Scotland was a strange and uncomfortable country to live in a hundred years ago. Strange beyond measure its state of society appears to us when we consider, not only that it was called a Christian country, but that the people had shown that they really did care very much for their religion, and were bent upon worshipping God according to their conscience and true belief. Whilst earnest in their religion, their state of society was yet very wicked: a thing which usually happens when a whole people are passing from one way of living and being governed to another. Scotland had not long been united with England. While the wisest of the nation saw that the only hope for the country was in being governed by the same king and parliament as the English, many of the most powerful men wished not to be governed at all, but to be altogether despotic over their dependents and neighbours, and to have their own way in everything. These lords and gentlemen did such violent things as are never heard of now in civilised countries; and when their inferiors had any strong desire or passion, they followed the example of the great men, so that travelling was dangerous; citizens did not feel themselves safe in their own houses if they had reason to believe they had enemies; few had any trust in the protection of the law; and stories of fighting and murder were familiar to children living in the heart of cities.
Children, however, had less liberty then than in our time. The more self-will there was in grown people, the more strictly were the children kept in order, not only because the uppermost idea of everyone in authority was that he would be obeyed, but because it would not do to let little people see the mischief that was going on abroad. So, while boys had their hair powdered, and wore long coats and waistcoats, and little knee-breeches, and girls were laced tight in stays all stiff with whalebone, they were trained to manners more formal than are ever seen now.
One autumn afternoon a party was expected at the house of Lord Carse, in Edinburgh; a handsome house in a very odd situation, according to our modern notions. It was at the bottom of a narrow lane of houses—that sort of lane called a Wynd in Scotch cities. It had a court-yard in front. It was necessary to have a court-yard to a good house in a street too narrow for carriages. Visitors must come in sedan chairs and there must be some place, aside from the street, where the chairs and chairmen could wait for the guests. This old fashioned house had sitting-rooms on the ground floor, and on the sills of the windows were flower-pots, in which, on this occasion, some asters and other autumn flowers were growing.
Within the largest sitting-room was collected a formal group, awaiting the arrival of visitors. Lord Carse’s sister, Lady Rachel Ballino, was there, surrounded by her nephews and nieces. As they came in, one after another, dressed for company, and made their bow or curtsey at the door, their aunt gave them permission to sit down till the arrival of the first guest, after which time it would be a matter of course that they should stand. Miss Janet and her brothers sat down on their low stools, at some distance from each other; but little Miss Flora had no notion of submitting to their restraints at her early age, and she scrambled up the window-seat to look abroad as far as she could, which was through the high iron gates to the tall houses on the other side the Wynd.
Lady Rachel saw the boys and Janet looking at each other with smiles, and this turned her attention to the child in the window, who was nodding her little curly head very energetically to somebody outside.
“Come down, Flora,” said her aunt.
But Flora was too busy, nodding, to hear that she was spoken to.
“Flora, come down. Why are you nodding in that way?”
“Lady nods,” said Flora.
Lady Rachel rose deliberately from her seat, and approached the window, turning pale as she went. After a single glance in the court-yard, she sank on a chair, and desired her nephew Orme to ring the bell twice. Orme who saw that something was the matter, rang so vigorously as to bring the butler in immediately.
“John, you see?” said the pale lips of Lady Rachel, while she pointed, with a trembling finger, to the court-yard.
“Yes, my lady; the doors are fastened.”
“And Lord Carse not home yet?”
“No, my lady. I think perhaps he is somewhere near, and cannot get home.”
John looked irresolutely towards the child in the window. Once more Flora was desired to come down, and once more she only replied, “Lady nods at me.”
Janet was going towards the window to enforce her aunt’s orders, but she was desired to keep her seat, and John quickly took up Miss Flora in his arms and set her down at her aunt’s knee. The child cried and struggled, said she would see the lady, and must infallibly have been dismissed to the nursery, but her eye was caught, and her mind presently engaged by Lady Rachel’s painted fan, on which there was a burning mountain, and a blue sea, and a shepherdess and her lamb—all very gay. Flora was allowed to have the fan in her own hands—a very rare favour. But 
presently she left off telling her aunt what she saw upon it, dropped it, and clapped her hands, saying, as she looked at the window, “Lady nods at me.”
