NEXT morning life began as usual for the saddened household. Breakfast, which had once been so lively a meal, passed over in comparative silence. Mr. Charles, indeed, did what he could to talk to the stranger, making conversation about the news and the newspapers, with a vague hope of enlivening the party.
“I daresay, as an Englishman, you don’t know much about Scotch affairs, Mr. Fanshawe,” he said. “If we were an ill-conditioned people like the Irish now, we might lead Parliament a pretty dance; but as we find it more to our advantage to keep quiet and mind our own business, nobody puts themselves out of the way.”
“And then you are very well off, which Ireland is not,” said Fanshawe, who had Irish blood in his veins.
“I am not so sure about that. We have our grievances like other folk. Our affairs are thrust to the wall for every kind of nonsense. Who cares to come when it’s a Scotch night, or when Scotch affairs are to be discussed? A handful of Scotch members—”
“It is like everything else,” said Mr. Heriot, breaking in harshly; “even, if you come to that, who are our Scotch members? In the very next county one of our best men was turned out the other day, to make room for some English radical or other. They hire our houses, they shoot our moors, they clear the fish out of our rivers, they treat us like a hunting-ground. Our old habits are destroyed, our old families dying out—”
“Not so bad as that, not so bad as that,” said Mr. Charles, soothingly. “You see, Mr. Fanshawe, we’re proud, and we think a retired English tradesman, though an excellent man—a most excellent man, perhaps better than half the Lairds about—is out of his proper place in our old castles. But still they bring money into the country, no doubt about that, and it’s good for trade and all the rest of it. By the way, I see there’s been a great match at St. Andrews—did you notice, Thomas?—with Tom Morris in it. We must take you to St. Andrews, Mr. Fanshawe, to see golf. You cannot say you know Scotland unless you know golf. Bless my life, what a long time it is since I have been there—not once all last season. What did you say, Thomas?—that is a most unusual thing for me.”
“I said nothing,” said Mr. Heriot. “Go to your golf, whatever happens, Charlie. Golf over your best friend’s grave, if you like. What does it matter? He would never feel it, you may be sure.”
Poor Mr. Charles and his attempts at conversation were thus cut short wheresoever he turned his steps.
“I mean no disrespect,” he said, with a certain humility, looking anxiously at his brother, who sat throned in the irritability of his sorrow, strangely pale through the brownness of his country colour, or rather grey—with a veil over his countenance such as had never been seen on it before. His heavy eyebrows were curved over the eyes, which shone out fiery and red from under them, red with sleeplessness, and nervous irritation, and unshed tears.
“It is nothing to me,” he said, in a high-pitched unsteady voice, “nothing to me! Let them amuse themselves that can. I am glad of it. Has Charlie been written to yet—that is all I want to know.”
“I wrote on Friday, papa.”
“Ah! Before the funeral,” said Mr. Heriot, “to let him know what had happened. But I mean more than that. I mean that he should be written to, to come home. I want him home. Why should he stay out there now, risking his health and his children’s lives? Write again, and say I want him home.”
“Yes, papa,” said Marjory, gently. “I said so then. I gave him all your messages. I said to come at once, as soon as Mrs. Charles could travel—”
“Confound Mrs. Charles! What do I care for Mrs. Charles?” cried the old man. And then he paused, and turned with a curious attempt at a smile to Fanshawe. “You’ll think I am a hotheaded old Turk, but you see how I am baffled by my family. I give a simple message, and it’s lost in a hundred paraphrases. Mrs. Charles may come when she pleases. I want Charlie. Do you hear, May? Write again this very day, and say I want him home.”
“Yes, papa, immediately, as soon as breakfast is over.”
“I knew there would be something to wait for,” said Mr. Heriot, rising up, impatiently. He was consumed by his grief as by a fire. The presence of any other individual, even those most dear to him, the sound of conversation, seemed to rouse into a kind of fury the smouldering heat in his soul. And when they dropped into silence he was still more impatient. “I fear I am a hindrance to conversation,” he said, pushing away his chair from the table after a painful pause. “I’ll levo l’incomodo, as the Italians say. If anyone wants me, I’m in the library. And mind that Charlie is written to without more delay.”
