MR. DOUGLAS of Drumcarro was the son of one of the Scotch lairds who had followed Prince Charlie, and had been attainted after the disastrous conclusion of the Forty-Five. Born in those distracted times, and learning as their very first lessons in life the expedients of a hunted man to escape his pursuers, and the anguish of the mother as to the success of these expedients, the two half-comprehending children, twin boys, had grown up in great poverty and seclusion in the corner of a half-ruined house which belonged to their mother’s father, and within cognizance of their own real home, one of the great houses of the district which had passed into alien hands. When they set out to make their fortune, at a very early age, their mother also having in the meantime died, two half-educated but high-spirited and strongly-feeling boys, they had parted with a kind of vow that all their exertions should be addressed to the task of regaining their old possessions and home, and that neither should set foot again upon that beloved alienated land until able in some measure to redeem this pledge. They went away in different directions, not unconfident of triumphantly fulfilling the mutual promise; for fame and fortune do not seem very difficult at sixteen, though so hard to acquire at a less hopeful age. Willie, the younger, went to England, where some relations helped him on and started him in a mildly successful career. He was the gentlest, the least determined of the two, and fortune overtook him in a manner very soothing after his troubled boyhood in the shape of a mild competency and comfort, wife and children, and a life altogether alien to the romance of the disinherited with which he had begun.
But Neil Douglas, the elder, went further afield. He went to the West Indies, where at that period there were fortunes for the making, attended however by many accessories of which people in the next generation spoke darkly, and which still, perhaps, among unsophisticated people survive in tradition, throwing a certain stain upon the planter’s fortunes. Whether these supposed cruelties and horrors were all or almost all the exaggerations of a following agitation, belonging like many similar atrocities in America to the Abolitionist imagination, is a question unnecessary to discuss. Up to the time at which this story begins, whenever Mr. Douglas of Drumcarro quarrelled with a neighbour over a boundary line or a shot upon the hill-side, he was called “an auld slave-driver” by his opponent, with that sense of having power to exasperate and injure which gives double piquancy to a quarrel. And of him as of many another such it was told that he could not sleep of nights; that he would wake even out of an after-dinner doze with cries of remorse, and that dreams of flogged women and runaways in the marshes pursued him whenever he closed his eyes. The one thing that discredited these popular rumours among all who knew Drumcarro was that he was neither tender-hearted nor imaginative, and highly unlikely to be troubled by the recollection of severities which he would have had no objection to repeat had he had the power. The truth was that he had by no means found fortune so easily as he had hoped, and had worked in every way with a dogged and fierce determination in spite of many failures, never giving up his aim, until at last he had found himself with a little money, not by any means what he had looked for and wanted, but enough to buy a corner of his old inheritance, the little Highland estate and bare little house of Drumcarro. Hither he came on his return from Jamaica, a fierce, high-tempered, arbitrary man, by no means unworthy of the title of “auld slave-driver,” so unanimously bestowed upon him by his neighbours, who, however, could not ignore the claims of his old Douglas blood however much they might dislike the man.
He had married a pretty little insipid girl, the daughter of one of his brother’s friends in “the south country,” who brought with her a piano and a few quickly-fading airs and graces to the Highland wilds, to sink as soon as possible into the feeble and fanciful invalid, entirely subject to her husband’s firmer will and looking upon him with terror, whom the reader has already seen. Poor Mrs. Douglas had not vigour enough to make the least stand against her fate. But for Marg’ret she would have fallen at once into the domestic drudge which was all Drumcarro understood or wanted in a wife. With Marg’ret to preserve her from that lower depth, she sank only into invalidism—into a timid complaining, a good deal of real suffering, and a conviction that she was the most sorely tried of women. But she bore her despotic husband seven boys without a blemish, robust and long-limbed lads equal to every encounter with fate. And this made him a proud man among his kind, strongly confident of vanquishing every adverse circumstance, in their persons at least, if not, as Providence seemed to have forbidden, in his own. He set his whole heart upon these boys—struggling and sparing to get a certain amount of needful education for them, not very much, it must be allowed; and by every means in his power, by old relationships half-forgotten, by connections of his West Indian period, even by such share as he could take in politics, contrived to get appointments for them, one after another, either in the King’s or the Company’s service for India. The last was much the best of any; it was a fine service, with perpetual opportunities of fighting and of distinction, not so showy as the distinctions to be gained in the Peninsula, but with far better opportunities of getting on. The four eldest were there already, and Robbie had started to follow them. For Jock, who took to his books more kindly than the others, there was a prospect of a writership. It was more easy in those days to set young men out in the world than it is now. Your friends thought of them, your political leaders were accessible; even a passing visitor would remark the boys in your nursery and lend a friendly hand. Nobody lends a friendly hand nowadays, and seven sons is not a quiverful in which a poor man has much reason to rejoice.
