Girlhood and Womanhood Part 15

They needed relief, these brilliant supple figures; they demanded the background of grey hangings, scant carpet, spindle-legged chairs, and hard sombre prints. To these very cultivated, very artificial and picturesque personages, a family sitting-room was but a stage, where lively, capricious, yet calculating actors were engaged in playing their parts.

The party were mostly French, from the ma.s.s of gallant, dauntless emigrants, many of whom were thus entertained with grateful, commiserating hospitality in households whose members had but lately basked in the sparkling geniality of the southern atmosphere, now lurid and surcharged with thunder.

There was a Marquise, worldly, light, and vain, whom adversity had not broken, and could not sour; an Abbe, bland and double, but gentle and kindly in his way; a soldier, volatile, hot-headed, brave as a lion, simple as a child; an older man, sad, sneering, indifferent to this world and the next, but with the wrecks of a n.o.ble head, and, G.o.d help him, a n.o.ble heart.

Of the three individuals present of a different nation and creed, two closely resembled the others with only that vague, impalpable, but perceptible distinction of those whose rearing affords a superficial growth which overspreads but does not annihilate the original plant. The one was a young man, buoyant, flippant, and reckless as the French soldier, but with a bold defiance in his tone which was all his own; the other a young girl, coquettish and vivacious as the Marquise, but with a deep consciousness under her feigning, an undercurrent of watchful pride and pa.s.sion, of which her model was dest.i.tute. The last of the circle was a fair-haired, broad-shouldered lad, who stood apart from the others, big, shy, silent:--but he was earnest amid their shallowness, n.o.ble amid their hollowness, and devoted amid their fickleness. How he gazed on the arch, haughty girl, with her lilies and roses, her pencilled brows, her magnificent hair magnificently arranged, with her rich silk and airy lace, and muslin folded and gathered and falling into lines which were the very poetry of attire, unless where a piquant provoking frill, band, or peak, reminded the gazer that the princess was a woman, a mocking mischievous woman, as well as a radiant lady! How he listened to her contradictory words, witty and liquid even in their most worthless accents! how he drank in her songs, the notes of her harp, the rustle of her dress, the fall of her foot! how he started if she moved!

how he saw her, though his eyes were on the ground, and though his head was in his hands, while she marked him ceaselessly, half with cruel triumph, half with a flutter and faintness which she angrily and scornfully resisted and denied.

A few more gay _bons mots_ and repartees, a last epigram from the Abbe, a court anecdote from the Marquise which might have figured in one of those letters of Madame de Sevigne where the freshness of the haymaker of Les Rochers survives the glare and the terrible staleness of the Versailles of Louis XV., a blunt camp jest from the soldier, a sarcasm from the philosopher, a joyous barcarole, strangely succeeded by a s.n.a.t.c.h from that lament of woe wrung forth by the fatal field of Flodden, and the company dispersed. The horse's hoofs of the single stranger of the evening rung on the causeway, as he made for the smooth sands of the bay, the lights one by one leaping out, and the pale moon remaining mistress of Earlscraig as when the warder on yon tower peered out over the waters for the boats of the savage Irish kern, or lit the bale-fire that summoned Montgomery and Muir to ride and run for the love or the fear of Boswell of Earlscraig.

Had these old-world times returned by magic? had a crazed serving-man revived the vanished duties of his warlike predecessor? was the wraith of seneschal or man-at-arms conjuring up a ghostly beacon to stream into the soft air? was an evil spirit about to bewilder and mislead a fated s.h.i.+p to meet its doom on the jagged rocks beneath the dead calm of that gla.s.sy sea? So dense was the vapour that suddenly gathered over Earlscraig, till like an electric flash, a jet of flame sprang from a high cas.e.m.e.nt and lit up the gathering obscurity. No horn blew, no bugle sounded, no tramp of horse or hurrying feet broke the silence; the house lay in profound rest, and the sleepers slept on, though truly that was no phantom glare, no marsh gleam, but the near presence of an awful foe.

