The house of Pitcomlie lay very still and quiet in the fitful sunshine,
when the daughters of the family reached its open door. The door stood
always open, unsuspicious, disclosing the way into its most private
corners to any comers. It had nothing to conceal. At this hour in the
afternoon, it was exceptionally still. The gentlemen were out, the
servants all absorbed into their own part of the house, and not a stir
nor sound announced the presence of a large household. The brightness of
the day was clouded, but yet held its own by moments, the sun coming out
now and then with double brilliancy from the edge of the clouds which
were driven over its face one by one. As Marjory and her little sister
rode up the avenue, one of those great masses of cloud had floated up,
and threw a heavy shadow over the house, and the blue broad sea beyond;
but as they alighted at the door, the sun burst forth again, blazing
upon the wide open doorway.
“Is my father at home, Rob?” asked Marjory of the groom who came to take
her horse.
“The laird’s out, ma’am, and so’s Mr. Charles. They’re baith away wast,”
said Rob, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
Marjory stood musing on the steps before she would go in; she did not
know whether to seek her father “away wast,” or to wait for him. How
still the house was, so unsuspecting, so serene and peaceful! It seemed
treacherous to go into it with a secret so deeply affecting its
existence in her hands. Somehow it seemed to Marjory’s excited fancy
that she was about to give a blow without warning, without preparation,
to some one whose smiling unalarmed countenance looked trustfully up at
her. It seemed a treachery even to know it, and above all to go on
knowing it, keeping the secret, into the old gentle family house that
feared nothing. When she went upstairs she changed her dress, and gave
her maid instructions to pack a few necessaries for her.
“My brother has met with an accident,” she said, as calmly as she could.
To say it even in this form relieved her mind. She did not feel such a
traitor to the kindly old house.
Mr. Heriot fortunately came back as soon as her preparations were made,
and now the worst part of her duty was to come. She ran down and met him
at the door.
“What made you so late, May?” he said, his face brightening
involuntarily at sight of her.
“I was detained,” she said; and came out and loitered in front of the
door, playing with the dogs, who always accompanied him. He was as
unsuspicious as his house. If he had been anxious in the morning, he had
thrown his anxieties off. He pointed out to his daughter the good points
of a pointer puppy, which, large-limbed and imbecile, came roving round
from the stables, scenting the arrival of the others.
“He’ll make a grand dog before September,” he said, “when he’s grown and
trained. Tom will be delighted with him.”
May interrupted him hastily, for she was choking with the news.
“Come round to the cliff, papa, there is a storm brewing,” she said.
Unsuspicious, he went with her. They took what Mr. Heriot called “a
turn” round the soft lawn which surrounded that side of the house. It
was too much exposed for flowers or even shrubs, but green and smooth as
velvet. The sea dashed with a muttering suppressed roar on the beach
beneath. It was of a steely blue, sometimes flashing in the gleams of
sunshine, sometimes leaden under the shadow. Towards the east, on the
very angle of the coast, stood the old mansion house, tall and narrow,
with its tourelles--all but one tower, which adjoined the present house,
was ruinous and roofless--but it was draped by branches which burst out
from the broken walls, and a wild luxuriance of ivy. The existing house
stood lower, and looked warm, and peaceful, and safe, like the present
under the protection of the past. Marjory and her father made their turn
round and round, she talking against time, not knowing how to introduce
her subject. At last, as they turned to come back, she pointed out to
him one of those sudden dramatic changes of the clouds.
“Look, papa, how quickly the lights change. It was in sunshine just now,
and how black everything is already! It makes one feel eerie. It is like
a cloud of misfortune enveloping the old house.”
She was foolishly in hopes that he would have taken up this metaphorical
strain, and thus given her an opening to say what she had to say.
“Nothing more natural, my dear,” said Mr. Heriot. “The clouds are
driving up from the mouth of the Firth. It’s an ill sign when they come
and go so fast. I hope those foolish fellows from Comlie shore will be
warned in time.”
“Oh, papa,” cried Marjory, seizing this opening. “It is dreadful to
think how seldom we are warned in time! How we go on to the very edge of
a precipice, and then--”
“Phoo!” said Mr. Heriot, “if a man does not keep a look-out before him,
it’s nobody’s fault but his own.”
Thus the door was shut upon her again. She looked at him with a kind of
despair, and put both her hands round his arm.
“Papa,” she said, “I think we have had a very tolerably happy
life--nothing very much to find fault with. Everything has gone on
comfortably. We have had no great troubles, no misfortunes to speak
of--”
“I don’t know what you call misfortunes,” said her father. “That affair
of the Western Bank was anything but pleasant.”
“It was only money, papa.”
“Only money! What would you have, I should like to know? _Only_ money!
May, my dear, to be a sensible girl as you are, you sometimes speak very
like a haverel. Loss of money is as great a misfortune as can befall a
family. It brings a hundred other things in its train--loss of
consideration, troubles of all kinds. Personal losses may hurt more for
the moment, but so far as the family is concerned--”
“Oh, don’t say so,” cried Marjory. “Papa, I am afraid there are things
that hurt a great deal more. I have heard--something about Tom--”
“What about Tom?” he said, turning upon her with an eagerness much
unlike his former calm.
