"She says so, no doubt. Do you believe her?"

"Yes."

"Weel, I'm glad she's off and awa'. We'll hae a bit o' peace now."

"My heart is bleeding, bursting; I cannot listen to you."

"Such parfect nonsense! You ought to be thanksgiving. Who broke that vase to smithereens?"

"I did."

"It cost twenty guineas."

"I don't care a tinker's curse, if it cost a hundred guineas." He walked to the mantlepiece and flung down on the marble hearth a valuable piece of Worcester.

"My G.o.d, Robert! Have you lost your senses?"

"I have lost my wife and child."

"Good riddance of baith o' them."

"How dare you?"

"Dinna say 'dare' to me."

"Go away! Go instanter!"

"You will go first. I'll not leave you alane."

"If you don't go, I will call McNab and Jepson, and they will help you to your own room. Do you hear me?"

"Robert Campbell, go to your decent bed and sleep, and behave yourself."

"My G.o.d, woman!"

"I am your mother."

"G.o.d pity me! I can't throw you down, but----" then he lifted a white marble clock, and let it crash among the broken china. "Out of here!" he screamed. His usually deep, strong voice had been rising with every word he spoke, and his last order was given in a mad _alto_ which terrified the woman browbeating him. It was not Robert's voice; its shrill shriek was the cry of extremity or insanity. She fled upstairs to McNab's room.

"Waken! waken! McNab," she cried. "Your master has lost his senses. Run for Dr. Fleming. Make him come back wi' you."

"What hae ye been doing to the poor man?" she asked sleepily as she put on her shoes.

"Nothing, nothing at all. Just advising him. It is that English cutty--she----"

"Meaning Mrs. Robert Campbell?"

"Call her what you like. It is her, it is her! She has taken the bairn and gone."

"Gone?"

"Left her husband forever. Be in a hurry, woman. Don't you hear the man raving like a wild beast?"

He was not raving when McNab looked at him in pa.s.sing. He was lying on the sofa perfectly still, with his hands clasped above his head. So the doctor found him a quarter-of-an-hour later. "You have had a great shock, Campbell," he said.

"A shot in the backbone, doctor. My wife has left me, and taken my son with her."

"I know! But were you not expecting her to do so?"

"No, no! Why should I?"

"How much longer did you think your wife could bear--what she had to bear? Come, come, you must look at this trial like a sensible man! I suppose you want to find her?"

"It is all I shall live for."

"Then you must sleep. I will go with you to your room, and give you a sedative. You must sleep, and get yourself together. Then you will have to make your face iron and bra.s.s, for all you will have to meet--advice and pity, blame and sympathy, but you will carry your cup of sorrow without spilling it o'er everybody you meet--or I don't know you. What made you lose your grip to-night?"

"Necessity, doctor. I had to, or----"

"I know."

"One towering rage was better than daily and hourly disputing. The subject is buried now, between my family and myself. It was a necessity."

"Ay, ay, and when Necessity calls, none shall dare 'bring to _her_ feet excuse or prayer.' Your wife's flight was a necessity also. Keep that in your mind. You are sleepy, I see; don't look at the newspapers till the wonder is over."

The newspapers easily got hold of the story, and each related the circ.u.mstance in its own way. Some plainly said domestic misery had driven the ill-used lady to flight; others spoke of her great beauty and wonderful voice, and made suspicious allusions to the temptations always ready to a.s.sail beauty and genius. None of them omitted the world-weary taunt of the mother-in-law, and some very broad aspersions were made on Mrs. Campbell's well-known impossible temper, and her hatred of all matrimonial intrusions into her family. The story of her eldest son's unsatisfactory marriage was recalled, his banishment and exile and supposed death. Christina's flight from her rich, t.i.tled lover to the poor man she preferred added a romantic touch; and the final tragedy of the disappearance of Robert Campbell's wife and son seemed to the majority proof positive that the trouble-making element was in the Campbell family, and rested in the hard, proud, scornful disposition of the mother, and mother-in-law. There was not a single paper that did not take a special delight in blaming Mrs. Traquair Campbell, but all, without exception, praised extravagantly the beauty, the sweet nature, and the genius of her wronged and terrorized daughter-in-law.

Robert Campbell took no notice of anything, that either the newspapers or his mother said. One day Isabel showed him a remark concerning "the unhappy life of that unfortunate gentleman, the late amiable Traquair Campbell, Esq." "You ought to stop such shameful allusions, Robert,"

she said, "they make mother furious."

He looked at her with eyes sad and suffering, and answered: "Neither you nor I, Isabel, can gainsay those words. They describe only too truly our father's position. He was amiable, and he was unhappy."

"But, Robert, the insinuation is, that mother was to blame for our father's unhappiness."

"She was. Such accusations are best unanswered. If we do not talk life into them, they will die in a few days."

To those who did not know Robert Campbell, he seemed at this time indifferent and unfeeling. In reality he was consumed by the two pa.s.sions that had taken possession of him--the finding of his wife and son, and the making of money to keep up the search for them. He spent his days at the works, his evenings were devoted to interviewing his detectives, writing them instructions, or reading their reports.

Shabby-looking men, in various disguises, haunted the hall and library of Traquair House, and every single one of them gave Mrs. Campbell a fresh and separate attack of anger. They were naturally against her, they believed everything wrong said of her, they talked slyly to the servants, and would scarcely answer her questions; they trespa.s.sed on her rights, and disobeyed her orders; and if she made a complaint of their behavior to her son, he looked at her indignantly and walked silently away. Speech, which had been her great weapon, and her great enjoyment, lost its power against the smouldering anger in her son's heart, and the speechless insolence of his "spying men."

Very soon after his sorrow had found him out he locked every drawer and closet in the rooms that had been Theodora's. It was a necessary action, but he had a bitter heartache in its performance. The carefully folded garments, with their faint scent of lavender, held so many memories of the woman he longed to see. The knots of pale ribbons, the neckwear of soft lace! Oh, how could such things hurt him so cruelly? In one drawer of her desk he found the stationery she had begged her own money to buy.

She had not even taken the postage stamps. That circ.u.mstance set him thinking. She was leaving England, or she would have taken the stamps--perhaps not--they might have been left for the very purpose of inducing this belief. Who could tell?

Meantime nothing in the life of Traquair House changed or stopped, because Robert Campbell's life had been snapped into two parts. Mrs.

Campbell soon recovered her pride and self-confidence. She told all her callers she "had received measureless sympathy, and as for her enemies, and what they said, she just washed her hands of them--poor, beggarly scribblers, and such like."

Isabel's behavior was a nearer and more constant annoyance. She spent the most of her time in her own room with maps and guidebooks and writing, and the pleasure she derived from these sources was a pleasure inconceivable to her mother. "You are past reckoning with, Isabel," she said fretfully one day, "what on earth are you busy about?"

"I am planning routes of travel, mother, putting down every place to stop at, what hotel to go to, what is worth seeing, and so on. I have four routes laid out already. I am hoping some day, when I have made all clear, you will go with me."