CHAPTER VII.

“Werena my heart licht, I wad die.”--GRIZZEL BAILLIE.

At the same bright hour of noon as that on which Helen set out so sadly, commissioned with her mother’s domestic errands, Lilias Maxwell sat in the sunshine upon the mossy steps of the old sun-dial in the garden of Mossgray. She had her work in her hand as usual, and was sewing listlessly, with long intervals of idleness. It was an occupation very ill-suited for her at that time, for there was nothing in it to deliver her from the sway of her own thoughts; and so she pursued the quiet work and the long trains of musing together, looking, as she always did, very pale and very sad. To-morrow--to-morrow was the day.

The “soul of happy sound” surrounded her on every side, and she was faintly conscious of it; the drowsy stir of summer life, the hum of passing bees, the ripple of the water as it went on its way, plaintively, beyond the willows, softened by the warm medium of that sunny air through which they came, fell gently on her ear--perhaps they soothed her unawares; but we feel the solemn weight of our humanity more heavily when the heart of Nature throbs beside us in its spring joy, conscious of an inner world, whose revolutions and vicissitudes are of greater import to ourselves than all the happy changes of the earth.

But as the old man looked out from the projecting turret-window, it pleased him to see where she was, and how she was employed--for Lilias was singing, and the sunshine stealing through the trees rested on her head. He could not catch the words, and scarcely the music of her song, but the gentle human voice mingled with the familiar cadence of the river, and the young head drooped in graceful meditation beneath the joyous skies of noon. He thought the cloud was beginning to break and disappear; he fancied that the youthful life was asserting its native elasticity, and he turned in to his books with his benign smile.

But it was not so. She was singing indeed, but her voice was so low that it scarcely ever rose above the murmuring tone of the accompanying water; and she had chosen fit words to express the caprice of a sick heart. It was the brave Grizzel Baillie’s pathetic ballad, “Werena my heart licht, I wad dee”--most sad of all the utterances of endurance. Lilias had never known before that sick and flickering lightness of the strained heart.

Her hands fell listlessly upon her lap; her head drooped forward--so pale it was and troubled--into the golden air; her mind was away, wandering painfully through all the bitter hypotheses of care and anxious sorrow, and the slow notes stole murmuring over her lip, the unconscious plaint of her weariness. Who has not felt that contradiction? who does not know the strength and life of pain, and how it buoys up the feeble almost as hope does?--“Werena my heart licht, I wad dee.”

As she sat thus, Halbert entered the grounds of Mossgray, and perceiving Lilias, advanced to her with some hesitation. He seemed to be doubtful whether he should speak to her or no, and gave a wavering glance up to the turret-window of Mossgray’s study as he passed. But Mossgray was seated in the dusk of the large apartment, with content upon his face--content for both the children of his old age, and good hope that the cloud of Lilias’ firmament was floating away. The young man went on with a slow, reluctant step to the sun-dial: she had not noticed him, and unseen he listened to the pathetic burden of her song.

“Werena my heart licht, I wad dee.” Halbert had never heard the words before, and they struck him strangely.

Lilias started as she heard his step; she had fallen into strange habits of late--customs not common to the calm and thoughtful composure of her nature. Such fancies as the poet’s Margaret had, as she sat by her solitary door, while her eyes

“Were busy in the distance, shaping things That made her heart beat quick.”

It startled her very much, this sudden footstep. She turned her head with a sharp, quick flush of pain, and then it drooped again so languidly.

“Is it you, Halbert?”

“Lilias,” said Halbert, with a difficult attempt at cheerfulness, “it is very rare to hear you sing, and that strange song. Where does it come from?”

“Do you think it strange?” said Lilias. “I think it is not strange, but only very sad and true. Grizzel Baillie must have had a sick heart sometimes, and it sang to her so.”

But the stalwart, healthful Halbert had never been sick at heart.

“I do not understand it very well,” he said, frankly; “but where did you get it, Lilias?”

“My mother had a maid called Barbara,” said Lilias, with her faint smile, “and, like Desdemona’s, she carried this old, plaintive music about with her. She did not die singing it; but I think, in her homely fashion, she knew its meaning well. I had it from her. But, Halbert, you are not well--something has troubled you!”

