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Merkland: or, Self Sacrifice

Год написания книги
2017
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Jacky’s first impulse was to turn her back on Schole, and flee without a moment’s delay to Oranside. She recollected herself, however; she only sat down on the mossy garden-path, and indulged in a fit of joyous crying – pride, and exultation, and affection, all contributing their part. “For I kent,” said Jacky to herself, tremulously, when Anne was gone, “I aye kent she was like somebody – a’ but the e’en – and it would be her mother’s e’en!”

But Jacky recollected her charge – recollected the solemn tenant who lay within those walls, and became graver. Marget was sitting in the kitchen when she entered, refreshing herself with a cup of tea. Their salutations were laconic enough.

“Is that you, lass?” said Marget.

“Yes, it’s me,” said Jacky. “Miss Anne said I was to come in and stay; and she’ll be back soon hersel.”

“And wha’s Miss Anne that’s taking sae muckle fash wi’ this puir afflicted family?” said Marget. “Are ye ony friend to us, lassie? or what gars your mistress and you come into our house, this gate?”

“Miss Anne says Miss Lillie is a friend. I think it’s maybe by ither friends being married, but I dinna ken – only that they’re connected – Miss Anne said that.”

“And what do they ca’ ye?” continued Marget.

“They ca’ me Jacobina Morison – I was christened that after my uncle – but I aye get Jacky at hame; and they ca’ Miss Anne, Miss Ross, of Merkland.”

“She’ll be frae the north country,” said Marget. “I never heard o’ ony Norland freends Miss Kirstin had. Onyway it maun be for love ony fremd person taks heed o’ us – for it canna be for siller. They’re a strange family. Ye see the breath was scarce out o’ Maister Patrick, puir lamb – he was liker a bairn, than a man of years at ony time – when Miss Kirstin she gaed away. I saw your leddy seeking her – whaur she’s gane, guid kens.”

“Did she ever do that before?” asked Jacky.

“Eh, bless me, no: she was aye ower feared about him, puir man, wha has won out o’ a’ trouble this night. Maybe ye wad like to see him? He’s a bonnie – ”

Jacky interrupted her hurriedly. In that imaginative, solemn awe of hers, she could not endure the ghastly admiration which one hears so often expressed by persons of Marget’s class for the dead, about whom they have been employed.

“Ye’ll be wearied?” said Jacky, hastily.

“Ay, lass, I’m wearied: it’s no like I could be onything else wi’ a’ that I have to do – and that sair hoast, and the constant fecht I hae wi’ my breath – it’s little the like o’ you ken – forbye being my lane in the house. If ye’ll just bide and look to the door, I’ll gang an get some o’ the neighbor wives to come in beside me: there’s nae saying when Miss Kirstin may be hame.”

“Miss Anne’s coming hersel,” said Jacky, eagerly. “And if ye would lie down and get some rest, I’ll do the work – and I’m no feared to be my lane – and if ye had a guid sleep, ye would be the better o’t.”

“I’ll no’ say but what I would,” said Marget, graciously; “and ye’re a considerate lass to think o’t. Tak a cup o’ tea – it’s no right to gang out in the morning fasting – and I daresay I’ll just tak your counsel. It doesna do for an auld body like me to be out o’ my bed a’ night.”

So Jacky got Marget disposed of, and remained with much awe, and some shadow of superstitious fear, alone within the house of Schole – supported by the sunshine round about her as she lingered at the door – for Marget, in decent reverence, had drawn a simple curtain across the window. The other rooms were shuttered and dark – the natural homage of seemly awe and gravity in the presence of death.

Anne had no difficulty in inducing Miss Crankie to take upon her those matters of sad external business, which she herself was not qualified to manage. With more delicacy than she expected, Miss Crankie undertook them immediately. Mrs. Yammer was “in sore distress with rheumatics in my back, and my head like to split in twa wi’ the ticdoloureux – and it’s a’ yon awfu’ nicht – and I dinna believes Miss Ross, I’ll ever get the better o’t. – Johann and you, that are strong folk, fleeing out into the storm, and me, a puir weak creature, left, to fend my lane – forbye being like to gang out o’ my judgment wi’ fricht, for you and the perishing creatures in the ship. Eh! wha would have thought of a weak man like yon saving them – and so he’s ta’en to his rest! Weel I’m sure, Miss Ross, you’ve been uncommon kind to them – they canna say but they’ve found a friend in need.”

“They are my relatives,” said Anne: “I mean we are nearly connected.”

Miss Crankie opened her little dark eyes wide. Mrs. Yammer began, with an astonished exclamation, to recollect the pedigree of the Lillies, and acquaint herself with this strange relationship. – Her sister stopped her abruptly.

“Take your breakfast, Tammie, and dinna haver nonsense. Is Kirstin content, Miss Ross, to have ye biding in her house?”

“Quite content,” said Anne.

Miss Crankie’s eyes opened wider. She began with a rapid logic, by no means formal, but which had a knack of arriving at just conclusions, to put things together. She had a glimmering of the truth already.

