"How long have they been paying that tax?" she asked.
"It is about thirty years since the dyke was built."
"Thirty years!" she said. "Thirty years! These poor people have been paying a tax all this time for an embankment built to improve the property? Really, Mr. Purdie!——"
"They get the value of it!" he said, as testily as he dared. "The land is no longer flooded——"
"Tell this man," said she, with some colour mounting to her face, "that the tax for the dyke is abolished—here and now!"
"Godiva!" said Käthchen, in an undertone, with a bit of a titter.
And the factor would have protested from his own point of view. But this young woman's heart was all aflame. She cared nothing for ridicule, nor for any sort of more practical opposition. Here was some definite wrong that she could put right. She did not want to hear from Mr. Purdie, or from anybody else, what neighbouring landlords might think, or what encouragement it might give the crofters to make other and more impossible demands.
"I don't care what other landlords may say!" said she with firm lips: "You tell me that I improve my property—and then charge these poor people with the cost! And for thirty years they have been paying? Well, I wish you to say to this man that the tax no longer exists—from this moment it no longer exists—it is not to be heard of again!"
The factor made a brief communication: the taciturn crofter answered not a word—not a word of recognition, much less of thanks. But Mary Stanley was not to be daunted by this incivility: as she descended to the waggonette, her face wore a proud look—right and justice should be done, as far as she was able, in this her small sphere: the rest was with the gods.
And again they drove on; but now was there not some subtle softening of the air, some moist odour as of the sea, some indication of the neighbourhood of the Atlantic shores? Clearly they were getting down to the coast. And unhappily, as they went on, the land around them seemed to be getting worse and worse—if there could be a worse. A wilderness of crags and knolls—of Hebridean gneiss mostly; patches of swamp, with black gullies of peat; sterile hills that would have threatened a hoodie crow with starvation: such appeared to be Miss Stanley's newly found property. But a very curious incident now occurred to withdraw her attention from these immediate surroundings—an incident the meaning of which she was to learn subsequently. They had come in sight of a level space that had evidently at one time been a lake, but was now a waste of stones, with a touch of green slime and a few withered rushes here and there; and in the middle of this space, on a mound that had apparently been connected with the mainland, was a heap of scattered blocks that looked like the tumbled-down ruins of some ancient fort.