The Project Gutenberg EBook of What's Mine's Mine, by George MacDonald
(#20 in our series by George MacDonald)

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: What's Mine's Mine

Author: George MacDonald

Release Date: June, 2004  [EBook #5969]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on October 1, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, WHAT'S MINE'S MINE ***




Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.



WHAT'S MINE'S MINE

By George MacDonald

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.






CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

CHAPTER

   I. HOW COME THEY THERE?
  II. A SHORT GLANCE OVER THE SHOULDER
 III. THE GIRLS' FIRST WALK
  IV. THE SHOP IN THE VILLAGE
   V. THE CHIEF
  VI. WORK AND WAGE
 VII. MOTHER AND SON
VIII. A MORNING CALL
  IX. MR. SERCOMBE
   X. THE PLOUGH-BULLS
  XI. THE FIR-GROVE
 XII. AMONG THE HILLS
XIII. THE LAKE
 XIV. THE WOLVES
  XV. THE GULF THAT DIVIDED
 XVI. THE CLAN CHRISTMAS
XVII. BETWEEN DANCING AND SUPPER






WHAT'S MINE'S MINE.

CHAPTER I.

HOW COME THEY THERE?





The room was handsomely furnished, but such as I would quarrel with
none for calling common, for it certainly was uninteresting. Not a
thing in it had to do with genuine individual choice, but merely
with the fashion and custom of the class to which its occupiers
belonged. It was a dining-room, of good size, appointed with all the
things a dining-room "ought" to have, mostly new, and entirely
expensive--mirrored sideboard in oak; heavy chairs, just the dozen,
in fawn-coloured morocco seats and backs--the dining-room, in short,
of a London-house inhabited by rich middle-class people. A big fire
blazed in the low round-backed grate, whose flashes were reflected
in the steel fender and the ugly fire-irons that were never used. A
snowy cloth of linen, finer than ordinary, for there was pride in
the housekeeping, covered the large dining-table, and a company,
evidently a family, was eating its breakfast. But how come these
people THERE?

For, supposing my reader one of the company, let him rise from the
well-appointed table--its silver, bright as the complex motions of
butler's elbows can make it; its china, ornate though not elegant;
its ham, huge, and neither too fat nor too lean; its game-pie, with
nothing to be desired in composition, or in flavour natural or
artificial;--let him rise from these and go to the left of the two
windows, for there are two opposite each other, the room having been
enlarged by being built out: if he be such a one as I would have for
a reader, might I choose--a reader whose heart, not merely his eye,
mirrors what he sees--one who not merely beholds the outward shows
of things, but catches a glimpse of the soul that looks out of them,
whose garment and revelation they are;--if he be such, I say, he
will stand, for more than a moment, speechless with something akin
to that which made the morning stars sing together.

He finds himself gazing far over western seas, while yet the sun is
in the east. They lie clear and cold, pale and cold, broken with
islands scattering thinner to the horizon, which is jagged here and
there with yet another. The ocean looks a wild, yet peaceful
mingling of lake and land. Some of the islands are green from shore
to shore, of low yet broken surface; others are mere rocks, with a
bold front to the sea, one or two of them strange both in form and
character. Over the pale blue sea hangs the pale blue sky, flecked
with a few cold white clouds that look as if they disowned the earth
they had got so high--though none the less her children, and doomed
to descend again to her bosom. A keen little wind is out, crisping
the surface of the sea in patches--a pretty large crisping to be
seen from that height, for the window looks over hill above hill to
the sea. Life, quiet yet eager, is all about; the solitude itself is
alive, content to be a solitude because it is alive. Its life needs
nothing from beyond--is independent even of the few sails of fishing
boats that here and there with their red brown break the blue of the
water.

If my reader, gently obedient to my thaumaturgy, will now turn and
cross to the other window, let him as he does so beware of casting a
glance on his right towards the place he has left at the table, for
the room will now look to him tenfold commonplace, so that he too
will be inclined to ask, "How come these and their belongings HERE
--just HERE?"--let him first look from the window. There he sees
hills of heather rolling away eastward, at middle distance beginning
to rise into mountains, and farther yet, on the horizon, showing
snow on their crests--though that may disappear and return several
times before settling down for the winter. It is a solemn and very
still region--not a PRETTY country at all, but great--beautiful with
the beauties of colour and variety of surface; while, far in the
distance, where the mountains and the clouds have business together,
its aspect rises to grandeur. To his first glance probably not a
tree will be discoverable; the second will fall upon a solitary
clump of firs, like a mole on the cheek of one of the hills not far
off, a hill steeper than most of them, and green to the top.

Is my reader seized with that form of divine longing which wonders
what lies over the nearest hill? Does he fancy, ascending the other
side to its crest, some sweet face of highland girl, singing songs
of the old centuries while yet there was a people in these wastes?
Why should he imagine in the presence of the actual? why dream when
the eyes can see? He has but to return to the table to reseat
himself by the side of one of the prettiest of girls!

She is fair, yet with a glowing tinge under her fairness which
flames out only in her eyes, and seldom reddens her skin. She has
brown hair with just a suspicion of red and no more, and a waviness
that turns to curl at the ends. She has a good forehead, arched a
little, not without a look of habitation, though whence that comes
it might be hard to say. There are no great clouds on that sky of
the face, but there is a soft dimness that might turn to rain. She
has a straight nose, not too large for the imperfect yet decidedly
Greek contour; a doubtful, rather straight, thin-lipped mouth, which
seems to dissolve into a bewitching smile, and reveals perfect
teeth--and a good deal more to the eyes that can read it. When the
mouth smiles, the eyes light up, which is a good sign. Their shape
is long oval--and their colour when unlighted, much that of an
unpeeled almond; when she smiles, they grow red. She has an object
in life which can hardly be called a mission. She is rather tall,
and quite graceful, though not altogether natural in her movements.
Her dress gives a feathery impression to one who rather receives
than notes the look of ladies. She has a good hand--not the doll
hand so much admired of those who can judge only of quantity and
know nothing of quality, but a fine sensible hand,--the best thing
about her: a hand may be too small just as well as too large.

Poor mother earth! what a load of disappointing women, made fit for
fine things, and running all to self and show, she carries on her
weary old back! From all such, good Lord deliver us!--except it be
for our discipline or their awaking.

Near her at the breakfast table sits one of aspect so different,
that you could ill believe they belonged to the same family. She is
younger and taller--tall indeed, but not ungraceful, though by no
means beautiful. She has all the features that belong to a
face--among them not a good one. Stay! I am wrong: there were in
truth, dominant over the rest, TWO good features--her two eyes,
dark as eyes well could be without being all pupil, large, and
rather long like her sister's until she looked at you, and then they
opened wide. They did not flash or glow, but were full of the light
that tries to see--questioning eyes. They were simple eyes--I will
not say without arriere pensee, for there was no end of thinking
faculty, if not yet thought, behind them,--but honest eyes that
looked at you from the root of eyes, with neither attack nor defence
in them. If she was not so graceful as her sister, she was hardly
more than a girl, and had a remnant of that curiously lovely
mingling of grace and clumsiness which we see in long-legged growing
girls. I will give her the advantage of not being further described,
except so far as this--that her hair was long and black, that her
complexion was dark, with something of a freckly unevenness, and
that her hands were larger and yet better than her sister's.

There is one truth about a plain face, that may not have occurred to
many: its ugliness accompanies a condition of larger undevelopment,
for all ugliness that is not evil, is undevelopment; and so implies
the larger material and possibility of development. The idea of no
countenance is yet carried out, and this kind will take more
developing for the completion of its idea, and may result in a
greater beauty. I would therefore advise any young man of aspiration
in the matter of beauty, to choose a plain woman for wife--IF
THROUGH HER PLAINNESS SHE IS YET LOVELY IN HIS EYES; for the
loveliness is herself, victorious over the plainness, and her face,
so far from complete and yet serving her loveliness, has in it room
for completion on a grander scale than possibly most handsome faces.
In a handsome face one sees the lines of its coming perfection, and
has a glimpse of what it must be when finished: few are prophets
enough for a plain face. A keen surprise of beauty waits many a man,
if he be pure enough to come near the transfiguration of the homely
face he loved.

This plain face was a solemn one, and the solemnity suited the
plainness. It was not specially expressive--did not look specially
intelligent; there was more of latent than operative power in
it--while her sister's had more expression than power. Both were
lady-like; whether they were ladies, my reader may determine. There
are common ladies and there are rare ladies; the former MAY be
countesses; the latter MAY be peasants.

There were two younger girls at the table, of whom I will say
nothing more than that one of them looked awkward, promised to be
handsome, and was apparently a good soul; the other was pretty, and
looked pert.

The family possessed two young men, but they were not here; one was
a partner in the business from which his father had practically
retired; the other was that day expected from Oxford.

The mother, a woman with many autumnal reminders of spring about
her, sat at the head of the table, and regarded her queendom with a
smile a little set, perhaps, but bright. She had the look of a woman
on good terms with her motherhood, with society, with the
universe--yet had scarce a shadow of assumption on her countenance.
For if she felt as one who had a claim upon things to go pleasantly
with her, had she not put in her claim, and had it acknowledged? Her
smile was a sweet white-toothed smile, true if shallow, and a more
than tolerably happy one--often irradiating THE GOVERNOR
opposite--for so was the head styled by the whole family from mother
to chit.

He was the only one at the table on whose countenance a shadow--as
of some end unattained--was visible. He had tried to get into
parliament, and had not succeeded; but I will not presume to say
that was the source of the shadow. He did not look discontented, or
even peevish; there was indeed a certain radiance of success about
him-only above the cloudy horizon of his thick, dark eyebrows,
seemed to hang a thundery atmosphere. His forehead was large, but
his features rather small; he had, however, grown a trifle fat,
which tended to make up. In his youth he must have been very
nice-looking, probably too pretty to be handsome. In good health and
when things went well, as they had mostly done with him, he was
sweet-tempered; what he might be in other conditions was seldom
conjectured. But was that a sleeping thunder-cloud, or only the
shadow of his eyebrows?

He had a good opinion of himself-on what grounds I do not know; but
he was rich, and I know no better ground; I doubt if there is any
more certain soil for growing a good opinion of oneself. Certainly,
the more you try to raise one by doing what is right and worth
doing, the less you succeed.

Mr. Peregrine Palmer had finished his breakfast, and sat for a while
looking at nothing in particular, plunged in deep thought about
nothing at all, while the girls went on with theirs. He was a little
above the middle height, and looked not much older than his wife;
his black hair had but begun to be touched with silver; he seemed a
man without an atom of care more than humanity counts reasonable;
his speech was not unlike that of an Englishman, for, although born
in Glasgow, he had been to Oxford. He spoke respectfully to his
wife, and with a pleasant playfulness to his daughters; his manner
was nowise made to order, but natural enough; his grammar was as
good as conversation requires; everything was respectable about
him-and yet-he was one remove at least from a gentleman. Something
hard to define was lacking to that idea of perfection.

Mr. Peregrine Palmer's grandfather had begun to make the family
fortune by developing a little secret still in a remote highland
glen, which had acquired a reputation for its whisky, into a great
superterrene distillery. Both he and his son made money by it, and
it had "done well" for Mr. Peregrine also. With all three of them
the making of money had been the great calling of life. They were
diligent in business, fervent in spirit, serving Mammon, and
founding claim to consideration on the fact. Neither Jacob nor John
Palmer's worst enemy had ever called him a hypocrite: neither had
been suspected of thinking to serve Mammon and God. Both had gone
regularly to church, but neither had taught in a Sunday school, or
once gone to a week-day sermon. Peregrine had built a church and a
school. He did not now take any active part in the distillery, but
worked mainly in money itself.

Jacob, the son of a ship-chandler in Greenock, had never thought
about gentleman or no gentleman; but his son John had entertained
the difference, and done his best to make a gentleman of Peregrine;
and neither Peregrine nor any of his family ever doubted his
father's success; and if he had not quite succeeded, I would have
the blame laid on Peregrine and not on either father or grandfather.
For a man to GROW a gentleman, it is of great consequence that his
grandfather should have been an honest man; but if a man BE a
gentleman, it matters little what his grandfather or grandmother
either was. Nay--if a man be a gentleman, it is of the smallest
consequence, except for its own sake, whether the world counts him
one or not.

Mr. Peregrine Palmer rose from the table with a merry remark on the
prolongation of the meal by his girls, and went towards the door.

"Are you going to shoot?" asked his wife.

"Not to-day. But I am going to look after my guns. I daresay they've
got them all right, but there's nothing like seeing to a thing
yourself!"

Mr. Palmer had this virtue, and this very gentlemanlike way--that he
always gave his wife as full an answer as he would another lady. He
was not given to marital brevity.

