Read Ebook: The Story of Valentine and His Brother by Oliphant Mrs Margaret

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"Where did you say it was?" said the stranger, vacantly, paying no regard to this benevolent offer; and she went on with her children, following the old man's directions, without waiting for Mrs Miller's return with the "piece" which she had gone into her house to seek. This of itself was a strange thing to happen with any one so poor and miserable, and impressed the fact of her appearance upon the mind of the smith's wife, mortified by such a tacit refusal of her kindness. "She maun be a foreigner--or a fool," said Merran, standing with the rejected piece in her hand, and watching the retreating figures as they approached Jean Macfarlane's door.

"Jean, you're the greatest randy in the parish!" said one of the men, getting up in time to save himself from the ignominious push aside which sent his companion, reeling, out of the way.

"And if I'm a randy, what are ye? drucken beasts that drink a' night and sit owre the fire a' day? Ca' yourselves men!" cried Jean, with the freedom of perfect independence. "You can sit down here, wife, if this will do ye. Eh, what a handless thing that canna warm her wean's feet, nor even gie't a clat on the side o' the head to make it haud its tongue! Ye're a' alike, a' alike. Tea? Lord preserve us! what does the woman want wi' tea? A wee drap whisky would do ye ten times the good. Will I gie ye what ye want? Oh ay, now you've gotten to your English I'll gie ye what ye want--if ye'll make thae little deevils stop their clatter, and no look sic a draiglet idiot yoursel'."

The men laughed uneasily, not knowing whether they might not divert the stream of Jean's eloquence upon themselves, as she thus rated her other guest; but all took the despotism as a matter of course, and submitted meekly, without anything of the surprise or indignation with which the lodgers of a different kind of hostelry would have regarded such an address. They were her customers, it is true, but at the same time they were her subjects. The new-comer scarcely, indeed, seemed to hear the abuse directed against her. She drew her little boys to the fire, took one on her knee and put her arm round the other, drying their little wet hands and faces with a corner of her shawl. They were subdued into quiet and comfort by the time that Mrs Macfarlane's servant-lass, Jess, brought them their tea, on a battered old iron tray, with coarse brown sugar, and a jug of skim-milk flanking the broken and smoky teapot. People in this poor woman's condition of life are not fastidious, and the miserable beverage warmed and comforted the humble travellers. After some time and much further parley with Jess--who was less peremptory and despotic than her mistress, though she, too, felt herself the superior of so poor a guest--the woman and her children were allowed to go up-stairs into a dingy little bedroom,--a poor exchange for the fireside which, grimy as it was, had the comfort of warmth. Dear reader, your children or mine would have died of such treatment; but the tramp-mother is saved from anxieties which trouble mothers in other circumstances. She did all she could for them, and which of us can do more? She had no dry clothes to put on them, but she was not afraid of taking cold. She put them both on the bed, where they soon fell asleep, and covered them with a blanket;--they were damp but warm, and rest was heavenly to their poor little wearied limbs. They were asleep as soon as their little heads touched the pillow; and then she sat down by the bedside--to think.

I do not believe that a woman ever sullied by vice would have been capable of the moral impression to which this woman had been made subject. I think that the natural consciousness of the vicious, coincides curiously with common law in this respect,--giving, with a bitterness of natural scorn, upon which conventional interpretations throw the aspect of a privilege and advantage, no fatherhood to the vicious man, and but one parent to the child of shame. Purity alone recognises the right on both sides; though law stops short with insolent opposition to nature, and robs the virtuous woman as it robs, justly, the vicious man. How long it was before it dawned upon the woman of whom I speak, in the confusion of her uninstructed thoughts, in the bewildered silence of her ignorant soul, that she had robbed the father of her children in taking both of them, I cannot tell; nor how long in her absolute solitude, with no one to counsel or even to understand what was in her mind, she fought against the idea; but at last it had become too strong for her. To my thinking there could be no such unanswerable argument to prove that she had remained an uncontaminated wife; and now the long-debated question had come to its hardest point, its most limited compass--which was she to give and which to keep, of the two who were all in all to her? Which was she to give away?

