“It was done in no other case,” repeated Mr. Ferguson.
“Was there any other lease out,” retorted Mrs. Catherine, “that the hunger of siller could have its aliment on? You are a discreet man, Mr. Ferguson, and you, Walter Foreman, with your business-breeding, should have some notion of the value of siller. Is it not a deep sea that ye are asking me to throw this portion into? A hungry mouth that, the more ye fill it, will but gape and gaunt the more? So far as the siller is mine, have I not gotten it to use it well, as my light goes?—to succour the widow and fatherless, maybe—not to pamper the unnatural wants of a waster and a prodigal?”
“Mrs. Catherine,” said the factor, “hear me speak before you make this decision. I do not, by any means, defend Strathoran. I have taken it upon me, indeed, both to warn and to entreat him to give up this ruinous—I will not say criminal course, he is embarked on: and I have received from him, in return, letters that would melt your heart. Why he persists in what he acknowledges to be wrong, I cannot tell; and I do not defend him. He has got into the vortex, I suppose, and cannot extricate himself. But his father built up my fortunes, Mrs. Catherine, and so long as anything can be done, I will not forsake his son. This seasonable relief may save him: without this, his affairs are hopelessly entangled, and Strathoran must cease to be the home of the Sutherlands.”
Mrs. Catherine leaned her head upon her hand, and did not speak. At length, looking up, she saw, through the opposite window, Anne Ross and Lewis coming up the waterside, to the Tower.
“You will leave me a time, for further thought,” she said, slowly. “Put the papers out of yon keen gallant’s sight, or go into another room. You will hear tidings of your prodigal from Lewis, Mr. Ferguson; and doubtless you know him well enough, Walter, being birds of a feather. Euphan Morison, send lunch for the gentlemen into the dining-parlor, and tell Miss Ross I am waiting for her, in the little room.”
So speaking, Mrs. Catherine rose and left the library, her face shadowed with deeper gravity than was its wont—her step slow and heavy, and proceeded through many winding passages, to a locked door, in the furthest angle of the western wing. She opened it with a key which hung from her neck, and entered a small apartment furnished with the most meagre simplicity. It contained but two chairs and a small table, and from the deep diamond-paned window, you could only see the steep side of a hill, rough with whins and crags, which sprang sheer upward from the back of the Tower. Upon the wall hung a fine portrait—a noble, thoughtful, manly face, resembling Mrs. Catherine’s except in so far as its flush of strong manhood was different from the aspect of her declining years. It was her brother, whose untimely death had cast its heavy shadow over her own womanly maturity; and the room was Mrs. Catherine’s especial retirement, whither she was wont to come in her seasons of most solemn and secret prayerfulness, or at some crisis when her deliberations were grave enough to require the entire attention of her whole earnest mind. Upon the table lay a large Bible—other furniture or adornments there were none. In elder days, when the Douglases of the Tower professed the faith of Rome, it might have been called the lady’s oratory; in these plainer times it was only “the little room;” yet was surrounded with the awe, which must always environ the strugglings of a strong spirit, however faintly known to the weaker multitude around. Mrs. Catherine paced up and down its narrow limits, moved in her spirit, and expressing often her strong emotion aloud.
“Isabel Balfour,” she murmured to herself, stopping as she passed, to turn upon the picture a look of deep and sorrowful affection. “Ay, Sholto, it is her bairn, her firstborn, the son of her right hand. If ye were here, Sholto Douglas, where you should have been, but for God’s pleasure, what would you spare for Isabel’s son, that should have been yours also, and a Douglas? I envied you your bride and your bairns, Strathoran, for his sake that I left lying in foreign earth, and now your home is left to you desolate—woe’s me! woe’s me!”
Mrs. Catherine turned away and paced the room again, with quick and uneasy steps: “Unrighteous? I know it is unrighteous; but if he had been Sholto’s son, what would I not have done for him, short of sin? and he is Isabel’s—”
A footstep approached, through the passage, as she spoke, and controlling herself instantly, Mrs. Catherine opened the door to admit Anne Ross.
“What is the matter?” exclaimed Anne, as she entered. “What has happened, Mrs. Catherine, that you are here?”