Chapter XV: Evil Tidings

'I'm glad to see you back, Miss Cheyne,' said Archie, as she met him in the passage or entrance-hall; 'Sir Ranald has missed you sairly.'

'Missed me? I left him asleep, Archie,' exclaimed Alison.

'Something wakened him wi' a start, just as ye gaed into the garden.'

'Something--what?'

'A sound, I watna what,' replied Archie, unwillingly, smoothing his silver hair with his hand, and looking round him stealthily.

'What sound? I heard nothing in the garden.'

'Weel, something like the baying o' a hound.'

'A _hound_!' said Alison, faintly.

'I dinna quite say sae; but say naething to Sir Ranald aboot it. Gang to him at aince; he's got some unco news, I fear, by the evening post.'

Walking like an automaton, though very pale, and tremulous in heart and limb, Alison entered the dining-room, where she found her father walking up and down its entire length, with a letter crushed and crumpled in his thin white hand, which was nervously clenched upon it. His face was very pale; his lips were twitching, and drops of perspiration stood upon his brow.

'Papa!' exclaimed Alison, winding her soft arms round him; 'what is the matter with you?'

'It has come at last, child.'

'What has come?'

'The long-impending and utter ruin, unless--unless----'

'What?'

'You will save me; end my sorrows, and your own, by accepting Cadbury. You can lift from my heart and our family the shadow that has darkened them so long--the cold shadow of grinding poverty.'

Her lips became white and parched--so parched that she had to moisten them with her tongue, and even then she could not speak for a time. Bevil Goring's kisses were fresh upon them, and now she had to listen to a death sentence like this!

Her first dread had been a reference to her absence at such a time, but, by the business in question, it was evident her ramble in the dusk was forgotten, or a very subordinate matter indeed.

'A man named Slagg has written me,' said Sir Ranald, in a low and faint voice, while leaning with one hand on the table and the other pressed on the region of the heart, 'written me to the effect that all my recent and too often renewed acceptances and promissory notes have come--how, I know not--into his possession, and that if I do not liquidate them forthwith everything we have--even to the chairs we sit on--will be seized, and myself too probably arrested, while you, Alison--you, my loved Ailie,' he continued, with sudden pathos in his voice--'will have neither house nor home!'

He was a proud man, Sir Ranald Cheyne, and apart from the selfishness peculiar to many of his class--especially in Scotland--an honourable man. Thus it is but fair to infer that had he known or been aware in the least degree of the game Lord Cadbury was playing, and that the letter of Solomon Slagg was his trump card, he would rather have faced ruin and beggary than urged this odious marriage on his daughter.

The latter clasped her hands in silence and looked and felt like a hunted creature. Prior to this she had often thought over the means of escape, of working for her bread--a mode of work of which she had very vague ideas indeed--but now she felt stunned and stupefied.

After all--after the dawn and noon of the sweet day that had stolen upon her--could she do nothing, if she was to serve her father, but to marry this vulgar lord?

'I have refused Lord Cadbury's written proposal, papa,' said she, in a voice so low that it sounded like a whisper.

'He will renew it, and it is a brilliant offer, Alison. He will be kind to you--so kind, Alison--and you--you will not be so mad as to refuse him now. Think of his proffered settlements and of what we--what I owe him.'

'Think of every one, of all--all but myself and my future!' said Alison, with her slender fingers interlaced above her head and her eyes cast despairingly upward.

'She is yielding,' thought Sir Ranald; 'but I see how it is--this fellow Goring is in our way.'

Then he put his arm round her caressingly and said,

'The sooner you become sensible, Alison, and forget your foolish--your most unwise fancy for that young fellow at Aldershot, the better for yourself and for--me.'

He never forgot _himself_ with all his love for his daughter.

'But, papa,' she said, with pallid lips, 'I love--Bevil.'

'It has come to this--an engagement?'

'Yes, papa, I cannot deceive you.'

'An engagement--a secret one--without my knowledge; how dared you?'

'I promised to wait for a year--he asked me only a year--and he loves me so much!'

'No doubt,' snarled Sir Ranald, through his set teeth. 'People cannot live on love, however, and your friend "Bevil," as you call him, cannot pay my debts.'

'Oh, would that he could do so!'

'Till recently you have always been accustomed to luxury and ease. These Cadbury lays at your feet, offering you--who by position and education are unfit to be a poor man's wife--absolute splendour.'

'But Bevil is not so poor as you think, and, moreover, may be richer in time,' urged Alison, piteously; 'he has prospects, expectations----'

'Of course--what sharper is without them?--and for the realization of these visions you would be waiting to the sacrifice of your youth, your beauty, and your poor old father's few remaining years.'

She wrung her white hands. She had often thought before of the tradesmen's unpaid bills--of her dresses made to do duty for a second season she had never thought at all; but now the letter of Slagg had filled her with vague and undefinable terror.