And the smoke burst forth in thicker, more suffocating volume; the red streamers shot up again and again, and the burning embers fell like thickest swarms of fire-flies, before a single hasty step roused an echo already lost in the roar and crackle of fire. A scared, half-dressed servant ran out into the court, flung up his hands as he looked around him, then hurried back, and suddenly the great bell pealed out its faithful alarum. "Good folk, good folk, danger is at the door! For Jesu's sake and your dear lives, up and flee! The angels hold out their hands, Sodom is around you--away, away!"

The summons was not in vain. Within a few seconds clamorous outcries, shrieks of dismay, the das.h.i.+ng open of doors and windows, answered the proclamation. A horror-struck crowd a.s.sembled rapidly in the court; but notwithstanding that the Abbe's wan face and shaven crown appeared speedily, and the soldier shouted, "Who is in danger? _mes camarades, suivez-moi!_" the philosopher instinctively elected himself commander; he rose, tall and erect, over the heads of his fellows; his face flushed and brightened; and he spoke words of wisdom and resolution whose spirit men recognised through the veil of his frozen tongue; while cravens shrank back, brave men rallied round him!

"Where is Boswell? _Mon Dieu!_ the house is burning and the master is not found! Adolphe, _sauve la Marquise, cet escalier n'est pas perdu_.

But where is Boswell? Show his room to me--the nearest way--quick, or he perishes. _Ah, le voila!_"

Down a flight of side steps stumbled the butler and a favourite groom, bearing between them the young laird, motionless, senseless, his dress dishevelled, but unscathed by flame, and unstained by blood; still breathing, but his marked imperious features were unconscious, heavy, and lethargic.

The Abbe and his elder friend exchanged glances. The brow of the latter contracted in disgust and gloom.

"Adolphe and he played billiards against my desire, as if he were not _bete_ enough already," he said in an undertone. "Lay him here, my friends," to the servants, "and listen to me. If you love the Seigneur, let him never know that thus it happened this night. Cover him with a mantle; he will awake to see his chateau a ruin. _Mais, n'importe_, we will do our best. Carry out what is most precious; bring up buckets of water. _Ma foi!_ there is enough at hand."

Yes; at their feet, but by a few fathoms unavailable, lay the broad sea, sufficient to extinguish the conflagration of a thousand cities, while the house above was rent with fierce heat, which reddened the sea like blood.

The Marquise was rescued sobbing and s.h.i.+vering, but she shared her blanket with one of the poor servant-girls. Even the old bed-ridden nurse, so blind and stupid with age that none could satisfy her of the cause of the tumult and din, was carried out, and placed on the gra.s.s terrace beside the master; where no sooner did she apprehend intuitively the neighbourhood of her proudly cherished nursling, than she left off her weak wailing, and began to croon over him as fondly and contentedly as when he lay an innocent babe in his cradle:

"Are you weary, Earlscraig? Have you come back sorely tired from the hunt or the race? Weary fa' the men folk that let you lie down with the dew-draps on your bonny curls--bonnier than Miss Alice's, for a' their fleechin'--as if it were high noon. No but noontide has its ills, too; but you would never heed a bonnet, neither for sun nor wind. A wild laddie, a wild laddie, Earlscraig!"

Eager but ignorant hands were piling up heaps of miscellaneous goods--pictures, feather-beds, old armour, plate, mirrors, harness, carpets, and wearing apparel. All were tossed together in wild confusion. The moon was hidden; air, earth, and water were lurid; a hot blast blew in men's faces, which alone remained white and haggard, when a murmur and question, a doubt and frenzy, first stirred and fast convulsed the ma.s.s. "Where is Miss Alice?" Ay, where was Miss Alice?

Who had seen her? Speak, in G.o.d's name!--shout her name until her voice replies, and men's shuddering souls are freed from this ghastly nightmare.

