“It’s awfu’ easy when it’s no’ your ain case,” said Jean; “an’ I suppose we’ve a’ as much or mair than we deserve; but that does not satisfy your wame when you’re hungry, nor your back when you’re cauld. The maister has never been out here since the first time. The leddy came once, a fine sensible woman, that looks weel after her family; but it’s Missie that’s the queen o’ the Hewan. As it’s such a fine night, and nane but bairns in the house, if you’ll come ben we’ll maybe see them. I’ll have to think o’ some supper for them, for thae lang laddies are just wolves for their supper. Or maybe you’ll first take another cup o’ tea?”
Mrs Harding declined this hospitable offer, and rose, taking her shawl and bonnet with her, for it was nearly the time, she remarked, when she “must be going.” The two lingered outside to look at the hens, and especially that careful but premature mother who had begun to “sit,” though the weather was still but moderately adapted for the fledglings; and then they made a momentary divergence to see “Grumphy,” who was the pride of his mistress’s heart. “I’ll no’ kill him till after harvest, and I’ll warrant you there’ll be no better meat between this and Edinburgh. Poor beast!” she said, with a mixture of the practical and sentimental, “he’s a fine creature, and has a fine disposition; but it’s what we a’ must come to. And yonder’s where I would keep the coo—if I had ane,” she added with a sigh, pointing to a little paddock. The cow was to old Jean what the barony of Eskside was to Mr Pringle, and the house at the Loanhead to her daughter Marg’ret: but the old woman’s lot was the easiest, in that the object of her desire was not almost within her longing grasp.
CHAPTER XI.
Lord and Lady Eskside, as the reader has seen, were not quite in accord about their grandson: or at least they took different views of the circumstances which attended his arrival. They took (perhaps) each the view which came naturally to man and woman in such a position of affairs. The old lord, although himself at length absolutely convinced that the boy was his son’s child and his own heir, was deeply oppressed by the consciousness that though there was moral certainty of this fact, there was no legal proof. “Moral certainty’s a grand thing,” said Willie Maitland, the factor, a man who knew the Eskside affairs to the very depths, and from whom there were no secrets possible; but he spoke so doubtfully as to inflame the mind of my lady, who sat by listening to their talk with an impatience beyond words.
“A grand thing!” cried Lady Eskside; “it is simply everything: what would you have more? And who can judge in such a question but ourselves? my son, who must know best, and my old lord and myself, who are next nearest? What do the men mean by their dubious looks? What can you have more than certainty? Mr Maitland, with your knowledge of the law, I would like you to answer me that.”
“Well, madam, as my lord says,” said Willie Maitland, who was old-fashioned in his manners, “there is legal proof wanted. It may be just a deficiency on our part—and indeed, according to the Scriptures themselves, law is a sign of moral deficiency—but everything has to be summered and wintered before the Lords of Session.”
“And what have the Lords of Session to do with our boy?” said my lady, indignantly. “I hope we are not so doited but what we can take care of him ourselves.”
“My dear Catherine, that is not the question.”
“What is the question, I would like to know?” said Lady Eskside, flushing with the heat of argument. “Do I need the Lords of Session to tell me whose son my own bairn is? I think you are all taking leave of your senses with your formalities and your legal proof. Poor Alexander Pringle there, up the water, cannot bring his delicate little girlie to the country for change of air but you think he’s plotting against Val. If this suspicion and distrust of every mortal is what your bonnie law brings, I’m thankful for my part that I know nothing about the law; and I wish everybody was of my mind.”
Lord Eskside and his factor went out quite cowed from my lady’s presence. They were half ashamed both of the law and themselves, and I think the visit which they made to the land which was being marked out for “feus” was necessary to get up their spirits. Lord Eskside was rather excited about these feus—allotments of land to be let for building, upon a kind of copyhold which secured a perpetual revenue in the shape of ground-rent to the proprietor: though he was a little disposed at the same time to alarm himself as to the persons who might come to live there, and perhaps bring Radical votes into the county, and corrupt a constituency still stanch, amid Scotland’s many defections, to “the right side.” This public anxiety was a relief to his mind from the private anxiety; for however public-spirited a man may be, and however profound his interest in politics, the biting of a little private trouble is more sharp and keen than that patriotic concern for his country which drives him wild with excitement over a contested election. Willie Maitland the factor—a man “very well connected,” half a lawyer, half a farmer, and spoken of by every soul in the parish and on the estate by his Christian name—was big and burly and easy-minded, and took things much more easily than his lord. “By the time there is any question of the succession,” he said, “the story will be clean forgotten. It will be many a year, I hope, before Richard succeeds, let alone the boy.”