“It is mamma!” cried the elder ones, starting to their feet, as the lady thrust her face through the flowers, and close to the window-pane.
“Go to the nursery, children,” said Lady Rachel, making an effort to rise. “I will send for you presently.” The elder ones appeared glad to escape, and they carried with them the struggling Flora.
Lady Rachel threw up the sash, crossed her arms, and said, in the most formal manner, “What do you want, Lady Carse?”
“I want my children.”
“You cannot have them, as you well know. It is too late. I pity you; but it is too late.”
“I will see my children. I will come home and live. I will make that tyrant repent setting up anyone in my place at home. I have it in my power to ruin him. I—”
“Abstain from threats,” said Lady Rachel, shutting the window, and fastening the sash.
Lady Carse doubled her fist, as if about to dash in a pane; but the iron gates behind her creaked on their hinges, and she turned her head. A chair was entering, on each side of which walked a footman, whose livery Lady Carse well knew. Her handsome face, red before, was now more flushed. She put her mouth close to the window, and said, “If it had been anybody but Lovat you would not have been rid of me this evening. I would have stood among the chairmen till midnight for the chance of getting in. Be sure I shall to-morrow, or some day. But now I am off.” She darted past the chair, her face turned away, just as Lord Lovat was issuing from it.
“Ho! ho!” cried he, in a loud and mocking tone. “Ho, there! my Lady Carse! A word with you!” But she ran up the Wynd as fast as she could go.
“You should not look so white upon it,” Lord Lovat observed to Lady Rachel, as soon as the door was shut. “Why do you let her see her power over you?”
“God knows!” replied Lady Rachel. “But it is not her threats alone that make us nervous. It is the being incessantly subject—”
She cleared her throat; but she could not go on.
Lord Lovat swore that he would not submit to be tormented by a virago in this way. If Lady Carse were his wife—
“Well! what would you do?” asked Lady Rachel.
“I would get rid of her. I tell your brother so. I would get rid of her in one way, if she threatened to get rid of me in another. She may have learned from her father how to put her enemies out of the way.”
Lady Rachel grew paler than ever. Lord Lovat went on.
“Her father carried pistols in the streets of Edinburgh and so may she. Her father was hanged for it; and it is my belief that she would have no objection to that end if she could have her revenge first. Ay! you wonder why I say such things to you, frightened as you are already. I do it that you may not infuse any weakness into your brother’s purposes, if he should think fit to rid the town of her one of these days. Come, come! I did not say rid the world of her.”
“Merciful Heaven! no!”
“There are places, you know, where troublesome people have no means of doing mischief. I could point out such a place presently, if I were asked—a place where she might be as safe as under lock and key, without the trouble and risk of confining her, and having to consider the law.”
“You do not mean a prison, then?”
“No. She has not yet done anything to make it easy to put her in prison for life; and anything short of that would be more risk than comfort. If Carse gives me authority, I will dispose of her where she can be free to rove like the wild goats. If she should take a fancy to jump down a precipice, or drown herself, that is her own affair, you know.”
The door opened for the entrance of company. Lord Lovat whispered once more, “Only this. If Carse thinks of giving the case into my hands, don’t you oppose it. I will not touch her life, I swear to you.”
Lady Rachel knew, like the rest of the world, that Lord Lovat’s swearing went for no more than any of his other engagements. Though she would have given all she had in the world to be freed from the terror of Lady Carse, and to hope that the children might forget their unhappy mother, she shrank from the idea of putting any person into the hands of the hard, and mocking, and plotting Lord Lovat. As for the legality of doing anything at all to Lady Carse while she did not herself break the law, that was a consideration which no more occurred to Lady Rachel than to the violent Lord Lovat himself.
