day
Traquair appeared like a man who had gone under the harrows; and his
lady wife thenceforward continued in her old course without the least
deflection.

Thenceforward Ninian went on his way without complaint, and suffered his
wife to go on hers without remonstrance. He still minded his estate, of
which it might be said he took daily a fresh farewell, and counted it
already lost; looking ruefully on the acres and the graves of his
fathers, on the moorlands where the wildfowl consorted, the low,
gurgling pool of the trout, and the high, windy place of the calling
curlews--things that were yet his for the day and would be another's
to-morrow; coming back again, and sitting ciphering till the dusk at his
approaching ruin, which no device of arithmetic could postpone beyond a
year or two. He was essentially the simple ancient man, the farmer and
landholder; he would have been content to watch the seasons come and go,
and his cattle increase, until the limit of age; he would have been
content at any time to die, if he could have left the estates
undiminished to an heir-male of his ancestors, that duty standing first
in his instinctive calendar. And now he saw everywhere the image of the
new proprietor come to meet him, and go sowing and reaping, or fowling
for his pleasure on the red moors, or eating the very gooseberries in
the Place garden; and saw always, on the other hand, the figure of
Francis go forth, a beggar, into the broad world.

It was in vain the poor gentleman sought to moderate; took every test
and took advantage of every indulgence; went and drank with the dragoons
in Balweary; attended the communion and came regularly to the church to
Curate Haddo, with his son beside him. The mad, raging, Presbyterian
zealot of a wife at home made all of no avail; and indeed the house must
have fallen years before if it had not been for the secret indulgence of
the curate, who had a great sympathy with the laird, and winked hard at
the doings in Montroymont. This curate was a man very ill reputed in the
countryside, and indeed in all Scotland. "Infamous Haddo" is Shield's
expression. But Patrick Walker is more copious. "Curate Hall Haddo,"
says he, _sub voce_ Peden, "or _Hell_ Haddo, as he was more justly to be
called, a pokeful of old condemned errors and the filthy vile lusts of
the flesh, a published whoremonger, a common gross drunkard, continually
and godlessly scraping and skirling on a fiddle, continually breathi