CHAPTER XI.
[AN EXCURSION].
Mrs. Sangster decided that Mr. Wallowby ought to see something of the country during his stay. An excursion was planned, and to introduce some appearance of novelty into the party, the Rev. Roderick was summoned to join the expedition.
It was an early September morning when they started from Auchlippie. Peter drove the phaeton, and his friend sat beside him on the box. Inside were the ladies and the minister, in his quality of priest, or one of the third sex, which, as though not either male or female, possesses all the claims to deference of both, and owes the duties of neither. Roderick sat in the back seat beside his hostess, while the two young ladies faced him. The two gentlemen on the box looked back from time to time with some remark which was gaily responded to by the ladies, and Roderick occasionally joined in with a quiet jest. The presence of Sophia filled his mind with happiness too deep for merriment, and there she sat before him in full view.
Sophia being a placid person abounding in the beauty of repose, had worked her spell upon him more by looks, which he had interpreted into sympathy, and what he chose to imagine the beauty of her virgin soul, than by anything she had ever said. Looking in her eyes he had dreamt of all that was loveliest and then fancied he saw it there. Another Narcissus, he had gazed in their crystal depths, and, mistaking his own reflection for the spirit of the flood, had fallen in love with it.
It made little matter to him that they were in the midst of a merry company, he could sun himself in the presence that was so much of his own creating all the same, and save that he was more silent than at other times, no one could have observed any departure from his usual bearing. Sophia was aware of his mute observance, and thought it 'very nice,' she was used to it, and it required from her no irksome effort in response, which, as her thinking part was neither imaginative nor emotional, and somewhat sluggish besides, was comfortable. The contrast between Roderick's quiet and the lively loquacity of Mr. Wallowby, told all in favour of the former; for although Mary and her mother with their greater readiness relieved her from the necessity of reply, it was mortifying thus to realize her own slowness, and she found the constant smiling and laughter over jests whose point she had missed, fatiguing to her facial muscles, and at last she took refuge in a private chat with Roderick as to whether he thought the day would keep fine and such like weighty matters.
Loch Gorton and Inchbracken. Page 79.
They drove across the upland moors and the ridge dividing Glen Effick from the neighbouring valley of the Gorton, and down Gorton side to where it spreads into the lake of the same name. At that point it is crossed by a bridge, the road passing an old posting inn which looks down the loch, and is backed by Craig Findochart, the highest mountain of the district, and the goal of the day's expedition.
Loch Gorton is a basin among the hills, deep and narrow at its upper end, but broadening and shallowing towards its base. It fills the mouth of a valley whose precipitous slopes crowd down upon the water at its head, but draw back in lessening and ever-widening undulations from the lower end. Near the outlet is the broad low island of Inchbracken, connected with the mainland by a narrow neck of land. Here in the old time stood the castle of the Drysdales, commanding the isthmus, which they cut across and commanded by a drawbridge. The moat is filled up now, and the square old keep, ivy-grown and ruinous, has sunk into a mere picturesque feature in the shrubbery of the modern mansion.