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Updated: June 14, 2025
If they had only been allowed to sleep at Rothieden, what a universe of freedom would have been theirs! As it was, he had but two hours to himself, pared at both ends, in the middle of the day. Dooble Sanny might have given him a lesson at that time, but he did not dare to carry his instrument through the streets of Rothieden, for the proceeding would be certain to come to his grandmother's ears.
The next morning Robert and Shargar got on the coach and went to Rothieden. Robert turned his head aside as they came near the bridge and the old house of Bogbonnie. But, ashamed of his weakness, he turned again and looked at the house.
Think o' a Rothieden soutar playin' afore his grace! Robert saw that his mind was wandering, and mingled the paltry honours of earth with the grand simplicities of heaven. He began to play The Land o' the Leal. For a little while Sandy seemed to follow and comprehend the tones, but by slow degrees the light departed from his face.
He's a fine scholar, ye ken, said another of the bystanders. The ostler held the lantern to the card upon one of the boxes, but Robert found only an M., followed by something not very definite, and a J., which might have been an I., Rothieden, Driftshire, Scotland.
But how? But where? There was a building in Rothieden not old, yet so deserted that its very history seemed to have come to a standstill, and the dust that filled it to have fallen from the plumes of passing centuries. It was the property of Mrs. Falconer, left her by her husband.
They put up a great screen inside the door, and there the lan'less laird lay like a lord. Robert's heart was dreary when he got on the box-seat of the mail-coach at Rothieden it was yet drearier when he got down at The Royal Hotel in the street of Ben Accord and it was dreariest of all when he turned his back on Ericson's, and entered his own room at Mrs. Fyvie's.
My reader may here be tempted to remind me that Robert had been only too glad to return to Rothieden from his former visit. But I must in my turn remind him that the circumstances were changed. In the first place, the fiddle was substituted for grannie; and in the second, the dragon for the school.
Next day, his foot was so much better that he sent Shargar to Rothieden to buy the string, taking with him Robert's school-bag, in which to carry off his Sunday shoes; for as to those left at Dooble Sanny's, they judged it unsafe to go in quest of them: the soutar could hardly be in a humour fit to be intruded upon. Having procured the string, Shargar went to Mrs. Falconer's.
Ericson was growing steadily worse in fact, he feared Robert might not see him alive. If this news struck Robert to the heart, his pain was yet not without some poor alleviation: he need not tell Ericson about Mysie, but might leave him to find out the truth when, free of a dying body, he would be better able to bear it. That very night he set off on foot for Rothieden.
It was arranged for three days. Half-an-hour after, Robert came upon Mr. Lammie emptying the two bottles of whisky into the dunghill in the farmyard. He returned with glad heart to Rothieden. It did not take him long to arrange his grandmother's little affairs. He had already made up his mind about her house and furniture. He rang the bell one morning for Betty.
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