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While I sat, I heard the muffled sound of horses' feet prancing in the flagged court-yard, for the house fronted on the street, one end overhanging the river, the back and the north side lost in the gardens that stretched up to Margray's grounds one way and down to the water's brink the other, so the stroke of their impatient hoofs reached me but faintly; yet I knew 'twas Angus and Mr.
But Mary rose and sped after my mother, with her tripping foot; and in a minute she came back laughing and breathless. "You put my heart in my mouth, Mistress Graeme," she said. "And all for nothing. My mother's just ordering the cream to be whipped. Well, little one, what now?" "It's just this dress of Margray's, mother's right, 't will never do for me; I'll wear shadows.
And there were those who had seen his seraglio; but few, indeed, had seen him, a lonely man, in fact, who lived aloof and apart, shunned and shunning, tainted by the curse of his birth. "Oh, yes," I said, "of Helmar away down the bay; but the mate of our brig was named Helmar, too." Margray's ivory stiletto punched a red eyelet in her finger.
So it came to pass, one time being precedent of another, that in all the merrymakings I had small share, and spent the greater part of those bright days in Margray's nursery with, the boy, or out-doors in the lone hay-fields or among the shrubberies; for he waxed large and glad, and clung to me as my own.
But by the next dawning I judged 't was best that I should gather courage and settle things as they were to be. Margray's grounds joined our own, and I snatched up the babe, a great white Scotch bairn, and went along with him in my arms under the dripping orchard-boughs, where still the soft glooms lingered in the early morn.
"Ah, yes, indeed," said he, "she is reading the future in her palm, reading it backward, and finding out what this Angus Ingestre has to do with her fate!" "Nay, but," said I, and then held fast again. "Here's a young woman that's keen to hear of her home, of her sisters, of Queen Mary Strathsay, and of Margray's little Graeme!" "What do I care for Johnny Graeme? the little old man!"
I ran over to Margray's, and finding the boy awake, I dismissed his nurses the place, and stayed and played with him and took the charge till long past the dinner-hour, and Margray came home at length, and then, when I had sung the child asleep again, for the night, and Margray had shown me all the contents of her presses, the bells were ringing nine from across the river, and I ran back as I came, and up and into my little bed, and my heart was fit to break, and I cried till the sound of the sobs checked me into silence.
"When I'm married, Ailie," she whispered, "I'll sing from morn till night, and you shall sit and hear me, without Margray's glowering at us, or my mother so much as saying, 'Why do you so?" For all the time the song had been purling from her smiling lips, Mrs. Strathsay's eyes were laid, a weight like lead, on me, and then she had risen as if it hurt her, and walked to the door.
I'd heard Angus's coming, early in the afternoon, and had heard him, too, or e'er half the cordial compliments were said, demand little Alice; and they told him I was over and away at Margray's, and in a thought the hall-doors clashed behind him and his heels were ringing up the street, and directly he hastened home again, through the gardens this time, and saw no sign of me; but now my heart beat so thickly, when I thought of him passing me in the dance, that, could I sit there still, I feared 'twould of itself betray me, and that warned me to question if the hour were not ready for the dances, and I rose and stole to the piano and sat awaiting my mother's word.
But what made it hardest of all was a word of Margray's one day as I sat over at her house hushing the little Graeme, who was sore vexed with the rash, and his mother was busy plaiting ribbons and muslins for Effie, Effie, who seemed all at once to be blossoming out of her slight girlhood into the perfect rose of the woman that Mary Strathsay was already, and about her nothing lingering rathe or raw, but everywhere a sweet and ripe maturity.
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