“Is this the way you treat your visitors, coming in at this hour of the morning?” said Miss Jean, “and with so little regard to what folk may think? Let the young man bide below till I’m out of the way. I’ll see you to your room, Marjory. You want some woman-person to see after you, and that taupie of a maid is snoring, disturbing my slumbers for hours past.”
“I am sorry you waited for me,” Marjory said in her strange stupor, “but when you know the cause—”
“Oh, ay, I know the cause,” said Miss Jean, throwing a jealous glance over her shoulder at Fanshawe, who hesitated and lingered on the stairs. “I know the cause,” she repeated, following Marjory into her room and closing the door with much severity, “but for my part I’m a great deal more interested, to tell the truth, in what may be the result.”
Thus with one consent the elder members of the party—the ones who had lived longest and were nearest the ending—thrust the death-scene away from them, and went on with the threads of life as if there had been no interruption of its ordinary course. This was what they cared for—the living, not the dead.
And Fanshawe, dazed too with his watching, with his strange long walk through the unnatural yet fresh and lovely morning, which had seemed to spy upon them all the way, with wondering looks, like a child, went into the room prepared for him—having added that picture of Miss Jean in her dressing-gown to all the others, of which his mind was full. He did not hear what she said, but he made out her sharp look of disapproval, and the jealousy of her watch over Marjory, thus peremptorily parted from him, and taken out of his keeping the moment she crossed the threshold. She had been so absolutely confided to him before, that the contrast was all the more remarkable. When he was safe in his room, the ludicrousness of the old lady’s appearance came before him so strongly, that he laughed in spite of himself—and then was intensely ashamed of himself, and crept to bed, feeling guilty in the daylight, feeling as if he had been doing something he ought not to have done. How strange to glide into the stillness of an orderly sleeping-room after an exciting night! And he was dizzy with his journey, with fatigue, and long waking. But still, of all the memories of the night, Miss Jean at the top of the stairs was the one that lingered most in his memory. He dreamed of her, and laughed in his sleep, and woke with a half-hysterical mixture of laughter and emotion, as much moved by that momentary comic glimpse as by all that had happened. But this levity, fortunately, nobody knew.
CHAPTER XXI.
The party which met in the morning after this vigil regarded each other strangely, feeling the fever of their excitement still about them. Marjory did not appear, and it was from Mr. Charles that Fanshawe learnt that his own mission had failed, and that the missing witness had already appeared, a fact which he had guessed from all he saw, but had not been informed of. There was a long discussion over the breakfast table about this strange change in the family affairs, and all the revolutions it must bring about.
“An application must be made at once to the Court of Session to appoint tutors,” Mr. Charles said, who was full of suppressed excitement, “and these young women at Pitcomlie must be informed. It will be hard upon them, poor things, after all.”
“They had nothing to do with the house or the family,” said Miss Jean, briskly. “Strangers, all strangers; neither one nor another has any pity from me. Eight thousand pounds is not a bad provision for a younger son’s widow, with nothing of her own; but take you my advice, Charlie Heriot, and be very clear in your mind about this bairn. I’m not fond of chance bairns coming in when nobody expects them. This lass, that you all think so much of, may have been everything that’s good; but I would have the court to sit upon it, and make sure. I would trust nothing to chance, if it was me.”
“We’ll take every precaution—every precaution,” said Mr. Charles; and then he fell into a reverie, from which he roused up slowly, with a look of satisfaction in his face, rubbing his hands. “I am glad,” he said, “that I never began to dismantle my old room. I’ve thought of doing it more than once. If I could suppose,” added Mr. Charles, changing countenance, “that leaving Pitcomlie would be any heart-break to these young women; if they had had time to get attached to the place—But as one house or another is the same to them, and Mrs. Charles is not badly provided for, on the whole, with her pension and all—I hope it’s not any way hard-hearted on my part.”