CHAPTER XXVII.
ANNOT'S MISGIVINGS.
Jack Elliot's mishap—accident though it could scarcely be called—thoroughly marred and shortened the partridge shooting at Earlshaugh, and the birds had quite a holiday of it.
'Never mind, Jack,' Roland had said on his departure for Edinburgh, 'you'll make amends when the pheasants are ready.'
Irritated by the event which had struck him down—exasperated by the whole affair, the secret motives for which had gradually become more apparent to him, Elliot tossed on his bed feverishly and wearily, at times scarcely conscious, in a sleepy trance, for he had lost much blood; but being a tough fellow, with a splendid constitution, he soon became convalescent, after the few grains of No. 5 that lodged had been picked out by the doctors.
Feverishly he called for cooling draughts, which were always at hand, prepared by old Mrs. Drugget, the buxom housekeeper, and even by grim, grave Mrs. Lindsay, whom the catastrophe had seriously startled and upset, as it showed the cruelty, cunning, and devilish villany of which her brother and protégé was capable.
Mrs. Drugget, influenced by Jack's love of Maude, whom she had known from infancy, scarcely left the patient for an instant, and ever sat motionless and watchful by his bedside, till he was safe, and in the way of a rapid recovery.
Many were the calls to know the progress of the invalid, whose 'accident' had made some noise and excited much speculation; carriages were always rolling up to the porte-cochère, the great iron bell of which was clanged incessantly, and on the same errand horsemen came cantering across the park; and one thing seemed certain, that, until the party then assembled at Earlshaugh left the place, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe would not show himself there in the field, nor under the roof of the house, it was confidently supposed.
Ere long Elliot was promoted from jellies and beef-tea to chicken and champagne, administered by the loving little white hands of Maude; and, with such a nurse, it seemed not a bad thing to lie convalescent to one like Jack, who had undergone enteric fever in the hospital at Ismailia, by the Lake of Tismah, and later still in the huts at Quarantine Island, by the burning shore of Suakim.
Maude grew bright and merry; she had got over the shock; but yet had in her heart all the terror and loathing it could feel for the hand that had dealt the injury—an injury which, but for the scandal it must have caused in the county generally, and in the 'East Neuk' in particular, might have been made a very serious matter for Mr. Hawkey Sharpe.
Actuated by some judicious remarks from the old Writer to the Signet of Thistle Court, Roland returned to Earlshaugh with the intention of endeavouring to 'tide over' the humiliation and difficulties of his position till he could turn his back upon that place for ever, without making any more unpleasantness, and, more than all, giving rise to any useless speculation or esclandre.
Mrs. Lindsay had somehow heard of his sudden, but certainly not unexpected, visit to Edinburgh, and divined its object, if indeed no casual rumour had reached her about it; and a smile of derision and triumph, that would greatly have pleased her obnoxious brother, stole over her pale and usually calm face when she thought of the utter futility of Roland's expedition; and something of this emotion in her eyes was the response to his somewhat crest-fallen aspect when she met him in the Red Drawing-room on his return.
But he was master of himself, if he was master of nothing more, and resolved to have a truce, if not a treaty of peace, with 'Deborah Sharpe,' as he and Maude always called her in her absence.
Strange to say, he found that, outwardly at least, her old animosity, jealousy, and spirit of defiance were much lessened, though he knew not the secret cause thereof; but she was a woman, and as he looked on the deathly pallor of her face, the ill-concealed agitation of her manner, and thought of the terrible secret disease under which she laboured, he felt something of pity for her, that was for the time both genuine and generous.
'You look pale,' said he gently as he took her hand and led her to a sofa, adjusting a cushion at her back; 'I hope you have not been exciting yourself about the state of my friend Elliot; Jack will be all right in a few days now.'
The soft grace of his manner and sweetness of his tone (common to him when addressing all women) impressed her greatly; her own brother, Hawkey Sharpe, never spoke thus, even when seeking his incessant monetary favours. If the latter watched her pallor or detected illness, his observation was rendered acute, not by fraternal tenderness, but by selfishness and ulterior views of his own; thus Roland's bearing vanquished, for a time at least, her innate dislike of him, for it is an idiosyncrasy in the hearts of many to dislike and fear those they have wronged or supplanted.
Thus Roland was superior to her.
