Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 33, December, 1873

"A hansom, papa?" said Sheila. "Mairi must go with us, you know."

This was precisely what he had angled for, and he said, with a show of impatience, "Mairi! How can we take about Mairi to every place? Mairi is a ferry good lass—oh yes—but she is a servant-lass."

The words nearly stuck in his throat; and indeed had any other addressed such a phrase to one of his kith and kin there would have been an explosion of rage; but now he was determined to show to Sheila that her husband had some cause for objecting to this girl sitting down with his friends.

But neither husband nor father could make Sheila forswear allegiance to what her own heart told her was just and honorable and generous; and indeed her father at this moment was not displeased to see her turn round on himself with just a touch of indignation in her voice. "Mairi is my guest, papa," she said. "It is not like you to think of leaving her at home."

"Oh. it wass of no consequence," said old Mackenzie carelessly: indeed he was not sorry to have met with this rebuff. "Mairi is a ferry good girl—oh yes—but there are many who would not forget she is a servant-lass, and would not like to be always taking her with them. And you hef lived a long time in London—"

"I have not lived long enough in London to make me forget my friends or insult them," Sheila said with proud lips, and yet turning to the window to hide her face.

"My lass, I did not mean any harm whatever," her father said gently: "I wass saying nothing against Mairi. Go away and bring her into the room, Sheila, and we will see what we can do now, and if there is a theatre we can go to this evening. And I must go out, too, to buy some things; for you are a ferry fine lady now, Sheila, and I was coming away in such a hurry—"

"Where is your luggage, papa?" she said suddenly.

"Oh, luggage!" said Mackenzie, looking round in great embarrassment. "It was luggage you said, Sheila? Ay, well, it wass a hurry I wass in when I came away—for this man he will have to pay me at once whatever—and there wass no time for any luggage—oh no, there wass no time, because Duncan he wass late with the boat, and the mare she had a shoe to put on—and—and—oh no, there was no time for any luggage."

"But what was Scarlett about, to let you come away like that?" Sheila said.

"Scarlett? Well, Scarlett did not know, it was all in such a hurry. Now go and bring in Mairi, Sheila, and we will speak about the theatre."

But there was to be no theatre for any of them that evening. Sheila was just about to leave the room to summon Mairi when the small girl who had let Mackenzie into the house appeared and said, "Please, m'm, there is a young woman below who wishes to see you. She has a message to you from Mrs. Paterson."

"Mrs. Paterson?" Sheila said, wondering how Mrs. Lavender's hench-woman should have been entrusted with any such commission. "Will you ask her to come up?"

The girl came up stairs, looking rather frightened and much out of breath.

"Please, m'm, Mrs. Paterson has sent me to tell you, and would you please come as soon as it is convenient? Mrs. Lavender has died. It was quite sudden—only she recovered a little after the fit, and then sank: the doctor is there now, but he wasn't in time, it was all so sudden. Will you please come round, m'm?"

"Yes—I shall be there directly," said Sheila, too bewildered and stunned to think of the possibility of meeting her husband there.

The girl left, and Sheila still stood in the middle of the room apparently stupefied. That old woman had got into such a habit of talking about her approaching death that Sheila had ceased to believe her, and had grown to fancy that these morbid speculations were indulged in chiefly for the sake of shocking bystanders. But a dead man or a dead woman is suddenly invested with a great solemnity; and Sheila with a pang of remorse thought of the fashion in which she had suspected this old woman of a godless hypocrisy. She felt, too, that she had unjustly disliked Mrs. Lavender—that she had feared to go near her, and blamed her unfairly for many things that had happened. In her own way that old woman in Kensington Gore had been kind to her: perhaps the girl was a little ashamed of herself at this moment that she did not cry.

