Peggy Oglivie's Inheritance. By the author of 'Round the Court,' etc

Front matter

PEGGY OGLIVIE'S INHERITANCE. " Built on a rock, its granite walls battered by the storm " (p. 3). Frontispiece. PEGGY OGLIVIE'S INHERITANCE. BY THE AUTHOR OF "ROUND THE COURT," etc. etc CASSELL, PETTER, GALPIN & CO., LONDON, PARIS, & NEW YORK. [ALL rights reserved.] CONTENTS. CHAP. PAO« I. The Oolivies of Oglivie 1 II. The Heir of Oglivie 8 III. Delaube 14 TV. Wild in the Woods 20 V. The Forest House 25 VI. Peggy Demands an Explanation .... 30 VII. The Manse of Strathie 35 VIII. A Scotch Sabbath 42 IX. Dangling and Angling 49 X. A Dish of Fish 56 XL Beasons for Reticence 61 XII. A Dull Pabty 64 XIII. The Captain on his Good Behaviour ... 69 XIV. A Pastime 74 XV. A Midsummer Night's Dream 79 XVI. The Music of the Pines 85 XVII. A Scotch Communion 92 XVIII. A Bad Look-out S9 XIX. Down in the Village 105 XX.

Death in the Biggin' Ill XXI. Young Haldane and Auld Haldane .... CONTENTS. VI CHAr. ™s;E XXII. Breaking up lL'7 XXIII. Marked for the Axe ... . l3i XXIV. An Unexpected Visitor 1" XXV. Bound "8 XXVI. The Inheritance ... ... 155 XXVII. The East Wind IM XXVIII. Death and Change . . ... 167 XXIX. Captain Oglivie is Generous .... 175 XXX. The Letter is Lost 182 XXXI. Guilty or Not Guilty? 183 XXXII. Gratitude 193 XXXIII. Dealino with Women 202 XXXIV. Understanding it All 208 XXXV. Turning Usurer 217 XXXVI. Worse than Death 224 XXXVII. Match-Making 232 XXXVIII. Sandie's Sofa 240 XXXIX. The Letter is Found 216 XL. A Father's Claims 253 XLI. Peggy's Parting 260 XLII. An Interval 207 XLIII. The Canker of Covetousness .... 273 XLIV. First and Second Love 279 XLV. A Step-Mother ...... .286 XL VI. Sur Le Toit • .293 XLVII.

Old Sweethearts ..... . 300 XLVIII. Ordeal by Fire ....,,. 306 XLIX. Remorse— Not Repentance , , 315 i • L. Paris, 1830 321 LI. A Fruitless Search 329 LII. Guilty CONTENTS. CEAr. PAOB LIII. From Dusk to Dawn 344 LIV. From Dawn to Dusk 352 LV. The Barricades 360 LVL Found at Last 368 LVII. The Return 375 LVIII. The Title in Abeyance 383 LIX. Sir Horace 386 LX. Preparations 389 LXI. Home .396

Chapter I. The Oglivies Of Oglivie

N evil days the warp of our story, the threads of which run from generation to generation, was spun and dyed ; and though the woof is of the fairer colours which are those of our own everyday life, throughoutall the pattern the darker threads niust run. I am not goingback to the times which exist for us only in hooks. The " bad old times " of which I speak still live in the minds of those few whose memories stretch back to the opening of the century, the memories and the men alike fading. But many of us retain vivid impressions of them, as depicted to us by living witnesses, now silent for ever. They were times of war. The babes of that genera tion were cradled in war and nursed in war ; at war they played as children, and to war they were marched as men. They were times of famine. As early as 1795 mobs in London were shouting round the King's coach for B " Peace and Bread !

