Sir Robert's Fortune. Маргарет Олифант
might be lost and never heard of more? Ronald pondered all these things much, but his pondering was in different circumstances from Lily’s. She had nothing to divert her mind; he had a great deal. Society had ended for her, but it was in full circulation, and he had his full share in every thing, where he was. The pressure is very different in cases so unlike. The girl had nothing to break the monotony of hour after hour, and day after day. The young man had a full and busy life: so long in the Parliament House, so long in his chambers; a consultation; a hard piece of mental work to make out a case; a cheerful dinner in the evening with some one; a wavering circle of other men always more or less surrounding him. The difficulty was not having too much time to think, but how to have time enough; and the season of occupation and company and events hurried on so that when he looked back upon a week it appeared to him like a day. And he had no way of knowing how it lingered with Lily. He wondered a little and felt it a grievance that she did not write to him, which would have been so very easy. There were no faithful servants on his side to intercept letters. She might have at least sent him a line to announce her safe arrival, and tell him how the land lay. He on his side could quite endure till the Vacation, when he had made up his mind to do something, to have news of her somehow. Even this determination made it more easy for him to defer writing, to make no attempt at communication; for why warn Sir Robert’s servants and himself of what he intended to do, so that they might concert means to balk him? whereas it was so very doubtful whether any thing he sent would reach Lily. Thus he reasoned with himself, with always the refrain that a year or two of waiting at his own age and Lily’s could do no one any harm.
Yet Ronald was but mortal, though he was so wise. Sir Robert left Edinburgh, going to pay his round of visits before he went abroad, which he invariably did every autumn. There was no Monte Carlo in those days, and old gentlemen had not acquired the habit of sunning themselves on the Riviera; but, on the other hand, there was much more to attract them at the German baths, which had many of the attractions now concentrated at Monte Carlo; and Florence possessed a court and society where life went on in that round of entertainment and congregation which is essential to old persons of the world. Sir Robert disappeared some time before the circles of the Parliament House broke up, and young Lumsden was thus freed from the disagreeable consciousness of being more or less under the personal observation of his enemy. And he loved Lily, though he was willing to wait and to be temporarily separated from her in the interests of their future comfort and Sir Robert’s fortune. So that, when he was released from his work, and free to direct his movements for a time as he pleased, an attraction which he could not resist led him to the place of his lady’s exile. All the good reasons which his ever-working mind brought forth against this were, I am happy to say, ineffectual. He said to himself that it was a foolish thing; that if reported to Sir Robert—and how could it fail to be reported to Sir Robert, since his servants were so faithful, and it would be impossible to keep them in the dark?—would only precipitate every thing and lead to Lily’s transfer to a safer hiding-place. He repeated to himself that to wait for a year or two at twenty-two and at twenty-eight was no real hardship: it was rather an advantage. But none of these wise considerations affected his mind as they ought to have done. He had a hunger and thirst upon him to see the girl he loved. He wanted to make sure that she was there, that there was a Lily in the world, that eventually she would be his and share his life. It was plus fort que lui.
He went home, however, as in duty bound, to the spare old house on the edge of the Highlands, where he and all his brothers and sisters had been born and bred; where there was a little shooting, soon exhausted by reason of the many guns brought to bear upon it, and a good deal of company in a homely way, impromptu dances almost every night, as is the fashion in a large family, which attracts young people round it far and near. But in all this simple jollity Ronald only felt more the absence of his love, and the vacant place in the world which could only be filled by her; though what, perhaps, had as great an effect upon him as any thing else was that his favorite sister, whom, next to her, perhaps he liked best in the world, knew about Lily, having been taken into his confidence before he had realized all the difficulties, and talked to him perpetually about her, disapproving of his inactivity and much compassionating the lonely girl. “Oh, if I were only near enough, I would go and see her and keep up her heart!” Janet Lumsden would cry, while her brother was fast getting into the condition of mind in which to see her, to make sure of her existence, was a necessity. In this condition the old house at home, with all its simple gayeties and tumult, became intolerable to him. He could have kicked the brother who demanded his sympathy in his engagement to a young lady with a fortune, neither the young lady nor the fortune being worthy to be compared to Lily, though the family was delighted by such a piece of good luck for Rob. And it set all his nerves wrong to see the flirtations that went on around him, though they were frank and simple affairs, the inevitable preferences which one boy and girl among so many would naturally show for each other. All this seemed vulgar, common, intolerable, and in the worst taste to Ronald. It was not that he was really more refined than his brothers, but that his own affairs had gone (temporarily) so wrong, and his own chosen one was so far out of the way. All the jolly, hearty winter life at home jarred on him and upset his nerves, those artificial things which did not exist in Perthshire at that period, whatever they may do now.
At last, when he could not endure it any longer, he announced that he was going a-fishing up toward the North. He was not a great fisherman, and the brothers laughed at Ronald setting out with his rod; but he had the natural gift, common to all Scotsmen of good blood, of knowing most people throughout his native country, or at least one part of his native country, and being sure of a welcome in a hundred houses in which a son of Lumsden of Pontalloch was a known and recognizable person, though Lumsden of Pontalloch himself was by no means a rich or important man. This is an advantage which the roturier never acquires until at least he has passed through three or four generations. Ronald Lumsden knew that he would never be at a loss, that if rejected in one city he could flee into another, and that if any impertinent questions were put to him by Sir Robert’s own faithful servants, he could always say that he was going to stay at any of the known houses within twenty miles. This hospitality perhaps exists no longer, for many of these houses now, probably the greater part of them, are let to strangers and foreigners, to whom even the native names are strange and the condition of the country means nothing. But it was so still in those days.
He set out thus, more or less at his ease, and lingered a little on his way. Then he bethought himself, or so he said, of the Rugas, in which he had fished once as a boy, and which justified him in getting off the coach at the little inn, not much better than a village public-house, where a bare room and a hard bed were to be had, and a right to fish could be negotiated for. He had a day’s fishing to give himself a countenance, enquiring into the history generally of the country, and which houses were occupied, and which lairds “up for the shooting.”
“Sir Robert here? Na, Sir Robert’s not here. Bless us a’, what would bring him here, an auld man like that, that just adores his creature comforts, and never touches a gun, good season or bad. No, he’s no here, nor he hasna been here this dozen years. But I’ll tell you wha’s here, and that’s a greater ferlie: his bonnie wee niece, Maister James’s daughter, Miss Lily, as they call her. And it’s no for the shooting, there’s nae need to say, nor for the fishing either, poor bit thing. But what it is for is more than I can tell ye. It’s just a black, burning shame–”
“Why is it a shame? Is the house haunted, or what’s the matter?” Ronald said, averting his face.
“Haunted! that’s a pack of havers. I’m not minding about haunted. But I tell ye what, sir, that bit lassie (and a bonnie bit lassie she is) is all her lane there, like a lily flower in the wilderness; for Lily she’s called, and Lily she is—a bit willowy slender creature, bowing her head like a flower on the stalk.” The landlord, who was short and red and stout, leaned his own head to one side to simulate the young lady’s attitude. “She’s there and never sees a single soul, and it’s mair than her life’s worth if ye take my opinion. If there was any body to keep her company, or even a lot of sportsmen coming and going, it would be something; but there she is, all her lane.”
“Miss Ramsay! I have met her in Edinburgh,” Ronald said.
“Then, if I were you, I would just take my foot in my hand and gang ower the moor and pay her a visit. She will have a grand