Читать книгу The Royal Regiment, and Other Novelettes - James Grant - Страница 6

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Yes, Roland felt himself, most terribly alone now—far from the merry mess and the daily companionship of his brother officers, in that great old mansion, wherein for centuries generations of his ancestors were born and had died, and which stood amid such wild and desolate, yet beautiful scenery.

Expected though his father's death had been, by Roland, the shock of the event when it did occur, was so great, that it was not until two days after the funeral, and when his legal agents and advisers, Messrs. Hook and Crook, writers to Her Majesty's Signet, came to consult him on certain matters concerning the estate, that he bethought him of the old cabinet found by the Royals in Scindia's fortress, and he sprang up with a start to execute the last commands of his father the old Colonel.

In the latter's desk he found the key—one of very curious workmanship, and as he put it into the lock a singular sense of some great and impending evil—a sense which had never impressed itself upon him so vividly before—came over him, and seemed to whisper to him to be prepared!

Prepared for what?

He had seen the old cabinet years ago; it was about four feet square, formed of ebony inlaid with the finest ivory and mother-of-pearl with many elaborate ornaments, and even some precious stones, and it had been a gift from old Patrick Ruthven to his bride.

With vivid painfulness too, there came before Roland, the last expression of his father's face, and more than all, his eyes with their restless feverish expression, and strangely lustrous glare.

The doors of the beautiful cabinet unfolded and displayed two rows of drawers, the handles of which were chased silver, and with nervous haste, Roland opened these in quick succession.

Therein he found old muster-rolls, reports and memoranda connected with the First Royal Scots; letters and orders from brother-officers who had found their graves in every quarter of the globe; complimentary addresses from generals and magistrates, and all his father's medals and orders. There too were letters from his mother in their lover-days, faded and brown; letters of the lost uncle Philip, and letters from Roland himself, even those he had written as a schoolboy, with the now withered and dry locks of hair belonging to those who had been loved and had long since departed.

All the little relics and souvenirs that the poor old man had treasured most in life were there; but what could the secret be, that he had so strangely and with such evident emotion and pain referred to, thought Roland, as in nervous haste and sorrow he drew out each tiny drawer in succession—sorrow, for the hands that had touched and the eyes that had seen them last were cold and still now in yonder dark old vault.

At last he found a packet carefully sealed with his father's crest, a goat's-head embossed; but directed to no one.

He tore it open, and found within the cover, a legal document tied with red tape, and a page or two written by the hand of his father, and bearing the latter's signature.

Both these papers Roland read quickly, but he had to do so again and again ere his startled mind could take in their contents.

The first was the last will and testament of his grandfather General Roland Ruthven, and the latter was a confession written by his father concerning it.

"My God—oh that this could ever be the case!" exclaimed Roland in a broken and hollow voice, as he read them. Philip, the elder brother, had in some mysterious manner incurred the high displeasure of the general, who bequeathed his entire estate and fortune to Patrick, the younger; but, repenting, had executed a second will superseding the first; and this will, Roland's father had found and suppressed, while, with a curse upon their father's name and memory, Philip believing himself to be disinherited, went forth into the world and was heard of no more!

Philip who had never loved him, continued the old man's tremulously written confession, was gone he knew not where, beyond all trace, so that rumour even said he was dead; and to denounce himself then as the possessor of the second will, was to cut away the ground from under his own feet, when on the very eve of marriage with a girl, whose family would not permit her to marry a penniless younger son—so he had deemed himself thus not intentionally guilty, and that no one's interests suffered by his silence.

If he had followed the dictates of the highest principles, he would at once have made the document known; but where was Philip? As time went on Patrick Ruthven became conscience-struck, and he now charged Roland with the task of making some amends if possible, by discovering the lost man or his heirs, if lie had any.

A bitter bequest indeed!

With a painfully throbbing heart, and hands that trembled, Roland laid the documents down and strove to collect his thoughts. The first dull and stunning emotion, of confusion and unreality past, he looked dreamily around him to see if he was not undergoing a species of nightmare; but no! There was the stately old dining-hall, the spacious Scottish fireplace with its silver fire-dogs, and here were the ebony cabinet of Scindia, with the suppressed will, and the signed confession of his father.

It was a terrible shock to Roland Ruthven to find that his father—his father of all men in the world!—whom through all the years of his life he had looked up to with love and reverence, and who seemed ever to him and to all who knew him, the model of chivalrous honour, should have acted thus, and he actually wept over the event!

