CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE FIRST QUARREL.
In his anxiety to leave Earlshaugh, Roland writhed under his convalescence, thus retarding in no small degree his complete recovery, and keeping him chained to a sofa in his sitting-room, when otherwise he might have been abroad in the grounds, though the brown foliage and the falling leaves, with the piping of the autumn winds, were not calculated much to raise the spirits of the ailing.
The partridges had become wild; the pheasants were still in splendid order, and cub-hunting was beginning in those districts where it was in vogue; but no one in Earlshaugh House thought of any of these, yet cub-hunting, as an earnest of the coming season, had been one of Roland Lindsay's delights.
However, he had other more serious and bitter things to think of now; and for cub-hunting or fox-hunting, never again would he set out from Earlshaugh and feel the joyous enthusiasm roused by seeing the hounds 'feathering' down a furrowed field with all their heads in the air, or find himself crossing the fertile and breezy Howe of Fife, from meadow to meadow, and field to field, over burns, hedges, and five-foot drystone dykes, then standing erect in his stirrups and galloping as if for life after the streaming pack, as they swept over 'the Muirs of Fife' which merge in the rich and extensive plains of the famous East Neuk.
Hunt he might elsewhere in the future, but never again where he and his fathers before him had hunted for generations, though Mr. Hawkey Sharpe was then actually doing so, and with horses from 'his sister's' stables at Earlshaugh!
During this period of convalescence and enforced idleness Roland became conscious of a kind of change—subtle and undefinable—in Annot. She—in a spirit of maidenly reserve—was apparently in no hurry for the completion of arrangements about their marriage.
She left all these pro tem. in the hands of 'mamma' in South Belgravia; and the old lady's letters—changed in tone—were full of suggested delays, doubts, and difficulties in finally fixing a period to her daughter's engagement with Roland; the said letters, of course, bearing on the all-important matter of settlements, which—as circumstances now stood at Earlshaugh—he was utterly at a loss how to make without the advice, more than ever, of the family agent, old Mr. M'Wadsett of Thistle Court.
Meanwhile, full of themselves and their own affairs, and of their marriage, which was now fixed for an early day, and before Jack Elliot's return to Egypt, Maude and the latter were less observant than Hester of what transpired at Earlshaugh during Roland's convalescence.
Attended by old Buckle, Annot had gone to see the hounds throw off, and in following the field for some little way contrived to lose her venerable groom, whom no doubt she deemed a bore; and while he was searching for her hopelessly over a Fifeshire muir she came home to one of the park gates attended by a gentleman in hunting costume, with whom she seemed on pretty intimate terms—a circumstance which, when mentioned, she laughingly explained away.
But at a subsequent period she was seen by Maude and Hester riding in the park with one supposed to be the same stranger, but at a considerable distance.
The two girls could see that the pair were going slowly together—perhaps their cattle were tired, but, as Maude said, that was no reason why they should ride so near each other that his right hand could rest on her saddle-bow.
'Who is he? I don't like this,' said Maude.
But Hester remained silent and full of her own thoughts.
Other meetings between these two became whispered about, rather intangibly, however, and then rumour gave the gentleman the name of Hoyle.
'Hoyle?' thought Hester, and she remembered Annot's confidence about her Belgravian admirer, 'the Detrimental' Bob Hoyle.
Annot blushed deeply and painfully with a suffusion that dyed her snowy neck and face to the temples, and which was some time in passing away, when questioned on this matter by Maude, who she knew mistrusted her, and falteringly she asked:
'How did you learn his name?'
'It dropped from you incidentally when speaking to Elliot.'
'Did it?' said she, with a pallid lip.
'Yes, when hunting, at a house in the neighbourhood.'
'I—I know no one—I mean no harm—and Roland cannot ride to hounds just now,' urged Annot, a little piteously, and adopting her child-like manner.
'Then neither should you, Annot.'
'I will do so no more, Maude—and I give you my word,' she added emphatically, and with an air of perfect candour, 'that I shall never again see Mr. Hoyle!'
Then Maude kissed her, but, as she did so, it scarcely required so close an observer as Hester to detect the actual dislike—all sweet and lovely as her face was—that lurked under her cousin's affected cordiality.
But the latter's indignation returned when the pledge was broken.
Deeming all this most unfair to Roland, his sunny-haired sister consulted with Hester, but that young lady nervously declined to involve herself in the matter, though Roland nearly took the initiative one day (when Hester was arranging some fresh flowers in his room) with reference to Annot's now frequent absences and seeming neglect of him.
'Does the dear girl shrink from me, Hester,' said he, 'because I am pale and thin—wasted and feeble—after that cursed accident?'
'Surely not, Roland!'
'It seems very like it, by Jove!' he grumbled almost to himself.
