THE WONDERFUL HISTORY
OF
MR. ROBERT DALYELL.
IT was a September night, rather chilly and dreary, as the evening often becomes at that season, even when the day has been beautiful. There was a little cold wailing wind about, like the ghost of an autumn breeze, which came in puffs of air, only strong enough to dislodge a fluttering yellow leaf or two, and sometimes with a few drops of rain upon it, which it dashed in your face with an elfish moan—not a night to walk in the garden for pleasure. It was, however, a custom with Mr. Dalyell to smoke his cigar out-of-doors after dinner in all weathers, and Fred, who was his eldest son, was proud to be his father’s companion and share this indulgence—too proud to make any opposition to the chill of the night or the occasional dash of rain. All that was visible from the windows of the Yalton drawing-room, across which now and then a white figure would flutter, with a glance out were the red fire-tips of the two cigars, moving now quickly, now slowly, stopping altogether for a moment, going on with renewed rapidity—which was papa’s way.
You could not see a prettier old house than Yalton in all the eastern shires. It had the mixture of French with native Scotch architecture which distinguishes a period in history. There were turrets, which the profane called pepper-boxes, at the corners, and lines of many windows in the commodious, comfortable corps de logis, now shining through the night with cheerful lights. Two terraces stood between the altitude of the house and the walk in which the father and son were, with lines of stone balustrades all overgrown by creeping plants and adorned with great vases in which the garish flowers of autumn were still fully blooming, though they were unseen in the darkness. On the lower level was the little temple of a fountain, which was reduced to a small and broken jet by age and negligence. The scent of the mignonette in the borders, the faint dripping of the water in the fountain, communicated to the atmosphere a little half-artificial speciality of character, like the terraces and great vases, not altogether natural to the locality, yet not uncongenial in its quaint double nationality. The two dark figures walking up and down, made visible by those red points, were yet undistinguishable, save by the fact that one was slim and slight, a boyish figure, and the other round and solid in the complete development of the man. The lad had been unfolding to his father the many novelties and wonders of his first year at the University, with that delightful force of conviction that such pleasant and wonderful experiences had never happened to anybody before which is the perennial belief of the young: while the father listened with that half-amused, half-pensive sympathy, made up of recollections fond and familiar, and the half-provoked, half-pleased sensation of amazement at finding those experiences re-embodied in the person of his son, which is habitual to the old. But, indeed, to say old is merely to express a comparative quality, for Mr. Dalyell of Yalton was a man under fifty, in the full force and vigour of life.
“Ah, yes,” he said, “Fred, it’s fine times for you now, my boy. But you must remember that life is not made up of bumps and bump-suppers, and that there are worse things than a proctor waiting for you, perhaps, round the next corner. I don’t want you not to play—but you must learn to work a little, too.”
“All right, father,” said Fred; “I’ll pull through. I sha’n’t disgrace the old house.”
“No,” said Mr. Dalyell. “I don’t suppose you will: but you might perhaps go a little farther than that.”
“I didn’t think,” said Fred, surprised, “that you intended me to do more than a good pass. I never supposed there was—any need for hard work.”
“Need? I never said there was need: but it does a young fellow good to be thought to work: even if it does no more it does that. It’s well for you to be thought to work, Fred.”
“If that’s all,” said the young man, “I don’t fancy I want to get a reputation in that way.”
“Then you’re a silly boy,” said his father. “It’s a capital thing to have a good reputation. You don’t know what it might do for you.”
“Well,” said the lad, with a laugh, “I don’t fancy that matters so much, so long as you do everything for me, father.”
“That’s just the point, Fred. That’s what I wanted to show you. I sha’n’t always be here to do everything for you.”
“Why,” said Fred, “you’re almost as young as I am!”
“I’m not particularly old: but no man’s life is secure, however young he may be; it’s not to be lippened to, as old Janet says. You ought to contemplate what your position would be if I were taken away. Think what happens to many a young fellow, Fred, whose father dies—perhaps just when he is where you are: and he has to stop all his pleasant ways and turn to, perhaps to work for his mother and the rest, perhaps only to look after them and take care of them—but at all events to be the head of the family instead of a careless boy.” Mr. Dalyell had stopped in his walk to enforce what he said, which was a way he had. “I’ve known a boy of your age,” he said, “that had to give up everything, and go into an office, and work like a slave: instead of your bump-suppers, Fred.”
“I’ve heard of such a thing myself,” said Fred; “though you don’t think much of my experience, father. It happened to Surtees of New, a fellow a little senior to me. It was awfully hard upon him. He would have been in the ‘eight’ if he had stayed another year. What he felt most was leaving the ‘Varsity without getting his blue. But,” added the lad, “if it matters about what people think, as you were saying, he was thought no end of for it. He went abroad, I think, to look after some business there.”
