SIR Robert arrived, as they had been warned, next day. An express came in the morning, preceding him, to order rooms to be prepared for three guests—to the great indignation of Katrin, who demanded where she was expected to get provender for four men, and maybe men-servants into the bargain, that were worse than their masters, at a moment’s notice. “As if there was naething to do but put linen on the beds,” she cried. “The auld man must have gaun gyte. Ye canna make a dinner for Sir Robert and his gentlemen out of a chuckie and a brace o’ birds frae the moor. If I had but a hare to make soup o’, or a wheen trout, or a single blessed thing. You’ll just put the black powny in the cart, Dougal, and ye’ll gang down yoursel’ to the toun. Sandy! What does Sandy ken? How could I trust that callant to look after Sir Robert’s denner? You’re nane so clever yoursel’—but it’s you that shall go, and no another. Man, have ye no thought of your auld maister and his first dinner when the auld man comes home?”
“I think of him maybe mair than some folk that have keepit grand goings on in his auld hoose.”
“What were ye saying?” cried Katrin, fixing him with a commanding eye. She pronounced this, as I have gently insinuated before, “F’what,” which gave great force to the sound. “I might have kent,” she cried, with a toss of her head, “there wasna a man breathing that could hold his tongue when he thought he had a story to tell!”
“Me—tell a story!” said Dougal in instinctive self-defence. Then he added: “It a’ depends—on what a man has to tell.”
“Ye’re born traitors, a’ the race o’ ye, from Adam doun!” cried Katrin in her wrath, “and aye the women to bear the wyte, accordin’ to you. Tell till ye burst!” she exclaimed with concentrated fury, “and it’s no me ’ll say a word; but put the powny in the cart and gang doun to the town, and try what ye can get for my denner. I’ll no have the auld man starved, no, nor yet shamed afore his freends, nor served with an ill denner the first night—him that hasna been in his ain auld hoose for years.”
“Ye’re awfu’ particular about his denner, considering every thing that’s come and gone, and the care you’ve ta’en of him and his.”
“Yes!” cried Katrin, “I’m awfu’ particular about his denner. Are you going? or will I have to leave the rooms to settle themselves and go mysel’?”
Dougal at last obeyed this strong impulsion; but the black powny and the cart were not for so important a person as Sir Robert’s factotum the day his master came home. He put Rory into the geeg, and drove down in such state as was procured by these means, with his countenance full of unutterable things. He was, indeed, when the little quarrel with Katrin was over, a man laden with much thought. Dougal had observed not very clearly, but yet more than he was believed to have observed. His stolid understanding had been played upon unmercifully by the women, and he had been taken in many times in respect to Ronald’s presence or absence in the house. Often it had occurred that he “could have sworn” the visitor was there when he was not there, and still oftener he could have sworn the reverse; but at the end of all the tricks and deceptions he was tolerably clear as to the position of affairs, if he had possessed the faculty of speech, and sufficient indifference to other motives to have used it. But Dougal, who was a very simple soul, was held in the grasp of as great a complication of influences as if he had been the most subtle and the most self-analyzing. Should he tell Sir Robert what he had seen and guessed? Sir Robert was his master, and it was Dougal’s duty, as guardian of the house, to report what had occurred in it. Ay! but would he shame the house by raising a story that maybe never would be got at by the right end? For what could he say? That a gentleman from Edinburgh had been about the place, coming and going by night and by day; that a person could never tell when he was there and when he wasna there; and, finally, that it was clear as daylight him and Miss Lily were “great freends.” Ah, Miss Lily! That brought up again another series of motives. She was his, Dougal’s, young leddy, by every lawful tie, the only bairn of the house, the real heir. If Sir Robert, as he was perfectly capable, were to leave Dalrugas away from her the morn, she would not a whit the less be the only Ramsay left of the old family, Mr. James’s daughter, who had been Dougal’s adoration in his youth. Was he to raise a scandal on Miss Lily—he, her own father’s man? Dougal’s heart revolted at the thought. And Katrin, that spoiled the lassie, that could see nothing that was not perfect in her—Katrin would never have a good word for her man again. She would call him a traitor—that word that burns and never ceases to wound—like black Monteith that betrayed the Wallace wight, like—— But Dougal’s courage was not equal to that anticipation; rather any thing than that, rather flee the country than that—to betray a bit creature that trusted him, Mr. James’s daughter, the last Ramsay, a little lass that could not fight for herself. “No me!” cried Dougal to all the winds that blew. “No me!” he said, confronting old Schiehallion, as if that tranquil mountain had tempted him. He shook his fist at the hills and at the world. “No me, no me!” he said.
