CHAPTER XXII: WHENCE AND WHITHER?
He wandered along the shore on the land side of the mound, with a favourite old book of Scottish ballads in his hand, every now and then stooping to gather a sea anemone—a white flower something like a wild geranium, with a faint sweet smell, or a small, short stalked harebell, or a red daisy, as large as a small primrose; for along the coast there, on cliff or in sand, on rock or in field, the daisies are remarkable for size, and often not merely tipped, but dyed throughout with a deep red.
He had gathered a bunch of the finest, and had thrown himself down on the side of the dune, whence, as he lay, only the high road, the park wall, the temple of the winds, and the blue sky were visible. The vast sea, for all the eye could tell, was nowhere—not a ripple of it was to be seen, but the ear was filled with the night gush and flow of it. A sweet wind was blowing, hardly blowing, rather gliding, like a slumbering river, from the west. The sun had vanished, leaving a ruin of gold and rose behind him, gradually fading into dull orange and lead and blue sky and stars. There was light enough to read by, but he never opened his book. He was thinking over something Mr Graham had said to him a few days before, namely, that all impatience of monotony, all weariness of best things even, are but signs of the eternity of our nature—the broken human fashions of the divine everlastingness.
"I dinna ken whaur it comes frae," said a voice above him.
He looked up. On the ridge of the mound, the whole of his dwarfed form relieved against the sky and looking large in the twilight, stood the mad laird, reaching out his forehead towards the west with his arms expanded as if to meet the ever coming wind.
"Naebody kens whaur the win' comes frae, or whaur it gangs till," said Malcolm. "Ye're no a hair waur aff nor ither fowk, there, laird."
"Does't come frae a guid place, or frae an ill?" said the laird, doubtingly.
"It's saft an' kin'ly i' the fin' o' 't," returned Malcolm suggestively, rising and joining the laird on the top of the dune, and like him spreading himself out to the western air.
The twilight had deepened, merging into such night as the summer in that region knows—a sweet pale memory of the past day. The sky was full of sparkles of pale gold in a fathomless blue; there was no moon; the darker sea lay quiet below, with only a murmur about its lip, and fitfully reflected the stars. The soft wind kept softly blowing. Behind them shone a light at the harbour's mouth, and a twinkling was here and there visible in the town above; but all was as still as if there were no life save in the wind and the sea and the stars. The whole feeling was as if something had been finished in heaven, and the outmost ripples of the following rest had overflowed and were now pulsing faintly and dreamily across the bosom of the labouring earth, with feeblest suggestion of the mighty peace beyond. Alas, words can do so little! even such a night is infinite.
"Ay," answered the laird; "but it maks me dowfart (melancholy) like, i' the inside."
"Some o' the best things does that," said Malcolm. "I think a kiss frae my mither wad gar me greet."
He knew the laird's peculiarities well; but in the thought of his mother had forgotten the antipathy of his companion to the word. Stewart gave a moaning cry, put his fingers in his ears, and glided down the slope of the dune seawards.
Malcolm was greatly distressed. He had a regard for the laird far beyond pity, and could not bear the thought of having inadvertently caused him pain. But he dared not follow him, for that would be but to heighten the anguish of the tortured mind and the suffering of the sickly frame; for, when pursued, he would accomplish a short distance at an incredible speed, then drop suddenly and lie like one dead. Malcolm, therefore, threw off his heavy boots, and starting at full speed along the other side of the dune, made for the bored craig; his object being to outrun the laird without being seen by him, and so, doubling the rock, return with leisurely steps, and meet him. Sweetly the west wind whistled about his head as he ran. In a few moments he had rounded the rock, towards which the laird was still running, but now more slowly. The tide was high and came near its foot, leaving but a few yards of passage between, in which space they approached each other, Malcolm with sauntering step as if strolling homewards. Lifting his bonnet, a token of respect he never omitted when he met the mad laird, he stood aside in the narrow way. Mr Stewart stopped abruptly, took his fingers from his ears, and stared in perplexity.