" and as the century closed this foo of the poor came to a very death-grapple. And, worst of all, they were times of widespread domestic corruption. Through all the miseries of war, and above all the groanings of the people, rose the mad dening sound of the riot of a senseless crew. In Bleakshire, in the corner of the island where this story is transacted, the suffering was extreme. There, if anywhere, the invader was expected to descend. The flower of its youth were tempted, bribed, or pressed into active service. Its stiff soil and inclement skies made it the first to suffer from the prevailing dearth. And there, in town, and camp, and castle, grew rampant a more reckless libertinism than was, perhaps, to be found any where else throughout the land. The private history of its noble families is rife with strange and tragic stories of these days.

Some date from them their decay ; others it swept from the face of the earth, which could no longer support their iniquities. Even in these evil clays the Oglivies of Oglivie had an evil name. In the little fishing villages that nestled here and there along the coast of Bleakshire, setting their backs to the bare rock and their faces to the rude sea, to grapple with it for very life, wild Sir Alexander was regarded, by sober men and pious matrons, as a man reprobate and accursed, who was destined to die " an ill death " as soon as he had filled up the measure of his iniquity. In the little moorland farms, dotted over the bleak uplands where he and his companions from " the castle " ranged in the shootiug season, startling the lonely places with their oaths, and blasphemies, and half-drunken laughter the mother sent her blooming daughter " ben the hoose " and served them herself with the warm milk into which they emptied their flasks of rum and brandy, while she strictly charged the maiden on no account to peep from THE OGLIVIES OF OGLIVIE. 3 her covert till they were gone.

The people felt towards him as they might towards a bird of prey, against whom. they could only act in self-defence, and not always succeed in that. The castle was his eyrie, and thither he gathered others like himself. Lesser birds of prey trooped in his train and sheltered within the sweep of his wing. There was the secret still on the moors, where whisky was made that never paid tax to the King, but paid tithe to Oglivie ; and there was the strange barque that at midnight sent on shore a cargo purchased with something brighter and redder than gold. But with him and his deeds my story, happily, has little to do ; only all stories have their roots in the past, and " wild Sir Alexander," sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind, was preparing an aftergrowtn of misery for the time to come.

Castle Oglivie was a fit home for such a man. Built on a rock, its granite walls battered by the storm, its garden sown with salt by the spray-laden winds, so that no tender flower would grow there, the moan of the sea filled it for ever. But it was no fit home for women. It seemed fatal to all gentle things. It was said that the brides who crossed its threshold shuddered as with a death-chill ; and, for two generations, at least, they had speedily been carried out again, to rest where no chill could reach them, either of granite walls or hearts of stone. So it had fared with the first wife of " wild Sir Alex ander." Her ways were quiet and sober, and her husband had left her to pine alone, as soon as a single summer of her wedded life was over. The winter and life's heaviest disappointment struck their chills into her heart, and she died, leaving twin daughters to be reared in the inclement soil where she had perished.

But where she had perished they had lived and grown, sheltered by the kindly arms of humble nurses, and nur- B % tured by the pious care of a poor dependant. They grew np unheeded by their father, who was now here, now there — only swooping down upon his lands, from time to time, with some of his riotous town companions, to hatch some fresh mischief, and to carry off what he could to the gambling-tables of Bleaktown or London. The sisters had learned to cling to each other in fear and trembling at his coming, with the storm of curses it brought upon everybody and everything at the castle. At least, the one clung and trembled, while the other stood firm in the front and did battle when need was. The one sister was the shadow of the other in every way. They were never apart so much as an hour.

Wonderfully alike in feature and gesture, the one was yet thinner, fainter, and feebler than the other ; like the same note on different keys. Where Miss Janet was low and plain tive, Miss Margery was loud and indig_ant. Miss Janet left to herself would have been wavering and purposeless, but she seemed, in following her sister, less to bend to than to be inspired by the stronger will. As they grew older, their father was more with them. He began to lack the means for his expensive pleasures abroad, and to indulge in them more at home ; and the girls would stand at their room-door in the dark, and listen with a curious awe as the sounds of voices, and the rattle of dice, and the shout of laughter echoed through the rooms below far into the night. White with terror, they had hearkened to the still more terrible sounds of strife : and when, after a heavy fall, they had seen their father carried insensible to his room, they had reason for their dread, that some day he would be carried there a dead, if not a murdered man ; but the next morninohe would be gulping down half a tumblerful of brandy, and going out for the day, swearing that everything was going to the dogs.

