Читать книгу The Primrose Path: A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife онлайн

11 страница из 131

And while she tries to find these, what can we do better than let the reader know who old Sir Ludovic was, and how he came to have so young a child? Margaret’s foot flying up-stairs, and the sound she made of doors and drawers opening, and now an impatient exclamation (for the way thimbles hide themselves and refuse to be found!) and now a little snatch of song, was all that was audible in the still old house. Bell and John and Jeanie in the kitchen had their cracks, indeed, as they took their tea; but sounds did not travel easily up the spiral stair, and the long room with its one inhabitant was as void of all movement as was the vacant little white-panelled chamber with Lady Jean’s old work thrown on the table. All silence, languor, stillness; and yet one creature in the house to whom stillness was as death.

ssss1

The Leslies had been settled at Earl’s-hall since before the memory of man. Now they were related to other Leslies in Fife; and out of it, I do not pretend to say. But this family itself was old enough to have carried any amount of honors, much less the poor baronetcy which was all it had got out of the sometimes lavish hand of fame. The family was old enough to have supported a dukedom, but not rich enough. Sir Ludovic had got but a moderate fortune from his father, and that which he would transmit to his son would be considerably less than moderate. Indeed, it was not worth calling a fortune at all. When the Baronet began his life, the policy was a real policy, a pretty small park enough, with its girdle of hardy trees. No turnip-field then thrust its plebeian presence and odor between the house and its own woods; the garden was kept up with care, the other part of the house was still habitable and inhabited, and the greatest people in the country did not scorn to dine and dance in the rooms so well adapted for either purpose. But of all these good things, the rooms and old Sir Ludovic were all that remained. He had not done any particular harm at any time, nor had he wasted his means in lavish living, and nobody was so much surprised as he when his money was found to have been spent. “What have I done with it?” he had asked all his life. But nobody could tell; he had no expensive tastes—indeed, he had no tastes at all, except for books, and his own library was a very good one. It was true, he had indulged in three wives and three families, which was inconsiderate, but each of the wives had, greatly to the comfort of her respective children, possessed something of her own. Time went and came, however, taking these ladies away in succession, but leaving Sir Ludovic still in his great high-backed chair, older, but otherwise not much different from what he had ever been. The eldest son, also called Ludovic, was the only one now surviving of the first marriage. He was a man of forty-five, with a family of his own; a hard-working lawyer in Edinburgh, with no great income to keep up his position, and little disposed to welcome the burden of his father’s little title when it should come. A baronetcy, and an old house altogether uninhabitable by a family, and entirely out of modern fashion—what should he make of these additions when his father died? He had made his own way as much as if he had been a poor school-master’s son, instead of the heir of an ancient and important family. He could not even take his children home to the old place, or give them any associations with it, for there was no room at Earl’s-hall. “Your father might as well be in Russia,” his wife sometimes said when she wanted a change for a little boy who was delicate. And privately, Mr. Leslie had made up his mind to sell the place, though it had been so long in the family, when Sir Ludovic died.