While Malcolm Skene was counting the days wearily and anxiously, and, in common parlance, 'eating his heart out,' in that distant zereba, near the Third Cataract of the Nile, time and events did not stand still with some of his friends elsewhere; among these certainly were Roland Lindsay and Hester Maule, and the latter did indeed mourn for the hard and unknown fate of one whose love she never sought but surely won.
Roland did not start immediately for Egypt after turning his back in mortification and disgust on Earlshaugh, but for a brief time took up his quarters at the United Service Club in Edinburgh with Jack Elliot. The speedy marriage of the latter and Maude, who had gone to Merlwood with Hester, was then on the tapis, and fully occupied the attention of all concerned.
It was impossible for anything like love to exist long, after the rude shock—the terrible awakening—Roland had received; yet ever and anon he found himself rehearsing with intense bitterness of spirit the memory of scenes and passages between himself and Annot—drivelling scenes he deemed them now! How had he said to her more than once:
'My darling—my darling! Be true to me; the day when I cease to believe in you will kill me—you are such a child—you know so little of the world, sweet one!'
'So little of the world—a child!' thought he. 'What an ass I was! I am not killed by it, and she has been false as the devil. How came I to say things that seemed so prophetic?'
Thus, as he thought over all the love and blind adoration he had lavished on her, he felt only rage and sickness at his own folly. He saw it all now, when it was too late—too late!
What human heart has not learned the bitterness of these two bitter words, in many ways, through life?
Yet, tantalizingly, she would come before him in dreams, and thus recall him to the words of an old sonnet—
'Half pleading and half petulant she stands;
Her golden hair falls rippling on my hands;
Her words are whispered in their old sweet tone.
But neither word nor smile can move me now—
There is an unseen shadow on her brow.
I cannot love, because all trust is gone!'
It was a very awkward subject for Hester to approach, yet, seeing him so moody, so silent and trist, when first again he came to Merlwood, she said to him timidly and softly:
'Forget the past, Roland. She made no real impression on your heart, but affected your imagination only.'
And now he began to think that such was indeed the case; while to Maude it seemed strange indeed that Annot Drummond should be at Earlshaugh, posing as the future mistress thereof, while she and her disinherited brother were a species of outcasts therefrom.
Earlshaugh—the old house of so many family traditions and memories—was very dear to Maude in spite of all the dark and mortifying hours she had lately spent under its roof. What races and frolics and fun had gone on there in the past time, when she, her brothers, and Hester Maule were all happy children, in the long corridors and ghostly old attics, under the steep roofs and pointed turrets where the antique vanes creaked in the wind; and how greater seemed their fun when the rain storms of winter or spring came rattling down on the old stone slates, and they all nestled together under the slope, with a sense of protection and power unknown in future years—so the girl's heart clung to the old roof-tree with a love that nothing in the future could destroy.
There was no use thinking of all these and a thousand other things, as her home was now to be wherever that of Jack Elliot was.
Some of her regrets at times were shared by Roland, for they were a race peculiar to—but not alone in—Scotland, these Lindsays of Earlshaugh.
They had ever been high in pride and strong in self-will, lording it over their neighbours in the Howe and East Neuk of Fife, in the days when many a barbed horse was in stall, and many an armed man, 'boden in effeir of weir,' sat at the Laird's table; proud of their ancient pedigree and many heroic deeds, all unstained by timidity in war, and foreign gold in time of peace—a stain few Scottish noble families are without; proud of the broad lands that had come to them not by labour or talent certainly, but by the undoubted right to be lords of the soil by inheritance, when the soil was not held by a mere sheepskin, but by the sword and knight-service to the Scottish Crown.
And now to return to more prosaic times. We have said that there was a chronic antagonism between Maude and her stepmother, Mrs. Lindsay; then, when Roland hurried to quit Earlshaugh, she and Jack resolved to get married, and married they were, quite quietly, as Roland was in haste to be gone to Egypt, and they were to pass a brief honeymoon ere Jack followed him—as he had inexorably to take his turn of service there too.
Of the Earlshaugh will, and Maude's small inheritance under it, Jack made light indeed.
'What matters it?' said he; 'I am Elliot of Braidielee, and there will be our home-coming, when we have smashed up the Mahdi, and I can return with honour!'
At this marriage Annot Drummond was not present—no invitation was given to her, and Mrs. Lindsay excused herself through illness. Maude laughed at her apology.
'Though we were grown up, and so beyond her reach in some respects, she has been like the typical stepmother of the old fairy tales,' said the girl, who, sunny-haired, blue-eyed, and bright, looked wonderfully beautiful, apart from t lat strange halo which surrounds every bride on her marriage day.
'All weddings are dull affairs, and we are well out of this one—don't you think so?' said Annot coyly to her new lover.
'Perhaps, but ours won't be so,' replied Hawkey Sharpe with a knowing wink. 'I expect it will be rather good fun.'
She shivered a little at his bad style. The visits that are usually paid and received, the letters that are usually written, the choosing of much useless millinery, furniture, plate, and equipages, and the being 'trotted out' for the inspection of mutual friends were all avoided or evaded by the quiet mode in which Jack Elliot and Maude were made one, and their nuptials a fact accomplished; but there was no time for 'doing' Paris, Berlin, the Riviera, or Rome, as Jack was bound for Egypt within a tantalizingly short period, so he secured a charming little villa for his bride in the southern and perhaps most pleasing quarter of the Modern Athens till he could return—if he ever did return—from that land of disease and death, where so many of our young and brave have found their last home.
Mr. Hawkey Sharpe at Earlshaugh laughed viciously when he read the announcement of the marriage in the newspapers. It was not a pleasant laugh, even Annot thought, and boded ill to some one.
Maude seemed beyond his reach now, so far as he seemed concerned; but there remained to him still hatred and revenge, as we may have to show.