Nancy Stair Part 15

"We are both Highland folk," I answered.

"Which is one excellent reason," he interrupted; "yet there are several more moving than that. Your father, Lord Stair, and mine were out together in the forty-fives, on which side I need scarcely mention; and again, your grandfather and mine both loved and fought for the beautiful Nancy Hamilton, and, but for the preference of the lady herself, she might have been my own grandmother. These things call for a friendly feeling between us, Lord Stair, but that which drives me forward most to your acquaintancy is the admiration I have for the writings of your daughter, Mistress Nancy, whose lines ring through my head more often than I care to tell, and whose poems have been upon my writing-table ever since they were published."

In this pleasant way we fell to talk of Nancy, of her gifts, her beauty, her loving tenderness for all things, her strange up-bringing, her people on the Burnside; and to a doting father such as I was the time flew quickly by.

I noted at length that there was some stir in the circle around her, and watched her cross the room with her Grace of Gordon and Danvers Carmichael in attendance, to the musicians' place in the great window.

I have wondered at times if folk who dwell on the temptations male creatures have think ever of those which come to women of great attractiveness to men. The thought came to me as Nancy took her place beside the harp and violins, which were to accompany her singing, and I sent a prayer to Heaven to keep my child unspotted from the world, uttering it none the less fervently because his Grace of Borthwicke, with lids veiling the fire of his eyes, was looking at her.

Twice she sang, her songs being of her own land, one of the highlands, with the perfume of the gorse and the heather in the lilt of it, and the second, by demand of Sandy, the gipsy song which had been handed down from woodland mother to woodland child for hundreds of years; a song which sent Nancy's lawless blood to her cheeks and set her heart beating with an inherited remembrance of raids and sea-fights, and lawless loves; which made her eyes misty with tears and unawakened pa.s.sion; the song which I had learned to dread, Marian's song:

"Love that is Life, Love that is Death, Love that is mine"----

And as she finished, carried off her feet by her own feelings, she looked toward us for a moment; but it was neither upon me nor Danvers Carmichael that the look fell; for, as one who knows she will be understood, her glance turned to his Grace of Borthwicke, whose eyes told a tale so openly that he who ran might read. I was more disturbed by this occurrence than I cared to admit, and after the supper, when Nancy, attended still by Danvers Carmichael, came back to us, I was glad to hear her say that she wished to go home. His Grace of Borthwicke being still near us, it fell upon me to present Danvers Carmichael to him, an introduction which Dandy acknowledged by a perfunctory bow and scant courtesy, and the duke by turning his eyes for one second in Dandy's direction and repeating his name as "McMichael" in the exasperating manner of one who neither knows nor cares who the person is who has been presented to him; and although at the time of the murder the lawyers tried to have it that the acquaintance between these two men was of London breeding, I can vouch for it, from my own knowledge and the testimony of Danvers Carmichael to me on our way home, that this was the first time he and the duke ever set eyes on each other.

In just the manner in which I have set it forth, in the compa.s.s of a few days, the three most important factors in Nancy's life came to the working out of it, Robert Burns, though but by book; Danvers Carmichael, a gentleman; and that splendid devil, John Montrose, Duke of Borthwicke, Ardvilarchan and Drumblaine in the Muirs.

CHAPTER XI

DANVERS CARMICHAEL MAKES A PROPOSAL

Whether the conduct of the Duke of Borthwicke brought a climax to the affairs between Danvers and Nancy I can not state for a surety, but the next morning as I sat alone on the south porch the boy came upon me with some suddenness.

"Lord Stair," he said, "it is with my father's knowledge and pleasurable consent that I come to ask your permission to have Nancy for my wife, if she can fancy me as a husband."

He turned very white as he spoke, but his bearing was manly and brave as that of his father's son should be, and my heart went out to him.

"Sit ye down, laddie," I said, "sit ye down. We'll have a smoke together and talk it over. I'm not denying that I like you for the two best reasons in the world. The first, for yourself; and the second, that ye're your father's son. And to pretend that a wedding between you two children would not give me the greatest pleasure in life would be idiot foolishness. I feel it my duty to you, however, as well as to my girl, to talk the thing over plainly. Have you any notion now," I asked, "as to Nancy's feeling toward you?"

"None whatever," he answers, gloomily enough.

"You've not questioned her in any way----"

"I'm a man of honor, Lord Stair," he responded, a bit in the air.

"Well, then," said I, "it will do no harm to set some of the obstacles before you that you may be allowed to deal with the situation bare-handed.

