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Updated: June 22, 2025
Down in the street he knew the burgh men were speeding the long winter nights with song and mild carousal; the lodges and houses up the way, each with its spirit keg and licence, gave noisiness to the home-returning of tenants for Lochow from the town, and as they went by Ladyfield in the dark they would halloo loudly to the recluse lad within who curled, nor shot, nor shintied, nor drank, nor did any of the things it was youth's manifest duty to do.
They would be sitting about the table, perhaps, or spinning by the fire, the good-wife of Ladyfield still for them a living, breathing body, home among her herds, and he would come in among them and in a word bring her to their notice in all death's great monopoly. It was a duty to be done with care if he would avail himself of the whole value of so rare a chance.
Ladyfield was a small farm of its kind with four hundred sheep, seven cows, two horses, a goat or two and poultry. When the little old woman with a face like a nut was alive she could see the whole tack at one sweep of the eye from the rowan at the door, on the left up to the plateau where five burns were born, on the right to the peak of Drimfern.
Never seemed a landscape so miserable as then. The hills, in the morning haze, gathered in upon his heart and seemed to crush it. A poor farmer indeed to be thus affected by short brute sorrows, but so it was with Gilian, and on some flimsy excuse he left Ladyfield in the afternoon and rode to town.
The door of Ladyfield, where he was born and where he had slept without an absent night since first his cry rose there, a coronach in the ears of his dying mother, would be shut against him; the stranger would bar the gates at evening, the sheep upon the hills would have another keel-mark than the old one on their fleecy sides.
The lines dashed to her brow; when she spoke it was in a cold constrained accent utterly different from that the boy had grown accustomed to. "It is the oe from Ladyfield," she explained. "He'll be making a noise in the house," said the Cornal with a touch of annoyance. "I cannot stand boys; he'll break things, I'm sure. When is he going away?"
Their first salutations would be in the speech of the glens; it would be, "Oh Gilian, little hero! fair fellow! there you are! sit down and have town bread, and sugar on its butter," and if he followed the usual custom he would answer in the same tongue. But between "Tha bean Lecknamban air falbh" and "The wife of Ladyfield is gone," there must be some careful choice.
And she saw, as if a curtain had fallen from before her eyes, that this was no more the fair-haired, wan-faced, trembling child who came from Ladyfield to her heart. "I wish, I wish," said she all trembling, "the children did not grow at all!"
"Man!" said the Paymaster in English, looking whimsically at this childish expression of surprise. "Man! you're a queer callant too. Are there no curlews about Ladyfield that you should be in such a wonder at this one? Just a plain, long-nebbed, useless bird, not worth powder and shot, very douce in the plumage, and always at the same song like MacNicol the Major."
Well, well dead! blessings with her; did I not know her well? Yes, and I knew her husband too, Long Angus, since the first day he came to Ladyfield for Old Mar for the Paymaster till the last day he came down the glen in a cart, and he was the only sober body in the funeral, perhaps because it was his own.
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