'Nothing ails me,' she replied.  It was strange; but she spoke and
stood at that moment like a lady of degree, drawn upward by her
aspirations.

'You speak to me, by God, as though you scorned me!' cried the
husband.

The man's passion was always formidable; she had often looked on
upon its violence with a thrill, it had been one ingredient in her
fascination; and she was now surprised to behold him, as from afar
off, gesticulating but impotent.  His fury might be dangerous like
a torrent or a gust of wind, but it was inhuman; it might be feared
or braved, it should never be respected.  And with that there came
in her a sudden glow of courage and that readiness to die which
attends so closely upon all strong passions.

'I do scorn you,' she said.

'What is that?' he cried.

'I scorn you,' she repeated, smiling.

'You love another man!' said he.

'With all my soul,' was her reply.

The wine-seller roared aloud so that the house rang and shook with
it.

'Is this the--?' he cried, using a foul word, common in the South;
and he seized the young countryman and dashed him to the ground.
There he lay for the least interval of time insensible; thence fled
from the house, the most terrified person in the county.  The heavy
measure had escaped from his hands, splashing the wine high upon
the wall.  Paradou caught it.  'And you?' he roared to his wife,
giving her the same name in the feminine, and he aimed at her the
deadly missile.  She expected it, motionless, with radiant eyes.

But before it sped, Paradou was met by another adversary, and the
unconscious rivals stood confronted.  It was hard to say at that
moment which appeared the more formidable.  In Paradou, the whole
muddy and truculent depths of the half-man were stirred to frenzy;
the lust of destruction raged in him; there was not a feature in
his face but it talked murder.  Balmile had dropped his cloak:  he
shone out at once in his finery, and stood to his full stature;
girt in mind and body all his resources, all his temper, perfectly
in command in his face the light of battle.  Neither spoke; there
was no blow nor threat of one; it was war reduced to its last
element, the spiritual; and the huge wine-seller slowly lowered his
weapon.  Balmile was a noble, he a commoner; Balmile exulted in an
honourable cause.  Paradou already perhaps began to be ashamed of
his violence.  Of a sudden, at least, the tortured brute turned and
fled from the shop in the footsteps of his former victim, to whose
continued flight his reappearance added wings.

So soon as Balmile appeared between her husband and herself, Marie-
Madeleine transferred to him her eyes.  It might be her last
moment, and she fed upon that face; reading there inimitable
courage and illimitable valour to protect.  And when the momentary
peril was gone by, and the champion turned a little awkwardly
towards her whom he had rescued, it was to meet, and quail before,
a gaze of admiration more distinct than words.  He bowed, he
stammered, his words failed him; he who had crossed the floor a
moment ago, like a young god, to smite, returned like one
discomfited; got somehow to his place by the table, muffled himself
again in his discarded cloak, and for a last touch of the
ridiculous, seeking for anything to restore his countenance, drank
of the wine before him, deep as a porter after a heavy lift.  It
was little wonder if Ballantrae, reading the scene with malevolent
eyes, laughed out loud and brief, and drank with raised glass, 'To
the champion of the Fair.'

Marie-Madeleine stood in her old place within the counter; she
disdained the mocking laughter; it fell on her ears, but it did not
reach her spirit.  For her, the world of living persons was all
resumed again into one pair, as in the days of Eden; there was but
the one end in life, the one hope before her, the one thing
needful, the one thing possible--to be his.



CHAPTER I--THE PRINCE



That same night there was in the city of Avignon a young man in
distress of mind.  Now he sat, now walked in a high apartment, full
of draughts and shadows.  A single candle made the darkness
visible; and the light scarce sufficed to show upon the wall, where
they had been recently and rudely nailed, a few miniatures and a
copper medal of the young man's head.  The same was being sold that
year in London, to admiring thousands.  The original was fair; he
had beautiful brown eyes, a beautiful bright open face; a little
feminine, a little hard, a little weak; still full of the light of
youth, but already beginning to be vulgarised; a sordid bloom come
upon it, the lines coarsened with a touch of puffiness.  He was
dressed, as for a gala, in peach-colour and silver; his breast
sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons; for he had held a
levee in the afternoon and received a distinguished personage
incognito.  Now he sat with a bowed head, now walked precipitately
to and fro, now went and gazed from the uncurtained window, where
the wind was still blowing, and the lights winked in the darkness.

The bells of Avignon rose into song as he was gazing; and the high
notes and the deep tossed and drowned, boomed suddenly near or were
suddenly swallowed up, in the current of the mistral.  Tears sprang
in the pale blue eyes; the expression of his face was changed to
that of a more active misery, it seemed as if the voices of the
bells reached, and touched and pained him, in a waste of vacancy
where even pain was welcome.  Outside in the night they continued
to sound on, swelling and fainting; and the listener heard in his
memory, as it were their harmonies, joy-bells clashing in a
northern city, and the acclamations of a multitude, the cries of
battle, the gross voices of cannon, the stridor of an animated
life.  And then all died away, and he stood face to face with
himself in the waste of vacancy, and a horror came upon his mind,
and a faintness on his brain, such as seizes men upon the brink of
cliffs.

