Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance

"No, I tell you!" cried Lord Mergwain, opening his eyes and sitting up. "When I'm cold I'll go to—. If you attempt to leave the room, I'll send a bullet after you.—God have mercy! what's that at my feet?"

"It is only my son," replied the laird gently. "We have been with you all night—since you were taken ill, that is."

"When was that? What do you mean by that?" he said, looking up sharply, with a face of more intelligence than he had yet shown.

"Your lordship had some sort of fit in the night, and if you do not compose yourself, I dread a return of it."

"You well may, if I stop here," he returned—then, after a pause,

"Did I talk?" he asked.

"Yes, my lord—a good deal."

"What did I say?"

"Nothing I could understand, my lord."

"And you did your best, I don't doubt!" rejoined his lordship with a sneer. "But you know nothing is to be made of what a man says in a fit."

"I have told your lordship I heard nothing."

"No matter; I don't sleep another night under your roof."

"That will be as it may, my lord."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at the weather, my lord.—Cosmo!"

The boy was still asleep, but at the sound of his name from his father's lips, he started at once to his feet.

"Go and wake Grizzie," said the laird, "and tell her to get breakfast ready as fast as she can. Then bring some peat for the fire, and some hot water for his lordship."

Cosmo ran to obey. Grizzie had been up for more than an hour, and was going about with the look of one absorbed in a tale of magic and devilry. Her mouth was pursed up close, as if worlds should not make her speak, but her eyes were wide and flashing, and now and then she would nod her head, as for the Q. E. D. to some unheard argument. Whatever Cosmo required, she attended to at once, but not one solitary word did she utter.

He went back with the fuel, and they made up the fire. Lord Mergwain was again lying back exhausted in his chair, with his eyes closed.

"Why don't you give me my brandy—do you hear?" all at once he cried. "—Oh, I thought it was my own rascal! Get me some brandy, will you?"

"There is none in the house, my lord," said his host.

"What a miserable sort of public to keep! No brandy!"

"My lord, you are at Castle Warlock—not so good a place for your lordship's needs."

"Oh, that's it, yes! I remember! I knew your father, or your grandfather, or your grandson, or somebody—the more's my curse! Out of this I must be gone, and that at once! Tell them to put the horses to. Little I thought when I left Cairntod where I was going to find myself! I would rather be in—and have done with it! Lord! Lord! to think of a trifle like that not being forgotten yet! Are there no doors out? Give me brandy, I say. There's some in my pocket somewhere. Look you! I don't know what coat I had on yesterday! or where it is!"

He threw himself back in his chair. The laird set about looking if he had brought the brandy of which he spoke; it might be well to let him have some. Not finding it, he would have gone to search the outer garments his lordship had put off in the kitchen; but he burst out afresh:

"I tell you—and confound you, I say that you have to be told twice—I will not be left alone with that child! He's as good as nobody! What could HE do if—" Here he left the sentence unfinished.

"Very well, my lord," responded the laird, "I will not leave you. Cosmo shall go and look for the brandy-flask in your lordship's greatcoat."

"Yes, yes, good boy! you go and look for it. You're all Cosmos, are you? Will the line never come to an end! A cursed line for me—if it shouldn't be a rope-line! But I had the best of the game after all!—though I did lose my two rings. Confounded old cheating son of a porpus! It was doing the world a good turn, and Glenwarlock a better to—Look you! what are you listening there for!—Ha! ha! ha! I say, now—would you hang a man, laird—I mean, when you could get no good out of it—not a ha'p'orth for yourself or your family?"

"I've never had occasion to consider the question," answered the laird.

"Ho! ho! haven't you? Let me tell you it's quite time you considered it. It's no joke when a man has to decide without time to think. He's pretty sure to decide wrong."

"That depends, I should think, my lord, on the way in which he has been in the habit of deciding."

"Come now! none of your Scotch sermons to me! You Scotch always were a set a down-brown hypocrites! Confound the whole nation!"

"To judge by your last speech, my lord,—"

"Oh, by my last speech, eh? By my dying declaration? Then I tell you 'tis fairer to judge a man by anything sooner than his speech. That only serves to hide what he's thinking. I wish I might be judged by mine, though, and not by my deeds. I've done a good many things in my time I would rather forget, now age has clawed me in his clutch. So have you; so has everybody. I don't see why I should fare worse than the rest."