"It's a richt bonny nicht, laird," said Malcolm.
The poor fellow looked hurriedly behind him, then stared again, then made gestures backward, and next pointed at Malcolm with rapid pokes of his forefinger. Bewilderment had brought on the impediment in his speech, and all Malcolm could distinguish in the babbling efforts at utterance which followed, were the words,—"Twa o' them! Twa o' them! Twa o' them!" often and hurriedly repeated.
"It's a fine, saft sleekit win,' laird," said Malcolm, as if they were meeting for the first time that night. "I think it maun come frae the blue there, ayont the stars. There's a heap o' wonnerfu' things there, they tell me; an' whiles a strokin win' an' whiles a rosy smell, an' whiles a bricht licht, an' whiles, they say, an auld yearnin' sang, 'ill brak oot, an' wanner awa doon, an' gang flittin' an' fleein' amang the sair herts o' the men an' women fowk 'at canna get things putten richt."
"I think there are two fools of them!" said the marquis, referring to the words of the laird.
He was seated with Lady Florimel on the town side of the rock, hidden from them by one sharp corner. They had seen the mad laird coming, and had recognised Malcolm's voice.
"I dinna ken whaur I come frae," burst from the laird, the word whaur drawn out and emphasized almost to a howl; and as he spoke he moved on again, but gently now, towards the rocks of the Scaurnose. Anxious to get him thoroughly soothed before they parted, Malcolm accompanied him. They walked a little way side by side in silence, the laird every now and then heaving his head like a fretted horse towards the sky, as if he sought to shake the heavy burden from his back, straighten out his poor twisted spine, and stand erect like his companion:
"Ay!" Malcolm began again, as if he had in the meantime been thinking over the question, and was now assured upon it, "—the win' maun come frae yont the stars; for dinna ye min', laird? Ye was at the kirk last Sunday—wasna ye?"
The laird nodded an affirmative, and Malcolm went on.
"An' didna ye hear the minister read frae the buik 'at hoo ilka guid an' ilka perfit gift was frae abune, an' cam frae the Father o' lichts?"
"Father o' lichts!" repeated the laird, and looked up at the stars. "I dinna ken whaur I cam frae. I hae nae father. I hae only a … I hae only a wuman."
The moment he had said the word, he began to move his head from side to side like a scared animal seeking where to conceal itself.
"The Father o' lichts is your father an' mine—The Father o' a' o' 's," said Malcolm.
"O' a' guid fowk, I daursay," said the laird, with a deep and quivering sigh.
"Mr Graham says—o' a'body," returned Malcolm, "guid an' ill; —o' the guid to haud them guid an' mak them better—o' the ill to mak them guid."
"Eh! gien that war true!" said the laird.
They walked on in silence for a minute. All at once the laird threw up his hands, and fell flat on his face on the sand, his poor hump rising skywards above his head. Malcolm thought he had been seized with one of the fits to which he was subject, and knelt down beside him, to see if he could do anything for him. Then he found he was praying: he heard him—he could but just hear him—murmuring over and over, all but inaudibly, "Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts!" It seemed as if no other word dared mingle itself with that cry. Maniac or not—the mood of the man was supremely sane, and altogether too sacred to disturb. Malcolm retreated a little way, sat down in the sand and watched beside him. It was a solemn time—the full tide lapping up on the long yellow sand from the wide sea darkening out to the dim horizon: the gentle wind blowing through the molten darkness; overhead, the great vault without arch or keystone, of dim liquid blue, and sown with worlds so far removed they could only shine; and, on the shore, the centre of all the cosmic order, a misshapen heap of man, a tumulus in which lay buried a live and lovely soul! The one pillar of its chapter house had given way, and the downrushing ruin had so crushed and distorted it, that thenceforth until some resurrection should arrive, disorder and misshape must appear to it the law of the universe, and loveliness but the passing dream of a brain glad to deceive its own misery, and so to fancy it had received from above what it had itself generated of its own poverty from below. To the mind's eye of Malcolm, the little hump on the sand was heaved to the stars, higher than ever Roman tomb or Egyptian pyramid, in silent appeal to the sweet heavens, a dumb prayer for pity, a visible groan for the resurrection of the body. For a few minutes he sat as still as the prostrate laird.
