A letter from his friend Hector Logan roused him a little, and made him think of returning at once to the regiment. It was full of the mess gossip and barrack news generally, and about a ball "where la belle Aurelia had appeared with a new and very remarkable admirer, a Colonel Ithuriel Smash, of the United States army. If the row with the colonists comes off," continued Logan, "some of us may lose our chance of picking up a handsome heiress—for heiresses here are to be had for the asking, some think; I don't. But a girl like Aurelia Darnel, with a stray forty thousand pounds, and having also the frankness and good taste to accept a nice fellow with whom to spend it, is just the kind of girl for my complexion. Logan Braes and that ilk, sound very well; but my pedigree is a powersight longer than my rent-roll."
The letter concluded by urging him to rejoin, as an outbreak among the colonists was daily expected.
Apart from Aurelia Darnel, concerning whom a change had come over his future now, he felt in every way the necessity for action, and for returning to America, and he felt, too, as if he would go mad, if he lingered longer in Ardgowrie.
Aurelia! could he go back to the charm of her society again, with that horrible secret in his mind—the secret the cabinet had contained, and which made him a penniless man! Yet, his thoughts would wander again and again to the girl he had left beyond the broad Atlantic, and doubts rather than hopes, fear rather than joy, crowded upon him, all born of recent events.
Perhaps absence might already have erased all memory of him, and he was forgotten; and who was this new dangler—"admirer," Logan called him, with the atrociously grotesque name? He had left her, without any declaration of his love, and dared he make one now? Left her, at that period, when, as Lever says, "love has as many stages as a fever; when the feeling of devotion, growing every moment stronger, is chequered by a doubt lest the object of your affections should really be indifferent to you—thus suggesting all the torturing agonies of jealousy to your distracted mind. At such times as these a man can scarcely be very agreeable to the girl he loves; but he is a confounded bore to a chance acquaintance."
Aurelia Darnel was one of the wealthiest girls in Montreal. Could he speak to her of love now? No—no! It was not to be thought of, and in going back, he would avoid her, and devoutly hoped that the expected "row" would come off, and the Royal Scots would have to take the field.
The two last days of his residence at Ardgowrie he spent in solitude beside the Linn of Dee. There was something soothing to his soul in the wild turmoil of the rushing torrent, from whence, the body of any living thing that finds its way into it, can never be recovered.
What a change had come over Roland Ruthven, since last, in boyhood, and just before he joined the Royals, he had gazed into those black and surgy depths which fascinate the eye and render the brain giddy, where the dead white of the foam contrasts so strongly with the sombre tints of the turbulent cauldron, and the still blacker uncertainties of the caverns beneath the rocks, as the Dee, there terrible, yet beautiful thunders over the Linn on its passage to the German Ocean.
Roland felt keenly the change that had come over him, since last he heard the familiar roar of his native stream; a new life, with the regiment had been opened to him; but a blight had fallen upon it now. Out of many a passing flirtation, his love for Aurelia stood prominently forth on one hand; on the other was his father's sore temptation (he could scarcely give it a harder name); yonder grand old house, with all its turrets amid the stately woods, no longer his; his future wasted, his love denied him, and his inheritance lost!
It was a conviction hard to adopt and bear, yet Roland adopted and bore it bravely, and turning his back, as he certainly believed, for ever on Ardgowrie, departed to rejoin his regiment.