The Ladies Lindores · Chapter 39 (1/2)

XXXIX

Rolls disappeared on the evening of the day on which he had that long consultation with Mr. Monypenny. He did not return to Dalrulzian that night. Marget, with many blushes and no small excitement, served the dinner, which Bauby might be said to have cooked with tears. If these salt drops were kept out of her sauces, she bedewed the white apron which she lifted constantly to her eyes. “Maister John in jyal! and oor Tammas gone after him; and what will I say to his mammaw?” Bauby cried. She seemed to fear that it might be supposed some want of care on her part which had led to this dreadful result. But even the sorrow of her soul did not interfere with her sense of what was due to her master’s guest. Beaufort’s dinner did not suffer, whatever else might. It was scrupulously cooked, and served with all the care of which Marget was capable; and when it was all over, and everything carefully put aside, the women sat down together in the kitchen, and had a good cry over the desolation of the house. The younger maids, perhaps, were not so deeply concerned on this point as Bauby, who was an old servant, and considered Dalrulzian as her home: but they were all more or less affected by the disgrace, as well as sorry for the young master, who had “nae pride,” and always a pleasant word for his attendants in whatever capacity. Their minds were greatly affected, too, by the absence of Rolls. Not a man in the house but the stranger gentleman! It was a state of affairs which alarmed and depressed them, and proved, above all other signs, that a great catastrophe had happened. Beaufort sent for the housekeeper after dinner to give her such information as he thought necessary; and Bauby was supported to the door by her subordinates, imploring her all the way to keep up her heart. “You’ll no’ let on to the strange gentleman.” “Ye’ll keep up a good face, and no’ let him see how sair cast down ye are,” they said, one at either hand. There was a great deal of struggling outside the door, and some stifled sounds of weeping, before it was opened, and Bauby appeared, pushed in by some invisible agency behind her, which closed the door promptly as soon as she was within. She was not the important person Beaufort had expected to see; but as she stood there, with her large white apron thrown over her arm, and her comely countenance, like a sky after rain, lighted up with a very wan and uncertain smile, putting the best face she could upon it, Beaufort’s sympathy overcame the inclination to laugh which he might have felt in other circumstances, at the sight of her sudden entrance and troubled clinging to the doorway. “Good evening,” he said, “Mrs.⁠—” “They call me Bauby Rolls, at your service,” said Bauby, with a curtsey, and a suppressed sob. “Mrs. Rolls,” said Beaufort, “your master may not come home for a few days; he asked me to tell you not to be anxious; that he hoped to be back soon; that there was nothing to be alarmed about.” “Eh! and was he so kind as think upon me, and him in such trouble,” cried Bauby, giving way to her emotions. “But I’m no alarmt; no, no, why should I be?” she added, in a trembling voice. “He will be hame, no doubt, in a day or twa, as ye say, sir, and glad, glad we’ll a’ be. It’s not that we have any doubt⁠—but oh! what will his mammaw say to me?” cried Bauby. After the tremulous momentary stand she had made, her tears flowed faster than ever. “There has no such thing happened among the Erskines since ever the name was kent in the countryside, and that’s maist from the beginning, as it’s written in Scripture.” “It’s all a mistake,” cried Beaufort. “That it is⁠—that it is,” cried Bauby, drying her eyes. And then she added with another curtsey, “I hope you’ll find everything to your satisfaction, sir, till the maister comes hame. Tammas⁠—that’s the butler, Tammas Rolls, my brother, sir, if ye please⁠—is no’ at hame tonight, and you wouldna like a lass aboot to valet ye; they’re all young but me. But if you would put out your cloes to brush, or anything that wants doing, outside your door, it shall a’ be weel attended to. I’m real sorry there’s no’ another man aboot the house: but a’ that women can do we’ll do, and with goodwill.” “You are very kind, Mrs. Rolls,” said Beaufort. “I was not thinking of myself⁠—you must not mind me. I shall get on very well. I am sorry to be a trouble to you at such a melancholy moment.” “Na, na, sir, not melancholy,” cried Bauby, with her eyes streaming; “sin’ ye say, and a’body must allow, that it’s just a mistake: we manna be put aboot by suchlike trifles. But nae doubt it will be livelier and mair pleesant for yoursel’, sir, when Mr. John and Tammas, they baith come hame. Would you be wanting anything more tonight?” “Na, I never let on,” Bauby said, when she retired to the ready support of her handmaidens outside the door⁠—“no’ me; I keepit a stout heart, and I said to him, ‘It’s of nae consequence, sir,’ I said⁠—‘I’m nane cast down; it’s just a mistake⁠—everybody kens that; and that he was to put his things outside his door,’ He got nothing that would go against the credit of the house out of me.”

But in spite of this forlorn confidence in her powers of baffling suspicion, it was a wretched night that poor Bauby spent. John was satisfactorily accounted for, and it was known where he was; but who could say where Rolls might be? Bauby sat up half through the night alone in the great empty kitchen with the solemn-sounding clock and the cat purring loudly by the fire. She was as little used to the noises of the night as Lord Rintoul was, and in her agony of watching felt the perpetual shock and thrill of the unknown going through and through her. She heard steps coming up to the house a hundred times through the night, and stealing stealthily about the doors. “Is that you, Tammas?” she said again and again, peering out into the night: but nobody appeared. Nor did he appear next day, or the next. After her first panic, Bauby gave out that he was with his master⁠—that she had never expected him⁠—in order to secure him from remark. But in her own mind horrible doubts arose. He had always been the most irreproachable of men; but what if, in the shock of this catastrophe, even Tammas should have taken to ill ways? Drink⁠—that was the natural suggestion. Who can fathom the inscrutable attractions it has, so that men yield to it who never could have been suspected of such a weakness? Most women of the lower classes have the conviction that no man can resist it. Heart-wrung for his master, shamed to his soul for the credit of the house, had Rolls, too, after successfully combating temptation for all his respectable life, yielded to the demon? Bauby trembled, but kept her terrors to herself. She said he might come back at any moment⁠—he was with his maister. Where else was it likely at such a time that he should be?

