Читать книгу Flemington And Tales From Angus - Violet Jacob - Страница 11

DALMAIN VILLAGE lies a few miles from Forfar town in that part of western Angus where the land runs up in great undulations from Strathmore towards the Grampians; and it is tucked away, deep down in a trough between a couple of these solid waves. A narrow burn slips westward to the Isla through this particular trough with the roughest of rough country roads alongside it. The two together pass in front of a small collection of low cottages which forms the village. There is just room, and no more, for the little hamlet, and from their southern windows the dwellers in the kirkton of Dalmain can see their kirk perched on the bank above them where the shoulder of the next wave rises in their faces. In the dusky evenings of late autumn it looks like a resident ghost with its dead white sides glimmering through the trees that surround it. It is the quietest place imaginable, and no doubt it was quieter still in the days of which I am writing; for the ‘forty-five’, with its agonies and anxieties, had passed by nearly forty years back; and though the beadle was still lame from a sword-cut, the old man’s limp was all that was left to show any trace of that convulsion of Scotland to the outward eye.

It was on one of these October afternoons of 1784 that two men sat talking in Dalmain manse; one was the minister, Mr. Laidlaw, and the other was an Englishman who had arrived a few hours earlier. The latter had never seen his host before, and had crossed the Tweed a few days before, for the first time. He had just started upon the business which had brought him from Northumberland and the stir of Newcastle into this – to him – remotest of all possible places.

The minister was a plain, elderly man with pursed lips which gave him the look of being a duller person than he actually was, and his companion, a good many years the younger of the two, alarmed him by his unfamiliar accent. The Englishman had a pleasant, alert expression. He was leaning over the table at which both were sitting, one on either side.

‘I know that his name was Moir,’ he was saying, ‘and that is all I know, except that they were seen together in Glen Aird soon after Culloden, and that my cousin Musgrave was badly wounded in the side. I have discovered from the records of his regiment that there was a Moir in it, a native of Dalmain. I can only guess that this man is the same. No doubt I have set out on a wild-goose chase, sir, but I thought it might be worth while to make the experiment of coming here.’

‘It is a matter of an inheritance, you say,’ said Mr. Laidlaw, pursing his lips more than ever and raising his eyebrows, ‘I got that from your letter, I think?’

‘It is. We are a Jacobite family, though we are not Scots – there are many such in the north of England – and this officer in the Prince’s army, whom, of course, I never saw, made my father his heir. He had nothing to leave, as a matter of fact,’ he added, smiling.

‘Then, sir, I would remark that it is not very easy to see your difficulty,’ observed Laidlaw drily.

‘There’s an answer to that. It has only lately been discovered that he had an interest in a foreign business which has never paid until now. His share of the profits should come to me, as my father is dead and I am his only surviving child. But it appears that I cannot claim the money until my cousin Musgrave’s death is legally proven. It is barely possible that he is still alive, for it is about forty years since he disappeared, and he has made no sign, though his wife was living until six months ago.’

‘He would be an old man too, no doubt?’

‘He would be nearing eighty by this time.’

There was a pause.

‘You tell me there are still some of the Moir family left in this parish,’ continued the Englishman.

Laidlaw cleared his throat. ‘I doubt you may not find much to help you,’ he said. ‘It is curious that you should choose this time for your search. It is not just a fortunate one; for though, as I have said, I shall be happy to serve your interests, I fear it is little I can do. There are two persons of the name of Moir in the parish, two elderly bodies. One is at this moment dying – indeed she may be dead by now. She has been unconscious these few days, and it is for that reason that I am not beside her; my ministrations are useless.’

‘I see,’ said the Englishman, his face falling; ‘of course I could not trouble her sister in the circumstances.’

‘It is not that, sir, for I should be glad to give you what hospitality I can till she was able to see you; but she is a strange creature – both are strange. The dying one has been slightly deranged in her mind since she was a young lass – for the last twelve-month she has been completely so – and the younger sister, Phemie, is a very extraordinary character. The bairns are feared of her, and some of the more foolish of my congregation take her for a witch, though I tell them such things are just havers. She seems to have no ill-will at anybody.’

‘But what is wrong with her, then?’

‘She will speak to nobody. Months at a time she will keep the house. I have only been a short while in this place, just three years past, and in that time she has been twice at the kirk on the Lord’s Day, no more.’

‘There must be madness in the family, sir, I should think.’

‘I believe not,’ replied the minister. ‘She is thrawn, that’s all – twisted, I suppose you might say in England.’

‘And are there no male relations?’

‘I understand there was an older brother, but he left Dalmain long ago. I have heard no more than that.’

‘If my cousin and the man Moir fled together after the battle of Culloden, the same fate may have overtaken them both. I admit that my chances of discovering the truth are not promising.’

‘That is true enough,’ said Laidlaw, ‘but we should wait awhile before we despair.’

‘But I cannot trespass indefinitely on you, Mr. Laidlaw—’

‘You’ll need to bide a day or two, sir; I shall be happy if you will. I am not much company for you, I know,’ he added diffidently.

‘You are only too kind!’ exclaimed the other. ‘I have heard many a time that Scotland is a hospitable country and now I see it. I am very fortunate to be here with you instead of hunting a dead man by myself.’

Laidlaw coloured a little. He was a shy man and a humble one.