THE OGLIVIES OF OGLIVIE. Thus their girlhood passed, and their first youth went by, till two forlorn women, with premature lines in their colourless faces and premature threads of grey in their red locks, looked out upon the changeless and yet unresting sea, and on a horizon of life as wild and as monotonous. Of the comings and goings of Sir Alexander Oglivie his household kept no reckoning ; but it was after a more prolonged absence than usual that, one night, early in the last year of the century, he returned, bringing a lady with him. The sisters were sitting by their fire — necessary in these bleak regions almost all the year round — listening to the wail of the March wind, when they were roused by the stir of the arrival ; and shortly after, Sir Alexander came to them, leading in a fair young creature, faint and weary with travel, so it seemed, wet with salt sea-water and disordered by the blast.

To his daughters, struck dumb with astonishment, he presented her as his wife, and requested — only the tone was a command — that she might be kindly cared for. To their somewhat cold greeting she returned no answer, and as he left her in their hands, and went off to join the man he had brought with him, Sir Alexander added, " She will do no harm with her tongue at least." Wonderingly, but still kindly and with awkward attempts at tenderness, they tried to find out her wants, and tend and comfort her — their new mother, more like a younger sister to them ; but, except sobs and loudly uttered sighs, she made no attempt to reply, and they set her down as a foreigner who did not understand their speech. On the morrow they were to learn why their questions had remained unanswered, and they felt a shock of mingled pity and horror on hearing that their father's wife was deaf and dumb, that their new companion would never be able to understand or to answer word of theirs.

On the morrow, in presence of the sisters, took place a parting between the new Lady Oglivie and one who had accompanied her to the castle on the previous night. He was a seafaring man, of bold and resolute bearing. They had seen him there before. The parting was proof of near relationship between him and the dumb girl, who clung about his neck with tears and passionate mute entreaties. In the presence of the stranger, Sir Alexander made his daughters promise to treat her, as his wife, with dutiful love and care, and the look with which the former led her to a seat beside them, and left her there, was half appeal half menace. The new Lady Oglivie must have been a wealthy bride, for there was plenty of gold going at the castle after she came, and it had been scant enough before her coming. How it had been come by was another matter, and one which no one inquired into.

Sixty years ago wealth and wives were not always come by in the peaceable way in which they are acquired in our soberer and less picturesque days. But though there was greater plenty at the castle, its lord did not long remain there. As in earlier days, he absented himself, leaving his dumb wife to the care of his daughters, who were faithful to their promise, to the letter and also to the spirit. Resentment against their father, strong in Miss Margery, fainter in Miss Janet, mingled with pity for the dumb sharer of their sorrows. The last night of the century was one of storm and tempest more furious than any in the memory of man. It began in the afternoon of the previous day, and raved throughout the next with unabated fury. Alonothe iron-bound coast of Bleakshire the German Ocean rose and dashed itself in insurrection.

The huge waves leapl into the jaws of the rocks and were churned through their teeth into a milky froth. The wind rushed, and shrieked, and trampled, and trumpeted into the coves and gulleys, THE OGLIVIES OF OGLIVIE. 7 whirling balls of foam over the highest cliffs. The dawn of the new year's morning saw sixty wrecks, great and Email, along that coast alone. All the afternoon the dumb wife sat watching the sea from her favourite station in a deep bay-window over the cliff. As the wind and the sea rose, a wild restlessness seemed to take possession of her. Pacing up and down the room was no noticeable feature, for that was her com mon custom, and halting in the window for another look over the sea. But she would go down and stand ou the cliff and pace about there, till she had to crouch before the blast, and hold fast by the tufts of coarse grass that grew on the bank, to keep her from being whirled away.

