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The Wizard's Son, Vol. 2 (of 3)

by Mrs. Oliphant · English · Gutenberg #47556 · 428,732 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Wizard's Son, Vol. 2 (of 3)

Author: Mrs. Oliphant


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIZARD'S SON, VOL. 2 (OF 3) ***

                     THE WIZARD'S SON

                         A Novel

                     BY MRS. OLIPHANT

    AUTHOR OF "THE CURATE IN CHARGE," "YOUNG MUSGRAVE," ETC.


    IN THREE VOLUMES
    VOL. II.

    London
    MACMILLAN AND CO.
    1884

    [_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved_]

    LONDON:
    R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS,
    BREAD STREET HILL.




THE WIZARD'S SON.




CHAPTER I.


When Walter seated himself beside Oona in the boat, and Hamish pushed
off from the beach, there fell upon both these young people a sensation
of quiet and relief for which one of them at least found it very
difficult to account. It had turned out a very still afternoon. The
heavy rains were over, the clouds broken up and dispersing, with a sort
of sullen stillness, like a defeated army making off in dull haste, yet
not without a stand here and there, behind the mountains. The loch was
dark and still, all hushed after the sweeping blasts of rain, but black
with the reflections of gloom from the sky. There was a sense of safety,
of sudden quiet, of escape, in that sensation of pushing off, away from
all passion and agitation upon this still sea of calm. Why Oona, who
feared no one, who had no painful thoughts or associations to flee from,
should have felt this she could not tell. The sense of interest in, and
anxiety for, the young man by her side was altogether different. That
was sympathetic and definable; but the sensation of relief was something
more. She looked at him with a smile and sigh of ease as she gathered
the strings of the rudder into her hands.

"I feel," she said, "as if I were running away, and had got safe out of
reach; though there is nobody pursuing me that I know of," she added,
with a faint laugh of satisfaction.

The wind blew the end of the white wrapper round her throat towards her
companion, and he caught it as she had caught the rudder ropes.

"It is I that am pursued," he said, "and have escaped. I have a feeling
that I am safe here. The kind water, and the daylight, and you--but how
should _you_ feel it? It must have gone from my mind to yours."

"The water does not look so very kind," said Oona, "except that it
separates us from the annoyances that are on land--when there are
annoyances."

She had never known any that were more than the troubles of a child
before.

"There is this that makes it kind. If you were driven beyond bearing, a
plunge down there and all would be over----"

"Lord Erradeen!"

"Oh, I don't mean to try. I have no thought of trying; but look how
peaceful, how deep, all liquid blackness! It might go down to the
mystic centre of the earth for anything one knows."

He leant over a little, looking down into those depths profound which
were so still that the boat seemed to cut through a surface which had
solidity; and in doing this put the boat out of trim, and elicited a
growl from Hamish.

It seemed to Oona, too, as if there was something seductive in that
profound liquid depth, concealing all that sought refuge there. She put
out her hand and grasped his arm in the thrill of this thought.

"Oh, don't look down," she said. "I have heard of people being caught,
in spite of themselves, by some charm in it." The movement was quite
involuntary and simple; but, on second thoughts, Oona drew away her
hand, and blushed a little. "Besides, you put the boat out of trim," she
said.

"If I should ever be in deadly danger," said Walter, with the
seriousness which had been in his face all along, "will you put out your
hand like that, without reflection, and save me?"

Oona tried to laugh again; but it was not easy; his seriousness gained
upon her, in spite of herself.

"I think we are talking nonsense, and feeling nonsense; for it seems to
me as if we had escaped from something. Now Hamish is pleased; the boat
is trimmed. Don't you think," she said, with an effort to turn off
graver subjects, "that it is a pity those scientific people who can do
everything should not tunnel down through that centre of the earth you
were speaking of, straight through to the other side of the world? Then
we might be dropped through to Australia without any trouble. I have a
brother there; indeed I have a brother in most places. Mamma and I might
go and see Rob now and then, or he might come home for a dance, poor
fellow; he was always very fond of dancing."

Thus she managed to fill up the time till they reached the isle. It lay
upon the surface of that great mirror, all fringed and feathered with
its bare trees; the occasional colour in the roofs gleaming back again
out of the water; a little natural fastness, safe and sure. As Oona was
later in returning than had been expected, the little garrison of women
in the isle was all astir and watching for her coming. Out of one of the
upper windows there was the head of a young maid visible, gazing down
the loch; and Mrs. Forrester, in her furred cloak, was standing in the
porch, and Mysie half way down to the beach, moving from point to point
of vision.

"They are all about but old Cookie," said Oona. "It is a terrible
business when I am late. They think everything that is dreadful must
have happened, and that makes a delightful sensation when I get home
safe and well. I am every day rescued from a watery grave, or saved from
some dreadful accident on shore, in my mother's imagination. She gives
herself the misery of it, and then she has the pleasure of it," cried
the girl, with the amused cynicism of youth.

"But to-day you bring a real fugitive with you--an escaped--what shall I
call myself?--escaped not from harm, but from doing harm--which is the
most dangerous of the two."

"You will never do harm to the poor folk," said Oona, looking at him
with kind eyes.

"Never, while I am in my senses, and know. I want you to promise me
something before we land."

"You must make haste, then, and ask; for there is Mysie ready with the
boat-hook," said Oona, a little alarmed.

"Promise me--if it ever occurs that harm is being done in my name, to
make me know it. Oh, not a mere note sent to my house; I might never
receive it like the last; but to make me know. See me, speak to me,
think even:--and you will save me."

"Oh, Lord Erradeen, you must not put such a responsibility on me. How
can I, a girl that is only a country neighbour----"

"Promise me!" he said.

"Oh, Lord Erradeen, this is almost tyrannical. Yes, if I can--if I think
anything is concealed from you. Here I am, Mysie, quite safe; and of
course mamma has been making herself miserable. I have brought Lord
Erradeen to luncheon," Oona said.

"Eh, my lord, but we're glad to see you," said Mysie, with the gracious
ease of hospitality. "They said you were going without saying good-bye,
but I would never believe it. It is just his lordship, mem, as I said
it was," she called to Mrs. Forrester, who was hastening down the
slope.

The mistress of the island came down tripping, with her elderly graces,
waving her white delicate hands.

"Oh, Oona, my dear, but I'm thankful to see you, and nothing happened,"
she cried; "and ye are very welcome, Lord Erradeen. I thought you would
never go away without saying good-bye. Come away up to the house. It is
late, late, for luncheon; but there will be some reason; and I never
have any heart to take a meal by myself. Everything is ready: if it's
not all spoiled?" Mrs. Forrester added, turning round to Mysie, as she
shook hands with the unexpected guest.

"Oh, no fear of that, mem," said the factotum, "we're well enough used
to waiting in this house: an hour, half an hour, is just nothing. The
trout is never put down to the fire till we see the boat; but I maun
away and tell cook."

"And you will get out some of the good claret," Mrs. Forrester cried.
"Come away--come away, Lord Erradeen. We have just been wondering what
had become of you. It is quite unfriendly to be at Auchnasheen and not
come over to see us. Oona, run, my dear, and take off your things. Lord
Erradeen will take charge of me. I am fain of an arm when I can get one,
up the brae. When the boys were at home I always got a good pull up. And
where did you foregather, you two? I am glad Oona had the sense to bring
you with her. And I hope the trout will not be spoiled," she said with
some anxiety. "Mysie is just too confident--far too confident. She is
one that thinks nothing can go wrong on the isle."

"That is my creed too," said Walter with an awakening of his natural
inclination to make himself agreeable, and yet a more serious meaning in
the words.

"Oh fie!" said Mrs. Forrester, shaking her head, "to flatter a simple
person like me! We have but little, very little to offer; the only thing
in our favour is that it's offered with real goodwill. And how do you
like Auchnasheen? and are you just keeping it up as it was in the old
lord's time? and how is Mary Fleming, the housekeeper, that was always
an ailing body?" These questions, with others of the same kind, answered
the purpose of conversation as they ascended to the house--with little
intervals between, for Mrs. Forrester was a little breathless though she
did not care to say so and preferred to make pauses now and then to
point out the variations of the landscape. "Though I know it so well, I
never find it two days the same," she said. None of these transparent
little fictions, so innocent, so natural, were unknown to her friends,
and the sight of them had a curiously strengthening and soothing effect
upon Walter, to whom the gentle perseverance of those amiable foibles,
so simple and evident, gave a sense of reality and nature which had
begun to be wanting in his world. His heart grew lighter as he watched
the "ways" of this simple woman, about whose guiles and pretences even
there was no mystery at all, and whose little affectations somehow
seemed to make her only more real. It gave him a momentary shock,
however, when she turned round at her own door, and directed his
attention to his old castle lying in lines of black and grey upon the
glistening water. He drew her hastily within the porch.

"It gets colder and colder," he said; "the wind goes through and through
one. Don't let me keep you out in the chilly air."

"I think you must have caught a little cold," said Mrs. Forrester,
concerned, "for I do not find it so chilly for my part. To be sure, Loch
Houran is never like your quiet landward places in England: we are used
up here to all the changes. Oona will be waiting for us by this time;
and I hope you are ready for your dinner, Lord Erradeen, for I am sure I
am. I should say for your lunch: but when it comes to be so far on in
the day as this, these short winter days, Oona and me, we just make it
our dinner. Oh, there you are, my dear! Lord Erradeen will like to step
into Ronald's room and wash his hands, and then there will be nothing to
wait for but the trout."

When they were seated at the table, with the trout cooked to perfection
as fish only is where it is caught, Mrs. Forrester pressing him to eat
with old-fashioned anxiety, and even Mysie, who waited at table, adding
affectionate importunities, Walter's heart was touched with a sense of
the innocence, the kindness, the gentle nature about him. He felt
himself cared for like a child, regarded indeed as a sort of larger
child to be indulged with every dainty they could think of, and yet in
some ineffable way protected and guided too by the simple creatures
round him. The mistress and the maid had little friendly controversies
as to what was best for him.

"I thought some good sherry wine, mem, and him coming off the water,
would be better than yon cauld clairet."

"Well, perhaps you are right, Mysie; but the young men nowadays are all
for claret," Mrs. Forrester said.

"Just a wee bittie more of the fish, my lord," said Mysie, in his ear.

"No, no, Mysie," cried her mistress. "You know there are birds coming.
Just take away the trout, it is a little cold, and there's far more
nourishment in the grouse."

"To my mind, mem," said Mysie, "there is nothing better than a Loch
Houran trout."

All this had the strangest effect upon Walter. To come into this simple
house was like coming back to nature, and that life of childhood in
which there are no skeletons or shadows. Even his mother had never been
so sheltering, so safe, so real. Mrs. Methven had far more intellect and
passion than Mrs. Forrester. It had been impossible to her to bear the
failure of her ideal in her boy. Her very love had been full of pain and
trouble to both. But this other mother was of a different fashion.
Whatever her children did was good in her eyes; but she protected, fed,
took care of, extended her soft wings over them as if they still were in
the maternal nest. The innocence of it all moved Walter out of himself.

"Do you know," he said at last, "what I have come from to your kind,
sheltering house, Mrs. Forrester? Do you know what everybody, even your
daughter, thought of me two hours ago?"

"I never thought any harm of you, Lord Erradeen," said Oona, looking up
hastily.

"Harm of him! Dear me, Oona, you are far, very far, from polite. And
what was it they thought of you?" asked Mrs. Forrester. "Oona is so
brusque, she just says what she thinks; but sure am I it was nothing but
good."

"They thought," said Walter, with an excitement which grew upon him as
he went on, "that I, who have been poor myself all my life, that never
had any money or lands till a few weeks ago, that I was going to turn
poor women and children out of their houses, out upon the world, out to
the wet, cold mountain-side, without a shelter in sight. They thought I
was capable of that. An old woman more than eighty, and a lot of little
children! They thought I would turn them out! Oh, not the poor creatures
themselves, but others; even Miss Oona. Is thy servant a dog--" cried
the young man in a blaze of fiery agitation, the hot light of pain
shining through the involuntary moisture in his eyes. "Somebody says
that in the Bible, I know. Is thy servant a dog that he should do this
thing?"

"Oh, my dear!" cried Mrs. Forrester, in her sympathy, forgetting all
distinctions, and only remembering that he was very like her Ronald, and
was in trouble, "nobody, nobody thought you would do that. Oh no, no,
fie no! nobody had such a thought. If I could believe it of Oona I would
not speak to her--I would--no, no, it was never believed. I, for one, I
knew you would never do it. I saw it," cried the kind lady, "in your
eyes!"

Though Walter had no real confidence in the independent judgment which
she asserted so unhesitatingly, yet he was consoled by the softness of
the words, the assurance of the tone.

"I did not think such things ever happened in Scotland," he said. "It is
Ireland one thinks of: and that it should be supposed I would do it, has
hurt me more than I can say--a stranger who had no one to stand up for
me."

"That was just the way of it," said Mrs. Forrester, soothingly. "We
think here that there is something strange in English ways. We never
know how a thing will appear to them--that is how it was. But I said all
through that it was impossible, and I just wrote to you last night (you
would get my letter?) that you must not do it--for fear you might not
have understood how it was."

"But there is another side to it," said Oona, "we must not forget,
mother. Sometimes it is said, you know, that the poor folk can do no
good where they are. We can all understand the shock of seeing them
turned out of their houses: but then people say they cannot live
there--that it would be better for themselves to be forced to go away."

"That is true, Oona," said her mother, facing round: "it is just a kind
of starvation. When old Jenny went there first (she was in my nursery
when I had one) there was just a perpetual craik about her rent. Her man
was one of the Frasers, and a well-doing, decent man, till he died, poor
fellow, as we must all do: and since that I have heard little about it,
for I think it was just out of her power to pay anything. Duncan Fraser,
he is a very decent man, but I remember the minister was saying if he
was in Glasgow or Paisley, or some of those places, it would be better
for his family. I recollect that the minister did say that."

"So, Lord Erradeen," said Oona, "without being cruel you might: but
I--we all like you ten times better that you couldn't," said the girl
impulsively.

"Ay, that we do," said her mother, ready to back up every side, "that we
do. But I am not surprised. I knew that there was nothing unkind either
in your heart or your face."

"There was no time," said Walter, "to think what was wise, or take into
consideration, like a benevolent tyrant, what could be done for their
good, without consulting their inclinations: which is what you mean,
Miss Forrester----"

Oona smiled, with a little heightened colour. It was the commencement of
one of those pretty duels which mean mutual attraction rather than
opposition. She said, with a little nod of her head, "Go on."

"But one thing is certain," he said, with the almost solemn air which
returned to his face at intervals, "that I will rather want shelter
myself than turn another man out of his house, on any argument--far less
helpless women and children. Did you laugh? I see no laughing in it,"
the young man cried.

"Me--laugh!" cried Mrs. Forrester, though it was at Oona he had looked.
"If I laughed it was for pleasure. Between ourselves, Lord Erradeen
(though they might perhaps be better away), turning out a poor family
out of their house is a thing I could never away with. Oona may say what
she likes--but it is not Christian. Oh, it's not Christian! I would have
taken them in, as many as Mysie could have made room for: but I never
could say that it was according to Christianity. Oh no, Lord Erradeen! I
would have to be poor indeed--poor, poor indeed--before I would turn
these poor folk away."

"There would be no blessing upon the rest," said Mysie, behind her
mistress's chair.

"That is settled then," said Walter, whose heart grew lighter and
lighter. "But that is not all. Tell me, if I were a benevolent despot,
Miss Forrester--you who know everything--what should I do now?--for it
cannot stop there."

"We'll go into the drawing-room before you settle that," said Mrs.
Forrester. "Dear me, it is quite dark; we will want the candles, Mysie.
There is so little light in the afternoon at this time of the year. I am
sorry there is no gentleman to keep you in countenance with your glass
of wine, Lord Erradeen. If you had been here when my Ronald or Jamie, or
even Rob, was at home! But they are all away, one to every airt, and the
house is very lonely without any boys in it. Are you coming with us?
Well, perhaps it will be more cheerful. Dear me, Mysie, you have left
that door open, and we will just be perished with the cold."

"Let me shut it," Walter said.

He turned to the open door with a pleasant sense of taking the place of
one of those absent boys whom the mother regretted so cheerfully, and
with a lighter heart than he could have thought possible a few hours
ago. But at the first glance he stood arrested with a sudden chill that
seemed to paralyse him. It was almost dark upon the loch; the water
gleamed with that polished blackness through which the boat had cut as
through something solid; but blacker now, shining like jet against the
less responsive gloom of the land and hills. The framework of the
doorway made a picture of this night scene, with the more definite
darkness of the old castle in the centre, rising opaque against the
softer distance. Seeing that Lord Erradeen made a sudden pause, Oona
went towards him, and looked out too at the familiar scene. She had seen
it often before, but it had never made the same impression upon her.
"Oh, the light--the light again!" she said, with a cry of surprise. It
came up in a pale glow as she was looking, faint, but throwing up in
distinct revelation the mass of the old tower against the background.
Walter, who seemed to have forgotten what he had come to do, was roused
by her voice, and with nervous haste and almost violence shut the door.
There was not much light in the little hall, and they could see each
other's faces but imperfectly, but his had already lost the soothed and
relieved expression which had replaced its agitated aspect. He scarcely
seemed to see her as he turned round, took up his hat from the table,
and went on confusedly before her, forgetting ordinary decorums, to the
drawing-room, where Mrs. Forrester had already made herself comfortable
in her usual chair, with the intention of for a few moments "just
closing her eyes." Mysie had not brought the lights, and he stood before
the surprised lady like a dark shadow, with his hat in his hand.

"I have come to take my leave," he said; "to thank you, and say
good-bye."

"Dear me," said Mrs. Forrester, rousing herself, "you are in a great
hurry, Lord Erradeen. Why should you be so anxious to go? You have
nobody at Auchnasheen to be kept waiting. Toots! you must just wait now
you are here for a cup of tea at least, and it will take Hamish a
certain time to get out the boat."

"I must go," he said, with a voice that trembled: then suddenly threw
down his hat on the floor and himself upon a low chair close to her,
"unless," he said, "unless--you will complete your charity by taking me
in for the night. Will you keep me for the night? Put me in any corner.
I don't mind--only let me stay."

"Let you stay!" cried the lady of the isle. She sprang up as lightly as
a girl at this appeal, with no further idea of "closing her eyes." "Will
I keep you for the night? But that I will, and with all my heart! There
is Ronald's room, where you washed your hands, just all ready, nothing
to do but put on the sheets, and plenty of his things in it in case you
should want anything. Let you stay!" she cried, with delighted
excitement, "it is what I would have asked and pressed you to do. And
then we can do something for your cold, for I am sure you have a cold;
and Oona and you can settle all that business about the benevolent
tyrant, which is more than my poor head is equal to. Oona, my dear, will
you tell Mysie?--where is Mysie? I will just speak to her myself. We
must get him better of his cold, or what will his mother think? He must
have some more blankets, or an eiderdown, which will be lighter, and a
good fire."

If her worst enemy had asked hospitality from Mrs. Forrester, she would
have forgotten all her wrongs and opened her doors wide; how much more
when it was a friend and neighbour! The demand itself was a kindness.
She tripped away without a thought of her disturbed nap, and was soon
heard in colloquy with Mysie, who shared all her sentiments in this
respect. Oona, who stood silent by the fire, with a sense that she was
somehow in the secret, though she did not know what it was, had a less
easy part. The pang of sympathy she felt was almost intolerable, but she
did not know how to express it. The quiet room seemed all at once to
have become the scene of a struggle, violent though invisible, which she
followed dumbly with an instinct beyond her power to understand. After
an interval of silence which seemed endless, he spoke.

"It must be intended that we should have something to do with each
other," he said, suddenly. "When you are there I feel stronger. If your
mother had refused me, I should have been lost."

"It was impossible that she should have refused you, Lord Erradeen."

