Patsy

by S.R. Crockett

They stood high on the Abbey cliff-edge-an old man, eagle-profiled, hawk-beaked, cockatoo-crested, with angry grey eyebrows running peakily upwards towards his temples at either side ... and a boy. They were the Earl Raincy and his grandson Louis-all the world knew them in that country of the Southern Albanach. For Leo Raincy was a great man, and the lad the heir of all he possessed. For all-or almost all-they looked upon belonged to the Earl of Raincy. Even those blue hills bounding the meadow valleys to the north hid a fair half of his property, and he was sorry for that. Because he was a land miser, hoarding parishes and townships. He grudged the sea its fringe of foam, the three-mile fishing limit, the very high-and-low mark between the tides which was not his, but belonged to the crown-along which the common people had a right to pass, and where fisherfolk from the neighbouring villages might fish and dry their nets, when all ought to have been his. The earl's dark eyes passed with carelessness over hundreds of farm-towns, snug sheltered villages, mills with little threads of white wimpling away from the unheard constant clack of the wheel, barns, byres and stackyards-all were his, but of these he took no heed. Behind them Castle Raincy itself stood up finely from the plain of corn-land and green park, an artificial lake in front, deep trees all about, patterned gardens, the fiery flash of hot-house glass where the sun struck, and pinnacles high in air, above all the tall tower from which Margaret de Raincy had defied the English invader during the minority of James the Fifth. The earl's eyes passed all these over. He did not see them as aught to take pride in. 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.

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1913

About the author

Samuel Rutherford Crockett was a Scottish novelist. He was born at Duchrae, Balmaghie, Kirkcudbrightshire, the illegitimate son of dairymaid Annie Crocket. He was raised on his grandfather's Galloway farm, won a bursary to Edinburgh University in 1876, and graduated from there during 1879.

After some years of travel, he became in 1886 the Free Kirk minister of Penicuik. During that year he produced his first publication, Dulce Cor (Latin: Sweet Heart), a collection of verse under the pseudonym Ford Brereton. He eventually abandoned the Free Church ministry for full-time novel-writing in 1895.

The success of J. M. Barrie and the Kailyard school of sentimental, homey writing had already created a demand for stories in Lowland Scots when Crockett published his successful story of The Stickit Minister in 1893. It was followed by a rapidly produced series of popular novels frequently featuring the history of Scotland or his native Galloway. Crockett made considerable sums of money from his writing and was a friend and correspondent of R. L. Stevenson, but his later work has been criticised as being over-prolific and feebly sentimental.

Crockett was well travelled in Europe and beyond, spending time in most European countries and he wrote several novels of European history including The Red Axe (1898), A Tatter of Scarlet (1913), and the non-fiction The Adventurer in Spain (1903) which holds its own against Robert Louis Stevenson's travel writing.

He died in France on 16 April 1914.