She was impatient, too, of the presence of the sisters, and made passionate signs to be left alone. How they longed to be able to soothe her with words, but, alas ! they could only understand her meaning when material wants were in question. They had no mutual language for the wants and desires of the soul. At length she sought them eagerly, pointing from the window to a ship nearing that perilous shore under bare poles. The darkness was coming down, and the ship in peril ; but her own peril had come to the poor dumb wife, and she went down in it, pleading with outstretched arms and wild appealing eyes for something, they knew not what. He might have known if he had been there. In that wild night the heir of Oglivie was born. In the morning light a motherless infant lay on Margery Oglivie's knees, and the ship in the offing had disappeared.

CHAPTER LT. OF OGLIVIE. THE HEIR ARGERY and Janet Oglivie welcomed the weak and sickly infant left in their hands, as hungry creatures welcome food. They were too near, too identical as it were, to fill up to each other that hunger of the woman's heart, to spend itself and to be /few/ spent on another. They felt their hearts wither *&**> ing, though they could not have said that this was what made their lives look poorer and sadder, and more colourless day by day ; aud the coming of the child was like rain on the dry grass. They got a nurse from one of the little clusters of labourers' cottages on the estate — a tall, soft, sweet-spoken Highland woman, who had lost her own baby, and was ready to give the little stranger all the fondling care she would have given to her own : for in her part of the country the relation of foster-mother is held in great esteem.

But as time went on, instead of loving her nurs ling, as the honest creature was prepared to do, she began to shrink from it more and more. All her nursing would not plump out the small skinny limbs. The wee white face grew more aud more weird-like every day, and the secret of the nurse's care came out at last, in tears and lamentations, while she owned her belief that the " bairn was no cannie." In other words, the superstitious crea- THE HEIK OF OGLIVIE. ture considered that the child was not altogether of the earth, and that it was hardly safe to nourish and cherish it. So the nurse went away, and the sisters took on themselves the task of rearing their baby-brother. Then it dawned on them that there was something strange about the child. " See how he stares about, and never seems to notice anything," said Janet, as she looked on the little creature in her sister's lap.

" Perhaps it's because he is like his mother. Oh, Margery, what if he is like her ! " she added, with a burst of unwonted tears. " Hush, Janet ! " said Margery, " I've been thinking of that, though I did not like to speak ; and if it is so, it's the judgment of Cod, and we have no right to rebel against it." The hard look which came into her face was perhaps more rebellious than Janet's tears. " Could we not find out, Margery ? " ventured the latter, after a pause ; " it would be better to know the worst. Let us make a noise and see if it will scare him." But the child began to start and cry, as was his wont, and so they were obliged to put off the experiment till ho was asleep. As soon as he was laid in his cradle, Janet whispered, " Now ! " but Margery sat down in her chair, and took her knitting and began to rock gently with her foot, answering, also in a whisper, " No, let him sleep awhile first."

Down in that woman's heart there was a deep well of tenderness, though it came little to the hard surface. She sat there an hour in silence, schooling herself to wake an infant from its sleep. " Try now," she said, breaking it at last. Janet brought a heavy bell to ring over the cradle ; but her sister seized it ere it swayed. " That would raise the whole house," she whispered, with a flush of impatience, betraying her pride, and reticence. " Let some thing fall." Janet went to the hearth and made a vigorous clash of metal, by letting fall one of the fire-irons ; whilst Margery continued rocking gently with her foot. Not a start, not a movement stirred the cradled child, from whom " the world was at one opening quite shut out." The sisters looked at each other, and Janet knew by Margery's face that there was nothing to be said.