So saying, he went out hastily, with a heavy step, which yet sounded uncertain upon the floor, as if it might stumble over anything. He waved his hand to Fanshawe, with a forced smile, as he disappeared. He met his darling Milly at the door—she whom he had never passed without a caress, and brushed by, taking no notice of her. Then he came back, and looked into the room sternly.
“See that there’s no mistake about Charlie,” he repeated.
Marjory made an ineffectual effort to restrain the tears which fell suddenly, in great drops, upon her sleeve. She, too, turned anxious apologetic looks upon the stranger.
“He never was like this before,” she said. “Oh, don’t think he is rude or unkind, Mr. Fanshawe. There never was anyone so good or so tender; but his heart is broken. He can think of nothing but poor Tom.”
“And you’ll write to Charlie?” said Mr. Charles. “I don’t wonder at him being anxious. If you’ll think what India is, and what the life is—a life made up of accidents, and fevers, and everything that’s deadly. The lad might be bitten by some venomous creature; some ill beast might fall foul of him; or he might catch the jungle fever, which they tell me is most dangerous—”
“But all this might have happened to him for years past, I suppose,” said Fanshawe; “unless he went to India very recently. These dangers are not new.”
“He was not the heir then!” said Mr. Charles very simply; and he too rose from the table. “Would you like to come and see my room, Mr. Fanshawe? There is not much to show, but I have some prints that are not just what you will see every day, and a curiosity or two; while Marjory writes her letters.” And as he left the room he too looked back to say: “You’ll write at once, May; you’ll be very urgent? It will be good for us all to have Charlie at home.”
“Oh, May!” cried little Milly, who did not remember her second brother; “why are they so anxious for Charlie to come home?”
“Who is anxious, Milly, besides papa and Uncle Charles?”
“Oh, the whole house!” said Milly. “Mrs. Simpson asks me every time she sees me; and old Fleming. ‘Mr. Charlie must come home now!’ they say. May, will you tell me why?”
“To fill Tom’s place!” said Marjory, with an outburst of sudden tears. “Oh, my little Milly, that is what we do even when we love best. My father is breaking his heart for Tom; yet he wants Charlie to fill Tom’s place.”
“Nobody could ever fill your place, May,” cried Milly; “I would never let them; dinna cry. I could cry too, for papa never minds me, never looks at me; and oh, he’s so strange; the house is so strange! but May, so long as there is you—”
The little girl’s arms clinging round her neck were a comfort to Marjory. Little Milly was wounded too; she had received that first lesson of her own unimportance, which is hard even for a child; she was half indignant, half angry even with “poor Tom,” though she cried at the sound of his name—and very sore about Charlie, whom everybody wished for.
“They have May, and what do they want more?” this faithful little maiden said to herself. “When Tom was living we never saw him; and nobody ever thought of Charlie. Why do they make such a fuss now? when they have May!”
Fanshawe went with Mr. Charles to his room. After the scene of the morning he felt sadly out of place, an intruder into the family life. It seemed to him that he ought to go away; and only the day before he had felt the tediousness of the existence so much that any excuse for going away would have seemed a godsend; but yet, at the same time, he felt that he did not want to go. Why, he could not have told; he seemed to have been caught in the web of this family’s life, to be waiting for some dénouement or for some new turn in the story. He had known nothing of them two weeks before; yet now he was a member of the household, a spectator of the father’s misery, of the effort of the family to right itself after this terrible blow. They seemed all to be playing their parts before him, while he was the judge chance had appointed to decide how they all fulfilled their rôle. With this curious sensation in his mind he went over Mr. Charles’s treasures—his prints, his cabinets of coins, his little collection of old jewellery, which he had ranged in boxes under glass covers. “Here is a necklace that I sometimes lend to May,” the old man said, pointing out a delicate circlet in fine enamel, and the lightest fairy goldsmith’s work. “It was brought to her great grandmother, Leddy Pitcomlie, from Rome, in the beginning of last century, and is said to have belonged to a line of great Italian beauties, whom I need not name. They’re all written out on the case. I can recollect seeing it on the old Leddy’s withered neck.”
“Then you had a title in the family in those days?”
