MALCOLM SKENE.
The sportsmen assembled next morning a little later than usual, and
after hastily partaking of coffee, were about to set forth after the
partridges, with dogs, keepers, and beaters, to a particular spot
where Gavin Fowler assured them that the coveys were so thick as to
cover the ground, when Malcolm Skene, whom all were beginning to
miss, suddenly appeared, but minus gun, shot belt, and other shooting
paraphernalia, yet with a brighter smile on his face that it had won
overnight.
'What is up, Malcolm?' asked Roland; 'don't you go with us?'
'Impossible! I have just had a telegram from the Colonel. The corps
is short of officers, from sickness, casualties, and so forth; so I
must resign my leave and start at once.'
'For the depôt?'
'No--for Egypt,' continued Skene, 'so I must be off. Let me have a
trap, Roland, that I may catch the up train for the South.'
'This is sudden!' exclaimed several.
'Sudden indeed--but no less welcome,'
'I am so sorry, old fellow!' exclaimed Roland, 'when the birds are in
such excellent order, too.'
'I can scarcely realize it,' said Skene, whose thoughts were not with
the birds certainly. 'In a fortnight, I shall be again in my
fighting kit and in the land of the Pharaohs.'
Ignorant of what had so suddenly transpired, Hester, for whom he
looked anxiously and wistfully, was lingering in her room, till the
shooting party should have gone forth, unwilling to face Malcolm
Skene after the interview of last night, and full of a determination
to return at once to Merlwood, to her old life by the wooded Esk,
with her silver-haired father, his bubbling hookah, and his Indian
reminiscences--oh! how well she knew them all! But Maude, and even
the selfish and apparently volatile Annot, regarded the handsome
fellow with deep interest, and the lips of the former were white and
quivering as she bade him adieu.
'Good-bye, all you fellows;' he exclaimed, when old Buckle came with
the trap to the _porte-cochère_. 'Good-bye, Roland and you,
Jack--when shall we three meet again? In thunder and all the rest of
it, no doubt. Farewell, Miss Lindsay--Maude I may call you just
now--bid Hes--, your cousin, adieu for me, and God keep you all till
we meet once more--if ever!' he added, under his moustache.
Another moment he was gone, and no trace remained of him but the
wheel-tracks in the avenue.
'Good-bye--good-bye;' it sounded like a dirge in the air of the warm
autumn morning.
'Poor Malcolm--he is the king of good fellows,' said Roland to his
friends who were gathered in the entrance-hall, just as Hester Maule,
pale as a lily, after vainly practising a little the art of smiling
and looking happy in her mirror, appeared at the foot of the
staircase, and heard what had occurred.
'Yes--Skene has just gone, poor fellow. Should you not have liked to
have bade him farewell?'
'Yes--of course,' said Hester, with colourless lips; but thought, 'it
is better not--better not _now_.'
'His last message was to _you_,' whispered Maude.
'Well--it will be my turn next, and yours too, Elliot,' said Roland
as he lit a cigarette.
'It but reminds me of Wolfe's song,' added Elliot cheerily, as he
sang in a tragic-comic way--
'Let mirth and wine abound.
The trumpets sound,
And the colours flying are, my boys!
'Tis he, you, or I,
Whose business is to die;
Then why should we be melancholy, boys,
Whose business is to die?'
Come along--here are the dogs.'
'Skene's departure seems to have upset you girls,' said Roland, 'and
now, Hester, my dear cousin,' he added in a blundering way, 'you look
as pale as if Melancholy had marked you for her own.'
'Don't jest, Roland,' said Maude; 'Malcolm Skene looks like one who
has a history behind him, and a strange destiny before him. Only
think, Roland,' she added in a whisper, as she drew her brother
aside; 'he proposed to Hester in the conservatory last night!'
'And--and she----'
'Refused him.'
'Why?'
Maude only shook her pretty head; but his heart told him too probably
_why_, and for a time his conscience smote him.
'Don't you think she was foolish?' asked Maude; 'I certainly told her
that I thought so, as Malcolm is such a lovable fellow.'
'And what did she say?'
'Replied, with a feeble laugh, that she meant to die an
unappropriated blessing.'
'What is that, Maudie?'
'An old maid.'
'Nonsense--a handsome girl like Hester!'
To do the latter justice, she asked herself more than once why had
she refused him, and for _what_?
Many may deem that Hester acted a foolish part: but her heart was too
sore, and still too full of regard for another to find a place in it
for the love of Malcolm Skene, though she knew it had been hers in
the past, ready to lay at her feet.
Steadfast of purpose, she was, in some respects, a remarkable girl,
Hester Maule. Roland, her companion in childhood, as we have
elsewhere stated, was the one love of her life.
'All of hers upon that die was thrown,' and her heart was not to be
caught on the rebound, through pique, pride, soreness, or
disappointment.
But now that Malcolm was gone, Hester in solitude could not but give
a few tears as she thought of his true regard for her; his stately
presence, his soft earnestness, and his sad, tender eyes--thought
over all that--but for Roland's image--might have been; and of the
high compliment Skene's honest and gallant heart had paid her; but
all--even could she have wished it otherwise--was over now, and he
had gone to that fatal land of battle and disease, where so many
found their graves then!
Did Roland jest when he asked if Melancholy had marked her for its
own? If so, it was a species of wound, and she felt that 'it is only
wounds inflicted by those we love whose sting lasts.'
Maude and Annot, with the old groom, Johnnie Buckle, as their
_Escudero_, had gone for a 'spin' on their pads as far as Kilmany, to
visit the Gaules-Den, a deep ravine through which a river runs; Mrs.
Lindsay was in the seclusion of her own room, as usual at that time
of the day, when she took some kind of drops for her heart, and
Hester, left alone to silence and solitude, mentally followed Malcolm
Skene in his journey southward. Her hands were folded idly in her
lap; a kind of sad listlessness was all over her, and her soft dark
eyes were dreamily fixed on vacancy, and seemed to see--if we may say
so--visions, while, as on yesternight, the perfume of the lily of the
valley, of the stephanotis, and other flowers was floating round her.
She thought she might have seen him once again had she gone
downstairs at the usual time--but have seen him to what end or
purpose, constituted as her mind was then? Better not.
In these days it seemed to Hester that there was not one of her
actions which she did not repent of before it was half conceived or
half acted upon.
The forenoon sun soared hot and high, and the drowsy flies and one
huge humming bee, enclosed by the windows of her room, made their
useless journeys up and down the panes, on which the climbing ivy
pattered; the birds twittered among the leaves of the latter; an
occasional dog barked in the stable-yard, and the voice of the
peacock--never pleasant at any time--was heard on the terrace
without; but soon other sounds--voices indicative of excitement and
alarm--caused her to rise, throw open a window in the deep embayment
of the ancient wall, and look out.
Advancing across the emerald sward of the lawn, but slowly and
carefully, came a group--the sportsmen of the morning, with their
guns sloped on the shoulder or carried under an arm, and the dogs
cowering, as if overawed, about their footsteps.
What was the cause of this? What had happened?
Four men were bearing a fifth on a stretcher or hurdle of some
kind--a man either terribly wounded or dead, he lay so still--so very
still!
A half-stifled cry escaped Hester, as she rushed downstairs, for some
dreadful catastrophe had evidently taken place!