The Ladies Lindores

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! Man, will ye no put on your breeks and go down and see what it is?” Rolls, for his part, was already in the midst of a calculation. So much plate as there was in the house he had brought up with him to his room. “They cannot steal tables and chairs,” he said to himself; “and as for the young laird, if he’s not able to take care of himself, he’ll be none the better of me for a defender.” Audibly he answered, “Hold your tongue, woman. If the master likes to take the air in the sma’ hours, what’s that to you or me?” There was a pause of dismay on Bauby’s part, and then a faint ejaculation of “Lord bless us! take the air!” But she was less easily satisfied than her brother. When John went upstairs with his candle, he saw a light glimmering in the gallery above, and a figure in white, far too substantial to be a ghost, leaning over the banisters. “Eh, sir! is it you, Mr. John?” Bauby said. “I was feared it was robbers;” and then she added in her round, soft, caressing voice, “but you mustna take the air in the middle of the night: you’ll get your death of cold, and then, what will your mammaw say to me, Mr. John?” John shut himself up in his room, half laughing, half affronted. It was many years since he had been under the sway of his “mamma” in respect to his hours and habits; and nothing could be more droll than to go back to the kind annoyance of domestic surveillance just at the moment when his manhood and independence were most evident. He laughed, but the encounter brought him back, after he had been partly freed from it, to a consciousness of all his limitations once more.

But things were better in the morning. Unless you have something bitter to reproach yourself with, or some calamity impending over you, things are generally better in the morning. John looked about him with more hopeful eyes. He had an excellent, a truly Scotch, breakfast, which, at five-and-twenty, puts a man in good-humour with himself; and there were one or two features about Dalrulzian which, in the morning sunshine, looked more encouraging. The stables were tolerably good, made habitable, and furnished with some of the latest improvements by Colonel Barrington; and “the policy” was in admirable order⁠—the turf faultless, the shrubberies flourishing, the trees⁠—well, not like the trees at Milton Magna, but creditable performances for the North. John’s countenance cleared as he inspected everything. Rolls led or followed him about with great importance, introducing and explaining. Had he been an English butler, John would have dismissed him very summarily to his pantry; but it was part of the natural mise-en-scène to have a Caleb Balderstone attached to an old Scotch house. He was half proud of this retainer of the family, though he threatened to be something of a bore; even Bauby, and her care for his health, and her sense of responsibility to his “mammaw,” was tolerable in this light. When one is born a Scotch laird, one must accept the natural accompaniments of the position; and if they were sometimes annoying, they were at least picturesque. So John put up with Rolls, and “saw the fun” of him with a kind of feeling that Dalrulzian was a Waverley novel, and he himself the hero. He had been seeing things so much through the eyes of his problematical visitors, that he was glad to see this also through their eyes. To them, these servants of his would be altogether “characteristic,” and full of “local colour.” And then the subtle influence of property began to affect the young man and modify his disappointment. “A poor thing,