Playing With Fire

"I should go with you, of course."

"That stands to reason."

"How do you know, Aunt? I mean, about Lady Cramer?"

"I had a sure word. I do not doubt it."

"Did my father tell you?"

"No. It is a new thing yet; only a mustard seed now, but it will grow to a great tree. It might have happened yesterday."

"Longer ago than that, Aunt, at least on Lady Cramer's side. When I was staying at the Hall she was cross because he did not come, and she wanted to send for him, but Richard would not let her."

"Why then?"

"Because he said the company they had would be an offense to the Minister, and the Minister would be unwelcome to the other guests. I must write and tell Richard your suspicion. It may affect his prospects."

"No doubt it will, but, if he could marry you at once, it might prevent the other marriage."

"I see not how nor why."

Then Mrs. Caird went pitilessly over the sensation the double marriage would make not only socially, but in the Church of the Disciples. She put into the mouths of its elders, deacons and members the foolish jibes and jokes they would be sure to make. The riddling and laughter and comedy sure to flow from the situation were vividly present to her own imagination, and she spared Marion none of the scorn and indignation they would evoke.

"Just think, Marion," she continued, "of your father having to thole all this vulgar tomfoolery – he, that never sees a flash of humor, however broad and plain it may be. Some men would just laugh, and let the jokes go by, but not so your father. They would be words in earnest to him, and every word would be a whip lash. He would fret and fume and worry himself into a brain fever, or he would fall into one of his miraculous passions with some laughing fool, and there would be tragedy and ruin to follow."

Marion did not speak, but she was white as the white dress she wore. Mrs. Caird looked at her and was not quite pleased with her attitude. She had expected tears or anger, and Marion gave way to neither, but her silence and pallor and a certain proud erectness of her figure spoke for her. At this hour she was startlingly like her father. She had put herself completely in his place, and was moved just as he would have been by her aunt's scornful picture of the Church of the Disciples in a jocular insurrection. So she looked like him. Quick as thought and feeling, the soul had photographed on the plastic body the very presentment of Ian Macrae. Her erect figure, her haughty manner, her scornful and indignant expression, and her large dark eyes, full of reproach, but quite tearless, were exactly the symptoms which he would have manifested if subjected to a like recital. For it is the expression of the human face, rather than its features, which makes its identity. The face enshrined in our hearts, which comes to us in dreams, when it has long moldered in the grave, is not the mechanical countenance of the loved one – it is its abstract idealization, its essence and life – it is the spirit of the face.

Mrs. Caird was astonished. It was a Marion she did not expect, but after a few moments' silence she said, "You can see your father's position, child?"

"Yes, I can see it and feel it, too. He would be distracted with the gossip and the disgrace of it."

"Well, then?"

"I must prevent it."

"Would you marry Allan Reid?"

"No."

"What will you do?"

"Stand by my father whatever befall, if he will let me."

"And Lord Cramer?"

"We can wait."

"But if you married at once, the onus of such a condition as I have pointed out would be on your father, and he would not face it for any living woman. That stands to reason."

"It is nineteen years since my mother died. He has given all those years to Donald and myself. He gave us you for a mother, but he never gave us a stepmother. He was good to us in that respect, and, though we may not have known it, he may have had many temptations to alter his life and he denied himself a wife for our sakes. I must stand by my father. If he wishes to marry Lady Cramer, I will only express satisfaction in his choice."

"But if he insists on your marrying Allan Reid first?"

"That I will not do. His hopes and desires are sacred to me. I shall expect him to give to mine the same regard. I am sure he will do so. Why do you not point out to him the results you have just made so plain to me?"

"Not I! I shall wash my hands of the whole affair. I wonder what kind of mortals you Macraes are! I was trying to prepare some plain road for you and your lover, and the thought of your father steps in between you and you make him a curtsey, and say, 'Your will be it, Father.'"

"Aunt, for a thousand years the father and the chief in my family have been one. He has had the affection and the loyalty due to both relations. My father is still to me the Macrae, and I owe him and give him the first and best homage of my heart."

"Goodness! Gracious! I am very sorry, Miss Macrae, I have presumed to meddle in your affairs. I am only a poor Lowland Scot, ignorant of your famous clansmen. I have seen some of them, of course, in the Glasgow and Edinburgh barracks, but we called them 'kilties,' just plain kilties! Good soldiers, I believe, but – "

"Dear Aunt, you are making yourself angry for nothing at all. If you think over what I have said, you will allow I am right."

