THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER.
When Malcolm and Joseph set out from Duff Harbour to find the laird,
they could hardly be said to have gone in search of him: all in
their power was to seek the parts where he was occasionally seen
in the hope of chancing upon him; and they wandered in vain about
the woods of Fife House all that week, returning disconsolate every
evening to the little inn on the banks of the Wan Water. Sunday came
and went without yielding a trace of him; and, almost in despair,
they resolved, if unsuccessful the next day, to get assistance and
organize a search for him. Monday passed like the days that had
preceded it, and they were returning dejectedly down the left bank
of the Wan Water, in the gloamin’, and nearing a part where it
is hemmed in by precipitous rocks, and is very narrow and deep,
crawling slow and black under the lofty arch of an ancient bridge
that spans it at one leap, when suddenly they caught sight of a head
peering over the parapet. They dared not run for fear of terrifying
him, if it should be the laird, and hurried quietly to the spot.
But when they reached the end of the bridge, its round back was bare
from end to end. On the other side of the river, the trees came
close up, and pursuit was hopeless in the gathering darkness.
“Laird, laird! they’ve taen awa’ Phemy, an’ we dinna ken whaur to
luik for her,” cried the poor father aloud.
Almost the same instant, and as if he had issued from the ground,
the laird stood before them. The men started back with astonishment
--soon changed into pity, for there was light enough to see how
miserable the poor fellow looked. Neither exposure nor privation
had thus wrought upon him: he was simply dying of fear. Having
greeted Joseph with embarrassment, he kept glancing doubtfully at
Malcolm, as if ready to run on his least movement. In a few words
Joseph explained their quest, with trembling voice and tears that
would not be denied enforcing the tale. Ere he had done, the laird’s
jaw had fallen, and further speech was impossible to him. But by
gestures sad and plain enough, he indicated that he knew nothing
of her, and had supposed her safe at home with her parents. In vain
they tried to persuade him to go back with them, promising every
protection: for sole answer he shook his head mournfully.
There came a sudden gust of wind among the branches. Joseph,
little used to trees and their ways with the wind, turned towards
the sound, and Malcolm unconsciously followed his movement. When
they turned again, the laird had vanished, and they took their way
homeward in sadness.
What passed next with the laird, can be but conjectured. It came
to be well enough known afterwards where he had been hiding; and
had it not been dusk as they came down the riverbank, the two men
might, looking up to the bridge from below, have had it suggested
to them. For in the half spandrel-wall between the first arch and
the bank, they might have spied a small window, looking down on
the sullen, silent gloom, foam-flecked with past commotion, that
crept languidly away from beneath. It belonged to a little vaulted
chamber in the bridge, devised by some banished lord as a kind of
summer-house--long neglected, but having in it yet a mouldering
table, a broken chair or two, and a rough bench. A little path led
steep from the end of the parapet down to its hidden door. It was
now used only by the gamekeepers for traps and fishing-gear, and
odds and ends of things, and was generally supposed to be locked
up. The laird had, however, found it open, and his refuge in it had
been connived at by one of the men, who, as they heard afterwards,
had given him the key, and assisted him in carrying out a plan he
had devised for barricading the door. It was from this place he
had so suddenly risen at the call of Blue Peter, and to it he had
as suddenly withdrawn again--to pass in silence and loneliness
through his last purgatorial pain.[8]
[8] _Com’ io fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro
Gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi,
Tant’ era ivi lo ’ncendio senza metro._
Del Purgatoria, xxvii. 49.
Mrs Stewart was sitting in her drawing-room alone: she seldom had
visitors at Kirkbyres--not that she liked being alone, or indeed
being there at all, for she would have lived on the Continent, but
that her son’s trustees, partly to indulge their own aversion to
her, taking upon them a larger discretionary power than rightly
belonged to them, kept her too straitened, which no doubt in the
recoil had its share in poor Stephen’s misery. It was only after
scraping for a whole year that she could escape to Paris or Hamburg,
where she was at home. There her sojourn was determined by her good
or ill fortune at faro.
What she meditated over her knitting by the fire-light,--she had
put out her candles,--it would be hard to say, perhaps unwholesome
to think:--there are souls to look into which is, to our dim
eyes, like gazing down from the verge of one of the Swedenborgian
pits.
But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of evil
beasts: they know not what they do--an excuse which, except in
regard of the past, no man can make for himself, seeing the very
making of it must testify its falsehood.
She looked up, gave a cry, and started to her feet: Stephen stood
before her, half-way between her and the door. Revealed in a flicker
of flame from the fire, he vanished in the following shade, and
for a moment she stood in doubt of her seeing sense. But when the
coal flashed again, there was her son, regarding her out of great
eyes that looked as if they had seen death. A ghastly air hung
about him as if he had just come back from Hades, but in his silent
bearing there was a sanity, even dignity, which strangely impressed
her. He came forward a pace or two, stopped, and said:--
“Dinna be frichtit, mem. I’m come. Sen’ the lassie hame, an’ du
wi’ me as ye like. I canna haud aff o’ me. But I think I’m deein’,
an ye needna misguide me.”
His voice, although it trembled a little, was clear and unimpeded,
and though weak, in its modulation manly.
Something in the woman’s heart responded. Was it motherhood--
or the deeper godhead? Was it pity for the dignity housed in the
crumbling clay, or repentance for the son of her womb? Or was it
that sickness gave hope, and she could afford to be kind?
“I don’t know what you mean, Stephen,” she said, more gently than
he had ever heard her speak.
Was it an agony of mind or of body, or was it but a flickering
of the shadows upon his face? A moment, and he gave a half-choked
shriek, and fell on the floor. His mother turned from him with
disgust, and rang the bell.
“Send Tom here,” she said.
An elderly, hard-featured man came.
“Stephen is in one of his fits,” she said.
The man looked about him: he could see no one in the room but his
mistress.
“There he is,” she continued, pointing to the floor. “Take him
away. Get him up to the loft and lay him in the hay.”
The man lifted his master like an unwieldy log, and carried him
convulsed from the room.
Stephen’s mother sat down again by the fire, and resumed her
knitting.