Lunch ended, Roland was lingering rather gloomily over a glass of his father's old favourite Amontillado, which Simon Funnell had disinterred from the cobwebby bins of the cellar for his special delectation, when an exclamation made him start; a pair of soft arms were thrown around his neck, and a bright, fair face was pressed against his cheek.
'Maude!'
'Roland—Roland—you here! oh, such an unexpected joy!' exclaimed his sister, a merry and impulsive girl, who had just returned from riding, in bearing so smart, handsome, and perfect in her hat and habit, as she tossed aside her whip and gauntlets and embraced him again and again, so effusively and affectionately that he felt an emotion of welcome for the first time.
'I am here, Maude—but why did you not come to meet me?' said he.
'I knew not that you were to be here to-day,' she replied, with a sparkle in her eyes.
'Did your—did not Mrs. Lindsay tell you I was coming?'
'No,' replied Maude indignantly.
'Another act of coldness and unwelcome.'
'Oh, Roland—how I dread these people!'
'Who?'
'Mrs. Lindsay and her Mr. Sharpe! I have just had a spin over breezy Tentsmuirs, making the sheep and rabbits fly before me, as you and I and Hester Maule have often done before, Roland,' said Maude, changing abruptly from grave to gay.
Full of health and spirits, with a soft rose-leaf complexion that was heightened by recent exercise and present excitement, she was a girl whose beauty was of a delicate type. Her hair was of the sunniest brown, her eyes a soft and dreamy blue, yet wont to beam and sparkle at times; her figure was slight, extremely graceful, and she was now in her twentieth year.
'By Jove, Maude, you have grown quite a little beauty!' exclaimed Roland, while, holding each other at arm's length, brother and sister surveyed each other's face; 'but in expression you are not changed a bit.'
'Nor you, Roland—yet, how scorched—how brown you are!'
'That was done in Egypt—but much of it wore off at Merlwood.'
'How long you have been of coming here, Roland!' said Maude, with a pout on her ruby lip.
'Since returning to Britain, you mean?'
'Since returning to Scotland.'
'With all my love for you, my dear little sister, I was loth to face the—the mortifications that I feared awaited me at home.'
'A changed home, Roland!'
'If we can call it so.'
'But then at Merlwood,' said she archly, 'Hester—dear Hester, would be an attraction, of course.'
Roland actually coloured, and stooped to scrape a cigar light on his heel, and to change the subject said:
'I saw Jack Elliot of ours for a few minutes at his club in Edinburgh.'
'Dear Jack! and how is he looking?'
'Well and jolly as usual; unluckily his leave is shorter than mine, yet I hope to keep him here till the pheasants are ready.'
'Darling Roland—how good of you!' exclaimed his sister, kissing him again.
'You and he expect your little affair to come off when——'
'When the regiment returns home—I could not go out to Egypt, you know, Roland.'
'Worse than useless, when we may be moving towards the frontier again.'
'In her last letter to me Annot Drummond seemed full of Egypt, and Egypt only.'
'She has a lover out there, perhaps—or going,' said Roland, laughing.
'Not improbable. She is coming here; but, truth to tell, I do not like Annot Drummond much.'
'Why?'
'I cannot say.'
'Nay, Maude, that is unjust.'
'It is a case of Dr. Fell, I suppose.'
'Yet you have invited her for a month or two to Earlshaugh.'
'Yes.'
'Why, then?'
'As a return for her mother's kindness to me when in London—nothing more. There is no love lost between Annot and me.'
Roland became silent, as his sister evidently spoke unwillingly; and to change the subject, he said:
'And the stepmother, Maude; how do you and she get on?'
'As my letters have told you—oh, I hate her, as much as it is in my nature to hate anyone. When she comes near me I feel like a cat with its fur rubbed the wrong way. Can you not pension her away from Earlshaugh?'
'Not if all I hear is true,' replied Roland, giving his dark moustache an angry twist. 'But who is this fellow Sharpe, who seems to be her factotum—and where did she pick him up?'
'He is her brother.'
'Her brother!'
'Yes—so you must be wary——'
'Till I see MacWadsett?'
'If that will make any difference, which I fear not,' replied Maude, lowering her voice, and actually glancing round with apprehension, while her blue eyes lighted with indignation; 'he lives here—perhaps she told you so?'
