News were brought to Over-Kellie only in the afternoon of the next day that the new heir, who had made so ungracious an entrance, was gone. It was brought by Neil Morison, in the faded velvet doublet which was his habit of state, attended by the varlet called Jaicque (Anglicè, Jack), who was man enough to groom all the horses left in the Kellie stables—to wit, a sober steed of all work, now ridden by Maister Neil, and the skittish pony of Mistress Jean, who held in these old unused stalls something like the same position which her mistress held in the Castle. It was Jaicque who opened the gate, and "tirled at the pin" of the house door, and held the stirrup while the major-domo got down from his horse, which he did slowly and with difficulty. He had been Sir Walter's faithful attendant, and long confinement to his master's chamber had given to his scarcely more than middle age the aspect of an old man. He gave the Mistress a bow which almost alarmed her, it was so grand, a much finer bow than that with which he signified his sense of the presence of his own young lady, whom it appeared he had come to seek.
"I was weel aware," he said, "and it was the conviction of our Mistress Marjory, who is my Lady Jean's auld caretaker, and kens her ways, that our young damsel, Leddy Over-Kellie, would have taken shelter here."
"It was the natural place for her to come to,—my son Pate," said the Mistress, "being her own blood relation and next of kin."
"Madam," said Neil, "we've mair confidence in yoursel' as a guardian than in any man whatsomever. But we judge it quite safe for the young leddy to come her ways hame."
"I will never cross the door," cried Jean, "as long as yon painted pyet, yon fause lord, is there."
"The popinjay," said Margaret, in the background, proud of the name her lover had given.
"He is nae lord," said Neil; "his father is the Lord Oliphant, and he is but the Master, and may never be a lord at all for ought that we can tell,—nor would it be, I'm thinking, ony great loss to the name, for a wilder or a wantoner I have never seen. Anyway, Mistress Jean, he is gane. And, so far as I hear, none of them will meddle us more till the summer, and for the present you are better at hame than ony other where."
"Till the summer," Jean said, with sparkling eyes. She gave a glance at Pate, who had just entered the room, and stood a little perplexed and doubtful on the threshold in his farmer's dress, as he had hastened from the fields on hearing of this emissary from the Castle. For aught he knew, it might have been some scornful message from the interloper which Neil brought; and he stood, his ruddy face clouded with unusual sternness, expectant and somewhat defiant. "Cousin Pate," cried Jean, over the head of the old servant, "yon popinjay is gone, and they are not coming back till the summer: the summer, and there's three months to that. Oh, if ye were my real captain, and like our forebears of the past! Neil, did you ever hear tell that Kellie Castle had held out against a mortal foe?"
"And where is the mortal foe, my young leddy? Sir Walter, my honoured master, had neither feud nor fray with any man—that is," said Neil, with caution, "not for many a year."
"Eh! may the green turf lie soft upon him," said the Mistress; "he was an auld, auld man."
"No so old as ye think—if it were not for care and sorrow. I have seen a stour about the Castle, and swords drawn, if that is what you mean, my Lady Jean. There are few castles in Scotland, nor even ha'-houses," said Neil, "that could say less."
"Eh, and that is true!" said the Mistress; "but the present times are more quiet, the Lord be thanked!"
"The most of the fiery blood is away," said the old man. "Your own son now, young Over-Kellie, there, where he stands, he has his farms and his fields to think of, and never fashes his thoom about feats of arms."
Pate, still lingering at the door, grew darkly red, and came forward with a gloomy brow. "I have my father's sword, Maister Neil," he said, "ready for any man that doubts my spirit."
"Ay, ay, I ken that," said the major-domo. "The father's sword, maist likely rusted to its scabbard, and as heavy as a plough pettle. But the young gallants have blades that flash out at a moment's notice, as free as breath, though it's the stoppage of breath they're bent upon." The old servitor laughed, a low laugh, like the creaking of a door, at his own wit. But it was at Pate's expense, and the young man felt it to the bottom of his heart.
"Yesterday was no day for a brawl," he said; "but let him cross my gait again, and he will learn if there is rust or not on a man's sword."
"I lovena the lad," said Neil. "He has nae respect either for a young lass nor an auld man. But he's no sweart with his blade, and he'll stand up to you were you Wallace wight."
It is hard upon a young man to be driven to protestations of what he would do if the occasion came, and Neil's tone was bitter to Pate, in the uneasy pride of his position, thus waved aside more or less offensively not only by the others, but by the very servants of the others, conscious of all the external differences between the place he claimed and that to which, notwithstanding his claims of blood, he had been barn. Might ill be the fate of that Oliphant who was first led away by love of a fair face, and married a farmer's daughter, and settled down on a yeoman's land! And yet that Oliphant was the source of all his claims, the honour of his house, and a far better man than if, like any swashbuckler, the laird's younger son of Kellie had died in a foolish fray, and left behind him neither heir nor land.
"Cousin Pate," cried Jean, "mind that it is you I look to. I will not say another word; but the walls, they are old and they are strong, and if the men are not stout, the knaves belie their name: and as for your auld motto, I just cast it in your teeth. Provide, then, an' ye are so fond of it! and let it be for your lady, as is your bounden duty, and you the next kinsman." She took up the edge of her riding-cape, which Margaret with affectionate devotion had been arranging on her shoulders—at the spot where the gold lace with which it was trimmed was frayed and broken—and held it up to him. "Next kinsman, and only friend," she said, putting her hand into his with a gleam of moisture in her eyes that made them twice as bright as usual: and they were bright enough at all times, as bright as stars to Pate's thought. They were not the Oliphant eyes, which in their kind were not to be despised, brown, glowing, and liquid, full of laughter and light: but blue, with such a sparkle in them as the sapphire has, and shooting out rays like arrows—that kind of blue fire which has something in it more keen than the brown, piercing and cutting like a dart. It softened with the last words, and the water swam in the darkness of the blue.