He was there for the grouse-shooting--not exactly, only "as it
were." He did not care VERY much about the sport, and had he cared
nothing, would have been there all the same. Other people, in what
he counted his social position, shot grouse, and he liked to do what
other people did, for then he felt all right: if ever he tried the
gate of heaven, it would be because other people did. But the
primary cause of his being so far in the north was the simple fact
that he had had the chance of buying a property very cheap--a fine
property of mist and cloud, heather and rock, mountain and moor, and
with no such reputation for grouse as to enhance its price. "My
estate" sounded well, and after a time of good preserving he would
be able to let it well, he trusted. No sooner was it bought than his
wife and daughters were eager to visit it; and the man of business,
perceiving it would cost him much less if they passed their autumns
there instead of on the continent, proceeded at once to enlarge the
house and make it comfortable. If they should never go a second
time, it would, with its perfect appointments, make the shooting
there more attractive!

They had arrived the day before. The journey had been fatiguing, for
a great part of it was by road; but they were all in splendid
health, and not too tired to get up at a reasonable hour the next
day.






CHAPTER II.

A SHORT GLANCE OVER THE SHOULDER.





Mr. Peregrine was the first of the Palmer family to learn that there
was a Palmer coat of arms. He learned it at college, and on this
wise.

One day a fellow-student, who pleased himself with what he called
philology, remarked that his father must have been a hit of a
humorist to name him Peregrine:--"except indeed it be a family
name!" he added.

"I never thought about it," said Peregrine. "I don't quite know what
you mean."

The fact was he had no glimmer of what he meant.

"Nothing profound," returned the other. "Only don't you see
Peregrine means pilgrim? It is the same as the Italian pellegrino,
from the Latin, peregrinus, which means one that goes about the
fields,--what in Scotland you call a LANDLOUPER."

"Well, but," returned Peregrine, hesitatingly, "I don't find myself
much wiser. Peregrine means a pilgrim, you say, but what of that?
All names mean something, I suppose! It don't matter much."

"What is your coat of arms?"

"I don't know."

"Why did your father call you Peregrine?"

"I don't know that either. I suppose because he liked the name."

"Why should he have liked it?" continued the other, who was given to
the Socratic method.

"I know no more than the man in the moon."

"What does your surname mean?"

"Something to do with palms, I suppose."

"Doubtless."

"You see I don't go in for that kind of thing like you!"

"Any man who cares about the cut of his coat, might have a little
curiosity about the cut of his name: it sits to him a good deal
closer!"

"That is true--so close that you can't do anything with it. I can't
pull mine off however you criticize it!"

"You can change it any day. Would you like to change it?"

"No, thank you, Mr. Stokes!" returned Peregrine dryly.

"I didn't mean with mine," growled the other. "My name is an
historical one too--but that is not in question.--Do you know your
crest ought to be a hairy worm?"

"Why?"

"Don't you know the palmer-worm? It got its name where you got
yours!"

"Well, we all come from Adam!"

"What! worms and all?"

"Surely. We're all worms, the parson says. Come, put me through;
it's time for lunch. Or, if you prefer, let me burst in ignorance. I
don't mind."

"Well, then, I will explain. The palmer was a pilgrim: when he came
home, he carried a palm-branch to show he had been to the holy
land."

"Did the hairy worm go to the holy land too?"

"He is called a palmer-worm because he has feet enough to go any
number of pilgrimages. But you are such a land-louper, you ought to
blazon two hairy worms saltier-wise."

"I don't understand."

"Why, your name, interpreted to half an ear, is just PILGRIM
PILGRIM!"

"I wonder if my father meant it!"

"That I cannot even guess at, not having the pleasure of knowing
your father. But it does look like a paternal joke!"

His friend sought out for him the coat and crest of the Palmers; but
for the latter, strongly recommended a departure: the fresh
family-branch would suit the worm so well!--his crest ought to be
two worms crossed, tufted, the tufts ouched in gold. It was not
heraldic language, but with Peregrine passed well enough. Still he
did not take to the worms, but contented himself with the ordinary
crest. He was henceforth, however, better pleased with his name, for
he fancied in it something of the dignity of a doubled surname.

His first glance at his wife was because she crossed the field of
his vision; his second glance was because of her beauty; his third
because her name was SHELLEY. It is marvellous how whimsically
sentimental commonplace people can be where their own interesting
personality is concerned: her name he instantly associated with
SCALLOP-SHELL, and began to make inquiry about her. Learning that
her other name was Miriam, one also of the holy land--

"A most remarkable coincidence!--a mere coincidence of course!" he
said to himself. "Evidently that is the woman destined to be the
companion of my pilgrimage!"

When their first child was born, the father was greatly exercised as
to a fitting name for him. He turned up an old botany book, and
sought out the scientific names of different palms. CHAMAEROPS would
not do, for it was a dwarf-palm; BORASSUS might do, seeing it was a
boy--only it stood for a FAN-PALM; CORYPHA would not be bad for a
girl, only it was the name of a heathen goddess, and would not go
well with the idea of a holy palmer. COCOA, PHOENIX, and ARECA, one
after the other, went in at his eyes and through his head; none of
them pleased him. His wife, however, who in her smiling way had
fallen in with his whim, helped him out of his difficulty. She was
the daughter of nonconformist parents in Lancashire, and had been
encouraged when a child to read a certain old-fashioned book called
The Pilgrim's Progress, which her husband had never seen. He did not
read it now, but accepting her suggestion, named the boy Christian.
When a daughter came, he would have had her Christiana, but his wife
persuaded him to be content with Christina. They named their second
son Valentine, after Mr. Valiant-for-truth. Their second daughter
was Mercy; and for the third and fourth, Hope and Grace seemed near
enough. So the family had a cool glow of puritanism about it, while
nothing was farther from the thoughts of any of them than what their
names signified. All, except the mother, associated them with the
crusades for the rescue of the sepulchre of the Lord from the
pagans; not a thought did one of them spend on the rescue of a live
soul from the sepulchre of low desires, mean thoughts, and crawling
selfishness.






CHAPTER III.

THE GIRLS' FIRST WALK.





The Governor, Peregrine and Palmer as he was, did not care about
walking at any time, not even when he HAD to do it because other
people did; the mother, of whom there would have been little left
had the sweetness in her moral, and the house-keeping in her
practical nature, been subtracted, had things to see to within
doors: the young people must go out by themselves! They put on their
hats, and issued.

The temperature was keen, though it was now nearly the middle of
August, by which time in those northern regions the earth has begun
to get a little warm: the house stood high, and the atmosphere was
thin. There was a certain sense of sadness in the pale sky and its
cold brightness; but these young people felt no cold, and perceived
no sadness. The air was exhilarating, and they breathed deep breaths
of a pleasure more akin to the spiritual than they were capable of
knowing. For as they gazed around them, they thought, like Hamlet's
mother in the presence of her invisible husband, that they saw all
there was to be seen. They did not know nature: in the school to
which they had gone they patronized instead of revering her. She
wrought upon them nevertheless after her own fashion with her
children, unheedful whether they knew what she was about or not. The
mere space, the mere height from which they looked, the rarity of
the air, the soft aspiration of earth towards heaven, made them all
more of children.

But not one of them being capable of enjoying anything by herself,
together they were unable to enjoy much; and, like the miser who,
when he cannot much enjoy his money, desires more, began to desire
more company to share in the already withering satisfaction of their
new possession--to help them, that is, to get pleasure out of it, as
out of a new dress. It is a good thing to desire to share a good
thing, but it is not well to be unable alone to enjoy a good thing.
It is our enjoyment that should make us desirous to share. What is
there to share if the thing be of no value in itself? To enjoy alone
is to be able to share. No participation can make that of value
which in itself is of none. It is not love alone but pride also, and
often only pride, that leads to the desire for another to be present
with us in possession.

The girls grew weary of the show around them because it was so
quiet, so regardless of their presence, so moveless, so monotonous.
Endless change was going on, but it was too slow for them to see;
had it been rapid, its motions were not of a kind to interest them.
Ere half an hour they had begun to think with regret of Piccadilly
and Regent street--for they had passed the season in London. There
is a good deal counted social which is merely gregarious. Doubtless
humanity is better company than a bare hill-side; but not a little
depends on how near we come to the humanity, and how near we come to
the hill. I doubt if one who could not enjoy a bare hill-side alone,
would enjoy that hill-side in any company; if he thought he did, I
suspect it would be that the company enabled him, not to forget
himself in what he saw, but to be more pleasantly aware of himself
than the lone hill would permit him to be;--for the mere hill has
its relation to that true self which the common self is so anxious
to avoid and forget. The girls, however, went on and on, led mainly
by the animal delight of motion, the two younger making many a
diversion up the hill on the one side, and down the hill on the
other, shrieking at everything fresh that pleased them.

The house they had just left stood on the projecting shoulder of a
hill, here and there planted with firs. Of the hardy trees there was
a thicket at the back of the house, while toward the south, less
hardy ones grew in the shrubbery, though they would never, because
of the sea-breezes, come to any height. The carriage-drive to the
house joined two not very distant points on the same road, and there
was no lodge at either gate. It was a rough, country road, a good
deal rutted, and seldom repaired. Opposite the gates rose the steep
slope of a heathery hill, along the flank of which the girls were
now walking. On their right lay a piece of rough moorland, covered
with heather, patches of bracken, and coarse grass. A few yards to
the right, it sank in a steep descent. Such was the disposition of
the ground for some distance along the road--on one side the hill,
on the other a narrow level, and abrupt descent.

As they advanced they caught sight of a ruin rising above the brow
of the descent: the two younger darted across the heather toward it;
the two elder continued their walk along the road, gradually
descending towards a valley.

"I wonder what we shall see round the corner there!" said Mercy, the
younger of the two.

"The same over again, I suppose!" answered Christina. "What a rough
road it is! I've twice nearly sprained my ankle!"

"I was thinking of what I saw the other day in somebody's
travels--about his interest in every turn of the road, always
looking for what was to come next."

"Time enough when it comes, in my opinion!" rejoined Christina.

For she was like any other mirror--quite ready to receive what was
thrown upon her, but incapable of originating anything, almost
incapable of using anything.

As they descended, and the hill-side, here covered with bracken and
boulders, grew higher and higher above them, the valley, in front
and on the right, gradually opened, here and there showing a glimpse
of a small stream that cantered steadily toward the sea, now
tumbling over a rock, now sullen in a brown pool. Arriving at length
at a shoulder of the hill round which the road turned, a whole mile
of the brook lay before them. It came down a narrow valley, with
scraps of meadow in the bottom; but immediately below them the
valley was of some width, and was good land from side to side, where
green oats waved their feathery grace, and the yellow barley was
nearly ready for the sickle. No more than the barren hill, however,
had the fertile valley anything for them. Their talk was of the last
ball they were at.

The sisters were about as good friends as such negative creatures
could be; and they would be such friends all their lives, if on the
one hand neither of them grew to anything better, and on the other
no jealousy, or marked difference of social position through
marriage, intervened. They loved each other, if not tenderly, yet
with the genuineness of healthy family-habit--a thing not to be
despised, for it keeps the door open for something better. In itself
it is not at all to be reckoned upon, for habit is but the merest
shadow of reality. Still it is not a small thing, as families go, if
sisters and brothers do not dislike each other.

They were criticizing certain of the young men they had met at the
said ball. Being, in their development, if not in their nature,
commonplace, what should they talk about but clothes or young men?
And why, although an excellent type of its kind, should I take the
trouble to record their conversation? To read, it might have amused
me--or even interested, as may a carrot painted by a Dutchman; but
were I a painter, I should be sorry to paint carrots, and the girls'
talk is not for my pen. At the same time I confess myself incapable
of doing it justice. When one is annoyed at the sight of things
meant to be and not beautiful, there is danger of not giving them
even the poor fair-play they stand in so much the more need of that
it can do so little for them.

But now they changed the subject of their talk. They had come to a
point of the road not far from the ruin to which the children had
run across the heather.

"Look, Chrissy! It IS an old castle!" said Mercy. "I wonder whether
it is on our land!"

"Not much to be proud of!" replied the other. "It is nothing but the
walls of a square house!"

"Not just a common square house! Look at that pepper-pot on one of
the corners!--I wonder how it is all the old castles get deserted!"

"Because they are old. It's well to desert them before they tumble
down."

"But they wouldn't tumble down if they weren't neglected. Think of
Warwick castle! Stone doesn't rot like wood! Just see the thickness
of those walls!"

"Yes, they are thick! But stone too has its way of rotting.
Westminster palace is wearing through, flake by flake. The weather
will be at the lords before long."

"That's what Valentine would call a sign of the times. I say, what a
radical he is, Chrissy!--Look! the old place is just like an empty
egg-shell! I know, if it had been mine, I wouldn't have let it come
to that!"

"You say so because it never was yours: if it had been, you would
know how uncomfortable it was!"

"I should like to know," said Mercy, after a little pause, during
which they stood looking at the ruin, "whether the owners leave such
places because they get fastidious and want better, or because they
are too poor to keep them up! At all events a man must be poor to
SELL the house that belonged to his ancestors!--It must be miserable
to grow poor after being used to plenty!--I wonder whose is the old
place!"

"Oh, the governor's, I suppose! He has all hereabout for miles."

"I hope it is ours! I SHOULD like to build it up again! I would live
in it myself!"

"I'm afraid the governor won't advance your share for that purpose!"

"I love old things!" said Mercy.

"I believe you take your old doll to bed with you yet!" rejoined
Christina. "I am different to you!" she continued, with Frenchified
grammar; "I like things as new as ever I can have them!"

