SIR ROBERT’S FORTUNE
A Novel
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF “CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD” “HARRY JOSCELYN”
“HE THAT WILL NOT WHEN HE MAY” ETC.
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1894
Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
_Printed by the Mershon Company, Rahway, N.J._
SIR ROBERT’S FORTUNE
CHAPTER I
“We are to see each other no more.”
These words were breathed rather than spoken in the dim recess of a
window, hidden behind ample curtains, the deep recess in which the
window was set leaving room enough for two figures standing close
together. Without was a misty night, whitened rather than lighted by a
pale moon.
“Who says so?”
“Alas! my uncle,” said the white figure, which looked misty, like the
night, in undistinguishable whiteness amid the darkness round.
The other figure was less distinguishable still, no more than a faint
solidity in the atmosphere, but from it came a deeper whisper, the low
sound of a man’s voice. “Your uncle!” it said.
There was character in the voices enough to throw some light upon the
speakers, even though they were unseen.
The woman’s had a faint accentuation of feeling, not of anxiety, yet
half defiance and half appeal. It seemed to announce a fact
unchangeable, yet to look and hope for a contradiction. The man’s had a
tone of acceptance and dismay. The fiat which had gone forth was more
real to him than to her, though she was in the position of asserting and
he of opposing it.
“Yes,” she said, “Ronald, my uncle--who has the strings of the purse and
every thing else in his hands----”
There was a moment’s pause, and then he said: “How does he mean to
manage that?”
“I am to be sent off to-morrow--it’s all settled--and if I had not
contrived to get out to-night, you would never have known.”
“But where? It all depends upon that,” he said with a little impatience.
“To Dalrugas,” she answered, with a sigh; and then: “It is miles and
miles from anywhere--a moor and a lodge, and not even a cottage near.
Dougal and his wife live there, and take care of the place; not a soul
can come near it--it is the end of the world. Oh, Ronald, what shall I
do? what shall I do?”
Once more in the passionate distress of the tone there was an appeal,
and a sort of feverish hope.
“We must think; we must think,” he said.
“What will thinking do? It will not change my uncle’s heart, nor the
distance, nor the dreadful solitude. What does he care if it kills me?
or any body?” The last words came from her with a shriller tone of
misery, as if it had become too much to bear.
“Hush, hush, for Heaven’s sake; they will hear you!” he said.
On the other side of the curtain there was a merry crowd in full career
of a reel, which in those days had not gone out of fashion as now. The
wild measure of the music, now quickening to lightning speed, now
dropping to sedater motion, with the feet of the dancers keeping time,
filled the atmosphere--a shriek would scarcely have been heard above
that mirthful din.
“Oh, why do you tell me to hush?” cried the girl impetuously. “Why
should I mind who hears? It is not for duty or love that I obey him, but
only because he has the money. Am I caring for his money? I could get my
own living: it would not want much. Why do I let him do what he likes
with me?”
“My darling,” said the man’s voice anxiously, “don’t do any thing rash,
for God’s sake! Think of our future. To displease him, to rebel, would
spoil every thing. I see hope in the loneliness, for my part. Be
patient, be patient, and let me work it out.”
“Oh, your working out!” she cried. “What good has it done? I would cut
the knot. It would be strange if we two could not get enough to live
upon--or myself, if you are afraid.”
He soothed her, coming closer, till the dark shadow and the white one
seemed but one, and murmured caressing words in her ears: “Let us wait
till the case is desperate, Lily. It is not desperate yet. I see chances
in the moor and the wilderness. He is playing into our hands if he only
knew it. Don’t, don’t spoil every thing by your impatience! Leave it to
me, and you’ll see good will come out of it.”
“I would rather take it into my own hands!” she cried.
“No, dearest, no! I see--I see all sorts of good in it. Go quite
cheerfully, as if you were pleased. No, your own way is best--don’t let
us awake any suspicions--go as if you were breaking your heart.”
“There will be no feigning in that,” she said; “I shall be breaking my
heart.”
“For a moment,” he said. “‘Weeping endureth for a night, but joy cometh
in the morning.’”
“Don’t, Ronald! I can’t bear to hear you quoting Scripture.”
“Why not? I am not the devil, I hope,” he said, with a low laugh.