She could not, poor girl, understand the tenor of it altogether, but she knew it meant ruin, for she could read that in her father's anxious face; yet why should fate compel her to marry Lord Cadbury?--she could work--work or die!

'Loving Bevil as I do, papa, it would be very base of me to accept Lord Cadbury without even an atom of respect or gratitude,' said she, gathering courage from her very despair, while her eyes streamed with tears.

'I do not see that love has much to do with marriage, but know that money has a great deal,' said her father, smoothing out the letter of Solomon Slagg for re-perusal. 'Love is a luxury the poor can't afford, and it is better to marry on a little of it, and find that little increase by residence together and force of habit, than marry on much, and find that much dwindling away into mutual toleration and cold indifference.'

Sir Ranald had not an atom of sympathy with or toleration for this love fancy, so he deemed it, of his daughter. His own lover-days and his marriage seemed to have come to pass so long ago as to have belonged to some state of pre-existence. He could scarcely realise them now; yet he knew they must have been; Burke and Debrett told him so; and Alison was there as a living proof of both; but his love--if love it was--had been a well-ordered arrangement with a lady of good position and ample means, not with an obscure nobody.

'Papa,' said Alison, after a silence that had been broken only by her sighs and his own, 'when urging me to do what you wish, have you no thought of the long line of the Cheynes of Essilmont, who lived there for so many centuries--who so often lost their lives in battle, but never honour, who never stained their name by any base or ignoble transaction, who lived and died so spotlessly?'

This little outburst was something precisely after his own heart; he patted Alison's head of rich brown hair, and said, with a kindling in his eyes,

'It is precisely because I do think of them that I wish to see you wealthy and ennobled, raised out of this now sordid life of ours.'

'Ennobled by wedding the son of Timothy Titcomb, of Threadneedle Street!'

'If you will not save me by doing so, we have nothing left for it now but a disgraceful flight.'

'Flight?'

'Yes; I must quit this place ere I am arrested.'

'For where?'

'God alone knows.'

Alison interlaced her fingers again in mute misery.

'You look worn and weary, Alison,' said Sir Ranald, observing the pinched expression of her little white face.

'I am both, indeed!'

'Then go to bed, child; think over all I have urged, think of what is before us, think well, and give me a final answer in the morning.'

She kissed him with lips that were cold and quivering, and retired to her room, while he threw open his bureau, drew the lamp towards him, spread a sheet of paper with a vague idea that he was about to make some monetary calculations, and mechanically dipped a pen in the ink-bottle.

Then he threw it down, and, resting his aching head upon his delicate and wrinkled hands, sank into a kind of stupor of thought.

From this he was roused by a hand being laid gently on his shoulder, and by the voice of old Archie Auchindoir saying, while he shook his white head,

'Puir Sir Ranald--oh! my dear maister; eild and poortith are sair burdens for ae back.'

'What do you want, Archie?' he asked, peevishly.

'Sir Ranald, sir, I've a sma' matter o' three hunder pound and mair saved up in your service, and at your service it is now, every bodle o'd--tak' it and welcome; it may help ye at this pinch--tak' it, for God's sake, if it will tak' the tears frae Miss Alison's een.'

'Poor Archie, I thank you,' said Sir Ranald, shaking the hand of this faithful old man, whose eyes were inflamed with the tears he was, perhaps, too aged to shed; 'it is very generous of you, this offer, but is--pardon me saying so--simply absurd!'

Again and again Archie pressed the little man in vain upon the acceptance of his master, till the pride of the latter turned his gratitude into something of his usual hauteur, on which Archie withdrew sorrowfully, muttering under his breath,

'Troth, he's weel boden there ben, that will neither borrow nor lend.'

Meaning that Sir Ranald must surely be well enough off, if he could afford to dispense with all assistance.

With her gorgeous brown hair unrolled and floating over her shoulders, Alison, with her hands lying listlessly in her lap, sat lost in her own terrible thoughts, with her tear-inflamed eyes gazing into her bed-room fire, which had just attained that clear, red light, without flickering flame, in which one may fancy strange scenes without end--deep valleys, caverns, rocks, castles perched on cliffs, faces, and profiles; and therein had she seen, more than once, Essilmont with its Scoto-French turrets with their conical roofs and vanes, its crow-stepped gables and massive chimneys, that she now might never see in reality again!

A victim on the double altar of gold and filial piety.

How often had she read in novels and romances, and how often had she seen on the stage, the story of a heroine--a wretched girl placed in precisely the cruel predicament in which she now found herself, and deemed that such dramatic and doleful situations could only exist in the fancies of the author or of the playwright!

Without, the cold and wintry wind had torn away the last leaves from every tree long since; the last flowers were also long dead; the chill night rain pattered, with sleet and hail, upon the windows; and, like the heart of Alison, all nature seemed desolate and sad.

She shuddered when she heard the moaning of the wind, and thought of the Spectre Hound.

Could it be that she had indeed seen it?