I do not believe that Katrin ever was in the least afraid in respect to Dougal, but a very troubled woman was Katrin that day. She had been in Ronald Lumsden’s confidence all along, more than his wife knew, and in her way had abetted him and helped him, though often against her conscience. Beenie had done the same, but she had not Katrin’s head, and meekly followed where the other led. They had both been partially guilty in respect to Marg’ret, a woman introduced into the house by the clumsiest means, which Lily could have seen through in a moment had she tried, but whose presence was so great a comfort and relief to the other two that their eagerness to accede to the artifice by which she was brought as a guest to Dalrugas was very excusable. “What would you and me do, Beenie?” Katrin had said, for once acknowledging a situation with which she was not able to cope. They had been able “to sleep at night,” as they both said, since that woman was there, and there was nothing to be said against the woman. She was not troublesome, she was kind, she knew what she was about. That she was Ronald’s emissary was nothing against her. She was, on the contrary, an evidence of the husband’s tender care for his wife; his anxiety that she should have the best and most costly attention. “And a bonnie penny she will cost him,” the two women said to themselves. But the events of the last twenty-four hours had altogether overwhelmed Katrin, and she had not the comfort even of speaking to any one on the subject, of expressing her horror, her amazement and dismay, for Beenie was shut up with Lily, whose state was such that she could not be left alone for a moment. It was well for the housekeeper that her head was filled with Sir Robert’s dinner and the airing of the mattresses. It gave her a relief from her heavy thoughts to drag down the feather beds and turn them over and over before a blazing fire, though it was August, and the sun blazing hot out of doors. She worked—as a Highland housekeeper works the day the gentlemen are to arrive—for the credit of the house and her own. “Would I let strangers find a word to say, or a thing forgotten, and me the woman in charge of Dalrugas this mony and mony a year?” she said to herself. And it did Katrin a great deal of good, as she did not hesitate to acknowledge. It took off her thoughts.
Sir Robert arrived in the evening with two elderly friends and one young one, with all their guns and paraphernalia, Sir Robert’s own man directing every thing, and at least one other man-servant, bringing dismay to Katrin’s heart. “You will not have more than two or three good days on my little bit of moor,” the old gentleman had said with proud humility, “but the neighbors are very friendly, and no doubt my niece has got a lot of cheerful Highland lassies about her that will enliven the time for you, my young friend.” The friends, young and old, had protested their perfect prospective satisfaction with the entertainment Sir Robert had to offer, none of them believing, as, indeed, he did not believe himself, his own disparaging account of the moor. They arrived very dusty in their post-chaise, but in high spirits, the old gentleman with an excited pleasure in returning to the old house of his fathers, which he had not seen for years. Perhaps it looked to him small and gray and chill, as is the wont of old paternal houses when a long-absent master comes back. He called out almost as soon as he came in sight of the door, where Dougal was waiting with his bonnet poised on the extreme edge of his head, on one hair, and Sandy behind him, ready with awe to follow the directions of the gentlemen’s gentlemen, and carry the luggage upstairs. “Where is Miss Lily? Where is my niece?” Sir Robert cried. “Does she not think it worth her trouble to come and meet her old uncle at the door?”
Katrin came forward from the threshold, within which she had been lurking, and courtesied to the best of her ability. “You’re welcome, Sir Robert; you’re awfu’ welcome,” she said; “but Miss Lily, I’m sorry to say, is just very ill in her bed.”
“Ill in her bed!” cried Sir Robert. “Nonsense! Nonsense! I know that kind of illness. She is vexed at me for sending her here, and she’s made up her mind to sulk a little that I may flatter her and plead with her. You may tell her it won’t do. I’m not that kind of man. I’ll pardon, maybe, a bonnie lass in all her braws and showing her pleasure in them, but a sulky, sour young woman—— Eh, Evandale, what were you saying—an old house? It’s old enough if ye think that to its credit, and bare enough. Katrin, I hope you’ll be able to make these gentlemen comfortable in the old barrack, such as it is.”
“I hope so, Sir Robert,” said Katrin. She was relieved that his animadversions on Lily should be cut short.
And then they mounted the spiral staircase with the worn steps, which in one or two places were almost dangerous, and which the elder men mounted very cautiously, one after the other, the loud footsteps of the men echoing through the place, their deeper voices filling the air.
“Lord bless us all!” Katrin cried within herself, “if they had arrived ten days ago!” It was a comfort, in the midst of all the trouble, that Lily was safe in her bed, and, whatever happened, could not be disturbed.
