[2] Harvest home merrymakings.
CHAPTER XL
THE GREAT “TABERNACLE” REVIVAL
Though Boyd Connoway had not said anything directly threatening the house of Heathknowes or its inmates, his story of his own “conversion” and the death of Dick Wilkes under the Black Flag somehow made us vaguely uneasy. The door of the house was locked at eight. The gates of the yard barricaded as in the old time of the sea raids from the Golden Hind.
So strong was the feeling that Irma would gladly have returned before our time to the little White House above the meadow flats, and to the view of the Pentlands turning a solid green butt towards the Archers’ Hall of the Guid Toon of Edinburgh.
But it was not so easy to quit Heathknowes. My grandmother held tightly to Duncan the Second. I found myself in good case, after the fatigues of the town, to carry out some work on my own account. This, of course, for the sake of my wife’s happiness, I would have given up, but after all Irma’s plans went to pieces upon the invincible determination of Sir Louis to remain. He was now a lad of seventeen, but older looking than his age. He had his own room at Heathknowes, his books, his occupations. Indeed we seldom saw him except at meals, and even then often in the middle of dinner he would rise, bow haughtily to the company, and retire without uttering a word. He had learned the lesson from Lalor that plain farm people were no society for such as he. He went as far as he could in the way of insolence, making us pay for the refusal of the lawyers to let him go to London with the member for the county.
I could see the blush rise crimson to Irma’s neck and face after such a performance. But by some mysterious divine law of compensation, no sooner had she Baby in her arms, than she forgot all about the sulky boy, sitting moping among his books in the wood parlour, looking out on the red-boled firs of Marnhoul forest.