A Lame Dog's Diary Part 22

The cold weather has set in very suddenly, and already there is a sprinkling of snow on some of the distant hills. The robins still sing cheerily, but the gulls on the sh.o.r.e, flying over the yellow seaweed, call to each other plaintively in the gray of the early twilight. The heavy-winged herons stand in an att.i.tude of serious thought for hours on the cold rocks; then, as if suddenly making up their minds to something, they stretch out their red legs behind them, and flop with large wings over the waters of the loch. The red Virginian creeper has begun to drop its leaves regretfully, after a night or two of white frost, and the dahlias hang their heads, heavy with the moisture which their cups contain. The sun wakes late in the mornings now, but s.h.i.+nes strong and warm when it does get up. Cottage lights and fires burn cheerily o' nights, and within the cottages the old folks and the young ones draw round the fires and speak eerily of wraiths and whaurlochs, and some will tell of death-lights which they have seen on the lonely sh.o.r.e road. The herring fishers who sail away in the early twilight wear good stout jerseys now, and red woollen "crauvats" which the "wumman at hame" has knitted. The _Lord_ has sailed away to Dunoon to lay up for the winter, and the shepherds have gone away down South "to winter the hogs." The shepherds' wives sit alone in the little hillside cottages away up on the face of the brae, and "mak dae" with their slender money till their men come home again.

The old women in the village have begun their winter spinning, and the tap, tap, tap of the treadle on the floor gives a pleasant sound as one pa.s.ses outside on the dark road. Old men tell tales of snow in the pa.s.ses in winter-time, and of death on the bleak hillsides, and some wife, shuddering, will say, "Ay, I mind I saw his corp-licht the very evening he was lost." And then they tell tales of fantasy and signs and premonitions of death.

The Finlaysons are going to wind up their very successful autumn in the Highlands by giving what they insist upon calling a gillies' dance, though probably the revels will mostly be indulged in by their large retinue of English servants. Good-natured old Finlayson has more than once said that he hopes we shall all come to the gillies' dance, and that it will give ourselves and our guests a chance of seeing some Highland customs. A good many of us come to Scotland most years, and have seen gillies and pipers before, but our good-natured neighbours certainly out-distance any one I know in their Highland sympathies.

They invited us to dine with them before the dance should begin, and six of us went, feeling very like the Jamiesons, and resolved that when we got home we should never put a limit to their numbers when we send them an invitation again.

We talk of returning home at the end of next week, and Mrs. Fielden and our other two guests are leaving on Monday, I believe.

Mrs. Fielden looks much prettier in the Highlands, I think, than anywhere else. Young Finlayson is in love with her, and I believe has offered her his heart and the ironmongery business with it; but I think of all her lovers Anthony Crawshay is the one she likes best. He is the only one for whom her moods never alter, and to whom she is always gracious and charming and sweet. Perhaps it is in a quiet, less radiant way than that in which she treats others, but it is with an unvarying loving-kindness which I have not seen her bestow elsewhere.

And Anthony Crawshay is a good fellow--one of the best.

Old Mr. Finlayson actually donned a kilt for the gillies' dance; young Finlayson also wore the national dress, and Thomas tells me that they have sported the Macdonald tartan, and wants to know why. Old Finlayson met us at the door of his baronial hall in a clannish, feudal sort of way, and seizing his glengarry bonnet from his head he flung it down upon the oak settle in the hall, and exclaimed in hearty accents, "Welcome to the Glen." The Misses Finlayson wore sashes of royal Stuart tartan put plaid-wise across their shoulders. Mrs. Finlayson was dressed in a very regal manner which I cannot attempt to describe, and her platform voice was in use throughout the entire evening.

Ellicomb said the dance was barbaric, but Thomas enjoyed the evening immensely, and so did Crawshay, who said in his hearty way, "The Finlaysons did us uncommonly well," and shouted out, "Not at all bad people, not at all bad."

