Mary Johnston - Foes

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"I will go with you to the top of the hill," said Ian. They climbed
the ridge that was like a purple cloud. "I'll come to Glenfernie
to-morrow or the next day."

"Yes, come! I'm fond of Jamie, but he's three years younger than I."

"You've got a sister?"

"Alice? She's only twelve. You come. I've been wanting somebody."

"So have I. I'm lonelier than you."

They came to the level top of the heath. The sun rode low; the shadow
of the hill stretched at their feet, out over path and harvest-field.

"Good-by, then!"

"Good-by!"

Ian stood still. Alexander, homeward bound, dropped over the crest.
The earth wave hid from him Black Hill, house and all. But, looking
back, he could still see Ian against the sky. Then Ian sank, too.
Alexander strode on toward Glenfernie. He went whistling, in expanded,
golden spirits. Ian--and Ian--and Ian! Going through a grove of oaks,
blackbirds flew overhead, among and above the branches. _The cranes of
Ibycus!_ The phrase flashed into mind. "I wonder why things like that
disturb me so!... I wonder if there's any bottom or top to living
anyhow!... I wonder--!" He looked at the birds and at the violet
evening light at play in the old wood. The phrase went out of his
mind. He left the remnant of the forest and was presently upon open
moor. He whistled again, loud and clear, and strode on happily.
Ian--and Ian--and Ian!

CHAPTER V

The House of Glenfernie and the House of Touris became friends. A
round of country festivities, capped by a great party at Black Hill,
wrought bonds of acquaintanceship for and with the Scots family
returned after long abode in England. Archibald Touris spent money
with a cautious freedom. He set a table and poured a wine better by
half than might be found elsewhere. He kept good horses and good dogs.
Laborers who worked for him praised him; he proved a not ungenerous
landlord. Where he recognized obligations he met them punctually. He
had large merchant virtues, no less than the accompanying limitations.
He returned to the Church of Scotland.

The laird of Glenfernie and the laird of Black Hill found
constitutional impediments to their being more friendly than need be.
Each was polite to the other to a certain point, then the one glowered
and the other scoffed. It ended in a painstaking keeping of distance
between them, a task which, when they were in company, fell often to
Mrs. Jardine. She did it with tact, with a twist of her large,
humorous mouth toward Strickland if he were by. Admirable as she was,
it was curious to see the difference between her method, if method
there were, and that of Mrs. Alison. The latter showed no effort, but
where she was there fell harmony. William Jardine liked her, liked to
be in the room with her. His great frame and her slight one, his
rough, massive, somewhat unshaped personality and her exquisite
clearness contrasted finely enough. Her brother, who understood her
very little, yet had for her an odd, appealing affection, strange in
one who had so positively settled what was life and the needs of life.
It was his habit to speak of her as though she were more helplessly
dependent even than other women. But at times there might be seen who
was more truly the dependent.

August passed into September, September into brown October. Alexander
and Ian were almost continually in company. The attraction between
them was so great that it appeared as though it must stretch backward
into some unknown seam of time. If they had differences, these
apparently only served in themselves to keep them revolving the one
about the other. They might almost quarrel, but never enough to drag
their two orbs apart, breaking and rending from the common center. The
sun might go down upon a kind of wrath, but it rose on hearts with the
difference forgotten. Their very unlikenesses pricked each on to seek
himself in the other.

They were going to Edinburgh after Christmas, to be students there, to
grow to be men. Here at home, upon the eve of their going, rein upon
them was slackened. They would so soon be independent of home
discipline that that independence was to a degree already allowed.
Black Hill did not often question Ian's comings and goings, nor
Glenfernie Alexander's. The school-room saw the latter some part of
each morning. For the rest of the day he might be almost anywhere with
Ian, at Glenfernie, or at Black Hill, or on the road between, or in
the country roundabout.