But bethinking himself that his grandfather would not go to bed until he went back, also that the laird was in no danger, as the tide was now receding, he resolved to go and get the old man to bed, and then return. For somehow he felt in his heart that he ought not to leave him alone. He could not enter into his strife to aid him, or come near him in any closer way than watching by his side until his morning dawned, or at least the waters of his flood assuaged, yet what he could he must: he would wake with him in his conflict.
He rose and ran for the bored craig, through which lay the straight line to his abandoned boots.
As he approached the rock, he heard the voices of Lord Lossie and Lady Florimel, who, although the one had not yet verified her being, the other had almost ruined his, were nevertheless enjoying the same thing, the sweetness of the night, together. Not hearing Malcolm's approach, they went on talking, and as he was passing swiftly through the bore, he heard these words from the marquis,—"The world's an ill baked cake, Flory, and all that a woman, at least, can do, is to cut as large a piece of it as possible, for immediate use."
The remark being a general one, Malcolm cannot be much blamed if he stood with one foot lifted to hear Florimel's reply.
"If it 's an ill baked one, papa," she returned, "I think it would be better to cut as small a piece of it as will serve for immediate use."
Malcolm was delighted with her answer, never thinking whether it came from her head or her heart, for the two were at one in himself.
As soon as he appeared on the other side of the rock, the marquis challenged him: "Who goes there?" he said.
"Malcolm MacPhail, my lord."
"You rascal!" said his lordship, good humouredly; "you've been listening!"
"No muckle, my lord. I heard but a word apiece. An' I maun say my leddy had the best o' the loagic."
"My lady generally has, I suspect," laughed the marquis. "How long have you been in the rock there?"
"No ae meenute, my lord. I flang aff my butes to rin efter a freen', an' that's hoo ye didna hear me come up. gaein' efter them noo, to gang hame i' them. Guid nicht, my lord. Guid nicht, my leddy."
He turned and pursued his way; but Florimel's face, glimmering through the night, went with him as he ran.
He told his grandfather how he had left the mad laird lying on his face, on the sands between the bored craig and the rocks of the promontory, and said he would like to go back to him.
"He'll be hafing a fit, poor man," said Duncan. "Yes, my son, you must co to him and to your pest for him. After such an honour as we 'fe had this day, we mustn't pe forgetting our poor neighpours. Will you pe taking to him a trop of uisgebeatha?"
"He taks naething o' that kin'," said Malcolm.
He could not tell him that the madman, as men called him, lay wrestling in prayer with the Father of lights. The old highlander was not irreverent, but the thing would have been unintelligible to him. He could readily have believed that the supposed lunatic might be favoured beyond ordinary mortals; that at that very moment, lost in his fit, he might be rapt in a vision of the future—a wave of time, far off as yet from the souls of other men, even now rolling over his; but that a soul should seek after vital content by contact with its maker, was an idea belonging to a region which, in the highlander's being, lay as yet an unwatered desert, an undiscovered land, whence even no faintest odour had been wafted across the still air of surprised contemplation.
About the time when Malcolm once more sped through the bored craig, the marquis and Lady Florimel were walking through the tunnel on their way home, chatting about a great ball they were going to give the tenants.
He found the laird where he had left him, and thought at first he must now surely be asleep; but once more bending over him, he could hear him still murmuring at intervals, "Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts!"
Not less compassionate, and more sympathetic than Eliphaz or Bildad or Zophar, Malcolm again took his place near him, and sat watching by him until the gray dawn began in the east. Then all at once the laird rose to his feet, and without a look on either side walked steadily away towards the promontory. Malcolm rose also, and gazed after him until he vanished amongst the rocks, no motion of his distorted frame witnessing other than calmness of spirit. So his watcher returned in peace through the cool morning air to the side of his slumbering grandfather.