After dinner old Finlayson showed us all the pictures in the hall by the light of a long wax taper which he held above his head, and he pointed out the beauties of the house in a proprietary way, even to Evan himself, to whom the place belongs. Evan Sinclair, in a shabby green doublet, accepted all Mr. Finlayson's wildest statements about his own house with a queer, humorous grin on his face, and submitted to being patronized by the Miss Finlaysons, whose commercial instincts, no doubt, caused them to despise a young man who was obliged to let his place.

One of the Highland axioms which the Finlaysons have accepted is that "a man's a man for a' that," and they shook hands with every one in an effusive way, and condescended to a queer sort of familiarity with the boatmen and keepers about the place. The daughters of the house, with flying tartan ribbons, swung the young gillies about in the intricate figures of the hoolichan, and talked to them with a heartiness which one would hardly have thought possible of the Clarkham young ladies.

The Finlaysons had a large number of English guests staying in the house for the dance. These all made the same joke when the pipes began to play. "Is the pig being killed?" they asked, and looked very pleased with their own ready wit.

Red-headed Evan Sinclair carried his old green doublet and battered silver ornaments very well, and his neat dancing was in pleasant contrast to the curious bounds and leaps of the Finlaysons. Old Mr.

Finlayson spent his evening strutting about in a kindly, important fas.h.i.+on, and in making Athole Brose after a recipe supplied by Tyne Drum, who superintended the brewing of it himself.

I hope I am not fanciful when I say that the pipes when I hear them have to me something irresistibly sad about them, and that they conjure up many fantasies in my head which I am half ashamed to put down on paper. They seem to me to gather up in their bitter sobbings all the sorrows of a people who have suffered much and have said very little about it. There is the cry in them of children dying in the lonely glens in winter-time, when the wind howls round the clachan and the snow fills the pa.s.ses. One almost sees the little procession of black-coated men bearing away a tiny burden from the cottage door into the whiteness beyond, with its one heaped-up patch of brown earth on either side of the little grave. They wail, too, of the Killing Time, when the Covenanters were crushed but never broken under persecution; and one seems to see the defiant gray-haired old men, with their splendid obstinacy, unmoved by threats--not defiant, but simply unbreakable. Thinking of the Covenanters as they pa.s.s slowly before one to the sighing of the pipes, one wonders if it is possible to punish by death the man who is content to die.

The tuneful reeds sob out, too, the story of the Prince for whom so many brave men bled, and they tell again of the days of song, and of n.o.ble legends and deeds of daring when the nation spent its pa.s.sionate love on its King. "Come back! come back!" The desolate cry of the times. Almost one hears it sounding across the hills, and it seems to me that all that it is so hard to speak, so hard even to look, may perhaps be told in music. And I think loyalty and love speak very beautifully in the old Jacobite airs.

Again, as Evan's piper marches up and down in the moonlight playing a lament, the romance of life seems lost in the hardness of it, its stress and its loss. "Hame, hame, hame!" the pipes sob forth, crying for the homes that are sold to strangers, and for the hills and the glens which pa.s.s away from the old hands. It is "Good-bye, good-bye,"

an eternity of farewells. And still, wherever life is most difficult, wherever comforts are fewest and work is most hard, in the distant parts of the world are the Scottish exiles. But I know that all the world over the sons of the heather and the mist, in however distant or alien lands they may be, feel always, as they steer their way through life, that there is a pole-star by which they set their compa.s.s; and that some day, perhaps, they or their children may steer the boat to a haven on some rocky sh.o.r.e, where the whaup calls shrilly on the moors above the loch, and the heather grows strong and tough on the hillside, and the peat reek rises almost like the incense of an evening prayer, against a gray, soft sky in the land of the North.

I suppose that even in a diary I have no business to mix this up with an account of the Finlaysons' dance.

Palestrina came up to me after conscientiously dancing reels with Thomas, looking very pink and pretty, and thoughtful of me, as usual.

"Don't stay longer than you feel inclined," she said. "I told them to come for you in the dog-cart, and to wait about for you between twelve and one."

"I will take a turn down on the sh.o.r.e," I said, "and have a cigar, and then I will come back and see how you are getting on."