"I wish you would not call me by that ill-omened name. It is a horror to
me; and then if all that is true----How is it possible that one man
should lord it over an entire race for so long? Did you ever hear of a
similar case? Oh! don't go away. If you knew what an ease it is to speak
to you! No one else understands. It makes one feel as if one were
restored to natural life to be able to speak of it, to ask advice.
Nothing," he cried suddenly, getting up, picking up his hat as if about
to leave the house, "nothing--shall induce me to go----"

"Oh, no, no!" she cried, "you must not go;" though she could not have
told why.

He put down the hat again on the table with a strange laugh. "I was
going then," he said, "but I will not. I will do exactly as you say." He
came up to her where she stood full of trouble watching him. "I dare say
you think I am going wrong in my head, but it is not that. I am being
dragged--with ropes. Give me your hand to hold by. There! that is
safety, that is peace. You hand is as soft--as snow," cried the young
man. His own were burning, and the cool fresh touch of the girl's hand
seemed to diffuse itself through all his being. Oona was as brave in her
purity as the other Una, the spotless lady of romance, and would have
shrunk from no act of succour. But it agitated her to have this strange
appeal for help made to her. She did not withdraw her hand, but yet drew
away a little, alarmed, not knowing what to do.

"You must not think," she said, faltering, "that any one--has more power
over another than--he permits them to have."

She spoke like one of the oracles, not knowing what she said; and he
listened with a slight shake of his head, not making any reply. After a
moment he yielded to the reluctance which made itself felt in her, and
let her hand go.

"Will you come with me outside?" he said; "not there, where that place
is. I think the cold and the night do one good. Can we go out the other
way?"

Oona accepted this alternative gladly. "We can go to the walk, where it
is always dry," she said, with an assumption of cheerfulness. "It looks
to the south, and that is where the flowers grow best." As she led the
way through the hall, Walter took up Mrs. Forrester's furred cloak which
hung there, and put it round her with a great deal of tenderness and
care. The girl's heart beat as he took this office upon him, as one of
her brothers might have done. It was the strangest conjunction. He was
not thinking of her at all, she felt, save as affording some mysterious
help in those mysterious miseries: and yet there was a sweetness in the
thought he took, even at this extraordinary moment, for her comfort.
There could have been no such dangerous combination of circumstances for
Oona, whose heart was full of the early thrill of romance, and that
inextinguishable pity and attraction towards the suffering which tells
for so much in the life of women. A softness and melting of the heart
indescribable came over her as she felt his light touch on her
shoulders, and found herself enveloped as it were, in his shadow and the
sentiment of his presence. He was not thinking of her, but only of his
need of her, fantastic though that might be. But her heart went out
towards him with that wonderful feminine impulse which is at once
inferior and superior, full of dependence, yet full of help. To follow
all his movements and thoughts as well as she could with wistful
secondariness; yet to be ready to guide, to save, when need was--to dare
anything for that office. There had never been aught in Oona's life to
make her aware of this strange, sweet, agitating position--the one
unchangeable form of conjunction for the two mortal companions who have
to walk the ways of earth together. But his mind was pre-occupied with
other thoughts than her, while hers were wholly bent upon him and his
succour. It was dangerous for her, stealing her heart out of her breast
in the interest, the sympathy, the close contact involved; but of none
of these things was he aware in the pre-occupation of his thoughts.

They walked up and down for a time together, behind the house, along the
broad walk, almost a terrace, of the kitchen garden, where there was a
deep border filled in summer with every kind of old-fashioned flowers.
It was bare now, with naked fruit-trees against the wall, but the moon
was hid in clouds, and it was impossible to see anything, except from
the end of the terrace the little landing-place below, and the first
curves of the walk leading up to the house, and all round the glimmer of
the loch. The stillness had been broken by the sound of a boat, but it
was on the Auchnasheen side, and though Oona strained her eyes she had
not been able to see it, and concluded that, if coming to the isle at
all, it must have touched the opposite point, where there was a less
easy, but possible, landing-place. As they reached the end of the
terrace, however, she was startled to see a figure detach itself from
the gloom and walk slowly towards the house.

"The boat must have run in under the bushes, though I cannot see it,"
she said; "there is some one coming up the walk."

Walter turned to look with momentary alarm, but presently calmed down.
"It is most likely old Symington, who takes a paternal charge of me," he
said.

Soon after they heard the steps, not heavy, but distinctly audible,
crushing the gravel, and to Oona's great surprise, though Walter, a
stranger to the place, took no notice of the fact, these footsteps,
instead of going to the door, as would have been natural, came round the
side of the house and approached the young pair in their walk. The
person of the new-comer was quite unknown to Oona. He took off his hat
with an air of well-bred courtesy--like a gentleman, not like a
servant--and said--

"I am reluctant to interrupt such a meeting, but there is a boat below
for Lord Erradeen."

Walter started violently at the sound of the voice, which was,
notwithstanding, agreeable and soft, though with a tone of command in
it. He came to a sudden stop, and turned round quickly as if he could
not believe his ears.

"There is a boat below," the stranger repeated, "and it is extremely
cold; the men are freezing at their oars. They have not the same
delightful inspiration as their master--who forgets that he has business
to settle this final night----"

Walter gave a strange cry, like the cry of a hunted creature. "In God's
name," he exclaimed, "what have you to do here?"

"My good fellow," said the other, "you need not try your hand at
exorcising; others have made that attempt before you. Is Circe's island
shut to all footsteps save yours? But, even then, you could not shut out
me. I must not say Armida's garden in this state of the temperature----"
he said.

"Who is it?" asked Oona in great alarm under her breath.

"Let me answer you," the intruder said. "It is a sort of a guardian who
has the first right to Lord Erradeen's consideration. Love, as even the
copybooks will tell, ought to be subordinate to duty."

"Love!" cried Oona, starting from the young man's side. The indignant
blood rushed to her face. She turned towards the house in sudden anger
and shame and excitement. Circe! Armida! Was it she to whom he dared to
apply these insulting names.

Walter caught her cloak with both hands.

"Do you not see," he said, "that he wants to take you from me, to drive
you away, to have me at his mercy? Oona! you would not see a man drown
and refuse to hold out your hand?"

"This is chivalrous," said the stranger, "to put a woman between you and
that--which you are afraid to meet."

To describe the state of excited feeling and emotion in which Oona
listened to this dialogue, would be impossible. She was surprised beyond
measure, yet, in the strange excitement of the encounter, could not take
time to wonder or seek an explanation. She had to act in the mean time,
whatever the explanation might be. Her heart clanged in her ears.
Tenderness, pity, indignation, shame, thrilled through her. She had been
insulted, she had been appealed to by the most sacred voice on
earth--the voice of suffering. She stood for a moment looking at the two
shadows before her, for they were little more.

"And if he is afraid why should not he turn to a woman?" she said with
an impulse she could scarcely understand. "If he is afraid, I am not
afraid. This isle belongs to a woman. Come and tell her, if you will,
what you want. Let my mother judge, who is the mistress of this place.
Lord Erradeen has no right to break his word to her for any man: but if
my mother decides that you have a better claim, he will go."

"I will abide by every word she says," Walter cried.

The stranger burst into a laugh.

"I am likely to put forth my claim before such a tribunal!" he said.
"Come, you have fought stoutly for your lover. Make a virtue of
necessity now, and let him go."

"He is not my lover," cried Oona; "but I will not let him go." She added
after a moment, with a sudden change of tone, coming to herself, and
feeling the extraordinary character of the discussion. "This is a very
strange conversation to occur here. I think we are all out of our
senses. It is like the theatre. I don't know your name, sir, but if you
are Lord Erradeen's guardian, or a friend of his, I invite you to come
and see my mother. Most likely," she added, with a slight faltering,
"she will know you as she knows all the family." Then, with an attempt
at playfulness, "If it is to be a struggle between this gentleman and
the ladies of the isle, Lord Erradeen, tell him he must give way."

The stranger took off his hat and made her a profound bow.

"I do so on the instant," he said.

The two young people stood close together, their shadows confounded in
one, and there did not seem time to draw a breath before they were
alone, with no sound or trace remaining to prove that the discussion in
which a moment before their hearts had been beating so loudly had ever
existed at all. Oona looked after the stranger with a gasp. She clung to
Walter, holding his arm tight.

"Where has he gone?" she cried in a piercing whisper. She trembled so
after her boldness that she would have fallen but for his sustaining
arm. "Who is he? Where has he gone? That is not the way to the beach.
Call after him, call after him, and tell him the way."

Walter did not make any reply. He drew her arm closer threw his, and
turned with her towards the house. As for Oona, she seemed incapable of
any thought but that this strange intruder might be left on the isle.

"He will get into the orchard and then among the rocks. He will lose
himself," she cried; "he may fall into the water. Call to him, Lord
Erradeen--or stop, we will send Hamish. Here is Hamish. Oh, Hamish! the
gentleman has taken the wrong way----"

"It will just be a boat that has come for my lord," said Hamish. "I
tellt them my lord was biding all night, but nothing would satisfee
them, but I had to come up and get his lordship's last word."

"Oh, he is not going, Hamish! but there is a gentleman--"

Walter interrupted her with an abruptness that startled Oona.

"Let them see that every one is on board--and return at once," he said.

"Oh there will just be everybody on board that ever was, for none has
come ashore," said Hamish. "What was you saying about a gentleman, Miss
Oona? There will be no gentleman. It is joost Duncan and another man
with him, and they cried upon me, Hamish! and I answered them. But there
will be no gentleman at all," Hamish said.




CHAPTER II.


It was very dark upon Loch Houran that night. Whether nature was aware
of a dark spirit, more subtle and more powerful than common man, roaming
about in the darkness, temporarily baffled by agencies so simple that
their potency almost amused while it confounded him--and shrank from the
sight of him, who could tell? but it was dark, as a night in which there
was a moon somewhere ought never to have been. The moon was on the wane,
it was true, which is never like her earlier career, but all trace and
influence of her were lost in the low-lying cloud, which descended from
the sky like a hood, and wrapped everything in gloom. The water only
seemed to throw a black glimmer into the invisible world where all
things brooded in silence and cold, unseen, unmoving. The only thing
that lived and shone in all this mysterious still universe was one warm
window, full of light, that shone from the isle. It was a superstition
of the simple mistress of the house that there should be no shutter or
curtain there, so that any late "traveller by land or water" might be
cheered by this token of life and possible help. Had that traveller,
needing human succour, been led to claim shelter there, it would have
been accorded fearlessly. "Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold." The
little innocent household of defenceless women had not a fear. Hamish
only, who perhaps felt a responsibility as their sole possible defender,
might have received with suspicion such an unexpected guest.

The mysterious person already referred to--whose comings and goings were
not as those of other men, and whose momentary discomfiture by such
simple means perplexed yet partially amused him, as has been said,
passed by that window at a later hour and stood for a moment outside.
The thoughts with which, out of the external cold and darkness, which
affected him not at all, he regarded the warm interior where simple
human souls, sheltering themselves against the elements, gathered about
their fire, were strange enough. The cold, which did not touch him,
would have made them shiver; the dark, which to his eyes was as the day,
would have confused their imaginations and discouraged their minds; and
yet together by their fire they were beyond his power. He looked in upon
their simplicity and calm and safety with that sense of the superiority
of the innocent which at the most supreme moment will come in to dash
all the triumphs of guile, and all the arts of the schemer. What he saw
was the simplest cheerful scene, the fire blazing, the lamp burning
steadily, a young man and a girl seated together, not in any tender or
impassioned conjunction, but soberly discussing, calculating, arguing,
thought to thought and face to face; the mother, on the other side,
somewhat faded, smiling, not over wise, with her book, to which she paid
little attention, looking up from time to time, and saying something far
from clever. He might have gone in among them, and she would have
received him with that same smile and offered him her best, thinking no
evil. He had a thousand experiences of mankind, and knew how their minds
could be worked upon and their imaginations inflamed, and their
ambitions roused. Was he altogether baffled by this simplicity, or was
there some lingering of human ruth in him, which kept him from carrying
disturbance into so harmless a scene? or was it only to estimate those
forces that he stood and watched them, with something to learn, even in
his vast knowledge, from this unexpected escape of the fugitive, and the
simple means by which he had been baffled for the moment, and his prey
taken from him? For the moment!--that was all.

"Come, come now," Mrs. Forrester said. "You cannot argue away like that,
and fight all night. You must make up your bits of differences, and
settle what is to be done; for it is time we had the Books, and let the
women and Hamish get to their beds. They are about all day, and up early
in the morning, not like us that sit with our hands before us. Oona, you
must just cry upon Mysie, and let them all come ben. And if you will
hand me the big Bible that is upon yon table--since you are so kind,
Lord Erradeen."

At this simple ceremonial--the kindly servant-people streaming in, the
hush upon their little concerns, the unison of voices, from Oona's, soft
with youth and gentle breeding, to the rough bass of Hamish, in words
that spectator knew as well as any--the same eyes looked on, with
feelings we cannot attempt to fathom. Contempt, envy, the wonder of the
wise over the everlasting, inexplicable superiority of the innocent,
were these the sentiments with which he gazed? But in the night and
silence there was no interpreter of these thoughts. How he came or went
was his own secret. The window was closed soon after, the lights
extinguished, and the darkness received this little community of the
living and breathing, to keep them warm and unseen and unconscious till
they should be claimed again by the cheerful day.

The household, however, though it presented an aspect of such gentle
calm, was not in reality so undisturbed as it appeared. In Oona's
chamber, for one, there was a tumult of new emotions which to the girl
were incomprehensible, strange, and terrible, and sweet. Lord Erradeen
was but a new acquaintance, she said to herself, as she sat over her
fire, with everything hushed and silent about her; nevertheless the
tumult of feeling in her heart was all connected with him. Curiously
enough, the strange encounter in the garden--of which she had received
no explanation--had disappeared from her thoughts altogether. The rise
and sudden dawn of a new life in her own being was more near and
momentous than any mysterious circumstances, however unlike the common.
By-and-by she might come to that--in the mean time a sentiment "_nova,
sola, infinita_," occupied all her consciousness. She had known him
during the last week only: three times in all, on three several days,
had they met; but what a change these three days had made in the life
that had been so free and so sweet, full of a hundred interests, without
any that was exclusive and absorbing. In a moment, without knowing what
was coming, she had been launched into this new world of existence. She
was humbled to think of it, yet proud. She felt herself to have become a
sort of shadow of him, watching his movements with an anxiety which was
without any parallel in her experience, yet at the same time able to
interpose for him, when he could not act for himself, to save him. It
seemed to Oona suddenly, that everything else had slipped away from her,
receding into the distance. The things that had occupied her before were
now in the background. All the stage of life was filled with him, and
the events of their brief intercourse had become the only occupation of
her thoughts. She wondered and blushed as she wandered in that maze of
recollections, at her own boldness in assuming the guidance of him; yet
felt it to be inevitable--the only thing to be done. And the strange new
thrill which ran through her veins when he had appealed to her, when he
had implored her to stand by him, came back with an acute sweet mixture
of pleasure and pain. She declared to herself, Yes!--with a swelling of
her heart--she would stand by him, let it cost her what it might. There
had been no love spoken or thought of between them. It was not love:
what was it? Friendship, fraternity, the instinctive discovery of one by
another, that divination which brings those together who can help each
other. It was he, not she, who wanted help--what did it matter which it
was? in giving or in receiving it was a new world. But whether it was a
demon or an angel that had thus got entrance into that little home of
peace and security--who could tell? Whatever it was, it was an inmate
hitherto unknown, one that must work changes both in earth and Heaven.

Everything that could trouble or disturb had vanished from the dark
world outside before Oona abandoned her musings--or rather before she
felt the chill of the deep night round her, and twisted up her long
hair, and drew aside the curtains from her window as was her custom that
she might see the sky from her bed. There had been a change in the
midnight hours. The clouds at last had opened, and in the chasm made by
their withdrawal was the lamp of the waning moon "lying on her back"
with a sort of mystic disturbance and ominous clearness, as if she were
lighting the steps of some evil enterprise, guiding a traitor or a
murderer to the refuge of some one betrayed. Oona shivered as she took
refuge in the snow-white nest which had never hitherto brought her
anything but profound youthful repose, and the airy flitting dreams of a
soul at rest. But though this momentary chill was impressed upon her
senses, neither fear nor discouragement were in her soul. She closed her
eyes only to see more clearly the face of this new influence in her
life, to feel her pulses tingle as she remembered all the events of the
three days' Odyssey, the strange magical history that had sprung into
being in a moment, yet was alive with such endless interest, and full of
such a chain of incidents. What was to be the next chapter in it? Or was
it to have another chapter? She felt already with a deep drawing of her
breath, and warned herself that all would probably end here, and
everything relapse into vacancy--a conclusion inconceivable, yet almost
certain, she said to herself. But this consciousness only excited her
the more. There was something in it of that whirl of desperation which
gives a wild quickening to enjoyment in the sensation of momentariness
and possible ending--the snatching of a fearful joy.

This sudden end came, however, sooner than she thought; they had
scarcely met at the breakfast table when Lord Erradeen begged Mrs.
Forrester to allow him to send for his servant, and make his
arrangements for his departure from the isle, instead of returning to
Auchnasheen. "I have not felt safe or at ease, save here, since I came
to the loch," he said, looking round him with a grateful sense of the
cheerful quiet and security. His eyes met those of Oona, who was
somewhat pale after her long vigil and broken rest. She had recognised
at once with a pang the conclusion she had foreseen, the interruption
of her new history which was implied in the remorseless unintentional
abruptness of this announcement. He was going away; and neither felt any
inducement to stay, nor any hesitation in announcing his resolution. She
had known it would be so, and yet there was a curious pang of surprise
in it which seemed to arrest her heart. Notwithstanding, as in duty
bound, she met his look with a smile in her eyes.

"Hoots," said Mrs. Forrester, "you flatter the isle, Lord Erradeen. We
know that is just nonsense; but for all that, we take it kind that you
should like our little house. It will always be found here, just
faithful and friendly, whenever you come back. And certainly ye shall
send for your man or make what arrangements suits you. There's the
library quite free and at your service for any writing you may have to
do, and Hamish will take any message to Auchnasheen, or wherever you
please. The only thing that grieves me is that you should be so set on
going to-day."

"That must be--that must be!" cried Walter: and then he began to make
excuses and apologies. There were circumstances which made it
indispensable--there were many things that made him anxious to leave
Auchnasheen. No, it was not damp--which was the instant suggestion of
Mrs. Forrester. There were other things. He was going back to Sloebury
to his mother (Mrs. Forrester said to England), and it was so recently
that he had entered upon his property, that there was still a great
deal to do. After he had made this uncompromising statement of the
necessities that he had to be guided by, he looked across the table at
Oona once more.

"And Miss Forrester is so kind as to take in hand for me the settlement
of the cotters. It will be her doing. I hope they will not blame me for
that alarm yesterday, which was no fault of mine; but the new
arrangement will be your doing altogether."

"I shall not take the credit," said Oona. "I had not even the boldness
to suggest it. It was your own thought, and they will bless you so, that
wherever you are, at Sloebury or the end of the world, you must feel
your heart warm----"

She said this with great self-command; but she was pale, and there was a
curious giddiness stealing over her. She seemed to feel the solid ground
slip away from under her feet.

"My heart," he said, looking at her with a grateful look, "will always
be warm when I think of the Isle, and all that has been done for me
here."

"Now, Lord Erradeen," said Mrs. Forrester, "you will just make Oona and
me vain with all these bonnie speeches. We are always glad to be
friendly and neighbourlike, but what have we been able to do?--just
nothing. When you come back again and let your friends see a little more
of you, we will all do what we can to make the loch agreeable. But I
hope it will be warmer weather, and more pleasure in moving about. You
will be back no doubt, if not sooner, in time for the grouse?"

He grew pale in spite of himself, and Oona, looking at him, felt the
steady earth slip more and more away.

