“I undertake for it that you shall not have to wait much longer,” said Lord Lindores.
XXXVIII
Rintoul had bad nights, and could not sleep. He had been in such constant movement that day that he was fatigued, and had hoped for rest; but after tossing on his uneasy bed, he got up again, as for several nights past he had been in the habit of doing, and began to pace up and down his room. The house was all buried in repose and silence—the woods rustling round, the river flowing, the silence outside tingling with the never altogether hushed movements of nature; but indoors nothing stirring—all dark; nothing but the heavy breath of sleep within the thick old walls. The fire was dying out on the hearth; the candles, which he lighted hastily, did not half light the room, but rather cleared a little spot in the darkness, and left all else in gloom. A nervous tremor was upon the young man—he to whom nerves had been all folly, who had scoffed at them as affectation or weakness; but he had no longer that command of himself of which he had once been proud. His mind strayed involuntarily into thoughts which he would fain have shut out. They dwelt upon one subject and one scene, which he had shut his mind to a hundred times, only to feel it the next moment once more absorbing every faculty. His shadow upon the window paced up and down, up and down. He could not keep quiet. He did not care to have the door of his room behind him, but kept it in sight as if he feared being taken at a disadvantage. What did he fear? he could not tell. Imagination had seized hold upon him—he who had never known what imagination was. He could not rest for it. The quiet was full of noises. He heard the furniture creaking, as it does at night, the walls giving out strange echoes; and never having kept any vigil before, thought that these strange voices of the night had to do with himself, and in his soul trembled as if he had been surrounded by enemies or spies searching his inmost thoughts.
Thus he walked up and down the room, keeping his face to the door. Did he expect anyone, anything to come in? No, no; nothing of the kind. But it is certain that sometimes along the long passage he heard sounds as of a horse’s hoofs. He knew it was nonsense. It was the sound of the river, to which he was perfectly accustomed; but yet it sounded somehow like a horse’s hoofs. He never would have been surprised at any moment to see the door pushed open and something come in. He knew it was ridiculous, but still he could not help the feeling. And the silence of the house was a pain to him beyond telling. One of these nights one of the servants had been ill, and Rintoul was glad. The sense that someone was waking, moving about, was a relief. It seemed somehow to give him a sort of security—to deliver him from himself. But while he thus felt the advantage of waking humanity near him, he was thankful beyond description that the society of the house was diminished—that his mother and Edith were away. He knew that they must have found him out—if not what was in his mind, at least that there was something on his mind. During the last twenty-four hours particularly they would have been worse spies than the trees and the winds. How could he have kept himself to himself in their presence, especially as they would have besieged him with questions, with incitements to do something. They would have assumed that they knew all about it in their ignorance. They! They were always assuming that they knew. There was a fierce momentary satisfaction in Rintoul’s mind to think how completely out they would be, how incapable of understanding the real state of the case. They thought they knew everything! But he felt that there was a possibility that he might have betrayed himself in the very pleasure he would have had in showing them that they knew nothing. And it was better, far better, that they should be out of the way.
He did not, however, yield to this fever of the mind without doing what he could manfully to subdue it. He made a great effort now to fix his mind upon what his father had said to him—but the names of Millefleurs and Lady Reseda only swept confusedly through his brain like straws upon the surface of the stream. Sometimes he found himself repeating one of them vaguely, like a sort of idiotical chorus, while the real current of his thoughts ran on. Lady Reseda, Lady Reseda: what had she to do with it?—or Millefleurs, Millefleurs!—they were straws upon the surface, showing how rapidly the torrent ran, not anything he could catch hold of. There was one name, however, round which that dark current of his thoughts eddied and swirled as in a whirlpool—the name of John Erskine. There could not be any doubt that he had something to do with it. He had thrust himself into a matter that did not concern him, and he was paid for his folly. It was not his place to stand up for Carry, to resent her husband’s rudeness—what had he to do with it? He was an intrusive, officious fool, thrusting himself into other people’s business. If
