by Unknown
My visitors are likely to be few for some time to come; neighbours from the Five Houses whiles, and I hope Mistress Lindinnock and Dr John from Branders.
The smith at the Five Houses is my chief elder, and as his bairns are innumerable, the family in their two pews are a heartsome sight. A more cautious man in argument I have never known. About as far as he will go is, ‘I agree with you to a certain extent,’ or ‘My answer to that is Yes and No.’ Posty has a story that he made the second of these answers at his marriage when asked if he took this woman.
Posty is also at the Five Houses, and is the kind that bears ill-will to none, even if they catch him cheating at the dambrod, which he does with the elbow. He has the cheery face that so often goes with roguery and being good at orra jobs, but though I don’t lippen to him in matters of import, I like to fall in with him more than with some better men. I sometimes play at the teetotum with the smith’s bairns, when there is a prize of cracknuts, and undoubtedly on such occasions Posty’s pranks add to the festive scene. He will walk miles, too, to tell any ill news.
His most valued possession is a velocipede, which has so often come to bits when he was on it that near every man in the glen has been at the repairing of it, including myself, or at least has contributed twine or iron girds. He brings the letters from Branders on this machine, and as it often runs away with him, we all, dogs, hens and humans, loup the dyke when we see him bearing down on us. He carries telegrams too, but there are so few of these, now the English have gone, that when we see him waving one we ask, ‘Who is dead?’
My great friend is Dr John, who is sometimes in the glen to succour us, though he lives at Branders, where he sits under Mr Watery, with whom I sometimes suffer niffer pulpits.
Branders is an overgrown place of five hundred inhabitants, and stands high near a loch, out of which two streams run in opposite directions, like parties to a family feud that can no longer be settled with the claymore. In a spate as many new burns come brawling into this loch as there are hairs on a woman’s head, and then are gone before they can be counted. Branders is not in the glen but just at the head of it, and, according to Dr John, it stopped there because it said to itself, ‘Those who go farther will fare worse.’ It is jimply six miles from my manse in summer weather, but seventeen from the nearest railway station and electric telegraph. Dr John says that whether Branders is the beginning or end of desolation depends on your looking up or down the road.
A gnarled, perjink little figure of about fifty is Dr John, grandly bearded, but for a man of larger size. His blue eyes are hod away in holes, sunken into them, I suppose, because he has looked so long on snow. He wears a plaid in all weathers and sometimes even in the house, for, as he says, before he has time to wap it off and find it again somebody on a cart-horse will be clattering to his door to hurry him to my glen. I have seen him, too, sitting behind on that clattering horse. Repute says that for humane ends he will get through when the glen is locked to all others, though his sole recompense may be a ham at the killing, or a kebbock or a keg of that drink I have spelt —— . Though I touch it not, I cannot deny that he partakes as if it were water, and is celebrated (and even condoled with) for never being the worse of it. He always takes it hot, which he calls never mixing his drinks, and I don’t know a neater hand at squeezing down the sugar with the ladle.
If he is in the glen he sometimes puts up his shalt at the Five Houses and stays the night with me, when we have long cracks, the kettle-lid plopping while he smokes his pipe, grunting, which is the Scottish way of bringing out the flavour. Last night was such an occasion, and up here in the study as we sat into the fire we got on to the stories about ‘Strangers,’ of which he says humorously he has heard many clutters though he has never had the luck to encounter the carls themselves. He maintains that the origin of all the clavers and clecking of nowadays was that lamentable affair of the ‘45, which, among its misdeeds, for long gave an ill name to the tartan.
The glen had been a great hiding place of ‘pretty men’ of the period, and among its fearsome crags and waur cleughs, if ancient tales be true, those ill-gettit gentlemen had lurked for months and some of them for years.
It is said that forebears of folk still in the glen used to see them from below searching for roots atween the rocks, and so distraught with hunger that they went on searching openly while they were being shot at by the red-coats, who would not face the speel. When the glen was in a sink of snow, and pursuit for a time at an end, they sometimes lay at the Grand House (which was loyal to their dark cause), and held secret carouse there.
