SHADOW hung over Kirkhumphries—one of those almost palpable shadows that seem to lie like a dead weight on one's shoulders and lungs, even on one's very feet, so that movement of any sort becomes burdensome.
The very urchins in Kirkhumphries were listless. Their depths of depression may be judged by the fact that, though the sun had already set in wintry red behind the hills over Glen Every, not one of their freckled faces was seriously dirty, and there was a painful immaculateness about their attire that suggested a very serious state of things, indeed.
Mrs. Saunders, snatching her youngest off the steps of the shop, where he had been sitting in an attitude of sullen dejection, groaned as she looked at him.
“Hoots, laddie, ye maun be sickening with the rest of them!” she exclaimed bitterly. “Ye hae no been so clean sin' ye were born!”
The youth took the remark as an insult.
“I'm no clean,” he muttered, and wiped a challengingly smutty hand overt a stubby nose. “I'm no sickening.” He burst into a sudden wail. “The laird's deed!” he ended, in tragic explanation.
Mrs. Saunders shook him.
“And what's the laird to ye, ye puir, foolish bairn?”
“He's deed!” her son repeated gloomily.
Mrs. Saunders gave him another shake, and, apparently finding no satisfactory retort to this statement, pushed the scion of the House of Saunders resolutely in front of her into the sitting room behind the shop. There he vanished into a cloud of tobacco smoke which emanated from the three men seated round the table. Mrs. Saunders coughed, and the three looked up at her with a kind of sullen truculence.
“Ye canna complain, woman,” said her husband. “When a man's heart is oot o' him, he maun take his comfort where he finds it. Pass the whisky, meenister,”
The “meenister” passed the whisky, and there was a moment's silence, broken only by lugubrious sniffs from an invisible corner of the apartment. Then the minister sat up with a jerk, as if suddenly conscious that some special effort was expected of him.
“I think, gentlemen,” he began, in beautiful university English, “I think, gentlemen, it is time that we considered earnestly our reason for coming together. The laird is dead. To-morrow the old castle is to be put up for auction by his creditors. As far as we can see, Sir John Hodge is the only likely purchaser, and”
“We hae eno' of Sir John,” Saunders interrupted fiercely. “There's no been a furriner up on the crag sin' me fathers came to Kirkhumphries. We'll hae no Sir John, thank ye, with his puffed-up English ways. If there's to be a laird, he maun be a Scotchman—and a Highlander, as well,” he added hurriedly.
Mr. Firth, the third man, a greengrocer, who hailed all too recently from Glasgow, looked uncomfortable.
“Could ye no step into the breach ye'sel', mon?” he suggested ingratiatingly. “The reserve's no more than three thousand pounds, and they say Sir John's unco careful with the bawbees. He'll no go so high for an auld tumble-down ruin”
“It's the grandest castle in Scotland,” Saunders interrupted, with cold scorn. “And if it were three thousand sixpences, I couldna do it. I'm no sae rich as a' that, mon.”
They sighed together.
“The Lord doesna send troubles singly,” Saunders went on gloomily. “There's that lassie o' mine fretting her heart out for that feckless Jamie Douglas. He'll no come back, and if he did, he shouldna have her. But she's sore over him. She'll no eat, and the doctor, he's no sae easy in his mind about her.”
“The willfu' hussy!” said Mrs. Saunders, from the background.
The Reverend John Andrews shook his head.
“Jamie Douglas is a brave laddie,” he remarked, forgetting his English, “and I ken he has a way with him.”
“And women maun be queer folk—fra all I've heard say,” added the greengrocer, who was unmarried.
Further remarks on the subject were cut short by a sharp rap at the outer door. Mrs. Saunders went out and returned with two letters, which she handed across the table. Whereat, both visitors stared fixedly into the fire. Letters were rare in Kirkhumphries, and it behooved them to show no undue curiosity nor even any consciousness that anything unusual had happened. Over the first epistle, Mr. Saunders snorted; the second, as his guests felt by a certain tension of the atmosphere, contained news of grave import.
“Sandy McGrab is coming home,” said Saunders abruptly.
The Reverend John Andrews looked up with his mouth open, as if on the point of uttering some remark, and then apparently changed his mind.
“And who may Sandy McGrab be?” Mr. Firth ventured to ask.
Mr. Saunders' face was wry with disgust.