But Rolls was not with his master. He was on the eve of a great and momentous act. There were no superstitious alarms about him, as about Rintoul, and no question in his mind what to do. Before he left Dalrulzian that sad morning, he had shaped all the possibilities in his thoughts, and knew what he intended; and his conversation with Mr. Monypenny gave substance and a certain reasonableness to his resolution. But it was not in his nature by one impetuous movement to precipitate affairs. He had never in his life acted hastily, and he had occasional tremors of the flesh which chilled his impulse and made him pause. But the interval, which was so bitter to his master, although all the lookers-on congratulated themselves it could do him no harm, was exactly what Rolls wanted in the extraordinary crisis to which he had come. A humble person, quite unheroic in his habits as in his antecedents, it was scarcely to be expected that the extraordinary project which had entered his mind should have been carried out with the enthusiastic impulse of romantic youth. But few youths, however romantic, would have entertained such a purpose as that which now occupied Rolls. There are many who would risk a great deal to smuggle an illustrious prisoner out of his prison. But this was an enterprise of a very different kind. He left Mr. Monypenny with his head full of thoughts which were not all heroic. None of his inquiries had been made without meaning. The self-devotion which was in him was of a sober kind, not the devotion of a Highland clansman, an Evan Dhu; and though the extraordinary expedient he had planned appeared to him more and not less alarming than the reality, his own self-sacrifice was not without a certain calculation and caution too.

All these things had been seriously weighed and balanced in his mind. He had considered his sister’s interest, and even his own eventual advantage. He had never neglected these primary objects of life, and he did not do so now. But though all was taken into account and carefully considered, Rolls’s first magnanimous purpose was never shaken; and the use he made of the important breathing-time of these intervening days was characteristic. He had, like most men, floating in his mind several things which he intended “some time” to do⁠—a vague intention which, in the common course of affairs, is never carried out. One of these things was to pay a visit to Edinburgh. Edinburgh to Rolls was as much as London and Paris and Rome made into one. All his patriotic feelings, all that respect for antiquity which is natural to the mind of a Scot, and the pride of advancing progress and civilisation which becomes a man of this century, were involved in his desire to visit the capital of his own country. Notwithstanding all the facilities of travel, he had been there but once before, and that in his youth. With a curious solemnity he determined to make this expedition now. It seemed the most suitable way of spending these all-important days, before he took the step beyond which he did not know what might happen to him. A more serious visitor, yet one more determined to see everything and to take the full advantage of all he saw, never entered that romantic town. He looked like a rural elder of the gravest Calvinistic type as he walked, in his black coat and loosely tied white neckcloth, about the lofty streets. He went to Holyrood, and gazed with reverence and profound belief at the stains of Rizzio’s blood. He mounted up to the Castle and examined Mons Meg with all the care of a historical observer. He even inspected the pictures in the National Collection with unbounded respect, if little knowledge, and climbed the Observatory on the Calton Hill. There were many spectators about the streets who remarked him as he walked about, looking conscientiously at everything, with mingled amazement and respect; for his respectability, his sober curiosity, his unvarying seriousness, were remarkable enough to catch an intelligent eye. But nobody suspected that Rolls’s visit to Edinburgh was the solemn visit of a martyr, permitting himself the indulgence of a last look at the scenes that interested him most, ere giving himself up to an unknown and mysterious doom.

On the morning of the 24th, having satisfied himself fully, he returned home. He was quite satisfied. Whatever might now happen, he had fulfilled his intention, and realised his dreams: nothing could take away from him the gratification thus secured. He had seen the best that earth contained, and now was ready for the worst, whatever that might be. Great and strange sights, prodigies unknown to his fathers, were befitting and natural objects to occupy him at this moment of fate. It was still early when he got back: he stopped at the Tinto Station, not at that which was nearest to Dalrulzian, and slowly making his way up by the fatal road, visited the scene of Torrance’s death. The lodge-keeper called out to him, as he turned that way, that the road was shut up; but Rolls paid no heed. He clambered over the hurdles that were placed across, and soon reached the scene of the tragedy. The marks of the horse’s hoofs were scarcely yet obliterated, and the one fatal point at which the terrified brute had dinted deeply into the tough clay, its last desperate attempt to hold its footing, was almost as distinct as ever.

The terrible incident with which he had so much to do came before him with a confused perception of things he had not thought of at the time, reviving, as in a dream, before his very eyes. He remembered that Torrance lay with his head down the stream⁠—a point which had not struck him as important; and he remembered that Lord Rintoul had appeared out of the wood at his cry for help so quickly, that he could not have been far away when the accident took place. What special signification there might be in these facts Rolls was not sufficiently clearheaded to see. But he noted them with great gravity in a little notebook, which he had bought for the purpose. Then, having concluded everything, he set out solemnly on his way to Dunearn.