Here Cosmo returned with the brandy-flask, which he had found in his greatcoat. His lordship stretched out both hands to it, more eagerly even than when he welcomed the cob-webbed magnum of claret—hands trembling with feebleness and hunger for strength. Heedless of his host's offer of water and a glass, he put it to his mouth, and swallowed three great gulps hurriedly. Then he breathed a deep breath, seemed to say with Macbeth, "Ourselves again!" drew himself up in a chair, and glanced around him with a look of gathering arrogance. A kind of truculent question was in his eyes—as much as to say, "Now then, what do you make of it all? What's your candid notion about me and my extraordinary behaviour?" After a moment's silence,—

"What puzzles me is this," he said, "how the deuce I came, of all places, to come just here! I don't believe, in all my wicked life, I ever made such a fool of myself before—and I've made many a fool of myself too!"

Receiving no answer, he took another pull at his flask. The laird stood a little behind and watched him, harking back upon old stories, putting this and that together, and resolving to have a talk with old Grannie.

A minute or two more, and his lordship got up, and proceeded to wash his face and hands, ordering Cosmo about after the things he wanted, as if he had been his valet.

"Richard's himself again!" he said in a would-be jaunty voice, the moment he had finished his toilet, and looked in a crow-cocky kind of a way at the laird. But the latter thought he saw trouble still underneath the look.

"Now, then, Mr. Warlock, where's this breakfast of yours?" he said.

"For that, my lord," replied the laird, "I must beg you to come to the kitchen. The dining-room in this weather would freeze the very marrow of your bones."

"And look you! it don't want freezing," said his lordship, with a shudder. "The kitchen to be sure!—I don't desire a better place. I'll be hanged if I enter this room again!" he muttered to himself—not too low to be heard. "My tastes are quite as simple as yours, Mr. Warlock, though I have not had the same opportunity of indulging them."

He seemed rapidly returning to the semblance of what he would have called a gentleman.

He rose, and the laird led the way. Lord Mergwain followed; and Cosmo, coming immediately behind, heard him muttering to himself all down the stairs: "Mere confounded nonsense! Nothing whatever but the drink!—I must say I prefer the day-light after all.—Yes! that's the drawing-room.—What's done's done—and more than done, for it can't be done again!"

It was a nipping and an eager air into which they stepped from the great door. The storm had ceased, but the snow lay much deeper, and all the world seemed folded in a lucent death, of which the white mounds were the graves. All the morning it had been snowing busily, for no footsteps were between the two doors but those of Cosmo.

When they reached the kitchen, there was a grand fire on the hearth, and a great pot on the fire, in which the porridge Grizzie had just made was swelling in huge bubbles that burst in sighs. Old Grizzie was bright as the new day, bustling and deedy. Her sense of the awful was nowise to be measured by the degree of her dread: she believed and did not fear—much. She had an instinctive consciousness that a woman ought to be, and might be, and was a match for the devil.

"I am sorry we have no coffee for your lordship," said the laird, "To tell the truth, we seldom take anything more than our country's porridge. I hope you can take tea? Our Grizzie's scons are good, with plenty of butter."

His lordship had in the meantime taken another pull at the brandy-flask, and was growing more and more polite.

"The man would be hard to please," he said, "who would not be enticed to eat by such a display of good victuals. Tea for me, before everything!—How am I to pretend to swallow the stuff?" he murmured, rather than muttered, to himself.—"But," he went on aloud, "didn't that cheating rascal leave you—"

He stopped abruptly, and the laird saw his eyes fixed upon something on the table, and following their look, saw it was a certain pepper-pot, of odd device—a piece of old china, in the shape of a clumsily made horse, with holes between the ears for the issue of the pepper.

"I see, my lord," he said, "you are amused with the pepper-pot. It is a curious utensil, is it not? It has been in the house a long time—longer than anybody knows. Which of my great-grandmothers let it take her fancy, it is impossible to say; but I suppose the reason for its purchase, if not its manufacture, was, that a horse passant has been the crest of our family from time immemorial."

