“Sleep sound!” said she.
But the charm did not work, for when daylight came he had not closed his eyes.
Chapter Nine.
“The honest man, howe’er so poor,
Is king of men for a’ that.”
John Beaton’s father had been John Beaton also, and so had his father before him. The first John had farmed a three-cornered nook of land, which had found a place among the grey stones scattered closely over a certain part of the high coast that looks down upon one of the narrow bays setting in from the North Sea.
He must have been a strong man, this John, for on this bit of land he lived and laboured for sixty years and more, and on it he brought up, and then sent out, to make a place for themselves, in their own, or in other land’s, five strong sons and four fair daughters. And he had so brought them up that never, as long as he lived, did he, or any one else, hear aught of son or daughter to cause him to bow his good grey head before the face of man.
One son, neither the eldest nor the youngest, stayed near home. First he had broken stones on one of the great highways which they were stretching through Scotland about that time. Then he learned to cut and dress the grey granite of his native hills, and then to build it into houses, under another man’s eye, and at another man’s bidding. After a time he took his turn, first as overseer, and then as master-builder, and succeeded, and men began to speak of him as a rising man, and one well-to-do in the world. All this was before he had got beyond middle life.
Then he married a woman “much above him,” it was said, but that was a mistake. For though Marion Sinclair came of a good stock, and had all her life lived in a home well placed and well plenished, among folk who might have thought themselves, and whom others might have thought to be John Beaton’s superiors, yet no man or woman of them all had a right to look down on John Beaton. He stood firm on his own feet, in a place which his own hand had won. No step had he ever taken which he had needed to go back upon, nor had he ever had cause to cast down his eyes before the face of man because of any doubtful deed done, or false word spoken.