Читать книгу The Rhymer - McAulay Allan - Страница 3

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CHAPTER I.

In the year of grace 1787, Mr. Graham of The Mains, a worthy gentleman and laird of the county of Perth, had a family of seven daughters. This, though hardly at that date amounting to a social crime, was an indiscretion in a man of few acres and modest income. Moreover, his partner in life was even now a blooming and a buxom dame, capable of adding further olive branches to the already over-umbrageous family tree. She had, indeed, but lately performed the somewhat procrastinated duty of adding an heir to the tale of the seven lasses of The Mains. This was as it should be—but it was quite enough.

It was market day in the autumn of the year, and Mr. Graham, who farmed his own land, had attended the weekly market at the country town of C——. He was about to jog home in the dusk, when he was accosted by a neighbour and fellow-laird.

'Hey—Mains!' called out this personage. 'Bide a bit, man! It is in my mind to do you and the mistress at The Mains a good turn.' Mr. Graham drew rein.

'It is not I that will miss a chance of that,' he observed, in good humour.

'Well, to be straight to the point,' said his friend, 'I have a friend biding with me at this time, one Jimmy Cheape—you may have heard me speak of him, for he was a crony of our college days. He is a man of substance in the county of Fife—and he has a mind to be made acquainted with you and your lady.'

'Ay, ay!' ejaculated Mr. Graham. 'A most laudable and polite wish, truly, and not to be gainsaid!'

'He is in search of a wife,' said the friend, slily, with a dig in the ribs of the laird with the butt-end of his whip, 'and I bethought me that a presentation to a man with seven daughters was the very thing to be useful. So I promised it, and he jumped for it—as keen as a cock at a groset.'

Mr. Graham pricked up his ears.

'That's the wife's business rather than mine,' he observed, cautiously.

'Well! let the wife see him, but see him yourself first. Yonder he is.' The speaker pointed to a burly form, standing with its back to the friends. 'I will bring him forward;' and he proceeded to be as good as his word.

When Mr. Cheape, of the county of Fife, presented his countenance to his possible father-in-law of the future, he was found to be a gentleman of decidedly mature age, already grey, deeply pitted with the smallpox, and of no very alluring address. His salutation was gruff, and his eye shifty.

'To-morrow,' he remarked, with rather alarming abruptness, immediately after the form of introduction had been gone through, 'I will wait upon Mrs. Graham at The Mains, at about eleven of the clock in the morning.' With that he stumped off, for he added to his other peculiarities that of being rather lame of one leg.

'Ah! he means business, you see!' said the intermediary, admiringly. The corners of Mr. Graham's mouth, which had taken an upward inclination at the first salutation of his friend, now drooped considerably, as he gazed after his new acquaintance.

'He is somewhat well on in years,' he remarked, dubiously, 'and there is not that about him that will take a lass's fancy.'

'Tut!' said his friend, 'there is well-nigh one thousand a year about him and his bonny bit place of Kincarley in the county of Fife; and he has fine store of plate and plenishing of linen—so he tells me—as well as the siller. And that takes a lass's fancy fast enough, let me tell you.'

'Well, maybe,' said the laird, and he gave the reins a jog. 'Good-night to you, and you shall hear what betides.'

Mr. Graham jogged home along the muddy roads towards The Mains in a meditative mood. The thought of his seven daughters often sat heavy on his mind. He could not portion them, and, with or without portions, it was difficult to imagine how they could marry or settle in a part of the country so remote, that society could hardly be said to exist—daughters, as they were, of a man who could not possibly afford to send them to share the gaieties of the capital, or even of the distant county town. Yet their marriage was a fixed idea with his wife, as he well knew—the only idea, indeed, for their future which it was natural and proper, at that day, for her to entertain. Alison, their eldest girl, was almost twenty, and at that age her mother had been already three years married and had a thriving nursery; two others, well arrived at woman's estate, trod closely on her heels. Very well indeed could the laird imagine with what enthusiasm his partner would welcome the advent of a suitor, and a wealthy suitor, too. Yet he had vague doubts as to whether he should have placed this temptation within reach of the eager mother of seven daughters. Perhaps it would have been better to have declined the visit from Mr. Cheape once for all. For although this obscure country laird of old-time Scotland had a rough exterior, not differing greatly from that of a farmer or yeoman of the better class, and though he rode a horse that sometimes drew the plough, a clumsy figure in his brass-buttoned blue coat and miry buckskins, yet he was a gentleman at heart, and an honest man to boot. He had been far from admiring the exterior and address of Mr. Cheape of Kincarley, and compunction assailed him when he thought of his Alison, or Kate, or Maggie, subjected to the wooing of such a bear. However, it was their mother's affair, he thought, with that comfortable shifting of responsibility on to feminine shoulders which man has so gracefully inherited from Adam. Besides, he looked forward to telling the news, being a bit of a humorist in his own way. So he whipped up the old horse into a heavy trot.

