Mary Johnston - Foes

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"Now, maybe, we'll have some light on Ian's doings!"

"I came for light to you, sir."

"Do you mean that he hasn't written you?"

"Only a line that I found waiting for me. It says, simply, that he
leaves Black Hill for a while."

"Well, you won't get light from me! My light's darkness. The women
found in his room a memorandum of ships and two addresses, one a house
in Amsterdam, and one, if you please, in Paris--_Faubourg
Saint-Germain!_"

"Do you mean that he left without explanation or good-by?"

Mrs. Alison spoke. "No, Archibald does not mean that. One evening Ian
outdid himself in bonniness and golden talk. Then as we took our
candles he told us that the wander-fever had him and that he would be
riding to Edinburgh. Archibald protested, but he daffed it by. So the
next day he went, and he may be in Edinburgh. It would seem nothing,
if these Highland chiefs were not his kin and if there wasn't this
round and round rumor of the Pretender and the French army! There may
be nothing--he may be riding back almost to-morrow!"

But Mr. Touris would not shake the black dog from his shoulders.
"He'll bring trouble yet--was born the sort to do it!"

Alexander defended him.

"Oh, you're his friend--sworn for thick and thin! As for Alison, she'd
find a good word for the fiend from hell!--not that my sister's son is
anything of that," said the Scotchman. "But he'll bring trouble to
warm, canny, king-and-kirk-abiding folk! He's an Indian macaw in a
dove-cote."

They rose from table. Out on the terrace they walked up and down in
the soft, bright morning light. Mr. Touris seemed to wish company; he
clung to Glenfernie until the latter must mount his horse and ride
home. Only for a moment did Alexander and Mrs. Alison have speech
together.

"When will you be seeing Elspeth?"

"I hope this afternoon."

"May joy come to you, Alexander!"

"I want it to come. I want it to come."

He and Black Alan journeyed home. As he rode he thought now and again
of Ian, perhaps in Edinburgh according to his word of mouth, but
perhaps, despite that word, on board some ship that should place him
in the Low Countries, from which he might travel into France and to
Paris and that group of Jacobites humming like a byke of bees around a
prince, the heir of all the Stewarts. He thought with old affection
and old concern. Whatever Ian did--intrigued with Jacobite interest or
held aloof like a sensible man--yet was he Ian with the old appeal.
_Take me or leave me--me and my dusky gold!_ Alexander drew a deep
breath, shook his shoulders, raised his head. "Let my friend be as he
is!"

He ceased to think of Ian and turned to the oncoming afternoon--the
afternoon rainbow-hued, coming on to the sound of music.

Again in his own house, he and Strickland worked an hour or more upon
estate business. That over and dinner past, he went to the room in the
keep. When the hour struck three he passed out of the opening in the
old wall, clambered down the bank, and, going through the wood, took
his way to White Farm.

Just one foreground wish in his mind was granted. There was an orchard
strip by White Farm, and here, beneath a red-apple tree, he found
Elspeth alone. She was perfectly direct with him.

"Willy told us that you were home. I thought you might come now to
White Farm. I was watching. I wanted to speak to you where none was
by. Let us cross the burn and walk in the fields."

The fields were reaped, lay in tawny stubble. The path ran by this and
by a lichened stone wall. Overhead, swallows were skimming. Heath and
bracken, rolled the colored hills. The air swam cool and golden, with
a smell of the harvest earth.

"Elspeth, I stayed away years and years and years, and I stayed away
not one hour!"

She stopped; she stood with her back to the wall. The farm-house had
sunk from sight, the sun was westering, the fields lay dim gold and
solitary. She had over her head a silken scarf, the ends of which she
drew together and held with one brown, slender hand against her
breast. She wore a dark gown; he saw her bosom rise and fall.

"I watched for you to tell you that this must not go on any longer. I
came to my mind when you were gone, Mr. Alexander--I came to my mind!
I think that you are braw and noble, but in the way of loving, as love
is between man and woman, I have none for you--I have none for you!"

