THE SEA-FAIRY OF FRENCH FORELAND.
ONCE I saw a fairy King, and it was in the Castle up-by. The Castle took fire, and a fine blaze it made at the foot of Dunchaach. A boy, I ran with the rest to carry out the MacCailein's rich gear, and behold! I wandered and lost my way in that large place where is a window for every day in the year. Up the long stairs and through the far passages, and over the shining sounding floors went I, barefoot, with a feared eye on every hole and corner. At every door it was, “Surely now I'm with the folks at the fire”; but every door was a way into a quieter quietness, and the Castle was my own. I sat at last on a black chair that had a curious twisted back, and the tears went raining on the lap of my kilt.
Long, long I sat, and sore I grat, my mind full, not so much of my way lost, but of the bigness of things, and the notion of what it would be to have to live in a castle at night, with doors on every hand for ghosts to rap at, and crooked passages without end for gowsty winds to moan in. Thinks I, “The smallest hut in the town for me, with all plain before me, with the one door shut and my face to it, and the candlelight seeking into every crack and cranny!”
It was then that the fairy King came on me out of the sewed cloth hanging on the wall.
He was a dainty wee man, in our own tartan, with a steel plate on his breast baronly-style, and strange long curly hair. I ran my wet eyes down seven silver buttons the shape of salmon on the front of his vest before I let myself go, but go I must, so I put fast heels on my fright. I galloped with a frozen tongue through miles of the Duke's castle till a door brought me out on the grass of Cairnban, in front of the friendly bleeze that my own folks were pouring the stoups of water on.
That was the only time the quiet folk and I came to a meeting, though our family was always gleg at seeing things. A cousin-german once saw the fairy bull that puts up in Loch Steallaire-bhan behind the town. It came on a jaunt to the glen in the guise of a rich maiden, and my cousin, the son of the house, made love to her. One night—in a way that I need not mention—he found himself in her room combing down her yellow hair, and what was among her hair but fine sand that told the whole story? “You are a gruagach of the lake!” cried the lad, letting the comb drop on the floor, with his face white, and the thing tarned to its own shape and went bellowing to the shore.
And there was a man—blessings with him! for he's here no more—who would always be going up on Sithean Sluaidhe to have troke with the wee people on that fine knowe. He would bring them tastings of honey and butter to put them in a good key, and there they would dance by the hour for his diversion to the piping of a piper who played on drones of grass with reeds made of the midge's thrapple.
Still, in all my time I know but one body who could find the way to the den of the Sea-Fairies, and she was a lass whose folks were in Ceannmor at the time the French traffickers were coming here to swap casks of claret wine for the finest herrings in the wide world.
It was her custom to go down on the hot days to the shore at the Water-foot when the tide was far out, and the sand was crusting with salt in the sun, and the wrack-balls burst with the heat, and the water lay flat like oil, and lazy, for want of a breath of wind. Sometimes it would be the French Foreland she would seek, and sometimes Dalchenna; but when the Frenchmen were at the Foreland she kept clear of it by the counsel of a cautious father.
Up the loch they would sail, the Frenchmen, in their gabberts, and hove-to with their casks to change for the cured herrings. A curious people they were, not much like our own good Gaels in many a way, but black-avised and slim; still with some of the Gael's notions about them too, such as the humour of fighting and drinking and scouring the countryside for girls.
But it happened that one year they left behind them only a wine of six-waters, and did some other dirty tricks forbye, and there was for long a feud, so that the Frenchmen behooved to keep to their boats and bargain with the curers over the gun'le.
On a day at that time, Marseli that I speak of had been bathing at the Ceannmor rocks—having a crave for salt water the Ceannmor folks nowadays are not very namely for. When she had her gown on again, she went round to Dalchenna sands and out far to the edge of the tide, where she sat on a stone and took to the redding of her hair, that rolled in copper waves before the comb—rich, thick, and splendid.
Before her, the tide was on the turn so slow and soft that the edge of it lifted the dry sand like meal. All about on the weedy stones the tailor-tartans leaped like grasshoppers, the spout-fish stuck far out of the sand and took a fresh gloss on their shells from the sun.
You might seek from shire to shire for a handsomer maid. She was at the age that's a father's heartbreak, rounding out at the bosom and mellowing at the eyes; her skin was like milk, and the sigh was at her lips as often as the song. But though she sighed, it was not for the Ceannmor fishermen, coarse-bearded, and rough in their courting; for she had vanity, from her mother's side, and queer notions. The mother's family had been rich in their day, with bards and thoughtful people among them.
“If a sea-fairy could see me now,” said Marseli, “it might put him in the notion to come this way again,” and she started to sing the child-song—
From the lobbies that lie below the sea.”
“So agad el” cried a gull at her back, so plainly that she tamed fast to look, and there was the fairy before her!
