Margaret Maliphant

								

of it mingled imperceptibly with my thoughts. I had never known what
it really was that I desired for my sister's lot. To be the wife of
a country bumpkin she was far too beautiful; and yet I thought that
nothing should have induced me to help towards mating her with one of
the gentry who crushed the people's honest rights. Sir Walter Scott's
"Fair Maid of Perth," which I had just finished reading, had lent
wings to my youthful imagination; but there were no burghers in these
days who held the honorable positions of those smiths and glovers,
although no doubt at that time there had been many such living in the
very town where we had just been to market, and which was in days of
old one of the strongholds of his Majesty's realm. If there had been
any such suitors, I think I would have given our "Fair Maid" to one
of them; but there was all the difference between the man who owned
the linen-draper's shop--even if he did not measure off yards of stuff
behind the counter--and the man who fashioned the goods with his own
hand and took a pride in making them beautiful. And nowadays there were
no men who made armor--there were no men who needed it. War had become
a very brutal thing compared to what it was then, when it really was a
trial of individual strength; nevertheless, of the professions of which
I knew anything, it was still to my mind the finest, and it seemed
to me that a fine profession was the only thing between a countryman
and a landed proprietor such as Squire Broderick. I wonder if I
should have thought all this out so neatly if the fine, handsome, and
gentlemanly young man who had come across our path had not borne the
title of "Captain?" Anyway, it had struck my fancy, as he had struck my
fancy--for Joyce.
There was something fresh and brave and bright about him, with those
wide-open brown eyes, that he fixed so intently upon one's own. I
felt sure that he was full of enthusiasm, full of courage and of
loyalty--every inch a soldier. He was the first man I had ever seen
who impressed me by his personality; and yet with all that, he was so
simple, so light and easy.
As I look back now upon my first impression of Captain Forrester, I
do not think it was an unnatural one; I think that he really had a
rare gift of fascination, and it was not to be wondered at that I said
to myself that this was the noble hero of whom I had dreamed that he
should carry off the lily nurtured in the woodland shade. He was just
the kind of man to fit in with my notion of a gallant and a hero--a
notion derived solely from those old-fashioned novels of father's
library which I devoured in the secrecy of my bedchamber when I could
snatch a moment from household darning, and mother was not by to pass
her scathing remarks upon even such profitable romance-reading as the
works of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen.
As I sat there in the midst of the snow-plain, with the ocean beyond
it, and the weather-worn old town the only human thing in the wide