CHAPTER XII.

MAUDE.

Lunch ended, Roland was lingering rather gloomily over a glass of his father's old favourite Amontillado, which Simon Funnell had disinterred from the cobwebby bins of the cellar for his special delectation, when an exclamation made him start; a pair of soft arms were thrown around his neck, and a bright, fair face was pressed against his cheek.

'Maude!'

'Roland—Roland—you here! oh, such an unexpected joy!' exclaimed his sister, a merry and impulsive girl, who had just returned from riding, in bearing so smart, handsome, and perfect in her hat and habit, as she tossed aside her whip and gauntlets and embraced him again and again, so effusively and affectionately that he felt an emotion of welcome for the first time.

'I am here, Maude—but why did you not come to meet me?' said he.

'I knew not that you were to be here to-day,' she replied, with a sparkle in her eyes.

'Did your—did not Mrs. Lindsay tell you I was coming?'

'No,' replied Maude indignantly.

'Another act of coldness and unwelcome.'

'Oh, Roland—how I dread these people!'

'Who?'

'Mrs. Lindsay and her Mr. Sharpe! I have just had a spin over breezy Tentsmuirs, making the sheep and rabbits fly before me, as you and I and Hester Maule have often done before, Roland,' said Maude, changing abruptly from grave to gay.

Full of health and spirits, with a soft rose-leaf complexion that was heightened by recent exercise and present excitement, she was a girl whose beauty was of a delicate type. Her hair was of the sunniest brown, her eyes a soft and dreamy blue, yet wont to beam and sparkle at times; her figure was slight, extremely graceful, and she was now in her twentieth year.

'By Jove, Maude, you have grown quite a little beauty!' exclaimed Roland, while, holding each other at arm's length, brother and sister surveyed each other's face; 'but in expression you are not changed a bit.'

'Nor you, Roland—yet, how scorched—how brown you are!'

'That was done in Egypt—but much of it wore off at Merlwood.'

'How long you have been of coming here, Roland!' said Maude, with a pout on her ruby lip.

'Since returning to Britain, you mean?'

'Since returning to Scotland.'

'With all my love for you, my dear little sister, I was loth to face the—the mortifications that I feared awaited me at home.'

'A changed home, Roland!'

'If we can call it so.'

'But then at Merlwood,' said she archly, 'Hester—dear Hester, would be an attraction, of course.'

Roland actually coloured, and stooped to scrape a cigar light on his heel, and to change the subject said:

'I saw Jack Elliot of ours for a few minutes at his club in Edinburgh.'

'Dear Jack! and how is he looking?'

'Well and jolly as usual; unluckily his leave is shorter than mine, yet I hope to keep him here till the pheasants are ready.'

'Darling Roland—how good of you!' exclaimed his sister, kissing him again.

'You and he expect your little affair to come off when——'

'When the regiment returns home—I could not go out to Egypt, you know, Roland.'

'Worse than useless, when we may be moving towards the frontier again.'

'In her last letter to me Annot Drummond seemed full of Egypt, and Egypt only.'

'She has a lover out there, perhaps—or going,' said Roland, laughing.

'Not improbable. She is coming here; but, truth to tell, I do not like Annot Drummond much.'

'Why?'

'I cannot say.'

'Nay, Maude, that is unjust.'

'It is a case of Dr. Fell, I suppose.'

'Yet you have invited her for a month or two to Earlshaugh.'

'Yes.'

'Why, then?'

'As a return for her mother's kindness to me when in London—nothing more. There is no love lost between Annot and me.'

Roland became silent, as his sister evidently spoke unwillingly; and to change the subject, he said:

'And the stepmother, Maude; how do you and she get on?'

'As my letters have told you—oh, I hate her, as much as it is in my nature to hate anyone. When she comes near me I feel like a cat with its fur rubbed the wrong way. Can you not pension her away from Earlshaugh?'

'Not if all I hear is true,' replied Roland, giving his dark moustache an angry twist. 'But who is this fellow Sharpe, who seems to be her factotum—and where did she pick him up?'

'He is her brother.'

'Her brother!'

'Yes—so you must be wary——'

'Till I see MacWadsett?'

'If that will make any difference, which I fear not,' replied Maude, lowering her voice, and actually glancing round with apprehension, while her blue eyes lighted with indignation; 'he lives here—perhaps she told you so?'

'No—lives here—here in Earlshaugh?'

'Yes; he has rooms set apart for him in the Beatoun wing.'

'By her orders?'

'Yes. She has the whole estate, and you and me too, completely in her power. Papa, in his folly, left her, apparently, everything; but to come to us, I presume, in time; and now she is entirely influenced and guided by her brother. Literally, we seem to be at his mercy,' continued the girl, with a kind of a shudder, 'and you must play your cards well to prevent a catastrophe.'

'It is intolerable!' exclaimed Roland, in an accent of rage.

'It is beyond my comprehension.'

'I wish old MacWadsett were at home.'

'He will not be in town for some weeks yet.'

Some bitter words escaped Roland, who added:

'God, give me patience! A fracas in the house with so many guests coming is, of course, to be avoided.'

'I hope your return may make some change, Roland; it has been so dull here.'

'Why—how?'

'County people—the ladies at least—are shy of visiting, I feel that, and often long to join Hester at Merlwood. You may see that the calling cards in the basket are quite faded and old.'

'No visitors!'

'Very few, beyond the parish minister and his wife, or the doctor, when she has some petty illness. She was a reader, a worker, and a musician in mamma's time, I understand; but is a total idler now, and, save to church, rarely leaves the grounds.'

