed of turning his steps towards Mrs. Purdy’s in the High Street; he took his carpet bag to a hotel instead, half wondering at himself for his changed ideas. Cameron’s ideas too, probably, were equally changed. Where was he, or how had he managed to reconcile the present with the past? But Cosmo had no time to inquire. He could not pause in Edinburgh for any thing but his needful business, which was to see Mr. Cassilis, and to place in his hands the interests of Madame Roche.
The young lawyer received him with a careless kindness not very flattering to Cosmo’s dignity, but was greatly startled by the news he brought. Once only he paused in taking down all the facts of the case which Cosmo could give him, to say:—
“This discovery will be a serious loss to your brother;” but Cosmo made no reply, and with that the comment ceased. Huntley and his heirship melted away out of sight in the strangest manner while this conversation went on. Cosmo had never realized before how entirely it separated him and his from all real connection with Melmar. The sensation was not quite satisfactory, for Melmar, one way or another, had borne a most strong and personal connection with all the thoughts and projects of the family of Norlaw for a year or two past; but that was all over. Cosmo alone now had any interest in the matter, and that solely as the representative of Madame Roche.
When he had fully informed the young lawyer of all the needful points in the matter, and formally left the cause in his hands, Cosmo left him to secure a place in the first coach, and to hasten home with all the speed he could make. He could scarcely have felt more strange, or perceived a greater change upon every thing, if he had dropped from the skies into Kirkbride; yet every thing was precisely the same, so clearly and broadly recognizable, that Cosmo could not understand what difference had passed upon them, and still less could understand that the difference was in himself. His mother stood waiting for him at the door of the Norlaw Arms. It was cold March weather, and the Mistress had been sitting by the fire, waiting the arrival of the coach. She was flushed a little with the frosty air and the fire, and looked disturbed and uneasy. Cosmo thought he could fancy she turned a jealous eye upon himself as he sprang from the coach to meet her, which fancy was perfectly true, for the Mistress was half afraid that her son who had been abroad might be “led away” by his experiences of travel, and might have become indifferent or contemptuous about his home. She was a little displeased, too, that he had lingered behind Cameron. She was not like Madame Roche—all-enduring sweetness was not in this old-fashioned Scottish mother. She could not help making a strong personal claim of that arbitrary love which stinted nothing in bestowing upon those who were her own, and opened her heart only slowly and secondarily to the rest of the world.
“So you’re hame at last!” was the Mistress’s salutation; though her eye was jealous, there was moisture in it, as she looked at her boy. Cosmo had grown in stature for one thing; he was brown with exposure, and looked manly and strong; and, not least, his smooth cheeks began to show evidence of those symptoms of manhood which boys adore. There was even a something not to be described or defined upon Cosmo’s upper lip, which caught his mother’s eye in a moment, and gave a tangible ground for her little outburst of half-angry fondness.
“You’re no’ to bring any of your outlandish fashions here!” said the Mistress, “though you have been in foreign parts. I’ll have no person in my house bearded like a Frenchman. Can you no’ carry your bag in your ain hand, laddie? Come away, then; you can shake hands with other folk another time.”
As the Mistress spoke, a figure strange to Kirkbride stalked through the circle of lookers-on. Nothing like that bearded face and wide cloak had been known to Cosmo’s memory in the village or the district. He turned unconsciously to look after the stranger. Further down on the road before were two girls whom Cosmo recognized with a start; one was Joanna Huntley, the other there was no possibility of mistaking. Cosmo gazed after her wistfully—a blush of recollection, of embarrassment, almost of guilt, suddenly rising to his face. Bowed Jaacob stood at his smithy door, with the fiery glow of the big fire behind him, a swart little demon gazing after her too. Desirée! Was she the desired of this unknown figure in the cloak, who went languidly along to join her? Cosmo stood silent for a moment, altogether absorbed by the junction of old and new thus strangely presented to him. Familiar Kirkbride, with Jaacob at the smithy door, and that graceful little figure of romance, whose story no one but Cosmo knew, followed by the other stranger figure which he was entirely unacquainted with. He started when his mother repeated her imperative summons—the color on his cheeks looked guilty and troubled; he had his secret on his heart, and knew beforehand that it would not be agreeable to the Mistress. So he did the very worst thing he could have done—postponed the telling of it to a more convenient season, and so went uncomfortably, and with a visible restraint, which vexed his mother’s soul within her, home to Norlaw.
Patie, as it happened, had come home a few days before on a brief visit; and when they met round the fire that first evening, every one’s thought instinctively was of Huntley. When Marget came in, disturbing the gloamin quietness with lights, her long-drawn sigh and involuntary exclamation:—
“Eh, sirs! if Master Huntley were but here!” startled the little family group into open discussion of the subject which was in all their hearts.