Lady Rachel was exerting herself to entertain her guests, and had sent for the children, when, to her inexplicable relief, the butler brought her the news that Lord Carse and his son Willie were home, and would appear with all speed. They had been detained two hours in a tavern, John said.
“In a tavern?”
“Yes, my lady. Could not get out. Did not wish to collect more people, to cause a mob. It is all right now, my lady.”
When Lord Carse entered, he made formal apologies to his guests first, and his sister afterwards, for his late appearance. He had been delayed by an affair of importance on his way home. His rigid countenance was somewhat paler than usual, and his manner more dictatorial. His hard and unwavering voice was heard all the evening, prosing and explaining. The only tokens of feeling were when he spoke to his eldest son Willie, who was spiritless, and, as the close observer saw, tearful; and when he took little Flora in his arms, and stroked her shining hair, and asked her if she had been walking with the nurse.
Flora did not answer. She was anxiously watching Lady Rachel’s countenance. Her papa bade her look at him and answer his question. She did so, after glancing at her aunt, and saying eagerly, in a loud whisper, “I am not going to say anything about the lady that came to the window, and nodded at me.”
It did not mend the matter that her sister and brothers all said at once, in a loud whisper, “Hush! Flora.”
Her father sat her down hastily. Lord Carse’s domestic troubles were pretty well-known throughout Edinburgh; and the company settled it in their own minds that there had been a scene this afternoon.
When they were gone, Lord Carse gave his sister his advice not to instruct any very young child in any part to be acted. He assured her that very young children have not the discretion of grown people, and gave it as his opinion that when the simplicity, which is extremely agreeable by the domestic fireside, becomes troublesome or dangerous in society, the child is better disposed of in the nursery.
Lady Rachel meekly submitted; only observing what a singular and painful case was that of these children, who had to be so early trained to avoid the very mention of their mother. She believed her brother to be the most religious man she had ever known; yet she now heard him mutter oaths so terrible that they made her blood run cold.
“Brother! my dear brother,” she expostulated.
“I’ll tell you what she has done,” he said, from behind his set teeth. “She has taken a lodging in this very Wynd, directly opposite my gates. Not a child, not a servant, not a dog or cat can leave my house without coming under her eye. She will be speaking to the children out of her window.”
“She will be nodding at Flora from the court-yard as often as you are out,” cried Lady Rachel. “And if she should shoot you from her window, brother.”
“She hints that she will; and there are many things more unlikely, considering (as she herself says) whose daughter she is.—But, no,” he continued, seeing the dreadful alarm into which his sister was thrown. “This will not be her method of revenge. There is another that pleases her better, because she suspects that I dread it more.—You know what I mean?”
“Political secrets?” Lady Rachel whispered—not in Flora’s kind of whisper, but quite into her brother’s ear.
He nodded assent, and then he gravely informed her that his acquaintance, Duncan Forbes, had sent a particular request to see him in the morning. He should go, he said. It would not do to refuse waiting on the President of the Court of Session, as he was known to be in Edinburgh. But he wished he was a hundred miles off, if he was to hear a Hanoverian lecture from a man so good natured, and so dignified by his office, that he must always have his own way.
Lady Rachel went to bed very miserable this night. She wished that Lady Carse and King George, and all the House of Brunswick had never existed; or that Prince Charlie, or some of the exiled royal family, would come over at once and take possession of the kingdom, that her brother and his friends might no longer be compelled to live in a state of suspicion and dread—every day planning to bring in a new king, and every day obliged to appear satisfied with the one they had; their secret, or some part of it, being all the while at the mercy of a violent woman who hated them all.
When Lord Carse issued from his own house the next morning to visit the President, he had his daughter Janet by his side, and John behind him. He took Janet in the hope that her presence, while it would be no impediment to any properly legal business, would secure him from any political conversation being introduced; and there was no need of any apology for her visit, as the President usually asked why he had not the pleasure of seeing her, if her father went alone. Duncan Forbes’s good nature to all young people was known to everybody; but he declared himself an admirer of Janet above all others; and Janet never felt herself of so much consequence as in the President’s house.