"I don't know," he said, hurriedly, "when I may come back--not before
I--not sooner than I can----I mean there are a great many things to look
after; and my mother----"

His eyes seemed to seek hers again as if asking her sympathy, and
appealing to her knowledge. "Not before I must--not sooner than I can
help," that was what he meant to say. Oona gave him a faint smile of
response. It was so wonderful that when she understood him so
completely, he should understand her so little, and never suspect that
there was anything cruel in those words. But she made the response he
required, and strengthened him by that instinctive comprehension of him
in which he put so strange a trust. There was an eagerness in all his
preparations for going away which he almost forced upon her notice, so
strong was his confidence in her sympathy. He lost no time about any of
these arrangements, but sent Hamish with his boat to Auchnasheen for
Symington, and wrote down his instructions for Shaw, and talked of what
he was going to do when he got "home," with the most absolute
insensibility to any feeling in the matter save his own. And it seemed
to Oona that the moments flew, and the quick morning melted away, and
before she could collect her thoughts the time came when her mother and
she walked down to the beach with him, smiling, to see him off. There
had never been a word said between them of that conversation in the
garden on the previous night. Only when he was just about to leave, he
cast a glance towards the walk where that encounter had taken place, and
turned to her with a look such as cannot pass between any but those that
have some secret link of mutual knowledge. Her mother was talking
cheerfully of the view and the fine morning after the rain, walking
before them, when he gave Oona that look of mutual understanding. "I owe
you everything," he said, in a low tone of almost passionate fervour.
Presently she found herself shaking hands with him as if he had been
nothing more than the acquaintance of three days which he was, and
wishing him a good journey. And so the Odyssey came to an end, and the
history stopped in the course of making. She stood still for a little,
watching the boat and the widening lines it drew along the surface of
the water. "Sometimes to watch a boat moving off will give you a
giddiness," Mrs. Forrester said.




CHAPTER III.


There could be no greater contrast than that which existed between
Walter Methven, Lord Erradeen, hurrying away with the sense of a man
escaped with his life from the shores of Loch Houran, and Oona Forrester
left behind upon the isle.

It was not only that he had all at once become the first object in her
life, and she counted for little or nothing in his. That was not the
question. She had been for sufficient space of time, and with sufficient
stress of circumstances to make the impression one which would not die
easily, of the first importance in his thoughts: and no doubt that
impression would revive when he had leisure from the overwhelming
pre-occupation which was in his mind. But it was that he was himself
full of an anxiety and excitement strong enough to dwarf every other
feeling, which made the blood course through his veins, and inspired
every thought; while she was left in a state more like vacancy than
anything else, emptied out of everything that had interested her. The
vigorous bend of the rowers to the oars as they carried him away was
not more unlike the regretful languor of the women as they stood on the
beach, Mrs. Forrester waving her handkerchief, but Oona without even
impulse enough in her to do that.

As for Walter, he was all energy and impulse. He arranged the
portmanteaux which Symington had brought with his own hands, to leave
room for the sweep of the oars, and quicken the crossing. His farewells
were but half said. It seemed as if he could scarcely breathe till he
got away. Every stroke of the oars lightened his heart, and when he was
clear of that tragic water altogether, and sprang up upon the rude
country waggonette which had been engaged at the inn to carry him to the
station, his brow relaxed, and the muscles of his mouth gave way as they
had not done since his first day on Loch Houran. He gave a look almost
of hatred at the old castle, and then averted his face. When he reached
the railway, the means of communication with the world he had known
before, he was a different man. The horses had gone too slowly for him,
so did the leisurely friendly trains on the Highland railway, with their
broad large windows for the sake of the views. Travellers, as a rule,
did not wish to go too fast while they skirted those gleaming lochs, and
ran along under shadow of the mountains: they liked to have somebody to
point out which was Loch Ool and which St. Monan's. It was too slow for
Lord Erradeen, but still it was going away. He began to think of all the
commonplace accessories of life with a sort of enthusiasm--the great
railway stations, the Edinburgh Hotel, with its ordinary guests. He was
so sick of everything connected with his Highland property and with its
history, that he resolved he would make no pause in Edinburgh, and would
not go near Mr. Milnathort. The questions they would no doubt put to him
made him impatient even in thought. He would not subject himself to
these; he would put away altogether out of his mind, if he could,
everything connected with it, and all that he had been seeing and
hearing, or, at least, had fancied he heard and saw.

But when Oona turned away from looking after the boat--which she was
indeed the first to do, Mrs. Forrester waiting almost as long as it was
within sight to wave her handkerchief if the departing guest should look
back--she felt herself and her life emptied out all at once. When she
began to think of it in the cold light of this sudden conclusion, a
sense of humiliation came over her. She blushed with hot shame at this
altogether unasked, unreasonable, unnecessary resignation of herself and
her interests to a stranger. He was nothing but a stranger, she said to
herself; there was no remarkable charm in him one way or another. She
had not been at all affected by his first appearance. He was not
handsome enough or clever enough, nor had he any special attraction to
gain him so high a place. Somehow she had not thought of Walter in her
first realisation of the new interest which had pushed away all the
other occupations out of her existence: and she had not blushed in the
high sense of expanded life and power to help. But now it moved her with
a certain shame to think that the sudden departure of a man whom she
scarcely knew, and to whom she was nothing, should thus have emptied out
her existence and left a bewildering blank in her heart. She went slowly
up the walk, and went to her room, and there sat down with a curious
self-abandonment. It was all over, all ended and done. When he came into
her life it was accidentally, without any purpose in it on either side;
and now that he had gone out of it again, there was no anger, no sense
of wrong, only a curious consciousness that everything had gone
away--that the soil had slipped from her, and nothing was left. No,
there was no reason at all to be angry--nobody was to blame. Then she
laughed a little at herself at this curious, wanton sort of trouble
intended by nobody--which neither he had meant to draw her into, nor she
to bring upon herself.

There was one thing however between her and this vacancy. He had left
her a commission which any kind-hearted girl would have thought a
delightful one--to arrange with the factor how the cotters were to be
most effectually helped and provided for. It had been their thought at
first--the young man being little better instructed than the girl on
such matters--that to make Duncan Fraser and the rest the proprietors of
their little holdings would be the most effectual way of helping them,
and would do the property of Lord Erradeen very little harm--a thing
that Walter, unaccustomed to property, and still holding it lightly,
contemplated with all the ease of the landless, never thinking of the
thorn in the flesh of a piece of alienated land in the midst of an
estate, until it suddenly flashed upon him that his estates being all
entailed, this step would be impossible. How was it to be done then?
They had decided that Shaw would know best, and that some way of
remitting the rents at least during the lifetime of the present Lord
Erradeen must be settled upon, and secured to them at once. Oona had
this commission left in her hands. She could have thought of none more
delightful a few days ago, but now it seemed to make the future vacancy
of life all the more evident by the fact that here was one thing, and
only one, before her to do. When that was done, what would happen?--a
return upon the pleasant occupations, the amusements, the hundred little
incidents which had filled the past? After all, the past was only a week
back. Can it ever return, and things be again as they were
before?----Oona had never reasoned or speculated on these matters till
this moment. She had never known by experiment that the past cannot
return, or that which has been be once more; but she became aware of it
in a moment now.

Then she got up and stood at her window and looked out on the unchanging
landscape, and laughed aloud at herself. How ridiculous it was! By this
time it made no difference to Lord Erradeen that she had ever existed.
Why should it make any difference to her that he had come and gone? The
new generation takes a view of such matters which is different from the
old-fashioned sentimental view. After yielding to the new influence
rashly, unawares, like a romantic girl of any benighted century, Oona
began to examine it like an enlightened young intelligence of her own.
Her spirit rose against it, and that vigorous quality which we call a
sense of humour. There was something almost ludicrous in the thought
that one intelligent creature should be thus subject to another, and
that life itself should be altered by an accidental meeting. And if this
was absurd to think of in any case, how much more in her own? Nobody had
ever had a more pleasant, happy life. In her perfect womanliness and
submission to all the laws of nature, she was yet as independent as the
most free-born soul could desire. There was no path in all the district,
whether it led to the loneliest cottage or the millionnaire's palace,
that was not free to Oona Forrester. The loch and the hills were open to
her as her mother's garden, to the perfectly dauntless, modest creature,
who had never in her life heard a tone or caught a look of disrespect.
She went her mother's errands, which were so often errands of charity,
far and near, with companions when she cared for them, without
companions when she did not. What did it matter? The old cotter people
about had a pretty Gaelic name for her; and to all the young ones Miss
Oona of the Isle was as who should say Princess Oona, a young lady whom
every one was bound to forward upon her way. Her mother was not so
clever as Oona, which was, perhaps, a drawback; but she could not have
been more kind, more tender, more loving if she had possessed, as our
Laureate says, "the soul of Shakespeare." All was well about and around
this favourite of nature. How was it possible then that she could have
come to any permanent harm in two or three days?

Notwithstanding this philosophical view, however, Oona did nothing all
that day, and to tell the truth felt little except the sense of vacancy;
but next day she announced to her mother that she was going to the Manse
to consult with Mr. Cameron about the Truach-Glas cotters, and that
probably she would see Mr. Shaw there, and be able to do the business
Lord Erradeen had confided to her. Mrs. Forrester fully approved.

"A thing that is to make poor folk more comfortable should never be put
off a moment," that kind woman said, "for, poor bodies, they have little
enough comfort at the best," and she stood at the porch and waved her
hand to her child, as the boat sped out of the shade of the isle into
the cold sunshine which had triumphed for an hour or two over the clouds
and rain. Oona found Mr. Shaw, as she had anticipated, in the village,
and there was a very brisk and not altogether peaceable discussion in
the minister's study, over this new idea. The factor, though he was so
strongly set against all severe measures, and in reality so much on the
side of the cotters, was yet taken aback, as was natural, by the new
idea presented to him. He laughed at the notion of making them the
owners of their little holdings.

"Why not give Tom Patterson his farm too? He finds it just as hard to
pay the rent," he cried in minded ridicule and wrath. "There is no
difference in the principle though there may be in the circumstances.
And what if Lord Erradeen had a few hundred crofters instead of
half-a-dozen? I'm speaking of the principle. Of course he cannot do it.
It's all entailed, every inch of the land, and he cannot do it; but
supposing he could, and that he were treating them all equally? It's
just not to be done. It is just shifting the difficulty. It is putting
other people at a disadvantage. A man cannot give away his land and his
living. It is just a thing that is not to be done."

"He knows it is not to be done; he knows it is entailed, therefore----"

"Oh yes, Miss Oona; therefore--" cried the factor. "Little of it, very
little, would have come his way if it had not been entailed. Whether or
not it is good for the country, there can be no doubt it's the
stronghold of a family. Very likely there would have been no Methvens
(and small damage, begging his pardon that is a kind of a new stock),
and certainly there would have been no property to keep up a title, but
for the entail. It is a strange story, the story of them altogether."
Shaw continued, "it has been a wonderfully managed property. I must say
that for it; no praise to me, so I am free to speak. There was the late
lord--the only one I knew. There was very little in him, and yet the way
he managed was wonderful; they have just added land to land, and farm to
farm. I do not understand it. And now I suppose we've arrived at the
prodigal that always appears some time in a family to make the hoards
go."

"No, no," said the minister, "you must not call the man a prodigal whose
wish is to give to the poor."

"That is all very well," said Shaw; "the poor, where there are
half-a-dozen of them, are easily enough managed. Give them their land if
you like (if it was not criminal to cut a slice out of an estate), it
does not matter much; but if there were a hundred? It is the principle I
am thinking of. They cannot buy it themselves, and the State will not
buy it for them, seeing they are only decent Scots lads, not blazing
Irishmen. I cannot see where the principle will lead to: I am not
against the kindness, Miss Oona, far from that: and these half-a-dozen
Frasers, what would it matter? but if there were a hundred? The land is
just my profession, as the Church is Mr. Cameron's, and I must think of
it, all the ways of it; and this is a thing that would not work so far
as I can see."

"But Lord Erradeen acknowledges that," said Oona. "What he wants to do
is only for his time. To set them free of the rent they cannot pay, and
to let them feel that nobody can touch them, so long as he lives--"

"And the Lord grant him wealth of days," said the minister; "a long life
and a happy one!"

"You will not look at it," cried the factor, "from a common-sense point
of view. All that is very pretty, and pleasing to the young man's--what
shall I call it?--his kindness and his vanity, for both are involved, no
doubt. But it will just debauch the minds of the people. They will learn
to think they have a right to it; and when the next heir comes into
possession, there will be a burning question raised up, and a bitter
sense of wrong if he asks for his own again. Oh yes, Miss Oona, so long
as the present condition of affairs lasts it will be their own. A man
with a rent of two or three pounds is just as liable as if it were two
or three hundred. The principle is the same; and as I am saying, if
there were a number of them, you just could not do it: for I suppose you
are not a communist, Miss Oona, that would do away with property
altogether?"

A sudden smile from among the clouds lit up Shaw's ruddy, remonstrative
countenance, as he put this question, and Oona smiled too.

"I don't make any theories," she said; "I don't understand it. I feel as
Lord Erradeen does, that whatever the law may be, I would rather be
without a roof to shelter myself than turn one poor creature out of her
home. Oh, I don't wonder when I remember the horror in his face! Think!
could you sleep, could you rest--you, young and strong, and well off,
when you had turned out the poor folk to the hill?--all for a little
miserable money?" cried Oona, starting to her feet, "or for the
principle, as you call it? I, for one," cried the girl, with flashing
eyes, "would never have let him speak to me again."

"There you have it, Oona; there's a principle, if you like; there is
something that will work," cried the old minister, with a tremulous
burst of laughter. "Just you keep by that, my bonnie dear, and all your
kind; and we'll hear of few evictions within the Highland line."

"That would be all very well," said the factor, "if every landlord was a
young lad, like Lord Erradeen; but even then it might be a hard case,
and Miss Oona would not find it as easy as she thinks; for supposing
there were hundreds, as I'm always saying: and supposing there were some
among them that could just pay well enough, but took advantage; and
supposing a landlord that was poor too, and was losing everything? No,
no, Miss Oona, in this world things are not so simple. My counsel is to
let them be--just to let them be. I would bid them pay when they can,
and that my lord would not be hard upon them. That is what I would do. I
would tell them he was willing to wait, and may be to forgive them what
was past, or something like that. After what happened the other day,
they will be very sure he will not be hard upon them. And that is what I
would advise him to do."

"You are not going to wash your hands of it, after all?" the minister
said.

Shaw laughed. "Not just this time, Mr. Cameron. I always thought he was
a fine lad. And now that he has good advisers, and amenable----" he
added, with a glance at Oona, which fortunately she did not see.

And after this interview she went home, very silent, depressed as she
had no right to be, feeling as if life was over, and all things come to
an end.




CHAPTER IV.


It would be difficult to describe the sensations with which Lord
Erradeen found himself set at liberty, and on his way back, as he
thought at first, to the easy mind, the quiet life, the undisturbed and
undisturbing circumstances of his previous existence. He scarcely seemed
to breathe till he had crossed the Border, and was outside of Scotland,
feeling during that time like a fugitive in full flight, incapable of
thinking of anything except that he had eluded his pursuers and had
escaped all possible risks and apprehensions. His trial had lasted
nights and days, he could not tell how many. Now for the first time he
had the calm, the leisure, the sense of safety, which were necessary for
a review of all that he had gone through: he had seen the moon light up
the pale line of the sea at Berwick, where Tweed falls into the waste of
water, and the lights of Newcastle, turning into a shining highway the
dark crescent of the Tyne, and then as the train pounded along through
the darkness, with the throb and swing of life and speed, through the
silence and night, his faculties seemed to come back to him, and his
judgment to be restored. Through what a strange episode of existence
had he passed since he saw the lights curve round the sides of that
river, and the great bridge striding over above the roofs of the
sleeping town! And now he had escaped--had he escaped? He had time at
least and quiet to think it all out and see where he stood.

He had been for nearly three weeks altogether on Loch Houran, during
which time he had gone through the severest mental struggle he had ever
known. It seemed years to him now since the moment when he had been
suddenly confronted by the strange and mysterious personage who had
assumed a tone towards him and claimed a submission which Walter had
refused to yield. That this man's appearance had awakened in him a
sensation of overwhelming excitement mingled with fear, that he had come
in an unaccountable way, that he had been seen apparently by no one in
the old castle but himself, that nobody had betrayed any consciousness
of knowing who he was or how he was there, and yet that he had come and
gone with a perfect acquaintance and familiarity with the place, the
family, the estates, the story of the race; these were details which,
with a tremulous sensation in his mind, as of a panic nearly over, he
gathered together to examine and find out, if possible, what they meant.
He had been unable during the time that followed, when he had taken
refuge in Auchnasheen, to exercise any discriminating faculty, or use
his own judgment upon these facts. At the moment of seeing and hearing
occurrences which disturb the mind, reason is hampered in its action.
Afterwards you may ask yourself, have you really heard and seen? but not
when a definite appearance is before your eyes, or likely to re-appear
at any moment, and a distinct voice in your ears. The actual then
overmasters the soul; the meaning of it must be got at later. He had
seen this man whose faculties and pretensions were alike so
extraordinary, he had listened to the claim he made, he had been bidden
to yield up his individual will and to obey under threatening of evil if
he refused, and promises of pleasure and comfort if he consented. And
Walter had said "No." He would have said No had an angel out of heaven
appeared before him, making the same demand. He had been subjected to
this strange trial at the very height of independence and conscious
power, when he had newly begun to feel his own importance, and to enjoy
its advantages. It had seemed to him absurd, incredible, that such a
claim should be made, even while the personality of the strange claimant
had filled him with a sensation of terror, which he summoned all his
forces to struggle against, without any success. He had been like two
men during that struggle. One a craven, eager to fly, willing to promise
anything might he but escape; the other struggling passionately against
the stranger and refusing--refusing, night and day. When he went to
Auchnasheen the character of the conflict within him had become more
remarkable still. The man who claimed his obedience was no longer
visible, but he had been rent asunder between the power of his own
resisting spirit and some strange influence which never slackened, which
seemed to draw him towards one point with a force which his
unwillingness to yield made into absolute agony. Still he had resisted,
always resisted, though without strength to escape, until the moment had
come when by sudden inspiration of natural justice and pity he had
broken loose--by that, and by the second soul struggling in him and with
him, by Oona's hand holding him and her heart sustaining him. This was
the history of these two tremendous weeks, the most eventful in his
life. And now he had escaped out of the neighbourhood in which he could
feel no safety, out of the influence which had moved him so strangely,
and was able to think and ask himself what it was.

The night was dark, and, as has been said, the moon was on the wane. She
shed a pale mist of light over the dark country, where now and then
there broke out the red glow of pit or furnace fires. The train swung
onwards with a rock of movement, a ploughing and plunging, the dim light
in the roof swaying, the two respectable fellow-passengers each in his
corner amidst his wraps, slumbering uneasily. Walter had no inclination
to sleep. He was indeed feverishly awake; all his faculties in wild
activity; his mind intensely conscious and living. What did it all mean?
The events which had affected him to a passionate height of feeling with
which his previous life had been entirely unacquainted--was it possible
that there was any other way of accounting for them? To look himself in
the face as it were, and confess now at a distance from these influences
that the man to whom he had spoken in the language of to-day was one of
the fabulous men in whom the ignorant believe, his own early
ancestor--the still existing, undying founder of the house, was, he said
to himself, impossible. It could not be; anything else--any hypothesis
was more credible than this. There was no place for the supernatural in
the logic of life as he had learned it. Now that he had recovered
control of himself, it was time for him to endeavour to make out a
reason for the hallucination in which he had almost lost himself and his
sober senses. And accordingly he began to do it; and this is what he
said to himself. His imagination had been excited by all that had
happened to him; the extraordinary change in his circumstances which
seemed almost miraculous, and then the succession of incidents, the
strange half-communications that had been made to him, the old, ruinous
house in which he had been compelled to shut himself up, the wonderful
solitude, full of superstitious suggestions, into which he had been
plunged. All these details had prepared his mind for something--he knew
not what. He felt a hot flush of shame and mortification come over him
as he remembered how easily, notwithstanding all his better knowledge,
he, a man of his century, acquainted with all the philosophies of the
day, had been overcome by those influences. He had expected something
out of nature, something terrible and wonderful. And when such a state
of mind is reached, it is certain (he thought) that something will arise
to take advantage of it.

