Mary Johnston - Foes

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CHAPTER XXIV

Two days after this Glenfernie rode to White Farm. Jenny Barrow met
him with exclamations.

"Oh, Mr. Alexander! Oh, Glenfernie! And they say that you are amaist
as weel as ever--but to me you look twelve years older! Eh, and this
warld has brought gray into _my_ hair! Father's gane to kirk session,
and Gilian's awa'."

He sat down beside her. Her hands went on paring apples, while her
eyes and tongue were busy elsewhere.

"They say you're gaeing to travel."

"Yes. I'm starting very soon."

"It's na _said oot_--but a kind of whisper's been gaeing around." She
hesitated, then, "Are you gaeing after him, Glenfernie?"

"Yes."

Jenny put down her knife and apple. She drew a long breath, so that
her bosom heaved under her striped gown. A bright color came into her
cheeks. She laughed. "Aweel, I wadna spare him if I were you!"

He sat with her longer than he had done with Mrs. Alison. He felt
nearer to her. He could be friends with her, while he moved from the
other as from a bloodless wraith. Here breathed freely all the strong
vindications! He sat, sincere and strong, and sincere and strong was
the countrywoman beside him.

"Oh aye!" said Jenny. "He's a villain, and I wad gie him all that he
gave of villainy!"

"That is right," said Alexander, "to look at it simply!" He felt that
those were his friends who felt in this as did he.

On the moor, riding homeward, he saw before him Jarvis Barrow.
Dismounting, he met the old man beside a cairn, placed there so long
ago that there was only an elfin story for the deeds it commemorated.

"Gude day, Glenfernie! So that Hieland traitor did not slay ye?"

"No."

Jarvis Barrow, white-headed, strong-featured, far yet, it seemed, from
incapacitating old age, took his seat upon a great stone loosened from
the mass. He leaned upon his staff; his collie lay at his feet. "Many
wad say a lang time, with the healing in it of lang time, since a
fause lover sang in the ear of my granddaughter, in the glen there!"

"Aye, many would say it."

"I say 'a fause lover.' But the ane to whom she truly listened is an
aulder serpent than he ... wae to her!"

"No, no!"

"But I say 'aye!' I am na weak! She that worked evil and looseness,
harlotry, strife, and shame, shall she na have her hire? As, Sunday by
Sunday, I wad ha' set her in kirk, before the congregation, for the
stern rebuking of her sin, so, mak no doubt, the Lord pursues her now!
Aye, He shakes His wrath before her eyes! Wherever she turns she sees
'Fornicatress' writ in flames!"

"No!"

"But aye!"

"Where she was mistaken--where, maybe, she was wilfully blind--she
must learn. Not the learning better, but the old mistake until it is
lost in knowledge, will clothe itself in suffering! But that is but a
part of her! If there is error within, there is also Michael within to
make it of naught! She releases herself. It is horrible to me to see
you angered against her, for you do not discriminate--and you are your
Michael, but not hers!"

"Adam is speaking--still the woman's lover! I'm not for contending
with you. She tore my heart working folly in my house, and an ill
example, and for herself condemnation!"

"Leave her alone! She has had great unhappiness!" He moved the small
stones of the cairn with his fingers. "I am going away from
Glenfernie."

"Aye. It was in mind that ye would! You and he were great friends."

"The greater foes now."

"I gie ye full understanding there!"

"With my father, those he hated were beyond his touch. So he walked
among shadows only. But to me this world is a not unknown wood where
roves, alive and insolent, my utter enemy! I can touch him and I will
touch him!"

"Not you, but the Lord Wha abides not evil!... How sune will ye be
gaeing, Glenfernie?"

"As soon as I can ride far. As soon as everything is in order here. I
know that I am going, but I do not know if I am returning."

"I haud na with dueling. It's un-Christian. But mony's the ancient
gude man that Jehovah used for sword! Aye, and approved the sword that
he used--calling him faithful servant and man after His heart! I am na
judging."

From the moor Glenfernie rode through the village. Folk spoke to him,
looked after him; children about the doors called to others, "It's tha
laird on Black Alan!" Old and young women, distaff or pan or pot or
pitcher in hand, turned head, gazed, spoke to themselves or to one
another. The Jardine Arms looked out of doors. "He's unco like tha
auld laird!" Auld Willy, that was over a hundred, raised a piping
voice, "Did ye young things remember Gawin Elliot that was his
great-grandfather ye'd be saying, 'Ye might think it was Gawin Elliot
that was hangit!'" Mrs. Macmurdo came to her shop door. "Eh, the
laird, wi' all the straw of all that's past alight in his heart!"

