“That is the worst of it,” said Stephen: “you have it all there in your hand! It lay apart from the rest, and I put it in my pocket.”
“It is nothing but the truth,” protested Stephen sullenly. “I was observed, whether by man or woman, beast or bugle, I cannot tell, but I heard the laugh at my elbow, and I ran. It pattered at my heels, and would have caught me if I had not dropped my burden in the old Peel well.”
“And there let it lie and rot!” exclaimed his father: “But you—oh, Stephen!—you to be the robber! and bring on me the second blow!” and the wine-vault rang with the blame and lamentation of a shattered man.
The son was packed off on the morrow lest a worse thing should befall in a suspicion of his part in the fall of Mellish: his father paid the last penny of his available money for the journey to the south; the search for the spoiler passed into other parts of the country, and was speedily abandoned. When the hue and cry had ceased, old Wanlock, professing to have found the brooch on the roadside, sent it back to Mellish, and waited with a savage expectation for another demonstration of its power.
He had not long to wait. The very day on which the talisman was sent, the match of Mellish with the Glasfurd girl—as rich as she was proud, haughty, and ambitious—was broken off by one who could not bring herself to marry a beggared man, and the tale, by gossip amplified and rendered almost laughable, went round the parish like a song.
’Twas Dreghorn brought the news to Manor—the ancient wooer. Wanlock broke a bottle of wine and made the occasion festival, but Mirren could not be discovered.
Full of his plans, her father went that evening to her chamber at an hour when she should be bedded, and found with apprehension that although the door was barred the chamber held no tenant. He went outside in darkness lashed by rain, and to her open window: made his way within—and found the brooch upon her unpressed pillow! It caught a flicker from the fire and shot a lance of light across the room.
“My God!” cried Wanlock harshly, “oh, my God! is this himself, Mahoun?” and with the jewel burning in his loof, he turned to see his daughter, with a face of shame and fear, framed in the open window. She had, in other hours, a sweetness and a charm like sunny Highland weather, or like the little lone birds of the sea, or like an air of youth remembered; but now arising from the outer night of misty exhalations, pallid against the background of the Manor trees, she seemed a blameful ghost.