On the other hand the girls at Drumcarro were left without any care at all. They were unlucky accidents, tares among the wheat, handmaids who might be useful about the house, but who had no future, no capabilities of advancing the family, creatures altogether of no account. Men in a higher position than the laird of Drumcarro might have seen a means of strengthening their house by alliances, through the means of four comely daughters, but the poor little Highland lairdlings, who were their only possible suitors, were not worth his trouble, and even of them the supply was few. They too went out into the world, they did not remain to marry and vegetate at home. Mr. Douglas felt that every farthing spent upon the useless female portion of his household was so much taken from the boys, and the consequence was that the girls grew up without even the meagre education then considered necessary for women, and shut out by poverty, by pride, by the impossibility of making the appearance required to do credit to the family, even the homely gaieties of the country-side. They grew up in the wilds like the heather and the bracken, by the grace of nature, and acquired somehow the arts of reading and writing, and many housewifely accomplishments, but without books, without society, without any break in the monotony of life or prospect in their future. Their brothers had gone off one by one, depriving them in succession of the natural friends and companions of their youth. And in this way there had happened a domestic incident never now named in Drumcarro; the most awful of catastrophes in the experience of the younger members of the family. The eldest of the girls, named Anne, was the handsomest of the three elder sisters. She was of the same type of beauty which promised a still more perfect development in the little Jeanie, the youngest of the daughters; with fair hair just touched with a golden light, blue eyes soft and tender, and a complexion somewhat pale but apt to blush at any touch of sentiment or feeling into the warmest variable radiance. She sang like a bird without any training, she knew all the songs and stories of the district, and read every poetry-book she could find (they were not many—The Gentle Shepherd, an old copy of Barbour’s Bruce, some vagrant volumes of indifferent verse); she was full of sentiment and dreamy youthful romance without anything to feed upon. But just at the time when her favourite brother Nigel went away, and Anne was downcast and melancholy, a young doctor came temporarily to the district, and came in the usual course to see Mrs. Douglas, for whose case he recommended certain remedies impossible to be carried out, as doctors sometimes do. He advised change of air, cheerful company, and that she should be kept from everything likely to agitate or disturb her. “That’s sae easy—that’s sae likely,” said Marg’ret under her breath. But Anne listened anxiously while the young doctor insisted upon his remedies. He came again and again, with an interest in the patient which no one had ever shown before. “If you could take her away into the sunshine—to a brighter place, where she would see new faces and new scenes.” “Oh, but how could I do that,” cried Anne, “when I have no place to take her to, and my father would not let me if I had?” “Oh, Miss Anne, let me speak to your father,” the young man pleaded. “You shall have a pleasant house to bring your mother to, and love and service at her command, if you will but listen to me.” Anne listened, nothing loth, and the young doctor, with a confidence born of ignorance, afterwards asked for an interview with Drumcarro. What happened was never known; the doctor departed in great haste, pale with wrath, Mr. Douglas’s voice sounding loud as the burn when in spate after him as he strode from the door; and Anne’s cheeks were white and her eyes red for a week after. But at the end of that week Anne disappeared and was no more seen. Marg’ret, who had risen very early in the middle of the wintry dark, to see to some great washing or other household work, found, as was whispered through the house, a candle nickering down in the socket upon the hall-table, and the house-door open. To blow out the last flickering flame, lest it should die in the socket and so foreshadow the extinction of the race, was Marg’ret’s first alarmed precaution; and then she shut the open door, but whether she saw or heard anything more nobody ever knew. A faint picture of this scene, the rising and falling of the dying light, the cold wind blowing in from the door, the wild darkness of the winter morning, with its belated stars in a frosty sky looking in, remained in the imagination of the family surrounding the name of Anne, which from that day was never pronounced in the house. Where she went or what became of her was supposed by the young ones to be absolutely unknown. But it is to be hoped that even Drumcarro, savage as he was, ascertained the fate of his daughter even while he cursed her. It came to be understood afterwards that she had married her doctor and was happy; but that not for a long time, nor to the sisters thus taught by the tremendous force of example what a dreadful thing it was to look at any upstart doctor or minister or insignificant person without a pedigree or pretensions like their own.
This was the only shape in which love had come near the door of Drumcarro, and if there was a certain attraction even in the tragic mystery of the tale, there was not much encouragement for the others to follow Anne’s example, thus banished summarily and for ever from all relations with her family. Also from that time no doctor except the old man who had brought the children into the world was ever allowed to enter those sacred doors, nor any minister younger or more seductive than Mr. Pyper. As for other ineligible persons there were none in the country-side, so that Mary and Kirsteen were safe from temptation. And thus they went on from day to day and from year to year, in a complete isolation which poverty made imperative more even than circumstances, the only event that ever happened being the departure of a brother, or an unusually severe “attack” of their mother’s continued ever-enduring illness. They were not sufficiently educated nor sufficiently endowed to put them on a par with the few high-born ladies of the district, with whom alone they would have been allowed to associate; and there was native pride enough in themselves to prevent them from forming friendships with the farmers’ daughters, also very widely scattered and few in number, who, though the young ladies of Drumcarro were so little superior to themselves in any outward attribute, would have thought their acquaintance an honour. Nothing accordingly could exceed the dulness, the monotony of their lives, with no future, no occupation except their work as almost servants in their father’s house, no hope even of those vicissitudes of youth which sometimes in a moment change a young maiden’s life. All was bald and gray about them, everything but the scenery, in which, if there is nothing else, young minds find but an imperfect compensation. Mary indeed had a compensation of another kind in the comfortable apathy of a perfectly dull and stolid character, which had little need of the higher acquirements of life. But Kirsteen with her quick temper and high spirit and lively imagination was little adapted for a part so blank. She was one of those who make a story for themselves.