William Jardine, chancing to be one day at Black Hill, watched from
Mrs. Alison's parlor the two going down the avenue, the dogs at their
heels. "It's a fair David and Jonathan business!"

"David needed Jonathan, and Jonathan David."

"Had Jonathan lived, ma'am, and the two come to conflict about the
kingdom, what then, and where would have flown the friendship?"

"It would have flown on high, I suppose, and waited for them until
they had grown wings to mount to it."

"Oh," said the laird, "you're one I can follow only a little way!"

Ian and Alexander felt only that the earth about them was bright and
warm.

On a brown-and-gold day the two found themselves in the village of
Glenfernie. Ian had spent the night with Alexander--for some reason
there was school holiday--the two were now abroad early in the day.
The village sent its one street, its few poor lanes, up a bare
hillside to the church atop. Poor and rude enough, it had yet to-day
its cheerful air. High voices called, flaxen-haired children pottered
about, a mill-wheel creaked at the foot of the hill, iron clanged in
the smithy a little higher, the drovers' rough laughter burst from the
tavern midway, and at the height the kirk was seeing a wedding. The
air had a tang of cooled wine, the sky was blue.

Ian and Alexander, coming over the hill, reached the kirk in time to
see emerge the married pair with their kin and friends. The two stood
with a rabble of children and boys beneath the yew-trees by the gate.
The yellow-haired bride in her finery, the yellow-haired groom in his,
the dressed and festive following, stepped from the kirkyard to some
waiting carts and horses. The most mounted and took place, the
procession put itself into motion with clatter and laughter. The
children and boys ran after to where the road dipped over the hill. A
cluster of village folk turned the long, descending street. In passing
they spoke to Alexander and Ian.

"Who was married?--Jock Wilson and Janet Macraw, o' Langmuir."

The two lounged against the kirkyard wall, beneath the yews.

"_Marry!_ That's a strange, terrible, useless word to me!"

"I don't know...."

"Yes, it is!... Ian, do you ever think that you've lived before?"

"I don't know. I'm living now!"

"Well, I think that we all lived before. I think that the same things
happen again--"

"Well, let them--some of them!" said Ian. "Come along, if we're going
through the glen."

They left the kirkyard for the village street. Here they sauntered,
friends with the whole. They looked in at the tavern upon the drovers,
they watched the blacksmith and his helper. The red iron rang, the
sparks flew. At the foot of the hill flowed the stream and stood the
mill. The wheel turned, the water diamonds dropped in sheets. Their
busy, idle day took them on; they were now in bare, heathy country
with the breathing, winey air. Presently White Farm could be seen
among aspens, and beyond it the wooded mouth of the glen. Some one,
whistling, turned an elbow of the hill and caught up with the two. It
proved to be one several years their senior, a young man in the
holiday dress of a prosperous farmer. He whistled clearly an old
border air and walked without dragging or clumsiness. Coming up, he
ceased his whistling.

"Good day, the both of ye!"

"It's Robin Greenlaw," said Alexander, "from Littlefarm.--You've been
to the wedding, Robin?"

"Aye. Janet's some kind of a cousin. It's a braw day for a wedding!
You've got with you the new laird's nephew?--And how are you liking
Black Hill?"

"I like it."

"I suppose you miss grandeurs abune what ye've got there. I have a
liking myself," said Greenlaw, "for grandeurs, though we've none at
all at Littlefarm! That is to say, none that's just obvious. Are you
going to White Farm?"

Alexander answered: "I've a message from my father for Mr. Barrow. But
after that we're going through the glen. Will you come along?"

"I would," said Greenlaw, seriously, "if I had not on my best. But I
know how you, Alexander Jardine, take the devil's counsel about
setting foot in places bad for good clothes! So I'll give myself the
pleasure some other time. And so good day!" He turned into a path that
took him presently out of sight and sound.

"He's a fine one!" said Alexander. "I like him."

"Who is he?"

