“A man from the other side of the water,” said Sir Robert in the old phraseology of the countryside. “Macalister, I think.”
“Well, it’s the best you can do here. Our man’s a cleverer man, if you could ever be sure of finding him with his head clear. But Macalister is an honest fellow. I would not say but I would have a man from Edinburgh if it was me.”
“Do you think so?” said Sir Robert.
“If it was my Eelen—Lord, it’s no one, but half-a-dozen men I’d have from Edinburgh before I’d see her slip through my fingers. But there’s nothing like your own very flesh and blood.”
“I will write at once!” cried Sir Robert.
“I would send a man—the post’s slow. I would send a man by the coach that leaves to-night; for an hour lost you might repent all the days of your life, Robert Ramsay,” said the minister, once more grasping and holding fast in his large, limp, but not unvigorous hand the other old gentleman’s firm and hard one. “Just bear with me for another word. If she’s hanging between life and death—and you know not what may happen—and if there is a man in Edinburgh she would rather see than any doctor, for the love of God, man, don’t do things by halves, but send for him, too.”
“What the deevil do you mean with your ‘man in Edinburgh’?” Sir Robert said, with a shout, drawing his hand forcibly away.
He rode home upon Rory, much discomfited and disturbed. It is scarcely too much to say that he had forgotten much, or almost all, about Ronald Lumsden in the long interval that had occurred, during which he was fully occupied with his own life, and indifferent to what took place elsewhere. He had sent Lily off to Dalrugas to free her from the assiduities of a young fellow who was not a proper match for her. That is how Sir Robert would have explained it; and he had never entertained a doubt that, what with the fickleness of youth and the cheerful company about, Lily had forgotten her unsuitable suitor long ago. But to have it even imagined, by the greatest old fool that ever was, that Lily’s terror of being obliged by her uncle to accept another man had upset her very brain and brought on a deadly fever was too much for any man to bear. And old Blythe was not an old fool, though he had behaved like one. If he thought so, other people would think so, and he—Robert Ramsay, General, K. C. B., a man almost as well known as the Prince of Wales himself, a member of the best clubs, an authority on every social usage—he, the venerated of Edinburgh, the familiar of London—he would be branded, in a miserable hole in the country, with the character of a domestic tyrant, with the still more contemptible character of a match-maker, like any old woman! Sir Robert’s rage and annoyance were increased by the consciousness that he was not himself cutting at all a dignified figure on the country road mounted upon Rory, for whom his legs were too long (though he was not a tall man) and his temper too short. Rory tossed his shaggy head to the winds, and did battle with his master, when the pace did not please him. He all but threw the old gentleman, who was famed for his horsemanship. And it was in the last phase of exasperation, having dismounted, and, with a blow of his light switch, sent Rory careering home to his stable riderless, that Sir Robert encountered the doctor returning from his morning’s visit. Mr. Macalister’s face was grave. He turned back at once, and eagerly, desiring, he said, a few minutes’ conversation. “I cannot well speak to you with your people and those women always about.”
“I am afraid, then,” said Sir Robert, “you have something very serious to say.”
“Maybe—and maybe not. In the first place there are indications this morning of a change—we will hope for the better. The pulse has fallen. There’s been a little natural sleep. I would say in an ordinary subject, and with no complications, that perhaps, though we must not just speak so confidently at the first moment, the turn had taken place.”