Since it had turned out a weakling, Sir Alexander had shown but a feeble interest in his heir ; and when Margery at his next advent made known to him the cala mity of his child, he answered with a curse, which Mar gery flung back with her steel-blue eyes, as she said, " You need not call for curses, for they will come sure enough, only the curse causeless shall not come ! There are some in our days who believe that an evil course of life, especially a life of habitual drunkenness — and such was very common among the gentry fifty years ago — induces a kind of moral insanity. I for one believe it : there comes a time when the most powerful motives fail to move the man of sin. He has brought on himself paralysis of the will, and can no more escape, that is, humanly speaking, from the power of his bad propensity, cost him what it may, than a paralytic can run from the fii-e which is leaping towards his bed.

So it seemed to fare with Sir Alexander Oglivie. Neither fearing God nor regarding man from his youth up, he went on his way, more and more defying the judgment of Heaven, more and more heedless of every human obligation. Making himself mad with cursing, mad with passion, mad with drink, he had turned his life of pleasure into a lift of torture, to which he added day by day. But the end was at hand. He and another, a near kinsman, and brother in iniquity THE HEIR OF OGLIVIE. 11 were riding to the castle along the high road on the cliff. They had been to the camp near Bleaktown, and both had been drinking and losing at play all night, and now it was fair broad daylight. Sir Alexander's horse became restive from the rude handling of his half -tipsy rider, and Gilbert Oglivie, who was comparatively sober, had more than once urged restraint.

But the demon of rage was in his kinsman's heart, and every now and then he plunged his spurs into the creature's sides, at the same time reining him tight as he darted forward. Suddenly, at a narrow and dangerous»part of the road, the animal, who had lost his temper too, and with greater reason than the other who mastered him, reared and swerved till his fore-legs for a moment actually overhung the precipice. In another, Sir Alexander had swung him round and flung himself off. No sooner were horse and man standing on solid ground, than the master brute began to use the whip with all the force of ungovernable rage. But it seemed as if the nobler animal had thrown off restraint, and defied him, rearing, plunging, and kicking, and baffling his showering strokes. " Now stop, Oglivie, stop ! " cried his sobered companion.

He did not stop, but stepping back for vantage ground to inflict a heavier blow, he reeled a pace too far, and disappeared over the cliff. He was not gone, however. In his left hand he held the bridle, and the powerful creature stood the tug and strain, backing against the bank behind him, though trembling in every limb with the sudden shock. " Hold on ! " cried his companion, dismounting, and flinging himself on the ground full length, while he looked over the edge, and reached his hand ; but Sii Alexander had clutched a ledge of rock, and could not seize it without greater danger. He loosed the bridle and seized another ledge, and by planting his feet in the fissures of the rock, would soon have scrambled to the path, but in a moment the ledge crumbled in his hands, the loosened rein was jerked from his hold, and he fell, rolled rapidly over the stones, and then dropped noise lessly into the abyss below.

What were Gilbert Oglivie's feelings at that moment no one ever knew. A poor man passing to his work had witnessed the close of the tragedy, and was on the spot in time to keejj the other from going over the cliff after his kinsman. " Ye maun ride roun, sir — a cat couldna -keep her feet below tho broo o' that craig ! " was the countryman's speech ; and seeing it was too true, Gilbert Oglivie rode round, and warned the servants at the castle, and told them to prepare the ladies for the worst. On his return with the dead, Margery refused to see him. Her father had " died by the judgment of God " — that was her stern verdict ; but neither truce nor parley would she hold with any who had aided and abetted the course on which that judgment overtook him. The estate was not entailed, but had been settled by deed on the children of Sir Alexander and their heirs, passing first to the male children, and then to the females.