'A more glorious victory cannot be gained over another than this,' says Tillotson; 'when the injury began on their part, the kindness should begin on ours.'
'I hope you have secured medical advice as to the state of your health?' said he after a little pause, and with a nameless courtesy in his attitude.
'Thank you so much for your kindness, Roland.' (She usually called him 'Captain Lindsay.') 'Just now you remind me so much of your father; and this is the anniversary of the day when he met with his terrible accident, and his horse threw him,' she added, looking not at him, but past him; yet the woman's usually hard disposition was suddenly moved by the touch of nature that 'makes the whole world kin.'
'Like my father, you think?' said Roland coldly.
'Yes—and for his sake it is perhaps not too late—too late——'
'For what?' he asked, as her lip quivered and she paused.
'Time will show,' she replied, as one of her spasms made her lip quiver again, and her breath came short and heavily.
'Is there anything Maude or I can do for you—speak, please?' said Roland, starting up.
'Nothing—but do give me your arm to the door of my own room, and ring for Mrs. Drugget.'
He gave her his escort tenderly and courteously; and thus ended a brief interview—the first pleasant one he had ever had with 'the usurper' of his patrimony, and which he was to recall at a future time.
Whether or not Annot Drummond was thinking over Hester's cloudy and alarming communications it is difficult to say; but she said to the latter after a most effusive meeting with her fiancé:
'What has come over Roland since his visit to Edinburgh? He looks shockingly ill—so changed—so triste—what does it all mean?'
'I told you he went there on business, and that seems to have always its worries—all the greater, perhaps, to those who detest or know nothing about it.'
'His moodiness quite belies the sobriquet of his name—"The Lindsays lightsome and gay;" but here he comes again. Roland,' she added, springing up and kissing his cheek, 'a thousand thanks, darling, for this lovely bracelet you have brought me. It was so kind—so like you to remember poor little me!'
'As if I could, even for a moment, forget,' was his half-maudlin response, while she drew up her sleeve a little way, coquetishly displaying a lovely arm of snowy whiteness, firmly and roundly moulded by perfect health and youth, with the bracelet clasped on her slender wrist; and while turning it round and round, so as to inspect it in every light and from every point of view, she was thinking that when—after the bestowal of so many other valuable gifts—he could bring her a jewel so expensive as this, surely Hester's hints about the will must have been nonsense, or the outcome of jealousy at her—Annot's—success with a handsome cousin, whom she knew that Hester was at least well disposed to regard with interest.
Yet, when she and Roland were together, to Annot's watchful eyes his manner did seem thoughtful and absent at times, and would have caused misgivings but that she thought, and flattered herself, that it was caused, perhaps, by his having to go prematurely to Egypt, like Malcolm Skene.
After Elliot had become convalescent, and Roland, with others, had resumed their guns, and betaken them again to the slaughter of the partridges, all went well apparently for a few weeks. There were gay riding parties in the afternoon to visit the ruined castles at Ceres and the muir where Archbishop Sharpe was slain; to the caves of Dura Den at Kemback; picnics to Creich and the hills of Logie; there were dances in the evening, and music, when Hester's rich contralto, Elliot's tenor, Maude's soft soprano, and Roland's bass, took principal parts.
'Young hearts, bright eyes, and rosy lips were there;
And fairy steps, and light and laughing voices
Ringing like welcome music through the air—
A sound at which the untroubled heart rejoices.'
Life seemed a happy idyl, and that of Annot—we must suppose that she had her special dreams of happiness too—was ever gay apparently; but Roland's soul was secretly steeped in misery!
Circumstanced as he knew himself to be, Annot's frequent praises of Earlshaugh and her delight with all therein galled and fretted him, and made him so strange in manner at times that the girl, to do her justice, was bewildered and grieved; and Hester, though she wished it not nor thought of it, was in some degree avenged.
'What can be the meaning of it?' was often Annot's secret thought.
Like Elliot and Maude, to her it seemed that perhaps they were too happy for commonplace speeches as they idled hand-in-hand about the grounds, wandering through vistas of thick and venerable hawthorn-hedges, away by the thatched hamlet, through the wooded haugh, where the 'auld brig-stane' still spanned the wimpling burn, while face turned to radiant face, and loving eye met eye.
In such moments what need had they, she thought, for words that might seem dull or clumsy? 'But, after all, words, though coarse or clumsy, are the coin in which human creatures must pay each other, and failing in which they are often bankrupts for life.'