“And dropped, I suppose, never to be heard of more—among his old chums at least?”
“It was awfully hard upon him,” said Fred, regretfully.
“Well,” said Mr. Dalyell, “that’s what may happen to any one of you whose fathers are in business. You ought to remember that such a contingency is always on the cards.”
“Why, father——!” cried Fred. The boy was unwilling to make any application, to seem to think that there could be anything in their own circumstances to suggest this conversation: but he threw an involuntary glance at the house behind him with all its cheerful lights, and at the dark clouds of trees all round in the distance, which marked the great extent of the park and woods of Yalton. He did not add a word, and indeed the whole movement was involuntary—a sort of appeal from the lugubrious remarks on one side to all these unending signs of wealth on the other.
“You mean to say there’s Yalton; and though I’m in business, I’m not all in business,” said Mr. Dalyell with a laugh. “I was not speaking of ourselves, my boy; but of the vicissitudes of life. I hope there will be Dalyells of Yalton as long as Edinburgh Castle stands upon a rock; and one can’t say more than that. Still, there are wonderful changes in life, and I’d like to think—if you force me to an application—that you were up to anything that might happen. You’d have to take the command, you know, Fred,” he added after a moment, knocking the ash off his cigar against the balustrade of the terrace, with another curious laugh. “Your dear mother has never been used to anything but to be taken care of. You had better not bother her by asking advice from her if you should ever be in that position.”
“I wish you would not say such dreadful things,” said Fred petulantly. “Why should we talk of what I hope to heaven will never happen?—you make me quite uncomfortable, papa.”
“Well, my dear boy,” said Mr. Dalyell, “that’s the penalty, don’t you know, of being grown up—like shaving, and other disadvantages. You rather like the shaving—which implies an imaginary beard: but you don’t like to hear of the much more important responsibilities.”
“Shaving’s inevitable,” said Fred, giving a little furtive twirl to an almost imaginary moustache.
“Oh, is it?” said his father, with a more cheerful laugh. “Not for years yet; don’t flatter yourself. When do you start for your ball to-morrow? It’s fine to be an eligible young man, and sought after for all the dances. That’s a pleasant consequence of being a ‘Varsity man, and heir of Yalton, eh?”
“Well, father,” said Fred, “seeing I’ve known the Scrymgeours all my life, we needn’t put it on that ground. Whatever I was—if I was heir to nothing—it would be the same to them.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Mr. Dalyell, and he breathed a sigh, which somehow got mingled with the little wail of the wind, and echoed into Fred’s heart with a poignant suggestion. There was no reason to fear anything, and he was angry with himself. It was childish and superstitious to shiver as he did, as if the cold had caught him. There was no occasion in the world for anything of the sort. He was not a fellow to catch cold, he said to himself indignantly, nor to have presentiments, both of which things were equally absurd. There was nothing but prosperity and peace known in Yalton, and his father had the constitution of an elephant. But the night was eerie, the horizon had a sort of weird clearness upon it in the far distance, like a light showing through the openings of the clouds. The trees stood up black in billows of half-distinguishable shade, and the hills beyond them marked out their outlines wistfully against the clearness in the west. It was cold, and the air breathed of coming winter. A leaf drifting on the wind caught him on the cheek like a soft blow. Altogether the night was eerie, wild, full of possibilities. There was no ghost at Yalton; but sometimes old Janet said there was a sound in the avenue that meant trouble, like a horseman riding up to the house who never arrived. Fred involuntarily listened, as if he might have heard that horseman, which was as good as inviting trouble, but he did not think of that. However, there was no sound, nor ghost of a sound, except what was purely natural—the wild bitter wind wailing, driving a few leaves about, and bending, with a soft swish of the dark unseen foliage, the light branches of the trees.
“Come, let’s go in, Fred; I’ve finished my cigar,” said Mr. Dalyell; and then, as though a brain wave, as scientific people say, had passed from one to another—Fred’s unspoken thought of old Janet suggested her to his father’s mind. They were going up one of the sets of stone steps which led from one terrace to the other, when Mr. Dalyell suddenly put his hand on his son’s arm:
“You’ll laugh,” he said, but not himself in a laughing tone, “at what I’m going to say. But if you should be in any difficulty what to do in case of my absence, or—or anything of that sort—do you know, Fred, whom I’d advise you to consult? The last person you would think of, probably, by yourself—old Janet! You know she’s been about Yalton all her life. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for any of us—and she’s an extraordinarily sensible old woman, full of resource, and with a head on her shoulders——”
“I’m not fond of old Janet,” said Fred sturdily.
“No, none of you are. Your mother never could be got to like her. It’s a prejudice. She’s been invaluable to me.”