'Her dowry and the Dower House she was entitled to, but who could ever have dreamed that she, the meek-faced, humble, and most obsequious Deborah Sharpe would ever be the mistress of all this!' exclaimed Roland as he strode to a window and looked forth upon the view with a heart that thrilled with many mingled emotions, for he loved his ancestral home with a love that was a species of passion, especially after his term of foreign exile.

Its situation was so perfect, overhanging the fertile haugh that gave the place a name, and through which meandered a stream, that, though insignificant there, widened greatly before it reached the sea.

The house of Earlshaugh is large and picturesque. Built originally in the days when James III. was King of the realm, and when that ill-fated monarch granted a special license to the then Baron to erect a fortalice, 'surrounded with walls and ditches, defended by gates of brass or iron,' many additions had been made to it, and the grace of a venerable antiquity was now combined with the comfort and luxury of modern days.

The old rooms were small, panelled with pine rather than oak; and the old shot and arrow loopholes under the windows had long since been plugged up and plastered over. In the olden time gardens were too valuable to be left outside the walls of a Scottish fortalice at a feudal neighbour's mercy, and trees only afforded cover for an attacking foe; but now the slopes crowned by Earlshaugh sheltered a modern garden with all its rare flowers, and the clefts of the rock afforded nurture for numerous trees and shrubs.

Royalty had often taken its ease in Earlshaugh, and in its grounds there is still a venerable thorn-tree in which tradition says the hawks of the Fifth and Sixth Jameses were wont to roost; nor was the house unknown in history and war, for there is still a room that was occupied by Cardinal Beatoun, the stair to which had a peculiarity after his murder, that whoever went up its steps felt as if going down; and the western wall yet bears the marks of the cannon shot, when it was attacked by General D'Oisel, the Comte de Martigues, and other French chevaliers, in the wars of Mary of Guise, and when Kirkcaldy of Grange, by one stroke of his two-handed sword, slew at its gate the Comte de St. Pierre, Knight of St Michael.

In that old house every chamber had its story of some past occupant; for there the Lairds of Earlshaugh were born; there they brought home their brides, and there they had—unless they fell in battle—died and been borne forth by their own people to Leuchars Kirk, or to the Chapel of St. Bennet, of which no vestige now remains.

Looking over the fair and sunlit scene before him, Roland Lindsay was thinking of all these things, while Maude drooped her pretty head on his shoulder, and said:

'It is so terrible to suppose that we may have lost all this through the folly—the weakness of papa.'

'In the hands of an artful Jezebel! But who is that person riding straight across the lawn, heedless of path or avenue?'

'Sharpe—Mr. Hawkey Sharpe,' replied Maude, starting with something like a shudder again—an emotion which Roland fortunately did not perceive; for with reference to this obnoxious person there was a secret between him and her which Maude, with all her love and affection, dared not confide to her fiery brother, lest it should bring about the very catastrophe which she dreaded so much.

CHAPTER XIII.

ROLAND'S VEXATION.

'In my father's house on sufferance only, it would seem!' was the half-aloud remark muttered through his teeth by Roland, when betimes next morning he was up while the dew was glittering on shrub and tree, to have a ramble, cigar in mouth, and feeling with bitterness in his heart that through the fault of another, rather than himself, he had been severely and unjustly dealt with.

When Roland joined his regiment an elder brother now dead, Harry Lindsay of the Scots Guards, had been, like himself, somewhat extravagant—Harry particularly so amid the facilities afforded by London for spending freely and living fast—thus between certain bills which the later had compelled the old gentleman to accept, looking upon him, as he too often said, 'merely as the family banker,' but more especially by his betting, racing, and other proclivities peculiar to 'the Brigade,' he had so enraged the old Laird of Earlshaugh that, acted upon by the influence of his unwise 'second election,' the latter had executed a will—the obnoxious document so often referred to—completely in her favour, leaving her everything, with certain arrangements—a provision—for his surviving son Roland and his daughter Maude.

A codicil, tending to reverse or revoke this, had evidently been in preparation, but was never fulfilled or signed.

Thus far alone Roland had been made aware, but was still inclined to doubt the tenor of a document he had never seen, which he could not as yet see, and the copy of which, sent to him in Egypt, had been lost in the transmission as stated.

Moreover, he was a soldier—nothing but a soldier in many ways, and, as he was wont to say to himself, 'an utter muff,' so far as business matters were concerned.

Of his own dubious position at Earlshaugh and the presumption of Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, the steward or manager of the property, he was soon to have unpleasantly convincing proofs that sorely tested his patience and tried his proud and impetuous temper.

A prey to somewhat chequered thoughts, he had wandered in the dewy morning over much of the beautiful and picturesque property. Every lane, hedgerow, field, and farm had been familiar to him from his boyhood, since old Johnnie Buckle, the head groom, had taught him to take his fences, even as the old gamekeeper, Gavin Fowler, had shown him where the best grown coveys were sure to be found. He had seen alterations and innovations which displeased him extremely, and had visited some of the tenants, attended in his ramble by an old herd who had been in the service of the Lindsays for half a century; and he now returned by the great avenue, where still the ancient oaks, that erewhile had heard the bugle of King James, the Scottish Haroun, on many a hunting day, still gave forth their leaves from year to year, and entered the cosy old-fashioned breakfast-room, where Dresden china and glittering plate, with an array of cold meats, fish, and fruit, suggested a hearty Scottish morning repast, and over the carved stone fireplace of which hung a portrait of his father in the scarlet costume of the Caledonian Hunt. Maude was not there; but to his indignation the room had another occupant.

'Mr. Trotter, when you have quite ended the perusal of that paper you will, perhaps, so far favour me?'