They were talked of with an intake of breath by the glen folk, who liked best to be of no party unless they were of both, would not betray them to an enemy that hunted them with bloodhounds, yet would hold no intercourse with them willingly, and looked the other way if they came upon one of the gaunt red-shanks unexpectedly, as sometimes happened, carrying braxy mutton or venison to his lurking place, or a salmon that the otters had left by the burn after taking one nip from its neck.
Those glen folk were too mouse to call the fugitives Jacobites. ‘The Strangers,’ they said.
In one case they said ‘Someone Who Was With Him,’ as if that was as far as it was canny to go. The Him was the Stranger who is believed by the simple to have been the Chevalier himself. He is said to have lain in the glen for a time in July month, fevered and so hard pressed that no friends dared go nigh him with nourishment lest it led to his capture. I have not seen his hoddy place, but the doctor tells me it is still there and is no more than a lair beneath what we call a bield, a shelter for sheep. Very like, it began by being a tod’s hole, and was torn bigger with dirks. If it ever existed, the lair has been long filled up with stones, which are all that remain to mark the royal residence.
Sheep again shelter in the bield, but there were none there in the time of the Prince, if it was he, nor, as I say the story goes, could food be passed to him. In his extremity he was saved by the mysterious Someone Who Was With Him.
Of course the legend has it that she was young and fair and of high degree, and that she loved much.
She fed him with the unwilling help of the eagles. The Eagles Rock, which is not far from the bield, is a mighty mass, said by the ghillies of today to be unscaleable by man because of what is called the Logan stone. No eagles build there now; they have fallen to the guns of their modern enemy, the keepers, who swear that one pair of eagles will carry a hundred grouse or more to their nest to feed their young.
At that time there was an eagle’s nest on the top of the rock. The climb is a perilous one, but now and again hardy folk get up as far as the Logan stone, where they turn back. There are Logan stones, I am told, throughout the world, and they are rocking stones. It is said they may be seen rocking in the wind, and yet hold on for centuries. Such a monster hangs out from our Eagles Rock, and you cannot reach the top save by climbing over it, nor can you get on to it without leaping. Twice men of the glen have leapt and it threw them off. Natheless, the story is that this Someone Who Was With Him got through the searchers in the dark, reached the top of the rock by way of the Logan stone, and after sometimes fighting the parent eagles for possession, brought down young grouse for her lord.
By all kind accounts she was a maiden, and in our glen she is remembered by the white heather, which, never seen here till then, is said, nonsensically, to be the marks of her pretty naked feet.
The white heather brought her little luck. In a hurried and maybe bloody flitting she was left behind. Nothing more is recorded of her except that when her lord and master embarked for France he enjoined his Highlanders ‘to feed her and honour her as she had fed and honoured him.’ They were faithful though misguided, and I dare say they would have done it if they could. Some think that she is in the bield in the hole beneath the stones, still waiting. They say, maybe there was a promise.
Such was the doctor’s tale as we sat over the fire. ‘A wayward woman,’ was how he summed her up, with a sh
ake of the head.
CHAPTER III.
THE SPECTRUM
Dec.3 (Contd.). ‘I am thinking,’ Dr John was saying when I caught up with him again, for my mind had been left behind with this woman, and I was wondering if she was ‘wayward,’ and what was wrong with it, for I liked the word, ‘I am thinking that all the clash about the folk of nowadays meeting ‘Strangers’ when the glen is locked comes out of that troubled past. In a white winter, as you have jaloused yourself, there is ower little darg for a hardy race, and they hark back by the hearthstone to the forgotten, ay, and the forbidden. But I assure you, Mr Yestreen, despite the whispers, the very name of the ‘45 is now buried in its own stour. Even Posty, though he is so gleg with the pipes, gets by himself if you press him about what his old ballants mean. Neither good luck nor mischief, so far as I can discover, comes to the havrels of nowadays who think they have talked or walked with a Stranger; unless indeed, as some say, it was one of them who mairtered poor Mr H.; and I understand he, being a learned man, always called it a Spectrum.’