Probably all these effects had been calculated upon by the individual,
whoever he was, who haunted Kinloch Houran to excite and exploit these
terrors. Who was he? Even now, so far out of his reach, so emancipated
from his influence that he could question and examine it, Walter felt a
certain giddiness come over his spirit at this thought, and was glad
that one of his fellow-passengers stirred and woke, and made a shivering
remark, How cold it was, before he again composed himself to sleep. It
was very cold. There was an icy chill in the air which penetrated
through the closed windows. But nothing else could come in--nothing
else! and it could be but a sudden reflection from his past excitement
that made Walter feel for a moment as if another figure sat opposite to
him, gazing at him with calm sarcasm, and eyes that had a smile in them.
When the giddiness passed off, and he looked again, there was (of
course) no one opposite to him, only the dark blue cushions of the
unoccupied place. Who was this man then who held a sort of court in
Kinloch Houran, and demanded obedience from its proprietor? He was no
creature of the imagination. Excited nerves and shaken health might
indeed have prepared the mind of the visitor for the effect intended to
be produced upon him; but they could not have created the central
figure--the powerful personality from whom such influence flowed. Who
was he? The circumstances were all favourable for a successful
imposture, or even a mystification. Suppose it to be some member of the
family aggrieved by the promotion of a far-off branch, some dependent
with so much knowledge of the secrets of the race as to be able to play
upon the imagination of a novice, with mysterious threats and promises;
perhaps, who could tell, a monomaniac, the leading idea of whose
delusion was to take this character upon him? Walter's breast lightened
a little as he made out one by one these links of explanation. It was
characteristic of his time, and the liberality of mind with which modern
thought abjures the idea of absolute imposture, that the sudden
suggestion of a monomaniac gave him great relief and comfort. That might
explain all--a man of superior powers crazed in this one point, who
might have convinced himself that he was the person he claimed to be,
and that it was the interest of the family he had at heart. Such a
being, acquainted with all the mysterious passages and hiding-places
that exist in such old houses, able to appear suddenly from a secret
door or sliding panel, to choose moments when nature herself added to
the sense of mystery, hours of twilight and darkness when the half-seen
is more alarming than anything fully revealed--this would explain so
much, that the young man for the moment drew a long breath of relief,
and felt half-consciously that he could afford to ignore the rest.

And in the sense of this relief he fell asleep, and dreamed that he
stood again at Mrs. Forrester's door in the Isle, and saw the light on
the old tower of Kinloch Houran, and felt the attraction, the drawing
and dragging as of some force he could not resist; and woke up with the
blow he gave himself against the rail that supported the netting on the
opposite side of the carriage, against which he struck his head in his
rush towards the place to which he had felt himself called. He staggered
back into his seat, giddy and faint, yet thankful to feel that it was
only a dream; and then had to begin his self-arguments over again, and
trace once more every link of the chain.

A monomaniac--yes, that might be the explanation; but whence then that
power which drew him, which he had fought against with all the powers of
his being at Auchnasheen, which he had never given in to, but which,
even in the reflection of it given in his dream, was vivid enough to
awaken him to a new branch of the question? Magnetism, mesmerism, he had
heard of, and scorned as other names for charlatanism; but when you are
searching anxiously for the means of accounting for mysterious phenomena
you are glad to seize upon explanations that at another moment would be
little satisfactory. Walter said to himself that the madman of Kinloch
Houran--the monomaniac, must possess these strange powers. He might know
many secrets, though his wits were gone astray. He might be sane enough
to have a purpose, and to cultivate every possible means of affecting
the mind he wished to work upon. Such curious combinations of madness
and wisdom were not beyond human experience. Perhaps at the end of all
his arguments, having fully convinced himself, the thread of the
reasoning escaped him, for he suddenly shuddered and grew pale, and
shrank into his corner, drawing his wraps close round him and raising
the collar of his coat to his very eyes, as if to shut out some
bewildering, overwhelming sight. But by this time the wintry day was
breaking, and the stir of awakened life reached the other travellers,
who woke and stretched themselves, shivering in the chill of the dawn,
and began to prepare for their arrival. One of them spoke to Walter,
expressing a fear that he was ill, he looked so pale, and offering his
services to "see him home." The young man indeed felt as if he had come
through a long illness when he stepped forth upon the platform at King's
Cross, and felt that he had escaped from his fever and his trouble, and
had new ways and new thoughts--or rather the repose of old thoughts and
old ways--before him for some time to come.

He remained in London all day, and after his bath and his breakfast,
felt the rising of a new life, and began to remember all the good things
which he had partially forgotten, but which surely were more than enough
to counterbalance the evil things, of which, when you set your mind to
it, after all, so feasible an explanation could be found. London was at
its darkest, and nothing invited him in the foggy and murky streets;
nevertheless he lingered with that mixture of old habit and mental
indolence which wastes so much time and disperses so many admirable
resolutions. He went in the morning to see the house which belonged to
him in Park Lane, and which was at present empty. It was one of those
which look out from pleasant, large bow-windows upon the brightness of
the Park and the cheerful thoroughfare. Even at such a moment it had a
kind of brightness--as much light as could be got in London. It gave
Walter a real pleasure to think of furnishing it for his mother, of
seeing her take her place there and enter upon a larger life, a mode of
existence for which he felt--with a glow of pride in her--she was more
qualified than for the smaller village routine at Sloebury. His energy
even went so far as to direct that the house should be put in order and
prepared for occupation. And if he had gone home at once after this
feat, not all the threatenings of his mysterious enemy would have
prevented a pleasant re-beginning of his old life.

But he did not; he lingered about the streets, about the hotel to which
he had gone in the morning, for no particular reason, and it was late
when he started for Sloebury--late and dark and cold, and his sleepless
night and all the excitements from which he had fled, began to tell upon
him. When he reached the familiar station his cheerfulness and
good-humour had fled. And all the pleasant anticipations of the
home-coming and the comfort with which he had remembered that
existence, free of all mystery, in which he had seldom done anything but
what seemed good in his own eyes, abandoned him as he stepped into the
drizzle of a dark and rainy December night, into the poor and
badly-lighted streets that surround a railway everywhere, and turn the
worst side of every town to the eyes of strangers. He sent Symington and
his baggage off before him, and himself set out to walk, with that
incomprehensible pleasure in a little further delay which is so general.
Stepping out into the mean streets had all the effect upon Walter's
tired frame and capricious and impatient mind, of sudden disenchantment.
His imagination perhaps had been affected by the larger atmosphere from
which he had come, and he had forgotten the dinginess and poverty, which
never before had struck him with the same force. The damp drizzle which
was all there was for air, seemed to suffocate him; the pavement was wet
and muddy, dirt and wretchedness pervaded everything. Then he began to
realise, as he walked, the scene he was going to, which he could call up
before him with such perfect distinctness of memory. Home! It used to be
the centre, in books, of all pleasant thoughts--the tired wanderer
coming to rest and shelter, the prodigal out of hunger and misery to
forgiveness and the fatted calf, the "war-beaten soldier" from his cold
sentry's march, the sailor from the wet shrouds and gloomy seas--to good
fires and welcomes, kisses and a hot supper. But that primitive symbol
of imagination, like so many others, has got perhaps somewhat soiled
with ignoble use; and it never was, perhaps, from this point of view
that young men of Walter Methven's type regarded the centre of family
life, to which they returned when there was nothing better to do, with a
sort of penitential sense of the duties that were considered binding
there, and the preposterous things that would be expected of them.

Lord Erradeen, who had been longing for that safe and sensible refuge
where no exaggeration or superstition prevailed, suddenly felt it rise
before him like a picture of still life as he walked towards it. His
mother seated knitting at one side of the fire, with a preoccupied look,
listening for his step outside, the evening newspaper and a novel from
Mudie's on the table. Miss Merivale opposite working crewel work, and
putting a question now and then as to when he was expected: the two
lamps burning steadily, the tick of the clock in the foreground, so to
speak, the soul of the silent scene. The other accessories of the piece
were all conventional ones: fire blazing brightly, now and then breaking
into the monologue of the clock with a sudden rush and jet of flame, or
dropping of ashes; curtains drawn, sofas and chairs within the glow of
the warmth, ready for the new-comer's choice. There would be a sudden
springing up, a disturbance of the perfect order of all these
arrangements, on his entrance. He would be made to sit down in far too
warm a corner; his personal appearance would be commented upon; that he
was looking well, or ill, or tired, or as fresh as possible. And then
the cross-examination would begin. Walter reminded himself that this
cross-examination was maddening, and that even as a boy at school he had
never been able to bear it. When he had said that he was well, and
consented, yes, that he had come home sooner than he expected, but no,
that nothing was wrong, what was there more to say? To be sure he had
intended to say a great deal more, to pour forth all his troubles into
his mother's sympathetic bosom; but that in any case could only have
been when the two were alone. And would she understand him if he did so?
Cousin Sophy--he could hear her in imagination--would give a sharp
shriek of laughter at the idea of anything mysterious, at any suggestion
of the supernatural (in which, of course, by this time Walter did not
believe himself, but that was another matter). She would shriek even
derisively at the idea that mesmerism could have affected any man in his
senses. And his mother--what would she do? not shriek with laughter,
that was not her way; but smile perhaps with a doubtful look to see
whether it was possible that he could be in earnest in this incredible
story of his. No, she would not believe him, she would think he was
under the influence of some hallucination. She would look at him with a
shock of something like contempt, an annoyed dismay that _her_ son
should be so credulous, or so weak. Walter's imagination leaped back to
the other warm and softly-lighted room on the Isle, the innocent mother
talking, who would have believed everything, the girl standing by who
did understand, and that almost without a word. Ah, if that indeed were
home! Thus with a sudden revulsion in his mind, shutting himself up, and
double-locking the door of his heart, even before he had come to the
door of the house, to which his mother, he knew, would rush to meet him,
hearing and distinguishing his step--he went home.

Mrs. Methven, who had been on the watch all day, opened the door to him
as he foresaw. She was trembling with anxiety and pleasure, yet
self-restrained and anxious not to betray the excitement which probably
he would think uncalled for; she took his wraps from him, and helped to
take off his great-coat, giving an aid which was quite unnecessary, but
which he, on his side commanding himself also, did his best to accept
with an appearance of pleasure. "You have not dined," she said, "there
is something just ready. We waited half an hour, but I thought you would
prefer to come by this train. Come in and get thawed, and let me look at
you, while they bring up your dinner." She took him by the arm as she
spoke, and led him into the drawing-room where everything was exactly as
he had imagined. And she drew him, as he had imagined, too close to the
fire, and drawing the softest chair, said "Sit down, dear, and get
warm."

"I am not a bit cold. I have walked, you know, from the station. How do
you do, Cousin Sophy? Your room is too warm, mother, I always tell you
so. However it looks very cheerful after the wet and mud outside," he
said, with an attempt to be gracious.

"The rain makes everything dismal out of doors. Has it been raining all
the way? You have had a dreadful journey, my poor boy."

"Of course it is warmer here than in Scotland," said Miss Merivale.

And then there was a pause, and his mother looked at him more closely by
the light of the lamp. She was just going to say "You are not looking
very well"--when Walter broke in.

"I hear a tray coming, and I am very hungry. I shall go into the
dining-room, mother, and join you by-and-by."

"I will go too and wait upon you, Walter. I mean to wait upon you myself
to-night. I hope your lordship has not grown too fine for that," she
said with an attempt at playful ease. It was a relief to leave Miss
Merivale, and have her son all to herself. She put his chair to the
table for him, and brought the claret which had been warming, and handed
him his plate with a smile of content. "It is pleasant to serve one's
boy," she said, "and we don't want any third person. I have so much to
hear, and to ask--"

An impatient prayer that she would not begin the moment he sat down to
worry a fellow with questions was on Walter's lips; but he forbore,
doing his very best to command himself. To sit in his old place, to
feel his old impulse, to find the claret too warm, and the potatoes
cold, was almost too much for him; but still like a hero he forbore. And
she took advantage of his magnanimity. She never relaxed her watch upon
him. That is the penalty one pays for having one's mother to serve one:
a servant is silent at least. She asked him if he would not have a
little more, just this little piece which was very nicely done? Some of
the vegetables which were better cooked than usual? A little salad? Some
stewed fruit with that Devonshire cream which he used to like? A little
of his favourite cheese? She was not in general a fussy woman, but she
was so anxious, after the _rapprochement_ that had taken place on the
eve of his going away, to please him, to preserve that tenderer strain
of feeling--if it could be done this way! And yet all the time she was
restraining herself not to say too much, not to worry him. A woman has
to exercise such wiles often enough for her husband's benefit; but it is
hard to go through the process again for her son.

He bore it all with a devouring impatience, yet self-restraint too--not
entreating her in words to let him alone for heaven's sake! as he would
so fain have done. Perhaps there was something to be said on his side
also; his mind was laden with care and anxiety, and wanted repose above
all; and this wistful over-anxiety and desire to propitiate by details
was irritating beyond description. He did not know how to put up with
it. Love itself is sometimes very hard to put up with--embarrassing,
officious, not capable of perceiving that to let its object alone is the
best. Mrs. Methven did not know how to propitiate him--whether to show
her interest or to put on a form of indifference. All her urgency about
his dinner, was it not to spare him the questions which she knew he did
not love? But that succeeded badly, and her curiosity, or rather her
anxiety, was great.

"How did you like Kinloch Houran?" she ventured to say at last. What a
question! It seemed to Walter that a glance at his face would have shown
her how inappropriate it was.

"Like Kinloch Houran!" he said. "If you want a categorical answer,
mother--and I know you are never satisfied with anything else--not at
all!"

"I am sorry for that, Walter, since it seems a place you must have a
great deal to do with. Auchnasheen, then, was that better? You must
teach me to pronounce the name."

"Auchnasheen, if possible, was worse," he said. "I shall never be able
to endure either the one or the other, or forget the associations--don't
make me think of them, please. When I got home I thought I should be
able to escape all that."

"My dear, I beg your pardon: I did not know. Was the weather then so
bad? They say it always rains--and the place very dull, of course, so
far in the wilds? But you said in your letter that the lake was lovely,
and that there were some pleasant people----"

He put up his hand, begging her to go no further. "It was lovely enough
if you like, but I hate the place; isn't that enough? I shall never go
back with my free will."

Mrs. Methven looked at him in astonishment. "I thought--" she said, "you
remember how fantastic you thought it, and mediæval--that you had to
make a periodical visit to the old home of the race?"

His very lips trembled with irritation. He had written about all that in
the first days of his absence, and even after his arrival at Loch
Houran, making fun of the old world stipulation. She might have divined,
he thought, that it was a very different matter now. "I am sorry to keep
you so long here, out of your own comfortable corner," he said. "You
never like sitting in the dining-room. It is brutal of me to keep you
here."

"No, Walter, it is my pleasure," she cried; then, poor soul, with that
most uncalled-for, unprofitable desire for information, "And there are
so many things I want to know----"

He commanded himself with a great effort. "Mother," he said, "I have not
enjoyed my visit to Scotland. There are a great many things that perhaps
I may be able to talk of hereafter if you will give me time, but that I
don't want even to think of now. And I'm tired with my journey; and
everything is not _couleur de rose_, as you seem to think. Let me alone,
if you can, for to-night."

"Let you alone--if I can!" She was so startled, so bitterly
disappointed, that for a moment or two she could not speak. And this
aggravated Walter still more.

"Mother," he cried, getting up from his unsatisfactory meal, "I hope you
are not going to make a scene the first night."

Thus, without any intention, with indeed the strongest desire to adopt a
better way, this was how young Lord Erradeen resumed his intercourse
with his mother. And yet Oona's mother, with all her little gentle
affectations, with her kind effusiveness which there was no
withstanding, had given him the sincerest sense of home and a refuge
from trouble. Was it Oona's presence that explained all, or was there
something more subtle underneath? There followed on this occasion no
scene; but when Mrs. Methven returned to the drawing-room alone, leaving
Walter, as she said, in peace to smoke his cigar after his dinner, Miss
Merivale's keen eyes perceived at once that the traveller's meal had not
been a happy ceremonial.

"I dare say he is tired," she said.

"Yes, he is tired--almost too tired to eat. Smoke is the grand panacea,"
said Mrs. Methven, with a smile.

"The worst of smoke is that it is so unsociable," said Miss Merivale,
cheerfully, picking up her book. "I think I'll go to bed and leave you
free for your talk with Walter when the cigar's done. Oh yes, you will
get on better by yourselves. You will get more out of him if you are
alone. But I dare say you won't get very much out of him. It will come
by scraps--a little at a time; and he will be quite astonished that you
don't know--by instinct, I suppose. Men are all like that."

It was very kind of Cousin Sophy. Mrs. Methven gave her a kiss of
gratitude as she took her candle and went away. But the expedient after
all did little good. Walter lingered over his cigar, growing less and
less inclined for any confidences, while his mother lingered in the
drawing-room, hoping he would come to her; and Cousin Sophy, by far the
most comfortable of the three, established herself cosily in her
easy-chair by her bed-room fire, with a yellow novel. Miss Merivale had
aspirations beyond Mudie. She thought the French writers far more subtle
and searching in their analysis of character than her compatriots ever
were, and she liked their boldness, and the distinctness with which they
cut away all pretences and showed humanity as it was. She had no opinion
of humanity--but yet she was in her way very good-natured, and would
even go out of her way to show kindness to one of her fellow-creatures,
as she had done to-night. Though her own room looked comfortable, and
was so indeed up to a certain point, Miss Merivale, if nobody else, was
aware that there was a draught which there was no eluding,--a draught
which, whatever you might do, caught you infallibly in the back of the
neck. She had taken down the curtains and put them up again. She had
changed the position of her seat. She had bought a folding screen. She
had even changed her chair and procured a high-backed old-fashioned
thing, something like that cushioned sentry-box in which porters
delight; but in no way could she escape this draught, except in bed, and
it was much too early to go to bed. Therefore she had made a distinct
sacrifice of personal comfort in coming so soon up-stairs. She sat there
and mused, asking herself what boys were born for, or at least by what
strange mistake Providence ever committed them to the charge of women;
and why it was that they could not be happy or natural with the people
they belonged to. "I feel almost sure now," she said to herself, "that I
shall have a stiff neck to-morrow, to no purpose, and that those two
down-stairs are sitting in separate rooms, and will not say a word to
each other."

It was a curious, very curious reading of an English home, could any
spectator have looked through the secure covering of that respectable
roof, or through the curtains that veiled the windows, and seen the two
rooms in which these two persons sat each alone. How was it? Why was it?
The mother had no thought but for her son. The son was not unkind or
heartless, but full of good qualities. And yet at a moment when he had
much to tell, and she was eager to hear, they sat in two separate rooms,
as if they were fellow-lodgers and no more. Cousin Sophy, who was a
sensible woman, with much kind feeling towards both, though she was not
perhaps the kind of person from whom any high degree of unselfish
devotion was to be looked for, sat and shook her head, and "wondered at
it," as the ladies at Camelot did over Elaine. But it was a greater
wonder than Elaine.

Was it, perhaps, the beginning of the fulfilment of that threat that
everything would go ill with him, which had been made at Kinloch Houran?
But if so it was no new ill, but only the further following out of an
evil that had been growing for years.




CHAPTER V.