So that it had not been in the father's power to alienate the property, as he might otherwise have done. Margery and Janet were, however, left totally unpro vided for, with the exception of a small property called " The Forest House," several miles inland, which they inherited from a relative. It was found, too, that their father had appointed them guardians of his children by the second marriage, in the event of his death, by a deed drawn up at the time of that marriage, and which, they surmised, was none of his suggesting. To this house of theirs, with the allowance provided for the infant, the sisters resolved to retire. They were THE HEIR OF OGLIVIE. 13 still young women, though people spoke of them as old. " Old maids " they were called, at the time when other women are in the midst of the cares of early motherhood.

Margery, as usual, led the way. " It's a dull house we are going to," she said to her sister ; " but not duller than our days will be." " Do you think he will ever be like other bairns, Margery ? " said Janet, alluding to a still darker fate in store for the unconscious heir. " Never, never," answered Margery ; " the bairn's a born idiot. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation," she murmured, bitterly ; " but there will be neither third nor fourth in our line." Poor Margery ! she forgot the redeeming clause of the terrible penalty — the loving ones who are made the channels of mercy even to those on whom that penalty falls most heavily.

Chapter III. Delaube

N the early part of the last century, the house of Delaube had been built to receive an Oglivie and his foreign wife. The origin of the name no one thought of. It was among the things forgotten, and its poetic meaning, de Vaube, " of the dawn," had been lost sight of in the neighbourhood. It was built of the white-and-blue granite of the district, which, when fresh from the quarry, sparkles like sugar-loaf in the sun. The granite was rough hewn and the house plain and unpretending. It rose three storeys high on its little hill, clown which its garden ran, cut into terraced slopes, with steps of granite between. An old-fashioned garden, with old-fashioned flowers of the hardiest sorts, was the garden of Delaube. Hardy flower they needs were, fac ing as they did the east wind and the sea. The sea, however, was miles away, though always in sight — a cloud of grey in hazy weather, a belt of shimmering silver in the sunshine.

Between the house and the sea stretched the lands of Oglivie, beginning with a broad belt of fir-wood at the foot of the little hill. Round the back of this hill the firs had marched their ranks, and up its western slopes ; nay, they had clothed it all round, as with a sombre cloak, save on the cast, where the garden ran into the few small fields DELAUBE. that formed the miniature domain. From the windows could be seen, far away in the west, the grand outlines of the Highland hills. The house caught the first glimpse of the dawn, flushing out all over in its light ; but whether because of this, or because it had witnessed the dawn of a new day to the first dwellers there, it had been named Delaube, no one knew or cared. The century was twenty years old ; the bad old times had passed away. George III. had died, old and mad and blind, the saddest and most sobering spectacle that was ever perhaps offered to a nation, to teach it the vanity of earthly greatness.

There was peace at last. The passions of war had worn themselves out, its wounds were healing over, and its sad and miserable wrecks had drifted into quiet havens, or altogether disappeared. But there are sadder wrecks than even these : the wrecks of stormy passions and lives of sin. Just such a stranded wreck in the sea of life was Gilbert Oglivie, of Delaube. It is needless to go back upon his past. He had been much abroad, his branch of the family having close ties with France, and his wife also being a French woman. Till the breaking out of the Revolution his only son had remained among his mother's relatives in Paris, and shortly after his return to his father's house had joined a militia regiment in which the former held command. But not many years of active life remained to Gilbert Oglivie in which to retrace his steps towards a better life than he had led in company with his cousin, wild Sir Alexander.

It was said that he had begun to do this ; but, be that as it may, while yet, as it seemed, in full vigour, he was smitten with paralysis, and condemned to drag out what was left of life as a hopeless cripple. At the time of his enforced retirement there was no thing left of his modest fortune, except his place a Delaube, which he and his son had visited at intervals and kept up ; if maintaining an old servant there could be said to keep it from falling into decay. At one time Louis Oglivie had been more at the place than his father, having, for reasons of his own, exchanged into a regiment stationed near Bleaktown. But that was before his father's calamity. The young man had been a universal favourite, except with his father, who cherished for him a sort of con temptuous toleration, rather than affection.