“You must hold yourself ready to be called back at a moment’s notice, Val,” said the old lord. “It must be some time next year, and it may be any day. That is to say, we can scarcely have it, I suppose, before Parliament meets, except in some unforeseen case. Therefore see all you can as soon as you can, and after February hold yourself in readiness to be recalled any day.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Val, with a blithe assent which was trying to his grandfather. He was quite ready to do anything that was wanted of him—to make up his mind on any political subject on the shortest notice, and sign anything that was thought desirable; but as for personal enthusiasm on the subject, or excitement in the possibility of being elected member for the county, I am afraid Val was as little moved as the terrier he was caressing. Perhaps, however, he was all the more qualified on that account to carry the traditionary principles of the Rosses to the head of the poll, and to vote as his fathers had voted before him, when they had the chance,—or would have voted had they had the chance. Val was setting out on his travels when this warning was given. He was going to see his father in Florence, and, under his auspices, to visit Italy generally, which was a very pleasant prospect. Up to this time he had done the whole duty of boy in this world; and now he had taken his degree, and had a right to the prouder title of man.

Not that Val was very much changed from his Eton days. He was still slim and slight, notwithstanding all his boating. His brown complexion was a trifle browner, if that were possible, with perpetual exposure to the sun; his hair as full of curls, and as easily ruffled as ever, rising up like a crest from his bold brown forehead; and I do not think he had yet got his temper under command, though its hasty flashes were always repented of the moment after. “A quick temper, not an ill temper,” Lady Eskside said; and she made out that Valentine Ross, the tenth lord, her husband’s father—he whose portrait in the library her son called “a Raeburn,” and between whom and Val she had already attempted to establish a resemblance—was very hasty and hot-tempered too; which was an infinite comfort to her, as proving that Val got his temper in the legitimate way—“from his own family”—and not through that inferior channel, “his mother’s blood.” He was slightly excited about the visit to his father, and about his first progress alone into the great world—much more excited, I am sorry to say, than he was about representing the county; but on that point Lord Eskside did everything that was necessary, filling up what was wanting on Valentine’s part in interest and emotion. He had again filled Rosscraig with a party which made the woods ring with their guns all morning, and talked politics all night; and there was not a voter of importance in the whole county who had not already been “sounded,” one way or other, as to how he meant to dispose of his vote. “The first thing to be done is to make sure of keeping the Radicals out,” Lord Eskside said; for, indeed, a Whig lawyer was known to be poising on well-balanced wing, ready to sweep down upon a constituency which had always been stanch—faithful among the faithless known. The present Member, I must explain, was in weak health; and but for embarrassing his party, and thwarting the cherished purpose of Lord Eskside, who was one of the leading members of the Conservative party in the county, would have retired before now.

Val’s term of residence at home was not, therefore, much more than a visit. He did what an active youth could do to renew all his old alliances, and climbed up the brae to the Hewan many times without seeing any of the family there, except the younger boys, who were mending of some youthful complaint under Mrs Moffatt’s care, and who looked up to him with great awe, but were not otherwise interesting to the young man. “Are any of the others coming—is your mother coming—or Vi?” said Valentine; but these youthful individuals could afford him no information. “Oh ay, they’re maybe coming next month,” said old Jean, who took a feminine pleasure in the dismay that was visible in Valentine’s face. “They were here a’ the summer, June and July; and I wouldna wonder but we’ll see them all October—if it’s no too cauld,” the old woman added, with a twinkle in her eye.

“What good will that do me?” said Val; and he leapt the dyke and went home through the ferns angry with disappointment. And yet he was not at all in love with Violet, he thought, but only liked her as the nicest girl he knew. When he remarked to Lady Eskside that it was odd to find none of the Pringles at the Hewan, my lady arose and slew him on the spot. “Why should the Pringles be at the Hewan?” she said; “they have a place of their own, where it becomes them much better to be. To leave Violet there so long by herself last year was a scandal to her mother, and gave much occasion for talking.”

“Why should it give occasion for talking?” said Val.

