Chapter VII: Dreams and Doubts

The sun of a soft and balmy summer afternoon was, as the song has it,

'Glinting bright
On Invermay's sweet glen and stream,'

on all the silver birches that grow thereby, on the rocky gullies through which the stream gurgles and babbles as it forces a passage towards the Earn, and on the green mound of the Holy Hill, of which its ceaseless current has swept so much away, when Mary Wellwood, alone, or attended only by her dog, and full of her own happy and innocent day-dreams, took a narrow path that leads northward down the side of the sylvan strath.

Her dress was plain, but fitted well her lithe and slender figure. She had on the daintiest of white cuffs and collar; a sunshade over her head lined with pink imparted to her soft face a glow that it did not naturally possess, and over her left arm were the two chaplets she and Ellinor had been so lately preparing.

No sound but the rustle of leaves and the twitter of birds broke the sunny stillness, till she eventually heard Jack, her fox-terrier, who was careering in front of her, barking and yelping with all the satisfaction of a joyous dog that has met with a friend, and almost immediately afterwards a turn of the rocky path brought her face to face with Captain Colville, who, rod in hand and basket on shoulder, had just quitted his fishing in the May after a satisfactory day's sport, and about whose well-gaitered legs Jack was leaping and bounding noisily.

'When Jack was here, I knew his mistress could not be far off,' said Colville, lifting his fly-garnished wideawake and presenting a hand with his brightest smile. 'You know the saw, Miss Wellwood, "Love me, love my dog," but it would seem that Jack loves me. And Jack is a travelled dog, I understand--one who has seen the world?'

'Yes; Jack was a soldier's dog--was with Roberts' army in India, and in more than one battle,' replied Mary.

'I too have been in India--a bond between Jack and me,' said Colville, as he produced a biscuit from his pocket, and the dog caught it with a snap.

'He wags his dear old tail quite as if he recognised a comrade,' said Mary, laughing, while Colville accompanied her along the narrow path over which the silver birches drooped their graceful foliage.

'And so you and your sister, Miss Ellinor, are cousins of my brother-officer, Wellwood?' said Colville, after a pause, and a little abruptly, as Mary thought.

'I am sorry to say we are.'

'Why sorry--he is not half a bad fellow?'

'Well, I have no reason to be otherwise than quite indifferent on the subject of his existence. It was some family matter. Our parents were never friends, and he--he----'

'What?'

'Has chosen to forget there were such persons in the world as Ellinor and I; and considering that we have so few relations--none else nearly now----' Mary paused, and her eyes fell on the chaplets through which her slender arm was passed.

'He could never have seen you,' said Colville, earnestly; 'had he done so he would never have forgotten you, believe me; and when I tell him----'

'Tell him nothing, pray.'

'As you please, Miss Wellwood. I knew him in India, before I was in the Guards.'

'Indeed.'

'Yes; I remember his first dinner with our mess at Lahore--got screwed, as the phrase is; and how do you think he was taken to his bungalow?'

'In a cab, perhaps,' suggested Mary.

'We carried him through the lines shoulder-high upon a door, with the bugles playing the "Dead March in Saul," before him.'

'Then he is dissipated?'

'Oh--awfully--a wild fellow, in that sense.'

'He was wounded in an affair with a hill tribe?'

'So was I. Had your odious cousin been shot, I suppose you would not have cared much?'

'Nay--nay--_nay_,' exclaimed Mary; 'can you think so vilely of me? Perhaps I might have wept for him?'

'Indeed. Why?'

'In the knowledge that, like Ellinor and myself, he had no father, mother, or other kindred to sorrow for him.'

Her voice, musical at all times, and sweetly modulated--for a chord seemed to run through every word--broke a little just then; and she coloured on seeing how earnestly her companion was regarding her.

'For what purpose are those wreaths of flowers?' he asked, softly, after a pause.

'To lay upon our graves.'

'Our graves,' he repeated.

'Papa and mamma's graves, I mean.'

'A melancholy duty.'

'The only one that is left us now.'

'May I accompany you?'

'If you choose, Captain Colville.'

'And where are they buried?'

'Here,' replied Mary, as she gently opened the gate of the churchyard, and they entered together.

It was an old and sequestered burying-ground--older than the days when Fordoun, the Father of Scottish History, wrote of the district as Fortevioch, a supposed corruption of the Gaelic for distant and remote. Old headstones, spotted with lichens and green with moss, were there half sunk in the ground amid the long rank grass; but the two graves that Mary sought so lovingly, were smoothly turfed and adorned with flowers planted by the hands of herself and Ellinor.

As she knelt to deposit a chaplet at the head of each, Colville read the inscription on the modest tombstone to the memory of Colonel Wellwood, of the Scots Fusiliers, and Ellinor his wife, and Mary, glancing upwards, saw that as he read a soft expression stole into his face, while he hastily, almost surreptitiously, lifted his hat, and then looked more kindly, if possible, at her.

'Well,' thought the girl, 'he is, at least, the best of good fellows to feel this interest in total strangers. It is, I suppose, what poor papa used to call "the Freemasonry of the service."'

