Jaunty Jock and Other Stories

She had the radiant sleekness of the country’s girls, – a strapping, rosy healthfulness, a jaunty carriage, and a dancing and inviting eye: she seemed to Wanlock for a moment like a stranger, and she carried with her scents of the cool night winds.

For a moment she looked at him, astounded – he had so suddenly grown very old and his mouth so strangely twisted; then she gave a little cry, and hurried to his bedside, and he saw that the shawl she wore was pinned upon her shoulder by the luckless brooch!

It glowed portentous and commanding like a meteor; with the squeal of a netted hare he grasped at his walking-cane, and struck with fury at the object of his terror. The woman shrank before the blow; the rattan swept the candle from the table to the floor: a fountain of flame from the hell that is under life sprang up the bedstead curtains!

With an oath old Wanlock staggered from his bed in time to save himself, but the Manor-house was doomed – at dawn the bitter smell of woody ashes blew across the valley.

From the shabby lodge-house midway in the avenue he looked astonished at the girdling hills, to see them all so steadfast and indifferent: the sun came up and sailed across the heavens, heedless of the smouldering space among the pines, where turret and tower more lofty than themselves had seemed, a day ago, eternal. The rat squeaked as it burrowed for a new home under fallen lintels; the raven croaked upon the cooling hearth. And night came down on these charred relics, swiftly – night, the old conquering rider, ally of despair! It appeared to Wanlock like a thousand years since he had had a careless heart, yet the ruin of his home for the moment seemed less dreadful than its cause, and the new light it had thrown on his situation. Never before was he so desolate, so desolate! – forsaken of God and man. All night his flaming house had stained the clouds: the crackle of its timbers and the thunder of its falling walls appeared to fill the whole world’s ear, yet none had come to his assistance: as if abhorred by all, he was left to dree his weird alone among the ashes.

One thing only he had saved besides his life – a bottle of Bordeaux. He had seized upon it as the only friend from whom he could look for consolation. Even the maid and the dog had fled from him, but she returned at nightfall to the cheerless lodge to make it habitable.

“Where in the name of God got ye yon accursed thing?” he asked her, and she told him, flushing, she had got it from a lover.

“A lover!” quo’ Wanlock, regarding his helpless arm, remembering happier things. “Are there still folk loving?”

“It’s what he would like to be,” said the woman awkwardly; “but the man’s a dwarfish waif I daren’t hardly venture through the woods for; ye’ll have heard him screech for a month past. He haunts me like a bogle, comes from I kenna where – a crazy, crooked, gangrel body, worse than the Blednock brownie. He was squatted at the door last night when I got home, and he gave me the brooch, – I – I wish to the Lord I had never seen it.”

“Where is it now?” asked Wanlock.

“I – I have given it back,” the girl replied with some confusion.

“Ye were wise in that,” said her master. “Woe upon the owner of the havock brooch! for I have had it too, and the heart of me is withered in my bosom. No brooch, no human brooch, I’ll warrant! but a clot of the blood that dried on the spear of the Roman soldier. Ye have trafficked with the devil and have worn his seal. It has robbed me of my money and my home, my son, my daughter, and the power of my members – look at that blemished arm!”

She watched him for a moment, fascinated, seeing now his palsy; he beheld the pity in her eye, resenting it, and caught with his able hand at the bottle of Bordeaux which he poured with a splash into a tarnished goblet. He was about to drink it when he saw a look of fear and speculation come upon her face.

“May the Lord forgive me, Manor!” she exclaimed, “but I gave the brooch this morning to your son!”

“To my son!” he cried, incredulous. “How could you have seen him? He is far from here.”

“He never left the country,” cried the woman, weeping, “and I have known his hiding all the time. He saw the brooch upon me, was furious when he heard how I had got it, and made me give it up.”

“Furious,” said Wanlock curiously. “Had he the right?”

“None better,” said the woman, looking on the floor.

“I might have guessed,” said Wanlock bitterly. “‘Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.’ He has the brooch! Then are his footsteps dogged by the Accuser of the Brethren, for the gem is hell’s bell-wether!”

The night was tranquil, windless, frosty-cold; deep in the valley’s labyrinth lay the lodge-house, far from other dwellings, alien, apparently forgot, with the black plumes of the trees above it. In pauses of the conversation something troubled Wanlock like the fear of ambush; some absorbing sense of breathing shadows: silence itself took on a substance and stood listening at the threshold.

