Rolls disappeared on the evening of the day on which he had that long
consultation with Mr Monypenny. He did not return to Dalrulzian that
night. Marget, with many blushes and no small excitement, served the
dinner, which Bauby might be said to have cooked with tears. If these
salt drops were kept out of her sauces, she bedewed the white apron
which she lifted constantly to her eyes. "Maister John in jyal! and oor
Tammas gone after him; and what will I say to his mammaw?" Bauby cried.
She seemed to fear that it might be supposed some want of care on her
part which had led to this dreadful result. But even the sorrow of her
soul did not interfere with her sense of what was due to her master's
guest. Beaufort's dinner did not suffer, whatever else might. It was
scrupulously cooked, and served with all the care of which Marget was
capable; and when it was all over, and everything carefully put aside,
the women sat down together in the kitchen, and had a good cry over the
desolation of the house. The younger maids, perhaps, were not so deeply
concerned on this point as Bauby, who was an old servant, and considered
Dalrulzian as her home: but they were all more or less affected by the
disgrace, as well as sorry for the young master, who had "nae pride,"
and always a pleasant word for his attendants in whatever capacity.
Their minds were greatly affected, too, by the absence of Rolls. Not a
man in the house but the stranger gentleman! It was a state of affairs
which alarmed and depressed them, and proved, above all other signs,
that a great catastrophe had happened. Beaufort sent for the housekeeper
after dinner to give her such information as he thought necessary; and
Bauby was supported to the door by her subordinates, imploring her all
the way to keep up her heart. "You'll no' let on to the strange
gentleman." "Ye'll keep up a good face, and no' let him see how sair
cast down ye are," they said, one at either hand. There was a great deal
of struggling outside the door, and some stifled sounds of weeping,
before it was opened, and Bauby appeared, pushed in by some invisible
agency behind her, which closed the door promptly as soon as she was
within. She was not the important person Beaufort had expected to see;
but as she stood there, with her large white apron thrown over her arm,
and her comely countenance, like a sky after rain, lighted up with a
very wan and uncertain smile, putting the best face she could upon it,
Beaufort's sympathy overcame the inclination to laugh which he might
have felt in other circumstances, at the sight of her sudden entrance
and troubled clinging to the doorway. "Good evening," he said, "Mrs----"
"They call me Bauby Rolls, at your service," said Bauby, with a curtsey,
and a suppressed sob. "Mrs Rolls," said Beaufort, "your master may not
come home for a few days; he asked me to tell you not to be anxious;
that he hoped to be back soon; that there was nothing to be alarmed
about." "Eh! and was he so kind as think upon me, and him in such
trouble," cried Bauby, giving way to her emotions. "But I'm no alarmt;
no, no, why should I be?" she added, in a trembling voice. "He will be
hame, no doubt, in a day or twa, as ye say, sir, and glad, glad we'll a'
be. It's not that we have any doubt--but oh! what will his mammaw say to
me?" cried Bauby. After the tremulous momentary stand she had made, her
tears flowed faster than ever. "There has no such thing happened among
the Erskines since ever the name was kent in the country-side, and
that's maist from the beginning, as it's written in Scripture." "It's
all a mistake," cried Beaufort. "That it is--that it is," cried Bauby,
drying her eyes. And then she added with another curtsey, "I hope you'll
find everything to your satisfaction, sir, till the maister comes hame.
Tammas--that's the butler, Tammas Rolls, my brother, sir, if ye
please--is no' at hame to-night, and you wouldna like a lass aboot to
valet ye; they're all young but me. But if you would put out your cloes
to brush, or anything that wants doing, outside your door, it shall a'
be weel attended to. I'm real sorry there's no' another man aboot the
house: but a' that women can do we'll do, and with goodwill." "You are
very kind, Mrs Rolls," said Beaufort. "I was not thinking of myself--you
must not mind me. I shall get on very well. I am sorry to be a trouble
to you at such a melancholy moment." "Na, na, sir, not melancholy,"
cried Bauby, with her eyes streaming; "sin' ye say, and a'body must
allow, that it's just a mistake: we manna be put aboot by suchlike
trifles. But nae doubt it will be livelier and mair pleesant for
yoursel', sir, when Mr John and Tammas, they baith come hame. Would you
be wanting anything more to-night?" "Na, I never let on," Bauby said,
when she retired to the ready support of her handmaidens outside the
door--"no' me; I keepit a stout heart, and I said to him, 'It's of nae
consequence, sir,' I said,--'I'm nane cast down; it's just a
mistake--everybody kens that; and that he was to put his things outside
his door,' He got nothing that would go against the credit of the house
out of me."