Something of the same perversity which had turned all his good
resolutions to nothing on the night of his arrival, affected Walter when
he went out next morning into Sloebury. The place had narrowed and grown
small in every way. There was no horizon, only lines of brick houses; no
space, only the breadth of a street; no air to breathe for a man who had
come from the wide solitude of the hills, and the keen freshness of the
Highland breezes. Everything here was paltry, and monotonous, and small;
the people who met him--and he met everybody, and there was not a man
who could claim the slightest acquaintance with him, or a woman who had
seen him once in her neighbour's drawing-room who did not now claim
acquaintance with Lord Erradeen--seemed to have dwindled along with the
scene. They had never been distinguished by intelligence or originality,
but he had not been aware how paltry they were before. Had he seen
Jeremy's new turn-out? all the men inquired of him. He had already heard
of it from Miss Merivale, who had given him a sketch of the history of
the town, and what had happened during his absence, at breakfast. It was
a high phaeton, "which I suppose must be the fashion," Miss Merivale
said. "You should really see it," cried all the young men, with details
about the harness and the high-stepping mare which were endless. What
did Lord Erradeen care for young Jeremy's phaeton or the high-stepping
mare? but it was the only topic at Sloebury--that, and a report which
Miss Merivale had also furnished him with about Julia Herbert. "Your old
flame: no doubt it was to console herself in your absence," said Cousin
Sophy. This was disagreeable too. Walter did not care to hear that the
girl who had distinguished himself and been distinguished by him should
make herself remarkable in a flirtation with another man. He did not
want her indeed, but he objected to the transfer of her affections. And
everything around looked so barren, stale, flat, and unprofitable.
Perhaps it was the quickening of life which his recent experiences,
painful though they had been, had brought him, which made him feel how
dead-alive everything was. At Loch Houran his mind had gone back to the
safe and peaceable commonplace of his native town with something like an
enthusiasm of preference for its calm common sense, and superiority to
the fever and excitements of that life upon the edge of the
supernatural. Now it seemed to him that superstition itself, not to
speak of the heats and chills of human passion, were higher things than
this cynic-steadiness, this limit of matter-of-fact. What would Sloebury
think of those things that had been so real to him, that had rent his
very being asunder? He could imagine the inextinguishable laughter with
which his story would be greeted, and blushed at the possibility of
betraying himself. A seer of ghosts and visions, a victim of mesmerism!
He would become in a moment the scorn, as he was at present, the envy,
of the town. Not a soul of them would understand. His experiences must
be buried in his own bosom, and no one here must ever know that he had
got beyond that surface of life to which all their knowledge was
confined. When he met Underwood indeed this determination wavered a
little: but then Underwood looked at him with an eagerness of inspection
which was still more offensive. What did the fellow mean? Did he think
it likely that he, a stranger, a person whom the better people
disapproved, should be chosen as the confidant of Lord Erradeen?

"You have come back very soon," the captain said; as indeed did
everybody whom he met.

"No--not sooner than I intended," said Walter, coldly. "It was business
merely that took me there at all."

Underwood examined his face with a curiosity that had knowledge in it.
"I know that country so well," he said. "I should like to know what you
think of it. Of course you were at Auchnasheen? I have been weeks
there, with the late lord--and at the old castle too," he added, with a
keen look.

"You were interested in the architecture, I suppose."

Underwood said nothing for a moment. Then suddenly--"I wish you'd come
and talk to me about it!" he cried. "Any time that you will come I'll
shut out everybody else. I'll keep myself free--"

"My dear fellow," Walter said in a supercilious tone, "why should I make
Sloebury pay the penalty, and banish your friends from you for my
selfish advantage?" To remember the time when this man had taken notice
of him and been his superior, gave him a sense of impatient indignation.
"Besides, I don't know that there is anything to say."

"Oh, as you please," said Underwood; but when they passed each other, he
turned back and laid a hand on Walter's sleeve. "I keep early hours
now," he said. "After ten I am always free."

Lord Erradeen walked away, half-angry, half-amused, by the man's
presumption, who, after all, was a nobody; but yet, he made a secret
note in his mind, almost outside of his consciousness. After ten--It
might, in the dreadful blank of those hours after ten at Sloebury (or
even before ten for that matter), be a resource.

He had not gone very much further when he fell into another lion's
mouth. But how wrong, how cruel, to apply such a phrase to the red and
smiling mouth, fresh as the cherries in the song, of Miss Julia Herbert,
on her way from the rectory where she paid her old aunt a daily visit,
to the cottage in which she was her mother's stay and solace! She had
been flirting a great deal in Walter's absence, no one could deny. A
young Wynn, a relation on the other side of the house, had been staying
there, on leave from his regiment, and on such an occasion what else was
there to do? But young Wynn was gone, and his circumstances were not
such as to have stood in competition for one moment with Lord Erradeen.
As soon as she saw him, Julia began to smile and wave her hand. If there
was a little sense of guilt in her, so much the more reason for even an
excess of friendliness now. And perhaps there was in Walter a certain
desire to let the little world about, which had insisted upon her little
infidelities, perceive that she was as much under his influence as ever,
as soon as he chose to appear. This was not the way in which the world
regarded the matter, if Walter had known. Instead of looking at him as
the conquering hero, who had but to show himself, the spectators said
pityingly that Julia Herbert had got hold of poor Lord Erradeen again.

"Oh, Walter!" she cried; then changed her tone with a very pretty blush,
and said, "I ought to have said Lord Erradeen; but it was the surprise.
And so you have come home?"

"I have come _back_," he said, with a little emphasis.

"I see it all. Forgive me that I should be so silly--_back_, of course;
that means a few days, that means you have come for your boxes, or to
see your mother, or to know her wishes respecting the new furniture of
the banqueting hall. Shall it be mediæval or renaissance? If you ask my
advice----"

"I do; of course, I do. It is for that chiefly I am here."

"That is what I thought. Renaissance, then. There, you have my
opinion--with plenty of cupids and good, fat garlands----"

She laughed, and Walter laughed too, though he was not very much amused.
But, of course, he could not speak to a lady as he had spoken to
Underwood.

"Come now, tell me about it," the young lady said. "You cannot refuse
such a little bit of novelty to one who never sees anything new except a
novel: and there is so little novelty in them! About what? Oh, about
Scotland, and the scenery, and the old castle: and who you met, and what
you did. Mayn't I show a little curiosity--in one whom," she added with
that exaggeration of sentiment which leaves room for a laugh, "I have
known all my life?"

"That, I hope, is not all the claim I have on your interest," said
Walter in the same tone.

"Oh, no, not half. There have been moments!--And then the romance of
you, Lord Erradeen! It is delightful to touch upon the borders of
romance. And your rank! I feel a great many inches higher, and ever so
much elevated in my own estimation, by being privileged to walk by your
lordship's side. When are you going to take your seat and help to rule
your country? They say the House of Commons is to be preferred for that.
But there is nothing so delightful as a peer."

"How lucky for me that you should think so. I may walk with you, then,
to the----"

"Corner," said Julia, "not too far; oh, certainly, not too far: or we
shall have all the old ladies, male and female, making comments."

"I don't care for the old ladies--or their comments," said Walter: the
fun was languid, perhaps, but yet it afforded a little occupation when
one had nothing else to do.

"You? Oh, of course not, as you will escape presently, and know all my
wiles by heart already, it cannot make much difference to you. It is I
who have to be considered, if you please, my lord. They will say there
is _that_ Julia Herbert at her old tricks, trying to take in poor Lord
Erradeen--a poor, innocent young man in the snares of that designing
baggage! They will probably add that the police should put a stop to
it," Miss Herbert said.

"The deluded old ladies! Without knowing that it is exactly the other
way----"

"Now that is the prettiest speech you ever made," said Julia. "I never
heard you say anything so nice before. You must have been in very good
society since you went away. Tell me, who was it?" she asked with her
most insinuating look.

They were old practitioners both. They understood each other: they had
flirted since they had been in long clothes, and no harm had ever come
of it. This is, no doubt, what Miss Herbert would have said had any
feminine critic interposed; but there was something more serious, as the
feminine critic would have divined, at once, in Julia's eye. She meant
more, not less, than she said; and she was anxious to know, having her
eyes upon all contingencies like a wise general, what rivals might have
come in the way.

"I have met scarcely any one," said Walter. "You cannot conceive what a
lonely place it is. Oh, of course there are people about. I was promised
a great many visitors had I stayed. On the other hand, even in winter,
it is wonderfully beautiful. Coming back to this perfectly flat country,
one discovers for the first time how beautiful it is."

"Yes," said Julia, indifferently; the beauty of the country did not
excite her. "I have seen a photograph of your old castle. You can only
get to it by water, Captain Underwood says. Oh, he has been a great
authority on the subject since you went away. One of your castles is on
Loch Houran; but the others----"

"If you like to call them castles," said Walter, gently flattered by
these queries, "there are two of them on Loch Houran. One I call a ruin,
and the other a shooting-box----"

"Oh, you lucky, lucky person; and a house in town, and another grand
place in Scotland! Aren't you frightened to trust yourself among poor
people who have nothing! Don't you feel alarmed lest we should rush at
you and tear you to pieces, and divide your spoils? I am very romantic.
I should have the old castle," she said with a side glance of
provocation and invitation.

Her watchful eyes perceived a change in his countenance as she spoke.
There were limits, it was evident, to the topics her flying hand might
touch. She went on cleverly without a pause--

"You wonder what I should do with it? Restore it, Lord Erradeen. Build
the walls up again, and make everything as it used to be. I should enjoy
that--and then the furnishing, how delightful! Don't you know that the
aim and object of every rational being now is to make a little Victorian
house look like a big Queen Anne one? or if not that, an Eastern harem
with quantities of draperies, and mats and cushions. How much more
delightful to have the real thing to work upon!"

"But my house is not a Queen Anne house, or an Oriental----"

"You don't like to say the word, you good, delicate-minded young man! Of
course not; but a castle like the _Mysteries of Udolpho_. At all events
you must ask mamma and me to pay you a visit, and I shall take my lute
like Emily in that beautiful story, and a small but well-chosen
collection of books; and then whatever happens--suppose even that you
shut my lover up in one of your dungeons----"

"Which I should certainly do; nay, hang him on the gallows-hill."

"No, no," she said, "not hang him; let him have the death of a
gentleman. Here we are at the corner. Oh, you are going my way? Well,
perhaps that makes a difference. You meant to pay your respects to
mamma? I don't think that I can in that case, Lord Erradeen, interfere
with the liberty of the subject; for you have certainly a right, if you
wish it, to call on mamma."

"Certainly I have a right. I am prepared to obey you in every other
respect; but Mrs. Herbert has always been very kind to me, and it is one
of my objects----"

"How much improved you are!" cried Julia. "How nice you are! How
grateful and condescending! Tell me whom you have been consorting with
while you have been away. The Scotch have good manners, I have always
heard. Who is your nearest neighbour in your old castle, Lord Erradeen?"

Walter cast about in his mind for a moment before he replied. He had no
mind to profane the sanctity of the Isle by betraying its gentle inmates
to any stranger's curiosity. He said--"I think my nearest neighbour is a
Mr. Williamson--not a distinguished name or person--who has a gorgeous
great house and everything that money can buy. That means a great deal.
It has all been made by sugar, or some equally laudable production."

"And Mr. Williamson--no, it is not distinguished as names go--has a
daughter, Lord Erradeen?"

"I believe so, Miss Herbert."

"How solemn we are! It used to be Julia--and Walter. But never mind,
when one gets into the peerage one changes all that. 'One fair daughter,
and no more, whom he loved passing well!'"

"There is but one, I think; sons in an indefinite number, however, which
lessens, I suppose, in a commercial point of view, the value of the
lady."

"Lord Erradeen, you fill me with amazement and horror. If that is how
you have been taught by your Scotch neighbours----"

"Miss Herbert, I am following the lead you have given me--trying humbly
to carry out your wishes."

And then they looked at each other, and laughed. The wit was not of a
high order, but perhaps that is scarcely necessary to make a duel of
this kind between a young man and a young woman amusing. It was more
than amusing to Julia. She was excited, her bosom panted, her eyes
shone--all the more that Walter's calm was unbroken. It was provoking
beyond measure to see him so tranquil, so ready to respond and follow
her lead, so entirely unlikely to go any further. He was quite willing
to amuse himself, she said to herself, but of feeling in the matter he
had none, though there had been moments.

And it did not once occur to her that her antagonist was clever enough
to have eluded her investigations, or that the smile upon his face was
one of secret pleasure in the secret sanctuary whose existence he had
revealed to no one--the little isle in the midst of Loch Houran and the
ladies there. He went back to them while all this lively babble went on,
seeing them stand and wave their hands to him, as he was carried away
over the wintry water. He had come away with relief and eagerness to be
gone; but how fair it all looked as he turned back out of this scenery
so different from his loch, and from the side of a girl who wanted to
"catch" him, Walter knew. Odious words! which it is a shame to think,
much less speak, and yet which are spoken constantly, and, alas! in some
cases, are true.

Notwithstanding this lively consciousness of the young lady's meaning
(which in itself is always flattering and propitiates as much as it
alarms), Walter accompanied Julia very willingly to the cottage. He had
not thought of going there so soon. It was a kind of evidence of
interest and special attraction which he had not meant to give, but that
did not occur to him at the moment. The mother and daughter exerted
themselves to the utmost to make his visit agreeable. They insisted that
he should stay to luncheon, they sang to him and made him sing, and
talked and made him talk, and burned delicate incense before him, with
jibes and flouts and pretences at mockery. They had the air of laughing
at him, yet flattered him all the time. He was such a prize, so well
worth taking a little trouble about. The incense tickled his nostrils,
though he laughed too, and believed that he saw through them all the
time. There was no deception, indeed, on either side; but the man was
beguiled and the woman excited. He went away with certain fumes in his
brain, and she came down from the little domestic stage upon which she
had been performing with a sense of exhaustion, yet success. Miss
Williamson, a country beauty, or perhaps not even a beauty, with red
hair and a Scotch accent, and nothing but money to recommend her! Money
was much to ordinary mortals, but surely not enough to sweep away all
other considerations from the mind of a young favourite of fortune. No!
Julia believed in a certain generosity of mind though she was not
herself sufficiently well off to indulge in it, and she could not think
that money, important as it was, would carry the day.

In the mean time, it was apparent to all the world that Lord Erradeen
had spent the greater part of his first day at Sloebury, at the Cottage;
he had stayed to luncheon, he had promised to come back to practise
those duets. A young man who has just come into his kingdom, and is
therefore in circumstances to marry, and likely in all human probability
to be turning his thoughts that way, cannot do such things as this with
impunity. If he had not meant something why should he thus have
_affiché'd_ his interest in her daughter, Mrs. Herbert asked herself in
polyglot jargon. There was no reason why he should have done so, had he
not meant it. Thus Walter walked into the snare though it was so
evident, though he saw it very well, and though the sportswoman herself
trailed it on the ground before him and laughed and avowed her deep
design. In such cases fun and frankness are more potent than deceit.

Walter continued in Sloebury for two or three weeks. He found the
stagnation of every interest intolerable. He had nothing to do, and
though this was a condition which he had endured with much composure for
years before, it pressed upon him now with a force beyond bearing. And
yet he did not go away. He betook himself to the Cottage to practise
those duets almost every day; and presently he fell into the practice of
visiting Captain Underwood almost every night; but not to confide in him
as that personage had hoped. Underwood soon learned that a reference to
Loch Houran made his companion silent at once, and that whatever had
happened there the young lord meant to keep it to himself. But though
Walter did not open his heart, he took advantage of the means of
amusement opened to him. He suffered Captain Underwood to discourse to
him about the turf; about horses, of which the young man knew nothing;
about the way in which both pleasure and profit might be secured,
instead of the ruin to which it is generally supposed that pursuit must
lead. Underwood would have been very willing to "put" his young friend
"up" to many things, and indeed did so in learned disquisitions which
perhaps made less impression than he supposed upon a brain which was
preoccupied by many thoughts. And they played a great deal, that deadly
sort of play between two, which is for sheer excitement's sake, and is
one of the most dangerous ways of gambling. Walter did not lose so much
as might have been expected, partly because his interest was apt to
flag, and partly that his companion had designs more serious than those
of the moment, and was in no hurry to pluck his pigeon--if pigeon it
was, of which he was not yet sure.

Thus the young man held himself up to the disapproval of the town,
which, indeed, was ready to forgive a great deal to a peer, but "did not
like," as all authorities said, "the way he was going on." He was
behaving shamefully to Julia Herbert, unless he meant to marry her,
which she and her mother evidently believed to the derision of all
spectators; and to mix himself up so completely with Underwood, and
abandon the society of his own contemporaries, were things which it was
very difficult to forgive. He did not hunt as he had intended, which
would have been an amusement suited to his position, partly because
there was a good deal of frost, and partly because it was not an
exercise familiar to Walter, who had never had the means of keeping
horses. And the football club belonged to the previous ages, with which
he now felt so little connection. Therefore, it happened after a time,
notwithstanding the charm of his rank, that Sloebury felt itself in the
painful position of disapproving of Lord Erradeen. Strange to say, he
was very little different from Walter Methven, who was a young fellow
who had wasted his time and chances--a kind of good-for-nothing. It was
something of an insult to the community in which he lived, that he
should be "caught" by the most undisguised flirt, and should have fallen
under the influence of the person most like a common adventurer of any
in Sloebury. He owed it at least to those who had contemplated his
elevation with such a rush of friendly feeling that he should be more
difficult to inveigle. Had he still been plain Walter Methven, he could
not have been more easily led away.

The house in which Walter was the first interest, and which had risen to
such high hopes in his elevation, was held in the strangest state of
suspense by this relapse into his old ways. The only element of
agreeable novelty in it was the presence of Symington, who had taken
possession of the house at once, with the most perfect composure and
satisfaction to himself. He was the most irreproachable and orderly
retainer ever brought into a house by a young man returning home. He
gave no trouble, the maids said; he was not proud, but quite willing to
take his meals in the kitchen, and did not stand upon his dignity.
Presently, however, it appeared that he had got everything in his hands.
He took the control of the dinner table, made suggestions to the cook,
and even to Mrs. Methven herself when she ordered dinner, and became by
imperceptible degrees the chief authority in the house. In this
capacity he looked with puzzled and disapproving eyes at his young lord.
His first inquiries as to where the horses were kept, and where he was
to find his master's hunting things, being answered impatiently, with an
intimation that Walter possessed neither the one nor the other,
Symington took a high tone.

"You will, no doubt, take steps, my lord, to supply yourself. I hear
it's a fine hunting country: and for a young gentleman like you with
nothing to do----"

"Don't you think I can manage my own affairs best?" the young man said.

"It's very likely ye think so, my lord," with great gravity, Symington
said. He was laying the table for luncheon, and spoke sometimes with his
back to Walter as he went and came.

"I suppose you are of a different opinion?" Walter said, with a laugh.

"Not always--not always, my lord. I've seen things in you that were very
creditable--and sense too--and sense too!" said Symington, waving his
hand. "I'm just thinking if I were a young gentleman in your lordship's
place, I would get more enjoyment out of my life. But we never know," he
added piously, "what we might be capable of, if we were exposed to
another's temptations and put in another's place."

"Let me hear," said Walter, with some amusement, "what you would do if
you were in my place."

"It's what I have often asked mysel'," said Symington, turning round,
and polishing with the napkin in his hand an old-fashioned silver salt
cellar. "Supposing ye were rich and great that are at present nobody in
particular, what would ye do? It's an awful difficult question. It's far
more easy to find fault. We can all do that. Your lordship might say to
me, 'That silver is no what it ought to be.' And I would probably
answer, 'It's been in a woman's hands up till now,' which he had never
taken into consideration. And I may misjudge your lordship in the same
way."

"Do you mean to say that I too have been in a woman's hands? But that is
uncivil, Symington, to my mother."

"I would on no hand be unceevil to my lady; and it was not that I was
meaning. To my thinking, my lord, you just dinna get enough out of your
life. There is a heap of satisfaction to be got out of the life of a
lord, when he has plenty of money, and five-and-twenty years of age like
you. It is true your lordship is courting, which accounts for many
things."

"What do you mean by courting? Come, we have had enough of this," Lord
Erradeen said.

"I did not expect, my lord, that you would bide it long, though you were
very good-natured to begin with. Courting is just a very well kent
amusement, and no ill in it. But I will not intrude my remarks on your
lordship. There is one thing though, just one thing," Symington said,
re-arranging the table with formal care. "You'll no be going north
again, my lord, as well as I can reckon, for nigh upon another year?"

"What have you to do with my going north?" Walter cried impatiently.

"Your lordship forgets that I will have to go with ye, which gives me a
hantle to do with it," said Symington imperturbably; "but that will no
be at least till it's time for the grouse? It will always be my
duty:--and my pleasure, and my pleasure!" he added with a wave of his
hand, "to follow your lordship to the place ye ken of, and do my best
for you: but in the mean time I'm thinking this place suits me real
well, and I will just bide here."

"Bide here, you old Solomon!" Walter cried, between laughter and wrath;
"how do you know that you are to bide anywhere, or that I mean you to
stay with me at all?"

