CHAPTER XII.
CECIL'S DEPARTURE.
Though indignant at Falconer, Sir Piers could scarcely find it in his heart to be angry with Mary, she was so sweet and winning—his dead kinsman's one ewe lamb, committed to his care. She had been to him as the child of his old age, taking the place of that only son whose death he had never ceased to lament; she, who by her affection, in the thousand nameless little recurring trifles of life, as a tender and loving daughter rather than a grand-niece, had made herself so useful and necessary to him.
Mary had come in search of a book, a passage in which she meant to show Cecil, whom she had left with Annabelle Erroll, when Sir Piers summoned her to his side; and though she saw a gloom on his fine old face, the cause of which she dreaded and suspected to have been Hew, who had just quitted the room, she seated herself on a velvet tabouret, near her guardian's own chair, and nestling at his knee as she had been wont to do when a little girl, she drew one of his shrivelled hands caressingly over her handsome head, and, looking up smilingly, said:
'Well, grand-uncle darling, what have you to say to me?'
'Much, Mary—yet a few words may suffice,' he replied, as the lines faded out of his face. He had at first resolved to be very stern and irate with her; but he reserved all his bitterness for Falconer. 'Am I right when I say that I have been given to understand that Mr. Falconer has forgotten his place as a guest in my house, and dared to address you surreptitiously in language other than a mere friend or guest may do?'
At this question, so sententiously put, Mary blushed painfully, and then grew very pale indeed, for her heart was yet vibrating with its new-found joy, and the memory of that kiss, the first that was ever given her by any man save old Sir Piers himself.
'Has he attempted to win for himself that affection which should belong to another?'
'Oh, grand-uncle, what do you mean?' asked Mary piteously, and feeling quite overwhelmed.
'What I ask, Mary; and I wish you to know, further, that he is every way unworthy the consideration of any girl—wholly unworthy the kindness I have wasted on him.'
'Unworthy!' repeated Mary, faintly; and yet her heart rebelled, for she now recognised the malevolent influence of Hew.
'I have other views for your future, as you know, dear Mary—views long cherished and most dear to me, and I am not going to have my plans and prospects marred by a fortune-hunting subaltern and a romantic girl's folly. Understand me, Mary, and the power your father's will has given me over you and your fortune.'
Mary remained silent, but tears welled up in her eyes—tears that sprang from emotions of anger as much as annoyance and intense mortification.
'I don't object to the fellow because he is a subaltern, with little, if anything, more than his pay,' said Sir Piers, as if ashamed of using the military rank as an adjective; 'but I do object to this, Mary, as your guardian and only kinsman, in whose hands the whole of your fortune is vested, to bestow, so far as possible, on my heir of entail, who is to share it with you. But here, if all I am told is true, you have been tempted—you, with beauty and attractions that might win a coronet—you, with an inheritance, and certainly with a name, second to none in Scotland—to cast your lot, perhaps, with one destitute of position, save that which a commission gives him—one without family or friends either, so far as we know,' continued the general, musing, or talking himself into a fit of anger; 'as Hew has hinted, the first of his race—a gambler, too——'
'A gambler, grand-uncle?'
'A gambler—and worse—who has sorely fleeced poor Hew! But I shall amply reimburse him, as it was by my old-fashioned folly our unlucky guest came here. How I shall be able to receive him at dinner to-day I scarcely know, for now I consider his presence in Eaglescraig an insult. You may have been foolish—girlish, Mary; but I know that you won't further vex your old grand-uncle, who loves you so, but will sedulously avoid or shun this person, Falconer, during the few hours he is under our roof: and when he leaves it let his existence be to you as a thing of the past—as that of the dead—but the dead who are forgotten!'
And with this cruel advice, which was all the more cruel and impressive from being coolly, calmly, and deliberately given, the general rose and quitted the library, leaving Mary in a flood of tears and quite overwhelmed with dismay; not at the invectives bestowed upon Falconer, as she knew their source and true value, but at the hostility so suddenly developed by Sir Piers, and the long term of domestic misery she saw before her in the future.
