"An' do ye mind Barry, too?" she asked. (This was an old man-servant of the house.) "An' many's the quirrel, an' many's the gree we had."
Barry was dead. Dead also was the beautiful girl whom my companion remembered well,—dead of a broken heart before she was eighteen years of age. Forbidden to marry her lover, she had drooped and pined. He went to India and died. It was in a December the news of his death came, just at Christmas time, and in the next September she followed him.
"Ay, but she was a bonnie lass," said Elspie, the tears rolling down her face.
"I dare say she [nodding his head toward the house]—I dare say she's shed many a salt tear over it; but naebody 'ill ever know she repentit," quoth the grand-nephew.
"Ay, ay," said Elspie. "There's a wee bit closet in every hoos."
"'Twas in that room she died," pointing up to a small ivy-shaded window. "I closed her eyes wi' my hands. She's never spoken of. She was a bonnie lass."
The picture of this desolate old woman, sitting there alone in her house, helpless, blind, waiting for death to come and take her to meet that daughter whose young heart was broken by her cruel will, seemed to shadow the very sunshine on the greensward in the court. The broken arches and crumbling walls of the old stone abbey ruins seemed, in their ivy mantles, warmly, joyously venerable by contrast with the silent, ruined, stony old human heart still beating in the house they joined.
In spite of my protestations, the grand-nephew urged Elspie to show us the room. She evidently now longed to do it; but, casting a fearful glance over her shoulder, said: "I daur na! I daur na! I could na open the door that she'd na hear 't." And she seemed much relieved when I made haste to assure her that on no account would I go into the room without her mistress's permission. So we came away, leaving her gazing regretfully after us, with her hand shading her eyes from the sun.
Going back from Mauchline to Ayr, I took another road, farther to the south than the one leading through Tarbolton, and much more beautiful, with superb beech-trees meeting overhead, and gentlemen's country-seats, with great parks, on either hand.
On this road is Montgomerie Castle, walled in by grand woods, which Burns knew so well.