Читать книгу The McBrides - John Sillars - Страница 6

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MAKES SOME MENTION OF ONE JOCK McGILP, AND TELLS HOW BELLE BROUGHT

THE WEAN IN THE TARTAN SHAWL INTO THE HOUSE OF NOURN.

Nourn was home to me in my holidays and vacations from the college, and here I was back again for good, having become Magister Artium and well acquainted with the plane-stanes and glaber of the town of Glasgow—back again to the green countryside on my uncle's land of Nourn, concerned more about horses and cattle beasts than with the Arts, and with enough siller left me by my parents to be able to follow my inclinations.

My uncle—the Laird of Nourn, as he was called—had married kind of late, a common habit where the years bring strength and not eld; and Dan, his brother Ewan the soldier's son, had been at Nourn since he could creep, being early left an orphan.

On the Sunday after the coming of Belle the gipsy I lay long abed. In those days my cousin Dan and I made a practice of sleeping above the horses, "to be near them," as Dan said; but for myself I aye thought it would be that he might the easier slip out at night, and in again in the morning, and nobody the wiser.

In the years I would be at the college Dan had become airt and pairt of every wildness in the countryside, and in these times every man with red blood in him was concerned with the smuggling or the distilling of whisky—and that is the reason that mothers were wishful that their sons should be able to "take a horse by the head and a boat by the helm," for these would be very needful attributes in a handy lad.

And lying there in bed I minded how I once fell in with Jock McGilp, the captain of the smuggler Seagull, a man that sailed the Gull like a witch, and cracked his fingers at the Revenue cutters, and this was the way of it.

When I was a lonely boy, dreaming dreams of ages past and long ago, I had a favourite haunt. I made my way to the graveyard and lay among the long lush grass, for the grass grew nowhere so long or so full of sap as in the graveyard, and I thought of all the great warriors of our glens whose bones had been laid in this place, and shivered to think of the hot red blood stilled in death, and the grass roots creeping downwards like tentacles into the chinks of the wood, and sending up great fat greasy blades that sweated in the sun. I hated the grass roots, and dreamed horribly of them piercing into my heart, and drawing the life-blood to feed the bloated sweaty leaves, but the graveyard had an awful fascination for me. Sometimes old men would wander inside the dyke and move slowly to a rude stone and sit there, and I would hear great sighs bursting into the quiet afternoon, when the sun always beat down. But I liked the old men for being there when the ivy rustled on the ruined old chapel wall when the wind was lost, and the starlings flew affrighted from their nests over the mural tablet that told all men to—

FIR GOD 16—

And I feared God very much, and spoke to Him often in my lonely wanderings, when I saw wee men in green coats among the heather, but oftener on the soft green turfy bits on the hill. And one awful time when the hill road was all silent and the grasshoppers hidden and quiet, an eerie humming came into my ears like a language I could not understand, and I felt myself waiting for something. Round the turn of the hill before you come to the old quarry it came, and I stopped stricken as a rabbit when a snake sways before it, for there came towards me a thing like a dog—but such a dog—its shaggy coat was white and its ears only were black, and as it passed its tongue lolled out, and it looked at me through blue eyes with black rims, and I think I feared that thing more than God. But always before I left the graveyard for my hill road home I crept up to a window, and looked into a part of the chapel that was walled off and dark. Great brambles grew in this space and nettles of phenomenal size, with ugly fleshy-looking clots of seeds on them. A gnarled ash-tree had grown and broken the wall, but over against the broken wall were great stones, and one of these I liked best of all, for it made the blood tingle down my back and my eyes see visions. On a warm Sunday I lay half in the window resting on the sill, for the walls were very thick, and I gazed at the foot of the great stone where a plumed helmet was carved, and a sword in its sheath; and round the helmet and sword battle-gear lay as though the warrior had flung down his harness as he rested. In imagination I had girt me with the sword, the plumed helmet was on my head, when my feet were seized and a rumbling voice cried—

"Can ye read?"

"Ay."

"Read that stane. I'm no' a bawkin."