“It may not perhaps be so bad as appears. He has had--an accident,” she
said, breathless and terrified.
To her surprise, the anxiety in her father’s face calmed down.
“An accident! is that all?” he said, with a long-drawn breath of relief.
“All! papa!”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Heriot, half-impatiently, “you think I’ve no
feeling. You are mistaken, May. But that boy, that brother of yours, has
been in worse scrapes--scrapes that no doctor could mend. However,
that’s not the question. How did you hear? and when did it happen? and
what is it? Arm, or leg, or collar-bone? I know how lads lame
themselves. Hunting is all very well in moderation, but these young men
pay dear for it. They think no more of breaking a limb than if it was
the branch of a rotten tree.”
“But, papa, I am afraid it is, perhaps, more serious than you think,”
faltered Marjory, half rendered hopeful by his ease, half frightened by
indifference.
“Never fear,” said Mr. Heriot; “women always think worse of such things
than they deserve. Tom’s not the lad to come to harm that way. It’s long
or the de’il dee at a dykeside.”
Then a moment of silence followed. She felt as if her tongue clove to
the roof of her mouth. She was bewildered by her father’s strange
levity. She strolled round the cliff slowly, as if she were in a dream,
not feeling sure for one dizzy moment whether her senses might not have
deceived her, whether the telegram might not be some mere delusion and
her father right. He was so confident and easy in his confidence--and
surely on these kind of subjects, at least, he must know better than she
did. But then, to be sure, it was not on her judgment the matter rested.
It was Tom’s friend who had communicated news which nobody’s opinion
could change; and already the lights were lengthening and the afternoon
passing away.
“Papa, you will not mind my going to him,” she said, hurriedly. “He
wishes it; he has sent for me. And I wish very much to go at once.”
“He has sent for you?”
“For all of us. He says, ‘Tell my father--’ I fear, I fear, he must be
very bad. Oh! my poor Tom, my poor Tom!”
“You are talking nonsense,” said her father, letting her hand drop from
his arm with a certain impatience. “Tom might have known better than to
make such an appeal to you. Where is he? And if he were so very bad how
could he have written? Phoo, phoo, May; this fuss and nonsense is not
like you.”
“It is not my doing,” she cried. “Oh! papa, look, the afternoon is
flying away, and we shall lose the train.”
He looked up at the sky as she did, and somehow this practical reference
seemed to alarm him more than all she had said. In the bright, slanting
sunshine which suddenly burst upon him at this moment, his face paled as
suddenly as if some evil breath had passed over it.
“The train! I did not think of that. You can order the carriage if you
like,” he said. “It is nonsense; but I will put some things into a bag,
if I must be foolish and go with you on a fool’s errand--”
“Your things are all ready, papa; I have seen to everything. If we do
not miss the train--”
“I will go round to the stables myself,” he said; and then he turned
upon her with a forced smile. “Mind, I think it a fool’s errand--a
fool’s errand; but to please you, May--”
Marjory stood motionless, as with a harsh little laugh he strode away
from her. She could not have borne any more; but when Uncle Charles came
suddenly round the corner of the old house, blown so suddenly round by
the wind, which seemed to sway his long legs and slight, stooping
figure, there burst from her, too, a little hysterical laugh, which
somehow seemed to relieve her as tears might have done.
“What a wind!” said Mr. Charles. “You may laugh, but a slim person has
hard ado to stand before it; and rising every moment, May. I should not
like to be on the Firth to-night.”
“I hope we shall get across,” said May, eagerly, “before it is quite
dark.”
“Get across?” said Uncle Charles, in consternation. “Who is going to
Edinburgh to-night?”
“Oh! Uncle Charles, my heart is breaking! Tom has had a terrible
accident. Perhaps he is dying. We must go to him at once. And papa will
not believe me; he will not understand how serious it is.”
“God bless me!” said Mr. Charles. He made a few sudden steps towards the
house, and then he came back. “My dear May, there’s you to think of.
What is it? I’ll go myself.”
“No, no, no,” she said. “It was me he sent for. Oh, uncle, quick! bid
them make haste with the carriage; we shall lose the train.”
When the carriage came round to the door ten minutes after, Mr. Charles
put aside the two travelling bags which had been placed inside, and took
his place opposite the father and daughter on the front seat.
“I’m coming too,” he said.
Mr. Heriot gave vent to another strange little laugh.
“We had better have Milly in, and Mrs. Simpson, and all the rest,” he
cried; but he made no further remark or objection. His ruddy, rural
countenance had paled somehow. It looked as Marjory had seen it after a
period of confinement in town (town meant Edinburgh more than London to
the Hay-Heriots, though sometimes they went to London too), when the
sun-burnt brownness had worn off. He leant back in his corner and did
not speak; he had not even asked where they were going. He seemed eager
to keep up his appearance of indifference; but his heart had failed him.
