… “On the shadowy margin
Of the lake, in a spot sequester’d.”
“Can that noise be the bagpipes?” said Frances to Julia, trying to look from an upper window in one of the turrets of Arandale Castle. But no object immediately near the building could be discerned from windows situated as were those of this apartment. The more removed prospect, however, was rich and magnificent. Woods, which seemed interminable, every where met the eye; with, here and there, an opening among their ranges, displaying a[71] grassy avenue which ran along till lost again in the far perspective of grove meeting grove. In some of those avenues stood herds of deer, looking around them with an air of the most stately security; in others, even hares and rabbits were sometimes seen to venture from under cover, cross a path, and disappear again, whilst innumerable cawing rooks, continually passing and repassing each other’s heavy flight, hovered over all the summits of the trees; and in their branches sat gay plumed peacocks, uttering, from time to time, their wild cry. To complete the picture, one of the grassy avenues already described, terminated in a smooth, still sheet of water, an arm of which was crossed, at a considerable height, by a light bridge of iron work; while, on its glassy surface, sailed two snow white swans, the sole visible inhabitants of this their watery realm.
[72]
“It is the bagpipes, my Lady,” said Alice Smyth, “the housekeeper told me to tell your ladyships, that that was the way your ladyships would know when breakfast was ready. The old piper walks up and down under the windows, playing highland tunes all the time of breakfast, which my Lady Arandale makes herself every day at ten o’clock, and never waits for any body, but sends all away again at eleven, let who will or will not come down.”
“And does her ladyship make no allowance for the first morning after a long journey?” said Frances, (for they had all arrived at Arandale but the night before); “I declare my limbs are quite stiff. But we had better make haste, or, by Alice’s account, we shall have no breakfast,” she continued, taking her sister’s arm.
As they passed along the galleries above,[73] and across the halls below, numerous domestics pointed out, in silence, the way to the breakfast room. On their entrance, a general move took place among the gentlemen, though only the family party, each offered or pointed out a seat or seats. It so happened, that Julia took one offered by Edmund, who seated himself beside her, and began silently placing within her reach, every thing she could possibly want.
Lady Arandale sat at the head, Lady Susan at the foot of a long table; the one filled tea, the other coffee; and, in the intermediate space appeared the usual hot rolls, toast, eggs, etc. of an English breakfast, reinforced by the Scottish addition of crisp leaves of oaten cake, thin as writing paper, together with comfits, marmalade, and all sorts of[74] sweetmeats. Lord Morven presided at a side table, abundantly covered with savoury pies, cold meats, and dried fish; while Lord Arandale seemed to have the sole possession of a third and lesser one, where he alone was eating of a certain preparation of oatmeal, called in Scotland, porridge.
“You have quite forsaken your post, Captain Montgomery,” said Lady Susan. “I beg a thousand pardons,” exclaimed Edmund, starting up, “I thought I had filled all the cups.”
“Indeed!” replied her ladyship, in a tone of much pique, “Oh, pray be seated,” then, affecting a laugh, and closing her eyelids quickly once or twice to disperse a tear that might else have betrayed her mortification, she added, “you did not then, let me inform you, fill[75] even one. Nay, do pray sit down!” she continued, as Edmund made another attempt to rise, “I have completed my task with very little fatigue, I assure you, though you were so much shocked at the idea of my undertaking it.” Lord Morven, a wing of pigeon suspended on his fork, looked round at his sister with a broad and silent stare. She blushed, and addressed, successively, Henry, Frances, and Colonel Morven, without waiting for an answer from any of them. Edmund coloured, and Julia, who had neither been addressed nor accused, but by her own conscience, coloured also.
Lord Arandale, having dispatched his first course, joined the general table to finish his repast with some of the good things it afforded. Plans of amusement for the day now became the general topic; Julia and Frances[76] begged that they might be permitted to explore some of the beauties of the grounds, which, from their windows, promised so much. Lady Susan proposed a visit to her cottage; it was one of those imitations of a real rustic habitation, which, situated in some delightful retirement in the midst of extensive pleasure grounds, were the fashionable playthings of the great young ladies of the day. A spinning wheel was always a part of the furniture, and a proficiency in its use a necessary accomplishment to ladies possessing these rural boudoirs. Her ladyship’s proposition seemed agreeable to every one; particularly as the walk to the cottage led through much of what was most interesting in the grounds. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, the whole party assembled in front of the castle to commence their ramble.
