The Last of Their Race

by Annie S. Swan

From being a guest on sufferance, disapproved of by Isla, who was mistress of the situation, he had stepped into power, which simply reversed their positions. Isla, so to speak, was now his guest, and, because there had been no will and there was nothing except the land to divide, a pensioner on his bounty.

Love would have laughed at the difficulties with which the situation bristled. But the difficulty of existence in these circumstances became more acute, and, to Isla, every day more unbearable. It was not that Malcolm was rude or actively unkind. Nay, his gay good humour never failed. But he had no use for her advice and he absolutely ignored anything she said as to his conduct of affairs.

Take the case of the Maclures, for instance.

"You'll never put Donald Maclure out of Darrach, Malcolm," she said one day in the autumn, when Martinmas was looming in sight. "I met him yesterday, and he looked like a man under sentence of death. He had heard that you have been in communication with a man in Fife about the croft. Is that true?"

"It might be, and, again, it might not be," he answered, though there was not a word of truth in the report yet.

He had thought of it, but it was characteristic of Malcolm's nature to postpone most of the serious things of life till a more convenient season. And just then his energies and his hopes were elsewhere engaged.

"But, Malcolm," she said, with a touch of passion, "it isn't right to treat the folk like that--to torment them without sense or purpose. They haven't been used to it."

"No--they've been used to nothing but having their own way, to paying when they liked and what they liked," he answered, with a touch of grimness. "But I'm going to alter all that."

They were at breakfast at the moment, and she looked down the narrow table at him with a feeling of strong disgust. There is no bitterness like the bitterness between those of one blood who persistently misunderstand and misjudge each other.

Malcolm Mackinnon was not wholly bad. Nay, at that very time he was honestly striving to do his duty and to establish himself in the esteem of those whose esteem he valued. But among these he did not include his dependants. Towards them he was a bit of a martinet, as his mother--a creature from the nether world dressed in a little brief authority--had been before him.