not known to any of them; the sound of the broken words, loud, as if
close to their ears, gradually becoming intelligible, yet without any
meaning they could understand, drove them wild with terror. “What is
it?” they all cried. Was it some madman who had broken into the house?
Lily cast a glance--the mother’s first idea--to see that all was safe
with the child, and then hastened through the empty drawing-room, where
she expected to find Ronald. The door was open, and through the doorway
there appeared a tragic, awful figure, a woman with her hands sometimes
lifted to her head, sometimes wildly flung into the air, her voice
growing hoarser, giving forth in terrible succession those broken
sentences, in wild prayer, exhortation, invective, it was impossible to
say which. Some locks of her hair, disturbed by the motion of her hands,
hung loose on her forehead, her eyes were wildly enlarged and staring,
her lips loose and swollen with the torrent of passionate sound. For a
moment Lily stood fixed, terrified, thinking it a stranger, some one she
had never seen before, and the first words were like those of a prayer.

“Lord hae mercy! Lord hae mercy! Swear ye didna lay a finger on him, no
a finger! Swear ye didna touch him, man! Oh, the bonnie lad! oh, the
bonnie lad!” Then a shriek again, as from something she saw. “Tak’ him
up gently, tak’ him softly! his head, his head! tak’ care of his head!
Oh, the bonnie lad, the bonnie lad! Lord hae mercy, mercy! Say ye didna
lay a finger on him! Swear ye didna touch him! Oh, his head, his head,
it’s his head! Oh, men, lift him like a bairn! Lord hae mercy, hae
mercy! Say ye didna lay a finger on him! Oh, the bonnie lad, the bonnie
lad!” The wild figure clasped its hands, watching intently something
going on below, which now became audible to the terrified watchers
also--sounds of men’s footsteps, of hurried shuffling and struggling,
audible through the broken shrieks and outcries of the woman at the top
of the stairs.

“Who is it?” cried Lily, breathless with terror, falling back upon her
attendants behind her.

“Katrin, Katrin, Katrin!” cried Beenie, carried away by the wild
contagion of the moment; “she’s gone mad, she’s gone out of her senses!
Mem, come back to your ain room; come back, this is nae place for you!”

Katrin! was it Katrin, this wild figure? Lily darted out and caught her
by the arm.

“Katrin! what has happened? Is it you that have been crying so? Katrin,
whatever it is, compose yourself. Come and tell me what has happened!
Is it Dougal? What is it? We will do every thing, every thing that is
possible.”

Katrin turned her changed countenance upon her mistress; her swollen
lips hanging apart ceased their utterance with a gasp. She looked wildly
down the stairs, then, putting her hands upon Lily’s shoulders, pushed
her back into the room, signing to Robina behind. “Keep her away, keep
her----” she seemed to them to say, making wild motions with her hands
to the rooms beyond. Her words were too indistinct to be understood, but
her gestures were clear enough.

“Oh, mem,” cried Beenie, “it will be something that’s no for your eyes!
For mercy’s sake, bide here and let me gang and see!”

“Whatever has happened, it is for me to see to it,” said Lily. And then,
disengaging herself from them, she said, for the first time very gravely
and calmly: “My husband must have gone out. Go and look for him.
Whatever has happened, it is he who ought to be here.”

She got down stairs in time to see the stumbling, staggering figures of
the men carrying him into the library. But it was not till some time
afterward that Lily had any suspicion what it was. She thought it was
Dougal, who had met with some dreadful accident. She had the calmness in
this belief to send off at once for a doctor in two different
directions; and, having been begged by her uncle’s valet not to go into
the room till the doctor came, obeyed him without alarm, and went out to
the door to look for Ronald. It was strange he should have gone out at
this moment, but how could he know that any thing would be wanted to
make his presence indispensable? Most likely he was angry with her for
keeping him waiting, for talking to Helen Blythe when there were things
so much more important in hand. She went out to the door to look for
him, not without a sense that to have him to refer to in such an
emergency was something good, nor without the thought that it would
please him to see her looking out for him over the moor.

