The Light of Scarthey Part 31

Some two days later, Rene, sitting upon a ledge of the old Scarthey wall, in the spare sunshine which this still, winter's noon shone pearl-like through a universal mist, busy mending a net, to the tune of a melancholy, inward whistle, heard up above the licking of the waves all around him and the whimper of the seagulls overhead, the beat of steady oars approaching from land side.

Starting to his feet, the little man, in vague expectation, ran to a point of vantage from which to scan the tideway; after a few seconds'

investigation he turned tail, dashed into the ruins, up the steps, and burst open the door of the sitting-room, calling upon his master with a scared expression of astonishment.

Captain Jack, poring over a map, his pipe sticking rakishly out of one side of his mouth, looked up amused at the Frenchman's evident excitement, while Adrian, who had been busy with the uppermost row of books upon his west wall, looked down from his ladder perch, with the pessimist's const.i.tutional expectation of evil growing upon his face.

"One comes in a boat," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Rene, "and I thought I ought to warn his honour, if his honour will give himself the trouble to look out."

"It must be the devil to frighten Renny in this fashion," muttered Captain Jack as distinctly as the clench of his teeth upon the pipe would allow him. Sir Adrian paled a little, he began to descend his ladder, mechanically flicking the dust from his cuffs.

"Your honour," said Rene, drawing to the window and looking out cautiously, "I have not yet seen her, but I believe it is old miss--the aunt of your honour and these ladies."

Captain Jack's pipe fell from his dropping jaw and was broken into many fragments as he leaped to his feet with an elasticity of limb and a richness of expletive which of themselves would have betrayed his calling.

Flinging his arm across one of Adrian's shoulders he peeped across the other out of the window, with an alarm half mocking, half genuine.

"The devil it is, friend Renny," he cried, drawing back and running his hands with an exaggerated gesture of despair through his brown curls; "Adrian, all is lost unless you hide me."

"My aunt here, and alone," exclaimed Adrian, retreating from the window perturbed enough himself, "I must go down to meet her. Pray G.o.d it is no ill news! Hurry, Renny, clear these gla.s.ses away."

"In the name of all that's sacred, clear me away first!" interposed Captain Jack, this time with a real urgency; through the open lattice came the sound of the grating of the boat's keel upon the sand and a vigorous hail from a masculine throat--"Ahoy, Renny Potter, ahoy!"

"Adrian, this is a matter of life and death to my hopes, hide me in your lowest dungeon for goodness' sake; I do not know my way about your ruins, and I am convinced the old lady will nose me out like a badger."

There was no time for explanation; Sir Adrian made a sign to Rene, who highly enjoying the situation and grinning from ear to ear, was already volunteering to "well hide Mr. the Captain," and the pair disappeared with much celerity into the inner room, while Adrian, unable to afford himself further preparation, hurried down the great stairs to meet this unexpected guest.

He emerged bareheaded into the curious mist which hung pall-like upon the outer world, and seemed to combine the opposite elements of glare and dulness, just as Tanty, aided by the stalwart arm of the boatman, who had rowed her across, succeeded in dragging her rheumatic limbs up the last bit of ascent to the door of the keep.

She halted, disengaged herself, and puffing and blowing surveyed her nephew with a stony gaze.

"My dear aunt," cried Adrian, "nothing has happened, I trust?"

"Sufficient has already happened, nephew, I should _hope_," retorted the old lady with extreme dignity, "sufficient to make me desire to confer with you most seriously. I thank you, young man," turning to William Shearman who stood on one side, his eager gaze upon "the master," ready to pull his forelock so soon as he could catch his eye, "be here again in an hour, if you please."

"But you will allow me to escort you myself," exclaimed Adrian, rising to the situation, "and I hope there need be no hurry so long as daylight lasts--Good-morning, Will, I am glad the new craft is a success--you need not wait. Tanty, take my arm, I beg, the steps are steep and rough."