Alexander answered the "good days," but he did not draw rein. He rode
slowly up the steep village street and over the bare waste bit of hill
until here was the manse, with the kirk beyond it. Coming out of the
manse gate was the minister. Glenfernie checked his mare. All around
spread a bare and lonely hilltop. The manse and the kirk and the
minister's figure buttressed each the others with a grim strength. The
wind swept around them and around Glenfernie.

Mr. M'Nab, standing beside the laird, spoke earnestly. "We rejoice,
Glenfernie, that you are about once more! There is the making in you
of a grand man, like your father. It would have been down-spiriting if
that son of Belial had again triumphed in mischief. The weak would
have found it so."

"What is triumph?"

"Ye may well ask that! And yet," said M'Nab, "I know. It is the
warm-feeling cloak that Good when it hath been naked wraps around it,
seeing the spoiler spoiled and the wicked fallen into the pit that he
digged!"

"Aye, the naked Good."

The minister looked afar, a dark glow and energy in his thin face.
"They are in prison, and the scaffolds groan--they who would out with
the Kirk and a Protestant king and in with the French and popery!"

"Your general wrong," said Glenfernie, "barbed and feathered also for
a Scots minister's own inmost nerve! And is not my wrong general
likewise? Who hates and punishes falsity, though it were found in his
own self, acts for the common good!"

"Aye!" said the minister. "But there must be assurance that God calls
you and that you hate the sin and not the sinner!"

"Who assures the assurances? Still it is I!"

Glenfernie rode on. Mr. M'Nab looked after him with a darkling brow.
"That was heathenish--!"

Alexander passed kirk and kirkyard. He went home and sat in the room
in the keep, under his hand paper upon which he made figures,
diagrams, words, and sentences. When the next day came he did not
ride, but walked. He walked over the hills, with the kirk spire before
him lifting toward a vast, blue serenity. Presently he came in sight
of the kirkyard, its gravestones and yew-trees. He had met few persons
upon the road, and here on the hilltop held to-day a balmy silence and
solitude. As he approached the gate, to which there mounted five
ancient, rounded steps of stone, he saw sitting on one of these a
woman with a basket of flowers. Nearer still, he found that it was
Gilian Barrow.

She waited for him to come up to her. He took his place upon the
steps. All around hung still and sunny space. The basket of flowers
between them was heaped with marigolds, pinks, and pansies.

"For Elspeth," said Gilian.

"It is almost two years. You have ceased to grieve?"

"Ah no! But one learns how to marry grief and gladness."

"Have you learned that? That is a long lesson. But some are quicker
than others or had learned much beforehand.... Where is Elspeth?"

"Oh, she is safe, Glenfernie!"

"I wanted her body safe--safe, warm, in my arms!"

"Spirit and spirit. Meet spirit with spirit!"

"No! I crave and hunger and am cold. Unless I warm myself--unless I
warm myself--with anger and hatred!"

"I wish it were not so!"

"I had a friend.... I warm myself now in the hunt of a foe--in his
look when he sees me!"

Gilian smote her hands together. "So Elspeth would have loved that!
So the smothered God in you loves that!"

"It is the God in me that will punish him!"

"Is it--is it, Glenfernie?"

He made a wide gesture of impatience. "Cold--languid--pithless! You,
Robin, Strickland, Alison Touris--"

Gilian looked at her basket of marigolds, pinks, and pansies. "That
word death.... I bring these here, but Elspeth is with me everywhere!
There is a riddle--there is a strange, huge mistake. She must solve
it, she must make that port of all ports--and you and I must make
it.... It is a hard, heroic, long adventure!"

"I speak of the pine-tree in the blast, and such as you would give me
pansies! I speak of the eagle at the crag-top in the storm, and you
offer butterflies!"

"Ah, then, go and kill her lover and the man who was your friend!"

Glenfernie rose from the step, in his face strong anger and denial. He
stood, seeking for words, looking down upon the seated woman and her
flowers. She met him with parted lips and a straight, fearless look.

"Will you take half the flowers, Glenfernie, and put them for
Elspeth?"

"No. I cannot go there now!"

"I thought you would not. Now I am Elspeth. I love her. I would give
her gladness--serve her. She says, 'Let him alone! Do you not know
that his own weird will bring him into dark countries and light
countries, and where he is to go? Is your own tree to be made thwart
and misshapen, that his may be reminded that there is rightness of
growth? He is a tree--he is not a stone, nor will he become a stone.
There is a law a little larger than your fretfulness that will take
care of him! I like Glenfernie better when he is not a busybody!'"

Alexander stared at her in anger. "Differences where I thought to find
likeness--likenesses where I thought to find differences! He deceived
me, fooled me, played upon me as upon a pipe; took my own--"

"Ha!" said Gilian. "So you are going a-hunting for more reasons than
one?--Elspeth, Elspeth! come out of it!--for Glenfernie, after all,
avenges himself!"

Alexander, looking like his father, spoke slowly, with laboring
breath. "Had one asked me, I should have said that you above all might
understand. But you, too, betray!" With a sweep of his arms abroad, a
gesture abrupt and desolate, he turned. He quitted the sunny bare
space, the kirkyard and the woman sitting with her basket of marigolds
and pansies.

But two nights later he came to this place alone.

The moon was full. It hung like a wonder lantern above the hill and
the kirk; it made the kirkyard cloth of silver. The yews stood unreal,
or with a delicate, other reality. It was neither warm nor cold. The
moving air neither struck nor caressed, but there breathed a sense of
coming and going, unhurried and unperplexed, from far away to far
away. The laird of Glenfernie crossed long grass to where, for a
hundred years, had been laid the dead from White Farm. There was a
mound bare to the sunlight thrown from the moon. He saw the flowers
that Gilian had brought.

The flowers were colorless in the moonlight--and yet they could be,
and were, clothed with a hue of anger from himself. They lay before
him purple-crimson. They were withered, but suddenly they had sap,
life, fullness--but a distasteful, reminding life, a life in
opposition! He took them and threw them away.

Now the mound rested bare. He lay down beside it. He stretched his
arms over it. "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!" But Elspeth
did not answer--only the cool sunlight thrown back from the moon.

CHAPTER XXV

Ian traveled toward a pass through the Pyrenees. Behind him stretched
difficult, hazardous, slow travel--weeks of it. Behind those weeks lay
the voyage to Lisbon, and from Lisbon in a second boat north to Vigo.
From Vigo to this day of forested slopes and brawling streams,
steadily worsening road, ruder dwellings, more primitive, impoverished
folk, rolled a time of difficulties small and great, like the mountain
pebbles for number. It took will and wit at strain to dissolve them
all, and so make way out of Spain into France--through France--to
Paris, where were friends.

Spanish travel was difficult at best--Spanish travel with scarcely any
gold to travel on found the "best" quite winnowed out. Slow at all
times, it grew, lacking money, to be like one of those dreams of
retardation. Ian gathered and blew upon his philosophy, and took
matters at last with some amusement, at times, even, with a sense of
the enjoyable.

He was not quite penniless. Those who had helped in his escape from
Edinburgh had provided him gold. But, his voyage paid for, he must buy
at Vigo fresh apparel and a horse. When at last he rode eastward and
northward he was poor enough! Food and lodging must be bought for
himself and his steed. Inns and innkeepers, chance folk applied to for
guidance, petty officials in perennially suspicious towns--twenty
people a day stood ready to present a spectral aspect of leech and
gold-sucker! He was expert in traveling, but usually he had borne a
purse quite like that of Fortunatus. Now he must consider that he
might presently have to sell his horse--and it was not a steed of
Roland's, to bring a great price! He might be compelled to go afoot
into France. He might be sufficiently blessed if the millennium did
not find him yet living by his wits in Spain. It was Spanish, that
prospect! Turn what? Ian asked himself. Bull-fighter--fencing-master--
gipsy--or brigand? He played with the notion of fencing-master. But he
would have to sell his horse to provide room and equipment, and he
must turn aside to some considerable town. Brigand would be easier, in
these wild forests and rock fortresses that climbed and stood upon the
sky-line. Matter enough for perplexity! But the sweep of forest and
mountain wall was admirable--admirable the air, the freedom from the
Edinburgh prison. Except occasionally, in the midst of some
intensification of annoyance, he rode and maneuvered undetected.

Past happenings might and did come across him in waves. He remembered,
he regretted; he pursued a dialectic with various convenient divisions
of himself. But all that would be lost for long times in the general
miraculous variety of things! On the whole, going through Spain in the
autumn weather, even with poverty making mouths alongside, was not a
sorry business! Zest lived in pitting vigor and wit against mole hills
threatening an aggregation into mountains! As for time, what was it,
anyhow, to matter so much? He owned time and a wide world.

Delay and delay and delay. In one town the alcalde kept him a week,
denying him the road beyond while inquiries were made as to his
identity or non-identity with some famed outlaw escaping from justice.
Further on, his horse fell badly lame and he stayed day after day in a
miserable village, lounging under a cork-tree, learning patois. There
was a girl with great black eyes. He watched her, two or three times
spoke to her. But when she saw how he must haggle over the price of
food and lodging she laughed, and returned to the side of a muleteer
with a sash and little bells upon his hat.

All along the road fell these retardations. Then as the mountains
loomed higher, the spirit of contradiction apparently grew tired and
fell behind. For several days he traveled quite easily. "My Lady
Fortune," asked Ian, "what is up your sleeve?"

The air stayed smiling and sweet. In a town half mountain, half plain,
he made friends at the inn with Don Fernando, son of an ancient,
proud, decaying house, poor as poverty. Don Fernando had been in
Paris, knew by hearsay England, and had heard Scotland mentioned.
Spaniard and Scot drank together. The former was drawn into almost
love of Ian. Here was a help against boundless ennui! Ian and his
horse, and the small mail strapped behind the saddle, finally went off
with Don Fernando to spend a week in his old house on the hillside
just without the town. Here was poverty also, but yet sufficient acres
to set a table and pour good wine and to make the horse forget the
famine road behind him. Here were lounging and siesta, rest for body
and mind, sweet "do well a very little!" Don Fernando would have kept
the guest a second week and then a third.

But Ian shook his head, laughed, embraced him, promised a return of
good when the great stream made it possible, and set forth upon his
further travel. The horse looked sleek, almost fat. The Scot's jaded
wardrobe was cleaned, mended, refreshed. Living with Don Fernando were
an elder sister and an ancient cousin who had fallen in love with the
big, handsome Don, traveling so oddly. These had set hand-maidens to
work, with the result that Ian felt himself spruce as a newly opened
pink. And Don Fernando gave him a traveling-cloak--very fine--a last
year's gift, it seemed, from a grandee he had obliged. Cold weather
was approaching and its warmth would be grateful. Ian's great need was
for money in purse. These new friends had so little of that that he
chose not to ask for a loan. After all, he could sell the cloak!

The day was fine, the country mounting as it were by stairs toward the
mountains. Before him climbed a string of pack-mules. The merchant
owning them and their lading traveled with a guard of stout young men.
For some hours Ian had the merchant for companion and heard much of
the woes of the region and the times, the miseries of travel, the
cursed inns, bandits licensed and unlicensed, craft, violence, and
robbery! The merchant bewailed all life and kept a hawk eye upon his
treasure on the Spanish road. At last he and his guard, his mules and
muleteers, turned aside into a skirting way that would bring him to a
town visible at no great distance. Left alone, Ian viewed from a
hilltop the roofs of this place, with a tower or two starting up like
warning fingers. But his road led on through a mountain pass.

The earth itself seemed to be climbing. The mountain shapes, little
and big, gathered in herds. Cliffs, ravines, the hoarse song of water,
the faces of few human folk, and on these written "Mountains,
mountains! Live as we can! Catch who catch can!" After a time the road
was deprived of even these faces. The Scot thought of home mountains.
He thought of the Highlands. Above him and at some distance to the
right appeared a distribution of cliffs that reminded him of that
hiding-place after Culloden. He looked to see the birchwood, the
wheeling eagle. The sun was at noon. Riding in a solitude, he almost
dozed in the warm light. The Highlands and the eagle wheeling above
the crag.... Black Hill and Glenfernie and White Farm and
Alexander.... Life generally, and all the funny little figures running
full tilt, one against another....

His horse sprang violently aside, then stood trembling. Forms, some
ragged, some attired with a violent picturesqueness, had started from
without a fissure in the wood and from behind a huge wayside rock. Ian
knew them at a glance for those brigands of whom he had heard mention
and warning enough. Don Fernando had once described their practices.

Resistance was idle. He chose instead a genial patience for his
tower, and within it keen wits to keep watch. With his horse he was
taken by the fierce, bedizened dozen up a gorge to so complete and
secure a robber hold that Nature, when she made it, must have been in
robber mood. Here were found yet others of the band, with a bedecked
and mustached chief. He was aware that property, not life, answered to
their desires. His horse, his fine cloak, his weapons, the small mail
and its contents, with any article of his actual wearing they might
fancy, and the little, little, little money within his purse--all
would be taken. All in the luck! To-day to thee, to-morrow to me. What
puzzled him was that evidently more was expected.

When they condescended to direct speech he could understand their
language well enough. Nor did they indulge in over-brutal handling;
they kept a measure and reminded him sufficiently of old England's own
highwaymen. Of course, like old England's own, they would become
atrocious if they thought that circumstances indicated it. But they
did not seem inclined to go out of their way to be murderous or
tormenting. The only sensible course was to take things good-naturedly
and as all in the song! The worst that might happen would be that he
must proceed to France afoot, without a penny, lacking weapons, Don
Fernando's cloak--all things, in short, but the bare clothing he stood
in. To make loss as small as possible there were in order suavity,
coolness, even gaiety!

And still appeared the perplexing something he could not resolve. The
over-fine cloak, the horse now in good condition, might have something
to do with it, contrasting as they certainly did with the purse in
the last stages of emaciation. And there seemed a studying of his
general appearance, of his features, even. Two men in especial
appeared detailed to do this. At last his ear caught the word
"ransom."

Now there was nobody in Spain knowing enough or caring enough of or
for Ian Rullock to entertain the idea of parting with gold pieces in
order to save his life. Don Fernando might be glad to see him live,
but certainly had not the gold pieces! Moreover, it presently leaked
fantastically out that the bandits expected a large ransom. He began
to suspect a mistake in identity. That assumption, increasing in
weight, became certainty. They looked him all around, they compared
notes, they regarded the fine cloak, the refreshed steed. "English,
senor, English?"

"Scots. You do not understand that? Cousin to English."

"English. We had word of your traveling--with plenty of gold."

"It is a world of mistakes. I travel, but I have no gold."

"It is a usual lack of memory of the truth. We find it often. You are
traveling with escort--with another of your nation, your brother, we
suppose. There are servants. You are rich. For some great freak you
leave all in the town down there and ride on alone. Foreigners often
act like madmen. Perhaps you meant to return to the town. Perhaps to
wait for them in the inn below the pass. You have not gold in your
purse because there is bountiful gold just behind you. Why hurt the
beautiful truth? Sancho and Pedro here were in the inn-yard last
night."

Sancho's hoarse voice emerged from the generality. "It was dusk, but
we saw you plainly enough, we are sure, senor! In your fine cloak,
speaking English, discussing with a big tall man who rode in with you
and sat down to supper with you and was of your rank and evidently, we
think, your brother or close kinsman!"

The chief nodded. "It is to him that we apply for your ransom. You,
senor, shall write the letter, and Sancho and Pedro shall carry it
down. It will be placed, without danger to us, in your brother's hand.
We have our ways.... Then, in turn, your brother shall ride forth,
with a single companion, from the town, and in a clear space that we
shall indicate, put the ransom beneath a certain rock, turning his
horse at once and returning the way he came. If the gold is put there,
as much as we ask, and according to our conditions, you shall go free
as a bird, senor, though perhaps with as little luggage as a bird. If
we do not receive the ransom--why, then, the life of a bird is a
little thing! We shall put you to death."

Ian combated the profound mistake. What was the use? They did not
expect him to speak truth, but they were convinced that they had the
truth themselves. At last it came, on his part, to a titanic
whimsicalness of assent. At least, assenting, he would not die in the
immediate hour! Stubbornly refuse to do their bidding, and his thread
of life would be cut here and now.

"All events grow to seem unintelligible masks! So why quarrel with
one mask more? Pen, ink, and paper?"

All were produced.

"I must write in English?"

"That is understood, senor. Now this--and this--is what you are to
write in English."

The captive made a correct guess that not more than one or two of the
captors could read Spanish, and none at all English.

"Nevertheless, senor," said the chief, "you will know that if the gold
is not put in that place and after that fashion that I tell you, we
shall let you die, and that not easily! So we think that you will not
make English mistakes any more than Spanish ones."

Ian nodded. He wrote the letter. Sancho put it in his bosom and with
Pedro disappeared from the dark ravine. The situation relaxed.

"You shall eat, drink, sleep, and be entirely comfortable, senor,
until they return. If they bring the gold you shall pursue your road
at your pleasure even with a piece for yourself, for we are nothing if
not generous! If they do not bring it, why, then, of course--!"

Ian had long been bedfellow of wild adventure. He thought that he knew
the mood in which it was best met. The mood represented the grist of
much subtle effort, comparing, adjustment, and readjustment. He
cultivated it now. The banditti admired courage, coolness, and good
humor. They had provision of food and wine, the sun still shone warm.
The robber hold was set amid dark, gipsy beauty.

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