Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/446

440 look in his soft hazel eyes, he hung over the side of the waggonette as it swayed slightly towards the Conan, and gazed down into the depths of the abyss. The elderly gentleman, who sat by him on the front seat, drew long breaths of profound satisfaction; and yet the very next moment you would have said that his face had slightly clouded. At least so it seemed to strike the youngest of the three, whose quick eyes, that caught everything above and below, were suddenly attracted by the other, and watched him curiously. Not for long, however. If he thought his host had an abiding care, that must only have been a foolish fancy; and what, indeed, could be more improbable?

David Moray, the lord of those barren grandeurs of Glenconan, was at last realising the cherished dream of his life. He was returning a rich man to the paternal property, which he had only visited at rare intervals since he inherited it; and to the shootings, which had been leased till last year to a Southern banker. Now he might hope to end his days there in peace, if the dregs of life would only run kindly. He was a sportsman born: he had come back to a paradise of sport; and though his life had been passed in tropical climates, he was as hale and sound of constitution as any man of his years could hope to be.

He could be a boy still, in the light exuberance of his spirits; and nothing keeps a man so fresh as perennial boyhood. If he had been coming home to Glenconan, as he used to come, for the holidays, he could hardly have thrown himself more heartily into the happy excitement of the hour. As the road extricated itself from the bosky entanglements of the shaggy gorges, and swept down into a smiling stretch of mountain-meadows, he stood up in the carriage, though sorely puzzled to keep his feet; for the waggonette, as it dashed downwards with locked wheels, was rocking about like a boat among the lake billows in a fresh north-easter. But it was not for nothing that Moray had so often taken the Overland route, to say nothing of weathering the Cape. And now that he was fairly and finally homeward-bound, in the "kent face" of each peak and ridge he saw the features of some familiar friend of his childhood.

"Fine weather to-morrow, Donald, though of course that old glass of yours is at ' stormy ' as usual; for there is the cloud-belt on the sides of Funachan: had the hill been wearing his night-cap, it would have been another matter altogether. I say, Jack, do you see that purple patch on the shoulder – there, away to the right of the gap, and just over the birch-stump? – you should have been with me the last evening I shot there with my tenant, when we found the coveys lying like stones, though they had been wild as hawks elsewhere all through the day. Please the Fates, we'll have bloodshed there in August. And when you go out for sketches, what do you think of that for a subject? – the pool, I mean, with the grey rock, like a chapel-gable rising out of the water. And if Leslie is looking for a spot where he may indulge himself in dreaming and poetry, that bank of bracken under the birches there ought to suit him down to the ground – if we dare to talk of ground, indeed, in connection with any scene so ethereal."

In the further miles of unmeasured Highland road that led on to the old house of Glenconan, the face and spirits of its lord and