Miss Alice! Alice Boswell! are you safe, lamenting unseen the home of your fathers? Or are you within that turret whose foundation rock descends sheer into the sea--that turret close by which the demon began his work, where his forked tongue is now licking each loophole and outlet, where beams are bursting and the yawning jaws of h.e.l.l are about to swallow up the rapid wreck--forgotten, forsaken--the queen of hearts, the wooed and wors.h.i.+pped beauty; fair and sweet, ripe and rare, the sole daughter of the race; the charm and delight of its grey heads?

Oh, Father, thou art terrible in thy decrees! Oh, men, ye are miserable fools! She is there by the blazing framework of the window of her chamber, which she has never quitted; her hair loose, some portion of her dress cast about her, her eyes wide open and glazing with terror, but strangely beautiful--with a glory behind and about her; an unearthly brightness upon brow and cheek, and white arms stretched out imploringly, despairingly for help in her utmost need.

They pressed forward; they looked up in anguish; old men who had followed her when a fairy child, friends of long standing, acquaintances of yesterday. Again and again the gallant soldier penetrated the low doorway; again and again he swerved and recoiled from the furnace fumes that met him--a more fearful encounter than the fury of the sans-culottes and the reeking pools beneath the guillotine.

"_Courage, soldats! Vive la mort, pour la femme et pour la gloire!_" and with a shout half-exulting, half-maddened, the Gallic blood again fired to the desperate feat. Then there was a diversion--a rush to the opposite side of the building--a ladder might be of use there. A notion of forcing open a closed-up and disused gallery of communication, seized hold of these agitated minds, and this afforded a vent to the pent-up sympathy and distress. New energy supplanted stupor; and through the deep hush of the fire could be distinguished the blows of axe and hammer, wielded l.u.s.tily by stalwart and devoted arms, eager to clear a way of life and liberty for the captive.

But this was a work of time, and louder crackled and hissed the flames.

A fiercer blaze filled the sky, and glittered back from the waves; the serpent tongues drew together, and shot up through the room in a yellow pyramid. In vain! in vain! The zealous labourers panted in the sickness of horror and the chill of great awe.

"A boat! a boat!" called a voice from the outer circle. The thinker, the scorner, stood on the verge of the rocks above the illuminated sea, his head bare, his coat stripped off. "Let Mademoiselle cast herself from the cas.e.m.e.nt instantly; it is her only hope. I can swim; I will hold her up until a boat is launched. _Courage, Mademoiselle!_ trust in G.o.d and in me."

"Yes, Marquise," he whispered for a second to his countrywoman near him; "I have lost G.o.d for many a day; I have found him again in this hour. A _Te Deum_ for my requiem!" and looking aghast upon his face in the great light, the Marquise crossed herself, and averred ever afterwards that it was transformed like unto that of his patron saint, St. Francis. The next moment he plunged into the midnight sea. Those who witnessed the action declared that the reflection of the burning was so strong that he seemed to sink into a lake of fire, where he rose again presently, and breasted the waters stoutly.

The girl saw the design; she comprehended it, and the hoa.r.s.e murmur of encouragement that hailed its presence of mind. The concentration of the flames, which threatened every moment to bring down a portion of the ponderous roof in one destroying crash, left a freer pa.s.sage. She advanced quickly--she put her foot on the smouldering sill; she paused, hesitated. It was a fearful alternative.

"Leap down, leap down, Miss Alice; a drowning man has two lives, a burning man but one. Down, down, or you are lost!"

But another cry mingled with the vehement appeal--a piercing, confident cry, that would have vibrated on the dull ear of the dying, though it said only, "I am coming. Alice Boswell: I am coming!"

He was there, on his panting, foam-flecked horse: he flung himself from his saddle; he heard her answer, "Hector Garret, save me, save me!"

