The Last of Their Race

by Annie S. Swan

"I can't conceive of Elspeth being impertinent. You must have said something to offend her."

"I gave her the truth about Donald and the croft, if you like. Darrach is a bit of the best land on Achree, and if it were joined to Tully and let to a responsible and capable man it would bring in a good rent. Maclure's lazy, and greedy besides. I'd like to chuck him from Darrach, and I mean to tell Cattanach that when I go up to Glasgow to-morrow."

Isla said nothing, though she thought much. The Maclures had been in Darrach in direct descent for four generations, and Donald naturally regarded the place as his own. To turn him out and join up the crofts into bigger holdings would revolutionize the whole life of the glens and take the bread out of many mouths.

But this was not the time to argue that question. Above all things, she must try to live at peace with Malcolm, and find some quiet, persuasive method of getting him to let well alone.

Isla was a curious mixture. Her temperament was active, her judgment quick and shrewd, but she was bound by the immemorial traditions of her race and ought to have been born in feudal times. She looked upon all the tenants of Achree as the children of the estate, having as good a right to the land as the Mackinnons themselves. The fact that they paid small, in some cases inadequate, rents for their holdings, thereby keeping the coffers of Achree sadly empty, altered nothing. She would rather have starved herself--and that cheerfully--than ask them for more. Besides, she knew the hunger of the land, the late and scanty harvests, the long winters, and the difficulty of wresting a living from the bare hill-sides and the swampy breadths that lay to the Loch-side.

She knew it to the uttermost. She had seen the blackened stocks sodden with November rains and touched with December snows to such an extent that the corn was hardly worth the trouble of carrying to the barn. She had felt the dank smell of the potatoes rotting with disease in the furrows when the autumn was wet, and she knew the poverty of the homes where she was ever a welcome, and never an intruding, guest.

Malcolm knew none of these things. He had no practical acquaintance with the long fight between man and nature in these high latitudes, and he had exaggerated ideas of the profits of farming. Already he was full of ill-considered and half-digested plans for the entire regeneration of Achree. Now that all was over, he was making all the haste he could to let bygones be bygones. He was going to begin afresh a new life, which, he promised himself, might be as interesting and far less strenuous than the old.

His father's death had altered the whole situation, and, from his point of view, had occurred at the psychological moment. Now, as Laird of Achree and head of his clan, he occupied a very different niche in the scheme of things.

Isla left Achree for the second time without any bitter pang. Nay, it pleased and comforted her to think that Peter Rosmead and his folk had it for a home. That thought somehow seemed to bring him nearer to her. In the months to come it would lessen the breadth and depth of that vast dividing sea. Yet how she would have been startled had her own thoughts been mirrored before her, who had never before taken such interest in a man!

She thought of him as she walked down the dry, crisp road to Darrach, and she wondered where he would be at that moment and whether the telegram she had dispatched to them at the St. Enoch's Hotel, announcing their departure to Creagh, would bring him back to Glenogle before he finally set out on his long journey. She did not admit even to herself her secret hope that he would, but it was of him she thought as she approached Elspeth's hospitable gate, of his deep and encompassing tenderness, his continuous thought for her, his earnest eyes looking into hers and assuring her of his devotion to her cause.