The sun appeared to dip, the fields to darken. Pain came to
Glenfernie, wildering and blinding. He stood silent.

"I might have known before you went--I might have known from that
first meeting, in May, in the glen! But I was a fool, and vague, and
willing, I suppose, to put tip of tongue to a land of sweetness! If,
mistaken myself, I helped you to mistake, I am bitter sorry and I ask
your forgiveness! But the thing, Glenfernie, the thing stands! It's
for us to part."

He stared at her dumbly. In every line of her, in every tone of her,
there was finality. He was tenacious of purpose, capable of
long-sustained and patient effort, but he seemed to know that, for
this life, purpose and effort here might as well be laid aside. The
knowledge wrapped him, quiet, gray, and utter. He put his hands to his
brow; he moved a few steps to and fro; he came to the wall and leaned
against it. It seemed to him that he regarded the clay-cold corpse of
his life.

"O the world!" cried Elspeth. "When we are little it seems so little!
If you suffer, I am sorry."

"Present suffering may be faced if there's light behind."

"There's not this light, Glenfernie.... O world! if there is some
other light--"

"And time will do naught for me, Elspeth?"

"No. Time will do naught for you. It is over! And the day goes down
and the world spins on."

They stood apart, without speaking, under their hands the heaped
stones of the wall. The swallows skimmed; a tinkling of sheep-bells
was heard; the stubble and the moor beyond the fields lay in gold, in
sunken green and violet; the hilltops met the sky in a line long,
clean, remote, and still. Elspeth spoke.

"I am going now, back home. Let's say good-by here, each wishing the
other some good in, or maybe out of, this carefu' world!"

"You, also, are unhappy. Why?"

"I am not! Do I seem so? I am sorry for unhappiness--that is all! Of
course we grow older," said Elspeth, "older and wiser. But you nor no
one must think that I am unhappy! For I am not." She put out her hands
to him. "Let us say good-by!"

"Is it so? Is it so?"

"Never make doubt of that! I want you to see that it is clean
snapped--clean gone!"

She gave him her hands. They lay in his grasp untrembling, filled with
a gathered strength. He wrung them, bowed his head upon them, let them
go. They fell at her sides; then she raised them, drew the scarf over
her head and, holding it as before, turned and went away up the path
between the yellow stubble and the wall. She walked quickly, dark
clad; she was gone like a bird into a wood, like a branch of autumn
leaves when the sea fog rolls in.

The laird of Glenfernie turned to his ancient house on the craggy
hill.... That night he made him a fire in his old loved room in the
keep. He sat beside it; he lighted candles and opened books, and now
and then he sat so still before them that he may have thought that he
read. But the books slipped away, and the candles guttered down, and
the fire went out. At last, in the thick darkness, he spread his arms
upon the table and bowed his head in them, and his frame shook with a
man's slow weeping.

CHAPTER XVI

The bright autumn sank into November, November winds and mists into a
muffled, gray-roofed, white-floored December. And still the laird of
Glenfernie lived with the work of the estate and, when that was done,
and when the long, lonely, rambling daily walk or ride was over, with
books. The room in the keep had now many books. He sat among them, and
he built his fire higher, and his candles burned into late night.
Whether he read or did not read, he stayed among them and drew what
restless comfort he might. Strickland, from his own high room, waking
in the night, saw the loophole slit of light.

He felt concern. The change that had come to his old pupil was marked
enough. Strickland's mind dwelt on the old laird. Was that the
personality, not of one, but of two, of the whole line, perhaps,
developing all the time, step by step with what seemed the plastic,
otherwise, free time of youth, appearing always in due season, when
its hour struck? Would Alexander, with minor differences, repeat his
father? How of the mother? Would the father drown the mother? In the
enormous all-one, the huge blend, what would arrive? Out of all
fathers and mothers, out of all causes?