He broke the circle as Samson burst the green withes: he paralysed all remonstrance; he vanished into the abyss which the great staircase presented. He must have borne a charmed life to reach thus far--when a mightier roar, a perfect column of fire, a thundering avalanche of glowing timber and huge stones descended with a shock of an earthquake, and rebounded into the sea, engulfing for ever the fair slight form within.

By daring and magnanimous effort and main force, other arms bore back Hector Garret from the tottering walls and shaken foundation: and the boat rowed out and delivered the heroic Frenchman. The sinking in of the turret roof satiated the destroyer, so that the further wing of the house was preserved. Its master lived unharmed, to rouse himself from his portentous slumber and face his calamity, while the lover lay writhing and raging in the clutch of wild fever.

But the summer sun s.h.i.+ning down on the sea, once more blue and clear as heaven, fell on black yawning gaps and mounds of ashes; on s.h.i.+vered gla.s.s and strewn relics of former luxury; on the very gra.s.s of the promontory, brown and withered, and trodden into the earth for many a yard; on the horrible grave of the maiden who had watched her own image in the crystal pools, lilted her siren songs to the break of the waves, woven at once chains for her adorers and the web of that destiny which buried her there, unshrouded and uncoffined.

II.--THE OFFER.

The Clyde was forded by man and horse where s.h.i.+ps now ride at anchor; but the rush of trade, not quite so deep and rapid fifty years since as now, yet strong and swift, the growth of centuries, was hurrying, jostling, trampling onward in Jamaica Street and Buchanan Street and their busy thoroughfares. Within our quarter, however, were stillness and dimness, the cold, lofty, cla.s.sic repose of the n.o.ble college to which a professor's house was in immediate vicinity.

The room, large, low-roofed, with small, peaked windows, had not been built in modern times. The furniture was almost in keeping: roomy settees, broad, plain, ribbed-back chairs, with faded worked covers, the task of fingers crumbled into dust, heavy bookcases loaded with proportionably ponderous or curiously quaint volumes, and mirrors, with their frames like coffins covered with black velvet and relieved by gilding.

The only fresh and fragrant thing in the room--ay, or in the house, where master and mistress and servants were old and withered--was a young girl seated on a window-seat, her hands lightly crossed, watching the white clouds in the July sky, white, though nothing else is so in Glasgow, where the air is heavy with perpetual smoke and vapour.

That girl, too broad-browed and large-eyed for mere youthful beauty, but with such an arch, delicate, girlish mouth and chin as betokened her a frank, unsophisticated, merry child after all, was Leslie Bower, the young daughter and only child of an erudite and venerated professor.

Leslie had no brothers and no sisters, and in a sense she had neither father nor mother, for Professor Bower was the son, husband, and father of his books, and he had so mighty a family of these, ancient and modern, that he had very little time or attention to spare for ties of the flesh. He was a mild, absent, engrossed old man, flas.h.i.+ng into energy and genius in his own field of learning, but in the world of ordinary humanity a body without a soul.

Professor Bower married late in life a timid, shrinking English wife, who, removed from all early ties, and never mingling in Glasgow society, lapsed into a stillness as profound as his own.

Dr. Bower took little notice of his child; what with duties and studies, he had no leisure; he read in his slippered morning gown, he read at meals, he read by his evening lamp; probably, if Mrs. Bower would have confessed it, he kept a volume under his pillow. No wonder he was a blear-eyed, poking, muttering old man, for he was much more interested in Hannibal than in Bonaparte, and regarded Leslie, like the house, the yearly income, the rector, the students, the janitors, as one of many abstract facts with which he troubled himself as little as possible.

Mrs. Bower cared for Leslie's health and comfort with scrupulous nervous exactness, but she was incapable of any other demonstration of regard.

She was as shy and egotistical as poor Louis XVI., and perhaps it would have demanded as tragic a domestic revolution to have stirred her up to lively tenderness. Leslie might have been as dubious as Marie Antoinette of the amount of love entertained for her by her nearest kin, but curiously, though affectionate and pa.s.sionate enough to have been the pure and innocent child of some fiery Jocobin, she had not vexed herself about this mystery. One sees every day lush purple and rose-flowered plants growing in unaccountable shade; true, their a.s.sociates are pale and drooping, and the growth of the hardier is treacherous, and may distil poison, but the evil principle is gradual, and after conditions have been confirmed and matured.