Symington waved his hand dismissing this question with the contempt it
merited. "I am just a person much attached to the family," he said, "and
ye would not find it comfortable, my lord, up yonder, without me. But in
the mean time ye will get a younger lad with my advice. And I'll just
bide where I am with my lady, your mother, who is a lady of great
judgment. I am getting an auld man; and your lordship is a young one;
and if you are over-quiet at present, which is my opinion, it is no to
be expected or desired that the like of that can last. Ye will aye find
me here, my lord, when you want me. It will suit me far better at my
years than running to and fro upon the earth at the tail of a young lad.
But as long as I can draw one foot after another, I will go with your
lordship _up yonder_, and never fail ye," Symington said.




CHAPTER VI.


The manner of life of which Symington disapproved went on till Christmas
was over, and the new year had begun. It was not a new kind of life, but
only the old, heightened in some of its features; less tragical in its
folly because the young man was now no longer dependent upon his own
exertions, yet more tragical in so far that life had now great
opportunities for him, and means of nobler living, had he chosen. He
received business letters now and then from Mr. Milnathort and from Shaw
at Loch Houran which he read with impatience or not at all. Business
disgusted him. He had no desire to take the trouble of making up his
mind on this or that question. He let his letters collect in a pile and
left them there, while he went and practised his duets, or lighted his
cigar with the pink paper of the telegram which called his attention to
letters unanswered, and went out to play ecarte with Underwood. He did
not care for the ecarte. He did not care for the duets. Poor Julia's
devices to secure him became day by day more transparent to him, and
Underwood's attempts to gain an influence. He saw through them both, yet
went on day by day. The Herberts, mother and daughter, spoke of him
with a secure proprietorship, and Julia, though never without that doubt
which adventurers know, had almost a certainty of the coronet upon her
handkerchief which she worked upon a cigar-case for him by way of making
quite sure what a viscount's coronet was. It is a pretty ornament. She
was rather ashamed of her old-fashioned name, but that above it made
everything right. Underwood for his part shook off the doubt which had
been in his mind as to whether Lord Erradeen was a pigeon to be plucked.
He thought of a campaign in town carried on triumphantly by means of his
noble victim. It was worth waiting for after all.

And thus Christmas passed. Christmas, that season of mirth! There was
the usual number of parties, at all of which Lord Erradeen was a
favoured guest, and allowed himself to be exhibited as Miss Herbert's
thrall. In these assemblies she used to talk to him about Miss
Williamson. "Oh yes, a lady in Scotland, whose wealth is untold; hasn't
Lord Erradeen told you? It is to be a match, I understand," Julia would
say with a radiant countenance. "Sugar--or cotton, I don't remember
which. When one has estates in the West Highlands, that is part of the
programme. One always marries--sugar. That is a much prettier way of
putting it than to say one marries money." This tantalised Sloebury a
little, and painfully mystified Mrs. Methven, who had never heard Miss
Williamson's name; but it did not change the evident fact that Lord
Erradeen must either be engaged, or on the point of being engaged--or
else that he was using Julia Herbert very ill. When the new year began,
and it was suddenly announced that he was going away, there was a
flutter and thrill of excitement over all the town. The rector, who met
Walter on his way to the railway, and who was aware of all the
expectations connected with him, stared aghast at the intimation. "Going
away!" he said, then put forth a tremulous smile. "Ah, I see! going on
some visits, to pot a few pheasants before the season is over."

"I don't think that would tempt me," Walter said. "I am going to town,
and my mother will follow shortly. It is a removal, I fear----"

"You are going from Sloebury! But then--but then----" The old clergyman
gasped for breath.

"My friends think I have wasted a great deal too much time in Sloebury,"
Lord Erradeen said, and he waved his hand to the rector, who went home
with his lower lip dropped, and his cheeks fallen in, in a consternation
beyond words. His excitement was as great, though of a different kind,
as on that day when he ran in from church with his surplice still on,
and the most extraordinary disregard of decorum to carry the news of
Walter's elevation in rank to his wife. "That fellow is going off
without a word," cried Mr. Wynn. "He has been amusing himself, that's
all; but you never will listen to me. The girl has been going too far, a
great deal too far, her mother ought not to have allowed it. And now I
shall hear nothing else wherever I go," the rector said. He was almost
ready to cry, being old and a nervous man by nature. "I thought it was
settled this time, and that we should have no further trouble with her,"
which was a contradiction of himself after the words he had begun with.
Mrs. Wynn soothed him as best she could, though indeed she had been the
one who had all along doubted Lord Erradeen's "intentions," and bade the
rash Julia beware.

"Perhaps," she said, "they have come to an understanding, my dear. For
it was quite true what he told you: he has wasted too much time in
Sloebury. A young man in his position should not hang about in a place
like this."

"A young man in his position--should not raise expectations that are
never to come to anything," the rector said; which was a truth so
undeniable that even his peace-making wife could find nothing to reply.

The change of sentiment which led Walter away from Sloebury was
accomplished almost in a moment. In a capricious and wayward mind, a
touch is sometimes enough to change the entire direction of a life. He
had been kept indoors by a cold, and for want of something else to do
had read his letters, and even answered one or two of them. There were
several from Shaw relating the course of events at Loch Houran; but
these might not perhaps have moved him, had he not found inclosed in one
of them a note, now somewhat out of date, from Oona. It was very short
and very simple. "I found I was not authorised to do anything with the
poor Frasers except to tell them you would not be hard upon them: and I
took it upon me to assure old Jenny that whatever happened you would
never take the coo, and Granny that she should die in peace in her own
house even--which she would like, I think, for the credit of the
glen--if she should live to be a hundred. I think you will not disown my
agency by doing anything contrary to this. My mother sends her best
regards." There was nothing more: but the words acted upon Walter's
dissatisfied mind like the sudden prick of a lance. It seemed to him
that he saw her again standing, with a somewhat wistful look in her
eyes, watching him as his boat shot along the gleaming water--her mother
with her waving handkerchief, her nodding head, her easy smile, standing
by. Oona had said nothing, made no movement, had only stood and looked
at him. How little she said now! and yet she was the only living
creature (he said to himself in the exaggeration of a distracted mind)
who had ever given him real help. She had ever given him her hand
without hesitation or coquetry or thought of herself, to deliver him
from his enemy--a hand that had purity, strength in its touch, that was
as soft--as snow, he had said: cool, and pure, and strong. The thought
of it gave him a pang which was indescribable. He rose up from where he
sat among a litter of paper and books, the accumulations of an idle man,
and went hurriedly to the drawing-room, where his mother sat alone by
her fire--so much the more alone because he was in the next room, a
world apart from her. He came in with a nervous excitement about him.

"Mother," he said, "I am going to town to-morrow."

She put down her book and looked at him. "Well, Walter?" she said.

"You think that is not of much importance; but it is, as it happens. I
am going away from Sloebury. I shall never do any good here. I can't
think why I have stayed--why _we_ have stayed indeed; for it cannot have
much attraction for you."

She put down the book altogether now. She was afraid to say too much or
too little in this sudden, new resolution, and change of front.

"I can understand your feeling, Walter. You have stayed over Christmas
out of consideration for----" She would have said "me" if she could, but
that was impossible. "For the traditions of the season," she added, with
a faint smile.

"That is a very charitable and kind way of putting it, mother. I have
stayed because I am a fool--because I can't take the trouble to do
anything but what suggests itself at the moment. Perhaps you think I
don't know? Oh, I know very well, if that did any good. I am going to
get the house ready, and you will join me when it is fit for you to live
in."

"I, Walter?" she said, with a startled tone. Her face flushed and then
grew pale. She looked at him with a curious mixture of pleasure and
pain. It seemed like opening up a question which had been long settled.
Death is better than the reviving flutters of life when these are but to
lead to a little more suffering and a dying over again. She added,
somewhat tremulously, "I think perhaps it would be better not to
consider the question of removal as affecting me."

"Mother," he said, almost wildly, his eyes blazing upon her, "your
reproaches are more than I can bear."

"I mean no reproach," she said, quietly. "It is simple enough. Your life
should not be fettered by cares which are unnecessary. I am very well
here."

"We can't go all over it again," he said. "We discussed that before. But
you will say I have been as selfish, as careless as ever I was: and it
is true--worse. Ah, I wonder if this was part of the penalty? Worse, in
the old way. That would be a sort of a devilish punishment, just like
him--if one were so silly as to believe that he had the power."

"Of whom are you speaking, Walter?" asked his mother, startled.
"Punishment--who can punish you? You have done nothing to put yourself
in any one's power."

He gazed at her for a moment as she looked at him with anxious eyes,
investigating his face to discover, if she could, what he meant. Then he
burst into an excited laugh.

"I am getting melodramatic," he said, "by dint of being wretched, I
suppose."

"Walter, what is this? If there is indeed anything hanging over you, for
God's sake tell me."

She got up hurriedly and went to him in sudden trouble and alarm, but
the sensation of the moment did not carry him any further. He put away
her hand almost impatiently. "Oh, there is nothing to tell," he said,
with irritation. "You take everything _au pied de la lettre_. But I am
going to town to-morrow, all the same."

And this he did, after a night in which he slept little and thought
much. It may be thought that Oona Forrester's letter was a small
instrument to effect so much, but it is not thus that influences can be
reckoned. His mother had done a great deal more for him than Oona, but
nothing she could have done or said could have moved him like the
recollection of that small, soft hand by which he had held as if it were
the anchor of salvation. It kept him from a sort of despair as he
remembered it, through this turbulent night, as he lay awake in the
darkness, asking himself could this be what his adversary meant? Not
misfortune or downfall, which was what he had thought of, feeling
himself able to defy such threats: but this self-abandonment to his
natural defects, this more and more unsatisfactoriness of which he was
conscious to the bottom of his heart. It did not occur to him that in
the dread that came over him, and panic-stricken sense of the
irresistible, he was giving the attributes of something far more than
man to his maniac, or monomaniac, of Kinloch Houran. It was not the
moment now to question what that being was, or how he had it in his
power to affect the life and soul of another. The anguish of feeling
that he was being affected, that the better part was being paralysed in
him and the worse made stronger, was what occupied him now. When he got
a little sleep in the midst of his tossings and troublings of mind and
body, it was by the soothing recollection of Oona's refreshing,
strengthening touch, the hand that had been put into his own and had
given him the strength of two souls.

And so it was that next morning, when he ought to have been practising
those duets at Julia Herbert's side, he was hurrying up to London as
fast as steam and an express train could carry him. It was not perhaps
the best place to go to for spiritual reformation, but at least it was a
beginning of something new. And in the force of this impulse he went on
for some time, proceeding at once to Park Lane, to push forward the
preparations of the house, securing for himself a servant in the place
of Symington, and establishing himself, for the interval that must
elapse before the house was ready for him, in chambers. In this way he
found occupation for a week or two. He made an effort to answer his
letters. He suffered himself to go through certain forms of business
with the London lawyers who were the correspondents of Mr. Milnathort;
and so for a short time found himself in the position of having
something to do, and, still more strange, of doing it with a lightness
of mind and enlivenment of life which was extraordinary, and without a
reflection in respect to the duets and the ecarte. They were over, these
_délaissements_, and that was all about it.

It was not such plain sailing however after the beginning. Established
in chambers which were pleasant enough, with plenty of money, with youth
and health, and what was still more, as he thought, with rank and a
title which had the effect of making everybody civil and more than civil
to him, Lord Erradeen suddenly awoke to the fact that he was less than
nobody in the midst of that busy world of London in which there are so
many people who love a lord. Yes; but before you can love a lord, invite
him, caress him, make his time pass agreeably, you must know him. And
Walter knew nobody. The most curious, the most rueful-comic,
insignificant-important of all preliminaries! The doors were open, and
the entertainment ready, and the guest willing; but there was no master
of the ceremonies to bring him within the portals. It had not occurred
to him until he was there, nor had he thought, even had his pride
permitted him to ask for them, of the need of introductions, and some
helping hand to bring him within the reach of society. Society, indeed,
had as yet scarcely come back to town, but yet there was a sprinkling at
the club windows, men were to be seen in Pall Mall and Piccadilly, and
even a few carriages with ladies in them frequented the Park. But what
did that matter to him who knew nobody? He had no club. He was a
stranger from the country. No house was open to him; he went about the
streets without meeting a face he knew. To be sure, this must not be
taken as an absolute fact, for there were people he knew, even
relations, one very respectable clan of them, living at Norwood, in the
highest credit and comfort, who would have received him with open arms.
And he knew Mr. Wynn, the rector's nephew, a moderately successful
barrister, who called upon and asked him to dinner with extreme
cordiality, as did one or two other people connected with Sloebury. But
in respect to the society to which he felt himself to belong, Walter was
like the Peri at the gate of Paradise. He knew nobody. Had ever any
young peer with means to keep up his rank, been in such a position
before? It gave him a certain pleasure to think upon one other, born to
far higher fortunes than himself, who had entered London like this in
inconceivable solitude. Byron! a magnificent example that went far to
reconcile him to his fate. Walter thought a great deal of the noble poet
in these days, and studied him deeply, and took pleasure in the
comparison, and consolation in the feeling that he could enter
thoroughly into all those high, scornful-wistful, heroic utterances
about mankind. The Byronic mood has gone out of fashion; but if you can
imagine a youth richly endowed by fortune, feeling that his new honours
should open every door to him, and also a little that he was fit to hold
his own place with the best, yet perceiving no door move on its hinges,
and forced to acknowledge with a pang of surprise and disappointment,
and that sense of neglected merit which is one of the most exquisite
pangs of youth, that nobody cared to make his acquaintance, or even to
inquire who was Lord Erradeen! It is all very well to smile at these
sentiments where there has been no temptation to entertain them. But the
young peer, who knew nobody, entered completely into Byron's feelings.
He pondered upon the extraordinary spectacle of that other young peer
strolling haughtily, with his look like a fallen angel, up between the
lordly ranks to take his hereditary seat: all the representatives of the
old world staring coldly at him, and not one to be his sponsor and
introduce him there. The same thing Walter felt would have to happen in
his own case, if he had courage enough to follow the example of Byron;
and he felt how hollow were all his honours, how mean the indifferent
spectators round him, how little appreciated himself, with all the
keenness of youthful passion and would-be cynicism. Unfortunately, he
was not a Byron, and had no way of revenging himself upon that world.

This curious and irritating discovery, after all his good resolutions,
had, it need scarcely be said, the reverse of an elevating influence
upon him. He sought the amusement from which his equals shut him out in
other regions. Strolling about town in an aimless way, he picked up
certain old acquaintances whose renewed friendship was of little
advantage. There will always be black sheep everywhere, and it is no
unprecedented case for a boy from a public school, or youth from the
university, to come across, six or seven years after he has left these
haunts of learning, stray wanderers, who in that little time have fallen
to the very depth of social degradation. When such a thing happens to a
young man, the result may be a noble pity and profound impression of
life's unspeakable dangers, and the misery of vice; or it may be after
the first shock a sense that his own peccadilloes are not worth thinking
of, seeing how infinitely lower down others have fallen. Walter stood
between these two. He was sincerely sorry, and anxious to succour the
fallen; but at the same time he could not but feel that in his position,
who never could come to that, the precautions which poor men had to take
were scarcely necessary. And what could he do? A young man must have
something to amuse himself and occupy his time.

It was while he was sliding into the inconceivable muddle of an indolent
mind and a vacant life that Underwood came to town. The captain's
motives and intentions in respect to him were of a very mixed character,
and require further elucidation: but the effect of his appearance in the
mean time was a rapid acceleration of the downward progress. Underwood
was "up to" many things which Lord Erradeen was not "up to" as yet, and
the young man did not any longer, except by intervals, despise the
society of the elder one, who brought, it could not be denied, a great
many fresh excitements and occupations into his life. Under Captain
Underwood's instructions he became acquainted with the turf, which, as
everybody knows, is enough to give a young man quite enough to do, and a
good many things to think of. And now indeed the time had come when the
captain began to feel his self-banishment to Sloebury, and his patience,
and all his exertions, so far as Walter was concerned, fully repaid.
There was no repetition of that Byronic scene in the House of Lords.
Instead of proudly taking his seat alone, and showing the assembled
world how little he cared for its notice, Walter discovered that he was
indifferent to the world altogether, and asked himself, What is the good
of it? with the philosophy of a cynic. What was the good of it, indeed?
What was it but a solemn farce when you came to look into it? The House
of Commons might be something, but the House of Lords was nothing; and
why should a man trouble himself to become a member of it? Then as to
the clubs. What was the use of struggling to get admission to White's,
or Boodle's, or any other of those exalted institutions which Walter
only knew by name--when at Underwood's club, where he was received with
acclamation, you had the best dinner and the best wine in London, and no
petty exclusiveness? Walter was not by any means the only titled person
in that society. There were quantities indeed of what the captain called
"bosses" on its books. Why then should Lord Erradeen take the trouble to
sue and wait for admittance elsewhere with these doors so open to him?
In the midst of this new influx of life, it is scarcely necessary to
say that the house in Park Lane came to a standstill. It stood through
all the season profitless, of use to nobody; and Walter's life went on,
alas, not to be described by negations, a life without beauty or
pleasure; though pleasure was all its aim.

At Sloebury the commotion made by his departure had been great. At the
Cottage there had been a moment of blank consternation and silence, even
from ill words. Then Mrs. Herbert's energies awoke, and her vivacity of
speech. Fire blazed from this lady's eyes, and bitterness flowed from
her tongue. She fell upon Julia (who, indeed, might have been supposed
the greatest sufferer) with violent reproaches, bidding her (as was
natural) remember that _she_ had always been against it: a reproach in
which there was really some truth. Julia, too, had a moment of
prostration in which she could hold no head at all against the sudden
disappointment and overthrow, and still more overwhelming realisation of
what everybody would say. She retired to her room for a day, and drew
down the blinds and had a headache in all the forms. During that period,
no doubt, the girl went through sundry anguishes, both of shame and
failure, such as the innocent who make no scheming are free from; while
her mother carried fire and flame to the Rectory, and even betrayed to
various friends her burning sense of wrong, and that Julia had been
shamefully used. But when Julia emerged out of the shelter of that
headache she put down all such demonstrations. She showed to Sloebury,
all on the watch to see "how she took it," a front as dauntless and eyes
as bright as ever. In a campaign the true soldier is prepared for
anything that can happen, and knows how to take the evil with the good.
Had she weakly allowed herself to love Walter the result might have been
less satisfactory; but she had been far too wise to run such a risk.
Afterwards, when rumours of the sort of life he was leading reached
Sloebury, she confided to her mother, in the depths of their domestic
privacy, that it was just as well he was going a little wrong.

"Oh, a little wrong!" cried Mrs. Herbert vindictively. "If all we hear
is true it is much more than a little. He is just going to the bad as
fast as his legs can carry him--with _that_ Captain Underwood to help
him on; and he richly deserves it, considering how he has behaved to
you."

"Oh, wait a little, mamma," Julia said. "I know him better than any one.
He will come round again, and then he will be ready to hang himself. And
the prodigal will come home, and then----Or, perhaps Tom Herbert will
ask me up to town for the end of the season, after all the best is over,
as he is sometimes kind enough to do. And I shall carry a little roast
veal, just a sort of specimen of the fatted calf, with me to town." Thus
the young lady kept up her heart and bided her time.

Mrs. Methven bore the remarks of Sloebury and answered all its
questions with a heavier heart. She could not take any consolation in
Walter's wrong-doing, neither could she have the relief of allowing that
he was to blame. She accounted for the rearrangement of everything,
which she had to consent to after taking many measures for removal, by
saying that she had changed her mind. "We found the house could not be
ready before the end of the season," she said heroically, "and what
should I do in London in the height of the summer with nobody there?"
She bore a fine front to the world but in reality the poor lady's heart
had sunk within her. Oddly enough, Julia, the wronged, who at heart was
full of good nature, was almost her only comforter. Julia treated Lord
Erradeen's absence as the most natural thing in the world.