The person he addressed with a grim but mock suavity was Tam Trotter, who, clad in the Lindsay livery, blue and yellow, making certain of not being disturbed, had—with all the coolness, if not the easy elegance, of a 'Jeames' of Belgravia or Mayfair—seated himself in the breakfast-room, and, with his slippered feet on a velvet fender stool, and his broad back reclined in an easy-chair, was deep in the columns of the Fife Herald.

He started up overwhelmed with confusion, and began in a breathless voice to stammer an apology.

'There—there—that will do; but don't let this happen again, Trotter,' said Roland; 'it shows that the discipline of the house wants adjustment. By Jove, if I had you in barracks I'd send you to knapsack-drill for a week!'

The wretched Tam made a hasty retreat, and Maude, detecting the situation, came in laughing merrily to get her brother's morning kiss, and looking, he thought, so bright, so sweet, and so pretty. 'Who,' says Anthony Trollope, 'has not seen some such girl when she has come down early, without the full completeness of her morning toilet, and yet nicer, fresher, prettier to the eye of him who is so favoured than she has ever been in more formal attire?'

'Covers laid for two only—thank goodness, you and I are to have our breakfast tête-à-tête!' she exclaimed, as she seated herself at the table, and the terribly 'cowed' or abashed Trotter took post behind her.

'And then I must be off to the stables to see what cattle are there, and renew my acquaintance with old Johnnie Buckle, who taught me how to take my flying leaps—never to funk at a bullfinch, a sunk fence, a mill race, or anything. Many of Johnnie's tricks stood me in good stead, Maude, when I was with poor Hicks and Baker in Egypt,' said Roland.

Strolling forth in the bright morning sunshine, amid which the house of Earlshaugh, with its massive walls of polished ashlar, its machicolated battlement and tall, old windows, glittered in light, with masses sunk in shadow, he was met by the head gardener, old Willie Wardlaw, whom he remembered as a faithful servitor in years past (and whose rarest peaches he had stolen many a time and oft), with a hand outstretched in welcome, and his hat in the other, as he bowed his silvery head in token of respect.

'Oh, sir, but I've been langing to see ye ere it is owre late and the mischief done!' he exclaimed.

'What mischief?'

'The meadowing o' the park and lawn, where never a plough has been since the King was in Falkland.'

'Who has suggested this piece of utilitarian barbarity?' asked Roland with lowering brow.

'Wha wad it be but Mr. Hawkey Sharpe? Pawkie-Sharpe wad be a better name for him,' was the contemptuous response, made with evident bitterness of heart.

'I'll see to that, Willie,' said Roland as he strode on, but soon to be confronted by another official—a kind of forester—who had charge of all the timber on the property.

'I hope, Captain,' said the latter, 'you're in time to save the King's Wood, sir.'

'What do you mean?'

'Ye surely ken it is doomed—a' to the King's Thorn?'

'Doomed—how?'

'To be cut down and sold—a black, burning shame! Some o' the aiks are auld as the three Trees o' Dysart!'

'By whose order?' asked Roland, greatly ruffled.

'Oh, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe's, of course.'

'But why?'

'It is no for me to say, sir,' replied the old man uneasily; 'but folk hint that when a body backs the wrong horse at races some one maun pay the piper. Maister Sharpe cuts gey near the wind, and comes aftener wi' the rake than the shool; but he'll get a bite o' his ain bridle, I hope, yet!'

'Racing, is it? I shall see this matter attended to also. His presumption is unparalleled!' said Roland, as with something between a groan and an imprecation on his lips he passed on, to look after a mount for Annot Drummond, and to digest this new piece of information—that the so-called steward was about to cut down one of the oldest of the ancestral woods on the property to meet a gambling debt!

At the stables, warm indeed was the welcome he met from the veteran groom Johnnie, who did not seem older by a day since Roland had seen him last—hale, hardy, and lithe, though past his sixtieth year, with long body, short bandy legs, small, closely-shaven head, and sharp, keen, twinkling eyes—his white tie scrupulously folded, and attired as usual in a heavily flapped corduroy waistcoat, with large pockets, in one of which was stuck a curry-comb, and in his hands was a steel bridle-bit, which he was polishing with leather till it shone like silver.

Roland Lindsay had been so long away from among his own people and native country, that he felt the keenest pleasure at the warmth of his reception by any of the old servants whom the new régime permitted to linger about Earlshaugh.

'Eh, Captain, how like the Laird, your worthy father, you are!' exclaimed old Johnnie Buckle, with kindly eyes, adding, 'but I hope you'll never live to be sic a gomeral—excuse me, sir.'

Roland knew to what the old fellow referred, and was silent.

Like the old English squire of Belton, his father had been, though a popular man with all his friends, and brother fox-hunters especially, and a boon companion too—one that had a dignity that was his from nature rather than effort, but was 'a man who, in fact, did little or nothing in the world—whose life had been very useless, but who had been gifted with such a presence that he looked as though he were one of God's noblest creatures. Though always dignified, he was ever affable, and the poor liked him better than they might have done had he passed his time in searching out their wants and supplying them.' Though little of eleemosynary aid is ever required or looked for by the manly, self-reliant, and independent peasantry of Scotland.

'You have some good nags here,' said Roland, as he walked through the stables. 'I shall want two or three for the saddle in a day or two.'

The old groom shook his head and chewed a straw viciously.

'I should like a spin on this one—a pretty roan hunter.'

'Yes; he's about sixteen hands high, a bonnie wee head, full chest and barrel, broad i' the loins, and firm of foot.'

'The very nag for me, Johnnie.'

