Saying which, Rodie made a stride against the little garden gate which led to the Buchanan’s front door, flung it inwards with a clang, and disappeared under the shadow of the dark elder-tree which overshadowed the entrance.
It was not until that moment that Frank realised what the consequence might be of quarrelling with Elsie’s brother. He called after him, but Rodie was remorseless, and would not hear; and then the young man went home very sadly. Everybody knew that Rodie was Elsie’s favourite brother; she liked him better than all the rest. If Rodie asked anything of her, Elsie was sure to grant almost everything to his request: and Frank had been such a fool as to offend him! He could not think how he could have been so foolish as to do it. It was the act of a madman, he said to himself. What was a few hundreds, or even thousands in comparison with Elsie, even if he recovered his money? It would be no good to him if he had to sacrifice his love.
Frank was not a young man who despised either hundreds or thousands, and probably, later, if all went well with him, he might think himself a fool to sacrificing good money for any other consideration; but he certainly was not in this state of feeling now. Elsie and Rodie, and the Statute of Limitations, and the money that Uncle Anderson had strewed about broadcast, jumbled each other in his mind. What did it matter to him if he lost the favour of his love? and on the other hand the pity it would be to lose the money for want of asking for it, and knowing who the man was who had got it, and had not had the honesty to pay. He grew angrier and angrier at these people as he went along, seeing that in addition to this fundamental sin against him, they were also the cause of his quarrel with Rodie, and terrible dismissal by Elsie. The cads! to hold their tongues and conceal who they were, when it was a debt of honour; and to trust in such a poor defence as a Statute of Limitations, and to part him from the girl he loved. He had been more curious than eager before, thinking besides the natural feeling one has not to be robbed, and to recover at all hazard that which is one’s own, however wicked people should endeavour to cheat one out of it—that it would be fun to break through the secret pretences of those people, and force them to disgorge the money they had unlawfully obtained; but now Frank began to have a personal animosity against those defaulters, as his mother called them, who not only had cheated him of his money, but had made him to quarrel with Rodie, and perhaps with Rodie’s sister. Confound them! they should not be let off now. He would find them, though all the world united in concealing them. He would teach them to take away his inheritance, and interfere between him and his love! It was with these sentiments hot in his heart that he hastened home.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE UNJUST STEWARD ONCE MORE.
Rodie Buchanan plunged into the partial darkness of his father’s house, with a heart still more hot and flaming than that of Frank. He could not have told anyone why he took this so much to heart. It was not that he was unusually tender of his neighbours, or charitable beyond the ordinary rule of kindness, which was current in St. Rule’s. He was one of those who would never have refused a penny to a beggar, or a bawbee to a weeping child, provided he had either the penny or the bawbee in his ill-furnished pockets, which sometimes was not the case; but, having done that by habit and natural impulse, there was no necessity in Rodie’s mind to do more, or to make himself the champion of the poor, so that he really was not aware what the reason was which made him turn so hotly against Frank, in his equally natural determination to get back what was his own. The hall and staircase of Mr. Buchanan’s house lay almost completely in the dark. There was one candle burning on a little table at the foot of the stair, which made the darkness visible, but above there was no light at all. Gas was not general in those days, nor were there lamps in common use, such as those which illuminate every part of our dwellings now. The dark passages and dreadful black corners of stair or corridor, which are so familiar in the stories of the period, those dreadful passages, through which the children flew with their hearts beating, not knowing what hand might grip them in the dark, or terrible thing come after them, must perplex the children of to-day, who know nothing about them, and never have any dark passages to go through. But, in those days, to get from the nursery to the drawing-room by night, unless you were preceded by the nursery-maid with a candle, was more alarming than anything a child’s imagination could grasp nowadays. You thought of it for a minute or two before you undertook it; and then, with a rush, you dared the perils of the darkness, flinging yourself against the door to which you were bound, all breathless and trembling, like one escaped from nameless dangers. Rodie, nearly twenty, big and strong, and fearing nothing, had got over all those tremors. He strode up the dark stairs, three at a time, and flung open the drawing-room door, groping for it in the wall. He knew what, at that hour, he would be likely to find there. It was the hour when Mrs. Buchanan invariably went to the study “to see what papa was doing,” to make sure that his fire was mended, if he meant to sit up over his sermon, or that things were comfortable for him in other ways when fires were not necessary. The summer was not far advanced, and fires were still thought necessary in the evenings at St. Rule’s. Between the fire and the table was seated Elsie, with a large piece of “whiteseam,” that is, plain sewing, on her knee, and two candles burning beside her. Another pair of candlesticks was on the mantelpiece, repeated in the low mirror which hung over it, but these candles were not lighted, neither were those on the writing-table at the other end of the room. When there was company, or, indeed, any visitor, in the evening they were lighted. The pair on the mantelpiece only when the visitor was unimportant, but the whole six when anybody of consequence was there, and then, you may suppose, how bright the room was, lighted al giorus, so to speak. But the household, and Elsie’s little friends, when they came rushing in with some commission from their mothers, were very well contented with the two on the table. They wanted snuffing often, but still they gave, what was then supposed to be, a very good light.
Elsie looked up, pleased to see her brother, and let her work fall on her knee. Her needlework was one of the chief occupations of her life, and she considered the long hours she spent over it to be entirely a matter of course; but, by this hour of the night, she had naturally become a little tired of it, and was pleased to let it drop on her knee, and have a talk with Rodie over the fire. It was considered rather ill-bred to go on working, with your head bent over your sewing, when anyone came in. To be sure, it was only her brother, but Elsie was so glad to see him a little earlier than usual, that, though the task she had given herself for the evening was not quite completed, she was glad to let her seam drop upon her knees. “Oh, Rodie, is that you?” she said.
“Of course it’s me,” said Rodie. “I suppose you were not looking for anybody else at this hour?”
“I am glad you are in so soon,” said Elsie. “And who was that that came with you to the door? Not Johnny Wemyss. I could tell by his foot.”
“What have you to do with men’s feet?” said Rodie, glad to find something to spend a little of his wrath upon. “Lassies must have tremendously little to think of. I am sure I would never think if it was one person’s foot, or another, if I were sitting at home like you.”
“Well,” said Elsie, “you never do sit at home, so you cannot tell. I just notice them because I cannot help it. One foot is so different from another, almost as much as their voices. But what is the matter with you, Rodie? Have you been quarrelling with somebody? You look as if you were in a very ill key.”