Poor soul! she had done much that was very foolish, and much that was wrong in her life. She had been a trouble to many better people than herself. She had spoiled one other existence as well as her own, and thrown a cloud upon several lives--all without knowing much what she was doing,--without meaning it--out of ignorance. Now here she sat, absolute arbitress of two lives more, able to determine their course almost as she pleased, yet as ignorant as ever--as little aware of the real character of her responsibility. If ever woman merited pity, this poor woman did--not only to give up one of her children, but to choose which to give up. Her brain, so dull, yet so keen as it was, became, as it were, suffused with a mist of pain; her head grew giddy, a film came before her eyes; a sense of the intolerable overwhelmed her--that terrible sensation which makes your very being reel like a drunken thing, the sense that you cannot bear that which you know you must bear, whatever happens. She put down her throbbing head into her hands. To keep silent for that terrible moment--not to cry out and writhe, as this sword went through her heart, was all that she could do.

She was a tall young woman, with a fine, elastic, well-developed figure, looking about thirty, but not so old. Her features were very fine and regular: her great, restless, unquiet, dark eyes flashed out of deep caverns, which seemed to have been hollowed out by pain or passion rather than by time. Any delicacy of complexion or youthful bloom which she had ever possessed must have been long gone, for her skin was burned to one uniform tint of reddish brown--the colour of exposure, of health and vigour, but of that vigour and health which are purchased by all the severities of an outdoor life. No one could see her once without looking again, without wondering over so much beauty accompanied by so little attractiveness. She had vagrant written in every line of her fine form and miserable dress; but notwithstanding there was that in her abstract look, always busy with something else than the thing immediately before her--in a certain careless calm of manner, and indifference to all surrounding her, which, I think, would have made the most abandoned of men hesitate ere he offered any rudeness to this strange vagrant. She had a wedding-ring on her finger--that was no great matter, for it is easy to show to the world that ensign of respectability; but there was something more trustworthy in her look and presence, the passionless abstraction of her air. In her rough dress, with her outdoor look, her hard hands, her strange beauty scarcely on the wane, she was protected from every shadow of insult by the stony purity of her looks. Such a woman might be miserable enough, but wanton never.

If any one had spoken to her or touched her, I believe the poor distracted creature would have gone mad or fallen into dead unconsciousness; for nature was strained in her almost to the furthest limit; but no one saw or interfered, or knew what was being done. She never looked at the boy again, but held him fast and hurried on. He was a child of seven years old, but small and light; in her vigorous arms--she was as strong as a man, as light and rapid as a savage--he was as a feather's weight. She went away with him unnoticed, wrapping her poor shawl round him to keep him from the rain, through the muddy roads, in the storm and dusky twilight. Merran Miller, the smith's wife, shutting her door in the darkening, when the rain began to blow in, saw the dark figure pass, and said to herself that Jean Macfarlane had sent the beggar-wife away; and oh! what a night it was to travel in, even for the like of her! "But what's come o' the bairns?" she asked herself; then shut the door, and went in, and stirred her fire, and put on her kettle. The beggar-wife and her bairns were no concern of hers.

"The beggar-wife" went swiftly up by dark Eskside beneath the trees, that waved overhead like spirits in pain. She was blinded with the rain, not with tears, for her eyes were dry and refused to shed more. Her limbs trembled under her, but her wild heart and purpose did not fail. After a time she came back again alone, without her burden. The dark branches still tossed against the pale sky, and kept on their passionate struggle against the elements; but the forlorn human creature who tottered along underneath, swift but unsteady, beaten about by the wind, drenched by the rain, too miserable to feel either, had lost all sense of struggle. The lassitude of soul which comes after a great act accomplished was in her. She went like a ghost across the bridge, where no one now was visible, so much had the storm increased, and up the further end of the village street. Jean Macfarlane was sitting with her guests in the little room down-stairs, drinking with them, and filling the air with her loud excited voice and torrent of words. There was no one in the passage or stair to note the dark figure gliding back to the room which no one had cared to notice since she entered it. It was dark, but she required no light. The other child, he who remained, her only one, lay still as she had left him. She put down her face upon his warm flushed cheek; she lifted him tenderly on her lap, and put on his little boot, and soothed him when he woke and cried in the dark, and clung to her. "Mother's here!--mother's here!" she murmured, crooning to him, poor wretched hopeless soul! with the voice of a dove in her nest. Then she took him too in her arms, and going down-stairs stopped the dirty maid who was Jean Macfarlane's whole staff of service, and paid for the poor refreshment she had had. "You're no going on sic a night?" said the girl; "and whaur's the other wee laddie?" "He has gone on before," said the mother. "We are going to meet the coach at Loanhead." "Then you'll have to be awfu' quick," cried the girl, compassionate. "Poor wee man! what a night to be out in! Here's a piece to give them when you're in the coach; but oh, woman, tak' pity on the bairns, and bide till the morn. It's enough to give them their death."

