Even when those who took care of me did not know I was
thinking at all, I had begun to wonder if I were not different from
other children. That was, of course, largely because Muircarrie
Castle was in such a wild and remote part of Scotland that when my few
relations felt they must pay me a visit as a mere matter of duty, their
journey from London, or their pleasant places in the south of England,
seemed to them like a pilgrimage to a sort of savage land; and when a
conscientious one brought a child to play with me, the little civilized
creature was as frightened of me as I was of it. My shyness and fear of
its strangeness made us both dumb. No doubt I seemed like a new breed of
inoffensive little barbarian, knowing no tongue but its own.
A certain clannish etiquette made it seem necessary that a relation
should pay me a visit sometimes, because I was in a way important. The
huge, frowning feudal castle standing upon its battlemented rock was
mine; I was a great heiress, and I was, so to speak, the chieftainess
of the clan. But I was a plain, undersized little child, and had no
attraction for any one but Jean Braidfute, a distant cousin, who took
care of me, and Angus Macayre, who took care of the library, and who was
a distant relative also. They were both like me in the fact that they
were not given to speech; but sometimes we talked to one another, and I
knew they were fond of me, as I was fond of them.
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