Sir Robert's Fortune

“Leave her with Beenie and me for another day, Sir Robert, and the morn, if she’s no better, I’ll be the first to ask for a doctor; and eh, I hope it’s safe no to have him the day.” The latter part of this speech Katrin said to herself under cover of the door.

“She’ll have got cold coming home late from one of her parties,” said the old gentleman, regaining his composure.

“Her pairties, Sir Robert!” said Katrin, almost with a shriek. “And where, poor thing, would she get pairties here?”

“She has friends, I suppose?” he said with a little impatience, “companions of her own age. Where will young creatures like that not find parties? is what I would ask.”

“Eh, Sir Robert! but I’m doubting you’ve forgotten our countryside. There’s Miss Eelen at the Manse that is her one great friend; and John Jameson’s lass at the muckle farm, that has been at the school in Edinburgh, and would fain, fain think herself a lady, poor bit thing, would have given her little finger to be friends with Miss Lily. But you would not have had her go to pairties in the farmhouse; and at the Manse they give nane, the minister being such a lameter. Pairties! the Lord bless us! Wha would ask her to pairties on this side of the moor?”

“There are plenty of people,” said Sir Robert almost indignantly, “that should have shown attention to my brother James’s daughter, both for my sake and his. What do you call the Duffs, woman? and the Gordons of the Muckle moor, and Sir John Sinclair’s family at the Lews? Many a merry night have we passed among us when we were all young. The Duffs’ is not more than a walk, even if Lily were setting up for a fine lady, which, to do her justice, was not her way.”

“Eh, hear till him!” breathed Katrin under her breath. She said aloud: “Times are awfu’ changed, Sir Robert, since your days. The present Mr. Duff he’s married on an English lady, and they say she cannot bide the air of the Highlands, though it is well kent for the finest air in a’ the world. He comes here whiles with a wheen gentlemen for the first of the shooting—but her never, and there’s little to be said for a house when the mistress is never in it. Of the Gordons there’s nane left but one auld leddy, the last of them, I hear, except distant connections. And as for Sir John at the Lews, poor man, poor man, he just died broken-hearted, one of his bonnie boys going to destruction after the other. They say the things are to be roupit and the auld mansion-house to be left desolate, for of the twa that remain the one’s a ne’er-do-well and the other a puir avaricious creature, feared to spend a shilling, and I canna tell which is the worst.”

“Bless me, bless me!” Sir Robert had gone on saying, shaking his head. He was receiving a rude awakening. He saw in his mind’s eye the old house running over with lively figures, with fun and laughter—and now desolate. It gave him a great shock, partly from the simple fact, which by itself was overwhelming, partly because of a sudden pity which sprang up in his mind for Lily, and, most of all, for himself. What, nobody to come and see him, to tell the news and hear what was in the London papers; no cheerful house to form an object for his walk, no men to talk to, no ladies to whom to pay his old-fashioned compliments! This discovery went very much to his heart. After a long time he said: “It would be better to let the houses than to leave them to go to rack and ruin, or shut up, as you say—the best houses in the countryside.”

“Let them!” cried Katrin. “Gentlemen’s ain houses! We’re maybe fallen low, Sir Robert, but we’re no just fallen to that.”

“You silly woman! the grandest folk do it,” cried Sir Robert. Then he added in a lower tone: “Lily, I am afraid, may not have had a very lively life.”

“You may well say that!” cried Katrin. “Poor bonnie lassie, if she had bidden ony gangrel body on the road, or any person travelling that passed this way, to come in and bear her company, I would not have been surprised for my part.”