“Huntley’s been further than you, Cosmo,” said the Mistress, “and maybe seen mair; but I wouldna wonder if Huntley thinks yet, as he thought when he left Norlaw, that there’s no place equal to hame.”
“Huntley’s in the bush; there’s not very much to make him change his opinion there, mother,” said Patrick.
“Ay, but Huntley’s heart is ever at hame,” said the Mistress, finding the one who was absent always the dearest.
“Mother,” said Cosmo, his courage failing him a little, “I have something to tell you—and it concerns Huntley, too, mother. Mother, I have found the lady, the heir—she whom we have all heard so much about; Patie, you know?”
“What lady? what heir? and how does Patie know?” asked the Mistress; then she paused, and her countenance changed. A guess at the truth occurred to her, and its first effect was an angry flush, which gradually stole over her face. “Patie is no a romancer, to have to do with heirs and ladies,” she added, quickly; “nor to have strange folk in his thoughts the first hour he’s at home. I canna tell wherefore any one of you should have such wandering fancies; it’s no’ like a bairn of mine.”
“Mother, I’ve learnt something by it,” said Cosmo; “before I went away, I thought it worth hunting over all the world to find her—for no reason that I can tell, except that she was wronged, and that we might be the better if she never came back; but now I have found her—I know where Mary of Melmar is, and she knows she’s the heir; but ever since my thought has been of Huntley. Huntley could have had no pleasure in Melmar, mother, if it were not justly his own.”
The Mistress raised her head high as Cosmo spoke. Anger, great disappointment, of which she was half ashamed, and a pride which was resolute to show no sign of disappointment, contended in her face with that bitter dislike and repugnance to the lost Mary which she had never been able—perhaps had seldom tried to conquer. “I have heard plenty of Mary of Melmar,” said the Mistress, hastily; “ae time and another she’s been the plague of my life. What, laddie! do you mean to say you left me, and your hame, and your ain business, to seek this woman? What was she to you? And you come back and tell me you’ve found her, as if I was to rejoice at the news. You ken where she is, and she kens she’s the heir; and I crave ye to tell me what is that to me? Be silent, Patie! Am I her mother, or her sister, or her near friend, that this lad shall come to bring the news to me?”
“It’s poor news,” said Patie, who did not hesitate to look gravely annoyed and disappointed, as he was; “very poor news for all of us, mother; but at least it’s better that Cosmo found her than a stranger—if found she was to be.”
The Mistress paused a moment, subdued by this suggestion. “Poor news! I kenna what you both mean,” she said, with pride; “what concern is it of ours? Would my Huntley ever put hand or touch upon another person’s gear? Let her come back the morn, and what the waur are we? Do you think I envied her Melmar, or her land? Do you think I would have made my son rich at her cost, that never was a friend to me? You may ken many things, laddies, but you dinna ken your mother. Me!—I wouldna take blade o’ grass or drop of water belonging to her, if you asked me; and I’m thankful to tell ye baith my Huntley is Huntley Livingstone of Norlaw, and needs to be indebted to no person in this whole country-side.”
The Mistress rose up in the fervor of her indignant disappointment; vexation and mortified feeling brought the water to her eyes. She felt aggrieved and wronged, not only in this setting aside of Huntley, but in the very fact that Mary of Melmar was about to return. This Mary, for whose unthankful sake her husband had neglected her honest love and faithful heart, had at last lured even her son, her youngest and best beloved, away from her, and was coming back triumphant to the inheritance which might have been Huntley’s. The Mistress’s heart rose in a tumult of pride, love, indignation, and bitterness. She said “my son,” and “my Huntley,” with a proud and tender emphasis, an involuntary, anxious impulse to make amends to him for the hope he had lost—yet with an equally natural feeling rejected indignantly all sympathy for him, and would not permit even his brothers to speak of disappointment or loss to Huntley in this new event. She went away across the room, breaking up the fireside circle by the hasty movement, to seek out in her basket the stocking which she was knitting—for the Mistress’s eyes began to fail her in candlelight with all her more delicate industries—and coming back to the table, began to knit with absorbed attention, counting the loops in the heel as if she had no care for the further particulars which Cosmo, encouraged by Patie, proceeded to tell. Yet she did hear them notwithstanding. But for the presence of Patie’s practical good sense, Cosmo and his mother might have had painful recollections of that night; but his brother’s steady look and sober attention kept Cosmo from indulging the irritation and wounded feeling which he might have felt otherwise. He went on with his story, gradually growing interested in it, and watching—as a dramatist might watch his first audience—the figure of the Mistress, who sat almost with her back to him, knitting assiduously, the light of the candle throwing a great shadow of her cap upon the wall, and her elbow moving slightly with the movement of her wires. Cosmo watched how the elbow moved irregularly at certain points of his tale, how it was still for an instant now and then, as the interest grew, and the boy-poet was pleased and forgave his mother. At last the stocking fell from the Mistress’s hand—she pushed back her chair, and turned round upon him with a half-scream.
