Some days passed on after the little episode at the piano, and the intercourse between the cousins, if tender and alluring, was still somewhat strange, undecided, and doubtful—save in the recesses of Hester's heart.
Rambling together, as in days past, among the familiar and beautiful sylvan scenery around Merlwood, times there certainly were, when eye met eye with an expression that told its own story, and each seemed to feel that their silence covered a deeper feeling than words could express, and that though the latter were not forthcoming as yet, their hearts and lives might soon be filled by a great joy, on the part of the untutored girl especially.
At others, Roland, though not quite past seven-and-twenty, had, of course, seen too much of the world and of life, in and out of garrison, to be a hot-headed and reckless lover, or to rush into a position which left him no safe or honourable line of retreat.
His passions were strong, but tempered by experience and quite under his control; and he was inclined to be somewhat of a casuist.
'Was this brilliant and attractive companion,' he sometimes asked himself, 'the same little girl who had been his playmate in the past, who had so often faded out of his boyish existence amid other scenes and places? And now did she really care for him in that way after all?'
His manner was kind and affectionate to her, but playful, and while lacking pointed tenderness, there was—she thought—something forced about it at times.
When this suspicion occurred, her pride took the alarm. Could it be that she had insensibly allowed her heart to slip out of her own keeping into that of one from whom no genuine word of love had come to her? Then the fear of this would sting Hester to the soul, and make her at times—even after the [oe]illades and eloquent silences referred to—cold and reserved; and old Sir Harry, who, for many reasons, monetary and otherwise, apart from a sincere and fatherly regard for his only nephew, would have been rejoiced to have him as a son-in-law, would mutter to himself:
'Do they know their own minds, these two young fools?'
He often thought sadly and seriously of Hester's future, for he had been an improvident man; his funds and his pensions passed away with himself; thus it was with very unalloyed delight that he watched the pair together again as in the days of their childhood, and he wove many a castle in the air; but they all assumed the form of a certain turreted mansion in the East Neuk of Fife. Then he would add to Hester's annoyance by saying to her in a caressing and blundering way:
'He will love you very dearly, as he ought to do, some day, my pet; and if you don't love him just now, you also will in time. Your poor mother would have liked it—Roland was ever her favourite.'
'Please not to say these things, papa,' implored Hester, though they were alone, and she caressed his old white head, for Sir Harry seldom or never spoke of her mother, whose death occurred some twelve years before, without an emotion which he could not conceal, for he was gentle and loving by nature.
'Bother the fellow!' said Sir Harry testily, ashamed that his voice had broken and his eyes grown full; 'he should know his own heart by this time.'
'I would rather, papa, you did not say such things.'
'Well—I can't help thinking of them, and you have no one to confide in, Pet Hester, but me,' he added, drawing her head down on his breast.
'If it will make you any happier, dear papa,' said Hester in a very low voice, 'I will promise to do as you wish, if Roland asks me to love him, which he has not done yet. Anyway, it does not matter,' she added, a little irrelevantly; 'I care for no one else.'
'Not even for Malcolm of Dunnimarle?' he asked laughingly.
'No, papa—not even for Malcolm Skene.'
'He admires you immensely, Hester, but then Roland seems to me just the sort of fellow to advise and protect—to be good to a girl—strong and brave, kind and tender.'
'Oh, hush, papa,' said Hester, ready to sink with confusion and annoyance; 'here he comes,' she added, as Roland came lounging through an open French window into the dining-room.
'What about Skene of Dunnimarle, uncle—surely I heard his name?' he asked, adding to Hester's emotion of confusion, though he failed to notice it. 'May I finish my cigar here, Hester?'
'Oh, please do—I rather like it,' she replied hastily.
'I have asked Skene for the shooting next month at Earlshaugh—to knock over a few birds.'
'That will be pleasant for Hester; he is rather an admirer of hers,' said Sir Harry.
'I don't know that he is,' said Hester; 'and if you talk that way, I shall not go to Earlshaugh this summer at all, papa.'
'After your promise to me that you will do so?' asked Roland.
'Yes, even after my promise to you,' she replied, as she left the room.
'I'll tell you a strange story of Malcolm's father when we were together in Central India,' said Sir Harry, to change the subject. 'It happened at Jhansi—you never heard it, I suppose?'
'Not that I know of,' replied Roland, who was already weary of the Indian reminiscences that Sir Harry contrived to drag into conversation whenever he could.
'Well, it was a strange affair—very much out of the common, and happened in this way. Duncan Skene was Captain of our Grenadiers—ah, we had Grenadiers then, before the muddlers of later years came!—and a handsomer fellow than Duncan never wore a pair of epaulettes. A year before we stormed Jhansi from the Pandies, we were in quarters there, and all was as quiet at Allahabad as it is here in the valley of the Esk. We did not occupy the city or the Star Fort, but we had lines outside the former then, and one night Duncan, when pretty well primed, it was thought, after leaving the mess bungalow, betook him towards his own, which stood in rather a remote part of the cantonment. All seemed dark and quiet, and the ghurries at the posts had announced the hour of two in the morning, when Duncan came unexpectedly upon a large and well-lighted tent, within which he saw six or seven fellows of ours—old faces that he knew, but had not seen for some time—all carousing and drinking round the table; he entered, and was at once made welcome by them all.