On the table, by the side of the candle, stood a tray of glasses, a
bottle, and a silver bell.  He went thither swiftly, then his hand
lowered first above the bell, then settled on the bottle.  Slowly
he filled a glass, slowly drank it out; and, as a tide of animal
warmth recomforted the recesses of his nature, stood there smiling
at himself.  He remembered he was young; the funeral curtains rose,
and he saw his life shine and broaden and flow out majestically,
like a river sunward.  The smile still on his lips, he lit a second
candle and a third; a fire stood ready built in a chimney, he lit
that also; and the fir-cones and the gnarled olive billets were
swift to break in flame and to crackle on the hearth, and the room
brightened and enlarged about him like his hopes.  To and fro, to
and fro, he went, his hands lightly clasped, his breath deeply and
pleasurably taken.  Victory walked with him; he marched to crowns
and empires among shouting followers; glory was his dress.  And
presently again the shadows closed upon the solitary.  Under the
gilt of flame and candle-light, the stone walls of the apartment
showed down bare and cold; behind the depicted triumph loomed up
the actual failure:  defeat, the long distress of the flight,
exile, despair, broken followers, mourning faces, empty pockets,
friends estranged.  The memory of his father rose in his mind:  he,
too, estranged and defied; despair sharpened into wrath.  There was
one who had led armies in the field, who had staked his life upon
the family enterprise, a man of action and experience, of the open
air, the camp, the court, the council-room; and he was to accept
direction from an old, pompous gentleman in a home in Italy, and
buzzed about by priests?  A pretty king, if he had not a martial
son to lean upon!  A king at all?

'There was a weaver (of all people) joined me at St. Ninians; he
was more of a man than my papa!' he thought.  'I saw him lie
doubled in his blood and a grenadier below him--and he died for my
papa!  All died for him, or risked the dying, and I lay for him all
those months in the rain and skulked in heather like a fox; and now
he writes me his advice! calls me Carluccio--me, the man of the
house, the only king in that king's race.'  He ground his teeth.
'The only king in Europe!'  Who else?  Who has done and suffered
except me? who has lain and run and hidden with his faithful
subjects, like a second Bruce?  Not my accursed cousin, Louis of
France, at least, the lewd effeminate traitor!'  And filling the
glass to the brim, he drank a king's damnation.  Ah, if he had the
power of Louis, what a king were here!

The minutes followed each other into the past, and still he
persevered in this debilitating cycle of emotions, still fed the
fire of his excitement with driblets of Rhine wine:  a boy at odds
with life, a boy with a spark of the heroic, which he was now
burning out and drowning down in futile reverie and solitary
excess.

From two rooms beyond, the sudden sound of a raised voice attracted
him.

'By . . .




HEATHERCAT




CHAPTER I--TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT



The period of this tale is in the heat of the KILLING-TIME; the
scene laid for the most part in solitary hills and morasses,
haunted only by the so-called Mountain Wanderers, the dragoons that
came in chase of them, the women that wept on their dead bodies,
and the wild birds of the moorland that have cried there since the
beginning.  It is a land of many rain-clouds; a land of much mute
history, written there in prehistoric symbols.  Strange green raths
are to be seen commonly in the country, above all by the kirkyards;
barrows of the dead, standing stones; beside these, the faint,
durable footprints and handmarks of the Roman; and an antiquity
older perhaps than any, and still living and active--a complete
Celtic nomenclature and a scarce-mingled Celtic population.  These
rugged and grey hills were once included in the boundaries of the
Caledonian Forest.  Merlin sat here below his apple-tree and
lamented Gwendolen; here spoke with Kentigern; here fell into his
enchanted trance.  And the legend of his slumber seems to body
forth the story of that Celtic race, deprived for so many centuries
of their authentic speech, surviving with their ancestral
inheritance of melancholy perversity and patient, unfortunate
courage.

The Traquairs of Montroymont (Mons Romanus, as the erudite expound
it) had long held their seat about the head-waters of the Dule and
in the back parts of the moorland parish of Balweary.  For two
hundred years they had enjoyed in these upland quarters a certain
decency (almost to be named distinction) of repute; and the annals
of their house, or what is remembered of them, were obscure and
bloody.  Ninian Traquair was 'cruallie slochtered' by the Crozers
at the kirk-door of Balweary, anno 1482.  Francis killed Simon
Ruthven of Drumshoreland, anno 1540; bought letters of slayers at
the widow and heir, and, by a barbarous form of compounding,
married (without tocher) Simon's daughter Grizzel, which is the way
the Traquairs and Ruthvens came first to an intermarriage.  About
the last Traquair and Ruthven marriage, it is the business of this
book, among many other things, to tell.