In the dark violet eyes of Hester there shone at that moment, as she bent over the flower-vases, a strange light—the light that is born of mingled anger and love.
Maude thought it very strange that in all reports of the meets, hunting and county packs, etc., the name of Mr. Hoyle never appeared among others, nor were her suspicions allayed by the idea of Jack Elliot, that 'he was probably a duffer whose name was not worth mentioning.'
But gossip was busy, and Roland's loving and tender sister's complaints of Annot seemed to become the echo of his own secret and growing thoughts, which rose unpleasantly now on Annot's protracted absences from his society, and a new and undefinable something in her manner that, in short, he did not like.
The half-uttered hints of Maude—uttered painfully and reluctantly, trembling lest she should become a mischief-maker—stung him deeply, more deeply than he cared to admit.
'What has Annot done now?' he asked on one occasion, tossing on his sofa and flinging away a half-smoked cigar. 'It seems to me that if a woman is popular with our sex she becomes intensely the reverse with her own.'
'Roland,' urged Maude, 'you are unnecessarily severe, on me at least.'
'Well—perhaps the atmosphere of this place is corrupting her; I don't wonder if it is so; we live here in one of deceit,' said he bitterly. 'Poor little Maude,' he added more gently, 'home is no longer home to you now.'
'I shall soon have another,' said Maude, with brightness dancing in her eyes of forget-me-not blue.
'Bui I must have this matter out with Annot—ask her to come to me.'
And when Annot came, with all her strange and flower-like fairness of colour and willowy grace, how fragile, soft, and petite she looked, with her minute little face and wealth of golden hair, her bright inquiring eyes, their expression just then having something of alarm mingled with coyness in them!
How could he be angry with her? What was he to say—how to begin?
We say there was alarm in her expression, for she saw near Roland's hand his powerful field-glasses, with which he was in the habit of amusing himself in viewing the far stretch of country extending away to the distant hills. He could also view the park, which was much nearer.
She knew not whom he might have seen there, and the little colour she had died away.
'What is it, Roland?' she asked; 'you wish to speak with me.'
How terrible it is, says someone, to confront direct and apparently frank people! 'To state in precise terms the offences of all those who incur our displeasure would occasion a good deal of humming and hawing, and, it is to be feared, invention on the part of most of us in the course of twelve months. We have wrought ourselves up to the pitch of a very pretty quarrel, and it is dreadfully embarrassing to be called upon to state our grounds for it.'
So it was with Roland. He had worked himself up to a point which he failed just then to sustain, while in her manner there was a curious mixture of the caressing and the defiant; but when she tried some of her infantile and clinging ways, Roland became cold and hard in the expression of his mouth and eyes, though she hastened to adjust the sofa-cushion on which his head reclined.
'You wish to speak with me, Maude said,' remarked Annot, in a low voice, while looking down and somewhat nervously adjusting a flower in her girdle.
Roland did not reply at once. She eyed him furtively, and then laughed.
'I do not understand your mirth,' said he coldly.
'Nor I your gloom, Roland dear; but then you are far from well.'
He sighed, as if deprecating her manner.
'Am I to be scolded, like a naughty child?' she asked.
'You seem to feel that you deserve it.'
'But I won't be scolded—and for what?'
'Acting as you ought not to do.'
'How?'
'Riding to see the hounds throw off, without my knowledge, and escorted only by an old groom, whose place another has taken more than once.'
He paused, loth to say more. His proud soul revolted at the idea of being jealous—vulgarly, grotesquely jealous of anyone; yet he eyed her with pain and anger mingled.
'Oh, you refer to Bob Hoyle—poor Bob! Hester knows about him,' said Annot, after a little pause, in which she grew, if possible, paler, and certainly more confused.
'He is not a visitor here—and yet you have been seen with him in the park and lawn.'
'Yes. Can I be less than polite when he escorted me home from the meet—in the dusk, too?'
'And who the deuce is Bob Hoyle?'
'I have mentioned him to Hester,' replied Annot, still evasively.
'But who is he visiting in this locality?'
'I do not know.'
'Not know—how?'
'Simply because I never asked him.'
'Strange!'
'Not at all, Roland dear, when I think and care so little about him.'
She tried a tiny caress, but he turned from her, embittered and humiliated.
Disappointment, shame, sorrow, and mortification were all gathering in his heart, as doubts of Annot grew there too; and in his then weak and nervous state he actually trembled to pursue a subject so obnoxious. Was it to be the old story;
'Of one that loved, not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme.'
A little silence ensued, during which, as he looked upon her in all her fair beauty, so unstable of purpose, and so humble in heart is one who loves truly that he felt inclined to throw himself upon her affection for him, and only beseech her to be careful.
