The Interloper

Chapter 2: AUTHOR’S NOTE

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About This Book

The narrative follows a shy young heir who arrives at his ancestral Lowlands house on the coast and negotiates the responsibilities and social entanglements of inheritance. Legal formalities and local acquaintances introduce tensions between tradition and personal inclination; the book traces friendships, rivalries, and romantic complications amid a vividly rendered rural community. Scenes alternate between domestic conversation, parish life, and estate matters, and the tone combines observation of manners with subtle psychological insight. Recurring motifs include language and local custom, the burdens of expectation, and the slow unraveling of secrets tied to family property, culminating in personal reckonings and resolutions.

TO
AN UNDYING MEMORY

AUTHOR’S NOTE

BEFORE proceeding with this story I must apologize for a striking inaccuracy which it contains. I have represented the educated characters as speaking, but for certain turns of phrase, the ordinary English which is now universal. But, in Scotland, in the very early nineteenth century, gentle and simple alike kept a national distinction of language, and remnants of it lingered in the conversation, as I remember it, of the two venerable and unique old ladies from whom the characters of Miss Hersey Robertson and her sister are taken. They called it ‘Court Scots.’

For the assistance of that tender person, the General Reader, I have ignored it.

V. J.

1903.