“Desirée!” cried the Mistress, as she might have exclaimed at the crisis of a highly interesting novel, “it’s her that’s at Melmar—whisht!—dinna speak to me—I’m just as sure as that we’re a’ here—it’s her ain very bairn!”
After this, Cosmo’s tale ended with a great success; he had excited his mother—and the truth began to glide into her unwilling heart, that Mary of Melmar was, like herself, the mother of fatherless children, a widow, and poor. She heard all the rest without a word of displeasure; she became grave, and said nothing, when her sons discussed the matter; she nodded her head approvingly when Patie repeated rather more strongly than before his satisfaction that Cosmo had found the lost Mary, since she was to be found. The Mistress was thinking of something—but it was only after she had said good night to them that the youths discovered what it was.
“Bairns,” said the Mistress then, abruptly pausing upon the stair, with her candle in her hand, “that bit lassie at Melmar is in the dwelling of the enemy—and if it were not so, the mother canna make war on the house where her bairn has shelter. You’re her nearest kinsmen that I ken of, to be friends as well—she’ll have to come here.”
“Mother!” cried Cosmo, in delight and surprise, and compunction, “can you ask her here?”
“Ay, laddie—I can do mony things, mair than the like of you ken of,” said the Mistress; and, saying so, she went slowly up stairs, with the light in her hand, and her shadow climbing the wall after her, leaving no unkindness in the echo of her motherly good night.
CHAPTER LX
During all these months Desirée had led a strange life at Melmar. She had never told any one of the revelation, painful and undesired, the miserable enlightenment which Aunt Jean’s story had brought. What Cosmo told Madame Roche months after, Madame Roche’s little daughter knew on that winter night by the Kelpie, when the tale of Aunt Jean, and all its confirming circumstances, stung her poor little heart with its first consciousness of falsehood and social treachery. After that she was ill, and they were kind to her at Melmar, and when she recovered Desirée still did not tell her mother. People did not write so many letters then as they do now, in these corresponding days—Madame Roche certainly did not hear oftener than once a fortnight, sometimes not more than once a month from her daughter, for Melmar was nearly as far from St. Ouen in those days as India is now. Many a painful thought it cost poor Desirée as she stole out by herself, avoiding every one, to the side of Tyne. Oswald Huntley, after her recovery, had resumed his manner of devotion toward her—but Desirée’s eyes were no longer touched with the fairy glamour of her first dream. She had not been “in love,” though the poor child imagined she had—she had only been amused by that dream of romantic fancy to which seventeen is subject, and touched into gratitude and pleasure by the supposed love she had won—yet, even while she scorned his false pretense of tenderness, that very disdain made Desirée shrink from the thought of injuring Oswald. She was sadly troubled between the two sentiments, this poor little girl, who was French, and Madame Roche’s child, and who consequently was much tempted by the dangerous intoxications of feeling. What was barely, simply, straightforwardly right might have satisfied Joanna; but Desirée could not help thinking of self-sacrifice and suffering for others, and all the girlish heroics common to her age. She could not live in their house and betray the family who had sheltered and were kind to her. She seemed to be tempted to avenge herself on Oswald by righting her mother at his expense; so for feeling’s sake Desirée kept herself very unhappy, saying nothing to her mother of the discovery she had made, unable to resume her old cordiality with the Huntleys, ill at ease in her own mind, and sadly solitary and alone. If it had been any mere piece of information—or had the injury to be done been her own, Desirée would have seen what was right, plainly enough—but as it was, she only thought of the cruel difference to the family of Melmar, which a word of hers might make, and of the selfish advantage to herself; and feeling conscious of the sacrifice she made for them—a sacrifice which nobody knew or appreciated, and which her conscience told her was even wrong—Desirée’s mind grew embittered against them and all the world; and her poor little heart, uneasy, cross, and restless, consumed itself. As the struggle continued it made her ill and pale, as well as disturbed in mind; nobody could tell what ailed her—and even Aunt Jean, with her keen black eyes, could not read Desirée. She had “something on her mind.”
When one day she was startled by the arrival of a visitor, who asked to see her, and was put into a little waiting-room—a cold little room, without a fire, into which the March sunshine came chill, with no power of warmth in it—to wait for the little governess. Desirée was much amazed when she entered here to see the ruddy and comely face of the Mistress looking down upon her, out of that black bonnet and widow’s cap. It was a face full of faults, like its owner, but it was warm, bright, kind, full of an unsubduable spirit and intelligence, which had long ago attracted the eye of the vivacious little Frenchwoman, who, however, did not know Mrs. Livingstone, except by sight. They looked at each other in silence for the first moment—one amazed, and the other thoughtful—at last the Mistress spoke.