'Now, Duncan must have been pretty well primed indeed not to have been sobered and chilled by what he saw; he could scarcely believe his eyes or his own identity, and thought that for the past year he must have been in a dream; for there he was met with outstretched hands and hearty greetings by many of ours who he thought were gone to their last homes. There was Jack Atherly, second to none in the hunting-field, whom he had seen knocked over by a matchlock ball in a rascally hill fight; and there, too, was Charley Thorold, once our pattern sub and pattern dancing man, who he thought had fallen the same day at the head of the Light Company; there, too, were Maxwell and Seton, our best strokes at billiards, whom he had seen—or thought he had seen—die of jungle fever in Nepaul; and Hawthorn and Bob Stuart, for whom he had backed many a bill, and who had been assassinated by Dacoits; but now seeming all well and jolly, hale and hearty, though a trifle pale, after all they had undergone. It was a marvellous—a bewildering meeting; but he felt no emotion either of fear or surprise—as it is said that in dreams we seldom feel the latter, though some of his hosts in figure did at times look a little vaporous and indistinct.
'He was forced to sit down and drink with them, which he did, while old regimental jokes were uttered and stories told till the tent seemed to whirl round on its pole, the pegs all in pursuit of each other; and then Duncan thought he must be off, as he was detailed for guard at dawn. But ere he quitted them, they all made him promise that he was to rejoin them at the same place that day twelvemonth, a long invitation, at which he laughed heartily, but to which he acceded, promising faithfully to do so; then he reeled away, and remembered no more till he was found fast asleep under the hedge of his compound by the patrol about morning gun-fire.
'Duncan's dream, or late entertainment, recurred vividly to him in all its details; he could point to the exact spot where the tent had stood, but not a trace of it was to be found in any way, and no more was thought about the matter by the few in whom he confided till that time twelvemonth, when we found ourselves before Jhansi, with the army sent under Lord Strathnairn to avenge the awful slaughter and butchery there of the officers of the 12th Native Infantry by the mutineers, from whom we took the place by storm; and in the conflict, at the very hour of the morning in which Duncan Skene had had that weird meeting and given that terrible promise, and on the very spot where the supposed tent stood, he was killed by a cannon shot; and just about the same time I received the infernal bullet which is lodged in me still.
'That is a story beyond the common, Roland, for Skene of ours was a fellow above all superstition, and wild though his dream—if a dream it was—he was wont to relate it in a jocular way to more than one—myself among the number.'
Was it the case that the mention of young Skene as a new admirer—perhaps more than an admirer—of Hester had acted as a species of fillip to Roland? It almost seemed so, for after that there was more tenderness if possible in his manner to her, and he did not fail to remark that he saw music and books lying about, presented to Hester by the gentleman in question; and her father muttered to himself with growing satisfaction, for he loved Roland well:
'Now they are all day together, just as they used to be; and see, he is actually carrying her watering pan for the rosebuds. Well, Roland, that is better fun, I suppose, than carrying the lines of Tel-el-Kebir!' And the old gentleman laughed at his own conceit till he felt his Jhansi bullet cause an aching where it lodged. This companionship filled the heart of the girl with supreme happiness, and more than once she recalled the words of a writer who says of such times: 'I think there are days when one's whole past life seems stirred within one, and there come to the surface unlooked-for visions and pictures, with gleams from the depths below. Are they of memory or of hope? Or is it possible that those two words mean one thing only, and are one at last when our lives are rounded and complete?'
One evening, after being absent in the city, Roland suddenly, when he and Hester were alone, opened a handsome morocco case wherein reposed, in their dark-blue satin bed, a necklace of brilliant cairngorms set in gold with a beautiful pendant composed of a single Oriental amethyst encircled by the purest of pearls.
'A little gift for you, Hester,' said he; 'I am soon going to Earlshaugh, and I hope to see you wear these there,' added he, clasping the necklace round her slender throat.
'Oh, Roland!' exclaimed Hester in a breathless voice, while her colour changed, 'can I accept such a gift?'
'From me—your cousin—Hester?' he asked softly but reproachfully, and paused. Beyond the gift he gave no distinct sign as yet, and it flashed on Hester's mind that with the jewels there was no ring. Could that be an omission? Scarcely.
Then, seized by a sudden impulse, he abruptly, yet softly and caressingly, drew her towards him and kissed her more than once. He had often saluted her before at meeting and parting, but always in a cousinly way; but this seemed very different now.
Breathless, dazed apparently, the trembling girl pushed him from her, and he gazed at her with some surprise as she said:
'Why did you do that, Roland? It is cruel—unkind of you,' she added, with trembling fingers essaying, but in vain, to unclasp the necklet.
'Cruel and unkind—between us, Hester?'
'Yes,' she said, blushing deeply, and then growing very pale.
'I forgot myself for a moment, dearest Hester, in my fondness of you.'
She was trembling very much now, and as he took her hands caressingly within his own, her eyes grew full of tears.
'Hester, you know—you know well,' he began, with a voice that indicated deep emotion.
'Know what, Roland?' said she, trying to withdraw her hands.
'That I love you,' he was about to say, and would no doubt have said, but that Sir Harry most inopportunely came limping heavily in, so Roland was compelled to pause. The few words that might have changed all the story we have to tell were left unuttered, and next moment Hester was gone.
'He does love me!' she thought in the solitude of her own room; 'love me as I love him, and wish to be loved!'
Long she pondered over the episode and gazed on his gift ere she retired to rest that night. She hoped in time to bind him to her more closely, for she thought he was a man who would love once in a lifetime with all the strength of a great and noble nature.
Sweetly and brightly the girl smiled at her own reflection in the mirror as with deft fingers she coiled up her rich brown hair for the night; while slowly but surely she felt herself, with a new and joyous thrill, to be turning her back upon the past, yet a happy and an innocent past it had been, and that she was standing on the threshold of a new and brighter world of dreams.
At last she slept.
Roland Lindsay had been on the point of declaring his love, but something—was it Fatality?—withheld him; then the interruption came, and the golden moment passed!
Would it ever come again?
But a change was at hand, which neither he nor Hester could foresee.