Ronald never spoke again. If his death was not instantaneous in point of
fact, it was so virtually, for he never recovered consciousness. He had
fallen with great force down the stairs from the worn upper step, which
had failed his foot as he made that recoil backward from Dougal’s
threatening advance--the step of which he had so often spoken in half
derision, half seriousness, as a danger for any old man. Neither he nor
any one else could have supposed it was a danger for Ronald, so young,
so full of energy and strength. And many were the reflections, it need
not be said, upon the vicissitudes of life and the fate of the young
man, just after long waiting come into possession of all that was best
in life--fortune and happiness, and all the rest. The story was told all
over the country, from one house to another, and in Edinburgh, where he
was so well known. To have waited so long for the happiness of his life
and then not to enjoy it for a week, to be seized by those grim fangs of
fate in the moment of his victory, in the first hour of his joy! The
papers were not as bold in those days as now. The fashion of
personalities had not come in unless when something very scandalous,
concealed under initials, was to be had. But there was nothing
scandalous in Ronald Lumsden’s story.

In the enquiry that followed there was at first an attempt to suggest
that Dougal, who was shown to have been always in opposition to him, and
sometimes to have uttered half threats of what he would do if he could
get his hands on that birky from Edinburgh, was instrumental in causing
his death. And poor Katrin, changed into an old woman, with gray hair
that would not be kept in order under her white cap, and lips that hung
apart and could scarcely utter a word clearly, was examined before the
procurator, especially as to what she meant by the words which she had
been heard by all in the house to repeat as she stood screaming at the
head of the stairs: “Swear you never lifted a finger upon him!” Were
these directions she was giving to her husband in case of any future
investigation? or was she adjuring him to satisfy her, to let her know
the truth? But Katrin was in no condition to explain to any one, much
less to the procurator in his court, what she had meant. But there was
no proof against Dougal, and every evidence of truth in his story; and
any doubt that might subsist in the minds of persons apt to doubt every
thing, and to believe the worst in every case, died away into silence
after a while. It is possible that the possibility harmed him, though,
as he retained his place and trust in Dalrugas, even that was of no
great consequence; but Katrin never was, as the country folk said, “her
own woman” again. She never could get out of her eyes the horror of that
sudden fall backward, the sound against the stone wall, on the stone
steps. In the middle of the night, years after, she would wake the
house, calling upon her husband, with pathetic cries, to swear he never
laid a finger on him. This made their lives miserable, though they did
not deserve it; for Katrin knew at the bottom of her heart, as Dougal
knew--but having said it once, would not repeat--that he laid no finger
on Ronald, nor ever, save in the emptiest of words, meant him any harm.

Lily was lost for a time in a horror and grief of which compunction was
the sharpest part. Her heart-recoil from her husband, her sense of the
impossibility of life by his side, her revulsion against him,
overwhelmed her now more bitterly, more terribly, than the poignant
recollections of happiness past which overwhelm many mourners. The only
thing that gave her a little comfort in those heavy depths was the
remembrance of the moment when, all unknowing that he could never again
come to her, she had gone out to look for Ronald over the moor. There
might have been comfort to her after a while in that moor, which had
been the confidant of so many of her thoughts of him; but to go up and
down, in all the common uses of life, the stairs upon which he died was
impossible. She felt a compunction the more to leave the scene of all
the happier days, the broken life which yet was often so sweet, which
had been the beginning of all. It seemed almost an offence against him
to leave a place so connected with his image, but still it was
impossible to remain. There was a little mark upon the wall which made
them all shudder. And Lily was terrified when her baby was carried up or
down those stairs: the surest foot might stumble where he had stumbled,
and it is not true that the catastrophes of life do not repeat
themselves. Life is all a series of repetitions; and why not that as
well as a more common thing?