The Traquairs were always strong for the Covenant; for the King
also, but the Covenant first; and it began to be ill days for
Montroymont when the Bishops came in and the dragoons at the heels
of them.  Ninian (then laird) was an anxious husband of himself and
the property, as the times required, and it may be said of him,
that he lost both.  He was heavily suspected of the Pentland Hills
rebellion.  When it came the length of Bothwell Brig, he stood his
trial before the Secret Council, and was convicted of talking with
some insurgents by the wayside, the subject of the conversation not
very clearly appearing, and of the reset and maintenance of one
Gale, a gardener man, who was seen before Bothwell with a musket,
and afterwards, for a continuance of months, delved the garden at
Montroymont.  Matters went very ill with Ninian at the Council;
some of the lords were clear for treason; and even the boot was
talked of.  But he was spared that torture; and at last, having
pretty good friendship among great men, he came off with a fine of
seven thousand marks, that caused the estate to groan.  In this
case, as in so many others, it was the wife that made the trouble.
She was a great keeper of conventicles; would ride ten miles to
one, and when she was fined, rejoiced greatly to suffer for the
Kirk; but it was rather her husband that suffered.  She had their
only son, Francis, baptized privately by the hands of Mr. Kidd;
there was that much the more to pay for!  She could neither be
driven nor wiled into the parish kirk; as for taking the sacrament
at the hands of any Episcopalian curate, and tenfold more at those
of Curate Haddo, there was nothing further from her purposes; and
Montroymont had to put his hand in his pocket month by month and
year by year.  Once, indeed, the little lady was cast in prison,
and the laird, worthy, heavy, uninterested man, had to ride up and
take her place; from which he was not discharged under nine months
and a sharp fine.  It scarce seemed she had any gratitude to him;
she came out of gaol herself, and plunged immediately deeper in
conventicles, resetting recusants, and all her old, expensive
folly, only with greater vigour and openness, because Montroymont
was safe in the Tolbooth and she had no witness to consider.  When
he was liberated and came back, with his fingers singed, in
December 1680, and late in the black night, my lady was from home.
He came into the house at his alighting, with a riding-rod yet in
his hand; and, on the servant-maid telling him, caught her by the
scruff of the neck, beat her violently, flung her down in the
passageway, and went upstairs to his bed fasting and without a
light.  It was three in the morning when my lady returned from that
conventicle, and, hearing of the assault (because the maid had sat
up for her, weeping), went to their common chamber with a lantern
in hand and stamping with her shoes so as to wake the dead; it was
supposed, by those that heard her, from a design to have it out
with the good man at once.  The house-servants gathered on the
stair, because it was a main interest with them to know which of
these two was the better horse; and for the space of two hours they
were heard to go at the matter, hammer and tongs.  Montroymont
alleged he was at the end of possibilities; it was no longer within
his power to pay the annual rents; she had served him basely by
keeping conventicles while he lay in prison for her sake; his
friends were weary, and there was nothing else before him but the
entire loss of the family lands, and to begin life again by the
wayside as a common beggar.  She took him up very sharp and high:
called upon him, if he were a Christian? and which he most
considered, the loss of a few dirty, miry glebes, or of his soul?
Presently he was heard to weep, and my lady's voice to go on
continually like a running burn, only the words indistinguishable;
whereupon it was supposed a victory for her ladyship, and the
domestics took themselves to bed.  The next day Traquair appeared
like a man who had gone under the harrows; and his lady wife
thenceforward continued in her old course without the least
deflection.

Thenceforward Ninian went on his way without complaint, and
suffered his wife to go on hers without remonstrance.  He still
minded his estate, of which it might be said he took daily a fresh
farewell, and counted it already lost; looking ruefully on the
acres and the graves of his fathers, on the moorlands where the
wild-fowl consorted, the low, gurgling pool of the trout, and the
high, windy place of the calling curlews--things that were yet his
for the day and would be another's to-morrow; coming back again,
and sitting ciphering till the dusk at his approaching ruin, which
no device of arithmetic could postpone beyond a year or two.  He
was essentially the simple ancient man, the farmer and landholder;
he would have been content to watch the seasons come and go, and
his cattle increase, until the limit of age; he would have been
content at any time to die, if he could have left the estates
undiminished to an heir-male of his ancestors, that duty standing
first in his instinctive calendar.  And now he saw everywhere the
image of the new proprietor come to meet him, and go sowing and
reaping, or fowling for his pleasure on the red moors, or eating
the very gooseberries in the Place garden; and saw always, on the
other hand, the figure of Francis go forth, a beggar, into the
broad world.

It was in vain the poor gentleman sought to moderate; took every
test and took advantage of every indulgence; went and drank with
the dragoons in Balweary; attended the communion and came regularly
to the church to Curate Haddo, with his son beside him.  The mad,
raging, Presbyterian zealot of a wife at home made all of no avail;
and indeed the house must have fallen years before if it had not
been for the secret indulgence of the curate, who had a great
sympathy with the laird, and winked hard at the doings in
Montroymont.  This curate was a man very ill reputed in the
countryside, and indeed in all Scotland.  'Infamous Haddo' is
Shield's expression.  But Patrick Walker is more copious.  'Curate
Hall Haddo,' says he, sub voce Peden, 'or Hell Haddo, as he was
more justly to be called, a pokeful of old condemned errors and the
filthy vile lusts of the flesh, a published whore-monger, a common
gross drunkard, continually and godlessly scraping and skirling on
a fiddle, continually breathing flames against the remnant of
Israel.  But the Lord put an end to his piping, and all these
offences were composed into one bloody grave.'  No doubt this was
written to excuse his slaughter; and I have never heard it claimed
for Walker that he was either a just witness or an indulgent judge.
At least, in a merely human character, Haddo comes off not wholly
amiss in the matter of these Traquairs:  not that he showed any
graces of the Christian, but had a sort of Pagan decency, which
might almost tempt one to be concerned about his sudden, violent,
and unprepared fate.



CHAPTER II--FRANCIE



Francie was eleven years old, shy, secret, and rather childish of
his age, though not backward in schooling, which had been pushed on
far by a private governor, one M'Brair, a forfeited minister
harboured in that capacity at Montroymont.  The boy, already much
employed in secret by his mother, was the most apt hand conceivable
to run upon a message, to carry food to lurking fugitives, or to
stand sentry on the skyline above a conventicle.  It seemed no
place on the moorlands was so naked but what he would find cover
there; and as he knew every hag, boulder, and heather-bush in a
circuit of seven miles about Montroymont, there was scarce any spot
but what he could leave or approach it unseen.  This dexterity had
won him a reputation in that part of the country; and among the
many children employed in these dangerous affairs, he passed under
the by-name of Heathercat.