Up got Marseli, all shaking and ready to fly, but the fairy-man looked harmless enough as he bowed low to her, and she stayed to put her hair behind her ears and draw her gown closer.
He was a little delicate man the smallest of Marseli's brothers could have put in his oxter, with close curled hair, and eyes as black as Ridir Lochiel's waistcoat. His clothes were the finest of the fine, knee-breeches with silk hose, buckled brogues, a laced jacket, and a dagger at his belt—no more like a fairy of the knowe than the green tree's like the gall.
“You're quick enough to take a girl at her word,” said Marseli, cunning one, thinking to hide from him the times and times she had cried over the sands for the little sea-folks to come in with the tide.
The fairy-man said something in his own tongue that had no sense for the girl, and he bowed low again, with his bonnet waving in his hand, in the style of Charlie Munn the dancer.
“You must speak in the Gaelic,” said Marseli, still a bit put about; “or if you have not the Gaelic, I might be doing with the English, though little I care for it.”
“Faith,” said the fairy-man, “I have not the Gaelic, more's the pity, but I know enough English to say you're the prettiest girl ever I set eyes on since I left my own place.”
(Ho! hoi was he not the cunning one? The fairies for me for gallantry!)
“One of such judgment can hardly be uncanny,” thought Marseli, so she stayed and cracked with him in the English tongue.
The two of them walked up over the sand to the birch-trees, and under the birches the little fellow asked Marseli to sit down.
“You are bigger than I looked for in a sea-fairy,” said she when the crack was a little bit on.
“A fairy?” said the little fellow, looking at her in the flash of an eye.
“Yes! Though I said just now that you took one fast at her word, the truth to tell is, that always when the tide went out I sang at your back-doors the song you heard to-day for the first time. I learned it from Beann Francie in the Horse Park.”
The stranger had a merry laugh—not the roar of a Finne fisherman—and a curions way of hitching the shoulders, and the laugh and the shoulder-hitch were his answer for Marseli.
“You'll be a king in the sea—in your own place—or a prince maybe,” said the girl, twisting rushes in her hand.
The man gave a little start and got red at the face.
“Who in God's name said so?” asked he, looking over her shoulder deep into the little birch-wood, and then uneasy round about him.
“I guessed it,” said Marseli. “The kings of the land-fairies are by-ordinar big, and the dagger is ever on their hips.”
“Well, indeed,” said the little fellow, “to say I was king were a bravado, but I would not be just denying that I might be Prince.”
And that way their friendship began.
At the mouth of many nights when the fishing-boats were off at the fishing, or sometimes even by day when her father and her two brothers were chasing the signs of sea-pig and scart far down on Tarbert, Marseli would meet her fairy friend in a cunning place at the Black-water-foot, where the sea puts its arms well around a dainty waist of lost land. Here one can see Loch Finne from Ardno to Strathlachlan: in front lift the long lazy Cowal hills, and behind is Auchnabreac wood full of deer and birds. Nowadays the Duke has his road round about this cunning fine place, but then it lay forgotten among whins that never wanted bloom, and thick, soft, salty grass. Two plantings of tall trees kept the wind off, and the centre of it beaked in warm suns. It was like a garden standing out upon the sea, cut off from the throng road at all tides by a cluster of salt pools and an elbow of the Duglas Water.
Here the Sea-Fairy was always waiting for the girl, walking up and down in one or other of the tree clumps. He had doffed his fine clothes after their first meeting for plain ones, and came douce and soberly, but aye with a small sword on his thigh.
The girl knew the folly of it; but tomorrow was always to be the last of it, and every day brought new wonders to her. He fetched her rings once, of cunning make, studded with, stones that tickled the eye in a way the cairngorm and the Cromalt pearl could never come up to.
She would finger them as if they were the first blaeberries of a season and she was feared to spoil their bloom, and in a rapture the Sea-Fairy would watch the sparkle of eyes that were far before the jewels.
“Do your folk wear these?” she asked.
“Now and then,” he would say, “now and then. Ours is a strange family: to-day we may have the best and the richest that is going, to-morrow who so poor, without a dud to our backs and a mob crying for our heads?”
“Ochanorie! They are the lovely rings any way.”
“They might be better; they would need to be much better, my dear, to be good enough for you.”
“For me!”
“They're yours—for a kiss or two,” and he put out an arm to wind round the girl's waist.
Marseli drew back and put up her chin and down her brows.
“'Stad!” she cried. “We ken the worth of fairy gifts in these parts. Your rings are, likely enough, but chuckie-stones if I could but see them. Take them back, I must be going home.”
The little man took the jewels with a hot face and a laugh.
“Troth,” he said, “and the same fal-fals have done a lover's business with more credit to them before this. There are dames in France who would give their souls for them—and the one they belong to.”
“You have travelled?” said Marseli. “Of course a sea-fairy-”
“Can travel as he likes. You are not far wrong, my dear. Well, well, I ken France! O France, France! round and about the cold world, where's your equal?”
