THE FATAL DAY OF THE RUTHVENS.
The affectionate and filial heart of Roland was wrung by the wan and
haggard aspect of his father, who looked as grim and pale as that
other Patrick Ruthven, whose ghastly visage in his helmet had so
appalled the luckless Mary on the night that Rizzio was slain; but
the old man's eyes brightened, his colour came back for a time, and
his strength even seemed to rally as his son embraced him.
"You have lost no time in attending my summons, Roland," said he,
retaining the latter's hand within his own.
"I left Montreal by the first steamer, my dear father, but I got away
with difficulty."
"Why?"
"A revolt among the colonists is daily expected; but when I mentioned
your illness, the Colonel at once obtained leave for me from the
General at Halifax."
"Dear old Geordie Wetherall! I remember him a sub in his first red
coat, when we were ensigns together, in the "rookery," as we called
it, in Edinburgh Castle. Ah, few of the Royals of that day are
surviving now. They have nearly all gone before me to the Land o'
the Leal! But in fancy I can see them all yet."
Then, though ailing nigh unto death, true to his old instincts,
almost the first questions he asked of Roland were about their old
regiment, its strength and appearance, of the officers and rank and
file; and then he sighed again, to think that none remembered him
save old Geordie Wetherall, a veteran of the conquest of Java; and
all these questions Roland had to answer, ere he could lure his
father to speak of himself, and when the latter did so, his spirit
fell, his colour faded, and the momentary lustre died out of his
eyes, though the glassy glare of illness still remained.
"I hope the alleged danger of this mysterious illness is
exaggerated," said Roland, tenderly and anxiously; "and that ere I
return to the regiment, I shall see you well and strong--ay, perhaps
taking your fences as of old with Bob Buckle at your back."
The old Laird of Ardgowrie smiled sadly, and turned restlessly on his
pillow--and a handsome man he was, even in age, with a wonderful
likeness to his son, having the same straight nose and mouth clean
cut and chiselled, "the prerogative of the highly born," as Lever has
it--for Patrick Ruthven belonged to the untitled noblesse of
Scotland, the lineage of some of whom stretches far back into the
shadowy past.
"I am lying in my last bed save one, Roland," said the sufferer, in
low concentrated voice; "we have not all died in our beds, we
Ruthvens of that ilk, but it shall be said that all have died with
honour except----"
"Except _who_, father?"
The old man trembled as if with ague, and closed his eyes, as he said
hoarsely--
"I cannot tell you--in time you will know all!"
"You have been a good soldier to the Queen, father."
"But a bad servant to her Master."
"Do not speak thus!" said Roland, imploringly.
"The heart knoweth its own bitterness; and I have been bad, evil,
wicked--false!"
"This is some fancy."
"It is _not_!" said Patrick Ruthven, emphatically.
"Then can I make amends?"
"You may, if it is not too late, my poor Roland. Oh, my God!"
These mysterious words filled the listener with genuine grief and
alarm. Was it all some hallucination? What did they import or refer
to? For much in his father's moody and wayward life, in his latter
years especially, seemed to corroborate them, and to hint that there
was "a skeleton in the house," as the doctor had ventured to say.
"I will have no clergyman about me," said the sufferer, petulantly
and almost passionately, in reply to some remark of Roland's.
"Why?"
"I hope to make my peace with God alone. The Reverend Ephraim Howie,
to whom I gave the living of Ardgowrie! What can he, or such as he,
do for me now?"
"Oh, father!"
"No one ever prospered who grew rich by fraud, it has been said--yet
have I, in a manner, prospered," added the old man, as if communing
with himself.
"You, father?" exclaimed Roland, whose blood seemed to grow very cold.
"Yes--I."
"How--how?"
"I cannot--dare not tell you. Hush!" he added, glancing stealthily
about, as Mr. Runlet, the butler, placed two shaded candles, in
massive antique silver holders, on the toilet table, and withdrew,
and Roland thought--
"Poor old man--his mind wanders!"
"My mind is _not_ wandering."
"I never said so, father."