John went as an escort to his young lady on her return.
Janet felt her father’s arm twitch as they issued from their gates; and, looking up to see why, she saw that his face was twitching too. She did not know how near her mother was, nor that her father and John had their ears on the stretch for a hail from the voice they dreaded above all others in the world. But nothing was seen or heard of Lady Carse; and when they turned out of the Wynd Lord Carse resumed his usual air and step of formal importance; and Janet held up her head, and tried to take steps as long as his.
All was right about her going to the President’s. He kissed her forehead, and praised her father for bringing her, and picked out for her the prettiest flowers from a bouquet before he sat down to business; and then he rose again, and provided her with a portfolio of prints to amuse herself with; and even then he did not forget her, but glanced aside several times, to explain the subject of some print, or to draw her attention to some beauty in the one she was looking at.
“My dear lord,” said he, “I have taken a liberty with your time; but I want your opinion on a scheme I have drawn out at length for Government, for preventing and punishing the use of tea among the common people.”
“Very good, very good!” observed Lord Carse, greatly relieved about the reasons for his being sent for. “It is high time, if our agriculture is to be preserved, that the use of malt should be promoted to the utmost by those in power.”
“I am sure of it,” said the President. “Things have got to such a pass, that in towns the meanest people have tea at the morning’s meal, to the discontinuance of the ale which ought to be their diet; and poor women dank this drug also in the afternoons, to the exclusion of the twopenny.”
“It is very bad; very unpatriotic; very immoral,” declared Lord Carse. “Such people must be dealt with outright.”
The President put on his spectacles, and opened his papers to explain his plan—that plan, which it now appears almost incredible should have come from a man so wise, so liberal, so kind-hearted as Duncan Forbes. He showed how he would draw the line between those who ought and those who ought not to be permitted to drink tea; how each was to be described, and how, when anyone was suspected of taking tea, when he ought to be drinking beer, he was to tell on oath what his income was, that it might be judged whether he could pay the extremely high duty on tea which the plan would impose. Houses might be visited, and cupboards and cellars searched, at all hours, in cases of suspicion.
“These provisions are pretty severe,” the President himself observed. “But—”
“But not more than is necessary,” declared Lord Carse. “I should say they are too mild. If our agriculture is not supported, if the malt tax falls off, what is to become of us?”
And he sighed deeply.
“If we find this scheme work well, as far as it goes,” observed the President, cheerfully, “we can easily render it as much more stringent as occasion may require. And now, what can Miss Janet tell us on this subject? Can she give information of any tea being drunk in the nursery at home?”
“Oh! to be sure,” said Janet. “Nurse often lets me have some with her; and Katie fills Flora’s doll’s teapot out of her own, almost every afternoon.”
“Bless my soul!” cried Lord Carse, starting from his seat in consternation. “My servants drink tea in my house! Off they shall go—every one of them who does it.”
“Oh! papa. No; pray papa!” implored Janet. “They will say I sent them away. Oh! I wish nobody had asked me anything about it.”
“It was my doing,” said the President. “My dear lord, I make it my request that your servants may be forgiven.”
Lord Carse bowed his acquiescence; but he shook his head, and looked very gloomy about such a thing happening in his house. The President agreed with him that it must not happen again, on pain of instant dismissal.
The President next invited Janet to the drawing-room to see a grey parrot, brought hither since her last visit—a very entertaining companion in the evenings, the President declared. He told Lord Carse he would be back in three minutes, and so he was—with a lady on his arm, and that lady was—Lady Carse.
She was not flushed now, nor angry, nor forward. She was quiet and ladylike, while in the house of one of the most gentlemanly men of his time. If her husband had looked at her, he would have seen her so much like the woman he wooed and once dearly loved, that he might have somewhat changed his feelings towards her. But he went abruptly to the window when he discovered who she was, and nothing could make him turn his head. Perhaps he was aware how pale he was, and desired that she should not see it.