Suddenly there came a scratching at the door, and Wanlock blenched.

“God save us!” said the girl, and her face like sleet.

“I dare ye to open the door!” cried Wanlock, shaking.

“It is the dog,” she said – “the dog come back; I left it in the company of Stephen.”

“There is some compact here with things beyond me,” said her master. “Open – open the door and see.”

One glance only Wanlock gave at the grey dog trotting in, and fell to weeping when he saw a neckcloth pinned upon it with the brooch! He reeled a moment at the sight, then fumbled at the neckcloth and drew out the gem. With a curse he cast it in the heart of the burning peats, where it lay a little, blinking rubescent, then rolled among the cooler ashes. He moved expectant to the open door where the dog was leading: the girl took up the gem, which stung her like an asp upon the palm; she dropped it in the goblet where it hissed and cooled among the wine, and at that moment rose the cry of Stephen in the avenue.

With a snatch at the burning candles she ran out behind her master where he stood with head uplifted looking at the squadrons of the stars. She was the first to reach the figure lying on the ground, and putting down the candlesticks, she raised the lad, whose face was agonised and white like sapple of the sea. He had no eyes for them, but, trembling, searched with a fearful glance the cavern of the night made little by the candles burning in the breathless avenue.

“Stephen! Stephen! what has happened?” cried the girl, her lips upon his cheek.

“It – it caught me,” gasped the lad. “I ran from The Peel, and it caught me, clawed upon my thrapple, and left me here. I pinned my neckcloth on the dog.”

He leaned upon the woman, helpless in his terror. “Bring me the wine!” she bade her master, and old Wanlock stumbled back to fetch it.

“Oh, Stephen! Stephen! what were ye doing at The Peel?” she asked. “Ye know ye promised me – ”

“I could not help myself,” he answered, “knowing what was in the well. ’Twas that that kept me in the country. I got it out and was making off with it when I heard the eerie laugh again. I dropped the plunder at the very door of Mellish when the de’il was on me. He was no bigger than a bairn, but he kept upon my heels till I got here, and then he leaped.”

“My Stephen! oh, my Stephen!” cried the woman, fondling him upon her breast, and he hung within her arms. A snarl came from the shadows: a creature smelling of mould and rotten leafage, clothed as in ragged lichens, contorted like a pollard willow, leaped at the throat of Stephen and crushed it like a paste, then fled with the bittern call.

Old Wanlock heard the woman shriek: he tottered with the goblet from the lodge and came within the circuit of the candles where she knelt beside her lover.

“He’s gone! he’s gone!” she cried, demented. “The devil has strangled him,” and at the moment passed the ghost of Stephen Wanlock.

“I knew it,” said the father – “very well I knew it: the sixth blow! There is no discharge in this war!” His head seemed filled with wool: his blood went curdling in its channels, and he staggered on his feet. Raising the goblet till it chattered on his teeth, he drained it at a draught, and the woman, heedless, straightened out the body of his son.

She heard her master choke: she turned to see his face convulsed, his eyeballs staring, and the empty flagon falling from his hand.

“The brooch! the brooch!” she screamed: a gleam of comprehension passed for a moment over Wanlock’s purpling visage: he raised his arms, and stumbling, fell across the body of his son!

THE FIRST-FOOT

I

THE husband, with an eye of warm alacrity and a welcome manner that should have made his fortune in some livelier hostel than the dreary inn of Flanders Moss, regarded the stranger with compassion. The wife, an acrid peevish body, ill-content to be roused from bed at such an hour, plucked at the strings of her night-cap, loosened and fastened them half a dozen times as if they bridled a wroth that choked her, and looked with candid disapproval on the customer standing in the kitchen with the rain running from his wrap-rascal coat on the fresh-caumed flagstones of her floor.

“H’m!” she coughed; “it’s no’ a time o’ the year when we’re lookin’ for many visitors to the Flanders Moss.”

“But still-and-on ye’re welcome,” said the husband hastily, tender of the stranger’s feelings. “I think there’s an egg or twa, Jennet, isna there? And – and the hen; or – or yon ham?”

But Jennet tied her cap more tightly down upon her ears.