It could not be said that Alexander was surly. Nor, if the weather
was dark with him, that he tried to shake his darkness into others'
skies. Nor that he meanly succumbed to the weight, whatever it was,
that bore upon him. He did his work, and achieved at least the show of
equanimity. Strickland wondered. What was it that had happened? It
never occurred to him that it had happened here in this dale. But in
all that life of Alexander's in the wider world there must needs have
been relationships of lands established. Somewhere, something had
happened to overcloud his day, to uncover ancestral resemblances,
possibilities. Something, somewhere, and he had had news of it this
autumn.... It happened that Strickland had never seen Glenfernie with
Elspeth Barrow.

Mrs. Grizel was not observant. So that her nephew came to breakfast,
dinner, and supper, so that he was not averse to casual speech of
household interests, so that he seemed to keep his health, so that he
gave her now and then words and a kiss of affection, she was willing
to believe that persons addicted to books and the company of
themselves had a right to stillness and gravity. Alice stayed in
Edinburgh; Jamie soldiered it in Flanders. Strickland wrote and
computed for and with the laird, then watched him forth, a solitary
figure, by the fir-trees, by the leafless trees, and down the circling
road into the winter country. Or he saw firelight in the keep and knew
that Alexander walked to and fro, to and fro, or sat bowed over a
book. Late at night, waking, he saw that Glenfernie still watched.

It was not Ian Rullock nor anything to do with him that had helped on
this sharp alteration, this turn into some Cimmerian stretch of the
mind's or the emotions' vast landscape. If Strickland had at first
wondered if this might be the case, the thought vanished. Glenfernie,
free to speak of Ian, spoke freely, with the relief of there, at
least, a sunny day. It somewhat amazed and disquieted, even while it
touched, the older man of quiet passions and even ways, the old
strength of this friendship. Glenfernie seemed to brood with a
mother-passion over Ian. To an extent here he confided in Strickland.
The latter knew of the worry about Jacobite plots and the drawing of
Ian into that vortex--Ian known now to be in Paris, writing thence
twice or thrice during this autumn and early winter, letters that came
to Glenfernie's hand by unusual channels, smacking all of them of
Jacobite or High Tory transmissals. Strickland did not see these
letters. Of them Alexander said only that Ian wrote as usual, except
that he made no reference to sere leaves turning green or a dead staff
budding.

In the room with only the loophole windows, by the firelight,
Alexander read over again the second of these letters. "So you have
loved and lost, old Steadfast? Let it not grieve you too much!" And
that was all of that. And it pleased Alexander that it was all. Ian
was too wise to touch and finger the heart. Ian, Ian, rich and deep
and himself almost! Ten thousand Ian recollections pressed in upon
Alexander. Let Ian, an he would, go a-lusting after old dynasties! Yet
was he Ian! In these months it was Ian memories that chiefly gave
Alexander comfort.

They gave beyond what, at this time, Mrs. Alison could give. At
considerable intervals he went to Black Hill. But his old friend lived
in a rare, upland air, and he could not yet find rest in her clime.
She saw that.

"It's for after a while, isn't it, Alexander? Oh, after a while you'll
see that it is the breathing, living air! But do not feel now that you
are in duty bound to come here. Wait until you feel like coming, and
never think that I'll be hurt--"

"I am a marsh thing," he said. "I feel dull and still and cold, and
over me is a heavy atmosphere filled with motes. Forgive me and let me
come to you farther on and higher up."

He went back to the gray crag, Glenfernie House and the room in the
keep, the fire and his books, and a brooding traveling over the past,
and, like a pool of gold in a long arctic night, the image, nested and
warm, of Ian. Love was lost, but there stayed the ancient, ancient
friend.

Two weeks before Christmas Alice came home, bright as a rose. She
talked of a thousand events, large and small. Glenfernie listened,
smiled, asked questions, praised her, and said it was good to have
brightness in the house.

