EVIL TIDINGS.
'I'm glad to see you back, Miss Cheyne,' said Archie, as she met him
in the passage or entrance-hall; 'Sir Ranald has missed you sairly.'
'Missed me? I left him asleep, Archie,' exclaimed Alison.
'Something wakened him wi' a start, just as ye gaed into the garden.'
'Something--what?'
'A sound, I watna what,' replied Archie, unwillingly, smoothing his
silver hair with his hand, and looking round him stealthily.
'What sound? I heard nothing in the garden.'
'Weel, something like the baying o' a hound.'
'A _hound_!' said Alison, faintly.
'I dinna quite say sae; but say naething to Sir Ranald aboot it.
Gang to him at aince; he's got some unco news, I fear, by the evening
post.'
Walking like an automaton, though very pale, and tremulous in heart
and limb, Alison entered the dining-room, where she found her father
walking up and down its entire length, with a letter crushed and
crumpled in his thin white hand, which was nervously clenched upon
it. His face was very pale; his lips were twitching, and drops of
perspiration stood upon his brow.
'Papa!' exclaimed Alison, winding her soft arms round him; 'what is
the matter with you?'
'It has come at last, child.'
'What has come?'
'The long-impending and utter ruin, unless--unless----'
'What?'
'You will save me; end my sorrows, and your own, by accepting
Cadbury. You can lift from my heart and our family the shadow that
has darkened them so long--the cold shadow of grinding poverty.'
Her lips became white and parched--so parched that she had to moisten
them with her tongue, and even then she could not speak for a time.
Bevil Goring's kisses were fresh upon them, and now she had to listen
to a death sentence like this!
Her first dread had been a reference to her absence at such a time,
but, by the business in question, it was evident her ramble in the
dusk was forgotten, or a very subordinate matter indeed.
'A man named Slagg has written me,' said Sir Ranald, in a low and
faint voice, while leaning with one hand on the table and the other
pressed on the region of the heart, 'written me to the effect that
all my recent and too often renewed acceptances and promissory notes
have come--how, I know not--into his possession, and that if I do not
liquidate them forthwith everything we have--even to the chairs we
sit on--will be seized, and myself too probably arrested, while you,
Alison--you, my loved Ailie,' he continued, with sudden pathos in his
voice--'will have neither house nor home!'
He was a proud man, Sir Ranald Cheyne, and apart from the selfishness
peculiar to many of his class--especially in Scotland--an honourable
man. Thus it is but fair to infer that had he known or been aware in
the least degree of the game Lord Cadbury was playing, and that the
letter of Solomon Slagg was his trump card, he would rather have
faced ruin and beggary than urged this odious marriage on his
daughter.
The latter clasped her hands in silence and looked and felt like a
hunted creature. Prior to this she had often thought over the means
of escape, of working for her bread--a mode of work of which she had
very vague ideas indeed--but now she felt stunned and stupefied.
After all--after the dawn and noon of the sweet day that had stolen
upon her--could she do nothing, if she was to serve her father, but
to marry this vulgar lord?
'I have refused Lord Cadbury's written proposal, papa,' said she, in
a voice so low that it sounded like a whisper.
'He will renew it, and it is a brilliant offer, Alison. He will be
kind to you--so kind, Alison--and you--you will not be so mad as to
refuse him now. Think of his proffered settlements and of what
we--what I owe him.'
'Think of every one, of all--all but myself and my future!' said
Alison, with her slender fingers interlaced above her head and her
eyes cast despairingly upward.
'She is yielding,' thought Sir Ranald; 'but I see how it is--this
fellow Goring is in our way.'
Then he put his arm round her caressingly and said,
'The sooner you become sensible, Alison, and forget your
foolish--your most unwise fancy for that young fellow at Aldershot,
the better for yourself and for--me.'
He never forgot _himself_ with all his love for his daughter.
'But, papa,' she said, with pallid lips, 'I love--Bevil.'
'It has come to this--an engagement?'
'Yes, papa, I cannot deceive you.'
'An engagement--a secret one--without my knowledge; how dared you?'
'I promised to wait for a year--he asked me only a year--and he loves
me so much!'
'No doubt,' snarled Sir Ranald, through his set teeth. 'People
cannot live on love, however, and your friend "Bevil," as you call
him, cannot pay my debts.'
'Oh, would that he could do so!'
'Till recently you have always been accustomed to luxury and ease.
These Cadbury lays at your feet, offering you--who by position and
education are unfit to be a poor man's wife--absolute splendour.'
'But Bevil is not so poor as you think, and, moreover, may be richer
in time,' urged Alison, piteously; 'he has prospects,
expectations----'
'Of course--what sharper is without them?--and for the realization of
these visions you would be waiting to the sacrifice of your youth,
your beauty, and your poor old father's few remaining years.'
She wrung her white hands. She had often thought before of the
tradesmen's unpaid bills--of her dresses made to do duty for a second
season she had never thought at all; but now the letter of Slagg had
filled her with vague and undefinable terror.
