Olive

"Indeed! and you never told me anything about it," said Sybilla, with a vexed look.

"Now, my little wife, do not be foolish; you never wish to hear about business, and I have taken you at your word; you cannot object to that?"

But she could, and she had a thousand half-pouting, half-jesting complaints to urge. She put them forth rather incoherently; in fact, she talked for five minutes without giving her husband opportunity for a single word. Yet she loved him dearly, and had in her heart no objection to being saved the trouble of thinking beforehand; only she thought it right to stand up a little for her conjugal prerogative.

He listened in perfect silence. When she had done, he merely said, "Very well, Sybilla; and we will leave Stirling this day month. I have decided to live in England. Oldchurch is a very convenient town, and I have no doubt you will find Merivale Hall an agreeable residence."

"Merivale Hall. Are we really going to live in a Hall?" cried Sybilla, clapping her hands with childish glee. But immediately her face changed.

"You must be jesting with me, Angus. I don"t know much about money, but I know we are not rich enough to keep up a Hall."

"We _were_ not, but we are now, I am happy to say," answered Captain Rothesay, with some triumph.

"Rich! very rich! and you never told me?" Sybilla"s hands fell on her knee, and it was doubtful which expression was dominant in her countenance--womanly pain, or womanly indignation.

Angus looked annoyed. "My dear Sybilla, listen to me quietly--yes, quietly," he added, seeing how her colour came and went, and her lips seemed ready to burst out into petulant reproach. "When I left England, I was taunted with having run away with an heiress. That I did not do, since you were far poorer than the world thought--and I loved little Sybilla Hyde for herself and not for her fortune. But the taunt stung me, and, when I left you, I resolved never to return until I could return a rich man on my own account. I am such now. Are you not glad, Sybilla?"

"Glad--glad to have been kept in the dark like a baby--a fool! It was not proper treatment towards your wife, Angus," was the petulant answer, as Sybilla drew herself from his arm, which came as a mute peacemaker to encircle her waist.

"Now you are a child indeed. I did it from love--believe me or not, it was so--that you might not be pained with the knowledge of my struggles, toils, and cares. And was not the reward, the wealth, all for you?"

"No; it wasn"t."

"Pray, hear reason, Sybilla!" her husband continued, in those quiet, unconcerned tones, which, to a woman of quick feelings and equally quick resentments, were sure to add fuel to fire.

"I will not hear reason. When you have these four years been rolling in wealth, and your wife and child were--O Angus!" and she began to weep.

Captain Rothesay tried at first, by explanations and by soothings, to stop the small torrent of fretful tears and half-broken accusations. All his words were misconstrued or misapplied. Sybilla would not believe but that he had slighted, ill-used, _deceived_ her.

At the term the husband rose up sternly.

"Mrs. Rothesay, who was it that deceived me?"

He pointed to the child, and the glance of both rested on little Olive.

She sat, her graceful playthings fallen from her hands, her large soft eyes dilated with such a terrified wonder, that both father and mother shrank before them. That fixed gaze of the unconscious child seemed like the reproachful look of some angel of innocence sent from a purer world.

There was a dead silence. In the midst of it the little one crept from her corner, and stood between her parents, her little hands stretched out, and her eyes full of tears.

"Olive has done nothing wrong? Papa and mamma, you are not angry with poor little Olive?"

For the first time, as she looked into the poor child"s face, there flashed across the mother"s memory the likeness of the angel in her dream. She pressed the thought back, almost angrily, but it came again.

Then Sybilla stooped down, and, for the only time since her babyhood, Olive found herself lifted to her mother"s embrace.

"The child had better go away to bed," said Captain Rothesay.

Olive was carried out nestling closely in her mother"s arms.

When Sybilla came back the angry pout had pa.s.sed away, though a grave troubled shadow still remained. She made tea for her husband, tried to talk on common topics once or twice, but he gave little encouragement.

Before retiring to rest, she said to him, timidly,

"There is no quarrel between us, Angus?"

"Not in the least, my dear," he answered, with that composed deprecation of any offence, given or received, which is the most painful check to an impulsive nature; "only, we will not discuss matters of business together again. Women never can talk things over quietly. Good-night, Sybilla."