"Aye, it is!" she answered. "How grave and old you and Mr. Strickland
and the books and the hall and Bran look!"

"It's heigho! for Jamie, isn't it?" asked Alexander. "Winter makes us
look old. Wait till springtime!"

That evening she waylaid Strickland. "What is the matter with
Alexander?"

"I don't know."

"He looks five years older. He looks as though he had been through
wars."

"Perhaps he has. I don't know what it is," said Strickland, soberly.

"Do you think," said Alice--"do you think he could have had--oh,
somewhere out in the world!--a love-affair, and it ended badly? She
died, or there was a rival, or something like that, and he has just
heard of it?"

"You have been reading novels," said Strickland. "And yet--!"

That night, seeing from his own window the light in the keep, he
turned to his bed with the thought of the havoc of love. Lying there
with open eyes he saw in procession Unhappy Love. He lay long awake,
but at last he turned and addressed himself to sleep. "He's a strong
climber! Whatever it is, maybe he'll climb out of it."

But in the keep, Alexander, sitting by the fire with lowered head and
hanging hands, saw not the time when he would climb out of it....

He went no more to White Farm. He went, though not every Sunday, to
kirk and sat with his aunt and with Strickland in the laird's boxlike,
curtained pew. Mr. M'Nab preached of original sin and ineffable
condemnation, and of the few, the very, very few, saved as by fire. He
saw Jarvis Barrow sitting motionless, sternly agreeing, and beyond him
Jenny Barrow and then Elspeth and Gilian. Out of kirk, in the
kirkyard, he gave them good day. He studied to keep strangeness out
of his manner; an onlooker would note only a somewhat silent,
preoccupied laird. He might be pondering the sermon. Mr. M'Nab's
sermons were calculated to arouse alarm and concern--or, in the case
of the justified, stern triumph--in the human breast. White Farm made
no quarrel with the laird for that quietude and withdrawing. In the
autumn he had told Jarvis Barrow of that hour with Elspeth in the
stubble-field. The old man listened, then, "They are strange warks,
women!" he said, and almost immediately went on to speak of other
things. There seemed no sympathy and no regret for the earthly
happening. But he liked to debate with the laird election and the
perseverance of the saints.

Jenny Barrow, only, could not be held from exclamation over
Glenfernie's defection. "Why does he na come as he used to? Wha's done
aught to him or said a word to gie offense?" She talked to Menie and
Merran since Elspeth and Gilian gave her notice that they were wearied
of the subject. Perhaps Jenny's concern with it kept her from the
perception that not Glenfernie only was changing or had changed.
Elspeth--! But Elspeth had been always a dreamer, rather silent, a
listener rather than a speaker. Jenny did not look around corners; the
overt sufficed for a bustling, good-natured life. Gilian's arrival,
moreover, made for a diversion of attention. By the time novelty
subsided again into every day an altered Elspeth had so fitted into
the frame of life that Jenny was unaware of alteration.

But Gilian was not Jenny.

Each of Jarvis Barrow's granddaughters had her own small bedroom.
Three nights after Gilian's home-coming she came, when the candles
were out, into Elspeth's room. It was September and, for the season,
warm. A great round moon poured its light into the little room.
Elspeth was seated upon her bed. Her hair was loosened and fell over
her white gown. Her feet were under her; she sat like an Eastern
carving, still in the moonlight.

"Elspeth!"

Elspeth took a moment to come back to White Farm. "What is it,
Gilian?"

Gilian moved to the window and sat in it. She had not undressed. The
moon silvered her, too. "What has happened, Elspeth?"

"Naught. What should happen?"

"It's no use telling me that.--We've been away from each other almost
a year. I know that I've changed, grown, in that time, and it's
natural that you should do the same. But it's something besides that!"

