“Eh, Sir Robert! but I’m doubting you’ve forgotten our countryside. There’s Miss Eelen at the Manse that is her one great friend; and John Jameson’s lass at the muckle farm, that has been at the school in Edinburgh, and would fain, fain think herself a lady, poor bit thing, would have given her little finger to be friends with Miss Lily. But you would not have had her go to pairties in the farmhouse; and at the Manse they give nane, the minister being such a lameter. Pairties! the Lord bless us! Wha would ask her to pairties on this side of the moor?”
“There are plenty of people,” said Sir Robert almost indignantly, “that should have shown attention to my brother James’s daughter, both for my sake and his. What do you call the Duffs, woman? and the Gordons of the Muckle moor, and Sir John Sinclair’s family at the Lews? Many a merry night have we passed among us when we were all young. The Duffs’ is not more than a walk, even if Lily were setting up for a fine lady, which, to do her justice, was not her way.”
“Eh, hear till him!” breathed Katrin under her breath. She said aloud: “Times are awfu’ changed, Sir Robert, since your days. The present Mr. Duff he’s married on an English lady, and they say she cannot bide the air of the Highlands, though it is well kent for the finest air in a’ the world. He comes here whiles with a wheen gentlemen for the first of the shooting—but her never, and there’s little to be said for a house when the mistress is never in it. Of the Gordons there’s nane left but one auld leddy, the last of them, I hear, except distant connections. And as for Sir John at the Lews, poor man, poor man, he just died broken-hearted, one of his bonnie boys going to destruction after the other. They say the things are to be roupit and the auld mansion-house to be left desolate, for of the twa that remain the one’s a ne’er-do-well and the other a puir avaricious creature, feared to spend a shilling, and I canna tell which is the worst.”
“Bless me, bless me!” Sir Robert had gone on saying, shaking his head. He was receiving a rude awakening. He saw in his mind’s eye the old house running over with lively figures, with fun and laughter—and now desolate. It gave him a great shock, partly from the simple fact, which by itself was overwhelming, partly because of a sudden pity which sprang up in his mind for Lily, and, most of all, for himself. What, nobody to come and see him, to tell the news and hear what was in the London papers; no cheerful house to form an object for his walk, no men to talk to, no ladies to whom to pay his old-fashioned compliments! This discovery went very much to his heart. After a long time he said: “It would be better to let the houses than to leave them to go to rack and ruin, or shut up, as you say—the best houses in the countryside.”
“Let them!” cried Katrin. “Gentlemen’s ain houses! We’re maybe fallen low, Sir Robert, but we’re no just fallen to that.”
“You silly woman! the grandest folk do it,” cried Sir Robert. Then he added in a lower tone: “Lily, I am afraid, may not have had a very lively life.”
“You may well say that!” cried Katrin. “Poor bonnie lassie, if she had bidden ony gangrel body on the road, or any person travelling that passed this way, to come in and bear her company, I would not have been surprised for my part.”