How much his father knew of this employment might be doubted.  He
took much forethought for the boy's future, seeing he was like to
be left so poorly, and would sometimes assist at his lessons,
sighing heavily, yawning deep, and now and again patting Francie on
the shoulder if he seemed to be doing ill, by way of a private,
kind encouragement.  But a great part of the day was passed in
aimless wanderings with his eyes sealed, or in his cabinet sitting
bemused over the particulars of the coming bankruptcy; and the boy
would be absent a dozen times for once that his father would
observe it.

On 2nd of July 1682 the boy had an errand from his mother, which
must be kept private from all, the father included in the first of
them.  Crossing the braes, he hears the clatter of a horse's shoes,
and claps down incontinent in a hag by the wayside.  And presently
he spied his father come riding from one direction, and Curate
Haddo walking from another; and Montroymont leaning down from the
saddle, and Haddo getting on his toes (for he was a little, ruddy,
bald-pated man, more like a dwarf), they greeted kindly, and came
to a halt within two fathoms of the child.

'Montroymont,' the curate said, 'the deil's in 't but I'll have to
denunciate your leddy again.'

'Deil's in 't indeed!' says the laird.

'Man! can ye no induce her to come to the kirk?' pursues Haddo; 'or
to a communion at the least of it?  For the conventicles, let be!
and the same for yon solemn fule, M'Brair:  I can blink at them.
But she's got to come to the kirk, Montroymont.'

'Dinna speak of it,' says the laird.  'I can do nothing with her.'

'Couldn't ye try the stick to her? it works wonders whiles,'
suggested Haddo.  'No?  I'm wae to hear it.  And I suppose ye ken
where you're going?'

'Fine!' said Montroymont.  'Fine do I ken where:  bankrup'cy and
the Bass Rock!'

'Praise to my bones that I never married!' cried the curate.
'Well, it's a grievous thing to me to see an auld house dung down
that was here before Flodden Field.  But naebody can say it was
with my wish.'

'No more they can, Haddo!' says the laird.  'A good friend ye've
been to me, first and last.  I can give you that character with a
clear conscience.'

Whereupon they separated, and Montroymont rode briskly down into
the Dule Valley.  But of the curate Francis was not to be quit so
easily.  He went on with his little, brisk steps to the corner of a
dyke, and stopped and whistled and waved upon a lassie that was
herding cattle there.  This Janet M'Clour was a big lass, being
taller than the curate; and what made her look the more so, she was
kilted very high.  It seemed for a while she would not come, and
Francie heard her calling Haddo a 'daft auld fule,' and saw her
running and dodging him among the whins and hags till he was fairly
blown.  But at the last he gets a bottle from his plaid-neuk and
holds it up to her; whereupon she came at once into a composition,
and the pair sat, drinking of the bottle, and daffing and laughing
together, on a mound of heather.  The boy had scarce heard of these
vanities, or he might have been minded of a nymph and satyr, if
anybody could have taken long-leggit Janet for a nymph.  But they
seemed to be huge friends, he thought; and was the more surprised,
when the curate had taken his leave, to see the lassie fling stones
after him with screeches of laughter, and Haddo turn about and
caper, and shake his staff at her, and laugh louder than herself.
A wonderful merry pair, they seemed; and when Francie had crawled
out of the hag, he had a great deal to consider in his mind.  It
was possible they were all fallen in error about Mr. Haddo, he
reflected--having seen him so tender with Montroymont, and so kind
and playful with the lass Janet; and he had a temptation to go out
of his road and question her herself upon the matter.  But he had a
strong spirit of duty on him; and plodded on instead over the braes
till he came near the House of Cairngorm.  There, in a hollow place
by the burnside that was shaded by some birks, he was aware of a
barefoot boy, perhaps a matter of three years older than himself.
The two approached with the precautions of a pair of strange dogs,
looking at each other queerly.

'It's ill weather on the hills,' said the stranger, giving the
watchword.

'For a season,' said Francie, 'but the Lord will appear.'

'Richt,' said the barefoot boy; 'wha're ye frae?'

'The Leddy Montroymont,' says Francie.

'Ha'e, then!' says the stranger, and handed him a folded paper, and
they stood and looked at each other again.  'It's unco het,' said
the boy.

'Dooms het,' says Francie.

'What do they ca' ye?' says the other.

'Francie,' says he.  'I'm young Montroymont.  They ca' me
Heathercat.'

'I'm Jock Crozer,' said the boy.  And there was another pause,
while each rolled a stone under his foot.

'Cast your jaiket and I'll fecht ye for a bawbee,' cried the elder
boy with sudden violence, and dramatically throwing back his
jacket.

'Na, I've nae time the now,' said Francie, with a sharp thrill of
alarm, because Crozer was much the heavier boy.

'Ye're feared.  Heathercat indeed!' said Crozer, for among this
infantile army of spies and messengers, the fame of Crozer had gone
forth and was resented by his rivals.  And with that they
separated.

On his way home Francie was a good deal occupied with the
recollection of this untoward incident.  The challenge had been
fairly offered and basely refused:  the tale would be carried all
over the country, and the lustre of the name of Heathercat be
dimmed.  But the scene between Curate Haddo and Janet M'Clour had
also given him much to think of:  and he was still puzzling over
the case of the curate, and why such ill words were said of him,
and why, if he were so merry-spirited, he should yet preach so dry,
when coming over a knowe, whom should he see but Janet, sitting
with her back to him, minding her cattle!  He was always a great
child for secret, stealthy ways, having been employed by his mother
on errands when the same was necessary; and he came behind the lass
without her hearing.

'Jennet,' says he.

'Keep me,' cries Janet, springing up.  'O, it's you, Maister
Francie!  Save us, what a fricht ye gied me.'