She was—he thought—young, artless, rash, and perhaps knew not how unseemly, especially in a censorious country place, were these mistakes of hers. But her manner repelled him. The half-grown sensation of softness died away, and irritation came instead. So he said bluntly:
'Annot, I tell you plainly that there must be no more of this sort of thing.'
Her usually sweet little lips curled defiantly, and she eyed him inquiringly now.
'Dare you try to make me believe that what you admit is all that has occurred?'
'I do not wish to try and make you believe anything,' she replied sullenly, yet in a broken tone.
'This is worse and worse,' said Roland in a husky voice.
'Are you jealous of him?' she asked, with a laugh that had no mirth in it. 'Surely not; he is but a boy.'
'I am, and shall be, jealous of no one, Annot!'
'He speaks to me; it is not my fault—and is always polite. Do not let us squabble, dearest Roland—I do so hate squabbling,' said she, selecting a white bud from among the flowers at her waist and pinning it in his hole; but Roland's blood was too much up to be propitiated by a white bud, so Annot had recourse to a few tears; but, so far from there being peace between them, matters waxed more unpleasant still.
'Why has this Mr.—ah—Hoyle—as you name him, never called here, nor left even a card?'
'I cannot tell.'
Yet he is an old London friend, and has come almost to the house door!'
'I cannot tell,' repeated Annot.
'Ycu have met him on the skirts of the park?'
'By the merest chance.'
'These chances would seem to have occurred too often,' interrupted Roland, greatly ruffled now, yet feeling sick at heart; 'so let us come to an end!'
'By—by parting?' she asked, with pale lips.
'It is easily done; I am going back to the regiment in a little time, and gossips will soon cease to link my name with yours, when you——'
'How cruel of you, Roland!' she said, and she looked at him entreatingly for a moment with her small hands clasped, and then turned away her face.
'It may be merely flirtation or folly that inspires you; but beware, Annot, how you treat me thus, and remember that lovers' quarrels are not always love renewed.'
He felt and feared that a gulf which might never be bridged over was widening suddenly between them. Had she asked him just then, with all his anger, to kiss her once and forgive her, he would have yielded too probably; but the little beauty, all unlike her usually pliant, soft, and clinging self, held haughtily aloof and said:
'Am I to give you back your ring, and relinquish all that it involves?'
'No, Annot, no, no,' exclaimed Roland, not yet prepared for such a climax.
With an angry sob in her slender throat she tried to twist it off, but in vain; and they regarded each other with a curiously mingled expression which they never forgot—he sorrowfully and indignantly; she saucily and defiantly.
'Have you anything more unpleasant to say to me, Roland?' she asked.
'Only that I begin to wish, Annot—oh, my God—that we had never, never met!'
'Indeed! Good-bye.'
'Good-bye.'
She swept away. What a change—was it witchcraft?—had come ever the once playful, childlike, and winning little Annot! Roland's heart was sick and crushed, and he began to have a growing and unpleasant suspicion that he had made, as he thought, 'a confounded fool of himself.'
'Thank Heaven, Hester! I shall soon have the sea rolling between me and this place,' said he, when, after a time, he told his cousin, the early playmate and sweetheart of other days, the story of this interview and his complaint against Annot. 'Regrets are useless; we cannot change the past; but I have neither the inclination nor the capacity to face all the circumstances that seem to surround me in Earlshaugh now.'
'Why has he addressed me in his distress, and on this subject?' thought Hester almost angrily; 'how can I sympathize with him in the matter? And he comes to me at a time, too, when I know we may be soon parted for ever, and when my thoughts are as full of him as they were in that old time that can return no more.'
Piqued at and disappointed with Annot, a curious and confusing emotion came more than once into the mind of Roland—one described by a Scottish writer as feeling 'that had he not, and had he been, and if he could he might—in line, he thought the medley which many a man thinks when he knows that he loves one, and only one; but under suasion and pressure would find it just possible to yield to other distractions.'
Annot did not afford him many opportunities of recurring to their first quarrel or effacing its memory; and from that hour she kept indignantly and sullenly aloof, as much as she could in courtesy do, from Maude and Hester—to their surprise—spending most of her time in the apartments and society of Mrs. Lindsay.
But once again, in the long shady avenue near the Weird Yett, when Maude was idling there, under the cold blue sky of an October evening, with Jack Elliot—idling in the happiness a girl feels when on the brink of her marriage with the man she loves with all the strength of her warm heart—the man whose voice and the mere touch of whose hand gives joy—she felt that heart turn cold when she detected Annot—her brother's fiancée—bidding a hasty adieu to the stranger before referred to—clad in a red hunting coat, and leading his horse by the bridle.
So a crisis of some kind was surely at hand now!