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DANVERS CARMICHAEL MAKES A PROPOSAL
Whether the conduct of the Duke of Borthwicke brought a climax to the affairs between Danvers and Nancy I can not state for a surety, but the next morning as I sat alone on the south porch the boy came upon me with some suddenness.
"Lord Stair," he said, "it is with my father's knowledge and pleasurable consent that I come to ask your permission to have Nancy for my wife, if she can fancy me as a husband."
He turned very white as he spoke, but his bearing was manly and brave as that of his father's son should be, and my heart went out to him.
"Sit ye down, laddie," I said, "sit ye down. We'll have a smoke together and talk it over. I'm not denying that I like you for the two best reasons in the world. The first, for yourself; and the second, that ye're your father's son. And to pretend that a wedding between you two children would not give me the greatest pleasure in life would be idiot foolishness. I feel it my duty to you, however, as well as to my girl, to talk the thing over plainly. Have you any notion now," I asked, "as to Nancy's feeling toward you?"
"None whatever," he answers, gloomily enough.
"You've not questioned her in any way —— "
"I'm a man of honor, Lord Stair," he responded, a bit in the air.
"Well, then," said I, "it will do no harm to set some of the obstacles before you that you may be allowed to deal with the situation bare-handed.
"Ye must see, Dandy, that Nancy Stair is different from other women and has been raised in a strange way. I'm no saying it's either a good way or a bad. I am saying that it's far from the accepted way women are bred up generally. It's no mere talent she has — for in a woman that's not harmful and frequently helps to entertain the children, as they come along; but with a girl, raised by men, whose name is ringing throughout the kingdom, who baffles every one by unfailing love and kindness, who has only the religion of making things better for others; a bit of a coquette, with such magnetism that one wants to touch her as one does a flower — I tell ye frankly, Danvers, as Pitcairn says, she's a dangerous contrivance of the Almighty's, and a man had best think many times before he takes her to his bosom as a wife."
"It's a singular state of affairs," Danvers answers, with a short laugh, "and one for which, I venture, even Nancy could find no bookish parallel. You tell me that you'd like me for a son-in-law, but warn me against your own daughter as a wife; while my father takes the other view of it: that he would like Nancy for his daughter, but thinks I'm far from being the one suited to her as a husband. Parents are not usually so dispassionate," he added, somewhat bitterly. I felt for the lad, and took a step along a side path.
"Ye're both over young as yet," I said, "and it's been less than a month since ye've known each other." And it was here that I had a taste of his fine temper, for he turned upon me in a sudden heat that made him splendid and natural to the eye.
"I have not heard that my Lord Stair was over-deliberate in his own wooing," he said.
I laughed aloud as he glowered at me, and put my hand on his shoulder, for I liked his impetuous ways and his deil's temper.
"There, there," I said, "gang your own gate. I but wanted ye to know what ye might expect in a wife. She'll contradict ye —— "
"I don't want a wife who is an echo of myself," he retorted.
"She's jealous —— "
"I wouldn't give a groat for a woman who wasn't," he responded.
"She is so extravagant," I went on, "that I never let even Sandy know her bills."
He made no answer to this whatever, as though it were a matter beneath discussion.
"She will forget you for days at a time while she's rhyme-making," I went on. "She will be interested in other men until the day she dies — " his eye darkened at this — "and to sum it up, I don't know any woman more unsuited to you; but if she will have you, you've my consent," and I reached out my hand to him. "God bless you," I cried, and before our hands had parted Sandy came around the turn of the path.
"You've done just what I knew you'd do, Jock Stair," he said, glowering first at his son and then at me, "and ye know as well as I the foolishness of it. Take a man like this lad, who has been spoiled by an overfond mother, and a woman like Nancy, who has had her own way since birth, marry them to each other, and you've a magnificent basis for trouble. Why don't you marry your cousin Isabel? You'd thoughts of it before you left London!" he ended, in a futile way.
"I'm going to marry Nancy Stair, if she'll have me," Danvers replied, doggedly.
"Well, well, she may not have you," Sandy replied, soothingly. "And as she's under the lilacs you may care to join her."
Nothing passed between Danvers and Nancy on the subject of marriage that morning, and I found at luncheon a probable explanation of the fact by reason of her absorption in the labor training idea and the building of an extension on the Burnside.
Between this scheme, her talk of Robert Burns, her interest in his Grace of Borthwicke, and an absolute and unnatural silence concerning Danvers, I was in some anxiety, and could come to no conclusion whatever concerning the state of her feelings. I mentioned Danvers' good looks, and she quoted me back "The Cotter's Saturday Night." I praised his conduct, and she answered with "The Epistle to Davie." It was the name of Burns that was constantly upon her lips; she set his verses to the music of old songs, singing them softly to herself in the gloaming, and I could see had made a god of him by her own imaginings.
