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There was blithe work in the cheerful hall, in whose broad chimney great seacoal fires blazed at whose humming wheels the young Mays of Staneholme, as well as its dependants, still took their morning turn. There was willing toil in the sleeping-rooms, with their black cabinets and heavy worsted curtains.
"My puir bairn," Lady Staneholme began brokenly, "I've had an interview with my son, and I've learnt, late, some passages in the past; and I wonder not, but I maun lament, for I am a widow mother, Nelly, and my only son Adam who did you wrong and showed you no pity, has got his orders to serve with the soldiers in the Low Countries.
Lady Staneholme would fain have made her town-bred daughter-in-law enamoured with the duties of a country life, and cheered the strange joylessness of her honeymoon. Failing in this attempt, she, with a covert sigh, half-pain, half-pleasure, resumed the old oversight of larder and dairy.
Something more Staneholme raved of this undeserved, unwon love, whose possession had become an exaggerated good which he had continued to crave without word or sign, with a boy's frenzy and a man's stanchness. Nelly lost her power of will: she sat with the paper in her hand as if she had ceased to comprehend its contents as if its release from bondage came too late.
"The curtain is drawn, and the shadow is on you; but is that a scar on your brow, Staneholme, and where did you get it?" "A clour from a French pistol;" it was but skin deep he was off his camp-bed in a few days. He stooped forward, as he spoke slightingly, and pushed back the hair that half obscured the faint blue seam.
Staneholme laughed, and retorted something perhaps neither quite modest nor wise; but the ready tongue that had learnt so speedily to pour itself out to his greedy ears did not now scold and contradict him, but sighed "Ah, Adam Home, you do not have the best of it; it is sweet to be beat; I didna ken I never guessed that."
And oh, Staneholme, be not hard, it's her last nicht." That was Nelly Carnegie's marriage eve. On the morrow the marriage was celebrated.
The next time he came he twisted a rose in his hand, and Nelly felt that it must indeed be Beltane: she looked at the flower wistfully, and wondered "would the breezes be shaking the bear and the briar roses on the sea-braes at Staneholme, or were the grapes of southern vines bonnier than they?" He flung down the flower, and strode to her side.
"Whisht!" said Nelly, reprovingly, "dinna scorn sickness; that bit stroke might have cost Lady Staneholme her son and my bairn his father;" and she bent towards him in her turn, and passed her fingers curiously and pityingly over the healed wound, ignorant how it burned and throbbed under her touch.
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."
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