"I like new things well enough, Chrissy--you know I do! It is
natural. The earth herself has new clothes once a year. It is but
once a year, I grant!"

"Often enough for an old granny like her!"

"Look what a pretty cottage!--down there, half-way to the burn! It's
like an English cottage! Those we saw as we came along were either
like a piece of the earth, or so white as to look ghastly! This one
looks neat and comfortable, and has trees about it!"

The ruin, once a fortified house and called a castle, stood on a
sloping root or spur that ran from the hill down to the bank of the
stream, where it stopped abruptly with a steep scaur, at whose foot
lay a dark pool. On the same spur, half-way to the burn, stood a
low, stone-built, thatched cottage, with a little grove about it,
mostly of the hardy, contented, musical fir--a tree that would seem
to have less regard to earthly prosperity than most, and looks like
a pilgrim and a stranger: not caring much, it thrives where other
trees cannot. There might have been a hundred of them, mingled, in
strangest contrast, with a few delicate silver birches, about the
cottage. It stood toward the east side of the sinking ridge, which
had a steep descent, both east and west, to the fields below. The
slopes were green with sweet grass, and apparently smooth as a lawn.
Not far from where the cottage seemed to rest rather than rise or
stand, the burn rushed right against the side of the spur, as if to
go straight through it, but turned abruptly, and flowed along the
side to the end of it, where its way to the sea was open. On the
point of the ridge were a few more firs: except these, those about
the cottage, the mole on the hill-cheek, and the plantation about
the New House, up or down was not a tree to be seen. The girls stood
for a moment looking.

"It's really quite pretty!" said Christina with condescension. "It
has actually something of what one misses here so much--a certain
cosy look! Tidy it is too! As you say, Mercy, it might be in England
--only for the poverty of its trees.--And oh those wretched bare
hills!" she added, as she turned away and moved on.

"Wait till the heather is quite out: then you will have colour to
make up for the bareness."

"Tell true now, Mercy: that you are Scotch need not keep you from
speaking the truth:--don't you think heather just--well--just a
leetle magentaish?--not a colour to be altogether admired?--just a
little vulgar, don't you know? The fashion has changed so much
within the last few years!"

"No, I don't think so; and if I did I should be ashamed of it. I
suppose poor old mother Earth ought to go to the pre-Raphaelites to
be taught how to dress herself!"

Mercy spoke with some warmth, but Christina was not sufficiently
interested to be cross. She made no answer.

They were now at the part of the road which crossed the descending
spur as it left the hill-side. Here they stopped again, and looked
down the rocky slope. There was hardly anything green betwixt them
and the old ruin--little but stones on a mass of rock; but
immediately beyond the ruin the green began: there it seemed as if a
wave of the meadow had risen and overflowed the spur, leaving its
turf behind it. Catching sight of Hope and Grace as they ran about
the ruin, they went to join them, the one drawn by a vague interest
in the exuviae of vanished life, the other by mere curiosity to see
inside the care-worn, protesting walls. Through a gap that might
once have been a door, they entered the heart of the sad unhoping
thing dropt by the Past on its way to oblivion: nothing looks so
unlike life as a dead body, nothing so unfit for human dwelling as a
long-forsaken house.

Finding in one corner a broken stair, they clambered up to a gap in
the east wall; and as they reached it, heard the sound of a horse's
feet. Looking down .the road, they saw a gig approaching with two
men. It had reached a part not so steep, and was coming at a trot.

"Why!" exclaimed Christina, "there's Val!--and some one with him!"

"I heard the governor say to mamma," returned Mercy, "that Val was
going to bring a college friend with him,--'for a pop at the
grouse,' he said. I wonder what he will be like!"

"He's a good-big-looking fellow," said Christina.

They drew nearer.

"You might have said a big, good-looking fellow!" rejoined Mercy.

"He really is handsome!--Now mind, Mercy, I was the first to
discover it!" said Christina.

"Indeed you were not!--At least I was the first to SAY it!" returned
Mercy. "But you will take him all to yourself anyhow, and I am sure
I don't care!"

Yet the girls were not vulgar--they were only common. They did and
said vulgar things because they had not the sensitive vitality to
shrink from them. They had not been well taught--that is roused to
LIVE: in the family was not a breath of aspiration. There was plenty
of ambition, that is, aspiration turned hell-ward. They thought
themselves as far from vulgar as any lady in any land, being in this
vulgar--that they despised the people they called vulgar, yet
thought much of themselves for not being vulgar. There was little in
them the world would call vulgar; but the world and its ways are
vulgar; its breeding will not pass with the ushers of the high
countries. The worst in that of these girls was a FAST, disagreeable
way of talking, which they owed to a certain governess they had had
for a while.

They hastened to the road. The gig came up. Valentine threw the
reins to his companion, jumped out, embraced his sisters, and seemed
glad to see them. Had he met them after a like interval at home, he
would have given them a cooler greeting; but he had travelled so
many miles that they seemed not to have met for quite a long time.

"My friend, Mr. Sercombe," he said, jerking his head toward the gig.

Mr. Sercombe raised his POT-LID--the last fashion in head-gear--and
acquaintance was made.

"We'll drive on, Sercombe," said Valentine, jumping up. "You see,
Chris, we're half dead with hunger! Do you think we shall find
anything to eat?"

"Judging by what we left at breakfast," replied Christina, "I should
say you will find enough for--one of you; but you had better go and
see."






CHAPTER IV.

THE SHOP IN THE VILLAGE.





Two or three days have passed. The sun had been set for an hour, and
the night is already rather dark notwithstanding the long twilight
of these northern regions, for a blanket of vapour has gathered over
the heaven, and a few stray drops have begun to fall from it. A thin
wind now and then wakes, and gives a feeble puff, but seems
immediately to change its mind and resolve not to blow, but let the
rain come down. A drearier-looking spot for human abode it would be
difficult to imagine, except it were as much of the sandy Sahara, or
of the ashy, sage-covered waste of western America. A muddy road
wound through huts of turf--among them one or two of clay, and one
or two of stone, which were more like cottages. Hardly one had a
window two feet square, and many of their windows had no glass. In
almost all of them the only chimney was little more than a hole in
the middle of the thatch. This rendered the absence of glass in the
windows not so objectionable; for, left without ordered path to its
outlet, the smoke preferred a circuitous route, and lingered by the
way, filling the air. Peat-smoke, however, is both wholesome and
pleasant, nor was there mingled with it any disagreeable smell of
cooking. Outside were no lamps; the road was unlighted save by the
few rays that here and there crept from a window, casting a doubtful
glimmer on the mire.

One of the better cottages sent out a little better light, though
only from a tallow candle, through the open upper half of a door
horizontally divided in two. Except by that same half-door, indeed,
little light could enter the place, for its one window was filled
with all sorts of little things for sale. Small and inconvenient for
the humblest commerce, this was not merely the best, it was the only
shop in the hamlet.

There were two persons in it, one before and one behind the counter.
The latter was a young woman, the former a man.

He was leaning over the counter--whether from weariness,
listlessness, or interest in his talk with the girl behind, it would
not have been easy, in the dim light and deep shadow, to say. He
seemed quite at home, yet the young woman treated him with a marked,
though unembarrassed respect. The candle stood to one side of them
upon the counter, making a ghastly halo in the damp air; and in the
light puff that occasionally came in at the door, casting the shadow
of one of a pair of scales, now on this now on that of the two
faces. The young woman was tall and dark, with a large forehead:--so
much could be seen; but the sweetness of her mouth, the blueness
of her eyes, the extreme darkness of her hair, were not to be
distinguished. The man also was dark. His coat was of some rough
brown material, probably dyed and woven in the village, and his kilt
of tartan. They were more than well worn--looked even in that poor
light a little shabby. On his head was the highland bonnet called a
glengarry. His profile was remarkable--hardly less than grand, with
a certain aquiline expression, although the nose was not roman. His
eyes appeared very dark, but in the daylight were greenish hazel.
Usually he talked with the girl in Gaelic, but was now speaking
English, a far purer English than that of most English people,
though with something of the character of book-English as
distinguished from conversation-English, and a very perceptible
accent.

"And when was it you heard from Lachlan, Annie?" he asked.

After a moment's pause, during which she had been putting away
things in a drawer of the counter--not so big as many a kitchen
dresser--

"Last Thursday it was, sir," answered the girl. "You know we hear
every month, sometimes oftener."

"Yes; I know that.--I hope the dear fellow is well?"

"He is quite well and of good hope. He says he will soon come and
see us now."

"And take you away, Annie?"

"Well, sir," returned Annie, after a moment's hesitation, "he does
not SAY so!"

"If he did not mean it, he would be a rascal, and I should have to
kill him. But my life on Lachlan's honesty!"

"Thank you, sir. He would lay down his for you."

"Not if you said to him, DON'T!-eh, Annie?"

"But he would, Macruadh!" returned the young woman, almost angrily.
"Are not you his chief?"

"Ah, that is all over now, my girl! There are no chiefs, and no
clans any more! The chiefs that need not, yet sell their land like
Esau for a mess of pottage--and their brothers with it! And the
Sasunnach who buys it, claims rights over them that never grew on
the land or were hid in its caves! Thank God, the poor man is not
their slave, but he is the worse off, for they will not let him eat,
and he has nowhere to go. My heart is like to break for my people.
Sometimes I feel as if I would gladly die."

"Oh, sir! don't say that!" expostulated the young woman, and her
voice trembled. "Every heart in Glenruadh is glad when it goes well
with the Macruadh."

"Yes, yes; I know you all love my father's son and my uncle's
nephew; but how can it go well with the Macruadh when it goes ill
with his clan? There is no way now for a chief to be the father of
his people; we are all poor together! My uncle--God rest his
soul!--they managed it so, I suppose, as to persuade him there was
no help for it! Well, a man must be an honest man, even if there be
no way but ruin! God knows, as we've all heard my father say a
hundred times from the pulpit, there's no ruin but dishonesty! For
poverty and hard work, he's a poor creature would crouch for those!"

"He who well goes down hill, holds his head up!" said Annie, and a
pause followed.

"There are strangers at the New House, we hear," she said.

"From a distance I saw some young ladies, and one or two men. I
don't desire to see more of them. God forbid I should wish them any
manner of harm! but--I hardly understand myself--I don't like to see
them there. I am afraid it is pride. They are rich, I hear, so we
shall not be troubled with attention from them; they will look down
upon us."

"Look down on the Macruadh!" exclaimed Annie, as if she could not
believe her ears.

"Not that I should heed that!" he went on. "A cock on the barn-ridge
looks down on you, and you don't feel offended! What I do dread is
looking down on them. There is something in me that can hate, Annie,
and I fear it. There is something about the land--I don't care about
money, but I feel like a miser about the land!--I don't mean ANY
land; I shouldn't care to buy land unless it had once been ours; but
what came down to me from my own people--with my own people upon
it--I would rather turn the spigot of the molten gold and let it run
down the abyss, than a rood of that slip from me! I feel it even a
disgrace to have lost what of it I never had!"

"Indeed, Macruadh," said Annie, "it's a hard time! There is no money
in the country! And fast the people are going after Lachlan!"

"I shall miss you, Annie!"

"You are very kind to us all, sir."

"Are you not all my own! And you have to take care of for Lachlan's
sake besides. He left you solemnly to my charge--as if that had been
necessary, the foolish fellow, when we are foster-brothers!"

Again came a pause.

"Not a gentleman-farmer left from one end of the strath to the
other!" said the chief at length. "When Ian is at home, we feel just
like two old turkey-cocks left alone in the yard!"

"Say two golden eagles, sir, on the cliff of the rock."

"Don't compare us to the eagle, Annie. I do not love the bird. He is
very proud and greedy and cruel, and never will know the hand that
tames him. He is the bird of the monarch or the earl, not the bird
of the father of his people. But he is beautiful, and I do not kill
him."

"They shot another, the female bird, last week! All the birds are
going! Soon there will be nothing but the great sheep and the little
grouse. The capercailzie's gone, and the ptarmigan's gone!--Well,
there's a world beyond!"

"Where the birds go, Annie?--Well, it may be! But the ptarmigan's not
gone yet, though there are not many; and for the capercailzie--only
who that loves them will be here to see!--But do you really think
there is a heaven for all God's creatures, Annie? Ian does."

"I don't know what I said to make you think so, sir! When the heart
aches the tongue mistakes. But how is my lady, your mother?"

"Pretty well, thank you--wonderfully cheerful. It is time I went
home to her. Lachlan would think I was playing him false, and making
love to you on my own account!"

"No fear! He would know better than that! He would know too, if she
was not belonging to Lachlan, her father's daughter would not let
her chief humble himself."

"You're one of the old sort, Annie! Good night. Mind you tell
Lachlan I never miss a chance of looking in to see how you are
getting on."

"I will. Good night, Macruadh."

They shook hands over the counter, and the young chief took his
departure.

As he stood up, he showed a fine-made, powerful frame, over six feet
in height, and perfectly poised. With a great easy stride he swept
silently out of the shop; nor from gait any more than look would one
have thought he had been all day at work on the remnant of property
he could call his own.

