In the pursuit of personal information, which should have been in his possession before, that somewhat too easy-going young soldier, Roland Lindsay, in the course of a day or two, found himself in the 'Gray Metropolis of the North,' or rather in that portion thereof which has sprung up within the last hundred and forty years or so.
The office of Mr. M'Wadsett, W.S., was amid a number of such 'wasps' nests,' in a small and rather gloomy and depressing arena known as Thistle Court, under the shadow of St. Andrew's great, sombre, and circular-shaped church.
The situation was a good one for a prosperous town lawyer's office, and Mr. M'Wadsett was a prosperous—and, as usual with many of them, effusively pious—lawyer, and all about him, whether by chance or design, was arranged to give clients—victims many deemed themselves—an impression that his practice was wide, select, and respectable—intensely respectable—while Mr. M'Wadsett never omitted church services at least twice daily, for the kirk was his fetish—the test of a decorous life, like his black suit and white necktie.
He was busily engaged just then, so Roland sent in his card and had to wait, which he felt as a kind of hint that he was not so important a client now as he might have been. The room he was ushered into was a dull one, overlooking the gloomy court; and slowly the time seemed to pass, for Roland was in an agony of impatience now to know the worst—the profound folly of his father, for whom his feelings just then were, to say the least of them, of a somewhat mingled cast.
Mr. M'Wadsett's office consisted of several rooms—the interior and upper floors of an old-fashioned house. In one of these, partly furnished like a parlour, the walls hung with fly-blown maps and prospectuses—a waiting-room—Roland was left to fume and 'cool his heels'; while in one somewhere adjacent he heard a curious clashing of fire-irons, and a voice giving the—to him—somewhat familiar words of command, but in a suppressed tone:
'Guard—point—two! Low guard—point—two!' etc., for it was evident that some of the clerks who were rifle volunteers were having a little bayonet exercise, till a bell rang, when they all vaulted upon their stools and began to write intensely, for then the voice of old Mr. M'Wadsett was heard, and Roland was ushered into his presence.
His room was snug and cosy, albeit its principal furniture consisted of green charter boxes on iron frames, all of which held secrets relating to the families whose well-known names were displayed upon them. How much, indeed, did he not know about all the leading proprietors of Fife and Kinross?
He received his visitor warmly and pleasantly enough, spoke of the war in Egypt, his health, the weather, of course, and then when a pause ensued, Roland stated the object for which he had come.
The lawyer, a fussy little man, with a sharp, keen manner, and sharp, keen gray eyes, raised his silver-rimmed glasses above his bushy white eyebrows, and said:
'My dear sir, I sent a copy of your respected father's will to Egypt.'
'Addressed to me?'
'Yes.'
'I never got it.'
'Why?'
'We were holding the lines in front of Ramleh at that time; the Arabs made free with the mail-bags, and lit their pipes with the contents, no doubt, in the desert beyond Ghizeh.'
'My dear sir, how lawless of them!'
'I have thought about this will at times, till I have become stupid—woolly in fact, and hated the name of it.'
'Your good father—
'Ah,' interrupted Roland, a little testily, 'I fear we only looked upon him latterly as the family banker, and he was useful in that way—very.'
'To your brother in the Guards perhaps too much so,' said the lawyer gravely.
'Well—about the cursed document itself?' began Roland a little impetuously.
'Strong language, my dear sir—strong language! The terms of your respected father's will are, I must say, a little peculiar, and were framed much against my advice; though his old family agent, I scarcely felt justified in drawing out the document.'
'I have heard that its conditions are outrageous.'
'They are—my dear sir—they are.'
'Such as no respectable lawyer should have drawn up,' said Roland sternly.
'Captain Lindsay, there you are wrong—severe—but I excuse you,' replied Mr. M'Wadsett, perking up his bald, shining head, as he drew the document in question from a charter box, after some trouble in finding the key thereof, and which Roland eyed—without touching it—with a very gloomy and louring expression.
'Dear me—dear me,' muttered M'Wadsett, as, seating himself in a well-stuffed circular chair, and adjusting his spectacles, he glanced over the document. 'He wrote: "I have delayed making my will so long as I have thought it safe to do so, but I am an old man now, and the gross and wilful extravagance of——" Shall I read it all, Captain Lindsay? The first few clauses are unimportant enough: £1,000 to Sir Harry Maule; some jewellery to his daughter Hester—bequests to the servants—Funnell the butler, Buckle the head groom, and then with the provisions appointed for your sister and yourself——'
'Comes the "crusher," I suppose,' interrupted Roland, crashing his right heel on the floor.
