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Updated: June 29, 2025
Old Johnny Graeme was the partner in what had been my father's house, and for fifteen years it had gone prospering as never house did yet, and making Mrs. Strathsay bitterer; and Johnny Graeme, a little wizened warlock, had never once stopped work long enough to play at play and reckon his untold gold.
Margray, and Mary Strathsay, had been back three years from school, and the one was just married, and if she left her heart out of the bargain, what was that to me? and the other was to reign at home awhile ere the fated Prince should come, and Effie and myself were to go over seas and take their old desks in the famous school at Edinboro'. The mother knew that she must marry her girls well, and we two younglings were sadly in Queen Mary Strathsay's way.
But 't will not need the altering of a hair for you, Mary, and you shall take it." "I think I see myself," said Mary Strathsay, "wearing the dress Margray married Graeme in!" For Margray had gone out to my mother in her turn. "Then it's yours, Effie. I'll none of it!"
And still in the nights of clear dark we lean from the broad bower-window and watch the river flowing by, the rafts swimming down with breath of wood-scents and wild life, the small boats rocking on the tide, revivifying our childhood with the strength of our richer years, heart so locked in heart that we have no need of words, Angus and I. And often, as we lean so, over the beautiful silence of lapping ripple and dipping oar there floats a voice rising and falling in slow throbs of tune; it is Mary Strathsay singing some old sanctified chant, and her soul seems to soar with her voice, and both would be lost in heaven but for the tender human sympathies that draw her back to our side again.
And she's like me in more than that, gin she doesn't sell hersel' for siller and gowd." "I'll tell you what. Mrs. Strathsay is over-particular in speech. She'll have none of the broad Highland tongue about her. It's a daily struggle that she has, not to strike Nurse Nannie dumb, since she has infected you all with her dialect. A word in time. Now I must go.
Strathsay, who had journeyed over the Atlantic for one last look at sweet home-things, and to see how all went with us, and then had flitted back again, but for that, home would have seemed the veriest dream that ever buzzed in an idle brain: would so have seemed to other maidens, not to us, for the fibres of the Strathsay heart were threads that never wore thin or parted.
But what made it hardest of all was a word of Margray's one day as I sat over at her house hushing the little Graeme, who was sore vexed with the rash, and his mother was busy plaiting ribbons and muslins for Effie, Effie, who seemed all at once to be blossoming out of her slight girlhood into the perfect rose of the woman that Mary Strathsay was already, and about her nothing lingering rathe or raw, but everywhere a sweet and ripe maturity.
"Sir Angus rides this way the morrow." Ah, what was that to me? I just doubled the pillow over eyes and ears to shut out sight and hearing. And so on the morrow I kept well out of the way, till all at once Mrs. Strathsay stumbled over me and bade me, as there would be dancing in the evening, to don my ruffled frock and be ready to play the measures.
I but sprang to the window and made as if I had been amusing myself there: I would have no Angus Ingestre be thinking that he was all the world to me, and I nought to him. "A little ruffled," said he, at the saucy shake of my head. "Well, I sha'n't tell you where I've been. I've the right to go into the country for a day, have I not? What is it to Alice Strathsay how often I go to Loch Rea?
She found her own death from a careless foot, the eager haste of an arm, the breaking branch of your willow-tree. Woman! woman!" he cried, shaking his long white hand before her face, "you took the light out of my life, and I swore to darken your days!" Mrs. Strathsay fell forward on the body with a long, low moan.
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