Margaret Oliphant - It was a Lover and his Lass

"Is it me that you have nothing to do with?" said Philip, piteously. "I think nobody can have so hard a heart."

"What have I to do with you, Mr. Philip? – we are just friends. You are friends with a great many people. There are the Borrodailes – "

"I knew that was coming," said Philip, "though I tell you six times a day that Annie Borrodaile is nothing – "

"I said not a word about Annie Borrodaile. It is just a guilty conscience that makes you name one more than another. And why should you tell me six times a day? I wonder what I have got to do with it?"

"Katie," cried poor Philip, "how can you speak to me so, when you know just as well as I do that there's no one in the world I care about but you? You have got everything to do with me. You know, if all the ladies in the world were here, it is you I would choose; you know it is for you I come here; you know I think of nobody else and nothing else." Here Philip, approaching humbly, endeavoured to draw into his own Katie's hand, which lay within reach upon her lap, for by this time the pair had seated themselves, as they usually did, upon a fallen tree which lay conveniently within reach of the road, but sheltered by the brushwood. "Nobody else, and nothing else," said Philip, drawing closer.

"Except the trout," said Katie, with a laugh, "and birds in the season, and the hunting, and the curling, and two or three hundred things, not to speak of Annie Borrodaile."

To this Philip made no reply. He was wounded, and withdrew a little to the other end of the tree. It was a scene which had been played a great many times, and they were both quite familiar with it: but it was always new to them, and always threatened for ten minutes at least a tragical severance, which, however, happily never came.

"That, however, is nothing to me," said Katie; "but when your mother comes and speaks as if – oh, as if I were the dust beneath her feet – as if I were nobody that had ever been heard of before – as if I were a girl that could be bought in the market like a slave in the 'Arabian Nights' – "

"Katie, for goodness sake tell me what she said!"

Katie continued to play with his curiosity for some time longer, until she had worked that and her own indignation into a tragic heat; then, with tears of youthful fury and injured feeling in her eyes, she unfolded her wrongs.

"Mr. Murray was there – he had come to play his piece to mamma – and Mrs. Stormont turned round and looked me straight in the face, and said to him that he must settle in Murkley. 'You'll get a nice house,' she said, 'and a wife; you can pick and choose among the young ladies – oh, yes you can take your choice of them,' and she looked at me – all the time she looked at me! She just offered me – as if she had any business with me! – to that man that is not a man, that can do nothing but fiddle on the piano," cried Katie, transported by her wrongs and her indignation. She even cried a little – hot tears, out of pity for herself and the sense of injury which swelled all her youthful veins.

Philip on his side was greatly relieved to find that it was no worse. What he had feared was that his mother had interfered definitely in his own affairs. His mind was greatly eased when he heard the extent of her transgressions. He ventured upon a short laugh under his moustache.

"That was so like my mother," he said.

"It may have been very like your mother, Mr. Stormont," cried Katie, "but if you think that I am going to put up with it – and mamma too!"

"Was Mrs. Seton angry?" said Philip. "Don't call me Mr. Stormont. Now just reflect; I have nothing to do with it; I did not make my mother. Was Mrs. Seton angry? – what did Mrs. Seton say? If you think my mother ill-tempered, Katie, I know that your mother is kind. What did she say?"

"Oh," said Katie, softened, "she said nothing at all. She said that to go out for a walk would do me good. She did not say a word; she just said it was Mrs. Stormont's way."

"I don't think it is her way," said Philip, piqued a little; "but it was like my mother," he added, "oh, yes, it was like her. She would wish to snatch you away under my very nose, and marry you to another man before I knew what she was doing. Oh, that is just what she would like to try. She would think it was no harm to you."

"And what business had she with me at all?" cried Katie, but more gently, the storm having had its way.

"Well, I suppose she guesses what you know so well," said the young lover, "and that is what you are to me, Katie: that there is nobody but you for me: that I would not care if all the world was swept away so long as I had you safe: that – "

"Oh, that is just your way of talking," said Katie, but she did not withdraw her hand; "that is just your nonsense. As if it was likely the world would be swept away, and me left! But that is no reason, if you do like me, that she should think ill of me. I have done nothing to her – why should she be so cruel to me?"

"I am all she has, you see," said Philip, "and she does not like to give me up, as she will have to do."

"I am sure I am not wanting you," cried Katie. "She is welcome to keep you to herself for me; besides, if it was not me, it would be somebody else," she added, after a moment, reflectively, with a philosophy that poor Mrs. Stormont would have done well to emulate. "At your age you are sure to have somebody. She ought to mind that. If it was Annie Borrodaile, would she be better pleased? Most likely," said Katie, "it will be Annie Borrodaile after all."

It was when Philip was employed in energetic disposal of this hypothesis, which it was her pleasure to fling at him whenever the liveliness of the conversation flagged, that Lewis Murray, emerging from the woods of Murkley, in which he had been wandering, thinking over his own urgent affairs, approached the water-side. He came down from behind the scaur by a path half overgrown with tall beeches and brushwood, which was little used. The path was clothed with mosses and covered with the brown beech-wort and the slippery droppings of the firs, and a footstep was scarcely audible upon it. In the hollow of the scaur the little girls were playing, the redness of the earth throwing up their small active figures as they performed their little mimicry of life, "pretending" to be grown-up actors in it, their voices sounding clear into the echoes. At a distance the boys were shouting to each other, and Vixen barking, all of them after the water-rat which had not yet been exhausted as a possibility of fun.

Lewis looked at the children with ready pleasure and sympathy, without thinking of anything further. He was just about to call to them, when a lower murmur of voices caught his ear. He was still on a higher level than the angle of the little wood where it ran down to the river, and, as he glanced in the direction of this softer sound, the young pair became apparent to him. They were close together now, bending towards each other, making but one shadow. Philip's head was uncovered, the light catching its vigorous reddish-brown, and Katie's blue frock made a little background for the group as Lewis looked down upon them, separating that spot from the brown of the tree's trunk and the green of the foliage. A spectator may be pardoned for looking a moment at such a scene before he makes his presence known, especially when he comes upon it by surprise. Lewis stood still in a passion of soft sympathy and emotion which he himself did not quite understand. In some things he was younger than his age. He had known none of the innocent emotions of boy and girl; darker and less lovely episodes he had heard of in plenty, but fortunately for him his absorption in the life of an old man, kind as his patron had been, had kept him apart from all such seductions, and it had never been within his possibilities to fall sweetly and innocently in love, according to what was the course of nature with Katie and Philip.