Читать книгу The Royal Regiment, and Other Novelettes - James Grant - Страница 5

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The affectionate and filial heart of Roland was wrung by the wan and haggard aspect of his father, who looked as grim and pale as that other Patrick Ruthven, whose ghastly visage in his helmet had so appalled the luckless Mary on the night that Rizzio was slain; but the old man's eyes brightened, his colour came back for a time, and his strength even seemed to rally as his son embraced him.

"You have lost no time in attending my summons, Roland," said he, retaining the latter's hand within his own.

"I left Montreal by the first steamer, my dear father, but I got away with difficulty."

"Why?"

"A revolt among the colonists is daily expected; but when I mentioned your illness, the Colonel at once obtained leave for me from the General at Halifax."

"Dear old Geordie Wetherall! I remember him a sub in his first red coat, when we were ensigns together, in the "rookery," as we called it, in Edinburgh Castle. Ah, few of the Royals of that day are surviving now. They have nearly all gone before me to the Land o' the Leal! But in fancy I can see them all yet."

Then, though ailing nigh unto death, true to his old instincts, almost the first questions he asked of Roland were about their old regiment, its strength and appearance, of the officers and rank and file; and then he sighed again, to think that none remembered him save old Geordie Wetherall, a veteran of the conquest of Java; and all these questions Roland had to answer, ere he could lure his father to speak of himself, and when the latter did so, his spirit fell, his colour faded, and the momentary lustre died out of his eyes, though the glassy glare of illness still remained.

"I hope the alleged danger of this mysterious illness is exaggerated," said Roland, tenderly and anxiously; "and that ere I return to the regiment, I shall see you well and strong—ay, perhaps taking your fences as of old with Bob Buckle at your back."

The old Laird of Ardgowrie smiled sadly, and turned restlessly on his pillow—and a handsome man he was, even in age, with a wonderful likeness to his son, having the same straight nose and mouth clean cut and chiselled, "the prerogative of the highly born," as Lever has it—for Patrick Ruthven belonged to the untitled noblesse of Scotland, the lineage of some of whom stretches far back into the shadowy past.

"I am lying in my last bed save one, Roland," said the sufferer, in low concentrated voice; "we have not all died in our beds, we Ruthvens of that ilk, but it shall be said that all have died with honour except——"

"Except who, father?"

The old man trembled as if with ague, and closed his eyes, as he said hoarsely—

"I cannot tell you—in time you will know all!"

"You have been a good soldier to the Queen, father."

"But a bad servant to her Master."

"Do not speak thus!" said Roland, imploringly.

"The heart knoweth its own bitterness; and I have been bad, evil, wicked—false!"

"This is some fancy."

"It is not!" said Patrick Ruthven, emphatically.

"Then can I make amends?"

"You may, if it is not too late, my poor Roland. Oh, my God!"

These mysterious words filled the listener with genuine grief and alarm. Was it all some hallucination? What did they import or refer to? For much in his father's moody and wayward life, in his latter years especially, seemed to corroborate them, and to hint that there was "a skeleton in the house," as the doctor had ventured to say.

"I will have no clergyman about me," said the sufferer, petulantly and almost passionately, in reply to some remark of Roland's.

"Why?"

"I hope to make my peace with God alone. The Reverend Ephraim Howie, to whom I gave the living of Ardgowrie! What can he, or such as he, do for me now?"

"Oh, father!"

"No one ever prospered who grew rich by fraud, it has been said—yet have I, in a manner, prospered," added the old man, as if communing with himself.

"You, father?" exclaimed Roland, whose blood seemed to grow very cold.

"Yes—I."

"How—how?"

"I cannot—dare not tell you. Hush!" he added, glancing stealthily about, as Mr. Runlet, the butler, placed two shaded candles, in massive antique silver holders, on the toilet table, and withdrew, and Roland thought—

"Poor old man—his mind wanders!"

"My mind is not wandering."

"I never said so, father."

