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I left Bryde sleeping at last and restless, with Belle wide-eyed by his bedside, and traked down to the big house very bitter at heart against Hugh, for the quarrel had been of his seeking; and when I came under the rowan-trees and past the moss-covered stone horse-trough, the grey day was coming in.
David Ritchie affected to frequent solitary scenes, especially such as were supposed to be haunted, and valued himself upon his courage in doing so. To be sure he had little chance of meeting anything more ugly than himself. For the same reason, doubtless, he desired to have rowan-trees set above his grave. We have stated that David Ritchie loved objects of natural beauty.
Now it was in the waning of the year, when the great fuchsia-tree covering the front of Braeside Cottage had dropped all its dark-red bells, and when the rowan-trees along the road were yellowing, though masses of the scarlet berries still remained to delight the eye, that the news of the breaking of the City of Glasgow Bank came to these parts.
This crossed, they descended between young plantations of firs and rowan-trees and birches, till they reached a warm house on the side of the slope, with farm-offices and ricks of corn and hay all about it, the front overgrown with roses and honeysuckle, and a white-flowering plant unseen of their eyes hitherto, and therefore full of mystery.
At the byre end the old rowan-trees were creaking and groaning to the violence of the gale, the bourtree bushes were flattened near to the ground, and everywhere was white. The driven snow melted on my tongue as I gasped, and I felt the flakes melt in my eyes; but we followed the road by instinct, for where the hedges should have been only a black blur showed.
One morning it was a day in the summer of 1746; the heather was bursting into bloom, shadows of great fleecy clouds trailed sleepily over the quiet hillsides, larks sang high in the heavens, blue-bells swung their heads lazily in the gentle breeze, and all things spoke of peace there came the tramp of horses down the glen, past the rocks where the rowan-trees grew, and so up to the cottage door.
On the road home she made no complaints when I put my arm round her, for was she not my own lass now. Moreover, it was dark. We were at our first good-night under the rowan-trees beside the byre, for rowans will keep the fairies away, and it is good farming to have them where the beasts will be walking under them every day.
It was a picturesque spot; rowan-trees hung from clefts in the crags, their bright berries rivalling the scarlet of the hips and haws; green fronds of fern bent at the water's edge, and brilliant carpets of moss clothed the boulders. At one point a great tree-trunk, a giant of the fells, rotten through many years of braving the strong west wind, had fallen and lay across the torrent.
"That is very pretty," said she; and then he was eager to tell her that this little glen was even more beautiful when the rowan-trees showed their rich clusters of scarlet berries. "Those bushes there, you mean," said she. "The mountain-ash?" "Yes." "Ah," she said, "I never see those scarlet berries without wishing I was a dark woman. If my hair were black, I would wear nothing else in it."
There was a smell of birch and beech buds sealed up in gum, of berries clotted on the rowan-trees, and of balsam and spice from plantations of Highland firs and larches. The babbling water of the burn was scented with the dead bracken of glens down which it foamed. Even the leafless hedges had their woody odors, and stone dykes their musty smell of decaying mosses and lichens.
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