“Mr. Bally,” said I, “I have near five hundred pounds laid by in Scotland, the economies of a hard life. A letter goes by yon ship to have it lifted. Have so much patience till the return ship comes in, and it is all yours, upon the same condition you offered to my lord this morning.”
He rose from the table, came forward, took me by the shoulders, and looked me in the face, smiling.
“And yet you are very fond of money!” said he. “And yet you love money beyond all things else, except my brother!”
“I fear old age and poverty,” said I, “which is another matter.”
“I will never quarrel for a name. Call it so,” he replied.—“Ah! Mackellar, Mackellar, if this were done from any love to me, how gladly would I close upon your offer!”
“And yet,” I eagerly answered—“I say it to my shame, but I cannot see you in this poor place without compunction. It is not my single thought, nor my first; and yet it’s there! I would gladly see you delivered. I do not offer it in love, and far from that; but, as God judges me—and I wonder at it too!—quite without enmity.”
“Ah!” says he, still holding my shoulders, and now gently shaking me, “you think of me more than you suppose. ‘And I wonder at it too,’ ” he added, repeating my expression and, I suppose, something of my voice. “You are an honest man, and for that cause I spare you.”
“Spare me?” I cried.
“Spare you,” he repeated, letting me go and turning away. And then, fronting me once more: “You little know what I would do with it, Mackellar! Did you think I had swallowed my defeat indeed? Listen: my life has been a series of unmerited cast-backs. That fool, Prince Charlie, mismanaged a most promising affair: there fell my first fortune. In Paris I had my foot once more high up on the ladder: that time it was an accident; a letter came to the wrong hand, and I was bare again. A third time I found my opportunity; I built up a place for myself in India with an infinite patience; and then Clive came, my rajah was swallowed up, and I escaped out of the convulsion, like another Aeneas, with Secundra Dass upon my back. Three times I have had my hand upon the highest station: and I am not yet three-and-forty. I know the world as few men know it when they come to die—Court and camp, the East and the West; I know where to go, I see a thousand openings. I am now at the height of my resources, sound of health, of inordinate ambition. Well, all this I resign; I care not if I die, and the world never hear of me; I care only for one thing, and that I will have. Mind yourself; lest, when the roof falls, you, too, should be crushed under the ruins.”
As I came out of his house, all hope of intervention quite destroyed, I was aware of a stir on the harbour-side, and, raising my eyes, there was a great ship newly come to anchor. It seems strange I could have looked upon her with so much indifference, for she brought death to the brothers of Durrisdeer. After all the desperate episodes of this contention, the insults, the opposing interests, the fraternal duel in the shrubbery, it was reserved for some poor devil in Grub Street, scribbling for his dinner, and not caring what he scribbled, to cast a spell across four thousand miles of the salt sea, and send forth both these brothers into savage and wintry deserts, there to die. But such a thought was distant from my mind; and while all the provincials were fluttered about me by the unusual animation of their port, I passed throughout their midst on my return homeward, quite absorbed in the recollection of my visit and the Master’s speech.
The same night there was brought to us from the ship a little packet of pamphlets. The next day my lord was under engagement to go with the Governor upon some party of pleasure; the time was nearly due, and I left him for a moment alone in his room and skimming through the pamphlets. When I returned, his head had fallen upon the table, his arms lying abroad amongst the crumpled papers.
“My lord, my lord!” I cried as I ran forward, for I supposed he was in some fit.
He sprang up like a figure upon wires, his countenance deformed with fury, so that in a strange place I should scarce have known him. His hand at the same time flew above his head, as though to strike me down. “Leave me alone!” he screeched, and I fled, as fast as my shaking legs would bear me, for my lady. She, too, lost no time; but when we returned, he had the door locked within, and only cried to us from the other side to leave him be. We looked in each other’s faces, very white—each supposing the blow had come at last.
“I will write to the Governor to excuse him,” says she. “We must keep our strong friends.” But when she took up the pen it flew out of her fingers. “I cannot write,” said she. “Can you?”
“I will make a shift, my lady,” said I.
She looked over me as I wrote. “That will do,” she said, when I had done. “Thank God, Mackellar, I have you to lean upon! But what can it be now? What, what can it be?”
In my own mind I believed there was no explanation possible, and none required; it was my fear that the man’s madness had now simply burst forth its way, like the long-smothered flames of a volcano; but to this (in mere mercy to my lady) I durst not give expression.
“It is more to the purpose