"But you seem to think so—I can read it in your eyes. I have been successful in life, and leave at death a handsome fortune to one who has no right to it—you, my son—you whom I love better than my own soul!" he exclaimed, in a broken voice that seemed full of tears, and a great horror began to possess the heart of the listener.

"Oh heaven—heaven! he is mad!"

"Would that I had died at the head of the Royals, when I led them at Nagpore!"

Intense perplexity mingled with the natural grief of Roland, for the whole tenor of this interview was so utterly beyond all that he could have anticipated.

In a half fatuous manner, the patient was muttering to himself, and in great agony of mind, Roland listened intently.

"Live it down, people say—I have lived it down—it was never known indeed! Poor Philip—poor Philip! One may live down a lie, but not the truth—it is the truth that hurts—that never may be lived down. I ever thought a day of retribution would come, and it is coming—fast!"

"Retribution for what?" asked Roland, in a low but passionate voice.

"Could I face the malevolence of the vulgar on one hand, and the scorn of my equals on the other?—no—oh no!" continued his father, speaking in a low voice, and at long gasping intervals, as if to himself. "It has been truly said, that 'manner and tone of voice may be made to give stabs, only less sharp and cowardly than vile and baseless calumny.... There is no insolence like the insolence of the well-born and well-bred; and the most vulgar and purse-proud wife of the most purse-proud plutocrat is altogether inferior in her capacity to inflict pain and give offence to the patrician lady of title.' I have been spared all that—for I cast the die in secret!"

"What die?" asked Roland imploringly.

The old man regarded him wildly, as if for a time he had forgotten his presence.

"When I am dead and gone—dead and gone, dear Roland, you will know all."

"Why not now?"

"Because I—even hovering on the brink of eternity—blush to tell you. Oh, what a thing it is for a father to cower like a very craven before his only son, and yet, Roland, you know how I have loved you. When I am gone and buried, Roland, open the old Indian cabinet that I found on the day when the Royals stormed Scindia's fortress of Neembolah—read the sealed packet you will find there—and—and pray for me."

These were almost the last coherent words his father spoke; and he uttered them with the veins in his temples throbbing, and as if the most bitter of all emotions, self scorn, wrung his heart, and then he seemed to sink fast. But he lingered for some days after this, and though his words, manner, and injunction, filled Roland with grief and intense curiosity, he resolved to obey him to the letter and not open the cabinet till end came, and the doctor assured him it was near now.

"Under what hallucination can the poor old man be labouring?" thought Roland, as he sat alone in the stately dining-room—a veritable hall—and thought how proud he who was about to pass away to a dark and narrow home, had been of Ardgowrie and all its details and surroundings—its stately park where the deer made their lair among the green ferns, its dark blue loch full of pike, and the pine plantations where the pheasant pea-fowl were thick as the cones that lay around them.

Daily by the sun, nightly by the moon, for many centuries, had the same shadows of the quaint old house been cast on the same places, and it was now an epitome of a proud historic past. It had entertained more than one king of Scotland, and everything in the old mansion was on a grand scale, from the portraits by Jamesone and Vandyck (who married a Ruthven of Gowrie, by the way) to the massive cups won in many a race that glittered on the sideboard. Above the latter, a splendid full-length of the "bonnie Earl" who was wont to flirt with Anne of Denmark in Falkland Woods, and who on the 5th of August, 1600, perished in the famous conspiracy, had its place of honour; and among other portraits of later times, was one by Sir Watson Gordon of the present proprietor, in his uniform as a field officer of the Royal Scots.

The massive mantelpiece of the early Stuart times ascended to the ceiling. It was an exact copy of the famous one in Gowrie House at Perth, and over it in Gothic letters was the same remarkable and apposite legend borne by the former:—

"Truths long concealed at length emerge to light,

And controverted facts are rendered bright."

But Roland now perceived with genuine wonder, that the couplet had been chiselled completely away, and the stone frieze was now smooth and bare.

