Playing with Fire: A Story of the Soudan War

by James Grant

Had Roland spoken then and said much that he left unsaid, perhaps much suffering might have been spared him at a future time—we says 'perhaps,' but not with certainty, as we have only our story to tell, without indulging in casuistry as to what might have occurred in the sequel.

The story of the will, Annot began to think, must have been a fallacy—a cruel and unpalatable one. By-and-by she refused to face the probability at all; but she could not help remarking that when their conversation insensibly turned upon the future, as that of lovers must do, upon their probable trip to London, his certain tour of service in Egypt, or on anything that lay beyond the sunny horizon of the present, Roland became strange in manner, abrupt and cloudy, and nervously sought to turn the subject into another channel.

Could he tell her yet, that he was a kind of outcast in the house of his forefathers; that he was a mere visitor at Earlshaugh, and that not a foot of the soil he trod was his own?

And so day by day and night after night went on. The riding lessons through which Annot hoped sometime to shine in 'The Lady's Mile,' were still continued, on the beautiful and graceful pad which old Johnnie Buckle had procured for her at Cupar fair—tasks requiring at Roland's hand much adjustment of flowing skirts and loose reins; of a dainty foot in a tiny stirrup of bright steel; the buttoning of pretty gauntlets; much pressure of lingering fingers, and joyous laughter in the sunny and grassy parks, where now the deers' antlers were still lying, though one tradition avers that stags bury their horns in the moss after casting them, and another that they chew and eat them—a practice which Gavin Fowler and the forester asserted they had often seen them attempt.

'And in all your stately old home there is not even one traditional ghost?' said Annot, looking back from the spacious lawn to where the lofty façade of the ancient fortalice towered up on its rock in the red autumnal sunshine.

'A ghost there is, or used to be in my grandmother's time, at the Weird Yett,' replied Roland; 'but in the house, thank Heaven, no—though there are bits about it eerie enough to scare the housemaids after dark without that dismal adjunct; yet blood enough and to spare has been shed in and about Earlshaugh often in the olden time; and more than one ancestor of mine has ridden forth to die on the battlefield or at Edinburgh Cross, for the Stuart kings. But let us drop this subject, Annot; a fellow cuts a poor figure swaggering about his ancestors and their belongings in these days, when even every Cockney cad airs his imaginary bit of heraldry on his notepaper.'

'But there were fairies surely in the Fairy Den?' persisted Annot.

'But never with golden hair like yours, Annot,' said Roland, laughing now. 'Tradition has it that an ancestor of mine, who was Master of the Horse to Anne of Denmark, made a friend of an old Elf who dwelt in the glen—a droll little fellow with a huge head, a great ruff, and a gray beard that reached to his knees—and when the then Laird of Earlshaugh, after being caught in a flirtation with the Queen in Falkland Wood, was about to be led to the scaffold for his pretended share in the Gowrie Conspiracy, the Elf came on a white palfrey and bore him away, through crowd and soldiers and all, from the Heading Hill of Stirling to his own woods of Earlshaugh, a story which Sir Walter Scott assigns to another family, I believe.'

So Annot strove with success in partially abandoning herself to the joy of the present, and to the full budding hope of the future.

She could not bring herself, 'little woman of the world,' as Hester knew her to be, to do or say anything that could have the aspect of a wish on her part to hurry on a marriage before Roland departed to Egypt; but, while trembling at all the contingencies thereby involved, had to content herself by prettily and coquettishly referring from time to time to the events of their future life together and combined; consoling herself with the knowledge that so far as Roland's honour went, and that of his family, 'an engagement known to all the world is much more difficult to break than one to which only three or four persons are privy;' whilst for herself, she adopted the tone of being, in her correspondence with London friends, vague and cloudy, as if the engagement might or might not be; or that her visit to Earlshaugh meant nothing at all, more than one anywhere else.