Olive Part 8

"Olive, dearest," said Mrs. Rothesay, herself subdued into weeping.

"I know, mamma," was the answer. "Now I have no one to love me but you."

The feeling was strange, perhaps even wrong; but as Mrs. Rothesay clasped her child, it was not without a thrill of pleasure that Olive was all her own now.

"Where shall Miss Rothesay sleep to-night?" was the whispered question of the maid. Olive burst into tears.

"She shall sleep with me. Darling, do not cry for your poor nurse, will not mamma do instead?"

And looking up, Olive saw, as though she had never seen it before, the face which, now s.h.i.+ning with maternal love, seemed beautiful as an angel's. It became to her like an angel's evermore.

How often, in our human fate, does the very Hand that taketh, give!

CHAPTER IX.

Mrs. Rothesay, touched by an impulse of regretful tenderness, showed all due respect to the memory of the faithful woman who had nursed with such devotion her husband and her child. For a whole long week Olive wandered about the shut-up house, the formal solemnities of death, now known for the first time, falling heavily on her young heart. Alas!

that there was no one to lift it beyond the terrors of the grave to the sublime mysteries of immortality.

But the child knew none of these, and therefore she crept, awe-struck, about the silent house, and when night fell, dared not even to pa.s.s near the chamber--once her own and Elspie's--now Death's. She saw the other members of the household enter there with solemn faces, and pa.s.s out, carefully locking the door. What must there be within? Something on which she dared not think, and which nothing could induce her to behold.

At times she forgot her sorrow; and, still keeping close to her mother's side, amused herself with her usual childish games, piecing disjointed maps, or drawing on a slate; but all was done with a quietness sadder than even tears.

The evening before the funeral, Mrs. Rothesay went to look for the last time on the remains of her faithful old servant. She tried to persuade little Olive to go with her; the child accompanied her to the door, and then, weeping violently, fled back and hid herself in another chamber.

From thence she heard her mother come away--also weeping, for the feeble nature of Sybilla Rothesay had lost none of its tender-hearted softness.

Olive listened to the footsteps gliding downstairs, and there was silence. Then the pa.s.sionate affection which she had felt for her old nurse rose up, driving away all childish fear, and strengthening her into a resolution which until then she had not dared to form. To-morrow they would take away Elspie--_for ever_. On earth she would never again see the face which had been so beloved. Could she let Elspie go without one look, only one? She determined to enter the awful room now, and alone.

It was about seven in the evening, still daylight, though in the darkened house dimmer than without. Olive drew the blind aside, took one long gaze into the cheerful sunset landscape to strengthen and calm her mind, and then walked with a firm step to the chamber-door. It was not locked this time, but closed ajar. The child looked in a little way only. There stood the well-remembered furniture, the room seemed the same, only pervaded with an atmosphere of silent, solemn repose. There would surely be no terror there.

Olive stole in, hearing in the stillness every beating of her heart.

She stood by the bed. It was covered, not with its usual counterpane of patchwork stars, the work of Elspie's diligent hand through many a long year, and on which her own baby-fingers had been first taught to sew--but with a large white sheet. She stood, scarce knowing whether to fly or not, until she heard a footstep on the stairs. One minute, and it would be too late. With a resolute hand she lifted the sheet, and saw the white fixed countenance, not of sleep, but death.

Uttering a shriek so wild and piercing that it rang through the house, Olive sprang to the door, fled through the pa.s.sage, at the end of which she sank in convulsions.

That night the child was taken ill, and never recovered until some weeks after, when the gra.s.s was already springing on poor Elspie's grave.

It is nature's blessed ordinance, that in the mind of childhood the remembrance of fear or sorrow fades so fast. Therefore, when Olive regained strength, and saw the house now smiling within and without amidst the beauty of early autumn,--the horrors of death pa.s.sed from her mind, or were softened into a tender memory. Perhaps, in the end, it was well for her that she had looked on that poor dead face, to be certain that it was not Elspie. She never thought of Elspie in that awful chamber any more. She thought of her as in life, standing knitting by the nursery-window, walking slowly and sedately along the green lanes, carrying the basket of flowers and roots, collected in their rambles, or sitting in calm Sunday afternoons with her Bible on her knee.