"I cannot stay--good night," cried the stranger, passing out. The good-natured lass, though she was dirty, looked after her, shaking an unkempt head, and twisting up as she did so an elf-lock which had fallen out of the poor hold of her deficient hair-pins. "Eh, thae tramps, what an awfu' life!" Jess said to herself, comparing her own position with that of the wanderer, with a thrill of superior comfort and well-being. She paused to fasten up the refractory lock before she followed to the door to look out after the departing guest; but by that time the darkness had swallowed her up, and nothing was visible except the wild sweeping rain, which came down in a sheet, visible across the blackness of the night, like the warp of a sable web. "Lord save us! sic a night to be out in! and oh thae puir weans!" cried Jess, with a grimy tear in the corner of her eye.

The stranger and her child got into the coach at Loanhead, but they did not reach Edinburgh in that respectable conveyance. Somewhere in the outskirts of the town they managed to drop out of the coach, leaving the money for their fare on the damp seat, which their wet clothes had soaked. "A queer customer yon, but an awfu' honest woman!" the coachman said, with mingled wonder and admiration. It was still scarcely night, though so much had happened since it began to grow dark. The vagrant found her way to some haunt of vagrants such as I do not know, and have no chance of being able to describe, and there passed the night safe from all search or possibility of pursuit, encompassed by securities and precautions which can only be made perfect by a class at war with society. She herself had done no crime so far as any one knew; but the instinctive suspicion of a race accustomed to shelter from the eye of justice kept her safe. Notwithstanding the hue and cry that was raised after her, she went on her way as secure as any woman could be, and got back to England with her boy, and disappeared among the mysterious fastnesses of her class, not to reappear or be heard of for years. Poor soul! she had left no traces behind her by which she could be recognised. Even in Jean Macfarlane's house the instinct of caste was roused to cover her retreat. "A woman with a wean? Am I to remark a' the women with weans that come and gang afore my door--there's ower mony o' them, far ower mony! I've something better to do than to glowr at women," cried the mistress of the place. "There was but ane here--a real decent person, with twa bairns. She took them baith away with her, safe and sound, and got the coach at Loanhead," said Jess. "What like was she? How am I to tell that never saw her but in her bannet? A' that I can tell you was that she sighed sair, mair like a moan than a sigh. She was a real decent woman," cried good-hearted Jess. And this was all her history and description--all by which she could be identified among others. The prolonged investigations that were made disclosed nothing more.

The hall at Rosscraig was large and long: there was a great fireplace in it, from which came a feeble gleam of firelight. A large lamp, swinging from the raftered roof, threw but a moderate light into its great height and space; but upon a side-table a candle was flaring, its long waving flame blown about by the movement in the air, which had not yet subsided after the opening of the door. A group of servants who had been crowding round some unseen object in the corner dispersed hastily as Lady Eskside was seen descending the stair, but only to hang about behind-backs waiting the interpretation of the mystery. One person only, an old and confidential servant, kept her place near the door, round which there was a wide stain of wet made by the rain, which had burst in when it was opened. Lady Eskside went forward bewildered, not perceiving what it was she had been called to see; and it was not till a sick disappointment had begun to creep over her that the old lady found out the central object on which all eyes were turned. On the great skin mat which lay between the door and the wall stood something so small and dark as to be almost undistinguishable, till the light caught a glimmer and sparkle from a pair of eyes low down, gleaming out of a little pale and scared face. Lady Eskside went slowly forward, bracing herself for something, she knew not what. When she caught the gleam of those eyes, she stood still and uttered a sudden cry.