“A boy like you knows nothing about the matter,” the old lady answered, putting a stop to him decisively. Perhaps that was true enough; but it was also true that Val took a long walk to the linn next day, and sat down under the beeches, and mused for half an hour or so, without quite knowing what he was thinking about. How clearly he remembered those two expeditions, mingling them a little in his recollection, yet seeing each so distinctly! the small Violet in her blue cloak, sleeping on his shoulder (which thought made him colour slightly and laugh in the silence, such intimate companionship being strangely impossible to think of nowadays), and the elder Violet, still so sweet and young, younger than himself, though he was the very impersonation of Youth, repeating all the earlier experiences except that one. “By Jove, how jolly Mary is!” said Valentine to himself at the end of this reverie; and when he went home he devoted himself to Miss Percival, who was again at Rosscraig, as she always was when Lady Eskside was exposed to the strain and fatigue of company. “Do you remember our picnic at the linn last year?” he said, standing over Mary in a corner after dinner, to the great annoyance of an elderly admirer, who had meant to take this opportunity of making himself agreeable to a woman who seemed the very person to “make an excellent stepmother” to his seven children. Mary, who was conscious in some small degree of the worthy man’s meaning, was grateful to Val for once; and enjoyed, as the quietest of women do, the discomfiture of her would-be suitor.

“Yes,” she said, smiling; “what of it, you unruly boy?”

“I am not a proper subject for such epithets,” said Val. “I have attained my majority, and made a speech to the tenantry. I say, Mary, do you know, that’s a lovely spot, that linn. I was there to-day——”

“Oh, you were there to-day?”

“Yes, I was there. Is there anything wonderful in that?” said Val, not sure whether he ought not to take offence at the laughing tone, which seemed to imply something. “Tell Violet, when you see her, that it was uncommonly shabby of her not to come this year. We’d have gone again.”

“There’s a virtue in three times, Val,” said Mary. “If you go again, it will be more than a joke; and I don’t think I’ll give your message to Vi.”

“Why should it be more than a joke? Or why should it be a joke at all?” said Val, reddening, he scarcely knew why. He withdrew after this, slightly confused, feeling as if some chance touch had got at his heart, giving it a dinnle which was half pleasure and half pain. Do you know what a dinnle is, dear English reader? It means that curious sensation which you, in the poverty of your language, call “striking the funny bone.” You know what it is in the elbow. Valentine had that kind of sensation in his heart; and I think if this half-painful jar of the nerve lasted, and suggested quite new thoughts to the boy, it was all Mary Percival’s fault. I am happy to say that her widower got at her on Val’s withdrawal, and made himself most overpoweringly agreeable for the rest of the night.

And then the boy went away on his grand tour, leaving the old people at home rather lonely, longing after him; though Lord Eskside was too much occupied to take much notice of Val’s departure. My lady was very busy, too, paying visits all over the country, and paying court to great and small. She promised the widower her interest with Mary, but judiciously put him off till Miss Percival’s next visit, saying, cunningly, that she must have time to prepare her young friend for the idea, and trusting in Providence that the election might be over before an answer had to be given. It was gratifying to the Esksides to find a devoted canvasser for Valentine in the person of Lord Hightowers, the only possible competitor who could have “divided the party” in the county. Hightowers, however, was not fond of politics, and had no ambition for public life; it would have suited him better to be a locksmith, like Louis Seize. And among them all, they got the county into such a beautiful state of preparation that Lord Eskside could scarcely contain his rapture—and having laid all his trains, and holding his match ready, sat down, in a state of excitement which it would be difficult to describe, to wait until the moment of explosion came.

In other places, too, Valentine’s departure had caused far more excitement than he was at all aware of. He had seen and said good-bye to Dick with the most cordial kindness, on the day he left Oxford. But Val had not failed to remark a gravity and preoccupation about his humble friend which troubled him in no small degree. When he recounted to Dick the failure of Lady Eskside and himself on the day before, the young man had received the information with a painful attempt to seem surprised, which made Val think for a moment that Dick’s mother had avoided the visit of set purpose. But as he knew of no hidden importance in this, the idea went lightly out of his head; and a few days after he remembered it no more. Very much more serious had been the effect upon Dick. His mother’s flight and her panic were equally unintelligible to him. The thought that there must be “something wrong” involved, in order to produce such terror, was almost irresistible; and Dick’s breeding, as I have said, had been of that practical kind which makes the mind accustomed to the commoner and vulgarer sorts of wrong-doing. He did not insist upon knowing what it was that made his mother afraid of Val’s grandmother; but her abject terror, and the way in which she dragged him too, out of sight, as if he had been a partner of her shame, had the most painful effect upon the young man. In the rudimentary state of morals which existed among the class from which he sprang, and where all his primitive ideas had been formed, dishonesty was the one crime short of murder which could bring such heavy shame along with it. He who steals is shunned in all classes, except among the narrow professional circles of thieves themselves; and Dick could not banish from his thoughts a painful doubt and uncertainty about his mother’s relations with “Mr Ross’s people.” She herself was so stunned and petrified by the great danger which she seemed to herself to have escaped, that she was very little capable of giving a rational explanation of her conduct. “You knew this lady before, mother?” said Dick to her, half pitifully, half severely, as he took her back to the parlour and placed her in a chair after the visitors were gone. “Yes,” she answered, but no more. And though he asked her many other questions, nothing more than repeated Yes and No could he get in reply.

