Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

CHAPTER XI.

'AND WHO BUT MY FINE FICKLE LOVER STOOD

THERE?'

HERE was no more need, or possibility of concealment where the family was concerned. John Dunglas had broken with Anne Macdonald, and Anne Macdonald with John Dunglas. He had been trifling, or he had altered his mind, or had other engagements, and Anne could not stand his treatment. It was idle to pretend that she was the person to blame; even he could not be so grossly insulting as to affect to impute Maclean's levity to the lady who suffered from it. It had merely served as the pretext for his withdrawal. So the world of the Country said; so folk who were not intimately acquainted with John Dunglas's disposition agreed; so even some of those who might have known him were tempted to conclude in their bitterness; the provocation was so preposterous, the retribution so hasty and extremeas if anything could be too preposterous for a passionate and excitable young man-as if anything could

[graphic]

be too impulsive for the rebound of his faith and regard!

John Dunglas would come no more to Aldour while Anne Macdonald was the cherished guest of the house in the glen; John Dunglas would never more come to Aldour as he had done.

Mary had expected her father to be furious, to vow, 'I'll trounce the fellow, Mary; I'll have him out. What am I a man for? My cousin, the sweetest girl in the Highlands and Lowlands, setting aside her penny, the unconscionable villain! What are people to think of her?'

'Good people will think none the worse of her, father; they will say, better he should jilt her than that she should jilt him—or else their faith must be sadly astray. Did not Socrates remind his wife, bewailing his innocence, "Would you have had me die guilty?" We will build confidently on dear Anne's innocence. He is not deserving your chastisement, and the days are past when sword and pistols could amend a wrong. You forget, father, the Highlanders are disarmed; the Laird of Culrossie could not now fight for the superiority of Aberdeen butter. Ay, laugh, father; Anne would rather have that than any explosion of your righteous anger. Anne's heart may be broken already, but it would kill her at our feet if you took the case in hand, and called John Dunglas to account.'

Mary had thought when his first expression of wrath was borne down, that it would pass momentarily like

many another; that in half a day Aldour would snap his fingers and protest that Anne was well quit of the fellow, she would get a hundred better the first summer day, only he was sorry that his old friend Dunglas had such a scapegrace of a son and heir. But no; Aldour was perturbed as well as incensed by the turn in the fortunes of his cousin; it seemed to take hold of his big heart. Many a sigh it cost him; many a gloomy walk up and down the parlour and the hall he took, as if revolving in amazement and consternation the degeneracy of the Highlanders and the impending ruin of the Country and its countrymen. 'It is not the Country that it was when I was young,' he lamented. A man cannot spend his own, or borrow his neighbour's, or lick his enemy as he was wont to do. I wonder what we're coming to, Mally? I've half a mind to give up the glen to Charlie, and go to the backwoods with the rest of them.' But this was Aldour labouring under a fit of despondency.

Mary could better understand her mother.

Mrs. Macdonnel had only noticed Anne in a general, though motherly way. She had no time for young favourites; she had but a small space in her heart for a stranger heiress cousin ; she had merely smiled at John Dunglas's wooing; she was no match-maker, busy in idleness. But now everything was changed; Anne was in trouble, and Mrs. Macdonnel took her to her heart; she vied with Mary herself in the strength and tenderness of her friendship; she left little Anne crooning on her stool, to walk with big Anne on the hills

she trusted the maid servants with the drying of the great cheese, to hear Anne read her favourite extracts to her; she deserted the household wheels for the cushion and bobbins, with which she too had flirted in her nonage, and with which she could still beat Mary and Anne at her old fine scollops and dead and light masses—like a great Dutch painter of lace collars and cuffs. If she did not apportion the slice of muttonham, and the bit of roast mutton, and the goat's milk and sack whey, as her namesake, Mrs. Macdonnel of the Schoolhouse, had recommended betimes in the business, she watched the girl's rest and food; she coaxed her appetite, she lulled her to sleep, she nursed her under her blow as she nursed lame Niel and little Annie. Even in the grey summer night Anne shut her wide-open eyes at the sound of the firm but soft foot grown so familiar, and through the nearly closed lids saw Mrs. Macdonnel's tall, large figure like an extensive ghost in her night-dress and mantle, and heard Mary murmur sleepily, 'Is that you, mother? Is there anything the matter? You need not be stirring.' And the response, 'Hush! child, I only wanted to see that you were all lying still. Don't let me disturb you.' And never the most distant allusion to the cause of the care. Mrs. Macdonnel would have died before she had intruded into Anne's confidence, or enticed her into sickly sentimentalism and mawkish confession. But how that woman despised John Dunglas.

'Mary,' whispered Anne, after a nocturnal visitation,

P

'I did not know that your mother was so good. What a blessed thing it is to have such a mother; I shall be grateful for her to the end of my existence, though I am but an adopted child. I have read of a brother born for adversity, Mary; this is a mother born for

sorrow.'

'Yes,' Mary answered with honest pride, 'my mother is good; she is not a soft woman, but she is as true as steel.'

There is an alloy of pride in such a nature, but it is a noble nature nevertheless. All honour to the hearts that bear as their shield the ivy clinging round the ruin, with the motto, In adversity faithful.'

[ocr errors]

Let us hum perseveringly the old Scotch song,

Here's to the friend we can trust,
When the blasts of adversity blaw;

let us learn by heart the English lines,

When lone and neglected, oh! my love will be
Like the moss to the stone-like the vine to the tree;

and God bless us if we practise them.

But Mary had now to acquire a vivid experience of the plague of popularity. Had the Aldour family been a single family, an obscure group in a street full of foreigners to each other, then no man, or more properly woman, would have intermeddled with their sorrow; but, as it was, Anne Macdonald's love affair, and how it had gone off, was patent to the whole glen, and bodach and cailliach, lad and lass, were overflowing with sympathy. These simple imaginative High

« ForrigeFortsæt »