CHAPTER XXIV.
JACK ELLIOT'S PERIL.
We have anticipated some of the occurrences referred to in the last chapter, but shall relate them in their place.
Gathering in an excited group at the scene of the catastrophe, the sportsmen, keepers, and beaters found Elliot reclining against, or clinging to the stem of a tree in the old hedge, looking very pale, with his chest all bloody—at least his shirt dyed crimson, and divested of his coat and vest, which he had thrown off.
Spared by what he had done, the moment Hawkey Sharpe had seen his victim fall—the moment his finger had pulled the trigger—the savage and secret exultation that had filled his heart passed away.
He felt as if on the verge of a giddy precipice, over which he dared not look; yet he was compelled to confront the scene, and to proceed—but apparently with lead-laden feet—with the others, to where his victim was now supported in the arms of Gavin Fowler and Spens, the beater.
For a minute the intended assassin scarcely seemed to breathe, and to have but one wish—that the deed were undone, for the hot blood that prompted it was cool enough now, and the instincts of revenge had grown dull. Terror seized his soul, and his gaze wandered in the air, on the while flying clouds, on the yellow stubble fields and waving woods; but he nerved himself to approach the startled and infuriated group, whose menacing eyes were on him; and he nerved himself also to act a part, or, if not, lose his senses, and with them, everything.
He felt that beyond cheating, cardsharping, jockeying at horse races, and peculation at Earlshaugh, he had taken a mighty stride in crime, and that mingling curiously with his craven fear, there was an insane recklessness—a wild incoherence about his brain and heart, with a sickening knowledge that if Captain Elliot died, he—Hawkey Sharpe—would be that which he dared not name to himself, even in thought.
Hence his apparent sorrow and compunction seemed, and perhaps were, genuine pro tem., but the outcome of selfishness.
'How in Heaven's name came this to pass—how did it happen?' demanded Roland, his eyes blazing as he fixed them on Sharpe.
'It was an accident—an entire accident,' faltered the latter. 'The leaves of a turnip twisted round my right ankle, causing me to stumble and my rifle to explode.'
'A likely thing,' growled Jamie Spens, the beater, with a scowl in his eyes. 'Ye were oot o' the belt o' neeps at the time; but I've aye thocht ye wad pot some puir devil, as ye have done the Captain.'
'Silence, you poaching——,' began Sharpe in a furious voice; but Roland interrupted him.
'Stand back, sir. This is no time for words. "Accident," you say. To me it seems a piece of cowardly revenge—a case for the police and the Procurator-Fiscal.'
At these words Hawkey Sharpe grew, if possible, paler still, as they were the echoes of his own fears, and drew sullenly back.
'My poor, dear fellow—Elliot—Jack,' exclaimed Roland, kneeling down by his friend's side, 'are you much hurt—tell me?'
'I cannot say,' replied Elliot faintly. 'I feel as if my breast was scorched with fire—the charge, or some of it, seems thereabout.' Then, after a pause, he added in a husky voice: 'This horrible accident is most inopportune, when my leave is running out, and I am so soon due at headquarters.'
'Don't bother about that, dear Jack, I'll make all that right—meantime your hurt must be instantly seen to. Jamie Spens, run, as if for your life, my man, to the stables; get a good horse from Buckle, and ride to Cupar on the spur for the doctors—send a couple, at least.'
'Let me—let me go!' urged Hawkey Sharpe, in a breathless voice.
'You—be hanged!' cried old Fowler, who, like all the people on and about the estate, hated the tyrannical steward.
So the ex-poacher was away on his errand—speeding across the fields like a hare.
'Now, my lads,' cried Roland, after having, with soldier-like promptitude, secured a handkerchief folded as a pad, by another torn into bandages, across the wound; 'quick with that iron hurdle,' pointing to one in a gap of the hedge; 'hand it here to form a litter.'
Roland, like Elliot, had faced danger and death too often to be made a woman by it now, and his eyes seemed stern and fearless as he gave one long, steady, and withering glance at the cowering and white-faced Hawkey Sharpe; then he took off his coat, an example others were not slow in following, to make as soft a couch as possible of the iron hurdle, which four stout fellows lifted, as soon as the sufferer was laid thereon, and the sorrowful procession, which Hester from the window had seen approaching, set out for Earlshaugh.
'Fules shouldna hae chappin' sticks! I kent how it wad be wi' some o' us,' muttered old Gavin Fowler, as he sharply drew his cartridges, and unaware of Hawkey Sharpe's secret motives for action, added, 'Maister Roland, he has nearly made cauld meat o' me mair than ance; but ne'er again—ne'er again will I beat the coveys wi' him. It is as muckle as your life's worth!'
Slowly the shooting party wended their way, by field and hedgerow, towards the mansion-house; and, with his heart full of bitter and vengeful, if vague, thoughts, Roland strode by that blood-stained litter, thinking of the time when he had seen Jack Elliot similarly borne from the field of Tel-el-Kebir.
Seeing the deep commiseration of Roland, Elliot attempted to smile, and said:
'You know, perhaps, the old Spanish proverb—that a soldier had better smell of polvora rancho de Santa Barbara, than of musk or lavender.'
'But not in this fashion, Jack, at the hands of a blundering cad—if a blunder it was!'
The bearers had some distance to traverse, as the park stretched for a couple of miles around them, wooded and undulating, crossed by a broad silvery burn or stream, that flowed through the haugh, and past the Weird Yett to the hamlet of Earlshaugh.