‘And now,’ said his companion, rising, ‘I will not waste your time with my affairs. You are probably busy at this hour. I will go for a stroll and see something of this place before dark sets in.’

He walked to the window, which was open to the still October air.

‘Surely that is someone tuning a violin,’ he said, turning round to the minister. His face was bright. ‘I am something of a musician myself,’ he added.

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Laidlaw, jumping up, ‘I had forgotten! You have come at a good time, sir – the great Neil Gow is here!’

‘And who is he?’

‘Presairv’s!’ cried Laidlaw, growing, as he always did, more Scottish under astonishment, ‘did ye never hear o’ Neil Gow?’

‘I have not had that advantage,’ replied his guest, becoming correspondingly English.

‘He is the greatest fiddler in Scotland!’

‘Indeed.’

The minister was oblivious of any humour but his own. ‘This is a chance an English body might not get in a lifetime! It’s many a long day since he was here. It was the year of Culloden, they tell me, before they had put the plough on thae fields west o’ the kirkton. There was a green yonder, below the braes o’ broom, that was a fine place for dancing. The English soldiers were about these parts then at the foot of the glens, waiting for the poor lads that were seeking their homes after the battle, but they danced for all that. Neil was a young lad himsel’ then. There’s nobody here but the beadle minds of it. But he’ll never forget yon days till they take him to the kirkyard.’

‘Indeed,’ said the Englishman again.

‘Aye, he was lying in his bed in a house that looked on the green with a wound in his leg, though his wife tellt everybody it was typhus, to keep folks from going in. It was June-month, and the broom was out on the brae. They said Neil was daft; the beadle could hear him from where he lay, skirling and laying on the bow. He kept them dancing till it was too late for a man to see the lass he danced with, and Neil’s arm was that stiff he had it tied up next day when he left Dalmain; and a callant had to go with him to carry the fiddle. But time flies, sir. Likely there’ll no be a lad dancing to it the night that ever heard him play before. I am a Dunkeld man mysel’, so I am well acquaint with him. He’s playing at a dance at the Knowes’ farm. Knowes’ wife is a niece o’ Neil’s.’

‘Then you do not disapprove of dancing?’

‘Toots, no! And suppose I did, what would it avail me in Perth or Angus?’

‘Are they great dancers here?’

Laidlaw gave an impatient snort. There seemed to be so many things his travelled-looking guest had not heard of.

‘I will certainly go and hear your fiddler,’ said the Englishman. ‘But sir, you must come with me.’

Laidlaw sighed. His sermon lay heavy on his mind. ‘I must follow you later – but it’s a pity,’ said he.

While this conversation was going on in the manse, a little group was assembled in the kitchen of Phemie Moir’s cottage, where the beadle of Dalmain kirk stood with open psalm-book in the middle of the room. He was a lean, lame old man with aquiline features set in a fringe of white whisker, and he was sending his stentorian voice into the faces of the men before him. The place was full of rough figures, roughly clothed. Two women were in the kitchen, but only one was visible, and she sat by the hearth. The other lay behind the drawn curtain of the box-bed let into the wall; for she was dying, and had nearly got to the end of what was proving to be a very easy business. The elders had gathered together this evening to give point to Margaret Moir’s passage into the next world, and were well embarked on the psalm that was following the prayer they had offered. A shadow of officialdom impelled the singers to hold their books breast-high and to keep their eyes fixed upon the page, though the dimness of the cruisie at the wall turned their action into a pure piece of romance. It was romance and officialdom mixed that made those who had no books look over the shoulders of those who had; for none could see and all had the metrical psalms by heart. They went about their work with a disinterested unanimity that levelled them all into a mere setting for the beadle, Phemie, and the unseen figure behind the curtain.

No stir nor sign came from the drawn hangings of the box-bed, and though the most tremendous event of human life was enacting itself in that hidden space sunk in the wall, the assembly seemed to be entirely concerned with keeping up the gale of psalmody. Even Phemie, who neither sang nor prayed, and to whom the approaching loss must convey some personal significance, remained detached and impassive, with the tortoiseshell cat at her feet. The animal alone appeared to be conscious that anything unusual was going forward, for it sat bolt upright, looking with uneasy, unblinking eyes to the bed.

In the middle of the fourteenth verse, the last but one of the dragging psalm, the cat rose and walked with slow, tentative feet towards the wall. It sprang up on the seat of a chair at the bedside and disappeared behind the short curtain; whilst the singers, aroused from their preoccupation by the movement of the stealthy creature across the flags, wavered a moment in their tune.

Before a man had time to do more than nudge his neighbour the cat had leaped back into view and made frantically for the door, where it crouched, miaowing and scraping at the threshold.

The verse faltered and fell and a faint breath of disquiet went over the singers; they were dumb as the beadle limped across the kitchen and, drawing back the wisp of hanging stuff, peered into the dark, square space that opened behind it like a mouth. There was a moment’s silence; then he turned to them again!

‘Sing on, lads,’ he said, ‘anither verse’ll anither land her!’

The elders struck up once more. They sang steadily to the end and then stood back with closed books and shuffling feet. The beadle released the terrified cat. The company filed solemnly out, leaving him and Phemie in the kitchen – only two now; that hidden, third presence was gone.

The woman stood by the bed.

‘Aye, she’s awa’,’ she said.

Her sister had been practically dead for the last twelve months, a mere mindless puppet to be fed a little less regularly than the cat, a little more regularly than the hens.