'Ay, it's me,' said Francie.  'I've been thinking, Jennet; I saw
you and the curate a while back--'

'Brat!' cried Janet, and coloured up crimson; and the one moment
made as if she would have stricken him with a ragged stick she had
to chase her bestial with, and the next was begging and praying
that he would mention it to none.  It was 'naebody's business,
whatever,' she said; 'it would just start a clash in the country';
and there would be nothing left for her but to drown herself in
Dule Water.

'Why?' says Francie.

The girl looked at him and grew scarlet again.

'And it isna that, anyway,' continued Francie.  'It was just that
he seemed so good to ye--like our Father in heaven, I thought; and
I thought that mebbe, perhaps, we had all been wrong about him from
the first.  But I'll have to tell Mr. M'Brair; I'm under a kind of
a bargain to him to tell him all.'

'Tell it to the divil if ye like for me!' cried the lass.  'I've
naething to be ashamed of.  Tell M'Brair to mind his ain affairs,'
she cried again:  'they'll be hot eneugh for him, if Haddie likes!'
And so strode off, shoving her beasts before her, and ever and
again looking back and crying angry words to the boy, where he
stood mystified.

By the time he had got home his mind was made up that he would say
nothing to his mother.  My Lady Montroymont was in the keeping-
room, reading a godly book; she was a wonderful frail little wife
to make so much noise in the world and be able to steer about that
patient sheep her husband; her eyes were like sloes, the fingers of
her hands were like tobacco-pipe shanks, her mouth shut tight like
a trap; and even when she was the most serious, and still more when
she was angry, there hung about her face the terrifying semblance
of a smile.

'Have ye gotten the billet, Francie said she; and when he had
handed it over, and she had read and burned it, 'Did you see
anybody?' she asked.

'I saw the laird,' said Francie.

'He didna see you, though?' asked his mother.

'Deil a fear,' from Francie.

'Francie!' she cried.  'What's that I hear? an aith?  The Lord
forgive me, have I broughten forth a brand for the burning, a fagot
for hell-fire?'

'I'm very sorry, ma'am,' said Francie.  'I humbly beg the Lord's
pardon, and yours, for my wickedness.'

'H'm,' grunted the lady.  'Did ye see nobody else?'

'No, ma'am,' said Francie, with the face of an angel, 'except Jock
Crozer, that gied me the billet.'

'Jock Crozer!' cried the lady.  'I'll Crozer them!  Crozers indeed!
What next?  Are we to repose the lives of a suffering remnant in
Crozers?  The whole clan of them wants hanging, and if I had my way
of it, they wouldna want it long.  Are you aware, sir, that these
Crozers killed your forebear at the kirk-door?'

'You see, he was bigger 'n me,' said Francie.

'Jock Crozer!' continued the lady.  'That'll be Clement's son, the
biggest thief and reiver in the country-side.  To trust a note to
him!  But I'll give the benefit of my opinions to Lady Whitecross
when we two forgather.  Let her look to herself!  I have no
patience with half-hearted carlines, that complies on the Lord's
day morning with the kirk, and comes taigling the same night to the
conventicle.  The one or the other! is what I say:  hell or heaven-
-Haddie's abominations or the pure word of God dreeping from the
lips of Mr. Arnot,


'"Like honey from the honeycomb
That dreepeth, sweeter far."'


My lady was now fairly launched, and that upon two congenial
subjects:  the deficiencies of the Lady Whitecross and the
turpitudes of the whole Crozer race--which, indeed, had never been
conspicuous for respectability.  She pursued the pair of them for
twenty minutes on the clock with wonderful animation and detail,
something of the pulpit manner, and the spirit of one possessed.
'O hellish compliance!' she exclaimed.  'I would not suffer a
complier to break bread with Christian folk.  Of all the sins of
this day there is not one so God-defying, so Christ-humiliating, as
damnable compliance':  the boy standing before her meanwhile, and
brokenly pursuing other thoughts, mainly of Haddo and Janet, and
Jock Crozer stripping off his jacket.  And yet, with all his
distraction, it might be argued that he heard too much:  his father
and himself being 'compliers'--that is to say, attending the church
of the parish as the law required.

Presently, the lady's passion beginning to decline, or her flux of
ill words to be exhausted, she dismissed her audience.  Francie
bowed low, left the room, closed the door behind him:  and then
turned him about in the passage-way, and with a low voice, but a
prodigious deal of sentiment, repeated the name of the evil one
twenty times over, to the end of which, for the greater efficacy,
he tacked on 'damnable' and 'hellish.'  Fas est ab hoste doceri--
disrespect is made more pungent by quotation; and there is no doubt
but he felt relieved, and went upstairs into his tutor's chamber
with a quiet mind.  M'Brair sat by the cheek of the peat-fire and
shivered, for he had a quartan ague and this was his day.  The
great night-cap and plaid, the dark unshaven cheeks of the man, and
the white, thin hands that held the plaid about his chittering
body, made a sorrowful picture.  But Francie knew and loved him;
came straight in, nestled close to the refugee, and told his story.
M'Brair had been at the College with Haddo; the Presbytery had
licensed both on the same day; and at this tale, told with so much
innocency by the boy, the heart of the tutor was commoved.

'Woe upon him!  Woe upon that man!' he cried.  'O the unfaithful
shepherd!  O the hireling and apostate minister!  Make my matters
hot for me? quo' she! the shameless limmer!  And true it is, that
he could repose me in that nasty, stinking hole, the Canongate
Tolbooth, from which your mother drew me out--the Lord reward her
for it!--or to that cold, unbieldy, marine place of the Bass Rock,
which, with my delicate kist, would be fair ruin to me.  But I will
be valiant in my Master's service.  I have a duty here:  a duty to
my God, to myself, and to Haddo:  in His strength, I will perform
it.'