Sir Robert’s enquiries again next morning after his niece were made late and after long delay. It was the 12th of August, and unnecessary to say that Dalrugas was full of sound and hurry from an early hour; the manufacture and consumption of an enormous breakfast, and the preparations for the first great day with the grouse, occupying every-body, so that Katrin herself, though very anxious, had not found a moment to visit Lily’s room, or even to snatch a moment’s talk with Beenie over her mistress’s state. “Just the same, and that’s very bad,” Beenie said, through the half-open door, “and just half out of her wits with the noise, and no able to understand what it means.” “Oh, it’s a’ thae men!” cried Katrin. “The gentlemen and their grouse, and the others with the guns and the douges and a’ the rest o’t. Pity me that have not a moment, that must gang and toil for them and their breakfasts!” When every thing was ready at last, and the party set out, Sir Robert, whose shooting days were over, accompanied them to a certain favorite corner upon Rory, who, though the old gentleman was not a heavy weight, objected to the unusual length of his limbs and decision of his proceedings; but he returned to the house shortly after, musing, with a sigh or two. Perhaps it was a rash experiment to come back after so many years; his doctor had advised it strongly, giving him much hope from his native air, the air of the moors and hills, and from the quiet and regular hours and rule of measured living which he would have no temptation to transgress. “We must remember we are not so young as we once were—any of us,” the physician had said, notwithstanding that he himself was but forty. When a man is old and ailing, and lives too perilously well, and sees and does too much in the gayer regions of the land, and is known at the same time to have a castle in the North, an old patrimony in the Highlands, delightful in August at least, and probably the best place in the world for him at all times of the year, such a prescription is easy. “Your native air, Sir Robert, and a quiet country life.” The 12th of August, a fine day, and already the sharp, clear report of the guns in the brilliant air, and a sense of company and enjoyment about, and the moor a great magnificent garden, purple with heather, is about as cheerful a moment as could be chosen to make a beginning of such a life. But old Sir Robert, returning from the beginning of the sport which he was not able to share to his old house, his Highland castle, which, as he turned toward it in the glorious sunshine of the morning, looked so gray and pinched and penurious, with the tower, that was only a high outstanding gable, and the farm buildings, which had for so long a time been the chief and most important points of the cluster of buildings to its humble occupants, had little to make him cheerful. A sharp sensation almost of shame stung the old man as he realized what his friends must have thought of his Highland castle. Taymouth and Inverary are castles, and so are the brand-new houses down the Clyde in which the Glasgow merchants establish themselves with all the luxuries which money can buy. But where did old Dalrugas come in, so spare and poor, rising straight out of the moor without garden or plaisance, not to speak of parks or woods? He smiled to himself a little sadly at the misnomer. He was wounded in the pride with which he had regarded that shrunken, impoverished little place—a pride which he felt now was half ludicrous and yet half pathetic. How was it that he had not thought so when last he was here, then a mature man and having passed all the glamour of youth? He shook his head at the pinched, tall gable, the corbie steps cut so clearly against the blue sky, the gray line of the bare, blank wall. After all, it was but a poor house for a family with such pretensions as the Ramsays of Dalrugas—a poor thing to brag to his Southern friends about. And it was not very gay. He, who had been a man who loved to enjoy himself, and who had done so wherever he had been, to come back here in the end of his days to settle down to the dreariness of the solitary moor and the silence of a country life—was it not a discipline more than he could bear that “those doctors” had put him under? Was a year or two more of vegetation here worth the giving up of all his old gratifications and amusements? It is hard even upon a man who knows he is old, but does not care to acknowledge it, to accompany on a pony for a little way his friends, who are keen for their sport, to set them off on the 12th without being able to go a step or fire a shot with them. Those doctors—what did they know? They had probably sent him off, not knowing what more to do for him, that they might not be troubled with the sight of him dying before their eyes.
Then, however, there came before Sir Robert, by some more kindly touch of memory, certain scenes from the old life, when Dalrugas was the warmest and happiest home in the world, always overflowing with kindly neighbors and friends of youth. Their names came back to him one by one—Duffs, Gordons, Sinclairs. Where were they all now? There would be at least their representatives in all the old places—sons, nay, perhaps grandsons, of his contemporaries, young asses that would turn up their noses at a vieille moustache; yet perhaps some of the old folk too. Lily would know; no doubt but Lily would know every one of them. She would have her partners among the boys and her cronies among the girls. He felt glad that Lily was here to renew the alliances of the old place. What had he sent her here for, by-the-bye? Something about a silly sweetheart that she would not give up, the silly thing. Probably she would have forgotten his very name by this time, as Sir Robert did; and there would be another now waiting his sanction. Well, no harm if it was a fit match for the last Ramsay. He would insist upon that. Somebody that had gear enough, and good blood, and a proper place in the world. No other should poor James’s daughter marry; that was one thing sure.
And then he began to think what had become of Lily that she had neither come to meet him last night nor appeared this morning. Was she bearing malice? or sulking at her old uncle? He would soon see there was an end to that. If she was ill, she must have the doctor. If it was but some silly cold or other, or the headache that a woman sets up at a moment’s notice, she must get up out of her bed, she must come down stairs. Self-indulgence was good for nobody, especially at Lily’s age. He would see her woman, Beenie, who was her shadow, and whom Sir Robert began to recollect he had not seen any more than Lily herself. And then the alternative should be given her—the doctor, who would stand no nonsense, or to get up and put a shawl about her, and nurse her cold by the fireside, where she could talk to him, and be much better than if she were in bed. Sir Robert quickened Rory’s paces, and, indeed, as the pony was nothing loath to reach his stable, appeared at the house with almost undignified haste to put in immediate operation this plan.