The Mains lay low and sheltered in the heart of an uninteresting agricultural corner of the Perthshire lowlands. It was a low, rambling, old house, of no pretensions—little better, indeed, than a farm—with small windows in thick walls, and little low-ceilinged, ill-lighted rooms. There were some fine sycamores about it, the abode of an ancient rookery, and a grand lime tree grew in the field in front of the house—so very old that no one knew or could guess its age. To the east of The Mains lay its farm buildings, and beyond them again the old-fashioned tangled garden. Further, and around on all sides, were thick spruce woods, where the wild pigeons crooned in the summer, and there were always cones for the gathering. Through gaps in the woods, and from certain points of vantage on The Mains's land, you could see the Highland hills. But to Alison and her little sisters these always seemed far, far away—as though in another country altogether.

Lights in the deep-set windows welcomed the laird, and they were cheery in the damp murk of the autumn evening. When he was divested of his mud-stiffened riding gear, he stretched himself at ease before the crackling fire in his own sanctum, and his lady joined him. It was a long, low, dark room, lined with fusty books, which no one ever took from the shelves. The mantelpiece was of solid stone, washed a pale green, and—chiseled roughly—just below the shelf was a motto, rudely finished off with a clam-shell, the crest of the Grahams:—

'In human life there's nothing steadfast stands,

Youth, Glorie, Riches fade. Death's sure at hand.'

So it said. But neither the laird nor the lady of The Mains had any air of paying attention to this warning of a somewhat despondent progenitor.

The mistress of the house was a handsome woman still, in spite of household and maternal cares. Above the middle height, and of comely figure, she had hair still raven black, a glowing colour in her soft unwithered cheek, and the light of a strong and unimpaired vitality in her fine, though rather hard, black eye. She had the complete empire over her husband, which such a woman will ever have over men—a woman, healthy, fresh, strong-willed, though not moulded, perhaps, in the most refined of nature's moulds. He had married her in his youth—the daughter of a small Glasgow lawyer, hardly, perhaps, his equal from a social point of view. But this was a failing soon overlooked in the blooming, hearty, managing bride, who brought fresh blood to mingle with the rather attenuated strain of a genteel Scottish family, which boasted more lineage than looks.

The laird stretched himself to the genial warmth, and prepared to enjoy the communication of his bit of news.

'A gentleman is to visit us here at The Mains to-morrow in the morning, wife,' he began, casually.

'Oh, ay,' said Mrs. Graham, in the tone of one who expects no pleasant surprises. 'It'll be Cultobanocher or Drumore, likely, to speir about the grey mare and her foal.'

'Not at all,' said the laird, 'but a stranger this time—one Cheape of Kincarley, in the county of Fife, at this time abiding with Drumore.'

'And what will he be wanting with us?' inquired the mistress of The Mains.

'A wife, it would seem,' said the laird, in a carefully-suppressed tone of voice, but a twinkle in his eye.

'Tut, laird!' said the lady, crossly, 'you're joking, but none of your jokes for me!' She indeed believed the news too good to be true, and was wroth with the laird for tantalising her on so tender a subject.

'I am not joking—not I,' protested the husband and father. ''Tis the living truth, as I sit here. This fellow will be over here to-morrow at noon to see if he cannot choose a wife among our seven lasses.'

Then followed, in answer to a rain of questions from the excited lady, a full and particular account of Mr. Cheape, his means and estate—all, indeed, that the laird could tell. Mrs. Graham's face was flushed, her eyes sparkling; the corners of her full, firm mouth twitched with eagerness. Before the conversation was half over, she had the wedding settled in her mind, with already a side-thought for the bride's dress, and such scanty plenishing as could be spared from The Mains.

'And to think that I was putting poor Ally down for an old maid!' she exclaimed, rapturously. 'The girl with never a man after her yet, and then to have this rich husband flung at her head! She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, after all—poor Ally!'