The beadle looked on, silent, as his companion drew the sheet over the dead woman’s face. His legitimate part in the event was to come later. Then he also went out, crossing the small, rapid burn which divided Phemie’s cottage from the road. Under the overhanging weeds it was gurgling loud, for it had rained in the hills and the streams were swelling.

He stood looking up and down the way. Voices were floating to him from the Knowes ‘farm. He had done what he considered was required of him as an official and relaxation was his due. Also it was unthinkable that anything, from a kirk meeting to a pig-killing, should go on without him at Dalmain. He clapped his psalm-book into his pocket and turned towards the Knowes’, for, like the Englishman, he heard the fiddle tuning. He had worn a completely suitable expression at the scene he had just left, and as he drew nearer to the steading it changed with every step; by the time he had kicked the mud from his feet at the threshold of the big barn, which was filling with people from all corners of this and neighbouring parishes, he wore a look of consistent joviality. His long mouth was drawn across his hatchet face and grinned like that of a sly old collie dog.

The barn was roughly decorated with branches of rowan nailed here and there against the walls, and the scarlet berries of the autumn-stricken leaves were like outbreaks of flame. The floor was swept clean and a few stable lanterns were hung from rafters, or set on boxes in the angles of the building; the light from these being so much dispersed that it only served to illuminate such groups as came into the individual radius of each. The greater part of those who stood about waiting for the dancing to begin were dark figures with undistinguishable faces. There was a hum of talk and an occasional burst of laughter and horseplay. At the further end of the place a heavy wooden chair was set upon a stout table. Knowes, the giver of the entertainment, loitered rather sheepishly in the background; he was of no account, though he was a recent bridegroom; for it was his wife’s relationship to the great fiddler who was to preside this evening which shed a glory on his household and turned their house-warming into an event. He was an honest fellow and popular, but the merrymakers had no thought for anyone but Neil.

The position that Neil Gow had made for himself was a remarkable one. There was no community in Perthshire, Angus, or the Mearns, that did not look on him with possessive affection. He played alike at farmhouse dances, at public balls, in villages and bothies, at the houses of lairds and dukes; he met every class and was on terms of friendship with the members of each. He had humour and spirit; and though he was entirely outspoken and used a merry tongue on every rank and denomination among his friends, his wit and good sense and the glamour of a fine personality allowed him to do so without offence. He was accustomed to speak his mind to his great friend and patron, the Duke of Atholl, as well as to his guests. ‘Gang doon to yer suppers, ye daft limmers,’ he had once cried to the dancers at Atholl House, ‘an’ dinna haud me here reelin’ as if hunger an’ drouth were unkent i’ the land!’ Many a poor man knew Neil’s generosity and many a richer one in difficulties; out of his own good fortune he liked to help those less happy than himself. He had an answer for everybody, a hand for all. He was a self-made king whose sceptre was his bow and whose crown was his upright soul and overflowing humanity.

At last the group inside the barn-door dispersed, and Neil, who had been the centre of it, shook himself free and went over, his fiddle under his arm, to the table beside which a long bench was set that he might step up to his place. He would begin to play alone to-night, for his brother Donald, who was his violoncello, had been detained upon their way.

‘Aye, sit doon, twa-three o’ ye, on the tither end o’t,’ he exclaimed to a knot of girls who were watching him with expectant eyes; ‘ye’d nane o’ ye get yer fling wi’ yer lads the nicht, gin a was tae turn tapsalterie!’

They threw themselves simultaneously upon the bench, tittering, and he stepped up on the table, a tall, broad figure in tartan breeches and hose. His hair was parted in the middle and hung straight and iron grey, almost to his great shoulders, and his cheekbones looked even higher than they already were from the shadows cast under them by the lantern swinging above. There was no need for the light, for he carried no music and would have scorned to depend upon it. His marked eyebrows rose from his nose to the line that drew them level along the temples above his bright and fearless eyes. His large, finely cut mouth was shut, his shoulders back, as he surveyed the crowd below him. A subdued murmur rose from it. The company began to arrange itself in pairs. He smiled and stood with his bow hand raised; he was just going to drop it to the strings when Donald Gow came in.

WHEN THE ENGLISHMAN had left the minister to his sermon he made his way slowly to the village. He was in no hurry, for though Laidlaw had stirred a slight curiosity in him about the fiddler, he was principally interested in seeing what it was that this unsophisticated little world, of which he knew nothing, had magnified into a marvel. The thought of it amused him. It was a kindly amusement, for he was a good-hearted man who liked his fellow-creatures as a whole. The rotting leaves were half fallen and their moist scent rose from underfoot, a little acrid, but so much mixed with earth’s composite breath that it was not disagreeable. A robin hopped along at a few yards ‘distance with the trustful inquisitiveness of its kind. The fiddle had begun, but he was too far from it to hear plainly, and it sounded muffled, as though from the interior of some enclosed place. One or two faint lights were showing in cottage windows across the burn. The gurgling voice of the water made him feel drowsy. He was in the humour which makes people lean their folded arms on gates, but he could not do that, for there were no gates here; rough bars thrust across the gaps in unpointed walls were the nearest approach to gates that he could see. How much poorer it all looked than England, and how different! He knew that it was a wilder place over which his cousin had fought, and he thought of the wounded fugitive tramping this comfortless country with the vanished and problematical Moir. He feared, as he had said to Laidlaw, that he was on a wild-goose chase. He felt a stirring of pity in him for the dwellers in this lost, strange backwater; and it seemed no wonder to him that a common fiddler should arouse so much delight, even in a moderately educated man, such as he took Laidlaw to be. As the dusk fell it grew chilly, so he went to the Knowes’ farm and found his way among the stacks to the barn-door. The dancing was now in full swing, so he stood unnoticed by the threshold, looking in.

