The investigation, as you know, terminated in Alexander’s favor.
And this witness and self-styled heir presumptive was liberally remunerated and sent home to his poor lodgings, pale wife and pining children, to brood over the vicissitudes of this life—to brood until he, whose temper had through all his trials been sweet, kind and cheerful, became soured and embittered and sorely tempted.
What right, he asked himself, had this man—whose branch of the Killcrichtoun family had been self-expatriated for generations—to come over here and claim the ancient barony?
He was not a Scotchman, nor even an Englishman, that should he hold it.
And what good did it do him, after all?
Beyond the mere title, the new baron cared little for the inheritance. He had not even visited Killcrichtoun. While to him the poor usher, what a god-send, what a treasure, what a paradise it might have been. This estate which was nothing to the wealthy Virginian, would have been everything to himself.
He, had he possessed it, would have sold one-half the land to get funds to cultivate the other half. He would have pulled down the most ruinous parts of the castle to get materials to build up the better part of it. And he would have employed the starving tenants of the little hamlet in repairing his dwelling and tilling his ground, and a part of the wages he paid them would have come back to himself in the form of rents.
He, the despised usher, oppressed by master and chafed by pupils, would then be lord of the manor, with servants, and tenantry dependent upon him.
His poor wife, who was looked down upon by small shopkeepers and snubbed by her laundress, would be a baroness and “my lady.”
His pale little girls, bleached by the fogs of London, would grow strong and rosy on the bracing air of the Highlands.