"Ye must see, Dandy, that Nancy Stair is different from other women and has been raised in a strange way. I'm no saying it's either a good way or a bad. I am saying that it's far from the accepted way women are bred up generally. It's no mere talent she has--for in a woman that's not harmful and frequently helps to entertain the children, as they come along; but with a girl, raised by men, whose name is ringing throughout the kingdom, who baffles every one by unfailing love and kindness, who has only the religion of making things better for others; a bit of a coquette, with such magnetism that one wants to touch her as one does a flower--I tell ye frankly, Danvers, as Pitcairn says, she's a dangerous contrivance of the Almighty's, and a man had best think many times before he takes her to his bosom as a wife."

"It's a singular state of affairs," Danvers answers, with a short laugh, "and one for which, I venture, even Nancy could find no bookish parallel. You tell me that you'd like me for a son-in-law, but warn me against your own daughter as a wife; while my father takes the other view of it: that he would like Nancy for his daughter, but thinks I'm far from being the one suited to her as a husband. Parents are not usually so dispa.s.sionate," he added, somewhat bitterly. I felt for the lad, and took a step along a side path.

"Ye're both over young as yet," I said, "and it's been less than a month since ye've known each other." And it was here that I had a taste of his fine temper, for he turned upon me in a sudden heat that made him splendid and natural to the eye.

"I have not heard that my Lord Stair was over-deliberate in his own wooing," he said.

I laughed aloud as he glowered at me, and put my hand on his shoulder, for I liked his impetuous ways and his deil's temper.

"There, there," I said, "gang your own gate. I but wanted ye to know what ye might expect in a wife. She'll contradict ye----"

"I don't want a wife who is an echo of myself," he retorted.

"She's jealous----"

"I wouldn't give a groat for a woman who wasn't," he responded.

"She is so extravagant," I went on, "that I never let even Sandy know her bills."

He made no answer to this whatever, as though it were a matter beneath discussion.

"She will forget you for days at a time while she's rhyme-making," I went on. "She will be interested in other men until the day she dies--"

his eye darkened at this--"and to sum it up, I don't know any woman more unsuited to you; but if she will have you, you've my consent," and I reached out my hand to him. "G.o.d bless you," I cried, and before our hands had parted Sandy came around the turn of the path.

"You've done just what I knew you'd do, Jock Stair," he said, glowering first at his son and then at me, "and ye know as well as I the foolishness of it. Take a man like this lad, who has been spoiled by an overfond mother, and a woman like Nancy, who has had her own way since birth, marry them to each other, and you've a magnificent basis for trouble. Why don't you marry your cousin Isabel? You'd thoughts of it before you left London!" he ended, in a futile way.

"I'm going to marry Nancy Stair, if she'll have me," Danvers replied, doggedly.

"Well, well, she may not have you," Sandy replied, soothingly. "And as she's under the lilacs you may care to join her."

Nothing pa.s.sed between Danvers and Nancy on the subject of marriage that morning, and I found at luncheon a probable explanation of the fact by reason of her absorption in the labor training idea and the building of an extension on the Burnside.

Between this scheme, her talk of Robert Burns, her interest in his Grace of Borthwicke, and an absolute and unnatural silence concerning Danvers, I was in some anxiety, and could come to no conclusion whatever concerning the state of her feelings. I mentioned Danvers'

good looks, and she quoted me back "The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night." I praised his conduct, and she answered with "The Epistle to Davie." It was the name of Burns that was constantly upon her lips; she set his verses to the music of old songs, singing them softly to herself in the gloaming, and I could see had made a G.o.d of him by her own imaginings.

"That Burns book was a bad investment for you," I said to Danvers one evening.

"Why," says he, "it's naught but a book!"

"True," I answered, "but the maker of it is a man--and she's idealized him into a G.o.d. Ye just brought trouble for yourself when you brought that volume among us," I cried.

To the best of my recollection it was about a week after my talk with Danvers concerning a marriage between them that the three of us sat at the dinner together, and there never was a more bewitching or dangerous Nancy than we had with us that night. A tender, brilliant, saucy, flattering Nancy, who moved us male creatures about as though we were chessmen.

"Jock, tell about the old minister and the goose," she said. "There's no one can tell that story like you."

Or,

"Danvers, do you recall the anecdote of Billy Deuceace and the opera-singer? It's one of the best jokes I ever heard." And it was after the laugh that followed this narration that Danvers said, with some abruptness, I thought:

"We had bad news to-day. The Honorable Mrs. Erskine and her daughter are coming to Arran. My father invited them over a year ago, and had forgotten all about it when their letter of acceptance came."

"Is it Isabel Erskine whom your father advises you to marry?" Nancy asked.

"It is the very same," Dandy answered with a careless laugh; "and I'm warning you you are to have a rival in the same house with me!"

"Is she pretty?"