He lifted his head a little, a very little, for her accustomed kiss. She gave it, but with it there came a sigh. He scarcely noticed either one or the other, being apparently deep in a large folio "Commentary on the Proverbs," for it was Sunday evening. He lingered for a whole hour over the last chapter, and chiefly the pa.s.sages,--

"Who can find a virtuous woman; for her price is far above rubies.

The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her: so that he shall have no need of spoil....

She openeth her mouth with wisdom: and in her tongue is the law of kindness."

At this, Captain Rothesay closed the book, laid his arms upon it; and sighed--O how heavily! He did not go to bed that night until his young wife had lain awake for hours, regretting and resolving; nor until, after many determinations of future penitence and love, she had at last wept herself to sleep for very sorrow.

CHAPTER VII.

Looking back on a calm and uneventful childhood--and by childhood we mean the seven years between the babyhood of five and the dignity of "teens,"--it always seems like a cloudy landscape, with a few points of view here and there, which stand out clearly from the rest. Therein the fields are larger and the sky brighter than any we now behold. Persons, places, and events a.s.sume a mystery and importance. We never think of them, or hear them named afterwards, but there clings to them something of the strange glamour of the time when "we saw men as trees walking."

Olive"s childhood was pa.s.sed in the place mentioned by her father.

Merivale! Oldchurch! In her future life the words, whenever heard, always sounded like an echo of that dreamy time, whose sole epochs are birthdays, Christmas-days, the first snowdrop found in the garden, the first daisy in the field. Such formed the only chronicle of Olive"s childhood.

Its earliest period was marked by events which she was too young to notice, troubles which she was too young to feel. They pa.s.sed over her like storm-clouds over a safely sheltered flower--only perceived by the momentary shadow which they cast. Once--it was in the first summer at Merivale--the child noticed how pleased every one seemed, and how papa and mamma, now always together, used to speak more tenderly than usual to her. Elspie said it was because they were so happy, and that Olive ought to be happy too, because G.o.d would soon send her "a wee wee brother." She would find him some day in the pretty cradle, which Elspie showed her. So the little girl went to look there every morning, but in vain. At last her nurse said she need not look there any more, for G.o.d had taken away the baby-brother as soon as it came. Olive was very much disappointed, and when she went down to her father that day she told him of her trouble. But he angrily sent her away to her nurse. She looked ever after with grief and childish awe on the empty cradle.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Page 45, Olive, little noticed, sat on the hearthrug]

At last it was empty no longer. She, a thoughtful child of seven, could never forget the impression made, when one morning she was roused by the loud pealing of the Old-church bells, and the maids told her, laughing, that it was in honour of her little brother, come at last. She was allowed to kiss him once, and then spent half her time, watching, with great joy and wonderment, the tiny face and touching the tiny hands.

After some days she missed him; and after some more Elspie showed her a little heap in the nearest churchyard, saying, that was her baby-brother"s cradle now. Poor little Olive!--her only knowledge of the tie of brotherhood was these few days of silent watching and the little green mound left behind in the churchyard.

From that time there came a gradual change over the household, and over Olive"s life. No more long, quiet hours after dinner, her father reading, her mother occupied in some light work, or resting on the sofa in delicious idleness, while Olive herself, little noticed, but yet treated with uniform kindness by both, sat on the hearthrug, fondling the sleepy cat, or gazing with vague childish reverie into the fire. No more of the proud pleasure with which, on Sunday afternoons, exalted to her grave papa"s knee, she created an intense delight out of what was to him a somewhat formal duty, and said her letters from the large family Bible. These childish joys vanished gradually, she scarce knew how. Her papa she now rarely saw, he was so much from home, and the quiet house, wherein she loved to ramble, became a house always full of visitors, her beautiful mamma being the centre of its gaiety. Olive retreated to her nursery and to Elspie, and the rest of her childhood was one long, solitary, pensive dream.

In that dream was the clear transcript of all the scenes amidst which it pa.s.sed. The old hall, seated on a rising ground, and commanding views which were really beautiful in their way, considering that Merivale was on the verge of a manufacturing district, bounded by pastoral and moorland country. Those strange furnace-fires, which rose up at dusk from the earth and gleamed all around the horizon, like red fiery eyes open all night long, how mysteriously did they haunt the imaginative child! Then the town, Oldchurch, how in her after-life it grew distinct from all other towns, like a place seen in a dream, so real and yet so unreal! There was its castle-hill, a little island within a large pool, which had once been a real fortress and moat. Old Elspie contemned alike tradition and reality, until Olive read in her little "History of England" the name of the place, and how John of Gaunt had built a castle there. And then Elspie vowed it was unworthy to be named the same day with beautiful Stirling. Continually did she impress on the child the glories of her birthplace, so that Olive in after-life, while remembering her childhood"s scenes as a pleasant land of earth, came to regard her native Scotland as a sort of dream-paradise. The shadow of the mountains where she was born fell softly, solemnly, over her whole life; influencing her pursuits, her character, perhaps even her destiny.