'Bide a wee!' said the laird, cautiously. 'Wait till you see the man, my woman! A grey beard, even like myself, and speckled like a puddock wi' the cow-pox. I doubt the girl will get a scunner when she sees him.'

But his partner pounced upon his doubts with righteous anger.

'Laird,' she said, 'if I see you putting the like o' that into Ally's head, I'll be at the end of my patience. Setting the lass against her meat that gait—such foolery!'

'Lasses think of love—' began the laird.

'Love, indeed!' almost screamed the lady; 'and what right has she to think of love, and her almost twenty, and never a jo to her name yet, or a man's kiss but her father's on the cheek o' her? When I was her age, well knew I what love was; but she—let her thank her stars she's got this chance, and needna pine a spinster all her days!'

'Well, well,' said the laird, uncomfortably, 'manage it your own way. I'll keep my fingers out of the pie. And sort you Mr. Cheape of Kincarley when he comes to-morrow, for I'll ha' none of him!'

His lady, finding he would respond on the subject no longer, bustled off to her daughter.

CHAPTER II.

'Ally, Ally!' she called in her clear, strong voice all over the house, 'where are you, Ally?' and through the darkening passages she went in eager search of her eldest daughter. The seven lasses of The Mains were variously disposed of in the old warren of a house—in the lesser rooms, in the attics under the roof, reached by a spiral wooden stair, on which their young feet clattered up and down from early morn till early bed-time.

At this moment Alison was putting to bed her two-year-old brother, the 'young laird,' and apple of all eyes at The Mains. She sat with him in her arms at the tiny window of the nursery and crooned him to sleep, and as she sang she looked out at the murky red sky behind the plane trees, at the rooks circling and cawing on their way to bed, at the old lime, a towering mass of black shadow in the gloaming. This was the scene that Alison looked upon continually every evening of her life—this young woman without lovers and innocent of kisses.

Mrs. Graham was breathing rather quickly by the time she stood at the nursery door, and her first elated sentences were somewhat breathless.

'Braw news your father has brought home for you to-night, Ally!' she began.

'Wheesht, mother!' said Alison, 'you will waken Jacky.'

'Ah!' said Mrs. Graham, knowingly, 'you'll soon have done with Jacky now!'

'Sure,' said Alison, lifting round grey eyes to her mother's face, and pressing Jacky's head close to her shoulder, 'I've no wish to be done with Jacky;' and she put a kiss on the boy's curls.

'Tut!' said Mrs. Graham, impatiently, 'you might have little Jackys of your own. Think you never of that, Ally?' Alison blushed in the dark: it was not a fair question. Jacky was so sound asleep by this time that the voices did not wake him, and she rose, laid him on the wooden cot beside her own bed, and happed the clothes about him with deft movements full of a natural motherliness.

'Come down now, Ally,' said her mother, 'I want you.'

Alison obeyed her mother, as hitherto she had always done, in the simple management of her life.

'You are to get a man, Ally, after all,' said the lady, impressively. 'A husband, and a good one. Isn't that the brawest news ever you've heard yet?'

Alison was not quite certain, but there is no doubt, simple soul that she was, that she was impressed and awed, and that a flutter disturbed her quiet heart. Alison had never read even the few romances of her day, and knew nothing about love; and although she sang, in her sweet, untrained voice, as she went about the house, the love-songs of her country, often piercing in their pathos and passion—their language was a sealed book to her. True, Kirsty the dairy-maid had a lover who put an arm round her willing waist, and Alison had seen the pair walking so, in many a gloaming, by the gate of the cow-park. Would she have a lover now, and an arm round her waist? Mrs. Graham did not dwell on such things in the present interview with her daughter; but she spoke of Mr. Cheape of Kincarley with solemn impressiveness; of his house and his lands, and his plate and his linen, and Alison was no unwilling listener. It was a calm-blooded, unawakened nature, this of Alison's yet, moulded in the dim monotony of obscure country life, in daily performance of humble duties; a heart stirred yet by no passion more mastering than a sister's matter-of-course love for other sisters, and the little brother, born so late. She was a sensible, steady girl, yet only a girl, after all; and I do not say, that night, as she lay down in her narrow, hard bed beside the softly-breathing baby-brother, that she did not dream of a bridegroom and a wedding-dress.