But, as indignation swelled in her heart against Hew, she dried her tears and gathered a courage from her growing anger. Yet she drew her breath with difficulty, and pressed a hand upon her side as if a pang of pain was there.
Unaware of all this scene, Falconer, even in the face of his approaching departure, was chatting away gaily with Annabelle Erroll, and having the full assurance of Mary's love, seemed to tread on air, and feel emotions only of gratitude and joy. He was as sure that Mary was not a girl to love lightly as he was sure that she had given her whole heart to him, despite the fiat, the 'general order' of Sir Piers, that was to assign her as a bride to Hew Montgomerie.
When the little circle assembled for dinner, the last of which he was to partake in Eaglescraig, Cecil became suddenly and painfully sensible that some change had come over all present, save Miss Erroll.
Though all were scrupulously polite, their old cordiality seemed to have evaporated!
Hew was colder than ever; not that Cecil Falconer cared much for that, but he felt that the usually chatty and genial Sir Piers was cold in manner too, and haughty and monosyllabic, for a time; and Cecil recalled the cordial welcome of his first night in that hospitable mansion, when his old host insisted on escorting him to 'his quarters,' as he called his room, singing his old Indian song about 'half-batta' as they went. He felt the change keenly, and angrily too, all the more that he failed to understand it.
'What the deuce does the general suspect—what does he know?' thought Cecil, whose own suspicions certainly pointed towards Hew; but he and Mary were without the means of comparing notes together, or even of taking of each other the tender farewell they would have wished.
At table—with the memory of all that had passed in the library—she was nervous, silent and reserved, while she kept listening to the voice and looking furtively in the eyes that as secretly sought hers—the voice and eyes she had been bidden to forget as those of 'the forgotten dead.'
When the ladies withdrew, the general, who was the soul of hospitality, when pushing the decanters round—for he was vain of his clarets, Chateau Lafitte, Haut Brion, and Margaux—felt half inclined to relax and relent at times. Could Hew have been mistaken in that diabolical story about the cards? But if so, he was not mistaken on the subject of Falconer's admiration of his intended wife: and though such was utterly adverse to the wish of Sir Piers, he felt that he could forgive it, especially as, like Mrs. Garth, he felt that in the look and air, the expression of face, and bearing of Cecil Falconer, there were an undefinable something that brought painfully back to memory the face of another; and yet, between the two faces, that of his dead son—for his it was—and the face of Falconer, there was no especial likeness.
'Had poor Piers been living now, thought the general, 'he would have been nearly fifty years of age, which reminds me that I am getting too old to harbour thoughts of anger now.'
In the drawing-room, Cecil found the piano closed; there was evidently to be no music that evening, nor was he in the mood for it, except in so far that it might have served to cloak a few farewell words to Mary, whom he found occupied at chess with Mrs. Garth, and save that she trembled a little and changed colour at his entrance, she seemed unconscious of his presence, as the slow and silent game proceeded in its tedium: and leaving Sir Piers and Hew deep in some matter of local improvements to be made on a certain farm, he seated himself beside Miss Erroll, on an ottoman, a little way apart.
'And so you indeed go to-morrow?' she observed, for lack of something else to say apparently.
'Inexorably, Miss Erroll,' he replied, with a smile that was no smile at all; 'and after all the happiness I have enjoyed here I shall feel doubly lonely at Dumbarton, as it is most probable that the general may invite my brother officer here, to take my place.'
'Mr. Leslie Fotheringhame?' she said in a low voice, while her eyes drooped.
'Yes.'
'What leads you to think so?' she asked, with a little agitation of manner that Cecil could not fail to detect.
'He has once or twice said such was his intention.'
Such, indeed, had been the general's wish, but recent events had made him change his mind.
Miss Erroll was a singularly attractive and bright-looking girl—bright in her manner and blonde beauty. Her fair, golden hair rippled back from her broad, low, snowy forehead; and she had a tender, rosebud-like mouth, and very lovely eyes. In the full preoccupation of his thoughts with Mary, Cecil Falconer had not been quite conscious that on several occasions Miss Erroll had led him to talk of his solitary friend at Dumbarton, Leslie Fotheringhame, as if she had some interest in him; and also, that if he attempted to question her on the subject, she skilfully or nervously changed it, or evaded it.