'But you can't have him, Maister Roland,' said the groom, forgetting the lapse of years.

'Why?'

'That is Mr. Hawkey Sharpe's favourite saddle horse.'

'Oh—indeed—this mare, then?'

'That is his hack.'

'The devil! This roadster, then?'

'His pad; no leg must cross it but his own. That is a nag more difficult to find in perfection than even a hunter or roan,' said Buckle, passing a hand admiringly over the silky flank of the animal. 'That bay cob is close on saxteen hands high, bonnie in shape, as ye see, and high-stepping in action, gentle as a wean, and a wean might lead it.'

'That, too, is Mr. Sharpe's, I presume!'

'Yes, sir.'

'By Jove, he is well mounted!' said Roland, in irrepressible wrath, thinking of a certain individual 'on horse-back.'

'That pair of thirteen hands each are Miss Lindsay's.'

'Ah,' thought Roland, a little mollified, 'one of them will mount Annot. Mr. Sharpe dabbles a little in horse-flesh, I have heard?'

'And loses sometimes, Maister Roland.'

'How do you know?'

'By his face, for then he girns like a sheep's heid in the smith's tangs. He kens as little o' dogs, or he wadna gang aboot wi' a dust-hole pointer at his heels.'

'What kind of pointer is that, Buckle?'

'A cur o' nae mair breed than himsel',' replied the old groom, who evidently had no love for the steward. 'Hech, me!' he added under his breath, as Roland left the stable-yard with evident disgust and annoyance in his face and air, 'is he yet to learn that a bad servitor never made a gude maister, and that a sinking maister mak's a rising man? Dule seems to hang o'er Earlshaugh!'

But more mortification awaited Roland. He knew that there was an infinity of matters connected with the tenants—rents, repairs, timber, oxen, fences, and winter forage, renewal of leases, and so forth—on which there was no appearance of him, the heir, the only son, being consulted; and of this he soon had unpleasant proof.

'Remember what I urged, dearest Roland,' said his sister, as she joined him at the porte cochère and lifted her loving and smiling blue eyes to his, while clasping both hands over his arm and hanging upon him. 'Do keep your temper in any interview you may have with this man Sharpe, who actually affects to think it a condescension to accept his post in our household, as he has been heard to say that a gentleman must live somehow, as well as other people do.'

'I must see him,' said Roland through his clenched teeth, as he entered the library, where he found Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, who was usually installed there at the same hour daily, on business matters intent, occupying the late Laird's easy-chair, seated at his table, which was littered with account-books, letters, and papers, while at his back hung on the wall a full-length, by Scougal, of that Colonel Lindsay who figured in the Legend of the Weird Yett, looking grim, haughty, and proud, as the subjects of most old portraits do, when every gentleman looked like a great lord.

Sharpe saw the black expression that hovered in Roland's sombre face, and, rising, accorded him a bow, and, in deference to the presence of Maude (and perhaps of his sister, who entered the room at the same moment), laid aside his cigar.

'Among some letters to me this morning,' said Roland, 'is one from old Duncan Ged, for a renewal of his lease of the Mains of Dron.'

'But I have no idea of doing so,' replied Mr. Sharpe, dipping his pen in the ink-bottle.

'You?' queried Roland.

'I—I mean, that is——'

'Who or what the devil do you mean, Mr. Sharpe?' said Roland, undeterred by the pressure of Maude's little hand on his arm.

'I mean that Mrs. Lindsay, acting on my advice, has no intention of doing so.'

'Why?' asked Roland, dissembling his rage, to find the mask thrown off thus.

'Because the land is worth twice as much again as it was in the days when your grandfather gave a tack of the Mains to his grandfather.'

'Surely he deserves to benefit thereby?'

'We don't think so.'

'We again!' thought Roland, trembling with suppressed passion; but now Trotter, the servant, announced that the gamekeeper wished to see Mr. Sharpe, and Gavin Fowler was ushered in—an old man whose eyes, when Roland shook hands with him, glistened with pride and pleasure, as he exclaimed:

'Welcome back to your father's rooftree and yer ain fireside, sir; a' here hae lang wanted ye sairly.'

A sneer hovered on the lips of Hawkey Sharpe, as he said briefly to the keeper, who had a gun under his arm, a shot-belt over his shoulders, and a couple of dogs at his heels:

'Well, what brings you here to-day?'

'I've caught that loon Jamie Spens snaring rabbits and hares in the King's Wood.'

'At last,' said Hawkey Sharpe through his teeth.

'At last, sir,' responded the keeper, chiefly to Roland.

'Did he show fight?' asked Sharpe.

'Of course he did; Jamie comes o' a camstairy and fechtin' race.'

'I know that,' said Roland; 'this is not his first offence, by what you said?'

'Allow me, sir,' said the steward pointedly, with a wave of his hand.

'He is no bad kind o' chield,' urged the keeper.

'He will serve for an example, anyway!'

'His family are puir—starving, in fact, sir.'

'What the deuce do I care? I'd as soon shoot a poacher as a weasel.'

'Let the poor fellow off for this time,' said Roland.

'Of course—do, please,' urged Maude; 'if you, Mr. Sharpe, were poor, hungry, and, more than all, had a hungry wife and children——'

'They are nothing to me.'

'But such pretty little children!' urged Maude.

'God bless your kind heart, miss!' exclaimed the old keeper.

'Let him go—this once—I say,' said Roland, still boiling at the tone and manner adopted by the steward.

'For my sake,' added Maude sweetly.

'For yours?' asked Mr. Sharpe, looking at her with a peculiar expression to which Roland had not yet the key, for he said firmly and emphatically:

'At my order, rather!'