The lights were flickering in the draught created by the whirl of the reel which was in progress, and men and women of all ages between sixteen and sixty seemed lost to everything but the ecstasy of recurrent rhythm that swayed them. The extraordinary elaboration of steps and the dexterity of feet shod in heavy brogues amazed the Englishman. He could not follow any single pair long enough to disentangle their intricacies of movement, for no sooner did he think he was on the way to it than the whole body of dancers was swallowed up in collective loops of motion, and then were spinning anew in couples till the fiddle put them back in their places and the maze of steps began again. The rhythmic stamping went on like the smothered footfall of a gigantic approaching host; not so much a host of humanity as of some elemental force gathering power behind it. It gripped him as he listened and felt the rocking of the wooden floor. His eyes were drawn across the swinging crowd, the confused shadows and the dust of the thickening atmosphere, to what was the live heart of it all.

The largest lantern, high above, hung direct from its rafter over the head of Donald Gow as he sat on his chair with the dark, dim-looking violoncello between his knees. Before him on the broad table stood Neil, the light at his back magnifying his size. His cheek was laid against his violin, his right foot, a little advanced, tapped the solid boards, as, pivoted on his left one, he turned to and fro, swaying now this way, now that, his eye roving over the mass that responded, as though hypnotised, to the spur of his moving bow. It was as if he saw each individual dancer and was playing to him or to her alone; as if his very being was urging each one to answer to his own abounding force and compelling the whole gathering to reflect every impulse of his mind. The stream of the reel poured on, throbbing and racing, leaping above the sonorous undertone of the violoncello, but never, for all the ardent crying of the string, leaving the measured beat of the matchless time. Now and again, at some point of tension, he would throw a short, exultant yell across the barn, and the tumult of ordered movement would quicken to the sharp inspiration of the sound.

The Englishman stood, with beating pulses and every nerve and muscle taut, gazing at Neil. He loved music and had toiled patiently, and with a measure of success, at the violin. He knew enough to recognise his technical skill, yet the pleasure of that recognition, so great even to one with less knowledge than he possessed, was forgotten in the pure rush of feeling, the illumination cast upon his mind by which intangible things became clear. He seemed to understand – perhaps only for a moment – the spirit of the land he was in, and the heart of the kinsman whose track he was trying to follow, whose body lay, perchance, somewhere among those hills he had seen before him guarding the northern horizon, as he neared Dalmain. For a moment he could have envied him his participation in the forlorn cause he had espoused. The love of country, which was a passion in the race around him, which, unexpressed in mere words, poured out of the violin in this master-hand, was revealed to him, though he could only grasp it vicariously. As he stood, thrilled, on the brink of the whirlpool, its outer circles were rising about his feet. The music stopped suddenly and Neil threw down his bow.

The Englishman awoke as from a dream and drew back. One or two people, aware for the first time of a stranger’s presence, looked at him curiously, but most of the dancers were crowding round the table where Neil was now sitting in his brother’s place.

‘Na, na,’ he was saying, ‘a’ll no win doon till a hae a drink. Man Donal’, awa’ wi’ ye an’ get a dram till us baith.’

The Englishman went back to the stackyard; he wished Mr. Laidlaw had not stayed behind, for he did not mean to return to the manse till he had heard Neil play again. He was an intruder, which was a little embarrassing to him, and he felt his position would be bettered if he had someone to speak to. But the scraps of talk he heard did not encourage him to address anyone, because he was not sure of understanding any reply he might get. Soon a small boy came out of the barn and paused in surprise to look at him; he was apparently of an inquisitive turn of mind, for he hung about examining every detail of the stranger’s appearance. He bore the scrutiny for a few minutes.

‘What is your name, my lad?’ he inquired at last, reflecting that it would not matter if he did look like a fool before this child.

The boy made no answer but backed a step, open-mouthed. The question was repeated, and this time produced an effect, for he turned and ran, as though accosted by an ogre.

He did not stop till he was clear of the stackyard, but when he reached the road he stood still. He had been told by his mother to come home before dark, and when he had first caught sight of the Englishman he was debating whether or no he should obey her. He was now put out at finding himself on the way there, and stood undecided, pouting and kicking his heels in the mud. Looking back, he saw a figure moving among the stacks, and the sight decided him. He set off resentfully, cheated into virtue; a situation that was hateful.

He had no mind to hurry. If he was diddled by an unfair chance into respecting his mother’s orders, he was not going to interpret them literally. Everything was close together in the kirkton of Dalmain, and though he was not a dozen yards from the farm-gate he was abreast of the first cottage in the row. The fiddle had begun again and he could hear it very plainly and the shouts and thudding of feet. It was almost as good as being in the barn, if only there was something to look at. He began to amuse himself by building a little promontory out into the burn with the biggest stones he could collect. He had often been forbidden to do this, and he was glad of the opportunity of being even with fate. When he had been at it for some time, and even disobedience began to pall, he noticed that a bar of light was lying on the water, falling on it from the window of a cottage down stream. Bands of shadow were crossing and recrossing this in a strange way, as if some movement were going on behind the window panes. He jumped over the burn, crept along by the harled wall and, crouching by the sill, peered in.

