Nancy Stair: A Novel

by Elinor Macartney Lane

"There's just naething the matter at all," he returned. "Ye've been drinkin'. Is Rab Burns with ye?" he asked, resting his elbows imperturbably on the window-ledge.

His conduct, in my excited state, enraged me to the extent of using language which acquainted him with my wishes if not with my sobriety, and I noted him withdraw his head hastily, and the light grow bright and dim, and bright again, in his turning of the stairs, before the bars were let down and the door opened to me.

"There's just naething the matter at all," was his greeting. "Aye, ye will have been drinkin'!"

Although he carried such a brave front I saw that he had taken the precaution to bring an old blunderbuss with him, and two of the serving-men, who appeared from a rear stairway in a sleep-befuddled condition.

As we stood in the silence of the great dark hall a fear came over me that I had up-turned the house to no purpose, but underneath it lay the premonition of a great trouble, a feeling so strong that I was unable to put it by. The doors on both sides of the hall were closed, and there was no light save one small gleam which trickled from the keyhole of Nancy's writing-room. Advancing to the door I rapped boldly upon it, and waited for the duke to bid me enter; no voice answered, nor was any sound to be heard save the tick, tick, tick of a great clock that stood near. Again I beat upon the door, and called Montrose loudly by name, and with baited breath listened to the tick-ticking of the clock, and nothing else.

"He's fell asleep," Huey suggested, and upon this, thinking the door locked, I threw my weight against it, precipitating myself into the room with unnecessary violence, to find the duke sitting at the desk, his head thrown back upon the cushions, and one hand on the arm of the great chair in an attitude of peaceful slumber. But there came to me a dread of the sleep which could keep a man of his temperament unconscious while the house was being pulled about his ears. As I drew nearer to him the wind from the opened casement blew the curtains far into the room and rustled the papers on the table, the light of which was pushed back and the papers redd up, as if the business of the evening were by with.

I stepped softly to the sitting man and touched him on the shoulder, and, as I did so, fell back with a loud cry, while a voice with which I seemed to have nothing to do cried out:

"He's been murdered! He's shot! He's dead!"

I can not recall what other words this personless voice cried out, but I know that I stood staring at this man who but a few hours before had been so hated, feared, aye, and admired; staring at his dreadful pallor, his inhuman repose, and his inscrutable smile, as he sat before me with the blood trickling down the side of his face from a bullet-hole just over the temple.

In the first sight I had of him I knew that he was dead; the feeling of death was around him; there was death in the air, in the awful serenity of the pale face, in the hands which lay motionless and relaxed, as if surrendering all; in the faint smile, as though Death himself had come before the great man's vision and had been regarded calmly before his work was done; and while the four of us were standing, drunk with fear at this awful sight, there came to us the sound of carriage-wheels and gay voices, and before the power of action was with any of us, Nancy stood in the doorway, her eyes filled with laughter, her scarlet lips curved backward in a smile as she came forward to the place where I stood.