THE house of Pitcomlie lay very still and quiet in the fitful sunshine, when the daughters of the family reached its open door. The door stood always open, unsuspicious, disclosing the way into its most private corners to any comers. It had nothing to conceal. At this hour in the afternoon, it was exceptionally still. The gentlemen were out, the servants all absorbed into their own part of the house, and not a stir nor sound announced the presence of a large household. The brightness of the day was clouded, but yet held its own by moments, the sun coming out now and then with double brilliancy from the edge of the clouds which were driven over its face one by one. As Marjory and her little sister rode up the avenue, one of those great masses of cloud had floated up, and threw a heavy shadow over the house, and the blue broad sea beyond; but as they alighted at the door, the sun burst forth again, blazing upon the wide open doorway.
“Is my father at home, Rob?” asked Marjory of the groom who came to take her horse.
“The laird’s out, ma’am, and so’s Mr. Charles. They’re baith away wast,” said Rob, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
Marjory stood musing on the steps before she would go in; she did not know whether to seek her father “away wast,” or to wait for him. How still the house was, so unsuspecting, so serene and peaceful! It seemed treacherous to go into it with a secret so deeply affecting its existence in her hands. Somehow it seemed to Marjory’s excited fancy that she was about to give a blow without warning, without preparation, to some one whose smiling unalarmed countenance looked trustfully up at her. It seemed a treachery even to know it, and above all to go on knowing it, keeping the secret, into the old gentle family house that feared nothing. When she went upstairs she changed her dress, and gave her maid instructions to pack a few necessaries for her.
“My brother has met with an accident,” she said, as calmly as she could.
To say it even in this form relieved her mind. She did not feel such a traitor to the kindly old house.
Mr. Heriot fortunately came back as soon as her preparations were made, and now the worst part of her duty was to come. She ran down and met him at the door.
“What made you so late, May?” he said, his face brightening involuntarily at sight of her.
“I was detained,” she said; and came out and loitered in front of the door, playing with the dogs, who always accompanied him. He was as unsuspicious as his house. If he had been anxious in the morning, he had thrown his anxieties off. He pointed out to his daughter the good points of a pointer puppy, which, large-limbed and imbecile, came roving round from the stables, scenting the arrival of the others.
“He’ll make a grand dog before September,” he said, “when he’s grown and trained. Tom will be delighted with him.”
May interrupted him hastily, for she was choking with the news.
“Come round to the cliff, papa, there is a storm brewing,” she said.
Unsuspicious, he went with her. They took what Mr. Heriot called “a turn” round the soft lawn which surrounded that side of the house. It was too much exposed for flowers or even shrubs, but green and smooth as velvet. The sea dashed with a muttering suppressed roar on the beach beneath. It was of a steely blue, sometimes flashing in the gleams of sunshine, sometimes leaden under the shadow. Towards the east, on the very angle of the coast, stood the old mansion house, tall and narrow, with its tourelles—all but one tower, which adjoined the present house, was ruinous and roofless—but it was draped by branches which burst out from the broken walls, and a wild luxuriance of ivy. The existing house stood lower, and looked warm, and peaceful, and safe, like the present under the protection of the past. Marjory and her father made their turn round and round, she talking against time, not knowing how to introduce her subject. At last, as they turned to come back, she pointed out to him one of those sudden dramatic changes of the clouds.
“Look, papa, how quickly the lights change. It was in sunshine just now, and how black everything is already! It makes one feel eerie. It is like a cloud of misfortune enveloping the old house.”
She was foolishly in hopes that he would have taken up this metaphorical strain, and thus given her an opening to say what she had to say.
“Nothing more natural, my dear,” said Mr. Heriot. “The clouds are driving up from the mouth of the Firth. It’s an ill sign when they come and go so fast. I hope those foolish fellows from Comlie shore will be warned in time.”
“Oh, papa,” cried Marjory, seizing this opening. “It is dreadful to think how seldom we are warned in time! How we go on to the very edge of a precipice, and then—”
“Phoo!” said Mr. Heriot, “if a man does not keep a look-out before him, it’s nobody’s fault but his own.”
Thus the door was shut upon her again. She looked at him with a kind of despair, and put both her hands round his arm.
“Papa,” she said, “I think we have had a very tolerably happy life—nothing very much to find fault with. Everything has gone on comfortably. We have had no great troubles, no misfortunes to speak of—”
“I don’t know what you call misfortunes,” said her father. “That affair of the Western Bank was anything but pleasant.”
“Only money! What would you have, I should like to know? Only money! May, my dear, to be a sensible girl as you are, you sometimes speak very like a haverel. Loss of money is as great a misfortune as can befall a family. It brings a hundred other things in its train—loss of consideration, troubles of all kinds. Personal losses may hurt more for the moment, but so far as the family is concerned—”
“Oh, don’t say so,” cried Marjory. “Papa, I am afraid there are things that hurt a great deal more. I have heard—something about Tom—”
“What about Tom?” he said, turning upon her with an eagerness much unlike his former calm.
