Never did I realize so clearly the difference between what interests the people in a great city and those inhabiting remote provinces as when, in mid-August, I took Irma and my firstborn son down to the wholesome breath and quiet pine shadows of Heathknowes. I had seen the autumnal number of the Universal safe into its wrapper of orange and purple. In Edinburgh the old town and the new alike thrilled and hummed with the noise of a contested election. There were processions, hustings, battles royal everywhere, the night made hideous, the day insupportable.

But here, looking from the door out of the sheltering arms of Marnhoul wood into the peace of the Valley, the ear could discern only the hum of the pirn-mill buzzing like a giant insect in the greenest of the shade, and farther off the whisper of the sea on the beaches and coves about Killantringan.

Now we had taken rather a roundabout road and rested some nights on the way, for I had business at Glasgow—a great and notable professor to visit at the college, and in the library several manuscripts to consult. So Irma remained with the Wondrous Duncan the Second at the inn of the White Horse, where the coach stopped.

When I came back I thought that Irma’s face looked a trifle flushed. I discovered that, having asked the hostler to polish her shoes, he had refused with the rudeness common to his class when only rooms of the cheaper sort are engaged. Whereupon Irma, who would not let her temper get the better of her, had forthwith gone down to the pantry, taken the utensils and done them herself.

I said not much to her, but to the landlord and especially to the man himself I expressed myself with fulness and a vigour which the latter, at least, was not likely to forget for some time.

It was as well, however, that my grandmother was not there. For in that case murder might have been done, had she known of the scullion’s answer and what Irma had done. Well also, on the whole, for us that she had refused to keep us company. For having been only once in a great city in her life, and never likely to be there again, Mary Lyon made the most of her time. She had had two trunks when she came to our gate. Four would not have held all that she travelled with on her way back. And when we remonstrated on the cost, she said, “Oh, fidget! ’Tis many a day since I cost anything to speak of to the goodman. He can brave and weel afford to pay for a trifle o’ luggage.”

Accordingly she never passed a fruit stall without yearning to buy the entire stock-in-trade “for the neighbours that have never seen siccan a thing as a sweet orange in their lives—lemons being the more marketable commodity in Eden Valley.”

She had also as many commissions, for which she looked to be paid, as if she had been a commercial traveller. There were half-a-dozen “swatches” to be matched for Aunt Jen—cloth to supply missing “breadths,” yarn to mend the toes of stockings, ribbons which would transform the ancient dingy bonnet into a wonder of beauty on the day of the summer communion. She had “patterns” to buy dress-lengths of—from the byre-lasses brown or drab to stand the stress of out-of-door—checked blue and white for the daintier dairy-worker among her sweet milk and cheese.

Even groceries, and a taste of the stuff they sell in town for “bacon ham”—to be sniffed at and to become the butt for all the goodwives in the parish—no tea, for Mary Lyon knew where that could be got better and cheaper, but a Pilgrim’s Progress for a neighbour lad who was known to be fond of the reading and deserved to be encouraged—lastly, as a vast secret, a gold wedding-ring which could not be bought without talk in Eden Valley itself. Grandmother did not tell us for whom this was intended. Nor did we know, till the little smile lurking at the corner of her mouth revealed the mystery, when Agnes Anne came home from the kirk and named who had been “cried” that day. It was no other than our sly Eben—and Miss Gertrude Greensleeves was the name of the bride—far too young for him, of course, but—he had taken his mother into his confidence and not a man of us dared say a word. Doubtless the women did, but even they not in the hearing of Mary Lyon.

But now we were at rest, and quite ten days ago grandmother had arrived with her cargo. The commissions were all distributed. The parish had had a solid week to get over its amazement. And, to put all in the background, there had been a successful run into Portowarren and another the same night to Balcary—a thing not often done in the very height of summer. Yet, because the preventive men were not expecting it, perhaps safer then than at any other time.

And above all and swamping all the endless talk of a busy, heartsome farm-town! Ah, how good it was. Even the little god in the “ben” room, Master Duncan Maitland MacAlpine, had times and seasons without a worshipper, all because there was a young farmer’s son in the kitchen telling of his experiences “among the hills,” with the gaugers behind them, and the morn breaking fast ahead.

