I don't know how it was that I myself seemed to see my young father and
mother so clearly and to know how radiant and wildly in love they
were. Surely Jean Braidfute had not words to tell me. But I knew. So I
understood, in a way of my own, what happened to my mother one brilliant
late October afternoon when my father was brought home dead--followed by
the guests who had gone out shooting with him. His foot had caught in a
tuft of heather, and his gun in going off had killed him. One moment
he had been the handsomest young chieftain in Scotland, and when he was
brought home they could not have let my mother see his face.
But she never asked to see it. She was on the terrace which juts over
the rock the castle is built on, and which looks out over the purple
world of climbing moor. She saw from there the returning party of
shooters and gillies winding its way slowly through the heather,
following a burden carried on a stretcher of fir boughs. Some of her
women guests were with her, and one of them said afterward that when she
first caught sight of the moving figures she got up slowly and crept
to the stone balustrade with a crouching movement almost like a young
leopardess preparing to spring. But she only watched, making neither
sound nor movement until the cortege was near enough for her to see that
every man's head was bowed upon his breast, and not one was covered.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25