Foreman – you are not an ill gallant, but have overmuch favor for your own wisdom, as is common at your years. If you live to count threescore, you will be an humbler man.”
“Our success is a most fortunate thing for Strathoran,” said Mr. Ferguson, as they left the Tower. “But the letter – I would not receive such a letter as Mrs. Catherine will write, on such a subject, for the half of his estate.”
Walter Foreman shrugged his shoulders.
“And yet she has the greatest regard for him. Mrs. Sutherland was betrothed to Mrs. Catherine’s brother, when he died, people say; and it is her strange adoration of his memory that makes her so fond of young Strathoran. A singular consequent, one would think.”
“Mrs. Catherine is altogether singular,” said Mr. Ferguson, “and not to be judged as people of the world are.”
And when the night was far spent, and Alice had carried her bounding heart, and her new possessions, into her own bright apartment, and was electrifying little Bessie there, with a glimpse of the wonderous beauty of those pearls, and trying them on before the mirror on the walls, and listening with bursts of gay laughter to Bessie’s guesses of their value – sums immense and fabulous to the simplicity of both, yet, nevertheless, in truth, not greatly exceeding their true worth – Mrs. Catherine sat in the library alone, writing her letter, her strong features swept by deep emotion often, and her steady hand shaken. The course which the young man was pursuing, was in every way the most repulsive to her feelings. Sin it appeared in the eyes of her strong, unswerving, pure religion – dishonor to her nice sense of uprightness and independence. His foreign residence and likings shocked her warm, home-affections, her entire nationality, and the possible alienation of his lands from the name and family in whose possession they had been so long, alarmed alike fear and prejudice; for Mrs. Catherine, boasting her own pure descent from the “dark-grey man,” was no enemy to the law of entail. His sister, too, and her separation from the husband for whom she had left her mother’s sick-bed – all these things poured in upon Mrs. Catherine’s mind, increasing her agitation, and hallowed, as all her fears were, by that strange visionary tenderness, so thoroughly in unison with her strong character, despite its romance, which clung around those who might have been the children of that dearest brother Sholto, whose mortality, so much as remained of it, lay treasured in yon lone burying-ground in far Madeira, upon whose sunny shore he died.
“Archibald Sutherland,” wrote Mrs. Catherine, “I have been hearing tidings of you, which have carried a sword into my inmost heart; and though I might well write in anger, seeing that though I am not of your kin, you were in my arms a helpless bairn, before you were in the arms of any mortal – it is in grief rather that I speak to you. Wherefore is there neither firelight nor candlelight in the house of Strathoran? Is the home of your fathers not good enough for a son that puts in jeopardy their good fame? Is the roof that sheltered Isabel Balfour in her bridal days, too mean for Isabel Sutherland? or wherefore is it, that with your fair lands and good possessions you are dwelling in a strange and ungodly country? Father and mother you have none to warn you. Answer to me, Archie Sutherland, who have known you all your days, wherefore it should be so. Think you that among the flattering fools that are about you, there is one that would lose a night’s sleep, if Strathoran and all belonging to it, were swept into the sea? Come back to your own dwelling-place: witless and prodigal as you have been, there is not a hind in the parish but would lament over the desolate house of your fathers. Think you that it is a small thing, the leal liking and respect of a whole countryside, come down to you as a heritage? or is it your will to give up that for the antics of a papistical and alien race? I say to you, come back to your own house, Archie Sutherland. There is neither healthfulness nor safety – let alone good fame and godliness, a man’s best plenishing for this world and the next – in the course you are running now.
“Think not that I write this because I have served you with siller. Over the son of Isabel Balfour, the sister of Sholto Douglas has a right of succor and counsel, warning and reproof. Boy! if you had been my own – if in God’s good pleasure you had borne the name of my own brother – the dearest name upon this earth to me – what is there that you might not have claimed at my hands? What is there now, that would be for your own good, that I would hesitate to do? – but far be it from me, who mind your mother’s travail for the new birth in you, the which in all mortal seeming has not yet been granted to her prayers – to prop up your goings in a way of ill-doing. Of what good is it to the world, I ask you, Archie Sutherland, that you have been made upon it, a living man with a mind within you, and a heaven over you? Who is the better for the light that God has put into your earthen vessel? A crowd of dancing, singing fools, that know not either the right honor, or the grave errand of a man into this world. Shame upon you, the son of a stalwart and good house, to be wasting in bairnly diversion, the days you will never see again, till you meet them before the Throne. Listen to me, Archie Sutherland – return to your own house, and to such a manner of life as becomes an honorable and upright man, and I give you my word – the worth of which, you may be known – that for disentangling you from the unhealthful meshes of borrowed siller, the means shall not be to seek.
“Unto your sister Isabel, I have ever been a prophet of evil; nevertheless, she bears the name, and, in a measure, the countenance, of Sholto’s Isabel and mine. If she will not return to the lawful shelter and rule of her own house, let her come to Strathoran, or, if it likes her, to the Tower. Do you think, or does she think, that the very winged things that are about you, their own sillie selves, honor the wife for disregarding her natural right? The bond was of her own tieing; she liked him better than father and mother once – does she like him less now than she likes ill-fame, and slight esteem? If it is so, let her come home to me, her mother’s earliest and oldest friend. Bairns! – bairns! there is more to provide for than the pleasure of the quick hours that are speeding over ye. Purity before God, honor in the sight of men: are your spirits blinded within ye, that you cannot perceive the two?
CHAPTER IV
THE festive morning dawned at last, a vigorous, red October day, and all about and around Merkland was bustle and preparation.
“Duncan,” cried Bell the cook, her face looming, already red and full, through a mist; “when was that weary man, Bob Partan, to send up the turbot?”
“Punctual at eleven,” said the laconic Duncan.
“Eh! man, Duncan,” said May, “have ye tried on your new livery yet? – isn’t it grand?”
“Hout, you silly fool,” responded Duncan, “has the like o’ me leisure, think you, to be minding about coats and breeks?”
“Eh!” exclaimed Bell, “what has possessed me! There’s no clove in a’ the house and they need to be in – I kenna how mony things. You maun off to Portoran, Duncan, gallopping; there’s not a minute to be lost.”
“Duncan,” cried Johnnie Halflin, the boy at the Tower, who, with sundry other articles, had been lent for the occasion, “I’ve casten doun a jar o’ the Smoothlie honey, and it’s broken twa o’ the bottles. Man, come afore the leddy sees’t.”
“Duncan,” said Barbara Genty, Mrs. Ross’s own especial attendant. “You are to go up to the parlor, this minute. You were sent for half an hour ago.”
“Conscience!” exclaimed the overwhelmed Duncan, “is there two of us, that ye are rugging and riving at a man in that gate? Get out o’ my road, ye young sinner, or there shall be mair things broken than bottles! I’m coming, Bauby. Woman Bell, could ye no hae minded a’thing at once?”
Above stairs, Mr. Lewis’s servant, who had left Merkland a loutish lad, and returned glistening in Parisian polish and refinement, a superfine gentleman, was condescendingly advising with Mrs. Ross, as to the garniture of the dinner-table.