There was a question in the girl’s hot, impatient heart, and then a
quick revulsion of feeling. “I don’t know what to do, or to think; I
feel as if I could not bear it,” she said, the quick tears dropping from
her eyes.
He wiped them tenderly away with the flourish of a white handkerchief in
the dark. “Trust to me,” he said soothingly. “Be sure it is for our
good, this. Listen: they are calling for you, Lily.”
“Oh, what do I care? How can I go among them all, and dance as if I
were as gay as the rest, when my heart is broken?”
“Not so badly broken but that it will mend,” he whispered, as with a
clever, swift movement he put aside the curtain and led her through. He
was so clever: where any other man would have been lost in perplexity,
or even despair, Ronald Lumsden always saw a way through. He was never
at a loss for an expedient: even that way of getting back to the room
out of the shadow of the curtains no one could have performed so easily,
so naturally as he did. He met and entered into the procession of
dancers going out of the room after the exertions of that reel as if he
and his partner formed part of it, and had been dancing too. People did
not “sit out” in those days, and Ronald was famous for his skill in the
national dance. Nobody doubted that he had been exerting himself with
the rest. Lily was half English--that is, she had been sent to England
for part of her education, and so far as reels were concerned, had lost
some of her native skill, and was not so clever. She was not, indeed,
supposed to be clever at all, though very nice, and pretty enough, and
an heiress--at least she was likely to be an heiress, if she continued
to please her uncle, who was not an easy man to please, and exacted
absolute obedience. There were people who shook their heads over her
chances, declaring that flesh and blood could not stand Sir Robert
Ramsay’s moods; but up to this time Lily had been more or less
successful, and the stake being so great, she had, people said, “every
encouragement” to persevere.
But Lily was by no means so strong as her lover, who joined the throng
as if he had formed part of it, with a perfect air of enjoyment and
light-heartedness. Lily could not look happy. It may be said that in his
repeated assurance that all would be right, and that he would find a way
out of it, she ought to have taken comfort, feeling in that a pledge of
his fidelity and steadiness to his love. But there was something in this
readiness of resource which discouraged, she could not have told why,
instead of making her happy. It would have been so much simpler, so
much more satisfactory, to have given up all thoughts of Sir Robert’s
money, and trusted to Providence and their own exertions to bring them
through. Lily felt that she could make any sacrifice, live upon nothing,
live anywhere, work her fingers to the bone, only to be independent, to
be free of the bondage of the uncle and the consciousness that it was
not for love but for his money that she had to accept all his caprices
and yield him obedience. If Ronald would but have yielded, if he would
have been imprudent, as so many young men were, how thankful she would
have been! She would have been content with the poorest living anywhere
to be free, to be with him whom she loved. She would have undertaken the
conduct of their little _ménage_ herself, without even thinking of
servants; she would have cooked for him, cleaned the house for him,
shrunk from nothing. But that, alas, was not Ronald’s way of looking at
the matter. He believed in keeping up appearances, in being rich at
almost any cost, and, at best, in looking rich if he were not really so;
and, above all and beyond all, in keeping well with the uncle, and
retaining the fortune. He would not have any doubt thrown on the
necessity of that. He was confident of his own powers of cheating the
uncle, and managing so that Lily should have all she wanted, in spite of
him, by throwing dust in his eyes. But Lily’s soul revolted against
throwing dust in any one’s eyes. This was the great difference between
them. I do not say that there was any great sin in circumventing a harsh
old man, who never paused to think what he was doing, or admitted a
question as to whether he was or was not absolutely in the right. He was
one of the men who always know themselves to be absolutely right;
therefore he was, as may be said, fair game. But Lily did not like it.
She would have liked a lover who said: “Never mind, we shall be happy
without him and his fortune.” She had tried every thing she knew to
bring young Lumsden to this point. But she was not able to do so: his
opinion was that every thing must be done to preserve the fortune, and
that, however hard it might be, there was nothing so hard but that it
must be done to humor old Sir Robert, to prevent him from cutting his
niece out of his will. Was not this right? Was it not prudent, wise, the
best thing? If he, an advocate without a fee, a briefless barrister,
living as best he could on chance windfalls and bits of journalism, had
been as bold as she desired, and carried her off from the house in Moray
Place to some garret of his own up among the roofs, would not every-body
have said that he had taken advantage of her youth and inexperience, and
deprived her of all the comforts and luxuries she was used to? That Lily
cared nothing for those luxuries, and that she was of the mettle to
adapt herself to any circumstances, so long as she had somebody to love
and who loved her, was not a thing to reckon with public opinion about;
and, indeed, Ronald Lumsden would have thought himself quite unjustified
in reckoning with it at all. To tell the truth, he had no desire on his
own part to give up such modest luxuries for himself as were to be had.
