Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/608

602 and the reflection brought him infinite relief.

Had Mrs Moray been still in the body, the small family-party that was to greet Grace at Glenconan might have been differently arranged. Here was a great heiress, inexperienced and unsophisticated, about to be launched on English society. "She might marry a duke," her proud father often said to himself; and indeed there seemed no just cause or impediment why she should not. Besides the money which might come in conveniently were she to marry a peer with a nominally ample rent-roll, she was well-born, well-bred, singularly winning, and accomplished to boot. For her accomplishments came to her by intuition instead of education. Like her cousin Jack, she drew and coloured with a facility that marvellously resembled genius. She would sit down to the piano and rattle you off a fantasia of her own very original conception. Brilliancy was brought in in aid of feeling; and in her intense though unconscious strength of sympathetic abstraction, she threw her whole soul into the melodious intonations. Though she had seldom crossed the Border, she would warble some plaintive Scotch air so as to bring tears to the eyes of impressionable listeners; and perhaps nothing leads on to serious love-making like mutual abandon in such emotional moments.

Moray knew all that as well as anybody: he was very much a man of the world, although his days had been passed in the far East; and it certainly was not his way to underestimate the fascinations of his daughter. Yet he had deliberately chosen to throw her into the company of a couple of cousins who could scarcely be called eligible, although well aware that at any moment an accident might happen, the consequences of which it would be impossible to remedy.

For the two young gentlemen to whom the reader has already been introduced were his nephews – the one by marriage, the other by blood. Leslie, whom he liked rather than loved, was his sister's son, and proprietor of a small estate in East-Lothian. Roodholm, when the moderate jointure of the dowager Mrs Leslie was deducted, might be worth some £1200 per annum – certainly not more. But Leslie, with his many estimable qualities, was a man in whom Moray scarcely believed. As he had been heard to remark once, when touched in the liver, "That boy is doomed to die in the fulness of years and reverence, after wasting his days and frittering away his opportunities. And the best reward for his life of thoughtful benevolence would be living to attend his own funeral, and listening to the eulogies pronounced over his coffin. Yes, Master Ralph is a thoroughly good fellow, and a trustworthy; but—"

In that somewhat depreciatory estimate, perhaps Moray was mistaken, for the natures of the uncle and nephew had little in common. Moray scarcely believed in the existence of those qualities he admired, unless their possessor was perpetually showing certificates to character in the shape of palpable evidences of visible success.

As for Jack Venables, in all essential circumstances he was infinitely less eligible than Leslie. The nephew of Moray's wife, he was the eldest son of a highly respectable Sussex rector, who was, besides, a canon of Chichester Cathedral. But the Church dignitary lived nearly up to his means, and there would be little to distribute among his numerous children. Jack might be said to have no expectations; nor had he any of those specially