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Updated: May 18, 2025
Tenant and servant, hanger-on and sprig of the central tree, bore regard as well as fear for the young laird all save Staneholme's whilom love and wedded wife. Nelly did not wish to understand this repressed, ardent nature, although its developments sometimes forced themselves upon her.
And there was a thronged mêlée in the court formed by the outhouses, over whose walls the small-leaved ivy of the coast clustered untreasured. Staneholme's favourite horse was rubbing down; and Staneholme's dogs were airing in couples.
She rose above her hapless lot the old Nelly Carnegie, though subdued and chastened, was in a degree restored. "Nanny! Nanny Swinton!" called Nelly from her couch, as she managed to hold up, almost exultingly, the big crowing baby, in its quaintest of mantles and caps, "Staneholme's son's a braw bairn, well worthy Lady Carnegie's coral and bells." "'Deed is he," Nanny assented.
But think you poor vanquished Nelly Carnegie's crushed heart leapt up to meet these Homes that her eyes glanced cordially at Joan, and Madge, and Mysie that her cheek was bent gratefully to receive old Lady Staneholme's caress? No, no; Nelly was too wretched to cry, but she stood there like a marble statue, and with no more feeling, or show of feeling.
The coast-line at Staneholme was high and bold, but in place of descending sheerly and precipitately to the yellow sands, it sloped in a green bank, broken by gullies, where the long sea-grass grew in tangled tufts, interspersed with the yellow leaves of the fern, and in whose sheltered recesses Nelly Carnegie so often lingered, that she left them to future generations as "Lady Staneholme's Walks."
With a strange pallor on the olive of her cheek, and swollen, burning lids, drooping over sunk violent lines beneath the hot eyeballs, and cold, trembling hands, she bore Staneholme's stated presence in these long, bleak March afternoons. He never addressed her particularly, although he took many a long, sore look. Few and formal then were the lover's devoirs expected or permitted.
"Na, but, my bairn, I'm blithe for you to fill my place; Staneholme's mither may well make room for Staneholme's wife," urged the lady, gently. But Nelly remained childishly rooted in her refusal to preside at his board, unless compelled; and her brow, knit at the remembrance of her fall, was set to meet the further encounter.
"When the bairn is grown, and can rin his lane, Staneholme," Nelly informed him in her new-found freedom of speech, "I will send him for a summer to Staneholme; I'll be lonesome without him, but Michael Armstrong will teach him to ride, and he'll stand by Lady Staneholme's knee." Staneholme expressed no gratitude for the offer, he was fastening the buckle of his beaver.
As she was returning, her eye fell on the folds of an object fluttering among the tedded grass. It was Staneholme's plaid. This was the first time he had intruded upon her solitary refuge. When Nelly climbed the ascent, and saw the mansion house, with its encumbered court, she could distinguish the sharp sound of a horse's hoof. Its rider was already out of sight on the bridle-road.
"I never will; I'll let myself be starved to death, I'll throttle myself with my own hands first," cried Nelly Carnegie, fire flashing in her large eyes and on her dark cheeks; and looking up in her defiance she met the glow for glow of Staneholme's star.
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