“Was the bargain concluded when you left?” said Mr. Foreman.
“Very near it,” was the reply. “Why, he’s been plunging on deeper in Gillravidge’s debt every night. I say it was uncommonly merciful to think of taking the land – an obscure Scotch place, with nothing but the preserves worth looking at; but Gillravidge knows what he’s about.”
Half an hour afterwards, Mrs. Catherine re-entered the library. The obnoxious visitor was gone, and Mr. Foreman sat alone, his brow clouded with thoughtfulness. He, too, had known Archibald Sutherland’s youth, and in his father had had a friend, and the kindly bond of that little community drew its members of all ranks too closely together, to suffer the overthrow of one without regret and sympathy.
“Is it true – think you it is true?” said Mrs. Catherine.
“I can think nothing else,” said Mr. Foreman, gravely; “there is but one hope – that strange person who left the Tower just now tells me that the bargain was not completed. Mr. Ferguson’s letter, telling Strathoran of the advance you were willing to make, Mrs. Catherine, may have reached him in time to prevent this calamity.”
“I cannot hope it – I cannot hope it,” said Mrs. Catherine, vehemently. “It is a race trysted to evil. Do you not mind, George Foreman, how the last Strathoran was held down all his days, with the burdens that father and grandsire had left upon him? Do you not mind of him joining with his father to break the entail, that some of the debts might be paid thereby? and now, when he has labored all his life to leave the good land clear to his one son, must it be lost to the name and blood? George Foreman, set your face against the breaking of entails! I say it is an unrighteous thing to give one of a race the power of disinheriting the rest; to put into the hands of a youth like Archie Sutherland, fatally left to his own devices, the option of overthrowing an old and good house – I say it is unrighteous, and a shame!”
Mr. Foreman made no answer – well enough pleased as he might have been that in this particular case, the lands of Strathoran had been entailed, he yet had no idea of committing himself on the abstract principle, and Mrs. Catherine continued:
“What is he to do? what can the unhappy prodigal do, but draw the prize of the waster – want. I cannot stand between him and his righteous reward – I will do no such injustice. Where did you meet with the ne’er-do-weel that brought you the tidings, Mr. Foreman? a fit messenger no doubt, with his hairy face, and his lying tongue.” Mrs. Catherine groaned. “You are well gone to your rest, Isabel Balfour, before you saw your firstborn herding with cattle like yon!”
“I think,” said Mr. Foreman, “that you are anticipating evil which is by this time averted, Mrs. Catherine. At the very crisis of Strathoran’s broken fortunes, your seasonable assistance would come in; and, on such a temperament as his, I should fancy the sight of the precipice so near would operate powerfully. I know how it has acted on myself, who ought to have more prudence than Mr. Sutherland, if years are anything. I came here to advise you to withdraw your money, when there was such imminent danger of loss – and here I am, building my own hopes and yours on the fact of its being promised.”
Mrs. Catherine was pacing heavily through the room.
“What care I for the siller,” she exclaimed, sternly. “What is the siller to me, in comparison with the welfare of Isabel Balfour’s son? Doubtless, if all the rest is gone, there is no need for throwing away that with our eyes open; but what share in my thoughts, think you, has the miserable dirt of siller, when the fate of the lad that might have been of my own blood, is quivering in the balance? George Foreman, you are discreet and judicious, but the yellow mammon is overmuch in your mind. What is it to me that leave none after me – that am the last of my name?”
“I think we may depend on the last statement of that strange messenger – that Fitzherbert,” said Mr. Foreman, endeavoring gently to lower the excitement of his client, “that he came down to examine, and would have his report to make, before the transaction was finished. Your letter must reach Strathoran, Mrs. Catherine, before this fellow can return. Depend upon it, the immediate danger is averted. Mr. Sutherland has good sense and judgment: he must by this time have perceived the danger, and receded from it.”
Mrs. Catherine seated herself in gloomy silence.
“And if he has,” she said, after a long pause, “if he has saved himself for this moment, what then? He has sown the wind, and think you he can shun its harvest? What has he to trust to? principle, honor, good fame, the fear of God, the right regard to the judgment of his fellows which becomes every man – has he not thrown them all away? What is there then, to look to in his future, if it be not a drifting before every wind, a running in every stray path, a following of all things that have the false glitter upon them, whatsoever ill may be below? I am done with hope for the lad: there is nothing to guide him, nothing to restrain him. I must e’en take fear to my heart, and look this grief in the face.”
“He is quite young,” said Mr. Foreman; “there is abundant time and room for hope, Mrs. Catherine. I feel assured we have erred on the side of fear. A shrewd lad, like Strathoran, surely could not be fascinated to his destruction, in society which can tolerate that man, Fitzherbert. Depend upon it, we have overrated the dangers; and that, by this time, Mr. Sutherland has taken warning, and withdrawn. A pretty counsellor I am, after all! – I should have sent Walter – coming here to advise you to withdraw your money, and now felicitating myself that it is given.”
Mrs. Catherine became more cheerful at last, before the kind-hearted Portoran writer took his departure, and admitted the chances in favor of his hopes. Archibald had been shrewd and sensible, and could not surely be so ruinously involved as to put his whole estate in peril; nevertheless, dreary visions, such as he had read in books of modern travel, of haggard gamesters risking their all upon a cast – staking wealth, and hope, and honor, in the desperate game, and marking its loss with the ghastly memento of blood, the hopeless death of the suicide – rose darkly before the lawyer’s eyes, as he rode home – home, to pleasant competence and unobtrusive refinement, and to a family of sound principle and cultivated intellect, in whose healthful upbringing and clear atmosphere fictitious excitement had no share.
And Mrs. Catherine went up stairs, gravely, to her cheerful inner drawing-room, and looking on the youthful faces there – the peaceful household looks, suggesting anything rather than misery and crime – forgot her terrors for Isabel Balfour’s son, warm as her interest in him was.
Haggard, desolate, hopeless, with no roof which he could justly call his own to shelter him, and with a dreary blank before him, where the teeming dreams of a bright future were wont to be, Archibald Sutherland stood that night, in the strange alien country, a ruined man.
CHAPTER VI
TIRESOME as the manifold preparations for a feast may be, there is something especially dreary and full of discomfort in the bustle of setting to rights, which comes after: dismantled rooms undergoing a thorough purification, before they can once more settle down into their every day look and aspect; servants, in a chaos and frenzy of orderliness, turning the house into a Babel – a kitchen saturnalia; mistresses toiling in vain to have the work concluded bit by bit; and all this without the stimulant of expected pleasure to make it bearable.
Mrs. Ross rather liked such an overturn, and had it commenced gaily in the first relief of Mr. Ambler’s departure; so that when Lewis and Anne returned from the Tower, there was no place of refuge for them, save in the small library, which Lewis had already appropriated as his own peculiar place of retirement.
Mrs. Ross had long taken a malicious pleasure in excluding Anne from all share in the economies of Merkland, in which, indeed, her own active habits and managing disposition could brook no divided empire; and it was not, therefore any super refinement of feeling which called Anne Ross out after her daily task was over, into the silent evening air, upon the quiet side of Oran. It is true that there were delicate tones of harmony there, which few ears could appreciate as well as her own; but the first yearning of these human spirits of ours, is for the sympathy of other human spirits, and it is