Chapter XVII: For the House of Barnysdale

Up and down the empty corridors of an empty house Mrs. Keith walked, gaunt and old. Never in all her seventy years had it come home to her that Ardmore Castle was an eery house when the rain rained every day and the wind whined through the long nights, but she knew it now.

“Soft David” sat by the kitchen fire caring for nothing but his meals; in the maid’s room Sophy and Grizel were cheerful in a Scotch and sour way, but the housekeeper could take no rest. Something that she had never spoken of had shaken her nerve, for her old eyes grew fiercer every day as she went on those needless errands through the silent house.

Stratharden and his men had gone, after being interrupted in their useless search of Clyde waters by that telegram from Mr. Barrow, which for a second time snatched the bread from a needy man’s mouth.

Perhaps he was too busy in keeping a decent pleasure on his own face to notice other people’s; he did not see the sudden twitch of the housekeeper’s hard old mouth as she heard in silence that the usurpers of Ardmore were better employed than in tossing drowned and stark in the Clyde. It was queer that as the days ran on to weeks a restlessness grew on the old woman.

It took her day after day to watch for the post-boy, who never came. Her restlessness led her everywhere in the house but into the locked-up chapel, where no step but hers had been these twenty years gone. Perhaps she did not know herself what she expected, nor why she could not sleep at night for thinking of the dead, but when one day the big bell of the front door rang in the silence of twilight, the old blood leaped in her worn-out veins.

“Bide where ye are!” she cried fiercely to Sophy, and ran past her, a gaunt, ungainly figure in her clean cotton gown.

Her hand shook on the door-handle as she turned the key; but when the door stood wide it was steady as stone and colder.

It was Stratharden who waited on the step.

“Were you all asleep?” said he with that smile which was not smiling. “I’ve nearly rung the house down.” He could not see her face as he stepped into the cold, dark house, nor did he think of looking at it.

“Ye were not expected, Stratharden,” and if the words were apologetic the tone was not. “Yer bed’ll not be aired.”

“Oh, air it, then, and don’t talk!” said the man with a sudden irritation not usual to him; but the next instant his voice and manner were his own again and smooth as silk. “My dear woman I’m tired and anxious, that’s why I’m here. Get me some dinner like a good soul, and then I’ll talk to you. I assure you I’m worn out.”

“Ye’re looking well,” she dryly returned in the way he had known since childhood.

She walked before him and knelt with cracking joints to light the fire that was already laid in the dining-room. But the air of the deserted room struck chill to Lord Stratharden’s bones.

“I’ll come to your room till this is habitable,” he said urbanely. “I’m sure you keep yourself warmer than this.”

“At your pleasure,” was all she said, but he was used to her hard speech and had not expected better. Armed neutrality had reigned between the two for twenty years, except for that brief time when they had combined against a common foe.

“Hard old devil!” said Lord Stratharden to himself, as he sat down in her comfortable sitting-room. “She’d have let me freeze rather than offer it. But she is a very faithful, well-meaning woman.” He smiled to himself and said it over again as if it pleased him.

When she had finished serving his dinner--and if Dolly had been half-starved, Stratharden was scrupulously well fed--he stopped her as she put the decanter in front of him before leaving the room. The old woman was too well used to him to notice that he would have been a good-looking man, for all his forty-five years, if he could have learned to keep his crooked eyebrows quiet in an otherwise impassive face. One was lifted higher than the other now as he turned round in his chair to her.

“Have you heard from Lady Barnysdale?” he quietly asked.

“Not I.” She never moved a muscle. “Did ye expect me to?”

“No, I didn’t.” He looked at the port in his glass, tasted it, put it down again. “In fact, I should have been surprised if you had. But Lady Barnysdale--I may as well tell you--is not in Paris, never has been there. I am more troubled than I can say.”

Mrs. Keith sat down unbidden.

“I’m to close the house, then?” said she stolidly.

Stratharden looked round the half-warmed dining-room with a shrug.

“How do I know?” he responded. “You take your orders from Lady Barnysdale, not me.”

“A woman that ye said was crazy,” scornfully.

It never occurred to Stratharden to look for the root of the contemptuous fling.

“I suppose it isn’t in nature that you should like it,” he said kindly, “but till Lady Barnysdale does something mad, before all the world, you can’t call anyone else mistress here. No woman in her senses would have gone off to London without so much as letting us know she was safe, nor have seen fit to disappear ever since, by pretending to go to Paris. I don’t know what to do. For all I know it isn’t safe to leave the little boy in her care. I ought, in all prudence, to know at least where she is.”

