The last of her race, save herself!
'Surely, surely, if he is in England, Bevil will come to me now when he hears of this calamity!' she whispered in her heart, as she sat in the solitude of her own room when all was over.
But Bevil Goring came not. He had never had explained to him the cause of her abrupt and mysterious flight or departure from Chilcote, and the subsequent trip in Cadbury's yacht, and why, or how, she had neither time nor opportunity to write to him the briefest note of farewell or enlightenment on the subject; but all that had nothing to do with his absence on the present occasion, as we shall relate anon.
But she was brooding sadly over it, while—declining the proffered hospitality of the vicarage—she sat in her loneliness, watching the stars as they came out one by one, thinking of the bitterness and brevity of human life, and marvelling how many millions of the human race these orbs had looked down upon, and would yet look down upon, in the ages to come.
Her father's spendthrift errors in youth, and his petulance and selfishness in old age, were all forgotten by Alison now. She remembered only his love for herself, and even repented that she could not gratify him by sacrificing herself to Cadbury.
Would she have prolonged his life by doing so? That was a problem on which she could not—dared not dwell.
His tenants—or rather those who had been his tenants—far away among the Braes of Aberdeenshire, longer than they might have been, but for the merciful consideration of his creditors—men who, even in this advanced age, deemed themselves born vassals of the house of Cheyne, as their fathers did when the Red Harlaw was fought, or the Brig o' Dee was bravely manned in the days of Montrose—were stirred with much genuine grief when they heard of his death. For, though proud to his equals, he had ever been a friendly and kindly landlord to them, and thinking of them ever, in the good spirit of the olden time, as 'my father's people,' he would shake warmly the hand of old Donald Gordon, the gudeman of a little farm-town, while asking after his wife and daughters by name; though he would barely nod his aristocratic head to some 'earth-hungry' commercial man, who had acquired a fine estate—all won by honest industry.
'Oh, why does not Bevil come to me; if in England, he must have heard of papa's death?' was her ever recurring thought.
And he did hear it; but, by a strange contingency, a little too late. Meanwhile, not much time was given Alison to linger in desolate Chilcote, and she found that, a day or two after the funeral, she would have to face the cold and bitter world—yea, and to face it alone, tender, young, and inexperienced as she was!
Sir Ranald's death brought the last of his creditors swooping down upon the dregs and lees of his possessions, and, with a heart that seemed broken afresh, Alison surrendered to them everything, even to that heirloom which her father deemed the palladium of the Cheynes—the great silver tankard that had been the gift of Elizabeth, Queen Dowager of Scotland, to Sir Ranald Cheyne of Essilmont and Inverugie, the master of her household. And she wept with the knowledge that to have parted with that would well-nigh have broken her father's heart.