Part 34 (2/2)
”I think you're _horrid_!” she said indignantly. ”I've always heard that girls don't tell such things to any one.”
”They do to their brothers--of the pen, if they have any such. Besides, you don't need to tell. I'm a regular Sherlock Holmes where people I--like, are concerned, and I know what's been happening to you this afternoon. A manna-rain of proposals, in the wilderness of Edinburgh Castle. Many girls would have accepted them all, and then sorted them out to see which they liked best; but I have a shrewd idea from the look of the gentlemen's backs that they are now one and all your adopted brethren.”
”It's almost wicked to joke on such a subject,” Barrie reproached me, trying not to laugh, ”and it's not nice of you to make fun of them, just because you consider yourself superior, as an author who is always a.n.a.lyzing people's minds and motives. It's not as if they were so much in love with me that they had to propose in a hurry for their own sakes.
It's not that _at all_; but only because they thought it wouldn't be very convenient for--Barbara to have me live with her, travelling about so much, or if she should marry. So they felt as if something ought to be _done_ for me, you know, as soon as possible.”
”Sainted, unselfish young men!” I murmured. ”But I don't consider myself superior, as it happens. I'd do the same thing in a minute if I thought there were the faintest chance of your giving me an answer different from theirs. Is there?”
”Don't talk nonsense!” she exclaimed. ”But of course, I'm happy to say, I know you don't mean it.”
”Well, if you're happy to say that, I'll leave you your fond illusions for the present,” I returned. ”But, as girl to man, tell me; don't you rather like being proposed to?”
”It's very exciting,” she admitted. ”I never expected, somehow, that such a thing could happen to me.”
”Oh, didn't you? Why not?”
”Well, there's my red hair, which I always thought was _fatal_, until I saw my mother's portrait--and heard Mr. Somerled say he liked painting red-haired women.”
”Red hair _can_ be fatal, though not in the way you appear to mean,”
said I. ”Which thrilled you more, the Castle or the proposals?”
”Oh, the Castle, of course!” she answered scornfully. ”After the first one or two, they seemed like interruptions.”
All five of my rivals (there might have been six, had it not been for the girl in the Highlands) having had their medicine, I was allowed almost as much as I wanted of Barrie's society during the walk down from the Castle Rock, and to Holyrood. Together she and I walked through that most romantic royal house of all the world; and long as I may live, never shall I forget those hours. Chestnut-tressed Mary herself could not have been lovelier than the red-haired girl who walked beside me, and when the royal beauty came on a day of chill, northern haar, to her Scottish realm, she was only a year older than this child we all love but think too young for love. Yet already, at nineteen, Mary was a King's widow, and had been Queen of France.
It was of Barrie's romance, Barrie's future, I thought most, as we wandered side by side through the haunted rooms where Mary danced and loved and suffered, where her grandson Charles I of England came, and left his ruby Coronation ring for remembrance, and where Prince Charlie, her far-off descendant, made hearts flutter at the great ball given in his honour. But it was the past which had all Barrie's thoughts, unless she sent a few to the man who had stayed at home reading his letters, instead of following in her train.
We looked at Queen Mary's bed with its tattered splendour of brocade: the box filled with relics of her short reign in Holyrood: her neat embroideries, her tear bottle, and Darnley's glove, which Barrie thought Mary would not like to have kept with the other things: and then, having saved the best for the last, I took the girl up to the little supper-room where Rizzio was murdered. Barrie gazed at everything in silence: and now we could both be silent when we liked, for the chastened ones had meekly trooped off to show Mrs. James the Abbey, or Royal Chapel, where Mary and Darnley were married, and where a hundred things had happened, things connected with others whose romances were as poignant if less well remembered here, than hers.
We had come up the secret stairway in the wall, because I wanted Barrie to miss no thrill this place could give; but it was not the thought of the murder-scene which most caught her imagination. She listened to my dramatic version of the tragedy of the room, and of the dark closet where Rizzio tried to hide, and shuddered a little; but soon she was drawn, as if beckoned by an unseen hand, to the bevelled mirror with scalloped edge, which Mary brought with her to Scotland from France, a dim oval full of memories, may be, of dear, dead days at Amboise and Chenonceaux.
”What does that poor piece of blurred gla.s.s make you think of so intently?” I asked, when Barrie had stood silently staring down the veiled vista of mystery for many minutes. ”You look like a young modern Ca.s.sandra, crystal gazing.”
”So I am!” the girl almost whispered. ”I'm trying to see something in the mirror--the things _she_ saw in it--or to see her eyes looking into mine. If anything can be haunted, it is this mirror. Think of what has pa.s.sed before it. But do you know, I don't believe it has ever really intelligently seen anything since the day Queen Mary went away from Holyrood. I feel she ran here, to take one last look into her mirror, and to bid it farewell as she bade farewell to France, gazing and gazing as the land faded from her sight forever. Then, when she'd gone, the gla.s.s she loved grew dim as it is now, and _blind_ because it could no longer give back the brightness of her eyes. There's nothing left in it now but sad dreams and memories of the past.”
”Did you ever,” I asked, ”go down into the cellar at midnight on All Hallow E'en with a candle and a mirror and wish to see the face of your future husband?”
”No, indeed,” Barrie answered emphatically; ”we had no such tricks at Hillard House.”
”Now, in this mirror, if any in the world, you might be able to see such a vision, not only at midnight, but on an ordinary afternoon, like this for instance,” said I. ”Suppose you stop thinking of Queen Mary for a minute and concentrate on yourself. Wish with all your heart for the face of the man you'll love, the man you'll marry, to appear under this clouded surface of gla.s.s.”
Barrie looked somewhat impressed by my mysterious tone as well as the overwhelming romance of her surroundings. She put her face close to the mirror, and I was about to profit by the situation I'd led up to when some one stepped between us and looked over the girl's shoulder. It was Somerled, who must have come in just in time to overhear my advice, and take advantage of it for himself. But he could not wholly blot me out of the mirror. Both our faces were there, to be seen by Barrie, ”as in a gla.s.s darkly.” She gave a little cry of surprise, and wheeled round to smile at Somerled.
”You came after all!” she exclaimed, forgetting or pretending to forget the solemn rite which had engaged us. But I must admit I was in a mood to be almost superst.i.tious about it. I had prophesied to the girl that she would see reflected the face of the man she was destined to love and marry. An instant later she had seen two faces, Somerled's and mine.
Would she love one man, and marry the other? Or would only one of these two men count in her life?
Perhaps Queen Mary's mirror knew. It looked capable of knowing--and keeping--any secret of the human heart.
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