The House on the Moor. Volume 2. Oliphant Margaret

Letty, do be quiet! – for your mamma’s sake!” cried Susan, in terror and dismay, holding fast by her friend’s arm, as if afraid to see her vanish into the impalpable air.

      Letty was not at all inclined, having made so great an impression, to give up the subject, and was about to resume it in a still more pathetic tone, when Susan, stimulated by her own livelier meditations, made an animated diversion.

      “My Uncle Edward has been here!” said Susan; “he is the very kindest, dearest old man you ever saw. I did not think there was anybody like him in the world. He took me to Kenlisle one day in a gig, and bought me books, and I don’t know how many things. Oh, Letty, such delightful books! – one is the ‘Heiress;’ I have just finished it; about a young lady that had a great deal of money left her, and did not know of it, and was brought up quite poor, and a gentleman fell in love with her, and they went through such troubles; and at last they were – but oh, I forgot, I ought not to tell you the end. You don’t know how nice it is to get frightened over and over again, and think something dreadful must happen, and yet everything comes all right in the end. I wish, I am sure – oh, Letty, do you think you could come, just come once, to Marchmain?”

      “Yes, if you wish me, Susan,” said Letty, with a little demureness.

      “Wish you! Oh, if I could only have my own will! Would your mamma be pleased?” cried Susan; “and would you promise not to be frightened if you saw papa?”

      “Frightened!” exclaimed Letty, repeating the word in her turn. “But if I saw him, it would perhaps be my duty to speak to him, Susan – for very likely if some one spoke to him properly, about being good to you, and about what people say, he would be kinder, I should like very much to see him – perhaps I might be the means of doing him good.”

      Susan was lost in unspeakable dismay. “Oh, Letty, what are you thinking of? – you don’t know papa!” she said with a smothered voice; her desire to show Letty all her treasures fading before her terror at the thought of anybody attempting to “do good” to her terrible father. Unconsciously she quickened her pace, and hurried her companion farther from Marchmain. The idea terrified her out of her discretion. She forgot everything else in that dreadful thought. Lost in her apprehensions, she hurried her companion on towards Letty’s own house, where she resolved to deposit her safely out of harm’s way, telling meanwhile in elaborate detail the plot of another of her novels. Letty, who had no intention of making an immediate onslaught upon Mr. Scarsdale, turned the matter over in her mind, and thought it was “quite a duty,” if she should see him, to remonstrate with her friend’s unnatural father. The thought captivated Letty. As for the consequences, instead of being frightened, she would be pleased to be denounced and upbraided. That would be the persecution which she could not possibly find out in any other form in her life, and for which she longed as the seal of her Christianity. Notwithstanding, she inclined her ear to hear of the novel, and was not unmoved by Susan’s promise to send it to her. They parted at a little distance from the little manse, which was Letty’s home. “And remember, Susan,” said Letty, kissing her affectionately, “that whenever you choose to send for me, I shall come.”

      Susan turned home again alone, with the sensation of having escaped from a great danger. She was quite sick with apprehensions. No wonder her father debarred her from society, when the issue was that a girl of her own age should take it upon her, without warrant from any one, to argue the question of his conduct with papa. She made haste to reach Marchmain, with an odd fear that Letty might possibly take another fancy and get there before her; and what with the fright and the ridiculous thought, Susan, half laughing and half crying, began to run to the defence of her home and her father. Who could the poor child trust if Letty failed her? When she came in sight of Marchmain, Susan stayed her steps; she did not want to betray her panic to any one there, though indeed nobody but herself ever looked out of these gloomy windows. There was some one, a rare event in that road, passing before the house. He went slowly along in front of Marchmain, looking at it. Susan looked at it too, with curiosity, wondering what could interest any stranger in her cheerless home. The sun shone once more on the gable as Colonel Sutherland had seen it, besetting the bare walls round and round, and printing off its naked outline against the moor, which stretched round it on every side. Familiar as she was with the house, Susan’s heart sank as her attention fell involuntarily upon the strange nakedness and neglect which its unenclosed condition seemed to show. A bit of cottage paling, a yard of grassplot, the merest attempt at flowers, even a little paved yard, would have made a difference. No such thing was there; the doorstep descended upon the wayside herbage; around, the black whins and withered heather came close up to the walls. Here was no gracious life, active and affectionate, to beguile into verdure the stubborn yet persuadable soil. Nobody cared – that was the sentiment of the place: its unloveliness was of the merest unimportance to those who found a shelter within its walls. Who was this looking at it? When he had once passed the house, he turned back again, made a little pause, and then sauntered along the front of it once more, advancing to meet Susan, who felt a little alarmed at so unusual an exhibition of interest. One of the little clumps of seedling trees in the moss interposed between them before they met. Coming out of its shadow at the same instant, they encountered each other suddenly, and without preparation. Susan half stopped, started, made a suppressed exclamation, for which she could have killed herself, and blushed over all her face. The young man was no less startled; he too grew crimson with a guilty and conscious colour; and as Susan hastened past him, stepped aside out of her way, and took off his hat, without attempting to say a word. Both not only recognized each other, but perceived, with a wondering sensation, something akin to pleasure, that they were mutually recognized. Both hurried off the scene precipitately, without looking behind them, and both somehow discovered that this sudden meeting had given a different direction to their several thoughts. Strange, unexplainable consequence of a natural accident! – why should not these two have met on a public road as well as any other two in the district? Yet somehow this sudden encounter had a certain extraordinary supernatural aspect to them both.

      This person whom Susan was so unaccountably startled to see, was, of course, Roger Musgrave, walking here, as he walked everywhere within ten miles, because the poor fellow could not endure himself, and did not venture to battle with his own thoughts, and kept himself out-of-doors and in motion as a kind of safeguard. The only wonderful thing of the whole was that while Susan, without running, reached Marchmain with an incredible silent speed, and got in with her pulse high and her eyes shining, and the most profound amazement in her mind, Roger scarcely ever drew breath, on his part, till he had reached his own deserted house, though that was five miles off. Why they should have used such prodigious pains to get as far distant as possible from each other, in the shortest conceivable time, remains until this hour the mystery of that day.

      CHAPTER VI

      THAT day was an important one to Roger Musgrave. To live in that Grange, a great, empty, deserted house, where every desolate apartment echoed to his footstep as if he were a dozen men, and which contained through all its ample rooms nothing but a rude table and chair in the library, where he took his solitary food, a truckle bed where he slept, and some homely implements for poor old Sally in the kitchen, which the unfortunate young man had redeemed out of his mother’s twenty pounds – became at last and once for all impossible to him. That day, setting out for the only refuge of his idleness, a long walk, it had occurred to him to turn his steps in the direction of Marchmain, more from a passing caprice than a serious intention. His kind old Colonel had been there – and there was the Colonel’s niece, the pretty frank little girl, who had clapped her hands at his boyish exploit a year ago. The gratified vanity of that moment, his former curiosity to see Susan again, and her friendly mention of him to her uncle, warmed the young man into more earnestness as he approached the house. Seeing no one, and amazed at its utter solitude and sadness, he had turned away disappointed, when their meeting took place. Then, as we have already said, the young man hurried home. When he arrived there he kept walking up and down the empty library, till the old house rung again, and old Sally believed the young squire was “a-gooin’ out of his mind.” But he was not doing any such thing; he was only repeating to himself that it was impossible! – impossible! that it was against nature, and a discredit to his own character; that he could no longer wait for what other people were doing for him; that this very