A child stood there, with its feet buried in the long skin of the mat, backing closely into the corner for support, half frightened, half defiant. Tears were standing in those great eyes, and hanging on the pale little cheek--the lip was ready to quiver at a moment's notice; but still he confronted the novel world in which he found himself with a certain defiance. The old lady, who felt all her dreams and hopes suddenly realised at the first glance, went nearer to him, with tremulous excitement, and stooped down over the child. Her whole frame was trembling--a mist obscured her eyes. "Who are you?--who are you?" she cried. "Oh, who are you?" then stopping short as the frightened look got the mastery on the child's face, and his lip began to quiver, she changed her tone with a wonderful effort, and dropped down upon her knees on the mat to bring herself on a level with him. Lady Eskside saw in the little face more than any one else could see, and knew him, as she said afterwards, at once. "My bonny man!" she cried, "my poor little man, nobody will hurt you. What is your name, and who brought you here? You are safe--quite safe--and nobody will harm you. Who are you, and who brought you here?"

The child made a pause--he was struggling proudly against his inclination to cry; and there was breathless silence in the hall as if some great revelation had been about to be made. Then a small whimpering voice, with tears in it, made itself audible, "I am--Val," it said.

Lady Eskside rose up as if by some force which she could not resist. She turned upon Mary Percival, and the group of servants beyond, with uplifted hands, calling their attention imperatively, though for the moment she could not speak. Then her voice broke forth, choked and hoarse, "Val! Mary, you hear, you hear! Did not I know it? Val! Oh, at last, at last!"

Then in a moment she stilled herself, and knelt down trembling upon the mat. "My bonnie little man!" she said, her voice trembling, "tell me again. Val--Val what? And, oh, who brought you here?"

"Nobody don't call me nothing but Val," said the child. "Mammy brought me. Not for no harm. She's gone back for Dick."

"Ah!" Lady Eskside's breath seemed to stop. She put out one hand behind her, and plucked blindly at Mary Percival's dress, to call her close attention. "Your mammy has gone back--for--Dick?"

"He's down at the village," said the child, keeping his eyes fixed upon her with the watchfulness of terror. "He's asleep. I've got to wait for mammy. She put me in out of the rain. I'll be good till mammy comes. Oh, don't let him touch me! I ain't come for no harm."

Harding the butler had approached nearer, anxious to bring his superior cleverness to his mistress's aid; and it was this movement which made the little fellow back further into his corner, holding up one small arm before his face as if to ward off a blow. A precocious knowledge of danger and a precocious desperation of baby courage glimmered in his frightened but excited eyes. "I won't touch nobody if you'll let me alone!" he cried.

"Stand back, Harding," said Lady Eskside; and then she laid her soft old hand upon the child's raised arm, which yielded to her touch. "Nobody will harm you here, my poor little bonnie man. Oh, look at him! look at him, Mary! Is it my old een that deceive me? Is it from having always one idea in my head? But you are not half-crazy like me. Mary, try to forget the name and everything else. Look at his face!"

Mary Percival stood close behind, as much moved in her way, though with feelings very different from those of her old friend. Instead of the love and yearning in Lady Eskside's heart, there was something which felt like half-hatred--a repugnance for which she detested herself--in the intense interest with which she had watched every look and movement of the little alien creature. Her voice was low and choked as she replied, as if the words were extracted from her, "I am looking at him. He is dark--not fair--like--his father. He has different eyes. Oh, Lady Eskside, what can I say? Everything else is Richard--everything; and I don't wish to think so like you."

I do not believe that Lady Eskside heard these last words, which were foreign to the passionate tenderness and joy in her own mind. She heard only so much as chimed in with her own thoughts. "Mary sees it too," she said, with a low outcry of such emotion as cannot be put into words. She was still on her knees in the attitude of prayer. With one hand she held the child fast, and with the other she covered her face. Some low sounds, but they were not audible words, came from her as she knelt--sounds which no one around heard distinctly, yet all understood by the strange sentiment of mingled anguish and rapture there was in them. Then she rose up, shaken and agitated, yet all her vigorous self.

"Oh, yes, my lady--yes! I see it a'," cried the housekeeper; "but it will be too much for you."

"Joy's never hard to bear," said Lady Eskside, with a smile. "My bonnie boy! come with me--you are not afraid of me?"