Lord Arandale saying that he would show[77] Julia the way, drew her arm over his; Lord Morven offered his to Frances; Henry joined Colonel Morven; Lady Susan walked alone; and Edmund, who on first setting out had intended to walk at the other side of Julia, felt himself obliged, in common politeness, to step forward and join the lady who had no companion. He did not, however, intend to offer his arm, as he meant to avail himself of the first favourable opportunity for desertion. But her ladyship struck her foot against the stump of a flower root, then limped a step or two, and next came in contact with a loose stone: in short he found it impossible to evince a suitable concern for such accidents, without saying something about an arm. Lady Susan accordingly took his arm; laughed at her own giddiness, confessed her want of a guide; “Though,” she added, “here I ought rather[78] to be yours, instead of making myself so troublesome.” Edmund said, very coolly, as he thought, that he was happy in being useful; reproached her ladyship in due form for misnaming the pleasure of being so, a trouble; and proceeded to hope that she had not suffered materially from his negligence, in the first instance. There was something so soothing, so persuasive in Edmund’s manner and voice, at all times, that common politeness from him, possessed an almost dangerous charm; and her ladyship was willing to be deceived.
Such a manner must be the result of suppressed feeling, thought Lady Susan; but she remembered the coffee: yet, might not even that, she asked herself, be one of the strange inconsistencies of love. Her spirits began to rise; and her good humour, never long absent, returned. She introduced sentimental subjects, and frequently[79] spoke in so low a tone, that Edmund was obliged to stoop towards her to gather the meaning of what she said; so that to those who walked behind them, they appeared to be engaged in very earnest, and very interesting conversation. They turned off into a narrower walk; and the next time Edmund looked over his shoulder, which he did rather oftener than Lady Susan liked, not one of the rest of the party was any where to be seen.
“Your ladyship should certainly know the way here,” said Edmund, hesitating, and slackening his pace; “but we have either left them all very far behind, or taken a wrong path.” “This is the prettiest way to my cottage,” said her ladyship, “to which they will all certainly bend their steps, by whatever walk they may have gone round.” Accordingly, our advance couple proceeded onward uninterrupted[80] through delightful solitudes. Her ladyship grew more and more romantic; many of her opinions, many of her very expressions were in perfect unison with the secret sentiments of Edmund; though those sentiments had, it must be confessed another object; Edmund’s replies, therefore, were frequently bursts of feeling suddenly checked; he was often silent, and sometimes sighed.
Lady Susan no longer doubted. There was a struggle in her bosom between natural modesty and a generous wish to reward the attachment of one, who was kept silent by honourable and manly motives.
By this time they reached the cottage. It was all that was rural; thatched, of course, and overgrown with jessamine, honeysuckle, and ever blowing roses. Buried in the deep woods that surrounded the castle, it had a little[81] paled in garden and a small space of green, clear in its front; and, at the foot of the green, ran a little rivulet with a plank thrown over it, to form a rustic bridge. Tamed pheasants strayed about instead of barn-door fowl, a kid was tied to the paling, and a sheep with two lambs fed on the little plot of grass before the door.
Her ladyship having, with Edmund’s assistance, crossed the plank, caressed each of her favourites as she passed them, and, leading the way through the little garden, opened the latch of the cottage. All within was perfect rusticity: the furniture consisted of a small dresser with a few delf plates, a corner cupboard with some common looking cups and saucers, a deal table, a few wooden chairs, a low three legged stool, a spinning wheel, a kettle and some dried herbs suspended from the ceiling, some bright tin utensils arranged on nails against the wall[82] over the chimney-piece, and a small looking-glass hung at the side of the latticed window.
Lady Susan became silent and absent; went to various repositories of grain and fed each of her pets; Edmund, of course, assisting. When she had finished, she seated herself on the three-legged stool, and began to spin with great assiduity and quite a practised hand. Edmund, whom she had requested to take a chair beside her, sat for some time in silent admiration of her performance. Suddenly, she lifted the toe of the foot that had kept the wheel in motion, and suspended the little white hand over the fore finger, of which the thread had been passing. “This spot, you see, Captain Montgomery,” she said, “is my plaything; yet, how happy might people be whose all it was!”
“Certainly!” he replied with much energy,[83] instantly making Julia in imagination its mistress, and himself her partner for life: “Here is all that unsophisticated nature calls for; and, in the society of an object beloved, how seldom would the outer world be remembered!”
Her ladyship blushed and sighed; but Edmund’s thoughts were full of another image, and the blush and the sigh, which else might have spoken volumes, were unnoticed by him. A considerable pause ensued. “It certainly is madness,” said Lady Susan at length in a low voice, and with some hesitation, “It certainly—is—madness, to sacrifice realities to opinions, and those opinions not our own!”
“Oh, most assuredly!” replied Edmund, “when such is the case; but when our own opinions, our own sense of all that is honourable, just, grateful, are in direct opposition to our own feelings of all that:”—he recollected[84] himself, broke off suddenly, and coloured: not that he apprehended being misunderstood; he rather dreaded that he was too well understood, and conscious that he thought of Julia while he spoke, feared he had inadvertently betrayed sentiments it was so incumbent upon him to conceal. “Yet—yet—” said her ladyship, “if—if the object—of an attachment so tender, yet governed so entirely by honourable principles, is willing to wave imaginary, in favour of real superiority?”—and she held out her hand.