“If it’s all the same to you, father,” said Fred stiffly, “I’d rather not turn to an old wife for advice, an old nurse. What can she know? Of course your good opinion goes a very long way——”
“For or against? I’m afraid, so far as your mother is concerned, it is rather against. However, we need say no more about it. But, remember! as King Charles said.”
They had paused on the landing between two flights of stairs. A great trail of yellow nasturtium, dropping from the vase at the corner, showed even in the dark a ghost of colour, and thrust its pungent odour into Fred’s nostril. The faint billows of the trees stretched out dark and darker over the landscape below, and the cold clear light in the sky seemed to look on like a spectator who knows far more than the actors what is and is going to be. Fred once more gave a little shiver, and elevated his shoulders to his ears.
“You’d better go and take some camphor, boy. You’ve caught cold,” his father said.
The drawing-room of Yalton was on the first floor, unlike the generality of country houses, which gave it a great advantage in respect to the landscape. On the ground floor a great deal of space was taken up with the hall, which opened into a large portico, and was scarcely light enough to be made much use of, in a climate where there is seldom too much sun. It happened, fortunately, that Mrs. Dalyell, who was a nervous and somewhat fantastic woman, was fond of a great deal of light, so that the large windows, which made the turreted Scotch house like a wing of the Louvre, were not displeasing to her. The curtains were but partially drawn over the central windows even now, so that it was possible to turn at any moment from the light and warmth of the interior to the wide landscape out-of-doors, with its wild breadth of sky and wailing winds. But within it was exceedingly bright with a number of lamps and candles and that pleasant blaze of a fire which it is an agreeable tradition in Scotch country houses to keep up in the evening, whether it is wanted or not. In September it is generally wanted; but it cannot be said there was any necessity for it on this particular night. The company in the drawing-room consisted of Mrs. Dalyell, her two daughters, and a gentleman of middle age and manners very ingratiating and friendly, if a little formal—Mr. Patrick Wedderburn, than whom no man was more respected in Edinburgh, a W.S. of the first eminence, learned in the law, and a favourite everywhere. He belonged, it need scarcely be said, to a good Scotch family, and was any man’s equal in Scotland, though he acted as a “man of business” to many of his friends. He was one of the dearest friends of Robert Dalyell of Yalton, and was a more constant visitor than any other of the many familiar associates who called the laird of Yalton “Bob,” and knew him and his affairs to the finger-points. Pat Wedderburn, as the visitor was commonly called, was an old bachelor, and therefore had no family to call him to a fireside centre of his own. He was as much in Yalton as he was in his own handsome but dull house in Ainslie Place, where, except when he had a dinner-party, the rooms were so silent, the solitude so serious. Neither the girls nor their mother made “company” of Mr. Wedderburn. He was seated in a deep chair, reading the papers while they talked, as if he were an uncle at the least, and he did not hesitate to interrupt their conversation now and then by reading out a bit of news or making a remark. He did not hesitate to correct Susie, who sometimes ventured upon a big word with which she was not familiar, and used it wrongly, or to tell Alice that she was a fidget, and could not keep still for five minutes; and as this was done from behind the newspaper, in the most accidental manner, it deepened still more the impression that nowhere could Mr. Wedderburn have been more perfectly at home. The papers, it may be added—that is to say, the London papers—arrived in Edinburgh in the evening. The conversation which was going on when Mr. Dalyell came into the drawing-room was, however, confined to the young people, and was chiefly on the subject of the Scrymgeour ball, to which Fred was going next day.
“I think they might have asked me,” said Susie in an aggrieved tone. “I am just the same age as Lucy Scrymgeour. It isn’t my fault mother, that you’ve never taken me out yet. I am seventeen and past, as everybody knows.”
“No, it’s not your fault. I am sure you have badgered me enough about it,” said Mrs. Dalyell; “but though you think you can do anything you like with me, I have my opinions about some things. And one of them is that a girl should not go out too soon. People are quite capable of saying, ten or twenty years hence, ‘Oh, Susie Dalyell, I can tell you her age to a day! She came out in such a year, and she must have been nineteen at the least.’ That is exactly how people talk.”
“And if they did,” cries Susie, “what would it matter? Farmer thinks I look quite eighteen when I have my hair nicely dressed.”
“That is all very well now, my dear; but wait till you are thirty or thirty-five. You would like to put on a year or two now, but you will like to take them off at the other end.”
“Let’s hope,” said Mr. Wedderburn from behind his paper, “that she’ll not be Susie Dalyell then.”
“What difference will that make?” said Susie scornfully. “If I were forty I should never make a mystery about it. What is the use of trying to hide it, if you do have one foot in the grave?”
“Mother’s forty—or more,” said Alice, “and nobody would say she had one foot in the grave.”