Her father went out with her, and up to the house with the dusty ivy and the red curtains. How strangely like was the aspect of the house inside to the very picture that Mrs. Lavender had herself drawn of her death! Sheila could remember all the ghastly details that the old woman seemed to have a malicious delight in describing; and here they were—the shutters drawn down, the servants walking about on tiptoe, the strange silence in one particular room. The little shriveled old body lay quite still and calm now; and yet as Sheila went to the bedside, she could hardly believe that within that forehead there was not some consciousness of the scene around. Lying almost in the same position, the old woman, with a sardonic smile on her face, had spoken of the time when she should be speechless, sightless and deaf, while Paterson would go about stealthily as if she was afraid the corpse would hear. Was it possible to believe that the dead body was not conscious at this moment that Paterson was really going about in that fashion—that the blinds were down, friends standing some little distance from the bed, a couple of doctors talking to each other in the passage outside?

They went into another room, and then Sheila, with a sudden shiver, remembered that soon her husband would be coming, and might meet her and her father there.

"You have sent for Mr. Lavender?" she said calmly to Mrs. Paterson.

"No, ma'am," Paterson said with more than her ordinary gravity and formality: "I did not know where to send for him. He left London some days ago. Perhaps you would read the letter, ma'am."

She offered Sheila an open letter. The girl saw that it was in her husband's handwriting, but she shrank from it as though she were violating the secrets of the grave.

"Oh no," she said, "I cannot do that."

"Mrs. Lavender, ma'am, meant you to read it, after she had had her will altered. She told me so. It is a very sad thing, ma'am, that she did not live to carry out her intentions; for she has been inquiring, ma'am, these last few days as to how she could leave everything to you, ma'am, which she intended; and now the other will—"

"Oh, don't talk about that!" said Sheila. It seemed to her that the dead body in the other room would be laughing hideously, if only it could, at this fulfillment of all the sardonic prophecies that Mrs. Lavender used to make.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," Paterson said in the same formal way, as if she were a machine set to work in a particular direction, "I only mentioned the will to explain why Mrs. Lavender wished you to read this letter."

"Read the letter, Sheila," said her father.

The girl took it and carried it to the window. While she was there, old Mackenzie, who had fewer scruples about such matters, and who had the curiosity natural to a man of the world, said to Mrs. Paterson—not loud enough for Sheila to overhear—"I suppose, then, the poor old lady has left her property to her nephew?"

"Oh no, sir," said Mrs. Paterson, somewhat sadly, for she fancied she was the bearer of bad news. "She had a will drawn out only a short time ago, and nearly everything is left to Mr. Ingram."

"To Mr. Ingram?"

"Yes," said the woman, amazed to see that Mackenzie's face, so far from evincing displeasure, seemed to be as delighted as it was surprised.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Paterson: "I was one of the witnesses. But Mrs. Lavender changed her mind, and was very anxious that everything should go to your daughter, if it could be done; and Mr. Appleyard, sir, was to come here to-morrow forenoon."

"And has Mr. Lavender got no money whatever?" said Sheila's father, with an air that convinced Mrs. Paterson that he was a revengeful man, and was glad his son-in-law should be so severely punished.

"I don't know, sir," she replied, careful not to go beyond her own sphere.

Sheila came back from the window. She had taken a long time to read and ponder over that letter, though it was not a lengthy one. This was what Frank Lavender had written to his aunt:

"MY DEAR AUNT LAVENDER: I suppose when you read this you will think I am in a bad temper because of what you said to me. It is not so. But I am leaving London, and I wish to hand over to you, before I go, the charge of my house, and to ask you to take possession of everything in it that does not belong to Sheila. These things are yours, as you know, and I have to thank you very much for the loan of them. I have to thank you for the far too liberal allowance you have made me for many years back. Will you think I have gone mad if I ask you to stop that now? The fact is, I am going to have a try at earning something, for the fun of the thing; and, to make the experiment satisfactory, I start to-morrow morning for a district in the West Highlands, where the most ingenious fellow I know couldn't get a penny loaf on credit. You have been very good to me, Aunt Lavender: I wish I had made a better use of your kindness. So good-bye just now, and if ever I come back to London again I shall call on you and thank you in person.