"By whose orders was this done, Runlet?" he asked with angry surprise.

"Those of the Laird, your father," replied the butler.

"When?"

"Just before his last illness."

"Why?"

"I cannot say, Mr. Roland, but he has done some queer things of late," he added with diffidence.

On that mantelpiece were cut the Ruthven arms, bars and lozenges, within a border flowered and counter-flowered, crested with a goat's head, and above them hung the tattered colours of Ruthven's battalion of the 1st Royal Scots—one of four—which had borne them in triumph from the plains of Corunna to the gates of Paris, covered with trophies, among which are still the cross of St. Andrew and the crowned thistle of James VI.

Off the dining hall opened a long and lofty corridor hung with moth-eaten tapestries of russet and green hues and with trophies of arms, each having its history; such as the helmet of Sir Walter Ruthven who died by the side of King David at the battle of Durham; the sword of Sir William who became hostage for King James I.; the pennon of the Master of Ruthven who fell at Flodden, and weapons of later wars, with trophies of the chase, heads and skulls of lions shot in Africa, tigers in Bengal, bears in Russia, of elephants from the miasmatic Terrai of Nepaul—spoils wherever his father had served; and of noble deer from the forests of the adjacent hills.

From all these objects and the drooping colours of the grand old regiment, Roland's eyes would wander again and again to settle on the cabinet of Scindia, and he would marvel what it contained—if indeed it contained any secret whatever!

With a fond, proud and yet sad smile he looked at the portrait of more than one fair ancestress, and thought,

"The girl I left behind me is fairer than them all!"

For in Montreal he had left Aurelia Darnel de St. Eustache, whom we shall meet in time. A kind of half-flirtation—something even more tender and taking had subsisted between them, and but for his sudden summons home, it would have assumed greater proportions and had a firmer basis; he would have explained to her the nature and extent of his love for her, and obtained some pledge or promise from her, with the consent of her mother, for father she had none now; and when Elspat Gorm spoke apprehensively of the 5th of August, as being "the fatal day of the Ruthvens," he would think, with a smile,

"I hope not, as it was on the evening of that day, I first met Aurelia at our ball in Montreal! Would that I could tell the poor old man who is passing away, of my love, and gain his permission to address her; for she must know of my love for her and will await my return; but I would that he could see her, even as I in memory see her now!"

And before him came a mental vision of a very beautiful girl, whose dark hair and long black lashes contrasted with the pale delicacy of her skin, her pencilled eyebrows rather straight than arched, a calm loveliness in her face when, in repose, but a brightness over it all, when she was animated, when her soft eyes lighted up and her lips became tremulous.

"Aurelia!" he whispered to himself, and marvelled if the time would ever come, when he would bring her hither to be the queen of his life, and of beautiful Ardgowrie.

Day by day, his father was sinking, and all the powers of medicine could do nothing for him; his ailment was not old age but a passing away of the powers of life. The old Highland housekeeper, Elspat, had much contempt for the nostrums of the doctor, and believing her master to be under the spell of a gipsy-woman whom he had sent to prison for theft, maintained that he would never be cured, until the parings of his finger nails and a lock of his hair were buried in the earth with a live cock, a remnant of ancient Paganrie, which the reign of Victoria still finds prevailing in some parts of the Highlands.

So, as she fully expected, the morning of the 5th of August, saw the old Laird expire peacefully, after playing fatuously with the coverlet, and muttering that he could "hear the drums of the Royal beating the old Scots March," and the lamenting wail of Macaulay's pipe was heard on the terrace without, as Roland closed his father's eyes, and, crushed with natural grief, knelt by the side of his bed, and Elspat placed a plate containing a little salt on his breast.

In due time, amid the lamentations of his tenantry, and while the pipes woke the echoes of the glen, by the March of Gilliechriost (or of the Follower of Christ), one of the oldest airs in existence, he was laid in his last home, in the Ruthven aisle of Ardgowrie kirk, and Roland found himself alone in the world.