But in spite of this forlorn confidence in her powers of baffling
suspicion, it was a wretched night that poor Bauby spent. John was
satisfactorily accounted for, and it was known where he was; but who
could say where Rolls might be? Bauby sat up half through the night
alone in the great empty kitchen with the solemn-sounding clock and the
cat purring loudly by the fire. She was as little used to the noises of
the night as Lord Rintoul was, and in her agony of watching felt the
perpetual shock and thrill of the unknown going through and through her.
She heard steps coming up to the house a hundred times through the
night, and stealing stealthily about the doors. "Is that you, Tammas?"
she said again and again, peering out into the night: but nobody
appeared. Nor did he appear next day, or the next. After her first
panic, Bauby gave out that he was with his master--that she had never
expected him--in order to secure him from remark. But in her own mind
horrible doubts arose. He had always been the most irreproachable of
men; but what if, in the shock of this catastrophe, even Tammas should
have taken to ill ways? Drink--that was the natural suggestion. Who can
fathom the inscrutable attractions it has, so that men yield to it who
never could have been suspected of such a weakness? Most women of the
lower classes have the conviction that no man can resist it. Heart-wrung
for his master, shamed to his soul for the credit of the house, had
Rolls, too, after successfully combating temptation for all his
respectable life, yielded to the demon? Bauby trembled, but kept her
terrors to herself. She said he might come back at any moment--he was
with his maister. Where else was it likely at such a time that he should
be?
But Rolls was not with his master. He was on the eve of a great and
momentous act. There were no superstitious alarms about him, as about
Rintoul, and no question in his mind what to do. Before he left
Dalrulzian that sad morning, he had shaped all the possibilities in his
thoughts, and knew what he intended; and his conversation with Mr
Monypenny gave substance and a certain reasonableness to his resolution.
But it was not in his nature by one impetuous movement to precipitate
affairs. He had never in his life acted hastily, and he had occasional
tremors of the flesh which chilled his impulse and made him pause. But
the interval, which was so bitter to his master, although all the
lookers-on congratulated themselves it could do him no harm, was exactly
what Rolls wanted in the extraordinary crisis to which he had come. A
humble person, quite unheroic in his habits as in his antecedents, it
was scarcely to be expected that the extraordinary project which had
entered his mind should have been carried out with the enthusiastic
impulse of romantic youth. But few youths, however romantic, would have
entertained such a purpose as that which now occupied Rolls. There are
many who would risk a great deal to smuggle an illustrious prisoner out
of his prison. But this was an enterprise of a very different kind. He
left Mr Monypenny with his head full of thoughts which were not all
heroic. None of his inquiries had been made without meaning. The
self-devotion which was in him was of a sober kind, not the devotion of
a Highland clansman, an Evan Dhu; and though the extraordinary expedient
he had planned appeared to him more and not less alarming than the
reality, his own self-sacrifice was not without a certain calculation
and caution too.
All these things had been seriously weighed and balanced in his mind. He
had considered his sister's interest, and even his own eventual
advantage. He had never neglected these primary objects of life, and he
did not do so now. But though all was taken into account and carefully
considered, Rolls's first magnanimous purpose was never shaken; and the
use he made of the important breathing-time of these intervening days
was characteristic. He had, like most men, floating in his mind several
things which he intended "some time" to do,--a vague intention which, in
the common course of affairs, is never carried out. One of these things
was to pay a visit to Edinburgh. Edinburgh to Rolls was as much as
London and Paris and Rome made into one. All his patriotic feelings, all
that respect for antiquity which is natural to the mind of a Scot, and
the pride of advancing progress and civilisation which becomes a man of
this century, were involved in his desire to visit the capital of his
own country. Notwithstanding all the facilities of travel, he had been
there but once before, and that in his youth. With a curious solemnity
he determined to make this expedition now. It seemed the most suitable
way of spending these all-important days, before he took the step beyond
which he did not know what might happen to him. A more serious visitor,
yet one more determined to see everything and to take the full advantage
of all he saw, never entered that romantic town. He looked like a rural
elder of the gravest Calvinistic type as he walked, in his black coat
and loosely tied white neckcloth, about the lofty streets. He went to
Holyrood, and gazed with reverence and profound belief at the stains of
Rizzio's blood. He mounted up to the Castle and examined Mons Meg with
all the care of a historical observer. He even inspected the pictures
in the National Collection with unbounded respect, if little knowledge,
and climbed the Observatory on the Calton Hill. There were many
spectators about the streets who remarked him as he walked about,
looking conscientiously at everything, with mingled amazement and
respect; for his respectability, his sober curiosity, his unvarying
seriousness, were remarkable enough to catch an intelligent eye. But
nobody suspected that Rolls's visit to Edinburgh was the solemn visit of
a martyr, permitting himself the indulgence of a last look at the scenes
that interested him most, ere giving himself up to an unknown and
mysterious doom.
