John Splendid Part 7

Herself she would never speak of, her plans, cares, ambitions, preferences, or aversions; she seemed dour set on aloofness. And though she appeared to listen to my modestly phrased exploits with attention and respect, and some trepidation at the dangerous portions, she had notably more interest in my talk of others. Ours was the only big house in the glen she never came calling to, though her father was an attentive visitor and supped his curds-and-cream of a Sat.u.r.day with friendly gusto, apologising for her finding something to amuse and detain her at Roderick's over the way, or the widow's at Gearran Bridge.

I would go out on these occasions and walk in the open air with a heart uneasy.

And now it was I came to conclude, after all, that much as a man may learn of many women studied indifferently, there is something magical about his personal regard for one, that sets up a barrier of mystery between them. So long as I in former years went on the gay a.s.sumption that every girl's character was on the surface, and I made no effort to probe deeper, I was the confidant, the friend, of many a fine woman.

They all smiled at my douce sobriety, but in the end they preferred it to the gaudy recklessness of more handsome men.

But here was the conclusion of my complacent belief in my knowledge of the s.e.x. The oftener I met her the worse my friends.h.i.+p progressed. She became a problem behind a pretty mask, and I would sit down, as it were, dumb before it and guess at the real woman within. Her step on the road as we would come to an unexpected meeting, her handling of a flower I might give her in a courtesy, her most indifferent word as we met or parted, became a precious clue I must ponder on for hours. And the more I weighed these things, the more confused thereafter I became in her presence. "If I were in love with the girl," I had to say to myself at last, "I could not be more engrossed on her mind."

The hill itself, with days of eager hunting after the red-deer, brought not enough distraction, and to stand by the mountain tarns and fish the dark trout was to hold a lonely carnival with discontent.

It happened sometimes that on the street of Inneraora I would meet Betty convoying her cousin young Mac-Lachlan to his wherry (he now took care to leave for home betimes), or with his sister going about the shops. It would be but a bow in the bye-going, she pa.s.sing on with equanimity and I with a maddening sense of awkwardness, that was not much bettered by the tattle of the plainstanes, where merchant lads and others made audible comment on the cousinly ardour of young Lachie.

On Sundays, perhaps worst of all, I found my mind's torment. Our kirk to-day is a building of substantiality and even grace; then it was a somewhat squalid place of wors.h.i.+p, in whose rafters the pigeon trespa.s.sed and the swallow built her home. We sat in torturous high-backed benches so narrow that our knees rasped the boards before us, and sleep in Master Gordon's most dreary discourse was impossible.

Each good family in the neighbourhood had its own pew, and Elrigmore's, as it is to this day, lay well in the rear among the shadows of the loft, while the Provost's was a little to the left and at right angles, so that its occupants and ours were in a manner face to face.

Gordon would be into many deeps of doctrine no doubt while I was in the deeper depths of speculation upon my lady's mind. I think I found no great edification from the wors.h.i.+p of those days--shame to tell it!--for the psalms we chanted had inevitably some relevance to an earthly affection, and my eyes were for ever roaming from the book or from the preacher's sombre face.

They might rove far and long, but the end of each journey round that dull interior was ever in the Provost's pew, and, as if by some hint of the spirit, though Betty might be gazing steadfastly where she ought, I knew that she knew I was looking on her. It needed but my glance to bring a flush to her averted face. Was it the flush of annoyance or of the conscious heart? I asked myself, and remembering her coldness elsewhere, I was fain to think my interest was considered an impertinence. And there I would be in a cold perspiration of sorry apprehension.

CHAPTER VII.--CHILDREN OF THE MIST.

The Highlanders of Lochaber, as the old saying goes, "pay their daughters' tochers by the light of the Michaelmas moon." Then it was that they were wont to come over our seven hills and seven waters to help themselves to our cattle when the same were at their fattest and best It would be a skurry of bare knees down pa.s.s and brae, a ring of the robbers round the herd sheltering on the bieldy side of the hill or in the hollows among the ripe gra.s.s, a brisk change of shot and blow if alarm rose, and then hie! over the moor by Macfarlane's lantern.

