Roland was quite aware that Hester was no longer a child, but a girl almost out of her teens, and one that looked older than her years. He had seen her at intervals, and seen how she had grown up and expanded into the handsome girl she had become—one of whom any kinsman might be proud; and with all his seeming indifference and doubt of his true emotions, it was evident now that propinquity might do much; and times there were when he began to feel for her some of that tender interest and admiration which generally form a sure prelude to love. Moreover, they were cousins, and 'there is no denying that cousinship covers a multitude of things within its kindly mantle.'
Hester was the only daughter of his maternal uncle, the old General, whose services had won him a K.C.B.—an improvident and somewhat impoverished man, who for years had been a kind of invalid from ailments contracted after the great Indian Mutiny—chiefly from a bullet lodged in his body at Jhansi, when he fought under the famous Sir Hugh Rose—Lord Strathnairn in later years.
She was the one 'ewe lamb' of his flock, all of whom were lying by their mother's side under the trees in the old kirkyard of Lasswade, within sound of the murmuring Esk; and though the charm of Hester's society had been one of the chief reasons that induced Roland Lindsay to linger at Merlwood, as he had done for nearly a month past, he was loth to adopt the idea now being involved therein. Such is the inconsistency of the male heart at times; and he, perhaps, misconstrued, or attributed his emotion to compassion for her apparently lonely life and somewhat dubious future—for Sir Henry's life was precarious; and in this perilous and dubious state matters were now, while Roland's leave of absence was running on.
Not that the latter was extremely limited. To the uninitiated we may mention that what is technically termed winter leave extends generally from the 15th October to the 14th of the following March, 'when all officers are to be present with their respective regiments and depôts;' but Roland had extended or more ample leave accorded him than this, owing to the sufferings he had undergone from a wound and fever when with the army of occupation in Egypt, a portion of which his regiment formed—hence it was that August saw him at Merlwood.
And now we may briefly state how he was situated, and some of the 'features' on which his future 'hinged.'
During his absence with the army his father, the old fox-hunting Laird of Earlshaugh, a widower, after the death of Roland's mother had rashly married her companion, a handsome but artful woman, who, at his death (caused by a fall in the hunting-field, after which she had nursed him assiduously), was left by him, through his will, all that he possessed in land, estate, and heritage, without control; but never doubting—poor silly man—that she would do full justice in the end to his only son and daughter, as a species of mother, monitress, and guardian—a risk the eventualities of which he had not quite foreseen, as we shall show in the time to come.
But so it was; his father, who, at one time, he thought, would hardly have rested in his grave if the acres of Earlshaugh and the turrets of the old mansion had gone out of the family, in which they had been since Sir James Lindsay of Edzell and Glenesk fell by his royal master's side at Flodden, had been weak enough to do this monstrous piece of injustice, under the influence of an artful and designing woman!
It was an injury so galling, so miserable, and—to Roland Lindsay—so scarcely realizable, that he had been in no haste to return to his ancestral home.
And hence, perhaps, he had lingered at Merlwood, where his uncle, Sir Harry, who hated, defied, and utterly failed to understand anything of the 'outs and ins' of law or lawyers, including wills and bequests, etc., etc., fed his natural indignation by anathematizing the artful Jezebel of a step-mother; and declaring that he never did and never would believe in her; and adjusting himself as well as that cursed 'Jhansi bullet' would allow him, while lounging back in his long, low, and spacious Singapore chair, he would suck his hookah viciously, and roundly assert, as a crowning iniquity, that he was certain she had 'at least four annas to the rupee in her blood!'