To a cit it would have seemed strange that one sprung from
innumerable patriarchal ancestors holding the land of the country,
should talk so familiarly with a girl in a miserable little shop in
a most miserable hamlet; it would have seemed stranger yet that such
a one should toil at the labour the soul of a cit despises; but
stranger than both it would seem to him, if he saw how such a man is
tempted to look down upon HIM.

If less CLEVERNESS is required for country affairs, they leave the
more room for thinking. There are great and small in every class;
here and there is a ploughman that understands Burns, here and there
a large-minded shopkeeper, here and there perhaps an unselfish
duke. Doubtless most of the youth's ancestors would likewise have
held such labour unworthy of a gentleman, and would have preferred
driving to their hills a herd of lowland cattle; but this, the last
Macruadh, had now and then a peep into the kingdom of heaven.






CHAPTER V.

THE CHIEF.





The Macruadh strode into the dark, and down the village, wasting no
time in picking his way--thence into the yet deeper dark of the
moorland hills. The rain was beginning to come down in earnest, but
he did not heed it; he was thoroughbred, and feared no element. An
umbrella was to him a ludicrous thing: how could a little rain--as
he would have called it had it come down in torrents--hurt any one!

The Macruadh, as the few who yet held by the sore-frayed,
fast-vanishing skirt of clanship, called him, was the son of the
last minister of the parish-a godly man, who lived that which he
could ill explain, and was immeasurably better than those parts of
his creed which, from a sense of duty, he pushed to the front. For
he held devoutly by the root of which he spoke too little, and it
supplied much sap to his life and teaching--out of the pulpit. He
was a genial, friendly, and by nature even merry man, always ready
to share what he had, and making no show of having what he had not,
either in wisdom, knowledge, or earthly goods. His father and
brother had been owners of the property and chiefs of the clan, much
beloved by the poor of it, and not a little misunderstood by most of
the more nourishing. For a great hunger after larger means, the
ambition of the mammon-ruled world, had arisen in the land, and with
it a rage for emigration. The uncle of the present Macruadh did all
he could to keep his people at home, lived on a couple of hundreds a
year himself, and let many of his farms to his gentlemen-tacksmen,
as they were called, at lower rents; but it was unavailing; one
after another departed, until his land lay in a measure waste, and
he grew very poor, mourning far more over his clan and his country
than his poverty. In more prosperous times he had scraped together a
little money, meaning it, if he could but avoid spending it in his
old age, for his brother, who must soon succeed him; for he was
himself a bachelor--the result of a romantic attachment and sorrow
in his youth; but he lent it to a company which failed, and so lost
it. At length he believed himself compelled, for the good of his
people, to part with all but a mere remnant of the property. From
the man to whom he sold it, Mr. Peregrine Palmer bought it for twice
the money, and had still a good bargain. But the hopes of the laird
were disappointed: in the sheep it fed, and the grouse it might be
brought to breed, lay all its value in the market; there was no
increase in the demand for labour; and more and more of the
peasantry emigrated, or were driven to other parts of the country.
Such was the present treatment of the land, causing human life to
ebb from it, and working directly counter to the creative God.

The laird retired to the humble cottage of his brother the pastor,
just married rather late in life--where every comfort love could
give waited for him; but the thought that he could have done better
for his people by retaining the land soon wore him out; and having
made a certain disposition of the purchase-money, he died.

What remained of the property came to the minister. As for the
chieftainship, that had almost died before the chief; but, reviving
by union with the reverence felt for the minister, it took
thereafter a higher form. When the minister died, the idea of it
transmitted to his son was of a peculiarly sacred character; while
in the eyes of the people, the authority of the chief and the
influence of the minister seemed to meet reborn in Alister
notwithstanding his youth. In himself he was much beloved, and in
love the blessed rule, blessed where understood, holds, that to him
that hath shall be given, he only who has being fit to receive. The
love the people bore to his father, both pastor and chief, crowned
head and heart of Alister. Scarce man or woman of the poor remnant
of the clan did not love the young Macruadh.

On his side was true response. With a renewed and renovating
conscience, and a vivid sense that all things had to be made new, he
possessed an old strong heart, clinging first to his father and
mother, and then to the shadow even of any good thing that had come
floating down the ages. Call it a dream, a wild ideal, a foolish
fancy--call it what you please, he was filled with the notion of
doing something in his own person and family, having the remnant of
the clan for the nucleus of his endeavour, to restore to a vital
reality, let it be of smallest extent, that most ancient of
governments, the patriarchal, which, all around, had rotted into the
feudal, in its turn rapidly disintegrating into the mere dust and
ashes of the kingdom of the dead, over which Mammon reigns supreme.
There may have been youthful presumption and some folly in the
notion, but it sprang neither from presumption nor folly, but from
simple humanity, and his sense of the responsibility he neither
could nor would avoid, as the person upon whom had devolved the
headship, however shadowy, of a house, ruinous indeed, but not yet
razed.

The castle on the ridge stood the symbol of the family condition. It
had, however, been a ruin much longer than any one alive could
remember. Alister's uncle had lived in a house on the spot where Mr.
Peregrine Palmer's now stood; the man who bought it had pulled it
down to build that which Mr. Palmer had since enlarged. It was but a
humble affair--a great cottage in stone, much in the style of that
in which the young chief now lived--only six times the size, with
the one feature indispensable to the notion of a chief's residence,
a large hall. Some would say it was but a huge kitchen; but it was
the sacred place of the house, in which served the angel of
hospitality. THERE was always plenty to eat and drink for any comer,
whether he had "claim" or not: the question of claim where was need,
was not thought of. When the old house had to make room for the new,
the staves of the last of its half-pipes of claret, one of which
used always to stand on tap amidst the peat-smoke, yielded its final
ministration to humanity by serving to cook a few meals for mason
and carpenter.

The property of Clanruadh, for it was regarded as clan-property
BECAUSE belonging to the chief, stretched in old time away out of
sight in all directions--nobody, in several, could tell exactly how
far, for the undrawn boundary lines lay in regions of mist and
cloud, in regions stony, rocky, desert, to which a red deer, not to
say a stray sheep, rarely ascended. At one time it took in a portion
at least of every hill to be seen from the spot where stood the
ruin. The chief had now but a small farm, consisting of some fair
soil on the slope of a hill, and some very good in the valley on
both sides of the burn; with a hill-pasture that was not worth
measuring in acres, for it abounded in rocks, and was prolific in
heather and ling, with patches of coarse grass here and there, and
some extent of good high-valley grass, to which the small black
cattle and black-faced sheep were driven in summer. Beyond
periodical burnings of the heather, this uplifted portion received
no attention save from the mist, the snow, the rain, the sun, and
the sweet air. A few grouse and black game bred on it, and many
mountain-hares, with martens, wild cats, and other VERMIN. But so
tender of life was the Macruadh that, though he did not spare these
last, he did not like killing even a fox or a hooded crow, and never
shot a bird for sport, or would let another shoot one, though the
poorest would now and then beg a bird or two from him, sure of
having their request. It seemed to him as if the creatures were
almost a part of his clan, of which also he had to take care against
a greedy world. But as the deer and the birds ranged where they
would, it was not much he could do for them--as little almost as for
the men and women that had gone over the sea, and were lost to their
country in Canada.

Regret, and not any murmur, stirred the mind of Alister Macruadh
when he thought of the change that had passed on all things around
him. He had been too well taught for grumbling--least of all at what
was plainly the will of the Supreme--inasmuch as, however man might
be to blame, the thing was there. Personal regrets he had none
beyond those of family feeling and transmitted SENTIMENT. He was
able to understand something of the signs of the times, and saw that
nothing could bring back the old way--saw that nothing comes
back--at least in the same form; saw that there had been much that
ought not to come back, and that, if patriarchal ways were ever to
return, they must rise out of, and be administered upon loftier
principles--must begin afresh, and be wrought out afresh from the
bosom of a new Abraham, capable of so bringing up his children that
a new development of the one natural system, of government should be
possible with and through them. Perhaps even now, in the new country
to which so many of his people were gone, some shadowy reappearance
of the old fashion might have begun to take shape on a higher level,
with loftier aims, and in circumstances holding out fewer
temptations to the evils of the past!

Alister could not, at his years, have generated such thoughts but
for the wisdom that had gone before him--first the large-minded
speculation of his father, who was capable even of discarding his
prejudices where he saw they might mislead him; and next, the
response of his mother to the same: she was the only one who
entirely understood her husband. Isobel Macruadh was a woman of real
thinking-power. Her sons being but boys when their father died, she
at once took the part of mediator between the mind of the father and
that of his sons; and besides guiding them on the same principles,
often told them things their father had said, and talked with them
of things they had heard him say.

One of the chief lessons he left them wrought well for the casting
out of all with which the feudal system had debased the patriarchal;
and the poverty shared with the clan had powerfully helped: it was
spoken against the growing talionic regard of human relations--that,
namely, the conditions of a bargain fulfilled on both sides, all is
fulfilled between the bargaining parties.

"In the possibility of any bargain," he had said, "are involved
eternal conditions: there is relationship--there is brotherhood.
Even to give with a denial of claim, to be kind under protest, is an
injury, is charity without the love, is salt without the saltness.
If we spent our lives in charity we should never overtake neglected
claims--claims neglected from the very beginning of the relations of
men. If a man say, 'I have not been unjust; I owed the man nothing;'
he sides with Death--says with the typical murderer, 'Am I my
brother's keeper?' builds the tombs of those his fathers slew."

In the bosom of young Alister Macruadh, the fatherly relation of the
strong to the weak survived the disappearance of most of the outward
signs of clan-kindred: the chieftainship was SUBLIMED in him. The
more the body of outer fact died, the stronger grew in him the
spirit of the relation. As some savage element of a race will
reappear in an individual of it after ages of civilization, so may
good old ways of thinking and feeling, modes long gone out of
fashion and practice, survive and revive modified by circumstance,
in an individual of a new age. Such a one will see the customs of
his ancestors glorified in the mists of the past; what is noble in
them will appeal to all that is best in his nature, spurring the
most generous of his impulses, and stirring up the conscience that
would be void of offence. When the operative force of such regards
has been fostered by the teaching of a revered parent; when the
influences he has left behind are nourished and tended, with
thorough belief and devoted care, by her who shared his authority in
life, and now bears alone the family sceptre, there can be no bound
set to their possible potency in a mind of high spiritual order. The
primary impulse became with Alister a large portion of his religion:
he was the shepherd of the much ravaged and dwindled Macruadh-fold;
it was his church, in which the love of the neighbour was
intensified in the love of the relation and dependent. To aid and
guard this his flock, was Alister's divine service. It was
associated with a great dislike of dogma, originating in the recoil
of the truth within him from much that was commonly held and taught
for true.

Call the thing enthusiasm or what you will, so you believe it there,
and genuine.

It was only towards the poor of a decayed clan he had opportunity of
exercising the cherished relation; almost all who were not poor had
emigrated before the lands were sold; and indeed it was only the
poor who set store by their unity with the old head. Not a few of
the clan, removed elsewhither, would have smiled degenerate, and
with scorn in their amusement, at the idea of Alister's clinging to
any supposed reality in the position he could claim. Among such
nevertheless were several who, having made money by trade, would
each have been glad enough to keep up old traditions, and been ready
even to revive older, had the headship fallen to him. But in the
hands of a man whom, from the top of their wealth, they regarded as
but a poor farmer, they forgot all about it--along with a few other
more important and older-world matters; for where Mammon gets in his
foot, he will soon be lord of the house, and turn not merely Rank,
his rival demon, out of doors, but God himself. Alister indeed lived
in a dream; he did not know how far the sea of hearts had ebbed,
leaving him alone on the mount of his vision; but he dreamed a dream
that was worth dreaming; comfort and help flowed from it to those
about him, nor did it fail to yield his own soul refreshment also.
All dreams are not false; some dreams are truer than the plainest
facts. Fact at best is but a garment of truth, which has ten
thousand changes of raiment woven in the same loom. Let the dreamer
only do the truth of his dream, and one day he will realize all that
was worth realizing in it--and a great deal more and better than it
contained. Alister had no far-reaching visions of anything to come
out of his; he had, like the true man he was, only the desire to
live up to his idea of what the people looked up to in him. The one
thing that troubled him was, that his uncle, whom he loved so
dearly, should have sold the land.

Doubtless there was pride mingled with his devotion, and pride is an
evil thing. Still it was a human and not a devilish pride. I would
not be misunderstood as defending pride, or even excusing it in any
shape; it is a thing that must be got rid of at all costs; but even
for evil we must speak the truth; and the pride of a good man, evil
as it is, and in him more evil than in an evil man, yet cannot be in
itself such a bad thing as the pride of a bad man. The good man
would at once recognize and reject the pride of a bad man. A pride
that loves cannot be so bad as a pride that hates. Yet if the good
man do not cast out his pride, it will sink him lower than the bad
man's, for it will degenerate into a worse pride than that of any
bad man. Each must bring its own divinely-ordained consequence.