Again and again he read the confession that on one hand Philip had never loved him, had exasperated the general; and on the other, there was the chance—nay, the certainty—of a marriage being marred by the production of the will which was now dated nearly forty years back.

"Justice must be done, at all risks and hazards—but justice to whom?" thought Roland.

Ardgowrie seemed no longer his; as if touched by an enchanter's wand, it seemed already to have passed away, wood, wold, and mountain, by this cruel discovery. He felt homeless in a splendid home, his worldly prospects ruined, and Aurelia Darnel, the only girl he had ever loved, utterly lost to him!

Why not destroy the will?

But no—oh no! Roland felt his cheek crimson, as something seemed to whisper of this in his ear, and then he recalled his dead father's remorseful injunctions to himself.

He looked up at the portrait of the lost and disinherited Philip—the outcast son of a patrician race, as limned by the President of the Scottish Academy.

It represented a handsome young man, in a red hunting coat and cap, with regular but rather pale features, dark blue eyes and well defined eyebrows, with a pleasant smile that actually, to Roland's then distempered fancy, seemed to light up, as he looked on the portrait.

Roland wiped the beady perspiration from his brow, and a moan as if of pain escaped him, but again and again he muttered—

"Justice shall be done—justice if it be not too late—oh Heaven—too late!"

He stepped to the sideboard, filled a silver hunting cup with sherry, drained it at a draught, and taking up the two fatal documents, locked the Indian cabinet, and prepared to join Messrs. Hook and Crook, who were busy with certain accounts and papers in the library.

Of lawyers, Roland, as a soldier, had ever a wholesome dread, and he shrank from the horror of disclosing this trickery on the part of his father even to them, whose lives were too probably but one long and tangled yarn of trickery and deceit; but again, he muttered that justice must be done.

His assumed coolness deserted him, his face became livid, and his eyes sparkled with a strange light, when he spoke to them of the papers he had found, and laid them before their legal eyes.

Then his proud pale face flushed scarlet, his dark eyebrows were knitted nearly into one, and his nether lip quivered with suppressed emotion and intense mortification, and in some degree the lawyers were also excited, but amazement was what they chiefly felt.

"What did Mr. Ruthven intend to do?"

"Justice," said he hoarsely.

"But to whom?"

"That is precisely what I have been asking of myself."

"This will revoking the former disposition, is fully forty years old; but it has never been recorded," said Mr. Hook.

"And none know of its existence, save ourselves," added Mr. Crook suggestively; "and it is a dreadful thing to lose so fine an estate—so noble a heritage—by one stroke of a pen!"

"But I quite agree with the young Laird, that some attempt should be made to do justice, and endeavour to trace out Mr. Philip or his heirs," said Mr. Hook, seeing in futurity a pyramid of three-and-fourpences and six-and-eightpences.

"To advertise for the lost one would degrade my father's name!" exclaimed Roland passionately.

"How else are we to go about it, my dear sir?" asked Mr. Hook, pulling his nether lip reflectively; "but enquiries might be made——"

"Where?"

"Well—a rumour did go about at one time that your uncle had married in Jamaica, Mexico, or somewhere."

"I never heard of it."

Neither had Mr. Hook, but he only threw out the hint to suggest difficulty and complication, and in his simplicity Roland rapidly adopted it.

"Prosecute enquiries in both places," said he; "spare no money—collect and pay in the rents as usual—though not a penny of them shall come to me! You understand me, gentlemen?"

They could better have understood his quietly putting alike the will and confession into the fire.

Why had not his father done so, and spared Roland this season of shame and humiliation, of disappointment and sudden poverty?

But his plans were adopted with decision and rapidity.

"All the old servants will be retained as usual, gentlemen," said he, after a painful pause, during which a swelling seemed to have risen in his throat, "but no new ones will be engaged, and the whole revenue of the estate shall be paid into the bank for the benefit of the real heir, or of his children, if they can be found. I leave all in your hands."

"But you must have some little income out of the estate!" said the astounded lawyers simultaneously.

"Not a penny until I am proved to be indubitably the last and only Ruthven of Ardgowrie and that ilk!" exclaimed Roland with emotion.

"My dear sir, you can't live on your pay," suggested Mr. Hook.

"I will try."

"No one does now-a-days. Nor will you be able to marry."

"I do not mean to marry," said Roland, whose voice fairly broke as he thought of Aurelia Darnel; "but perhaps you may help me with a few pounds till I get exchanged into a regiment in India, for meantime I must rejoin the Royals."

By this discovery in the Indian cabinet, Roland now learned bitterly why the old legend above the mantel-piece had become obnoxious to his father's eye, and been obliterated by his order!

