Chapter XL: The Rosebud

When the ladies had gone from the room, and the men had settled down to port-wine and after-dinner talk, the Whaup sat by himself, silent and gloomy. A glass of claret remained on the table before him untasted. He stared at it as if it were some distant object; and the hum of the voices around him sounded like the murmur of the wind, as he had listened to it at night up on Airlie moor.

What did Coquette mean? Why did she put away into the future, as if it were something to be dreaded, the happy time which ought to have been welcomed by a young girl? As the Whaup puzzled over these things, he asked himself what hindered his going to her now, in the royal fashion of Lochinvar, and marrying her out-of-hand before she had time to say no?

Alas! Lochinvar belonged to the upper classes. He could support the bride whom he stole away in that romantic manner; and his merry black eye, in bewitching the girl, and making her ready to ride with him over the Border, was not troubled by any consideration as to how the two should be able to live. The Whaup looked up the table. There were rich men there. There were men there who could confidently place fabulous figures on cheques; and yet they did not seem to know what a magic power they possessed. They only talked feeble platitudes about foreign affairs; and paid further attention to that god which, enshrined in the capacious temple underneath their waistbelt, they had worshipped for many years. Had they ever been young? the Whaup asked himself. Had they known some fair creature who resembled, in some inferior fashion, Coquette? Was there at that remote period anybody in the world, in the likeness of Coquette, on whom their wealth could shower little delicate attentions? Had they been able to marry when they chose? Or were they poor in their youth--when alone money is of value to any one--only to become rich in their old age, and think with a sigh of the Coquette of long ago, and console themselves with much feeding and the imposing prominence of a portly stomach?

Dr. Menzies, it is true, had vaguely promised that, when his studies were completed, the Whaup should become his assistant, or even his junior partner. But how far away seemed that dim prospect! And why should Coquette--a princess on whom all the world ought to have been proud to wait--be bound down by such ignominious conditions and chances? The Whaup plunged his hands deep into his empty pockets, and stared all the more moodily at his glass.

Then suddenly there was a sound of a piano--a bright, sharp prelude which he seemed to know. Presently, too, he heard as through muffled curtains the distant voice of Coquette; and what was this she was singing? Why, that brisk old ballad of his own that she had heard him sing in his lodgings. Where had she got it? How had she learnt it? The Whaup started to his feet--all the gloom gone from his face. He stole out of the room--in the hubbub of vinous political fervour he was scarcely noticed--and made his way to the drawing-room door. This was what he heard--

Come lasses and lads, get leave of your dads,
And away to the maypole hie,
For every fair has a sweetheart there,
And the fiddlers standing by!
For Willy shall dance with Jane,
And Johnny has got his Joan,
To trip it, trip it, trip it, &c.

Coquette, then, was in no melancholy mood? Why, what an ass he had been, to grow dismal when there still remained to him the proud possession of that promise of hers! That was his own song she was singing brightly and merrily, and with strange oddities of pronunciation. She herself belonged to him in a manner--and who was there that would not envy him? When the song was finished, the Whaup went into the room, walked up to the piano, sat down by Coquette, and told her that he knew nobody among the men, and had been forced to come in there.

"And where did you get that song, Coquette?" he asked.

"Monsieur!" observed Coquette, "you do talk as if you had the right to be here--which you have not. Do you not see that your friends, the doctor's young ladies, did laugh when you came in and walked over to me!"

"Where should I go, Coquette?"

"I will tell you," she answered in a low voice, as she pretended to turn over the music. "When at the dinner, I did see the youngest of the three young ladies look much at you. I have spoken to her since we came here. She is charming--and oh! very good, and speaks kindly of you, and with a little blush, which is very pretty on your Scotch young ladies. And when I asked her if she knows this song, she did laugh and blush a little again--you have been singing it to her----"

"Oh, Coquette!" he said. "What a sly mouse you are--for all your innocent eyes--to be watching everybody like that."

"But now you go to her, and sit down there, and make yourself very agreeable. You do not know how much she is a friend of yours."

The Whaup began to lose his temper.

"I won't be goaded into speaking to anybody," said he; "and the first thing you have to do, Miss Coquette, to-morrow morning, is to come to a distinct understanding about all the nonsense you have been talking at dinner. What is it all about, Coquette? Are you proud? Then I will coax you and flatter you. Are you frightened? Then I will laugh at you. Are you unreasonable? Then--then, by Jingo, I'll run away with you!"

Coquette laughed lightly; and the Whaup became aware that several pairs of eyes had been drawn towards them.

"This place is getting too hot for me," he said. "Must I really go back?"

"No," she said; "you will stop and sing--something bright, joyful, happy--and you will forget the melancholy things we have been talking about. Have I been unkind to you? You will see I will make it up, and you shall not sit gloomy again at dinner. Besides, it does not improve your good looks: you should be more of the wild boy that I saw when I did first come to Airlie."

"I wish we were both back at Airlie, in those old times!" said the Whaup.

Coquette looked at him with some surprise. She had caught quite a new tone of sadness in his voice, and his eyes had grown absent and clouded.

So he, too, was striving to pierce that unknown future, and seemed bewildered by its vagueness and its gloom? The seriousness of life appeared to have told on him strangely since he left the quiet moorland village. What had wrought the change within the brief space of time that had elapsed since her arrival from France? Was she the cause of it all?--she, who was willing to sacrifice her own life without a murmur for the happiness of those whom she loved? Already, the first months of her stay at Airlie--despite the petty persecutions and little trials she had to endure--had become an idyllic period towards which she looked back with eyes filled with infinite longing.

All that evening she was the prominent figure in Lady Drum's drawing-room. When the men came in from their port wine and politics, they found that Coquette had established herself as a sort of princess, and they only swelled the number of those who formed her court. But upon two, only, of those present did she bestow a marked favour; and these were the Whaup and the youngest of Dr. Menzies' daughters. She so managed that the three of them were generally close together, engaged in all manner of private confabulation. The fair-haired young girl had approached with a certain diffidence and awe this queenly small woman, whom everybody seemed to be talking about; but Coquette had only to smile, and begin to speak a little in her foreign way, in order to win over the soft-hearted young Scotch girl. These three appeared, indeed, to form a group in the nebulous crowd of people who chatted, or drank tea, or listened to the music; and before the evening was over Coquette had conveyed to Miss Menzies--by that species of esoteric telegraphy known to women--a series of impressions which certainly neither had remotely mentioned.

"Coquette," said the Whaup, when all the people had gone but himself, and as he was bidding her good-night, "why did you try to make Mary Menzies believe that she and I were much greater companions, and all that sort of thing, than you and I? You always talked as if you were the third person talking to us two."

"It is too late for questions," said Coquette, with a mingled air of sauciness and gentleness. "You must go away now, and do not forget you go with me to the theatre to-morrow evening--and if you do send me some flowers I will put them in my hair."

"I wish you would give me one just now," he said, rather shyly.

She took a pale-tinted tea-rose out of her bosom and kissed it lightly (for Sir Peter was just then coming along the hall), and gave it him. The rose was a great consolation to the Whaup on his homeward way. And were not the constant stars overhead--shining so calmly, and clearly, and happily, that they seemed to rebuke his anxious forebodings?

"She is as pure as a star," he said to himself, "and as beautiful--and as far away. The years she talks of seem to stretch on and on; and I cannot see the end of them. The stars up there are far nearer to me than Coquette is."

Yet he held the rose in his hand, and she had kissed it.