Anon came other thoughts that were less pleasing to her. Did real emotion and kindness prompt all this, or was it but a cunning attempt, by an affectation of sympathy and friendly interest, to gain her favour.

But she repelled the suspicion as something unworthy of him and of herself.

Quitting the churchyard in silence, he softly closed the gate, and they continued to walk on slowly a little way together, and Colville was silently recalling Mary's curious legendary story of the funereal light seen by Elspat, the old soldier's widow.

Mary Wellwood's manner and bearing proved to Colville wonderfully attractive. Easy, unaffected, and apparently unconscious of her own beauty, she was charming. She was equal, in all the attributes of good society, to any girl he had met, and Leslie Colville was no bad judge, as he had been brought up in an exclusive set, among whom any faults of breeding were discrepancies never to be atoned for.

And she--how was she affected towards him? Stealing a glance at his handsome face and figure from time to time, and listening to his very pleasant voice, Mary--somewhat of a day-dreamer--was thinking how delightful it would have been had God given her and Ellinor such a man as a brother to guide, love, and protect them.

It began to seem to both that they had been friends--companions certainly--for a longer time than they had known each other; they discovered so much in common between them, so far as sentiment and opinion went; but remembering Mr. Wodrow's assurance that Captain Colville was engaged to Blanche Galloway, she compelled herself to be somewhat reserved in her manner towards him, yet more than once it thawed unconsciously. However, she was a little startled when, after a pause, he said suddenly, in a low and earnest tone, while looking down into her face,

'Tell me something of your life here at Invermay, Miss Wellwood?'

'Something of my life--what a strange request!' exclaimed Mary, her dark blue eyes dilating as she spoke. 'What can I tell you that could be of interest to you?'

'Pardon me--how your time passes, for instance, I mean.'

'As you see,' she replied, smiling, 'and as you have seen; my daily duties but repeat themselves. I have my little household to look after, accounts and taxes to pay--thanks to our kind kinsman abroad (for Birkwoodbrae is entailed) we have no rent to pay; I have my feathered family in the yard to supervise; my garden with its flowers and fruits; my poor pensioners in the village and all round about.'

'A grey life for one so young and winning,' thought Colville; 'and with you,' he added aloud, 'so runs the world away?'

'Yes.'

'And all your people love you, Dr. Wodrow tells me?'

'I hope so--nay, I am sure they do,' replied Mary, with one of her brightest smiles.

'And you love the scenery here?'

'Yes--every rock and tree and stream; they have all their old stories and young associations to me.'

'And your old home at Birkwoodbrae?' he added, smiling at her enthusiasm.

'Yes--dearly, every stone of it!'

He paused a little, as if lost in thought, and then said,

'But surely you must miss something in your life, Miss Wellwood--you must be lonely amid these birchen woods?'

'Lonely with Ellinor and all my work? Oh! no. I assure you I am not.'

'But you cannot expect to have her--a girl so very handsome--always with you?'

'Perhaps not,' said Mary, and her long dark lashes drooped, as her thoughts hovered between poor Robert Wodrow and his probable rival, the tawny-haired Englishman.

'Nor can she always have you; and what then?' said Colville, lightly touching her hand, and lowering his voice in a way that to some there would have been no mistaking; but Mary, devoid of vanity, was all unconscious of it, and, disliking to talk about herself, now talked of other things.

Again and again Colville thought, in her perfect sweetness, humility, and composure, how utterly dissimilar she was in many ways from the town-bred girls he had been wont to meet in his London life especially, where the beautiful was so often combined with the artificial, and even youth with utter hollowness of heart. Amid dinners, garden-parties, the Row, and the general _rôle_ of his life as a Guardsman, the pet of many a woman and her fair brood, all the more that he was now the inheritor of a revenue that was great, he had been conscious of all that.

To Mary--who was a close observer in her way--it sometimes seemed that there was in Captain Colville's face, when he addressed her, a half-amused expression, mingling with much of undoubted admiration. The first was occasionally a source of pique to her; and the other was a source of pique, too, rather than pleasure; for, if he was the _fiancé_ of Miss Galloway, he had no business to amuse himself with, or bestow admiration on, any other young lady, and these ideas made her manner to him reserved at times.

In being assisted over an awkward stone stile, though she required no aid, yet she was compelled to take his proffered grasp, but even then unconsciously her

'Very coldness still was kind,
And tremulously gentle her small hand
Withdrew itself from his, but left behind
A little pressure, thrilling, and so bland
And slight, that to the mind 'twas but a doubt.'

As her slim hand was quickly withdrawn from his, and she murmured her 'thanks,' Mary's first thought was that it was cased in a somewhat too well-worn glove, and Colville perhaps remarked this too, for he said,

'Do you always wear gauntlet gloves?'

'No; but then I am so much in the garden among thorns and bushes that ordinary gloves are useless, and I used to get through so many of six and a quarter.'

