Chapter VII: Le Chagrin D'amour

Allan Graham, with all his quiet and growing love for Olive, seeing how she received him, neither petted her as he was wont to do in his boyhood, nor after a time had attempted any tenderness with her; but trusted to the progress of events and the necessity for fulfilling her father's wish rather than to his own influence or power of persuasion, aware that she could only become the bride of another, penniless, or nearly so, a circumstance which militated sadly against himself.

But this assumed coldness and calmness withal, Olive could feel, with a woman's acuteness in such matters, how much the expression of his dark eyes and the tone of his voice changed and softened, unconsciously, when he looked at and addressed her. She was of his own blood, like a sister, whom he might treat with formality or affection, coldly or playfully, according to the occasion or the mood, and whom he might love as much as he liked, or she would permit. Ah! this tender and mysterious tie of cousinship must give him, as he thought, 'a great pull' over Hawke Holcroft, and every other man.

On this evening, how handsome she looked, in all her wilfullness! How Allan longed that he might take her in his embrace, to kiss her starry eyes, her peach-like cheek, and sheeny hair with an ardour he had never felt in his boyhood, when he had done so many times; but now, somehow, he dared scarcely think of such a thing, and there was that fellow Holcroft, with all his easy insouciance, and with the smile of one who never laughed really in his life, hanging just rather too much over her, with a considerable amount of empressement in his eyes and manner, pouring his flowery nothings into her apparently willing ear, and Lady Aberfeldie, who could stand this no longer, became secretly provoked, and opened and shut her fan of heavy mother-of-pearl with such vehemence that the sticks rattled.

And, with the emotions we have described in his heart, Allan, as if the further to play out the game of cross-purposes, in a spirit of pique, doubtless, remained in close attendance on Miss Ruby Logan.

Now the latter was not the heiress of Loganlee, as she had several brothers; but, even had she been so, it would not have enhanced her value in the ambitious estimation of Lady Aberfeldie.

But Ruby was a very handsome girl, with a skin pure, transparent, and delicate as the lining of a shell, while her fine hair was ample in quantity, and of the darkest amber; her eyes large, deep-blue, and fringed by dark lashes. She was large, full in form, and altogether a bright and attractive-looking girl, and Olive felt conscious that she might prove rather a formidable rival if she ever had to view her as such.

Replacing the three daughters of the minister of Dundargue, who had been afflicting the company with much boarding-school Mozart and Chopin, who would have deemed anything national vulgar, to say the least of it, compared with some lachrymose drawing-room ballad, and who in a ditty of great length and mystery, which we quote at second hand, had informed their hearers--

'Mermaids we be,
Under the blue sea'--

replacing them, we say, Ruby Logan sang to Allan in a rich mezzo-soprano voice, and with a suppressed emotion, born perhaps of a coquettish desire to dazzle and please him, as a handsome young fellow of good position, all of which proved a fresh annoyance to my Lady Aberfeldie, who deemed music at times 'a convenient noise for drowning conversation, and under whose shelter the old people talk scandal and the young people make love,' and who knew that Miss Logan, like Olive, had that wonderful charm, which is, perhaps, one of the greatest any girl can possess, a lovely and ever-changing expression; and even Allan, as he gazed down into the depths of her dark-blue eyes (while she sang _at_ him), and anon glanced furtively at Olive, thought to himself,

'How the dickens _will_ our little game of cross-purposes end?'

Lady Aberfeldie was just then indulging in the same surmise, as, full of watchfulness, she occupied an ottoman in the centre of the inner drawing-room, cresting up her white throat and well-shaped head; looking in her stately beauty like the heroine of some grand old Scottish romance of the days of Montrose or Prince Charles, for there was something of a past age in her style and bearing, though attired in the latest fashion by a modiste of Princes Street.

In her matronhood, Lady Aberfeldie had still that subdued charm which was not now the beauty of youth, yet stood very much in place of it; but, with all her softness of manner, she was a proud and determined woman, capable of doing much to accomplish a purpose of her own, and the marriage of Eveline to Sir Paget Puddicombe was certainly her purpose at present.

Thinking that it was high time to make some change in the general grouping, the moment Miss Logan's musical performance was done she summoned Allan to her side by a wave of her fan.

'So glad I am that your father, who so often mistakes, invited dear Sir Paget here,' she said, in low voice.

'He is rather a good sort,' replied Allan, in his off-hand way; 'capital cellar and preserves, I have heard.'

'So rich, and not _very_ old; he always admired Eveline, and she certainly cares for no one else--thus I have great hopes for her, Allan,' she added, confidently; but Allan sighed; he knew better, and recalled the tears of his gentle sister on the terrace, and her half murmured admissions of deep interest in that winsome young brother-officer, whom he loved so well; and, as he remained silent, his mother spoke again.