"But you seem to think so--I can read it in your eyes. I have been
successful in life, and leave at death a handsome fortune to one who
has _no_ right to it--_you_, my son--you whom I love better than my
own soul!" he exclaimed, in a broken voice that seemed full of tears,
and a great horror began to possess the heart of the listener.
"Oh heaven--heaven! he is mad!"
"Would that I had died at the head of the Royals, when I led them at
Nagpore!"
Intense perplexity mingled with the natural grief of Roland, for the
whole tenor of this interview was so utterly beyond all that he could
have anticipated.
In a half fatuous manner, the patient was muttering to himself, and
in great agony of mind, Roland listened intently.
"Live it down, people say--I have lived it down--it was never known
indeed! Poor Philip--poor Philip! One may live down a lie, but not
the truth--it is the truth that hurts--that never may be lived down.
I ever thought a day of retribution would come, and it is
coming--fast!"
"Retribution for what?" asked Roland, in a low but passionate voice.
"Could I face the malevolence of the vulgar on one hand, and the
scorn of my equals on the other?--no--oh no!" continued his father,
speaking in a low voice, and at long gasping intervals, as if to
himself. "It has been truly said, that 'manner and tone of voice may
be made to give stabs, only less sharp and cowardly than vile and
baseless calumny.... There is no insolence like the insolence of the
well-born and well-bred; and the most vulgar and purse-proud wife of
the most purse-proud plutocrat is altogether inferior in her capacity
to inflict pain and give offence to the patrician lady of title.' I
have been spared all that--for I cast the die in secret!"
"What die?" asked Roland imploringly.
The old man regarded him wildly, as if for a time he had forgotten
his presence.
"When I am dead and gone--dead and gone, dear Roland, you will know
all."
"Why not now?"
"Because I--even hovering on the brink of eternity--blush to tell
you. Oh, what a thing it is for a father to cower like a very craven
before his only son, and yet, Roland, you know how I have loved you.
When I am gone and buried, Roland, open the old Indian cabinet that I
found on the day when the Royals stormed Scindia's fortress of
Neembolah--read the sealed packet you will find there--and--and pray
for me."
These were almost the last coherent words his father spoke; and he
uttered them with the veins in his temples throbbing, and as if the
most bitter of all emotions, self scorn, wrung his heart, and then he
seemed to sink fast. But he lingered for some days after this, and
though his words, manner, and injunction, filled Roland with grief
and intense curiosity, he resolved to obey him to the letter and not
open the cabinet till end came, and the doctor assured him it was
near now.
"Under what hallucination can the poor old man be labouring?" thought
Roland, as he sat alone in the stately dining-room--a veritable
hall--and thought how proud he who was about to pass away to a dark
and narrow home, had been of Ardgowrie and all its details and
surroundings--its stately park where the deer made their lair among
the green ferns, its dark blue loch full of pike, and the pine
plantations where the pheasant pea-fowl were thick as the cones that
lay around them.
Daily by the sun, nightly by the moon, for many centuries, had the
same shadows of the quaint old house been cast on the same places,
and it was now an epitome of a proud historic past. It had
entertained more than one king of Scotland, and everything in the old
mansion was on a grand scale, from the portraits by Jamesone and
Vandyck (who married a Ruthven of Gowrie, by the way) to the massive
cups won in many a race that glittered on the sideboard. Above the
latter, a splendid full-length of the "bonnie Earl" who was wont to
flirt with Anne of Denmark in Falkland Woods, and who on the 5th of
August, 1600, perished in the famous conspiracy, had its place of
honour; and among other portraits of later times, was one by Sir
Watson Gordon of the present proprietor, in his uniform as a field
officer of the Royal Scots.
The massive mantelpiece of the early Stuart times ascended to the
ceiling. It was an exact copy of the famous one in Gowrie House at
Perth, and over it in Gothic letters was the same remarkable and
apposite legend borne by the former:--
"Truths long concealed at length emerge to light,
And controverted facts are rendered bright."
But Roland now perceived with genuine wonder, that the couplet had
been chiselled completely away, and the stone frieze was now smooth
and bare.