Then he straitly discharged Francie to repeat the tale, and bade
him in the future to avert his very eyes from the doings of the
curate.  'You must go to his place of idolatry; look upon him
there!' says he, 'but nowhere else.  Avert your eyes, close your
ears, pass him by like a three days' corp.  He is like that
damnable monster Basiliscus, which defiles--yea, poisons!--by the
sight.'--All which was hardly claratory to the boy's mind.

Presently Montroymont came home, and called up the stairs to
Francie.  Traquair was a good shot and swordsman:  and it was his
pleasure to walk with his son over the braes of the moorfowl, or to
teach him arms in the back court, when they made a mighty comely
pair, the child being so lean, and light, and active, and the laird
himself a man of a manly, pretty stature, his hair (the periwig
being laid aside) showing already white with many anxieties, and
his face of an even, flaccid red.  But this day Francie's heart was
not in the fencing.

'Sir,' says he, suddenly lowering his point, 'will ye tell me a
thing if I was to ask it?'

'Ask away,' says the father.

'Well, it's this,' said Francie:  'Why do you and me comply if it's
so wicked?'

'Ay, ye have the cant of it too!' cries Montroymont.  'But I'll
tell ye for all that.  It's to try and see if we can keep the
rigging on this house, Francie.  If she had her way, we would be
beggar-folk, and hold our hands out by the wayside.  When ye hear
her--when ye hear folk,' he corrected himself briskly, 'call me a
coward, and one that betrayed the Lord, and I kenna what else, just
mind it was to keep a bed to ye to sleep in and a bite for ye to
eat.--On guard!' he cried, and the lesson proceeded again till they
were called to supper.

'There's another thing yet,' said Francie, stopping his father.
'There's another thing that I am not sure that I am very caring
for.  She--she sends me errands.'

'Obey her, then, as is your bounden duty,' said Traquair.

'Ay, but wait till I tell ye,' says the boy.  'If I was to see you
I was to hide.'

Montroymont sighed.  'Well, and that's good of her too,' said he.
'The less that I ken of thir doings the better for me; and the best
thing you can do is just to obey her, and see and be a good son to
her, the same as ye are to me, Francie.'

At the tenderness of this expression the heart of Francie swelled
within his bosom, and his remorse was poured out.  'Faither!' he
cried, 'I said "deil" to-day; many's the time I said it, and
DAMNABLE too, and HELLITSH.  I ken they're all right; they're
beeblical.  But I didna say them beeblically; I said them for sweir
words--that's the truth of it.'

'Hout, ye silly bairn!' said the father, 'dinna do it nae mair, and
come in by to your supper.'  And he took the boy, and drew him
close to him a moment, as they went through the door, with
something very fond and secret, like a caress between a pair of
lovers.

The next day M'Brair was abroad in the afternoon, and had a long
advising with Janet on the braes where she herded cattle.  What
passed was never wholly known; but the lass wept bitterly, and fell
on her knees to him among the whins.  The same night, as soon as it
was dark, he took the road again for Balweary.  In the Kirkton,
where the dragoons quartered, he saw many lights, and heard the
noise of a ranting song and people laughing grossly, which was
highly offensive to his mind.  He gave it the wider berth, keeping
among fields; and came down at last by the water-side, where the
manse stands solitary between the river and the road.  He tapped at
the back door, and the old woman called upon him to come in, and
guided him through the house to the study, as they still called it,
though there was little enough study there in Haddo's days, and
more song-books than theology.

'Here's yin to speak wi' ye, Mr. Haddie!' cries the old wife.

And M'Brair, opening the door and entering, found the little,
round, red man seated in one chair and his feet upon another.  A
clear fire and a tallow dip lighted him barely.  He was taking
tobacco in a pipe, and smiling to himself; and a brandy-bottle and
glass, and his fiddle and bow, were beside him on the table.

'Hech, Patey M'Briar, is this you?' said he, a trifle tipsily.
'Step in by, man, and have a drop brandy:  for the stomach's sake!
Even the deil can quote Scripture--eh, Patey?'

'I will neither eat nor drink with you,' replied M'Brair.  'I am
come upon my Master's errand:  woe be upon me if I should anyways
mince the same.  Hall Haddo, I summon you to quit this kirk which
you encumber.'

'Muckle obleeged!' says Haddo, winking.

'You and me have been to kirk and market together,' pursued
M'Brair; 'we have had blessed seasons in the kirk, we have sat in
the same teaching-rooms and read in the same book; and I know you
still retain for me some carnal kindness.  It would be my shame if
I denied it; I live here at your mercy and by your favour, and
glory to acknowledge it.  You have pity on my wretched body, which
is but grass, and must soon be trodden under:  but O, Haddo! how
much greater is the yearning with which I yearn after and pity your
immortal soul!  Come now, let us reason together!  I drop all
points of controversy, weighty though these be; I take your defaced
and damnified kirk on your own terms; and I ask you, Are you a
worthy minister?  The communion season approaches; how can you
pronounce thir solemn words, "The elders will now bring forrit the
elements," and not quail?  A parishioner may be summoned to-night;
you may have to rise from your miserable orgies; and I ask you,
Haddo, what does your conscience tell you?  Are you fit?  Are you
fit to smooth the pillow of a parting Christian?  And if the
summons should be for yourself, how then?'

Haddo was startled out of all composure and the better part of his
temper.  'What's this of it?' he cried.  'I'm no waur than my
neebours.  I never set up to be speeritual; I never did.  I'm a
plain, canty creature; godliness is cheerfulness, says I; give me
my fiddle and a dram, and I wouldna hairm a flee.'

