Red Rowans Part 41

"And what does he say was his own part in the business?" asked Marjory. "All I remember is a face--very like yours, Lord George--with great wide eyes, while Eve and Adam were hiding theirs."

Lord George gave another odd little sound between a laugh and a sob.

"He says he sate still and swore, like Uncle Paul!"

"I'm afraid I did, Miss Carmichael," confessed the culprit, with a flash of the old manner; "but really, the tangle that young idiot had got things into, and stramash----" He turned to the window with a frown, and looked out. "You are the heroine of the hour, I see," he added cynically. "There is the Manse machine, with your two devoted admirers in it, come to congratulate you. Blanche, if you have induced Miss Carmichael to dine with us to-night--our last night--we had better quit the court. By the way, Mrs. Vane desired me to say, Miss Carmichael, that she did not intend to leave Gleneira without seeing you again; so, as she is not well enough to come to the Lodge, you may be induced to take pity on her."

The covert implication that some such inducement was necessary to overcome her reluctance, stung the girl's pride, without her recognising the cause of it, and she accepted the invitation hurriedly, telling herself she was glad it was the last, and that after to-morrow she could return to the old peaceful days. The thought made her turn with a quick expansion of face and manner to the two old men who advanced to meet them, as she accompanied Lady George to the garden-gate. Two old men almost tremulous with pride and delight.

"_Tanto fortior tanto felicior!_" cried the little Father, his fresh, round face beaming with sheer content.

"So, so, young lady! we have heard the story," put in the minister, full of courtly bows, in which those suggestions of a shapely calf had a fair field. "True is it that _Fortis cadere, cedere non potest_. Ah, Lady George! I have to express my great thankfulness that a dreadful bereavement has been spared you, under Providence, by our dear young friend's courage; or, rather, by her wisdom, since, without the quick thought, the former would have been useless. In this case, to paraphrase the saying, _tam Minerva quam Marte_, as even a soldier must allow."

"You will not find me backward, sir, in acknowledging either Miss Carmichael's wisdom or her courage," replied Paul, thus challenged; but his tone had that suggestion of a hidden meaning in it, to which Lady George objected, and rightly, as bad form; so she covered it by a remark upon the beauty of a boy, who stood holding open the gate.

"He is a little like that crayon portrait of you when you were a boy, Paul," she added cheerfully.

"He is old Peggy's grandson," replied Marjory, "and as he has been left to Dr. Kennedy's care, I am to look after him. He will be my first pupil."

"Then the likeness will soon disappear," said Paul, in a low voice, as he pa.s.sed out.

"Perhaps he will be not the worse of that," retorted Marjory, in the same tone.

"I don't know. Men who are brought up by women are generally prigs."

"And women who have been brought up by men?" she asked sharply, not thinking of herself or her past.

"Are brave," he said quietly.

Brave! So he thought that of her. The one word was worth all the rest.

And as she went up the path again with Father Macdonald on her right hand and Mr. Wilson on her left, all their fine phrases seemed forgotten in that simple acknowledgment. She would remember that always, even when the old peaceful days came back, as they would on the morrow. There was only the dinner at the Big House between her and that desirable consummation; but that was an ordeal without Tom, who was at home anywhere.

To tell truth, it would have been an ordeal to one less reluctant than Marjory; for a general air of uncertainty, like that of amateur theatricals when the prompter is best man, pervaded the party. Mrs.

Woodward called her host by his Christian name with a manifest effort of memory, and when Sam ventured on a like familiarity with Blanche, her face betrayed her real feelings. Indeed, she took a private opportunity of confiding to Lord George her relief that it was only a one-night part, as she could not stand it much longer.

"Yet you condemn poor Paul to a life-long connection with that young bounder. Upon my soul! you women are queer creatures;" and the perversity of the feminine nature appeared to absorb him for the rest of the evening. Even Mrs. Vane, who ventured down to dinner for the first time, could make nothing of the ghastly function, so she retired immediately afterwards on plea of being tired, chiefly because she wished to have an opportunity of seeing Marjory alone, which she secured by bidding her in a whisper be sure and come to her room after she had said good-bye to everyone else.

Her departure reduced the drawing-room to flat despair.

"It is the sadness of farewell," remarked Miss Smith, part of whose contract was that she was to remain to the last and see nothing was forgotten; not even a decent show of sentiment.

"Parting is such sweet sorrow," murmured the Major under his moustache. He was the most cheerful of the party, since his flirtation had resulted in another week's grouse shooting with his charmer's father.

"Mr. St. Clare has written such a sweet thing called 'Good-bye,'"

continued the Moth, appealing to the Poet. "He might recite it to cheer us up."

"I wonder how many poets there are who haven't written a piece on that subject," put in Paul, hastily, as Mr. St. Clare gave a preliminary cough, "and yet it will supply tons of agony to generations still unborn."

"There are forty songs of that name," remarked Alice, practically. "I wanted one for a friend, and the music man told me so."

Then the remembrance of that friend, a certain young fellow with a pleasant baritone voice, busy over tallow at Riga, gave her quite a pang of regret.

"Mostly trash, too," a.s.sented the Major; "Tosti's is the best, but even there one is all battered to pieces before the end."

"That is true," put in Marjory, eagerly. "You see, the poet begins by fine-drawing the agony, the composer follows suit, and the singer carries out the distortion. So in the third verse there is nothing for it but to 'kill the coo.'"

"I haven't heard 'Auld Robin Gray' for twenty years," murmured Lord George. "No one sings anything but German nowadays. German or comic operas."

"Miss Carmichael sings Scotch songs; I've heard her," said Paul from the skein of silk he was holding for Alice Woodward.

"Oh, do!" cried the Moth. "Something touching."

"Somethin' to cheer us up, you mean," put in Sam; "somethin' with a chorus, you know."

"Something old-fas.h.i.+oned," protested Lord George.

"Something appropriate to the occasion," suggested his wife.

"Something Miss Carmichael approves of," came from the skein of silk.

The girl stood by the piano for an instant, looking at them all with a touch of fine scorn in her face.

"I will do my best," she said at last, with a laugh. The next instant, with a crash of chords, her clear, fresh, young voice rang through the room in that gayest and saddest of songs:--

"A weary lot is thine, fair maid, A weary lot is thine; To pull the thorn thy brow to braid, And press the rue for wine.

A lightsome eye, a soldier's mien, A feather of the blue, A doublet of the Lincoln green, No more of me you knew, My love, No more of me you knew."

Paul's hands turning the skeins paused, his eyes were on the girl's face as, with a mixture of recklessness and regret, she went on--

"The morn is merry June, I trow, The rose is budding fain, But she shall bloom in winter snow Ere we two meet again!

He turned his charger as he spake Upon the river sh.o.r.e, Said 'Adieu for evermore, My love, And adieu for evermore.'"

"What a heartless, unromantic, roving wretch!" remarked Lady George, in the pause which followed the refrain. "I hope he was jilted after all by the heiress; there generally is an heiress in these cases."

Then, becoming aware of the possible indiscretion of her words, she looked at her brother hurriedly.

"In that case he married and lived happily ever afterwards; at least, that is what I should have done in his case. And I don't think he was so heartless, after all. He told the truth. It isn't as if he had sneaked away without saying good-bye."

Marjory rose from the piano with a little shrug of her shoulders.

"I must say good-night, at any rate, Lady George, and sneak up to see Mrs. Vane; for it is getting late, and you have all to be up so early."

Paul, standing at the door holding it open for her to pa.s.s through, was the last of the group to whom she had to give the conventional farewell.

"Good-bye," she said, feeling above her real regret a relief that this was the end.