“No, Lilias.” He was looking very pitifully at the pale, calm face now raised to his.

“What is it then? There is no evil news from the North?”

“No, Lilias,” repeated Halbert, “nothing has happened to distress me; but--I wish you would tell me why you are so pale. Have you any friend ill? are you afraid of--”

Lilias had risen from her low seat in eager haste; her fingers were clasped together; the feverish hectic of anxiety was burning on her cheek.

“What is it?--tell me.”

“I do not know,” faltered Halbert, looking at her humbly, as if he had done wrong; “perhaps it is nothing--but I got a letter for you in Fendie, Lilias.”

She could not speak; her lips were dry and would not come together; but she held out her hand with a gesture of angry, commanding impatience, such as never mortal saw before in Lilias Maxwell.

And he placed the letter in the trembling outstretched hand--the ominous, mournful letter, with its border and seal of mourning. He saw her eye fall on the strange handwriting of the address; he heard the low groan with which the heart breaks; and then she turned away.

She turned away, groping in the noon sunshine like one blind; and Halbert stood in reverent pity, watching the tottering, rapid steps which went sheer forward to the door of the house, leaving footprints among the flowers, and breaking down the snowy, drooping head of one of the cherished lilies of Mossgray. Like it, Lilias was crushed to the ground. The honest heart of Halbert melted as he sat down on the steps of the sun-dial. Man as he was, he could have wept for her; the shadow of sympathetic grief came over him, and Halbert sat still and mused while the shadows lengthened on the dial at his head, thinking as he had never thought before.

“What has become of Lilias, Halbert?” said Mossgray.

The young man started; his own face was very grave and melancholy, but the smile of good pleasure with which he had looked upon Lilias from his turret-window was still upon the lip of Adam Graeme.

“Lilias has gone in,” said Halbert, hurriedly--“Lilias is ill--I mean something has happened, Mossgray.”

“What has happened, Halbert?” Mossgray was still smiling.

“I cannot tell--she has lost some friend. I brought a letter, an Indian letter to her, from the town:--the seal was black--it seemed to carry news of a death.”

The face of Mossgray changed.

“My poor child!--my poor Lilias! Halbert, I trust, I hope you are wrong; but if you are not--”

The old man covered his face with his hand as he turned away. He remembered what it was to be made desolate.

The long, bright hours stole on, but no one in Mossgray saw the broken lily. An unexpressed understanding of some calamity fell upon the household; the blinds were drawn down in the family rooms--the voices were hushed even in the kitchen, and when any went up or down stairs, they went in silence, as if death, and the reverence that belongs to death, were in the house. But the door of Lilias’ room was not opened, and though the old man himself lingered near it ready to catch any sound, he would permit no intrusion on her; for now there could be no hope that Halbert was wrong, and the grief of his youthful days came back to the heart of Adam Graeme, as he thought of those young hopes setting, like the sun, in the dark sea of death.

It was twilight, and he had returned to his study--soft, downy masses of clouds just touched with the lingering colours of the sunset were piled up like mountains of some dreamy fairyland on that wonderful placid sea of heaven, and long strips of coast and floating tinted islands stretched along the whole breadth of the sky. He sat, sadly, looking at them, and thinking of the holy, calm land beyond, where the sun of hope and promise sets never more, when his watchful ear caught the sound of a slow step ascending the stair. He looked towards the door with painful interest. It was Lilias. She had laid aside the light summer dress which she had worn in the morning, and the old man started as he looked upon the shadowy, drooping figure in its heavy, black garments, and the perfectly pale face on which no shade of colour remained. He rose to meet her; but Lilias seemed comparatively calm.

“I have brought it to you, Mossgray.”

She spoke very slowly as if deliberate pain were necessary to produce each single word. She had brought _it_--the messenger of death.

And laying it on the table before him, Lilias sat down on Charlie’s chair, and leaning her heavy head upon her hand, lifted her eyes to the old man’s face as he read the letter.