"I have something else to think over now, and I'll meddle no more with other people's love affairs. There now – go away and let me alone – I want no kissing and fleeching. You have cast me clean off – after nineteen years – " and the rest of her complaint was lost in passionate sobs and tears.

Then Marion was on her knees, crying with her, and the upcome and outcome was kisses and fond words and forgiveness. But do we forgive? We agree to put aside the fault and forget it; the real thing is, we agree to forget.

After this common family rite Mrs. Caird washed her face and went down to look after dinner, and as she did so she felt a little hardly toward Marion, and her thoughts were grieving and reminiscent. "Oh, the sleepless nights and anxious days I have spent for that dear lassie!" she sighed; "and, now she is a woman, her lover and her father fill her heart. I am just a nobody. Well, thank the Father of all, I gave my love freely. I did not sell it, I gave it, and the gift is my reward. It is more blessed to give than to receive."

Marion, at her sewing, had thoughts not much more satisfactory. "Aunt makes so much of things," she said to herself. "She is so romantic and simple-minded, and she goes over the score on both sides; everything is the very worst or the very best. I wish she would not talk so much about Richard, and be always planning this and that for us. Oh, I ought to be ashamed of such thoughts, and I am ashamed! Aunt Jessy has been my mother, God bless her!" She had a few moments of repentant reflection and resolutions, and then she continued them in a different way, saying almost audibly: "My father! Oh, Aunt knows my father is different. His blood flows through my heart. I am his child from head to feet. Aunt has often told me so. She ought, then, to know I would stand by my father, whomever he married."

They had forgiven each other – but had they forgotten?

CHAPTER V

THE MINISTER IN LOVE

"The sun and the bees,
And the face of her love through the green,
The shades of the trees,
And the poppy heads glowing between:
His heart asked no more,
'Twas full as the hawthorn in May,
And Life lay before,
As the hours of a long summer day."

For a week there was no change in the usual course and tenor of life at the Little House. Dr. Macrae read or wrote all morning, and after his lunch he dressed with care and rode over to the Hall, took a late dinner with Lady Cramer, and returned home about ten o'clock. He usually took a manuscript with him, and often spoke of reading it to Lady Cramer. Sometimes, also, he alluded to other company who were present, most frequently to the elderly Earl Travers, whom he described as an ultramontane Presbyterian. "He sits in a Free Church," he would say, with a slight tone of anger, "but his place is in one of the churches yet subject to Cæsar, not in a Free Church, which is a Law unto itself; its title deeds being only in the Registry above." Marion was proud of his enthusiasm, but Mrs. Caird told herself, privately, that Earl Travers had no doubt stimulated its character. For it was evident he disliked Travers on grounds more personal than the government of the Church.

Travers had been a close friend of the late Lord Cramer, and he took his place quietly but authoritatively at the side of his widow; indeed it appeared to Dr. Macrae that, on the very first night he met him at the Hall, Lady Cramer referred questions to the Earl that might have been left to his judgment. Even then, Dr. Macrae had an incipient jealousy of the Earl, who had just returned from a twelve months' cruise, rich in charming anecdotes of entertaining persons and events.

Really, Travers was much interested by the Minister and, hearing that he was going to preach in Cramer Church on the following Sabbath, he made an engagement at once with Lady Cramer to go with her to the service. She was delighted with the proposal and, with an intimate look at Dr. Macrae and a private handclasp as she passed him, vowed it would be the greatest pleasure the Earl could offer her. "I have always longed," she continued, "to hear one of those famous sermons that are said to thrill the largest congregations in Glasgow."

Certainly Dr. Macrae was flattered and much pleased. He had no fear of falling below any standard set up for him, yet he kept closely to himself all the previous Saturday, for he was gathering together his personality, so largely diffused by his late happiness, and flooding the sermon he was to deliver with streams of his own feeling and intellect. And, oh, how good he felt this exercise to be! For some hours he rose like a tower far above the restless sea of his passions. He put every doubt under his feet, he made himself forget he ever had a doubt.

The next morning was in itself sacramental, a Sabbath morning filled the soul with peace, and everywhere there was a sense of rest. Even the cart horses knew it was Sunday, and were standing at the field gates, idle and happy. In the pale sunlight the moor stretched away to the mountains, and silent and serious little groups of people were crossing it from every side, but all making for one point – Cramer Church.

"so cool, so calm, so bright;
The bridal of the earth and sky,"