MARY JOHNSTON

Author of
“To Have and to Hold” “Audrey” “Lewis Rand”
“Sir Mortimer” “The Long Roll”

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London

1918

[Illustration]

CHAPTER I

Said Mother Binning:  “Whiles I spin and whiles I dream.  A bonny day like this I look.”

English Strickland, tutor at Glenfernie House, looked, too, at the feathery glen, vivid in June sunshine.  The ash-tree before Mother Binning’s cot overhung a pool of the little river.  Below, the water brawled and leaped from ledge to ledge, but here at the head of the glen it ran smooth and still.  A rose-bush grew by the door and a hen and her chicks crossed in the sun.  English Strickland, who had been fishing, sat on the door-stone and talked to Mother Binning, sitting within with her wheel beside her.

“What is it, Mother, to have the second sight?”

“It’s to see behind the here and now.  Why’re ye asking?”

“I wish I could buy it or slave for it!” said Strickland.  “Over and over again I really need to see behind the here and now!”

“Aye.  It’s needed mair really than folk think.  It’s no’ to be had by buying nor slaving.  How are the laird and the leddy?”

“Why, well.  Tell me,” said Strickland, “some of the things you’ve seen with second sight.”

“It taks inner ears for inner things.”

“How do you know I haven’t them?”

“Maybe ’tis so.  Ye’re liked well enough.”

Mother Binning looked at the dappling water and the June trees and the bright blue sky.  It was a day to loosen tongue.

“I’ll tell you ane thing I saw.  It’s mair than twenty years since James Stewart, that was son of him who fled, wad get Scotland and England again intil his hand.  So the laddie came frae overseas, and made stir and trouble enough, I tell ye!...  Now I’ll show you what I saw, I that was a young woman then, and washing my wean’s claes in the water there.  The month was September, and the year seventeen fifteen.  Mind you, nane hereabouts knew yet of thae goings-on!...  I sat back on my heels, with Jock’s sark in my hand, and a lav’rock was singing, and whiles I listened the pool grew still.  And first it was blue glass under blue sky, and I sat caught.  And then it was curled cloud or milk, and then it was nae color at all.  And then I saw, and ’twas as though what I saw was around me.  There was a town nane like Glenfernie, and a country of mountains, and a water no’ like this one.  There pressed a thrang of folk, and they were Hieland men and Lowland men, but mair Hieland than Lowland, and there were chiefs and chieftains and Lowland lords, and there were pipers.  I heard naught, but it was as though bright shadows were around me.  There was a height like a Good People’s mount, and a braw fine-clad