href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@21893@[email protected]#CHAPTER_XXXVIII" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE LAND OF ALWAYS AFTERNOON
CHAPTER XXXIX. REBEL GALLOWAY
CHAPTER XL. "WHY DO THEY LOVE YOU?"
CHAPTER XLI. THE BATTLE OF THE CAUSEWAY

CHAPTER I

HEIRESS AND HEIR

They stood high on the Abbey cliff-edge—an old man, eagle-profiled, hawk-beaked, cockatoo-crested, with angry grey eyebrows running peakily upwards towards his temples at either side ... and a boy.

They were the Earl Raincy and his grandson Louis—all the world knew them in that country of the Southern Albanach. For Leo Raincy was a great man, and the lad the heir of all he possessed.

For all—or almost all—they looked upon belonged to the Earl of Raincy. Even those blue hills bounding the meadow valleys to the north hid a fair half of his property, and he was sorry for that. Because he was a land miser, hoarding parishes and townships. He grudged the sea its fringe of foam, the three-mile fishing limit, the very high-and-low mark between the tides which was not his, but belonged to the crown—along which the common people had a right to pass, and where fisherfolk from the neighbouring villages might fish and dry their nets, when all ought to have been his.

The earl's dark eyes passed with carelessness over hundreds of farm-towns, snug sheltered villages, mills with little threads of white wimpling away from the unheard constant clack of the wheel, barns, byres and stackyards—all were his, but of these he took no heed.

Behind them Castle Raincy itself stood up finely from the plain of corn-land and green park, an artificial lake in front, deep trees all about, patterned gardens, the fiery flash of hot-house glass where the sun struck, and pinnacles high in air, above all the tall tower from which Margaret de Raincy had defied the English invader during the minority of James the Fifth. The earl's eyes passed all these over. He did not see them as aught to take pride in.

What he lingered upon was the wide pleasant valley beneath him, with a burn running and lurking among twinkling birches, interspersed with alders, many finely drained fields with the cows feeding belly-deep with twitching tails, and the sweep of the ripening crops which ran off to either side over knolls carefully planed down—and so back and back to the shelter of dark fir woods. Twelve hundred acres—and not his! Not a Raincy stone upon it, nor had been for four hundred years.

There were two houses on this twelve hundred acres of good land. First came Cairn Ferris, at the head of the glen of the Abbey Water. Close to the road that, under the lee of the big pines, a plain, douce, much-ivied house; and down in a nook by the sea, Abbey Burnfoot, called "The Abbey," a newer and brighter place, set like a jewel on the very edge of the sea, the white sand in front and the blue sweep of the bay widening out on either hand. Horrible—oh, most horrible! Not his—nor ever would be!

This was the blot which blackened all the rest—the property of the Ferrises of Cairn Ferris, of Adam, chief of the name at the top of the Glen, and of his brother Julian—he who had cursed the noble scythe-sweep of the Abbey Bay, which all ought to have been untouched Raincy property, with crow-stepped gables and beflowered verandahs.

"They stole it, boy, stole it!" muttered old Earl Raincy, setting a shaking hand on the boy's shoulder, "four hundred years ago they stole it. They came with the Stuart king who had nothing to do in the Free Province, and we stood for the Douglases, as was our duty. Your ancestor and mine was killed at Arkinholm with three earls and twenty barons, he not the least noble!"

He paused a moment to control his senile anger and then went quavering on.

"This Ferris was a mercenary—a fighter for his own hand, and they gave him this while we were exiled. And they have held it ever since—the pick of our heritage—the jewel in the lotus. Often we have asked it back—often taken it. But because they married into the Fife Wemysses—yes, even this last of them, they have always retaken and held it, to our despite!"

The boy on the stile, sprawling and thinking of something else (for he had heard all this fifty times before), yawned.

"Well, there's plenty more—why worry, grandfather?" he said, fanning himself with the blue velvet college cap that had a bright gold badge in front.

The old man started as if stung. He frowned and blinked like an angry bald eagle.

"There speaks the common wash of Whiggish blood. MacBryde will out!—No Raincy would thus have sold his birthright for a mess of pottage."

The eyes of the lad were still indolent, but also somewhat impudent in schoolboy fashion, as he answered, "Still, grandfather, mother's MacBryde money has paid off a good many Raincy—encumbrances, don't you call them here?—mortgages is the name for them in England! And more than that, don't go back and worry mother about these old cow-pastures. You know you are really very fond of her. As for me, I may not be a real Raincy, for I was born to do something in life, not to idle through it. You won't let me go into the navy, and fight as a man ought. If I go into the army, we shall have mother in a permanent fit. So I must just stop on and lend a hand where I can, till I am old enough to turn out that thief of an estate agent of yours and do something to help you—really, I mean!"

"Remember you are a Raincy by name, whatever you may be by nature," said the old man. Suddenly the boy stood up straight and firm before him, with a dourness on his face which was clearly not akin to the swoop and dash of his vulturine grandfather.

"If you don't let me do as I like here—do something real which will show that I have not been to school and the university for nothing, I shall go straight to the ship-building yard and get my uncle, mother's brother David, to take me on as an apprentice! We still own enough of the business to make him ready to do that."

Like one who hears and rebukes blasphemy, the old man made a gesture of despair with his hands, as though abandoning his grandson to his own evil courses, and then turned on his heel and walked slowly away towards the Castle.

With a sigh of relief the young man stretched himself luxuriously out on the broad triple plank of the stile, and drew from his pocket a brass spy-glass which he had been itching to make use of for the past ten minutes. He also had his reasons for being interested in the Ferris properties which lay beneath him, every field and dyke and hedgerow, every curve of coast and curvet of breaking wave as clear and near as if he could have touched them merely by reaching out his finger. But Louis Raincy nourished no historical wraths nor feudal jealousies.

"I am sorry the old fellow is savage with me," he muttered as he looked about to make sure that his grandfather was not turning round to forgive him. "I'm sure I don't mean to make him angry. I promise mother every day. But why he wants to be for ever trotting out a grievance four hundred years old—hang me if I see. Anyway, Dame Comfort will soon put him all right. He gets on with her—he and I never hit it off ... quite. I fear I wasn't born lordly, even though my father was a Raincy. They say he disgraced his family by being an artist, and that it was when he was painting Dame Comfort's portrait