Had Roland spoken then and said much that he left unsaid, perhaps much suffering might have been spared him at a future time—we says 'perhaps,' but not with certainty, as we have only our story to tell, without indulging in casuistry as to what might have occurred in the sequel.
The story of the will, Annot began to think, must have been a fallacy—a cruel and unpalatable one. By-and-by she refused to face the probability at all; but she could not help remarking that when their conversation insensibly turned upon the future, as that of lovers must do, upon their probable trip to London, his certain tour of service in Egypt, or on anything that lay beyond the sunny horizon of the present, Roland became strange in manner, abrupt and cloudy, and nervously sought to turn the subject into another channel.
Could he tell her yet, that he was a kind of outcast in the house of his forefathers; that he was a mere visitor at Earlshaugh, and that not a foot of the soil he trod was his own?
And so day by day and night after night went on. The riding lessons through which Annot hoped sometime to shine in 'The Lady's Mile,' were still continued, on the beautiful and graceful pad which old Johnnie Buckle had procured for her at Cupar fair—tasks requiring at Roland's hand much adjustment of flowing skirts and loose reins; of a dainty foot in a tiny stirrup of bright steel; the buttoning of pretty gauntlets; much pressure of lingering fingers, and joyous laughter in the sunny and grassy parks, where now the deers' antlers were still lying, though one tradition avers that stags bury their horns in the moss after casting them, and another that they chew and eat them—a practice which Gavin Fowler and the forester asserted they had often seen them attempt.
'And in all your stately old home there is not even one traditional ghost?' said Annot, looking back from the spacious lawn to where the lofty façade of the ancient fortalice towered up on its rock in the red autumnal sunshine.
'A ghost there is, or used to be in my grandmother's time, at the Weird Yett,' replied Roland; 'but in the house, thank Heaven, no—though there are bits about it eerie enough to scare the housemaids after dark without that dismal adjunct; yet blood enough and to spare has been shed in and about Earlshaugh often in the olden time; and more than one ancestor of mine has ridden forth to die on the battlefield or at Edinburgh Cross, for the Stuart kings. But let us drop this subject, Annot; a fellow cuts a poor figure swaggering about his ancestors and their belongings in these days, when even every Cockney cad airs his imaginary bit of heraldry on his notepaper.'
'But there were fairies surely in the Fairy Den?' persisted Annot.
'But never with golden hair like yours, Annot,' said Roland, laughing now. 'Tradition has it that an ancestor of mine, who was Master of the Horse to Anne of Denmark, made a friend of an old Elf who dwelt in the glen—a droll little fellow with a huge head, a great ruff, and a gray beard that reached to his knees—and when the then Laird of Earlshaugh, after being caught in a flirtation with the Queen in Falkland Wood, was about to be led to the scaffold for his pretended share in the Gowrie Conspiracy, the Elf came on a white palfrey and bore him away, through crowd and soldiers and all, from the Heading Hill of Stirling to his own woods of Earlshaugh, a story which Sir Walter Scott assigns to another family, I believe.'
So Annot strove with success in partially abandoning herself to the joy of the present, and to the full budding hope of the future.
She could not bring herself, 'little woman of the world,' as Hester knew her to be, to do or say anything that could have the aspect of a wish on her part to hurry on a marriage before Roland departed to Egypt; but, while trembling at all the contingencies thereby involved, had to content herself by prettily and coquettishly referring from time to time to the events of their future life together and combined; consoling herself with the knowledge that so far as Roland's honour went, and that of his family, 'an engagement known to all the world is much more difficult to break than one to which only three or four persons are privy;' whilst for herself, she adopted the tone of being, in her correspondence with London friends, vague and cloudy, as if the engagement might or might not be; or that her visit to Earlshaugh meant nothing at all, more than one anywhere else.
'Now that Jack is nearly quite well,' said Maude to her, 'we are to have all manner of festivities before the pheasant shooting is over, and we all bid adieu to dear old Earlshaugh, Roland says. There will be a ball, the Hunt Ball, a steeplechase is also talked of, and I know not what more.'
But ere these things came to pass there occurred a catastrophe which none at Earlshaugh could foresee, that of which, to his profound concern and bewilderment, Malcolm Skene read in the papers at Pietro Girolamo's roulette saloon, at Cairo.