Next morning, at the usual hour, Alison attended to one of her accustomed duties, the care of a flock of young turkeys, in a meadow by the farm. They were a late brood, and the object of Alison's most anxious solicitude. This morning her mother had commanded her to put on a better gown than usual, and to place upon her curls a fine mob-cap of lace and cambric, whose flapping frills annoyed her. It was an antique piece of finery, belonging to her mother's girlhood rather than to hers; but fashions at The Mains were not advanced. Alison's looks were not thought greatly of by her parents. She lacked her mother's brilliant colouring and bold, black-eyed beauty. She was rather pale, indeed, though with a healthy, even pallor that a touch of cold wind or a little exertion easily brightened into a pleasing softness of pink. Her hair, which would never grow beyond her shoulders for length, curled all about her ears and neck—tendrils borrowed from the stubborn, reddish locks of her father, only they were not red, but of a light, sunny brown. Her face had the calmness and strength of clear-cut features, and she was tall beyond the common, well and strongly made. Not an unpleasing figure at all was she, as she stood calling to her turkeys, the autumn sun catching at her hair, and shining in her grey eyes. Yet the hearts of her parents misgave them, as they saw her, lest she should fail to find favour in the eyes of Mr. Cheape of Kincarley.

For Mr. Cheape had arrived, and, with laudable punctuality, had stumped into the library, where the laird, who had been talked round the night before into a temporary acquiescence in his suit, waited to receive him. To the pair, presently entered the lady of the house in her Sunday silk, and genteelest manners. A gruff nod to the laird, and a stiff inclination to his dame, was all the salutation vouchsafed by Mr. Cheape, who then stood hitting at his boots with the whip in his hand, and grunting at intervals.

''Tis a fine morning for the time of the year, and grand for lifting the neeps,' began the laird, with a cough.

Mr. Cheape snorted. 'I'm not here,' he remarked, with plainness, 'to discuss the weather and turnips. I'm come, ma'am, to be presented to your daughters;' and he ignored the laird, and addressed himself to the lady.

'To my Daughter Alison, doubtless?' said Mrs. Graham, with polite firmness.

'Hum,' said Mr. Cheape, 'I understood there were seven of them.'

'We are blessed with seven girls, indeed,' said Mrs. Graham, majestically. 'But our daughter Alison is the only one from whom we could think of parting ourselves at this time. The rest'—coolly—'are bairns.'

'I should like to see them all,' objected the suitor, who felt himself being 'done.'

'You will see Alison,' said Mrs. Graham, composedly. 'You must e'en take them as the Lord gave them—or want!' she added, with spirit. ('To think,' as she said to her husband afterwards, 'if I hadna been canny—he might ha' taken Susie or Maggie, as likely as not—and left Ally on our hands!')

'Mr. Cheape is pleased to be plain and to the point,' here interrupted the laird, not without sarcasm in his tone, which, however, was quite lost upon his visitor. 'We have, indeed, seven lasses, and little to give them, sir, and cannot therefore be over nice in the matter of their wooing. Alison is at her turkeys in the east meadow, wife. Supposing we conduct this gentleman to the spot, and see if he is inclined to make a bargain of it?'

So Alison's fate approached her in this quaint fashion, Mr. Cheape stumping at her mother's side, and the laird bringing up the rear, with a comical eye on the suitor's burly back. They paused at a gate where Alison could not see them, but they could see her in a patch of sun, with the turkeys picking and cheeping at her feet. 'Is that the one?' said Mr. Cheape, pointing at the object of his wooing with his whip.

'Our daughter Alison,' said Mrs. Graham, complacently, with an introductory wave of the hand. 'But twenty, come the New Year time,' for she much feared that Alison looked older.

Mr. Cheape seemed lost in thought and calculation. 'A knowledge of fowls,' he said at last, heavily, 'is useful in a female.'

''Tis indispensable in the lady of a country mansion,' said Mrs. Graham, cheerfully. 'And none beats Alison at that, let me tell you!'

'Alison, come here!' called her father. Alison turned round and obeyed. When she approached the group which held her suitor, she curtseyed, but the behaviour of Mr. Cheape at this juncture was so singular and so disconcerting, that there was no time for a formal introduction between the two. Whether it was the wide, all-too-frankly astonished gaze of Alison's grey eyes, or the young lady's imposing height, or simply a fit of bashfulness that overpowered him, cannot be said. But merely the fact can be given, that at this delicate juncture the gallant wooer, with a fiercer grunt than usual, and some muttered exclamation which no one caught, incontinently turned tail and fled towards the house, the distracted matron almost running in his wake. Alison and her father were left together.