His eyes filled with tears, and the broad-cloth on his breast heaved stormily, and Marseli saw that here was some sad thinking.
“Tell me of Fairydom,” said she, to change him off so dull a key.
“'Tis the same, the same. France and fairyland, 'tis the same, self-same, madame,” said the sea-prince, with a hand on his heart and a bow.
He started to tell her of rich and rolling fields, flat and juicy, waving to the wind; of country houses lost and drowned among flowers. “And all the roads lead one way,” said he, “to a great and sparkling town. Rain or shine, there is comfort, and there is the happy heart! The windows open on the laughing lanes, and the girls lean out and look after us, who prance by on our horses. There is the hollow hearty hoof-beat on the causey stones; in the halls the tables gleam with silver and gold; the round red apples roll over the platter among the slim-stemmed wine-beakers. It is the time of soft talk and the head full of gallant thoughts. Then there are the nights warm and soft, when the open doors let out the laughing and the gliding of silk-shooned feet, and the airs come in heavy with the scent of breckan and tree!”
“On my word,” said Marseli, “but it's like a girl's dream!”
“You may say it, black-eyes, mo chridhe! The wonder is that folk can be found to live so far astray from it. Let me tell you of the castles.” And he told Marseli of women sighing at the harp for far-wandered ones, or sewing banners of gold. Trumpets and drums and the tall chevaliers going briskly by with the jingle of sword on heel on the highway to wars, every chevalier his love and a girl's hands warm upon his heart.
That night Marseli went early abed to wander in fairydom.
Next day the sea-gentleman had with him a curious harp that was not altogether a harp, and was hung over the neck by a ribbon.
“What hast here?” asked Marseli.
“A salve for a sore heart, lass! I can play on it some old tunes, and by the magic of it I'm back in my father's home and unafeared.”
He drew his white fingers over the strings and made a thin twittering of music sweeter than comes from the clarsach-strings, but foreign and uncanny. To Marseli it brought notions of far-off affairs, half sweet, half sad, like the edges of dreams and the moods that come on one in loneliness and strange places, and one tune he played was a tune she had heard the French traffickers sing in the bay in the slack seasons.
“Let me sing you a song,” said he, “all for yourself.”
“You are bard?” she said, with a pleased face.
He said nothing, but touched on the curious harp, and sang to the girl's eyes, to the spark of them and the dance of them and the deep thought lurking in their corners, to her lips crimson like the rowan and curled with pride, to the set of breast and shoulder, and the voice melting on the tongue.
It was all in the tune and the player's looks, for the words were fairy to the girl, but so plain the story, her face burned, and her eyes filled with a rare confusion.
“'Tis the enchantment of fairydom,” said she. “Am not I the oinseach to listen? I'll warrant yon have sung the same to many a poor girl in all airts of the world?”
The little one laughed and up with the shoulders. “On my sword,” quo' he, “I could be content to sing to you and France for all my time. Wilt come with a poor Prince on a Prince's honour?”
He kissed her with hot lips; his breath was in her hair; enchantment fell on her like a plaid, but she tore herself away and ran home, his craving following at her heels.
That night Marseli's brothers came to knives with the French traffickers, and the morning saw the black-avised ones sailing out over-sea for home. Back to French Foreland they came no more, and Finne-side took to its own brewing for lack of the red wine of France.
That, too, was the last of the Sea-Fairy.
Marseli went to the Water-foot and waited, high tide and low; she cried the old child tune and she redded her hair, but never again the little man with the dainty clothes, and the sword upon his thigh.
SHUDDERMAN SOLDIER
BEYOND the Beannan is the Bog of the Fairy-Maid, and a stone-put farther is the knowe where Shudderman Soldier died in the snow. He was a half-wit who was wise enough in one thing, for he knew the heart of a maid, and the proof of it came in the poor year, when the glen gathered its com in boats, and the potato-shaws were black when they burst the ground, and the catechist's horse came home by Dhuloch-side to a widow that reckoned on no empty saddle. And this is the story.
“Ho, ho, suas e!” said the nor' wind, and the snow, and the black frost, as they galloped down Glenaora like a leash of strong dogs. It was there was the pretty business! The Salachary hills lost their sink and swell in the great drifts that swirled on them in the night; the dumb white swathes made a cold harvest on the flats of Kilmune; the frost gripped tight at the throats of the burns, and turned the Salmon-Leap to a stack of silver lances. A cold world it was, sure enough, at the mouth of day! The bloodshot sun looked over Ben Ime for a little, and that was the last of him. The sheep lay in the shoulder of the hill with the drift many a crook's-length above them, and the cock-of-the-mountain and the white grouse, driven on the blast, met death with a blind shock against the edge of the larch-wood.
