Though, by her own admission, not entirely ignorant of Annot's secret springs of action, that social buccaneer, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, was exultantly defiant about his victory over, and revenge on, Roland Lindsay, for such he deemed the new position to be; and in his pale gray eyes, as he thought over it, there gleamed a savage light, such as it is said 'men carry when the thirst for blood possesses them.'
Roland, whom latterly Mrs. Lindsay had learned to like better than was her wont, was now gone, and would nevermore, she was assured, repass the door of Earlshaugh, and she actually felt as much regret for him as it was in her hard, cold nature to feel. He had been kind, her heart said to herself, and his soft, gentle, and polished manners contrasted most favourably with those of the few men she met now, and especially with those of her brother Hawkey.
'The self-contained bearing, the habitual repose of one who mixes in good society, invariably displays,' it is said, 'a striking dissimilarity to those who, immersed in the business of life, have not such opportunities. Women note these things keenly; especially do they regard the carriage of those whom they believe to move in circles above their own.'
With regard to Annot, as one connected by marriage with the Lindsay family, she was not sorry at the turn affairs had taken with regard to that enterprising young lady and her brother, Hawkey Sharpe. Socially, Annot was far beyond, or above, the bride he could ever have hoped to win, and she might be the means of raising him, steadying and curing him of his horsy, low, and gambling propensities, which had made him prove a great anxiety in many ways, with all his usefulness to herself, since, on her husband's death, she became mistress of Earlshaugh.
'Thanks, Deb, old girl,' said he, as he pocketed a cheque of hers for fifty pounds, and thought gloomily over the two thousand that would in time become inexorably due and must be paid, or see him stigmatized as a welsher!
'Little does the outer world know of all I have to put up with from you, Hawkey,' said she, with a sigh, as she locked away her cheque-book, and he surveyed her with a cool and discriminating stare through his eyeglass—the use of which be affected in imitation of others—screwed into his right eye.
'It is too bad of you to talk to me in that way, Deb,' said he, 'when I have cut out and relieved you of the presence of that impudent beggar, Lindsay. Miss Drummond, as an only daughter, must, I suppose, be the heiress to something or other.'
'I thought she would never look with favour on you—but treat you as Maude did,' said Mrs. Lindsay, slowly fanning herself with a large black lace fan.
Hawkey laughed maliciously; then he suddenly set his teeth together and exclaimed:
'Maude! I'll pay her out yet—she and I have not squared our accounts—I shall be even with her before long. As for little Annot not looking at me—by Jove, she has looked and said all I could have wished. She is not so "stand-off" and unapproachable as you may think all her set to be, when a fellow knows the way to go about it—as I rather flatter myself I do,' he added, caressing his straw-coloured and tenderly-fostered moustache, and pulling up his shirt-collar.
'But where have you and she met, since you ceased to occupy your rooms here?'
'Oh—with the hounds—in the park—wherever I wished, in fact. You and she, Deb, will get on excellently together, if we all play our cards well now—I marry one of the family, don't you see? Then, I haven't a doubt that Annot has money.'
'Did she give you reason to suppose she has?'
'N—no—not exactly—well?'
'She will succeed to whatever her mother may have—little, probably.'
'Will have, or may have—shady that! Well, unlike most heiresses, she's a deuced pretty little girl, Deb, and suits my book exactly. So, with your assistance, we shall be all right.'
'My assistance?'
'Of course.'
'Bright, soft, and girlish as she seems, I suspect there is not a more artful damsel in London,' said Mrs. Lindsay shrewdly.
'Oh bosh, Deb! Well, if it be so, two can do the artful game; but does not your own knowledge of human nature lead you to see,' he added sententiously, 'that art and prudence too give place when love comes on the scene?'
'Love—yes—are you quoting a play? Will this fancy of hers last—if fancy it is?'
'Why not?'
'You are not a gentleman in her sense of the word.'
'You are deuced unpleasant, Deb!' said he, contemplating his spiky nails.
'And her sudden quarrel with Roland Lindsay—if quarrel it was—I do not understand.'
'I do. He is a poor beggar—dropped out of the hunt—and I—I am——'
'What?'
'Supposed to be your heir,' said he, putting the suggestion gently; 'long, long may it be only supposition, Deb; but a few thousands yearly—say five—would make us all right, and then we have the run of the house here—what more do we want? So all will be right, even with the county, I say again, if we only play our cards well.'
She had played her cards well in the past time, she thought, as Hawkey, whom conversation always made thirsty, left her in quest of a brandy and soda.