“No, no; no title! Leddy is the feminine of Laird, in old Scots—not Lady, mind, which has another meaning. This is a ring that belonged to Robert Hay in the end of the fifteenth century. We bear the yoke still in our arms, you see. Robert Hay, of the Erroll family, married the heiress of Pitcomlie—who was Marjory, like our Marjory downstairs. It’s a romance in its way. I have put together some of the facts in the shape of a kind of family history; but whether it will ever see the light of day—”
“Then you are an author, as well as an antiquary?” said Fanshawe; “and an art collector; and all sorts of learned things besides. What an impudent wretch I was to speak of dulness here!”
Mr. Charles blushed, and waved his hand in gentle deprecation.
“No more of an author than I am of an antiquary,” he said; “a bit smattering here and there, that’s all the knowledge I possess. As for my bits of family notes, I doubt if they would interest any but the family and connections. We have never had any notabilities among us; good, honest, ordinary folk; some soldiers that have done well in their day, but never very remarkable; and some clever women—that’s been our speciality. You may see it in Marjory at the present moment. Clever women—I don’t mean authoresses, or that kind of cattle, but real capable mothers of families, that could guide their house and rule their children. We’ve been great for that. Here are some miniatures that, perhaps, will interest you; some very good, some bad enough, but all the same character, the same character running through them. There is one you would say was done for May, and it’s her great-aunt I don’t know how many times removed.”
Thus the old man chattered, leading the stranger from one corner to another of his domain. Mr. Charles’s rooms were in the habitable corner of the old house of Pitcomlie, which was connected with the new house by a long corridor, a windy passage, with the garden on one side and the cliff on the other. One wing of the old building had been preserved in sufficient repair, and Mr. Charles’s study occupied the round of the old tourelle, as well as part of the ancient front of the house. It was a large, cheerful room, with many windows, which he had fitted up according to his taste, and his taste was good. His writing-table stood in the round of the little tower commanding views up and down the Firth. All the wonderful panorama on which Fanshawe had gazed with so much interest from the cliffs, unfolded itself round the old windows which were set in the half-circle of the tower. Between these windows Mr. Charles had placed frames of crimson velvet, set with miniatures, with rare old prints, and with small but exquisite scraps of sketches. Only a trained eye, indeed, could have divined the amount of modest wealth contained upon these; delightful faces, lovely little scraps of scenery, gems which nothing could replace, though to the ignorant they seemed simple enough.
Fanshawe felt himself grow smaller and smaller as he looked. After all, this was not the dull and level blank of existence he had supposed. This homely old man, with his Scotch accent, changed under his eyes; he became something a great deal more lofty and elevated than Mr. Charles. In his compunction and shame, the young man went as far too high in his second estimate as he had been too low in his first. As for Mr. Charles, this change gave him a simple satisfaction which it was delightful to behold.
“You see, after all, there are some things worth looking at in Pitcomlie,” he said. “It is not such a humdrum house, after all, though it stands in a county so little interesting as comfortable Fife.”
“Nothing could have made it a humdrum house,” said the penitent. He was not thinking of Mr. Charles’s pictures: he was thinking of—something else.
Just then an unexpected summons came to the door.
“Miss Heriot’s compliments, and would the gentleman step over to the north room?” the maid said, who waited, curtseying, to show the way.
Mr. Charles’s countenance clouded over.
“That’s poor Tom’s room,” he said. “I’ll go with the gentleman myself—and yet, no; on second thoughts I’ll not go. You two may have something to consult about, that I should not meddle with; or Marjory may think there is something. Go, as she has sent for you, Mr. Fanshawe; you can come back to me another time.”
With a curious little thrill of interest, Fanshawe went, threading the turret staircase down from Mr. Charles’s rooms, and the windy passages, wondering what she could want with him. Marjory received him in a room of a very different description. It was in the back of the house, looking across the gardens to the level line of the ploughed land, and the low hills on the horizon. It was a long, narrow room, with a door opening from each end; and its decorations were of a kind as different from Mr. Charles’s study as was its form. On the walls hung two crossed swords, some old guns carefully arranged according to their antiquity, a collection of whips, fishing-rods, clubs for playing golf—worn out traces of a boyhood not yet so very long departed. In one corner was a bookcase, full of old classics, thumbed and worn, the school-books of the two boys whose progress in polite letters Pitcomlie had once been so proud of. The pictures on the walls were of the most heterogeneous character; languishing French “Etudes” in chalk, were mingled with sporting subjects, heads of dogs, portraits of sleek race-horses led by sleeker grooms, and one staring view of Pitcomlie, painted in water-colours, with very lively greens and blues, and signed “Ch. Hay-Heriot,” in bold boyish characters.