On the morning of the 24th, having satisfied himself fully, he returned
home. He was quite satisfied. Whatever might now happen, he had
fulfilled his intention, and realised his dreams: nothing could take
away from him the gratification thus secured. He had seen the best that
earth contained, and now was ready for the worst, whatever that might
be. Great and strange sights, prodigies unknown to his fathers, were
befitting and natural objects to occupy him at this moment of fate. It
was still early when he got back: he stopped at the Tinto Station, not
at that which was nearest to Dalrulzian, and slowly making his way up by
the fatal road, visited the scene of Torrance's death. The lodge-keeper
called out to him, as he turned that way, that the road was shut up; but
Rolls paid no heed. He clambered over the hurdles that were placed
across, and soon reached the scene of the tragedy. The marks of the
horse's hoofs were scarcely yet obliterated, and the one fatal point at
which the terrified brute had dinted deeply into the tough clay, its
last desperate attempt to hold its footing, was almost as distinct as
ever.
The terrible incident with which he had so much to do came before him
with a confused perception of things he had not thought of at the time,
reviving, as in a dream, before his very eyes. He remembered that
Torrance lay with his head down the stream--a point which had not struck
him as important; and he remembered that Lord Rintoul had appeared out
of the wood at his cry for help so quickly, that he could not have been
far away when the accident took place. What special signification there
might be in these facts Rolls was not sufficiently clear-headed to see.
But he noted them with great gravity in a little notebook, which he had
bought for the purpose. Then, having concluded everything, he set out
solemnly on his way to Dunearn.
It was a long walk. The autumnal afternoon closed in mists; the moon
rose up out of the haze--the harvest moon, with a little redness in her
light. The landscape was dim in this mellowed vapour, and everything
subdued. The trees, with all their fading glories, hung still in the
haze; the river tinkled with a far-off sound; the lights in the cottages
were blurred, and looked like huge vague lamps in the milky air, as
Rolls trudged on slowly, surely, to the place of fate. It took him a
long time to walk there, and he did not hurry. Why should he hurry? He
was sure, went he ever so slowly, to arrive in time. As he went along,
all things that ever he had done came up into his mind. His youthful
extravagances--for Rolls, too, had once been young and silly; his
gradual settling into manhood; his aspirations, which he once had, like
the best; his final anchorage, which, if not in a very exalted post, nor
perhaps what he had once hoped for, was yet so respectable. Instead of
the long lines of trees, the hedgerows, and cottages which marked the
road, it was his own life that Rolls walked through as he went on. He
thought of the old folk, his father and mother; he seemed to see Bauby
and himself and the others coming home in just such a misty autumn night
from school. Jock, poor fellow! who had gone to sea, and had not been
heard of for years; Willie, who 'listed, and nearly broke the old
mother's heart. How many shipwrecks there had been among the lads he
once knew! Rolls felt, with a warmth of satisfaction about his heart,
how well it was to have walked uprightly, to have "won through" the
storms of life, and to have been a credit and a comfort to all belonging
to him. If anything was worth living for, that was. Willie and Jock had
both been cleverer than he, poor fellows! but they had both dropped, and
he had held on. Rolls did not want to be proud; he was quite willing to
say, "If it had not been for the grace of God!----" but yet it gave him
an elevating sense of the far superior pleasure it was to conquer your
inclinations in the days of your youth, and to do well whatever might
oppose. When the name of Rolls was mentioned by any one about Dunearn,
it would always be said that two of them had done very well--Tammas and
Bauby: these were the two. They had always held by one another; they had
always been respectable. But here Rolls stopped in his thoughts, taking
a long breath. After this, after what was going to happen, what would
the folk say then? Would a veil drop after to-day upon the unblemished
record of his life? He had never stood before a magistrate in all his
days--never seen how the world looked from the inside of a prison, even
as a visitor--had nothing to do, nothing to do with that side of the
world. He waved his hand, as if separating by a mystic line between all
that was doubtful or disreputable, and his own career. But now----Thus
through the misty darkening road, with now a red gleam from a smithy,
and now a softer glimmer from a cottage door, and anon the trees
standing out of the mists, and the landscape widening about him, Rolls
came on slowly, very seriously, to Dunearn. The long tower of the Town
House, which had seemed to threaten and call upon Lord Rintoul, was the
first thing that caught the eye of Rolls. The moon shone upon it, making
a white line of it against the cloudy sky.