This Michaelmas my father put up a _buaile-mhart_, a square fold of wattle and whinstone, into which the herdsmen drove the lowing beasts at the mouth of every evening, and took turn about in watching them throughout the clear season. It was perhaps hardly needed, for indeed the men of Lochaber and Glenfalloch and the other dishonest regions around us were too busy dipping their hands in the dirty work of Montrose and his Irish major-general to have any time for their usual autumn's recreation. But a _buaile-mhart_ when s.h.i.+fted from time to time in a field is a profitable device in agriculture, and custom had made the existence of it almost a necessity to the sound slumber of our glens. There was a pleasant habit, too, of neighbours gathering at night about a fire within one of the s.p.a.ces of the fold and telling tales and singing songs. Our whole West Country is full of the most wonderful stories one might seek in vain for among the world of books and scholars--of giants and dwarfs, fairies, wizards, water-horse, and sea-maiden. The most unlikely looking peasant that ever put his foot to a _caschrom_, the most uncouth hunter that ever paunched a deer, would tell of such histories in the most scrupulous language and with cunning regard for figure of speech. I know that nowadays, among people of esteemed cultivation in the low country and elsewhere, such a diversion might be thought a waste of time, such narratives a sign of superst.i.tion. Of that I am not so certain. The practice, if it did no more, gave wings to our most sombre hours, and put a point on the imagination. As for the superst.i.tion of the tales of _ceilidh_ and _buaile-mhart_ I have little to say. Perhaps the dullest among us scarce credited the giant and dwarf; but the Little Folks are yet on our topmost hills.

A doctor laughed at me once for an experience of my own at the Piper's Knowe, on which any man, with a couchant ear close to the gra.s.s, may hear fairy tunes piped in the under-world.

"A trick of the senses," said he.

"But I can bring you scores who have heard it!" said I.

"So they said of every miracle since time began," said he; "it but proves the widespread folly and credulity of human nature."

I protested I could bring him to the very spot or whistle him the very tunes; but he was busy, and wondered so sedate a man as myself could cherish so strange a delusion.

Our fold on Elrigmore was in the centre of a flat meadowland that lies above Dhu Loch, where the river winds among rush and willow-tree, a constant whisperer of love and the distant hills and the salt inevitable sea. There we would be lying under moon and star, and beside us the cattle deeply breathing all night long. To the simple tale of old, to the humble song, these circ.u.mstances gave a weight and dignity they may have wanted elsewhere. Never a teller of tale, or a singer of song so artless in that hour and mood of nature, but he hung us breathless on his every accent: we were lone inhabitants of a little s.p.a.ce in a magic glen, and the great world outside the flicker of our fire hummed untenanted and empty through the jealous night.

It happened on a night of nights--as the saying goes--that thus we were gathered in the rushy flat of Elrigmore and our hearts easy as to reivers--for was not MacCailein scourging them over the north?--when a hint came to us of a strange end to these Lorn wars, and of the last days of the Lord of Argile. A night with a sky almost pallid, freckled with sparkling stars; a great moon with an aureole round it, rolling in the east, and the scent of fern and heather thick upon the air.

We had heard many stories, we had joined in a song or two, we had set proverb and guess and witty saying round and round, and it was the young morning when through the long gra.s.s to the fold came a band of strangers. We were their equal in numbers, whatever their mission might be, and we waited calmly where we were, to watch.

The bulk of them stood back from the pin-fold wall, and three of them came forward and put arms upon the topmost divots, so that they could look in and see the watchers gathered round the fire.

"Co tha'n sud's an uchd air a bhuaile?" ("Who is there leaning on the fold?") asked one of our men, with a long bow at stretch in his hands.

He got no answer from any of the three strangers, who looked ghastly eerie in their silence on the wall.

"Mar freagar sibh mise bithidh m'inthaidh aig an fhear as gile broilleach agaibh" ("My arrow's for the whitest breast, if ye make no answer "), said my man, and there was no answer.

The string tw.a.n.ged, the arrow sped, and the stranger with the white breast fell--shot through her kerchief. For she was a woman of the clan they name Macaulay, children of the mist, a luckless dame that, when we rushed out to face her company, they left dying on the field.

They were the robber widows of the clan, a gang then unknown to us, but namely now through the west for their depredations when the absence of their men in battles threw them upon their own resource.

And she was the oldest of her company, a half-witted creature we grieved at slaying, but reptile in her malice, for as she lay pa.s.sing, with the blood oozing to her breast, she reviled us with curses that overran each other in their hurry from her foul lips.