'Precisely so, my dear sir; I don't wonder that you feel it; but listen and I shall read it all.'
'Please don't,' cried Roland; 'lawyers make everything so lengthy, so elaborate, so full of circumlocution and irritating repetition. Cut it short—the gist of it.'
'Is—that all the estates, real and personal, are devised and bequeathed by the testator to his wife, Deborah Sharpe or Lindsay.'
'For life?
'No—to do with as she pleases in all time coming; the whole power of willing everything away is left in her hands, as you may read for yourself here.'
There was a silence of a minute.
'I thought such episodes—such outrages—never happened but in novels?' said Roland.
The lawyer smiled faintly and shook his head, and refolding the document, said:
'It is, of course, duly recorded.'
'And Earlshaugh will go to her heirs?'
'To Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, unless she devises otherwise.'
'A bitter satire!'
'A codicil was framed, or nearly so, revoking much that had gone before; but was never signed. By that omission——'
'I have lost all,' said Roland, starting to his feet; 'so the fortunes of the Lindsays of Earlshaugh are at their lowest ebb.'
'Unless you can find an heiress,' said the lawyer, with another of his weak smiles.
Annot was no heiress, Roland remembered.
'As for my father's folly,' he was beginning bitterly, when M'Wadsett touched his arm:
'Let us not speak ill of the dead,' said he; 'the late Laird may have been deceived, misled—let us not wrong him.'
'But he has wronged the living, who have to feel—to endure and to suffer!'
'The folly of your brother, the Guardsman—rather than your own—brought all this about, Captain Lindsay,' said the lawyer, rising too, as if the unprofitable interview had come to an end; and, a few minutes after, Roland found himself outside in the bustle and sunshine of George Street, that broad, stately, and magnificent thoroughfare, along which he wandered like one in a bad dream, and full of vague, angry, and bitter thoughts.
A deep sense of unmerited humiliation galled his naturally proud spirit, now that the truth of his real position had been laid before him without doubt.
The 'fool's paradise' in which he had been partly living had vanished; and he thought how much better it had been had he left his bones at Tel-el-Kebir, at Kashgate, or anywhere else in Egypt, as so many of his comrades had done.
What was he to do now?
His profession at least was left him. Would he return to his regiment at once, and go to Earlshaugh no more? It was impossible just yet to turn his back on what was once his home. There was Annot, his fiancée; there was Maude, his sister; there were Jack Elliot and other guests; before them a part must be acted as yet—and then—what then—what next?
A bitter malediction rose to his lips, but he stifled it.
Once matters were somehow smoothed over, back to the regiment he should, of course, go, and turning his back on Scotland for ever, try to forget the past and everything!
With incessant iteration the thought—the question—was ever before him how to explain to Jack Elliot and Annot Drummond that he—Roland Lindsay, deemed the heir, the Lord of Earlshaugh and all its acres of wood and wold, field and pasture, was little better than an outcast—admitted there on the sufferances of the sister of that most pitiful wretch, Hawkey Sharpe!
Viewed in every way the situation was maddening—intolerable. With regard to Annot, he could but trust to her love now. Should he ask Maude or Hester to break the matter to her gently? No—that task must be his own.
Most of the hopes of himself and his sister seemed to be based on the goodwill that might be borne them by Deborah Sharpe (how he loathed to think of her as Mrs. Lindsay), and she, too, evidently, was inimical to them both, and under the complete influence of her brother, Hawkey Sharpe.
Amid the turmoil of his thoughts he did not forget to procure as a souvenir of this wretched visit to Edinburgh a valuable bracelet for Annot Drummond, and then took his way—homeward he could not deem it—to Earlshaugh.
He had but one crumb of consolation, that at the last hour his father seemed to have repented the evil he had done him—at the last hour—but too late!
'Not always in life is it possible to unravel the mesh which our fingers have woven,' says a writer. 'Sometimes it is permitted to recall the lost opportunities of a few mistaken hours; sometimes, when all too late, we would willingly buy back with every drop of our heart's blood the moments we have so wilfully abused, and the chances we have so foolishly neglected. But it is too late!'
So it was too late when Roland's father thought to amend his fatal will.