Gripping her nephew's arm with her bony old woman's hand, Miss O'Donoghue began a laborious ascent, pausing every five steps to breathe stertorously and reproachfully, and look round upon the sandstone walls with supreme disdain; but this was nothing to the air with which, when at last installed upon a high hard chair, in the sitting-room (having sternly refused the easy one Sir Adrian humbly proffered), she deliberately proceeded to survey the scene. In truth, the neatness that usually characterised Adrian's surroundings was conspicuously absent from them, just then.

Two or three maps lay overlapping each other upon the table beside the tray with its flagon of amber ale, which had formed the captain's morning draught; and the soiled gla.s.s, the fragments of his pipe, and its half-burnt contents lay strewn about the prostrate chair which that lively individual had upset in his agitation. Adrian's ladder, the books he had been handling and had not replaced, the white ash of the dying fire, all contributed to the unwonted aspect of somewhat melancholy disorder; worse than all, the fumes of the strong tobacco which the sailor liked to smoke in his secluded moments hung rank, despite the open window, upon the absolute motionlessness of the atmosphere.

Tanty snorted and sniffed, while Adrian, after picking up the chair, began to almost unconsciously refold the maps, his eyes fixed wonderingly upon his visitor's face.

This latter delivered herself at length of some of the indignation that was choking her, in abrupt disjointed sentences, as if she were uncorking so many bottles.

"Well I'm sure, nephew, I am not surprised at your _extraordinary_ behaviour, and if this is the style you prefer to live in--style, did I say?--sty would be more appropriate. Of course it is only what I have been led to expect, but I must say I was ill prepared to be treated by you with actual disrespect. My sister's child and I your guest, not to speak of your aunt, and you your mother's son, and her host besides! It is a slap in the face, Adrian, a slap in the face which has been a very bitter pill to have to swallow, I a.s.sure you--I may say without exaggeration, in fact, that it has cut me to the quick."

"But surely," cried the nephew, laughing with gentle indulgence at this complicated indictment, "surely you cannot suppose I would have been willingly guilty of the smallest disrespect to you. I am a most unfortunate man, most unfortunately situated, and if I have offended, it is, you must believe, unwittingly and unavoidably. But you got my letter--I made my motives clear to you."

"Oh yes, I got your letter yesterday," responded Tanty, not at all softened, "and a more idiotic production from a man of your attainments, allow me to remark, I never read. Adrian, you are making a perfect fool of yourself, and _you cannot afford it_!"

"I fear you will never really understand my position," murmured Adrian hopelessly.

Tanty rattled her large green umbrella upon the floor with a violence that made her nephew start, then turned upon him a countenance inflamed with righteous anger.

"It is only three days ago since I gave you fully my view of the situation," she remarked, "you were good enough at the time to admit that it was a remarkably well-balanced one. I should be glad if you will explain in what manner your position could have changed in the s.p.a.ce of just three hours after, to lead you to rush back to your island, really as if you were a mole or a wild Indian, or some other strange animal that could not bear civilised society, without even so much as a good-bye to me, or to your cousins either? What is that?--you say you wrote--oh, ay--you wrote--to Molly as well as to me; rigmaroles, my dear nephew, mere absurd statements that have not a grain of truth in them, that do not hold water for an instant. You are not made for the world forsooth, nor the world for you! and if that is not flying in the face of your Creator, and wanting to know better than Providence!--And then you say, 'you cast a gloom by your mere presence.' Fiddle-de-dee! It was not much in the way of gloom that Molly brought back with her from her three days' visit to you--or if that is gloom--well, the more your presence casts of it the better--that is all I can say. Ah, but you should have seen her, poor child, after you went away in that heartless manner and you had removed yourself and your shadow, and your precious gloom--if you could have seen how unhappy she has been!"

"Good G.o.d!" exclaimed the man with a paling face, "what are you saying?"

"Only the truth, sir--Molly is breaking her heart because of your base desertion of her."

"Good G.o.d," muttered Adrian again, rose up stiffly in a sort of horrified astonishment and then sat down again and pa.s.sed his hand over his forehead like a man striving to awaken from a painful dream.

"Oh, Adrian, don't be more of a fool than you can possibly help!"

cried his relative, exasperated beyond all expression by his inarticulate distress. "You are so busy contemplating all sorts of absurdities miles away that I verily believe you cannot see an inch beyond your nose. My gracious! what is there to be so astonished at?