'Surely even that is too large for a hand like yours,' said he; and Mary now fairly blushed at the tenor of the conversation, and when he attempted again to take her shapely little hand in his she resolutely withheld it, and, thinking of Blanche Galloway, said,

'Please don't, Captain Colville; and now I must bid you farewell, with many thanks for your escort.'

And Colville, who was under the impression, from Blanche Galloway's mistaken remark, that Robert Wodrow was 'the lover of the elder sister,' thought he would not just then press his society further upon Mary Wellwood. Nor could he have done so, for just where the little wooded path they had been pursuing opened upon the highway, a well-appointed little park phaeton, drawn by a pair of beautiful ponies, and driven by Blanche Galloway, was seen drawn up under the trees about forty yards off.

'The time has passed so quickly when with you, Miss Wellwood,' said Colville, lifting his hat with an air of positive confusion, 'that I forgot--I quite forgot----'

'What, Captain Colville?'

'That Miss Galloway's pony carriage was to meet me here, and drive me home. Ah, there it is----'

'And she too, I think,' said Mary, turning, and growing pale with absolute pain and annoyance at the whole situation; yet, after all, there was nothing in it. However, the Honourable Blanche, after a glance at Mary from under her tied veil, turned away also; and Mary, with pride awakened and a sense of mortification, pursued the path to Birkwoodbrae.

But Jack, as if loth that the two should part, scoured backwards and forwards between them, till, after a time, he finally followed his mistress, and even from this, probably, Blanche angrily drew deductions.

We fear the captain did not enjoy much his drive home, though driven by a Park beauty in that luxurious pony phaeton, as Blanche put her own construction on the meeting and sudden parting--a construction far apart from the reality. She was sorely piqued, and he was not surprised by her taciturnity, though he strove to ignore it, and expatiated on the beauty of the scenery, on lights and shades, tints and effects, as if he had been a Royal Academician; nor was he surprised when she remarked to him very pointedly and plainly in the drawing-room after dinner, when she was idling over the piano,

'I don't think mamma will approve much of your cultivating those strange girls at Birkwoodbrae.'

'I do not do so,' said he, stooping close to her pretty head; 'but did not you and Lady Dunkeld call for them the other day?'

'Out of curiosity--and urged, perhaps, by Dr. Wodrow, who greatly affects to favour them.'

'Surely this is severe?' urged Colville, gently.

'Men, like women, cannot be too wary of chance medley acquaintances,' persisted Blanche, cresting up her handsome head.

'I have somewhere read,' said her mamma, who was now _au fait_ of the whole episode, 'that men may study women as they do a barometer, but only understand them on a subsequent day.'

'It may be so,' said Colville, 'but what then?'

'I agree with Blanche in her views of these Wellwood girls. People may do much in town that they cannot do in country places, where everyone's actions are, as it were, under a microscope; where every trivial movement is known, freely commented upon, and often exaggerated by menials and the vulgar. Thus,' continued Lady Dunkeld, with a very set expression on her usually placid face, 'I am not sure--nay, I am quite certain--it does not agree with what society calls _les convenances_, visiting these young girls.'

'In some respects you are right,' replied Colville, colouring with real pain; 'but I was not visiting. I only met Miss Wellwood near the old burying-ground--moreover, they are ladies, she and her sister, perfect ladies!' he urged, with a gleam in his dark eyes, which Lady Dunkeld was not slow to detect.

'But living so eccentrically alone?'

'So independently, let us say,' he continued.

'Captain Colville is quite their champion,' said Blanche, with a laugh that was not very genuine; and then the subject dropped.

Lady Dunkeld exchanged a quick glance with her daughter, and slowly fanned herself with an inscrutable expression on her certainly aristocratic face, and adopting the imperturbable placidity generally peculiar to her class and style.

Her somewhat unmotherly and selfish views deeply pained Colville, for reasons peculiarly his own, but had quite an opposite and most encouraging effect upon the enterprising mind of Sleath, who had listened in attentive silence.

A day or two subsequently a parcel came for Mary, addressed to Birkwoodbrae, but having with it no other clue than the vague one of the Edinburgh postmark. It contained, for both sisters, two beautiful boxes of gloves, all of the most delicate tints and finest quality. Each box was a miracle of carved white Indian ivory, lined with blue satin, a sachet of perfume on the under side of each lid, and their initials in silver on the upper.

Remembering what had passed at the stile, Mary Wellwood could not doubt who the donor was, and she flushed hotly with pleasure; yet it could all mean nothing--nothing but gallantry.

To decline the gifts would seem churlish and ungracious. She could not write, and resolved to wait for the first meeting with Colville to thank him.

Ellinor was quite in a flutter about the gifts--more so than Mary, who really felt, after a time, some confusion and dismay, for in the course of her simple life no such episode had occurred before; and she was all unlike the fair Blanche, to whom boxes of gloves were as nothing, and who could book her bets for far more than gloves on the winner of the Oaks or the Derby with the prettiest air of _sang froid_ in the world.

Mary's mind became filled with pleasant dreams, that joined with unpleasant doubts.

Was Colville really becoming an admirer of hers; or dared he be so, if the rumour about Blanche Galloway was true?