Katrin spoke very deliberately, avec intention. It seemed well to prepare an argument, in case it might be used with effect another time. And Sir Robert was much subdued. He had not meant to inflict such a punishment upon his niece. He had believed, indeed, that her life at Dalrugas would be even more gay than her life in Edinburgh. There the parties might occasionally be formal, or the convives bores, according to his own experience at least; but here there was nothing but the good, warm, simple intimacy of the country, the life almost in common, the hospitable doors always open. If a compunctious recollection of Lily ever crossed his mind in the midst of his own elderly amusements, this was what he had been in the habit of saying to himself: “There will be lads enough to make a little queen of her, and lasses enough to keep her company, for she’s a bonnie bit thing when all is said.” He had always been a little proud of her, though she had been a great trouble to him; and he thought he knew that in his old home Lily would be fully appreciated. That he had sent her out into the wilderness had never entered his thoughts. He dismissed Katrin with an uneasy mind, imploring her, almost with humility, to do every thing she could think of for his poor Lily, and if she was not better in the morning, to send at once for the best doctor in the neighborhood. Who was the best doctor in the neighborhood? Indeed, there was but little choice—the doctor at Kinloch-Rugas, who was not so young as he once was, and had, alas, a sore weakness for his glass, and the one at Ardenlennie on the other side, who was well spoken of. “Let it be the one at Ardenlennie,” Sir Robert said. He spent rather a wretched day afterward, taking two or three short constitutionals, up and down the high-road, three-quarters of an hour at a time, to while away the lonely day until his friends returned from the moor. It was far too painful an ordeal, to spend the 12th of August alone in this place where, in his recollection, the 12th of August had always been ecstasy. He should have chosen another moment. He had not imagined that he would have felt so much his own disabilities of old age. He had been wont to boast that he did not feel them at all, one kind of enjoyment having been replaced by another, and his desire for athletic pleasures having died a natural death in the perfection of his matured spirit and changed tastes, which were equal to better things. But he had certainly subjected himself to too great a trial now. That the 12th should be his first day at home, and that all his sport should consist of a convoy given to the sportsmen on the back of Rory, but not a gun for his own shoulder, not a step on the heather for his foot! It was too much. He had been a fool. And then this silly misadventure of Lily and her illness to make every thing worse.

A moment of comparative comfort occurred in the middle of the day when he had his luncheon. “Really that woman’s not bad as a cook,” he said to himself. She was but a woman, and a Scotch, uncultivated creature, but she had her qualities—and there was taste in what she sent him, that priceless gift, especially for an old man. He took a little nap after his luncheon, and then he took another walk, and so got through the day till the sportsmen came back. They came in noisy and triumphant, with their bags, and their stories of what happened at this and that corner, of the cheepers that had been missed and the old birds that were full of guile. Had they been Sir Robert’s sons it is possible that he might have listened benignly, and felt more or less the pleasure by proxy which some gentle spirits taste. But they were strangers, mere “friends” in the jargon of the world, meaning acquaintances more or less intimate. Of the three he bore best the laughter and delight and brags and eagerness to show his own prowess of the young man. The others awakened a sharper pang of contrast. “Almost my own age!” Alas! the difference between fifty and seventy is the unkindest of comparisons. They were not even good companions for him in the evening. When they had talked over every step of their progress, and every bird that had fallen before them, and eaten of Katrin’s good dishes an enormous dinner, the strong air of the moor, and the hot fire of the peats, and the fatigue of the first day’s exercise and excitement, overpowered them one after another with sleep. This would not have been the case had Lily been afoot to sing a song or two and keep them to their manners. Sir Robert was driven to the expedient of sending for Dougal when they had all, with many excuses, gone to bed. Dougal was sleepy, too, and tired, though not so much so as “the gentlemen,” to whom the grouse and the moor were, more or less, novelties. He gave his wife a curious look when Sir Robert’s man called him to his master, and Katrin responded with one that partly entreated and partly threatened. She said: “You can tell him Miss Lily is very bad, and I’ll get the doctor the first thing the morn.”

Dougal uttered no word. He could not wear his bonnet when he went up to see the laird, but he took it in his hands, which was some small consolation. He was in a dreadful confusion of mind, not knowing what was to be said to him, what was to be demanded of him. He might be about to be put through his “questions,” and want all his strength to defend himself; or it might be nothing at all—some nonsense about the guns or the birds. His heavy shock of hair stood up from his forehead, giving something of an ox-like breadth and heaviness of brow. He held his head somewhat down, with a trace of defiance. Katrin might gloom; it was little he cared for Katrin when his blood was up; but there was not a bit of the traitor in Dougal. No blood of a black Monteith in him, if they were to put the thumbscrews on him or matches atween his fingers. That poor bonnie creature, whatever was her wyte—they should get nothing to trouble her out of him.

“Well, Dougal,” said Sir Robert, dangerously genial, “you see I’m left all alone. My friends they have gone to their beds, as if they were callants home from the school.”

“The gentlemen would be geyan tired,” said Dougal; “they’re English, and no accustomed to our moors, and some of them no so young either. You never kent that, Sir Robert, you that were to the manner born.”

“But too auld for that sort of thing, Dougal, now.”

