In vain the quartermaster urged him to do nothing rashly, and to await the return of Lord Rohallion, who had ridden over to Eglinton castle, to visit his old friend and American comrade, Earl Hugh, who had just returned from London; but pride and passion, with a conviction that the mother's unwonted bitterness was only a supplement to the son's insulting conduct, seemed to dissolve all the ties that had bound Quentin to Rohallion and its family.
These emotions of anger had full swing in his heart. What Lady Rohallion had said, the old Lord must, he argued, have heard repeatedly, and may often have thought; and so, forth—forth to seek his bread elsewhere, he would go before the clocks struck midnight.
Mentally he vowed and resolved, that the first hour of another morning should see him far in search of a new home.
Deluding good John Girvan by some excuse, he slipped to his own room and packed a few necessaries in a small portmanteau, feeling, while he did so, a sense of mortification that they were the gifts of those whom, in justice to himself, he was compelled to leave. His watch, a ring, a breast-pin, and other trinkets given to him by Lady Rohallion, he laid upon his dressing-table, leaving them in token that he took with him nothing but what was absolutely necessary.
The time was an hour and a-half from midnight. Unheeding he had heard the supper-bell clanged long ago, and cared not what any one—Flora excepted—thought of his absence now. Opening a window, he looked forth upon the night. The moon had waned, and the atmosphere was thick and gusty—yea, nearly as stormy and as wild as on that night when he had been washed ashore on the sand of the bay below Rohallion.
Putting his purse in his pocket—it contained but a half-guinea, he gave a last glance at his bed-room—to leave it with all its familiar features cost him a pang; there were some of Lady Rohallion's needlework, and sketches by Flora, books lent him by the dominie, gloves and foils that had borne the dint of many a bout between him and John Girvan; quaint shells given to him by Elsie Irvine, and many little trophies of his shooting expeditions with the gamekeeper, and so forth. He quitted the room with a sigh, and slipping downstairs reached the hall-door unseen by any of the household.
"And now a long farewell to Rohallion!" he exclaimed, as he reached the ivied arch of the haunted gate.
"Not so fast, Quentin," said a voice, and the rough hand of the worthy quartermaster grasped his.
"John Girvan," said Quentin, with emotion.
"I thought it would come to this. So you are really about to take French leave of us—to levant in the night, and without beat of drum?"