CEAD MILLE MALOCH!
The shout uttered by Allan in his delirium had not been uttered in
vain.
It chanced that Mr. Tappleton, the silver-haired old butler, who had
been custodier of the wine binns and the massive old plate in its
iron-bound chest, since the present Lord Aberfeldie was a baby in
long clothes, had entered his dusty and cobwebbed repositories, and
was seeking through their stone shelves for some fine old crusted
port of a peculiar vintage, kept alone for the use of his master and
himself, when the cry of Allan and some other strange sounds reached
his ears, as he thought, and seriously startled him.
We say he thought, for the recess of his wine binns was an unlikely
place to hear any other sound than that made by a scared rat.
It was now the dead, dull silence of midnight, when the sounds that
are unknown amid the buzz of mid-day life are heard, and seem so
oddly, so preternaturally loud and strange--a crack in a door panel
or wainscot, the tap of a moth against the window-panes, distant
noises that come we know not how or from what on the still damp air.
In a country house at night there is usually a solemn stillness that
is painful and oppressive to the wakeful; and it was amidst this
silence, the cry--for a human cry it was--reached the butler's
startled ear.
But whence had it come? Out of the stone wall, or from the ground
beneath, or from the throat of a raven in one of the great chimneys
of the old house?
'Impossible!' thought Tappleton; 'it was the voice of a man--or a
ghost.'
At the latter idea he closed the wine-binn door, and retired with
precipitation to his cosy room, and thought the matter over as he
stirred and sipped his hot whisky toddy, but feeling ever and anon
that wild throbbing of the heart, and 'that electric chill and rising
of the hair which accompanies supernatural panic.'
The old man had a most uncomfortable feeling about the voice he had
heard, and its strangely muffled sound seemed to come in fancy to his
ear again and again; and now he, not unnaturally, began to associate
it with the mysterious disappearance of Allan, the Master.
With earliest dawn he betook himself to his wine cellar again, and
felt that he was a bolder man in daylight than in the gloom of
midnight; but 'most men are,' says Charles Dickens; yet when an
unmistakable moan or two reached his ears, his fear of the
supernatural so nearly gained the ascendancy that he was about to
take to flight again.
However he paused, while his old heart beat painfully, and began to
think of what adjoined his cellars, and at once there flashed upon
his memory the locality of the horrible old vault; for the butler
knew all the 'outs and ins' of Dundargue as well as if he had built
it.
In the course of modern alterations and repairs a portion of the
originally enormous wall of the vault had been thinned and cut away.
There were crannies in the masonry, and it was through these the
voice of the imprisoned had reached the butler during his casual
visit to his cellar.
'Some one is there. Good Heavens! if it should be the Master--the
Master after a'!' exclaimed Tappleton; and, quick as his old legs
could carry him, he rushed up stairs, through the picture-gallery,
along the arched corridor, and reached at last the oak trap-door; but
when he saw it, with its great iron hasp over the rusted staple, hope
died away, and his soul sank within him.
Loth to linger in a place where, as we have stated, superstition
believed that those who did so, had a creeping sense of having near
them shadowy forms and intangible presences, he was on the point of
turning away, when, controlling his silly fears, he thought he might
as well pursue his investigations further.
He raised the trap-door, and almost immediately a voice ascended to
his ear from the darkness below. He peered down, but could see
nothing.
'Wha is there--wha spoke?' asked the butler.
'I--I, the Master,' replied the weak voice of Allan Graham.
'You, sir--heaven be gude tae us! You sir! hoo in God's name cam' ye
to be doon there?' cried Tappleton, in mingled joy, horror, and great
perplexity.
'Summon help--there's a good old fellow; get me out, and then you
will know all--quick, Tappleton, or--or I shall not last much
longer,' replied Allan, faintly, and at intervals, in a voice so low
that his last words seemed to die away, while Tappleton rushed off as
fast as his years would permit, to seek Lord Aberfeldie and alarm the
whole household, which he did very effectually by a sudden and
furious application to the great house-bell, causing a very general
idea of fire, and bringing all from their rooms in various kinds of
_déshabille_ at that early hour of the morning.
'The Master's found--the Master's found!' he kept shouting on every
hand.
'Where--where?' asked twenty voices.
'Ay, ye may weel ask _whar_,' was the tantalizing response.
In the breast of Lord Aberfeldie and all his household incredulity at
first, and then profound astonishment, reigned for a time on the
butler making himself understood, and all hastened to the scene of
his discovery.
'The Master--the Master down there,' muttered the servants, looking
inquiringly in each other's faces. 'How came such a thing to pass?'
They jostled and impeded each other; but Lord Aberfeldie's authority
and soldier-like promptitude soon defined a line of action.
'Lights--lights and ropes; look alive, men!' he exclaimed.
These requisites were soon brought.
'Lower away--take courage--we'll soon have you out,' exclaimed his
father. 'Tie the ropes tightly round you.'
Allan, in a faint voice, made them aware that this was impossible, as
his left arm was broken, tidings which added commiseration and grief
to the blank amazement of Olive, Eveline, and his mother.
'Who will go down?' asked Lord Aberfeldie, looking around him.
'I--and I--and I!'