She could not, poor girl, understand the tenor of it altogether, but
she knew it meant ruin, for she could read that in her father's
anxious face; yet why should fate compel her to marry Lord
Cadbury?--she could work--work or die!
'Loving Bevil as I do, papa, it would be very base of me to accept
Lord Cadbury without even an atom of respect or gratitude,' said she,
gathering courage from her very despair, while her eyes streamed with
tears.
'I do not see that love has much to do with marriage, but know that
money has a great deal,' said her father, smoothing out the letter of
Solomon Slagg for re-perusal. 'Love is a luxury the poor can't
afford, and it is better to marry on a little of it, and find that
little increase by residence together and force of habit, than marry
on much, and find that much dwindling away into mutual toleration and
cold indifference.'
Sir Ranald had not an atom of sympathy with or toleration for this
love fancy, so he deemed it, of his daughter. His own lover-days and
his marriage seemed to have come to pass so long ago as to have
belonged to some state of pre-existence. He could scarcely realise
them now; yet he knew they must have been; Burke and Debrett told him
so; and Alison was there as a living proof of both; but his love--if
love it was--had been a well-ordered arrangement with a lady of good
position and ample means, not with an obscure nobody.
'Papa,' said Alison, after a silence that had been broken only by her
sighs and his own, 'when urging me to do what you wish, have you no
thought of the long line of the Cheynes of Essilmont, who lived there
for so many centuries--who so often lost their lives in battle, but
never honour, who never stained their name by any base or ignoble
transaction, who lived and died so spotlessly?'
This little outburst was something precisely after his own heart; he
patted Alison's head of rich brown hair, and said, with a kindling in
his eyes,
'It is precisely because I do think of them that I wish to see you
wealthy and ennobled, raised out of this now sordid life of ours.'
'Ennobled by wedding the son of Timothy Titcomb, of Threadneedle
Street!'
'If you will not save me by doing so, we have nothing left for it now
but a disgraceful flight.'
'Flight?'
'Yes; I must quit this place ere I am arrested.'
'For where?'
'God alone knows.'
Alison interlaced her fingers again in mute misery.
'You look worn and weary, Alison,' said Sir Ranald, observing the
pinched expression of her little white face.
'I am both, indeed!'
'Then go to bed, child; think over all I have urged, think of what is
before us, think well, and give me a final answer in the morning.'
She kissed him with lips that were cold and quivering, and retired to
her room, while he threw open his bureau, drew the lamp towards him,
spread a sheet of paper with a vague idea that he was about to make
some monetary calculations, and mechanically dipped a pen in the
ink-bottle.
Then he threw it down, and, resting his aching head upon his delicate
and wrinkled hands, sank into a kind of stupor of thought.
From this he was roused by a hand being laid gently on his shoulder,
and by the voice of old Archie Auchindoir saying, while he shook his
white head,
'Puir Sir Ranald--oh! my dear maister; eild and poortith are sair
burdens for ae back.'
'What do you want, Archie?' he asked, peevishly.
'Sir Ranald, sir, I've a sma' matter o' three hunder pound and mair
saved up in your service, and at your service it is now, every bodle
o'd--tak' it and welcome; it may help ye at this pinch--tak' it, for
God's sake, if it will tak' the tears frae Miss Alison's een.'
'Poor Archie, I thank you,' said Sir Ranald, shaking the hand of this
faithful old man, whose eyes were inflamed with the tears he was,
perhaps, too aged to shed; 'it is very generous of you, this offer,
but is--pardon me saying so--simply absurd!'
Again and again Archie pressed the little man in vain upon the
acceptance of his master, till the pride of the latter turned his
gratitude into something of his usual hauteur, on which Archie
withdrew sorrowfully, muttering under his breath,
'Troth, he's weel boden there ben, that will neither borrow nor lend.'
Meaning that Sir Ranald must surely be well enough off, if he could
afford to dispense with all assistance.
With her gorgeous brown hair unrolled and floating over her
shoulders, Alison, with her hands lying listlessly in her lap, sat
lost in her own terrible thoughts, with her tear-inflamed eyes gazing
into her bed-room fire, which had just attained that clear, red
light, without flickering flame, in which one may fancy strange
scenes without end--deep valleys, caverns, rocks, castles perched on
cliffs, faces, and profiles; and therein had she seen, more than
once, Essilmont with its Scoto-French turrets with their conical
roofs and vanes, its crow-stepped gables and massive chimneys, that
she now might never see in reality again!
A victim on the double altar of gold and filial piety.
How often had she read in novels and romances, and how often had she
seen on the stage, the story of a heroine--a wretched girl placed in
precisely the cruel predicament in which she now found herself, and
deemed that such dramatic and doleful situations could only exist in
the fancies of the author or of the playwright!
Without, the cold and wintry wind had torn away the last leaves from
every tree long since; the last flowers were also long dead; the
chill night rain pattered, with sleet and hail, upon the windows;
and, like the heart of Alison, all nature seemed desolate and sad.
She shuddered when she heard the moaning of the wind, and thought of
the Spectre Hound.
Could it be that she had indeed seen it?