'No—lives here—here in Earlshaugh?'
'Yes; he has rooms set apart for him in the Beatoun wing.'
'By her orders?'
'Yes. She has the whole estate, and you and me too, completely in her power. Papa, in his folly, left her, apparently, everything; but to come to us, I presume, in time; and now she is entirely influenced and guided by her brother. Literally, we seem to be at his mercy,' continued the girl, with a kind of a shudder, 'and you must play your cards well to prevent a catastrophe.'
'It is intolerable!' exclaimed Roland, in an accent of rage.
'It is beyond my comprehension.'
'I wish old MacWadsett were at home.'
'He will not be in town for some weeks yet.'
Some bitter words escaped Roland, who added:
'God, give me patience! A fracas in the house with so many guests coming is, of course, to be avoided.'
'I hope your return may make some change, Roland; it has been so dull here.'
'Why—how?'
'County people—the ladies at least—are shy of visiting, I feel that, and often long to join Hester at Merlwood. You may see that the calling cards in the basket are quite faded and old.'
'No visitors!'
'Very few, beyond the parish minister and his wife, or the doctor, when she has some petty illness. She was a reader, a worker, and a musician in mamma's time, I understand; but is a total idler now, and, save to church, rarely leaves the grounds.'
'Her dowry and the Dower House she was entitled to, but who could ever have dreamed that she, the meek-faced, humble, and most obsequious Deborah Sharpe would ever be the mistress of all this!' exclaimed Roland as he strode to a window and looked forth upon the view with a heart that thrilled with many mingled emotions, for he loved his ancestral home with a love that was a species of passion, especially after his term of foreign exile.
Its situation was so perfect, overhanging the fertile haugh that gave the place a name, and through which meandered a stream, that, though insignificant there, widened greatly before it reached the sea.
The house of Earlshaugh is large and picturesque. Built originally in the days when James III. was King of the realm, and when that ill-fated monarch granted a special license to the then Baron to erect a fortalice, 'surrounded with walls and ditches, defended by gates of brass or iron,' many additions had been made to it, and the grace of a venerable antiquity was now combined with the comfort and luxury of modern days.
The old rooms were small, panelled with pine rather than oak; and the old shot and arrow loopholes under the windows had long since been plugged up and plastered over. In the olden time gardens were too valuable to be left outside the walls of a Scottish fortalice at a feudal neighbour's mercy, and trees only afforded cover for an attacking foe; but now the slopes crowned by Earlshaugh sheltered a modern garden with all its rare flowers, and the clefts of the rock afforded nurture for numerous trees and shrubs.
Royalty had often taken its ease in Earlshaugh, and in its grounds there is still a venerable thorn-tree in which tradition says the hawks of the Fifth and Sixth Jameses were wont to roost; nor was the house unknown in history and war, for there is still a room that was occupied by Cardinal Beatoun, the stair to which had a peculiarity after his murder, that whoever went up its steps felt as if going down; and the western wall yet bears the marks of the cannon shot, when it was attacked by General D'Oisel, the Comte de Martigues, and other French chevaliers, in the wars of Mary of Guise, and when Kirkcaldy of Grange, by one stroke of his two-handed sword, slew at its gate the Comte de St. Pierre, Knight of St Michael.
In that old house every chamber had its story of some past occupant; for there the Lairds of Earlshaugh were born; there they brought home their brides, and there they had—unless they fell in battle—died and been borne forth by their own people to Leuchars Kirk, or to the Chapel of St. Bennet, of which no vestige now remains.
Looking over the fair and sunlit scene before him, Roland Lindsay was thinking of all these things, while Maude drooped her pretty head on his shoulder, and said:
'It is so terrible to suppose that we may have lost all this through the folly—the weakness of papa.'
'In the hands of an artful Jezebel! But who is that person riding straight across the lawn, heedless of path or avenue?'
'Sharpe—Mr. Hawkey Sharpe,' replied Maude, starting with something like a shudder again—an emotion which Roland fortunately did not perceive; for with reference to this obnoxious person there was a secret between him and her which Maude, with all her love and affection, dared not confide to her fiery brother, lest it should bring about the very catastrophe which she dreaded so much.