Chapter XIV: Mina Triumphant

There never existed under the canopy of heaven so careless, unsatisfactory, incomprehensible a being as Malcolm Frazer; such an indolent, pleasure-seeking, easily ruffled, easily appeased, vain, self-sufficient, good-natured, hard to be angry with, creature as Mina’s brother, who, having been cut out by nature for a useless, dandified “man about town,” took it exceedingly hard to be kicked by fate from post to pillar; to be told he ought to exert himself; to have, in one brief word, to do any single thing but what he liked himself; to hear any solitary remark that was not precisely such as suited his taste. He combined the faults of a man with the absurdities of a child; he would catch at a straw to-day, and then turn round and be angry with the person who had flung it in his way, to-morrow. Misfortune had taught him nothing but irritability; the necessity for firmness only made him vacillating; he had no fixed principle of action, no aim nor object in life; he never seemed to have properly developed, he never seemed likely to develope; he had, owing to some peculiarity in his mental construction, grown older in years, but not in sense; bodily, he was not, perhaps, quite so young as formerly, but in mind he never aged; he remained a boy, and he looked a man: his resentment was not worth dreading, his friendship not worth having; any one who could give him what he liked, flatter his vanity, humour his weaknesses, was the best creature in the world at the time; whosoever annoyed him, crossed his whim, or told him an unpalatable truth, was his enemy for the time: he had become perfectly good for nothing since his uncle’s death; the unrestrained liberty, the wild free existence, the unlimited command of money he had enjoyed during his mother’s lifetime, had utterly ruined him for any settled regular employment; he possessed talents which were never used, energies he never exerted, feelings that never were aroused: it depended on future events whether he should remain for ever the same useless and desperately simple—ready to believe and hope anything, willing to be turned from or to any purpose, anxious to be benefited by any one—sort of youth he actually was,—when one day Mina, forgetful of her former vows never to try to influence or meddle with him, dragged him off to a quiet summer-house, and made him sit down and hearken to her.

“Malcolm,” she began, “you spoke very harshly, very unkindly, very unjustly to me one evening since we came here; you joined one, who is no friend to either of us, in her exclamations against me; you implied that you desired I should marry a man in adversity, whom you insisted I ought not to speak civilly to in prosperity; you declared I had injured your prospects by not blasting my own happiness; though you knew our mother lacked no comfort money could procure for her, you affirmed, I might have made her life more peaceful by marrying, or, at least, temporizing, with a man I despised; you accused me of deceit, for not speaking on a painful subject; you said my secresy had ruined you, when I merely kept silent because I was perfectly well aware Alfred Westwood never would do anything for you, unless I married him, and very possibly not then. I believe he could, perhaps, have wrung a fortune out of Mrs. Merapie by some means, had I wedded him, but it would have been a fortune, not for you, but for me, his wife. I do not profess to thoroughly understand Mr. Westwood, but he cannot blind me for all that, and though I am poor, I never intend to be his wife; do you hear that, Malcolm?”

“Yes, I do, and I’m not sure that I ever wanted you, only Cecilia said——”

“I know she did,” interposed Mina; “she has said a great many things you ought never to have believed, Malcolm; but I do not want to talk about her or the bitter words you spoke that night. I wish to tell you, first, what was the last sentence our mother ever spoke; I never have told you yet, because I never had an opportunity, and there has been a sort of coolness between us for a long time: I know why there has been and who has caused it, and therefore I have never felt angry with you, only hurt and grieved. Just before she died, she gasped out, ‘Be a fond sister to Malcolm.’ She was always far fonder of you than of me; you were her first thought, her pride, her darling; the place I held in her heart was nothing in comparison to that you occupied; I never heard her speak to me as she used to speak to you, as papa used to speak to me, till the very day she died; but still we were both her children: and do not you think, Malcolm, that if you had been there too, and life had lingered for a minute longer, she might have added, ‘Be a fond brother to Mina?’”

The young man did not answer for a minute; he looked away towards the mountains, though he was unconscious of seeing them. Then taking his sister’s hand, he replied, with a sort of huskiness in his voice which betrayed more than he would have thought it dignified to confess,

“And so I will, little one, so I will, though she did not say it; I will be a fond brother, for her sake, and yours, and my own.”

