“Believe me—believe me,” cried John, “all that a brother can do, I will do.”
In the midst of this misery, which he felt to the bottom of his heart, there ran through him a secret stir of pleasure. Her brother!—the suggestion went through all his veins. Strange encounter of the dream with the fact! The cold trembling hand he held in his gave him a thrill of warmth and happiness, and yet his sympathy was as strong, his pity as profound, as one human creature ever felt for another. He stood still and watched her as she flitted back to the house, like a shadow in the gathering darkness. His heart ached, yet beat high. If it should ever be so, how different would be the fate of the other daughter of Lindores’s!—how he would guard her from every vexation, smooth every step of her way, strew it with flowers and sweetnesses! He resumed his way more quickly than ever, hastening along in the soft darkness which yet was not dark, by the Scaur—the shortcut which had alarmed his groom. To the pedestrian the way by the Scaur was the best way. He paused a moment when he reached it, to look out through the opening in the trees over the broad country, lying like a dream in that mystical paleness which was neither night nor day. Underneath, the river rushed joyously, noisily, through the night—not still, like a Southern stream, but dashing over the stones, and whirling its white eddies in foam against the bank. The sound of the water accompanied the quick current of his thoughts. He had a long walk before him, having come without preparation and left in haste and displeasure. But seven or eight miles of country road in a night of June is no such punishment. And the thoughts that had been roused in him, made the way short. How different—how different would be the fate of that other daughter of Lindores’s! It was only when he reached his own gate that he woke up with a start to remember indeed how different it would be. The bare little white house, with its little plantation, its clump of firs on the hilltop, its scanty avenue—the little estate, which could almost be said, with scornful exaggeration, to lie within the park of Tinto—the position of a small squire’s wife—was it likely that Lord Lindores would smile upon that for his daughter? John’s heart, which had been so buoyant, sank down into the depths. He began to see that his dream was ridiculous, his elation absurd. He to be the brother, in that sweetest way, of Carry Lindores! But nevertheless he vowed, as he went home somewhat crestfallen, that he would be a brother to her. She had given him her confidence, and he had given her his promise, and with this bond no worldly prudence nor rule of probabilities should be allowed to interfere.
XIX
John Erskine woke with the singing of the birds on the morning of Midsummer-day. It was early—far before any civilised hour of waking. When he suddenly opened his eyes in the sweet strangeness of that unearthly moment, the sensation came back to his mind of childish wakings in summer mornings long departed; of getting up in the unutterable stillness with the sense of being the first adventurer into an unknown world; of stealing downstairs through the silent visionary house all full of unseen sleepers, like ghosts behind the closed doors; of finding, with heart beating and little hands trembling, half with alarm, half with delight, the bolt low down on some easily opened door; and of stepping out into the sweet dews, into the ineffable glory of sunshine in which there was no shadow but that little one which was his own. Nobody alive, nobody awake, except that riot of the birds in every tree which wounded the ideal sense of unearthly calm, yet gave a consolatory consciousness of life and motion in the strange quiet, though a life incomprehensible, a language unknown. Strange that this was the first recollection brought to him in his waking—for the next was very different. The next was a confused sweet tumult in the air, a sound in his ears, an echo in his heart: “They are coming, they are coming!” He could not feel sure that somewhere or other in the words there were not joy-bells ringing—a tinkle of chimes, now rising, now falling, “as if a door were shut between us and the sound.” “They are coming,” everything seemed to say. The air of the morning blowing in by the open window puffed it at him with playful sweetness. The birds sang it, the trees shaped their rustlings to the words, “They are coming.”
Well, it was perfectly true. The Earl and Countess of Lindores, and their daughter, Lady Edith Lindores, and perhaps their son Lord Rintoul, and it might be other noble persons in their train, were certainly expected to arrive that day; but what was that to John Erskine of Dalrulzian, a country gentleman of the most moderate pretensions, with nothing about him above mediocrity, and no claim to any part or share in the life led by these great people? For the moment John did not ask himself that question. He only felt after this long interval of solitude and abandonment that they were coming back. He had been as it were shipwrecked in this country with which he was so little acquainted, though it was his own country: and the time of their absence had appeared very long to him. He said to himself their absence—but it will be understood that the absence of Lord Lindores, for example, had very little importance to the young man. He would not have been deeply concerned if that nobleman had been induced to
