ANNE had fairly started upon her voyage of discovery. The beginning of it cost her many thoughts. She had half advanced to various peasant wives, whom she saw at cottage doors, screaming to unruly children, or out upon the universal “green,” superintending their little bleaching—and had as often shrunk back, in painful timidity, which she blamed herself greatly for, but could not manage to overcome. It was quite different among the well-known cottages of Strathoran, though even with them, Anne would have felt visits of condescension or patronage unspeakably awkward and painful. Now this constitutional shyness must be overcome. Walking along the high road, a considerable way beyond the village of Aberford, she suddenly came upon a desolate mansion-house. The broken gate hung by the merest tag of hinge; the stone pillars were defaced and broken. What had formerly been ornamental grounds before the house, were a jungle of long grass, and uncouth brushwood. Bushes grown into unseemly straggling trees, beneath the shadow of which, thistles and nettles luxuriated, and plumes of unshorn grass waved rank and long, as if in the very triumph of neglect. The house-door hung as insecurely as the gate—the steps were mossy and cracked—the windows entirely shattered, and in some cases the very frames of them broken. Behind, the gardens lay in a like state of desolation. Here and there a cultivated flower, which had been hardy enough to cling to its native soil, marked among wild blossoms, and grass, and weeds, a place where care and culture had once been. Upon a mossed and uneven wall some fruit-trees clung, rich with blossoms: it had been an orchard once. In the midst of another waste and desolate division stood the broken pedestal of a sun-dial; a sloping wilderness ascended from it to the low windows of what seemed once to have been a drawing-room. A spell of neglect was over it all, less terrific than that still horror which a poet of our own time has thrown over his haunted house, but yet in the gay wealth and hopefulness of spring, striking chill and drearily upon the observer’s eye. Anne examined it with curious interest; she could suspect what house it was.
A little further on she came upon a cottage of better size and appearance than most, with a well-filled little garden before its door, and knots of old trees about it. It was the house of a “grieve,” or farm overseer, a rising man in his humble circle, whose wife aimed at being genteel. She stood in the door, basking in the sun, with her youngest baby in her arms; the good woman had a multitude of babies; the latest dethroned one was tumbling about at her feet. Anne bent over the little gate to ask the name of the forlorn and desolate house she had just past.
“Oh, that’s Redheugh,” said Mrs. Brock, the grieve’s wife.
Anne lingered, and held out her hand to the hardy little urchin scrambling in the garden. Mrs. Brock looked as if she would quite like to enter into conversation:
“Be quiet, Geordie; ye’ll dirty the lady’s gloves.”
“No, no,” said Anne, taking the small brown hand into her own. “I am very fond of children, and this is a fine, sturdy little fellow.”
“Ye’ll be a stranger, I’m thinking?” said Mrs. Brock. “There’s few folk in our parish that dinna ken Redheugh.”
“Yes,” said Anne. “I am quite a stranger; what is the reason it lies so deserted and desolate?”
“Ye’ll be come to the sea-side?” pursued Mrs. Brock; “it’s no often we have folk out frae Edinburgh sae early in the year. Is’t no unco cauld for bathing?”
“I should think it was,” said Anne smiling, “but I have never, bathed yet.”