“Miss Lillie is out,” said Anne. “I fear, in her deep grief, she wandered out, finding herself unable to rest; but neither she nor I are able for these details. You will greatly oblige me, Miss Crankie, and do your old friend a most kind service, if you will undertake this.”

Miss Crankie promised heartily, and Anne returned to Schole. Again there passed a long, weary, brilliant summer day, but Christian did not return. The night fell, but the roof that covered the mortal garment of Patrick Lille, sheltered no kindred blood. Anne had taken Christian’s place – she was the watcher now.

CHAPTER XXVIII

ANOTHER day, as bright, as weary, and as long, and still there were no tidings of Christian. Anne became alarmed. She sent out Jacky to make inquiries; Jacky ascertained that Miss Lillie on the previous morning had gone by the earliest coach to Edinburgh. The intelligence was some relief, yet perplexed Anne painfully; the arrangements were going on, but what could she do, if Christian remained absent, thus left alone with the dead?

In the middle of the day, Miss Crankie brought her a letter from Mrs. Catherine. Anne’s conscience smote her; during Patrick’s illness, she had scarcely written to Mrs. Catherine at all; and her brief notes had only intimated his illness, and her hope of obtaining some further information through the Lillies. Mrs. Catherine’s letter had an enclosure.

“My Gowan,

“What has come over you? I have been marvelling these past mornings whether it was success or failure – a light heart or a downcast one, that made you forgetful of folk to whom all your doings are matters of interest, and have been since you could use your own proper tongue to testify of them. Think you this lad Lillie has any further knowledge than you have yourself? I count it unlikely, or else he is a pithless laggard, not worthy to call Norman Rutherford friend, and Norman was not one to choose his friends lightly, or be joined in near amity with a shallow head and a faint heart. So I would have you build little on the hope of getting good tidings from him, seeing that if he had known anything, he must have put it to its fitting use before now. You say it gave him a fever? I like not folk, child, who are thrown into fevers by sore trouble and anguish, and make themselves a burden and a cumbrance, when they ought to be quickened to keener life – the more helpful and strong, the greater the extremity; it augurs a narrow vessel and a frail spirit in most cases – it may be other in his. Certain he bore himself like a man in the night you tell me of. Let me see his sister, if you can bring her; there, seems – if ye draw like the life – to be no soil in her for the cowardice of sickness to flourish on, from which I take my certainty, that if she had kent any good word concerning this dark mystery, she must have put it to the proof before now.

“To speak about other matters, I send you a letter – worthy the light-headed, undutiful fuil from whose vain hand it comes. You will see she will have none of my counsel, and puts my offer of an honorable roof over her, and a home dependent on no caprice or strange woman’s pleasure, in the light of a good meaning – will to do kindness without power. If it were not for Archie’s sake, and for the good-fame of their broken house, she should never more say light word to me. He has been but a month dead, this miserable man of hers – that she left her mother’s sick-bed for – and look at her words! without so much as a decent shadow on them, to tell where the sore gloom of death had fallen so late. I am growing testy in my spirit, child; though truly sorrow would set me better than anger, to look upon the like of a born fuil like this – her brother ruined, and her man killed. Archie, a laboring wayfarer, with his good name tarnished, and his father’s inheritance, lost; the husband for whose sake she brought down her mother’s gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, taken away suddenly from this world by the red grip of a violent death, and the wanton fuil what can I call her else? – as if she had not gotten enough to sober her for a while, returning in haste to her vanities – feared to leave the atmosphere of them – singing songs over the man’s new grave, and giving long nights to strangers, when she can but spare a brief minute to say a kind word to her one brother – a kind word, said I! I should say a bitter one, of folly and selfishness, – not comfort to him in his labor, but records of her own sinful vanities.

“You will say I am bitter, child, at this fuil – so I am – the more that I cannot be done with her, as I could with any other of her kind. She is still the bairn of Isabel Balfour – in good or in evil I am trysted to keep my eye upon her. I have been asking about the household she is in. The mistress of it, her friend, is at least of pure name; a scheming woman as I hear from one of their own vain kind – who has a pride in yoking the fuils about her in the unstable bands of marriage. Isabel has her mother’s fair face; they will be wedding her again for some passing fancy, or for dirt of siller. I scarce know which is the worst. I will have no hand in it, however it happens. Since she will be left to herself, she must. If deadly peril ever comes, I must put forth the strong hand.

“You will come to me with all speed when you can win. If you have any glimpse of good tidings, or if you have none – I am meaning when you come to any certainty – let me know without delay, that I may make ready for our home-going. To say the truth, I am weary at my heart of this place, and sickened with anger at the fuil whose letter I send you. Let me look upon you soon, lest the wrath settle down, and I be not able to shake it off again; which evil consequent, if you prevent it not, will be the worse for you all.

    CATHERINE DOUGLAS.”

Mrs. Duncombe’s letter was enclosed.