“Maybe I may not name you right,” she said; “I have nae knowledge of your tongue, and no’ much of strangers, whatever place they come from; but my son Cosmo has seen your mother, in foreign parts, and that is the reason that brings me here.”
Desirée started violently; for the moment it seemed to her that this was her true and fit punishment. Her mother, whom she might have been with—who might have been here had Desirée but spoken—was sick, was dying, and a stranger brought her the news! She grew very pale and clasped her little French hands in a passion of grief and self-upbraiding.
“She is ill!” cried Desirée, “ill, and I am here!”
“Na—no’ that I ken of,” said the Mistress; “stranger news than that; do you know of any bond between your mother and this house of Melmar? for that is what I am come to tell you of now, as maybe she has done herself before this time by hand of write.”
From pale, Desirée’s cheeks became burning red—her eyes sank beneath the look of the Mistress, her heart beat loud and wildly. Who had found her out? but she only turned her head aside with an uneasy movement and did not speak.
“I may guess you’ve heard tell of it by your face,” said the Mistress; “Melmar was left by will to my family—to my Huntley, the eldest and the heir—failing your mother, that was thought to be lost. When he heard tell of that, my Cosmo would not rest till he was away on his travels seeking her. He’s been through France and Italy, and I ken not what unlikely places a’ to look for your mother, and at last he’s found her; and she’s coming home with little mair delay to be enfeoffed in her ain lands and prove herself the heir.”
Bitter tears, which still had a certain relief in them, fell heavy from Desirée’s eyes—she had known it all, but had not been the means of bringing this fortune to her mother. Her first impulse was not the delighted surprise which the Mistress expected, but she threw herself forward, after a moment’s pause, at her visitor’s feet, and seized her hand and cried—“Is it true?” with a vehemence which almost scandalized the Mistress. Cosmo’s mother took her hand away involuntarily, but moved by the girl’s tears laid it on her head, with a hasty but kindly motion.
“It’s true,” said the Mistress; “but being true do you no’ see you canna stay here? It is your mother’s house—but though I hold this Me’mar for little better than a knave, yet I would not deceive him. You canna remain here when your mother’s plea against him is begun. You should not stay another day without letting him ken who you are—and that is why I’m here to bid you come back with me to Norlaw.”
“To Norlaw!” cried Desirée, faintly; she had no words to express her amazement at the invitation—her shame for the deceit which she had practiced, and which was worse than any thing the Mistress supposed possible—her strange humiliation in comparing herself, Oswald Huntley, every one here, with Cosmo; somehow when this sudden burst of honest daylight fell upon her, Desirée felt herself as great a culprit as Melmar. Her place seemed with him and with his son, who knew the truth and concealed it—not with the generous and true hearts who relinquished their own expectations to do justice to the wronged. In an agony of shame and self-disgust, Desirée hid her face in her hands—she was like Oswald Huntley whom she despised—she was not like Cosmo Livingstone nor Cosmo’s mother.
“Ay—to Norlaw,” said the Mistress, ignorant of all this complication of feeling and with a softening in her voice; “Norlaw himself, that’s gane, was near of kin to your mother; your grandfather, auld Melmar, was good to us and ours; my sons are your nearest kinsmen in these parts, and I’m their mother. It’s mair for your honor and credit, and for your mother’s, now when you ken, to be there than here. Come hame with me—you’ll be kindly welcome at Norlaw.”
“And yet,” said Desirée, lifting her tearful eyes, and her face flushed with painful emotion; “and yet but for us, all this fortune would have gone to your son. Why are you kind to me? you ought to hate me.”
“Na!” said the Mistress, with proud love and triumph; “my Huntley is nane the waur—bairn, do you think the like of you could harm my son, that I should hate you? Na! he would work his fingers to the bone, and eat dry bread a’ his days before he would touch the inheritance of the widow—loss of land or loss of gear is no such loss to my Huntley that I should think ill of any person for its sake and you’re my son’s kinswoman, and I’m his mother. Come hame with me till your ain mother is here.”
Without a word Desirée rose, dried her eyes, and held out her little hand to the Mistress, who took it doubtfully.
“I will be your daughter, your servant!” cried the little Frenchwoman, with enthusiasm; “I will come to learn what truth means. Wait but till I tell them. I will stay here no longer—I will do all that you say!”
In another moment she darted out of the room to prepare, afraid to linger. The Mistress looked after her, shaking her head.
“My daughter!” said the Mistress to herself, with a “humph!” after the words—and therewith she thought of Katie Logan; where was Katie now?