Girlhood and Womanhood<br />The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes, Sarah Tytler [books for men to read TXT] 📗

with fair result. Tenant and servant, hanger-on and sprig of the central tree, bore regard as well as fear for the young laird—all save Staneholme's whilom love and wedded wife.

Nelly did not wish to understand this repressed, ardent nature, although its developments sometimes forced themselves upon her. She had heard Staneholme hound on a refractory tyke till he shouted himself hoarse, and yet turn aside before the badger was unearthed; she had seen him climb the scaurs, and hang dizzily in mid-air over the black water, to secure the wildfowl he had shot, and it was but carrion; and once, Joan and Madge, to whom he was wont to be indulgent in a condescending, superior way, trembled before the stamp of his foot and the kindling flash of his eye. Some affair abroad had disturbed him and he came into the hall, when his sisters' voices were raised giddily as they played off an idle, ill-thought-of jest on grave, cold Nelly. "Queans and fools," he termed them, and bade them "end their steer" so harshly, that the free, thoughtful girls did not think of pouting or crying, but shrank back in affright. Nelly Carnegie, whom he had humbled to the dust, was below his anger.

When the grey mansion of Staneholme basked in the autumn sun, an auspicious event gladdened its chambers. Joan was matched with a gay, gallant young cousin from Teviotdale, and from the commencement of the short wooing to the indefatigable dance which the young bride herself led off right willingly, all was celebrated with smiles and blessings, and harvest-home fulness of joy and grati[Page 188]tude. But a dark shadow moved among the merrymakers. A young heart robbed of its rights, like an upbraiding ghost, regarded the simple, loving, trusting pair, and compared their consecrated vows with the mockery of a rite into which it had been driven.

The only change time brought to Nelly, was the progress of an unacknowledged bond between her and good old Lady Staneholme. The obstacle to any interchange of ideas and positive confidence between them, was the inducement to the tacit companionship adopted by the sick, wayward heart, with its malady of wrong and grief. Influenced by an instinctive, inexplicable attraction, Nelly's uncertain footsteps followed Lady Staneholme, and kept pace with her soft tread, when she overlooked her spinners and knitters, gave out her linen and spices, turned over her herbs, and visited her sick and aged. There they were seen—the smiling, deaf old lady, fair in her wrinkles, and her mute, dark, sad daughter whom in patient ignorance she folded in her mantle of universal charity.

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VI.—THE LAIRD CONSCIENCE-SMITTEN.

Under a pale February sun Nelly was out on the sea-braes, where the sprays of the briar-roses were swept in circles, streaming far and wide. She lingered in the hollow, and strayed to the utmost limit of her path. As she was returning, her eye fell on the folds of an object fluttering among the tedded grass. It was Staneholme's plaid. This was the first time he had intruded upon her solitary refuge. When Nelly climbed the ascent, and saw the [Page 189]mansion house, with its encumbered court, she could distinguish the sharp sound of a horse's hoof. Its rider was already out of sight on the bridle-road. Michael Armstrong, the laird's man, was mounting his own nag; Wat Pringle, the grieve, and other farm folk, stood looking after the vanished traveller; Liddel, the Tweedside retriever, paced discontentedly up and down; and old Lady Staneholme met her on the threshold, and as on the night of her arrival at Staneholme, led her up the staircase and into her sleeping-chamber. Nelly marked, with dim dread, the tear-stains on the pallid cheeks of placid age, and the trembling of the feeble hand that guided her. She had nothing to fear; but what was the news for which there was such solemn preparation?

"My puir bairn," Lady Staneholme began brokenly, "I've had an interview with my son, and I've learnt, late, some passages in the past; and I wonder not, but I maun lament, for I am a widow mother, Nelly, and my only son Adam who did you wrong and showed you no pity, has got his orders to serve with the soldiers in the Low Countries. He has not stayed to think; he has left without one farewell: he is off and away, to wash out the sins of him and his in his young blood. I will never see his face more: but you are a free woman; and, as the last duty he will receive at your hand, he bids you read his words."

Nelly's hand closed tightly over its enclosure. "Who says I told he did me wrang?" she said, proudly, her dilated eyes lifted up to the deprecating ones that did not avoid her gaze.

"Na, na, ye never stoopit to blame him. Weary fa' [Page 190]him! Nelly Carnegie," ejaculated honest Lady Staneholme, "although he is my ain that made you his, sair, sair against your woman's will, and so binged up blacker guilt at his doorstane, as if the lightest heritage o' sin werena' hard to step ower. But, God forgive me! It's old Staneholme risen up to enter afresh upon his straits, and may He send him pardon and peace in His ain time."