Such a letter he had once received--but this was written by a friend of the dead, and written with tears as it had been read, though the tears were very different. The writer said his dear friend Grant, travelling for his health to some place among the mountains where health was to be found, had joined a British Company, a few officers and a small band of men, on the way; that one of the revolted Affghan tribes had encountered them, and after a desperate and unavailing struggle, the small, brave force had been utterly cut to pieces, and it was impossible even to recover the bodies of the slain. Mossgray shuddered as he came to this conclusion of the kind, well-meaning letter, and felt what torture it must have inflicted; yet it was gently done, and in few words, as is the kindest, when such tidings are to be told.

She was looking at him; with the deep, blue, wakeful eyes which cast wan light like the moon over her colourless face, she was reading his countenance.

“My poor Lilias!” said the kind Mossgray--he could say nothing more.

And then, in her slow, painful way, she began to speak. It was so great a grief to hear every distinct convulsive word as she uttered it, that the old man could hardly gather their import while he listened. She did not look at him now; her eyes were wandering through the vacant room, opened widely, as though she dared not cast down their lids, and the slow tide of her speech--those single words which came from her lips, like so many life-drops from a heart, pained to the utmost the gentle soul of Adam Graeme. She wanted to tell him that now she was alone--that she had only one wish now, separate from Mossgray, and that was to see his mother.

“My poor child,” said the old man, as Lilias came to this point, and laboured with her convulsed utterance to articulate the words: “We will speak of this another time when we _can_ speak of it; but now you must rest.”

And when he spoke of rest she laid down her head upon her hands, and her agony returned upon her.

“Lilias,” said the old man, “what if he had changed?--what if you had learned that he was not what you believed him to be? Rather thank God that bravely in honour and faith, he has been taken home; in the odour and grace of youth, before evil days or stains came upon him. Lilias, there are sorrows harder than yours--you shall find again him whom you have lost. There are those who have lost, and shall find never more, because they are parted not by this faithful and pure death, but by the dark barriers of sin and change. Lilias, my good child!”

She did not hear him; the words fell on her ear indefinite as the sound of the stream without, for words do not bring comfort to the desolate heart of grief when the blow has fallen newly.

And then she went away again slowly and painfully to her own darkened room. Halbert met her on the stair but she did not speak to him, and her wan face, and deep mourning dress, awed the light-hearted Halbert into reverential silence. He was not light-hearted then--he almost felt that his own happiness was selfish in the presence of such grief.

And the old man paced heavily his large, low, study-room, thinking with tender compassion of his ward, the orphan, and the widowed. It brought back the days of his own pained and struggling youth, and he remembered how gentle to him would have been this hand of death instead of the more cruel stroke which laid his early dreams in the dust. He thought of Lucy Murray and of her tears--tears which fell singly in their force and bitterness like the words of Lilias; and he thanked God that rather thus the stroke had fallen upon his child. She was now doubly his child--left to him alone for care and succour--set apart from all the world.

But Lilias grew calm; there was no fever in the great stillness of this grief--no antagonist powers of hope and uncertainty to sicken her with its fretting painful life. She was fitted for her lot; and when she entered again the little world in which they lived, there was a saintly repose about her mourning, a hush of deep melancholy in her atmosphere, which subdued and mellowed all who approached her. But there was no elasticity left; the human hopes, the warm links which unite the living to the world they dwell in, had all been snapt for Lilias. Except the reverend duty of a child for the old man who mourned with her for the dead, she had no other bond to the world.

And so it happened that she came to stand, as we sometimes see the afflicted, alone upon the solitary isthmus between the earth and heaven. The changing tide of human life seemed to have left her there--above the reach of the benign and gentle hand of change--above the happy impatiences--the impulse and varying motive of the common lot; standing alone among the stars, waiting till her summons came.

She was very gentle, very mild, very calm--but it was less sympathy than reverence that attended her. The human life had ebbed away from her lonely feet, and she grew feeble as she moved in her melancholy, shadowy grace about that old house of Mossgray. They tended her in silent pity as they might have tended a hermit spirit, and she repaid them as she could with her resigned and patient mildness; but they thought of her as one about to pass away, fated to another life than this of earth.