“There are only the two of us in the world, Malcolm,” she continued, “only the two, strongly tied to one another. We have relatives and friends and acquaintances; but none so near, but that a day might alienate them; none so dear, but that they might feel themselves at perfect liberty to hate us bitterly: the bond between us is so strong, nothing ought ever to have power to snap it; there ought to be no coldness, no disguise in our conduct,—we must try to work with and for each other, to have no concealments, to be true to ourselves, and to join together against all external enemies; not to be influenced by the breath of slander or the words of strangers, who care for neither of us and only desire to sow sorrow in the hearts of both. Do you agree with me?”

“Yes.” He said it half stupidly, as if he did not understand what she was driving at. Though he comprehended the little hint directed against Cecilia, he felt Mina’s speech implied a vast deal more, and he waited for further explanation: it was speedily given.

“If we are truly brother and sister,” recommenced Mina, “the secret of one ought to be the secret of both. I was once so wounded with you that I almost vowed I never would meddle in any affair of yours, never try to influence you, never tell you any plan of my own; but then I reflected that was not a right way for us to get on,—that where there is little confidence there can never be much fondness; and when I saw that Cecilia was beginning to sneer at you, as she sneered at me, to make you feel our painful position, to let you taste a drop of the cup she has long been making me swallow, my resolution was fairly overturned, and I thought I would neither bear longer myself, nor let you be humiliated by her and Alfred Westwood; and, in place of deciding to leave this alone, I determined to strive and get you to go with me.”

“That’s all very well, Mina, and I have thought about it myself; but I really don’t see where you can go, unless——”

“I marry Mr. Westwood; well, just listen to me, once for all, Malcolm, and remember I am not speaking now rashly and unthinkingly, but in calm sober earnest: before I would do that—before I would become wife to a man I hate and despise and scorn, and still dread, I would walk quietly down to that lake, and shroud myself from care and want and sorrow for ever in its deep waters. I know I should be committing a sin; but I should not care for that, because the other would be, to my mind, one nearly equally great. I should—if I saw no means of escape open but by death—choose death, and never think twice about the matter: you know I would do what I say, so you may settle your mind positively on one point, namely, that ever leave Craigmaver his wife—_I will not_.”

She had risen as she spoke. From the spot they occupied the lake below was clearly visible, lying calm, dark, and silent a hundred feet beneath; and, when she pointed with one hand down towards the grave she said she should never hesitate to select, and raised the other with a half-passionate, half-despairing gesture above her head, Malcolm—looking into her flushed face, gazing at the black sullen shadow lying across her eyes, hearkening to her thoroughly serious words—felt it was in her to do what she threatened—felt there was an obstinacy and force of will about her which entered not into the composition of his nature. He could not admire the wild stubbornness of her character: there was a something rather repelling, violent, unfeminine, to his thinking, in the composition of his sister; she was unlike him,—no weathercock blown about by the changeful breath of the world’s opinion—no reed shaken by the withering wind of circumstances—no pliable creature, eager to do what seemed best at the moment, to accept help from any quarter, to like and dislike according to the amount of shillings she possessed, and the number of guineas her friends could give her; she was unlike him, and Malcolm felt the consciousness of their dissimilarity strike home and annoy him, even whilst he knew he was capable of being somewhat influenced by a disposition so completely opposite to that which he had always considered the acme of perfection—his own.

“But, Mina,” he commenced, after a pause, “I really do not see what you are to do.”

“Tell me, Malcolm,” she said, “do you see what _you_ are to do? Put me out of the question—suppose you were situated just as you are at present, only without a sister, what would you do?”

Malcolm moved uneasily on his seat: he would willingly have shirked the question, but Mina’s eyes were fastened on his face, and an answer of some kind became absolutely necessary; he could not conceal, even from himself, the fact that he was lounging away the best part of his life as a dependant: still the query, though a direct one, was only supposititious; an answer, therefore, bound him to nothing; he might talk grandly and still remain inactive, and the instant this idea struck him, he replied,

“Why, supposing an impossibility—supposing you never had existed, and that I were standing here all alone, I would gather together any money that was left out of the wreck, start for London, and take my chance of finding employment there.”

“That is what you would do if no Mina Frazer walked on this earth,” she said: “well, Malcolm, that is just what I want you to do; you will go to London to work out your plans, I to work out mine. If you were not here I should leave Craigmaver to-morrow. As it appears we have both one common destination, shall we make up our minds at once to travel in company, and that speedily?”

Here was a “fix.” Malcolm stared in blank amazement at his sister, who had uttered this audacious proposal with a perfectly unmoved face; and he echoed the words.

“To London, and that speedily?”

“Tell me,” she said, in a sort of imperious tone—for she had made up her mind to go, whether he did or not, and, strong of purpose, she was resolute of speech—“tell me, when we came here, did you intend to stay all your life at Craigmaver?”

