The Ladies Lindores

he took the step beyond which he did not know what might happen to him. A more serious visitor, yet one more determined to see everything and to take the full advantage of all he saw, never entered that romantic town. He looked like a rural elder of the gravest Calvinistic type as he walked, in his black coat and loosely tied white neckcloth, about the lofty streets. He went to Holyrood, and gazed with reverence and profound belief at the stains of Rizzio’s blood. He mounted up to the Castle and examined Mons Meg with all the care of a historical observer. He even inspected the pictures in the National Collection with unbounded respect, if little knowledge, and climbed the Observatory on the Calton Hill. There were many spectators about the streets who remarked him as he walked about, looking conscientiously at everything, with mingled amazement and respect; for his respectability, his sober curiosity, his unvarying seriousness, were remarkable enough to catch an intelligent eye. But nobody suspected that Rolls’s visit to Edinburgh was the solemn visit of a martyr, permitting himself the indulgence of a last look at the scenes that interested him most, ere giving himself up to an unknown and mysterious doom.

On the morning of the 24th, having satisfied himself fully, he returned home. He was quite satisfied. Whatever might now happen, he had fulfilled his intention, and realised his dreams: nothing could take away from him the gratification thus secured. He had seen the best that earth contained, and now was ready for the worst, whatever that might be. Great and strange sights, prodigies unknown to his fathers, were befitting and natural objects to occupy him at this moment of fate. It was still early when he got back: he stopped at the Tinto Station, not at that which was nearest to Dalrulzian, and slowly making his way up by the fatal road, visited the scene of Torrance’s death. The lodge-keeper called out to him, as he turned that way, that the road was shut up; but Rolls paid no heed. He clambered over the hurdles that were placed across, and soon reached the scene of the tragedy. The marks of the horse’s hoofs were scarcely yet obliterated, and the one fatal point at which the terrified brute had dinted deeply into the tough clay, its last desperate attempt to hold its footing, was almost as distinct as ever.

The terrible incident with which he had so much to do came before him with a confused perception of things he had not thought of at the time, reviving, as in a dream, before his very eyes. He remembered that Torrance lay with his head down the stream⁠—a point which had not struck him as important; and he remembered that Lord Rintoul had appeared out of the wood at his cry for help so quickly, that he could not have been far away when the accident took place. What special signification there might be in these facts Rolls was not sufficiently clearheaded to see. But he noted them with great gravity in a little notebook, which he had bought for the purpose. Then, having concluded everything, he set out solemnly on his way to Dunearn.

It was a long walk. The autumnal afternoon closed in mists; the moon rose up out of the haze⁠—the harvest moon, with a little redness in her light. The landscape was dim in this mellowed vapour, and everything subdued. The trees, with all their fading glories, hung still in the haze; the river tinkled with a far-off sound; the lights in the cottages were blurred, and looked like huge vague lamps in the milky air, as Rolls trudged on slowly, surely, to the place of fate. It took him a long time to walk there, and he did not hurry. Why should he hurry? He was sure, went he ever so slowly, to arrive in time. As he went along, all things that ever he had done came up into his mind. His youthful extravagances⁠—for Rolls, too, had once been young and silly; his gradual settling into manhood; his aspirations, which he once had, like the best; his final anchorage, which, if not in a very exalted post, nor perhaps what he had once hoped for, was yet so respectable. Instead of the long lines of trees, the hedgerows, and cottages which marked the road, it was his own life that Rolls walked through as he went on. He thought of the old folk, his father and mother; he seemed to see Bauby and himself and the others coming home in just such a misty autumn night from school. Jock, poor fellow! who had gone to sea, and had not been heard of for years; Willie, who ’listed, and nearly broke the old mother’s heart. How many shipwrecks there had been among the lads he once knew! Rolls felt, with a warmth of satisfaction about his heart, how well it was to have walked uprightly, to have “won through” the storms of life, and to have been a credit and a comfort to all belonging to him. If anything was worth living for, that was. Willie and Jock had both been cleverer than he, poor fellows! but they had both dropped, and he had held on. Rolls did not want to be proud; he was quite willing to say, “If it had not been for the grace of God!⁠—” but yet it gave him an elevating sense of the far superior pleasure it was to conquer your inclinations in the days of your youth, and to do well whatever might oppose. When the name of Rolls was mentioned by anyone about Dunearn, it would always be said that two of them had done very well⁠—Tammas and Bauby: these were the two. They had always held by one another; they had always been respectable. But here Rolls stopped in his thoughts, taking a long breath. After this, after what was going to happen, what