Mrs. Keith sat in open, unalloyed indifference. Lady Barnysdale, with her furious rages, her flighty speech, which the old Scotch woman thought indecent and unintelligible, had borne out Stratharden’s warnings about her well enough; her attempt to escape from Ardmore in her best widow’s weeds on a wet day would have clinched them, had it been needed. Mad or sane, she cared not a jot about Lady Barnysdale, but for some reason she did not say so.

“Ye can find out,” said she coolly. He could not dream her gnarled hands were clasped hard under her apron as she waited for him to answer.

“Unfortunately I cannot personally!” and she saw the uncontrolled rage in his eyes. “I have to go away, out of England, on business.”

“I always said ye were a fool to traffic with the Jews,” she dryly remarked.

Her apt guess at the cold truth made him laugh, as another man would have sworn. There was not a man in England that night more embarrassed than Lord Stratharden.

“Let that be,” said he softly. “Some one has to find Lady Barnysdale, and I can’t do it.”

“What ails yer heathen?”

“Just that--he’s a heathen--and people look at him when he walks in the street. Look here, Keith--in common humanity that woman must be found and looked after. You remember how we had to watch her here.”

“What may be ye’re meaning, Stratharden?” said the old woman quietly.

“Just what I’ve said. Lady Barnysdale, to my knowledge and belief, is as irresponsible as a child. I have to go away, but I ought to know at least where Barnysdale’s son is--and I want you to go to London and find out.”

“There’s detectives.” Her eyes were dull under their thin lashes.

“And policemen on the street corners. I want neither. You’re faithful, if you do care more for the name than for me; you know London----”

A dull red burned to the woman’s cheek; she had reason to know London, but it was not Stratharden who should tell her so.

“Would ye have me knock at every door in the place and inquire if my Lady Barnysdale is within?” she wrathfully cried.

“Don’t, don’t treat me like a fool!” he answered smilingly.

“Oh, I’d put that past ye!” she said politely, but his eyebrows twitched.

“I want you to take a lodging opposite the bank she must go to for her money,” he said, with a sudden savage earnestness. “I’m certain she’s in London, in spite of that fool Barrow. And she’ll have to have money. If I know her sort, a hundred pounds won’t last her long. And now you can take it or leave it. I’ll pay your expenses and wages, besides what you’re getting, and all you’ll do for them will be to sit at your window in banking hours and wait till she goes in. Then you can take a cab, follow her home, and telegraph to me where she is. Then you can take the first train for home. For the honor of the name, that boy must be taken care of.”

“And supposing she does not go herself? How long will I be in London then? She’d a sister that I never laid eyes on but once,” she musingly remarked. “Maybe she’d go in and out before my eyes and I not know her--but that she’d dark hair.”

“Dark? You’re dreaming! Dull-red, that doesn’t grow on every bush. And tall--you’d know her.”

“Oh, ay! Tall? And dark-eyed?”

“I never saw her eyes.”

“You peeked through the windows hard enough,” she bluntly asserted.

“She had her back to me. Why the devil do you harp on her? If you won’t go, say so. I suppose Ah Lee can look through a window as well as you.”

Mrs. Keith took one glance at him.

“I’ll go,” she said. “He’ll perhaps not know London ‘as I do.’”

Ah, he did not know how the words had made an old and savage score against him leap to life.

Lord Stratharden leaned back in his chair as if he were suddenly tired. He had, in very truth, no one to send on his philanthropic errand but this old woman. Without James he could not hope to leave England, and leave he must; and he had no desire that Ah Lee, suavely and conspicuously exotic, should do what an elderly Scotch woman could do unnoticed.

“Thank you, Keith,” he said. “Here is your money.” And truly it was hard-earned and ill-spared.

“You have never failed the house, have you?” his voice light with relief.

The housekeeper stood up with a curious pride.

“I’ve never failed the house, my lord,” said she. “But I’ll take no wages for doing your work. I’m well paid. And where will I let ye know when I find the lady?”

He wrote on a card and gave it to her.

“And Buff Ogilvie, too?” she said dryly, when she read it.

“No, not Buff! And if you see him, the thing is no concern of his,” casually. “But you’d better take the money.”

“Ye’ll not be too throng of it there!” she returned, with a cool glance at the card.

Out in the hall she paused and spat upon the ground.

“I’ll take no blood-money for the work I’ll do for the house of Barnysdale,” she said, under her breath. “And I’ll do my work well.”