"Curse the crest, and the horse too!" said his lordship.

The laird started. His guest had for the last few minutes been behaving so much like a civilized being, that he was not prepared for such a sudden relapse into barbarity. But the entrance of Lady Joan, looking radiant, diverted the current of things.

The fact was, that, like not a few old people, Lord Mergwain had fallen into such a habit of speaking in his worse moods without the least restraint, that in his better moods, which were indeed only good by comparison, he spoke in the same way, without being aware of it, and of himself seldom discovering that he had spoken.

The rest of the breakfast passed in peace. The visitors had tea, oatcake, and scons, with fresh butter and jam; and Lady Joan, for all the frost and snow, had yet a new-laid egg—the only one; while the laird and Cosmo ate their porridge and milk—the latter very scanty at this season of the year, and tasting not a little of turnip—and Grizzie, seated on a stool at some distance from the table, took her porridge with treacle. Mrs. Warlock had not yet left her room.

When the meal was over, Lord Mergwain turned to his host, and said,

"Will you oblige me, Mr. Warlock, by sending orders to my coachman to have the horses put to as quickly as possible: we must not trespass more on your hospitality.—Confound me if I stop an hour longer in this hole of a place, though it be daylight!"

"Papa!" cried Lady Joan.

His lordship understood, looked a little confused, and with much readiness sought to put the best face on his blunder.

"Pardon me, Mr. Warlock," he said; "I have always had a bad habit of speech, and now that I am an old man, I don't improve on it."

"Don't mention it, my lord," returned the laird. "I will go and see about the carriage; but I am more than doubtful."

He left the kitchen, and Cosmo followed him. Lord Mergwain turned to his daughter and said,

"What does the man mean? I tell you, Joan, I am going at once. So don't you side with him if he wants us to stop. He may have his reasons. I knew this confounded place before you were born, and I hate it."

"Very good, papa!" replied Lady Joan, with a slight curl of her lip. "I don't see why you should fancy I should like to stop."

They had spoken aloud, regardless of the presence of Grizzie.

"May it be lang afore ye're in a waun an' a warmer place, my lord an' my lady," said the old woman, with the greatest politeness of manner she knew how to assume. When people were rude, she thought she had a right to be rude in return. But they took no more notice than if they had not heard.

CHAPTER XVI.

THROUGH THE DAY

It was a glorious morning. The wind had fallen quite, and the sun was shining as if he would say, "Keep up your hearts; I am up here still. I have not forgotten you. By and by you shall see more of me." But Nature lay dead, with a great white sheet cast over face and form. Not dead?—Just as much dead as ever was man, save for the inner death with which he kills himself, and which she cannot die. It is only to the eyes of his neighbours that the just man dies: to himself, and to those on the other side, he does not die, but is born instead: "He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." But the poor old lord felt the approaching dank and cold of the sepulchre as the end of all things to him—if indeed he would be permitted to lie there, and not have to get up and go to worse quarters still.

"I am sorry to have to tell you, my lord," said the laird, re-entering, "that both our roads and your horses are in such a state that it is impossible you should proceed to-day."

His guest turned white through all the discoloration of his countenance. His very soul grew too white to swear. He stood silent, his pendulous under lip trembling.

"Though the wind fell last night," resumed the laird, "the snow came on again before the morning, and it seems impossible you should get through. To attempt it would be to run no small risk of your lives."

"Joan," said Lord Mergwain, "go and tell the rascal to put the horses to."

Lady Joan rose at once, took her shawl, put it over her head, and went. Cosmo ran to open the door for her. The laird looked on, and said not a word: the headstrong old man would find the thing could not be done!

"Will you come and find the coachman for me, Cosmo?" said Lady Joan when they reached the door—with a flash of her white teeth and her dark eyes that bewitched the boy. Then first, in the morning light, and the brilliance of the snow-glare, he saw that she was beautiful. When the shadows were dark about her, the darkness of her complexion obscured itself; against the white sheen she stood out darkly radiant. Specially he noted the long eyelashes that made a softening twilight round the low horizon-like luminousness of her eyes.

Through the deep snow between the kitchen and the stable, were none but his father's footsteps. He cast a glance at her small feet, daintily shod in little more than sandals: she could not put down one of them anywhere without sinking beyond her ankle!