“I was making for the port o’ Menteith,” explained the stranger in a breath, compassing the chamber and the characters before him at a gled’s glance, feeling himself master of them both, flinging off the wrap-rascal and throwing his bonnet on the hearth to dry. It struck the stone with a sodden slap that would have made plain the kind of night from which he had escaped, even if the ear had not more eloquently indicated that the house was in the very throat of tempest.

“Ye’ll no hae pack nor powney?” said the dame sourly, with a pursed mouth, surveying the young man’s hose, the clinging knee-breeches, the stained red waistcoat, and the shabby green cutaway coat, but more intent upon the dissipation of his shaven boyish countenance, the disorder of his hair, and his reckless eye.

“Tut, tut! It’s no’ a nicht for a cadger’s dog, let alane a powney,” said the amiable host; and then, in a beseeching tone that told the nature of their partnery, “Am I richt or am I wrang, Jennet? At least there maun be an egg or twa.”

The wife scowled at her mate, and said emphatically that eggs were out of the question, and the hour was quite ridiculous.

“I’m no heedin’,” said the stranger; “I had a meal of a kind at Fintry. What I want’s a bed.”

“Ye’ll get that!” cried the landlord heartily, glad to be assured of a speedy return to his own blankets. “There’s a snug bed ben, and ye’ll hae a’ the better appetite for breakfast.”

“But what’s your security?” demanded madam, and the goodman sighed.

Her customer shrugged his shoulders, threw himself in a chair, and thrust his feet out to the fire of turf.

“God,” said he.

“Sir?” she queried.

“I said God was my security,” remarked the stranger.

“Ye couldna hae better!” cried the innkeeper, and drawing a chopin of ale for the pious gentleman, beat down by the very gust of his geniality the rising opposition of the woman’s manner.

Twenty minutes later Black Andy went to bed in the ben. He went with his boots on, for he had, in the very act of stooping to unlace them by the light of a tallow candle, seen that which led at the end to the rout of any thought of sleep. The candle, which he had placed on the floor the better to see his knots untied, threw a beam under a heavy oaken kist in the corner, and glinted on a ring of brass that oddly hung from the bottom of the box. He threw up the lid, to find no more than a pile of homespun blanketing; then turned the kist quietly on its side, to learn that the ring was on the latch of a secret bottom. He opened it: the shallow space between the false bottom and the real one seemed at first to hold no more than rags; but fumbling through them, he found a leather pouch with three-and-twenty guineas – madam’s private hoard! As he counted the money silently on the covering of the bed, the storm that held the Flanders Moss in its possession seemed for the while to hold its breath, as he did his own, so that he could hear the thud of his heart and each reluctant tick of the kitchen clock.

For an hour he lay in darkness, wide awake, with the pouch in his breast. The murmur of voices in the kitchen ceased, its light went out; the lonely inn on the edge of the moor was black, and wholly lost in the privacy of the night.

The innkeeper, easy man! turned his face to the box-bed wall in the kitchen, and counted sheep going through a dip-tank till the fleece of the last of them spread, and spread, and spread, like a magic counterpane, and fell on him at last, smothering him to sleep. It was his goodwife’s elbow. For she lay on her back, her hands hollowed behind her ears, her cap-strings loose, and listened for some other sound than the creak of the roof-cabars, the whistle of the thatch, and tempest’s all-pervading symphony. Ah! it would have been an easier night for her if she had had some chance to put her money elsewhere; it was her evil star that had surely brought this man to Flanders Moss on a Hogmanay, the very night when all honest bodies ought to be at their own fire-ends!

A sound in the room where he lay brought her sitting up in bed with every sense alert. A sash squeaked: she shook her husband out of the fleece of sleep, and they jumped together to the chamber door. It opened to a gale that blew right through it from an open window: their lodger was gone!

“I kent it!” cried the woman furiously, and shrieked to realise, by a feel of the hand in the dark, that her hoard had been discovered.

“Dod, now, that’s droll!” said her husband, scratching his head. “And him had such good security!”