And then, pa.s.sing from the memory of Elspie once on earth, Olive thought of Elspie now in heaven. Her glowing imagination idealised all sorrow into poesy. She never watched the sunset, she never looked up into the starry sky at night, without picturing Elspie as there. All the foibles and peculiarities of her poor old Scottish nurse became trans.m.u.ted into the image of a guardian invisible, incorporeal; which seemed to draw her own spirit nearer to heaven, with the thought that there was one she loved, and who loved her, in the glorious mansions there.

From the time of her nurse's death, the whole current of Olive's life changed. It cast no shadow over the memory of the deep affection lost, to say that the full tide of living love now flowed towards Mrs.

Rothesay as it had never done before, perhaps never would have done but for Elspie's death. And truly the mother's heart now thirsted for that flood.

For seven years the little cloud which appeared when Captain Rothesay returned, had risen up between husband and wife, increasing slowly but surely, and casting a shadow over their married home. Like many another pair who wed in the heat of pa.s.sion, or the wilful caprice of youth, their characters, never very similar, had grown less so day by day, until their two lives had severed wider and wider. There was no open dissension that the wicked world could take hold of, to glut its eager eyes with the spectacle of an unhappy marriage; but the chasm was there, a gulf of coldness, indifference, and distrust, which no foot of love would ever cross.

Angus Rothesay was a disappointed man. At five-and-twenty he had taken a beautiful, playful, half-educated child,

"His bride and his darling to be,"

forgetting that at thirty-five he should need a sensible woman to be his trustworthy sympathising wife, the careful and thoughtful mistress of his household. When hard experience had made him old and wise, even a little before his time, he came home expecting to find her old and wise too. The hope failed. He found Sybilla as he had left her--a very child.

Ductile and loving as she was, he might even then have guided her mind, have formed her character, in fact, have made her anything he liked. But he would not do it; he was too proud. He brooded over his disappointed hope in silence and reserve; and though he reproached her not, and never ceased to love her in his own cold way, yet all respect and sympathy were gone. Her ways were not his ways, and was it the place of a man and a husband to bend? After a few years of struggling, less with her than with himself, he decided that he would take his own separate course, and let her take hers.

He did so. At first she tried to win him back, not with a woman's sweet and placid dignity of love, never failing, never tiring, yet invisible as a rivulet that runs through deep green bushes, scarcely heard and never seen. Sybilla's arts--the only arts she knew--were the whole armoury of girlish coquetry, or childish wile, pa.s.sionate tenderness and angry or sullen reproach, alternating each other. Her husband was equally unmoved by all. He seemed a very rock, indifferent to either suns.h.i.+ne or storm. And yet it was not so. He had in his nature deep, earnest, abiding tenderness; but he was one of those people who must be loved only in their own quiet, silent way. A hard lesson for one whose every feeling was less a principle than an impulse. Sybilla could not learn it. And thus the happiness of two lives was blighted, not from evil, or even lack of worth in either, but because they did not understand one another. Their current of existence flowed on coldly and evenly, in two parallel lines, which would never, never meet!

The world beheld Captain Rothesay in two phases--one as the grave, somewhat haughty but respected master of Merivale Hall; the other as the rash and daring speculator, who was continually doubling and trebling his fortune by all the thousand ways of legal gambling in which men of capital can indulge. There was in this kind of life an interest and excitement Captain Rothesay rushed to it as many another man would have rushed to far less sinless means of atoning for the dreary blank of home.

In Mrs. Rothesay the world only saw one of its fairest adornments--one of those "charming women" who make society so agreeable; beautiful, kind-hearted--at least as much so as her thoughtless life allowed; lively, fond of amus.e.m.e.nt--perhaps a little too much, for it caused people to note the contrast between the master and the mistress of the Hall, and to say what no wife should ever give the world reason to say, "Poor thing! I wonder if she is happy with her husband?"

But between those two stood the yet scarce recognised tie which bound them together--the little deformed child.

CHAPTER X.

"Captain Rothesay?"

"My dear?"

Reader, did you ever notice the intense frigidity that can be expressed in a "my dear!" The coldest, cruellest husband we ever knew once impressed this fact on our childish fancy, by our always hearing him call his wife thus. Poor, pale, broken-hearted creature! He "my deared"

her into her grave.