'Mr. Holcroft seems to be fairly absorbing Olive; he has been talking to her quite long enough, and this will not do; ask her to play something at my request, and do you lead her to the piano.'

'We are anticipated,' said Allan, as he saw his sister seat herself at the instrument with young Cameron by her side, busy among the leaves of her music; and a shade of annoyance deepened in the face of Lady Aberfeldie as she glanced at her husband, whose eyes were turned also towards the pair, and she knew from personal experience how much may be inferred or deduced from the words of a song, and also how many a tender speech, an accompaniment, however ill or well executed, may conceal.

Lord Aberfeldie, of course, would never consent to Eveline having a suitor with means so limited as those of her young admirer; but, though the idea of such a contingency had not occurred to him. Lady Aberfeldie was much sharper and more suspicious; she saw 'how the tide set,' and was much opposed to Cameron being even a visitor at Dundargue in any way, as an utter 'detrimental,' and declined to see how his being one of 'Ours'--the Black Watch--altered _that_ matter.

And now, after a considerable amount of preluding, much unnecessary whispering, as 'my lady' thought, much glancing and many reciprocal smiles, Evan Cameron began to sing, accompanied by her daughter; and more annoyed became the matron on finding the theme chosen one of love and tenderness that could be, and was, sung with considerable _point_--a now forgotten little Scotch song, which the author adapted to the air of 'Rousseau's Dream,' and with the desire to excel before the girl he loved better than life, young Cameron, gave his whole soul to the lyric.

'See the moon o'er cloudless Jura
Shining in the loch below;
See the distant mountain towering
Like a pyramid of snow.
Scenes of grandeur--scenes of childhood--
Scenes so dear to love and me!
Let us roam by bower and wild wood,
All is lovelier when with _thee_.

'On Jura's hills the winds are sighing,
But all is silent in the grove;
And the leaves with dewdrops glistening
Sparkle like the eye of love.
Night so calm, so clear, so cloudless,
Blessed night to love and me;
Let us roam by bower and fountain,
All is lovelier when with _thee_.'

And it was not unnoticed by Lady Aberfeldie that at the closing word of each verse the eyes of the pair unconsciously met. Ere Eveline could be prevented, she had acceded to Cameron's softly uttered desire that she would sing anything for _him_; and she frankly did so, throwing into her voice the thrill and tenderness that are sure to come into a girl's utterances when singing to the man she loves. The heart of Cameron responded to this mysterious influence, and, as the girl regarded him furtively from time to time, she thought, with his crisp wavy hair, his clear grey eyes, general expression and bearing, he looked every inch what he was, the descendant of that Sir Evan Cameron of Lochiel who met Cromwell's men in combat under the shadow of Ben Nevis; yet to other eyes he seemed just a good sample of an infantryman who had across his forehead the genuine sunmark of his craft, made under the line of his forage-cap by a scorching tropical sun.

And now when Lady Aberfeldie, to stop any more musical performances between these two, prevailed upon Olive to replace her cousin, she was quick enough to detect that the former, displeased or piqued by Allan's apparent attention to Ruby Logan, swept past him with the most subtle little touch of disdain in the carriage of her handsome head.

Now Cameron had once more to give place to pudgy little Sir Paget, who--puffing out his chest and jerking forward his bald shining head--began to do his best to make himself pleasing to Eveline, while the latter, under her mother's watchful eye, was compelled to listen and appear to act with compliance and complacency; and poor Eveline, like Olive, often felt with some compunction that her mother's general bearing--which a certain quiet yet lofty dignity seemed never to forsake--was more calculated to inspire respect than love.

And Cameron, while he found himself talking rather absently on regimental matters with Lord Aberfeldie, as he looked at Eveline from time to time, was thinking sadly in his honest heart,

'Oh, what madness it is in me to love her as I do, and how wicked if I lure her into loving me! Can I expect her ambitious mother or her calculating father ever to view with favour one so penniless as I am? Would it be honourable in me to profit by her girlish prepossession in my favour, and so preclude her from reaping those advantages of wealth, position, and rank which she is entitled to expect, and to which her parents looked forward? and alas! as the wife of Sir Paget--if such be her fate--poor Eveline will be lost for ever to me.'

His breast felt torn by such thoughts as these; and, sooth to say, it is as often amid the splendour and luxury of life, as amid its squalor and poverty, that some of its bitterest tragedies are acted out.

But now the party began to break up--the ladies to seek their respective apartments, and the gentlemen to adjourn for a time to the smoking-room.

As the two cousins, each so different in her style of loveliness, crossed the great apartment, the soft _frou-frou_ of their long silken dresses seemed to mingle with their soft laughter and silvery voices. Sir Paget jerked forward his head and remarked to his hostess that 'they made a charming picture.'