"By whose orders was this done, Runlet?" he asked with angry surprise.
"Those of the Laird, your father," replied the butler.
"When?"
"Just before his last illness."
"Why?"
"I cannot say, Mr. Roland, but he has done some queer things of
late," he added with diffidence.
On that mantelpiece were cut the Ruthven arms, bars and lozenges,
within a border flowered and counter-flowered, crested with a goat's
head, and above them hung the tattered colours of Ruthven's battalion
of the 1st Royal Scots--one of four--which had borne them in triumph
from the plains of Corunna to the gates of Paris, covered with
trophies, among which are still the cross of St. Andrew and the
crowned thistle of James VI.
Off the dining hall opened a long and lofty corridor hung with
moth-eaten tapestries of russet and green hues and with trophies of
arms, each having its history; such as the helmet of Sir Walter
Ruthven who died by the side of King David at the battle of Durham;
the sword of Sir William who became hostage for King James I.; the
pennon of the Master of Ruthven who fell at Flodden, and weapons of
later wars, with trophies of the chase, heads and skulls of lions
shot in Africa, tigers in Bengal, bears in Russia, of elephants from
the miasmatic Terrai of Nepaul--spoils wherever his father had
served; and of noble deer from the forests of the adjacent hills.
From all these objects and the drooping colours of the grand old
regiment, Roland's eyes would wander again and again to settle on the
cabinet of Scindia, and he would marvel _what_ it contained--if
indeed it contained any secret whatever!
With a fond, proud and yet sad smile he looked at the portrait of
more than one fair ancestress, and thought,
"The girl I left behind me is fairer than them all!"
For in Montreal he had left Aurelia Darnel de St. Eustache, whom we
shall meet in time. A kind of half-flirtation--something even more
tender and taking had subsisted between them, and but for his sudden
summons home, it would have assumed greater proportions and had a
firmer basis; he would have explained to her the nature and extent of
his love for her, and obtained some pledge or promise from her, with
the consent of her mother, for father she had none now; and when
Elspat Gorm spoke apprehensively of the 5th of August, as being "the
fatal day of the Ruthvens," he would think, with a smile,
"I hope not, as it was on the evening of that day, I first met
Aurelia at our ball in Montreal! Would that I could tell the poor
old man who is passing away, of my love, and gain his permission to
address her; for she must know of my love for her and will await my
return; but I would that he could see her, even as I in memory see
her now!"
And before him came a mental vision of a very beautiful girl, whose
dark hair and long black lashes contrasted with the pale delicacy of
her skin, her pencilled eyebrows rather straight than arched, a calm
loveliness in her face when, in repose, but a brightness over it all,
when she was animated, when her soft eyes lighted up and her lips
became tremulous.
"Aurelia!" he whispered to himself, and marvelled if the time would
ever come, when he would bring her hither to be the queen of his
life, and of beautiful Ardgowrie.
Day by day, his father was sinking, and all the powers of medicine
could do nothing for him; his ailment was not old age but a passing
away of the powers of life. The old Highland housekeeper, Elspat,
had much contempt for the nostrums of the doctor, and believing her
master to be under the spell of a gipsy-woman whom he had sent to
prison for theft, maintained that he would never be cured, until the
parings of his finger nails and a lock of his hair were buried in the
earth with a live cock, a remnant of ancient Paganrie, which the
reign of Victoria still finds prevailing in some parts of the
Highlands.
So, as she fully expected, the morning of the 5th of August, saw the
old Laird expire peacefully, after playing fatuously with the
coverlet, and muttering that he could "hear the drums of the Royal
beating the old Scots March," and the lamenting wail of Macaulay's
pipe was heard on the terrace without, as Roland closed his father's
eyes, and, crushed with natural grief, knelt by the side of his bed,
and Elspat placed a plate containing a little salt on his breast.
In due time, amid the lamentations of his tenantry, and while the
pipes woke the echoes of the glen, by the March of Gilliechriost (or
of the Follower of Christ), one of the oldest airs in existence, he
was laid in his last home, in the Ruthven aisle of Ardgowrie kirk,
and Roland found himself alone in the world.