There is one other point in the character of the Macruadh which I
must mention ere I pass on; in this region, and at this time, it was
a great peculiarity, one that yielded satisfaction to few of the
clan, and made him even despised in the strath: he hated whisky, and
all the drinking customs associated with it. In this he was not
original; he had not come to hate it from noting the degradation and
crime that attended it, or that as poverty grew, drunkenness grew,
men who had used it in moderation taking more and more as
circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he
had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman
doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself
greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous
not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had
banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from
their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness
and its physical means into the minds of her sons. In her childhood
she had seen its evils in her own father: by no means a drunkard, he
was the less of a father because he did as others did. Never an
evening passed without his drinking his stated portion of
whisky-toddy, growing more and more subject to attacks of had
temper, with consequent injustice and unkindness. The recollection
may have made her too sweeping in her condemnation of the habit, but
I doubt it; and anyhow a habit is not a man, and we need not much
condemn that kind of injustice. We need not be tender over a habit
which, though not all bad, yet leads to endless results that are all
bad. I would follow such to its grave without many tears!

Isobel Macruadh was one of those rare women who preserve in years
the influence gained in youth; and the thing that lay at the root of
the fact was her justice. For though her highland temper would
occasionally burst out in hot flame, everyone knew that if she were
in the wrong, she would see it and say it before any one else would
tell her of it. This justice it was, ready against herself as for
another, that fixed the influence which her goodness and her
teaching of righteousness gained.

Her eldest child, a girl, died in infancy. Alister and Ian were her
whole earthly family, and they worshipped her.






CHAPTER VI.

WORK AND WAGE.





Alister strode through the night, revolving no questions hard to
solve, though such were not strangers to him. He had not been to a
university like his brother, but he had had a good educational
beginning--who ever had more than a beginning?--chiefly from his
father, who for his time and opportunity was even a learned man--and
better, a man who knew what things were worth a man's human while,
and what were not: he could and did think about things that a man
must think about or perish; and his son Alister had made himself
able to think about what he did not know, by doing the thing he did
know. But now, as he walked, fighting with the wind, his bonnet of
little shelter pulled down on his forehead, he was thinking mostly
of Lachlan his foster-brother, whose devotion had done much to
nourish in him the sense that he was head of the clan. He had not
far to go to reach his home--about a couple of miles.

He had left the village a quarter of the way behind him, when
through the darkness he spied something darker yet by the roadside.
Going up to it, he found an old woman, half sitting, half standing,
with a load of peats in a creel upon her back, unable, apparently,
for the moment at least, to proceed. Alister knew at once by her
shape and posture who she was.

"Ah, mistress Conal!" he said, "I am sorry to see you resting on
such a night so near your own door. It means you have filled your
creel too full, and tired yourself too much."

"I am not too much tired, Macruadh!" returned the old woman, who was
proud and cross-tempered, and had a reputation for witchcraft, which
did her neither much good nor much harm.

"Well, whether you are tired or not, I believe I am the stronger of
the two!"

"Small doubt of that, Alister!" said mistress Conal with a sigh.

"Then I will take your creel, and you will soon be home. Come along!
It is going to be a wild night!"

So saying he took the rope from the neck of the old woman right
gently, and threw the creel with a strong swing over his shoulder.
This dislodged a few of the topmost of the peats which the poor old
thing had been a long way to fetch. She heard them fall, and one of
them struck her foot. She started up, almost in a rage.

"Sir! sir! my peats!" she cried. "What would you be throwing away
the good peats into the dark for, letting that swallow them they
should swallow!"

These words, as all that passed between them, were spoken neither in
Scotch nor English, but in Gaelic--which, were I able to write it
down, most of my readers would no more understand than they would
Phoenician: we must therefore content ourselves with what their
conversation comes to in English, which, if deficient compared with
Gaelic in vowel-sounds, yet serves to say most things capable of
being said.

"I am sorry, mistress Conal; but we'll not be losing them," returned
the laird gently, and began to feel about the road for the fallen
peats.

"How many were there, do you think, of them that fell?" he asked,
rising after a vain search.

"How should I be knowing! But I am sure there would be nigh six of
them!" answered the woman, in a tone of deep annoyance--nor was it
much wonder; they were precious to the cold, feeble age that had
gone so far to fetch so few.

The laird again stooped his long back, and searched and searched,
feeling on all sides around him. He picked up three. Not another,
after searching for several minutes, could he find.

"I'm thinking that must be all of them, but I find only three!" he
said. "Come, let us go home! You must not make your cough worse for
one or two peats, perhaps none!"

"Three, Macruadh, three!" insisted the old woman in wavering voice,
broken by coughing; for, having once guessed six, she was not
inclined to lower her idea of her having.

"Well, well! we'll count them when we get home!" said Alister, and
gave his hand to her to help her up.

She yielded grumbling, and, bowed still though relieved from her burden,
tottered by his side along the dark, muddy, wind-and-rain-haunted road.

"Did you see my niece to-night at the shop?" she asked; for she was
proud of being so nearly related to those who kept the shop of the
hamlet.

"That I did," answered the chief; and a little talk followed about
Lachlan in Canada.

No one could have perceived from the way in which the old woman
accepted his service, and the tone in which she spoke to him while
he bent under her burden, that she no less than loved her chief; but
everybody only smiled at mistress Conal's rough speech. That night,
ere she went to bed, she prayed for the Macruadh as she never prayed
for one of her immediate family. And if there was a good deal of
superstition mingled with her prayer, the main thing in it was
genuine, that is, the love that prompted it; and if God heard only
perfect prayers, how could he be the prayer-hearing God?

Her dwelling stood but a stone's-throw from the road, and presently
they turned up to it by a short steep ascent. It was a poor hut,
mostly built of turf; but turf makes warm walls, impervious to the
wind, and it was a place of her own!--that is, she had it to
herself, a luxury many cannot even imagine, while to others to he
able to be alone at will seems one of the original necessities of
life. Even the Lord, who probably had not always a room to himself
in the poor houses he staid at, could not do without solitude;
therefore not unfrequently spent the night in the open air, on the
quiet, star-served hill: there even for him it would seem to have
been easier to find an entrance into that deeper solitude which, it
is true, he did not need in order to find his Father and his God,
but which apparently he did need in order to come into closest
contact with him who was the one joy of his life, whether his hard
life on earth, or his blessed life in heaven.

The Macruadh set down the creel, and taking out peat after peat,
piled them up against the wall, where already a good many waited
their turn to be laid on the fire; for, as the old woman said, she
must carry a few when she could, and get ahead with her store ere
the winter came, or she would soon be devoured: there was a death
that always prowled about old people, she said, watching for the
fire to go out. Many of the Celts are by nature poets, and mistress
Conal often spoke in a manner seldom heard from the lips of a
lowland woman. The common forms of Gaelic are more poetic than those
of most languages, and could have originated only with a poetic
people, while mistress Conal was by no means an ordinary type of her
people; maugre her ill temper and gruffness, she thought as well as
spoke like a poetess. This, conjoined with the gift of the second
sight, had helped to her reputation as a witch.

As the chief piled the peats, he counted them. She sat watching him
and them from a stone that made part of a rude rampart to the
hearth.

"I told you so, Macruadh!" she said, the moment she saw his hand
return empty from the bottom of the creel. "I was positive there
should be three more!--But what's on the road is not with the
devil."

"I am very sorry!" said the chief, who thought it wiser not to
contradict her.

He would have searched his sporan for a coin to make up to her for
the supposed loss of her peats; but he knew well enough there was
not a coin in it. He shook hands with her, bade her good night, and
went, closing the door carefully behind him against a great gust of
wind that struggled to enter, threatening to sweep the fire she was
now blowing at with her wrinkled, leather-like lips, off the hearth
altogether--a thing that had happened before, to the danger of the
whole building, itself of the substance burning in the middle of its
floor.

The Macruadh ran down the last few steep steps of the path, and
jumped into the road. Through the darkness came the sound of one
springing aside with a great start, and the click of a gun-lock.

"Who goes there?" cried a rather tremulous voice.

"The Macruadh," answered the chief.

The utterance apparently conveyed nothing.

"Do you belong to these parts?" said the voice.

A former Macruadh might have answered, "No; these parts belong to
me;" Alister curtly replied,

"I do."

"Here then, my good fellow! take my game-bag, and carry it as far as
the New House--if you know where I mean. I will give you a
shilling."

One moment the chief spent in repressing a foolish indignation; the
next he spent in reflection.

Had he seen how pale and tired was the youth with the gun, he would
have offered to carry his bag for him; to offer and to be asked,
however, most people find different; and here the offer of payment
added to the difficulty. But the word SHILLING had raised the vision
of the old woman in her lonely cottage, brooding over the loss, real
or imaginary mattered nothing, of her three far-borne peats. What a
happy night, through all the wind and the rain, would a silver
shilling under her chaff pillow give her! The thought froze the
chief's pride, and warmed his heart. What right had he to deny her
such a pleasure! It would cost him nothing! It would even bring him
a little amusement! The chief of Clanruadh carrying his game-bag for
a Sasunnach fellow to earn a shilling! the idea had a touch of
humorous consolation in it. I will not assert the consolation strong
enough to cast quite out a certain feeling of shame that mingled
with his amusement--a shame which--is it not odd!--he would not have
felt had his sporan been full of sovereigns. But the shame was not
altogether a shameful one; a fanciful fear of degrading the
chieftainship, and a vague sense of the thing being an imposition,
had each a part in it. There could be nothing dishonest, however, in
thus earning a shilling for poor mistress Conal!

"I will carry your bag," he said, "but I must have the shilling
first, if you please."

"Oh!" rejoined Valentine Palmer. "You do not trust me! How then am I
to trust you?"

"Sir!" exclaimed Alister--and, again finding himself on the point of
being foolish, laughed.

"I will pay you when the job is done," said Valentine.

"That is quite fair, but it does not suit my purpose," returned
Alister.

They were walking along the road side by side, but each could
scarcely see anything of the other. The sportsman was searching his
pockets to find a shilling. He succeeded, and, groping, put it in
Alister's hand, with the words--

"All right! it is only a shilling! There it is! But it is not yours
yet: here is the bag!"

Alister took the bag, turned, and ran back.

"Hillo!" cried Valentine.

But Alister had disappeared, and as soon as he turned up the soft
path to the cottage, his steps became inaudible through the wind.

He opened the door, went in, laid the shilling on the back of the
old woman's hand, and without a word hurried out again, and down to
the road. The stranger was some distance ahead, tramping wearily on
through the darkness, and grumbling at his folly in bribing a fellow
with a shilling to carry off his game-bag. Alister overtook him.

"Oh, here you are after all!" exclaimed Valentine. "I thought you
had made off with work and wages both! What did you do it for?"

"I wanted to give the shilling to an old woman close by."

"Your mother--eh?"

"No."

"Your grandmother?"

"No."

"SOME relation then!" insisted the stranger.

"Doubtless," answered the laird, and Valentine thought him a surly
fellow.

They walked on in silence. The youth could hardly keep up with
Alister, who thought him ill bred, and did not care for his company.

"Why do you walk so fast?" said Valentine.

"Because I want to get home," replied Alister.

"But I paid you to keep me company!"

"You paid me to carry your bag. I will leave it at the New House."

His coolness roused the weary youth.

"You rascal!" he said; "you keep alongside of me, or I'll pepper
you."

As he spoke, he shifted his gun. But Alister had already, with a few
long strides, put a space of utter darkness between them. He had
taken the shilling, and must carry the bag, but did not feel bound
to personal attendance. At the same time he could not deny there was
reason in the man's unwillingness to trust him. What had he about
him to give him in pledge? Nothing but his watch, his father's, a
gift of THE PRINCE to the head of the family!--he could not profane
that by depositing it for a game-bag! He must yield to his employer,
moderate his pace, and move side by side with the Sasunnach!

Again they walked some distance in silence. Alister began to
discover that his companion was weary, and his good heart spoke.

"Let me carry your gun," he said.

"See you damned!" returned Valentine, with an angry laugh.

"You fancy your gun protects your bag?"

"I do."

The same instant the gun was drawn, with swift quiet force, through
the loop of his arm from behind. Feeling himself defenceless, he
sprang at the highlander, but he eluded him, and in a moment was out
of his reach, lost in the darkness. He heard the lock of one barrel
snap: it was not loaded; the second barrel went off, and he gave a
great jump, imagining himself struck. The next instant the gun was
below his arm again.

"It will be lighter to carry now!" said the Macruadh; "but if you
like I will take it."

"Take it, then. But no!--By Jove, I wish there was light enough to
see what sort of a rascal you look!"

"You are not very polite!"

"Mind your own politeness. I was never so roughly served in my
life!--by a fellow too that had taken my money! If I knew where to
find a magistrate in this beastly place,--"

"You would tell him I emptied your gun because you threatened me
with it!"

"You were going off with my bag!"

"Because I undertook to carry your bag, was I bound to endure your
company?"

"Alister!" said a quiet voice out of the darkness.

The highlander started, and in a tone strangely tremulous, yet with
a kind of triumph in it, answered--

"Ian!"

The one word said, he stood still, but as in the act to run, staring
into the darkness. The next moment he flung down the game-bag, and
two men were in each other's arms.