It was this above all things else that made her leave the house of her
fathers, the place where her tragedy had been played out, from its
heedless beginning to its dreadful, unthought-of end. It was not so
common then as now for the wrecked persons of existence to betake
themselves over the world to the places where the sun shines brightest
and the skies are most blue; but still, when the wars were all well
over, it was done by many, and the young widow, with her beautiful
child, and her two women attendants, was met with by many people who
knew, or were told by those who knew, her strange story and pitied her
with all their hearts. They pitied her for other sufferings than those
which were really hers. Those that were attributed to her were common
enough and belong to the course of nature; the others were different,
but perhaps not less true. But it cannot be denied either that as there
was a certain relief even in the first shock of Lily’s grief, a sense of
deliverance from difficulties beyond her power to solve, so there was a
rising of her heart from its oppression, a rebound of nature and life
not too long delayed. Her child made every thing easy to her, and made,
all the more for coming back to her so suddenly, a new beginning of
life. And that life was not unhappy, and had many interests in it
notwithstanding the fiery ordeal with which it began.

Helen Blythe came back to Kinloch-Rugas within the year, bringing her
husband with her. He was not, perhaps, reformed and made a new man of,
as he vowed he would be in her hands. Perhaps, except in moments of
exaltation, she had not expected that. But she did what she had soberly
declared to be the mission of many women--she “pulled him through.” They
settled upon her little property and farmed it more or less well, more
or less ill, according as Alick could be kept “steady,” and Helen’s
patience. Two children came, both more or less pathetically careful,
from their birth, of their father; and the household, though it bore a
checkered existence, was happy on the whole. When Helen saw the Manse
under the chill celibate rule of the new minister, she was very sorry
for him, but entertained no regrets; and when, later in life, he
married, the preciseness of the new establishment moved her to many a
quiet laugh, and the private conviction, never broken, that, in her own
troubled existence, always at full strain, with her “wild” Alick but
partially reformed, and the many roughnesses of the farmer’s life, her
ambitions for her boy, and her comfort in her girl, she was better off
than in her old sphere. She did not make her husband perfect, but she
“pulled him through.” Perhaps, had she taken the reins of that wild
spirit into her hands at first, she might have made him all that could
have been wished; but as it was she gave him a possible life, a
standing-ground when he had been sinking in the waves, a habitation and
a name.

Lily came back to the North to establish herself in a house more modern
and comfortable, and less heavy with associations, than Dalrugas, some
years after these events, and there was much friendship between her and
the old minister’s daughter, who had been so closely woven with the most
critical moments of her life. They were different in every possible
respect, but above all in their view of existence. Helen had her serene
faith in her own influence and power to shape the other lives which she
felt to be in her charge, to support her always. But to Lily there
seemed no power in herself to affect others at all. She, so much more
vivacious, stronger, to all appearance of higher intelligence, had been
helpless in her own existence, able for no potent action, swept by the
movements of others into one fated path, loved, yet incapable of
influencing any who loved her. She was now a great deal better off, her
life a great deal brighter, with all manner of good things within her
reach, than Helen, on her little bit of land, pushing her rough husband,
with as few detours as possible, along the path of life, and smiling
over her hard task. Lily was a wealthy woman, with a delightful boy, and
all those openings of new hope and interest before her in him which give
a woman perhaps a more vivid happiness than any thing strictly her own.
But the one mother trembled a little, while the other looked forward
serenely to an unbroken tranquil course of college prizes and bursaries,
and at the end a good manse, and perhaps a popular position for her son.
What should Lily have for hers? She had much greater things to hope for.
Would it be hers to stand vaguely in the way of Fate, to put out
ineffectual hands, to feel the other currents of life as before sweep
her away? Or could she ever stand smiling, like simple Helen, holding
the helm, directing the course, conscious of power to defeat all harm
and guide toward all good? But that only the course of the years could
show.

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FOOTNOTES:

 [A] There is a scheme in consideration now, I believe, to restore that
 noble street out of its degradation to something like the stateliness
 of old, through the patriotic exertions of Professor Geddes.

End of Project Gutenberg's Sir Robert's Fortune, by Margaret Oliphant