Elspeth laughed and her laughter was like a little, cold, mirthless
chime of silver bells. "You're fanciful, Gilian!... We're no longer
lassies; we're women! So the colors of things get a little
different--that's all!"

"Don't you love me, Elspeth?"

"Yes, I love you. What has that to do with it?"

"Has it not? Has love naught to do with it? Love at all--all love?"

Elspeth parted her long dark hair into two waves, drew it before her,
and began to braid it, sitting still, her limbs under her, upon the
bed. "I saw you on the moor walking and talking with grandfather.
What did he say to you?"

"You are changed and I said that you were changed. He had not
noticed--he would not be like to notice! Then he told me about the
laird and you."

"Yes. About the laird and me."

"You couldn't love him? They say he is a fine man."

"No, I couldn't love him. I like him. He understands. No one is to
blame."

"But if it is not that, what is it--what is it, Elspeth?"

"It's naught--naught--naught, I tell you!"

"It's a strange naught that makes you like a dark lady in a
ballad-book!"

Elspeth laughed again. "Didn't I say that you were fanciful? It's late
and I am sleepy."

That had been while the leaves were still upon the trees. The next
morning and thenceforward Elspeth seemed to make a point of
cheerfulness. It passed with her aunt and the helpers in the house.
Jarvis Barrow appeared to take no especial note if women laughed or
sighed, so long as they lived irreproachably.

The leaves bronzed, the autumn rains came, the leaves fell, the trees
stood bare, the winds began to blow, there fell the first snowflakes.
Gilian, walking home from the town, was overtaken on the moor by Robin
Greenlaw.

"Where is Elspeth?"

"We are making our winter dresses. She would not leave her sewing."

The cousins walked upon the moor path together. Gilian was fairer and
more strongly made than Elspeth. They walked in silence; then said
Robin:

"You're the old Gilian, but I'm sure I miss the old Elspeth!"

"I think, myself, she's gone visiting! I rack and rack my brains to
find what grief could have come to Elspeth. She will not help me."

"Gilian, could it be that, after all, her heart is set on the laird?"

"Did you know about that?"

"In part I guessed, watching them together. And then I saw how
Glenfernie oldened in a night. Then, being with my uncle one day, he
let drop a word that I followed up. I led him on and he told me.
Glenfernie acted like a true man."

"If there's one thing of which I'm sure it is that she hardly thinks
of him from Sunday to Sunday. She thinks then for a little because she
sees him in kirk--but that passes, too!"

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know. I don't know of anybody else. Maybe no outer thing has
anything to do with it. Sometimes we just have drumlie, dreary seasons
and we do not know why.... She loves the spring. Maybe when spring
comes she'll be Elspeth once more!"

"I hope so," said Greenlaw. "Spring makes all the world bonny again."

That was in November. On Christmas Eve Elspeth Barrow drowned herself
in the Kelpie's Pool.

CHAPTER XVII

There had been three hours of light on Christmas Day when Robin
Greenlaw appeared at Glenfernie House and would see the laird.

"He's in his ain room in the keep," said Davie, and went with the
message.

Alexander came down the stair and out into the flagged court. The
weather had been unwontedly clement, melting the earlier snows,
letting the brown earth forth again for one look about her. To-day
there was pale sunlight. Greenlaw sat his big gray. The laird came to
him.

"Get down, man, and come in for Christmas cheer!"

"Send Davie away," said Greenlaw.

Alexander's gray eyes glanced. "You're bringing something that is not
Christmas cheer!--Davie, tell Dandie Saunderson to saddle Black Alan
at once.--Now, Robin!"

"Yesterday," said Greenlaw, "Elspeth Barrow vanished from White Farm.
They wanted to send Christmas fare to old Skene the cotter. She said
she would take a basket there, and so she went away, down the
stream--about ten of the morning they think it was. It was not for
hours that they grew at all anxious. She's never come back. She did
not go to Skene's. We can hear no word of her from any. Her
grandfather and I and the men at White Farm looked for her through the
night. This morning there's an alarm sent up and down the dale."