Up from Lochow, where Kames looks over to Cruachan, and Cruachan cocks his grey cap against Lorn, a foolish lad came that day for a tryst that was made by a wanton maid unthinking. Half-way over the hill he slipped on the edge of a drift, and a sore wound in the side he got against a splinter of the blue stone of the Quey's Rock; but he pushed on, with the blood oozing through his cut vest. Yet, in spite of himself, he slept beyond the Bog of the Fairy-Maid. Mo-thruaigh! mo-thruaigh!
The Fairy-Maid came and covered him up close and warm with a white blanket that needs no posting, and sang the soft tune a man hears but once, and kissed him on the beard as he slept in the drift—and his name had been Ellar Ban.
Round by the king's good highroad came Solomon the carrier with his cart, and many a time he thought of turning between Carnus and Kilmune. But he was of the stuff of Clan Coll, and his mare was Proud Maisie. He had a boll of meal from Portinsherrich, from the son of a widow woman who was hungry in Inneraora and waiting for that same.
“No Ellar here yet!” he said at Kilmune when he asked, and they told him. “Then there's a story to tell, for if he's not here, he's not at Karnes, and his grave's on the grey mountain.”
Later came Luath, the collie of Ellar, slinking through the snow wet and weary, and without wind enough for barking. 'Twas as good as the man's ghost.
The shepherds came in from the fanks, and over from the curling at Carlonan, to go on a search.
Long Duncan of Drimfem, the slim swarthy champion, was there before them. He was a pretty man—the like never tied a shoe in Glenaora—and he was the real one who had Mairi's eye, which the dead fellow thought had the laugh only for him. But, lord! a young man with a good name with the shinty and the clachneart has other things to think of than the whims of women, and Donacha never noticed.
“We'll go up and see about it—about him at once, Main,” he said, sick-sorry for the girl. All the rest stood round pitying, because her kists were said to be full of her own spinning for the day that was not to be.
Mairi took him to the other side of the peat-stack, and spoke with a red face.
“Is it any use your going till the snow's off the hill, Drimfem?” she said, biting at the corner of her brattie, and not looking the man in the face.
“Dhia gleiih sinn! it's who knows when the white'll be off the snouts of these hills, and we can't wait till—— I thought it would ease your mind.” And Donacha looked at the maid stupid enough. For a woman with her heart on the hill, cold, she was mighty queer on it.
“Yes, yes; but it's dangerous for you to go up, and the showers so heavy yet. It's not twenty finger-lengths you can see in front of you, and you might go into the bog.”
“Is't the bog I would be thinking of, Main? It's little fear there is of that, for here is the man that has been on Salachary when the mist was like smoke, as well as when the spittle froze in my mouth. Oh, I'm not the one to talk; but where's the other like me?”
Mairi choked. “But, Dona—— but, Drimfem, it's dead Ellar must be; and—and—you have a widow mother to mind.” Donacha looked blank at the maid. She had the sweet face, yon curve of the lip, and the soft turn of the neck of all Arthur's children, ripe of the cheek, with tossed hair like a fairy of the lake, and the quirk of the eye that never left a plain man at ease if he was under the threescore. There were knives out in the glen for many a worse one.
It was the lee of the peat-stack they stood in, and the falling flakes left for a while without a shroud a drop of crimson at the girl's feet. She was gripping tight at her left wrist under the cover of her apron till the nails cut the flesh. There was the stress of a dumb bard's sorrow in her face; her heart was in her eyes, if there had been a woman to see it; but Drimfern missed it, for he had no mind of the dance at the last Old New Year, or the ploy at the sheep-dipping, or the nuts they cracked on the hot peats at Hallowe'en.
The girl saw he was bound to go. He was as restless as if the snow was a swarm of seangans. She had not two drops of blood in her lips, but she tried to laugh as she took something out from a pocket and half held it out to him. He did not understand at first, for if he was smart on the caman ball, 'twas slow in the ways of women he was.
“It's daft I am. I don't know what it is, Donacha, but I had a dream that wasn't canny last night, and I'm afraid, I'm afraid,” said the poor girl. “I was going to give you——”
Drimfern could not get the meaning of the laugh, strained as it was. He thought the maid's reason was wandering.
She had, whatever it was—a square piece of cloth of a woman's sewing—into the man's hand before he knew what she would be after; and when his fingers closed on it, she would have given a king's gold to get it back. But the Tullich lads, and the Paymaster's shepherd from Lecknamban, with Dol' Splendid and Francie Ro, in their plaids, and with their crooks, came round the gable-end. Luath, who knew Glenaora as well as he knew Creag Cranda, was with them, and away they went for the hill. All that Donacha the blind one said, as he put the sewing in his pocket to look at again, was, “Blessing with thee!” for all the world like a man for the fair.