"White Farm's great-nephew. Littlefarm was parted from White Farm.
It's over yonder where you see the water shining."

"He's free-mannered enough!"

"That's you and England! He's got as good a pedigree as any, and a
notion of what's a man, besides. He's been to Glasgow to school, too.
I like folk like that."

"I like them as well as you!" said Ian. "That is, with reservations of
them I cannot like. I'm Scots, too."

Alexander laughed. They came down to the water and the stepping-stones
before White Farm. The house faced them, long and low, white among
trees from which the leaves were falling. Alexander and Ian crossed
upon the stones, and beyond the fringing hazels the dogs came to meet
them.

Jarvis Barrow had all the appearance of a figure from that Old
Testament in which he was learned. He might have been a prophet's
right-hand man, he might have been the prophet himself. He stood, at
sixty-five, lean and strong, gray-haired, but with decrepitude far
away. Elder of the kirk, sternly religious, able at his own affairs,
he read his Bible and prospered in his earthly living. Now he listened
to the laird's message, nodding his head, but saying little. His staff
was in his hand; he was on his way to kirk session; tell the laird
that the account was correct. He stood without his door as though he
waited for the youths to give good day and depart. Alexander had made
a movement in this direction when from beyond Jarvis Barrow came a
woman's voice. It belonged to Jenny Barrow, the farmer's unmarried
daughter, who kept house for him.

"Father, do you gae on, and let the young gentlemen bide a wee and
rest their banes and tell a puir woman wha never gaes onywhere the
news!"

"Then do ye sit awhile, laddies, with the womenfolk," said Jarvis
Barrow. "But give me pardon if I go, for I canna keep the kirk
waiting."

He was gone, staff and gray plaid and a collie with him. Jenny, his
daughter, appeared in the door.

"Come in, Mr. Alexander, and you, too, sir, and have a crack with us!
We're in the dairy-room, Elspeth and Gilian and me."

She was a woman of forty, raw-boned but not unhandsome, good-natured,
capable, too, but with more heart than head. It was a saying with her
that she had brains enough for kirk on the Sabbath and a warm house
the week round. Everybody knew Jenny Barrow and liked well enough
bread of her baking.

The room to which she led Ian and Alexander had its floor level with
the turf without the open door. The sun flooded it. There came from
within the sound, up and down, of a churn, and a voice singing:

"O laddie, will ye gie to me
A ribbon for my fairing?"

CHAPTER VI

It grew that Ian was telling stories of cities--of London and of
Paris, for he had been there, and of Rome, for he had been there. He
had seen kings and queens, he had seen the Pope--

"Lord save us!" ejaculated Jenny Barrow.

He leaned against the dairy wall and the sun fell over him, and he
looked something finer and more golden than often came that way. Young
Gilian at the churn stood with parted lips, the long dasher still in
her hands. This was as good as stories of elves, pixies, fays, men of
peace and all! Elspeth let the milk-pans be and sat beside them on the
long bench, and, with hands folded in her lap, looked with brown eyes
many a league away. Neither Elspeth nor Gilian was without book
learning. Behind them and before them were long visits to scholar
kindred in a city in the north and fit schooling there. London and
Paris and Rome.... Foreign lands and the great world. And this was a
glittering young eagle that had sailed and seen!

Alexander gazed with delight upon Ian spreading triumphant wings. This
was his friend. There was nothing finer than continuously to come upon
praiseworthiness in your friend!

"And a beautiful lady came by who was the king's favorite--"

"Gude guide us! The limmer!"

"And she was walking on rose-colored velvet and her slippers had
diamonds worked in them. Snow was on the ground outside and poor folk
were freezing, but she carried over each arm a garland of roses as
though it were June--"

Jenny Barrow raised her hands. "She'll sit yet in the cauld blast, in
the sinner's shift!"