How did you behave to the poor innocent from the very instant she crossed your threshold? Fact is, you have been a regular gay Lothario.

Did you not"--cried Tanty, starting again upon her fine vein of metaphor--"did you not deliberately hold the cup of love to those young lips only to nip it in the bud? The girl is not a stock or a stone. You are a handsome man, Adrian, and the long and the short of it is, those who play with fire must reap as they have sown."

Tanty, who had been holding forth with the rapidity of a loose windmill in a hurricane, here found herself forced to pause and take breath; which she did, fanning herself with much energy, a triumphant consciousness of the unimpeachability of her logic written upon her heated countenance. But Adrian still stared at her with the same incredulous dismay; looking indeed as little like a gay Lothario as it was possible, even for him.

"Do you mean," he said at last, in slow broken sentences, as his mind wrestled with the strange tidings; "am I to understand that Molly, that bright beautiful creature, has been made unhappy through me? Oh, my dear Tanty," striving with a laugh, "the idea is too absurd, I am old enough to be her father, you know--what evidence can you have for a statement so distressing, so extraordinary."

"I am not quite in my dotage yet," quoth Tanty, drily; "neither am I in the habit of making unfounded a.s.sertions, nephew. I have heard what the girl has said with her own lips, I have read what she has written in her diary; she has sobbed and cried over your cruelty in these very arms--I don't know what further evidence----"

But Sir Adrian had started up again--"Molly crying, Molly crying for me--G.o.d help us all--Cecile's child, whom I would give my life to keep from trouble! Tanty, if this is true--it must be true since you say so, I hardly know myself what I am saying--then I am to blame, deeply to blame--and yet--I have not said one word to the child--did nothing...." here he paused and a deep flush overspread his face to the roots of his hair; "except indeed in the first moment of her arrival--when she came in upon me as I was lost in memories of the past--like the spirit of Cecile."

"Humph," said Tanty, pointedly, "but then you see what you took for Cecile's spirit happened to be Molly in the flesh." She fixed her sharp eyes upon her nephew, who, struck into confusion by her words, seemed for the moment unable to answer. Then, as if satisfied with the impression produced, she folded her hands over the umbrella handle and observed in more placid tones than she had yet used:

"And now we must see what is to be done."

Adrian began to pace the room in greater perturbation.

"What is to be done?" he repeated, "alas! what can be done? Tanty, you will believe me when I tell you that I should have cut off my right hand rather than brought this thing upon the child--but she is very young--the impression, thank heaven, cannot in the nature of things endure. She will meet some one worthy of her--with you, Tanty, kindest of hearts, I can safely trust her future. But that she should suffer now, and through me, that bright creature who flitted in upon my dark life, like some heaven-sent messenger--these are evil tidings. Tanty, you must take her away, you must distract her mind, you must tell her what a poor broken-down being I am, how little worthy of her sweet thoughts, and she will learn, soon learn, to forget me, to laugh at herself."

Although addressing the old lady, he spoke like a man reasoning with himself, and the words dropped from his lips as if drawn from a very well of bitterness. Tanty listened to him in silence, but the tension of her whole frame betrayed that she was only gathering her forces for another explosion.

When Adrian's voice ceased there was a moment's silence and then the storm burst; whisking herself out of her chair, the umbrella came into play once more. But though it was only to thump the table, it was evident Miss O'Donoghue would more willingly have laid it about the delinquent's shoulders.

"Adrian, are you a man at all?" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed fiercely. Then with sudden deadly composure: "So _this_ is the reparation you propose to make for the mischief you have wrought?"

"In G.o.d's name!" cried he, goaded at length into some sort of despairing anger himself, "what would you have me do?"

The answer came with the prompt.i.tude of a return shot:

"Do? why marry her, of course!"

"_Marry her!_"

There was a breathless pause. Tanty, leaning forward across the table, crimson, agitated, yet triumphant; Adrian's white face blasted with astonishment. "Marry her," he echoed at length once more, in a whisper this time. Then with a groan: "This is madness!"