'Is that Mr. Cheape, sir?' enquired the daughter, gravely.

'Ay, lass,' said the laird. ''Tis even the great Mr. Cheape of Kincarley, in the county of Fife!'

Alison said nothing, but with her chin in the air, and lilting the flounces of her good dress above the wet grass she went back to her turkeys. Her father laughed his jolly laugh. 'He will have none of you, Ally, that's plain!' he called after her. 'So don't you be losing your heart to his bonny face, I warn you!'

CHAPTER III.

But so very far was the laird of The Mains from being accurate in his assertion of Mr. Cheape's indifference to his daughter's charms, that when he re-entered the library, which he presently did, he found that gentleman and his wife in the closest confabulation, the subject of their discourse being no other than that of a contract of marriage between Miss Graham of The Mains, and Mr. Cheape of Kincarley. The latter gentleman appeared now to be much easier of demeanour.

'These matters,' he observed, almost jocularly, 'are better settled without the presence of the lady!'

'But, God bless my soul!' cried the laird, 'you hardly saw the girl, or she you—'

'Oh, she'll do, she'll do,' said Mr. Cheape, with an agreeable grunt, but an air of hurry. 'An' now I must away: good-day, good-day!' He stuck out a snuffy hand, which Mrs. Graham clutched with warmth. 'Sir,' he continued, addressing the laird, 'if you will be pleased to honour me with your company at dinner to-morrow night at four, at the King's Arms in C——, we can discuss this matter at our ease. I am in a position to act handsomely on my part, as I have informed your lady. But 'tis better to discuss such matters between gentlemen. Good-day t'you.' He had hurried off, and had scrambled upon his horse at the door, with some assistance from that animal's abundant mane, and was jogging down the approach, before the open-mouthed laird had found time or presence of mind to accept or reject the invitation to dinner.

'Saw ever man the like of that!' ejaculated the master of the house, gazing after man and horse.

'Saw ever woman the like o' you!' retorted his spouse, furiously, 'staring like a stuck pig after an honest gentleman that's done you the honour to speir your penniless daughter, instead of shaking him warmly by the hand!'

'I'd as lief shake the tatty-bogle by the hand,' said the laird, provokingly. 'Wife, you're clever, but you'll never get Ally to stomach yon,' and he indicated the disappearing Mr. Cheape with a derisive finger.

'Will I not?' retorted the lady, with a defiant eye, 'ye sumph, John, to take the bread out of a lassie's mouth like that, afore she's bitten on it. Ye are even a bigger fool than I thocht ye!'

With such plainness was the much-tried mother of many daughters driven to address their exasperating father. The laird laughed: but then and there a serious marital tussle began, the kind in which the laird was never victorious. Mr. Graham announced that he would not dine with Mr. Cheape to-morrow night, or any other: that it was useless, that there was no object in his putting himself about to do so, in as much as that Mr. Cheape's proposals were preposterous, and not for a moment to be seriously entertained. Mrs. Graham, on the other hand, asserted that, dine with Mr. Cheape of Kincarley, at four of the clock to-morrow evening at the King's Arms in C——, he, Mr. Graham of The Mains, in his best blue coat and ruffled shirt, with powder in his hair—most unquestionably would, and should. Gradually, the laughing mood went out of the laird. For his lady intrenched upon money matters, and got him on the raw there, as only a wife or a creditor can. The laird at this time was an embarrassed man, and very eager to be quit of his embarrassments. Previous to the birth of his son, and when it was thought he would not have an heir, but that the entail, at his death, would send The Mains to a distant cousin, he had been careless of money, and had considerably burdened the estate. Now it was the wish of his heart to lift these burdens, and leave an unencumbered inheritance to the young laird; and if it was his wish, it was his wife's passion.

'What is to become of these lasses? Are they all to hang upon their brother?' was the eternal burden of her cry. Twenty-four hours of unremitted harping upon this subject, under all its aspects, reduced the laird to a frame of mind in which he would have dined with Beelzebub, had the dinner promised him a solution of his difficulties, and peace with his wife. Needless to say, therefore, he dined with Mr. Cheape, of Kincarley, on the appointed day and hour; and, moreover, did not come home until past two o'clock on the following morning.