How they must get to a place where they could hide, a place with water, where they could restore their beasts and repose themselves, a place of great shadowing rocks in a weary land. For of a certainty the sun would smite by day, even if the moon afforded them guidance over the waste by night.

Or Boyd Connoway would tell of the Golden Hind having been seen out in the channel, of rafts of “buoyed” casks sunk to within three foot of the bottom, to be fished up when on a dark night the herring craft slipped out of Balcary or the Scaur, silent as a shadow.

Or mayhap (and this, married or single, Irma liked best of all) there came in some shy old farmer from the uplands, or perhaps a herd, to whose boy or girl “out at service” the mistress of Heathknowes had brought home a Bible. These had come to thank Mary Lyon, but could not get a word out. They sipped their currant wine as if it were medicine and moved uneasily on the edges of their chairs. They had excellent manners stowed away somewhere—the natural well-bredness of the hill and the heather, but in a place like that, with so many folk, it seemed as if they had somehow mislaid them.

Then was Irma’s time. She would glide in, her face still pale, of course, but with such a gracious sweetness upon it that the shyest was soon at his ease. Here was a cup, an embarrassment to the hand. She would fill its emptiness, not with Aunt Jen’s currant wine, but with good Hollands—not to the brim, because the owner would spill it over and so add the finishing touch to his bashfulness. She sat down by the oldest, the shaggiest, the roughest, and in a moment (as if, like a fairy of Elfland, she had waved her wand) old Glencross of Saltflats, who only talked in monosyllables to his own wife, was telling Irma all about the prospects of his hay crop, and the bad look-out there was along the Colvend shore owing to the rabbits breeding on the green hill pastures.

“Oh, but I’ll thin them, missie,” he affirmed, in response to her look of sympathy, “ow aye, there are waur things than hare soup and rabbit pie. Marget” (his wife) “is a great hand at the pie. Ye maun come ower some day and taste—you and your guidman. I will send ye word by that daft loon Davie.”

Then with hardly an effort, now that the ice was broken, turning to my grandmother, “Eh, mistress, but it was awesome kind and mindfu’ o’ you to fetch the laddie a Bible a’ the road frae Enbra. I hae juist been promising him a proper doing, a regular flailing if he doesna read in it every nicht afore he says his prayers.”

Needless to say Davie had promised—but as to Davie’s after performance no facts have been put on record. Still, he had his Bible and was proud of it.

Then Irma, safe in her married state, would set herself down by some shy, horny-fisted fellow, all nose and knuckles. She would draw him away from his consciousness of the Adam’s apple in his throat (which he privately felt every one must be looking at) and give him a good sympathetic quarter of an hour all to himself. She would smile and smile and be a villain to her heart’s content, till the lad’s tongue would at last be loosened, and he would tell how he tried for first prize at the last ploughing match, and boast how he would have been first only for his “coulter blunting on a muckle granite stane.” He would relate with exactness how many queys his father had, the records of mortality among the wintering sheep, the favourable prospects of the spring lambs—“abune the average—aye, I will not deny, clean abune the average.”

So he would sit and talk, and gaze and gaze, till there entered into his soul the strong desire to work, to rise up and conquer fate and narrow horizons—so that in time, like a certain Duncan MacAlpine (whom very likely, as a big country fellow, he had thrashed at school), it might happen to him to have by his fireside something dainty and sweet and with great sympathetic eyes and a smile—like that!

We had only a little while of this, however, for on the morrow Louis was to arrive from school, safely escorted by Freddy Esquillant and half-a-dozen students, who had made a jovial party all the way from Edinburgh.

Now I may write myself down a selfish brute by the confession I am going to make. But all the same, the thing is true and had better be owned up to, all the more in the light of what afterwards happened. I had no great wish that Louis should join our little party, which with the advent of little Master Red Knuckles, had been rendered quite complete. It was, I admit, an unworthy jealousy. But I thought that as Irma had always been so passionately devoted to Louis—and also because she had, as I sometimes teased myself by imagining, only come to me because she had lost Louis—his coming back would—might, I had the grace to say on second thoughts, deprive me of some part of my hard-earned heritage—the love of the woman who was all to me. For with me, his unworthy father, even Duncan Maitland had not yet begun to count. With a man that comes later.