"Where are you from, Ian?" said the chief at length, in a voice
broken with gladness.

All Valentine understood of the question, for it was in Gaelic, was
its emotion, and he scorned a fellow to show the least sign of
breaking down.

"Straight from Moscow," answered the new-comer. "How is our mother?"

"Well, Ian, thank God!"

"Then, thank God, all is well!"

"What brought you home in such haste?"

"I had a bad dream about my mother, and was a little anxious. There
was more reason too, which I will tell you afterwards."

"What were you doing in Moscow? Have you a furlough?"

"No; I am a sort of deserter. I would have thrown up my commission,
but had not a chance. In Moscow I was teaching in a school to keep
out of the way of the police. But I will tell you all by and by."

The voice was low, veiled, and sad; the joy of the meeting rippled
through it like a brook.

The brothers had forgotten the stranger, and stood talking till the
patience of Valentine was as much exhausted as his strength.

"Are you going to stand there all night?" he said at last. "This is
no doubt very interesting to you, but it is rather a bore to one who
can neither see you, nor understand a word you say."

"Is the gentleman a friend of yours, Alister?" asked Ian.

"Not exactly.--But he is a Sasunnach," he concluded in English, "and
we ought not to be speaking Gaelic."

"I beg his pardon," said Ian. "Will you introduce me?"

"It is impossible; I do not know his name. I never saw him, and
don't see him now. But he insists on my company."

"That is a great compliment. How far?"

"To the New House."

"I paid him a shilling to carry my bag," said Valentine. "He took
the shilling, and was going to walk off with my bag!"

"Well?"

"Well indeed! Not at all well! How was I to know--"

"But he didn't--did he?" said Ian, whose voice seemed now to tingle
with amusement. "--Alister, you were wrong."

It was an illogical face-about, but Alister responded at once.

"I know it," he said. "The moment I heard your voice, I knew
it.--How is it, Ian,"--here he fell back into Gaelic--"that when you
are by me, I know what is right so much quicker? I don't understand
it. I meant to do right, but--"

"But your pride got up. Alister, you always set out well--nobly--and
then comes the devil's turn! Then you begin to do as if you
repented! You don't carry the thing right straight out. I hate to
see the devil make a fool of a man like you! Do YOU not know that in
your own country you owe a stranger hospitality?"

"My own country!" echoed Alister with a groan.

"Yes, your own country--and perhaps more yours than it was your
grandfather's! You know who said, 'The meek shall inherit the
earth'! If it be not ours in God's way, I for one would not care to
call it mine another way."--Here he changed again to English.--"But
we must not keep the gentleman standing while we talk!"

"Thank you!" said Valentine. "The fact is, I'm dead beat."

"Have you anything I could carry for you?" asked Ian.

"No, I thank you.--Yes; there! if you don't mind taking my gun?--you
speak like a gentleman!"

"I will take it with pleasure."

He took the gun, and they started.

"If you choose, Alister," said his brother, once more in Gaelic, "to
break through conventionalities, you must not expect people to allow
you to creep inside them again the moment you please."

But the young fellow's fatigue had touched Alister.

"Are you a big man?" he said, taking Valentine gently by the arm.

"Not so big as you, I'll lay you a sovereign," answered Valentine,
wondering why he should ask.

"Then look here!" said Alister; "you get astride my shoulders, and
I'll carry you home. I believe you're hungry, and that takes the
pith out of you!--Come," he went on, perceiving some sign of
reluctance in the youth, "you'll break down if you walk much
farther!--Here, Ian! you take the bag; you can manage that and the
gun too!"

Valentine murmured some objection; but the brothers took the thing so
much as a matter of course, and he felt so terribly exhausted--for he
had lost his way, and been out since the morning--that he yielded.

Alister doubled himself up on his heels; Valentine got his weary
legs over his stalwart shoulders; the chief rose with him as if he
had been no heavier than mistress Conal's creel, and bore him along
much relieved in his aching limbs.

So little was the chief oppressed by his burden, that he and his
brother kept up a stream of conversation, every now and then
forgetting their manners and gliding off into Gaelic, but as often
recollecting themselves, apologizing, and starting afresh upon the
path of English. Long before they reached the end of their journey,
Valentine, able from his perch to listen in some measure of ease,
came to understand that he had to do, not with rustics, but,
whatever their peculiarities, with gentlemen of a noteworthy sort.

The brothers, in the joy of their reunion, talked much of things at
home and abroad, avoiding things personal and domestic as often as
they spoke English; but when they saw the lights of the New House, a
silence fell upon them. At the door, Alister set his burden
carefully down.

"There!" he said with a laugh, "I hope I have earned my shilling!"

"Ten times over," answered Valentine; "but I know better now than
offer to pay you. I thank you with all my heart."

The door opened, Ian gave the gun and the bag to the butler, and the
brothers bade Valentine good night.

Valentine had a strange tale to tell. Sercombe refused to accept his
conclusions: if he had offered the men half a crown apiece, he said,
they would have pocketed the money.






CHAPTER VII.

MOTHER AND SON.





The sun was shining bright, and the laird was out in his fields. His
oats were nearly ready for the scythe, and he was judging where he
had best begin to cut them.

His fields lay chiefly along the banks of the stream, occupying the
whole breadth of the valley on the east side of the ridge where the
cottage stood. On the west side of the ridge, nearly parallel to,
and not many yards from it, a small brook ran to join the stream:
this was a march betwixt the chief's land and Mr. Peregrine
Palmer's. Their respective limit was not everywhere so well defined.

The air was clear and clean, and full of life. The wind was asleep.
A consciousness of work approaching completion filled earth and
air--a mood of calm expectation, as of a man who sees his end
drawing nigh, and awaits the saving judgment of the father of
spirits. There was no song of birds--only a crow from the yard, or
the cry of a blackcock from the hill; the two streams were left to
do all the singing, and they did their best, though their water was
low. The day was of the evening of the year; in the full sunshine
was present the twilight and the coming night, but there was a sense
of readiness on all sides. The fruits of the earth must be housed;
that alone remained to be done.

When the laird had made up his mind, he turned towards the house--a
lowly cottage, more extensive than many farmhouses, but looking no
better. It was well built, with an outside wall of rough stone and
lime, and another wall of turf within, lined in parts with wood,
making it as warm a nest as any house of the size could be. The
door, picturesque with abundant repair, opened by a latch into the
kitchen.

For long years the floor of the kitchen had been an earthen one,
with the fire on a hearth in the middle of it, as in all the
cottages; and the smoke rose into the roof, keeping it very dry and
warm, if also very sooty, and thence into the air through a hole in
the middle. But some ten years before this time, Alister and Ian,
mere lads, had built a chimney outside, and opening the wall,
removed the hearth to it--with the smoke also, which now had its own
private way to liberty. They then paved the floor with such stones
as they could find, in the fields and on the hill, sufficiently flat
and smooth on one side, and by sinking them according to their
thickness, managed to get a tolerably even surface. Many other
improvements followed; and although it was a poor place still, it
would at the time of Dr. Johnson's visit to the highlands have been
counted a good house, not to be despised by unambitious knight or
poor baronet. Nor was the time yet over, when ladies and gentlemen,
of all courtesy and good breeding, might be found in such houses.

In the kitchen a deal-dresser, scoured white, stood under one of the
tiny windows, giving light enough for a clean-souled cook--and what
window-light would ever be enough for one of a different sort? There
were only four panes in it, but it opened and closed with a button,
and so was superior to many windows. There was a larger on the
opposite side, which at times in the winter nights when the cold was
great, they filled bodily with a barricade of turf. Here, in the
kitchen, the chief takes his meals with his lady-mother. She and Ian
have just finished their breakfast, and gone to the other end of the
house. The laird broke his fast long ago.

A fire is burning on the hearth--small, for the mid-day-meal is not
yet on its way. Everything is tidy; the hearth is swept up, and the
dishes are washed: the barefooted girl is reaching the last of them
to its place on the rack hehind the dresser. She is a red-haired,
blue-eyed Celt, with a pretty face, and a refinement of motion and
speech rarer in some other peasantries.

The chief enters, and takes from the wall an old-fashioned gun. He
wants a bird or two, for Ian's home-coming is a great event.

"I saw a big stag last night down by the burn, sir," said the girl,
"feeding as if he had been the red cow."

"I don't want him to-day, Nancy," returned her master. "Had he big
horns?"

"Great horns, sir; but it was too dark to count the tines."

"When was it? Why did you not tell me?"

"I thought it was morning, sir, and when I got up it was the middle
of the night. The moon was so shiny that I went to the door and
looked out. Just at the narrow leap, I saw him plain."

"If you should see him again, Nancy, scare him. I don't want the
Sasunnachs at the New House to see him."

"Hadn't you better take him yourself, Macruadh? He would make fine
hams for the winter!"

"Mind your own business, Nancy, and hold your tongue," said the
chief, with a smile that took all the harshness from the words.
"Don't you tell any one you saw him. For what you know he may be the
big stag!"

"Sure no one would kill HIM, sir!" answered the girl aghast.

"I hope not. But get the stoving-pot ready, Nancy; I'm going to find
a bird or two. Lest I should not succeed, have a couple of chickens
at hand."

"Sir, the mistress has commanded them already."

"That is well; but do not kill them except I am not back in time."

"I understand, sir."

Macruadh knew the stag as well as the horse he rode, and that his
habit had for some time been to come down at night and feed on the
small border of rich grass on the south side of the burn, between it
and the abrupt heathery rise of the hill. For there the burn ran so
near the hill, and the ground was so covered with huge masses of
grey rock, that there was hardly room for cultivation, and the bank
was left in grass.

The stalking of the stag was the passion of the highlander in that
part of the country. He cared little for shooting the grouse, black
or red, and almost despised those whose ambition was a full bag of
such game; he dreamed day and night of killing deer. The chief,
however, was in this matter more of a man without being less of a
highlander. He loved the deer so much, saw them so much a part of
the glory of mountain and sky, sunshine and storm, that he liked to
see them living, not dead, and only now and then shot one, when the
family had need of it. He felt himself indeed almost the father of
the deer as well as of his clan, and mourned greatly that he could
do so little now, from the limited range of his property, to protect
them. His love for live creatures was not quite equal to that of St.
Francis, for he had not conceived the thought of turning wolf or fox
from the error of his ways; but even the creatures that preyed upon
others he killed only from a sense of duty, and with no pleasure in
their death. The heartlessness of the common type of sportsman was
loathsome to him. When there was not much doing on the farm, he
would sometimes be out all night with his gun, it is true, but he
would seldom fire it, and then only at some beast of prey; on the
hill-side or in the valley he would lie watching the ways and doings
of the many creatures that roam the night--each with its object,
each with its reasons, each with its fitting of means to ends. One
of the grounds of his dislike to the new possessors of the old land
was the raid he feared upon the wild animals.

The laird gone, I will take my reader into the PARLOUR, as they
called in English their one sitting-room. Shall I first tell him
what the room was like, or first describe the two persons in it? Led
up to a picture, I certainly should not look first at the frame; but
a description is a process of painting rather than a picture; and
when you cannot see the thing in one, but must take each part by
itself, and in your mind get it into relation with the rest, there
is an advantage, I think, in having a notion of the frame first. For
one thing, you cannot see the persons without imagining their
surroundings, and if those should be unfittingly imagined, they
interfere with the truth of the persons, and you may not be able to
get them right after.

The room, then, was about fifteen feet by twelve, and the ceiling
was low. On the white walls hung a few frames, of which two or three
contained water-colours--not very good, but not displeasing; several
held miniature portraits--mostly in red coats, and one or two a
silhouette. Opposite the door hung a target of hide, round, and
bossed with brass. Alister had come upon it in the house, covering a
meal-barrel, to which service it had probably been put in aid of its
eluding a search for arms after the battle of Culloden. Never more
to cover man's food from mice, or his person from an enemy, it was
raised to the WALHALLA of the parlour. Under it rested, horizontally
upon two nails, the sword of the chief--a long and broad ANDREW
FERRARA, with a plated basket-hilt; beside it hung a dirk--longer
than usual, and fine in form, with a carved hilt in the shape of an
eagle's head and neck, and its sheath, whose leather was dry and
flaky with age, heavily mounted in silver. Below these was a
card-table of marquetry with spindle-legs, and on it a work-box of
ivory, inlaid with silver and ebony. In the corner stood a harp, an
Erard, golden and gracious, not a string of it broken. In the middle
of the room was a small square table, covered with a green cloth. An
old-fashioned easy chair stood by the chimney; and one sat in it
whom to see was to forget her surroundings.

In middle age she is still beautiful, with the rare beauty that
shines from the root of the being. Her hair is of the darkest brown,
almost black; her eyes are very dark, and her skin is very fair,
though the soft bloom, as of reflected sunset, is gone from her
cheek, and her hair shows lines of keen silver. Her features are
fine, clear, and regular--the chin a little strong perhaps, not for
the size, but the fineness of the rest; her form is that of a
younger woman; her hand and foot are long and delicate. A more
refined and courteous presence could not have been found in the
island. The dignity of her carriage nowise marred its grace, or
betrayed the least consciousness; she looked dignified because she
was dignified. That form of falsehood which consists in assuming the
look of what one fain would be, was, as much as any other,
impossible to Isobel Macruadh. She wore no cap; her hair was
gathered in a large knot near the top of her head. Her gown was of a
dark print; she had no ornament except a ring with a single ruby.
She was working a bit of net into lace.