For, let it be remembered, these were the jolly days of the bottle, when a man was no man who could not carry his port, and carry it home, too. The laird of The Mains was no drunkard, but he had a head of iron and a stomach of leather in the good old style of our ancestors. He was a four-bottle-man with the best of them, and he chanced to find in Mr. Cheape of Kincarley just such another hardened elderly cask as himself. The two sat hour after hour, swallowing glass after glass, at first in gloomy silence; but presently each began to mellow in his own way. The laird's tongue was loosened, and he began to talk about his daughters and his difficulties. Mr. Cheape lost his shyness, became genial and generous; at any time, to do him justice, he was a man not niggardly in money-matters. The settlements he proposed to make upon his bride were more than handsome: to the impoverished laird they sounded princely. And it is a fact—such are the wonder-working powers of the rosy god of wine—that before the night was out, not only were the preliminaries of a marriage contract agreed upon, but the laird had become a borrower on his own account, and Mr. Cheape a lender, of certain sums that the laird had been at his wits' end, for many a day, to lay his hands on. When he got home, which he managed to do upon his horse with the utmost propriety, he was not precisely in a condition to explain complicated money transactions with absolute perspicacity. But the morning brought explanations which were eminently satisfactory to the wife of his bosom. Certain twinges of conscience indeed assailed the laird, and during the morning's narration, he was not quite so comfortable in his mind as he had been over-night. What about Alison's part of the bargain? But he reflected that he was the father of seven penniless girls, and must harden his heart.

Alison, meanwhile, made fun of Mr. Cheape in the attics, among her sisters. True, there was a prick of disappointment at her heart, for her mother had dangled a wedding before her eyes, and a wedding meant a lover, of course. But the happy heart of twenty is sound and light, and by next morning Alison had forgotten her disappointment, and Mr. Cheape along with it. Her mother's early summons gave her no misgiving.

'Come with me to the big press in the east passage, Alison,' said the dame, jingling a bunch of keys, and with the light of battle in her eye. ''Tis time we looked at something there, and I have a mind to have a talk with you, besides.' And at this Alison's heart did certainly jump—not pleasantly.

The big press in the east passage smelt agreeably of dried lavender and rose leaves. Here was store of fine linen, and a few of the more valued articles of personal apparel.

'Get out my wedding-silk, Ally,' commanded Mrs. Graham. Alison reached up long arms, and got down the silk, which was laid by, with layers of fine muslin between its folds. It was a superb brocade of sweet floral bunches on a ground of greenish-grey; the flounces of Mechlin on it were fragile as a fairy's web, and ivory-tinted with age. Mrs. Graham fingered and examined the fabric; then she said, significantly:

'So, 'tis you that's going to rob me of my fine silk, after all, Ally? 'Tis just as it should be—my eldest girl!' Alison shook in her shoes, for she knew well that determined inflection of the maternal voice.

'I don't understand, mother,' she managed to stammer.

'Tuts, nonsense!' said Mrs. Graham, sharply, 'you're no fool, Ally: you understand fine. That honest gentleman you saw yesterday is to marry you, and lucky you are to get him!'

'Sure, not that man, mother!' cried poor Alison.

'And why not that man, miss?' retorted the matron with a rising colour and an angry eye.

'He's as old as my father,' blurted out the reluctant bride, 'and has no liking for me, for-bye!'

'And why should he ask you when he's seen you, if he has no liking for you?' demanded the matron.

'Because no one else will have him, likely,' said Alison, in desperation. She had never spoken in rebellion to her mother before, and the effort it cost her was truly desperate. 'If I have to take that man,' she plunged on recklessly, 'I'll be the laughing-stock of the countryside and of my very sisters!'

'Alison,' said Mrs. Graham, in a more reasoning tone, for she felt her own strength, 'you are a silly lassie, and just don't know the grand chance you're wanting to throw away. Think what it will be to be a married woman, wi' a house and man of your own—a man of substance, too—and lord it over a whole countryside! Why, here, Ally, you're little better than a nurse-girl and a hen-wife!'

'And I'd rather be a nurse-girl and a hen-wife all my days, than married to that old man,' cried Alison, with a rising sob. 'He'll neither love me, nor I him!'

'Love!' cried Mrs. Graham, with a blaze of fury, 'and who taught you to speak of love, and you twenty, and never a lover near you! Set you up to be saucy, indeed! I had had my choice long afore I was your age, and might ha' turned up a neb at a decent man, maybe. But for the likes of you, it's very different, let me tell you!'