"I am your affectionate nephew,

    "FRANK LAVENDER."

So far the letter was almost business-like. There was no reference to the causes which were sending him away from London, and which had already driven him to this extraordinary resolution about the money he got from his aunt. But at the end of the letter there was a brief postscript, apparently written at the last moment, the words of which were these: "Be kind to Sheila. Be as kind to her as I have been cruel to her. In going away from her I feel as though I were exiled by man and forsaken by God."

She came back from the window the letter in her hand.

"I think you may read it too, papa," she said, for she was anxious that her father should know that Lavender had voluntarily surrendered this money before he was deprived of it. Then she went back to the window.

The slow rain fell from the dismal skies on the pavement and the railings and the now almost leafless trees. The atmosphere was filled with a thin white mist, and the people going by were hidden under umbrellas. It was a dreary picture enough; and yet Sheila was thinking of how much drearier such a day would be on some lonely coast in the North, with the hills obscured behind the rain, and the sea beating hopelessly on the sand. She thought of some small and damp Highland cottage, with narrow windows, a smell of wet wood about, and the monotonous drip from over the door. And it seemed to her that a stranger there would be very lonely, not knowing the ways or the speech of the simple folk, careless perhaps of his own comfort, and only listening to the plashing of the sea and the incessant rain on the bushes and on the pebbles of the beach. Was there any picture of desolation, she thought, like that of a sea under rain, with a slight fog obscuring the air, and with no wind to stir the pulse with the noise of waves? And if Frank Lavender had only gone as far as the Western Highlands, and was living in some house on the coast, how sad and still the Atlantic must have been all this wet forenoon, with the islands of Colonsay and Oronsay lying remote and gray and misty in the far and desolate plain of the sea!

"It will take a great deal of responsibility from me, sir," Mrs. Paterson said to old Mackenzie, who was absently thinking of all the strange possibilities now opening out before him, "if you will tell me what is to be done. Mrs. Lavender had no relatives in London except her nephew."

"Oh yes," said Mackenzie, waking up—"oh yes, we will see what is to be done. There will be the boat wanted for the funeral—" He recalled himself with an impatient gesture. "Bless me!" he said, "what was I saying? You must ask some one else—you must ask Mr. Ingram. Hef you not sent for Mr. Ingram?

"Oh yes, sir, I have sent to him; and he will most likely come in the afternoon."

"Then there are the executors mentioned in the will—that wass something you should know about—and they will tell you what to do. As for me, it is ferry little I will know about such things."

"Perhaps your daughter, sir," suggested Mrs. Paterson, "would tell me what she thinks should be done with the rooms. And as for luncheon, sir, if you would wait—"

"Oh, my daughter?" said Mr. Mackenzie, as if struck by a new idea, but determined all the same that Sheila should not have this new responsibility thrust on her—"My daughter?—well, you was saying, mem, that my daughter would help you? Oh yes, but she is a ferry young thing, and you wass saying we must hef luncheon? Oh yes, but we will not give you so much trouble, and we hef luncheon ordered at the other house whatever; and there is the young girl there that we cannot leave all by herself. And you hef a great experience, mem, and whatever you do, that will be right: do not have any fear of that. And I will come round when you want me—oh yes, I will come round at any time—but my daughter, she is a ferry young thing, and she would be of no use to you whatever—none whatever. And when Mr. Ingram comes you will send him round to the place where my daughter is, for we will want to see him, if he hass the time to come. Where is Shei—where is my daughter?"

Sheila had quietly left the room and stolen into the silent chamber in which the dead woman lay. They found her standing close by the bedside, almost in a trance.

"Sheila," said her father, taking her hand, "come away now, like a good girl. It is no use your waiting here; and Mairi—what will Mairi be doing?"