Every man in the house was ready to descend, but Angus Glas, the
active young deerstalker, slid down the rope with a lanthorn in his
hand, followed by the prayer of Olive, who would not be kept back,
her eyes wild, her now pale lips apart, her sweet face blanched, and
a strange stiffness in all her usually lithe limbs.
Pale as death, his face plastered with dried blood--blood that had
flowed from a contusion in his head--livid and helpless, his left arm
hanging limp as an empty sleeve by his side, his eyes half closed, as
if unable to endure the glare of the day after being so long in the
dark, Allan was brought up, and, on beholding him, the exclamations
of commiseration and astonishment redoubled; and yet it could be seen
that he was almost past questioning, and mounted grooms were
instantly despatched to summon all the medical aid of the district.
Had the butler's nocturnal visit to his binns been twenty-four hours
later, Allan Graham must have perished, and his fate might never have
been known in his own generation perhaps.
The whole catastrophe seemed so strange, unintelligible, unnatural,
and harrowing that the nerves of Lady Aberfeldie were terribly shaken
by it; so were those of her daughter and Olive, and each needed all
the comfort and support the other could give.
Some wine, which he drank thirstily, first revived the patient after
he was conveyed to his room.
'How in the name of heaven, Allan, came you to fall into that place?'
asked his father.
'I did not fall in,' replied Allan, in a species of husky whisper.
'How then?'
'Holcroft!' was all Allan could utter, when the room seemed to swim
round him and he became insensible.
Lord Aberfeldie knew not precisely what to make of the reply, but
suspicion gave him a certain clue to what he thought had happened,
and the same idea seemed to occur to young Angus, the gillie, who was
assisting to undress his master and put him to bed, for his eyes
gleamed under their shaggy brows, and he could only mutter from time
to time,
'_Cead mille maloch!_'
A malediction in which Lord Aberfeldie heartily concurred.
When ultimately the Peer learned all that had transpired, the
incident of the cheque he had so innocently and generously given
Holcroft was completely forgotten. He felt only rage, mingled with
utter stupefaction, that a man could act so basely as his recent
guest had done. It was altogether out of his calculation and
experience of human life in every way.
'But what is to be done now--to search out and punish this malignant
scoundrel?' he exclaimed; while Lady Aberfeldie, all her motherly
feelings outraged, was for raising fire and sword, and letting loose
all the terrors of the law on Holcroft's head.
Lord Aberfeldie, however, after a time thought differently. He had a
horror of publicity, of newspaper gossip and scandals, of making his
honoured and ancestral home and the affairs of his family a _point
d'appui_, as he said, for such things--a world's wonder, even for a
time; and thus he declined to attempt to punish Holcroft for an
outrage none had seen him commit.
He would leave that to the course of events, and to Time, the avenger.
More than all, the name of Olive Raymond might crop up in the
unseemly matter.
'His father was a brave, good fellow, and my dearest friend!' said
Lord Aberfeldie sadly; 'how comes his son to be such an utter
villain? He has drawn his evil tendencies from some past generation;
it is said that such a kind of poison is at times transmitted in the
blood, and that no human being can truly value the resistance of sin
or folly.'
But Lady Aberfeldie was stormy, and declined to be pacified.
'We have the future to think of,' said her husband again; 'evil
tongues to guard against for the sake of Olive, our whole family, and
my old comrade the General, who is now in his grave--the father of
that foul ingrate.'
Thus it was that no mention of the affair was made by the daily
prints, to the surprise, certainly, and perhaps the relief, of
Holcroft's mind.
'Say no more on this subject, Eveline,' said Lord Aberfeldie, as he
sought to soothe his wife. 'Gladly would I forget that we had ever
sheltered at Dundargue a guest so degrading in character; gladly
would I forget as soon as possible--if it be possible--the hours of
intense suffering we have undergone, more than all that Allan must
have undergone in that horrible place, and yet under his own roof!'
Many a silent and reproachful tear Olive shed in secret, as she knew,
in the recent past time, how much her pride, petulance, and suspicion
had done to further jealousy and resentment in the mind of Holcroft
against her cousin; and she felt that too probably she had caused all
this.
But Holcroft was a bankrupt and a blackleg now, and never more, at
London or anywhere else, she thought, could he cross _her_ path
again. Till now she never believed that the world could contain a
man so utterly unprincipled, so thoroughly base!
The household servants supposed that the Master had fallen into that
gruesome vault by accident, and they were allowed to adopt the idea.
'But who closed the trap and dropped the hasp over the staple?'
thought old Tappleton; yet eventually he allowed himself to be talked
into the idea that he had made a mistake in that matter.
Allan lay long ill and delirious after all he had undergone; but when
it was announced that he was past danger, great was the rejoicing of
all the servants and the household at Dundargue, for all loved the
Master well, and were faithfully attached to the family by ties of
residence and clanship, even in this Victorian age. 'The devoted
loyalty of the clansmen to their chiefs existed undiminished for
generations after the system of clan government was abolished in
1746,' said the _Standard_ newspaper recently; 'and it would be
wholly erroneous to contend, _even now_, that the peculiar affection
between the people and their chief, altogether different in nature
and degree from any relationship known in a Saxon community, has died
away.'
But the family of Aberfeldie had not seen the last of Mr. Hawke
Holcroft.