CHAPTER III.

       Table of Contents

      That night dispersed illusions from the mind of John Erskine which it had taken all his life to set up. He discovered in some degree what his real position was, and that it was not a great one. He got rid of many of his high notions as he walked about the pleasant, comfortable, but somewhat dingy old house, which no effort of the imagination could make into a great house. He made acquaintance with the household. Mrs. Rolls the cook, who curtseyed and cried for pleasure at the sight of him, and two smiling, fair-haired young women, and old Andrew the gardener—a quite sufficient household for the place, he felt, but very different from the army of servants, all so noiseless, punctilious, carefully drilled, whom he had seen at country-houses, with which he had fondly hoped his own might bear comparison. What a fool he had been! These good honest folk have little air of being servants at all. Their respect was far less than their interest in him; and their questions were more like those of poor relatives than hired attendants. "I hope your mammaw is well, Mr. John," Bauby the cook had said. "Let the master alone with your Mr. Johns," Rolls had interrupted; "he's come to man's estate, and you must learn to be more respectful. The women, sir, are all alike; you can never look for much sense from them." "Maybe you're right, Tammas," said Bauby; "but for all that I cannot help saying that its an awfu' pleasure to see Mr. John, that was but that height when I saw him last, come home a braw gentleman like what I mind his father." John could do nothing but stand smiling between them, hearing himself thus discussed. They made it very clear that he had come home where he would be taken ample care of—but how different it was from his thoughts! He thought of the manor-house at Milton Magna, and laughed and blushed at the ridiculous comparisons he had once made. It was a keen sort of self-ridicule, sharp and painful. He did not like to think what a fool he had been. Now he came to think of it, he had quite well remembered Dalrulzian. It was not his youthful imagination that was to blame, but a hundred little self-deceits, and all the things that he had been in the habit of hearing about his own importance and his Scotch property. His mother had done more than any one else to deceive him, he thought; and then he said to himself, "Poor mother!" wondering if, perhaps, her little romance was all involved in Dalrulzian, and if it was a sacred place to her. To think that the Kingsford household was prose, but the early life in which she had been Harry Erskine's wife and little John's mother, the poetry of her existence, was pleasant to her son, who was fond of his mother, though she was not clever, nor even very sensible. John thought, with a blush, of the people whom he had invited to Dalrulzian under that extraordinary mistake—some of his friends at college, young fellows who were accustomed to houses full of company and stables full of horses. There was nothing in the stables at Dalrulzian but the hired horse which had been provided by Rolls in a hired dogcart to bring him up from the station; and as he looked round upon the room in which he sat after dinner, and which was quite comfortable and highly respectable, though neither dignified nor handsome, poor John burst into a laugh, in which there was more pain than amusement. He seemed to himself to be stranded on a desert shore. What should he do with himself, especially during the long summer, when there could be no hunting, no shooting—the summer which he had determined to occupy, with a fine sense of duty, in making acquaintance with his house and his surroundings, and in learning all his duties as a country gentleman and person of importance? This thought was so poignant, that it actually touched his eyelids with a sense of moisture. He laughed—but he could have cried. There would turn out, he supposed, to be about three farms on this estate of his; and Scotch farmers were very different people from the small farmers of the South. To talk about his tenants would be absurd. Three pragmatical Scotchmen, much better informed in all practical matters at least than himself, and looking down upon him as an inexperienced young man. What a fool he had been! If he had come down in August for the shooting—if there was any shooting—and let his friends understand that it was a mere shooting-box—a "little place in Scotland," such as they hired when they came to the moors—all would have been well. But he had used no disparaging adjectives in speaking of Dalrulzian. He had called it "my place" boldly, and had believed it to be a kind of old castle—something that probably had been capable of defence in its day. Good heavens! what a fool he had been!

      He had thought he would be glad to get to bed, and felt pleased that he was somewhat tired with his journey; but he found that, on the contrary, the night flew by amidst these thoughts—fathomless night, slow and dark and noiseless. Rolls had made repeated attempts to draw him into conversation in what that worthy called the fore-night; but by ten o'clock or so, the house was as still as death, not a sound anywhere, and the hours passed over him while he sat and thought. A little fire crackled and burned in the grate, with little pétillements and bursts of flame. There were a good many books on the shelves; that was always something: and Mrs. Rolls had given him an excellent dinner, which he ought to have considered also as a very great alleviation of the situation. John scarcely knew what hour it was when, starting suddenly up in the multitude of his thoughts, he threw open the window which looked upon the Walk, and gazed out moodily upon the night. The night was soft and clear, and the great stretch of the landscape lay dimly defined under a half-veiled poetic sky, over which light floating vapours were moving with a kind of gentle solemnity. There was not light enough to distinguish the individual features of the scene, save here and there a pale gleam of water, a darkness of wood, and the horizon marked by that faint silvery edge which even by night denotes the limit of human vision. The width, the freshness, the stillness, the dewy purity of the air, soothed the young man as he stood and looked out. What was he, a human unit in the great round of space, to be so disconcerted by the little standing-ground he had? He felt abased as he gazed, and a strange sense of looking out upon his life came over him. His future was like that—all vague, breathing towards him a still world full of anticipations, full of things hidden and mysterious—his, and yet not his, as was the soil and the fields. He could mortgage it as he could his estate, but he could not sell it away from him, or get rid of what was in it, whether it carried out his foolish expectations or not. Certainly the sight of this wide scenery, in which he was to perform his part, did him good, though he could not see it. He closed the window, which was heavy, almost with violence, as he came back to the ascertained—to the limited walls with their books, the old-fashioned original lamp, and crackling fire.

      But this sound was very unusual in the house in the middle of the night. Bauby, whose room was next her brother's, knocked upon the wall to rouse him. "D'ye hear that, Tammas? There's somebody trying to get into the house." Her voice came to Rolls faintly muffled by the partition between. He had heard the noise as well as she, but he did not think fit to answer save by a grunt. Then Bauby knocked again more loudly. "Tammas!