The sportsmen assembled next morning a little later than usual, and after hastily partaking of coffee, were about to set forth after the partridges, with dogs, keepers, and beaters, to a particular spot where Gavin Fowler assured them that the coveys were so thick as to cover the ground, when Malcolm Skene, whom all were beginning to miss, suddenly appeared, but minus gun, shot belt, and other shooting paraphernalia, yet with a brighter smile on his face that it had won overnight.
'What is up, Malcolm?' asked Roland; 'don't you go with us?'
'Impossible! I have just had a telegram from the Colonel. The corps is short of officers, from sickness, casualties, and so forth; so I must resign my leave and start at once.'
'For the depôt?'
'No—for Egypt,' continued Skene, 'so I must be off. Let me have a trap, Roland, that I may catch the up train for the South.'
'This is sudden!' exclaimed several.
'Sudden indeed—but no less welcome,'
'I am so sorry, old fellow!' exclaimed Roland, 'when the birds are in such excellent order, too.'
'I can scarcely realize it,' said Skene, whose thoughts were not with the birds certainly. 'In a fortnight, I shall be again in my fighting kit and in the land of the Pharaohs.'
Ignorant of what had so suddenly transpired, Hester, for whom he looked anxiously and wistfully, was lingering in her room, till the shooting party should have gone forth, unwilling to face Malcolm Skene after the interview of last night, and full of a determination to return at once to Merlwood, to her old life by the wooded Esk, with her silver-haired father, his bubbling hookah, and his Indian reminiscences—oh! how well she knew them all! But Maude, and even the selfish and apparently volatile Annot, regarded the handsome fellow with deep interest, and the lips of the former were white and quivering as she bade him adieu.
'Good-bye, all you fellows;' he exclaimed, when old Buckle came with the trap to the porte-cochère. 'Good-bye, Roland and you, Jack—when shall we three meet again? In thunder and all the rest of it, no doubt. Farewell, Miss Lindsay—Maude I may call you just now—bid Hes—, your cousin, adieu for me, and God keep you all till we meet once more—if ever!' he added, under his moustache.
Another moment he was gone, and no trace remained of him but the wheel-tracks in the avenue.
'Good-bye—good-bye;' it sounded like a dirge in the air of the warm autumn morning.
'Poor Malcolm—he is the king of good fellows,' said Roland to his friends who were gathered in the entrance-hall, just as Hester Maule, pale as a lily, after vainly practising a little the art of smiling and looking happy in her mirror, appeared at the foot of the staircase, and heard what had occurred.
'Yes—Skene has just gone, poor fellow. Should you not have liked to have bade him farewell?'
'Yes—of course,' said Hester, with colourless lips; but thought, 'it is better not—better not now.'
'His last message was to you,' whispered Maude.
'Well—it will be my turn next, and yours too, Elliot,' said Roland as he lit a cigarette.
'It but reminds me of Wolfe's song,' added Elliot cheerily, as he sang in a tragic-comic way—
'Let mirth and wine abound.
The trumpets sound,
And the colours flying are, my boys!
'Tis he, you, or I,
Whose business is to die;
Then why should we be melancholy, boys,
Whose business is to die?'
Come along—here are the dogs.'
'Skene's departure seems to have upset you girls,' said Roland, 'and now, Hester, my dear cousin,' he added in a blundering way, 'you look as pale as if Melancholy had marked you for her own.'
'Don't jest, Roland,' said Maude; 'Malcolm Skene looks like one who has a history behind him, and a strange destiny before him. Only think, Roland,' she added in a whisper, as she drew her brother aside; 'he proposed to Hester in the conservatory last night!'
'And—and she——'
'Refused him.'
'Why?'
Maude only shook her pretty head; but his heart told him too probably why, and for a time his conscience smote him.
'Don't you think she was foolish?' asked Maude; 'I certainly told her that I thought so, as Malcolm is such a lovable fellow.'
'And what did she say?'
'Replied, with a feeble laugh, that she meant to die an unappropriated blessing.'
'What is that, Maudie?'
'An old maid.'
'Nonsense—a handsome girl like Hester!'
To do the latter justice, she asked herself more than once why had she refused him, and for what?
Many may deem that Hester acted a foolish part: but her heart was too sore, and still too full of regard for another to find a place in it for the love of Malcolm Skene, though she knew it had been hers in the past, ready to lay at her feet.
Steadfast of purpose, she was, in some respects, a remarkable girl, Hester Maule. Roland, her companion in childhood, as we have elsewhere stated, was the one love of her life.
'All of hers upon that die was thrown,' and her heart was not to be caught on the rebound, through pique, pride, soreness, or disappointment.
But now that Malcolm was gone, Hester in solitude could not but give a few tears as she thought of his true regard for her; his stately presence, his soft earnestness, and his sad, tender eyes—thought over all that—but for Roland's image—might have been; and of the high compliment Skene's honest and gallant heart had paid her; but all—even could she have wished it otherwise—was over now, and he had gone to that fatal land of battle and disease, where so many found their graves then!
Did Roland jest when he asked if Melancholy had marked her for its own? If so, it was a species of wound, and she felt that 'it is only wounds inflicted by those we love whose sting lasts.'
Maude and Annot, with the old groom, Johnnie Buckle, as their Escudero, had gone for a 'spin' on their pads as far as Kilmany, to visit the Gaules-Den, a deep ravine through which a river runs; Mrs. Lindsay was in the seclusion of her own room, as usual at that time of the day, when she took some kind of drops for her heart, and Hester, left alone to silence and solitude, mentally followed Malcolm Skene in his journey southward. Her hands were folded idly in her lap; a kind of sad listlessness was all over her, and her soft dark eyes were dreamily fixed on vacancy, and seemed to see—if we may say so—visions, while, as on yesternight, the perfume of the lily of the valley, of the stephanotis, and other flowers was floating round her.
She thought she might have seen him once again had she gone downstairs at the usual time—but have seen him to what end or purpose, constituted as her mind was then? Better not.
In these days it seemed to Hester that there was not one of her actions which she did not repent of before it was half conceived or half acted upon.
The forenoon sun soared hot and high, and the drowsy flies and one huge humming bee, enclosed by the windows of her room, made their useless journeys up and down the panes, on which the climbing ivy pattered; the birds twittered among the leaves of the latter; an occasional dog barked in the stable-yard, and the voice of the peacock—never pleasant at any time—was heard on the terrace without; but soon other sounds—voices indicative of excitement and alarm—caused her to rise, throw open a window in the deep embayment of the ancient wall, and look out.
Advancing across the emerald sward of the lawn, but slowly and carefully, came a group—the sportsmen of the morning, with their guns sloped on the shoulder or carried under an arm, and the dogs cowering, as if overawed, about their footsteps.
What was the cause of this? What had happened?
Four men were bearing a fifth on a stretcher or hurdle of some kind—a man either terribly wounded or dead, he lay so still—so very still!
A half-stifled cry escaped Hester, as she rushed downstairs, for some dreadful catastrophe had evidently taken place!