What he lingered upon was the wide pleasant valley beneath him, with a burn running and lurking among twinkling birches, interspersed with alders, many finely drained fields with the cows feeding belly-deep with twitching tails, and the sweep of the ripening crops which ran off to either side over knolls carefully planed down--and so back and back to the shelter of dark fir woods. Twelve hundred acres--and not his! Not a Raincy stone upon it, nor had been for four hundred years.
There were two houses on this twelve hundred acres of good land. First came Cairn Ferris, at the head of the glen of the Abbey Water. Close to the road that, under the lee of the big pines, a plain, douce, much-ivied house; and down in a nook by the sea, Abbey Burnfoot, called "The Abbey," a newer and brighter place, set like a jewel on the very edge of the sea, the white sand in front and the blue sweep of the bay widening out on either hand. Horrible--oh, most horrible! Not his--nor ever would be!
This was the blot which blackened all the rest--the property of the Ferrises of Cairn Ferris, of Adam, chief of the name at the top of the Glen, and of his brother Julian--he who had cursed the noble scythe-sweep of the Abbey Bay, which all ought to have been untouched Raincy property, with crow-stepped gables and beflowered verandahs.
"They stole it, boy, stole it!" muttered old Earl Raincy, setting a shaking hand on the boy's shoulder, "four hundred years ago they stole it. They came with the Stuart king who had nothing to do in the Free Province, and we stood for the Douglases, as was our duty. Your ancestor and mine was killed at Arkinholm with three earls and twenty barons, he not the least noble!"
He paused a moment to control his senile anger and then went quavering on.
"This Ferris was a mercenary--a fighter for his own hand, and they gave him _this_ while we were exiled. And they have held it ever since--the pick of our heritage--the jewel in the lotus. Often we have asked it back--often taken it. But because they married into the Fife Wemysses--yes, even this last of them, they have always retaken and held it, to our despite!"
The boy on the stile, sprawling and thinking of something else (for he had heard all this fifty times before), yawned.