WHEN THE ELDERS had left the Moirs’ house and the beadle had betaken himself to the Knowes’, Phemie sat on by the fire, like some commonplace image of endurance, seemingly stupefied. Another woman might have been aroused by the entrance of neighbours drawn by the news of what had happened and ready to help in those duties necessitated by a death that the poor share so faithfully with one another. But she had no neighbours in the fuller sense of the word, and the few with whom she had even the slightest communication were enjoying themselves not a furlong from her door. Her thoughts had gone back – far back; years and years back – to the turning-point of her obscure life. She saw it dimly, across the everlasting monotony that had closed down on her and hers at that last time upon which she had taken her place among her kind. Secrecy and servitude to the stricken creature who now lay rigid upon the box-bed; these had been her lot. Servitude was over, but her tardy freedom conveyed little to her, and secrecy – long since unnecessary, though she had never grasped the fact that it was so – clung to her as a useless, threadbare garment. Her solitariness would be no greater. The doors of her prison had opened, but she could not go free because of the fetters she wore.

She got up at last and threw some fuel into the grate. The flame rose and she tried to collect herself. There were things she must do. She went to the outhouse that opened from the back of the kitchen and got a bucket to fill at the burn. This she carried out to the water, but as she stooped with it, it dropped from her hands. The sound of leaping, compelling reel-music cut its way from the Knowes’ farm to her ears. A blind fiddler had once said that he could tell the stroke of Neil Gow’s bow among a hundred others, and Phemie Moir knew who was playing. She clasped her hands over her face and fled indoors.

The lethargy that had enveloped her was gone, snatched away as a wayfarer’s cloak is snatched from him by the wind. She began to run to and fro, crying out, now lifting her arms over her head, now thrusting them forward; her sobs filled the kitchen though her eyes were tearless. She had slammed the door behind her that she might not hear the fiddle. Once she paused by it, not daring to open it, but laying her ear to the edge of the jamb, in the hope of finding that it had ceased. It was going on steadily, and she turned the little shawl she wore up over her head and ran back into the outhouse to get farther from the sound. But a broken plank in the thin wooden walls brought it to her afresh, and she rushed back again and sank upon the chair she had left by the hearth.

When she was a little quieter she returned to the door to listen, the tension of fear upon her. It was at this moment that the urchin, creeping along outside, stumbled over the fallen pail. The sudden noise shattered the temporary quiet of her strained nerves and let loose the unreasoning demon of her terror again. She ran up and down between the walls like a frenzied thing.

The boy crept nearer. It was now dark enough to conceal him from the inmate of the house so long as he did not approach his face to the deep-set panes. He was having his fill of wonders to-night and he watched her, fascinated. He had heard no word of Margaret Moir’s death. Phemie was a person he had seldom seen at close quarters, because his home was at some distance from the kirkton, and the garden of her cottage, beyond which she rarely ventured, lay behind it, out of sight of passers along the road. But he knew from the children he played with that there was something disquieting about her, and that the minister had rebuked a friend of his mother’s for saying that she was a witch. What he now saw woke the horrid suspicion that it was the minister who was in the wrong. His sense of adventure in gazing at her thus was great; only the wall between them gave him the courage to indulge it. The cat, which, since the beadle had let it out, had been skulking restlessly about the roadside, came, a parti-coloured shadow, out of the darkness and thrust itself between his feet. He was not sorry to have a familiar living creature so near him. He was about to touch its warm head with his fingers when his eye fell upon the bed. There was no more to see on it than the square space revealed, but that was enough. There is something about the lines of a dead figure not to be mistaken, even by a child, particularly by a child bred up among the plain-spoken inhabitants of a countryside. Panic-struck, he plunged through the burn and made as hard as he could for the cheerful commotion of the Knowes’. The cat stood looking after him, its back arched, recoiling a little, like a gently bred dame from some unforeseen vulgarity.

The fiddle had stopped and Neil had gone out to get a breath of fresh air and to gossip with his niece, whom he had not seen since her wedding. Several of the guests were in the stackyard cooling themselves, but the hostess and the fiddler sauntered out to the roadside where it sloped to the kirkton. The boy almost ran into them, weeping loudly; blaring, after the fashion of unsophisticated childhood.

‘Maircy, laddie! What ails ye?’ exclaimed the young woman.

‘Phemie’s daft! Ragin’ daft – the wifie’s deid!’

His words came out with an incoherent burst of blubbering, and to Knowes’ bride, who had been a bare ten days in the place, the name conveyed nothing.

‘Lord’s sake!’ she cried, ‘what is’t? wha is’t?’

He pointed down the road.

‘Ragin’ – roarin’ daft doon yonder – whaur the licht is – gang doon the brae an’ ye’ll see’t yonder!’

‘But wha’s deid?’ cried the woman. ‘Is’t a murder?’

‘Aye, aye – she’s deid! Phemie’s ragin’ mad!’ bawled the boy, gathering excitement from his companion’s trembling voice, and only concerned for someone to share his emotions.

She poured out a string of questions, and as she grew more insistent, his tale grew more difficult to follow. She looked round for her uncle, but by this time he had started for the village to investigate for himself.