The President placed the lady in a chair, and then approached Lord Carse, and laid his hand on his shoulder, saying, “You will forgive me when you know my reasons. I want you to join me in prevailing on this good lady to give up a design which I think imprudent—I will say, wrong.”
It was surprising, but Lady Carse for once bore quietly with somebody thinking her wrong. Whatever she might feel, she said nothing. The President went on.
“Lady Carse—”
He felt, as his hand lay on his friend’s shoulder, that he winced, as if the very name stung him.
“Lady Carse,” continued the President, “cannot be deterred by any account that can be given her of the perils and hardships of a journey to London. She declares her intention of going.”
“I am no baby; I am no coward,” declared the lady. “The coach would not have been set up, and it would not continue to go once a fortnight if the journey were not practicable; and where others go I can go.”
“Of the dangers of the road, I tell this good lady,” resumed the President, “she can judge as well as you or I, my lord. But of the perils of the rest of her errand she must, I think, admit that we may be better judges.”
“How can you let your Hanoverian prejudices seduce you into countenancing such a devil as that woman, and believing a word that she says?” muttered Lord Carse, in a hoarse voice.
“Why, my good friend,” replied the President, “it does so vex my very heart every day to see how the ladies, whom I would fain honour for their discretion as much as I admire them for their other virtues, are wild on behalf of the Pretender, or eager for a desperate and treasonable war, that you must not wonder if I take pleasure in meeting with one who is loyal to her rightful sovereign. Loyal, I must suppose, at home, and in a quiet way; for she knows that I do not approve of her journey to London to see the minister.”
“The minister!” faltered out Lord Carse.
He heard, or fancied he heard his wife laughing behind him.
“Come, now, my friends,” said the President, with a good-humoured seriousness, “let me tell you that the position of either of you is no joke. It is too serious for any lightness and for any passion. I do not want to hear a word about your grievances. I see quite enough. I see a lady driven from home, deprived of her children, and tormenting herself with thoughts of revenge because she has no other object. I see a gentleman who has been cruelly put to shame in his own house and in the public street, worn with anxiety about his innocent daughters, and with natural fears—inevitable fears, of the mischief that may be done to his character and fortunes by an ill use of the confidence he once gave to the wife of his bosom.”
There was a suppressed groan from Lord Carse, and something like a titter from the lady. The President went on even more gravely.
“I know how easy it is for people to make each other wretched, and especially for you two to ruin each other. If I could but persuade you to sit down with me to a quiet discussion of a plan for living together or apart, abstaining from mutual injury—”
Lord Carse dissented audibly from their living together, and the lady from living apart.
“Why,” remonstrated the President, “things cannot be worse than they are now. You make life a hell—”
“I am sure it is to me!” sighed Lord Carse.
“It is not yet so to me,” said the lady. “I—”
“It is not!” thundered her husband, turning suddenly round upon her. “Then I will take care it shall be.”
“For God’s sake, hush!” exclaimed the President, shocked to the soul.
“Do your worst,” said the lady, rising. “We will try which has the most power. You know what ruin is.”
“Stop a moment,” said the President. “I don’t exactly like to have this quiet house of mine made a hell of. I cannot have you part on these terms.”
But the lady had curtseyed, and was gone. For a minute or two nothing was said. Then a sort of scream was heard from upstairs.
“My Janet!” cried Lord Carse.
“I will go and see,” said the President. “Janet is my especial pet, you know.”
He immediately returned, smiling, and said, “There is nothing amiss with Janet. Come and see.”
Janet was on her mother’s lap, her arms thrown round her neck, while the mother’s tears streamed over them both. “Can you resist this?” the President asked of Lord Carse. “Can you keep them apart after this?”
“I can,” he replied. “I will not permit her the devilish pleasure she wants—of making my own children my enemies.”
He was going to take Janet by force: but the President interfered, and said authoritatively to Lady Carse that she had better go: her time was not yet come. She must wait; and his advice was to wait patiently and harmlessly.