"My lady," he said, "you'll get your feet soaking wet! They're so small, they'll just dibble the snow! Please ask your papa if I mayn't go and give his message. It will do just as well."

"I must go myself," she answered. "Sometimes he will trust nobody but me."

"Stop then a moment," said Cosmo. "Just come to the drawing-room. I won't keep you more than two minutes. The path there, you see, is pretty well trodden."

He led the way, and she followed.

The fire was alight, and burning well; for Grizzie, foreseeing how it must be, and determined she would not have strangers in the kitchen all day, had lighted it early. Lady Joan walked straight to it, and dropped, with a little shiver, into a chair beside it. To Cosmo the sight of the blaze brought a strange delight, like the discover of a new loveliness in an old friend. To Lady Joan the room looked old-fashioned dreariness itself, to Cosmo an ancient marvel, ever fresh.

He left her, and ran to his own room, whence presently he returned with a pair of thick woollen stockings, knitted in green and red by the hands of his grandmother. These he carried to Lady Joan, where she sat on the low chair, and kneeling before her, began, without apology or explanation, to draw one of them over the dainty foot placed on the top of the other in front of the fire. She gave a little start, and half withdrew her foot; then looking down at the kneeling figure of service before her, recognized at once the utterly honest and self-forgetful earnestness of the boy, and submitted. Carefully he drew the stockings on, and she neither opposed nor assisted him. When he had done, he looked up in her face with an expression that seemed to say—"There now! can't I do it properly?" but did not speak. She thanked him, rose, and went out, and Cosmo conducted her to the stable, where he heard the coachman, as she called him, not much better than a stable-boy, whistling. She gave him her father's order. . .

The lad stared with open mouth, and pointed to one of the stalls. There stood an utterly wretched horse, swathed in a cloth, with his head hanging down, heedless of the food before him. It was clear no hope lay there. She turned and looked at Cosmo.

"The better for us, my lady!" replied Cosmo to her look; "we shall have your beautiful eyes the longer! They were lost in the dark last night, because they are made out of it, but now we see them, we don't want to part with them."

She looked at him and smiled, saying to herself the boy would be dangerous by and by, and together they went back to the kitchen, where since they left not a word had been spoken. Grizzie was removing the breakfast things; Lord Mergwain was seated by the fire, staring into it; and the laird had got his Journal of George Fox, and was reading diligently: when nothing was to be done, the deeper mind of the laird grew immediately active.

When Lady Joan entered, her father sat up straight in his chair: he expected opposition!

"One of the horses, my lord, is quite unfit," she said.

"Then, by my soul! we'll start with the other," he replied, in a tone that sounded defiance to heaven or earth or whatever said him nay.

"As your lordship pleases," returned Joan.

"My lord," said the laird, lowering his book to his knee, "if I thought four cart-horses would pull you through to Howglen to-night, you should have them; but you would simply stick fast, horses and all, in the snow-wreaths."

The old man uttered an exclamation with an awful solemnity, and said no more, but collapsed, and sat huddled up, staring into the fire.

"You must just make the best of your quarters here; they are entirely at your service, my lord," said the laird. "We shall not starve. There are sheep on the place, pigs and poultry, and plenty of oatmeal, though very little flour. There is milk too—and a little wine, and I think we shall do well enough."

Lord Mergwain made no answer, but in his silence seemed to be making up his mind to the ineludible.

"Have you any more of that claret?" he asked.

"Not much, I am sorry to say," answered the laird, "but it is your lordship's while it lasts."

"If this lasts, I shall drink your cellar dry," rejoined his lordship with a feeble grin. "I may as well make a clean breast of it. From my childhood I have never known what it was not to be thirsty. I believe thirst to be the one unfailing birth-mark of the family. I was what the methodists call a drunkard before I was born. My father died of drink. So did my grandfather. You must have some pity on me, if I should want more than seems reasonable. The only faculty ever cultivated in our strain was drinking, and I am sorry to say it has not been brought to perfection yet. Perfection is to get drunk and never know it; but I have bad dreams, sir! I have bad dreams! And the worst of it is, if once I have a bad dream, I am sure to have it again; and if it come first in a strange place, it will come every night until I leave that place. I had a very bad one last night, as you know. I grant it came because I drank too much yesterday, but that won't keep it from coming again to-night."