This set us talking of him of whom I may have already let out that he once kept a Diary in this manse. It was so far back as to be just hearsay even to Dr John, and belongs to the days when there were no seats in my kirk and all stood on their shanks. Though I say we talked about him we really said very little, unless an occasional furtive glance be speech. All in these parts become furtive when a word, falling as meaningless you would say as a cinder from the fire, brings a sough of the old man back to mind.
Mr H. was a distant predecessor of mine, and a scholar such as the manse is not likely to house again. It was he who collected the library of noble erudition that is in the presses of this room, many of the volumes bound by his own hands that may have dawted them as he bound. His Diary was written on the flyleaves of a number of them.
I believe he thought in Latin and Greek quicker than in his own tongue, for his hurried notes are often in those languages and the more deliberate ones in ours. I am in a dunce’s cap with the Greek, but I can plod along with a Latin dictionary, and his entries in the Latin have made me so uneasy that I have torn out the pages and burned them. Mr. Carluke, whom I succeeded, had to confine himself, having no Latin, to the English bits, and he treated some of them similarly, for as he said to me they were about things that will not do at all.
They appear suddenly amidst matter grandly set forth, as if a rat had got at the pages. Minute examination has made me question their being in the same handwrite, though an imitation. This tampering, if such it was, had got by Carluke’s attention. ‘You mean,’ Dr John said to me when I had let him study these bits of Diary (which he peered into with a magnifier the size of a thimble that he carries in his waistcoat pocket and is near as much dreaded by malingerers as he is himself), ‘that it is the handwrite of the Spectrum?’ If Dr John has a failing it is that he hankers too much to tie one down to a statement, and of course I would not accept this interpretation, for I do not believe in Spectrums.
It is not known even by the credulous when, in Mr H.’s distorted fancy, the Spectrum first came chapping softly at the manse door, and afterwards blattering on it, in a wicked desire to drive the lawful possessor out of the house and take his place. But it was while the glen was locked. Sometimes one of the twain was inside the house and sometimes the other. Sounds were heard, they say, coming from the study, of voices in conflict and blows struck. The dwellers of that time in the Five Houses, of whom two carlines are still alive, maintained that they had seen Mr H. sitting on his dyke at night, because the other was in possession. By this time no servant would bide in the manse after gloaming; and yet, though Mr H. was now the one chapping at the door, they said they could see a light being carried in the house from room to room, and hear something padding on the floors. He did not walk, they said, he padded.
‘When they found the minister, according to the stories,’ Dr John said, ‘his face was in an awful mess.’
What had caused that, I asked, and he said shortly that he supposed Spectrums had teeth.
It was eerie to reflect that to those two carlines, as we call ancient women, my study must still be more his than mine, and that they would not be taken aback if they came into it at that moment and found the old man in the grandy chair.
‘The wayward woman was a better visitor to the glen than this other at any rate,’ I ventured, and the answer he made I would as soon he had kept to himself. ‘According to some of the ranters,’ he said, with a sort of leer at me, ‘they are the same person.’
We tried to get on to more comfortable subjects, but it was as if the scholar’s story would not leave the room. ‘I feel as if there were three of us here tonight,’ I said to the doctor.
‘Ay,’ said he, ‘and a fourth keeking in at the window.’
As usual, the old-wife gossip in which we had been luxuriating (for what more was it?) was interrupted by Christily coming in to announce that our sederunt was at an end. She did this, not in words, but by carrying away the kettle. This garr’d us to our beds, fuming at her as being one of those women, than whom there are few more exasperating, who think all men should do their bidding. I had to be up betimes this morning to see him take the gate.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LOCKING OF THE GLEN
Dec. 19. In this white wastrie of a world the dreariest moment is when custom makes you wind up your watch. Were it not for the Sabbath I would get lost in my dates. Not a word has gone into my Diary for a fortnight past. Now would be the time for it if there were anything to chronicle; but nothing happens, unless one counts as an event that I brought my hens into the manse on discovering that their toes were frozen to the perch (I had to bring the perch too). My two sheep are also in by, and yesterday my garden slithered off to the burn with me on it like a passenger. I have sat down at an antrin time to the Diary to try to fill up with an account such as this of the locking of the glen, and the result has been rather disquieting to me, as I will maybe tell farther on and maybe not.