"Dogs! dogs!--heaven's worst ill on ye, dogs!" she cried, a waeful spectacle, and she spat on us as we carried her beside the fire to try and staunch her wound. She had a fierce knife at her waist and would have used it had she the chance, but we removed it from her reach, and she poured a fresher, fuller stream of malediction.

Her voice at last broke and failed to a thin piping whisper, and it was then--with the sweat on her brow--she gave the hint I speak of, the hint of the war's end and the end of MacCailein Mor.

"Wry-mouths, wry-mouths!" said she; "I see the heather above the myrtle on Lhinne-side, and MacCailein's head on a post."

That was all.

It is a story you will find in no books, and yet a story that has been told sometime or other by every fireside of the s.h.i.+re--not before the prophecy was fulfilled but after, when we were loosed from our bonded word. For there and then we took oath on steel to tell no one of the woman's saying till the fulness of time should justify or disgrace the same.

Though I took oath on this melancholy business like the rest, there was one occasion, but a day or two after, that I almost broke my pledged word, and that to the lady who disturbed my Sunday wors.h.i.+p and gave me so much reflection on the hunting-road. Her father, as I have said, came up often on a Sat.u.r.day and supped his curds-and-cream and grew cheery over a Dutch bottle with my father, and one day, as luck had it, Betty honoured our poor doorstep. She came so far, perhaps, because our men and women were at work on the field I mention, whose second crop of gra.s.s they were airing for the winter byres--a custom brought to the glen from foreign parts, and with much to recommend it.

I had such a trepidation at her presence that I had almost fled on some poor excuse to the hill; but the Provost, who perhaps had made sundry calls in the bye-going at houses farther down the glen, and was in a mellow humour, jerked a finger over his shoulder towards the girl as she stood hesitating in the hall after a few words with my father and me, and said, "I've brought you a good harvester here, Colin, and she'll give you a day's darg for a kiss."

I stammered a stupid comment that the wage would be well earned on so warm a day, and could have choked, the next moment, at my rusticity.

Mistress Betty coloured and bit her lip.

"Look at the hussy!" said her father again, laughing with heaving shoulders. "'Where shall we go to-day on our rounds?' said I; 'Where but to Elrigmore,' said she; 'I have not seen Colin for an age!' Yet I'll warrant you thought the cunning jade shy of a gentleman soldier! Ah, those kirtles, those kirtles! I'll give you a word of wisdom, sir, you never learned in Glascow Hie Street nor in the army."

I looked helplessly after the girl, who had fled, incontinent, to the women at work in the field.

"Well, sir," I said, "I shall be pleased to hear it. If it has any pertinence to the harvesting of a second crop it would be welcome."

My father sighed. He never entered very heartily into diversion nowadays--small wonder!--so the Provost laughed on with his counsel.

"You know very well it has nothing to do with harvesting nor harrowing,"

he cried; "I said kirtles, didn't I! And you needn't be so coy about the matter; surely to G.o.d you never learned modesty at your trade of sacking towns. Many a wench----"

"About this counsel," I put in; "I have no trick or tale of wenchcraft beyond the most innocent. And beside, sir, I think we were just talking of a lady who is your daughter."

Even in his gla.s.s he was the gentleman, for he saw the suggestion at once.

"Of course, of course, Colin," he said hurriedly, coughing in a confusion. "Never mind an old fool's havering." Then said he again, "There's a boy at many an old man's heart. I saw you standing there and my daughter was yonder, and it just came over me like the verse of a song that I was like you when I courted her mother. My sorrow! it looks but yesterday, and yet here's an old done man! Folks have been born and married (some of them) and died since syne, and I've been going through life with my eyes shut to my own antiquity. It came on me like a flash three minutes ago, that this gross oldster, sitting of a Sat.u.r.day sipping the good _aqua_ of Elrigmore, with a pendulous waistcoat and a wrinkled hand, is not the lad whose youth and courts.h.i.+p you put me in mind of."

"Stretch your hand, Provost, and fill your gla.s.s," said my father. He was not merry in his later years, but he had a hospitable heart.

The two of them sat dumb a s.p.a.ce, heedless of the bottle or me, and at last, to mar their manifest sad reflections, I brought the Provost back to the topic of his counsel.

"You had a word of advice," I said, very softly. There was a small tinge of pleasure in my guess that what he had to say might have reference to his daughter.