CHAPTER X.
A STARTLING LETTER.
The step taken by Dulcie was a source of great mortification to Lady Fettercairn.
She regretted that she had not anticipated such an unforeseen event by dismissal. Visitors, she knew, would miss the bright-faced, golden-haired English girl who—when permitted—played with such good execution, and sang so well and sweetly; and Lady Fettercairn could not, with a clear conscience, say that she had given her her congé, or why.
'Miss Carlyon has put me in a most awkward position,' she said querulously; 'her conduct has been most unprincipled, in leaving me thus abruptly, before I could look about me for a substitute; and I think Mr. Kippilaw might be instructed to prosecute her criminally. Don't you think so, Fettercairn?'
But the Peer only smiled faintly and applied himself to another egg.
Ere breakfast was over another event occurred. Shafto appeared suddenly at table. He had heard of Dulcie Carlyon's absence or flight, and was in no way surprised by the occurrence.
'You are just in time, Shafto dear,' said Lady Fettercairn, with one of her made-up smiles; 'tea or coffee?'
'Tea,' said he curtly, as Finella took the silver teapot, Shafto all the while looking as if he would rather have had a stiff and well-iced glass of brandy and soda, for he had a crushed and weary aspect.
'We thought you would be here last night,' said Lady Fettercairn.
'Why?' asked Shafto, who seemed inclined to deal in monosyllables.
'Your letter led us to expect you.'
'Did it?'
'Yes.'
'Well—I missed the last train.'
'You always do,' said Lord Fettercairn somewhat pointedly.
'Ah,' thought Shafto, 'the old fellow's liver is out of order, and gout threatening, of course—a bad look-out for me.'
On that morning he did not like the expression of Lord Fettercairn's face, so he resolved to defer speaking of his 'affairs' till a future time; but in a little space, as we shall show, the chance was gone for throwing himself, as he had thought to do, 'on the mercy' of either Lord or Lady Fettercairn.
The evening before he had been among a set of very different people—flashily dressed roughs returning from a local racecourse, their dirty hands over-bejewelled, with foul pipes and fouler language in their mouths, speeding hither and thither by train in search of pigeons to pluck, with their jargon of backing the favourite, making up books, and playing shilling Nap and Poker by the dim light of the carriage lamp, while imbibing strong waters from flasks of all sorts and sizes.
What a contrast they presented to his present refined surroundings, with Finella standing out among them, so pure, so patrician, and so exquisitely lady-like; and in attendance upon him, with hands that were white as alabaster—Finella, fresh and fragrant as a white moss rose, attired in a most 'fetching' morning costume to the feminine eye, suggestive of Regent Street.
Lord Fettercairn now addressed himself to the task of opening his letters, after the contents of the household postbag had been distributed round the table by that rubicund priest of Silenus, old Mr. Grapeston, the butler.
There were several blue envelopes for Shafto, which—with an unuttered malediction on his lips—he thrust unopened into the pocket of his tweed morning coat.
Among his letters Lord Fettercairn received one which seemed to startle him so much that, ignoring all the rest, he read it again and again, his sandy grey eyebrows becoming more and more knitted, and the colour going and coming in his now withered cheek, as Shafto, who was watching him very closely, could plainly see. He seemed certainly very perturbed, and tossed aside all his other letters, as if their contents could be of no consequence compared with those of this particular missive.
'Your letter seems to disturb you, grandfather,' said Shafto.
'It does—it does, indeed.'
'Sorry to hear it: may I inquire what it is about—or from whom it comes?'
'It is a letter from Mr. Kippilaw, senior,' replied Lord Fettercairn, darting from under his shaggy eyebrows, and over the rim of his pince-nez, a glance at Shafto, so keen and inquiring that the latter felt his heart stand still; yet summoning his constitutional insolence to his aid, he asked:
'And what is the old pump up to now?'
'Shafto!' exclaimed Lady Fettercairn, who detested slang.
'He refers to something that may prove very unpleasant,' said the Peer, carefully smoothing out the letter.
'To—to me?'
'Yes—and to me, I regret to say, most certainly. He says there are many matters on which he wishes to confer with me personally; among others, "A visit from an old Highland woman, named Madelon Galbraith, a native of Ross-shire, who was nurse to Mr. Lennard's wife in her infancy, and also to their son. Her revelations, conjoined with other things, now startle me, as they are most strange, and must be probed to the bottom." He also says that this woman—Madelon Galbraith—visited Craigengowan in my absence. Did such a visit take place?'