'Roland, please don't interfere,' said his cold and pale-faced stepmother; 'Mr. Sharpe knows precisely how to deal with these people.'

'Oh—indeed!'

'I shall not take my way in this instance,' said Mr. Sharpe condescendingly; 'and so, to please you, Miss Lindsay, the culprit shall go free,' he added, with a bow to Maude, who blushed, more with annoyance, apparently, than satisfaction, while Roland, in obedience to an imploring glance from her, stifled his indignation, and abruptly quitted the library.

'I thank ye for trying to help me, sir,' said old Duncan Ged, who stood in the hall, bonnet in hand, and apparently quite crushed by the non-renewal of his lease; 'but Hawkey Sharpe is the hardest agent between the Forth an' Tay; he turns the puir out o' house and hame at a minute's notice, and counts every hare and rabbit in the woods. E'en's ye like, Mr. Sharpe!' said the old man, shaking his clenched hand in the direction of the library door; 'ilka man buckles his belt his ain gate, as I maun buckle mine. Everything has an end, and a pudding has twa.'

And thus strangely consoling himself, he took his departure. Roland sent the old man by post a cheque for fifty pounds; he could do no more at that time.

'But for dear Maude's sake,' thought Roland, 'I should certainly never set foot in Earlshaugh till these matters of mine are cleared up—and perhaps never again! But I'll make no fracas till after the covert shooting is over and our guests are gone; then, by Jove; won't I bring Mr. Hawkey Sharpe and this grim stepmother to book, if I can!'

CHAPTER XIV.

MAUDE'S SECRET.

Roland had got a suitable mount from old Buckle and gone for 'a spin,' to leave, if possible, his worries and fidgets behind him, away by Radernie and as far as Carnbee, where the green hills that culminate in conical Kellie Law look down on the Firth of Forth and the dark blue German Sea; while Maude—after being down at Spens the poacher's cottage with money and sundry comforts for his starving wife and children—full of the subject of Roland's return and the approaching visit of her fiancé, Jack Elliot, had written a long, effusive, and young girl-like epistle to the latter, and was on her way to slip it into the locked letter-bag in the hall with her own hand. She had a consciousness that she was watched, and with it no desire that her correspondence should be discussed just then, as she had a nervous dread of Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, who had actually and presumptuously ventured on more than one occasion to evince some unmistakable tenderness towards her—an indiscretion, to say the least of it, of which she dared give no hint to her fiery brother; but which was the source of much disquietude to poor Maude, and of confusion and distress to her, as regarded the steward's power in the house, and made her change colour at the mere mention of his name.

And now when passing through a long and lonely wainscotted corridor, the windows of which on one side overlooked the haugh beneath the house, and which led to the great staircase, she came suddenly upon the very object of her dread, Mr. Sharpe, and hastily thrust her letter into the bosom of her dress.

Though her own mistress, with her engagement to Captain Elliot acknowledged and accepted by her brother, Maude, from the influence of circumstances, was—as stated—actually afraid lest this daring admirer should discover that she was writing to Elliot, so much did she dread the power of Sharpe and his sister, and their capacity for working mischief.

Some vague sense, or doubt, of his security in the future, and of his sister's continued favour to himself, made Mr. Sharpe thus raise his bold eyes to the daughter of the house, aware that she was almost unprotected; her maternal uncle, Sir Harry, was an old and well-nigh helpless man, and her brother had yet to run the risks of war in that land now deemed the grave of armies—the Soudan.

Apart from her beauty of mind and person—not that Mr. Hawkey Sharpe cared much about the former or was influenced thereby—the latter certainly allured him, and the helplessness referred to encouraged him in his pretensions, even when he began to suspect that there was another in the field, though he knew not yet precisely who that other was.

Mr. Sharpe's antecedents were not brilliant. He had begun life in a solicitor's office in Glasgow, but had learned more than law elsewhere; book-making, betting, the race-course, and billiards had brought him in contact with his betters in rank but equals in mischief and roguery, and from them he had acquired a certain factitious polish of manner, which he hoped now to turn to good account.

Maude Lindsay knew and believed in that which Roland struggled against knowing and believing, the precise tenor of their father's will; and in terror of precipitating matters with Sharpe and his sister, she had been compelled to temporize and submit to the more than effusive politeness of the former, whose bearing, however, she could not mistake.

In nothing, as yet, had he gone beyond those—in him, somewhat clumsy—tendernesses of incipient love-making, which might, or might not, mean anything, though Maude felt that they meant too much; and she never forgot the shock, the start, the humiliating conviction that she experienced when the necessity of regarding him as a lover was forced by necessity upon her.

Her disdain she utterly failed, at first, to conceal; but Hawkey Sharpe, whose reading had taught him, through the perusal of many low and exciting love stories, that a girl might be won in spite of her teeth, was resolved to persevere.

'Good-evening, Mr. Sharpe—what a start you gave me!' said Maude, essaying to pass him in the narrow corridor; but he contrived to bar her way.

'Pardon me for a moment,' said he submissively enough; 'I wish you would not call me Mr. Sharpe; and oh, more than all, that you would permit me to—to call you Maude!'

The latter's eyes flashed fire, soft and blue though they were. There was no mistaking the tenor of this mode of address. Hawkey Sharpe seemed to have opened the trenches at last, and Maude's first thought was:

'Has he been imbibing too much?'

'It was for your sake I let off that poacher Spens this morning,' said he in a slightly reproachful tone.

'For the sake of his wife and children, I hope, rather.'

'Oh, bother his wife and brats! what are they to me compared with the satisfaction of pleasing you?'