"That Burns book was a bad investment for you," I said to Danvers one evening.
"Why," says he, "it's naught but a book!"
"True," I answered, "but the maker of it is a man — and she's idealized him into a god. Ye just brought trouble for yourself when you brought that volume among us," I cried.
To the best of my recollection it was about a week after my talk with Danvers concerning a marriage between them that the three of us sat at the dinner together, and there never was a more bewitching or dangerous Nancy than we had with us that night. A tender, brilliant, saucy, flattering Nancy, who moved us male creatures about as though we were chessmen.
"Jock, tell about the old minister and the goose," she said. "There's no one can tell that story like you."
Or,
"Danvers, do you recall the anecdote of Billy Deuceace and the opera-singer? It's one of the best jokes I ever heard." And it was after the laugh that followed this narration that Danvers said, with some abruptness, I thought:
"We had bad news to-day. The Honorable Mrs. Erskine and her daughter are coming to Arran. My father invited them over a year ago, and had forgotten all about it when their letter of acceptance came."
"Is it Isabel Erskine whom your father advises you to marry?" Nancy asked.
"It is the very same," Dandy answered with a careless laugh; "and I'm warning you you are to have a rival in the same house with me!"
"Is she pretty?"
"She's well enough," he replied indifferently.
"I believe," said Nancy, looking through her wine-glass far off somewhere, "that she'll suit you better than I."
"She treats me better."
"She doesn't write verses?" this with a glance from under her eyelids.
"She does not."
"Nor think her own way always the best?"
"She's very sweet and yielding, as becomes a woman," Danvers answered teasingly.
"She's just without sin at all," Nancy continued with apparent dejection.
"Entirely," Danvers returned solemnly, but with a laugh shining through his long black lashes.
"Then I'd better not meet with her — I, who have so many failings."
"Have you failings?" Dandy asked, and the teasing tone left him. "I've yet to find them."
And at this Nancy broke into a laugh so funny and contagious that the two of us joined with her.
"Have I failings?" she repeated. "That I have! And so many 'twould be a day's work to name them.
"Sometimes," she began, "I make light of other folks' religion when I disagree with it — and that's little short of scandalous. And I belittle the people whom I don't like — and there's no breeding in that; and where a friend is concerned I'm like the Stewarts, 'Back to back, and a claymore in each hand,' and —— "
"Ye're right in that," Danvers and I broke in like a chorus.
"And sometimes," she went on, and the humor she found in these revelations concerning herself was a droll thing to see, "sometimes I use bad language —— "
We men broke into a roar of laughter at this.
"Once, I remember," she said, with the gleam in her eye, "I danced till three in the morning at Peggy MacBride's wedding, and getting out of the coach twisted my arm till I thought I'd broken it. About four of the same morning I rose with a raging tooth, and crossing the room for laudanum, I struck the elbow of the injured arm against a chest of drawers, and before I thought I said —— "
"What?" Danvers cried, his face lit up with merriment.
"Nothing will ever make me tell," she said firmly, "nothing!"
"Whatever it was, it was moderate. You haven't a vocabulary sufficient for that situation, Nancy Stair," I laughed.
"Then, too, I'm no respecter of family," she went on, as though set for complete absolution. "It's mayhap because my own mother was an Irish gipsy —— "
"Nancy!" Dandy cried with amazement.
"She was so," Nancy insisted, "and the present lord's grandfather was a strange old cummer who ran away with another man's wife —— "
"Nancy!" I expostulated, "Nancy, you mustn't talk in that way of your forbears —— "
"Why not?" she inquired.
"It's a thing ye can't explain, my dear; but it just isn't done," Dandy said.
"Is it not?" she asked, and there was a look in her eyes of amused amazement. "Is it not? You see, I, in my poor blind way, can not understand why the naming of a thing is worse than the being of it — but if ye say it is, I'm amiable. I'll give out that my forbears were all kings and queens of the Egyptians, and that I ate my haggis when I was a child from the seat of the throne. It makes no difference to me, for I'm something more than the Laird of Stair's daughter."
"Meaning the future Countess of Glenmore, mayhap?" I suggested.
"I'm not meaning any such thing, and it's perhaps not becoming for me to explain what I do mean; but whether I say it of myself or 'tis said of me in the Glasgow Sentinel, it makes little differ, for I have the verse-making, and 'tis more to me than lands or titles.
"Aye," she said, after a pause, with a laugh as though making fun of her conceit of herself, "I have the genius —— "
At the end of the meal, before she left us, bewildered by her vivacity and charm, she stopped at the door.
"Am I nice?" she asked.
"Very," said Danvers and I.
"And will ye give me," she asked, as a child might have done, "the thousand pounds for Father Michel?"