“My dear Mrs. Catherine,

“It is so good of you to think of troubling yourself with me at the Tower, and must have put you so much out of the way, coming to Edinburgh, that I hasten to thank you. Poor dear Duncombe was taken away very suddenly; you would be quite shocked to hear of it. I was distracted. They had been quarrelling over their wine. Poor Duncombe was always so very jealous; and it was all for the merest word of admiration, which he might have heard from a thousand people beside. So they fought, and he was wounded mortally. You may think how dreadful it was, when they brought him home to me dying. I went into hysterics directly, I believe I needed the doctor’s care more than he did: before he died I was just able to speak to him, and he was so very penitent for having been sometimes rude to me, and so sorry for his foolish jealousy. Poor dear Edward! – I shall never forget him.

“I am staying here with a dear friend of mine, Mrs. Legeretie. She has got a delightful house, quite out of town, and they have come here just for my sake, to be quiet and away from the gay world, which of course I could not bear just now. We have quite a nice circle of friends, besides our visitors from London, and just with quiet parties, and country amusements, get on delightfully. Dear Eliza is so kind, and gives up her engagements in town, without a murmur, just to let me have the soothing quietness of the country, which the doctors order me – with cheerful society – for if it were not for that, my poor heart would break, I am sure – I have suffered so dreadfully.

“You will have heard that dear Archibald has arrived safely at that horrid place in America. What could induce him to do such a thing, when he might have gone into the army, or got into Parliament, or something? and the friends of the family would have helped him, I am sure. It’s just like Archie; he’s always so hot and extreme. I thought he would have killed himself that dreadful time at Paris, before he took the fever; and what a shocking thing that would have been for me, with all my other misfortunes. To be sure, it was a horrid, foolish business – that of losing the estate – and if it had not been that dull old Strathoran, where papa and mamma managed to vegetate all the year through, I don’t know how – I should have been broken-hearted. I am sure, considering that dear Archie was only my brother, there was nothing I was not willing to do for him; but to go away a common clerk, into a horrid mercantile office! I must say he has shown very little regard for the feelings of his relatives, especially as he knows how I detest these ogres of commercial people. One can only bear with them if they are very rich, and I am afraid dear Archie is not likely ever to become a moneyed man.

“They are so fond of me here, and dear Eliza has done so much to make me comfortable, that I should be very ungrateful to run away, else I should have been delighted to spend a week or two at the Tower. Mr. Legeretie has a shooting-lodge in the Highlands, and dear Eliza talks of going down with him this year to give me a little change; if we do, we shall come by dear old dreary Strathoran just to look at it again. I hope the Rosses, and all the other old friends, are well. I used to think a good deal of Lewis. I suppose Anne is never married yet; she must be getting quite ancient now.

    “My dear Mrs. Catherine,
    “Very sincerely yours,
    “ISABEL DUNCOMBE.”

It was a strange contrast – with Christian Lillie’s desolate life before her – with her own heart throbbing so anxiously for the stranger, Norman, whom, in her remembrance, she had never seen – to hear this Isabel, her play-mate long ago, talking of Archie as “only” her brother. The effect was very singular. What had become of the sad sufferer who lay within these walls in the tranquil rest of death, if for Christian, and Marion, and Norman there had been any “only” stemming the deep tide of their self-denying tenderness?

Anne wrote a brief note to Mrs. Catherine, announcing Patrick Lillie’s death, and saying that her mission was now accomplished; and that in a day or two she would return to Edinburgh to explain the further particulars of this long mystery. The day was waning again; in weary sadness and solitude she sat in Patrick Lillie’s study. From the kitchen she could hear the subdued voices of Marget and Jacky: above, the stealthy step of Miss Crankie, as she arranged the sad preliminaries of the funeral. The second evening had fallen since he departed to his rest; and where was Christian?

A dark shadow flitted across the window. She heard a footstep enter, and pass quickly up the stair. Anne rose and followed. The footstep was quicker than Christian’s, but it went steadily to the chamber of death.

Anne paused at the door. The lonely dimness of the evening air gathered shadowy and spiritual round the bed, a dark background, from which that rigid marble face stood out in cold relief. A deadly stillness – a dim, brooding, tremulous awe – which carried in it a vague conviction of watching spirits, and presences mysteriously unseen, was hovering in the room.

And kneeling at the bedside, her veil hanging round her white, thin face, like a cloud over the tearful pallor of a wan November sky, was Christian Lillie, the quivering smile upon her lip again, and the words of sad thankfulness falling from her tongue.

“Ye are thanking God in His own heaven, Patrick, my brother; the justice is done, the cloud is taken away. Henceforward, in the free light of heaven, may Norman bear his own name; and now there remaineth nothing but to lay you, with hope and solemn thanksgiving into your quiet grave.”

Anne stood still; there was a long pause. Christian knelt silently by her dead brother’s side, in darkness, in silence, in the presence of death, thanking God.

At last she rose, and turned to leave the room. Anne’s presence did not seem to excite any wonder; she took her offered arm quietly and kindly.
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