This is my confession, and once made, let us pass on. I had even then the grace to be ashamed—at least, rather.

Louis arrived. He had grown into a tall lad with long hair of straw-coloured gold, that shone with irregular reflections like muffled moonlight on a still but gently rippling sea. He was quieter, and seemed somehow different. He was now all for his books and solitude, and sat long in the room that had been given him for a bedroom and study—that with the window looking out on the wood. It was the quietest in the house—not only because of our youthful bull of Bashan and his roaring, but because it was at the farthest end of the long rambling house, away from the stables and cattle sheds.

However, he seemed delighted to see Irma, and sat a long time with her hand in his. But I, who knew her well, noticed that there was not now on her face the old strained attention to all that her brother said or did. It was in another direction that her ears and thoughts were turned, and at the first cry from baby’s cot she rose quietly, disengaging her hand without remark before disappearing into the bedroom-nursery. In another moment I could see my grandmother pass the window drying her hands on her apron. I knew from the ceasing of the plunging thud of the dasher that she had called a substitute to the churning. The dasher was now in the hands of Aunt Jen, who handled it with a shorter, more irrascible stroke.

Left alone with him, I talked to Louis a while of his studies, of the games the boys played at school, of the length of the holidays. But to all these openings and questionings he responded in a dull and uninterested fashion. I could not but feel that he resented bitterly the marriage which had come between his sister and himself. He had had, of course, a place to come to on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons, but I had seen little of him then. My work was generally absorbing, and when I had time to give to Irma, I wanted her all to myself. So I had fallen into a habit, neither too kind nor yet too wise, of taking to my writing or my proofs as often as Louis came to our house.

Now, from the glances he cast at the door by which Irma had gone out, I saw that he too was suffering from jealousy—even as I had done. He was jealous of that inarticulate Jacob which comes into so many houses as a tiny Supplanter—the first baby!

After a quarter of an hour he rose and got out of the room quickly. I could hear him go to his own room and shut the door. When Irma and Mary Lyon had reduced our small bundle of earthquake to a sulky and plaintive reason, she came back to talk to her brother. Finding him gone, she asked where Louis was, and immediately followed him to his chamber, doubtless to continue their conversation.

But she returned after a while with a curious gleam on her face, saying that doubtless travel had given her brother a headache. He had shut his door with the bolt, and was lying down.

I was on the point of asking Irma if he had answered when she called to him, but remembered in time that I had better not meddle in what did not concern me. If Louis behaved like a bear, it would only throw Irma the more completely upon me. And this, at the time, I was selfish enough to wish for.

Afterwards—well, I had, as all men have, many things to reproach myself for—this stupid jealousy being by no means the least or the lightest.

Still, on the whole I had a great deal of peace and the composure of the quiet mind during these first days at Heathknowes. My father, almost for the first time in his life, withdrew himself from his desk, and took a walk beyond the confines of the Academy Wood to see his grandson, keeping, however, his hands still behind him according to his custom in school. My mother, even, arranged with Agnes Anne to take the post-office duties during her absence, and seemed pleased in her quiet way to hold the boy in her arms. In this, however, she was not encouraged by Mary Lyon, who soon took Duncan away on the plea that he cried, except with her. Duncan the Second certainly stopped as soon as he felt my grandmother’s strong, well-accustomed hands grasp him. Yet she was not in the least tender with him. On the contrary, she heaved him, as it were promiscuously, over one shoulder with his head hanging down her back, and tucking his swathed legs under one armpit she proceeded about her household business, as if wholly disembarrassed—all the while Duncan never uttering a word.

But through all the talk of the weather and the crops, the night runs to Kirk Anders and the Borgue shore, the capture made by the preventives at the Hass of the Dungeon, the misdoings of Tim Cleary who had got seven days for giving impudence to the Provost of Dumfries in his own court-room, there pierced the strange sough of politics.

The elections were upon us also in Galloway, and the Government candidate was reported to be staying at Tereggles with the Lord Lieutenant. He had not yet been seen, but (it was, of course, Boyd Connoway who brought us word) his name was the Honourable Lalor Maitland, late Governor of the Meuse—a province in the Low Countries.