Still the nor' wind, and the snow, and the dark frost said “Suas e!” running down the glen like the strong dogs on the peching deer; and the men were not a hundred yards away from the potato-pit when they were ghosts that went out altogether, without a sound, like Drimendorran's Grey Dame in the Red Forester's story.
A white face on a plump neck stood the sting of the storm dourly, though the goodwife said it would kill her out there, and the father cried “Shame!” on her sorrow, and her a maiden. “Where's the decency of you?” says he, fierce-like; “if it was a widow you were this day you couldn't show your heart more.” And into the house he went and supped two cogies of brose, and swore at the sgalag for noticing that his cheeks were wet.
When the searchers would be high on the hill Shudderman came on the maid. He was a wizened, daft old one, always in a tinker Fencible's tartan trews and scarlet doublet. He would pucker his bare brown face like a foreign Italian, and whistle continually. The whistle was on his face when he came on the girl standing behind the byre, looking up with a corpse's whiteness where the Beannan should be.
“Te-he! Lord! but we're cunning,” said the soldier. “It's a pity about Ellar, is it not, white darling?”
Mairi saw nothing, but swallowed a sob. Was this thing to know her secret, when the wise old women of the glen never guessed it? There was something that troubled her in his look.
The wee creature put his shoulder against the peats, and shoved each hand up the other sleeve of his doublet, while he whistled soft, and cunningly looked at the maid. The cords of her neck were working, and her breast heaved sore, but she kept her teeth tight together.
“Ay, ay, it's an awful thing, and him so fond, too,” he went on; and his face was nothing but a handful of wrinkles and peat-smoke. It was a bigger ploy for the fool than a good dinner.
“What—who—who are you talking about, you poor amadan?” cried Mairi, desperately.
“Och, it's yourself that'll know. They're saying over at Tullich and upbye at Miss Jean's, Accurach, that it's a bonny pair you would make, you and Ellar. Yonnat Yalla says he was the first Lochow man ever she saw that would go a mile out of his way for a lass, and I saw him once come the roundabout road by Cladich because it was too easy to meet you coming the short cut over the hill. Oh! there's no doubt he was fond, fond, and-”
“Amadan!” cried the maid, with no canny light in her eyes.
“Hoots! You're not angry with me, darling. I ken, I ken. Of course Drimfern's the swanky lad too, but it's not very safe this night on yon same hill. There's the Bog of the Fairy-Maid that never was frozen yet, and there's the Quey's Rock, and—te-he! I wouldn't give much for some of them not coming back any more than poor Ellar. It's namely that Drimfem got the bad eye from the Glenurchy woman come Martinmas next because of his taking up with her cousin-german's girl, Morag Callum.”
“Yon spàgachd doll, indeed!”
“God, I do not know about that! but they're telling me he had her up at all the reels at Baldy Geepie's wedding, whatever, and it's a Maclean tartan frock she got for the same—I saw it with my own eyes.”
“Lies, lies, lies,” said the girl to herself her lips dry, her hands and feet restless to do some crazy thing to kill the pain in her heart.
She was a little helpless bird in the hands of the silly one.
He was bursting himself inside with laughing, that couldn't be seen for the snow and the cracks on his face.
“But it's not marriages nor tartan you'll be thinking on, Mairi, with your own lad up there stiff. Let Morag have Drimfem——”
“You and your Morag! Shudderman, if it was not the crazy one you were, you would see that a man like Donacha Drimfern would have no dealings with the breed of MacCallum, tinker children of the sixty fools.”
“Fools here or fools there, look at them in the castle at Duntroon! And Drimfern is——”
“Drimfern again! Who's thinking of Drimfern, the mother's big pet, the soft, soft creature, the poor thing that's daft about the shinty and the games—and—and—— Go inbye, haverer, and——oh, my heart, my heart!”
“Cripple Callum,” whistled the daft wee one; and faith it was the great sport he was having! The flame sparkled in the lass's eyes; she stamped furiously in the snow. She could have gone into the house, but the Shudderman would follow, and the devil was in him, and she might just as well tell her story at the cross-roads as risk. So she stayed.
“Come in this minute, O foolish one!” her mother came to the door and craved; but no.
The wee bodach took a wee pipe from his big poke and started at the smoking. When his match went out the dark was almost flat on the glen, and a night-hag complained with a wean's cry in the planting beyond the burn. At each draw of the pipe the eyes of the soldier glinted like a ferret's, and like any ferret's they were watching. He put in a word between-while that stabbed the poor thing's heart, about the shame of love in maids uncourted, and the cruelty of maids that cast love-looks for mischief. There were some old havers about himself here and there among the words: of a woman who changed her mind and went to another man's bed and board; of sport up the glen, and burials beyond; and Ellar Ban's widow mother, and the carry-on of Drimfem and the Glenurchy woman's cousin-german's girl. And it was all ravelled, like the old story Loch Finne comes up on the shore to tell when the moon's on Sithean Sluaidhe.
