IT was a cheerful summer morning when Mary set out on her visit to her brother-in-law. She had said nothing to her boys about it, for Hugh was fantastical, like Aunt Agatha, and would have denounced her intention as an expedient¹ to make his uncle provide for him. Hugh had gone out to attend to some of the many little businesses he had in hand for Sir Edward; and Islay was working in his own room preparing for the “coach,” to whom he was going in a few days; and Wilfrid, or Will, as everybody called him, was with his curate-tutor. The Cottage held its placid² place upon the high bank of Kirtell, shining through its trees in a purple cloud of roses, and listening in the sun to that everlasting³ quiet voice that sung in its ear, summer and winter, the little river’s changeful yet changeless song. It looked like a place to which no changes could ever come; calm people in the stillness of age, souls at rest, little children, were the kind of people to live in it; and the stir and quickening of pleasurable pain which Mary felt in her own veins,—the sense of new life and movement about her,—felt out of place with the quiet house. Aunt Agatha was out of sight, ordering her household affairs; and the drawing-room was silent and deserted⁴ as a fairy palace, full of a thousand signs of a habitation, but without a single tenant⁵ audible or visible, except the roses that clambered about the open windows, and the bee that went in and made a confused investigation⁶, and came out again none the wiser. An odd sense of the contrast struck Mrs. Ochterlony; but a little while before, her soul had been in unison⁷ with the calm of the place, and she had thought nothing of it; now she had woke up out of that fair chamber⁸ turned to the sunrising, the name which is Peace, and had stepped back into life, and felt the tingle⁹ and thrill of resurrection. And an unconscious smile came on her face as she looked back. To think that out of that silence and sunshine should pour out such a tide of new strength and vigour—and that henceforth hearts should leap with eagerness and wistfulness under that roof, and perhaps grow wild with joy, or perhaps, God knows, break with anguish¹¹, as news came good or evil! She had been but half alive so long, that the sense of living was sweet.
 
It was a moment to call forth¹⁰ many thoughts and recollections, but the fact was that she did not have time to entertain them. There happened to her one of those curious coincidences which occur so often, and which it is so difficult to account for. Long before she reached the little station, a tall figure broke the long vacant line of the dusty country road, a figure which Mary felt at once to be that of a stranger, and yet one she seemed to recognise. She could not believe her eyes, nor think it was anything but the association of ideas which misled her, and laughed at her own fantastic imagination as she went on. But nevertheless it is true that it was her brother-in-law himself who met her, long before she reached the railway by which she had meant to go to him. Her appearance struck him too, it was evident, with a little surprise; but yet she was at home, and might have been going anywhere; whereas the strange fact of his coming required a more elaborate explanation than he had in his power to give.
 
“I do not know exactly what put it into my head,” said Mr. Ochterlony; “perhaps some old work of mine which turned up the other day, and which I was doing when you were with me. I thought I would come over and have a talk with you about your boy.”
 
“It is very strange,” said Mary, “for this very morning I had made up my mind to come to you, and consult you. It must be some kind of magnetism¹², I suppose.”
 
“Indeed, I can’t say; I have never studied the natural sciences,” said Mr. Ochterlony, with gravity. “I have had a very distinguished¹³ visitor lately: a man whose powers are as much above the common mind as his information is—Dr. Franklin, whose name of course you have heard—a man of European reputation.”
 
“Yes,” said Mary, doubtfully, feeling very guilty and ignorant, for to tell the truth she had never heard of Dr. Franklin; but her brother-in-law perceived her ignorance, and explained in a kind of compassionate¹⁴ way:
 
“He is about the greatest numismatist¹⁵ we have in England,” said Mr. Ochterlony, “and somehow my little monograph¹⁶ upon primitive¹⁷ art in Iceland came to be talked of. I have never completed it, though Franklin expressed himself much interested—and I think that’s how it was suggested to my mind to come and see you to-day.”
 
“I am very glad,” said Mary, “I wanted so much to have your advice. Hugh is almost a man now——”
 
“A man!” said Mr. Ochterlony, with a smile; “I don’t see how that is possible. I hope he is not so unruly as he used to be; but you are as young as ever, and I don’t see how your children can be men.”
 
And oddly enough, just at that moment, Hugh himself made his appearance, making his way by a cross road down to the river, with his basket over his shoulder, and his fishing-rod. He was taller than his uncle, though Mr. Ochterlony was tall; and big besides, with large, mighty¹⁸, not perfectly¹⁹ developed limbs, swinging a little loosely upon their hinges like the limbs of a young Newfoundland or baby lion. His face was still smooth as a girl’s, and fair, with downy cheeks and his mother’s eyes, and that pucker²⁰ in his forehead which Francis Ochterlony had known of old in the countenance²¹ of another Hugh. Mary did not say anything, but she stopped short before her boy, and put her hand on his shoulder, and looked at his uncle with a smile, appealing to him with her proud eyes and beaming face, if this was not almost a man. As for Mr. Ochterlony, he gave a great start and said, “God bless us!” under his breath, and was otherwise speechless for the moment. He had been thinking of a boy, grown no doubt, but still within the limits of childhood; and lo, it was an unknown human creature that faced him, with a will and thoughts of his own, like its father and mother, and yet like nobody but itself. Hugh, for his part, looked with very curious eyes at the stranger, and dimly recognised him, and grew shamefaced and a little fidgety, as was natural to the boy.
 
