第102章

A FATHER AND A DAUGHTER.

The presence at the street door of which Ericson's over-acute sense had been aware on a past evening, was that of Mr.Lindsay, walking home with bowed back and bowed head from the college library, where he was privileged to sit after hours as long as he pleased over books too big to be comfortably carried home to his cottage.He had called to inquire after Ericson, whose acquaintance he had made in the library, and cultivated until almost any Friday evening Ericson was to be found seated by Mr.Lindsay's parlour fire.

As he entered the room that same evening, a young girl raised herself from a low seat by the fire to meet him.There was a faint rosy flush on her cheek, and she held a volume in her hand as she approached her father.They did not kiss: kisses were not a legal tender in Scotland then: possibly there has been a depreciation in the value of them since they were.

'I've been to ask after Mr.Ericson,' said Mr.Lindsay.

'And how is he?' asked the girl.

'Very poorly indeed,' answered her father.

'I am sorry.You'll miss him, papa.'

'Yes, my dear.Tell Jenny to bring my lamp.'

'Won't you have your tea first, papa?'

'Oh yes, if it's ready.'

'The kettle has been boiling for a long time, but I wouldn't make the tea till you came in.'

Mr.Lindsay was an hour later than usual, but Mysie was quite unaware of that: she had been absorbed in her book, too much absorbed even to ring for better light than the fire afforded.When her father went to put off his long, bifurcated greatcoat, she returned to her seat by the fire, and forgot to make the tea.It was a warm, snug room, full of dark, old-fashioned, spider-legged furniture; low-pitched, with a bay-window, open like an ear to the cries of the German Ocean at night, and like an eye during the day to look out upon its wide expanse.This ear or eye was now curtained with dark crimson, and the room, in the firelight, with the young girl for a soul to it, affected one like an ancient book in which he reads his own latest thought.

Mysie was nothing over the middle height--delicately-fashioned, at once slender and round, with extremities neat as buds.Her complexion was fair, and her face pale, except when a flush, like that of a white rose, overspread it.Her cheek was lovelily curved, and her face rather short.But at first one could see nothing for her eyes.They were the largest eyes; and their motion reminded one of those of Sordello in the Purgatorio:

E nel muover degli occhi onesta e tarda:

they seemed too large to move otherwise than with a slow turning like that of the heavens.At first they looked black, but if one ventured inquiry, which was as dangerous as to gaze from the battlements of Elsinore, he found them a not very dark brown.In her face, however, especially when flushed, they had all the effect of what Milton describes asQuel sereno fulgor d'amabil nero.

A wise observer would have been a little troubled in regarding her mouth.The sadness of a morbid sensibility hovered about it--the sign of an imagination wrought upon from the centre of self.Her lips were neither thin nor compressed--they closed lightly, and were richly curved; but there was a mobility almost tremulous about the upper lip that gave sign of the possibility of such an oscillation of feeling as might cause the whole fabric of her nature to rock dangerously.

The moment her father re-entered, she started from her stool on the rug, and proceeded to make the tea.Her father took no notice of her neglect, but drew a chair to the table, helped himself to a piece of oat-cake, hastily loaded it with as much butter as it could well carry, and while eating it forgot it and everything else in the absorption of a volume he had brought in with him from his study, in which he was tracing out some genealogical thread of which he fancied he had got a hold.Mysie was very active now, and lost the expression of far-off-ness which had hitherto characterized her countenance; till, having poured out the tea, she too plunged at once into her novel, and, like her father, forgot everything and everybody near her.

Mr.Lindsay was a mild, gentle man, whose face and hair seemed to have grown gray together.He was very tall, and stooped much.He had a mouth of much sensibility, and clear blue eyes, whose light was rarely shed upon any one within reach except his daughter--they were so constantly bent downwards, either on the road as he walked, or on his book as he sat.He had been educated for the church, but had never risen above the position of a parish school-master.He had little or no impulse to utterance, was shy, genial, and, save in reading, indolent.Ten years before this point of my history he had been taken up by an active lawyer in Edinburgh, from information accidentally supplied by Mr.Lindsay himself, as the next heir to a property to which claim was laid by the head of a county family of wealth.Probabilities were altogether in his favour, when he gave up the contest upon the offer of a comfortable annuity from the disputant.To leave his schooling and his possible estate together, and sit down comfortably by his own fireside, with the means of buying books, and within reach of a good old library--that of King's College by preference--was to him the sum of all that was desirable.