When the shooting party, after being somewhat delayed by Skene's unexpected departure, was setting forth, Roland and Elliot, with no small indignation, and confounded by his profound assurance, saw Hawkey Sharpe join them, belted, accoutred, gaitered, and gun in hand, looking quite sobered and fresh, having doubtless just had from Mr. Funnell 'a hair of the dog that bit him' overnight.
'That fellow here, actually—after all!' said Roland through his clenched teeth, though Elliot had given him but a vague outline of Sharpe's rudeness, remembering Maude's earnest desire and evident anxiety.
While somewhat 'dashed' by the coolness of his reception by all—even to old Ponto the setter, who gave him a wide berth—Mr. Hawkey Sharpe was mean enough—or subtle enough—to hammer a kind of excuse for 'some mistake' he had made last night, attributing it to the wine he had taken—mixing champagne and claret-cup with brandies and soda—of all of which he had certainly imbibed freely, as his still yellow-balled and bloodshot eyes bore witness.
Elliot heard him with a fixed stare of calm disdain; while Roland, writhing in his soul, still temporized—despising himself heartily the while—for the sake of appearances, but determined now, before twenty-four hours were past, to get at the bottom of the mystery—to ascertain the real state of his affairs.
There was something in Jack Elliot's well-bred and steady stare, as he focussed him with his eye-glass, that expressed vague wonder, insouciance, and no small contempt; it enraged Hawkey Sharpe and made his whole heart seem to burn in his breast with hate and suppressed passion, while fixing his own eyeglass defiantly and attempting suavely to say:
'Good-morning, Captain Lindsay—good-morning, gentlemen, all.'
Roland could scarcely master his passion or the impulse to club his fowling-piece and knock the fellow down.
'Mr. Sharpe,' said he in a low voice that seemed all unlike his own, so low and husky was it, as he beckoned Hawkey aside, 'considering the rudeness of which I understand you were guilty last night, I wonder that you have the bad taste to address me at all, or thrust yourself upon our society.'
'Thrust—Captain Lindsay!' exclaimed Sharpe, in turn suppressing his rage.
'Yes—I repeat that considering there was something—I scarcely know what—amounting to a fracas between my friend Captain Elliot and you, I also wonder—nathless your relative and assumed position in this house—that you venture to join my party this morning.'
It was the first time that Roland had spoken so plainly to this obnoxious personage.
'I don't quite understand all your words imply,' replied the latter with an assumption of dignity and would-be hauteur that sat grotesquely upon him. 'I am in the house of my sister, Mrs. Lindsay of Earlshaugh, who has accorded me permission to shoot, and shoot I shall whether you like it or not!'
'For the last time, I trust,' muttered Roland under his moustache.
'That we shall see,' was the mocking remark of Hawkey, who overheard him.
Roland turned abruptly away, loth to excite comment or surprise among his friends by the strange bearing of one deemed by them his mere dependent.
So the shooting progressed, and for a time without let or impediment. Away through the King's Wood and the Fairy's Den went the sportsmen, over the harvest fields, so rich in beauty to the picture-loving eye, by the green and scented hawthorn hedgerows, where the golden spoil of the passing corn carts remained for the gleaner; among brambles and red fern—the crimson bracken that, according to the Scottish proverb, brings milk and butter in October; firing in line, as adjusted by old Gavin Fowler; and as their guns went off, bang, bang, bang, in the clear and ambient air, when the startled coveys went whirring up, the brown birds came tumbling down with outspread wings, before the double barrels.
If the autumn sunset in Scotland is lovely, not less so is the autumn sunrise, when seen from the slope of some green hill, like the spur of the Ochils that looks down on Logic, while through pastoral valley and wooded haugh the white silver mist is rolling. 'Then the tops of the trees seem at first to rise above a country that is flooded, while the kirk spire appears like some sea mark heaving out of the mist. Then comes a great wedge-like beam of gold, cutting deep down into the hollows, showing the stems of the trees and the roofs of the cottages, gilding barn and outhouse, making a golden road through a land of white mist that seems to rise on either side like the sea which Moses divided to pass through dryshod. The dew-drops on the sun-lighted summit the feet rest upon, are coloured like precious stones of every dye, and every blade of grass is beaded with the gorgeous gems.'
And never do the deer look more graceful and beautiful than when in autumn they leave their lair among the bracken, when the blue atmosphere is on a Scottish mountain side, and changing hues are on leafy grove and heath-clad slope.
As the sportsmen, now pretty far apart, after beating successfully up the slope of a stubble field on a hill-side, came upon some aged and irregular hedgerows, full of gaps and interspersed with stunted thorn-trees, and having on each side a wet grassy ditch, the warning voice of the old keeper was heard some paces in the rear:
'Tak' tent, gentlemen; tak' tent. Nae cross shots here. There is a different ground owre beyond.'
A covey of some twenty birds whirred up from a gap in the hedge, and both Elliot and Hawkey Sharpe seemed to fire at it. We say seemed, as the former fired straight to his front, the latter, who was on his right, obliquely to the left; and then there came a sharp cry of anguish and pain but seldom or never heard among a group of gay sportsmen.
'By the Lord, but he's done it at last,' cried old Fowler.
'I aye thocht he wad be the death on the field o' somebody,' cried Jamie Spens, the ex-poacher, who was acting as a beater.
'Sharpe's dune it at last,' cried Fowler again.
'What—who—what?' said a dozen voices.
'Murdered some ane—hang me if it isna Captain Elliot. Sharpe's a devilish gleed gunner, if ever there was ane.'
Hawkey Sharpe heard these excited exclamations as if in a dream, and as if heard by another and not himself.
He had unexpectedly seen Jack Elliot come, if not in his line of fire, unseen by others, within range of it; and though hitherto vaguely intent on mischief, a sudden, a devil-born impulse came like a flash of lightning over him.
He fired, and Jack Elliot dropped like a stone!
The moment he had done so the heart of Hawkey Sharpe seemed to stand still; enmity, rivalry, and affront were all forgotten—seemed never to have existed. There was a roaring or surging of the blood in his ears, while a sudden darkness seemed to fall upon the sunshiny landscape.
Was it accident or murder, he thought, and then felt keenly that
'Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.'