“Well,” said Archie, “don’t give it up for that. I have a little more in the bank. It is not very much; it’s about fifty pounds more. My father gives me an allowance. It’s a new thing for me to have all that money, and I just never spend it. What would I spend it upon here? I got two of Rankin’s little dogues—but they’re paid for, the little dashed beasts that have taken to—somebody else—that don’t care a button for me. Come, take it, lad: and if you’ll come to my room when we get home, I’ll give ye a cheque for the rest. If it was to buy anything, ye might demur, and say as well me as you; but when it’s to free you of something on your mind——”
“I should think it was on my mind,” Eddy said, not looking up at the other face which beamed benignant upon him. Archie perhaps, was never so much at ease with himself, so conscious of power and faculty, so flattered and gratified during his whole life.
“Well—and I have nothing on my mind,” he said with a happy laugh. He doubled up the cheque and thrust it into Eddy’s hand. “And just come to my room as soon as you get back—or perhaps——” He paused a little, wondering, as he had a favour to confer, which was the best way. “I’ll tell ye what’s the best. I’ll come to yours, and then there will be no difficulty,” Archie said.
He went down over the shoulder of the hill to Rosmore, never feeling for a moment the roughness of the way, laughing at himself as he stuck in a bog or stumbled over a rock, elated, happy, twice the man he was when he threaded slowly through the harsh bushes of the ling to where Eddy awaited him. What a half-hour that had been! He had never been able to be of use to any one all his life. The experience was quite new to him, delightful above all words. He did not even remember for some time that it was Rosamond’s brother whom he thus had it in his power to deliver from mysterious and unknown troubles. The first recollection of that additional inducement produced upon him indeed rather a sobering than an exciting effect. He divined instinctively that to Rosamond this would be a horror and humiliation. Heaven forbid she should ever know! He felt nothing but delight in being able to do something for Eddy, but the thought of Rosamond covered him with sudden cold dews of alarm. Never, never, must Rosamond know. She would blame him for it, Archie foresaw. It would raise a mountain of horrible obstacles between them. She would resent the mere possibility of such a link between her brother and himself. He must warn Eddy in the first place, who was so careless, who might let it out at any moment; and in the next, he must take every precaution that no one should ever discover what had passed. Even his cheque might be compromising to Eddy; there must be no way of betraying him, no possibility left. He turned over in his mind, as he hurried home, all the precautions that could be taken to conceal the transaction. Archie was not a man of business. He had little knowledge of the ways of banks and the manner of passing money from one hand to another. But when the heart is concerned, the mind becomes ingenious. And he had thought it well out, and how it was to be done, so that whatever secrets might be revealed, nothing of this should ever come out against Eddy, before he had reached home.
Eddy himself was too much ashamed of the part he was playing to walk home with the young man who had thus come to his help. There was so much grace left in him that he could not do that. He made the excuse that he was going a little way up the loch to speak to Alick Chalmers, the universal agent, about something that was wanted for the decoration of the ball-room, and when Archie had left him he stood watching his progress over the hill till he was out of sight. He had been really touched by Archie’s kindness, and by the absolute trust that young Rowland had showed in him, and something of compunction, something of unwonted tenderness was in Eddy’s eyes as he looked after that good Samaritan. “What a good fellow he is,” he said to himself; “but Jove! how badly he carries himself. To think he should treat a man like that whom he knows so little as he knows me; but I ought to have gone with him, for he’ll be on his nose before he gets down to the road.”
He could not but laugh at the manner in which Archie cannoned off a big boulder and nearly rolled down the hill at one point in his progress. His heart was still touched, but yet to be as awkward as that, was what no man had any right to be. Then he threw himself down on the heather again and thought, steadily following out with puckered eyebrows and a set face the scheme which had sprung to being in his brain when he set his eyes on the cheque which now kept him warm against his bosom. How much fun and frolic there was in that bit of paper, if he could have used it for his own pleasure. It gleamed across him that he might yet use it for his own pleasure and let everything slide; but there are some things that are more necessary than pleasure even to the most sordid mind. He had hailed this money as a benediction from heaven when it first dropped so unexpectedly into his hands, to enable him perhaps to arrange his most pressing affairs and deliver himself from a galling presence. But by the time Eddy rose from his seat among the heather, the most lively feeling he felt in his mind was resignation, and a sense that he was giving up his personal wishes in the noble way of paying an old debt, when he might have got so much fun out of the money! It was a wonderful change of view.
He took his way to the upper end of the loch, but not to see Alick Chalmers. He went on for a mile or two on the crest of the hill, and then dropped down upon a little cluster of houses on a little knoll among the harvest fields where the scanty crop was only being gathered in in the end of October. Johnson came out of one of those houses as the young man approached.
“If you’ve anything particular to say, let us go up the hill,” he said. “It aint safe talking in these little holes. They can hear you in the other room, if not next door.”
“What makes you think I have anything to say?”
“Well, there’s those invitations you promised me,” said Johnson.