WHEN Horace and Susan had left Tillington, the Colonel wrapt his great cloak round him, and went out to take a pondering, meditative walk, and think over all these concerns. This last conversation he felt had rather complicated his position, and changed a little the posture of affairs. It was now he who had to take the initiative—he who seemed to be sending Horace away, and deciding that it was his duty to follow a path of his own, and make his own career. This idea was the last which had occurred to him, when he met his nephew’s passionate complaints with his own good, sober, kind advice. Horace had, however, completely turned the tables upon him. He was no longer engaged to give merely a friendly assistance to the young man’s exertions, to help him by representing the case to his father, or by using such influence as he possessed to further his nephew’s wishes. Horace had skilfully managed to make it appear, even to Colonel Sutherland himself, that it was he who had suggested the necessity for leaving home—that it was he who must decide the manner of doing so, and that the whole responsibility of the matter would lie upon his shoulders. This was far from pleasant to the Colonel; he thought over the whole matter with a very troubled brow: why should he draw upon himself all the trouble and blame of such a proceeding?—undertake the painful task of an interview with Mr. Scarsdale—most likely fail to satisfy Horace himself, and possibly meet with severer reproach hereafter, when the young man came to know that secret which he made vain inquiries after now? The Colonel did not relish his position as he thought over it. It was not of his making. He had but replied, as his kindly nature could not help doing, by offers of assistance to the outcry of Horace’s impatience; and behold here was the result.
The very fact that something did exist which he knew, and which Horace did not know, embarrassed and straitened him further. But, at the same time, he had promised. Nothing but the agitation into which the young man had thrown him, by his sudden suggestion that the Colonel meant to accuse his father with breaking his mother’s heart, could have led Colonel Sutherland to make so rash an engagement. He had no reason to believe that this was the cause of Mrs. Scarsdale’s death. He knew she had been restrained, overruled, and chidden—but he knew also that to the end she loved, and made no complaint beside. For his own part, the circumstances of his sister’s death, which followed very quietly upon a singular misfortune to her husband, had filled Edward Sutherland with the deepest compassion and sympathy for his brother-in-law; and accordingly he was more shocked than he could explain by Horace’s sudden supposition, that it was Mr. Scarsdale’s unkindness which had killed his wife; and in the eager anxiety with which he entreated the youth to believe that this was not the case, he consented unawares to make himself the arbitrator of Horace’s fate—so far, at least, as that could be determined by its beginning. He had promised—that was indisputable; yet what right had he to take the first step in such a matter, or to urge upon a young man, in the very peculiar circumstances of Horace, the same personal labour which was necessary to his own sons? When the Colonel had come so far in his thoughts he paused with a sudden effort, and resolutely turned to the other side of the question.
“Ought I to stand by for fear of responsibility, or for the sake of my own pride, or for the risk of ingratitude, and see my sister’s son sink into ignorance and debasement, and end in being the autocrat of an ale-house?” he said to himself, and did all that was possible to change the current of his own thoughts. But it was not much easier to choose a profession for Horace, or to fix on what he ought to be. Colonel Sutherland had come to perceive that he did not understand his nephew, and that not a single feature of resemblance existed between them. He marched on upon the road with his steady soldier’s step, not perceiving how far he was going, nor how the night darkened—marching gradually into a more and more bewildering mist of thought. The village lay sheltered in a shallow valley, with low slopes ascending on every side towards a higher level of country, slopes much too gentle and gradual to have much affinity with the distant fells. Colonel Sutherland had nearly reached the top of one of these banks, when the toil of the ascent, which just there was steep, awakened him to a consciousness of where he was. He might have wandered for miles over the open country, but for the failure of wind and sensation of fatigue which seized him upon that brae. When he came to himself, wheeling about suddenly, he saw the lights of the village twinkling into the twilight a long way beneath him, and perceived, for the first time, how far he had come.
“The wind being on my back all the time,” he said, with a kind of involuntary apology to himself half-aloud, as he commenced his return.
The Colonel’s ears were sharper out of doors than in. He recognized that somewhere near, somebody had made a sudden start at the sound of his voice. There was no one to be seen—the Colonel beat the hedgerows with his stick, and called “Who’s there?” with soldierly promptitude. He had no idea of being attacked from behind, in case a highwayman lurked behind those bare thorns. After a little interval, during which Colonel Sutherland continued his examination minutely, a voice gruff but subdued, answered somewhat peevishly—
“Cornel, it’s me.”
And the gaunt figure of Kennedy came crushing through a gap of the hedge to the Colonel’s side.
“You!—why, what the deuce are you after here?” said the Colonel, his extreme amazement forcing that mysterious adjuration from his lips, he could not tell how.
“Weel, Cornel, watching the sport o’ them living craetures,” said Kennedy, with a little hesitation. “I seed the rabbits whisking in and out as I took my walk, and says I to myself—they’re as diverting as childer, I’ll take a look at them. And that’s how it was—I’m rael fond of dumb craetures, Cornel, and there’s sich a spirit in thae wild things.”