“No, merely to recruit our mother’s health; but, then, you see, Mina, a great change has taken place lately.”

“I know that; a mother has died—a sorrow has been endured: but, Malcolm, there is less now than ever to keep us here. For her sake we might have dreaded encountering the world with small means; but she can never feel earthly privation more: we have not a tie here of any kind; we ought to be gone; you must go to London and commence work of some kind.”

Once again Malcolm tried to find refuge behind the old excuse.

“I really do not see, Mina,” he said, “what is to become of you?”

“Will you oblige me, Malcolm, by thinking, not what is to become of me, but of yourself. I am going, whether you remain here or not. Miss Caldera’s cousin is dead; she has written to offer me a share of her home: I mean to return, and try whether I cannot make money either by translations or by original tales. I never told you before I had attempted writing, but I have; and now all that remains to be decided is, whether you will come and try to support yourself, as I mean to go and support myself. Will you choose?”

“But I say, Mina, have you any chance as a—whatever you call it—author, eh?” he eagerly demanded.

“That remains to be tried,” she answered, with a smile; “I am a tolerable linguist at all events, and if I cannot do one thing, I will another—there, that’s the secret I want you to keep: now will you go or stay?—stay here to be sneered at, and remain doing nothing, attempting nothing, hoping for nothing, or go to make a fortune, and obtain enough to buy a fine estate and become a man of consideration and substance: you can be that if you like; choose, brother.”

Make a fortune! what a captivating phrase it is; how easily the words are spoken; what a “making” it generally proves; how seldom, when obtained, it seems worth the wear and tear and fret and trouble it required to gain it. But the idea is a fascinating one, especially when with the sound no thought, is conveyed to the sense of weary days and sleepless nights and toiling years, and obstacles to be surmounted and sorrows endured; when it is grasped by the fancy as readily as if produced at the touch of an enchanter; when all the brightness is revealed—all the darkness concealed. It costs but a breath to utter the phrase, it costs but a thought to realise it; the breath expires and the thought dies in time, but out of their ruins the fortune does not arise; the fabric, built of air—made tangible to imagination—crumbles into its original nothingness, and disappointment broods on the foundations, and anger and irritability dwell among the wrecks. Fortunes have to be made of sterner stuff than imagination: it is easy to talk of them—hard to win them; yet still the phrase is a captivating one uttered by hopeful lips, listened to by self-sufficient ears.

And Mina was hopeful, and her brother prone to believe fortune would come to him somehow; that he, by raising his finger, could command anything; so he was ruled by her, and Mina had incurred the heavy responsibility of leading him off after a chimera. She felt glad about it then, but her soul shrunk in after times from the weight of that responsibility—she could have led him by a thread after a few minutes more of earnest vehement discourse: how she often wished afterwards he had been difficult to move as a log of wood, which might have resisted all her efforts to drag it from that place; not but what it was well for Malcolm to follow, though it was ill for her to lead; not but that the responsibility was a holy one, only it was rather too great for her.

It fettered and oppressed her in after times; but what else could she do then but go herself, and try to take him with her? what could she do? It was a choice presented between the known and the unknown—the felt and the unfelt; it was right for them to leave Craigmaver, but not as they did leave it—perfect children in sense and experience and folly, running off, without a thought of failure, in quest of the crock of gold, to be found at the end of the rainbow arch,—in search of what they never found for years; never found at all, unassisted, for themselves.

It was quite a stormy scene when Mina, who undertook to “break the news,” declared they were going, that nothing but force should prevent her doing so. It was, indeed, rather an alarming declaration to “weak nerves,” as Cecilia insinuated hers were; it was painful intelligence to be conveyed to a loving heart such as the laird’s actually was: all his old anxiety about the girl’s welfare returned with tenfold intensity; his interest in—his love for—her came back to their old quarters; he implored, he pleaded, he commanded. Mr. Westwood, getting an inkling of the true state of the case, insisted he was the person to depart, a proposition the laird, instigated by Cecilia, refused to listen to, more particularly as Mina declared, if there were no such person in the world, she would go all the same, though she declined giving her reasons for taking such a step.

The torrent of opposition had well nigh swept Malcolm along with it; but Mina, sitting still amidst the uproar, said so fixedly,

“Malcolm may stay or go, just as he pleases, but I am determined; his resolution cannot influence mine,” that the laird at length remarked, if she went, he should insist on Malcolm going also to take care of her, which observation settled Mr. Malcolm and made him decide to become her “grand protector.”

