So he went to his bed that night, and never rose from it, for he was dying—dying partly of a general decay of the whole vital system; for he was a man who had lived high, and with whom life, if easy in one way, had been a species of feverish chase in another.
In anxious monotony passed the nights and days. Dr. Kneebone, the Esculapius of Chilcote village, could do nothing for him now; indeed, there seemed nothing to be done but to watch for the end; and as Alison watched, with a heart torn by anxiety, passionate filial regard, and terror of what must inevitably come, again her sweet face, the softness and delicacy of which the pencil of a Greuze alone could have pourtrayed, became sad and pale and livid.
Her eyes grew heavy and inflamed by much sleeplessness, and over all her bearing there spread a soft air of patient suffering with equal evidence of great resolution and fortitude; and yet—yet, withal, with a shudder in her heart, times there were when she began to think of sacrificing herself, if doing so could save her father and prolong his days.
And old Archie Auchindoir moaned to himself as he pottered about his daily work, and often he muttered anxiously:
'It's no for nocht the gleds whustle at nicht!'
Dying—Dr. Kneebone assured Lord Cadbury that the old man was certainly dying, and fully stronger than ever grew the hopes of the peer to possess Alison, the poor and forlorn, beautiful and hunted creature, in the midst of her coming desolation and loneliness. Genuine pity or commiseration he had none.
'Save the puir lassie, he is the last o' the Cheynes o' Essilmont, my lord,' said Archie, in a very broken voice, as he ushered the peer out one day; 'the last leaf o' a lang, lane: ancestral tree!'
'What the devil is the use of a family tree unless one could sell it for timber,' replied the peer, as he took his horse's reins from Gaskins; 'and as for ancestors' (this was rather a sore subject with him), 'if one could raise the wind on them, there is many a fellow who wouldn't even leave himself a father just now!'
And so his lordship cantered off, sitting in his saddle, as Archie said, 'for a' the warld like a pock o' peats.'
Alison was watching her father sleeping, while this would-be lover rode pleasantly home to his luxurious dinner, and, as she watched him, she thought how fearfully wan and gray his face looked; and yet how noble it was in its manly beauty. What a handsome youth he must have been, when he won her mother's heart as a girl.