"But, my dear sir," said Fergus, "if I am to understand these lines--""Yes! if you are to understand where there is no sense whatever!""I think I understand them--if you will excuse me for venturing to say so; and what I read in them is, that, whoever the writer may be, the lady, whoever she may be, had refused him.""You cannot believe that the wretch had the impudence to make my daughter--the heiress of--at least--What! make my daughter an offer!
She would at once have acquainted me with the fact, that he might receive suitable chastisement. Let me look at the stuff again.""It is quite possible," said Fergus, "it may be only a poem some friend has copied for her from a newspaper."While he spoke, the laird was reading the lines, and persuading himself he understood them. With sudden resolve, the paper held torch-like in front of him, he strode into the next room, where Ginevra sat.
"Do you tell me," he said fiercely, "that you have so far forgotten all dignity and propriety as to give a dirty cow-boy the encouragement to make you an offer of marriage? The very notion sets my blood boiling. You will make me hate you, you--you--unworthy creature!"Ginevra had turned white, but looking him straight in the face, she answered, "If that is a letter for me, you know I have not read it.""There! see for yourself.--Poetry!" He uttered the word with contempt inexpressible.
She took the verses from his hand and read them. Even with her father standing there, watching her like an inquisitor, she could not help the tears coming in her eyes as she read.
"There is no such thing here, papa," she said. "They are only verses--bidding me good-bye.""And what right has any such fellow to bid my daughter good-bye?
Explain that to me, if you please. Of course I have been for many years aware of your love of low company, but I had hoped as you grew older you would learn manners: modesty would have been too much to look for.--If you had nothing to be ashamed of, why did you not tell me of the unpleasant affair? Is not your father your best friend?""Why should I make both him and you uncomfortable, papa--when there was not going to be anything more of it?""Why then do you go hankering after him still, and refusing Mr.
Duff? It is true he is not exactly a gentleman by birth, but he is such by education, by manners, by position, by influence.""Papa, I have already told Mr. Duff, as plainly as I could without being rude, that I would never let him talk to me so. What lady would refuse Donal Grant and listen to him!""You are a bold, insolent hussey!" cried her father in fresh rage and leaving the room, rejoined Fergus.
They sat silent both for a while--then the preacher spoke.
"Other communications may have since reached her from the same quarter," he said.
"That is impossible," rejoined the laird.
"I don't know that," insisted Fergus. "There is a foolish--a half-silly companion of his about the town. They call him Sir Gibbie Galbraith.""Jenny knows no such person."
"Indeed she does. I have seen them together.""Oh! you mean the lad the minister adopted! the urchin he took off the streets!--Sir Gibbie Galbraith!" he repeated sneeringly, but as one reflecting. "--I do vaguely recall a slanderous rumour in which a certain female connection of the family was hinted at.--Yes!
that's where the nickname comes from.--And you think she keeps up a communication with the clown through him?""I don't say that, sir. I merely think it possible she may see this Gibbie occasionally; and I know he worships the cow-boy: it is a positive feature of his foolishness, and I wish it were the worst."Therewith he told what he heard from Miss Kimble, and what he had seen for himself on the night when he watched Gibbie.
"Her very blood must be tainted!" said her father to himself, but added, "--from her mother's side;" and his attacks upon her after this were at least diurnal. It was a relief to his feeling of having wronged her, to abuse her with justice. For a while she tried hard to convince him now that this now that that notion of her conduct, or of Gibbie's or Donal's, was mistaken: he would listen to nothing she said, continually insisting that the only amends for her past was to marry according to his wishes; to give up superstition, and poetry, and cow-boys, and dumb rascals, and settle down into a respectable matron, a comfort to the gray hairs she was now bringing with sorrow to the grave. Then Ginevra became absolutely silent; he had taught her that any reply was but a new start for his objurgation, a knife wherewith to puncture a fresh gall-bladder of abuse. He stormed at her for her sullenness, but she persisted in her silence, sorely distressed to find how dead her heart seemed growing under his treatment of her: what would at one time have made her utterly miserable, now passed over her as one of the billows of a trouble that had to be borne, as one of the throbs of a headache, drawing from her scarcely a sigh. She did not understand that, her heaven being dark, she could see no individual cloud against it, that, her emotional nature untuned, discord itself had ceased to jar.