"And after a time there walked in the king, and the courtiers behind
him like the tail of a peacock--"

They had a happy hour in the White Farm dairy. At last Jenny and the
girls set for the two cold meat and bannocks and ale. And still at
table Ian was the shining one. The sun was at noon and so was his
mood.

"You're fey!" said Alexander, at last.

"Na, na!" spoke Jenny. "But, oh, he's the bonny lad!"

The dinner was eaten. It was time to be going.

"Shut your book of stories!" said Alexander. "We're for the Kelpie's
Pool, and that's not just a step from here!"

Elspeth raised her brown eyes. "Why will you go to the Kelpie's Pool?
That's a drear water!"

"I want to show it to him. He's never seen it."

"It's drear!" said Elspeth. "A drear, wanrestfu' place!"

But Ian and Alexander must go. The aunt and nieces accompanied them to
the door, stood and watched them forth, down the bank and into the
path that ran to the glen. Looking back, the youths saw them
there--Elspeth and Gilian and their aunt Jenny. Then the aspens came
between and hid them and the white house and all.

"They're bonny lasses!" said Ian.

"Aye. They're so."

"But, oh, man! you should see Miss Delafield of Tower Place in
Surrey!"

"Is she so bonny?"

"She's more than bonny. She's beautiful and high-born and an heiress.
When I'm a colonel of dragoons--"

"Are you going to be a colonel of dragoons?"

"Something like that. You talk of thinking that you were this and that
in the past. Well, I was a fighting-man!"

"We're all fighting-men. It's only what we fight and how."

"Well, say that I had been a chief, and they lifted me on their
shields and called me king, the very next day I should have made her
queen!"

"You think like a ballad. And, oh, man, you talk mickle of the
lasses!"

Ian looked at him with long, narrow, dark-gold eyes. "They're found in
ballads," he said.

Alexander just paused in his stride. "Humph! that's true!..."

They entered the glen. The stream began to brawl; on either hand the
hills closed in, towering high. Some of the trees were bare, but to
most yet clung the red-brown or the gold-brown dress. The pines showed
hard, green, and dead in the shadow; in the sunlight, fine,
green-gold, and alive. The fallen leaves, moved by foot or by breeze,
made a light, dry, talking sound. The white birch stems clustered and
leaned; patches of bright-green moss ran between the drifts of leaves.
The sides of the hills came close together, grew fearfully steep.
Crags appeared, and fern-crowded fissures and roots of trees like
knots of frozen serpents. The glen narrowed and deepened; the water
sang with a loud, rough voice.

Alexander loved this place. He had known it in childhood, often
straying this way with the laird, or with Sandy the shepherd, or Davie
from the house. When he was older he began to come alone. Soon he came
often alone, learned every stick and stone and contour, effect of
light and streak of gloom. As idle or as purposeful as the wind, he
knew the glen from top to bottom. He knew the voice of the stream and
the straining clutch of the roots over the broken crag. He had lain on
all the beds of leaf and moss, and talked with every creeping or
flying or running thing. Sometimes he read a book here, sometimes he
pictured the world, or built fantastic stages, and among fantastic
others acted himself a fantastic part. Sometimes with a blind turning
within he looked for himself. He had his own thoughts of God here, of
God and the Kirk and the devil. Often, too, he neither read, dreamed,
nor thought. He might lie an hour, still, passive, receptive. The
trees and the clouds, crag life, bird life, and flower life, life of
water, earth, and air, came inside. He was so used to his own silence
in the glen that when he walked through it with others he kept it
still. Slightly taciturn everywhere, he was actively so here. The path
narrowing, he and Ian must go in single file. Leading, Alexander
traveled in silence, and Ian, behind, not familiar with the place,
must mind his steps, and so fell silent, too. Here and there, now and
then, Alexander halted. These were recesses, or it might be projecting
platforms of rock, that he liked. Below, the stream made still pools,
or moved in eddies, or leaped with an innumerable hurrying noise from
level to level. Or again there held a reach of quiet water, and the
glen-sides were soft with weeping birch, and there showed a wider arch
of still blue sky. Alexander stood and looked. Ian, behind him, was
glad of the pause. The place dizzied him who for years had been away
from hill and mountain, pass and torrent. Yet he would by no means
tell Alexander so. He would keep up with him.

There was a mile of this glen, and now the going was worse and now it
was better. Three-fourths of the way through they came to an opening
in the rock, over which, from a shelf above, fell a curtain of brier.

"See!" said Alexander, and, parting the stems, showed a veritable
cavern. "Come in--sit down! The Kelpie's Pool is out of the glen, but
they say that there's a bogle wons here, too."

They sat down upon the rocky floor strewn with dead leaves. Through
the dropped curtain they saw the world brokenly; the light in the cave
was sunken and dim, the air cold. Ian drew his shoulders together.

"Here's a grand place for robbers, wraiths, or dragons!"

"Robbers, wraiths, or dragons, or just quiet dead leaves and
ourselves. Look here--!" He showed a heap of short fagots in a corner.
"I put these here the last time I came." Dragging them into the middle
of the rock chamber, he swept up with them the dead leaves, then took
from a great pouch that he carried on his rambles a box with flint and
steel. He struck a spark upon dry moss and in a moment had a fire. "Is
not that beautiful?"

The smoke mounted to the top of the cavern, curled there or passed out
into the glen through the briers that dropped like a portcullis. The
fagots crackled in the flame, the light danced, the warmth was
pleasant. So was the sense of adventure and of _solitude a deux_. They
stretched themselves beside the flame. Alexander produced from his
pouch four small red-cheeked apples. They ate and talked, with between
their words silences of deep content. They were two comrade hunters of
long ago, cavemen who had dispossessed bear or wolf, who might
presently with a sharpened bone and some red pigment draw bison and
deer in procession upon the cave wall.--They were skin-clad hillmen,
shag-haired, with strange, rude weapons, in hiding here after hard
fighting with a disciplined, conquering foe who had swords and shining
breastplates and crested helmets.--They were fellow-soldiers of that
conquering tide, Romans of a band that kept the Wall, proud, with talk
of camps and Caesars.--They were knights of Arthur's table sent by
Merlin on some magic quest.--They were Crusaders, and this cavern an
Eastern, desert cave.--They were men who rose with Wallace, must hide
in caves from Edward Longshanks.--They were outlaws.--They were
wizards--good wizards who caused flowers to bloom in winter for the
unhappy, and made gold here for those who must be ransomed, and fed
themselves with secret bread. The fire roared--they were happy, Ian
and Alexander.

At last the fagots were burned out. The half-murk that at first was
mystery and enchantment began to put on somberness and melancholy.
They rose from the rocky floor and extinguished the brands with their
feet. But now they had this cavern in common and must arrange it for
their next coming. Going outside, they gathered dead and fallen wood,
broke it into right lengths, and, carrying it within, heaped it in the
corner. With a bough of pine they swept the floor, then, leaving the
treasure hold, dropped the curtain of brier in place. They were not so
old but that there was yet the young boy in them; he hugged himself
over this cave of Robin Hood and swart magician. But now they left it
and went on whistling through the glen:

Gie ye give ane, then I'll give twa,
For sae the store increases!

The sides of the glen fell back, grew lower. The leap of the water was
not so marked; there were long pools of quiet. Their path had been a
mounting one; they were now on higher earth, near the plateau or
watershed that marked the top of the glen. The bright sky arched
overhead, the sun shone strongly, the air moved in currents without
violence.

"You see where that smoke comes up between trees? That's Mother
Binning's cot."

"Who's she?"

"She's a wise auld wife. She's a scryer. That's her ash-tree."

Their path brought them by the hut and its bit of garden. Jock
Binning, that was Mother Binning's crippled son, sat fishing in the
stream. Mother Binning had been working in the garden, but when she
saw the figures on the path below she took her distaff and sat on the
bench in the sun. When they came by she raised her voice.

