After all he had endured in the deserts by the Nile, hunger, thirst, suffering, sickness, and wounds, facing and enduring all that a soldier may since last he had looked on old, gray Earlshaugh, as memory went flashing back he strove to forget for a brief time the wrong his father had done himself and his sister Maude, and to think only of his happy boyhood, and all that had been then.
Memories of his dead parents, of his gentle and loving mother, of his manly and fox-hunting father, who had taught him to ride, and shoot, and fish—of little brothers who lay buried by their side in the grave—of his childhood, of games, and old—or rather young—longings and imaginings, when the woods of Earlshaugh, and the trouting stream, were objects of vague mystery, the former peopled with fairies, and the latter the abode of a wicked kelpie!
Many a living voice and loving face had passed away since then—vanished for ever; but the memories of them were strong and pathetic. The rooks still clamoured in the old trees, and the birds sang amid the shrubberies as of old; he heard the men whistling and singing in the stable-yard. In the fields the soil had a fresh and grassy odour in the noonday sunshine familiar to him; and he felt the conviction that though he in many a sense had changed, Nature had not—'for the wind blows as it will through all the long years, and the land wakes glad and fragrant at the kiss of the pale dawn, and plain daily labour goes on steadily and unheedingly from generation to generation.'
As unnoticed and unseen he drew near the house—a massive old Scottish fortalice with tourelles at every angle—and surveyed its striking façade, he recalled the words of his uncle and Hester, and felt that he had now much that was practical to think about, much that was painful and dubious to forgive or submit to, while a vague sense of coming bitter annoyance—it might be humiliation, as we have said—rose before his haughty spirit, and the suspicion or emotion was not long of being put to the test.
A man with his hands in the back pockets of his coat, his hat set negligently into the nape of his neck—a thickset, well-to-do, little fellow, about thirty years of age, clad in a kind of semi-sporting style, with a straw in his mouth and much display of jewellery at his waistcoat—came leisurely down the front steps from a porte-cochère, which the late Laird had added to the old house—leisurely, we say, and with a very insouciant air, and accorded a nod—bow it could not be called—to Roland and paused.
'Oh,' said he, 'Captain Lindsay, I presume?'
'Yes,' replied the other, with surprise, and curtly.
'Ah, welcome; we've been expecting you. Did you walk from the station?'
'I was obliged to do so——'
'Ah.'