'Mr. Sharpe!' said Maude, drawing back a pace, and, in spite of herself, cresting up her proud little head.

'It seems so hard,' said he, affecting an air of humility, and casting down his eyes for a moment, 'that there should be such a gulf apparently between us, Miss Lindsay.'

'A gulf,' repeated Maude, not precisely knowing what to say.

'Yes—and you deepen it. If I attempt to speak to you even as a friend, you recoil from me; and in this huge, sequestered house, it seems natural that we should at least be friends.'

'If we are enemies, I know it not, Mr. Sharpe,' said Maude with some hesitation, and then attempting to cover the latter by a smile, as she knew the necessity—a knowledge which distressed and disgusted her—of temporizing, which seemed, even if for a moment, a species of treason to Jack Elliot.

On the other hand, inclination and calculations as to the future, made Sharpe admire Maude very much, and perhaps he was in love with her as much as it was in his nature to be in love with anyone beyond himself. Rejected, or even scorned, he was not a man to break his heart for any woman in the land, though it might become inspired by hatred and a longing for revenge. Yet he was prepared to make 'a bold stroke for a wife' in Maude's instance. If refused once he would try again, and even perhaps a third or a fourth time, and feel only an emotion of rage on his final rejection—so in reality heart was not so much the affair with him.

Maude attempted to pass him, but he still barred her way, and even sought, without success, to capture one of her hands.

'Open confession is good for the soul,' he resumed, in a blunt and blundering way, 'and avowals come to one's lips at times, and cannot be restrained. I have played too long with fire, or with edged tools. You must know, Miss Lindsay, that no man could be in your society much without admiring you, and admiration is but a prelude to—love.'

Fear of him, and all a quarrel with him might involve, repressed the girl's desire to laugh at this inflated little speech; but he—with all his constitutional impudence—quailed for a moment under the expression that flashed in her eyes—blue, and usually soft and sunny though they were—while she remained silent and thinking:

'What on earth will he say next?'

'Do you not understand me, Miss Lindsay?' he asked, perceiving a look of wonder gathering in her face. 'Do you not know that I love you?' he added, lowering his voice, while glancing round with quick and stealthy eyes.

'Mr. Sharpe,' said Maude, trembling, yet rising to the occasion, 'I understand what you say; but I hope you are not serious, and not insulting me.'

'Is the emotion with which you have inspired me likely to be mingled with jest, or with insult to you?'

'Oh, this is too much!' said Maude, interlacing her fingers, with difficulty restraining tears of anger and resentment, while, with a keen sense of future danger and his presumption, she felt as if there was something unreal and grotesque in the situation. Moreover, she was anxious to get her letter into the house postal bag ere the latter was taken away.

'I am deeply earnest, Miss Lindsay,' resumed Sharpe, still with great humility of tone and manner. 'My regard for you is no passing fancy. I learned to love you from the first moment I saw you.'

'Mr. Sharpe,' said Maude, gathering courage from desperation, 'I do not understand why you venture to talk in this style to me! Encouragement I have never given you, even by a glance.'

'Too well do I know that,' said he, affecting a mournful tone; 'but I hope to lead you to—to like me a little in return.'

'I don't dislike you,' said Maude, again seeking to temporize.

'And, if possible, to love me—as a man—one to whom you can entrust a future you cannot see—one whom you will one day call husband.'

He drew nearer as his voice became lower and more earnest, and Maude recoiled hastily in growing dismay, and the words 'a future you cannot see' stung her deeply.

Too well did she know that all this bold love-making was born of the humbled, fallen, and peculiar nature of her position under her ancestral rooftree, and of the ruin of her family—a ruin on which this man was rising under his sister's wing!

'I beseech you, Mr. Sharpe,' said she, 'to say no more on this subject, for more than the merest friendship there can never be between us.'

'Have you thought it over?'

'Certainly not!'

His face clouded, and his usually bold, observant, and keen gray eyes became inflamed with growing anger.

'Seriously—deliberately you refuse to accord me the slightest hope?'

'Yes.'

'You think by this bearing to humiliate me as much as a proud girl can do?'

'You pain me now by speaking thus,' she responded more gently.

'And you ruin my life!'

'I think not,' said Maude, with a little curl on her lovely lip.

'And may make that ruin a subject of jest to your brother's fine friends who are coming here in a few days—a few hours, rather, now.'

At this coarse remark Maude accorded him an inquiring stare.

'Oh, I know what young girls are,' he resumed in a half-savage, half-sullen manner. 'A rejection like mine is just the sort of thing they like to boast of.'

'You thus add insult to your profound presumption!' exclaimed Maude, quite exasperated now by the under-breeding of the style he adopted so suddenly; and, sweeping past him, she reached the entrance-hall, where the postal bag lay—a square and stately place, the stone floor of which was covered with soft matting; where in winter a great fire always blazed in the spacious stone fireplace, over which hung a single suit of armour, amid a trophy of weapons, old swords, mauls, and pikes.

She put her hand in her bosom—her letter—the letter she wished to dispose of with her own hand—was no longer there! How—where had she dropped it? She turned, looked hastily round her, and saw Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, who had evidently picked it up, descending the staircase, and he handed it to her with a slight and grave bow.

'Oh—thank you,' said Maude, her mind now full of confusion and vexation.

Quick as thought she dropped it into the postal bag after he handed it to her, but not before he had seen the address, and a dangerous gleam shot athwart his shifty eyes, and again the coarse, bold nature of the man came forth.

'So—so,' said he, through his clenched teeth. 'I find I have been mistaken in you, Miss Lindsay.'

'Mistaken, Mr. Sharpe?'