The day of clubs was not yet, at least in Edinburgh, to make life easy
for young men, but yet to get along, as he was doing precariously, was
easier for one than it would be for two. Even Lily, all hot for
sacrifice and for ministering with her own hands to all the needs of
life, had never contemplated the idea of doing without Robina, her maid,
who had been with her so many years that it was impossible for either of
them to realize what life would be if they were separated. Even if it
should be a necessary reality, Robina was included as a matter of
course. How it might be that Lily should require to scrub, and clean,
and cook with her own hands, while she was attended by a lady’s maid,
was a thing she had never reasoned out. You may think that a lady’s maid
would probably be of less use than her mistress had such service been
necessary; but this was not Robina’s case, who was a very capable person
all round, and prided herself on being able to “turn her hand” to any
thing. But then a runaway match was the last thing that was in
Lumsden’s thoughts.
It was a dance which every-body enjoyed that evening in the big,
old-fashioned rooms in George Square. George Square has fallen out of
knowledge in all the expansions of new Edinburgh, the Edinburgh that
lies on the other side of the valley, and dates no farther back than
last century. It also is of last century, but earlier than the Moray
Places and Crescents; far earlier than the last developments, the
Belgravia of the town. There Sir Walter once lived, in, I think, his
father’s house; and these substantial, ample, homely houses were the
first outlet of the well-to-do, the upper classes, of Edinburgh out of
the closes and high-up apartments, approached through the atrocities of
a common stair, in which so refined and luxurious a sybarite as Lawyer
Pleydell still lived in Sir Walter’s own time. These mansions are
severely plain outside--“undemonstrative,” as Scotch pride arrogantly
declares itself to be, aping humility with a pretence to which I, for
one, feel disposed to allow no quarter; but they are large and pleasant
inside, and the big square rooms the very thing to dance in or to feast
in. They were full of a happy crowd, bright in color and lively in
movement, with a larger share of golden hair and rosy cheeks than is to
be seen in most assemblies, and, perhaps, a greater freedom of laughter
and talk than would have been appropriate to a solemn ball in other
localities. For Edinburgh was not so large then as now, and they all
knew each other, and called each other by their Christian names--boy and
girl alike--with a general sense of fraternity modified by almost as
many love affairs as there were pairs of boys and girls present. There
were mothers and aunts all round the wide walls, but this did not subdue
the hilarity of the young ones, who knew each other’s mothers and aunts
almost as well as they knew their own, and counted upon their
indulgence. Lily Ramsay was almost the only girl who had nobody of her
own to turn to; but this only made her the more protected and
surrounded, every-body feeling that the motherless girl had a special
claim. They were by no means angels, these old-fashioned Edinburgh folk:
sharper tongues could not be than were to be found among them, or more
wicked wits; but there was a great deal of kindness under the terrible
turbans which crowned the heads of the elder ladies and the scarfs which
fell from their bare shoulders, and they all knew every one, and every
one’s father and mother for generations back. Their dress was queer, or
rather, I should have said, it was queer before the present revival of
the early Victorian or late Georgian style began. They wore puffed-out
sleeves, with small feather pillows in them to keep them inflated; they
had bare shoulders and ringlets; they had scarfs of lace or silk,
carefully disposed so as not to cover any thing, but considered very
classical and graceful, drawn in over the elbows, by people who knew how
to wear them, making manifest the slender waist (or often the outlines
of a waist which had ceased to be slender) behind. And they had, as has
been said, a dreadful particular, which it is to be hoped the blind fury
of fashion will not bring up again--turbans upon their heads. Turbans
such as no Indian or Bedouin ever wore, of all colors and every kind of
savage decoration, such as may be seen in pictures of that alarming age.