“Oh, what does it matter,” cried Susie again, “at that time of life, when you are medeval and antediluvious? It is now that one minds.”
“Susie, don’t call mamma such dreadful names.”
“Mediæval and antediluvian, Susie”—from behind the paper, in an undertone.
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Dalyell tartly, “that Mr. Wedderburn thinks that quite appropriate. Gentlemen always think a girl’s impertinence is amusing when it’s directed against her mother; but you ought to know better, Susie, than to hold me up to ridicule. I am sure, whatever else I may be, I have been a careful mother to you.”
“Oh, mamma! As if I meant anything like that,” cried Susie petulantly, flinging herself upon her mother. “I only mean you don’t care now. It’s nothing to you to think of Lucy dancing all night in billows of tulle, like the girls in the novels, and me going to bed at ten o’clock. They will only just have begun then. And to think they should have asked Fred! and me Lucy’s greatest friend and contemporaneous, and friends with Davie all my life—and that they never thought of asking me—never even tried! Perhaps if they had asked me—and it’s such an opportunity and such old friends—you would have let me go.”
“I’ll tell you what, Susie,” said Fred, who had just come in; “I’ll ride over to-morrow morning first thing and ask them to ask you. I dare say they will for my sake.”
Susie looked at him for a moment with a flush of hope, and then her face clouded. “For your sake!” she said, with a sister’s frank contempt. “If it’s only for your sake, I’ll stay at home. I am not a nobody like that. I’m Lucy Scrymgeour’s oldest friend. If she doesn’t of her own account—and Davie too,” cried the girl with an access of indignation—“it’s more than any one can bear!”
“I would never speak to one of them again,” said Alice, “if it was me.”
“And what good would that do?” cried Susie, with the tear still in her eye, turning upon her sister. “Lose the ball and a friend too! I suppose they had some reason. Perhaps there were too many girls already—else why should they ask Fred? Or, perhaps—— Yes, I’ll speak to Lucy again, the first time I see her; but I shall be very dignified, and pretend that I didn’t care a bit.”
“But you couldn’t if you tried; dignified, my dear—that would be rather difficult.”
“Is there anything in the paper, Pat?” said Mr. Dalyell.
“Not much. But it’s ill talking between a full man and a fasting. I’ve seen what there is, and you’ve not. Here’s the Times. Munro’s in for that place in the North.”
“Bless my soul! and you call that nothing? Another firebrand, and as good as two lost in our majority. That’s bad, Pat; that’s bad.”
“I never think anything of a bye-election. They’re all in the nature of accidents. There’s a good speech of Gladstone’s at one of the Lancaster towns, and John Bright flaming on the side of peace like a house on fire.”
“And he says there’s nothing in the paper!” said Mr. Dalyell, as he dropped into an easy-chair in his turn with the great broad-sheet of the Times in his hand.
“When gentlemen begin talking politics,” said Mrs. Dalyell, “I always think it is time for the ladies to retire. But you have begun early to-night. Are you going into town at your usual hour to-morrow, Robert? I hope you’ll be home early, for, with Fred away, there will be no man but only the servants in the house.”
“And what the worse will you be for that, Amelia? There are plenty to protect you, I hope, if I were never to be seen again.”
“Robert! that’s not a thing to joke about. I never feel safe, you know, in this big, rambling old house when you’re not here—if it was only the rats——”
“What could the rats do to you, mother?”
“Hold your peace, Fred!” said Mrs. Dalyell. “I sometimes think of Bishop Hatto in that poem you used all to be so fond of—and those in the Pied Piper. If you just heard some of old Janet Macalister’s stories, they would make your hair stand on end.”
“You’ll be back in time, Bob, not to keep her uneasy,” said Mr. Wedderburn behind the Standard, which he had just taken up, to his friend behind the Times.
Dalyell answered carelessly, “Yes, yes. Why shouldn’t I be back in time?” Then, with a laugh, to his wife, “You should never mind old Janet. I dare say you were interfering with some hiding-holes of hers that she did not want disturbed. She’s a kind of familiar spirit of the house, that old woman. She knows it better than any of us; and there’s all sorts of uncanny corners about this house. It would be to keep you out of the secret chamber that she told you daft stories about the rats.”
“I don’t believe in any nonsense about secret chambers,” said Mrs. Dalyell. “That’s all very well in Glamis, and such places: but Yalton’s not good enough for that.”
“Yalton’s good enough for anything, mamma,” cried Susie, indignant. “I heard the horseman in the avenue a week ago, as clear as——”
“What’s that you’re saying, Susie?” said Mr. Dalyell sharply.
“Oh!” said the girl tremulously, “I mean the rain pattering in that place, you know.”
“Susie is always hearing some nonsense,” said her mother. “Gather up your work and things, children, for it is time you were going to your beds.”