The Laird of Norlaw; A Scottish Story - Маргарет Олифант

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eyes. Sometimes, he said a faint word to his wife, who sat holding his hand. He was conscious, and calm, and departing. His sins had been like a child’s sins—capricious, wayward, fanciful transgressions. He had never harmed any one but himself and his own household—remorseful recollections did not trouble him—and, weak as he was, all his life long he had kept tender in his heart a child’s faith. He was dying like a Christian, though not even his faith and comfort, nor the great shadow of death which he was meeting, could sublime his last hours out of nature. God does not always make a Christian’s death-bed sublime. But he was fast going where there is no longer any weakness, and the calm of the evening rest was on the ending of his life.

      Candles had been brought softly into the room; the moon rose, the night wore on, but they still waited. No one could withdraw from that watch, which it is agony to keep, and yet worse agony to be debarred from keeping, and when it was midnight, the pale face began to flush by intervals, and the fainting frame to grow restless and uneasy. Cosmo, poor boy, struck with the change, rose up to look at him, with a wild, sudden hope that he was getting better; but Cosmo shrunk appalled at the sudden cry which burst as strong as if perfect health had uttered it from the heaving, panting heart of his father.

      “Huntley, Huntley, Huntley!” cried the dying man, but it was not his son he called. “Do I know her name? She’s but Mary of Melmar—evermore Mary to me—and the will is there—in the mid chamber. Aye!—where is she?—your mother will tell you all—it’s too late for me.”

      The last words were irresolute and confused, dropping back into the faint whispers of death. When he began to speak, his wife had risen from her seat by the bed-side—her cheeks flushed, she held his hand tight, and over the face of her tenderness came an indescribable cloud of mortification, of love aggrieved and impatient, which could not be concealed. She did not speak, but stood watching him, holding his hand close in her own, even after he was silent—and not even when the head sank lower down among the pillows, and the eyes grew dim, and the last hour came, did the watcher resume the patient seat which she had kept so long. She stood by him with a mind disquieted, doing every thing that she could do—quick to see, and tender to minister; but the sacramental calm of the vigil was broken—and the widow still stood by the bed when the early summer light came in over her shoulder, to show how, with the night, this life was over, and every thing was changed. Then she fell down by the bed-side, scarcely able to move her strained limbs, and struck to the heart with the chill of her widowhood.

      It was all over—all over—and the new day, in a blaze of terrible sunshine, and the new solitude of life, were to begin together. But her sons, as they were forced to withdraw from the room where one was dead, and one lost in the first blind agony of a survivor, did not know what last pang of a long bitterness that was, which struck its final sting, to aggravate all her grievous trouble, into their mother’s heart.

      CHAPTER IV

      Those slow days of household gloom and darkness, when death lies in the house, and every thought and every sound still bears an involuntary reference to the solemn inmate, resting unconscious of them all, went slowly over the roof of Norlaw. Sunday came, doubly mournful; a day in which Scottish decorum demanded that no one should stir abroad, even to church, and which hung indescribably heavy in those curtained rooms, and through the unbroken stillness of its leisure, upon the three youths who had not even their mother’s melancholy society to help them through the day. The Mistress was in her own room, closely shut up with her Bible and her sorrow, taking that first Sabbath of her widowhood, a solitary day of privilege and indulgence, for her own grief. Not a sound was audible in the house; Jenny, who could be best spared, and who was somewhat afraid of the solemn quietness of Norlaw, had been sent away early this morning, to spend the Sabbath with her mother, in Kirkbride, and Marget sat alone in the kitchen, with a closed door and partially shuttered window, reading to herself half aloud from the big Bible in her lap. In the perfect stillness it was possible to hear the monotonous hum of her half-whispering voice, and sometimes the dull fall of the ashes on the kitchen hearth, but not a sound besides.