No one in the Seaton of Portlossie ever dreamed of locking door or window at night.
CHAPTER XXIII: ARMAGEDDON
The home season of the herring fishery was to commence a few days after the occurrences last recorded. The boats had all returned from other stations, and the little harbour was one crowd of stumpy masts, each with its halliard, the sole cordage visible, rove through the top of it, for the hoisting of a lug sail, tanned to a rich red brown. From this underwood towered aloft the masts of a coasting schooner, discharging its load of coal at the little quay. Other boats lay drawn up on the beach in front of the Seaton, and beyond it on the other side of the burn. Men and women were busy with the brown nets, laying them out on the short grass of the shore, mending them with netting needles like small shuttles, carrying huge burdens of them on their shoulders in the hot sunlight; others were mending, calking, or tarring their boats, and looking to their various fittings. All was preparation for the new venture in their own waters, and everything went merrily and hopefully. Wives who had not accompanied their husbands now had them home again, and their anxieties would henceforth endure but for a night—joy would come with the red sails in the morning, lovers were once more together, the one great dread broken into a hundred little questioning fears; mothers had their sons again, to watch with loving eyes as they swung their slow limbs at their labour, or in the evenings sauntered about, hands in pockets, pipe in mouth, and blue bonnet cast carelessly on the head: it was almost a single family, bound together by a network of intermarriages, so intricate as to render it impossible for any one who did not belong to the community to follow the threads or read the design of the social tracery.
And while the Seaton swarmed with "the goings on of life," the town of Portlossie lay above it still as a country hamlet, with more odours than people about: of people it was seldom indeed that three were to be spied at once in the wide street, while of odours you would always encounter a smell of leather from the saddler's shop, and a mingled message of bacon and cheese from the very general dealer's—in whose window hung what seemed three hams, and only he who looked twice would discover that the middle object was no ham, but a violin—while at every corner lurked a scent of gillyflowers and southernwood. Idly supreme, Portlossie the upper looked down in condescension, that is in half concealed contempt, on the ant heap below it.
The evening arrived on which the greater part of the boats was to put off for the first assay. Malcolm would have made one in the little fleet, for he belonged to his friend Joseph Mair's crew, had it not been found impossible to get the new boat ready before the following evening; whence, for this one more, he was still his own master, with one more chance of a pleasure for which he had been on the watch ever since Lady Florimel had spoken of having a row in his boat. True, it was not often she appeared on the shore in the evening; nevertheless he kept watching the dune with his keen eyes, for he had hinted to Mrs Courthope that perhaps her young lady would like to see the boats go out.
Although it was the fiftieth time his eyes had swept the links in vague hope, he could hardly believe their testimony when now at length he spied a form, which could only be hers, looking seaward from the slope, as still as a sphinx on Egyptian sands.
He sauntered slowly towards her by the landward side of the dune, gathering on his way a handful of the reddest daisies he could find; then, ascending the sandhill, approached her along the top.
"Saw ye ever sic gowans in yer life, my leddy?" he said, holding out his posy.
"Is that what you call them?" she returned.
"Ow ay, my leddy—daisies ye ca' them. I dinna ken but yours is the bonnier name o' the twa—gien it be what Mr Graham tells me the auld poet Chaucer maks o' 't."
"What is that?"
"Ow, jist the een o' the day.—the day's eyes, ye ken. They're sma' een for sic a great face, but syne there's a lot o' them to mak up for that. They've begun to close a'ready, but the mair they close the bonnier they luik, wi' their bits o' screwed up mooies (little mouths). But saw ye ever sic reid anes, or ony sic a size, my leddy?"
"I don't think I ever did. What is the reason they are so large and red?"
"I dinna ken. There canna be muckle nourishment in sic a thin soil, but there maun be something that agrees wi' them. It's the same a' roon' aboot here."