"I know what took him away in such a hurry," she said. "It was Miss
Williamson. Oh, don't you know about Miss Williamson? his next neighbour
at that Lock--something or other, a girl made of money--no, sugar. The
next thing we shall hear is that you have a daughter-in-law with red
hair. What a good thing that red hair is so fashionable! She is so rich,
he was quite ashamed to mention it; that is why he never told you; but
Walter," she cried, with a laugh, "had no secrets from me."

Mrs. Methven, in dire lack of anything to cling to, caught at Miss
Williamson as at a rock of salvation. If he had fallen in love, did not
that account for everything? She could only pray God that it might be
true.

Symington had been bringing in the tea while Miss Herbert discoursed.
When he came back to remove the tea things after she was gone, he "took
it upon him," as he said, "to put in his word." "If you will excuse me,
my lady," he said (a title which in a sort of poetical justice and
amendment of fate Symington considered due to my lord's mother), "my
lord could not do better than give his attention to Miss Williamson, who
is just the greatest fortune in all the country-side. But, even if it's
not that, there is nothing to be out of heart about. If he's taking a
bite out of the apples of Gomorrah, he'll very soon find the cinders
cranshing in his mouth. But whatever he is after, when it comes to be
the time to go _up yonder_ there will be an end to all that."

"My good Symington," said Mrs. Methven, "do you think it is necessary to
excuse my son to me? It would be strange if I did not understand him
better than any one." But notwithstanding this noble stand for Walter,
she got a little consolation both from the thought of Miss Williamson,
and of that mysterious going _up yonder_, which must be a crisis in his
life.

Thus winter ran into summer, and the busy months of the season went over
the head of young Lord Erradeen. It was a very different season from
that which he had anticipated. It contained no Byronic episode at all.
The House of Lords never saw its new member, neither did any of those
gay haunts of the fashionable world of which he had once dreamed. He
went to no balls, or crowded dazzling receptions, or heavy dinners. He
did not even present himself at a _levée_. He had indeed fallen out of
his rank altogether, that rank which had startled him so, with a kind of
awe in the unexpected possession. His only club was that one of
indifferent reputation to which Underwood had introduced him, and his
society, the indifferent company which collected there. He began to be
tolerably acquainted with race-courses, great and small, and improved
his play both at billiards and whist, so that his guide, philosopher,
and friend declared himself ready on all occasions to take odds on
Erradeen. He spent a great deal of his time in these occupations, and
lost a great deal of his money. They were almost the only things that
gave him a semblance of an occupation in life. He was due at the club at
certain hours to pursue this trade, which, like any other trade, was a
support to his mind, and helped to make the time pass. At
five-and-twenty one has so much time on hand, that to spend it is a
pleasure, like spending money, flinging it to the right hand and the
left, getting rid of it: though there is so much to be got out of it
that has grown impossible to the old fogeys, no old fogey is ever so
glad to throw it away.

And thus the days went on. They were full of noise and commotion, and
yet, as a matter of fact, they were dullish as they dropped one after
another. And sometimes as he came back to his rooms in the blue of the
morning, and found as the early sun got up, that sleep was impossible,
or on such a moment as a Sunday morning, when there was little or
nothing "to do," Walter's thoughts were not of an agreeable kind.
Sometimes he would wake from a doze with the beautiful light streaming
in at his windows, and the brown London sparrows beginning to twitter,
and would jump up in such a restlessness and fierce impatience with
himself and everything about him as he could neither repress nor endure.
At such moments his life seemed to him intolerable, an insult to reason,
a shame to the nature that was made for better things. What was the good
of going on with it day after day? The laughter and the noise, who was
it that called them the crackling of thorns--a hasty momentary blaze
that neither warmed nor lighted? And sometimes, even in the midst of his
gaiety, there would suddenly come into his mind a question--Was this
what was to happen to him if he resisted the will of the dweller on Loch
Houran? Psha! he would say to himself, what was happening to him?
Nothing but his own will and pleasure, the life that most young fellows
of his age who were well enough off to indulge in it possessed--the life
he would have liked before he became Lord Erradeen: which was true; and
yet it did not always suffice him for an answer. At such times curious
gleams of instinct, sudden perceptions as by some light fitfully
entering, which made an instantaneous revelation too rapid almost for
any profit, and then disappeared again--would glance across Walter's
soul.

On a fine evening in June he was walking with Underwood to the club to
dine. The streets were cool with the approach of night, the sky all
flushed with rose red and every possible modification of heavenly blue,
the trees in the squares fluttering out their leaves in the coolness of
the evening, and shaking off the dust of day, a sense of possible dew
going to fall even in London streets, a softening of sounds in the air.
He was going to nothing better than cards, or perhaps, for a caprice, to
the theatre, where he had seen the same insane burlesque a dozen times
before, no very lively prospect: and was cogitating in his mind whether
he should not run off to the Continent, as several men were talking of
doing, and so escape from Underwood and the club, and all the rest of
the hackneyed round: which he would have done a dozen times over but for
the trouble of it, and his sense of the bore it would be to find
something to amuse him under such novel circumstances. As they went
along, Underwood talking of those experiences which were very fine to
the boys in Sloebury, but quite flat to Walter now--there suddenly
appeared to him, standing on the steps of a private hotel, in a light
overcoat like a man going to dinner, a middle-aged, rustic-looking
individual, with a ruddy, good-humoured countenance, and that air of
prosperity and well-being which belongs to the man of money. "I think I
have seen that man somewhere before," said Walter. Underwood looked up,
and the eyes of all three met for a moment in mutual recognition.
"Hallo, Captain Underwood!" the stranger said. Underwood was startled by
the salutation; but he stopped, willingly or unwillingly, stopping
Walter also, whose arm was in his. "Mr. Williamson! You are an
unexpected sight in London," he said.

"No, no, not at all," said the good-humoured man, "I am very often in
London. I am just going in to my dinner. I wonder if I might make bold,
being a countryman and straight from Loch Houran, to say, though we have
never met before, that I am sure this is Lord Erradeen?"

Walter replied with a curious sense of amusement and almost pleasure.
Mr. Williamson, the father of the fabulous heiress who had been invented
between Julia Herbert and himself!

"I am very glad to make your acquaintance, Lord Erradeen; you know our
lands march, as they say in Scotland. Are you engaged out to your
dinner, gentlemen, may I ask, or are ye free to take pot luck? My
daughter Katie is with me, and we were thinking--or at least she was
thinking--for I am little learned in such matters--of looking in at the
theatre to see a small piece of Mr. Tennyson's that they call the
_Falcon_, and which they tell me, or rather she tells me, is just most
beautiful. Come now, be sociable; it was no fault of mine, my lord, that
I did not pay my respects to ye when ye were up at Loch Houran. And
Katie is very wishful to make your acquaintance. Captain Underwood
knows of old that I am fond of a good dinner. You will come? Now that's
very friendly. Katie, I've brought you an old acquaintance and a new
one," he said, ushering them into a large room cloudy with the fading
light.

The sudden change of destination, the novelty, the amusing associations
with this name, suddenly restored Walter to a freshness of interest of
which the _blasé_ youth on his way to the noisy monotony of the club
half an hour before could not have thought himself capable. A young lady
rose up from a sofa at the end of the room and came forward, bending her
soft brows a little to see who it was.

"Is it any one I know? for I cannot see them," in simplest tones, with
the accent of Loch Houran, Miss Williamson said.




CHAPTER VII.


The room was large with that air of bare and respectable shabbiness
which is the right thing in a long-established private hotel--with large
pieces of mahogany furniture, and an old-fashioned carpet worn, not bare
exactly, but dim, the pattern half-obliterated here and there, which is
far more correct and _comme il faut_ than the glaring newness and luxury
of modern caravanseries. As Mr. Williamson, like a true Englishman (a
Scotsman in this particular merely exaggerates the peculiarity), loved
the costly all the better for making no show of being costly, it was
naturally at one of these grimly expensive places that he was in the
habit of staying in London. A large window, occupying almost one entire
side of the room, filled it with dim evening light, and a view of roofs
and chimneys, against which Katie's little figure showed as she came
forward asking, "Is it any one I know?" It was not a commanding, or even
very graceful figure, though round and plump, with the softened curves
of youth. When the new-comers advanced to meet her, and she saw behind
her father's middle-aged form, the slimmer outlines of a young man,
Katie made another step forward with an increase of interest. She had
expected some contemporaries of papa's, such as he was in the habit of
bringing home with him to dinner, and not a personage on her own level.
Mr. Williamson, in his good-humoured cordiality, stepped forward
something like a showman, with a new object which he feels will make a
sensation.

"You will never guess who this is," he said, "so I will not keep ye in
suspense, Katie. This is our new neighbour at Loch Houran, Lord
Erradeen. Think of me meeting him just by chance on the pavey, as ye may
say, of a London street, and us next door to each other, to use a vulgar
expression, at home!"

"Which is the vulgar expression?" said Katie. She was very fond of her
father, but yet liked people to see that she knew better. She held out
her hand frankly to Walter, and though she was only a round-about,
bread-and-butter little girl with nothing but money, she was far more at
her ease than he was. "I am very glad to make your acquaintance, Lord
Erradeen," she said. "We were just wondering whether we should meet you
anywhere. We have only been a week in town."

"I don't think we should have been likely to meet," said Walter with
that tone of resentment which had become natural to him, "if I had not
been so fortunate as to encounter Mr. Williamson as he says, on the
_pavé_."

Katie was not pleased by this speech. She thought that Walter was rude,
and implied that the society which he frequented was too fine for the
Williamsons, and she also thought that he meant a laugh at her father's
phraseology, neither of which offences were at all in the young man's
intention.

"Oh," Katie cried, resentful too, "papa and I go to a great many
places--unless you mean Marlborough House and that sort of thing. Oh,
Captain Underwood!" she added next moment in a tone of surprise. The
appearance of Captain Underwood evidently suggested to her ideas not at
all in accordance with that of Marlborough House.

"Yes," he said, "Miss Williamson: you scarcely expected to see me. It is
not often that a man is equally intimate with two distinct branches of a
family, is it? But I always was a fortunate fellow, and here I am back
in your circle again."

Walter's mind was considerably preoccupied by his own circumstances, and
by the novelty of this new meeting; but yet he was quick-witted enough
to remark with some amusement the recurrence of the old situation with
which he was quite acquainted--the instinctive repugnance of the
feminine side everywhere to this companion of his, and the tolerance and
even friendliness of the men. Katie did all but turn her back upon
Underwood before his little speech was ended. She said, "Will you ring
for dinner, papa?" without making the slightest reply to it: and
indeed, after another glance from one to the other, retired to the sofa
from which she had risen, with a little air of having exhausted this new
incident, and indifference to anything that could follow, which piqued
Walter. Had she been a noble person either in fact or in appearance, of
an imposing figure and proportions even, it might have seemed less
insupportable; but that a little dumpy girl should thus lose all
interest in him, classifying him in a moment with his companion, was
beyond Lord Erradeen's patience. He felt bitterly ashamed of Underwood,
and eager even, in his anger at this presumptuous young woman's hasty
judgment, to explain how it was that he was in Underwood's company. But
as he stood biting his lip in the half-lighted room, he could not but
remember how very difficult it would be to explain it. Why was he in
Underwood's company? Because he could get admittance to none better.
Marlborough House! He felt himself grow red all over, with a burning
shame, and anger against fate. And when he found himself seated by
Katie's side at the lighted table, and subject to the questions with
which it was natural to begin conversation, his embarrassment was still
greater. She asked him had he been here and there. That great ball at
the French Embassy that everybody was talking about--of course he had
been one of the guests? And at the Duke's--Katie did not consider it
necessary to particularise what duke, confident that no Christian,
connected ever so distantly with Loch Houran, could have any doubt on
the subject. Was the decoration of the new dining-room so magnificent
as people said? Walter's blank countenance, his brief replies, the
suppressed reluctance with which he said anything at all, had the
strangest effect upon Katie. After a while she glanced at Captain
Underwood, who was talking with much volubility to her father, and with
a very small, almost imperceptible shrug of her little shoulders, turned
away and addressed herself to her dinner. This from a little girl who
was nobody, who was not even very pretty, who betrayed her plebeian
origin in every line of her plump form and fresh little commonplace
face, was more than Walter could bear.

"You must think me dreadfully ignorant of the events of society," he
said, "but the fact is I have not been going out at all. It is not very
long, you are aware, since I came into the property, and--there have
been a great many things to do."

"I have always heard," said Katie, daintily consuming a delicate
_entrée_, with her eyes upon her plate as if that was her sole interest,
"that the Erradeen estates were all in such order that there was never
anything for the heir to do."

"You speak," said Walter, "as if they changed hands every year."

"Oh, not that exactly; but I remember two; and I might have remembered
others, for we have only been at Loch Houran since papa got so rich."

"What a pleasant way of remembering dates!"

"Do you think so, Lord Erradeen? Now I should think that to have been
rich always, and your father before you, and never to have known any
difference, would be so much more pleasant."

"There may perhaps be something to be said on both sides," said Walter;
"but I am no judge--for the news of my elevation, such as it is, came to
me very suddenly, too suddenly to be agreeable, without any warning."

Katie reconsidered her decision in the matter of Lord Erradeen; perhaps
though he knew nobody, he might not be quite unworthy cultivation, and
besides, she had finished her _entrée_. She said, "Didn't you know?"
turning to him again her once-averted eyes.

"I had not the faintest idea; it came upon me like a thunderbolt," he
said. "You perceive that you must treat me with a little indulgence in
respect to dukes, &c.--even if I had any taste for society, which I
haven't," he added, with a touch of bitterness in his tone.

"Oh," said Katie, looking at him much more kindly; then she bent towards
him with quite unexpected familiarity, and said, lowering her voice, but
in the most distinct whisper, "And where then did you pick up that
odious man?"

Walter could not but laugh as he looked across the table at the
unconscious object of this attack.

"I observe that ladies never like him," he said; "at home it is the
same."

"Oh, I should think so," cried Katie, "everybody thought it was such a
pity that Lord Erradeen took him up--and then to see him with you! Oona
Forrester would be very sorry," Katie added after a pause.

"Miss Forrester!" Walter felt himself colour high with pleasure at the
sound of this name, then feeling this a sort of self-betrayal, coloured
yet more. "You know her?"

Katie turned round upon him with a mixture of amusement and disdain.
"Know her! is there any one on the loch, or near it, that doesn't know
her?" she said.

"I beg your pardon," cried Walter. "I forgot for the moment." Then he
too retired within himself for so long a time that it was Katie's turn
to be affronted. He devoted himself to his dinner too, but he did not
eat. At last "Why should she be sorry?" he asked curtly as if there had
been no pause.

"How can I tell you now while he sits there?" said Katie, lowering her
voice; "some other time perhaps--most likely you will call in the
day-time, in the morning, now that we have made your acquaintance."

"If you will permit me," Walter said.

"Oh yes, we will permit you. Papa has always wanted to know you, and so
have I since--If you are allowed to come: but perhaps you will not be
allowed to come, Lord Erradeen."

"Will not be _allowed_? What does that mean? and since when, may I ask,
have you been so kind as to want to know me? I wish I had been aware."

"Since----well, of course, since you were Lord Erradeen," said the girl,
"we did not know of you before: and people like us who have nothing but
money are always very fond of knowing a lord--everybody says so at
least. And it is true, in a way. Papa likes it very much indeed. He
likes to say my friend, the Earl of ----, or my friend, the Duke of
----. He knows a great many lords, though perhaps you would not think
it. He is very popular with fine people. They say he is not at all
vulgar considering, and never takes anything upon him. Oh, yes, I know
it all very well. I am a new person in the other way--I believe it is
far more what you call snobbish--but I can't bear the fine people. Of
course they are very nice to me; but I always remember that they think I
am not vulgar considering, and that I never pretend to be better than I
am."

There was something in this address spoken with a little heat, which
touched Walter's sense of humour, a faculty which in his better moods
made his own position, with all its incongruities, ruefully amusing to
him. "I wonder," he said, "if I pretend to be better than I am? But then
I should require in the first place to know what I am more distinctly
than I do. Now you, on that important point, have, I presume, no doubt
or difficulty?----"

"Not the least," she said, interrupting him. "The daughter of a rich
Glasgow man who is nobody--that is what I am--everybody knows; but you,
my lord, you are a noble person of one of the oldest families, with the
best blood in your veins, with----" She had been eyeing him somewhat
antagonistically, but here she broke off, and fell a laughing. "I don't
believe you care a bit about it," she said. "Are you going with us to
the theatre to see the _Falcon_, Lord Erradeen?"

"What is the _Falcon_?" he said.

"You have not seen it nor heard of it? It is Mr. Tennyson's," said Katie
with a little awe. "How is it possible you have not heard? Don't you
know that lovely story? It is a poor gentleman who has nothing but a
falcon, and the lady he loves comes to see him. She is a widow (that
takes away the interest a little, but it is beautiful all the same) with
a sick child. When he sees her coming he has to prepare an entertainment
for her, and there is nothing but his falcon, so he sacrifices it,
though it breaks his heart. And oh, to see the terrible stage bird that
is brought in, as if that could be his grand hawk! You feel so angry,
you are forced to laugh till you cry again. That kind of story should
never be brought to the literal, do you think it should?"

"And what happens?" said Walter, young enough to be interested, though
not sufficiently well-read to know.

"Oh, you might guess. She had come to ask him for his falcon to save
her child. What could it be else? It is just the contrariety of things."

"You cannot know very much, Miss Williamson, of the contrariety of
things."

"Oh, do you think so? Why shouldn't I? I think I am precisely the person
to do so. It seems to me in my experience," she added, fixing a look
upon him which seemed to Walter's conscience to mean a great deal more
than it was possible Katie could mean, "that almost everything goes
wrong."

"That is a most melancholy view to take."

"But so is everything melancholy," said the girl. Her little simple
physiognomy, her rosy cheeks and blue eyes, the somewhat blunted profile
(for Katie had no features, as she was aware) and altogether commonplace
air of the little person who produced these wonderful sentiments amused
Walter beyond measure. He laughed perhaps more than was strictly
decorous, and drew the attention of Mr. Williamson, who, absorbed in his
talk with Underwood, had almost forgotten his more important guest.

"What is the joke?" he said. "I am glad to see you are keeping his
lordship amused, Katie, for the captain and me we have got upon other
subjects concerning the poor gentleman, your predecessor, Lord Erradeen.
Poor fellow! that was a very sad business: not that I would say there
was much to be regretted before the present bearer of the title," the
rich man added with a laugh; "but at your age you could well have
waited a little, and the late lord was a very nice fellow till he fell
into that melancholy way."

"I told you everything was melancholy," said Katie in an undertone.

"And I," said the young man in the same suppressed voice, "shall I too
fall into a melancholy way?" He laughed as he said so, but it was not a
laugh of pleasure. Could he do nothing without having this family
mystery--family absurdity--thrust into his face?

"If you want your cigar, papa--" said Katie getting up, "and you can't
live without that, any of you gentlemen--I had better go. Let laws and
learning, wit and wisdom die, so long as you have your cigars. But the
carriage is ordered at a quarter to ten, and Lord Erradeen is coming, he
says. In any case _you_ must come, papa, you know. I can't go without
you," she said, with a little imperative air. It was enough to make any
one laugh to see the grand air of superiority which this little person
took upon her, and her father greeted her exit with a loud laugh of
enjoyment and admiration.

"She is mistress and more, as we say in Scotland," he said, "and there
must be no trifling where my Katie is concerned. We will have to keep to
the minute. So you are coming with us, Lord Erradeen? What will you do,
Underwood? I'm doubting if what they call the poetical dramaw will be
much in your way."

To which Underwood replied with some embarrassment that it certainly was
not at all in his way. He liked Nelly Somebody in a burlesque, and he
was always fond of a good ballet, but as for Shakespeare and that sort
of thing, he owned it was above him. Good Mr. Williamson disapproved of
ballets, utterly, and administered a rebuke on the spot.