"What harm could happen--"

"She might have strayed into some lonely place--fallen--hurt herself.
There were gipsies seen the other day over by Windyedge. Or she might
have walked on and on upon what road she took, and somehow none
chanced to notice her. I am going now to ride the Edinburgh way."

"Have you gone up the glen?"

"That was tried this morning at first light. But that is just opposite
to Skene's and the way she certainly took at first. She would have to
turn and go about through the woods, or White Farm would see her." His
voice had a haunting note of fear and trouble.

Glenfernie caught it. "She was not out of health nor unhappy?"

"She is changed from the old Elspeth. When you ask her if she is
unhappy she says that she is not.... I do not know. Something is
wrong. With the others, I am seeking about as though I expected each
moment to see her sitting or standing by the roadside. But I do not
expect to see her. I do not know what I expect. We have sent to
Windyedge to apprehend those gipsies."

"Let me speak one moment to Mr. Strickland to send the men forth and
go himself. Then I am ready."

On Black Alan he rode with Robin down the hill and through the wood
and upon the White Farm way. The earth was mainly bare of snow, but
frozen hard. The hoofs rang out but left no print. The air hung still,
light and dry; the sun, far in the south, sent slanting, pale-gold
beams. The two men made little speech as they rode. They passed men
and youths, single figures and clusters.

"Ony news, Littlefarm? We've been--or we're going--seeking here, or
here--"

A woman stopped them. "It was thae gipsies, sirs! I had a dream about
them, five nights syne! A lintwhite was flying by them, and they gave
chase. Either it's that or she made away with herself! I had a dream
that might be read that way, too."

When they came to White Farm it was to find there only Jenny and Menie
and Merran.

"Somebody maun stay to keep the house warm gin the lassie come
stumbling hame, cauld and hungry and half doited! Eh, Glenfernie, ye
that are a learned man and know the warld, gie us help!"

"I am going up the glen," said Alexander to Greenlaw. "I do not know
why, but I think it should be tried again. And I know it, root and
branch. I am going afoot. I will leave Black Alan here."

They wasted no time. He went, while Robin Greenlaw on his gray took
the opposed direction. Looking back, he saw the great fire that Jenny
kept, dancing through the open door and in the pane of the window.
Then the trees and the winding of the path shut it away, shut away
house and field and all token of human life.

He moved swiftly to the mouth of the glen, but then more slowly. The
trees soared bare, the water rushed with a hoarse sound, snow lay in
clefts. So well he knew the place! There was no spot where foot might
have climbed, no ledge nor opening where form might lay, huddled or
outstretched, that lacked his searching eye or hand. Here was the
pebbly cape with the thorn-tree where in May he had come upon Elspeth,
sitting by the water, singing.... Farther on he turned into that
smaller, that fairy glen, bending like an arm from the main pass. Here
was the oak beneath which they had sat, against which she had leaned.
It wrapt him from himself, this place. He stood, and space around
seemed filled with forms just beyond visibility. What were they? He
did not know, but they seemed to breathe against his heart, to
whisper.... He searched this place well, but there were only the
winter banks and trees, the little burn, the invisible presences. Back
in the deep glen a hawk sailed overhead, across the stripe of
pale-blue sky. Alexander went on by the stream and the projecting rock
and the twisted roots. There was no sound other than the loud voice of
the water, talking only of its return to the sea. When he came to the
cave he pushed aside the masking growth and entered. Dark and barren
here, with the ashes of an old fire! For one moment, as it were
distinctly, he saw Ian. He stood so clear in the mind's eye that it
seemed that one intense effort might have set him bodily in the
cavern. But the central strength let the image go. Alexander moved the
ashes of the fire with his foot, shuddered in the place of cold and
shadow, and, stooping, went out of the cave and on upon his search for
Elspeth Barrow.

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