“You see how he has grown,” said Mary, who, being the triumphant²² one among the three, was the first to recover herself. “You do not think him a child now? It is your uncle, Hugh, come to see us. It is very kind of him—but of course you knew who he was.”
 
“I am very glad to see my uncle,” said Hugh, with eager shyness. “Yes, I knew. You are like my father’s picture, sir;—and your own that we have at the Cottage—and Islay a little. I knew it was you.”
 
And then they all walked on in silence; for Mr. Ochterlony was more moved by this sudden encounter than he cared to acknowledge; and Mary, too, for the moment, being a sympathetic woman, saw her boy with his uncle’s eyes, and saw what the recollections were that sprang up at sight of him. She told Hugh to go on and do his duty, and send home some trout²³ for dinner; and, thus dismissing him, guided her unlooked-for visitor to the Cottage. He knew the way as well as she did, which increased the embarrassment²⁴ of the situation. Mary saw only the stiles and the fields, and the trees that over-topped the hedges, familiar objects that met her eyes every day; but Francis Ochterlony saw many a past day and past imagination of his own life, and seemed to walk over his own ashes as he went on. And that was Hugh!—Hugh, not his brother, but his nephew and heir, the representative of the Ochterlony’s, occupying the position which his own son should have occupied. Mr. Ochterlony had not calculated on the progress of time, and he was startled and even touched, and felt wonderingly—what it is so difficult for a man to feel—that his own course was of no importance to anybody, and that here was his successor. The thought made him giddy, just as Mary’s wondering sense of the unreality of her own independent life, and everlastingness²⁵ of her stay at the Cottage, had made her; but yet in a different way. For perhaps Francis Ochterlony had never actually realized before that most things were over for him, and that his heir stood ready and waiting for the end of his life.
 
There was still something of this sense of giddiness in his mind when he followed Mary through the open window into the silent drawing-room where nobody was. Perhaps he had not behaved just as he ought to have done to Agatha Seton; and the recollection of a great many things that had happened, came back upon him as he wound his way with some confusion through the roses. He was half ashamed to go in, like a familiar friend, through the window. Of all men in the world, he had the least right to such a privilege of intimacy²⁶. He ought to have gone to the door in a formal way and sent in his card, and been admitted only if Miss Seton pleased; and yet here he was, in the very sanctuary²⁷ of her life, invited to sit down as it were by her side, led in by the younger generation, which could not but smile at the thought of any sort of sentiment between the old woman and the old man. For indeed Mary, though she was not young, was smiling softly within herself at the idea. She had no sort of sympathy with Mr. Ochterlony’s delicate embarrassment, though she was woman enough to hurry away to seek her aunt and prepare her for the meeting, and shield the ancient maiden²⁸ in the first flutter of her feelings. Thus the master of Earlston was left alone in the Cottage, with leisure to look round and recognise the identity of the place, and see all its differences, and become aware of its pleasant air of habitation, and all the signs of daily use and wont²⁹ which had no existence in his own house. All this confused him, and put him at a great disadvantage. The probabilities were that Agatha Seton would not have been a bit the happier had she been mistress of Earlston. Indeed the Cottage had so taken her stamp that it was impossible for anybody, whose acquaintance with her was less than thirty years old, to imagine her with any other surroundings. But Francis Ochterlony had known her for more than thirty years, and naturally he felt that he himself was a possession worth a woman’s while, and that he had, so to speak, defrauded³⁰ her of so important a piece of property; and he was penitent³¹ and ashamed of himself. Perhaps too his own heart was moved a little by the sense of something lost. His own house might have borne this sunny air of home; instead of his brother Hugh’s son, there might have been a boy of his own to inherit Earlston; and looking back at it quietly in this cottage drawing-room, Francis Ochterlony’s life seemed to him something very like a mistake. He was not a hard-hearted man, and the inference he drew from this conclusion was very much in his nephew’s favour. Hugh’s boy was almost a man, and there was no doubt that he was the natural heir, and that it was to him everything ought to come. Instead of thinking of marrying, as Aunt Agatha imagined, or founding a hospital, or making any other ridiculous use of his money, his mind, in its softened³² and compunctious state, turned to its natural and obvious duty. “Let there be no mistake, at least, about the boy,&r............