_ CHAPTER LXIV. THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER
When Malcolm and Joseph set out from Duff Harbour to find the laird, they could hardly be said to have gone in search of him: all in their power was to seek the parts where he was occasionally seen in the hope of chancing upon him; and they wandered in vain about the woods of Fife House all that week, returning disconsolate every evening to the little inn on the banks of the Wan Water. Sunday came and went without yielding a trace of him; and, almost in despair, they resolved, if unsuccessful the next day, to get assistance and organize a search for him. Monday passed like the days that had preceded it, and they were returning dejectedly down the left bank of the Wan Water, in the gloamin', and nearing a part where it is hemmed in by precipitous rocks, and is very narrow and deep, crawling slow and black under the lofty arch of an ancient bridge that spans it at one leap, when suddenly they caught sight of a head peering over the parapet. They dared not run for fear of terrifying him, if it should be the laird, and hurried quietly to the spot. But when they reached the end of the bridge its round back was bare from end to end. On the other side of the river, the trees came close up, and pursuit was hopeless in the gathering darkness.
"Laird, laird! they've taen awa' Phemy, an' we dinna ken whaur to luik for her," cried the poor father aloud.
Almost the same instant, and as if he had issued from the ground, the laird stood before them. The men started back with astonishment --soon changed into pity, for there was light enough to see how miserable the poor fellow looked. Neither exposure nor privation had thus wrought upon him: he was simply dying of fear. Having greeted Joseph with embarrassment, he kept glancing doubtfully at Malcolm, as if ready to run on his least movement. In a few words Joseph explained their quest, with trembling voice and tears that would not be denied enforcing the tale. Ere he had done, the laird's jaw had fallen, and further speech was impossible to him. But by gestures sad and plain enough, he indicated that he knew nothing of her, and had supposed her safe at home with her parents. In vain they tried to persuade him to go back with them, promising every protection: for sole answer he shook his head mournfully.
There came a sudden gust of wind among the branches. Joseph, little used to trees and their ways with the wind, turned towards the sound, and Malcolm unconsciously followed his movement. When they turned again, the laird had vanished, and they took their way homeward in sadness.
What passed next with the laird, can be but conjectured. It came to be well enough known afterwards where he had been hiding; and had it not been dusk as they came down the riverbank, the two men might, looking up to the bridge from below, have had it suggested to them. For in the half spandrel wall between the first arch and the bank, they might have spied a small window, looking down on the sullen, silent gloom, foam flecked with past commotion, that crept languidly away from beneath. It belonged to a little vaulted chamber in the bridge, devised by some banished lord as a kind of summer house--long neglected, but having in it yet a mouldering table, a broken chair or two, and a rough bench. A little path led steep from the end of the parapet down to its hidden door. It was now used only by the gamekeepers for traps and fishing gear, and odds and ends of things, and was generally supposed to be locked up. The laird had, however, found it open, and his refuge in it had been connived at by one of the men, who, as they heard afterwards, had given him the key, and assisted him in carrying out a plan he had devised for barricading the door. It was from this place he had so suddenly risen at the call of Blue Peter, and to it he had as suddenly withdrawn again--to pass in silence and loneliness through his last purgatorial pain.*
* [Com'io fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro
Gittato mi sarci per rinfrescarmi,
Tant' era ivi lo 'ncendio senza metro.
Del Purgatoria, xxvii. 49.]
Mrs Stewart was sitting in her drawing room alone: she seldom had visitors at Kirkbyres--not that she liked being alone, or indeed being there at all, for she would have lived on the Continent, but that her son's trustees, partly to indulge their own aversion to her, taking upon them a larger discretionary power than rightly belonged to them, kept her too straitened, which no doubt in the recoil had its share in poor Stephen's misery. It was only after scraping for a whole year that she could escape to Paris or Hamburg, where she was at home. There her sojourn was determined by her good or ill fortune at faro.
What she meditated over her knitting by the firelight,--she had put out her candles,--it would be hard to say, perhaps unwholesome to think:--there are souls to look into which is, to our dim eyes, like gazing down from the verge of one of the Swedenborgian pits.
But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of evil beasts: they know not what they do--an excuse which, except in regard of the past, no man can make for himself, seeing the very making of it must testify its falsehood.
She looked up, gave a cry, and started to her feet: Stephen stood before her, halfway between her and the door. Revealed in a flicker of flame from the fire, he vanished in the following shade, and for a moment she stood in doubt of her seeing sense. But when the coal flashed again, there was her son, regarding her out of great eyes that looked as if they had seen death. A ghastly air hung about him as if he had just come back from Hades, but in his silent bearing there was a sanity, even dignity, which strangely impressed her. He came forward a pace or two, stopped, and said--
"Dinna be frichtit, mem. I 'm come. Sen' the lassie hame, an' du wi' me as ye like. I canna haud aff o' me. But I think I 'm deein', an ye needna misguide me."
His voice, although it trembled a little, was clear and unimpeded, and though weak, in its modulation manly.
Something in the woman's heart responded. Was it motherhood-- or the deeper godhead? Was it pity for the dignity housed in the crumbling clay, or repentance for the son of her womb? Or was it that sickness gave hope, and she could afford to be kind?
"I don't know what you mean, Stephen," she said, more gently than he had ever heard her speak.
Was it an agony of mind or of body, or was it but a flickering of the shadows upon his face? A moment, and he gave a half choked shriek, and fell on the floor. His mother turned from him with disgust, and rang the bell.
"Send Tom here," she said.
An elderly, hard featured man came.
"Stephen is in one of his fits," she said.
The man looked about him: he could see no one in the room but his mistress.
"There he is," she continued, pointing to the floor. "Take him away. Get him up to the loft and lay him in the hay."
The man lifted his master like an unwieldy log, and carried him convulsed from the room.
Stephen's mother sat down again by the fire, and resumed her knitting. _