“Maybe, and maybe not,” said Dougal. “There’s naething like the auld blood and the habit o’t. I’d sooner see you cock a rifle, Sir Robert, though I say it as shouldna, than the whole three of them.”

“No, no, Dougal,” said Sir Robert, “that’s flattery. They’re not very good shots, then,” he said, with a smile. He was not indisposed to hear this of them, though they were his friends.

“Well, Sir Robert, I wouldna say, on their ain kind o’ ground, among the stubble and that kind o’ low-country shooting, which, I’m tauld, is the common thing there; but no on our moors. When you’re used to the heather, it’s a different thing.”

“No doubt there is something in that,” Sir Robert allowed with discreet satisfaction. And then he added: “What’s this I hear from your wife about all the old neighbors, and that there’s scarcely a house open I knew in my young days?”

“What is that, Sir Robert?” said Dougal cautiously.

“The neighbors, ye dunce, my old friends that were all about the countryside when I was young, and that I thought would be friends for my poor little Lily when she came here. I’m told there’s not one of them left.”

Dougal did not readily take up what was meant, but he held his own firmly. “There’s been nae gentleman’s house,” he said, “what you would call open and receiving visitors round about Dalrugas as long as I mind—no more than Dalrugas itsel’.”

“Ah, Dalrugas itself,” said Sir Robert, a little abashed. It was true—if the others had closed their doors, so had Dalrugas; if they were left to silence and decay, so had his own house been. Other reasons had operated in his case, but the result was the same. “I’m afraid, Dougal,” he said, “that my poor little Lily has had an ill time of it, which I never intended. Give me your opinion on the subject. Your wife’s a very decent woman—and an excellent cook, I will say that for her—but she’s like them all, she stands up for her own side. She would have me think that my niece has been very solitary among the moors. Now that was never what I intended. Tell me true: has Miss Lily been a kind of prisoner, and seen nobody, as Katrin says?”

Dougal pushed his mass of hair to one side as if it had been a wig. “The young leddy,” he said, “had none o’ the looks of a prisoner, Sir Robert. I’ve seen her when you would have thought it was the very sun itsel’ shining on the moor.”

“You’re very poetical, Dougal,” said Sir Robert, with a laugh.

“And she would whiles sing as canty as the birds, and off upon Rory as light as a feather down to the market to see all the ferlies o’ the toun, and into the Manse for her tea.”

“That sounds cheerful enough,” said the old gentleman, “though the ferlies of the town were not very exciting, I suppose. And old Blythe’s still at the Manse? He’s one of the old set left at least.”

“He’s an altered man noo, Sir Robert; never a step can he make out o’ his muckle chair; they say he’s put into his bed at nicht, but it’s a mystery to me and many more how it’s done, for he’s a muckle heavy man. But year’s end to year’s end he’s just living on in his muckle chair.”

“Lord bless us!” Sir Robert said. He looked down on his own still shapely and not inactive limbs with an involuntary shiver of comparison, and then he added, with a half laugh: “A man that liked his good dinner, and a good bottle of wine, and a good crack, with any of us.”

“That did he, Sir Robert!” Dougal said.

“Poor old Blythe! I must go and see him,” said the happier veteran, with an unconscious stretch of his capable legs, and throwing out of his chest. It was not any pleasure in the misfortune of his neighbor which gave him this glow of almost satisfaction. It was the sense of his own superiority in well-being, the comparison which was so much in his own favor. The comparison this morning had not been in his own favor and he had not liked it. He felt now, let us hope with a sensation of thankfulness, how much better off he was than Mr. Blythe.

“Well, well, the Manse was always something, Dougal,” he said. “Manses are cheerful places; there’s always a great coming and going. I hope there was nobody much out of her own sphere that Miss Lily met there—no young ministers coming up here after her, eh? They have a terrible flair for lasses with tochers, these young ministers, Dougal?”

“Ay, Sir Robert, that have they,” said Dougal, “but I’ve seen no minister here.”

“That was good luck for Lily—or we that are responsible for her,” said the old gentleman. “Well, Dougal, my man, you’ll be tired yourself and ready for your bed, and to make an early start to-morrow with the gentlemen.”

“Ay, Sir Robert,” said Dougal. He was very glad to accept his dismissal, and to feel that without so much as a fib he had kept his own counsel and betrayed nothing. But when he had reached the door, he turned round again, crushing his bonnet in his hands. “I was to tell you Miss Lily was no better, poor thing, and that the women thought the doctor would have to be sent for the morn.”