II

Black Andy, with the pouch of guineas comforting the breast of him like liquor, so that he hardly missed his wrap-rascal or his bonnet that were drying by the kitchen fire, ran along the broken road for Kippen. It was like the bed of a burn, and like a rested monster rose the storm afresh from the Hieland hills. One glance he gave behind him at a step or two from the window whence he burst; so dark was the night that the inn in the womb of it was quite invisible. He looked over his shoulder for a second time, having run for a little, and saw the bobbing of a lanthorn. His amiable host was already on his track, and Kippen was plainly no place for Black Andy.

With an oath he quitted the road, ran down through a clump of hazel, and launched on the rushy moss that (as the story goes) had once been a part of the sea that threshed on Stirling rock.

Like many another man, this scamp, unskilled in thievery, had no sooner escaped the urgent danger of arrest than he rued his impulsive fall to the temptation of a bag of clinking coins. He had drunk through an idle youth, and others had paid the lawing; he had diced and cheated; he had borrowed and left unpaid; he had sold bad cattle and denied his warrandice; he had lived without labour – all of which is no more different from theft than tipsyness is different from drunkenness. But hitherto he had stopped on the verge of crime denominate, and it was his mother’s only glad reflection when the thought of his follies haunted her pillow. Had the temptation of the inn-wife’s gold come to him on another night, and elsewhere, he could have turned the broad of his back on it, and mustered conquering hosts of fear and of expedience to his support; the misfortune was that it found him in a desperate hour. For a week he had been in a most jovial company with some Campsie lairds; he had spent the price of his father’s horse to the last plack royally, as if he had been a bonnet-laird himself, and New Year’s Day should have seen him back at Blaruisken with the price of the horse, or else it meant disaster. Even that consideration scarcely would have made a thief of him (as he thought now), but for the wife in the Moss of Flanders inn; she had so little deserved to be the sole possessor of such gold. A comely wife, a civil wife, a reasonably hospitable wife (as he argued with himself), might have kept her money on the doorstep, and he would have been the last to meddle with it; but this one deserved some punishment, and he was, in a fashion, Heaven’s instrument. The husband – true, he was a kindly soul (and here the instrument of Heaven found his sophistry weak a little at the knees); but Black Andy had an intuition that the hoard was secret, even from the husband, and he guessed aright the wife would never report the actual nature of her loss.

He seemed the more contemptible a thief to himself, because in one particular he had blundered like a fool. For yonder, beiking before the innkeeper’s fire, were his wrap-rascal and his bonnet – the first, at least, a clue to his identity. There was not another wrap-rascal than his own in his native parish; the very name of the coat had seemed too sinister for his mother, and the garment made him kenspeckle over half the shire. Though the folk in the inn of the Flanders Moss might never before have cast an eye on him, they had but to hang that garment on a whin-bush at their door to learn his history from scores of passers-by.

Thinking thus – not any penitent in him, but the poltroon that is in all of us at the thought of discovery by the world of what we really are – the woman’s money coldly weighed upon his bosom like a divot. By God! a rotten bargain had he made – to swap the easy mind of innocence for three days’ drinking with numskull bonnet-lairds in a Campsie tavern.

But the thing was done, with no remedy; there was nothing for it but to tramp home and meet his obligation to his father.

So busily did his mind engage with these considerations that the increase of the tempest for a little never touched his comprehension. He came to himself with a start at a stumble in a hag whose water almost reached his knees, and realised that he was ignorant of the airt he moved to, and that the passion of the night was like to shake the world in tatters. The very moss below him seemed to quiver like a bog; no rush, no heather shrub, but had its shrieking share in the cacophony of that unco hour upon the curdled spaces of the ancient sea. Black Andy put out his cold-starved hand before his face, and peered for it in vain; it might have been a hand of ebony.

For hours he laboured through that windy desert, airting, as he judged by the wind, for the north, as far away as possible from the inn of his misdoing, and weariness seemed to turn his blood to spring-well water, and his flesh to wool, so that the earthy cushion of the hags in which he sometimes stumbled tempted him to lie and sleep. The last sheuch would have done his business if he had not, sitting on its edge, beheld a glimmer of light from a window. He dragged with an effort towards it, climbed a dry-stone dyke, and felt with his hands along the back of some dwelling which he took for a shepherd’s hut, until he came upon the door. Breathlessly he leaned his shoulder to it and loudly rapped.

“First-foot!” he heard a voice exclaim, and remembered it was the New Year’s Day as the bolt shot back and he fell in the arms – of the innkeeper!