She could speak Gaelic as well as any in the glen--perhaps better;
but to her sons she always spoke English. To them indeed English was
their mother-tongue, in the sense that English only came addressed
to themselves from her lips. There were, she said, plenty to teach
them Gaelic; she must see to their English.

The one window of the parlour, though not large, was of tolerable
size; but little light entered, so shaded was it with a rose-tree in
a pot on the sill. By the wall opposite was a couch, and on the
couch lay Ian with a book in his hand--a book in a strange language.
His mother and he would sometimes be a whole morning together and
exchange no more than a word or two, though many a look and smile.
It seemed enough for each to be in the other's company. There was a
quite peculiar hond between the two. Like so many of the young men
of that country, Ian had been intended for the army; but there was
in him this much of the spirit of the eagle he resembled, that he
passionately loved freedom, and had almost a gypsy's delight in
wandering. When he left college, he became tutor in a Russian family
of distinction, and after that accepted a commission in the
household troops of the Czar. But wherever he went, he seemed, as he
said once to his mother, almost physically aware of a line
stretching between him and her, which seemed to vibrate when he grew
anxious about her. The bond between him and his brother was equally
strong, but in feeling different. Between him and Alister it was a
cable; between him and his mother a harpstring; in the one case it
was a muscle, in the other a nerve. The one retained, the other drew
him. Given to roaming as he was, again and again he returned, from
pure love-longing, to what he always felt as the PROTECTION of his
mother. It was protection indeed he often had sought--protection
from his own glooms, which nothing but her love seemed able to
tenuate.

He was tall--if an inch above six feet be tall, but not of his
brother's fine proportion. He was thin, with long slender fingers
and feet like his mother's. His small, strong bones were covered
with little more than hard muscle, but every motion of limb or body
was grace. At times, when lost in thought and unconscious of
movement, an observer might have imagined him in conversation with
some one unseen, towards whom he was carrying himself with courtesy:
plain it was that courtesy with him was not a graft upon the finest
stock, but an essential element. His forehead was rather low,
freckled, and crowned with hair of a foxy red; his eyes were of the
glass-gray or green loved of our elder poets; his nose was a very
eagle in itself--large and fine. He more resembled the mask of the
dead Shakspere than any other I have met, only in him the
proportions were a little exaggerated; his nose was a little too
large, and his mouth a little too small for the mask; but the
mingled sweetness and strength in the curves of the latter prevented
the impression of weakness generally given by the association of
such a nose and such a mouth. On his short upper lip was a small
light moustache, and on his face not a hair more. In rest his
countenance wore a great calmness, but a calmness that might seem
rooted in sadness.

While the mother might, more than once in a day, differ to
fault-finding from her elder-born--whom she admired, notwithstanding,
as well as loved, from the bottom of her heart--she was never KNOWN
to say a word in opposition to the younger. It was even whispered
that she was afraid of him. It was not so; but her reverence for Ian
was such that, even when she felt bound not to agree with him, she
seldom had the confidence that, differing from HIM, she was in the
right. Sometimes in the middle of the night she would slip like a
ghost into the room where he lay, and sit by his bed till the black
cock, the gray cock, the red cock crew. The son might be awake all
the time, and the mother suspect him awake, yet no word pass between
them. She would rise and go as she came. Her feeling for her younger
son was like that of Hannah for her eldest--intensest love mixed
with strangest reverence. But there were vast alternations and
inexplicable minglings in her thoughts of him. At one moment she
would regard him as gifted beyond his fellows for some great work,
at another be filled with a horrible fear that he was in rebellion
against the God of his life. Doubtless mothers are far too ready to
think THEIR sons above the ordinary breed of sons: self, unpossessed
of God, will worship itself in its offspring; yet the sons whom HOLY
mothers have regarded as born to great things and who have passed away
without sign, may have gone on toward their great things. Whether this
mother thought too much of her son or not, there were questions moving
in his mind which she could not have understood--even then when he would
creep to her bed in the morning to forget in her arms the terrible
dreams of the night, or when at evening he would draw his little stool
to her knee, unable or unwilling to enjoy his book anywhere but by her
side.

What gave him his unconscious power over his mother, was, first, the
things he said, and next, the things he did not say; for he seemed
to her to dwell always in a rich silence. Yet throughout was she
aware of a something between them, across which they could not meet;
and it was in part her distress at the seeming impossibility of
effecting a spiritual union with her son, that made her so desirous
of personal proximity to him. Such union is by most thinking people
presumed impossible without consent of opinion, and this mistake
rendered her unable to FEEL near him, to be at home with him. If she
had believed that they understood each other, that they were of like
OPINION, she would not have been half so unhappy when he went away,
would not have longed half so grievously for his return. Ian on his
part understood his mother, but knew she did not understand him, and
was therefore troubled. Hence it resulted that always after a time
came the hour--which never came to her--when he could endure
proximity without oneness no longer, and would suddenly announce his
departure. And after a day or two of his absence, the mother would
be doubly wretched to find a sort of relief in it, and would spend
wakeful nights trying to oust it as the merest fancy, persuading
herself that she was miserable, and nothing but miserable, in the
loss of her darling.

Naturally then she would turn more to Alister, and his love was a
strengthening tonic to her sick motherhood. He was never jealous of
either. Their love for each other was to him a love. He too would
mourn deeply over his brother's departure, but it became at once his
business to comfort his mother. And while she had no suspicion of
the degree to which he suffered, it drew her with fresh love to her
elder born, and gave her renewal of the quiet satisfaction in him
that was never absent, when she saw how he too missed Ian. Their
mutual affection was indeed as true and strong as a mother could
desire it. "If such love," she said to herself, "had appeared in the
middle of its history instead of now at its close, the transmitted
affection would have been enough to bind the clan together for
centuries more!"

It was with a prelusive smile that shone on the mother's heart like
the opening of heaven, that Ian lowered his book to answer her
question. She had said--

"Did you not feel the cold very much at St. Petersburg last winter,
Ian?"

"Yes, mother, at times," he answered. "But everybody wears fur; the
peasant his sheep-skin, the noble his silver fox. They have to fight
the cold! Nose and toes are in constant danger. Did I never tell you
what happened to me once in that way? I don't think I ever did!"

"You never tell me anything, Ian!" said his mother, looking at him
with a loving sadness.

"I was suddenly stopped in the street by what I took for an
unheard-of insult: I actually thought my great proboscis was being
pulled! If I had been as fiery as Alister, the man would have found
his back, and I should have lost my nose. Without the least warning
a handful of snow was thrust in my face, and my nose had not even a
chance of snorting with indignation, it found itself so twisted in
every direction at once! But I have a way, in any sudden occurrence,
of feeling perplexed enough to want to be sure before doing
anything, and if it has sometimes hindered me from what was
expedient, it has oftener saved me from what would have been wrong:
in another instant I was able to do justice to the promptitude of a
fellow Christian for the preservation of my nose, already whitening
in frosty death: he was rubbing it hard with snow, the orthodox
remedy! My whole face presently sharpened into one burning spot, and
taking off my hat, I thanked the man for his most kind attention. He
pointed out to me that time spent in explaining the condition of my
nose, would have been pure loss: the danger was pressing, and he
attacked it at once! I was indeed entirely unconscious of the state
of my beak--the worst symptom of any!"

"I trust, Ian, you will not go back to Russia!" said his mother,
after a little more talk about frost-biting. "Surely there is work
for you at home!"

"What can I do at home, mother? You have no money to buy me a
commission, and I am not much good at farm-work. Alister says I am
not worth a horseman's wages!"

"You could find teaching at home; or you could go into the church.
We might manage that, for you would only have to attend the divinity
classes."

"Mother! would you put me into one of the priests' offices that I
may eat a piece of bread? As for teaching, there are too many hungry
students for that: I could not take the bread out of their mouths!
And in truth, mother, I could not endure it--except it were required
of me. I can live on as little as any, but it must be with some
liberty. I have surely inherited the spirit of some old sea-rover,
it is so difficult for me to rest! I am a very thistle-down for
wandering! I must know how my fellow-creatures live! I should like
to BE one man after another--each for an hour or two!"

"Your father used to say there was much Norse blood in the family."

"There it is, mother! I cannot help it!"

"I don't like your holding the Czar's commission, Ian--somehow I
don't like it! He is a tyrant!"

"I am going to throw it up, mother."

"I am glad of that! How did you ever get it?"

"Oddly enough, through the man that pulled my nose. I had a chance
afterwards of doing him a good turn, which he was most generous in
acknowledging; and as he belonged to the court, I had the offer of a
lieutenant's commission. The Scotch are in favour."

A deep cloud had settled on the face of the young man. The lady
looked at him for a moment with keenest mother-eyes, suppressed a
deep sigh, and betook herself again to her work.

Ere she thought how he might take it, another question broke from
her lips.

"What sort of church had you to go to in St. Petersburg, Ian?" she
said.

Ian was silent a moment, thinking how to be true, and not hurt her
more than could not be helped.

"There are a thousand places of worship there, mother," he returned,
with a curious smile.

"Any presbyterian place?" she asked.

"I believe so," he replied.

"Ian, you haven't given up praying?"

"If ever I prayed, mother, I certainly have not given it up."

"Ever prayed, Ian! When a mere child you prayed like an aged
Christian!"

"Ah, mother, that was a sad pity! I asked for things of which I felt
no need! I was a hypocrite! I ought to have prayed like a little
child!"

The mother was silent: she it was who had taught him to pray
thus--making him pray aloud in her hearing! and this was the result!
The premature blossom had withered! she said to herself. But it was
no blossom, only a muslin flower!

"Then you didn't go to church!" she said at length.

"Not often, mother dear," he answered. "When I do go, I like to go
to the church of the country I happen to be in. Going to church and
praying to God are not the same thing."

"Then you do say your prayers? Oh, do not tell me you never bow down
before your maker!"

"Shall I tell you where I think I did once pray to God, mother?" he
said, after a little pause, anxious to soothe her suffering. "At
least I did think then that I prayed!" he added.

"It was not this morning, then, before you left your chamber?"

"No, mother," answered Ian; "I did not pray this morning, and I
never say prayers."

The mother gave a gasp, but answered nothing. Ian went on again.

"I should like to tell you, mother, about that time when I am almost
sure I prayed!"

"I should like to hear about it," she answered, with strangest
minglings of emotion. At one and the same instant she felt parted
from her son by a gulf into which she must cast herself to find him,
and that he stood on a height of sacred experience which she never
could hope to climb. "Oh for his father to talk to him!" she said to
herself. He was a power on her soul which she almost feared. If he
were to put forth his power, might he not drag her down into
unbelief?

It was the first time they had come so close in their talk. The
moment his mother spoke out, Ian had responded. He was anxious to be
open with her so far as he could, and forced his natural
taciturnity, the prime cause of which was his thoughtfulness: it was
hard to talk where was so much thinking to be done, so little time
to do it in, and so little progress made by it! But wherever he
could keep his mother company, there he would not leave her! Just as
he opened his mouth, however, to begin his narration, the door of
the room also opened, flung wide by the small red hand of Nancy, and
two young ladies entered.






CHAPTER VIII.

A MORNING CALL.





Had Valentine known who the brothers were, or where they lived, he
would before now have called to thank them again for their kindness
to him; but he imagined they had some distance to go after
depositing him, and had not yet discovered his mistake. The visit
now paid had nothing to do with him.

The two elder girls, curious about the pretty cottage, had come
wandering down the spur, or hill-toe, as far as its precincts--if
precincts they may be called where was no fence, only a little grove
and a less garden. Beside the door stood a milk-pail and a churn,
set out to be sweetened by the sun and wind. It was very rural, they
thought, and very homely, but not so attractive as some cottages in
the south:--it indicated a rusticity honoured by the most
unceremonious visit from its superiors. Thus without hesitation
concluding, Christina, followed by Mercy, walked in at the open
door, found a barefooted girl in the kitchen, and spoke pleasantly
to her. She, in simple hospitality forgetting herself, made answer
in Gaelic; and, never doubting the ladies had come to call upon her
mistress, led the way, and the girls, without thinking, followed her
to the parlour.

As they came, they had been talking. Had they been in any degree
truly educated, they would have been quite capable of an opinion of
their own, for they had good enough faculties; but they had never
been really taught to read; therefore, with the utmost confidence,
they had been passing judgment upon a book from which they had not
gathered the slightest notion as to the idea or intention of the
writer. Christina was of that numerous class of readers, who, if you
show one thing better or worse than another, will without hesitation
report that you love the one and hate the other. If you say, for
instance, that it is a worse and yet more shameful thing for a man
to break his wife's heart by systematic neglect, than to strike her
and be sorry for it, such readers give out that you approve of
wife-beating, and perhaps write to expostulate with you on your
brutality. If you express pleasure that a poor maniac should have
succeeded in escaping through the door of death from his haunting
demon, they accuse you of advocating suicide. But Mercy was not yet
afloat on the sea of essential LIE whereon Christina swung to every
wave.