      The blinds were all down in the dining-room, and the lower half of the shutters closed. Though the July sun made triumphant daylight even in spite of this, it was such a stifling, closed-in, melancholy light, bright upon the upper walls and the roof, but darkened and close around the lads, that the memory of it never quite passed out of their hearts. This room, too, was paneled and painted of that dull drab color, which middle-class dining-rooms even now delight in; there were no pictures on the walls, for the family of Norlaw were careless of ornaments, like most families of their country and rank. A dull small clock upon the black marble mantel-piece, and a great china jar on the well-polished, old-fashioned sideboard, were the only articles in which any thing beyond use was even aimed at. The chairs were of heavy mahogany and hair-cloth—a portion of the long dining-table, with a large leaf folded down, very near as black as ebony, and polished like a mirror, stood between the front windows—and the two round ends of this same dining-table stood in the centre of the room, large enough for family purposes, and covered with a red and blue table-cover. There was a heavy large chintz easy-chair at the fire-place, and a little table supporting a covered work-basket in the corner window—yet the room had not been used to look a dull room, heavy and dismal though it was to-day.

      The youngest boy sat by the table, leaning over a large family Bible, full of quaint old pictures. Cosmo saw the pictures without seeing them—he was leaning both his elbows on the table, supporting his head with a pair of long, fair hands, which his boy’s jacket, which he had outgrown, left bare to the wrists. His first agony of grief had fallen into a dull aching; his eyes were observant of the faintest lines of those familiar wood-cuts, yet he could not have told what was the subject of one of them, though he knew them all by heart. He was fair-haired, pale, and delicate, with sensitive features, and dark eyes, like his father’s, which had a strange effect in contrast with the extreme lightness of his hair and complexion. He was the tender boy—the mother’s child of the household, and it was Cosmo of whom the village gossips spoke, when they took comfort in the thought that only his youngest son was like Norlaw.

      Next to Cosmo, sitting idly on a chair, watching how a stream of confined sunshine came in overhead, at the side of the blind, was Huntley, the eldest son. He was very dark, very ruddy, with close curls of black hair, and eyes of happy hazel-brown. Heretofore, Huntley Livingstone’s principal characteristic had been a total incapacity to keep still. For many a year Marget had lamented over him, that he would not “behave himself,” and even the Mistress had spoken her mind only too often on the same subject. Huntley would not join, with gravity and decorum, even the circle of evening visitors who gathered on unfrequent occasions round the fireside of Norlaw. He had perpetually something on hand to keep him in motion, and if nothing better was to be had, would rummage through lumber-room and family treasury, hunting up dusty old sets of newspapers and magazines, risking the safety of precious old hereditary parchments, finding a hundred forgotten trifles, which he had nothing to do with. So that it was rare, even on winter evenings, to find Huntley at rest in the family circle; it was his wont to appear in it at intervals bringing something with him which had no right to be there—to be ordered off peremptorily by his mother with the intruding article; to be heard, all the evening through, knocking in nails, and putting up shelves for Marget, or making some one of the countless alterations, which had always to be made in his own bed-chamber and private sanctuary; and finally, to reappear for the family worship, during which he kept as still as his nature would permit, and the family supper, at which Huntley’s feats, in cutting down great loaves of bread, and demolishing oat-cakes, were a standing joke in the household. This was the old Huntley, when all was well in Norlaw. Now he sat still, watching that narrow blade of sunshine, burning in compressed and close by the side of the blind; it was like his own nature, in those early days of household grief.

      Patrick was a less remarkable boy than either of his brothers; he was most like Huntley, and had the same eyes, and the same crisp, short curls of black hair. But Patrick had a medium in him; he did what was needful, with the quickest practical sense; he was strong in his perception of right and justice; so strong, that the Quixotry of boyish enthusiasm had never moved him; he was not, in short, a describable person; at this present moment, he was steadily occupied with a volume of sermons; they were extremely heavy metal, but Patrick went on with them, holding fast his mind by that anchor of heaviness.

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