The girl was sobbing sore. “Man!” she said at last, “give me the peace of a night till we know what is.” The amadan laughed at her, and went shauchling down to the cotter's, and Mairi went in out of the darkness.
The hours passed and passed, and the same leash of strong dogs were scouring like fury down Glenaora, and the moon looked a little through a hole, and was sickly at the sight, and went by in a hurry. A collie's bark in the night came to the house where the people waited round the peats, and “Oh, my heart!” said poor Mairi.
The father took the tin lantern with the holes in it, and they all went out to the house-end. The lantern-light stuck long needles in the night as it swung on the goodman's finger, and the byre and the shed and the peat-stack danced into the world and out of it, and the clouds were only an arm's-length overhead.
The men were coming down the brae in the smother of snow, carrying something in a plaid. The dog was done with its barking, and there was no more sound from the coming ones than if they were ghosts. Like enough to ghosts they looked. No one said a word till the goodman spoke.
“You have him there?” he said.
“Ay, beatmachi leis! all that there is of him,” said the Paymaster's man; and they took it but an' ben, where Mairi's mother had the white dambrod cloth she had meant for herself, when her own time came, on the table.
“It's poor Ellar, indeed,” said the goodman, noticing the fair beard.
“Where's Donacha? where's Drimfern?” cried Mairi, who had pulled herself together and come in from the byre-end, where she had waited to see if there was none of the watchers behind.
The Paymaster's man was leaning against the press-door, with a face like the clay; Dol' Splendid was putting a story in the sgalag's ear; the Tullich men were very busy on it taking the snow off their boots. Outside the wind had the sorry song of the curlew.
“Me-the-day! it's the story of this there is to tell,” at last said Francie Ro, with a shake of the head. “Poor Drimfern——”
“Drimfem—ay, where's Drimfem in all the world?” said the goodman, with a start. He was standing before his girl to keep her from seeing the thing on the table till the wife had the boots covered. It was the face of a cailleach of threescore Mairi had.
“It's God knows! We were taking Ellar there down, turn about resting. It was a cruel business, for the drifts. There's blood on his side where he fell somewhere, and Drimfern had to put a clout on it to keep the blood off his plaid. That's Drimfern's plaid. When Donacha's second turn was over up at the bog, we couldn't get a bit of him. He's as lost as the deer the Duke shot, and we looked and whistled for hours.” The maid gave a wee turn to the door, shivered, and fell like a clod at her mother's feet.
“Look at yon, now! Am not I the poor father altogether?” said the old man with a soft lip to his friends. “Who would think, and her so healthy, and not married to Ellar, that she would be so much put about? You'll excuse it in her, lads, I know, for she's not twenty till the dipping-time, and the mother maybe spoiled her.”
“Och, well,” said the Splendid one, twisting his bonnet uneasy in his hands, “I've seen them daft enough over a living lad, and it's no great wonder when this one's dead.” They took the maid beyond to the big room by the kitchen, and a good mother's morning for Drimfern was set by the men. They had a glass before going home, and when they were gone the bochdans came in the deep hollow of the night and rattled the windows and shook the door-sneck; but what cared yon long white thing on the goodwife's dambrod tablecloth?
At the mouth of day there was one woman with a gnawing breast looking about the glen-foot among the snow for the Shudder-man soldier. She found him snedding the shaft of a shinny-stick at the Stronmagachan Gate, and whistling as if it was six weeks south of Whitsunday and the woods piping in the heat.
“I ken all about it, my white little lamb,” he said with a soft speech. “All about them finding Ellar, and losing a better man, redding put her to rights. A search in the maybe, but any way one that some will miss more.”
“God's heavy, heavy on a woman!” said the poor child. “I gave Donacha a sampler with something sewn on it yesterday, and the men, when they go up the hill to look for him to-day, will get it on him—and—it would——”
“Ay, ay, ay! I ken, my dear. We'll put that right, or I'm no soldier.” And the little man cocked his bonnet on his head like a piper. Then he was sorry for the pride of it, and he pulled it down on his face, and whistled to stop his nose from jagging.
“My heart! my bruised heart! they're saying sorry things of Ellar, and Donacha dead. The cotter's wife was talking this morning, and it'll send me daft!”
“Blind, blind,” quo' the soldier; “but you'll not be shamed, if the amadan can help it.”
“But what can you do, my poor Shudderman? And yet—and yet—there's no one between Carnus and Croit-bhile I can speak to of it.”
“Go home, white love, and I'll make it right,” said the daft one, and faith he looked like meaning it.
“Who knows?” thought the girl. Shudderman was chief enough with the Glenurchy woman, and the Glenurchy woman sometimes gave her spells to her friends. So Mairi went home half comforted.