I do not know what wild sense of peril was in the poor creature’s heart. She feared, perhaps, that they could have taken her up and punished her for running away from her husband; she felt sure that they would separate her from her remaining boy—though had they not the other, whom she had given up to them? and in her panic at the chance of being found out, all power of reasoning (if she ever had any) deserted her. Ah, she thought to herself, only a tramp is safe! As soon as you have a settled habitation, and are known to neighbours, and can be identified by people about, all security leaves you: only on the tramp is a woman who wishes to hide herself safe. In her first panic, the thought of going away again, of deserting everything, of taking refuge on those open roads—those outdoor bivouacs which are full in the eye of day, yet better refuges than any mysterious darkness—came so strongly over her, that it was all she could do to withstand its force. But when she looked at her son, active and trim, in his boat-building yard, or saw him studying the little house at night, with his tools in his hand, to judge where he could put up something or improve something—his mother felt herself for the first (or perhaps it was the second) time in her life, bound as it were by a hundred minute threads which made it impossible for her to please herself. It was something like a new soul which had thus developed in her. In former times she had done as the spirit moved her, obeying her impulses whenever they were so strong as to carry everything else before them. Now she felt a distinct check to the wild force of these impulses. The blood in her veins moved as warmly as ever, impelling her to go, and she knew that she was free to go if she would, and that Dick too could be vanquished, and would come with her, however unwillingly. She was free to go, and yet she could not. For the first time in her life she had learned consciously to prefer another to herself. She could not ruin Dick. The struggle that she maintained with her old self was violent, but it was within herself, and was known to nobody; and finally, the new woman, the higher creature, vanquished the old self-willed and self-regarding wanderer. She set herself to meet the winter with a dogged resolution, feeling less, perhaps, the absence of that visionary solace which she had found in the sight of Val, in consequence of the hard and perpetual battle she had to fight with herself. And, to make it harder, she had not the cheery gratitude and tender appreciation of the struggle, which had rewarded her much less violent effort before. Dick was gloomy, overcast, pondering upon the strange thing that had happened. He could not get over it: it stood between him and his mother, making their intercourse constrained and unhappy. Had she robbed the old lady from whom she had fled in so strange a panic? Short of that, or something of that kind, why, poor Dick thought, should one woman be so desperately afraid of another? He did not, it is true, say, or even whisper to himself, this word so terrible to one in his insecure position, working his way in the world with slow and laborious advances; but the suspicion rankled in his heart.

All this time, however, his mother neither thought of setting herself right by telling him what her mystery was, nor once felt that she was wronging Dick by keeping the secret of his parentage so closely hidden from him. It did not occur to her that by doing this she was doing an injury to her boy. The life of gentlefolks—the luxurious and elegant existence into which her husband had tried to tame her, a wild creature of the woods—had been nothing but misery to her; and I doubt whether she was capable of realising that Dick, so different from herself in nature, would have felt differently in respect to those trammels from which she had fled. Had she been able to think, she would have seen how—unconsciously, with the instinct of another race than hers—the boy had been labouring all his life to manufacture for himself such a poor imitation of those trammels as was possible to him; but she was little capable of reasoning, and she did not see it. Besides, he was hers absolutely, and she had a right to him. She had given up the other, recognising a certain claim of natural justice on the part of the father of her children; and in so doing she had gone as far as nature could go, giving up half, with a rending of her heart which had never healed; but no principle of which she had ever heard called upon her to give up the whole. The very fact of having made a sacrifice of one seemed to enhance and secure her possession of the other—and how could she do better for Dick than she had done for herself? But this question had not even arisen in her mind as yet. She feared that they had hidden emissaries, who, if they found her out, might take her remaining child from her; but that he was anyhow wronged by her silence, or had any personal rights in the matter, had not yet entered into her brooding, slowly working, confused, and inarticulate soul.