Pate said little for the rest of the day to the inquisitive and anxious women of his house; but he pondered long as he strode about the fields in the afternoon, and later in the night, when the labourers had gone to their houses, to the scattered clump of lowly cottages that sheltered beyond the farm-buildings, and all the members of the family within the house, bound to be early astir in the morning, had gone to rest. There had been talk enough and consultation. But though the Mistress and Margaret had not been able to refrain from carrying on the arguments of last night between themselves, there was a consciousness even in their minds that it was he alone who had to decide. And they had withdrawn to their beds, a little reluctant, yet constrained by necessity and a sense of duty, to leave him to himself. It was a relief to him when they were gone, and yet it troubled him to feel himself left under the flickering light of the cruse in the stillness of the house to face this problem which was his, and not another's. He had been more or less of an easy mind during all his youth, disturbed from time to time by his gentle blood and his possibilities, which from shadows, that they had been at first, had grown into present and real things, as old Sir Walter's family had failed one by one, and it had become more and more apparent that it was he, and only he, who was the heir. The lass who was the last of the house of Kellie had not seemed of much importance to Pate's eyes,—not more than she had been to old Sir Walter, who was her brother, though he might almost have been her grandfather, and to whom she was an accident, troublesome, and sometimes exasperating to think of, and therefore pushed aside and not considered at all. Neither did Pate think of her. He had been troubled at times by the consciousness that he had not been bred so well as he was born—that he had about him that something of the fields and the plough which made him different from the young gallants, the flash of whose ready rapiers from the scabbard was, as Neil had said, with wise and wounding justice, unlike the deliberate drawing of the sword which perhaps had rusted a little in its sheath. And the thought of this, and such incidents as had occurred yesterday, when the train of gentlemen who, though they resented his intrusion, and supported Pate in his rights, still crowded about the Master of Oliphant, and left his kinsman to such consolation as the humbler yeomen could bestow,—had irritated and vexed him. It seemed to Pate a humiliation, not only that they should withdraw, but that he himself should care.
But all these thoughts had gone like last year's snow, in a new dilemma very differently felt. That he should not after all be the next in succession, the just heir; that there should be some one between him and Kellie,—to have discovered this, had he ever anticipated or dreamt of such a possibility, would have been in all his previous thoughts a sort of deathblow. But somehow that dread discovery did not hurt him at all. No; nor that he should be recognised as the first vassal, the loyal servant of this intruder, who shut him out of his lawful inheritance. He had tried for a moment to be angry, even to be wounded, but he had not succeeded. It had given him a shock; but the shock had been such as the discovery of a new inheritance, a something better even than Kellie, might have given. Who was it, this true heir, for whom he was called upon to give up the claim which had been dear as his life? who commanded him imperiously as the first vassal, the nearest kinsman, servant, and officer. It would have been incredible to him that he should have accepted such a position; that he should have met the call, not with defiance, rage, denial, but with a consent and acquiescence which astonished himself; which filled him with generous emotion, with a kind of pleasure, with a soft humorous sense of something beyond reason in it, foolish, noble, more exquisite than any emotion he had ever felt before. To secure the home of his fathers, the hope of his life, the right most dear to him—for Jean! not for himself. It brought the moisture into his eyes, a dew of pain, yet warm with every sweetness. He turned round on the heavy wooden stool, beside the big table, on which he sat, and fixed his eyes on the words scrabbled in stone upon the chimney, and still more misshapen and irregular in that medium through which he looked at them. "À TOVT POVRVOIR." What meaning had been in these words! He had seen himself the master of his father's house, the head of his name, the providence of his race. Not an Oliphant in St Monance, not a fisher on the coast, that would not be the better for him, that would not rejoice to think that the auld blood had been revived in the new master, and every ancient tradition of kindness from lord to vassal made true. It was no ignoble hope that had been in the young man's heart. No one had ever called old Sir Walter an ill laird; but he had grown old, indifferent, rapt in the shadows of his old age, no longer capable of thought or care for those around him. Whereas Pate was young, full of sympathy, full of vigour, knowing every man and caring for every house. To cry "an Oliphant!" in a street brawl, or take the crown of the causeway from any passer-by, had not been in his thoughts; but to be the defence of his own folk, the champion of Fife, one of the supporters of the common weal!
Pate rose up with a start, pricked by his thoughts, and went to the fireplace—leaning his head upon the rude carving, and gazing down at the smouldering red on the hearth. Would she be that? A bit of a lass, not much more than a child, without knowledge; also a creature of caprice, moved not, like himself, by long-held, long-pondered resolution, but by every wind that blew, by sudden impulses, perhaps unwise, by the council of the moment, born to-day and gone to-morrow. He pressed his brow upon the stone till the carving was printed upon it, as it had been before on his heart. Who could tell what mood would sway her, what strength she would have, what instruction would commend itself to her—what (and perhaps this was the great question of all)—what husband she would marry? But that question, which suddenly roused the blood in every vein, so that Pate felt a sudden flush go over him from head to foot,—that question had to be crushed at once, having nothing to do with the matter. That was not his affair. No such solutions from fairyland were to be brought into the consideration of a man's duty. The women might dwell upon them. They might so, if they would, set injustice right, and contradict the laws of nature at their pleasure; but such considerations were not for him. The question was not one of fancy or of chance, but of what he, a strong man and a steadfast, taking gravely into consideration every side of the subject, was to do: and this was what he had to settle now.