Merkland: or, Self Sacrifice. Oliphant Margaret
should not mean it for that, Miss Ross; but Mrs. Catherine said you would perhaps go with me to Falcon’s Craig. Will you? I should be half afraid if I went alone.”
“Feared for Marjory Falconer!” said Mrs. Catherine, entering the room. “If once she knew her own spirit, it is not an ill one; and I see not wherefore she should scare folk. I know well you are not feared, Anne. See, bairns, here are some bonnie dyes to look at, while I am away. Ye are to wear them the morn’s night, Alison Aytoun, according to your pleasure. They belong to yourself. And see you go not away, Anne, till I come back again. I will send Lewis up to hold you in mirth. For myself, I have things to make me up, other than mirthful.”
Alice advanced timidly to the table as Mrs. Catherine left the room. What might be within that mysterious enclosure of morocco? Anne smilingly anticipated her. Rich ornaments of pearls, more beautiful than any thing the simple, girlish eyes had ever looked upon before. Alice did not know how to look, or what to say; only her heart made one great leap of delight – all these were her own! How pleased and proud, not for the gift alone, but for the kindness that gave it, would be the mother’s heart at home!
Mrs. Catherine descended slowly, and, resuming her seat in the library, called the young lawyer and the factor to her presence, and dismissed Lewis to the pleasanter company up stairs. Mr. Ferguson, one of those acute, sagacious, well-informed men, who are to be met with so frequently in the middle class of rural Scotland, came with looks of anxious expectation, and Walter Foreman, of whom his independent client did not deign to ask counsel, took his place again, with secret pique, fancying himself at least as good an adviser as the plain and quiet stepdaughter of Mrs. Ross, of Merkland.
“Mr. Ferguson,” said Mrs. Catherine, “I have made up my mind. You shall have the siller. Thank me not. I do that which I know is wrong, and which I would have done for no mortal but Isabel Balfour’s son. You can get the papers made out at your convenience, and tell me the name of his dwelling. I will write to the ill-doer myself.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Ferguson, eagerly, “I beg you will not give yourself so much trouble, Mrs. Catherine. I will myself write to Strathoran immediately, and tell him of your kindness.”
“Doubtless,” said Mrs. Catherine: “but wherefore should I not have my word of exhortation, as well as another? Write me down Archie Sutherland’s address. I could get it from Lewis Ross, but I do not choose that; and let the siller be paid to Mr. Ferguson, Walter Foreman – that is, when the papers are ready – for mind that I do not give this siller, I only lend it.”
“On the lands of Lochend and Loelyin,” said Mr. Ferguson. “Of course, Mrs. Catherine.”
A slight smile of triumph hovered about the factor’s mouth. – Mrs. Catherine perceived it.
“On which I will have the annual rent paid to a day,” she said, with some sternness, “as if I were the coldest stranger that ever heard of Archie Sutherland’s needs or ill-doings, and, I trow, that is a wide word. If I had not purposed so, I might have given him the siller, for what is it to a woman of years like me? Truly, my own spirit bears me witness, that I would give that threefold, if it were mine to give, with a light heart, to restore the prodigal to the house of his fathers, as innocent as he went away. Let the business be done, Walter Foreman; doubtless, you will be taken up with the ploy to-morrow, and will be putting it off till after that.”
“We can get it done immediately,” said Walter, somewhat sullenly.
“What ails you, sir?” said Mrs. Catherine. “Should I have taken counsel with you on the secrets of my own spirit, think you? – I that am given to take counsel of no man. Be content, Walter 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