who,
having received a charge to build the shell wherein two people were to
make a home, laid its foundations deep and raised strong walls that
nothing but gunpowder could rend in pieces, and roofed it over with
oaken timber and lined it with the same, so that many generations might
live therein in peace and honour. Such a house was the Lodge in those
days, although at last beginning to show signs of decay, and it somehow
stirred up the heroic spirit of the former time within a man to sit
before the big fire in the hall, with grim Carnegies looking down from
the walls and daring you to do any meanness, while the light blazing
out from a log was flung back from a sword that had been drawn in the
'15. One was unconsciously reinforced in the secret place of his
manhood, and inwardly convinced that what concerneth every man is not
whether he fail or succeed, but that he do his duty according to the
light which may have been given him until he die. It was also a
regeneration of the soul to awake in a room of the eastern tower, where
the Carnegies' guests slept, and fling up the window, with its small
square panes, to fill one's lungs with the snell northern air, and look
down on the woods glistening in every leaf, and the silver Tochty just
touched by the full risen sun. Miracles have been wrought in that
tower, for it happened once that an Edinburgh advocate came to stay at
the Lodge, who spake after a quite marvellous fashion, known neither in
England nor Scotland; and being himself of pure bourgeois blood, the
fifth son of a factor, felt it necessary to despise his land, from its
kirk downwards, and had a collection of japes at Scottish ways, which
in his provincial simplicity he offered to the Carnegies. It seemed to
him certain that people of Jacobite blood and many travels would have
relished his clever talk, for it is not given to a national decadent to
understand either the people he has deserted or the ancient houses at
whose door he stands. Carnegie was the dullest man living in the
matter of sneering, and Kate took an instant dislike to the mincing
little man, whom she ever afterwards called the Popinjay, and so
handled him with her tongue that his superiority was mightily shaken.
But there was good stuff in the advocate, besides some brains, and
after a week's living in the Lodge, he forgot to wear his eye-glass,
and let his r's out of captivity, and attempted to make love to Kate,
which foolishness that ma