The child looked at her with his great eyes, which fright and novelty and the paleness of his little face made twice their usual size. "Richard never had eyes like these," Miss Percival said to herself; but it would have been cruel, indeed, to have said this aloud. He paused a moment irresolute, and then gave a wild glance at the door, as if the impulse of flight was the strongest; then he put his little cold hand, half-reluctantly, into the soft white hand held out for it. The old lady looked round upon them all with a glow of triumph indescribable; how her hand closed upon those little tremulous fingers! She marched to the door of the dining-room, which was nearest, her whole figure expanding like some Roman woman in a victor's procession. What battle had she won? what enemy had she conquered? Mary, full of strange agitation, followed her, wondering, tremulous, excited, but always with a certain repugnance, into the warm room, all ruddy and cheerful with light from the fire.

And then a sudden change, strange to be seen, came upon this old Volumnia, this heroic matron in her triumph. She sat down by the fire, in the great chair where her old lord had been sitting over his wine half an hour before, and gathered up the child into her lap, and turned at once as by the touch of a wand into the old mother, the mere woman, all whose instincts culminated in simple maternity. Perhaps her delicate old hands had never touched anything so muddy and rough before; but she was totally unconscious of this as she set the shivering wet little figure upon her satin lap, and began to unlace and draw off his wet boots. Lady Eskside was a proud woman, fastidious in everything she approached or handled; but she undid the muddy leather laces, and pulled off the dirty little boots, and stained her worn and fine old hands, so delicately white and dainty, without hesitation, even without a thought. She held the child close to her, murmuring over him unconscious sounds of endearment, like a dove in her nest. "My little man! my bonnie little man!--put out your poor wee feetie to the fire--how cold they are, the poor wee pilgrim feet--and how far they've wandered! but this is home, my darling, this is home!--And so they call you Val!--Oh, my bonnie boy, to be out in such a night,--they call you Val? and your brother is Dick--oh, may God keep my heart that I may not die of joy!"

The child sat on her knee with all the gravity of his age, and heard everything, but made no response. I think the weariness and the unusual comfort began alike to tell upon him; the cheerful light dazzled his eyes, the warmth crept into his baby limbs, and even the excitement and strange novelty of his position were not enough at seven years old to counteract these subduing influences. By-and-by his little eyes began to wink as he gazed into the fire and felt the drowsy spell of the genial warmth. When Joseph brought the tray, he took the piece of cake which was put into his hand, and ate it slowly, gazing and winking at the fire. Then his head began to droop against Lady Eskside's breast. With an effort he opened his eyes at intervals, fixing them severely as if they could never close again, upon the fire, then gradually subdued by the warmth shut them altogether, and half turning towards her, nestled his head upon the old lady's shoulder. As his curls fell finally into this resting place, Lady Eskside turned to Mary with an unspeakable look: "He knows them that belong to him," she said in a whisper. Her arms encircled him with that delight of protecting maternity which goes through all the levels of creation. It was but the hen gathering her chickens under her wing--yet God himself can find no tenderer simile. All expression, save that last supreme beatitude which borders upon vacuity, went out of her face. She forgot everything around her--the past, the future, her duties of the present. Everything in the world had become suddenly concentrated to her in this action, which was no more elevated than that of a bird in her nest, this watch which secured warmth, slumber, and safety to the child.

Miss Percival sat on the other side of the great dining-table and gazed at her old friend with that mixture of irritation, wonder, and reluctant sympathy which provokes and tantalises a friendly soul when watching some novel exhibition of human weakness. She could not understand Lady Eskside's instant adoption into her very heart of the strange little unknown creature, dropped from the skies or by the winds, unseen and unknown until this moment, and which might be a little demon in human form for aught that any one knew. And yet she did understand in a way which made her irritation rather greater than less. Mary was not very clever, not very remarkable in any way; but she was herself--thinking and feeling according to her own nature and principles, and not according to any conventional model. She did not possess that sugary sweetness of disposition, or those very etherial Christian sentiments which put aside all personal consciousness of wrong and seem to prefer injury. Richard Ross had been, if not her lover, at least so indicated by every family prepossession, so prepared by training and association to be her eventual husband, that his sudden and strange marriage had given a shock to her nerves and moral nature from which she had never recovered. I cannot tell if she had ever been what people call "in love" with him. If she had, her love had never taken full shape and form, but had lingered insidiously about her heart, prepared, by every indication of her young life, and every probability of the future, to come into being at a touch. This touch was given in another way when Richard disappeared into the nameless obscurity and shame that surrounded his marriage. Her whole being received the shock, and received it without warning or preparation. It changed the aspect of all mankind to her, more perhaps than it changed her feeling towards Richard. He it was who had inflicted the wound, but its effects were not confined to him. She was the gentlest creature in existence, but her pride was roused against the whole world, in which outward appearances seem ever to gain the day, and the still and unpretending are held of no account.

