Sir Robert's Fortune. Маргарет Олифант
the long rays of the setting sun. It was as if it came to life as the summer days wore toward autumn. The mountains stood round, blue and purple, in their unbroken veil of distance and visionary greatness, but the moor was becoming alive and full of color, warming out of all bleakness and grayness into life and light. The corner of the road under the trees showed like a peep into a real world, not a dreary vacancy from which no one came. There was a cart slowly toiling its way up the slope, its homely sound as it came on informing the silence of something moving, neighborly, living. Lily smiled unconsciously as if it had been a friend. And when the cart had passed, there appeared a figure, alone, walking quickly, not with the slow wading, as if among the heather, of the rare, ordinary passer-by. Lily’s interest quickened in spite of herself as she saw the wayfarer breasting the hill. Who could he be, she wondered. Some sportsman, come for the grouse—some gentleman, trained not only to moorland walking, but to quick progress over smoother roads. He skimmed along under the fir-trees at the corner, up the little visible ascent. Lily almost thought she could hear his steps sounding so lightly, like a half-forgotten music that she was glad, glad to hear again; but he disappeared soon under the rising bank, as every thing did, and she was once more alone in the world. The sun sank, the horizon turned gray, the moor became once more a wilderness in which no life or movement was.
No!—what a jump her heart gave!—it was no wilderness: there was the same figure again, stepping out on the moor. It had left the road, it was coming on with springs and leaps over the heather toward the house. Who was it? Who was it? And then he, he! held up his hand and beckoned, beckoned to Lily in the wilderness. Who was he? Nobody—a wandering traveller, a sportsman, a stranger. Her heart beat so wildly that the whole house seemed to shake with it. And there he stood among the heather, his hat off, waving it, and beckoning to her with his hand.
CHAPTER IX
The situation of Ronald Lumsden, for whom Lily felt herself to have sacrificed so much, and who showed, as she felt at the bottom of her heart, so little inclination to sacrifice any thing for her, was, in reality, a difficult one. It would have been false to say that he did not love her, that her loss was no grief to him, or that he could make himself comfortable without her—which was what various persons thought and said, and he was not unaware of the fact. Neither was he unaware that Lily herself had a half grudge, a whole consciousness, that the way out of the difficulty was a simple one; and that he should have been ready to offer her a home, even though it would not be wealthy, and the protection of a husband’s name and care against all or any uncles in the world. He knew that she was quite willing to share his poverty, that she had no objection to what is metaphorically called a garret—and would really have resembled one more than is common in such cases: a little flat, high up under the roofs of an Edinburgh house—and to make it into a happy and smiling little home. And as a matter of fact that garret would not have been inappropriate, or have involved any social downfall either on his side or Lily’s. Young Edinburgh advocates in those days set up their household gods in such lofty habitations without either shame or reluctance. Not so very long before the man whom we and all the world know as Lord Jeffrey set out in the world on that elevation and made his garret the centre of a new kind of empire. There was nothing derogatory in it: invitations from the best houses in Edinburgh would have found their way there as freely as to George Square; and Lily’s friends and his own friends would have filled the rooms as much as if the young pair had been lodged in a palace. He could not even say to himself that there would have been privations which she did not comprehend in such a life; for, little though they had, it would have been enough for their modest wants, and there was a prospect of more if he continued to succeed as he had begun to do. Many a young man in Edinburgh had married rashly on as little and had done very well indeed. All this Ronald knew as well as any one, and the truth of it rankled in his mind and made him unhappy. And yet on the other side there was, he felt, so much to be said! Sir Robert Ramsay’s fortune was not a thing to be thrown away, and to compare the interest, weight, and importance of that with the suffering involved to young people who were sure of each other in merely waiting for a year or two was absurd. According to all laws of experience and life it was absurd. Lily was very little over twenty; there was surely no hurry, no need to bring affairs to a climax, to insist on marrying when it would no doubt be better even for her to wait. This was what Lumsden said to himself. He would rather, as a matter of preference, marry at once, secure the girl he loved for his life-companion, and do the best he could for her. But when all things were considered, would it be sensible, would it be right, would it be fair?
This was how he conversed with himself during many a lonely walk, and the discussion would break out in the midst of very different thoughts, even on the pavement of the Parliament House as he paced up and down. Sir Robert’s fortune—that was a tangible thing. It meant in the future, probably in the near future, for Sir Robert was a self-indulgent old man, a most excellent position in the world, safety from all pecuniary disasters, every comfort and luxury for Lily, who would then be a great lady in comparison with the struggling Edinburgh advocate. And the cost of this was nothing but a year’s, a few years’, waiting for a girl of twenty-two and a young man of twenty-eight. How preposterous, indeed, to discuss the question at all! If Lily had any feeling of wrong in that her lover did not carry her off, did not in a moment arrange some makeshift of a poor life, the prelude to a continual, never-ending struggle, it could only be girlish folly on Lily’s part, want of power to perceive the differences and the expediencies. Could any thing be more just than this reasoning? There is no one in his senses who would not agree in it. To wait a year or two at Lily’s age—what more natural, more beneficial? He would have felt that he was taking advantage of her inexperience if he had urged her to marry him at such a cost. And waiting cost nothing, at least to him.
Not very long after Lily left Edinburgh Lumsden had encountered Sir Robert one evening at one of the big dinner-parties which were the old gentleman’s chief pleasure, and he had taken an opportunity to address the young fellow on the subject which could not be forgotten between them. He warned Lumsden that he would permit no nonsense, no clandestine correspondence, and that it was a thing which could not be done, as his faithful servants at Dalrugas kept him acquainted with every thing that passed, and he would rather carry his niece away to England or even abroad (that word of fear and mystery) than allow her to make a silly and unequal marriage. “You are sensible enough to understand the position,” the old man had said. “From all I hear of you you are no hot-headed young fool. What you would gain yourself would be only a wife quite unused to shifts and stress of weather, and probably a mere burden upon you, with her waiting-woman serving her hand and foot, and her fine-lady ways—not the useful helpmate a struggling man requires.”
“I should not be afraid of that,” said Lumsden, with a pale smile, for no lover, however feeble-hearted, likes to hear such an account of his love, and no youth on the verge of successful life can be any thing but impatient to hear himself described as a struggling man. “I expect to make my way in my profession, and I have reason to expect so. And Lily–”
“Miss Ramsay, if you please. She is a fine lady to the tips of her fingers. She can neither dress nor eat nor move a step without Robina at her tail. She is not fitted, I tell you, for the wife of a struggling man.”
“But suppose I tell you,” cried Lumsden with spirit, “that I shall be a struggling man only for a little while, and that she is in every way fitted to be my wife?”
“Dismiss it from your mind, sir; dismiss it from your mind,” said Sir Robert. “What will the world say? and what the world says is of great consequence to a man that has to struggle, even if it is only at the beginning. They will say that you’ve worked upon a girl’s inexperience and beguiled her to poverty. They will say that she did not know what she was doing, but you did. They will say you were a fool for your own sake, and they will say you took advantage of her.”
“All which things will be untrue,” said Lumsden hotly.
But then they were disturbed and no more was said. This conversation, though so brief, was enough to fill a man’s mind with misgivings, at least a reasonable man’s, prone to think before and not after the event. Lumsden was not one that is carried away by impulse. The first effect was that he did not write, as he had intended, to Lily. What was the use of writing if Sir Robert’s faithful servants would intercept the letters? Why run any risk when there