"Mr. Alexander, how are the laird and the leddy?"

"They're very well, Mother."

"Ye'll be gaeing sune to Edinburgh? Wha may be this laddie?"

"It is Ian Rullock, of Black Hill."

"Sae the baith o' ye are gaeing to Edinburgh? Will ye be friends
there?"

"That we will!"

"Hech, sirs!" Mother Binning drew a thread from her distaff. The two
were about to travel on when she stopped them again with a gesture.
"Dinna mak sic haste! There's time enough behind us, and time enough
before us. And it's a strange warld, and a large, and an auld! Sit ye
and crack a bit with an auld wife by the road."

But they had dallied at White Farm and in the cave, and Alexander was
in haste.

"We cannot stop now, Mother. We're bound for the Kelpie's Pool."

"And why do ye gae there? That's a drear, wanrestfu' place!" said
Mother Binning.

"Ian has not seen it yet. I want to show it to him."

Mother Binning turned her distaff slowly. "Eh, then, if ye maun gae,
gae!... We're a' ane! There's the kelpie pool for a'."

"We'll stop a bit on the way back," said Alexander. He spoke in a
wheedling, kindly voice, for he and Mother Binning were good friends.

"Do that then," she said. "I hae a hansel o' coffee by me. I'll mak
twa cups, for I'll warrant that ye'll baith need it!"

The air was indeed growing colder when the two came at last upon the
moor that ran down to the Kelpie's Pool. Furze and moss and ling, a
wild country stretched around without trees or house or moving form.
The bare sunshine took on a remote, a cool and foreign, aspect. The
small singing of the wind in whin and heather came from a thin, eery
world. Down below them they saw the dark little tarn, the Kelpie's
Pool. It was very clear, but dark, with a bottom of peat. Around it
grew rushes and a few low willows. The two sat upon an outcropping of
stone and gazed down upon it.

"It's a gey lonely place," said Alexander. "Now I like it as well or
better than I do the cave, and now I would leave it far behind me!"

"I like the cave best. This is a creepy place."

"Once I let myself out at Glenfernie without any knowing and came here
by night."

Ian felt emulation. "Oh, I would do that, too, if there was any need!
Did you see anything?"

"Do you mean the kelpie?"

"Yes."

"No. I saw something--once. But that time I wanted to see how the
stars looked in the water."

Ian looked at the water, that lay like a round mirror, and then to the
vast shell of the sky above. He, too, had love of beauty--a more
sensuous love than Alexander's, but love. This shared perception made
one of the bonds between them.

"It was as still--much stiller than it is to-day! The air was clear
and the night dark and grand. I looked down, and there was the
Northern Crown, clasp and all."

Ian in imagination saw it, too. They sat, chin on knees, upon the
moorside above the Kelpie's Pool. The water was faintly crisped, the
reeds and willow boughs just stirred.

"But the kelpie--did you ever see that?"

"Sometimes it is seen as a water-horse, sometimes as a demon. I never
saw anything like that but once. I never told any one about it. It may
have been just one of those willows, after all. But I thought I saw a
woman."

"Go on!"

"There was a great mist that day and it was hard to see. Sometimes you
could not see--it was just rolling waves of gray. So I stumbled down,
and I was in the rushes before I knew that I had come to them. It was
spring and the pool was full, and the water plashed and came over my
foot. It was like something holding my ankles.... And then I saw
her--if it was not the willow. She was like a fair woman with dark
hair unsnooded. She looked at me as though she would mock me, and I
thought she laughed--and then the mist rolled down and over, and I
could not see the hills nor the water nor scarce the reeds I was in.
So I lifted my feet from the sucking water and got away.... I do not
know if it was the kelpie's daughter or the willow--but if it was the
willow it could look like a human--or an unhuman--body!"

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