'You know Fotheringhame, it would seem?' he asked.
'I do—or did, rather,' she replied, in a low voice.
This implied that there had been a coolness, a quarrel, or a dropping of acquaintance somehow.
'He was not always in the Cameronians,' said Falconer.
'I am aware of that.'
'Perhaps you knew him when in his former regiment?'
'When in his former regiment—yes,' she replied, repeating his words, as if afraid to trust herself to any of her own. 'How long will Mary puzzle over her king?—she is quite checkmated!' she said with a forced laugh, as she moved towards the chess-table, to conceal from Falconer an expression of genuine pain that shot over her soft, fair face.
He noticed now an unmistakable agitation of manner and sudden sadness of eye and tone in Annabelle Erroll; and though he almost immediately forgot this amid the anxiety of his own love affair, he remembered it all at a future time.
The brief evening that followed the late and fashionable dinner-hour passed rapidly—too rapidly for Cecil; yet heavily withal. The evening was so unlike its predecessors, for the once pleasant circle seemed entirely changed. How Falconer's heart would have swollen with just rage had he known the reason why!
And this was his last night at Eaglescraig; it seemed as if he was looking on everything there for the last time, Mary's pale face included, and the time came at last when he had to say to her:
'Good-night, and good-bye, Miss Montgomerie.
Yet Fate was not so cruel as to make them part thus, for through a skilful manœuvre executed by Miss Erroll—in compelling Hew to hold a folio book of Indian photographs while the general explained to her something therein—as Mary gave Cecil her hand, 'her soft, white virgin hand, that had never touched aught to soil or harden it,' he whispered hurriedly, and unheard by all save her:
'Good-bye. Oh, my darling, my own Mary! How am I to live without you, how make the time pass till we meet again—if ever?'
And eye conveyed to eye and heart, a world that was alike unsaid and unseen.
Courtesy compelled him to shake the damp, limp hand of Hew, and the shifty eyes of the latter looked radiant with malevolence and triumph.
Grey dawn was breaking, and save Mr. Tunley, the butler, and a sleepy valet, all the household were sunk in slumber, when Falconer, after an almost sleepless night, and feeling as if it must be some other person and not himself that was about to depart, got into the dog-cart with his portmanteaus and gun-case.
A cold, chilly morning, the last day of January. The crocus formed a golden band along the parterres of the terrace; a few snow-flakes came aslant the dull grey sky, and the robin redbreast, his little heart filled at least with hope, twittered and sung on the bare spray, where the first buds of spring would soon be bursting. All around the landscape looked dank and barren and dreary—unusually so it seemed to Cecil's eye.
Pate Pastern, a groom, drove the dog-cart. Hew had again flatly declined to do so, saying overnight to Sir Piers that he 'didn't care to drive a fellow like Falconer, a fellow so devilish sharp at cards, and all that sort of thing, you know;' and the general had said approvingly:
'Of course not, of course not, my dear boy.'
Cecil's mind was a prey to great bitterness in the conviction that he was leaving Eaglescraig, as it seemed, for ever, and with no definite plans, views, or hopes for the future. Was all this new love, this new joy, to pass out of his life and out of hers as suddenly as it had come to them?
It seemed so!
He had, he thought, done wrong in winning the heart of Mary Montgomerie without the permission of her proud old guardian and kinsman; but now he had little compunction for having done so, as that permission would never have been accorded to him, and he felt that his departure seemed a welcome move to all but her—a departure permitted to pass coldly, and without even a well-bred expression of regret.
A farewell glance at the stately modern villa, and the grim old keep that towered behind it, showed him their walls all reddened in the early morning sun; the window-blinds close drawn, all closed as yet, save one. His heart told him it was that of Mary's room. The sash remained, of course, unlifted, but the blue silk curtain was festooned back, and every pulse vibrated within him when he saw the wave of a white handkerchief, just as the dog-cart went bowling down the wooded avenue towards the highway.
It was Mary's farewell to him.
Would the strains of the sweet old story, that never tires, come to their ears again? How would it all end between him and Mary Montgomerie, or was it ended now?