The stronger portion of Leslie's nature, which required abundant and invigorating food, was slow of development; the lighter side flourished in the silent, dull house, where nothing else courted the sunbeam. In her childhood and girlhood, Leslie had gone out to school, and although always somewhat marked and individual in character, she had companions, friends, sufficient sympathy and intercourse for an independent, buoyant nature at the most plastic period of its existence. This stage of life was but lately left behind; Leslie had not long learnt that now she was removed from cla.s.ses and masters, and must in a great measure confine her acquaintances to those who returned her visits at her father's house; and as visitors put mamma and papa about, and did not suit their habits, she must resign her little world, and be almost as quiet and solitary as her elders. Leslie had just begun to sigh a little for the old thronged, bustling cla.s.s-rooms which she had lightly esteemed, and was active by fits and starts in numerous self-adopted occupations which could put former ones out of her head, and fill up the great blanks in her time and thoughts, for she was not inclined to sit down under a difficulty, and instinctively battled with it in a thousand ways.

Thus Leslie had her flower-painting--few natural flowers she saw, poor girl--card boxes, worsted vases, eggsh.e.l.l baskets, embroidery pieces, canary bird, and books--the last greedily devoured. She did not a.s.sist her mother, because although their household was limited, Mrs. Bower's quiet, methodical plans were perfect, and she gently declined all interference with her daily round. Neither did Leslie work for her father, because the professor would as soon have employed her canary bird. She was not thoughtful and painstaking for the poor, because, though accustomed to a species of almsgiving, she heard nothing, saw nothing of nearer or higher a.s.sociation with her neighbours. Yet there was capacity enough in that heart and brain for good or for evil.

So Leslie sat there, pausing in her sewing, and gazing idly at the sky, with a girl's quick pensiveness and thick-coming fancies, as she mused.

How blue it was yonder! What glorious clouds! yet the world below was rather stupid and tiresome, and it was hard to say what people toiled so arduously for. There were other lands and other people: should she ever see them? Surely, for she was quite young. She wished they could go in summer 'down the water,' out of this din and dust, to some coast village or lonely loch between lofty purple mountains, such as she had seen when with Mrs. Elliot; papa might spare a few weeks, people no richer did; they had no holidays, and it was so hot and close, and always the same.

But she supposed she must be contented, and would go away to cool and compose herself in the crypt of their own cathedral. How grand it was; how solemn the aisles and arches on every side, like forest trees; and then the monuments--what stories she invented for them! St. Mungo's Well! St. Mungo, austere, yet beneficent; with bare feet, cowled head, scarred back, and hardest of all, swept and garnished heart, with his fruitful blessing, 'Let Glasgow flourish.' What would St. Mungo think now of the city of the tree, the fish, and the bell?

This h.o.a.r, venerable, beautiful feat of art was to the imprisoned Glasgow girl as St. Paul's to such another isolated imaginative nature.

There was a knock at the street-door; a very decided application of the queer, twisted knocker. Leslie roused herself: not a beggar's tap that; none of the janitors; and this was not Dr. Murdoch's or Dr. Ware's hour: the girl was accurate in taps and footsteps. Some one was shown in; a man's voice was heard greeting "Dr. Bower," before the study door was closed. Leslie started up with pleased surprise,--"Hector Garret of Otter! he will come upstairs to see us; he will tell us how the country is looking; he will bring news from Ferndean," and for the next hour she sat in happy, patient expectation.

Mrs. Bower, a fair, faded, grave woman, came into the room, and sat down with her needlework in the other window.

"Mamma," exclaimed Leslie, "do you know that Hector Garret of Otter is downstairs with papa?"