And so, as soon as the earl's letter reached the peninsula, the rejoicings began. The tenantry knew well enough who the earl had fixed upon to come after him, but his was his first public acknowledgment of the fact. Helen's position, as heiress presumptive, was regarded as merely nominal; it was her son, the fine young fellow whom every body knew from his babyhood, toward whom the loyalty of the little community blazed up in a height of feudal devotion that was touching to see. The warm Scotch heart—all the warmer, perhaps, for a certain narrowness and clannishness, which in its pride would probably, nay, certainly, have shut itself up against a stranger or an inferior—opened freely to "Miss Helen's" son and the minister's grandson, a young man known to all and approved of by all.
So the festivity was planned to be just the earl's coming of age over again, with the difference between June and December, which removed the feasting-place from the lawn to the great kitchen of the Castle, and caused bonfires on the hill-tops to be a very doubtful mode of jubilation. The old folk—young then—who remembered the bright summer festival of twenty-four years ago told many a tale of that day, and how the "puir wee earl" came forward in his little chair and made his brief speech, every word and every promise of which his after life had so faithfully fulfilled.
"The heir's a wise-like lad, and a braw lad," said the old folks of the clachan, patronizingly. "He's no that ill the noo, and he'll aiblins grow the better, ye ken; but naibody that comes after will be like him. We'll ne'er see anither Earl o' Cairnforth."
The same words which Mr. Menteith and the rest had said when the earl was born, but with what a different meaning!
Lord Cairnforth came back among his own people amid a transport of welcome. Though he had been long away, Mrs. Bruce and other assistants had carried out his plans and orders so successfully that the estate had not suffered for his absence. In the whole extent of it was now little or no poverty; none like that which, in his youth, had startled Lord Cairnforth into activity upon hearing the story of the old shepherd of Loch Mhor. There was plenty of work, and hands to do it, along the shores of both lochs; new farms had sprung up, and new roads been made; churches and schools were built as occasion required; and though the sheep had been driven a little higher up the mountains, and the deer and grouse fled farther back into the inland moors, still Cairnforth village was a lovely spot, inhabited by a contented community. Civilization could bring to it no evils that were not counteracted by two strong influences—(stronger than any one can conceive who does not understand the peculiarities almost feudal in their simplicity, of country parish life in Scotland)—a minister like Mr. Cardross, and a resident proprietor like the Earl of Cairnforth.
The earl arrived a few days before the festival day, and spent the time in going over his whole property from one end to the other. He took Mrs. Bruce with him. "I can't want you for a day now, Helen," said he, and made her sit beside him in his carriage, which, by dint of various modern appliances, he could now travel in far easier than he used to do, or else asked her to drive him in the old familiar pony-chaise along the old familiar hill-side roads, whence you look down on ether loch— sometimes on both—lying like a sheet of silver below.
Man a drive they took every day, the weather being still and clam, as it often is at Cairnforth, by fits and snatches, all winter through.
"I think there never was such a place as this place," the earl would often say, when he stopped at particular points of view, and gazed his fill on every well-known outline of the hills and curve of the lochs, generally ending with a smiling look on the face beside him, equally familiar, which had watched all these things with him for more than thirty years. "Helen, I have had a happy life, or it seems so, looking back upon it. Remember, I said this, and let no one ever say the contrary."
And in all the houses they visited—farm, cottage, or bothie— every body noticed how exceedingly happy the earl looked, how cheerfully he spoke, and how full of interest he was in every thing around him.
"His lordship may live to be an auld man yet," said some one to Malcolm, and Malcolm indignantly repudiated the possibility of any thing else.