Seated in her luxurious boudoir, her memory went back to the days of her early life, as an underpaid and hard-worked governess; and then to those when she became the humble and useful companion to Roland's mother, and, after her death, a kind of guardian to Maude on the latter leaving school. Then came the accident that befel the old Laird in the hunting-field at Macbeth's Stank—a wet ditch with a 'yarner' on each side, the terror of the Fife Hunt, but said to have been leapt by the usurper's horse when he returned from Dunnimarle after slaying the family of Macduff; and how necessary she made herself to the suffering invalid; how (artfully) she seemed to anticipate his thoughts, to understand all his wants, his favourite dishes and so forth; and how grateful he became to her, and how she clung to him like a barnacle or octopus, without seeming to do so. How necessary he soon found it to have a clever, sensible, and loving woman—one rather handsome, too—to look after him, when his two sons—especially that spendthrift in the Scots Guards—seemed to regard him as only a factor or banker to draw upon without mercy; and so he married her one morning when the weather was very cold; when the early snow was on the Ochil summits and powdering the Lomonds of Fife, and then she knew that she was the wife of a landed gentleman of old and high descent—Colin Lindsay, Laird of Earlshaugh!
She was, of course, to be a second mother to Maude (who declined to view her as such) and to his two sons if they became careful; and meantime, ere dying, he handed over to her, by will, as stated, beyond all hope of disputing it at law, every wood, acre, and tree he possessed, causing much uplifting of hands and shaking of heads in ominous wonder throughout the county, and more especially in the East Neuk thereof.
But she bore herself well, dressed richly as became her age and new station—kept a handsome carriage with her late husband's arms—the fesse chequy argent and azure for Lindsay—thereon in a lozenge; but was rarely seen in the company of Maude, who did not, would not, and never could, approve of the position so ungenerously assigned to herself and her only surviving brother Roland, who had been much less to blame than his senior of the Household Brigade.
And Mrs. Lindsay was just then beginning to discover that she was likely to have—in the person of her brother, as an intrusive, if sometimes necessary factotum—something of a skeleton in her cupboard at Earlshaugh.
Since the Laird's death, Hawkey Sharpe had loved well to pose as a man of influence and importance—more than all, as the probable and future proprietor of Earlshaugh; and liked to imagine how all would look up to him then and seek his favourable notice.
His sister's secret and deadly ailment was to him a constant source of anxiety that was not borne of affection; he dreaded, also, her 'kirk proclivities,' and the influence possessed over her 'by that old caterpillar, the minister.' 'I'll have to look sharp now after my own interests—old Deb is getting rather long in the tooth for me,' he would think at times.
Treated as she had been by Maude and others of the family since her marriage, she could not have a very kindly feeling to the Lindsay line. 'Blood is warmer than water,' says our Scottish proverb; and Hawkey was the only kinsman she had in the world that she knew of; but, a scapegrace, a spendthrift, and toady to herself, as she knew him to be, some of her sympathies were just then rather more with the disinherited Roland Lindsay than Mr. Hawkey Sharpe would have relished, had he in the least suspected such a thing.
And Annot's thoughts on reviewing her new position were rather of a mingled sort, and something of this kind:
'I am going to marry this man Hawkey Sharpe. Odious man! I cannot pretend, even to myself, to be much in love with him—if at all; yet I am going to marry him—and why? Because I love the splendid patrimony that, in time, will become his; this beautiful estate, this grand old house, the parure of family diamonds, and the settlements that must be made upon me. I always meant to marry the first wealthy man who asked me, and now I am only true to my creed—the creed mamma taught me. Can anyone blame me for that? Of course I would rather a thousand times have had poor Roland with Earlshaugh, because he is a man that any woman might love and be proud of; but failing him, I must put up with the person and name of—Hawkey Sharpe. Can anyone think it very wicked that I—a penniless little creature—should prefer such a well-feathered nest as this to that gloomy and small poky house in South Belgravia, with its one drab of a servant, cold meat, shabby clothes, and all its sordid concomitants? No; give me the ease, the prosperity, the luxury, and the flesh-pots of Earlshaugh, with its manor and lands, wood, hill, and field.'
But it was a considerable relief to her mind—shamelessly selfish though she was—when within twenty-four hours after Roland's departure her two cousins and Jack Elliot (whose faces she cared never to see again) also left for the capital, and she remained behind the guest of—Mrs. Lindsay.
'As for Roland,' Annot thought, 'he will get over our little affair easily. He loved me, no doubt, but love we know to be only a parenthesis in the lives of most men.'