“Mina, child,” said Mr. Frazer, holding the girl to his heart and literally shedding tears over the wilful one, “Mina, child, do not go; for pity’s sake stay here among those who love and wish you well! Oh! my dear little niece, how time and the world have changed you since those days at Glenfiord, when a word from your old uncle would have made you do anything; but you do not care for me now, Mina.”

As in those “old days,” he had pushed back the long glossy curls from her face, so she now laid a gentle hand on his forehead and removed some straggling locks of silver white that strayed over it. She listened to him for a minute in perfect calmness; but all at once the sorrow of her soul burst forth.

“Don’t call me changed,” she cried; “anything but that: better than ever I did, I love you now: it’s not for the world I pine, but for peace; I am forced to leave you, but it is not that _I_ am changed: oh! no indeed, indeed I am not!”

She hardly knew what she was saying, but she put her arms round his neck and kissed him half wildly, and cried and sobbed as if her heart would break. Standing in the cold damp air of a winter morning, on the threshold of “beautiful Craigmaver,” the stern old mountains contemplating that burst of passionate human feeling from afar, the pine trees looking on grim and motionless, the lake sleeping far below, she hung about him murmuring she was not changed, and begging and praying him to believe her.

“Dear papa,” exclaimed Cecilia, “how can you dream of standing there without your hat? Mina, I wonder you had not more consideration than to allow him; but then you never think about any person excepting——”

“Myself, Cecilia, you were going to say,” returned Mina, raising her tearful face and gazing almost fiercely at the evil genius of that Highland home. “God witness between us which loves that good man best,—you or I,—which would sacrifice the most for him; but, dear uncle,” she added, the flush of anger half fading from her cheek as she turned towards him, “do go in; it is far too cold for you here, only first bid me good-bye again, and say you don’t think me changed,—say you don’t.”

Her face was touching his once more as she spoke, and she whispered the few last words so tenderly and entreatingly, that the old man had no choice left but to answer,

“I hope you are not; I will try to hope.” He strained her to his heart: and, as Mina felt a tear fall on her face, she cried almost wildly,

“Oh! let me go; I shall die! let me go! Good-bye, good-bye, dear, dear uncle.”

She was almost choking with emotion; she saw nothing, heeded no one but him; and, tearing herself away, she sprang into the carriage without even looking at Cecilia, and, burying her face in her hands, shut out Craigmaver and every external object from her sight. She never raised her head again for miles; and when she did, all visible traces of the mental storm, save death-like paleness, had passed away.

“Mina,” said her brother, “should you like to go back again?”

“No,” she obstinately answered, and for hours she spoke not a single word.

“Do come in, papa,” Cecilia said as the vehicle drove off; “you will be sure to catch cold, and, as she was so willing to go, you need not grieve so much about her: she will be very happy in London, I dare say, much happier in the midst of its gaiety than shut up in our quiet hermitage here: she went off without bidding me good-bye; what a strange wayward creature she is. But do come in, dear papa,” and the lady laid a persuasive hand on his sleeve when she concluded.

The old man withdrew his eyes from the southern road and turned to re-enter the house, sighing deeply. For about the first time in his life, he felt Cecilia’s words jar on his feelings: he did not know why, but his heart seemed like a loosened string, which, having been thoughtlessly touched by a rude finger, the sound it returned to his soul was harsh and discordant.

For, oh! how he once loved the child of his dead nephew, she who was now gone forth so lonely and friendless,—he knew; how he loved her still, spite of all her faults, he felt, but cared not to confess. It was about the first note Cecilia had ever unintentionally struck out of tune; perhaps, indeed, it was not so much out of tune as time: it had not been judiciously pressed down just at the right moment, and it consequently grated, with the force of a discord, on the ear of the listener. And so the old laird, without answering a word, walked mournfully into the house.

His granddaughter felt piqued to see the effect Mina’s departure had produced, and angrily accompanied him; she shut the hall door with a sort of bang, which sound once again smote on Mr. Frazer’s heart; for, when the nerves are loosened, even a breath causes them to vibrate and tremble. He crossed the hall with a heavy step, and moodily entered his library without asking Cecilia to follow him.

She who noticed everything, noticed this, and she consequently turned towards the drawing-room with a disdainful shrug; but her displeasure did not prevent her hearing that the old man was coughing, as had very frequently been the case for some time past, painfully.

About three weeks afterwards, a letter directed to Allan Frazer, Esq., senior, and marked “Private,” with two emphatic strokes underneath the word, arrived by the southern post at Craigmaver. Allan Frazer, junior, who had ten days previously been hastily summoned from Edinburgh, in consequence of his father’s illness, after gazing intently at it for a minute, laid the missive unopened in his desk, and turned the key upon his cousin’s dispatch.