He started to his feet, the muscles of his face working frightfully.

"Send for your horses, Mr. Warlock," he cried. "Have them put to at once. Four of them, you said. At once—at once! Out of this I must go. If it be to—itself, go I must and will."

"My lord," said the laird, "I cannot send you from my house in this weather. As my guest, I am bound to do my best for you; especially as I understand the country, and you do not. I said you should have my horses if I thought they could take you through, but I do not think it. Besides, the change, in my judgment, is a deceitful one, and this night may be worse than the last. Poor as your accommodation is, it is better than the open road between this and Howglen; though, doubtless, before to-morrow morning you would be snug in the heart of a snow—wreath."

"Look here, sir," said Lord Mergwain, and rising, he went up to the laird, and laid his hand on his shoulder; "if I stop, will you give me another room, and promise to share it with me to-night? I am aware it is an odd request to make, but, as I tell you, we have been drinking for generations, and my nerves are the worse for it. It's rather hard that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children! Before God, I have enough to do with my own, let alone my fathers'! Every one should bear his own burden. I can't bear mine. If I could, it's not much my fathers' would trouble me!"

"My lord, I will do anything I can for you—anything but consent to your leaving Castle Warlock to-day."

"You will spend the night with me then?"

"I will."

"But not in that room, you know."

"Anywhere you please in the house, my lord, except my mother's room."

"Then I'll stop.—Joan, you may amuse yourself; we are not going till to-morrow."

The laird smiled; he could not flatter himself with the hope of so speedy a departure. Joan turned to Cosmo.

"Will you take me about the place?" she said.

"If you mean in-doors," interposed the laird. "It is a curious old house, and might interest you a little."

"I should like nothing better. May I go with Cosmo?"

"Certainly: he will be delighted to attend your ladyship.—Here are the keys of the cabinets in the drawing-room, Cosmo. Her ladyship may like to look at some of their contents."

"I hardly know enough about them," returned Cosmo. "Won't you come yourself, father, and show them to us?"

It was the first time the boy used the appellation.

"If they are not worth looking at in themselves, the facts about them cannot be of much consequence, my boy," answered the laird.

He was unwilling to leave Lord Mergwain. Lady Joan and Cosmo went without him.

"Perhaps we may follow you by and by," said the laird.

"Is the place very old, Cosmo?" asked Lady Joan on their way.

"Nobody knows how old the oldest part of it is," answered Cosmo, "though dates are assigned to the most of what you will see to-day. But you must ask my father; I do not know much of the history of it. I know the place itself, though, as well as he does. I fancy I know nearly every visible stone of it."

"You are very fond of it, then?"

"There never could be any place like it to me, my lady. I know it is not very beautiful, but I love it none the less for that. I sometimes think I love it the more for its ruggedness—ugliness, if you please to call it so. If my mother had not been beautiful, I should love her all the same."—"and think there wasn't anybody like her," he was going to add, but checked himself, remembering that of course there was not.

Arrived in the drawing-room, whither Cosmo led her first, Lady Joan took her former place by the fire, and sat staring into it. She did not know what to make of what she saw and heard. How COULD people be happy, she thought, in such a dreary, cold, wretched country, with such poverty-stricken home-surroundings, and nothing to amuse them from one week's end to another? Yet they seemed to be happy to a degree she knew nothing of! For alas, her home was far from a blessed one; and as she had no fountain open in herself, but looked entirely to foreign supply for her life-necessities, and as such never can be so supplied, her life was not a flourishing one.

There are souls innumerable in the world, as dry as the Sahara desert—souls which, when they look most gay and summer-like, are only flaunting the flowers gathered from other people's gardens, stuck without roots into their own unproducing soil. Oh, the dreariness, the sandy sadness of such poor arid souls! They are hungry, and eat husks; they are thirsty, and drink hot wine; their sleep is a stupor, and their life, if not an unrest, then a yielded decay. Only when praised or admired do they feel as if they lived! But Joan was not yet of such. She had had too much discomfort to have entered yet into their number. There was water not yet far from the surface of her consciousness.