One question they had been discussing was, whether the hero of the
story was worthy the name of lover, seeing he deferred offering his
hand to the girl because she told her mother a FIB to account for
her being with him in the garden after dark. "It was cowardly and
unfair," said Christina: "was it not for HIS sake she did it?" Mercy
did not think to say "WAS IT?" as she well might. "Don't you see,
Chrissy," she said, "he reasoned this way: 'If she tell her mother a
lie, she may tell me a lie some day too!'?" So indeed the youth did
reason; but it occurred to neither of his critics to note the fact
that he would not have minded the girl's telling her mother the lie,
if he could have been certain she would never tell HIM one! In
regard to her hiding from him certain passages with another
gentleman, occurring between this event and his proposal, Christina
judged he had no right to know them, and if he had, their
concealment was what he deserved.

When the girl, who would have thought it rude to ask their names--if
I mistake not, it was a point in highland hospitality to entertain
without such inquiry--led the way to the parlour, they followed
expecting they did not know what: they had heard of the cowhouse, the
stable, and even the pigsty, being under the same roof in these parts!
When the opening door disclosed "lady" Macruadh, every inch a chieftain's
widow, their conventional breeding failed them a little; though incapable
of recognizing a refinement beyond their own, they were not incapable
of feeling its influence; and they had not yet learned how to be rude
with propriety in unproved circumstances--still less how to be gracious
without a moment's notice. But when a young man sprang from a couch,
and the stately lady rose and advanced to receive them, it was too
late to retreat, and for a moment they stood abashed, feeling, I am
glad to say, like intruders. The behaviour of the lady and gentleman,
however, speedily set them partially at ease. The latter, with movements
more than graceful, for they were gracious, and altogether free of
scroll-pattern or Polonius-flourish, placed chairs, and invited them
to be seated, and the former began to talk as if their entrance were
the least unexpected thing in the world. Leaving them to explain
their visit or not as they saw fit, she spoke of the weather, the
harvest, the shooting; feared the gentlemen would be disappointed:
the birds were quite healthy, but not numerous--they had too many
enemies to multiply! asked if they had seen the view from such and
such a point;--in short, carried herself as one to whom cordiality
to strangers was an easy duty. But she was not taken with them. Her
order of civilization was higher than theirs; and the simplicity as
well as old-fashioned finish of her consciousness recoiled a little
--though she had not experience enough of a certain kind to be able
at once to say what it was in the manner and expression of the young
ladies that did not please her.

Mammon, gaining more and more of the upper hand in all social
relations, has done much to lower the PETITE as well as the GRANDE
MORALE of the country--the good breeding as well as the honesty.
Unmannerliness with the completest self-possession, is a poor
substitute for stiffness, a poorer for courtesy. Respect and
graciousness from each to each is of the very essence of
Christianity, independently of rank, or possession, or relation. A
certain roughness and rudeness have usurped upon the intercourse of
the century. It comes of the spread of imagined greatness; true
greatness, unconscious of itself, cannot find expression other than
gracious. In the presence of another, a man of true breeding is but
faintly aware of his own self, and keenly aware of the other's self.
Before the human--that bush which, however trodden and peeled, yet
burns with the divine presence--the man who thinks of the homage due
to him, and not of the homage owing by him, is essentially rude.
Mammon is slowly stifling and desiccating Rank; both are miserable
deities, but the one is yet meaner than the other. Unrefined
families with money are received with open arms and honours paid, in
circles where a better breeding than theirs has hitherto prevailed:
this, working along with the natural law of corruption where is no
aspiration, has gradually caused the deterioration of which I speak.
Courtesy will never regain her former position, but she will be
raised to a much higher; like Duty she will be known as a daughter
of the living God, "the first stocke father of gentilnes;" for in
his neighbour every man will see a revelation of the Most High.

Without being able to recognize the superiority of a woman who lived
in a cottage, the young ladies felt and disliked it; and the matron
felt the commonness of the girls, without knowing what exactly it
was. The girls, on the other hand, were interested in the young man:
he looked like a gentleman! Ian was interested in the young women:
he thought they were shy, when they were only "put out," and wished
to make them comfortable--in which he quickly succeeded. His
unconsciously commanding air in the midst of his great courtesy,
roused their admiration, and they had not been many minutes in his
company ere they were satisfied that, however it was to be accounted
for, the young man was in truth very much of a gentleman. It was an
unexpected discovery of northern produce, and "the estate" gathered
interest in their eyes. Christina did the greater part of the
talking, hut both did their best to be agreeable.

Ian saw quite as well as his mother what ordinary girls they were,
but, accustomed to the newer modes in manner and speech, he was not
shocked by movements and phrases that annoyed her. The mother
apprehended fascination, and was uneasy, though far from showing it.

When they rose, Ian attended them to the door, leaving his mother
anxious, for she feared he would accompany them home. Till he
returned, she did not resume her seat.

The girls took their way along the ridge in silence, till the ruin
was between them and the cottage, when they burst into laughter.
They were ladies enough not to laugh till out of sight, but not
ladies enough to see there was nothing to laugh at.

"A harp, too!" said Christina. "Mercy, I believe we are on the top
of mount Ararat, and have this very moment left the real Noah's ark,
patched into a cottage! Who CAN they be?"

"Gentlefolk evidently," said Mercy, "--perhaps old-fashioned people
from Inverness."

"The young man must have been to college!--In the north, you know,"
continued Christina, thinking with pride that her brother was at
Oxford, "nothing is easier than to get an education, such as it is!
It costs in fact next to nothing. Ploughmen send their sons to St.
Andrew's and Aberdeen to make gentlemen of them! Fancy!"

"You must allow this case a successful one!"

"I didn't mean HIS father was a ploughman! That is impossible!
Besides, I heard him call that very respectable person MOTHER! She
is not a ploughman's wife, but evidently a lady of the middle
class."

Christina did not count herself or her people to belong to the
middle class. How it was it is not quite easy to say--perhaps the
tone of implied contempt with which the father spoke of the lower
classes, and the quiet negation with which the mother would allude
to shopkeepers, may have had to do with it--but the young people all
imagined themselves to belong to the upper classes! It was a pity
there was no title in the family--but any of the girls might well
marry a coronet! There were indeed persons higher than they; a duke
was higher; the queen was higher--but that was pleasant! it was nice
to have a few to look up to!

On anyone living in a humble house, not to say a poor cottage, they
looked down, as the case might be, with indifference or patronage;
they little dreamed how, had she known all about them, the
respectable person in the cottage would have looked down upon THEM!
At the same time the laugh in which they now indulged was not
altogether one of amusement; it was in part an effort to avenge
themselves of a certain uncomfortable feeling of rebuke.

"I will tell you my theory, Mercy!" Christina went on. "The lady is
the widow of an Indian officer--perhaps a colonel. Some of their
widows are left very poor, though, their husbands having been in the
service of their country, they think no small beer of themselves!
The young man has a military air which he may have got from his
father; or he may be an officer himself: young officers are always
poor; that's what makes them so nice to flirt with. I wonder whether
he really IS an officer! We've actually called upon the people, and
come away too, without knowing their names!"

"I suppose they're from the New House!" said Ian, returning after he
had bowed the ladies from the threshold, with the reward of a
bewitching smile from the elder, and a shy glance from the younger.

"Where else could they be from?" returned his mother; "--come to
make our poor country yet poorer!"

"They're not English!"

"Not they!--vulgar people from Glasgow!"

"I think you are too hard on them, mother! They are not exactly
vulgar. I thought, indeed, there was a sort of gentleness about them
you do not often meet in Scotch girls!"

"In the lowlands, I grant, Ian; but the daughter of the poorest
tacksman of the Macruadhs has a manner and a modesty I have seen in
no Sasunnach girl yet. Those girls are bold!"

"Self-possessed, perhaps!" said Ian.

Upon the awkwardness he took for shyness, had followed a reaction.
It was with the young ladies a part of good breeding, whatever
mistake they made, not to look otherwise than contented with
themselves: having for a moment failed in this principle, they were
eager to make up for it.

"Girls are different from what they used to be, I fancy, mother!"
added Ian thoughtfully.

"The world changes very fast!" said the mother sadly. She was
thinking, like Rebecca, if her sons took a fancy to these who were
not daughters of the land, what good would her life do her.

"Ah, mother dear," said Ian, "I have never"--and as he spoke the
cloud deepened on his forehead--"seen more than one woman whose ways
and manners reminded me of you!"

"And what was she?" the mother asked, in pleased alarm.

But she almost repented the question when she saw how low the cloud
descended on his countenance.

"A princess, mother. She is dead," he answered, and turning walked
so gently from the room that it was impossible for his mother to
detain him.






CHAPTER IX.

ME. SERCOMBE.





The next morning, soon after sunrise, the laird began to cut his
barley. Ian would gladly have helped, but Alister had a notion that
such labour was not fit for him.

"I had a comical interview this morning," said the chief, entering
the kitchen at dinner-time. "I was out before my people, and was
standing by the burn-side near the foot-bridge, when I heard
somebody shouting, and looked up. There was a big English fellow
in gray on the top of the ridge, with his gun on his shoulder,
hollo-ing. I knew he was English by his hollo-ing. It was plain it
was to me, but not choosing to be at his beck and call, I took no
heed. 'Hullo, you there! wake up!' he cried. 'What should I wake up
for?' I returned. 'To carry my bag. You don't seem to have anything
to do! I'll give you five shillings.'"

"You see to what you expose yourself by your unconventlonalities,
Alister!" said his brother, with rnock gravity.

"It was not the fellow we carried home the other night, Ian; it was
one twice his size. It would take all I have to carry HIM as far!"

"The other must have pointed you out to him!"

"It was much too dark for him to know me again!"

"You forget the hall-lamp!" said Ian.

"Ah, yes, to be sure! I had forgotten!" answered Alister. "To tell
the truth, I thought, when I took his shilling, he would never know
me from Nebuchadnezzar: that is the one thing I am ashamed of in the
affair--I did in the dark what perhaps I should not have done in the
daylight!--I don't mean I would not have carried him and his bag
too! I refer only to the shilling! Now, of course, I will hold my
face to it; but I thought it better to be short with a fellow like
that."

"Well?"

"'You'll want prepayment, no doubt!' he went on, putting his hand in
his pocket. Those Sasunnach fellows think every highlandman keen as
a hawk after their dirty money!"

"They have but too good reason in some parts!" said the mother. "It
is not so bad here yet, but there is a great difference in that
respect. The old breed is fast disappearing. What with the
difficulty of living by the hardest work, and the occasional chance
of earning a shilling easily, many have turned both idle and
greedy."

"That's for you and your shilling, Alister!" said Ian.

"I confess," returned Alister, "if I had foreseen what an idea of
the gentlemen of the country I might give, I should have hesitated.
But I haven't begun to be ashamed yet!"

"Ashamed, Alister!" cried Ian. "What does it matter what a fellow
like that thinks of you?"

"And mistress Conal has her shilling!" said the mother.

"If the thing was right," pursued Ian, "no harm can come of it; if
it was not right, no end of harm may come. Are you sure it was good
for mistress Conal to have that shilling, Alister? What if it be
drawing away her heart from him who is watching his old child in her
turf-hut? What if the devil be grinning at her from, that shilling?"

"Ian! if God had not meant her to have the shilling, he would not
have let Alister earn it."

"Certainly God can take care of her from a shilling!" said Ian, with
one of his strangely sweet smiles. "I was only trying Alister,
mother."

"I confess I did not like the thought of it at first," resumed Mrs.
Macruadh; "but it was mere pride; for when I thought of your father,
I knew he would have been pleased with Alister."

"Then, mother, I am glad; and I don't care what Ian, or any
Sasunnach under the sun, may think of me."

"But you haven't told us," said Ian, "how the thing ended."

"I said to the fellow," resumed Alister, "that I had my shearing to
do, and hadn't the time to go with him. 'Is this your season for
sheep-shearing?' said he.'We call cutting the corn shearing,' I
answered, 'because in these parts we use the reaping hook.' 'That is
a great waste of labour!' he returned. I did not tell him that some
of our land would smash his machines like toys. 'How?' I asked. 'It
costs so much more,' he said. 'But it feeds so many more!' I
replied. 'Oh yes, of course, if you don't want the farmer to make a
living!' 'I manage to make a living,' I said. 'Then you are the
farmer?' 'So it would appear.' 'I beg your pardon; I thought--'
'You thought I was an idle fellow, glad of an easy job to keep the
life in me!' 'You were deuced glad of a job the other night, they
tell me!' 'So I was. I wanted a shilling for a poor woman, and
hadn't one to give her without going home a mile and a half for it!'
By this time he had come down, and I had gone a few steps to meet
him; I did not want to seem unfriendly. 'Upon my word, it was very
good of you! The old lady ought to be grateful!' he said. 'So ought
we all,' I answered, '--I to your friend for the shilling, and he to
me for taking his bag. He did me one good turn for my poor woman,
and I did him another for his poor leg!' 'So yo