THE HEIRESS OF McGREGOR.
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[CHAPTER I.]
THE HEIRESS OF McGREGOR.
THE heiress of McGregor walked slowly up the valley, absorbed in sorrowful thoughts, till a turn of the path brought to her view the baronial mansion of her forefathers. In other words, Marion McGregor, going home from school, came in sight of her father's house. The first expression was the way in which Marion would have liked to describe her progress; the latter was more in accordance with the stern, prosaic facts of the case.
Strictly speaking, it was not exactly true, either, for neither house nor farm belonged to the McGregor family, though they had lived there so many years that the house was always known as the McGregor place. It was part of a large estate which covered at least half of Holford county. A great Scotch nobleman had bought an immense tract of wild land in those parts very soon after the Revolution, and most of it remained in the hands of his grandson. It was partly improved and let on long leases as farming and grazing land, though there were still large tracts of mountain and forest which had never been touched by man.
On one of these leased farms, in a substantial though very plain and homely brick house, lived three generations of McGregors. These were, first, old Hector McGregor, the grandfather, who had come over from Scotland and taken the lease nearly fifty years before. He was a stout, hale old man, with blue eyes that were still bright and limbs which were still strong and able to carry him "to kirk and market," though he was fast approaching his ninetieth year. Then came a son and daughter, Alick and Barbara, and then a granddaughter, Marion. Alick was a widower and had no children; of the rest, one son was a minister in Minnesota, and another daughter the wife of a Syrian missionary. Barbara had never been married, and at fifty-five was not likely to be so. It was not for want of opportunity, for there had never been a prettier girl in Holford county than Baby McGregor, as her father in Scotch still called her. She had received more than one "grand offer," but Baby had put all her suitors courteously but firmly aside, and waited, first with the patience of hope, then with patient despair, and at last in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection, for one who went away to sea and never came home any more.
Few people save her father and brothers knew or guessed that Barbara had ever had any romance in her history. She was a bright, active, stirring housewife, ready to lend a hand in all her neighbours' real sorrows and difficulties, but, it must be confessed, a little too apt to be impatient of unnecessary worries, borrowed troubles, and sentimental woes. All of these she classed together under the general name of "fashes," and treated with more contempt than was absolutely necessary or desirable. She loved her own family dearly, and was ready to lay down her life every day and all day long in their service, but her great favourites were unquestionably her youngest sister, Christian, wife of the Reverend Doctor Campbell of Beyrout, Syria, and her niece, Marion. Both of these she had brought up; and as is usual with persons of her temperament, she loved them all the more for the trouble they had given her.
Marion was the child of another daughter, Eileen—or, as her father and sister called her, Eiley—McGregor. Eiley was even handsomer than Barbara, and she had been much more unfortunate. She made an ill-assorted marriage when she was quite too young to have been wedded at all, and found a worse disappointment in her marriage than Barbara had done in her bereavement. She married a man who, with a good education and some talents, had neither sense nor principle—a man who was too proud to work at what he contemptuously termed "menial occupations," meaning thereby any sort of honest hard work, but who was not too proud to let his wife labour hard at anything she could get to do to support herself and the child. His trade was that of a painter, and he might have done very well at the business, especially as he had some taste for the ornamental part of his profession. But he wanted to be an artist and a poet, though Nature had intended him for neither, and he neglected the work which might have supported his family to paint bad pictures which nobody would buy, and write worse verses which nobody would publish, much less pay for.