No contrast could have been greater than this mass of incongruous elements, seen after the careful collection of Mr. Charles; and yet this, too, was not without its attraction. It looked like the chaos of a boy’s mind, a hopeless yet innocent confusion; all sorts of discordant things connected together by the sweet atmosphere of youth and possibility, out of which all harmonies might come. In the midst of this schoolboy chamber sat Marjory. She had a writing-case placed before her on a table, the key of which she held in her hand. Fanshawe recognised it at once. It was one which Tom had used constantly, which he had carried about with him everywhere. Tom’s sister looked up at him with a wistful and anxious glance.
“Mr. Fanshawe,” she said, “this has been brought to me to open. My father cannot bear to look at anything, and I—I feel as if we had no right to search into his secrets. It seems dishonourable, when he cannot defend himself—when he is in our power.”
Fanshawe went round to Marjory’s side, and took into his own the hand which, half unconsciously, she held out, appealing to him, and touched the fingers with his lips. Her eyes were full of tears, and the look she turned to him, asking for counsel and sympathy, went to his very heart. A slight colour came to her face at this answer to her appeal; but Marjory was not vain, and took it in no other light than as an impulse of sympathy.
“Must I do it?” she asked.
“Is there any reason why? is it necessary? must you do it?” he asked. “Miss Heriot, your brother was but a man like others. There may be things he would not have had you see.”
Once more Marjory blushed; but this time more hotly. She drooped her head not to look at him.
“That is what I thought,” she said, very low. Then after a pause, she looked up suddenly in his face. “Mr. Fanshawe, you were his friend; you heard what he said about something to tell me. He thanked God at the last that he had told me, though he had not, you are aware. Do you know what it was?”
“No.” It was a relief unspeakable to him to be able to say this. “I know none of his secrets—if he had any. So far as I am aware, he was irreproachable. I knew nothing of him which you might not have known.”
“Thanks!” she said, with a smile, once more holding out her hand. How grateful she was to him for knowing nothing! “Do you think, if I keep it by me, to refer to in case of need—do you think that would do?”
“Or your uncle might do it,” said Fanshawe.
To his astonishment, she shrank from this suggestion.
“Uncle Charles is very good and kind; but he would be hard upon poor Tom—he was always hard upon him. I must do it, if it has to be done. Must it be done? I am so unwilling to do it, that I cannot trust my own judgment. Oh! why cannot our little treasures, our secrets, our mysteries, be buried with us in our graves?”
“He may have left a will—instructions—something that concerns others,” said Fanshawe, hesitating.
Miss Heriot was not perfect, or an angelical woman. She almost turned her back upon him as she answered coldly,
“Thanks; you seem to think it necessary. I will not trouble you further, Mr. Fanshawe. I am much obliged to you for your advice.”
“What else could I say?” poor Fanshawe asked himself, as he retired. “What the deuce have I done? She talks as if it was my fault. I did not kill Tom Heriot, nor lock up his secrets in his despatch box. I hope, though, she won’t find anything to shock her. What do the people here mean by leaving all this to her? They give her everything to do. By Jove! if it was me she would find the difference. I should be her slave. She should do just what she liked, and so would I. I wonder if she’d like it? I mean not me, but the kind of thing—to be served instead of serving, to be kept from trouble instead of being bothered by everybody. Just for the fun of the thing I should like to know.”
At this stage of his thoughts, Mr. Fanshawe being outside on the platform before the house, lighted his cigar; and then he strolled down the cliff to the rocks, where he wandered about till the hour of luncheon.
“I suppose it’s best as it is,” he said to himself, as he clambered up again at the sound of the bell. Such a sentiment is perhaps less contented, less satisfactory than it looks. “I suppose it’s best as it is!” Certainly there was a certain ruefulness in the countenance with which it was said.