Chapter XII: A Revelation to Holcroft

The sudden, unexpected, and unexplained departure of Allan Graham from Dundargue (a reason for which will be given in due time), if it puzzled his family, still more puzzled and piqued Olive, especially after what passed between them on their homeward ride. But then, says Lefanu,--'Women are so enigmatical; some in everything--all in matters of the heart.'

The monetary matters of Mr. Hawke Holcroft were approaching a species of crisis now, and he was daily getting orange-coloured missives and messages 'wired' in mysterious terms from jockeys, bookmakers, and other horsey folks that added to his tribulation, for things seemed to be going wrong with him, and he felt that now or never must he attempt to secure the heiress, who, he thought, was only waiting to be carried off.

Even loo and écarté in the evening with such pigeon-like players as Sir Paget were beginning to fail as resources.

'Odd fellow in his way,' remarked the baronet to Cameron. 'A trifle too lucky at cards for my taste.'

'Or mine,' said Cameron, grimly.

'Turns up the king too often after the early hours of the morning.'

Yet when night came again and the small hours of the morning, the somewhat simple M.P. for Slough-cum-Sloggit was again a heavy loser to Holcroft.

'He has some secret about him,' said the former.

'Most men have some secret which they generally keep to themselves,' replied Cameron.

'Secrets certainly, which they seldom tell to their wives or sweethearts,' said the baronet, laughing.

We have said that Olive had a secret thought that might prove somewhat fatal to Allan's success with her, a mistaken idea that Holcroft loved her--loved her for herself--and despite the tenor of her father's will; while Allan might love her because he knew the value of its tenor to himself.

And, now that the latter was so unaccountably absent, Holcroft was full of confidence, and, the ice having once been broken, thought it would be easy to go back to where he had left off on the ride home from Dunsinane.

In his own selfish way he loved her; but then she was beautiful. Loved her! 'Oh, poverty of language, that we must so often use the word love!' exclaims a writer.

It was some days before his inevitable departure from Dundargue (and not an hour too soon for that), when he and Olive were somewhat earlier, and before anyone else, in the breakfast-room, and the notes of Ronald Gair's pipes, playing his morning reveille, 'The Black Watch,' a slow and wailing air, were dying away on the terrace outside.

Holcroft's face looked worn and haggard--more freckled, and the eyes more than usually shifty in their expression. He had received some letters and telegrams the evening before that upset him so much that he failed even to win at loo or écarté, and the live-long night he had been heard by Cameron pacing to and fro, as if unable to rest.

Olive was struck by his pallid appearance.

They exchanged 'Good-mornings,' and then a few minutes' silence ensued.

'We may have rain soon.' was the not very original remark of Holcroft.

'The sky looks very like it. Rain always comes when the mist is where we see it now, on yonder low spur of the Sidlaw Hills,' replied Olive.

She was kneeling on a bearskin, beside the great staghounds, Shiuloch and Bran, with her little white hands outspread before the fire for warmth; and a charming picture she made, in her morning costume, fresh and lovely as a fairy, with the dogs in the foreground, and the great carved stone arch of the baronial chimney-piece for a frame.

Hawke Holcroft turned from the window and came to her side, though curiously enough the hazel eyes of the hounds glistened, and they showed their teeth at him, suggestive of kicks secretly administered.

'We are down earlier than usual this morning,' said she.

'All the better.'

'Why?'

'I want so particularly to talk to you,' said he, with all the softness he could assume.

'And I with you,' said Olive, with a frankness that was a curious mistake. 'You leave us soon, I believe?'

'Yes.'

'For London?'

'For London,' he replied, mechanically, as it were.

'I thought you came to stay out the grouse-shooting?'

'Till the tenth of December! I have not been asked,' he replied, gnawing his yellow moustache; and then, after a pause, added, 'would _you_ wish that I stayed?'

'Certainly, if you are enjoying yourself,' was the girl's frank but--after what he had urged some time ago--rather rash response.