A cogie of brose and a bit braxy in his belly, and a farl of cake in his poke, and out stepped the Shudderman with never a word to any one about the end of his journey. Dol' Splendid had told him the story of the night before, and whereabout Drimfern was lost, close beyond the Beannan. He would find the body and the sampler, he promised himself as he plunged up the brae at Taravh-dubh. The dogs were nearly as furious as the night before, and the day's eye was blear. Hours passed, and the flats of Kilmune were far below.
There was nothing in all the world but whiteness, and a silly old bodach with a red coat trailing across it. Shudderman Soldier sank his head between his shoulders as he pushed himself up with his hazel crook, his tartan trews in rags about his ankles, his doublet letting in the teeth of the wind here and there, and at the best grudging sore its too tight shelter for his shrunk body. He had not the wind to whistle, but he gasped bits of “Faill-il-o,” and between he swore terribly at the white hares that jerked across in front of him with the ill-luck of a lifetime on their backs.
If it was the earth that was white, the sky was not far behind it; if they were paper, it would take schooling to write on them straight, for there wasn't a line between them. The long sweep of Balantyre itself was lost, and the Beannan stone was buried. The creature's brogues were clods of snow, ugly, big, without a shape: his feet were lumps of ice; his knees shook under his frail skinful of bones; but, by the black stones, 'twas the man's heart he had!
When the snow made a paste on his win'ard cheek, he had it off with a jerk of the head, and one of the jerks put off his bonnet. Its frozen ribbons had been whipping his eyes, and he left it where it fell, with never a glance over his shoulder. His hair clogged with flakes that kept the frost even after they fell. It was a peching effort for the foot of the Beannan brae.
“Poor lamb, poor Mairi, calf of my heart!” gasped the soldier to himself. He was staggering half blind through the smother of snow, now and then with a leg failing below him, and plunging him right or left. Once his knees shut like a gardener's gully, and he made a crazy heap in the drift. His tired wrists could hardly bring him up, and the corpse of the world swung in his eyes when he was on his feet again and trying to steady himself.
There's a green knoll beside the Bog of the Fairy-Maid, where the wee folks dance reels when the moon's on it, and there the old fellow struggled to. He thought if he was up there he would see some sign of what he wanted. Up he pushed, with the hazel cromag bending behind him, and his brogues slipping on the round snow-soles. Up he went, with the pluck of a whole man, let alone a poor silly object; up he went till he got his foot on the top, and then his heart failed, for he saw nothing of what he sought.
“I'll look again when I'm out of this foolish sleep,—I'll see better when I waken,” said the poor amadan; and behold the dogs were on him! and he was a man who was.
For all that, the story tells, Drimfern was no ghost. When he was lost he found Kames, where the Callum girl was that came to his fire-end later and suckled his clan. And Ellar's mother, dressing her son's corpse in the house at Kilmune, found on his wound a sampler that went with him to his long home in green Inishail. Its letters, sewn in the folly of a woman, told her story:—
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.”
WAR.
I.
IT was the pause of the morning, when time stands, and night and day breathe hard ere they get to grips. A cock with a foggy throat started at the crowing, down at Slochd-a-Chubair. Over from Stron a shrewd thin wind came to make stir among the trees in the Duke's big garden, and the crows rasped their beaks on the beech-branches, for they knew that here was the day's forerunner. Still and on the town slept, stretched full out, dour set on the business. Its quirky lanes and closes were as black as the pit. There was only one light in all the place, and a big town and a bonny it is, house and house with high outside stairs and glass windows, so that the wonder is the King himself does not take thought to stay in it, even if it were only for the comfort of it and the company of the MacCailein Mor. Only one light, and that was splashing, yellow, and mixed with a thick peat-reek, out of Jean Rob's open door, facing the bay, on the left, on the Lowlands road. Now and then Jean would come to the door and stand, a blob of darkness in the yellow light, to see if the day was afoot on Ben Ime, or to throw a look at the front of the town for signs of folk stirring.
“Not a peep, not a peep! Sleep! sleep! Few of them part with a man to-day with so sore a heart as Jean Rob.”
Then back to her Culross girdle, for she was at the baking of bannocks to go in her husband's dorlach for the wars.
She had not shut an eye all night. Rob snored at her side slow and heavy while she lay on her back on a bed of white hay, staring up at the black larch joists glinting with the red scad of the peats. She was a Crarae woman, and that same people were given to be throng with the head, and she kept thinking, thinking even on. At last she could bide it no longer, so she up with a leap on the floor to face a new day and all the luck of it.
About the luck being good or ill there might be little doubt. It was the year after they started at the building of the Castle, a laggard spring at the hind-end of a cruel winter, with not a fin in all the seas for the poor fishermen, and black mutton at six Saxon shillings the side. And what the wars were about Jean Rob or her like little knew or cared. Very little, like enough, as is the way with wars, but any way wars there were: the Duke and his House would have it that their people must up and on with belt and target, and away on the weary road like their fathers before them. Some said it was the old game with the Inverlochy dogs (rive them and seize them!); others, that some bastard was at variance with the Duke about the Papist Stewarts—a silly lad called Tearlach with a pack of wild Irishers and daddy Macleans and Macdonalds and Camerons from the Isles and the North at his back.