Instead, however, of making the more of the simple beauty she possessed, which was of a very attractive kind, though moderate in degree, or taking the good of her real advantages, Mary had done what many proud gentlewomen do--she had retired doubly into herself after the shock she received. She had withdrawn from society, and society, heedless, had gone on its way and paid little attention to the withdrawal: so that the penalties fell not at all upon it, but upon herself. She was still young, between six and seven and twenty; but something of the aspect which that same mocking and careless world calls that of an old maid, was stealing imperceptibly upon her. Her pride, though so natural, thus told doubly against her--for people who were incapable of understanding the shock she had received, or the revulsion of her proud and delicate heart, called her, with light laughter, a disappointed woman, foiled in her attempt to secure a husband. Many of us who ought to know much better use such words in thoughtless levity every day. I need not enter into the circumstances which, on this night of all others, had brought Mary to Rosscraig, and recalled to her mind, through Lady Eskside's story, many sharp and painful memories which she had partially succeeded in banishing from her thoughts. I do not think that this rush of recollection had the effect of moving her to any enthusiasm for Richard's child. The strange bitterness of scorn with which she learned what kind of woman that was who had been preferred to herself, moved not the best part of her nature; for Mary, as I have said, was not sweetness and gentleness personified, but a genuine human creature, not all good. Perhaps the very strength of her antagonistic feelings, and the absence of any general maudlin sympathy with everything pitiful presented to her, made her all the more certain that the child was Richard's child, the child of the tramp whom Richard had admired and loved more than herself; an interest which was half repugnance attracted her eyes and her thoughts to this little creature, who was assuredly no stranger, no impostor, but the very flesh and blood which might have been her own. Yes, he might have been her child--and the blood ran tingling with shame, anger, pride, and dislike to Mary's very finger-tips, as this thought flashed through her mind. She sat and watched him, falling asleep on Lady Eskside's knee, with the strangest aching mixture of irritation and interest. She was half envious, half impatient of the strange beatitude and absorption with which her old friend held the boy, throwing her own very being into him--the child who had been stolen away from all lawful life and protection, who had lived among outcasts, a beggar, a baby-adventurer, the child of a tramp! How could that proud old woman take him out of hands so stained, and take him to her pure and honourable breast? Poor Mary was not quite responsible for the hot anger, the unjust condemnation of this thought; these angry feelings surged uppermost, as the worst of us always does, to the surface of her agitated soul.

The lamp had been placed in a corner, so as not to disturb the child's sleep, and the room formed a dark background to that group, which was relieved against the dusky glow of the fire. Silence was in the house, sometimes interrupted by a stealthy suggestive creaking of the great door, as Mrs Harding from time to time looked out into the night. The winds still raged without, and the rain swept against the window, filling the air with a continuous sound. Soon that stealthy noise outside, which betrayed the watchers who were on the outlook for the mother's return with the other child, affected Mary with a sympathetic suspense. Her imagination rushed out to meet the stranger, to realise her appearance. Richard's wife! She could not sit still and think of this new figure on the scene. If the woman came Mary felt that she must withdraw; she would not meet her--she could not! and this feeling made her eagerly anxious for the appearance of the stranger who excited such wild yet causeless antagonism in her own mind. She went to the window, and drew aside the curtain and gazed out--that she might see her approach, she said to herself, and escape out of the way.