It could not have been believed how instantaneously a woman in such emotion could recover herself.
She put Janet off her knee. In an instant there were no more traces of tears, and her face was composed, and her manner hard.
“Good-bye, my dear,” she said to the weeping Janet. “Don’t cry so, my dear. Keep your tears; for you will have something more to cry for soon. I am going home to pack my trunk for London. Have my friends any commands for London?”
And she looked round steadily upon the three faces.
The President was extremely grave when their eyes met; but even his eye sank under hers. He offered his arm to conduct her downstairs, and took leave of her at the gate with a silent bow.
He met Lord Carse and Janet coming downstairs, and begged them to stay awhile, dreading, perhaps, a street encounter. But Lord Carse was bent on being gone immediately—and had not another moment to spare.
Lady Carse and her maid Bessie—an elderly woman who had served her from her youth up, bearing with her temper for the sake of that family attachment which exists so strongly in Scotland,—were busy packing trunks this afternoon, when they were told that a gentleman must speak with Lady Carse below stairs.
“There will be no peace till we are off,” observed the lady to her maid. In answer to which Bessie only sighed deeply.
“I want you to attend me downstairs,” observed the lady. “But this provoking nonsense of yours, this crying about going a journey, has made you not fit to be seen. If any friend of my lord’s saw your red eyes, he would go and say that my own maid was on my lord’s side. I must go down alone.”
“Pray, madam, let me attend you. The gentleman will not think of looking at me: and I will stand with my back to the light, and the room is dark.”
“No; your very voice is full of tears. Stay where you are.”
Lady Carse sailed into the room very grandly, not knowing whom she was to see. Nor was she any wiser when she did see him. He was muffled up, and wore a shawl tied over his mouth, and kept his hat on; so that little space was left between hat, periwig, and comforter. He apologised for wearing his hat, and for keeping the lady standing—his business was short:—in the first place to show her Lord Carse’s ring, which she would immediately recognise.
She glanced at the ring, and knew it at once.
“On the warrant of this ring,” continued the gentleman, “I come from your husband to require from you what you cannot refuse,—either as a wife, or consistent with your safety. You hold a document,—a letter from your husband, written to you in conjugal confidence five years ago, from London,—a letter—”
“You need not describe it further,” said the lady. “It is my chief treasure, and not likely to escape my recollection. It is a letter from Lord Carse, containing treasonable expressions relating to the royal family.”
“About the treason we might differ, madam; but my business is, not to argue that, but to require of you to deliver up that paper to me, on this warrant,” again producing the ring.
The lady laughed, and asked whether the gentleman was a fool or took her to be one, that he asked her to give up what she had just told him was the greatest treasure she had in the world,—her sure means of revenge upon her enemies.
“You will not?” asked the gentleman.
“I will not.”
“Then hear what you have to expect, madam. Hear it, and then take time to consider once more.”
“I have no time to spare,” she replied. “I start for London early in the morning; and my preparations are not complete.”
“You must hear me, however,” said the gentleman. “If you do not yield your husband will immediately and irrevocably put you to open shame.”
“He cannot,” she replied. “I have no shame. I have the advantage of him there.”
“You have, however, personal liberty at present. You have that to lose,—and life, madam. You have that to lose.”
Lady Carse caught at the table, and leaned on it to support herself. It was not from fear about her liberty or life; but because there was a cruel tone in the utterance of the last words, which told her that it was Lord Lovat who was threatening her; and she was afraid of him.
“I have shaken you now,” said he. “Come: give me the letter.”
“It is not fear that shakes me,” she replied. “It is disgust. The disgust that some feel at reptiles I feel at you, my Lord Lovat.”
She quickly turned and left the room. When he followed she had her foot on the stairs. He said aloud, “You will repent, madam. You will repent.”
“That is my own affair.”
“True, madam, most true. I charge you to remember that you have yourself said that it is your own affair if you find you have cause to repent.”