'Yes—mistaken all along.'

'I do not comprehend you.'

'Deceived by your soft, fair face and gentle eyes, I thought you unlike other girls—no coquette—no flirt—and now—now, I find——'

'What, sir?' demanded Maude impetuously.

'That you have correspondents.'

'Few, I suppose, are without them.'

'But who is he to whom you openly write—this Captain John Elliot?'

'Intolerable! How dare you ask me?' demanded Maude, her breast swelling, her cheeks, not flushed, but pale with anger, and her eyes flashing.

'A military friend of your brother's, I suppose we shall call him,' said he with an undisguised sneer.

'And a dear friend of mine,' said Maude defiantly, exasperated to find that the very discovery she wished to avoid had been made, and by this person particularly; 'but here comes my brother, and perhaps you had better make your inquiries of him,' she added, as a great sigh of mingled anger and relief escaped her on hearing Roland dismount under the porte-cochère; but, unable to face even him, distressed, humiliated, and altogether unnerved by her recent interview, all it involved, and all she had undergone, poor little Maude rushed away to seek alleviation amid a passion of tears, unseen and in the solitude of her own room.

So this was Maude's secret!

Hawkey Sharpe cared not just then to face Roland Lindsay; but with hands clenched he sent a glance of hate after the retreating figure of Maude, and withdrew in haste.

They met in future, as we shall show, even amid Roland's guests; but with a consciousness—a most humiliating and irritating one to Maude, that there was almost a secret understanding—that odious love-making between them—and known, as she thought, to themselves alone.

CHAPTER XV.

MR. HAWKEY SHARPE SEEKS COUNSEL.

We have said that Maude thought that Mr. Hawkey Sharpe's love-making, with all its euphonious platitudes, was known to him and to herself alone.

In this she was mistaken, as Hawkey's sister Deborah, Mrs. Lindsay, was in his confidence in that matter, and quite au fait of its doubtful progress. She did not appear at dinner that evening, but dined in her own room, and then betook her to her brother's sanctum, or 'den,' as he called it—a picturesque old panelled apartment, in what was named the Beatoun wing—which had a quaint stone fireplace, the grate of which was full of August flowers then, but at the hearth of which in the winter of the year before Pinkeyfield was fought, his Eminence had been wont to toast his scarlet-slippered toes.

The furniture was quite modern. Fishing and shooting gear, with whips, spurs, billiard cues, a few soiled books on farriery and racing, were its chief features now; while sporting calendars, etc., strewed the table, with a few note and account books, and letters of minor importance.

After gloomily referring to his late interview with Maude Lindsay, he assisted himself to a briar-root pipe from a nice arrangement of meerschaums and other pipes stuck in an oaken and steel mounted horseshoe on the broad mantel-shelf, and prepared to soothe himself with 'a weed' and the contents of a remarkably long tumbler—brandy and soda—sent up, per Mr. Trotter, from the pantry of old Funnell, the butler, for his delectation; while his pale and sallow-visaged sister was content to sip from a slender glass a decoction of some medical stuff prescribed for chronic low spirits and weak action of the heart—an affliction under which she laboured, and to which, no doubt, her pallid and at times stone-coloured complexion was attributable.

Always calm in demeanour, she was otherwise unlike her brother Hawkey, who was not particular to a shade in anything (provided he was not found out), and she was outwardly a model of religion and propriety, blended with hypocrisy, which—according to Rochefoucauld—is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

Attired in a luxurious dressing-gown and tasselled smoking cap, Mr. Sharpe lounged in a cosy easy-chair, shooting his huge cuffs forward from time to time, and stroking his sandy, ragged moustache, in what he thought to be 'good style.'

Instead of being thick and podgy, as his humble origin might suggest, his hands, we must admit, were rather thin, with long spiky filbert nails, reminding one—with all their cultivated whiteness—of the talons of a bird of prey.

'Deuced good thing for us, Deb, that codicil was never completed,' said he (for about the hundredth time), breaking a pause; 'but still we have now that fellow, Roland Lindsay, back again, ready to overhaul matters, after escaping Arab bullets and swords, desert fever, and the devil only knows what more.'

'You forget that this is his home,' said she, with a little touch of womanly feeling for the moment, 'or he deems it as such.'

'So long as you permit it, I suppose.'

'I cannot throw down the glove to the County just now.'

'But assume a virtue if you have it not,' said Hawkey, applying himself to the long tumbler, that still sparkled and effervesced in the lamp-light.

'He cannot harm me, at all events.'

'I don't know that, and I was deuced easier when he was away in Egypt. Some might call this selfish—what the devil do I care! A man's chief duty centres on himself.'

'Without pity for the unfortunate?'

'Don't be a humbug, Deb, and don't act to me! The poor and unfortunate are so, by their own fault, I suppose. I wish to speak with you about that to which I have—reluctantly—referred more than once.'

Mrs. Lindsay made a gesture of impatience, and said, while toying with her pet cur Fifine:

'Ah—money matters with reference to yourself in the future?'

'Yes; but I do dislike, my dear Deb,' said he, with an affection which she knew right well was mostly simulated, 'discussing them with you.'

'Why?'

'It is so disagreeable.'

'It would be more disagreeable for you if there were no money matters to discuss,' she replied with the smallest approach to a sneer. 'But, to the point, Hawkey—I know what it is!'

'You are not strong, you know, dear Deb; you may go off—' (the hooks, he was about to say, but changed his mind)—'off suddenly, and not leave your house well ordered. We should always be prepared for the worst. You know what the best doctors in Edinburgh have told you,' he added, burying his nose and moustache in the tumbler again.