He looked at his family motto—the strongly apposite and ancient motto of the Ruthvens—Facta Probant, and muttered—

"That of Argyle would suit me better now!"

He felt that under pressure of the sudden change in his circumstances, that to avoid surmises and explanations which it would be impossible to make, his wisest mode of action would be to effect an exchange into some other regiment where he was unknown; but his own honour at that time of expected peril required that he should rejoin the Scots Royals, and he could not yet bring his heart to quit them, for the corps had been the home of his family for many generations, quite as much as their ancestral abode of Ardgowrie.

Moreover, he was well up the list of lieutenants now. He could recall the emotions with which he first joined them in all the freshness of boyhood, and felt, as a writer says, how "the first burst of life is a glorious thing; youth, health, hope and confidence, and all the vigour they lose in after years: life is then like a splendid river, and we are swimming with the stream—no adverse waves to weary, no billows to buffet us, we hold on our course rejoicing."

But all pride of birth, of race, and name had gone completely out of Roland Ruthven for the time.

Cards of condolence poured in upon him from the county people, but he returned none; neither did he pay any visits; he felt himself a species of usurper.

"A morose fellow he has become," some said; "just like his father in his latter years—moping and melancholy."

A letter from his friend Hector Logan roused him a little, and made him think of returning at once to the regiment. It was full of the mess gossip and barrack news generally, and about a ball "where la belle Aurelia had appeared with a new and very remarkable admirer, a Colonel Ithuriel Smash, of the United States army. If the row with the colonists comes off," continued Logan, "some of us may lose our chance of picking up a handsome heiress—for heiresses here are to be had for the asking, some think; I don't. But a girl like Aurelia Darnel, with a stray forty thousand pounds, and having also the frankness and good taste to accept a nice fellow with whom to spend it, is just the kind of girl for my complexion. Logan Braes and that ilk, sound very well; but my pedigree is a powersight longer than my rent-roll."

The letter concluded by urging him to rejoin, as an outbreak among the colonists was daily expected.

Apart from Aurelia Darnel, concerning whom a change had come over his future now, he felt in every way the necessity for action, and for returning to America, and he felt, too, as if he would go mad, if he lingered longer in Ardgowrie.

Aurelia! could he go back to the charm of her society again, with that horrible secret in his mind—the secret the cabinet had contained, and which made him a penniless man! Yet, his thoughts would wander again and again to the girl he had left beyond the broad Atlantic, and doubts rather than hopes, fear rather than joy, crowded upon him, all born of recent events.

Perhaps absence might already have erased all memory of him, and he was forgotten; and who was this new dangler—"admirer," Logan called him, with the atrociously grotesque name? He had left her, without any declaration of his love, and dared he make one now? Left her, at that period, when, as Lever says, "love has as many stages as a fever; when the feeling of devotion, growing every moment stronger, is chequered by a doubt lest the object of your affections should really be indifferent to you—thus suggesting all the torturing agonies of jealousy to your distracted mind. At such times as these a man can scarcely be very agreeable to the girl he loves; but he is a confounded bore to a chance acquaintance."

Aurelia Darnel was one of the wealthiest girls in Montreal. Could he speak to her of love now? No—no! It was not to be thought of, and in going back, he would avoid her, and devoutly hoped that the expected "row" would come off, and the Royal Scots would have to take the field.

The two last days of his residence at Ardgowrie he spent in solitude beside the Linn of Dee. There was something soothing to his soul in the wild turmoil of the rushing torrent, from whence, the body of any living thing that finds its way into it, can never be recovered.

What a change had come over Roland Ruthven, since last, in boyhood, and just before he joined the Royals, he had gazed into those black and surgy depths which fascinate the eye and render the brain giddy, where the dead white of the foam contrasts so strongly with the sombre tints of the turbulent cauldron, and the still blacker uncertainties of the caverns beneath the rocks, as the Dee, there terrible, yet beautiful thunders over the Linn on its passage to the German Ocean.

Roland felt keenly the change that had come over him, since last he heard the familiar roar of his native stream; a new life, with the regiment had been opened to him; but a blight had fallen upon it now. Out of many a passing flirtation, his love for Aurelia stood prominently forth on one hand; on the other was his father's sore temptation (he could scarcely give it a harder name); yonder grand old house, with all its turrets amid the stately woods, no longer his; his future wasted, his love denied him, and his inheritance lost!

It was a conviction hard to adopt and bear, yet Roland adopted and bore it bravely, and turning his back, as he certainly believed, for ever on Ardgowrie, departed to rejoin his regiment.