When young Lumsden left his Lily, it was in the midst of a group of
girls collected together in the interval between two dances, lamenting
that the programme was nearly exhausted, and that mamma had made a point
of not staying later than three o’clock. “Because it disturbs papa!”
said one of them indignantly, “though we all know he would go on snoring
if the Castle Rock were to fall!” They all said papa and mamma in those
days.
“But mamma says there are so many parties going,” said another: “a ball
for almost every night next week; and what are we to do for dresses?
Tarlatan’s in rags with two, and even a silk slip is shameful to look at
at the end of a week.”
“Lily has nothing to do but to get another whenever she wants it,” said
Jeanie Scott.
“And throw away the old ones, she’s such a grand lady,” said Maggie
Lauder.
“Hold all your tongues,” said Bella Rutherford; “it does her this good,
that she thinks less about it than any of us.”
“She has other things to think of,” cried another; and there was a laugh
and a general chorus, “So have we all.” “But, Lily! is Sir Robert as
dour as ever?” one of the rosy creatures cried.
“I don’t think I am going to any more of your balls,” said Lily; “I’m
tired of dancing. We just dance, dance, and think of nothing else.”
“What else should we think about at our age?” said Mary Bell, opening
wide a pair of round blue eyes.
“We’ll have plenty other things to think about, mamma says, and that
soon enough,” said Alison Murray, who was just going to be married, with
a sigh. “But there’s the music striking up again, and who’s my partner?
for I’m sure I don’t remember whether its Alick Scott, or Johnnie
Beatoun, or Bob Murray. Oh! is it you, Bob?” she said with relief,
putting her hand upon an outstretched arm. They were almost all in a
similar perplexity, except, indeed, such as had their own special
partner waiting. Lily was almost glad that it was not Ronald, but a big
young Macgregor, who led her off to the top of the room to a sedate
quadrille. The waltz existed in those days, but it was still an
indulgence, and looked upon with but scant favor by the mothers. The
elder folks were scandalized by the close contact, and even the girls
liked best that it should be an accepted lover, or at the least a
brother or cousin, whose arm encircled their waist. So they still
preferred dances in which there were “figures,” and took their pleasure
occasionally in a riotous “Lancers” or a merry reel with great relief.
Lily was young enough to forget herself and her troubles even in the
slow movement of the quadrilles, with every-body else round chattering
and beaming and forgetting when it was their turn to dance. But she said
to herself that it was the last. Of all these dances of which they spoke
she would see none. When the others gathered, delighted to enjoy
themselves, she would be gazing across the dark moor, hearing nothing
but the hum of insects and the cry of the curlew, or, perhaps, a
watchful blackbird in the little clump of trees. Well! for to-night she
would forget.
I need not say it was Lumsden who saw her to her own door on the other
side of the square. No one there would have been such a spoil-sport as
to interfere with his right whatever old Sir Robert might say. They
stole out in a lull of the leave-taking, when the most of the people
were gone, and others lingered for just this “one more” for which the
girls pleaded. The misty moonlight filled the square, and made all the
waiting carriages look like ghostly equipages bent upon some mystic
journey in the middle of the night. They paused at the corner of the
square, where the road led down to the pleasant Meadows, all white and
indefinite in the mist, spreading out into the distance. Lumsden would
fain have drawn her away into a little further discussion, wandering
under the trees, where they would have met nobody at that hour; but Lily
was not bold enough to walk in the Meadows between two and three in the
morning. She was willing, however, to walk up and down a little on the
other side of the square before she said good-night. Nobody saw them
there, except some of the coachmen on the boxes, who were too sleepy to
mind who passed, and Robina, who had silently opened the door and was
waiting for her mistress. Robina was several years older than Lily, and
had relinquished all thoughts of a sweetheart in her own person. She
stood concealing herself in the doorway, ready, if any sound should be
made within which denoted wakefulness on the part of Sir Robert, to
snatch her young lady even from her lover’s arms; and watching, with
very mingled feelings, the pair half seen--the white figure congenial to
the moonlight, and the dark one just visible, like a prop to a flower.
“Lily’s her name and Lily’s her nature,” said Robina to herself, with a
little moisture in her kind eyes; “but, oh! is he worthy of her, is he
worthy of her?” This was too deep a question to be solved by any thing
but time and proof, which are the last things to satisfy the heart. At
last there was a lingering parting, and Lily stole, in her white wraps,
all white from top to toe, into the dark and silent house.