Thus time went on; Lady Eskside, worn out with emotion, and hushed by happiness, dozed too, I think, in the easy-chair with the sleeping child on her lap, while Miss Percival stood, with every sense awake, watching the dark avenue through the window. And I do not know how long it was before, all at once, another conviction took possession of Mary--which was the true one--that Richard's wife had no intention of coming back. This thought came to her in a moment, as if some one had said it in her ear. Had some one said it? Was it a mysterious communication made to her somehow, from one soul to another through the darkness of that night which hid the speaker, which had fallen upon the child's mother like a veil? Miss Percival sank, almost fell, down upon the chair, on which she had been kneeling in her eagerness to look out. She was startled and shaken, yet calmed, with sensations incomprehensible to her. She sat still and listened, but without any further expectation. A strange dim realisation of the unknown creature of whom she had been thinking hard thoughts came into her mind. Was she too, then, an independent being, with a heart which could be wrung, and a mind capable of suffering?--not merely Mary's rival, Mary's antagonist, a type of lower nature and coarser impulse. The wind abated, the rain cleared off, the silent minutes crept on, but no one came to the house where all except the old lord were listening and watching. Mary, roused at length, stirred up in all her own energies by this conviction, felt that doubt was no longer possible. The unknown mother had given this remorseful tribute to the house she had despoiled, but had kept her share and would appear no more.

"Dear Lady Eskside," she said, laying her hand on her old friend's shoulder, "don't you think it would be better to let Mrs Harding put him to bed?"

"Eh? Is it you, Mary? What were you saying? I do not feel sure," said Lady Eskside, looking up with a smile, "that I was not dozing myself upon the bairn's head. Put him to his bed? it would perhaps be the best thing, as you say; but I cannot give him over to Harding, I will carry him up-stairs myself."

"She has not come. She does not mean to come," said Mary; but she spoke low, and Lady Eskside did not mark what she said. Her own mind was filled to overflowing with her new possession, and no real anxiety about the other one or about the mother existed for the moment in her mind. "Jean, take this darling in your arms--softly, softly," she said to the maid. "You are a strong, good girl, and you will carry him kindly. Don't waken my bonnie boy. I'll go with you up-stairs and see him put to bed."

And, absorbed in this new occupation, she hurried up-stairs after Jean, giving a hundred warnings--to lay his head comfortably--to hold him faster--to throw her apron about his little feet--like a foolish old mother, half beside herself with love and happiness. She could think of nothing but the lost treasure restored; and I might spend pages on the description before I could tell you with what renewal of all old and dead joys she watched the maid's anxious but vain attempts to prepare the child for bed without awaking him, and to soothe him when he stirred and pushed them away with his rosy feet, and murmured whimpering childish objections to everything that was being done for him. In this unlooked-for fulness of joy, she forgot everything else in the world.

Lord Eskside was a homely representative of Scotch aristocracy. He was as proud as Lucifer in his own way, but that way was quaint and unsuspected by strangers; and his outward appearance and manners, and the principles he professed, were even humorously homely and almost democratical. Pretension of any kind moved him to an exaggeration of this natural homeliness; though when his dignity was really touched nobody could be more decided in his treatment of the vulgar, whom on ordinary occasions he seemed to incline towards, and to whom, so long as they made no fictitious claims to importance, he was whimsically friendly and indulgent. He had many other paradoxical sentiments about him. Being a high Tory by tradition and birth, it happened to him now and then to take up a trenchant Radical theory, which he clung to with the obstinacy of his race, and would carry out in the most uncompromising manner. He was keenly intelligent when he chose; but when he did not choose, no lout in the village could be more thickheaded than the old lord, nor show greater need to have everything "summered and wintered" to him, as Lady Eskside often impatiently said. He had strong feelings, but they lay very deep, and were seldom exhibited to the common eye, his own consciousness of their existence showing itself chiefly in a testy determination to avoid all means of moving them, which gave many ignorant persons the impression that our old lord was an ill-tempered man. He was impatient, I allow, and resented all long and slow explanations, except when it happened to be his caprice to put on the air of requiring them; and many people were afraid of his sharp retorts and ruthless questions. He was a little man, with keen hazel eyes gleaming out from under overhanging eyebrows, which often gathered into seeming frowns; not a man with whom, you may be sure, sentimental considerations would weigh much--or at least who would permit it to be seen how much they weighed.