'Yes,' said Lady Fettercairn.
'And she was expelled very roughly.'
'Well—I believe so—rather.'
'Why?'
'Because she was mad or intoxicated—most insolent, at all events,' replied Shafto, with a choking sensation in his throat.
'To you?'
'Yes—to me.'
'Well,' resumed Lord Fettercairn, who evidently seemed very much perturbed, 'she has been with Mr. Kippilaw, as I tell you, and has made some strange revelations requiring immediate and close investigation.'
'May I know what they are?' asked Shafto with a sinking heart, that only rose when spite and hate and fury gathered in it.
'No—you may not, yet,' replied Lord Fettercairn, as he folded up the letter and abruptly left the table; and that same forenoon his lordship took an early train for Edinburgh.
Shafto heard of this with growing alarm, which all the brandy and soda of which he partook freely in the smoking-room, and more than one huge cabana, could not soothe. Though fearing the worst, through Madelon Galbraith, he thought that perhaps in the meantime Kippilaw's business referred to his gambling debts, his bills and promissory notes, and too probably to his 'row with that cad, Garallan,' as he mentally termed the affair of the loaded die.
He rambled long alone in the same stately avenue down which Lennard Melfort had passed so many years before, when, with a gallant heart full of anger, wounded pride, and undeserved sorrow, he turned his back for ever on lordly Craigengowan.
There he loitered, full of anxious and most unenviable thoughts, sulkily dragging down his fair moustache; and it has been remarked by physiognomists that good-natured men always twirl their moustaches upwards, whereas a morose or suspicious man does just the reverse.
From the avenue he wandered across the lawn and under the trees, like a restless or unquiet spirit, his unpleasant face wearing an uneasy expression, and his eyes, which were seldom raised from the ground, shifted always from side to side.
'I may have to make a clean bolt for it,' he muttered as Finella came suddenly upon him, and, though detesting him, she was too gentle not to feel some pity for his crushed appearance.
'Shafto, why are you so disturbed?' she asked. 'Of what are you afraid?'
'Of what?' he queried almost savagely.
'Yes.'
'I don't know.'
'Who then can know?'
'I tell you I don't know what to fear, but things are looking infernally dark for me. I am going down the hill at a devil of a pace, and with no skid on.'
'I do not understand your phraseology,' said Finella coldly.
'Understand, then, that many of my troubles lie at your door,' said Shafto, turning abruptly from her, as he thus referred to her aversion to himself and certainly not unnatural preference for Vivian Hammersley, and that much of the money he had raised had been advanced on the chances of his lucrative marriage with her.
'What is about to happen? When will old Fettercairn return, and in what mood? What the devil is up—perhaps by this time?' thought Shafto, as he resumed his solitary promenade. 'I would rather face a hundred perils in the light of day, than have one, with a nameless dread, overhanging me in the dark.'
And as he muttered and thought of Madelon Galbraith, his shifty eyes gleamed with that savage expression which comes with a thirst for blood.
Meanwhile Lord Fettercairn, a man of strict honour in his own way, though utterly destitute of proper patriotism or love of country, was being swept on to Edinburgh by an express train; he was full of bitter thoughts, vexation, pain, even grief and shame, for all that Shafto was evidently bringing upon his house and home.
He had secured, he thought, an heir to his ill-gotten title and estates, and with that knowledge would ever have to drain the bitter cup of disappointment to the dregs.
Finella never doubted that, owing to their great mutual regard, Dulcie would write to her, and tell of her own welfare, safety, and prospects; but weary, long, and solitary days passed on and became weeks, and Dulcie never did so. She had perhaps nothing pleasant to relate of herself, and thus the tenor or spirit of her letters to a friend so rich might be liable to misconstruction. If written, perhaps they were intercepted. So, regarding Shafto and Lady Fettercairn as the mutual cause of the poor girl's flight, and perhaps destruction, Finella now resolved to leave Craigengowan, and go on a visit to her maternal grandmother, Lady Drumshoddy, then in London, when that matron, having now her favourite nephew with her, began to mature some schemes of her own; but carefully, as she had read that 'the number of marriages that come to nothing annually because one or other or both of the innocent victims suddenly discover they are being thrown together with intention, is inconceivable.’