"Nelly" (Staneholme's letter said),—"for my Nelly you'll never be, though the law has given me body and estate,—what garred me love you like life or death? I've seen bonnier, and you're no so good as my mother, or you would have forgiven me long syne. Why did you laugh, and mock, and scorn me, when I first made up to you among your fine Edinburgh folks? Had you turned your shoulder upon me with still steadfastness, I might have been driven to the wall—I would have believed you. When you said that you would lie in the grave sooner than in my arms, you roused the evil temper within me; and though I had mounted the Grassmarket, I swore I would make you my wife. What call or title had you, a young lass, to thwart your lady mother and the Laird of Staneholme? And when I had gone thus far—oh! Nelly, pity me—there was no room to repent or turn back. I dared not leave you to dree alane your mother's wrath: there was less risk in your wild heart beating itself to death against the other, that would have gladly shed its last drop for its captive's sake. But Heaven punished me. I found, Nelly, that the hand that had dealt the blow could not heal it. How could I approach you with soft words, that had good right to shed tears of blood for [Page 191]my deeds? So, as I cannot put my hand on my breast and die like my father, I'll quit my moors and haughs and my country; I'll cross the sea and bear the musquetoon, and never return—in part to atone to you, for you sall have the choice to rule with my mother in the routh and goodwill of Staneholme, or to take the fee for the dowager lands of Eweford, and dwell in state in the centre of the stone and lime, and reek, and lords and ladies of Edinburgh; in part because I can hold out no longer, nor bide another day in Tantalus, which is the book name for an ill place of fruitless longing and blighted hope. I'll no be near you in your danger, because when other wives cry for the strong, grieved faces of their gudemen, you will ban the day your een first fell upon me. Nelly Carnegie, why did my love bring no return; no ae sweet kiss; never yet a kind blink of your brown een, that ance looked at me in gay defiance, and now heavily and darkly, till they close on this world?"

Something more Staneholme raved of this undeserved, unwon love, whose possession had become an exaggerated good which he had continued to crave without word or sign, with a boy's frenzy and a man's stanchness. Nelly lost her power of will: she sat with the paper in her hand as if she had ceased to comprehend its contents—as if its release from bondage came too late.

"Dinna ye ken, Nelly woman, his presence will vex you no longer? you're at liberty to go your own gate, and be as you have been—that was his propine," whispered Lady Staneholme, in sorrowful perplexity, but without rousing Nelly from her stupor. They lifted her on her bed, [Page 192]and watched her until her trial took hold of her. No stand did Nelly make against pain and anguish. She was sinking fast into that dreamless sleep where the weary are at rest, when Lady Staneholme stood by her bed and laid an heir by her side, bidding her rejoice, in tones that fell off into a faint quivering sob of tenderness and woe; but Nelly's crushed, stunned heart had still some hidden spring among its withered verdure, and her Benoni called her back from the land of forgetfulness.

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VII.—BLESSING AND AFFLICTION—ADAM HOME'S RETURN.

Nelly recovered, at first slowly but cheeringly, latterly with a doubt and apprehension creeping over her brightening prospect—until, all too certainly and hopelessly, her noon, that had been disturbed with thunder-claps and dashing rain, was shrouded in grey twilight.

Nelly would live, but her limbs would never more obey her active spirit, for she had been attacked by a relentless malady. The little feet that had slid in courtly measure, and twinkled in blithe strathspeys, and wandered restlessly over moor and brae, were stretched out in leaden helplessness. When she was young, she "had girded herself and gone whither she would;" but now, ere she was old, while there was not one silver thread in those chestnut locks, "another would gird her and carry her whither she would not." And oh! to think how the young mother's heart, ready to bud and bloom anew, was doomed to drag out a protracted existence, linked to the corpse-like frame [Page 193]of threescore and ten, until the angel of death freed it from its tabernacle of clay.

Nelly never spoke of her affliction—never parted from her baby. Travelling with difficulty, she removed to Edinburgh, to the aspiring tenement in the busy Canongate, which she had quitted in her distraction. Lady Carnegie, in her rustling silk and with her clicking ivory shuttle, received her into her little household, but did not care to conceal that she did so on account of the aliment Staneholme had secured to his forsaken wife and heir. She did not endure the occasional sight of her daughter's infirmities without beshrewing them, as a reflection on her own dignity. She even sneered and scoffed at them, until Nanny Swinton began to fear that the judgment of God might strike her lady—a venerable grandame still without one weakness of bodily decay or human affection.

And did Nelly fret and moan over the invalid condition for which there was neither palliation nor remedy? Nay, a blessing upon her at last; she began to witness a good testimony to the original mettle and bravery of her nature. She accepted the tangible evil direct from God's hand, sighingly, submissively, and with a noble meekness of resignation. She rose above her hapless lot—the old Nelly Carnegie, though subdued and chastened, was in a degree restored.

"Nanny! Nanny Swinton!" called Nelly from her couch, as she managed to hold up, almost exultingly, the big crowing baby, in its quaintest of mantles and caps, "Staneholme's son's a braw bairn, well worthy Lady Carnegie's coral and bells."

[Page 194]"'Deed is he," Nanny assented. "He'll grow up a stately man like his grandsire;" and recurring naturally to forbidden memories, she went on: "He'll be the marrow of Master Hugh. Ye dinna mind Master Hugh, Lady Staneholme?—the picture o' auld Lady Carnegie. That I sud call her auld!"

Nelly's brow contracted with something of its old indignation. "There's never a look of the Carnegies in my son; he has his father's brow and lip and hair, and you're but a gowk, Nanny Swinton!" and Nelly lay back and closed her eyes, and after a season opened them again, to tell Nanny Swinton that "she had been dreaming of a strange foreign city, full of pictures and carved woodwork, and of a high-road traversing a rich plain, shaded by apple and chestnut trees, and of something winding and glittering through the branches," leaving Nanny, who could not stand the sight of two magpies, or of a cuckoo, of a morning before she had broken her fast, sorely troubled to account for the vision.

The gloaming of a night in June was on the Canongate and the silent palace of the gallant, gentle King James. Lady Carnegie was gracing some rout or drum; Nanny