Mr Monypenny was at dinner with his family. They dined at six o'clock,
which was thought a rather fashionable hour, and the comfortable meal
was just over. Instead of wine, the good man permitted himself one glass
of toddy when the weather grew cold. He was sitting between the table
and the fire, and his wife sat on the other side giving him her company
and consolation,--for Mr Monypenny was somewhat low and despondent. He
had been moved by Sir James Montgomery's warm and sudden partisanship
and belief of John Erskine's story; but he was a practical man himself,
and he could not, he owned, shaking his head, take a sensational view.
To tell him that there should have been just such an encounter as seemed
probable--high words between two gentlemen--but that they should part
with no harm done, and less than an hour after one of them be found
lying dead at the bottom of the Scaur--that was more than he could
swallow in the way of a story. To gain credence, there should have been
less or more. Let him hold his tongue altogether--a man is never called
upon to criminate himself--or let him say all. "Then you must just give
him a word, my dear, to say nothing about it," said Mrs Monypenny, who
was anxious too. "But that's just impossible, my dear, for he blurted it
all out to the sheriff just as he told it to me." "Do you not think it's
a sign of innocence that he should keep to one story, and when it's
evidently against himself, so far as it goes?" "A sign of innocence!" Mr
Monypenny said, with a snort of impatience. He took his toddy very
sadly, finding no exhilaration in it. "Pride will prevent him departing
from his story," he said. "If he had spoken out like a man, and called
for help like a Christian, it would have been nothing. All this fuss is
his own doing--a panic at the moment, and pride--pride now, and nothing
more."
"If ye please," said the trim maid who was Mr Monypenny's butler and
footman all in one--the "table-maid," as she was called--"there's one
wanting to speak to ye, sir. I've put him into the office, and he says
he can wait."
"One! and who may the one be?" said Mr Monypenny.
"Weel, sir, he's got his hat doon on his brows and a comforter aboot
his throat, and he looks sore for-foughten, as if he had travelled all
the day, and no' a word to throw at a dog; but I think it's Mr Rolls,
the butler at Dalrulzian."
"Rolls!" said Mr Monypenny. "I'll go to him directly, Jeanie. That's one
thing off my mind. I thought that old body had disappeared rather than
bear witness against his master," he said, when the girl had closed the
door.
"But oh, if he's going to bear witness against his master, it would have
been better for him to disappear," said the sympathetic wife. "Nasty
body! to eat folk's bread, and then to get them into trouble."
"Whesht with your foolish remarks, my dear: that is clean against the
law, and it would have had a very bad appearance, and prejudiced the
Court against us," Mr Monypenny said as he went away. But to tell the
truth, he was not glad; for Rolls was one of the most dangerous
witnesses against his master. The agent went to his office with a
darkened brow. It was not well lighted, for the lamp had been turned
down, and the fire was low. Rolls rose up from where he had been sitting
on the edge of a chair as Mr Monypenny came in. He had unwound his
comforter from his neck, and taken off his hat. His journey, and his
troubled thoughts, and the night air, had limped and damped him; the
starch was out of his tie, and the air of conscious rectitude out of
his aspect. He made a solemn but tremulous bow, and stood waiting till
the door was closed, and the man of business had thrown himself into a
chair. "Well, Rolls--so you have come back!" Mr Monypenny said.
"Ay, sir, I've come back. I've brought you the man, Mr Monypenny, that
did _yon_."
"Good Lord, Rolls! that did what? You take away my breath."
"I'll do it more or I'm done. The man that coupit yon poor lad Tinto and
his muckle horse ower the brae."
Mr Monypenny started to his feet. "Do you mean to tell me--Lord bless
us, man, speak out, can't ye! The man that----Are ye in your senses,
Rolls? And who may this man be?"
"You see before you, sir, one that's nae better than a coward. I thought
it would blow by. I thought the young master would be cleared in a
moment. There was nae ill meaning in my breast. I did the best I could
for him as soon as it was done, and lostna a moment. But my courage
failed me to say it was me----"
"You!" cried Monypenny, with a shout that rang through the house.
"Just me, and no other; and what for no' me? Am I steel and airn, to
take ill words from a man that was no master of mine? Ye can shut me up
in your prison--I meant him no hairm--and hang me if you like. I'll no'
let an innocent man suffer instead of me. I've come to give myself up."