[CHAPTER I
THE HEIR]
HALF-WAY up the east coast of Scotland, the estuary of the North Lour cuts a wide cleft in an edge of the Lowlands, and flows into the North Sea among the sands and salmon nets.
The river winds in large curves through the shingles and green patches where cattle graze, overhung by woods of beech and birch, and pursuing its course through a country in full cultivation—a country of large fields; where rolling woods, purple in the shadow, stretch north towards the blue Grampians.
A bridge of eight arches spans the water before it runs out to sea, the bank on its further side rising into a line of plough-fields crowning the cliffs, where flights of gulls follow the ploughman, and hover in his track over the upturned earth. As the turnpike runs down to the bridge, it curls round the policies of a harled white house which has stood for some two hundred years a little way in from the road, a tall house with dead-looking windows and slates on which the lichen has fastened. A clump of beech-trees presses round it on two sides, and, in their bare branches, rooks’ nests make patches against the late autumn skies.
Inside the mansion of Whanland—for such is its name—on a December afternoon in the first year of the nineteenth century, two men were talking in the fading light. The room which they occupied was panelled with wood, polished and somewhat light-coloured, and had two arched alcoves, one on either side of the chimney-piece. These were filled with books whose goodly backs gave a proper solemnity to the place. The windows were narrow and high, and looked out to the beeches. A faint sound of the sea came droning in from the sand-hills which flanked the shore, and were distant but the space of a few fields.
The elder of the two men was a person who had reached that convenient time of life when a gentleman may attend to his creature comforts without the risk of being blamed for it. He was well-dressed and his face was free from any obvious fault. He produced, indeed, a worse effect than his merits warranted, for his hair, which had the misfortune to look as though it were dyed, was, in reality, of a natural colour. Nothing in his appearance hinted at the fact that he was the family lawyer—or ‘man of business,’ as it is called in Scotland—of the young man who stood on the hearthrug, nor did his manner suggest that they had met that day for the first time.
He sat looking up at Gilbert Speid[[1]] with considerable interest. Though he was not one to whom the finer details of another’s personality were apparent, he was yet observant in the commoner way. It did not escape him that his companion was shy, but he did not suspect that it was with the shyness of one, who, though well accustomed to the company of his kind, had no intimacies. A few hours ago, when starting to meet him at Whanland, he had told himself that his task would be easy, and he meant to be friendly, both from inclination and policy, with the strange laird, who was a stranger to his inheritance. But though he had been received with politeness a little different from the amenity of anyone he had known before, he felt that he was still far from the defences of the young man’s mind. As to Gilbert’s outward appearance, though it could hardly be called handsome, the lawyer was inclined to admire it. He was rather tall, and had a manner of carrying himself which was noticeable, not from affectation, but because he was a very finished swordsman, and had a precision of gesture and movement not entirely common. He did not speak with the same intonation as the gentry with whom it was Alexander Barclay’s happiness to be acquainted, professionally or otherwise, for, though a Scot on both sides of his family, he had spent most of his youth abroad, and principally in Spain. His head was extremely well set and his face gave an impression of bone—well-balanced bone; it was a face, rather heavy, and singularly impassive, though the eyes looked out with an extraordinary curiosity on life. It seemed, to judge from them, as though he were always on the verge of speaking, and Barclay caught himself pausing once or twice for the expected words. But they seldom came and Gilbert’s mouth remained closed, less from determination to silence than from settled habit.
It was in the forenoon that Gilbert Speid had arrived at Whanland to find Barclay awaiting him on the doorstep; and the two men had walked round the house and garden and under the beech-trees, stopping at points from which there was any view to be had over the surrounding country. They had strolled up a field parallel with the road which ran from the nearest town of Kaims to join the highway at the bridge. There Gilbert had taken in every detail, standing at an angle of a fence and looking down on the river as it wound from the hazy distance of bare woods.
‘And my property ends here?’ he asked, turning from the fascinating scene to his companion.
‘At the bend of the Lour, Mr. Speid; just where you see the white cottage.’