“I will keep it for him,” the young man murmured, “till he is better.”

Days passed away, but the looked-for improvement never came. Feverishly Mina had written that letter; eagerly she awaited a reply: she wondered, day by day, whether it had offended him—if he were from home—if Cecilia had intercepted it—or whether he had shown it to her and she was adroitly satirizing it; she felt as if it must have produced an effect of some kind, good, bad, or indifferent; she thought for weeks of nothing but that letter, never dreaming how it was lying unthought of, unopened, totally forgotten,—whilst sorrow shadowed the house, a corpse tenanted one of the formerly pleasant chambers, a funeral train wound solemnly down the avenue.

The old laird was dead. His eyes had closed on earth’s sorrows for ever without reading the record of trial, the assurances of love, the story of foolish hopes, the half explanation that missive contained; his hand never touched the sheet; he had no opportunity of learning to understand her better, no leisure to grow to love her more: yet, almost the last words he uttered ere passing to that land where deceit and hypocrisy find no entrance, ere casting earthly blindness from him and walking into the full glory of celestial light, were,

“And Mina, Allan, our Mina, be kind to her; if she need help, as she will some day, be to her like a brother. I hope, I believe she is _not_ changed.”

If he had seen down into her soul, if he had read even the partial disclosures of what was passing there contained in her epistle, blotted occasionally by a tear, and the text made clearer—paradoxical as it may sound—by that unintentional marginal note, he would have been quite sure that, if she were changed, it was only for the better.

Allan Frazer knew perfectly well that he ought to return the letter to Mina rather than open it himself, but he adopted the latter course one day after the interment was over; and then, with a sort of pang, he sat down to answer it and tell her the news of his grandfather’s death.

He told her of the charge he had received from the deceased, to “be kind to our Mina.” He said he would always be a friend, a cousin, a brother to her and Malcolm; he touched slightly on the sudden departure from Craigmaver, and implied he understood the cause more clearly than she had cared to explain it; he alluded to what she had told her uncle of her intention to support herself by “pen work,” and added, that he would help her with money, influence, suggestions, time,—anything she required, he would do; in any way she could think of, he would help her, his poor dear little Mina, who had been so lately a child and who was still his sister.

The girl scanned the contents of that long, most truly affectionate letter through blinding tears; he never once asked her to come back to Craigmaver; but the burden of the whole was, “let me help you.”

It might not be; Mina scarcely knew why, but she felt the fact: it was not but that they were, in some sort, like brother and sister; since childhood, the laird had seemed to her to come only after her father, Allan scarcely after Malcolm, in her heart’s affections: it was not that she felt estranged from him, that she was proud, or angry, or morbid; no, but she could take nothing from him: she might have subdued her spirit, tamed her nature sufficiently to have gone and begged a boon from Alfred Westwood, but she never would, so long as she lived, accept the commonest favour from the hands of Cecilia’s husband. She cared not to ask herself why, because so many painful reproaches, so many sharp stinging words, returned to memory as she analyzed, or rather attempted to analyze, her feelings; but she was resolved, and so she quietly wrote and told him.

It was a brief letter, almost touching in its simple expressions of gratitude, almost mournful in its earnest, absurd, self-reliance; there was not a word in it intended to convey an intimation of her real reasons for refusing assistance from him; but all was clear to Allan as the noonday sun,—he read her heart through her actions; he saw her wish that intercourse of all sort should cease; he knew she meant that for a final adieu to Scotland—her early home, his present abode,—himself, Cecilia, everything; and, watching the expression of his wife’s face, when she accidentally caught sight of the envelope, he acknowledged, in bitterness of heart, that the girl was right,—that friend, cousin, sister, she could never be to him more; that, inferior in beauty and talents and accomplishments though she might be to the graceful mistress of Craigmaver, she was still sufficient to be jealous of, to have some feminine venom poured out upon. Yes, it was better there should be no correspondence between him and his cousins, even on business.

Still he felt he must do something for them, so he sent a large sum of money to Mina, to fulfil the desire of his grandfather that he should help her; but Mina returned the money, and the note, thanking him for his offer, was the last that for years passed between them,—the last, save one, and that one came not then.

So the Highlands faded from Mina’s eyes: thus the friends and the relatives of early days dropped off one by one; thus the vision of her childhood—“perfect happiness”—melted away as she and Malcolm started in life, all alone.