'You lived in a town,' said poor Alison, in weak defence, 'and saw the men.'

'Town or no town makes no difference,' said Mrs. Graham with lofty superiority. 'The men come down the lum to likely lasses, and them that's not likely may be thankful to get a chance at all. What's to become of you all,' she continued, her tone of reasoning degenerating into the high voice of the scold, 'you seven muckle, useless lasses? Are you all to sorn on Jacky, poor wee man, for all his days, and take the very bread out of his mouth?'

'I would not sorn on Jacky,' said Alison, with a quivering lip.

'Then get you a husband, and no nonsense!' said Mrs. Graham. ''Tis, indeed, a settled business,' she went on, coolly, 'settled by your father.'

'Oh, I'll not believe it!' cried Alison, fairly in tears. 'Let me see my father first.'

'That you shall not,' said Mrs. Graham with force. Well she knew the inevitable effects of a daughter's tears on that weak man. It became an indispensable thing, in fact, that Alison should not see her father, and to that end firm measures must at once be taken.

'Up you get to your room, and stay there, miss, till you are of a better mind,' said the stern mother of seven, who did not stick at trifles. She chased Alison up the garret stair, shut the door on her, and turned the key.

'A few days o' that,' she said to herself triumphantly, 'and she'll be ready to jump at Mr. Cheape—honest man.'

CHAPTER IV.

I no not wish, in the very opening of her story, to give the idea that Alison Graham was a girl of poor spirit. Perhaps she should have turned upon her mother on the stair, or, at any rate, stood up for her freedom with a bolder front. But the habit of Alison's life, up to this point, had been obedience, and, in the days of which I write, parental authority was no matter to be trifled with. It wanted a hundred years yet to the birth of the Revolted Daughter, and to Alison, even the tacit form of resistance which she was about to offer to her parents' wishes, seemed a very terrible and almost wicked line of conduct. She sat down on the creepie-stool by the little window, where she was wont to sing Jacky to sleep every night, and was too much puzzled and too heavy at the heart to cry. Presently her sisters came and tirled at the door, wanting to know what was the matter; but the key was safely in the maternal pocket, and Alison shut off from comfort and communion of these friendly spirits. Then her tears began to flow, in very pity for herself; but she was quite determined that she would have none of Mr. Cheape.

'The lass will never be got to thole him, I doubt,' said the laird, with a sigh. Now that there was a matter of money between him and Mr. Cheape, his position was complicated, and he could no longer openly side with his daughter.

'Leave that to me,' said Mrs. Graham, grimly. To her mind it was like the breaking in of a colt or filly—a fling up, a few kicks over the traces, and a little restiveness at first, to be treated with a firm hand, judiciously low diet, and a new bit.

'She's saucy,' said the mother of seven. 'She'll be cured of that in a day or two!'

'Do not be hard on poor Ally,' said the laird, sorely pricked with compunction.

''Tis for her own good,' the lady replied, with no doubt upon that point whatsoever.

In this awkward predicament it was lucky that the gallant wooer of Miss Graham of The Mains gave no trouble. Mr. Cheape of Kincarley having, in his opinion, safely secured a bride, was, in the meantime, returned to the county of Fife, doubtless to make preparation for the impending change in his condition. He required no silly assurances or fruitless antenuptial interviews with the lady herself.

Thus Alison remained a prisoner in her little room, deprived of all her daily tasks and little pleasures, and of all good cheer of warmth and light and company. The actual prisoner's fare of bread and water was indeed not hers, but clots of half-cold porridge and a sup of skim-milk twice a day are not enticing provender, nor greatly calculated to keep up a flagging spirit. Her mother was her only jailer, and with her own hands dunted down this unsavoury dog's mess before her, with the unceasing jibe upon her tongue—angry, persuasive, mocking, cruel, all in turn. The weather, meanwhile, without doors, had broken for the season, and the days were short and dark and dreary. The rain lashed the little deep-set window, and Alison sat shivering beside it, and listening to the howling wind, which whirled the dead leaves off the trees and drove the protesting rooks from shelter to shelter. She was a girl of great good sense and a clear head. She could see her mother's point of view well enough. There were seven of them—she and her sisters—and what was to become of them if they did not marry? She had had no lovers, therefore it was quite true she had no right to be saucy. But to marry Mr. Cheape! Her gorge rose at the thought of him, of the ugly, pitted face, the grizzled, scrubby beard, the uncouth form and fashion of the man. Surely that was not to be expected of her? No! So Alison held out, and the dreary days dragged on, till all but a week had passed.