'And I repeat my question,' said M'Brair:  'Are you fit--fit for
this great charge? fit to carry and save souls?'

'Fit?  Blethers!  As fit's yoursel',' cried Haddo.

'Are you so great a self-deceiver?' said M'Brair.  'Wretched man,
trampler upon God's covenants, crucifier of your Lord afresh.  I
will ding you to the earth with one word:  How about the young
woman, Janet M'Clour?'

'Weel, what about her? what do I ken?' cries Haddo.  'M'Brair, ye
daft auld wife, I tell ye as true's truth, I never meddled her.  It
was just daffing, I tell ye:  daffing, and nae mair:  a piece of
fun, like!  I'm no denying but what I'm fond of fun, sma' blame to
me!  But for onything sarious--hout, man, it might come to a
deposeetion!  I'll sweir it to ye.  Where's a Bible, till you hear
me sweir?'

'There is nae Bible in your study,' said M'Brair severely.

And Haddo, after a few distracted turns, was constrained to accept
the fact.

'Weel, and suppose there isna?' he cried, stamping.  'What mair can
ye say of us, but just that I'm fond of my joke, and so's she?  I
declare to God, by what I ken, she might be the Virgin Mary--if she
would just keep clear of the dragoons.  But me! na, deil haet o'
me!'

'She is penitent at least,' says M'Brair.

'Do you mean to actually up and tell me to my face that she accused
me?' cried the curate.

'I canna just say that,' replied M'Brair.  'But I rebuked her in
the name of God, and she repented before me on her bended knees.'

'Weel, I daursay she's been ower far wi' the dragoons,' said Haddo.
'I never denied that.  I ken naething by it.'

'Man, you but show your nakedness the more plainly,' said M'Brair.
'Poor, blind, besotted creature--and I see you stoytering on the
brink of dissolution:  your light out, and your hours numbered.
Awake, man!' he shouted with a formidable voice, 'awake, or it be
ower late.'

'Be damned if I stand this!' exclaimed Haddo, casting his tobacco-
pipe violently on the table, where it was smashed in pieces.  'Out
of my house with ye, or I'll call for the dragoons.'

'The speerit of the Lord is upon me,' said M'Brair with solemn
ecstasy.  'I sist you to compear before the Great White Throne, and
I warn you the summons shall be bloody and sudden.'

And at this, with more agility than could have been expected, he
got clear of the room and slammed the door behind him in the face
of the pursuing curate.  The next Lord's day the curate was ill,
and the kirk closed, but for all his ill words, Mr. M'Brair abode
unmolested in the house of Montroymont.



CHAPTER III--THE HILL-END OF DRUMLOWE



This was a bit of a steep broken hill that overlooked upon the west
a moorish valley, full of ink-black pools.  These presently drained
into a burn that made off, with little noise and no celerity of
pace, about the corner of the hill.  On the far side the ground
swelled into a bare heath, black with junipers, and spotted with
the presence of the standing stones for which the place was famous.
They were many in that part, shapeless, white with lichen--you
would have said with age:  and had made their abode there for
untold centuries, since first the heathens shouted for their
installation.  The ancients had hallowed them to some ill religion,
and their neighbourhood had long been avoided by the prudent before
the fall of day; but of late, on the upspringing of new
requirements, these lonely stones on the moor had again become a
place of assembly.  A watchful picket on the Hill-end commanded all
the northern and eastern approaches; and such was the disposition
of the ground, that by certain cunningly posted sentries the west
also could be made secure against surprise:  there was no place in
the country where a conventicle could meet with more quiet of mind
or a more certain retreat open, in the case of interference from
the dragoons.  The minister spoke from a knowe close to the edge of
the ring, and poured out the words God gave him on the very
threshold of the devils of yore.  When they pitched a tent (which
was often in wet weather, upon a communion occasion) it was rigged
over the huge isolated pillar that had the name of Anes-Errand,
none knew why.  And the congregation sat partly clustered on the
slope below, and partly among the idolatrous monoliths and on the
turfy soil of the Ring itself.  In truth the situation was well
qualified to give a zest to Christian doctrines, had there been any
wanted.  But these congregations assembled under conditions at once
so formidable and romantic as made a zealot of the most cold.  They
were the last of the faithful; God, who had averted His face from
all other countries of the world, still leaned from heaven to
observe, with swelling sympathy, the doings of His moorland
remnant; Christ was by them with His eternal wounds, with dropping
tears; the Holy Ghost (never perfectly realised nor firmly adopted
by Protestant imaginations) was dimly supposed to be in the heart
of each and on the lips of the minister.  And over against them was
the army of the hierarchies, from the men Charles and James Stuart,
on to King Lewie and the Emperor; and the scarlet Pope, and the
muckle black devil himself, peering out the red mouth of hell in an
ecstasy of hate and hope.  'One pull more!' he seemed to cry; 'one
pull more, and it's done.  There's only Clydesdale and the
Stewartry, and the three Bailiaries of Ayr, left for God.'  And
with such an august assistance of powers and principalities looking
on at the last conflict of good and evil, it was scarce possible to
spare a thought to those old, infirm, debile, ab agendo devils
whose holy place they were now violating.

