“Ill in her bed!” cried Sir Robert. “Nonsense! Nonsense! I know that kind of illness. She is vexed at me for sending her here, and she’s made up her mind to sulk a little that I may flatter her and plead with her. You may tell her it won’t do. I’m not that kind of man. I’ll pardon, maybe, a bonnie lass in all her braws and showing her pleasure in them, but a sulky, sour young woman—— Eh, Evandale, what were you saying—an old house? It’s old enough if ye think that to its credit, and bare enough. Katrin, I hope you’ll be able to make these gentlemen comfortable in the old barrack, such as it is.”
“I hope so, Sir Robert,” said Katrin. She was relieved that his animadversions on Lily should be cut short.
And then they mounted the spiral staircase with the worn steps, which in one or two places were almost dangerous, and which the elder men mounted very cautiously, one after the other, the loud footsteps of the men echoing through the place, their deeper voices filling the air.
“Lord bless us all!” Katrin cried within herself, “if they had arrived ten days ago!” It was a comfort, in the midst of all the trouble, that Lily was safe in her bed, and, whatever happened, could not be disturbed.
Sir Robert’s enquiries again next morning after his niece were made late and after long delay. It was the 12th of August, and unnecessary to say that Dalrugas was full of sound and hurry from an early hour; the manufacture and consumption of an enormous breakfast, and the preparations for the first great day with the grouse, occupying every-body, so that Katrin herself, though very anxious, had not found a moment to visit Lily’s room, or even to snatch a moment’s talk with Beenie over her mistress’s state. “Just the same, and that’s very bad,” Beenie said, through the half-open door, “and just half out of her wits with the noise, and no able to understand what it means.” “Oh, it’s a’ thae men!” cried Katrin. “The gentlemen and their grouse, and the others with the guns and the douges and a’ the rest o’t. Pity me that have not a moment, that must gang and toil for them and their breakfasts!” When every thing was ready at last, and the party set out, Sir Robert, whose shooting days were over, accompanied them to a certain favorite corner upon Rory, who, though the old gentleman was not a heavy weight, objected to the unusual length of his limbs and decision of his proceedings; but he returned to the house shortly after, musing, with a sigh or two. Perhaps it was a rash experiment to come back after so many years; his doctor had advised it strongly, giving him much hope from his native air, the air of the moors and hills, and from the quiet and regular hours and rule of measured living which he would have no temptation to transgress. “We must remember we are not so young as we once were—any of us,” the physician had said, notwithstanding that he himself was but forty. When a man is old and ailing, and lives too perilously well, and sees and does too much in the gayer regions of the land, and is known at the same time to have a castle in the North, an old patrimony in the Highlands, delightful in August at least, and probably the best place in the world for him at all times of the year, such a prescription is easy. “Your native air, Sir Robert, and a quiet country life.” The 12th of August, a fine day, and already the sharp, clear report of the guns in the brilliant air, and a sense of company and enjoyment about, and the moor a great magnificent garden, purple with heather, is about as cheerful a moment as could be chosen to make a beginning of such a life. But old Sir Robert, returning from the beginning of the sport which he was not able to share to his old house, his Highland castle, which, as he turned toward it in the glorious sunshine of the morning, looked so gray and pinched and penurious, with the tower, that was only a high outstanding gable, and the farm buildings, which had for so long a time been the chief and most important points of the cluster of buildings to its humble occupants, had little to make him cheerful. A sharp sensation almost of shame stung the old man as he realized what his friends must have thought of his Highland castle. Taymouth and Inverary are castles, and so are the brand-new houses down the Clyde in which the Glasgow merchants establish themselves with all the luxuries which money can buy. But where did old Dalrugas come in, so spare and poor, rising straight out of the moor without garden or plaisance, not to speak of parks or woods? He smiled to himself a little sadly at the misnomer. He was wounded in the pride with which he had regarded that shrunken, impoverished little place—a pride which he felt now was half ludicrous and yet half pathetic. How was it that he had not thought so when last he was here, then a mature man and having passed all the glamour of youth? He shook his head at the pinched, tall gable, the corbie steps cut so clearly against the blue sky, the gray line of the bare, blank wall. After all, it was but a poor house for a family with such pretensions as the Ramsays of Dalrugas—a poor thing to brag to his Southern friends about. And it was not very gay. He, who had been a man who loved to enjoy himself, and who had done so wherever he had been, to come back here in the end of his days to settle down to the dreariness of the solitary moor and the silence of a country life—was it not a discipline more than he could bear that “those doctors” had put him under? Was a year or two more of vegetation here worth the giving up of all his old gratifications and amusements? It is hard even upon a man who knows he is old, but does not care to acknowledge it, to accompany on a pony for a little way his friends, who are keen for their sport, to set them off on the 12th without being able to go a step or fire a shot with them. Those doctors—what did they know? They had probably sent him off, not knowing what more to do for him, that they might not be troubled with the sight of him dying before their eyes.
Then, however, there came before Sir Robert, by some more kindly touch of memory, certain scenes from the old life, when Dalrugas was the warmest and happiest home in the world, always overflowing with kindly neighbors and friends of youth. Their names came back to him one by one—Duffs, Gordons, Sinclairs. Where were they all now? There would be at least their representatives in all the old places—sons, nay, perhaps grandsons, of his contemporaries, young asses that would turn up their noses at a vieille moustache; yet perhaps some of the old folk too. Lily would know; no doubt but Lily would know every one of them. She would have her partners among the boys and her cronies among the girls. He felt glad that Lily was here to renew the alliances of the old place. What had he sent her here for, by-the-bye? Something about a silly sweetheart that she would not give up, the silly thing. Probably she would have forgotten his very name by this time, as Sir Robert did; and there would be another now waiting his sanction. Well, no harm if it was a fit match for the last Ramsay. He would insist upon that. Somebody that had gear enough, and good blood, and a proper place in the world. No other should poor James’s daughter marry; that was one thing sure.
And then he began to think what had become of Lily that she had neither come to meet him last night nor appeared this morning. Was she bearing malice? or sulking at her old uncle? He would soon see there was an end to that. If she was ill, she must have the doctor. If it was but some silly cold or other, or the headache that a woman sets up at a moment’s notice, she must get up out of her bed, she must come down stairs. Self-indulgence was good for nobody, especially at Lily’s age. He would see her woman, Beenie, who was her shadow, and whom Sir Robert began to recollect he had not seen any more than Lily herself. And then the alternative should be given her—the doctor, who would stand no nonsense, or to get up and put a shawl about her, and nurse her cold by the fireside, where she could talk to him, and be much better than if she were in bed. Sir Robert quickened Rory’s paces, and, indeed, as the pony was nothing loath to reach his stable, appeared at the house with almost undignified haste to put in immediate operation this plan.
CHAPTER XXXIV
“No better this morning! What is the matter with her? I never heard Lily was unhealthy or delicate!”
“She is neither the one nor the other,” said Katrin, indignant, “but she’s not well to-day. The best of us, Sir Robert, we’re subjeck to that.”