In one other house besides, Val and his concerns were productive of some little tumult of feeling—not the least important of the many eddies with which his stream of life was involved. Mr Pringle was almost as much excited about the approaching conflict as Lord Eskside. He saw in it opportunities for carrying out his own scheme, which he called exposure of fraud, but which to others much more resembled the vengeance of a disappointed man. He was the bosom friend of the eminent lawyer who meant to contest Eskside in the Liberal interest, and had no small share in influencing him to this step. His own acquaintance with the county, in the position of Lord Eskside’s heir-presumptive in past days, had given him considerable advantages and much information which a stranger could not easily command; and with silent vehemence he prepared himself for the conflict—contemplating one supreme stroke of revenge—or, as he preferred to think, contemplating a full exposure to the world of the infamous conspiracy against his rights and those of his children, from which the county also was now about to suffer. He did not speak freely to his family of these intentions, for neither his wife nor his children were in harmony with him on the subject; but this fact, instead of inducing him to reconsider a matter which appeared to other eyes in so different a light, increased the violence of his feelings, just in proportion to the necessity he felt for concealing them. It was even an additional grievance against Valentine, and the old people who had set Valentine up as their certain successor, that the lad had secured the friendship of his enemy’s own family. Sandy, who was by this time a hard-working young advocate, less fanciful and more certain of success than his father—though a very good son, and very respectful of his parents, had a way of changing the subject when the Eskside business was spoken of, which cut Mr Pringle to the quick. He could see that his son considered him a kind of monomaniac on this subject; and indeed there was sometimes very serious talk between Sandy and his mother about this idÉe fixe which had taken hold upon the father’s mind.

Thus Mr Pringle’s own family set themselves against him; but perhaps there was not one of them that had the least idea what painful results might follow except poor little Violet, who was very fond of her father, and in whose childish heart Val had established himself long ago. She alone was certain that her father meant mischief—mischief of a deeper kind than mere opposition to his election, such as Mr Pringle, as tenant of the Hewan and the land belonging to it, had a right to make if he pleased. Violet watched him with a painful mixture of dread lest her father should take some unworthy step, and dread lest Valentine should be injured, contending in her mind. She could scarcely tell which would have been the most bitter to her; and that these two great and appalling dangers should be combined in one, was misery enough to fill her young soul with the heaviest shadows. This she had to keep to herself, which was still harder to bear, though very usual in the troubles of youth. Everything which concerns an unrevealed and nascent love,—its terrors, which turn the very soul pale; its partings, which press the life out of the heart; its sickness of suspense and waiting,—must not the maiden keep all these anguishes locked up in her heart, until the moment when they are over, and when full declaration and consent make an end at once of the mystery and the misery? This training most people go through, more or less; but the trial is so much harder upon the little blossoming woman that the dawnings of the inclination, which she has never been asked for, are a shame to her, which they are not to her lover. Violet did not venture to say a word even to her mother of her wish to be at the Hewan while Val was there—of her sick disappointment when she found he had gone away without a chance of saying good-bye; and though she did venture to whisper her fears lest papa might “say something to hurt poor Val’s feelings,” which was a very mild way of putting it—she got little comfort out of this suppressed confidence. “I am afraid he will,” Mrs Pringle said. “Indeed, the mere fact that your papa is Mr Seisin’s chief friend and right-hand man, will hurt Val’s feelings. I am very sorry, and I think it very injudicious; for why should we put ourselves in opposition to the Eskside family? but it cannot be helped, and your papa must take his way.”

“Perhaps if you were to speak to him,” said Vi, with youthful confidence in a process, than which she herself knew nothing more impressive, and even terrible on occasion.

“Speak to him!” said Mrs Pringle; “if you had been married to him as long as I have, my dear, you would know how much good speaking to him does. Not that your papa is a bit worse than any other man.”

With this very unsatisfactory conclusion poor Violet had to be satisfied. But she watched her father as no one else did, fearing more than any one else. Her gentle little artifices, in which the child at first trusted much, of saying something pleasant of Val when she had an opportunity—vaunting his fondness for the boys, his care of herself (in any other case the strongest of recommendations to her father’s friendship), his respect for Mr Pringle’s opinions, his admiration of the Hewan—had, she soon perceived, to her sore disappointment, rather an aggravating than a soothing effect. “For heaven’s sake, let me hear no more of that lad! I am getting to hate the very sound of his name,” her father said; and poor Violet would stop short, with tears springing to her eyes.