‘Oh, Uncle Neil! dinna gang!’ she wailed; ‘like as no ye’ll be murder’t yersel’ – come awa back. Uncle Neil!’

Hearing his steps die away in the darkness, she rushed through the stackyard with the headlong run of a startled fowl. ‘There’s a puir body murdert i’ the kirkton!’ she shouted as she went.

The words ran from mouth to mouth. In a few minutes the main part of the company was on its way down the brae, leaving behind it a handful of nervous women, some men who had discovered the fountain-head of the whisky, and Donald Gow, whose instinct, probably from years of attendance on a bigger man than himself, was always for the background.

Neil strode into the kirkton, making for the light pointed out by the boy. Most of the cottages were darkened, but Phemie’s uncurtained window shone like a beacon. He did not stop to look through it, fearing that he might be seen and the house barred against him. He pushed open the door and stood still, completely taken aback. There was no sign of disorder, nothing to suggest a struggle. Phemie, exhausted by her own violence, was sitting at the hearth, her body turned from the fire; her elbows were on the chair-back, her hands clasped over her bowed head. At the click of the latch she looked up and saw him in the doorway. She gave a terrible cry and ran towards him.

‘Neil Gow! Neil Gow! Div ye no mind o’ me?’

His amazement deepened. Death, whose presence he realised as he looked about him, had come quietly here, as he comes to most houses; but he supposed that bereavement must have turned the brain of the desperate creature who clung to him.

‘Whisht, wumman, whisht!’ he exclaimed, ‘whisht noo, puir thing.’

‘Hae maircy on me, Neil Gow!’

‘Whisht, whisht – a’ll awa’ an’ get the minister tae ye.’

But she only held him tighter; he had not believed a woman’s hands could be so strong. He did not like to force them open.

‘Ye mauna seek tae tell him – ye winna! Ye winna hae me ta’en awa’?’

‘Na, na, na. Wumman, what ill wad a dae ye?’ he cried, bewildered; ‘a dinna ken ye – a’m no seekin’ tae hurt ye.’

‘Oh, Neil Gow, div ye no mind o’ playin’ on the auld green o’ Dalmain? It’s me – it’s Phemie Moir!’

The name ‘Moir’ arrested him. He turned her round to the firelight, gazing into her face.

‘Moir?’ he said. ‘Is it yersel’?’ He could hardly trace in it the features of the girl he remembered.

‘Moir,’ she said. ‘Jimmy Moir was the lad ye saved frae the sodgers – him an’ the ither ane – ma bonnie brither. Neil Gow, ye’ll save me – ye winna speak o’t – ye winna let them tak’ me noo?’

‘Hoots!’ he exclaimed. Then looking into her anguished eyes, he realised the depths of her simplicity; the cruelty of that ignorance whose burden she had borne these two score of years. He was silent, seeking for words with which to bring conviction to her warped understanding, to overthrow the tyranny of a fixed idea. There was a sound of feet outside, and both he and she looked towards the window. Beyond the narrow panes a crowd of faces were gathered, pressing against them. She tore herself from him and ran to the door. She turned the key just as a hand outside was about to lift the latch.

Neil drew the curtain across the casement, and, taking her by the arm, led her to the hearth.

‘See noo,’ said he, ‘sit ye doon. There’s naebody’ll touch ye. They’re a’ freends. Will ye no believe me?’

‘A hae nae freends, Neil Gow – man, ye dinna understand.’

The tears came at last and she rocked herself to and fro.

‘Ye fule!’ he exclaimed, ‘is there no me? Was a no a freend tae ye, yon time ye mind?’

‘Ye was that – ye was that,’ she murmured.

‘An’ wad a tell ye a lee?’

The latch rattled again.

He went to the door and opened it. Someone pressed up against him and would have entered. He was flung back.

‘Awa’!’ he cried, ‘awa’ wi’ ye a’! There’s nane murdert here. There’s just a done body that’s deed in her bed. There’s nane o’ ye’ll hear the sound o’ my fiddle the nicht gin ye dinna leave the puir cratur’ that’s greetin’ in-by in peace. There’s just the minister’ll win in, an’ nae mair!’

There was an irresolute collective movement, but the beadle pushed himself forward.

‘Na, na,’ said Neil simply, filling the doorway with his bulk. The beadle was pulled back by several hands. The sensation was dying down, and a dance without music was a chill prospect.

‘We’ll see an’ get Donal’ tae play,’ said the beadle angrily.

‘No him,’ replied Neil.

‘Here’s the minister,’ said a voice.

Phemie’s dread seemed to have left her. She sat quietly listening to what was going on round the doorstep; an unformulated hope was glimmering in her mind like dawn on a stretch of devastated country. She could hear the people dispersing and returning to the Knowes’ and the minister’s subdued murmur of talk with the fiddler outside. It went on till the two men came in together. She was dumb and still.

‘Ye’ve naething to fear i’ this warld,’ said Laidlaw, dropping into the vernacular. ‘I’d tell ye the same, if I was to tell ye frae the pulpit.’

And he put his hand on her shoulder. She laid her head against his arm, like a child.