Katrin spoke very deliberately, avec intention. It seemed well to prepare an argument, in case it might be used with effect another time. And Sir Robert was much subdued. He had not meant to inflict such a punishment upon his niece. He had believed, indeed, that her life at Dalrugas would be even more gay than her life in Edinburgh. There the parties might occasionally be formal, or the convives bores, according to his own experience at least; but here there was nothing but the good, warm, simple intimacy of the country, the life almost in common, the hospitable doors always open. If a compunctious recollection of Lily ever crossed his mind in the midst of his own elderly amusements, this was what he had been in the habit of saying to himself: “There will be lads enough to make a little queen of her, and lasses enough to keep her company, for she’s a bonnie bit thing when all is said.” He had always been a little proud of her, though she had been a great trouble to him; and he thought he knew that in his old home Lily would be fully appreciated. That he had sent her out into the wilderness had never entered his thoughts. He dismissed Katrin with an uneasy mind, imploring her, almost with humility, to do every thing she could think of for his poor Lily, and if she was not better in the morning, to send at once for the best doctor in the neighborhood. Who was the best doctor in the neighborhood? Indeed, there was but little choice—the doctor at Kinloch-Rugas, who was not so young as he once was, and had, alas, a sore weakness for his glass, and the one at Ardenlennie on the other side, who was well spoken of. “Let it be the one at Ardenlennie,” Sir Robert said. He spent rather a wretched day afterward, taking two or three short constitutionals, up and down the high-road, three-quarters of an hour at a time, to while away the lonely day until his friends returned from the moor. It was far too painful an ordeal, to spend the 12th of August alone in this place where, in his recollection, the 12th of August had always been ecstasy. He should have chosen another moment. He had not imagined that he would have felt so much his own disabilities of old age. He had been wont to boast that he did not feel them at all, one kind of enjoyment having been replaced by another, and his desire for athletic pleasures having died a natural death in the perfection of his matured spirit and changed tastes, which were equal to better things. But he had certainly subjected himself to too great a trial now. That the 12th should be his first day at home, and that all his sport should consist of a convoy given to the sportsmen on the back of Rory, but not a gun for his own shoulder, not a step on the heather for his foot! It was too much. He had been a fool. And then this silly misadventure of Lily and her illness to make every thing worse.
A moment of comparative comfort occurred in the middle of the day when he had his luncheon. “Really that woman’s not bad as a cook,” he said to himself. She was but a woman, and a Scotch, uncultivated creature, but she had her qualities—and there was taste in what she sent him, that priceless gift, especially for an old man. He took a little nap after his luncheon, and then he took another walk, and so got through the day till the sportsmen came back. They came in noisy and triumphant, with their bags, and their stories of what happened at this and that corner, of the cheepers that had been missed and the old birds that were full of guile. Had they been Sir Robert’s sons it is possible that he might have listened benignly, and felt more or less the pleasure by proxy which some gentle spirits taste. But they were strangers, mere “friends” in the jargon of the world, meaning acquaintances more or less intimate. Of the three he bore best the laughter and delight and brags and eagerness to show his own prowess of the young man. The others awakened a sharper pang of contrast. “Almost my own age!” Alas! the difference between fifty and seventy is the unkindest of comparisons. They were not even good companions for him in the evening. When they had talked over every step of their progress, and every bird that had fallen before them, and eaten of Katrin’s good dishes an enormous dinner, the strong air of the moor, and the hot fire of the peats, and the fatigue of the first day’s exercise and excitement, overpowered them one after another with sleep. This would not have been the case had Lily been afoot to sing a song or two and keep them to their manners. Sir Robert was driven to the expedient of sending for Dougal when they had all, with many excuses, gone to bed. Dougal was sleepy, too, and tired, though not so much so as “the gentlemen,” to whom the grouse and the moor were, more or less, novelties. He gave his wife a curious look when Sir Robert’s man called him to his master, and Katrin responded with one that partly entreated and partly threatened. She said: “You can tell him Miss Lily is very bad, and I’ll get the doctor the first thing the morn.”
Dougal uttered no word. He could not wear his bonnet when he went up to see the laird, but he took it in his hands, which was some small consolation. He was in a dreadful confusion of mind, not knowing what was to be said to him, what was to be demanded of him. He might be about to be put through his “questions,” and want all his strength to defend himself; or it might be nothing at all—some nonsense about the guns or the birds. His heavy shock of hair stood up from his forehead, giving something of an ox-like breadth and heaviness of brow. He held his head somewhat down, with a trace of defiance. Katrin might gloom; it was little he cared for Katrin when his blood was up; but there was not a bit of the traitor in Dougal. No blood of a black Monteith in him, if they were to put the thumbscrews on him or matches atween his fingers. That poor bonnie creature, whatever was her wyte—they should get nothing to trouble her out of him.