“It may not perhaps be so bad as appears. He has had—an accident,” she said, breathless and terrified.
To her surprise, the anxiety in her father’s face calmed down.
“An accident! is that all?” he said, with a long-drawn breath of relief.
“All! papa!”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Heriot, half-impatiently, “you think I’ve no feeling. You are mistaken, May. But that boy, that brother of yours, has been in worse scrapes—scrapes that no doctor could mend. However, that’s not the question. How did you hear? and when did it happen? and what is it? Arm, or leg, or collar-bone? I know how lads lame themselves. Hunting is all very well in moderation, but these young men pay dear for it. They think no more of breaking a limb than if it was the branch of a rotten tree.”
“But, papa, I am afraid it is, perhaps, more serious than you think,” faltered Marjory, half rendered hopeful by his ease, half frightened by indifference.
“Never fear,” said Mr. Heriot; “women always think worse of such things than they deserve. Tom’s not the lad to come to harm that way. It’s long or the de’il dee at a dykeside.”
Then a moment of silence followed. She felt as if her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. She was bewildered by her father’s strange levity. She strolled round the cliff slowly, as if she were in a dream, not feeling sure for one dizzy moment whether her senses might not have deceived her, whether the telegram might not be some mere delusion and her father right. He was so confident and easy in his confidence—and surely on these kind of subjects, at least, he must know better than she did. But then, to be sure, it was not on her judgment the matter rested. It was Tom’s friend who had communicated news which nobody’s opinion could change; and already the lights were lengthening and the afternoon passing away.
“Papa, you will not mind my going to him,” she said, hurriedly. “He wishes it; he has sent for me. And I wish very much to go at once.”
“He has sent for you?”
“For all of us. He says, ‘Tell my father—’ I fear, I fear, he must be very bad. Oh! my poor Tom, my poor Tom!”
“You are talking nonsense,” said her father, letting her hand drop from his arm with a certain impatience. “Tom might have known better than to make such an appeal to you. Where is he? And if he were so very bad how could he have written? Phoo, phoo, May; this fuss and nonsense is not like you.”
“It is not my doing,” she cried. “Oh! papa, look, the afternoon is flying away, and we shall lose the train.”
He looked up at the sky as she did, and somehow this practical reference seemed to alarm him more than all she had said. In the bright, slanting sunshine which suddenly burst upon him at this moment, his face paled as suddenly as if some evil breath had passed over it.
“The train! I did not think of that. You can order the carriage if you like,” he said. “It is nonsense; but I will put some things into a bag, if I must be foolish and go with you on a fool’s errand—”
“Your things are all ready, papa; I have seen to everything. If we do not miss the train—”
“I will go round to the stables myself,” he said; and then he turned upon her with a forced smile. “Mind, I think it a fool’s errand—a fool’s errand; but to please you, May—”
Marjory stood motionless, as with a harsh little laugh he strode away from her. She could not have borne any more; but when Uncle Charles came suddenly round the corner of the old house, blown so suddenly round by the wind, which seemed to sway his long legs and slight, stooping figure, there burst from her, too, a little hysterical laugh, which somehow seemed to relieve her as tears might have done.
“What a wind!” said Mr. Charles. “You may laugh, but a slim person has hard ado to stand before it; and rising every moment, May. I should not like to be on the Firth to-night.”
“I hope we shall get across,” said May, eagerly, “before it is quite dark.”
“Get across?” said Uncle Charles, in consternation. “Who is going to Edinburgh to-night?”
“Oh! Uncle Charles, my heart is breaking! Tom has had a terrible accident. Perhaps he is dying. We must go to him at once. And papa will not believe me; he will not understand how serious it is.”
“God bless me!” said Mr. Charles. He made a few sudden steps towards the house, and then he came back. “My dear May, there’s you to think of. What is it? I’ll go myself.”
“No, no, no,” she said. “It was me he sent for. Oh, uncle, quick! bid them make haste with the carriage; we shall lose the train.”
When the carriage came round to the door ten minutes after, Mr. Charles put aside the two travelling bags which had been placed inside, and took his place opposite the father and daughter on the front seat.
“I’m coming too,” he said.
Mr. Heriot gave vent to another strange little laugh.
“We had better have Milly in, and Mrs. Simpson, and all the rest,” he cried; but he made no further remark or objection. His ruddy, rural countenance had paled somehow. It looked as Marjory had seen it after a period of confinement in town (town meant Edinburgh more than London to the Hay-Heriots, though sometimes they went to London too), when the sun-burnt brownness had worn off. He leant back in his corner and did not speak; he had not even asked where they were going. He seemed eager to keep up his appearance of indifference; but his heart had failed him. Mr. Charles, however, on the contrary, seemed to feel that all the amusement of the party depended upon him. He kept up a perpetual stream of talk, till the very sound of his voice made Marjory sick.