IT WAS A full hour later that Laidlaw returned to the manse. He had stayed some little time at the cottage after Gow went back to the Knowes’ to finish his evening’s work. One half of his mind was full of the story he had heard pieced together by Phemie and the fiddler. He was a thoughtful man, with sympathies stronger than many who knew him were inclined to suspect, and he was deeply stirred by the obscure tragedy which had dragged on, unrealised by himself, ever since he had been called to Dalmain. He blamed himself. His sense of his own limitations, a healthy quality in most people, had been a stumbling-block to him; for he had taken the discouragements received in his timid efforts to know more of Phemie as proofs of how little he was fitted to deal with her. He envied people like Neil Gow; people whose masterful humanity carried them full sail into those waters where their fellow-men were drowning for want of a rope. The other half of his mind was amazed by the prank of a coincidence that had brought the Englishman here to meet the one man necessary to him in his quest.

He hurried home, hoping that his guest would soon return; in the crowd at the farm he had noticed his presence, but lost him in the sudden scare which dispersed the party. He entered the little living-room to find him.

‘You look perturbed,’ said the Englishman. ‘Certainly you have no lack of incident in Dalmain. I’m truly glad it was a false alarm.’

‘I have much to say to you,’ began Laidlaw, sitting down.

‘Well, before you begin, let me have my turn. Perhaps you thought me sceptical when you spoke of Neil Gow, and I will not deny that I was. I was a fool – since I have heard him I know how great a fool. And now, sir, go on, and I will listen. My mind has been lightened of a little of its conceit.’

His frankness struck some sensitive chord in Laidlaw. Perhaps the minister’s reserve was shaken by the sharp contact with realities tonight, perhaps stirred by sympathies he saw in others.

‘I am glad you came here,’ he stammered. ‘I should be glad to think – to hope – I have got some information for you, sir. Your cousin was lost sight of here; he reached Dalmain.’

‘You have got news of him?’

‘Something. Little enough; but I have heard a strange tale from Neil Gow.’

‘From Neil Gow?’

Laidlaw nodded.

‘Margaret Moir died this evening, and a little laddie saw her through the window and came crying some havers to the Knowes’. Her sister was nearly wild, poor soul, and the bairn got a fright – but you were there, no doubt?’

‘I saw there was a disturbance, but I stayed where I was.’

‘The door was locked when I arrived,’ went on Laidlaw, ‘and Gow was with her. But he got her quiet and I went in-by. You’ll mind that I told you he was here the year of Culloden, playing on the old green? It was three nights before that dance that Jimmy Moir, who was the brother of these two lasses – as they were then – Margaret and Phemie, came to Dalmain with a wounded officer – likely the man you are seeking – and they hid themselves on the brae in a cave that is there, in amongst the broom. You can see it still; the bairns play at the mouth of it often enough, though I do not think they go far in. I have never been to it myself, but they say it runs a long way into the hillside. Moir got into the kirkton, without being seen, to tell his sisters, and Phemie and Margaret went out in the dark to bring them food and water; but there was no one in the place knew they were there, not even the beadle, that had been fighting himself, for he was lying ill in his house. The English soldiers were all about the country. The officer was so bad with his wound they could not get forward to the coast, and the day Neil came he was shouting and raving in a fever. You could hear him at the foot of the brae, Phemie says, just where the dancing was to be, and the lasses made sure the poor fellows would be discovered. They got short shrift in those times, you see, sir.’

‘But would anyone have given them up?’ asked the other.

‘Aye, well,’ said the minister, ‘whiles a man’s foes are they of his own household, and they said there were some in the kirkton that favoured King George. But Phemie was bold and went to seek Neil Gow. He was a young lad then, but she told him the truth and he said he would play till he had no arms left before anyone should hear aucht but his fiddle. When I spoke to you of that dance, not a couple of hours syne, little I thought how much it concerned you.’

‘Nor I, indeed.’

‘Margaret was a puir, timid thing and Jimmy was all the world to her. She stopped at home her lane, but Phemie went out and danced till the most o’ them were fou with whisky and Neil had played them off their legs. She waited till the last were gone. There was no crying from the broom when she went home. It was an awesome night for her, but it was the ruin of Margaret. She lay ill a long while, and when she rose from her bed her mind was never the same again.’

‘But the men – what became of them?’ asked the Englishman, getting impatient to reach what was, for him, the main point.

‘The days were long in June-month and Phemie had to wait for dark to go back. She found the place empty.’

‘And did no news ever come? Was nothing more heard?’

‘Nothing, sir. Nothing.’

The other made a sharp exclamation of disappointment.

‘It has been a wild-goose chase after all,’ he said at last.

The progress of Laidlaw’s detailed history had raised his expectations and he was half resentful at finding it end, for all the difference it would make to him, where it had begun. But he was too just a man to let the other see it.

‘I am greatly to blame!’ cried the minister, with sudden vehemence. ‘Here am I, a servant of men’s souls, and it was left for Neil Gow to loose Phemie Moir from her martyrdom while I went by on the other side! Aye! but I am an unprofitable servant!’ he exclaimed, seeing the other man’s astonished face; ‘that poor creature shut herself up with her sister and would thole nobody near them for fear some word should slip from the daft body and Moir be traced. Then, as time went by, her heart failed her and concealment grew in her mind like some poisonous weed, and she took the notion that, if word got out, the two of them would have to suffer for what they had done. Fear sat down with her to her meat and fear lay down with her in her bed. The years passed on, but she was too ignorant to ken that the world changes with them and old things go out of mind. People wonder that she’s not like other folk; they wouldna wonder if they knew! She was feared that Gow, who had stood friend to her, would let out what he kent, and fail her. Poor foolish wife to think such a thing of Gow! And the man had forgotten her till he saw her, and then she had need to tell him before he remembered! But when she heard his playing again she was fairly demented.’