Yet there was a curious fascination about Oldchurch. She never forgot it. The two great wide streets, High-street and Butcher-row, intersecting one another in the form of a cross: the two churches--the Old Church, gloomy and Norman, with its ghostly graveyard; and the New Church, shining white amidst a pleasant garden cemetery, beneath one of whose flower-beds her baby-brother lay: the two shops, the only ones she ever visited, the confectioner"s, where she stood to watch the yearly fair, and the bookseller"s whither she dragged her nurse on any excuse, that she might pore over its incalculable treasures.

Above all, there was fixed in her memory the strange aspect the town wore on one day--a Coronation-day, the grandest gala of her childhood.

One king had died and been buried.--Olive saw the black-hung pulpit and heard the funeral sermon, awfully thundered forth at night Another king had been proclaimed, and Olive had gloried in the sight of the bonfires and the roasted sheep. Now the people talked of a Coronation-day. Simple child! She knew nothing of the world"s events or the world"s destinies, save that she rose early to the sound of carolling bells, was dressed in a new white frock, and taken to see the town--the beautiful town, smiling with triumphal flower-arches and winding processions. How she basked in the merry sunshine, and heard the shouts, and the band playing "G.o.d save the King," and felt very loyal, until her enthusiasm vented itself in tears.

Such was one of the few links between Olive"s early life and the world outside. Otherwise she dwelt, for those seven years of childhood, in a little Eden of her own, whose boundary was rarely crossed by the footsteps of either joy or pain. She was neither neglected nor ill-used, but she never knew that fulness of love on which one looks back in after-life, saying deprecatingly, and yet sighing the while, "Ah, I was indeed a spoiled child!" Her little heart was not positively checked in its overflowings; but it had a world of secret tenderness, which, being never claimed, expended itself in all sorts of wild fancies. She loved every flower of the field and every bird in the air. She also--having a pa.s.sionate fondness for study and reading--loved her pet authors and their characters, with a curious individuality. Mrs. Holland stood in the place of some good aunt, and Sandford and Merton were regarded just like real brothers.

She had no one to speak to about poetry; she did not know there was such a thing in the world. Yet she was conscious of strange and delicious sensations, when in the early days of spring she had at length conquered Elspie"s fears about wet feet and muddy fields, and had gone with her nurse to take the first meadow ramble; she could not help bounding to pluck every daisy she saw; and when the violets came, and the primroses, she was out of her wits with joy. She had never even heard of Wordsworth; yet, as she listened to the first cuckoo note, she thought it no bird, but truly "a wandering voice." Of Sh.e.l.ley"s glorious lyric ode she knew nothing; and yet she never heard the skylark"s song without thinking it a spirit of the air, or one of the angels hymning at Heaven"s gate. And many a time she looked up in the clouds at early morning, half expecting to see that gate open, and wondering whereabouts it was in the beautiful sky.

She had never heard of Art, yet there was something in the gorgeous sunset that made her bosom thrill; and out of the cloud-ranges she tried to form mountains such as there were in Scotland, and palaces of crystal like those she read of in her fairy tales. No human being had ever told her of the mysterious links that reach from the finite to the infinite, out of which, from the buried ashes of dead Superst.i.tion, great souls can evoke those mighty spirits, Faith and Knowledge; yet she went to sleep every night believing that she felt, nay, could almost see, an angel standing at the foot of her little bed, watching her with holy eyes, guarding her with outspread wings.

O Childhood! beautiful dream of unconscious poetry; of purity so pure that it knew neither the existence of sin nor of its own innocence; of happiness so complete, that the thought, "I am now happy," came not to drive away the wayward sprite which never _is_, but always is to come!

Blessed Childhood! spent in peace and loneliness and dreams; hidden therein lay the germs of a whole life.