Edmund first stared at the hand; then, scarcely conscious of the mechanical movement, took it in his. “For heaven’s sake, what do you mean, Lady Susan?” he exclaimed, changing colour twenty times in a minute; for, still possessed with the one idea, and too little of a coxcomb to be ready to believe[85] her ladyship seriously attached to him because idle people had jested on the subject, the thought crossed his mind in the confusion of the moment, that Lady Susan must be in the confidence of her cousin, and must be expressing her belief that Julia returned his attachment.
Lady Susan spoke again,—“It would be mere affectation in me, Captain Montgomery,” she said, “to pretend blindness to the state of your feelings, and I respect the motives that have prevented their open declaration—” Her ladyship looked down, paused, and trembled excessively. Voices were heard without. The party passed the paling gate, and moved along the little walk of the garden. Lady Susan looked in alarm towards the door, coloured very deeply, and said, in a hurried tone, and with a kind of smile that struggled with a few tears of mingled pleasure and shame, “It is[86] rather hard, that I should have it to say, half unasked after all; yet, in favour of your motives, which I honour, I will say it—I am yours!” At this moment, the whole party flocked in, and filled up the little cottage room. Lady Susan snatched away her hand, which Edmund had been too much puzzled to resign, and resumed her spinning in a state of overwhelming confusion. Edmund stood rooted to the spot, looking and feeling, if possible, still more confounded; his colour mounting gradually as his perception of the truth cleared up, while his countenance became filled with expressions the most inexplicable!
Lord Arandale, fortunately for Lady Susan, was too busy speaking to Julia about some of the beauties of the grounds to observe his daughter. But he addressed an ear that heard little of what he said. Julia, during the walk, had[87] been wishing that Edmund would join them. She had observed him when going on before the rest of the party with Lady Susan, and, seemingly engaged in a conversation so earnest; and she had, even then, felt a slight unacknowledged sensation of uneasiness.
On entering the cottage, the first object that met her eye was the eye of Edmund. For the first time its expression did not banish every shadow from her thoughts, did not bring sunshine to her heart. It had never before had a meaning that she had not felt, at least, (if not exactly understood,) and felt with a too dangerous consciousness of delight; now his eye wandered from hers without an answering look. Lady Susan, too, how extraordinary was her expression! Julia became in one moment, though she had no time to ask herself why, miserable! entirely miserable! It was a kind[88] of wretchedness, too, that she had never before even imagined. It puzzled—it alarmed her. A hopelessness came over her heart, that in all her grievings over the thoughts of Edmund’s going away, she had never known. Though she had never formed any other plan but that Edmund was to be her friend, her brother, she his friend, his sister; this had all been, while the bare idea of ever being other than the first in his affections, had not once presented itself to her imagination as even possible; but now, unaccustomed as she was to analyze subjects of love and marriage, there was something in the circumstances of the two conscious beings before her, which seemed obviously to set up a living, breathing object between herself and Edmund. Why such should be any obstacle to brotherly and sisterly regard still subsisting between them, she did not particularly enquire;[89] yet all the stores of love and happiness that she had been collecting from infancy, seemed now to have been swept away in one single moment. She continued, however, to hang on the arm of Lord Arandale, and to answer any direct questions put to her as well as she could. After examining and admiring the cottage and grounds, the party at length returned to the gravel-sweep before the castle.
A curricle, with a gentleman driving, and a lady seated beside him, was now seen approaching. “Here is Lady Morven at last,” said Lord Arandale, letting go Julia’s arm, and advancing towards the new arrival.
“Matilda, I declare!” cried Lady Susan, hastening forward with her brother, who, on their return from the cottage, had, in a very marked manner, insisted on her taking his second arm. Edmund, who had walked in silence[90] on the other side of Julia, pondering partly on her altered manner, and partly on his own late adventure; when Lord Arandale withdrew his support, took up her hand, softly, and drew it over his arm; bending forward, at the same time, as if anxious to catch a view of her countenance. She kept her head, however, carefully turned in a contrary direction, and the moment they reached the steps, without speaking or looking round, withdrew her arm, glided away, and hurried up to her own room. Yet, such is the weakness of the heart that loves, that she had felt less unhappy during the few seconds her arm had rested on that of Edmund.
Julia’s conduct and feelings on this occasion, were certainly very foolish, but it must be remembered that she was scarcely eighteen; that she had been brought up in perfect[91] seclusion, a seclusion too of sentiment, where, from five years old, she had never seen, or even heard any thing of life, but within the one domestic circle, in which all that was thought of, was tender mourning for the one that was lost, and tender cherishing of the few that were left. It is not then surprising that those few, and the first place in their hearts, should be romantically valued by one whose opening mind had thus, in every stage of its developement, been strongly impressed with the one idea, that all the rest of the world must be for ever strangers to her, in comparison of those who had, in this exclusive manner, possessed her earliest affections. And when, in addition to all this, the spell of a first love had fallen on a heart so prepared, could much philosophy be expected?