Captain Rothesay also used the epithet with a formality which was chilling enough in its way. He said it without lifting his eyes from the book, "Smith's Wealth of Nations," which had become his usual evening's study now, whenever he was at home. That circ.u.mstance, rare enough to have been welcome, and yet it was not welcome, now subdued his wife and daughter into silence and quietness. Alas! that ever a presence which ought to be the suns.h.i.+ne of a household should enter only to cast a perpetual shade.

The firelight shone on the same trio which had formed the little after-dinner circle years ago at Stirling. But there was a change in all. The father and mother sat--not side by side, in that propinquity which is so sweet, when every breath, every touch of the beloved's garment gives pleasure; they sat one at each corner of the table, engrossed in their several occupations; reading with an uncommunicative eagerness, and sewing in unbroken silence. Each was entrenched within a chilling circle of thoughts and interests in which the other never entered. And now the only point of meeting between them was the once-banished child.

Little Olive was growing almost a woman now, but she was called "little Olive" still. She retained her diminutive stature, together with her girlish dress, but her face wore, as ever, its look of premature age.

And as she sat between her father and mother, now helping the one in her delicate fancy-work, now arranging the lamp for the other's reading, continually in request by both, or when left quiet for a minute, watching both with anxious earnestness, there was quite enough in Olive's manner to show that she had entered on a woman's life of care, and had not learned a woman's wisdom one day too soon.

The captain's last "my dear" found his wife in the intricacies of a Berlin-wool pattern, so that she did not speak Again for several minutes, when she again appealed to "Captain Rothesay." She rarely called him anything else now. Alas! the time of "Angus" and "Sybilla"

was gone.

"Well, my dear, what have you to say?"

"I wish you would not be always reading, it makes the evening so dull."

"Does it?" and he turned over another leaf of Adam Smith, and leisurely settled himself for its perusal.

"Papa is tired, and may like to be quiet. Suppose we talk to one another, mamma?" whispered Olive, as she put aside her own work--idle, but graceful designings with pencil and paper--and drawing near to her mother, began to converse in a low tone. She discussed all questions as to whether the rose should be red or white, and what coloured wool would form the striped tulip, just as though they had been the most interesting topics in the world. Only once her eyes wandered wistfully to the deserted "Sabrina," which, half sketched, lay within the leaves of her "Comus." Mrs. Rothesay observed this, and said, kindly--

"Let me look at what you are doing, love. Ah!--very pretty! What is Sabrina? Tell me all about her." And she listened, with a pleased, maternal smile, while her gratified little daughter dilated on the beloved "Comus," and read a pa.s.sage or two in ill.u.s.tration. "Very pretty, my love," again repeated Mrs. Rothesay, stroking Olive's hair.

"Ah! you are a clever child. But now come and tell me what sort of winter dresses you think we should have."

If any observer could have seen a shade of disappointment on Olive's face, he would also have seen it instantly suppressed. The young girl closed "Comus" with the drawing inside, and came to sit down again, looking up into the eyes of her "beautiful mamma." And even the commonplace question of dress soon became interesting to her, for her artistic predilection followed her even there, and no lover ever gloried in his mistress's charms, no painter ever delighted to deck his model, more than Olive loved to adorn and to admire the still exquisite beauty of her mother. It stood to her in the place of all attractions in herself--in fact, she rarely thought about herself at all. The consciousness of her personal defect had worn off through habit, and her almost total seclusion from strangers prevented its being painfully forced on her mind.

"I wish we could leave off this mourning," said Mrs. Rothesay. "It is quite time, seeing Sir Andrew Rothesay has been dead six months. And, living or dying, he did not show kindness enough to make one remember him longer."

"Yet he was kind to papa, when a child; and so was Auntie Flora," softly said Olive, to whose enthusiastic memory there ever clung Elspie's tales about the Perths.h.i.+re relatives--bachelor brother and maiden sister, living together in their lonely, gloomy home. But she rarely talked about them; and now, seeing her mamma looked troubled, as she always did at any reference to Scotland and the old times, the little maiden ceased at once. Mrs. Rothesay was soon again safely and contentedly plunged into the mysteries of winter costume.