"I hope you are not leading Lord Erradeen into the like of that. It is
very bad for a young man to lose respect for women, and how you can keep
any after those exhibitions is beyond me. Well, I will not say I take a
great interest, like Katie, in poetry and all that. I like a good laugh.
So long as it is funny I am like a bairn, I delight in a play: but I am
not so sure that I can give my mind to it when it's serious. Lord! we've
enough of seriousness in real life. And as for your bare-faced
love-making before thousands of people, I just can't endure it. You will
think me a prejudiced old fogey, Lord Erradeen. It makes me blush," said
the elderly critic, going off into a laugh; but blush he did, through
all the honest red upon his natural cheeks, notwithstanding his laugh,
and his claret, and his cigar. Was he a world behind his younger
companion who glanced at him with a sensation of mingled shame,
contempt, and respect, or was he a world above him? Walter was so
confused in the new atmosphere he had suddenly begun to breathe, that he
could not tell. But it was altogether new at all events, and novelty is
something in the monotony of life.

"I'll see you at the club after," said Underwood, as they loitered
waiting for Miss Williamson at the hotel door. But Walter made no
reply.

Now Lord Erradeen, though he had been perverse all his life, and had
chosen the evil and rejected the good in many incomprehensible ways, was
not--or this history would never have been written--without that finer
fibre in him which responds to everything that is true and noble. How
strange this jumble is in that confusion of good and evil which we call
the mind of man! How often may we see the record of a generous action
bring tears to the eyes of one whose acts are all selfish, and whose
heart is callous to sufferings of which he is the cause: and hear him
with noble fervour applaud the self-sacrifice of the man, who in that
language by which it is the pleasure of the nineteenth century to make
heroism just half-ridiculous, and to save itself from the highflown,
"never funked and never lied; I guess he didn't know how:" and how he
will be touched to the heart by the purity of a romantic love, he who
for himself feeds on the garbage--and all this without any conscious
insincerity, the best part of him more true and real all the time than
the worst! Walter, to whom his own domestic surroundings had been so
irksome, felt a certain wholesome novelty of pleasure when he set out
between the father and daughter to see what Mr. Williamson called the
"poetical dramaw," a thing hitherto much out of the young man's way. He
had been of late in all kinds of unsavoury places, and had done his best
to debase his imagination with the burlesques; but yet he had not been
able to obliterate his own capacity for better things. And when he stood
looking over the head of Katie Williamson, and saw the lady of the
poet's tale come into the poor house of her chivalrous lover, the shock
with which the better nature in him came uppermost, gave him a pang in
the pleasure and the wonder of it. This was not the sort of heroine to
whom he had accustomed himself: but the old Italian romancer, the noble
English poet, and the fine passion and high perception of the actors,
who could understand and interpret both, were not in vain for our
prodigal. When that lady paused in the humble doorway clothed in high
reverence and poetry, not to speak of the modest splendour of her mature
beauty and noble Venetian dress, he felt himself blush, like good Mr.
Williamson, to remember all the less lovely images he had seen. He could
not applaud; it would have been a profanation. He was still pure enough
in the midst of uncleanness, and high enough though familiar with
baseness, to be transported for the moment out of himself.

The other two formed a somewhat comical counterbalance to Walter's
emotion; not that they were by any means unfeeling spectators. Mr.
Williamson's interest in the story was unfeigned. As Mrs. Kendal poured
forth that heartrending plea of a mother for her child, the good man
accompanied her words by strange muffled sounds which were quite beyond
his control; and which called forth looks of alarm from Katie, who was
his natural guardian, and who herself maintained a dignified propriety
as having witnessed this moving scene before. But the running commentary
_sotto voce_, which he kept up throughout, might have furnished an
amusing secondary comedy to any impartial bystander. "Bless us all!"
said Mr. Williamson, "two useless servants doing nothing, and not a
morsel in the house! How do ye make that out!" "Lordsake! has he killed
the hawk? but that's just manslaughter: and a tough morsel I would say,
for the lady, when all's done." "What is it she's wanting--just the
falcon he's killed for her. Tchick! Tchick! Now I call that an awful
pity, Katie. Poor lady! and poor fellow! and he has to refuse her! Well,
he should not have been so hasty. After all she did not eat a morsel of
it; and what ailed that silly old woman there to toss up a bit omelette
or something, to save the bird--and they're so clever at omelettes
abroad," the good man said, with true regret. "Oh, papa, how material
you are! Don't you know it's always like that in life?" cried Katie. "I
know nothing of the kind," said her father, indignantly. "What is the
use of being a poet, as you call it, if ye cannot find some other way
and not break their hearts? Poor lad! Now that's a thing I can't
understand--a woman like that come pleading to you, and you have to
refuse her!" Katie looked round upon her father with her little air of
oracle. "Don't you see, papa, that's the story! It's to wring our hearts
he wrote it." Mr. Williamson paid no attention to this. He went on
softly with his "Tchick! tchick!" and when all was over dried his eyes
furtively and got up with haste, almost impatience, drawing a long
breath. "It's just all nonsense," he said. "I'll not be brought here
again to be made unhappy. So she's to get _him_ instead of the
bird--but, bless me! what good will that do her? _that_ will never save
her bairn."

"It will satisfy the public, more or less," said a voice behind.

Walter had been aware that some one else had come into the box, who
stood smiling, listening to the conversation, and now bent forward to
applaud as if aware that his applause meant something. Katie turned half
round, with a little nod and smile.

"Did you hear papa?" she said. "Oh, tell Mr. Tennyson! he is quite
unhappy about it. Are you unhappy too, Lord Erradeen? for you don't
applaud, or say a word."

"Applaud!" Walter said. "I feel that it would be taking a liberty.
Applaud what? That beautiful lady who is so much above me, or the great
poet who is above all? I should like to go away and draw breath, and let
myself down----"

"Toots!" said Mr. Williamson, "it is just all nonsense. He should not
have been so hasty. And now I would just like to know," he added, with
an air of defiance, "what happened to that bairn: to want a falcon and
get a stepfather! that was an ill way to cure him. Hoots! it's all
nonsense. Put on your cloak, Katie, and let us get away."

"But I like you, Lord Erradeen, for what you say," cried Katie. "It was
too beautiful to applaud. Oh, tell Mrs. Kendal! She looked like a
picture. I should like to make her a curtsey, not clap my hands as you
do."

"You will bid me tell Boccaccio next?" said the new-comer. "These are
fine sentiments; but the actors would find it somewhat chilly if they
had no applause. They would think nobody cared."

"Lord Innishouran," said Katie, "papa has forgotten his manners. He
ought to have introduced to you Lord Erradeen."

Walter was as much startled as if he had been the veriest cockney whose
bosom has ever been fluttered by introduction to a lord. He looked at
the first man of his rank (barring those damaged ones at Underwoods
club) whom he had met, with the strangest sensation. Lord Innishouran
was the son of the Duke--the great potentate of those northern regions.
He was a man who might make Walter's career very easy to him, or, alas!
rather might have made it, had he known him on his first coming to
London. The sense of all that might be involved in knowing him, made the
young man giddy as he stood opposite to his new acquaintance. Lord
Innishouran was not of Walter's age. The duke was the patriarch of the
Highlands, and lived like a man who never meant to die. This gentleman,
who at forty-five was still only his father's heir, had taken to the
arts by way of making an independent position for himself. He was a
_dilettante_ in the best sense of the word, delighting in everything
that was beautiful. Walter's enthusiasm had been the best possible
introduction for him; and what a change there seemed in the young man's
world and all his prospects as he walked home after taking leave of the
Williamsons with Innishouran's, not Underwood's, arm within his own!

"I cannot understand how it is that we have not met before. It would
have been my part to seek you out if I had known you were in town," his
new friend said. "I hope now you will let me introduce you to my wife.
The duke has left town--he never stays a moment longer than he can help.
And everything is coming to an end. Still I am most happy to have made
your acquaintance. You knew the Williamsons, I suppose, before? They are
excellent people--not the least vulgarity about them, because there's no
pretension. And Katie is a clever girl, not without ambition. She is
quite an heiress, I suppose you know----"

"I don't know--any one, or anything," Walter said.

"Come, that is going too far," said the other, with a laugh. "I presume
you don't care for society. That is a young man's notion; but society is
not so bad a thing. It never answers to withdraw from it altogether.
Yes, Katie is an heiress. She is to have all the Loch Houran property, I
believe, besides a good deal of money."

"I thought," said Walter, "there were several sons."

"One--one only; and he has the business, with the addition also of a
good deal of money. Money is a wonderful quality--it stands instead of
a great many other things to our friends there. I am fond of intellect
myself, but it must be allowed that the most cultivated mind would not
do for any man what his money does at once for that good neighbour of
ours--who is a most excellent fellow all the same."

"I have met him for the first time to-day," said Walter, "in the most
accidental way."

"Ah! I thought you had known them; but it is true what I say. I look
upon money with a certain awe. It is inscrutable. The most perfect of
artists--you and I when we most look up to them, do also just a little
look down upon them! No, perhaps that is too strong. At all events, they
are there on sufferance. They are not of us, and they know it. Whether
they care for us too much, or whether they don't care at all, there is
still that uneasy consciousness. But with this good-natured
millionnaire, nothing of the sort. He has no such feeling."

"Perhaps because his feelings are not so keen. Miss Williamson has just
been telling me what you say--that her family are considered not vulgar
because they never pretend to be better than they are."

"Ah!" cried Lord Innishouran, startled, "did Katie divine that? She is
cleverer than I thought--and a very fine fortune, and an ambitious
little person. I hope her money will go to consolidate some property at
home, and not fall into a stranger's hands. I am all for the Highlands,
you see, Erradeen."

"And I know so little about them," said Walter.

But nevertheless he knew very well what was meant, and there was a
curious sensation in his mind which he could not describe to himself, as
if some perturbation, whether outside or in he could not tell which, was
calmed. He had a great deal of talk with his new friend as they threaded
the noisy little circles of the streets, among the shouting link-boys
and crowds of carriages, then reached the calm and darkness of the
thoroughfares beyond. Lord Innishouran talked well, and his talk was of
a kind so different from that of Underwood's noisy coterie, that the
charm of the unusual, added to so many other novel sensations, made a
great impression upon Walter's mind, always sensitive and open to a new
influence. He felt a hot flush of shame come over him when walking thus
through the purity of the night, and in the society of a man who talked
about great names and things, he remembered the noise of the club, the
heated air full of smoke and inanities, the jargon of the race-course
and the stables. These things filled him with disgust, for the moment at
least, just as the duets had given him a sense of disgust and impatience
at Sloebury. His new friend only left him at the door of his rooms,
which happened to lie in Lord Innishouran's way, and bade him good
night, promising to call on him in the morning. Walter had not been in
his rooms so early for many a day. He hesitated whether or not to go out
again, for he had not any pleasure in his own society; but pride came
to the rescue, and he blushed at the thought of darting out like a
truant schoolboy, as soon as the better influence was withdrawn. Pride
prevented him from thus running away from himself. He took a book out of
the shelves, which he had not done for so long. But soon the book
dropped aside, and he began to review the strange circumstances of the
evening. In a moment, as it seemed, his horizon had changed. Hitherto,
except in so far as money was concerned, he had derived no advantage
from his new rank. Now everything seemed opening before him. He could
not be unmoved in this moment of transition. Perhaps the life which was
called fast had never contained any real temptation to Walter. It had
come in and invaded the indolence of his mind and filled the vacant
house of his soul, swept and garnished but unoccupied, according to the
powerful simile of Scripture; but there was no tug at his senses now
urging him to go back to it. And then he thought, with a certain
elation, of Lord Innishouran, and pleasurably of the Williamsons. Katie,
was that her name? He could not but laugh to himself at the sudden
realisation of the visionary Miss Williamson after all that had been
said. What would Julia Herbert say? But Julia Herbert had become dim to
Lord Erradeen as if she had been a dozen years away.




CHAPTER VIII.


Next morning Lord Innishouran fulfilled his promise of calling, and made
his appearance almost before Walter, following the disorderly usages of
the society into which he had fallen, was ready to receive him. The
middle-aged eldest son was a man of exact virtue, rising early, keeping
punctual hours, and in every way conducting himself as became one whose
position made him an example to the rest of the world. And he was one
who had a deep sense of the duties of his position. It seemed to him
that this young man was in a bad way. "He is at a crisis, evidently at a
crisis," he had said to his wife, "and a good influence may be
everything for him." "He should marry Katie Williamson," said Lady
Innishouran. "The Erradeens may be odd, as you say, but they always
manage to do well for themselves." "Not always, not always, my dear; the
property seems to grow, but the men come to little," Innishouran said,
shaking his head; and he left his house with the full intention of
becoming a "good influence" to Walter. He proposed at once to put him up
at the most irreproachable and distinguished of clubs, and asked him to
dinner on the spot. "I am afraid there is nobody of consequence left
whom I can ask to meet you," he said; "but in any case Lady Innishouran
is anxious to make your acquaintance."

The Innishourans belonged to the ranks of those very great people for
whom the season ends much earlier than for others. The duke had gone
home early in June, and his son held that in the end of that month there
was nobody of consequence left, except, he said to himself, cabinet
ministers, who were perhaps something too much for a young Highland
lord.

"And you must take your seat," he said, "that is a matter of duty. If we
had met earlier the duke would of course have been one of your
supporters. I am sure my father will regret it very much. But, however,
it can't be helped, and I, you know, don't occupy the necessary
position; but there will be no difficulty in that respect."

This was very different from Walter's fine misanthropic Byronic idea of
solitary grandeur, and defiance of the staring ranks of superannuated
peers. "I am no politician," he said awkwardly. "I had scarcely thought
it was worth the while." "It is always worth while to assume the
privileges of your position," Lord Innishouran said. Walter was taken
possession of altogether by this good influence. And forthwith his path
lay in a course of golden days. It was characteristic of Walter that it
gave him no trouble to break his old ties, perhaps because of the fact
that he had not, so to speak, made them by any exercise of his will,
but simply drifted into them by the exertions of those who meant to
benefit by his weakness. He did not, perhaps, put this into words, but
yet felt it with a sort of interior conviction which was deeper than all
those superficial shades of sentiment which bind some men to the
companions of the day, even when they care little for them. Perhaps it
was selfishness, perhaps strength--it is difficult sometimes to
discriminate.

Thus Captain Underwood, after his interrupted, but latterly almost
unbroken, sway over the young man's time and habits, found himself
suddenly left in the lurch, and quite powerless over his pupil. The
captain tried in the first place the easy tone of use and wont.

"Come, Erradeen," he said, "we shall be late. You forget the engagement
you made with So-and-so, and So-and-so--"

"I think it was you who made the engagement," Walter said. "I am not
going to keep it anyhow. I am going with Innishouran to----"

"With Lord Innishouran!" the other cried, overawed. "So then," he said,
with such a sneer as is often effectual with the young and generous,
"now that you have got in with the big-wigs you mean to throw your old
friends over."

"I don't know much about old friends," Walter said. "I don't call the
fellows at your club old friends."

And then Captain Underwood made one of those mistakes which persons of
inferior breeding are so apt to make. "You were glad enough to have
them when you had nobody else to take any notice of you," he said. This
was after two or three attempts to recover his old standing, and when he
began to feel a certain exasperation. Walter, though he was irritable by
nature, had so much the best of the argument at this moment that he kept
his temper.

"I don't think," he said, "that I ever was very glad. I allowed myself
to be drawn into it _faute de mieux_."

"And now I suppose you think you can throw _me_ off too, like an old
glove, in your infernal Scotch, cold-blooded way!" cried the captain.

"Am I Scotch?" said Lord Erradeen.

It was not much wonder, perhaps, if Underwood lost his temper. But
another time he took matters more wisely. He would not give up in a fit
of temper the hold he thought he had obtained upon the young man. He was
very unwilling, as may be supposed, to resign his _protégé_ and victim,
and made spasmodic attempts to regain his "influence." At all times this
"influence" had been held precariously, and had it been a virtuous one
like that of Lord Innishouran, Walter's mentor and guide might have
called forth the sympathy of the spectator; for he had many things to
bear from the young man's quick temper, and the constantly recurring
dissatisfaction with himself and all things around which made him so
difficult to deal with. Underwood, however, after his first
disappointment, did not despair. The changeable young fellow, upon whom
no one could calculate, whose mind was so uncertain, who would shoot
off at a tangent in the most unexpected way, might as suddenly, as he
had abandoned, turn to him again.

Miss Williamson received her new acquaintance very graciously when he
went to see her next day. She met him with all the ease of an old
acquaintance.

"Papa has been so busy," she said, "putting John into the business, that
we have only got here at the very end of the season. Yes, it is a
nuisance; but think how many people there are much better than I, that
never come at all. Oona Forrester for instance. You think perhaps she is
too good even to wish to come? Not at all; there never was a girl so
good as that. Besides, I don't think it would be good. A girl ought to
see the world as much as a boy. When you don't know the world, it makes
you uninteresting--afterwards; you don't know how to talk to people. Not
Oona, you know. I don't think there is any want of interest about her;
but most people. Well, did you like Lord Innishouran? He is very kind,
and fond of exerting a good influence. I felt that he was the very
person for you."

"You think then that I stand in need of a good influence?" Walter said.

"Yes, after Captain Underwood," said Katie calmly. "I think it was very
lucky that you met papa, and that Lord Innishouran was at the theatre
and came into our box. Perhaps you will look back to it and think--if
you had not happened to come here, what people call accidentally, as you
passed----"

"I might go a step further," said Walter, "and say if I had not happened
to be with Captain Underwood, who knew your father, I should never have
known what good fortune was standing upon these steps, and never have
made the acquaintance of Miss Williamson."

"You are making fun of me," said Katie. "I do not mind in the very
least. But still it is just as well, perhaps, that you made the
acquaintance of Miss Williamson. What were you going to do with
yourself? Nothing so good I am sure as seeing the _Falcon_, and making
friends with Lord Innishouran, who can be of a great deal of use to you.
_We_ cannot do much for you, of course. All sorts of people ask us, but
still you know we are not of your class. We are only not vulgar,
because--I told you last night."

Walter laughed with guilty amusement, remembering how Lord Innishouran
had justified Katie's estimate of the world's opinion.

"I do not understand," he said, "how any one can think of you and
vulgarity in the same day."

"Well," said Katie, calmly, "that is my own opinion. But still between
me and Oona Forrester there is a great difference. I don't deceive
myself about that. And why is it? I am--oh, some hundred times more
rich. I can do almost whatever I like; that is to say, I can turn papa,
as people say, round my little finger (that is rather vulgar, by the
way). I come up here, I go abroad, I meet all kinds of interesting
people: and yet I am not like Oona when all is said. Now how is that? It
does not seem quite fair."

She looked at him with an honest pair of blue eyes out of a
prepossessing, sensible little face, as she asked this question with all
the gravity of a philosophical investigator. Notwithstanding a little
figure which threatened in after life to be dumpy, and a profile of
which the lines were by no means distinctly drawn, Katie Williamson at
twenty had enough of the _beauté du diable_ to make her rather an
attractive little person. But as Walter looked at her, he too seemed to
see a vision of the other with whom she compared herself. He always
thought of Oona as she had stood watching his boat pushed off; his mind
at the time had been too hurried and eager to remark her look; but that
deeper faculty which garners up a face, a look, an act, which we do not
seem to notice at the moment, and makes them afterwards more real and
present to us than things that are under our eyes, had taken a picture
of Oona as she stood in that profoundest deep of emotion, the most
poignant moment of her life, with something of the wondering pang in her
eyes which was in her heart. How many times since then had he seen her,
though he had not seen her at the time! Looking at her in his mind's
eye, he forgot altogether the question Katie was putting to him, and the
necessity of protesting politely that she did herself wrong. Indeed he
was not roused to this till Katie herself, after pausing for reply,
said with a little sharpness, "You don't make me any answer, Lord
Erradeen: you ought to tell me I have no reason to be so humble-minded,
but that I am as good as Oona. That is what any polite person would
say."

Thus challenged, Walter started with a certain sheepishness, and
hastened to inform her, stammering, that comparisons were odious, but
that there was nobody who might not be flattered, who ought not to be
pleased, who, in short, would not be happy to think themselves on the
same level----

Katie broke through his embarrassed explanations with a laugh. "You
quite agree with me," she said, "and that is what I like you for. I am
not a girl who wants compliments. I am an inquirer. And things are so
funny in this world: everything about ourselves is so dr

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