“Do you mean to tell me, you old humbug, that you could see rabbits, or any other moving thing, at this time of the night?” said the Colonel. “If I did not know you to be an Orangeman I would think you were a Jesuit, Kennedy, with a dispensation for telling lies. Man, do you ever speak the truth?”
“Oh, ay, Cornel—always when it’s to any person’s advantage,” said Kennedy; “and as for the Papishers, I hate the very name to my last drop of blood, as is nat’ral for a man of Derry born. I’m none ashamed of my lodge, nor my principles nouther. When I was a young lad, Cornel, the great Castlereagh, sir, he belounged to the same—and as for my eyes, a better sight, barring for the small print, does not beloung to a man of my years within twenty mile.”
“I’ve seen the day,” said Colonel Sutherland, softening unconsciously towards his old fellow-soldier, “when neither small print nor half-light would have bothered either you or me; but we’re getting old, Kennedy, and Providence has given us both rest, and comfort, and leisure to think before our end comes—a blessing that falls to but few.”
“Ay, Cornel, that’s just what I say,” echoed the ready sergeant; “not that I would even myself with my commanding officer, but a man that has seen the world is a great advantage to the young and onexperienced. Begging your pardon, Cornel, but I knowe your nephew, sir—I knowe Mr. Horry well.”
“And what do you know of him, pray?” cried the Colonel, turning sharp round upon his companion, who, startled by the sudden movement and sharpness of the tone, swerved aside a little, and in doing so made visible for a moment a mysterious something, hitherto concealed with great skill, which he swung from his further hand.
“Eh?—what was it you were saying, Cornel?” said Kennedy, with confusion, drawing back his hand. “What do I knowe of him?—a fine young lad, sir, and very affable when he’s in the humour, and a dale of judgment, and an oncommon reliance on himsel’. Many’s the time, Cornel, he’s said ‘No’ in my face, as bould as a lion, with no more knowledge of the matter, sir, nor a babe unborn. That’s what I cal’ courage, Cornel. Though he comes and goes in a rale friendly manner, there’s ne’er a man in the village will use a freedom with Mr. Horry; but it’s poor society for him, as I have seen many a day; and he said to me wance, says he, ‘Sergeant, you’re a wise man among a set of fools,’ he says—‘if it warn’t for you the blockheads would have it all their own way; and as for me,’ says the poor young gentleman, ‘I’ve no business here.’ I could see that, though I little thought he belounged to my honoured Cornel of the ould Hunderd, and a credit to his relations and al’ his friends.”
During this speech, Kennedy keeping wary eyes about him, was guarding the Colonel off with the utmost skill, and contriving that he should neither get sufficiently in advance or behind to have a chance of discovering again the burden he carried. However, the sergeant betrayed himself by a momentary impulse of vanity: he looked round in Colonel Sutherland’s face to read the success of his last compliment, and in that moment of incaution the Colonel slid a step in advance, and, thrusting his stick to Kennedy’s other side, caught by the feet a hare. The sergeant made the best of it, finding himself caught. He fixed his eyes on the Colonel’s face after the first start of discovery with a comical half-defiance, half-deprecation, which, however, the light was too dim to show.
“You old sinner!—you romancing old humbug!—what do you call that thing there, eh? That’s what takes you behind the hedge in the gloaming, with your wisdom and your experience! What do you call that thing there?”
“Call it, Cornel?—sure and it’s a bit of a leveret, sir,” said the sergeant, twisting it up by the legs with pretended carelessness. “I picked the poor baste up, that was laid, with its leg broke, upon the grass.”
“And so that’s how you take your walks and show your love for the dumb creatures, you old leasing-maker!” cried the Colonel. “Throw it down this moment, sir—carry it back to where you got it, or I’ll make an information against you the moment we get to Tillington—I will, by George!”
“Oh, ay, Cornel, at your pleasure,” cried the sergeant; “I’m not the man to withstand my commanding officer when he takes to swearing. I’ll put it down, lookye, sir, where we stand; or I’ll take it back beyant the hedge, and the first labouring chap as comes by, he’ll get the baste, and link it hoam in his clumsy hand, Cornel, and be spied upon and given up, and a snare proved to him, and clapped in jail. He’ll goo in innocent, Cornel, and he’ll come out wroth and ruined, and all because my own officer seed an ould sodger pick up a bit of meat that was useless to any mortal beyant a hedge, and informed on me. And it shall never be said that William Kennedy transgressed discipline. There it is, sir—I’m blythe to be quat of it; pitch it from ye furder than I can see.”
The Colonel poised the hare on his stick for a moment, shaking his head, then laughed aloud, and tossed it at Kennedy’s feet.
“There’s reason in what you say, you poaching old sinner; keep your spoil,” he said, “but march on, sergeant, and keep out of my sight till we can take different roads. I don’t keep company with stolen game. There, there, that’s enough. I’ve heard your best excuses already. Good night, my man; and I advise you, for the sake of the old Hundred, to have nothing to do after this either with hares or snares.”