"I will not," I answered, the yielding in me showing through the words.
Danvers saw his chance and took it with the spur.
"I will," he said, going toward her to open the door, but it looked more as though he meant to take her in his arms, "I will, Nancy."
She looked at him with a softness in her eyes.
"Thank you, Danvers," she said, and the glance made me think that, even did I allow such a manifest impossibility, he could never have invested money in any way to bring him a richer return.
It was a task beyond me to get sensible talk from him with Nancy waiting in the moonlight, a moonlight fragrant with honeysuckle and climbing roses; and I bade him to be off to her; and I opened the papers which had come by a late post.
I heard a merry talk between them as Huey came in to say that the white night-flowers were in bloom by the fountain, and I went off with him to have a look at them. As I came back I turned into the path which led to the porch, intending to tell them of these wonderful blooms, when I saw the two of them on the steps, standing near together, and Danvers's arms were around the girl he loved, and he was looking down into her eyes with rapture in his fond, handsome face, and I heard him say:
"When, when, when ?"
"When do you want it?" she asked.
"When do I want it! Now, to-night," and he drew her lips to his.
"Wife!" he said.
When I reentered the library I found it occupied by Sandy, who had walked across country from his own place with some news concerning the whisky tax. As we sat in dispute over it, upward of an hour later, I heard Nancy go to her room without coming in to wish us a good night, and a second later Danvers Carmichael stood in the doorway. It was good for us older men to see the lad, and at the sight of him I was out under the stars of Landgore; the sound of gipsy singing, the salt from the sea, and the odor of blown hawthorn were in the room, and I was young again with Marian Ingarrach folded in my arms. The brooding look was gone from his eyes and his face bore a strange illumination. He had added something to, rather than lost any of the cocksureness of his manner; but the happiness of him, combined with the love and passion of his ardent nature, made him a singularly handsome creature as he came toward us.
"Will you not congratulate me?" he said, looking from one to the other of us.
"Is she willing to marry you?" his father asked, with exaggerated amazement.
"If she finds none whom she fancies more, she said she would marry me within the year —— "
"Well, well, there's some hope for you," Sandy went on. "She may meet in with some one else."
"You've my pity," I laughed, but I took his hand in mine with the words.
His joy radiated itself to us, and his talk was just as it should be for his years. He patronized us a bit for being older and out of the way of it all, spoke of Nancy as though she were the only woman since Eve, and discussed a betrothal ring as though it were a thing for empires to rise and fall by.
"She fancies rubies; she cares for gems, you know," he said, as though the information was new to us instead of having been anciently and expensively bought.
He must have the best ruby in Scotland, he went on. He wished he could attend to the matter himself. "But," he stood with his thumbs in the arms of his waistcoat as he spoke, with a conscious smile — "but no fellow would be such a bally ass as to dash to London for a ring under present conditions." There were the four thousand pounds his grandmother had given him. They might all be spent for this. There was a fellow named Billy Deuceace, an Oxford man, with taste in such matters. He would write him concerning it to-night, he said.
"Faith," said Sandy, drolly, "you talk as if married life were all a ring. Ye'll find it different when your wife has the genius and is taken up wi' other men."
And Danvers faced the two of us here by a statement which has never left me from the night he uttered it till the minute of my setting it down.
"I am far from believing," he said, "that genius is a thing which rightly belongs to women. 'Tis to me but an issue on one side. And the woman who has enough of her husband's kisses and his babies at her breast has little time to write verses or think of other men."
With these words still ringing in my ears I rapped at Nancy's door on my way to bed, to find her sitting by a glaring light with the everlasting Burns book in her hand. I was a bit dashed in spirit by her occupation, for it seemed unnatural that a girl should be spending the time immediately after her betrothal in such an employ, and I affected a gaiety I was far from feeling.
"Is it to Nancy Stair or the possible Countess of Glenmore that I speak?"
She stood by the table, her finger still marking her place in the book.
"Dandy told you, then?" she asked.
"Told us!" I echoed. "It's my opinion he'll tell the town-crier to-night and have it in all the prints of the realm within the week."
"He told you just what the understanding was?"
I repeated what he had said, and she nodded at the end in acquiescence.
"You see," she said, coming toward me and putting her head on my shoulder, "I'm not sure of myself. My mind's ill redd up for marriage with any one. I've had too much freedom, perhaps; and while one side of my nature, probably the strongest one, loves Danvers Carmichael, I am drawn to the writer of these lines, this Burns man, in a way I can not tell; and at the very foot of the matter I am mightily taken up with the power of John Montrose. It's no highly moral, is it?" she asked, with an amused smile, "to feel ye could be in love with two — three men at once? But my nature's many sided, and on one of these sides I find a most 'treacherous inclination' toward his Grace of Borthwicke."