'County people—the ladies at least—are shy of visiting, I feel that, and often long to join Hester at Merlwood. You may see that the calling cards in the basket are quite faded and old.'
'No visitors!'
'Very few, beyond the parish minister and his wife, or the doctor, when she has some petty illness. She was a reader, a worker, and a musician in mamma's time, I understand; but is a total idler now, and, save to church, rarely leaves the grounds.'
'Her dowry and the Dower House she was entitled to, but who could ever have dreamed that she, the meek-faced, humble, and most obsequious Deborah Sharpe would ever be the mistress of all this!' exclaimed Roland as he strode to a window and looked forth upon the view with a heart that thrilled with many mingled emotions, for he loved his ancestral home with a love that was a species of passion, especially after his term of foreign exile.
Its situation was so perfect, overhanging the fertile haugh that gave the place a name, and through which meandered a stream, that, though insignificant there, widened greatly before it reached the sea.
The house of Earlshaugh is large and picturesque. Built originally in the days when James III. was King of the realm, and when that ill-fated monarch granted a special license to the then Baron to erect a fortalice, 'surrounded with walls and ditches, defended by gates of brass or iron,' many additions had been made to it, and the grace of a venerable antiquity was now combined with the comfort and luxury of modern days.
The old rooms were small, panelled with pine rather than oak; and the old shot and arrow loopholes under the windows had long since been plugged up and plastered over. In the olden time gardens were too valuable to be left outside the walls of a Scottish fortalice at a feudal neighbour's mercy, and trees only afforded cover for an attacking foe; but now the slopes crowned by Earlshaugh sheltered a modern garden with all its rare flowers, and the clefts of the rock afforded nurture for numerous trees and shrubs.
Royalty had often taken its ease in Earlshaugh, and in its grounds there is still a venerable thorn-tree in which tradition says the hawks of the Fifth and Sixth Jameses were wont to roost; nor was the house unknown in history and war, for there is still a room that was occupied by Cardinal Beatoun, the stair to which had a peculiarity after his murder, that whoever went up its steps felt as if going down; and the western wall yet bears the marks of the cannon shot, when it was attacked by General D'Oisel, the Comte de Martigues, and other French chevaliers, in the wars of Mary of Guise, and when Kirkcaldy of Grange, by one stroke of his two-handed sword, slew at its gate the Comte de St. Pierre, Knight of St Michael.
In that old house every chamber had its story of some past occupant; for there the Lairds of Earlshaugh were born; there they brought home their brides, and there they had—unless they fell in battle—died and been borne forth by their own people to Leuchars Kirk, or to the Chapel of St. Bennet, of which no vestige now remains.
Looking over the fair and sunlit scene before him, Roland Lindsay was thinking of all these things, while Maude drooped her pretty head on his shoulder, and said: