Witch Wood

John Buchan

PROLOGUE

Time, my grandfather used to say, stood still in that glen of his. But the truth of the saying did not survive his death, and the first daisies had scarcely withered on his grave before a new world was knocking at the gate. That was thirty years ago, and to-day the revolution is complete. The parish name has been changed; the white box of a kirk which served the glen for more than two centuries has been rebuilt in red suburban gothic; a main railway line now runs down the Aller, and the excellent summer service brings holiday-makers from a hundred miles distant: houses and shops have clustered under the Hill of Deer; there may be found a well-reputed boarding school for youth, two inns—both of them reformed—a garage, and a bank agent. The centre of importance has moved from the old village to the new town by the station, and even the old village is no more a clachan of thatched roofs straggling by a burnside. Some enemy of the human race has taught the burn to run straight like a sewer, and has spanned it with a concrete bridge, while the thatch of the houses has been replaced by slates of a metallic green. Only the ruins of the old kirkton have not been meddled with; these stand as I remember them, knee-deep in docks and nettles, defended by a crumbling dry-stone dyke against inquisitive cattle from Crossbasket.

The old folk are gone, too, and their very names are passing from the countryside. Long before my day the Hawkshaws had disappeared from Calidon, but there was a respectable Edinburgh burgess family who had come there in the seventeenth century; now these have given place to a rawer burgess graft from the West. The farmers are mostly new men, and even the peasant, who should be the enduring stock, has shifted his slow bones. I learned from the postman that in Woodilee to-day there was no Monfries, no Sprot, but one Pennecuik, and only two bearers of the names of Ritchie and Shillinglaw, which had once been plentiful as ragwort. In such a renovated world it was idle to hope to find surviving the tales which had perplexed my childhood. No one could tell me when or why the kirk by the Crossbasket march became a ruin, and its gravestones lay buried in weeds. Most did not even know that it had been a kirk.

I was not greatly surprised by this, for the kirk of Woodilee had not been used for the better part of three centuries; and even as a child I could not find many to tell me of its last minister. The thing had sunk from a tale to an "owercome," a form of words which every one knew but which few could interpret. It was Jess Blane, the grieve's daughter, who first stirred my curiosity. In a whirl of wrath at some of my doings she prayed that the fate of the minister of Woodilee might be mine—a fate which she expounded as to be "claught by the Deil and awa' wi'." A little scared, I carried the affair to my nurse, who was gravely scandalized, and denounced Jess as a "shamefu' tawpie, fyling the wean's mind wi' her black lees." "Dinna you be feared, dearie," she reassured me. "It wasna the Deil that cam' for the minister o' Woodilee. I've aye heard tell that he was a guid man and a kind man. It was the Fairies, hinny. And he leev'd happy wi' them and dee'd happy, and never drank out o' an empty cup." I took my information, I remember, to the clan of children who were my playmates, and they spread it among their households and came back with confirmation or contradiction. Some held for the Devil, some for the Fairies—a proof that tradition spoke with two voices. The Fairy school slightly outnumbered the others, and in a battle one April evening close to the ruined kirk we routed the diabolists and established our version as the canon. But save for that solitary fact—that the minister of Woodilee had gone off with the Fairies—the canon remained bare.

Years later I got the tale out of many books and places: a folio in the library of a Dutch college, the muniment-room of a Catholic family in Lancashire, notes in a copy of the second Latin edition of Wishart's Montrose, the diaries of a captain of Hebron's and of a London glove-maker, the exercise book of a seventeenth-century Welsh schoolgirl. I could piece the story together well enough, but at first I found it hard to fit it to the Woodilee that I knew—that decorous landscape, prim, determinate, without a hint of mystery; the bare hilltops, bleak at seasons, but commonly of a friendly Pickwickian baldness, skirted with methodically-planned woods of selected conifers, and girdled with mathematical stone dykes; the even, ruled fields of the valley bottom; the studied moderation of the burns in a land meticulously drained; the dapper glass and stone and metal of the village. Two miles off, it was true, ran the noble untamed streams of Aller; beyond them the hills rose in dark fields to mid-sky, with the glen of the Rood making a sword-cut into their heart. But Woodilee itself—whither had fled the savour? Once, I knew from the books, the great wood of Melanudrigill had descended from the heights and flowed in black waves to the village brink. But I could not re-create the picture out of glistening asphalted highway, singing telegraph wires, spruce dwellings, model pastures, and manicured woodlands.

Then one evening from the Hill of Deer I saw with other eyes. There was a curious leaden sky, with a blue break about sunset, so that the shadows lay oddly. My first thought, as I looked at the familiar scene, was that, had I been a general in a campaign, I should have taken special note of Woodilee, for it was a point of vantage. It lay right in the pass between the Scottish midlands and the south—the pass of road and water—yes, and—shall I say?—of spirit, for it was in the throat of the hills, on the march between the sown and the desert. I was looking east, and to my left and behind me the open downs, farmed to their last decimal of capacity, were the ancient land of Manann, the capital province of Pictdom. The colliery headgear on the horizon, the trivial moorish hilltops, the dambrod-pattern fields, could never tame wholly for me that land's romance, and on this evening I seemed to be gazing at a thing antique and wolfish, tricked out for the moment with a sheep's coat… . To my right rose the huddle of great hills which cradle all our rivers. To them time and weather bring little change, yet in that eerie light, which revealed in hard outline while it obscured in detail, they seemed too remote and awful to be the kindly giants with whose glens I daily conversed… . At my feet lay Woodilee, and a miracle had been wrought, for a gloom like the shadow of an eclipse seemed to have crept over the parish. I saw an illusion, which I knew to be such, but which my mind accepted, for it gave me the vision I had been seeking.

It was the Woodilee of three hundred years ago. And my mind, once given the cue, set out things not presented by the illuded eye… . There were no highways—only tracks, miry in the bogs and stony on the braes, which led to Edinburgh on one hand and to Carlisle on the other. I saw few houses, and these were brown as peat, but on the knowe of the old kirkton I saw the four grey walls of the kirk, and the manse beside it among elders and young ashes. Woodilee was not now a parish lying open to the eye of sun and wind. It was no more than a tiny jumble of crofts, bounded and pressed in upon by something vast and dark, which clothed the tops of all but the highest hills, muffled the ridges, choked the glens and overflowed almost to the edge of the waters—which lay on the landscape like a shaggy fur cast loosely down. My mouth shaped the word "Melanudrigill," and I knew that I saw Woodilee as no eye had seen it for three centuries, when, as its name tells, it still lay in the shadow of a remnant of the Wood of Caledon, that most ancient forest where once Merlin harped and Arthur mustered his men… .

An engine whistled in the valley, a signal-box sprang into light, and my vision passed. But as I picked my way down the hillside in the growing dusk I realized that all memory of the encircling forest had not gone from Woodilee in my childhood, though the name of Melanudrigill had been forgotten. I could hear old Jock Dodds, who had been keeper on Calidon for fifty years, telling tales for my delectation as he sat and smoked on the big stone beside the smithy. He would speak of his father, and his father's father, and the latter had been a great hero with his flintlock gun. "He would lie in the moss or three on the winter mornin's, and him an auld man, and get the wild swans and the grey geese when they cam' ower frae Clyde to Aller. Ay, and mony's the deer he would kill." And when I pointed out that there were no deer in the countryside, Jock shook his head and said that in his grandfather's day the Black Wood was not all destroyed. "There was a muckle lump on Windyways, and anither this side o' Reiverslaw." But if I asked for more about the Wood, Jock was vague. Some said it had been first set by the Romans, others by Auld Michael Scott himself… . "A grand hidy-hole for beasts and an unco bit for warlocks." … Its downfall had begun long ago in the Dear Years, and the last of it had been burnt for firewood in his father's day, in the winter of the Sixteen Drifty Days… .

I remembered, too, that there had been places still sacrosanct and feared. To Mary Cross, a shapeless stone in a field of bracken, no one would go in the spring or summer gloaming, but the girls decked it with wild flowers at high noon of Midsummer Day. There was a stretch of Woodilee burn, between the village and the now-drained Fennan Moss, where trout, it was believed, were never found. Above all, right in the heart of Reiverslaw's best field of turnips was a spring, which we children knew as Katie Thirsty, but which the old folk called the Minister's Well, and mentioned always with a shake of the head or a sigh, for it was there, they said, that the minister of Woodilee had left the earth for Fairyland.

Chapter 1 THE COMING OF THE MINISTER

The Reverend David Sempill began his ministry in Woodilee on the fifteenth day of August in the year of grace sixteen hundred and forty-four. He was no stranger to the glen, for as a boy he had spent his holidays with his grandfather, who was the miller of Roodfoot. In that year when the horn of the Kirk was exalted the voice of a patron mattered less; Mr. Sempill had been, as they said, "popularly called," and so entered upon his office with the eager interest of the parish which had chosen him. A year before he had been licensed by the presbytery of Edinburgh; he was ordained in Woodilee in the present year on the last Sabbath of June, and "preached in" on the first Sabbath of August by the weighty voice of Mungo Muirhead, the minister of Kirk Aller. His plenishing—chiefly books—had come from Edinburgh on eight pack-horses, and, having escaped the perils of Carnwath Moss, was now set out in an upper chamber of the little damp manse, which stood between the kirk and Woodilee burn. A decent widow woman, Isobel Veitch by name, had been found to keep his house, and David himself, now that all was ready, had ridden over on his grey cob from his cousin's at Newbiggin and taken seisin of his new home. He had sung as he came in sight of Woodilee; he had prayed with bowed head as he crossed the manse threshold; but as he sat in the closet which he named his "study," and saw his precious books on the shelf, and the table before him on which great works would be written, and outside the half-glazed window the gooseberry bushes of the garden and the silver links of the burn, he had almost wept with pure gratitude and content.

His first hour he had spent exploring his property. The manse was little and squat, and gave lodging in its heather-thatched roof to more than one colony of bees. The front abutted on the kirkton road, save for a narrow strip of green edged with smooth white stones from the burn. The back looked on a garden, where stood a score of apple trees, the small wild fruit of which was scarcely worth the gathering. There was also a square of green for bleaching clothes, a gean tree, a plot of gillyflowers and monkshood, and another of precious herbs like clary, penny-royal, and marjoram. At one end of the manse stood a brewhouse and a granary or girnel, for the storing of the minister's stipend meal; at the other a stable for two beasts, a byre with three stalls, a hen-house of mud, and, in the angle of the dykes of the kirk loan, a midden among nettles.

Indoors the place was not commodious, and even on that warm August day a chill struck upward from the earthen floors. The low-ceiled lobby had no light but the open door. To the right of it was the living-room with a boarded ceiling, a wooden floor, and roughly plastered walls, where the minister's eight-day clock (by John Atchison, Leith, 1601) had now acclimatized itself. To the left lay Isobel's kitchen, with a door leading to the brewhouse, and Isobel's press-bed at the back of it, and a small dog-hole of a cellar. The upper story was reached by a wooden staircase as steep as a ladder, which opened direct into the minister's bedroom—an apartment of luxury, for it had a fireplace. One door led from it to the solitary guest-chamber; another to a tiny hearthless room, which was his study or closet, and which at the moment ranked in his mind as the most miraculous of his possessions.

David ranged around like a boy back from school, and indeed with his thick, sandy hair and ruddy countenance and slim, straight back he seemed scarcely to have outgrown the schoolboy. He spilt the browst in the brewhouse, and made a spectacle of himself with pease-meal in the girnel. Isobel watched him anxiously out of doors, where he sampled the fruit of the apple trees, and with various rejected specimens took shots at a starling in the glebe. Then, in response to his shouts, she brought him a basin of water and he washed off the dust of his morning ride. The August sun fell warm on the little yard; the sound of the burn in the glen, the clack of the kirkton smithy, the sheep far off on Windyways, the bees in the clove gillyflowers, all melted into the soothing hum of a moorland noontide. The minister smiled as he scrubbed his cheeks, and Isobel's little old puckered apple-hued face smiled back. "Ay, sir," she said, "our lines is fallen intil a goodly place and a pleasant habitation. The Lord be thankit." And as he cried a fervent amen and tossed the towel back to her, a stir at the front door betokened his first visitors.

These were no less than three in number, neighbouring ministers who had ridden over on their garrons to bid the young man welcome to Woodilee. Presently stable and byre were crowded with their beasts, and the three brethren had bestowed themselves on the rough bench which adjoined the bleaching-ground. They would have their dinner at the village ordinary—let not Mr. Sempill put himself about—they would never have come thus unannounced if they had thought that they would be pressed to a meal. But they allowed themselves to be persuaded by the hospitable clamour of Isobel, who saw in such a function on her first day at the manse a social aggrandizement. "Mr. Sempill would think black burnin' shame if the gentlemen didna break breid… ." There was walth o' provender in the house—this moment she had put a hen in the pot—she had a brace of muir-fowl ready for brandering that had been sent from Chasehope that very morn… . The three smiled tolerantly and hopefully. "Ye've gotten a rare Abigail, Mr. Sempill. A woman o' mense and sense—the manse o' Woodilee will be well guidit."

The Reverend Mungo Muirhead had a vast shaven face set atop of a thick neck and a cumbrous body. He had a big thin-lipped mouth which shut tight like a lawyer's, a fleshy nose, and large grey eyes which at most times were ruminant as a cow's, but could on occasion kindle to shrewdness. His complexion was pale, and he was fast growing bald, so the impression at first sight was of a perfect mountain of countenance, a steep field of colourless skin. As minister of Kirk Aller he was the metropolitan of the company, and as became a townsman he wore decent black with bands, and boasted a hat. The Reverend Ebenezer Proudfoot, from the moorland village of Bold, was of a different cast. He wore the coarse grey homespun of the farmer, his head-covering was a blue bonnet, his shoes were thick brogues with leather ties, and he had donned a pair of ancient frieze leggings. A massive sinewy figure, there was in his narrow face and small blue eyes an air of rude power and fiery energy. The third, Mr. James Fordyce from the neighbouring parish of Cauldshaw, was slight and thin, and pale either from ill-health or from much study. He was dressed in worn blue, and even in the August sun kept his plaid round his shoulders. In his face a fine brow was marred by the contraction of his lean jaws and a mouth puckered constantly as if in doubt or pain, but redeemed by brown eyes, as soft and wistful as a girl's.

At the hour of noon they sat down to meat. Mr. Muirhead said a lengthy grace, which, since he sniffed the savour from the kitchen, he began appropriately with "Bountiful Jehovah." All the dishes were set out at once on the bare deal table—a bowl of barley kail, a boiled fowl, the two brandered grouse, and a platter of oatcakes. The merchant in the Pleasance of Edinburgh had given his son a better plenishing than fell to the usual lot of ministers, for there were pewter plates and a knife and a fork for each guest. The three stared at the splendour, and Mr. Proudfoot, as if to testify against luxury, preferred to pick the bones with his hands. The home-brewed ale was good, and all except Mr. Fordyce did full justice to it, so that the single tankard, passed from hand to hand, was often refilled by Isobel. "Man, Mr. David," cried Mr. Muirhead in high good-humour, "this is a great differ from the days of your predecessor. Worthy Mr. Macmichael had never muckle but bannocks to set before his friends. But you've made us a feast of fat things."

David inquired about his predecessor, whom he remembered dimly from his boyhood as a man even then very old, who ambled about the parish on a white shelty.

"He was a pious and diligent minister," said Mr. Muirhead, "but since ever I kenned him he was sore fallen in the vale of years. He would stick to the same 'ordinary' till he had thrashed it into stour. I've heard that he preached for a year and sax months on Exodus fifteen and twenty-seven, the twelve wells of water and three score and ten palm trees of Elim, a Sabbath to ilka well and ilka tree. I've a notion that he was never very strong in the intellectuals."

"He wrestled mightily in prayer," said Mr. Proudfoot, "and he was great at fencing the Tables. Ay, sirs, he was a trumpet for the pure Gospel blast."

"I doubt not he was a good man," said Mr. Fordyce, "and is now gone to his reward. But he was ower auld and feeble for a sinful countryside. I fear that the parish was but ill guided, and, as ye ken, there was whiles talk of a Presbytery visitation."

"I differ!" cried Mr. Muirhead. "I differ in toto. Woodilee has aye been famous for its godly elders. Has it not Ephraim Caird, who was a member of Assembly and had a hand in that precious work of grace done in the East Kirk of St. Giles's two years syne? Has it not Peter Pennecuik, who has a gift of supplication like Mr. Rutherford himself? Ay, and in the Bishops' War you'll mind how Amos Ritchie was staunch to uphold the Covenant with the auld matchlock that had been his gudesire's. There's no lack of true religion in Woodilee."

"There's no lack of carnal pride, Mr. Mungo. The folk of Woodilee are ready enough for any stramash in Kirk or State. But what of their perishing souls, I ask? Are they striving to get a grip of Christ, as a bird scrapes with its claws at a stone wall? And do they bring forth works meet for repentance?"

"There was no clash of cauld morality in worthy Mr. Macmichael," said Mr. Proudfoot sourly.

"Is there the spirit of God in the people? That's what I want to ken. There's ill stories in the countryside anent Woodilee. The Black Wood could tell some tales if the trees could talk."

Mr. Muirhead, having finished his meal and said a second grace, was picking his teeth in great good-humour.

"Hoot toots, Mr. James, you'll give our young brother a scunner of the place, to which it has pleased the Almighty to call him, before he has had a look at it himself. I'm not denying that the Wood is ower near Woodilee. It's a wanchancy thing for any parochine to have a muckle black forest flung around it like a maud [plaid]. And no doubt the Devil walks about like a roaring lion in Woodilee as in other bits. But there's men of God here to resist him. I tell you, sirs, there have been more delations to the Presbytery for the sin of witchcraft in Woodilee than in any other parish on the water of Aller."

"And what does that prove, Mr. Mungo?"

"That there's wealth of prayerful and eident [careful] folk to confound the Adversary. This is no season to despair of Kirk and Covenant, when this day they hold the crown of the causeway. You'll no have heard of the astonishing mercy vouchsafed to us in England? A post came to Kirk Aller yestreen, and it seems that some weeks syne there was a great battle beside the city of York, where our Scots wrought mightily, and our own Davie Leslie gave the King's horsemen their kail through the reek. What does that portend?"

"It portends," said Mr. Proudfoot, whom food did not mellow, "that our pure and reformed Kirk of Scotland is linked more than ever with sectaries and antinomians and those, like the bloody and deceitful Cromwell, that would defile the milk of the Word with the sour whey of their human inventions. What avails a triumphant Kirk if its doctrine be sullied?"

Mr. Muirhead laughed. "It portends nothing of the kind. The good work goes cannily on, and the noble task to which the Assembly of Divines at Westminster set itself is advanced by a long mile. Man, Eben, you folk at Bold live ower far from the world. It's the Kirk of Scotland that holds the balance to-day and can enforce its will on both King and sectaries. Two days back I had a letter from that gospel-loving nobleman, the Earl of Loudoun … "

Mr. Muirhead was mounted on his high horse. He lit his pipe and for the space of half an hour dealt comprehensively with politics, labouring to show the happy posture of affairs for what he called the "good cause." The Solemn League and Covenant bound all Scotland in a pact with the Lord, and presently all England would follow suit. There would be soon that comfortable sight which had been foretold by their godly fathers, a uniform Kirk and a pure Gospel established by law from London to the Orkneys, and a covenanted Sion to which all the peoples of the earth would go up. Mr. Muirhead was eloquent, for he repeated a peroration which he had once used in the General Assembly.

"I have heard," he concluded, "that in Woodilee there was a signing of the Covenant by every soul that could make a scart with a pen. That for your encouragement, Mr. David."

Mr. Fordyce shook his head. "How many appended their names out of fear or from mere carnal policy? Mankind will run like jukes after a leader. I much misdoubt if there is any spiritual health to be got from following a multitude under duress. I would have left the choice to every man's conscience."

"You're not sound," cried Mr. Muirhead. "You're shaky on the fundamentals, Mr. James. I will confound you out of the Word. When King Josiah made a solemn covenant, did he leave it to ilka man's fancy to sign or no? Nay, he caused all—all, I say—in Jerusalem and Benjamin to stand to it. See Second Chronicles thirty-four and thirty-two."

There was a touch of asperity in the one disputant and of recalcitrance in the other, so David for good-fellowship's sake suggested that he might show them the manse in its new guise. But at that moment Isobel appeared with word that Chasehope was at the door seeking speech with the minister of Kirk Aller. At her back appeared the fiery head of the visitor, who was that Ephraim Caird whom Mr. Muirhead had already praised as a pillar of the Covenant and who farmed the largest tack in the parish. He was a big fellow, red as a fox, with a white freckled face, no eyebrows, and greenish blue eyes, a man of over forty, whose muscular frame was now somewhat overlaid by flesh. His mouth was small and generally puckered together, a habit which gave him an air of thought and gravity. He had been an opponent of David Sempill before the call, but had acquiesced in the majority vote and had welcomed the new minister at the "preaching in" with a great show of goodwill. To-day he was apologetic and affable. He asked pardon for his intrusion—he would take neither bite nor sup—he had heard that the ministers were at the manse, and he begged a word with Mr. Muirhead on Presbytery matters which would save him a journey to Kirk Aller, when he was busy with the bog hay. So David took the other two to his closet and left Chasehope and Mr. Muirhead to their colloquy.

Mr. Proudfoot eyed with disapproval the books in the little dark chamber. He was content, he said, with the Bible and the Institutes of John Calvin and old Robert Rollock's commentary on the Prophet Daniel. He read the lettering on one volume, Sancti Clementi Opera, and on another, a work by a Dutch theologian, De Sancti Pauli Epistolis. The word "Saint" roused his ire. "Rags of Popery," he muttered, as he banged the books back on their shelves. "What for 'Saint' Paul and not 'Saint' Moses or 'Saint' Isaiah? It's a queer thing that Antichrist should set himself to miscall the godly Apostles of the New Testament and let the auld prophets alone. You're a young man, Mr. Sempill, and, as is natural in youth, with but a small experience of religion. Take the advice of an older man, and no clog yourself on the road to Heaven with ower much printit lear, when you can put the whole Word of God in your pouch."

But Mr. Fordyce looked at the shelves with greedy eyes. The moor-fowl at dinner had loosened a tooth, and now it came out in his hand and was wrapped carefully in his kerchief. "I have kept ilka tooth I have ever cast," he told the others, "and they will go into my coffin with me that my bodily parts may be together at the Resurrection." "Would you shorten the arm of the Lord?" Mr. Proudfoot had asked testily. "Can He no gather your remnants from the uttermost parts of the earth?" "True, true," the other had answered gently, "but it's just my fancy to keep all my dust in the one place." This ceremony over, he flung himself on the books like a hungry man on food. He opened them lovingly, read their titles, fingered them as if he could scarcely bear to part with them. "You're no half my age," he told the owner, "but you've twice as many books as there are in the Cauldshaw manse. You start well provided, Mr. David."

The theology he knew already and approved, but there were other works over which he shook a moralizing head. "You've a hantle of pagan writers, Mr. David. I would counsel a young minister to apply himself rather to the Hebrew than to the Greek, for though the Greek was the tongue of the New Testament, it was also the tongue of lascivious poets and mocking philosophers, whereas the Hebrew was consecrate wholly to God… . But you have the Hebrew too, I see. Losh, here's the lexicon of Bamburgius, of which I have read but have never seen. We must consult, Mr. David. I've a new theory of the Hebrew accents on which I would like your judgment."

As he ran over the list he suddenly cried aloud with pleasure, and then checked himself almost shamefacedly. "Preserve us, but here's Hieronymus Cardanus, and other astrologic works. Man, I've diverted myself whiles with the science of the stars, and can make a shape at calculating a nativity. I cannot see why the thing should not be turned to holy uses, as when the star guided the Wise Men of the East to Bethlehem. You and me must have long cracks some day. These books will be like the Pole Star to draw me to Woodilee, and I'm looking to see you soon at Cauldshaw. It's but a poor desert bit, but there have been precious occasions there and many an outpouring of grace. I'm sore troubled with the gravel, Mr. David, and the goodwife has had a flux in the legs this twelvemonth back, but the Lord has showed me singular favour, and my damps are lightened since a leech in Edinburgh prescribed a hyperion of bourtree and rue… . We're a childless household, for we had but the one bairn, and sax year syne the Lord gathered her to Himself."

Downstairs Mr. Muirhead had finished his talk, and the three ministers took their leave—they of Bold and Cauldshaw to jog the moorland miles to their homes, he of Kirk Aller to take his "four-hours" with Chasehope at Lucky Weir's in the clachan. Each of the three kissed David on the cheek and blessed him after his fashion. "May you live to be a pillar of the Kirk," said Mr. Muirhead. "Keep a Gospel walk," said Mr. Proudfoot, "on the narrow rigging of the truth." But Mr. Fordyce took the young man's hand, after saluting him, and held it with a kind of wistful affection. "I pray," he said, "that your windows may be ever open towards Jerusalem."

 

When his guests had gone David Sempill explored once more his little domain, like a child who counts his treasures. Then, as the afternoon mellowed into evening, the slopes of the Hill of Deer, red with flowering heather, drew him for a walk. He wanted a wide prospect, to see his parish in its setting of hill and glen, and recall the landmarks now blurred in his childhood's memory. His black coat and breeches were of Edinburgh make and too fine for moorland work, but he had stout country shoes and hose of ram's wool, the gift of his cousin's wife at Newbiggin, and he moved over the bent with the long stride of a shepherd. He crossed the burn of Mire, and saw below him the farm-town of Mirehope, with barley and nettles at strife in the infield, and the run-rigs of the outfield feathered with very green oats. Presently he was on the Hill of Deer, where the long stacks of peats were drying so well that every breath of air sent up from them a fine flurry of dust. The Mirehope cattle, wretched little black beasts, were grazing under the charge of a herd-boy, and the Mirehope sheep, their coats matted with tar till they looked like monstrous slugs, were picking up an uneasy livelihood among the heather bushes, leaving tufts of smelly wool behind them on the scraggy twigs which were still charred from the March moorburn. He reached the low summit, and flung himself down on a patch of thymy turf between the whinstone screes, with his face to the valley.

His holiday mood still held. The visit of his ministerial brethren had not dashed him, for he saw their prosiness through a golden haze. Mr. Muirhead was a stout warder on the walls of Sion, Mr. Proudfoot a guardian of the purity of the Temple, and Mr. Fordyce beyond question a saint, with his haggard face and his wistful eyes. It was Mr. Fordyce who stuck in his memory. A lovable saint, with his cast teeth saved up to make easy the business of a bodily resurrection, his love of the stars, his pathetic bookishness. David was full of the zest of his calling, but for himself he was ready to circumscribe its duties. Not for him to uphold the Kirk against its ill-wishers in the State; in that cause he would do battle when the need arose, but not till then. He left to others the task of keeping the canon of truth pure from alloy: he accepted the Kirk's doctrine loyally, but let others do the dogmatizing. The work for which he longed was to save and comfort human souls.

Seen on that hilltop the minister of Woodilee was a different figure from that beheld by his colleagues in the dim light of the manse. His active form, his colour, his tumbled hair, spoke of the boy, but his face was not boyish. In its young contours there were already thought and resolution and spiritual fineness, and there was a steady ardour in the eyes. If his chin was the fighter's, his mouth was the comforter's. Five years before he had been set on a scholar's life. At the college he had been a noted Grecian, and in Robert Bryson's bookshop at the Sign of the Prophet Jonah in the West Bow his verses, Latin and English, had been praised by the learned. When religion called him it was as a challenge not to renounce but to perfect his past. A happy preoccupation with his dream made him blind to the harshness and jealousies which beset the Kirk, and he saw only its shining mission. The beauty which was to be found in letters seemed in very truth a part of that profounder beauty which embraced all earth and Heaven in the revelation of God. He had not ceased to be the humanist in becoming the evangelist. Some had looked askance at him as too full of carnal learning for the sacred office, some as too cheerful for a shepherd of souls in a perishing world. But his critics as yet were few, for David carried with him a light and warmth which it was hard for the sourest to resist. "He is a gracious youth," an old minister had said at his ordination. "May the Lord deal tenderly with him!"

David's eyes from his perch on the hilltop rested first on the kirkton of Woodilee. He saw the manse among its trees, and the church with its thatched roof—the roof had been lead till Morton the Regent stripped it and melted it down for bullets. He saw the little beehive cottages in the clachan with the taller gable-end of Lucky Weir's ale-house. He saw the adjoining farm-towns—the Mains, Chasehope, Nether Windyways, Crossbasket, the two Fennans, each with its patches of crops lifted well above the bogs of the glen. He saw the mill of Woodilee at present idle by the burn, and hay being cut on the side of Windyways hill, and what looked like the clipping of the miller's sheep. In the bright evening the scene was all of peace and pastoral, and David's heart kindled. There dwelled his people, the little flock whom God had appointed him to feed. His heart yearned over them, and in a sudden glow of tenderness he felt that this sunset prospect of his parish was a new and more solemn ordination.

It was long before he lifted his eyes beyond the glen to the great encircling amphitheatre of the hills. At first he gazed at them in an abstraction, till childish memories came back to him and he began to name the summits to himself one by one. There was the bald top of the Lammerlaw, and the peak of the Green Dod, and far beyond the long line of the great Herstane Craig, which in that childhood had been the synonym for untravelled mystery. He saw the green cleft in the hills where the Aller came down from its distant wells, and the darker glen of the Rood where bent was exchanged for rock and heather. He saw the very patches of meadow by Roodside which he had made his boyish playground. Such a hilltop prospect he had never before known, for a child lives in a magnified world, and finds immensity in short vistas. One thing struck hard on his mind. Never before had he realized the extent of the forest ground. He remembered travelling to Roodfoot through trees, and all up the water of Rood there had been a drift of scrub. But it was the meadows and the open spaces that had been his kingdom, and his recollection was of a bare sunny land where whaup and peewit cried and the burns fell headlong from windy moors. But now, as he gazed, he realized that the countryside was mainly forest.

Everywhere, muffling the lower glen of the Woodilee burn and the immediate vale of the Aller, and climbing far up the hillside, was the gloom of trees. In the Rood glen there was darkness only at the foot, for higher up the woods thinned into scrub of oak and hazel, with the knees of the uplands showing through it. The sight powerfully impressed his fancy. Woodilee was a mere clearing in a forest. This was the Silva Caledonis of which old writers spoke, the wood which once covered all the land and in whose glades King Arthur had dwelt. He remembered doggerel Latin of Merlin the Bard and strange sayings of True Thomas—old wives' tales which concerned this sanctuary. He had grown up beside it and had not known of it, and now he had come back to a revelation. Silva Caledonis! Up the Rood water lay the house of Calidon. Were the names perhaps the same?

The young man's fancy was quick to kindle, and he looked with new eyes at the great cup of green, broken only at one spot by Aller side with the flash of water. At first in the soft evening light it had worn a gracious and homely air, even the darkness of the pines seemed luminous, and the feathery top of a patch of birches was like the smoke of household fires… . But as the sun sank behind the Rood hills a change seemed to come over the scene. The shade became gloom, a hostile, impenetrable darkness. The birches were still like smoke, but a turbid smoke from some unhallowed altar. The distant shallows of Aller caught a ray of the dying sun and turned to blood… . The minister shivered and then laughed at himself for his folly.

The evening deepened in the hollows, though the hilltops were still faintly bright. The great wood seemed now to be a moving thing, a flood which lapped and surged and might at any moment overflow the sandspit which was Woodilee. Again the minister laughed at himself, but without conviction. It must be an eerie life under the shadow of that ancient formless thing. Woodilee could not be quite as other parishes, or its folk like other folk. The Wood, this hoary Wood of Caledon, must dominate their thoughts and form their characters… . Had not some one called it the Black Wood?—Yes, they had spoken of it that afternoon. Mr. Muirhead had admitted that it must be queer to live so near it, and Mr. Fordyce had shaken his head solemnly and hinted at tales that would be told if the trees could speak… . Did the Devil use the place as a stronghold and seduce the foolish into its shadows? Could it be said of a lost soul, Itur in antiquam silvam?

David was less superstitious than most men, but he had too ready a fancy and a mind too well stored with learning to be easy at the thought. Already he felt that he had found an antagonist. Was Woodilee to prove a frontier-post for God's servant against the horrid mysteries of heathendom? … He gave a sudden start, for a voice had sounded behind him.

The voice was singing—a charm against bogles which he remembered himself using as a child:

 

"Weary, Ovie, gang awa',

Haste ye furth o' house an' ha',

Ower the muir and doun the burn,

Wearie, Ovie, ne'er return."

 

A grotesque figure emerged from the dusk. It was a tall fellow, who seemed to have been broken in the middle, for he walked almost doubled up. His face, seen in the half-light, was that of a man of thirty or so, with a full black beard and red protuberant lips. His clothes were ruinous, an old leather jerkin which gaped at every seam, ragged small-clothes of frieze, and for hosen a wrapping of dirty clouts. There were no shoes on his feet, and his unwashed face was dark as a berry. In his hand he had a long ash pole, and on his head a blue cowl so tight that it was almost a skull-cap.

David recognized the figure for Daft Gibbie, the village natural, who had greeted him with mewing and shouting at his ordination. In the clachan street he had seemed an ordinary deformed idiot—what was known locally as an "object"—but up on this twilight hilltop he was like an uncouth revenant from an older world. The minister instinctively gripped his staff tighter, but Gibbie's intention was of the friendliest.

"A braw guid e'en to ye, Mr. Sempill, sir. I saw ye tak' the hill and I bode to follow, for I was wantin' to bid ye welcome to Woodilee. Man, ye gang up the brae-face like a maukin [a hare]. Ower fast, I says to mysel', ower fast for a man o' God, for what saith the Word, 'He that believeth shall not make haste!'"

The creature spoke in a voice of great beauty and softness—the voice rather of a woman than of a man. And as he spoke he bowed, and patted the minister's arm, and peered into his face with bright wild eyes. Then he clutched David and forced him round till again he was looking over the Wood.

"The Hill o' Deer's a grand bit for a prospect, sir, for is it no like the Hill o' Pisgah from which ye can spy the Promised Land? Ye can lift up your eyes to the hills, and ye can feast them on the bonny haughs o' the Aller, or on the douce wee clachan o' Woodilee, wi' the cots sittin' as canty round the kirk as kittlins round an auld cat."

"I was looking at the Wood," said David.

The man laughed shrilly. "And a braw sicht it is in the gloamin' frae the Hill o' Deer. For ye can see the size o' the muckle spider's wab, but doun in the glen ye're that clamjamphried wi' michty trees that your heid spins like a peery and your e'en are dozened. It's a unco thing the Wud, Mr. Sempill, sir?"

"Do you know your ways in it, Gibbie?"

"Me! I daurna enter it. I keep the road, for I'm feared o' yon dark howes." Then he laughed again, and put his mouth close to the minister's ear. "Not but what I'll tak' the Wud at the proper season. Tak' the Wud, Mr. Sempill, like other folk in Woodilee."

He peered in the minister's face to see if he were understood. Satisfied that he was not, he laughed again.

"Tak' Gibbie's advice, sir, and no gang near the Wud. It's nae place for men o' God, like yoursel', sir, and puir Gibbie."

"Do they call it the Black Wood?"

Gibbie spat. "Incomin' bodies, nae doot," he said in contempt. "But it's just the Wud wi' nae 'black' aboot it. But ken ye the name that auld folk gie'd it?" He became confidential again. "They ca'd it Melanudrigill," he whispered.

David repeated the word. His mind had been running on heathen learning, and he wondered if the name were Greek.

"That might mean the 'place of dark waters,'" he said.

"Na, na. Ye're wrong there, Mr. Sempill. There's nae dark waters in Melanudrigill. There's the seven burns that rin south, but they're a' as clear as Aller. But dinna speak that name to ither folk, Mr. Sempill, and dinna let on that Gibbie telled ye. It's a wanchancy name. Ye can cry it in a safe bit like the Hill o' Deer, but if ye was to breathe it in the Wud unco things micht happen. I daurna speak my ain name among the trees."

"Your name is Gibbie. Gibbie what?"

The man's face seemed to narrow in fear and then to expand in confidence. "I can tell it to a minister o' the Word. It's Gilbert Niven. Ken ye where I got that name? In the Wud, sir. Ken ye wha gie'd it me? The Guid Folk. Ye'll no let on that I telled ye."

The night was now fallen, and David turned for home, after one last look at the pit of blackness beneath him. The idiot hobbled beside him, covering the ground at a pace which tried even his young legs, and as he went he babbled.

"Tak' Gibbie's advice and keep far frae the Wud, Mr. Sempill, and if ye're for Roodfoot or Calidon haud by the guid road. I've heard tell that in the auld days, when there was monks at the kirkton, they bode to gang out every year wi' bells and candles and bless the road to keep it free o' bogles. But they never ventured into the Wud, honest men. I'll no say but what a minister is mair powerfu' than a monk, but an eident body will run nae risks. Keep to fine caller bits like this Hill o' Deer, and if ye want to traivel, gang west by Chasehope or east by Kirk Aller. There's nocht for a man o' God in the Wud."

"Are there none of my folk there?"

For a second Gibbie stopped as if thunderstruck. "Your folk!" he cried. "In the Wud!" Then he perceived David's meaning. "Na, na. There's nae dwallin' there. Nether Fennan is no far off and Reiverslaw is a bowshot from the trees, but to bide in the Wud!—Na, na, a man would be sair left to himsel' ere he ventured that! There's nae hoose biggit [built] by human hand that wadna be clawed doun by bogles afore the wa' rase a span frae the grund."

At the outfield of Mirehope Gibbie fled abruptly, chanting like a night bird.

Chapter 2 THE ROAD TO CALIDON

The minister sat at his supper of porridge and buttermilk when Isobel broke in on him, her apple-hued face solemn and tearful.

"There's ill news frae up the water, Mr. Sempill. It's Marion Simpson, her that's wife to Richie Smail, the herd o' the Greenshiel. Marion, puir body, has been ill wi' a wastin' the past twalmonth, and now it seems she's near her release. Johnnie Dow, the packman, is ben the house, and he has brocht word that Richie is fair dementit, and that the wife is no like to last the nicht, and would the minister come up to the Greenshiel. They've nae bairns, the Lord be thankit; but Richie and Marion have aye been fell fond o' ither, and Richie's an auld exercised Christian and has been many times spoken o' for the eldership. I doot ye'll hae to tak' the road, sir."

It was his first call to pastoral duty, and, though he had hoped to be at his books by candle-light, David responded gladly. He put his legs into boots, saddled his grey cob, flung his plaid round his shoulders, and in ten minutes was ready to start. Isobel watched him like a mother.

"I'll hae a cup o' burned yill [ale] waitin' for ye to fend off the cauld—no but what it's a fine lown [mild] nicht. Ye ken the road, sir? Up by Mirehope and round by the back o' the Hill."

"There's a quicker way by Roodfoot, and on this errand there's no time to lose."

"But that's through the Wud," Isobel gasped. "It's no me that would go through the Wud in the dark, nor naebody in Woodilee. But a minister is different, nae doot."

"The road is plain?" he asked.

"Aye, it's plain eneuch. There's naething wrong wi' the road. But it's an eerie bit when the sun's no shinin'. But gang your ways, sir, for a man o' God is no like common folk. Ye'll get a mune to licht ye back."

David rode out of the kirkton, and past the saughs and elders which marked the farm of Crossbasket, till the path dipped into the glen of the Woodilee burn and the trees began. Before he knew he was among them, old gnarled firs standing sparsely among bracken. They were thin along the roadside, but on the hill to his right and down in the burn's hollow they made a cloud of darkness. The August night still had a faint reflected light, and the track, much ribbed by tree roots, showed white before him. The burn, small with the summer drought, made a far-away tinkling, the sweet scents of pine and fern were about him, the dense boskage where it met the sky had in the dark a sharp marmoreal outline. The world was fragrant and quiet; if this be the Black Wood, thought David, I have been in less happy places.

But suddenly at a turn of the hill the trees closed in. It was almost as if he had stripped and dived into a stagnant pool. The road now seemed to have no purpose of its own, but ran on sufferance, slinking furtively as the Wood gave it leave, with many meaningless twists, as if unseen hands had warded it off. His horse, which had gone easily enough so far, now needed his heel in its side and many an application of his staff. It shied at nothing visible, jibbed, reared, breathing all the while as if its wind were touched. Something cold seemed to have descended on David's spirits, which, as soon as he was aware of it, he tried to exorcise by whistling a bar or two, and then by speaking aloud. He recited a psalm, but his voice, for usual notably full and mellow, seemed not to carry a yard. It was forced back on him by the trees. He tried to shout, with no better effect. There came an echo which surprised him, till he perceived that it was an owl. Others answered, and the place was filled with their eldritch cries. One flapped across the road not a yard from him, and in a second his beast was on its haunches.

He was now beyond the throat of the glen, and the Woodilee burn had left him, going its own way into the deeps of Fennan Moss, where the wood was thin. The road plucked up courage, and for a little ran broad and straight through a covert of birches. Then the pines closed down again, this time with more insistence, so that the path was a mere ladder among gnarled roots. Here there were moths about—a queer thing, David thought—white glimmering creatures that brushed his face and made his horse half crazy. He had ridden at a slow jog, but the beast's neck and flanks were damp with sweat. Presently he had to dismount and lead it, testing every step with his foot, for there seemed to be ugly scaurs breaking away on his left. The owls kept up a continuous calling, and there was another bird with a note like a rusty saw. He tried to whistle, to shout, to laugh, but his voice seemed to come out of folds of cloth. He thought it was his plaid, but the plaid was about his chest and shoulders and far from his mouth… . And then, at one step the Wood ceased and he was among meadows.

He knew the place, for after the darkness of the trees the land, though the moon had not risen, seemed almost light. There in front was the vale down which Aller flowed, and on the right was his own familiar glen of Rood. Now he could laugh at his oppression—now that he was among the pleasant fields where he had played as a boy… . Why had he forgotten about the Black Wood, for it had no part in his memories? True, he had come always to Roodfoot by the other road behind the Hill of Deer, but there were the dark pines not a mile off—he must have adventured many times within their fringes. He thought that it was because a child is shielded by innocence from ugliness… . And yet, even then, he had had many nightmares and fled from many bogles. But not from the Wood… . No doubt it was the growing corruption of a man's heart.

The mill at Roodfoot stood gaunt and tenantless, passing swiftly into decay. He could see that the mill-wheel had gone, and its supports stood up like broken teeth; the lade was choked with rushes; the line of a hill showed through the broken rigging. He had known of this, but none the less the sight gave him a pang, for David was a jealous conserver of his past… . But as the path turned up the glen beside the brawling Rood, he had a sudden uplifting of spirit. This could not change, this secret valley, whose every corner he had quartered, whose every nook was the home of a delightful memory. He felt again the old ardour, when, released from Edinburgh, he had first revisited his haunts, tearful with excited joy. The Wood was on him again, but a different wood, his own wood. The hazels snuggled close to the roadside, and the feathery birches and rowans made a canopy, not a shadow. The oaks were ancient friends, the alders old playmates. His horse had recovered its sanity, and David rode through the dew-drenched night in a happy rapture of remembrance.

He was riding up Rood—that had always been the thing he had hoped to do. He had never been even so far as Calidon before, for a boy's day's march is short. But he had promised himself that some day when he was a man he would have a horse, and ride to the utmost springs—to Roodhope-foot, to the crinkle in Moss Fell where Rood was born… . "Up the water" had always been like a spell in his ear. He remembered lying in bed at night and hearing a clamour at the mill door: it was men from up the water, drovers from Moffat, herds from the back of beyond, once a party of soldiers from the south. And up the water lay Calidon, that ancient castle. The Hawkshaws were a name in a dozen ballads, and the tales of them in every old wife's mouth. Once they had captained all the glens of Rood and Aller in raids to the Border, and when Musgrave and Salkeld had led a return foray, it was the Hawkshaws that smote them mightily in the passes. He had never seen one of the race; the men were always at the wars or at the King's court; but they had filled his dreams. One fancy especially was of a little girl—a figure with gold hair like King Malcolm's daughter in the "Red Etin of Ireland" tale—whom he rescued from some dire peril, winning the thanks of her tall mail-clad kin. In that dream he too had been mail-clad, and he laughed at the remembrance. It was a far cry from that to the sedate minister of Woodilee.

As he turned up the road to the Greenshiel he remembered with compunction his errand. He had been amusing himself with vain memories when he was on the way to comfort a bed of death. Both horse and rider were in a sober mood when they reached the sheiling, the horse from much stumbling in peat-bogs, and the man from reflections on his unworthiness.

Rushlights burned in the single room, and the door and the one window stood open. It was a miserable hut of unmortared stones from the hill, the gaps stuffed with earth and turf, and the roof of heather thatch. One glance showed him that he was too late. A man sat on a stool by the dead peat-fire with his head in his hands. A woman was moving beside the box bed and unfolding a piece of coarse linen. The shepherd of the Greenshiel might be an old exercised Christian, but there were things in that place which had no warrant from the Bible. A platter full of coarse salt lay at the foot of the bed, and at the top crossed twigs of ash.

The woman—she was a neighbouring shepherd's wife—stilled her keening at the sound of David's feet.

"It's himsel'," she cried. "Richie, it's the minister. Wae's me, sir, but ye're ower late to speed puir Mirren. An hour syne she gaed to her reward—just slipped awa' in a fit o' hoastin' [coughing]. I've strauchten'd the corp and am gettin' the deid claes ready—Mirren was aye prood o' hers, and keepit them fine and caller wi' gall and rosmry. Come forrit, sir, and tak' a look on her that's gane. There was nae deid-thraws wi' Mirren, and she's lyin' as peacefu' as a bairn. Her face is sair faun in, but I mind when it was the bonniest face in a' Rood water."

The dead woman lay with cheeks like wax, a coin on each eye, so that for the moment her face had the look of a skull. Disease had sculptured it to an extreme fineness, and the nose, the jaw, and the lines of the forehead seemed chiselled out of ivory. David had rarely looked on death, and the sight gave him a sense first of repulsion and then of an intolerable pathos. He scarcely heard the clatter of the shepherd's wife.

"She's been deein' this mony a day, and now she's gane joyfully to meet her Lord. Eh, but she was blithe to gang in the hinner end. There was a time when she was sweir to leave Richie. 'Elspet,' she says to me, 'what will that puir man o' mine dae his lee lane?' and I aye says to her, 'Mirren, my wumman, the Lord's a grand provider, and Richie will haud fast by Him. Are not twa sparrows,' I says—"

David went over to the husband on the creepie by the fireside, and laid his hand on his shoulder. The man sat hunched in a stupor of misery.

"Richie," he said, "if I'm too late to pray with Marion, I can pray with you."

He prayed, as he always prayed, not in a mosaic of Scripture texts, but in simple words; and as he spoke he felt the man's shoulder under his hand shake as with a sob. He prayed with a sincere emotion, for he had been riding through a living, coloured world, and now felt like an icy blast the chill and pallor of death. Also he felt the pity of this lifelong companionship broken, and the old man left solitary. When he had finished, Richie lifted his face from his hands, and into his eyes, which had been blank as a wall, came the wholesome dimness of tears.

"I'm no repinin'," he said. "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, and I bless His name. What saith the Apostle—Mirren has gane to be with Christ, whilk is far better. There was mony a time when the meal-ark was toom [empty], and the wind and weet cam' in through the baulks, and the peats wadna kindle, and we were baith hungry and cauld. But Mirren's bye wi' a' that, for she's bielded in the everlasting arms, and she's suppin' rich at the Lord's ain table. But eh, sir, I could wish it had been His will to hae ta'en me wi' her. I'm an auld man, and there's nae weans [children], and for the rest o' my days I'll be like a beast in an unco loan [strange lane]. God send they binna mony."

"The purposes of the Lord are true and altogether righteous. If He spares you, Richie, it's because He has still work for you to do on this earth."

"I kenna what it can be. My fit's beginnin' to lag on the hill, and ony way I'm guid for nocht but sheep. Lambin's and clippin's and spainin's [weanings] is ower puir a wark for the Lord to fash wi'."

"Whatever you put your hand to is the work of the Lord, if you keep His fear before you."

"Maybe, sir." The man rose from his stool and revealed a huge gaunt frame, much bowed at the shoulders. He peered in the rushlight at the minister's face.

"Ye're a young callant to be a minister. I was strong on your side, sir, when ye got the call, for your preachin' was like a rushin' michty wind. I mind I repeated the heids o' your sermon to Mirren… . Ye've done me guid, sir—I think it's maybe the young voice o' ye. Ye wad get the word from Johnnie Dow. Man, it was kind to mak' siccan haste. I wish—I wish ye had seen Mirren in life… . Pit up anither petition afore ye gang—for a blessin' on this stricken house and on an auld man who has his title sure in Christ, but has an unco rebellious heart."

It seemed to David as he turned from the door, where the shepherd stood with uplifted arm, that a benediction had been given, but not by him.

The moon had risen and the glen lay in a yellow light, with the high hills between Rood and Aller shrunk to mild ridges. The stream caught the glow, and its shallows were like silver chased in amber. The young man's heart was full with the scene which he had left. Death was very near to men, jostling them at every corner, whispering in their ear at kirk and market, creeping between them and their firesides. Soon the shepherd of the Greenshiel would lie beside his wife; in a little, too, his own stout limbs would be a heap of dust. How small and frail seemed the life in that cottage, as contrasted with the rich pulsing world of the woods and hills and their serene continuance. But it was they that were the shadows in God's sight. The immortal thing was the broken human heart that could say in its frailty that its Redeemer liveth. "Thou, Lord," he repeated to himself, "in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou shalt endure; they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall be changed: but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail."

But as the road twined among the birches David's mood became insensibly more pagan. He could not resist the joy of the young life that ran in his members, and which seemed to be quickened by the glen of his childhood. Death was the portion of all, but youth was still far from death… . The dimness and delicacy of the landscape, the lines of hill melting into a haze under the moon, went to his head like wine. It was a world transfigured and spell-laden. On his left the dark blotch which was Melanudrigill lay like a spider over the hillsides and the mouths of the glens, but all in front and to his right was kindly and golden. He had come back to his own country, and it held out its arms to him. "Salve, O venusta Sirmio," he cried, and an owl answered.

The glen road was reached, but he did not turn towards Roodfoot. He had now no dread of the wood of Melanudrigill, but he had a notion to stand beside Rood water, where it flowed in a ferny meadow which had been his favourite fishing-ground. So he pushed beyond the path into a maze of bracken and presently was at the stream's edge.

And then, as he guided his horse past a thicket of alders, he came full upon a little party of riders who had halted there.

There were three of them—troopers, they seemed, with buff caps and doublets and heavy cavalry swords, and besides their own scraggy horses there was a led beast. The three men were consulting when David stumbled on them, and at the sight of him they had sprung apart and laid hands on their swords. But a second glance had reassured them.

"Good e'en to you, friend," said he who appeared to be the leader. "You travel late."

It was not an encounter which David would have sought, for wandering soldiery had a bad name in the land. Something of this may have been in the other's mind, for his next words were an explanation.

"You see three old soldiers of Leven's," he said, "on the way north after the late crowning mercy vouchsafed to us against the malignants. We be Angus men, and have the general's leave to visit our homes. If you belong hereaways you can maybe help us with the road. Ken you a place of the name of Calidon?"

To their eyes David must have seemed a young farmer or a bonnet-laird late on the road from some errand of roystering or sweethearting.

"I lived here as a boy," he said, "and I'm but now returned. Yet I think I could put you on your way to Calidon. The moon's high."

"It's a braw moon," said the second trooper, "and it lighted us fine down Aller, but the brawest moon will not discover you a dwelling in a muckle wood, if you kenna the road to it."

The three had moved out from the shade of the alders and were now clear under the sky. Troopers, common troopers and shabby at that, riding weary, ill-conditioned beasts. The nag which the third led was a mere rickle of bones. And yet to David's eye there was that about them which belied their apparent rank. They had spoken in the country way, but their tones were not those of countrymen. They had not the air of a gaunt Jock or a round-faced Tam from the plough-tail. All three were slim, and the hands which grasped the bridles were notably fine. They held themselves straight like courtiers, and in their voices lurked a note as of men accustomed to command. The leader was a dark man, with a weary thin face and great circles round his eyes; the second a tall fellow, with a tanned skin, a cast in his left eye, and a restless dare-devil look; the third, who seemed to be their groom, had so far not spoken, and had stood at the back with the led horse, but David had a glimpse above his ragged doublet of a neat small moustache and a delicate chin. "Leven has good blood in his ranks," he thought, "for these three never came out of a but-and-ben." Moreover, the ordinary trooper on his way home would not make Calidon a house of call.

He led them up to the glen road, intending to give them directions about their way, but there he found that his memory had betrayed him. He knew exactly in which nook of hill lay Calidon, but for the life of him he could not remember how the track ran to it.

"I'll have to be your guide, sirs," he told them. "I can take you to Calidon, but I cannot tell you how to get there."

"We're beholden to you, sir, but it's a sore burden on your good-nature. Does your own road lie in that airt?"

The young man laughed. "The night is fine and I'm in no haste to be in bed. I'll have you at Calidon door in half an hour."

Presently he led them off the road across a patch of heather, forded Rood at a shallow, and entered a wood of birches. The going was bad, and the groom with the led horse had the worst of it. The troopers were humane men, for they seemed to have a curious care of their servant. It was "Canny now, James—there's bog on the left," or "Take tent of that howe;" and once or twice, when there was a difficult passage, one or the other would seize the bridle of the led horse till the groom had passed. David saw from the man's face that he was grey with fatigue.

"Get you on my beast," he said, "and I'll hold the bridle. I can find my way better on foot. And do you others each take a led horse. The road we're travelling is none so wide, and we'll make better speed that way."

The troopers docilely did as they were bidden, and the weary groom was hoisted on David's grey gelding. The change seemed to ease him, and he lost his air of heavy preoccupation and let his eyes wander. The birch wood gave place to a bare hillside, where even the grey slipped among the screes and the four horses behind sprawled and slithered. They crossed a burn, surmounted another ridge, and entered a thick wood of oak, which David knew cloaked the environs of Calidon and which made dark travelling even in the strong moonlight. Great boulders were hidden in the moss, withered boughs hung low over the path, and now and then would come a patch of scrub so dense that it had to be laboriously circumvented. The groom on the grey was murmuring to himself, and to David's amazement it was Latin. "Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram," were the words he spoke.

David capped them.

 

"Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna,

Quale per incertam lunam … "

 

The man on the horse laughed, and David, looking up, had his first proper sight of his face. It was a long face, very pale, unshaven and dirty, but it was no face of a groom. The thin aquiline nose, the broad finely arched brow, were in themselves impressive, but the dominant feature was the eyes. They seemed to be grey—ardent, commanding, and yet brooding. David was so absorbed by this sudden vision that he tripped over a stone and almost pulled the horse down.

"I did not look," said the rider, in a voice low-pitched and musical, "I did not look to find a scholar in these hills."

"Nor did I know," said David, "that Virgil was the common reading of Leven's men."

They had reached a field of wild pasture studded with little thorns, in the middle of which stood a great stone dovecot. A burn falling in a deep ravine made a moat on one side of the tower of Calidon, which now rose white like marble in the moon. They crossed the ravine, not without trouble, and joined the main road from the glen, which ended in a high-arched gate round which clustered half a dozen huts.

At the sound of their arrival men ran out of the huts, and one seized the bridle of the leader. David and the groom had now fallen back, and it was the dark man who did the talking. These were strange troopers, for they sat their horses like princes, so that the hand laid on the bridle was promptly dropped.

"We would speak with the laird of Calidon," the dark man said. "Stay, carry this ring to him. He will know what it means." It seemed curious to David that the signet given to the man was furnished by the groom.

In five minutes the servant returned. "The laird waits on ye, sirs. I'll tak' the beasts, and your mails, if ye've ony. Through the muckle yett an it please ye."

David turned to go. "I've brought you to Calidon," he said, "and now I'll take my leave."

"No, no," cried the dark man. "You'll come in and drink a cup after the noble convoy you've given us. Nicholas Hawkshaw will be blithe to welcome you."

David would have refused, for the hour was already late and he was many miles from Woodilee, had not the groom laid his hand on his arm. "Come," he said. "I would see my friend, the student of Virgil, in another light than the moon," and to his amazement the young man found that it was a request which he could not deny. There was a compelling power in that quiet face, and he was strangely loth to part from it.

The four dismounted, the three troopers staggering with stiff bones. The dark man's limp did not change after the first steps, and David saw that he was crippled in the left leg. They passed through the gate into a courtyard, beyond which rose the square massif of the tower. In the low doorway a candle wavered, under a stone which bore the hawk in lure which was the badge of the house.

The three men bowed low to the candle, and David saw that it was held by a young girl.

Chapter 3 GUESTS IN CALIDON TOWER

"Will you enter, sirs?" said the girl. She was clad in some dark homespun stuff with a bright-coloured screen thrown over her head and shoulders. She held the light well in front of her, so that David could not see her face. He would fain have taken his leave, for it seemed strange to be entering Calidon thus late at e'en in the company of strangers, but the hand of the groom on his arm restrained him. "You will drink a stirrup-cup, friend. The night is yet young and the moon is high."

A steep stairway ran upward a yard or two from the doorway. Calidon was still a Border keep, where the ground-floor had once been used for byres and stables, and the inhabitants had dwelt in the upper stories. The girl moved ahead of them. "Will you be pleased to follow me, sirs? My uncle awaits you above."

They found themselves in a huge chamber which filled the width of the tower, and, but for a passage and a further staircase, its length. A dozen candles, which seemed to have been lit in haste, showed that it was raftered with dark oak beams, and that the walls were naked stone where they were not covered with a coarse arras. The floor, of a great age, was bare wood blackened with time and use, and covered with a motley of sheepskins and deerskins. Two long oak tables and a great oak bench made the chief furniture, but there were a multitude of stools of the same heavy ancient make, and by a big open fireplace two ancient chairs of stamped Spanish leather. A handful of peats smouldered on the hearth, and the thin blue smoke curled upward to add grime to an immense coat of arms carved in stone and surmounted by a forest of deer horns and a trophy of targes and spears.

David, accustomed only to the low-ceiled rooms of the Edinburgh closes, stared in amazement at the size of the place and felt abashed. The Hawkshaws had made too great a sound in his boyhood's world for him to enter their dwelling without a certain tremor of the blood. So absorbed was he in his surroundings that it was with a start that he saw the master of the house.

A man limped forward, gathered the leader of the party in his arms and kissed him on both cheeks.

"Will," he said, "Will, my old comrade! It's a kind wind that has blown you to Calidon this night. I havena clapped eyes on you these six year."

The host was a man about middle life, with the shoulders of a bull and a massive shaggy head now in considerable disorder from the fact that a night-cap had just been removed from it. His clothes were of a comfortable undress, for the tags of his doublet and the points of his breeches were undone, and over all he wore an old plaid dressing-gown. He had been reading, for a pipe of tobacco marked his place in a folio, and David noted that it was Philemon Holland's version of the Cyropædia. His eyes were blue and frosty, his cheeks ruddy, his beard an iron grey, and his voice as gusty as a hill wind. He limped heavily as he moved.

"Man, Will," he cried, "it's a whipping up of cripples when you and me forgather. The Germany wars have made lameters of the both of us. And who are the lads you've brought with you?"

"Just like myself, Nick, poor soldiers of Leven's, on our way home to Angus."

"Angus is it this time?" The host winked and then laughed boisterously.

"Angus it is, but their names and designations can wait till we have broken our fast. 'Faith, we've as wolfish a hunger as ever you and me tholed in Thuringia. And I've brought in an honest man that guided us through your bogs and well deserves bite and sup."

Nicholas Hawkshaw peered for a moment at David. "I cannot say I'm acquaint with the gentleman, but I've been that long away I've grown out of knowledge of my own countryside. But ye shallna lack for meat and drink, for when I got your token I bade Edom stir himself and make ready. There's a good browst of yill, and plenty of French cordial and my father's Canary sack. And there's a mutton ham, and the best part of a pie—I wouldna say just what's intil the pie, but at any rate there's blackcocks and snipes and leverets, for I had the shooting of them. Oh, and there's whatever more Edom can find in the house of Calidon. Here's back your ring, Will. When I read the cognizance I had a notion that I was about to entertain greater folk—"

"Than your auld friend Will Rollo and two poor troopers of Leven's. And yet we're maybe angels unawares." He took the ring and handed it to the groom, who with David stood a little back from the others, while Nicholas Hawkshaw's eyes widened in a momentary surprise.

An ancient serving-man and a barefoot maid brought in the materials for supper, and the two troopers fell on the viands like famished crows. The groom ate little and drank less; though he was the slightest in build of the three travellers, he seemed the most hardened to the business. The lame man, who was called Will Rollo, was presently satisfied, and deep in reminiscences with his host, but the other required greater sustenance for his long wiry body, and soon reduced the pie to a fragment. He pressed morsels upon the groom—a wing of grouse, a giblet of hare—but the latter smiled and waved the food away. A friendly service, Leven's, David thought, where a servant was thus tenderly considered.

"Yon were the brave days, when you and me served as ensigns of Meldrum's in the Corpus Evangelicorum. And yon was the lad to follow, for there never was the marrow of the great Gustavus for putting smeddum into troops that had as many tongues and creeds as the Tower of Babel. But you and me were ower late on the scene. We never saw Breitenfeld—just the calamitous day of Lutzen, and the blacker day of Nordlingen, where Bernhard led us like sheep to the slaughter. That was the end of campaigning for you, Will. I mind leaving you on the ground for dead and kissing your cheek, the while I was near my own end with a musketoon ball in my ribs. Then I heard you were still in life and back in Scotland, but I was off with auld Wrangel to Pomerania, and had to keep my mind on my own affairs."

So the talk went on, memories of leaguers and forced marches and pitched battles, punctuated with the names of Leslies and Hamiltons and Kerrs and Lumsdens and a hundred Scots mercenaries.—"I got my quietus a year syne serving with Torstensson and his Swedes—a pitiable small affair in Saxonia, where I had the misfortune to meet a round shot on the ricochet which cracked my shin-bone and has set me hirpling for the rest of my days. My Colonel was Sandy Leslie, a brother of Leslie of Balquhain, him that stuck Wallenstein at Eger, but a man of honester disposition and a good Protestant. He bade me go home, for I would never again be worth a soldier's hire, and faith! when the chirurgeon had finished with my leg I was of the same opinion.—So home you find me, Will, roosting in the cauld rickle of stones that was my forbears', while rumours of war blow like an east wind up the glens. I'm waiting for your news. I hear word that Davie Leslie … "

"Our news can wait, Nick. We've a gentleman here to whose ears this babble of war must sound outlandish." It seemed to David that some secret intelligence passed between the two, and that a foot of one was pressed heavily on the other's toes.

"I am a man of peace," David said, for the talk had stirred his fancy, "but I too have word of a glorious victory in England won by the Covenant armies. If you have come straight from the south you can maybe tell me more."

"There was a victory beyond doubt," said the tall man with the squint, "and that is why we of Leven's are permitted to go home. We have gotten our pay, whilk is an uncommon happening for the poor soldier in this land."

"I have heard," said David, "that the ranks of the Army of the Covenant fought for higher matters than filthy lucre."

"For what, belike?"

"For the purity of their faith and the Crown honours of Christ."

The other whistled gently through his teeth.

"No doubt. No doubt. There's a braw sough of the Gospel in Leven's ranks. But we must consider the loaves and fishes, good sir, as well as the preaching of the Word. Man canna live by bread alone, but he assuredly canna live without it, and to fill his belly he wants more than preaching. Lucre's none so filthy if it be honestly earned, and goes to keep a roof over the wife and bairns. I have served in many lands with a kennin' o' queer folk, and, believe me, sir, the first thing a soldier thinks of is just his pay."

"But he cannot fight unless he has a cause to fight for."

"He'll make a very good shape at it if he has been learned his business by a heavy-handed sergeant. I have seen the riddlings of Europe stick fast as rocks before Wallenstein's horse, because they had been taught their trade and feared death less than their Colonel's tongue. And I have seen the flower of gentrice, proud as Lucifer and gallant as lions, and every one with a noble word on his lips, break like rotten twigs at the first musket volley. It's discipline that's the last word in war."

"But if the discipline be there, will not a conviction of the right of his cause make a better soldier?"

"You have spoken a true word, and there's a man in England this day that knows it. That is what Cromwell has done. He has built up a body of horse that stand like an iron wall and move like a river in spate. They have the discipline of Gustavus's Swedes, and the fires of Hell in their hearts. I tell you, there is nothing in this land that can stand against them."

"I have no love for sectaries," said David. "But cannot our Scots do likewise, with the Covenant to nerve them?"

The other shrugged his shoulders.

"The Covenant's but sour kail to the soldier. Davie Leslie has hammered his men into a wise-like army, because he learned his trade from Gustavus. But think you our bannock-fed foot-sentinels care a doit for the black gowns at Westminster? A man will fight for his King and for his country, and for liberty to worship God in his own way. But, unless he has a crack in his head, he will not fight for a fine point of Church government."

David was becoming ill at ease. He felt that it was his duty to testify, or otherwise he would be guilty of the sin of Meroz, the sin of apathy when his faith was challenged. But he was far from clear as to the exact nature of his faith. There was no blasphemy in questioning whether the Covenant were truly in the hearts of the people. Had not the minister of Cauldshaw that very afternoon expressed the same doubt?

Nicholas Hawkshaw was peering at him intently.

"I should ken you, friend, for they tell me you belong to this countryside. And your face sticks in my memory, but I canna put a name to it."

"They call me David Sempill. I am the new-ordained minister of Woodilee."

Nicholas cried out. "Auld Wat o' the Roodfoot's grandson. I heard of your coming, sir, and indeed I'm your chief heritor. I'll nave your hand on that. Man, I kenned your gudesire well, and many a pouchful of groats I had from him when I was a laddie. You're back among kenned folk, Mr. Sempill, and I wish you a long life in Woodilee."

The troopers did not seem to share their host's geniality. Quick glances passed between them, and the tall man shifted his seat so that he came between David and the groom. This latter had taken no part in the conversation, indeed he had not spoken a word, but after his meal was finished had sat with his head on his breast as if sunk in meditation. Now he raised his eyes to David, and it was he who spoke.

"I am not less loyal to the Kirk of Scotland than you, Mr. Sempill. You are a placed minister, and I am a humble elder of that Kirk."

"In what parish?" David asked eagerly.

"In my native parish benorth of Forth."

The man's dress and station were forgotten by David when he looked at his face. Now that he saw clearly in the candle-light, it was not the face of a common groom. Every feature spoke of race, the firm mouth of command, the brooding grey eyes of thought. The voice was sweet and musical, and the man's whole air had a gentle but imperious courtesy.

The movement of the tall trooper, while it had separated David from the groom, had brought the latter full into the view of Nicholas Hawkshaw. Then a strange thing happened. The host, after a long stare, during which amazement and recognition woke in his eyes, half rose from his seat and seemed on the verge of speaking. His gaze was fixed on the groom, and David read in it something at once deferential and exulting. Then the toe of the lame man's boot came down on his shin, and the lame man's hand was laid on his arm. The lame man, too, said something in a tongue which David could not understand. Nicholas subsided in his chair, but his face remained both puzzled and excited.

The groom spoke again.

"You are a scholar, and you are young, and you are full of the ardour of your calling. This parish is fortunate in its minister, and I would that all Scotland were as happily served. What is it that you and I seek alike? A pure doctrine and a liberated Kirk? Is there no more?"

"I seek above all things to bring men and women to God's mercy-seat."

"And I say Amen. That is more than any disputation about the forms of Presbytery. But you seek also, or I am mightily mistook in you, the freedom and well-being of this land of ours—that our Israel may have peace and prosperity in her borders."

"If the first be won, all the rest will be added unto us."

"Doubtless. But only if the first be truly won—if the Kirk attend to the work of salvation and does not expend her toil in barren fields. Her sovereign must be King Jesus. Take heed that instead it be not King Covenant."

The words recalled to David Mr. Fordyce's doubts, which had been so scornfully repelled by the ministers of Kirk Aller and Bold.

"Does it lie in the mouth of a minister or an elder of the Kirk to cavil at the Kirk's doings?" he asked, but without conviction in his tone.

The other smiled. "You give due loyalty, as the Scripture enjoins, to the King, Mr. Sempill?"

"I am faithful to his Majesty so long as his Majesty is faithful to law and religion."

"Even so. It is my own creed. The King must respect the limits of his prerogative—it is the condition on which he rules in a free land. My loyalty to the Kirk is in the same case. I am loyal when she fulfils those duties which God has laid upon her—that duty, above all, of bringing mortal men to God. If she forget those duties, and meddle arrogantly with civil matters that do not concern her, then I take leave to oppose her, as in a like case I would oppose his Majesty. For by such perversities both King and Kirk become tyrants, and tyranny is not to be endured by men who are called into the liberty of Christ."

"Or by Scots," added the tall trooper.

"I have no clearness on the point," said David after a pause. "I have not thought deeply on these matters, for I am but new to the ministry, and my youth was filled with profane study."

"Nevertheless, such study is a good foundation for a wise theology. I judge that you are a ripe Latinist—maybe also a Grecian. You have read your Aristotle? You are familiar with the history of the ancient world, which illumines all later ages? I would point my arguments from that armoury."

"I cannot grant that the doings of ancient heathendom give any rule for a Christian state."

"But, sir, the business of government is always the same. We have our Lord's warning that there are the things of Cæsar and the things of God. The Roman was the great master of the arts of government, and he did not seek throughout his empire to make a single religion. He was content to give it the peace of his law, and let each people go its own way in matters of worship. It was in that tolerant world which he created that our Christian faith found its opportunity."

"Doubtless God so moved the Roman mind for His own purpose. But I join issue on your application. The Church of Christ is now in being, and the faith of Christ is the foundation of a Christian state. Civil law is an offence against God unless it be also Christian."

The young man smiled. "I do not deny it. This realm of ours is professedly a Christian realm—I would it were more truly so. But that does not exempt it from obedience to those laws of government without which no realm, Christian or pagan, may endure. If a man is so ill a smith that he cannot shoe my horse, I will be none the better served because he is a good Christian. If a land be ill governed, the disaster will be not the less great because the governors are men of God. If his Majesty—to take a pertinent example—override the law to the people's detriment, that tyranny will be not the less grievous because his Majesty believes in his heart that he is performing a duty towards the Almighty. Honest intention will not cure faulty practice, and the fool is the fool whether he be unbeliever or professor."

David shook his head. "Where does your argument tend? I fear to schism."

"Not so. I am an orthodox son of the Kirk, a loyal servant of his Majesty, and a passionate Scot. Here, my friend, is my simple confession. There is but one master in the land, and its name is Law—which is in itself a creation of a free people under the inspiration of the Almighty. That law may be changed by the people's will, but till it be so changed it is to be revered and obeyed. It has ordained the King's prerogative, the rights of the subject, and the rights and duties of the Kirk. The state is like the body, whose health is only to be maintained by a just proportion among its members. If a man's belly be his god, his limbs will suffer; if he use only his legs, his arms will dwindle. If, therefore, the King should intrude upon the subject's rights, or the subject whittle at the King's prerogative, or the Kirk set herself above the Crown, there will be a sick state and an ailing people."

Nicholas Hawkshaw had been listening intently with a puzzled air, his eyes fixed on the groom's face, but the two troopers seemed ill at ease.

"Man, James," said the tall man, "you've mistook your calling. You should have been a regent in the college of St. Andrews, and hammered sense into the thick heads of the bejaunts."

Rollo, the lame man, shifted his seat and seemed inclined to turn the conversation.

"Patience, Mark," said the groom. "It's not often a poor soldier of Leven's gets a chance of a crack with a like-minded friend. For I'm certain that Mr. Sempill is very near my way of thinking."

"I do not quarrel with your premises," said David, "but I'm not clear about the conclusion."

"It's writ large in this land to-day. There are those that would make the King a puppet and put all authority in parliaments, and there are those who would make the Kirk like Calvin's at Geneva, a ruler over both civil and religious matters. I say that both ways lie madness and grief. If you upset the just proportion of the law you will gain not liberty but confusion. You are a scholar, Mr. Sempill, and have read the histories of Thucydides? Let me counsel you to read them again and consider the moral."

"What side are you on?" David asked abruptly.

"I am on the side of the free people of Scotland. And you by your vows are on the same side, for your concern is to feed the flock of God which is among us. Think you, sir, if you depress the balance against the King, that thereby you will win more for the people? Nay, nay, what is lost to the prerogative will go, not to the people, but to those who prey on them. You will have that anarchy which gives his chance to the spoiler, and out of anarchy will come some day a man of violence who will tyrannically make order again. It is the way of the world, my friend."

"Are you for the Covenant?"

At the question the others started. "Enough of politics," cried Rollo. "These are no matters to debate among weary folk." But the groom raised his hand, and they were silent.

"I am for the Covenant. Six years back I drew sword for it, and I did not sheathe that sword till we had established the liberties of this land. That was indeed a Covenant of Grace."

"There is another and a later. What say you of that?"

"I say of that other that it is a Covenant of Works in which I have no part, nor any true lover of the Kirk. It is a stepping of the Kirk beyond the bounds prescribed by the law of God and the law of man, and it will mean a weakening of the Kirk in its proper duties. And that I need not tell you, as a minister of Christ, will be the starvation and oppression of Christ's simple folk. Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi. Is it not more pleasing to God that His ministers should comfort the sick and the widow and the fatherless, and guide souls to Heaven, than that they should scrabble for civil pre-eminence?"

Into David's mind came two visions—that of the complacent ministers of Kirk Aller and Bold as they had discoursed at meat, and that of the old herd at the Greenshiel, sitting by his dead wife. The pictures belonged to different worlds, and at the moment he felt that these worlds were eternally apart. He had the disquieting thought that the one had only the husks of faith, and the other the grain. Dimly he heard the voice of the groom. "I will give you a text, Mr. Sempill. 'The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah His pleasant plant; and He looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.'"

 

He scarcely realized that the others had sprung to their feet, and it was only when Nicholas Hawkshaw exclaimed that he turned his head.

A girl stood before them, the girl who had opened the door, but whose face he had scarcely seen at the time in the poor light.

"Katrine, my dear, you've been long of coming." It was Nicholas who spoke. "I thought you had slipped off to your bed. This is my sister's child, sirs, who keeps me company in this auld barrack—Robert Yester's daughter, him that fell with Monro in the year 'thirty-four. You see three gentlemen-troopers of Leven's, my dear, and Mr. Sempill, the new minister of Woodilee."

The girl was dressed in a gown of blue velvet, the skirts of which were drawn back in front to show an embroidered petticoat of stiff yellow satin. It was cut low at the neck and shoulders, and round the top ran a broad edging of fine lace. Her dark hair was caught up in a knot behind, but allowed to fall in curls on each side of her face. That face, to David's startled eyes, was like none that he had ever seen before, certainly like none of the Edinburgh burgher girls whom he had observed in their finery on the Saturday causeway. It was small and delicately featured, the cheeks flushed with youth and health, the eyes dark, brilliant, and mirthful. At another time he would have been shocked at her dress, for the fashion of a low bodice had not spread much beyond the Court, but now he did not take note of what she wore. He was gazing moonstruck upon a revelation.

She smiled on him—she smiled on them all. She curtsied lightly to her uncle, to Rollo, and to the dark man. But she did not curtsy to the minister. For suddenly, as she looked at the groom, her composure deserted her. Her mouth moved as if she would have spoken, and then she checked herself, for David saw that the groom had put his finger to his lips. Instead she curtsied almost to the ground, a reverence far more deep than she had accorded to the others, and when he gave her his hand she bent her head as if her impulse was to kiss it.

All this David saw with a confused vision. He had scarcely spoken ten words in his life to a woman outside his own kin, and this bright apparition loosened his knees with nervousness. He stammered his farewells. He had already outstayed the bounds of decency, and he had a long ride home—he wished his friends a safe conclusion to their journey—in the course of his pastoral visitations he would have the chance of coming again to Calidon. "'Deed, sir, and you'll make sure of that," said the hospitable Nicholas. "There's aye a bite and a sup at Calidon for the minister of Woodilee."

He bowed to the girl, and she looked at him for the first time, a quizzical appraising look, and gave him a fleeting smile. Five minutes later he was on his horse and fording Rood.

He took the long road by the back of the Hill of Deer, riding in bright moonshine up the benty slopes and past the hazel thickets. His mind was in a noble confusion, for on this, his first day in his parish, experiences had thronged on him too thick and fast. Out of the welter two faces stood clear, the groom's and the girl's… . He remembered the talk, and his conscience pricked him. Had he been faithful to his vows? Had he been guilty of the sin of Meroz? Had he listened to railing accusations and been silent? … He did not know—in truth he did not care—for the sum of his recollection was not of an argument but of a person. The face of the young man had been more than his words, for it had been the face of a comrade, and an intimate friendliness had looked out of his eyes. He longed to see him again, to be with him, to follow him, to serve him—but he did not know his name, and they would doubtless never meet again. David was very young, and could have wept at the thought.

And the girl …  ? The sight of her had been the coping-stone to a night of marvels. She was not like the groom—he had been glad to flee from her company, for she had no part in his world. But a marvel beyond doubt! The recollection of her made him a poet, and as he picked his way over the hill he was quoting to himself the lines in Homer where the old men of Troy see Helen approaching, and wonder at her beauty… .?? ??????? ?????—how did it go? "Small wonder that the Trojans and the mailed Greeks should endure pain through many years for such a woman. In face she is strangely like to some immortal."

And then he felt compunction, for he remembered the worn face of the dead woman at the Greenshiel.

Chapter 4 THE FAITHFUL SERVANT

For two days the minister of Woodilee was a man unbalanced and distraught. He sat at his books without concentration, and he wandered on the hills without delight, while Isobel's face puckered in dismay as she removed his scarcely tasted meals. It was hot thundery weather, with storms that never broke in rain grumbling among the glens, and to this she set down his indisposition to eat. But David's trouble was not of the body. He had thought himself the mailed servant of God, single in purpose, armed securely against the world, and lo! in a single night he had been the sport of profane fancies and had rejoiced in vanities.

The girl he scarcely thought of—she had scared rather than enthralled him. But the Wood of Melanudrigill lay heavy on his conscience. Where was his Christian fortitude if a black forest at night could set him shivering like a lost child? David had all his life kept a tight hand on his courage; if he dreaded a thing, that was good reason why he should go out of his road to face it. His instinct was to return alone to Melanudrigill in the dark, penetrate its deepest recesses, and give the lie to its enchantments… . But a notion which he could not combat restrained him. That was what the Wood wanted, to draw him back to it through curiosity or fear. If he yielded to his impulse he would be acknowledging its power. It was the part of a minister of God to deny at the outset that the place was more than a common wilderness of rock and tree, to curb his fancies as things too vain for a grown man's idlest thought.

On this point he fixed his resolution and found some comfort. But the memory of Calidon and the troopers and the groom's words remained to trouble him. Had he not borne himself in their company as a Laodicean, assenting when he should have testified? … He went over every detail of the talk, for it stuck firmly in his mind. They had decried the Solemn League and Covenant in the name of the Kirk, and he had not denounced them… . And yet they had spoken as Christian men and loyal sons of that Kirk… . What meant, too, the groom's disquisition on law and government? David found the argument hard to gainsay—it presented a doctrine of the state which commended itself to his reason. Yet it was in flat contradiction of the declared view of that Kirk which he was sworn to serve, and what then became of his ordination vows? … But was it contrary to the teaching of the Word and the spirit of his faith? He searched his mind on this point and found that he had no clearness.

His duty, it seemed, was to go to some father-in-God, like the minister of Kirk Aller, and lay his doubts before him. But he found that course impossible. The pale fleshy face of Mr. Muirhead rose before him, as light-giving as a peat-stack; he heard his complacent tones, saw the bland conceit in his ruminant eyes. Nor would he fare better with the militancy of his brother of Bold, who classed all mankind as Amalekites, save the chosen few who wore his own phylacteries. Mr. Fordyce might give him comfort, and he was on the point many times of saddling his horse and riding to the manse of Cauldshaw… . But each time he found it impossible, and when he asked himself the cause he was amazed at the answer. Loyalty forbade him—loyalty to the young man, habited as a groom, who had spoken both as counsellor and comrade. That was the enduring spell of that strange night. David as a youth in Edinburgh had had few familiar friends, and none that could be called intimate. For the first time he had met one from whom had gone forth an influence that melted his heart. He recalled with a kind of aching affection the gentle, commanding courtesy, the winning smile, the masterful and yet wistful grey eyes. "I wonder," he thought, "if I was not meant to be a soldier. For I could follow yon man most joyfully to the cannon's mouth."

On the third day peace returned to him, when he buried Marion of the Greenshiel. The parish coffin was not used, as was the custom for poor folk, since the farmer of Reiverslaw, Richie's master, paid the cost of a private one, and himself attended the "chesting" the night before. On the day David walked the seven miles to the cottage, where Richie had set out a poor entertainment of ale and oatcakes for the mourners. It was not the fashion for the minister to pray at the house or at the grave, as savouring of Popish prayers for the dead, nor was it the custom for a widower to attend the funeral; but David took his own way, and prayed with the husband, the wailing women, and the half-dozen shepherds who had assembled for the last rites. The light coffin was carried by four young men, and David walked with them all the way to Woodilee. The farmer of Reiverslaw joined them at a turn of the road—his name was Andrew Shillinglaw, a morose, dark man not over-well spoken of in the parish—and he and the minister finished the journey side by side. The bellman, Nehemiah Robb, who was also the gravedigger and the beadle, met them at the entrance to the kirkton, and with him a crowd of villagers. Preceded by the jangling of Robb's bell, the procession reached the shallow grave, the women remaining at the kirkyard gate. The coffin was lowered, the earth shovelled down, and the thing in five minutes was over. There was no "dredgy" [funeral feast] at the poor house of the Greenshiel to draw the mourners back upon the seven moorland miles. The men adjourned to Lucky Weir's, the kirk bell was restored to its tree, a woman or two sobbed, and the last of Marion Smail was a thin stream of figures vanishing in the haze of evening, one repeating to the other in funereal voices that "puir Mirren had got weel awa'."

Yet the occasion, austere and bare as poverty could make it, woke in David a mood of tenderness and peace. The lowering clouds had gone from the sky, all morning it had rained, and the afternoon had had a soft autumn freshness. He had prayed with Richie, but his prayers had been also for himself, and as he walked behind the coffin on the path by the back of the Hill of Deer his petition seemed to have been answered. He had an assurance of his vocation. The crowd at the kirkyard, those toil-worn folk whose immortal souls had been given into his charge, moved him to a strange exultation. He saw his duty cleared from all doubts, and there must have been that in his face which told of his thoughts, for men greeted him and then passed on, as if unwilling to break in on his preoccupation. Only Reiverslaw, who was on his way to Lucky Weir's, whence he would depart drunk in the small hours, was obtuse in his perceptions. He took the minister's hand and shook it as he would a drover's at a fair, seemed anxious to speak, found no words, and left with a grunted farewell.

 

It was a fine, long-drawn-out back-end, the best that had been known for twenty years. All September the sun shone like June, and it was well into October before the morning frosts began, and the third week of November before the snow came. The little crops—chiefly grey oats and barley, with an occasional rig of peas and flax—were well ripened and quickly reaped. The nettie-wives were busy all day in the fields, and the barefoot children made the leading in of the harvest a holiday, with straw whistles in their mouths and fantastic straw badges on their clothing. Then came the threshing with jointed flails, and the winnowing on barn roofs when the first east winds blew. There were no gleaners in the empty stubbles, for it was held a pious duty to leave something behind for the fowls of the air. Presently the scanty fruits of the earth were under cover, the bog hay in dwarfish ricks, the unthreshed oats and bear in the barns, the grain in the girnels, and soon the wheel of the Woodilee mill was clacking merrily to grind the winter's meal. In that parish the burden of the laird lay light. Nicholas Hawkshaw asked no more than his modest rental in kind, and did not exact his due in labour, but for a week the road by the back of the Hill of Deer saw a procession of horses carrying the "kain" meal to the Calidon granary. As the minister watched the sight one day, Ephraim Caird, the Chasehope tenant, stood beside him, looking gloomily at his own beasts returning. "That's the way our puir crops are guided," he said. "As the auld folk used to say, 'Ane part to saw, ane part to gnaw, and ane to pay the laird witha'.'" His eyes showed that he had no love for Calidon.

Hallowmass that year was a cheerful season. The elders shook their heads at the Hallowe'en junketings, and the severe Chasehope was strong in his condemnation. But on the night of Hallowe'en, as David walked in the bright moonlight and saw the lights in the cottages and heard laughter and a jigging of fiddles, he did not find it in his heart to condemn the ancient fashions. Nor apparently did Chasehope himself, for David was much mistaken if it was not Ephraim's great shoulders and fiery head that he saw among the cabbage-stalks in Nance Kello's garden. He had been to Hallowe'en frolics himself in past days when he stayed with his cousin at Newbiggin, but it seemed to him that here in Woodilee there was something oppressed and furtive in the merriment. There was a secrecy about each lit dwelling, and no sign of young lads and lasses laughing on the roads. He noticed, too, that for the next few days many of the people had a look of profound weariness—pale faces, tired eyes, stealthy glances—as if behind the apparent decorum there had been revels that exhausted soul and body.

With the reaping of the harvest the ill-conditioned cattle were brought from the hills to the stubbles, and soon turned both outfield and infield into a miry wilderness. David, whose knowledge of farming was derived chiefly from the Georgics, had yet an eye in his head and a store of common sense, and he puzzled at the methods. The land at its best was ill-drained, and the trampling of beasts made a thousand hollows which would be puddles at the first rains and would further sour the rank soil. But when he spoke on the matter to the farmer of Mirehope, he was answered scornfully that that had been the "auld way of the land," and that those who were proud in their own conceit and had tried new-fangled methods—he had heard word of such in the West country—could not get two bolls from an acre where he had four. "And Mirehope's but wersh [sour] land, sir, and not to be named wi' the Clyde howms."

When the November snows came all live stock was gathered into the farm-towns. The cattle were penned in yards with thatched shelters, and soon turned them into seas of mud. The milking cows were in the byre; the sheep in paddocks near-by: the draught-oxen and the horses in miserable stables of mud and heather. It was the beginning of the winter hibernation, and the chief work of the farms was the feeding of the stock on their scanty winter rations. The hay—coarse bog grasses with little nutriment in them—went mainly to the sheep; horses and cattle had for fodder straw and messes of boiled chaff; while Crummie in the byre was sometimes regaled with the débris of the kailyard and the oddments left from the family meals. Winter each year was both for beast and man a struggle with famine, and each was rationed like the people of a besieged city. But if food was scarce at the best, Woodilee did not want for fuel. It had been a good year for peats, for they had ripened well on the hills, and the open autumn had made them easy to carry. Each cottage had its ample peat-stack, and when harvest was over there had been also a great gathering of windfalls from the woods, so that by every door stood a pile of kindlings.

Melanudrigill in the bright October days had lost its menace for David. He had no occasion to visit it by night, but more than once he rode through it by day on his pastoral visitations to Fennan or the Rood valley, and once in a flaming sunset he returned that way from Kirk Aller. The bracken was golden in decay, and the yellowing birches, the russet thorns, and the occasional scarlet of rowans made the sombre place almost cheerful. In his walks on the hill the great forest below him seemed to have grown thin and open, no longer a vast enveloping cloak, but a kindly covering for the ribs of earth. Some potency had gone from it with the summer, as if the tides of a fierce life had sunk back into the ground again. He had seen deer in the glades, and they looked innocent things… . But he noticed as curious that none of the villagers in their quest for wood penetrated far into it, and that on its fringes they only gathered the windfalls. Up at the back of the Hill of Deer and in the Rood glen men were busy all day cutting birch and hazel billets, but no axe was laid to any tree in the Black Wood.

A week before Yule came the great snow. It began with a thin cold fog which muffled every fold of the hills. "Rouk's [fog] snaw's wraith," said the parish, and saw to its fuel-stacks and looked gloomily at its shivering beasts. The thick weather lasted for three days and three nights, weather so cold that it was pain to draw breath, and old folk at night in their box beds could not get warmth, and the Woodilee burn was frozen hard even in the linns. It was noted as a bad omen that deer from Melanudrigill were seen in the kirkton, and that at dawn when the Mirehope shepherd went out to his sheep he found half-frozen blue hares crouching among the flocks. On the fourth morning the snow began, and fell for three days in heavy flakes, so that it lay feet deep on the roads and fields. Then the wind rose and for six furious hours a blizzard raged, so that the day was like night, and few dared stir from their doors. David, setting out to visit Amos Ritchie's wife, who was sick of a congestion, took two hours over a quarter of mile of road, wandering through many kitchen middens, and had to postpone his return till the wind abated in the evening, while Isobel in the manse was demented with anxiety. The consequence was that the snow was swept bare from the knowes, but piled into twelve-foot drifts in the hollows. It was an ill time for the sheep in the paddocks, which were often one giant drift, where the presence of the flock could only be detected by the yellowish steaming snow. Chasehope lost a score of ewes, Mirehope half as many, and Nether Fennan, where the drifts were deep, the best part of his flock. To David it seemed that the farmers' ways were a tempting of Providence. Had the sheep been left on the hill they would have crowded in the snow to the bare places; here in the confined paddocks they were caught in a trap. Moreover, on the hill in open winter weather there was a better living to be picked up than that afforded by the narrow rations of sour bog hay. But when he spoke thus his hearers plainly thought him mad. Sheep would never face a winter on the hills—besides, the present practice was the "auld way."

The snow lay till the New Year was a week old, and when the thaw came and the roads ran in icy streams, David took to his bed for two days in utter exhaustion. All through the storm he had been on his legs, for there were sick folk and old folk in Woodilee who would perish miserably if left alone. The farm-towns could look after themselves, but in the scattered cottages of the kirkton there was no one to take command, and neighbourliness languished when each household was preoccupied with its own cares. Peter Pennecuik, a ruling elder, whose gift of prayer had been commended by Mr. Muirhead, had lost a tup and had his byre roof crushed in by the drift, so he became a fatalist, holding that the Lord had prepared a visitation which it would be impiety to resist, and sat lugubriously by his fireside. David's fingers itched for his ears. From Amos Ritchie the blacksmith he got better assistance. Amos was a shaggy, black-bearded man of thirty-five, a great fiddler and a mighty putter of the stone, whose godliness might have been suspect but for his behaviour in the Bishops' War. His wife was at death's door all through the storm, but he nevertheless constituted himself the minister's first lieutenant, and wrought valiantly in the work of relief. There were old women too chilled and frail to kindle their fires in the morning and melt snow for water; there were households so ill provided that they existed largely on borrowed food; there were cots where the weather had broken roof or wall. Isobel in the manse kitchen was a busy woman, and her girdle was never off the fire. David had looked forward to the winter snows as a season of peace, when he could sit indoors with his books; instead he found himself on his feet for fourteen hours out of the twenty-four, his hands and face chapped like a ploughman's, and so weary at night that he fell off his chair with sleep while Isobel fetched his supper.

Yet it was the storm which was David's true ordination to his duties, for it brought him close to his people, not in high sacramental things like death, but in their daily wrestling for life. He might visit their houses and catechize their families, but these were formal occasions, with all on their best behaviour, whereas in the intimate business of charity he saw them as they were.

The new minister was young and he was ardent, and his duties were still an adventure. His Sabbath sermons were diligently meditated. For his morning lecture he took the book of the prophet Amos, which, as the work of a herdsman, seemed fitting for a country parish. His two weekly discourses dealt laboriously with the fourfold state of man—his early state of innocence, his condition after the Fall, his state under grace, his condition in eternity. That winter David did not get beyond the state of innocence, and in discoursing on it he exhausted his ingenuity in piecing texts together from the Scriptures, and in such illustrations as he believed would awaken his hearers' minds. Profane learning openly used would have been resented, but he contrived to bring in much that did not belong to the divinity schools, and he escaped criticism, it may be, because his Kirk Session did not understand him. His elders were noted theologians, and what was strange to them, if it was weightily phrased, they took for theological profundity.

At ten o'clock each Sabbath morning Robb the beadle tinkled the first bell; at the second the congregation moved into the kirk, and Peter Pennecuik, who acted as precentor, led the opening psalm, reading each line before it was sung. When Robb jerked the third bell, David entered the pulpit and began with prayer. At one o'clock the people dispersed, those who came from a distance to Lucky Weir's ale-house; and at two fell the second service, which concluded at four with the coming of the dark. The kirk, with its earthen floor, was cold as a charnel-house, and the dimness of the light tried even David's young eyes. The people sat shivering on their little stools, each with the frozen decorum and strained attention which was their Sabbath ritual. To the minister it seemed often as if he were speaking to sheeted tombstones, he felt as if his hearers were at an infinite distance from him, and only on rare occasions, when some shining text of Scripture moved his soul and he spoke simply and with emotion, did he feel any contact with his flock.

But his sermons were approved. Peter Pennecuik gave it as his verdict that he was a "deep" preacher and sound in the fundamentals. Others, remembering the thrill that sometimes came into his voice, called him an "affectionate" preacher, and credited him with "unction." But there were many that longed for stronger fare, something more marrowy and awful, pictures of the hell of torment which awaited those who were not of the Elect. He had the "sough," no doubt, but it was a gentle west wind, and not the stern Euroclydon which should call sinners to repentance. Their minister was a man of God, but he was young; years might add weight to him and give him the thunders of Sinai.

To David the Sabbath services were the least of his duties. He had come to Woodilee with his heart full of the mighty books which he would write in the solitude of his upper chamber. The chief was that work on the prophet Isaiah which should be for all time a repository of sacred learning, so that Sempill on Isaiah would be quoted reverently, like Luther on the Galatians or Calvin on the Romans. In the autumn evenings he had sketched the lines of his masterpiece, and before the great snow he had embarked on its prolegomena. But the storm made a breach in his studies. He felt himself called to more urgent duties, for he was a pastor of souls before he was a scholar. His visitations and catechizings among his flock were his chief care, and he began to win a name for diligence. On nights when even a shepherd would have kept the ingle side, David would arrive at a moorland cottage, and many a time Isobel had to welcome in the small hours a dripping or frozen master, thaw him by her kitchen fire, and feed him with hot ale and bannocks, while he recounted his adventures. He was strong and buoyant, and he loved the life, which seemed to him to have the discipline of a soldier. His face high-coloured by weather, his cheerful eyes, and his boyish voice and laugh were soon popular in the length of the parish. "He is a couthy lad," said the old wives, "and for a man o' God he's terrible like a plain body."

Also he took charge of the children. In Woodilee there was no school or schoolmaster. There were three hundred communicants, but it was doubtful if more than a dozen could read a sentence or write their names. In the Kirk Session itself there were only three. So David started a school, which met thrice a week of a morning in the manse kitchen. He sent to Edinburgh for horn-books, and with them and his big Bible taught his class their rudiments. These were the pleasantest hours of the day for master and children, and weekly the gathering grew till there was not a child in the kirkton or in the farm-towns of Mirehope and Chasehope that would have missed them. When they arrived, blue with cold and often breakfastless, Isobel would give each a bowl of broth, and while the lesson proceeded she would mend their ragged garments. Indeed more than one child emerged new clad, for the minister's second-best cloak and an old pair of breeches were cut up by Isobel—expostulating but not ill-pleased—for tattered little mortals.

David was more than a private almoner. He and his Session had the Poor Box to administer, the sole public means of relieving the parish's needs. Woodilee was better off than many places, in that it possessed a mortification of a thousand pounds Scots, bequeathed fifty years earlier by a certain Grizel Hawkshaw for the comfort of the poor. Also there was the weekly collection at the kirk services, where placks and doits and bodles, and a variety of debased coins, clinked in the plate at the kirk door, and there were the fines levied by the Session on evil-doers. In the winter the task of almoner was easier, for there were few beggars on the roads, and those that crossed the hills came as a rule only to die, when the single expense was the use of the parish coffin. Yet the administration of the scanty funds was a difficult business, and it led to David's first controversies with his Session. Each elder had his own favourites among the poor, and Chasehope and Mirehope and Nether Fennan wrangled over every grant. The minister, still new to the place, for the most part held his peace, but now and then, in cases which he knew of, he asserted his authority. There was a woman, none too well reputed, who lived at Chasehope-foot, with a buxom black-eyed daughter, and whose house, though lamentably dirty and ill guided, seemed to lack nothing. When he opposed Chasehope's demand that she should receive a benefaction as a lone widow, he had a revelation of Chasehope's temper. The white face crimsoned, and the greenish eyes looked for a moment as ugly as a snarling dog's. "Worthy Mr. Macmichael … " he began, but David cut him short. "These moneys are for the relief of the helpless poor," he said, "and they are scant enough at the best. I should think shame to waste a bodle except on a pitiful necessity. To him or her that hath shall not be given, while I am the minister of this parish." Chasehope said nothing, and presently he mastered his annoyance, but the farmer of Mirehope—Alexander Sprot was his name—muttered something in an undertone to his neighbour, and there was tension in the air till the laugh of the Woodilee miller broke it. This man, one Spotswood, reckoned the richest in the parish and the closest, had a jolly laugh which belied his reputation. "Mr. Sempill's in the right, Chasehope," he cried. "Jean o' the Chasehope-fit can manage fine wi' what her gudeman left her. We daurna be lovish wi' ither folks' siller." "I am overruled," said Chasehope, and spoke no more.

 

Little news came in those days to Woodilee. In the open weather before the storm the pack-horses of the carriers came as usual from Edinburgh, and the drovers on the road to England brought word of the doings in the capital. Johnnie Dow, the packman, went his rounds till the snow stopped him, but in January, when the weather cleared, he broke his leg in the Tarrit Moss, and for six weeks disappeared from the sight of men. But Johnnie at his best brought only the clash of the farm-towns and the news of Kirk Aller, and in the dead of the winter there was no chance of a post, so that David was buried as deep as if he had been in an isle of the Hebrides. It was only at Presbytery meetings that he heard tidings of the outer world, and these, passed through the minds of his excited brethren, were all of monstrous portents.

The Presbytery meetings in Kirk Aller were at first to David a welcome break in his quiet life. The one in November lasted two days, and he, as the youngest member, opened the exercises and discoursed with acceptance on a Scripture passage. The business was dull, being for the most part remits from the kirk sessions of contumacious heritors and local scandals and repairs to churches. The sederunt over, the brethren adjourned to the Cross Keys Inn and dined off better fare than they were accustomed to in their manses. It was then that Mr. Muirhead in awful whispers told of news he had had by special post from Edinburgh. Malignancy had raised its head again, this time in their own covenanted land. Montrose, the recusant, had made his way north when he was least expected, and was now leading a host of wild Irish to the slaughter of the godly. There had been battles fought, some said near Perth, others as far off as Aberdeen, and the victory had not been to the righteous. Hideous tales were told of these Irish, led by a left-handed Macdonald—savage as Amalekites, blind zealots of Rome, burning and slaughtering, and sparing neither sex nor age. The trouble, no doubt, would be short-lived, for Leven's men were marching from England, but it betokened some backsliding in God's people. The Presbytery held a special meeting for prayer, when in lengthy supplications the Almighty was besought to explain whether the sin for which this disaster was the punishment lay with Parliament or Assembly, army or people.

To David the tale was staggering. Montrose was to him only a name, the name of a great noble who had at first served the cause of Christ and then betrayed it. This Judas had not yet gone to his account, was still permitted to trouble Israel, and now he had crowned his misdeeds by leading savages against his own kindly Scots. Like all his nation he had a horror of the Irish, whose barbarity had become a legend, and of Rome, whom he conceived as an unsleeping Antichrist, given a lease of the world by God till the cup of her abomination was full. The news shook him out of his political supineness, and for the moment made him as ardent a Covenanter as Mr. Muirhead himself. Then came the storm, when his head was filled with other concerns, and it was not till February that the Presbytery met again. This time the rumours were still darker. That very morning Mr. Muirhead had had a post which spoke of Montrose ravaging the lands of that light of the Gospel, Argyll—of his fleeing north, and, at the moment when his doom seemed assured, turning on the shore of a Highland sea-loch and scattering the Covenant army. It was the hour of peril, and the nation must humble itself before the Lord. A national fast had been decreed by Parliament, and it was resolved to set apart a day in each parish when some stout defender of the faith should call the people to examination and repentance. Mr. Proudfoot of Bold was one of the chosen vessels, and it was agreed that he should take the sermon on the fast-day in Woodilee in the first week of March.

But David was now in a different mood from that of November. He repressed with horror an unregenerate admiration for this Montrose, who, it seemed, was still young, and with a handful of caterans had laid an iron hand on the north. He might be a fine soldier, but he was beyond doubt a son of Belial. The trouble with David was the state of his own parish, compared with which the sorrows of Argyll seemed dim and far away.

January, after the snows melted, had been mild and open, with the burns running full and red, and the hills one vast plashing bog. With Candlemas came a black frost, which lasted the whole of February and the first half of March. The worst of the winter stringency was now approaching. The cattle in the yards and the sheep in the paddocks had become woefully lean, the meal in the girnels was running low, and everybody in the parish, except one or two of the farmers, had grown thin and pale-faced. Sickness was rife, and in one week the kirkyard saw six burials… . It was the season of births, too, as well as of deaths, and the howdie [midwife] was never off the road.

Strange stories came to his ears. One-half of the births were out of lawful wedlock … and most of the children were still-born. A young man is slow to awake to such a condition, and it was only the miserable business of the stool of repentance which opened his eyes. Haggard girls occupied the stool and did penance for their sin, but in only one case did the male paramour appear… . He found his Session in a strange mood, for instead of being eager to enforce the law of the Kirk, they seemed to desire to hush up the scandals, as if the thing was an epidemic visitation which might spoil their own repute. He interrogated them and got dull replies; he lost his temper, and they were silent. Where were the men who had betrayed these wretched girls? He repeated the question and found only sullen faces. One Sabbath he abandoned his ordinary routine and preached on the abominations of the heathen with a passion new to his hearers. His discourse was appreciated, and he was congratulated on it by Ephraim Caird; but there was no result, no confession, such as he had hoped for, from stricken sinners, no cracking of the wall of blank obstinate silence… . The thing was never out of his mind by day or night. What was betokened by so many infants born dead? He felt himself surrounded by a mystery of iniquity.

One night he spoke of it to Isobel, very shamefacedly, for it seemed an awful topic for a woman, however old. But Isobel was no more communicative than the rest. Even her honest eyes became shy and secretive. "Dinna you fash yoursel', sir," she said. "The Deil's thrang in this parochine, and ye canna expect to get the upper hand o' him in sax months. But ye'll be even wi' him yet, Mr. Sempill, wi' your graund Gospel preachin'." And then she added that on which he pondered many times in the night watches. "There will aye be trouble at this time o' year so long as the folk tak' the Wud at Beltane."

The fast-day came, and Mr. Proudfoot preached a marrowy sermon. His subject was the everlasting fires of Hell, which awaited those who set their hand against a covenanted Kirk, and he exhausted himself in a minute description of the misery of an eternity of torment. "They shall be crowded," he said, "like bricks in a fiery furnace. O what a bed is there! No feathers, but fire; no friends, but furies; no ease, but fetters; no daylight, but darkness; no clock to pass away the time, but endless eternity; fire eternal that ever burns and never dies." He excelled in his conclusion. "Oh, my friends," he cried, "I have given you but a short touch of the torments of Hell. Think of a barn or some other great place filled up topfull with grains of corn; and think of a bird coming every thousand years and fetching away one of those grains of corn. In time there might be an end of all and the barn might be emptied, but the torments of Hell have no end. Ten thousand times ten millions of years doth not at all shorten the miseries of the damned."

There was a hush like death in the crowded kirk. A woman screamed in hysterics and was carried out, and many sobbed. At the close the elders thronged around Mr. Proudfoot and thanked him for a discourse so seasonable and inspired. But David spoke no word, for his heart had sickened. What meant these thunders against public sin when those who rejoiced in them were ready to condone a flagrant private iniquity? For a moment he felt that Montrose the apostate, doing evil with clean steel and shot, was less repugnant to God than his own Kirk Session.

 

The frost declined in mid-March, there was a fortnight of weeping thaw and a week of bitter east winds, and then in a single night came a south wind and spring blew up the glens.

Isobel chased the minister from his books.

"Awa' to the hill like a man, and rax [stretch] your legs. Ye've had a sair winter, and your face is like a dish-clout. Awa' and snowk up the caller air."

David went out to the moors, and on the summit of the Hill of Deer had a prospect of the countryside, the contours sharp in the clear April light, and colour stealing back after the grey of winter. The Wood of Melanudrigill seemed to have crowded together again, and to have regained its darkness, but there was as yet no mystery in its shadows. The hill itself was yellow like old velvet, but green was mantling beside the brimming streams. The birches were still only a pale vapour, but there were buds on the saughs and the hazels. Remnants of old drifts lay behind the dykes, and on the Lammerlaw there was a great field of snow, but the breeze blew soft and the crying of curlews and plovers told of the spring. Up on Windyways and at the back of Reiverslaw the heather was burning, and spirals of blue smoke rose to the pale skies.

The sight was a revelation to a man to whom spring had come hitherto in the narrow streets of Edinburgh. He had a fancy that life was beating furiously under the brown earth, and that he was in the presence of a miracle. His youth, long frosted by winter, seemed to return to him and his whole being to thaw. Almost shamefacedly he acknowledged an uplift of spirit. The smoke from the moorburn was like the smoke of sacrifice on ancient altars—innocent sacrifice from kindly altars.

That night in his study he found that he could not bring his mind to his commentary on the prophet Isaiah. His thoughts ranged on other things, and he would fain have opened his Virgil. But, since these evening hours were dedicate to theology, he compromised with Clement of Alexandria, and read again the passage where that father of the Church becomes a poet and strives to mingle the classic and the Christian.—"This is the Mountain beloved of God, not a place of tragedies like Cithæron, but consecrate to the dramas of truth, a mount of temperance shaded with the groves of purity. And there revel on it not the Mænads, sisters of Semele the thunderstruck, initiate in the impure feast of flesh, but God's daughters, fair Lambs who celebrate the holy rites of the Word, chanting soberly in chorus."

In these days his sermons changed. He no longer hammered subtle chains of doctrine, but forsook his "ordinary," and preached to the hearts of the people. Woodilee was in turn mystified, impressed, and disquieted. One bright afternoon he discoursed on thankfulness and the praise due to God. "Praise Him," he cried, "if you have no more, for this good day and sunshine to the lambs."

"Heard ye ever the like?" said Mirehope at the kirk door. "What concern has Jehovah wi' our lambin'?"

"He's an affectionate preacher," said Chasehope, "but he's no Boanerges, like Proudfoot o' Bold."

The other agreed, and though the tone of the two men was regretful, their eyes were content, as if they had no wish for a Boanerges in Woodilee.

Chapter 5 THE BLACK WOOD BY DAY

On the 22nd day of April the minister went for a walk on the Hill of Deer. He had heard news from Isobel which had awakened his numbed memory. All the long dark winter Woodilee had been severed from the world, and David had also lived in the cage and had had no thoughts beyond the parish. Calidon and its people were as little in his mind as if they had been on another planet. But as spring loosened the bonds word of the neighbourhood's doings was coming in.

"Johnnie Dow's ben the house," Isobel had said as he sat at meat. "He's come down the water frae Calidon, and it seems there's unco changes there. The laird is awa' to the wars again… . Na, Johnnie didna ken what airt he had ridden. He gaed off ae mornin' wi' his man Tam Purves, baith o' them on muckle horses, and that's the last heard o' them. It seems that the laird's gude-sister, Mistress Saintserf frae Embro, cam' oot a fortnight syne to tak' chairge o' Calidon and the young lassie—there's a lassie bides there, ye maun ken, sir, though nane o' the Woodilee folk ever cast een on her—and the puir body was like to be smoored [smothered] in the Carnwath Moss. Johnnie says she's an auld wumman, as straucht as a wand and wi' an unco ill tongue in her heid. She fleyed Johnnie awa' frae the door when he was for daffin' wi' the serving lasses."

It was of Calidon that David thought as he took the hill. Nicholas Hawkshaw, lame as he was, had gone back to the wars. What wars? Remembering the talk of that autumn night he feared that it could not be a campaign of which a minister of the Kirk would approve. Was it possible that he had gone to join Montrose in his evil work? And the troopers and the groom? Were they with Leven again under the Covenant's banner, or were they perilling their souls with the malignants? The latter most likely, and to his surprise he felt no desire to reprobate them. Spring was loosening other bonds than those of winter.

It was a bright warm day, which might have been borrowed from June, and the bursting leaves were stirred by a wandering west wind. David sat for a little on the crest of the hill, gazing at the high summits, which, in the April light, were clear in every nook and yet infinitely distant. The great Herstane Craig had old snowdrifts still in its ravines, and he had the fancy that it was really built of marble which shone in places through the brown husk. The Green Dod did not now belie its name; above the screes and heather of its flanks rose a cone of dazzling greenness. The upper Aller glen was filled with pure sunshine, the very quintessence of light, and the sword-cut of the Rood was for once free from gloom. There was no gold in the landscape, for the shallows, even when they caught the sun, were silver, the bent was flushing into the palest green, the skies above were an infinity of colourless light. And yet the riot of spring was there. David felt it in his bones and in his heart.

The herd of Reiverslaw was busy with his late lambs. The man, Prentice by name, was a sour fellow whom an accident in childhood had deprived of a leg. In spite of his misfortune he could move about on a single crutch at a good pace, and had a voice and a tongue which the parish feared. He was a noted professor, with an uncanny gift of prayer, and his by-names in Woodilee were "Hirplin' Rab" and the "One Leggit Prophet." But to-day even Prentice seemed mellowed by the spring. He gave David a friendly good-day. "The voice o' the turtle is heard on the yirth," he announced, and as he hobbled over a patch of old moorburn, sending up clouds of grey dust, Prentice too became a figure of pastoral.

David had rarely felt a more benignant mood. The grimness of winter had gone clean out of his mind, and he had entered on a large and gracious world. He walked slowly like an epicure, drinking in the quintessential air of the hills, marking the strong blue swirl of the burns, the fresh green of the mosses, the buds on the hawthorns, the flash of the water-ouzels in the spray of the little falls. Curlews and peewits filled the moor with their crying, and as he began to descend into the Rood glen a lark—the first he had heard—rose to heaven with a flood of song.

His eyes had been so engaged with the foreground that he had not looked towards Melanudrigill. Now he saw it, dark and massy, the only opaque thing in a translucent world. But there was nothing oppressive in its shadows, for oppression could not exist in a scene so full of air and light and song. For a moment he had a mind to go boldly into its coverts by way of Reiverslaw and make for the lower course of the Woodilee burn. But the sight of the wild wood in the Rood glen detained him. It was a day not for the pines, but for the hazels and birches, where in open glades a man would have always a view of the hills and the sky. So he slanted to his right through the open coppice, meaning to reach the valley floor near the foot of the path which led to the Greenshiel.

The coppice was thicker than he had imagined. This was no hillside scrub, but a forest, a greenwood, with its own glades and hollows, its own miniature glens and streams. He was in the midst of small birds who made a cheerful twittering from the greening boughs, cushats too were busy, and the thickets were full of friendly beasts. He saw the russet back of a deer as it broke cover, and the tawny streak of a hill-fox, and there was a perpetual scurrying of rabbits. Above all there was a glory of primroses. The pale blossoms starred the glades and the sides of the dells, clung to tree-roots, and climbed into crannies of the grey whinstone rock. So thick they were, that their paleness became golden, the first strong colour he had seen that day. David was young and his heart was light, so he gathered a great clump of blooms for his manse table, and set a bouquet in his coat and another in his bonnet. These latter would have to go before he reached the highway, or the parish would think that its minister had gone daft. But here in the secret greenwood he could forget decorum and bedeck himself like a child.

Presently he had forgotten the route he had planned. He found himself in a shallow glade which ran to the left and away from the Greenshiel, and down which leaped a burn so entrancing in its madcap grace that he could not choose but follow it. Memory returned to him; this must be the burn which descended near the mill at Roodfoot; he knew well its lower course, for he had often guddled trout in its pools, but he had never explored its upper waters. Now he felt the excitement of a discoverer… . The ravine narrowed to a cleft where the stream fell in a white spout into a cauldron. David made the passage by slithering down the adjacent rocks and emerged wet to the knees. He was as amused as a boy playing truant from school, and when he found a water-ouzel's nest in the notch of a tree-root he felt that he had profit of his truancy. There came a more level stretch, which was a glory of primroses and wood-anemones, then another linn, and then a cup of turf rimmed with hazels, where the water twined in placid shallows… . He looked up and saw on the opposite bank a regiment of dark pines.

He had come to the edge of Melanudrigill. The trees rose like a cloud above him, and after the open coppice of birch and hazel he seemed to be looking into deep water where things were seen darkly as through a dull glass. There were glades which ran into shadows, and fantastic rocks, and mounds of dead bracken which looked like tombs. Yet the place fascinated him. It, too, was under the spell of Spring, and he wondered how Spring walked in its recesses. He leapt the stream and scrambled up the bank with an odd feeling of expectation. He was called to adventure on this day of days.

The place was not dark, but dim and very green. The ancient pines grew more sparsely than he had imagined, and beneath them were masses of sprouting ferns—primroses too, and violets, which he had not found among the hazels. A scent of rooty dampness was about, of fresh-turned earth, and welling fountains. In every tree-root wood-sorrel clustered. But there were no small birds, only large things like cushats and hawks, which made a movement in the high branches. A little farther and he was in a glade, far more of a glade than the clearings in the hazels, for it was sharply defined by the walls of shade.

He stood and gazed, stuck silent by its beauty. Here in truth was a dancing-floor for wood nymphs, a playground for the Good Folk. It seemed strange that the place should be untenanted… . There was a rustling in the covert, and his heart beat. He was no longer the adventurous boy, but a young man with a fancy fed by knowledge. He felt that the glade was aware and not empty. Light feet had lately brushed its sward… . There was a rustling again, and a gleam of colour. He stood poised like a runner, his blood throbbing in a sudden rapture.

There was the gleam again and the rustle. He thought that at the far end of the glade behind the red bracken he saw a figure. In two steps he was certain. A green gown fluttered, and at his third step broke cover. He saw the form of a girl—nymph, fairy, or mortal, he knew not which. He was no more the minister of Woodilee, but eternal wandering youth, and he gave chase.

The green gown wavered for a moment between two gnarled pines and then was lost in the dead fern. He saw it again in the cleft of a tiny rivulet which came down from a pile of rocks, but he missed it as he scrambled up the steep. It seemed that the gown played tricks with him and led him on, for, as he checked at fault, he had a glimpse of it lower down, where an aisle in the trees gave a view of the bald top of a mountain. David was young and active, but the gown was swifter than he, for as he went down the slope in great leaps it vanished into the dusk of the pines. He had it again, lost it, found it suddenly high above him—always a glimmer of green with but a hint of a girl's form behind it… . David became wary. Nymph or human, it should not beat him at this sport of hide-and-seek. There was a line of low cliffs above, up which it could not go unless it took wings. David kept the lower ground, determined that he would drive that which he followed towards the cliff line. He succeeded, for after twice trying to break away, the gown fluttered into a tiny ravine, with thick scrub on both sides and the rock wall at the top. As David panted upward he saw in a mossy place below the crags a breathless girl trying to master her tumbling tresses.

He stopped short in a deep embarrassment. He had been pursuing a fairy, and had found a mortal—a mortal who looked down on him with a flushed face and angry eyes. He was furiously hot, and the pace and his amazement bereft him of speech. It was she who spoke first.

"What does the minister of Woodilee in the Wood—and bedecked with primroses?"

The voice was familiar, and as he brushed the sweat from his eyes the face too awoke recollection. She was far cooler than he, but her cheeks were flushed, and he had seen before those dark mirthful eyes. Mirthful they were, for her anger seemed to have gone, and she was looking down on him with a shy amusement. She had recognized him too, and had spoken his name… . He had it. It was the girl who had curtsied to Nicholas Hawkshaw's guests in the candle-light at Calidon. His abashment was increased.

"Madam," he stammered, "Madam, I thought you were a fairy."

She laughed out loud with the abandonment of childhood. "A fairy! And, pray, sir, is it part of the duties of a gospel minister to pursue fairies in the woods?"

"I am shamed," he cried. "You do well to upbraid me. But on this spring day I had forgot my sacred calling and dreamed I was a boy once more."

"I do not upbraid you. Indeed I am glad that a minister can still be a boy. But folks do not come here, and I thought the wood my own, so when I saw you stumbling among the fern I had a notion to play a trick on you, and frighten you, as I have frightened intruders before. I thought you would run away. But you were too bold for me, and now you have discovered my secret. This wood is my playground, where I can pick flowers and sing ballads and be happy with birds and beasts… . You were a man before you were a minister. What is your name?"

"They call me David Sempill. I lived as a child at the Mill of the Roodfoot."

"Then you have seisin of this land. You too have played in the Wood?"

"Nay, madam, the Wood is strange to me. I have but ridden through it, and till to-day I have had some dread of it. This Melanudrigill is ill reputed."

"Old wives' havers! It is a blessed and innocent place. But I do not like that name—Melanudrigill. There is dark magic there. Call it the Wood, and you will love it as I do… . See, I am coming down. Make room, please, and then I will take you to Paradise. You do not know Paradise? It is the shrine of this grove, and none but me can find the road."

This was not the stately lady in the gown of yellow satin and blue velvet who had abashed him that night in Calidon tower. It was a slim laughing girl in green who presently stood beside him, her feet in stout country shoes, her hair bound only by a silk fillet and still unruly from the chase. He suddenly lost his embarrassment. His reason told him that this was Katrine Yester of Calidon, a daughter of a proud and contumacious house that was looked askance at by the godly, a woman, a beauty—commodities of which he knew nothing. But his reason was blinded, and he saw only a girl on a spring holiday.

She led him down the hill, and as she went she chattered gaily, like a solitary child who has found a comrade.

"I saw you before you saw me, and I hoped you would follow when I ran away. I liked you that night at Calidon. They told me that ministers were all sour-faced and old, but you looked kind. And you are merry, too, I think—not sad, like most people in Scotland."

"You have not been long in this land?" he asked.

"Since June of last year. This is my first Scottish spring, and it is different from France and England. In those lands summer comes with a rush on winter's heels, but here there is a long preparation, and flowers steal very softly back to the world. I have lived mostly in France since my father died."

"That is why your speech is so strange to my ears."

"And yours to mine," she retorted. "But Aunt Grizel is teaching me to be a good Scotswoman. I am made to spin till my arms are weary, and to make horrid brews of herbs, and to cook your strange dishes. 'Kaatrine, ye daft quean, what for maun ye fill the hoose wi' floorish and nesty green busses? D'ye think we're nowt and the auld tower o' Calidon a byre?' That is Aunt Grizel. But she is like a good dog and barks but does not bite, though the serving-maids walk in terror. I play with her at the cartes, and she tells me tales, but not such good ones as Uncle Nick's. Heigho! I wish the wars were over and he were home again… . Now, sir, what do you think of this? It is the gate of Paradise."

She had led him into a part of the wood where the pines ceased and a green cleft was lined with bursting hazels and rowans and the tassels of birch. The place was rather hill than woodland, for the turf was as fine as on a mountain-side, and in the centre a bubbling spring sent out a rivulet, which twined among the flowers till it dropped in a long cascade to a lower shelf. Primroses, violets, and anemones made it as bright as a garden.

"I call this Paradise," she said, "because it is hard for mortals to find. You would not guess it was here till you stumbled on it."

"It's away from the pines," he said.

She nodded her head. "I love the dark trees well enough, and on a day like this I am happy among them. But they are moody things, and when there is no sun and the wind blows they make me sad. Here I am gay in any weather, for it is a kindly place. Confess, sir, that I have chosen well."

"You have chosen well. It is what the poet wrote of—Deus nobis hæc otia fecit."

"La, la! That is Latin, and I am not learned. But I can quote my own poets." And in a voice like a bird's she trilled a stanza of which David comprehended no more than that it was a song of Spring, and that it was Flora the goddess herself who sang it.

 

"O fontaine Bellerie,

Belle fontaine chérie

De nos Nymphes, quand ton eau

Les cache au creux de ta source,

Fuyantes le Satyreau

Qui les pourchasse à la course

Jusqu'au bord de ton ruisseau,

Tu es la Nymphe éternelle

De ma terre paternelle—"

 

Some strange and cataclysmic transformation was going on in David's mind. He realized that a film had cleared from his sight, and that he was looking with new eyes. This dancing creature had unlocked a door for him—whether for good or ill he knew not, and did not care. He wanted the world to stand still and the scene to remain fixed for ever—the spring glade and the dark-haired girl singing among the primroses. He had the courage now to call her by her name.

"You have a voice like a linnet, Mistress Katrine. Can you sing none of our country songs?"

"I am learning them from the serving-maids. I know 'The Ewebuchts' and 'The Yellow-hair'd Laddie' and—ah, this is the one for Paradise," and she sang:

 

"The King's young dochter was sitting in her window,

Sewing at her silken seam;

She lookt out o' a bow-window,

And she saw the leaves growing green,

My luve;

And she saw the leaves growing green."

 

"But Jean, the goose-girl who taught it me, remembered just the one verse. I wish I was a poet to make others."

Above the well was one of those circles of green mounds which country people call fairy-rings. The girl seated herself in the centre and began to make posies of the flowers she had picked. David lay on the turf at her feet, watching the quick movement of her hands, his garlanded hat removed and the temperate sun warming his body. Never had he felt so bathed in happy peace.

The pixie seated above him spared time from her flowers to glance down at him, and found him regarding her with abstracted eyes. For he was trying to fit this bright creature into his scheme of things. Did the world of the two of them touch nowhere save in this woodland?

"Your uncle is the chief heritor in Woodilee parish," he said, "but you do not come to the kirk."

"I was there no longer back than last Sunday—" she said.

"Sabbath," he corrected.

"Sabbath, if you will have it so. Calidon is in Cauldshaw parish, and it was to Cauldshaw kirk we went. Four weary miles of jogging on a plough-horse, I riding pillion to Aunt Grizel. Before that the drifts were too deep to take the road… . I have heard many a sermon from Mr. Fordyce."

"He is a good man."

"He is a dull man. Such a preachment on dismal texts. 'Seventhly, my brethren, and in parenthesis—'" she mimicked. "But he is beyond doubt good, and Aunt Grizel says she has benefited from his words, and would fain repay him by healing his disorders. He has many bodily disorders, the poor man, and Aunt Grizel loves sermons much, but her simples more."

"You do not love sermons?"

She made a mouth.

"I do not think I follow them. You are learned theologians, you of Scotland, and I am still at the horn-book. But some day I will come to hear you, for your sermons I think I might understand."

"I could not preach to you," he said.

"And wherefore, sir? Are your discourses only for wrinkled carls and old rudas wives? Is there no place in your kirk for a girl?"

"You are not of our people. The seed can be sown only in a field prepared."

"But that is heresy. Are not all souls alike?"

"True. But the voice of the preacher is heard only by open ears. I think you are too happy in your youth, mistress, for my solemnities."

"You do me injustice," she said, and her face was grave. "I am young, and I think I have a cheerful heart, for I can exult in a spring morning, and I cannot be very long sad. But I have had sorrows—a father slain in the wars, a mother dead of grieving, a bundling about among kinsfolk who were not all gracious. I have often had sore need of comfort, sir."

"You have found it—where?"

"In the resolve never to be a faintheart. That is my creed, though I fail often in the practice."

To an ear accustomed to a formal piety the confession seemed almost a blasphemy. He shook a disapproving head.

"That is but a cold pagan philosophy," he said.

"Yet I learned it from a sermon, and that little more than a year back."

"Where was it preached?"

"In England, and in no kirk, but at the King's Court."

"Was it by Mr. Henderson?"

"It was by a Presbyterian—but he was no minister. Listen, and I will tell you the story. In March of last year I was taken to Oxford by my lady Grevel, and was presented by her to the Queen, and her Majesty deigned to approve of me, so that I became a maid-of-honour, and was lodged beside her in Merton College. There all day long was a coming and going of great men. There I saw"—she counted on her fingers—"his grace of Hamilton—him I did not like—and my lord of Nithsdale, and my lord of Aboyne, and my lord Ogilvy, and that very grave person Sir Edward Hyde, and my lord Digby, and the wise Mr. Endymion Porter. And all day long there were distracted counsels, and the King's servants plotting in side-chambers, and treason whispered, and nowhere a clear vision or a brave heart. Then there came among us a young man, who spoke simply. 'If the King's cause go down in England,' he said, 'it may be saved in Scotland.' When they asked him what he proposed, he said—'To raise the North for his Majesty.' When they asked him by what means, he said—'By my own resolution.' All doubted and many laughed, but that young man was not discouraged. 'The arm of the Lord is not shortened,' he said, 'and they who trust in Him will not be dismayed… .' That was the sermon he preached, and there was silence among the doubters. Then said Mr. Porter: 'There is a certain faith that moves mountains, and a certain spirit which may win against all odds. My voice is for the venture!' … And then the Queen, my mistress, kissed the young man, and the King made him his lieutenant-general… . I watched him ride out of the city two days later, attended by but one servant, on his mission to conquer Scotland, and I flung him a nosegay of early primroses. He caught it and set it in his breast, and he waved his hand to me as he passed through the north gate."

"Who was this hero?" David asked eagerly, for the tale had fired him.

The girl's face was flushed and her eyes glistened.

"That was a year ago," she went on. "To-day he has done his purpose. He has won Scotland for the King."

David gasped.

"Montrose the malignant!" he cried.

"He is as good a Presbyterian as you, sir," she replied gently. "Do not call him malignant. He made his way north through his enemies as if God had sent His angel to guide him. And he is born to lead men to triumph. Did you not feel the compulsion of his greatness?"

"I?" David stammered.

"They told me that you had spoken with him, and that he liked you well. Yon groom at Calidon was the Lord Marquis."

Chapter 6 THE BLACK WOOD BY NIGHT

Word came of a great revival in the parish of Bold. Men called it a "Work," and spoke of it in hushed voices, attributing it to the zeal and gifts of Mr. Ebenezer Proudfoot, the minister. For, after much preaching on fast-days in the shire, Mr. Ebenezer had fallen into a rapture and had seen visions, and spoken with strange voices. The terror of the unknown fell upon his people, fasting and prayer became the chief business of the parish, and the most careless were transformed into penitents. For a season there were no shortcomings in Bold; penny-bridals and fiddling and roystering at the change-houses were forgotten; even swearing and tippling were forsworn; the Sabbath was more strictly observed than by Israel in the Wilderness. To crown the Work, a great field-preaching was ordained, when thousands assembled on Bold Moor and the sacrament was dispensed among scenes of wild emotion. In Bold there was a lonely field of thistles, known as Guidman's Croft, which had been held to be dedicate to the Evil One. The oxen of all the parish were yoked, and in an hour or two it was ploughed up and sown with bear for the use of the poor, as at once a thankoffering and a renunciation.

People in Woodilee talked much of the Work in Bold, and the Session sighed for a like experience. "Would but the wind blow frae that airt on our frostit lands!" was the aspiration of Peter Pennecuik. But David had no ears for these things, for he was engrossed with the conflict in his own soul.

Ever since that afternoon in Paradise he had walked like a man half asleep, his eyes turning inward. His first exhilaration had been succeeded by a black darkness of doubt. He had adventured into the Wood and found magic there, and the spell was tugging at his heartstrings… . Was the thing of Heaven or of Hell? … Sometimes, when he remembered the girl's innocence and ardour, he thought of her as an angel. Surely no sin could dwell in so bright a presence… . But he remembered, too, how lightly she had held the things of the Kirk, how indeed she was vowed to the world against which the Kirk made war. Was she not a daughter of Heth, a fair Moabitish woman, with no part in the commonwealth of Israel? Her beauty was of the flesh, her graces were not those of the redeemed. And always came the conviction that nevertheless she had stolen his heart. "Will I too be unregenerate?" he asked himself with terror.

The more he looked into his soul the more he was perplexed. He thought of the groom at Calidon, to whom had gone out from him a spark of such affection as no other had inspired. That face was little out of his memory, and he longed to look on it again as a lover longs for his mistress… . But the man was Montrose the recreant, who was even now troubling God's people, and who had been solemnly excommunicated by the very Kirk he was vowed to serve… . And yet, recreant or no, the man believed in God and had covenanted himself with the Almighty… . What were God's purposes, and who were God's people? Where in all the round earth should he find a solution of his doubts?

The study, now warm in the pleasant spring gloamings, saw no longer the preparation of the great work on Isaiah. It had become a closet for prayer. David cast his perplexities on the Lord, and waited feverishly for a sign. But no sign came. A horde of texts about Canaanitish garments and idol worship crowded into his mind, but he refused their application. A young man's face, a girl's eyes and voice, made folly of such easy formulas… . Yet there were moments when in sheer torment of soul David was minded to embrace them—to renounce what had charmed him as the Devil's temptation, and steel his heart against its glamour.

One day he rode over to Cauldshaw to see Mr. Fordyce. He was in the mood for confession, but he found little encouragement. Mr. James was sick of a spring fever, and though he was on his feet he had been better in bed, for his teeth chattered and his hand trembled.

They spoke of the household at Calidon. "Mistress Saintserf has beyond doubt her interest in Christ," said the minister of Cauldshaw. "When I have gone to Calidon for the catechizing I have found her quick to apprehend the doctrines of the faith, and her life is in all respects an ensample, save that she is something of a libertine with her tongue. But the lassie—she's but a young thing, and has sojourned long in popish and prelatical lands. Yet I detect glimmerings of grace, Mr. David, and she has a heart that may well be attuned to God's work. My wife pines for the sight of her like a sick man for the morning. Maybe I fail in my duty towards her, for she is lamentably ignorant, but I cannot find it in me to be harsh to so gracious a bairn."

David returned with his purpose unfulfilled, but a certain comfort in his soul. He would rather have Mr. Fordyce's judgment than that of the Boanerges of Bold or the sleek minister of Kirk Aller. His doubts were not resolved, but the very uncertainty gave him ease. He was not yet called to renunciation, and having reached this conclusion, he could let the memory of Paradise sweep back into his mind in a delightful flood.

Yet youth cannot be happy in indecision. David longed for some duty which would absorb the strong life that was in him. Why, oh why was he not a soldier? He turned to his parish, and tried to engross himself in its cares. It may have been that his perception was sharpened by his own mental conflicts, but he seemed to detect a strangeness in Woodilee.

It had been a fine spring, with a dry seed-bed, and the sowing of crops and the lambing had passed off well. The lean cattle had staggered out of byres and closes to the young grass, and their ribs were now covered again. Up on the hills lambs no longer tottered on weak legs. There was more food in the place, for there had been feasts of braxy mutton, and the hens were laying again, and there was milk in the cogies. The faces of the people had lost their winter strain; the girls had washed theirs, and fresh cheeks and bright eyes were to be seen on the roads. Woodilee had revived with the spring, but David as he went among the folk saw more than an increase in bodily well-being… . There was a queer undercurrent of excitement—or was it expectation?—and the thing was secret.

Every one did not share this. There seemed to be an inner circle in the parish which was linked together by some private bond. He began to guess at its membership by the eyes. Some looked him frankly in the face, and these were not always the best reputed. Amos Ritchie, the blacksmith, for instance—he was a profane swearer, and was sometimes overtaken in drink—and the farmer of Reiverslaw had, in addition to the latter failing, a violent temper, which made him feared and hated. Yet these two faced him like free men. But there were others, whose speech was often the most devout, who seemed to have shutters drawn over their eyes and to move stealthily on tiptoe.

Woodilee was amazingly well-conducted, and the Poor Box received the scantiest revenue in penalties. Apart from the lawless births in the winter, there were few apparent backslidings. David rarely met young lads and lasses at their hoydenish courtings in the gloamings. Oaths were never heard, and if there was drunkenness it was done in secret. Not often was a Sabbath-breaker before the Session, and there were no fines for slack attendance at the kirk. But as David watched the people thronging to service on the Sabbath, the girls in their clean linen, walking barefoot and only putting on shoes at the kirkyard gate, the men in decent homespun and broad bonnets, the old wives in their white mutches—as he looked down from the pulpit on the shoulders bent with toil, the heavy features hardened to a stiff decorum, the eyes fixed dully on his face—he had the sense that he was looking on masks. The real life of Woodilee was shut to him. "Ye are my people," he told himself bitterly, "and I know ye not."

This was not true of all. He knew the children, and there were certain of the older men and women in the parish who had given him their friendship. Peter Pennecuik, his principal elder and session-clerk, he felt that he knew to the bottom—what little there was to know, for the man was a sanctimonious egotist. With Amos Ritchie and Reiverslaw, too, he could stand as man with man… . But with many of the others he fenced as with aliens; the farmers, for example, Chasehope and Mirehope and Nether Fennan, and Spotswood the miller, and various elderly herds and hinds, and the wives of them. Above all, he was no nearer the youth of the parish than when first he came. The slouching hobbledehoy lads, the girls, some comely and high-coloured, some waxen white—they were civil and decent, but impenetrable. There were moments when he found himself looking of a Sabbath at his sober respectable folk as a hostile body, who watched him furtively lest he should learn too much of them… . Woodilee had an ill name in the shire, Mr. Fordyce had told him the first day in the manse. For what? What was the life from which he was so resolutely barred—he, their minister, who should know every secret of their souls? What was behind those shuttered eyes? Was it fear? He thought that there might be fear in it, but that more than fear it was a wild and sinister expectation.

On the last day of April he noted that Isobel was ill at ease. "Ye'll be for a daunder, sir," she said after the midday meal. "See and be hame in gude time for your supper—I've a rale guid yowe-milk kebbuck [cheese] for ye, and a new bakin' o' cakes—and I'll hae the can'les lichtit in your chamber for you to get to your books."

He smiled at his housekeeper. "Why this carefulness?" he said.

She laughed uneasily. "Naething by ordinar. But this is the day they ca' the Rood-Mass and the morn is the Beltane, and it behoves a' decent bodies to be indoors at the darkenin' on Beltane's Eve. My faither was a bauld man, but he wadna have stirred a fit over his ain doorstep on the night o' Rood-Mass for a king's ransom. There's anither Beltane on the aucht day of May, and till that's by we maun walk eidently."

"Old wives' tales," he said.

"But they're nane auld wives' tales. They're the tales o' wise men and bauld men."

"I thought of walking in the Wood."

"Mercy on us!" she cried. "Ye'll no gang near the Wud. No on this day o' a' days. It's fou' o' bogles."

Her insistence vexed him, and he spoke to her sharply. The heavy preoccupation of his mind had put him out of patience with folly. "Woman," he cried, "what concern has a servant of God with these heathen fables? Think shame to repeat such folly."

But Isobel was not convinced. She retired in dudgeon to her kitchen, and watched his movements till he left the house as a mother watches a defiant child. "Ye'll be hame in guid time?" she begged.

"I will be home when I choose," he said, and to show his independence he put some cheese and bannocks in his pockets.

The afternoon was warm and bright, with a thin haze on the highest hills. Spring had now fairly come; the yews in the kirkyard were russet with young shoots, the blossom was breaking on the hawthorn, and hazel and oak and ash were in leaf. His spirit was too laden to be sensible of the sweet influences of sky and moorland as on the walk which had first taken him to Paradise. But there was in him what had been lacking before—excitement, for he had tasted of magic and was in the constant expectation of finding it again. The land was not as it had once been, for it held somewhere enchantments—a girl's face and a girl's voice. From the summit of the Hill of Deer he looked towards Calidon hidden in the fold of the Rood hills. Was she there in the stone tower, or among the meadows whose green showed in the turn of the glen? Or was she in her old playground of the Wood?

He had resolved not to go near the place, so he set himself to walk in the opposite direction along the ridge of hill which made the northern wall of the Rood valley. As he strode over the short turf and scrambled through the patches of peat-bog his spirits rose. It was hard not to be light-hearted in that world of essential airs and fresh odours and nesting birds. Presently he was in view of Calidon tower, and then he was past it, and the Rood below him was creeping nearer to his level as its glen lifted towards its source. He strode along till he felt the sedentary humours leave his body and his limbs acquire the lightness which is the reward of the hill walker. He seemed, too, to gain a lightness of soul and a clearness of eye. In a world which God had made so fair and clean, there could be no sin in anything that was also fair and innocent.

The sun had set beyond Herstane Craig before he turned his steps. Now from the hilltops he had Melanudrigill before him, a distant shadow in the trough of the valley. Since that afternoon in Paradise awe of the Wood had left him. He had been among its pines and had found Katrine there. He watched the cloud of trees, growing nearer at each step, as earlier that day he had watched the environs of Calidon. It was her haunt; haply she might now be there, singing in the scented twilight?

When he stood above Reiverslaw the dusk was purple about him, and the moon, almost at her full, was climbing the sky. He longed to see how Paradise looked in this elfin light, for he had a premonition that the girl might have lingered there late and that he would meet her. There was no duty to take him home—nothing but Isobel's silly fables. But in deference to Isobel he took the omens. He sent his staff twirling into the air. If it fell with the crook towards him, he would go home. The thing lighted in a heather bush with the crook at the far end. So he plunged downhill among the hazels, making for the glade which slanted eastward towards the deserted mill.

He found it, and it was very dark in that narrow place. There was no light to see the flowers by, and there was no colour in it, only a dim purple gloom and the white of the falling stream, for the moon was still too low in the heavens to reach it.

In time he came to the high bank where the pines began. He was looking for Paradise, but he could not find it. It was not among the pines, he remembered, but among the oaks and hazels, but he had gone to it through the pines, led by a flitting girl… . He found the point where he had entered the darker Wood, and resolved to try to retrace his former tracks.

The place was less murky than he had expected, for the moon was now well up the sky, so that every glade was a patch of white light… . This surely was the open space where he had first caught the glimmer of a green gown… . There were the rocks where she had stood at bay… . She had led him down the hill and then at a slant—but was it to right or left? Right, he thought, and plunged through a wilderness of fern. There had been briars, too, and this was surely the place where a vast uprooted trunk had forced them to make a detour.

Then he found a little stream which he fancied might be the outflow of the Paradise well. So he turned up hill again, and came into a jungle of scrub and boulder. There was in most places a dim light to move by, but a dim light in a broken wood is apt to confuse the mind. David had soon lost all sense of direction, save that of the upward and downward slopes. He did not know east or west, and he did not stop to think, for he was beginning to be mesmerized by the hour and the scene. Dew was in the air and an overpowering sweetness of fern and pine and mosses, and through the aisles of the high trees came a shimmer of palest gold, and in the open spaces the moon rode in the dusky blue heavens—not the mild moon of April, but a fiery conquering goddess, driving her chariot among trampled stars.

It was clear to him that he would not find Paradise except by happy chance, since he was utterly out of his bearings. But he was content to be lost, for the whole place was Paradise. Never before had he felt so strong a natural magic. This woodland, which he had once shunned, had become a holy place, lit with heavenly lights and hallowed by some primordial peace. He had forgotten about the girl, forgotten his scruples. In that hour he had acquired a mood at once serene and gay: he had the light-heartedness of a boy and the ease of a wise philosopher; his body seemed as light as air, and, though he had already walked some twenty miles, he felt as if he had just risen from his bed. But there was no exuberance in him, and he had not the impulse to sing which usually attended his seasons of high spirits… . The silence struck upon him as something at once miraculous and just. There was not a sound in the Wood—not the lightest whisper of wind, though there had been a breeze on the hilltops at sundown—not the cry of a single bird—not a rustle in the undergrowth. The place was dumb—not dead, but sleeping.

Suddenly he came into a broad glade over which the moonshine flowed like a tide. It was all of soft mossy green, without pebble or bush to break its carpet, and in the centre stood a thing like an altar.

At first he thought it was only a boulder dropped from the hill. But as he neared it he saw that it was human handiwork. Masons centuries ago had wrought on it, for it was roughly squared, and firmly founded on a pediment. Weather had battered it, and one corner of the top had been broken by some old storm, but it still stood foursquare to the seasons. One side was very clear in the moon, and on it David thought he could detect a half-obliterated legend. He knelt down, and though the lower part was obscured beyond hope, the upper letters stood out plain. I. O. M.—he read: "Jovi Optimo Maximo." This uncouth thing had once been an altar.

He tiptoed away from it with a sudden sense of awe. Others had known this wood—mailed Romans clanking up the long roads from the south, white-robed priests who had once sacrificed here to their dead gods. He was scholar enough to feel the magic of this sudden window opened into the past. But there was that in the discovery which disquieted as well as charmed him. The mysteries of the heathen had been here, and he felt the simplicity of the woodland violated and its peace ravished. Once there had been wild tongues in the air, and he almost seemed to hear their echo.

He hurried off into the dark undergrowth… . But now his mood had changed. He felt fatigue, his eyes were drowsy, and he thought of the anxious Isobel sitting up for him. He realized that this was the night of Rood-Mass—pagan and papistical folly, but his reason could not altogether curb his fancy. The old folk said—folly, no doubt, but still—He had an overpowering desire to be safe in his bed at the manse. He would retrace his steps and strike the road from Reiverslaw. That would mean going west, and after a moment's puzzling he started to run in what he thought the right direction.

The Wood, or his own mind, had changed. The moonlight was no longer gracious and kind, but like the dead-fires which the old folk said burned in the kirkyard. Confusion on the old folk, for their tales were making him a bairn again! … But what now broke the stillness? for it seemed as if there were veritably tongues in the air—not honest things like birds and winds, but tongues. The place was still silent so far as earthly sounds went—he realized that, when he stopped to listen—but nevertheless he had an impression of movement everywhere, of rustling—yes, and of tongues.

Fortune was against him, for he reached a glade and saw that it was the one which he had left and which he thought he had avoided… . There was a change in it, for the altar in the centre was draped. At first he thought it only a freak of moonlight, till he forced himself to go nearer. Then he saw that it was a coarse white linen cloth, such as was used in the kirk at the seasons of sacrament.

The discovery affected him with a spasm of blind terror. All the tales of the Wood, all the shrinking he had once felt for it, rushed back on his mind. For the moment he was an infant again, lost and fluttering, assailed by the shapeless phantoms of the dark. He fled from the place as if from something accursed.

Uphill he ran, for he felt that safety was in the hills and that soon he might come to the clear spaces of the heather. But a wall of crag forced him back, and he ran as he thought westward towards the oaks and hazels, for there he deemed he would be free of the magic of the pines. He did not run wildly, but softly and furtively, keeping to the moss and the darker places, and avoiding any crackling of twigs, for he felt as if the Wood were full of watchers. At the back of his head was a stinging sense of shame—that he, a grown man and a minister of God, should be in such a pit of terror. But his instinct was stronger than his reason. He felt his heart crowding into his throat, and his legs so weak and uncontrollable that they seemed to be separate from his body. The boughs of the undergrowth whipped his face, and he knew that his cheeks were wet with blood, though he felt no pain.

The trees thinned and he saw light ahead—surely it was the glen which marked the division between pine and hazel. He quickened his speed, and the curtain of his fear lifted ever so little. He heard sounds now—was it the wind which he had left on the hilltops? There was a piping note in it, something high and clear and shrill—and yet the Wood had been so airless that his body was damp with sweat. Now he was very near air and sanctuary.

His heart seemed to stop, and his legs wavered so that he sunk on his knees. For he was looking again on the accursed glade.

It was no longer empty. The draped altar was hidden by figures—human or infernal—moving round it in a slow dance. Beyond this circle sat another who played on some instrument. The moss stilled the noise of movement, and the only sound was the high, mad piping.

A film cleared from his eyes, and something lost came back to him—manhood, conscience, courage. Awe still held him, but it was being overmastered by a human repulsion and anger. For as he watched the dance he saw that the figures were indeed human, men and women both—the women half-naked, but the men with strange headpieces like animals. What he had taken for demons from the Pit were masked mortals—one with the snout of a pig, one with a goat's horns, and the piper a gaping black hound… . As they passed, the altar was for a moment uncovered, and he saw that food and drink were set on it for some infernal sacrament.

The dance was slow and curiously arranged, for each woman was held close from behind by her partner. And they danced widdershins, against the sun. To one accustomed to the open movement of country jigs and reels the thing seemed the uttermost evil—the grinning masks, the white tranced female faces, the obscene postures, above all that witch-music as horrid as a moan of terror.

David, a great anger gathering in his heart, was on his feet now, and as he rose the piping changed. Its slow measure became a crazy lilt, quick and furious. The piper was capering; the dancers, still going widdershins, swung round and leaped forward, flinging their limbs as in some demented reel… . There were old women there, for he saw grey hair flying. And now came human cries to add to the din of the pipe—a crying and a sighing wrung out of maddened bodies.

To David it seemed a vision of the lost in Hell. The fury of an Israelitish prophet came upon him. He strode into the glade. Devils or no, he would put an end to this convention of the damned.

"In the name of God," he cried, "I forbid you. If you are mortal, I summon you to repent—if you are demons, I command you to return to him that sent you."

He had a great voice, but in that company there were no ears to hear. The pipe screeched and the dance went on.

Then the minister of Woodilee also went mad. A passion such as he had never known stiffened every nerve and sinew. He flung himself into the throng, into that reek of unclean bestial pelts and sweating bodies. He reached the altar, seized the cloth on it, and swept it and its contents to the ground. Then he broke out of the circle and made for the capering piper, who seemed to him the chief of the orgiasts.

In his flight through the wood David had lost his staff, and had as weapon but his two hands. "Aroynt you, Sathanas," he cried, snatched the pipe from the dog-faced figure, and shivered it on his masked head.

With the pause in the music the dance stopped suddenly, and in an instant the whole flock were on him like a weasel pack. He saw long-nailed claws stretched towards his face, he saw blank eyes suddenly fire into a lust of hate. But he had a second's start of them, and that second he gave to the piper. The man—for the thing was clearly human—had dealt a mighty buffet at his assailant's face, which missed it, and struck the point of the shoulder. David was whirled round, but, being young and nimble, he slipped in under the other's guard, and had his hands on the hound-mask. The man was very powerful, but the minister's knee was in his groin, and he toppled over, while David tore the covering of wood and skin from his head. It crumpled under his violent clutch like a wasps' nest, and he had a glimpse of red hair and a mottled face.

A glimpse and no more. For by this time the press was on him and fingers were at his throat, choking out his senses.

Chapter 7 THE FIRST BLAST

Late in the forenoon of the next day David awoke in his own bed in the manse of Woodilee. He awoke to a multitude of small aches and one great one, for his forehead was banded with pain. The room was as bright with sunshine as the little window would permit, but it seemed to him a dusk shot by curious colours, with Isobel's head bobbing in it like a fish. Presently the face became clear and he saw it very near to him—a scared white face with red-rimmed eyes. Her voice penetrated the confused noises in his ears.

"The Lord be thankit, sir, the Lord be praised, Mr. David, ye're comin' oot o' your dwam. Here's a fine het drink for ye. Get it doun like a man and syne ye'll maybe sleep. There's nae banes broke, and I've dressed your face wi' a sure salve. Dinna disturb the clouts, sir. Your skin's ower clean to beal [fester], and ye'll mend quick if ye let the clouts bide a wee."

Her arm raised his aching head, and he swallowed the gruel. It made him drowsy, and soon he was asleep again, a healthy natural sleep, so that when he awoke in the evening he was in comparative ease and his headache had gone. Gingerly he felt his body. There were bruises on his legs, and one huge one on his right thigh. His cheeks under the bandages felt raw and scarred, and there was a tenderness about his throat and the muscles of his neck, as if angry hands had throttled him. But apart from his stiffness he seemed to have suffered no great bodily hurt, and the effects of the slight concussion had passed.

With this assurance his mind came out of its torpor, and he found himself in a misery of disquiet. The events of the night before returned to him only too clearly. He remembered his exaltation in the Wood—the glade, the altar. He recalled with abasement his panic and his flight. The glade again, the piping, the obscene dance—and at that memory he had almost staggered from his bed. He felt again the blind horror and wrath which had hurled him into the infernal throng.

Isobel's anxious face appeared in the doorway.

"Ye've had a graund sleep, sir. And now ye'll be for a bite o' meat?"

"I have slept well, and I am well enough in body. Sit you down, Isobel Veitch, for I have much to say to you. How came I home last night?"

The woman sat down on the edge of a chair, and even in the twilight her nervousness was manifest.

"It wasna last nicht. It was aboot the hour o' three this mornin', and sic a nicht as I had waitin' on ye! Oh, sir, what garred ye no hearken to me and gang to the Wud on Rood-Mass?"

"How do you know I was in the Wood?"

She did not answer.

"Tell me," he said, "how I came home."

"I was ryngin' the hoose like a lost yowe, but I didna daur gang outbye. At twal hours I took a look up the road, and again when the knock was chappin' twa. Syne I dozed off in my chair, till the knock waukened me. That was at three hours, and as I waukened I heard steps outbye. I keekit oot o' the windy, but there was naebody on the road, just the yellow mune. I prayed to the Lord to strengthen me, and by-and-by I ventured out, but I fand naething. Syne I took a thocht to try the back yaird, and my hert gied a stound, for there was yoursel', Mr. David, lyin' like a cauld corp aneath the aipple tree. Blithe I was to find the breath still in ye, but I had a sair job gettin' ye to your bed, sir, for ye're a weary wecht for an auld wumman. The sun was up or I got your wounds washed and salved, and syne I sat by the bed prayin' to the Lord that ye suld wauken in your richt mind, for I saw fine that the wounds o' your body would heal, but I feared that the wits micht have clean gane frae ye. And now I am abundantly answered, for ye're speakin' like yoursel', and your een's as I mind them, and the blood's back intil your cheeks. The Lord be thankit!"

But there was no jubilation in Isobel's voice. Her fingers twined confusedly, and her eyes wandered.

"Do you know what befell me?" he asked.

"Eh, sirs, how suld I ken?"

"But what do you think? You find me in the small hours lying senseless at your door, with my face scarred and my body bruised. What do you think I had suffered?"

"I think ye were clawed by bogles, whilk a'body kens are gi'en a free dispensation on Rood-Mass E'en."

"Woman, what is this talk of bogles from lips that have confessed Christ? I was assaulted by the Devil, but his emissaries were flesh and blood. I tell you it was women's nails that tore my face, and men's hands that clutched my throat. I walked in the Wood, for what has a minister of God to fear from trees and darkness? And as I walked I found in an open place a heathen altar, and that altar was covered with a linen cloth, as if for a sacrament. I was afraid—I confess it with shame—but the Lord used my fear for His own purpose, and led me back in my flight to that very altar. And there I saw what may God in His mercy forbid that I should see again—a dance of devils to the Devil's piping. In my wrath I rushed among them, and tore the mask from the Devil's head, and then they overbore me and I lost my senses. When I wrestled with them I wrestled with flesh and blood—perishing men and women rapt in a lust of evil."

He stopped, and Isobel's eyes did not meet his. "Keep us a'!" she moaned.

"These men and women were, I firmly believe, my own parishioners."

"It canna be," the old woman croaked. "Ye werena yoursel', Mr. David, sir… . Ye were clean fey wi' the blackness o' the Wud and the mune and the wanchancy hour. Ye saw ferlies [marvels], but they werena flesh and bluid, sir… ."

"I saw the bodies of men and women in Woodilee who have sold their souls to damnation. Isobel Veitch, as your master and your minister, I charge you, as you will answer before the Judgment Seat, what know you of the accursed thing in this parish?"

"Me!" she cried. "Me! I ken nocht. Me and my man aye keepit clear o' the Wud."

"Which is to say that there were others in Woodilee who did not. Answer me, woman, as you hope for salvation. The sin of witchcraft is rampant here, and I will not rest till I have rooted it out. Who are those in Woodilee who keep tryst with the Devil?"

"How suld I ken? Oh, sir, I pray ye to speir nae mair questions. Woodilee has aye been kenned for a queer bit, lappit in the muckle Wud, but the guilty aye come by an ill end. There's been mair witches howkit out o' Woodilee and brunt than in ony ither parochine on the Water o' Aller. Trust to your graund Gospel preachin', Mr. David, to wyse folk a better gait, for if ye start speirin' about the Wud ye'll stir up a byke that will sting ye sair. As my faither used to say, him that spits against the wind spits in his ain face. Trust to conviction o' sin bringin' evildoers to repentance, as honest Mr. Macmichael did afore ye."

"Did Mr. Macmichael know of this wickedness?"

"I canna tell. Nae doot he had a glimmerin'. But he was a quiet body wha keepit to the roads and his ain fireside, and wasna like yoursel', aye ryngin' the country like a moss-trooper… . Be content, sir, to let sleepin' tykes lie till ye can catch them rauvagin'. Ye've a congregation o' douce eident folk, and I'se warrant ye'll lead them intil the straucht and narrow way. Maybe the warst's no as ill as ye think. Maybe it's just a sma' backslidin' in them that's pilgrims to Sion. They're weel kenned to be sound in doctrine, and there was mair signed the Covenant—"

"Peace," he cried. "This is rank blasphemy, and a horrid hypocrisy. What care I for lip service when there are professors who are living a lie? Who is there I can trust? The man who is loudest in his profession may be exulting in secret and dreadful evil. He whom I think a saint may be the chief of sinners. Are there no true servants of Christ in Woodilee?"

"Plenty," said Isobel.

"But who are they? I had thought Richie Smail at the Greenshiel a saint, but am I wrong?"

"Na, na. Ye're safe wi' Richie."

"And yourself, Isobel?"

Colour came into her strained face. "I'm but a broken vessel, but neither my man nor me had ever trokin's wi' the Enemy."

"But there are those to your knowledge who have? I demand from you their names."

She pursed her lips. "Oh, sir, I ken nocht. What suld a widow-woman, thrang a' the day in your service, ken o' the doings in Woodilee?"

"Nevertheless you know something. You have heard rumours. Speak, I command you."

Her face was drawn with fright, but her mouth was obstinate. "Wha am I to bring a railin' accusation against onybody, when I have nae certainty of knowledge?"

"You are afraid. In God's name, what do you fear? There is but the one fear, and that is the vengeance of the Almighty, and your silence puts you in jeopardy of His wrath."

Nevertheless there was no change in the woman's face. David saw that her recalcitrance could not be broken.

"Then listen to me, Isobel Veitch. I have had my eyes opened, and I will not rest till I have rooted this evil thing from Woodilee. I will search out and denounce every malefactor, though he were in my own Kirk Session. I will bring against them the terror of God and the arm of the human law. I will lay bare the evil mysteries of the Wood, though I have to hew down every tree with my own hand. In the strength of the Lord I will thresh this parish as corn is threshed, till I have separated the grain from the chaff and given the chaff to the burning. Make you your market for that, Isobel Veitch, and mind that he that is not for me is against me, and that in the day of God's wrath the slack hand and the silent tongue will not be forgiven."

The woman shivered and put a hand to her eyes.

"Will ye hae your bite o' meat, sir?" she quavered.

"I will not break bread till God has given me clearness," he said sternly; and Isobel, who was in the habit of spinning out her talks with her master till she was driven out, slipped from the room like a discharged prisoner who fears that the Court may change its mind.

 

David rose next morning after a sleepless night, battered in body, but with some peace of mind, and indeed a comfort which he scarcely dared to confess to himself. He had now a straight course before him. There was an evil thing in the place against which he had declared war, an omnipresent evil, for he did not know who were the guilty. The thing was like the Wood itself, an amorphous shadow clouding the daylight. Gone were the divided counsels, the scruples of conscience. What mattered his doubts about the policy of the Kirk at large when here before his eyes was a conflict of God and Belial? … For the first time, too, he could let his mind dwell without scruples upon the girl in the greenwood. The little glen that separated the pines from the oaks and the hazels had become for him the frontier between darkness and light—on the one side the innocency of the world which God had made, on the other the unclean haunts of devilry… . And yet he had first met Katrine among the pines. To his horror of the works of darkness was added a bitter sense of sacrilege—that obscene revelry should tread the very turf that her feet had trod.

That afternoon he set out for Chasehope. The matter should be without delay laid before his chief elder, and the monstrous suspicion which lurked at the back of his mind dispelled. He was aware that his face was a spectacle, but it should not be hidden, for it was part of his testimony. But at Chasehope there was no Ephraim Caird. The slatternly wife who met him, old before her time, with a clan of ragged children at her heels, was profuse in regrets. She dusted a settle for him, and offered new milk and a taste of her cheese, but all the time with an obvious discomfort. To think that Ephraim should be away when the minister came up the hill! … He had had to ride off that morn to Kirk Aller upon a matter of a bull that Johnnie Davidson had brought from Carlisle—an English bull to improve the breed—and he would not be home till the darkening. The woman was voluble and hearty, but it seemed to David that she protested too much… . Was her husband all the while between the blankets in the press-bed?

On his way back, at the turn of the road from the kirkton, he encountered Daft Gibbie. The idiot had throughout the winter been a satellite of the minister, and had had many a meal in the manse kitchen. When they met it was "Eh, my bonny Mr. Sempill," or "my precious Mr. David," and then an outpouring of grotesque but complimentary texts. But now the first news he had of Gibbie was a small stone that whizzed past his ear, and when he turned he saw a threatening figure with a face twisted into a demoniac hate. A second stone followed, very wide of the mark, and when David threatened pursuit, the idiot shuffled off, shouting filth over his shoulder. A woman came out of a cottage, and said something to Gibbie which caused him to hold his peace and disappear into a kailyard… . But the woman did not look towards the minister, but hurried in again and closed the door. Was the whole parish, thought David, banded in a tacit conspiracy? Was this poor idiot one of the misbegotten things of the Wood?

The next Sabbath, which was the fifth of May, the kirk of Woodilee showed a full congregation. That day, save for infants in arms, there were few absentees. Never had the place been more hushed and expectant. David preached from the text, "Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust for fear of the Lord," and he delivered his soul with a freedom hitherto lacking in his carefully prepared discourses. Not the Boanerges of Bold could have outdone the fiery vigour with which he described how Israel went astray after forbidden gods and how the wrath of the Almighty smote her with death and exile. But when he came to the application, which should have been as a nail fastened in a sure place, he faltered. The faces below him, set, composed, awful in their decency, seemed like a stone wall against which he must beat with feeble hands.

"I have the sure knowledge," he said, "that there are altars set up to Baal in this very parish, and that this little Israel of ours has its own groves where it worships the gods of the heathen—ay, the very devils from the Pit. Be assured that I will riddle out this evil mystery and drag it into the light of day, and on the priests of Baal in Woodilee, be they libertines or professors, I will call down the terrors of the Most High. I summon now in this place all poor deluded sinners to confession and repentance, for in the strength of the Lord I will go forward, and woe be to those that harden their hearts."

But his words seemed to be driven back upon him by the steely silence. He saw his elders—the heavy white face of Chasehope, the long sanctimonious jowl of Peter Pennecuik, the impish mouth of Spotswood the miller now composed in an alien gravity, the dark sullenness of Mirehope—they relished his vigour, but their eyes were hard as stones. And the folk behind them, men and women, old and young, were attentively apathetic. There was none of the crying and weeping and the spasms of conviction which had attended the fast-day service of the minister of Bold. Were they a congregation of innocents to whom his summons had no application? Or were they so thirled to their evil-doing that his appeals were no more than an idle wind?

His Session congratulated him on his discourse.

"Ye had a gale on your spirit this day, Mr. Sempill," said Chasehope. "Yon was a fine waft o' the Word ye gie'd us, and it's to be hoped that it will be blessed to many."

As David looked at the pale cheeks and the red hair of the man he had a sudden assurance. It was a mild day, but Ephraim Caird wore a strip of flannel as if he were nursing a cold. And was there not a discoloration of the skin around his fleshy jaw and a dark bruise below his left ear?

Next day David sought out Amos Ritchie, the smith. He learned that the man was on a job at Nether Windyways, and he watched for him on the hill-road as he returned in the evening. The big loose-limbed figure of Amos, striding down the twilit slopes with his bag of tools slung on his shoulder, was a pleasant sight to eyes that hungered for a friend. For with the smith David had advanced far in friendliness since their partnership in the winter snowstorm. The man was of a high spirit and a complete honesty, and his professions were well behind his practice. Rough of tongue and apt in a quarrel, he had a warmth of heart that did not fail even those he despised. He was no purveyor of edifying speech, but the milk of human kindness ran strong in him. It was a saying in the village that there was "mair comfort in an aith from Amos than a prayer from Peter Pennecuik."

But on this occasion the smith's straightforward friendliness seemed to have deserted him. When David appeared before him he looked as if he would fain have avoided the meeting. His eyes were troubled, and he increased the pace of his walk when the minister fell into step beside him.

"How's the wife?" David asked.

"Fine, sir. Her kist's stronger, and I'm hopin' the simmer will pit colour intil her cheek." But as he spoke his eyes were on a distant hill.

"I want a word with you, Amos. You and I are, I believe, true friends, and I can speak to you as to a brother. I have become aware of a horrid evil in this parish. There is that in the Wood which tempts men and women to abominations. With these eyes of mine I saw it on Beltane's Eve."

There was no answer.

"You were in the kirk yesterday, Amos, and you heard my sermon. The decision is on Woodilee to choose whom they will serve. You are my friend, and, apart from certain backslidings, a man of a Christian walk and conversation. I summon you to my aid, and conjure you by Christ who died for you, to tell me what you know of this great sin and who are the sinners."

Amos came to a standstill. He laid down his tools, and looked the minister in the face.

"Let it alane, sir. I rede ye, let it alane."

"In the name of God, what folly is this?" David cried. "Are you, too, my own familiar friend, entangled in this wickedness?"

The man's face crimsoned.

"Deil a haet! Na, na, I never could abide thae trokin's wi' the Wud. But oh, Mr. Sempill, ye're but a callant, and ye kenna the wecht o' the principalities and poo'ers that are against ye. Hae patience, sir, and gang cannily. Trust in the Word, whilk it is your duty to preach, to bring conviction o' sin in the Lord's ain gude time, for if ye're ettlin' [intending] to use the arm o' flesh it will fail ye."

It was the counsel which Isobel had given, and David's heart sank. What was it in Woodilee which made honest men silent and craven in the face of proved iniquity?

"Man, Amos," he cried, "I never thought to get a coward's counsel from you. Am I to reckon you among my enemies, and among God's enemies? I tell you I see my duty as clear before me as the Hill of Deer. I must unveil this wickedness and blast its practisers into penitence or I fail in my first duty as the minister of this parish. And from you, my friend, I get only silence and contumacy, and what is worse, the advice of a Laodicean. Alas! that you who have fought stoutly in your country's battles should be such a poor soldier in God's battles."

There was no answer. The two had resumed their walk, and the smith strode at a pace which was almost a run, his eyes steadily averted from his companion.

"This is my last word to you, Amos," said David, as they reached the turn where the loan ran to the manse. "Wednesday—the day after the morn—is the second Beltane, and I fear that that night there will be further evil in the Wood. I will go there and outface the Devil, but the flesh is weak, and I am one against many, and I would fain have a friend. Will you not bear me company?"

The smith stopped again. "Deil hae me if I gang near the Wud! Na, na, I'll no pit my heid intil ony sic wull-cat's hole. And, Mr. Sempill, be you guidit by an aulder man and bide at hame."

"You are afraid?"

"Ay. I'm feared—but mair for you than for mysel'."

"You're like the men of Israel that failed Gideon at the waterside," David cried angrily as he turned away.

The next two days were spent by the minister in a strange restlessness. He walked each afternoon some violent miles on the hilltops, but for the rest he stayed in the manse, principally in his study. Isobel believed him to be at prayer, and indeed he prayed long and fervently, but he was also busied about other things. Among his belongings was a small-sword, for he had won some skill of fence in Edinburgh, and this he had out and saw to its point and edge. Also he read much in books which were not divinity, for he felt himself a soldier, and would brace his spirit with martial tales. With Isobel he exchanged no word save commonplaces, and the old woman, who had the air of a scolded child, showed no desire to talk. His meals were set before him in silence, and silently the table was cleared. Amos Ritchie came to the manse on some small repairing job, and he too seemed to be anxious to get his work done and leave. David saw him arrive as he set out for a walk, and when he returned the shoulders of the smith were disappearing past the stable end.

Wednesday evening came, an evening of mellow light and a quiet sunset, and after his early supper David retired to his study to prepare himself for his task. He had already written out an account of what he had seen in the Wood and of what he proposed to do, and this he signed and directed under cover to Mr. Fordyce at Cauldshaw. Whatever mischance befell him, he had left a record. He had also written a letter to his father, setting forth what, in the event of his death, was to be the destination of his worldly goods. Then on his knees he remained for a while in prayer.

The clock struck nine, and he arose to begin his journey, strapping the sword to his middle, and taking also a great stick which the shepherd of the Greenshiel had made for him. The moon would rise late, and there was ample time.

But he found that the door of his study would not open. It had no lock, and had hung on a light hasp, but now it seemed to have bolts and bars. It was a massive thing of oak, and when he shook it it did not yield.

He shouted for Isobel, but there was no reply. Then he assaulted it furiously with knees and feet and shoulder, but it did not give. There was no hope from the window, which was a small square through which a child could not have crept.

Further attacks on the door followed, and futile shouting. By the time the late light had faded from the little window David had acknowledged the fact that he was imprisoned, and his first fury had ebbed from sheer bodily fatigue. But the clock had struck one before he attempted to make a bed on the floor, with for pillow a bag of chaff which Isobel had placed there for a winter footstool, and the dawn was in the eastern sky before he slept.

He was awakened by Isobel in the doorway.

"Peety on us," she wailed, "that sic a thing suld hae come to this hoose! Hae ye spent the nicht in this cauld chamber and no in your bed? The wyte's [blame] on me, for I got Amos Ritchie yestereen to put a bar on the door, for there's walth of guid books here and I wad like to steek the place when ye're awa' to the hills and me maybe in the kitchen. I maun hae steekit it to see if it wad wark, no kennin' ye were in inside. And syne I gaed doun to my gude-brither's to speir after his bairn, and I was late in getting back, and, thinks I, the minister will be in his bed and I'll awa' to mine. Puir man, ye'll be as stiff as a wand, and ye'll maybe hae got your death o' cauld… . See and I'll get ye a het drink, and your parritch's on the boil… . Wae's me that I didn' tak' a thocht … "

"Silence, woman, and do not cumber your soul with lies." David's white face as he strode from the room did more than his words to cut short Isobel's laments.

Chapter 8 THE SECOND BLAST

On the following Sabbath the minister's text was, "When the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" This time there was no faltering in the application. The congregation, men and women, were arraigned at the bar as sinners by deed or by connivance, and he had an audience hushed not in the ordinary Sabbath decorum, but in a fearful apprehension. Every moment he seemed to be about to name the sinner, and if he did not single out persons he made it blindingly clear that it was not for lack of knowledge. Never had he preached with greater freedom, never had passion so trembled in each sentence. Words seemed to be given him, stinging, unforgettable words that must flay the souls of the guilty. "Blinded self-deceivers," he cried, "you think you can tamper with devilry and yet keep your interest in Christ. You are set up with covenants, public and private, but I tell you that your covenant is with Death and Hell. The man who believes he is elected into salvation, and thinks that thereby he has liberty to transgress and that his transgressions will be forgiven him, has sinned against the Holy Ghost—that sin for which there is no forgiveness." He declared that till there was a general confession and repentance there would be no Communion in the parish of Woodilee, for those who sat down at the Lord's Table would be eating and drinking damnation to themselves… . But at the end he broke down. With tears in his eyes and a sob in his voice he besought a people whom he loved to abase themselves before the Mercy Seat. "You poor folk," he cried, "with your little dark day of life, with your few years of toil and cold and hunger before the grave, what have you if you have not Christ?" He was moved with an ecstasy of pity, and told them, like the Apostle, that if he could but save their souls, he was willing that his own should be cast away.

Not the oldest remembered such a sermon in the kirk of Woodilee, and the fame of it was soon to go abroad in the countryside. The place emptied in a strange silence, as if the congregation went on tiptoe, and men and women did not look at each other till they were outside the kirkyard gates. The elders did not await the minister in the session-house, and as David walked the hundred yards to the manse he saw what looked like the back of Peter Pennecuik, crouching behind a turf dyke to avoid a meeting.

These were days of loneliness and misery for the minister of Woodilee. He saw himself solitary among enemies, for even those whom he thought his friends had failed him. It was clear that Amos Ritchie had conspired with Isobel to imprison him in his study on the eve of the second Beltane, and though their motive was doubtless affection it but emphasized the hopelessness of his task. He had to bring conviction of sin into a parish where even the innocent were ready to cumber his arm. These honest creatures feared for him—what? Anger would choke him at the thought of such contempt for his sacred mission, and then awe would take its place, awe at the immensity of the evil with which he fought. "Principalities and powers," Amos had said—yes, the Powers of the Air and the Principalities of Darkness. He had no doubt that the Devil and his myrmidons were present in the Wood in bodily form, mingling with the worshippers, and that the tongues which he had heard were in very truth mutterings of the lost. There were times when ordinary human fear loosened his knees, and he longed to flee from the parish as from a place accursed. But his courage would return, and his faith, for he knew that the armies of Heaven were on his side, and wrath would cast out fear, wrath and horror at the seducers of his flock. Nevertheless in these days his nerves were frayed, he lay awake of nights listening anxiously for noises without, and he would awake suddenly in the sweat of a nameless terror.

But his chief burden was that he did not know how to shape his course. The pulpit rang with his denunciations, but there was no response; no stricken Nicodemus came to him by night. On the roads and at the house-doors people avoided his eyes. There were no more stones from Daft Gibbie—indeed Gibbie had resumed his fawning friendliness—but none waited to speak a word with him. Isobel had recovered her cheerfulness, and sought to atone for past misconduct by an assiduous attention to his comforts, but Amos Ritchie shunned him. And the children, too, who had been his chief allies. Perhaps their parents had warned them, for a group would scatter when he came near, and once when, coming up behind him, he laid a kindly hand on a boy's head, the child burst into tears and fled. What was the fama of the minister which had been put about in Woodilee?

The worst of it was that he could contrive no plan of campaign. Evidence which was overwhelming to his own mind would not convince the Presbytery or the Sheriff. He could not bring a reasoned charge against any man or woman in the parish. As the days passed he began to sort out his flock in his mind as the guilty and the abettors. Some were innocent enough, save for the sin of apathy; but others he could believe to have shared in the midnight debauches—heavy-browed, sensual youths, women with shifty eyes, girls high-coloured and over-blown, whose sidelong glances seemed to hint at secrets, old wives, too, whose wild laughter he heard at cottage doors. But of one, his first certainty was giving way to doubt. Ephraim Caird's white face had got a wholesome tan from the summer sun, and he alone in the parish seemed to seek out the minister. He gave him a cheerful greeting when they met, spoke wisely of parish matters, had a word of humble commendation for the Sabbath discourses. "It's gaun to be a braw year for the aits," he said, "gin the weather hauds, and the lambs are the best I've yet seen on Chasehope hill. Let us hope, sir, that the guid seed ye've sown will come to as bountiful a hairst." The words were so simply spoken that they seemed no hypocrisy.

A plan of campaign! On that David could get no clearness, and the anxiety was with him at bed and board. He shrank from confessing himself to his brother-ministers, for what could they do to help him? Kirk Aller would pooh-pooh the whole thing, since Woodilee had been so forward in signing the Covenant. Bold would no doubt believe, but his remedy would be only a stiffer draught of doctrine. Even Mr. Fordyce at Cauldshaw seemed a broken reed, for Mr. Fordyce was an ailing saint, and this task was for the church militant. No, he must fight his battles alone, and trust to God to send him allies. He wanted men of violence, who would fight not with words but with deeds, Israelitish prophets who with their own hands cut down groves and uprooted altars and hewed Agag in pieces. And where would he find them in a countryside where the good were timid as sheep and their pastors like loud voices in a fog?

June was a month of hot suns and clear skies, when the hills were bone-dry and the deepest flowe-moss could be safely passed. It was weather for the high tops, and one afternoon David, walking off his restlessness on the Rood uplands, stumbled unexpectedly on a friend. For at the head of the glen where the drove-road crosses from Clyde to Aller, he fell in with the farmer of Reiverslaw leading his horse up a steep patch of screes.

This man, Andrew Shillinglaw, was something of a mystery both to parish and minister. He was a long lean fellow of some forty years, black-haired, black-bearded, whose sullen face was redeemed by a humorous mouth, so that the impression was of a genial ferocity. He was reputed the most skilful farmer in the place, and some held him a rival in worldly wealth to the miller, but beyond the fact that he had in Reiverslaw the best of the hill farms, there was no clue to his prosperity. He had the only good riding-horse in Woodilee, and was a notable figure on the roads, for he travelled the country like a packman. For weeks on end he would be away from home, and he was heard of in Galloway and the west and as far south as the Border, so that speculation about his doings became a favourite pastime among his neighbours. He neither sold nor bought in the parish, and he kept his own counsel, but his profession was clear enough had there been eyes to see. For he was dealer and middleman as well as farmer, and in a day when stock and produce scarcely moved beyond parish bounds, he sold and bought in outlying markets. In a district of home-keepers he was the sole traveller.

Few liked him, for there was always an undertone of satire in his speech. But all feared him, for his temper was on a hair-trigger. Drink made him quarrelsome, and the spence at Lucky Weir's had seen some ugly business, since with him blow followed fast on word. Three years before he had buried his wife, there were no children, and he lived at Reiverslaw with an aged cousin for housekeeper, who was half blind and wholly deaf. His attendance at the kirk was far from exemplary; in winter there were the drifts and the full bogs to detain him, and in summer he was as often as not on his travels. The Session, who did not love him, had talked of citing him to appear before them, but in the end they seemed to shrink from belling so formidable a cat.

At the head of the little pass, which in that country is called a "slack," he halted and let David approach him.

"A guid day to ye, sir," he cried. "We'll let Bess get her wind, for it's a lang gait frae Crawfordjohn. I rade ower yestereen to see the sma' Cumberland sheep that the Lowther herds are trying on yon hills. I hae nae great broo o' them. They'll maybe dae on yon green braes where the bite is short, but they're nae use for a heather country… . Sit ye doun, sir. What brings ye sae far ower the tops? Ye werena ettlin' to gie me a ca' in at Reiverslaw?"

David gladly stretched himself on the bent beside him. The man seemed willing to talk, and of late he had had little speech with his fellows.

"I came here for the caller air," he said, "and to drive ill humours from body and mind. There are whiles when I cannot draw breath in Woodilee."

"Ay," said the man. "Ay! Just so." He pursed his lips and looked at the minister under half-shut eyes.

"Were you born in this parish?" David asked.

"Na, na. Far frae that. I'm but an incomer, though I've had the tack o' Reiverslaw for a dizzen years. My father, honest man, was frae the Glenkens, and my mither cam' frae the Cairn side. I was born at a bit they ca' Dunscore, but I was a stirrin' lad in my young days and I've traivelled the feck o' the Lawlands, frae the Forth to the Solway. But now I've got my hinderlands doun in Woodilee, and it's like I'll lay my banes here."

The man spoke in a different voice from the people of the place, and to David he seemed as one detached from the countryside, sharing neither its interests nor affections. As he looked at him, sprawling in the heather bush with one foot on his horse's bridle, he had a sense of something assured and resolute and not unfriendly.

"Ye're an incomer like mysel', sir," Reiverslaw said after a pause. "What think ye o' Woodilee?"

"I think that the Devil has chosen this miserable parish for his own."

"Ay… . Well, I wadna say ye were wrang. I jaloused [guessed] frae your last discourse that ye were perplexed wi' the Enemy. And they tell me that ye've stirred up an unco byke against ye."

"Are you one of them?" David asked.

"No me. If there's fechtin' to be done, I'm on your side. I aye likit a bauld man, and it's a question, sir, if ye ken yoursel' how bauld ye are when ye offer to drive the Deil frae Woodilee."

David had got to his feet, for these were the first words of sympathy he had had.

"Andrew Shillinglaw, I command you to tell me if you have kept yourself clean from this mystery of evil which scourges the parish."

The man still sprawled on the ground, and the face he turned to the minister was twisted in a grim humour.

"Ay. I'll swear ony aith ye like. I'll no deny my backslidin's, and, as ye may ken, my walk and conversation's no to boast o'. But as sure as God made me, I wad burn off my richt hand in the fire afore I wad file mysel' wi' the Babylonish abominations o' the Wud. I whiles drink a stoup ower muckle, and I whiles gie a waur straik than I ettle when my bluid's het, but these are honest stumblin's whilk I hope the Lord will forgie. But for yon—" and he spat viciously.

"Then, if you are yourself clean from this evil, tell me what you know of it, and who are its chief professors."

"That's easy speirin' [asking], but ill to answer. How suld I ken the covens that rampage in the Wud? I bide cheek by jowl wi' the muckle black thing, and often I wish it was a field o' strae in a dry back-end so that I could set fire to it and see it burn frae Reiverslaw to Windyways, and frae Woodilee to the Aller side. But I've never entered the place in mirk or licht, for my wark's wi' sheep, and the honest beasts will no gang near it."

"But you must have heard … "

"I've heard nocht. I have maybe guessed, but it's no like I wad hear a cheep. I never gang near the clachan except to kirk or to Lucky Weir's, and the Woodilee folk are pawky bodies even when they're fou, and ony way I'm nae clatter-vengeance to be clypin' wi' auld wives at the roadside. But I've my ain notion o' what's gaun on, and I can tell ye, sir, it's gaun on in mony anither godly parochine in this kingdom o' Scotland, and it's been gaun on for hundreds o' years, long afore John Knox dang doun the Pape. But it's gotten a braw new tack in these days o' reformed and covenantit kirks. What do your Presbytries and Assemblies or your godly ministers ken o' the things that are done in the mirk? … What do they ken o' the corps in the kirkyairds buried o' their ain wull wi' their faces downwards? … They set up what they ca' their discipline, and they lowse the terrors o' Hell on sma' fauts like an aith, or profane talk on the Sabbath, or giein' the kirk the go-by, and they hale to the cutty-stool ilka lass that's ower kind to her joe. And what's the upshot? They drive the folk to their auld ways and turn them intil hypocrites as weel as sinners."

"Hush, man!" said the scandalized David. "That is impious talk."

"It's true a' the same, though it's maybe no for a minister's lugs. The Kirk is set against witchcraft, and every wee while a daft auld wife is brunt. But, God help us, that's but the froth on the pat. Na, na, Mr. Sempill. If you're lookin' to get to grips wi' the Adversary, it's no the feckless camsteery lad ye maun seek that likes a randan, or the bit lassie that's ower fond to wait for the Kirk's blessin', or the grannie that swears she rade to France on a kail-runt. It's the dacent body that sits and granes aneath the pu'pit, and the fosy professor that wags his pow and deplores the wickedness o' the land.—Yon's the true warlocks. There's saunts in Scotland, the Lord kens and I ken mysel', but there's some that hae the name o' saunts that wad make the Deil spew."

Reiverslaw had risen, and in his face was such a flame of fierce honesty that David's heart kindled. He had found an ally.

"Give me names," he cried. "I will denounce the sinner, though he were one of my own elders."

"I speak nae names. I have nae proof. But ye've seen yoursel'. They tell me ye broke in on the coven at their wark."

"I had but a glisk of them, before they beat the senses out of me. But I intend to go back to the Wood, and this time I shall not fail."

"Ay. Ye've a stout heart, Mr. Sempill."

"But I must have help. Out of the mouths of witnesses I must establish the truth, and the innocent in Woodilee are very fearful. I have nowhere to look but to you. Will you come with me when I return to the Wood?"

"I'll no say that, for there's maybe better ways o' guidin' it. But this I will say—I'll stand by ye; for may the Deil flee awa' wi' me or I see a guid man beat. There's my hand on't… . And now I maun be takin' the road again. Come na near the Reiverslaw, sir, for that would set the bodies talkin'. If ye want word wi' me, tell Richie Smail at the Greenshiel."

 

The knowledge that he had found a friend lightened David's heavy preoccupation of mind. Athanasius now was not alone against the world, and his path was not towards martyrdom but to victory. He walked with a more assured step and turned a bolder face to the furtive hostility of the parish. When he met Amos Ritchie he looked on him not in reproach but in defiance. His sermons were now less appeals than challenges, as of one whose course was proclaimed and whose loins were girded.

To his consternation he found that he now sat very loose in his devotion to the Kirk. The profession of religion was not the same thing as godliness, and he was coming to doubt whether the insistence upon minute conformities of outward conduct and the hair-splitting doctrines were not devices of Satan to entangle souls. The phrases of piety, unctuously delivered, made him shudder as at a blasphemy. The fact that his only supporter was one looked askance at by strict professors confirmed his shrinking. Had not Christ set the publican and the sinner above the Pharisee?

One consequence of his new mood was that his thoughts turned again to the girl in Paradise. In his season of desolation he had not dared to think of her; she belonged to a world of light, and had no part in his perplexities. To let her image fill his memory seemed sacrilege, when that memory held so many foul shadows. But as the skies cleared for him her figure appeared again in the sunlight and he did not banish it, for it was she who was the extreme opposite of the horror of the Wood—she and her bright domain of oaks and hazels. He would go again to Paradise for his soul's comfort.

He chose a day when he was certain she would be there. There was a week of fiery weather—moist heat and heavy skies and flying thunderstorms, and after it came a spell of long bright days, when the sunshine had a dry tonic in it, and the afternoons were mellow and golden. On one such afternoon he crossed the Hill of Deer and entered the glen which divided the pines from the hazels.

Midsummer had changed the place. The burn-side turf was all thyme and eyebright and milkwort, with the stars of the grass of Parnassus in the wet places. The water was clear and small, and the cascades fell in a tinkling silver. He had no doubts as to his road now. Paradise was among the hazels, but one could find it only by descending the glen to where the pines of the Wood began and then turning to the right towards the Greenshiel.

Presently the pines in a sombre regiment rose on the steep to the left. He looked at the beginning of the Wood with an awe which had now no fear in it. The place was hateful, but it could not daunt him. It was the battleground to which he was called… . On the edge of the trees was a great mass of dark foxgloves, the colour of blood, and they seemed to make a blood-trail from the sunlight into the gloom.

He turned up the right bank, and through hazel copses and glades, breast-high with bracken, he made his way as if by instinct. He found the shallow cup lined with birches and the blossoming rowans, and as he brushed through the covert he saw the girl sitting on the greensward by the well.

Motionless he watched her for a little, while his heart played strange pranks. She had a basket beside her full of flowers, and she was reading in a book… . She laid down the book, and shook her curls and dabbled her fingers in the water. She sang as she dabbled, low and clear in snatches, a song which he was to remember to his dying day:

 

"There's comfort for the comfortless,

And honey for the bee,

And there's nane for me but you, my love,

And there's nane for you but me."

 

She crooned the verse twice, broke off to watch a ring-ouzel, and then sang again:

 

"It's love for love that I have got,

And love for love again,

So turn your high horse heid about

And we will ride for hame, my love,

And we will ride for hame."

 

He would fain have lingered and watched her, but he felt like an eavesdropper on her privacy. So "Mistress Katrine!" he cried softly, and "Mistress Katrine" a second time.

She sprang to the alert like a bird. Her face, when she saw him, showed no welcome.

"I give you good-day, sir," she said. "Have you maybe lost your road?"

"I am seeking Paradise," he replied.

"It is the quest of all mortals, they tell me. But the ministers say it is not to be found on earth."

"I was seeking the earthly one to which you yourself first led me."

"You entered then by my invitation, but I do not think I bade you come again."

"Then I beg for admission, mistress, for indeed I have sore need of Paradise."

She looked at him curiously. "You look older—and sadder. I have not been to your kirk, but they tell me that you are scorching the souls of your folk with your terrors."

"Would to God I could scorch them into salvation! … I have been in dire straits, Mistress Katrine. For I came again to find Paradise and I found it not, but stumbled into Hell."

The girl looked at him with compassionate eyes.

"You may sit down in Paradise," she said. "I permit you. And I will give you some of my wild strawberries. Tell me what has troubled you."

He told her of the doings of Beltane Eve, stumblingly, with many omissions. He told her of his strife with his parishioners, of his loneliness, of the mission to which he was vowed. "I am resolved," he said, "that though I go on alone I will not fail in courage. Your Montrose's comfort is mine—that the arm of the Lord is not shortened."

The girl brooded.

"Did you come here to find me?"

"I had a conviction that you would be in Paradise. This is no tale for a maid's ear, but I came here to warn you, mistress. The long glen that runs down to the Rood Mill is a frontier-line, which if you pass you are in the land of darkness. I found you first among the pines, and I beseech you go not again among them, though it were at high noon, for yon Wood is accursed."

She nodded. "I felt it too. When spring was passing I felt a gloom come over me as I walked there, and one day a terror seized me and I ran and ran till I was among the hazels. I cannot bear even to be in sight of the dark trees. You say that there is witchcraft there." She lowered her voice and her eyes were solemn. "What is this witchcraft?"

"I cannot tell, save that it is the nethermost works of darkness, and that it has seduced the hearts of my unhappy people… . God help me, but I have seen with my eyes what I cannot forget… . There is no smooth ministry for me, for now I am a soldier of Christ and must be fighting till I have got the victory."

"And you are alone?"

"I have one who will stand by me." And he told her of Reiverslaw.

"Nay, you have another," she cried. "You have me for a friend, and you have this greenwood for a sanctuary. If I cannot fight by your side, you will know that I am here and that I am wishing you well. See, I make you free of Paradise. It is yours now, as well as mine." She held out her hand.

He took off his hat.

"You were singing," he said, "and your song was true, for here's 'comfort for the comfortless.' You have put steel into my bones, Mistress Katrine. If I can come here and speak with you at times, it will be like the water beside the gate of Bethlehem to King David… . I will know when you are here without your sending me word."

"Then there is witchcraft in the greenwood," she said, smiling gravely, "for I, too, knew that you were coming to-day before you came."