His eyes sparkled--he drew nearer.

'Miss Raymond--Olive!' he exclaimed, but paused, as, at that moment, Lady Aberfeldie swept into the room; 'on the terrace--the terrace after breakfast,' he whispered, hurriedly, and then turned to receive his hostess's morning greeting, which was so frigid that he feared she had overheard him call her niece by her Christian name.

Holcroft was rather abstracted at breakfast; thus Ruby Logan, who had been watching him, said,

'I would not, if I were you, put more sugar on the devilled turkey; it won't improve it.'

'Forgot it was not salt; thanks, Miss Logan,' stammered Holcroft.

Now, whether the charming Olive was inspired by coquetry, curiosity, caprice, or a strange desire to play with fire, we know not; but when breakfast was over she laid down a novel she had been reading, or affecting to read, at intervals during the meal, and, assuming her garden hat, with all the laces and ribbons of her bright morning dress fluttering about her, while everyone else at table was deep in his or her letters and papers, went forth upon--the terrace!

Now Mr. Hawke Holcroft never read novels or anything else unless for a purpose. He glanced at the page which Olive had left open (the work was 'Miss Forrester') and the passage struck him as most _apropos_ to himself:

'I never pretended to goodness. I have certain views for myself. I never pretended to fooling. I am clever. What stands between me and my ambition I will remove; of whatever can administer to it I will avail myself. Beyond this, it seems to me, I am as good as other people.'

'Hawke, my boy, yourself to a hair!' thought he, as he quietly sought the terrace, not by the French window, as Olive had done, but by going through a corridor and the entrance hall.

As coolly as if she had no prevision of what he was sure to urge, Olive, who wore a waggish yet shy expression under her garden hat, and who kept her hands deep in the pockets of her morning dress, said,

'What have you to say to me here that you could not have said in the vicinity of the tea-urn?'

'All that I have to say may be said in three words.'

'Three! say it then.'

'I love you; a confession that has hovered on my timid lips many a time.'

'I cannot listen to this, and I wish to have back my bangle. If Allan were to see it--good heavens!'

'I have said that it shall be buried with me. Do give me some hope.'

'Of what; permission to retain the bangle?'

'No; that you may one day love me.'

'I cannot.'

'Say rather that you will not.'

Barring, in an angle of the terrace, her attempts to leave him, he continued, in an earnestness that was born of monetary pressure and desperate hope, to plead his passion.

'I am greatly honoured,' replied the girl, growing cold as he waxed warm, and glancing nervously at the windows of the mansion; 'but I am very sorry----'

'That you don't love me.'

'Yes.'

'But you may in time. Oh, how I could teach you to do so! Let me wait and strive, Olive. You deem me wild, perhaps--horsey, and all that sort of thing; but do you think a man never changes, never grows better, under a woman's softening influence? Are you entirely to let this family compact, whatever it may be, Olive--pardon me, Miss Raymond,' he added, as he saw how her face clouded by the reference to her position--'are you intending to let it stand between you and all other chances of marriage?'

'You have no right to question me thus, or to assume this interest in my affairs, Mr. Holcroft.'

'Pardon me, but I have a love for you that will last while life does.'

He did not add that it was the love of--her money.

'If there is only the Master, your cousin, between us, that is no barrier, as I know you don't love him.'

'Then you know more of me than I do of myself,' said Olive, provoked by his blunt brusquerie of manner, and failing to be flattered by his pertinacity just then.

'Perhaps you deem me an heiress?' said Olive, as a new light suddenly broke upon her.

'My dear Miss Raymond,' stammered Holcroft, colouring with surprise at the abruptness of her question. 'I never thought upon the subject; I only knew that--that--I am not just now a man of fortune; my place in Essex----' he paused, thinking the less he said about it the better. 'But who thinks of pelf when the heart is full of passion!' he added, magnanimously. 'But tell me now,' said he, in his most suave tone, 'do you care for anyone else more than for me?'

