“And I might have been there, if I had but known. What will he think of me? And can it be that Geordie has sailed on the ‘John Seaton’? No wonder that my heart grew sick as the ship went out of sight. And oh how can I ever tell my father?”
Chapter Four.
Saughleas.
Saughleas with the June sunshine felling on it was a very different place from Saughleas under the “drip, drip” of winter rain and sleet, with the wind moaning or roaring through the bare boughs of its sheltering beeches.
The house was plain and heavy looking. It stood too near the road for so large a house, it was said, and it was so high that it made all the trees—except the few great beeches—look smaller than they would have looked elsewhere. But it was built of the cheerful looking reddish granite of the neighbourhood, and with its green adornment of honeysuckle and climbing roses and its low French windows opening on the little terrace above the lawn, it looked in summer-time a handsome and homelike dwelling.
There were many trees about it—fruit trees, elms, and poplars, Norway spruces, and Scotch firs; but most of them had been planted within the last fifteen years, and trees on this east coast—like the children in the song—“take long to grow.” The beeches, seven in number, were both old and beautiful—so beautiful and so stately amid the dwarfs around them that they, and not the wavering line of Saughs or willows that followed the margin of the burn running through the long low fields, it was sometimes said, should have given a name to the place.
There was a narrow belt of wood behind the house which had been planted long ago, and even in it the trees were not very large. But it was a very pretty spot, a real wood, where up through the undisturbed dead leaves of autumn came snowdrops and violets and primroses in the spring. Between this wood and the house was a field of grass, which was not cut smoothly every day or two like the lawn in front, but was allowed to grow tall and strong till the right time came to cut it down for hay. Through this field a gravelled walk led down to “The Well”; a clear, unfailing spring at the edge of the wood, and to a moss-covered stone seat beside it.
Beyond this a narrower path led through the grass and the last year’s dead leaves into the heart of the wood, where, in a circular space, large enough to let the sunlight in though the trees had been higher, lay “Mary Keith, beloved and honoured wife of George Dawson,” with her little children at her side. Here the turf was soft and green, but there was no adornment of shrub or flower on the grave or near it, only a simple headstone of grey granite and near it a turf seat, over which the slender boughs of a “weeping birch” hung sadly down.