[CHAPTER XL]
SERPENT'S EGGS
For a little we must leave both the narrow, sea-barriered, rock-girt bounds of Suliscanna and the flat, hard-won, and yet more hardly kept fields and polders of the Netherlands for the moorish pastures, the green, changeful woodlands, the flowery water-meadows of Balmaghie. It is necessary at this point to take a cast back in our story and tell of the strange things which have befallen Roger McGhie since we saw him at our tale's beginning, making his farewells by the stirrup-leather of my Lady Wellwood.
It was perhaps natural that the laird of Balmaghie, delicate of body, retiring of habit, a recluse from the society of roaring bears like Lag and Baldoon, who were his immediate neighbors, should succumb readily enough to the fascinations of my Lady Wellwood. It is not so obvious, on the other hand, why she found pleasure in the company of Roger McGhie.
It may be that the caustic kindliness, the flavor of antique chivalry, which had compelled to more than liking the unwonted heart of John Graham of Claverhouse, also had power to fascinate the widow of the Duke of Wellwood. That title had been one of the late king's making, and in the absence of heirs direct, it had lapsed immediately on the death of the king's minister and administrator in Scotland, while the original impoverished earldom of Wellwood had gone back to a kinsman remotely collateral. So my lady never forgot that she was not "the dowager" merely, but still, in the face of all—Susannah, first and only Duchess of Wellwood.
Nevertheless, to her credit, perhaps, as a woman of discernment, she married Roger McGhie, and that though far younger, richer, and gallanter men stood ready at her call. But the needy king and his new ministry had stripped her estates of most that her husband had so painfully gathered. Little was left her but the barren heritages of Grenoch—where, indeed, was heather enough and granite to spare, but where crops were few and scanty, and where even meadow-hay had a fashion of vanishing in the night whenever the Dee water took it into its head to sweep through the narrow Lane, raising the loch till it overflowed the low-lying meads nearly to the house-door of Grenoch itself.
Then, on the other hand, the acres of Balmaghie were undoubtedly broad, the finances of the laird unhurt by government exactions, and the house of Balmaghie a wide and pleasant place compared with the little square block-house of the Grenoch, sitting squatly like a moorhen's-nest on its verge of reedy loch.
So the Lady Susannah became, not long after Kate betook herself to Holland, the mistress of Balmaghie; but from some feeling of restraint or shame Roger McGhie had hitherto carefully kept the matter from his daughter, whose sentiments in the matter he had good reasons to suspect.
It had not seemed the least of the attractions of the house of Balmaghie to my lady that at the time of her marriage it wanted the presence of the girl who till now had been its mistress. And she resolved that, once out, Kate should abide so—that is, till the time came when a match politically and socially suitable could be found for the girl, and also a home not too near the well-trimmed garden pleasances of Balmaghie.