Then, at dusk one night, when her heart was faint within her, and her body faint too, for lack of fresh air and wonted food, her father, having purloined the key, came creeping up to her attic—very quietly, good man (indeed, upon his stocking soles)—so that the mistress, engaged in hustling the maids in a distant laundry, should have no chance of hearing.

''Tis a pity, all this, Ally,' he said, in the dark.

Alison did not trust her voice to answer.

'Were your mother not so doom-set on it,' went on the laird—'and sure she ought to know what is best for lasses—I would say never mind, and let Mr. Cheape go hang. But she's set on it, sure and fast, Ally; and maybe it's not just such a bad thing as it looks.' He stopped and coughed; nothing but his daughter's quick breathing answered him. 'He's not a bonny man, I will say,' he continued; 'but 'tisn't always the handsome faces and the fine manners that pay best in the end, Ally. Mr. Cheape is most handsome in his dealings if he's not so in his looks; and, on my soul, I think he would do well by a wife.' No answer yet. 'You would not help to ruin Jacky, would you, Ally?' urged the laird, pathetically.

'Indeed, no,' said Alison at last, in a low voice.

'But ruin him you will in the future, if you let this chance go by,' said the laird more firmly, for he was conscious of his advantage. 'Mr. Cheape is a monied man, and generous with his money, and we have profited by that already. I have taken a loan from him, at a nominal interest, which has greatly eased my circumstances; but I cannot hold to that if you give Mr. Cheape the go-by, Ally.'

'I didn't know of that, sir,' said Alison.

''Tis true,' said the laird, 'and not over much to my credit, for it seems like the selling of you, lass. But 'tis for your own good in the end, too, I swear, or I would hold back yet. What's your future, Ally, but to feed the hens? And when we're gone—your mother and I—to feed them to Jacky's wife, and she perhaps not so willing to let you. There's not much lies before you here, my lassie.' It seemed not, indeed.

'Then there's all your sisters—poor, silly bodies,' pursued the laird, who knew his ground, in Alison's nature, better than did his wife, because it was akin to his own weaker flesh. 'What a chance for them in this braw marriage of yours! You can give them a lift, poor lasses, such as we never can.... 'Tis not to ourselves alone we live in this world, Ally!'

'No, sir,' said Alison, quietly. Then, all of a sudden, she reached for the tinder-box, and, rising, lit the little cruisey lamp upon the wall. By its weak flame, her father could see her standing before him, very tall and straight, her face very white, the cheeks a little hollow with a week of fasting, and the tumbled curls about her broad, soft brows.

'I will have to take Mr. Cheape, sir, I see,' she said, a little doggedly, 'since it is best for everybody, and I will—if I can.'

'Now that's a sensible lassie!' cried the laird, 'and how pleased your mother will be!' And, indeed, his own life, from that lady's displeasure, had been little, if at all, pleasanter than Alison's for the past week. 'Come, Ally, kiss your father! Things will be better than you think for, and Cheape a better husband than many a young spark.'

Alison was about to do as she was bid, when her quick ear caught a sound outside, and she started away from her father's arm.

'Listen, sir!' she cried, 'didn't you hear the sound of wheels? It seems like a chaise driving up.... Father,' she clutched the laird's sleeve, and turned upon him a piteous face, white with fear, 'it will not be Mr. Cheape come back?'

The laird shook her off, crossly; that frightened face gave a horrid prick to his conscience.

'Tut, girl,' he said, 'don't be a fool! Mr. Cheape, indeed! 'Tis you have been in disgrace, and don't know the news; indeed, I had forgotten it myself. Your mother has a friend—'tis a Mistress Maclehose of Edinburgh—comes to lie here for a night on her way back to the town, from a visit. Fine and put about your mother's been—to get the best room ready, and a dinner cooked, and all the best china out, and the silver candlesticks and the tea-set, and all without you. I was for having you down, but deil a bit! She's thrawn, is your mother, Ally, when the notion takes her! But it will be all right now—and there, I must away to bid welcome to this fine Edinburgh madam. She'll set you all the fashions, Ally, and so cheer up!' And the laird hustled off, well pleased with himself in the end. Ally listened to his heavy footsteps on the wooden stair, but did not follow him.