THE LADIES LINDORES
BY MRS OLIPHANT
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXXXIII
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 'BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE'
"Two of the sweet'st companions in the world."
—Cymbeline.
THE LADIES LINDORES.
CHAPTER I.
The mansion-house of Dalrulzian stands on the lower slope of a hill,which is crowned with a plantation of Scotch firs. The rugged outline ofthis wood, and the close-tufted mass of the tree-tops, stand out againstthe pale East, and protect the house below and the "policy," as thesurrounding grounds are called in Scotland; so that though all the windsare sharp in that northern county, the sharpest of all is tempered. Thehouse itself is backed by lighter foliage—a feathery grove of birches,a great old ash or two, and some tolerably well-grown, but lesspoetical, elms. It is a house of distinctively local character, with thecurious, peaked, and graduated gables peculiar to Scotch ruralarchitecture, and thick walls of the roughest stone, washed with aweather-stained coat of yellow-white. Two wings, each presenting agabled end to the avenue, and a sturdy block of building retired betweenthem,—all strong, securely built, as if hewn out of the rock, formedthe homely house. It had little of the beauty which a building of nogreater pretensions would probably have had in England. Below the wings,and in front of the hall-door, with its two broad flat stone steps,there was nothing better than a gravelled square, somewhat mossy in thecorners, and marked by the trace of wheels; but round the south wingthere swept a sort of terrace, known by no more dignified name than thatof "The Walk," from which the ground sloped downwards, broken at a lowerlevel by the formal little parterres of an old-fashioned flower-garden.The view from the Walk was of no very striking beauty, but it had thecharm of breadth and distance—a soft sweep of undulating country, withan occasional glimpse of a lively trout-stream gleaming here and thereout of its covert of crags and trees, and a great, varied, andever-changing world of sky,—not a prospect which captivated a stranger,but one which, growing familiar day by day and year by year, washenceforth missed like something out of their lives by the people who,being used to it, had learned to love that silent companionship ofnature. It was the sort of view which a man pauses, not to look at butto see, even when he is pacing up and down his library thinking of JohnThomson's demand for farm improvements, or, heavier thought, about hisbalance at his bankers: and which solaces the eyes of a tired woman,giving them rest and refreshment through all the vicissitudes of life.People sought it instinctively in moods of reflection, in moments ofwatching, at morning and at twilight, whenever any change was going onin that great exhaustless atmosphere, bounded by nothing but the paledistance of the round horizon,—and when was it that there was no changein that atmosphere?—clouds drifting, shadows flying, gleams of lightlike sudden revelations affording new knowledge of earth and heaven.
On the day on which the reader is asked first to visit this house ofDalrulzian, great things were happening in it. It was the end of onerégime and the beginning of another. The master of the house, a youngman who had been brought up at a distance, was coming home, and thefamily which had lived in it fo