Lady Florimel sat looking at the daisies, and Malcolm stood a few yards off watching for the first of the red sails, which must soon show themselves, creeping out on the ebb tide. Nor had he waited long before a boat appeared, then another and another—six huge oars, ponderous to toil withal, urging each from the shelter of the harbour out into the wide weltering plain. The fishing boat of that time was not decked as now, and each, with every lift of its bows, revealed to their eyes a gaping hollow, ready, if a towering billow should break above it, to be filled with sudden death. One by one the whole fleet crept out, and ever as they gained the breeze, up went the red sails, and filled: aside leaned every boat from the wind, and went dancing away over the frolicking billows towards the sunset, its sails, deep dyed in oak bark, shining redder and redder in the growing redness of the sinking sun.
Nor did Portlossie alone send out her boats, like huge seabirds warring on the live treasures of the deep; from beyond the headlands east and west, out they glided on slow red wing,—from Scaurnose, from Sandend, from Clamrock, from the villages all along the coast,—spreading as they came, each to its work apart through all the laborious night, to rejoin its fellows only as home drew them back in the clear gray morning, laden and slow with the harvest of the stars. But the night lay between, into which they were sailing over waters of heaving green that for ever kept tossing up roses—a night whose curtain was a horizon built up of steady blue, but gorgeous with passing purple and crimson, and flashing with molten gold.
Malcolm was not one of those to whom the sea is but a pond for fish, and the sky a storehouse of wind and rain, sunshine and snow: he stood for a moment gazing, lost in pleasure. Then he turned to Lady Florimel: she had thrown her daisies on the sand, appeared to be deep in her book, and certainly caught nothing of the splendour before her beyond the red light on her page.
"Saw ye ever a bonnier sicht, my leddy?" said Malcolm.
She looked up, and saw, and gazed in silence. Her nature was full of poetic possibilities; and now a formless thought foreshadowed itself in a feeling she did not understand: why should such a sight as this make her feel sad? The vital connection between joy and effort had begun from afar to reveal itself with the question she now uttered.
"What is it all for?" she asked dreamily, her eyes gazing out on the calm ecstasy of colour, which seemed to have broken the bonds of law, and ushered in a new chaos, fit matrix of new heavens and new earth.
"To catch herrin'," answered Malcolm, ignorant of the mood that prompted the question, and hence mistaking its purport.
But a falling doubt had troubled the waters of her soul, and through the ripple she could descry it settling into form. She was silent for a moment.
"I want to know," she resumed, "why it looks as if some great thing were going on. Why is all this pomp and show? Something ought to be at hand. All I see is the catching of a few miserable fish! If it were the eve of a glorious battle now, I could understand it—if those were the little English boats rushing to attack the Spanish Armada, for instance. But they are only gone to catch fish. Or if they were setting out to discover the Isles of the West, the country beyond the sunset!—but this jars."
"I canna answer ye a' at ance, my leddy," said Malcolm; "I maun tak time to think aboot it. But I ken brawly what ye mean." Even as he spoke he withdrew, and, descending the mound, walked away beyond the bored craig, regardless now of the far lessening sails and the sinking sun. The motes of the twilight were multiplying fast as he returned along the shore side of the dune, but Lady Florimel had vanished from its crest. He ran to the top: thence, in the dim of the twilight, he saw her slow retreating form, phantom-like, almost at the grated door of the tunnel, which, like that of a tomb, appeared ready to draw her in, and yield her no more.
"My leddy, my leddy," he cried, "winna ye bide for 't?"
He went bounding after her like a deer. She heard him call, and stood holding the door half open.
"It's the battle o' Armageddon, my leddy," he cried, as he came within hearing distance.
"The battle of what?" she exclaimed, bewildered. "I really can't understand your savage Scotch."
"Hoot, my leddy! the battle o' Armageddon 's no ane o' the Scots battles; it 's the battle atween the richt and the wrang, 'at ye read aboot i' the buik o' the Revelations."
"What on earth are you talking about?" returned Lady Florimel in dismay, beginning to fear that her squire was losing his senses.
"It's jist what ye was sayin,' my leddy: sic a pomp as yon bude to hing abune a gran' battle some gait or ither."