Palestrina gave me my crutch, and I went down towards the loch, which looked like a sheet of silver in the moonlight, and I found Anthony and Mrs. Fielden sitting on a garden bench beneath some wind-torn beeches by the sh.o.r.e. To-night there was not a breath of air stirring, and Mrs. Fielden had only thrown a light wrap round her.

"Have you come to tell me that I am to go in and dance reels with old Mr. Finlayson?" she said. "It is really so much pleasanter out here.

Do sit down and talk to Sir Anthony and me."

She would never have allowed one to know that one was in the way, even if one had interrupted a proposal of marriage.

Anthony made room for me on the bench, and said heartily, "I am awfully glad to see you able to sit up like this, Hugo. Why, man, you're getting as strong as a horse!"

"Oh. I'm all right again," I said. "I'll begin to grow a new leg soon. And the first thing I mean to do when that happens is to dance reels like the Finlaysons."

"I believe I ought to be going in to supper now with Mr. Finlayson,"

said Mrs. Fielden. "Does any one know what time it is? He said he would 'conduct me to the dining-hall' at twelve o'clock."

"It is a quarter past now," said Anthony, looking at his watch in the moonlight. "Don't go in, Mrs. Fielden. Wait out here, and talk to Hugo and me."

But old Finlayson in his kilt had tracked us to our seat underneath the beech-trees, and he took instant possession of our fair neighbour, and told us to follow presently. He thought all the supper-tables were full just now.

"We shan't eat everything before you come," said hospitable old Finlayson, walking away with his beautiful partner on his arm.

Mrs. Fielden was dressed in white satin, with some pretty soft stuff about her, and she wore some white heather in her hair.

"What a good sort she is!" said Anthony in a loud voice, almost before Mrs. Fielden was out of hearing.

It wasn't, perhaps, the most poetical way in which he could have put it, but one didn't want or expect Anthony to express himself poetically.

"Utterly spoilt!" I replied, because at that moment I happened to be feeling supremely miserable, and I did not want Anthony to know it.

"Not a bit," he replied; "and you know that as well as I do, old chap."

"Allow me, Anthony," I said, "to be as savage as I like; it is one of the privileges of a cripple."

"Oh, blow cripples!" said Anthony. "You will be shooting next autumn, man."

"And what will you be doing?" I said. After all, we have been pals all our lives, and I think Anthony might tell me about it if there is anything to tell.

"Oh, I'll be shooting too, I suppose," said Anthony.

We smoked for some time in silence.

And then Anthony began, and said that he had enjoyed himself amazingly up here in the North, and he went on to say a good word for every one.

Old Finlayson had been a brick about his shooting and deer-stalking, and it was beastly hard luck that I hadn't been able to come too. The minister wasn't a bad fellow, even when he was jocose; and Evan Sinclair was one of the best; and so on.

"What shall you be doing when you go back, Anthony?" I said, harking back to my old question, and hoping for more information than I actually asked for. "Are you going straight home?"

"I'll be at the first shoot at Stanby. Shall you be there?"

"I'm afraid not," I said. "I haven't learned to do cross-st.i.tch yet, and I'm sure all the women would think me a great bore, sitting about in their morning-rooms all day. Except Mrs. Fielden, of course! Mrs.

Fielden would probably persuade me into thinking that the only thing that made her house-party successful, or saved herself from boredom, was the presence of a lame man in the house."

"I don't think you are quite just about Mrs. Fielden, Hugo," said Anthony, moving rather resentfully on the garden bench.

"That doesn't matter much," I replied. "One voice will not be missed from the general chorus of praise that follows Mrs. Fielden wherever she goes."

"No; but still----" began Anthony; and then he stopped, and we smoked on for some time without speaking. "You see," he began at last, "she is the best friend I ever had." He did not lower his voice, because I suppose Anthony finds it impossible to do so, but went on steadily: "You see, I once cared for a little cousin of hers, and she died when she was eighteen. I don't think anybody ever knew about it, except Mrs. Fielden. But she knows how much cut up I was, and I suppose that is why she is so nice to me always."

"I'm awfully sorry!" I said.