“Ye’re back, my man!” cried the innkeeper’s wife, with a face as white as sleet. “It’ll be to pay your lodging?”

“Tut, tut! never mind the lawin’. It’s the New Year’s Day, and here’s your dram,” said the genial landlord. “But, man, yon was a bonny prank to play on us! We thought ye were awa’ wi’ the wife’s best blankets.”

“But a lodgin’s aye a lodgin’,” said the wife nervously; and Andy laughed, knowing her perturbation.

“Here’s the lawin’,” he exclaimed, and banged her pouch of guineas in her hand. “Ye’ll can count it later, and I’m awa’ to my bed again. Were ye really feared I was gaein’ to cheat ye?”

It was the innkeeper who answered; his wife was off with her hoardings.

“Not me!” he said. “I kent ye had Grand Security.”

ISLE OF ILLUSION

I

MACDONNELL of Morar, on the summer of his marriage, and when the gladness of it was still in every vein, sailed his sloop among the Isles. He went from sound to sound, from loch to loch, anchoring wherever the fancy took his lady, and the two of them were seeking what no one ever found nor shall find – that last and swooning pang of pleasure the Isles in summer weather, either at dawn or dusk, seem always to promise to youth and love. At night they lay in bays in the dim light of the cool north stars, or in the flush of the sunken sun that made wine of the sea-waves, and the island cliffs or the sandy shores seemed populous with birds or singing fisher-people.

It was very well then with Morar.

His wife was still a girl. In the mornings, when she came on deck with her hair streaming and the breeze making a banner of her gown, her gaiety surging to her breast in song, she seemed to him and to his men like one of the olden sea princesses told about in Gaelic stories, born from foam for the happiness and hurt of the hearts of men. She was lovely, tender, and good, and he himself, with those that knew him best, was notable for every manly part. One thing only he had a fear of in his bride – that, as had happened with others before, and perhaps with himself, a day might come to him when the riddle of her would be read, her maidenly sweet mystery revealed; when he could guess with certainty what was in the deep dark wells of her eyes, and understand, without a word, the cause for every throb of her bosom. To have her for ever with a part to baffle and allure, as does the sea in its outer caves, and as do the dawns in Highland glens – that was the wish of Morar.

The captain of the yacht, who, having no passion for her, knew her, some ways, better than her husband, perhaps, said she had what, westward in the Barra Isle he hailed from, they call the Seven Gifts for Women – content and gentleness, looks and liking, truth, simplicity, and the fear of God. To him and to his men – gallant fellows from Skye, and somewhat jealous of her that she was not of the isles herself, but a stranger – she was at least without a flaw. One time they thought it might be temper was her weakness, for she walked the deck with pride and had a noble carriage of the head, but the tiniest cloud of temper never crossed her honeymoon. Indeed, it was well with Morar.

And it seemed that summer as if the very clime befriended him, for there never blew but the finest breezes, and the sun was almost constant in the sky. Round all the remoter isles they sailed – even Harris and the Uists, and the countless lesser isles that lie to the west of Scotland, – an archipelago where still are dwelling the ancient Gaelic gods, whereto at least they come at sunset and sit upon the sands communing, so that sailors knowing the language, and having the happy ear, can sometimes catch far off at sea deep murmurs of the olden world that others take for the plash of waters.

Morar’s wife put the yacht into every creek. She loved the little creeks, she doted on the burns going mourning through the darkness, and on the sound of tides on shallow shores; it was her great delight sometimes to sleep on land below a canvas shelter, bathe at morning in the inner pools, walk barefooted on the sand, or stand on rocky promontories facing the rising sun, with her hair tumultuous. Her first breakfast then was the wild berry, her morning drink the water from island wells.

“I could live on the berries,” she would say to her husband. “Oh, I love them!”

“Doubtless, mochree,” would he answer her, laughing. “Faith! it’s my notion they have been growing all these years in the islands waiting just for you; their bloom is on your cheek; it’s the berry stain that was on your lips since ever I knew you. But for a common person like myself there is a certain seduction in a sea-trout or a herring. Madam, I wish you joy of your wild berries, and indeed I love the taste of them – on your lips, – but let me press on you a simple cabin-biscuit, though it suffers from having been baked by the hand of man.”