Each had a sore place in her heart, but there was no appearance of it then.

Though resenting the position in which she was placed, and much inclined to resist it, Olive Raymond--such is female caprice--also resented Allan's having hovered so much about the amber-haired beauty, and, when she bade him adieu for the night, she could not help singing softly, with some point and waggery, as she glanced back at him, the lines of Tennyson's song:

'I know a maiden fair to see,
Take care!
She can both false and friendly be,
Beware, beware!
Trust her not, she is fooling thee.'

But whether she applied the words to herself or Ruby Logan it puzzled him to divine.

Olive and Eveline were of an age, and able to sympathise with each other in every thought or fancy. They had grown up together like sisters, Olive, as an orphan, doubtless being the most petted of the two by the household ever since she came a little child to Dundargue, and both were frank, both were open-hearted, and proud of each other's personal attractions; and now, dismissing their maids, they brushed out each other's shining hair that they might have a quiet gossip together.

'So ends a tiresome night,' said Eveline, shrugging her white shoulders, which shone like ivory in the light of the toilette candles: 'a night when the conversation of everyone seemed of a nature so antagonistic, or as if it was all broken up into wrong duets.'

Like her father, Eveline was anxious to discover how the cousins were affected towards each other now; yet the course of this evening, in which Allan had plainly flirted with Ruby Logan, while Olive seemed to have been engrossed by Mr. Holcroft, did not seem to promise much, and she hinted this pretty plainly.

'I do think Holcroft loves me, or leads me to infer that he does,' said Olive, with a soft smile on her downcast face, as she took off her rings, bangles, and bracelets, and tossed them on the marble toilette-table.'

'And you--what is your feeling for him?' asked Eveline, with some anxiety in her face and tone; 'not love, I hope.'

'I don't know what I feel--perhaps it is only a girl's emotion of gratitude and vanity.'

'I hope it will never be anything more. You scarcely spoke to poor Allan to-night?' said Eveline, interrogatively.

'Rather say he scarcely spoke to me! But we are fated to see quite enough of each other, I suppose,' replied Olive, as with slender fingers she coiled and knotted up the silky masses of her rich brown hair. 'How absurd it is,' she added, petulantly, 'to think, as I have said a hundred times, that I have a lover cut and dry for me--a _fiancé_--ever since he was in jackets and knickerbockers!'

After a pause, during which she was critically and approvingly regarding herself sideways in the swinging cheval-glass, she said,

'When I heard that he was returning to Dundargue, I was quite prepared to dislike him intensely.'

'Olive!'

'Fact, dear; and since then he must have been sorely puzzled by my various moods towards him.'

'You speak but with truth in this; and yet he seems to have been somewhat the same with you.'

'Poor fellow--but ever so good and kind.'

'And--and you think, Olive dear, that you are beginning to love him as mamma wishes?'

'Nay--nay, I cannot admit that.'

'Even to me?' said Eveline, caressing her.

'Even to you. Did you not see his manner to-night with Ruby Logan?'

'To pique you, if possible, Olive; but when Allan proposes to you, as I am sure he will, and must do----'

'_Must_ do!' interrupted Olive. 'Yes--there it is.'

'Well?'

'Then, and in that case, as the will has it, I shall tell him that, however I may esteem and regard him as my cousin, he can never be more, or nearer, or dearer than as such.'

Eveline sighed and smiled; but she told this reply next day to Allan, and hence he became less in a hurry to bring matters to an issue, though love was growing in his heart, nevertheless.

'Oh, why is it that women cannot speak their minds as men do? I wish I dared run away!' exclaimed the petulant beauty, beating the carpet with a little impatient foot. 'To-day I saw two great brown eagles winging their way skyward from the rock of Dundargue; and oh! Eveline, you can't think how long and wistfully I watched them till they dwindled into tiny specks.'

'Why?'

'They seemed such free agents, and, as such, to be envied. They had no wills or last testaments made by others to control their actions--no parents to rule them in the matters of love and marriage.'

'How droll you are, Olive! To whom but you would such speculations occur? I hope you did not express them to--to----'

'Allan?'

'Yes.'

'Not to Allan.'

'To whom then?'

'Mr. Holcroft.'

'Then, you were very wrong to do so,' said Eveline, almost severely; 'he will be certain to draw his own deductions therefrom.'

'In something else I was, I fear, wrong too.'

'How?'

'I permitted him to try one of my gold bangles--one sent me by Allan from Delhi--on his arm, and it would not come off again.'

'And the bangle?'

'Is still there,' said Olive, laughing, but not without a little emotion of alarm.

'Oh, Olive!' exclaimed Eveline, with something of dismay, 'how could you? This is worse than the photo.'