“We’ll find him drinking beer, like the man in Thackeray’s book,” said Mr. Charles; “a ruffianly sort of hero in my way of thinking; but that’s what you like, you young folk. We’ll find him drinking beer, I’m saying, May, as well as ever he was. I think I can hear the great laugh he will give when he sees the whole procession of us coming in.”
Mr. Heriot was nettled by his brother’s interference, yet not disposed to depart from his own rôle of indifference.
“It’s a fool’s errand,” he said; “but you may diminish the procession, Charles, if you like. It will be no procession, if there is only May and me.”
Mr. Charles made no reply to this; he continued his cheerful talk.
“It’s the penalty of all violent sports,” he said; “even your cricket that such a fuss is made about. There’s no risks of that kind with golf, now, for instance; and in my way of thinking, a far nobler game; but as for horses and hounds, they’re simple destruction—in the first place to a man’s living, and in the second to his bones.”
“You never were great across country,” said Mr. Heriot, satirically. “It was never one of the sins you were inclined to commit. That must be taken into account.”
“And the consequence is I never had a broken limb,” said Mr. Charles; “no surgeon has ever been needed for me; whereas the rest of you have spent, let us say three weeks in the year on an average, in your beds—”
With intervals, this kind of talk went on until the travellers had reached the edge of the stormy Firth, which spread like some huge boiling cauldron in black and white between them and the misty heights of Edinburgh. It was late twilight failing into night; but as there was a moon somewhere, the stormy landscape was held between light and dark in a pale visibleness which had something unearthly in it. Arthur’s Seat appeared through the mist like a giant, with huge sullen shoulders turned upon them, and head averted. The boiling Firth was black and covered with foam.
While Marjory sat wrapping her cloak close round her in the most sheltered corner, her uncle, with the fierce wind catching at his slim legs, came and leaned over her, and tried what he could, in gasps between the gusts of the storm, to keep up his consolatory remarks.
“This is nothing, Marjory, my dear; nothing to what it used to be,” he said in snatches, blown about, now by the wind, now by the lurches of the steamer, “when we used to have to go, in a sailingboat, from Kinghorn to Leith. This is nothing, nothing; I have seen the day—”
But here being driven first into her lap, and then forced to retreat violently backwards, in obedience to the next wave, Mr. Charles for the moment succumbed.
What a strange tragi-comedy it was! The boats from Comlie shore were out in that merciless storm, and the poor fisher-wives at their windows, or marching with bare feet on the sharp rocks, were looking out upon the struggles of their “men” to reach the harbour, which that wild suppressed light permitted them the additional misery of seeing. On the other hand, far away in the peaceful inland depths of England, Tom Heriot was lying tragically gay with fever; sometimes delirious, shouting out all kinds of strange follies in the ear of his friend, who was no better than himself. While yet between the two the wind made a jest and plaything of Mr. Charles Heriot, seizing him by his legs and tossing him about as in a rough game of ball, taking the words out of his mouth, though they were words of wisdom, and dispersing his axioms to the merciless waves. Even Marjory could not but laugh as she wrapped herself closer in her cloak. She laughed, and then felt the sobs struggle upward choking into her throat.
Then came the long night journey, silent, yet loud, with the perpetual plunging and jarring of the railway, that strange, harsh, prosaic jar—which yet, to those who listen to it all through an anxious night as May did—is an awful sound. Ordinary wheels and hoofs make a very different impression on the mind; but there is something in the monotonous clang of a railway which sounds unearthly to an excited mind, thus whirled through the darkness. How fast the colourless hedgerows, the dark spectres of trees, the black stretches of country fly past, with now and then a flitting phantasmagoria of lights from some town or village; and yet how slow, how lingering, how dreary are the minutes which tick themselves out one by one with a desperate persistence and steadiness! In the faint and uncertain lamplight the face of her father dozing uneasily in the corner opposite to her, seemed to Marjory so blanched and worn, that she could scarcely keep herself from watching him in alarm, to make sure that he was living and well. Uncle Charles was at the other end of the carriage, shifting his long legs uneasily, sometimes uttering a dismal groan as he awoke, with a twinge of cramp, to which he was subject. He had filled the carriage with newspapers and railway books, by way of amusing Marjory.
“I don’t pretend that I can read myself by this unsteady light,” he said; “but you’re young, May, and they’ll keep you from thinking.”
Poor Marjory! it was her youth (she thought) which made her so capable of thinking, and kept from her eyes the broken sleep which brought momentary rest to her companions. Thus passed the lingering weary night.