His face changed and he turned away. ‘Mea culpa,’ he faltered. He had little Latin, but he understood that much.

‘I fear the burden has shifted to you, my poor friend,’ said the Englishman gently.

IT WAS ON the forenoon of the morrow that Laidlaw, the beadle and the Englishman stood up to their middles in the broom. The pods were black in the green mist of stems. About their feet rabbits had riddled the earth. The outcrop of rock had broken open in the hill-side, to be roofed with the turf of the overhanging brae and swallowed by the sea of broom and whin and the ash-coloured blur of seeding thistles. Interlacing whin-roots lurked about the burrows, traps for human steps. When they had climbed to their goal the three men stopped to get breath, and turned to look at the kirkton below them. Westward, through the creek cut by the burn to the Isla, they could see the indigo-blue Sidlaws with such lights as seem only to fall on Angus bathing their undulating shoulders.

Each man carried a lantern, and when all were lighted they went crouching, one after another, into the cave. In a few paces they were able to stand up and look about them.

Both Laidlaw and the Englishman had gone late to sleep on the preceding night, and the latter, lying thinking in the dark hours, turning over in his mind all he had heard, had come to a definite conclusion. He told himself that no man with a serious body-wound, exhausted by days of wandering and ill enough to be shouting in delirium, could escape on foot from a place in which he had once lain down. A man may go till he drops, but when he falls he will not rise again in circumstances like these, far less escape unseen. But Moir could accomplish what was impossible to his companion.

‘I believe Musgrave to be lying up there in the hill-side,’ he had said to Laidlaw that morning.

‘But—’ began the minister.

‘Yes, sir, I know what you would say; I know that the village children play there, in the cave, at times. For all that, Moir left him there. But he left a dead man.’

The minister stared at him, incredulous.

‘But Phemie went next night. She would have lit a light there,’ said he.

‘She saw no one above ground. You said that when Neil Gow had stopped playing and she went home to her sister, all was quiet. Depend upon it, Musgrave died in the small hours, as sick men will; Moir buried him next day and escaped at dusk.’

‘But he had no tools,’ objected Laidlaw, unconvinced.

‘If the rock is hollowed deep and there is sand and loose earth choking much of it, he did it. A man in his case makes shift to use anything.’

‘He maybe had his dirk,’ suggested the minister, his doubts a little shaken.

‘He is there, sir; believe me, he is there.’

And now Laidlaw was sitting at a short distance from the cave on a bare patch in the tangle. He had come out of its heavy atmosphere to leave room for the Englishman and the beadle, who were working inside with the pick and shovel the latter had brought up from the kirkyard. The opening tunnelled some way into the hill, narrowing as it went, but in one place at which the rock fell back in an irregular recess they had resolved to make their experiment.

The shine from the lanterns had cast up the faint outline of a mound. This decided them, this and the belief that a man engaged in a work like Moir’s would get as far from the entrance as he might.

The minister looked a little less harassed. His shyness of the Englishman’s accent was gone. like many people whose days are spent in remote places, he was intensely surprised at seeing the human side of a stranger, and he still doubted that the outer world contained others of a similar sort. His face grew a little wistful as he remembered that they would go down the hill to part at its foot. The Englishman would ride to Stirling to meet the Edinburgh coach. He fell to musing. The early autumn sunshine, warm and very clear, and the healing quiet of the braes were pleasant to him. He could see his small world lying below like a plaything on the floor. In his vigil last night he had burnt his tallow till within a short time of daylight, for his sermon had been interrupted by the clamour that had arisen and he was fain to finish it. He was not much of a preacher and the task of writing it was a weekly load upon him. He had got up early too, and gone to Phemie’s cottage; for there was something he wanted to say to her and his self-distrust made him eager to put this also behind him, lest he should lose courage. But his visit was accomplished and he was now more at ease. His eyes closed wearily; they ached this morning from his midnight labours as his heart had ached last night from his own shortcomings. But now he forgot all these as he dozed among the broom and the fluffy thistledown …

He awoke to a touch on his shoulder. The Englishman was beside him. For a moment, bewildered, he could not recollect where he was, nor how he had come to such a place.

‘Look,’ said the other, who was holding out a little discoloured silver snuff-box, ‘his name is on it. We have found him.’

IN THE KIRKTON of Dalmain the two men bade each other good-bye, but said it as those do who are to meet again. The Englishman wished Musgrave to lie under the wall of its spectral kirk; and when the necessary steps should be taken to establish the dead man’s identity in the eyes of the law, his skeleton, clothed in the rags of his tattered uniform, would be carried from the bosom of the hill that had sheltered it for so long and committed by Laidlaw to the earth.

‘I believe you are less troubled than you were last night,’ said the Englishman, leaning from his horse as they parted. ‘I should be happy to know it.’

The minister’s plain face brightened.

‘I have seen Phemie already,’ he replied; ‘she is to come to me to take care of the manse – my serving lass is just a silly tawpie—’

The rider pulled up a little later upon the southern brae and turned to look back. On the northern one, two dark figures were doing the like. The taller of these, seeing him, took off his bonnet and stood holding it high in air. It was Neil Gow.