The day after this was one of the days on which Robert chose to go to Edinburgh, which were days his mother dreaded, though no harm that she could specify came of them. He had not seen Susie on that afternoon, but was angry and put out when he heard of her visit, and that she had seen him asleep in his chair. “You might have saved me from that,” he said, angrily; “you need not have made an exhibition of me.” “I did not know, Robbie, that she was there.” “It is the same thing,” he cried: “you keep all your doors and windows open, in spite of everything I say. What’s that but making an exhibition of me, that am something new, that anybody that likes may come and stare at?” She thought he had reason for his annoyance, though it was no fault of hers: and it pleased her that he should be angry at having been seen by Susie in circumstances so unfavourable. Was not that the best thing for him to be{175} roused to a desire to appear at his best, not his worse? He went to Edinburgh next day in the afternoon, after the early dinner. There was no question put to him now as to when he should be back.

During that afternoon Susie came again, and was much disappointed and cast down not to see him. Perhaps it was well that Susie’s first sight of him had been at a moment when he could say or do nothing to diminish or spoil her tender recollection. None of those things that vexed the soul of his mother affected Susie. The maturity of the man, so different from the boy; the changed tone; the different way of regarding all around him; the indifference to everything,—all these were hidden from her. The only thing unfavourable she had seen of him was his personal appearance, and that had not struck Susie as unfavourable. The long, soft, brown beard, so abundant and well grown, had been beautiful to her; his size, the large development of manhood, had filled her with a half pride, half respect. Pride! for did not Robbie, her oldest friend, more or less belong to Susie too. She had dreamt already of walking about Eskholm with him, happy and proud in his return, in the falsification of all malicious prophecies to the contrary. He was her oldest friend, her playfellow from her first recollection. There was nothing more wanted to justify Susie’s happy excitement—her satisfaction in his return.{176}

“And he is away to Edinburgh, and has never come to see us! That is not like Robbie,” she cried, with a trace of vexation in her eyes.

“Susie, I will tell you and no other the secret, if it is a secret still. He had fallen into ill company, as I always feared, in that weary, far America.”

“How could he help it?” cried Susie, ready to face the world in his defence, “young as he was, and nobody to guide him.”

“That is true; and we that live in a quiet country, and much favoured and defended on every side, we know nothing of the lawlessness that is there. You will read even in the very papers, Susie: they think no more of drawing a pistol than a gentleman here does of taking his stick when he goes out for a walk.”

Susie nodded her head in acquiescence, and Mrs Ogilvy went on: “Where that’s the custom, harm will come. Men with pistols in their hands like that, that sometimes go off, even when it’s not intended, as you may also read in the papers every day——. Oh, Susie! it happened that there was an accident. How can we tell at this long distance, and so little as we know their manners and their ways, the rights of it all, and what meaning there was in it, or if there was any meaning! But a shot went off, and a man was killed. I am used to it now,” said Mrs Ogilvy, her lip quivering, her face appealing in every line to the younger woman at her side not—oh! not—to condemn{177} him; “but at the first moment I was as one that had no more life. The stain of blood may be upon my son’s hand.”

“No, no!” cried Susie. “No, I will not believe it—not him, of all that are in the world!”

“God bless you, my bonnie dear, that is just the truth! But the shot came out of the band, he among them. There is another man that was at the head who is likely the man. And he is like Robbie, the same height, and so forth. And he has kept hold of him, and kept fast to him, and never let him go.”

“I am not surprised,” said Susie, very pale, and with her head high. “For Robbie would never betray him. He would never fail one that trusted in him.”

“And the terror in his heart is—oh, he says little to me, but I can divine it!—the terror in his heart is that this man will come after him here.”

“From America!” said Susie; “so far, so far away.”

“It is not so far but that you can come in a week or a fortnight,” said Mrs Ogilvy; “you or me would say, impossible: but naturally he is the one that knows best. And he does not think it is impossible. He makes us bolt all the windows and lock the doors as soon as the sun goes down. Susie, this is what is hanging over us. How can he go and see his friends, or let them know he is here, or take the good of coming home—with this hanging over him night and day?”{178}

The colour had all gone out of Susie’s face. She put an arm round her old friend, and gave her a trembling almost convulsive embrace. “And you to have this to bear after all the rest!”

“Me!” said Mrs Ogilvy; “who is thinking of me? It is an ease to my mind to have said it out. You were the only one I could speak to, Susie, for you will think of him just as I do. You will excuse him and forgive him, and explain it all within yourself—— as I do, as I must do.”

“Excuse him!” cried Susie; “that will I not! but be proud of him, because he’s faithful to the man in trouble, whoever he may be!”

Mrs Ogilvy did not say, even to Susie, that it was not faithfulness but panic that moved Robert, and that all his anxiety was to keep the man in trouble at arm’s-length. Even in confessing what was his problematical guilt and danger, it was still the first thing in her thoughts that Robbie should have the best of it whatever the position might be. They were walking up and down together on the level path in front of the house—now skirting the holly hedges, now brushing the boxwood border that made a green edge to the flowers. Susie had come with perplexities of her own to lay before her friend, but they all fled from her mind in face of this greater revelation. What did it matter about Susie? Whatever came to her, it would be but she who was in question, and she could{179} bear it—but Robbie! Me! who is thinking of me? she said to herself, as Mrs Ogilvy had said it, with a proud contempt of any such petty subject. It was not the spirit of self-sacrifice, the instinct of unselfishness, as people are pleased to call such sentiments. I am afraid there was perhaps a little pride in it, perhaps a subtle self-confidence that whatever one had to fear in one’s own person, what did it matter? one would be equal to it. But Robbie—— What blood could be shed, what ordeal dared to keep it from him!

“You will feel now that I am always ready,” said Susie, “to do anything, if there is anything to do. You will send for me at any moment. If it were to take a message, if it were to send a letter, if it were to go to Edinburgh for any news, if it were to—hide the man——”

“Susie!”

“And wherefore not? it’s not ours to punish. I know nothing about him: but to save Robbie and you, or only to help you, what am I caring? I would put my arm through the place of the bolt, like Katherine Douglas for King James. And why should I not hide a man in trouble? Them that went before us have done that, and more than that, for folk in trouble, many a day.”

“But not for the shedder of blood,” said Mrs Ogilvy.{180}

“They were all shedders of blood,” cried Susie; “there was not one side nor the other with clean hands—and our fore-mothers helped them all, whichever were the ones that were pursued: and so would I any man that stood between you and peace. If he were as bad a man as ever lived, I would help him to get away.”

“We must not go so far as that, Susie. We will hope that nothing will need to be done. Robbie and me, we will just keep very quiet till all this trouble blows over. I have a confidence that it will blow over,” said Mrs Ogilvy, with a shadow in her eyes which belied her words.

“Certainly it will,” cried Susie, with an intensity of assent which, though she knew so little, yet comforted the elder woman’s heart.

And Susie once more left her friend without saying a word of the anxieties which were becoming more and more urgent in her own life. She had not yet been told what was the true state of the case, but many alarms had filled her mind, terrors which she would not acknowledge to herself. It did not seem credible that she should be dethroned from her own household place, which she had filled so long, to make way for a stranger, “a strange woman,” as Susie, like Mrs Ogilvy, said; nor that the children should be taken out of her hands, and her home be no longer hers. But all other apprehensions and alarms had{181} been confusedly deepened and increased, she could scarcely tell how, by the sudden interference of her father in behalf of an old lover long ago rejected, whose repeated proposals had become the jest of the family, a man whom nobody for years had taken seriously. Mr Logan had suddenly taken up his cause, and pressed it hotly and injudiciously, filli............