Mr. Charles, however, on the contrary, seemed to feel that all the
amusement of the party depended upon him. He kept up a perpetual stream
of talk, till the very sound of his voice made Marjory sick.
“We’ll find him drinking beer, like the man in Thackeray’s book,” said
Mr. Charles; “a ruffianly sort of hero in my way of thinking; but that’s
what you like, you young folk. We’ll find him drinking beer, I’m saying,
May, as well as ever he was. I think I can hear the great laugh he will
give when he sees the whole procession of us coming in.”
Mr. Heriot was nettled by his brother’s interference, yet not disposed
to depart from his own _rôle_ of indifference.
“It’s a fool’s errand,” he said; “but you may diminish the procession,
Charles, if you like. It will be no procession, if there is only May and
me.”
Mr. Charles made no reply to this; he continued his cheerful talk.
“It’s the penalty of all violent sports,” he said; “even your cricket
that such a fuss is made about. There’s no risks of that kind with golf,
now, for instance; and in my way of thinking, a far nobler game; but as
for horses and hounds, they’re simple destruction--in the first place to
a man’s living, and in the second to his bones.”
“You never were great across country,” said Mr. Heriot, satirically. “It
was never one of the sins you were inclined to commit. That must be
taken into account.”
“And the consequence is I never had a broken limb,” said Mr. Charles;
“no surgeon has ever been needed for me; whereas the rest of you have
spent, let us say three weeks in the year on an average, in your beds--”
With intervals, this kind of talk went on until the travellers had
reached the edge of the stormy Firth, which spread like some huge
boiling cauldron in black and white between them and the misty heights
of Edinburgh. It was late twilight failing into night; but as there was
a moon somewhere, the stormy landscape was held between light and dark
in a pale visibleness which had something unearthly in it. Arthur’s Seat
appeared through the mist like a giant, with huge sullen shoulders
turned upon them, and head averted. The boiling Firth was black and
covered with foam.
While Marjory sat wrapping her cloak close round her in the most
sheltered corner, her uncle, with the fierce wind catching at his slim
legs, came and leaned over her, and tried what he could, in gasps
between the gusts of the storm, to keep up his consolatory remarks.
“This is nothing, Marjory, my dear; nothing to what it used to be,” he
said in snatches, blown about, now by the wind, now by the lurches of
the steamer, “when we used to have to go, in a sailingboat, from
Kinghorn to Leith. This is nothing, nothing; I have seen the day--”
But here being driven first into her lap, and then forced to retreat
violently backwards, in obedience to the next wave, Mr. Charles for the
moment succumbed.
What a strange tragi-comedy it was! The boats from Comlie shore were out
in that merciless storm, and the poor fisher-wives at their windows, or
marching with bare feet on the sharp rocks, were looking out upon the
struggles of their “men” to reach the harbour, which that wild
suppressed light permitted them the additional misery of seeing. On the
other hand, far away in the peaceful inland depths of England, Tom
Heriot was lying tragically gay with fever; sometimes delirious,
shouting out all kinds of strange follies in the ear of his friend, who
was no better than himself. While yet between the two the wind made a
jest and plaything of Mr. Charles Heriot, seizing him by his legs and
tossing him about as in a rough game of ball, taking the words out of
his mouth, though they were words of wisdom, and dispersing his axioms
to the merciless waves. Even Marjory could not but laugh as she wrapped
herself closer in her cloak. She laughed, and then felt the sobs
struggle upward choking into her throat.
Then came the long night journey, silent, yet loud, with the perpetual
plunging and jarring of the railway, that strange, harsh, prosaic
jar--which yet, to those who listen to it all through an anxious night
as May did--is an awful sound. Ordinary wheels and hoofs make a very
different impression on the mind; but there is something in the
monotonous clang of a railway which sounds unearthly to an excited mind,
thus whirled through the darkness. How fast the colourless hedgerows,
the dark spectres of trees, the black stretches of country fly past,
with now and then a flitting phantasmagoria of lights from some town or
village; and yet how slow, how lingering, how dreary are the minutes
which tick themselves out one by one with a desperate persistence and
steadiness! In the faint and uncertain lamplight the face of her father
dozing uneasily in the corner opposite to her, seemed to Marjory so
blanched and worn, that she could scarcely keep herself from watching
him in alarm, to make sure that he was living and well. Uncle Charles
was at the other end of the carriage, shifting his long legs uneasily,
sometimes uttering a dismal groan as he awoke, with a twinge of cramp,
to which he was subject. He had filled the carriage with newspapers and
railway books, by way of amusing Marjory.
“I don’t pretend that I can read myself by this unsteady light,” he
said; “but you’re young, May, and they’ll keep you from thinking.”
Poor Marjory! it was her youth (she thought) which made her so capable
of thinking, and kept from her eyes the broken sleep which brought
momentary rest to her companions. Thus passed the lingering weary
night.