The glen road, on which our intercourse with ourselves as well as with the world so largely depends, was among the first to disappear under the blankets. White hillocks of the shape of eggs have arisen here and there, and are dangerous too, for they wobble as though some great beast beneath were trying to turn round. The mountains are so bellied out that they have ceased to be landmarks. The farm-towns look to me to be smored. I pull down my blinds so that I may rest my eyes on my blues and reds indoors. Though the Five Houses are barely a hundred yards away I have to pick out signs of life with my spyglass.
I am practically cut off from my kind. Even the few trees are bearing white ropes, thick as my wrist, instead of branches, and the only thing that is a bonny black is the burn, once a mere driblet but now deep, with a lash around at corners, and unchancey to risk. At times of ordinary wet they cross here to the kirk in two easy jumps on boulders placed there for the purpose, and called the brig, but the boulders are now like sunk boats, and of the sprinkling of members who reached the kirk on the 9th, one used a vaulting pole and lost it.
Last Sabbath I did not open the kirk but got down to the burn and preached to a handful standing on the other side. My heart melted for the smith’s bairns, every one of whom was there, and I have cried a notice across the burn that next Sabbath the bell will ring as a solemn reminder, but the service will be in the smiddy, whether I find that man’s pole or not.
Two or three times Posty, without his velocipede, has penetrated to Branders and delivered my letters and a newspaper to me by casting them over the burn tied to stones. There is no word of Dr John. For nearly a week, except for an occasional shout, I have heard no voice but Christily’s. I sit up here o ‘nights trying to get meanings out of Mr H.’ s Diary, and not so much finding them in the written books as thinking I hear them padding up the stair as a wayward woman might do. In the long days I go out and shule, and get dunted by slides from the roof.
Of an evening Posty struts up and down in front of the Five
Houses, playing on his pipes. I can see him like a pendulum passing the glints of light. I can hear him from the manse, but still better from the burnside, if I slue down to listen in the dark. On one of those nights I got a dirl in the breast of me. It was when I went back to the manse after hearing him finish that Border boast, ‘My name it is little Jock Elliot.’ The glen was deserted by all other sound now, but as I birzed open the manse door (for the snow had got into the staples) I heard my fiddle playing ‘My name it is little Jock Elliot.’ For a moment I thought that Christily was at it, but then I knew she must be bedded, and she has no ear, and it was grander playing than Posty’s though he is a kittle hand. I suppose I did not stand still in my darkened hallan for more than half a minute, and when I struck a light to get at a candle the music stopped. There is no denying that the stories about the Spectrum flitted through me, and it needed a shove from myself to take me up the stair. Of course there was nobody. I had come back with the tune in my ears, or it was caused by some vibration in the air. I found my fiddle in the locked press just as I had left it, except that it must have been leaning against the door, for it fell into my arms as I opened the press, and I had the queer notion that it clung to me. I could not compose myself till I had gone through my manse with the candle, and even after that I let the instrument sleep with me.
More reasonable fancies came to me in the morning, as that it might be hard on a fiddle never to be let do the one thing it can do; also that maybe, like the performers, they have a swelling to cry out to rivals, ‘I can do better than that.’ Any allure I may have felt, to take advantage of this mere fancy and put the neck-rest beneath my chin again, I suppressed; but I let Posty know he could have the loan of my instrument on condition that he got it across the burn dry. By the smith’s connivance this was accomplished in a cart. It is now my fiddle Posty plays instead of his pipes, which are not in much better condition than his velocipede and are repaired in a similar manner. I extracted just one promise from him, that he would abstain from the baneful Jacobite lilts he was so fond of; but he sometimes forgets or excuses himself across the burn by saying, ‘She likes that kind best, and she is ill to control once she’s off.’ It is pretty to hear him in the gloaming, letting the songs loose like pigeons.