There might have been three hundred to four hundred present.  At
least there were three hundred horses tethered for the most part in
the ring; though some of the hearers on the outskirts of the crowd
stood with their bridles in their hand, ready to mount at the first
signal.  The circle of faces was strangely characteristic; long,
serious, strongly marked, the tackle standing out in the lean brown
cheeks, the mouth set and the eyes shining with a fierce
enthusiasm; the shepherd, the labouring man, and the rarer laird,
stood there in their broad blue bonnets or laced hats, and
presenting an essential identity of type.  From time to time a
long-drawn groan of adhesion rose in this audience, and was
propagated like a wave to the outskirts, and died away among the
keepers of the horses.  It had a name; it was called 'a holy
groan.'

A squall came up; a great volley of flying mist went out before it
and whelmed the scene; the wind stormed with a sudden fierceness
that carried away the minister's voice and twitched his tails and
made him stagger, and turned the congregation for a moment into a
mere pother of blowing plaid-ends and prancing horses; and the rain
followed and was dashed straight into their faces.  Men and women
panted aloud in the shock of that violent shower-bath; the teeth
were bared along all the line in an involuntary grimace; plaids,
mantles, and riding-coats were proved vain, and the worshippers
felt the water stream on their naked flesh.  The minister,
reinforcing his great and shrill voice, continued to contend
against and triumph over the rising of the squall and the dashing
of the rain.

'In that day ye may go thirty mile and not hear a crawing cock,' he
said; 'and fifty mile and not get a light to your pipe; and an
hundred mile and not see a smoking house.  For there'll be naething
in all Scotland but deid men's banes and blackness, and the living
anger of the Lord.  O, where to find a bield--O sirs, where to find
a bield from the wind of the Lord's anger?  Do ye call THIS a wind?
Bethankit!  Sirs, this is but a temporary dispensation; this is but
a puff of wind, this is but a spit of rain and by with it.  Already
there's a blue bow in the west, and the sun will take the crown of
the causeway again, and your things'll be dried upon ye, and your
flesh will be warm upon your bones.  But O, sirs, sirs! for the day
of the Lord's anger!'

His rhetoric was set forth with an ear-piercing elocution, and a
voice that sometimes crashed like cannon.  Such as it was, it was
the gift of all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or
identity.  Their images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the
moor and the rainy hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-
piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and
the withdrawal of the sun.  An occasional pathos of simple
humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the
homely tissue.  It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine,
and redolent of the soil.

A little before the coming of the squall there was a different
scene enacting at the outposts.  For the most part, the sentinels
were faithful to their important duty; the Hill-end of Drumlowe was
known to be a safe meeting-place; and the out-pickets on this
particular day had been somewhat lax from the beginning, and grew
laxer during the inordinate length of the discourse.  Francie lay
there in his appointed hiding-hole, looking abroad between two
whin-bushes.  His view was across the course of the burn, then over
a piece of plain moorland, to a gap between two hills; nothing
moved but grouse, and some cattle who slowly traversed his field of
view, heading northward:  he heard the psalms, and sang words of
his own to the savage and melancholy music; for he had his own
design in hand, and terror and cowardice prevailed in his bosom
alternately, like the hot and the cold fit of an ague.  Courage was
uppermost during the singing, which he accompanied through all its
length with this impromptu strain:


'And I will ding Jock Crozer down
No later than the day.'


Presently the voice of the preacher came to him in wafts, at the
wind's will, as by the opening and shutting of a door; wild spasms
of screaming, as of some undiscerned gigantic hill-bird stirred
with inordinate passion, succeeded to intervals of silence; and
Francie heard them with a critical ear.  'Ay,' he thought at last,
'he'll do; he has the bit in his mou' fairly.'

He had observed that his friend, or rather his enemy, Jock Crozer,
had been established at a very critical part of the line of
outposts; namely, where the burn issues by an abrupt gorge from the
semicircle of high moors.  If anything was calculated to nerve him
to battle it was this.  The post was important; next to the Hill-
end itself, it might be called the key to the position; and it was
where the cover was bad, and in which it was most natural to place
a child.  It should have been Heathercat's; why had it been given
to Crozer?  An exquisite fear of what should be the answer passed
through his marrow every time he faced the question.  Was it
possible that Crozer could have boasted? that there were rumours
abroad to his--Heathercat's--discredit? that his honour was
publicly sullied?  All the world went dark about him at the
thought; he sank without a struggle into the midnight pool of
despair; and every time he so sank, he brought back with him--not
drowned heroism indeed, but half-drowned courage by the locks.  His
heart beat very slowly as he deserted his station, and began to
crawl towards that of Crozer.  Something pulled him back, and it
was not the sense of duty, but a remembrance of Crozer's build and
hateful readiness of fist.  Duty, as he conceived it, pointed him
forward on the rueful path that he was travelling.  Duty bade him
redeem his name if he were able, at the risk of broken bones; and
his bones and every tooth in his head ached by anticipation.  An
awful subsidiary fear whispered him that if he were hurt, he should
disgrace himself by weeping.  He consoled himself, boy-like, with
the consideration that he was not yet committed; he could easily
steal over unseen to Crozer's post, and he had a continuous private
idea that he would very probably steal back again.  His course took
him so near the minister that he could hear some of his words:
'What news, minister, of Claver'se?  He's going round like a
roaring rampaging lion. . . .




Footnotes:


{1} From the Sydney Presbyterian, October 26, 1889.

{2a}  Theater of Mortality, p. 10; Edin. 1713.

{2b}  History of My Own Times, beginning 1660, by Bishop Gilbert
Burnet, p. 158.

{2c}  Wodrow's Church History, Book II. chap. i. sect. I.

{2d}  Crookshank's Church History, 1751, second ed. p. 202.

{2e}  Burnet, p. 348.

{3a}  Fuller's Historie of the Holy Warre, fourth ed. 1651.