"Granny will be telling you all about it," he said, rising. "Come, lads, it will be getting late."
The three young men followed their father out to the stable. Ordinarily they attended to the evening duties there themselves, but to-night Big Malcolm wished to leave the boy alone with his grandmother, realising that the situation needed a woman's delicate handling.
This new proceeding filled Scotty with an added alarm. He clambered up on his grandmother's knee as soon as they were alone and demanded an explanation; surely that English name wasn't his. He whispered the momentous question, for though Old Farquhar was snoring loudly in his corner, Bruce was there, wide awake and looking up inquiringly, as though he could understand.
And so, with her arms about him, Granny told him for the first time the story of his birth. How Granny had had only one little girl, older than Callum, eh, and such a sweet lassie she was; how just when they had landed in Canada she had married a young Englishman who had come over with them on the great ship; how they had left them in Toronto when they came north to the forests of Oro; how their baby had come, the most beautiful baby, Granny's little girl wrote, and how she had written also that they, too, were coming north to live near the old folks when,—Granny's voice faltered,—when the fever came, and both Granny's beautiful little girl and her Englishman died, and Grandaddy and Callum had journeyed miles through the bush to bring Granny her baby, and how Kirsty John's mother had carried him all the way, and how he was all Granny had left of her bright lass!
At the sound of grief in his grandmother's voice, the child put up his hand to stroke her face, and found it wet with tears. Instantly he forgot his own trouble in sympathy for hers, and clasping his hands about her neck he soothed her in the best way he knew. He scarcely understood her grief; was Granny crying because he was only an Englishman after all? For to him, bereavement and death were but names, and in the midst of abounding love he had never realised the lack of parents.
He had often heard of them before, of his beautiful mother, whose eyes were so dark and whose hair was so curly like his own; and how his father had been such a fine, big, young man, and a gentleman too, though Scotty had often vaguely wondered just what that meant. But that his parents had left him an inheritance of a name and lineage other than MacDonald he had never dreamed. And now there was no denying the humiliating truth; his father had been an Englishman, he himself was English, and that disgraceful name, at which Peter Lauchie had sneered, was his very own. Henceforth he must be an outcast among the MacDonalds, and be classed with the English crew that lived over on the Tenth, and whom, everyone knew, the MacDonalds despised. Yes, and he belonged to the same class as that stuck-up Captain Herbert, who lived in that grand house on the north shore of Lake Oro, and whom his grandfather hated!
He managed to check his tears by the time the boys returned, but during prayers he crouched miserably in a dark corner behind Hamish, a victim of despair. He derived very little comfort from the fact that Grandaddy was reading, "And thou shalt be called by a new name"; it seemed only an advertisement of his disgrace. He wondered drearily who else was so unfortunate as to be presented with one, and if it would be an English name. And afterwards, when they had gone up to the loft to bed, he crept in behind Hamish, and cried himself to sleep because of that, which, in after years, he always remembered with pride.