In this, again, Jack pleased his grandma very much. Drumglen mansion-house was in itself a somewhat antiquated and dreary abode, although situated in the midst of the most beautiful Highland scenery—hill and dale, river, loch, scaur, and wild wood.
The weeping birch trees were nowhere of sweeter, softer green in early spring than on the banks and braes around here; and among their branches the mavis and blackbirds trilled their songs with a joy that seemed half hysterical, while from far aloft, skimming the clouds, the laverock showered his notes of love. Nowhere did the primroses grow bigger, cooler, sweeter, than by the banks of the bickering burn that went singing over the stones on its way to the loch, forming many a clear pool wherein the minnows darted hither and thither, and where the crimson-ticked trout loved to bask in the sunshine. Then in autumn the hills around were purpled and encrimsoned with heather and heath high up their sides, till their rugged heads were lost in the clouds.
But the garden walls of Drumglen were high and strong, and the gates of ponderous iron. It seemed as if they had been built to stand a siege in the stormy days of old.
Inside these walls the garden itself was wide and wild, and away aloft, in the black and gloomy foliage of the pine trees, the hoody crow had his nest, and eke that bird of ill-omen the magpie.
The walls of the house itself were very thick and the windows small. Not a sound did your footsteps make as you glided about the rooms. So silent did you move on the thick, soft carpets, that you could scarce help thinking at times that you were your own ghost.
The furniture of this gloomy house seemed a thousand years old at least. The stairs were of oak; and when Jack first beheld his grandmother's bed, he gazed at it with a feeling of awe. It was a huge, dark, and curtained edifice, with drapery of the snowiest white. To have slept under such a weight as that would have made a stranger dream he was about to be smothered alive.
The old dame's servants had always been chosen for their solemnity, one would have said, and their reverential stateliness. They had never been heard to laugh till Jack went to reside at the mansion.
But now things were a little bit altered. For the boy moved about the house like a ray of sunshine, and you could no more have kept him from laughing, or singing the fag-ends of old Scotch songs, than you could have prevented a lark from trilling his love-lilts in May.
I may tell you that Jack knew well enough that his grandam wished him to keep his place if ever he entered the servants' hall. So he did; and yet his presence there never failed to bring sunshine, light, and music, and oftentimes now the dark oak ceilings re-echoed the mirth of servants who had ever before been as sad and solemn as church beadles or funeral mutes.
With all her orthodox conservativeness, however, Mrs. Mackenzie seemed to know that boys like Jack cannot live without amusement, and so at no time was she averse to the visits of youngsters of his own age. She even gave entertainments, and invited to them the children of neighbouring lairds, so that on the whole Jack's life was not so solemn an affair as it might otherwise have been.