Sir Robert’s countenance clouded over. “Tchick, tchick!” he said, with an air of perplexity. “You’ll see that the best man in the neighborhood is the one that’s sent for,” he cried.

CHAPTER XXXV

There had been a pause after Lily called to Marg’ret to bring the baby on the night when Ronald left her. Marg’ret, though very kind, was a person who liked her own way. If the child’s toilet was not complete, according to her own elaborate rule, she did not obey in a moment even the eager call of the young mother. There were allowances made for her, as there always are for those who insist upon having their own way.

Accordingly there was a pause. Lily lay and listened to the wheels of the geeg which carried Ronald away. They did not bring the same chill to her heart as usual, and yet a chill began to steal into the room. The night was warm and soft—the early August, which in the North is the height of summer—and there was no chill at all in the atmosphere. It seemed to Lily’s keen ears as she lay listening that the geeg paused as if something had been forgotten, but then went on at double speed, galloping up the brae, till the sound of the wheels was extinguished in the night and distance. Then she called again sharply: “Marg’ret, Marg’ret! bring in my baby!” But still there was no reply.

“She’s just a most fastidious woman, with all her dressings and her undressings. She’ll no have finished him just to the last string tying,” said Robina.

“Bid her come at once, at once!” cried Lily. “I want my little man.”

And Beenie dived into the next room, which was muffled in curtains, great precautions having been taken lest the cry of the child should be heard down stairs. There was another room still within that, into which the nurse occasionally retired; but there was no one in either place, nor were there any traces of the little garments lying about which betray a baby’s presence—every thing appeared to have been swept away. Beenie, who had come for the child with her rosy countenance beaming, stood still in consternation, her mouth open, her terrified eyes taking in every thing with speechless dismay; for Marg’ret had never ventured down stairs as yet, nor had, they flattered themselves, a sound of the infant been heard, to awaken any question there. Beenie stood silent and terrified for a moment, and then, instead of returning to her mistress, she flew down stairs. Katrin was alone, doing some of her delicate cooking carefully over the fire; all was still, as if nothing but the most commonplace and tranquil events had ever happened there. Beenie, who had burst into the place like a whirlwind, again paused, confounded by this every-day tranquillity. “Katrin, Katrin, where is Marg’ret?” she cried, adding in a lower tone, “and the bairn?”

“What a question to ask me!” said Katrin. “She’s with your mistress without a doubt. Have you ta’en leave of your senses,” she murmured in a hurried undertone, “to roar out like that about a bairn? What bairn?”

Here Beenie found herself at the end of all her resources. She burst out into loud weeping. “She’s no up the stair and she’s no down the stair,” cried Beenie, “and my bonnie leddy is crying out for her, and will not be satisfied! And she’s no place that I can find her—neither her nor yet the bairn.”

Katrin thrust her saucepan from her as if it had been the offending thing; she wiped her hands with her apron. She looked at Beenie, both of them pale with horror. “Oh, the ill man!” she cried. “Oh, the monster! Oh, sic a man for our bonnie dear! I have been misdoubting about the bairn—but wha could have expectit that a young man no hardened in iniquity would have thought of a contrivance like that?”

Beenie had no thought or time to spare even on such an enormity. “How am I to face her—and tell her?” she said.

And at this moment they heard Lily’s voice calling from above, at first softly, then shouting, screaming all their names. “Marg’ret! Beenie! Katrin! Marg’ret! Marg’ret! Beenie! Katrin! Where is my bairn? where is my bairn?”

The two women flew up the stairs, at the head of which they found Lily in her white night-dress, with her feet bare, her hair waving wildly about her head, her face convulsed and drawn. “My bairn!” she cried, “my bairn! my little bairn! Where is Marg’ret? Where is my baby? Marg’ret! Marg’ret! Beenie! Katrin! bring me my baby—my baby!” She seized Beenie wildly with her trembling hands.

“Oh, my daurlin’!” Beenie cried. “Oh, my bairn—oh, my bonnie Miss Lily!”

Lily flung the large weeping woman from her with a passion of impatience. “Katrin!” she said breathlessly, “you have sense; where is my baby? bring me my baby! My little bairn! Did ye ever hear that an infant like that should be kept from his mother? Marg’ret! Marg’ret! Where has she taken my baby—my baby—my–”

Lily’s voice rose to a kind of scream. She ceased to have command of her words, and went on calling, calling, for Marg’ret and for her child in an endless cry, not knowing what she said.