He was very much startled when he heard what had happened--so much startled that he received the tale in comparative silence, half stupefied by the strange incident; and allowed himself to be led by his wife to the side of the bed where the child slept profoundly, almost without a word of remark. He stood and gazed at it, his keen eyes twinkling from beneath their heavy eyebrows, and his under lip working, as it habitually did when he was moved by any feeling which he did not choose to show. But he uttered nothing more than an unintelligible "humph!" and instead of sympathising with Lady Eskside's excitement, her tearful enthusiasm, and the tumult of agitation in which she was, turned away almost without response, and went off to his study, where he had been painfully busy with calculations and cogitations over the 'Journal of Agriculture;' for he was a great farmer, and just then deeply occupied with the question of manures, a study of thrilling and delicate interest. He tried to resume these studies, but for this his philosophy did not suffice. He sat down, however, by his table as before, and with his periodical open before him--working his under lip, which projected slightly, and bending his brows--gave his mind to this new problem, which was more astounding than anything in agriculture. After a while he rose and rang the bell. It was answered by Harding, the English butler, who had been in Lord Eskside's service for thirty years, and knew all about the family as an old servant knows--that is, rather more than there is to know. The fact, however, that Harding was English, gave a certain peculiarity to the connection between himself and his old master, who was equally ready to hold him up to admiration as "a good solid Englishman, not troubling himself about whimsies," or to denounce him as "a doited English body, never understanding the one-half of what you said to him." Lord Eskside had a mingled trust in Harding and contempt for him, which I do not think he could have entertained for a countryman of his own.

"Harding," he said, "come in and shut the door. I suppose you know all that's happened in the house to-night. You should have called me. Haven't I always told you to call me when anything out of the way occurred?"

"That will do," said Lord Eskside; "you needn't recriminate. The thing I want to know is about this child. How did it come? who brought it? My lady has told me something, but I want your account. Now take your time, and begin at the beginning. Who brought the boy here?"

"Never mind the storm," said Lord Eskside, with an effort of patience, "think a little.--When did this occur. Fix upon the hour. Now--that's something definite. We'll get on from that."

"Lordsake, man, never mind your thoughts or your Mrs Hardings! get on."

"There are to be no bells that ever I heard of at the day of judgment," said his master; "leave metaphors, man, and give me facts--that's all I want."

"Send for your wife," growled Lord Eskside, who had rung the bell violently, and now stood impatient on the hearth with his back to the fire, working his projecting lip and shaggy eyebrows. This was so very common an interruption of the more important interviews between master and man, that Mrs Harding came without further call, not sorry of the opportunity of getting rid of a little of her own excitement, and very anxious to know, in a matter of so much moment, "what my lord would say."

"Look here," said her master. "What did he see? Not a word can I get out of him but havers. What did the man see? I suppose you were there too, like all the rest of the house--like everybody, in short, except myself. What did he see?"

"He saw naething, my lord, that I can make out," said the housekeeper; "just the door dung open in his face with the wind and a good push from the outside. It's been a wild night, and the sounds of the storm were awfu' confusing even to the like of me. So far as I can discover, there was just something thrown inside, and a blast of weet, and the big door snatched out of his hand and clashed to, and all in a moment before he could say a word. That's a' that I can make out. I was in the servants' passage myself listening and wondering, and a' in a tremble with the thoughts of visitors or waur. He didna say a word but gaed a kind of skreigh, and I kent something had happened. When I ran into the hall, and a' the women after me--for ye ken the story of the Eskside warning, my lord, as well as me--there was the wean standing up in the corner against the wa'; and him there glow'ring at it, as if the bonnie bit laddie was a ghaist."

"And that's all?"

"It was a woman wrapped in a cloak," said Harding, somewhat sullenly--"I was coming to that; a tall figure of a woman, not like nobody I know--a sort of a beggar--a tramp."

"Would you know her again, if you saw her?" asked Lord Eskside.

"And said nothing--you are sure she said nothing?"

"Not a word, my lord. I called out to her, Hollo! 'old 'ard!" said Harding; "but she didn't pay no attention. She took hold of the door, and dragged it out of my hand. It's true as I was taken by surprise and didn't put out my strength."

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