“Bundle and Go” it was any way in Campbell country from Cruachan to Cowal, from Cantyre to the march of Keppochan, and that's the fine rolling land of sappy grasses and thick woods. In the heart and midst of it Duke Archie played dirl on the boss of his shield on a cold March day, and before night swords were at the sharping from shore to shore. That's war for ye—
quicker than flame, surer than word of mouth, and poor's the man who says “What for?” to his chief.
Rob Donn, for all that, was vassal to no man; for he was come of the swordsmiths of the glen, and they had paper to show that their rigs were held for no service other than beating out good fighting steel on the anvil. Poor, as he was, he could wear one feather in his bonnet if his fancy was on feathers, and no one bragged more of his forefolk. But Elrigmor—a thin old man with little stomach for quarrels—offered twenty pounds English for a man to take his place with the Campbells; and Rob took the money and the loan of Elrigmor's sword, half for the sake of the money and half for the sake of a bit play with Sir Claymore.
Said he to his wife, jingling the Geordies in his hand on the day he got them, “Here's the price of a hero; and troth it's little enough for a good armsmith's blood!”
“Don't say it, Rob,” said Jean.
“Och! I am but laughing at thee, good-wife. Brave dogs would they be that would face the tusks of the Diarmaid boars. Like the wind on the chaff—troosh!—we'll scatter them! In a week I'll be home.”
“In a week?”
“To be sure, Jean. I'll buy with the money a stot or two on the road to bring back with me, for there's little lifting in the Duke's corps, more's the pity! My grandfather seldom came back from the wars without a few head of cattle before him.”
So the money went in Rob Donn's sporran, and Jean would have bit her tongue out before she would crave for part o't from a man going among strangers and swords.
The bairn had but one word for her father from then till he started, and that was “Cockade.” What it was the little one never knew, but that it was something braw and costly, a plaything for a father to go far off for.
“Two or three of them, my white love!” would Rob Donn say, fond and hearty. “They'll be as thick as nuts on the ground when we're done of the gentry that wear them on their bonnets.” And he had a soft wet eye for the child, a weakling, white and thin, never quite the better of the snell winds of winter. If cockades, indeed, were to be had for the fighting of a fortnight without sleep, Rob Donn would have them for her.
So now was the morning to put on fighting gear and go on the foray for white cockades.
By-and-by a cruisie-light crept out at the gables of the town, and the darkness filled with the smell of new peat burning. Aora, spluttering past Jean Rob's door with a gulp into the Cooper's Pool, made, within the house, the only sound of the morning.
Jean scraped the meal off her hands and went again to the door to look about and listen.
“Ay, ay! up at last,” she said to herself.
“There's the Major's light, and Kate Mhor up for the making of his breakfast, and a lowe in the weaver's shed. The Provost's is dark—poor man!—it's little his lady is caring!”
She was going to turn about and in, when the squeal of a bagpipe came from the town-head, and the player started to put his drones in order. “Ochan! ochan!” said poor Jean, for here, indeed, was the end of her hopes; there was no putting back from the Duke's errand. She listened a little to the tuning as if it was the finest of piobaireachds, and it brought a curious notion to her mind of the first reel she danced with her man to the squeezing of that same sheepskin. Then the reeds roared into the air of “Baile Inneraora.”
“Och a Dhé! siod e nis! Eirich, eirich, Rob!” she cried in to the man among the blankets, but there was no need for the summons. The gathering rang far ben in the chambers of sleep, and Rob was stark awake, with a grasp at his hip for the claymore.
“Troth! I thought it was the camp! and them on us,” he laughed foolishly in his beard.
Up and down the street went Dol' Dubh, the Duke's second piper, the same who learned the art of music right well from the Macruimens of Boreraig, and he had as sweet a finger on the chanter as Padruig himself, with the nerve to go round the world. Fine, fine it was for him, be sure, to be the summoner to battle! Lights jumped to the little lozens of the windows and made streaks on the cracks of the doors, and the Major's man came from his loft ganting with a mouth like the glee'd gun, a lantern swinging on a finger, making for the stable to saddle his master's horse. A garret window went up with a bang, and Peter MacIntyre, wright, pat out a towsy head and snuffed the air. It was low tide in the two bays, and the town was smelling less of peat-reek than of sea-wrack and saltness. One star hung in the north over Dunchuach.
“They have the good day for starting the jaunt, whatever,” said the wright. “If I was a stone or two lighter, and had one to look after the shop, it's off on this ploy I would be too.” He took in his head, the top nodding briskly on his Kilmarnock bonnet, and wakened the wife to help him on with his clothes.