'Well?' said she.

'I mean that you should execute that will you spoke of.'

'In your favour?'

'And so preclude all contention from any quarter—a hundred times I have hinted this to you.'

'How kind and soothing the reminder is!' she replied bitterly, unwilling, like all selfish people, to adopt or face the dire idea of death, sudden or otherwise.

'I do advise you to consider well, Deb.'

'For your sake, of course.'

'Well—it may seem selfish, dear Deb.'

'Ah—advice is a commodity which every possessor deems most valuable, and yet hastens to get rid of.'

Hawkey eyed her anxiously, for her irritation and animosity, when her delicate health and disease of the heart were referred to, always predominated over every other feeling, but she waived them for the time and returned to the first subject.

'So that was all your success with Maude?'

'Not much, certainly,' he replied, with a scowl at vacancy.

'Unfortunate!'

'Rather!'

'As the provision left by her father is a most ample one for her.'

'Not so ample as all Earlshaugh, however,' thought he, refilling his briar-root in silence.

'You must persevere. It has been truly said that "the days of Jacob are over, that men don't understand waiting now, and it is always as well to catch your fish when you can."'

Hawkey smoked on in silence. He had never before dared to lift his eyes so high, never before ventured to 'make love' to a lady. His past experience had been more sudden, abrupt, less bothersome, and more acceptable. Had he done or said too much, or too little? Ought he to have gone down on his knees like the lovers he had seen on the stage, or read of in old story books?

No—he was certain she would have laughed at him had he done so; and he was also certain no one 'did that sort of thing' nowadays. The age of such supplication was assuredly past; and he thought, viciously too, that he had 'done all that may become a man.'

'These bloated aristocrats, Deb, have a way all their own, of setting a fellow down!' said he, with a louring expression in his shifty, pale-gray eyes; 'she is, I know, my superior in position, in the way the world goes, as yet,' he continued, for Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, though longing for the vineyard of Naboth, was—at heart—a Social-Democrat; 'my superior in birth, education, and habits.'

'I should think so.'

'Don't sneer at me, Deb.'

'So far, perhaps, as Maude is concerned, your success depends, Hawkey, upon whether there is anyone else in her thoughts.'

'Before me, you mean?'

'Yes—she may be engaged for all we know. I, for one, am certainly not in her confidence. She has a lover, however, I suspect.'

'It looks deuced like the case. I saw her post a letter to a fellow named Elliot to-night,' he added, with a knit in his brow and an ugly gleam in his pale eyes.

'Elliot—that is the name of one of those who come here to shoot, for the First.'

'To shoot?'

'Yes—on Roland's invitation.'

'There may be something else shot than partridges.'

'Elliot—Captain Elliot?'

'Yes—that was the name on her letter.'

'Well—you must not quarrel with him—that would be unseemly.'

'My dear Deb, I never quarrel with those I hate,' was the comprehensive and sinister reply of Hawkey Sharpe, with his most diabolical expression; 'and though I have never seen this interloper Elliot, I feel a most ungodly hatred of him already.'

'I repeat that no good can come of a vulgar quarrel, and that you must not forget the proprieties. What would the servants alone say or think?'

'Oh, d—n the servants!' responded her brother, tugging his moustache angrily; 'but if that fellow Elliot is her lover, I must put my brains in steep and contrive to separate them at all hazards, Deb. If I allow him or anyone else to enter the stakes, I shall be out of the running. Anyhow, as you are looking pale, Deb, I mustn't keep you here talking over my incipient love affairs, or you will not be able to receive some of these infernal guests, who, I believe, come to-morrow. You are not overburdened with visitors, however.'

'Yet I would rather it was the time of their going than their coming,' said Mrs. Lindsay, whom his remark touched on a tender point.

'Why?' asked Hawkey.

'They must soon perceive that I am tabooed by the county families—that no one calls here as of old.'

'Well?'

'Except, perhaps, the people from the Manse and the doctor.'

'Neither—or none—of whom I care to see.'

'And yet I subscribe to all local charities, bazaars, school feasts, as regularly——'

'As if you were an Elder of the Kirk—thereby wasting your money to win a place among the "unco guid," and all to no purpose,' said Hawkey, with the slightest approach to derision. 'Well—well; how I shall succeed with the fair Maude—if I succeed at all—time and a little management, in more ways than one, will show,' he added with knitted brows and hands clenched by thoughts that were full of vague but savage intentions.

'You know the proverb,' said Mrs. Lindsay, with a cold smile, as she lifted up her dog and retired: 'a man may woo as he will, but maun wed where his weird is.'

Hawkey Sharpe set his teeth, and his eyes gleamed as he thought with—but did not quote—Georges Ohnet, because he knew him not: 'Money is the password of these venal and avaricious times. Beauty, virtue, and intelligence count for nothing. People no longer say, "Room for the worthiest," but "Room for the wealthiest!"'

Then other things occurred to him.

'I am certain that Maude' (he spoke of her as 'Maude' to himself and his sister) 'won't mention our little matter, for cogent reasons, to her brother,' he reflected confidently;. 'but I must work the oracle with Deb about her will. With that heart ailment which she undoubtedly has, she may go off the hooks at any moment, as I, perhaps unwisely, hinted; and I am not lawyer enough to know how old Earlshaugh's last testament may stand; yet, surely, I am Deb's heir-at-law, anyhow, I should think!'

Unless Mr. Hawkey Sharpe had indulged—which was not improbable—in 'tall talk,' his language and disposition augured ill for the safety and comfort of Maude's fiancé if he came to Earlshaugh; but Sharpe's threatened vengeance had no decided plan as yet.