'I don't care for you at all--at least in the way you mean,' she replied, defiantly.

He ground his teeth, even while he smiled, and thought,

'I must have patience before I tempt my fate again!'

Hawke Holcroft had made it so much a habit during his sojourn at Dundargue to be in close attendance upon Olive--especially when they were alone together--that his lovemaking took her less by surprise. In a spirit of pique she had permitted him to dangle, and to play--if we may use the term--at admiration for herself; but, now that he had become serious a second time, she became alarmed.

The remark which had escaped her had excited some surprise in the mind of Holcroft, as it interested him deeply; thus he said, in a low soft voice,

'You referred to your not being an heiress, Miss Raymond, as if _that_ could possibly make any difference with one who loves you as--as----'

'There, there, that will do!' interrupted the impetuous Olive; 'I am _not_ an heiress, in one sense, but very much of a beggar, if you knew all,' she added, in a voice that faltered.

He regarded her with some bewilderment, as well he might, and said,

'My dear Miss Raymond, what am I to understand by this paradox?'

'Understand that I must marry my cousin Allan, or forfeit papa's fortune--it goes to him if I refuse, or to charities.'

Her distinctness and vehemence carried conviction with her words. Holcroft was confounded; but, being a practised dissembler, he only smiled, and said,

'A most remarkable arrangement, and a tyrannical one for you. But suppose the Master had died in his boyhood--or were to die now?'

'The will would be worthless in effect, of course, I suppose,' replied Olive, whose cheeks now burned scarlet, for--always a creature of hot impulse--she now thought, '_why_ should I have permitted my self to speak to _him_, one, almost a stranger, or to any man, of papa's will? What must he think of me! Oh, what will Aunt Aberfeldie say?'

For half a minute Holcroft was silent. He was thinking, 'this must be all bosh!--a cock and a bull, or a madman's will; she doesn't know what she is talking about--no woman or girl ever knows business. Well--I've a pull on her anyway; a viscount's niece isn't in a fellow's power every day, as she will find herself in mine.'

What he referred to we shall show ere long.

While Olive was still crimson with reflections on her own imprudence, Holcroft took possession of her passive hands, and said, in a partly assumed voice of agitation,

'You told me, Miss Raymond--let me say Olive--a minute or two ago that you did not care for me. I shall not take that as your final answer; and ere I leave Dundargue, when I again venture to speak to you on the subject nearest my heart, your reply----'

'Will too probably be the same,' replied Olive, wrenching away her hands, as steps were heard near, and she hastily re-entered the house.

The footsteps heard were those of Allan, who came leisurely up the flight, a broad and stately one, which led to the terrace. He had, while proceeding down the avenue, observed the pair together, and, as it seemed to him, in rather too close proximity. He also remarked Olive's abrupt departure, at _his_ approach as he supposed, and his soul become ireful within him; but he felt himself, as he gave a hand to Holcroft, compelled to dissemble.

So did the latter who met him smilingly.

'Welcome home to Dundargue,' he exclaimed; 'you have come back as unexpectedly as you went; but whither?'

'Only as far as Edinburgh.'

'Ah.' The reply seemed rather to relieve Holcroft. Nothing was known about him there, he thought.

'A lady was on the terrace with you just now?'

'Yes--Miss Raymond.'

'So I thought--sorry she did not stay.'

'Why--particularly?'

'I have some news that may interest her.'

'About whom?'

'Herself.'

'Hope they are pleasant?'

'That will depend upon how she may view them,' said Allan, with a nod, as he entered the house.

'Now, what the deuce has he been up to--this fellow, with his hair cut to the military pattern--Newgate crop, I should call it--he looks queer this morning,' muttered Holcroft, as he selected a cigar from his case, bit the end off with his sharp white teeth, and proceeded to smoke it with brief, angry, and unenjoyable puffs that indicated a mind full of bitterness and ill at ease. Olive's communication had been a sudden revelation to him.