“You will come back to your bed first and then I will tell you,” said Katrin. There was no one in the house but themselves, and they were isolated in this sudden tragedy from all the world by the distance and the silence of night and the moor. The door stood open at the foot of the stairs, and a cold air blew up through the long, many-cornered passage, chill and searching notwithstanding the warmth of the night. Lily was glad to lean shivering upon the warm support of the kind woman who encircled her with her arm. “You will tell me—you will tell me,” she murmured, permitting herself to be drawn back to her room. The blind had been raised from one of the windows, and the moonlight streamed in, crossing the dimly lighted chamber with one white line of light. The bed, with the little table by it, and the candle burning calmly, seemed too peaceful for Lily’s mood of suspense and alarm. She stood still in the moonlight, which seemed to make her figure luminous with her white bare feet and pale face. “Tell me!” she cried, “tell me! Marg’ret! Marg’ret! Where has she taken my baby? I want my baby—nothing more—nothing more.”

“For the Lord’s sake, mem!” said Katrin, “ye are shivering and trembling. Go back to your bed.”

“Oh, my daurlin’!” cried the weeping Beenie. “Oh, my bonnie lamb, he’s just away with his father in the geeg. Ye needna cry upon Marg’ret; she’ll no hear you, for it’s just her that’s taken him away!”

“Oh, you born fool!” Katrin cried, supporting her young mistress with her arm.

But Lily twisted out of her hold. She turned upon Beenie, bringing her hands together wildly with a loud clap that startled all the silences about like the sudden report of a pistol, and then fell suddenly with a cry at their feet.

Since that moment she had not recovered consciousness. Both of them knew by the force of experience how dangerous a symptom in Lily’s condition is the strong convulsive shivering which had seized her, and for the greater part of that dreadful night before Sir Robert’s arrival they were both by her bedside striving with every kind of hot application to restore a natural temperature. But when they had partially succeeded in this, she still lay unconscious, sometimes agitated and disturbed, flinging herself about with her arms over her head, and once or twice repeating, what filled them with horror, the extraordinary clap together of her hands—sometimes quite still, and murmuring under her breath a continuous flow of inarticulate words, but never conscious of them or their ministrations, saying no word that had meaning in it. Sir Robert’s arrival made a certain change, and left the weight of the nursing upon Beenie, Katrin, with her many additional labors, being unable to bear her share. They had already, however, had time for several consultations on the subject, which Sir Robert naturally disposed of with so much ease, but which to the two women was a much more serious matter—a doctor. Would not a doctor divine at once with his keen, educated eyes what had happened so recently? Would not he read as clearly as in a book what had been the beginning of Lily’s illness? She lay helpless now, able to give them no assistance in disposing of her—she, so wilful by nature, who had always got her own way, so far, at least, as they were concerned. It filled them with awe to look at her lying unconscious, and to feel that her fate was in their hands. What were they to do? They were responsible for her life or death.

The doctor, when he came, listened with very small attention to Beenie’s long and confused story, chiefly made up from things she had read and heard of the causes of Lily’s illness. Whatever the causes were, the result was clear enough. She was in a high fever, her faculties all lost in that confusion of violent illness which takes away at once all consciousness of the present and all personal control. “Fever” was an impressive word in those days, more alarming in some senses, less so in others, than now. It was not mapped out and distinct, with its charts and its well-known rules. There was not, so far as I am aware, such a thing as a clinical thermometer known, at least not in ordinary practice; and the word “fever” meant something dangerously “catching,” something before which nurses fled and friends retired in dismay—which is not to say that those who suffered from it were less sedulously guarded and taken care of by their own people then than now. The first idea of both Beenie and Katrin, however, was that it must be “catching,” being fever, and Sir Robert, when he was informed, was not much wiser. “Fever—where could she have got it?” he said with a sudden imagination of some wretched beggar-woman with a sick child who might have given it to the young lady. “It is not a thing of that kind. You are thinking of scarlatina or maybe typhus. Nothing of that sort. It does not spring from infection. It is brain-fever,” the medical man said. “Brain-fever!” said Sir Robert, indignant. “There was never any thing of that kind in my family.” He took it as a reproach, as if the Ramsays had ever been a race subject to disturbance in the brain!