"What has the catching of fish to do with a battle in the Revelations?" said the girl, moving a little within the door.
"Weel, my leddy, gien I took in han' to set it furth to ye, I wad hae to tell ye a' that Mr Graham has been learnin' me sin ever I can min.' He says 'at the whole economy o' natur is fashiont unco like that o' the kingdom o' haven: its jist a gradation o' services, an' the highest en' o' ony animal is to contreebute to the life o' ane higher than itsel'; sae that it 's the gran' preevilege o' the fish we tak, to be aten by human bein's, an' uphaud what's abune them."
"That's a poor consolation to the fish," said Lady Florimel.
"Hoo ken ye that, my leddy? Ye can tell nearhan' as little aboot the hert o' a herrin'—sic as it has—as the herrin' can tell aboot yer ain, whilk, thinkin', maun be o' the lairgest size."
"How should you know anything about my heart, pray?" she asked, with more amusement than offence.
"Jist by my ain," answered Malcolm.
Lady Florimel began to fear she must have allowed the fisher lad more liberty than was proper, seeing he dared avow that he knew the heart of a lady of her position by his own. But indeed Malcolm was wrong, for in the scale of hearts, Lady Florimel's was far below his. She stepped quite within the door, and was on the point of shutting it, but something about the youth restrained her, exciting at least her curiosity; his eyes glowed with a deep, quiet light, and his face, even grand at the moment, had a greater influence upon her than she knew. Instead therefore of interposing the door between them, she only kept it poised, ready to fall to the moment the sanity of the youth should become a hair's breadth more doubtful than she already considered it.
"It's a' pairt o' ae thing, my leddy," Malcolm resumed. "The herrin 's like the fowk 'at cairries the mate an' the pooder an' sic like for them 'at does the fechtin'. The hert o' the leevin' man's the place whaur the battle's foucht, an' it 's aye gaein' on an' on there atween God an' Sawtan; an' the fish they haud fowk up till 't."
"Do you mean that the herrings help you to fight for God?" said Lady Florimel with a superior smile.
"Aither for God or for the deevil, my leddy—that depen's upo' the fowk themsel's. I say it hauds them up to fecht, an' the thing maun be fouchten oot. Fowk to fecht maun live, an' the herrin' hauds the life i' them, an' sae the catchin' o' the herrin' comes in to be a pairt o' the battle."
"Wouldn't it be more sensible to say that the battle is between the fishermen and the sea, for the sake of their wives and children?" suggested Lady Florimel supremely.
"Na, my leddy, it wadna he half sae sensible, for it wadna justifee the grandur that hings ower the fecht. The battle wi' the sea 's no sae muckle o' an affair. An', 'deed, gien it warna that the wives an' the verra weans hae themsel's to fecht i' the same battle o' guid an' ill, I dinna see the muckle differ there wad be atween them an' the fish, nor what for they sudna ate ane anither as the craturs i' the watter du. But gien 't be the battle I say, there can be no pomp o' sea or sky ower gran' for 't; an' it 's a weel waured (expended) gien it but haud the gude anes merry an' strong, an' up to their work. For that, weel may the sun shine a celestial rosy reid, an' weel may the boatie row, an' weel may the stars luik doon, blinkin' an' luikin' again—ilk ane duin' its bonny pairt to mak a man a richt hertit guid willed sodger!"
"And, pray, what may be your rank in this wonderful army?" asked Lady Florimel, with the air and tone of one humouring a lunatic.
" naething but a raw recruit, my leddy; but gien I hed my chice, I wad be piper to my reg'ment."
"How do you mean?"
"I wad mak sangs. Dinna lauch at me, my leddy, for they're the best kin' o' wapon for the wark 'at I ken. But no a makar (poet), an' maun content mysel' wi' duin' my wark."
"Then why," said Lady Florimel, with the conscious right of social superiority to administer good counsel,—"why don't you work harder, and get a better house, and wear better clothes?"
Malcolm's mind was so full of far other and weightier things that the question bewildered him; but he g