Their arrival at the house elicited a shout of dismay from Tom Trotter, whose nerves were not of the strongest order, and consternation spread from the drawing-room to the servants' hall and from thence to the stable court, with many exaggerated reports of the very awkward part the obnoxious Mr. Hawkey Sharpe—for obnoxious he was to all—had played in the catastrophe; while the anguish of Maude, her suspicion and her loathing of the latter, may be imagined, as Elliot was borne past her to his rooms.
On hearing of an accident, neither Annot nor Hester had thought of Captain Elliot. The first dread of the former—a selfish one, we fear, and of the latter, a purer one, certainly—was for Roland Lindsay, who, accustomed to bloodshed, wounds, and suffering, was to all appearance singularly cool and collected.
'Don't be alarmed, Maudie, darling,' said he, endeavouring to look cheerful, as he drew his terrified sister almost forcibly aside; 'Jack will be all right in a few days.'
'But what—oh, what has happened?'
'He has been hit—shot—wounded, I mean—that is all, by Hawkey Sharpe, or some other duffer.'
'Oh, Roland, why did you have that horrid fellow to shoot with you? But need I ask why—we can help nothing now! But Jack—my darling—my darling!' she added with a torrent of tears; 'I had a presentiment—I knew something would happen, and it has happened! Oh heavens, Roland, our position here seems overstrained and unnatural. Would that we were out of Earlshaugh and his power!'
'Maude? Our father's house!'
'Our father's house no more.'
'That is as may be,' replied Roland, through his set teeth.
Meanwhile the author of all this dismay ascended the turret-stairs to his 'sanctum' and betook him without delay, with tremulous hands and chattering teeth, to a stiff and tall rummer of brandy and soda to steady his nerves, gather Dutch courage, and prepare to face the worst, while muttering as if to excuse himself.
'An insult of the sort he gave me can never be forgotten!' and he rubbed his right ear, which seemed yet to be conscious of Jack's finger and thumb when used by the latter as a fulcrum to twist him round; while, to do her justice, his sister Deborah grew paler than ever, and seemed on the point of sinking when she heard of what had occurred.
'It was all an accident—a horrible accident, Deb,' said he, an assertion to which he stuck vigorously; 'my ankle got twisted in a turnip shaw, don't you see—anyhow, don't get up your agitation-of-the-heart business just now, for my nerves may not stand it.'
She eyed him coldly—almost sternly, and not as she was wont to do; she read his real fear, and knew the full value of his sham contrition, and that it was born of alarm for himself; but his courage rose, and his secret wrath and hate returned apace, when the doctors, after a consultation and much pulling of nether lips, with also much mysterious and technical jargon, declared that the wound was not a serious one, though some of the charge (No. 5), which had crossed Jack's chest transversely, went perilously near the heart; and that unless suppuration took place, his constitution was so fine 'he would soon pull through.'
The doubt that he might not, or that a relapse might ensue, proved too much just then for the nerves of Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, who resolved on taking his departure for a time.
'And you go—for where, Hawkey?' asked his sister, not surprised that he should suddenly remember an engagement.
'To the western meeting—they make such a fuss over this accident, and you know I hate fuss. Besides, I have a pot of money on the Welter Cup, and if I lose——'
'Well?'
'Well—why, the timber of that old King's Wood may come to the hammer—that's all, Deb,' said he, as confidently as if it were his own.
'Now, girls, don't be foolish,' said Roland, in reply to the entreaties of Maude and Hester—the former especially—to be permitted to visit Jack, who was now abed, and in the hands of an accredited nurse.
'Why—may not I see him?' pled Maude.
'Not yet, certainly,' replied Roland, caressing her sunny brown hair, and patting her cheek, from which the faint rose tint was fled.
'I must see him, Roland, that I may know he is not—not—dead.
'Dead, you dear little goose! Such fellows as Jack Elliot take a long time in dying. You should have seen him as I did (though it is well, however, you did not), when doubled up by a grape-shot at Tel-el-Kebir. He'll be all right in a day or two, and meanwhile—
'What, Roland?' asked the trembling girl.
'I go to Edinburgh, to get at the real state of our affairs, what or however they may be; I feel inclined to shoot that fellow Sharpe like a dog if he crosses my path again at Earlshaugh!'
'Roland, Roland, you surely know all?' said his sister with intense sadness.
'No, I do not know all,' said he, drawing her head on his breast and caressing her; and feeling keenly that their father's roof was degraded by the presence of this fellow, after attempting such a crime—for a crime Roland felt and knew it to be; albeit that the perpetrator was the brother of their father's widow, and should, but for cogent reasons, be handed over to the mercies of the Procurator-Fiscal for the county.
By the very outrage he had committed, Sharpe had excited all the tenderness and commiseration for Elliot of which Maude's nature was capable, and for himself all the loathing and detestation which her usually gentle heart could feel. Thus he had lost much and won nothing; and notwithstanding his sister's position, influence, and interest at Earlshaugh, he felt himself very much de trop; and, unable to face the heavy fire of obloquy and blame that met him on every hand, he feigned the excuse—if such were wanting—of having to attend the Ayr races, which came off about that time, and departed ostensibly for the great western meeting on that famous course which lies southward of the ancient town of Ayr. His farewell words to his sister were:
'I'll be even with Roland Lindsay yet—yes, more than even, as you shall see, Deb!'
Whether he really went there was apocryphal, as he was seen ere long hovering about the vicinity of Earlshaugh, if not in the house itself.
And Hawkey Sharpe never did anything without a prime or ulterior object in view.
The event we have narrated marred the partridge shooting at Earlshaugh for a time; and as lately quite a crop of dances and drums, garden and music parties had sprung up in the vicinity, and attendance at these was marred too, Annot Drummond felt more exasperation than commiseration at the cause thereof.